A would-be guest who found the Sitwells away when he called at Renishaw was D. H. Lawrence. After meeting Osbert and Edith in Italy, he had been taken over Montegufoni by Sir George: according to Lady Ida, if shown some treasure during the tour, Mrs Lawrence – ‘an enormous German’ – would stare at her host, lean against a gilded bed and breathe heavily.
Later, a suspicion that Mr Lawrence had given Osbert’s characteristics to the cuckolded Sir Clifford in Lady Chatterley’s Lover infuriated Edith. She never forgave Lawrence, saying that he looked like a garden gnome. As their nephew Reresby realised much later, however, the real model for Clifford Chatterley must have been Joseph Arkwright of Sutton Scarsdale – near Renishaw and not far from Lawrence’s birthplace, Eastwood – who broke his spine in a riding accident and then acquired a young bride.
Even so, Sir Clifford does sound uncannily like Osbert. ‘Just a little bit frightened of middle and lower class humanity’, but rebelling against his own class, he wrote stories about people he had known, ‘clever, rather spiteful . . . The observation was extraordinary and peculiar.’ He was ‘morbidly sensitive’ about these stories, wanting everybody to think them good. Nevertheless, Osbert was magnanimous enough to describe Lawrence as a genius.
Some of Renishaw’s guests got more than they expected. Against his host’s advice, one of them visited a rarely-used bedroom in the ‘ghost wing’ at midnight. He emerged half an hour later, dazed and needing brandy. ‘I know it sounds ridiculous,’ he told Osbert when he pulled himself together. ‘But I felt that I was drowning, that I was wretched beyond words, and that my face was covered with some hanging wet stuff.’ What made this so odd was that he had never heard the story of the Boy in Pink.18
Chapter 20
MARKING TIME IN THE THIRTIES
uring the 1930s, many lost interest in the Sitwells. They were ageing, while no longer acting as a Trio had diminished their image. Better writers were emerging – Joyce, Waugh, Greene, Powell, Auden – even if Eliot and Woolf stayed on their pedestals. Nor did a patrician background keep quite so much glamour in the era of the Slump and the Jarrow Hunger March.
Among the reasons why Sitwellianism waned was that Edith had stopped producing poetry and gone to live in Paris, where she wrote prose to earn money. Her one novel, I Live Under a Black Sun, was a failure despite kind words from Evelyn Waugh, but her other books, such as the delightful English Eccentrics, were very good indeed. None, however, made the same impact as her verse. She was also distracted by the painter Pavel Tchelitchew, the love of her life and one reason why she went to Paris, in an unhappy platonic romance that dragged on for a quarter of a century.
Yet another cause was the Trio’s disinterest in politics. Marxism and the redistribution of wealth failed to attract them. If repelled by Nazism, they did not object to Mussolini, who preserved ‘the social order’ and Montegufoni. They refused to take sides during the Spanish Civil War, which Osbert regarded as ‘a horrible and incredible gladiatorial combat’, although they were relieved by Franco’s victory. This was an unusual position for English intellectuals in the late thirties when so many saw hope in Communism.
Osbert nonetheless remained a significant figure in the literary world. According to Anthony Powell, this was because he was essentially ‘a personal appearance artist’. It also owed a lot to his kindness to young writers, whom he encouraged and helped with small gifts of money.
Powell does not mention how Osbert intervened for him with his employers, Duckworth in Henrietta Street, who published Osbert’s books. A copy of Powell’s first novel, Afternoon Men, at Renishaw is inscribed ‘For Osbert Sitwell (cher maître). In admiration, and because he has always done his best to protect me from the ungovernable tantrums of my employers, from Tony Powell, May 28th 1931’. From a View to a Death, published two years later, has written on the flyleaf, ‘For Osbert, the Hero of Henrietta Street’.
Moreover, Osbert corresponded with countless writers, established and aspiring. He also went on going to literary parties in London, including those of Bloomsbury. And he continued to entertain intellectual friends at Renishaw. At the same time, he enjoyed his role as squire, reviving rent dinners for his tenant farmers. Twice a year they trooped into the dining room, handed a cheque to the agent and then sat down to a hearty meal with their landlord.
Eager for Renishaw to have a role in public life, in 1931 Osbert joined Oswald Mosley’s New Party, allowing it to hold a rally in the grounds that was attended by thousands. Yet, while he strongly approved of Mosley’s determination to avoid another war, he declined to become a member of the British Union of Fascists.
During the thirties, the ‘Gingers’ came even less to Derbyshire. They were enjoying life at Montegufoni too much. However, a photograph taken at Renishaw by Beaton in summer 1930 shows the entire family, with the Judocus de Vos tapestries as background. Sir George looks as distinguished as ever, while Lady Ida, in a cloche hat and sitting on one of the throne-like Brustolon chairs, still shows traces of beauty. Sachie’s nervous little three-year-old son Reresby perches between the old couple, whom he much preferred to his difficult, self-obsessed parents.
There was increasing friction between Osbert and his own father. Besides his luxurious regime at Renishaw, Osbert spent heavily on his London establishment and lived well beyond his means, running up a huge overdraft at Coutts. After years of warning him that he was risking bankruptcy and might end by having to sell Renishaw, in 1933 his father threatened to go to law in an attempt to curb his expenditure.
Osbert’s response was to tell everybody that he was being cruelly persecuted by an unnatural parent. Visiting him in August, Edith Olivier wrote of the house being haunted by ‘the nightmare hatred of Sir George for his whole family . . . He moves about like a Poisoner’s Ghost with his thin cruel smile’ (clearly Osbert’s description).1 Luckily, the spendthrift’s finances suddenly improved when more money started coming in from the estate – thanks to the work of a dedicated land agent – and he began to make a better income from journalism.
As Osbert was never going to produce an heir, George placed all his hopes on Reresby. ‘Life begins again with the grandchildren,’ he wrote at about this time.2 The little boy was already promising. ‘What a charm the child has!’ wrote Cecil Beaton after meeting him at Montegufoni in 1933, ‘with an extraordinary mind and with the fantasy of the rest of the family’.3
Making Reresby the ultimate beneficiary of his will, his grandfather kept in touch with him as he grew older through letters accompanied by small cheques. The correspondence was often about sea monsters, for which his grandson had a passion. In November 1936 he wrote from Montegufoni:
Our golden wedding passed very happily, but it would have been happier still if you had been with us. We had all the school-children of the neighbouring villages at the castle and gave them cups of whipped cream, which they prefer to tea or coffee, cakes, and little bags of sweetmeats . . . The monster world has been quiet lately. But some fishermen on the river Po at Mantua, which you will remember is West of Venice, got the fright of their lives, owing to some creature more like a huge animal than a fish climbing on to the bank near them. They did not give a more complete description, as they ran away as fast as they could . . . I enclose an illustration of the carcase of a sea-monster which was washed up on the shore of Morocco. It had choked to death, owing to having swallowed a large net full of fish and possibly the fishermen as well. Sea-monsters should eat slowly and avoid taking too big mouthfuls.4
The next year, 1937, Lady Ida fell ill with pneumonia. In July – inevitably, given she had only one lung – she was brought home to England to die. ‘Today my darling Ida died,’ her husband wrote in his notebook. He cried all day and was too upset to go to the funeral. Despite all the misery she had caused him, and although her inability to share his interests had made him very lonely, he had never thrown off her spell. He explained in his notebook, ‘It was the child in Ida one loved, but often she was a very naughty child
.’5
He wrote to Reresby, ‘I feel lost without your Grannie, but we must try and bear up, as she would have wished. It will be a great comfort having you with me.’6 Until he left Italy, he continued to give annual tea parties on her birthday for the children at Montegufoni.
Fearing that his father’s loneliness might end in an unsuitable attachment (and a new will), Osbert engaged a male private secretary for him. This was Francis Bamford, formerly the Duke of Wellington’s librarian at Stratfield Saye, who, it was hoped, would get on with Sir George because he too liked history and genealogy. He was told by Osbert to ‘take Mother’s place’. Despite thinking his new employer looked like Don Quixote and was equally eccentric, Bamford found him very good company – ‘amusing, with a puckish sense of humour, and . . . a fund of recondite information’.7
The Trio’s biographers all refer to Sir George as if by now his brain had atrophied, yet it remained as active as ever, and he was working on a history of the Sitwell family, although he would never finish it. However, Idle Fancies in Prose and Verse, eight short poems with a preface and a postscript, appeared in 1938 in an edition of fifty copies. Admitting that his poems are old-fashioned, in a style ‘after Tennyson’, he says there is ‘little in them except the expression of the grudge against Time, which anyone who has been moved too quickly into his 79th year may feel’.
Apart from a nod of approval in the preface to Sacheverell’s book on German Rococo, he does not mention the Trio. While his poems are forgettable if charming, the postscript is impressive, especially when he reflects on time and space after a careful reading of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Hermann Minkowski’s reformulation. (It is unlikely that any of the Trio read, let alone understood, Einstein.)
He also says he has changed his attitude to religion. ‘We cannot exclude the possibility of control or influence by a higher power,’ he writes. ‘Some definite code of ethics is required, and beyond reasonable doubt Christian ethics are the happiest and the best . . . The Communion service, as anyone may observe in Catholic as well as Protestant countries, is an aid to right living.’ This sworn enemy of spiritualists admits, too, that after all there may perhaps be ‘real ghosts’.8
Not even a secretary so understanding as Bamford could fill the void that Ida herself had never filled. At the end of October 1939 Sir George wrote to Osbert, ‘I have been very much alone all my life as your mother could not be and did not try to be a companion, and I am satisfied to die alone when the time comes.’9
He continued his correspondence with Reresby, now twelve, writing to him the next month that he really must work harder if he wanted to pass well into Eton. He added wistfully,
I spent three weeks at Venice at the Hotel Luna, a few yards from St Mark’s Square, and often thought of the happy times we had together there, five years ago . . . All the stucco figures in the grotto [at Montegufoni] were restored during the summer, as well as the painted vault and most of the water jets, but the marble pavement will have to wait for better times. I spend alternate weeks at the Castle and at the Hotel Grande Bretagne [in Florence], where they give me a bedroom looking out on to the Ponte Vecchio.10
He also went on worrying about his elder son’s extravagance, and Renishaw’s future.
Meanwhile, Osbert’s social life soared to giddy heights. He was introduced to the Duchess of York by Sir Philip Sassoon (for whom he had fagged at Eton), and his catty stories delighted her – ‘I can tell you, we used to laugh our heads off,’ she recalled sixty years later.11
Then in 1936 he endeared himself not only to the duchess, but to the entire Royal Family by defending Edward VIII in his poem ‘Rat Week’, fiercely denouncing those who wanted him to abdicate. When the duchess became Queen, Osbert was soon invited to stay at Balmoral, besides being given a seat in Westminster Abbey for King George VI’s Coronation in 1937. He had become a part-time courtier.
Two years later, the Second World War broke out.
Chapter 21
RENISHAW AND THE SECOND WORLD WAR
rudently, Osbert spent the entire war at Renishaw Hall, rarely visiting London even after the Blitz was over. He made it his self-appointed mission to keep the arts alive, giving the occasional party for writers and artists and asking some of them to stay. He also encouraged those whom he felt were suffering from poverty or isolation, sending money and letters of encouragement.
Another consequence of the war was the return of Edith, who in autumn 1940 came back to Renishaw and made it her home for the next twenty years. Her dislike of Osbert’s ‘friend’ David Horner smouldered as intensely as ever, but conflict was averted by his joining the RAF in August. The last person left who still remembers Edith and Osbert together at Renishaw, their niece by marriage Penelope Sitwell, says that brother and sister made a splendidly impressive couple.
A committed pacifist who could never forget the horror he had seen in the trenches, Osbert was shocked by Britain joining the Second World War, despite his loathing for Hitler. He still regarded Winston Churchill as a bombastic adventurer, the man responsible for the disaster at Gallipoli.1 He even felt some sympathy for Oswald Mosley as the one politician who openly opposed the war, if for the wrong reasons. Quite apart from his pacifism, Osbert believed that Germany and Russia were bound to fight each other to the death and there was no point in wasting British blood and treasure. Luckily, he possessed enough sense of self-preservation not to air these views.
The war had forced Edith to leave Paris, where, apart from summer visits to Renishaw, she had been living since 1932 in the rue Saint-Dominique, a run-down street in what was then a seedy area. Above a bistro and opposite a coal merchant, her flat was even worse than Pembridge Mansions, without a lavatory or running water. She had gone there to be near Tchelitchew and to nurse Helen Rootham, who had been struck down by an agonising, inoperable spinal cancer. (Some of Helen’s medical expenses were paid by Sir George.) By now Helen had died, and Edith was only too relieved to join Osbert at Renishaw.
Now that she had come home, like her mother she spent most of her time in bed, insisting on a blazing log fire in her bedroom even during the summer months, until wartime conditions made logs hard to come by. However, she always came down for dinner. She was busy enough, working on new poems with books spread all over the bed, or knitting shapeless socks for the Forces. Curiously, unless it was raining heavily, again just as Lady Ida had done, in the evenings brother and sister liked to sit together in the porch on the north side where the house seems dullest and darkest, instead of in the exquisite gardens to the south.
The only child of a multi-millionaire shipowner, Bryher Ellerman, best known as an historical novelist, arrived from Portugal in autumn 1940. Osbert joked that the tough little lesbian must have come on a German invasion barge. When she first saw the house after walking up from the station, ‘The range of windows reminded me of those old Italian palaces that are a town in themselves and the formal garden was still a blaze of summer flowers.’ (On her next visit, the flower beds were growing vegetables.)
At dinner she found herself next to the novelist Charles Morgan, who was pessimistic about how long the war would last and what it might do to civilisation. The next day, once the other visitors had left, Edith ‘read me poems, sitting outside on the terrace in the pale, October sunshine’, recalled Bryher. ‘It was indescribably peaceful to sit listening to the poems with the sweep of the gardens in front of us and the feeling that behind the poetry there could be something indestructible in the mind.’2
Yet Edith thought their world might not survive, even if the Nazis were beaten. ‘Ours was a world of shadows, and of unmistakable shadows, although the passing sound of that far off music among the ruins was for ever with us’, she tells us, in a Chekhovian passage. She hints at a fear that they would be the last Sitwells to live at Renishaw – there might be a revolution after the war.3 Both she and her brother believed they were living at the end of an age.
Despite these forebodings, the pai
r produced their most important work during this time. The end of Osbert’s demanding social life in London enabled him to write the mammoth autobiography he had long been planning. This was also the period when Edith wrote her best poems.
Food rationing made little impact on the Sitwells, since they ate illegally killed pork from the farms, pheasant, partridge or hare (out of season as well as in) and rabbit untainted by myxomatosis. Anthony Powell describes a shopping expedition to Sheffield when, wearing a high cylindrical hat ‘between an archimandrite’s and that of a Tartar horseman’, Edith even managed to buy an entire salmon, which was sent home by train in time for dinner.
Life at Renishaw was under constant threat, however. A dozen evacuees had arrived from the London slums at the same moment as Edith – two mothers with children, all of them dirty ‘fried fish shop types’, who mercifully preferred to move out into cottages on the estate. A few officers were billeted for brief periods. There was also a possibility of requisition by a government department, but the pampered civil servants could not face the cold and lack of electric light.
The house was kept in working order by Robins – despite his age and bad temper, and aided by his wife Susan, the housekeeper – but only just. Staff were almost impossible to find, as they were serving in the Forces or employed in factories. A fourteen-year-old maid who seemed to be possessed by a poltergeist left broken china in Edith’s fried whiting and shards of broken glass near Osbert’s gouty foot, and was finally sacked when her face broke out in a disgusting rash.
Renishaw Hall Page 17