One Hundred Summers Read online

  George worked assiduously on building the case against Casement, though ensured that the diaries were not used as evidence by the prosecution. After the trial, George received a letter from Casement’s Irish defence barrister, Alexander Martin Sullivan, thanking him for his good conduct during the case. Casement was found guilty and hanged in Pentonville Prison on 3 August 1916. The case sealed George Branson’s reputation as a hard-working barrister with a fine legal mind.

  That same year, the Bransons bought Wharfenden House in Frimley Green, Surrey, an imposing if ungainly Edwardian house. They were to own it until 1952, and until 1919 they also owned a house at 59 Gordon Square in London. A daughter named Joyce, perhaps to remind Mona of her past life, was born in 1916.

  Mona’s photos from the summer of 1918 give no clue to the tumultuous state of the world. The war was drawing to a close and the horror that it had unleashed was slowly being revealed. Rumours were emerging of the Armenian genocide, where more than one and half million people had been systematically murdered by the Ottoman Empire. The shattering realisation was dawning that millions of young men had been carelessly sacrificed by the decisions of incompetent generals using outdated methods of warfare. The country was walking a fine line between retaining national pride and supporting the returning troops, while also coming to terms with what had been going on during the war, now that public information was no longer subject to government propaganda.

  1918 also saw the outbreak of the Spanish Flu epidemic, which in that year is said to have killed between fifty and a hundred million people – millions more than were killed in the war itself. The flu killed many of the physically debilitated and run-down soldiers who had survived the slaughter in the trenches and was most deadly for men of fighting age – the majority of children and the elderly survived the illness. No corner of the world was spared. To maintain morale during the war, the censors minimised early reports of the illness. The name ‘Spanish Flu’ derived from the fact that Spain, being a neutral country, had no censors and reported the reality of the catastrophe, leading to the erroneous impression that the epidemic had originated there.

  On 10 March 1918, as the enormity of the epidemic was being realised, my father, Edward James Branson, was born at 5.30 a.m. in Orchard House Nursing Home in Byfleet, weighing a healthy 8 lbs 14 oz. Born as one overwhelming conflict was coming to a close, he would be the perfect age to head off into battle when the next conflict began twenty-one years later, in September 1939.

  There are numerous photographs of the bonny Branson babies dressed in home-knitted bloomers on windswept beaches as they busily built sandcastles. There is a photo of my father in Scotland during his first summer, his fat cheeks rosy from the West Coast sun. Pictures of his sister Joyce show her to be as robust as a baby as she would become as an adult; at only two years old her thick dark hair was already well past her shoulders. The photos of Joseph, Joyce’s son by Frank, show a more delicate, fair-skinned child occasionally raising a wry smile for the camera. Years later, Dad recalled that his father would always put Joe first, to compensate for any feelings of unfairness the child may have felt when he became aware that George wasn’t his biological father.

  When little Joe heard the news that his father was to become a ‘Sir’, he ran around the house shouting, ‘Daddy’s been made a saint!’ Becoming a high court judge in 1919 bought George a great deal of privilege and a decent salary, in addition to an automatic knighthood.

  The family were well served by a team of staff, including a chauffeur called Parton. To this day, whenever I enter a lift I can hear my chuckling father telling the story of how, as a small boy, he went to a drinks party with his parents in a smart London mansion block. His mother Mona, who rarely drank beyond a thimble of sherry, must have nervously gulped down one glass of champagne too many. On leaving, when the family entered the lift, my slightly squiffy grandmother turned to the attendant and said in a tone of great authority, ‘Home, Parton, please!’

  Wharfenden, with its ten-acre lake and mature woodland, was quite a home to grow up in. The house had eight bedrooms for the family, with a staff courtyard leading away from the kitchen at the back. At the front of the house, French windows opened from every reception room onto an expansive lawn. The staid Victorian and Edwardian furniture was enriched by objects inherited from various ancestors, including my great-grandfather’s pair of muskets, their stocks inlaid with intricate silverwork. On the mantelpiece above the fireplace there were delicately carved ivory balls, made for ceremonial decoration for elephants, as well as tigers’ teeth and Tibetan prayer wheels. The house was cluttered with artefacts and natural objects, which provided an endless source of intrigue. Every one held a magical story, whether of a great battle or massacre, or of ritual and mystery.

  The lawn, which was laid out with badminton and croquet sets, led down to the water, with its abundance of fascinating life to explore. There were trout to tickle and fish, and perch, pike, crayfish, newts, water boatmen and dragonflies to catch, either to study and return to the wild, to immerse in chloroform and label, to eat, or simply to marvel at. In spring, billowing clouds of frogspawn and threads of toadspawn appeared and were collected into jars and observed as the eggs grew fat, developed legs and leapt out of their containers to freedom. Bats loved flying over the water at dusk and catching the rising mosquitoes. They shared their meal with the faithful swallows, which returned summer after summer following their mighty migration from South Africa, taking it in turns to swoop down to scoop up a beak of water, like fighter planes coming into attack.

  Young Ted, as my father soon became known, would spend as much time as he could outside, investigating the wildlife in the lake, swimming in it or skating on it. The family built rafts and swings, camped out and cooked freshly caught trout and crayfish on open fires.

  As a child, I loved it when my father, Joe and Joyce reminisced about their childhood days without end. They spoke with such affection as they told stories of teasing their long-suffering, gullible mother, of hapless gardeners and of being spoilt by cooks. Their father, though a formal and distant man, was clearly loved by the three children. Photographs of him in his red robes and horsehair wig show a man comfortable in his role; he carried himself as a stern man of judgment, but his eyes betrayed a softer side.

  In reality, Nanny did a great deal of the childcare. A young Irish girl of simple education, she was instructed to bind little Ted’s sticking-out ears in ‘Mother Hubbard’s Ear Protectors’ each night, a contraption that went over his head and tied under his chin. On the night of every full moon, Nanny would pop my startled father, complete with ear protectors, in a gigantic wicker laundry basket – ‘to stop the banshees gettin’ to ya,’ she would explain. What effect this had on his state of mind is unclear, but he readily used the trauma as an excuse not to give up pipe smoking until he was in his sixties.

  The family all adored their dogs, but Dad felt his Jack Russell terrier, Bonny, was an extension of his soul, that she could read his mind and understand his mood. He loved his pony too and felt completely at one with her, becoming a fearless young horseman. He also became a crack shot. On his eighth birthday, Ted was given an air rifle and shot a sparrow from the scullery window. In his excitement, he leapt from the window but caught his foot on the ledge and fell headfirst into the coal cellar, giving himself a nasty gash on the forehead. Fifty years later, I was with him when he scratched his head, ‘Well, I’ll be blowed,’ he said. ‘Isn’t the body a wonderful thing?’ and a tiny piece of coal appeared under his fingernail.

  In the days before Google, when Ted’s grandchildren were young and had endless questions about how the world works, the cry would go up: ‘Ask Granddaddy! Granddaddy knows everything!’ His curiosity as to physics, astronomy, nature and history gave him a deep well of knowledge. He rarely offered information unprompted, but when asked he shared it with enthusiasm.

  Dad revelled in the wonder of nature, or in interesting objects of any kind. He relished an
ything that had a good anecdote attached to it. For example, he might hand you a button from a First World War uniform and ask you to guess why it was special. Gleeful at your bafflement as you fiddled with it, he would unscrew the brass ring at the back of the button, clockwise to fool the enemy, hooting with pleasure as he revealed the tiny compass hidden inside. Or he would show you the mechanism that fired the antique muskets, with their bowls designed to contain a pinch of gunpowder that would fire when a spark was created by the strike of the flint. ‘If the powder only flared, but didn’t fire the ball,’ he’d cheerfully explain, ‘it was called a “flash in the pan.”’

  When we despair today at how the internet reduces our children’s attention span, we can only contrast their lives to my father’s and weep. One summer holiday when he was about twelve years old, Ted became obsessed by pike and was curious to understand how fast they grew and whether they moved from lake to lake. The pike is the largest and most vicious of freshwater fish, but he invented a trap and caught every pike in the lake – ringing and weighing them before returning them to the water. He repeated the exercise the following year, noting down their sizes and numbers.

  The support he must have received to follow his passions was considerable. One summer’s morning, the thirteen-year-old budding geologist spotted an item in the morning newspaper. There’d been a large rockfall at Lyme Regis, on Dorset’s Jurassic Coast. Keen to be one of the first fossil hunters at the site, Ted managed to persuade Uncle Ron to drive him across the country to investigate. I wonder if it was his powers of persuasion, his enthusiasm or his engaging company that convinced his uncle to satisfy his nephew’s demands? Whatever charm Dad possessed, it clearly worked. They arrived at the enormous pile of newly broken cliff face as light was fading, his keen eyes spotted a hint of grey jutting from the local yellow sandstone, and he started chipping away with his hammer and chisel there and then. Afraid that someone would come and claim his fossil, he chipped and hammered all through the night. As the sun began to rise over the headland, the excited boy finally managed to free a perfectly formed giant ammonite from the sedimentary rock. His magnificent prize measured fifty centimetres in diameter and, at its fattest, was thirty centimetres thick. In his enthusiasm, the little chap managed to haul the heavy fossil along the beach, up the cliff path and back to the car single-handedly, waking his crumpled and long-suffering uncle with whoops of victory.

  Anything that caught Ted’s interest, he collected. He soon had enough exhibits to open a ‘Museum of Curiosities’ in a stable in the courtyard behind the house. He lined boxes with cotton wool from his mother’s dressing table and after placing the objects inside, he stuck a thin window of glass on top and wrote the description on a label in his schoolboy script.

  Young Ted’s museum proudly displayed his hoard of ancient pottery, Bronze Age fishhooks, numerous fossilised shark teeth and Stone Age flint arrowheads. He collected eggs, seeds, crystals and bones; nothing of interest was left uninvestigated, and all the adults around him enjoyed adding to his collection, too. His museum of curiosities contained a private world of fascination; every exhibit had a story to tell. My father would never lose his uncanny knack for finding objects of interest. Days of our summer holidays in Menorca were spent rooting around caves for treasure; we’d inevitably find a Roman coin or Neolithic bone or two.

  Another great influence on young Ted’s life was Uncle Bill, brother of Sir George. Bill was a doctor and a ‘confirmed bachelor’. When I asked my cousin Michael, who’d known him well, whether he thought his great-uncle was gay, he replied, ‘No, I don’t think so. Anyway, it was illegal back then.’ He added, ‘To imagine Uncle Bill doing anything between the sheets is unthinkable!’

  With no children of his own, Bill was happy to share his knowledge and explore the natural world with his curious young nephew. He generously gave Ted a microscope, enabling the keen amateur biologist to investigate the intricate veins of a daddy longlegs’ wings or the organisms that squirm around in a pinprick of Stilton cheese with thrilling clarity. He taught Ted to make his own slides, placing a thin layer of whatever he wanted to investigate onto a rectangle of glass before sticking a square of thin, brittle glass on top. This beautiful brass instrument came in a mahogany box, with tiny drawers containing the slides and five felt pockets, where the different-strength lenses were housed. How I loved playing with it as a child, pushing the slides labelled with my father’s childish handwriting under the lens and catching the light in the mirror below.

  Uncle Bill moved into Wharfenden in 1932 and lived with the family until his death in 1958. It was a happy arrangement for all parties, for Bill wasn’t only enriching company but also contributed £500 per year to the family coffers, having landed himself a cushy job as chief medical officer for an insurance company. Without emergencies to deal with or illnesses to cure, he simply had medical assessments to make and a healthy salary to pocket. He devoted so much time to the Branson family and was always entertaining with his stock of medical anecdotes and cheery intrigue. Bill also kept Sir George happy by allowing himself to be trounced at billiards on a nightly basis. Furthermore, having a doctor in the house was a handy bonus as His Honour, a notorious hypochondriac, needed constant reassurance that his various ailments were not life-threatening.

  As a young boy, my father remembered overhearing his mother saying to the family dentist, ‘I just don’t understand what’s the matter with Ted. He knows every planet in the universe and can name every insect, plant and bird in the garden, but when it comes to schoolwork, he’s hopeless.’ It was the first time my father learned that he was considered in some way handicapped or different. His mother’s experience of being home-schooled meant she had a more empathetic approach to his academic shortcomings, but Sir George came from a long line of distinguished lawyers and was less forgiving. As a consequence, my father suffered terribly at his boarding prep school; his response was, whenever possible, to seek out knowledge from those with a natural passion for their subjects rather than exam-focused teachers.

  Grandfather George’s other brother, Uncle Jim, was a slight embarrassment to the family. After receiving a knock to the head when falling from his horse, he decided that his tenants were more worthy of their cottages then he was and readily gave his small Hampshire estate over to them. A hundred years ahead of his time, Uncle Jim became an ardent vegan and foraged for food in the parks around his flat in the unfashionable south London borough of Balham. He would often cycle the forty miles to Wharfenden to stay with the family for the weekend, carrying his ‘nosebag’, into which he would put anything edible he found in the hedgerows as he pedalled along Surrey’s country lanes, before insisting on eating nothing else for the length of his stay.

  Evening meals were formal but animated affairs. Everyone would dress for dinner, and drinks were served by the butler at 8 p.m. sharp. Candlelight danced off the crystal wine glasses and decanters of red wine that had been left to happily breathe on the sideboard, having been selected by my grandfather from the cellar earlier that day. Monogrammed linen napkins were laundered for every meal. At the age of twelve, children progressed from eating with Nanny in the nursery and joined the adults in the dining room. Meals were long, and the men drank with enthusiasm. As Dad recalled longingly, ‘There was always a cheeseboard, followed by a pudding.’

  It was the 1920s and the world was evolving. The German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires ceased to exist and national borders were redrawn. During the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, the ‘Big Four’ – Britain, France, the United States and Italy – imposed the terms and the League of Nations was formed, with the aim of preventing any repetition of such a conflict. Many believe that the harsh treatment of Germany, rather than creating a lasting peace after ‘the war to end all wars’, sowed the seeds for economic depression, renewed nationalism and deep-rooted feelings of humiliation that would lead directly to the Second World War.

  Talk around the dinner table would have focused on t
he rapidly changing roles of women at work and in political life. The family would have despaired about the Great Depression, worried about the state of Europe and discussed Sir George’s current case. Sir George, aware of his grammar school roots, tended to overcompensate by being something of a snob. The family were not sufficiently aristocratic to be eccentric in their taste and they were too ‘establishment’ to take risks. Their interest in the arts focused on Bill’s appreciation of poetry (there is a book of his own poetry in the British Library), Cousin Olive’s painting and Mona’s love of Gilbert and Sullivan. The only books my father kept from his childhood were a copy of Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales, all of which he’d learned by heart, a book of Edward Lear’s collected limericks and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.

  Ted adored Uncle Jim and would spend hours listening to his tales. A few years later, during the Second World War, a sergeant major marched into the crowded mess hall at his barracks during dinner. ‘Has this fellow James Branson got anything to do with you, Branson?’ the notorious bully bellowed. Everyone in the room turned to stare at Dad. The sergeant major was brandishing a copy of Picture Post, a popular magazine of the era.

  Ted, aware that the family considered Jim to be a sandwich short of a picnic and not confident as to the content of the article, stuttered a cautious, ‘Why do you ask, Sir?’

  ‘By God, the man’s a hero!’ came the reply as he hurled the magazine towards Ted. ‘You should be damned proud of him.’ There, before him, was an entire page of pictures of Uncle Jim gathering lawn cuttings and teaching Allied troops how to survive in the wild by eating grass, twigs and berries. ‘My motto,’ reads the caption under a photograph of Uncle Jim, spooning foliage into his open mouth, ‘is a Branson never says “can’t”’. He goes on to claim, ‘I’m as fit as a flea at harvest.’

  ‘Well done, Branson,’ the sergeant major said, as he marched from the mess hall. The room erupted into cheers.