2.2: Siblings: finding my niche in the family

Caroline was there from the start. She was my constant companion, in those early days. Older than myself by three and three-quarter years, she knew the ropes and was protective to my interests with regard to life outside the walls of our nursery sanctuary. She knew (and probably deemed it unfair) that I was something unique within the family: the treasured heir. But she accepted her guardianship role with a possessiveness that was quite fierce. Others might display a rather special concern about my welfare, but there was never any challenge from me, to her personal dominance. I belonged to her, and could be trained to suit her ways.

Caroline's particular method of controlling me was by sensory deprivation, by which I mean that she would suddenly refuse to communicate with me until I had bent my will to hers. I invariably felt miserable while this mode of persuasion was being applied, and my one concern was to reopen the full bonding of her grace and favour. A sense of pride in my own human rights was quite evidently lacking.

I loved Caroline, and whatever she told me I believed. Mummy and Nanny would read us fairy stories, and Caroline confided to me that she herself was a fairy. If I had been so bold as to disobey her, which I seldom did, she would have turned me into a toad. But in my obedience to her, I was rewarded with many a special treat. I sinned once, however. This was at a party in London, when I informed another boy who was neglecting to show my sister the reverence she deserved, that she was a fairy, so he'd better watch out. His ribald laughter took me by surprise and offended me, and I noted how Caroline looked put out. What disappointed me was that she refrained from turning him into a toad. She was at pains to impress on me, later, that this being-a-fairy business was secret between ourselves. I must not divulge it to others. But I heard rather less about her magic powers after that.

If Caroline told me to run errands, I would run them. I was hers to command, and pleased that this should be so. The birth of a younger brother did nothing to alter any of that. I have no distinct memory of Christopher arriving upon the scene, almost two years later than myself. Nobody (apart from Nanny) treated him as a significant addition to the family, and he was generally left behind in her care, when Caroline and myself accompanied our parents to whatever might be going on. My first significant memory of Christopher was when our family doctor enquired what I thought of my little brother. I said: "He wets his bed."

Christopher's initial statement of identity was as the naughty one within the family. Caroline and I were shocked at the way he beamed with pleasure, when standing up in his cot, advertising the fact that, once again, he had performed this trick. He got smacked for it on successive occasions - until Dr Graham- Campbell suggested, gently, that this might be the motivation which prompted the bed-wetting. So thenceforward he was punished by Nanny's omission to smack him.

It was still by naughtiness that he best gained the family attention, however. He was only three when my father took us all to the Norfolk Broads, for a holiday on board a boat called `The Werry'. Christopher continually managed to escape from the cabin where he had been confined as a punishment, by climbing out of a port-hole. Henry tried to break this habit, by beating him (lightly enough I daresay,) with the top section of a fishing rod. Later, I was to hear my father say that he had been greatly impressed by the little boy's cheerfulness under such treatment: the one responding to the other perhaps, in what was the initiation of a special relationship. The exact working of this was something that I never did comprehend.

Christopher was exceptionally slow in learning how to speak: to such an extent that Henry was concerned at one point to discover if it might be necessary to have an operation performed upon his tongue, which gave the impression of being too large for his mouth. He was unable to pronounce his own name, which came out sounding something like "Pip.... Pip...." Hence it was Pip-Pip that we called him: or soon afterwards, just Pip. Caroline's name became abbreviated to Cal, incidentally, and my own to Al - until the time we went to school, that is to say.

My own viewpoint upon Pip was that he was a nuisance. Daddy had rules about not leaving our toys downstairs in the drawing-room. If we did so, they would be confiscated and given away to the local orphanage. And once rules had been made, they had to be strictly applied - in the interests of discipline and the development of obedience.

It is probable that I possessed many more toys than Christopher, but I seldom took this into account when he left my toys down in the drawing-room, with the result that they were confiscated. It was no good hoping that my father might bend the rules under such circumstances. Rules were rules, and they had to be applied.

I had a new game called Helter-Skelter, involving marbles rolled down a spiral chute, to score points in accordance with the hole they entered upon the final slope. I'd only just been given it, so I was peculiarly upset when Pip left this downstairs. The rule couldn't be broken, but I obtained Henry's permission to exchange the item that was to be confiscated for something else, of lesser personal value.

I had a large menagerie of cuddly toy animals, each with a distinct personality of its own, and I concluded that one of these must be sacrificed. Two of them were pigs, so perhaps one might be regarded as superfluous. Tommy Pig had been with me for a long time, and it was because he had lost most of his stuffing that I had recently been presented by my parents with Percy Pig, who was far classier and probably came from Harrods. But I hadn't yet developed a feeling of relationship with him, so it had to be he: a decision which nonetheless cost me many tears.

The expression on my mother's face was even more woebegone than my own, however, when I went to make the exchange. They had chosen Percy Pig for me with some care, and at no little expense - to wean me of my adoration for Tommy Pig. And here I was trading him in for a rubbishy game of marbles, which had cost a few shillings at the most. Rules were rules however, and they had to be strictly applied. So it was goodbye to Percy.

When I did play with Pip, it was not exactly as equals. I got into trouble on one occasion because a gardener at Sturford Mead reported to Nanny that I was dragging the poor little mite around the garden, with a rope around his neck. He made it sound as if I'd been intending to string him up, and that his life had only been saved by intervention in the nick of time. But it was a simple case of grown-ups getting things wrong. We'd been playing at cowboys - and Pip was my steer.

There was another occasion when we were playing robbers, and we had sticks as swords. It was old Mrs Garrett's misfortune to come walking down the lane from Corsley at this juncture. We jumped her from the bushes, and threatened to cut off her head with our swords. Nanny got to hear of this, and we were sent down to apologise to Mrs Garrett for our assault. I always assumed that it had been the old lady herself who must have lodged a complaint. But I was to learn many years later, from Nanny, that it was Cal who had spotted what we were up to, and reported us. I believe that Caroline played this sort of role more often than we suspected at the time. She liked to be in control of events, and this robbers game wasn't of her own making.

I was five and a half when my youngest brother, Valentine, was born. I remember his arrival, and we all got excited about it at the time. But it wasn't as if Cal and I were going to permit him to play a significant part in our lives. He was Nanny's favourite, of course. She always treasured the youngest addition to the family, extending to him the special cloak of her protection: spoiling him, as we saw it. And it could be that he had some need of this - if the truth be told.

There is one shameful story which had best be recounted. Valentine (or Baba, as he came to be known until his schooldays,) was such an inanimate creature, and it was almost in a spirit of scientific curiosity that Pip and I put nettles at the foot of his pram - just to see if his feet were truly sensitive. They were of course, and he started howling with pain, without displaying an awareness of who might be inflicting it upon him. At this moment Nanny fortuitously arrived upon the scene, kicking up one hell of a fuss. I was the culprit of course. Pip had only been watching what I did. And Nanny flounced off declaring that she was going to tell Mummy about what I'd been up to.

I followed her at a distance, and when I looked in at the drawing-room window, I espied that she was deep in a serious conversation with Daphne. Entering by the bay window, I said: "I'm sorry, Mummy. I'm sorry." It then became apparent that Nanny had in fact refrained from betraying me, so that I was now obliged to come out with my own confession: which may have been the circumstance which saved me from the punishment I merited.

In the summer of 1938, the whole family was holidaying at Piraillon, near Arcachon and Bordeaux in France. Henry had rented a house right down on the beach, and in different ways our respective personalities became noticeable. Baba for his part was delighting the family with little cabaret performances. When held just above the surface of the sea, he did `splashy-splashies' with his feet: or `smelly-smellies', with a crinkled nose when presented with a flower.

Pip's persona had taken a more erotic turn. Cal told me how she had seen him taking down his bathing pants to display his bottom to a young French girl, who dwelt in one of the neighbouring houses. I had made no progress, personally, in breaking the language barrier between myself and these French girls, and Christopher's evident success in this more direct approach struck me as shocking. Cal too had seemed to be shocked when telling me what he had done. So I fell into the trap of giving vent to my moral indignation, when passing on the story to my parents. She betrayed me however, by switching tone and telling them that I too had done precisely the same thing. I denied this indignantly. "I didn't!" "You did." "I didn't." "You did." And inasmuch that she was older than me, I received the uncomfortable impression that her word was being taken in preference to my own. This was an initial insight into my sister's highly flexible concept of truth.

The distinction between Caroline's, and my own attitude in other matters came vividly to the forefront of attention when the French cook in our house at Piraillon had a live cockerel, to slaughter for our lunch. She imagined that this would be a spectacle that would both interest and educate us, so she brought out the bird into the garden where we were playing, and stuck a carving knife down its throat so that an artery was severed, and the blood began to flow. I regret to say that my own interest was aroused. But Cal was of gentler spirit, displaying her disgust in no uncertain fashion, and when it came to her refusal to partake of flesh from the cockerel we had seen slaughtered, she had me wrong-footed, torn between the demands of my hunger and my fraternal desire to display ideological solidarity. Greed won the day, and I ate my share of the bird - while Cal missed out on lunch altogether.

The Munich crisis interrupted this holiday down in Piraillon, and we drove north in a frantic hurry to get back on the right side of the Channel. Tempers frayed quickly under such conditions, and when Pip and I were imitating the noise and the manoeuvres of circling fighter planes, from our seats in the back of the car, after one warning, Henry's patience with us snapped. Slamming on the brakes, he bade me step outside with him, whereupon I was spanked. Cal reported to me later how Pip was giggling away happily at the sight of all this. But then my father summoned him to a similar fate, and his tune was rapidly changed. "No please Daddy! No please!" Henry was later to recount how he had no heart to spank the little boy too fiercely, after that.

Cal was in fact beginning to distance herself from me over the latter part of this period. The age gap of nearly four years was in fact quite a hurdle to surmount. So long as I was prepared to be her personal servant, all had been well. Nor do I feel that she had greatly abused her status over me. It was from the fact that she never really did make too heavy demands, relying more on the nuance of the elder sister relationship to get what she wanted from me, which made my affection for her so durable. But I was beginning to find that there was more I could do with Pip, than with her; and I never managed to feel comfortable when she was in the presence of her particular local girl-friend, who was Diana Phipps from Chalcot House. It was girls' talk the whole time between the two of them, even in my presence; and my efforts to participate in such conversations merely led to some snide suggestions, from Diana, that I was probably a girlish sort of boy. In some ways my identity felt more secure when in the company of my brothers.

I can also remember that, while I was seven years old, Cal informed me (what she had no doubt been hearing from others,) that I was "passing through an awkward age." " I found this to be a description which, once applied, was never to be retracted. By now however, I find that I can live with it.

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