south lawn were permanently drawn, lending the whole room the air of long sleep, as though a spell had been cast upon it – time not just standing still, but altogether banished.
From the broad Jacobean hallway paved in large black and white marble chess-board squares, the elegantly curving main stairs bordered by high semi-circular alcoves, each one housing a large Imari bowl of rose petal potpourri, led up to more passages and bedrooms named after former occupants, mostly long dead. Great Aunt Amelia’s room, at the end of the longest corridor with the squeaky floorboards, was also shut down and locked, but with the heavy key left in the lock. I had to use both hands. The door squeaked open into a pallid gloom, sun-faded blinds drawn tight so that, tiptoeing cautiously in, it took a while for my eyes to adjust.
No dustsheets here; a room intact as if the old lady had just walked out, as no doubt she had before collapsing into a border of heavily scented damasks and mosses in the rose garden a few years before I was born. They said she was dead before she hit the ground; sun hat, scissors, trug and cut roses theatrically arrayed around her like the pre-Raphaelite J.E. Millais’ painting of Ophelia, and, when they found her, Bif, her little Yorkshire terrier, loyally sitting among her billowing skirts.
Her big brass bed still had a floral quilt counterpane and an eiderdown neatly spread over case-less pillows of blue and white ticking, and square folded blankets ready to be made up as though she was expected back any day. The glazed chintz curtains were part drawn; on the sills small tortoiseshell and peacock butterflies lay dead, brittle wings closed in a rigid clinch.
Her ivory-backed, family-crest-engraved hairbrushes still held strands of her platinum hair, tortoiseshell comb and silver-topped pots and trays for kirby grips, powders and creams laid out on her dressing table, and ornate flasks, too tempting to ignore. I eased the glass stopper from one little phial and recoiled, quickly replacing it. The perfume, rich and luscious, powered over me. It was as though some deeply personal element of her inner being had come back to life and escaped into the stillness of the room, the genie out of the bottle. Flushed by guilt, I felt that I had rudely invaded her privacy, made more poignant by the engaging stare from the silver-framed, fading sepia photograph of her handsome young officer husband killed in the Battle of Gallipoli in 1915. I quickly retreated, quietly locking the door behind me.
But it was the labyrinthine service areas of the house that I really loved: the separate world of kitchens, sculleries, dank slate-shelved larders, the old servants’ hall, game-larder, laundry and sewing room all ruled by Nellie West, the housekeeper, whose ‘I got my eye on you, young Jack’ made me wonder why she didn’t use both eyes. And where the almost completely toothless cook, Mrs Barnwell, with pouting lips like a goldfish and hair in a net, and Sally Franklin the scullery maid, with a backside like a shire horse and who daily threatened, ‘If you don’t look out I’ll skin thee alive’ together with deaf Ada in the laundry, whose surname I never knew, and old Bob Bryson, a retired gamekeeper then working on as a gardener, with sunken eyes swimming in bloodshot pools and whose pipe protruded through a double gap in his lower teeth, as well as a few other daily worthies, all lived out the merry backstairs pageant of everyday life. To my child’s feasting eyes everyone seemed happy and content; they all got on with their various tasks, gaily teasing each other as though they were all members of the same family.
Uncle Aubrey was often to be found there too, bandaged legs always in black wellington boots, his proximity revealed by a perpetual acrid fog from chain-smoking his filter-tipped Kensitas cigarettes, only removed from his lips to replace with another. As the staff numbers had dwindled during the war years and never been replaced, so Aubrey, once rehabilitated, had taken over the management of Moloch, the vast anthracite boiler in the outer scullery, where he also boiled up the daily bouillabaisse of bran mash, kitchen left-overs and vegetable peelings for the chickens in the paddock. For the rest of the day a rich aroma of barley meal edged with the sharper, earthy essence of hot bran and potato peelings pursued him through the house.
To me the front of the house seemed lifeless, most of its occupants dead and gone, enhancing the daunting possibility of ghosts and the lurking fear that accompanied territory forbidden to us children, as though there must have been something sinister there to hide. The adults who did pass through, including our parents, always seemed to live in a bubble of orgulous best behaviour, a strictly observed correctness that vanished once through the green baize door, where the servants’ rooms and corridors bustled with life and ribald laughter.
4
The Dun Cow
It was in the oldest Jacobean quarter of the house that one of the most mysterious relics of local legend, the Dun Cow rib, was permanently housed. On a few links of rusty chain at either end the rib was slung from two square iron spikes driven into a black beam crossing the ceiling of the servants’ hall. Like all ribs, it was curved with an angled head at one end, but this rib was exceptional. It tapered through four feet eight inches in an arc of dark, heavy bone. No one knew how long it had hung there. Some said 400 years, from the time of King James I, others claimed a much more ancient origin stretching back through former dwellings now crumbled into history, back a thousand years to the misty days of peasants, feudal overlords and Saxon kings. As a child I stood and stared up at it with a mixture of fear and awe.
I was first told its unlikely legend by my father when I was five. He picked me up in his arms. ‘Run your fingers along it,’ he whispered, as if to heighten its mystery. It was as rough as the ancient oak beam from which it hung, and patchily dark, its many centuries staining it almost black in places, quite unlike any bone I had seen before. And it was heavy, heavier than me at that age, although I would not hold its full weight in my arms for many years to come.
It was an inauspicious moment. George VI had just died on 6 February 1952. The whole nation was in mourning, the national newspapers edged in black. I can clearly recall the bold headline ‘THE KING IS DEAD’ and the chill of shock and disbelief permeating round the entire house. Across the lane the church bell tolled, and from its tower the St George’s Cross rippled at half-mast in the winter breeze. My grandfather and father dressed in black suits. They wore black ties for days. With long faces and lowered voices the grown-ups talked of nothing else. Around the kitchen table Nellie, Mrs Barnwell, Sally Franklin and Ada pored over the newspapers, and special issues of Picture Post and the Illustrated London News. On the day of the funeral, 15 February, they crowded around the old wireless set on the sideboard to listen to the Home Service coverage, the doleful brass bands, wailing pipes and muffled drums of the procession from Buckingham Palace to Windsor, and the sombre commentary by the young Raymond Baxter. Nellie was in tears most of the day, sobbing into her tea.
It was only a few days later that my father took me to see the rib. The funereal mood and pall of death seemed to lurk in the darkest corners of the house. He told me that it had never been taken down since an unknown hand nailed it there all those centuries ago. His words struck chill into my heart: ‘It must never be moved, and when it is, there will be bad times, and death will visit the family,’ – although I’m sure he added that bit for dramatic effect. It worked. My imagination whirled like a top. I could see the headline, YOUR FAMILY IS DEAD, with a black edge all its own. The rib’s image, hanging there on its old chains, went in deep and has remained, stark and vivid, to this day.
The legend of the Dun Cow is well known throughout middle England. There are many pubs called the Dun Cow; villages such as Dunchurch and Ryton, Bourton, Stretton and Clifton, all still have the historical appendage ‘-on-Dunsmore’ attached to their names. They surround a once wild and barren heath known as Dunsmoor, bisected by the Roman Fosse Way. A second almost identical rib hangs in Warwick Castle ten miles away, and to this day many versions of the legend persist throughout the Midlands. Our own family narrative, written up by a Victorian maiden aunt in the mid-nineteenth century, runs like this:
About 900 years ago, in the reign of the Saxon King Athelstan, a herd of wild cattle roamed a
