Last Curtsey

by Fiona MacCarthy

  The routines in these country houses were quite strict ones, rather as I imagine in a military barracks. Gongs sounded, bells were rung and the house party was expected to assemble. One of the recurring bones of contention between the hosts and guests was the young people’s attendance at breakfast, scheduled sharp at 8.30, when they might only have got to bed at 5.00. Was it better to turn up bleary-eyed or risk a cross host’s reprimand, which I can still remember with a shudder, if you simply stayed in bed? Even in those austere years breakfast retained some splendour with porridge on the sideboard, sausage, bacon, eggs and mushrooms kept hot in silver dishes set on little spirit stoves; toast, marmalade, honey, coffee, tea. No croissants, which at that time still bore the stigma of fancy foreign food. At 12.30 the house party would collect in the hall and a glass of sherry would be issued. Lunch was served at 1.00. At 4.30 tea would be pushed into the hall on a two-tier wooden trolley bearing sandwiches and cakes. Henry Blofeld, in his memoirs of his upbringing in Norfolk, describes how the old cake had to be used up before a new cake could be started. This figures: in such households there was a certain stinginess, a multitude of rules. In early evening, even when it was not a dance night, the whole family dispersed to bathe and change for dinner, men putting on a green or plum-coloured velvet smoking jacket and black tie, women usually wearing a long dress or long skirt worn with a blouse and long silk cardigan. Blofeld points out that this formality of dress persisted over the decades even when his then aged parents sat down to a small supper warmed up on the Aga and served on a yellow Formica kitchen table: the instinct for keeping up appearances died hard.

  It has always been a mystery how, in so tightly regimented a regime with every hour spoken for, the time went by so slowly. I have only to think back to those weekends in the country for the cloud of lassitude to redescend. In Hons and Rebels Jessica Mitford identifies this sense of being out of time, as she became aware of it during her own upbringing at Swinbrook, the Redesdales’ house in Oxfordshire: ‘Growing up in the English countryside seemed an interminable process … We were as though caught in a time-proofed corner of the world, foster-children, if not exactly of silence, at least of slow time.’

  This feeling of floating somewhere where the deadlines of ordinary human life did not apply was not simply a question of the physical isolation of these houses, often miles from the next village. It was even more a matter of the mental separation of their occupants from the workaday timetables of industry, commerce, the life of the big cities. There was a fastidious avoidance of such topics. Debutantes had little concept of how their friends’ fathers occupied their lives. Though many of our house party hosts had business interests, owned a factory, a local engineering works, one turning out to be a tycoon of toilet paper, these exploits were rarely mentioned. There was total concentration on country pursuits, breeding animals and birds, riding, hunting, shooting, fishing. These were the things which were regarded with the utmost seriousness, dominating conversation and imposing their own gentlemanly disciplines and deadlines, as if living in the country was itself the work.

  These were people who saw a virtue in recurrence. The routines of the household linked in closely to the cycle of the Seasons, from the winter to the summer, from the short days to the long days, from seed time to the harvest, as it was and as they hoped against hope it always would be, the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate. They put their faith in same old things. The same old cut-crystal salad bowl containing the same salad made of lettuce, tomatoes cut in quarters, spring onions and radishes shaped like water lilies, served not with vinaigrette – oh no – but bottles of Heinz Salad Cream. The comforting dowdy decor of the gentry: the same old chintzy chairs and sofas in the drawing room, velvet curtains, fringed silk lampshades; the reassuring clutter of the downstairs cloakroom with its fishing rods and field glasses, cartridge bags and deerstalkers, shooting sticks and Barbours, accumulated through the generations. Men’s clothes could last for centuries, till practically threadbare. Our hosts in the country wore old tweeds and dinner jackets they boasted of inheriting from fathers or from grandfathers. New clothes were always suspect and modern design anathema. June and Teddy Heywood-Lonsdale were the only people amongst my mother’s fairly widespread group of friends who showed any enthusiasm for the streamlined, actually commissioning a flat from Serge Chermayeff. The madly modern Junie was the one glorious equivalent of Evelyn Waugh’s Margot Best-Chetwynde, admirer of the Bauhaus, whom I had ever met. In his survey Industrial Art in England the German art historian Nikolaus Pevsner attempted to explain England’s deeply engrained conservatism of taste in terms of social hierarchy: the middle classes aped the upper who had in their turn adopted the traditionalism of the royal family. Progress around these country houses could be disorientating, each new set of rooms so precisely resembling in the detail of their décor, down to the exact position of the sofa table bearing the Lenare portrait of your hostess, the one you had just left.

  The humour too followed a formula. No one minded repeating a successful joke once made. People dined out on their anecdotes. At these country dinner parties funny stories would be reconstituted, details slightly altered, polished and embellished, until the cows came home. A very good example is the military anecdote recounted by Ludovic Kennedy at the funeral service for Sonia Heathcoat-Amory whose marriage to not one but two successive men named Heathcoat-Amory might be considered a funny story in itself. The story, often told by Roddy Heathcoat-Amory, Sonia’s second husband and now revived by Kennedy, concerns a telephone call taken by Heathcoat-Amory while serving with the British Army on the Rhine:

  In his office one day the telephone rang and Roddy answered it. The caller seemed particularly obtuse and Roddy gave as good as he got. Finally the caller said, ‘Do you know who you’re talking to?’ Roddy replied he didn’t and the voice said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you. It’s Philip Knightley, the Commander in Chief.’ ‘Oh,’ said Roddy, taken aback, ‘do you know who you’re talking to?’ ‘No,’ said Knightley, ‘can’t say I do.’ ‘Thank God for that,’ said Roddy, and slammed the phone down.

  It could be guaranteed that most of the congregation at Sonia’s service of thanksgiving had heard the story many times before and in a way this was the point of it. Such jokes, faintly anarchic and by their nature extremely upper class, comforted through repetition: they gave you confirmation of who and what you were.

  Likewise the tribal legends. In my recent re-encounters with the men with whom I danced half a century ago it has been startling to discover some old tales still circulating with a vigour that reminds me of the way in which the story of Jimmy Stripling’s attempt to put a po, a white earthenware chamber pot, in Sunny Farebrother’s hatbox keeps recurring in Powell’s Hearing Secret Harmonies. In 1958 our equivalents were these. The night when Johnnie Encombe killed a deer from the herd in the park at Magdalen College, Oxford, barbecuing it on the banks of the Cherwell. He was sent down from Oxford after the episode. The weekend Nigel Dempster, irritated by his hosts, stole the family silver and buried it beneath a tree on the estate. ‘I know you’ve got it somewhere,’ said the butler as they left.

  With their jokes and chat and rituals, there was a kind of lunatic valour in these households in which we landed so strangely and arbitrarily that summer. They were resilient, proud people and they were holding on. But even I, the young London visitor, was conscious of an underlying disquietude, deep fears for the future. How long could this antiquated way of life survive? When he succeeded Anthony Eden as Prime Minister in 1956, Harold Macmillan, with his grouse moors persona and his grand laconic manner, had appeared to be the saviour of the county set. But by 1958 disillusion had set in. There had been the recent cuts in subsidies to farmers and even a tax on racing prize-money, about which my Uncle Malcolm, as President of the Racehorse Owners’ Association, protested vigorously. It was becoming clear that Macmillan’s political agenda was much wider, and much wilier, than mere protection of the people whom he resembled sup
erficially in style. The debutante Season in its origins was territorial, to do with marriage treaties and the continuity of power through the landowners and monarchy. I was in at the tail end of it, as territories dwindled, as housing estates encroached upon old parklands, as great houses were either opened to the public or divided up and marketed as the most desirable of residences. Live like a lord! The land was all too visibly returning to the people and the landowners suffered the humiliation.

  *

  By the end of July the London Season was petering out. The debs were deadbeat, and for many of the mothers it was a time of reckoning. What had been achieved with all this effort and expenditure? I find my own name in the Sketch’s round-up list of ‘the well known girls’ of 1958, though I suspect that Gladys Boyd, the social editor, only included me to please my mother. In fact by July there was only one name worth mentioning and that was Sally Croker-Poole or Sally Poole as she now preferred to call herself, someone having perhaps told her that the ‘Croker’ was a joke. Lola Wigan, the Pre-Raphaelite beauty who had looked like the front runner early in the Season, lacked the stamina and will to follow through the adulation. She did not see the point of it. The publicity alarmed her. She drifted off to art school in her Chelsea Set black stockings and her Paris Left Bank polo necks. By the standards of the Season she became a bit eccentric, lavishing attention on pet ferrets in preference to dinner-jacketed young men.

  Sally Poole, made of sterner stuff, slimmed, groomed herself, invested in expensive clothes, acquired an aura. We, her neighbours across Limerston Street, watched this transformation in the course of a few weeks from the pretty, over-eager, horse-loving girl from Berkshire to the soignée and self-confident woman of the world. Before our very eyes Sally became a beauty, her looks blossoming into an Edwardian lushness. She was photographed at every dance, including mine, her presence adding lustre. She was pictured in the arms of the difficult-to-pin-down Duke of Kent. At Cecil Beaton’s own party, laden with famous faces, she was picked out by her host as ‘one of the four most beautiful women in the room’. Her own dance had been aggrandised from the small dance in the country, as announced at the beginning of the Season, to a London ball in the large and glamorous new ballroom at Quaglino’s. By the end of the summer Sally Poole was established as incontrovertible winner of the contest for 1958 Top Deb. There was the inevitable gossip and tut-tutting over the triumph of such naked ambitiousness shown by Sally and especially her cleverly calculating mother. At the same time most of us managed to be pleased for her. We basked in her reflected glory and we feared for her, with that instinctive solidarity of debs.

  Sally Croker-Poole being given a word of advice by her mother before her dance at Quaglino’s, shared with Julie Stratford

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Dublin Horse Show

  Early in August, as London emptied out, the Season had a burst of new activity in Dublin. Many of the debs travelled over for the Horse Show and the succession of hunt balls and private parties surrounding the official equestrian events. In 1958 the Season in London was still relatively decorous. Dublin Horse Show week was a great deal more rampageous. Perhaps it was the unremitting horsiness of Dublin, the reminder – ever-present – of the primitive relationship of man and beast, that released the inhibitions, encouraged bad behaviour of a flair and thoroughgoingness peculiar to Ireland. Nigel Dempster, debs’ delight turned social commentator, a poacher become gamekeeper, described the Dublin Horse Show as ‘a wild Rabelaisian week of total drunkenness’.

  I had been invited over to a house party for Horse Show Week. The travel instructions given by my Irish hostess were, for once, quite simple and allowed no argument. Take a plane from Heathrow to Dublin where the chauffeur will collect you. Travel in your evening dress since we will be going to a drinks party in Dun Laoghaire before that evening’s ball. I remember the dress well: it was white satin, strapless, with very big red flowers that must have looked conspicuous on the mid-afternoon Aer Lingus flight. When I got to the drinks party there was nobody I knew. My father’s family, the MacCarthys, originally Catholic, had come from County Cork. But this was a completely different kind of Ireland, the Anglo-Irish landowners, the racing and hunting set. To me, coming from London, they looked open-air and leathery. They spoke another language, the Jelletts, the Connolly-Carews, the hunting dynasties. The upper-class accents had a little Irish lilt. The son of the house, David Stapleton, loomed up, tall, dark, preposterously handsome, potentially brutal, Irish version of Clark Gable as Rhett Butler. I felt in a strange land.

  I had never been to Ireland. Southern Ireland in the fifties was as yet unmodernised. Dublin itself had a small town feel, shabby, still almost rural. Lugubrious old men sat around in dingy pubs. The countryside, with its straggling ugly villages, seemed desolate and raw. The roads were bumpy, rough and dusty, with very little traffic: you hardly met another car. In my debutante haze I was not of course aware of the extent of Southern Ireland’s social problems in this early post-war period: the problems of poverty, large families, poor housing, high infant mortality rates, excess drinking, excess smoking, alarming rates of suicides and mental illness, the ostracisation of single mothers and the disgrace surrounding bastard children. But a sense of the church-dominated culture of secrecy percolated through to me, even on that brief visit, and the desperation of many people’s lives. Meanwhile the Anglo-Irish gentry in their great romantic houses were going to the races, playing polo, breeding horses and, as Elizabeth Bowen, the Anglo-Irish writer, so perfectly expressed it, ‘closing their doors each evening and shutting Ireland out’. It was almost as if there were two separate nations. There was little of the nerviness, the social defensiveness, among the upper classes that had just begun in England. Class distinctions in Ireland were as extreme as they had been a century before.

  Beaulieu, the Waddingtons’ house at Drogheda, Co. Louth

  I stayed for Horse Show Week at Beaulieu, Drogheda, Co. Louth. The coming-out dance for Gabriel Waddington, whose parents owned Beaulieu, was one of the week’s events. Gabriel had been at my Paris finishing school, Madame Boués Study-Home. Besides some debs from England the house party included five alumnae of the Study-Home, so this was a finishing school reunion. There we perch in our twinsets and blue jeans in the girls’ group photograph taken in the drawing room at Beaulieu, a little more sophisticated than when we were last together in Paris in the spring. Gabriel is the one resting her arm upon the poodle, a high-spirited and reckless Anglo-Irish girl.

  The girls in the Beaulieu House party. From left: Sally Nelson, Zia Foxwell, Fiona MacCarthy, Penny Graham, Coral Knowles, unknown, Gabriel Waddington, unknown, Jane Holden

  We were fortunate in the house we had arrived at. Beaulieu is a building which sends the architectural historians into raptures. Mark Bence-Jones has described it as ‘the finest and best-preserved country house of the second half of the seventeenth century in Ireland’. Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd pronounces this ‘singularly satisfying house’ to be ‘the supreme example in Ireland of that delectable style of architecture which blended Dutch and Classical influence’. The beauty and coherence of the building in its setting with the church, trees, old walled gardens, lawns gently sloping down to the Boyne estuary, was obvious even to my then quite untrained eye. Drogheda was built from 1660 onwards by Sir William Tichborne whose father, Sir Henry, was a prominent Royalist military commander, famous for his exploits in the Siege of Drogheda. It had stayed in the same family from then on, descending to Gabriel’s mother, who was born Sidney Montgomery. The painting of an earlier Sidney Montgomery hung amongst the many family portraits in the hall.

  Staying with the Waddingtons I was in the heart of horsiness. Gabriel’s mother had married Nesbit Waddington, for many years manager of the Aga Khan’s stud farms in Ireland and himself a well-known rider. Nesbit was a grizzled, keen-eyed man, rather Regency in tone, dressing up for dinner in his velvet smoking jacket, debonair with all the debutantes, taking us on tours of the stab
les one by one. The house was run quite formally, more grandly than in many English houses I had stayed in: a maid had been instructed to unpack for us, did washing and ironing, laid our clothes out for the dances. At the same time there was an underlying sense of strain, as if the household were stretched to its limits by the influx of twenty or so self-centred and boisterous young people. It never occurred to anyone to offer to help with the bed-making or the washing-up. Sometimes, in desperation, the whole house party would be sent off into Dublin in the horsebox, jostled up against each other and singing bawdy choruses en route.

  Nesbit Waddington with Lady Ainsworth at the Irish Grand National in 1958