By 1940 the Free French had their headquarters in London and it was there that Nancy met Gaston Palewski, General de Gaulle’s chief of staff. He was the lover she had been waiting for all her life and she fell for him hook, line and sinker. Gaston, always called ‘Colonel’ by Nancy, was in some ways an English person’s idea of a typical Frenchman: not only did he adore women, he showed it (which does not often happen in England). He was not handsome, but the speed of his clever talk soon made you forget his appearance. He had studied at Oxford and somehow knew reams of English poetry, nursery rhymes and quintessentially English jokes. He was as good a tease as Nancy and used to go on at her until she said, ‘Oh Colonel, do shut up.’ I got to know him in Paris after the war when staying with Nancy and became fond of him. He was one of those people you instantly felt you had known all your life.
Nancy spent much of the war working at Heywood Hill’s bookshop in Mayfair. Heywood and his wife, Anne, had been her friends for years and he made a wise choice when he invited her to join the staff. No sooner did she appear in the Curzon Street shop than all her friends and acquaintances followed. In the bookshop, she was pinned down, available for chat anytime during business hours. Sometimes the laughter grew a bit much for serious book buyers and one customer said pointedly, ‘May I be allowed to buy this volume please?’ But the business Nancy brought was worth more than the odd lost sale. Household names from the writing fraternity, who also happened to be her friends, gathered at the shop and customers could see at close quarters what are now called ‘celebrities’.
The wages were meagre, £3 10s a week, and Nancy was so short of money that she usually walked the two miles home to Blomfield Road to save the bus fare. On one flush day she was waiting in the queue at the bus stop in Park Lane after dark when a huge black American soldier came up and hugged her. ‘Go away,’ she screamed, ‘I’m FORTY.’ At one point she became a firewatcher and was asked to give lectures on fire-fighting. These soon came to an end. When she enquired why, she was told, ‘Well, you see, it’s your voice. We’ve had several complaints, someone even wrote in and said they wanted to put you on the fire.’
Enough has been written about the war for people who did not live through it to know that it brought tragedies and upheavals to everyone’s lives. For each inhabitant of the British Isles there was a tale to tell. In our family, an unexpected sadness was my parents’ decision to separate. The events leading up to the war – Decca’s elopement and estrangement, Unity’s attachment to Nazism, Diana’s relationship with Sir O – had all poisoned life at home. Added to this was Muv and Farve’s fundamental disagreement over Germany. At first, Farve had been impressed by Hitler but, as a born patriot, from the day war was declared he publicly renounced his former opinion and stood firmly behind the government. Muv refused to consider Hitler a threat and believed that it was a mistake to go to war. Neither of these strong characters would budge from their positions and it was painful in the extreme to see their unhappiness. Farve was permanently cross and for the first time I saw my mother truly angry.
Unity’s suicide attempt was the last straw. Farve could not bear to see the day-in day-out hopelessness of her condition, which seemed to embody all the suffering brought on by the war. It became clear that he and Muv would be better apart so that the wireless news and propaganda would not provide daily fuel for their arguments. Muv never talked to me about the situation but I was, of course, acutely aware of it. Farve retreated to Inch Kenneth with Margaret Wright, who had been parlourmaid and later housekeeper at the Mews when 26 Rutland Gate was sold. Margaret was handsome and competent at her job but she was not used to the rough and tumble of family life. I felt her to be critical of my sisters and me – the opposite of Mabel – and she gave all her attention to Farve. She was one of those highly conventional women whose answer, in a prissy voice, you could guess before you had asked the question. She was such a boring companion that I often wondered how Farve could stand it, but he found her restful and undemanding. There was never any danger of a political argument and after a while she became indispensable to him.
These must have been terrible months for my poor mother. Added to her feelings about the war was the unhappiness of her marriage going awry, the ongoing worry of Unity’s condition, Diana’s imprisonment and Decca losing her soulmate in harrowing and uncertain circumstances. My own life was humdrum and almost carefree in comparison. According to Nancy, I was ‘having a wild time with young cannon fodders at the Ritz’, which was only partly true. Soon after the outbreak of war I worked in a canteen for servicemen at St Pancras Station and after Unity came home I did the same in Edinburgh to be with my Ogilvy cousins.
When war was declared, Andrew wanted to join the Coldstream Guards, in which his brother Billy was already serving as an officer, but there was a rush to join up and Andrew was told that he had to wait until there was a place for him. Frustrated, he returned to Cambridge. In December 1939, while he was marking time, he met Lady Digby (mother of my fellow debutante Pamela). ‘What, Andrew? Still not in uniform?’ she exclaimed. Andrew was incensed by this insult and never spoke to her again. I do not suppose she noticed, but she could not have said anything more wounding to a young man impatiently awaiting his call-up. This eventually came in June 1940.
When Andrew and I were in London we continued to drive around in my flimsy Austin Seven and when one nightclub got too hot with incendiary bombs falling close by, we moved to another. We took no notice of the bombing – it never occurred to us that we might be hit. In late 1940, on a visit to Andrew’s parents’ house in Derbyshire, we became officially engaged. My future mother-in-law said to Andrew, ‘You have either got to marry that girl or stop asking her here.’ So that is how it happened.
9
Marriage
C
HURCHDALE HALL, WHERE Andrew’s parents had lived since 1923, sits like a broody hen spreading itself over the top of a hill above the village of Ashford-in-the-Water. It was a home if ever there was one, made so by the presence of Moucher, Andrew’s mother, who in her self-effacing way was quite unconscious of the effect her goodness, beauty and ready understanding had on all around her. Andrew’s sisters, Elizabeth and Anne Cavendish, respectively six and seven years younger than me and still in the schoolroom, soon became, and have remained, my great friends. If my own father was thought eccentric, Eddy Devonshire ran him close. He wore paper collars, did not possess an overcoat and would stand, oblivious of the weather, in the freezing wind on Chesterfield Station in a threadbare London suit. He was a heavy smoker of ready-rolled Turkish cigarettes called Pasquale that he lit with a tinder cord, a curious bit of orange rope that looked like a dressing-gown cord. It smouldered away merrily even in a gale and was a useful lighter on outdoor occasions. It also smouldered away merrily in Eddy’s coat pocket and made some decent holes, blackened around the edges; these became part of the suit, which he would never have dreamed of replacing. His ancient clothes sometimes let him down: he got both legs stuck in the ragged lining of one of the trouser legs of an old dinner suit and we waited a long time for him that night.
An expert fly-tier, Eddy was keen eyed and neat fingered, and told me he would have practised dentistry had his life been different. He made an odd sight, a white apron over his well-worn, blue velvet smoking-jacket, leaning across a table covered with all the ingredients for fly-tying. The smell of the glue was to become very familiar. He begged plumes from the hats of his women friends and, picking one up, would sigh with nostalgia and say things like, ‘Ettie Desborough, Ascot, 1921.’ Once the flies were ready, he lay in the bath imagining he was a salmon while Edward, the butler, pretending to be a fishing rod, jerked them over his submerged head. The ones the Duke judged most attractive were used on his stretch of the Blackwater in County Cork at the start of the salmon fishing season.
Eddy was not much good at small talk and often remained silent. Coming from a family that never drew breath, I found this silence intimidating, but our mutual inte
rest in British wild flowers helped to break the ice. His copy of Bentham and Hooker is as good as a diary, with its neatly coloured-in line drawings of flowers and annotations of where and when he had found them. He returned from the funeral of his brother-in-law Evan Baillie, at Ballindarroch in the north of Scotland, delighted because he had stumbled on a Trientalis europæa in that remote glen.
Eddy was MP for Derbyshire West for fifteen years, until 1938 when his father, Victor, the Ninth Duke, died and Eddy moved to the House of Lords. He kept score of the number of votes cast in his constituency, one of the largest in the country, by planting crocuses at Churchdale in the parties’ colours: blue for Conservative, yellow for Liberal, and he had to make do with white for Labour, there being no red crocuses. In the early years, Eddy was driven to meetings by his chauffeur, Lewis James, in a brownish-yellow 1914 Humber known as the Yellow Peril. (It is still roadworthy today.) Outside a rowdy meeting in a quarrying village one day, a man shouted insults about Eddy in front of Lewis. ‘So what did you do?’ asked Eddy as they drove away. ‘I gave him one with my spanner,’ said Lewis.
Keenly interested in the animal kingdom, Eddy was president of the Zoological Society of London from 1948 until his death. Herbrand, the Eleventh Duke of Bedford (whose best friend was a spider), was a member of the Society. On one occasion when Eddy was being driven home by Lewis James from the London Zoo, he heard a strange grunting, gabbling noise coming from the boot. ‘James,’ said Eddy, ‘that is not a mechanical noise.’ ‘Geese, Your Grace. A present from the Duke of Bedford.’ They drove on in silence.
Soon after Andrew and I became engaged, he went to Rutland Gate to talk to my father. A lucky thing happened, an incident when they both behaved out of character: Farve put his jumbo teacup, full to the brim, on the edge of a card table that sloped a little. It started to slide. Quick as a flash, Andrew grabbed it with both hands just before the fatal moment when the strong milky tea would have made a hateful puddle on the carpet – the sort of occurrence Farve abhorred. Andrew handed him the cup and was immediately accepted as part of the family. We decided to be married in London, at St Bartholomew the Great in Smithfield. We loved the ancient church and, perhaps subconsciously, craved the feeling of permanence it gave in the upside-down world of war and bombs when everything we knew was changing.
Miraculously, the church survived the Blitz and we were married there on 19 April 1941. My parents-in-law were kindness itself, letting us have the furniture we needed for the tiny mews house off Regent’s Park where we lived while Andrew was stationed in London, making us presents of a car and a huge double bed, and giving me a pair of beautiful diamond and aquamarine clips. A sign of the formality of those far-off times was that they never asked me to call them by their Christian name: she was Duchess to me and he was Duke. It was the same for Andrew: Lord and Lady Redesdale never turned into David and Sydney. But these old rules did not interfere with friendship.
I was staying at the Mews with Muv and Farve two nights before our wedding when there was one of London’s heaviest air raids of the war. For the first time I was frightened. Two houses at the bottom of the street were sliced in half by a direct hit, and a bed was left hanging precariously over the edge of a floor. All the buildings near by were damaged and every window in No. 26 was blown out. The ballroom, where the reception was to be held, was covered in broken glass and the curtains, which were torn to shreds, had to be put out with the rubbish. Muv bought rolls of grey and gold wallpaper, shaped them into pretend curtains and nailed them to the windows. Luckily the weather was mild as the house was open to the elements. The caterers brought a cake in a white cardboard casing (no icing because of sugar rationing) and when the time came to cut it, all they had to do was lift the cover. Muv somehow got hold of champagne. The wine merchant begged her not to take too much of his precious supply as no more could be had from France.
I was married from the Mews and a photograph shows the wedding group in front of the dustbins. We had no pages or bridesmaids (although Mrs Ham offered to be one, dressed in black, of course). Victor Stiebel made me a dream of a dress from eighty yards of white tulle. I never thought I should own such a thing, and had we been married six weeks later I could not have done: clothes rationing came in and my dress would have taken several years’ worth of coupons. Farve gave me away in his Home Guard uniform. He had refused promotion from Private to Corporal because he did not want the responsibility, but his shoes were better polished than many of his comrades’. He was only sixty-three but looks old and sad in the photographs. After it was all over, Andrew and I drove to the government office where I had been summoned to register for war work, along with a crowd of other girls of my age.
We went to my parents-in-law’s house Compton Place for our six precious days of honeymoon. It was a week of intensive air raids. All night long the German planes throbbed overhead on their way to London – a constant drone of engines bent on their mission to destroy. Eastbourne was a restricted area because of being on the coast and, with the enemy only a few miles away across the Channel, it may seem a strange place for Andrew’s family to have gone in wartime, but we all loved it and I often stayed there when Andrew was away. It suited my father-in-law as the train from Eastbourne to London was quicker and surer for him than the long journey from St Pancras to Miller’s Dale, the nearest station to Churchdale. Compton Place had an Elizabethan core, brought up to date in the early eighteenth century by Colen Campbell, no less, and its plasterwork and furniture were superb. The lawns and tennis court were left unmown during the war and masses of bee orchids, which had lain dormant since the First World War, came up through the chalky soil.
Our great friend John Wyndham, a contemporary of Andrew at Eton and Cambridge, lodged with us at our cottage off Regent’s Park. His appalling eyesight ruled out military service and he was a civilian, working for Harold Macmillan who was then Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Supply. Like Andrew, John owed money. The bailiffs soon discovered where he was living and two of them spent one day sitting on a wall by the entrance to our cottage. John arrived back from work and asked them what they were doing. They explained and with presence of mind John said, ‘Yes, Mr Wyndham is very elusive. I am looking for him too,’ and joined them on the wall.
Soon after our honeymoon Andrew was posted to the newly formed 5th Battalion Coldstream Guards, later part of the Guards Armoured Division. For two and a half years they were sent to different camps around the country and I joined Andrew whenever I could. It was a period of intense activity and intense boredom for him. He said that the training in England was tougher in some ways than actually facing the enemy. On one bitterly cold night his battalion had to cross a swollen river in the north of England where several men lost their lives. On another occasion they were sprayed with blood from the local slaughterhouse; when the exercise was over they returned to camp, hungry and exhausted, to be given almost raw liver to eat. Such was the toughening-up programme. When the battalion was posted to Wiltshire we took a cottage in the main street of Warminster. Andrew went to the training camp by bus and on the way home he always brought a handful of wild flowers (to be identified in our Bentham and Hooker), including tall thistles which brushed the bosoms of the stout women sitting opposite. The battalion camped in the park of Siegfried Sassoon’s house, Heytesbury, and Andrew was intrigued to see the writer, whom he greatly admired, wandering around his garden. He longed to talk to him but did not dare.
There was terrific excitement one summer’s day when the Queen visited the troops on Salisbury Plain. Our friend Anthony Mildmay was the officer in charge and the men lined up to see Her Majesty drive by. They duly cheered and were bucked by her visit. Following her, sitting bolt upright in another stately Daimler, was the Queen’s lady-in-waiting, Lady Nunburnholme, a cool, classic and correct English beauty. As the car drove by, Anthony was delighted to hear a soldier say loudly to his neighbour, ‘Oo’s the tart?’
We spent many evenings at Sturford Mead,
on the edge of the Longleat estate, with Daphne, the beautiful, lively wife of Nancy’s old friend Henry Weymouth. Daphne’s house was always full of a cross-section of the British Army, all of whom were in love with her. (Henry Weymouth was in the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry and spent the entire war in the Middle East, without home leave.) It was at Daphne’s that we first met Evelyn Waugh. The phenomenal amount of drink that the writer downed made him tricky company and, as I was still shocked by drunkenness, I kept my distance. One night he poured a bottle of Green Chartreuse over his head and, rubbing it into his hair, intoned, ‘My hair is covered in gum, my hair is covered in gum,’ as the sticky mess ran down his neck.
When sober, Evelyn’s charm was winning, but you had to catch him early in the evening. He wanted to be friends and was full of compliments, but they turned to insults before you knew where you were. The cleverness came through but so did the criticisms; everything was wrong, including me. After the war he made up for his sharp remarks at Sturford by buying me a hat at Rose Bertin in Paris, which he tried on himself in the shop. It was made of white felt, with two white birds perched above its blue straw brim. A Paris hat was a thing of the past and was a welcome present if ever there was one. Good old Evie.
Another figure of Sturford days was Conrad Russell, a dairy farmer, cheese-maker and intimate of the Asquith gang at Mells. Blue eyed and silver haired, he was clever like all Russells. We made friends on the farming level – I could not compete with his brainy neighbours or his adored Diana Cooper. He realized that I was interested in the land and when he died left me his copy of Primrose McConnell’s Agricultural Note-Book, which ranks high among my unstealable books.
Wait for Me! Page 14