Telling Tales

by Penny Perrick

  The forbidding Victorian building was softened by an Italianate Renaissance cloister that linked the main house to a single-storey wing containing the library and billiard room, and was the original home of Sir John’s impressive Italian art collection. Anita did not mind the dark cold of the castle. She loved the lake, said to be the finest specimen pike lake in Ireland, the ancient woods and terraces flanked by giant lime trees. She loved the scrambled Leslie ancestry of soldiering (the family could trace this back to Attila the Hun) and bookishness. Dean Swift had been a visitor and had written in the castle’s guest book: ‘Glaslough with rows of books/Upon its shelves/Written by the Leslies/All about themselves.’ The castle was not just full of books but of letters and journals relating to generations of Leslies and, in the attics, clothes and jewellery and mementos of every kind. When Anita began to write about the lives of members of her interesting family, her research materials were all around her.

  There was a Bechstein in the drawing room, chosen for Leonie by the famous concert pianist and Polish prime minister, Ignacy Jan Paderewski, and a Della Robbia fireplace that Sir John had spotted as the fifteenth-century sacristy in Florence that housed it was being pulled down. When Jennie Churchill visited with her third, much younger, husband Colonel Montagu Porch, she and Leonie, excellent pianists, played duets, enchanting Anita and Jack. How dull London seemed after that. Great-aunt Jennie lived at 8 Westbourne Street and Anita passed her door on the way to her monotonous daily walk in Kensington Gardens but Miss Butler seldom allowed her to visit. No wonder that Jennie was regarded as a treat. Determined to always look on the bright side, she painted all the light bulbs in her house yellow, to reproduce sunlight. She and Leonie thought that mopiness was ill-mannered and in bad taste. ‘Smile dear, it costs nothing,’ Leonie would urge her sulky granddaughter.

  Desmond Leslie, Marjorie’s third child, was born by Caesarian section in London on 9 June 1921 to very muted celebrations. Only days beforehand, Henry Ide had died in Vermont without either of his daughters by his side, since Anne Cockran had come to England to be with Marjorie. And then on the day of Desmond’s birth, Jennie Churchill died suddenly, following complications after breaking her ankle. Marjorie took flight. With the new baby, a nanny and a personal maid, as well as Anita, she went to San Remo on the Italian Riviera, a spot chosen partly because the sun and sea air might cure the little girl’s asthma. Anita went to school at the local convent where she played with the nuns’ pet rabbits, picked up a few words of Italian and was prepared for her first Holy Communion in that language.

  Back in London, Marjorie discovered that her eight-year-old daughter was unable to read. It was Miss Butler’s fault. She had never conveyed to her pupil that letters represented sounds, so Anita just memorized the printed pages Miss Butler read aloud to her. In time, she knew Alice in Wonderland by heart and it was only when she was given the unfamiliar Alice Through the Looking Glass to read aloud that the game was up. It is hard to make excuses for Marjorie, a neglectful mother who saw her children as nuisances who cramped her style. ‘Why has God given me such children,’ she would complain when some naughtiness made her late for a dinner party.

  Shane’s time was taken up with the negotiations that led to the Anglo-Irish Treaty. He had no recognized status, unlike Winston Churchill, who was Secretary for the Colonies and an official delegate to the peace talks, and his role seemed mainly to persuade various interested parties of the benefits of Irish Home Rule. Lady Lavery, the beautiful wife of the artist Sir John Lavery, entertained the delegates at her house in Cromwell Place, opposite the Victoria and Albert Museum. At one of her dinner parties, Winston asked Michael Collins, President of the IRB and its Director of Intelligence, if he could make sure that Castle Leslie wasn’t burnt down as his favourite aunt lived there.

  Hazel Lavery was a femme fatale from central casting. During the treaty negotiations she was rumoured to have had affairs with both the charismatic and handsome Michael Collins and the Lord Chancellor, Lord Birkenhead. Her biographer, Sinéad McCoole, in Hazel: A Life of Lady Lavery 1880–1935, thinks that Shane wasn’t included in her long list of lovers, in spite of penning her love poems, sending her roses and, years later, writing: ‘She merely whistled to men and they obeyed as if it were a whip fashioned of her eyelashes.’

  Shane was becoming an important literary figure. During the First World War a Catholic schoolmaster, Monsignor Cyril Fay, who had taught F. Scott Fitzgerald, gave Shane the manuscript of This Side of Paradise, which Shane recommended to the publisher Scribner. When Fitzgerald’s first novel was published in 1920, he became instantly famous and so grateful to Shane that he dedicated his next novel to him, ‘in appreciation of much literary help and encouragement’. The book, published in 1922, was called The Beautiful and the Damned and Marjorie asked her husband which he thought he was. She was no longer sure.

  The aesthetic Irish nationalist was now intoxicated by the Jazz Age and attended wild parties with the actress Tallulah Bankhead who once, memorably, said: ‘I tell you cocaine isn’t habit-forming and I know because I’ve been taking it for years.’ Shane, an unlikely Casanova, retained the prejudices of Catholic Ireland, writing scathingly of James Joyce’s Ulysses in the Dublin Review (September 1922): ‘In this work the spiritually offensive and the physically unclean are united. We speak advisedly when we say that though no formal condemnation has been pronounced, the Inquisition can only require its destruction or, at least, its removal from Catholic houses.’

  Although, outwardly, Marjorie seemed like a typical product of the Roaring Twenties with her bobbed hair, short skirts that showed off her long legs, shaking cocktails or dancing at the Embassy Club, a favourite haunt of the Prince of Wales, she took an old-fashioned view of her husband’s behaviour, referring to his conquests as his ‘band of alley cats’. She thought of herself as an exciting woman. As a young girl she had gone on an official visit to China with her friend Alice Longworth and had been instructed in captivating sexual techniques at the court of the Dowager Empress. Marjorie is supposed to have passed on what she learned at the Chinese court to her friend Wallis Simpson, who had caught the eye of the Prince of Wales. Shane’s lack of attention was insufferable and, although Marjorie had converted to Catholicism, she began to think about divorce.

  Leonie was appalled. Her generation tolerated adultery if love affairs were conducted with tact, discretion and consideration but divorce was an upsetting experience for everyone, especially when the divorcing couple were parents. Shane and Marjorie were too absorbed in themselves to consider their children, leading to one of Marjorie’s characteristic flits. In 1925 she took the three children to Paris, where she attracted a rich American suitor, Major Logan. He longed to marry her but her Catholicism made her indecisive.

  It was an unhappy and unsettling time for Anita and Jack. Walks in the Parc Monçeau were even more disagreeable than in Kensington Gardens. Anita’s asthma got worse and she had three separate bouts of pneumonia, while Jack had painful recurrences of abscesses on his ear that required operations. Convalescence was pleasurable. Anita wrote later: ‘Jack and I decided we liked being ill. Once the pain ended we preferred being in bed to out of it … It was safer.’

  After some weeks, Shane appeared. He went down on one knee and offered his wife a bedraggled bunch of violets. The marriage was saved after a fashion and, within it, the children remained haphazardly parented.

  2

  An Education

  Henry James called his formal education ‘small, vague spasms of school’. Like Anita, he had unsettled parents who didn’t attach much importance to steady routines. Marjorie Leslie regarded schools as useful establishments, like kennels, where you could plonk your children when you wanted to travel (she loved travelling) and where you could remove them when you thought that their company might be amusing for a while. One of Anita’s obituarists calculated that Anita had been educated, or not, by fourteen governesses and at seven or eight schools. The most successful of t
he governesses followed the Parents’ National Education Union (pneu) syllabus, designed for home schooling, and Anita, after much frustrated sobbing, finally learned to connect letters with sounds.

  When she was in her early teens she was sent to the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Roehampton, outside London, the school notoriously described in Antonia White’s autobiographical novel Frost in May (1933) as ‘The Convent of the Five Wounds’. Antonia had been expelled from this house of horror when she was fourteen after the nuns had found her reading a novel. Books other than text books were prohibited. In an undated letter to her father, Anita thanks him for sending her two books, The Vicar of Wakefield and Hangman’s House:

  But, incredible as it may sound, they (Mother Ward) would not let me read either of them. I protested and showed her your letter … but the old bug said that it was not a book for school. She was much shocked at [sic] Oliver Goldsmith and murmured ‘Well of course if your father likes to let you read such books out of school.’ Did you ever hear such bunk?

  Resourcefully, Anita wrapped the books in a towel and hid them up the chimney. Another pupil at the convent during Anita’s time was Vivien Leigh and Anita later wondered whether the tuberculosis with which the actress was diagnosed soon after making Gone With the Wind in 1939 was due to the damp, cold, starvation rations and lack of exercise that made up convent life.

  In her memoir The Gilt and the Gingerbread (1981) Anita made light of the experience – ‘I began to wonder what sort of lunatic asylum I had fallen into’ – but her letters to Marjorie at the time were plaintive:

  Have a good time Mum and write to me a lot and don’t worry about my being so unhappy … the food is foul and occasionally gives even me violent indigestion but this week some mothers complained about it so that for a few days it was properly cooked … I don’t think three quarters of an hour a day out of doors is enough in the summer … I may be able to stand another term but I should much rather be with you where I could swim and work hard by myself.

  The suffering convent girl was always concerned about her mother’s happiness: ‘My Own Darlingest Mummy, I do hope you are having a good time. Getting up for lunch, spend the afternoon buying expensive clothes, go out to tea, rest till eight, dress for dinner go out and come home at 6.30 a.m laiden [sic] with flowers diamond necklaces ect [sic].’ A fairly accurate account of Marjorie’s life as she jaunted around Europe, seldom letting Anita know where she was or writing to her, except to complain about her own poor health. But Anita loved her and felt that, as far as her schooling was concerned, she and Marjorie were in it together and that the convent must be endured so that she was seen to be getting an education responsibly provided by her mother. She invented private endearments and nicknames for them both (‘Bambipoo’ and ‘Mousita’) and illustrated her letters with charming drawings of mice and veiled schoolgirls. This undated poem, with the original spelling, shows her adoration:

  O Mummy Darling

  You are soft as a starling

  And your sweet eyes

  Are just like the skys

  And your hair O your hair

  Could ever fine gold be so rare.

  And your feet O your feet

  Why to see them’s a treat

  But your hands so white

  Are a wonderfull sight

  O your lips so red

  What sweet things they have said.

  During her second term at the convent Anita worked hard and passed her Junior School Certificate. Marjorie, returning from a trip to Italy, paid her a visit and disapprovingly noticed the convent’s insanitary practices, although Anita didn’t tell her that the girls’ hair was shampooed only once, at the beginning of term, when their heads were fine-combed for nits. Soon after that visit Anita became ill, with a temperature of 101°f and was neglected in the sanatorium. She could bear it no longer: ‘O do bring me home, it’s awful here.’ A week later, an order arrived that she was to be sent home to the Leslies’ London residence, 12 Westbourne Terrace, Bayswater, in a taxi.

  Her next school, where she was dispatched in 1928, aged fifteen, was an improvement – ‘a boarding school which actually possessed a library!’ This was the brand new Westonbirt College, housed in the former home of a Victorian magnate, where there were welcoming rooms with brocade curtains and open fires, as many hot baths as you liked and no restrictions on reading and writing. ‘You’re a darling to have sent me,’ Anita wrote gratefully to Marjorie, who was probably unimpressed that the staff were university graduates; she had chosen the school because it had featured in a magazine article. But she may have been relieved that her daughter would not have to wear the same navy serge dress every day for every activity, as had been the case at the convent and that Anita’s friend Winifred (Pooh) Paget, who had been a day girl at the convent, was going to Westonbirt too.

  A school photograph of the Westonbirt intake in September 1928 shows lumpy-looking girls in grey suits and red ties, and teachers in academic robes with hair coiled around their ears in bluestocking fashion. I haven’t been able to identify Anita – the girls all look the same, squinting into the sun. She might have done well in this scholarly atmosphere had Marjorie, in need of a travelling companion, not taken her away after one term. One wonders what Anita’s teachers thought about a woman like Marjorie, who deposited her daughter at various schools ‘as if conferring a favour’ as Anita put it. Anita would have liked more time at Westonbirt but released from the classroom she was ‘now free to read and read and read’ and, true Leslie that she was, ‘to write and write and write’. The rare sightings of her razzle-dazzle parents, who were always somewhere else, turned her into an assiduous correspondent. Writing letters became a lifelong habit: she would often write six letters a day, repeating the same bits of gossip and news to friends and family, letters that were to prove useful when she began to write her memoirs. She was a haphazard diarist; telling herself about herself seemed like a waste of time, and experiences were for sharing. With little formal education, she had learnt to be observant: ‘I perceived people’s emotions and my memory became sharp,’ she wrote later. These were helpful attributes for the nascent biographer.

  Throughout her childhood and teenage years Anita’s letters to Marjorie made it clear where she most wanted to be. From a letter written from Glaslough on 23 January 1929, to ‘My Most Beloved Mummy’:

  Glaslough when I came to it at the age of ten was the heaven of all my twisted narrow little dreams – I adored it and when I was taken away to Paris or London I nursed a most savage and injurious idea against my surrounding [sic] in particular and civilisation in general.

  In the same letter she apologizes for being surly and sulky and, she suspects, a disappointment to Marjorie: ‘I was selfish, I admit but only as a starving man is selfish for Glaslough was my bread and I was ravenously hungry.’ She wrote that she had turned over a new leaf, spread her interests beyond the woods and lake, dogs and horses, practises the piano (‘nearly 3 hours today’) and reads the newspapers, although she rails against ‘the world of governesses, convention and schools that dragged my defiant body along the foul byways of men’.

  This letter, written when she was fifteen, is a more melodramatic version of those she wrote to her mother when she was much younger: ‘Please let me [stay at Glaslough]. It is so lovely and big and green here and the lake and boat and everything compered [sic] to dark little London.’ A similar letter to Shane, written miserably from Westbourne Terrace, tells him wistfully: ‘I do wish I was at Glaslough, I love it better than any other place.’ But she realized that she had to face up to the demands of the conventional world because the person she most admired insisted on it. This was Anita’s older cousin, Margaret Sheridan, the daughter of Leonie’s niece Clare, a woman so wild, and so neglectful a mother that one of her admirers, the writer Axel Munthe, later told Margaret: ‘The children – whenever I hear of Clare I say to myself: “The children, ach, the poor little children!”’ Another of Clare’s admirers, the great fi
nancier Bernard (Barney) Baruch, a scandalized witness to her escapades, said of Margaret: ‘I’d do anything for that poor kid.’ In 1976 Anita wrote an engrossing biography of Clare, an irresistible subject whose lovers included Charlie Chaplin, Lord Birkenhead, the Lord Chancellor and Lev Kamenev, Trotsky’s brother-in-law and a high-ranking Soviet functionary. Clare, a dauntless journalist and talented sculptor, was brought more spikily to black-hearted life in Margaret’s memoir Morning Glory (1961) written under her pen name, Mary Motley.

  Margaret, like Anita, had been dumped briefly and unhappily in a convent (‘the Kensington snakepit’) and then inadequately cared for in both Europe and America while her mother embarked on sensation-seeking exploits. Her escape from her rackety childhood had been in reading. From the time that Anita first met Margaret in 1923, Anita did her best to catch up. From Westonbirt she sent Shane a list of the books that she had read during the year. They included Clare’s memoir Nuda Veritas, an early version of the kiss-and-tell memoir, which had been published the previous year, 1927, and Shane’s more respectable Isle of Columbcille: A Pilgrimage and a Sketch (1910), published by the Catholic Truth Society of Ireland. She told him: ‘I do truly try to educate myself and it is so important to be well-read like Margaret.’

  While Anita was at Westonbirt, Margaret was in Algeria, where Clare had exotically chosen to live. The two girls wrote each other long letters: ‘Darling Margaret, Thank you so much for your last epistle of 23 pages’ begins one of Anita’s letters. The younger girl tried to persuade her cousin to become a Catholic: ‘Christ is essential. It is foolish and ungrateful after what he went through for us not to believe in him.’ They were two unhappy teenage souls. Anita to Margaret, from Glaslough: ‘À quoi vivre? you ask – the only answer is pour mourir. The climax of life is death.’ But she was at Glaslough, where she could never be unhappy for long: ‘O Margaret I am so happy here and it really is my home.’