We have always loved Paris at Christmas time, though on the whole we spent our winters in Ireland and our summers in France. Dolly and Mogens Tvede gave a reveillon party one New Year’s Eve. Mogens telephoned to say that Randolph had turned up in Paris; was it all right for us all to meet, he asked? I said it was. We had no sooner arrived than Randolph rushed across the room to sit near M. and began quoting passages from M.’s pre-war speeches; they talked half the night about days gone by. He came down to the Temple for luncheon next day and stayed till 7.30 when we were obliged to go to Paris for a dinner. He reminded M. of stories he had told him years before, he talked about Tom, he was at his gentlest and kindest. I was shocked by his appearance; he had become prematurely old, he looked puffy and ill and drank quantities of brandy and whisky hour after hour. We never saw him again, and when he died I regretted not having been to visit him in Suffolk. Occasionally he telephoned, generally at unearthly hours, two or three in the morning. If he was awake himself he saw no reason why anyone else should be asleep.
In London a few years later we sometimes dined with Diana Sandys, who lived in Gerald Road with her beautiful daughters surrounded by her father’s cheerful daubs. A good hostess, she seemed happy and amused, but she was often frightfully depressed and on the verge of suicide and finally she killed herself.
Evidently life was too much for her; she lacked robustness, she was quite unlike Randolph and her sisters.
Tom, Randolph, Diana C. and I had been very devoted to one another when we were young, but I remembered with remorse that as children we used to run off and hide from Diana. She would wander about looking for us, singing out of tune. Her favourite ditty, a quite exceptionally irritating song, was ‘Yes! We have no bananas.’
After Christmas Max always rushed back to Ireland as soon as he possibly could, and one winter M. let him off lessons altogether so that he could hunt to his heart’s content. The tutor had left and Alexander had gone to school at Pontoise. The head master was Father Superior of Oratorians, a teaching order, at St. Martin de France. At first he refused my written request for Alexander to go to his school and I went to see him to ask why. He said: ‘I see you are English which changes everything. I cannot take American boys, they are too far behind our boys in their work.’ After his winter spent hunting Max went to school in Germany, at Stein an der Traun.
We had only been at Clonfert for two and a half years when a disaster happened. M. and I were in London and about to return to Ireland, but I put off my journey for a day because Farve was coming south and it was a good chance to see him. I dined with him and flew to Dublin next morning. When I got through the customs I was surprised to see M. standing in the crowd, I had not expected him to meet me. As I approached I noticed he was unshaven. He took my hand and said gently: ‘Sit down here on this seat. Everything is all right. Nobody is hurt.’
‘Hurt!’ I said, and my heart missed a beat. ‘Why, has something terrible happened?’
He told me that in the night there had been a great fire at Clonfert. He and Alexander and two French people we had with us and the horses and dogs were all safe, but most of the house and furniture and pictures had been destroyed. Madeleine, our French cook, had run up to her room on the second floor to fetch something when she was supposed to be sitting out on the lawn, safe. Cut off by the flames, she had had to jump into a blanket held by M. and Alexander. She was bruised but no bones were broken. During the time it took to persuade her to jump the dining-room ceiling fell in; had it not been for her, M. and Alexander could easily have got the pictures out. My bedroom was the very centre of the furnace, nothing remained. All that was found among the cinders on the ground floor beneath were the blackened springs from the mattress of my four-post bed; a pretty bed with slender carved mahogany posts and a canopy of blue taffeta. The dining-room also was completely burnt; it was full of pictures of M.’s forebears, and it had a charming French table of about 1840 inlaid with roses and ribbons, all destroyed.
It had happened in the middle of a bitter December night. M. sent the car to telephone for help, but by the time the fire brigades from Ballinasloe and Birr got to Clonfert it was too late; the damage was done. The firemen were brave and efficient but what saved the west end of the house, the drawing-room and the library, was that the wind changed. The fire began in the chimney of the maids’ sitting-room where peat and wood were burnt winter and summer. An old beam in the chimney, dried no doubt by our central heating, had smouldered and finally blazed up, and the whole chimney was found to be coated with a deposit of inflammable tarlike substance, said to be the result of mixing peat and wood on the hearth.
At the back of the house there was a farm; Mrs. Blake Kelly was wakened by the persistent neighing and whinnying of her horses. Reluctant to stir out of bed, for it was bitterly cold, she finally got up, looked out of the window and saw the blaze. She called her son: ‘The palace is on fire!’ He ran round to the front of the house, he knew where Alexander slept and threw pebbles at his window until he woke up. But for the horses and their terror of flames there might have been a tragedy.
To make matters worse great floods rose so that the Dublin road became impassable and Clonfert was cut off. A few days later when I was able to go and I saw the blackened ruin I felt not only sad but guilty. It seemed as if we had come to a centuries-old house that had slumbered peacefully near the bog for ages until we pulled it about, put in heating, dried it unnaturally, and now it was ruined. A curious thing happened: when I heard about the fire, and for many days afterwards, my hands trembled so that I could hardly hold a pen to write a letter.
A month before, in November, hearing that Michel Mohrt, the French writer, was giving a lecture tour in Ireland and that he was to lecture at Galway I invited him to stay with us.
When soon afterwards back in Paris he heard about what had happened he wrote his sympathy and compared our disaster to the fire in The Spoils of Poynton. Fortunately for us it was not quite so bad as that. Quantities of our possessions were saved. The losses I minded most were a drawerful of letters including all M.’s letters to me from Brixton, three studies in sepia ink that Tchelichew had done of me and the boys which he gave me at the time when he painted us, a drawing by Lamb of Jonathan aged one year, photographs of M. and the children, the irreplaceable things with which one surrounds oneself. For years afterwards it happened from time to time that I was looking for something or other and suddenly remembered it had been in one of the rooms at Clonfert and was turned to dust and ashes.
We had been expecting Ingrid and Jonathan and their children for Christmas at Clonfert. Andrew and Debo immediately offered to lend us Lismore, a boon which not only saved our Christmas but much more besides for Lismore is one of the loveliest places on earth. The family gathered together; Max had been at school in Germany at the time of the fire, I was afraid he might be terribly sad, but he found the horses at Lismore and loved hunting with the West Waterford.
We had promised to have a Christmas Tree party for the children at Clonfert, in the end it had to be in the village school. The priest helped us to arrange it. At that time some of the people were very poor and there were not many toys for the children. Ingrid and I bought dozens of toys in Cork and we drove over for the feast in the school. Jonathan was Father Christmas. It was fun, but so much less lovely than it would have been in the house. On the long wet drive back to Lismore I became desperately sad. It was as if we were turning our backs on a place where we had received so much kindness and friendship and where perhaps our presence could, even though very slightly, have served to help a poor and neglected neighbourhood. Since those days there has been a transformation. The bog is not only a place to hunt over on foot, peat is cut and processed into fuel and it has given work to hundreds of men; a certain prosperity has resulted.
About fifteen years after the fire James Pope-Hennessy was writing his life of Anthony Trollope and he took rooms in Banagher, the town on the Shannon where Trollope was postmaster as a young man.
One day James was asked whether he would care to see the house ‘where the Mosleys lived’. He said he would and he was driven over to Clonfert. He told me the ruin seemed incredibly old. Big trees were growing out of it so that it was smothered in greenery. He said it was a ruin in a jungle, and one felt it might have been there for hundreds of years. Myself, I have not got the heart to go back. As I have said, I sometimes think if we had never seen Clonfert the nice old house might be there to this day, standing among the beeches between the ancient cathedral and the bog.
While we were at Lismore that Christmas Ikey Bell came to see us and told us about a house for sale a few miles up the Blackwater near Fermoy. We bought it at once, and what was left of our belongings came from Clonfert. Ileclash is a sunny, cheerful house standing on the cliff above the river. From my room there was a spectacular view of the Blackwater winding its way between cliff and water meadows towards Lismore and the sea. We were not far upstream from legendary Careysville where all the salmon that come up the river congregate together so that the fishing there is famous the world over. M. sometimes caught a salmon on our own little stretch of river. Our cook wrote to Max: ‘Your Dad brought a salmon into the kitchen. He was as pleased as if it had been an elephant.’
At Ileclash Max hunted with various packs, but much the most fun was the Avondhu hunted by our neighbour Paddy Flynn. They often got back very late, once it was hours after darkness had fallen. Somebody had seen a fox and the two of them had let the hounds out of the van where they were ready to go home to the kennels and had hunted until it was pitch dark. Such a thing would never happen in England, or perhaps anywhere in the world but Ireland. It is a paradise for sport because the people are young in heart, quite without fear and always ready for a lark.
Ileclash had none of the loneliness and solitude of Clonfert. Within walking distance there was Fermoy and Lismore was not far away. In the winter Andrew was there for the fishing and sometimes at the end of the day he blew in with a salmon, or I went over for dinner and billiard fives. In April Debo arrived, but by then we were usually on the move back to France. M. could never bear to miss the week he loved best in all the year, when Paris is ablaze with the chestnuts in full bloom. He came to Ireland much less than I did, he travelled about Europe. The only place where he never touched politics was in France; a matter of courtesy, since we were guests living in the country for much of the year.
As time went on we went to Ireland more rarely; the boys when they grew up could no longer spend weeks on end at Ileclash. In 1963 we sold it, and henceforward our only home was the Temple. Pam had left Tullamaine a few years before, but Desmond lives in Ireland at Leixlip near Dublin. He founded the Irish Georgian Society in order to try and save eighteenth-century country houses and the streets and squares of Dublin from ‘development’. When Castletown was threatened with development (the modern word for destruction) Desmond bought it and made it a museum of the Irish eighteenth century. The book he wrote with Desmond Ryan called Houses and Castles in Ireland is a beautiful book; it has sold in enormous quantities, principally in America, and all the profits it makes go to the Society.
It was when we were first at Ileclash that Jerry Lehane came. He and Emily Reilly got married, and they and their son John have been with us in Ireland and England and France ever since. Theirs has been a wonderful contribution to more than twenty happy years.
23
VENICE AND PARIS
When we first came to live in France the bitter divisions caused by war and occupation were very much part of the scene. There were a few determined neutrals, but nearly everybody was in one of the two camps. Dozens of our friends had been in prison, either put there by the Germans or else by the Gaullists. One clever writer and honest man, Alfred Fabre-Luce, was imprisoned by both. Abominable things had been done, but towards foreigners at least the old French virtue of live-and-let-live was the rule. Stanislas de La Rochefoucauld, who with his wife Yvonne were old friends of ours, had a theory that prison left its unmistakable mark on a person: ‘But one can’t see it on your face,’ he told me. I was only half pleased by this.
In any event, whether marked or not, one thing is certain: as a foreigner and a visitor both in France and in Ireland a precious sense of freedom was something I felt thankful for. Claudel says: ‘On parle de la liberté, mais pour la comprendre il faut avoir été captive.’ Freedom from fear of the policeman’s knock is, I think, one of Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s four freedoms. I cannot truthfully say I felt fear, but I have heard the policeman’s knock, and once is enough. Freedom in Britain is being restricted in every sphere; people are hemmed in by rules and regulations generously added to year by year. New laws, rules and regulations are at present England’s biggest growth industry; but so long as you know, for example, that it is against the law to advertise for a Scotch cook you may keep out of prison.
From 1950 on, we went to Venice nearly every summer, where Paris friends abounded; they gathered round Daisy at Palazzo Polignac and Charlie Beistegui at Palazzo Labia. I loved dining at the Labia and then walking the whole way back to S. Marco; there is nothing more heavenly than Venice on a summer night, the reflections, the shadows and unexpected vistas. It is beautiful when the sun shines and the bacino S. Marco is blue and sparkling; it is beautiful in the rain. Once, caught in a terrific thunderstorm when the sky opened and the rain deluged, I took cover upstairs at the far end of the Piazza. After a while every gutter and spout on St. Mark’s poured forth water so that the whole church was veiled in water. It looked as though it had just that moment risen from the sea which was running off its elaborate domes and the white lace-like stone decorating the façade, an illusion one could almost believe in because since the Piazza was ankle-deep in rain there was not a soul in sight. A collection of shells and precious stones and coral, St. Mark’s could have grown beneath the waves.
It is curious to consider the Venetian glass blowers who walk each morning through their incomparable city, and leaving the sounds of the sea and the bells behind them spend their days in dark cavernous rooms with fiery furnaces making objects so frightfully ugly that each year one imagines one has seen the very worst they can be capable of, only to be surprised the following summer by yet more hideous examples of their inventiveness. Wonderful skill, handed down for generations, and presumably a demand for their wares, combine to produce clowns with baggy trousers and red noses, Prince Charming candlesticks and glass baskets full of dainty blossoms. A glass blower will make a shining golden bowl and then quickly spoil it by sticking hot glass flowers on it before it has hardened. As a child, Max loved watching the glass blowing and sometimes I went with him into the hot den.
All over Venice there is greenery; plants and creepers grow from every crevice and hang in festoons, boxes of petunias and geraniums and pots of oleanders fill the windows and balconies, and in some of the campos there are plane trees and feathery acacias. In the Piazza there is not a leaf or a flower, only stones and sky, for there is no water either except when a spring tide or a storm floods over it. In summer it throbs with heat, in autumn a bright clean light is shed from a Tiepolo blue sky, in winter it is shrouded in mist. At night there is a hard, steady light and black shadows cast by the moon. Every season, every hour of day and night discloses new beauties to a lover of Venice.
One summer the Lopezs gave a party on their yacht. Daisy Fellowes and her guests, David Herbert and Jamie Caffery, were on board Sister Anne, also moored near the Dogana, and we all went across to Gaviotta together and installed ourselves at a table on deck. There was an elaborate supper, what Emilio Terry used to call ‘des purées d’orchidées’. Daisy was rather cross for some reason; she refused dish after dish and asked for ‘a little bit of gruyère cheese’. As she had doubtless guessed, there was no gruyère cheese on the boat. David said under his breath: ‘I’m not going to swim the canal to get her cheese.’ Perhaps she heard; in any case she decided to return to Sister Anne, taking her guests with her. No sooner had she gone bel
ow to her cabin a few moments later than they were on their way back to Gaviotta and the party. M. and Elisabeth Chavchavadze were leaning over the rail encouraging them when Daisy’s face appeared at her porthole. She was visibly displeased. Elisabeth said to M., ‘Whenever I see Daisy in that mood I’m so frightened my mouth goes dry.’
Daisy played the same trick on us, with more success, at a Temple luncheon party. Refusing wine, she asked for Coca cola, rightly guessing we should have none. The Duke of Windsor insisted on telephoning his house for a bottle of it; I went with him to show him the telephone and heard him say: ‘Hallo! Hier ist der Herzog,’ to his gardener. The Coca cola appeared in a trice. The Duke spoke little French, and he therefore got an Alsatian gardener to whom he could talk in German. He said he remembered as a child the older members of the royal family waited until the English courtiers were no longer in the room, and then comfortably relapsed into German.
Just as addicted to teasing as Nancy, Daisy’s teases often took the form of carefully planned practical jokes. She invited Elsa Maxwell, an old American who looked like a toad and who organized parties for café society, to dine at Les Zoraïdes. Miss Maxwell was at the Hotel de Paris at Monte Carlo. ‘Princess Grace will pick you up and bring you,’ said Daisy. Much gratified by this, Elsa Maxwell was hovering near the steps of the hotel when on the stroke of eighty-thirty a Rolls Royce drew up. She hurried forward and made a deep curtsy. As she rose from the ground she saw that the occupant of the car was Grace Radziwill. Daisy’s jokes were always designed in such a way that they could be due to pure chance. ‘Oh!’ she would say, ‘I never thought of that!’ and she gave her little tinkling laugh.
A Life of Contrasts: The Autobiography of Diana Mosley Page 28