A greater adventure for the vicar came about on Maud suggesting that all five should go on a tour to the Continent. They would drive around Flanders and Northern France, and visit cathedrals. His bald pate turned pallid as she spread a map over the library table. ‘We’re in the Association, and they’ll take any trouble off our shoulders. We’ll get the magic triptych fixed up, so there’ll be nothing to pay on the motor at the customs.’
The French drive on the wrong side of the road. What about petrol? How would they find their way? Foreign maps weren’t the same as English. Then there was the problem of different money, apart from the fact, he concluded, knocking the ash from his pipe on the dogs in the fireplace, ‘that my French isn’t proficient.’
‘Well,’ Maud said, ‘my French is all right, if I shout it loud enough,’ and she convinced him on all issues, though without mentioning the attraction for her of there being no speed limit: gendarmes with stop-watches didn’t hide like sneaks at bends in the roads.
Extra tyres were strapped on the footboard, the locker topped up with spare parts and sparking plugs. A leather satchel bulged with maps and documents, a phrase book with Baedekers and Michelins in the glove box.
Maud and her sisters stood on the top deck, and sang most of the way across the Channel, while their father was silent with anxiety and scepticism. When the car was swung off the steamer in Boulogne he suggested putting up at the Hôtel du Pavilion Imperial et Bains de Mer for a couple of days so as to recover from the crossing, but Maud was adamant for driving out of town. ‘We must do at least a few miles today,’ and they passed the first night in the Hotel de France at St Omer.
‘Got to surround Blue Force by morning!’ her sisters let out in their shrill voices, while Maud paid off the porters for taking in the luggage.
After a minute examination of the church of Notre Dame they struck south for Amiens, so that the vicar could read his Ruskin in the cathedral. ‘You’re the captain of the ship,’ her happy father said a few days later, ‘so we’ll go to Beauvais and then to Reims,’ at which place she stood on the pavement to take off her dust coat and said to herself: ‘Not another blasted cathedral!’
After a round of the ecclesiastical gems of Belgium they were rewarded at the end of their three-week tour by a few days at Ostend. The girls drank coffee and ate ices in the cafés, and made fun of common tourists coming off the boat from Dover, while the vicar, between walks up and down the beach, sat in the hotel lounge collating his notes.
When war began in 1914 Maud put on coat and goggles, and drove to Norwich, giving a lift to half a dozen volunteer soldiers on the way. Her experience and mechanical skill left no alternative, she said, but to enrol in an ambulance unit, but she fumed and brooded when no one wanted her, or she was sent from place to place, and felt herself sinking into an impossibly complicated maze of offices and organizations.
In six months she was driving an ambulance in France. From dressing stations near the front line to base hospitals she transported her cargoes of pain and misery, and sometimes death, and wept inwardly at the awful tribulations of the wounded, and swore with the sulphurous colour of any trooper at whoever mishandled them in or out and made their plight worse. A staff officer wanted to marry her, but she believed in love at first sight, deciding it was better to live an old maid than fall prey to whoever had the same idea.
She refused work in the administration of the ambulance service because it would take her away from motors, in spite of the hardship and the miserable squalor of stoppages on broken rainswept roads. In October 1918, resting one morning between goes at the starting handle, she recognized Colonel Thurgarton-Strang. His horse drank at a village trough, and when he mounted, his dressage was perfect. ‘I’ve seen you before,’ she called, above the boom and crack of distant gunfire. ‘Yarmouth, when my father’s car broke down. Long time ago, now. Don’t suppose you recollect.’
He saluted and smiled. ‘Of course I remember. Always hoped I’d see you again.’
‘Well, now you have.’
‘I’m astounded and delighted.’
‘Got to surround Blue Force by morning!’
‘We most certainly will!’
They laughed together, then he led his battalion of mainly eighteen-year-olds towards the German rearguards, whose machine gunners could not prevail against his enthusiastic young, who knew nothing of muddy stalemates in the Salient or on the Somme.
They met on the Rhine six months later, and Maud realized his place in her heart since their first encounter. ‘You’ve hardly been out of my mind,’ she said. They strolled the balcony of the hotel at Bad Godesburg while the orchestra played the old familiar tunes in the dining room. Maud smoked a cigarette, and Hugh took her statement as flattery, thinking that you ought not to believe a woman when she said something good about you. ‘There’s nothing I’d like better than to believe you.’
She put a hand on his. ‘I never say anything I don’t mean. I wouldn’t know how.’
All he wanted was to be the husband of this delightful woman. ‘I’m quite sure’, he told her, ‘that I shall love you forever — if you’ll have me.’
They were married at St Mary’s-All-Alone by an ex-chaplain uncle of Maud’s, the ceremony as much a regimental as a Christian affair, with an arbour of glistening swords to walk under, and so many dress uniforms that to Maud the gathering seemed like a scene of peace after a rabid and pyrrhic war.
In India the Thurgarton-Strangs avoided the oven heat of the plains by renting a house in Simla, living in a style helped by Maud’s thousand a year on the death of her father. Hugh expected their first child to be a girl, given the family from which Maud had come. This would not have disappointed him, but the dark-haired ten-pound baby, sound in wind and limb, was a gift for both, and they were pleased that he was stoical enough to make no sound at the font when he was christened. Their happiness was so intense — undeserved and precarious, they sometimes felt — that they could not resist doting on Herbert who, being new to the world, and having nothing to compare it with, thought such treatment normal.
His earliest memory was of being pushed in a large coach-like perambulator by a uniformed ayah along a track flanked by poplars. The continual trot of horses going to the polo ground was counterpointed by monkeys and birds performing an opera in the Annandale gardens. Above his cot he heard the clatter of raindrops on rhododendrons, violent splashes suppressing the voices of birds, and even his own when he gurgled for his nurse. Thunder gods growled among the deodars, then played to such a climax as seemed to burst the biggest granite globe asunder, sliced clean in two above the earth by a blade of lightning, which set him screaming.
The nurse was familiar with infants who were frightened, so he rarely wailed for long before she carried him — like a precious melon, Maud once said — to the covered terrace of the bungalow.
On calmer days, teething fractious hours, when he grizzled at the miasma of inherited dreams, his ayah laid him by the edge of a stream and, snapping off a hollow reed, directed the water from a few inches above, so that drops coming out of her home-made conduit on to his forehead with such gentle regularity soon put him to sleep. ‘You must have been too young to remember,’ Maud said in later years. ‘Or we told you about such incidents.’
He may also have imagined them, or they were culled from his dreams, the worst of which was of the nightmare meteor cleaved in half by an enormous blade of white fire. ‘The splintering of monsoon artillery,’ his father laughed.