by Mary Wesley
It was because Mary was worried that this incident would blacken her name with the security services that she was dining with her MI6 contact at the Ritz. She was in search of a job and a stable life to provide a home for her children.
The noisy party dining at Eric’s table was composed of Betty Paynter, a couple called Sylvester and Pauline Gates, and Pauline’s brother, the actor Robert Newton. Pauline and Robert had known Betty all their lives. They had been raised in Cornwall at Lamorna Cove, where their artist father was one of the colonel’s tenants, and by 1944 Robert Newton had become one of the most famous actors on the English screen and stage. He had just filmed Henry V with Laurence Olivier and David Lean was about to cast him as Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist. He was amusing, alcoholic and cruel when drunk, and in many ways a typical member of the set Mary spent her time with when she came to London. Although Eric appeared to be equally well suited to these rackety friends, he was in fact, like Mary, in a state of anxious indecision.
Eric was the third son of Otto Siepmann who, having been born in the Rhineland, left Germany as a young man to settle in England, disillusioned by Bismarck’s aggressive nationalism. Otto Siepmann became a brilliant language teacher, employed for many years at Clifton College, in Bristol, where Eric grew up. Otto’s wife was English and Eric’s two older brothers, Harry and Charles, had joined the British Army and fought throughout the Great War. The fact that Otto had two sons in the trenches did not protect him from the anti-German abuse of several of his colleagues in the Clifton masters’ common room. Eric afterwards said that the years of the Great War brought ‘the bad days for an Anglo-German family’.
Eric, born in 1903 and regarded as highly intelligent, won scholarships to Winchester and Oxford. At Winchester, he made an important friend, Anthony ‘Puffin’ Asquith, son of the man who had been prime minister two years earlier. Margot Asquith, Puffin’s mother, treated Eric as a member of the family and he often spent the holidays with the Asquiths at Sutton Courtenay. There as a schoolboy, he met the great men and women of England, and Europe, Lord Birkenhead, John Maynard Keynes, Lady Diana Cooper, the King’s private secretary Lord Stamfordham, Igor Stravinsky, ‘Papa’ Joffre, Marshal of France, – and of course H. H. Asquith, the last prime minister of England to win a double first. Asquith, a classicist, never read a newspaper; his fall from power amounted in Eric’s view to ‘the fall of the intellect’ in British public life. Remembering those years, Eric later wrote: ‘For the time, I lived in magic …’ But a fatal conflict had been set up in his mind – which he was never able to resolve – between the glamour and worldly values of Sutton Courtenay and Otto Siepmann’s emphatic teaching that virtue would never be found in the pursuit of worldly prizes.
At Oxford, Eric was a contemporary of Evelyn Waugh, Peter Rodd, Basil Murrayfn1 and Graham Greene. He left without taking a degree having decided that his friends, who also included Maurice Bowra,fn2 were much cleverer than he was. He then enrolled at RADA where John Gielgud was a fellow student. Eric showed no talent as an actor, but he did once understudy Gielgud when the latter was playing the male lead in Romeo and Juliet in Drury Lane.
When Eric left RADA he decided to earn his living by writing plays and novels. At the age of twenty he had become engaged to a fellow student, Benita Hume, who was sixteen. They married, but Benita left him after six years to pursue her career. She later married Ronald Colman.fn3 The failure of this marriage caused Eric to have a nervous breakdown, the first of several.
He started to write film scripts for Alexander Korda and collaborated with Winston Churchill, attempting to turn the latter’s ‘eighteenth-century prose’ into popular dialogue. Churchill’s draft script included the phrase ‘virtuous withal’ and the project turned into a fiasco. When it was cancelled, Churchill was inclined to blame Eric who, he said, had ‘behaved lamentably’. Korda next set Eric to work writing dialogue for Laurence Olivier, a more successful project which led to ‘Eric Siepmann’ getting an enormous screen credit for Moscow Nights.
Faced with this success, Eric promptly abandoned the film industry to write a novel, which was a satire on the film industry. He completed this in four weeks and it was published by Chatto & Windus. Then he wrote a play in three weeks and it was produced in New York, but these triumphs did nothing to reassure him. So he turned to journalism, working for The Times and the Manchester Guardian as a foreign and diplomatic correspondent. He was sent to cover the Spanish Civil War and his reporting of anarchist anti-clerical atrocities was admired. But in due course he walked out of both jobs in fits of depression. During this period he also wrote and threw away several books.
When war broke out Eric, who had been feeling increasingly aimless, joined the Royal Marines and was assigned to 8 Commando which embarked for the Middle East in 1941. A few days before sailing he met a very determined young woman called Phyllis Morris who pointed out to him that since he was almost certain to be killed and since he did not have a wife there would be a widow’s pension going begging. They were married in January, four days before Eric sailed for Cairo.
But Eric was not killed, so Phyllis’s plans were thwarted. When she eventually joined him in Cairo they had a spectacular falling-out. Eric became violent and they separated.
He spent most of the war in North Africa, working as a front-line information officer with the Eighth Army. On returning to London in the summer of 1944, he was encouraged to apply for a job with the French Intelligence Section of the PWD (Psychological Warfare Division). He was highly qualified for this position which would have meant him accompanying a combat unit into France after D-Day. But the officer in charge of the posting was R. H. S. Crossman.fn4 Twenty-five years earlier Crossman had been Eric’s fag at Winchester, where Eric, in a fit of high spirits, had caned him for no reason. The job went to someone else.
Eric, who was still a captain in the Royal Marines, did finally manage to get an appointment as commander of a small psychological warfare unit operating in south-west France. It was the only prospect before him and he was due to travel out at the end of October 1944.
The novelist Antonia White, with whom Eric had a brief and unhappy affair in the 1930s, once wrote: ‘He is terribly split and divided against himself … His mind strikes here and there like a sharp searchlight, but whole tracts are unilluminated … He has built up this swaggering, cynical Byronic self as a defence. But his cruelty, his impulse to destroy his own happiness and that of the people nearest him is very deep indeed …’ Eric Siepmann, she said, was ‘the wickedest man I ever met’.
This was the man with whom Mary, in search of security, fell in love, in a hotel bedroom overlooking Kensington Gardens in the autumn of 1944, while the streets around were being flattened by rockets and flying bombs. ‘I read him the Georgics in bed, and the Four Quartets … and we lay above the sound of the traffic looking out onto the Broad Walk … So casually do you find your Rubies,’ Mary recalled. Later she wrote a poem that included the following lines:
I no longer need to drift alone
In the mist of searching
For the door into our garden …
I will watch for the wind
And guard our solitude
Let no one invade it
Before your return.
The letters of Eric and Mary Siepmann stretch over twenty-four years and start four days after their first meeting. It is a two-way correspondence, a conversation that was only interrupted when they were together and was promptly resumed whenever they were separated.
Mary was thirty-two when she met Eric, and she survived his death by another thirty-two years. Their love affair was by far the most important relationship she experienced, but there are practically no traces of Eric, or of their time together, in the ten novels that brought her wealth and fame in her widowhood. For her fiction, she generally drew on other periods in her life, particularly the earlier wartime years. The twenty-six years with Eric remained private; she kept her original promise, and ‘let no one invade’
their solitude, the sealed world they shared.
But eventually she changed her mind. I first met Mary in 2002, nine months before she died, when we spent several days talking in her house in Totnes. These visits were repeated throughout the year. She had asked me to be her biographer after reading The Death of Jean Moulin, my account of the life of the French Resistance leader. As I was leaving after that first visit, she handed me a large carrier bag containing two shoeboxes and a bulky ring file, and on returning home I discovered that they contained these letters. In her opinion they provided the key to any understanding of her life. I drew on them for Wild Mary: A Life of Mary Wesley but very little of the correspondence has been published before.
It was quite appropriate that Mary and Eric should have been introduced in the louche surroundings of the wartime Ritz Hotel. During the war the great London hotels, particularly the Dorchester and the Ritz, became the sanctuary of London society. The Dorchester attracted the more prudent since it was constructed of steel and concrete; risk-takers preferred the more chic atmosphere of the Ritz. The Duke of Bedford’s great-granddaughter gave birth to a boy in a suite at the Ritz in January 1940, at the height of the Blitz.
Mary was an habitué of the Ritz. Her wartime diaries were punctuated by ‘Nips [drinks] Ritz’ followed by lists of restaurants, bars and nightclubs such as Ciro’s, the 400, the Ambassadors, Rules and the Café Royal. And it was in the Ritz that she was arrested in October 1943 by government enforcement officers who had followed her from Boskenna and then searched the pockets of her fur coat for those clothing coupons while she was lunching in the restaurant. Mary escaped a probable prison sentence after explaining to a lenient court that she had been handed a sealed envelope by an unnamed acquaintance.
The friends who introduced Mary and Eric in the Ritz were also part of that raffish and slightly desperate wartime world, a world that was volatile, erotic and bent on distraction. The ‘very, very pretty girl with raven black hair and a deep laugh’ fitted in perfectly – though a very different person was waiting to emerge. She remained a risk-taker of course. Eric once told her that one reason he loved her so much was that she took such incredible risks, and Mary added, ‘He was one of the risks.’
Throughout the long years of Eric’s struggle Mary remained admirably loyal, never doubting his talent or abandoning her belief in his eventual triumph, until the day in 1968 when she realised that he was dying.
Their correspondence does not just paint a vivid picture of life in post-war England, it tracks the story of a marriage. In 1945 Eric is the dominant partner, a published author and playwright, a scholar of Winchester and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, a man whose time has come. Mary is his pupil, headstrong, high-spirited and very funny – but without any confidence in her own ability, uneducated (she never sat an exam), shunned by her family and incapable of earning a living. By the end the pendulum has swung and it is Mary who is keeping the show on the road, paying the bills, raising the children and, in the process, teaching herself to be a writer.
PART ONE
Hope: 1944–46
THE CORRESPONDENCE STARTS on 30 October 1944, with Mary, who has taken the train back to Boskenna in Cornwall, writing to Eric on the day following her arrival, although she is due to return to London later that week. Boskenna, the seat of Colonel Camborne Paynter, has once more become a refuge for children evacuated from London to escape the V1 and V2 bombings. The resident children are Mary’s sons, Roger and Toby, Betty Paynter’s daughter, Sonya, and Nicky, the daughter of Betty’s friend, Diana Blackwood. Mary and Eric have just spent three days together, most of the time in bed, and are determined to get divorced and remarried to each other as soon as possible. Because Eric was still serving in the Royal Marines, the correspondence was subject to wartime censorship.
Boskenna, St Buryan, Cornwall
Telephone: St Buryan 202
30.10.44
My dear love,
I hope your journey was not too disagreeable. Mine was but only because I was travelling away from ‘you’. I collected four stray Americans – girls – and contracted to find them rooms in Penzance and take them in my taxi. The taxi instantly broke down and their polite voices reiterating how kind the English are to travellers in distress gradually lost conviction as we sat stranded in darkness, discomfort and rain, while the driver – never sweet-tempered at the best of times, roostled [sic] about underneath the car. It ended alright.
This morning the nasty evacuee child has a fine display of measles spots and all four other children look very suspicious to me. I am waiting for the doctor. I do hope if they must get it that all get it at once. If they do, I must stay here even if you don’t go to France at once as there is no one else to cope.
… I had a charming letter waiting for me from my lawyers to tell me my divorce is in the January list so I suppose it will be ground out during the next year.fn1 Viva!
I shall ring up Paulinefn2 this evening to thank her for making such a lovely thing possible. And when she says what did Eric do I shall resist saying ‘oh well he carried the coals and emptied the slops’. Or any of the other things I could say.
I hope you are dropping every fourth drink and getting some sleep … [censor’s blue pencil] I miss you dreadfully already and can see every sign of it getting worse and worse but it is a pleasure to miss you, for otherwise I wouldn’t love you and cherish loving you so much.
Fundamentally you have made me happier than I ever remember so the waves of missing and loneliness don’t so much matter though they feel very real.
With you I can become the person I really am – and bearing the grave in mind be buried as such. Dear love consider yourself kissed,
Mary
Boskenna – 4.11.44
Darling,
It was nice to talk to you this morning. The first nice thing since I got back here last night, creeping into a sleeping house with only the parrot to greet me and he was rudeness itself. (Apart from the children who set on me like a pack of terriers at six this morning. They were heaven.)
Otherwise it’s been the traditional homecoming, with all the horrors hoarded for one’s happy return dished up with my breakfast tray and ranging from ‘The cook’s left’ to ‘The fox has eaten your chickens’ and passing lightly over the fact that the children are in quarantine for measles. Ending with ‘I thought I’d wait till you got back to deal with it milady’…
So – I feel nothing will be nicer than to come straight back to London, see you and snaffle the job if it’s possible.fn3
I’m sorry the wind of malice is blowing round your head. It was bound to. When attacked I shall keep mum, when cornered, which is unlikely as I can always put the receiver down, I think I shall flaunt you as a red herring across the trail of the millionaire Betty’s yapping after at the moment.fn4 … I don’t think I’ll go to Ann Newton’s house.fn5. I don’t want us to be chewed up by gossip.
I don’t quite grasp which of us is supposed to be co-respondent in the other’s divorce? I don’t want one… and nor do I see any necessity to be yours …fn6
Anyway if you tell me your plans when you know them I will come. I want to very much.
Alec is here.fn7 The horrible suspicion that I am his next intended is growing, only for goodness’ sake keep that dark or Betty will veer in that direction and I couldn’t stand it. That I caught the milk train last Friday night on leaving Pauline and have been having gastric flu ever since has a sediment of truth. I find no difficulty in remembering you, darling, and will refresh my memory for myself – soon. This is a fine burst of pomposity against the gossips and doesn’t in the least express how much I want to see you – but you said you were imaginative, my love.
M.
Boskenna [undated, between 4 and 23 November]
Darling,
Your Aragon back, I’ve made a copy for myself.fn8 I calmed my ruffled feelings trying to translate it – an obvious case of Fools rushing in – after our sober–tipsy talk yesterday aft
ernoon. I’m afraid Pauline was too drunk to hear me tell her I’d thrown all the curtains into the creek. I am soberly throwing every fourth cigarette away. Setting fire to the house Colonel P. says, and watching the measles spots burgeoning. My children haven’t any yet but Betty’s Pekingese has bitten her child’s nose so badly that she looks as though she might have something far far worse …
I thought teatime was the moment to telephone Pauline and say thank you as she usually fetches Oliver home from school sober. I wasn’t right. This is a nasty letter but I feel a long way away.
I love you.
M.
Boskenna – 23.11.44
My dear love,
I was glad to hear those coins clinking into the slot and then to hear your voice this morning. I’m still wondering whether you got off, as if the weather here is any indication it must have been quite chancy.
I am glad that you spent the evening with the enemy and routed them. Claudfn9 rang Betty up, soon after you and after saying in a slightly surprised voice that he had a headache, gave a spirited description of the party. Apparently at one moment he knocked Joy clean out and she was supine for two hours. I ran into a slight barrage of curiosity here but was so damping that it died away with an apologetic fizzle. So I am fundamentally in very good heart missing you horribly (and naturally ‘je m’ennuie terriblement’), but so full of loving you that I am as happy as it’s possible to be without you in sight, or at least with a date to meet you in an hour or two’s time.
Do not doubt my darling that I like this state of mind and shall remain in it until you come back. Let that be soon. My measly child is very much better and having high jinks in bed. Toby looks as if he is brewing but not just yet. He scrubbed my back in my bath this morning and made no tactless references to ‘mangles’ [love bites or bruises]. Family rumour has it that my brother is going to get married on Saturday but there is no proof that he is not still in Brussels so I can’t worry about that yet. Alec B. is here, and Betty but no one else.