Lady in Waiting

by Anne Glenconner

  Our fathers remained close friends, and as the King’s Extra Equerry, my father assisted His Majesty in his public duties, as well as looking after foreign nobility and dignitaries when they came to England. In their spare time, they would often be together at Holkham or Sandringham, and when my father was needed in London, he would stay at the Guards Club, which he loved because he was surrounded by his friends from the Scots Guards. When my father wasn’t with the King, he would be found in the estate office at Holkham or with the gamekeepers and tenant farmers on the estate.

  Meanwhile, my mother had set up a pottery at Holkham, having been inspired by one of the German prisoners who had made his own kiln in the camp in the park. She was determined it would be a success and understood the need to raise money because, like all of the stately homes in England after the war, Holkham was becoming more and more expensive to run.

  People were impressed: it was unconventional for a lady to set up a business, let alone of her own accord. As well as being extremely capable and practical, she was rather liberal, in the sense that her headstrong characteristics meant she not only allowed Carey and me to be a part of it, she actively encouraged us, wanting to give us something to do. My father was cynical about the whole enterprise: “And how are you doing in the potting shed?” he would ask her, infuriatingly condescending.

  Carey and I did our best to throw pots but neither of us had the knack. So, Carey started to paint and design instead, with my mother, whose artistic talent, honed at the Slade School of Art, finally found its moment. Between them they designed a marvelous hand-painted dinner and tea set in a beautiful celadon green with snowdrops, and also a very smart blue and white chevron set. We developed a whole range, from mugs to butter dishes, and made quite a few things especially for Sandringham.

  I tried to paint, too, but it turned out I wasn’t at all artistic. My mother, determined to sustain my interest in the business, asked me what part I would like to play. “Can I sell?” I asked, instinctively knowing I was much better suited to that side of things. She agreed and, almost straightaway, off I set in my mother’s Mini Minor, with suitcases in the back containing all the samples wrapped up in newspaper, making my way around England.

  If friends lived near to where I was going I would stay with them, but often there was no option but to stay in traveling-salesmen hotels. These were quite a shock. They always smelled of cabbage, and each morning I would stand outside the bathroom clutching my sponge-bag in a line of traveling salesmen. They never invited me to go first—I was made to jolly well wait my turn and they all took ages shaving.

  Not only was I the only aristocrat on the road, I was the only woman on the road. All the men looked and acted the same wherever I went: wearing ill-fitting suits, they would congregate in the only heated room of the hotel, known as “The Lounge.” Inevitably, this room was dimly lit with a single 60-watt bulb and perpetually filled with cigarette smoke. In the evenings I would sit, awkwardly reading a book. In the salesmen would come and start asking me questions, and the more I answered, the more shocked they’d become. Once they found out I was the daughter of an earl, their chins would drop to the floor. I got used to the expression of confused amazement. At nine o’clock a trolley would be wheeled in and sometimes a minibar would appear, and the men rather sheepishly would ask, “Will you be Mother?”

  Despite being the odd one out, or perhaps because of the freedom that my stays in those hotels entailed, I really enjoyed it—the independence, the responsibility, the satisfaction of making a deal and, most of all, the feeling of being taken seriously for the first time in my life. The experience taught me the importance of staying down to earth and adapting to any situation. My mother had learned this trick particularly well—she was as good with tradesmen as she was with the Queen.

  My mother would also take Carey and me off to trade fairs in Blackpool, where big companies, like Wedgwood, would set up their goods in prime locations in the foyer of the hotel. We couldn’t afford a decent stand and had no choice but to set up in the attic or somewhere equally obscure. Determined to overcome the disadvantage, my mother would encourage Carey and me to bring the buyers up to her. She would say, “Use your feminine wiles.” Carey was a whizzo at this, and off we’d go, down to the foyer, reappearing with the buyers while the Wedgwood sales force looked on, furious, as we disappeared up the stairs.

  Holkham Pottery went from strength to strength, eventually employing a hundred people and becoming the largest light industry in North Norfolk. But in the spring of 1950, my debutante season was upon me, leaving me with little time for the pottery. I would turn eighteen in July, which meant I was old enough to be introduced to society—I had officially reached the age where I was deemed ready to marry. The pressure was unspoken but evident—my entire life had apparently been gearing up to this moment.

  My father wanted me to marry one of his best friends, Lord Stair, who was the same age as him. Lord Stair had represented Great Britain in the four-man bobsled team at the 1928 Winter Olympics—four years before I was even born. My father loved him because he was such a great shot, but I wasn’t interested. I was a teenager; he was in his forties. “But, Daddy,” I said, “there is absolutely no spark between us at all. He’s very nice but no.”

  “Well, if you don’t like him,” responded my father, “then what about his younger brother, Colin Dalrymple?”

  I reluctantly agreed to go out with Colin. My father got us tickets to Henley Royal Regatta, and we spent the day together—but, as with his brother, there was nothing between us. The date was a complete nonevent. My father was disappointed and lived in hope that I would change my mind.

  Declining all of my father’s suggestions, I was thrust into months of socializing. For girls of my background, the point of being a debutante was to be introduced to a generation of eligible men, with the intention of marrying one as soon as possible. Girls didn’t have the freedom to shack up with a single boyfriend to test them out, and if we did, we only got as far as the heavy-petting stage. I wouldn’t have dared risk getting pregnant, and with no contraceptive pill then, it was safer for girls to keep their distance.

  The Season, as it was known, was a deliberate solution to the problem of finding the “right” man: a series of dances and weekend parties held throughout the year to introduce aristocratic young men and women to one another. During the spring and summer, the dances were in England, and when winter came, everybody would go off to Scotland for the Highland balls.

  Each girl would have her own “coming-out” dance or cocktail party either at home or in a London hotel. In London, two or three dances would be held on the same night so when I was there, I would either pick one, especially if it was a friend’s, or I would go to a couple.

  The problem with being “out” in society in the early 1950s was that there weren’t any likely husbands around as there weren’t many men. My generation had either died in the war or were still away doing National Service—mandatory service in the military. If you weren’t married by twenty-one, you were on the shelf. My mother was nineteen when she married my father, so even though I was only eighteen, I felt very conscious that time was running out. Being in the country wasn’t helping anything so I was sent to Knightsbridge, London, where I stayed with my maternal grandmother, Ga. I adored Ga. Born Ellen Russell, she came from New Zealand and, like Great-aunt Bridget, was a commanding Christian Scientist. She and her sisters were all very good-looking and had come to England in search of eligible husbands. Soon she was married to Charlie, 8th Earl of Hardwicke. As Viscount Royston he was interested in sport and in particular in ballooning. He was an explorer in Western Australia and then worked for two years as an ordinary miner in the United States. My grandmother was responsible alongside Sir Thomas MacKenzie, the High Commissioner for New Zealand, for a new hospital to treat New Zealand soldiers wounded in the First World War. The New Zealand General Hospital opened in Walton-on-Thames in 1915 and she received a CBE for all her work in helping
the many injured soldiers who arrived there. Sadly their marriage did not last long and my grandmother filed for a divorce.

  Ga found me a job in a pottery shop in Sloane Street, owned by a Christian Science man she knew. I dreaded going in, spending most of my time avoiding the shop owner because he would brush past me, making unnecessary contact. When I mentioned this to my mother, she snapped, “Anne, for heaven’s sake, can’t you stand up for yourself? Just slap his hand hard!”

  In the evenings, I would go off to the dances. Having got used to greasy breakfasts on the road, I had become rather plump and my mother put pressure on me to slim down because the dances were all about first impressions. It was a game of luck, and wallflowers were completely invisible.

  All over London different hotel ballrooms would be filled with girls in evening dresses, spinning around the wide breadth of the polished parquet dance floors. Before the war the dresses would have been made from silks and satins, but with post-war rationing, many were made from curtains and other unlikely fabrics. At my coming-out dance I wore a dyed pale green and pleated parachute, which my mother had managed to get from the American officers who were based at the aerodrome near to Holkham.

  At first glance, those dances looked like the stuff of dreams, a moving image of one of Cecil Beaton’s fairy-tale creations. But on closer inspection the scene was full of nervous anticipation, thick with the anxiety that sprang from the girls and boys, who had lived separate lives away at boarding schools, only to be flung, quite literally, together.

  The Season was one huge rush of hormones and expectations binding the aristocracy together. While the aesthetics made it look innocent and romantic, the façade simply disguised the impending necessity to secure an heir for every titled family in England.

  The whole idea was that each dance of the evening would be reserved for an array of different suitors, so that by the end of the night and, by extension, of the Season, one man would have danced you off your feet and into married life. A game of probability, the dilemma came when you didn’t have a dance partner. During those dances, any spare girls would congregate in the cloakroom under the guise of powdering their noses, striking up long conversations with each other and the cloakroom attendants, half forgetting about the main event. We came to know the cloakroom attendants very well.

  I was still shy and, having no brothers and an old-fashioned father, I found it hard to navigate the fine line that every girl had to tread in their relations with the opposite sex. On the one hand you had to attract men; on the other you couldn’t attract them too much. Too little flirtation would mean they gave up on you for a more exciting girl, and too much would land you a bad reputation. Promiscuity didn’t do girls any favors and that was why there were chaperones. A hem of golden chairs circled the dance floor. On those chairs would sit a mother, an aunt, an older sister, or anybody who was deemed responsible enough to prevent any possibility of scandal. They acted as a stern reminder, a deterrent for young men’s (and sometimes young women’s) frowned-upon ideas. There was even an acronym, NSIT—not safe in taxis—used of certain young men to remind the girls not to allow their dates to get too carried away.

  In the spring of 1950, like all the debutantes, I was presented at court to the King and Queen. My mother had been presented wearing a flowing white evening dress, but times had changed. Tradition was modernized: my presentation at court was held in the afternoon, and we wore short dresses.

  Just before my eighteenth birthday, in June 1950, I had my coming-out dance at Holkham. The first of these had been held in June 1740, for Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester in its second creation, where 130 guests sat in the orangery, lit by thousands of candles hung in lamps. More than two hundred years later, Holkham was lit again, this time by searchlights left over from the war. The whole of the long avenue was covered with criss-cross colored lights, and the house was floodlit. Even the obelisk and the woods were lit up. It was like a Walt Disney production and the music spilled out of the ballroom into the park.

  Tatler had just declared me “debutante of the year,” which I was delighted by, although the status added to the pressure I felt. The season had only begun in May, so having my dance in June meant I hardly knew anyone.

  As I was about to change into the parachute dress that my mother was so thrilled by, my father said, “Well, I hope you don’t look like a parachute,” which didn’t help settle my nerves. He always said slightly the wrong thing and never exactly filled me with confidence. A few years later on my wedding day, all he could muster was “I suppose you’ll do.”

  The guests, who had filled many of the houses in North Norfolk, had dinner parties together before arriving to dance the night away. The dances started at ten or eleven o’clock and went on all night. Although Princess Elizabeth didn’t come because she was in Malta, Princess Margaret and the King and Queen arrived at about eleven, my father meeting them at the South Gate and escorting them down the long avenue.

  As I came down the marble stairs I stopped to take in the scene: there would have been nothing more romantic than to meet a young man that night, at my own dance. But the odds were low. My father had allowed me to invite only cousins and girlfriends from school because he was very careful about the men. He was in receipt of a list, given by friends, full of the “right sort of people” for me, so my dance was full of strangers, cousins, and my father’s friends.

  My dance was held in the state rooms, which came alive to the sound of Tommy Kinsman, the most popular band for these parties, known as the “Debs’ Delight.” Tommy Kinsman had played at several of the dances I had been to and would happily play requests, so my school friends and I had made lists of all our favorite songs ready to give him. Queen Elizabeth was a big fan of the band and was equally thrilled they were there, smiling and sparkling throughout the night.

  A buffet supper was served between dinner and breakfast, with eggs, venison, and vegetables from the estate, and champagne from the cellars. In the days beforehand, I had spent a lot of time visiting the kitchen, watching as the delicious food was being prepared. With rationing still in place, the supper felt luxurious and, all in all, the evening was an amazing spectacle of frivolity and fun.

  Magical as it all looked, I found it quite terrifying and I ended up spending a lot of time lingering at the edge of the ballroom and going off into the park, handing out champagne to the people in charge of the lights. I felt shy either not knowing or trying to avoid most of the men there. Instead I watched Princess Margaret dance with Mark Bonham Carter—Helena Bonham Carter’s uncle—Billy Wallace, a family friend, whom she later considered marrying, and my cousin David Ogilvy, having a lovely time as she swirled around in her light blue dress.

  One thing the evening achieved that made me happy was to reunite me with Princess Margaret. As the sun rose, I stood next to her, chatting, on the front portico at Holkham, watching the geese fly overhead in the dawn. I realized then that, even though we were now both grown-up, when you have been childhood friends with somebody, you can pick up where you left off. A lot had happened to her. A lot had happened to me. And here we were now, both on the threshold of our adult lives.

  While the evening unraveled into the most beautiful night I will ever remember, something terrible happened that I didn’t find out about for years. Once people started to rise, having gone to sleep at dawn, David Ogilvy passed the fountain, which had been playing all night, and noticed a coat in the water. He couldn’t reach it, so he went back to the house and got some help. To their horror they discovered it was a person, a young gardener, who had somehow drowned, while hundreds of people were dancing and laughing, drinking champagne, only feet away from him. The tragedy was kept from me. My father was absolutely devastated, as were the other gardeners, but none of them wanted to upset me, so that summer and for years afterwards, I had no idea and continued to remember my beautiful dance fondly. Now this much darker memory is associated with it.

  Although I met no dashing young men at my
own dance, the Season led to a few boyfriends. First, there was Nigel Leigh-Pemberton, who was extremely nice—probably a bit too nice. He was a singer and eventually went abroad and sang under the name Nigel Douglas. He was very kind but keener on me than I was on him. And whatever he planned, something always went wrong.

  Once he invited me to the opera. When I said yes, he made a point of warning me that I had to be ready at a set time. Unfortunately I was late. Dashing back to Ga’s house to get ready, as I rounded the corner I saw, to my horror, a huge hansom cab with a pawing horse. I thought, Oh, goodness, this is Nigel’s treat!

  Nigel, of course, was very upset because we were too late to travel to Covent Garden in it. We went to the opera in a taxi and the hansom cab collected us afterwards instead. Sitting in it was frightfully embarrassing because everybody stared as we clip-clopped down St. James’s Street—and suddenly there was the most awful noise, drawing even more attention to us. One of the wheels had got entangled with a taxi bumper and we were completely stuck. All the drivers started honking their car horns as the traffic came to a grinding halt. I was mortified and felt so sad for Nigel because it was meant to be such a lovely surprise.

  Another time, he asked me to help him because he was singing in a nightclub. In the middle of the floor there was a golden cage. “You’re to sit in the cage, on the perch, and swing while I sing ‘A Bird in a Gilded Cage,’” Nigel told me, “and it will be wonderful.” I sat there and it wasn’t at all wonderful and very uncomfortable.

  Nigel and I drifted apart.

  Then there was Roger Manners, a more successful match. Handsome and intelligent, he was a little too highly strung for me. Ironic, considering my future husband would turn out to be the most highly strung individual anybody could ever possibly hope to meet.