The whole point of a flat is a place to leave one’s books and papers in and know they will be there whenever one gets back. As it is I can’t remember half the things that Tarka has moved – and to tell the truth I HATE the new kitchen! Don’t buy any more of those odd shaped white plates because they are a nightmare and all the plates I slowly accumulated worked! I suppose the real time for letting is the summer – just when Bill and I need it.
Predictably she ended this shrill letter on a conciliatory note, urging Jane to get her, Anita’s, fur coat out of storage and wear it herself. To Tarka, who had returned to Glaslough and its agricultural problems, she wrote: ‘Don’t bother to come here [Oranmore] for only 1 night … because it tires me to have you for such a short time!’ Having said that she couldn’t afford to buy Christmas presents, she now told Tarka that she was sending Theodore Ramos £900, so that he could paint a portrait of her in her wartime regalia. This sounds deranged, as do her constant demands for money.
The last letters she wrote, again separate ones to Tarka and Jane, were dated 5 November. With Jane’s letter, she enclosed a cheque for William’s birthday, writing wistfully: ‘It is cruelly sad for me having grandchildren in two different countries – and such fascinating grandchildren.’ To Tarka, she gave some good news: the Inspector of Taxes was prepared to grant tax exemption for the six books published over the previous twelve years. Her accountants had written to her: ‘We trust you can appreciate the leniency of the Inspector of Taxes in this matter as there were no receipts to back up the expenses claimed for the years 1974 to 1983 inclusive.’ The word ‘leniency’ didn’t play well with Anita; she thought the decision was ‘only justice’.
Tarka had hoped that Bill would come to Pentridge in the spring to help with the pruning. Anita reported spitefully: ‘Pa says what is wrong with our children? They can’t survive on the income we gave them or do their own pruning!’ Hard to imagine pragmatic Bill saying anything like this. After this harsh criticism, Anita wrote: ‘Tarka – don’t worry about having too much to do. Glaslough is a nightmare that I did not expect.’ Then, in the next sentence: ‘You don’t say if you can refund me my tax money? This is the one thing I want to know … Can you pay me at least £5,000 in punts? Maybe £7600?’ The tetchy, unloving, unrealistic letter, the last one she wrote to Tarka, ended there.
27
Back Where She Belonged
‘Leslie-King. At midnight on November 5, at Oranmore Castle, quietly in her sleep, the author Anita Leslie, beloved wife of Bill Leslie-King and mother of Tarka and Leonie. Funeral at Glaslough Friday 8 November.’ (The Irish Times.) Tony Whittome wrote an obituary for The Times in which he said that Anita ‘represented all that was most captivating and individual about the Anglo-Irish aristocracy’, while David Holloway, the literary editor of The Daily Telegraph, wrote that Anita ‘was at her most effective in her books about her relations.’ Anita had left highly idiosyncratic burial instructions:
In accordance to the beliefs of my Red Indian ancestors I wish to return my body to the earth that made it. Feeling the breath of god in the trees I gladly give my physical remains to the roots of the great Irish forest beside the lake at Glaslough, which I have always loved – the grave to be unmarked. I would prefer to be buried without a coffin – just tied to a board – but if that is complicated take the lid off. And let those who love me not imagine I am where my cast-off body lies. That goes to the good earth. If you wonder where I am, listen to the trees whispering.
The perfect resting place was found, between two young lime trees, standing like sentinels beside the lake she loved. Anita was laid out in Castle Leslie’s gallery, surrounded by flowers and candles. The next day, there was a small, quiet funeral at the local Catholic church, before the journey to the edge of the lake. Volunteers had worked frantically to clear fallen branches and potholes from the lakeside avenue, so that mourners could reach the site beside the lime trees. In a letter to Tony Whittome, Desmond described a heavy rain sending everyone scurrying back to the Castle, from where they saw a sudden 100 mph gust of wind bending the trees double. Then the party began, with De Danann playing and the Irish Anthem of Peace sung. On 24 April of the following year, a Requiem Mass for Anita was held at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Farm Street, Mayfair.
Bill also wrote to Tony Whittome. He said that after the funeral he had stood beside Anita’s grave at dusk, listening to the rooks coming home to roost, and had been inspired to write the following: ‘Farewell my love/the spirit flies, we cannot follow/Deep in our bones we know/There is a tomorrow/When we shall fly and meet at Heaven’s Gate.’ Anita, controlling her family from beyond the grave, had left the written instruction: ‘No mourning, no tears.’ Bill complied, writing to Kathleen Abercorn, ‘We must pick up the bits.’ In his case, this meant continuing to hunt with the Blazers, of which he was the oldest member.
He also wanted to get Anita’s third volume of autobiography published and sent a typescript to Tony Whittome. Bill told Tarka that Anita had done ‘a lovely rewrite of Love in a Nutshell’, but her account of more recent events was disappointing: ‘I hoped that she would recover and make a better fist of it.’ Nothing more was heard of the typescript and, by the time I started my research, Tony Whittome, then still at Hutchinson after forty years, had forgotten about it until I showed him a copy of Bill’s letter of 1985, asking for a meeting to discuss it. A search of the Hutchinson files revealed a few typewritten chapters and some handwritten ones, none of them publishable. Anita had pilfered material not just from Love in a Nutshell but from her previous memoirs and her diary entries and arranged it in a rambling, chaotic way. Little wonder that Tony, who retired in 2010, put off discussing it with Bill.
The Revenue Commissioners, that fickle outfit, decided that Cousin Randolph wasn’t tax exempt. A furious Bill drafted a letter which, wisely, he didn’t post. It was signed off, ‘I hope that God will forgive you your gross trespass.’ The ‘Revenue Vultures’, as he called them, had warned Anita that any future claims for tax exemption must be backed up by receipts but their letter had arrived at Oranmore three days before Anita died, which was Bill’s explanation for the absence of receipts. Anita’s books soon went out of print, apart from Jennie, which a small publisher, George Mann Books, reissued in 1992, paying an advance of £750. More recently, Bloomsbury has reissued Train to Nowhere, the wartime memoir that I consider to be Anita’s masterpiece.
Glaslough’s shaky fortunes improved when Desmond and Helen’s daughter Sammy, who had qualified as an instructor with the British Horse Society when she was seventeen, took over the running of the estate in 1991 at the age of twenty-four. She started by opening a tearoom in the leaky conservatory and gradually restored the castle into a prizewinning country house hotel, which became famous, in 2002, when it hosted the wedding of Paul McCartney and Heather Mills. It now caters for about sixty weddings a year. In 2004 Sammy repurchased the equestrian centre, which Desmond had sold, and, in 2005, the Castle Leslie Estate won the Sunday Times Best Country House Hotel award. Those former houseguests who remember Anita’s lunch of half-cooked baked potatoes and mouldy chocolates must find it hardly credible that Castle Leslie is now a gourmet’s paradise. The journalist Kevin Myers listed the dishes served on the opening night of the Castle Leslie Gourmet Circle: ‘Quail eggs set in consommé, timbale of Glaslough pike on a bed of spinach … chicken creperettes with lardoons … petit pot de crème with praline.’ Until his death in 2016, Jack acted as a very idiosyncratic and popular tour guide at Castle Leslie.
Desmond died in Helen’s house in Antibes, in the south of France, in 2001. Agnes died in 1999, after a long and happy relationship with Maurice Craig and professional success as a cabaret singer, collaborating with Marc Almond, Elvis Costello and Tom Waits. Helen Leslie, the inspiration behind the equestrian centre, died in Antibes in 2011. Bill, who continued to live at Oranmore Castle, died in October 2012, at the age of 102. He was buried beside Anita at Glaslough. Oranmore village has
spread towards the city of Galway in a rash of new housing estates but, on its seaward side, the castle still soars in grey remoteness under the wild skies.
The Leslies continue to fascinate. Writers, other than themselves, now fill the shelves with books about this extraordinary family. They feature in Agnes’s memoir, The Fun Palace (1996), in Fortune’s Daughters (2004) by Elisabeth Kehoe, subtitled ‘The extravagant lives of the Jerome sisters’, and, in 2009, a further biography of Jennie by Anne Sebba. Shane Leslie: Sublime Failure by Otto Rauchbauer appeared in the same year, 2010, as did Robert O’Byrne’s Desmond Leslie: The Biography of an Irish Gentleman. Anita who, in her lifetime, was the best known of the writing Leslies, has been somewhat overlooked. I have tried to bring this brave, interesting and complicated woman into the limelight.
Acknowledgments
This book couldn’t have been written without the help of Anita Leslie’s children, Tarka King and Leonie Finn, who shared their insights into their mother’s life as well as her letters, photographs, diaries and albums.
I am also grateful to the late Leonie de Barros, Anita Burgh, Lord Burgh, Nicola Beauman, Lady Moyra Campbell, The Chartwell Trust, The Sir Winston Churchill Archive Trust, Thea Courchevel, Jeananne Crowley, the late Elspeth Gailey, Tim Gwyn-Jones, Eoghan Harris, Sarah Henson, the late Patricia, Countess of Jellicoe, Angela and Joe Kelly, Linda Kelly, the Lilliput Press for permission to quote from The Fun Palace, the late Fleur Melvill-Gardner, the late Roy Miles, the staff of the National Library of Ireland, Julian Mitchell, James Owen, The Hon. Lady Roche mbe, the Earl of Roden, Jean Rose, Serena de Stacpoole, Caroline Sweeney, the late Bill Vincent, Hugo Vickers, Anthony Whittome, the late Roddy Wilson and Djinn von Noorden, Bridget Farrell and Ruth Hallinan at the Lilliput Press.
Every effort has been made to secure all necessary clearances and permissions. Both the author and publisher will be glad to recognize any holders of copyright who have not been acknowledged above.
Bibliography
Books by Anita Leslie
Rodin: Immortal Peasant 1939
Train to Nowhere 1948
Love in a Nutshell 1952
The Fabulous Leonard Jerome 1954
Mrs Fitzherbert 1960
Mr Frewen of England 1966
Jennie: The Life of Lady Randolph Churchill 1969
Edwardians in Love 1972
Francis Chichester 1975
Cousin Clare 1976
Madame Tussaud (with Pauline Chapman) 1978
The Gilt and the Gingerbread 1981
A Story Half Told 1983
Cousin Randolph 1985
Books by Commander Bill King
The Stick and the Stars 1958
Capsize 1969
Adventure in Depth 1975
Dive and Attack 1983
The Wheeling Stars 1989
Kamikaze: The Wind of God 1997
Further reading
Agnes Bernelle, The Fun Palace. Lilliput 1996
Michael Bloch, James Lees-Milne. John Murray 2009
Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September. Jonathan Cape 1929
R.F. Foster, Words Alone. Oxford 2011
Adam Gopnik, The Table Comes First. Quercus 2011
Michael Holroyd, Works on Paper. Little, Brown 2002
Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. Heinemann 2005
Elizabeth Kehoe, Fortune’s Daughters. Atlantic Books 2004
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland. Jonathan Cape 1995
Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton. Vintage 2007
James Lees-Milne, Ancestral Voices. Chatto & Windus 1975
Sir John Leslie, Never a Dull Moment. 2006
Shane Leslie, The End of a Chapter. Constable 1917
Mary S. Lovell, The Mitford Girls. Little, Brown 2011; The Churchills. Little, Brown 2011
Sinead McCoole, Hazel: A Life of Lady Lavery 1880–1935. Lilliput 1996
Ben Macintyre, Operation Mincemeat. Bloomsbury 2010
W.J. McCormack, Blood Kindred. Pimlico 2005
Roy Miles, Priceless. Metro 2003
Mary Motley, Morning Glory. Longmans 1961
Robert O’Byrne, Desmond Leslie (1921–2001). Lilliput 2010
Anthony Powell, At Lady Molly’s. Heinemann 1957
Otto Rauchbauer, Shane Leslie: Sublime Failure. Lilliput 2009
Paul Rodzianko, Modern Horsemanship, 1936; Tattered Banners, 1939. Both published by Seeley Service.
Anne Sebba, Jennie Churchill – Winston’s American Mother. John Murray 2007
Clare Sheridan, Mayfair to Moscow. Boni and Liveright 1921; Nuda Veritas. Thornton Butterworth 1927
Dramatis Personae
Sir Harold Alexander, later 1st Earl Alexander of Tunis 1891–1969 Churchill’s favourite general, perhaps because he was always able to dance among the skulls. A long-time family friend of the Leslies, he told Anita in Italy, before she embarked for France: ‘Don’t falter, Anita.’ She didn’t.
Agnes Bernelle 1923–99 Fled Berlin for London in 1936 and, aged fifteen, worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) involved in black propaganda, under the code name Vicki. Became an actress and cabaret singer. Married Desmond Leslie 1945. Divorced 1969. Subsequently became very successful, singing with Marc Almond, Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, and The Radiators. Author of The Fun Palace (1996), in which she gives laconic descriptions of Anita’s wartime ‘beaux’.
Rose Burgh (née Vincent) 1915–81 The most important person in Anita’s life from their debutante days until Rose, long divorced from Lord Burgh and a second husband, disappeared en route to join her third husband and small daughter in the Bahamas. Anita said Rose was the only person she could tell the truth to and Anita’s life story is reconstructed in the almost daily letters she wrote to this rich, beautiful, much-married woman, who flitted to and from a series of luxury chateaux and villas in various countries and eventually became a drug addict. Rose’s letters to Anita, if they ever existed, haven’t survived.
Jennie Churchill 1854–1921 Daughter of Leonard Jerome, mother of Winston Churchill. Said by Lord d’Abernon to have ‘more of the Panther than the woman in her look’. Anita’s great-aunt and the subject of her biography, Jennie: The Life of Lady Randolph Churchill (1969), in which the smouldering panther is declawed and softened to disarming effect. This fascinating woman has been the subject of several biographies, all of them more revealing but less charming than Anita’s.
Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill 1874–1965 A very original portrait of her first cousin once removed emerges from Anita’s wartime memoirs. Until he became prime minister in May 1940, he was disregarded by many members of his family, who dismissed his warnings of the threat posed by fascism – after he became prime minister his relations asked for various favours. Yet he always showed tolerance towards them, even to his cousin Clare Sheridan, whose idiotic goings-on were a constant embarrassment. Anita, who had flirted with fascism before the war, redeemed herself by providing a link between Winston and the war on the ground in a series of enlivening and intelligent letters.
Commander William (Bill) King 1910–2012 Put in charge of his first submarine aged twenty-nine at the outbreak of the Second World War, the only person to command a British submarine on the first and last days of the war. Exceptionally brave – he was awarded seven medals during the war – he was also exceptionally modest. He first met Anita in 1943 in the Lebanon and became what he called ‘her number 4 admirer’, languishing behind her husband, Paul Rodzianko, who had followed her to the Middle East, Philip Parbury, whom Anita loved and Peter Wilson, who loved her. He finally became number one admirer and married Anita at Glaslough on 1 January 1949. After retiring from the navy he competed in round-the-world yacht races until late in middle age.
Anne Theodosia (Anita) Leslie 1914–85 When she became a successful writer of witty, entertaining and rather fluffy biographies of her Leslie, Churchill and Jerome relations, the audiences at her annual us lecture tours described her as ‘a grand old girl’. They had no idea
that she was a war heroine, twice awarded the Croix de Guerre, a survivor of offhand and unkind parenting, scarred by an abysmal first marriage and tormented by financial worries. Anita was less emotionally robust than she pretended to be, something that is revealed in her letters and diaries but not in her insouciant memoirs.
Desmond Leslie 1921–2001 Youngest son of Shane and Marjorie Leslie. Spitfire pilot in the Second World War but invalided out in 1943 on account of a damaged heart. Pioneer of electronic music, novelist, ufo enthusiast. Cast down by the difficulties of running the Castle Leslie estate, as was his father Shane. Married Agnes Bernelle in 1945 and, after a complicated divorce, Helen Strong in 1970.
Sir John Randolph (Shane) Leslie 3rd Baronet 1885–1971 Catholic convert, supporter of Irish nationalism, philanderer, fulminating critic of James Joyce, whose work, he thought, should be banned from every decent Catholic household. Reluctantly took over the management of the family estate when his son Jack wasn’t able to run it. Married Marjorie Ide in 1912 and after Marjorie’s death in 1951, Iris Carola Lang in 1958. Although rather flaunting his nationalist leanings by wearing an Irish kilt on most occasions, he joined the Home Guard in London in 1939 and stayed there throughout the Blitz.
Sir John (Jack) Leslie 4th Baronet 1916–2016 Older son of Shane and Marjorie. Joined the Irish Guards at the outbreak of war, was taken prisoner in May 1940 and spent the rest of the war in Bavaria. Released in May 1945, awarded the Légion d’Honneur in 2015. After the war he lived in Italy before returning to Glaslough in his old age. When Sammy Leslie took over the running of Castle Leslie, successfully turning it into a luxury hotel, Jack became a popular tour guide and an indefatigable patron of the local nightclubs.
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