While I Was Waiting

Chapter 5

June 1963, Clematis Cottage

I began to be who I am when I went to the big house for the very first time. This is my story.

Hetty readied herself. She re-filled her pen with indigo ink, took a sip of tea and grimaced. It had cooled since she’d sat down at the little table in the window and had become distracted by the view, as always. She gave herself a mental shake and began. If she didn’t start this now, in her seventieth year, it would be too late. She forced herself back into the past, the distant past, and began to write.

I was a young girl when I went to Delamere House. Now, I am an old lady seeing in a year I may not see out and surrounded by the detritus of a long life lived in many parts. I live in this cottage, with a blue clematis growing around the front door and am bothered by few. It is how I like it. For too long I have been at the mercy of others. I now intend to see out my days in a pure and blissful selfishness. The big house has long since been sold. The family has not, after all, managed to keep it. Perhaps if I’d had children? But I digress. I jump forward when really I should start at the beginning. The beginning of my life. I began to be who I am when I went to the big house for the first time.

It’s been over sixty years. Hard to believe that all those years have passed, but I can remember it better than yesterday. It was a fine spring day in 1903.

Papa delivered me, thrust a package at me and then, almost immediately, went away again. As a small child I never did hold the same fascination as his spiders and insects.

I was to stay with my very distant relatives Aunts Hester and Leonora whilst he travelled on an expedition with the then Royal National Geographic and Scientific Institute. I loved Aunt Hester from the very beginning. She was all lavender scent and soft skirts. I detested Aunt Leonora almost as quickly. And I believe the feeling was entirely mutual. She never failed to point out my lack of manners and decorum. I asked for cake before sandwiches once and it was never forgotten or forgiven.

There were two boys in their charge, motherless as was I. Edward tall and slightly pompous, but kind also, and Richard. Ah, Richard! As handsome as the day, with the cheek of the devil. He got me into many a scrape as a child. And I was only too willing to follow his mischievous lead. Wicked, charming, irresistible Richard.

On that first day, I failed to notice the decrepit nature of the house, the gentility that papered over the lack of income.

As Richard often teased me, the hope of all was for me to marry Edward and therefore save the great house with my money. It did not quite work out that way.

Rachel woke with a start to find herself still on the sofa. She looked down at the biscuit tin in her lap and smiled. She could still hear the woman’s voice in her head. Slightly priggish and as imperious as her handwriting. She must have been a handful when she was a little girl. Rachel caught sight of the clock and groaned. Two o’clock in the morning and she had to go to London tomorrow.

‘No, Henrietta, no matter how fascinating you are, I have to go to bed.’ With a yawn, Rachel tucked the pages into their tin, replaced it on the shelf and went upstairs, smiling as she did so, her head still full of an Edwardian childhood.

Chapter 6

June 1963, Clematis Cottage

Hetty sat in her usual place by the window in the sitting room and looked out at the view. An unseasonal rain fell and, with it, she sank into a gloom. Old age loomed on the horizon; she even had to push her bicycle up the track to the cottage nowadays.

She laid her elbows on the small table she used as a desk – it had been Hester’s from her dressing room at Delamere – and cupped her chin in her hand. She thought back to the tea parties, the dances – before it all changed so horribly, horrifically, and not just for those at the Front. Hetty frowned. Could she do justice to this task? There were too many gaps, too many lost memories. Too many regrets. She watched, amused, as a blackbird flew down into the garden and began to groom his damp feathers. Straightening her shoulders, she reminded herself that she had never undertaken a challenge without facing it square-on. After all she had lived through this really ought to be easy. She picked up her pen, dipped it into the ink and with it dipped into the past.

The bond between Richard and I was quick to form, thrown as we were into each other’s company. We had few other companions to dilute our friendship. I quickly regarded him as my best friend, although he irritated me more like a teasing brother.

It was a glorious summer afternoon in July 1907. I had been at Delamere for nearly four years and considered it my home. Richard was on holiday from school and had been taunting me from the door of the schoolroom while I did my lessons. In exasperation, Miss Taylor dismissed me. We found ourselves in the summer house again. It had quickly become our sanctuary, the place we came to when we wanted to escape the adults. Not that the aunts paid us a great deal of attention. As long as we did not cause any obvious mischief, they left us alone.

But we were no longer small children. We were growing up. A strange tension sprang up between us, making us unsure as to how to behave with each other. It was all terribly confusing.

Richard was in a strange mood that day. He often was. His mood would change in mercurial fashion from petulance to wild enthusiasm to an almost cruel delight in practical jokes. He had so much energy. He was easily bored and his mind danced like quicksilver onto the next enthusiasm before I had barely begun to grasp what it was. It was as if Delamere was too constricting, too limiting for him and he was bursting for more than anyone could offer. Today, he was almost febrile.

He sat me down on the flaking wooden seat and then looked about him furtively. There was no need. I’d spied the gardener over in the kitchen garden picking peas. I hoped they would appear at supper and my stomach rumbled in anticipation. Food, however, was all forgotten, when I saw what Richard drew from his pocket.

‘Look what I have!’ His eyes were enormous. ‘Isn’t it spiffing?’

‘A knife! Richard, wherever did you get it?’

I regarded it, in its leather scabbard, with fascination. We were barred from the kitchens, so my experience of such items was limited. Richard held it out to me and allowed me to take it. My hands shook with excitement. I repeated, ‘Where did it come from?’

Richard merely shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ He took it from me and slid the blade out of the scabbard. He held it up to the light and we watched in awe as it caught the hot sun and cascaded light around the shabby summer house. It made the place magical.

‘I have an idea,’ he said. ‘Would you like to be bound to Delamere and Edward and me forever?’

I nodded. Of course I would. After a dull childhood spent in a small villa in Kent, the Trenchard-Lewises seemed impossibly glamorous.

Richard’s eyes shone. ‘Then we can be bound together.’

‘How?’

He slid closer. ‘We can be blood brothers!’

I laughed. ‘But I am a girl, Richard! How can I be your brother?’

He looked affronted at my pedantry. ‘Blood brother and sister, then.’ He held up the knife again. The light caught the edge of the blade and it looked brutal.

I gasped. ‘Do you mean to cut me?’

Richard nodded. ‘It won’t hurt, Hetty, the knife is sharp. It will go through your skin like butter.’

‘No!’ I shrank back. ‘I do not like it.’

‘Are you scared?’

I nodded.

‘Feel the tip, Hetty. It’s sharp.’

I was terribly afraid, but Richard, even then, had a way of making me do things. He made me feel so dull, so unadventurous when I demurred. I reached out a shaking finger to the blade and tapped it, ever so slightly, on the tip. ‘Ow!’ I snatched my hand back.

He grinned. ‘Shall I go first?’

I watched, with a morbid fascination, as he pulled back his sleeve and pressed the blade to the white skin on his wrist. At the last moment, he stopped. Looking at me, with a mischievous glint in his blue eyes, he said, ‘You have to promise to do it too, otherwise I will bleed and it will go nowhere.’

‘Stop!’ An idea had occurred to me. ‘If you bloody your suit there will be an awfully nasty row. The aunts would not like it.

Richard shrugged.

‘They will not let you in here again,’ I warned. ‘You will have to do extra school work, even if you are on vac.’

He put the knife down and looked so disconsolate, I wracked my brain for an alternative plan. ‘What if we only prick our finger?’ I suggested.

‘Like the princess?’ he said, scornfully.

I grinned. ‘A finger will not bleed as much as a wrist. No one will know if we have cut our finger tip.’

Richard looked somewhat mollified. ‘Only if you do it too.’

I took in a great breath. ‘Very well,’ and then, with a quick look at the knife, I added, ‘you first.’

Richard nodded, held up his forefinger on his left hand and stabbed. Blood welled immediately. I could not tell if he was in pain as he grabbed hold of my hand and did the same before I had second thoughts.

‘Ow!’ It was done.

The knife clattered to the floor as Richard pressed our fingers together. Perhaps he had pricked my finger harder because a thin trickle of blood ran down my hand and dripped onto my pinafore. It made a tiny but unmistakable stain, just below the ruffle on my shoulder. I had to lie to Nanny afterwards and claim a nosebleed.

Richard’s eyes gleamed. ‘It’s done. Now we are bound together, you and me, Hetty, forever.’ He tugged out his handkerchief to dry our wounds. It was so filthy already that no one would notice one more brown blot.

I sucked my finger. It throbbed. I could not quite believe what he had made me do. He had half-charmed, half-dared me and I could never resist him. He could be quite cruel sometimes, I thought – nothing like Edward.

‘Now we must dance in a circle and recite the Lord’s Prayer backwards.’ Richard put the knife back into its scabbard and stood up.

This was one step too far, even for me. ‘Oh no, Richard,’ I said, firmly. ‘That will send us to Hell. I know that for a fact.’ The other fact being, if Aunt Leonora heard of this, we would be thoroughly thrashed.

‘A game of tag and then I must lie down before tea. All this blood is making me quite faint. Remember, I am only a girl.’

Before he could disagree, I’d run out of the summer house. Sometimes, being a mere girl had its advantages!

Christmas of that year brought great excitement to the occupants of Delamere House. My father had, at long last, returned from his travels, albeit temporarily.

He had come to stay at the big house, our more modest house being shut up whilst he had been away. He entertained us all with his stories of exotic people and places and only Aunt Leonora tired of hearing him speak.

One evening, we gathered, very unusually, in the drawing room after dinner. The room had been opened up just for Father’s visit. By now, I knew enough of the workings of this enormous house to understand that only a few rooms ever had a fire. I never had one lit in my bedroom. We existed in a scant few rooms and shivered even in those. Money was scarce but no one would ever admit as much.

Richard and I had been allowed to stay up late, as a special treat.

‘Oh I wish I could go back with you. To see those things – the mangrove swamps and the waterfalls!’ Richard, now a lanky, restless boy of fourteen, was hanging upon Father’s every word, egging him on, continually asking questions. ‘The tribes and the animals! Did you really see elephants? And lions? And zebras? And crocodiles?’ Richard babbled on, ‘if only Ed were here!’

‘Richard, do calm yourself. You have been allowed to sit up to talk to your Uncle Henry, but do let him get a word in edgeways!’ Aunt Hester, as always, was laughing indulgently at Richard’s enthusiasm. Aunt Leonora simply tutted her disgust and turned away to her sewing. Not for the first time did I wonder at how two sisters could be so different.

Father, too, laughed at his newest admirer. Here was a boy after his own heart. Nothing like the untidy, lumpish daughter he had sired. I was finding it rather more difficult to engage in the conversation. Four years had passed and Father, I could no longer give him the more familiar moniker of Papa, was a stranger to me. I had, long ago, lost my fascination with his travels and only wanted to talk to him about the information Richard had intimated at when I first came to Delamere. Father had resolutely ignored the questions with which I filled my letters. Did I really have money? If so, where was it? Why could I not have it? Was I really to marry Edward, currently at university and expected to enter the army?

I was fourteen, too, and nearly at my next birthday. Strange things had been happening to me over the last few months; things I could not bring myself to broach with a father now unknown and distant to me. Nanny knew, but even telling her had been painfully embarrassing. She had explained that I was a woman now and could no longer, at certain times of the month, play as I was used to with Richard. Gone were the games of chase around the gardens, the meetings in the summer house to pore over a battered atlas, the endless adventure stories made up by us both and continued week after week. I no longer slept in the night nursery and had my own room.

Part of me felt important at entering this new stage in my life, but a greater part felt desolate at leaving my childhood behind. I did not feel ready to face the adult world, particularly if it involved marrying Edward, more or less as much a stranger to me as Father, having been away for most of my time here. Now Richard had followed his brother to school and I did not even have his enlivening presence at our lessons with Miss Taylor to look forward to.

If this was adulthood, I thought it very dull.

My one consolation was retrieving the journal Papa had given me on my very first day at Delamere. ‘We live through great times,’ he had said then. ‘You must chronicle them, child. One day you may be great too. You must get into the habit of writing everything down.’

To my shame, I had hardly written anything at all. I had been too busy running around the grounds with Richard – and getting into trouble with Aunt Leonora. Now, with the boys away, I fell on my own company a great deal more. I am sure Papa had in mind my recording scientific fact. With these strange new happenings in my body, I was far more interested in exploring my emotions. I had taken to recording my thoughts and feelings as much as I had time for.

I looked at Richard, still deep in conversation with Father. He was as tall as me now, still energetic, still getting into scrapes. Only this term the aunts had received a written warning from his school. According to the letter, Richard had sneaked out of his dormitory one night and tried to buy beer at the local public house.

He was home for the holidays and had been refused permission to visit our neighbours, the Parkers, whose horses always proved irresistible to him, as a punishment.

School had changed him, had made him scornful of the limitations put on him by the aunts. They, in turn, having only had to deal with placid Edward in the past, struggled with this new, wayward Richard.

He had chafed at his imprisonment and had taken it out on me. Puzzled by my reluctance to engage in our childish games he had taken to spying on me, pulling my hair or my pinafore tails. Once he had put a worm in the neck of my blouse and watched with glee as I danced and shrieked and scrabbled to get it out. Vile boy. As bored as I, his natural sense of fun and mischief found expression in vindictiveness and spite. Our love-hate relationship was even stronger.

Only once had I glimpsed an even stranger Richard. We had gone exploring, as we used to and strictly against the dictates of the aunts. We had found our way up into the old attics. I did not like the attics; they were gloomy and the dust made me sneeze. As usual, Richard goaded me, claiming I was unadventurous and dull and, as usual, I responded by being even bolder than he.

In one of the rooms were stored some old tailors’ dummies, from goodness knows where and when. I hated them with a passion. They stood, headless but watching, silent in a corner. One or two were cloaked with dustsheets and that made them even more terrifying.

I ran ahead, wanting to put them behind me and furious that Richard had called me chicken for being scared. In the furthest-most attic, the roof had partially fallen in and pigeons were nesting and cooing on the rotten beams. It was lighter and colder here, the winter air whistling through the gaps. As I ran in, the pigeons took flight and disappeared, leaving a choking mess of feathers and swirling up the dust and their droppings. Shaking it out of my hair, I turned to where I thought Richard was behind me. And screamed.

I thought one of the Trenchard-Lewis ancestors had come to haunt me – a white-robed figure danced in front of me. I put my hand to my heart; it was beating so. I feared I should drop down dead. About to scream for help from Richard the ‘ghost’ let out a familiar giggle and dropped down to reveal the boy behind the dust-sheeted dummy.

‘Richard, you perfect beast!’

‘Jolly good wheeze, Freckle-Face.’

Looking about me, I spied a piece of rafter. Grabbing it, I attacked Richard. I was furious. But, even then, Richard was stronger than me. Easily overpowering me, he held me fast, managing to wrap the filthy dustsheet around me, trapping my arms against my body.

He held me to him, his blue eyes vivid and a little wild. ‘A kiss as a forfeit for your release.’

Struggling and calling ‘pax’ I began to giggle. ‘Richard, you are a shocking boy. How can I kiss you when I cannot move my head.’ He loosened his hold a little and I took advantage. Stamping on his toe with as much force as I could muster, I ran off as he let go. Shrieking, as he chased me, I ran.

Now, in a clean dress, I watched as Father and Richard began to trace Father’s most recent journey through West Africa in the atlas. My thoughts turned to Edward. He was a mysterious figure, only at home for holidays and currently in his second year at Cambridge. He was due home soon. Edward had inherited the family tendency to be tall; he was well over six feet now. Thankfully, to his relief, his hair had darkened to a quite nice dark brown, with reddish glints, rather like Aunt Hester’s. His eyes, not as vivid as Richard’s, were a gentle shade of grey. We had never really grown to know one another and he still treated me in a stiff and formal manner, as if I were a creature as exotic as one from my father’s collection. Was it still expected that I should marry him? Richard always averred that it was so. How did I feel about marrying Edward? What did I know of men and marriage? What did I know of anything? I sighed.

Richard, hearing me, looked up from the atlas. ‘I say, old thing, come and have a look at this. It’s where your father was last month and it’s the most spiffing-looking place. Look at the river, it goes the whole length of the country. Can you imagine?’

Aunt Leonora’s mouth thinned at Richard’s use of boarding-school slang.

I smiled at him. His enthusiasm was, as always, appealing. Perhaps he wasn’t being so awful after all. I joined them at the table and sensed Father’s warmth at my interest.

Chapter 7

Edward arrived the next day, just in time for afternoon tea. Tall and adult, with stubble on his cheek and smelling of the outside world. Beside him Richard looked like the little boy he was desperate to grow out of being. Tea in the drawing room reminded me of the tea parties when I first arrived. We hadn’t had many recently; little point with the boys away most of the time. Much was the same, except that it was even shabbier and the fire a paltry affair. He and Father were getting on famously, another reason to put Richard’s nose out of joint and the aunts beamed with pride at the splendid young man they had raised. Aunt Leonora was especially ecstatic at his return, for he was always her favourite. He didn’t cause the trouble that Richard and I did. He was holding court, with Richard on one side of the couch and Father on the other. The admiring females, including Nanny, gazed on.

‘So, Edward, tell me what you are reading and what is your college again?’ said Father, beaming at a fellow scholar.

‘Natural Sciences, sir, at Trinity.’ replied Edward, with his usual politeness.

My father’s eyes lit up. ‘Splendid, oh how splendid! I must tell you of the moth I have discovered – as big as a saucer and twice as ugly. You must see it. Come, I have brought it with me. Come,’ he said more impatiently, ‘let us find it. I have it in my room.’

The two men left in a flurry of scientific excitement and I felt a sneaking sympathy for Richard, who was left out. He huffed and threw himself back on the couch.

‘Sit up, Richard,’ murmured Aunt Leonora automatically.

‘But I’m bored. Can I have another piece of seed cake?’ Richard’s lower lip jutted in a sulk.

‘It is “may I” and no, you mayn’t, you have had two pieces already,’ responded Leonora, frowning and about to launch into one of her tirades.

‘Why don’t you take Hetty to the library, Richard?’ As ever, Aunt Hester stepped in as peacemaker. ‘We have it open for your Uncle Henry and Edward. Take her to look at the history books. I don’t believe she has seen them.’

This was not strictly true. One of the things Richard and I had always enjoyed was exploring the house, delighting in the many closed-up rooms, playing hide and seek amongst the dust sheets. The library had been a regular haunt and we had discovered many hidden gems: maps of Asia, stories of far-off and long-ago Greece.

I looked across at him; he was sitting up, his blue eyes gleaming. I knew that look. It meant trouble was afoot.

‘What a super idea Aunt Hester, please may we be excused?’ That settled it, such elaborate politeness from Richard could mean only one thing; he was up to something.

The door to the library opened with difficulty, stiff with lack of use. I loved this room; it was one of my favourites. Bookcases lined the walls, double height so that library steps were needed to reach the more remote volumes. Chairs and a chaise longue crowded around the space but were arranged in a careless manner, hinting at the room’s long abandonment. Today, however, the dustsheets were gone. Dorcas, who glorified in the title of housekeeper, when really she was the solitary upstairs maid, had obviously been busy polishing the mahogany bookcases. The woodwork gleamed and the aroma of lavender hung in the air, testament to her hard work. Richard, with an enigmatic look at me, pushed the library steps over to the furthest-most bookcase, climbed up and fiddled with the lock on the top glass door.