The weekend of 25 August was the first of several she spent at Castle Hill Farm, “an adorable cottage, too beautifully arranged. What taste we have in the family. Jessie much older but still the pillar! What devotion.” Harry d’Avigdor-Goldsmid lunched that first Sunday and showed her round Somerhill in the afternoon. (A few years later Alan and Poppy left, and he sent them these mysterious lines:
The pheasants that shine in the Colebrook Fields
Call Alan Alan Alan from over the wall
And the chestnut cants on Castle Hill
Whisper Poppy Poppy Poppy as the brown leaves fall.)
In the manner of a medieval monarch on a royal procession, Mitzi congratulates deserving inferiors, whether family members, hotel servants, or old friends like the Vansittarts. Either out of a sense of superiority, or perhaps because her usage of the English language owed a lot to Frank and made her sound jaunty and condescending, she seems to be rejoicing that she is one who had got away in time, and it was her privilege to do so. Details that Poppy gave her about concentration camps, she writes, were “just not to be taken in.” All the same, she did take in the sadism the camp personnel had inflicted on victims of typhus and women expecting babies. Julius Reinach from one of the most prominent Jewish families had told Poppy that he and his wife had been in Drancy, the Paris holding camp for Auschwitz. With them were Springer relations, Eric and Hélène Allatini, and the latter “had lived like a saint” before they were both deported to their death. Reinach and his wife somehow got out, but his brother Léon and his wife Béatrice, née Camondo, and their two children were killed. Her friends Jacques and Jeanne Helbronner, members of another prominent Jewish family, had also been murdered. “Lucie de Langlade will never come back nor will the Michel Proppers.” Mitzi knew that Dr Metzl, the director of the factory, had lost two brothers and a sister, and the Brülls had lost every member on both sides of their family.
Writing from Budapest, Zoltánné Blum was only one of those appealing to Mitzi for financial help. She was the daughter of Dora Springer, a relation though not close. In a dignified tone, she gives the tragic details of her immediate past. In 1944 her mother had been deported to Auschwitz and never returned. Zoltánné’s husband had spent several years in labour camps before he was dragged off (verschleppt is the word she uses) to Germany and murdered there. Her only brother, an engineer, was sent to Ukraine in 1942 as a slave labourer, and she has had no word from him since. Acquiring false papers, she had survived deportation but everything in her home had been stolen, and she’d got back the hairdressing salon she ran but not its most important contents. Nothing indicates whether Mitzi responded by sending money.
In the autumn she and Frank caught the Golden Arrow to Paris. At the station Elie was waiting, along with Max “green with emotion” and Adrian who once more happened to be in France. The flat in the rue de Surène had been recovered, and Bubbles and Lily joined them there. “We all drank, ate, talked and kissed till 2.15 in the morning. It was all very very lovely.” Just released from a prisoner of war camp, Robert was once again her butler and his wife Paulette the lady’s maid. Also originally from Montreuil, her chauffeur Harlé had spent the war working at the factory and was at her service. Being driven in the nearby rue François I a few days later, she couldn’t help remembering the van den Brecks who had entertained her and Eugène in their house in that street, “among their charming things and wonderful food. She starved to death in a German camp and he was tortured to death.”
To go back to central Europe was out of the question. She learnt from Alan that Meidling was in a fearful state. In the park were graves of German soldiers. Certain trees carried emotional associations; they had been felled. The house was badly damaged, and its interior degraded with pictures of Hitler and photographs from its days as a school for Gauleiters. In a letter in English, unsigned, therefore probably a translation, an advisor comments in dismay that when he was admitted to her service, “you could not guess that all the property in Central Europe was doomed.” If Meidling was not soon sold it might become too expensive a liability and would have to be given away. The Social Democrats in government were as intransigent as “the worst communists…. In order to appease the people big conspicuous properties are taxed in a drastic way.”
Alan quoted Franz the old butler at Meidling, “Such an end to a beautiful life with the Frau Baronin.” Writing for herself, she is restrained, “It does hurt a bit.” The Gestapo had stored the Meidling furniture and possessions in numbered containers in the Salzburger salt mines of Altaussee; these were returned to Paris two years later. Alan had seen the Red Army and passed on to Mitzi his fears about Soviet intentions in central Europe. At Lesvár, “commissars have told our people that if they complain to Pokorny or Alan they will be shot. The Russian officer who insisted on riding Trissolin, the 1940 Budapest Derby winner, was thrown, drew his revolver and shot the horse.” Pokorny was speaking about an indemnity of six million dollars, but she had no such expectation.
20 November 1945, she writes, was one of the happiest days of her life. Harlé drove her and Max to Maisons-Alfort. “As I walked into the bureau of my beloved factory all the workmen were there to welcome me…. I was given lovely flowers and then the senior workman, my dear old Dubois at 93 still looking 50 read the speech of welcome. Too touching for words. He spoke of poor Pollack and others killed in the war. Only since I was among them did I truly feel at home.” At that same moment she learnt that damp had destroyed numerous volumes of her diaries buried for safety at Montreuil. She always felt that masterpieces had been lost. However, “Royaumont seemed more like home to me than ever before.” In the visitors’ book on 2 December, she wrote a paragraph in French thanking Eduardo and Max, Marcel and Renée and Rimbert for preserving and embellishing everything, ending, “Royaumont made me understand that we are as one in our thankfulness and our affections.” She signed “Mummy” in English. “So happy to be in the family way again,” is Frank’s contribution.
In post-war letters to Mitzi, Alan describes how he had to go to Sheffield to be demobilised, and the correspondence he was having with the Foreign Office and the Treasury about visas and permissions and finances. In October 1946, about to start at the Times Literary Supplement, he tells her rather snarkily about Poppy that “Madame decided to feel better.” This allows them to stay put at Castle Hill although, “I suspect there are physical causes which ought to be taken in hand.” At that same moment Poppy was telling her mother, “Happily I feel better having come out of a rather bad crisis and I still don’t know if physique or morale was the cause of it.” Alan, she adds, was well and everyone was enthusiastic about his translation of Hofmannsthal’s libretto of Der Rosenkavalier, which he’d just completed. In an undated note in pencil, she says she is haunted by fear of a relapse, “it is so very frightening but I must try to calm myself.”
Poppy’s letters from that period usually begin with an excuse for not writing often enough. Then in June 1947, “Lots of gossip, we’ve been rather social.” Pearl Diver, Geoffroy and Lulu de Waldner’s horse, had just won the Derby, and Poppy had made fifty pounds with the bookies. She and Alan spent one weekend with Eddy Sackville-West at Knole, and another at Buscot with Gavin Faringdon; Alan had given a dinner party for the Romanian Princess Anne-Marie Callimachi; the cocktail party of their friends Honor and Vere Pilkington had been amusing; they had taken Cécile de Rothschild to dine at Somerhill and she had afterwards wondered if she shouldn’t regret having refused Harry’s hand in marriage.
Granny saw to it that the vie de château was restored straightaway at Royaumont. Every morning the household, one by one, paid respects to her, in a personal visit that might last a quarter of an hour or longer. In the second part of the morning’s ceremony, I was supposed to go to the Chambre des Fleurs where Frank would be in bed. He’d urge me to sit down next to him but some sixth sense kept me away. A governess gave lessons to Elly, and I might join them in the schoolroom. Raymond the groom came out
riding with me along the sandy paths through the woods to the Gros Chêne. We’d go to meets of the local stag hunt, the Rallye Vallière, Max impeccable in its royal-blue colours with gold braid and Lily riding side-saddle. Sometimes at the end of the day the huntsmen assembled on the terrace of the house to sound their horns. Stashed away in the stable block, the Pères, were ancient unmanageable penny-farthings. Magnificent Percheron cart-horses ploughed the fields. When they were let loose to drink in the stream that ran at the edge of the farm, their huge hoofs clattered on the cobbles with a noise like gunshots. In that same stream women washed sheets, scrubbing and slapping the wet linen on a cement incline. One Christmas, everyone from the château and the farm gathered in the yard to take part in the slaughter of a pig. The bladder, a sagging white balloon amid all the blood, was blown up and kicked about like a football.
In the unusually cold winter of 1947 the three lakes froze over so we could walk across them, setting off cracks that thundered through the ice. When I turned back in case the ice gave way, Frank took hold of me, pressing me tightly against him and not letting go until we had reached the far side. One evening we were gathering downstairs for dinner and Frank was missing. He had to be sent for. Entering the drawing room, he fell on the floor, drunk, in front of everyone. Robert helped him back upstairs and a furious Mitzi had his place removed from the dining table.
In the park, a landscaped expanse of water reaches almost up to the side of the house. A small island has a picturesque folly on it, a faux hermit’s cave. Staying in the house, Adrian took to the ice one arctic morning on this scenic rink, and gave a championship display of skating, leaping, pirouetting, reversing faster and faster. Double-jointed, he could bend one foot round his neck, and spin on the other foot while lowering himself into a ball like a human hedgehog right down on the ice. By the time he reached this finale, the whole household was leaning out of the windows, cheering and applauding.
The abbey is a couple of minutes away on foot. Its owners Henri and Isabel Gouin had the highest artistic and musical taste. They had an outstanding collection of manuscript scores that had belonged to François Lang, Isabel Gouin’s brother and a pianist compared to Dinu Lipatti. Denounced in Vichy France, he had been deported and murdered in Auschwitz. Famous intellectuals and musicians wandered through the immense refectory and other rooms set aside for a cultural foundation with a programme of lectures and concerts. In the part of the abbey reserved for the family were Marie-Christine and Françoise, the Gouin daughters, and the numerous pretty girls they were always inviting. Philip, Elly and I had the run of the place; we used even to roller-skate echoingly round and round the medieval cloister.
For two summers in the aftermath of the war and the heyday of ration-cards, I caught up with Philip and Elly in Switzerland. The Spanish diplomatic service had repaired Eduardo’s career by posting him consul in Zurich. The train went straight through, Poppy rubbed it in that I had only to sit tight until Eduardo and Bubbles met me at Interlaken. So at Zurich I stayed alone in an empty carriage reading the Sherlock Holmes stories. Night fell. The train at last crept into a shed, and there the cleaners found me. The stationmaster telephoned a frantic Bubbles and put me on the right train.
The Weisses Kreuz Hotel in Klosters was an escape from food coupons. Once more, there were as many bananas as could be eaten. Elly and I worked a racket in the best pâtisserie; an attractive little girl, she distracted the men behind the counter while I filled my pockets with sweets. Before dinner one day we made ourselves sick, the truth came out, and Eduardo marched us up to the shop to confess. The Tour de Suisse bicycle race was coming through Klosters and at lunch that day Eduardo and Philip had an argument about the merits of Fausto Coppi, the champion. Suddenly father and son, both so self-contained, were shouting at one another, and the whole dining room fell silent to enjoy it.
Now and again I caught hints that Poppy wanted me to spend as much time as possible with her family in order to get me away from Alan and his habitual indulgence. Rules and discipline were not for him. He seemed to be able effortlessly to remake the world in his own image. Asked to do anything practical, he would say, “Send for a man.” In the pantry was a large terracotta bowl of salt water in which eggs could be preserved indefinitely. When a mouse fell in and swam around desperately, Alan took one look and Mr Carter had to be fetched to hoick it out and break its neck.
Conversation was Alan’s medium. In a voice beautifully modulated, he made his point indirectly, through anecdote. He would cap and improve other people’s stories with an exaggeration that was an art form. “He doesn’t dwell in the palace of truth,” was the phrase he attached to others though its reference to himself was obvious. His vocabulary had idiosyncracies such as jinken for chicken, barouche or bolide for a car, puddocks or puds for hands, presumably quoting Robert Herrick. An outing or a party was a junket, and either as a verb or a noun smell was “niff.” A recurrent simile was, “he ran like a lamplighter.” In idioms surviving from the Edwardian era, “dewdrop” was his synonym for compliment, “the Place” for lavatory, and “conniption” signified an outburst of irritation. “Don’t vex me,” was how he insisted generously on stopping someone else picking up the bill in a restaurant. A few affected pronunciations, for instance “weskit” for waistcoat, “Millen” for Milan, and once something like “doocut” for dovecote, had a comic effect. “Beim Coquettieren sind die Englishwomen sehr handicappiert,” was a sentence he claimed to have heard one Austrian say to another.
To Alan, I was Auguste, pronounced as though French although it was shorthand from the German nursery song, “Ach du liebe Augustine, du bist so schön.” Schubert was a favourite composer and in another mode some piece of music by Scriabin seemed to shake the room. To us he played songs from a Victorian album, one of which had the title, “The policeman with the India-rubber boots.” Another had a jolly chorus, “We’ll join the glad throng that goes laughing along, and we’ll all go a-hunting today.” When the three of us came home from Annie Get Your Gun, he asked what we had liked about the musical, sat at the piano and played it through. My admiration for his gifts was boundless.
Another pastime was to scrutinize the houses advertised for sale in Country Life and fantasize about their suitability for us. Driving anywhere in the country, he and Poppy might turn in past a lodge that looked like an approach to grandeur, ring the front doorbell of the house at the end of the drive and spin some story to justify having a look round. “Pillars and stucco” was his shorthand for the indispensable architectural features that he was seeking for himself but never found. More than once, we climbed into the park of Finchcocks, the home of Denys Finch-Hatton, immortalized in Out of Africa by Baroness Blixen (writing as Isak Dinesen). The house was abandoned, ridden with dry rot. As we picnicked in the long grass that grew up to the classical façade, Alan was already imagining what it would be like to be the owner and how we were to find the money to buy it. “I’ll see you a Lady yet,” he used to say in make-believe to Poppy. She had a character strong enough to make him do things he didn’t want to, for instance to get down to writing. One evening in Castle Hill I suddenly heard him hammering on the door of the dressing room where he was supposed to be working. I’m an adult, he began shouting, let me out, you can’t lock me in. “I will unlock,” Poppy answered, “but only when you’ve finished your article and slipped it under the door so I can see it.”
By the time I passed Common Entrance and in September 1948 went on from Beachborough to Eton, Alan had become editor of the Times Literary Supplement. A journal of reviews of this kind offers opportunities for the ambitious and unscrupulous to make or break reputations. An article by F. R. Leavis in the June 1951 issue of his journal Scrutiny has the title “Mr Pryce-Jones, the British Council and British Culture.” The parts of this equation are not equal and the charge is false that Alan was promoting “the unanimities of the New Statesman, the Sunday papers and the BBC.” In his rather cumbersome wording, Leavis was accusing those
in charge of these outlets of running a racket promoting each other. Alan’s literary tastes were too wide for that, and savoir-vivre usually saved him from literary quarrelling. Looking out of the window of the office in Printing House Square, however, he noticed a lorry off-loading packing cases containing the many volumes of the Maoist New China Encyclopedia. He had them re-addressed to Dr Leavis at Downing College, Cambridge, and sent a letter asking Leavis for ten thousand words by the following Thursday. That was the story he told, at any rate, and Edith Sitwell, at daggers drawn with Leavis, took great pleasure in it. (It says something about Poppy that Edith Sitwell kept inviting her to lunch and gave her a volume of her poems with a particularly warm inscription.)
To avoid commuting from Tonbridge, Alan rented a pied-à-terre on the top floor of the house in Little Venice of the composer Lennox Berkeley and his wife Freda. Patrick Kinross lived in the same street. Alan fitted Poppy into a social life of people with much the same invitations as themselves to dinners and dances, and much the same attendance at the theatre and the opera. They sailed on the Queen Mary to the United States and returned talking about Edmund Wilson and Louis Auchincloss. “You do know, don’t you, that your father is the fourth most intelligent man in England,” Tony Quinton, the philosopher and future President of Trinity College, Oxford, was to say to me before I knew that this was how he liked to talk. I believed it.
Away either at school or at Royaumont, I was unaware of the life of Castle Hill ebbing. In the period of transition from one house to another Mitzi’s diaries fill with complaints. “Poppy took it out of me on Sunday morning,” she wrote. “Poppy says Alan is killing himself because they need lots of money to live the right way among the people he needs to meet.” Much as she would like to help, “Alas! I cannot do it, my head is no more up to it, nor are my nerves and nor is my cheque book.”
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