The Bolter

by Osborne, Frances

  In the spring of 1943 Lynx came home with the news that he had been joined in Cairo by David. After the loss of so many young men in the First World War, the British Government had been exercising a discreet policy of keeping the most academically able away from the front line. David had therefore been, much to his frustration,12 kept in barracks in Yorkshire while everyone else he knew seemed to be given the chance to fight for their country. He had spent endless evenings in the officers’ mess with men too old to fight again – and who spent the time reminiscing about dancing with Idina before the last war had even begun.13

  Eventually David had been selected to be the Foreign Office’s representative in Greece. He had been living in the country for the best part of five years and spoke the language fluently. He also knew well the Foreign Secretary and future Prime Minister, Anthony Eden – usually by the Wallace family nickname for him of Old Confucius.

  David had come to Cairo on his way to be parachuted in behind the Greek lines. He had been asked to liaise with the Greek guerrilla leaders and report on SOE’s (Special Operations Executive) activities there for the Foreign Office.

  David had left two daughters, Idina’s granddaughters, Laura and Davina, behind in England. Laura had been born in Cairo in May 1941. David, Pru and the baby had then returned to England via South Africa and South America, crawling up the eastern seaboard until they crossed the Atlantic again as far north as they dared go. David had been in charge of allocating rooms on the ship. The escaping Greek Royal Family were on the list of passengers. They wanted good rooms. David still had strong socialist instincts. It had been a delicate situation. Pru had intervened.14 They would all be spending several months on board together, after all. By the time they reached England the next baby was almost ready to be born.

  Barbie and Euan had bought Lavington Park, a country estate on the South Downs near Petworth, back in 1936. It had been on the market at what Barbie had thought was a surprisingly reasonable price15 and, without stopping to wonder why, Barbie had bought it. She had never liked Kildonan.16 She had told Euan it was too far for him to travel to now, given the demands of his ministerial posts. In truth perhaps it had always been another woman’s – Idina’s – house. The main house at Lavington, however, she had her brother, who had followed their father into architecture, redesign.

  When the war came the house had been requisitioned as a hospital. Barbie had moved into the pink Dower House next door and invited the entire Lutyens family to live with them. She had lent David and Pru the old head gardener’s cottage. Their second daughter, Davina, had been born there in June 1942. And while David was over in Cairo, Pru had stayed in the cottage, grating along beside Barbie.

  Gee, too, whom Idina had still not seen since he was a boy, had married. Like David, he had fallen in love with an older woman. This one, however, was old enough to be the wife of one of Euan and Barbie’s friends, creating a small scandal.17 But Gee and Elizabeth had married and were blissfully happy and spending as much time as they could together until he was posted abroad.18

  Shortly after Lynx returned to Cairo, Gee was posted abroad.

  And, having lost three lives close to her, Idina was now brought a new one. Gee was sent to Mombasa.

  They met at Muthaiga, at one of those heaving, balloon-filled dances with couples’ chests pinned to each other, legs flying out in all directions. To a newcomer the place appeared a maze of dance-halls and dining rooms, sitting rooms and bars – somewhere in which was a mother Gee hadn’t seen for twenty-five years. He asked a senior officer if he knew Lady Idina.

  ‘Well,’ the officer replied, ‘everyone knows of her. She has a dreadful reputation and it wouldn’t be wise for you to be seen about with her.’19

  Gee saluted, turned and walked away.

  He found her himself.

  There was too much to say to know where to begin. In the years since Idina had last seen him, Gee had grown from a toddler to a great bear of a man of twenty-eight. Idina stood tiny next to him. For, like David, he was tall but, unlike him, far from slender, almost round with joviality. Idina took Gee’s large hand in hers and led him on to the dancefloor, put her head against his chest and let her son’s thick arms wrap around her back. They ‘were seen dancing most amorously’.20

  Gee was good at hugs. He was a warmer, cosier character than David, able to smooth any social situation. In the latter regard, particularly, he was very like his father Euan, extraordinarily so. As David’s wife Pru later said of him, ‘You never met a lovelier man in your life. He was so funny, charming, always good-humoured.’21

  Idina had never had Euan in Kenya, the country she had come to adore. In his place had come their son: a living, breathing part of Euan and who, unlike his father, had a great deal of love to show her. They swayed together for hours.22 The war, which was wrenching so many apart, had brought the two of them together. As when she had met David at Claridge’s nine years earlier, this was for Idina the beginning of a new, loving relationship. Gee was a steadying character, and now he was here to steady her.

  For Gee, Idina offered something similar. The war had taken the father he loved, spread his family across the globe and separated him from his wife. But here at last he had his mother, his real biological mother, who had borne him, given birth to him and cradled him in her arms. He held her tight.23

  The next day, Gee was hauled up in front of the senior officer.

  ‘Look here,’ he told Gee, ‘I have warned you about Lady Idina . . . she’s old enough to be your mother.’

  ‘She is my mother,’ was the reply.24

  CHAPTER 25

  AND THUS IDINA AND HER SECOND SON CAME TO KNOW each other. For days at a stretch Gee would be down at his base at Mombasa, piloting a Catalina flying-boat on sea patrols. At weekends they could meet in Nairobi or, with enough days of leave ahead of him, Gee could make the long drive up to Clouds, bringing his friends. There Idina could show off her mountain paradise to her ‘darling son’1 and curl up on a sofa in front of a roaring fire, talking through the night.

  David had offered her a headstrong and intense filial love. Theirs had been a relationship where Idina adored and David burnt – both himself and her. Gee, on the other hand, was a rock who could give Idina the feeling that he would always be there for her. In her own son Idina had found the constant love that she had been searching for.

  But, on 25 August 1943, four short months after Gee had arrived and just long enough for the sharp newness of their relationship to begin to soften into permanence, a thin line of dust appeared along the hillside road leading to Clouds. As the minutes passed, the dust filled out into a cloud that eventually came to an abrupt halt at the gates. The usual small swarm of fezzes appeared. The gate was opened. The dust-covered car rattled in among the flowerbeds. Out climbed Dorothy Blin Stoyle. Dorothy had come to Kenya eight years earlier when her husband, Herbert, had been sent out to run the Uganda Railway. She had become friends with Idina. She had invited her and her current flame, whoever it was, to her parties – pointedly ignoring the raised eyebrows among the rest of her guests.2

  Dorothy’s daughter Molly was working as a nurse in Mombasa. One of Molly’s friends had become Gee’s ‘girlfriend’3 and invited Molly, as she knew Idina, to come and meet him for dinner. Two days earlier the two girls had gone to the air base to pick him up for the evening. When they arrived they were told that he had taken a crew out on an exercise in a Catalina that afternoon and had not yet returned. Molly and her friend decided to wait. They waited. Dinnertime passed and they continued to wait. Eventually, at around eleven o’clock in the evening, they were told that Gee had now been posted as missing.

  Dorothy had come to tell Idina for, as she later said, ‘I couldn’t think who else would.’4

  Idina drove down to Mombasa. Two days later, when she arrived, Gee had still not returned. Her ‘darling son’, so full of life and with so much to live for, was dead.

  Idina somehow found the strength to buy a plot of la
nd in the cemetery close to the ocean. Between the great, round, purple trunks of the baobabs, she raised a stone:

  ‘To my beloved son, Wing Cmdr G E Wallace, who flew from here to the unknown, and to his crew.’

  She then drove back through Nairobi to Clouds. She stayed up there in the hills. She didn’t come down to Nairobi for dances, not even to the club at Gilgil. She stopped eating and exercising. Surrounded by flowers continuing their relentless Kenyan bloom, Idina wilted.

  As though she were cursed, the touch of her affection appeared fatal. Idina turned her emotions to objects that she could not kill: she lit endless cigarettes and watched the bottoms of bottles clear. ‘I should never,’ she said to anyone who visited, ‘have left Euan in the first place.’5 At the end of December that year David ‘saw Lynx, in Cairo’, he wrote to his wife, Pru, ‘who tells me Dina is wasting away’.6

  Throughout her turbulent life Idina had, so far, managed to bounce back. The deaths of Joss, Euan and Alice had weakened her but she had nonetheless managed to absorb herself in a new wartime farming life. The death of her son was, however, too much for even the resilient Idina to bear. As she would shortly write: ‘I am not very brave any more.’7

  Idina was not the only one wasting after Gee’s death. Two months beforehand, in June, David had been parachuted behind the German lines in Greece in order to report on SOE activities. The Foreign Office, for which he worked, thought that what SOE was doing risked a rise of Communist power in the country. David had met up with both the Greek guerrilla leaders and Brigadier Myers, the head of the British SOE in Greece. There he had at last learnt that behaviour did not come in black and white. The Greek guerrillas could be an unruly bunch yet the other British officers were deliberately turning a blind eye in order to keep them on side. He was obviously shocked, wrote Myers.8 On 9 August David, Myers and half a dozen representatives from almost as many guerrilla factions had been picked up from a makeshift airfield and flown to Cairo. After six weeks with SOE, David had been convinced that Myers was not enabling a Communist takeover of Greece. When he reached Cairo he told the Ambassador this.9 The Ambassador was furious and spent several days trying to persuade David to change his mind. In the middle of this, David heard that Gee had been killed.

  David gave up battling his boss. Anthony Eden ordered him to come back to England immediately three days ahead of Myers, in order to report on what he had seen. David saw both Eden and Churchill. But, deeply upset by his brother’s death, he ended up in an argument with Churchill ‘about the Greek monarchy’.10 By the time he returned to Cairo he was still reeling. Perhaps in the absence of a mother’s love, he and Gee had been so close that they had almost been twins and now this other half of him was missing. And missing while doing a proper, fighting, job in the war. David’s new job in Cairo was a desk job in the Embassy. He felt he wasn’t doing anything useful, anything that counted.11 Like Idina, he began to waste. But, instead of being ‘not very brave any more’ he started making love to one of the secretaries in the Embassy. And then he asked the Ambassador to send him back into Greece.

  Eventually the Ambassador agreed. David was elated. And his misery over Gee’s death swung into ebullience. Lynx saw him just before he left, reporting to Idina that he was in high spirits. But it was a reckless, dangerous high.

  This time David went in by sea, from Italy. He spent the first two weeks of August observing guerrilla operations. On 14 and 15 August he sat down and wrote his report. On the 16th the group of guerrillas he was with planned an attack for the next day on a German garrison at the town of Menina. It was David’s first chance to pick up a gun and fight in this war. He loved the Greeks with whom he was as they both loved and appreciated him. And David, said his wife, was fearless. Just like Idina.

  On 17 August the Greeks broke into Menina, where, just inside the town, they met a heavy line of German resistance fighting ‘from fortified houses.’12 Rifle in hand, David walked towards the centre of the town. A machine gun opened fire from one of the houses. The bullet went straight through his neck.13

  The message was brought up to Clouds from the telegraph station at Gilgil. Telegrams in wartime rarely bring other than devastating news. It was almost exactly a year to the day since Gee had died. When she read the message inside, Idina collapsed.14

  For several days, high up on her mountainside, Idina felt as though she, too, must surely die from grief.15 It took a week for her to find the emotional and physical strength to scribble a short note to the pregnant woman she had met in a bank in Cairo two and a half years earlier.

  She sat at her desk at the far end of her cedar-panelled bedroom, under a window looking out across her manicured lawns and hedges, framed by the dust of the Rift Valley beyond. She took a piece of transparent airmail paper, almost as fragile as she now was, and finally picked up a pencil. This time, her violin-stroke script was so light that it was barely visible:

  Clouds

  Sept 13th

  Dearest Pru,

  There is so little I can say for what are words when one has lost

  all one loves – thank God you have the children – I have been completely shattered since I got Buck’s cable last week – I couldn’t write to you before – I am afraid I am not very brave any more & this on top of G, has nearly killed me. But I do want you to know how my whole heart goes out to you – you are young and you must have planned so much together for the future & I know how he adored you & how little happiness you had together – always a turbulent unsettled life – so little peace & home happiness.

  I can write no more for I am crying with you – anything you can write me about him do please – your children look so lovely.

  Bless you and your children are in heart broken heart [sic]

  Idina

  Pru wrote back to Idina. She sent her a photograph of herself and Idina’s tiny granddaughters, now two and three. She passed on what details she had of David’s death and that he had been buried in the Greek village of Paramythia. She told Idina that Anthony Eden himself had written an obituary for David in The Times, saying that ‘he was destined to be one of the leaders of his generation. Had he lived to take up that political career upon which he had set his heart, no position would have been beyond his reach.’16 She enclosed a copy of the full text, and of the other tributes in the press. The Greeks had declared him the ‘modern Byron’,17 saying that ‘a new name has been added to the pages of Greek history’ and he ‘died like a hero at Menina, falling in action like a true Greek.’18 On his tombstone the guerrillas had carved: ‘The soil of Greece is proud to offer hospitality to this hero.’

  To Pru, however, his death felt less than heroic.19 David had recklessly walked straight into the line of fire. It felt even less heroic when the British Embassy at which he had been working returned all his papers, including a love letter and photograph from his mistress with ‘From a sleek domestic pussy’ written on the back.

  And then Barbie asked Pru to move out of the gardener’s cottage. She needed it, she said, to lend to Pamela Churchill, Winston’s daughter-in-law, who wanted somewhere for her baby son, also Winston, to live far from the bombs falling on London.

  In Kenya, Idina absorbed herself in her lost sons. She ordered a copy of a new novel, The Sea Eagle,20 about a man fighting with the Greek guerrillas, and curled up and read every word of what David’s last days might have been like. And she began to fall apart again. The brief rally which had enabled her to write to Pru subsided and a latent frailty took hold. She lost the ability to eat or sleep properly; the day’s tasks appeared insurmountable; and she retreated behind a veil of tears.21

  Then, in February 1945, the physical pain began: knife-sharp electric shocks running down her arms, her legs, up her neck.22 She could barely move. She could barely not move. Real life ceased. The only way to sleep could be found at the bottom of a bottle, and then another.

  Phyllis called a doctor. He came. Idina had had a nervous breakdown. Her system had collapsed to the extent
that she had developed neuritis. He blamed her inability to recover on the fact that, since Gee’s death, she had not descended from the high altitude of Clouds and her body was no longer able to cope with prolonged periods at eight thousand feet.23 If she wished to live she would have to leave her home and go down to sea level.

  Idina started to pack. Her mountainside life had come to an end. She could visit Clouds, but it could no longer be her main home.

  Then, shortly before she left, Idina received another letter from Pru. It contained more photographs of Pru with David’s two daughters, some newspaper clippings from his death (including Eden’s obituary), a copy of his memorial service sheet. And Pru’s new address.

  Idina wrote back immediately:

  Clouds

  February 27th

  [1945]

  Pru dear –

  Your very wonderful letter and enclosures came yesterday – thank you so so much – I still think you are grandly brave & everything that David would want you to be but I know how unutterably lonely you must be in your heart.

  I, too, would love to know you talk to you & hear so much from you. I wonder so what David would have felt about the situation in Greece – it is so hard to understand it from here – one just feels the ghastly futile & tragic waste of it all. Have you read ‘Sea Eagle’ I thought it marvellous – one feels so terribly for those unflinching guerrillas.

  I often look at the photograph of you and the children & I long to see them. I am so glad Laura liked Dinan – it is now over 6 yrs since I last saw her – it’s hard to imagine her grown up. Do you see much of Elizabeth? What a terrible time she has had.

  I do think Anthony’s appreciation of David is lovely to have & I am so glad you have some of his diary – it must have been enthralling. You are right, he did go off gaily – Lynx saw him just before. Why is it in war the best are always taken – it seems to be inevitable, some cruel fate marks them down – as Anthony said a future leader that apart from all his sweetness that we knew. What an utter blank life must seem to you. Thank God you have the children.