A House Full of Daughters

by Juliet Nicolson

  But while the male-dominated awareness had lingered for a decade after the end of the war, the political, social, sexual and cultural context of Britain began to shift from 1928 onwards. Philippa was born a few months after the death of Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, a politician who, at his pre–Great War zenith, had prevaricated over the protests of the suffragettes during the long, hot summer of 1911, prompting women to carry out ever more drastic acts of violence and the government to punish them with imprisonment and the barbaric practice of force-feeding. In 1928, only one generation later, the voting age for women was lowered from thirty to twenty-one, Amelia Earhart became the first woman to make a solo transatlantic voyage in an aeroplane, and three works of literature that would have a lasting impact not only on what was read but on how people thought about sexuality were published to responses that varied from horror and censorship to qualified optimism. Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness, in which the prosecutors claimed the lesbian relationship was made explicit by the single phrase ‘and that night, they were not divided’, was removed from legal sale in England. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, with its gender-ambiguous hero, was applauded for its originality and imaginative breadth, and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was banned in Britain and the United States for sexual obscenity but published in Florence in 1928 and in Paris the following year. Children like my mother settled happily for A. A. Milne’s new book The House at Pooh Corner.

  Adults knew they were living in limbo. The government’s claim that the Great War had been the war to end all wars was gradually being eroded. The revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky had been arrested in Moscow under the instruction of the new Soviet leader Josef Stalin and in 1928 was exiled to Kazakhstan. The Fascist threat in Italy and the Communist influence in Spain were intensifying as the economic health of a wounded but increasingly defensive Germany was on the rise. In October 1929, when my mother was ten months old, more than thirty billion dollars was wiped from the New York Stock Exchange and the Great Depression got under way. Children grew to hate the overuse of the word ‘crisis’, popular with adults since the publication of Winston Churchill’s book The World Crisis in 1923. ‘Will our children bleed and gasp again in devastated lands?’ he had asked. My mother’s generation grew up under a national apprehension that the First World War would have a sequel, just as my own generation was fear-fogged by the adults’ anxiety that the Cold War would fulfil predictions of a third.

  Like many families of the time, the Tennyson d’Eyncourts secretly valued their sons more than they did their daughter. Philippa was a middle child, neatly and inconspicuously shelved between her two brothers. The boys were sent away to expensive schools while my mother’s education was reduced to the minimum, skimmed over, in the expectation that her blonde curls and sweetness of nature would eventually land her a husband, preferably one with a title who would keep her in the manner to which he would assume she had been accustomed. Despite the mood for women’s emancipation, Philippa remained trapped by her parents’ conservatism. With so little encouragement, she was as unlikely to pursue a career as the privileged members of Vita’s generation had once been. Pam and Gervaise did not neglect their only daughter, but for much of the time they ignored her: they were even more preoccupied with themselves than they were with their precious sons. A reaction to the deprivations of the First World War still hung over families like Philippa’s, the post-war well-off. Many were determined to compensate for the long, grim days when hedonistic excess had been discouraged by the King himself, the serving of alcohol at Buckingham Palace prohibited in order to encourage temperance among the affluent. Pam and Gervaise had swiftly become expert post-war cocktail mixers, their days filled with tennis parties, bridge games and travel to sunny places.

  Philippa spent her early years near Hyde Park in a white-painted Georgian square around which uniformed nannies heaved enormous prams and discussed the indiscretions and infidelities of their employers. Her early life followed a path as conventional as that set down in The Lady magazine, which advised its readers in December 1930 that ‘many a tomboy’s hands (and incidentally her manners) have been improved by the possession of a manicure set’. Philippa was taught the rules, handed on in turn to me, that stressed how important it was to finish everything on your plate except the pattern, to wear Chilprufe vests next to the skin, to say ‘vulgar’ rather than ‘common’ and ‘grown-up’ not ‘adult’, to choose Cadbury’s chocolates over Fry’s, to pass round the cigarette box at parties and to eat peas with the fork humped, as well as that ‘bugger’ was an acceptable swear word for women to use, that whistling was not for ladies, that the Church of England was aristocratic, that farting was funny and that a grown-up should never be addressed or even referred to by his or her first name. The inspirational example of the King’s second daughter, Princess Margaret Rose, some eighteen months younger than my mother, was dangled above Philippa like an ermine-lined balloon that might lift her to celestial rewards. Princess Margaret Rose was never late for meals and never forgot to wash her hands before tea. Reverence for the monarchy was stitched into her sensibility from birth, impregnated into the ‘By Royal Appointment’ terry-towelling nappies from Harrods.

  But one morning in September 1939 during a week of softly lit, autumn-sunny days, the swallows gathered on the telegraph wires, talkative, shiny, preparing for their imminent departure across the sea. That same week gas masks were placed next to tapestry kneelers on the floor of church pews, and my ten-year-old mother was released from her place beneath the flimsy domestic net and unwittingly embarked on a long pattern of flight that was to bookmark her life. The refuge from her parents’ stuffy way of life was a small, private, girls-only boarding school called Lady Walsingham’s in the heart of Norfolk. On the first day of the first term she found herself on the railway platform at London’s Liverpool Street Station standing next to a pretty, dark-haired girl of her own age who looked sad but nice. Only a month earlier Sarah Freeman’s mother had tripped on her own hair slides, carelessly and inexplicably left on a slippery wooden staircase, and tumbled to her death. Sarah’s father had married his dead wife’s best friend immediately after the accident, catapulting Sarah from motherlessness to stepdaughterhood within a week. Heading across the fens with the schoolgirls chattering and the steam train clattering, a friendship was formed between two neglected daughters. Half a century later a framed photograph of Sarah, my godmother, still sat on my mother’s dressing table, shining with the conspiratorial smile of a schoolgirl.

  My mother loved the time she spent in Norfolk. Everything good that she remembered about her early life was rooted in her schooldays; riding, bicycling, friendship, freedom. Lady Walsingham’s school was based at Westmere House, a small manor in the centre of what had been a thirty-four-thousand-acre estate and where the Walsingham family had been the local landowners since the arrival of William the Conqueror. In the late nineteenth century, the 6th Baron Walsingham, a member of the hedonistic Prince of Wales’s set, ran his heirs into tremendous debt after investing and losing everything in the fledgling Argentine railway. The 8th Baron had enough money left to send his only son away to board at Wellington School but none for the private education of his three daughters. His wife, Hyacinth, was determined that Lavender, Margaret and Katherine should have a decent start in life with proper tuition, and started a small school in the mid-1930s at home, where the daughters of her friends and friends of her friends would join her own three girls in the classroom. Lady Walsingham, born in 1890, had no formal educational training other than what her son called ‘etiquette in the dining room and withdrawing room’. But her inexperience did not deter her from adopting an intimidatingly headmistressy manner. She claimed she was psychic, the reincarnation of an Egyptian princess with Anglican beliefs. But the maids knew better, aware that the mistress of the house and school kept herself informed of all the goings-on below stairs by standing silently in the tiny serving lobby between the kitchen and the
dining room, eavesdropping on their chatter. But preserving the respect due to one in her position, the maids never failed to curtsy to Lady Walsingham nor the male servants to salute His Lordship, and none of them dreamt of taking a place in the front pew in the church, which was always reserved for the family from the Big House.

  Known to the pupils as Lady W, or when out of earshot as Dub, the school’s figurehead was a handsome woman, and a keen knitter. Encasing her well-built figure in one of three woollen gowns of her own making, she would give her maid a second dress to wash while unravelling the third into a twirly pile before knitting it up all over again into a new pattern. Hyacinth’s unusual taste in extravagant headgear challenged her otherwise unconditionally approving husband to query, ‘You’re not going out in that hat, are you, Cinter?’ She could not abide the fashionable bobbed cut, wearing her own thigh-length hair, plaited daily over half an hour, in a Victorian chignon encircling the top of her head. In photographs it looks like a French loaf ready for the oven.

  Lady W advertised her school in The Times personal columns on 1 August 1938. Riding side-saddle was her own favourite outdoor occupation and RIDING, capitalised in the newspaper promotion, became the central focus of the school. Sixteen ponies were shared among the thirty-two girls, a figure that rose to sixty with the school’s popularity and as well-off city dwellers sent their children as far as they could from the advancing threat of war. The pony obsession is evident in a sepia-coloured photograph of riding-breeches-clad figures ice-skating on the frozen pond. Lady Walsingham’s became a happy, even idyllic place to spend a war.

  During the summer the fields of the estate were dense with clover-rich grass, grazed by cows that provided each girl and teacher with half a pound of delicious butter a week. In a world where from 1940 onwards most of the country was rationed to a meagre two ounces, Lady W’s girls were spoilt. The dairy shop in the basement of the house sold the excess milk, butter and cheese to villagers who came to fill up their trays and jugs and cream churns. In order to earn some extra cash from fields thick with rabbit warrens that prevented the soil from flourishing, Lord Walsingham grew asparagus in two long strips on the land in front of the house. He planned to supply the fancy London hotels but discovered the crop would take eight years to reach both the maturity and quality worthy of London diners. Instead, the Norfolk schoolgirls thrived on the sweet and delicate nursery stems, adding to the school’s reputation as an indulgent establishment floating in melted butter and devoted to horsing around.

  There was little formality between staff and students, with girls calling the teachers by their first names. In the summertime there was tennis (three grass courts) and swimming (one swimming pool and a muddy pond that froze over in the winter to form the skating rink), and all year round there was dancing, cooking and needlework and in winter, meals of thick and delicious rabbit stew. Lavender Walsingham maintained that the four things she learned during her school years – darning socks, cooking, how to have children and Morse code – served her well through the subsequent years. However, Lady Walsingham’s school did not entirely neglect the academic curriculum, and lessons in English literature, English language, scripture, French, maths and music were given in small classes of no more than eight girls. One reluctant student, who preferred horses to books, had been told by a fortune-teller in the holidays that she would pass her School Certificate with flying colours. On her return to school she gave up lessons, saddled her horse and waited for the prophecy to come true. She was the only girl in her year to fail every exam.

  The wrong religion was the one acknowledged impediment to admission into Lady Walsingham’s school. Although Lady Walsingham was not a fervent Anglican, she considered observance of the Church of England services to be an essential part of patriotism. Both Lady W and His Lordship had been very shocked when a niece of theirs was ensnared by a Roman Catholic convent and became a devout ‘Mackerel Snapper’, following the Catholic custom of eating fish on Fridays. As a consequence of this family upset, Lady Walsingham’s advertisements stressed from the start that the school would accept ‘Protestants only’. When the school’s attendance levels were threatened by war and the extra financial pressure on parents, Lady Walsingham dropped her termly fee from fifty to thirty-five guineas. But her advertisements retained the religious caveat. And there was another undeclared prejudice. Lady Walsingham’s was a school for posh girls. Only one exception was made, when a place was given at a reduced rate to the daughter of the local vicar. The unfortunate girl was quickly identified by her fellow students as different, made acutely conscious of her charitable status and hated her isolated schooldays there. In the distant meadows and riding paddocks of Norfolk, snobbery and the class system were endemic. The girls remained their parents’ daughters.

  The little community was further segregated from the rest of the world by the remoteness of the landscape. The village shop was a mile away, but a generous sweet ration was kept in a big cupboard at school. When the enemy bombs began to land on London and the fear of a German invasion gradually spread through the country, there was little sign of the conflict in that part of Norfolk. For three years the schoolgirls rode and swam and knitted and sewed and laughed and played games and ate asparagus and made alliances to last a lifetime. Parents rarely visited. The girls were no longer a disparate grouping but a community of unrelated sisters, bonded in friendship rather than blood.

  The all-female environment was interrupted only when Wellington School broke up earlier than Lady W’s and the Walsingham son and heir, John de Grey, came home for the holidays. From the ages of thirteen to eighteen he steeled himself to return to this daunting establishment. ‘Like all males in their teens,’ he explained to me recently at the age of ninety, ‘I was naturally homosexual and found mixed-sex card games difficult and mixed swimming impossible.’ John and the vicar’s daughter were among the few at Westmere to feel out of sorts.

  Love inevitably flourished among the desks. The lively romance between two of the staff members was followed as keenly as a popular magazine serial. Miss Gummersall, the matron known as Gummy, fell uninhibitedly for Miss Joy, the maths and geography mistress. A frisson ran around the school whenever the two were spotted holding hands, a running risqué joke that the expression on Gummy’s face confirmed that she had recently been filled with joy. Romantic attachment between the girls also thrived. An excited queue would form before lights out as younger girls waited their turn to kiss Lavender, the very pretty and oldest Miss de Grey, goodnight. She was recognised as a ‘mother figure’, and according to her sister Katie, Philippa was invariably the first in the queue. Philippa gravitated towards any kind of proxy-maternal reassurance, even that offered by a fellow schoolgirl. A deprivation of attention at home had left her with a craving for a hug, some sort of intimacy, a physical connection with another person.

  The years Philippa spent at Lady Walsingham’s nourished her growing sense of individuality and of belonging. It provided an environment free from challenge, a jolly, girly, privileged place where schoolgirls were sometimes referred to by teachers as ‘our daughters’ and life seemed to hold such promise. She blossomed into the sort of pupil who was naughty enough, loyal enough, merry enough and pretty enough to be popular. She made people laugh and practised her gift for mimicry until she became an expert. More than seventy years after they had left the school, the youngest de Grey daughter still remembered how she and Philippa would make a midnight dash from their dormitory to the swimming pool for an illicit swim by the light of the moon. Racing back, wrapped in nothing but towels, they were on one occasion summoned to the headmistress the following morning, incriminated by their wet knickers, which they had inadvertently dropped on the path. ‘I liked her because, oh glory, she was fun,’ Katie told me.

  But even Lady Walsingham’s protective walls could not keep out the war forever. The government had begun to look around for military practice sites, especially those with habitable buildings in which the army could rehears
e tactics. One afternoon in June during the summer term of 1942, the villagers on the Walsingham estate, the farmers and their families were summoned to a meeting where Lieutenant General Anderson, the head of Eastern Command, announced that 18,000 acres, 150 houses, 3 schools, 2 pubs and 34 miles of roadway on the Walsingham estate had been identified for military occupation and every villager, man, woman and child, and those in residence at Lady Walsingham’s school were to be evicted for the remainder of the war, however long that would be. Lord Walsingham acknowledged in front of the silent gathering that this was indeed a calamity. The villagers, many of them related to one another, were given a month in which to find themselves alternative places to live. On 19 July, the day the evacuation was completed, the RSPCA arrived to dispose of all the newly homeless pets; the reproach in the animals’ eyes was never forgotten by their owners. Although Lady Walsingham moved her school to other buildings on the estate, many of the girls, including Sarah, were taken away by parents who felt it was no longer safe. Philippa stayed on for only another year before her education ended at the age of fifteen and she left Lady W’s for good.