Theft in Lord Darnley's Woods

For us Cobham Woods was never a place for quiet meanderings on Spring evenings such as those described in volumes with titles like `Kent Walks’ or in information leaflets for ramblers but always a special destination, much planned for in advance. There had to be a certain amount of pre-planning because a kettle had to be packed together with the oldest and most chipped cups, leaf tea, sugar, milk, sandwiches and biscuits and of course matches for igniting the camp fire. It had to be leaf tea because this was a time before even the most rudimentary tea bags. Sometimes if Molly was to come with us the cups would include the one that was kept at the back of the shelf for the aunt on my father’s side who my mother said looked consumptive. The milk was never fresh but usually what was left in a can of sweetened condensed. As for the sandwiches, my mother was very fond of cheese with Branston’s pickle or even Daddy’s sauce when the pickle was running low. The biscuits were usually of the broken variety that I was regularly sent to Penney, Son & Parker on The Hill to buy on Friday afternoons because either the Trokes of Shepherd Street did not stock them or Peggy and Vic were not to know that broken was always our first option. I didn’t mind too much because biscuits of any kind were a treat as far as I was concerned.

Occasionally the picnics took place more spontaneously as a weekend family outing but in Springtime they were prearranged as more strategic exercises specifically for the purposes of stealing Lord Darnley’s primroses. I doubt that Lord Darnley himself was aware of the thefts or if he was he chose to ignore the fact and to be fair at the time I did not really understand that what we were doing amounted to theft. That’s what happens when you grow up in a family where shoplifting was not discouraged and minor embezzlement and pilfering was accepted as the norm as long as you were not silly enough to get caught.

Garden Centres as we now know them did not seem to exist back then, or at least not for people like us. Vegetables and flowers were things you grew from seeds in little packets with colourful pictures on the front so that even if you were unsure of the word carrot or cabbage you knew what it was you were likely to end up with. You could buy them at the back of Rayner’s in Northfleet High Street and sometimes even in Woolworths. Some people, more mysteriously, produced the plants they desired from cuttings donated or perhaps filched from the gardens of neighbours known for having Green Fingers. In any case it is unlikely that my mother would have easily sanctioned the idea of spending money on something as frivolous as flowers when they existed in abundance in nearby farmer’s fields and gardens, on roadsides and of course in even further diversity in Lord Darnley’s woods. Old Mrs Bassant from next door whose cousin had once been in service at The Hall said that The Darnleys had taken less and less interest in the entire estate over the years which was understandable since the place had been overrun with evacuees and RAF officers from the Battle of Britain squadron for years and they must be sick to death of not being able to call their home their own any more. Even the family mausoleum had fallen into disrepair and deer and cattle were to be seen grazing around it because they had ceased to care enough about it.

The mausoleum was always the first place we visited, entering the strangely foreign looking construction in silence, breathing softly and hardly daring to allow our shoes to reverberate, as if we were in church. When my father explained in a low voice that we must show respect because this was the final resting place of the Darnley dead I could feel my heart pounding in my chest so loudly that I was fearful that the souls of the dead might also hear it and leap out of their stone alcoves to remonstrate with me. Later, gathering kindling for the fire with my mother, she would tell me of the local man who had for a wager elected to be locked in the place overnight. He had entered with a shock of black hair which by morning had turned completely white and he could never be persuaded to speak of his experience. Even then this story sounded slightly implausible to me but nevertheless I repeated it to Molly from number thirty one at the first opportunity knowing that she could be relied upon to be interested albeit disbelieving.

We always attended to the serious business of the picnic before tackling the unearthing of primroses and the best part of that was the lighting of the fire and keeping my brother away from it because it was dangerous and he was too young to understand the dreadful consequences of being burned. My mother’s own recollection of being left in charge of younger siblings in Maxim Road, Crayford in 1917 on the occasion of a fire breaking out was all too vivid and although she never quite revealed all the pertinent details as to how it happened and what the actual damage to life and limb had been, the trauma of the event was still evident on each occasion the possible dangers of fire were spoken of.

It wasn’t too difficult to keep Bernard away from the flames because even before he could walk he was much more entranced by the antics of the woodland birdlife and on each visit over several years his attention was completely captivated by them. As he grew older and the picnics ceased upon the death of my father he frequently ruminated over the memory and maintained that he clearly recalled that his first sightings of quite uncommon avian types was in the woods at Cobham, birds that included the Hawfinch, Willow Tit, the Spring migrant, the Nightingale and on one occasion even a Goshawk. But the most exciting of all had been what he years later recognized to be the Night Jar, the master of disguise, a bird with an almost supernatural reputation said to be able to feed from milk stolen from unwary goats. There were limited numbers of goats in the area and to be completely honest the only one I had ever seen was in a library book called `Farm Life for City Children’ which didn’t even mention stolen milk but my brother’s recollections in later years were vibrant if not exaggerated. At the time, while he was so occupied, sometimes not even demanding to be released from the confines of his push chair, the kettle was placed on the flames to boil and the cheese and pickle sandwiches were unwrapped and set out upon the verdant grassy area within view of the mausoleum. Mrs Bassant had told us that when The Hall was first built a landscape designer, a Mr Repton, had been hired at enormous cost to ensure that the family should have an undisturbed and sweeping view of their resting dead as they sat in the drawing room sipping gin and tonics. At the time of our picnics the undergrowth of decades ensured that view had completely vanished.

The initial campaign for stolen plants had emerged shortly after my father arrived home from his six-to-two shift one afternoon uncharacteristically late with squares of turf in the sidecar of the motor bike, carefully protected by newspaper but all the same causing my mother some annoyance. There was shortly to be a lawn installed adjacent to the old Anderson Shelter. A place for her to sit in the afternoon sun and perhaps read a newspaper he told her persuasively but she remained what she described as `none too keen’. For me it was an exciting development because people in books had gardens, albeit rather more elaborate than our own was going to be. I knew ours would of necessity be modest but a proper garden all the same and a garden promised endless possibilities. To my father, carefully laying the intriguing squares of turf in the small space between our outdoor lavatory and the now largely disused shelter, it first and foremost meant a border of flowers and where better to start than with Lord Darnley’s primroses? Old Mr Bassant commented that a border of carrots and cabbages would have been equally pleasing to him and that might well have been so because his eyes were known to light up at the thought and sight of vegetables. But as my mother morosely pointed out, we were currently dead set on flowers and my Aunt Mag, not known for love of growing things herself, commiserated and said that she blamed these ideas on the aftermath of the war and in time he might well go off the idea but of course he didn’t. In fact that very next weekend found us engaging in our first foray of woodland robbery. Later my brother claimed he remembered it as the day he first saw the Hawfinch which was far more exciting than the squabbling sparrows and starlings in York Road, though again he may have been exaggerating.

Although at times I pretended to be half-hearted I was never completely disinterested in trips to the woods because entering a space where mature trees dominated was invariably energizing and the reason for being there did not seem to matter very much. Oak, Beech, Hornbeam and Sweet Chestnut could be relied upon to provide a canopy beneath which in imagination, assignations could take place and secrets might be divulged. Woods were places where Enid Blyton’s characters habitually came face to face with dangerous criminals, explored long abandoned buildings, solved perplexing mysteries long before the local police force, and of course topped up their energy levels with cold tongue, ham sandwiches, jam tarts and lashings of ginger beer. Our own picnics were of course more humble but I was pleased that because the Five had access to the ginger beer I was so envious of, they missed out on the campfire necessary for kettle boiling.

Molly joined us when her mother said she could and was very keen to do so at Conker Time in late September or early October when the horse chestnuts lay in thick prickly carpets underfoot. Northfleet children were enthusiastic conker players back then and Alan Bardoe always said that to win a game you had to start with really hard conkers because they were the ones that would win. As they hardened with age he was in favour of keeping a selection of the biggest and best to use the following year. He called them Laggies because that’s what his father said they were and was known to soak them in vinegar and paint them with clear nail varnish which his opponents said was definitely cheating. His twin, Colin, said all that was nonsense in any case and the way to ensure a win was to make sure that a clean and round hole had been bored through in the first place. Both Molly and I were of the opinion, with no basis of fact to back it up, that the Cobham conkers were the best in Kent.

We would have been astounded had we been able to look ahead to the turn of the century when the game was to be banned in many schools for fear of unnecessary injuries and that particularly caring parents would provide their offspring with goggles as a precaution. The fact that some schools would choose to forbid conkers completely for fear of causing anaphylactic shock in students prone to nut allergies would have been a completely outlandish idea. In the late 1940s nut allergies were something that also belonged in the oddly fanciful country of the future together with Aspergers Syndrome and Attention Deficit Disorder.
For my father, intent upon establishing a garden oasis in our York Road back yard, the visits to the woods simply meant the acquisition of free flowers, and we appropriated them with enthusiasm during the months of March and April until the borders of our tiny green space was strident with various shades of yellow. My mother was, overall, more fond of the stately rows of rhododendrons that emerged in Spring and seemed to last for weeks into the summer, calling them Glorious. I disliked them for their lofty determination to be noticed and was glad when she seemed far too intimidated by their presence to carry blooms home with her. My favorite flower became the bluebell, growing alongside the primroses and delightfully easy to gather in armfuls for Molly and me as we pulled them from their beds with a savagery that ensured they would not re-emerge the following year.

Mrs Gunner, the vicar’s wife, observing our plundered spoils shook her head disapprovingly and told us that she was of the opinion that no good would come from stealing plant life from Lord Darnley’s woods because it was called Vandalism. She added that in years to come we would realise the damage we had done, the kind of harm in fact that would kill off the woodland completely if we were not careful. Then we were offended knowing that she should have better directed these observations towards the adult thieves but saying to each other that it was none of her business and in any case there was no good reason why we should pay any heed to what she said. Of course none of us were to know then that by the year 2001 funding would be provided for the local Council to purchase the woods together with the mausoleum on the understanding that ownership would eventually pass to the National Trust to ensure that the 600 acres of natural beauty would be preserved. The general idea of caring for the environment was again something that belonged to the strangely unpredictable future. My father would have been astonished to know that with the dawn of environmental concern a total of ninety five abandoned cars would be removed from the periphery of the woodland, the very space where we regularly left the motor bike and side car. Vehicular access therefore was to become severely restricted for the would-be primrose purloiners of the future.