Sail Upon the Land (7 page)

‘Mrs Hayes? Albert? I’m Mrs Jenkins. Good morning, do please come over and take a seat.’

Pearl led Bert over to the sofa. Mrs Jenkins waited until they were comfortable and then seated herself on one of the armchairs.

‘Would you like tea, Mrs Hayes? And Albert? A soft drink?’

They nodded, and the young secretary who had been waiting by the door left the room.

‘Now, Mrs Hayes, do I understood from your letter that you were not aware of your late husband’s Mount-Hey connections?’

‘No, Mrs Jenkins, I had never heard that name before. I met Mr Hayes in 1937 at the South Downs Sanatorium. He was one of the lucky ones who recovered from his TB. His parents were both dead by the time we married, and he never talked about his wider family. It didn’t seem important.’

‘I understand, and in fact if this century had not been plagued with war, you would have lived out your lives unaffected by his family connections in any way. But two wars in rapid succession decimated many of the old families, particularly ones like the Hayes which don’t seem to have been good at producing male heirs in the direct line. Surprisingly common, I’m afraid.’

The secretary came in with a tray, and put it down on the low table in front of Pearl and Bert. There was a pot of tea, milk jug and one cup, and a glass bottle of Coca Cola with a straw sticking out of it.

Mrs Jenkins indicated that Pearl should help herself to tea and opened the file on her lap.

‘Thank you for coming to see me today. I’m sorry for approaching you out of the blue like that, and I hope it hasn’t been inconvenient to come to London, but I felt we needed to proceed quickly.’

Pearl murmured, ‘No, it’s fine now it’s the holidays, thank you.’

Mrs Jenkins smiled again and consulted the notes in the file: ‘Now this is a bit complicated, so bear with me.

‘I mentioned in my letter that your husband was related to Baillie John Hayes, thirteenth Baron Mount-Hey? He died unmarried and in extreme old age last year having inherited the title during the war when his much younger cousin Robert Langdon Hayes, twelfth Baron, was killed at the Café de Paris in 1941. You may remember the case? A bomb came down through the ventilation shaft and exploded on the dance floor. Everyone believed they were safe underground. So sad.’

Pearl nodded.

‘Anyway, the twelfth Baron had been young and was expected to marry and take over the house and estate, having inherited as a child during the Great War from his second cousin Robert Baillie Hayes, eleventh Baron Mount-Hey, who was killed at Arras in 1917. Robert’s brother and heir, John Francis Hayes, was killed before him in 1916, during the Somme offensive. Neither of them had time to marry or have any children.’

Pearl nodded again, and Mrs Jenkins continued, ‘Now, as far as we have traced it back, and as trustees we have been in touch with the College of Heralds, your husband was a distant cousin of the late Lord Mount-Hey, and almost definitely his heir by descent from a second son of the eighth Baron.’

‘That’s dreadfully sad, so many men being killed in one family. But how on earth do they work out who is related to whom and who gets the title?’ Pearl asked.

‘Well,’ said Mrs Jenkins. ‘The original Baillie Hayes was one of the people who helped Charles II escape after the battle of Worcester. The Royalists passed the young king between them like a hot potato until he managed to get across to France. He never forgot the experience, and any of his rescuers who were still alive in 1660 when he returned to the throne were rewarded with titles, coats of arms and so on. But not money, sadly.

‘It’s a good story. Albert might like to hear it?’

‘Albert? Listen to Mrs Jenkins, please.’ She could see that he wasn’t paying attention but she knew he liked history stories as he borrowed them from the library all the time.

Mrs Jenkins continued: ‘On his last night in England, Charles stopped at the village of Hey, a few miles inland from Shoreham where a boat was waiting to take him to France. A troop of Parliamentary soldiers arrived at the inn where the King was hiding disguised as a servant. Baillie Hayes, who’d been wounded early in the war fighting as a Royalist, recognised the King while he was unsaddling his “master’s” horse in the stables. He couldn’t go back inside, so Baillie took him home to what was then Hey House, dressed them up as maidservants, and got him away to the sea both riding one of Baillie’s cart horses to disguise their height. They couldn’t stop laughing at each other which nearly got them caught.’

She paused while Bert snorted into his drink, and then continued, ‘The Mount-Hey coat of arms includes three petticoats – the King liked a joke.’

She extracted a piece of paper from the folder and passed it to Pearl and Bert. ‘Look, you can see it here.’

They looked at the picture of a shield with three stylised white petticoats on a blue background, two above and one below, separated by a silver chevron. Above the shield, there was a knight’s helmet with a silver horse’s head on top.

Pearl looked up, bemused. ‘But how does all this concern Albert?’

Mrs Jenkins carried on explaining: ‘It works like this: when a peer dies without a male heir of his own body, you hop back up the generations to see if any previous holder of the title had second or third sons with legitimate male descendants, and that’s how we traced your husband. Although I do just need to see his birth certificate and also his parents’ and your marriage certificates.’

‘They should all be in this folder. These are the documents that Albert brought with him when we married, including papers sent back from India.’

Mrs Jenkins took the folder. ‘Do you have any questions at this point?’

Pearl said, ‘What does all this mean for us?’

‘Well, as your husband is deceased, we believe your son Albert may be the fourteenth Baron Mount-Hey of Hey, which is important for two reasons. First, he will have a seat in the House of Lords, and secondly, and less usually, the estate goes with the title as there are no closer male heirs currently living, although the law of entail has changed and I will need to check everything very carefully.’

Pearl digested this, and then said, ‘You mean Bert is a lord?’

‘In effect, yes. But I’m afraid there is no fortune as such. The main problem with all this was the repeated death duties as one heir after another died unmarried. There were few or no concessions in tax law for death in war, so all the outlying farms and some other property had to be sold off to pay them.’

To Pearl, who lived in a semi-detached house in Eastbourne, anything that involved outlying farms sounded enormous. Bert looked quite indifferent.

‘There isn’t much left, but there is a house in Sussex called Castle Hey. It was commandeered by the Army as a listening post, and up until now they haven’t relinquished it so you don’t have to worry about it yet. There may be some compensation for the damage which you must be prepared for. Some families have had to pull their houses down as they were completely wrecked.’

She turned and smiled at Bert, who was sucking his unaccustomed Coca Cola through the straw – his grandparents refused to stock American drinks – with a great deal of pleasure and clearly not listening. She asked him if he had any questions, but he just blushed and muttered, ‘No, thank you.’

The meeting went on for an hour. When they got up to leave Pearl was still not at all sure what to think. The only immediate impression she received was that there was a fund available for the heir’s education.

As soon as they got home to Eastbourne, Pearl went round to call on her parents and give them the news. She could see that they too had no idea how to react to the information that their only grandchild was now a lord. Pearl led the way in deciding to ignore Albert’s elevation until the family was forced to build it into their world view. That happened faster than expected. Having ascertained the age of the Mount-Hey heir, and obtained all the proofs they needed, the trustees specified that Albert must go to public school, even though the academic year had already started. So stunned was the family that they simply complied, writing anxiously to Mrs Jenkins asking for recommendations.

She decided that Armishaw’s, a guild foundation school up on the Downs above Eastbourne, was the best choice. Albert would not find the hurried transition from grammar to public school so difficult there as it was on home territory.

Whap – loud, painful and shocking, it came out of nowhere. Bert’s head reeled with scattered sparks at the blow.

‘Daydreaming, Hayes? Is that what they teach you to do at these
grammar
schools? You’re at Armishaw’s now, boy, you need to buck up.’

It was his housemaster Mr Featherstone known as Eggy for his shiny bare pate which he tried to hide like a fat man behind a sapling with a slick strand of hair. After more than a term of it Bert was used to the slaps and jibes about his previous schooling, but he still wasn’t used to Greek. It was a passion for Eggy who couldn’t bear to be ignored when teaching his pet subject. Incomprehensible squiggles instead of the usual Roman alphabet had simply switched off Bert’s attention.

Bert found Eggy to be a peculiar man, but he had an accepting nature. He wasn’t particularly used to men at all, not having a father, and Eggy seemed always to be about to explode, his face red, his eyes watering. Hoping to keep out of Eggy’s way, Bert just kept his head down and did nothing to attract attention. The inmates of Reynolds House split neatly into two groups: a minority of sporty boys who hated and despised Eggy as a jumped-up little social climber (Bert thought he wasn’t in a position to judge) versus those who revered his classical scholarship and wanted to follow him to Oxford. Reynolds boasted a disproportionate number of Oxford Greats entrants due to Eggy’s dubious but unrelenting efforts.

Eggy loathed any kind of sport and tried to force the classics into all members of his little fiefdom, promoting his pet scholars as prefects and heads of house. Set apart from the main block, Reynolds House had a reputation for being peopled by swots and was thus ignored by the rest of the school.

Bert didn’t fit into either group. He wasn’t particularly sporty. He could hold his own at both football and cricket, although he disliked rugby. But it was too late for him to develop a passion for the classics. He much preferred history. Quite soon, he realised that he had been assigned to an unpopular house, replacing a boy who had left in the middle of the Lent term.

The abrupt disappearance of Tomkins had been preceded by a perfect hailstorm of slaps, according to Bert’s new housemates. When Eggy erupted, which he frequently did, boys jumped out of the way. Beating was falling out of favour, but that didn’t prevent an atmosphere of barely suppressed violence. Eggy had one redeeming feature, his plump and gentle wife Marjorie. She provided a haven of tea and ginger biscuits and organised a ‘house-father’ programme, where she picked a boy in the year above to help all new boys find their feet.

Bert had arrived at the beginning of the summer term. He'd been invited to get there early to meet his house-father and settle down a bit before the rest of Reynolds House barged in, high on testosterone and holiday-flavoured boasting. Mrs Featherstone had assigned as house-father to Bert a boy called Richard Payge. Payge had comparatively liberal leanings and a benign nature. His mother was an artist and his father a vague and dilapidated landowner of ancient lineage and few material assets. There was in the Payge family none of the rampant snobbery that infected public schools like a rash. Mrs Featherstone had waited for Bert in the hall when he first arrived and greeted him kindly, introducing him to fourteen-year-old Payge who was hovering behind her well-briefed and ready to do his stuff.

The taxi driver, who had brought him up to school on his first day, having deposited his new trunk in the front hall, came back to help him carry his cumbersome food hamper into the House Study. Glancing round, paralysed with shyness, he saw in every cubbyhole a wooden box, some pristine and new, some shiny with use and engraved with graffiti, all with black metal hasps and corners. He remembered, from being shown round with his mother, that these were called ‘tuck boxes’ and contained the boys’ treats. No one else had a hamper. He felt uneasy and exposed by this difference, when all he wanted to do was fade into the scarred panelling.

‘What’s that you’ve got, Hayes?’ enquired Payge immediately.

Sugar rationing had ended, and the bulging hamper contained a large fruit cake, tartan biscuit tins of shortbread, a can opener to deal with all the ham, turkey in jelly, condensed milk and fruit salad. His grandparents had added packets of peanuts, wine gums, Murray mints, Smith’s crisps, Bourneville and Cadbury’s chocolate bars and White’s lemonade and ginger beer – all barely subdued by the wicker lid’s straining leather straps.

‘Just some food and stuff from my grandparents,’ he replied shyly.

‘Tuck!’ exclaimed Payge and, his eyes gleaming, immediately took charge. Bert had nothing to worry about. Difference in the area of tuck was wholly acceptable.

Soon the hamper was concealed under the travel blanket prescribed in his kit list, in the dark space beneath the battered and carven shelf that served as a desk in his cubbyhole.

After that, Payge let it be known to a few select companions that Hayes had unlimited access to tuck, and word spread. His new friends seemed ravenous and Bert noticed that they wished to be in his good books to feed their insatiable hunger. Born just before or during the war, none of them had ever known anything other than rationing. Even now treats were scarce.

And never mind that Hayes’ grandparents were ‘in trade’. The trade they were in was food, and that made up for everything. Moreover, Bert had a generous nature and, having been brought up with groceries, took the food for granted. He had no desire to hoard and it was no novelty for him. Each time he went home for an exeat, his grandparents replenished the hamper with a lack of caution that was their silent way of loving their only grandchild.