Bertie, May and Mrs Fish. Xandra Bingley

with me at this time.

      She learns to farm. Two thousand acres. A mile of valley. Horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, poultry. Snow in winter above the lintels of the downstairs windows. Her fingers swell. Chilblains. Long white kid gloves are wrapped round a leaky pipe in her bedroom knotted at the fingers. She has a lot to learn that no one has taught her. Accidents happen.

       2 WARTIME

      After two days leave at Christmas my father writes

      … thank you for my very lovely and never to be forgotten first holiday in our new home and for all the happiness you have brought me. A terrible anticlimax coming back. I miss you and home as much as I used to as a small boy sent away to school. Our home is our own most perfect special Bears’ castle for ever and always.

      His regiment moves further north to a barracks in Northumberland.

       … your farmyard is a ballroom compared to my car parks up here. I am having cement roads built by charming German Jew refugees. A Sergeant in charge is Czech and was in an Austrian concentration camp with 20,000 others. A number were ordered to be hanged or shot by Hess for no reason at all. He has written three times to the Home Secretary to ask to be allowed to look after Hess for one night!!!

      No more news now darling Bear except to send you all my love and to say how I long to be with you. How splendid about the big new Esse kitchen range stove. The perfection of our lovely home.

      In the Pittville Nursing Home in Cheltenham, in snow, in February 1942, she endures a difficult birth and I am born … their Little Bear. My mother writes in her diary … I did not know it would hurt so much.

      In springtime my father sends

      … coupons for the calf with the usual unanswerable form. Here I am very lonely and far from my Bears and home. What a lovely Easter it was. Our first with our Little Bear and our new home. Both equally lovely. It is heaven and we are so lucky to be so happy. I’m sure few other people are as happy as we are. It all seems to be too good to be true. I have bought you a lovely birthday present Ralli-cart with yellow wheels and good tyres that will look brand new with a coat of varnish. I hope you will like it. When we find a nice pony and borrow a harness it will be a topper and very smart.

      A pony is tied to an apple tree on a rope to graze the lawn in circles and I am placed in a wicker basket on the pony’s back. I have an eighty-year-old nanny – Annie Nannie – my mother’s Irish cousins’ nanny forty years before. I must have looked up at branches and apple blossom and warplanes.

      Joe Rummings and Mr Griff and Mr Munday are farm labourers too old for call-up. Landgirls are seconded from their work at the Wills Tobacco cigarette factory in Birmingham. A lorry load of Italian prisoners of war is driven in for daily threshing and hoeing and fencing and stone collecting.

      Mrs Griffin walks two miles from Kilkenny three times a week and cleans. She squeezes water out of used tea leaves and scatters handfuls on carpets and kneels and bristle-brushes up dirt stuck to the leaves into a red dented tin dustpan. She dusts and wax-polishes Georgian furniture and scours iron saucepans and changes linen sheets and talks and talks all the time to my mother and Mrs Fish and to herself. Mrs Fish walks two miles over the fields from Needlehole to wash and iron bedsheets and clothes two days a week.

      He writes

      … so pleased to hear you are fixed up with Italian prisoners. Worrying about it on the train I didn’t know how you’d manage. Have been thinking about you all day looking after our Little Bear and keeping the threshing going. Only wish I could be there to help instead of leaving it all on your shoulders. I know we are going to make a success. One always does if one’s heart is really in it and both our hearts are. All my love my darlingest. Soon a lovely holiday together.

      The prisoners of war are forbidden to speak. Lined up in the yard in dark-blue jackets and trousers, they call out to me … Che bella bambina … cara … io te adoro … veni … veni qui. A man in dark-blue uniform has a gun in a holster and shouts … No talky … allez … skeddadle … go-go … follow lady on horsy. My mother rides into Homefield leading the line. Each prisoner carries a long-handled hoe over his shoulder. They walk to fields of kale and mangolds and turnips and swedes to hoe out weeds along the rows. In winter the Italians rub their hands and call out … È fredo in Inghilterra … molto molto fredo … è terribile … and my mother smiles and says … Yes … cold … molto coldo.

      Landgirls live in the house on the top floor. They sit in the kitchen and smoke cigarettes and cry and turn the battery wireless onto the Light Programme when my mother is not there. A landgirl called Jannie is my nanny after old Annie Nannie goes back to Ireland. My mother barters cigarettes for herself and the girls on the black market in Cheltenham. She drives Merrylegs the dock-tailed Welsh cob seven miles down and seven back uphill every fortnight in the Ralli-cart, and trades homemade butter and fresh eggs and dead rabbits. Until the day she says to the landgirls … Getting us all cigarettes takes up too much time … I am stopping smoking … I shan’t be buying cigarettes in Cheltenham any more for anyone.

      A landgirl says … We’ll have to get ours off the Yanks then, won’t we … American airmen are billeted at Guiting Grange. Our landgirls walk down the lane to the pub at Kilkenny in the evenings in gumboots and flowered cotton dresses and mackintoshes. They carry high-heeled shoes and get picked up in US jeeps.

      Sometimes a girl comes home in the morning late for milking. One girl cries to my mother … I can’t have a Yankee baby … I told him … I swear I did … and my mother says … we’ll have to get you back home to Birmingham somehow. She writes in her diary … New landgirl up the spout.

      My mother is pregnant again and has an abortion in the Pittville Nursing Home in Cheltenham. She does not tell my father. After a first difficult birth she is advised she must not risk having another child.

      January and February and March are terribly cold months. One March an east wind blows and the weathervane fox above the granary gallops east for a week. My mother walks out of the house carrying her shotgun and loads two cartridges and aims at the fox. She fires both barrels and says … That should change things … We’ve had enough of this cold east wind. Grey tumbler pigeons fly off the barns and circle high in the sky and the copper fox pirouettes all morning. Joe and Mr Griff and the landgirls stop in the yard and watch the twirling fox. One by one tumblers fall wings closed to a barn and glide to a window ledge. By afternoon the fox slows down facing north.

      Her diary says … Why can’t I be happy … I have everything I want … dear God …

      He writes

      … Eric Bates is having a bad turn. He has had a skin disease for months and that plus the fact that his wife is having a baby seems to have got him down. He sits by the hour with an ashen white face looking straight in front of him refusing to do anything. I try to knock some sense into him but it’s pretty tricky. His wife is in Scotland and due to foal next week.

      Last night we played billiards after dinner and everyone got foxed. I broke several very old gramophone records over Basil’s head and he walked round the billiard table saying ‘I’ve never had that done to me before in my whole life’ as if it happens to everyone every day. We all laughed a great deal and it does a lot of good. I get very depressed and feel almost like Eric at times.

      No more now my very special Bear. Not so very long to wait now till we see each other again after this lifetime apart. Soon now I shall be with you and we will be happy Bears together with all the spring flowers and sunshine and trees coming out and so much to look at and see with you. Keep your tail up. All my love my darlingest. Your one and only Big Bear.

      In the kitchen my mother hears aeroplanes and says … Listen … listen … are they ours … out we run … quick … look … look up … and black wide-winged aeroplanes fly over in lines. At milking time one afternoon a single big grey plane roars low across the