Our weeks in Ireland had their sombre side. The years of the Troubles in the north had their repercussions in the south. Alfred and Clementine Beit were attacked by thieves at Russborough, their house in County Wicklow, and locked in separate cellars while the gang made off with the best of Alfred’s world-famous pictures. Lord and Lady Donoughmore were kidnapped, bundled into a car, driven for miles in the dark at speed and held hostage for four days. Andrew was not put off by these attacks, but after Bloody Sunday in 1972 the Irish government increased the number of Garda looking after him – up to fourteen at any one time – and a police car travelled in front and behind him wherever he went. Three different routes take you from Lismore to Careysville and on the orders of the Garda he had to decide at the last minute which he would take, and several men stayed with him all day on the riverbank. In 1974, after Lord Mountbatten and three members of his family were murdered, even I was given a policeman. He must have been bored walking to the shops, the farm and endless times round the garden. He pointed to a stone sundial one day and asked me what it was. ‘A sundial,’ I said. ‘Oh, does it still work?’ It does, but its hours on duty are not long in Ireland.
The time came when all the old friends had departed from our Irish life and Andrew himself was not well. He was no longer able to walk up and down the steep steps from Careysville House to the river, and his failing eyesight made it difficult to cast over the wide water. The death of John O’Brien, the spirit of Careysville, and the loss of other friends made the place too full of ghosts and he stopped going. The castle was made over to Stoker and we retreated from Ireland, where we had had such happy times.
14
Moving to Chatsworth
S
OON AFTER MY father-in-law died, Andrew said to me, ‘Chatsworth may not go on as a family home, but I don’t want to be the one to let it go.’ He was thinking not only of the house itself, the garden, stables and everything else that goes with Chatsworth, but of what selling would mean to the people who belonged there. This was a major consideration in the struggle to keep it going. The 1950s were grim for this country. Rationing did not end until 1954, nine long years after the end of the war, and recovery was painfully slow. In our case it was not recovery but a downward slope we were facing. Many beautiful and useful buildings all over England were being destroyed and supplanted by monsters. No one believed that a house like Chatsworth would ever be wanted again, let alone lived in by the descendants of the family who built it. It was a period of limbo. No major decisions were being taken at Chatsworth but nevertheless a five-hundred-year legacy was beginning to come undone.
Hugo Read, who was the land agent during the time when the estate was in debt to the government, had a position of considerable influence as Andrew was often away and left many of the day-to-day decisions to him. I tried to prevent some of the worst desecrations, but the argument for knocking down old buildings and replacing them with new ones, which needed less maintenance, often won. I was talking to Hugo one day about Pilsley, a village on the estate, where he planned to pull down a row of semi-detached cottages called South View. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Well, they’re only Victorian,’ was the answer. Luckily there was no money and the cottages with their remarkable gardens are still there.
The exuberantly Victorian Barbrook House, built by the Sixth Duke’s head gardener Joseph Paxton for himself and his family, was not so lucky. It had been the home of the land agent till 1939 but was left unoccupied at the outbreak of the war. By the late 1940s it was used for storage; potatoes and wheat were shovelled into the dining and drawing rooms and it was riddled with dry rot. With so many outstanding repairs on the estate cottages hanging over us – few had indoor lavatories let alone bathrooms – there was no question of restoring such a white elephant and the house became a victim of the times. It was succeeded by an ugly and useful warehouse, designed by Hugo Read. Only the pretty lodge is left to remind us of the former grandeur of Paxton’s days, which had included a nine-acre kitchen garden with innovative hot houses, melon pits and pineapples.
It was not just visible signs of the past that were disappearing, morale was also low as no one could envisage a day when the place would be free of debt. The one bright spot in an otherwise dismal period was that the house and garden at Chatsworth were open to the public and, in spite of petrol rationing, visitors came. Hugo Read was wiser and more far-sighted in his views on the future of Chatsworth itself than of Victorian cottages. He believed that in spite of all the difficulties, the family – Andrew, me and our (then) two children – should move into the house. It was nearly twenty years since Eddy and Moucher had taken their belongings – which they had barely unpacked – back to Churchdale, and on the face of it, Hugo’s idea seemed wild, a complete reversal of all our efforts at scrimping and saving to pay off death duties. But Hugo, like Francis Thompson, who had emphasized the necessity of a family presence in his letter to my father-in-law in 1947, believed that Chatsworth and its family were inseparable. Both men warned that without a welcoming host the house would become a museum, as arid and lifeless as so many others.
Andrew’s initial reluctance to live there may have stemmed from unhappy memories of his grandfather’s last years, and perhaps from his parents’ attitude towards the house after Billy’s death. For a while we considered moving to Hardwick Hall when Granny Evie had had enough. Its astonishing beauty was a strong pull, but the disadvantages of extreme cold (tits pecked at the lead round the little window panes till they fell out and made cruel draughts) and the lack of bathrooms with nowhere obvious to put them, always brought us back to the homelier Chatsworth. By 1957 Andrew was convinced that moving was the right thing to do. I had been longing to live there and was thrilled. In the past when we had walked through the park, I had often said to him, ‘Oh, look at that lovely house. I wonder who lives there.’ And he would say, ‘Oh, do shut up.’ But now he threw himself wholeheartedly into the plans.
Once the major decision to move into Chatsworth was made, life changed gear and there were daily decisions to be taken. Even though it looks so big, the house and all its different rooms were surprisingly easy to get to know. First we debated which rooms to use. When it came to choosing our bedrooms, we always came back to the west-facing rooms that the dukes and duchesses had traditionally inhabited. After that it was a question of which should be the drawing room, dining room and kitchen. We looked carefully at the north-facing rooms on the first floor but the lack of sun was a major drawback and we gravitated naturally to the three, large, cheerful, south-facing rooms on the same floor. Our blue drawing room had been Andrew’s aunts’ schoolroom and then the billiard room; the yellow drawing room remained unchanged and what used to be the gold drawing room became our dining room.
Immediately below the new dining room was a light, airy room that had been used by Granny Evie’s secretary, and we decided to make it the pantry. It had a painted ceiling of quality, which seemed unwise to leave exposed so we put in a false one. Our chosen space for the kitchen was next to the pantry, but that left us with the problem of how to get the food upstairs. The solution was to put a lift in the old stairwell that sticks out on the east side of the house, but a portrait by Lely of General Monk (founder of the Coldstream Guards), which was fitted into one of the Bachelor (the Sixth) Duke’s ornate frames on the walls of the dining room, was in the way of the entrance to the new lift, just where the jib door had to go. There was nothing to do but cut the picture in half, so when the door was opened the old soldier’s legs swung round, startling the diners, but when it was shut General Monk appeared complete, legs and all. Our guest bedrooms and nurseries were scattered over two floors. Sophy was two when we moved in. There was no lift in our part of the house, so Diddy humped this toddler along the passages and up the stairs. Arriving in the nursery, poor Diddy sighed, ‘Oh dear’, and these were Sophy’s first words.
We turned the garden path along the west side of the house into a private drive and made our entrance through
the west front hall, where it had been before the long north wing was built in the 1820s. This left the grander north front door and hall for people who come to see the public part of the house. Andrew, who insisted that as much of the house as possible should be open, was keen that visitors should arrive at the front door and not be shovelled in through a side entrance, as we had seen in other houses newly opened to paying visitors. The public route was sacrosanct, even though it altered in direction from time to time. For fifty years this scheme served us well and allowed tourists to circulate easily, visit the state rooms and descend the west stairs to the chapel.
Once we had decided which rooms we would use and for what, Andrew left the rest to me. He did not want to hear about domestic details and never questioned my decisions. So now I had a job – big enough to occupy every waking moment. My budget was small and most of it had to be spent on plumbing and wiring. (Later, when I worked on the Cavendish and Devonshire Arms hotels I had become used to this squeeze on what I was allowed to spend, but it made me wary of builders’ estimates.) People ask me how I did it. The answer is partly that when you are young you think you can do anything, but also – just look at the help I had. There can never have been a better group than the staff I worked with, for whom nothing was too much trouble. The head of the household was the comptroller – an old-fashioned job description meaning being in charge of the domestic staff and the fabric of the house, stables and garden buildings. W. K. Shimwell was comptroller when we moved in; Dennis Fisher succeeded him; followed by Eric Oliver, who in turn was succeeded by his brother John. Eric and John were the third generation of their family to serve the estate; both had graduated from being head house carpenter to comptroller.
We made six flats for staff, which included a night watchman, a telephone switchboard operator and the head of the sewing room. They kept the house alive with their comings and goings, and their eyes and ears were extra security. Telephones were installed in rooms that had never seen such a thing, replacing the bells that had called the maids and valets who no longer existed. The trickiest and one of the longest operations was putting in central heating and the plumbing for seventeen new bathrooms where there had never before been running water (‘Who is my sister going to wash in all those baths?’ asked Nancy).
There were unexpected complications with the new bathroom that served the red velvet bedroom on the first floor. I wanted the ceiling lowered. This was beautifully done, as were all such alterations, but the coved wall above the window had been painted white and was visible from across the park. So it was repainted a dirty grey like the Derbyshire sky and does not show at all. The painting was done by a Chesterfield firm; their foreman, Eddie Greenwood, and I worked closely together, choosing colours. He was always smiling, even when he swallowed a mouthful of tintacks that he had rashly parked between his lips while using both hands to hang some lining paper. We all waited anxiously for news of the tintacks and were relieved when a message came the next morning to say that there was no longer any need to worry.
As work progressed, I spent more and more time at Chatsworth. I put a chair on the corner of the busiest passage where furniture movers, painters, decorators and sewing room people were bound to pass, and where we could talk about what and where and why. The dogs got to know this and gave up following me round the house for the hundredth time; they knew the walk would not lead out of doors but that sooner or later I would pass this spot, pick them up and at last we would go out. As well as woollen stockings, jerseys, gloves and a master key, an essential piece of equipment was a carpenter’s measure. These precious objects disappeared like summer snow, especially when there were carpenters about who slipped them into their pockets without thinking.
I did not employ a decorator; I was too mean to pay for something I could do myself and cannot imagine living surrounded by someone else’s taste; and besides, I loved every minute of it. Best of all was seeing plans I had agonized over take shape. Sometimes almost nothing seemed to be happening and then suddenly, like a conjuring trick, it was all there. I was pleased when Nancy Lancaster, who was one of our first guests and whose decoration of Ditchley had been such an influence when I was growing up, said to Andrew, ‘My God, you’re lucky. If I had done this house for you, you would have had to sell it to pay me.’
Part of the fun was opening drawers and finding things that had been hastily put away when my parents-in-law left. I once looked in a chest of drawers and discovered a miniature of Georgiana Duchess, a Women’s Institute programme of 1932, a bracelet given by Pauline Borghese to the Bachelor Duke to hide a crack in the marble arm of a statue of Venus, and a crystal wireless set. It was like finding Christmas presents wherever we went.
Excitement grew as the rooms began to look cheerful and became fit backgrounds for the furniture, pictures and carpets. Much of these came from other Devonshire houses: Chiswick Villa, Churchdale Hall, Hardwick Hall, Devonshire House and a few beauties saved from Compton Place. It was a motley collection but an extraordinary one from which to be able to choose. W. K. Shimwell, by then the clerk of works and head of the building yard, had an intimate knowledge of the house (where he had served since the age of eleven when he was errand boy and ran to Edensor post office with telegrams). He and Mr Maltby, who had been a house carpenter in London and at Chatsworth since 1910, remembered where various pieces had been previously, which was invaluable. On one occasion Mr Maltby came to me bearing carved wooden draperies which he said Granny Evie had thrown out because they were Victorian, a period she could not abide. Regilded, they were mounted above the blue drawing room windows, for which they had been made.
The actual work, including redecorating the grubbiest and dingiest leftovers from Penrhos School’s occupation, took just under two years (and rewiring the rest of the house a further three winters). We eventually moved across the park in November 1959. After all the anticipation, the move seemed quite natural. As soon as I arrived, I felt Chatsworth was home and a perfectly ordinary home at that. I realize now that it was anything but, yet that is how it felt – the obvious place for Andrew and his family to be. Waking the first morning in the bed I was to come home to for the next forty-six years was a joy and I never tired of the incomparable view west across the park. In all those years, I never took the place for granted, but marvelled at it and the fact that we were surrounded by beauty at every turn, both in and out of doors.
Andrew and I used to talk about having portraits painted to join the parade of family likenesses at Chatsworth, but knew that that would have to wait until things looked brighter financially. Then Andrew decided that he wanted to make an exception and asked the Florentine portrait painter Pietro Annigoni, who came to London from time to time and worked in a studio in Edwardes Square, to paint me. In 1954 I spent a month sitting for him, sometimes twice a day. He admired the dark-haired Italian girls by whom he was surrounded and usually painted them or their beautiful northern counterparts. I felt a bit of an imposter and said, ‘Sorry about my face, I know it’s not what you like.’ ‘Oh, it’s not your fault,’ he said, throwing his eyes to heaven (all this through an interpreter as neither of us could speak the other’s language). After hours of staring, he decided to paint me in a high white collar and red velvet coat. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘your clothes aren’t à la mode so it doesn’t matter.’ The telephone often rang during the sittings. He wanted me to answer it and I was to say he was busy. But the girls soon rang back, hoping to plan a meeting. In spite of not being able to talk, I got fond of Annigoni’s presence and his portrait is considered a success.
In the late 1950s I started sitting for Lucian Freud in his Paddington studio. He was a friend and only painted people at his own suggestion. I do not know how many sessions the portrait took, but time had no meaning for him and on it went. Whenever I was in London I used to arrive at the studio at 10 a.m. and sit as still as I could till lunchtime. During the sittings we sometimes talked and sometimes remained silent. Lucian made it obvious that I was no
t supposed to look at the canvas in the early stages but every now and again, walking round the room during a short break, I caught a glimpse of it. He started painting one eye, and slowly, very slowly, the rest of my face and hair appeared.
At last Woman in a White Shirt was ready for Andrew to see. Lucian was out when he called. Andrew hurried up the stairs and made his way between the rickety bedstead and rusty iron bath, almost the only furniture in the studio, to find he was not alone: two men were sitting there. Andrew went to the easel and gazed at ‘me’, all greenish khaki and with the resigned expression of one who had sat still for hour after hour. After a while one of the men said, ‘Who is that woman?’ ‘It’s my wife,’ said Andrew. ‘Well, thank God it’s not mine,’ was the bailiff’s answer, for that was the profession of the two strangers.
Andrew was an admirer of Lucian’s work and was pleased to possess the portrait, which is liked or disliked according to taste. (When Diana Cooper came to stay, she stuck envelopes all over the glass so she could not see it.) For myself, I am glad it was done by an artist who is still a friend and who is acclaimed by critics as ‘the greatest living painter’ whenever his work is shown. And I believe that as I have got older, so my likeness to the portrait grows.
Lucian was our first guest at Chatsworth; he came to paint a tiny bathroom next to the Sabine bedroom. The idea was to cover the whole of the bathroom walls with cyclamen like the walls in the bedroom next door, which are covered with paintings by Thornhill of Sabine women being tweaked by Roman soldiers. But Lucian is a slow worker and greeted me most mornings with, ‘I’ve had a wonderful night taking out everything I did yesterday.’ After five days, the pull of London became too strong and off he went, so the bathroom was never finished.
Wait for Me! Page 22
