by Mary Wesley
fn40 Mary’s brother, Hugh Farmar, had been appointed Clerk to the Worshipful Company of Drapers, a wealthy and charitable City livery association, in 1952.
fn41 Hertford Street by Shepherd Market, a popular area for prostitutes.
fn42 Eric was waiting for repayment of overpaid tax.
fn43 Violet Bonham Carter, born in 1887, daughter of Liberal prime minister Herbert Asquith, close to Winston Churchill when young, prominent and opinionated public figure, mother-in-law of Liberal Party leader Jo Grimond. Eric had known her since he was a schoolboy.
fn44 Eric’s sister Edith had proposed a visit to Thornworthy.
fn45 Mary has been concerned about the undue attention Philippe has been paying to the younger Jacques. She compares Philippe to the brilliant and seductive character of Steerforth in David Copperfield.
fn46 Averil Knowles, second wife of Carol Swinfen. They had married in 1950 and settled in Ireland. Roger and Toby regularly spent part of the school holidays with them.
fn47 In 1954, Edward Douglas-Scott-Montagu, 3rd Baron Montagu of Beaulieu, was convicted of sexual activity with an adult male on his own property and sentenced to twelve months in prison. The case caused a public scandal, with the Conservative home secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, ensuring that it received maximum publicity. The eventual consequence was widespread sympathy for the accused and a change in the law.
fn48 Roger, aged 19, had decided to join the Royal Scots, much against Mary’s wishes. This regiment was one of the few not to have been affected by severe defence budget cuts.
fn49 Toby’s Ziegler family, his grandfather and uncle, were bankers in Prague.
fn50 Mary is concerned that Carol’s second wife will object to the money he is spending on the education of Roger and Toby.
fn51 The German-Jewish Warburg banking family had emigrated from Hamburg in the 1930s. As the sons of Lord Swinfen, Roger and Toby were entitled to the courtesy title of ‘The Honourable’. Eric is suggesting that it might be a good idea to establish that Toby was a Ziegler.
fn52 Emily Holmes Coleman, American author of The Shutter of Snow, pre-war girlfriend of Eric’s, ultra-devout convert to Catholicism, made regular retreats at the Benedictine Abbey of Stanbrook.
fn53 Toby wanted to pursue his new friendship with Dom Paul Ziegler, a member of the Benedictine community at Quarr Abbey. Unknown to Toby at the time, Paul Ziegler was his uncle.
fn54 Eric apparently thinks that the counter-tenors in the Westminster Cathedral choir are castrati.
fn55 Monsignor Ronald Knox, Latinist, biblical translator and prominent apologist for Catholicism to which he had converted in 1917; died aged sixty-nine.
fn56 Malcolm Muggeridge resigned the editorship of Punch due to proprietorial interference. He said that the last straw was censorship of a cartoon showing an elderly man sitting up in bed beside a naked young lady. There was a tumbler of water on the table within her reach. He was saying: ‘Hand me my teeth. I want to bite you.’
fn57 Mary is faced with the consequences of her wartime decision to have three children by three different fathers. Toby believes that his father is Carol and is ignorant of the fact that his father was Heinz Ziegler, brother of Dom Paul Ziegler. Meanwhile Carol has not yet committed to paying for Toby to go to university.
fn58 In 1958, instead of telling Toby, Mary wrote an account of her life (unpublished), intending to explain herself to her three sons. She called it The Fruits of My Follies, but she kept it to herself.
fn59 Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, post-war British High Commissioner for Germany, had retired as Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs – head of the Foreign Office – in February and was now chairman of the Independent Television Authority.
fn60 Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg was the officer who planted the bomb in the conference room at the Wolf’s Lair, German military HQ in northern Poland, on 20 July 1944 in an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Hitler. Von Stauffenberg was executed immediately after the failure of the plot. His sons were aged ten and six at the time.
fn61 Graham Greene had just published A Burnt-Out Case, described by Evelyn Waugh in a letter to Greene as ‘a recantation of faith’.
fn62 Mary and Eric had been in Rome in 1950 when Pope Pius XII, speaking infallibly, had defined the dogma of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven. They had light-heartedly considered making a public demonstration against this proposition.
fn63 Father Gabriel Arnold, monk of Buckfast, serving the parish of Ashburton.
fn64 Father Stephen was the parish priest, not a monk of Buckfast.
fn65 Emily Coleman and Phyllis Jones. Jones was a friend of Antonia White’s and typed for her and Coleman. When Coleman moved to a cottage in the grounds of Stanbrook Abbey, Jones had moved in for a time with Mary and Eric at Thornworthy.
fn66 The Shoes of the Fisherman by Morris West, a worldwide bestseller about the election of a Slav pope.
fn67 Hans Kung, a Swiss theologian who had become a leading reforming influence at the Second Vatican Council.
fn68 Anniversary of their reception into the Catholic Church. This had actually taken place in August 1956.
fn69 £40 today.
fn70 Diana Rigg, star of the television series The Avengers, had just opened as Viola in a Royal Shakespeare company production of Twelfth Night.
fn71 My Life and Loves, an imaginative autobiography, was first published in 1922 and promptly banned all over the world. The Adventurers by Harold Robbins was published in 1966. In 1970 it was made into a film – regularly cited as one of the worst films ever made.
fn72 Eric is recalling an incident from his days as a Sunday Times correspondent in 1950.