Telling Tales

by Penny Perrick

  11

  The War Heroine

  The French army granted leave to those in its service who had a relative released from German imprisonment, so Anita was able to go home to see Jack. En route to Glaslough, she stayed with Rose, who was working her way steadily – or, perhaps, unsteadily – through a phalanx of fighter pilots. The latest one was Pete Gardner. He had escaped from a prison camp and, on meeting Rose at one of her favourite nightclubs said, immediately, ‘You’re going to marry me.’ Unlike Anita, Rose seemed able to get divorced at whim. She and Pete married before the end of the year.

  The raf, ‘always at Rose’s beck and call’, flew Anita to Belfast, where Jack met her and drove her to Glaslough in the familiar horsedrawn brougham. After this reunion Anita made her way to Berlin by an adventurous route, which included a stopover, near Frankfurt, at Schloss Friedrichshof, once the home of Queen Victoria’s favourite daughter, Vicky. Army discipline was unravelling. Nobody seemed to know where anyone else was or how they got there, which led to some surprising encounters and equally surprising absences. On 19 July Peter Wilson, having had no news of Anita for a while, wrote to her, asking where she was. Peter was part of the British delegation in Potsdam, the last of the Second World War conferences, held from 16 July until 2 August and attended by Churchill (whose place was taken by Attlee after the British General Election), Truman and Stalin. The conference was held at Cecilienhof, the home of Crown Prince Hohenzollern, in Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin, nine weeks after the German surrender. Its aim was to impose order on the new post-war world. What was to become East Germany was given to Russia; the south of the country became the American zone, and the north was given to Great Britain. After some deliberation, France was given part of west Germany, carved out of the us and British zones. In popular parlance, the us got the scenery, the French the wine and the Brits the ruins.

  And Anita? She was in Potsdam too. On the same day that Peter was writing to her, she was writing to Winston, boasting at having arrived there: ‘My division – General Soudre’s first armoured – is the only one here.’ Somehow, the other ambulancières had been left behind. Peter found her a day or so later and they explored the smashed Tiergarten and the ruins of Berlin. Peter had a new plan for their future, one that didn’t involve a gypsy life in the wild. He had been sounded out about the job of military adviser to the Syrian government and was convinced that Anita would be prepared to leave Europe and go back to the Middle East, perhaps forgetting that she hated the climate, had been wild with misery for much of her time there and thankful to have been posted to Italy.

  From Berlin, on 22 July, Anita wrote to Marjorie on writing paper headed with a swastika and eagle, filched from Hitler’s bombed-out chancellery. A Russian officer had plied her with souvenirs from the building: a piece of brocade from Hitler’s chair and a bronze Motherhood Cross of the kind awarded to mothers of four children. Silver crosses were given to mothers of six and gold ones to mothers of eight. The crosses had been awarded every year on 8 August, the birthday of Hitler’s mother. Anita was very excited: ‘Darling Ma! The climax of my military career has now arrived!’ She had lodged with her beloved 11th Hussars, the reconnaissance regiment of the Desert Rats. She had taken part in a grand parade watched by Winston, Alex, Monty and other wartime leaders. She had lunched with Winston and his daughter Mary at their villa in Potsdam, where she had sat between Winston and Anthony Eden. Her friends in the 11th Hussars had sent Winston ‘a huge red Iron Cross decoration which he fancied greatly’. In a few days’ time she would have to trek back to the Rhine to rejoin her ambulance unit but meanwhile, ‘I’ve certainly had the most spectacular end of a war.’

  But it wasn’t quite the end. On 11 August, the day that the war in Japan ended, Anita travelled to Wittlich, the Rhineland city on the Moselle, where, a few days later, she and Geneviève were told to be ready at 6 am in ironed skirts (cut out of gi trousers), polished boots, neatly turned-down white socks and white gloves to join a parade at which decorations were to be presented. A band played the Marseillaise as a general pinned the Croix de Guerre on Anita’s shirt. She had been awarded it for dragging wounded men out of the snow on the battlefields of Colmar. It was 15 August, the Feast of the Assumption, Napoleon’s birthday and the anniversary of the Marseilles landing; a perfect day to have one’s valour recognized and to experience the ecstasy of achievement.

  The result of the British general election had been declared on 26 July, showing a Labour landslide with a majority of 145 seats. Labour’s campaign slogan had been ‘Let us face the future’, an appealing exhortation to a people longing to forget the nightmare of the recent past. Anita wrote to Winston: ‘We were all wild the Socialists got in till news came that you were in terrific form and going to lead the Opposition.’ She then painted a picture of a drab, dull Britain of ‘hideous little tin houses’, which would be no fun at all to govern. A comforting letter for an old warhorse. Shane also wrote to his defeated cousin, in his usual mixture of pomposity and supplication. He asked Winston if he would have Jack down for a day at Chartwell: ‘He was the only soldier a blood relation of yours in German power and they never found out!’ Jack was staying at the Guards Club in London, while having ‘medical treatments’, which Shane doesn’t specify.

  In September Anita was demobilized via Paris. Thereafter things get a bit confused. Train to Nowhere ends in London where, thanks to Peter, although she doesn’t mention him, she manages to get hold of the pink wool from Winston’s map room, which had been used for marking the advance of armies, to send to her friend Monique in France, who was expecting a baby. A Story Half Told, the later version of her wartime life, ends at Glaslough, where Bill King proposes to her. She gives the impression that Bill’s lakeside proposal took place in 1946 but, in fact, Anita suffered some years of emotional turbulence before Bill rescued her from chaos. Agnes’s memoir describes things differently:

  Whenever my sister-in-law, Anita came to town, it was like a minor invasion of a major army. She was about to be demobbed and would arrive at South Lodge with kitbags, army boots, horse-blankets and gentlemen whom she referred to as her beaux. Beaux A and B [Philip and Peter] were semi-demobbed by then and, uncertain of their future whereabouts, they too brought their army gear and dumped it with us. Beau C [Bill] had not yet been released from his submarine duty and did not appear on the scene until much later, with spectacular results.

  That Christmas, Desmond, Agnes and Anita were all at Glaslough. ‘Anita looked incredibly beautiful in a tea-gown of cream-coloured lace,’ Agnes wrote. At Castle Leslie, there were still eight indoor servants, four gardeners, meals served by a footman in livery and, if you so desired, breakfast in bed. But it wasn’t enough.

  12

  The Unbearable Peace

  ‘People don’t recover from a war.’ Kurt Vonnegut wrote that sentence from personal experience: he had been a pow in Germany, and witnessed the fire bombing and destruction of Dresden in 1945. In her book Edwardians in Love, Anita quoted from Cynthia Asquith’s diary for 1918: ‘I am beginning to rub my eyes at the prospect of peace. I think it will require more courage than anything that has gone before.’ Or, to quote a German wartime joke: ‘Better enjoy the war – the peace will be terrible.’ The war had used up most people’s supply of courage. In 1946, the first full year of peace, Anita and Peter’s letters reveal a nervy, irritable couple, damped-down and disconsolate, while Jack was heading towards a nervous breakdown. Bill King remained undaunted. At the end of the war he was put in charge of the surrender of German U-boats which, on Russian orders, had to be sunk in the Atlantic. Bill planned a post-war life of skiing, sailing and, if possible, marrying Anita although, in 1946, that last intention looked hopeless.

  Anita decided that she wanted to live in the west of Ireland. Marjorie, always generous and now the beneficiary of her sister Anne’s will – the childless Anne had died in 1945 – bought her discontented daughter a castle in County Galway. Oranmore Castle was on the site of a roma
ntic Norman keep beside Galway Bay. Dating from the fifteenth century, it may have been on the site of an older castle. From the seventeenth century it had been part of the estate of one of Galway’s twelve tribes, the Blakes, an extravagant clan who, over the centuries, left the tower and the adjoining house in a ruinous state. Marjorie, after a spot of house-hunting with her friend the writer and lawyer Oliver St John Gogarty, bought house, castle, tower, the keep and a nearby field for £200 and started to repair the roofs. Meanwhile, Anita and Peter lived in the village of Craughwell, a few miles from Oranmore. It was a strange household.

  According to Peter, Anita wanted to live with both him and Philip Parbury. He wrote plaintively to Rose that as he and Anita still shared a bed, he didn’t know how Philip would react when Anita invited him to stay, as she was determined to do. Peter told Rose that Anita had no idea he would be hurt by her invitation to Philip. Ten days later Peter wrote to Rose again. Philip was now at Craughwell and things were worse than Peter had feared. Anita had taken Philip to see Oranmore Castle and he had offered to pay for it. Peter regarded the castle as his and Anita’s future home and had ambitious plans for its rebuilding, so he threatened to leave. This astonished Anita, who burst into tears. She insisted to Peter that Philip never made love to her, and she continued to sleep with Peter. Hard as it is to believe, Philip apparently had no idea about her relationship with Peter.

  Seemingly oblivious to Peter’s feelings, Anita asked him to arrange a picnic for herself and Philip. She then booked a suite at the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin for herself and Philip, which she had shared with Peter six weeks before. When Philip went back to England the following week, Anita fully expected Peter to go to Glaslough with her, which he did.

  Peter had convinced himself that he was far more important to Anita than Philip. His conviction was so strong that, even if he had known about the letter that Anita wrote to Winston on 24 June, he would probably not have believed it. This letter was posted from South Lodge, St John’s Wood, where Anita was staying with Desmond and Agnes. She used Agnes’s writing paper, headed by the initials ‘ABL’, Agnes Bernelle Leslie, which, in a curly and complicated typeface, could have been taken for Anita’s own. The letter begins: ‘I have a young man.’ This was Lt Colonel Philip Parbury and Anita asked her cousin whether she could bring Philip to see him before the former flew to Australia in a week’s time. She stressed Philip’s love of Empire – a love that Winston shared – and went on: ‘We have been sort of engaged for years but I hesitate to dampen the fire of his spirit with matrimony.’ She also wrote, knowing how fond Winston was of Clare, that it was Clare who had encouraged her to suggest this meeting. Sometimes Winston scrawled a comment on letters he received but he didn’t on this one, so there is no record of the meeting taking place. What could Anita have been thinking? She was living with one man and was still married to another, so could not have been even ‘sort of engaged’ to a third. Like Peter, and perhaps most other people exhausted by the war, she couldn’t think straight.

  During that hurdy-gurdy of a year, she visited Paul at his military camp in Scotland ‘to beg for a divorce’. It would be another two years before she obtained it, in the nick of time, as it subsequently turned out. She sounded blithe enough when she wrote to Rose on 1 October, congratulating her on the birth of a daughter, Fleur. Since it was assumed that Rose was still married to Michael Bell-Syer, Anita suggested that she tell people that ‘you’d divorced and married a fellow called Pete Gardner whenever anyone asks – and it will be simple just to announce how clever you are [for having Fleur] some other time!!’ She wrote this letter from the Shelbourne Hotel, where she was expecting Peter to join her that night. The hotel staff must have been intrigued by Anita’s frequent changes of escort.

  In the 1950s Anita wrote to Rose that the years 1947 and 1948 had been the most cruel of her life. The book she had written about the war, Train to Nowhere, was rejected by several publishers, one of whom said that it was ‘flung together and must be rewritten’, before being accepted by Hutchinson, who offered her £100 on delivery and 10 per cent on the sales price on the first 5000 copies sold. When it was published in 1948 it was widely considered to be the best book about the war to have been written by a woman – a dubious compliment. But people were not yet ready to revisit the war, especially in a grisly account written by a woman, illustrated by the author’s photographs of dead Germans, ruined cities and gibbets – for Anita had managed to take her camera and a supply of film everywhere. They preferred women in a keep-the-home-fires-burning role and, in 1948, both the government and women’s magazines were putting pressure on women to leave their wartime employment and become full-time homemakers, so that men released from the armed services could take their place on the factory floor. After she published Train to Nowhere, Anita didn’t write or talk about the war for another forty years, when she wrote A Story Half Told, a rather jauntier account of her soldiering. By that time she had found fame as a biographer of various Edwardian sexpots, including her great-aunt Jennie Churchill, and had a devoted readership. Also, by the 1980s there was an insatiable appetite for books about the war. A Story Half Told was more successful than its soberer predecessor.

  Philip was still in England. Anita, living with Peter at Oranmore, wrote to Marjorie in an undated letter from 1948 that she had been operated on (possibly for an ulcer) by the remarkable Dr Bethel Solomons, Master of the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin. Dr Solomons had forbidden any fried food, given her glucose pills and planned to put her on a vitamin regime. She wrote that Peter would look after her at Oranmore and Philip in Croydon. She wanted to bring Philip to Glaslough: ‘He is a terrific person and very manly!’ Her legal escape from Paul was proceeding at the pace of a very slow snail. In the same letter to Marjorie: ‘I have urgent letter from my solicitor that my annulment petition has gone to Counsel and got a good report but I must rewrite it before it can be put forward and the quicker the better.’ Then, on 28 July, to Marjorie: ‘Paul is returning to England and has employed a lawyer to fight the case.’ And in an undated letter to Rose: ‘I got a letter from Paul’s solicitors enclosing a bill for £47 and saying he had told them I’d pay all his legal expenses (to back the divorce!) and he’d just called on them to announce he was “without means”. That dear little divorce had already cost me £200.’ The plan for an annulment seems to have got nowhere, in spite of the two previous, and perhaps still living, Mrs Rodziankos. While waiting for her freedom, Anita changed her surname back to Leslie by deed poll. At the time, deed polls were enrolled in the Supreme Court and had to be advertised in The London Gazette.

  In 1947 George and Patsy Jellicoe had paid their first visit to Oranmore Castle. For George, the visit had not been a success. ‘The sea came in through the windows, nobody could cook and it was freezing cold,’ the late Lady Jellicoe told me in 2007, when I interviewed her in London. She thought that Anita’s poor housekeeping skills were a reaction against Marjorie, a domestic goddess: ‘There were always white sheets and towels and good food. Anita was a free spirit.’ The conditions at Oranmore didn’t stop Patsy from visiting again, but her husband stayed away.

  Shane’s literary career had had a bit of a setback. He had planned to publish a biography of Leonard Jerome, grandfather of Shane and Winston, but, Anita wrote to Marjorie: ‘Winston sent for him [Shane] and asked him not to put in any indiscreet bits or mention the three sisters’ [Leonard’s daughters] love affairs etc so he might let me work at it in the autumn but I am sick of writing books.’ In 1954 Anita was to bring out The Fabulous Leonard Jerome with Winston’s approval. Meanwhile, in wretched spirits, she told Rose: ‘I don’t know what to do with myself – it’s time I rejoined some army.’ She knew that she should be grateful to Marjorie, who had hoped that her generous gifts of a castle, a diamond bracelet and an allowance would dispel Anita’s churning despair but, as Anita wrote to Rose, the one person to whom she could be ‘as awful as I feel like’:

  It just doesn’t work like that. I
don’t know how to turn the wheels inside myself any more. They are so deep and out of one’s control … I know that I long for the feeling of life and comradeship that I had during the war and have now lost … and 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 to others now have nothing. It’s the mental depression that gets me down now … the utter futility and nerviness of everything.

  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 broken up and am bad at mending.’

  Anita, in the early post-war years, sounds very like Susan Traherne, the heroine of David Hare’s stirring play Plenty (1978). Susan had been a seventeen-year-old resistance fighter behind enemy lines and now finds the peace mundane and frustrating. ‘I want to move on. I do so desperately want to move on,’ Susan says. But she can’t stop wishing for a return to the years of excitement, danger and valour and becomes increasingly unstable. Edmund Wilson, visiting England in 1945, understood this kind of self-pitying misery. He wrote: ‘How empty, how sickish, how senseless everything suddenly seems the moment the war is over.’ Anita’s great-aunt Mary Crawshay, née Leslie, always said that self-pity was ‘like sitting in wet shoes’. Anita couldn’t take her feet out of sopping footwear.

  Thinking about new clothes cheered her up for a while. She wrote to Rose: ‘The stiff red dress sounds heavenly … all I really badly need now is a black velvet … I think Mme. Lavande could copy your navy blue.’ But little else could cure her despair. Neither Marthe Bibesco’s praise for Train to Nowhere nor the prospect of Bill King coming to Oranmore for a week’s hunting worked to lift her spirits. The castle was eating money: ‘I feel the whole project is getting beyond me and swamping me. I just long to go away and forget about it. But Peter thinks that he’s there for keeps. Dear kind affectionate loyal Peter but oh what a muddler.’