I.
I first came to Capri, and to the grotto, in the final week of April, nineteen-fifty. I was seventeen years-old, and until then had never travelled abroad. In fact, I had been outside of London only a few times before, once as an evacuee in the opening months of the Second World War. I took the train from Paddington Station, along with my siblings and dozens of other children, to our respective foster homes in deepest greenest Gloucestershire, a region unlike anything we had known, all meadows and wains and horse carts, like a pastoral scene from an old-fashioned postcards. Where, we wondered to ourselves, were the chimneystacks and terraces? Where were the underground stations? The Industrial Revolution, it seemed to us, had turned back a little after Swindon – ran out of steam, you might say.
These two particular journeys, the first to Stroud and the second to balmy Capri, were closely related, for on both occasions I was a guest of the Barclay family. Mr Julius Barclay, the patriarch, fifty three years-old on our first meeting, owned and managed a number of farms in Gloucestershire, and was exceedingly rich by the county’s standards, although to see him you would not know it. He habitually dressed as a labourer in slacks and denim and leather boots, except on Sundays when he wore tweed for church, and he was otherwise as modest and unassuming as a man could be.
The Barclay family home, and mine for a time, was a large farm house on the crest of a hillock, a few miles from Gatcombe Park, mansion-like in size but rambling and discordant, without symmetry, as if an ancient hamlet had, over centuries, been subsumed into a single building. The interior was an aimless maze of chambers and corridors, of spiral staircases leading nowhere, of exposed roof timbers, of hidden passages and long-forgotten amenities.
Everywhere you looked were broken ploughshares and wagon wheels, unframed canvases propped against the walls, and books, so many books, stacked high in each room as if for burning. Feral and domestic animals roamed in packs. Potted plants had either wilted years since, or outgrown their containers and sent roots down beneath the floorboards. The kitchen alone, Mrs Barclay’s domain, was very ordered and very tidy. Copper cauldrons the size of war drums hung in place above the sideboard and a vast oak table, perhaps fifteen feet long, took up almost the entire floor, except for an alcove which housed the stove. The white-painted ceiling of this curious domed feature had a flue at its apex, to draw out smoke and ventilate the room. The stove was rarely unlit, and from it the odour of meat and simmering sauces could be overpowering.
Every meal, whether breakfast, brunch, lunch or dinner, was a great event in that household, somehow with more food than could be stomached, more drink than could be drunk, and more guests – some invited, some not – than could be properly seated. It was not unknown for a cat, or even two or three, to prowl the table-top at mealtimes, scavenging morsels and soliciting affection from diners. Occasionally they would be plucked off and set aside by Mrs Barclay, but often not for they too were part of the great show. Mr Barclay, who grew up in the house, in his early teens had built the table from the trunk of a storm-felled tree, and it promised to outlive him. The kitchen was a venerable old theatre; we were the actors and that table our stage.
I do not remember the earliest days in the farmyard so clearly anymore, except to know I never once completed my daily chores. At first Mrs Barclay had me in charge of the poultry hutch set up behind the sheds – cleaning, feeding, repairing the chicken wire and so forth – only I despised the stupid, stinking birds, and was delighted to find them all dead one morning, torn to pieces by a fox. Blood-stained feathers, heaps of soft white down and dismembered body parts littered the floor of the hutch. Footprints in the sand evidenced the speed and ferocity of the attack, and it was a wonder that no one had overheard it. The enterprising vixen had apparently burrowed two feet beneath the hutch to get in, bless her. Had I sprinkled glass shards along the hutch’s perimeter, as instructed, the chickens might have lived, but I did not regret my inaction. Though the birds perished, elsewhere a den of famished kits may have gotten through the unforgiving winter, thanks to me.
Perhaps believing the violence of the hutch had traumatised me, I was moved by Mrs Barclay to patio and gardening duties, and it was there I properly befriended Florence, the daughter of the house, who spent her afternoons making dens behind the flowerbeds. She was an only child, a little older than me, and up to that point I had caught glimpses of her around the house: not quite pretty, but almost. She was very pale at that age, and she wore old-fashioned homemade dresses, white with frilly hems caked in mud. She would appear like a ghost at the far end of a corridor, and a moment later she was gone again, vanished into some hidden cubby, out of sight with only a trail of dirt on the carpet to mark her passage.
Florence was not shy exactly, but neither was she particularly engaging. Simply, I did not interest her. Many young children inhabit imaginary worlds of their making, and hers was especially vivid; quite impervious to gloom, to boredom and to strangers. I think it was my regular appearance in the garden which led her to perceive me anew. I was no longer a fixture of the indoors. I was of the outdoors now, her choice domain.
We exchanged only a few words in those early days, but we conversed unendingly in postures and attitudes. Her huge grey eyes disarmed my urbanite swagger – or what little swagger I had managed to adopt at that age – and in a short time we were inseparable playmates. There were few other children of our age in the locale, and what few there were we studiously ignored. They would understand our games. We thatched Florence’s den with conifer twigs and clay from the riverbed, and weaved ourselves Red Indian headdresses. We harried the sheep and befriended a Longhorn bullock, up to the point where we could enter his enclosure and feed him oats by hand. We whittled lances and arrows, and concocted war-paint from berries for our battles against an invisible, relentless, insurmountable foe, which we called ‘the reaper’, or something quite daft like that. The name, I believe, came from the manufacturer’s label on a piece of agricultural machinery, a weighted rake device to be towed behind a tractor.
The reaper’s territory ranged from the diverted stream above the grazing meadow to the silage bales in the valley below and, very conveniently, so did ours, and conflict was thus inevitable. We laid traps, dug trenches and fired arrows, yielding a hectare by morning and regaining it by tea time. It was a war of attrition, fought simultaneously on several fronts.
Of course, all this imaginary bloodletting only led to further dereliction of duty where my chores were concerned, but I don’t think Mrs Barclay minded. Although both from large families, for some reason she and her husband were unable to produce a sibling for Florence – a medical impediment perhaps – and their difficulty led to much heartache, borne in sorrow and silence. They were not the type to openly complain, but that Florence, a stubborn recluse throughout her infancy, should find in me a kind of brother pleased them no end, and as such they were blinded to my idleness, or so I hoped.
It is often difficult to recall old friends as they were in childhood; the human mind is adept to notice change, but once that change is accepted it promptly forgets the original state (think of a friend who has had her hair restyled. After just a fortnight you will not remember how she looked before). Florence was no exception. I struggle to imagine her, and indeed we two together, as we were in those days. Being now somewhat decayed and cynical, I struggle to view the world through so unblemished a lens. I no longer delight in purple sunsets – even nostalgically – or in moss-covered forest floors, or in turf expanses, twinkling with dew in the morning. But I am able to recall the hopeless devotion I felt for her, and which I suspect she felt for me in turn. She was my friend, my sister, and more than that besides. Were we uniquely paired? Honestly, I doubt it. Every painful, blissful spasm of a heartstring has been documented by a thousand love-sick writers before me, and it is vanity which compels the lover – spurned or requited – to imagine that his love, above all others, is somehow unique and original. (And worse still if he commits an account of it to paper!) Suffice to say that Florence and I fell in love as only young children can, and that the farm – or in any case, the portion of it which we were tasked to oversee – suffered as a consequence. As we grew together, so too did the strawberry beds fall into disrepair; so too did the potatoes turn to mulch in the ground; so too did the tulips wilt and the apples rot on the branch. Threads of moss which ran between flagstones on the patio were like barometer needles, gauging the intenseness of our bond, and after five years at Fersen Hall they lay untended and brazen; as thick as upturned guttering. The flagstones beneath had almost vanished from sight.
Leaving that place in early April nineteen-forty-five, a few weeks before Germany’s unconditional surrender, was the saddest day of my short life. The war, which had kept itself to itself as far as I knew, was virtually at an end, and with it my carefree days. Spring had in that year come early to the farm, only the usual promise of abundance – of berries and gillyflowers to be plucked at leisure and savoured – was this time unwelcome, for I knew I would not be there to see the promise fulfilled. My past life beckoned: a distant, unhappy memory of cramped houses and smog-filled air. I was picked up one morning from outside the deserted stables, teary-eyed, by the billeting officer in her motorcar. She was a dour-faced woman, quite spiritless; an almost cartoonish villain, rounding up the weeping children. The entire household, including a number of farm-hands, came out to see me away. I was to join my siblings, billeted with other families in the village, at the train station. Mrs Barclay gave me a small hessian sack of vegetables for nourishment on the way home: carrots, sticks of celery, plum tomatoes and the like. She held me very tightly indeed, as a mother would, and my clothes were smeared with the vegetable peelings stuck to her apron. From Mr Barclay I received a much-thumbed and beautifully bound Aeneid, the T C Williams translation. I suspect the time of my departure had slipped his mind and the book he gave me, which I never read, was something he had plucked from a library shelf on his way downstairs. I knew of and cared little for the Classical writers, Virgil least of all.
From Florence, who was too upset to personally attend my seeing off, I got a Shasta daisy, pressed and mounted onto a piece of card. She had touched up the white petals with watercolour paint, and they wore a delicate, scarlet hue. (These colours are faded now, and most of the petals have fallen away, and the stem has bent and browned with time.)