One of Tom’s friends was the MP and art collector Philip Sassoon, a highly civilized charmer and host, who in August 1930 asked Tom to stay with him at Port Lympne, his house in Kent. Philip provided an unusual entertainment for his guests: seven small aircraft, one piloted by Philip himself, the rest by professional pilots. Tom recorded the outing in a letter to Muv:
The party consists of Cousin Clementine and Winston, Sir Samuel Hoare & wife, Cousin Venetia [Montagu] and Aircraftsman Shaw [T. E. Lawrence].
I am a little disappointed with Shaw. He looks just like any other private in the air-force, is very short and has in his five years of service become quite hardened. He is not a bit like the Sargent portrait of him in his book. Last night I sat next him at dinner and he had Winston on the other side. Winston admires him enormously. He said at one moment ‘If the people make me Prime Minister, I will make you Viceroy of India.’ Lawrence politely refused and said he was quite happy in the air-force. When asked what he would do when in five years time he has to leave, he said simply ‘Go on the dole I suppose.’
It is curious that he should enjoy such a life, with no responsibilities, after being almost king in Arabia. Some say it is inverted vanity: he would have accepted a kingship, but as he didn’t get it, he preferred to bury himself and hide away.
This morning we flew over to see Colonel Guinness at Clymping, about 80 miles away. We had 7 machines and flew in perfect formation over Brighton and other resorts – very low to frighten the crowd. Lawrence was thrilled at flying: he said the air ministry had stopped him flying a year ago. Winston drove his machine a little way. I hadn’t realized that he had done a lot of piloting before the war.
We flew in arrow-head formation
Philip
Winston Sam Hoare
Me Lawrence
Venetia Bryan Thynne
(Each with a pilot)
and landed in the field next door to Diana’s cottage . . . It took about an hour getting there, and ¾ hour back, as we didn’t return in formation.
It was amusing flying very low on the edge of the sea and jumping the piers at Brighton and Littlehampton – to the astonishment of the people there.
Tom’s fellow guests and their aerial expedition sound like something out of a Hollywood production. Few other letters from Tom to my parents have survived and none about politics, which is a pity as I would have loved to have known his thoughts.
Pam never lacked admirers and in 1928 became engaged to Oliver ‘Togo’ Watney, a neighbour at Swinbrook. My father detested Togo’s mother whom he called ‘the Witch of Cornbury’ (the Watneys’ marvellous house near Charlbury). A London wedding was planned. The dining room was filled with presents – in those days the merest acquaintance sent something – and an oyster-coloured silk trousseau had been ordered. But as the day grew closer it became obvious that Togo would not go through with it. To Pam’s disappointment, he broke off the engagement and the piles of presents had to be packed up and returned. My mother, who realized that Togo would not have made Pam happy, was relieved – better to make the break before than after the marriage.
In order to give Pam a complete change of scene, my parents, who were planning to sail for Canada on one of their gold-prospecting trips, decided to take her with them. It was long before ocean liners provided gyms and swimming pools for exercise, and Pam and my parents marched round and round the deck of the big ship, greeting their fellow passengers. ‘I would like to introduce you to my cook,’ my father said, indicating Pam. They walked on and in due course bumped into the same people. ‘I would like to introduce you to my housemaid,’ and so on, down the domestic hierarchy each time they met, to the bemusement of their fellow passengers. Pam blossomed at The Shack, the wooden cabin built by my father on land he had staked out. With no domestic help and my parents all to herself for the first time, Pam’s innate talents, which were just waiting to be appreciated, came to the fore. On practical matters she always knew best (which was sometimes irritating, especially to Decca and me when we were still of an age to be bossed about).
When they returned, Diana realized that Pam would be at a loose end at Swinbrook and suggested to Bryan that she take charge of the farm at Biddesden. It was a time of agricultural depression and no farms were profitable, but Bryan could afford to run his as a hobby rather than a business. Although she had no formal training, Pam understood intuitively the work involved and did her best to keep expenditure down. She bought replacement stock for the herd of Guernsey dairy cows at local markets. Once in a while she made a bad purchase. We were all treated to her description of how thrilled she had been with a well-bred bargain and her dismay when she got her home and discovered ‘the brute was bagless’ – her exaggerated voice rising to a scream. It became a family saying for any failure, and, like many family sayings, found its way into one of Nancy’s novels, this time Wigs on the Green.
Pam lived in a farm cottage at Biddesden and was independent for the first time. Her car was as important to her as her dogs. She dug deep and bought a rare Italian breed called an OM (‘For comfort, Stublow, she’s a Rolls’) and set off to explore Europe with friends. Her memory for food was remarkable. ‘In Austria we had a most wonderful first course. It wasn’t a soufflé and it wasn’t an omelette, in a dish about that high,’ she said, indicating two or three inches with her fingers, ‘Oh Stublow, it was SO delicious.’ While farming at Biddesden she met John Betjeman, one of Diana’s legion of friends. He fell for her and wrote a poem, ‘The Mitford Girls’, which ended, ‘Gentle Pamela / Most rural of them all’. Pam thought John comical in the grubby trousers he bought at a WI jumble sale for a shilling but, although fond of him, she had no thoughts of marriage.
5
Rutland Gate and Old Mill Cottage
W
HEN ASTHALL WAS sold, Farve bought the lease on a house in London: No. 26 Rutland Gate, Knightsbridge; a big house for a big family. It stood alone, with the graveyard of the Russian Orthodox church on one side and the entrance to No. 4 Rutland Gate Mews, which also belonged to my father, on the other. Opposite was Eresby House, belonging to Lord Ancaster, and from our nursery window I could see the Willoughby girls playing tennis on the two courts in their garden. Our house had nine indoor staff, who came with us from Swinbrook, a ballroom as well as a drawing room and enough bedrooms for all of us (though Decca and I shared). There was a wonderfully unhygienic communication system between each floor. You blew down a mouthpiece with an almighty puff that made the connecting device on another floor fly out with a whistle. With your ear pressed to this dual-purpose mouthpiece, you could hear the caller talking from the floor above or below. The dining room, the scene of lunches and dinner parties for whichever of us was a debutante at the time, was decorated in the newly fashionable stipple – one of the rare occasions when my mother followed fashion. The drawing room, which had large, south-facing windows, was one of Muv’s great successes. Pale grey and gilded, it was furnished with pieces of Grandfather Redesdale’s French furniture that had survived the Batsford sale and these gave it an air of importance. Muv sat bolt upright at her secrétaire à abattant (a marvellous, plain and perfectly proportioned bit of furniture made by Charles Saunier) from 8.30 a.m. until she had finished her housekeeping chores and accounts. She was very fond of chocolate and in one of the drawers there were always boxes of Terry’s langues de chat and chocolate pastilles in their round boxes.
Muv ordered food over the telephone from ‘Wicked Old Harrod’ (her name for expensive but reliable Harrods), which was delivered a couple of hours later in a silent, electrically driven van. More often she walked to the Brompton Road where she could find Mac Fisheries on a raised pavement with fish of all colours, shapes and sizes displayed in picturesque fashion on miniature icebergs. Muv was always on the lookout for herrings and used to say, ‘It’s not the price that makes the dish, the herring is the king of fish,’ though I suspect the price did make her rather like herring.
Mrs Munro’s was well esta
blished in Montpelier Street, near the auction house Bonhams, where rolls of good-taste chintz and trimmings were sold. Owles and Beaumont (Owls and Bowels to us, of course) was a decent draper a few doors from Harrods. Muv always started there because it was ‘reasonable’ but when she could not find what she wanted, she sighed and went back to ‘Wicked Old’. Long after the war was over, my sisters and I used Harrods Bank as a meeting place. Conveniently situated on the ground floor (which is now all marble and make-up), the Bank had green leather chairs and sofas. Our dogs joined the Kensington ladies’ Pekes and Poms in the Harrods underground kennels, while we sat above them, chatting and watching the world go by. Sometimes Muv and Aunt Weenie met us there and the real customers stared when we made too much noise. The Bank hosted a carol service every Christmas, where God, Aunt Weenie, Muv and mammon met. I cannot imagine such a performance in Cosmetics now, where supercilious girls sell ultra-packaged face creams.
Tattersalls, the horse auctioneers behind Knightsbridge, was still just going when I was a child. The atmosphere of the place was cleverly evoked by the artist Robert Bevan, whose paintings bring back the clatter of hooves and the horse copers of his time. I wish I had a roomful of Bevans. A pony drew the Express Dairies’ milk cart and knew at which houses to stop. It gave Pam’s arm a sharp bite one day when she had some sugar for it. When a huge bruise appeared on the night of a dance she tied a satin bow round her arm. Coal and coke were delivered on a long wagon drawn by a Shire horse that wore a canvas nose bag containing oats and chaff – his ‘bite’. There was plenty of time for the horse to eat while the men, dressed like Stanley Holloway in My Fair Lady, shovelled the fuel down the coal hole. There was a water trough in nearby Knightsbridge so all the Shire’s needs were catered for.
The basement of Rutland Gate was the domain of the odd man, Mr Dyer, guardian of the boiler, who received and stacked the fuel to his (and Farve’s) satisfaction. Mr Dyer slept by his boiler. I never saw him upstairs nor heard him complain of his subterranean existence. The basement was connected by a door to the garage in the Mews, which was for the cars and chauffeurs that had succeeded carriages, coachmen and grooms. Tom referred to it simply as ‘the garage’, as though that was all it was, but it had in fact several small, low rooms on the upper floor. My mother made the most of things, as she always did, and the little rooms were transformed by her colours, curtains and covers. During the Season, whenever the main house was let, we retreated to the Mews. Coming home from parties we had to pick our way in long evening dresses between the cars and pools of oil to reach the narrow stairs.
Decca was fascinated by the white slave trade which she had read about in some book. She saw white slavers everywhere and so, of course, did I – half-thrilled and half-repelled at the idea. She was certain that a perfectly innocent fellow living in Rutland Gate was a slaver. ‘Why?’ asked Muv. ‘Well, when Debo and I are taking the dogs out in the morning he looks at us and says “Good morning”. He’s just waiting his chance to bundle us into a taxi and we’ll wake up in South America.’ The ‘slaver’, who carried a rolled umbrella and doffed his black homburg to us on his way to work, turned out to be Anthony Sewell, who later married a daughter of the architect Edwin Lutyens. He was a friend of Nancy, who no doubt told him what Decca thought.
The financial crash of 1929 changed our lives drastically. Farve was badly hit and was lucky to find tenants for his houses during those disastrous years. Swinbrook was let to Sir Charles Hambro and Rutland Gate to Mrs Warren Pearl, an American who annoyed my mother by painting everything, including the floors, green. We retreated to the Mews and to Old Mill Cottage in High Wycombe. The cottage had been in the background of our lives ever since I can remember. Grandfather Bowles leased it for my parents and their growing family in 1911 and when he died in 1922 Muv was able to buy it for £1,250. It proved a good investment, a place to go back to whenever money was short, and we came and went according to the state of Farve’s finances.
A small, cheerful, rambling house, it was made up of two cottages, joined at right angles around an open yard; the third side was formed by Marsh Green Mill, which was let to Mr Mason, the miller. With its stables, outhouses and big mill pond, it formed a busy, harmonious whole. Our dining room looked out on to the yard where the lorries arrived with sacks of wheat and left with bags of flour. When we overstepped the mark at lunch – and we often did – Muv tried to change the subject by pretending to see the miller out of the window and saying in a languid voice, ‘Mr Mason, there you are!’ It never worked, but became part of our language.
In the dining room, once a kitchen, Decca and I found a new place for the Hons’ meetings: the old brick bread-oven. The cottage had no walk-in linen cupboard like the one at Swinbrook, only useless shelves, so this oven hiding-place was ideal. There Decca and I and the third Hon, Margo Durman, my friend who lived across the road, sat in the dark, giggling and pondering our futures, totally happy away from the grown-ups. No one stopped Margo and me from playing in the loft or on the ladder-like stairs of the mill, whose banisters were as smooth as satin from the thin layer of flour that lay on every surface. No one bothered about the unprotected machinery whirring away and the hundredweight sacks ready to fall on us.
The mill pond was a world of frogs, dragonflies and myriad other summer insects. Across the road were beds of watercress, dark green and deliciously peppery, which grew on gravel in crystal-clear water that flowed from an artesian well. My mother gave the mill pond to the town of High Wycombe. It was what is now described as a ‘feature’ and she thought the town would like to have it as an adjunct to the Rye, a big open space that had been bequeathed by the Carrington family. She would be dismayed to know that the City Fathers of High Wycombe have thought fit to fill it in.
A large garden, with an orchard and fields beyond, completed the property. The famous Chiltern beeches covered the protecting hill, which was laced with public footpaths and bridleways. It was so different from Swinbrook, where the woods belonged to my father and we never met a soul. Here we often saw what we thought were sinister-looking men walking alone; we called them ‘singletons’, fully expecting to be murdered by them. A little way along the road was a sewage farm and a sawmill. We imagined that the loud sigh from the saws as they cut up the tree trunks came from the sewage farm – though how those lightweight rotating arms dripping water could have made such a giant sigh, we did not know.
Farve escaped his children and their animals by turning the garden shed into his study. Decca said that it was where his ‘old eyes would close for ever’, so it became the Closing Room. He thought it perfect – quiet, isolated and full of the ugly furniture that my mother had banned from her domain. The ponies came with us to High Wycombe and my father bought Hooper a house for £480 on a new housing estate just above our field. Hooper used to knock on the window of the Closing Room, push his ‘book’ under my father’s nose, saying, ‘Is your Lordship vacant?’ My father settled the carefully itemized accounts – linseed hoof oil and the like. Soon after tea he would disappear into the only bathroom, which was in our part of the house, change into his Great Agrippa dressing gown and set off to the Closing Room to luxuriate with the weather forecast and the six o’clock news. At this hallowed moment of the day no one dared disturb him.
Farve had taught himself to crack a stock whip after seeing the American Rodeo at Wembley in 1924 and he practised his skill on the lawn at High Wycombe. The whip had a short, stout stock and a long, plaited cowhide thong which required great strength in the wrist to get it going. Farve stood winding it round and round above his head until it had gathered enough momentum and flew out at full length, making an almighty crack like a rifle shot. To be accurate took skill – it was like fly fishing with a very heavy line. Farve could slice a chosen twig off an apple tree from a distance and told us that experts could knock a cigarette out of the mouth of a brave volunteer.
Our governess at the time was Miss Pratt. She was not interested in education but loved playing
cards, especially Racing Demon. We played from 9 a.m. till 11 a.m., had half an hour’s break, then more Demon until lunchtime. We became expert at this testing game, which depends on speedy co-operation of hand and eye. My mother discovered what we were doing and Miss Pratt left. There was no time to engage another governess, so Decca and I (aged eleven and nine) were packed off to a day school in Beaconsfield. Every morning at assembly we sang the same hymn: ‘For Those in Peril on the Sea’. I asked why. Answer: ‘The Head’s brother is in the Navy.’ I could not imagine why it was so perilous to be in the Navy in peacetime.
Decca liked the school. She was clever and appealing; I was dense and cross, and hated every moment of the crowded world of lessons. I did not understand what the teachers wanted or why. It was made worse by the horrible lunch, to which we said ‘No thank you’. My mother was informed and was sympathetic. She persuaded my father to see the headmistress and tell her that we would bring a banana instead. We could rely on Farve when it came to the crunch, and that lunch was the crunch. I wish I had been a fly on the wall at the interview between those two people who were both accustomed to getting their own way. My father won and it was bananas from then on.
Decca had acute appendicitis while we were at the Old Mill Cottage and the operation was performed on the nursery table. I was jealous of all the attention paid her and when the stitches came out, she put them up for sale and I bought one for sixpence. (In her memoirs, Hons and Rebels, she says she sold her appendix to me for £1, which was impossible as I did not have £1.) Another difficult time was when Muv, aged fifty-seven and not used to being unwell, got measles. She was dangerously ill but the only evidence was a sheet dipped in disinfectant every few hours and hung over her bedroom door. In spite of these precautions, I caught the disease (the only one in the house who did) and although not as ill as my mother, I remember having to spend Christmas in bed.
Wait for Me! Page 8
