The Bolter

by Osborne, Frances

  Don’t you think perhaps more could be done by trying to improve the present system under which with all its faults the standard of living has undeniably improved every 10 years.

  Please if you want to be a communist or a socialist or anything be a constructive one not just a rather priggish critic of the present system, from which you’ve drawn every advantage [underlined and ‘Did I ever deny it?’ added by David].

  I wonder if you would like to go up to Blagdon for part of the holidays and work in some of the very poor parts round Newcastle. I’m sure you would be harrowed and perhaps you could help. Anyway you would see a little of conditions and know more what you were talking about. I hope this letter makes sense to you but I’m not too good with the pen as you know [‘I certainly do!’ added by David]. With love from Mother.

  With love from Mother. Barbie had been Mother to David and Gee ever since the day she had appeared in Eastbourne with Euan, twisting the heavy new ring upon her finger. Euan had come down a week earlier with Aunt Avie and before that had been away for so long that the two boys could barely have remembered who he was. For a year their life had been a rotation of habitats: Granny Muriel’s, where they kept their ponies; Aunt Jean’s, where they had spent a long summer bouncing through heather and tunnelling through bracken; and Eastbourne. The seaside town was a place of endless damp sand and shingle, a wide, open sky and wind that required coats to be buttoned up when outside and lips when inside – an inevitably grey boarding house, its dining room filled with walnut faces emanating disapproval.

  Then, suddenly, David and Gee had had a father again, and a mother too – although a different one from the figure that had bounded through their nursery before. She had been ‘Mummie’.1 Barbie was most definitely ‘Mother’.2

  Then, almost as soon as they had arrived, Euan and Barbie had vanished again, taking the boys’ nanny, Miss Jeffreys, with them. In her place had come Nanny Sleath. Nanny Sleath had brought up Barbie, and Barbie’s brother and sisters – the entire Lutyens family – and now she was going to bring up Barbie’s stepsons too.

  David and Gee had stayed in Eastbourne for three more weeks. On Friday 30April, ten days before Euan and Barbie’s wedding, Nanny Sleath and the two nursery maids who trotted behind her, each clutching a boy quite firmly, piled themselves and David and Gee on to a train for London, arriving, wrote Euan in his diary, ‘at 4.30’. And then, as though discharging a duty before they again vanished for months, Euan and Barbie took the boys to a society doctor, who declared himself ‘delighted with them in every way’.

  Within a couple of hours Barbie and Euan had bundled the boys on to an overnight train to Scotland – ‘the kids went off to Kildonan by the 7.20’ – leaving the newly engaged couple free to enjoy their wedding and a two month-long trip abroad.

  By lunchtime on 1 May, David and Gee were standing in front of a gleaming new building-in-progress that promised to be larger than a seaside grand hotel and staffed on the inside by columns of black-dressed and white-capped housekeepers and housemaids, footmen and bootboys, cooks and undercooks, scullery maids and even a tweeny3 or two. The grounds, too, were packed with an army of retainers in brown and green: gardeners and gamekeepers, woodmen and kennel keepers.

  This, the Kildonan House that Idina had designed, was to be their new home. The only Wallace family staff missing were Euan’s valet, Wooster, and Barbie’s lady’s maid, Miss Knight. They had, of course, accompanied Euan and Barbie on honeymoon.

  Kildonan was Heaven for little boys.4 There was a vast amount of space to run around in and, unlike an Eastbourne boarding house, no wrinkled faces clearly wishing they were not there. There were lawns, with a climbing tree neatly split into two so that each of them could take a trunk and race the other as high as they could go. There was a wide river reached by climbing over a low fence and crawling through the long grass to the edge, where they could lie, dipping their hands in the water. There was other water too. A brook across the lawn and, behind the house, a burn – ‘a burrrrn’, said MacDowell (pronounced McDool), who ran the grounds. This stream also ran along one edge of the lawn but, for the sake of a few feet of extra grass, an enticingly long, dark tunnel had been engineered over it and turf laid on top.

  Up behind the tunnel and the burn were a tennis court, an orchard – too early in the year for apples when they arrived – a nursery garden straight out of Peter Rabbit and acres and acres of a very deep, very dark wood in which they built houses ‘out of sticks and bracken & played Red Indians all the afternoon’, wrote Barbie’s sister Ursula Lutyens in her diary of a visit to the house.5

  Euan and Barbie came, and stayed. For two long months the house bulged with their friends, then in late September the household packed up, piled back on the train and headed for their new London home. This was a Mayfair townhouse, filled with some of the same faces that had been at Kildonan and, of course, Nanny Sleath. From time to time Euan and Barbie wafted through their new nursery and the schoolroom in which a governess came to give them lessons. After two Christmases, Easters and summers at Kildonan, a new mewling bundle of baby boy joined them in the nursery, and two little black Shetland ponies arrived in the stables – ‘too sweet for words, and the children are marvellous on them,’ wrote Ursula.6 Within months, David and Gee had been sent away to boarding-school: ‘Barbie and I chose Hatherdown,’ wrote Euan, ‘with 90 boys, as 150 is too many.’

  For David and Gee, leaving for boarding school had been the beginning of the rest of their boyhood: three terms a year of joshing and teasing and freezing on rugby pitches and burning on cricket fields and Latin and arithmetic and parsing and Greek with ink-stained fingers. Then it was back to Kildonan for the summer hols, to a house jammed with braying red faces and tweed bottoms for the grouse, and again at Christmas, this time for the pheasant. Too young to shoot, they instead loaded guns on the moors, tied on flies on the riverbanks and cast a line or two. When it rained they ran inside. There were 250 feet of carefully thought out passageways on each floor, with a single corner to navigate at speed.

  From now on Easter was spent with Nanny Sleath by the sea, at Bognor or Brighton or Poole or Eastbourne again, or back at Frinton, on the other side of the country. It must have seemed that whenever they came home there was a new face in the nursery: brothers one, two and three. Johnny came first, Peter immediately after. Then there was a gap before Billy, who was not, as it had been hoped, a girl. But very much the youngest, and the only one not in an almost-twin pair, he was kept as spoilt as only the baby of a family can be. At the other end of the family, David and Gee clung to each other, inseparable: ‘When one of us was punished, and kept indoors for the day, the other stayed in with him.’7

  It was in the summer of 1931 that David had first begun to feel anger with the world. He was sixteen years old, his parents had beautiful homes, limitless funds and ranks of servants. He himself was now at Eton, cosseted in stiff collars and ancient traditions designed to insulate him from the world outside. But he had only to read a newspaper or open his eyes on the Windsor streets and see humans reduced to refuse, trying to sell anything they could with the fragments of dignity that remained. For almost two years businesses had been folding, the survivors supported only by the mercy of their lenders. Through June and July, the lenders themselves were imploding, throwing not just their debtors’ but their own employees on to the end of the winding, ragged queues waiting for dole, waiting for soup, waiting for change.

  The half-hearted new National Government under Ramsay MacDonald for David wasn’t enough.8 Quite the opposite. His father was put back into the Government. His parents’ friends continued to loll around drawing rooms, leaning back on the sofas, their own or their neighbour’s pearls twisted in one hand, the stem of a champagne glass in another. Outside there was still rampant unemployment. David did not hesitate to tell both his parents and their bejewelled friends that he did not believe it was right. He rapidly gained a reputation, wrote Euan, for being ‘socialistic.’9

>   By the end of 1931 even Euan and Barbie were beginning to feel pinched. ‘World financial conditions,’ wrote Euan in his Smythson’s diary, ‘resulted in the loss of 40per cent of our income and in October we had to make drastic household economies: everyone is in the same boat, & most people worse off than we are. All the same it is impossible to go on for many years when expenditure exceeds income by 60%.’ Family economies were made: the previous year the Wallaces had spent Christmas at Malaga and visited Cannes, Rome and Vienna. In 1932, however, ‘we did hardly any travelling & spent more time than usual in London,’ wrote Euan. They paid off as many servants as they could bear (so adding to the ranks of the unemployed), leaving a ‘reduced staff’ that ‘worked very well’. This saved Euan ‘£4000on general expenditure’ alone – a sum equivalent to a couple of hundred thousand today – of which ‘£1000represented no foreign expeditions’. Although ‘no foreign expeditions’ still meant ‘a week at Corne d’Or in July’ for Barbie and a ‘week-end at Le Touquet’ in Normandy for Euan.

  That year David’s anger subsided a little, at least as far as Euan noticed. He ‘became much more sociable and less socialistic and everyone likes him enormously’. It was his last year at Eton. He had been busy. A year younger than his classmates, David had still been House Captain, he had his School Certificate to sit and then the Oxford entrance exam. He left ‘with the most wonderful reports as to character from GWL [his housemaster] and the Headmaster’. On the basis that David and Gee’s ‘motor bikes caused no casualties’ so far, at Christmas Euan ‘gave them a small car’.

  Then David had gone abroad for the rest of the academic year, until he started at Oxford. He left for Paris in January. But, within a few weeks, he felt ‘not very happy’.10 Barbie urged him to give it more time. He did, and then went on to Germany for another three months, which he did not enjoy either.11 But Euan, busy with his political career – he was a junior defence minister, Civil Lord of the Admiralty and that year, 1933, ‘foreign affairs (France & Germany & Japan ) very awkward at times’ – was too preoccupied to notice otherwise. David’s sojourns abroad, he wrote, ‘were both very successful’.

  The week before David went up to Oxford, Euan left for a two-month tour of the ‘China and E. Indies Stations’. Barbie was busy with the younger ones, so David took himself up to Oxford alone.

  Oxford in the early thirties was a maelstrom of ideology, emotion and beliefs that the world was broken and only an extreme course of action could mend it. And David was caught up in its currents. Oddly, nobody in the family saw him from the day he went to the day he returned home at the Christmas vac. By then wearing clothes that looked as though they hadn’t been washed since he had left, he had come to his decision to live on the other side of the moral world as a temperate, sexually abstinent, Christian Socialist priest.12

  David scrawled in the diary Gee gave him for Christmas that year – not a leather-covered Smythson’s but a two-shilling, cardboard working-man’s diary, one that Gee knew David would accept – that abstinence did not come easily: ‘Another great failure. Changing, was nude before glass and as usual, after a few games, slipped straight into bed and making bloody mess and as usual being livid with self after.’.13 But, notwithstanding the difficulty of attaining his objective, the rift between David and his family broadened. When Barbie sacked a servant, Arthur, for visiting the doctor in working hours, David picked up ‘“Equality” by R M Tawney. It is extremely interesting. Marked a few passages. The rich are all kindness until their claims are questioned, when they become like a lion. The value of the working class movement is not to adjust the present order, redistribute wealth more equally, but to substitute the standard of men for that of wealth, gain that usual respect, which is owing to them and they do not get (e.g. Mother and Arthur).’

  This time Euan noticed that his son was at odds with the life he had been brought up in. Within days David recorded that his father had ‘told all the ancestors that I am going into the Church’.

  In January David returned to a university full of ‘ju-jitsu’, being invited to dons’ rooms for late-night whiskies ‘which I made water’, and the Labour Club. He went to talks and wrote afterwards in his diary: ‘Aneurin Bevan spoke. Repetitive and tiresome manner, demagogue and quite interesting . . . Walked back with Crofts. Tells me he has no confidence in working class. Comes of working class, which I did not know. I must talk to him more.’

  But, clearly now realising that David needed some attention, that spring term the family made an effort to visit him at Oxford.

  David’s first visitors were Nanny Sleath and his brothers John and Peter. They arrived at midday one Saturday in late January, stayed for lunch and a short walk and left at three. Having observed her former charge in his student habitat, a few days later Nanny Sleath sent ‘another pullover from Selfridges and said send her the yellow one to wash’, wrote David.

  Next came his beloved brother Gee. He stayed an entire weekend: two full days alone together after their first whole year apart, since David had left school the Christmas before. It was ‘grand’ to see Gee, ‘lovely having’ him, he wrote.

  Finally, on 19 February, on the way back from what was now widely called a ‘weekend’ hunting and golfing, Euan and Barbie decided to drop in, leaving their car to be driven on to London ahead of them. They lunched in David’s room, the college butler Adams rustling up a ‘last minute’ meal.

  This visit ran a little less smoothly. ‘Mother,’ wrote David that evening, ‘wants us to call Daddy “Father”.’ ‘Mother’ wanted a bit more than that too. In her eyes David’s appearance was giving the impression that the family had, like some of their friends, slipped into financial ruin. On the train to Paddington she complained to Euan that David was a mess. But Euan, perhaps seeing only what he wanted to see, wrote that night: ‘David seems well and happy and looks no dirtier or untidier than his colleagues!’

  But by the time David returned home at the Easter vacation and looked around his parents’, as ever, packed dining-room table – ‘Duff Coopers and Lord Titchfield there’, Barbie glowering at one end – David confessed to his diary that he ‘felt a terrible misfit’.

  Three weeks after that Idina re-entered his life:

  Balliol College, Oxford, Friday 11 May 1934

  Had letter from Sheila, saying had seen my mother, who wanted to meet me. All v. queer. Mother has quite filled her place. Not seen for 15 years. In some ways indifferent. Yet in others I long to see her. I certainly look forward to it immensely. I objectify it all, picture to myself. Young Oxford graduate, meeting mother after 15 years, moving scene, and not me.

  Balliol College, Oxford, Thursday 17 May 1934

  Letter from my mother; I knew it at once; suggesting meet Claridge’s next week; had to write to Sheila to find out her name.

  Balliol College, Oxford, Friday 25 May 1934

  To London to see Dina, my mother, whom I had not seen for 15 years.

  CHAPTER 22

  ON FRIDAY, 25 MAY 1934 IDINA STEPPED INTO CLARIDGE’S Hotel in Mayfair shortly before a quarter to one. Ahead of her stretched a maze of sofas and tables, chairs and kissing chairs. In the centre a vast glass Medusa’s head of a chandelier writhed above serpents of cigarette smoke curling up towards it. Idina sat down, lit a breakfast cigarette and ordered a cocktail. The weather was still turning in that haphazard English way and feather boas and entire dead foxes bobbed around, criss-crossing the lobby, with the odd ‘sorr-eh’ exhaled through motionless lips. The hallway echoed with steps accelerating and hesitating across the marble floor and up the wide staircase that wrapped around the walls. Here and there a head turned back towards her with the hiss of a whisper.

  At least there was no chance of a direct confrontation. Sheila had very deliberately taken Euan and Barbie for a long lunch at the Ritz.1 Idina had been left to face only the life she might have had.

  When she saw the red carnation, she knew it was her son. He was taller than his father. Six foot two, a long, pale n
eck rising from a pair of shoulders strong enough for, when he turned, Idina to trace the blades through the back of his leather-patched jacket2 – and an Adam’s apple that danced as he glanced this way and that, swallowing. The four-year-old boy she had said goodbye to was now a grown man. And although they had been five thousand miles apart, it seemed that, as her youth had drained, so his had blossomed. He had her high cheekbones and thick hair, a curl or two trying to kick through the Brylcreem. There was the Sackville slope to his eyes but, in a rather charming contrast to his hair, they were, as they always had been, Euan’s deep dark brown.

  Fifteen years on, however, this ‘Brownie’ needed her.

  David ‘loathed Claridges’.3 It epitomised all that he abhorred: ‘vulgarity, servility, the abasement of men’s lives before the very rich’, he wrote in his diary. But as he stood in the lobby he saw a woman approaching him, wearing a haze of peach4 and a deep, wide, intimate smile. She kept on walking, if you could call her sway walking, straight at him. Her hair was the colour of corn and she barely reached his shoulder but her bright-blue eyes were locked on to his, smiling. He ‘did not recognise her’. But she knew him. And as she raised her face and opened her lips and started to speak, the hard edges of David’s world began to melt.