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Our House in the Sky, we called it; our birthplace, our home, our
inspiration, our school and our playground. The Strines, a long low 14th
century farmhouse clinging to the wild open hillside on one of the
foothills of the Pennines on the Staffordshire-Derbyshire border; set in
half an acre of scrubby ground, half reedbeds, half grassy hummocks, with
a couple of tinkling streams, a large pond, and a stone track winding
round under the dilapidated outbuildings into the wide front yard. 6 bays
of crumbling stone with a blue slate roof, patchy whitewash, a motley
assortment of multicoloured doors and window frames, and the whole
surrounded by a sagging barbed wire fence to keep out the sheep and cows
grazing on the surrounding fields. When I look back, however long I have
been away from this place, and however far I may roam, I will always
remember it just like this, how it is now and how it has been are all the
same to me; strong colours and interesting scents and sounds, peeling
paint in purple, green and sky blue, rust on steel, oil, the whirring of
an angle grinder, blue and orange sparks flying through the garage door,
yellow dandelions in the stone flags of the back yard, and a splash of
purple foxgloves in the long grass.
I have three brothers, and a sister. I, Melandra, am the oldest, 28,
then comes Metia, 26, Felix, and after a long gap of nearly six years,
Fergus and Max, who are now 19 and 17. Our house is right in the middle of
Ministry of Defence land, all the fields around us, though full of
livestock still, are owned by the army, who used to train regularly across
them, much to our delight when we were children. The drive down to the
house from the main road is 2/3rds of a mile long; and part owned by the
Staffs Moorlands District Council, and therefore tarmacked; the rest is a
rough stone road. Away over to the left of the track is the Danger Area,
still full of live ammo from the last World War, when the Americans used
to practice here, and with a huge rusting Sherman tank lying abandoned
near the grenade pit. A dangerous place all sealed off with fences and
covered in warning signs with pictures of skulls on, but nevertheless
highly attractive to us, in spite of, and partly because of all this.
We live in the Dark Peak, between the gritstone crags of the Roaches,
Ramshaw Rocks and Hen Cloud, and the high sweeping moors of the Morridge.
Our parents bought The Strines in 1970, from a local family, the
Belfields, for a mere £2700. And here in this isolated spot, where the
traffic on the A53 is a distant murmur, and the only reminder of
civilisation are the blue and green roofs and spires of Leek market town
at the bottom of the valley, and the faint rumblings of jets heading
towards Manchester Airport, they decided to bring up their large family
outside the school system.
I was born in Macclesfield, Cheshire, on the 29th of August, 1973,
seven pounds three, with brown hair and a smile on my face, so they tell
me. A couple of days later Daddy came to fetch us in the Mini Moke, a kind
of canvas hooded jeepy mini sort of thing. Metia was born in Macc too, but
Felix and the other boys first saw daylight at the Cottage Hospital in
Leek, the little market town in the valley. And so much I have been told
by my parents, and the rest of my narrative is personal experience, albeit
sometimes somewhat shrouded by the mists of time, for when you have all
the time in the world, you lose all sense of days and weeks and months,
especially in childhood.
Our father is a Cambridge graduate, David Bethell MA Cantab; he gained
his degree in history with first class honours. Our mother was a graphic
designer in those days, and while our father was tapping away on his
electric typewriter, tracing their British roots for Americans, she would
be bent over the drawing board, creating some fascinating work of art all
in minute dots, with photos of gravestone carvings spread across the table
beside her.
Art played a large part in our education; as soon as we were old enough
to do more than just scribble, we were bought Jumbo Pads from WH Smiths in
Macclesfield, and huge packs of coloured felt pens. Mummy spent hours with
us, drawing mermaids and tabby cats and horses for us to copy.
It was great being brought up at home. People always ask the same
questions; and always pose the same objections. "But didn't you miss
all the company you'd have had at school?" "I wouldn't have the
time to bring my children up at home!" And the irritating, "But
what did you DO up there, with no TV?"
Well, our parents didn't have much time either. No time for watching TV
anyway. What with running a business from home as well, and looking after
a large house, they never had any spare time. But they still managed to
take us all round the country with them when Daddy was writing English
Ancestry, and they did also take us to Ireland on the plane when I was 15.
And company? We were never short of that. We had each other for a start!
Lessons were only held on rainy days. The rest of the time we were free
to do as we pleased, and even if they went on for weeks, we were never
schooled on Blue Sky Days. Daddy had the absolute authority to decide what
constituted a Blue Sky Day, of course, but he was always pretty lenient in
his judgement. We took lessons around the Round Table, fabled to be more
than 300 years old, and which had been passed down through our mother's
family. It is still standing on the blue and red quarry tiles by the
kitchen window, with a pot of fresh flowers and a clean orange cloth
hiding its many scars.
Lessons were fun. We did so many exciting things. I remember Latin
best; Daddy had made some word cards with pictures on. His pictures are
rather comical. And we learnt English, Maths, and every day our mother
taught us to read, from Tales of End Cottage, about Mrs Apple and her dogs
and cats. She would read us a chapter herself, and just when we were dying
to know what happened next, it was our turn. I think this was a great
method, as we were soon reading for ourselves. Daddy used to read to us at
night too, before Fergus and Max were born. We all climbed into the big
bed with our parents, Felix and Metia in the middle and me on the outside,
and he would read The Island of Adventure, and all the other stories in
the same series. It was all terribly exciting to us, and we sometimes
covered our ears when it got too much and the baddies were chasing the
children through underground caves. Good old Enid Blyton; she knew how to
tell a yarn!
Daddy wrote books for us too. I wish I knew what happened to them...
Mrs Orme stories. Mrs Orme was a wicked and cynical old woman, who broke
the law in every imaginable way, and had all kinds of rogue traders
ripping her off in turn. Her adventures were at once ludicrous and
frightening. We loved them. Sometimes Daddy would bring out a new book
after dinner. The stapled A4 sheets were full of his wild cartoons
illustrating the simple but highly entertaining story lines. If I were to
make comparisons I could only say that this was like some kind of a
crossover between Gary Larson and the Simpsons. Mrs Orme had frizzy
iron-grey hair and a habit of pinching shopping trolleys for her own
private use around the home. I shall have to look her out someday. There
is so much paper in this house...
The first time the Local Education Authority came to see us, I was
about five years old. It was a surprise to us. It seems that an
interfering health visitor who came to see Mummy shortly after Felix was
born noticed that I was not at school and alerted the authorities. There's
always someone, isn't there.
Three inspectors came to see us, two men and a woman called Miss
Stubbs. I remember her very clearly, although I was only five, because she
was so officious, loud, stupid, and refused to believe that I could read
The Borrowers without faltering, which book I was enjoying at the time.
"The child is reciting!" she cried, after I had read her a
page. Even after she had started me again at a random page in the book,
she couldn't believe it. She asked Metia, then three, to count to five.
Metia was angered at the tone, and the way she called her "Little
Girl!" She went right on to 100 without stopping. The men with Miss
Stubbs had to take her away and make peace with Daddy. She kept on saying,
"But these children must go to school." But these children
didn't, needless to say. We were assessed as being advanced beyond our
years with our studies, and the LEA left us alone, thereafter paying us a
friendly visit every year to offer help or support. We never saw Miss
Stubbs again.
When I was about seven, Daddy began to write a book; English Ancestry.
He had written two previously, published by Robert Hale, an English
publisher, Portrait of Chester, and Portrait of Cheshire, and had taken
all the photographs to illustrate the text himself. Now as he researched
the material for this new work, and as he was still doing family history,
he and my mother took me, Metia and Felix round the country to all kinds
of locations, sometimes staying only for a day, and sometimes stopping the
week.
Our favourite place was Chagford, and it is a shame that I cannot
remember more about it. The self-catering place we hired had many
interesting characteristics. There was a secret staircase, skulls hung
behind the big fireplace in the chimney, a huge rambling garden full of
dark places, and a shed full of green snails, which we tried to race. The
walk into the village was by a tinkling stream, and there was a
fascinating toyshop, where we bought a real swing, and a rope ladder.
Winter high on the moors was amazing. Amazing fun, and sometimes just a
little bit awesome too. Our house fits snugly against the hillside, but
not so snugly that there is not the space for the snow to do interesting
things when there is a blizzard. Behind the house we have a wide flagged
yard, and a small shed which we use to store the coal in, called the
Stirkbox. Sometimes when there had been a lot of snow and a high wind, a
huge drift would build up behind the house, which would increase in size
by the hour until it had dwarfed the Stirkbox completely, rising at times
to around twelve or fourteen feet high. I used to watch it through the
back door, until it was dark and all you could see in the faint glow cast
by the back yard light was the fine flakes spinning and whirling down from
the invisible crest of this enormous wave of snow. One winter we had so
much snow build up round the house that we woke up to find it level with
the bedroom windows. The kitchen was in a green gloom; Daddy pushed into
the porch to get a shovel, and he had to climb out of his bedroom window
and dig in to find the front door. We danced out to play with our plastic
spades through a ten foot trench, and with our parents and using a couple
of ladders, we made a snowman and a snow woman in the front yard, truly
giants, as high as the edge of the roof. They became unstable when it
thawed though, and first the snow woman tilted and leaned against her
husband, and then they both collapsed together, leaving a pair of snow
legs on the lawn, still standing about eight feet high!
When we grew a bit older our parents decided they should like to give
us the opportunity to learn a musical instrument, and one-day in
Macclesfield, to our great excitement, they bought Metia and me each a
classical guitar. They found a peripatetic guitar teacher advertising in
the Leek Post and Times, and arranged our first lesson for the following
Wednesday. We had no idea of this at the time, but this was the beginning
of a sequence of events that would alter the course of our whole life.
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