by Mary Wesley
Malcolm referring to his ravishing Parisian (who – you may remember named your scent), spoke of ‘the disadvantages of going to bed with someone who hasn’t read TS Eliot’ – which is a not entirely senseless gag! (There had been complications.) …
Boskenna – 12.12.45
… Colonel P. gave me a great welcome and produced a bottle of gin he had been hiding from Diana. This morning … a walk over to the farm with Toby to buy eggs for Christmas … He is beside me as I write, drawing with his left hand and cutting out with his right … Alice is teaching the children carols. The resultant cacophony is most painful. The boys sing treble and the girls bass.
Boskenna – 14.12.45
… Roger’s birthday is in full swing. Celebrations began at 5am and I am already exhausted. The other children are in tortures of jealousy …
I am battling with all the Christmas presents I have to dole round here, and complicated arrangements for Christmas geese, eggs, vegetables and so on to feed the children in London. I have told Alice my plan to take the children away to London in the spring. Her eyes filled with tears at the prospect of parting with them. I have been so lucky having her to look after them and shall always be grateful to her for what she’s done for them. She is a rare human being …
Boskenna – 16.12.45
My darling,
I was glad to hear your voice last night, even though I couldn’t talk to you properly as I had children, maids and Colonel P. milling around me …
I finished the Mann last night. It is … even better than the others and a great book.fn107 The violence and guile, the sexual complexities and appalling deceit of the house of Israel and the great joke of good coming out of evil in thoroughly jesuitical fashion is fascinating, and Mann relates it with deprecating humour and apparent approval. I am inspired to read the Bible more thoroughly and with my eyes open this time.
Sweet love, Christmas is going to be fun albeit exhausting …
M.
Mary took the boys to London for Christmas to stay with Carol in his house, formerly their house, in Ovington Square, Knightsbridge.
39 Smith Terrace – 4.1.46
… My brother gave a lunch at Frascati’s for my father, Edith and Roger – to which I was not invited. We do not seem to be bien vu by our relations …
I go to Arnwell Grove tomorrow. It will be exciting if I find you in the bath on my return …
Boskenna – 27.2.46
My dear love,
… I cannot get used to these separations … I moaned in my sleeper which was very joggly. But I slept and arrived in good order into wonderful sunshine, warm and still. The country at its best, clean, rain-washed and smiling.
Greeted at the door by Toby and True who had been waiting for me. Toby ebullient … True much slimmer and so pleased she came and sat primly by the bath when I had one …
Carol is here, very much better and very amiable. Colonel P., no longer snotty, gave me a great welcome. Sam St Levan was leaving, having spent the night for a meeting. He is trying to get elected to the County Council and no one will have him … [Lord St Levan, a county grandee, lived in his castle on St. Michael’s Mount].
Carol, Toby and I went to the sea before lunch and sat in the sun. There are a lot more flowers …
I see Harry figures in today’s Times large and clear; as Carol remarked, my father cannot fail to see it! I shall write from here about changing my name.fn108
39 Smith Terrace – 28.2.46
… There is a reddish sun, and have had a late breakfast having drunk beer with gin in it from 5.30 to closing time with Voigt …
Lunched at club yesterday and saw Muggeridge and Kingsmill. The Tatler [magazine] revealed to me at last Group Cpt. Green in his full horror; a gross face and vile ears! …
Under their new identity of Mr and Mrs Siepmann, Eric and Mary left the lodgings at Smith Terrace and moved into a rented house nearby at 29 Donne Place SW3. Following the move to Donne Place, Eric switched his hunt for employment to Paris.
29 Donne Place – 15.6.46
… I hope you arrived safely without being too bumped or frightened … You have given me a year of complete happiness since you arrived back a year and ten days ago … Hurry back and let’s go on with the years …
Hotel Scribe, Paris – 15.6.46fn109
Darling,
… I am just getting over my arrival nerves, when all concierges, waiters and even Parisians seem deliberately rude. This is made more complicated, and one’s acclimatisation is delayed, by the fact that they really are!
Good and frightening journey. They gave us sandwiches and chocolate and sweets. During the bus drive from Le Bourget one saw with the usual thrill the blue walls, the man sitting on the terrace café as if he had always been there, and peaches and cherries in the open markets.
Very good room reserved, with bathroom. I am seeing Anouilh’s Rendez-Vous de Senlis tonight; and Cocteau’s Les Parents Terribles and La Folle de Chaillot later in the week – all alone, which I rather like … I shall telephone to Colette and Darcy Gillie …
Vernon Bartlettfn110 greeted me in the hall – first primrose of the Big Four’s big spring: which looks as if it might harden into an early winter …
Love and many kisses,
Eric
29 Donne Place – 16.6.46
My Love,
… My cold being beastly I went to bed at six last night with hot milk, aspirins, books, wireless and True …
I am enjoying Bechover Roberts’s [Bechhofer Roberts] life of Verlaine – what an agreeable shit …
Hotel Scribe – 16.6.46
Today I kept for myself, and I spent the morning sitting in the sun at the Deux Magots opposite St Germain des Près church, reading the papers and making notes …
Yesterday as I flew off … I realised that for the first time I was not flying ‘away’. I had discovered in Tunis that my perpetual need to leave jobs, people or places was [a] centrifugal urge that went back to my running away from home as a child. Now I am not running away, even from myself; and I WANT TO GET BACK! That is your achievement and [a] great one …
Women seem to wear long loose coats over long loose behinds, hats tilted backwards which only look smart when they achieve a hunting-bowler effect, and bags on straps over their shoulders or between their breasts.
The Big Four, the new government, labour troubles and a wonderful fraud or ‘black market’ in bachot exam papers make the news …
29 Donne Place – 17.6.46
… It must be interesting to be in Paris at this very moment with the Big Four meetings and de Gaulle popping up like a jack-in-the-box.
With a view to joining you on future wanderings I went to Cook’s this morning to get forms to fill up for my passport. I sneezed my way from shop to shop looking for a black dress, an unobtainable rarity, and had a long gossip with Nina Le Clerc in Fortnum’s. Her office was strewn with garments chewed by rats in the night. ‘They don’t usually like black,’ she murmured, turning over a ragged black coat with her toe …
Jan Masarykfn111 has gone to Prague but may come back this week. I am delighted by an announcement in the Court Circular of Col. and Mrs. Napoleon Brinkman’s new address at Ascot. Yehudi Menuhin played last night but I fell asleep in the middle …
29 Donne Place – 18.6.46
… I am writing this in bed, where I have been all day …
Once I had made up my mind to spend the day in bed and not to see the little boys I felt much better. The last two days they were horrid, and it is bad for them and me that they should torment me into a frame of mind where I cry in the night because they are naughty! Also ridiculous to be blackmailed and bullied by them. A holiday from their temperaments is lovely, selfish little pigs that they are!
I am rejoicing in Verlaine which I read with left eye, the right one waters. Like Blunden’s Life of Shelley, which was about Byron, Bechover Roberts’s Verlaine is about Rimbaud. He, as a character, is a joyous discovery to me �
�
When you say in your letter that you have always been running away I realise that I too have been a fugitive, usually frightened and sometimes defiant. Since we have loved I have gained courage and with your help can say Boo to many geese …
19.6. – No news this morning. I slept very well after saying ‘Boo’ to my mother on the telephone. She stuck her neck out too far so I chopped it! …
Hotel Scribe – 19.6.46
… I have a luncheon party for Jean Cassou,fn112 Vernon Bartlett and Darcy Gillie on Friday … It’s lovely here but pointless as there’s not much work to be done … I’ve had lunch with Claud Cockburnfn113 (the communist) and his wife;fn114 and today [there is] a press luncheon at which Leon Blumfn115 is the guest of honour. So I’m getting around. My former colleagues welcome me back to the fold …
29 Donne Place – 29.6.46
My Darling,
It is a windy, sunny day and I have talked to you on the telephone. Also I have pulverised [thoroughly exercised] True …
Although, as my former wife says, neither you nor anyone can be my ‘solution’, you give me a basis to work out my own solutions (which I prefer to do; I can’t bear her interferences with my ‘soul’) and that basis is that I love you deeply, as I have never loved nor thought that I ever could.
True is in good spirits, but looks for you in the bedroom … I bring cigarettes and Marsala, and bangers …
I love you.
Eric
PART TWO
The Crisis: 1947–50
ERIC’S JOB-HUNTING PROVED successful and he took up a position as a press officer with British European Airways (BEA). Meanwhile Phyllis Siepmann, reacting angrily to Mary’s decision to change her name by deed poll, decided in July 1946 to refuse her husband a divorce. At the same time she started a campaign of stalking and persecution, following Eric around London and into his office at BEA. In October, she managed to get into the house in Donne Place carrying a suitcase. Eric had to return home and throw her out of the house, assisted by Mary.
During the winter of 1946–7 the crisis with Phyllis worsened. In November, her letters to the management of BEA took on a more sinister tone. She said that she was in urgent need of money and that if she did not get it she would create a scandal. She feared this might result in ‘harmful publicity’. In April 1947, Mary decided to take temporary shelter with a friend who lived in Scotland, Joan Hamilton.
Westercroft, Symington, by Kilmarnock – 10.4.47
My Dear Love,
… We nearly missed getting to St Pancras as Carol’s carburettor was leaking … Miss Mitchell [Carol’s housekeeper] gallantly chased us in a taxi with bits of the children’s luggage which had been left behind …
The Third Class was clean and we ate all meals in the restaurant car …
There were lambs and magpies to look at and astonishing beautiful bleak country in Cumberland, huge hills with masses of snow and brilliant sun. In the low ugly Midlands were dirty floods. What black sinister towns are Leeds, Chesterfield etc. stark, wicked, evil – black. The country round is tainted.
I read Peter Q’s article on Ruskin in the Cornhill. I see Ruskin wrote Harry and Lucy, the first book I ever read. My father bribed me …
We must laugh more. We haven’t laughed enough lately …
Away with this to you. I love you.
M.
Westercroft – 10.4.47
… This country is rather bare and beautiful. Three miles away is the sea … We all, Joan, myself and six children, went for a beautiful walk this morning. True in paradise! Pebblefn1 fearfully urban pranced round the cows … True chased a rabbit deliriously and then got stuck down a hole …
Please my darling let us never live in a large house and be worried about the servants. Joan and her husband seem quite old with worrying about servants, it seems to be a terrible thing. They also wonder ‘what the country is coming to …’
Pebble has a dachshund friend of his own age. True is livid. Joan’s husband simply hates dogs and wasn’t told we were coming until just before. He is trying to be nice to them. They yelp quite suddenly under the table at meals, and Joan sneaks the dachshund into the bed when he is asleep …
Joan is a bully. I like her …
I am looking forward to Curtis Brown’s letter.fn2 If possible I would like to re-write the ‘bad third’. While re-writing the bad third I would brood on the next book …
Westercroft – 14.4.47
… Joan’s husband who is a very stupid man [but] … fond of children, and who refers to the cook who is under notice as a Bolshie! … [is] a pompous ass exactly your age called Adam Hamilton …
Westercroft – 16.4.47
… I was glad you rang up in the middle of Dalton’s budget speech.fn3 Joan’s husband was verging on apoplexy. Afterwards he let off a great spout of rage and indignation and it was quite endearing … It will be so wonderful to get home … Pebble is a beastly bed fellow in a snuggle bed. We struggle all night …
I certainly don’t want to live up here. The Scotch are horrid. Madly nationalistic, soon they will be wearing tartan shirts and shouting ‘Heil!’ They detest the English. The country is very clean and bare, like a scraped pig …
Shortly after Mary returned to London, Eric flew to Rome on BEA business.
29 Donne Place – Tuesday 29.4.47
… No letter from you yet. Nancyfn4 is sending this for me on tomorrow’s plane …
I sat in windy sunshine while Roger and Toby ran with other children in the park yesterday. Pebble and True played with a lonely child in woollen gloves … The other children ignored her brutally.
Nancy and Ronnie [Emanuel] came to dinner … Afterwards we went to the Curzon where we saw Le Déserteur in which Corinne Luchairfn5 [sic] never changed a bovine expression except to tidy her hair when her young man committed a murder … It was remarkably bad and the Curzon audience thought it was wonderful and were angered by our laughter.
Today I am lunching with Carol, to hear about his amours I suppose. In the Berkeley Grill … I miss you abominably. Pebble slept on my stomach and True on my feet. They were most comfortable.
Harry forwarded a letter from PKS [Phyllis Siepmann] to Charlie, sent without comment by Charlie to Harry. The usual poppycock – You are mad, your insanity vouched for by Strauss,fn6 and I am a ‘woman of bad reputation’. Apart from feeling a little flattered I mind hardly at all …
Time drags on leaden feet so I try and fill my days with this and that but it doesn’t work … I badly need a hug …
M.
In May, while Eric was still away on company business, Phyllis got into the office and frightened a young woman working there. Eric felt embarrassed and humiliated and Nancy Gow noticed that his health had begun to suffer. Fearing that he would be sacked, Eric resigned from BEA in June 1947. Encouraged by this, Phyllis started to write to Mary’s former husband, Carol Swinfen. In September 1947, she warned him that his little boys were not safe in Eric’s company. She said that she was bringing an action against Eric for separation on the grounds of drunkenness, cruelty and unnatural vice, and repeated her claim that in Cairo during the war he had several times made advances to little boys in front of witnesses. Carol was not impressed and invited Eric to stay with him and the boys whenever he wished.
Following the loss of his job, Eric decided to make writing fiction his full-time occupation. Mary wanted to do the same. Spencer Curtis Brown had been encouraging about The Glass Bugle. He offered to send it to Collins, the publishers. Eric thought it needed more work.
‘Some bits are so good,’ he wrote, ‘that they show that you have it in you to do something really good … The chief point and the ultimate effect is that you have written a novel that is well above the average, beautiful and amusing in parts (funny and beautiful is, I feel sure, your line) … and full of promise as a first novel. I am frankly amazed!! …’
Then, referring to Phyllis, he wrote: ‘Do you know I am glad this woman persecutes
me – it keeps me alive, and balanced (this memento of how not to live) and drives me to write! I am only sorry that it should affect you.’
In August, Mary and Eric decided to head to the West Country for a holiday with the boys. They went to a hotel at Pinchaford, near Newton Abbot in Devon. But Phyllis, who was a talented amateur detective, followed them to the hotel where she threw a glass of water in Eric’s face. She agreed to leave if Eric would return to London and talk to her. Then she waited until Eric had boarded the train, returned to the hotel, walked into the dining room where Mary was lunching with the boys and struck Mary violently in the face. The police had to be called.
Mary and Eric continued their flight. They took the boys to another hotel, the Beverley at Chagford in the middle of Dartmoor, where the holiday continued a more peaceful course. In September, the boys returned to live with Carol in London and went back to school. Mary stayed in Chagford and started to rewrite her novel, by now called Henrietta. In October, Phyllis tracked her down again. Phyllis picked out one of the hotel guests, an elderly lady, and wrote to her out of the blue.
‘The woman posing as “Mrs Siepmann”,’ Phyllis wrote, was not married to Mr Siepmann, and the latter was ‘a violent, adulterous, alcoholic, wife-beating child molester … [but] it is wrong to blame or condemn him [as] my husband is irresistibly compelled to ill-treat all his women owing to a deep and unconscious mother-fixation which can only be cured by psychological treatment.’
Phyllis next took to tapping on the hotel windows calling Eric ‘a Bluebeard and a sadist’ and denouncing the hotel proprietor, a Major Hughes, for running a hotel that was being used for ‘immoral purposes’. Major Hughes emerged to eject her from the grounds, whereupon both Phyllis and her dog bit him on the leg.
Major Hughes then summonsed Phyllis for assault and battery and she was bound over to keep the peace. If she caused a disturbance in Chagford again she would be locked up. As a result, the village and parish of Chagford, reputed to be one of the most haunted settlements in England, became a safe haven for Mary and Eric.
