Wait for Me!

by Deborah Devonshire

  Granny Evie had lived at Edensor House during the war and took to austerity with a will; the degree of cold she tolerated and her hateful food (nettles downward) were a lesson to us all, and she continued in the same vein when she moved to Hardwick. She indulged in various imaginary illnesses, finding something wrong with her womb caught from her dog, or catching tulip fire from the tulips. Dr Evans told me that she had a ‘somewhat macabre’ interest in medicine. ‘To prevaricate was risky,’ he said. On one of his visits, Granny told him that she was trying out a new cure for rheumatism and showed him a length of frayed electric light flex knotted around her waist. Dr Evans remained non-committal. ‘I am not sure how I should wear it,’ said Evie, untying the flex and putting it on the other way round. ‘It does not matter, Your Grace,’ said Dr Evans, deadpan, ‘it’s an alternating current.’

  Granny Evie was not altogether easy to get on with, being critical of the younger members of her family, but she was fond of Emma and Stoker and was kind to me, I think because of Diddy, a paragon among nannies. When the children were about six and seven, they often went over to see Granny at Hardwick. Gardening and painting were on the agenda for these visits. One wet day Granny looked at the tapestry that hung on the curve of the magical stairs between the first and second floor of the house and thought it rather gloomy. She got out some poster paints and encouraged the children to do their best to cheer it up, and I do believe that if the tapestry has not been moved they could still find signs of their unusual graffiti.

  From the age of ten, Emma went daily to St Elphin’s School, five miles away in Darley Dale. St Elphin’s was founded in the early nineteenth century for the daughters of clergy and there were a number of such girls during Emma’s years. When John Betjeman went to talk to the school on Speech Day, he was delighted by an item on the programme: ‘Tug of War between Clergy and Laity’. I had been appointed a Visitor (I never knew what it meant but it sounded good) and sat next to John on the platform. I glanced at his notes and saw, ‘Oh you do look nice, ALL of you.’ I was much encouraged to see that this famous poet needed prompting on big occasions like the rest of us.

  Even though I never liked Edensor House – it faces north and east, has no view and was impossible to heat during fuel rationing – my memories of living there are full of laughter. Family and friends often came to stay, for no other reason than the fun of it. The house had only two spare rooms and when we had more people staying we used Moor View, a large cottage at the top of the village. Guests did not like having to turn out on cold winter nights and those chosen to go up the hill were known as the ‘Suicide Squad’. But they kept coming back and many were to remain lifelong friends.

  I inherited Jim Lees-Milne from Tom and Diana, and saw more of him as years went by. It is a pity that people reading about him now are told of his sexual proclivities and seem to overlook the work he did for the National Trust during and after the war. I loved Jim’s company and I loved both him and his wife, Alvilde. His private life was his own. Randal, Eighth Earl of Antrim, was also a regular. I did not know him well when he first arrived and called him ‘Lord Antrim’. The name stuck and became a nickname, confusing those who heard it and knew that he was a friend. In 1966 he realized his ambition when he was made chairman of the National Trust; he brought the best of amateurism to that organization and a light-hearted feel that it has never regained.

  Another regular was Kitty Mersey, the sister of my friends Charlie and Ned, killed in the war. Their father, the Sixth Marquess of Lansdowne, was a brother of Granny Evie so Kitty was Andrew’s cousin. She and her husband, Edward Bigham, stayed with us for a night in summer 1947 and we made friends immediately. Kitty had the same irresistible sense of humour that had made her brothers such wonderful companions and it was good to find them again through her. She had suffered terribly over their deaths; they were by far her favourite human beings, and it was a bond between us. How she got her nickname ‘Wife’ is convoluted. There was a famous Lothario whom neither of us knew but whose wife was called Kitty. To make sure that people knew he was referring to his wife and not to one of his many mistresses, he would say, ‘Kitty-my-wife’, almost as one syllable. We took to doing the same with Kitty Mersey. This was soon shortened to ‘my wife’ or ‘the wife’, and it became a habit, like ridiculous nicknames often do, and was applied to any best friend of either sex.

  Evelyn Waugh was a difficult guest and when he drank too much he was impossible. Everything was wrong: the wine, his bedroom, the outlook and, judging by his behaviour, the other guests too. Try as I might to remedy housekeeping shortcomings, I failed. Kitty was staying at the same time as Evelyn on one of her visits and when we went up to bed she came to talk to me in my bedroom. In no time Evelyn was in with a complaint. ‘The curtains don’t meet and I won’t be able to sleep,’ he grumbled. ‘So sorry,’ I said, ‘but there is nothing I can do about it now.’ Off he stumped but was soon back. ‘If you turn the hall light off, I won’t see my way to the bathroom.’ ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’ll leave it on.’ A while later, another knock on the door, louder and more insistent this time. ‘What is it now?’ I said. ‘I thought you ought to know,’ Evelyn announced with a look of triumph on his face, ‘that the pot in my bedside table is full.’ I shall never know if it was true but doubted it as he did not bring the evidence with him. The next day he was going to stay with Osbert Sitwell at nearby Renishaw and I begged him not to tell of this appalling oversight. Two days later I received Evelyn’s bread-and-butter letter, which ended, ‘No one has shown any curiosity about the strange Trove of Edensor. They wot not of the pot.’

  In spite of his uncertain ways, Evelyn remained a friend and a generous one. He sent us the limited edition of Brideshead Revisited in its floppy dark blue cover, which is in the library at Chatsworth, and he sent me his other works as they were published, inscribed in friendly terms. In Love Among the Ruins he wrote, ‘For Darling Debo, the Beardless Duchess, with love from Evelyn’ (the frontispiece depicts a goddess with a beard); he also sent me a copy of John Betjeman’s Continual Dew, inscribed on the blue endpapers: ‘A blue rose for Debo from Evelyn’. The best is his Life of Ronald Knox. I was sitting with Kitty Mersey when it arrived. As soon as I saw the unprepossessing beige cover and title, I put it down with the rest of the day’s post, thinking, ‘I’ll have to write and thank for that but I certainly won’t read it.’ Kitty, being a reader, picked it up and flipped through the pages. The inscription read, ‘To Darling Debo with love from Evelyn. You will not find a word in this to offend your protestant sympathies.’ There were no words – all the pages were blank. The perfect present for a non-reader. When The Antiques Roadshow came to Chatsworth, I proudly took Ronald Knox with its virgin white pages to the book expert, longing to know what price he would put on it. He was amused but would not risk a valuation and moved on to the next person in the queue.

  Osbert Sitwell came to see me one day when I was ill in bed. Poor Osbert, the wretched Parkinson’s disease had taken hold and his hand shook violently. He looked at it sadly and said, ‘All this wasted energy, it ought to be working a mill.’ He invited Andrew and me to the annual fête in the garden at Renishaw. Osbert was doing his duty by the stallholders, having a chat here and there, and he spotted a man in uniform. Thinking it was the leader of the band, he said, ‘Thank you, my man. Your music was excellent.’ He was talking to the local head of the St John Ambulance Brigade, but that little mistake passed him by. His sister, Dame Edith, did not come into the garden but swished about indoors wearing her usual ground-length skirt and huge rings on long, white fingers. On another occasion when we lunched at Renishaw, she wore a feather hat and long fur coat that she never unbuttoned. She told me that the chief things she remembered her mother saying were, ‘We must remember to order enough quails for the dance,’ and ‘If only I could get your father put into a lunatic asylum.’

  My sisters also came to stay at Edensor. Muv brought Unity for our first Christmas there. Our other guest was
Adele Astaire, sister of Fred and the widow of Andrew’s uncle Charles Cavendish. Farve said he could not come because he had no clothes, which was nonsense – Margaret was a more likely reason. Andrew insisted on having the Christmas-tree party for the village children either before Unity arrived or after she left because she embarrassed him so much with the vicar. I saw his point. She used to ask any man of the cloth she met why he had chosen that profession, whether he wished he had been made a bishop and if he enjoyed sleeping with his wife.

  Eighteen months later Unity was on Inch Kenneth with Muv when she collapsed with a violent pain in her head and a high fever. They got her as far as the hospital in Oban, but she had meningitis and there was nothing the doctors could do. She died on 28 May 1948 and was buried in Swinbrook churchyard. Muv had devoted her life to Unity since we had brought her home in January 1940, and I know how much she worried about what would happen to Unity should she outlive her. This haunting fear may have made the parting easier.

  Pam, the only one of my sisters who went on telling me what to do when I was grown up, used to knock on our door in the morning and tell Andrew and me that it was time to get up. Once she had let her dachshund out no one could have gone on sleeping anyway – the din was loud enough to waken the dead. The dog had many nicknames, as did her litter of puppies. Walks with Pam and these loved ones were punctuated with stops while, holding a riding crop aloft as a threat (never carried out), she shouted, ‘Come AT ONCE,’ followed by a string of names and nicknames.

  Nancy stayed with us when Stoker was about two and a half. ‘Can you talk?’ she asked him. ‘Not yet,’ he replied. She judged teenagers by their behaviour at bonfires: the slouching laggard who hardly picked up a stick to keep the blaze going was ‘no good’ (the sort my father would have dismissed as ‘a meaningless piece of meat’). I have often thought this as good a way as any of assessing a sixteen-year-old, to be recommended to Human Resources. Trial by bonfire is now my rule.

  Nancy wrote The Pursuit of Love in 1945 in the first flush of love for Gaston Palewski and it glows through the pages. The novel was an instant success and made her financially independent for the first time. We were all amused by it, including Farve, who laughed at the caricature of himself (although we knew that the entrenching tool really belonged to and was wielded by Sir Iain Colquhoun of Luss). Nancy put her family life into the book, including expressions that were part of our inter-sister shorthand. As a child, I had shortened the Whyte Melville quote that headed the cover of Horse & Hound (‘I freely admit the best of my fun I owe it to Horse & Hound’) to ‘You must freely admit’, which was shortened to ‘Do admit’, and used when trying to get Nancy’s attention. It appears again and again in the novel, where I suppose I am Linda. Much as we enjoyed it I do not remember any of us thinking The Pursuit of Love would last, yet sixty-five years later it is still hugely popular and is considered a classic.

  In 1946 Nancy moved to Paris to be near Gaston and remained in France, the country she adored, for the rest of her life. She had a theory that when you were travelling to the Continent the sun came out exactly halfway across the Channel and, going the other way, threatening clouds gathered as soon as you approached England. She found a ground-floor flat in a house on the Rue Monsieur in the Seventh Arrondissement, and often let me squeeze into the dressing room behind her bathroom. She had a large drawing room with an iron stove around which everything revolved in the winter. It gave out terrific heat but took a lot of looking after, having to be fed regularly with logs – like a horse with oats. Nancy knew its ways and stood over it with yet more logs to satisfy its voracious appetite. She loved the flat, which was a mixture of England and France, just as she was. There was an exquisite Sheraton roll-top writing table in the drawing room, more for show than work, an Aubusson carpet under an English sofa and a French chaise longue. The dining-room chairs were a wedding present from Diana.

  When she was working, Nancy pulled the telephone out by its roots, stayed in her room and wrote in bed. Her housekeeper Marie, a comfort-maker if ever there was one, looked after her. Marie came from Norman farming stock and was shaped like a cottage loaf. She wore black shoes and stockings and had a shuffling walk that one thought must end in disaster when she was carrying a tray, but it never did. She was a natural cook and could make any potato taste delicious; her only shortcoming was that she could hardly bear to make English puddings and they were what Gaston loved. Nancy and Marie had long talks on the subject and, although Marie disparaged them, her efforts pleased Monsieur Palewski. She shopped at the local market and came home one day with a live hen which was to be the main dish for a lunch party the following day. The hen was shut in the oven for the night and in the morning there was an egg. She was reprieved and lived in the garden, faithfully laying for several years.

  English friends visiting Paris were delighted to find Nancy there. Cecil Beaton was one of them. He and Nancy were always ready for a skirmish, scoring hits and spurring each other on to near-lethal digs. It was an entertainment for their friends that never failed to amuse. The jokes got nearer and nearer the knuckle till there was an explosion, then silence for a while until neither could resist starting up again. Soon after the opening of My Fair Lady in New York, where his costumes had brought gasps of wonder from the audience, Cecil came back to Europe, tired out by the pressures but thrilled by the acclaim. The papers had been full of it and everyone knew that it was just as much Cecil’s triumph as Julie Andrews’ and the composers’ Lerner and Loewe. Cecil lunched with Nancy in the Rue Monsieur. She knew all about the success of the musical and of how Cecil had lived and worked with it day and night for weeks on end. A pause in their chatter and Nancy asked casually, ‘When you were in New York, did you see My Fair Lady?’ ‘Yyyesss,’ replied Cecil in his sheep-like bleat.

  I never saw Nancy in fussy or ugly clothes. She bought few, but of the best, her perfect figure showing them off as their creators would have wished. She took me to see the clothes at Dior, Lanvin, Jean Dessès, Madame Grès, Balmain and Schiaparelli. Compared to the shops in England, they were fairyland during those early post-war years. A walk down the Faubourg St Honoré, which we called Main Street, was made impossibly tempting by the window displays and we longed for everything. Usually we looked and longed, but did not buy – like going to a gallery to admire the pictures. When we did fall for something there was huge excitement. I dug deep for a grand evening dress made of white organza covered with velvet appliquéd flowers, which went over a silk under-dress in Schiaparelli’s famous shocking pink. Some years later Cecil asked to borrow it for an exhibition at the V&A. What he meant (but did not say) was that it would join the permanent collection, so it was goodbye to my best dress – which is still there.

  Hubert de Givenchy had just started his own house and was a natural successor to the great Balenciaga, the acknowledged master of couture. When he opened a boutique on the ground floor of the house where he had his workshop, it became our first port of call. The vendeuses’ interest in every detail of dress, coat or whatever it was they were selling, made them so much more appealing than their English counterparts, who gazed out of the window thinking of men, hunting, or whatever English women think of – anything except the dresses they were trying to sell. Hubert’s staff would make the necessary alterations so that the finished garment fitted exactly, then one of them would go upstairs to see if ‘Monsieur’ was available. Hubert himself would come down to talk to us, wearing a white coat like a doctor, and tweaked the shoulders and hem before casting an approving eye. It was the height of pleasurable shopping. I still wear some of Hubert’s clothes, made forty years ago and as good as ever.

  In the 1950s my mother-in-law did voluntary work in the East End of London. She was a friend of Bunny Mellon, wife of the Anglophile philanthropist Paul Mellon. Bunny was curious to know more about Moucher’s charity. She heard of the poverty among the women and how cheered they would be by some new clothes, so on her return to America she arranged for what look
ed like cardboard coffins to be sent to Moucher at Eaton Square. Out came wondrous garments by Balenciaga: brocade evening dresses, a black winter coat lavishly trimmed with black mink, and piles of less showy but beautifully made coats, skirts and cocktail dresses. Moucher said that my sisters and I could take our pick, which we did, replacing the Balenciagas with decent, unworn clothes of our own that satisfied my mother-in-law’s charitable purposes.

  The master couturier’s clothes had come to a good home: they were well out of our reach to buy first-hand, but no one could have appreciated them more and we wore them time and again. Diana looked dangerously beautiful in the black coat with black mink facings. We met for lunch one day in London, at the Aperitif Restaurant in Jermyn Street, she a vision in The Coat. We sat down and looked round. I spied Paul Mellon and said, ‘Oh, I must go and say hello.’ Diana gave a scream and tried to make herself look small (impossible), terrified that he would recognize his wife’s coat and snatch it off her back. She and Nancy shared a white satin evening dress they called ‘Robeling’, which was kept for the grandest occasions. Nancy also had one of those simple linen dresses that are immediately recognizable (by those accustomed to such luxuries) as the very height of haute couture. She wore it in Venice where a friend remarked on it. ‘Oh well,’ said Nancy, ‘I always think one should have ONE good dress.’ It was so like her not to admit to its origin.