Incredible complications followed … and every sort of horror was envisaged from tumours to complete removal of machinery. Don’t let anyone know as Ma would drop dead if she heard … There is nothing radically wrong – just weakness.
That November there were riots in Beirut, with the French arresting the popular President Khoury in a brutal manner. Sentries were posted in the garden of Anita’s villa and soldiers from the Rifle Brigade drove her to the office of the Eastern Times ‘in a command car bristling with guns’. Rose was having a different kind of war, working as a vad (non-registered nurse) while based luxuriously in her Belgravia house. In 1943 she married for the second time, to a fighter pilot called Michael Bell-Syer, but it soon became clear that she had not really settled down.
Anita wanted to leave the Eastern Times for good. She found a job in the Red Cross, assisting Pamela Wavell, whose father was about to become Viceroy of India. The two girls drove supplies to isolated field hospitals in Lebanon and Syria, Pamela’s Red Cross uniform being a snowy white dress and white picture hat. These journeys were probably spying missions. On 23 March 1944 Patsy O’Kane married George Jellicoe who, at the age of twenty-five, had won a dso, mc and the Croix de Guerre as a Commando. Before the wedding, Patsy had had to disengage herself from another attachment in Egypt – ‘poor Peter Wilson, who was flying to Cairo, has had to take back the ring and dismissal letters,’ Anita wrote to Marjorie. The wedding was held in the Italian chapel in Beirut, the reception at the villa, its garden scented with orange blossom, and the honeymoon in Cyprus, where Richard Coeur de Lion and Berengaria had honeymooned.
After three years in the Middle East, Anita asked the Red Cross hq in Cairo to be sent to Italy. In May she boarded a hospital ship at Alexandria, travelling light, since all she owned were ‘my uniforms, some Damascus sandals, Aleppo sheepskins and a hoard of memories’. This was the published account of her departure but she told Rose the real story. She had become pregnant again and ‘in the end one did the brutal sensible thing – Peter minded terribly and so did I … it was a really ghastly goodbye’.
9
A Cobweb of Affection
There was a problem with the Italian assignment: Paul was in Italy, heading long treks with horses and mules. Anita wrote to Betsan: ‘I am demanding a divorce from Paul all the more urgently as the Red Cross has a mobile canteen for me to drive in Italy but I can’t if I have a husband in the same command. If I can’t fix that I go off to Tunisia to drive with the French.’ Somehow, she fixed it. She told Betsan how much she wanted to be in ‘the fight that lies ahead in Europe’, not least because of the personal problems she was leaving behind in the Middle East:
I am in such a tangle really as I so want to marry two men and cannot decide between them. One of them begs me to give him a child to bring up if I don’t marry him and altogether it is getting most complicated and I feel like buzzing off into the desert again and leading a clean soldier’s life.
Peter Wilson, who was in his forties, was closer to hand than Philip Parbury but was, nonetheless, a distant marital prospect. He was already married, as irksomely as Anita was, and had a teenage son. Anita never noticed obstacles. To Rose: ‘I want to have several cakes and eat them too.’ She tried to shake herself free of Paul by heading her letters ‘A Rodzianko Leslie’. ‘I am gradually changing my name back to Leslie as I’m just sick of being a Ukrainian!!’ She could drop Paul’s name but the man himself refused to let her leave him. Before she left for Italy she wrote to Rose:
I told the old boy that if he does not give me a divorce I will never speak or write to him again. Have had no answer to this! O Rose I so nearly did not marry him but was in such a state of nervous exhaustion and so weak-willed in consequence. He is such a bore, loathes Peter who wasted a whole hot afternoon trying to be nice to him and is just as selfish as he can be. Peter is so terribly nice about Philip. O Rose I am longing to get back to some nice tough desert work and out of this cobweb of affection.
Bill King was part of the same snarly cobweb. While on leave in London, he had visited Rose and Anita wrote to her: ‘O I grew so fond of Bill – he takes ages to know.’ At times, Anita thought that the only way out of the tangle was to ‘never marry again but just be me and perhaps breed a few more to please my friends’. Italy provided the perfect exit. From Naples, she told Rose:
And now here I am, with a job after my own heart - a mobile canteen to drive to meet the wounded in ships and trains and the guns booming some 40 miles away and our workers having a thrilling time and doing such wonderful work up near the front and nothing else to think about but work work work!
But there was something else to think about: how to end her marriage. Her latest scheme was to try to get a nullity decree ‘on non-consumation [sic] grounds’. This sounds far-fetched although when Rose wondered whether Anita’s miscarried baby might have been Paul’s, Anita responded: ‘You don’t imagine there’s ever been anything between us!!! What a horrid idea.’ Yet another facet of this strange marriage, during which so much had been done jointly – writing books, training horses – was that it may not have been consummated.
General Alexander was Commander-in-Chief of the Italian offensive, and Anita’s youngest uncle, Lionel, now married and father of a new baby, had been seconded from the Cameron Highlanders to the Independent Mountain Brigade, which helped escaping prisoners of war make their way over the mountains. Casualties from Anzio and Cassino streamed into Naples. Anita felt that it was like trying to run a canteen in Dante’s Inferno. Peter Wilson was in Syria where his life was stagnant, boring and unpleasant. He envied Anita for being in the thick of battle, which he thought, correctly, would improve her health. He still wanted Anita to have his child, telling her that if she would bear him a daughter, he could let her go. On the other hand, he didn’t want her to go through the hell of pregnancy again or to jeopardize her future; rather irreconcilable demands. He told her loftily that he was worried that she would never ‘reincarnate’ herself, leaving future generations to be born to stupid women, who would produce stupid children.
On 5 June 1944 Rome fell to the Allies, the event overshadowed by D-Day in Normandy, the beginning of the end of the war. Peter’s letters to Anita were increasingly discontented. He was forty-seven that month and, although he was performing a thankless task in the desert, had been turned down for promotion. He wanted the war to be over so that he and Anita could be together although he suspected, with reason, that Marjorie would think him too old and too poor. In the middle of June, a new order regarding the Middle East made it compulsory for anyone who had been in service abroad for more than five years to go home after 1 September. Peter saw this as an opportunity to get his affairs in order and try to get a divorce.
Anita was no longer euphoric about her escape to Italy. On 5 July she wrote to Betsan:
My own life is interesting but unhappy. My world is a tent where in clouds of dust the wounded are laid on stretchers while being sorted for various hospitals … It is extraordinary how quickly one gets shock proof with the wounded – it took me just 6 hours! I do so love the British Tommy. They tug at one’s heart as no other wounded do – isn’t it curious? Somehow it is their humour and courage that no one else seems to have when blown to bits.
Patsy and George Jellicoe, in their married bliss, were concerned about Anita. George wrote to her: ‘If I am sure of anything it is that someone so alive and perceptive and subtle as you is not destined for permanent depression. Please for our sakes get out of the dumps.’ But she was lonely and frustrated and regretted the abortion. To Rose, 4 July 1944: ‘I did so want just what Peter wanted only it seemed such a hopelessly bad time. Now I kick myself for having taken the decision … ’ She was doing
wonderful work grappling with the mental state of men blown to bits and how one gets to love them … such courage and humour [but] I am restless and discontented and long to join the French Ambulance Corps which are at the front and have a wilder freer time.
&nb
sp; Of the men she loved the best, Philip was fighting the Japanese in New Guinea and would soon be evacuated to Australia, ill and skeletally thin. Peter was trying to get sent to Yugoslavia – ‘I just can’t think how I am going to keep them both and I love them so much.’ Paul, whom she didn’t love at all, ‘writes jauntily from Sardinia that he lives in planes and cars and swoops from Sicily to Rome as he wishes, doing very important work that he cannot tell me about’. Bill King, now the captain of the submarine hms Telemachus, during that same restless July, wrote Anita a poem, ‘Sonnet to a Lady weary of lovers’. It ended: ‘O beautiful, lovely passionless lady/Someday you’ll have to bear somebody’s baby.’ Aware that he was ranked only admirer number four, Bill thought that he had lost Anita although ‘you will always be an angel to me’. Then along came the pleasant distraction of admirer number five. Anita had known Bill Cunningham for a long time before he turned up in Italy as General Alexander’s military assistant and gave her the chance to know him much better. An undated letter from him: ‘So nice to find that someone one always thought would be rather sweet … is actually so much sweeter than one could possibly have imagined! Dammit.’
There was a feeling that the war would soon be over but the mood was sombre, as the horrors of what had been happening away from the battlefields became more widely known. Winston Churchill wrote to Anthony Eden in July 1944, on the Nazis’ murder of the Jews:
There is no doubt that this is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the history of the world … It is clear that all concerned in this crime who fall into our hands, including the people who only obeyed orders in carrying out the butcheries, should be put to death.
Anita wrote in Train to Nowhere: ‘I had a faint selfish hope that war would not end before I had time for some startling achievement.’ So far, she had done nothing that was, by her own standards, extraordinary. Her old mtc unit, now incorporated in the ats, had never left Alexandria, although the fighting had moved elsewhere. In all, 200,000 British serving women had scarcely seen the front. Other countries deployed their female troops more usefully. Soviet China engaged 800,000 servicewomen, 70 per cent of whom were in close combat. The Poles, Americans and, more pertinently for Anita, the French divisions, allowed women at the front line, the French deploying female ambulance drivers when its forces were attacking. Anita was determined to be one of them.
On 15 August Allied landings in southern France began. The Red Cross handed over Anita to the French army, which demanded a dossier, to include ‘a certificate stating the British Government did not mind what was done to me … there were unpleasant clauses about deserters getting shot’. Reading these clauses, Anita’s friend, Comtesse Elizabeth de Breteuil, conveniently in charge of all female personnel in Italy, reassured Anita that she could always manage to ‘te débrouiller’ – meaning to wriggle out of impossible situations. Once the dossier was approved, Anita became un simple soldat de 2ème classe, attached to an ambulance company that was due to sail to Marseilles. During her last days in Naples she dined glamorously at the Allied Officers’ Club and met Lady Dorothy Macmillan and Lady Diana Cooper, both dressed in satin evening gowns. In Siena she had a farewell breakfast with General Alexander. As he left her, to tour the front with Winston, he said, ‘Don’t falter, Anita.’
In October the landing of a French ambulance unit at Marseilles began with a triumphal march through the streets – ‘Women put down their baskets in the roadway to blow kisses.’ But when the march was over, it was apparent that there was great suffering. People in the countryside were starving. On D-Day, an old man told Anita, a false alarm from the bbc had led the local Resistance to believe that landings in the south of France were imminent. But it had been another two months before the French army landed, by which time the Resistance had revealed itself in attacks on munitions dumps and acts of sabotage. The old man said: ‘I saw the finest young men of my region go to the carnage pits.’ ‘Everywhere the same tales damped one’s spirit,’ Anita recorded.
After much chaotic travelling northward, she caught up with Combat Command 1 of the 1st Armoured Division, which was fighting in the mountains north of Besançon:
Everyone congratulated me on being an ambulanciere divisionnaire. I had as yet no idea what these words signified nor could I imagine that from henceforth Combat Command 1 with its Cuirassiers in their Sherman tanks and its Zouaves in their muddy boots was to be my entire world … a small, intimate world of lovable human beings and good friends.
A world where ‘some startling achievement’ was possible.
It was also a world where Paul couldn’t find her. Not for want of trying. He pestered Lionel in Italy and then tried to prise information from Shane in a letter dated 29 August. Most of the letter describes a visit to the Pope – Paul still held the belief that professing Catholic piety was the way to Shane’s heart: ‘I left the Vatican strongly impressed and somehow very happy,’ he wrote before, as though as an afterthought, he added, ‘I still have no news from Anita. I know she is somewhere in France! Hope she’s well.’ He had already asked Marjorie for Anita’s address but, although she wrote back sympathizing over the death of his mother, she refused to reveal her daughter’s whereabouts.
Anita too was taking a sturdy attitude, telling Rose that she had made it clear to Paul that he could keep her officer’s wife’s allowance but
must save it as when he is demobilised neither I nor my family can help him … I’ve told him frankly he can’t finish his days sponging on my family … I’m never going to smile nicely and pander to that man again … My only bond is that of British law – my signature in the registry that day binds me to a contract which I can only terminate if he gives me evidence of his adultery. A legal annulment is infinitely more complicated and expensive. In the eyes of the Church I am not married.
And then, casually, in brackets, ‘(as his 2 other wives alive)’. This was a revelation. In Tattered Banners, only his first wife, Tamara Novosilzoff, is mentioned, very briefly. Other members of Paul’s family and friends who made perilous escapes after the revolution are also mentioned, but not a second wife and I have been unable to find out anything about her. These dispossessed aristocrats were extraordinary survivors. Penniless, they opened dress-shops, painted decorative glassware, served behind the counter at Selfridges, trained horses. Perhaps Paul’s elusive second wife was among their number.
Peter, on leave in London, had found a sympathetic listener in Rose, a great believer in marriage, who was about to embark on her third. She thought that Peter was the right man for her friend but Anita capriciously disagreed. ‘We’d be the most awful couple if we were man and wife – we’d just huddle together reading books and cooking each other glorious messes and snigger at the world.’ This is rather a change from a few months back when she claimed to want to marry both Peter and Philip, and the reason was that she’d received a long letter from Philip, which restored him to being her heart’s love. ‘Peter will tell you what a wonderful person he thought him – I know they’d get on together.’ An unlikely scenario but Anita didn’t dwell on it for long; she was caught up in the excitement of battle.
10
The Woods Are Full of Germans
During a cold October, Anita described events to Marjorie, who she knew suffered ‘terribly from her overwrought imagination’, that were bound to cause alarm:
This is the most interesting work imaginable, as one goes forward with the regiments … we park our ambulances in any field or orchard where there are not mines and are ready to move at any time at any hour of the day or night … One drives in the pitch dark at night as there is a complete blackout within 8 miles of the front and that is no fun – especially as the woods are full of Germans! Anyway, I don’t think any other Div uses women so far forward.
There had been a particularly tragic civilian casualty:
He was the bravest nicest little lad and it was heartbreaking when he died … Alas I can’t see how one can avoid killing
civilian children now as we advance through smashed up villages – they can’t evacuate to the hills as they did in Italy and they can’t retreat – to Germany.
She had no pity for the ill-looking German prisoners, captured as the Allied forces fought their way northward. By now, Germans were ‘barbarians lacking in judgement, pompous white savages with a power complex’.
Cold, wet and muddy, sleeping in her ambulance, dressed in men’s trousers and underwear – courtesy of the Americans – instead of the well-tailored uniform of the mtc in which she’d left England four years ago, Anita told her mother, ‘I’ve never enjoyed life more.’ The cause of much of this enjoyment was her commanding officer, a remarkable woman called Jeanne de l’Espée. While on her way to join her unit, Anita had been assured by many people that several Englishmen ‘très bien connus’ had been in love with Jeanne. The daughter of a famous general, she had nursed at the front during the Great War, driving through the lines in the middle of a bombardment to translate for the French wounded – she spoke perfect English – and had been awarded the American Medal of Merit. In that long weekend between the wars, she had run the couture house of Jean Patou and was admired for her enchanting personality and chic. An early instruction to Anita was: ‘Whatever happens, remember to use lipstick because it cheers up the wounded.’ Scarlet-mouthed, Jeanne drove out one nightfall to rescue wounded parachutists from a mountain top where they had lain for three days, surrounded by Germans. She brought them down, uninjured, driving through heavy shellfire. She was rather different from the histrionic Maria Newall.
Telling Tales Page 10