The German blitzkrieg on western Europe began on 10 May, when the Netherlands and Belgium fell to the Nazis. Anita didn’t seem particularly disturbed. She wrote to Rose: ‘Have just heard news of invasion of Holland and Belgium – a pretty pair! I doubt if Jack will get his weekend with Grania Guinness.’ She was more interested in getting some kind of foot treatment, which involved putting her feet in plaster and staying in bed for a week. There was no mention in her letter of that day’s other main news story: Winston Churchill, whose opinions Anita had derided, had become prime minister.
6
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
What happened next meant that Anita could no longer ignore what was going on beyond the world of hunting and foot treatments. In the same month that her cousin was chosen to lead Great Britain, her brother Jack’s regiment was sent to Boulogne and Jack was almost immediately reported missing in action while commanding a forward post. On 15 June, after weeks of not knowing whether Jack was still alive, Anita received a postcard from Second Lieutenant John Leslie Prisoner 400, in Oflag v11 b, in Eichstratt, Bavaria, Germany. Jack asked her to send him thirty Gillette razor blades, brown shoes, size 9 ½, bootlaces, handkerchiefs, face towel and soap, and wanted her to get the hat-maker, Edward Smith Ltd, Cork Street, to post him an Irish Guards brown service dress cap. It was inevitable that the regiment would fare badly. In contrast to the efficiently equipped Germans, Anita was told, ‘the Guards had so much equipment they could hardly walk – blankets, saucepans, picnic accessories and only a few rounds of ammunition’.
This was the month that France fell and Britain stood alone, threatened with invasion. Winston Churchill made a speech that inspired a generation:
We shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
The country was stirred by Churchill’s language and what his biographer, Roy Jenkins, called ‘a euphoria of irrational belief in ultimate victory’. General Alan Brooke, Winston’s chief military adviser throughout the war, wrote: ‘Without him England was lost for a certainty, with him England has been on the verge of disaster again and again.’
Anita seemed to be the only person in the country who wasn’t inspired by her cousin. She didn’t mention him in her letters, or express any loyalty towards him, until she herself became a soldier. Instead, she returned to her petty obsessions. On 26 June, the day that the Battle of Britain began, she complained to Marjorie that ‘All the Jews are buying uncut diamonds and good pictures.’ In July she began to focus on her own mortality, not altogether seriously. On 9 July she wrote to Marjorie: ‘In my legacy – Gemma and Ham [her dogs] go to Rose, Bully [another dog] to Olive Walker, Bestobel [her horse] and Paul to you, and my clothes to the Nation!’ In her 1981 memoir, Anita reflected on the deaths of several friends in the early summer of 1940: ‘How lucky I was to be husbandless, childless, unloving, unloved.’ A beautifully written sentence, if not quite factual.
Inspired or not by Winston’s rhetoric, by August she had decided to do some war work. This wasn’t a completely altruistic or patriotic gesture: it had dawned on her that enrolling in one of the women’s services might be a way to escape from Paul. Both the wrns, Women’s Royal Naval Service, and the wraf, Women’s Royal Air Force, turned her down – ‘on account of my American mother and Russian husband’, she informed the aforementioned American mother. On 28 August she learned that she had been selected to train as an ambulance driver for the Mechanised Transport Corps (mtc). On 7 September she wrote to Marjorie:
I am very fond of Paul but he does get on my nerves. For six years his financial difficulties have kept me in a mental rut of worry … You know how I have always longed to explore and never been able to … I feel this is my only chance ever. Now don’t get upset because I won’t go if you really can’t bear to let me but the time has come to try to make something of my life and I must make a decision soon.
During her last few weeks in England, her letters to her mother were light-hearted, the way they had been when she was a schoolgirl, and she did her best to reassure Marjorie that all was well. She doesn’t mention her imminent departure to Africa with No. 11 Coy. of the mtc, nor the effect on London of the Blitz, which began on 7 September, when German bombers crossed the English Channel into British airspace, filling 800 square miles of sky and killing 430 Londoners in a single night. Forty thousand people were to die as a result of the German air raids. Anita reported only the comical: a captured German pilot’s pockets contain photographs of beautiful women, ‘an English half crown and three birth control appliances!! An odd idea for a bombing expedition.’ She enlists Marjorie’s help in trying to track down missing jewellery: ‘Did I give you the diamond and ruby bracelet Olive gave me for my wedding to put in your jewel box for Glaslough? I think so. It is in a small pink leather case. Do you remember?’
In September she went back to Glaslough for embarkation leave. Of Leonie’s three surviving sons, Shane and Seymour were in the thick of the London bombing while the youngest, Lionel, in kilt and sporran, was in the Cameron Highlanders. Of her grandchildren, Jack was a prisoner of war, Desmond had joined the raf and now Anita was about to set sail on a troopship. But there were no tears. Marjorie’s only advice to her daughter was: ‘Don’t get sunburnt in Africa – men hate it,’ while Grandpa Jack pressed a pound into her hand as he saw Anita off in the family brougham and told her, ‘Take this, my dear and be careful of yourself.’
The mtc was a fairly bizarre organization; ‘a voluntary unit of considerable renown’ was how Anita put it. Officers were addressed as ‘Madam’ and recruits paid for their training and the attractive uniforms designed by Hardy Amies. But these well-heeled girls knew how to take a car apart and put it together again. Soon they would learn how to cope in the desert and help wounded men to survive. In her memoirs, Anita doesn’t tell the half about the mtc but her letters are more revealing. In 1981 she wrote to Harold Harris, her editor at Hutchinson:
We regarded ourselves somewhat snobbishly as a sort of Guards Brigade, ready to rush forward into any breach. BUT were pernickety about our uniforms and what we wore!!! Unlike the ATS who hated us and waged a war-long battle against our smart leather belts and becoming caps. We had a certain CHOICE as to where we went & what we did – as long as you bought your own uniform and did the training one could volunteer to drive ambulances at ARP posts or go abroad as in my Unit or use one’s own car for VIPs at War Office!! Hence the ghastly entanglement of Colonel [sic] Eisenhower and Kay Summersby – she drove him in her own car to start with … it was all a scream.
Harold Harris’s successor at Hutchinson was Anthony Whittome and, on 27 January 1983, just before the publication of her memoir, A Story Half Told, Anita wrote to him about her mtc commandant Maria Newall, including facts that couldn’t be published because Mrs Newall, now in her eighties, was ‘still being unutterable in Portugal – I wouldn’t put anything past her’. In her letter Anita wrote:
After being forced out of the MTC, she [Maria Newall] ruined Walter Monckton’s career – he was to be Minister of State Middle East but she settled herself in his office (still in MTC uniform with pistol on her belt!) … Eventually, she went too far – shocked a desert Arab chief by attending Walter’s lunch for him and eventually was SENT home against her will by the Military Police!! He had his job taken away and was flown back to England and she got on his plane and was picked off it in West Africa by the authorities, then had to wait six weeks for a slow boat from Lagos – and when Lady M did agree to a divorce, lost him to Biddy Carlisle! So there!
Since all the principals in this story are dead, it’s not possible to verify Anita’s account of scandalous goings-on in the desert.
Anita had told Marjorie that she had always wanted to e
xplore but escaping her marriage was the main reason why she was glad to board the liner Arundel Castle on 15 October and sail away from the Glasgow docks. From the ship, she wrote to Rose: ‘Only I could invent this way of running away from a husband.’ She wrote ‘private’ in the margin. Rose was now involved with someone called Tony. ‘Don’t consider his feelings,’ Anita advised her. ‘That is the worst thing to do with men – they immediately start inventing feelings designed to keep you attached to them.’ On 7 November, as the ship neared Pretoria, she wrote again to Rose: ‘Never again am I going to live a dull domesticated existence – I’m just going to be naughtier and naughtier! He he.’ She had left Paul and his smothering routines in London, pestering the War Office for a job. Heady with the idea of freedom, it didn’t occur to her that Paul would follow her to Africa and stalk her wherever she went.
The Arundel Castle sailed on through U-boat-infested waters. On board were squadrons of the Free French Air Force, including the writer Romain Gary, on their way to reclaim North African states from the Vichy French. Also among the passengers were Lord and Lady Dunsany, sent by the British Council to read poetry to the troops in Crete, a visit that had to be curtailed as Greece was shortly captured by the Germans. Anita knew the Dunsanys well: ‘How often had I seen the great poet astride his horse when the hounds met at Dunsany Castle in Ireland!’ Throughout the war, Anita met people she knew: old playmates, ex-debs, childhood neighbours who had since become generals. And, of course, the war was directed by her cousin Winston, her grandmother Leonie’s favourite nephew. Max Hastings wrote of Churchill: ‘He wanted war, like life, to be fun.’ So did Anita. In all but the most horrifying moments, she made the war sound like an amusing cocktail party with sudden death attached.
7
Sunburn Is So Unbecoming
Anita’s bid for freedom was soon compromised by Paul’s arrival in Pretoria, her unit’s first posting. Forty years later, when she was writing her memoirs, she decided not to mention the frequent and unwelcome appearances of her husband. To Harold Harris she explained, in 1981:
I somehow cannot bear to go on and on about him – explaining how for years I was running like a hare and he was following and swearing he’d give me a divorce ‘as soon as war ended’ … He kept turning up to annoy me – BUT when he produced nice horses I did ride them! – And we thought one of us would be killed – we weren’t – ! My own mental hysteria makes a book on its own – a psychological trauma. He RUINED my youth but it was my own fault – if that is any comfort.
But in those first weeks in Pretoria, in November, with no inkling that Paul had tracked her down, Anita reverted to carefree, giggling girlishness. It turned out that the MTC wasn’t needed in Kenya, so it was attached to the South African army. This was an unpopular decision but had the unit refused to be sent to Durban, the girls would have been denied wages, shoes, socks, knickers and breakfast. While waiting for their new posting, Anita wrote to Marjorie (26 November):
We have nothing to do but drill, polish our belts, march about and be taken out to tea by charitable societies – the Synagog [sic] soc. And the Mothers of Sons of England!!! Even the 6000 men who clamour to take us out every day are getting monotonous.
The hooting cars encircling the MTC barracks were ‘like Piccadilly Circus’. Picnics, swimming, sunshine, the veldt and mountains and Anita’s ‘gang’ of three like-minded girls, Anita, Betty Holberton and Susan Southby – ‘we stick together as we’re all frail, foolish and lazy and we all go out together always’ – began to wipe out the unsatisfactory past. ‘We feel already we could never settle down to a normal existence again! We’ll just wander round the world in search of war and adventure.’
And then, in February, Paul arrived in Pretoria, staying at Polley’s Hotel, where Anita joined him during a 48-hour leave. He had somehow obtained the command of the 3rd Remount Detachment, training and supervising English and Irish horses. She made a second escape thanks to the redoubtable Maria Newall who had flown to Kenya, seen people in high places and arranged for her girls to join the advance MTC unit driving the wounded in the East African campaign. They sailed from Durban aboard the Dutch ship Nieuw Holland, in a military, and wageless, limbo since the MTC was no longer part of the South African army and not yet part of the British one. During the uncomfortably hot two-week voyage, the commandant became increasingly tyrannical, holding daily court-martials. Betty Holberton, a diplomat’s daughter who knew only ‘that it was imperative never to wear a ball dress twice without sending it to the cleaners’ was made to be Mrs Newall’s batman and launder her khaki shirts. The MTC recruits were now unsuitably dressed in collars, ties, corduroy trousers and blue chiffon scarves. They were issued with tropical kit that included ‘jungle outfits, mosquito veils and mittens and anti-insect gaiters. None of this could be used except the topees, in which it was so difficult to salute.’
On 3 March, after a delay caused by mines dropped by Italian planes, which had blocked the Suez Canal, the Nieuw Holland docked at Suez, where a fleet of Dodge ambulances, a gift from the USA, was waiting for them. When, tired and hungry, they arrived in Cairo, they were made to listen to a lecture from the High Command on the perils of flirting. Wherever they went, the girls caused consternation mixed with amusement, partly because they were women doing what was regarded as men’s work and partly because nobody had been expecting the arrival of uniformed females. These females could strip engines and drive all night but were instructed: ‘Now girls! Even though you wear trousers you must always sit as though you were in skirts.’ This insistence on ladylike behavior was understandable. Even wearing trousers, the MTC girls were alluring. Anita herself, slender, tall and leggy with large, moony eyes was lovely, as was the equally tall Betty Holberton. Regarding these willowy creatures, an Egyptian general, Aziz-el-Masri, sighed, ‘Magnificent girls. All giraffe stock.’
Based at Helmieh camp, outside Cairo, ‘a horrible entanglement of barbed wire and petrol tins in the sand’, where the heat in the huts led them to drag their beds outside, the girls were on duty three days and three nights running, working in heavy, sand-filled air and the hot wind called khamsin. In the first week of April, Benghazi fell to the Germans and Anita, driving wounded men back from the battlefield, felt part of the desert war and its ‘maddening discomfort’. Among the casualties transported in her ambulance were, she wrote to Marjorie, a sergeant with venereal disease and a soldier knocked out by a cricket ball. ‘So English!! Imagine coming 12,000 miles for v.d. and cricket casualties.’ In this letter of 5 April she discussed her finances – always a concern. Marjorie had put £150 in Anita’s bank account but Anita was managing to live on her army pay of fourteen shillings a week, ‘which none of the other girls managed to do’. Bizarrely, in the middle of the gruelling desert war, her expenses included taxis, laundry, shoes, stockings and hairdressers. She asked her mother to send her a pair of brown suede shoes and jodhpurs. About the work, she wrote: ‘Though most of it is hell and one’s entire life is ruined by petty rules and regulations, I would not have missed it for anything and hope to write a comic book about it some day.’
While her troops were eating hard meat, cabbage and rice pudding in the noonday heat, Mrs Newall was living luxuriously in Cairo, meeting de Gaulle, General Spears and other notables and lunching at various embassies before inspecting her dungareed ambulance drivers. She had put Anita, Betty and Susan in different units because they were ‘too cliquey’. These mindless regulations reminded Anita ‘of a convent rule that girls must never walk in twos or the devil will make a mischievous third’. Most of the girls in the MTC shared something of Anita’s background: careless parenting, bad experiences in dubious educational establishments and the expectation that they would make the best of things – ‘Smile dear, it costs nothing,’ to quote Leonie once again.
That April, after the triple occupation of Greece by Germany, Italy and Bulgaria, the MTC ambulances met the wounded who had been evacuated from Athens. The summer of 1941 was Egypt
’s hottest for fifty years. In her diary of 1 June Anita wrote: ‘We love the starlit nights and hate the blazing day, hate even the pink dawn that is its herald.’ The fifty MTC drivers were doing the work of the hundred men who, with their ambulances, had gone missing in Greece. The MTC vehicles were loaded with British, Australian and New Zealand wounded, patients and drivers exhausted by heat, flies and lack of sleep. Every sixth day off-duty drivers entered the dream world of Cairo, where they had the sand washed out of their hair, sipped iced drinks at the Gizera Club and watched officers on leave play polo. Then the officers went back to the desert to fight, sometimes to die, and the MTC drivers went back to their hot huts and suppers of black tea and beans. From Glaslough, Marjorie wrote to her daughter, reminding her: ‘Be sure to wear a hat, this modern craze for sunburn is so unbecoming!’
In her memoir, Anita wrote about the ten days’ leave in June 1941, spent with Betty Holberton in Jerusalem, during which they were driven the three hundred miles from Cairo by Father Blount, the Roman Catholic chaplain. An intriguing cast of characters scurried around the King David Hotel: Generals Wavell, Maitland Wilson, de Gaulle and Catroux, and Prince Aly Khan, who had once treated Anita to strawberries at Ascot and was now a soldier in the Warwickshire Yeomanry. He drove a peacock-blue sports car and was the lover of the beautiful Emira of the Druzes. The reason for so much activity around Jerusalem was that the invasion of Syria by Allied forces was taking place. After bitter fighting, Damascus fell to the allies on 21 June and Damour, just twenty-four kilometres south of Beirut and a strategic crossing point, a month later. ‘It was indeed the oddest week of sight-seeing that two girls and a priest could have known,’ Anita recorded.
Telling Tales Page 8