Wait for Me!

by Deborah Devonshire

  When they were in London, Sydney rode every day with her father in Rotten Row. She rode side-saddle, as all women did at the time, and for a few weeks every year when she was a child, the pommel of her saddle was fixed on the off (right) side, to ensure that her left hip grew in alignment with her right. The daily ride in Rotten Row provided not only exercise but also the opportunity to meet friends, part of the social life that Muv enjoyed. But the real fun for the two sisters was skating at the Prince’s Club, the ice rink in Montpelier Square. Muv fell for the skating instructor, Henning Grenander, a Swedish champion figure-skater, who was the equivalent of today’s ski-guides, so adored by their clients. Waltzing with him seemed to Muv the height of romance.

  In August, Grandfather sometimes took his family – along with some of his unusual habits – to a rented house on Deeside. He believed in Turkish baths and set one up in an empty dog kennel which was heated to the desired temperature with hot bricks. He sweated in the kennel and emerged sometime later to be drenched with buckets of cold water thrown from the roof by the butler. Muv’s abiding love of Scotland dated from these visits. She had holiday romances there, including one with a young suitor called Eustace Heaven. My sisters and I thought this the most wonderful name when she told us about him, half-laughing, years later.

  When Sydney was a debutante the first dance she went to, curiously enough, was given by the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire at their London house in Piccadilly. She was chaperoned by her father and they were early arrivals. I remember her telling me of Louise Duchess’s painted face and fixed smile, and how the Duke stood behind her, half asleep as usual. What Sydney did not know was that the Duke woke up the next morning and saw thick fog outside. He turned over in bed, muttering that there was no point getting up – not realizing that the window was covered by the tent left over from the night before.

  When Weenie was eighteen, Grandfather unwillingly agreed that a dance must be given for her. The guest list became too large for Lowndes Square, so Weenie brought in builders to break through the wall into the next house, whose owners were conveniently away. After Sydney married, Weenie, aged eighteen and equally as capable as Sydney, took over her tasks and faced the same difficulties with the drunken menservants in the household. There was a troublesome chef who was given notice several times but refused to leave. In order to get rid of him, Grandfather decided to shut the house and go to China, taking Weenie with him. On the day of departure the trunks were packed and stowed in the ‘growler’ that was to take them to the station to catch the boat train. Grandfather came down the steps and said, ‘It’s raining, my dear Piggy. We won’t go.’

  Weenie soon became engaged to Percy Bailey but knew nothing of what was in store. Grandfather was told that someone must explain the facts of life to her before she married. When these were disclosed, she exclaimed, ‘Surely no gentleman would ever do a thing like that!’ On her wedding day, she arrived at the church with Grandfather and his last words to her before walking up the aisle were, ‘Piggy, I shall never know what I owe the Aylesbury Dairy now.’ He had no more daughters to look after his household bills.

  Grandfather died in 1922 so I never knew him but he was a strong influence on Muv in many ways, including diet. He had noticed that among the children living in London the Jewish ones were the healthiest, and decided to bring up his own family according to the dietary laws of the Old Testament. Muv adopted these rules and we were fed accordingly. The language in which the Lord spoke to Moses is as threatening as a thunderstorm. We did not feel deprived of ‘eagle, ossifrage and osprey’, which are an ‘abomination’ and therefore banned from the table, but swine being ‘cloven-footed’ but not chewers of the cud meant no bacon, and the rule against eating anything without fins and scales but that lived in the water meant no shellfish. I did not taste lobster until I was eighteen.

  In spite of her unusual views, Muv’s cooks always produced good food. She was influenced by Grandfather’s foreign chefs and her table combined the best of French and English styles. She was no cook herself and when she and my father lived in a shack in Canada while prospecting for gold, she told us that she had bought a chicken, put it in the oven and was horrified on carving it to discover the crop and gizzard still full of corn which floated into the gravy. She was unexpectedly indulgent about our own food fancies, which many parents would have forbidden. Unity was addicted to mashed potatoes in her early teens and ate them to the exclusion of almost everything else. Bread sauce was my favourite, eaten with a spoon. My other craving was for Bovril, which Muv believed to be full of hated preservatives. She refused to buy it, but let me have it and charged it against my pocket money.

  Muv flirted with Christian Science but could not take Mrs Baker Eddy. Her simpler creed was that, if left alone, the Good Body would cure itself without Mrs Eddy’s help. She mistrusted the medical profession and used to say, ‘Doctors are so nice but if only they could get away from their training.’ Perhaps as children we were lucky that ninety per cent of the time, the Good Body did the job. When there was a crisis, Muv did get in a doctor but she preferred more unorthodox treatment. I once had a fierce attack of indigestion and a masseur, a follower of the Swedish osteopath Dr Kellgren, was called in. He gave me a rough pummelling all over and after a while I turned bright yellow. ‘That’s good,’ he said, ‘that’s the bile coming out,’ and I felt better. Muv was criticized by other parents who were sceptical of massage and disapproved of the infrequency of the doctor’s visits, but their children envied us because, like sausages, Syrup of Figs and castor oil were banned. Muv paid no attention to whether or not we went to the lavatory; she knew that the Good Body would see to it in the end.

  In 1931 tuberculin testing for cows became mandatory. Three of Muv’s herd of Guernseys reacted positive to the test. This annoyed her and she refused to get rid of them, telling the cowman, ‘What? Get rid of those beautiful animals. Certainly not! The children can have the milk’, and have it we did. She believed that wholegrain, stone-ground wheat – nothing added and nothing taken away – was ‘the bread of life’. She was critical of Lord Rank, ‘the wicked miller’, and regarded his ghost-white loaves (the cheapest kind of bread bought by the greatest number of people) and pale brown Hovis a confidence trick because the germ of the wheat had been removed, thereby lowering the bread’s nutritional value. All such processed food was described as ‘murdered food’ by Muv’s brother, Uncle Geoffrey, whose maxim was ‘Don’t keep it, eat it’. (He lived on bread, chocolate and the occasional herring.) All tinned food was considered close to poison; sardines were the exception and my father also bought something called ‘glass tongue’, which was visible through the jar. When refrigerators came into fashion, Muv said in a faraway voice, ‘I don’t really like refrigerators; they make the food so cold.’

  3

  Sisters and Tom

  U

  NTIL SHE MARRIED in 1933, my favourite sister after Decca was Nancy. She called me Linda, sometimes adding ‘May’ when it suited for a rhyme (‘Linda May drives the clouds away / What would life be without Linda May? Grey’). She made me laugh and cry about equally but what I remember now is the laughter. She was so funny, lively and imaginative that, in spite of the tears, I could not resist her company. The sixteen years between us made her almost another generation, but whenever she was at home I spent hours sitting on the end of her bed listening to gossip and secrets about the people she had met while staying with friends. The confidences were safe with me as I had no one to repeat them to: Muv and Nanny would not have listened and Decca was not interested. They were a window on a glamorous life, embellished no doubt, and they made me long to meet the butterfly people she described, a world away from the nursery and schoolroom. Nancy was a conundrum if ever there was one. She was everything and its opposite: loyal–disloyal, generous–mean, kind–unkind, steadfast–treacherous, hardworking–lazy, tolerant– intolerant. No wonder her biographers have found it difficult to steer through this maze of contradictions
to arrive at the person she was. In life she exaggerated until the truth was hard to dig out but she often hit the nail on the head in her books. Sophia, a character in her novel, Pigeon Pie, who had a talent for ‘embroidering on her own experiences’, and who rushed from hyperbole to hyperbole, ending on a wild climax of improbability with the words ‘it’s absolutely true,’ could be a portrait of Nancy. The one constant, however, was the pure pleasure Nancy’s company gave; the way she lifted spirits when she came into a room, her talent for turning serious into ridiculous and for seeing people and situations as no one else did. She sparkled, not only her eyes but all of her, and was the star of any gathering. Her elegance was inborn, her figure unchanging, never too fat or too thin, and long before she had money to spend on herself, her clothes were always just right. Her swinging walk took her for miles in town and country and few could keep up with her.

  She was not happy in youth, being well and truly unemployed for those years, with nothing to live on except the small allowance from our parents. Marriage was the career that we all aspired to – we were not trained to do a paid job. We learned how to keep house by example, but even that was with a future husband and family in mind. No work equalled no money. Any unskilled job, working in a hat shop, for instance, was frowned upon as ‘taking money from someone who really needed it’. Nancy did not marry until she was nearly thirty and until then led an aimless existence, staying with friends for long periods but coming home in between to wherever we were living at the time. ‘Sat about’ are words which recur in my own diary as I grew up, and I well remember what we called ‘aching voids of boredom’. It was a teenage disease, like being rude to our parents – especially to Muv who came in for criticism from all of us. It was not surprising that there was discontent on all sides. In The Pursuit of Love Nancy describes the agonizingly slow passing of the hours and days: ‘What’s the time?’ asks Linda. ‘Guess,’ says Fanny. ‘“A quarter to six?” “Better than that.” “Six?” “Not quite so good.” “Five to?” “Yes.”’

  Nancy’s fertile mind found an outlet in teasing – not difficult in my case as the slightest hint of pathos was guaranteed to bring tears, but none of us was spared; being laughed at was part of the rough and tumble of life in a large family. One day there was a headline in the paper: ‘SLOWLY CRUSHED TO DEATH IN A LIFT. MAN’S LONG AGONY IN THE LIFT SHAFT’. Nancy only had to say SLOWLY and Decca and I dissolved into tears. It became too much for the grown-ups and was banned, so Nancy tapped it out with her hand or foot, watching our faces to see the effect. When my bedtime was at seven, she started looking hopefully at the clock at a quarter to. When the blessed moment came at last and it was time for me to go, she shooed me out saying, ‘As soon as you’ve gone I shall do the Joy Dance.’ Sure enough, when I got upstairs I heard loud stomping and clapping of hands coming from down below.

  ‘No one will want to marry you,’ she used to say. ‘WHY?’ I wailed. To be told by a grown-up sister that there was no chance of happiness as a wife and mother, when marriage was the only prospect, was a crushing blow. ‘Why? Well, not only have you got a deformed thumb, there is the gland . . .’ Perhaps because we drank milk from the cows that had reacted to the tuberculin test, I did indeed have a lump in my neck, which is still there. Nancy explained that it hubbled and bubbled when I was asleep and that no man could stand it. She sang:

  The hounds and the horses

  Galloping over the land

  All stopped to hear

  The hubbling, bubbling of the gland.

  And added a second verse:

  The lords and the ladies

  Dancing to the band

  All stopped to hear

  The hubbling, bubbling of the gland.

  I was convinced there was no hope for my future.

  When Muv was expecting Nancy, Farve’s letters make it clear how certain she was that her first child was to be a boy. She referred to the unborn as ‘him’, named him Paul and knitted and sewed blue garments. After a punishing fourteen hours in labour, the nine-and-a-half-pound baby was not blue-eyed, fair-haired Paul but dark-haired, green-eyed Nancy. The birth was far from the fairytale experience that Muv had looked forward to and was followed by weeks of extremely painful breast-feeding. We were all born at home. The doctors’ rule in those days was that after giving birth, a mother should stay in bed for three weeks, flat on her back for the first two; the ‘patient’ was then allowed up for a few hours each day, extended as time went by until a normal daily routine was restored. Muv found this regime frustrating but kept to it. The pendulum has now swung too far in the opposite direction and she would have deplored the way mothers and their newborn infants are turned out of hospital after a few hours.

  My father’s sister Frances, Aunt Pussy, was five years older than my mother. She was the most beautiful of my father’s sisters and was full of memorable sayings, such as ‘I love this coat. It looks so cheap and was so expensive.’ Aunt Pussy had no children of her own when Nancy was born and no experience of what is now called ‘childcare’. But she had theories on how children should be brought up: they must never be crossed, corrected or criticized and must be allowed to develop in an atmosphere of heavenly peace. Muv was impressed by Aunt Pussy’s notions about bringing up children and put them into practice with Nancy – at least until Pam was born. When Aunt Pussy eventually married and was expecting a baby, she spent hours in museums gazing at portraits of children by Greuze, hoping her baby would resemble them. Alas, her only child, Clementine (Pussette), was the opposite of one of Greuze’s exquisite children and was mentally retarded.

  Nancy always told me that she was perfectly happy till she was three when Pam arrived, although how she remembered is open to question. The birth of a new baby and the attention it receives can be hard on an older sibling and this was perhaps the origin of Nancy’s jealousy, which later focused on Diana whose beauty and brains were unsettling to her eldest sister. The jealousy was hidden but to those of us who knew her it was very much there.

  Pamela was as different from Nancy as you could imagine. She was called Woman, with a few variations, by all of us for the simple reason that she was so womanly. She had huge cornflower-blue eyes and naturally stripy blonde hair of the kind envied by many girls and achieved with difficulty by expensive hairdressers. She was slightly lame, after an attack of polio at the age of three left her right leg weaker and shorter than her left. She was nursed at home and made an almost complete recovery. Later on she adored riding, but because her grip on the saddle was too weak to manage jumps she was never able to go hunting.

  Pam had much in common with Muv, her interests fixed firmly on the kitchen and garden rather than some fanciful library or the political leaders chosen by her siblings. There was no risk of extreme views or controversial talk; she was just herself, a comforting, sensible presence with no sharp edges. She was not quick-witted and could not keep pace with words and nuances, which made her a sitting target for Nancy whose teasing verged on bullying. But Pam’s good nature saw her through a persecuted childhood and she laughed about it later on. She was never out of favour with Farve and because she never deviated from the steady path of a country person she was the favourite of our aunts and uncles.

  Dogs played an important part in Pam’s life; she invested them with human characteristics and organized her existence around their needs, to an extent unusual even in an Englishwoman. Food was of paramount importance and she was a stickler for well-chosen menus. A friend of my mother once turned up unexpectedly for lunch. As bad luck would have it, Muv must have taken her eye off the ball early that morning when meals for the day were being planned. To Pam’s dismay, rice appeared twice: savoury in a risotto and creamy in a rice pudding. ‘Stublow,’ she told me, wide-eyed with horror, ‘it was ghoul, two rices at one meal’ – a kitchen gaffe remembered for the rest of our lives and any disaster was called ‘two rices’, in Pam’s voice. At a smart dinner party in Paris she once surprised the guests by explaining a cut of pork t
o her neighbour, emphasizing her point by standing up, slapping her thigh and saying, ‘Il faut le couper là’ – you have to cut it there.

  During the General Strike of 1926 Pam came into her own. A canteen for volunteer lorry drivers was set up in a big barn by the main road to Oxford, always called the Top Road (it is a smart restaurant now but it is still the canteen to me). So off went the sisters with heaps of sandwiches and an oil stove to brew the tea. Pam did the early shift. She had got everything ready, but no one came. Disappointed, she lay on the road pressing her ear to the tarmac, hoping to hear the sound of rumbling wheels. Silence. After a while a dirty old tramp wandered in and demanded tea. Pam, half afraid, brought him a cup. He sidled up to her and said with a leer, ‘Give us a kiss, Miss.’ Pam was terrified, and tripped and twisted her ankle as she fled. Once again, the tramp was Nancy.

  I hardly knew Tom. He was eleven when I was born and already more than halfway through prep school. He was a serious, thoughtful child, adored by parents and sisters and, although aware of his unique position in the family as the only boy in a troop of girls, he somehow remained unspoilt. He had a carved head of regular features and, like my father, the steady, confident gaze of an honest man. It is not enough to say that he was good-looking – which is how all his contemporaries described him, he had the kind of personality that drew attention and made you look at him even when he was silent. Unlike Nancy, whose face changed with every passing thought, Tom’s expression was impassive. He did not join in our silliness but was amused by it and when he laughed, sometimes unwillingly, at our idiotic jokes, a one-sided smile, which we called ‘blithering’, appeared. To make him blither was a small triumph and worth the try. He once got that curious complaint called Bell’s palsy and the muscles on one side of his face froze and for a while the smile did too. A sister took a photograph and it records his bizarre, lop-sided smile.