Anita’s wartime memoir, A Story Half Told, was published on 25 April 1983 and was celebrated with a party given by Roy Miles at his house 3 Trevor Square in Knightsbridge. Six hundred pounds worth of champagne was served, a rare event at book launches, which are usually held dismally in publishers’ offices, with tepid white wine the only drink on offer. Hutchinson paid £100 towards the cost of the party, in recognition that Anita was now a valuable literary property. Her latest advance was raised from £3000 to £3500 and the print run increased to five thousand. Since previous books had not been tax exempt, she transformed her advance into non-taxable expenses. Harold Harris had had misgivings about the book. He had been sent an early typescript, which prompted him to write to Tony Whittome:
It is bad enough having a dyslexic author without her appointing a dyslexic typist! Both of them use dashes where a full stop, a comma or a semi-colon would be appropriate … I am bound to say that I found it a very eccentric book indeed … the whole book is lifted from Train to Nowhere. It is only slightly paraphrased, some of the stories are cut out and some have had one or two comments added, not always to their advantage. I really don’t know why she went to the trouble of writing it all again instead of asking Hutchinson to re-publish the old volume. But there it is and this is the result. One can only hope that no-one will notice.
No one did. None of the enthusiastic reviewers realized that A Story Half Told was Train to Nowhere lite. It had been thirty-five years since the earlier book was published and it had been out of print since 1953. When she wrote it, she had been a disconsolate young woman, adrift in the post-war world. Now she was a well-known biographer of popular, frothy biographies of high-society figures. Readers picked up her books expecting to be amused and Hutchinson knew this. When her publisher sent Anita a rather skittish blurb for her approval, she reproved them: ‘My war was with the Fighting Troops – it wasn’t a society outing.’ But she was aware that her readers expected from her something akin to society outings and the rehashed memoir was more Anita-ish than the original, with more gossip and more detailed character sketches of the terrifying and glamorous Mrs Newall and the glorious Miranda Lampson. Some of the more macabre episodes were left out, such as the exhausted French woman being allowed to shoot dead two even more exhausted German soldiers in reprisal for the killing of her son.
Anita also added an untruthful ending: Bill proposing to her, almost immediately after the war, beside the lake at Glaslough. There had been a marriage proposal in that particular spot: in the spring of 1918, Montagu Porch had proposed to the much older Jennie Churchill, so Anita had just changed the personnel. The tone of the new book, with its touches of girlish gaiety, would have been inappropriate in 1948 but were appealing in 1982, as was the jacket illustration of Augustus John’s portrait of Anita, all long lashes and heart-shaped red lips. As in Train to Nowhere, Anita’s wartime story is less than half told. She doesn’t mention Paul stalking her all over the Middle East, her love affairs, abortions and bouts of depression; this is a very upbeat war story.
Critics liked the moments of lightheartedness. Anne Johnstone in the Sunday Standard: ‘It might not be going too far to say that Anita Leslie has done for the Second World War what Robert Graves did for the First in Goodbye to All That. Like that classic, it is both horrifying and hilarious. It is packed with gems of observation.’ Victoria Glendinning in The Times Literary Supplement: ‘It is as if Angela Brazil had collaborated with Noël Coward. Anita Leslie was conspicuously brave and effective, and she was awarded the Croix de Guerre. Yet she has the frivolity, and the style, to describe “her” war as “frivolous” … Anita Leslie was, is, a chic type.’
The chic type was ill again. On 1 May 1983 she wrote to Jack: ‘Darling I’ve been so sick – a virus pneumonia I think.’ The cause of the illness was her research on a planned biograpy of Randolph Churchill, who had died in 1968. Anita had gone to Colchester to interview Randolph’s last love, Natalie Bevan. Her return train had been delayed and she had spent hours on a freezing platform. In June she had a temperature of 102° every night for three weeks but refused to see a doctor, not even the one who believed in nature cures and was recommended by Sheila Chichester. Anita applied cold compresses until her temperature returned to normal. The 93-year-old Lady Diana Cooper, who had loved Randolph, rang Anita to tell her that she was praying for her to get well so that she could finish writing the book.
Anita was aware of Randolph’s faults: drunkenness, abominable rude-ness, an inflated sense of his own importance. But she thought that these character flaws were outweighed by fearlessness and intelligence. As she researched more deeply, she found that dishonesty had to be added to the list of sins; after the war, Randolph had rented a house in Oving and left without paying the bills. In her biography, she writes only: ‘Unfortunately, there had been some misunderstanding about Oving,’ but she was rattled, having believed Randolph to have an honest nature, the reason for his outspoken lack of tact. She felt that her own health was failing and, that August, made her will, naming her children as her executors, with Tarka her literary executor and legatee. She left her land at Glaslough to Tarka’s son William, although she had previously told Tarka that she didn’t own anything there, and the Oranmore lands to Leonie’s daughter, Heather Oriel. A flawed document, it made no provision for any future grandchildren.
Eccentric Anglo-Irishness was much in fashion, with television adaptations of Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour and The Irish RM by Somerville and Ross. In the greedy, ostentatious 1980s, Chekhovian stories of people in dusty diamonds and threadbare frocks drifting around their half-ruined estates during the last gasp of the British Empire had a nostalgic charm. An Irish media company, McDonagh Associates, thought that Anita, the epitome of Anglo-Irishness, would be the perfect subject for a television series and Tony Whittome agreed. In an internal memo, he wrote: ‘I too have long felt that there is enough in Anita’s amazing life story and her scatty aristocratic backgound to carry significantly more media exploitation than we have so far been able to arrange.’ McDonagh Associates wanted Hutchinson to cooperate in the venture but this was a step too far for the publisher. Although the media company paid £250 for a six-month option on Anita’s memoirs, it couldn’t raise the production money and the option was allowed to lapse.
Financial success eluded Anita. Not granted tax exemption, she also discovered that, even though she had a British passport and a uk publisher, because she lived in Ireland, she was not eligible to receive Public Lending Right (plr), a scheme under which authors are paid a small sum on every library borrowing of one of their books. In poor health herself, she gave comfort and advice to a languishing Roy Miles:
My diagnosis is that your LIVER is delicate. You’ve played it up with rich banquets and nerve strain combined … go 2 days on grapes only to purify your blood stream … only one disease exists – IMPURE BLOOD STREAM. So IMPURE BLOOD AND false values is [sic] all you have to worry about.
The final sentence of this letter to Roy could have been written by Jennie Churchill, it is so chirpily optimistic: ‘And remember the Chinese saying that each day is wonderful when the sun rises and there isn’t an earthquake or flood.’
By 1984 the 78-year-old Jack Leslie had been living in Italy for thirty years. It had become an unsettling country: in 1978 the outgoing prime minister, Aldo Moro, had been kidnapped by the terrorist group, the Red Brigades, who killed his five bodyguards and, fifty-five days later, Moro himself, leaving his body in the boot of a red Renault car. There was more street crime, robbery and political viciousness. Jack’s orderly domestic life was also affected. He recounted in his memoir Never A Dull Moment (2006) that, one evening, his manservant, Italo Deidda, ‘went out to the nearby fish shop and bought some polpi (small octopi) and ripe nectarines for lunch. After eating the delicious cooked polpi I wondered why he did not bring in the nectarines. Then I went to the kitchen and found Italo dead on the floor.’
Fearful of further calamity, Jack decided to
spend even more time at Glaslough. He bought a half-share in the village gate lodge from Agnes and started to negotiate for the paddock behind Dawson’s Lodge. But his family was at war. Desmond wrote snarling notes to Tarka:
All the gates to this estate belong to me … If you want to make this beautiful estate look like a tinker encampment, please stick to your own areas. But now that we are a recognised, tax-exempted National Monument, a far higher standard will be required of you and everyone living within the walls.
Hostility within the walls and increasing danger at its gates. From London, on 15 June 1984, Anita wrote to Kathleen Abercorn. Tarka had just arrived with stories to tell:
A lorry of explosives was captured by the 2nd class gardai who hadn’t gone down to guard Reagan in Galway! [The US president had visited Ireland earlier that month.] Apparently, this lorry was taken at gunpoint from the flustered family who owned it … Apparently, the mortars on it were about to go off – they’d intended to point them all at the barracks at Middletown! Tarka says the ‘boyos’ ran away in the dark when they saw a policeman waving a torch.
Later that year the entire village of Glaslough had to be evacuated. ‘Such incidents do not even warrant a line in newspapers here’, Anita wrote to Kath, ‘here’ referring to the uk, whose government tried to ignore the embarrassment that was the Irish border as much as possible, which was what Anita did too. The letter to Kath was mainly about her growing collection of grandchildren. Leonie had given birth to a ten-pound baby boy in March, and Jane was expecting her second child the following April. ‘Bill and i dote over all our grandchildren and are I think – excellent grand parents!!’ Bill’s book Dive & Attack, about his war years, had been published the previous year and Anita’s biography of Randolph, for which she had interviewed fifty people, was due out in April – ‘I understand him and why he was a drunk.’ In the Cleveland Square flat the balconies, built in 1860, were falling off and the plumbing didn’t work but Anita was used to decaying buildings; they were part of Anglo-Irish life.
26
Specialists in Survival
Media fascination with the Anglo-Irish continued. They were undoubtedly an interesting race, quirky survivors who were still regarded as usurpers in the country where they’d lived for centuries, and bearing the burden of not belonging with a mixture of insouciance, courage and exasperating insensitivity. At the beginning of January 1985, Channel 4 commissioned a five-part documentary series, Crown and Shamrock, an examination of this former ruling class, now financially adrift in their dilapidated houses but with an aura of superiority; players in a slapstick tragedy. The surviving members of the Leslie family were perfect representations of the ascendancy and its dual loyalties and murky heritage.
The researcher for the series was Jeananne Crowley, who would later become a well-known actress. A tall, good-looking girl, devoted to horses and hunting, she got on well with Anita and Bill, who admired the way she fearlessly rode their horses along the icy Oranmore roads. Not everyone in the local hunting set approved of the television crew. At a dance given by the indefatigable Mollie Cusack Smith, a guest referred to Jeananne as ‘a vulgar reporter’. ‘So glad I wasn’t there,’ Anita wrote thankfully to Tarka. Jeananne felt protective towards Anita, who she thought looked frail and in pain but David Hammond, the presenter and interviewer for the series, put Anita on the defensive about her perceived otherness. She snapped at him: ‘Well, if you live in a big house and you own a lot of land, you are different to the Irish who don’t own land and don’t live in big houses.’ She told him that she had been refused an Irish passport:
When I asked, you have to have a grandparent born in Ireland and my grandfather [Sir John Leslie] was born before birth certificates, and so I don’t know, I can’t prove where he was born. But I have two children who were born in Ireland and so they have Irish passports.
She was wrong about the non-availability of birth certificates – they were introduced in 1837 and Sir John was born in 1857 but she spoke with such authority that the interviewer didn’t contradict her.
British passport or not, Anita insisted on her Irishness. ‘Well, if you love Ireland, you love Ireland. It gives you a feeling, a sort of pull. How can you live anywhere else in the world except Ireland?’ Then a sentence she often repeated: ‘My roots have gone down from my toes into the soil.’ She compared the Anglo-Irish, deeply rooted in Irish soil as they may have been, to dinosaurs on the verge of extinction. Giving David Hammond a tour of Oranmore Castle, she said that, when she came home after the war, her mother had wanted to see her settled so
she thought that she would sell a beautiful emerald that she’d got, which she did. It was 19 carat I think, and she got £3,000 for it. And the £3,000 paid for all the windows and the wonderful cement roof and all the plumbing and all the electricity in this castle.
Anita proudly displayed ‘the tower to end all towers’, half the height of the castle, built with stones, salvaged from a Protestant church, which she’d bought for £300. She explained that the castle walls, although very thick, leaked ‘because the wind drives the rain in’. She made it sound the most normal thing in the world for Marjorie to have exchanged a valuable ring for a ruin in the west of Ireland. She and Mollie became a bit fluttery when filming began. At one point Mollie shouted, ‘Cut! I haven’t got my tooth in,’ and Anita, noticing the camera focusing on her, said, ‘Oh dear! I would have put on eyelashes or something.’ Jeananne, noticing that the castle didn’t have a kitchen apart from a very small scullery, suggested taking Anita and Bill out to dinner, at Channel 4’s expense. Anita was delighted for Bill to accept but, worryingly, wouldn’t go herself; outings were becoming too tiring.
Then it was Desmond’s turn to star. Filmed at Castle Leslie, he went through the family history: the rescue of Queen Margaret by an early Leslie, whereby the family motto became ‘Grip Fast’; the indispensable Ascendancy attributes – ‘England couldn’t run without us. Ireland supplies its generals, writers and horses.’ He suggested that Swift, that perspicacious visitor to Castle Leslie, may have been an alien, since he knew so much about magnetic poles. When asked if life on the Irish border was dangerous, he said: ‘Certainly one’s had a lot of luck in surviving; you become specialists in survival.’ He said that he had given up a successful career creating sound effects and music because,‘I thought this place was more important … I feel there’s a purpose in everything, and, if I hadn’t come here, I don’t think this place would still be going.’
Basking in limelight put Desmond in a buoyant mood. On 1 February he wrote affectionately to his sister, addressing her as ‘Darling A’. He told her: ‘Jeananne Crowley seemed pleased with my chatter … They photographed the dining table spread with all the Lesliana from the Dean’s tomes, through Anita and Ma to Flying Saucers Have Landed in Finnish translation.’ Castle Leslie was as icy as Oranmore. Desmond wrote: ‘Arrived back from France and have lived in thermals plus ski clothes ever since. Life is simple. When I retire to bed, I take off my cap. In the morning I replace it … Far too cold to take baths or wash.’
The Anglo-Irish shown in Crown and Shamrock were an unenviable bunch, living in near squalor in their mouldering houses. At Castle Leslie there may have been a table piled high with literary treasures but the central heating system had broken down years before, replaced by just one smoky, wood-burning stove at the foot of the staircase. Even those who lived in the snug bungalows that Anita disapproved of suffered from the cold that winter. Buses and trains were on strike and, all over Ireland, roads were impassable. Faced with having to fix frozen pipes and a 500 punt bill for central heating oil, Anita complained to her son: ‘What has really done me down is having to give you half my income after paying tax here [in Ireland].’ She repeated the complaint to Bill, who was stuck in London, unable to get back to Oranmore. ‘Tarka hasn’t sent me any money – in fact I pay him half my income (2500 punts) until next July.’
Perhaps because she realized that it was her own fault fo
r persuading Tarka to take up a life of unprofitable farming at Glaslough, or because, given the chance to act against her better judgement, she usually did, in dreadful driving conditions she transported a mare belonging to Tarka to Birr Castle, whence it would be sent to Pentridge House. Anita had already paid 1000 punts in stabling charges for the animal. Anita to Tarka: ‘We were lucky in 5 hours driving to get there and back without a puncture with bald tyres in front of Land Rover.’ Jane and Tarka’s daughter Olivia was born on 2 February, making Anita reflect on the complexity of her son’s life. A week after Olivia’s birth, she wrote to him:
I can’t help wishing Tarka that you were completely OUT of this country [Ireland]. I know Glaslough is beautiful and an old family holding BUT think how simple all our lives would be if run between London and Pentridge! … I just do feel that England is slightly better than here – it’s become a ridiculous country to live in.
Telling Tales Page 26