Papa Spy

by Jimmy Burns

  But letters and other material discovered by the author in the later stages of researching this book have helped bring to light one of the more intriguing social encounters of the 1930s, when a generation was forced to set aside the frivolity of its party days and face up to the slow drift to world war with a sense of urgency as well as vertigo. Ann was the daughter of Patrick Bowes Lyon, a retired army officer, and the fifth son of the 13th Earl of Strathmore. She was the youngest of four children. The oldest in the family, Gavin, was killed in action in the Great War, aged twenty-one. A second brother, Angus, fought and survived the same war and committed suicide in 1923, aged twenty-three. Ann’s sister, Jean, was three years older than her, and never married. The extended Bowes-Lyon family of cousins and second cousins had a history of early death, neurosis, and alcoholism. Ann was descended from an ancient aristocratic Scottish family, although rumour had it that the blue blood had been mixed by the time Ann was born due to the ancestral dalliance with working-class maids. The family seat, Glamis, was a legendary castle, the fictitious setting for the murder of King Duncan in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and the real-life childhood home Ann had shared with her cousin, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the future Duchess, Queen Consort, and eventual Queen Mother.

  Of those childhood days, prior to the outbreak of the Great War, royal biographer Hugo Vickers has remarked on the structured aristocratic society that manifested itself at Glamis, as it had done for centuries. ‘Following the three month London season, the aristocrats retired to their estates, where they remained from August to November … they invited other aristocrats to join them in their sport, be it shooting or hunting.’ During the First World War, Glamis was converted into a Red Cross home for wounded servicemen. While Elizabeth stayed in the castle helping her mother and older sister look after the soldiers, Ann remained closeted in her parental home in London’s Queen’s Gate, taught by governesses.

  Yet Ann was eleven years old by the time the war ended and not unaffected by the anguish and trauma which the Bowes-Lyons, like so many other families, suffered at the battlefield deaths of family members. The men of the Strathmore family, according to Vickers, were ‘damaged for life’, with a heavy strain of alcoholism affecting sons and fathers, and breakdown and suicides affecting the next generation.

  Ann survived her teenage years, living comfortably between Mayfair and a large country house in Kent and watching her older female cousins emerge in society, the normal events of the season – balls, races, hunts, and shoots – re-established despite crippling taxation.

  She came of age at eighteen in 1925, at a time when the old social boundaries of the Edwardian age were, in the words of D.J. Taylor, ‘annually dissolving’. Alongside the formal entertainments of Ascot and debutante balls there emerged the ‘smart bohemia’ of the ‘Bright Young Persons’, with hedonistic parties open as much to aspiring avant-garde intellectuals as to young Ladies and Honourables.

  How frequently Ann stepped out of her protective seasonal programme and into the racier nights where social convention was self-consciously flouted is not clear. There is an undated letter to her from Harman Grisewood offering an introduction to Olivia Plunket Greene, among the more notorious female members of one of the chief Bright Young Persons groups. She also corresponded as a young woman with academics and the occasional artist. But Ann did not earn a reputation as a fast aristocratic young lady with a particularly adventurous private life. It would take her some years before she found someone capable of breaking through her emotional self-control and gained sufficient trust in men with which to build a relationship.

  Burns’s own memoirs suggest that he spent most of the 1920s without ever falling seriously in love. It was a period during which he avoided deep commitments, including proposals of marriage, or complex affairs, preferring instead to live, as so many of his ‘set’ did, in a state of fluctuating and frivolous affections.

  Before moving to Glebe Place, on the King’s Road, Burns lived in a flat in St Leonard’s Terrace from where he straddled social milieus with an eclectic group of friends, several of them active members of the Bright Young Persons set, ranging from homosexual painters like Cedric Morris and his anonymous ‘saturnine lover’ to writers like John Betjeman and the poet’s friend from Oxford days, the extrovert Etonian Lord ‘Cracky’ Billy Clonmore.

  During ‘the season’ Burns emerged from his modest quarters in Chelsea ‘like a butterfly from a chrysalis’, in white tie and tails for events often given by hostesses he barely knew.

  He later recalled, ‘I discovered that I was on some sort of hostess register, my entry read: “Smart young man, dances well, safe in taxis.”’ When there were no balls, Burns visited the venues appropriated by the wilder party-goers and sexually liberated intellectuals of the Bloomsbury set. The Gargoyle, the Café Anglais, and Hell were habitual haunts.

  Life however had moved on by the time Burns met Ann Bowes-Lyon. By the 1930s, in common with many of the Bright Young Persons, Burns had put behind him the unbridled extravagance of his youth and replaced it with a deeper yearning to make sense of the gathering storms moving across the world stage. He was a committed publisher, dedicated to weighing up the possibilities for co-operation and resolution of conflict between the modern world and Catholicism at every point where contacts could be established – in arts, politics, economics, and, last but no means least, human relationships. Their first meeting is thought to have taken place on 19 June 1935 during the first performance in the Chapter House of Canterbury Cathedral of T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. The play had Robert Speaight, a mutual friend of Burns and Grisewood, in the main role of Becket and all three were there that night, as was Ann, invited by – drawn by – veneration for Eliot. Ann at the time had become increasingly drawn to the Catholic faith through her friendship with a Cambridge academic couple, Dorothy Hoare and her husband Jose Maria, otherwise known as ‘JM’ De Navarro – both Catholics – much to the disapproval of her Protestant parents.

  While Burns had befriended Eliot in 1932 during the poet’s yearlong professorship at Harvard University in the US, Ann’s acquaintance was more recent, and was linked to her developing interest in poetry as a writer of it herself, and her growing interest in religion. Like several aspiring poets, Ann had sent Eliot some of her own tentative verses to him at the publishing house Faber & Faber, where he was director, with the hope of obtaining his blessing.

  Within two years, by 1937, Eliot liked Ann sufficiently to publish her first and only collection of verses with the coveted Faber imprint. The edition was entitled simply Poems by Ann Lyon, had a very small print run, and limited publicity. It was subsequently circulated among friends rather than family, suggesting a tension between Ann’s public persona and private life.

  Of the fifty-four poems, mostly written in the haunting elegiac style of the early-twentieth-century ‘Georgian’ poets, three – ‘To Have Loved Enough’, ‘Hypnos from a Bronze’, and ‘The Lover’ – stand out because of the intimacy linking the poet to an unidentified person. They are love poems, intensely expressed, with feelings of longing underpinned by a prevailing sense of vulnerability and foreboding. The lover was Burns.

  So bound in you, I scarce can draw breath

  But your quiet breathing stirs against my breast,

  Under my heart I feel your heart’s unrest

  The close quiescence of your tenderness …

  I have no movement shared not-even death

  That stills the tumult of a blood to sleep

  Shall merge immortally hand and lip

  And seal the consummation of our kiss.

  It was over a discussion about Eliot, his growing interest in Christian activism, and the way in which the play they had seen in Canterbury seemed to combine faith and poetry in the figure of a solitary and ambivalent martyr, that Burns fell in love with Ann Bowes-Lyon, at twenty-eight years old one year younger than himself.

  Burns found Ann – born a Protestant but moving towards the Church of Rom
e much as Eliot was – intellectually mature and physically attractive in a way that set her apart from and above other women he had known. She was no sexual flirt like Olivia Plunket Greene, nor a religious fundamentalist like Gabriel Herbert. Her royal lineage and self-control challenged him socially and romantically – the commoner pursuing his ‘princess’. The suggestion that Ann’s blue blood may have been mixed as a result of an ancestor’s affair with a Welsh maid appears to have been kept from him, another secret the Bowes-Lyon family thought it prudent not to share with the outside world.

  Ann, for her part, found herself initially uneasy at being courted with such passion by a man who evidently was well outside the tightly-knit aristocratic circle in which she had been brought up. A cradle Catholic, born in a foreign land, and educated by the Jesuits, the darkly handsome Burns carried the charismatic air of a bachelor who seemed more content with life than the male members of her family, and with a self-confidence that contrasted with the stiff upright young men she had met when growing up. And yet from their first meeting, he had also shown himself disarmingly thoughtful.

  He was not only insightful about literature, and matters of faith, but deeply sensitive and receptive to her views. He began to pay court, writing to her and seeing her whenever he could – whenever she returned to London between extended stints at Glamis and her country home in Kent near Churchill’s house in Chartwell. Burns would often follow Ann to Orchard Farm, a large cottage her academic friends the De Navarros owned in Worcestershire, near to where her sister Jean lived.

  The De Navarros were happy to provide an intimate environment where the lovers could meet without the intrusion of Ann’s parents or some of her less liberated childhood friends. Such was the intensity of the affair that Burns would leave sealed notes around the cottage for Ann to remind her of a particular passionate moment they had recently shared.

  In one letter, dated 29 May 1939, Burns while at Orchard Farm wrote: ‘Darling, here I am alone in this room, crouched next to the fire – I can hear little padding about above and still the sound of your voice. This is just a “ticket” for your morning – to tell you how very dear you have been all day. From the moment you popped your fuzzy head out of the window – to the moment you laid it back on the pillow after I had kissed you goodnight you were beautiful, really and truly lovely … I know that my heart is branded with your beauty, Ann, and no one else can make their mark now. Dearest … I’m grateful for you being so much better than when I last saw you …’

  Photographs the De Navarros snapped of the couple at the time show Burns and Ann standing rather awkwardly before the camera, as if slightly uneasy about their relationship being recorded for posterity. Perhaps Ann’s sister Jean was present that day. However intense, their love affair appeared to be based on fragile ground.

  Gradually she found herself opening her inner feelings to him in a way that she had never done with anybody else, as if he had laid siege to her Edwardian battlement and breached its defences.

  As she wrote in another of her poems:

  If to have loved enough could be its own assurance

  There was no chink left in my armour,

  Never a hidden entry for betrayal

  Only the safety of your tenderness

  Like a firelit room secure from the winter night.

  The passionate poetess is barely hinted at in a collection of photographs taken by Howard Coster for the National Portrait Gallery in 1937, about the time her relationship with Burns was becoming more intense. It shows her very posed and controlled – a well-groomed woman with a swan-like neck, face of fine complexion and eyes suggesting an inner intelligence. As a mature young woman, Ann shared some common traits with her cousin Elizabeth, including deep-blue eyes and that ‘thrush-like beauty’ as Cecil Beaton would later refer to the future Queen Mother. Beneath the veneer of prudence and decorum was a multi-layered personality that Burns discovered only gradually, and which made his relationship with the future Queen’s cousin something tense, unpredictable, and for his part certainly, almost obsessive.

  That Burns’s relationship with Ann came to prove more complicated than his previous somewhat frivolous affairs of the heart had to do with the royal milieu into which she had been propelled as a result of the events of 1936. For in that year her cousin Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon had become the Duchess of York, briefly sister-in-law to King Edward VIII, before finally Queen Consort to King George VI. Suddenly Ann found herself sharing her family duties with an extended royal household that, after the debacle of Mrs Simpson’s relationship with King Edward VIII and the ensuing abdication crisis, was less than open to outsiders.

  Ann nonetheless stirred in Burns romantic notions of his own Scottish roots, which, he believed, stretched back, as they did with the Bowes-Lyon family, to Robert the Bruce, the great King of Scotland. The turmoil sweeping through European politics, and the growing realisation that world war might not be far off, made the relationship both intense and complicated as it developed during the late 1930s.

  When not seeing each other at Burns’s flat off the King’s Road, or at the homes of mutual friends, the pair maintained a regular correspondence, only Burns’s side of which has survived. The letters are punctuated with references to a feline world in which Burns includes sketches of himself and Ann as loving cats in constant pursuit of each other – he a dark tabby, she a sophisticated white Persian. The feline imagery and language show the influence of T. S. Eliot, whose recently published whimsical verses on cat psychology and sociology, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats – fully illustrated – contrasted with the intensity of his early works and the mounting sense of collective unease in the run up to the Second World War.

  During the first months of 1939, Ann suffered periodic illness – fatigue accompanied by nausea and fever, symptoms of the depression that affected generations of Bowes-Lyons. Several letters written to her by Burns during this period refer to her either as bed-ridden or recovering from illness. Learning from his experience of living with his friend David Jones, who was also a depressive, Burns tried his best to divert her attention from what he saw as the demons that threatened her from without – in particular the pressures to conform emanating from Glamis Castle and her parents’ home in Kent. But there was a part of him that increasingly came to see the darkness affecting those dearest to him as part of a broader pattern of political and social dislocation. As the war drew nearer, it focused his protective thoughts on her, expressing them as a form of prayer, as if by so doing he hoped not only to win her heart but ensure, through God’s intercession, that war would be avoided.

  In March he wrote, ‘My darling Ann, I wish I was with you tonight. Being together in love would put these given things in their place. Poor poor little miaoooo – being sick in the wood – I do indeed understand how you could be but you see, darling, things are much better than they appear to be: and we live in the frontiers of heaven and hell – of which peace or rumblings of war are very sketchy shadows. Live in the reality and the world will do what one expects of it, of good and bad. I mean live in a kind of prayer and you’ll be all right …’

  In August, Ann was with other members of the Bowes-Lyon family in Glamis Castle, attending the usual round of summer house parties as generations had done before them, when Ribbentrop, the former German ambassador to London who had become Hitler’s foreign minister, flew to Moscow and with Stalin’s foreign secretary Molotov signed the Nazi–Soviet Pact that divided Poland between them. A letter reached her from Burns: ‘I keep thinking of you isolated up there with all this wild and grim news flying around: poor darling: I do hope you are all right. The Russian–German hook-up may turn out to be a good thing; if the Germans and Poles both act with generosity and common sense: seeing destruction of Poland as certain if things waver and deciding to play for peace with Danzig and the diminished life of Poland after its gone. Before this pact, you see, the Poles were more likely to fight and the left wing in this country were getting more and more im
patient with Chamberlain and keener and keener on the Russians; now at any rate, even Mr Gollancz will have to see the light – which is simply that the Russian simply cannot be trusted at all. I hope it is not too late – but our left wing has led us a long way up the garden path and it’s difficult to come back …’

  The hope that another world war might be avoided was shattered by Hitler’s invasion of Poland. When he heard the news, Burns could think of nothing better to do but go to Fortnum & Mason and invest in a pair of strong brogues and an all-purpose canvas bag, in case he might be called up. Later he went back to his house, and there, in the white room, with Tim on his lap, wrote Ann the first lines that came into his head. In the intimate code language they used with each other, spontaneous notes quickly dispatched by messenger or left on coffee tables came to be known as ‘tickets’. This was the first ticket of the war.

  ‘Darling little heart – this is just a scribble in the midst of things to say hello. I think these last days aren’t at all without their muse. They make us take stock and see what we stand for and mean to do and be. My Darling – I will write a little ticket very soon – tonight it’s impossible … What a wind and rain tonight – cats ought to be curled up in boxes on such a night as this – I’ll send my love to keep you warm. Blessing you my dreamt one …’

  Hours after war had been declared, Burns sat at home drinking whisky with a young friend, Michael Richey, discussing the tumultuous events that were unfolding. At twenty-three, Richey was ten years younger than Burns. A fellow Catholic, he had been educated as a schoolboy by the Benedictines, and had for a while considered becoming a monk himself before joining Eric Gill’s commune of artists as an apprentice carver.