At the end of January 1980, three armed men stole a car outside the Castle Leslie equestrian centre and used it to kidnap a Mr Foster, whom they had mistaken for a member of the British security forces. They treated him roughly, before realizing their mistake and freeing him. He was found on the road six hours later, counting himself lucky not to have been shot. Anita to Iris: ‘Glaslough has now become horribly dangerous … Life is one long worry – and over it all looms the likelihood of Word War iii.’ Lord Rossmore, at nearby Rossmore Castle, ‘said that for the first time he felt the absolute hopelessness of trying to live there’. But Anita spent the summer at Glaslough, helping Tarka and Jane get in three thousand bales of wet hay with the help of just one farmhand, Jack Heaney. He had worked there for forty years, couldn’t handle a tractor but could lift a bale of hay that Anita only managed to roll along the ground. Jack was entitled to the full agricultural wage of £50 a week, unlike the farmhands of Anita’s childhood, who received less than £3. It annoyed her that other people’s enterprises were profitable. To Harold Harris: ‘The village hotel-pub (which I sold for £1,000) does a roaring trade outside our gates – A turn-over of £20,000 a week – wedding parties – Bar packed every night – and the 1840 Agents house is a Riding Club for continentals at £200 a week! It’s a mad world.’
She wrote to Betsan that although Glaslough had ‘become the most dangerous place in Europe … five men were shot dead within a mile of the house last winter’, Tarka and Jane loved farming there. She was, as she did so often, deluding herself. Tarka and Jane were expecting their first baby and wanted a safer haven than a home on the Irish border. Tarka did some creative cattle-dealing and bought Pentridge House, in the gentle Dorset countryside. Anita disapproved and showed her displeasure by misspelling the name of the house when she wrote to him. To everyone else she pretended that Pentridge House was a godsend. To her friend and neighbour Tim Gwyn Jones, owner of Lough Cutra castle in Gort: ‘Thank heavens! Tarka/Jane have upsticked and bought a house near Salisbury that they fell in love with at first sight – only 10 acres – just right in size. Damnably expensive but just where they want to be.’ She didn’t visit Pentridge until 1985, when Tarka’s daughter was born, commenting only: ‘It’s really rather nice.’
The police had advised Tarka and Jane to move out of the Glaslough stables, which they had lovingly restored, because the stable block was a ten-minute walk away from the farmyard and screened by wooded avenues. But it wasn’t the ira that torched this dangerously isolated homestead but the brand new flue for the wood stove. Irish wood is the worst possible fuel because it’s usually damp and exudes resin, a cause of chimney fires. Malfunctioning heating appliances caused the Leslies more trouble than violent republicans. Fires became blocked, boilers broke down, resulting in icy rooms and passages. The owners of Big Houses spent much of their lives in a quest for warmth. In the early 1980s Desmond described most of Castle Leslie as being ‘an energy-saving, environmentally-friendly deep freeze, which is why no one with any pulmonary troubles can survive there in winter’. Oranmore Castle wasn’t much warmer. Anita, thin and inclined to bronchitis, would have sold her soul for central heating. She wrote to Tim Gwyn Jones that she would love a visit but although there was a log fire in the Great Hall and the south door had been permanently sealed she advised him to wear ski togs.
On 2 March 1981 a second wave of hunger strikes by republican prisoners began in Northern Ireland. Over the summer ten men starved themselves to death; one of them was Bobby Sands, who had been elected as the anti-H block candidate on 9 April. He died on 5 May after sixty-six days on hunger strike and ten thousand people attended his funeral. The hunger strikes were overshadowed by the engagement of the Prince of Wales to Lady Diana Spencer and their wedding on 29 July. At a ball given by the Welsh Guards to celebrate the royal engagement, Jane wore the Fitzherbert tiara, the last of the Leslies to do so before it was sold at auction in 2010. In May, just before the publication of her first volume of autobiography, The Gilt and the Gingerbread, in which the young Rose Vincent featured entertainingly, Anita was told of Rose’s death. She had assumed that Rose had died years before, ‘And yet’, she wrote to Anita Burgh, ‘to learn that she no longer breathed on this earth made the most extraordinary sensations arise’. Rose, once ethereally slender but grown plump in middle age, had spent her last years in Rome, moving from hotel to hotel with her borzoi dogs. Anita was horrified to hear this. That month, there was an ominous lull in ira violence but many people, including Anita, expected renewed trouble in June, when London would be packed with tourists, in England for the royal wedding.
Jack had somehow convinced Tarka that he still had some ownership rights at Castle Leslie, infuriating Anita, who wrote to her son: ‘Remember that Jack no longer owns anything at Glaslough … Jack’s assent to the selling of any object he does not actually own means nothing whatsoever … You must realise the facts of legal ownership.’ Jack had the same gift of losing money as his two siblings. To help pay off some of Desmond’s debts, he had sold a house in Rome near to the one he lived in. Anita continued her letter to Tarka:
Meanwhile Rome property has soared and if he still owned that house it would be worth 1 million $ but he doesn’t! He has over £10,000 sterling a year to live on and the Badia [Jack’s country house in Tuscany] – he owns nothing else – Desmond owns Castle Leslie and the gardens and you own the land. I now own nothing but Oranmore Castle and its 16 acres. Pa has sold out and owns nothing in Ireland!
Anita then turned her attention to the dinner party that Tarka and Jane were planning to hold at Cleveland Square on 1 June:
I suggest starting with avocado pears filled with caviar, then chicken purchased hot and just cooked from Selfridges and salad, then tinned fruit salad strewn with fresh fruit and endless biscuits and cheese? But its YOUR show and you and Jane must do it as you like – I won’t appear (except to work in kitchen!) It quite amuses me to see young people stuffing.
And then the magnificent pay off: ‘I am dining out on June 1st with my old cousin Duke of Portland – the last duke and duchess – But can help you till 8 pm.’
The summer was darkened by the death of three-year-old Jessica Finn in August. Anita wrote to Harold Harris:
I feel I must let you know – and NO sympathy is required because it’s been the most extraordinary and wonderful experience of my life … I believe she came to us for a great scoop of love – not for a full life with all its complications and since she left I feel her strong vital spirit as never before.
And to Anita Burgh: ‘Since she has gone Jessica means more and more to me – She just dipped into human form for a time to get something she needed – and never for one moment have I felt it was cruel chance.’
In October Anita made a six-day trip to New York, as the guest speaker at the Churchill Library Memorial Lunch, a fundraiser that attracted wealthy sponsors. Not a woman to do things the easy way, she flew back standby on Air India to save the well-heeled committee money. Tarka and Jane’s son William was born in London on 22 November and started life in Cleveland Square before he and Jane went to Hampshire to stay with her mother. From cold, damp Glaslough, Anita wrote to Harold Harris that she realized that it was no place to bring a baby: ‘I’ve always adored my house but can see that now it’s in a war zone … So I can see that whatever England’s problems it has something to offer and the isolation of Glaslough no longer appeals.’ She had managed to get back to Oranmore before snow blocked all the Monaghan roads and was enduring the usual wintry conditions of the Atlantic coast. To Harold: ‘The gales blew – then we had huge waves and feared inundation by the sea but tide abated just in time – electrics and telephone broken but now mended and the men discovered rats had chewed through the lines as well!!’
As always, Anita had financial problems. Although her biography of Jennie Churchill had been given tax exemption, subsequent books hadn’t, the Revenue Commissioners who decided such things having judged them ‘non-creative’, una
ware of how many of the scenes and conversations in them were very creative indeed. Anita intended to fight the judgements book by book, a costly and irksome business. ‘It is so exhausting to be suddenly faced with such an unexpected dilemma,’ she wrote to Harold. The ways of the tax exemption committee were impossible to fathom; literary biographies could be denied the exemption, while ghost-written memoirs by politicians and sports stars were accorded it.
That winter at Oranmore, Anita and Bill carried kettles and buckets of hot water to the cows’ ice-covered drinking troughs. At Castle Leslie, Desmond and Helen tried, and failed, to light the wood stoves with damp wood. Tarka’s cattle, under cover in the farmyard, had to be given water from the lake since the water-tank, installed by Tarka’s great-grandfather, had cracked from the cold. It was impossible to drive even as far as the lodge gates. In this year of birth and death, violence and change, the September publication of Anita’s memoir, The Gilt and the Gingerbread, was hardly noticed by the chilled and overburdened family. It was dedicated to Fleur and Rebecca – Rose’s daughter and granddaughter. Rebecca was the daughter of Rose’s son Peter Burgh and his former wife Anita. The jacket reproduced a pastel portrait of Anita Rodzianko, as she then was, by her brother-in-law, Serge Rodzianko. She looks so dreamily pretty, so untouched by life that it’s hard to believe that the portrait was conceived during her hellish first marriage.
Anita’s writing was always best when she stayed close to home. The memoir ambles through Leslie family history, not altogether truthfully but always delectably. Only someone whose grandmother constantly admonished ‘Smile dear, it costs nothing’ and whose great-aunt advised ‘One must always pretend the sun is shining even when it isn’t’ could write with such a determined lack of self pity. Anita had enough material to write a misery memoir but, fortunately for her readers, not the inclination. She shrugged off the general unlovingness of her parents, apart from the observation that her father would have preferred his children not to have been born. As for being abandoned in the detestable Roehampton convent, there is only the mock-tragical comment: ‘The incarceration was complete, as if we were in prison.’ She doesn’t quote from her anguished letters to Marjorie, written from the various unsuitable schools where she had been dumped. Those woeful notes from a neglected and humiliated child would not have been ‘amusing’ to read.
Anita was not the first writer to describe the nastiness of the debutante Season but was perhaps the first to so exactly pinpoint its ideal in the afore-quoted: ‘This was what all mothers hoped of their daughters – maximum sex-appeal with the minimum of sex experience’. She writes lovingly of Castle Leslie, which ‘blinked its sixty plate-glass windows at the lake’ and, like its chatelaine, Leonie, gave Anita a sense of belonging. ‘An Irish childhood does something to one’s toes, causing invisible roots to grow into the soil,’ she maintained. The last chapter of the book, ‘War 1940’, noted the end of the phoney war and the start of the killing, which would continue for six years. ‘How lucky I was to be husbandless, childless, unloving and unloved.’ Not quite true but, to quote Sir Leslie Stephen, editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, ‘No good story is quite true,’ and The Gilt and the Gingerbread is a very good story.
‘Anecdotal’, ‘conversational’, ‘entertaining’ were the words reviewers reached for. In Books & Bookmen Brian Masters complained that ‘There is little sign of a struggle to build a work of literature.’ Anthony Powell, in The Daily Telegraph, struck by Marjorie’s attitude towards her daughter’s education, got to the heart of the matter: ‘Perhaps the chief point that emerges is how greatly all children dislike not being given an opportunity to learn.’ In the Irish Sunday Independent, Ulick O’Connor appreciated the stories about Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough, described by Anita as ‘hideous yet exotic, surrounded by a moving carpet of King Charles spaniels’. He thought the book was ‘a charming autobiography’ and looked forward to a second instalment in which Anita would continue ‘to paint for us a unique picture of a society in its dying years’. But, when this second memoir was published two years later, there was little about declining Big Houses and their impoverished owners. It was all about troops, prisoners of war, ambulance drivers, battles and wartime leaders – a picture of a society in its fighting years.
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The War Revisited
Gay Byrne, the popular Irish broadcaster, chose The Gilt and the Gingerbread as his top Christmas book buy for 1981 and so did Montgomery Hyde in Book Choice magazine. Once the first print run of four thousand copies had sold out, Hutchinson, unaccountably, allowed the memoir to go out of print, losing the Christmas market. Anita, who scorned to use an agent, wrote in anguish to the now retired Harold Harris, who reproached Hutchinson’s managing director, Brian Perlman, but to little avail. The situation was made worse when Anita noticed that Molly Keane’s novel Good Behaviour was on sale everywhere. She and Molly, two quirky chroniclers of a vanished Anglo-Irish world, had appeared on television together but, while Anita’s book quickly became unprocurable, Molly’s was sold to an English television company and, adapted by Hugh Leonard, aired the following year. In the spring, Anita, a staunch royalist, was cheered up by receiving an invitation to the ‘Authors of the Year’ party at Hatchards bookshop in Piccadilly, to be attended by Her Majesty the Queen.
In June 1982 Anita brought the sybaritic Roy Miles to Glaslough for a two-day visit. Accustomed to delicious food, he was surprised that Sunday lunch, which Anita cooked, consisted of half-cooked baked potatoes. When these had been eaten Anita disappeared for a while and then came back with ‘dessert’, a box of chocolates mouldily past their sell-by date. The chocolates had been given to her some time ago by Anthony Whittome, her new editor at Hutchinson. She wrote to him: ‘Your chocolates proved delicious and fed us all on Sunday when I blithely organised lunch in the old dining room prior to Roy’s departure.’ Roy found Anita’s frugality as baffling as she found his extravagance. When he flew back to London from Belfast after that unsatisfying lunch he paid £20 for the convenience of a guaranteed seat, shocking Anita, who always flew standby.
That autumn was the last one that Anita, Bill and Tarka would spend a week stalking at Glenveagh; Henry McIlhenny had gifted the estate to the Irish state and was moving permanently to his house in Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia. ‘The only person in Philadelphia with glamour’, Andy Warhol called him. Anita wrote to Roy:
I suffered from the disappearance of all pictures … the Stubbs and all the Landseers have gone to Philadelphia and to me who had grown accustomed over 35 years to look up and see them it was most melancholy – Of course he is right – life must be lived and it’s no good as Michael Rosse said ‘letting houses kill you’.
Did it occur to her that Glaslough too was a murderous sort of house?
There were two general elections in Ireland in 1982. In the first one, on 18 February, Charles Haughey’s Fianna Fáil government was narrowly returned. Anita’s opinion: ‘Charlie H & Co all crooks but very merry ones’. In the second election, in November, the merry crooks were defeated and Garret Fitzgerald became Taoiseach, for the second time, in a Fine Gael-Labour coalition. Anita’s view: ‘Fitzgerald is the best brain in Ireland but hamstrung by always being in coalition.’ Uncertainty in the Republic, terrorism in the North persuaded Tarka to shed some of his responsibilities at Glaslough. He sold Dawson’s Lodge to his uncle Jack for 24,500 Irish punts. The plan was for Jack to rent it out. He commented: ‘As a last resort the Gardaí might make suitable tenants.’ Tarka, living in Dorset, working in County Monaghan, had double loyalties. In December he attended a ball at Knightsbridge Barracks in aid of the dependants of those members of the Queen’s Lifeguard of the Household Cavalry who, on 20 July, had been killed by an ira bomb as they rode out to Whitehall. At about the same time he contributed to an event, held in County Monaghan, for the destitute families of imprisoned members of the ira. Agnes, living in Dublin, begged Anita to get Tarka away from Glaslough. Anita wrote to Jack: ‘It is
such a worry – I really hate him living there at all – and wonder if he realises the constant danger.’ Of course, he did; he had told her that he felt like a man with his feet caught in cement but it was hard for Anita to admit that ‘the huge effort I made to save something of Glaslough for him is just a handicap’.
Another cold winter. At Oranmore, four big dead rats were found under the floorboards in Bill’s bedroom. ‘The maddening thing is this,’ Anita wrote to Tarka:
I had arranged with McNally 2 years ago to lay electric cables in the cement so as to have ONE warm room here independent of central heating and he ordered the cables and then went broke and IF we lay cement now it’s impossible to lay cables later … we have given up the idea of underfloor electric heating … It is so cold here – the sea frozen and hail showers … the newer roof over the old water tank has cracked … a real job has got to be done with cauldrons of hot tar and it will cost several hundred so do send me that cheque as soon as possible … The really BAD leaks over big kitchen. I can hope that all rain water came in through there and NOT via the exit pipe which is ungettable at.
Oranmore was getting too much to cope with. Even the ponies were irksome – ‘I really can’t see any joy in riding around here anymore – Glaslough is different.’ Hunting no longer appealed to her; there was too much travelling to different meets and the post-hunt parties weren’t as lively as they used to be – ‘all so old except Min Mahony and his wife! “The county” is vanishing into the mists of old age.’ The new owner of one of the old Big Houses failed to put in an appearance: ‘She isn’t “county” and besides I think she had some row with Anne Hempill over who was most important in the Pony Club.’ Sir Oliver St John Gogarty observed that ‘The true county families are born concussed’ but Anita felt comfortable with them, at ease with their neighbourly gossip and lack of intellectual rigour. In January Anita and Bill were both in bed with high temperatures, rising from their sickbeds to carry feed to the horses and inspect the leaking roofs. Anita wrote plaintively to her son: ‘You say you have no time to talk to me here but I’ve got a lot of things to discuss.’ She pined for Cleveland Square: ‘I can’t tell you how much better I feel in London than here – I think because it’s drier – If it wasn’t for Heather [Leonie and Alec’s small daughter] I’d spend most of my time there.’
Telling Tales Page 25