CLAVERLEIGH, a small village with no plan but considerable charm below the South Downs. One winding street ending at a small church, ST JAMES THE LESS at the S end (1744, rebuilt in 1865 in a limp, mongrel version of the classical style). . BECKBURROW ½ m. E on the lane to Battle, a good capacious C18 tile-roofed cottage with attractive materials — brick, flint, clunch — and remains of timber framing at one gable end. The small mullioned windows of the old facade give an air of immense solidity. Sober neo-Georgian additions (1910) with a heavy-hipped roof. Inoffensive, a home to be lived in rather than an exposition of taste. A good weatherboard BARN.
That was what I always felt about Beckburrow — ‘a home to be lived in’. We were happy there, the Clay family, or so it seemed to me as I was growing up. Even when Papa came home after the war — thin, irritable, unable to write — nothing really seemed to have changed in the place’s benign enfolding atmosphere. We had a nanny, two housemaids, a cook (Mrs Royston who lived in Claverleigh) and a gardener/factotum called Ned Gunn. I went to a dame school in Battle, driven there and back by Ned Gunn in a dog cart, until we acquired our own motor car in 1914 and Ned added ‘chauffeur’ to his list of accomplishments.
When my father came home, in those early years after the war, the only real pleasure he seemed to take in life was long walks to the sea, over the Downs, to the beaches at Pevensey and Cooden. He strode out, leading his children and whatever friends and relatives we had with us, like some slightly demented Pied Piper, urging us on. ‘Step we gaily, on we go!’ he would shout back at us as we dawdled and explored.
My mother joined us later with the motor and we would be driven home at the end of the day to Beckburrow. However, once we arrived at the beach, it was immediately obvious how my father’s mood changed. The high spirits of the walk gave way to taciturn moodiness as he sat there smoking his pipe staring at the sea. We never gave it much thought. Your father was born moody, my mother would say, always brooding about something. He’s a writer who can’t write and it’s making him fractious. And so we put up with his interminable silences punctuated by the odd demonic rant when his patience finally snapped and he would stalk the house shouting at everyone, bellowing for ‘Just a bit of peace and quiet, for the love of Jesus! Is it too much to ask?’ We simply made ourselves scarce and Mother would calm him down, leading him back to his study, whispering in his ear. I’ve no idea what she said to him, but it seemed to work.
Your parents, however strange they may be in actual fact, always seem ‘normal’ to their offspring. Indeed, the slow realisation of your parents’ defining oddness is a harbinger of your developing maturity — a sign that you are growing up, becoming your own person. In those early years at Beckburrow, from our move there until the mid-1920s, nothing seemed much wrong with our little world. Servants came and went, the garden flourished; Peggy appeared to be some kind of infant prodigy on the piano; baby Xan turned into a somewhat self-contained, thoughtful and almost simple boy who could amuse himself for hours creating elaborate patterns with a handful of sticks and leaves or damming the stream at the bottom of the south lawn, conjuring into being a little empire of rivers and lakes and irrigation channels, setting small balsa-wood rafts off on minuscule voyages of discovery. It would keep him occupied an entire day until he was called in for supper.
What about our Amory? What about me? So far, so run of the mill. After the dame school in Battle came the secondary school in Hastings. Then in 1921 it was announced that I was going away — to be a boarder at Amberfield School for Girls near Worthing. When I left for Amberfield (Mother accompanying me, Ned driving) and we pulled away down the lanes from Beckburrow it was the first time in my life that I registered the full level of hurt, injustice and disappointment that amounted to a betrayal. My mother would hear nothing of it: ‘You’re a lucky girl, it’s a wonderful school, don’t make a fuss. I hate fuss and fusspots.’
I came home in the holidays, of course, but, as the one absentee, felt I was something of an outsider. The barn had been converted into a music room for Peggy, wainscotted, painted, a carpet on the floor and furnished with a baby grand piano, where she was taught by a Madame Duplessis from Brighton. Xan mooned about the garden and the lanes around the house, a solemn boy with a rare, transforming smile. My father appeared to be spending most of the week in London, looking for literary work of some sort. He was given a part-time job as an editor and contributor to the Strand magazine and was a reader for various publishing houses. The pot of money from ‘The Belladonna Benefaction’ was running out. A 1919 production in New York closed after a month but cheques continued to arrive in the post, the mysterious enduring legacy of a once successful play. My mother was quite content, it seemed to me, running her big house, or sitting on the bench of the magistrate’s court in Lewes, or initiating and organising charitable works in the East Sussex villages around Claverleigh — fetes, tombolas, bring-and-buy sales.
And Greville would come down occasionally from London. Only Greville was my friend, I felt, and he taught me how to take better photographs, changing my Box Brownie for a 2A Kodak Jnr, with an extending lens on a concertina mount and, one mysterious afternoon, he blacked out the pantry, unpacked his trays and pungent bottles, and showed me the astonishing alchemy involved in taking images trapped on film and, through the application of chemicals — developer, stopper, fixer and washes — turning them miraculously into negatives which could then be printed into black and white photographs.
I still felt this nagging sore of resentment at my banishment, however. One day I generated enough courage to confront my mother and asked her why I had to go away to school when Peggy and Xan could stay at home. My mother sat me down and took my hands. ‘Peggy is a genius,’ she said, breezily, ‘and Xan has problems.’ And that was that, an end to the matter until my father finally went totally insane.
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THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977
I feed Flam, my loyal and loving Labrador, and, as the summer night slowly comes on, light the oil lamps. I use my diesel generator to power the small refrigerator, the washing machine and my radio and hi-fi. I don’t want electric light or a television set — and, anyway, I won’t be around much longer, so what’s the point of more home improvements? I live in a comfortable technological limbo, a halfway house: on the one hand laundry, music, the world’s news and ice cubes for my gin and tonic; and, on the other, a peat fire and the particular glow that the oil lamp gives off — the subtle waver of the incandescent wick, the lambent marshmallow, generating that subtle shadow-shift that makes the room more alive, somehow — breathing, pulsing.
Barrandale doesn’t really deserve to be called an island. It’s separated from the mainland of the west of Scotland by a narrow ‘sound’, maybe fifty or sixty feet across at its widest. And the sound is bridged, the ‘Bridge over the Atlantic’ as we locals grandiosely like to term it. There’s another island with another more famous, grander, older, stone bridge (ours is made of girders and railway sleepers but is ten feet longer, which makes us feel ever so slightly more superior: we cross a larger portion of the Atlantic). Still, Barrandale is irrefutably an island, and driving over the bridge — over the sound — establishes, almost unknowingly, an island mentality.