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  The agricultural depression that dragged on from the 1870s to the 1890s bit deeply in south-west Berkshire, and the landscape grew greener as grass replaced tillage. Newbury and Hungerford swelled with desperate workers, farms were left untenanted and so many thousands of acres were switched to dairy pasture that the Great Western Railway was known as the Milky Way. But the Cherrys had plenty of capital. The limitless self-confidence, the moral seriousness, the social vigour: both George Henry and George Charles basked all their lives in the glow of paternalistic Toryism.

  When General Cherry moved his family to Berkshire more than seventy people lived on the Denford estate, either working for the Cherrys or subsisting as labourers or small tenant farmers. While the estate was not exactly prospering, the Cherrys were comfortable, and the General had inherited much goodwill in the county. As for Laddie, he toddled fearlessly around the new house pursued by his nurse, pausing to help the cook shell peas or play with his wooden soldiers in the spacious drawing room while Father rustled his newspaper. Occasionally the General received top-hatted visitors from Newbury or London and Laddie was permitted to remain downstairs while Lassie was corralled in the day nursery. The women of the house were almost permanently taken up with babies, and father and son formed a unit of manly isolation. They were often together. The General was a keen trainspotter, and if a new engine was running in the valley or a branch line had been opened, he would take Laddie off in the carriage to have a look. The two Apsleys made a fine sight, one a rotund old soldier pushing sixty with a curling moustache and a thick suit that smelt of cigar smoke, the other a small boy with long hair and a sailor suit.

  The General told stories of his Indian and African adventures which thrilled the small boy, especially if they involved one of the exotic souvenirs brought back from those far-off lands. In the upstairs hall at Denford there was a pair of Zulu shields, and Laddie liked to sweep the day nursery with the yak-tail brush stowed in the military chest with the striped cover.

  The Denford Cherrys kept in touch with more distant branches of the family, and if news came in that a relation had died, or married, or produced offspring, the fact was recorded in the pages of the family bible. Well-known stories of especially colourful ancestors were aired. And yet, or perhaps because of all this, the grown-up Laddie took no interest in his dead relations, and little more in those who were still alive. He was proud of his distinguished ancestry, but not a man of genealogical piety. His was a theoretical appreciation. In the course of his long life he broke with many traditions, sold the seat and wilfully elected to let the name die.

  The arrival of more girls – Elsie in September 1889, and Mildred in May 1891 – meant that Evelyn was permanently preoccupied. When the General was absent, Laddie spent much of his time with the servants. He had his baths by firelight in tepid water ferried in cans by the young nurserymaid, and went to sleep to the small sound of coal falling in the night nursery grate or the orchestrated plumbing in the bathroom. As he grew more independent, the estate gamekeepers and woodmen became his companions. His earliest memories were of the shallows of the spring in Goose Acre Coppice and the cushiony moss of Flaggy Mead. His life followed the rhythm of the seasons, from the millpond freeze to the eruption of the daffodils in the park. He was given rides in the gardener’s handcart, and later he was sometimes allowed to play with the estate workers’ children, many of whom were baptised in the Denford chapel like the young master.

  Evelyn and the General socialised at the local big houses, occasionally even venturing over the border to Hampshire to Lord Carnarvon at Highclere Castle. In the summer of 1891, the year Mildred was born and Laddie turned five, their parents went away to Weymouth. Laddie inscribed the alphabet to send to his mother, with only two reversed letters, and on a separate sheet he wrote: ‘LADDIES BEST LOVE BABYS LOVE’. The following year, in November, Evelyn was away again, and once more Laddie showed himself to be a committed correspondent. ‘DEAR MAMAR,’ he wrote, between lines which his nurse had drawn on the page, ‘WE HAVE HAD A VERY WET NIGHT BUT NOW THE SUN AS COME OUT AND WE HAD A NICE WALH WALK WITH LOVE AND KISSES FROM LADDIE.’

  The estate was his empire. He was not a natural explorer, and did not dream of discovering great lakes or charting polar wastes, even as an older boy. Instead, he was happy keeping tadpoles and minnows, and picking catkined hazels and primroses. He was shy, and rather an introvert. Laddie did not whack other children unless most severely provoked, nor did he bully his expanding troupe of sisters – at least, no more than any little boy might. Nature was his refuge, and a love of the world he observed in the fields and skies around him stayed with him for the rest of his life.

  When the vicar of Hungerford could manage it, the whole family and all the servants, indoor and outdoor, went to a service at Holy Trinity, that sublime piece of Victorian Gothic built by Laddie’s grandfather among the beech trees. Constructed from local bricks faced with Bath stone, it seated sixty and featured a bell tower of the elaborately pinnacled variety. Laddie was keen on the pigeons that roosted there, and sometimes, on weekdays, he played on the red tiles with Lassie and his nurse. His paternal grandparents were entombed in the west end, as well as an aunt, and his uncle George Charles. Their chiselled names were not yet worn smooth.

  It was a happy time for them all. E. M. Forster, born seven years before Laddie, described his own youth in a phrase that sums up the background against which the General brought up his young family: ‘I belong to the fag-end of Victorian liberalism,’3 wrote Forster, ‘and can look back to an age whose challenges were moderate in their tone, and the cloud on whose horizon was no bigger than a man’s hand.’

  In the summer of 1892 a message arrived from Hertfordshire announcing the death of Honora Drake Garrard, the General’s aunt. She was the 78-year-old widow of his mother’s brother Charles Benet Drake Garrard, and the General had been her sole heir since his own brother had died. The Cherrys were thrown not so much into mourning (they barely knew Aunt Honora) as confusion: they now owned another fortune and another estate, fifteen times bigger than Denford.

  Lamer was only about sixty miles from Denford, but their surroundings were quite different. Thirty-odd miles north of London, Hertfordshire was altogether more benign than Berkshire: it was a gently undulating, loamy expanse of forest and meadow bisected by the River Lea and several great Roman roads. The rise of the railways had brought agricultural prosperity to the region, as the capital was always hungry.

  The Cherrys’ new acquisition was on the edge of Wheathampstead, a village in the Lea Valley in the heart of the county and only forty-five minutes by train from London. The estate covered about twenty square miles and included numerous farms and cottages, half a dozen Elizabethan manor houses and a park and mansion. Garrards had been there for almost 300 years. They came from Kent, and had migrated to London to make their fortune at the end of the fifteenth century. The founder of the modern family and its considerable wealth was Sir William Garrard of Dorney in Buckinghamshire. He was the son of a grocer, and made his money as a haberdasher. By 1555 he had reached the lofty position of Lord Mayor of London. Two other Garrards went on to occupy the position, and a baronetcy was created by James I. When the Tory MP Sir Benet Garrard died without issue in 1767 the baronetcy expired with him, and Lamer was inherited by his distant cousin Charles Drake of Shardeloes, Buckinghamshire. Drake took the name Garrard in addition to his own. His daughter Charlotte married George Henry Cherry, who bought Denford. When Charles’s son died without issue, he left his estate to his wife Honora.

  The General had not just inherited Lamer Park and its estate. There were Garrard lands in other counties, and the family owned a large house in Watling Street in the City of London which was leased to a firm of cotton traders. The Cherrys had certainly gone up a rung: Charles Benet Drake Garrard’s estate was valued at £130,750 gross (well over £6 million in today’s terms). There was only one condition attached to their good fortune: under the terms of his uncle’s will the Ge
neral had to assume the name and arms of Garrard. The Drake was abandoned, and, by Royal Licence dated 30 September 1892, the name Cherry-Garrard came into existence.

  2

  Lamer

  Shortly after four o’clock one afternoon in the autumn of 1892, the General, Evelyn and their four small children climbed into a waiting carriage and ascended smartly from Wheathampstead station, trundling past the dog rose and bryony in the hedges, the restharrow on the banks and the furzy brakes on the heath. The horses clopped up the drive to the blocky stone portico of the Lamer mansion. The stuccoed brick of the eighteenth-century house was veined with creepers and gilded in the sunlight, a model of restrained neo-classical elegance. Between the pairs of columns at the entrance, a row of starched servants stood to welcome their new master.

  Juggling four small children and two large estates, the General and Evelyn had reluctantly opted to lease Denford and move up to Hertfordshire. Lamer Park needed more looking after, and it was nearer Evelyn’s family. But the move was a wrench. As for changing their name: it was an offence to the strong proprietorial sense of a five- and six-year-old, and Laddie and Lassie bitterly resented being Cherry-Garrards.

  A Lamer manor had existed since at least the fourteenth century and probably much earlier, and the odd medieval arch had survived. The origins of the name (pronounced to rhyme with ‘hammer’) were obscure: it may have come from a De La Mare family who held land in the area in the late Middle Ages. The mansion was one of a band of great houses that circled the capital like a ring road: when the first Sir John Garrard decided to live there early in the seventeeth century a gentleman could get to London easily enough – in a day, if he had a good horse. Sir John and his sons and grandsons rebuilt, extended and adorned, but the house the General inherited was an eighteenth-century creation of chaste simplicity, constructed mostly by Sir Benet in the golden age of the country seat. It stood on high ground, and the Garrards and their landscape gardeners – notably the fashionable Humphry Repton in the 1790s – had created a well-stocked park that rolled away from the front windows of the house, the ground sloping upwards slightly in front of the pillared façade. Framing the mansion at the back, stands of mature cedars were threaded with oak. An avenue of lime trees led off in the direction of Ayot St Lawrence, and in front of the library window a manicured path known as the Chain Walk was festooned with immaculate flower beds. The memoir of a mid-nineteenth-century Ayot neighbour noted that, ‘the balcony opening out of the saloon on the first floor spoke of syllabubs and shady hats and haymaking’.

  Even to children used to Denford, the house was as big as a castle. Immediately inside the front door, the hall gave onto the drawing room on the left and the dining room on the right; they in turn led to the bow-fronted library and the kitchen wing. At the rear of the hall, beyond the staircase, two flanks extended out to the laundry and the old chapel, which now housed the dairy, and from there to the larder, game larder, butchery, brew-house and lamp-room. A warren of rooms at the back and in the attics were occupied by the servants: the housekeeper, a laundress who starched, goffered and ironed, the lady’s maid, the cook and kitchen staff, housemaids, footmen, bootboys, hall boys and a newly engaged nurse and nursery maid. Welbourne, the butler, was quartered next to the pantry in a small room where the silver was stored. He slept with a pistol under his pillow. In the upstairs nursery wing the governess, Mrs Bright, presided over the schoolroom, where three cases of stuffed animal heads fought for attention among a profusion of solid mahogany furniture that exemplified the spirit of the age. The outside servants were led by head gardener Claude Tilbury, whose empire extended to hothouses that produced peaches and muscatel grapes. The lawns were kept short with a horse-drawn mower, the horse wearing special leather boots so his hooves would not spoil the surface.

  To a small boy with a lively imagination and a taste for snails and solitude, the estate was paradise. Laddie tried to catch fish in the old pond in the walled garden. He and Lassie persuaded their mother and Tilbury to hang a swing from the drooping branch of an oak, stole raspberries from the kitchen garden and picked mint and kingcups on the banks of the streams. They followed the gardeners to the potting shed and built forts from winnowing fans, cane-bottom sieves and wooden rat-traps. A few months after moving to Lamer, the seven-year-old Laddie wrote to his mother, who was visiting her family in Bedford.

  Dearest Mother,

  The hounds came here this morning, and found [a fox] in Lamer Wood, and Lassie came with me and we followed them through Lamer Wood, over those fields to the outskirts of Hall’s Wood by the Baxendales and I think they went the Kimpton way. We met Tilbury, Weakly with his gun and Clark on the mare I think it was by Hall’s Wood – Lassie & I came home by Gustard Wood Common and got home in good time for Dinner.

  Mrs Bright and I am going down to Wheathampstead today. Mrs Bright wants to get some PO [postal orders] at the Post Office. The others are not going out today again but are going to have their heads washed.

  As an afterthought, and perhaps with encouragement, at the top of the first sheet he wrote, ‘Mrs Bright is a very good girl.’

  When the pond by the stables froze, Laddie and Lassie learned to skate by pushing chairs on the ice, and when the skating was over Tilbury and his henchmen cut blocks from the pond to store in the ice house. Later in the winter nurse made blackberry syrup for their coughs, and if the children didn’t get better Dr Smallwood came and listened to their chests with his horn. In the summer they played croquet on the lawn, but Laddie was too short-sighted to win. He couldn’t see as well as any of the girls, but the General thought he might grow out of it, not liking the idea of an imperfect son.

  Honora and Charles Drake Garrard had presided over Victorian Wheathampstead like minor monarchs. Honora, who looked like the aged Queen Victoria, had been known as ‘Lady’ to the tenants and villagers. Towards the end she had been pushed about in a wicker wheelchair by a footman, and little girls were obliged to curtsey if they saw her. Most of the estate cottages still had a framed picture of her on the wall. The Cherry-Garrards quickly assumed their predecessors’ dignified mantle. The General had no trouble adapting to his seigneurial role. Each day fresh table linen was required in the Lamer dining room, and to make sure that no mistake was made, after dinner he would dip his fingers into a fingerbowl and draw them across the cloth. By this time he was a stocky, imposing figure: the handlebar moustache had whitened and the crinkly hair slightly receded, emphasising his strong forehead. In Hertfordshire he served as a magistrate, just as he had in Berkshire. As a justice of the peace, he sat on the Bench, though when the local police constable hustled a poacher to the house he was required to administer a more ad hoc kind of justice: a possible confrontation with the General was a potent deterrent to a man with poaching on his mind. But he was a well-loved social figurehead. ‘We knew him best,’ the local vicar said many years later, ‘as the kind country gentleman, always ready to help forward and support good works in our parish and elsewhere.’

  Evelyn inherited the unofficial title of Lady and its responsibilities: quite a shift for a doctor’s daughter. When she went shopping in St Albans, five miles away, shopkeepers ran out with trays of buttons and ribbons as her carriage approached so she need never descend. She visited the poorest cottagers, as she had done at Denford, often accompanied by a daughter or two, and if a tenant’s child was ill Evelyn would appear at the door with a milk pudding.

  It was always said that the architect Robert Adam had been employed at Lamer, at least in the design of the dining room and library; Laddie certainly grew up to believe it. (Sir Benet may have used him when he remodelled the house in the 1760s.) The reception rooms had marble fireplaces, carved chimney-pieces and superbly detailed cornices. They were extravagantly furnished with typical late-Victorian intensity: the drawing room heaved with rosewood and tortoiseshell cabinets, inlaid satinwood tabletops, lacquer writing desks and forests of Dresden and Derby china. A pair of great flute-legged console
tables under dim Vauxhall looking-glasses were spread with ivory penknives, silver trowels and china baskets encrusted with flowers. Ancestral portraits were hung all over the house, though they congregated especially in the entrance hall, where dark, full-length Garrards were now obliged to jostle for wall space with Cherrys transported from Denford. Evelyn and the General grew accustomed to taking breakfast under seventeenth-century mayors in extravagant ruffs.

  Behind the house, the General kept his eight horses in the eighteenth-century, cupolaed stable block. Nothing was too good for the Lamer horses. Henry Hobbs, the Denford coachman, had moved up to Hertfordshire to look after them, and he lived in a specially converted part of the stables with his young family. When out with the Master, Hobbs and the grooms wore a livery of cockaded top hat, beige breeches and prune coat complete with silver buttons embossed with the Cherry lion and Garrard leopard. Hobbs taught all the children to ride. The girls had to go side-saddle, and the General made them practise until they could sit ramrod straight, but when he was away they piled into the governess’s cart to be towed by the Lamer donkey.