Free Everything I Have Always Forgotten by Owain Hughes Page B

out on the salt marshes with my dog or walking the hills.
    These were just a sample of my general hosts, when my Parents could no longer put up with my existence… Mother once told me that, after a long luncheon with some relatives of their generation, Father said (as he turned the car out of their driveway): “Can you imagine? They have children! That means that they must have, at some time, disrobed and had intimate relations!” Yes, some of them were most definitely, Formal!
    If there was one thing Mother despised, it was conventionality – her greatest compliment was always: ‘original’. She loved her sisters, but it was despite their profound conventionality and really, they were much easier to deal with than her eccentric younger brother. They came when they said they would, they always had money in the bank and they could be counted upon to take in any of her children when she didn’t know what to do with us. Our cousins often came to stay with us and loved the unstructured, barefoot chaos of our lives, but I am sure the logistics of arranging for them to come must have been quite terrifying to their regimented parents!
    A pair of very young twin cousins were sent to stay with us alone by train. Their mother asked them if they would recognise the stop where they were supposed to get out. “Oh yes,” said one: “it’s the station which has a tap with a notice saying ‘Not Drinking Water’!” All train stations in Britain had taps with that warning on them…

VII
    GRANNY CADOGAN
    T hen there were the Christmases that we did not spend in London amongst ‘intellectuals’, when we went to stay with Mother’s mother (Granny Cadogan, née Howard, first married to Bazley, Mother’s father) for the holiday. She no longer lived in the enormous Jacobean/Victorian mansion where she had brought up her own family, by now that had been converted into a girl’s private school. She had moved to a much more modest old rectory… but modest? Oh how some country vicars had lived!
    The house seemed to have a dozen bedrooms, huge living room, elegant dining room, besides vast kitchens and coach houses around a courtyard, all built of that warm, honeycoloured stone so typical of the Cotswolds. A lovely lazy river (right out of The Wind In The Willows ) dozed brilliantly clear and full of water life, through the garden. Grandmother was old. She was virtually blind and wore a too-tidy white wig. She sat regally in her throne-like chairs and ran the household in its minutest detail. When she left one of her thrones and walked very slowly with two canes, then she became poignantly mortal. She was a staunch teetotaller, though she paid for her husband’s pleasure in good wines and spirits, besides that of all her guests. She did not impose her beliefs.
    On Christmas Day 1954, the enormous glass-like mahogany table had been set with her finest lace, cut crystal glasses and solid silver. Her second husband had carved the turkey with a textbook in front of him, counting out the enormous slices of over-cooked meat according to technical sketches in the book. We ate enormously, the grown-ups drank wine, but the festivity was muted, like a brewing storm that never bursts. We all knew that after lunch we would have to listen to the Queen’s Speech on the wireless and not until that was over, might we open our presents. As coffee was served to the adults, liqueur chocolates were passed. No one noticed that the children all had one, and then she took one. With the first bite she knew her mistake as a teetotaller and spat it out with such force that the perfectly waxed solid mahogany table, the hand-laundered and ironed lace, the lovingly shined, sparkling silver were all splattered with wet chopped chocolate.
    Granny’s second husband (the first, grandson of the amazing industrialist, having died of complications from a routine appendectomy after giving her