Muv hated Malcolm House, but we loved it. For the first time we were living in the real country. One day during that summer I saw a vision. At least I said I had seen one, and the others believed me and made me describe it so often that I hardly know now whether it was a dream or whether I saw it with my mind’s eye. It was the conventional sort of vision where heaven opens and angels appear in a golden light. Nancy, Pam and Tom flew to Muv to complain, ‘Oh Muv, it’s so unfair, Diana’s seen avision.’ They were in despair about it.
My sixth birthday was spent at Malcolm House, and not long afterwards Grandmother, meeting Pam and me in the garden at Batsford said: ‘Come, I will take you to visit Grand father.’ We knew Grandfather had been ill for some weeks; he was supposed to have caught a chill while fishing at Swin brook. He was seventy-nine, a soigné old gentleman with silvery hair and moustache and brilliant blue eyes. We were not in the least prepared for what we were to see.
Grandmother took us upstairs and along a corridor, and opening a door gently she pushed us before her into a vast bedroom. The blinds were down, and in the dim light, sitting bolt upright in bed, was a terrifying apparition. Could it be Grandfather? A thin, bright yellow face; a shock of white hair standing on end? I do not remember what he said to us; I could not take my eyes off his face. The visit was soon over but it filled my mind for many days.
He died in August. Pam, Tom and I crept into the church yard and looked into the newly-dug grave. The gardeners had lined it with flowers, so that one saw only a sort of vast box of blossom and not a scrap of earth. I had never before seen a grave, and as I always believed that everything that happened to us was the unvarying norm, for years when I heard of a death I pictured a grave lined with flowers. We each had two new cotton dresses, a mauve and a grey, as mourning for Grandfather, and on the day of his funeral the bell tolled in our very ears because the garden of Malcolm House was next to the churchyard.
A couple of months later we moved into Batsford, and my grandmother went away to live at Redesdale. Because of the war, and our poverty, we only used a few rooms; the rest of the house was in dust sheets.
A family of children came to live with us there to get away from wartime London; they were neighbours in Victoria Road, the Normans. Sibell and Mark and Pam and Tom and I were all bosom friends; we seldom quarrelled. There was also a smaller girl, Mary, and a baby boy. Sibell was always in tearing spirits; she was much bolder than we were, and we loved dashing about in and out of the unused rooms, and the feeling of being far away from the grown-ups.
When I was seven another child, Jessica, was born. Nanny was busy, and I had started lessons in the schoolroom. Our governess, Miss Mirams, used to say: ‘Now, Diana, try and remember that you are the least important person in the room.’
Sibell and Mark’s parents came down to see them quite often. They amazed me in several ways. One day after luncheon they were drinking coffee with Muv on the terrace when Mary went up to her mother and deliberately knocked the cup out of her hand. I held my breath but Lady Florence only said: ‘Oh darling, was that an accident?’
Even more abnormal, I went into Farve’s business room with Sibell one evening before dinner to say goodnight, and there was Mr. Norman sitting in an armchair, reading. He put down his book and talked to us for a few minutes. As we went up to bed I said to Sibell: ‘Does your father often read?’ ‘Oh yes,’ she replied.
‘I’ve never heard of aman reading,’ I said.
‘Oh haven’t you,’ said Sibell. ‘Lots of Fa’s friends read.’ Until that moment I had always imagined reading was for women and children only, though I knew that men wr
