I was talking one day to Maria about the (often furious) parental rows she remembers from the early years of her childhood, over bills unpaid, repossessions looming, and Desmond’s drinking, and about how secure the children nonetheless felt in the love of two kind, intelligent and funny people who simply couldn’t manage the world, despite their best efforts, so that it mattered less that they never knew where they would be living next, or where they would be going to school, there was a kind of adventure in it, when she suddenly absented herself and returned a little later from her cellar with a heavy black plastic bag. Inside was the complete set of letters her mother had written to her while she was up at Oxford, the only time in fact that they lived in different cities. All were in their postmarked envelopes, significant in that the letters are almost all undated as to year, and so exist in a seasonal but otherwise indeterminate present. There are two or three letters a week for each of her nine terms at the university and they provide an unusually detailed portrait of her state of mind at an unsettling period of her life when much was changing, and make on the whole for sadder reading than those to Tina:
‘Autumn: Departure of Daughters’
Oh my dark & light brown daughters
When you go to find new faces
Our place & me are put in our places
Our place may take what name it pleases –
It stares & stares, and all it sees is
That it is not a home.
Oh my dark & light brown daughters
When you go to find new places
Our place must face that it has no faces –
Tidiness, emptiness and peace is
All it has, and all it sees is
That it is not a home
Penelope put this poem away, in a drawer, without showing it to anyone, except these daughters. Its note continues to be sounded from time to time throughout the letters to her youngest child, the last to go away to find new places.
Now in her mid-fifties, she was working terribly hard: a full week’s teaching in two different jobs, three days at Queens Gate, Kensington, two days at Westminster Tutors, vast piles of exam-board marking as well as her own, with only Saturdays to spare for the mountainous research and writing of her first two books, the Burne-Jones and Knox Brothers biographies. After a difficult start (teaching R.E. at the stage school Italia Conti, remembered in At Freddie’s) she had become a valued and inspiring English teacher, the texts she was studying with her pupils – Jane Austen, but also Lawrence, Conrad, Forster, Joyce and Beckett, much modern poetry, philosophy, theory, history of art (we still have the tattered, meticulously annotated paperbacks) – all no doubt fuelling the future motor of her fiction. For, almost imperceptibly to her family, as she rarely spoke of work in progress, she was at last becoming what her old friends had always thought she would be: a writer, and this was confirmed by the acceptance of Edward Burne-Jones in 1973. It should have been an exciting and exhilarating time; intellectually and creatively it must have been, but personally it was a time of anxiety, loneliness and fear.
There had been ten years of comparative stability. Desmond and she had repaired their finances, made a rather stylish island home in their Clapham council flat, and seen their three children into and through Oxford. After the disasters of the previous decade, this had taken a great deal of persistence and bravery. Now they could say to each other: look, we have come through. A historian by training, he was able to help her in her research and they travelled happily together, at weekends and in the holidays, all over England, and to France, interviewing and absorbing atmospheres. In 1974 it became clear, though both delayed facing it (and their local GP was no help whatsoever), that Desmond was unwell. Penelope states barely in one of the later letters to Maria that she could not imagine living without one of her daughters nearby. The extent of her father’s illness, when it was eventually discovered, was kept hidden from Maria until she had completed her finals, but then she had to be told of his operation, in the reticent terms used in those days, which didn’t make anything any better.
Tina and I had married in 1973, and now we bought a three-storey house off Battersea Rise – the 25 Almeric Road of the letters – so that her parents could come and live with us. Desmond continued to go to work, growing frailer and thinner, but still as funny, endearing and patient. He died in the summer of 1976. In the first of the letters to her old friend, Maryllis, Penelope describes the morning of his death, at home, the district nurse reading to him: ‘such a kindly person, not much of a nurse but a very good woman, and she helped me to see him out of this world and read a Bible chapter, absolutely naturally, as only a West Indian could do’. In the same letter she reflects: ‘the truth is I was spoilt, as with all our ups and downs Desmond always thought everything I did was right’.
Penelope kept four close friends from her childhood and youth: Maryllis Conder (’Willie’), Jeanie Fisher (later Lady Talbot), Rachel Hichens and Janet Probert. Marriage, child-rearing, work and geographical distance separated them for long years after the war, but Jeanie and Maryllis in particular became a great support to her in her widowhood.
‘Your mother has been my dearest friend,’ wrote Willie to Maria. They met at Wycombe Abbey, ‘a terrible place’, as Penelope remembered it. She was thinking of its aping of boys’ boarding schools, the sport, the cricket, the rituals, but it was principally terrible to both of them because of their home-sickness: they cried themselves to sleep for the first three weeks of every term. English Literature, however, was inspiringly taught (’under Daisy’) and was a shared consolation. They would both go on to study it at Oxford, though Penelope’s great enthusiasm was Art and Maryllis’s Music. They sat together in class, laughed at the same absurdities, and Mops (as Penelope was always known to friends) would help Willie with her essays. At the end of their last term at Wycombe, Penelope’s mother, Christina, died. Her father, Evoe, was too grief-stricken to speak of her, and she went to stay with Maryllis and her family in Devon. ‘It was a painful visit,’ Maryllis said, ‘but she told me later that it had helped her.’ During the war, as young women, they would meet unfailingly every week for lunch. ‘How clearly I can see her walking down Sloane St with me in her cherry coat.’
It is a strange thing that some good friends (and even family members) don’t always welcome the transformation of a person known so well into a successful writer, almost as if they had been hiding something from them and had now to be seen in a different light. Maryllis emphatically didn’t fall into this category, but devoted a corner of her study to Penelope’s books and drawings, her idiosyncratic Christmas cards which gave such pleasure. She also kept a selection of her letters (’in my Mops letters file box’), which covers the last twenty-five years of her life. ‘You know what a wonderful letter-writer she was.’
Willie and her husband Mike had restored a beautiful small Jacobean manor house, ‘Terry Bank’, near Kirkby Lonsdale. It had always been in the Conder family and still retains some of its original furniture. It is a tranquil place in a serene setting. Here, or to their converted lighthouse on Alderney, they invited Penelope every year. ‘We had some very happy times together, unforgettable’. In the dramatic hillside garden they created on the bank behind the house they planted the Himalayan Blue Poppy (Meconopsis baileyi: The Blue Flower) in her honour. The letters provide a remarkable record of friendship and a continuing conversation. They discuss their children and grandchildren, plantings in their gardens. There is the occasional glimpse of Penelope’s busy literary career. They sympathise with each other over their ailments. Maryllis wrote to Tina after Penelope’s death that her mother had appeared to her at night in her room to console her and to tell her not to worry. It sounds the sort of thing she would do.
Another loving friendship of a whole life is detailed in the letters to Rachel Hichens (and her daughter Elizabeth Barnet, Penelope’s goddaughter). Each married a Cornish vicar, and they were and are rich in good works in a way with which Penelope had almost comp
lete sympathy, only regretting that she couldn’t match it herself. Rachel was the daughter of the writer Alfred Ollivant. She and Penelope met through their mothers’ friendship, in Hampstead, when they were both about six years old. She told her daughter that she believed Penelope’s childhood to have been overshadowed by her mother’s illness. She worked at Bletchley Park during the war, where Dillwyn Knox was working on breaking the German codes. (He often tried to recruit his niece to help him, but unsuccessfully.) After both women married, they saw each other only occasionally, but Elizabeth often stayed with her godmother in London as a young woman, and found her and her family ‘so interesting’.
Mary Knox, Penelope’s stepmother (and illustrator of Mary Poppins, daughter of E. H. Shepard, illustrator of Winnie the Pooh and The Wind in the Willows) was only seven years older than Penelope, something that might have been resented, but wasn’t. They were frequent companions, so that letters were not really necessary. Nonetheless, many were written, though sadly only a few have survived. I hope they show how dear she was to Penelope, and to all the family.
These collections, which I am most grateful to have been given, depict Penelope as she was with those she loved, but inevitably those who ‘answered some of her long marvellous letters but kept none’ have had to be omitted: Jean Fisher, her friend from prep school, a source of practical kindness and help, as close a friend as Maryllis, if not quite such a kindred spirit – books were off limits; Rawle, her brother, to whom she pays tribute in A House of Air; finally her son, Valpy, of whom she writes in a never completed late essay, with perhaps rather whimsical and unjust exaggeration: ‘I’m not sure that he knows how to write a letter, and I think it possible that he doesn’t read them.’ She took the greatest possible pride in his achievements, as in those of her daughters. The last paragraph of her essay reads:
Once when we were living on the Suffolk coast and the mechanics of daily living had got altogether too much for me, Valpy who must have been about thirteen, looked at me thoughtfully and said he’d take me out for a row. We had a proofed canvas boat, the Little Emily, down on the marshes. She was anchored to a stake in the bank. Quite often one or other of the local boys would ‘borrow’ her and leave her wherever they felt like it. We had to go looking for her in the maze of reeds and narrow waterways. However, that afternoon she was lying patiently in her proper place. We got in and Valpy rowed for an hour or so under the immense shining East Coast sky, a watercolours sky. We went as far as the old pumping mill, through great banks of flowering sedge with grey leaves as sharp as saws. We rowed back, tied up, took out the rowlocks and walked home without saying anything, because nothing needed to be said. I felt more at peace then I think than I had ever done before.
II: Writing
For someone who was not at all business-like, Penelope managed her literary career decisively and with acumen. She would never employ an agent, and money is rarely mentioned in these letters. She was concerned first that her projects would be published, then that the books would look right, be error-free, reviewed, read and understood. About her writing she kept her own counsel, but she relied on her editors for much reassurance, help, advice and friendship. In finding four publishers in as many years (this was necessitated by the scope of her interests, and her shifts between the genres) she had only her talent and persistence to recommend her. She was probably introduced to Michael Joseph, who published her first book, Edward Burne-Jones, by Jean Fisher, whose cousin was the managing director of the firm. By a lucky coincidence, she had printed the first story of Raleigh Trevelyan, the editor who first read her biography, in her magazine World Review in the early ‘50s. They admired each other’s writing and became friends. Sadly, publishers’ archives are parlously preserved in these days, and I haven’t been able to trace any of her letters to him. The book’s status is an awkward one, because, as Penelope remarks, as a non-member of the art history establishment she wasn’t really allowed to have written it. Literary biographies are usually written about writers. It was patchily but well reviewed and, despite remaining the standard work on its subject, since no-one has discovered more about Burne-Jones, nor written as entertainingly about his loves and sorrows, nor with such enthusiasm and skill about his art, it is nonetheless the least read of her books, the only one now out of print, and never to have been available in America. This is a pity, for its non-readers have missed many wonderful vivid scenes, as when Robert Browning, woken by his geese, sees from his windows Burne-Jones desperately trying to prevent his mistress-muse, Mary Zambaco, from throwing herself off the bridge over the Regents Canal. Penelope’s correspondence with the eminent American Burne-Jones scholar, Mary Lago, shows like minds, whose interest in one subject draws them on and outwards, at the most unexpected tangent, to the next. The seeds of several of her later projects are in this vast, living, late-Victorian world.
The biography, though, didn’t sell, and her next project didn’t sound any more commercial to the rather middlebrow publishing house of Michael Joseph (as Raleigh Trevelyan recently recalled, they preferred to publish books about horses and dogs). It was politely turned down. But there were good reasons to believe Macmillan might be interested in The Knox Brothers, for Harold Macmillan had been much influenced by the Catholic chaplain, Ronald Knox, as an undergraduate at Oxford, and they always remained friends. He appears in the book as ‘C’. Harold Macmillan’s letter of congratulations to Penelope is most touching: ‘you have brought out marvellously well the characteristics of these remarkable men…you have made it all so living and, to me, in my old age deeply moving’.
The first of the revealing sets of letters to editors that form the core of this book is to Richard Garnett at Macmillan: ‘All writers are intimidated by all publishers,’ she remarked to him, and he sounds more intimidating than most, though Penelope politely stood up to him, in part by quoting his brusqueries back to him: ‘It worried me terribly when you told me I was only an amateur writer, and I asked myself how many books do you have to write and how many semi-colons do you have to discard before you lose amateur status.’ And again: ‘I recall that my heart sank when you said "I have the right to expect accuracy".’ Garnett was a scrupulous editor, but Penelope won most of the skirmishes over accuracy, even over how best to explain the complex workings of the Enigma decoding machine.
To describe the Knoxes’ many achievements required an overview of several quite distinct disciplines and milieux. Sons of Bishop Knox of Manchester, two of her uncles became priests of quite different stripe. Ronnie, much to his father’s distress, was the most public convert to Catholicism since Newman. A Christian apologist famous between the wars for his witness, he was much in demand in the newspapers and on the radio. He also wrote much-praised learned theological works, was renowned as a wit – his book Let Dons Delight being a particular favourite with the public – translated the Bible, and, while chaplain at Oxford, penned a best-selling series of detective novels. Wilfred, the least known of the brothers, was an Anglican chaplain at Cambridge, wrote profound devotional works, and inspired a generation of clergymen. Penelope’s father Eddie (or ‘Evoe’, his chosen sobriquet), the longest lived of the family, dying in 1970 at the age of ninety, made humour his speciality, writing graceful light verse and prose for Punch. Collected every Christmas in volume form, it was very popular. He edited the paper between the wars and brought it to its highest point of success and circulation. Dillwyn began as a brilliant classicist, and editor of the Herodas papyri. His subsequent career, though shrouded in mystery at the time (Penelope had to break the Official Secrets Act to write about it), has probably had the most long-lasting effects of all the Knoxes’ achievements, as he was instrumental in breaking the German codes in both wars. The letters to Mavis Batey, his assistant at Bletchley Park, illuminate this aspect of Penelope’s research.
She began the book a year or so after her father’s death, as a memorial to him and her uncles, rarely mentioning herself, and even then only as ‘the niece’ and ‘th
e daughter’. Her research had the good effect of reuniting her with her cousins, and igniting a warm friendship in particular with Oliver Knox, Dilly’s son, which would last until the end of her life. The Knox Brothers is a skilful and original family biography, interleaving four contrasting stories with a wealth of feeling and detail. It also captures a whole period of British life, the memory of which was beginning to fade in very different times. This was immediately appreciated, and, with its appearance, in 1977, Penelope could be said to have arrived. With her Burne-Jones she had repaid a debt to an artist who, in an epiphanic childhood moment, when the sun shone through his stained-glass window, ‘The Last Judgement’, in Birmingham cathedral, had awoken in her a sense of ideal beauty in art. In The Knox Brothers she captured a quality of mind, personality, temperament and values that defined her. When Francis King seemed to mock the brothers’ sometimes unremitting brilliance and sanctity, she replied ‘I loved them’. Now she need no longer consider herself the daughter or the niece. Free of that long shadow, she could delve into herself. She would essay fiction.
In fact she had already begun, but in a recognisably Knoxian mode, with a comic detective story, perhaps a false start. We do not know quite how she came to offer The Golden Child to Colin and Anna Haycraft at Duckworth, as the firm cannot trace the correspondence relating to the book, but she certainly, and soon, came to regret it. In September 1977 she wrote to Richard Garnett at Macmillan:
So I Have Thought of You Page 2