When Rex returned home after the war, he said he despised Europe and what had happened to England. Two of his brothers were dead and his family in shock. There was no work. He was going to Australia to start a new life in a new economy. He liked the idea of sheep farming and empty spaces. No one argued with him. He wrote home for a time after he found work in Queensland, and was saving to buy his own land. He never returned to England.
Bill Bennett came to visit Tamar during his furloughs. Father was always glad to see him. With the older boys gone, he helped to fill some of the emptiness and was a steady, reassuring presence. He had not proposed to Doris for years and had never really been taken seriously when he did, but now Father, worried about the future of his business, was his champion. Gladys, three years younger than Doris, was already engaged.
One day, her father called Doris in to his study. It was no time for family estrangements, he told her; the country was in terrible shape and their family—his eyes wandered off to the window and he paused—was all they had left. He cleared his throat.
Doris could hardly bear to see her father like this. She knew Mother would survive and one day regain her sense of humor, but she was not sure about Daddy. Before Heinrich, she had loved him more than anyone, even more than Kem. The months after Heinrich left had been more terrible because he would not talk to her. Now he needed her again to help him bear the loss of his sons. She looked down at her hands. They were thin, and the knuckles, enlarged by repeated chilblains, looked uglier than ever. Mother worried about her hands and insisted on washing the dishes so she and Gladys could keep theirs looking nice, being young and unmarried. Now Doris covered one hand with the other in a gesture she kept all her life.
Father’s hair and beard had gone quite gray, and he had become thinner. Still a large man, he now stooped forward as if he could no longer stand straight without his paunch. Mother had not changed except to sit more erect and tighten her mouth to what was now a permanent line.
“I want you to marry Bill Bennett,” Father was saying.
“I don’t love him, Daddy,” said Doris. She could hardly get out the words.
“You must like him—there is nothing about him not to like. He is a good, kind man who will be a steady husband.”
Doris felt nothing. “I don’t think we can be happy,” she said. But in the end, she agreed. She could not imagine any kind of happiness anyway.
CHAPTER 13
Bill and Doris
On his next leave, in December 1918, Bill and Doris were married in Blechingley, Surrey, at the parish church. They left the church under the raised swords of the Queen’s Royal West Surrey Regiment. It was a month after the armistice, and Bill was posted to a remote district in India where the Army did not encourage wives to accompany their husbands. So Doris stayed behind once again, even though, in spite of threats of danger and discomfort, she wanted to go. Before that, it was clear she had been right about the marriage. She was not happy.
Kemys Deverell, my brother, named after Doris’s favorite brother and his father’s great grandmother, was born in St. Ives, Cornwall, on February 9, 1919, while Bill was in India. Doris had been sent to Cornwall because she had once again come down with pleurisy, which was complicated by her pregnancy. In Cornwall, she was given Guinness stout once a day. “A baby in every bottle,” went the ad. Whether it was the stout or the sun and the sea, she recovered and produced a 10-pound son. She would have stayed in St. Ives, except that her husband returned, retired from the Army, and took a job as director of the Forgrove Machinery Works in Leeds, Yorkshire.
Doris and Bill and Kem lived in a row house opposite the park in Harrogate, a pretty town known for its baths and mineral waters. Doris must have preferred Harrogate over Leeds as a place to live, and Bill would have agreed. His commute to the Works in Leeds was not far. Doris took Kem to the park, did her shopping, read novels by Eleanor Glyn, the Tatler, and perhaps some Byron or Keats, books given to her before her marriage. The char came once a week to clean.
But it was hard to escape the coal mines that covered everything with a black oily film. Slag heaps were common, as were men with black faces coming home from work. You could smell the coal in the air; it blackened curtains and men’s lungs.
Doris hated the long cold winters, the smell of coal, and the thick Yorkshire dialect. Bill was a good provider and a kind and thoughtful husband. He liked to come home from work and putter in the garden. Like many men of his generation, he had little use for bathing, especially in the winter. This did not make him attractive to his wife, who was sensual and fastidious, with a lifelong keen sense of smell.
Whether this was the reason or whether she was angry at him for not being someone else, Doris stopped sleeping with him.
“You are cruel,” he said.
She shrugged. “I can’t help it.”
It must have been in these early days of marriage that she learned her way around the kitchen with the help of Mrs. Beaton’s Book of Household Management, the definitive cookbook of the time. This book accompanied us everywhere and was consulted later in Portugal when we had a cook and much later in the United States when we didn’t. Mrs. Beaton determined the form of the food we ate.
This cookbook, first written before the turn of the century, was designed to instruct young woman on housewifery. It assumed the existence of maids, but it also assumed diligence in attention to details of cleanliness and food preparation. If there were maids, they were to be strictly instructed in these matters. The recipes were a happy blend of English and French. The steamed or baked pudding and pie (sweet or savory) and the famous joint of beef or mutton was British soul food. French cooking influenced the preparation of vegetables—petits pois, haricots verts, and aubergines—in ways that preserved their natural flavor rather than boiling them to death as the English did.
As a child, my favorite desert was steamed puddings and treacle tarts. The puddings, steamed in boiling water in a basin covered with wax paper and a cloth and tied with a piece of string were made with beef suet, white flour, eggs, butter, and milk poured over some Lyle’s Golden Syrup in the bottom of the basin. When done, the whole thing was turned out onto a plate, the hot syrup flowing over the pudding, smelling of butter and sugar. Treacle tarts were made with pastry dough—my mother had light hand—and filled with the same Lyle’s Syrup, then covered with bread crumbs.
Later, when we were poor, my mother would remember earlier times, and she would exclaim that a modest piece of meat or chicken would feed a family of four for a week. As teenagers, when my sister and I rejected the fried bread she was so fond of, she reminded us that families had raised strapping sons on a diet of bread and dripping. We didn’t care; we wanted to improve our figures and eating bread soaked in bacon fat was not going to do it.
Doris combined the ruggedness of the English character—tough as old boots, my brother was to say of her in her old age—and the sensuality of the French. This didn’t play well in England where “putting on airs” or “playing to the gallery” were disapproved of by her family.
Doris was naturally thrifty and able to save something from her weekly housekeeping allowance to put aside for holidays. Travel became her greatest pleasure.
She read about France and Switzerland and pored over maps. She read about Alpine flowers and ski runs and Mont Blanc and Lausanne and the Castle of Chillon near Montreux on Lake Geneva. She read about Paris and the artists who lived around Montparnasse and the Left Bank. She started remembering Mademoiselle’s lessons. But Bill was kept busy at the Works and now could take little time off.
When Doris and Bill were first married, before he left the Army, they took holidays during his home leave in France and Switzerland. He would have a pocket full of money when they met in Paris to go “on the razzle” to small hotels and French music halls where the wine was cheap.
Once, she met him in Vevey and, in honor of the occasion, bought a bottle of Italian Chianti. In those days, the bottles were often not profes
sionally corked but simply bottled where the grapes were harvested and sold locally in small quantities. Doris carried her bottle back to the small hotel room and decided to taste the wine. She carefully poured a small amount into a glass and tossed it down. Just as rapidly, she spat it out. The bottle had been topped with olive oil to prevent air from entering and spoiling the wine, which was corked by hand. When Bill arrived, she would have met his train at the little station. They went back to the hotel and she poured him a glass then told him her experience with the wine. He would have said “poor old Dor,” because that was the way as children they had expressed sympathy for an honorable hurt.
Even though she left him and lived the last half of her life outside her country, their speech remained the same, having come from the same roots. When I visited my father after being separated for five years during the war, I recognized the language as soon as he spoke. Even the inflections and expressions were the same as hers. They shared a dialect spoken by no one else I ever knew. I would have heard it at Tamar in Beckenham, sitting at the table next to her brothers or my grandparents.
When Kem was six, like all middle class boys and their fathers before them, he was sent to boarding school. Doris took him on school holidays to the Continent. They crossed the channel to Calais, then took a train to Switzerland and stayed in inexpensive pensiones or small hotels near Vevey or St. Moritz, where they pulled the small sleds she called luges up the slopes and whizzed down, Doris in front and Kem clinging to her waist. Madame, the propriétaire, fed the guests the same food she gave the family: the thick potage that began every dinner, poulet à l’ancienne or meat, cheese and fruit, wine. They were very happy there, and Kem learned to love France and prefer the refinements of French food and wine to the homelier cooking of England.
“Je suis plein,” Kem said after a full meal.
Madame laughed. “Non, mon enfant, tu dois dire ‘j’ai bien mangé.’ Tu n’es pas enceinte!”
Doris gave her son the affection she couldn’t give her husband, and these holidays allowed her to leave northern England with its black air and cold damp weather. In the Alps, she got up every morning to clear air, sun, and white snow. Her breakfast was freshly baked bread, coffee with milk, homemade preserves. In the evening the guests sat around the lounge, and Doris enjoyed being a woman alone with a pretty child. She had lost some of her earlier shyness and liked the attention she got from the other guests—especially the men, who did not seem to find her posturing or artificial, as she was accused of being at home. Italian and French men were interested in her clothes—something Englishmen did not notice. Did she go back to their rooms with them in the evening after her son was safely asleep? Perhaps—but she had no children in the 13 years between my brother’s birth and my own.
During this period, she gradually became “Sylvia,” rather than “Dor,” and felt more at home on the Continent than in England.
These holidays were important times in her life when she learned to love places instead of people, to prefer, as so many English have, to live outside their small demanding island with its illustrious past and yet remain, in exile, completely English.
She undoubtedly looked younger than she was, as she did throughout her life due to excellent posture, heavy dark brown hair, clear white skin, and a beautiful figure. She knew she was no beauty, but she was attractive to men and all her life preferred their company. She was sensual, and sentimental rather than warm, with a sense of humor and flexibility of temperament that helped her survive. She was capable of anger and later bitterness but in spite of “the little blue devils” that sometimes visited, she was never, as she said, a “miserable person.” A laugh and a drink, and she was back in business.
She alienated her family when she visited her parents and married sisters by putting on “Frenchified” airs. “Ooo-la-la! ” she exclaimed when she dropped her handkerchief. Her nieces collapsed in giggles at Auntie Dor, her sisters would roll their eyes, and Granny would tighten her mouth. After I was born, Granny refused to call me by my French name, Simone Sylvia, but dubbed me “Sally.” Doris wouldn’t argue with her mother, but later she told her sisters she wanted to be called “Sylvia” instead of “Doris.” Up went the eyebrows. But she was adamant, for all the good it did her. They never called her anything but “Dor.” However, for the rest of her life, she was “Sylvia” to herself and everyone else who knew her, including her children.
CHAPTER 14
Sylvia and Jack
It was at this time in Portugal that my Mother told me how she had come to know Jack. I knew, of course, that he was not my father but I had never heard how they met. Was I old enough to be told? No one ever asks if children are old enough. We were alone, and my mother needed someone to talk to.
Bill had asked Doris if he might bring a visitor home for dinner— an American engineer brought over to discuss new mining techniques. Bill had visited Chicago and known some Yanks in the Army. “Nice blokes,” he said. Doris had never known any Americans and was curious. They were generally thought of in England as “savages” or cowboys. So when Jack Pratt arrived, wearing a Savile Row suit with a box of chocolates from Fortnum & Mason, Doris was first surprised, then delighted. He was tall and dark with a quick mind and a warm easy manner. The chemistry between them was immediate.
Doris wore a white chiffon dress that clung to her body, and had pulled her dark brown hair back in waves coiled at the back of her neck in a chignon. Bill introduced her as “Doris,” but she confided to Jack later that she preferred “Sylvia.”
“’Who is Sylvia?’” he quoted with a smile. “’What is she, that all the swains commend her?’”
“I didn’t know Americans knew English poetry.”
“We are not complete ignoramuses, despite what you might have heard.”
By the time Bill returned with the drinks, Doris felt she had known Jack always. That is the way with love. He smelled good, was beautifully dressed, and lived in Spain, not America. She knew he wanted her; he hardly bothered to hide it. Before that first evening was over, they had kissed.
After he left, Doris and Bill were doing the dishes. “Interesting chap,” said Bill. “What did you think of him?”
Doris asked, “How long is he going to be here?”
“Dunno. We’ve finished with him, but he’s going around to some other firms. Knows a lot about mines. Got interested when he was a child in the mountains of Kentucky and Tennessee.” Bill stopped wiping his plate and stared into space. “Grew up among hillbillies, he told me. Now he wears Savile Row suits.” Bill grinned, “I had to ask him what a hillbilly was.”
“What is it?” asked Doris. For reasons she could not identify, the conversation was making her uneasy. She wanted this man to be what she wanted him to be—not some stranger with a bizarre background.
“Someone who lives in the mountains, makes whiskey and can’t read or write.”
“But he isn’t like that,” said Doris.
“He stole a pair of shoes so he could go to school.” Bill hung up his towel. “I’ll put the kettle on.” They always had tea before going to bed.
Doris rinsed out the pot and put two cups and saucers on a tray. She was thinking of his kiss. She did not feel any guilt or fear for the future. Sexual arousal had disarmed any warning signals. Did Bill know what was coming? Did he care? If he knew, his reticence would not have allowed him to intervene. He had always loved her the way you love someone you cannot have. She made him miserable, but he never complained. When she told him she was in love with Jack, he begged for another chance—that they go on a second honeymoon and try again.
I suppose she felt she could not refuse, although she knew it was wouldn’t work, didn’t want it to work. They went to Cornwall for a month and walked along the sea wall in St. Ives, where she been sent with pleurisy and where Kem was born. Once more, they slept together in the same bed. Bill was his gentlest self, but she felt nothing. When they returned home, Doris was pregnant.
When
Jack came to England, six months later, she agreed to see him to say goodbye.
“You cannot send me away,” Jack said. “These last six months have been unbearable.”
“Look at me,” she said. She was very large. Kem had weighed 10 pounds and this one would be near that weight, the doctor had said.
Jack knelt in front of her and buried his face in her skirt. “You look beautiful. I’ll never let you go.”
He was true to his word. He remained as close as possible, appearing for a few days at a time, writing, sending flowers. Somehow, Bill did not know of Jack’s presence, although Doris made no effort to hide anything. She put his flowers in the drawing room, left his letters lying about. Once Jack forgot his hat and it hung on the coat rack in the hall for a week until he returned. Bill saw nothing. He admired the flowers without asking where they came from, never read a letter not addressed to him, ignored the hat. He knew Doris was not happy, but he believed the baby would change everything.
Did my mother try to make the marriage work after I was born? My brother, 13 at the time, was away at school. Later she would tell me that “it was no good.” I took that to mean that a new baby changed nothing compared to her attraction to Jack Pratt—whom Granny referred to as a “fancy man.”
I was born at home in Harrogate in the little semi-detached house across from the park.
Within two years, Doris had asked Bill for a divorce, and this time he gave in. He arranged everything, and when the divorce was final she left with me and Nanny and traveled to London, where she and Jack were married. He meanwhile had terminated his marriage to the previously unheard-of Elsie.
She told me Bill had sent flowers when she and Jack were married. I thought she would have preferred them to have fought over her. After this, my mother left England, not to return as a resident until l946. She left her son, Kem, behind in boarding school and in the care of his father.
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