There was a further lapse: ‘Monty was wonderful with Tarka – a bit too wonderful as it turned out – Soon the child was laughing and joining in all conversation – accepting the Field Marshall as his particular pal.’ After lunch, Monty and the over-excited Tarka romped in the garden. Just before the Leslie-Kings were about to leave, Tarka leapt out of a bush and
in front of the detectives (and Sunday sightseers by gate) gave the FM a hearty smack on the bottom!!! I nearly died of mortification – Bill didn’t see – we snatched the child up and drove off hurriedly leaving Monty with an expression of absolute surprise on his face – the expression Rommel never succeeded in putting there.
Six months later on 9 December, Anita wrote contritely to ‘Dear Cousin Winston’:
My little son will never forget his visit to you in July – (I fear ‘Monty’ will never forget it either but he whirred the small fellow up into such a state of excitement as if it were the eve of Alamein). Next day he said to me apologetically ‘But Mummy you never TOLD me General Montgomery was a GREAT MAN TOO!’ (But don’t tell the Field Marshall this).
Anita and Tarka’s next trip was to the south of France, where they were joined by Jack and Desmond. Desmond was a regular visitor to the Côte d’Azur and was able to get free entry for his relations at both the de luxe Beach Swimming Pool and the Casino – ‘once is enough’, Anita wrote. In France both Tarka and Anita got chickenpox. Weary and poxed, she collected two other small boys, Paddy Jellicoe and Mark Leslie, and took them to Glaslough, ‘where I collapse in my large silent green room’. Many years later, when Desmond and Helen’s daughter Sammy was running Castle Leslie as a hotel, she retained the family bedrooms as ‘heritage rooms’, with notes on each written by Desmond. For ‘Anita’s Room’ he described his sister as writing her biographies in bed ‘while enjoying a simple diet of smoked salmon and champagne’, an unlikely diet for a woman who disliked rich food. Anita would have appreciated the room’s current, very restful, décor: white curtains and bed cover and a white-upholstered ottoman. She would also have approved of the generous radiator.
In the winter of 1959 in London, Anita and Bill were guests at a dinner party given by Duncan and Diana Sandys. Also attending were Oswald and Diana Mosley (née Mitford), neither of whom seemed to bear any grudge against their hostess, whose father, Winston, had had the pair imprisoned during the war as being ‘a danger to the King’s realm’. Diana Mosley’s cousin, Clementine Beit, had once told Anita that Diana was ‘politically calculating and dangerous whereas Unity was only a romantic fool’. Diana was also captivatingly beautiful; Evelyn Waugh said that ‘her beauty ran through the room like a peal of bells’. And since Diana was ‘the only person of the party not drunk and looking charming I settled on a sofa with her and discussed her “exile” in France’, Anita recorded. Oswald, whom Anita had not met before, joined the two women on the sofa. ‘It’s curious he shows such a good brain and yet is so dislikeable.’ Duncan Sandys became provocative: ‘Why on earth did you want Hitler ruling here Oswald?’ The answer: ‘I didn’t want Hitler. I wanted myself.’
That edgy occasion took place thirteen years after the end of the war. The sight of two old enemies dining together gave Anita a sense of closure: ‘I had a curious feeling of Epilogue – “Here the story of the war endeth.”’ After the conversation on the Sandys’ sofa, Anita found it ‘easy to understand Winston’s weakness for Diana M. He sent her and her baby “comforts” while she was in prison and tried to arrange for her to have a daily bath, not knowing that there wasn’t enough water to ensure this.’ In a memoir, A Life of Contrasts (1977), Diana wrote, ‘It had been a kindly thought of Winston’s who had, I suppose been told that this was one of the hardships I minded.’ Not everyone took such a benign view of Diana. In The Sunday Times (19 July 2009) Max Hastings wrote of her: ‘It is extraordinary that some people regard her indulgently as the Mitford family’s “fun fascist”. She was an impenitent Nazi sympathiser until the day she died.’ As was her husband, a fact recognized by most people in England. Oswald’s son, Nicholas Mosley, commented in a remark reported in the New Statesman in 1979, a year before Oswald’s death, that his father ‘must be the only Englishman today who is beyond the pale’.
In London again in the spring, Anita lunched with Clemmie Churchill and Diana Sandys at a time when another Churchill daughter, the actress, Sarah, had been on a bender: ‘The inevitable publicity – resisted arrest – fighting-drunk in Liverpool and wouldn’t pay her 2/9 taxi fare. As Diana said “awfully hard to turn into a plus – one’s only hope is that in time it will cease to be news and she’ll get smaller and smaller space in the press.”’ Anita reflected: ‘Well we have 3 absolute drunks as Leonard Jerome’s great grandchildren – Margaret Sheridan, Sarah and Randolph.’ Life was simpler in Oranmore. At Whitsun, it was Leonie’s First Communion: ‘She drove all over Galway being given 2/6 in each cottage. Came back with 30/- very red in the face and baccante like shouting “They liked my dress the best – I’m the richest and prettiest of all.” An eye-opener to Protestant Bill.’
Anita had begun another book. Like so much of her work, it relied on previous research carried out by Shane, discoveries in the Castle Leslie attics and Anita’s inventive mind. It was a life of Maria Fitzherbert, the publicly unacknowledged wife of King George IV and, through her adopted daughter, Minnie (or Minney) Seymour, who had married George Dawson-Damer, the father of Anita’s great-grandmother, Constance Leslie, almost a relation.
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Invented Lives
Shane Leslie spent much of his literary life enhancing the reputations of notable Catholics and Maria Fitzherbert was a favourite subject. In his 1917 book The End of a Chapter, he had written of Maria: ‘Whatever influence in the prince’s life was good came from her. Whatever unhappiness entered hers came from him.’ In 1939 he published a life of Mrs Fitzherbert and a volume of her letters and papers, taking the same chivalrous approach. Maria was put-upon and saintly; the prince, later George iv, ‘the uttermost cad in Europe’. As with so many of Shane’s biographies, his subject never came alive. His books were all about him, his opinions, his scholarship, his didacticism. Anita found her father’s life of Maria disappointing and knew that she could do better. She never had a problem bringing a subject to life, although her characterization didn’t always adhere to the life that was actually lived. She knew how to introduce colour and atmosphere and, unlike Shane, wrote with warmth and sympathy. Her biographies slide pleasantly through your fingers.
In her lifetime, Maria Fitzherbert had been the subject of scabrous gossip and rude cartoons. One of these, by James Gillroy, called ‘The Royal Exhibition – or – A Peek at the Marriage Heads’ (May 1786), is of George and Maria, bare-bottomed, with their faces shown on their naked behinds. The twentieth century was more polite towards Maria, although she was still seen as an equivocal figure. Since she destroyed many of her papers and letters – ‘Your quest will lead from bonfire to bonfire’, Shane had warned Anita – it’s still not certain whether Maria’s ward, Minney Seymour or her ‘niece’, Maryanne Smythe, were, in fact, her daughters by the King. George certainly seemed to think that Minney was; he gave her a dowry of £20,000. Anita’s Maria had a good head for finance, owning three houses and a fashionable carriage. On their secret marriage in 1785 she had managed to procure an annuity of £6000 from George and, when, after their parting, he sometimes fell behind with the payments, he got a sharp reminder: ‘Permit me to receive henceforward the allowance you promised me twenty-eight years ago – an allowance which the times have not increased in value.’
Papers that survived Maria’s bonfires were snipped to pieces by Minney’s daughter, Lady Constance Leslie, ‘in a fit of devotion to Queen Victoria who hated the Fitzherbert story … Scissors have cut out what one most wishes to know’, Anita wrote in her book’s foreword. But enough documents remained to inspire her to write a biography of the complex woman who was at the centre of the glamorous world of Regency England.
Here was a woman who was treated badly by the man she loved but managed to survive pretty well; a story familiar to her biographer. Although Anita’s style could be slushy: ‘Their eyes met for the first time – untroubled topaz and fevered grey’, she skilfully threaded in the love story of ‘a dangerously virtuous woman and a rather delightful rake’ with an account of what it was like to be a Catholic at the time of the Penal Laws, when English Catholics were ‘virtually outlaws in their own country, doomed to a life of secrecy and retirement’. Anita’s Maria isn’t just a devout innocent, neither is George just a contemptible cad. His failings are traced back to his cold, unresponsive parents, who allowed him to be ‘flogged unmercifully for faults in Latin grammar’.
Politics and passion are adroitly intermingled as Beau Brummel, the Duchess of Devonshire, Charles James Fox and Richard Brinsley Sheridan make their appearances. Of a later book, Anita told her publisher that a biography is interesting for what it doesn’t say as much as for what it does. This is certainly true of Mrs Fitzherbert. Without spelling it out, Anita hints that Maria had a financial steeliness worthy of Ivana Trump and that her tiara, which found its way into a Leslie jewellery box, might have been extracted from a prince whose ‘royal rubbery mind’ wobbled under the persistent demands of a predatory woman who was all backbone.
Patsy Jellicoe, always an enthusiastic hostess, gave a party in London to celebrate the book’s publication on 11 April 1960. The guests included Sally and Gerald Grosvenor, to whom Mrs Fitzherbert was dedicated, and ‘lots of cousins from the counties’. There don’t seem to have been any literary journalists, or publicists or anyone who might have been involved in the book’s promotion among the guests. Anita’s diary entry for the following day is about taking Tarka to the dentist and the rest of the Easter holiday in London was spent on outings for her own children and those of her friends: the boats at Regent’s Park, Disney films, the Tower of London and Tarka’s first visit to the ballet: ‘He loved it.’
Anita was the least self-conscious of writers. It’s as though she wrote books because that is what Leslies did and she didn’t suffer much over their composition. This may have been because she wrote biographies rather than novels. Michael Holroyd once remarked that ‘[b]iographers are like saints: they are always thinking of other people’. Anita didn’t have a literary agent or negotiate for higher advances. When her friend Virginia Crawley was given a £20,000 advance for a book on the Commando leader David Stirling, Anita was impressed but not envious because Virginia had ‘found it incredibly dreary to write’. She remained with the same publisher, Hutchinson, from 1948 (Train to Nowhere) until her death and looked upon her editors there, Harold Harris and Anthony Whittome, as dear friends with whom to enjoy sherry and gossip. To discuss advances would not have been ‘amusing’.
What she found increasingly pleasurable, from the 1960s onward, was to spend more time in England, visiting friends who owned well-maintained country houses and gardens, such as the one that was ‘all so English and beautifully kept-up with lawn tennis courts – so unlike the jungle-demesnes of Ireland with weedy hard courts deep in water’. Between these visits, she belatedly tried to improve her son’s education. In the autumn of 1961 a tutor came to Glaslough to coach Tarka for Eton – ‘huge bribes and presents but it all ended in tears over the Latin which he said had “suddenly got so difficult.”’ With a leaden heart, Anita delivered Tarka to a crammer, Mr Rolls, in Gloucestershire and then ‘drove the 4 hours back to Saighton Grange [the Grosvenors’ house] so unhappy at making the break with his utterly happy childhood’. Although she would probably have agreed with Nancy Mitford’s pronouncement on ‘The horror of not having been educated when young’, Anita, like her mother before her, could never see education as a priority and was concerned that schooling might get in the way of her children’s hunting. In the winter The Irish Field published a photograph of Anita, Tarka and Leonie at a meet of the Galway Blazers, and Tarka had ‘four good hunts before the frost turned the land to iron’. When the hunting ended, the search for a school began. In February 1962 Bill took Tarka to Scotland for an interview at Gordonstoun, which Prince Charles was about to attend. Suddenly the unfashionable school was oversubscribed. When Tarka told Bill that the interview and test were ‘all frightfully easy’, Anita wrote smugly in her diary: ‘Irish country life has certainly kept him natural and with the right values,’ and was delighted when the headmaster told Bill that Tarka
was so different at the interview from the others – had such a twinkle in his eye … so whatever the result one feels he has made his mark and one is grateful to the dear old village schoolmaster for giving him supreme self confidence without being cheeky. I feel sorry for the 55 little boys from non-twinkling boarding schools.
The mother abbess and the nuns of the Poor Clares convent in Galway prayed for Tarka’s success but to no avail. Tarka failed the test – ‘his math paper so very poor! Odd as its [sic] his best subject.’
Anita turned to Shane, who was well connected in educational circles, for help. He warned against his own old school, Eton, since he thought it turned out depraved boys – ‘This is why I did not send Jack or Des there’ – and suggested Stowe or Milton Abbey, implying that both schools had easier entry requirements. Anita understood his reservations about Eton when, disregarding Shane’s advice, she took Tarka for an interview at the school and found some of the older boys having tea at the nearby Cockpit restaurant ‘drinking tea out of a blonde’s slipper’. Anita now regretted that ‘the dear old village schoolmaster’ at Oranmore didn’t prepare his pupils for English public school entrance examinations, instead of letting them practise standing on their heads. A friend assured her: ‘You’ve taught your son more bringing him up in the west of Ireland than any school could,’ but she was upset when Tarka failed to get into Eton: ‘Tarka’s Eton attempt so bad in Latin and French that his housemaster advises not trying again in November.’ To her relief, Milton Abbey in Dorset, founded in the 1950s as a ‘forward looking school’, accepted Tarka. Anita’s final diary entry for 1962 is dated 23 August: ‘Wonderfully arranged houseparty [at Birr Castle] for Princess Margaret … She’s very pretty and exceedingly intelligent tho inclined to be difficult.’ Nancy Mitford, less inclined to deference towards the royal family, referred to the petite princess as ‘The Royal Pigmy’.
Anita and Bill were in charge of Glaslough but spent little time there. In 1962 they went on holiday twice with Roger and Xandra Frewen, first a skiing trip and, in August, one to Venice. By then the Leslie-Kings had had enough of Glaslough. The three farms were too much for Bill to manage and Anita, with Tarka at school in England and Leonie about to follow suit, had begun to think about buying a flat in London. According to the memoir of her sister-in-law Agnes the first sign of Bill and Anita’s dream of leaving was
a curious letter from Anita asking Desmond to take over Glaslough altogether; asking only for Drumlargen in return …Of course Desmond did not turn down the offer nor did he have any feelings of apprehension about having to run such a large demesne without the necessary capital.
In his 2010 biography of Desmond, Desmond Leslie (1921–2001), Robert O’Byrne tells the story of the handover in more detail. Trying to keep the estate solvent took up Bill and Anita’s time and energy, although they were only jointly co-owners with Desmond and Agnes, who were not involved in the day-to-day management. When the Leslie-Kings offered to transfer the estate to Desmond, he dithered, so exasperating Anita and Bill that they then offered to buy him out completely for £20,000. More dithering. Desmond was doing well in London composing music for films. So was Agnes, her singing career given a spectacular publicity boost when Desmond, in front of eleven million viewers, landed a punch on the critic Bernard Levin during a live television broadcast of That Was the Week That Was for having given Agnes’s cabaret show a poor review, the amplification system having failed. In the autumn of 1963 agreement was reached: Desmond would run Glaslough, Bill and Anita would retain Drumlargan. Nothi
ng about this was recorded in Anita’s diary during the previous spring and summer, when negotiations were getting increasingly frantic. Instead she wrote of her sorrow at the death, from cancer, of Pope John xxiii on 23 June: ‘There will never be anyone like him – I have lived in the time of a great saint.’ It upset her that the Pope’s last days were darkened by ‘the tyranny of modern medicine which with drugs draws out a dying and can only alleviate with the false effects of morphia’. She wasn’t alone in loving this man, who reached out beyond the Catholic Church to the whole human race and had been named Time magazine’s Man of the Year in 1962.
Three days after that June diary entry came another:
From the fascinating elation of Pope John’s death to the bathos of Profumo!!. One is wracked with laughter – so sordid – so silly – such an ass and the whole Tory party ludicrous with indignant explanations and trying to make it not matter – much!!
And then: ‘Poor Philip P was so easily embarrassed anyway. One really is so sorry for the family – but can’t stop giggling.’ I have been unable to trace any connection between Anita’s erstwhile fiancé and John Profumo, the disgraced Secretary of State for War, whose affair with Christine Keeler led to his resignation on 5 June, followed by that of the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, the following October.
The next diary entry isn’t until 1 September and is dramatic: ‘Made over Glaslough to brother Des … A creech owl drowned in the Fountain before I left – I hope this does not mean I have handed the place over to its doom.’ Anita’s uncle Seymour wrote her a farewell letter, thanking his niece for making it possible for his family to live in one wing of the castle – ‘our little hermitage! A sort of link between several epochs … I think both of you will be happier without this distant burden.’ In 1964 the Sir John Leslie Estate Company was wound up. Relieved of the distant burden, Anita began to look for a flat in London. Leonie was now a London schoolgirl, her previous lack of education revealed when she received minus ninety in her first test.
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