Doris was impressed by Miss Travers and Miss Burnand, as she called them. Ever so happy, they seemed, and Miss Travers so pretty with her curly hair and lipstick and smart-looking slacks. Doris had a long list of duties. She started at 9 A.M. First there was the general housework, the cleaning, the fires to be lit in winter. The oil lamps and oil heaters had to be cleaned every day. There was no electricity. She pumped up the geyser in the bathroom for the hot water. Doris swept around the two big armchairs near the fireplace, then cleaned the long oak-paneled table. Cu kept her company, trotting around on his squat little legs.
The mail and newspapers came each day; the wind-up phone rang often with news from London. The kitchen was Madge’s domain. Doris was fascinated by how much pasta Miss Travers and Miss Burnand got through. The milk came from Mr. Firrell’s Forge Farm nearby. Miss Travers always made an early start with her writing. Doris lit the fire in Pamela’s new study, added to the house in 1936. “Bring me coffee at eleven,” she instructed Doris. At lunchtime, she liked a whiskey. Every morning she sent Doris outdoors to tickle the carburetor of her car.
Often Pamela talked of America. Doris never really knew where her boss was going next, or why she was going, only that she seemed to be forever traveling. When Madge and Pamela were both away, Doris would check on the cottage, making sure the locks were secure, running a duster around the furniture.3
In January 1936, Pamela joined Jessie and her children on a skiing trip in Switzerland. Jessie’s diaries at the time reveal a new intensity in her relationship with Pamela. The diaries are not proof of intimacy, but there are many allusions to a lesbian relationship. From 1936, these are not specific and could refer just to a close friendship. Later, in the 1940s, the references are specific but still not conclusive proof.
In the spring and summer of 1936, Pamela and Jessie together attended meetings in London conducted by Jane Heap, a lesbian disciple of Gurdjieff who confided in friends “I’m not really a woman.” Heap, who wore scarlet lipstick and masculine suits, and looked a little like Oscar Wilde, was an American who had edited the radical arts magazine Little Review in Chicago with her lover Margaret Anderson. Both women had then studied with Gurdjieff in Paris, but Heap had recently moved to London, on his instructions.
Heap and Anderson, along with their lesbian entourage, had been fascinated with Gurdjieff since they met him in New York in the 1920s. He in turn was fascinated by them, and in January 1936 formed a special lesbian group in Paris called the Rope, whose members and associates included Margaret Anderson, Georgette Leblanc and Elizabeth Gordon. (After Gurdjieff said he had metaphorically roped them together, Kathryn Hulme, one member of the group, said “We knew…even from the first day what that invisible bond portended. It was a rope up which, with the aid of a master’s hand, we might be able to inch ourselves from the cave of illusory being which we inhabited. Or it was a Rope from which, with sloth and lip service, we could very well hang ourselves.”)4
Unlike the members of the Rope, both Pamela and Jessie loved men, but their relationships with men were often frustrating in different ways. When they became close friends, both were feeling the loss of important men in their lives: Jessie with Orage’s death and Pamela with the death of AE a year later.
Jessie Orage’s diaries show that she spent many days with Pamela in 1936, going to the theatre and movies, having dinner, taking holidays together, or just talking, often all through the night. In May, Jessie went shopping for Pamela, who wanted some coral. Jessie wrote in a diary entry: “She wants to wear it for her melancholia.” A few days later, after Jessie found just the right piece, a coral hand token she bought from a man in Chancery Lane, she went down to Pound Cottage for a “delightfully mad afternoon and evening with Pamela.” Next day, they walked in the woods in the rain. And the day after, “Pamela and I did not get up ’til late.”
In the middle of the year, Pamela’s American publisher, Eugene Reynal, suggested she visit New York, Detroit and Chicago to promote Mary Poppins.5 Jessie accompanied Pamela to Southampton, where she boarded the Queen Mary. Jessie wrote in her diary, “I shall miss P. terribly.” Pamela rang Jessie from the ship and then the United States quite often, with Jessie feeling “great excitement” at each call. Pamela returned in December, ill with pleurisy, almost too sick to walk from the boat. In her luggage, she had an extravagant present for Jessie: a luxurious evening cloak. That New Year’s Eve, Jessie and Pamela went to King’s Hotel in Brighton. Jessie’s diary records: “P. and I have a room overlooking the sea. At 12, P. rang Madge and sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’ into the phone.”
Madge was hardly a disinterested party in this relationship. In 1937, tensions grew among the three women. The entries in Jessie’s diaries for this year reveal a complex web of emotions and references to other tumultuous relationships in Pamela’s life. In May, Jessie drove down to Pound Cottage to find “P. not very well having had an emotional week. Damn Madge. I’ve always been suspicious of her temper and the cruelty of her nostrils.”
Jessie recorded that Pamela had suffered several “dizzy spells” in June. On June 29, “P. and I drove back to London. P. seemed happy but became more and more silent, not completely, “til after she rang Madge.” After a summer holiday at a beach in Ireland, during which Jessie squabbled with Pamela, the two women met Madge in Dublin where Jessie also fought with Madge. The next month, Jessie wrote, “P. told me many things about herself she’d never told me. It pleased me very much…we talked in front of the fire. I understand many things now.”
Those many things remain frustratingly hidden, but it may have been that Pamela told of her love for Francis Macnamara who, in 1937, succumbed to marriage for the third time. His new bride was the woman who had been his sexy young house guest in London, Iris O’Callaghan. The couple went to live in Ireland. Francis was a serial lover who compartmentalized his affairs, ignoring the trail of broken hearts and adopting the position that each affair was just a game, and that his women should take them as lightly as he did himself. Each game ended more messily than he hoped. Pamela cared for him a great deal more than he ever knew. She carried a torch for Francis Macnamara for the rest of her life, forgiving him, preserving him in her mind as the perfect man, though she knew all along he was a Don Juan.6
• • •
Despite her intimate relationship with Jessie, the loss of Macnamara represented a serious passing of hope for Pamela, and left a great emptiness in her spirit. His place was filled to some extent by Gurdjieff, whom Pamela first met with Jessie in March 1936 when the women took the boat train to France, visited the vacant Prieure at Fontainebleau, then drove to Paris to meet Gurdjieff in Paris at his favorite Café de la Paix.
As Jessie wrote in her diary, “Gurdjieff didn’t know me at first. We went to his flat…Margaret, Georgette and Elizabeth Gordon there. Same old ritual, drinks to idiots etc., very good food cooked by G….Pam and I did all the talking. I found I felt quite indifferent to him.”
Pamela, though, was entranced. Here, in the Gurdjieff work she had already studied with Heap, was a philosophy that appealed to both her intellect and senses for different reasons. It satisfied many parts of her, from her need to set herself apart from others to her need to find relief from dreadful anxiety. The Gurdjieff way was clearly not for the strugglers of the world. Firstly, he demanded money and secondly, he insisted on more self-absorption and more time than strugglers could afford. Gurdjieff attracted the emotionally needy and most of all, he was a magnet for artists of all kinds, among them Georgia O’Keeffe, T. S. Eliot, Frank Lloyd Wright and Lincoln Kirstein, the rich associate and backer of the choreographer George Balanchine.
Pamela was a snob. The exclusivity of the Gurdjieff work for the fortunate few appealed to her. There were other attractions: the emphasis Gurdjieff placed on studying oneself, and his promise of peace partly through dance. The first rule of his work was to know thyself, to practice deep inner observation. The student was to ask, “Do I actually know myself in the here an
d now, know myself with objectivity?” The Gurdjieffians constantly practiced turning in on themselves. Negative emotions had to be banished as they worked daily on their inner health in order to become “conscious” and transformed. Students took mental pictures of themselves, watched their sensations, moods, emotions, thoughts. The idea was to experience non-desire over desire. Such introspection suited Pamela perfectly.
All this self-study ran in tandem with Gurdjieff’s ritualistic dances and movements. He had about a hundred of these, derived from sources in Turkey, Turkestan, Tibet and Afghanistan. The dances represented a kind of meditation in action or body semaphore. Among them were six obligatory exercises as well as dervish dances for men and prayers in motion. Throughout his life, Gurdjieff affected the humble persona of “an old dancing teacher,” but that affectation was close to the mark.
In her soul, Pamela was a dancer, too, not trained but instinctive. She found the calmness she needed as she executed Gurdjieff’s sacred dances in various halls of London. Through dance, she met and became close friends with Gurdjieff-trained student teachers, among them Rosemary Nott, who was also a pianist, and Jessmin Howarth. Pamela eventually called Nott her mentor; she loved to hear her play for the movements, particularly the obligatory exercises.
The Gurdjieff work undoubtedly helped calm her mind to some extent, but Jessie’s diaries show that Pamela remained in a state of high tension through many of the next few years. She appeared to be in a double bind with Madge Burnand. Both women needed one another, yet hurt one another over and over again. At the end of 1937, Madge sailed on the Queen Mary for a long break in the USA, but by mid-May of 1938 Jessie’s diary notes, “Pam very depressed. She dreads M.’s return.” A week later, “M. is putting her through it all right.” In October, Pamela visited Jessie in London and after dinner, “cried and cried.” Jessie thought she was crying because Madge had taken a job that meant leaving Pound Cottage, although she was not specific about the place Madge was to move to.
At the cottage, Doris knew nothing of all this anguish. But one day, she was astonished to find Miss Burnand had packed up and left. She hadn’t told Doris she was going, and Pamela never mentioned Madge’s name to Doris again.7
Now, even Doris was to be drawn into Pamela’s unhappiness and uncertainty. For several years, Pamela had observed how easy Jessie was with her children, how a mother and her child can be even closer than lovers, snuggling into one another, giggling, hugging, sharing nothing specific yet everything.
Pamela quietly, without saying why, arranged for a new bedroom to be built at the cottage, next to her study. She called on Mrs. Vockins up the road. Pamela summoned up all her acting talent. In her most persuasive and charming way, she suggested that as Mr. and Mrs. Vockins had seven children, and because Doris was already working at Pound Cottage every day, would it not be an excellent idea if she took one of the children off her hands, and formally adopted Doris?
The plan failed dismally. The Vockinses just wouldn’t have it. And Doris herself told her she definitely did not want to live at Pound Cottage, despite Pamela’s offer that she would show her the world. To that, Doris replied: “I don’t want to see the world!”
On January 13, 1939, Jessie’s diary noted: “Tempestuous day. P. sacked Doris. P. and I rowed again, she is so snide, rude to my children, and flares at them.”8
• • •
Pamela now felt in desperate need of someone to love and control. Her sisters in Australia meant little to her. She had no parents, no permanent lover, no children, and even Madge had gone. The adoption fantasy remained firmly in her mind. She told Jessie, who wrote in her diary in February 1939: “P. is disappointed because I didn’t support her idea of adoption wholeheartedly.”
All through spring the women talked of the plan, Jessie trying not to tell Pamela she thought the scheme quite harebrained. Her growing obsession that she must have a baby coincided with exterior stresses—the certainty that there was going to be a war involving all of Europe. Jessie’s diary entries began to alternate between the fateful dates of Hitler’s advance, and the minutiae of life in Pound Cottage and Jessie’s own home in London. The escalating tensions before the declaration of war were also recorded in a poetic and dreamy way by Pamela, in a series of articles she wrote for the New English Weekly. From as early as 1937, when she reported on how Edward VII’s coronation was celebrated in her village, Pamela had chronicled the doings of Mayfield for the New English Weekly. She referred to Mayfield as either as “a Sussex Village” or “M—.” In the series, subtitled “Our Village,” she made the personal universal, gently mocking the fusspots of Mayfield while painting a picture of an English country town as romantic as a Constable landscape. Only an outsider, an Australian who had dreamed of the “Mother” country, could capture the essence of a Sussex village as well.
On the day war was declared, Pamela clambered into her BSA and drove to Mayfield “to see how the village was taking it.” The place was in turmoil, “worse than market day.” The butcher’s boy ran past her shouting that an air raid was in progress. She watched in alarm as the tobacconist—a warden—hurried along the street in a waterproof cape, clanging a dinner bell. It turned out to be only a fire at the Frogling Farm. A local boy, John Eldridge, stood at his front gate to be greeted by two passersby: “You’d better get indoors, war has been declared!”
The frenzy of those days had a parallel in the messy breakdown of the friendship between Pamela, Jessie and Madge, who was to make a reappearance in Jessie’s diary that autumn. By the end of September, Jessie and Pamela were squabbling at Pound Cottage whenever Jessie came to stay. Jessie wrote: “I must be independent even if it means getting a house of my own.” The next month, when the three women met for a drink at a hotel, Madge was very reserved and silent. Then, in an explosion of awful anger, Pamela yelled “Madge, you’re a goddamned bitch!” The outburst was followed by ghastly scenes, with Jessie recording that Madge actually hit Pamela and Jessie.
• • •
Pamela by now was determined to adopt a baby, despite Jessie repeatedly telling her it was “a crazy idea.” On October 23, Pamela received a letter from Dublin telling her a certain infant was ready for collection. She wrote of the journey in the New English Weekly, not revealing the reason for traveling from London, with its “sandbags, blackened windows and carefully staged humiliating atmosphere of Safety First,” to the quiet, diurnal and “comfortably realistic Dublin” with its “soft radiant light.” In such a place it was “impossible not to melt into whatever is one’s true self.”9
Pamela had first gone to Ireland in 1924 believing it was her own spiritual homeland, so it was hardly surprising that she would return there fifteen years later to pick up a piece of Ireland for herself. Her adopted baby was not to be just any old Irish child, but the grandson of a great friend of Yeats, the publisher of AE’s works and a cousin of Francis Macnamara.
The baby’s surname was Hone. His grandfather, Joseph Maunsell Hone, was a central figure in the Anglo-Irish literary network, Ireland’s most distinguished literary biographer. He had founded Maunsell and Company in 1905, which published works by Yeats, Synge and AE, and knew all the writers worth knowing, among them Gogarty, AE and Hubert Butler. In 1939, when he was in his late fifties, Hone had written The Life of George Moore, and he was soon to write the first biography of Yeats.
Francis Macnamara often came to stay with Hone at his big old house at South Hill, Killiney, on the coast south of Dublin. The home, inherited from his wealthy father, was open to all the literary clan. With its five bedrooms and three living rooms, there was more than enough room for Hone, his American wife Vera, their three children and all their friends. Madge Burnand, who knew Hone through her father, stayed at South Hill in the 1920s and Joseph and Vera Hone’s daughter, Sally, remembered that Pamela was a houseguest from the late 1920s. Joseph liked her very much, Vera less so.
The baby Pamela was to adopt was more like Vera in personality than Joseph, w
ho was as cautious and canny with money as Vera was extravagant. For many years the Hones spent their winters at the Grand Hotel in Gardone, near Genoa. Vera had accounts at all the best shops in Dublin. When the parcels and boxes arrived home Joseph complained, “You’re spending far too much money!” Although he was sociable, and amusing, Hone harbored a pessimistic, conservative streak. He gave his two sons names that had been in the Hone family for centuries. The elder son was called Nathaniel, after the best known of all the Hones, an eighteenth-century painter.
Nathaniel, shortened to Nat, lived life recklessly but with a certain style and great charm. He went to New College, Oxford, then in 1933, when he was twenty-one, inherited about £10,000. From then on, Nat lived the life of a rich young man about town.10 He joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, planning to take a group of Irish Republicans to fight for Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Or so he said. The plane he was piloting did not fly beyond Biarritz. His son wrote of the adventure: “He and the rest of the bibulous Irish brigade spent a week at the Imperial Palace instead, ambushing the champagne before flying back to Dublin.”
Nat was a publican’s nightmare, with a habit developed in the 1930s of moving around Dublin’s cocktail bars with a loaded .45 under his coat, blasting the tops off the brandy and Benedictine bottles.11 One day in the King’s Head and Eight Bells in the Kings Road, Chelsea, Nat met a nurse—Bridget Anthony, one of twelve siblings from a poor County Kilkenny family. Like her own father, the pretty Bridget (nicknamed Biddy) was very fond of a drink. She married Nat in August 1936. Biddy, a Catholic girl, was already pregnant.
When little Joe was born six months later, Nat and Biddy lived in comfort in Surrey. It seemed as though the inheritance would last forever. The next year, Nat and Biddy had another baby, Geraldine. Soon after, Biddy became pregnant yet again, this time with twins. She decided to go home to Ireland, to give birth in Dublin. Anthony Marlow Hone and John Camillus Hone were born on August 15, 1939. By now, the strain of raising four children on an ever-diminishing pile of money was beginning to tell. In the summer of 1939, with the war between Germany and Britain so close, the Hones decided the family must scatter. Little Joe Hone, only two and a half, was sent to his grandparents at Killiney. Grandmother Vera Hone wanted to bring him up herself, but old Joseph, still fussing about money, said he would not allow it.12 Instead, he was unofficially adopted by Joseph’s friend Hubert Butler and his wife, Peggy, at their family home in Kilkenny in the southeast of Ireland.13
Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P. L. Travers Page 18