In England we didn’t call them hobby farms but that was what they were.  Ours was called Goose Farm, although somewhere in those early years I learnt that its original name had been Gorse Farm.  This was due to the gorse bushes which grew, intertwined with blackberry and hawthorn, along the hedgerows.

‘The lower orders,’ my father would say, ‘have a problem with the Doric ‘r’ –‘ and he would give his listener the local Kentish rendering of the word ‘gorse’ in explanation.

My parents had a black lacquered double bed which bore the legend ‘By Appointment to His Majesty the King’.  This was painted on its headboard, in gold lettering.  I therefore had no difficulty identifying my father with royalty, although my mother, whose chosen place of residence was, despite household help, the kitchen, never seemed to fall into this category.

Goose Farm, together with the surrounding properties, was owned by my grandmother.   The farm provided her with many hectares of fields and woodlands on which to ride and graze her horses.  She always rode side saddle, in long brown skirt and jacket, a matching hard hat almost covering the tightly netted chignon.

I can see her now, a small, erect figure, brushing aside the leafy overhang with the short crop she invariably held in her right hand, my half-sister, Louisa, riding American cross saddle, a little way behind her.  Beside them, their numbers varying from two to four, ran the dogs.

My father had been married before.  He favoured driving a vintage Bentley on country excursions and the story was that the pin holding the passenger door had snapped.  His wife was thrown out and died instantly.  Louisa, who was at this time only six months old, went to live with my grandmother in what could only be described as a Gothic mansion that served as a hunting lodge situated at the other end of the estate.  Shortly after the accident, my father married my mother and brought her to live on the farm.

I was told I was a preterm baby.  Lucky to survive, they said, often with pursed lips and a perplexing shake of the head that I could never decode.  My mother told me of my father’s disappointment that I was not the eagerly anticipated son.  The florist delivered a single bouquet.  So there was me – and eighteen months later there was Charles.  This time my mother was concerned about too much pollen.

Louisa and Charles had little love for one another but shared the freedom of knowing that if I was with them they could do what they wished and see me suffer the consequences.  Broken windows, scratched records, sweet papers in the car – these were the sorts of anonymous crimes for which I was held responsible.  Dog leads, a switch broken from a nearby hedge, cruel words – these were my father’s instruments of correction.  I developed the habit of eating breakfast early and disappearing into the woods for hours, or hiding in the summerhouse with a book.

Schooldays were more difficult, as Louisa shared a string of governesses with Charles and myself.  ‘Unsuitable’ was the word used as each packed and left.  Mademoiselle Paillot, whom my father finally produced as a fitting educator for us, appeared after one of his visits to France to study the language.  Mademoiselle was a young woman with an excitable temperament who, to my distress, seemed to lose no opportunity to speak ill of my beloved mother – although never in her presence.  Her passion for marons glaces meant her touch was often sticky, as was my father’s after her arrival, which puzzled me as he expressed a dislike for these sweets.  I detested both my governess’s cold embrace and her sharp tongue but any attempts to escape her in my grandmother’s large garden and surrounding paddocks were thwarted by the arrival of her dog, Toby.  A foul-breathed wire-haired terrier, gifted to Mademoiselle by my grandmother, it seemed to make a point of tracking me down when I sought secret retreats under the hedges in my grandmother’s garden.

Although my grandmother kept horses, she did not enjoy their company as she enjoyed the company of her dogs.  She spoke often of their pedigrees and at night-time had them enclosed in a yard in the inner sanctum of the house.  As a hunting lodge, the house had been designed to accommodate not only the hunters but the hounds that accompanied the hunt.

My grandmother never had less than a dozen dogs in the house and during the Second World War she also accommodated the pack of hounds which ran with our local hunt.  To keep these hounds, which had been trained to kill foxes, from attacking her own dogs, she had kennels built behind the box hedge separating the gardens and lawns from the vegetable garden.  These kennels, originally painted white but now streaked with green lichens, were foul-smelling and damp.  It was my grandmother’s pleasure to lock me in one or other of them when reports of my misbehaviour reached her.  Louisa and , sticks in their hands, would taunt me through the wire netting.  Pressed against the back of the kennel I could avoid their jabs but never the humiliation.

Once a month, my father would escort my grandmother, Mademoiselle, Louisa and Charles on a shopping trip to London, some forty miles away.  They would travel by train from Meopham station first thing in the morning and return late in the afternoon.  I was excluded from these trips at my mother’s request to keep her company and it was on these days that my mother and I would share a secret freedom.  In spring and summer we would pack a picnic and go looking for violets and primroses in the woods.  We would laugh and sing and fill a basket with wildflowers.  Bluebells we never picked, nor the pink and white anemones, for they died quickly when cut, but we would fill vases with sweet-smelling blossoms of other varieties.  In autumn, we gathered hazel nuts and blackberries; in winter, shiny-leafed holly with its scarlet berries and chestnuts to roast on the fire.

My father never hit my mother but lashed her, instead, with his tongue.  He seemed to take pleasure in humiliating her in front of the servants, and Mademoiselle in particular.  Her rebellion was to eat and she grew massive, a factor which only added fuel to my father’s taunts.

We stayed in the woods for as long as we dared.  Sensing my mother’s sometimes overwhelming sadness, I became an expert mimic, and would be rewarded by her calls for repeat performances.

‘Mademoiselle again,’ she would cry from her seat under a shady tree, and I would oblige.  My reward was the tears of laughter on her plump, pretty face.  Sometimes she looked so young, so vulnerable, and my heart would ache as we walked home together.

The day when the end began was the first day of the holidays.  The last week of school had, for me, been unusually peaceful, for Mademoiselle had lost her dog, Toby.  The terrier spent its days stretched out on the sofa in the school room and had a habit of lifting its leg against our desks.  Louisa and Charles found this funny but for me this added to my sense of the place being somehow rotten and oppressive.  Mademoiselle would, with glace powdered pout, remonstrate with the little dog, then gather him to her and forgive him by burying her blonde head in his brown and white curls.

Despite the servants’ best efforts, the smell of dog urine, mixed with disinfectant, permeated our schoolroom, as it did the passageway from the courtyard behind the kitchen, along which my grandmother’s dogs ran at exercise time.  A gardener was employed whose main task was to clean up after the dogs and when Toby disappeared I suspected that this old man, whose arthritic frame moved painfully slowly, had failed to close the gate to the vegetable garden.  This was my suspicion but I kept my counsel.

Mademoiselle set work for us and spent several days scouring the hedgerows.  My grandmother, whose austerity did not stretch to dogs, allocated her a farm labourer to assist with the search.  Toby did not reappear and my father, showing unusual kindness, drove Mademoiselle down to Brighton for some sea air to help her recover from her loss.

On this first day, then, I awoke early and packed a sandwich and a drink in the rectangular lunch box my mother had given me for my forays.  It was her way of showing me she understood.  With a full day ahead I planned hours of uninterrupted reading in the silence of the woods.

Clearing away the traces of my breakfast, I slipped into the garden and picked a newly opened pink rose, placing it at the breakfast table for my mother.  Placing my lunch box and my book in my shoulder bag, I closed the door quietly, ran down the front path, and out across the laneway.  The field ahead of me, still veiled in morning mist, led to the opening to the woods.

This field was named Pink Field because of the reddish clay which was turned up there during ploughing.  Each area of the farm had its own name and the farm worker who was instructed to, “Turn the cows out on the Rolling Banks”, or “Get the mare out of Colonel’s field and taker her for shoeing,’ knew exactly where he was going.  Only men worked on the land.  Both my grandmother and my father had strong ideas about a woman’s place, although it was tacitly understood that my grandmother’s wealth exempted her from the restraints placed upon other women.

As I crossed Pink Field and entered the woods, the trees closed together above me and for a moment it was dark.  Then, as I squeezed my eyes to slits, the pale magic of the place settled about me and I looked ahead at the sea of blue which gave its name to this corner of the farm – the Bluebell Woods.  I stood for a moment, ecstatic, feeling the wonder, as I always did, of such a carpet.  Then I began to make my way along the footpath towards Big Pond, where my father kept his boat.

There were two ponds in the woods.  Little Pond was overhung by pine trees and, at this time of year, so enclosed by bracken that trying to reach it was no pleasure.  Big Pond, situated in a clearing in the woods, was banked by rhododendrons and almost bracken-free.  It was covered in summertime with a round-leafed green weed but the weed had shallow roots and never clogged up the paddle wheels in the boat as some weeds could.  I planned to lie in the boat and read.

As I walked, I searched the undergrowth for traps.  My grandmother’s instructions to the farm labourers were that rabbits were to be caught and fed to the foxes to ensure that their numbers increased.  This was so that the hunt would not be short of prey.  Sometimes, at night, I fancied I heard the rabbits screaming as the traps came down.  Releasing the rabbits was something that gave me intense pleasure.

The boat that lay moored at the edge of Big Pond was old and little used.  My father had brought it to the farm on a whim and soon tired of it.  It had a wooden seat across the centre and one at each end.  I clambered in, placed my lunch on the centre seat, and began to clear out the tree branches and leaves which had fallen into it since my last visit.

As I pushed my hands under the right-hand seat, I felt something hard.  I pulled out a small pair of blue secateurs which were beginning to show signs of rust.   I looked at them in astonishment.  They were my mother’s; the pair she used to cut flowers for the house.  I was warmed by the thought of her pleasure when I returned them to her.  I placed them beside me while I read.

The sun shone warmly and the hours passed quickly.  Soon it was lunch-time and I decided to paddle to the middle of the pond so I could watch the frogs and other pond-life through the weeds as I ate my sandwich.  I learned forward to turn the paddle handles but they did not move.  Surprised, I pulled the handles backwards.  Still nothing.  The water was too deep for the paddles to be jammed in the mud.  I climbed out of the boat and began to pull on the long mooring line.

It moved slowly upwards and as the paddle wheels rose higher I saw that one of them had run foul of some sacking.  Taking off my shoes and socks, I waded in and pulled at the hessian.  It moved up slowly from the bottom of the pond.  It was not a piece of sacking, I saw, but a sack with something inside it.  Carefully, I pulled the soggy, fibrous material out and away from the paddle and slid my hand down to separate it from its holding.  It was bulky and refused to move.  I saw now that there was twine tied around the top of the sack.  The end of it must have wound itself around the inside of the wheel.  I returned to the boat and picked up the secateurs.  Leaning over the edge, I lifted the sack and cut the twine.  The hessian left its jammed space and I lifted it into the boat.

Cutting the neck of the wet sacking, I pulled it open and looked down at what was inside. A smell of rotting flesh, mixed with the dampness of the sacking, reached me.  Short, curly, hair, brown and white.  I had found Mademoiselle’s beloved dog.  I had found Toby.  Nauseated, I stood up and flung the sack away from me onto the bank, where it thudded and lay still just above the waterline.

Shivering, I crouched in the bottom of the boat, staring at the secateurs I held in my hand.  What sick person had involved my sad, sweet mother in something like this?  My mind raced in search of an explanation.  Perhaps Toby had been caught in a rabbit trap and the farm labourer who set the traps, fearing my grandmother’s anger, had counted on the water rotting the evidence.  My mind sought other answers but found none.  Secateurs were easy to come by.  Maybe this was simply coincidence.  Maybe these didn’t, after all, belong to my mother.  I hesitated – but I knew I couldn’t afford to take that chance.  My hunger gone, I threw my untouched sandwich into the pond.

I must have sat there for some time, hunched in the bottom of that boat.  My heart was racing and I was afraid.  Then I remembered a story I had read where a body had been thrown into a lake in a sack weighted down by rocks.  The body hadn’t been discovered until the murderer had died years later, leaving a note.

I climbed quickly out of the boat and jumped onto the bank, careful to avoid the sack.  I tied up the boat, then began to search amongst the knotted trunks and low-lying, cool dark leaves of the rhododendrons.  I had collected a pile of bulky, misshapen rocks.  It was heavy work but I didn’t dare to stop until I had piled them, one by one, in the bottom of the boat.

Gingerly, then, I caught the sack by the neck and dragged it into the water.  Struggling with the weight and the awkwardness of it I climbed into the boat and pulled it up behind me, laying it across the front of the boat so it held fast.  Red-stained water oozed onto the floor of the boat and I bit my lip as I centred myself on the slatted wooden seat and gripped the handles, my feet jammed against the rocks.

With the added weight, the boat lay dangerously low in the water but, as I pushed, the familiar clunk clunk of the paddles began and the boat moved slowly out and away from the bank.  I looked behind me.  Water and weed sluiced up through the paddle wheels but all around was emptiness.

My thin wrists hurt and it seems to take forever but now I am at the centre, where the water is deepest.  I pull my blouse up by the neck, across my nose and mouth.  I don’t want to be sick and, as I open the neck of the sack. I look away as I thrust each stone into the rottenness.

Soon they are all in.  I gather up the shortened strands of twine and twist them into the tight, double knot that I use to secure my lace-up shoes.  Then I shut my eyes and push hard.  There is a splash.  The boat rocks and heaves upwards.  I open my eyes and watch, fascinated, as the green web of weed closes over the gap made by the burden.  Now all is silent but the taste for reading has left me and I rinse my hands carefully, remove the drink bottle from my lunch box, and replace it with the secateurs.  Pushing the drink bottle into my pocket, I dry my hands on my handkerchief, then reach again for the handles.

My mother was in the kitchen, slicing vegetables for the evening meal.  She always insisted on doing the cooking herself.  She smiled as I walked in.

‘You must be hungry.  I’ve made a cake.’

I shook my head and pushed the lunch box across the table, lifting the lid as I did so.

‘These.  Are they yours?’

Nothing had prepared me for the way her face crumpled.  I watched as she raised a hand to her mouth and began to run her thumbnail slowly backwards and forwards across her bottom teeth.  I’d noticed this habit before.  She did it when my father was lashing her with cruel words.  I couldn’t bear to think that something I had done was causing her to look like that; to be so unhappy.

Her eyes were of a particularly vivid blue.  Now they stared vacantly at the secateurs.  She put her hands behind her back.

‘Poor Toby,’ she whispered.  Then she looked across at me.  The blue eyes had no centres.  ‘Accidents happen,’ she said softly.

I nodded, withdrawing the lunch box.

‘They’re a bit rusty.  I’ll sandpaper them for you.’

‘You’ll do it yourself?’  The gaze was steady.

‘Yes – just me.’  I closed the lid.  She smiled quickly and reached for the cake tin.  I didn’t question her silence.  She was helpless in a way I couldn’t understand.

Early in July, there was another upset at my grandmother’s house.  Dan, the large Airedale my grandmother prized because he ran beside her when she went horse riding, was missing.  The local police were notified but the dog was not to be found.  My grandmother was at her dourest and I was careful to stay quietly in the school room, avoiding the gardens where the search was centred.  When my mother was out shopping one morning, I checked the kitchen drawers.  The secateurs, now shiny from my sandpapering, were still there.  Relieved, I closed the drawer tightly.

In September, it was Clou’s turn.  Clou was a White West Highland terrier.  My grandmother said Clou was Gaelic for ‘small’.  He slept in her bedroom with her.

This time, the police took the situation seriously.  The dogs, all pedigrees, were valuable.  Obviously someone was stealing them for breeding purposes.  Had we seen or heard anything suspicious?

The farm workers were nervous.  They knew my grandmother.  Ray Jones, the ploughman, a man of fifty-odd, was found to have a minor record for theft as a teenager.  He supported his elderly parents.  He pleaded with my father.  I could have told him to save his words.

A week before Christmas, I decided to surprise my mother by collecting the chestnuts she wold need for the turkey stuffing.  Louisa and Charles were working on a version of the Nativity play.  I was the innkeeper.  I recited my lines quickly and told them I was going for a walk.

‘To those old woods again!’ Charles groaned.  ‘Why can’t you help us with the stage set?’

‘I’ll see if I can find you some conkers.’

He shrugged and turned back to his work.  I knew now he would defend me if Louisa complained that I hadn’t helped with the play.

From my grandmother’s house I had to cross several fields in order to reach the end of the woods but I knew a copse where the chestnuts were thick on the ground.  I took gloves and a shoulder bag.  The prickly chestnut casings would be better opened at home.  The ground was covered in a thin layer of snow and the sky was black with more snow clouds.  I would have to move quickly.

Soon there was only one more field between me and the chestnut copse.  The field was ploughed and the chilled furrows hard under my feet.  When I finally reached the heavy wooden gate on the other side, my hands were too cold to pull back the metal catch that secured it.  First kneeling, then flattening myself against the ground, I was able to slip carefully under the electric fence that bounded the woods.  My breath made small clouds in the air as I scrambled to my feet.  Hugging myself to keep warm and a little out of breath I began to make my way through the dead, brown bracken.  There was a crack of twigs ahead and I started as a red fox ran through the trees.

Now I was on the footpath.  As I looked, I could see the chestnut trees, taller than the surrounding woods, up ahead.  I pulled my balaclava down and tucked it into my coat collar.  The top button came undone.  I stopped to fasten it.  Again a twig cracked.  A rabbit?  Another fox?  Quietly, keeping close to the trees, I moved towards the sound.

Through the bracken, I caught a glimpse of someone pushing into the thicker woods.  I sighed in disappointment as I saw it was my mother, carrying a swollen bag that she had obviously already filled.  She, too, knew where the chestnuts lay thickest, and seeing me occupied with the nativity play she had obviously decided to come here alone.  My only thought now was to help her.  I pushed quickly through the undergrowth and emerged beside her.  With a start, she released the bag she was carrying.  It slumped to the ground.  Ashen faced, she stared at me.

‘You!  You were at rehearsal!’

She moved in front of the bag but it was too late.  I found myself staring at it in horror.  The canvas was marked with red-brown stains.

‘Chestnuts,’ I whispered, filled with the dread of what I knew.  ‘I came to collect chestnuts – for you.’

For a moment the vivid blue stare, then she looked away.

‘That’s good of you.  Really kind.  I’ll just get rid of this, then we’ll collect them together.’

Biting back my fear, I looked at the bag.

‘Would you like me to help?’

She nodded.

‘Yes, that’s an idea.  You know this place better than I do.’  She smiled at me, then shivered and pulled her coat around her.  I wanted to take her hands, to reassure her.

‘The chestnut trees.  They’re big.  There are hollows inside the roots where’ my mouth was dry ‘it’ll be softer for digging.’

She nodded.

‘You go ahead.  I’ll follow you.’

She picked up the bag.  It hung between us.  Sickened, I wanted to turn away.  The snow clouds were oppressive now, seeming almost to touch the tops of the trees.

‘Do you want me to carry it for you?’ I asked quietly.

She nodded, the blue stare unseeing.

I placed the strap across my shoulder and swung the bag behind me.

‘Those are the best ones.  See.  They’re close together.’  I motioned towards a clump of trees to our right.  ‘There’s an old fox earth under the one in the middle.  We can hollow it out.’

Turning away from her, I began to push through the undergrowth.  I didn’t want to turn around, didn’t want to see the stain which I knew must now be soaking through my coat.  Shrubs and small trees forced me to bend.  There was a clearing ahead.  I made towards it.

I didn’t mean to cry out, didn’t mean to frighten her, but they moved so quickly from behind the trees.  There were two of them.  They stood in front of me, barring my way, the dark blue of their uniforms standing out starkly against the brown of the winter bracken.  I don’t know which of them spoke.  Maybe both.

‘We’ll take that if you don’t mind.’

Hands reached out for the bag.

‘No!’ I screamed.

I turned around.  But my mother was no longer there.