The Thatcher

I was a happy lad, living in a historic village in country England. My home was one of the thirty-six, almost identical, thatched houses along The Street, Milton Abbess, in Dorset. I was the third son of well-to-do parents.

My name is Mark Whiting, and my father, Norman, is the Station Commander at RAF Brize Norton, and spends a lot of his time on the base. My mother, Jane, had also been in the Air Force when they had married. They had moved around the world, with my brothers getting their education in a range of schools, until Father was posted, overseeing Number 10 Squadron and the Airbus KC3 of the Kings Flight.

That was when we settled in Milton Abbess, a quiet backwater after their busy life, some seventy-five miles south. I was four when we arrived in twenty-eighteen, and Mum took me to the Blanford St. Marys’ C of E primary every school day until I was eight. My eldest brother was at Southampton University, Studying Aeronautics, and the other one was at the Milton Abbey school, boarding during term time. That left me alone in the house, with Mum, for most of the time.

Father was some fifteen years older than Mum, and the photos show a dashing fighter pilot in full uniform and a beautiful girl, no older than early twenties, with a white dress. She had been in base administration and was very organised. When I say organised, I mean it! Our house was spotless, nothing left out of place. Our garden was trimmed to within an inch of its life, which was normal along The Street, seeing that we were designated a Village of Outstanding Beauty, and a magnet for tourists and photographers.

To give you an idea of how organised my parents were, each of us boys had files in the desk drawer with all our medical and scholastic records in. It didn’t take up much room and was easy to find. First file was for Mum, Jane, born nineteen seventy-nine. Second was for oldest son, Keith, born twenty-o-five. Third was for Lawrence, born twenty-o-nine. Fourth was me, Mark, born twenty-fourteen, and the last was Father, Norman, born nineteen-sixty-five. No doubt you saw the alphabetical progression. I don’t know what they would have done if there had been more of us. The only other files were Expenses, Finance, Garden, Household, and Insurance.

When I was eight, I was given a bicycle, one of the mountain bike ones. I was then cycling to and from the primary school, with me leaving home with time to spare, and my arrival back home to be within a fifteen-minute window, or else Mum would worry. I was on my third bike by the time of my last year at the primary, having a couple of growth spurts.

It was late Autumn of twenty-five when I got home, one day, to see a truck on the other side of the road that had been there for a week. The house was being rethatched, and, when I dismounted, I looked back and saw him. It was a young man, in shorts and a tee, standing on the roof and working on the straw cockerel mounted on the capping.

He saw me and waved, and I had a strange feeling in my body, as if my heart had stopped. I took out my phone and took a picture of him, bathed in late afternoon light. He was gone the next day, but my vision of him didn’t go. I wasn’t sure what it was that I had felt, but the memory stayed with me.

When I had passed my exams, I was sent to the Bryanston Prep School, a little way north of Blandford Forum, and around five miles from home, as the crow flies. Unfortunately, it was a lot further, by road, and I discovered the joys of boarding. It was to be my home, on and off, until I reached thirteen, at which time, I would be going to the Milton Abbey School, in the footsteps of my brother, until I was eighteen.

For me, my time at the Prep was a happy one. By the time I went there, I was quite tall and slim, a keen athlete and football player. I was getting pretty good as an artist, with several sketchbooks filled with ideas. One had a number of pages of the thatcher, in varying light. The Prep allowed me to thrive, with all the usual subjects and some others that I enjoyed. I took both French and Spanish, the normal maths, English, science subjects, and added gymnastics to the normal sports.

I played as a striker in the football team, was a middle-distance runner, and, with the gymnastics, was urged to take dancing by the other girls in the gym class. With my height and agility, I started to get involved. How many places can a twelve-year-old lad get to be up close with girls, even allowed to lift them in the air.

My two years at Bryanston were very enjoyable. It may have been the distance from home and regimentation, or just the joy of living among other children of my own age, The Street not having many. Whenever I was at home, during the holidays, I felt lonely, and ached to return, unlike other boarders I knew. I had been trained well to be a boarder, being neat, organised, and able to look after myself with my household cleaning and helping Mum in the kitchen. Like any child of a forces couple, I could iron my own clothes and made some cash by doing it for some of the others.

With the experience of Bryanston, moving to Milton Abbey was almost too easy. The biggest difference was that there were a lot less pupils. Bryanston had been well over a thousand, while the Abbey was two hundred and twenty. This had the effect of everyone tending to meet everyone else, and with a teacher to pupil ratio of one to four, the teachers were far more approachable.

Lawrence, being five years older, was leaving as I arrived, following the family tradition by enlisting in the Air Force. He wasn’t as brainy as Keith, so didn’t fancy university, but was built like a bull so was ideal for the forces. He had played rugby at the school, and I was urged to follow him, but I wanted to continue with dancing, and what would Rudolf Nureyevs’ career been like with a broken nose and gaps in his teeth!

The Abbey was like living in a stately home. The original monastery had been founded by King Athelstan in nine thirty-three. He was, by all accounts, the greatest of the Anglo-Saxon kings. It was put into private hands in fifteen-forty after the Dissolution and was later sold on. In the mid seventeen hundreds, the monastery, and the village that surrounded it, was demolished for the grand house and the hundred and eighty acres of Capability Brown landscape. What I found interesting was that our house, on The Street, was one of a village built at the time to house all the residents who had their homes demolished. The only part of the original buildings that was saved is the current chapel.

Father retired while I was in my first year there, and home visits during the holidays were like going to prison. He was always telling me about my future as a pilot, never questioning that it wasn’t something I was remotely interested in. I would get my old bike out and ride into Blanford Forum for most of the day, just to escape being ordered about. There were also several friends from the school who lived there.

When I met Terry and Bill, two members of the football team, we would go to the North Dorset Railway Park and ride along the old trackways or go and see a film at the Forum Cinema. Whenever I met up with Amy, Jean and Matilda, who were in my dance group, I would spend a lot of time in the School of Dance with them. They were paying pupils, but the teacher always allowed me to join in, seeing that having a good male dancer working with the girls was a rarity. I went there so often, I had my own locker with my dance clothes, so I didn’t have to take them every time.

One day, with nothing else to do, I went into the Fashion Museum, fascinated by some of the flowing gowns from the last century. The draping was something that piqued my artistic interest. Some of my sketches started to have elegant ladies in them, and I even did another one of the thatcher, with an Edwardian lady waving up at him. Of course, none of these featured in paintings that I produced for the art classes at the Abbey. These were my private thoughts.

I was fifteen when my parents sold our home and went to live in the sunshine of the South of France. For me, it was a good thing, and I lived in a spare room at Amy’s home during the holidays. That meant a lot of dancing. The girls and I joined the Performing Arts Theatre Academy, not far from the dance school, and took part in ballet, modern dance and musical theatre shows. When my parents had left the country, I had been given a bank account with a healthy balance, with it expected to last until I left school and enlisted. That allowed me to fund my new lifestyle.

I graduated from the Abbey at eighteen, with enough credits to be able to go on to university. Instead, I went to Newport, in Wales. I had been spotted at one of the Blandford Forum shows, by someone from the Ballet Cymru. I spent three fabulous years with them, touring small venues throughout the UK. At one performance, I was approached by someone from the Northern Ballet, which produced more of a musical theatre style of show, but still using all the ballet input.

When I arrived at their headquarters, on Cecilia Street, Leeds, it was like walking into another world. It was a fabulous place, modern and with its own theatre and practise rooms. I was helped find somewhere to live, and a few days later, I walked into a practise room to start rehearsing my first show. That’s where I saw Veronica Wilson for the first time, and I had that same feeling in my body that had struck me when I saw the thatcher. Now, I knew what it was, the sudden surge of instant love.

When the director saw us dancing together, he decided that we would take the second lead in the show. Over the course of a few weeks, we had started going out together and became a team, on, and off the stage. It took another few years, but Wilson and Whiting became bywords when people spoke about dance. We were feted for our dancing, had a couple of shows with the Royal Ballet, touring the world.

We married and bought a house on Somerville Gardens, in Leeds, where I, finally, had space to have an easel and start painting, using a large pile of sketchbooks to work from. When Veronica was pregnant, she worked with the Ballet in admin and production, while I was spending a lot of time teaching.

Ballet dancing isn’t kind to you as you age, so you tend to cut back on performances that rely on strength, doing more shows in the musical theatre vein for a few years, until you’re just a name from the past; a celebrity with a good job in the back office.

We had moved to a bigger house near Swillington, on Hall Road, where we had enough rooms for our three children, whenever they came home, and a conservatory with my easel set up. By that time, I had created a second career, that of a successful artist who sold for several thousand a picture. I had a few pictures that I would never sell.

One was over the fireplace. It showed me, on a roof, fixing the final cockerel to a thatched roof, with Veronica in a long dress, and smiles on both our faces. I had captured the late sunlight that made the picture so pleasing to look at. It was my own, very private recollection denoting the two times that I had fallen, hopelessly in love. It was called, ‘The Thatcher In The Sky’.

Marianne Gregory © 2026