TEARS BEFORE BEDTIME and WEEP NO MORE
With a new introduction by the author
BARBARA SKELTON
Introduction
My first choice of title, Where Dust Lies Deep, was taken from a Philip Larkin verse, ‘My past has gone to bed, upstairs in clockless rooms, my past is fast asleep, but hindsight reallumes, in my ruminant head, the days where dust lies deep.’ But this was rejected due to a certain amount of friendly mockery.
Finding an apt and original title is a regular bane. Some writers give the impression that they do not even try. There are those who believe that a selling title should contain the word love. Jean Rhys and Françoise Sagan seemed to be blessed with inspiration. In his introduction to The Evening Colonnade, Cyril Connolly wrote that some writers have no problem. ‘Their title descends in tongues of flame. If a quotation, it should stand on its own, nor should it be French or Latin nor contain words which nobody knows.’
One reader, after Tears Before Bedtime was published in 1987, wrote to say that their cleaner, assuming it to be a children’s book, had carefully laid it to rest on a nursery shelf! The second volume had to correspond. Reviewing Weep No More, the writer Anthony Powell stated: ‘One feels Balzac is the novelist who would best do justice to all this in fiction form. It is to be hoped that both volumes will be put together in one, perhaps in paperback, which is really required for the best appreciation of the story.’
Here it is – a combined version which has enabled me to correct numerous misprints and contorted sentences that appeared in the hardback. In my view, an autobiography should be utterly frank. Otherwise what is its point? Even so, some reviewers turned out to be strangely prudish. Not so Anthony Lambton in the Literary Review: ‘The writer has two remarkable literary qualities, she tells the truth and has no illusions about herself or her lovers.’
One lady reviewer described Tears as giving a vivid account of rackety wartime Bohemia and Café Society. More recently, five years after first publication, Julie Burchill has written in the Spectator: ‘The best autobiography I have ever read is Barbara Skelton’s Tears Before Bedtime, a brilliantly funny account of her life with Cyril Connolly. She was also married to George Weidenfeld and dallied with King Farouk.’ From these quotes, new readers will have some idea of what they are in for.
I have, in fact, been criticised for recycling bits of diary that should, for the sake of form, have been incorporated into the narrative. In my view, this would have lessened the realism of wartime London. What prompted me to write the books? Well, in spite of much faulty grammar and hopeless punctuation, and although not a natural writer – some sentences being slogged over, endlessly rewritten and cut, in order not to bore the reader – I happen to enjoy writing. Do I have second thoughts on any part of them? No. To what extent has the writing been cathartic? Not at all. What do I make of the life presented herein? I leave that for readers to answer. What qualities do I value in others? Honesty, generosity, courage and a capability for friendship, meaning the capability of putting yourself out for a friend in distress, when your own life is running smoothly. Most people are too selfish. The most degrading fault, to my mind, is hypocrisy – wanting to be in every camp in order to be liked. To what extent has the course of my life been determined by chance? Most of it. To what extent by design? Alas, none.
In conclusion, I would like to thank all the appreciative reviewers, as well as Peter Quennell who helped me to prune and punctuate the initial pages of the book, Alastair Forbes for corrections at the end, as well as dear Sonia McGuinness who typed and retyped the finished versions and sorted out sheets of typing after I had continuously muddled them up – which she did without a word of reproach or ridicule.
B.S. December 1992
PART ONE
TEARS BEFORE BEDTIME
To Jocelyn and Clive Donner
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter I – Family
Chapter II – YWCA
Chapter III – First Love
Chapter IV – The Lost Girls
Chapter V – The War
Chapter VI – Yugoslavs
Chapter VII – Egypt
Chapter VIII – Italy and Greece
Chapter IX – After the War
Chapter X – Cyril
Chapter XI – Marriage
Chapter XII – Kupy
Chapter XIII – Life at the Cottage
Chapter XIV – Waugh’s Visit
Chapter XV – Driving through Spain
Chapter XVI – Overnight in France
Chapter XVII – I Tatti
Plates
About the Author
Copyright
Chapter I
Family
Mummy was a beauty. She had very blue eyes that she liked to compare to the violet hue of hydrangeas. Not that she was particularly vain, but she craved admiration. When she met Daddy, she belonged to a repertory company, the members of which were known as the Gaiety Girls, renowned for looks rather than for talent. Following the trend of other young men of good family in those days, my father courted actresses. When my mother was playing in The Merry Widow, he called on her backstage, carrying a bouquet. Years later, she complained that was how he had frittered his money away.
My father Eric and his elder brother, Dudley, were child orphans. Their mother had been a direct descendant of the playwright, Sheridan, and at the age of twenty-one each boy came into an inheritance. Eric was a delicate, gentle man with sad brown eyes, slim and well built with beautiful hands and – ‘les attaches fines’, I think, is the French expression. An honourable man and witty, he had a very weak character, and no outstanding ability except as a sportsman. A keen cricketer, he had played in the second eleven for Sandhurst.
My mother’s instant summing up of any man depended on whether or not she considered him to be a ‘gentleman’. Those who did not qualify were either ‘blackguards’, ‘cads’, or ‘dagos’, but mostly they ended up like ‘Daddy’ being just a ‘poor devil’. It is doubtful if Mummy would have been able to define the term gentleman as well as the Regency courtesan, Harriette Wilson,* who claimed, ‘A man is a gentleman who has no visible means of gaining a livelihood or because he’s a Lord, and the system at White’s Club, the members of which are all choice gentlemen, of course, is and ever has been, never to blackball any man, or one who ties a good knot in his handkerchief, keeps his hands out of his breecher pockets, and says nothin’!’
I was born on the night of Mummy’s twenty-sixth birthday and handed over to Nanny, in whose care I remained throughout the formative years. Mummy claimed that she had been ’such a tiny little thing’, it had been a difficult birth, forceps being employed. It is doubtful if she felt much love for her child. My feelings became more extreme. But, towards the end of her life she inspired pity and, according to George Sand, love and pity can’t be separated.
In their early married years, my parents lived near Henley in a white clapboard house with a garden sloping down to the river. Then, punting was all the rage. Snaps of Mummy show her tightly belted into long white dresses with velvet laced-up booties, her long hair plaited round her head, as she reclined sensuously under a parasol in a punt, while Daddy, wearing a boater, stands manipulating the pole. While stationed in Barbados he contracted malaria. Then, after a severe heart attack, he was invalided out of the army altogether. For as long as I can remember, my father was considered an invalid, unable to take a very active part in life.
We moved about a good deal, living in rented houses, holidays being spent with my maternal grandparents in one of those four-sto
ried semi-detached houses lining Hythe seafront. Each house had a strip of garden that joined the promenade, and when the sea was rough the waves would sweep over the garden gate and lash against the French windows, depositing giant pebbles in their wake. The kitchen was in the basement, meals being carried up to a sitting cum dining room furnished in heavy Victorian oak. We ate seated round an oak gateleg table, above which hung a frilly red chiffon lampshade, so that, when seen from the promenade, the room resembled the interior of some red light district.
The Marine Parade house was invariably full. My mother had four sisters, Hilda, Elca, Vera and Greta, all married bar Aunty Greta whose flirt had been killed in the First World War. Aunty Greta never left Hythe. She remained with my grandparents all her life, cooking superbly, Mrs Beeton style: a Sunday roast with batter pudding, steak and kidney pies, boiled beef and dumplings, cheese straws with drinks, and sponge cakes for tea being the ritual. All the aunts chainsmoked and spent the mornings studying the racing form. They then made bets with a local tobacconist. Should there be a large gathering, as at Christmas, after dinner, a green baize cloth was spread over the gateleg table; everyone played roulette, poker or vingt-et-un, and money changed hands. Before going to bed, Aunty Greta came up the stairs carrying a loaded tray of hot drinks.
When anyone spoke of the house, it was always referred to by its number. ‘We’re going to forty-two,’ my mother would say and, because of the sea, staying with my grandparents was always a treat.
Grandma could barely read or write, but like many grandmothers she seemed to me to be an angel of goodness. What happy memories! – picnics together in the woods, coming back laden with primroses and bluebells and her delicious teas of home-made strawberry jam, and freshly baked warm scones spread with melting butter and thick Devonshire cream. Alas, as I grew older her ignorance and friendly questioning irritated me. Whenever I think of Grandpa, he is already over eighty, wiry and sprightly, with a certain rickety energy. The only remark of his that I remember is that he couldn’t eat bananas; they upset his digestion. When too old to play bowls, he took up gardening and walked to an allotment on the outskirts of the town, coming home at dusk laden with various produce of his own planting: some tomatoes, a cabbage, an abundance of artichokes or a prize marrow of colossal dimensions. He lived on a pension from the postal service and on retirement had been awarded a floridly designed certificate, claiming him to have been an impeccable civil servant, which remained on display between two Town Crier prints on the mantelpiece. But, with his bright blue eyes and slightly flushed complexion, Grandpa looked more like a retired seaman.
He was of Danish descent. His sister, Great Aunt Greta, could barely speak English. A tall formidable lady with a deep guttural voice, when visiting forty-two she remained seated by the fire doing very fine crochet work. Otherwise, she sang in operas. She was on her way to tour the United States, travelling in the Titanic, when the ship struck an iceberg. One of the few survivors, as her lifeboat rowed to safety, Great Aunt Greta sang hymns and was later given an award for bravery. My grandparents lived to celebrate their diamond wedding anniversary.
I used to love the crunch of the smooth brown pebbles as in summertime we stepped onto the beach to lie in the shade of a slimy green wooden breakwater just in front of the house. We’d take a picnic basket and lunch there, sheltered from the wind. I collected milk stones and at low tide paddled about the sand gathering mussels. Shoals of porpoises flipped past on the horizon. Dymchurch lighthouse flickered in the distance. At night, lying in a four-poster, one could hear the lap of the sea as the waves rolled over the shingle. Then, a horse-drawn tram ran along the seafront as far as Sandgate, and the narrow High Street of Hythe was full of old pubs and antique shops. Nowadays, red buses thunder through and a stream of traffic runs parallel to the canal bank. Ugly beach huts line the promenade, where at high tide men squat with fishing lines. Even the Ladies’ Walk, once a haven for lovers, is now a treeless barren waste.
Bun-faced, with slanting sludge-coloured eyes, I was probably a great disappointment to my parents. My hair looked as though it had been trimmed round a pudding basin and I wore a fringe. But I kept on smiling until my mother sat down at the piano, when I flew at her screaming with jealous rage. Aged four, during luncheon, after being refused a second helping of roast beef, I ran at her with a carving knife.
I was banned from the table and locked into the attic, and Aunty Hilda’s husband, Uncle Dicky, came up to console me. A schoolmaster, he was very fond of children, though he never had any of his own. Whenever trouble brewed, I sought his company, and spared him my usual term of abuse to grown-ups, ‘You silly old elk!’
Soon after the attack on my mother, wearing a boy’s sailor suit and a red tam-o’-shanter, I walked out of the house. It made a lasting impression on my mother. For years she went on recounting how, from her bedroom window, she had seen me bobbing along the cricket pitch as I strode purposefully into town.
One Easter, we were staying with an aunt in Cheltenham and Daddy took me into the town, where we saw three ducks wagging their heads up and down, seated on three large Easter eggs. When told the ducks were not for sale, that I couldn’t have them, I created such a scene that a crowd gathered and a policeman had to help Daddy drag me away.
When left in the care of this dreaded aunt, an underling took me to play on some public swings, whereupon a rash appeared on my hands. It was never clear whether the rash had been caught on the swing or from touching a hairy caterpillar, but I was considered to be unclean and, to prevent the door handles becoming contaminated, I was again locked into a room. It seemed to be a universal form of punishment in those days, locking children up to brood on their wickedness. Perhaps I had answered back, determined to have the last word, a habit that caused my father to suffer a great deal of anxiety.
Such a difficult child clearly needed more discipline. At the age of four, I was sent as a border to a nearby convent. Besides being less costly, a Catholic school was thought to be more strict. Having inherited Daddy’s aptitude for games, I was soon handling a hockey stick. Whenever I fell and grazed a knee, the nuns plied me with sweets. Brighton rock and sherbert sucked through a liquorice stick were then a childhood treat, though it is doubtful if that is what the nuns produced. After breakfast, when the other pupils trooped up to class, I lingered behind to eat the remains of the nuns’ buttered toast. Then, exacerbated by fear, lest someone should come in and catch me at it, I’d rub on the edge of the refectory table while conjuring up a fantasy of falling into a bed of stinging nettles. I developed a crush on a very plain girl, called Marjorie. I would creep into her bed or lie curled on her lap in a foetal ball, which was interpreted as precocious sexuality meriting instant spanking.
Then, when my sister Brenda was born, we settled into a large basement flat in a dingy London block not far from Hyde Park. The sitting room curtains had a design of red and yellow tulips, and in one of the window panes was a circular black patch where someone had kicked in a football. As pedestrians hurried past, one could hear the clank of a manhole. Above the mantelpiece hung a Victorian painting of Sir Walter Raleigh sitting on a deserted beach gazing longingly out to sea. A dining room at the back of the flat had Chippendale chairs and looked on to a yard of dustbins.
Our mongrel terrier Peter excited great admiration by accompanying my father to the War Office and finding his way home alone. My sister’s Irish nurse had coarse red hands with long brittle fingernails that were always getting chipped during our fisticuff fights in the kitchen. For, at this stage, it was Brenda who incited my jealous rages. Wearing a cloche hat, the nurse would wheel Brenda’s pram into the park, while Peter trotted alongside. I carried the picnic basket containing a thermos of tea, tomato and cucumber or jam sandwiches. Once at the Round Pond, with nurse settled on the grass, I’d take the pram, saying I was going to watch the little sailing boats and, once out of sight, pinched Brenda’s bare calves, so that screams prevailed all the way back to Hyde Park Mansions.
The nearest convent, Sion, was in Chepstow Villas. The entrance hall was dark and cavernous with candlelit Virgins in niches. The school uniform was a white silk blouse and black gym tunic with a coloured sash. Out of doors one wore a wide-brimmed cream Panama hat. The English and maths mistress was a brisk little nun who always came bustling into the classroom nervously adjusting her wimple. She must have been a good teacher, for I began to excel at maths. She would read out any essay that appealed to her. One subject I chose was the fantasy life of the cabby parked on the corner of Chepstow Villas. Whenever one passed, he was invariably asleep perched high up behind his horse, a whip in his hand and his mouth ajar.
Daddy paid extra for me to take piano lessons. At the end of school concerts, I and another girl would play duets. I collected rosaries. In chapel, I loved kneeling before the altar, waiting to have a wafer placed on my tongue and sipping Christ’s blood from the goblet of Madeira. Surprisingly enough, no one ever tried a conversion. And, although I often played truant, having saved up bus fares by walking to school in order to spend an afternoon in the local ‘fleapit’ watching Garbo and John Gilbert, I was very happy at Sion.
Mummy had retained an old bachelor admirer from her theatrical days, the Times theatre critic, who gave us free tickets; whenever we went to the Palladium to see Peter Pan, he got us a box to ourselves. But what Brenda and I enjoyed most was being taken to Barnum’s circus every year. When Brenda reached an age to attend Sion Convent, she was made to walk with me; in that way I saved up two bus fares. Everything went well until the age of puberty, when I rouged my cheeks and used Mummy’s tweezers to pluck out all my eyebrows. One day, a pale saintly-looking nun was rifling through our desks when she came across a bundle of love letters I had written to myself, but signed ‘Fred’. I was expelled in disgrace.
'Tears Before Bedtime' and 'Weep No More' Page 1
