Cousins Read online

  Though Will was always ‘Will’ to us, his given name was Wilfred. He was named after Grandpa, who, coming from an ancient Northumbrian family, had been saddled with a very grand set of names: Wilfred Acton Lancelot. But in fact, as long as I knew him, Grandpa was only ever known as Fred. He was a committed socialist and Granny used to joke that he called himself Fred after Engels. Anyway, Fred suited him.

  Granny was a Tye too. She and Grandpa were first cousins and Granny had a line she liked to spin which was that she only married Grandpa so she could keep her own surname. She was christened Bertha, which she hated, but was always known as Betsy, except to Grandpa, who occasionally referred to her as ‘Guns’, after the Big Bertha gun. To understand this you’d need to know that as well as being an ardent socialist Grandpa was a pacifist and had been a conscientious objector in the war.

  Our father was named after Bertrand Russell, who was Grandpa’s favourite philosopher because he was against religion and for pacifism. His sister, my Aunt Bell, was Christabel, after Mrs Pankhurst’s daughter, ‘which’, I once heard my mother say acidly, ‘tells you all you need to know about the Tyes’.

  If Dad couldn’t have been less philosophically minded, Aunt Bell could hardly have been more unlike the famous suffragette. She took not a scritch of notice of human rights, only of her own rights, which she interpreted liberally. Bell showed early promise with the violin and a great career was predicted for her when she won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music, where Cele’s father was a tutor. He taught Bell harmony, engendered Cele and then disappeared from their lives.

  After Cele was born my aunt gave up the violin, which was a pity but they needed money and fiddlers are poor earners. She took a job as housemother at a boys’ prep school in Durham, which took overseas pupils as boarders. She got the job because when she was only fifteen the headmaster had fallen, with adolescent passion, in love with her and had nursed a soft spot for her ever since. That was the kind of thing that happened with Bell.

  House-mothering was not the most suitable employment for her. She had had Cele too young to be readily maternal and, as Mum liked to say, Bell didn’t see the point of boys until they grew into long trousers. Her job also caused a minor friction with Grandpa, who disapproved of private education in spite of – or because of – having himself gone to a famous public school. But as he had given away all the family funds with which he might have helped out there was nothing he could do about his daughter’s means of earning, and money was badly needed since Cele’s father provided nothing.

  I suspect that the headmaster would have bent the rules and allowed Cele to be educated free alongside the boys, but Bell sent her to the local primary. It was a grim one but it was Bell’s gesture towards Grandpa, who was much more shocked by her association with a private school than by her having an illegitimate child.

  Our grandfather, as I explained, was ideological, unlike Granny, who mistrusted ‘principles’. But she was mostly tolerant of Grandpa’s quirks, though she was not afraid to laugh at him about them. At some point she inherited from her godmother Staresnest, a remote cottage on Exmoor. Granny was truly bothered that Bell had had to abandon her musical career and she minded that because of Grandpa’s socialist principles they were in no position to help financially. So, following her philosophy of damage limitation, she gave Bell the cottage.

  Aunt Bell’s hospitality in the cottage depended on her relationship with her current lovers, who it amused my father to refer to as ‘the applicants’. For some reason there were no lovers there the Whitsun when our mother was laid low with a slipped disc. Cele must have pleaded for Will to stay at the cottage and I expect Aunt Bell was happy enough to agree because Will absorbed Cele’s attention so completely that this relieved Bell of any responsibility for her daughter’s entertainment. At the last minute, I suppose because of our mother’s back, I was packed off to go to stay with them too.

  It was a long train ride from Northumberland and Will ignored me for most of the way. I finished reading my comics and then amused myself staring out of the window and making up stories about Moonblossom, the fairy with silver skin and silver hair I had invented as my companion and who at that time went everywhere with me. I expect Will was reading Sherlock Holmes. He was always one for crazes and he had a big Conan Doyle phase around that time. I was not quite seven and used to being ignored by him. I never minded much because Will was also protective of me and would have fought anyone who tried to harm me. It’s hard to convey quite how special he was but as a small child I would have done anything for him. He was someone who always minded things tremendously. I’ve never met anyone who cared quite as passionately as Will did about the things he cared for. Except Grandpa maybe.

  Besides being fearless – or so it seemed to me – Will had an explorer’s initiative. We had been at Bell’s for less than a day when Will found a place to swim near Cow Castle, the Iron Age fort that stood about five miles down the river that flowed past Staresnest. While the river was good enough near the cottage for fishing for minnows, it was too shallow for swimming. But downriver, by the ancient mound, the water ran deeper.

  We were country children and had grown up with the countryside our domain. And while Cele officially lived with her mother in the cramped school flat in Durham, she spent so much time with us at Dowlands that she counted as country-bred. For all her delicate looks she was physically strong. She had to be to keep up with Will.

  She carried me piggyback part of the way to the Iron Age hill fort where, on an oxbow bend of the river, under Will’s direction, we built a dam constructed of rocks and flotsam and some useful rubbish from the abandoned gypsy encampment on the opposite bank. The summer before a man had been spotted there cooking what rumour claimed was a squirrel over a fire. The gypsies had gone, leaving several car tyres, a clapped-out pushchair and some broken sheets of asbestos, and Will and Cele pirated these to fortify our dam.

  The others had swum and I had paddled in the shallows, and we were on the bank, letting our bodies dry in the unusual warmth of the late-May sun, when we heard a horrible row downstream. Will jumped up, pointing at the small round head of a creature swimming for its life.

  It was the first time I’d seen an otter, though I recognized what it was. We watched as, confused by the baying of hounds and no doubt crazed by the sense of peril, the otter began scrabbling desperately over our dam, its paws slipping on the corrugations of the asbestos. Will grabbed my towel and waded downstream. I saw him wrap the towel round his hands, making a kind of sling, and lean down and lift something out of the water. He hurried back cradling a towelled bundle in his arms.

  The otter must have been exhausted as it lay quite docile, shuddering from time to time and rolling back its lips to expose freckled pink gums. A rank smell of fear was exuding from its damp pelt.

  ‘Here,’ Will said, ‘you stay and see those bastards off.’ He walked to the gate that opened on to the water meadow, nursing the otter in my towel.

  Following orders, we stood on the bank, and when the pack of hounds and hunters came by we waved and squealed and generally acted like the kind of girls Will had ensured neither of us wanted to be, and told them their quarry had gone ‘that way’, pointing upstream.

  ‘Little beast,’ said a massively built man with a florid face, stopping to wipe his forehead with a handkerchief. He looked like a caricature from the old bound copies of Punch someone had long ago left in the cottage. ‘We nearly had the little devil but he slipped away from us.’

  We waited till the hunt had rounded the bend in the river and then flew over to Will, who was kneeling under a tree nursing the otter. When he saw us he said, ‘His paw looks as if it’s gone. Bloody, bloody bastards’.

  I began to cry because one of the otter’s back legs was horribly mangled where the dogs must have got him and the paw looked as if it was barely attached. ‘Shut up, Hetta, we don’t need crybabies,’ Will said. I expect I did shut up because he had a
temper and I was scared of rousing it.

  Cele said, ‘What should we do?’

  ‘Take him back with us, of course. We can’t leave him here. Those bastards’ll get him and if they don’t a fox will.’

  The otter seemed as willing to be resigned to Will’s command as we were. Swaddled in the towel, the poor creature made faint mews and occasionally a high chittering sound, and the damp little body made frantic twitches and jerks. But the chase and the pain must have depleted its instinct to escape and Will had that touch with animals so that they seemed to know they were in safe hands.

  ‘We’ll have to find a vet,’ he said.

  We carried the otter back, or Will did, to the cottage and applied pink Germolene to the wound and offered him mashed sardines from a tin, which he spurned. It was a dog otter.

  One of Bell’s lovers must have appeared around this time, because I remember some man drove Will and Cele with the otter to a vet they tracked down in Minehead. I know I stayed behind and Aunt Bell played Snap with me, which was kind of her as games bored her. In fact the game bored me too – all I wanted was to know what had happened at the vet’s – but our mother had raised us with a strict regard to manners and I knew to pretend I was enjoying it.

  After a bit Bell put down her cards and said, ‘God, Hetta, isn’t life just utterly bloody sometimes, don’t you find?’ I’ve always remembered this because I was grateful to her for talking to me that way. She never made any concessions for children being children.

  When the others came back their report was gloomy. The vet had said he would do his best, he felt the paw might have to be amputated, but he’d give it a go at healing first. Will had held the poor fazed creature in the towel while the vet injected him with an antibiotic and cleaned the wound and placed a splint and bound bandages round the hind paw.

  The next morning I was permitted to go with them to see how the otter was doing. His eyes were open but glazed and when the vet opened the cage he made no effort to escape.

  ‘He’s not going to recover. He’s better dead than lame,’ Will said. Because I still believed that emotion had the power to alter circumstance, I protested; but the vet agreed with Will’s verdict.

  He must have trusted Will, the vet, as he allowed him to hold the otter while he administered the fatal injection. The slight little body went limp at once and we took him back with us and buried him at the bottom of the garden, with a gravestone made from a slab of rock with ‘RIP Otter’ scratched on it with the point of a diamond brooch that Will had instructed Cele to ‘liberate’ from Bell’s jewellery case. Only diamonds, he explained, were sufficiently sharp to cut stone. Afterwards he was unusually angry, even for him, and swore at Aunt Bell when, quite mildly, she objected.

  4

  Among Bell’s ‘applicants’ were three principals, who came and went according to a system that was mysterious to us and, now that I think about it, was probably no system at all. More like pot luck, I imagine.

  There was Kenny, an eye surgeon, tall with a head of fading yellow hair and matching teeth. I disliked him because he made a fetish of not washing his hands. ‘I’m a surgeon,’ he used to proclaim, ‘there’s no point in washing. It does nothing to the significantly dangerous germs.’ Then there was Alastair, a Scottish civil engineer, a thin, reticent man with a prominent Adam’s apple and going prematurely bald. We liked him better than Kenny, who didn’t like children at all. But Alastair was awkward and his conversations with anyone under the age of twenty were for the most part strained.

  Our favourite by far of Aunt Bell’s admirers was Robert, whose occupation I never knew until lately. Robert was slightly overweight and wheezed asthmatically when he walked and he wore what we called ‘fancy’ socks, though now I see they were highly fashionable and certainly expensive. Among the applicants, Aunt Bell liked Robert the most too. I could tell this because, while she never made any open effort with her appearance, she always looked her best when Robert was around.

  Robert liked books and the theatre but above all he liked music. Part of his appeal for Aunt Bell must have been that he took her to the concerts and operas where orchestras were playing with which she must once have aspired to perform. To her credit, she never gave any sign of resenting this; but that she regretted the loss of that potential life you could see in her enthusiasm for her outings with Robert.

  It might have been Robert who drove Will to the vet’s that Whitsun when we found the otter. I can’t be sure. I do know that the summer of that same year, a time when Robert regularly took his wife on an opera tour, Aunt Bell was off somewhere in Europe with Kenny and was to follow this, presumably in one of her efforts at even-handedness, with a trip to the West Highlands with Alastair. Will and Cele were to spend part of the summer with our grandparents in Cornwall.

  It wasn’t until Grandpa’s heart began to fail that my grandparents moved to the house in Ely. When they first retired, they went to live in a place called St Levan in Cornwall. Quite recently, Granny told me that she’d felt it was best that they not live too near Dowlands and I suppose Cornwall was about as far removed from Northumberland as you could get. But the reason she always gave when we were children was that she hankered after a milder sea to bathe in.

  Both Granny and Grandpa loved sea swimming but the seas of the North-East are perishing and only children and the foolhardy submit their flesh to that icy water. In Cornwall there were no strictures about catching cold. We were issued with bald towels, which rather than absorbing the damp simply ensured that the salt abraded our skin, and if we were caught shivering we were told to run up and down the beach to get warm.

  It wasn’t hard to see where this spartan attitude came from. Grandpa had a theory he would never explain (probably because, as Bell said, it was inexplicable) that burning coal was unfair to miners. When he was a conscientious objector he’d become friendly with other COs who had been drafted down the Durham mines – in the days when there were still working mines – and this had led to a stubborn refusal on Grandpa’s part to allow fires except in the most exceptional circumstances. Although coal fires had long been left behind, this attitude had become a habit so that our grandparents’ house was needlessly cold. Only Bell, with her beautiful woman’s knack of getting her own way, could really shift Grandpa from this position and get him to put on the heating. Bell had made an early decision to rebel against any form of asceticism.

  But although our grandparents’ houses were cold their home was always warm because the welcome was warm, and we children were always happy there. Grandpa wasn’t bothered about the kinds of rules and regulations that plague children, and was generally occupied with his books in an absent-minded, easygoing kind of way, and Granny enjoyed indulging us, so there was a comfortable tranquillity in the atmosphere which Dowlands lacked. For one thing, we were allowed more autonomy than we were at home. Granny used to send us off on explorations, providing us with maps and compasses and local bus timetables, and packets of sandwiches in greaseproof paper, Marmite or peanut butter, and usually either a wormy apple from their garden or a blackening banana – for some reason all their bananas were speckled and over-ripe. We were sent off out with no safeguards beyond Grandpa’s maxim of ‘Use your common sense’. Will and Cele’s favourite activity was to swim when they could at Port Chapel with Cele’s namesakes the seals.

  When she was small Cele couldn’t quite manage ‘Cecilia’, and pronounced her name ‘Seal’, so seals came to have a special significance for her. And for years, among the family, this was how her name was spelled. A relative of Granny’s had had a sealskin jacket, from the days when killing animals for their pelts was acceptable, and from this had been made an amazingly lifelike toy by a woman who worked at Dowlands when Granny’s grandparents lived there and who, according to Granny, was really the person who had brought her and Grandpa up. When Cele was around four or five she discovered this toy seal, which became her special companion. Given that Bell was not exactly affectio
nate, I imagine Seal was a comforter and Cele was inseparable from him and slept with him until she was quite old. It was only when she had to leave home for school, and had also to leave her namesake behind, that to avoid schoolgirl sniggers from her peers she hit on the spelling of her name which has stuck.

  There was a feature of the visits to our grandparents which had a lasting significance for Will and Cele.

  I’ve explained about Grandpa translating the Aeneid. I think it was really to ensure he had something to get his teeth into when he gave up his job in adult education that Granny suggested this exercise. He’d worked all his life with ideas, and with nothing to feed his intellectual appetite he would have been at a loss and probably driven Granny to distraction. But, much as she loved literature, the Aeneid wasn’t to Granny’s taste and Grandpa wanted company to discuss his translation with. He always needed an audience. So at some point, I can’t say exactly when, in order that they could be involved he began to teach Will and Cele Latin. And there was this too: for all Grandpa’s radical views, he was still basically in favour of an old-fashioned education.

  Apart from Greek and Latin, Grandpa was fluent in French, German and Russian, which he learnt during the war at the height of his obsession with the USSR – and Will inherited Grandpa’s gift for languages. It sounds eccentric, and I suppose it was, but my grandparents were eccentric and my impression is that Will, at least, enjoyed these sessions. He probably liked the idea of being eccentric too. And maybe that is why neither of the cousins for years ever mentioned to the rest of us what it was that they did with Grandpa when down at St Levan.

  It isn’t only matters like sexual abuse that children keep to themselves. Children need secrets. For years I kept perfectly harmless possessions that no one could have minded my having – a Dinky car with only three wheels that I found on the beach, the exquisite bleached skull of a tiny bird and a glittery ring I’d blown my holiday money on – under a floorboard I’d prised up with the Swiss Army penknife that Grandpa had given me, and for which he’d got into trouble with Mum. (The knife was a secret too. She confiscated it, but having ferreted out her hiding place I discovered and retrieved it.) Bell wouldn’t have been interested in Cele’s accomplishments anyway and our mother might not have quite liked Grandpa teaching Will – she was odd about Granny and Grandpa, though she was always careful to speak well of them in front of us. But you couldn’t help picking up a reserve.