The Azalea Garden

By Frances Nugent

Naomi Griffin and Joss Parker, both thirteen, meet quite by chance during the spring half-term of 1956, when they arrive at the Rosebank Hotel within five minutes of each other − Naomi’s family from London in a brand-new Sunbeam Rapier, Joss and her parents by bus from the station in Windermere. And the memory of their discovery during that holiday in the Lake District stays with them through all the ups and downs of later years.

When Naomi’s father walks out on his family, it catapults his daughter into poverty and a disastrous marriage, leaving her longing for a stable family life, all her natural exuberance suppressed. Joss wonders how she’s managed to keep a cap on her boiler for all this time. Joss marries her first love, but disappointments and eventually illness leave her with a sense of uselessness. Is it too late now to accomplish something extraordinary?

This is the story of two women’s friendship which stretches over fifty years. Eventually, in their sixties, they come together again at the place where it all began – the azalea garden.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Frances Nugent
• Release date: Oct 20, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301316809

Frances Nugent

Frances Nugent has been a copyeditor of non-fiction for 30 years. In the 1990s she had two books published by Sceptre: Drawing from Life and Northern Lights. She has also self-published The Azalea Garden (2012), but her first love was always writing historical fiction. Frances lives in Nottingham with her husband. She has two daughters and three grandchildren.

Book preview

THE AZALEA GARDEN

Frances Nugent

Copyright 2012 Frances Nugent

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Prologue

Naomi Griffin and Joss Parker, both thirteen, met quite by chance during the spring half-term of 1956, when they arrived at the Rosebank Hotel within five minutes of each other − Naomi’s family from London in a brand-new Sunbeam Rapier, Joss and her parents by bus from the station in Windermere – and they eyed each other eagerly. At that in-between age family holidays were starting to pall, and another girl to make friends with would definitely be welcome.

After dinner, while their parents played whist in the hotel lounge and talked about how ghastly the weather could be in the Lake District in May, their daughters had an lively game of snakes and ladders with Naomi’s brother, who yelled at the top of his voice whenever he didn’t win.

Even so, it wasn’t exactly what Naomi had been hoping for. Secretly she had imagined there might be boys staying at the hotel; after almost two years at a girls’ private school she was keen to meet a real live boy of fifteen or sixteen. But all the other guests were as old as the hills. Why couldn’t Michael be an older brother and bring his friends home, instead of being a horrid little ten-year-old? It wasn’t fair.

But meeting Joss helped to make up for her disappointment. Joss looked a bit serious, but she wasn’t stupid, like most of the girls at school. Perhaps they could even have some fun together. And Joss had ordinary parents who seemed kind and didn’t draw attention to themselves. Naomi was painfully conscious that her own parents were never inconspicuous in public. They had loud voices and waved their arms about, so that small spaces didn’t suit them.

The next day it was raining, but Naomi didn’t care. ‘Come on,’ she said to Joss. ‘Let’s go exploring, just us on our own.’

Out in the hotel garden they sheltered in a summer house, and when the weather started to clear they ventured out and discovered a path leading steeply uphill beside a stream. For half a mile they followed it, climbing steadily through the birch woods.

‘They’ll never find us up here,’ Joss laughed, hitching herself onto a mossy rock and pulling Naomi up after her.

The two girls sat there for a while, dangling their wellingtons into the stream. The morning rain was passing over and a watery sun warmed their faces. Raindrops on the leaves of a holly bush shone like opals. They glanced at one another with a conspiratorial smile, pleased to have got away from their parents, who were hanging about waiting for the downpour to come to an end.

‘They won’t care where we are,’ Naomi said, tossing back her plait of fair hair and adjusting a couple of grips. Her mother wouldn’t allow it to be cut and she envied Joss her short pageboy style restrained only by a rather hideous pink Alice band. ‘Mine won’t anyway. I don’t suppose they’d even have brought us on holiday if Granny hadn’t been away.’

Joss nodded knowingly. She might have been left behind as well, if her parents could have trusted anyone to look after her properly. They hadn’t mentioned it to her of course, but she’d heard them talking rather excitedly about a second honeymoon, and everyone knew you didn’t take children on a honeymoon. She would have preferred to stay with her grandfather in his wonderfully chaotic house, where she could eat when she was hungry and go to bed when she was tired, but for some reason her parents judged Grandad to be a bad influence.

‘Mine were the same. They never tell you anything, but I’m pretty sure.’

Neither of them felt any surprise at this. In the fifties boys and girls were allowed a long childhood, carefully shielded from the world of grown-ups. Parents didn’t confide in their children or mention adult matters in their presence, and in the main children were used to doing as they were told without wondering why.

But there were compensations. Children went unsupervised most of the time. They were expected to play out, amuse themselves, get from under people’s feet. Staying indoors with a book and no fresh air was definitely harmful. So they were free to roam across the countryside wherever they pleased.

‘I’m awfully glad you’re here,’ Joss said. ‘I hate holidays these days. They drag me round to look at scenery and stately homes and never care what I want to do.’

Confusingly they expected her to stay a child in some ways and to act like an adult in others. At least the hotel was better than the cramped digs in Filey they normally went to, with the landlady who looked daggers whenever they trailed sand into the hall. The reason her parents looked on it as a second honeymoon was because they were staying at a proper hotel.

‘They call you Jocelyn,’ Naomi said. ‘Is that your real name?’

‘Yeah – awful isn’t it? They called me after some old relative who was supposed to leave me some money when she died, but she never did.’

Her name was a sore point and Joss changed the subject. ‘Come on, let’s keep going. So long as we’re back for dinner we can do as we like.’

‘Lunch,’ Naomi said. ‘It’s called lunch.’

‘Lernch,’ drawled Joss, imitating her. ‘You’re very posh, aren’t you? Do you live in a great big house?’

‘No, a flat. Granny owns the whole block of six, and she lives on the ground floor. We’re upstairs.’

‘In London?’ Joss, who had never been there, looked on London with some awe. And it was obvious that Naomi had hardly ever been to the country. She had brought a bag with her – not a rucksack but a proper handbag – and she didn’t seem to know that you couldn’t walk through a wood in the same way as you walked along a street, which meant that she kept tripping over roots and slipping on rocks. Joss had already had to haul her up out of the stream.

‘Yes. Daddy isn’t always there, though. He goes away a lot, but he’s resting at the moment.’

‘Resting? Why, is he poorly?’

‘Course not,’ Naomi was amused at her ignorance. ‘That’s what actors say when they aren’t working. But he’s in a play in Torquay for the summer season. We’re all going down there in the holidays.’

It sounded like another world to Joss. An actor! Not much like Dirk Bogarde, who was her favourite, but Naomi’s father certainly had a vague look of Trevor Howard, although his features were rather fleshier and he wore a polka-dot bow-tie. Joss’s father was a geography teacher at the same school that she went to, and her schoolmates were all a bit wary of her because of it. They thought she would blab anything she heard to the teachers. That had hurt her deeply at first, and she still wasn’t used to it. By comparison Naomi’s life seemed like heaven. And she even had a brother, to take away some of the attention. Joss, being the only one, knew she was the focus of her parents’ lives, and that was another burden.

‘Does your brother always scream like that when he doesn’t win?’ she asked.

‘Mostly. Isn’t he a little sod?’ Naomi grinned and Joss’s eyes widened with disbelief.

‘Are you allowed to say that?’

‘Not really, but Daddy says it, so why shouldn’t I? I don’t see the point of knowing words and not using them.’

Joss was impressed. She’d had a telling-off just for saying ‘damn’. In fact it was a down-right lecture. What a revelation to meet a girl who said whatever she liked and acted however she liked! But Joss got the impression that her parents rather disapproved of Naomi’s family.

‘That boy could do with a slap in the appropriate place,’ she had heard her father say last night, when they thought she wasn’t listening. ‘They’re a unorthodox family altogether. Not really what we’re used to.’

‘I hope it’s alright Jocelyn getting friendly with the girl.’ Her mother’s voice was nervous, as it often was. ‘I don’t want her getting ideas. Maybe we oughtn’t to be mixing with them at all.’

What sort of ideas she might get Joss couldn’t imagine, but she did realise that the Griffins were on rather a different social level, and she sensed that her parents were acutely apprehensive of making a blunder. They might disapprove, but they were still sucking up like mad.

Joss’s father was recovering from an attack of jaundice, and now that he was convalescing an aunt had provided them with the funds to go away for a week to be cosseted – her word not theirs – but they had never been cosseted before and the hotel made them feel uneasy. In trying to appear polite and worldly, they were worried by details, like which knife and fork to use and how to address the chambermaid.

Last night when Naomi’s father had suggested a scotch and soda, Eric Parker was rather flustered. They didn’t drink at home, except for a glass of port and lemon at Christmas. But he said yes, and then gulped it down too quickly and had a coughing fit, much to his wife’s embarrassment. When Mr Griffin asked her jovially to name her poison, Jane Parker had plumped for a grapefruit juice, just to be on the safe side. It was obvious that Naomi’s parents were much more sophisticated. Mrs Griffin drank bloody Marys and was sporting a tweed suit and expensive brogues for the country, with a black dress and costume jewellery in the evening. Mrs Parker, on the other hand, didn’t change for dinner, but wore a home-made floral skirt and a voile blouse − the sort that Englishwomen always salvaged from the wardrobe as soon as Easter was safely behind them − topped by a cardigan. Her idea of sophistication was a dab behind the ears of Evening in Paris, which she bought at Woolworths.

And now they were sitting in the hotel lounge drinking coffee and eating cream scones, waiting for the weather to clear, with Mrs Parker worrying how they were going to afford all these extras that the Griffins clearly took in their stride. After the war and years of scrimping she wasn’t used to cream and it made her feel rather queasy.

Dickie Griffin was an actor, apparently, while Christabel his wife had been a ballet dancer. You could have guessed that by the way she seemed to float along as though she was on wheels, and her red hair was done up in a bun. What’s more, she was stick-thin. The two couples really hadn’t a thing in common and Mrs Parker wished her own family could get away, hiking or rowing on the lake. She couldn’t picture Dickie Griffin puffing up the fells or his wife muddying her immaculate leather shoes.

But she felt sorry for the children. Naomi was dressed like an eighteen-year-old in an expensive silk blouse that looked as though it belonged to her mother. Thank goodness the Parkers happened to have an extra pair of wellingtons to lend her. Children needed the proper clothes for romping outdoors.

As for the boy, he was obviously spoilt, judging by his behaviour when he didn’t get his own way, but that was probably the sort of example he was set at home.

Having overheard her parents’ opinions Joss felt torn, but she found Naomi fascinating. She was always coming out with questions you hadn’t bargained for.

Like when she said abruptly: ‘Have you ever kissed a boy?’

Joss coloured. ‘What do you want to know that for?’

‘I just wondered. I don’t know any boys. I go to a stupid girls’ school with an awful maroon uniform – straw boater and everything. There’s a boy over the road I like who’s really gorgeous, but he’s older than me – seventeen. He comes home from college every day at ten to five and I stand outside the flats to watch out for him, but he never looks. At this rate I’ll still be a virgin when I’m twenty-five.’

‘What’s that mean?’ asked Joss, bewildered. She’d only ever heard the word in Christmas carols.

‘Don’t you know anything?’ Naomi caught sight of Joss’s face and let out a high-pitched giggle. ‘What have you gone all red for? You have been kissed, haven’t you? Come on, tell all.’

‘It wasn’t anything much,’ Joss stammered. ‘He really wanted to kiss Susan Williamson, but it was dark so he grabbed the wrong person.’

She remembered the inept embrace at the school Christmas party with a mixture of pride and revulsion.

‘What was his name?’

‘I don’t know.’

That seemed the most shameful thing of all – being kissed by someone whose name you didn’t even know – but Naomi was impressed and it was flattering to be thought so experienced.

‘So you’re not such a goody-goody after all. Did he put his hand down your blouse?’

‘No he didn’t!’

‘They do that,’ Naomi said wisely. ‘Not that you’ve got much to get hold of. Don’t you wear a bra?’

Joss blushed again, knowing that Naomi had a bra and plenty to fill it with. ‘No, Mum says it’s too early. She thinks I’m still a baby.’

‘Don’t they make you sick?’

It was a cry from the heart and both girls laughed.

They continued clambering up the path. Joss, leading the way, picked up a stick and used it to keep the overhanging branches in check. Physically, the girls had little in common. Joss was tall and skinny with bright brown eyes, a snub nose and freckles. She was wearing her school gabardine over a grey divided skirt and a hand-knitted jumper. Naomi was shorter, but already showing rounded hips and burgeoning breasts. Her face was oval, her complexion flawless. Joss knew she was going to be beautiful and was envious of that on first sight.

‘You’re bound to meet boys on the beach if you’re going to Torquay,’ she suggested, and Naomi’s eyes brightened with anticipation as she thought of the coming season.

The family spent the whole of the school holidays together at some seaside resort: Brighton or Scarborough or Weston-super-Mare. There her mother was more contented, more energetic. She no longer languished on the sofa all afternoon with the curtains half-drawn as she did at home, complaining of a migraine. There were fewer long silences, less sulking. During the day she arranged fishing trips and picnics for the children and was happy to join them on their expeditions.

Other actors crowded into their digs on Sunday evenings when there was no performance, and Naomi could hear laughter late into the night as she lay awake upstairs.

Last year Christabel had worn a calf-length circular skirt with poppies on, or a halter-neck swimsuit like Grace Kelly. Sometimes, in the evenings, she put on a long satin gown. Then Daddy would play a record and they would dance the cha-cha or else a slow waltz in each other’s arms.

Naomi knew perfectly well why this transformation took place. It was because Daddy was there all the time and there were no long weeks of waiting for him to come home. The summer was her favourite time too, though she was still aware of some moments of tension.

Last season, for instance, after years of begging, she was at last allowed to go and see one of her father’s plays: Daddy on the stage in a false moustache wearing tennis clothes, later a dinner jacket; everyone in the theatre with their eyes on him, adoring him just as she did. He wasn’t a tall man, but he had thick hair, arching brows and luminous grey eyes like Naomi’s own. It made her proud to think he was so good-looking. One of the young women in the play was in love with him and after a lot of misunderstandings, hiding in cupboards, running in and out of bedrooms, the play ended with their engagement.

As they embraced and the curtain came down, Naomi thought she heard a little sob from her mother and glanced round. In the half-darkness she caught a glimpse of pain and for a moment she was scared. But then her mother regained her composure, smiled and started to clap. Naomi felt so happy she almost choked, and she clapped too, until her hands started to hurt.

‘It was lovely,’ she exclaimed to her father when they went backstage to the dressing-room. ‘Absolutely super!’

‘Hardly King Lear,’ he said in a dismissive voice, peeling off the moustache, which Naomi thought so romantic, and looking round for a whisky glass. She wanted him to pick her up and hug her and call her his dearest darling girl as he usually did, but tonight he seemed dejected. ‘It’ll probably turn me into a zombie doing it twice a day for the whole season.’

‘It’s not the play that’ll make you into a zombie,’ his wife said sourly, glancing at the amount of whisky he was pouring. She didn’t congratulate him, just lit a cigarette and sucked on it jerkily. Naomi’s bubble of happiness, so fragile, was already bursting. Why did they have to talk to each other like that?

‘Perhaps I’ll get Bernie to look round for some TV parts,’ Dickie Griffin was saying. ‘It’s what people want nowadays. Better money too.’

Uncle Bernie was her father’s agent and when he came to dinner, Naomi noticed, Christabel always had a headache.

‘We could certainly do with it. Anyway, how long are they going to go on wanting a man your age to play the juvenile lead?’

Her mother turned to Naomi, smoothing her hair and buttoning her coat as though she was five years old, not twelve. Naomi tried to brush her off. Why did she always have to carp and make Daddy unhappy?

‘We must get back to Michael,’ Christabel said. ‘The baby-sitter’s only booked till eleven. Are you coming?’

‘I have to change and see a couple of people first. I’ll be back at the digs in an hour.’

Seeing her look of disbelief he took his wife’s chin in one hand and smiled at her. ‘I promise. Wait up for me?’

She pushed the hand away, but nevertheless gave a slight smile. ‘If you’re quick.’

Next day the sunshine had returned. They sat on the settee with their arms around each other and sent the children off to the beach on their own with money for icecreams. Daddy whistled ‘My Bonny Lies over the Ocean’, as he always did when he was happy. Naomi’s peace of mind was temporarily restored – at least until the holidays were over. Then it would be back to London and school, and Daddy would probably be away again. But that was in the future. Naomi was still young enough to live completely in the present when the present was a happy one.

And maybe this year there would be boys.

The two girls must have been going for about an hour, scrambling uphill beside the stream, but now the track turned abruptly to the right. Still full of energy, they scampered along through a clearing where there was a carpet of flowers, dusky blue.

‘What are they?’ Naomi asked, coming to a halt, and Joss was astonished. Being the daughter of schoolteachers meant that she’d always been familiar with the names of wild flowers and trees. ‘Bluebells of course. Haven’t you ever seen any before?’

In her imagination London became a huddle of black buildings devoid of any grass or birdsong.

‘We never go to the country. We only came here because Mummy wanted to see where Coleridge lived.’

‘Who?’

‘Just some old poet. Mummy’s called after somebody in one of his poems. She recites it to us sometimes and it’s weird. She’s going to visit the places he’s supposed to have been to, and read poetry. She’s says it’ll be uplifting.’

Joss secretly thought Naomi’s mother must be batty. She had a wild look in her eyes, as well as red hair.

‘Don’t you know any flowers?’

‘Yes, a few. Roses, snowdrops − and daffodils. There must be daffodils round here. There’s a poem about them as well, isn’t there?’

That was Wordsworth, Joss remembered, but she let it go. ‘Is that all?’

‘If you’re so clever, tell me what that one is.’ Naomi pointed at random towards a starry white flower and glanced at her new friend challengingly.

‘Wild garlic.’

Naomi snorted. ‘Garlic’s what you put in moules marinières. That one!’

‘Stitchwort.’

‘Jesus Christ!’

Joss sniggered. That language again. She could imagine the hurt looks from her parents if she’d said anything like that. And hurt looks, to her mind, were worse than a telling-off. Naomi was intriguing, with her funny clothes and her strange parents. Anyway, what was moules marinières when it was at home?

The path stopped abruptly at a dry-stone wall with an old gate set into it. Joss tried to unfasten the rusty catch.

Then she looked beyond the wall with a gasp, caught unawares. The same lush mosses and pale English flowers were growing there, but there was more. What met her eyes was an exotic feast of glossy leaves and flame-coloured blossoms: banks of rhododendrons, purple and pink, just coming into flower.

‘Go on,’ urged Naomi. ‘Doesn’t the gate open?’

‘It may be private.’

‘It doesn’t say so.’

Impatiently she pushed Joss out of the way and yanked the gate open herself. The path ahead of them had been paved with stone setts, but they were covered with lichens now and brambles sprawled across them. No one had been here for a very long time.

‘It’s a garden,’ Joss said, marvelling at the sight.

Naomi looked about her. ‘What sort of flowers are these then, Miss Know-all?’

‘Those over there are rhododendrons, but I’m not sure what these are.’ Joss stopped beneath a golden canopy and breathed in the musky perfume. ‘And look, there are loads of them – all colours. Pink, yellow, orange …’

‘They’re azaleas,’ announced Naomi, to her own surprise as much as Joss’s. ‘Granny’s got one in a pot on her balcony. But it isn’t as big as these.’ She realised that she was whispering. ‘Aren’t they absolutely gorgeous? They aren’t just red and yellow – they’re majestic colours like … like crimson and saffron and coral.’

Suddenly she grabbed Joss’s hand. ‘It’s a bit creepy, isn’t it?’ Joss thought she sounded like an actress herself the way she said that. It must be something in the blood. But she squeezed Naomi’s hand reassuringly.

‘Not really. Somebody must have planted them. You don’t have bushes and trees like these just growing in the middle of a wood by themselves. But nobody ever comes here now, you can tell. Look, there’s a seat over there, all overgrown.’

They crept along the path which led round the garden in a figure of eight. On the far side they found a field gate, and beyond was the open fell where sheep were grazing. By the gate was an old barn, but the slate roof had a hole in it and there were nettles in the open doorway. At the back was a lane, no more than a stony track, with grass growing down the middle. It looked as though the garden had been abandoned to grow wild. Nobody would ever notice it if they didn’t know it was there, for usually it would be as green as the rest of the wood, except for these few weeks in spring when its trees burst into glorious bloom.

They toured the whole enclosure, tiptoeing round like trespassers, although it was obvious there was no one else within miles. Then they sat side by side on the dilapidated seat, staring about them in silence. The rain had cleared away, and above the treetops was clear blue sky. A little breeze moved the branches slightly and a dappled sun was shining through the spring leaves. In the distance they could still hear the rushing of the stream. And all around them were the bright colours of the azaleas.

Naomi shivered. There was a romance about the place: a sense of princesses lost for a hundred years, far away from Mummy’s headaches and Daddy’s drinking and Michael’s tantrums. A sudden feeling of pure happiness pumped through her veins. She felt strangely safe, cradled in another dimension of time. The thought of growing up daunted her sometimes, but this was a place far from the world she knew, where ordinary life didn’t matter. She wished she could stay here for ever and ever.

‘It’s peculiar,’ Joss said. ‘Why isn’t there a house? You don’t have a garden all on its own. And why is it abandoned?’

‘The owners died and everyone else forgot about it.’

‘They wouldn’t do that. The children would have inherited it.’

‘Some people don’t have children. They don’t have anybody. They’re hermits.’

Joss was exasperated. She couldn’t understand why Naomi knew so much about some things and almost nothing about others.

‘There’s no hermits nowadays. That was in the Middle Ages. There weren’t any rhododendrons in England then.’

‘How do you know?’

Joss shrugged. ‘I just know.’

‘Oooh – you just know!’ Naomi’s tone was mocking. ‘You’re so clever, aren’t you? Are you going to be a schoolteacher yourself?’

That hit a raw nerve with Joss. Her parents were already talking about her going to teacher training college, but she hated the idea. She knew what the other children said about her father behind his back – about his old tweed jacket and his moustache and his dry-as-dust geography. It made her want to curl up with embarrassment. No, she wanted to be something very different, though she didn’t know what. Nobody told you what jobs there were, but you were still expected to choose one.

‘I’d hate to be a teacher!’

‘Yeah. Fancy spending the whole of your life at school. What do you want to do then?’

Joss considered. ‘I don’t know yet, but it would have to be something extraordinary.’

Something extraordinary! Naomi raised her eyebrows, not sure that girls could do anything like that. She’d never heard of any important women, except for film stars and the Queen. Girls’ comics sometimes has series called ‘Famous Women down the Ages’ but most of them were royalty or else really good people like Joan of Arc and Florence Nightingale who went through horrendous struggles with an angelic expression on their faces, whereas men didn’t have to be at all saintly to be famous. Usually just the opposite.

‘I don’t suppose I’m clever enough to get much of a job,’ she laughed. ‘But I do want to have fun.’

She suddenly remembered that she’d brought her camera, and she pulled a Box Brownie out of her bag, then glanced around in frustration. ‘Oh, I want to take a photo of all this, but black and white won’t be any good!’

‘Better than nothing. Shall I pose?’

A giant yellow azalea formed an awning above the seat, so that it resembled the throne of some oriental potentate.

‘Say cheese.’

‘Gorgonzola,’ Joss grinned obligingly. ‘Now I’ll take you.’ She peered at the camera. ‘How does it work?’

‘Just press there. I’ll send you a copy if you like. Shall we write to each other when we get home?’

‘What’s the point? We’ll never see each other again. You live in London, I live in Yorkshire. It’s hundreds of miles.’

‘We could write, couldn’t we? We could be pen-pals.’

She seemed quite eager, but to Joss’s way of thinking it was useless making a promise neither of them would want to keep in a few months’ time.

‘I had a pen-friend once, but she never wrote more than a couple of times. It’s not fair, saying you’ll be a friend and then changing your mind. It’s deceitful.’

‘Maybe she died.’

‘Course she didn’t. She couldn’t be bothered to write, that’s all. It’d be the same with us. We’d get bored.’

Naomi felt disappointed. Friends shouldn’t get bored with each other. They should be friends for ever and ever. Or that’s what she wanted to believe. She attracted a little gang of hangers-on at school – girls she knew how to manipulate – but she didn’t have a real best friend.

‘Anyway I’ll have to send you the photo so that you can remember the garden. It’s our own special garden that nobody else knows about. You won’t tell anybody about it, will you? Don’t tell tales to your mother.’

‘I wouldn’t do that!’ Joss was affronted. She got the same taunts at school and they always pierced her like red-hot pins.

Naomi stared at her with penetrating grey eyes. ‘No, I don’t believe you would. You’re sort of reliable, you are.’

‘Even if we don’t write,’ Joss assured her, ‘I’ll remember you. And I’ll remember the garden. The azalea garden.’

‘The azalea garden,’ Naomi repeated thoughtfully. She determined to come again tomorrow if she could. She wasn’t interested in Coleridge and spooky old poems. All she wanted was to feel again the romance of the lost garden.

Joss looked at her wristwatch. ‘We’d better get a move on. It’s nearly half past twelve. Are you ready?’

Naomi nodded and led the way in high spirits. When they reached the gate she started singing and this time she was out in front, cantering on down the track like a colt. She seemed to have found her country legs.

‘Do you know this one?’ she shouted back. ‘Bill Haley! Do you like rock and roll?’

Exuberantly, they sang and laughed and raced each other back down the side of the stream towards the hotel.

1959−1962

Dickie Griffin quit the flat the summer Naomi was sixteen, leaving behind eighty-three empty bottles in the basement and an array of debts, ranging from the electricity bill and an unpaid account from Harrods to an IOU for four pounds six shillings to one of his racing cronies. At the breakfast table Christabel informed her children very calmly that he would not be coming back.

‘Why not, where’s he gone?’ Naomi didn’t understand what she meant at first. When he went out last night he had looked round the door and called goodbye, just as usual. It was wonderful to have him at home in London, since he wasn’t doing a summer season for the first time in years. He’d been working on a radio play for the Home Service, playing a bishop, which Christabel seemed to think was a step up in the world.

Her mother shook her head with an air of detachment and lit a cigarette. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea. In future I shall only be communicating with him via my solicitors.’

‘What’s a solicitor got to do with it?’ Naomi spread butter thickly onto toast, still in ignorance. She wasn’t very good at comprehending subtleties.

‘Don’t you get it? She means they’re getting divorced,’ Michael said in such a matter-of-fact tone that Naomi rounded on him sharply, ready to slap him down. But at the same time it was as if someone was turning a knife in her heart.

‘Shut up! What do you know about it?’ she snapped, then turned back to Christabel. ‘It isn’t true, is it, Mummy?’

‘Yes, it is,’ Christabel said. Her hand trembled slightly and cigarette ash fell into her coffee. ‘Divorce. That’s about the top and bottom of it. He’s gone for good.’

Naomi was stunned. ‘I don’t believe it! Daddy wouldn’t just walk out like that! He couldn’t!’

‘I’m sorry, but it’s all too true, I’m afraid. I thought you’d have realised long ago how things were. But you’ve always seen your father through rose-tinted spectacles.’

This didn’t seem at all like the mother they were used to, so passive and unemotional. That red hair of hers wasn’t for nothing; usually her quick Irish temperament got the better of her, and even in less stressful situations she would normally have been throwing vases. Her fights with Dickie weren’t worth the name unless they involved broken crockery.

Of course Naomi knew he drank too much: that had been obvious for a long time, however hard her mother tried to conceal it from them both, and recently her parents hadn’t even tried to gloss over their differences. It made her uneasy, but she had little experience of other people’s families and to her their constant histrionics, though disturbing, were normal life. Even though Dickie Griffin was an actor, a profession where broken marriages were commoner than in other more mundane walks of life (and all the better for that as far as the gossip columns were concerned), she had still never imagined that one day they would both reach the end of their tethers. And this calmness of Christabel’s was unnerving.

‘But we’ll see him, won’t we?’ she asked. ‘He’ll come home sometimes?’

After all they lived in the flat above his own mother’s. He might leave Christabel but that didn’t mean that he would leave them – would leave her, his dearest darling girl as he always called her – and never come back.

But Christabel couldn’t even hold out that hope. ‘He’s going on tour for six months to America soon – that much I do know. He moved a lot of stuff out last week while you were at the pictures. But I expect we’ll know more when we hear from the solicitors.’

Naomi burst into tears of bewilderment. She was used to not seeing her father for a couple of months, but not six, not without a word to her. He hadn’t even mentioned America. Usually the two of them discussed his plans excitedly for weeks ahead. When he was at home they would whisper cosily together by the fire while Michael did his homework and Christabel listened to a concert on the wireless, and when a show was coming up she always helped him learn his lines. Sitting there with him, leaning against his knees, was what she loved best in the world.

‘I think it’s horrible,’ she sobbed. ‘And it’s all your fault. You’re always so beastly to him. You’ve driven him away.’

She sprang to