Never Learn to Type

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

One Sunday evening in 1915 a young soldier, invalided home from Gallipoli, shyly greeted a pretty young girl after church in Kington, a small market town in north-west Herefordshire, where he had been sent to recuperate. Had it not been for the vagaries of war my parents would never have met. In those days there was small chance for country-folk, born into straitened circumstances on the opposite sides of England, to move away from their place of origin.

Many years later, as an Under Secretary-General of the United Nations, I caused some consternation when, responding to the Turkish Foreign Minister's speech at a dinner given in my honour in Istanbul, I regretted that I had not been taken to the Dardanelles. My hosts relaxed visibly when I explained that, but for Gallipoli (where my father, a private soldier in the Fifth Essex Regiment, had narrowly escaped death), I would not have been at that dinner table, would not have existed at all.

Eleven years were to elapse after that chance encounter before I appeared on the scene. The young couple were able to 'walk out' together for only a brief few weeks before my father was sent back to the Middle East, first to Alexandria and then to join Allenby's campaign through Palestine. They could correspond only in the stark multichoice options allowed by army postcardsand did not meet again until after the war. On 16 September 1921 they became engaged and on 9 September 1922, they were married.

The Herefordshire Line

My mother's parents came from farming stock in Radnorshire, and my grandmother's family name, Probert, is Welsh, a modification of Ap-Robert, or 'son of Robert'. An orphan at three years old, she nonetheless had a comfortable childhood; she had her own pony, and went to boarding-school, spending the holidays with uncles and aunts who farmed the rich dairying country round Hereford at Bishopstone and Yazor Court, still solid farmhouses today, with an air of prosperity about them. She was barely eighteen when she married John Mills, at Penybont. He, too, came from a comfortable background, but the story of their marriage was, in the material sense, one of progressive decline. As their children increased, they moved to ever smaller and remoter hill farms, graduating downwards from ownership to tenancies.

According to my mother, my grandfather's troubles were caused by a ne'er-do-well nephew who either embezzled money from him, or failed to repay him a large loan, absconding, so the story goes, to Australia. The family fortunes were not helped by my grandfather's way of life. An accomplished horseman, frequently riding off to sheep fairs as far away as mid-Wales, he was of an outgoing and gregarious nature, and there was no lack of people prepared to take advantage of his generosity. He was also a handsome man, with that irresistible Celtic combination of dark, almost black hair, deep blue eyes and a ruddy complexion. A faded sepia photograph shows him in the saddle, clad in well-cut riding clothes and impeccably polished boots, looking quite splendid.

My grandmother was also a personality to be reckoned with. Of her I can speak directly, for she lived past 90, dying in 1964. She had an infectious sense of humour, and an almost mordant wit, softened by her Herefordshire accent, verging on a Welsh lilt. She was also a good-looking woman with large brown eyes and the high cheekbones that defy the onslaught of the years. Even in advanced old age she retained not only her beauty but also the imperceptibly imperious aura that goes with it. Life had done its best to defeat her but in the end one felt that it was she who had been the victor.

My mother was the fourth of the nine children, and the second girl. She was born on 12th February 1898 and christened Annie Adaliza, a Welsh name, after a great-aunt. To her eternal chagrin, it was spelt out as two words on her birth certificate, owing to a mistake by the registrar and the inattention of her father.

She was born at Heywood Common, outside Kington, on a small farm on the edge of Hergest Ridge, one of the tawny, bracken-covered hills that formed the natural bourne of the Welsh Marches long before King Offa of Mercia built his dyke. Her childhood memories were of the family's next home, the Bower, a hill farm of some two hundred acres. The poetic-sounding name must have been given by someone with a bent for wishful thinking. At the turn of the century it was a cold, grey stone house standing bleakly in its farmyard, surrounded by its granaries and barns, on the side of Rushock Hill, another bastion of the Welsh Marches. A more inclement and lonely location can scarcely be imagined. Yet it had, and still retains today, a compelling wild beauty that weaves its own spell.

My mother's childhood was hard but she recalled a happy time. She ran wild with her brothers about the hills and in the plocks (meadows) and paddocks around the farm. Jim, the one nearest to her in age and affection, was not much more than a year older and they were inseparable, almost like twins. He was killed at Ypres, in 1917, when barely 20, and my mother never quite recovered from his death.

Every morning my mother walked miles to the school in Kington in the valley below, climbing back up the hills in the evening, winter and summer. She was awarded a prize for never missing a day, whatever the weather. Her prize could hardly be called romantic, but was certainly suitable: it was a pair of boots.

The family moved to Oatcroft, a farm on the other side of the hill, a pleasant, large house with a lovely view over rolling countryside. The move also meant a new school for my mother, in the village of Titley, where she was very happy, for the schoolmaster taught not only the regulation three R's but even the elements of shorthand and Latin, as well as appreciation of poetry and literature. But my grandfather's health, like his finances, was flagging. Perhaps as a result of those long rides over bleak hills in all weathers, arthritis now confined him to bed. At the age of 12, in 1910, my mother had to leave school to care for him. This was a sorrow to her all her life, for she had been a good scholar, much addicted to 'book-learning'.

When, in 1914, my grandfather died - at the age of 49, leaving his widow only debts and nine children, the youngest only three - my mother was sent into domestic service. The family had to move out of the spacious farmhouse into a tiny, dour cottage, reached only by a rough track high on the hill above, with the appropriately bleak name of Gorsty Doles.

Yet my childhood memories of Gorsty are imbued with a fairylike aura, as of a castle guarding remote hills, high over the sunlit plain. The saving grace of Gorsty Doles was the view. A vast panoply of English countryside lay spread below, an intricate and enchanting mosaic of fields and woodlands, threaded with rivers, roads and hedgerows - a marvellous, composite picture, illuminated variously into changing images by shifting cloud shadows, one feature now thrown into relief by a shaft of sunlight while another was tantalisingly masked in shade.

My indomitable grandmother lived there for 20 years, hauling water from a well at the bottom of the hill, and cauldrons to pools in the valley to heat water over a wood fire to wash the family's clothes. She never lost her sense of humour and transformed the dreariest of activities into fun. With the help of the older siblings she even managed to educate two of her daughters to become teachers. There was a special, wholesome smell about her kitchen - where a sooty kettle, suspended on a hook over the old black grate, was always singing quietly away with the promise of a cup of tea - a smell compounded of wood smoke and the salty tang of whole sides of bacon hung from the blackened rafters. Despite the cold floor of enormous granite slabs, it was a warm, friendly place, where the family gathered at mealtimes at the old round table, lit at night by the soft glow of candles and oil lamps, and the fire in the hearth. At the risk of idealising a very hard existence, there must also have been compensations of a kind little known today.

My mother's life at her first 'place', Hergest Croft, just outside Kington, was not easy either. Aged barely 16, she earned £10 a year, most of which went home. Yet old photos show her always neatly and even fashionably turned out, for she sewed all her own clothes, adding finishing touches of embroidery, pin tucks and lace.

She showed enterprise in other directions too. Through an agency, she acquired a series of positions as parlour-maid to titled and high-society families, with whom she moved around: to London for the 'season' (where she frequently opened the door to Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, then a young debutante, later Queen, and ultimately Queen Mother); summers in Scotland; and visits to large country estates. During my childhood she regaled me with hilarious tales of life below stairs in grand establishments. I particularly relished those about a rumbustious cook, keen on her tipple, who on one occasion threw a pan of fish over the butler, already formally attired for dinner, and then picked up the pieces from the floor to serve to the guests; and who, on another, dumped the same unfortunate man in the sink in his own butler's pantry, and turned the tap on him.

The Essex Line

My father, Edward Curtis Anstee, was born on 26 November 1894. His family had deep roots in rural Essex, centred on the village of Writtle, in those far-gone days - and still in my own childhood - a self-contained community where the same families lived on for generations.

From mediaeval times Writtle clustered round a traditional green, surrounded by flat countryside of arable land and pastures, where the winds swept in unimpeded from the North Sea, a landscape very different from the hills that enfolded my mother's childhood homes. My paternal great-grandfather was the village tailor, William Collicott. My grandmother, Alice Ellen Collicott, was born in 1863. In 1887 she married her cousin, George Frederick William Anstee, then resident in Lambeth. He was born in Barnet, Hertfordshire, in 1862, the son of William Austin Anstee, a prosperous butcher who had expanded his business to Lambeth (there is still an 'Anstee's Yard' in Barnet).

One thing my parents' families had in common was declining fortunes. My grandfather was a total misfit as a butcher and businessman. By inclination he was a born scholar and intellectual. He had been sent away to school, and it seems had passed an entrance examination to Cambridge, which explains why he was so pleased when I got there two generations later. But his father died and he was thrust into the family business. He never recovered from this cruel change in his destiny. Not many years after their marriage my grandparents moved back to Writtle, probably because my grandfather had little taste for regular work, and particularly not the butchering kind.

For nearly 50 years my grandparents rented a solid stone house called Heroffs, fronting on Writtle Green. My grandfather occasionally worked for the village butcher, but mainly devoted himself to his intellectual interests. This unusual way of life was facilitated by a windfall, on his mother's death in 1905, of one or two properties which provided small rents.

My grandparents had aspirations to higher social status, an illusion to which my grandfather's life of leisure was no doubt considered to give credence. He read a lot, and dabbled in history and poetry. His reputation as an educated man led him to acquire the role of village wise man, filling in forms for people and counselling them on various matters. He was a big man, with a drooping walrus moustache in the Victorian mode, and always wore the stiff, celluloid shirt fronts of the same era. Early in life he became crippled, a mixture of arthritis and gout (no doubt hastened by his predilection for good drink and mountainous breakfasts of steak, as well as bacon and eggs). I cannot remember a time when he was not heaving himself awkwardly around, cross-legged, on creaking crutches. In summer he would station himself in a chair at the front gate, which gave him a commanding position for watching cricket on the village green, as well as for intercepting passers-by and harvesting village gossip.

To us children he was a gruff and intimidating figure, though in my later schooldays I had no hesitation in soliciting his help before history or Latin examinations. He had a remarkable memory, knowing all the dates, declensions and conjugations off pat, and I still cherish a tattered Latin dictionary bearing on its flyleaf the signature 'G. F. W. Anstee 1876' followed by my own, with the date 1942.

My grandmother was tiny but probably the more formidable personality. She must have had a hard time bringing up a brood of children (several died in babyhood but eventually there were seven extant) and trying to keep up appearances (she continued to have one or two maids while the children were growing up). She had a ferocious temper, which put the fear of God into everyone - including, I suspect, my grandfather - and ruled the household with a rod of iron. She was also a very good cook, producing gargantuan meals for large numbers of people.

Despite his own intellectual cast of mind, my grandfather did little to encourage his children's education. All of them left the village school at 14. The eldest, George, was something of a daredevil but his adventurous spirit did not survive long. He was killed on the Somme, about the same time as my mother's brother, Jim, lost his life. The other boys were apprenticed to local factories in Chelmsford. My father was the one who most deeply felt the lack of further education. He had been top of his class, and won many prizes (mostly bloodthirsty annals of patriotism and Empire, which I still have). He went into the employ of a local printer in Chelmsford and trained as a compositor, the nearest he could get to indulging his love of books, literature and learning. Dorothy, the youngest, and the only girl, became a lady's maid.

After the war my father went back to his old job and spent the next 30 years painstakingly composing type with little metal letter blocks, coming home each night with fingers stained black with printer's ink. As subsequent events showed, he was capable of much more, but he seemed to lack both confidence and ambition. Whether this was the result of an innate gentleness of character or of being brought up in an authoritarian household, it is hard to say. Perhaps it was a bit of both. My mother, in contrast, was full of energy and initiative, determined to overcome all obstacles.

The Wedding

My parents were married from Gorsty Doles in Titley Church, a couple of miles down the hill, whither the wedding party descended on foot.

Continues...

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