The twins delighted in having a pet elephant, riding her sometimes with Colin, and spent a great deal of time following her about. I was very fond of her too. Suddenly there she would be, swinging her trunk through the kitchen window, waiting for me to give her a banana.
One day, when Colin was having another of his birthday parties, this time on a yacht called Sea Star, someone killed one of Boopa’s pig friends for its meat. When Colin heard about this, he knew the danger Boopa might have put herself in, because she was aggressively protective of the pigs. He went ashore to find the culprit, hoping Boopa’s instincts hadn’t backfired on her. The next thing I saw from the boat was a man running for his life along the beach, with Colin chasing after him, his stick in the air. It was like a Charlie Chaplin silent film. The man got away and Colin’s temper cooled once he realized Boopa hadn’t come to any harm.
Colin made quite an impression on St. Lucia: this tall Englishman, with his flamboyant mood swings, who owned an elephant and strode around in his signature white kurtas and white pajama trousers. Having worn all sorts of different, normally brightly colored outfits, his fashion had changed after my friend Margaret Vyner and I returned from a holiday in India. Margaret and I had tried on all the beautiful women’s clothes and decided they looked dreadful on us, so had kitted ourselves out with the men’s things. When Colin saw us, his arms shot up and he said, “Exactly what I want! Brilliant!” And before we knew it, he had gone off to India to get a whole new wardrobe of clothes he’d wear for the rest of his life.
As he settled into his new ventures on St. Lucia, the children visited him regularly, becoming closer to him as they grew up. In the late nineties Amy, who was in her twenties, decided to go and live with Colin, who was thrilled by the decision, saying to me, “It’s the right time for Amy. She needs me but, more importantly, I need her!”
They had a strong relationship. Although he wasn’t tactile, he would show his affection in subtle ways: if Amy was dressed up for something, she would ask him, “Do I look all right?” And he would invariably tweak something or add something to her outfit before giving her the nod of approval. He was proud of her skills as a specialist painter and gilder, especially when she was commissioned to restore an Indian temple, and admired her for being down to earth and easygoing. Like him, she enjoyed engaging with the local community, often going off to cock fights with Kent in an effort to fit in.
They also had the same quick wit. When Colin had bought a restaurant in the middle of the two volcanic mountains known as the Pitons he asked Amy, “What shall we call it?”
Without hesitation, she replied, “Bang Between the Pitons?”
“Brilliant!” Colin exclaimed, delighted by the clever name.
Colin had thrown a huge launch party for Bang Between the Pitons, which Princess Margaret had officially opened, and she and May adorned the cover of Hello! magazine.
Over the years, Amy came and went, as I did, and Colin became more and more reliant on Kent for pretty much everything. Kent devoted his life to Colin, who in return was generous, giving him two hotels and paying him well. Occasionally, Kent would leave Colin for a few hours, having to get away to do some shopping or something for himself, and Colin would go berserk with anxiety. Although he had improved since the early days of our marriage, when he used to keep me awake all night, lying in a fetal position on the floor, crying, he still was very highly strung.
On one particular occasion, Colin became hysterical under the most embarrassing circumstances: he had taken me and Kent to Italy and organized an evening in Verona to see Nabucco, one of my favorite operas. I was really touched by this because while I love the opera Colin didn’t particularly enjoy it.
After a difficult drive there, with Colin flipping a few times, convinced we were going the wrong way, Kent, who was mad about football, went off to watch a match on television instead.
We arrived at our seats in the arena, which unfortunately were very uncomfortable, and Colin quickly declared, “Well, I’m going to leave at halftime. I can’t possibly sit on these seats.”
Having been so excited about the evening, I was determined to have a good night so I went off to see if we could get slightly more comfortable seats. After pleading that Colin was unwell, we were very kindly moved to much better seats nearer the front, so I could finally settle down, next to Colin, and anticipate a marvelous evening. It was going well until halfway through the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves in the opera’s third act when, to my absolute horror, Colin started to wail and scream beside me. “Colin, what is the matter?” I asked.
“I wish Kent was here,” he wailed.
“Honestly, I don’t think Kent would enjoy it, but I am here.”
But he continued to wail, “No, no, I want Kent!”
By this time, more and more of the audience were turning their heads in our direction. Seeing the rug over Colin’s knees, I grabbed it and threw it over his head, hoping it would shut him up. To my amazement, he didn’t tear it off and, with his wails now considerably muffled, the audience turned their attention back to the stage. Shrinking into my seat, I hoped the saga was over, but the worst embarrassment was yet to come. When the chorus finally ended, the conductor turned to the audience and announced, “Under the circumstances, I think we will have to have that again.”
I was utterly mortified as the chorus began again. My only solace was that the rug had finally done the trick and Colin had calmed down—although perhaps it would have been better if he had left at the interval.
For all of our married life, Colin felt he needed somebody on hand all the time, to solve problems and calm him down. I had been that somebody for decades, but after Christopher’s accident, my priorities changed and Kent replaced me. I just wasn’t prepared to spend every minute of the day doing things for Colin anymore. It was a job, a paid job now: I no longer felt it was my job as his wife.
Instead of looking after Colin, I stayed in England so I was not too far from Christopher and was delighted when he fell in love. Once he had moved back to London, still with terrible balance, he adopted a clever ploy of asking to be assisted over the zebra crossing near his house by passersby. He would wait until a pretty girl came along and ask to borrow her for a moment, so was rather disappointed when a much older woman volunteered. Reluctantly, Christopher crossed the road and the woman struck up a conversation, asking where he was going. When Christopher answered, the woman told him that her daughter lived right next to him and promptly introduced them. Her daughter, Anastasia, a half-Greek highly intelligent lawyer, fell in love with Christopher and they got married, having two beautiful daughters, Bella and Demetria.
But after being happily married for a time and raising a family, the marriage had started to fail, and one day Christopher rang me up and said, “Anastasia’s got fed up with me and told me to leave. Can I come and stay with you?” So he came to stay in my farmhouse in Norfolk, neither of us knowing how long he would be there, wondering if Anastasia would change her mind or whether their marriage was over.
Because my house is in a small village and walking long distances can be hard for Christopher, I got him a tricycle so he could get around. It was a strange image seeing a grown man cycling off down the country lane on a trike, but it meant he could get to the pub easily so he didn’t care what he looked like. Over the years, he had become completely at ease with how he was and took the attitude that if someone was going to give him a hard time about it, they weren’t worth knowing.
I was worried in case he fell and couldn’t get up, but didn’t want to be an overbearing mother of a middle-aged son, so I would just say, “Do come back by half past eleven or give me a ring so I know you’re all right.”
One night half past eleven came and went and there was no sign of him. My mind started darting around, worried he had had an accident, imagining him stuck in the middle of the road or in the ditch, unable to get up. I got out of bed, put a coat over my nightie, and drove to the pub. When I saw his tricycle
outside I was furious, realizing he must have just forgotten to phone me. I stormed in and started yelling at him: “How dare you? What do you think you’re doing? You had me so worried!” Shocked at my entrance, he didn’t have time to respond to my wrath as I dragged him out of the pub.
The next day when I had calmed down, he said, “I’m sorry I didn’t call you. I met the most brilliant woman.”
“But what about Anastasia and the children?” I said.
The truth was that, although they had loved each other, their lives were too imbalanced, too unequal. They decided to divorce, but amicably, and he stayed a big part of their daughters’ lives. As for the brilliant woman he’d met in the pub—he married her. Although I had been sad his first marriage hadn’t worked out, both Colin and I were terribly glad he’d met someone else who clearly adored him. Johanna became part of the family and Christopher was thrilled that she got on so well with both Colin and me. He settled down for good, conveying his absolute joy at being able to reassure both of us that we needn’t worry about him because he had Johanna, who would always be there to take care of him.
Suddenly, in my mid-seventies, I found myself completely independent. With Kent looking after Colin’s every need and Johanna supporting Christopher, the twins grown-up, and my days as a Lady in Waiting sadly gone, I could finally relax. I had a real love of travel so I embarked on spontaneous trips all over the world with friends, some of whom were almost as eccentric as Colin.
One of them, Mary Anna Marten, was a remarkable lady I’d known for years who sadly died in 2010. She would ring me out of the blue and ask if I wanted to go on holiday. The strangest trip we ever took was to Russia. Before we left, Mary Anna, who had a substantial figure, said, “The food is simply disgusting in Russia. I’ve ordered a leg of Parma ham from Harrods to be delivered to you. We’ll split the cost. One can always eat Parma ham, any time of the day or night.”
Two days before we were due to leave, a Harrods van trundled up. The delivery man rang the bell and put this enormous parcel into my arms. It weighed an absolute ton. I don’t quite know how we got it through Customs but we lugged it with us as we traveled to where we were staying in Moscow. The room was boiling and tiny, so I decided to put the leg of ham on the windowsill.
In the middle of the night, we woke up to the most dreadful noise of whirring and beating wings. Opening the curtain, I was greeted by every single bird in Moscow, busy devouring our Parma ham. The next day we cut off the bits that had not been savaged, took it with us, and went off to a park, where Mary Anna had arranged to meet someone. I discovered she was meeting a hit man, which, of course, horrified me. She had only told me there was an ulterior motive for the trip when we were already on our way.
Able to speak a bit of Russian, and convinced that her daughter had inadvertently married a Russian spy, Mary Anna had arranged to talk to a man to discuss “getting rid” of her son-in-law. I sat nervously on one park bench, while she sat with this shifty-looking man a few benches along, as I wondered whether we would be arrested. When she came back, I said, “Well, what happened? Have you hired a hit man?”
Mary Anna replied, “Actually, I don’t think it’s going to work quite as I hoped. There are one or two difficulties.”
I was unbelievably relieved when she gave up on the idea and even more relieved when we left Moscow altogether. We flew south to Samarkand, where Mary Anna wore brightly colored kaftans and a great deal of jewelry. People would gather round her wherever she went and we eventually realized that everybody thought she was an incarnation of Catherine the Great. People tried to touch her, thinking she might bring them luck, and more people would follow suit, creating a stir. I was used to people behaving in this manner when I had been with Princess Margaret, although it wasn’t quite the same, but as Mary Anna walked, I followed, brushing the arms away from her as she sailed along with all these people.
She was always full of surprises. On the way home it transpired that a lot of people on the plane had upset tummies. Mary Anna had just the solution. Out of her bag came a bottle of medicine no longer available over the counter called Dr. J. Collis Brown’s Mixture, which contains morphine, and she went up and down the aisle dispensing spoonfuls of it. By the end of the flight everybody was knocked out. I said to her, “That was fortunate. Do you always have that in your bag?”
“Yes, darling, I do,” she said. “You never know when you might need it.”
That was typical of Mary Anna. A trip with her was never short of incident—I might have had lots of dramatic things happen to me, but I had never considered hiring a hit man.
When I wasn’t off traveling the world with friends, I spent more and more time in Norfolk, finding a good balance between excitement and a more peaceful existence. I was delighted when, in 2005, May got engaged to Anton Creasy, a friend she and Amy had both known for years.
Eddy, the Earl of Leicester, very kindly insisted that the wedding should take place at St. Withburga’s, with the reception in the state rooms at Holkham. I was really touched by this because Holkham was such a part of us all, and since I had got married there in 1956 I was so glad that my own daughter was able to do the same.
I helped with the flowers, just like my mother had done for me, and May wore my tiara and looked absolutely beautiful. Eddy gave a speech, and then Colin stood up and, without having prepared anything formal, spoke eloquently and affectionately, injecting his characteristic enthusiasm, ending the speech perfectly with a humorous toast.
Shortly after they got married, May and Anton decided to move out to St. Lucia to be with Colin because by then Amy had decided to continue her adventures, going off to the Dominican Republic. Unfortunately, when May and Anton tried to help Colin run his businesses (not only Bang Between the Pitons, but also a hotel), he found it hard to give the reins to Anton. After several clashes, May and Anton decided to return to their life in England.
In his seventies, Colin still had the same tendency to lose his rag in a spectacular fashion. One day he was supposed to meet the minister of tourism at a restaurant on the cliff edge in St. Lucia, but the minister didn’t appear. Colin waited and waited, and eventually the cook came out and said that the kitchen would close after five more minutes. Colin completely lost it and went the whole way along the cliff edge, chucking one table after another into the sea. Then he drove straight to the airport, arrived in London without any luggage or his keys, and knocked on the door of our house. I hadn’t been expecting him and when I opened the front door he was covered with what I thought was blood.
“Colin, what’s happened? Are you all right?” I exclaimed, imagining he’d been in the most terrible accident.
“Anne,” he replied crossly. “It’s not blood, it’s ketchup.”
When he told me that the ketchup had spilled all over him as he had picked up the tables and thrown them off the cliff, I couldn’t help but laugh, which didn’t go down well but by then we had been married for over fifty years and his short fuse no longer alarmed me.
Although Colin’s moods were often extreme, especially from an English point of view, out in the West Indies people didn’t seem so affected by them. They simply accepted his blend of bad temper and incredible generosity.
Colin had always had protégés, trying to advance the careers of young men, and Kent became Colin’s last major “project” in the belief that, one day, he could run things for him. The only problem was that Kent was illiterate. Thinking he would be able to solve this, Colin sent Kent to London to an adult literacy center. After a few months, Colin got a phone call. “I very seldom fail,” said the director, “but I have with Kent. I’m sending him back to St. Lucia.”
Colin kept me regularly updated with everything that was going on, talking to me on the telephone for hours when we weren’t together, telling me all about his successes and failures when we were apart. One day in late 2009 he rang me up and asked me if I was sitting down. “What is it, Colin?” I asked, dreading whatever he was about to sa
y.
“Marvelous news!” he said. “I’ve got a new son.”
“What are you talking about?” I said, aghast.
“A letter came from out of the blue and now I’ve met him: somebody called Josh Bowler. I had a one-night stand with his mother before we were married. He’s been married three times so I have four new grandsons,” Colin continued, sounding delighted.
He always got frightfully overexcited about everything, but it never lasted very long. I tried to be suitably enthusiastic and gave a house party at Glen for Josh and his family, introducing him to everybody to make him feel welcome. Colin opened his arms to him, taking him back to St. Lucia with him to show his new son the island he so loved.
Within about three days, he was on the telephone again. “I can’t stand it any longer, Anne!” he shouted, as if he thought I couldn’t hear him all the way from St. Lucia.
I wasn’t surprised, and found it rather difficult myself that Josh had turned up after all that time.
By then Colin had prostate cancer but he was adamant that nobody should find out. He always had the idea that people didn’t want to buy land or do business with someone who looked ill or old. So, he had two face-lifts and kept his illness to himself, at first not even telling me.
I’d suspected he was ill for a while because he had lost so much weight, but he didn’t confirm anything until he took a turn for the worse in the summer of 2010, while in Trinidad with Charlie’s widow Sheilagh and their son, Cody, in search of a rare bat. Sheilagh called me and I went straight out to St. Lucia to look after him and stayed for several weeks. As he recovered slowly, we enjoyed our time together. I was glad to be looking after him and he was relaxed and loving.
With commitments in Norfolk, I went home with the intention of coming back to St. Lucia a week or so later with Amy, who was planning to live there permanently.
Lady in Waiting Page 25