Marriages are Made in Bond Street

by Penrose Halson

  PENROSE HALSON

  Marriages Are Made

  in Bond Street

  True Stories from a 1940s Marriage Bureau

  PAN BOOKS

  For Bill, and in memory of Heather Jenner

  Contents

  Prologue

  1. Audrey’s Uncle Has a Brainwave

  2. No, It’s Not a Brothel

  3. Open for Matrimonial Business

  4. The Capitulation of Cedric Thistleton

  5. The Perfect Secretary and Other Learning Curves

  6. New Clients Wanted – But No Spies, Please

  7. Mary Transforms Myrtle

  8. The Mansion and the Mating

  9. Mary’s Bones and Babies

  10. While Bombs Fall the Bureau Booms

  11. Sex, Tragedy, Success and Bust Bodices

  12. A Sideline and Two Triumphs

  13. Other Agendas, Pastures New

  14. Heather Chooses Mating over Chickens

  15. Picot and Dorothy Hold the Fort

  16. Peacetime Problems

  17. Loneliness and Heartbreak

  18. Mr Hedgehog, Journalists, a Tiny Baptist and Lies

  19. A Chapter of Accidents and Designs

  20. Thanks to Uncle George

  Appendix

  Requirements of female clients 1939–c.1949

  Requirements of male clients 1939–c.1949

  Interviewers’ comments 1939–c.1949

  Acknowledgements

  Picture Acknowledgements

  Reading Group Questions

  List of Illustrations

  Prologue

  ‘Buy a marriage bureau? You and me? You must be joking!’

  ‘No,’ said Bill, ‘I’m totally serious. You can interview the clients and do the match-making – you’re very good at that, I know – and I’ll do the finances and the advertising. Come on, let’s do it!’

  So we did. In 1986, after a motley career in writing, editing and teaching, I found myself, aged forty-six, sitting in a cramped little office in a seedy alley off Oxford Street, nervously awaiting my first client as proprietress of the Katharine Allen Marriage & Advice Bureau.

  ‘KA’ had been founded in 1960, modelled closely on the Marriage Bureau: Heather Jenner, established in 1939. In 1992, faced with a 700 per cent rent increase, Heather Jenner’s daughter asked me to take over her clients. So two small, eccentric, individualistic institutions became one. Their story begins in Assam, North-east India, in 1938 . . .

  1

  Audrey’s Uncle Has a Brainwave

  In 1938, farmer’s daughter Audrey Parsons was staying with her uncle, a tea planter who managed a remote plantation in the hills of Assam. Audrey was twenty-four, pretty, petite and fragile-looking, with a pink and white complexion, dark hair, big brown eyes and an infectious laugh.

  Six years earlier, after a whirlwind romance in England, she had sailed out to India to marry a young man who worked for her uncle. When she had first met him in England, Peter had seemed as exciting as Audrey could desire in a husband, and she had been in raptures as they went from ball to party in a dizzying round of gaiety. But in India she found him passionately (for him) and tediously (for her) absorbed in his work, and juvenile, dull and vapid when not busily engaged in planting tea.

  ‘I am sorry, Uncle George,’ she had apologized, ‘but I simply cannot marry Peter. I shall go home and think what to do next.’

  Uncle George was exceedingly fond of his vivacious niece, and sympathized since, much as he liked Peter, who was an ideal employee, he could see that she was not cut out for a conventional marriage to a pleasant, straightforward but unoriginal man in a remote and lonely place. Sorrowfully he waved her goodbye, begging her to come back soon to add sparkle to his solitary life. Most of the time he was content, but the isolation of his plantation, miles from any of his handful of European neighbours, sometimes threatened to overwhelm him.

  So Audrey had returned to her parents in Cambridgeshire. Her father, a down-to-earth farmer, was dismayed by her attitude: ‘I liked Peter. He’s not a chinless wonder with a one-track mind, like you say he is, my girl – he’s a decent fellow with a good future. You’re being too picky, like you always have been, always wanting something else. What do you think you’re going to do now? You can’t stay here for ever; I can’t keep you. You don’t like our farm anyway – you’re always off to London whenever you can. Find yourself a husband and get out!’

  Audrey’s mother was a bit more lenient, but nevertheless insistent that Audrey had to marry. One of her two brothers would eventually take over the farm, which had been in the family for generations, and there would be no place for Audrey in the farmhouse.

  But Audrey’s brush with possible matrimony had made her long to try some other way of life. In a local newspaper she spotted an advertisement for a job in a factory, packing and labelling papers for despatch. Determined to be independent and to earn some money, she applied and had a short interview with the factory manager, who was so startled that a girl so well-spoken and smartly dressed should want such a menial job that he bowed to her enthusiasm and said she could start next week.

  Audrey found the work physically exhausting and mind-blowingly boring, but she earned £1 a week, which was just enough for her to live in factory girls’ lodgings. By the end of the day she was weary, but not too tired to want some entertainment, of which there was none apart from the local cinema. The other girls regarded her with deep suspicion. Audrey did not dress like them, she did not talk like them, she was patently not one of them. They largely ignored her, excluding her from their interminable heart-to-hearts about make-up and boy-friends.

  It did not take many weeks before Audrey quailed at the dismal prospect of confronting another mountain of parcels, and of turning a deaf ear to yet another animated description of the relative merits of Ted and Fred. However, she had proved herself to be an independent woman with a spirit of adventure. She continued to demonstrate her success by getting a job as a dentist’s receptionist, making appointments and soothing fearful patients.

  On her first day, the dentist instructed her to leave her desk to assist him with an extraction, during which she was to observe where the torn-out teeth landed, pick them up, and wipe the blood off the floor. She promptly handed in her notice, marched out banging the door behind her, and walked up the street, until a card in an office window caught her eye: a photographer’s assistant was required.

  Once again Audrey found it easy to get the job, but hard to like it enough to stay. The negatives were developed in a darkroom, which she found oppressive and almost frightening. Her employer added to her discomfort by reprimanding her sharply when, in the unaccustomed darkness, she dropped a vital roll of film, or bumped into a tank of precious developing liquid. Late every afternoon she stumbled blinking into the daylight, until she admitted defeat and handed in her notice before, she feared, she was told to go.

  As the years passed, the thrill of being independent began to wear thin. Audrey yearned to travel, but could not afford to; and without qualifications, only menial work was open to her. She got a job delivering for a cake shop, but it ended when she was caught eating the tastiest cakes. Her final act of defiance was a job as a riding instructor. She was an excellent horsewoman, having been in the saddle since she was two, and a good teacher; but once again the job description had not been precise, and she jibbed when instructed to muck out the stables.

  Audrey walked home from the riding school wondering what on earth to do next. In the hall of the farmhouse she found an airletter: Uncle George would gladly pay her fare if she would come and lighten his life again (and there would be no embarrassing meetings with Peter, s
ince he now had his own tea plantation, many miles away).

  Desperate to escape the recriminations of her father and the tight-lipped reproach of her mother, Audrey accepted this generous offer and once again took ship for Assam. Her uncle was delighted to have her company, and took her round to meet his neighbours, often half a day’s ride away. Social occasions were few and far between, but Uncle George made an effort to entertain his favourite niece, introducing her to several single men. After her unsociable life in search of independence, Audrey got a kick out of flirting with the men, who were all itching to get married, but for whom there were scarcely any potential wives in Assam. At night, though, she lay in bed disconsolately considering her future: ‘I can’t stay here for ever, and I can’t go back home and flit from job to job. Perhaps I shall have to give up and get married after all.’

  So, in an uncharacteristically low moment, Audrey accepted the proposal of a most eligible man. However, as with her jobs, she found it easy to get engaged but hard to carry the engagement through to its logical conclusion: marriage. Her much older fiancé constantly lectured her about the wifely duties he expected. In return for his protection, she was to defer to her lord and master in an appropriately servile manner. Obeying would be the order of the day, not laughing and having fun and doing interesting things together. Growing more and more apprehensive, with a lavish and expensive wedding imminent, Audrey handed back her engagement ring.

  Once again, Uncle George was sympathetic. His own hasty, superficially suitable marriage had brought misery to both him and his wife, who for many years had lived in England. Before his niece left, he made a suggestion which was to change Audrey’s life, and that of countless others: ‘When you get back to England, why not do something about introducing the single young men you’ve met here – and, you know, there are thousands more like them – to marriage-minded young women, during their leave in England? As you’ve observed, marriageable girls are like gold dust here, and when the men are back on leave it’s hard for them to get to know the right sort of girls after being abroad for so long and falling out of touch with their old friends. Think about it, my dear.’

  During the voyage back to England, Audrey pondered on this suggestion. It piqued her imagination. But what on earth could she do about it?

  Back at her parents’ farmhouse Audrey was greeted coldly. Mr Parsons could scarcely conceal his anger at her failure to get off his hands by doing what every normal young woman did: get married. His wife too was becoming intolerant of Audrey’s bizarre behaviour. Why could not her only daughter behave like other girls?

  Audrey sought escape, any escape, preferably to somewhere far, far away. She answered an advertisement for a lady’s maid in the ‘Governesses, Companions and Lady Helps’ classified column of the Lady magazine, as the advertiser, an autocratic widow, said she was about to embark for the Far East. Audrey was paid 12s 6d a week, plus her board and lodging. Preparing her extensive wardrobe for the voyage, the widow instructed Audrey to sew in old-fashioned dress preservers, designed to protect clothes from under-arm perspiration. Thinking these strange objects were padding, Audrey sewed them neatly and firmly into the shoulders of all her employer’s dresses. She was promptly dismissed.

  Not finding another job abroad, Audrey settled for becoming a games mistress, which she loathed, and then a chauffeuse. Her parents had refused to let her learn to drive in their car, for in any case why did she need to drive? Her husband would do any necessary driving. Fortunately her employer, a neurotic old woman who took drugs to calm her nerves, was so sedated that she did not notice that, driving up Ludgate Hill, Audrey sped along the pavement.

  Audrey’s final employer, an equally elderly but iron-nerved lady, took her on as skipper on her private yacht. Audrey could scarcely tell a yacht from a canoe, but in the train on her way down to the east coast she read some informative books, picked up the basics, and took to running the forty-five-foot sloop-rigged sailing yacht like a duck to water. Fortunately the very nice old lady went to bed early, so every evening Audrey picked the brains of the skippers in the pubs by the harbour, and soon managed as if she had been born at sea.

  The old lady pulled the plug on the only job Audrey had thoroughly enjoyed when she decided her sailing days were over, and retired to a comfortable flat in Kensington. Audrey had no choice but to go back to the unwelcoming farm, and accepted with alacrity the invitation of a girl-friend to go and stay in London.

  At a Chelsea party, Audrey met Heather Lyon.

  Ex-debutante Heather was twenty-four, strikingly handsome, party-loving, strong-minded, six foot tall, with heavy blonde hair, a throaty, sexy voice and a commanding presence. After being presented at Court and ‘doing the Season’ in London, she had sailed out to join her father, a British Army brigadier, in Ceylon. One of a tiny handful of young white women, surrounded by hordes of young and not-so-young British Army officers, colonial servants, businessmen, tea planters and missionaries – all males starved of female company – Heather was fêted and flattered, wined, dined and worshipped. Dizzied by her popularity, lulled by the luxurious comfort provided by umpteen servants, warmed by the exotic sunshine, she was wooed so assiduously that at nineteen she was married.

  A suitable marriage at nineteen was the natural first step along the conventional path for a young woman of Heather’s background, to be followed as night succeeds day by children, housekeeping and entertaining in furtherance of her husband’s career. But Heather was feeling her way towards a less subservient, more independent existence. Her husband was nonplussed. The marriage quickly foundered, and Heather sailed back to England as a single woman.

  Heather with a broken marriage and Audrey with two broken engagements had failed to comply with the unwritten rules of their sex, age and class. Lacking husbands, what were they to do next? They were both in the same boat, and their common determination to find a future drew them together.

  ‘Listen, Heather,’ urged Audrey, ‘my Uncle George gave me an idea. In fact, I think it’s a brainwave. Remember what it was like on the ship you came back on? Hardly any girls among masses of men, most of them going back home to find a wife, lonely and sex-starved and forlorn, poor lambs. On my ship they kept giving me the glad eye – I could have been engaged half a dozen times before we even got into port! They visit their families in England, but every second of the day they’re on the prowl for a girl to marry. If they don’t find one, in a couple of months they have to go back to Ceylon or India or wherever, and they won’t have leave again for years and years. And you know what it’s like in Ceylon: there are so few girls that most of those chaps haven’t got a hope in hell of finding a wife, or they marry the first halfway presentable one who comes along – and we both know how dire that can be! So while they’re on leave in England, we could help them. We could introduce them to suitable girls, starting with our girl-friends. I’ve got plenty who can’t find a decent man in England, and I’m sure you have too. What a waste. The men come over here, the girls are already here, they all want to get together but they never meet! Let’s introduce them – let’s start a marriage agency!’

  Heather was intrigued, but thought the idea was a joke, not a serious proposition. She had only just arrived back in London, where an allowance from her father paid for a small flat so she could enjoy a gay life of parties, gossip and flirtations, interspersed with bits of work as an actress and model. She said she would think about it, but did not mean to. The two girls exchanged addresses and parted.

  Audrey returned to the farm, her mind buzzing. She had often worried away at Uncle George’s idea like a dog with a particularly meaty bone, convinced that it had a future; but had thought it too difficult to undertake by herself. Now, Heather struck her as exactly the right partner: she had a real understanding of the problem, the impressive poise and self-confidence of her class, a good brain and stunning looks. Audrey determined to keep in touch with Heather, and to do some research.

  Fobbing off her parents by sayin
g that she was visiting a London friend who socialized with a crowd of nice young men, Audrey went along to Scotland Yard. In a small bare room she enquired of a startled policeman whether a marriage agency, introducing single people in search of a matrimonial partner, would be breaking the law in any way. The astonished copper scratched his head in puzzlement over this unusual request, but could find no objection, nor any record of any existing marriage agency. So Audrey returned home, refusing to explain the enigmatic smile which baffled and irked her parents.

  Audrey bought one of the weekly matrimonial newspapers which carried seductive advertisements, placed by people seeking or offering themselves as spouses. But such advertisements, extolling the virtues of potential wealthy husbands and beautiful wives, were often invented by the newspapers themselves or by agencies advertising under box numbers, and could not be trusted: Audrey had heard of a swindle operated by a cynical pair, a Frenchwoman who had introduced her lover to three single ladies looking for a husband, charging each one about £70. When arrested, she had been sentenced to eighteen months in prison, and the lover to two years. Determined to investigate this shady world, Audrey invested £5 of her £15 capital in advertising for a husband.

  To her amazement and mounting alarm, letter after letter was forwarded to the farm by the matrimonial paper. Her parents suspected something was afoot but, seeing the uncompromising look in Audrey’s eye and the mulish set of her lips, they shrugged their shoulders and asked no questions. She took to intercepting the postman before he reached the farmhouse, and hurrying up to her bedroom where she read the often illiterate but flattering self-portraits of wife-seekers, mostly unsuitable: railway porters, bus drivers, commercial travellers, bank clerks, farm labourers, tailors, rat catchers, postmen, ploughmen, salesmen, doormen.

  Plucking up her courage, Audrey replied to a pleasant-sounding teacher, whose letter, on headed writing paper, correctly spelled, stood out from the rest. She met him one afternoon in Cambridge, where for an awkward hour they made stilted conversation before saying a formal, relieved farewell.