Child from Home (12 page)

On arrival we followed the spare and sprightly figure of Miss Thorne from the coach, which had pulled up under the luxuriant, green foliage of a towering beech tree. Kitty held open the heavy, five-barred gate and we skipped up the gravelled drive that was edged with neatly trimmed lawns and flowerbeds. A lovely, variegated holly shrub, with white-edged leaves, stood on the lawn near the station goods yard. In the borders the last few spikes of grey-green leaved, purple-flowered

honesty were going over and flat, round, green seedcases were forming. In time these would become large and opaque and we called them silver pennies. In the borders tulips and primulas were still in flower.

Grove House, a solid, thick-walled, seven-bedroomed residence within twelve acres of gardens and shrubbery, nestled in the lee of a steep wooded hillside deep in the valley amidst the peace and quiet of lovely countryside. It was a wonderful old Victorian gentleman's house and its grandeur and scale was in stark contrast with our working-class house that could have fitted into one corner of it. There were only fourteen children – aged from two to six years – in the nursery when the war started, but that number had grown to twenty-four as the bombing raids on Middlesbrough had increased.

Our little band of infants and toddlers entered the house through an oak door that led into a square, stone-built porch with a crenellated parapet. The side windows had wooden shutters on the outside and above the inner door was a rectangular stained-glass window. When the sun shone it cast red and orange-coloured patterns onto the plush carpet below the intricately wrought-iron chandelier that hung over the long corridor. Passing dark brown wainscoting, we came to the foot of the wide staircase with its intricately carved newel post. Its risers and treads were thickly carpeted and the banisters were made of pitch pine. Turning right we passed through a finely carved, panelled door into a large private lounge, which was to become our play room.

The long room had two wide, large-paned sash windows with wood-panelled reveals. The thick walls were wood-panelled and the windows looked out onto a wide, paved verandah with a glass roof that was supported on square wooden posts. It formed an open-sided portico and French doors led on to it. On the far side four stone steps led down to a gravelled area, beyond which were more well-tended lawns and colourful flowerbeds. The large, square windows were not blast-taped as they had blackout screens and sturdy wooden shutters to protect us from the battering rain and howling gales. Carved, forward-facing lion heads adorned the top corners of the fluted architraves of the windows. Apparently, lions' heads featured prominently on the Rowntree family crest. The high-ceilinged room had beautifully moulded medallions and cornices, and on the south wall was a wide, stone chimneybreast with a magnificent marble fireplace built to hold a blazing log fire. In front of it was a wire-mesh fireguard to ensure that we did not come to any harm.

Behind the play room lay the dining room, which also had a fine but smaller fireplace. A doorway led from it into a wide, stone-built, glass-windowed porch that faced south onto the grassy garden at the rear of the house. Ten yards away from the porch was a smooth-barked Locust tree, also known as Silver Chain or White Laburnum – a tree of light and graceful proportions which had long slender branches, and two feet up from its base it forked and its leaning trunk made it easy for agile youngsters such as us to climb it. It was just one of the many exotic and beautiful ornamental trees and shrubs in the spacious surroundings of the grand old house that we were to come to know every inch of. Some were rare species brought from foreign lands by wealthy owners, which was apparently the fashionable thing to do in Victorian times.

To the left of the front hallway was a large cloakroom, and behind it lay a stone-flagged kitchen with low beams that had large metal hooks in them. In the centre stood a heavy wooden table scrubbed almost white, and a deep, vitreous china sink stood under the blast-taped window of the scullery next door. It was a much smaller kitchen than the one at Sutherland Lodge but this time we had the whole house to ourselves. Behind the kitchen there was a large larder that kept the food cool.

The grand staircase had a gracefully curving balustrade and there were beautiful-stained glass windows above the landing halfway up. At the top there was a large bathroom and our metal-framed beds had been set up in the dormitory. Five large bedrooms, in which the nursery staff were to sleep, led off a long corridor. The rooms had a small wrought-iron, black-leaded fireplace with a mantle-shelf supported on delicately fluted, wooden columns, and there was a fender with a brass rail around each hearth. The bedrooms were directly above the kitchen and larder and their small-paned windows were all blast-taped.

At the southern end of the garden there was an overgrown pond, where we saw white-billed coots that dived and stayed under the water for so long that we thought they must have drowned. We were not allowed down there on our own but Kitty took us to see the small brown, chestnut-cheeked little grebes, commonly called dabchicks, with the female carrying three fluffy chicks on her back. She had a small whitish patch on each cheek where the beak joined it and her nest actually floated on the water amongst the reeds. There were small furtive waterhens with white-streaked flanks and red beaks tipped with yellow that looked as if they were wearing red garters on their green legs. They are, more correctly, called moorhens and we watched them as they dived for food. Emerging mayflies performed their strange up-and-down dance above the placid, pearly sheen of the water, and hundreds of gnats formed smoky clouds. A long rustic fence separated the garden from the station goods yard. The wooded slopes above the house were clothed in a mixture of conifers and deciduous trees.

The large, three-bedroom, stone-built station house stood just south of the pair of cottages and its gable end abutted the northbound platform. The door of the paved yard at the back of the house led directly onto this ‘up' platform. Near it was a cast-iron, Rowntree's one penny chocolate dispensing machine and close by stood a bench. The gable end of the house had a clock let into it at about shoulder height. It had a round, white dial faced with black Roman numerals. Late tulips were in flower in its little front garden where the door to the kitchen was set within a rectangular stone porch. The front windows overlooked the fields beside the railway line.

The kind and good-natured senior signalman, Mr Walter Artley, lived here, and on rising his first job was to wind up the platform clock. A door from the first sitting room led into the kitchen where a wooden clothes maiden, that was raised and lowered by means of cords and pulleys, hung from the ceiling above a gleaming black-leaded fire range.

The stairs led from the kitchen to the bedrooms where ceramic pitchers and ewers were used for washing. Walter lived here with his wife and their four children, aged from two to twelve years old. Mrs Artley, a friendly and caring lady, played the organ in Levisham Chapel-of-Ease every Sunday, and also played for the services held in the tiny valley church in the summer months.

There was a neatly cultivated flower and vegetable garden behind the station house, and it had an outside brick coalhouse and a privy with a flush toilet. A narrow beck ran past the bottom of their long garden before it swung west to drain into Pickering Beck. In dry, calm weather the beck could be heard babbling quietly over the water-worn pebbles of its stony bed. The Artleys kept a few black-faced Masham sheep and we would often hear the lowing of their black and brown Holstein cows as they grazed in the meadow. The smelly cow byre and the stables were situated in a range of wooden buildings at the far end of the field. The excess milk was carried across to Grove House in two-gallon, white-enamelled jugs to be sold to Dinner Lady.

On balmy early summer evenings we could hear Mrs Artley calling the cows in, as sound carried a long way in the quietness of that deep valley. The animals would amble along with their distended udders leaking milk and after we got to know her eldest daughter Monica, she would occasionally take us into the warm, cosy atmosphere of the byre. We liked to watch Mrs Artley as she sat on a three-legged stool with her head resting against the cow's side calmly milking them by hand. The milk from the limpid-eyed cows would squirt noisily into the white-enamelled pails. The cows seemed like huge beasts to us but they had a nice warm, sweet smell close up. Occasionally, as a special treat, we would be given a glass of the warm, creamy milk, which was now at its richest and most plentiful as the meadow grass was lush and green. Mrs Artley used to separate the lumpy curds from the thin watery whey to make cheese in an old contraption that had a wooden barrel fixed to a cast-iron wheel. She rotated it by turning the handle on the side and the whey was given to the pigs.

The stables housed Charlie, their loveable little black pony; Daisy, their roan horse, and her foal. They called the partition between their stalls the skelbeast, and the cow byre was known as the shippon – terms that lingered from a bygone age. They also kept a few clucking and scratching hens and reared a couple of pigs that were killed at Christmas to supply the family with sufficient ham and bacon for the year to come. Oil lamps were used to light the place and the small-paned windows were criss-crossed with sticky blast-tape like the railway cottages.

Levisham village was one and a half miles away up the steep gravelled lane, which – during high summer when the stones were dry and sunlit – became a dazzling white ribbon. The village could be reached by a shorter but steeper route as a rutted, earthen footpath led off the lane just above Grove House, passing behind the range of stone outbuildings that housed the electric generator and stored coal, garden tools and suchlike. It continued eastward before swinging left to climb steeply through mixed woodland and hazel shrubs. It emerged into open fields halfway up the hillside and led steeply up to a barn. It then passed a wooden bench, erected to celebrate the Coronation of King George VI three years earlier. From here there was an excellent view of Newtondale, the railway line running through it and Newton village perched on the opposite hilltop. The path continued before emerging on a lane that led to Levisham Chapel-of-Ease. The ‘squire' of the manor was a Mr Baldwin, the co-founder of the Paton and Baldwin wool manufacturing and knitting pattern empire, a firm that was a household name at that time. He had lived in Levisham Hall with his family for the last sixteen years.

The Hall was actually little more than a large, three-storey cottage with a castellated stone porch and double bay windows. It was full of quaint nooks and tiny rooms and its commanding position gave it fine views of the Lockton valley and the countryside to the south. Around the turn of the century, the wife of the future Lord Baden-Powell had hired the Hall for an extended holiday with her young family while her husband Robert, a cavalry officer, was fighting in the Boer War. He, of course, became famed for his founding of the Boy Scout movement in 1908 and the Girl Guides two years later.

On those glorious summer mornings the golden light of the sun, as it rose over the high ridge to the east, lit up the dark fringe of trees on the opposite hillside turning them a bright green. The dawn of a new day was the signal for choirs of birds to break into gloriously cascading waves of song. While the big house was still immersed in half-light and sombre shadows, we were roused, washed and dressed. The strengthening power of the ascending sun slowly burnt off the dew on the meadow and her rays dissipated the mists from the valley, as we sat down to breakfast. This usually consisted of thick, steaming porridge, made with Scott's Porridge Oats, that had a dollop of jam or treacle on it. We then filled up on thickly buttered toast and marmalade. Every morning, after breakfast, Kitty sat the younger children on a row of little ceramic chamber potties that we called pos (pronounced pose) or jerries. They sat outside on the verandah if the weather was dry and warm, but if it was cold or wet they would be brought inside until they had done their ‘duty', leaving the windows and doors open because of the smell. We older children were able to go to the toilet by ourselves. The large dormitory had a polished wooden floor and an elegant tiled fireplace and it was in here that most of the younger children slept.

The older ones, including myself, were allowed to stay up a little later than the rest as we slept in the play room. At midday we had a hot savoury meal with plenty of potatoes and vegetables depending on the season of the year, as there were no freezers to keep food fresh in those days. A sweet of sago, tapioca (that we called frogspawn), rice pudding, jam roly-poly or plum duff followed. After our meal we were laid in our little beds with the window shutters closed and this was our regular nap of an hour or so to allow our food to digest. In the half-light the ugly leonine faces above the windows frightened me and I hid my head under the bedclothes. If we were naughty and refused to lie down, or if Eric and I disturbed the other children by talking, we were made to stand in the corner with our faces to the wall. We were often told off but were never smacked. After our nap we would sometimes be taken for a walk along the path that started not far from the kitchen door.

Pretending to be soldiers or airmen, we chattered and babbled on. Aeroplanes were all the rage at that time and we zoomed about with our arms outspread dodging round the adults. We no doubt drove them mad making aeroplane noises as we bombed and killed hundreds of nasty Jerries in our imagination. My three-year-old brother George was quite content watching a snail pushing out one feeler at a time as it emerged from its shell, or in pushing the large, fluffy white toy Scottie dog along. With its short fur and stubby upright tail, it was mounted on a steel framework that had four rubber-tyred tin wheels. It had a tubular steel handle with which to trundle it along and our George really loved it. Eric preferred to pedal around on the flat-seated tricycle that had replaced the one wrecked at Sutherland Lodge.