Telling Tales

by Penny Perrick

  Bill had only a small naval pension and any money he made from farming was spent on buying and repairing the boats that he sailed single-handed around the world. After six perilous and exhausting years as a submarine commander he counteracted the stifling confines of submarines by sailing and skiing as often as he could. Anita would never admit that she was the one who kept the family afloat, in every sense of the word. Although she was the author of fourteen books, she presented herself as a lady dabbler, more involved with horses than literature and emulating the Edwardians, the subjects of many of her gauzy biographies, who ‘did not mix with the professional classes depicted in Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga’. With unwavering determination Anita kept on buying Glaslough farmland on Tarka’s behalf, entering into such complicated transactions that her son protested that he felt as though his feet were stuck in cement. To no avail: his mother’s method of dealing with dissent was to complain that ‘it makes my head spin’, or simply ‘not noticing’. As the Northern Irish Troubles escalated in the 1970s and farming on the Irish borders became a dangerous occupation, she continued not to notice. Apart from her blindness where Glaslough was concerned, she held views on Northern Ireland that were radical for their time, recognizing that economic and social inequality in the province were the sources of discontent. She held the British governments of Edward Heath and Harold Wilson to blame for making no attempt at healing the fractured society over the water. This was from a very traditional woman who basked in what Trevor-Roper called ‘the stifling, desiccating glow of boring royalty’, to the point of genuinely admiring the late Queen Mother’s plumed hats and tut-tutting when a television drama series showed Edwardian debutantes wearing the wrong kind of jewellery.

  ‘When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished,’ wrote the poet Czeslaw Milosz. But that’s only true if the writer strips the family bare. Anita cast a rosy glow over the generations of Leslies, Jeromes and Churchills about whom she wrote. Although she had the run of the Glaslough attics with their collections of intimate letters and diaries – ‘family twaddle’ – she was wary of revelation. You will not learn from her biographies or from the sly memoirs written in old age that there were doubts about Winston’s brother Jack’s parentage or that the father of another illustrious Leslie cousin, the sculptor Clare Sheridan, was probably King Milan of Serbia. The truth is to be found in the letters she wrote to Rose, the one person to whom she could be ‘as awful as I feel like’. She asked Rose to destroy her letters but they survived, to be given eventually by Rose’s daughter to Anita’s son. Reading them, I understood what Edmund de Waal meant when he wrote: ‘And I have the clammy feeling of biography, the sense of living on the edges of other people’s lives without their permission.’ I can see why James Joyce called biographers ‘biografiends’. The letters to Rose ended in the 1950s when Rose, having deserted her third husband and young daughter, descended into a haphazardly nomadic and druggy life. After that, although Anita wrote gossipy, interesting letters, sometimes ten a day, to many other people, she never again revealed her feelings so candidly in them.

  Nor did she talk about the war. Tarka was taken by surprise when, casting about for a career, his mother was able to introduce him to many influential figures in the Intelligence Services, whom she had known in the Middle East during the war, leading one to suspect that what Anita did in that spy-ridden area was rather more than producing an English-language newspaper for the troops. Her editor at Hutchinson, her longtime publisher, was equally astonished when, in 1983, she wrote a wartime memoir, A Story Half Told. He had not imagined that his ditsy, charming author, who had never quite got the hang of spelling and punctuation and whose life seemed bound up with repairing draughty castles and driving horses around Ireland, had tended wounded men on wintry French battlefields under sniper fire, as the snow around them became flecked with blood. By that time, Train to Nowhere had been long out of print and completely forgotten. People took Anita at face value: a witty, horsy lady who wrote a bit. Even after the well-received publication of the memoir, Anita played down her heroism. Being a professional heroine wasn’t her style.

  But a heroine was what she was. Geoffrey Wheatcroft reviewing Winston’s daughter Mary Soames’ memoir (A Daughter’s Tale, 2013) wrote: ‘Sentimentality about “the greatest generation” is a besetting temptation. But damn it all, they were wonderful, and we who came after have not lived up to them.’

  1

  Putting on a Show

  It was a very deceptive wedding day. The 35-year-old bride, described by her cousin, the sculptor Clare Sheridan, as looking ‘very jeune fille’, was three months pregnant by a man whom she wasn’t marrying that Wednesday, 12 January 1949. Her marriage certificate stated that she was a ‘spinster and gentlewoman’, which wasn’t quite the case: after many years of pleading for a divorce she had recently disengaged herself from a previous husband. And gentlewoman seemed too mild a term for a woman who had published two books and been awarded the Croix de Guerre for her wartime service. So, radiantly flying her false colours, Anne Theodosia Leslie, known as Anita, married Commander William (Bill) Donald Aelian King, dso and Bar, dsc, who was thirty-nine. The marriage was solemnized at the Catholic Chapel of Sisters of the Holy Ghost in the grounds of Anita’s family home, Castle Leslie, Glaslough, County Monaghan. After the ceremony, bride and groom joined hands over ‘that notable relic the Great Bell of Cappagh Abbey and in presence of Clan and County sworn troth accordingly’, as Anita’s father, Sir Shane Leslie, put it in a typewritten declaration. He also wrote a lyric to mark the occasion, to be sung to the ‘Londonderry Air’:

  An Irish winter brings a sight surprising –

  A slice of silver Spring has seemed to bide:

  Though Summer’s gold is gone, the flowers are rising

  To greet Anita Leslie as a bride.

  The old green lake is all a gentle glimmer,

  The forest firs have kept a bridal wreath:

  And though Demesne and fields are looking dimmer

  The buds of Spring are coming up beneath.

  So take each other now for worse or better

  And laugh at gains or losses in the game:

  Just take the sunny weather with the wetter

  For Irish rain and sunshine are the same.

  This was the wedding for which everyone at Castle Leslie, seat of the Leslies since 1665, had been waiting. Anita wrote to her best friend Rose Gardner:

  I’ll always be so glad I gave them [the estate workers] my wedding – the event of their lives! 40 or 50 old employees with gnarled hands and eyes shining with such sincere wishes for our happiness – the thrill for them of the conservatory full of flowers and downstairs cups of tea and cakes and pipers to dance to till midnight.

  One wonders whether the Irish Times report of the wedding struck a deliberately cryptic note when it reported: ‘Owing to the shortness of the notice over fifty guests were unable to come over from England, as well as many from America’ – ‘shortness of notice’ suggesting a shotgun wedding.

  Anita’s son, Tarka, was born in Dublin on 26 June of that year, although his birth remained a secret until August, the month in which Anita declared he was born. This meant that the baby had two birth certificates with different dates. ‘Cache ton jeu’ was a favourite admonition of Anita’s American-born grandmother, Leonie Leslie, née Jerome, and Anita was also steeped in the traditional wiliness of the Leslies, a family that could then be described as thriving on secrets and lies.

  Anita was born on 21 November 1914 at 10 Talbot Square in Bayswater, London, not far from Great Cumberland Place and a street known as Lower Jerome Terrace where Leonie and her two sisters, Jennie Churchill and Clara Frewen, Anita’s great-aunts, lived when in London. Anita’s parents were Shane and Marjorie, née Ide – ‘two more disparate beings could hardly be imagined,’ according to their daughter.

  On Anita’s birth certificate Shane’s profession is given as ‘journalist’. He was also a poet and, since the
Leslies were Protestant landlords, an unlikely Irish nationalist who had converted to Catholicism in 1908 at the age of twenty-three. For a time, Shane had considered entering the priesthood and, when his cousin Clare Frewen, later Sheridan, a beloved confidante since their teenage years, suggested that it was a restrictive thing to do, he told her: ‘I don’t want spiritual independence. I want intellectual anchorage.’ He eventually decided against the priesthood but changed his name from John Randolph to the more populist Shane and renounced ownership of the Leslie estates in favour of his younger brother Norman. The latter’s death in the First World War resulted in the sort of financial chaos that was to become familiar to future generations of Leslies, including Anita.

  The worldly Leslies, outwardly at least, accepted Shane’s conversion. Embracing Catholicism was something of a fad among idealistic and spiritually delicate young men under the influence of the famous convert John Henry Newman. Not all Protestant families were as tolerant. After Gerard Manley Hopkins’ conversion in 1866, his father wrote: ‘The blow is so deadly and so great that we have not yet recovered from the first shock of it.’ Marriage to the elegant American socialite Marjorie Ide on 12 June 1912 made Shane less austere. His younger brother Lionel noted: ’When I returned from India in 1927 I found that a very surprising metamorphosis had overtaken him [Shane] and instead of a moody introvert a talkative society loving extravert had emerged.’ Shane himself was rather apologetic about this personality change. In his book Long Shadows (1966), he lamented the death of many of his male friends in the First World War since it had meant that ‘Fate cast me in the arms and converse of women against my will.’

  Marjorie Ide was the pampered, high-spirited daughter of a self-made lawyer from Vermont, Henry Ide, who had become a judge in the Vermont Supreme Court, Justice of Samoa, Governor of the Philippines and, most enjoyably, the American Minister in Madrid. He was widowed young and brought up three little daughters. Marjorie was the youngest: golden-haired and leggy, it was said that she had turned down a hundred marriage proposals before Shane Leslie, who was lecturing for the Gaelic League and turned up at her sister Anne’s house, The Cedars, in Long Island. Anne was married to Bourke Cockran, the American politician who had schooled Shane’s cousin Winston Churchill in the art of oratory. The 27-year-old Irish poet seemed more interesting than those rejected suitors; for one thing, he went around in a kilt, the traditional Leslie one in saffron yellow, or in St Patrick’s Blue, either style probably a first for Long Island.

  He was tall and handsome, moody and witty. In 1907 he had visited Russia and had stayed with Leo Nicolaevitch Tolstoy, who had urged him to become a vegetarian and learn how to plough. Shane was also prone to nervous collapses, which, along with the kilt and the Catholicism, didn’t endear him to Henry Ide, who would have preferred Marjorie to marry someone less poetic and properly American.

  Shane and Marjorie might have settled in London contentedly enough – it offered a literary life for Shane, a shiny society one for Marjorie and the de rigeur pram rides in Hyde Park with a uniformed nurse for their first-born, Anita – had not the First World War dimmed all the lights for the Leslies, as it did for the whole of Europe.

  Captain Norman Leslie, owner of the family estates, was killed near Armentières in northern France only two months into the war. He had been the favourite son, conventional, good-natured, an excellent polo player and a captain in the Rifle Brigade. Shane set off for France to find his brother’s body, which lay between the guns of two armies. He had it encoffined and cut a lock of Norman’s hair for Leonie. Most unsuitably, since he was an appalling driver, Shane was put in charge of an ambulance, landing several wounded soldiers in ditches. After a short spell of rolling bandages Marjorie sailed back to America with Anita, a lady’s maid and a nanny, where she stayed with the Bourke Cockrans in Long Island and Washington or with her father in Vermont. Shane, having given up the ambulance, went to the Dardanelles with a mule transport unit, where he had a nervous breakdown. His position as a loyal British subject and a committed Irish nationalist can’t have been easy to reconcile and may have had something to do with his frequent nervous collapses. Recovering at a hospital in Malta, he wrote a mournful book of reminiscences, The End of a Chapter (published 1917), its theme ‘the suicide of the civilisation called Christian’. Since he was of little use in the war effort, Leonie decided to take him to America to join his wife and his daughter.

  There he turned out to be a convincing propagandist. He believed wholeheartedly that the war was just and England and her allies must win it, and that Ireland must be granted independence. In Washington he worked towards both aims, rightly feeling that there would be more chance of America entering the war on the Allied side if Irish-American disapproval of British policy in Ireland could be assuaged. He had excellent contacts on both sides: his cousin, Winston Churchill, who was First Lord of the Admiralty until his mismanagement of the Dardanelles offensive, his brother-in-law, Bourke Cockran, the British ambassador, Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, and John Redmond, the moderate leader of the Irish Nationalists. The Easter Rising of 1916 and the pitiless reprisals by the British caused Shane to despair but he was able to celebrate with Marjorie when America joined the war a year later.

  He didn’t spend much time with his family – Anita remembers seeing him only once during her early childhood – but a son, Jack, was born in New York in 1916. Jack’s Leslie grandparents decided that he should be their heir and bonfires were lit at Glaslough to celebrate his birth. As with so many Leslie decisions, this one turned out badly.

  Anita’s American childhood was privileged but unpleasant. Every afternoon she would be put into one of the eighty-two exquisite dresses bought for her by her childless aunt Anne and taken down to tea where she might meet Alice Longworth, the daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt. Her grandfather Henry Ide let her ride on his foot and she was much petted. But she began to suffer from severe asthma. Jack was another sickly child: like his parents, he came down with the Spanish flu, which killed millions just as the war was ending, and then got pneumonia and a mastoid on his ear that needed an operation. Winston Churchill inherited the robust Jerome constitution from his lustrous mother, Jennie, but the equally healthy Leonie, Jennie’s sister, doesn’t seem to have passed on this hardy genetic inheritance to Shane or his offspring, although the children’s fragility may also have been partly due to the stress of having Shane and Marjorie as parents.

  Shane’s grandfather Sir John Leslie, 1st Baronet of Glaslough since 1876, had died in 1916 and his widow, the bookish, dissatisfied Lady Constance, lived in London, so Leonie and her husband, another Sir John, were delighted when in the summer of 1919 Shane and Marjorie decided to move back to Ireland. Anita claimed that Shane didn’t come near his children during the voyage; like his own father, he found children boring. At Liverpool they were met by Leonie, who was horrified by Jack’s bandaged ears and the special mattress required for Anita’s wheeziness. A train from Liverpool to Belfast, a smaller one, ‘the train to nowhere’, as Anita later called it, for the sixty-mile journey to Glaslough was followed by arrival in darkness at Castle Leslie to be fussed over by servants and carried upstairs to bed.

  It was a strange time to be settling in Ireland, with the War of Independence raging, and many Protestant landlords fearing for their lives and the survival of their estates. The once-wealthy Leslies had unwisely invested their compensation money from the Wyndham Land Acts, which had transferred some of their land to their tenants, in Russian Railway Bonds and faced a problematic future. Yet there was a steely serenity about Jack and Leonie that allowed them to live peaceably with their Catholic tenants and with their fidgety son, the ardent nationalist. There is a story that in 1920, Sir John, quite deaf and short-sighted, inspected some armed troops in Glaslough village, thinking that they were loyalist Ulster Volunteers when they were in fact members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). That summer Marjorie took her seven-year-old daughter to the Donegal resort of Bundora
n for some sea air. Since the railway station was blown up while they were there, they had no means of getting away. Anita rather enjoyed the drama (‘the atmosphere of vague danger seemed delicious’) but Marjorie didn’t. After several jittery days, a local man was able to drive them to a shooting box that the Leslies owned in the village of Pettigo in County Donegal. To Marjorie’s surprise, she came across her father-in-law who, civil conflict notwithstanding, had come there for a spot of trout fishing. Soon afterwards the younger Leslies moved to London where Shane, by now an experienced negotiator, became involved in meetings which, the following year, resulted in the treaty that established the Irish Free State, of which more later. Anita hated London, its tamed, boring parks and the mindless routines inflicted by her governess Miss Butler, a bombazine-clad religious fanatic. She missed her grandparents and the wooded lakeside where wildlife and changing skies made every day an adventure. She determined to live in Ireland, although decades were to pass before she was able to do so.

  Not everyone who knows Castle Leslie falls in love with it. Shane certainly didn’t. His novel about the family seat, renamed Kelvey Hall but recognizably Castle Leslie because of its colony of rooks, woods and lake, was called Doomsland (1923) and dedicated to Marjorie. The Leslies had lived at Glaslough since 1665, when they bought the land with the £2000 given to the fighting bishop John Leslie by Charles ll. Their long tenure makes the Leslie motto ‘Grip Fast’ very appropriate. The castle in the Scottish baronial style was built in the 1870s for Anita’s great-grandfather, the Sir John Leslie who had the distinction of having a picture hung in the Royal Academy in the same year that he won the Military Grand Steeplechase. It stands on the site of an earlier building, incorporating part of it. Its dour and austere limestone façade surrounded by three miles of stone ‘famine walls’ was commented on by Shane: ‘No one who has seen Glaslough in Monaghan could believe it was merely the residence of Irish Squires.’