Dartington and the Macs| Christmas at Dartington
Getting there
Christmas 1963: I’d been invited to spend the week between Christmas and New Year at Newman Crescent, just as Nigel had done for years. While my parents would certainly have liked to see me at this time, they would not have stood in my way. My mother told me once how much she and my father had resented the unspoken yet firmly held assumption by her own parents that they would always spend Christmas in London with them. By the time I was aware of this, they’d got it down to alternate years but, for them at least, the occasion never really lost its flavour of suffocating tedium. My mother swore that she would never insist on such a thing where I was concerned - and she never did. I was pleased and relieved to hear this. It removed from me the responsibility for possibly disappointing them. The next three years saw me in Dartington for every Christmas holiday. I visited my parents during the previous weekend when we went through the usual seasonal motions, and enjoyed them. This move established yet another stage in my developing independence from the historical influences of hearth and home.
For this first one, I caught the train from Paddington around six o’clock on the last working day before the holidays. It was full of people doing the same thing, rushing away from London to their different Christmas destinations en route for the West Country. Despite the crowds of travellers, the knowledge that nearly everyone was leaving town for the same reason invested both station and journey with a light, bright, carefree, festive atmosphere. Many had had a few drinks earlier on, and were talking to others they would not normally have spoken to, discussing where they were going and what they would be doing. For most of them, work was finished for a week. They were released to spend a few days more or less as they wished, though, unavoidably, some would be burdened by family duties of a repetitive annual nature, even perhaps having to endure suffocating tedium. For me, no such thing was in prospect. My excitement and anticipation were as strong as when I’d first visited three months earlier, heightened indeed by the promise of seasonal behaviour on top of the usual everyday excesses.
The nature and quality of my arrival at the house was virtually identical each year. I would walk round the side to the back door and into the warm kitchen. There the Old Lady often sat on her low stool beside the hot range. She never really looked forward to Christmas because it meant even more beer shifting than usual, with highly predictable results. Someone or other would go too far. There was bound to be some kind of trouble – between brothers, between her and one or two of them, between her and the Old Man, and, if they weren’t careful, between a brother and brother-in-law John. The notion of peace and goodwill was strong in the land, but very likely to be fractured at the domestic level. The only questions that hung in the chilly air were who would do it, and how.
On this, my first Christmas visit, I said: ‘Hello, Mother, Happy Christmas.’ She gave me a smile, wise and gentle, and sighed her weary sigh. ‘Hello, Bruno. You’d better go in. The Old Man’s got something to show you.’ ‘You mean he’s at home, not still up at the Cott?’ ‘Well, you know, Bruno, it’s Christmas. He had rather a lot at lunchtime with Don Janes and Peter Roach (the Dartington dustmen) and, by the time he got home, all he could do was sleep. He woke up in plenty of time to go up the road this evening, but I told him if he went up there again today, there would be no Christmas for anybody. The boys are up there but the Old Man’s stayed in. He’s been flitting about, very restless, for a couple of hours, wondering what train you were on and when you’d be getting here.’
I put down my bag and walked through to the living room, the ‘public space’ in the house where most of its life was lived. The Old Man got up from his deep armchair beside the fire, immediately beneath the television screen. ‘Hello, Father,’ holding out my hand. He stood up, a shade unsteadily, a broad grin lighting his face and we shook hands. ‘Hello, Bruno. Now, come and look at this and see what you think.’ He led me out to the front hall with its paraffin stove, belting out the strange, air-destroying vapours that I came to associate with that exact location ever after. ‘Look. What do you make of that?’ There, on the floor by the front door, which was only very rarely opened, lay a four-and-a-half gallon beer barrel in its wooden cradle, tipped, tapped, spiled and possibly ready for use.
We stood there for a moment in silence, looking down at the barrel, two kings come to revere a babe in a manger. ‘Barrel of Worthington ‘E’, Bruno. Mother was all against having it in the house, but I said that if we had some here, we wouldn’t keep needing to go up the road.’ Of course, as we both knew but didn’t need to say, we’d be doing both. ‘In any case, I told her it was your favourite and I was really getting it to make you feel more welcome. Well, all right, she said, but it’s not coming in the living room. It’ll have to go in the hall. Good idea, isn’t it?’ I didn’t know what to say but my face probably said it all. ‘We put it down to settle three days ago, and nobody’s tried it yet. We were saving it until you got here. I think it’s time we tested it. Just in case.’ He drew off two half-pint glasses. We held them up to the light. They were both crystal clear. We each took a mouthful – and loved it. Our eyes met and we slowly nodded our heads. The Old Man and I had tested the ‘E’ and found it good. ‘Happy Christmas’ we said, and shook hands again. ‘Better have another, Bruno.’
Happy Christmas
We spent Christmas Eve in the Cott and, unsurprisingly, went to bed late with more beer on board than was strictly necessary. The following Christmas Eve, or perhaps the one after that, there was very nearly no Christmas at all. That particular night was viciously cold, with thick frost on everything by the time we got back from the Cott. We all trooped in through the back door as usual and went our various ways to bed. None of us even noticed that Gerald hadn’t come in. Perhaps he’d stayed on behind the pub’s locked doors. At this stage of a night like that all you wanted to do was get yourself horizontal in bed and close your eyes for a long, long time. Next morning we heard Mother shouting downstairs: ‘That’s it! I’m cancelling Christmas. This Christmas is cancelled!’ Up at her usual time, she’d found Gerald fast asleep where he’d fallen the previous night, cradled across the sturdy, supportive Brussels sprout plants in the back garden. His new sheepskin jacket, which may well have kept him alive through the night’s sub-zero temperature, was covered in frost, so were his hair, beard and face. His nose had been bleeding. Not a pretty sight for your mother to discover on Christmas morning. She was indescribably furious, and she distributed her anger around the rest of us as we each came downstairs. A quiet guilt hung over breakfast that morning, each of us on our best behaviour except for the Old Man who played her up, claiming he couldn’t see what the fuss was about. Eventually, she recovered her composure, Christmas was reinstated and everyone relaxed.
The thing I recall most clearly and painfully on that first Christmas morning was waking up. I had a magnificent headache, but there was no possibility of remaining undisturbed in bed until it had subsided enough to let me blink myself awake and face the morning. As a seasonal treat, Audrey’s three children, little Audrey, Tracey and Alistair, were allowed to stay the night at Newman Crescent in one of the two bedrooms upstairs. All the boys who were at home, certainly Bill, Gordon, Gerald and Edward, had the other bedroom. Andy was with Doreen up at Redlake with Audrey and John. The result of these arrangements was that I slept on the living room settee. Clearly I would have to be up and out of the way reasonably early in any case, but I never imagined the experience would be quite as early and as brutal as it actually was.
Dylan Thomas, in his broadcast piece Memories of Christmas, captures the moment of the child’s first consciousness of Christmas morning:
Now out of that bright white snowball of Christmas gone comes the
stocking, the stocking of stockings, that hung at the foot of the bed
with the arm of a golliwog hanging over the top and small bells ringing
in the toes . . . Christmas morning was always over before you could
say Jack Frost.
Like most kids, Audrey’s three were awake and running around by six a.m., probably earlier, opening presents prematurely then re-wrapping them for another, more detailed, examination later on. I awoke, realised where I was and what was going on, noted the state of my head and decided to keep my eyes shut. I heard Mother’s voice telling them not to make too much noise because of me. They obeyed for some time and I even managed to get back to sleep for a while. But the excitement was too much for them. They didn’t have golliwogs or bells but among their presents were several of the latest pop song singles. I didn’t know it, but their record player was standing on a stool at one end of the settee, immediately beside my head. Suddenly, while Roger the golden Labrador, stimulated by all the action and rustling paper, licked my face, the sounds of ‘Puppet on a String’ or ‘You’ll always be there to remind me’ exploded into the room at high volume three inches away from my ear. It was like having your consciousness raped by a pneumatic drill. This was the cruel but irrevocable end of my sleep, the beginning of my Christmas Day. Far from being over in a flash, that morning would stretch long and painfully ahead of me. I went to the bathroom to consult the aspirin bottle. The Old Man, already thoroughly and bustlingly up and about as usual, said ‘Morning, Bruno. Fancy a glass of ‘E’?’
Nothing was ever as traumatic as that first Christmas morning. Each festive stay at Dartington had a particular quality, often recounted affectionately and laughed about on some future occasion. I don’t know which of the events I recall so clearly now took place during which Christmas. It doesn’t really matter. Most people’s Christmas movements follow a pattern that the family repeats year by year. It’s then picked up later and modified by their own children in their own homes, to become a new repeatable pattern. By this slow generational process we discover that it doesn’t always have to be beef for the great celebratory Lunch or Dinner, nor even turkey. The fairy or the silver star at the top of the tree can be replaced by some other decoration. The tinsel and hanging baubles needn’t always be the same ones, in the same colours, and positioned in the same place every year. But they quite often are.
As Dylan Thomas put it:
One Christmas was so much like another, in those years . . . that I can
never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when
I was twelve, or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights
when I was six; or whether the ice broke and the skating grocer vanished
like a snowman through a white trap-door on that same Christmas Day
that the mince pies finished Uncle Arnold, and we tobogganed down the
sea-ward hill, all the afternoon, on the best tea tray . . .
In my memory they similarly join together in an indistinct, pleasurable haze as I immersed myself ever deeper in the convivial and boisterous Maclening family culture. Lunchtime on Christmas Day always meant staying up at the Cott until they closed, with everyone coming home for lunch together in a big noisy crowd. Occasionally, one or other of the boys found he couldn’t quite manage the act of eating and, as the Old Lady quite rightly glared and grumbled at him, went upstairs for a long lie down. As soon as the meal was finished, and we had done the washing up, the tendency to have a lie down forced itself on practically everyone. Recollections of Christmases past did not take place at that time, as they had in Thomas’s family, where the grown-ups sat round the fire bragging about how gloriously better it had been in their own childhood. Later on, after most sleepers had resurfaced, we had tea and Christmas cake. Then arose the annual question: do we stay in, watch television and drink some of the ‘E’ – or other warming and highly sustaining fluids - or go out and find an open pub somewhere in the vicinity, or do a bit of both? Whatever the outcome – and you’d be lucky to find an open pub on Christmas night - respect for Mother and the work she had put in to feed us all usually had a suitably moderating influence on the evening proceedings, a feeling that sometimes even spread across to Boxing Day. And so it should.
Later in that week after Christmas there was heavy snow and we’d finished the Worthington ‘E’. One night after closing time Gerald and I were carrying a crate of beer bottles down the hill from the Cott. Our progress was awkward and uncertain on the very slippery road. Gerald, at the front of the crate, eventually went too near the edge onto the grass and began sliding, gently but quite unstoppably, into the snow-filled ditch. It all seemed to be happening in slow motion. The others were too pre-occupied with remaining upright themselves to pay any attention to us. Totally committed to keeping hold of my end of the crate, I too was gradually pulled into the ditch after it. We both sat there for a while in the snow, the crate between us, wondering how we’d make the next move. No one was in a particularly suitable state to try and rescue us, so they stood on the side of the road, laughing. In time, we had the sense to let go of the crate, pull ourselves upright, by now covered in snow, and pull the crate out. All the bottles survived unhurt.
And again, and again
By the time of my second Christmas, Edward had married Liz, and gone to live in the leafy Southeast. They had been drawn into alternative Christmas arrangements. This made room for me in the bedroom upstairs, sharing a large foldaway bed with Bill. Gordon and Gerald were in the bunk beds. I had been given the short straw which neither of the other boys was keen on, as Bill had an occasional tendency to wet the bed after a skinful. In the event, nothing like that happened during the week - though I was the victim of one such incident in other circumstances elsewhere, with quite different people, a couple of years later.
Gordon’s current girl-friend was a West Indian nurse from Newton Abbott hospital. She turned up on Boxing Day afternoon and was introduced to us all. When it came to the Old Man’s turn, he pronounced his magnanimous speech of welcome: ‘Very pleased to meet you. And I’ll tell you this. We don’t mind what colour you are – red, yellow, green, black, white, Chink. Everybody’s welcome here.’ She had no idea how to respond to this but remained serene. The rest of us were enduring agonies as, avoiding eye contact with one another, we successfully fought to stifle our desperate impulse to explode into laughter.
That night I drove the old Consul over to the Pack Horse at South Brent. Gordon’s nurse had her own car so we had a good crowd, including the Old Man. Bill soon got stuck in with Arthur, one of whose gestures to the festive season was a bunch of Beatles wigs. Beatles numbers went on the jukebox and everyone had to wear one of the wigs. The sight of the Old Man in one was even funnier than his earlier stab at international diplomacy. Rather sooner than usual, Bill reached the stage of flinging his change all over the bar, crying ‘When I drink, everybody drinks!’ Long before it was time to leave, he had bought himself a half bottle of brandy, in case of urgent need later in the night, and tucked it into his inside jacket pocket.
Then a moment came when everyone was saying ‘Anyone seen Bill?’ ‘Where’s Bill?’ He was nowhere inside the pub. We found him lying spread-eagled on the car park gravel. The vision of a man with a bottle of brandy over his heart crashing face down onto the hard surface flashed across more than one muddled mind. We turned him over to find the bottle undamaged. Gordon’s nurse friend leaped in with tremendous efficiency to check the casualty’s condition. She felt his pulse, timed it carefully, flipped back one of his eyelids and shone her little torch into his eye. In a slightly contemptuous tone, she said ‘There’s nothing much wrong with him.’ The Old Man was fast asleep in the passenger seat beside me all the way home. As someone helpfully opened the car door for him, he tumbled out onto the pavement outside the house, still profoundly asleep. Next morning he was very keen to tell Mother how he’d worn a Beatles wig the previous night. Her response fell rather short of the encouragement and congratulation he might have been expecting.
Was that the year we had the goose for lunch? Probably. This goose had been part of the livestock inventory in the field behind the house for a considerable time. The Old Man had pronounced that this year its time had come. There had been lengthy discussion about this, most involved believing that the poor thing was too long in the tooth for eating, and would need to be cooked slowly for at least a week before it reached the table. The catching and killing had taken place some days before I’d arrived. I got the story from Gordon – who is definitely the one when it comes to telling a good story well, especially one about the Old Man. This was another occasion (one of so many, including the time the ferret that he kept in the wash house sank its teeth into his finger and he had to nearly throttle it to release himself) when the Old Man’s antics, performed in all seriousness, provoked immeasurable eruptions of mirth in everyone else. Even the Old Lady could not prevent herself from joining them. It was a great Maclening moment that I profoundly regretted having missed.
The despatching of the goose sounded straightforward enough to me. It involved the Old Man, on his own, armed with a broom handle. Having got hold of the bird, he would wind its neck around the broom handle until it had lost all interest. He hadn’t asked any of the boys to help him and, very wisely, none of them had volunteered. But they all watched from the back door and the window as his small figure, topped by his trademark flat cap, strutted over to the field. He closed the wire-netting gate firmly behind him and the chase began. No one could say how long he chased that wretched goose all around the field. He charged at it repeatedly through the clumps of innocent chickens, scattering them in every direction again and again. Once he caught it and somehow wrestled it to the ground against the fence, but it wriggled out from under him.
The goose squawked and ran in wildly erratic directions all over the field. Wings flapped, feathers flew. It was angry and getting angrier. In the feverish tempo of the chase, the Old Man’s cap came off. How long could he keep this up? His audience could have watched these antics all day. It might indeed have taken all day for there was no way he could have given in. Then perhaps at last the goose was tiring. The Old Man threw himself upon it, pinning it to the ground with his whole body. He deployed the broom handle, a lengthy and none too enjoyable process for either of the parties involved. The Old Man recovered his cap, put it back on his head and grinned, exhausted, at his admiring, applauding, whooping family. Mother closed the event simply with ‘Thank God that’s over.’ He dragged the goose back across the field and into the wash house for plucking. It had finally made the supreme seasonal sacrifice. The leg portion on my plate on Christmas Day fully bore out the dire predictions made earlier about its chewability. One tough old bird had brought down another.
Home entertainment
The most hilarious time, laughed at while it was happening and for many years afterwards whenever anyone recalled even the smallest detail, was the year Mother decided to invite the Old Man’s brother Owen (Uncle Owen to the boys) and family from Shoreham. With him were his wife Mildred (Auntie Mil), and their grown-up children young Mildred, her husband Malcolm, and their one or two children. This extended family must have put immense pressure on the Dartington sleeping arrangements, but they managed it, and I was again lucky enough to be in one of the bedrooms upstairs. It wouldn’t have made much practical difference if I’d had to be farmed out somewhere else, but sleeping in the house meant I was in the right place, at the centre of the family.
Uncle Owen was short, much the same height as the Old Man, and used to speaking his mind. The two brothers were very similar in many small ways, although Owen, who clearly enjoyed the pub, had not made such a committed career of beer-drinking as the Old Man. His daughter, young Mildred was a pale, mouse-like little person, completely unlike her mother, whose small children seemed to be even paler and quieter still. Her husband Malcolm was tall and gangly, also on the pale and quiet side. I’d met him before: he drove a lorry and, when he was doing a West Country trip, he’d sometimes stay the night with the Macs. He and young Mildred both called Mother ‘Auntie’ and the Old Man ‘Uncle’, which sounded strange to my ears, as I’d come across no one else who’d used those terms.
Auntie Mil was the unwitting source of much of our entertainment that year. Even Mother, who certainly had a sound sense of humour but kept it better regulated than the rest of us, found herself breaking into an involuntary smile or having to hide her giggles when she least expected it. Mildred’s form of conversation was a non-stop battery of disconnected bits and pieces about members of family, other people she knew, and random comments on the world at large. She would fling out questions and not wait for the answers before banging on again about something entirely different. Statements not really addressed to anyone in particular began with phrases like ‘It’s not as if . . .’ ‘Oh, and there’s another thing . . .’ ‘Mind you, no one can accuse me of . . .’ and ‘If you was to ask me . . .’ used over and over again. Hearing one of these triggers, we sat back in great and always rewarded anticipation, waiting for another robust slice of Auntie Mil’s rich and peculiar discourse. It was fatal to make eye contact with anyone else in the home team when she was in full flood. Sooner or later someone would have to rush suddenly from the room to release the increasing pressure of their uncomfortably restrained laughter.
Mildred was immensely fat and had great difficulty moving around. The funniest thing was her technique for getting herself into and out of an armchair. Her girth meant that it was impossible to simply lower herself into the chair in any conventional way. She would simply have lost her balance and toppled over. She had to stand in front of the chair, put one hand on each of the arms and subside into a kneeling position on the floor. From there, she would turn round and heave her backside up onto the seat cushion. She performed these movements in reverse when she wanted to get up. There was nothing graceful about any of this, and we were in fits every time, no matter how many times we’d seen it. She never appeared to know that we were laughing at her when she was talking, but she recognised the humour of the armchair business. ‘It’s all right you lot laughing. Just you wait until you’re as big as me. Then it won’t be so funny.’ It was as though she expected that, in the natural fullness of time, every one of us would have become just as fat as she had.
By contrast, Owen had an unusually slick way of sitting down that involved throwing himself back into the chair in a single fast movement. He did this once on the settee, which had a metal bar running along the back, part of the frame that enabled it to fold down into a bed. His bald head cracked hard against this bar, we all heard it and looked at him in horror, expecting semi-serious injury at least. He was certainly hurt but said nothing. Auntie Mil’s sympathy was limited to a brief interruption in her gushing monologue. She glanced sideways at him, face impassive, exclaimed ‘Silly sod!’ then rushed on without a further break.
That evening the usual decision had to be made: stay in or go out, both or neither. There was still some ‘E’ in the barrel and bottles of other things. There may also have been a film on TV that some of us wouldn’t have minded watching. In any case, as long as Auntie Mil was still awake, we were guaranteed some high quality in-house amusement. We stayed in. On Boxing Day lunchtime we were up at the Cott, all the boys, the Old Man, Uncle Owen and me, standing around near the bar. Uncle Owen said to me: ‘Bruno, I think we did the right thing last night by not going out. It was the respectful thing to do after all the work Mother had put in. I’m very pleased we all stayed in.’ I agreed. After all, I said, we can go out any night of the week. And usually do. ‘That’s right,’ replied Uncle Owen. ‘But it’s Christmas. We definitely did the right thing.’ He then went over to the Old Man and told him we’d done the right thing, and that I’d agreed with him. Gordon, who was always the chief wit and clown, heard this. After a while, he began going round the group telling each of them individually that we’d done the right thing last night. At the same time, Uncle Owen was still telling somebody else the same thing.
By the time they’d both been all the way round, everyone knew what Gordon was doing and it became funnier. One brother, say Gerald, turned to another, say Bill, and repeated the now familiar lines. The final act involved Uncle Owen standing again beside me with Gordon coming up to us and saying ‘I think we definitely did the right thing by staying in last night, especially after all the work Mother had put in.’ Uncle Owen turned to face him. ‘Gordon,’ he said, ‘you’re taking the piss. That’s what you’re doing. And when somebody tries to take the piss out me, I knock seven different colours of shit out of them.’ Suddenly it had become serious. There was no laughing at this, rather silence all round, with the Old Man smiling away quietly to himself over by the door. Gordon managed to talk himself out of this spot with an apparently genuine show of appreciation for Uncle Owen’s unselfish public spirit. In the process, his seven different colours remained intact.
On New Year’s Eve we were all up at the Cott. These Maclening boys were devils for washing, shaving, ironing a clean shirt and putting on a tie before going out for an evening’s drinks. The bathroom was in continuous occupation from about seven fifteen onwards. It was a habit developed from usually spending their working day in the open air, doing some form of manual work in the building trade. The Old Man was the only one who tended not to bother. It seems strange now, but we all walked up the road to the pub in our better clothes and all wearing a tie. When we got there that night we each put ten bob into a kitty to play the TIC-TAC-TOE fruit machine. Whatever we won would become the basis of our night’s drinking fund. We put plenty in but in the end we did win the jackpot, in those days only five or six quid, but quite enough in the early 60s to finance most of the night’s work.
Towards the end, when no one remained remotely sober, it was Bill’s habit to get us into a circle, tie all our ties together in the middle and, with arms round each other’s shoulders, go round and round singing ‘The More We Are Together’, over and over again. Someone usually fell over during this, and as the ridiculous performance went on, our ties got knotted ever tighter together. Releasing us all from the central knot took ages, with one fairly drunk person after another thinking he could do it. Of all the people to try and undo a tight knot, a drunk person is unquestionably one of the least qualified.
The other moment that stands out, albeit dully, from among the more generalised experiences, is the Boxing Day afternoon trip to the Long Bar at Plymouth, a place well known for its fights with and between paralytic off-duty sailors. It was a cold, dreary, drizzling day and I think Bill and John Neville cooked up the idea. Bill obviously liked the idea for old time’s sake. He might even ‘run into an old shipmate’, as if that were ever remotely likely. We drove over there and walked in to find it not much less cold and dreary than anywhere else outside. The Long Bar was indeed very long but also almost empty. There were two or three sad young sailors, stranded ashore for Christmas with nowhere else to go. It was utterly cheerless. Bill inspected them closely and realised that this was the first time he’d ever seen them in his life. So he began to tell them, not only about all his adventures in the Royal Navy and where he’d been, and who the Chief Sparks had been on whatever ship he was talking about, but also long passages, in great detail, of his entire life story. The rest of us slowly drank our beer and just waited for him to finish. It had not been a very good idea after all. On this occasion, we had not ‘done the right thing’.
The Long Bar non-event was the only lacklustre moment during those three Christmases. In every other respect, whatever we were doing, they were brilliant occasions filled with the spontaneous warmth that flowed around and towards me from the people in that family. Of course, they were lubricated with the products of some of the nation’s great brewers and distillers. My visits there at other times of the year, for so many years after, were just the same. I had found myself, without even trying, at the heart of a second family demonstrably different from the one I was born into. No sooner had I left Dartington than I was longing for the next visit and, once installed there again, resolutely put off any thought about the day when I would have to leave and return to London. I valued every single minute, even of the last hour that I spent chatting with Mother and Father, waiting for the taxi to arrive in the Crescent. The greatest honour of all was to leave the house by the front door, opened specially for me, as they came to the gate to see me off. □