Outrageous Fortune: Growing Up at Leeds Castle

by Anthony Russell

  “Funny how important some things are, Lady H.”

  “Isn’t it just?” said Lady Huntley, and we left it at that.

  Once again Borrett and Johnny materialized from nowhere for another round of tea pouring, scone dispensing, and other vital duties. Clearly, they were taking every conceivable precaution against anybody feeling the tiniest pang of hunger before dinner. Personally, I felt as stuffed as the proverbial Christmas turkey, but I did marvel at the intake capacity of the grown-ups, returning as they would in only three hours’ time to the dining room for a four-course dinner.

  My mother turned and spoke to me. “Darling, be an angel and see if your father or Mr. Warrender would like a sandwich or a piece of cake, would you?” She handed me two plates, which I carried over to the card table in the corner. It did not seem likely that Borrett had overlooked this area, but there was no point in causing a stir.

  “My dear sir, how enormously kind,” my father said as I offered the sandwich and cake, “we were beginning to fade away over here.” He took a sandwich, and I offered the plates to Mr. Warrender.

  “I won’t, thank you so much.” No wonder Mr. W remained so thin.

  “My dear sir,” my father went on, “is everything all right? I see you’ve been passing the time of day with Her Ladyship.”

  “Everything’s fine, thanks. She’s a really good egg.”

  “Indeed she is.”

  I sensed that my father and Mr. W would prefer to continue their own conversation rather than engage in idle banter with me, so I moved away. Judging by the speed with which they picked up where they had so recently left off, I considered my decision to have been prudent.

  I put the plates down on a side table instead of returning them to centre stage because, by now, I was starting to feel like going back upstairs. I thought if I did nothing for just a few more moments, I could maybe slip away without anyone noticing.

  Granny, my mother, and Morg were still sitting together, drinking their tea and talking. Gawaine and the Old Faithfuls had left, and Lady H was chatting with Bottle on the other sofa. I felt a familiar twinge of indecision: To speak or not to speak? Granny decided for me.

  “Anthony, darling, come over and have a chat with us, won’t you? Borrett, bring a chair up for Master Anthony, please,” she said, her throaty voice infused with a lifetime of asking with polite authority.

  I had not noticed that Borrett was still in attendance. What remarkable discretion. But now, instead of heading back to the nursery for my bath and William Tell, I had to cope with what might turn into a full-fledged “audience” with Granny.

  I sat between her and my mother, a little back from the table because that is where Borrett had positioned my chair, but I had a clear view of Morg, who started to hum loudly as he polished his glasses with a spotted silk handkerchief, winking at me as he did so. The round table was littered with debris from tea—crumbs, tea stains, scrunched-up napkins, empty cups, and full ashtrays.

  “Darling, your mother seems to think you might be bored, might not have enough to do, but my view is you’re old enough now to think for yourself, and be sensible. I’m talking about Nassau. I was wondering if during your Easter holiday you might like to come and join us for a couple of weeks?”

  No sooner had Granny’s words sunk in than my brain went into crisis mode, as I attempted to determine if the pros outweighed the cons in this frankly awkward decision. Apparently noticing my hesitation, Granny peered at me disconcertingly through her tortoiseshell spectacles.

  The crux of the matter came quickly to me. “Can Nanny come?”

  “Your mother and I think it’s a very good idea for Nanny to come too,” said Granny, removing her finished cigarette from its ivory holder and stubbing it out in her highly individual way. This entailed a combination of left-and-right sideways motions, followed by a few circular twists, culminating in the crushing of the stub by pressing down gently until the half fold extinguished the last dribble of smoke, thereby transforming a ritual that most people conducted with a simple two or three precision stabs into a ladylike performance of high style.

  “Excellent,” I said. “Thank you very much.”

  “All right, darling,” said my mother. “Off you go now. I’ll be up to see you in just a little while.”

  * * *

  “How did it go?” Nanny enquired.

  “It could have been a lot worse. Guess what? We’ve been invited to Nassau.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “I wasn’t sure.”

  “Let’s not worry about it now, dear. Get a move on, if you don’t mind. Your bath is running, and William Tell starts in half an hour.”

  “You know what, Nanny?”

  “No, my dear, tell me.”

  “You were right.”

  “Right about what, dear?”

  “About talking to them first. I did it. I talked to them first and put a cat inside their pigeons, just like you said. It took some courage, but after a bit things didn’t go at all badly.”

  9.

  PARADISE ISLAND

  It was April 1960. I was close to being eight years old, and was off to boarding school in May. Overnight, fifty thousand French francs had become worth five hundred for reasons not entirely clear. I was surprised I even found out that because nobody ever told me anything. There was, never, for instance, any illuminating talk at Hill House referencing the struggle of others to put bread on the table, and it was only when my mother popped up to the nursery one day and discovered some uneaten spinach on my plate that I heard about “the starving children of China.” This really confused me because I had no clue as to why the children of China should be starving.

  Adding insult to my multiple layers of ignorance, a serious flaw had arisen in my travel arrangements for joining Granny B in Nassau: Nanny was no longer coming, and not even she could explain to me why. Quite why David and James were not invited was also a mystery. Perhaps the house was full, or they had to go back to school before me, or had they simply made other plans? Nanny had been my constant companion and guide since I could remember, and this would be the first time my mother had sole charge of me, at least in theory, for fourteen days in a row. I was venturing into new territory here, and all I could do was hope that our growing closeness would continue to blossom in what I had been told was a tropical paradise.

  My relationship with my mother had always been closer than either of us recognized, perhaps because we were so similar in many ways. We shared sweet-natured exteriors which we hoped covered our shyness and insecurities from prying eyes, but we knew reality spoke otherwise. She had grown up with a dominating mother and sister, neither of whom had shown much in the way of tenderness or support for her delicate nature. We also shared determination and a degree of fortitude, she in the face of sometimes withering scorn coming from people who should have been ashamed of themselves for picking on her for not possessing whatever self-inflated intellectual standards they had granted their ungentlemanly selves. I wanted to wring their necks, but my strengths lay elsewhere at the time, and verbal confrontation with grown-ups was not one of them.

  We did not talk about these things because it didn’t occur to either of us to do so. Emotional outpourings worked fine on television and in novels, and from our perspective it was best left that way. Even as a nation we had never been comfortable wearing our hearts on our sleeves until, as Melanie Phillips wrote in her London Spectator blog, the onset of Diana Derangement Syndrome, “a mass epidemic of which broke out in Britain upon the death of Princess Diana when it was revealed to be the defining disorder of contemporary British society. The main characteristics of DDS are the replacement of reason, intelligence, stoicism, self-restraint and responsibility by credulousness, emotional incontinence, sentimentality, irresponsibility and self-obsession.” I’m glad that in 1960 we still had a way to go before collectively turning into mush.

  * * *

  A BOAC Boeing 707 flew my parents and me to Nassau in just ove
r eight hours. I had heard about, and seen pictures of, these beautiful aeroplanes with their sleek lines and four powerful jet engines, and I had been revved up to the maximum in anticipation. Not one iota of disappointment came my way. Every aspect of the journey was a revelation, though the adrenaline rush of accelerating rapidly down a runway for the first time and then lifting off into the cloudy blue sky at some fantastic speed was sensational. I looked out through the window, down at the stunning spectacle of London stretching for miles in every direction. It looked almost like a map brought to life, without any boundaries, free to shrink or grow as time or population dictated.

  My mother and I had a whale of a time on the flight, chatting, playing gin rummy, and reading before eventually having a snooze. My father buried his nose in newspapers and magazines for most of the trip, and we exchanged only a few words.

  Nassau airport was warm and humid and full of black people, whom I’d rarely seen before. Most, including the immigration and customs officers, wore loose short-sleeved shirts, and light cotton trousers. But the policemen looked as smart as the Household Cavalry at Trooping the Colour. They wore white tunics, black trousers with a red stripe down the side, black belts, black boots, and some topped it off with a white pith helmet. They could have been Royal Marines in tropical uniform. I wondered if that was actually how they felt, as the Bahamas were then still a British territory.

  We arrived at the dock after a thirty-minute taxi ride, during which I spent most of my time attempting to decipher what the driver had been saying to my parents, so different was his way of talking to the one with which I was familiar. I found myself surrounded by elegant buildings and a sea of colour; hundreds of black ladies, some of considerable girth, who sat on stools and steps and wobbly wicker chairs, weaving and sewing baskets and tropical clothing of multiple shapes and sizes. They were all dressed in rainbow patterns of flowing cotton prints and talked endlessly and excitedly to themselves and each other.

  And there, finally, was the sea, a dazzling turquoise, casually lapping at the stone steps leading down to Granny’s boat the Canard, a slightly decrepit and weatherbeaten motorboat whose sole function was to ferry guests to and from Harbourside, her house on Paradise Island, and the mainland. A former Royal Navy petty officer was the boat’s captain. His strong hands easily transferred our suitcases from shore to vessel, and then we were off for the short ride across the bay.

  * * *

  When Granny B had bought her house in 1950—at the time, not a single standing house but an enclave of buildings—the long, narrow strip of “paradise” was called Hog Island because it had formerly been inhabited primarily by semiwild pigs. Now, this lush tropical habitat, having been bought by a rich American called Huntington Hartford (heir to the A&P supermarket fortune) in 1959 and appropriately renamed by him “Paradise Island,” contained just a handful of private houses, all with large gardens, nestling along the western half. Hunt, as he was called, turned out to be a man with grandiose development plans, plans which, over time, would destroy the natural beauty and tranquillity of the island forever. But in 1960 they were of course just plans, which Hartford felt no need to divulge to people like us. The last thing he would have wanted was to incur the wrath of Lady Baillie, who might have opted to use her influence with friends in high places to try and stop him in his tracks.

  Stéphane Boudin, one of the world’s most famous interior designers following his work at the Château de Laeken, near Brussels, for King Leopold III of Belgium; Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire, for the British MP Ronald Tree and his American wife, Nancy; 24 boulevard Suchet in Paris, for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor; and, of course, Leeds Castle for Granny B, had been closely involved in the reconstruction and decorating of Harbourside. As we approached the island, the first example of his handiwork could be seen, a stone landing stage of simple elegance, with a miniature pagoda at the tip. Borrett, Johnny, and two black footmen were waiting to greet us and take the luggage to our rooms. It was just like arriving at Leeds.

  My fortnight in Nassau was saturated with a surfeit of castle way dynamics and dampened by spectacular amounts of rain but nonetheless instructive and periodically fun. Armed with some good books (Dennis Wheatley novels featuring my new hero, Gregory Sallust, a debonair, wickedly cool, and brave Nazi-fighting agent) I was never at a loss for something to do. Because there was no possibility of retreating to a nursery, I was exposed to the court and its ways as never before. Entertainment value aside, this provided useful opportunities to work on my underdeveloped drawing-room skills.

  At Harbourside I took my breakfast alone each day at nine o’clock, on the sun-dappled outdoor terrace, brought to me with impeccable dignity by Borrett, who always enquired, “And what can I get you this morning, Master Anthony?” Having recently acquired a taste for bacon and eggs at breakfast (thanks to Miss Preston’s insistence) I was thrilled to be introduced in Nassau to American bacon in all its crispy magnificence. It made English bacon seem limp and thoroughly uninteresting by comparison.

  “Scrambled eggs, bacon, and sausage, please, Mr. Borrett.”

  “Very good, Master Anthony.”

  In an effort to be accommodating, my mother was always the first grown-up to surface, usually around eleven. We walked through the garden in our swimming outfits, she with a pink terry towelling bag full of beach accoutrements and puffing away on a du Maurier cigarette through a white holder called an Aquafilter. Once at the covered beach-bar and sitting area, she would deposit her things on a favourite chaise longue, apply sun products to her face and body, asking for my assistance with the exposed areas of her back. She then covered me with the same products before replacing them neatly in her bag.

  I would fetch my swimming goggles and a beach towel from a cupboard, and off to the sea we’d go. Day after day we’d repeat the same procedure (even when it rained we’d potter about in the water for a while), never seeing anyone until the houseguests started to assemble around noon. My mother told me that Hunt had a house a little way down the beach, and someone called Sam Clapp (it would be a few years before we learned more about what he was getting up to) had one a short walk in the opposite direction. It wasn’t until our second week that Hunt chose to show his smiling face, accompanied by two rather attractive and talkative women, for drinks before lunch, thereby breaking the spell, for me, of spoiled privacy.

  * * *

  There was a couple staying at Harbourside I’d never met before called George and Lydia Gregory. Both were short, owlish, and tended to stay out of the sun. I hoped their conversation sparkled around Granny B as they conducted their afternoon and evening bridge and canasta sessions, because with me it was desultory and dull. Johnny Galliher was staying, down from New York like the Gregorys and Auntie Pops; Woody and Morg, naturally, were there; Mickey Renshaw was there, and Grace Dudley, a tall, attractive, and gregarious woman (widow of the Earl of Dudley) came over frequently from her house on the mainland for lunches, dinners, and cards.

  One evening the whole house party put on long dresses and dinner jackets to go and dine with the prime minister, Lynden Pindling, in Government House. It was said that by setting herself up so comprehensively on Paradise Island, Granny B had helped a great deal to establish the island’s reputation in international circles and to bring like-minded investors to Nassau. No one in Granny’s circle, least of all she, could have known exactly what type of investors were headed her way.

  I had supper on a tray in the dining room by myself.

  * * *

  I ate lunch with the grown-ups on the terrace, always sitting next to my mother, and on rainy days we moved to the dining room where the table extended to fit us all. There was crazy white trelliswork all over the dark green walls with circular mirrors in the middle. The floor was grass matting, and there was a giant porcelain swan on the sideboard. This was a fun room and had an unusual atmosphere. One lunch I sat next to Johnny G, who was as kind and funny as Mickey Renshaw was not.

  “Are you
enjoying your stay?” Johnny Galliher asked, his thin, handsome face, creased, tight cheeked, cocked a bit to the left and peering downward.

  “Very much, thank you. And are you?”

  “Oh, it’s divine here. You know your grandmother entertains like no one else and, believe me, I know.”

  “Do you know a lot of swish people?”

  “Oh my goodness, do I!”

  “But what is so special about her?”

  “Well, I think probably it’s her attention to detail. Nothing is overlooked, so the end result is always as perfect as it could possibly be. And that applies to everything she does, from the decorating of her houses to taking the best care of not only her guests but also the people who work for her.”

  I thought about mentioning that Granny hardly ever talked to me, but decided against it as she was sitting four chairs down. Also, I knew how silly it was to grumble. Elegantly breaking the silence, Johnny G continued, “Your mother tells me you’re off to boarding school in May. Are you looking forward to it?”

  “I think so. Hill House is going to double in size in May, and I’ve never really liked being there.”

  “And boarding school will be better?”

  “I don’t know, but we’ll play proper cricket every day during my first term, and James will be there for that one term too.”

  “My! I wish you all the best.”

  “Thank you, Mr. G. I look forward to telling you about it at Leeds.”

  As it happened, I never did tell him about it at Leeds because of castle way restraints; and by the time we became friends in late-seventies New York (“My, haven’t you come out of your shell—and some!” he informed me as I found myself enthusiastically participating in the city’s frothing and foaming ebullience), it quite slipped both our minds to spend time catching up on the pros and cons of English boarding school.