Telling Tales

by Penny Perrick

  This is how the tale unfolds: ‘“Bill,” I exclaimed, “you are a sailor! Let’s go away. Let’s go around the world in a little boat!” “All right,” he replied slowly.’ The announcement that a baby would be the second mate was later made to the boat builder. ‘I was glad not to be present on the day when Bill announced he wanted a swivel-cradle hung over the chart table.’

  The book is a delicious – to use one of Anita’s favourite words – romp, rather in the manner of a nineteen-thirties screwball comedy. Anita is hopeless at sea, ditsy and forgetful, while Bill is organized and masterful, and Tarka thrives in the sunshine. It strikes both Bill and Anita that after years in a submarine (Bill) and sleeping in an ambulance (Anita) that it was odd for them to choose to live for months in a small boat. It seemed somehow fated, as was the lack of decent food, similar to the situation at Oranmore when, on the rare occasions that Anita remembered to shop, the dogs got to the dinner first. They couldn’t always escape the rain either. On Christmas Day, in what was meant to be the dry season in Antigua, it rained without cease. Anita, typically, had not yet organized shore marketing, so Bill was put in charge of the festive meal, which turned out to be Bemax and raisins with rancid tinned butter mixed with rum. When Anita grumbled, Bill said: ‘I thought you liked simple fare. There wasn’t much to eat at the castle as far as I can remember.’

  There are jokes and banter and gossip about life on the more than a dozen islands they visited and glamorous episodes when Anita, in a slinky, sequinned dress, and Bill, in a white dinner jacket, are guests on sleek yachts and at airy villas, while Tarka is looked after by doting native maids. Towards the end of the voyage, Bill decides to enter a yacht race in Bermuda, and Anita and Tarka are flown home. Anita accepts that her husband will always choose a life at sea whenever he can and reflects: ‘I infinitely prefer good-tempered men emerging occasionally from dangers they enjoy than thwarted hearties who stay at home and are cross.’ Love in a Nutshell is all sunshine and blithe spirits, as the couple sail through five hundred miles of blue-green waters.

  While they were happily afloat, Marjorie was fretting in Tucson. She wrote to Shane, at Glaslough:

  When Anita and Bill get back from this foolish yachting trip, I think they would be the ones to take on Glaslough. She would make a wonderful hostess, Bill had always been mad to farm and it’s a grand place to bring up a child. Then Jack could stay there when he liked.

  Marjorie alluded to some scandalous behavior of Jack’s. ‘He swears, however, before God, that never never again would he do anything the way he did before at Glaslough, and I know he wouldn’t, the terrible lesson sank in too deep.’ To ensure Jack’s future good conduct, Marjorie was going to ‘keep an eye on a widow, however if a celebate [sic] life in the Glaslough climate should appeal to one’. Marjorie was ill; even the mild, sunny Arizona climate didn’t relieve her pain. She hadn’t left her cottage for a month and spent part of the day in bed. She complained to Shane that all he did was to get cardinals to pray for her ‘and put in the papers that I am dying … But if I were able I would gladly come back to you at Glaslough, in fact, wouldn’t have left if I had thought you were going to settle there.’

  At the beginning of 1950 Jack was in New York but wrote to Shane that he was planning to return to Glaslough in the middle of February, when he intended to plant some more trees on the estate. Later on, in the summer, he planned to bring over five daughters of leading American families, ‘for twelve dollars a day a piece!’ He asked Shane to see that the piano was tuned. Desmond and Agnes were also laying claim to Glaslough That year, Picture Post magazine sent one of its most celebrated photographers, Haywood Magee, to photograph the handsome couple at Castle Leslie. In one picture Agnes is asleep in a Venetian baroque bed; in another Desmond holds Titus, a live owl, while striking a pose in the Long Gallery.

  Alone at Oranmore, Peter was planning his future. He wrote to Rose that he would never give up Tarka and was determined not to let any offspring of Bill and Anita live at the castle. Since Anita owned the place, it is not clear how he intended to do this. He had always poured out his heart to Rose and now, in a series of letters, told her how much he loved her and how close he felt to her. Anita, from Grenada, in April, on the last leg of her voyage, also had plans. She wrote to her father:

  If you go to Eton on June 4th, you can put down baby’s name as Bill does not want him to go to Dartmouth [Bill’s alma mater] – says too young to decide a career – and says all his friends who went to Eton were glad they had. His official name is Richard Burke Leslie King – and we may put a hyphen between the last two.

  Anita was growing impatient with Shane’s eccentricities; she warned him not to wear his kilt when he visited her friend Diana Daly in Grosvenor Square, ‘as they are conventional and the Duke does not wear Scotch clothes in London’. Shane had always made his daughter feel that she was dull and uninteresting, and she had always taken his reputation as a brilliant conversationalist on trust. Now, her self-confidence boosted by marriage and motherhood, she recognized that her father was a pompous buffoon with his kilts and faux-Celtic traditions.

  Meanwhile, the unusual set-up at Oranmore was causing comment. Anita, after her long trip, was staying with Bill’s mother, Ina, at Angmering, when Peter wrote to Rose that people were beginning to guess at the real circumstances of Tarka’s birth and that he didn’t care, but Anita did and was worried that Philip might find out and laugh at her. Peter admitted that if Tarka was kept from him for too long he would threaten disclosure and, disingenuously, told Rose that he wasn’t a good liar. Anita was coming under criticism over her behaviour, Peter Gardner being among those who had taken against her. Anita wrote to Rose:

  As he feels as he does, I will never spend a night under your roof – for it is his roof also and I want him to be told this immediately. If there is no question of his ever seeing me there [the Gardners’ chateau at Fontainebleau] there should be no danger of disagreement between you on my account – I have done enough harm without causing argument between you two.

  Anita wrote to Peter Gardner by the same post, telling him that she would never stay under his roof and asking him not to divulge anything about her that Rose may have told him for, as Anita told Rose: ‘He knows that which I wish he did not and has spoken of it to my great detriment.’ Dan Ranfurly also expressed his disapproval of Anita. Anita to Rose:

  I suppose one ought to notice one’s friends have husbands but Dan and Peter [Gardner] have never really existed for me until suddenly they become preventatives of my seeing you or Hermione. Let’s hope that Peter does not object to your visiting me in Ireland or we shall never be able to meet – not even once in 18 months.

  Rose and Anita continued to write to each other. Anita often referred to the subject of her marriage to Bill: ‘I did not want to marry either Pete or Bill – but felt it imperative to marry someone.’ Life with Peter would, Anita felt, be spent picking potatoes, so ‘Bill seemed a better idea and at least he was a companion to go ski-ing with and he was thrilled to sail off in a boat. At the time it seemed a good plan to me and the marriage at Glaslough gave enjoyment to our faithful old employees.’ She and Bill were not sure about their future plans. They would be prepared to run Glaslough as long as they were given carte blanche, or Bill might take up the offer of being the skipper of a trading schooner, running from Bermuda through all the West Indies. Bill had also expressed an interest in climbing Mount Everest. Anita disclosed to Rose that the voyage on Galway Blazer had not been quite the way she would depict it in her forthcoming book, Love in a Nutshell: ‘We were so busy and often over-exhausted on the boat there was no time for discussion – it was all baby’s next meal and drying sails and the time we could stay at each island.’ She had wanted to call the book Life in a Nutshell but her publisher had insisted on ‘Love’. ‘Well, well, who cares.’ At the time, Bill was in New York, fitting out Galway Blazer with new racing sails and a shorter keel in preparation for the Bermuda race. In this uncert
ain autumn, Marjorie, to her family’s surprise, came back to settle at Glaslough. Anita to Rose on 20 October 1950: ‘So Jack feels he must clear out but Bill does not want to run it for him.’

  Marjorie knew that she was coming back to die. On her death on 7 February of the following year, Anita wrote to Rose: ‘Her poor sick body was an impossible burden – it tortured her – she longed to go and only wanted to be surrounded by affection and love.’ A few days before Marjorie died, Peter had brought Tarka to see her. ‘In Tarka she saw a sort of resurrection of herself – something she had created through me – “never was there a child with such a soul”, she kept saying, “he’s unique.”’

  The kidney infection that caused Marjorie’s death worsened so quickly that Desmond, Jack and Shane, who were in London, could not reach Glaslough before she died. By the time the doctor telephoned them, the last scheduled flight had left and the private plane that they then hired arrived too late. Agnes was in London too, nursing her son Sean, who had mastoiditis. As she was reading to the little boy at 5 am, doors opened and shut, the temperature in the room dropped and rose again and Sean reported that his pain had gone. When Desmond rang to say that his mother had died at 5 am, Agnes already knew. For Shane, his wife’s death was an occasion for high drama. ‘Pa drove us all demented,’ Anita told Rose:

  He wore Mummy’s black velvet teagown as a toga over his belt, laden with black sealing wax – the most important thing he could think of. Thank heaven the kind Alexanders have taken him off our hands and he can use up all their note paper writing lamentations for Shane Leslie.

  Marjorie had been much loved. The oldest gardener at Glaslough left his sick bed to say a rosary in her room and there were tributes from everyone who had known her, from the Queen of Spain to a kitchen maid who had benefitted from Marjorie’s kindness when the girl had given birth to an illegitimate baby twenty years before. The President of Ireland, Sean O’Kelly, walked for two miles behind her coffin. The first Catholic member of the Leslie family to be buried at Glaslough, she was laid to rest within the grounds of the Protestant church in a separate enclosure, which she had had built by the churchyard wall.

  Soon after his mother’s death, Jack decided to move to Rome and a company was set up to run Glaslough, of which he was managing director. The other directors were Anita, Bill, Desmond and Agnes, Anita holding fifty-one of the shares, an arrangement that would cause trouble in the future. Clare, aware of the muddle and uncertainty at both Glaslough and Oranmore, told Anita comfortingly: ‘Destiny has a queer way of working out tangled threads.’ Clare was convinced that Tarka would inherit Glaslough, in spite of Desmond and Agnes’s hopes of securing the inheritance for Sean.

  It had been two years since Anita had seen Rose, who now, for the first time, visited her at Castle Leslie. The house was bitterly cold so Rose took Anita to Dublin, a visit which was far more enjoyable than their stay in Paris, when Rose had been ill and Anita suffering from morning sickness. Rose was much stronger now. After she left Anita wrote, somewhat enviously: ‘You really can see things clearly and decide what you want and do it.’ This letter, which Anita wrote at Easter, was full of woe. Peter was being intolerable in spite – or perhaps, because of – having a willing red-headed girl helper. As for Oranmore Castle: ‘I thought it was going to be a small project – a sort of little base one could close for six months of the year – A place to have my own things in and perhaps let! Not an encampment for Peter and his incredible serfs.’ A note of martyrdom creeps in:

  Now one must just make the best of things and both Glaslough and Oranmore which have sapped the last of my youth and been the backgrounds to my own unhappiness take on a new meaning – They are both wonderful places to rear children … There does not seem any escape open and I am too old to try forcing the issue … For Tarka it’s alright – I can’t ask more.

  Bill, too, came in for criticism.

  He says he’s ‘expended’ finished with any attempt at a career and just ready to drift on the sea, or plod up mountains or dig a compost heap! How can I help him do any of these things? It is better he should lead his bachelor life and leave me in peace to organise the real nursery.

  Paul was on this list of unsatisfactory men. ‘Someone said to me once in Cairo “never hesitate about getting rid of Paul – he’ll always find his feet.” And he has.’ Paul was back in Ireland, training the country’s Olympic team at his friend Colonel Joe Dudgen’s equitation school. One of the young trainers, Elspeth Gailey, remembered Paul fondly because he supported her use of spurs when Colonel Dudgen questioned it. And Paul had married again, perhaps for the fourth time. His new wife was the former Joan Freeman Mitford, nicknamed ‘Rud’, a cousin of the famous Mitford Girls, and the widow of Guillermo de Udy, who had died in 1941. According to Mary S. Lovell, author of The Mitford Girls (2001), Jessica Mitford, a great friend of Joan’s, and her husband Bob Treuhaft, disliked Paul intensely. Jessica referred to Paul in a letter (22 April 1959) as ‘Rud’s ghastly husband’. ‘Well, of course, men are a rotten lot,’ Anita went on to write in Edwardians in Love (1972). This comment came from the heart. Anita’s doleful account of her uneventful and confined life in the letter to Rose didn’t mention that Love in a Nutshell was about to be published, or that she had started on another book, or that she was having a baby.

  She was in London on 13 April for Marjorie’s Requiem Mass, which was held at St James’s Church, Spanish Place in the West End of London. It was a sunny day and the church was filled with Marjorie’s friends. Not her husband, however. Shane was in Maryland, trying to drum up rich American customers for the hotel that he was planning to run at Glaslough, an idea originally mooted by Jack. That spring, Anita suspected that Rose’s third marriage was in trouble. Rose appeared to have left the chateau that she had spent years restoring and moved to the Place Vendôme in Paris. Anita skirted round the issue, writing only, ‘Let me know what you now call yourself – Vincent or Gardner.’

  Anita spent the summer at Angmering with Ina. Anita loved this house, both for the central heating inside and the balmy Sussex air outside. Bill, who now took organic farming seriously because of its perceived benefits to Anita’s health – she suffered constantly from bronchitis – was studying farming at Honey Tye Farm in Leavenheath, Colchester. He described himself as ‘an Irish peasant farmer and single issue organic maniac’. He intended to build a four-room thatched cottage with, Anita delightedly told Rose, ‘an Ideal boiler – central heating and bath water and all electrified as well – as the chief misery of life in Ireland is the complete inability of the houses to cope with the climate – the castle is really only habitable for 6 months a year.’ Peter, oblivious to cold and discomfort, ‘is there for ever as far as I can see’. He was building a series of what Anita called hideous, untidy sheds that ruined the landscape. In Ina’s warm, comfortable house, Anita was outlining a life of her great-grandfather, Leonard Jerome, a project that had previously and disastrously been embarked upon by Shane and then, in the face of Winston’s disapproval, abandoned. Anita understood that she would have to seek Winston’s approval at an early stage of writing.

  Leonie Rose King was born on 10 October 1951 in the Red Room at Castle Leslie, in the four-poster bed in which Marjorie had died eight months previously. She was the first, and so far the only, baby to have been born at Glaslough. Soon afterwards Anita and both her children moved in with Ina. Bill was still in Colchester but he and Anita had acquired a 334-acre farm in Drumlargan, County Meath. The land belonged to the Leslie estate and was given to the couple as part of the 1951 business arrangements. A photograph of Leonie’s christening on 11 December at the Brompton Oratory shows Shane, kilted and sporranned, and Anita in a chic, full-length coat and a very Parisian-looking hat. Leonie’s two godmothers, Winnie Carlton Page and Mary Soames, Winston’s daughter, are wearing drab ‘utility’ suits with sagging skirts, perhaps the only kind available in a still-rationed England. Six years after the end of the war, Anita and Ina had been grateful f
or the nylons and food parcels that Shane had sent during his American visit.

  At Oranmore the centrally-heated cottage, built for £3000, a ten-minute walk from the drafty castle, was taking shape. From this cosy base, Bill would be able to farm and hunt, and it was close enough for Peter to see Tarka every day. The children could have the freedom of the castle during the summer months and live in the cottage during the winter. Anita to Rose: ‘We can all farm, make compost, have lovely fresh food and hope for happiness – not in nagging each other’s souls out but in making a busy healthy background for a new generation.’ Although Peter was still cause for complaint – ‘it only depresses him when I try to explain the unbearableness of life with him not only for me but for any woman’ – Anita sounded positive about the future and her spirits rose further when Love in a Nutshell was published in 1952 by Hutchinson in the uk and Greenberg in the us and was well received on both sides of the Atlantic. The Field: ‘An uncommonly good narrative, enchantingly described in a language always witty and often wise.’ Guildford, Connecticut Times: ‘The book is highly recommended to any reader who wants laughs and some down to earth opinions on the business of living together, family style.’

  1952 and 1953 were bumper years for Leslie publications, new additions to the autobiographical ‘rows of books upon the shelves’, which Swift had disparagingly noted. Desmond, together with an eccentric American flying-saucer enthusiast, George Adamski, wrote Flying Saucers Have Landed, a successful book, which, according to Agnes, made Desmond ‘a household name with the lunatic fringe’, and much in demand for lecture tours. Shane published An Anthology of Catholic Poets to a somewhat quieter reception. The Leslie authors were put in the shade by Winston who, in 1953, won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was also governing the country for the second time, the Conservatives having won the October 1951 election, when Winston was seventy-seven years old.