12th January 1946
Randolph has pulled every string he knows, but the earliest passage we can get is March 4th. That damned war. It’s supposed to be over, but you’d never know it. Pips says the shortages are getting worse in England. Gasoline, clothing. Even bread’s rationed now, and she hasn’t seen an egg in months.
Good news for Wally though. I see the New York Dress Institute just named her as Best Dressed Woman of 1945. Well, now she’s achieved that she’ll stop at nothing to stay there. She and HRH have had a pretty good war of it from what one hears, sitting it out in the Bahamas while the Germans kept guard over their silver. They say their houses came through unscathed, apart from a few landmines in the lawns at La Croe. Well, they’ll soon get some sappers in to clear those. Ethel Croker heard that Wenner-Gren, the Electrolux man, is their new best friend and he has billions. I’m sure he’ll take care of everything.
28th January 1946
Judson Erlanger is in town to bury his father.
30th January 1946
Judson to tea. He says HRH has been in London, visiting his mother and angling for a new job, preferably Ambassador to Washington, but he’s not going to get it.
3rd February 1946
Ethel Croker has written to Wally, hoping to rekindle the friendship when she and Boss resume their European vacations. She says I should do the same and let bygones be bygones. She said, “We all had a war, Maybell. Everyone’s having to adjust to missing faces, even Wally. Charlie Bedaux’s dead. Lily. Kenny Opdyke. Count Ciano.”
Well, Charlie took an overdose, so that doesn’t count, and I doubt Wally’ll be grieving for Ciano. He took a great big piece of her Chinese history with him when he went to the wall. Anyway, they were just people she knew. They’re nothing compared to our losses.
Dear Rory on the Repulse off Malaya. He’d be twenty-three by now, just starting out. Looking forward to demobilization and a nice tea at Lyon’s Corner House with his Aunt Maybell. They say Violet never missed a day at her desk, not even the day the telegram came. She went right through to ’44, till a rocket bomb hit the Air Ministry. It’s all so unfair. She wasn’t even working at the Air Ministry. She was just walking down the Aldwych, minding her own business, then gone. She didn’t even live to hear that Ulick got a medal.
So, let Ethel pick up the threads, if she must. I can’t imagine what Wally and I would find to say to each other.
10th February 1946
Pips says HRH was greeted by cheering crowds when he went to Marlborough House to see the old Queen. Probably all arranged by loyal old Fruity. Metcalfe’s Rent-a-Throng!
1st March 1946
We sail on Monday, and now it comes to it, I feel quite apprehensive. Six years since I waved London good-bye. War seemed then like it might be rather an adventure. Pips says I’ll hardly know the place. She says it’s not just that London looks different, but the whole feeling of the place has changed, too. The bombs have stopped, but the gaiety hasn’t returned. That will be because the Socialists are in. But as Randolph says, we’re going because we’re needed. Someone has to give some direction to Susan Violet’s upbringing before the rot sets in.
10th March 1946, Carlton Gardens, London
Susan Violet is adorable and has my nose. She has signs of the Melhuish coloring, but we can hope for that to pass. Flora seems contented with motherhood after a pixilated fashion. She goes for hours on end without visiting the nursery, as though it slips her mind that she has a baby, but she’ll get the hang of things eventually. At least she’s not likely to turn into the kind of mother who keeps running out the door to Leper committees.
Her husband is in Lancashire, visiting with his people. As far as I’m concerned, it will be no loss to us if he stays there. A convalescent home is no place to choose a husband. Either he’ll remain an invalid, which will soon become boresome, or he’ll recover and start throwing his weight around in all kinds of unforeseen ways.
Melhuish says none of it matters if Flora’s happy. He says the boy seems a decent type, although he doesn’t have a penny to his name. Well, that’s for me to worry about, not poor Violet. I believe Melhuish has gone soft in the head without her.
Pips was right about London. Buildings gone, people tired and pinched, nothing in the shops. She’s very cheery, considering Freddie lost his seat. He has a few directorships and may try his hand at pig-farming. All in all, they got off rather lightly. Just a nephew of Freddie’s killed at Arnhem, and they hardly knew him.
She and Freddie didn’t try to see HRH when he was in town, and he made no effort to see them. Wally, apparently, had the wisdom not to show her face in London. I’m sure I never want to see her again. Too much has happened. Violet dead. Rory dead. And no matter which way I look at it, I can’t help but think it all comes back to Wally.
If she hadn’t been so anxious to escape from Baltimore and put her boardinghouse days behind her, she’d never have married Win Spencer, never have gone to Coronado, never met Benny Thaw, never happened upon him again in London.
No Benny, no Connie, no Thelma, no Prince of Wales, no Abdication. And that could have made all the difference. One thing about HRH, he got along well with Hitler. If he’d still been King, something could have been worked out, he’d have kept us out of that terrible war. But Bessie Wallis Warfield pulled one stick from the pile, and then everything came tumbling down.
We’ve all had to pay for it, but Wally and David always were slow to reach for the check. Still, as Randolph says, we have to look ahead. We have a new generation to think of now.
When Great Aunt Maybell left Paris on 24th May 1940, she joined the flood of refugees trying to stay ahead of the advancing German anny. She rode in a laundry van as far as La Rochelle, and then reached Santander on the north coast of Spain by coal boat. In Santander, she was advised that her best chance was to make for Lisbon, where she arrived, almost penniless, on the last day of July. It was only thanks to the help of her friend Kitty Rothschild and a timely wire to Pan Am from Great Uncle Randolph that she was able to secure a seat on a Dixie Clipper bound for New York. As she learnt later, nearing the Azores, they passed directly overhead the steamship that was carrying the Duke and Duchess of Windsor to Bermuda, en route to his new job as Governor of the Bahamas. It was the closest she ever came to being in their company again.
When eventually she got back to Baltimore, Great Aunt Maybell rewarded Randolph Putnam for his patience and loyalty. She married him the day before Pearl Harbour. She once told me it had been no great love match, and she’d done it as much as anything to spite her stepson, Junior, but that with time she’d grown very fond of Randolph.
She said, “He wouldn’t have suited me when I was younger, but after fifty, different things matter. And, of course, he got a very good deal. He couldn’t run a place like Sweet Air without me. A man on his own, it was ridiculous. And if I hadn’t taken charge after you were born, he’d never have known what it was to have a family.”
I don’t remember a single summer of my childhood when Great Aunt Maybell wasn’t around from May to September, browbeating my mother and infuriating my Uncle Ulick. Wherever we were—London, Drumcanna, or, later, after we had to let Drumcanna go, at Canna Lodge—it was Great Aunt Maybell who had colour televisions installed, who ordered pork ribs when we had a larder full of grouse, who sent out to Harrold’s, as she always insisted on calling it, for one bottle of Tabasco. Great Uncle Randolph, Grandpa Melhuish, Great Aunt Doopie, and Great Uncle Lightfoot would just hunker down somewhere with a bottle of whiskey and hope she’d forgotten them. Uncle Ulick always said it was a pity we couldn’t choose our relations, and Great Aunt Maybell said it was the only point on which they had ever agreed.
She had just arrived for her annual visit, when we heard that the Duke of Windsor had died in Paris. That was 1972, the year I was expecting my first baby and Great Aunt Maybell was revving up for yet another attempt at raising the perfect child.
There was some difficulty over th
e date of the Duke’s funeral, I remember, because it was coming up to the weekend of the Queen’s Birthday Parade, and Trooping the Colour is one of those ceremonies that can’t be postponed, not even for a man who once was king.
Grandpa Melhuish went to Windsor to pay his respects, one of the last outings he made, and Great Aunt Maybell gave him a letter of sympathy to deliver to the Duchess. She studied the photos in the next day’s newspaper very closely and noted that the Duchess was wearing Givenchy and looked the very picture of grief.
“Poor Wally,” I remember her saying. “She looks so lost. I suppose she did love him, after all.”
Great Aunt Maybell herself died on 24th May 1986, one month to the day after the Duchess. She was in her eighty-ninth year. Her eyesight was poor, her heart was no longer strong, and she kept mainly to her rooms, but one of her greatest pleasures was to have a few choice obituaries read to her each evening, and news of the Duchess’s death seemed to give her a new lease on life. In fact, she lost interest in any new deaths and preferred just to hear the Duchess’s obituaries read over and over.
“Lies!” she said when the year of the Duchess’s birth was given as 1896. “More lies!” she cried when it was said that the Duchess never gave a fig for titles. It was as though with each repetition she was hammering another nail in the coffin lid.
I read to her later than usual the evening of 23rd May, but she said she didn’t feel ready for sleep. She wanted things brought to her from the drawers and dressers in her sitting room. Photographs she could no longer make out but knew by their different frames: she and two friends, all in feathered hats, taking a sleigh-ride in Gannisch; my Grandma Violet in her debutante gown; me on my first birthday. Then a crystal egg she’d shown me many times before, souvenir of some long-past house party.
She said. “Philip Sassoon gave me this. He hung it from an orange tree for me to find. Now there was a man who knew how to do Easter.”
Silly things, too. A trick cigarette pack, once the property of my Uncle Rory; a threadbare, unidentifiable hand puppet—a pig, according to family legend, and one of my mother’s childhood favourites; and finally, an assortment of exercise books filled with Great Aunt Maybell’s loopy writing. They contained her diary begun in 1932 and kept faithfully until the war interrupted it. She had only taken it up again in 1946, to record my birth and make a few final entries.
“Susan,” she said. “These are for you. These are history. But don’t let your Uncle Ulick get his hands on them. He’ll throw them on the fire”.
I asked her if she wanted me to read to her from them.
“Oh no, honey,” she said. “I already know how it goes. I was there.”
Susan Melhuish Smith Erskine
CANNA LODGE
Aberdeenshire
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About the Author
Laurie Graham is the author of 9 novels. ‘The Ten O'Clock Horses’, was shortlisted for the Encore Award and dramatized for Radio 4, as was ‘Perfect Meringues’. Later titles are The ‘Dress Circle’, ‘Dog Days’, ‘Glenn Miller Nights’, ‘The Future Homemakers of America’, ‘The Unfortunates’, ’Gone with the Windsors’ and ‘Mr Starlight’, which was shortlisted for the Saga Wit Award. Her latest novel, ‘The Importance of Being Kennedy’ was published in 2007.
By the Same Author
FICTION
The Man for the Job
The Ten O’Clock Horses
Perfect Meringues
The Dress Circle
Dog Days, Glenn Miller Nights
The Future Homemakers of America
The Unfortunates
Mr Starlight
The Importance of Being Kennedy
NON-FICTION
The Parents’ Survival Guide
The Marriage Survival Guide
Teenagers
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Gone With the Windsors Page 46