Wait for Me!

by Deborah Devonshire

  When my father inherited Batsford, it was obvious to him that his old home would have to be sold. Soon after the end of the war, a buyer was found in Gilbert Wills, later Lord Dulverton, chairman of the tobacco company W. D. & H. O. Wills, makers of the Virginian cigarettes Farve always smoked. Gilbert and my father became lifelong friends. Farve seldom stayed in other people’s houses but made an exception for Gilbert and joined him in Scotland to shoot grouse on a moor rented from Lord Cawdor. (After the Second World War, Nancy was asked by the film director Alexander Korda to work on a script. She was proud of this coup and told my father about it. ‘What?’ he said, incredulous. ‘I never knew old Jack Cawdor was interested in films.’) Farve did not care for Gilbert’s wife, Victoria, and, to irritate her, took his own apples and Keiller’s Dundee marmalade – ‘my anti-scorbutics’ – whenever he went to stay. When we asked him why he did it, he said he did not want to get scurvy and could not ‘rely on her housekeeping’.

  Our own household added up to too many women; a wife, six daughters and a governess at every meal must have made Farve long for male company. This he found at the Marlborough Club and in the House of Lords. I am glad for his sake (and for theirs) that peeresses in their own right did not arrive in the House until after Farve died. Although he was a firm believer in the hereditary system, the idea of women making a nuisance of themselves in those hallowed surroundings would have ‘fair turned him up’, to put it in his own language. As for life peeresses, I can imagine his reaction to that ‘army of unkempt females’, all ‘lower than the belly of a snake’. As it was he enjoyed his work, representing the needs of country people. He was thorough and served on several committees, chairing the one to do with drains. I expect it had a grander name but drains was its job. He brought a world of common sense, unknown to politicians today, to these deliberations. He came back from London with rich tales of his fellow peers, all told in his deadpan way, with the ancient titles of Black Rod and Sergeant-at-Arms trotted out as though they were next-door neighbours. According to him, Lord Someone-or-Other had ‘passed a motion on the floor of the House . . . (long pause) . . . and left it on the paper for weeks’. To us, used to cleaning up dogs’ messes on the floor of our house, this was screamingly funny.

  In May 1934 Farve moved rejection of Lord Salisbury’s Private Member’s Bill to reform the House of Lords. Reform had been discussed for years and was to be mooted for another six decades before it was eventually passed. In his speech my father said, prophetically, that those who wished for reform did so because they were afraid that if a Socialist government came to power, it would want to abolish the House of Lords. If it found a reformed Upper Chamber, however, it might tolerate it. ‘But would they?’ asked my father. ‘Let their lordships make no mistake, they would not. Such a government would tolerate precisely nothing that interfered in any way with their plans and arrangements, and they would abolish anything that did. They would find no greater difficulty in abolishing a Constitution made in 1934 than one of greater antiquity.’ (All but ninety-two hereditary peers were turned out of the House of Lords in 1999 by Prime Minister Blair, who had no plan with which to replace them; a stranger to common sense, he preferred the grand gesture and the big spin.)

  In the same speech – he was known as ‘the peer of but a single speech’ – Farve reiterated his faith in the hereditary principle. He believed that a man who had spent all his life in politics or public affairs was more likely to have a son capable of following in his footsteps than a man who had never paid attention to either, ‘especially when that son had been brought up in the atmosphere of public work and in the knowledge that the day would come when he would have to bear his part in that work’. The idea of public service is so out of fashion now that to mention it is to court criticism, even ridicule. Jack Kennedy’s words, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country’, have been turned on their head. Yet you only have to think for a moment to realize that there is much sense in what Farve believed.

  When it came to business my father was easily tempted by romantic ideas of making a quick fortune. In 1912 he joined the gold rush to Canada but, unlucky as always, the ground he staked out was the only bit for miles around where there was no gold. He believed everyone to be as honest as he was and gullibility made him an easy target for charlatans. On a legendary occasion, one Andia (Marquis of) persuaded him to invest in a business that made tasteful cabinets for hiding wirelesses, which in those days were huge and hideous. It all ended in court with the ‘Marquis’ suing for slander. The case was dismissed and Andia unmasked. Randolph Churchill went to the court hearing with his sister Diana (their mother was Farve’s first cousin). ‘It’s so unfair,’ said Diana, ‘Cousin David was bound to win because he looks like God the Father.’

  I never knew my mother in her full beauty. She was forty when I was born, sixteen years after Nancy. Like my father, she had blonde hair and blue eyes, and her fine, regular features were a softer version of his. Totally without vanity, she did not seem to care what she looked like in everyday life, but when dressed up for an occasion she outshone her contemporaries. She loved clothes but possessed few and must have worn the same ones for years. I remember individual coats, skirts and dresses and an occasional evening dress; they were always original and exactly right for her. She was selfless to a rare degree and lived for her husband, children and other dependants. She belonged to a generation of women who were brought up to accept their husband’s decisions and to make the best of their circumstances. ‘For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer,’ were the widely accepted conditions of marriage then.

  Muv has been written about in books and newspapers, not because she sought recognition but because of her daughters. She is usually portrayed as vague, undemonstrative and cold, but I do not recognize her from this description. Vague she may have seemed to strangers, but she noticed and always understood our worries, real or imagined, and carried out her role as mother, wife and housekeeper in a way that a vague woman could never have done. In the 1920s and 30s she was responsible for what now seems an enormous indoor staff, as well as her family. She must have been sorely tried by us and there was seldom a day when a meal went smoothly. She presided above the noise, pretending not to notice the quick exit, banged door and tears, or the uncontrolled laughter sparked off by the silliest remark. She would sometimes go into a kind of reverie, abstracting herself from the ceaseless banter but remaining still present, a much-needed influence for calm. Telling Muv something thrilling or frightening seldom evoked more than, ‘Orrnnhh, Stubby, fancy’; or ‘Did you really? I do hope not.’ She had heard it all before, of course, from each sister in turn. She rarely gave advice and when she did it was to underline what Nanny said, ‘Don’t draw attention to yourself.’ Muv tried to prevent what she called ‘announcements’ such as ‘I’m just going to wash my hands,’ ‘I’m going upstairs,’ or, a shade more worthy, ‘Help, I’ve forgotten to feed the guinea pigs.’ She said, oh-so-truly, ‘All that is not of interest to anyone.’ What none of us realized at the time was just how much she taught us by her own example – and I cannot imagine a better one. By the time we were old enough to be aware of this, it was too late to tell her.

  I have never known anyone as fair as Muv. She had neither favourites nor victims. That alone must have been almost impossible with such a disparate lot of girls, with diverse personalities and interests. Whether her disappointment every time another girl was born had an effect on us, perhaps a psychiatrist could say; certainly I was never aware of it. Tom, being the only boy, was always the exception. Her insight into the characters of each of her daughters gave her an uncanny knowledge of what we were doing; she did not have to be told by a busybody friend, she knew by instinct. We (or certainly Unity, Decca and me – I was too young to know about the older ones) were aware of this and our feeling of guilt when overstepping the mark was a steadying influence. Long after it was all over Muv told me that each daughter had had two or t
hree years of adolescent rebelliousness or just bad temper, which had made life difficult for everyone in the house. As there were six of us, she went through twelve years of this kind of tension and it is not surprising that she retreated into her own thoughts from time to time. Her deafness in old age increased the impression she gave of being miles away. Two naughty grandsons fighting each other almost to the death said with glee, ‘Granny Muv doesn’t mind, she’s so lovely and deaf.’

  My sisters complained that she was strict. Perhaps after trying to make five girls stick to the rules she got tired of saying no and I was allowed a little more rope – but only a little as the tramlines of approved behaviour were still in force. It was not till the 1939 war that circumstances swept these away. One surprising indulgence was that I was allowed to go out hunting alone from the age of twelve. A friend of mine, an only child who longed to do the same, told her mother about this. ‘Oh, it’s all right for Lady Redesdale,’ said the mother, ‘she’s got five more girls so it doesn’t matter if anything happens to Debo.’ As ever, my mother’s reasoning was wise: out hunting someone is always around to look after you, but my friend was still forbidden.

  My mother liked figures. She remembered our London telephone number, Kensington 6476, by saying ‘six for seven-and-six is one-and-three each’. Her household account books recorded every penny she spent: ‘Utensils 15s 9d, Cleaning Materials 1s 2d, Vegetables 2s 10d’. In 1933 the under parlourmaid was paid £18 a year, Nanny £74 (up from £45 when she first arrived) and Mr and Mrs Stobie, the cook and gardener, £116. We all knew that if Muv had been in charge of our family finances everything might have been different. As it was, she had to juggle with what she was given and somehow remain solvent; intuition took her in the right direction and she never overspent. She was the one who put down roots and became part of the place where she lived, and it was she who bore the brunt of my father’s extravagances and unlucky investments. It must have been hard for her each time we moved but I never heard her say so. I wonder now how much Farve told her when another crisis was building up. As children, none of us was privy to such discussions – if indeed they took place. Money was not spoken about as it is now, when it is often the sole subject of conversation, with a bit of illness thrown in.

  Muv told me that had she had to earn her living she would have been happy as the woman at the caisse in a Paris restaurant, usually a formidable female dressed in black who sat enclosed in a raised glass cage above the tables and collected the cash from the diners’ bills. The nearest Muv got to her ambition was to be County Treasurer of the Oxfordshire Federation of Women’s Institutes. When she was totting up at the end of the year, a few pence out caused her major anxiety and we knew to keep out of her way. She was determined that we should all be as good managers as she was, and she started us off with a few pence a week pocket money. We graduated at the age of twelve to what was grandly called ‘an allowance’, eleven shillings a month, out of which we had to buy stockings, gloves, sweets, presents and any other extras we wanted. The amount was increased annually, bringing more responsibility, until we were seventeen and £100 a year had to cover most of our travelling as well as a complete wardrobe. When you compare our allowance with the wages of my parents’ indoor staff, the Great Unfairness of Life is brought home.

  When I was about ten, Muv got us all together to test our future housekeeping skills for an as yet unknown husband. Under the headings ‘rent, rates, wages, heating, cleaning materials, food, clothes, travelling, and other necessities’, she instructed us to account for an income of £500 a year. We pored over our sheet of paper, trying our best to apportion the money. Nancy finished almost before the rest of us had started. We read out our proposals and when it came to her turn, she waved her paper and said, ‘Flowers: £499. Everything else: £1.’ Muv gave up.

  Muv’s own childhood was unconventional, to say the least. Her mother, Jessica Bowles, née Evans-Gordon, died in 1887 when expecting her fifth child. Sydney was just seven years old. The family consisted of two brothers, George and Geoffrey, and Sydney and her younger sister Dorothy, known as Weenie all her life. A governess, Miss Henrietta Shell (Tello), joined them soon after their mother’s death.

  Sydney’s father, Thomas Gibson Bowles, was illegitimate – a fact of no consequence now but in the second half of the nineteenth century the sins of the father were visited on the children and his origins carried a slur. His was an unusual case in that he was brought up by his father, Thomas Milner Gibson, a Radical MP, and little is known about his mother, a Miss Susan Bowles. When he was three years old Tommy Bowles was taken to live at his father’s house in Suffolk (Mrs Milner Gibson must have been a generous woman to include him in her own brood). No public school would accept an illegitimate boy, so from the age of twelve he was educated in France. After a brief stint as a junior clerk in the Succession Duty office at Somerset House, he became a freelance journalist and magazine publisher, and was elected to Parliament in 1892.

  Tommy Bowles’ brains, forceful character and originality of thought made him a man to be reckoned with and he was a strong influence on his children. The sea was his passion. He held a master mariner’s certificate and spent as much time as possible on board ship. After the death of his wife, he sold Cleeve Lodge, the house near the Royal Albert Hall in Kensington where he and Jessica had lived since their marriage, and moved his family to the country. But he could not settle to life in England and in August 1888 set off in his schooner, the Nereid, to Egypt and the Holy Land, taking with him Miss Shell, his four children and a dog. My mother was eight and Weenie only three. The eight-month voyage made a deep impression on the children. A habit learned at sea stayed with Muv all her life: the fear of running out of fresh drinking-water meant she never filled a glass, even of tap water, more than one-third full.

  The Nereid was nearly wrecked in a hurricane off the coast of Syria, Grandfather having left Alexandria against the advice of the port authorities. Muv’s account of the storm and their eventual safe landing enthralled us as children. Many years later she told me that they set sail in such dangerous conditions because Grandfather had discovered that while he was away exploring Upper Egypt, Tello was having an affair with a young naval officer. Muv remembered the man coming on board the Nereid and singing, ‘You Are the Queen of my Heart Tonight’. Grandfather, who was enamoured of Tello himself, was so angry he insisted on leaving immediately.

  Tello went out of the children’s lives for some years after they returned to England. Then one day my mother was walking down Sloane Street when she saw, to her joy, Tello accompanied by four little boys in sailor suits. It transpired that the eldest was the son of the naval officer in Alexandria, but the next three were sired by Grandfather and were my mother’s half-brothers. He had forgiven Tello her peccadillo, set her up in a house in London and made her editor of The Lady, a position she held for many years. My mother always wondered why he had not married her but guessed it would have been because of the eldest boy. Tello and Muv took up their friendship where they had left off and after her marriage Muv often invited her old governess to stay at Asthall. Tello was an inspired storyteller and we delighted in her company.

  Back from the voyage, Grandfather took his family to Wilbury House, in Wiltshire, belonging to Sir Henry Malet. Sir Henry was hard up and had welcomed Grandfather’s offer to share the household expenses. My mother was not fond of the daughter of the house, Vera, with whom she had to do lessons, but the beautiful Palladian house made a lasting impression on her at an age when sensitive children notice the details of their surroundings. Muv never again lived in a fine eighteenth-century house like Wilbury, her ideal, but her ability to make her succession of houses attractive and original on little money was one of her outstanding talents. Her stamp was unmistakable and I thought the results perfection. Junk shops drew her like a magnet and in the streets behind Marylebone Station she found bargains in furniture, china and anything that took her fancy. She never employed a decorator or sought ad
vice; she knew what she wanted and got it done. When she was first married and living in a small house in Graham Street, Pimlico, she was amazed when a fashionable older woman asked her, ‘Is your drawing room green and white or white and green?’ To her chagrin Muv had to admit that it was indeed white and green. This must have been the nearest she ever came to following a trend.

  Grandfather was MP for King’s Lynn from 1892 to 1906 and when the House was sitting the family lived at No. 25 Lowndes Square. When Muv was fourteen, her father gave her the job of running his household, which she performed to his entire satisfaction. Not only did he have a beautiful daughter but a dependable housekeeper too. Grandfather had other lady friends besides Tello, including Lady Sykes, whom my mother particularly disliked and whose visits she dreaded. She described her as ‘drinking and painting her face too much’ – both were habits Muv abhorred.

  The widowed father did not wish to cope with dressing his two daughters so he decided they should wear thick serge sailor suits, day and evening, winter and summer, at home or away. Not till Muv was eighteen did a woman friend of Grandfather’s tell him that it was time for her to be dressed more conventionally. One evening he was the guest of honour at a dinner given in Hammersmith Town Hall by the mayor. He was ready to leave, dressed in tails and a white waistcoat, but could not find Sydney who was to accompany him. So he called Weenie, who was in the garden with the dogs. Still in her grubbiest sailor suit, with no time to wash or tidy, she grabbed her cap and was whisked off. The elegant ladies in gloves, gowns and jewels must have been surprised to see her being led into dinner on the arm of the mayor and placed on his right at the top table. Muv and Weenie were used to their father’s eccentric behaviour. He never gave them birthday or Christmas presents and when they complained that their friends all got something, he rounded on them saying that he housed, fed, watered, clothed and educated them and that was enough.