We have just spent four horrible days at the Campbells. I never wanted to go, but was tricked into it. The other guests, Joan and Freddie Ayer. Vast unheated house like a boys preparatory school, a twin-bedded room with a two-barred fire giving out no heat. No privacy and Robin bursting in at all hours without knocking, bringing someone with him to inspect his dead father’s suits, a chest of silver and a cupboard full of shoes [. . .] Robin, who doesn’t like me, is all the time on the nag. To make conversation, knowing Joan to be interested in cooking, I say, ‘Do you ever use any cooking GADGETS?’ She gives me a cold stare and drawls, ‘Only a FORK.’ In order to rouse them, I suggest the inherited silver tea caddy (left by Robin’s father) would be pretty gilded; Joan does not approve of any metals being made to seem what they’re not. I think to myself that she should be made to take a course of cleaning silver solidly for a year [. . .] What is it? Conceit? Complacency? Just don’t feel I’ve got anything to say to anybody. Robin’s puritanism a drag. Seems to disapprove of all his friends’ wives; in fact he’s uncharitable about most women. Joan, though, is sacred (well-bred, intelligent, has a private income, is a generous provider of food and drink. Has the right friends . . .Maurice Bowra . . . Cyril . . . is also considered to be a beauty! And is too bluestocking to take an interest in CLOTHES!).19
Frances Partridge said that Barbara could be ‘aggressively silent’. In 1955, Barbara, who liked fat men, began an affair with George Weidenfeld, Cyril’s new publisher and also the publisher of Barbara’s first novel (which was dedicated to Cyril). Cyril was devastated and the affair became the talk of literary London. Joan wrote:
Weidenfeld has got cold feet & says he will not marry Baby so she has gone scuttling off to Tangiers to meet Cyril there. I’m sick to death of the whole thing but I do give her top marks for determination, not only for making Cyril thoroughly miserable & stopping him writing, talking & seeing his friends but also making him not enjoy anything & stopping other people enjoying anything too.
Eventually Cyril and Baby divorced, naming Weidenfeld as corespondent. She and Weidenfeld did marry, but that marriage did not last either and Barbara took other lovers; Connolly was named as corespondent when Weidenfeld and Baby divorced. (In 1966 Barbara became Derek Jackson’s sixth wife but the marriage only lasted a year.)
In the circles within which Paddy and Joan moved divorce and remarriage were commonplace. Divorced couples might resume perfectly amicable relationships afterwards. Homosexuality was also regarded as a perfectly acceptable way of life. In 1954 the trial and conviction of Peter Wildeblood, Michael Pitt-Rivers and Lord Montagu of Beaulieu for conspiracy to commit acts of gross indecency (the first use of the charge since the trials of Oscar Wilde) had become a cause célèbre, which attracted both sympathy and abuse, and a considerable amount of sanctimonious press coverage. Paddy published a letter in the Spectator* advocating homosexual toleration and hoping for a change in the law: ‘There are three prerequisites to most reforms: the maturing of public opinion, a sort of tribal guilty conscience and a courageous legislator.’20
While such liberal attitudes were taken as a given by Paddy and Joan, Paddy was also at heart a traditionalist and a romantic royalist. He adored pomp and circumstance, uniforms, titles and honours, together with all the weight of history they carried, as well as all the flummery and fancy dress that went with them – the more exotic and ludicrous the better. After the death of King George VI in February 1952, he wrote to Patrick Kinross from Gadencourt, where he had listened to the funeral ceremony on the World Service. As Baron Kinross and a member of the House of Lords, Patrick was entitled to attend the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II the following year.
I listened in most of yesterday to the Royal Funeral, and for someone like me who reacts to these things exactly like a scullery maid, it was almost too much – a knot in the throat for 6 hours on end. Bosuns’ pipes, cannon booming, the sound of horses’ hoofs, clink of bits, muffled drums and distant pibrochs . . . Phew! The mention of the emerald Henry V had worn at Agincourt glittering on the crown on the bier was a dangerous moment. You’ll have to be shaking the moths out of your ermine soon if, as I hope, you’re taking part in the Coronation. You really mustn’t miss it.21
Joan was much more sceptical. She wrote to Paddy:
The King’s death was taken in widely opposite ways by our friends – some in deepest mourning & behaving as though they had lost a relation & others, alas, with ribaldry. For me it doesn’t make the slightest difference materially to life here – it was only maddening that the whole time I was at [Dumbleton] the 3rd programme was stopped – what balls – & the scherzo was cut out of Vaughan Williams’ 4th symphony. I didn’t see any processions or even the lying in state, though if I’d known that (daughter of a lord!) I could have walked in at the side door & not have to wait in the queue I would certainly have gone. Annoying not having taken advantage of a rare privilege.22
Although strongly anti-communist, Paddy was not otherwise political and he probably never voted in his life. He and Joan had friends of all political persuasions, and of none, but of Paddy’s close British friends only George Jellicoe and the Duke of Devonshire were politically involved (both served as Conservative ministers, although Andrew Devonshire later joined the Social Democratic Party). People were always interesting, however. Paddy once wrote to Joan from Lismore, the castle the Devonshires owned in Ireland: ‘Sir O. Mosley arrived unannounced. He has an alarming, perhaps unconscious, perhaps would-be hypnotic, characteristic of suddenly lifting his upper eyelids so that a white rim appears over the pupil. Thank God, no politics [. . .] A v. quiet, charming manner and style; but curiously eerie. I’m glad to have seen him.’23
The social and political changes which affected the nation came – literally – close to home in other ways. Throughout the years of Paddy’s roaming in the late 1940s and the 1950s and her own travels for work or to see Paddy or visit friends, Dumbleton Hall had always remained very much part of Joan’s life. Yet if she had sought in it permanence or refuge she would have been disappointed. Indeed, as she must have known, its sale was already being discussed before the end of the war. In June 1945, Joan’s brother-in-law, Colonel Tim Casey, was in Schleswig in north Germany dealing with the German Air Force. He wrote to his wife Diana that ‘Yes Dumbleton should be sold, really hard as it may be for you. It belongs to a different age, not in the world we are going to be left. I fear most soldiers and airmen will vote Labour and I shouldn’t be surprised to see Labour in at all.’24
This opinion was widespread. In the same year, Evelyn Waugh published Brideshead Revisited, when it seemed to him, as he added in a later preface, ‘that the ancestral seats which were our chief national artistic achievement were doomed to decay and spoliation like the monasteries in the sixteenth century’. Although Dumbleton Hall was not exactly an ancestral seat – the Eyres Monsells had only lived in it for sixty years – it remained the heart of a family estate. Like Waugh – and many others – Casey imagined that an incoming socialist government would tax such houses out of existence: sentiment alone would not be sufficient to save it. During the Second World War country houses were at a premium, because they were found to be adaptable for so many other uses, but that brief period was at an end.
Graham had ended the war as a lieutenant colonel. In September 1943 he was mentioned in dispatches and had been recommended for an MBE for his services during the planning of Operation Torch. He had also been awarded the United States Medal of Freedom with Bronze Palm. Five years later he was still in the army, serving in intelligence with the British troops. He wrote to Alan Pryce-Jones, who had just been appointed editor of the Times Literary Supplement:
Vienna was drab and full of displaced persons and were it not for the music life would be unbearable. It is all ‘married families’ now and there is very little fun. I find as I get older I am less and less dependent on gaiety but I do like to see a pretty face from time to time.25
Alan and his wife Poppy never
went back to live in Austria. Poppy’s family failed to recover most of their property – the Fould-Springer lands and houses in the east were confiscated by the communists.
Graham was also involved with the repatriation of POWs to the Eastern Bloc – many to their deaths – which caused him lasting damage. The emotional ordeal brought about another nervous breakdown, from which he never fully recovered. When he at last returned to England in the late 1940s it was to take on his duties as the only son and the heir to the Dumbleton estate. His father – once universally regarded in the press as – ‘the best-looking and best-dressed man in Parliament’ – was a serial womanizer. By the end of the 1940s, his marriage was over, and he had moved out of the Hall. Joan wrote that she and Graham were there alone with their mother and it was very pleasant. In May 1950 a decree nisi was granted on the grounds of adultery, and after forty-six years of marriage, Bolton and Sybil divorced. Two months later, in July, Bolton remarried. His new wife, Essex Drury, a divorcee, was a granddaughter of Sir John French, who had been ennobled after the First World War as the first Earl of Ypres. Essex had been a contemporary of Diana at St James’s School in the 1920s – both Diana and Joan detested her. At Christmas, however, she always gave her husband’s grandchildren boxes of chocolates, so they appreciated her rather more. Bolton’s family regarded the divorce as a great scandal and they sided with Sybil. She, however, would never have a word said against him.
Straight after the divorce, Joan wrote to Paddy from Dumbleton: ‘Mummy went to Scotland after the case – it’s all rather difficult & I have such a violent reaction I find it hard to be kind & polite. Oh dear.’26 After years of trying to have as little to do with her family as possible, Joan now found herself taking on responsibilities. The next year she wrote again to Paddy, who was in Greece:
I had meant to set off about the end of this week but my poor mama has fallen down and cracked two bones in her back and so has to lie in bed without moving for three weeks. It’s all very difficult and a ghastly bore especially for her, but I must stay on for a week or two longer to be able to go and see her and not leave it all to Graham. It is really too depressing for him being there all alone at the weekend and having to sit with her. Oh dear, and I am longing to see you again and think of retsina, sun and flowers which I’m terrified of missing. Do, my darling, write at once and tell me where you are and if you are going on any journeys.27
While she became more protective towards her mother and sometimes referred to her in her letters as ‘Mummy’ instead of ‘the Viscountess’, she could still find her trying.
The V. is in a terrible state about servants etc. The cook’s husband has been badly burnt in a factory explosion, the chauffeur’s wife has gone mad, Spenser [sic] has got a septic leg after the removal of a 1914 bullet, the Spensers [sic] want to leave because the housemaids are black, & the housemaids want to leave because the Spensers [sic] tell them they are – Oh for the Greeks.28
When they were at Dumbleton Joan and Paddy stayed in bed until 11.30. The staff did not approve. Joan’s attempts at keeping up a relationship with her father remained difficult. He called to see her one evening while Betjeman happened to be visiting. When Bolton left they all fell about laughing. In January 1955, Paddy received a typed letter from Dumbleton. Typed, Joan said, because she found it quicker than writing.
TYPEWRITER? There is not much time. And do get all your reading done in Athens (if any) before I come as I don’t think I shall want to be there many days but you must promise to meet me as I couldn’t bear to be alone there. Do write soon and send it to 20 Chesham Place, SW1, as I shall be there until I go, with weekends here of course. I haven’t yet told my mother that I am coming back as she seems in a dreadful state about everything and we have lots of hysterical conversations about selling Dumbleton because no-one wants to be here etc . . . Mr V [Viscount Monsell] seems to be behaving even more shittishly than was predicted. Needless to say he is the only one not losing any money, but he also seems to be arranging things so that everyone else loses a great deal more than they need. He apparently has a kind of charmed effect on even the toughest lawyers and Graham seems the only one who can contradict him at all. G. says he’s quite mad and the lies and crookedness which he thinks he can get away with are unbelievable. ALL THIS IS STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL.29
However detached Joan felt from her family, and however little they seemed to share her interests, she was bound to them all the same. Paddy was so rarely in England, that the family must have seen very little of him, if at all, which can hardly have increased their confidence in Joan’s elusive lover. Paddy himself was not the most attentive of sons or brothers. He wrote regularly to his mother and his sister Vanessa but did not see much of them. Joan, despite her complaints, was more caring. ‘I am not going to [Dumbleton] this weekend as Mummy will be away; rather a waste of virtue but I am acquiring some more but getting off a whole lot of family,’ she wrote to Paddy at the beginning of 1956.
Lunch with Bridget (Diana’s second daughter) today & a film ‘Bel Ami’, rather good & Bridget enchanting; so pretty & gay & having a wonderful life with swarms of young men. Lunched with Patricia & Robert [Patricia’s eldest son] on Thursday & a morning with them at the Natural History Museum. Robert very intelligent, knowing everything about fossils. Far more interested by that than the circus we went to in the afternoon. Wednesday Graham & I took Sir B. to Brown’s for lunch & we went to Les Diaboliques after. Very good. Did you see it? Tomorrow lunch with Aunt Molly! Rather wonderful isn’t it? I’ve still got Anna to get through.*30
So, unable to be a mother, Joan could at the very least be a good aunt. In 1957, Joan’s younger sister, Patricia, died, leaving a husband, Peter Kenward,* and three young sons, and the following year Tim Casey died from a heart attack while out riding, and Diana was left a widow with a son and three daughters. Peter Kenward and Diana had rowed and did not speak to one another. Kenward, whose father had been a brewer, was a heavy drinker. He married again but his new wife showed little maternal feeling towards her newly acquired stepchildren. It was Joan who encouraged her young nephew Robert in his interest in natural history, an interest she shared, and fossils became a standard birthday or Christmas gift. They also went collecting – on a trip to the island in the middle of the lake at Dumbleton Hall, Joan distracted the swans by feeding them while Robert raided their nest. (He was only allowed to take one egg.) To Robert’s older cousin, Michael, Joan was always the wonderfully exotic younger aunt who periodically drifted in to stay with the family in Rutland. She dressed in a fashion not seen in the country and looked amazing, not at all like his mother, Diana, who he was more used to seeing feed the hens. All too soon Joan was gone again, but not before they had all received some beautiful little present.
Eventually it was agreed that the Hall should be sold, and in 1959 it was bought by the Post Office Fellowship of Remembrance which, as a memorial to the fellow workers who had died during the two world wars, provided holidays and convalescence for Post Office workers. Graham moved into the Mill House, which had formerly been occupied by the estate’s land agent. The house was to be shared as a country home with Joan and Paddy. Joan wrote:
As you see I have a new & glorious Olivetti. I thought that one between us might lead to trouble. Goodness how I want to come and join you in your castle when you get there. London seems more and more depressing for words. If it was only nice weather I could live in Mill House for ever, it’s going to be so nice and cosy. I am longing for you to see it though I’m afraid it may be pretty funny with Graham’s and my despair at decorating and the occasional obvious help of G’s smart London interior decorator. But I shall have to be here a bit longer as I think G would really give up altogether if left alone with MH, Dumbleton and the V and it would be too unkind. It has all been absolutely dreadful, the V getting desperately ill just in the middle of moving, refusing to give up, rushing up and downstairs sorting out 80 years of rubbish, saying there was nothing the matter and then being ca
rted off to Cheltenham Hospital. Ivy [Compton-Burnett] mixed with Chekhov. She is better at the moment and we are having a badly needed rest in London but I fear it may all begin very soon. Two more weekends at D then we shall have to picnic in the MH to get things sorted out. I think it will be a very good place to work if you want to be in England.31
After she left Dumbleton, Sybil moved to Weymouth Street in Marylebone, but died in hospital a few months later, on Christmas Day 1959. Graham and Joan were ‘oddly shattered’, Paddy told Annie Fleming, ‘mostly, I think, through feelings of filial duties left undone in the past; completely baselessly. If you didn’t see, do write two lines to Joan, as I overheard a conversation between them say-ing they wished they had always written to people in the past in like circumstances, because – against all their principles – it gives tremendous pleasure.’32
12
In Love with Greece
In 1949, the civil war in Greece came to an end. Although the country was far from healed, it could begin to recover. From 1950 onwards, Paddy and Joan spent as much time as possible travelling around the country; it was as if they felt drawn back – whether stated or not – by the urge to live there permanently. In 1951 they explored for the first time the Mani, the central of the three peninsulas which stretch down from the Peloponnese. They came upon Kardamyli – this little castellated village by the edge of the sea was unlike anything they had seen before. The upper village enclosed the remains of a Venetian castro built high above the dry river bed, and inside its walls there was an eighteenth-century church with a tall, steepled campanile and houses which looked like miniature castles built of golden stone with medieval-looking pepper-pot turrets. The whole village was a fusion of Byzantine, Venetian and Turkish styles. Great whitewashed amphorae for oil or wine stood at the doorways of the houses. At the water’s edge, among the fishermen’s homes, there were high rustling groves of calamus reed and fishing nets looped across the trees. Joan took photographs of the skeletons of boat hulls under construction, as well as of the men drinking in a bar. According to legend, Kardamyli was one of seven cities offered by Agamemnon to Achilles to induce him to rejoin the fight during the Trojan War. And it was here that Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, landed on his way to Sparta, to ask for the hand of Hermione, the daughter of King Menelaus.
Joan Page 21