Determined that Tarka would own at least a part of Glaslough, she didn’t consider how he felt about her controlling his assets or how he saw his future. The letter that Tarka wrote to her on 4 December must have jolted her.
This Leslie half-world that exists either has to be held together or absolutely forgotten about. It is rather sad that such an interesting old family should suddenly come to such an end but you can see that it is hard for Mark, Shaun, Leonie and I to keep the Leslie spirit as it was when none of the grown-ups talk to each other and are eccentric. The army has provided me with a home and I feel stable for the first time in years. The tension is disappearing from my brain.
‘I feel stable for the first time in years.’ He couldn’t have written anything more wounding. To give her children a more secure childhood than her own, Anita had rooted herself at Oranmore when she longed to travel and given them a healthy, seaside life, free of pressure or the need to compete. It was lucky that, about this time, Peter Wilson and his wife came back to live in Oranmore, at Rocklands, the house which Anita had found for them. Peter immediately took over the irksome business negotiations. Anita was able to tell Tarka:
Don’t worry darling about Glaslough – Peter and I are working like beavers with Desmond who is a very tricky customer and is extremely EVASIVE about selling the Cor Meadows … he may possibly have sold them already … and does not wish to tell me so.
On the last day of 1970 an agreement was formalized between Desmond and Tarka that gave Tarka ‘the lands and premises’ for £46,924, paid for by Anita. The demesne lands had beautifully soothing names: Mullanlary, Mullaghjordan, Killyconnigan, Telayden, Tullyree, which belied the fraught transactions involved. Anita’s letter to her son did not address his concerns about Glaslough or ask if he approved of her purchase on his behalf. Anita tended to ignore other people’s desires if they didn’t coincide with her own.
Anita, as well as settling land on her son, had also shaped his career. Tarka had left Milton Abbey in 1967 with three O levels, hoping to join the Irish Guards. But without a more impressive academic performance or a hefty private income, he was turned down. Instead, he went on the hippy trail and was drifting around India when, he told me, ‘Anita arrived in Delhi in a swirl of sun hats and, within weeks, I was at Mons officer cadet school.’ Anita was putting her wartime contacts to good use. Betty Holberton, a friend since mtc days, had, in 1943, married John Nicholas Rede Elliott, an mi6 Intelligence Officer who had known Anita in Beirut where Anita’s job on the Eastern Times had allowed for some ladylike snooping. It was Elliott, a devoted friend of Kim Philby, who, in 1963, had been sent to Beirut to tell the double agent that the game was up, an episode grippingly recounted by Ben MacIntyre in his book A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (Bloomsbury 2014). In 1970 the Middle East was getting interesting again. In November the Syrian minister of defence, Hafez al-Assad, had toppled the civilian government in a bloodless military coup. Nicholas Elliott needed someone in the region who could set up an informal network, prior to the intelligence services moving in. He approached Anita, who had kept up several friendships made in the Middle East during the war. She said that, at fifty-six, she was too old for the job but suggested that Tarka might go, if some legitimate way could be found to get him to the region. The army proved to be the way. Tarka was admitted to Mons after being grilled by ‘a couple of grey-suited men at a strange office in Berkeley Square’. Impressed by the young man’s contacts with Chinese train bombers in Malaya, they were prepared to overlook his lack of academic qualifications and a private income. ‘Elliott briefed me privately at his home before each interview. Very good cellar.’ The Regimental Colonel of the Blues and Royals, Field Marshall Sir Gerald Templer, who, in the immediate post-war years, had been Director of Military Intelligence at the War Office, invited Tarka to tea at his house in Wilton Street, Belgravia, and said that he had been told that ‘I had a brain but no idea how to use it.’ After training at Mons, Tarka was posted to Nicosia, Lebanon, Germany and Cyprus. He managed to have a dazzling social life wherever he went.
As Anita fought to secure farmland for her son on an estate that bordered Northern Ireland, it didn’t seem to occur to her that this was becoming a place where members of Her Majesty’s Armed Forces would not be welcome. Her concerns about his stint in the army were all about his health. She issued lists of confused instructions:
Don’t drink quantities of liquid – weakening to lungs – Remember my tip weak whiskey and water (NOT SODA) … Remember the BODY BELT! Only heart and kidneys matter … My chief hope is that you went to bed early, ate well and did not drink anything except wine. Remember BULK is bad for lungs – keep liquid intake SMALL. Don’t get in the habit of swilling beer – it exhausts the kidneys which in turn put too much elimination work on the LUNGS. When drinking with the boys can’t you – owing to your pneumonia – just order a single whiskey, fill the glass up with water and sip it while they take in the 4 – 5 – 6 pints they think manly. Two single whiskeys a night in a LOT of water are as intoxicating as 6 pints of beer but less bulky. STRONG whiskey is bad for the liver. Learn these things and you will find you can drink a little in full control and yet NOT appear to be unsocial or NOT MANLY. The SECRET is to decide exactly what you want to drink – order your whiskey and pay other people’s rounds while making it last their FOUR.
There were more demented letters, full of lurching capitals, as Anita, in London, tried to keep track of possessions and reunite them with their owners:
WHERE has the Augustus John drawing disappeared to? It was in the hall when I left for Ireland Aug 7 … I found the cherub head among my shoes. Daddy arriving without pyjamas! What a pair you are! I am sending the rather grubby underwear so you can wear out and throw away … Nothing I could send from here except those brown boots with sham cowboy look! Can’t believe you actually want those?
Packages that Anita despatched to Tarka at his various postings – ‘plimsolls and brown shoes – two bath towels’– sometimes failed to arrive:
It must be stuck in Army PO [post office] as once the parcels reach that stage the ordinary PO can’t follow up for secrecy [sic] sake!! … What am I to do with the heaps of things on the floor? TINS and old underwear? Am I to SORT IT OUT and THROW ANY away OR keep?
Peter, more calmly, also wrote to Tarka. He and Prim had been visited by Peter’s son Roddy, who was getting divorced, his small child and a Dutch nanny and had turned the box room at Rocklands into a nursery. Both Tarka and Leonie realized that Peter was Tarka’s father but the subject was never discussed. It was considered bad form to speculate on one’s parentage. No longer responsible for the Oranmore farm, Peter enjoyed watching Bill hard at work saving the hay. Peter and Anita hunted and rode together and went to each other’s dinner parties, all past anguish forgotten. Peter still had a knack of getting things hopelessly wrong. He thought that the bad situation in Northern Ireland was bound to improve as more local girls married British soldiers and even that girls from the Republic were travelling to the North to raid the army for husbands.
1970 ended with Tarka making headway in a new career, Bill progressing steadily along the world’s seas and Leonie at art college in Brighton. Anita, in between wrapping up parcels doomed, like so many things she touched, to go missing, had made some progress on the book which, in 1974, would become her greatest success. The west of Ireland, like the rest of the country in the wake of the Troubles in the North, became embroiled in the general nastiness and ill-feeling. At Mollie Cusack Smith’s New Year dance, Gardaí were stationed at the door as threats had been made and Mollie’s daughter, Oonagh Mary, was in tears in the kitchen. Anita frequently mentioned Oonagh Mary in her letters to Tarka, hoping that he might marry her. Such a match would have lured Tarka back to Oranmore and the hunting life that Anita longed to share with him.
In the spring of 1971 Anita joined Bill in Australia, where Galway Blazer II had put into Perth. She wrote to Tarka: ‘Galway Blazer is the first
5 ton boat to sail non-stop from England to Australia through the Roaring Forties [strong westerly winds found in the Southern Hemisphere] so Daddy has achieved one record.’ They lived on the boat and were much feted, giving several interviews. This was pleasanter than the voyage described in Love in a Nutshell. From their complicated wedding when, it seems, Anita had married Bill just to give her unborn child a name and the Glaslough servants a day to remember, they had settled into a loving and companionable marriage. ‘The triumph of love consists, not in winning, but enduring,’ as the diarist James Lees-Milne, put it. In Jennie, Anita wrote that her great-grandmother, Clara Jerome, advised: ‘“Never scold a man, my dears. If you do he will only go where he is not scolded.” This piece of wisdom was passed on to three generations.’ It was certainly passed on to Anita, who never scolded Bill for sailing around the world, leaving her to cope with the horses and to write the books that financed the household, although she insisted that her writing was not a full-time occupation.
While this well-adapted pair were visiting Betsan in Queensland, Desmond was explaining his financial situation to Tarka:
You can imagine, dearest T, what my inner life has been like these past 7 years, waking up night after night struggling with seeming impossible problems and shortfalling solutions … I have given much prayer and thought to Glaslough all these years and believe that I can see a Guiding Hand at work.
He believed that Tarka had lived at Glaslough in a previous life, perhaps as his great-uncle Norman Leslie, ‘Otherwise I don’t think you’d feel as strongly as you do, and as I do, about the sacred trust and burden to preserve Glaslough for the New Age of Aquarius.’ He would perhaps not have dared to write in such hippy-dippy terms had Anita not been on the other side of the globe.
In August, while Desmond and Helen were in Dublin, Anita and Jack visited Glaslough. She was dismayed by the state of the place, writing to Roger Frewen:
The golf course scheme is apparently OVER. It looks like stony desert – all thistles – where the topsoil has been scraped off – meanwhile that lies in hummocks of nettles … The house is an untidy shambles – everything moved around all wrong and of course the drawing room ruined by loss of the Bassano.
This referred to the painting of the Flight into Egypt by the sixteenth-century north-Italian artist Jacopo Bassano. Desmond had sent it to be auctioned at Christies in order to raise more money for the estate and, in particular, his latest scheme: a village of artists’ and writers’ homes. It was hoped that many artists and writers would be lured to the Irish Republic by the then finance minister Charles Haughey’s 1969 tax exemption legislation. But although some British artists and writers came to live in Ireland to take advantage of Haughey’s scheme, many of them left again, feeling threatened by the increase in ira activity.
Tarka was now stationed in Cyprus and Anita wrote him almost daily letters, describing the restless goings-on within the family. ‘What turbulent artistic blood we Jeromes all have – it’s that mixture of Red Indian and pioneer White – infused into English aristocracy – we just can’t settle down.’ She also instructed her son on how to control hounds and, although Leonie seemed more than capable of meeting men, Anita ordered Tarka: ‘Tell your friends to ring her up here [the Cleveland Square flat] from now on and ask her out without letting her know I told you she is here!!’
On 24 June Xandra Frewen remarried. She was thirty-seven and her new husband, David O’Grady Roche, the son of an Irish baronet, was, according to Anita ‘23 (looking a wan 18) … I feel it will end in about 5 years – more forlorn infants’. The wedding reception was awkward. Although the bride looked ‘perfectly beautiful in new white outfit flowers in hair’, Xandra’s mother, a classmate of Anita’s at Westonbirt and wearing a ‘super mauve silk outfit’ was drunk and tearful and ‘cursing Roger [Frewen] for being such a damn fool and allowing all this to happen: “Why didn’t I go to Court and get it stopped – I could have proved he was living with 5 other women!!”’ The bridegroom’s parents stayed away.
At the Christie’s auction the following day, the Bassano failed to meet its reserve of £25,000 and was withdrawn from sale, ‘Desmond taking it calmly – champagne parties at the Ritz to cheer himself up.’ The painting sold later that year. Leonie showed early signs of entrepreneurship by taking a job as a waitress at the Chelsea Kitchen in the King’s Road and ‘phoning all my friends to come and order lots of wine so she gets a “wine bonus”, as well as her £20 wages and tips’.
Anita disliked literary gatherings, where she was bound to meet ‘clever’ people, or people who thought they were clever, but she agreed to take part in a discussion of Irish Writing to be staged at a festival organized by her friend Lady Birley at Seaford in West Sussex. ‘The “Irish Talk” was ghastly,’ she told Tarka:
It lasted 2 hours instead of the usual ¾ - Elizabeth Bowen drivelled on and on – gaga and with a stutter … No one spoke properly into microphones and Pa [Shane] walked out muttering ‘Are they speaking Irish or English – I can’t hear!’
It was a very disorganized festival. Leonie was put in charge of Irish crafts but with ‘no prices so she could not sell to fury of visitors’. Later, ‘the whole cast of Glyndeborne Opera [sic] arrived in costume starving having sung since 5 – to wait an hour for a vast cauldron of burnt rice – which wasn’t enough for sixty!’
She had told her son the previous year that he wasn’t to worry about Glaslough but now she wrote: ‘Now darling concentrate on finance – Tell me exactly how much you have in your current account.’ She then explained how things stood with Desmond, which was how things usually stood, with Desmond pressing for payment and Anita holding off as long as possible. To Tarka: ‘do not deal with Desmond direct. He is so hysterical.’ She was working hard on the book whose working title was ‘Edwardian Romantics’. She wrote to Harold Harris: ‘When can I have an advance and could it be large? I am buying back the farmland of Castle Leslie for my son and need all available funds – Why do I seem to make so little money?’ Jennie had sold well in the uk but Anita had given a quarter of her royalties to Seymour for helping with the research and Ralph Martin’s book had captured the American market, so it did not make her fortune.
Shane and Iris now lived in the seaside town of Hove, in Sussex. In July, Shane fell and broke his arm. He had an emergency operation and was found to have an enlarged prostate gland. Although shaken, he was still so strong at the age of eighty-five that his family wasn’t too worried about him and it was a shock when he died on 14 August. Anita wrote to Clodagh Roden: ‘It has left us immensely sad – his going – and curiously surprised.’ To Kathleen Abercorn, she described Shane’s funeral at Glaslough. To make room for the burial plot, two of Anita’s hunters had to be moved out of the orchards where they grazed and ‘escaped in the Pinetum where Tarka feared they’d poison themselves.’ Tarka, in a borrowed tailcoat, had to coral the horses during a hot morning before taking his place in the cortège, in a rather flushed state. The Bishop made ‘a splendid oration’ about Shane’s lifetime effort to fuse his own Anglo-Irish tradition with the older Gaelic one but he was overshadowed by the interesting presence of both Desmond’s wives. ‘Helen sat next to Bill in her see-through mourning gown and I saw his eyes rolling nervously towards No 1!’
Her father’s death brought home to Anita her folly in handing Glaslough to Desmond, a move that Shane had been against. She was trying to finish her book, scheduled for publication the following spring, but she found time to go with Bill and Tarka for their annual shooting holiday at Henry McIlhenny’s Glenveagh Castle in County Donegal. This was after she had spent the summer entertaining up to fifteen people at a time in the old tower at Oranmore, cooking ‘a vast meat meal in the Great Hall every evening’. Shane’s Requiem Mass was held at Westminster Cathedral on 5 October and then Anita went back to Oranmore, to spend the winter in the restored, centrally heated stables. The castle and outbuildings were now more civilized than they had been immediately after the war when
George Jellicoe had complained of the cold and the fish that slithered through the slit windows.
On 21 November, her fifty-seventh birthday, she went hunting – ‘jumped more than 57 walls’. She was concerned about the dangerous situation in the North, blaming it on the British governments of Harold Wilson and Edward Heath. In 1971 Heath wanted the Republic of Ireland ‘to close 300 mile border to ira when they [Heath’s government] are the cause of all this disaster’. She blamed Wilson for letting Terence O’Neill be thrown out and for sending in British troops and Heath for imposing internment. It was no longer safe for Tarka to come home on leave, ‘yet in Cyprus he is with Irish troops for games’. It seemed the right time for Tarka to get an Irish passport which, since he was born in the Republic, he was entitled to. He was advised to wear civilian clothes for his passport photograph.
Bill set off for another leg of his voyage at the end of 1972, from Australia. When he was about four hundred miles southwest of Fremantle, a large sea creature, either a whale or a shark, badly damaged his boat. Bill, hanging over the side, carried out emergency repairs on the shattered hull with ropes, tape and rubber for three days, before he was able to limp back into port at Fremantle. He set out again shortly afterwards but a faulty radio meant that he was out of contact for five months. When Galway Blazer ii was finally sighted the following May, Ivor Key, a reporter on the Daily Express, interviewed Anita in New York where she was publicizing her new book, of which more later. Although it was clear that she had endured five very anxious months, Anita was stoical:
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