Just Williams

Simon on the manor he once called home

IT WAS STRANGE revisiting Cobham Hall in Kent, 66 years after we’d moved out of our rented flat at the top of the east wing. It is now part of the girls’ school of that name, warm and full of light and the squealing of jolly hockey sticks. Not so in the 1950s, when we had to walk up 80 stairs to reach it – easy for me on sixyear-old legs, but not for Mum with all the shopping and my sister on her hip, (we were allowed to leave the pram downstairs by the payphone). My rheumatic grandmother rarely ventured out – like Fagin, she’d send me foraging, not for handkerchiefs but for cigarette ends: she’d reconfigure them into rollups and reward me with a wine gum.

It’s extraordinary, looking back, that I never noticed my parents going through hell. I don’t remember the cold or the economies or my father staring out the window for days at a time – an actor ‘resting’ as the cliché has it. I had plenty to explore downstairs – the ballroom and the minstrels’ gallery, the stables, the tumbled-down greenhouses. Our landlord was Lord Darnley, out of whose way I was ordered to keep at all costs. To me he was immensely tall and lugubrious – as scary as The Long-legged Scissor Man.

In reality, he was just a kindly but bashful old aristo. He told the story of coming across me one afternoon scurrying up some back staircase – out of bounds of course. I was petrified. As we faced one another in the half dark, apparently all I could find to say was, ‘Hello Lord Darnley, tall as ever.’

My grandmother sent me foraging for cigarette ends: she’d reward me with a wine gum

The happiest memory from that billet is of the Christmas present we found in the courtyard way below our flat – an old London taxi that 10 close friends had clubbed together to buy for us (for £50). It was the most beautiful car I’d ever seen. Fixed on a bracket between the two flip-up seats was a small vase where we’d put primroses or heather. We christened her Cosy Box and in the summer, Mummy, in a headscarf, would drive us down to Dymchurch for a day on the beach. There was no front passenger door, just an open space next to the driver for luggage, and we’d fight to be allowed to sit there, strapped in like a suitcase with the wind in our hair.

It was at Cobham Hall that my parents became playwrights, writing themselves out of the doldrums. Their most popular play, The Grass is Greener, oddly enough is about an impoverished earl living in the attic of his ancestral home. Perhaps it’s time for a plaque in what is now the sixth-former dormitory. Simon plays Justin Elliott in The Archers