by Mark Mazower
Like André, but with more success, Ira was consciously reinventing herself and devising her own riposte to revolutionary self-righteousness. She had arrived at the age of eight at Harwich docks knowing no English at all. By the time she was in her twenties, she refused to speak Russian at home or to attend her mother’s endless round of émigré teas and dinners, and she did her best to forget what traces of her family’s ancestral faith remained. One reason for her rise in the fashion business was surely its attractiveness as a form of everyday mythmaking, a promise of transformation. She understood the importance of this, and she understood too why it appealed to many other women of very different backgrounds from her own, especially once the war was over and rationing persisted and drabness reigned. She got the idea of writing a book on “the best-dressed woman in the room,” and in 1946, tapping away night after night in her small upstairs bedroom on Oakeshott Avenue, she wrote The Glass of Fashion. It is a product of the era of austerity, but it is also testimony to her drive, a paean to glamour in hard times. Her stepfather complained about the noise of her typewriter, but to her parents’ surprise and pleasure the book got good reviews. In fact its flimsy paper and plain covers belie a work of smooth style. Ira reassures British women that they can take grooming seriously, and achieve poise and elegance despite the many obstacles that lay in their path in the late 1940s. She looks ahead to the future, addressing her advice to teenage girls, to working women, and to older women too. She has an easy way with words and does not take herself too seriously.
A few years later, having left the world of fashion publishing, she would describe its ethos with clear-eyed sympathy:
[Women’s magazines] reflect the real world all right, up-to-date as a newspaper, but its image in our pages is romantically distorted as in water, and in that distortion are reflected the daydreams of millions of women.
In it, all girls are pretty, all babies healthy and smiling, all husbands handsome and all the recipes produce Cordon Bleu banquets for half-a-crown. Love always finds a way; sin is punished; a new hairdo brings scads of admiring young men; and no human problem from acne to xenophobia is beyond a happy solution.
It all does some good and little harm to women whose lifelong grip on the naked realities of love, money, birth and death makes them seek our gay dream-world for their relaxation. They remain realists at heart; and even the realist in them is catered for in our pages by stacks of information, especially on anything you can conceivably Do Yourself—generically known as Knit Your Own Man to the office. Levity is our professional defence against admitting that we are caught and held by the fascination of producing the dream-world. But caught and held we are.
Without leaving home, Ira had found her dream world. And she was evidently not only talented but recognized because a few years later, she landed a bigger job and became the art editor of Woman’s Own, where she worked for the best part of a decade.
This kind of success—unusual and impressive in Britain at that time—was only possible for a single woman but it was not the destiny Ira imagined for herself. After the fiasco of her brief marriage, she had been surrounded by the admirers and hangers-on her mother dismissively called her “heroes”—a term that suggests how far Ira projected a desire to be rescued for a more epic life, as well as what her mother, who had endured an epic of her own, thought about this fantasizing. Among the men there was still Morrie, available for evenings at the cinema or occasional holidays abroad, and from whom she was not yet divorced. There were actors, dancers, and writers. And then she met Jeff, a businessman who worked in the City and lived down the road. He happened to be married and a father several times over, and neither Max nor Frouma was happy with a situation that dragged on for nearly a decade and which Frouma described in frustration as “a cross between Chekhov and a comic opera.” Not one but two divorces were needed—to part Ira belatedly from Morrie and Jeff from his wife. Morrie was accommodating; Jeff was torn. But Ira was infatuated and after years of agonizing, Jeff left his wife and children and moved into a flat with her.
A photo from 1954 shows Ira approaching forty, having left Oakeshott Avenue only a few years earlier. Dressed in a dark knee-length dress, with one of the tight belts she liked, she is in heels and pearls, carrying a French straw country basket and posing, best foot forward, looking straight if unsmilingly at Dad’s camera. The whole effect is a fashion-shoot version of suburban come-to-lunch simplicity. She was unquestionably the most elegant thing on the street that spring morning. Standing next to her, sporting a smile of contentment, is Jeff, and behind them is their pale-colored Morris Minor. Their cars would soon get a lot bigger.
Jeff’s real name, unknown to us, was Richard Sellier Jefferies: Ira evidently liked calling her men by their surnames, a way of keeping her heroes at a distance. He was someone we would have described as “very English,” which conjured up a set of associations we so rarely put into words it is hard to pin it down now. Let us say a certain manner, pleasant and crisp, a touch drier and more formal than we were used to—with the houndstooth sports jacket and tie and a pocket square in the breast pocket. There was the barked laugh, a hint of sherry and Home Counties clubbability, and, it was tempting to imagine, an ease with servants in the tropics. There was also his not being Jewish (so far as we knew), though that did not seem important and I don’t remember it ever being discussed. Jeff’s Englishness was surely no small part of his attraction for Ira. He now seems to me, who hardly knew him, to have embodied the Square Mile at its most self-assured, in the prosperous solid days that ran on, it felt like, for decades after the end of the war before the Big Bang of the 1980s helped turn everyone into a get-rich-quick banker on bonuses, by which point the City itself had ceased to be much connected to England at all. At the time we are talking about, in the afterlife of empire, when London firms controlled plantations and mines and the destiny of natural resources across the former colonial world, Jeff ran one of Britain’s largest tropical timber traders. Denny Mott, his outfit, had become rich supplying wood for railroads and ships, and by the 1950s it had holdings everywhere from West Africa to Southeast Asia. It is characteristic of the era that this businessman, who liked the first-class cabin and enjoyed nothing so much as taking his wife to stay at the Paris Ritz, was also a lifelong Labour man, who had organized local party meetings. A tailor’s cutter was a teenage fantasy; making a home with the chairman of Denny Mott, Ira could realize the capitalist idyll that had beckoned to her at the Petrograd station in the summer of 1924.
When the two of them settled into West Hill Court, round the corner from Oakeshott Avenue, that was it with local party meetings. And with fashion too: Ira left magazine publishing and turned to writing books. Her 1958 account of traveling with Jeff to Siam did well enough and was followed by her historical romances—A Kingdom for a Song, The Witch’s Son, and The Troika Belle, ending up with The Fortune Hunter—fantasies packed with court intrigue, noble gamblers, dashing rakes, illegitimacy, mad passion, and fatal attractions. Georgette Heyer had paved the way for this kind of thing, and Ira trod a similar path and enjoyed a modest success. But although she was a writer with real talent, the books too stopped. Nothing, it seemed, with Ira was to be taken too far, and writing remained a divertissement.
After Max’s death, Frouma moved into their block of flats and continued to cook for her daughter as she always had in Oakeshott Avenue. Her mother, her husband, and the Heath—these were Ira’s devotions, hidden behind the fine clothes and careful elocution. She used to look out of their living-room window across the sunken lawns past the chestnut trees and the willows to the pond, listening to the geese in winter. In my small-boy’s memory, drawn from no more than a few visits—we hardly ever went there—the most conspicuous feature of their apartment, which had surprisingly few books, was a gleaming and well-stocked drinks trolley. It was a comfortable life, one she had made and ultimately chosen for herself. But the wildness and the fantasy of her early years were now confined to her writing. The s
arcasm had been reduced to formality. What remained were luxury cruises, company dinners at the Grosvenor or the Ritz, and drives in the Jag through France where they had some well-heeled friends in nice châteaus. Both of them liked a drink—another reason perhaps why our abstemious parents didn’t look forward to their company—and I guess they were drinking more as time went on.
The surfeit of bodice-ripping romanticism in her prose hid an underlying astringency that had once been much closer to the surface. In the spring of 1943 she had written to Dad to congratulate him on his birthday: “My dear Bill,” she had begun. “Please accept my felicitations on reaching (safely) the ripe old age of eighteen, with a small token of my esteem and astonishment at your having made it.” Of course she was the one who had been lucky to make it and for it all to work out the way it had, which was what, in a way, she was saying. This kind of irony became, for a time, second nature. “I understand that we are soon to be blessed by your presence again for a considerable period so I shall keep my congratulations this side idolatry, many happy returns, Love Ira.” These were years when she and Dad had been closer than we realized, despite all the differences in their upbringing and perhaps also despite jealousy at the attention his parents lavished on him. Yet life afterwards had not brought them together nor been able to preserve this intimacy. Ira’s way of dealing with the violent changes of her childhood years had been to forge a persona—cigarette or drink in hand, studiously unserious and self-consciously romantic—that was too contrary to Dad’s likes and taste to leave much room for enduring affection. She had tried to fix him up after the army with some of her fashionable friends, but neither they, nor she, were really his type. She became, in her egotism, her troubled and turbulent love life, her tendency to fantasy, her pursuit of looks and polish, another kind of anti-model for him, and it was difficult for us to see behind all that.
Many years after her death, the authorized version of our stepaunt’s character, authorized that is to say within our immediate family, was challenged unexpectedly by a conversation that I had over lunch with my cousin Patrick in Paris. I remembered Patrick, my senior by a decade and more, from my visits to Paris as a twelve-year-old boy because I had gone once to his shop, an Aladdin’s cave of African masks and textiles, which had made an impression on me chiefly because it was located on the Faubourg-Saint-Denis, in the heart of the old red-light district. Now in retirement in a quiet medieval backstreet near the Bastille, he and his companion, Françoise, shared a tiny flat filled with paintings, plants, and books. The gate from the street gave on to an ancient passage between two houses with carefully tended hydrangeas in large pots along its length. Inside their apartment, kilims covered the floor of their living room. It had not occurred to me to talk with Patrick about Ira, but when the conversation went that direction I was glad we did. The way he spoke about her was in such different tones to what I was used to and the warmth of his feeling was evident. She was “a woman of class,” he declared with admiration, always happy to leave the Ritz and come to dinner with the family in their small flat on rue Montparnasse. She would bring champagne and wine—he tapped his elbow in respect to show she could handle a glass or two—and she enjoyed a good time. Both of Patrick’s parents had liked her enormously and so had he. His father had died before Ira took her own life, but Alice, his mother, was alive, and when she heard the news, Patrick told me, “she collapsed in tears and wept.” The contrast with the reaction, or the lack of it, in our house made me aware of how powerfully one can be shaped by the distribution of affections that one grows up with, how specific and arbitrary these can be, their lack of visibility allowing them to penetrate deep and take root until one day something can come along and suggest an entirely different angle of vision and a new set of regrets.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Childhood
When I asked Dad what his first memory was, he said he remembered crawling into bed with his mother while his father was away on business. A large envelope had arrived for him and he had opened it in bed. “It turned out not to be a letter but a story by H. G. Wells. I think it was called something like ‘Tommy and the Elephant.’ ” His mother’s warmth, his father’s absence. The start from which the rest will follow. He was three years old.
And the story?
“Tommy and the Elephant” tells of a rich man whose pride leads him off a cliff. Fearless Tommy, who is fishing for sharks, pulls him out of the sea and refuses to take any money. He is a resourceful boy and a virtuous one, who believes that “a good deed is its own reward.” But eventually he concedes, and asks for a pet animal. The rich man visits a pet shop and rejects all the obvious candidates: He is very proud and they seem too ordinary. A tiger is ruled out because Tommy’s mother might object: “Mothers are sometimes so peculiar.” So after spending an entire day perusing the contents of all the shops in London, he chooses an elephant and sends it by train, express delivery, monogrammed. It arrives in less than a month, “so swift and perfect has the railway traffic of our country districts become.” Tommy decides to call it Augustus after the Roman emperor. He is not easily intimidated by sharks, money, or elephants. But he likes boats, and the trains work.
“Another memory I had was of playing in the garden. We had a garden on three sides. I think we might have been having tea or something in the garden in the summer and the baker’s boy wandered into the garden—or the butcher’s boy. This would have been 1929, something like that. He had wandered into the garden by mistake; he should have gone to the back door which was round the other side of the house. But he didn’t know the geography. I remember how confused he was. It was an example to my mind of class consciousness. That was the worst thing you could do … to invade someone’s garden like that.”
It is hard to think of anything that played a more important role in defining Dad’s sense of well-being than gardens. Growing up in suburban London, he flourished in spaces where one could build on a small and homely scale, a world of sheds and bonfires and compost, lawns, fences, and rockeries. Dad’s connection to gardens was to give him lasting joy, and one of the most immediate memories I can conjure up if I want to think of him is the sight of him in a short-sleeved shirt and Wellington boots, his fork underfoot turning over the earth in the vegetable beds. A life to come: carrots and beans, rhubarb and gooseberries, London clay and the rich loam of west Oxfordshire, a home, and thoughts that remain close to the ground. The gardener is not a metaphysician; his is a different, less speculative, more active and experimental kind of knowledge, acquired by acting in and on the world. Dad hated to be idle, and one of the reasons he loathed his time in the army was that it stuck him behind a desk. “Lazy day,” he would sometimes write in his diary; they were rare enough for him to note. “Dig, dig, dig”: That one we find especially during the war when he was hard at work in the Oakeshott Avenue back garden under the gaze of the barrage balloons, putting up a chicken coop, setting up the Anderson shelter ahead of the expected bombers—the first of other future gardens, all made productive and useful by physical labor.
But what strikes me now equally about this image is not only the summer and the tea and the sense of a sanctuary momentarily violated, but also his sympathy for the intruder, a boy not much older than himself, and his wondering why his mistake mattered so much. It was an early experience of the significance and arbitrariness of the English middle-class social code. You have to know your place.
Dad had a feeling for place, and a capacity to recognize the places in which he could be himself and feel at home. And for him the soil that counted was always English. Eternally curious about the Russia his parents had left behind—the half a dozen volumes of The Story of a Life, the lyrical memoirs of the Soviet writer Konstantin Paustovsky, sat on the bookshelf in our living room as long as I can remember; and a tiny Kustodiev snowscape on the wall was a reminder of the Russian winters of Max’s and Frouma’s childhood—he would have shared the very English sentiment expressed by the popular nineteenth-century author C
harlotte Yonge that “the record of a thousand peaceful years is truly a cause of thankfulness.” Tracking footpaths on family walks across the Downs, snagging blackberries with his walking stick, warding off inquisitive cows with a trusted Ordnance Survey map in his hand, he was in his element.
A quiet and nurturing childhood had been all but unknown in the Mazower family before Dad’s birth. Max’s father had died when he was fairly small, and the move to Vilna and the responsibilities on his shoulders had precluded much of a formal education. With his mother missing and his absent father, André’s early years had been almost entirely deprived of parental affection or stability. Frouma’s had been punctuated by the constant movement of her father’s work and Ira’s first memories were of checkpoints, squalor, and fear. So Dad’s settled upbringing was unprecedented and goes a long way to explaining, I think, the gratitude and respect he always felt to his parents and his sense of obligation towards them.
“The last memory I have is of a lorry running down West Hill out of control. The curb in those days was quite high. The pavement must have been a foot above the road. The lorry crashed into the curb and I think somebody was hurt or injured or killed. I remember my mother taking me indoors so I shouldn’t see this because there was some sort of crash. It was just on the other side of this hedge and fence onto West Hill.”
The Holly Lodge Estate was and is the most genteel of enclaves, its gates and fences allowing pedestrians in but otherwise keeping the world at bay. It is flanked on one side by the overgrown tangle of Highgate Cemetery and on the other, across West Hill, by Hampstead Heath, where under his mother’s gaze Dad remembered making houses out of the giant plane leaves that fell in autumn.