Am going to the Coast to recover from a slight nervous break down followed by neuritis & the Dr says I must get down to sea level – 8000 feet for 2 yrs is too long.
Bless you Pru – I often think of you & wish I could help but no one can only Time can soften the pain.
My love to you & my grandchildren –
Idina
Idina moved down to the coast, into a bungalow near Mombasa, where she started to plant a tropical garden. But she never fully recovered. Nor did she ever meet either David’s daughters or Gee’s wife. When the war ended, with neither Gee nor any children to live for, Elizabeth committed suicide. Pru, alone and having fallen out with Barbie, took David’s two little girls back to live in Greece. Eventually she returned to England and married a Welsh squire, moving straight to his tumbledown castle and rambling estate in the hills near Hay-on-Wye, and far from Idina’s orbit.
Dinan had spent her wartime teenage years continuing to live with Avie, have her lessons with Zellée, ride her ponies around and spend her holidays with her cousins, Buck’s children. Idina had sent her regular letters packed with photographs of Clouds, each with an inscription on the back, but by the end of the war Idina hadn’t seen her daughter for so long that it was, as she had written, ‘hard to imagine her grown up’.24 Yet, grown up she had, and in 1946, before Idina had managed to return to see her, the now twenty-year-old Dinan was engaged to be married.
Her fiancé was a twenty-seven-year-old called Iain Moncreiffe, who was, like her father Joss, a Scot. Iain had been a captain in the Scots Guards during the war. Since being decommissioned, also like Dinan’s father, he had spent six months as the private secretary to a British Ambassador. Iain had gone to Moscow. After half a year in the Soviet Union he had decided not to pursue a career in the diplomatic corps. When he had returned to Britain he had met Dinan.
Avie was organising the wedding and among the guests invited were the Queen25 and the two young princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret. The Queen was one of Avie’s great girlfriends. This enabled Avie and her second husband, Frank Spicer, to circumvent the official ban upon divorcees entering the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. On an agreed day of the Royal Ascot race meeting, Avie and Frank would hover by the entrance through which the Royal Party passed in their carriages. The Queen kept an eye out for her and, when she saw Avie, invited her into the Royal Box itself, where the ban did not apply. The Queen’s presence at Dinan’s wedding was, however, achieving precisely the opposite for Idina. There was no question of her being able to attend, for neither the Queen nor either of the princesses could be introduced to a woman four times divorced.
And, by the time Dinan married, it was five times divorced. Idina’s marriages did not wear war and long absences from husbands well.
But the presence of the Royal Family may have been more of an excuse than a reason not to invite Idina. Dinan had by now not seen her mother for eight years. She had last said goodbye to Idina as a twelve-year-old girl. Now she was a twenty-year-old woman – and the Countess of Erroll in her own right – engaged to be married. Idina had been absent for the entirety of her daughter’s growing up. Dinan’s mother figure had instead been Avie. Moreover, Dinan’s teenage years had been spent under the shadow of Joss’s murder and both of her parents’ misbehaviour, to the extent that there were still widely held doubts as to who her real father was. It was hardly surprising that she wanted little more to do with Idina.
Sadly, Idina soon came to understand the situation. Now that Dinan had married, she no longer received the income from her daughter’s share of Muriel’s trust. Nor, as she was no longer able to run the farm at Clouds herself, was she earning much money. She could therefore afford to travel back to England only once every couple of years. Nonetheless, when, in the spring of 1948, Dinan gave birth to a baby boy, Merlin, Idina leapt upon a boat back to Europe. This grandchild she was clearly determined to see. She reached England in May that year and, with no invitation from Dinan beckoning, Idina went to stay with Buck at Fisher’s Gate.
She arrived at her brother’s house with her new escort, a tattooed former sailor called James, or Jimmy, Bird, who managed her farm in Kenya. Almost exactly as Nancy Mitford described the Bolter as doing,26 Idina introduced Jimmy and explained to a bemused Buck that he would be very happy staying while Idina went to see her friends in houses to which it might be a little difficult to take him along. She then sashayed into the drawing room, where she kicked off her shoes, curled up in a chair and asked for ‘a little ginnies’.27 And another. Despite the attentions of a succession of young men as well as Jimmy, Idina had not had a good time since the war. By now that ‘slight nervous breakdown’ had grown into cancer of the womb. It took more than just one little ginnies to numb the pain.
But it was not a good moment to engineer some great reunion. Dinan was living at the other end of Britain, in Edinburgh, where she was still recovering from her child’s birth. And, several weeks later, having visited a number of her friends (leaving Jimmy behind with her brother at Fisher’s Gate each time), Idina returned to Kenya feeling deeply rejected.28
Once she had landed at Mombasa, Idina went all the way up into the hills, back to Clouds. When she arrived she asked her neighbours to come to lunch. They brought a friend with them who remembers Idina showing her around. Idina stopped by a large photograph of a young woman.
‘That’s my darling daughter,’ said Idina, ‘but she doesn’t speak to me, she doesn’t approve of me.’29
The war had taken both Idina’s sons. Now she seemed to have lost her daughter too.
Two years later, in 1950, when she could next afford to travel to England, Idina tried again to see Dinan. She took the boat back and sauntered up to Buck’s door on Jimmy’s arm. This time, however, Buck had a plan. He knew that Dinan’s husband, Iain Moncreiffe, yearned to become a writer. He therefore tempted both him and Dinan down to his house in Sussex with the promise of lunch with his and Idina’s cousin, the writer Vita Sackville-West, and her husband, author Harold Nicolson.
Dinan and Iain arrived with the now two-year-old Merlin towards the beginning of August. It was twelve years since Idina had said goodbye to a twelve-year-old Dinan before the war. This was almost as long as the decade and a half that Idina had had to bridge with David. Idina and her daughter now stood looking at each other. Both were petite, with the same eyes and hair, but Dinan, with softer, more rounded features than her mother, was as retiring as the far more glamorous bottle-blonde Idina was bold. But, at last face to face, Idina managed to win her daughter round.
Notwithstanding Dinan’s reservations beforehand, from the letters that followed it appears that the reunion was dramatic: ‘What a success my little Dinan is,’ Idina wrote lying in bed30 at Fisher’s Gate on the morning of 12 August, ‘and her Mummie loves her so much, with all her heart and she mustn’t go out of my life again.’
By the time the two of them parted, not only had a whole host of plans been laid but they had even slipped into a startlingly usual mother and daughter correspondence over whom Dinan should remember to write to: ‘I went to see poor Row31 yesterday . . . a letter and a snap of Merlin she would love . . . Buck and I are going again this morning,’32 wrote Idina. James Dunn, who, thirty-five years earlier, had commissioned William Orpen to paint Idina, had also offered the portrait to Dinan: ‘of course I will write to him & very plain that you should do so too . . . and send him one of your most glamorous photographs’.33
Idina had, of course, declared her grandson, Merlin, ‘outstanding’ and far more ‘attractive’ than his cousins, and had taken the ‘granny’ name of ‘Frou Frou’: ‘we are trying to make it my name for the family – do you like the idea darling?’34 Dinan had also suggested another name for her mother. When Idina had announced that she was considering marrying Jimmy next, an inevitably horrified Dinan had asked her not to. Instead of taking a sixth husband, why didn’t Idina simply return to her maiden name of Sackville, and keep it?35 Idina agreed, and mother and daugh
ter appear to have exchanged promises. For Dinan was pregnant with her second child and Idina asked her, if the child were a boy, to give him Euan’s name.36
Finally, despite the impending arrival of Dinan and Iain’s second child, great plans were laid for the couple to go out to Kenya the following year for Idina to take them on safari: ‘I have been thinking so much of you two coming out here next year and I will keep on saving a bit . . . & you do the same & between us we should be able to manage it.’37 Idina had even worked out how Merlin and the baby could be looked after while Dinan was in Africa: ‘the children to Fisher’s and Spye [Avie’s house]. Bless you my angel,’ the letter finished, ‘loads of love to you all and a hug to Merlin, yr devoted Mummie.’38
Three days later Idina wrote again. She had found a photograph of herself in 1922,39 looking just as Dinan did now: ‘I can see it – just as you looked that fair evening sitting on the groundsheet at the Homes.’40 She and Buck had also visited Vita and Harold: ‘both terribly sweet and pleased – Harold likes Iain a lot . . . I am sure Harold would do anything to help and advise if Iain should ever want to consult with him . . . How I wish you were here darling – I do miss you.’41
Idina’s final letter to Dinan before she left for Africa was another three days after that. She had now come up to stay at Buck’s London flat before heading off, with Jimmy and a new car she had bought, back to Kenya: ‘My darling Angel, This is just to say au revoir until you come to me. I can’t bear goodbyes even on the telephone . . . Bless you my darling darling my devoted love to you all yr loving Mummie.’42
But even after sending this, Idina telephoned her daughter. As she wrote a week later, from on board the SS Leicester, docked at Port Said in Egypt, she had called because she ‘wanted to tell you, if you are worried & if it should be of any comfort to you, I will try to come back to you in February.’43 Idina was doing everything she could to be a good mother: February was when Dinan’s next baby was due.
Idina returned to Kenya under the name of Sackville and a vow not to marry again. Jimmy nonetheless stayed with her, becoming known in Kenya as James VI. In reality he tolerated Idina’s still-wandering sexual appetite and pursued his own with the same sex.44 It was a non-marriage of convenience. ‘Drunk,’ said one young woman who knew Idina then, ‘she would frequently end up in bed with my father.’45
Idina did not return to England in February for the birth of Dinan’s son. Nonetheless, when Dinan gave birth to a boy, she kept her promise to her mother. She chose her own name, Peregrine, for his first, and then gave him both of Euan’s names: Peregrine David Euan.46
Idina instead saved her money for a ticket to Kenya for Dinan: ‘I prefer to save up and help you come out’47 and prepared for her daughter’s safari later that year.
But in 1951, just when Idina had planned her daughter’s trip, a wave of violent killing broke out in Kenya. The first victims were ‘loyalist’ Kikuyu chieftains. A gang of Kikuyu extremists, who called themselves the Mau Mau, were going around the villages demanding that the headmen take oaths of violence and murder against the white settlers. Oathing was a traditional Kikuyu form of ceremony that took the place of legal contracts in Kikuyu society; and an oath-breaker was subject to magical retribution. However, not only were the Mau Mau’s oaths violent in form but their ceremonies consisted of a combination of both obscenity and bestiality. Those chieftains who did not agree were hacked to pieces with machetes. Dinan’s visit to Kenya was postponed.
The murders of white settlers began in the autumn of 1952. On 3 October a European woman was stabbed to death on a farm outside Nairobi and a State of Emergency was declared in Kenya. In January 1953 a farmer’s wife died as her unborn child was ripped from her womb. Two months later, on a single night, ninety-seven inhabitants of an African village were butchered or burnt to death. Between excursions the Mau Mau retreated to the Aberdares, where they proved impervious to military assault.
That autumn, as Kenya disintegrated around her, Idina’s cancer tightened its grip. In December she was told that she needed a hysterectomy. But the Mau Mau had brought any income from the farm at Clouds to a standstill and, even at Kenyan prices, the operation was expensive. Buck, however, came to the rescue and offered to pay. Idina was admitted to the Princess Elizabeth Hospital in Nairobi and operated on immediately.
‘My darling,’ she wrote to Dinan on 20 December,
I am progressing marvellously – record patient – but still feel very weak & tired so forgive this short scrawl to wish you a Happy Xmas & a lucky New Year – also to send you a miserable Xmas present – things are still such a muddle owing to Mau Mau I can’t do more at the moment [the Christmas present was clearly a cheque] but there are one or two schemes on foot [sic] which pray God will materialize. Heaven to think Buckie is coming out on the 28th. Bless you my darlings – how I long to see you again. Your devoted Mummie xxxx Frou Frou.
Buck arrived, and Idina rallied. The writer Errol Trzebinski was working as a student nurse on the ward in which Idina was a patient. ‘Her room,’ she remembers, ‘was filled with flowers, glamorous people visited her every day at all hours; merry laughter could be heard along the corridors. She was charming to care for and, of course, I had not the least clue that I was helping to fetch and carry as a probationer for a legend . . .’48 When Idina left the hospital she gave a case of champagne to the nursing staff. Trzebinski drank hers from a teacup: ‘And swore never to submit to that again . . . nor have I!’49
Idina moved back to her bungalow outside Mombasa with Jimmy Bird still by her side. Despite the hysterectomy, her cancer returned. ‘Poor Dina,’ wrote Elspeth Huxley’s mother, Nellie Grant, as it was ‘a desperate cancer for a long time’.50 A year after Idina left hospital, however, in January 1955, the Mau Mau emergency at last came to an end when the colonial government invited the insurgents to surrender without punishment. Over nine and a half thousand Kenyans had been murdered; of these not even a hundred were white. Each white death, however, had created a storm of publicity and within the small settler community everyone knew someone who had been killed. It was the beginning of the end of colonial rule.
For Idina, however, the end of the Mau Mau meant a chance to make another plan for Dinan to visit. But in January 1955, Dinan was pregnant with her third child. It would be born in July. The safari was therefore set for early the following year.
At the end of October Idina wrote to Dinan, giving her a list of clothes she and Iain would need to bring for the heat of the day and the cold of the night. But after a couple of pages her writing gave way to another hand. It was Jimmy’s – after five divorces it was the man whom she didn’t marry who stayed with her.
Jimmy finished the letter and its safari instructions. Idina lay back on her pillows, Euan still gazing at her from the photograph beside her bed. She could relax. She was now confident that her daughter would know exactly what to pack.
Five days later Idina died. She left a dozen silver-and-glass face cream and scent bottles, half as many hairbrushes and nail files, a silver glove stretcher, a cocktail dress, an evening gown and a large black taffeta bow.
Idina had never wanted to be an old woman. By dying at just sixty-two, she seems to have had her way. As Nancy Mitford puts it in The Pursuit of Love when the Bolter visits her daughter shortly after the birth of her first child, and when her wickedly behaved niece Linda has just died giving birth to hers:
‘The Bolter came to see me while I was still in the Oxford nursing home where my baby had been born and where Linda had died.
‘“Poor Linda,” she said, with feeling, “poor little thing. But, Fanny, don’t you think it is perhaps just as well? The lives of women like Linda and me are not so much fun when one begins to grow older.”’51
Buck flew down to Kenya to bury his sister. He designed a headstone: ‘In loving memory of a warm, generous and courageous person.’ It gives only the date of her death – no birthday to age her by, leaving her forever young.
He la
id her under the stone that she had raised for Gee.
Where she still is.
Four days after Idina’s death Vita Sackville-West placed the following obituary in The Times:
No more succinct or better epitaph could be given to Idina Sackville than the following lines from the Chinese poet Wu-ti, 157–87 B.C., translated by Arthur Waley:
The sound of her silk shirt has stopped.
On the marble pavement dust grows.
Her empty room is cold and still.
Fallen leaves are piled against the doors.
Longing for that lovely lady
How can I bring my aching heart to rest?
V.S-W.
CHAPTER 26
AS A CHILD, ALL I KNEW OF THIS FAMILY, APART FROM my mother and her sister – David’s two little daughters – was Barbie. And it does not take much for me to be ten years old again, and standing outside the front of a boarding school in Sussex. It is late on a Sunday morning and Chapel is over but I am still in my Sunday Chapel dress, in which my mother has instructed me by letter to remain. I am waiting for Claydon. Claydon is Barbie Granny’s driver. I have mixed feelings about this trip. On the one hand it will be a few hours’ relief from the misery of this school. I have just joined it from a London primary – and the rest of my new class has already been there three years and long since chosen their friends. On the other hand I have a lunch with Barbie Granny ahead. Claydon pulls up in a long, black car and steps out. He is tall and slim with large, rounded features and a warm smile. He nods his capped head towards me and opens the door. Forty-five minutes later we arrive at a square, pink house with green window frames.
The Bolter Page 26