My first memory of a larger world was on the 4th of April 1914, when my father came into our nursery to announce with a very worried face that we had declared war on Germany and the war might well last until Christmas. This seemed a very long time to me, aged three. As my mother was German, although born and brought up in Liverpool, the news was particularly unpleasant. For some time though, the advent did not make a great impact and our nursery world continued. We were four children. I and a twin sister Nancy, and a younger and older brother, all within four years of each other with a much older brother and sister who already lived downstairs with our parents.
Such was the anti-German feeling that sprang up immediately in the country that my mother was shunned by a great many people and forced to resign from the chairmanship of the Hereford Branch of the British Red Cross. She had just started to teach us German and we loved singing the words of German songs whilst she played the piano.
An event that really excited us was when our German granny came to live with us in 1916 or 1917. After her husband died in 1909 she moved to London to be near her son, living first in Putney and then in Queensgate. When Germans started bombing London with the famous Zeppelin airships, my mother decided she must leave London and live with us in the country. So she went up to London to tell her this. My grandmother objected very strongly and although of a nervous disposition about most things, she said she adored the Zeppelins coming over. She told my mother that she went onto the roof of her large Queensgate house to wave at them because they reminded her of her homeland. But my mother insisted and brought her back to Hereford the next day where she lived with us till 1924. We got very fond of her even though she seemed very old (barely seventy I think!). In 1918 several of her German relations came to stay and we were told by our governess to tell everyone they were Americans. I found this very embarrassing as they all three talked with thick guttural German accents.
Adam’s Hill, our home, was a lovely large family house. It was ideal for six children with great opportunities for hide and seek and a huge drawing room to act and dance in after tea when we all came down. My children also enjoyed going to the big house and the company of their granny in the holidays.
The news of the war did not have much lasting effect on the tranquillity of my own nursery life. For children always make their own imaginative existence. We had an adorable nanny aged sixty-four and she did not interfere with our play except to occasionally join in it if invited. A far bigger change for us was the arrival of a Governess Miss Ruby Davis. No more running around the large garden after breakfast. Instead we had to sit at desks and do dictation, reading, writing (taught by copying books and letters). My younger brother Becket cheated at dictation by carving certain words he knew we would get on the bottom of his wooden chair. For this he spent a great deal of time in the corner with the most inappropriate dunce’s hat on his head. Harold, the older brother, was so bored that by eleven o’clock he had lost his temper with Miss Davis and when ordered out of the room went downstairs to spend the rest of the morning with my mother who accompanied him on his violin and talked to him whilst he played.
School room life was not quite so awful until our brothers both went to day school at the age of eight. Then Nancy and I had to suffer Miss Davis without them. From the age of four to eleven years, I think she imagined she was a form mistress of a large school class. The morning started with the most old fashioned gymnastics before the boring learning began. History was based on "Our Island Story", and geography on learning the countries and their capitals – strictly of the British Empire!
About six months before we went to school, Miss Davis, who was dreading the moment, would ask us at least once a week if we had heard anything about "school" and was most relieved when we said "no". However, one morning she was late as my mother intercepted her on arrival and told her that she would not be needed much longer. She came upstairs and with tears in her eyes told us the news, at which we were of course delighted. I think perhaps we couldn’t have treated her too badly.
"School" was the state high school, and we much enjoyed it. The teaching was very interesting and whilst Nancy shone at the top of the class of thirty, that didn’t bother me in the least. I kept my place between sixth and eighth without worrying. I made friends more easily than Nancy but sadly our mother did not like us to bring them back to the house as they were of a different social class. Her fears were encouraged when one day Harold’s day-school friends came to tea and did their best to drown us in the garden water butt! The lack of friends meant inevitably that Nancy and I quarrelled a great deal. She was very introvert and I exactly the opposite so we inevitably missed our brothers.
Just as I longed to escape from Miss Davis, so I longed to go to boarding-school and that wish was fulfilled at fourteen-and-a-half. I enjoyed the companionship of the other girls and made at least one life-long friend. Nancy and I only stayed two-and-a-half years at St Monica’s as my father decided that Nancy, "the clever twin", should be coached for Cambridge to read German and French. I was asked if I would like to go to Germany too. Without any discussion of my more distant future, and thinking Monica’s rather boring by then, we both left and were taken to Germany by my father. Nancy, being less confident than I, was left with some German relations in Frankfurt and I was taken to an elderly lady in a village near Darmstadt. Two old ladies (so they seemed to me then) ran an establishment to coach English girls for Oxford or Cambridge. There were never more than four of us and she was an excellent teacher. My recreations were taking a large Alsatian dog for walks in the surrounding forests, riding twice a week there and having a week of cello lessons in Darmstadt. I would also go to Frankfurt by train about two weekends out of three to stay with a different lot of relations to Nancy.
Whether it was Fraulein Koch’s teaching or her insistence on always talking German, when Nancy and I went home to England for a holiday, my mother decided that I had learnt far more German than Nancy. So in September we were both sent to Fraulein Koch for another three months.
Nancy went to Cambridge and was very happy. My poor mother, who had lost one daughter aged twenty-five, decided that I should be the daughter at home and with some reluctance I started to fulfil that role. I had one cello lesson a week, going to London for the day for that purpose. I went riding and twice a week went hunting. But I lacked companionship of my own age and began to think that I was never going to have a career. I then thought that I might have a try at music so I managed to pass into the Royal Academy of Music in London to learn cello with my then teacher. Tragically he died of pneumonia after six weeks and my next teacher at the academy said I had been taught all wrong and I must start again. It was all so boring. I was completely miserable and too humiliated to go home and say I hated London, was very lonely living in a horrible hostel, knew no-one and was life worth living? However, by the summer I did go home to stay for nearly a year with much the same life as before. By the summer, though, a marvellous opportunity arose to go to stay with my mother’s German uncle near Vienna. Again I had cello lessons and attended the University for a course in the history of music and went regularly to the opera. It was a lovely life. The house was full of people and I mixed with German speakers and English – mostly students at the university.
I went home after a year determined to study something and prepare myself for a career. By luck I discovered a course at the London School of Economics, a diploma in social science which I embarked on with enthusiasm. To start with I found the work very difficult as I had done nothing like it for several years. It took me a fortnight of four hours writing a day to produce an essay on the effects of the industrial revolution on the countryside and its inhabitants. With trepidation I handed it in to my tutor. When I went to my tutorial I was told my essay was very good whilst those of my poor companions were bad. From that moment my confidence in my intellectual ability increased and I really enjoyed the whole course, coming out in the top eight of two hundred pupils with a distinction.
But what to do now, I thought? I had no great desire to pursue a career in social work, which I was by now qualified to do. Social work was not very well organised in the thirties, either professionally or voluntarily. I chose therefore to work at the Fabian society on a semi-voluntary basis. The organization was started at about the turn of the century by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, both prolific writers of social history in Great Britain. It became the research organisation of the Labour Party and I much enjoyed taking part in its activities.
By 1933, however, Hitler had won the election in Germany and throughout the next six years a depressing cloud loomed over us as the likelihood of war came closer and closer. Our German relations seemed mesmerised by Hitler and closed their eyes and ears to his appalling treatment of the Jews. When Germany started invading the French-owned Rhineland in 1936 and Czechoslovakia in 1937, neither we nor the French moved a finger to stop him.
It was curious how little we knew about how father earned his living but when we understood how he and his brother had started the business we did become interested. Their father was a Church of England priest for forty-nine years in the same Parish of Credenhill, four or five miles from our home. From the age of about six, we were taken by our father to walk in the beautiful woods behind the church. Clergymen are allowed to make a little money out of their land, or glebe as it was called. Grandpa had a passion for growing and tending both roses and apple trees and made a small amount of cider, assisted by his second son Percy, who did not go to boarding-school as he was rather delicate. When he left the cathedral school in Hereford four-and-a-half miles away by train, he started to make cider at home and sell it. This small business went so well that when his brother (my father Fred) left Cambridge with a good degree in Classics, Percy begged him to join him in the cider venture. Because Fred was so fond of his parents and brother he eventually decided to do this in spite of being offered other jobs abroad. Their father lent them £1700 of his savings and in a few years the business began to expand and they employed more and more men. They travelled the distance from Credenhill to Hereford by train and after a few years were able to buy a nice house opposite the little factory. My father Fred put all his tremendous energy into trying to sell the cider (rather like Andrew now), mostly visiting pubs (not supermarkets!). He got on very well with people and had a great sense of humour which I am sure helped. Uncle Percy did more on the scientific side, going over to France to learn from the French how they made their cider.
As children we were fascinated to go round the factory which we always called the "works" and took a special interest in the making of the oak cider vessels by an old man called Mister Sheran who was so bad-tempered that no-one could work in the same room as him. A great thrill was when we were allowed to climb down into a huge oak vat although I was quite glad to get out of it again!
Our paternal grand-parents lived about ten minutes’ walk from Adam’s Hill in a house built for them by their sons Fred and Percy for their retirement. They shared it with their one daughter Bella who gave herself up to looking after them until they died, a custom of Victorian times. Grandfather had a very old-fashioned wooden leg which he took off at night. My oldest brother Bertram actually saw him do this when he stayed with them and was most intrigued. He only had one real leg as the other was shot off by a friend by accident when they were shooting rabbits together. This was the reason he could not go into the army, a career for which he was intended. He died in 1918 leaving his wife and daughter to live on in the house. "Granny Bulmer," as we referred to her, was a rather alarming character to us children. She was bursting with energy and we were really rather frightened of her. She criticised our mother’s bringing up of her children and everything she said had to be obeyed. She ordered that "those twins" must wear gaiters to walk to school in the winter, so awful blue gaiters were bought with about fifteen buttons to be done up with a button hook every morning. Worst still was taking them off at school when the other girls laughed at us.
However in spite of the gaiters we enjoyed the high school, the teaching was brilliant after the boredom of Miss Ruby Davis especially.