Xandra Bingley - Bertie, May and Mrs Fish

In their khaki uniforms in his armoured car they dash across the farm. My mother says … It all looks so terribly neglected … could there be something wrong with the land … I wish I knew more about these things … the Valley is nicely sheltered for horses … and the house does have lovely proportions.

White stones scatter the hilly land. Fences are broken walls or cut and laid hedges grown wild into tall bullfinch thorns. Gaps in walls are wide enough to drive a tank through. Gates and stable doors hang off hinges. Water is pumped by a windmill reservoir two miles away at Needlehole at the far end of the farm. Purple thistles and yellow poisonous charlock flower on grassland. Nettles spread inside barn doorways. Wild cats stare from stable drains. Rats run along house walls. In the drawing room a soldiers’ campfire has burnt a hole in the ceiling.

My father says … We will rise above any minor problems … we’re not about to start playing windy buggers. Not now we’ve found this heavenly place … quite right we’re not … no siree. We’ll invite your bank manager to a slap-up lunch at the Cavalry Club. A bank manager lunching with a bloody colonel in Piccadilly … he will think he is going up in the world. We’ll never look back … you mark my words.

In September 1940 the Blitz begins and a year later my mother’s Irish Georgian furniture arrives at the farm in a horsebox with her motorbike-sidecar. My father has gone north to Yorkshire to train his Inns of Court lawyer soldiers – the Devil’s Own – to fight like hell when their time comes.

Her lights are paraffin oil lamps and she cooks on a knee-high coal range with a hot iron square over one oven. Her heating is paraffin stoves until she hammers a nail into a wall to hang a picture in the drawing room. My father comes home and says … Who’d have thought a nail going through a wall like butter would produce a magnificent Elizabethan open fireplace … and he sings … Praise my soul the King of heaven …

She sells her blue Rover and her motorbike and buys a Ford van painted British racing green and has her initials stencilled in gold on both doors and her Pytchley Hunt Point-to-Point Ladies Race silver fox leaping through a horseshoe is screwed on the bonnet.

My father is frustrated soldiering in England between 1940 and 1944. His Eleventh Hussar cavalry brother officers are fighting on the North African front. He is a colonel training lawyers to be soldiers. He writes home from Yorkshire barracks:

I can’t tell you how much I miss you and our lovely home and wish I was there to help … and then I can’t help wishing I was out there in the hunt for the Boche … so I don’t know what I want. I worry all the time you have too much to do and work too hard. Find some woman to help in the kitchen … or else it’s no fun when I come home on leave .

Never thought you would get the rye and the beans planted. A week with fair weather and the land warm with no frost and our seeds and wheat will all germinate and we shall be established for the winter. The new saw bench means you will be warm. Get lots of wood cut up. Did I remind you no one must touch the machine until covered under the Workman’s Compensation Act in our insurance policy. If someone cuts their hand off it is liable to be expensive!

I miss you and everything so very much and long to be home doing something useful. Have been on a damned badly run armoured battle. Sent up by the General on to the enemy’s position to view the attack and give an opinion. Such a bad show that I am at a loss what to say or do. Came back before the end in disgust cold and disheartened. All my love from your own lonely Big Bear .

She props a prayer written in Gothic script and illuminated gold and blue capitals on the kitchen dresser – May He support us all the Day long … Until the Shadows lengthen and Evening comes – and reads his next letter:

… As it was my birthday I was allowed by the Priest to choose hymns for our Regimental Armistice Day Service. We sang ‘New Every Morning Is the Love’, ‘Lead Us Heavenly Father Lead Us’, ‘Now Thank We All Our God’. I had the ‘Nunc Dimittis’ put in … the best of all those things and never heard unless one goes in the evening. I wished my Bear was with me at this time .

She learns to farm. Two thousand acres. A mile of valley. Horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, poultry. Snow in winter above the lintels of the downstairs windows. Her fingers swell. Chilblains. Long white kid gloves are wrapped round a leaky pipe in her bedroom knotted at the fingers. She has a lot to learn that no one has taught her. Accidents happen.

After two days leave at Christmas my father writes

… thank you for my very lovely and never to be forgotten first holiday in our new home and for all the happiness you have brought me. A terrible anticlimax coming back. I miss you and home as much as I used to as a small boy sent away to school. Our home is our own most perfect special Bears’ castle for ever and always .

His regiment moves further north to a barracks in Northumberland.

… your farmyard is a ballroom compared to my car parks up here. I am having cement roads built by charming German Jew refugees. A Sergeant in charge is Czech and was in an Austrian concentration camp with 20,000 others. A number were ordered to be hanged or shot by Hess for no reason at all. He has written three times to the Home Secretary to ask to be allowed to look after Hess for one night!!!

No more news now darling Bear except to send you all my love and to say how I long to be with you. How splendid about the big new Esse kitchen range stove. The perfection of our lovely home .

In the Pittville Nursing Home in Cheltenham, in snow, in February 1942, she endures a difficult birth and I am born … their Little Bear. My mother writes in her diary … I did not know it would hurt so much.

In springtime my father sends

… coupons for the calf with the usual unanswerable form. Here I am very lonely and far from my Bears and home. What a lovely Easter it was. Our first with our Little Bear and our new home. Both equally lovely. It is heaven and we are so lucky to be so happy. I’m sure few other people are as happy as we are. It all seems to be too good to be true. I have bought you a lovely birthday present Ralli-cart with yellow wheels and good tyres that will look brand new with a coat of varnish. I hope you will like it. When we find a nice pony and borrow a harness it will be a topper and very smart .

A pony is tied to an apple tree on a rope to graze the lawn in circles and I am placed in a wicker basket on the pony’s back. I have an eighty-year-old nanny – Annie Nannie – my mother’s Irish cousins’ nanny forty years before. I must have looked up at branches and apple blossom and warplanes.

Joe Rummings and Mr Griff and Mr Munday are farm labourers too old for call-up. Landgirls are seconded from their work at the Wills Tobacco cigarette factory in Birmingham. A lorry load of Italian prisoners of war is driven in for daily threshing and hoeing and fencing and stone collecting.

Mrs Griffin walks two miles from Kilkenny three times a week and cleans. She squeezes water out of used tea leaves and scatters handfuls on carpets and kneels and bristle-brushes up dirt stuck to the leaves into a red dented tin dustpan. She dusts and wax-polishes Georgian furniture and scours iron saucepans and changes linen sheets and talks and talks all the time to my mother and Mrs Fish and to herself. Mrs Fish walks two miles over the fields from Needlehole to wash and iron bedsheets and clothes two days a week.

He writes

… so pleased to hear you are fixed up with Italian prisoners. Worrying about it on the train I didn’t know how you’d manage. Have been thinking about you all day looking after our Little Bear and keeping the threshing going. Only wish I could be there to help instead of leaving it all on your shoulders. I know we are going to make a success. One always does if one’s heart is really in it and both our hearts are. All my love my darlingest. Soon a lovely holiday together .