This replaces the earlier draft of Jane’s memoir of her years from 4-18.  One change is that she uses italics to indicate that adults are speaking (which includes extracts from her mother’s diaries). Her own voice, and those of her siblings, are in ordinary type. She also includes extracts from her own diaries - misspellings and all - from the age of 11.

                      Jane with Grandpa Horace, Uncle Edmund and Uncle

                       William (and various cousins) at Bushey Leys cottage

‘Jane, you’ve been eating the raspberries again.’

‘No I haven’t.’

‘Yes you have.’

‘No I haven’t.’

Mummy lifts me up; shows me to myself in the mirror. Around my mouth is a redness of raspberry juice.

‘See, you’re not a very good liar, are you, little one.’

‘I am a good liar. I am.’

Mummy laughs. ‘Caught you red-handed didn’t I?’

I look down at my hands. These are red with raspberry-juice, too.

‘First I catch you picking our precious apples before they’re ripe, Janie; then I catch you eating linseed balls in the barn ... because you thought they were flapjacks! Those were meant for the cows – not you. You must learn to share with everyone.’

We all help finding food - Edmund is 8. (He’s usually gone to Prep school, called ‘Normandale’, but it’s his holidays now).  Lynda is 5, I am 4, Geoffrey, 2 … and Vanessa is still 0, so she can’t help at all. And we have a pet tortoise called Horace.

We live in ‘Bushy Leaves’ cottage.

‘Bushey Leys’ is its proper name’, Daddy says, proudly, ‘and it’s very old ... Seventeenth Century’.

Bushey Leaves sits in its nest of green fields with long swishy grass. Thick hedges are the outside edge of the nest, and I know their names: blackberry, hawthorn, sweet-briar and damson.  In Autumn, the horse mushrooms grow big as dinner plates under the Elm trees. They taste like aniseed balls, but are nice with bacon.

When the sun shines, you can see “the Green Hill far away, without a city wall”. The hill is solid white all the way through itself like blackboard chalk, and green only on the top of itself like a coat. It’s perfectly all right without having a city wall. Tom at the Alms House says there’s a secret passage going underneath, right through from the church. Small aeroplanes fly overhead. Edmund says ‘They are left over from The War and land at RAF Halton. Some are Spitfires, some Gipsy Moth with two lots of wings’.

I think the Spitfires fly spitefully. They do turn-tail and loop-the-loop almost to the ground, and go ‘eeaaow eeaaow’, like Geoffrey when he’s playing with his small plastic plane.

Sometimes on misty mornings the cows moo through the smoke. When it‘s rainy, the cows look sad and hang their heads low down. When it’s windy, the rude rooks caw and caw. Sometimes it snows. Then we’re snowed in. Bushey Leaves has a thatched roof like an egg-cosy on top to keep us warm. This gets thicker and thicker, because every time Daddy re-thatches it, he only takes off a small layer, but presses lots more on. Now it’s a huge thick tea-cosy on top of us.  For the thatching, Mummy pulls all the straw from the fields herself.

Mr Tilbury comes rattling down the right-of-way in his meat van, but the baker walks down, in his white overall, bringing Mummy breads called ‘two split tins’ in his bread-basket.

Our right-of-way is because it goes right-the-way up to the road.  The Elm trees and Oak trees stand on either side. Once Daddy ran all the way down …

‘A small plane has crashed in the Elm tree at the top’.

We drop what we’re doing and rush up. And it’s true – there’s a tiny plane, stuck in the highest branch. Edmund says, ‘Oh! It’s only a model one, far too high to reach. What a pity.’

But I worry and worry what’s happened to the tiny pilot. So I go up there on my own afterwards, and look everywhere for him in case he fell out. But he cannot be found.  He was probably doing a flying visit to the tiny people who live in the long swishy grass around our cottage. Then he crashed, because he didn’t go high enough over the Elm tree. Maybe our tiny people must’ve buried him already, which is why he can’t be found. Edmund says there aren’t little people; Lynda hasn’t seen any yet. But I know the reason you cannot see them is because they don’t want you to. I know where all their swimming pools are where they capture rain-water – they’re in the hollows of trees where the leaves have got all their green soaked away, so only their skellington-leaves are left, all silver papery and thin. These are for making their clothes.

Our Vicar, the Reverent White, can make the very tiny people speak to him out right out of the fire-place chimney, or right over the other end of the room, because he’s Holy, so they obey him. The Reverent White comes to tea because he likes Mummy’s home-made cake. I wish I could make them talk to me. Lynda says ‘The Reverent White is a ‘ventrillyquist’; so that’s why he can do it.’

Edmund asks Mummy what a ‘ventrillyquist’ is, and she tries to explain:

‘but it’s a bit difficult ...’it’s the ability to throw your voice somewhere else...’

‘Well, if he can throw his voice like that,’ Edmund says, ‘why doesn’t he make his congregation speak back to him when he’s in the pulpit?’

‘What a wicked thought, Edmund,’ Mummy laughs ... ‘but I did hear that once he scared poor Mrs Spittles rigid. They were walking through the graveyard, when the Reverend White suddenly made the answer to one of her questions come right out of a grave. Mrs Spittles’ hair stood on end and she turned a nasty colour, so the Reverend White thought he’d better not do it again, as it was far too ungodly.’

The cuckoo is a ‘ventrillyquist’, as he can make his voice come right the way over from the misty valley beyond the green hill. ‘Cuckoo’ he calls so clearly through the mist again and again. He never comes nearer because he doesn’t want to be seen – like the tiny people; but I love him best of all.

Sometimes, we go into the Reverent White’s church, because we all love singing and praying. Inside, there is a Lady lying all carved in stone in the wall, and I’m going to be carved in the wall like that when I die. Daddy sings loudly out of tune in church. Mummy says, ‘Charles, you have no musical ability at all. You only know bits of song left over from the war.’ But when Daddy is working, he often hums the church Hymns. He sounds a bit like the aeroplanes humming overhead. Mummy says that Daddy hums badly, but Daddy thinks he hums very well. ‘It helps me concentrate,’ he says.

‘Run rabbit run rabbit run run run’ Daddy hums the next day. He’s mending a hole in our fence to stop the rabbits eating up our garden. He’s talking to Edmund. ‘We lived on rabbits during the war. We relied on them. That’s often all we had to live on. But bullets were so scarce – needed for the army - not to get food. So what I’d do, is creep along on my stomach very silently, wait ‘til two rabbits lined up, one in front of the other. Then Bang! I could kill two using only one cartridge. Mostly, though, we had to trap them. To trap a rabbit: put up your wire noose in the evening. Be prepared to be up at five the following morning, as the screams from the rabbit are unbearable. You have to dispatch it as fast as you can. Your Mother got most efficient at skinning them. I’m not all that fond of rabbit nowadays. Had too many in the war I suppose. But Tiggywinks seemed to know when times were bad, and used to help us out.’

Tiggywinks is our tabby-cat. He’s not very tame as he’s practically wild and not a pet like Horace the Tortoise. At night he prowls and goes out hunting. In the morning there’s a dead rabbit left on our door-mat. This is a present - but Mummy gives him back the head - also the paws and insides, which Mummy calls ‘the lights’ – though they’ve mostly been in the dark. Mummy makes a rabbit casserole, adding some dinner-plate mushrooms.

Nowadays, Tiggywinks is grown old, and it’s called ‘after the war is over’.  Sometimes he still leaves a rabbit, or a weasel, or a mouse-without-a-head whenever he can. Tiggywinks probably wonders why we don’t like weasel or mouse-without-a-head which Mummy gives back to him. I‘m pleased she does, as I shan’t like Weasel Pie – or Casserole of Headless Mice – with their tails all whirling round in the gravy.

The wild things we live on are as follows: rabbits, blackberries, mushrooms, nuts, damsons, elderberries, apples - also watercress from the stream. The tame things are: things Mummy grows – and eggs. These are laid by Rusty, Dusky, Speckledy, Ginger and Freda. 

It’s not fair finding food for us all the time without getting some for Horace the Tortoise. But Farmer Blundell’s bean-crop is in flower, so we pick lots of petals, hide them inside a sack. Horace can go on eating them for ages very slowly and concentrating, without his shell growing any bigger. He loves bean flowers, and we love watching him munch.

Farmer Blundell comes striding over to our cottage looking furious. ‘Have your children been ruining my crop, Mrs Waller?’

We hide. Mummy says, ‘I don’t think my children are capable of doing anything so outrageous’.

After Farmer Blundell has safely left, we creep slowly out from the coal shed.

Mummy sees us creeping. ‘Did you pick the bean flowers?’ she asks.

‘No,’ I lie, turning red.

‘I think you’re a big fibber, Jane.’

But it’s not fair; Mummy’s always calling me a fibber … but she’s a fibber, too. Edmund says the Doctor told her she wasn’t to have any more children after Geoffrey, as he was so difficult coming along, so she promised she wouldn’t ... but she lied ... because she went and got baby Vanessa.

Daddy says, ‘I only had to look at her and she was pregnant.’ What does he mean? Is Vanessa his fault?

Grandpa is called Horace, after our Tortoise. Grandpa Horace is Daddy’s Daddy. His leg is a  wooden one, and he can twirl a sixpence out of my hair as if it had been in there all the time. Or Lynda might suddenly find a threepenny bit inside her left-hand pocket.

Grandpa has silver hair and his silver beard comes to a point, and his eyes are bright bright blue. We love it when he walks all the way from ‘Gypsy Corner’, his thatched cottage where he lives with Granny. We run to the top of the right-of-way to wait. When he arrives, we line up behind him, and copy him going with his wooden leg all the way down - only our walking sticks are hazel twigs, and we sing: ‘a grand-pop, a grand-pop.’ He never minds. He always brings a sixpence for girls; a beetle in a matchbox for boys.

Daddy says to Edmund, ‘If Horace hadn’t got his wooden leg he would’ve died at the Front in the First World War. And he didn’t catch flu either in the great Flu Epidemic, because he was immune. Most people think he lost his leg fighting in the War – but he didn’t. This is how it happened:

One day, when Horace was ploughing a field, the Hunt went past. His horse got so excited, it rushed off to join the other horses. It pulled Horace right through the thick hedge. Horace’s leg got caught up and badly mangled. He managed to get home by crawling along in agony. His parents were so stingy they wouldn’t call a doctor. You had to pay for the Doctor in those days ... so they just told him to go up to bed. By the time they decided they’d better call the doctor after all, the leg had turned green and had to be chopped off. Horace managed to survive, and learned to deal with a wooden leg. He can ride a bike, and he likes to walk all the way to see us. Once, his wooden leg got wood-worm, so he injected it with ‘Rentokil.’

‘Did the worms creep into his leg while he was asleep?’ I ask.

‘Is Grandpa an Antique?’ Lynda asks, ‘because when there’s wood-worm in our Antiques, Mummy paints them with Rentokil to make them go away.’

‘I expect he’s antique,’ Daddy laughs.

‘Grandpa Horace is as old as Horace the Tortoise,’ says Geoffrey. ‘Tortoises can live for hundreds and hundreds of years you know.’

‘Sometimes Grandpa offers to dig the kitchen garden for Mother – even though it’s heavy clay.’

‘How can he do that?’ Edmund asks.

‘Well, his arms are as strong as an ox and he lifts the spade high in the air and hurls it down into the ground right up to the spade’s hilt. Of course Mummy has to dig it all again anyway because each clod is far too large’.

A Dutch girl, called Willie, comes along to help Mummy look after us. ‘The Government says we should try to have one, as they’re reduced to eating rats.’ She explains. We think this is far worse than eating headless mice. When Willie arrives, she is very thin. She looks at our thick slices of white bread in amazement:  ‘Dat is such luxury’, she says. We watch her carefully eating it. Her hands are shaking. She is very pleased to be with us.

Mummy says we all have knobbly knees and far too thin. Daddy doesn’t have knobbly knees because Mummy says he’s grown out of them. Mummy is different – she’s the shape of our ‘Icing Glass Barrel’.

Our ‘Icing Glass Barrel’ lives in the thatched garage next to Dad’s sleeping car ... ‘Can’t touch it yet. Out of commission until Petrol Rationing Stops,’ he says. The Barrel is filled with a magical liquid. Mummy says, ‘if we have any extra eggs during Summer, the icing glass preserves them to use in Winter when the hens don’t lay.’

Lynda trod on a rusty nail today, which nailed itself right through her foot. She was doing balancing along the plank over the pond in the field, to get to the moorhen’s nest. ‘ You must only take one egg, then moorhen will lay another,’ Daddy says.  Lynda goes to have an injection ... and she was only trying to help get food. She’s the thinnest because Mummy says she’s got something called ‘Rickets’. Lynda arrived only one year and 9 months after you, Janie, so you took all her milk.’

Lynda thinks it’s my fault she’s got Rickets. I think it is the tiny people who must’ve stolen her milk. I don’t remember stealing any. We all have the same amount on our cornflakes

Granny Batt has died. She is Mummy’s Mummy, but we didn’t really know her. Daddy says, ‘Your Granny Batt was so beautiful, that she was thrown a rose by King Edward V11.’

Mummy sighs and says, ‘And my Mother always favoured her boys above her girls. Me, your Aunt Anne and Wendy weren’t of much interest to her ... ‘but she’s kindly left £700 for each of you children, which is wonderful, really, and will help keep us going for ages.’

It’s August now, and we see a big white sheep, absolutely dead and not moving at all in the middle of the field near the Nut-wood.  But it isn’t a big sheep ... it’s the most gigantically big puffball you’ve ever seen. We all joggle it and joggle it until it creaks off its stalk. Then we pick it up and carry it back to Mummy. She’ll be really pleased at this huge food we’d found. But our puffball suddenly gets very hot when it’s brought into the kitchen where she’s making lunch. And ... BOOM! It explodes. Its million trillion spores stick on everything; covering the ceiling like bits of cotton wool; onto the cupboards like flour; onto the food Mummy’s cooking like icing-sugar –  even stuck onto her eyebrows to make her into a snowman. She’s terribly angry. Sometimes it’s not easy finding the right things to eat.

‘The great Year of the Mushrooms was our Wartime Miracle,’ Mummy tells us ... once she’d finished her shock. ‘One day we woke to find a strange white light filtering through the windows. It wasn’t an alien invasion – though it was an invasion of sorts. Out of the windows, the fields around the cottage were white with mushrooms. So white, you could hardly see between them. There were far too many for us. So we picked sackfulls and gave them away to everyone around. We had them strung up over the fireplace to dry; made pickles, made chutney ... eventually we got sick of them.’ 

August is also when Vanessa is 1. But there’s a big thunderstorm moving towards us over the Green Hill far away. Edmund runs up to warn us - ‘Quick! The Hefferlump is coming – the one who lives in the hollow on the hill–top ... and he might come down to get you’. We all shriek and hide under the dinner table until he’s stopped roaring. When we come out again, there’s a Birthday Cake on top for Vanessa’s tea, and she can try to blow out her candle and make a wish.

Daddy is making us our own special little house underneath the staircase in the living room.

He sings a very funny song while he builds it:

We don’t want to fight

But they say we’ve got to go,

To add a little glamour

To the Lord Mayer’s show.

You squeeze through the door and sit on our little chairs around the round table. We have a tea-party and drink tea from our dolls’ china set. And if you keep very quiet, you can hear exactly what’s going on when everybody’s forgotten you are there. So after Mrs Groombridge-Harvey has finished visiting Mummy, we hold our own secret tea-party. Lynda and I do ‘polite conversations’ to one another:

‘ ... Yes, and there were so many people there, It’s wonderful, really.’

‘Indeed, there were. It’s wonderful, really.’

‘ And of course they always do, you know. It’s wonderful, really.’

‘Yes, it’s such a tragedy she died. It’s wonderful, really.’

Then we lift our little cups and drink pretend tea.

We’ve got one big toy each. Mine’s called Dolly. Daddy gave me something for her as my Christmas Present: ‘There, Janie, I’ve made you a little cradle out of a basket, and carved wooden rockers to go underneath so you can rock her to sleep. And Mummy’s covered it with some of her white spotted muslin and blue ribbons and made a mattress for it as her present to you.’

Edmund says ‘I’m too old for toys’ - but he’s still got Mummy’s old teddy-bear. His best thing is a lovely wooden plane called ‘Spitfire’, carved by Daddy during the War. It’s hanging from his bedroom ceiling.

Geoffrey has his stuffed ‘Corduroy Pig’, which is floppy. It has two arms and two legs. Everybody knows that’s wrong for a pig - but Geoffrey won’t let anyone else play with it – it’s HIS. But his favourite thing, really, is banging lots of nails into a great block of wood with Daddy’s hammer - until it looks just like a hedgehog.

Lynda’s doll, ‘Muriel’ has gone and died. It was all her fault. She went and left her out in the green field. A cow stepped on her face and broke it all up during the night time.

Mummy is sad. ‘Muriel used to be my own doll. She was a special one with a china face.’

Daddy says:  ‘my only toy was my matchbox-sized Mouse Box.  If you opened it on one side, a mouse came out. If you opened it the other side, a different mouse came out. A small boy today would have broken the box impatiently to see how it worked. I never thought of doing that; I suppose I didn’t want to break the magic.’

All our very tiny toys have suddenly disappeared. We can’t find them anywhere. Geoffrey’s little plastic plane has gone, my tiny plastic ballet-dancer has gone; Lynda’s baby horse; Edmund’s lead soldiers -  even the fairy off the top of the Christmas Tree who sits on top of the bathroom cupboard is missing.

‘I don’t know where they’ve gone,’ Mummy says. ‘Someone must have taken them.’

As they are so small ... I think I know who might’ve stolen them ... but I’m keeping quite quiet. However, a real reason soon comes:

Daddy is talking seriously to Mummy: ‘Business for an Architect is almost non-existent. There’s no work whatsoever. It’s a worrying situation. I thought things would pick up once the War was over, but they’re even worse.’ So instead of going to his Office, Daddy finishes building his two gate-posts at the bottom of the right-of-way. He hums as he fills up the spaces between the bricks with cement:

‘What’s the sense sitting on the fence

All by yourself in the moonlight.

What’s the thrill by the water mill,

Giving yourself a hug; giving yourself a thrill.

Loves a farce sitting on the grass

All by yourself in the moonlight.’

The next day, the sun is shining and the two pillars are finished. Daddy takes Lynda and me by our hands and leads us to the right hand one. ’Put your eye up close,’ he says. ‘Look through the glass spy-hole.’

And there, magically inside the pillar, are all our tiny toys, captured in their own palace, mysteriously lit from above – My little pink dancer is dancing tiptoe in the middle of a glass lake - which is really a mirror all sparkly white. There’s Lynda’s small horse she’s been searching for, trotting round and round the outside of the mirror. Vanessa’s plastic baby sits on a piece of cloth, watching. And the Christmas fairy hangs cleverly in the air above them.

‘How did you do that?’ Lynda asks. ’

‘It’s a secret,’ Daddy replies.

Then he calls for the boys to look into the left hand pillar. Suddenly, Edmund sees all his lead soldiers, standing to attention next to some of his painted green loofah trees. Geoffrey’s tiny plastic plane hangs suspended in the air above. Little Geoffrey needs to be lifted up to discover where his lorry went. There’s his shell, too, from the sea-side, and his ‘Florescent Fish’. Edmund thinks Daddy might have used mirrors to make the light come down from the top of the pillar, but we’re not tall enough to check. All our smallest toys have been turned into treasure, coming from everywhere in the cottage to live in a new world. We love our Gate-Post Theatres, and whenever we miss playing with them, all we have to do is look through the spy-hole.  On cloudy days you cannot see them; that is when they are resting.

I hope all our toys will not mind being captured in there forever. I wonder if the tiny people will be able to go in there and play with them? I hope they can.

One night later, when Lynda and I are asleep in our bedroom, a ghost begins snoring down the chimney in great gasps. The ghost is dying in his sleep. His voice rattles and echoes.

‘Now we’ll be haunted to death’, Lynda says.

We’re so scared that we’re curled up tightly like hedgehogs shivering under our sheets.

‘There are no such things as ghosts’, Mummy says the next morning ... and you mustn’t be afraid of the dark, because it’s the same as the daytime - only with the lights switched off. We can’t give you a night-light; it’s just too dangerous in a thatched cottage – and we certainly can’t afford to leave lights on all night.’

But we make Daddy climb right up his thatching ladder to look inside the chimney for the ghost because we shan’t be haunted, and won’t go to sleep ever again, until the ghost goes away. Daddy shines a torch down, then shouts, ‘It’s only a nest of baby barn owls. It’s the baby ones snoring making the strange noise’.

Mummy makes everything better again with an ‘Owl-Story’ of her own:

‘Once, when I was little, I saw a Mother owl with her 3 small owlets sitting on the signal on our railway line. Then the signal suddenly went down because a train was coming, and they all fell off – Plop! Plop! Plop! Plop!’

      

Jane’s grandmother, Mabel Alice Ridley, on the day of her wedding to Edward Albert Batt at Saint Peter’s Eaton Square in 1901.