The Housekeeper's Tale - Grace Higgens's Story by Tessa Boase

Author:Tessa Boase
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MBI
Published: 2014-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Small Pleasures

Peter John recalled nothing of the kitchen conflict when asked for his memories of the war. Grace’s son was four years old when war broke out, ten years old when it ended. As an adult he could still picture himself lying in bed at night, looking up through the rusting attic skylight and seeing German doodlebugs zooming over Charleston en route to London.

As Grace walked her son across the fields to Selmerston school, they’d warily watch the dogfights overhead. ‘All those planes, fighting in the air above our countryside. I wouldn’t think of the danger,’ he said. ‘I was fascinated by what was going on in the air.’ At the end of the school day Grace would leave the kitchen and walk to meet him. He had a little bicycle, and she’d push it all the way to meet him so he could ride the bike down Barleymow Hill home. ‘We wouldn’t see a car, in those days.’ Once home, Peter John ran outside with a stick, ‘shooting’ at German planes flying low across the cornfields, chased by British Spitfires, ‘which petrified my mother because she thought they would shoot at me’. Grace had every reason to be anxious: a young Lewes mother had been fired at by a German plane as she pushed her six-week-old baby along in a pram.12

A searchlight was stationed near the farmhouse, run by a dynamo that thundered away at night. It was manned by the Home Guard, trigger-happy local men who would fire at low-flying enemy aircraft with a mounted gun. Grace would shout at them, furious: ‘Of all the stupid things! You could hit one and blow us all up!’

That was Grace: outspoken, opinionated, instinctively pacifist. She had ambitions for her son, the spider-limbed Peter John. Working for the upper middle classes had changed her outlook on life. She decided to take him out of Selmerston Primary and send him to a private school in Lewes for a ‘better education’; a ‘mainly girls school’ that took in boys. Broughton House School drilled him parrot-fashion in countries, capitals and rivers and coached him in sport, at which he excelled. He had no sense of being different to his classmates for being the son of a domestic servant. ‘I was just another boy from the country.’ This was a measure of Grace’s standing with Vanessa, Clive and Duncan. She did not feel inferior, so neither did her son. Nor was he aware that the ménage at Charleston might be of interest to anyone. ‘The Bloomsbury lot? They were just another family. “Bloomsbury” didn’t mean anything to me at the time. There was no mention at school of them…I never talked about them, and no one appreciated or realised who they were.’

When Virginia Woolf committed suicide in March 1941 he was unaware of her great fame as a writer–he was, after all, just five years old. But he remembered vividly the change in atmosphere at Charleston at the time. Vanessa, ‘fragile but not overwhelmed’, broke the news to Duncan on his arrival from London.

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