I was presented in May. Muv and I waited in a room in the Palace for an hour and a half before making our entrée, while in the background ‘The Donkey’s Serenade’ (So I’ll sing to a mule / If you’re sure she won’t think that I am just a fool / Serenading a mule) played through amplifiers. When it came to our turn, I followed Muv, careful not to step on her train, and curtseyed first to the King and then to the Queen. I was not nervous because I knew exactly what I had to do and everything was so precisely organized, as it always is at Court. We made a quick getaway afterwards to have our photographs taken by Lenare.
One of my first big dances in 1938 was at Chandos House, given by Lady Kemsley for her daughter Ghislaine Dresselhuys. The men armed the girls into dinner – already an old-fashioned custom then – and I was allotted to Lord Howland. The poor fellow was as shy as I was and we felt silly walking down the long passage, clamped unhappily together and with nothing to say. At that age Ian Howland (later the supremely comic Duke of Bedford who brought thousands to Woburn Abbey with his antics) was what we described as ‘wet’. ‘If all the dances are going to be like this,’ I said to Muv, ‘I’m not going.’
My own dance was held at Rutland Gate on 22 March, early in the Season; the bigger, smarter parties took place from May onwards. Three hundred guests were invited, including the familiar sprinkling of elderly uncles and aunts. Basics ran along the usual lines: gold chairs and a butler were hired for the evening, helpers were brought in to greet the guests and serve at table, and a bedroom near a bathroom became a ladies’ cloakroom. (Nanny presided over the Ladies – goodness knows who looked after the Gents.) But the food at supper was not the usual Hunca Munca beef, ham or chicken-à-la-king that we saw every night. Muv had a talent for making the commonplace original. Kedgeree (when the all-wild salmon was real and red) was the best dish imaginable and the guests fell on ours with delight. Instead of ice cream, rich mousses and pastries, she gave us black cherries and Devonshire cream. We ate off eighteenth-century Berlin porcelain decorated with European birds, butterflies and moths; even the steel knives and silver forks had painted china handles. The service had belonged to Warren Hastings and was bought by a Mitford ancestor at the sale to raise funds to pay for Hastings’ trial. Heaven knows how much of this priceless china was smashed in the hurried washing-up after midnight. It is now wrapped in cotton wool at Chatsworth.
Two weeks after my party, I was invited to a dinner given by Lady Blanche Cobbold for her daughter Pamela before Lavinia Pearson’s dance. I sat next to Andrew Cavendish. We were both just eighteen. Ignoring our neighbours, we never stopped talking throughout dinner. That was it for me – the rest of the Season passed in a haze of would-he-wouldn’t-he be there; nothing and nobody else mattered. Meeting him was the beginning and end of everything I had dreamed of. A month later he left for Lyons ‘to learn French’ for a term (I never saw, or rather heard, any evidence of this in later life but it did not seem to matter). I missed him during his absence, but it was all the more exciting when he came back, and we managed to meet at parties time and again.
Three dances stand out in my memory that year. Mrs Kennedy gave a dinner-dance for Kick and her eldest sister Rosemary at the American Embassy in Prince’s Gate on 2 June. My cousin Jean Ogilvy, who came out the year before we did, had taken on the pleasurable task of introducing Kick to her English contemporaries and to the unwritten rules and nuances of social life in this country. It was Jean who helped Kick arrange the seating at table and that was perhaps why I was lucky enough to find myself at Kick’s table with Jean, Elisabeth Moncrieffe, Prince Frederick of Prussia, and, according to my diary, a ‘very dull’, nameless American. The three other men at the table – John Stanley, Robert Cecil and Eric Duncannon – were of a similar age, all heirs to large estates. Ambrose’s famous band played and the cabaret was Harry Richman, brought over from America for the night. But it was the Kennedys themselves who lit up the evening.
Three weeks later the Speaker Fitzroy gave a dance for his granddaughters Anne and Mary at the Speaker’s House. (No one made anything of it at the time but what a fuss there would be now if that historic house were used for such a frivolous purpose, and presumably free to Mr Speaker – a permissible perk that went unquestioned in those days.) The sun was well up over the Houses of Parliament when Muv and I left at 5 a.m. She had had a long wait that night. I remember the taxi-ride home because she was so angry with me. Dancing more than two dances with the same partner was strictly against the unwritten rules, but I was missing Andrew and had danced all night with Mark Howard. I expect Muv had had enough anyway without my bad behaviour. My diary for the next day says, ‘Very dull day’, and ‘Duller still’ the following. Perhaps this was a result of Muv’s anger; it was rare for her to give us a ticking-off and it made a strong impression.
On 1 July I went to a ball at Bowood House in Wiltshire, for the coming of age of Charlie Lansdowne who, with his younger brother Ned Fitzmaurice, had become my great friends. After Andrew, I loved them best. The main house at Bowood, a large square Adam block, was still standing (it was pulled down after the war) and there was ample room for hundreds of guests. The garden with its eye-catching lake and cottage are set in the sort of idyllic eighteenth-century landscape that makes you gasp at the sheer beauty and Englishness of it. It was the most enjoyable evening I remember of all the glorious evenings we had that year. Andrew was back from Lyons and he and Tom Egerton stayed at the Swan Inn in Swinbrook. A girlfriend and I stayed next door at the Mill Cottage, which Farve rented after selling the Swinbrook estate. Tom and Andrew had met, aged thirteen, on their first day at Eton and remained lifelong friends. I too had grown to love Tom, and Andrew and I seldom planned anything that did not include him. Like Andrew, he was in the Coldstream Guards during the war and became famous in the regiment for rescuing the marmalade from the Officers’ Mess at the Siege of Tobruk.
At the end of July, Andrew and I went to stay at Compton Place, his parents’ house in Eastbourne, for Goodwood races. Also staying were Tom Egerton, Robert Cecil, my friends Irene (Rene) Haig, Zara Mainwaring and Jakie Astor. Andrew’s brother, Billy Hartington, had invited Kick. Rene must have been irritated by Kick joining the party because until then she had been Billy’s favourite. In September we all went to Cortachy Castle, Jean Ogilvy’s home, for the Perth races and the Highland balls. After the riotous fun at Compton Place, we had to be on our guard when we got to Cortachy under the critical eye of Bridget Airlie, Jean’s mother. Hugh Fraser and Andrew got into trouble for running on to the Perth racecourse in front of the crowds and jumping the water jump.
Kick had by now become part of the scene and was as much with Billy as I was with Andrew. The rest of the Kennedy family were in the South of France that summer but Kick had struck out and was determined to spend those few days with Billy. Rose Kennedy, a forceful character of whom all her children were in awe, was not pleased and I wondered what reception Kick would get when she eventually joined her family. As far as Mrs Kennedy, a staunch Catholic, was concerned, it was out of the question for Kick to marry Billy because he was a practising Protestant. Kick went back to America when war was declared, but her heart was in England and in 1943 she returned, ostensibly to work for the American Red Cross, but really to join Billy; and despite the opposition from both families, they were soon engaged.
In August I got a stiff letter from Muv, who was in Germany with Unity, criticizing me for going to Castle Howard without telling her and spelling out what was expected of me when I stayed with Andrew. ‘I hope if you went to Derbyshire that the Duchess invited you to visit and not only Andrew, as I do not wish you to visit about at the invitation of this boy or that.’ By this time Andrew and I considered ourselves unofficially engaged but there were some hiccups. He became fond of Dinah Brand, a niece of Nancy Astor, and more or less deserted me for her. I minded terribly and had gone to Castle Howard to dry my eyes. He also liked the look of Maxine Birley, daughter of the painter Oswald Birley – a real beau
ty of whom I was deeply jealous. For a while Andrew and I did not meet, but then all obstacles seemed to dissolve and we took up as though we had never left off.
Like Farve, Andrew was very much a second son. His parents, Eddy and Mary (always known as ‘Moucher’) Devonshire, adored their elder son, Billy, the epitome of all that was good, clever and handsome. When they were in London, the Devonshires leased No. 2 Carlton Gardens from the Crown Estates (Devonshire House had been sold in the 1920s). These big London houses were built for entertaining, not for family life, and the grander the house, the less the younger members of the family and the household staff were considered. Andrew had no bedroom at Carlton Gardens and slept on a camp bed in his mother’s sitting room. Edward, the butler, slept in a cupboard on the stairs.
In the autumn term of 1938 Andrew went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he enjoyed himself to the full. Unlike me and my girlfriends, he and his friends were conscious of the looming danger of a war and this added to their frenetic search for pleasure. They got into scrapes and baited the Proctors to within an inch of being sent down. They drank too much, danced all night and rode hopeless hirelings in point-to-points. There was a rule that undergraduates had to be back in College by 6 a.m. and there were many early morning accidents as they raced back from London to be in on time. Andrew had a lucky escape when the car he was sharing with two friends overturned, landed on top of him and damaged one of his kidneys beyond repair. He was in hospital for a month and told me that his time there conveniently coincided with end of first year exams, so he did not have to take them. He was greatly relieved as he was sure he would have failed. After one escapade, Bernard van Cutsem, later Andrew’s racehorse trainer, was described on a newspaper hoarding of the Cambridge News as ‘MILLIONAIRE JESUS PLAYBOY’. Anyone not conversant with the names of the Cambridge Colleges might have wondered at this headline.
Newmarket was near by and more time was spent at the races than at lectures. I do not think Andrew or any of his friends went in much for learning – it came a long way down their scale of priorities. There were exceptions, of course, and there was a sharp drawing-in of breath when George Jellicoe, one of the principal party-goers, got a First in modern history. Andrew planned to visit me at the Mill Cottage. As he did not drive, he came by rail, cross-country from Cambridge to Oxford, but missed three trains running. I drove the nineteen miles to Oxford Station and back to meet him off each one. Muv grew exasperated and said, ‘I should give up seeing him if I were you, he’s unreliable.’ I went to see him at Cambridge just once and even I, philistine that I am, was stunned by the beauty of the place.
The spring and summer of 1939 brought more freedom for me, now an ex-debutante. I was invited to a few dances and was allowed to see Andrew unchaperoned. Our meeting place was often Keith Prowse in Bond Street, where we spent hours listening to 78 r.p.m. records in enclosed, so-called soundproof, booths. We lunched at Luigi’s in Jermyn Street, the embodiment of new-found freedom, where a minute steak and all that went with it, including a bottle of wine, cost a guinea. (When war broke out Luigi was bundled off to Canada as an Enemy Alien – anyone less of an enemy I cannot imagine.) The place for evening entertainment was the Café de Paris. It was expensive and a rare treat. We were sometimes invited by friends, but often it was Andrew who paid. The cabaret never failed to be the best: Beatrice Lillie and Douglas Byng were the funniest; Frances Day, who sang ‘It’s De Lovely’, the most glamorous; and the black band leader, Ken ‘Snakehips’ Johnson, was fascinating to look at. The last tune, signalling that it was time to go home, was always ‘Goodnight Sweetheart’.
After war was declared, the Café de Paris went on as if nothing had happened – best dresses for women, uniforms for the men who had joined up and black tie for the others. In March 1941 when the bombing was at its height, the Café de Paris received a direct hit and many people were killed, including Snakehips, aged only twenty-six. An acquaintance of mine who passed by on foot later that night (the raid was so bad that even the taxis had gone home) said that he would not have believed the corpses and the mixture of blood and jewels had he not seen it with his own eyes.
The nightclub we loved best was the 400 in Leicester Square. Drink laws at the time were peculiar: members could buy a bottle of spirits, write their name and the date on it, and on their next visit the unfinished bottle would be waiting for them. Sometimes overseas service meant a long absence for a member, but the bottle was always there. A hazard at the 400 was that it was also a favourite of Andrew’s father, who was apt to sit at a table near the narrow entrance with his friend Lady Dufferin. We had to pass close by, which was embarrassing for Andrew and Billy. In an attempt at anonymity, my future father-in-law labelled his bottles with the name of a fish beginning with ‘H’ (for his courtesy title ‘Hartington’). Billy and Andrew discovered this and would ask Mr Rossi, the maître d’hôtel, ‘Have you got a bottle belonging to Mr Hake or Herring or Halibut?’
This way of life cost Andrew far more than his allowance and he owed money to his tailor and bookmaker. After a day’s racing at Brighton, he was chased by a Ladbroke’s man the length of the train at Victoria Station. His long, nineteen-year-old legs enabled him to escape into the crowd, but the bills kept coming. One extravagance he did not fall for was a car of his own. He never liked the idea of driving and only did so under duress – and to the terror of his passengers. When he was in Italy during the war, he sometimes had to take the wheel but never afterwards. I became the driver when we married, except when he was on some official engagement and then the chauffeur drove.
On 6 July 1939 the last grand ball before the war was given at Holland House by Lady Ashcombe for her daughter Rosalind Cubitt. The King and Queen were there and it was full of friends – so many that it was difficult to circulate in the succession of small rooms of the old Elizabethan house. It rained so hard that arriving guests had to queue for an hour and a quarter because only one car at a time could drop its passengers under the covered porch. The awful weather was somehow a portent of things to come; most of us realized that it was the last time we would see anything like it and in spite of being one of the best parties of the Season, it was also a kind of farewell.
8
War
I
N 1938, SOON after the sale of Swinbrook, my father saw an advertisement for Inch Kenneth, a small island in the Inner Hebrides off the west coast of Mull. He went to look at it, fell under its spell and bought it. Perhaps the fact that it was so far away made the island all the more attractive. Muv went to see it for herself and her love of Scotland and the sea made her pleased with it. The house with its modern exterior – the latest addition was built in 1934 – fits surprisingly well into the landscape. Sheltered to the north by a hill and fearsome cliffs, it faces south on to white sands and small coves. The ruins of the ancient chapel of St Kenneth, a follower of St Columbus, are close by and there is a farmstead and walled kitchen garden. I veered between wanting to live there for the rest of my life and hating it. The weather was more important than in any place I have ever known: sublime when it was fine and the distant islands seemed to hover above the sea, infinitely depressing when the weather closed in and there was no escape until it was calm again. I was on Inch Kenneth with Muv, Farve and Nancy on 3 September 1939, the day war was declared. The farm man, John McFadyen, was called up immediately. He came to the house in his uniform of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders to say goodbye and we were all in the kitchen in floods, including him. (He came back safely, I am happy to say.) I was left with three cows to milk. Two were of uncertain lineage but with a distinctly Shorthorn look, the third was a lovely little Jersey heifer, a first calver – on the skittish side. The cows’ routine was sacrosanct: morning milking at about 7.30 a.m., then they were turned out to graze till 5 p.m. when the evening milking was due.
I do not know how many of my dear readers have milked a cow – not just tried their hand at it but been in total charge of this wonderful animal
, who would be in considerable pain if left unmilked. The best part is burying your head into the warm and comforting flank; the worst is the flick of a tail over your eyes or hair, with a thin wet film of muck. Each cow is different. The older Shorthorns were relatively easy – their big floppy teats yielding the milk with a satisfying sizzle and spurt, hitting the bucket held tight between my knees. The little Jersey was my trouble. Her teats were short and embedded in her udder. The double squeeze which brings the milk was hard on my hands, using unaccustomed muscles. Had I been a pianist, the muscles might have been ready and waiting, but no such luck, and the sharp ache in my fingers and across the back of my hands became acute. I cut my nails as short as I dared to spare the flesh on the lower part of my palms, but even the satisfaction of an endless supply of fresh milk and enough cream to please the greediest seemed a high price to pay for the pain. The poor little Jersey was restless and I was in despair when a cow kick (a hind leg flashed forward – the opposite of a horse’s kick) turned me and the bucket over. The three-legged milking stool was upside down with the rest. Being told not to cry over spilt milk is ridiculous; of course you cry when all that effort goes to waste.
As soon as war was declared, we feared for Unity. She had always said that in the event of war between England and Germany, her life would be over. True to her word she went to a public park in Munich, took out the small mother-of-pearl pistol she had bought for the purpose (she used to show it to us, telling us what she would do with it) and fired a bullet into her right temple. My parents were well aware of her threat and when they heard nothing from her they suffered the same awful anxiety as they had when Decca disappeared – not knowing whether she was alive or dead. Communications with Germany during the Phoney War were uncertain but eventually they heard from Teddy Almásy, János’s brother, who wrote from neutral Hungary to say that Unity was ill in hospital but was being well looked after. The letter arrived on 2 October. There was no further news for six weeks. We were at Rutland Gate on Christmas Eve when the telephone rang. It was János, who was with Unity. He had taken her on an ambulance train from Munich to Berne, arranged by Hitler who kept in touch with her progress. ‘When are you coming to fetch me?’ Unity asked. To Muv she sounded her old self.
Wait for Me! Page 12