On the carpet
2009 will mark the fiftieth anniversary of our family’s move to what was then Clarke’s Hill Farm House, now Hill House, in Little Rissington. Yesterday, we drove there for lunch and came back late this afternoon. Odd to be driving without glasses, after all these years. House abuzz with chiidren of various ages.
And when I spoke of some Scottish neighbours having come to visit us the previous evening in Barnes, and mentioned that the mother of one of them had been strafed in the streets of Edinburgh by a Luftwaffe bomber, hurling herself behind a garden hedge, we discovered that the Luftwaffe had also had a go at another strategic asset. Pat, my mother. She had been sitting on a bench in a garden or park south of London, watching a gaggle of three aircraft growing larger on the horizon – and thinking how wonderful the RAF were. Then one of the planes opened fire on her – “and the bullets came as close to me as this Aga.” They missed her, evidently, but sadly went on to bomb a school, with some 60 children ending up in a mass grave, apparently.
Happily, we grew up in a very different world, despite the background of violence in Northern Ireland and Cyprus, where we spent much of the 1950s. This morning Elaine and I headed across to Icomb and Guy’s Farm, to see the Palmers, who we young Elkingtons grew up alongside after our return to England in 1959. Like the nearby Keays, they had also lived in Africa and then the Middle East in the waning days of Empire, which perhaps gave us all a sense of being misplaced. But Guy’s farm has always been a home from home, Indeed, at one point today Elaine demonstrated her exercise regime on the carpet, in front of the fire, for a slightly bemused Rolf (Feichtinger).
Struck me, when Bunny was talking about how most of the inhabitants of Icomb are now retirees or recent arrivals, that our families have been somewhat of an invasive species in these villages – like the parakeets mentioned in the Richmond Park entry above. Exotics making a new home, in the process dispossessing – however unwittingly – the original inhabitants. One particularly exotic denizen of Guy’s Farm we all recalled with great affection today was Phoebe, the Palmers’ African Grey parrot. Sadly, she has long since ceased to be.
NOTE [16-01-09]: Speaking to my parents this morning, it turns out that the strafing story mentioned above was a little more complicated — and since the blog entry above has already led to Pat being interviewed for a book, am keen to get the story right. She was actually sitting on a hill top outside Croydon, looking over a great sweep of south-east England, when the planes came in, very low. They were part of a larger group of Focke-Wulf 190s, each carrying a 500lb bomb. One reason why they were able to fly so low was that the barrage balloons had been lowered that day, apparently, to calibrate the anti-aircraft guns. And the element of the story of pastoral innocence disrupted that hadn’t been shared with me until this morning was that Pat was wearing uniform and sitting atop an anti-aurcraft battery. So my sense of grievance that Hermann Göring had sent half his airforce to assassinate my civilian-in-the-park mother-to-be was slightly misplaced.
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