(This is the first chapter of Jane’s memoir of her early years. It is written as if it is happening, in the voice of a young child. The spelling mistakes are deliberate).  

*********************

   Chapter One        4  years old         ‘Things To Eat’

‘Jane, you’ve been eating the raspberries again.’

‘No I haven’t.’

‘Yes you have.’

‘No I haven’t.’

Mother lifts me up; shows me to myself in the mirror. Around my mouth is a red rim of raspberry juice.

‘See, you’re not a very good liar, are you, little one.’

‘I am a good liar. I am.’

Mother laughs. ‘Caught you red-handed didn’t I?’

I look down at my hands. These are red with raspberry-juice, too.

‘First I catch you picking our precious apples before they’re ripe, Janie; then I catch you eating linseed balls in the barn ... because you thought they were flapjacks! Those were meant for the cows – not you. You must learn to share with everyone.’

We all help to find food - all five of us: Edmund is 8  and just gone to his Prep school, called ‘Normandale’, so we’ll only ever see him in the holidays; Lynda is 5, me 4, Geoffrey 2 and Vanessa is still 0, so she can’t help yet. And we have a tortoise called Horace.

We live in ‘Bushy Leaves’ cottage. ‘Bushey Leys’ is its proper name, but we all call it ‘Bushey leaves.’ It’s very old ... ‘Seventeenth Century’, Father says, proudly. The cottage sits like a hen in the middle of its nest of  green field with long lush grass. Thick hedges hide us from the outside like the edge of a nest: blackberry, hawthorn, sweetbriar, damson.  In Autumn, horse mushrooms grow as big as dinner plates under the Elm trees. They taste like aniseed balls, but are nice with bacon.

When the sun shines, you can see “the Green Hill far away, without a city wall”. The hill is solid white through and through like blackboard chalk; green only on the top of itself like a coat. It’s perfectly all right without having a city wall. Tom at the Alms House says there’s a secret passage going underneath, right through from the church. Small aeroplanes fly overhead. These are left over from the war. They land at RAF Halton. Some have two sets of wings which are called ‘Gipsy Moth’. The ‘Spitfires’ fly spitefully. They do turn-tail and loop-the-loop almost to the ground. They make noises  ‘eeaaow’, like Geoffrey when he’s playing with his small plastic plane.

Sometimes on misty mornings the cows moo through the smoke. When it‘s rainy, the cows look sad and hang their heads low down. When it’s windy, the rude rooks come to caw and caw. Sometimes it snows. Then we’re snowed in. Bushey Leaves has a thatched roof on top to keep us warm like an egg-cosy. This gets thicker and thicker, because every time Father re-thatches it, he only takes off a small layer, but presses lots more on. Now it’s almost thick as a tea-cosy on top of us.  For the thatching, Mother has pulled all the straw from the fields by herself.

The Elm trees and Oak trees stand on either side of the right-of-way. It’s called a right-of-way because it goes right-the-way up to the road. 

Mr Tilbury comes rattling down the right-of-way in his meat van, but the baker won’t come down. He leaves his van at the top and walks along in his white overall, bringing two ‘split tins’ in his bread-basket .The postman and the dustman won’t come down either, so our dustbin and letterbox stay up there. Father picks up the post when he goes to the office, and takes up any rubbish. There’s not much rubbish: most goes on Mother’s compost heap, or our chickens and Tiggywinks eat the scraps.

Tiggywinks is our tabby. He’s not really a pet, because he’s practically wild. He’s the cleverest cat. At night he prowls and goes out hunting. In the morning there’s a dead rabbit left on the front door-mat. This is a present because he knows we are poor. Mother gives him back the head, if he hasn’t taken it already, also the paws and insides - which Mother calls ‘the lights’ – though they’ve mostly been in the dark. We use the rest in casseroles, together with things Mother grows – or mushrooms.

‘Run rabbit run rabbit run run run’ Father hums. He’s mending a hole in our fence to stop them getting in. ‘We lived on rabbits during the war,’ he explains to Edmund. ‘We relied on them. That’s often all we had to live on. But bullets were so scarce – needed for the army, not to get food. So what I’d do, is creep along on my stomach very silently, wait ‘til two rabbits lined up, one in front of the other. Then Bang! I could kill two using only one cartridge. Mostly, though, we had to trap them. To trap a rabbit: put up your wire noose in the evening. Be prepared to be up at five the following morning, as the screams from the rabbit are unbearable. You have to dispatch it as fast as you can. Your mother got most efficient at skinning them. I’m not all that fond of rabbit nowadays. Had too many in the war I suppose. But Tiggywinks seemed to know when times were bad, and he’d help us out.’

Nowadays, Tiggywinks is grown old, and it’s ‘after the war is over’. Sometimes he still leaves a rabbit, or a weasel, or a mouse-without-a-head whenever he can. Probably Tiggywinks wonders why we don’t like weasel or mouse-without-a-head, which Mother  gives back to him. I‘m pleased she does, as I’m not sure I’d like Weasel Pie – or Casserole of Headless Mice – with tails all whirling round in the gravy.

We all have knobbly knees and are far too thin. Father doesn’t have knobbly knees because Mother says he’s grown out of them. Mother is different - she is shaped like the icing glass barrel.

The icing glass barrel is in the thatched garage next to Dad’s sleeping car, (‘out of commission until Petrol Rationing Stops,’ he says.) The barrel is filled with a magical liquid called icing glass. Mother puts all the eggs ‘excess to requirement’ in there (laid by Rusty, Dusky, Speckledy, Brownie, Ginger and Freda.)  The icing glass preserves them. Then we can use them in the winter when the hens don’t lay. The wild things we live on are as follows: rabbits and blackberries, mushrooms and nuts, damsons, elderberries and apples - and watercress from the stream. The tame things we live on are things Mother grows – and eggs.

Grandpa is called Horace, after our Tortoise. Grandpa Horace is Daddy’s father. He has a wooden leg, and he can twist a sixpence out of my hair as if it had been in there all the time. Or Lynda will suddenly find a threepenny bit inside her left-hand pocket.

Grandpa has silver hair and a silver beard coming to a point, and bright bright blue eyes. We love it when he comes over. He walks all the way from ‘Gypsy Corner’ -  his thatched cottage where he lives with Granny. We all run to the top of the right-of-way to wait. When he arrives, we line up behind him, and copy him walking with his wooden leg all the way down - only we have hazel twigs for walking sticks, and sing: ‘a grand-pop, a grand-pop.’ He never minds. He always brings a sixpence for the girls; a beetle in a matchbox for the boys.

Daddy says to Edmund, ‘If Horace hadn’t got his wooden leg he would’ve died at the Front in the First World War. And he didn’t catch flu either in the great Flu Epidemic, because he was immune. Most people think he lost his leg fighting in the War – but he didn’t. This is how it happened:

One day, when Horace was ploughing a field, the Hunt went past. His horse got so excited, that it rushed off to join the other horses. It pulled Horace right through the thick hedge. Horace’s leg got caught up and badly mangled. He managed to get home by crawling along in agony. His parents were so stingy they wouldn’t call a doctor. You had to pay for the Doctor in those days ... so they just told him to go up to bed. By the time they decided they’d better call the doctor after all, the leg had turned green and had to be chopped off. Horace managed to survive, and learned to deal with a wooden leg. He can ride a bike, and he likes to walk all the way to see us. Once, his wooden leg got wood-worm in it, so he injected it with ‘Rentokil.’

‘Did the worms creep into his leg while he was asleep?’ I ask.

‘Is Grandpa an antique?’ Lynda asks, ‘because sometimes there’s woodworm in our antiques. Then Mother paints them with Rentokil to make them go away.’

‘I expect he’s antique,’ Father laughs.

‘Grandpa Horace is as old as Horace the tortoise,’ says Geoffrey. ‘Tortoises can live for hundreds and hundreds of years you know.’

Edmund has caught whooping cough and measles and has been sent home from Normandale. Geoffrey has caught his measles now. Mother has caught his whooping cough – and she thinks she’s got his measles, too. Mother deserted me while they went away to the seaside to get better – so I stopped eating anything at all until she had to come back.

Geoffrey has begun to rock back and forward all night long, and he shouts out loudly.

‘He’s got Pinks Disease’ the doctor says. ‘It’s a deficiency of vitamins.’ 

Geoffrey has not gone pink as far as we can see, but we’ve all been given cod-liver oil and ‘sticky’ ... Sticky is Malt Extract. If you eat the horrid cod liver first, Mother posts in a large teaspoonful of sticky very fast. This makes your mouth nice again. But the cod liver oil is clever, and comes up in the back of your throat later on when you’re not expecting it. Burp! ‘Uggh.’ The sticky never comes back up, though; it’s far too heavy and stays stuck at the bottom of your stomach.

A Dutch girl, called Willie, has come along to help Mother look after us. ‘The government says we should try to have one, as they’re reduced to eating rats.’ She explains. This is far far worse than eating headless mice. When Willie arrives, she looks at our thick slices of white bread in amazement, hardly daring to eat such luxury. We all watch her carefully. Her hands are shaking. She’s very pleased to be with us.

Lynda trod on a rusty nail today, which has gone right through her foot. She was balancing along the plank over the pond in the field, trying to get to the moorhen’s nest. You only have to take one egg, then the moorhen will lay another.  Lynda had to go and have an injection ... and she was only trying to help get food. She’s the thinnest one because she’s got something called rickets and dysentery all at the same time. And there aren’t enough white-of-eggs to feed her on, which is all she can eat at the moment. Farmer Blundell won’t let us have any of his eggs. Lynda probably thinks it’s my fault she’s got rickets. Mother says to me, ‘Lynda arrived only one year and 9 months after you, Janie; so you  stole all her milk.’

But I don’t remember stealing any of her milk. We all have the same amount on our cornflakes.

I think it is the very small people who must’ve stolen her milk.

These ‘very small people’ are living all around our cottage, in the long grass and the fields. The reason you cannot see them is because they don’t want you to. But I know all about their swimming pools: they capture rainwater in the hollows of trees where the leaves have got all their green dissolved away, so only their skellington-leaves are left, all silver and papery thin. These are used for their clothes. Edmund says there aren’t little people; Lynda isn’t sure.

‘You have to know the signs,’ I say. I will try to prove it to you by various means, when I come across them.’

My first proof is our vicar. He’s the Reverend White. He comes to tea because he likes Mother’s home-made cake. The Reverend White can make the very small people speak to him out of the fire-place chimney, or from right the other end of the room, because he is holy and they obey him. I wish I could make them talk to me. Lynda says ‘it’s because the Reverend White’s a ventrillyquist, and that’s why he can speak to my very small people.’

Edmund asks Mother what a ventrillyquist is, and she tries to describe what it is, but it’s a bit difficult to do.

‘Well, if he can throw his voice like that,’ Edmund says, ‘why doesn’t he make his congregation speak back to him when he’s in the pulpit?’

‘What a wicked thought, Edmund,’ Mother laughs ... ‘but I did hear, however ... that once, he scared poor Mrs Spittles rigid. They were walking through the graveyard, when the Reverend White suddenly made the answer to one of her questions come right out of a grave. Mrs Spittles’ hair stood on end and she turned a nasty colour, so the Reverend White thought he’d better not do it again – he probably thought it was far too ungodly, anyway.’

The cuckoo is a ventrillyquist. He can make his voice come right the way over from the misty valley beyond the green hill. His ‘cuckoo’ calls so clear, again and again through the mist - and I love him best of all. He never comes nearer because he doesn’t want to be seen either. Once, when the relations came and loomed their great faces over my pram when I was a baby, they called “cuckoo! cuckoo!” to me, hiding their faces behind their hands, doing peekaboo. But they were liars and not real cuckoos. They weren’t proper ventrillyquists either.

We sometimes go to the Reverend White’s church, because we all love singing and praying – and there is a Lady lying all carved in stone in the wall. I am going to be carved in stone like that when I die. Father sings loudly out of tune in the church. Mother says, ‘Charles, you have no musical ability at all; you only know ‘Gems from the Musicals’, or bits of song left over from the war.’

But when Father is working, he often hums the church hymns. He sounds a bit like the aeroplanes humming overhead. Mother says that Father hums badly, but Father thinks he hums very well. He says it helps him concentrate.

Father ran all the way down the right-of-way to tell us that a small plane had crashed in the Elm tree at the top. We all drop what we’re doing and rush up. And there is a tiny plane, stuck right up in the highest branch. Edmund says, ‘it is only a model one, and far too high up to reach, which is a pity’.

But I worry and worry, wondering what’s happened to the tiny pilot. So I go up on my own afterwards, and look everywhere for him in case he fell out. But he cannot be found.  He was probably coming over to visit the other tiny people round our cottage. Then he crashed, because he didn’t go high enough above the Elm tree. Maybe our tiny people have buried him already, which is why he can’t be found. But he and his aeroplane is the second proof of what I was telling you about.

The third proof is when Father shows us his office at 26, Temple Street, Aylesbury. On the wall behind a glass panel half way up the stairs, is some antique wood sticking out of the plaster.  It’s got Rentokil and some woodworm holes in it. Father says: ‘it’s the top of a gothic arch that I saved. It used to be a door where the monks went through when it was part of the Grey Friars Monastery.’

But I think the tiny arch is really full-sized, and it is the monks who are very very small.

Father has made us our own special little house. It’s underneath the staircase in the living room. You squeeze through the door and sit on little chairs around the round table. You have a tea-party and drink tea from the dolls’ china set. But if you keep very quiet, you can hear exactly what is going on outside without anyone knowing, and you can hide inside and listen when people come to visit Mother and they’ve forgotten we’re in here.

So after Mrs Groombridge-Harvey has finished visiting Mummy, we hold our own secret tea-party. Lynda and I do polite conversations to one another:

‘ ... Yes, and there were so many people there, It’s wonderful, really.’

‘Indeed, there were. It’s wonderful, really.’

‘ And of course they always do, you know. It’s wonderful, really.’

‘Yes, It’s such a tragedy she died. It’s wonderful, really.’

Then we lift our little cups and drink pretend tea.

One night, Lynda and me were asleep in our bedroom, when a ghost began snoring down the chimney in great gasps. The ghost was dying in his sleep. His voice rattled and echoed.

‘Now we will be haunted to death’, Lynda says.

We are so scared that we’ve curled up tightly like hedgehogs under our sheets to try to stop us shivering.

The next day, Mother says, ‘There are no such things as ghosts ... and you mustn’t be afraid of the dark, because it’s the same as the daytime - only with the lights switched off. We can’t give you a night-light; it’s just too dangerous in a thatched cottage – and we certainly can’t afford to leave lights on all night.’

But we make Father climb up his thatching ladder to look inside the chimney ... just to make quite sure. Because Lynda and I don’t want to be haunted tonight, and we certainly aren’t going to go to sleep ever again in our bedroom, until the ghost goes away. Father shines a torch down, then shouts, ‘It’s only a nest of baby barn owls. It’s the baby ones snoring and making the strange noise’.

Mother makes us feel better again with an owl-story story of her own: ‘Once, when I was little, I saw a mother owl with her 3 small owlets sitting on the signal on our railway line. Then the signal suddenly went down because a train was coming, and they all fell off – Plop! Plop! Plop! Plop!’

We can’t go on finding food for ourselves all the time without getting some for Horace the tortoise. So when Farmer Blundell’s bean-crop is in full flower, we pick lots of their petals and hide them in a sack. Horace loves bean flowers; he’ll go on eating them for ages without growing any bigger.

Farmer Blundell comes along to our cottage. He looks furious. ‘Have your children been ruining my crop, Mrs Waller?’

We hide. Mother says, ‘I don’t think my children are capable of doing anything so outrageous’.

After the farmer has safely gone away, we creep slowly out from the coal shed.

Mother sees us creeping. ‘Did you pick the bean flowers?’ she asks.

‘No’, I lie, turning red.

‘I think you’re a big fibber, Jane.’

After that, the bean-flower-picking stops.

But it’s not fair; Mother’s a fibber, too. The Doctor told her not to have any more children after Geoffrey being ‘Cesarian’. She promised she wouldn’t ... but she lied ... because she went and got baby Vanessa.

Father said, ‘I only had to look at her and she was pregnant.’ What does he mean? Is Vanessa his fault?

‘Your Father and I have begun to look for a bigger house for us all’, Mother informs us. ‘Our family is now too large to fit into this tiny cottage. But so far, every place we’ve looked at has fallen through.’

I think it’s sad that they’ve all fallen through. We really need to find a house that stays up ... But I don’t want to leave Bushey Leaves at all.

All our smallest toys have suddenly disappeared. We can’t find them anywhere. Geoffrey’s little plastic plane has vanished, my tiny plastic ballet-dancer has disappeared; Lynda’s baby horse; Edmund’s lead soldiers -  even the fairy off the top of the Christmas Tree who sits on top of the bathroom cabinet is missing.

‘I don’t know where they’ve gone,’ Mother says. ‘Someone must have stolen them.’

As they are so small ... I think I know who might have stolen them ... but I’m keeping quite quiet.

Father has been talking seriously to Mother: ‘Business for an Architect is almost non-existent. There’s no work whatsoever. It’s a worrying situation. I thought things would pick up after the War was over, but they’re even worse.’

So instead of business, Father finishes building his two gate-posts at the bottom of the right-of-way. He hums as he fills up the spaces between the bricks with cement:

‘What’s the sense sitting on the fence

All by yourself in the moonlight.

What’s the thrill by the water mill,

Giving yourself a hug, giving yourself a thrill. hug

Loves a farce sitting on the grass

All by yourself in the moonlight.’

The next day, the sun is shining and his two pillars are finished. Then Father takes Lynda and me by the hand and leads us up to the right hand one.’ He says, ‘put your eye up close. Look through the glass spy-hole.’

And there, magically inside the pillar, are all our tiny toys, captured in their own little palace theatre, mysteriously lit up from above – My little pink dancer is dancing tiptoe in the middle of a glass lake - which is really a mirror all sparkly white.  There is Lynda’s small horse she’s been searching for, trotting round and round the outside of the mirror. Vanessa’s plastic baby is sitting on a piece of cloth, watching. And the Christmas fairy is suspended in the air above them.

‘How did you do that?’ Lynda asks. ’

‘It’s a secret, Father replies.

Then he calls for the boys to look into the left hand pillar. Suddenly, Edmund sees all his lead soldiers, standing to attention next to some green painted loofah trees. Geoffrey’s tiny plastic plane hangs suspended in the air above. Little Geoffrey needs to be lifted up to discover where his lorry went. There is his shell, too, from the sea-side, and his florescent fish. Edmund thinks Father might have done it by using mirrors to make the light come down from the top of the pillar, but we’re not tall enough to check. It’s as if all our small toys have been turned into treasure, coming from everywhere in the cottage to live in a new world together. We love our Gate-Post Theatres, and whenever we miss playing with our small toys, all we have to do is look through the spy-hole.  On cloudy days you cannot see them; that is when they are resting.

I hope all our toys will not mind being captured in there forever. I wonder if the tiny people will be able to go in there and play with them? I hope they can.

In August, we thought we saw a big white sheep, absolutely dead and not moving, in the middle of the field near the Nut-wood.  But it wasn’t a sheep at all; it was the most gigantic puffball you’d ever seen. We all joggled it until it creaked off its stalk. Then we picked it up and carried it back to Mother to cook. She was in the kitchen preparing lunch. She’d be really pleased at this huge food we’d found. But the puffball suddenly got very hot when it was brought indoors, and when we carried it into the kitchen for her, it exploded ... BOOM ! Its million trillion spores stuck onto everything; covering the ceiling in bits of cotton wool; stuck itself onto cupboards like flour, onto the food Mother was cooking like icing-sugar – even stuck onto her eyebrows to make her into a snowman. She was terribly angry. Sometimes it’s not easy finding the right things to eat.

‘The great Year of the Mushrooms was our Wartime Miracle,’ Mother told us ... once she had recovered from the shock. ‘One day we woke up to find a strange white light filtering through the windows. It wasn’t an alien invasion – though it was an invasion of sorts. Out of the windows, the fields around the cottage were white with mushrooms. So white, you could hardly see between them. There were far too many for us. So we picked sackfulls and gave them away to everyone around. We had them strung up over the fireplace to dry; made pickles, made chutney ... eventually we got sick of them.’ 

It’s the end of August now, and Vanessa is 1 today. But there’s a big thunderstorm moving towards us over the Green Hill. Edmund has run up to warn us - ‘Quick! The Hefferlump is coming – the one who lives in the hollow on the hill–top – and he might come down to get you’.

We all shriek and hide under the dinner table until he’s stopped roaring. When we come out again, there’s a Birthday Cake on top for Vanessa’s tea, and she can blow out her candle and make a wish.

Willie has gone back to Holland and a new German Girl has come. She is hungry, too. She’s called Anna Marie. Mother says that after learning better English, Anna Marie will be able to get a good job with the ‘American Network in Germany’ when she goes back. She is quickly devoted to our family. ‘She’s an artist – and very gifted,’ Mother says. And to prove it, Anna Marie is painting a life-size ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ on Geoffrey’s bedroom wall. You have to squeeze through a low narrow door and go down two steps to get into Geoffrey’s room. Then you are in the other part of the cottage. Suddenly Geoffrey has new friends all over his wall at night. He is delighted, and learns all their names.

Mummy has decided to do some painting, too, as she is also an artist.  She is going to paint a picture on her four-poster bed. It will be ‘The Holy Family’, and there’ll be tendrils and flowers painted up each post. It will be ready in time for Christmas Day.