Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
THE STREET WHERE I GREW UP
YARDLEY PARK ROAD, TONBRIDGE, KENT
Jenny Seagrove, 64, actress and horse sanctuary founder
I was born in
Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, where my father Derek was working in import/ export. I had an older brother David, and when I was not yet two my mother, Pauline, had a stroke during a stillbirth. My father, bless him, was left to look after two very young children while my mother recovered from a coma in hospital. She was a really sweet, gentle woman but a fighter too, and although it took her a year she learned to walk, talk and write again and was able to return home to look after us. She died in 1993 aged 68 – far too young.
I loved the sunshine and freedom of the tropics, but due to my father’s work we moved around so much. The house I have the most precious memories of is a bungalow in Yardley Park Road in Tonbridge in Kent, which belonged to my maternal grandparents Marjorie and Ivor. I was sent to boarding school in England and so from the age of nine until I left school at 17 most of our holidays and half-term breaks were spent there at ‘The Fridge’, as my brother and I called it due to the lack of central heating.
I was at St Hilary’s School in Godalming, Surrey, which I loved, but my heart lifted as my grandparents arrived to pick me up in their car. The threebedroom bungalow had a small front garden and a long back garden. My grandad loved his vegetable patch and I loved helping him, or thinking I was. There was a quince tree and my gran made delicious quince jelly. I’d help her make fudge and treacle tarts, and she made her own ice cream. She had an old Swiss cow bell which she rang loudly to call Grandad in for meals. On summer days we’d have breakfast, lunch and dinner outside in a covered area off the kitchen, which was lovely.
To entertain ourselves my brother and I read and played cards – rummy, canasta, pelmanism. Sometimes we’d all pile in the car and go to the
seaside. Our pleasures were simple. Granny had an old-style mangle and I loved turning the handle and squeezing water out of the washing.
Some areas of the house were ice cold in winter, but I was used to it and was never ill. The toilet was freezing and the toilet paper was that hard shiny stuff. Frost used to form on the inside of the windows. But they had an electric cooker in the kitchen and a Rayburn stove in what was called the breakfast room.
There was an open fire in the little sitting room where we would toast crumpets and watch the Daleks take on Doctor Who on TV. Grandad used to clean out the ashes from the fire every day, and as he’d bring the hot embers out to the garden shouting, ‘Coming through!’, we’d dodge out of the way.
Grandad had been a prisoner of war in Germany, but at some point before his internment he brought home a dark carved wood sideboard from Burma. It took pride of place in the dining room. When he and Gran died my brother insisted we keep it. It was in storage for years and I’ve now found the right place for it in the house I share with theatre producer Bill Kenwright. It looks wonderful.
‘The Fridge’ is still there, but the mangle is gone and the cow bell is silent. It’s a world I remember fondly with good people who loved us.
Jenny started the Mane Chance horse sanctuary in Surrey ten years ago, and they have a birthday lunch on 10 May. Visit manechancesanctuary.org for tickets.
After six series and a hugely successful spin-off film, Downton Abbey’s downstairs staff finally get a proper taste of the glamour enjoyed by the upstairs characters in the highly anticipated second movie Downton Abbey: A New Era. And no one deserves it more than Britain’s favourite married servants Mr and Mrs Carson (nee Hughes), the loyal butler and head housekeeper to the Crawley family – although they get it in very different ways.
The first movie, released in 2019, four years after the TV series
ended, was a box-office smash, raking in more than £150 million. But it left us with a cliffhanger ending – the Dowager Countess, played by Dame Maggie Smith, was told she may not have long to live, raising fears her pithy putdowns wouldn’t grace this sequel. But fans will be pleased to know she’s back along with the other Downton stalwarts including Hugh Bonneville as Lord Grantham, Elizabeth Mcgovern as his wife Cora, Michelle Dockery as their daughter Lady Mary, Sophie Mcshera as assistant cook Daisy and Lesley Nicol as head cook Mrs Patmore.
The film, set in 1928, nine months after the first movie, involves a trip to the South of France and a surprise wedding, and sees a Hollywood film crew take over the abbey. Indeed it’s the Dowager Countess who instigates the jaunt to the Med when she casually reveals she’s inherited a villa from an old suitor. ‘They’d better be warned, the British are coming,’ teases Carson, one of only three staff permitted to pack their bags for a stay at the Villa of the Doves on the French Riviera for the ‘grandest escape of the year’.
The villa is luxurious enough to give the abbey a run for its money, and the Crawley family spend the trip zooming along the coastline in speedboats, schmoozing new lovers on the sands and attending extravagant bashes. But how does stickler Carson cope with the upheaval? ‘Carson can’t cope with electricity or a fridge, never mind the French,’ says Jim Carter, who’s played the grumpy butler since the TV series began in 2010. ‘So going to France, which is full of French people with dubious eating habits, is tricky for him. He’s appalled at what they eat because he’s old-fashioned in
that way. There’s a bedroom scene with Mrs Hughes [the character decided to retain her original surname while still working] before he goes, where she’s starting to fall
asleep and I’m reading – in horror – a travel guide to France. That’s about as sexy as we get.
‘You hear Carson talking about how he can’t believe what he has to go through, having to teach these French servants how to behave. While he’s there he insists things will happen in the English manner, so he refuses to acknowledge the heat and ends up sweating profusely in his starchy clothes.’
You might wonder why Carson has been dispatched to France, given that usually it’s only the maids and valets who travel with the Crawleys when they depart for
holidays in Scotland. ‘The plan of getting Carson to go to France is rather spurious,’ says Jim, 73. ‘They want him away from the house where there’s upheaval that they know he won’t cope with. It was an odd experience because I only did a couple of days filming in England with Phyllis [Logan, who plays Mrs Hughes] and I hardly saw any of our downstairs gang while I was in France being sweaty.’
Back home Mrs
Hughes experiences her
own taste of the high
life when she’s left holding the fort while a Hollywood film crew descends on the abbey. ‘We need to persuade the servants to take Carson with them so he’s out of the way,’ laughs Phyllis. ‘But Mrs Hughes needs to be there – the last thing in the world she would want is to leave the house unattended.
‘She doesn’t look like a woman of the world, but for that time she’s a bit more forward thinking than others of her age. So she’s quietly entertained by the whole spectacle of the film crew and cast, and certainly more tolerant than Carson would have been of the invasion.’
Leading that invasion are Dominic West as Guy Dexter, the dashing star of the movie – one of the first ‘talkies’ after the silentmovie era – and Hugh Dancy as the film’s director Jack Barber. Even
though Lady Violet refuses to be swept up by the glamour of the film set (‘I should have thought the best thing about films is that you can’t hear them; even better if you couldn’t see them either,’ she says at one point), the other characters feel differently. ‘Daisy is thrilled that these famous people who she sees in the magazines are in our house, and it’s lovely for Mrs Hughes to see the delight of the downstairs staff,’ says Phyllis, 66. ‘It’s a bit out of their comfort zone but they get to be so involved.’
Jack Barber has his work cut out keeping his actors in check – in particular Myrna Dalgleish (Laura Haddock), who’s prone to throwing tantrums. ‘But Daisy ends up having rather a nice relationship with her,’
‘Granny used to ring an old Swiss cow bell loudly to call Grandad in for meals’