Lady in Waiting

by Anne Glenconner

  I was enchanted by the warm air, turquoise waters, and white sandbars. We stayed with John and Janet Lovell in the Maracas Valley in the middle of the rainforest on the Ortinola estate, which C. Tennant & Sons owned. Colin adored the Lovells, who had played a significant role in forming his love of the West Indies when he had stayed with them after he’d left Oxford.

  When we were there, Colin heard about an island in the Grenadines that was for sale called Mustique—from the French moustique, meaning “mosquito.” Owned by the Hazells, a Creole family, for almost a hundred years, Mustique, which had a dwindling cotton estate, had become an increasingly expensive burden, and by the time Colin found out about it, it had been on the market for five years. Curious, he made arrangements to go and have a look while I went back to England to be with Charlie. After sailing round the island, Colin bought it for £45,000 without even having set foot on it. It was a risky asset, having no running water and no electricity, and only about a dozen acres were under cultivation growing cotton, while the rest of the island’s 1,300 acres or so were frazzled to a crisp.

  Anybody else who had considered buying it must have concluded it was a nonstarter. Even St. Vincent, one of the largest of the Grenadines, was much more advanced, and still communication was terrible: letters took a fortnight to be delivered, if at all, and there weren’t any telephone lines. If anybody needed to fly anywhere, there was a little seaplane: although it took off on a runway, it would land on the water, much to the horror of any passengers who hadn’t been warned. What was even more of a concern was that Colin knew nothing about cotton or agriculture, tropical or otherwise.

  But for Colin, it was as though he had been born to live in that part of the world so Mustique offered him a vibrant existence, his character infinitely suited to life on a Caribbean island, a Panama hat much more his thing than a bowler. He was in a high state of excitement from the moment he bought the island, embracing life on Mustique as though he was the embodiment of it all, longing to show it to me.

  I was intrigued to see it, but the first time I went to Mustique, I was in for a shock. To begin with, it was a palaver to get there, and after flying from England to Barbados, from Barbados to St. Vincent, I boarded a boat, only to endure a very rough two-hour crossing. Eventually, the boat dropped me ashore, on a huge stretch of white sand with a jungle of manchineel trees coming right down to the beach where, I was relieved to see, Colin was waiting for me. Between us and the only road, feral cows roamed freely. Twice Colin and I had to shin up manchineels, which in fact are the most poisonous trees in the world, but that risk was preferable to being gored by ferocious cattle.

  When we eventually got to the road, we climbed onto a tractor, with a trailer that had plastic chairs strapped on it to accommodate more passengers. The tractor was nothing like Colin’s Thunderbird, although he drove it equally enthusiastically round the island, excited to show me everything. The road took us up from Macaroni beach to a stone building, the Cotton House, where the cotton was prepared: the ladies on the island picked the cotton and carried it in their aprons to the house, where they laid it all out on the floor before teasing it to get out the seeds and bundling it together. It was then shipped to St. Vincent where it was packed before being sent to England to be spun. I found it fascinating to find out about each step. It reminded me of the pottery—so many people were involved in making a pretty mug or plate, which the end buyer probably didn’t think about, in the same way it hadn’t occurred to me to consider where my cotton clothes or bed linen had come from.

  The only other substantial structure was The Great House, a building on a stone base with a wide veranda. Inside there was one huge room with a very long table that could seat about thirty people. Perplexed, I said to Colin, “Why is there such a big table here? Are we going to entertain?” Colin explained that it was for cotton buyers, who came twice a year and sat round the table to discuss rates and inspect samples before striking a deal.

  Apart from the cotton houses, there was a tiny fishing community, the islanders living in a collection of tin huts, and that was it. There was almost nothing familiar to anyone from England, and although seeing the cotton estate was interesting, I walked around feeling increasingly bemused, wondering why this had all appealed so much to Colin.

  The views were stunning, like picture-postcards, but the land was barren, and I found it hard to imagine that I would ever want to spend any time there. What made it all much worse was that the island was riddled with mosquitoes—it wasn’t called Mustique for nothing. My lily-white skin was not made for the Caribbean, but the mosquitoes were sure it was made for them, even biting me through the gaps of the cane chairs when I sat down for a rest, my skin going red and blotchy, coming up in welts.

  When Colin turned to me, and asked what I thought, I didn’t hold back. “Colin,” I said, “this is sheer madness!”

  He looked at me. “You mark my words, Anne,” he said defiantly. “I will make Mustique a household name.”

  Colin’s certainty was convincing, but I was left wondering what our lives would have in store. We had only gone to Trinidad for a short trip and now I found myself realizing that our conventional life was going to change completely.

  We moved from Kent to London, and from then on, Colin and I went back and forth between Mustique and England, staying on the island for weeks on end, leaving Charlie behind. Both of us had been brought up by nannies and governesses, and in those days, no mothers I knew cooked for their children or ate with them. When I was growing up, mothers were put on pedestals, associated with treats and special occasions, while the monotonous discipline and general looking-after were done mostly by others. Children had their routine and adults had theirs. Being a wife seemed more urgent than being a mother. Colin needed support throughout our marriage: he didn’t seem able to cope on his own, always needing me to be there, just in case. I never considered refusing to go out to Mustique and, as with everybody else I knew, wives stayed with their husbands.

  Colin spent longer away than I did, which was a relief: although the sound of having your very own desert island was wonderful, the reality was far less attractive. Growing up in freezing Norfolk, in a house with footmen and maids, didn’t prepare me for weeks of eating tinned beans and sweating, rather than sleeping, at night. Without the practical attitude I inherited from my mother, the inner strength I had built up living through the war, and from my experiences as the only female traveling salesman, I doubt that I would have managed to cope. While Colin had a “vision,” I was left wondering whether I would ever adapt to this new Robinson Crusoe life, feeling relieved each time I went back to England.

  Slowly, I began to get used to island life, accepting that I just had to jolly well get on with it and not complain. We ate fish for almost every meal so eventually, as a change, we would hunt for lobster: Colin and I would make our way down to the beach, through the thickets, avoiding the cows, to the lagoon. In the shallows we found lobsters in their holes and, putting towels over our hands, we would grab them and drag them out. They were more trouble than they were worth, since the warmer water made them very tough. With no running water, we caught rainwater on the roof and showered using a bucket with holes on it fixed up in the tree at the back of the house. It was rudimentary, but we managed. In fact, Colin seemed not to mind in the least, although I really missed being able to have a bath.

  As well as Colin’s dream of making Mustique a household name, he wanted to establish better living conditions and an infrastructure to ensure that the island as a whole would prosper. Influenced by the Lovells, who had worked hard to generate a fair and stable environment on the Ortinola estate, Colin worked tirelessly, finding out what could be improved on the island and what might help the local community.

  The cotton estate on Mustique was a dying business, threatening the islanders’ outlook, but although Colin wasn’t knowledgeable about the cotton industry, he did have a good head for business. He set about introducing himself to every si
ngle person on the island, engaging with everybody, starting to build relationships with them, and I did the same. Without an official purpose, I learned about their way of life: I went down to see the boats come in, watched the fishermen work, and, although most of them spoke only Patois and very basic English, they became more friendly over time, especially when I bought fish from them. I went to the little school and struck up a rapport with the mistress and noted that they could all do with more books. I organized a shipment, which overjoyed her when they arrived.

  Some felt at ease with me more quickly than with Colin, and a steady trickle of people began to approach me, starting conversations with the words, “We didn’t like to bother Mr. Tennant but…” I always listened carefully, then thought up ways to help solve each problem.

  When a young man called John Kiddle got in touch out of the blue, asking for a job, saying he had experience in tropical agriculture, Colin hired him on the spot. All John had come with was a sorry story about his business partner running off with all the money and a reference from his vicar, but Colin was just glad to have someone on board. While Colin and John were busy, I spent a lot of time on my own, and there would be whole days when I would read because I had nothing else to do. I read Jane Austen, Proust, and revisited one of my favorite novels, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

  Learning to adjust to the much slower pace of life was a big challenge. It was frustrating that nothing ever seemed urgent, and difficult to accept that time was a vague concept in that part of the world. It wasn’t just the pace of everything that was hard, but also the completely different culture, and I often found myself wondering what I was doing, trying to make a life somewhere that was so different from home. If I had married my father’s friend, Lord Stair, I would have been running his Scottish estate; if I had married Johnnie, my life would have been firmly in England. Instead, I was navigating an entirely new identity on a run-down desert island.

  In 1959, having realized I was pregnant with our second son, Henry, I happily returned home. Going back to English society, to stucco-fronted houses and formal dinner parties in London, was like being catapulted to another world: there was London, beginning to be swept up in the new fads of prawn cocktail, duck à l’orange, and Crêpes Suzette, busy experiencing a revolution of miniskirts and beehive hairdos. It was a huge transition to make and I found it almost impossible to comprehend that Mustique existed at the same time as England and everything it entailed.

  I continued to split my life between England and Mustique, going from being with Colin to being with our two small children. Colin was in his element, remaining passionately attached to the island, his vision for change slowly coming into sight. I think he felt free to be himself and was never affected by the challenges of bucket showers, or lack of electricity.

  It was only the bravest of friends who visited in the early years. In 1960, two years after Colin had spontaneously bought Mustique, Princess Margaret married Tony Armstrong-Jones, our wedding photographer, who was given the title Earl of Snowdon by the Queen, and was fast becoming what many people now consider one of the most iconic photographers of the day.

  When their engagement was announced we were thrilled for Princess Margaret. The whole nation was behind the match because everybody had felt so sorry for her when she couldn’t marry the divorced Group Captain Peter Townsend. Following the wedding, they set off on their six-month tour of the Caribbean. They waved to cheering crowds as they left London on the Royal Yacht Britannia, passing the Docklands and Tony’s “little white room,” his famous photographic studio at number 59 Rotherhithe Street, where Princess Margaret had secretly spent so much time.

  When they arrived in the Caribbean, they made their way to Mustique. Colin could hardly contain his excitement, while I felt rather nervous that it would be a disaster. The last time we had entertained them in London, at the next house we had moved to in Rutland Gate Mews, Colin had decided that Princess Margaret liked ox tongue of all things and rushed off to Harrods to get some. He brought back a box filled with curled-up gray tongues. They looked far from appealing. In fact, they looked perfectly disgusting—and, even worse, when we all sat down to dinner, Princess Margaret took one look at the solid gray tongue and went green. So did Tony. The tongues met the plates with a thud. We hid them politely behind our vegetables, and no one said a word. Suffice to say, they never returned to dinner at the Mews.

  As we stood with our binoculars, scanning the horizon until Britannia came into view, I had mixed emotions. It anchored on Walkers Bay, which was promptly renamed “Britannia Bay.” A smart little boat came to shore and a man in white naval uniform appeared at the door with an invitation to dine with them on the yacht. I wrote back, saying, “Ma’am, it is very, very kind. We’d absolutely love to, but we haven’t had a bath for about two months and we really, really stink, and so I don’t think we’d be very good guests.”

  A reply came, saying they quite understood but wished for our company regardless and would have a cabin put at our disposal. I was thrilled and took the opportunity to soak, for quite some time, in the bath. It was bliss. I would have enjoyed any old bath, but there was something rather special about bathing on the royal yacht.

  The following day, Princess Margaret and Tony came ashore, and we took them on a tour of the island. I’d half expected them to flatly refuse the ride, but they both got into the trailer, and I noticed Princess Margaret had a big smile on her face, enjoying the relaxed atmosphere. For the rest of their stay, we invited them to use any beach they liked, and reassured them that they would be left alone, undisturbed. So, every day the sailors came and set up a tent for them. On the last day, they came and had a drink with us. We didn’t have much to offer, just rum and the most disgusting mixer called sorrel, a bright pink drink, made from slightly sour hibiscus, which the islanders brewed. I could see Princess Margaret wincing as she sipped it. I felt the same.

  That was the moment when Colin said, “Ma’am, we haven’t given you a wedding present. Would you like something in a little box or would you like a piece of land?”

  Princess Margaret turned to Tony and made up her mind without waiting for him to respond. “Oh, I think a piece of land would be just wonderful,” she said.

  It was Tony’s first and last visit. He never returned, largely because of his dislike of Colin, which went back some way. Colin and Princess Margaret had hit it off in the 1950s when they had met at a drinks party held by Elizabeth Lambart, one of the Queen’s bridesmaids. In the summer of 1954, when Colin had been invited as Princess Margaret’s only guest at Balmoral, the press decided he had either proposed or was about to. It was a made-up rumor but it meant that when Tony came on the scene he didn’t exactly take a shine to Colin. I think he also held a grudge from our wedding when he had overheard my father referring to him as “Tony Snapshot.” Years later, someone rang Tony to ask him about Colin and he blurted out that he had always detested him, before slamming the phone down. Apparently, he referred to Mustique as “Mustake.” But for Princess Margaret, Mustique would eventually end up providing her with a whole new life.

  With the visit a success (at least for Princess Margaret), Colin was even more enthusiastic and, with John Kiddle’s help, the cotton estate seemed to have a more hopeful future—the workforce was motivated by Colin’s bonus schemes, and the production rate hit a stable rhythm. Proud of his efforts, Colin came back to England, full of excitement.

  After that Christmas of 1960, though, I could see why Colin might prefer the freedom and lightness of being on Mustique. We spent Christmas at Holkham, which was never very relaxing because my father had rigid rules about shooting. The problem for Colin was that there was a long-standing tradition of the guns being placed by rank. Members of the Royal Family were put in the middle of the drive, and that Christmas Eve the Duke of Edinburgh was there. His equerries were placed beside him; next were other dukes, followed by any marquesses, then earls and viscounts. Colin, not being any of those, was right at t
he bottom of the heap. At the beginning of every shoot, my father would tell him: “Colin, you’re going to walk with the beaters.” Colin wanted to stand in line and shoot and was livid, although somehow managed not to show any outward anger.

  On one of the shoots, he did the unforgivable thing of telling my father at lunch, halfway through the day’s strict itinerary, that he was “rather cold” and was “going to go back in.” My father nearly fainted at the audacity of it. If you were asked to shoot at Holkham it was a tremendous honor, really, and people longed to be invited, so Colin telling my father it was too cold and leaving didn’t go down at all well. On the other hand my mother, in spite of her reservations about Colin before we’d got married, had become very fond of him, and he of her.

  On that Christmas Eve, I was sitting in the smoking room listening to Colin telling everybody all about Mustique, encouraging Carey and Sarah to come out, when he was handed a telegram that read, “GREAT HOUSE BURNED TO THE GROUND.” We were left completely shocked, especially once we realized that the fire had been started deliberately: John Kiddle had burned it down, making it look like an accident. We later found he had stolen all the money he could find to put in a suitcase and hide in a ditch, started the fire, then returned to the case to run off with what was all the staff’s wages, before fleeing the island. Fortunately no one was hurt but so much for the vicar’s reference.

  After this, Colin lost faith in the whole project and tried to sell Mustique, but when no one was interested, he commissioned a prefabricated house to be built as a replacement for The Great House. When he returned to find it complete, his vision was restored.