Telling Tales

by Penny Perrick

  This book is dedicated to Anita Leslie’s children, Tarka King and Leonie Finn, and to her grandchildren, William and Olivia King and Jessica Ottaine, Heather Oriole and Cian Merlin Finn

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 Putting on a Show

  2 An Education

  3 The Devil’s Decade

  4 Married to the North Wind

  5 Things Fall Apart

  6 Enormous Changes at the Last Minute

  7 Sunburn Is So Unbecoming

  8 Laughter Among the Skulls

  9 A Cobweb of Affection

  10 The Woods Are Full of Germans

  11 The War Heroine

  12 The Unbearable Peace

  13 The Burden of the Day

  14 Charades at Castle Leslie

  15 ‘He Enchants My Every Moment’

  16 A Sea Change

  17 Complicated Chronicles

  18 They All Talk Amusingly

  19 Invented Lives

  20 Jolly Old Age I’m Having

  21 This Leslie Half-World

  22 The Low-Down on the High-Ups

  23 Deaths and Entrances

  24 No Chance of a Warm Light Room

  25 The War Revisited

  26 Specialists in Survival

  27 Back Where She Belonged

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Dramatis Personae

  Anita’s Houses

  A Note on the Author

  Index

  Plate

  ‘The lies we tell are part of the truth we live.’

  Michael Holroyd, Works on Paper (1998)

  ‘Do what you want to do and then pay the price.

  That is the only bargain which fate understands.’

  Frances, Countess Lloyd-George of Dwyfor, CBE

  Introduction

  Six months before she died, on 5 November 1985, Anita Leslie wrote to her daughter-in-law, Jane, asking for the loan of a khaki shirt. She wanted to pin on the sleeve the two decorations that she had won in the Second World War, the Desert Star and the Croix de Guerre, when the artist Theodore Ramos painted her portrait. ‘I was the only woman in the world to get both,’ Anita pointed out. On the battlefield with the French army as it slowly pushed the Germans back across the Rhine, she was probably the only woman, perhaps the only person, to keep her cousin Winston Churchill, the wartime prime minister, informed about what was happening on the ground: the behaviour of the retreating Germans, the thoughts of ordinary combatants. Her respectful but idiosyncratic letters obviously touched Winston’s heart. After the war he kept in close touch with his young cousin and assisted her in writing a biography of his American grandfather, Leonard Jerome, having previously vetoed Anita’s father, Shane Leslie, from writing the book.

  The portrait was never commissioned in the end, although an earlier one by Ramos exists, showing Anita looking old, ill and wispy-haired. The decorations have been mislaid. Anita Leslie is remembered not for her wartime heroism but as the author of larky biographies, many of them of members of her family, including her great-aunt Jennie Churchill, mother of Winston, known as ‘the Panther’ because of her smouldering dark eyes and, possibly, her predatory ways.

  Born in 1914, Anita led a haphazard life apart from her heroic war service. She may have suffered from akrasia, a mental condition that leads one to act against one’s better judgement. Her bewildering behaviour, bewildering even to herself, suggests a chronic disposition for taking the wrong road. She knew this. ‘Now I kick myself for having taken the wrong decision,’ she wrote after one mishap. And, during a fraught period in the Desert War: ‘I want to marry two men.’ Her editor once commentated: ‘Miss Leslie does get herself into the most fearful muddles.’

  Perilous dithering ran in the family. An associate of her younger brother Desmond described him as having ‘a foot in two clouds at once’. Anita was at her most akratic when she handed over to her brother Desmond Glaslough, the estate in County Monaghan that the Leslies had owned since 1665. She then spent years trying to get it back. The Leslies were Anglo-Irish, a tribe described by Declan Kiberd as ‘a hyphenated people, forever English in Ireland, forever Irish in England’. A confusing condition to be in.

  Anita was a hybrid of a hybrid class. Her father, Sir Shane Leslie, had, as a young man, renounced his inheritance to become both a Catholic and an Irish Nationalist in a betrayal of his family’s Ulster Protestant values. This could have been seen as an embarrassment but, as Elizabeth Bowen, that superb chronicler of the Anglo-Irish, has pointed out, this class had a gift for ‘not noticing’, a stance both arrogant and brave. Among the things it determinedly didn’t notice were those that R.F. Foster describes in a section called ‘Lost in the Big House’ in his book In Words Alone, as a combination of ‘loneliness, uncertainty … an implicitly threatening countryside, unknown natives, the threat of death’. Anita’s cousin Winston, not being Anglo-Irish, noticed. During the 1921 treaty negotiations that followed the Irish War of Independence, Winston, as Colonial Secretary, supposedly asked the Irish delegate Michael Collins to ensure that Castle Leslie in Glaslough wasn’t harmed, since it was the home of his favourite aunt, Leonie Leslie, Anita’s grandmother. It was left intact. On the whole, the Anglo-Irish were not persecuted as a class, merely enduring what Kiberd calls the ‘tragedy of irrelevance’ and subject to increasing taxation and loss of land while, as John Banville described it, holding on to a ‘languid but valiant mode of life at the Big House’.

  They didn’t quite know what to do with themselves. The essayist Hubert Butler wrote of the way that families like the Leslies floundered in the new Irish State: ‘Sometimes they seemed not to live in Ireland at all but in a little cocoon of their own making.’ ‘We have no code,’ Anita wrote in her diary, referring to the Leslies. She was visiting her mother’s family, the Ides of St Johnsbury, Vermont. The Ides were diligent, hard-working, influential in public life and emotionally stable. In Vermont, Anita realized that her mother Marjorie came from a milieu that ‘admired men for their individual achievement and where women were married for love and expected to be virtuous!!’ How different from the society into which Marjorie had married, ‘where inherited titles and wealth were adored, where poor men looked around for heiresses and it was “chic” to sleep with everyone on the right “snob” level.’ The Ides’ ‘sincerity, trueness, lack of sophistication allied to love of culture and instinct for training of the intellect’ made Anita feel ashamed of the pleasure-seeking Leslies who ‘lived in such different airs and morals – in many subjects we would have been Chinese to each other.’

  In 1937 when she was twenty-four, Anita made a catastrophic marriage, without deluding herself that it would bring her anything but misery. The exiled Colonel Paul Rodzianko was thirty years older than she was, dispossessed of his Ukrainian lands and considerable wealth by the Russian Revolution, whose leaders regarded aristocrats like Paul as ‘former people’. He was a brilliant horseman but such a hellish husband that, thirty years after their divorce, Anita could hardly bear to mention him in her memoirs. From the start of their marriage Anita wanted to get away from it but she was such a useful wife that Paul wouldn’t let her go. She ghosted his books – an autobiography and a manual on horsemanship, helped him train other people’s horses and inexpertly kept house for him in a mean little flat in west London. She claimed not to be able to make a cup of tea and her culinary skills didn’t improve. Decades later a luncheon guest at Castle Leslie was surprised when the meal cooked by Anita turned out to be only a half-cooked baked potato.

  Paul infected Anita with his vicious anti-Semitism. He blamed the Jews for the loss of everything he had once had and saw the downfall and murder of the Tsar and his family, whom Paul had served and
loved, as inspired by Jews. The word ‘Jew’ was synonymous with ‘communist’, equally loathsome to him. Anita, who sympathized with her dispossessed husband, even while wanting to leave him, was influenced by his attitude. Their shabby marriage was played out in the 1930s, W.H. Auden’s ‘low, dishonest decade’, that inter-war interlude ‘born of exhaustion’ according to the historian Tony Judt: fertile ground for racial prejudice and class warfare.

  It is hard to reconcile Anita’s courage, generosity and intelligence with her hatred of Jews. The American writer Adam Gopnik faced a similar problem with regard to a particular heroine of his, the nineteenth-century feminist food critic and anti-Semite Elizabeth Pennell. Gopnik came to the uneasy conclusion that ‘to demand that our ancestors be right about everything in advance is as mad as hoping that our descendants will think us right about everything in retrospect.’ In his book The Table Comes First he addresses the shade of Pennell: ‘Would you have seen a wiser way, with better company and a larger view?’ Anita too might have seen a wiser way in those circumstances. As it was, throughout the late 1930s, her opinion of Hitler veered between admiration and amusement: ‘We may go to Nuremberg as Hitler’s guests,’ she wrote to her friend Rose Burgh in 1938. ‘Rather fun to meet all the Nazis!’ And in April 1939: ‘I thought Hitler’s speech brilliant, sane and dignified, the best he has ever made.’

  We all see the world in our own time. Felix Frankfurter, the Austrian-born Jewish lawyer whom President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed to the Supreme Court the year before the war, said in 1945: ‘If the judgement of the time must be corrected by that of posterity, it is no less true that the judgement of posterity must be corrected by that of the time.’ Like many people, Anita hoped for peace at any price. Her uncle Norman Leslie had been killed in the Great War and her much-loved grandmother, Leonie, had never recovered from the death of her favourite son, keeping his room at Castle Leslie exactly as he had left it.

  After the war, Anita admitted to having been ‘an idiotic debutante’ but not to her earlier anti-Semitism. In a memoir, she described a highly improbable scene from the 1930s, in which Leonie ‘shaking with emotion’ holds a newspaper clipping that shows a man stripped to his underwear, to which a large yellow star was pinned. Anita’s letters, always more truthful than her published work, tell a different story. She wrote of Leonie joking with a customs official about sending Jews who had recently escaped to Ireland back to Germany ‘and let Hitler sort them out’. While Winston Churchill, Leonie’s favourite nephew, warned about the coming horrors of Nazi Germany, few members of his family, including Anita, took much notice of him. The war changed her attitude: Winston became her hero and the recipient of lively and informative letters about life on the frontline as Anita, now an ambulance driver in the French army, drove through a ruined France towards the Rhine.

  Not that Anita became particularly philo-Semitic. She regarded Jews, along with intellectuals and the professional classes, as ‘clever’ – not a compliment. Perhaps because of her scanty schooling, people who led swottish indoor lives and failed to be amusing rattled her. The writer Logan Pearsall Smith maintained that: ‘Quality folk are seldom at their ease with intellectuals, among whom they make a great deal of mischief.’ Anita didn’t make mischief; she just chose to live among the descendants of those members of the aristocracy who were the subjects of her biographies, a choice that intellectuals such as the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper would have deplored. In his wartime journals, he wrote: ‘When I … observe the lack of education and values amongst most of them [aristocrats], and their dreary pleasures, the sickening triviality of their lives, I despise them.’ They may have been empty-headed but they were amusing, a word that Anita held dear, and shared her love of horses, hunting and the countryside, as, incidentally, did Trevor-Roper.

  Writing was what the Leslies did. Dean Swift, a visitor at Castle Leslie, noted the Leslie-authored books on the shelves, ‘all about themselves’. Diaries, memoirs, essays and, long after the dean’s visit, Shane’s novels and poetry, which were all rather self-centred, even when he was writing about other people. Anita, not a self-confident woman by any means, never doubted that she could write. Living briefly in Paris, after a predictably unsuccessful debutante Season, and getting to know some elderly sculptors who had worked with Rodin, she produced a biography of the artist which, with bad timing, was published just as war was declared. By then the success or otherwise of her first book didn’t matter. The war was an opportunity to leave Paul. She joined the Mechanised Transport Corps (mtc), a snobbish but efficient service that attracted upper-class young women, whose beautifully tailored uniforms were designed by the couturier Hardy Amies. As she sailed from Glasgow to Cape Town on board the Union Castle, Anita wrote to Rose Burgh: ‘Only I could invent this way of running away from a husband.’

  The husband wasn’t mentioned in her wartime memoirs. ‘How lucky I was to be husbandless, childless, unloving, unloved,’ she wrote untruthfully. The running away from Paul was a mixed success and he followed her to various postings: South Africa, the Middle East and Italy, to be finally shaken off when Anita joined the French army in 1944. It is in Anita’s letters that we learn of Paul’s pursuit, the lovers who relieved the boredom of hanging around waiting for the next battle to start by courting her while a suspicious and vengeful husband hovered nearby. It was like an ooh-la-la French farce with Russian overtones.

  Anita’s real war, the one that gave her the reputation of ‘une anglaise formidable’, began when she landed with the French forces at Marseilles in August 1944. As a front-line ambulance driver in the 1st French Armoured Division, she played a vital part in the liberation of France. The French were unique in allowing female ambulance drivers on the front line. Had Anita stayed in the mtc, now incorporated into the ats (Auxiliary Territorial Service), she would have been stuck in Alexandria. Anita wrote in Train to Nowhere: ‘Whatever the achievements of the ats, the tendency of male authorities was always to scoff, and keep first-rate women subordinate to second-rate men.’ The second-rate men withdrew the iconic ‘Blonde Bombshell’ recruitment poster for the ats, designed by Abram Games, as being too glamorous.

  They did things differently in France. Train to Nowhere is dedicated to Jeanne de L’Espée, Anita’s commanding officer. Jeanne’s first command to Anita was: ‘Whatever happens, remember to use lipstick because it cheers the wounded.’ Amid the sound of shellfire and kitted out in American soldiers’ outfits, including ‘comic underwear’, eating tinned beans off tin plates, the ambulancières listened to Jeanne, who had run the salon of the couturier Jean Patou before the war, lecture on the perfect wardrobe: ‘[A] well-cut black tailleur will get you from breakfast to midnight and the hat is of great importance.’

  Anita gave Winston her opinion of the Germans: ‘Pleasant kindly people, they are so tolerant they’ll let children be tortured if someone in authority says so.’ When the war was won at last, she lunched with Winston at Potsdam in July before rejoining her unit in Moselle where in ‘ironed shirts, polished boots and our best white gloves’ Anita and three other ambulancières were presented with the Croix de Guerre. In September, demobilized and trying to find unobtainable knitting wool for the baby a French officer’s wife was expecting, she applied for ‘the discarded fighting lines’ from Winston’s map room. It arrived in the form of ‘pink wool of best Churchillian quality … I reflected happily that little pink pants need never grow obsolete’. Train to Nowhere ends on this hopeful note.

  A German wartime joke: ‘Better enjoy the war – the peace will be terrible.’ Anita certainly found it so. In 1948, a war heroine with a leftover life to kill, disconsolately trying to breed greyhounds at Castle Leslie, she wrote to Rose:

  It’s the mental depression that gets me down now … the utter futility and nerviness of everything … I know that I long for the feeling of life and comradeship that I had during the war and have now lost … that I am terribly tired and the last three years have been exhausting disillusion so
that I don’t even know what to grasp at any more … And that I who used to have something to give others now have nothing.

  The letter ends: ‘I am so sorry to go on being in such a bad state like a lead weight to my friends … I just got all broke up and am bad at mending.’

  She had been betrayed by one wartime lover, which led to half-hearted suicide attempts, airily dismissed as ‘the sulks’, lived unhappily with a second, by whom she became pregnant and then, the fates finally smiling on her, married the ideal husband, Commander Bill King, another old admirer. An odd household was set up at Oranmore Castle on the west coast of Ireland, where Anita, Bill and Peter Wilson, the father of Anita’s son Tarka, attempted to farm beside the wild Atlantic shore. When it became clear that Anita’s brother Jack, who had spent most of the war in a German prison camp, was not able or willing to run Glaslough, the estate was offered to Anita and Bill. The reasons for them relinquishing the estate a few years later are confused and confusing. Having handed it over to Desmond, Anita spent years buying back the farmland, almost acre by acre, so that Tarka could inherit it. Most of the money she made from her books was spent on Glaslough’s fields and meadows.

  Anthony Powell in At Lady Molly’s ascribed to the fictional Lady Warminster biographies that delighted readers because of ‘their engaging impetuosity of style and complete lack of pretension to any serious scholarship’. He might have been describing Anita’s biographies. So might Michael Holroyd when he described another biographer, Hesketh Pearson: ‘He often wrote as if he had to catch the next post.’ What makes Anita’s rather breathless books so readable is her knack of putting her subjects, from the sexpot Jennie Churchill to the gruesome Marie Tussaud, convincingly in the world about them. Like Theodor Adorno, she recognized: ‘Even the biographical individual is a social category.’ Mme Tussaud’s biography was commissioned by the Tussaud company and Anita wrote it only for the money. She thought Marie ‘a dismal little bore obsessed with waxworks’ and never again wrote about a person she disliked. Her books sold well and led to overseas book tours and appearances by their author, now described admiringly as ‘a racy old girl’, at literary lunches.