Wait for Me!

by Deborah Devonshire

  The castle and its estate had been an outright gift from the Ninth Duke to Charlie, and would have gone to one of Charlie’s children in due course, but that was not to be. Adele and Charlie had a daughter in 1933 and twin sons in 1935, all three of whom were premature and died soon after birth. After Charlie’s death, Lismore was left to Adele for her lifetime or until she remarried. In 1947, she married fellow American Kingman Douglass, and Lismore came to Andrew. Andrew nearly put his foot in it with Adele when we were married: she sent us a coffee service for a wedding present and as he had just been commissioned in the Coldstream Guards and had other things on his mind, he forgot to write the necessary thank-you letter. Adele was furious and told him she would get Charlie to leave the place to a cousin. The threat produced the required flowery note and all was well.

  I first went to Lismore in the autumn of 1947; it seemed to me like a dream on that visit and remained so ever after. For nearly fifty years Andrew went for the opening of the salmon fishing season in February and we both spent every April there. In 1947 there was still a station at Lismore and the train from Rosslare stopped a few hundred yards from the castle. You could do the last bit of the journey from London on foot, walking up the short drive – or avenue as it is called in Ireland – between the walls of the upper and lower garden. This brought you to the ancient arch of the gatehouse, so low that I used to fear for the butcher boy’s head when he stood up in the pony trap that delivered the meat to the castle. The courtyard walls, which are at odd angles to each other, looked for all the world like an Oxbridge quad. The avenue of tall yews, whose branches met high overhead to form a dark tunnel, was, according to Miss Bolton (my sister-in-laws’ governess), where Sir Walter Raleigh had walked and she saw his ghost whenever she went to that bit of the garden.

  If by some magic I could be transported blindfold from where I am sitting now to the high-ceilinged hall of the castle, the first intake of breath would tell me I was at Lismore. The vague smell of peat and wood, just the general feel of that loved place, would bring nostalgia for the unchanging sights and sounds of half a century. In spite of its size, the castle was as welcoming as can be. Kathleen Nevin, the castle cook, is the world’s best. Every morsel of her food had to travel from the kitchen, along a passage, up a flight of steps and across Pugin’s extravagant banqueting hall with its star-covered ceiling and chandeliers copied from those in the House of Commons (or is it the other way round?), until it arrived, still perfect, in the dining room. The brass stair-rods were polished to brilliance. The water ran blue from the copper pipes, staining the baths the colour of a swimming pool. In one of the bathrooms, photographs of Fred Astaire dancing in his top hat, white tie and tails hung next to photos of King Edward VII arriving at the castle in a grand carriage in 1904. The hall with its huge fireplace led to a small sitting room perched high above the river with dreamlike views over woods and far-distant mountains. In the Irish climate the outlook was never the same two days running and the light could change by the minute.

  The views from the adjoining drawing room were even more dramatic. King James II spent a night at Lismore in 1689 and is said to have approached the huge bay window then started back in surprise when he saw the sheer drop below. The other window looked east, downstream over the Fifth Duke of Devonshire’s beautiful bridge, the arches of which span both the river and The Inches, the fields on the far side that are often flooded. From the window you had the strange experience of looking down on the backs of swans flying below. On the edge of the river, year after year, a heron stood like a sentinel in a little pebble-bottomed inlet watching his stretch of the water. I hardly ever saw him catch a fish but he must have thought it worth his while waiting there patiently on one leg, and I wondered if it was always the head heron that inherited that spot. Tony and Bindie Lambton came to stay for long visits and Tony, who was a renowned shot, used to aim an apple at the heron from the drawing-room window. He never hit it, but the bird would fly off slowly in the lumbering way of herons, to prove that it was untouched.

  As if all this were not enough there was Lismore itself, its shops, Protestant and Catholic cathedrals and its people. There were few cars in the town and on Sundays and Fair Days the donkey carts and pony traps followed in single file across the bridge to double park along Main Street. Until the 1960s, horses, goats and donkeys were hobbled as they grazed the Long Acre, the grass on the roadside verges. Travellers and tinkers were plentiful (though how they existed I cannot tell). For us, coming from austerity England, the fact that meat and other food was not rationed added to the unreal atmosphere. There was heady excitement when we discovered on the counter of the Arcade, the draper’s shop, rolls and rolls of the top-quality black cloth worn by priests, and we bought lots of it to take home to make coats and skirts.

  Living near by in a house belonging to the castle dairy farm was Mrs Feeney, who cooked all her food in an iron pot that hung on a chain over an everlasting fire. Her daughter, Mary, who became a great friend of mine, told me that the taste was second to none, which I can well imagine as the goodness lay in all the ingredients being combined in one pot. Mary Feeney, who made many of the curtains at Lismore Castle, had been taught dressmaking by Ann Astaire and excelled at it. I wore her creations at both the grandest and humblest occasions and always felt happy in them. Norah Willoughby behind the counter of the newsagent’s shop knew her customers well and gave them a tremendous welcome when they came in one by one to buy their paper. The town’s ancient doctor came to visit me once when I was pregnant. Dressed in curious old-fashioned hunting clothes of green breeches and shiny black leather gaiters, he glanced at the letter sent by my English doctor, looked at me and said, ‘The woman doesn’t always die from this disease’, and then left to join the hunt.

  There was plenty of room at Lismore for friends. They arrived with children and dogs off the Fishguard–Rosslare boat. Our old friends Richard and Virginia Sykes came with their family, including Tatton, the eldest, aged about five. He was a bit namby-pamby and held up his spoon (kept in the usual damp cupboard), and whined to Diddy, ‘My spoon’s rusty.’ ‘Rusty?’ said Diddy. ‘That’s iron. It will do you good.’ Robert Kee was always a welcome guest. His interest in Ireland, which gave rise to his histories of ‘that most distressful country’, was inspired by his love for Oonagh Oranmore, one of the three blonde Guinness girls, daughters of Lord Iveagh. Robert is strikingly handsome, strikingly clever, articulate like no other, and as good a writer as he is talker. The Green Flag is generally accepted as being the best of a long list of his works on Ireland. He slid into television naturally and Panorama was lucky to have him as its presenter during that programme’s most influential years. As an interviewer he was penetrating without being rude and he never interrupted or bullied his victims.

  In 1958 Robert brought his friend Cyril Connolly to stay. I was intrigued to meet this famous writer and critic, who was admired by his peers and apparently loved by women. Cyril had put about the idea that he wanted to buy a house in Ireland, but I soon realized it was just an excuse to see inside some of the houses in the neighbourhood. This resulted in embarrassing telephone calls and visits to people who had no intention of selling. If the plasterwork and proportions were not up to Cyril’s expectations, he got as far as the hall then lost interest, leaving me to look at the other rooms and thank for the invasion and obligatory drink. Cyril was said to be a gardener and to understand plants. The climate at Lismore allows all sorts of wonders to be grown that would perish in Derbyshire. Andrew and I were able to plant mimosa and different kinds of magnolia, including the best Magnolia sprengeri‘Diva’ I have ever seen. We also planted a Magnolia delavayi, whose growth was so rapid that, like the hedge in The Sleeping Beauty, it would have obliterated the door to the lower garden had it not been drastically cut back every year. When Cyril came to stay, the lower garden was planted for spring and the Chaenomeles along the wall was quite a feature. The pink form of the shrub is called ‘Apple Blossom’ – muddlin
g, but anyone who knows about plants knows the confusing habit plant breeders have of calling a daffodil ‘Buttercup’ or a nectarine ‘Pineapple’. Cyril duly admired it. ‘Oh yes,’ said Emma, conversant from an early age with such botanical traps, ‘Apple Blossom.’ ‘No,’ said Cyril sententiously, ‘it’s a Chaenomeles.’ Emma gave him a pitying look and that was that as far as Cyril was concerned.

  Paddy Leigh Fermor came to Lismore for the first time in April 1956. He described his visit in a letter to our mutual friend Daphne (ex Bath, then married to Xan Fielding).

  The whole castle and the primeval forest round it were spellbound in a late spring or early summer trance; heavy rhododendron blossom everywhere and, under the Rapunzel tower I inhabited, a still, leafless magnolia tree shedding petals like giant snowflakes over the parallel stripes of an embattled new-mown lawn: silver fish flickered in the river, wood pigeons cooed and herons slowly wheeled through trees so overgrown with lichen they looked like green coral, drooping with ferns and lianas, almost like an equatorial jungle. One would hardly have been surprised to see a pterodactyl or an archaeopteryx sail through the twilight, or the neck of a dinosaur craning through the ferns and lapping up a few bushels out of the Blackwater, which curls away like the Limpopo, all set about with fever-trees . . .

  Paddy provided all the entertainment anyone could wish for and has been the quickest and funniest companion for more than half a century. The classical scholar, famed writer and acclaimed war hero spent his time bang down to earth when he was at Lismore. He took up the idiotic songs that Decca and I had invented as children and whirled and twirled round the dining room singing this gibberish loudly. To one who had translated ‘Widdecombe Fair’ and ‘John Peel’ into Italian (and sings them at the drop of a hat), such nonsense verses came naturally and he entered into the spirit of things with gusto. Taking a cork from a wine bottle, he shut one eye, studied it close up with the other and said, ‘What Irish newspaper am I?’ The Cork Examiner, of course.

  Andrew loved Paddy and they went on walks and climbing expeditions in the Pyrenees, Greece and Peru. When he was at Lismore Paddy and I went on long rides, seeing no one all day, up and around the mountains and through the woods to the Grand Lodges, neo-Gothic extravagances that were built as the entrance to a house that never was. Royal Tan was in the stables. A five-times runner in the Grand National (he came second in 1951, won in 1954 and was third in 1956), he had been given to me by Aly Khan, who bought him from Vincent O’Brien’s stable when his owner, Joe Griffin, went bust. By the time the old fellow came to me, he had had enough of travelling and refused to enter a horse box. He also did things his way, stopping in the road for no apparent reason and no one could make him budge. Enticements, threats, a lead from another horse, nothing was any good. This exasperated Paddy but he had to concede defeat. ‘The trouble with Royal Tan,’ he said ruefully, ‘is he doesn’t like riding.’

  When Mrs Hammersley came to Lismore, she brought a travelling companion to help during the journey. On one of her visits the novelist L. P. Hartley filled the role. I hoped he had enjoyed his stay and was disillusioned when in one of his books I read a description of his bedroom at Lismore, down to the smallest detail – and it was not flattering. The sting in the tale was ‘a pair of soapstone bookends with no books between them’.

  Another of Mrs Ham’s carriers of shawls and bags was the Bloomsbury painter Duncan Grant, who was amused by her gloomy forecasts and used to egg her on to describe all the horrors she believed lay in store. (Some of which have come to pass, such as the degradation of art and the appalling misuse of the English language.) Irresistible to both men and women, and with a charm to floor the crustiest of human beings, Duncan became a good friend of Andrew’s and mine. He was middle-aged by the time we knew him but still wickedly attractive, with turned-up eyes that disappeared when he laughed. He brought his paints when he came to stay and was the easiest of guests, working away wherever he happened to be. Modest as he was, Duncan would be amazed by the prices his paintings fetch at auction today and by the pleasure his and Vanessa Bell’s decorations give to visitors to Charleston, their once very private Sussex home, now open to you and me.

  Mrs Ham provided a wonderful subject for Duncan and his two portraits of her are among my treasured possessions. I wish I owned another portrait he made while staying with us. It is of Margaret Murphy, a little red-haired girl who was one of a big family living at the Grand Lodges. Heaven knows how her widowed mother managed with so many children to feed and no husband as breadwinner, but manage she did and was always cheerful and hospitable when I took visitors to call on her at the not-so-grand Grand Lodge, where there was no running water, or any other of the amenities judged necessary today. The Mrs Murphys of this world are the ones who ought to be given medals.

  Harold Macmillan came to stay with his wife, Dorothy, who adored Lismore, having spent early springs there when she was a child. Uncle Harold had a lot of the actor in him and to entertain us one evening he played the punter to Porchy Carnarvon’s bookmaker. Without rehearsal and dressed in whatever they could find in the hall, including loud-checked caps and binoculars, they gave us a sketch worthy of any theatre. Uncle Harold liked walking alone. One day we dropped him some miles from the castle and he made his way home, deep in thought, with no one to bother him. He had been trudging along a lonely lane for about an hour when he saw a donkey leaning its head over the roadside wall. Uncle Harold, who was getting weary, stopped and said, ‘Ass, how far is it to Lismore?’ The donkey took no notice but a man emerged from behind the wall, curious to see the daft fellow who had asked a question of a donkey. Little did he guess he was looking at a former Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

  Our weeks at Lismore were enlivened not only by a stream of visitors from abroad but also by neighbours, including a number of friends and relations who, disenchanted with England and its Socialist government, had decided to emigrate. Pam and Derek were among our first guests and they fell for Ireland. Derek was attracted by its lack of bureaucracy and bossiness, not to mention Attlee’s penal taxation, and decided to buy Tullamaine Castle in County Tipperary, where he set up a racehorse training establishment. He and Pam entertained a great deal – too much for Pam to manage single-handed – and they employed a succession of cooks. None of them came up to Pam’s high standards and she used to come over to see me and regale me with her kitchen woes. ‘Stublow, ordering with Mrs B is a nightmare,’ or ‘Isn’t game soup the richest and loveliest soup you ever laid hands on? Well, a milky affair came up.’ This said in a dramatic voice that grew lower and more urgent until the last sentence might have been recounting a world-shaking disaster. To Pam it was. Between cooks she produced the meals herself. I telephoned one day to ask if she could come to lunch. ‘No, of course I can’t,’ she said crossly, ‘I’m much too busy making egg mousse for sixty.’ (I had forgotten it was the day of the Tipperary point-to-point that was run over the Tullamaine farm.)

  Derek was a human time-bomb ready to explode and was not cut out for an enduring marriage. As time went by and he had no success with the racing venture, he began to grow restless and miss his scientific work – a part of his life that was impossible to share with the Tipperary locals. Robert Kee, knowing of Derek’s brilliance, once said to him, ‘I’m afraid all I know about maths is that two plus two equals four.’ Derek thought for a bit and said, ‘I’ve often wondered.’ In the 1945 General Election I asked him if he was going to vote Conservative. He exploded and, hardly able to get out the words, said, ‘How can I vote for a man who speaks of the third alternative?’ A rare grammatical error from Winston cost him Derek’s vote.

  Derek had always been unpredictable, darting off to left and right, and he now spent more and more time away from home, leaving Pam with the racehorses as well as a large house to look after. It became obvious that their years of marriage were at an end. As always when life seemed to conspire against her, Pam faced the separation with courage. After Derek l
eft, she must have had an impossibly difficult time but carried on as best she could and never complained to her sisters, though Diana and I were aware how unhappy she was.

  Tullamaine was sold in 1958 but Pam stayed on as a tenant until 1960. We all knew she was careful, but sometimes her watching of the pennies was so comical it has to be recorded. She told her new landlord that the house needed rewiring. He obeyed and sent round some workmen. Pam then said she must have a cow to provide milk for the workmen’s tea. He sent round a cow that gave four gallons a day. The workmen only used a pint, so Pam bought four piglets and fed the milk to them. Even they could not get through it all so she sent the rest to the creamery. She was staying with friends when a cheque for £10 arrived from the creamery. Her host, who happened to be a land agent and versed in such matters, said, ‘I suppose you’re going to pass it on to the landlord.’ ‘OH NO!’ cried Pam. ‘After all, my gardener milks the cow. But for me his workmen would have to buy their milk.’ So she kept the cheque, the cow, the pigs and the workmen.

  Sophy’s first stay at Lismore came when she was a year old. The older children’s cot and all that went with it were long gone, but I knew that Pam would still have the cot that Diana’s sons slept in when they lived with her during the war. I wrote to ask if I could borrow it. She answered at once to say yes but suggested I get it painted as it was obviously in a poor state. She had some perfectly good blankets, she said, with a few moth holes, and added, ‘If Miss Feeney cut them into the right size leaving out the eaten parts she could put some pretty ribbon to bind them and this would save a lot.’ She also offered linen sheets: ‘Some large double bed sheets which are rather worn but here again Miss Feeney could find plenty left to make cot sheets.’