One night when staying with Daphne we were awakened by the smell of burning. The house was on fire. We ran round the bedrooms, shouting to the sleeping guests to leave the house. Daphne’s own door was locked; too much had been drunk that evening and it took what seemed an age to wake her. To add to the misery of that night, I put my bare foot in a huge dog’s mess in the passage before we all got out – just in time. Panic produces strange reactions. In that house full of what are now described as ‘decorative arts’, all we managed to grab as we left were a few gramophone records. Poor Daphne lost many precious belongings and, to add insult to injury, was reported for infringing the blackout regulations. We were at Sturford Mead the night Henry came home. He was the handsomest man you ever saw and all seemed happy between him and Daphne. But the separation had been too long and their twenty-five years of marriage ended soon after his return.
Andrew’s battalion was later posted to Norfolk, where I stayed in a pub at Hunstanton. We went botanizing in country that was new to both of us and, sitting on a straw stack, I fiddled with my wedding ring and dropped it. A gold ring in a pile of wheat straw is a goner so the ring is in that wheatfield still. Its replacement is a ‘utility’ one, gold in colour but probably of some baser metal. The loss of the wedding ring was made up for, however, by finding a corncockle – a rare flower in those days.
When I could not be with Andrew, his parents were the kindest of hosts. My mother-in-law was universally loved. She was vague and always late, but she never interfered or criticized and I was well aware of what a wonderful woman she was. In 1940 an unwelcome guest arrived at Churchdale to disturb our routine: Sir Edward Marsh CVO, CB, CMG, scholar, translator and long-time private secretary to Winston Churchill. He had been knocked down in the blackout by a London taxi and was taken, badly shaken but with no bones broken, to nearby Pratt’s Club (owned by my father-in-law) to be tidied up. The Duke took pity on him and invited him to Churchdale to recuperate. He arrived. Almost at once, Elizabeth, Anne and I were irritated by him and his boring tales of his old boss and the stage folk he knew. There he was at supper every night with only us for an audience – my parents-in-law were often in London. He insisted on listening to the nine o’clock news, which interrupted our records of Harry Roy and the like, but as soon as Alvar Liddell’s soothing voice came over the wireless telling of the latest disaster, Eddie fell asleep. The little click when we turned off the wireless to go back to our favourite dance bands woke him with a start, and it was back to Alvar Liddell.
For exercise, Eddie tossed a pack of playing cards on the floor and picked them up one by one. I often wondered why he could not do something more useful – dig the garden for instance – but no, he was too special for that. After he had been with us for about a month, a van arrived at Churchdale with his cellar (many cases of Drambuie) and we realized that he was in for a long stay. He was so dug in, and I suppose thought himself part of the family, that whenever the Devonshires moved from Compton Place to Churchdale and back, Eddie Marsh went too. He was head over heels in love with Ivor Novello (whose name he maddeningly pronounced ‘I-vor’) and was in a state of high excitement the day Novello came to tea at Compton Place, as Eddie’s guest. Novello looked at my whippet, Studley, and said, his head to one side, ‘What an enchanting bit of beige.’ Studley was a serious dog, the hero of many hare-coursing days, and was not to be dismissed as ‘a bit of beige’. That was the end of the composer of The Dancing Years as far as I was concerned. After fourteen and a half months, Eddie finally left. He would have stayed longer but Edward, the butler, and my sisters-in-law formed up to his hosts and said enough was enough. He arrived in November 1940 and left in January 1942. Talk about the man who came to dinner . . .
In November 1943 Andrew embarked for Italy with his battalion. Our daughter Emma was eight months old and we needed a house of our own. I moved into the Rookery, a dark, damp house in Ashford-in-the-Water (the Derbyshire River Wye flows through the garden) belonging to the Chatsworth estate. There were pigsties, stables and a paddock where I kept my driving pony. In the kitchen, a huge coal range took up one wall and smuts penetrated everywhere. The stove gave off such fierce heat, rapidly followed by the depressing sight of cold grey ashes, that our wartime rations were often inedible. Rationing and coupons ruled our lives. When I was in London for Andrew’s last few days of leave before he left for Italy, he entrusted me with three hundred of the clothing coupons issued to soldiers to buy all the special kit they needed for going abroad. I was meant to be the reliable one, but I left the precious coupons in a taxi. It was a disaster because they could not be replaced, but Andrew never reproached me.
I lived at the Rookery with Emma, her nanny Diddy, three dogs, a pony and trap, a pig, a cow, and Violet, an evacuee with two small sons. I was blessed with Diddy – Ellen Stephens – who had arrived two months earlier, sent by Divine Providence. She was fifty-four, the minimum age at which any job other than ‘war work’ could be taken up, and it was our luck that her age coincided with our need. Babies thrived under her care: put a screaming infant into her arms and it immediately calmed down. Her influence went much further than the nursery and her intelligence, common sense, knowledge of the natural world and devotion to the children in her care gave them the best possible start in life. Diddy looked after Emma while I pretended to sort things at the Red Cross county clearing house in Bakewell. I was not much use to them as I was pregnant again and was sick over everything without warning.
I got about in an old milk float drawn by a splendid pedigree Hackney mare and sometimes drove up the steep hill past Sheldon to the limestone plateau of the Peak District. Along the broad grass verges, stretching for a mile or more, were piles of bombs, long and thin, short and fat, unguarded, waiting. They became part of the scenery and then disappeared one day as mysteriously as they had arrived. The mare trotted along the empty A6 to Bakewell in no time. I tied her to a post near Mr Thacker’s butcher’s shop, where he let me help him cut up the meat in the back room and get a few scraps for the dogs. Tongue was offal and therefore not rationed. ‘Any chance of a tongue?’ I would ask. ‘You’re thirty-sixth on the list,’ was always the answer. I do not think I ever got to the top. (A woman next to me in the queue, listening to people talking about the end of rationing, said one day, ‘Well, if they give it up, meat will be rationed by price and that would never do.’ As the years have gone by I have often thought about what she said.) One day a wounded soldier repatriated from Italy brought home a lemon. Such a luxury had not been seen for a long time and it caused a minor sensation when he put it on the post office counter at Ashford-in-the-Water and charged tuppence a smell – proceeds to the Red Cross.
We paid rent to the Chatsworth estate to live at the Rookery. Our income was small at the time and I was appalled by the size of the estate bill for logs, our only form of heating apart from the ancient kitchen range. (My mother-in-law always said that the bill for logs was the land agent’s way of trying to balance the forestry accounts.) In one of the snowy winters of the war, I fell ill while on a prolonged visit to Churchdale and Dr Sinclair Evans was called. His practice took him up rough tracks to remote farms and he always dressed in the same thick tweeds and gumboots for any bedside he was called to; with the sleeves of his woollen vest showing round his wrists, he was a reassuring sight in an emergency. Dr Evans was an excellent diagnostician and pronounced pneumonia, which in those days was treated with pills called M & B. In spite of the pills, I was delirious for a while and he told me afterwards that I shouted, ‘I’m not in debt, I’m not in debt’, obviously the result of the huge bills for firewood from Chatsworth Estates Co.
In January 1944, Henry Hunloke, MP for Derbyshire West, my father-in-law’s old constituency, resigned his seat and a by-election was quickly called. Henry had been with his regiment in the Middle East since the outbreak of war and felt that he could no longer adequately represent the voters’ interests. More significant, perhaps, he was married to Eddy Devonshire’s sist
er Anne and was in the process of getting a divorce. Derbyshire West had been held almost exclusively by a member of the Cavendish family since the sixteenth century. Andrew’s brother, Billy, yet another Cavendish nominee, was selected as the Conservative candidate and in February 1944 got leave from his regiment to fight the election. His selection turned out to be unwise as it made people feel the influence of Chatsworth was too strong: Conservatives were annoyed because the selection procedure had been so hasty and the opposition felt that they had not been given enough time to mount their campaign.
Billy and Andrew did not get on well and there was jealousy on both sides. As the second son, Andrew felt left out of things, and Billy suffered because Andrew was more attractive – not better looking, but quick, funny and popular with girls. It did not help matters that when Andrew was commissioned in 1940 the brothers sometimes found themselves near-neighbours when training. They were wary of stepping on each other’s territory and the result was that I saw little of Billy in pre-war days. It was only in the run-up to the by-election that I got to know him and grew fond of him. He used to drop in for a drink on his way home to Churchdale and unwind after the punishing round of political meetings in village halls scattered over the constituency. Billy’s opponent was Charles Frederick White Jr, a Socialist who had been active in local government for over thirty years. The fight was personal and grubby, and the meetings rowdy and sometimes rough. White’s supporters taught children to chant:
Charlie White’s a gentleman
Hartington’s a fool
Before he goes to politics
He ought to go to school.
The country as a whole was fed up with rationing, discipline and the worsening conditions at home; and there seemed to be no light at the end of the tunnel. Nationalization of the coal industry was on everyone’s lips and although mining was minimal in Derbyshire West, the constituency was surrounded by coal mines and heavy industry and the electorate was longing for change. As heir to one of the largest land holdings, and perhaps the greatest private collection of works of art in England, as well as several huge houses, Billy was a target for the anti-establishment brigade. He was beaten by 4,561 votes, receiving 41.5 per cent of the vote to White’s 57.7 per cent. Billy’s speech at the declaration of the poll was as memorable as his appearance: tall and fit from five years of army service, he was as handsome as a film star. ‘It has been a hard fight,’ he told his audience, ‘and that is the way it goes. I am going out now to fight for you at the front. After all, unless we win the war there can be no home front. Better luck next time.’ There were loud cheers, some of the women were in tears – perhaps they had a premonition of what was to come. One old lady standing next to me said, ‘It’s a shame to let him go, a great tall man like he is, he’s such a target.’
The result of the by-election was a personal blow for Churchill, foreshadowing the defeat of Conservatism and Labour’s landslide victory the following year. Derbyshire West had decided it wanted out with the old and in with the new, but the ‘old’ in this case was young and full of promise, while the ‘new’ was a grey man, lacking in distinction or appeal, with a bitter twist to his speeches. C. F. White sank without trace in the House of Commons. He hung on to his seat by only 156 votes in the 1945 General Election and decided, wisely, not to stand again in 1950.
Billy rejoined his regiment, now preparing for the invasion of France. Sadly, I could not go to his wedding to Kick on 6 May 1944 as I was still in bed after the birth of our son, Stoker. That Billy and Kick managed to marry at all was a tribute to their love for each other. It is difficult to realize the depth of antagonism that still existed in the 1940s between Protestants and Catholics. Billy came from a deeply religious Protestant background and Kick’s Irish-Catholic parents felt just as strongly about their creed. At the eleventh hour, after a series of discussions with the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and the Archbishop of Canterbury, the seemingly insurmountable obstacles were overcome and it was agreed that any sons of the union should be brought up in the Church of England and any daughters as Roman Catholics. My father-in-law had been haunted by the possibility that if his beloved Billy married a Roman Catholic any eventual heirs would be brought up in that faith, and the outcome satisfied him. Both he and Moucher became devoted to Kick, who was welcomed into the family by all. Rose Kennedy never accepted the decision and her relationship with her daughter suffered accordingly.
Billy and Kick had ecstatically happy moments together, snatching days and nights while preparations for D-Day were gathering speed. Six weeks after their wedding Billy left with his battalion for France and was part of the Allied advance that pushed towards Belgium at a fearful cost of British lives. They reached the border at the beginning of September, where they met stiff enemy resistance. Unbelievably, officers were allowed to wear pale-coloured corduroy trousers, a beret and to carry a swagger stick – an obvious target for a sniper. And so it was. On 9 September 1944 Billy, now a Major, was walking ahead of his company to lead an assault on the village of Heppen, when he was shot through the heart by a single bullet and died where he fell. His men were enraged. ‘We took no prisoners that day,’ one of them wrote to my father-in-law. Billy was buried at Leopoldsburg, one of nearly 800 Commonwealth dead in that cemetery.
Eddy and Moucher were devastated. Their hopes for the future died with their son. Kick, a widow at twenty-four, was in America for a memorial service for her elder brother, Joe Jr, who had been killed in action. She returned immediately to Compton Place, where Billy’s parents, sisters and I tried to comfort each other. I wrote to Muv, ‘As always when someone you know intimately has been killed, it seems quite impossible that you won’t see him again. I am afraid of writing to Andrew. I don’t know what to say or how to say it . . . They don’t hold out any hope of getting Andrew home till after the war. I wish Winston was here as it’s possible he might understand and send for him. I do so want to see him and he would make the whole difference to his mother and father.’ To Diana I wrote that I was worried that Andrew might go right under for a time.
When the news of his brother’s death reached him, Andrew was in the front line of some of the fiercest battles of the Italian campaign. The enemy were holding every inch of the ground and his company was in the thick of it. It was a miracle that he came out alive.
He wrote to me on 22 September:
My Own Darling,
In an odd sort of way I have always known that the happiness of our family life was too good to last and now the tragedy has happened. It seems odd that Billy, with everything to live for and so brilliantly capable of carrying out the life that he had to lead, should be taken just when that life was beginning, but I do not doubt for one moment that there is a reason. Wherever he has gone, he has gone in the good company of his and our friends.
My darling, you must be having a difficult and utterly miserable time. If only I could be there to be of some use – but it is the greatest comfort to me to know that you are there. I know what a difference it will make to Mummy and Daddy. The thought of their grief is terrible. That is the wicked part of death – the grief and sorrow it leaves behind.
Darling, it seems out of place among the misery of the moment and I only mention it on the chance it will give you all a bit of pleasure, I have been given an MC – most undeserved. It is nice to have it and I hope Mummy and Daddy will be pleased.
Darling, I suppose our life is going to be very different to what we had planned. But I know whatever life has in store, with you beside me life has no fears.
God bless you, my darling. Don’t grieve for me.
It was so typical of Andrew just to throw in that he had received the Military Cross, as though it had been at a vicarage tea party. He was, in fact, decorated for ‘the cheerfulness and leadership he displayed’ when his Company had to dig in under heavy shelling near a village called Strada, south of Florence, and was trapped for thirty-six hours in scorching weather with nothing to eat and, worse, no
thing to drink.
Andrew’s time in Italy changed him. He saw many of his comrades dead or wounded and had a particularly horrifying experience when his mentor, Sergeant King, was killed. He had told the Sergeant to stay put while he went to look over a ridge to see if there was any sign of the enemy. When he got back the gallant Sergeant had been blown to bits by a mortar bomb. Andrew rarely spoke of this or any other of his experiences during the war, but they must, as they did for millions, have had a traumatic effect. The process of becoming an adult was concentrated into a few hard weeks.
After Billy’s death, my parents-in-law continued their peregrinations between Churchdale and Eastbourne, but Eddy vowed never to set foot inside Chatsworth again. He had lost heart and could not bring himself to be interested in the future of a house which five years previously had been the scene of joyous celebrations for his adored son’s twenty-first birthday.
For me 1944 was a momentous year. Two events of the greatest joy were the birth of Stoker and the news in October that Andrew was coming home. But the bad news came thick and fast. A few weeks before D-Day I was staying at Compton Place. Eastbourne was crowded with troops and my mother-in-law invited Ned Fitzmaurice, who was in the Irish Guards, Luke Lillingston, from the Leicestershire Yeomanry, and other young officers to tea. She told them to go to the kitchen garden and help themselves to strawberries. ‘Awfully sorry,’ said Luke, ‘I’ve done that already.’ He had scaled the high brick wall and gorged on a private feast. Two weeks later he was dead from wounds received in action. He left a lasting memory of a most attractive man with a reputation for being a fine horseman and an old-fashioned thruster out hunting.
Wait for Me! Page 15