That autumn Diana Churchill and her mother stayed with us for my first ball; it was at Oxford, the Radcliffe Infirmary Ball was its unpromising name. Prof telephoned next day to ask how many proposals we had had? None, was the disappointing answer.
As our London house was let I sometimes stayed at 11 Downing Street with the Churchills when there was a ball in London and Diana and I went together. At Christmas Tom came back and we visited various friends for hunt balls. One became almost as cold on the way to these entertainments as we used to be in the Morris Cowley when we went to the dancing class. There was no chance of leaving again, however cheerless the town hall, until one’s hostess thought everybody had had enough fun. Hunt balls were not my idea of what glamorous grown-up life should be.
The following summer I went to dozens of balls in London. Sometimes Muv came too, and sometimes Farve. I waited until they were at supper or engaged in close conversation on the chaperon’s bench to escape to a nightclub. The charm of night clubs was the fact that they were forbidden. After a short time we would return to the ball; there was poor Muv, very sleepy, dying to go home, and only hoping we had enjoyed ourselves. Parents are no longer expected to perform this intolerable corvée; looking back, I see how good they were to put up with it, year after year, for daughter after daughter.
In July I had a proposal from Bryan Guinness, which I accepted. ‘Oh no,’ said Muv when I told her. ‘You are much too young. How old is he?’
‘Twenty-two.’
‘Oh no, darling, that’s ridiculous. Of course you can ask him to stay if you like, but you must wait two years.’
‘Two years?’
‘Well, one year. You are too young to make up your mind.’
7.
BAILIFFSCOURT
In July 1928 I went accompanied by Nanny, to stay at Bailiffscourt. This was a piece of country by the sea in Sussex which the Guinnesses had bought a couple of years before; they had saved it from speculators who had planned to ruin the entire coast.
Bailiffscourt itself was a small farm-house at Climping, notorious as the home of Colonel Barker, a woman who pretended she was a man and married a Brighton girl. We loved this story which had filled the newspapers and I was considered very lucky to be going to see the place formerly hallowed by the presence of Colonel Barker. I soon discovered, however, that one must not mention Colonel Barker at Bailiffscourt; her name was taboo and Lady Evelyn preferred to forget that she had ever existed.
Lady Evelyn Guinness, her children, their Willoughby cousins, and two nurses lived in the Huts. These really were huts, made of pitch pine and set on brick foundations. They smelt deliciously of raw wood and salty air. They were planted down in the middle of a cornfield, and at the bottom of the field was the sea. There was a quite exceptional glare in summer outside the Huts; the flat treeless landscape, the enormous sky, the ripe corn and the sea reflecting back the light of the sun almost blinded one.
Lady Evelyn, like Farve, was a builder. She was going to build a very strange house; already her mind was full of her plans for it, but meantime the family put up in the Huts. Bryan and I wandered about the fields or sat on the beach. Sometimes we all went for a picnic on the Downs.
Lady Evelyn, Nurse Helche, Grania, Rosalie, Peregrine, Nurse Pink McDonnell, Bryan and I. When we reached the chosen spot the drivers of the cars unpacked a huge tea, a frying pan, a pat of butter, and eggs. ‘Diana’s so clever, Mummy, she can cook,’ said Bryan, bursting with pride.
‘I’ve never heard of such a thing, it’s too clever,’ said Lady Evelyn in her whispery little voice.
‘I can’t really. Only fried eggs. Anybody can do fried eggs,’ I said modestly, but Lady Evelyn and the nurses took up the refrain. To cook! It was too wonderful.
Grania was exactly Debo’s age, eight. She had gold curls, an exquisite, agile figure, and she was a ballet dancer. ‘She doesn’t do many lessons because of her dancing,’ said Bryan. One of her masters had been the great Massine himself. As Diaghilev and all his dancers were my heroes and heroines I looked at Grania with awe.
Bryan’s brother, Murtogh, never came for the picnics, nor was he seen on the beach or in the cornfield. He stayed in his room with the blinds drawn against the glare, making toy cinemas. He reminded me of Colin in The Secret Garden; I wondered he was not ordered out of doors, but Lady Evelyn never dreamed of crossing her children in their slightest whim.
At that time she was in her early forties; a very pretty, slight, fair-haired and blue-eyed person with a very tiny voice. Her voice was not exactly soft; it was more like a miniature hard voice, scarcely audible. She never raised it. She had a ferocious collie called Lady which bit men visitors. ‘Lady! Lady! What do I see you doing?’ Rather naturally, Lady never noticed this reproof, what with her own growls and the exclamations of her victim.
Lady Evelyn loved wild flowers growing among the corn and did her best to encourage them. Not only in the fields near the Huts were poppy and cornflower seeds strewn in profusion; all the way down in the train from Victoria to Arundel she would lean out of her carriage window in spring time, scattering weeds and seeds as she went. ‘I’m afraid Walter doesn’t quite approve,’ she told me. Walter, Bryan’s father, was Minister of Agriculture.
I had been invited to go to Scotland; I was not anxious to accept and would have preferred to stay at the Huts with Bryan, but Muv said I must go. She thought it would help me to make up my mind; it was a good plan to see as many people as possible. Nanny and I set off. First we went to the Malcolms at Poltalloch, and then to Meikleour. Margaret Mercer-Nairne thought of nothing but horses. When I told her about my engagement she said: ‘Yes, marry Bryan, and then you can live in Leicestershire and hunt.’
This was in fact the last thing I wanted to do; I had had enough of the country for a lifetime. People, an eternity of talk, books, pictures, music and travel—these were my eighteen-year-old desires.
Margaret, her mother Lady Violet Astor, and I rode through fertile, un-Scotch country every morning while the men were on the moors. They had their horses at Meikleour to get them fit for the season’s hunting. We joined the guns for luncheon, trudged with them all afternoon, and ate a huge dinner sitting in stuffed armchairs. I loved Margaret and her comfortable house full of beautiful French furniture; next to Diana she was my greatest friend at that time.
When I got back to Swinbrook I told them my mind was still made up. Lady Evelyn was on our side, but said she could not write to Muv and Farve. ‘I shouldn’t dare,’ she whispered. While Parliament was in recess Bryan’s father was away on his yacht—far away. He did not go to the Mediterranean, but to distant, savage lands.
In September he was expected back. Lady Evelyn and the children left the Huts and went to Heath House, Hampstead. ‘I wish we could stay on at Bailiffscourt,’ she said. ‘Such beautiful weather. But I must go at once because of Christmas.’
‘Christmas, Lady Evelyn?’ I cried. ‘But that’s three months off!’
‘Oh yes,’ said Bryan, ‘but it takes Mummy a good three months to do her Christmas. In fact she’s really at it the whole year.’
This astonished me so much that I asked Rosalie and Pink McDonnell about it one day. ‘Aunt Evelyn’s Christmas is terrific,’ said Rosalie. ‘In fact Uncle Walter can’t stand it. He always leaves England the moment Parliament rises because of the Grosvenor Place Christmas.’
Bryan came to stay with us at Swinbrook. Every time he said or did something uncountrified I glowed with pride and pleasure. Uncle George used to say the country was ‘all mud and blood’. I was beginning to agree, and I saw in Bryan the antithesis of a squire.
The only time his vagueness unnerved me was at breakfast, when we helped ourselves. He would stand by the sideboard, holding a plate in one hand and a spoonful of sticky porridge in the other, which he shook violently in an attempt to dislodge it into the plate, looking away and talking to us the while. Farve slightly ground his teeth, but bore it in silence for my sake; and I was grateful,
for I knew how much it cost him. Bryan, in fact, never spilt; not even the porridge; but one always felt he might just be going to. He seemed to love being part of our huge family and could not understand my complaints about the lack of solitude; the more sisters the better for him, and he particularly loved the little ones. I loved them too, but Swinbrook had no charm for me, I wanted to go away and never come back. The schoolroom atmosphere exasperated me and it was that which Bryan most enjoyed.
Colonel Guinness, who turned up eventually, had a long talk with Bryan. I was invited to stay at Heath House; Bryan met me at Paddington and drove me to Hampstead. When we arrived his mother was gardening. She was walking along a path with a watering can, watering it here and there, if that is the word, with milk. ‘Mummy’s encouraging the moss’, explained Bryan.
The garden was quite big by Hampstead standards; it looked rather sad. Ugly tufts of murky, un-tended grass and weeds sprouted everywhere, there were over-grown hedges with holes and gaps in them, and not a flower was to be seen except the odd dandelion and thistle. ‘Mummy can’t bear garden flowers,’ Bryan told me. ‘She only likes wild ones, and of course they don’t do very well in London.’
Lady Evelyn pointed vaguely here and there. ‘You can’t imagine what a perfectly ghastly pergola there used to be,’ she said, adding in a horrified whisper, ‘And there were hideous roses—in beds.’
Inside, Heath House had also been transformed to Lady Evelyn’s taste, and one saw what Bailiffscourt would eventually become.
Colonel Guinness seemed not to notice either the garden or the house. He talked about politics, people and health.
‘What! No vitamins?’ he said when I refused some raw carrot. The food was excellent; we ate it off a wormeaten refectory table. I felt very shy of Bryan’s father. He was kind but distant to me; but he had promised Bryan to write to Farve.
Every evening we dined early and went to a play. In the mornings Lady Evelyn did her Christmas shopping, and in the afternoon she scattered milk over the grim garden.
Farve gave in and we were officially engaged. I spent my time between Swinbrook and Grosvenor Place, where the Guinnesses returned in October. Lady Evelyn shopped all day now, as there were only about seventy shopping days till Christmas.
Grosvenor Place was like Heath House only much, much more so. When you approached the great, ugly Victorian imitation of a French château and walked up the steps the door opened at once. This was the work of George, the door man, who sat all day watching the entrance from a little window in the porch. He was by way of being clumsy. ‘Did George knock you down?’ was Lady Evelyn’s first question when one arrived. George led the way across a dark hall with stripped pine panelling to the lift, which looked like a tiny mediaeval closet. The lift whizzed up several floors and was opened by a nursery-maid. Tea, and in fact most of life, was spent in Grania’s nursery. Lady Evelyn herself slept in one of the night nurseries. The day nursery was a large cheerful white room with a bright fire, plenty of toys and books, and sofas covered in chintz. While the rest of the house was almost pitch dark, lights blazed in the nursery. Lady growled and made little dashes, but she only bit men guests; Raymond and Edward Greene, great friends of Lady Evelyn, always came to Grosvenor Place wearing riding boots because of the collie.
If one arrived for luncheon or dinner George handed one over to the head parlourmaid and the full oddity of Grosvenor Place was unfolded. The downstairs rooms were lined—panelled is not the word—with rough, blackened wood. The fires were encouraged to smoke and smoulder, because the effect Lady Evelyn wished to create was that of a house so ‘early’ that chimneys had not been invented. The furniture, besides refectory tables black with age—or with simulated age—one did not always quite believe in the Grosvenor Place furniture—consisted of dozens of Spanish chairs, of various sizes but similar design, a strip of dark, hard leather for the back, another for the seat, with many a rusty nail to catch a stocking here and there in the crumbling wooden frame. The lamps were made of bent pieces of iron holding sham yellow candles with yellow bulbs of about five watts shaded in thick old parchment—tallow, not wax, was the note. This ground floor was just as dark by day as when the glimmering lights were lit, for ancient leaded windows of greenish hue had been fitted in place of the Victorian plate glass. The dining-room gave on to a small courtyard, on the other side of which a carved stone gothic door had been built into what was really the wall of the Mews. There was also a gnarled tree, which, I was told, had been lifted roots and all by a giant crane over the Mews at the back of the house. These amenities were guessed at rather than seen as one peered through the tiny panes of primitive, almost opaque, glass.
On the tables were pewter pots containing bunches of grasses and wild flowers, and there were polished pewter plates and dishes to eat off. The forks had two prongs. The pewter things were made by Day, the head chauffeur, in a garage. He had given up driving and spent his whole time making more and more pewter plates, because Colonel Guinness liked to have dinner parties of over a hundred people. Lady Evelyn thought entertaining a tiresome bore, but she did it for his sake, only insisting that there must be enough pewter for everybody. To have had to fall back on silver or china would have been too humiliating.
On the day of a dinner party the cars went out of London at dawn, crowded with maids; when they got to the country they filled baskets with cow parsley, grasses and buttercups and then hurried back to London and changed into their medieval gowns made of stuff with a pattern of wild flowers on it, to be ready by the time the guests began to arrive.
The guests behaved rather badly; they all pretended to get hay-fever from the floral decorations. I sat next to Philip Sassoon at one of these dinners; he was quite furious because Lady Evelyn could just as well have had orchids everywhere instead of cow parsley and moon daisies, and gold rather than pewter. He loudly disapproved of her eccentricity.
Grosvenor Place had two of everything because it was numbers 10 and 11 knocked into one house. One of the big staircases was entirely taken up by Murtogh’s slide. After a visit to a fair he had said to his mother: ‘Why can’t we have a slide from the top of the house to the bottom?’ and immediately a beautiful, polished wooden slide was built and fitted on the staircase. Everybody, not only Murtogh, played on the slide. It was a marvellous idea perfectly executed.
Lady Evelyn’s father was still alive. His children and even his grandchildren called him the P.A. This stood for Pocket Adonis; Lord Buchan was a tiny man and had been a handsome dandy in his youth. He and Granny Rose no longer lived together; the P.A. hardly ever came to England, but preferred Paris and Fontainebleau. His only son, Uncle Ronny, was a bachelor of about fifty. He was charming and rather eccentric; he believed in the Hidden Hand and the Jewish World Plot. Colonel Guinness had no patience with Uncle Ronny’s pet theories, but as he was a member of the government Uncle Ronny deluged him with literature about them which went straight into the waste-paper basket.
In the dark and gloomy rooms at Grosvenor Place Lady Evelyn and Grania looked more fairy-like than ever, they were so graceful and slender and had such bright, pale hair. There was no question of home-spun to go with the decor, Lady Evelyn dressed at Paquin and Grania at Wendy, a shop for children’s clothes kept by her aunt, Lady Muriel Willoughby.
As soon as our engagement appeared in The Times wedding presents began to pour in. In those days even nodding acquaintances sent wedding presents. Some of them were useful, or pretty; many of them I treasure to this day; but the majority were frightful, and they came in cohorts—fifteen lamps of the same design, forty trays, a hundred and more huge glass vases. They were assembled at Grosvenor Place, where the Guinnesses had kindly offered to have the wedding party; Rutland Gate was let. When the presents were all arranged Lady Evelyn looked at them reflectively.
‘The glass will be the easiest,’ she said. ‘It only needs a good kick.’ She said silver was much more of a problem. ‘Walter and I had such luck, all ours was stolen while we w
ere on our honeymoon.’
Farve looked grave when I repeated this boutade. ‘It is so kind of people to give you presents,’ he said.
Just before my wedding day Decca and Debo got whooping-cough; they could not be bridesmaids. It spoilt the wedding for me; I could have spared anyone else more easily than them. The Dulvertons lent us their house in Wilton Crescent, and there I was dressed in a white satin gown made by Hartnell.
Lady Evelyn had given me lace for my veil; I found it impossibly difficult to arrange. Nanny and Gladys were standing by; Farve was ready to start. He had been begged not to get me to the church half an hour early; he was an excessively punctual person. ‘We won’t get there ahead of the game,’ he promised; but now it really was time for us to be off, and my veil was awry. In my nervousness and despair I snatched away from the helping hands. ‘Never mind, darling,’ said Nanny soothingly, ‘nobody’s going to look at you.’ As I hugged her, all my bad temper vanished, I guessed, rightly, that I was hearing these words for the last time.
Bryan’s friend Michael Rosse was his best man. Although if anything rather younger than Bryan, Michael had constituted himself the mentor of his contemporaries, who received letters containing fatherly advice. These letters afforded much amusement; they were irresistibly comic in their artless pomposity. But Bryan was very fond of Michael.
As I walked up the aisle on Farve’s arm followed by a flock of bridesmaids in tulle sylphide dresses I saw Bryan and Michael waiting, and thought how neat and handsome they looked.
All I remember of the marriage service is that Tom had got hold of a wonderful trumpeter who filled the church with triumphant sound when the choir sang Handel’s ‘Let the bright seraphim in burning row’, and that the clergyman pressed his hand on my head so hard that the rickety wreath and veil arrangement almost fell over my eyes.
A Life of Contrasts: The Autobiography of Diana Mosley Page 8