Chilblains in the Cotswold

One day in 1941 an officer on exercise in the Cotswolds looked down from the brow of a hill and saw a cluster of stone buildings in the valley below. On closer inspection these turned out to be a deserted farm, with a beautiful Elizabethan farmhouse and great cathedral-like barns. It was in a derelict state, but the soldier, the Bertie of the title and Xandra Bingley’s father, was undeterred. ‘We will rise above any minor problems… we’re not about to start playing windy buggers. Not when we’ve found this heavenly place… No siree.’ His, or rather his wife May’s, money bought it, and it was in this idyllic though primitive setting that Xandra Bingley spent her childhood.

The subtitle of her memoir, ‘Country Memories of Wartime’, is a little misleading. She was only three at the end of the war, and that period is covered mainly through her parents’ letters and a few of those isolated and tantalising memories which unaccountably survive from very early childhood. Far more interesting, and also less explored by others, is her picture of life in the difficult postwar years.

It is a world and set of values with which I am very familiar, being her exact contemporary and having attended the same prep school, where she was one of the few envied daygirls who arrived every morning on horseback. The school was full of girls like her — fearless and expert riders, stalwarts of the Cotswold or Heythrop Pony Clubs. They were the daughters of trainers or, as in the case of Xandra Bingley, cavalry officers. I married into just such a Cotswold family, deeply dedicated to horse and hound. On my first night staying at the farm I groped my way to the one bathroom in the dark, and, on reaching for the plug, found myself holding a small furry paw, which on closer inspection in daylight proved to be a fox’s pad with ‘Gone to ground, 1933’ on a silver band round its wrist.