She flew back to Ireland in the middle of October. A diary entry: ‘Tarka said: “Mummy, don’t go away again. I don’t like it” and I knew I never wanted to – not till they are grown up – 3 months away in 6 months has broken my desire ever to travel again – They are in my mind wherever I go – and they need me now – They won’t later.’ But the next month she flew to London for the uk launch of The Fabulous Leonard Jerome, now number thirteen on the American bestseller lists. She went to Winston’s eightieth birthday party at Downing Street – ‘I was lent a wonderful dress by Worth – Bill said the best there.’ She hunted in Galway throughout the winter and returned to London for Clemmie Churchill’s seventieth birthday party, the last that the Churchills would hold in Downing Street: ‘Winston sad at going – forced to by Eden and Macmillan.’
An extraordinary thing had happened at the end of 1953: Peter Wilson left Oranmore. From being embedded in the muddy, windswept farm, working too hard, unwashed and living on bread and marmalade, he first travelled the world and then settled in the Bahamas at the home of Nancy Oakes. She was the daughter of the tycoon Sir Harry Oakes, whose murder in Nassau, on 8 July 1943, remained unsolved. At the time of Sir Harry’s death Nancy was married to Count Alfred de Marigny, who was accused of the murder on the false testimony of two corrupt detectives, brought over from the usa by the then Governor of the Bahamas, the Duke of Windsor. De Marigny was acquitted but because of his contemptuous attitude – he described the Duke as ‘a pimple on the arse of the Empire’ – was deported from the country. He and Nancy were divorced in 1949 and, in 1952, Nancy married Baron Ernst von Hoyningen-Huene. By the time Peter Wilson arrived in the Bahamas that marriage was shaky and another divorce followed in 1956.
Peter Wilson may have decided to go to the Bahamas because Dan Ranfurly, whom he knew, was then governor, while another acquaintance, Peter Gardner, was his adc. Dan’s term of office ended in 1956, and he and Hermione left for England the following year. Peter Gardner stayed on. He opened a restaurant, Sun And, in Lakeview Drive in Nassau and it became fashionable among the glitterati: The Beatles, Sean Connery, Winston Churchill, Frank Sinatra. For part of the year Peter left the restaurant in the hands of a deputy and ran Snow And, a similar restaurant in the fashionable skiing resort of Kitzbuhl. Peter Wilson also made a life in the Bahamas, working for an unlikely employer, Harold Christie, a property developer and, during Prohibition, a bootlegger. Christie had been a friend and partner of Sir Harry Oakes and was widely believed to have murdered him. He had motive enough: he owed Sir Harry money and the latter had called in the loan because he was planning to move to Mexico. Sir Harry’s death meant that the loan needn’t be repaid. Christie subsequently became a property millionaire and was knighted in 1964. William Boyd gave a fictional account of this murder mystery in his gripping novel Any Human Heart, in which Christie is the main suspect.
Peter Wilson, who had always professed a longing for simplicity and a loathing of corrupting wealth, was a strange employee for the dodgy property developer who had acquired Cat Island, south of Nassau, where, some believe, Christopher Columbus first stepped ashore in the New World. Known as an ‘out island’, sunshine and tropical lushness apart, it shared some of the features of the west of Ireland: ruins of great houses, poor, decent inhabitants and, something that would have appealed to Peter, ‘the feel of true isolation’, as described by the travel writer Benedict Thielen in Holiday magazine (December 1964). Peter, the only white resident of the island, was in charge of Christie’s land there. He planned on returning to Oranmore at some stage and, in a transaction negotiated by Anita, bought Rocklands House, near the castle.
Anita was thriving. Her children were old enough to travel and her diary entries, while short and not very informative, have a sunlit quality. The incessant rain seems to have given way to balmy summers. Tarka and Leonie, the Jellicoe children, and Desmond and Agnes’s boys enjoyed ‘Heavenly months of sunshine and laughter’ at Oranmore. In England there was ‘a delightful day with the Lysaghts in the Wye valley’, ‘a jolly night’ with Pooh in Oxford, as well as opera and dinner parties in England, stalking at Glenveagh in Ireland, ‘one stag rolling on his back in the sunshine – too sweet to shoot’. In September 1955 the Leslie family gathered at Glaslough to celebrate Shane’s seventieth birthday: ‘He took it very gloomily with closed eyes and groans’ before Anita, Bill and the children moved back to Oranmore and the centrally-heated cottage for the winter.
Tarka was six and his education had begun, with lessons at Monaghan Convent during the summer and home-schooling by Anita, using pneu teaching methods – short lessons lasting twenty minutes with the emphasis on real ideas – during the hunting season at Oranmore. She was delighted by her little son’s unselfconscious religious convictions: ‘The maturity of his vision astounds me. Everything I have ever let drop of my own religious beliefs evidently has sunk deep into his imagination.’ A letter from Tarka to Peter Wilson: ‘Dear PP [Poppa Pete] I saw two dragonflies get out of their skins – just like me when I die.’
Anita’s friends were going through harsher times. Sally Perry, who had married the severely wounded Gerald Grosvenor, heir to the Duke of Westminster, during the war, gave birth to a stillborn child and was unable to have another baby. After a visit to the Grosvenors in February 1956, Anita wrote in her diary: ‘Sally so lovely and so sad – her twin sister dying of paralysis and herself childless.’ And that romantic pair, Patsy and George Jellicoe, were coming adrift: ‘Patsy writes miserably about how awful George is – drunk and after floozies.’
In May Anita and Bill took the children skiing in the Austrian Tyrol. Then on to Rome to visit Jack and wave rosaries at the Pope in St Peter’s Square: ‘I never dreamt how impressive he would be – a radiant personality of love and pity.’ Not a universal view; this was Pope Pius xii, whose wartime papacy was, to say the least, controversial. She took the children all over southern Italy, bringing back wartime memories, before they returned to Oranmore and Tarka’s lessons. The pneu school, run by Miss Faunce and Miss Lambert – ‘teachers of genius’ – had been the only part of her education that Anita had enjoyed. It had instilled in her a love of poetry and literature and ‘the sensuous delight of words’ before Marjorie’s habit of shifting her daughter in and out of different schools had brought this bright period to a close. Anita’s next school had been the detestable Convent of the Sacred Heart, which had offered no delight, sensuous or otherwise.
In the summer of 1957 the King family sailed the Brittany coast and that winter, hunting at Oranmore, ‘Tarka got the brush.’ In March they set off again for three months, the trip beginning with skiing at Klosters in Switzerland with the film director John Huston’s children, Tony and Angelica. At the age of forty-four Anita had enough money to give up writing for a few years. Her aunt Anne had left her money to Marjorie, who, in turn, had left it to her children. The Fabulous Leonard Jerome had sold well. No longer trapped at Oranmore, Anita spent a lot of time packing suitcases, something that always filled her with pleasurable anticipation.
18
They All Talk Amusingly
Anita now spent more time in London, where she led a heady social life. ‘They all talk amusingly,’ her diary records, ‘but then London lives are unhealthy and to me unliveable.’ Patsy Jellicoe had established herself as a patron of the arts, throwing interesting parties for new friends, including the prima ballerina of her time, Margot Fonteyn, and writing and lecturing on Far Eastern Art and garden history. But her marriage to George was coming to an end. Anita’s undated diary entry: ‘[Fonteyn’s] amusing, witty Panamanian husband [Roberto “Tito” Arias] sought to cheer up Patsy who was given a black eye by George last night when she refused a divorce (for the sake of her four children).’ George persisted in trying to obtain a divorce and, in 1958, resigned from the Foreign Office to avoid scandal. He told an inquisitive reporter: ‘Half London must know I want to marry Mrs [Philippa] Bridge.’ He was able to do this, and start a new family, in
1966 when his marriage to Patsy was finally dissolved. He resumed a distinguished political career, becoming Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Lords, but it came to an end in 1973 when an involvement with call girls was exposed in the press. George said: ‘I behaved with incredulous stupidity.’
All this was in the future. In early 1958 a tearful Patsy waved goodbye to Anita as the latter sailed to New York on the Liberté for a social visit to New York, Philadelphia and Palm Beach.
Bill and the children had gone ahead to Andros Island in the Bahamas, staying at the house of Audrey Pleydell-Bouverie, who had created a beautiful garden. When Anita arrived there she was greeted by Bill and Peter Wilson, who seemed to be staying at the house, both men ‘dressed in tatters, Eton ties and naval jackets’, while her children introduced her to ‘a whirl of little black friends’. On 15 May Anita wrote to Shane that this holiday was ‘Bill’s first real rest since he took over Glaslough’, although he seemed to have taken quite a few recent skiing breaks. They had a wonderful time, ‘swimming in blue water, coral reef, snorkel-gazing at small brilliant fish, barracuda catching … hide and seek and calypso with negro children in garden! Heaven.’ At the end of it, they were seen off by Peter Wilson and Peter Gardner and his small daughter Fleur, ‘a brown-eyed Rose’.
This long holiday took place in term time. Tarka was now a pupil at the Boys’ National School at Oranmore but Anita took a relaxed attitude about his attendance there. She and Bill intended Tarka to go to Eton but were bypassing the traditional route of pre-prep followed by prep school, which most parents of future Etonians considered essential for passing Eton’s entrance examination. Anita paid the Oranmore schoolmaster to teach Tarka English grammar instead of Gaelic. When her son told her that, after four years of lessons, he had learnt only how to stand on his head in the hard playground, Anita decided that he was a natural Huckleberry Finn.
Meanwhile Shane, his Eton days long behind him, and short of money, was selling the library at Glaslough, a collection of books and manuscripts that had been housed at Castle Leslie since the late eighteenth century. The library’s contents were sold to John Fleming, a rare-book dealer who, like Shane, had worked with A.S.W. Rosenbach. Fleming paid £1500 and the collection was subsequently resold to the University of Chicago. Later Shane sold many of Winston’s books and letters, items much in demand as ‘Winstomania’, a term coined by Shane, took hold.
Back from the Bahamas, the Leslie-Kings went straight to Augustus John’s studio at Fordingbridge, Hampshire. John made two drawings of Anita, both so beautiful that Bill found it hard to choose between them. The one that Anita described as ‘tranquil instead of wild-eyed’ was shown on the cover of her 1983 memoir, A Story Half Told. She wears an expression both world-weary and faraway and has a perfect maquillage – dewy, red lips, long, dark lashes – and a soft cloud of hair. In the memoir published two years earlier, The Gilt and the Gingerbread, the cover portrait is by her former brother-in-law Serge Rodzianko, drawn during the 1930s, and Anita’s pretty face is a blank canvas, with none of the sexual allure of the later version.
There was less travelling during the winter months, when Anita hunted with the Galway Blazers. The Joint Master of Foxhounds (mfh) was Mollie Cusack Smith, who had given up a successful career as a London couturier during the Second World War to live in Ireland, where for thirty-eight years, from 1946 to 1984, she ruled over horse and hound. Bill and Anita hunted with the Blazers two days a week and with Mollie’s own pack, the Bermingham and North Galway Hunt, of which Anita became Joint mfh, for one further day. As well as hunting in Galway, every September Anita stayed with Henry McIlhenny at Glenveagh Castle, Donegal for more strenuous activity: ‘Lots of stalking – I seem to get fitter each year.’ If she got tired, a ‘Nature Cure’ diet of lettuce revived her. She had always associated food with asthmatic attacks and ate very little. Meeting her dashing wartime friend Gavin Astor, now ‘a plump red faced balding middle aged gentleman’, she noted in her diary: ‘Food and drink is really the destroyer of youth I suppose.’ In 1958 she doesn’t seem to have begun a new book of her own but helped Bill to write The Stick and the Stars, the first of seven books about his life of sea.
There were two unexpected marriages that year. Peter Wilson married Prim Baker, a former Wren and professional gardener. Audrey Pleydell-Bouverie, Anita’s hostess in the Bahamas, didn’t approve. Visiting Anita in London, ‘she held forth on Peter – his indiscreet tongue and “second rate snob-wife”!!’ On 30 May Shane married Iris Carola Frazer, née Laing, in London, ‘in great privacy in the little Catholic church round the corner’, as he described it to Clare. ‘Our chief thought is to pray for the souls of our dead spouses.’ Unlike Marjorie, Iris regarded Shane as a great literary figure and devoted herself to putting his papers in order, to help a future biographer. Another couple were having marital problems. Desmond Leslie had had many extra-marital affairs and had even fathered an illegitimate child but Agnes had put up with his infidelities. Now, during a five-week-long holiday in Kitzbuhl, he had met and fallen in love with Helen Strong, a tall, beautiful blonde who, it being a small world, had been staying with the Ruck-Keenes. Agnes and Desmond’s marriage continued unhappily for the next few years, with Anita an unwilling go-between. Once, when Desmond was lunching with her in London, ‘Agnes burst in tearfully to enquire where he was living etc and I tried to sustain a calm discussion of children’s holiday plans – it is trying not having any address at which to write to him.’
At Whitsun, at Oranmore, it was Tarka’s First Communion, ‘thrilled by his new suit and white socks covered with medals and amulets from all the convents around … Leonie was envious and dreadful all day’, Anita wrote in her diary. Afterwards the family went to Glaslough, ‘frantic with guests and cattle’. Among the guests was Rose’s stepmother, Derry Vincent, ‘who told me about Rose – that exquisite creature takes drugs – she loves me still but the lack of balance is too intense for us to communicate’. This was all Anita had to record about the woman she had addressed as ‘Darlingest’ for most of her life. During that Whitsun holiday Charles de Gaulle became president of France. Anita’s diary: ‘I believe implicitly in de Gaulle – He is so unlikeable and so uncompromising and so admirable – just the iron rod that can save France IF anything can.’ She chafed peevishly at the sluggishness of Glaslough:
Now I long to be in Paris/Algiers with my thumb on the pulse of Europe – oh it is a cage here – a beautiful prison in which one’s mind rots – But the children and their blooming fills my creative instinct. Only them – or I’d die of boredom.
Although she insisted that she could never live in London, ‘in a milieu of very smart women on stilt heels, their toes ruined by the new pointed shoes’, she went there often, having supper at ‘a bohemian club in Chelsea’, dining with politicians, where the talk was of the Westminster village rather than the cattle pasture.
On 10 June, although Anita and Bill were now in charge of three farms at Glaslough, Oranmore and Drumlargan, the last one needing to be ‘entirely rehabilitated’, they went to England: ‘I had asked Clemmie if I might bring Tarka to see Winston as at nine and a half he will take him in … I was sure the psychic import of Winston’s personality would register on a child’s mind.’ Clemmie had written that Winston was much changed, weak and deaf and that he wouldn’t remember what he did in the war. ‘I think he will though’, Anita wrote in her diary. The invitation for lunch at Chartwell was 6 July, so the Leslie-Kings made a round of visits to the English countryside before arriving at the Churchills’ house in its woodland setting in the Weald of Kent. At Audrey Pleydell-Bouverie’s home, Julians, in Hertfordshire, whose rose garden was admired as the most beautiful in England, ‘the house [was] set like a small jewel in the centre of its fountains and banks of flowers’. Audrey, old and frail, ‘whose wit has amused everyone from Queen Mary to Winston’, toured her garden in a wheelchair. After a kitchen supper at the house of her friends Aidan and Virginia Crawley, Anita wrote, ‘S
he cooks about like me’, which is to say atrociously.
In a long diary entry for Sunday, 6 June 1958, Anita wrote ‘Mustn’t forget this day!’ There was no chance that she would. They arrived at Chartwell to find Clemmie in bed with shingles and too ill to see them and her daughter Diana Sandys acting as hostess. ‘Tarka had been warned to be very good and only speak when spoken to and he watched Winston with huge eyes. At lunch he and I sat between Winston and Field Marshal Montgomery! Some company for a small boy to make conversation to!’
At the other end of the table with Bill and Diana sat Winston’s literary agent, Emery Reves (1904–81), a distinguished writer, publisher and art collector whom, in 1939, Winston had sent to America to boost pro-British propaganda. Emery was too brilliant for Anita. She described him as a ‘Hungarian Jew very clever who has lovely villa at Rocquebrune where Winston stays to the raised eyebrows of proper old ladies who don’t approve of Wendy R.’ Wendy, also at the table, was Emery’s mistress – they married in 1964 – and was a Texan-born Vogue model. Their villa, where Winston was a frequent guest, was La Pausa, built in the 1920s by Bendor, Duke of Westminster, for his mistress Coco Chanel. The ‘proper old ladies’ may have disapproved of Wendy Russell, as she then was, but she captivated everyone else. Noël Coward, another frequent guest at La Pausa, thought that Winston was ‘absolutely obsessed’ with this ‘most fascinating lady’, although he doubted that Winston would ever be unfaithful to Clemmie. Anita admitted that Winston found Wendy ‘restful’ and then, spitefully: ‘She exactly resembles a Peter Arno caricature of a gorgeous poule – huge eyes, huge mouth – startled stare – deliciously brainless and rather sweet.’ This waspishness may have been caused by the sight of Bill and Wendy ‘making eyes at one end of the table’.
Telling Tales Page 17