by Mary Wesley
fn23 The story of the dead coastguard eventually inspired a significant incident in Mary’s second novel, The Camomile Lawn, published in 1984. The parrot lived again in A Dubious Legacy (1992).
fn24 Wing Commander C. P. ‘Paddy’ Green DSO DFC. Paddy Green was one of Mary’s most persistent wartime lovers. He was a veteran of the Battle of Britain who became a celebrated night fighter pilot. He had been posted to North Africa and Italy. On his return he was wondering whether Mary was still interested.
fn25 Alice Grenfell. Alice had been working for Colonel Paynter as a housemaid since she was a child. She became a lifelong friend and support for Mary and her children.
fn26 True was a stray mongrel, a cross terrier-hound bitch, that followed Mary home to Boskenna early on in the war. True had previously belonged to the butcher in St Just, who had trained the dog to steal chickens from farmyards while he was delivering meat to the front door. Over the years, as Mary’s dogs died and were replaced, she called the new dogs by the old names.
fn27 A prominent critic and moralist who was both left-wing and anti-Marxist; he coined the phrase ‘la trahison des clercs’.
fn28 Mary’s fiction would contain a number of references to socialised insanity, notably in A Dubious Legacy.
fn29 Born Rosemary Hope-Vere, in 1943 she married her third husband, Colonel Roderick Brinckman DSO MC, chief of staff, British Military Mission to Moscow.
fn30 Solicitors acting for Mary in her divorce.
fn31 The purchasing power of £100 in 1945 would be £3,854 today.
fn32 14th arrondissement, off the Boulevard Montparnasse.
fn33 Elsa Triolet, the wife of Aragon. During the occupation, Aragon and Triolet, though identified as Communist writers, continued to publish and sell their work. They were also discreetly associated with the Communist Resistance, which became active in June 1941, following the termination of the Nazi–Soviet pact. In September 1944, after the liberation of Lyons, they moved to the city, then under Communist control, and were feted as the symbols of France’s intellectual Resistance.
fn34 These broadcasts were part of a British deception operation intended to dissuade the German High Command from transferring more units to the Eastern Front.
fn35 The Glass Bugle became the title of Mary’s first (unpublished) novel.
fn36 Sir Malcolm Robertson, ex-diplomat, MP, chairman of the British Council.
fn37 Diplomat, novelist and briefly in 1944 the last of Mary’s casual wartime lovers.
fn38 Arthur Chichester, 6th Marquis, aviator, war correspondent, jazz fiend, disc jockey and gossip columnist.
fn39 Mrs Grant, a Penzance widow by then aged 79. She had lost her husband in the Boer War c.1901. She was a neighbour and confidante of Mary’s and once said that her jolliest times had been in her fifties – ‘By far the best lovers, my dear’.
fn40 Edwin John was the fourth son of Augustus and Ida John. When his aunt Gwen John died in 1939 he inherited the contents of her studio. In 1945 he and his wife Betty were living in the Fish Store in Mousehole, a disused pilchard store. He was a trained artist who died in Wales in 1978.
fn41 Raymond Lee, see Introduction.
fn42 Boris Melikof, Armenian expatriate and Communist, friend and suitor of Mary from pre-war Boskenna days. They had an affair during the war. Mary once had to lock him into her bedroom wardrobe to make way for a more importunate suitor.
fn43 George ‘Geordie’ Sutherland, 5th Duke of Sutherland, married to Clare O’Brien. He was the first chairman of the British Film Institute, Conservative politician and landowner. Barbara Cartland suggested that he was probably the father of her daughter Raine, Countess Spencer.
fn44 Between June 1944 and March 1945 London and southern England were bombarded by 3500 V1 flying bombs and 1100 V2 rockets.
fn45 Born Mary Frances Linton in 1870, she became the second wife of Sir Theodore Brinckman, 2nd Baronet in 1895. They were divorced in 1912. She and her husband had called their second son ‘Napoleon’.
fn46 Lady Brinckman died in 1948.
fn47 Eric’s play, which was never completed. Throughout their relationship, Eric was engaged on an endless stream of plays, novels, works of criticism, popular theology and current affairs, each of which was abandoned and destroyed in turn as it was overtaken by some brilliant new idea.
fn48 Sir Anthony Lindsay-Hogg, 2nd Baronet, theatregoer and socialite, briefly married to the Canadian actress Frances Doble.
fn49 Eric had become friends with Nancy Mitford in 1933 when she married his disreputable friend, Peter Rodd. Mitford’s first successful novel The Pursuit of Love would be published in 1945.
fn50 Spencer Curtis Brown, a leading literary agent and founder of the agency to which Mary eventually sent all her unpublished work.
fn51 £7,200 today.
fn52 Actually Donne Place SW3.
fn53 A reference to his divorce negotiations with Phyllis. If Eric supplies evidence of his adultery he will be the guilty party and will have to support her for the rest of his life.
fn54 Maurice Bowra, notable classical scholar and wit, later Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, was an Oxford contemporary of Eric’s and a friend of Mary’s.
fn55 ‘Elaine’ is probably a slip. George Sutherland’s first wife, Eileen, died in 1943. He married Clare O’Brien in 1944. Mary clearly had a soft spot for ‘Geordie’ who was twenty-four years older than her and a notorious womaniser.
fn56 Mary is offering to be named as Eric’s co-respondent.
fn57 Vera Emanuel was the sister of the Duchess of Sutherland, née O’Brien. Mary later described the sisters, for some reason, as ‘two Hungarian tarts’.
fn58 Man about town, Ford car salesman, identified by the Metropolitan Police as the secret lover of Mrs Wallis Simpson in the months leading up to Edward VIII’s abdication.
fn59 Cousin of John Bolitho, Toby’s godfather, who had first employed Mary in MI5 in 1940.
fn60 Sylvester Gates, having identified the suspect he had had in his sights since December, beat him up.
fn61 The explosion of this V2 by Marble Arch blew the windows out of the Hyde Park Hotel on the opposite side of the park.
fn62 News had just reached Mary of Harry Siepmann’s appointment as an executive director of the Bank of England. Eric as a child had revered Harry, who was thirteen years older than him, and whom he described as ‘my brother the god’. It was Harry who had arranged for Eric to go to Winchester. While at Oxford H. A. Siepmann was said to have gained the most brilliant first in Greats since Archbishop William Temple. He was a personal assistant to J. M. Keynes at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 and later became the right-hand man of Montagu Norman when Norman was governor of the Bank. Following his appointment as an executive director of the Bank, Harry was widely expected to succeed as governor.
fn63 Mary had discovered that her cherished brother, Hugh, was a principal witness for Carol and against her in her divorce case. Carol obtained a decree nisi in April 1945 on the grounds of Mary’s desertion. He was given custody of the boys. He continued to pay Mary an allowance and met all the educational expenses. Mary and Carol remained on good terms, however, and they shared the care of the children in the school holidays.
fn64 Wealthy visitor to Boskenna, whose noisy sister-in-law Clare, wife of the Duke of Sutherland, had established herself in the Boskenna stables, much to Mary’s irritation. Ronnie’s wife, Vera, had departed on 29 March, accompanied by her boyfriend Guy Trundle.
fn65 Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci were shot by Italian partisans on 27 April, their bodies photographed in Milan on 28 April. Hitler committed suicide on 30 April.
fn66 Gluck, niece of founder of J. Lyons & Co. and celebrated painter of floral subjects, lover of Constance Spry, lived with bisexual journalist Edith Shackleton Heald – last mistress of W. B. Yeats – at Chantry House, Steyning, Sussex.
fn67 Charles Siepmann, the middle brother, won the Military Cross at the age of nineteen while serving
with the Royal Field Artillery on the Western Front. After leaving Oxford he became a housemaster at Borstal. He was later Director of Talks at the BBC, a key position from which he resigned after a violent argument with the Director General, Lord Reith. He then emigrated to the United States.
fn68 RAF friend of Mary’s who remained devoted to her for the rest of his life.
fn69 Possibly Conservative political writer, author of Democracy and Dictatorship.
fn70 Member of a Russian-British family of virtuoso musicians – Michal, Max, Jan, Boris, etc. Their father had been accused of being German during WWI and had successfully sued for libel after showing that he was of Russian descent and had been a naturalised British subject for twenty years – see the similar story of Max Erstweiler in The Camomile Lawn.
fn71 Annie Maclean, Pauline’s sister-in-law.
fn72 The conference of fifty nations opened on 25 April and drafted the United Nations Charter.
fn73 Pierre Bertaux, pre-war professor of German literature at the University of Toulouse, left-wing anti-Communist. In August 1944 he had survived a machine-gun attack on his car by a pro-Communist Resistance death squad.
fn74 Eric was planning a book on the political situation in France.
fn75 Bill Blackwood, RAF fighter pilot, badly burned in 1940, father of Nicky. His wife Diana had left him.
fn76 Lord Haw Haw, nickname given to William Joyce, an American citizen and naturalised German who broadcast enemy propaganda from Hamburg. He was executed on a trumped-up charge of treason in January 1946.
fn77 John Montagu-Pollock, Mary’s first real boyfriend; ‘Trix’ Macartney, a painter, was supposed to be Mary’s chaperone but had allowed them to get on with it.
fn78 Jennifer Fry, the beautiful muse of John Betjeman, Henry Green and Cyril Connolly – among others – married Robert Heber-Percy in 1942. He threw her out of Faringdon House, Oxfordshire, in 1944, preferring to live there alone with the owner of the house, Lord Berners. The ‘lover’ may have been a soldier called Michael Luke, who was aged eighteen and whom Jennifer once stabbed with a hatpin.
fn79 Alice Grenfell’s teeth had been removed at an early age. This was standard practice in Cornwall and many other parts of England to save dental bills, and was often part of a bride’s wedding preparations.
fn80 Alec Beechman was a National Liberal MP. The National Liberal Party split from the main Liberal Party in 1931 because they opposed Liberal support for Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government. In 1947 they merged with the Conservative Party.
fn81 Joe Boscence, a retired antiques dealer, formerly of Penzance, lived alone in a remote cottage at Sancreed near Land’s End. He was a misanthrope who made an exception for Mary.
fn82 A school friend of Hugh Farmar’s.
fn83 Postwar telephone operators terminated the call after three minutes.
fn84 Robert Boothby, 1st Baron Boothby, an influential Conservative MP and friend of Winston Churchill’s. Lover of Harold Macmillan’s wife, Lady Dorothy; he was bisexual and became involved in old age with an East End gangster, Ronnie, ‘the gay Kray’.
fn85 Brendan Bracken, 1st Viscount Bracken, ex-journalist and wartime minister of information, one of Churchill’s most trusted advisers. As minister, Bracken was head of the Political Warfare Executive whose staff had been transferred into the Psychological Warfare Division, which Eric still wanted to join.
fn86 Charles Sweeney was an American playboy whose first wife Margaret Whigham had broken her engagement to the Earl of Warwick in order to marry him. Following the above discovery, Margaret Sweeney started divorce proceedings and later married the Duke of Argyll. Their divorce case in 1963 became an international scandal; the duke provided the court with a very long list of men who he believed had shared the duchess’s bed, including several Conservative ministers and three members of the royal family.
fn87 Sylvia Stanley, née Hawkes, lingerie model, dancer and actress first married Anthony Ashley-Cooper, Lord Ashley, heir to the Earl of Shaftesbury, in 1927. They were divorced and in 1936 she married Douglas Fairbanks Jr. They were divorced and in 1944 she married Edward Stanley, later 6th Baron Sheffield. They were later divorced and in 1948 she married Clark Gable. They were divorced and in 1954 she married HRH Prince Dimitri Djordjadze of Georgia. They were not divorced and she died childless in Los Angeles in 1977.
fn88 Paul Ziegler was Heinz’s younger brother. During the war he served with the British Army in the London area as an anti-aircraft gunner. Before the war he had been an adviser to Warburg’s Bank and had an affair with Betty Paynter. After the war he decided to become a Benedictine monk and joined the community at Quarr Abbey on the Isle of Wight – where he spent the rest of his life. Sigmund Warburg’s son, George, continued to consult him from time to time on financial matters. Paul remained a good friend of Mary’s and was for a time a strong influence on Toby.
fn89 Mary was pregnant and mistakenly thought that she had miscarried. Hyacinth and Dominick were the names they had chosen for their first child.
fn90 Eric was lodging with Mr and Mrs Devos in Smith Terrace, SW3. Mr Devos was the sommelier at the Ritz.
fn91 Eric’s older sister, married to the Reverend Roger Bankes-Jones.
fn92 The Gargoyle Club in Dean Street, Soho, was a private members’ club. It closed in 1978.
fn93 Founder of the Gargoyle.
fn94 Leonard Ingrams was a banker who had worked at the Political Welfare Executive producing black propaganda during the war. He had been chairman of the pre-war Anglo-German Friendship Society and once flew his private plane between the towers of Cologne Cathedral. He was the father of the writer Richard Ingrams, first editor of Private Eye.
fn95 Bernard Rickatson Hatt, director of the Bank of England.
fn96 Parisian barrister, twice escaped from occupied France to serve with the Free French; wartime lover of Mary’s.
fn97 Apparently another wartime lover of Mary’s.
fn98 Early in their relationship Eric had insisted that Mary give him a list of her previous lovers. She had not asked him for a list of his.
fn99 Robin Fedden was an academic and poet whom Eric had known in Cairo during the war. Mrs Fedden was a friend of Phyllis, Eric’s wife, whom he was striving to divorce.
fn100 Mary had not suffered a miscarriage after all, so had decided to have an abortion.
fn101 A fellow Royal Marine officer and drinking companion.
fn102 In early October the Labour government, which had been elected in July, was faced with a national dock strike. In response, the government sent troops into the docks to prevent an economic crisis. At one point 43,000 dockers were out on strike. The trouble had started in the London docks where the workforce was unofficially organised by Communist Party shop stewards. The 1945 dockers’ strike revealed an ideological fault line within the political left that is still visible today.
fn103 Christina Sandberg, a young lady lodging in Donne Place, familiar with life at Boskenna.
fn104 Paul Hill, Cornish neighbour and a favourite of Mary’s. He was a crooked solicitor who was running a black market in daffodils and butter in partnership with Colonel Paynter, who was a magistrate.
fn105 Sir Humphrey and Sir Roger Mynors were twins, and cousins of Mary’s father, living at Treago Castle, Herefordshire. Sir Humphrey, a baronet, became deputy governor of the Bank of England. Sir Roger was a classicist of both Oxford and Cambridge Universities. He was Roger Swinfen’s godfather.
fn106 Hugh Kingsmill Lunn, prominent journalist, critic, parodist and wit.
fn107 Probably a reference to the Joseph novels.
fn108 In order to make their life together easier Mary decided to change her name by deed poll from Swinfen to Siepmann. Eric then started to address his letters to ‘Mrs Siepmann’ instead of to ‘The Lady Swinfen’. This change of identity was unwise since it enraged Phyllis, the real ‘Mrs Siepmann’, who had not yet agreed to give Eric a divorce, and caused Mary and Eric many years of unhappiness.
fn110 Vernon Bartlett, Independent MP, foreign correspondent and co-author of Journey’s End.
fn111 Masaryk, the first foreign minister of post-war Czechoslovakia, had been the leader of the Czech government-in-exile in London during the war. He had become a friend of Mary’s through his own long friendship with Heinz Ziegler. On 10 March 1948 he was found dead in the courtyard of the Czernin Palace in Prague, beneath his bathroom window. The Communist government said he had committed suicide, but it is accepted today that he had been thrown out of the sixth-floor window by Soviet secret police.
fn112 Art historian, poet and leading resister, Cassou had been appointed Commissaire de la République in Toulouse in 1944 before Eric’s arrival, and had survived a lethal attack by retreating German troops.
fn113 Claud Cockburn, a contemporary of Eric’s at Oxford and a school friend of Graham Greene. In the 1930s he founded and edited an influential political news sheet, The Week, in which he coined the phrase ‘the Cliveden Set’. He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, travelled to Spain during the Civil War, and filed carefully constructed reports to the Daily Worker about imaginary Republican victories.
fn114 Patricia Cockburn, née Arbuthnot, born into the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, was presented at court in 1931, married a wealthy businessman and travelled through the South Seas, India and Africa. On returning to London she kept a pet cheetah, divorced the businessman and married Claud. She and her husband went to live in a tumbledown barracks outside the town of Youghal, Co. Cork, where she bred ponies and made shell pictures. She once broke a Bakelite telephone receiver over the unwelcome grasp of Malcolm Muggeridge.
fn115 Socialist politician and pre-war prime minister of France.
Part 2
fn1 Mary had a second dog, a large mongrel, one of True’s puppies. Both dogs had a lifelong habit of escaping and disappearing into the landscape so that search parties had to be sent out.
fn2 Mary had sent her first attempt at a novel, The Glass Bugle, to the literary agent Spencer Curtis Brown.