away and I had to be with my mother on my own for two weeks. I can only have been six or seven at the time, but once I realised what was happening, I went into a catatonic state. She had to call the doctor. I just sat unable to move for three hours. I was in such a state of shock at the prospect of two weeks on our own. Now it sounds like nothing but then it was a lifetime.’
Siblings experience their parents in different ways and while Bronwen found her mother a cold, distant figure, Ann remembers an entirely separate person with great affection. ‘My mother was not a cuddly sort of person but she was kind and caring.’ Such a divergence of views is not uncommon in brothers and sisters, depending on their temperament and their position in the family. Parents who are strict with their older children, perhaps daunted by the serious business of forming young minds and possibly, at an early stage in their careen, anxious over material matters, become indulgent, relaxed mentors to their younger children, self-confident in then-behaviour and sometimes cushioned by greater financial resources. In Bronwen’s case there was certainly more money around when she was a child and Ann retains the distinct memory that her youngest sister was spoilt and indulged. Yet Bronwen was also aware of a new anxiety in Kathleen Pugh – her desire to break out of the confines of being a stay-at-home parent, which contributed to the temperamental clash between mother and daughter.
Kathleen’s difficult relationship with her youngest and most independent daughter reflected her tense dealings with her own mother, Lizzie Goodyear, who lived on in her Bromley house to the age of ninety-one, surviving her husband by twenty-two years. ‘My mother was scared of my grandmother,’ says Bronwen. ‘I used to be taken to tea when she had to go and visit her mother as a kind of distraction. Out would come the silver and the maid and the cucumber sandwiches-the complete opposite of the way my mother ran our house. So it was wonderful for me but I sensed my mother was terrified.’
Bronwen’s picture of the house in Pilgrims Lane as one that was lacking in warmth is also qualified by Bella Wells, the nanny. ‘There was no hugging or kissing or anything like that. But then not many people would do that then.’ Much later, in an academic paper she wrote ‘Of Psychological Aspects of Motherhood’, Bronwen reflected obliquely on her own experiences: ‘Assuming the child is wanted from the moment of conception – and many of us are not – and is the right gender – again, many of us are not’, the mother’s love, attitude and behaviour are ‘more fundamental to the child’s early formation than that of the father’.
Her perceptions of the absence of that love from her own mother left a deep scar. ‘I could entertain her – go shopping with her, do the crossword – but she made me feel like a thorough nuisance. I’m still always apologising for being a nuisance. I try to stop now that I know. I had my handwriting analysed recently. “Oh, but you’re still running away from your mother,” the graphologist told me. Even now!’
What love she felt – and therefore returned – was all to do with her father. As she grew up, Bronwen knew from an early age that she did not want to be like her mother. ‘I remember deciding, when I was quite young, that I was going to be more graceful than my mother. She never made the best of herself. She never wore make-up and her hair was cut in an Eton crop like a boy.’
Alun Pugh, by contrast, was his daughter’s hero – indeed the hero of all his daughters. ‘We were all devoted to our father,’ says Ann. ‘I can remember as a girl walking down the High Street in Hampstead with him and saying, “What would you do if the house caught fire? Who would you save?” and being heart-broken when he said, “Your mother, of course.”’ He was, she recollects, a charmer, but part of that charm lay in the fact that he was so seldom at home; his work often took him away and he was unpredictable in his hours. He brought an excitement but also an uncertainty to the home with his eccentricity and sense of adventure. He would have great enthusiasms that were utterly impractical. At one stage he decided it would be fun to keep silk-worms and make their own clothes. So Gwyneth and Bronwen made cocoons out of old newspaper and hung them from the ceiling, but when the worms began to produce silk the little hand-spinner their father had made could not cope with the output. ‘It had closed-in ends, so you couldn’t get anything off it,’ says Bronwen. ‘It was typical of my father, this do-it-yourself-and-have-fun-doing-it mentality, but then never to finish it off. He had lots of imagination and was terrific fun. When he emerged from his study at home, the atmosphere would change at once. But he was totally impractical.’
When he was a student, Alun Pugh had made a jelly in a teapot, thinking it would make an interesting shape, but then he couldn’t get it out. It is a useful symbol for most of his schemes. When he imported hives of bees into the garden, he eventually had to abort the project because his wife grew allergic to their sting, though he did manage to make some mead and plenty of honey.
Like Kathleen, Alun Pugh didn’t go in much for hugging and kissing, but as a substitute he took a keen, almost zealous, interest in his children’s progress, forever pushing them to do better and be the best. When Bronwen was twelve she was taken to see Roy Henderson, then a celebrated voice coach. He said she had a pleasant voice and good pitch, and suggested lessons, but when he made it clear she would never sing solo in the great concert halls of the world, Alun Pugh decided against. ‘You do something to get to the top or you don’t bother at all,’ is how his youngest daughter sums up the prevailing attitude.
Singing had been something Alun Pugh associated with his mother, who reputedly had a beautiful voice and played the harp, with her son accompanying her on the piano. Bronwen was also told that physically she resembled her paternal grandmother and this may have contributed to a special closeness between father and daughter that compensated for the alienation between mother and daughter.
With Ann and David away at school, Bronwen and Gwyneth developed an enduring bond. The two would get up to all sorts of mischief and it was Gwyneth who was Bronwen’s chief source of fun in the house. ‘She was always inventing things,’ Bronwen remembers. ‘Once when she was ill in bed, she spent hours building this elaborate system of pulleys and string so that we could send each other messages from bedroom to bedroom. Or she would devise complicated games where she would be the captain and I would be the boatswain. I was always saying, “Ay, ay, captain,” to her. She was in charge.’
The five-year age-gap with Gwyneth meant that the youngest Pugh sibling often had to while away many hours on her own or with her nanny. There were friends in the neighbourhood and cycle rides around the carefree streets of Hampstead, but going to school just before her fifth birthday came as something of a blessing. St Christopher’s was a Church of England primary on the way down Rosslyn Hill from Hampstead into central London. Though the Pughs retained their links to the Welsh chapel, their ordinary practice of religion had become increasingly Anglican. (When he joined up with the Welsh Guards in 1915, Alun Pugh had claimed to have no religious affiliations at all.)
Bronwen’s reports suggest a model pupil, with hints at future interests. From her earliest days she did well at recitation, and was praised in April 1936 as ‘a useful leader of the class’. She joined a percussion band that same year and the only blot on the landscape was her problems with an unusual addition to the otherwise standard curriculum, Swedish drill, where she ‘sometimes lacks control’. At the end of summer term 1937, aged seven, she was put up two classes – into a group where the average age was fourteen months above hers-on account of her excellent progress. She made the transition effortlessly, save for occasional blips in arithmetic – ‘must try to be more accurate’ – and painting – ‘is inclined to use too pale colours’ (both spring term 1939). By the time of her final report from St Christopher’s, her card was Uttered with ‘very goods’ and adjectives like ‘appreciative’, ‘careful’, ‘neat’ and ‘musical’.
She did not return to the local school that autumn. War had broken out in September and her parents decided to send her early to join her sister Gwyneth at boarding school in Wales. The two older Pugh girls had gone at the age of twelve, but in view of the anticipated threat to London by German bombers
