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About the author Hilary Geiger, nee Colpoys, then Manners, has led her life primarily as a housewife, but she has occupied many other positions as and when the need arose. She is a mother of five, with 17 grandchildren and 10 great grandchildren. Hilary is now living with her husband in Far North Queensland.
t was my mother’s screams that woke me. “It’s only your mother having one of her nightmares,” Nannie murmured from her bed on the other side of the room. Pop – six foot, three inches and as thin as a bean pole and very short-sighted without his glasses – once fully awake, realised that there was a shadowy form lurking at the end of their beds. Throwing back the sheet, he leapt from the bed and started to wrench open the bedroom door, which always stuck in the wet season. It was with the intention of throwing the portable gramophone, which was on a stand just outside, at the intruder. My mother’s screams intensified, as she thought he was going to leave her. At the same time, realising that she was standing up in a very transparent nightie, and being that Mama felt the indecency of the situation in front of a stranger, she pulled the bed sheet up to her chin while her screams continued unabated. The burglar, now thoroughly demoralised by the screaming woman and the rattling door, seized the nearest thing to hand, which happened to be my father’s suit with the bank keys in a pocket. The burglar threw it out of the window to an accomplice below (they evidently usually have accomplices) and slid down the drain pipe. Mama’s screams had reached the tram depot a few hundred metres up the road. The men on night duty thought that a murder was taking place, so grabbing iron bars that they used for changing the points on the lines they headed towards the scene. At the same time our neighbours, who lived in an identical house, and were members of the government which had just been toppled in the recent revolution, thought that some assassins had got into the wrong house and were murdering us. They also arrived on the doorstep armed with their revolvers. So there we all were; all talking, gesticulating, telling gory stories and thoroughly enjoying the midnight excitement. I don’t think we had met the neighbours before, so it certainly made an unusual introduction. My father, Francis Arthur Colpoys, was at that time manager of a branch of the Bank of London and South America in the town of Pernambuco, now Recife, in Brazil. He had joined the bank on qualifying as an accountant. He had hoped to join his father in a firm of insurance brokers in London, but as family relations were apparently rather strained and his two elder brothers had already been set up with farms in Canada. He decided to head overseas as well. He had been in Brazil since his mid-twenties and in 1919 aged 27, he married my mother, Winifred Morrish. She was living up-country from Recife at Tiuma with her father who was an engineer working for a sugar-processing company. They subsequently had three children, Ilfra born in 1921, Vernon 1923 and me 1924. The incident with the burglar occurred in 1933. Ilfra and Vernon were then at school in England, and I was due to go home that year and also start my schooling. Up till then, Nannie had been teaching me the three Rs. Of his bachelor days as a junior member of the staff, my father recalled one occasion when, along with other junior members of the British colony they were endeavouring to paint the town red. It was not long before their revelries brought them to the attention of the local police and they ended in the lock up. Undaunted, they managed to bribe the guard, who was quite happy to oblige them when given a suitable remuneration, to hand over the keys of the gaol. Having let themselves out, they proceeded to release other inmates, who had also been destined to spend a night cooling off behind bars. It was also at that same branch that he spilt the ink on one page of a ledger, so he solved the problem by sticking that page to the next one, and was amused to find the offending ledger in the archives when he was manager there some 30 years later. Papa had a marvellous sense of humour and a dry wit to go with it. At the same time he was very strict and conventional, but to go out with him there was always the chance of having a good laugh. Once when Mama and Nannie must have been busy preparatory to our going out, he was told to take us out into the garden till they were ready. So we all trooped out into the garden behind Pop. He was no gardener; I remember hearing him tell Mama that when they retired in England his idea of a garden was a lawn with a rhododendron bush stuck in the middle of it. Anyway, this day he chose to focus on some banana trees growing in a corner of the garden. He decided to show us how to pick a bunch of bananas. His efforts met with disaster which we all found exceedingly funny and when told to, “Stop giggling and give a hand,” we managed to get our neat and tidy clothes thoroughly stained with banana juice. He then had to face up to Nannie’s wrath. Pretending to look meek, six-foot-three Papa bowed his head in front of five-foot-two Nannie while we three hid behind Papa. Nannie folded her arms, took a deep breath and said, “Really sir.” He was a very impractical man; sitting in an armchair and studying the stock market in the newspaper is how I think of him. But he did claim to having the ability to draw an elephant sitting down (which he did occasionally to amuse us), also to cook scrambled eggs – though when or why he ever learnt to do that considering we always had a cook and his parents had always had staff, I don’t know. But again, he could always turn that into a comic act. It is hard to know from whom he got his sense of fun. His father William Colpoys, who had died in 1916, sounded like any strict authoritarian Victorian father. He had left his wife, Josephine Colpoys comfortably off. She was a petite, composed, dignified little person. She would have been in her sixties at the time I remember her best. I regarded her with awe and respect, she was not the sort of grandmother one would hug or treat in a familiar manner, just a peck on the cheek was greeting enough. She lived in a lovely three-storied house, Riverbank, Hampton Wick, set in fairly extensive grounds which ran down to a frontage on the Thames. Her unmarried daughter Dorothy, whom we referred to among ourselves as ‘the Aunt’, lived with her. The rest of the household comprised three indoor staff, three gardeners and prior to the days of the motorcar, a coachman. Granny seemed to me to spend most of her time sitting in a wing-backed armchair with a stool for her feet, an easel across her lap, doing large, complex jigsaw puzzles. She would offer me a Glacier mint, the large tin containing them with its embossed polar bear on the lid, was kept in a sideboard which was made of inlaid wood – an imposing piece of furniture. By her armchair was a standard lamp with a shade, from which hung blue, silky tassels. I just loved the feel of those tassels and I would stroke and twist them around my fingers. One day to my horror one came away in my hand! Fearfully I admitted my crime to Granny. She can’t have reacted very much as I have no further recollection of that episode. When I came home to England in 1934, Granny and the Aunt were living in a large flat in London at De Vere Gardens, Kensington. We children would often stay for a couple of days with them as we had to pass through London on our way from school. School was near Hastings in Sussex. Where we spent our holidays was in the New Forest, Hampshire, so it necessitated changing trains in London. Granny and the Aunt’s home was run on formal decorous lines. Each morning Granny and the Aunt had breakfast in bed in their respective rooms along with The Times newspaper. The Aunt said that she always read the ‘hatched, matched and despatched’ columns first. Granny had the reputation of being able to complete The Times cryptic crossword by 9.00 a.m. When the gong rang for meals, Granny would enter the dining room taking her seat at the head of the table with the Aunt at the other end. There was a button placed discreetly just under the table near Granny’s hand, and when ready to be served or when requiring the next course to be brought in, she would press the button and the maid would appear. It used to puzzle me by what magic the maid knew when to materialise, till one day watching Granny closely, I saw what she was up to. The formality of the meals and the highly-polished table – heaven forbid you spilt anything on it – used to fill me with so much apprehension that my usual hearty appetite would vanish. Once, at the biscuit and cheese stage of the meal, the Aunt asked me if I would like one of the Ryvita biscuits, one of which she was having. I replied, “No thank you, but I love the sound you make when you are eating them.” This caused much amusement. The Aunt was tall and thin, so much so that a doctor once asked her how she got past the dogs in the street as she was just a bag of bones. She was a natural blonde, with sharp features and a very electric personality. She supervised the staff, cook and maid, and the general running of the flat. Each morning she would interview the cook to discuss the day’s menu. The kitchen was strictly out of bounds to the children. Having decided the requirements for the day we would all head off to the shops. The Aunt drove a Vauxhall car, in it we would be whisked from one part of London to another. Off to Barkers, with us pattering behind her, as she seemed to sweep through the grocery section ordering this and that to be delivered, then to other departments of the shop, making witty comments as she went. She had been a good tennis, badminton and squash player when younger. She was a member of the Wimbledon Tennis and Croquet Club and had played badminton for Ireland, the homeland of our earlier forebears. She had also been umpire and linesman for some of the matches. Once when my father and mother were on home leave and visiting them, they went to her squash club. My father decided to try his luck with the one-armed bandit, he put in sixpence, hit the jackpot and the coins came cascading onto the floor. Laughing, he decided to try the shilling machine, with the same happy result. It had to be drinks all round after that. |
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