From Megève, Anita wrote to Shane to thank him for organizing the wedding: ‘I don’t think any wedding could have been nicer and it has given a happy aura to the old place where our family has been loved and respected for so long.’ At the end of this letter, rather ungraciously, since a bishop had accommodated her mixed marriage, she took a snipe at his profession. Irish bishops were ‘pompous tyrants with no knowledge of world affairs’. She also wrote, provocatively: ‘Don’t you really approve of partition? I do,’ although she must have known that Shane didn’t. He was both a Catholic and a royalist, who wished to see a united Ireland on warm terms with England. At Megève Anita skied all day, although Peter had begged Rose not to let her. She planned to stay with Rose until April, while Bill went to Austria for some more serious skiing with his old friend Ruck-Keene. Unusually, perhaps because he felt lonely at Glaslough, Shane wanted to know his daughter’s future whereabouts. Anita produced an itinerary that didn’t mention the forthcoming stay in Dublin. She told Shane that after April she was going to Oranmore while Bill finished building his yacht. Bill had asked her whether she needed a lavatory on the boat, ‘or could one just throw buckets overboard as it sails faster without a drain!!!’ She had insisted on a drainage system. She gave her father the impression that the yacht, when ready to sail, would be moored in the south of France, close to the villa that Rose would be renting for the summer. Naturally, she did not mention her plans to give birth, secretly, in Dublin or to take the unannounced baby on a long sea voyage.
Rather bossily, she instructed Shane on how to talk about her marriage: ‘Be sure to tell everyone how pleased the family is at my marrying Bill and what a hero he is and what a darling too. It’s so important that everyone should know what sort of person Bill is owing to last summer’s dramas.’ The Philip Parbury fiasco had not done her reputation much good; one of Bill’s many assets was that he was able to provide her with respectability.
15
‘He Enchants My
Every Moment’
‘I don’t know how we can call this premature’ were the first words Anita heard as she came to from the chloroform that she’d had during the very last stages of a twelve-hour labour. Tarka Leslie King, as he would later be called, was born on 27 June 1949 at 23 Mount Merrion Avenue in Blackrock, Dublin, in the middle of a heatwave. The house belonged to a Mrs Burke, who rented rooms to country people who came to Dublin for medical examinations, but rarely to give birth soon after arrival. Six days after Tarka was born, Anita wrote to Rose:
Never has she [Mrs Burke] known such tenants – Bill appears half shipwrecked and starving and vanishes in a little boat – Peter and I appear with a van of lettuces and produce a baby! – Nurses and doctors arrive – She kept staggering up with sandwiches and coffee and Solomons charmed her so she did not quite faint when he met her on the stairs in his underpants only prior to slipping on his white gown – It was a broiling hot night.
So charmed was Mrs Burke that ‘she spent the afternoon saying hail Marys in the garden and sending me up roses!’
In his memoir, One Doctor in His Time (1956), Bethel Solomons mentions Anita – her elegance and literary achievements – but not the circumstances of her son’s birth, when a man who wasn’t her husband waited with her for the baby to be born. Anita, because of her precarious health, had been Dr Solomons’ patient for some years. He would have seen the photographs of her wedding in The Irish Times and realized that the man who stayed with her during her long labour was not Commander King and that her nine-pound baby boy had inherited this man’s very large hands and feet.
Following Betsan’s advice, Anita had followed the methods of the obstetrician Dr Grantly Dick-Read, who advocated relaxation, deep breathing and an understanding of the birth process long before these procedures became widely acceptable. When Anita’s labour began, she ‘went into the fray fit as a fiddle’ and managed without pain-reducing drugs for the first seven hours. She wrote to Rose about the birth of her little son: ‘What a moment it was – rapturous – I never knew I wanted a baby so much – in fact never felt maternal before – the emotion came with an inordinate rush! He enchants my every moment.’ This unanticipated state of bliss complicated things. Before Tarka’s birth, it had been understood that Peter would mainly take charge of him while Anita and Bill travelled but the rush of maternal feelings changed everything. Anita who, a year previously, had been planning to leave both Peter and Oranmore, now clung to both. Parenthood ‘gives us both something to work for – a reason to mend the castle leaks, to improve the garden.’
This change of attitude affected Bill deeply. On 6 July he wrote a five-page letter to his wife from Portsmouth where he was fitting out Galway Blazer. He assured her that he was not writing ‘in a haze of unhappiness jealousy or emotion but the result of long and careful thought.’ He proposed that, in order to provide a stable upbringing for the baby, Anita should remain with Peter at Oranmore, even though their relationship was not ideal. Bill suggested that, for his own mother’s sake, he and Anita should keep up a pretence of staying together for some time. He was doubtful whether he himself could ever sire healthy children since, in the past, ‘with great misgivings’, he had tried to – with three miscarriages as a result. ‘Who knows that my weakness may not have contributed to that.’ He urged Anita not to consider his proposal emotionally but ‘to give it careful thought and consideration.’ He then dismissed Anita’s plans to stay with Tarka on Galway Blazer in September in the Mediterranean to keep the obviously full-term baby out of sight. ‘Its first few months are the most important, to look after it in a tiny boat might prove disastrous.’ He would allow Anita and Tarka to join him on the boat in the West Indies in the winter. This letter had a sobering effect on Anita, as it was meant to.
On 18 July Anita wrote to Rose from Mrs Burke’s hospitable house:
I can see I’ve done great wrong to both Peter and Bill … men have only meant disaster in my life – and I have only dealt out unhappiness … I’ll cope with the future as best I can, remembering one can’t go on getting married and unmarried and having babies – and just saying one does not realise what one is doing.
It was no hardship to remain hidden in Dublin, successfully breastfeeding but able to leave Tarka with a competent nurse in order to go to the ballet with Dr Solomons. For these outings, Anita dressed chicly but practically ‘in the Schiaparelli cardigan and all Aunty Anne’s old camisole tops as nursing mothers have occasional difficulties at meal times’. She planned to stay in Dublin until 1 August and then return to Oranmore, claiming that the baby had been born prematurely on 27 July – ‘no one notices or cares about time in the West’. Tarka’s birth would be formally announced on 12 September ‘when I’ll have been married 8 months’. She and the baby would then travel to Gibraltar and keep out of Ireland until the following May.
One of the first things that Bill had noticed about Anita was that she always managed to get her way against all odds. She was doing it now: what she wanted was to stay married to Bill, so she simply ignored his letter. Towards the end of her stay in Dublin, he came to see her. The nurse who had been looking after Tarka had to leave for her next case. Bill and Anita tripped over wet nappies, heated supplementary bottles and, over the following three days, after which Bill had to leave, seemed to have put their marriage together again. ‘I do love him,’ Anita wrote to Rose, ‘and having made a wrong decision must try to play it right.’
Bill left; Peter came back to help Anita during her last five days in Dublin. On 30 July Anita drove back to Oranmore, Peter holding his son in his arms. To Rose: ‘What a moment for Peter bringing his son to the home he built so much with his own hands.’ Mother and baby were installed in the tower room, the sunniest place and with a bathroom beside it. With Margaret Glynn, ‘our stalwart peasant maid who dotes on children’, to help her look after Tarka, Anita was able to spend the next two days in bed. To Rose:
It is strange to be here in the great vaulted hall where a yea
r ago I lay in a vacuum of weary despair and now be utterly obsessed by a new devotion – And here, in the turret with its great stone corbels at which I used to stare and its narrow carved windows where Peter strove to bring me back to health I have brought him something – He is mad about the boy – we share the enchantment – He is all plans for the future – to teach him to ride and swim and sail and dig and farm and know wild birds.
In this undated letter to Rose, which must have been written soon after the return to Oranmore, Anita revealed how she came to marry Bill:
All that last summer I was completely finished – the main spring broken so that I did not care about anything … So disjointed was my mind that it seemed quite normal and feasible to ask Bill to ‘invent’ a husband for me, call him Cochian, announce he’d fallen overboard and sail me around the world in a tiny boat – it never struck me questions might be asked or any of this considered extraordinary.
Out of this strange plan had come her marriage to Bill, a marriage that she had gone into lightheartedly – ‘so much of my life was charades – the idiocy of my mental engine at this time can be gauged in [sic] the fact that I thought it would all be fun for Peter’. Bill’s heart-stricken letter, offering to give her up, had amazed her: ‘After breaking myself I can’t realise there are other people in the world still to break afresh.’ She had clearly learned nothing from Peter’s distress over Philip’s visit to Oranmore the previous year. Somehow, things began to work out. Peter became the involved father of the child he’d longed for. Bill could sail away for months at a time, knowing that Peter would look after Anita. And Anita? She was determined to atone for her previous thoughtlessness towards both men. To Rose: ‘Although my whole being is centred on the child … I am conscious of two other children dear and sweet who also depend on me.’
Marjorie was still in Santa Barbara, where she found the climate good for her health, and Jack was in San Francisco, looking for a job and sampling the nightlife, particularly the bars. Unfortunately one of the men he met in a bar and to whom he had given Bill Vincent’s address, broke into Bill’s flat late at night, to Bill’s fury. Jack had a new plan: to get up a brochure for Glaslough and let it out to rich Americans, an idea he soon abandoned, to Anita’s relief. She was, as always, worried about her brother, writing to Rose of ‘the mixture of Catholic chastity – suicide and the other extreme’. She didn’t explain what the other extreme was.
That August the Ruck-Keenes stayed at Oranmore for three weeks. Anita was so slender that they thought that she had miscarried until they saw Tarka, who was two months old and large for his age. Unusually for August, often the wettest month in the west of Ireland, the weather was perfect. They swam, rowed out to seal islands and the Ruck-Keenes, perfect guests, did all the cooking. Anita, now ‘strong and calm’ and with an organized life, wanted Rose and Fleur to visit too – ‘Come and have a real rest in good air’ but Rose was ill and exhausted again and Oranmore didn’t sound like a good place in which to recuperate – ‘If the autumn gales blow we just sit indoors (plenty of air even there).’ As well as the possibility of gales, there were nine new greyhound puppies who needed a hundred saucers of milk a day. Rose stayed away.
Peter’s health was a worry too. To Rose, on 3 September:
He is so tired as to be almost gaga … has organised a sort of Chinese coolie life for himself – slaves from 7am till nightfall – unshaven – dressed in rags – a plate of porridge for breakfast – bread and marmalade at 3 for lunch – cocoa and bread for dinner at 10 and goes to bed too tired for a bath. And all for about £30 in profit from the farm … He’s so tired I haven’t the heart to ask him to carry the baby upstairs even – and he weighs 12 lbs.
Peter had toothache and a swollen face – and post-divorce problems. His ex-wife, who lived in Limerick, had appealed against a judgement ‘giving her only £700 a year’. She lost the case but wanted Peter to pay her legal bills. Anita suggested paying them in kind, ‘long to ship off a cart of puppies and little pigs to Limerick’. She still felt twinges of guilt: ‘Perhaps it was terrible of me not to marry Peter after the wonderful way he behaved last summer but he seemed to have purposely made a life which it was impossible to share.’
Tarka, on the other hand, was pure pleasure, sleeping through the night and waking ‘all yawny and stretchy and almost talks’. Anita was looking forward to taking him to join Bill in Antigua in the West Indies, to spend a sunny winter on the Galway Blazer. Unusually for such a self-centred man, Shane wrote to his daughter, objecting to the plan to take the baby on a long sea voyage. Anita replied huffily: ‘I am not taking the baby on any long cruise. Solomons recommended sunshine, sea bathing and fruit juice for us both so I am hoping to get on a French steamer in November direct to Guadaloupe and Bill can sail over from Antigua to fetch me.’ Shane had obviously reproached her for neglecting Marjorie – a major case of the pot calling the kettle black – for Anita told him: ‘I do realise how ill Mummy is and I am therefore planning to join her in usa in April. If she feels well enough to return for the summer we can return together with baby – if not she will at least see him and I’ll be back on May 1st.’
Shane also wanted to know who was going to take over the running of Glaslough. Anita’s tone remained tetchy:
It should be you. You have no other home but you won’t stay there long enough at a time. Otherwise Desmond but he only wants to make films. However, we all decided a year ago to leave the final decision until October 1950 and I’m sure that is best. We’ll all have a jolly summer there to discuss.
In a ps, she told Shane that she didn’t think Marjorie would ever come back to Glaslough permanently and that Bill, who was planning to represent England in the Bermuda Race in the summer, would be back in England by October, ‘just in time to decide if and on what basis he could farm Glaslough’. To his family’s embarrassment, Jack had proposed marriage to Anita’s friend Grania Guinness, who was astonished and angry at the proposal, as Jack was clearly not the marrying kind. Anita told her father: ‘I agree with her. A wife without love living in that large freezing house would be macabre beyond words. Glaslough only makes sense as a lovely family home with a young happy gay couple whose hearts are in farming and family life.’ She meant herself and Bill but this was the first time she’d mentioned the idea.
On Tarka’s supposed date of birth, 27 August, when he was actually nearly two months old, Anita had sent wires to Marjorie in America, Shane at Glaslough and Bill’s mother, Ina, in Angmering, West Sussex. Anita to Rose:
Bill’s sister Diana would go and have a son 3am morning of [August] 22nd – 6 hours after my supposed ‘landing’!!! A 9lb 6 oz boy – 2 weeks overdue – she’ll never forget the date. His mother knows all but I sent her a wire too to show to family etc. Her head must be spinning – 18lb of grandson in one night.
Richard Tarka Bourke Leslie King was christened in the Franciscan monastery in Galway on 11 November 1949, in the painted tin that was the temporary font. Old ladies with black shawls over their heads jangled their rosaries at the baby – ‘those who had no beads waved cigarette cartons and his poor bewildered little face turned purple with disapproval’, his mother noted. Clare, who adored the baby and was delighted that he was named after her late son Richard, appointed herself Chief Sponsor and wore a flowing cloak. Peter was godfather to his own son, and one of Tarka’s Protestant godmothers, Diana Daly, was, impressively, able to say the Creed. Most of the godparents were unable to be present: Patsy Jellicoe, General Gruss, the Governor of Strasbourg, Rose Gardner, Hermione Ranfurly, Admiral Ruck-Keene and Henry McIlhenny, the owner of beautiful houses in Donegal and Philadelphia. The christening was a simple little ceremony and, since the Franciscans weren’t allowed to accept money, Peter gave the friars two ducks and twenty eggs.
On 19 November Peter drove Anita and Tarka to Cobh, where mother and baby boarded the Britannic for New York, where Henry McIlhenny sent a car to bring them to his house at Lincoln Drive, Philadelphia. There life was ra
ther different to the rugged existence at Oranmore. Henry lived life on the grand scale. There was a party to celebrate the opening of the opera and a dinner for Anita. ‘Henry has certainly given us a wonderful time,’ Anita wrote to Marjorie who was spending the winter in Tucson, Arizona, ‘theatres and operas galore and his sister whirled me to her coiffeur and I had my hair done in a new way which everyone praises as very becoming.’ Tarka had a slightly snivelly nose and a doctor was called. He pronounced the sniveller
a beautifully healthy baby [who] should thrive in the West Indies, where he can kick bare and absorb vitamin C through his skin from the sun-drenched air. The doctor said this was a difficult climate [in Philadelphia] for babies as it’s cold and changeable and hard to give them enough air.
Fresh air was something of an obsession of Anita’s. Her childhood had been made wretched by asthma, which made it difficult to breathe.
Bill cabled that he had reached Antigua after about six weeks’ sailing from the Canaries, and Anita and Tarka set off to join him from New York. Until the following April, when not on board the Galway Blazer, her address would be the idyllic-sounding Beach Hotel, Parham, Antigua, West Indies.
16
A Sea Change
The story that Anita told in Love in a Nutshell, which was published in 1952, was that she and Bill decided to set sail in a 31-foot ocean racer to escape both the wildness and wet of the west of Ireland, and the eccentric household at Oranmore Castle. This included Peter wearing a bowler hat in an attempt to stop the rain dripping though the eight-foot-thick walls from also dripping down his neck, Clare dangerously swinging a mallet in the great hall as she hewed a limestone Madonna, and a clutch of thieving greyhounds.
Telling Tales Page 14