One Hundred Summers Read online

  ONE HUNDRED SUMMERS

  For Noah, Florence, Louis and Ivo

  ‘If you don’t do it, you haven’t done it.’

  Eve Branson

  CONTENTS

  Family Tree

  Prologue

  PART ONE 1918–1959

  1 Sloe Gin

  2 Mysteries Solved

  3 Museum of Curiosities

  4 Ted’s War

  5 Deepest Darkest Devon

  6 Mother Courage

  7 Love Is the Devil

  PART TWO 1959–1983

  1 Pear Drops, Robots and Budgerigars

  2 Peafucks and Roebucks

  3 For Better, For Worse

  4 Trunks, Kicks and Shoplifting

  5 Dusk Over Fields

  6 Aunt Clare’s Story

  7 Two Slightly Distorted Guitars

  8 Finding Beauty

  9 Working Girl

  PART THREE 1983–1999

  1 Portobello

  2 Necker Island Dreaming

  3 Great Storms, Life and Death

  4 Wannabe

  5 Monument to the Midlife Crisis

  6 And All the Men and Women Merely Players

  PART FOUR 1999–2018

  1 The Rose City

  2 My Arab Spring

  3 Neverland Found

  List of Illustrations

  My Little Devils

  Note on the Author

  FAMILY TREE (SIMPLIFIED)

  PROLOGUE

  Sri Lanka, 20 January 2017

  I’m sitting with my great friend Navin – a keen historian, linguist, thespian and wit – next to a monumental stone Buddha in the Sri Lankan hills. We’re contemplating how we got to this point, and where on earth we’re going.

  Those of us lucky enough to be born in the decades after the Second World War sailed towards the new millennium with innocent, wide-eyed enthusiasm, taking it for granted that the waters ahead would be calm. Improvements in health, human rights and education, together with the decline in conflict and inequality, gave us cause for optimism. We placed our faith in the rule of law, and in diplomacy. Walls were tumbling and bridges were being built. It’s true that the dark clouds of climate change were rumbling in the distance, but the storm hadn’t yet broken.

  But now we’re not so sure.

  ‘You’ve got to laugh,’ said Navin, breaking the silence.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, shrugging my shoulders and raising my palms to the air in surrender. ‘It’s frightening though, as if everything our parents and grandparents fought for is being undermined.’

  I was already grappling with my own unresolved past and now, approaching my sixties and with the world so unsure of which direction it was taking, I was wondering how on earth to deal with the coming years. We could hear the rumble of bulldozers as they began their day’s work, ripping up the rich jungle nearby and transforming it into neat palm oil plantations. Then the words of that wise old Buddha broke into my thoughts.

  ‘To understand where you’re going to, you first have to understand where you’ve come from.’

  ‘I can’t just sit here and do nothing, Navin,’ I said, opening my laptop. ‘I need some sort of anchor, some certainties to grab hold of. I’m going to do some digging into my past.’ Navin was silent as I continued, warming to my theme. ‘I’m going to delve back, maybe by a century, to see how my family coped, while history tossed them on the wild seas of fortune.’

  ‘Wow, good luck,’ he chortled, before opening his own laptop.

  ‘I’ll give it a year,’ I whisper, somewhat startled by my conviction. ‘I like the symmetry of spending one year covering three generations over one hundred years.’ I’ve said it now. There’s no going back. My fingers hover over the keys. But where to begin?

  ‘I wonder what your father would have made of the world today?’ Navin asks.

  I smile as I recall Dad’s slow, deep, twinkly, oh-so-English voice. The thought that so much of him is me and that his essence is spiralled through every inch of my being comforts me as I try to channel a little of his ease. I close my eyes and feel his warm chuckle enter my soul.

  PART ONE

  1918–1959

  1

  SLOE GIN

  Sussex, 2011

  My father was one of the happiest people I’ve ever known. Not laugh-out-loud happy (although he would often weep with laughter); more a purring, contented sort. His diet consisted of standard English fare: plenty of eggs, white sauces, cheese and sausages, and a slug of Gordon’s gin each evening, poured into a cut-glass tumbler as the pips for the six o’clock news rang out from the wireless. Regardless of this, and despite the stresses of work and living with my restless mother Eve, my father discovered the secret to deep contentment.

  Nearing the end of his long life, Dad would drive to my Sussex farm to join me for a walk. Achieving this simple task was a complicated affair that involved ingenuity and effort on his behalf and a certain amount of patience on mine. On reflection, although these few walks were just a couple of hours, carved out of odd weekends here and there, they were of monumental significance in my life. They were the only occasions that my father and I spent time together, alone and at peace.

  The battered silver BMW that he still proudly drove, aged ninety-two, would crunch up the drive, towing a trailer on which his mobility scooter teetered precariously. It tickled me to note that, for someone who’d rarely been in a grocery store in his life, his scooter was called a ‘Happy Shopper’. We would then carefully position two scaffolding planks from the back of the trailer a wheel-width apart and my father, armed with walking sticks and virtually blind, would shuffle up the planks, position himself behind the controls of his beast, turn on the ignition and reverse towards the planks, often after a false start or two as he tried to line the wheels up with the planks. Watching him reverse gingerly down, with a wheel first an inch over one edge and then the other was, quite frankly, terrifying.

  ‘Oh lordy,’ he’d whoop, once he was safely on the ground. ‘All’s well that ends well!’

  ‘Well done, Dad – you’ve made it. How lovely to see you.’ I’d bend down and kiss his cheek while patting his bulky shoulders. ‘Any excitements?’ I’d ask.

  ‘Darling, I have to tell you, this morning I bagged that old father fox – he’d been wreaking havoc with our chickens. There’s nothing quite like the Happy Shopper when it comes to silently creeping up on foxes, armed with my twelve-bore.’

  Leaving the front drive, we’d head off around the fields, his electric buggy setting the pace. We were often silent as we settled into each other’s moods. I found it hard not to feel moved by the sight of this once-powerful man who was now barely my height, his spine having concertinaed into an agonising rub of bone on bone. He would cheerily explain his widening girth as the consequence of his torso being squeezed outwards as he shrank. The truth had more to do with the fact that, since the war and subsequent rationing, he could not allow a morsel of leftover food to go unfinished. We called him ‘the family dustbin’, as he would happily exchange his plate for ours with a grin. ‘Pity to let this go to waste.’

  Over the years, Dad had had numerous melanomas removed from his face and head and as a result always wore a battered old Tilley Hat that he lined with tin foil, having read somewhere that it would radiate the sun’s harmful rays away from his bald head. Invariably he wore one of the flamboyant short-sleeved shirts he’d collected on his travels over the years, with khaki shorts and, over the bandages covering his ulcerated shins and swollen ankles, a pair of flesh-coloured surgical stockings to keep the dreaded thrombosis at bay.

  I was always excited to show him new developments on the farm and to talk through the ideas we had for the future, such as
how I was planting avenues of oak saplings with a view that, in years to come, these walks would be transformed by the dappled shade of mighty trees.

  ‘Well, Nessie, this is just wonderful,’ he said. And then, with a gleeful chuckle, ‘I’ve never had the land to plant trees myself, but then I suppose I planted you and you’ve planted them for me, so I can take a little bit of the credit!’

  I’d mown a grassy path around the perimeter of the fields that was wide enough for the two of us to make our steady progress.

  ‘How’re you feeling, Daddy? Any new ailments?’ I’d nervously ask.

  I shouldn’t have worried as he would inevitably reply, ‘Ah darling, I can’t complain. If I start to tell you what hurts I wouldn’t stop, and we don’t want to waste a good walk, do we?’

  ‘Do you ever get bored at home?’ I asked.

  He smiled and paused for a second. ‘You know, Ness, in this day and age it’s criminal for the elderly to admit to boredom. At the flick of a switch I can have the entire Berlin Philharmonic playing in my sitting room on Radio 3, or I can be transported to Mao’s China with the History Channel, or I can take part in the migration of the wildebeest on the Nature Channel.’ I also knew that he could make The Times last the entire day and always had the radio tuned to Radio 4 for company.

  After ten minutes or so he’d say, ‘Shall we stop a minute and take in this beautiful morning?’ His watery eyes could notice far more detail than mine. He loved to point out things of interest, like the cornflowers dancing as the bumblebees bounced from one bloom to another, or a seething mass of cinnabar caterpillars, with their distinctive black and yellow woolly jumpers, on the stem of the ragwort plant.

  He would carefully remove his dark glasses and place them in his shirt pocket. Like all elderly people with diminishing eyesight, everything he did was considered and painfully slow. His shaking hands reached for the battered pair of binoculars that always hung around his neck, and he raised them to his eyes. The binoculars would wobble up and down at an alarming rate, but still he would thrill at spotting something unusual.

  ‘Oh, do look, Ness, there’s a family of roe deer. Ah, the mum has seen us and is being protective of her young. She’s standing stock-still and not taking her eyes off us. Do take a look – the young one is such a dear little thing.’

  We would discuss the best mix for English country hedges. ‘Always include plenty of blackthorn,’ he insisted.

  He then told me his grandmother’s recipe for sloe gin. ‘Take three gallons of gin,’ he started. ‘Imagine three gallons of gin! I make mine in four large Kilner jars now. Some say to wait for the first frost before picking, but I’m not sure. Pick enough plump sloes to fill half the jar. I prick each berry with a safety pin. Some people freeze them to burst the skins and allow the flavour out. Come to think of it,’ he added, ‘that must be the reason that some people wait until the first frost, but you’re risking the birds getting to them first if you wait too long. Then you pour in enough sugar to cover the sloes and cover the lot with gin. The secret is to add a few drops of almond essence to each bottle. Delicious!’

  Dad used to store his batches of sloe gin in the boot of his car until the following season. ‘Isn’t life wonderful,’ he chuckled. ‘While I’m driving up front, the gin is stirring behind.’

  Walking down the avenue of Scots pines, we talk about my friend Shelagh and the fifty-four trees we have planted, one for each year of her life, and are silent for a moment as I recall her bravery in the face of her illness and remember her laugh. We notice one of the trees leaning at an alarming angle. ‘She’ll get younger as each tree topples,’ says Dad.

  Around the corner is my friend Annabel’s mulberry tree, planted by Poppy and Wilf, her two young children, to remember their mother. Dad and I pause here, too. The trees grow so fast – can it really be that long since she died?

  Walking with someone close to you is magical, but walking in nature with someone you love is nothing short of a miracle. Being side by side removes the need for eye contact and allows for far more intimacy than in the usual exchanges you’d have over a table. It was here, walking around the fields in late spring, with the gulls catching the sea air, that we discussed my father’s belief in heaven.

  ‘You know, darling, the closer I get to meeting my maker, the less I believe in him.’ We talked about his relationship with Mum and her unpredictable ways, and we discussed how I should feel after his death. ‘I’ve had a good innings. An extraordinary life – it would be an indulgence to grieve for me.’

  Oh Daddy, I thought, I’ll try.

  Our circuit complete, we’d drink a long glass of his homemade elderflower cordial. The reverse journey up the planks was always a little more straightforward, after which he’d tuck himself into the car seat, his crumbling spine supported by foam padding, his hands level with his head as they rested on the steering wheel. I’d bend down towards him, say goodbye and gently kiss his soft jowls. He in turn would look me in the eye with tender love, raising his hand to stroke my cheek, as if tickling a spaniel behind its ear. He’d close the car door, buckle up and then slowly set off down the drive.

  I’d stand and wave, big arms-up, whole-body waves to express my pleasure in seeing him and to stop my throat constricting and turning into ridiculous tears, all too well aware that each walk is more precious than the last.

  2

  MYSTERIES SOLVED

  Sussex, February 2017

  To travel back a century is a small historical hop, but it’s a giant leap into the dark for me as I look for clues in the muffled world of family myth and memory. Mum’s grasp of the truth is tenuous now: so many stories have been embroidered in the retelling and her memories are no longer clear. I begin to root around her cupboards for memoir treasure, whether a fading photograph or an object slipped into a top drawer as a keepsake, but it’s impossible to make any sense from these oddments.

  Then I remember Michael Addison, a distant cousin twenty years my senior. As a child, he spent many weekends with our grandparents and their siblings. He welcomes the idea of delving back, his clear memory able to flesh out stories with not only names but also juicy personality quirks of generations past. A retired judge, he’s a reliable witness – his photographic memory and attention to detail clear the fog and give me a framework in which to piece a number of clues together. I can touch the Victorians now, at only one remove. The past is so near that I can almost smell it.

  ***

  It’s the spring of 1918. The Representation of the People Act has just been passed, giving some women the right to vote, and German forces are making their devastating attack along the Western Front. But all is calm in the Surrey nursing home where my father Edward James Branson emerges into the world. As beautiful as this scene is, we won’t dwell here for long; we need to go back a further thirty years, when the nineteenth century was drawing to its close in a country where the classes ‘knew how to behave’ and women ‘knew their place’.

  We’re in the Scottish Highlands, on the banks of Loch Lochy in Inverness-shire in 1890. This was the year that my grandmother, Joyce Mona Bailey, was born, delivered by a doctor who’d been summoned from Fort William, fourteen miles away. The good doctor had urged his horse to go as fast as it could and just managed to enter the master bedroom of Invergloy House as the baby took her first breath.

  The only memory I have of my grandmother is when I last saw her. I was four years old when I was led to her bedside in 1964, to say goodbye as she lay dying. A uniformed nurse stood next to a tall mahogany dresser and sunlight streamed through a gap in the curtains. The grandfather clock ticked loudly on the landing. My eyes were level with Granny Branson’s enormous bed and it took me a moment to realise there was someone in it, her emaciated legs barely making a bump under the blanket. She was propped up in her powder pink crochet jacket, and everything else was white: her hair, the sheets, her skin. I distinctly remember her lifting her trembling hand to stroke my cheek and smiling down at me. I�
��m afraid the moment was just too terrifying, and rather than say my prepared piece, I buried my head in my mother’s skirts.

  Invergloy House was built in an era when labour was cheap and stones were plentiful. The house was so remote that if all the family were out for the day, they would lower the flag on the front lawn by the water’s edge, saving the postman the long drive around the loch to deliver the post. Intriguingly, the house was to burn down in mysterious circumstances in 1947 – a fate it shared with a number of other large houses whose owners could no longer afford to run them.

  We take so much of our family history for granted, but when you begin putting the jigsaw together, some pieces refuse to slot neatly in. I wondered where the funds to set up an educational trust for us children came from; my father certainly never earned enough. What were the origins of my great-grandparents’ wealth, and why didn’t all the names connect?

  It wasn’t until my brother Richard was invited to take part in the American version of Who Do You Think You Are? that we learned of the Dickensian story behind the family’s first bit of good fortune. It transpired that my great-grandfather James, Granny Branson’s father, had been born a poor gardener’s son and the youngest of four children. When his mother died, though his biological father was still very much alive, he was adopted by his father’s employer, an unmarried and celebrated surgeon. Ten years later, when the surgeon died, both James and his father were pallbearers at the old man’s funeral and afterwards James learned that, in return for changing his surname to that of his benefactor, Bailey, and bearing the family crest, he would inherit £18,000, the equivalent of over £2 million today. This was enough money to set himself up as a gentleman, find himself a society wife and build himself a mansion, Invergloy House.