Kittens In The Barn
A Memory of East Farleigh.
I was wearing my little red wellingtons which squelched when I put them on. They came well over my ankles but my legs still got splashed if I wasn’t careful. Sometimes I stamped on purpose into the puddles in the ruts made by the wheels of the farm cart. My boots made a slapping noise and the muddy water shot up and dribbled down my legs. Stamping in puddles was fun, but today I had something much more important to do.
My big sister Elizabeth held my hand and helped me not to slip by mistake into the puddles on the way to the barn.
“Careful,” she said. “If you fall over I’ll have to take you back to the house.”
We walked down the path across the pampas grass lawn in front of Half Yoke House, and up the track past the cottages where Miss Mainwaring and Mr Acot lived, to the barn.
I watched my feet, making sure I put them down one after the other in a safe place.
The barn door creaked when Elizabeth pushed it open. It was dark inside and smelt lovely and dusty. Slits of light striped the mud floor from the cracks between the wall boards. The floor was strewn with whisps of hay and a big pile was pushed up into a far corner.
“Sh, sh,” said my sister. “Listen.”
Tiny squeaks came from the corner. We tiptoed over. Four little kittens, eyes tight shut were rolled up in a nest of hay. A big tabby cat lay on her side curved round them. Two of the babies were tabby like their mother, one was tortoiseshell and the fourth one was black. Their eyes were slanting slits and their tiny pink mouths pointed in a vee downwards from their little pink noses. Their ears were laid back like those of a grumpy horse.
I held my breath. I was stunned with wonder in a way that has never since been so intense. It drowned me, overcame me; unexplained. The memory drifts back to me now and then, and I wonder whether it was the kittens’ fragility that so moved me, or the wonder of creation: four new lives where yesterday there were none. My sister bent down and picked up the black one. It wriggled between her fingers. She held it out to me and I touched its little pink nose with one finger, and then stroked it between its laid-back ears, and it mewed. It was so tiny even the lightest touch of my finger felt the fragility of its bones.
Elizabeth laid it back in the hay. Tabby mother stretched herself round her babies and they ranged themselves in a row and fed from her breast. I watched in a kind of trance.
This all happened more than eighty years ago in a vanished world. The barn has been pulled down, the puddles in the lane tarmacked over, the cat, the kittens, my sister all long gone, but the memory drifts across my mind from time to time and I can recollect if not re-experience the wonder of it.
But even now, so many years later the dusty smell of old hay, the creak of a door or a streak of light falling across a floor can still stir up an echo of the enchantment I stumbled upon as a very little girl: an enchantment I can never recapture.
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I copy below my recollection of the house at that time. It is unrecognisable nowadays but maybe this will stir some memory in you
Half Yoke House: with its garden stretching down to the railway.
At the bottom of the garden was a low Kentish ragstone wall; over the wall a footpath; then a narrow strip of allotment garden where ‘dig-for-victory’ gardeners grew vegetables, and then the railway line leading into East Farleigh station.
The house itself had two aspects, well summed up by the letters carved into a wood panel over the bathroom fireplace - yes, there was a fireplace in the bathroom; sadly a fire was never lit in it. The inscription read “This house were bylt by mee William Vydan 1603`’ in wobbly letters. Briskly underneath in a neat and easily deciphered incision: “Restored by Fanny Lawrence 1858”
The nineteenth century part had high ceilings, big windows and spacious rooms. The drawing room was twenty two foot square. French windows led down stone steps into the garden. The other window in the room had a wide window ledge where I did my homework in my first years at Grammar School. The fireplace was a miscegenation. An ugly nineteen thirties yellow tile surround had been set below pretty late nineteenth century white marble corbels and mantlepiece. There was plenty of room for a sofa, armchairs bookcases, a table for the wireless and a piano
The drawing room led off the dining room, and parallel to it and identical except for a big window instead of french windows, was our playroom, with bookcases, cupboards and chests, a bed, a red carpeted floor, an open fire place with a brass topped fender opposite another window looking onto the trap door which was opened by the coal man to tip coal down into the cellar below. This fireplace was sturdy black iron and had not been tampered with. A huge reproduction of Botticelli’s Primavera hung on the wall
The dining room in which stood a big square table and a substantial sideboard, was, when I come to think about it, more like a corridor. Two doors on the left led off to the drawing room and playroom, a staircase rose up on the wall opposite and next to that an opening shrouded by a faded velvet curtain which led to a hallway and the never-used front door, and through it to the old part of the house. On the wall opposite the window a door led into a dark passage where the Frigidaire stood , and off that into the kitchen.
There were three staircases in the house. The one leading off the dining room led to a landing and the old bathroom with the inscription over the fireplace, and up another few stairs to two roomy bedrooms each with two big windows, and a lavatory
The old part of the house accessed through the dining room consisted of a big study with a huge Tudor fireplace and another front door which nobody used. A little sitting room led off with its own gallery kitchen and access to a tiny back yard. For much of the time this was the territory of Grandma, my father’s mother. A second staircase led up from the study to two more bedrooms and a bathroom.
A third staircase led from the kitchen in the new part of the house to a bedroom. - presumably intended to be a maid’s bedroom. This was for much of the time we lived in the house, the bedroom belonging to me and my sister. Off it was a strange little annexe with a niche scooped out of the wall, which I was once told was intended as a place to keep salt. I still can’t see why salt would be kept upstairs in the maid’s bedroom. Beyond this little annexe a door led into the larger of the two bedrooms in the old part of the house.
We were lucky children to have such an idiosyncratic house to live in. As children, of course, we took it for granted. It was just where we happened to live and on the whole we liked to be outside. I have never come across a better house in which to play hide-and-seek.
At the front of the house - or should I call it the back - it was always hard to decide which was the front and which was the back; each side had a front door, but one side had a “back” door as well, which was the door everyone always used. - at this front of the house lay the less interesting part of the garden. A path led up to the house. On the left was a lawn with sumac trees and two splendid humps of pampas grass, and on the right was a big vegetable patch. This path led to the drive and a conglomeration of garages, sheds, farm buildings and an old oast house. To the left the drive led to Farleigh Lane, turn left and down to East Farleigh station and the level crossing.
To the right, the drive dwindled into a small lane leading to three cottages which had once been a single ale house called The Three Pigeons. The three cottages were occupied by Mr Acot and Miss Mannering, which I never went into. The third was occupied by Mrs Teale who was the mother of our much-loved help Margery. There was a fourth detached cottage occupied by Mrs Pulfer, and beyond that an old barn. All around were grassy orchards.
The best part of the garden was entered by an old wooden door set in a ragstone wall. This part of the garden always seemed very big to me. There was, first and foremost, tucked away against a stone wall, a big sandpit with a wide concrete platform on which to build more sandcastles. There was a greenhouse, a tool shed, stone walls spread with peach trees and a vast acreage of
lawn which it was often the task of my sister to mow with a heavy hand-pushed mower. There were apple trees, cherry trees, a mulberry tree on it’s own special ‘mulberry lawn’, elm trees, three ponds, what had once been a tennis court and during the war became a chicken run, a big vegetable garden on a steep slope, and my father’s creation and pride, a rock garden.