A House Full of Daughters

by Juliet Nicolson

  * * *

  Philippa’s eventual return home made little difference to the lives of my grandparents. Sarah would come to stay and was taken aback by Gervaise and Pam’s lack of interest in their daughter and her friend. Barely looking up from their game of canasta or bezique, unless it was to mix another super-strength martini, they would spend the evenings playing card games and shaking cocktails before edging their inebriated way to bed.

  Gervaise was a presentation in pastel. From his slick grey hair – faintly yellowish from a regular infusion of tobacco smoke – downwards, he appeared bleached out. He wore baby-pink and lavender shirts with white collars and cuffs like a nurse, and his soft, damp-from-the-flannel complexion was so pale as to appear almost bloodless. He took a womanly care of his appearance. His skin was wiped clean of blemish by the Trumper’s barbers in St James’s while his fingernails were buffed, shaped and grime-innocent. He smelled nice. Even the snap of a new five-pound note being flicked years later from the wad he carried in his leather wallet and handed out with abundance to us grandchildren smelled as good as it sounded. Dirt was to be avoided. Dirt smelled of poverty. Gervaise smelled rich.

  As a small granddaughter I instinctively avoided physical contact with Pam, recoiling from the knobbly pearls at her neck that dug into me during the obligatory embrace on arrival at her house, while fascinated by the red lipstick stains that muralled her teeth. They lived in the New Forest in Hampshire in a mock-Tudor house. The silky fringes of her two identical Yorkshire terriers, Yorkshire and Bartie (her private, jokey shortening of Baronet), were combed to a gleam and tied neatly between the ears in pink and blue silk ribbons. Our favourite person in the house was the cook and our favourite room was the kitchen: both smelled deliciously of newly baked cake. Upstairs the uncomfortable, lemon-striped, horsehair sofas abutted sharp-angled side tables made from mottled walnut bearing china horses and silver ashtrays. Paintings of hunting scenes and fishing scenes and shooting scenes and all manner of other outdoor sporting scenes hung on the walls. On our visits there in the 1960s a pre-war lifestyle endured. At breakfast time, the electric hotplate on the sideboard was laden with fishcakes and chewy grilled kidneys, food we associated with lunch. The stables had remained untouched for years. Dozens of rosettes, many of the red first-prize variety, were attached to the beams with drawing pins, but I remember being more intrigued by the rows of ancient cans of tomato soup that had been rusting on the surrounding shelves since rationing began in 1940. One end of the garden terminated in a ha-ha, a terrifying hazard if you were on a bicycle, while the rest of the garden was surrounded by barbed-wire fences stopping the New Forest ponies from wandering onto the lawn and eating the flowers. The vegetation beyond the fence was largely yellow gorse, full of prickles. It was a hostile environment without and within. My grandparents never questioned their position of superiority within the village, but behind their backs the villagers referred to them, in true E. F. Benson style with an affected double tap of forefinger to nose, as the Tennis-Courts.

  Shortly after the outbreak of war, together with most country householders with rooms to spare, Pamela and Gervaise had been legally obliged to give a home to young evacuees from Britain’s larger cities, especially London, where the danger of attack was greatest. A million children had been evacuated by the end of 1939 and received no schooling for four months. The distress of the parents at the parting was mitigated by the knowledge that their children were going to stay in safer and healthier surroundings. But parents had no control over how much compassion would be shown to their children by the temporary guardians. Three little girls arrived at my grandparents’ diamond-paned, well-ordered, polished-mahogany, stiff-chintzy house, nervous, disorientated and miserable, saved from the threat of falling bombs but ripped out from the rootedness of their own houses. They carried few reminders of home with them other than a change of clothes and one another.

  At the first supper, one of the little girls eyed the plate of greyish meat in front of her and asked if she could please have some of her father’s favourite sauce. Except she did not put it like that. ‘Daddy’s favourite sauce’ was what she said. I came to dread my mother’s retelling of this story, and the accompanying affectation of a cockney accent to emphasise the almost foreign nature of these children. In an attempt to identify Daddy’s favourite sauce, Pam encouraged Philippa, home from the very different society of Lady Walsingham’s, to join the guessing game as together they went through every sauce they could think of. Tomato, Worcester, Tabasco and salad cream were swiftly dismissed in favour of béarnaise and hollandaise, each of these two options delivered in an exaggerated French accent. Goodness, Daddy must have a very unusual sauce as his favourite if it was none of these! The little girls had begun by shaking their heads at each suggestion, but when all recognisable possibilities had been exhausted they sat still in their chairs and began to sniff and then to weep. And then Pamela finally guessed what she had known all along. Daddie’s Favourite Sauce was a spicy, sticky, messy, glutinous, brown liquid, sweetened with a hint of molasses. The brand became well known during the war for the Daddie’s Girls, the brown-sauce factory workers whose flirtatious notes of encouragement attached to the consignments headed for the men at the front had resulted in marriage proposals featured in the popular press. But kitchens in nice houses in Hampshire villages were not acquainted with such nasty substances, even though the angelic curly-haired girl on the bottle’s label looked exactly like the daughter of the house.

  Pamela’s cruelty towards these innocents was not yet complete. When she discovered the girls had washed their underwear and strung it up to dry between the chimney pots, defiling the dignity of her nice, well-appointed house, she took a photograph and presented it to the child refugees’ housing authorities as evidence that the children could not be trusted to behave properly and must be moved to another family. Years later, at the same age as those evacuees, listening to my mother telling this story and of her collusion with her mother, I wondered if she realised that it was not as funny as she had once thought. If this episode did not demonstrate to Philippa, even in hindsight, the extent of her skewed approach to children, it certainly did to me. The failure to understand, let alone love, children, together with the overriding snobbery that dictated Pam’s conduct in most matters, was impossible to miss, and in part became my mother’s own learned behaviour. Snobbery was the means by which Pam and in turn Philippa reassured themselves that they were significant individuals. Snobbery masked their own deficiencies. If they could not be happy within themselves, and who knows whether Pam and Gervaise, with all their martinis and indolence, were truly happy, then they could at least comfort themselves that they were superior to these frightened children.

  Part of the reason why my mother had not supported the children against my grandmother’s cruel taunts was because she did not know how to stand up to those taunts herself. Although Philippa was the daughter of the house and not a visiting refugee, she was not exempt from her mother’s expressions of contempt nor from her regime of domestic discipline. She swept and cleaned and, in her own later interpretation, Cinderella-ed her way through those final two years of international conflict and well beyond the end of the war. Just as the Victorian daughter had been raised to help her mother with the running of the home, now in the 1940s and ’50s the unmarried daughter in families who once had afforded servants became indispensible in maintaining pre-war standards. The difference between them and the housemaids who had preceded them was they were not paid. But the bitter resentment that my mother felt about the ‘skivving’ that she was required to do, a resentment that she often voiced to us, so much luckier, she reminded us, in our chore-free adolescence than she had been, is more easily explained by the knowledge that Philippa’s parents were not poor, just mean.

  Throughout the war Gervaise had spent time in the splendour of his suite at the Dorchester in Park Lane, a hotel owned and built by McAlpines, the family construction firm run partly by the father
of an old school friend of his from Charterhouse. Gervaise had clearly not neglected his investments, so Philippa had the impression that she was being unnecessarily punished for a crime that she had not committed. She saw herself as a daughter without any marital prospects (she was still only seventeen) and therefore as a burden who must be made to earn her board and lodging. There was one period of respite from the tedium of keeping house. Lavender, the eldest Walsingham daughter, had left school to enrol as a trainee in undercover surveillance as part of the Special Operations Executive. Just before the end of the war her sister Katie persuaded my mother to go with her to the same ‘finishing school’ as Lavender had attended. It was in London’s Queen’s Gate and run by Mrs Renee O’Marmy, known to her students as Mrs Really So Smarmy. Philippa and Katie were publicly hazy about exactly what they were learning in this strange establishment. They told friends they were studying ‘public speaking’. My mother lasted one term and never spoke of this period in her life but something dreadful upset her there. Neither my brother nor I remember any talk of a dashing career in espionage before her marriage, but whatever it was that Philippa got up to during those few unhappy months at Queen’s Gate, she begged to be allowed to return home to Hampshire where she continued her job as unpaid housekeeper.

  Eventually Gervaise turned his attention to his drifting daughter. He seems to have realised that, despite her youth, her attractiveness and her sense of humour that had flourished so freely at school, she was beginning to wither, alone in Hampshire with few friends and often only the New Forest ponies as companions. There seemed little chance that Philippa would ever find a husband among the card-playing Tories with whom he and Pam spent their time in the country. Through Gervaise’s connections with the owners of the Dorchester, the hotel’s Swiss chef, Eugene Kaufeler, was persuaded to take Philippa on as an apprentice in his kitchen. Of all the hobbies and passing interests of my mother’s life, cookery was the one that endured. She became a wonderful cook, adapting the haute cuisine of Park Lane recipes to those she eventually served for us at home. My brother remembers ‘enormous cartwheels of mushroom quiche, sole in creamy sauces, giant pieces of roast beef and roast potatoes which she fried to make crisp’, the delicious food of our early childhood, while I, misty with nostalgia, still dream of the Elysian sticky toffee pudding and the roast chicken that melted into my homesick mind during the first weeks of each new boarding-school term. Eugene Kaufeler’s kitchen served a clientele of movie stars, but while clouds of Grand Marnier soufflé wafted up the Dorchester stairs to the luxurious suites, the chef fell paternalistically for my mother. Their pupil-student relationship lasted far beyond her yearlong apprenticeship and we children were the dubious long-term beneficiaries. Our own birthday cakes, ridiculously rich and elaborate with thick glacé icing and a filling of whipped cream embedded with out-of-season strawberries, would be delivered by special van on an annual basis to our boarding schools. Taking its place among the fish-paste sandwiches and ginger biscuits provided by the school for all birthdays Monsieur Kaufeler’s embarrassing cake stood out like a fur coat in a nudists’ colony.

  As an apprentice chef Philippa stayed down in the Park Lane kitchens during the day, but in the evening she came out. After a five-year break during the war the debutante season resumed over the summer months of 1946. The season kicked off with Queen Charlotte’s ball in the Great Room at the Grosvenor House Hotel, where one hundred virginal beauties including my mother curtsied to a cardboard cake before twirling off in the hope of landing a marital contract with a suitably well-bred bachelor. The plan was to spend the next nine months negotiating the deal under the cover of flirting at a Lyons Corner House, at garden parties in Buckingham Palace, on the race course at Ascot, in the dining rooms of London’s smartest residences, on the dance floors of nightclubs and in Britain’s grandest country houses on the weekends. The trick was not to find yourself alone at any point with someone who was NSIT (not safe in taxis) or who insisted that he MTF (must touch flesh, or specifically the gap between the top of the stocking and the elastic of the knicker), or, as some were warned, allow yourself to be kissed by a boy in case that made you have a baby.

  There are some joyful pictures of my mother at a picnic, loafing around, playing leapfrog, being silly, unselfconscious, happy. They are precious pictures, the only ones I have of her at this time in her life when she was so obviously free from any anxiety at all. Friends from those days remember her enviable femininity, her lovely figure and her gaiety during tennis games at Woods Corner and at evenings with the Montagues at Beaulieu Abbey. And she was in love. Patrick Plunket was the Catherine wheel, the fizzing pivot around whom all of London society, including the two royal princesses, spun. An Irish peer with crinkly, smiley eyes who was equerry first to George VI and later to Elizabeth II, he enchanted everyone he met, including his young boss. He lived in West Malling, on what Kentish people knew as ‘the cherry blossom route’, in a pretty pink house with a lovely garden and a conservatory overflowing with orchids and geraniums. My mother was one of many young women to be smitten by him, hoping they might become The One in Patrick’s eyes. To the frustration of them all, he remained a friend to dozens if not hundreds of young women, but never relinquished his bachelor status.

  As her time as a debutante and the traineeship at the hotel both came to an end, my mother returned to the New Forest, with her Border terrier Romeo as chief companion, confined once again within the ivy-coated walls of her parents’ house. She nearly ducked out of a New Year’s cocktail party at a neighbour’s thatched cottage where she knew Bournemouth colonels and their tweed-suited wives would be out in force to meet the guest of honour, the hostess’s lodger, the new Conservative MP for Bournemouth East. But Philippa went, partly because she had become the diligent secretary of the New Forest Young Conservatives Association, a role she took seriously, and partly because her parents, aware of the shortage of men after the war and of the stigma of spinsterhood, wanted her to accompany them, just in case.

  Nigel Nicolson was twelve years older than Philippa but decades younger than the other guests. He was tall and dark, with a creditable war record in the Grenadier Guards. He was the son of well-known if rather bohemian parents. As he mingled among his Tory supporters, among them a pleasing number of pretty young women, his eye fell on my mother and he was smitten. Or so he said to himself at the time. Early in the New Year he took her to a white-tie dance and, although entirely out of character and experience, kissed her in the car on the way home. Then he took her to lunch at the House of Commons and began writing her letters of ‘mounting affection’. He was touched by her sweetness, her responsiveness.

  Five weeks after the cocktail party, and having met no more than half a dozen times, Nigel proposed. He had never mentioned marriage to Philippa herself and the first she knew of it was when Nigel approached Gervaise in the sitting room, where he and Pam were taking their pre-dinner drinks. Nigel described the moment in his diary. As Philippa stood to one side, he cleared his throat and asked Gervaise if he might have Philippa’s hand in marriage. It sounded like a business proposition from one man to another with the two women acting as witnesses to the negotiation. A gasp, some tears, acceptance and champagne all followed as my mother’s parents congratulated Nigel on his arrangement to ‘take Philippa off our hands’. Soon afterwards Nigel took the train to London, leaving a bemused Philippa alone with her parents. The following morning Nigel woke up in the Piccadilly flat he shared with his father thinking, ‘My God, what have I done?’

  7

  Philippa

  Trapped

  Nigel maintained at the time that he had chosen Philippa as his bride because she was ‘unblemished, creamy, innocent’ and ‘the loveliest flower of the New Forest’. He felt, or at least convinced himself to feel, that the motivation behind his proposal was entirely honourable, even laudable: he had fallen in love with her. But in an unpublished memoir written years later he admitted that he had decided to propose mainly bec
ause the acquisition of a wife would do him a lot of good in his constituency. Philippa’s version almost concurred. Although at first she truly believed he had fallen in love with her and she with him, she was under no illusions as to the practical advantages a marriage would produce for Nigel. She discovered through her Young Conservative friends that a few weeks before their meeting, Nigel’s constituency agent had given him some personal advice. The Conservative member for Bournemouth East was in his late thirties and unmarried, and people were beginning to talk. He had to consider his majority. The agent could help. Suddenly Nigel became very gay, attending numerous cocktail parties at which a series of pretty girls were dangled as potential wife material. Philippa was the prettiest. She would enhance his professional reputation.

  In 1953, however, he pretended quite successfully to himself, as well to his constituents, Philippa’s parents and Philippa herself to have met the woman of his dreams. ‘I fantasised my own romance,’ he wrote thirty years later, ‘and acted the role I had created.’ And, love apart, he felt he was doing Philippa a favour. ‘I was rescuing her from a stultifying life of cooking, riding, mowing the lawn and would show her the delights of literature and politics and London and literature.’ And that is exactly what she thought he was doing too. At least that is what she thought at first. Nigel wrote her wonderful love letters, all put neatly away in date order in the ‘Philippa from Nigel’ file that we found after his death. But later Nigel would confess that he knew he ‘was not as head over heels as [he] pretended in the letters’. He was simulating in-loveness. In his unpublished memoir, he cites the fact that his fiancée was ‘barely educated’ as his earliest fear for the long-term success of their marriage. Within weeks Nigel was bored by her. He thought, dangerously and arrogantly, that although she was ‘unformed intellectually’, he would be able to ‘mould’ her, to erase the Tennyson d’Eyncourt–ness from her.