Philippa’s replies, which are all the more touching for the evident genuineness of the emotion, are interleaved with his in the file. For the twin escape routes that marriage offered – escape from the dreary demands of home and escape from the ever-present fear of spinsterhood fostered by her mother – Philippa also wanted the marriage to work. But she did not know what to expect nor did she have any experience with which to compare her feelings, having never had a boyfriend before. The weeks leading up to the wedding were difficult ones for her. Nigel took her to meet his parents. Her two letters of thanks, one each to Vita and Harold, written after her first visit to Sissinghurst, are full of gratitude for their ‘gentleness and understanding’ and ‘acceptance of me as Nigel’s wife to be’.
The response from the Nicolson side was less straightforward. In an ambivalent letter to his other son, Ben, that I found among Nigel’s papers, Harold described his future daughter-in-law as a racehorse owner might assess a new filly. ‘Very pretty in a rather chocolate box way. Pink and white complexion, a ready smile with flawless teeth, saffron-coloured eyes, fair hair, good figure, about five foot ten inches … obviously straight and reliable and competent and decent. Not clever I should think in the intellectual sense … enormously presentable and Niggs will be proud of her.’ But the Nicolson parents had not conducted themselves in a manner to make their son proud. Before her first meeting with Philippa, Vita was so worried that she might make her future daughter-in-law nervous that she gave Harold the ‘impression that she had been drinking heavily’, an observation he passed on to Nigel, not by way of criticism of Vita, but more as an explanation of her ‘muzziness’. And during an encounter between the prospective in-laws, Harold’s archaic suggestion to Gervaise that the father of the bride should provide a substantial dowry went down predictably badly. Philippa herself, however, was won over when Harold urged the reserved girl to call him by his first name. ‘I think you will find it comes very naturally,’ he assured her, ‘after fifty years of practice.’ But on 8 April 1953 Nigel wrote separately and ominously to his mother. He had been engaged to Philippa for a month. ‘I can already see her shaking off the rather dull conventions of her family and becoming a Sissinghurst person. She is an unopened flower, a strong bud. It will be fascinating to see her develop.’ She had become an experiment for Nigel not only to shape to his own ideal but to reflect well on himself. At the age of thirty-six Nigel was still looking for his parents’ approval. And they gave it, but with reservations, joining in the Nicolson family conspiracy that Philippa would have to be taught how to be a satisfactory Nicolson wife. ‘Can she open a bazaar well?’ Harold asked Nigel. ‘She’ll have to learn,’ Nigel told him. And in a shocking letter to Vita shortly before the wedding, Harold wrote, ‘I do not think she is an interesting or intellectual girl, but Niggs would not have wanted that – what he wants is an adoring slave.’
Beyond the need for parental solidarity, there was another and potentially more dangerous indicator of Nigel’s immaturity. He was frightened of Philippa, or at least of her femininity, a quality of which he had been almost entirely unaware as he grew up, resulting in a naivety compounded by sexual ignorance. He was unable to recognise that his own terror of humiliation would lead to resentment of the very person whom he wished to impress.
Nigel had been a virgin until the age of thirty-one. He had once removed the socks of a girl he adored but with such evident nerves that she told him to return for the rest of her clothes after he had mastered the art of seduction. Desperately in love with this girl, he sought expert help. Over a drink in London in the Guards’ Club, my father’s business partner, George Weidenfeld, a man of the world, gave Nigel blow-by-blow instructions. George was an Austrian émigré who had escaped the German annexation of his country and arrived in Britain in 1938 and, fluent in several languages, at once landed a job with the BBC wireless. Through his work there he had met Harold Nicolson, who, impressed with the young man’s brilliant intellect and entrepreneurship, had identified a potential work colleague for his younger son. An uncertain and unconfident Nigel, demobbed from the army, had intended to retire to the countryside and become a woodman. Instead Harold made the introductions and in 1948 George and Nigel founded a publishing firm together, an ampersand joining their two surnames. The commercially unpromising title of their first published book was A New Deal for Coal. But George and Nigel were convinced that its clever young author had prospects. His name was Harold Wilson. The future leader of the Labour Party, and Britain’s future twice-over prime minister, was the first of an increasingly eminent list of writers who soon signed up with the new firm.
George was not only clever; he was also irresistibly charming and unfailingly practical. He was experienced in the art of understanding women. He knew just the person to lift Nigel out of his restricting inexperience and made arrangements. A few days later Nigel went round to the flat of a young actress called Olga, whose performance in the role of a handmaiden to Vivien Leigh in the film Caesar and Cleopatra had been considered most accomplished by the critics. Olga gave Nigel the essential knowledge he needed, although he wrote in his memoir that ‘in no sense was this affair with Olga a sexual liberation’. By the time he was engaged to Philippa, he was still inexperienced, unconfident and rather horrified by the whole sexual rigmarole. He thought of sex as ‘nasty, something one was obliged to do only occasionally, almost like going to the loo’. When a friend of George’s ‘pressed her leg’ against his at one of George’s parties, he wrote, ‘I hastily withdrew it’. During the few months of his engagement, he comforted himself that Philippa’s lack of expectation would see them through when the time came. My mother was heading towards an emotional and physical trap of which she was quite unaware. The thought of her innocence terrifies me.
Unlike his fiancée, Nigel had not warmed to his new parents-in-law, considering them ‘a menace in duplicate’. The distrust was mutual. Each thought the other vulgar, ‘vulgar’ being the fiercest charge Pam could make against another human being. Long afterwards Philippa confided to friends that Pam had asked her several times whether she was sure she should go through with the wedding. Her mother was caught between the attraction of her daughter marrying into a famous, aristocratic (if not rich) family and her distaste for these unconventional individuals who did not change for dinner, wrote books and got up to all manner of deviant things behind their bedroom doors. Neither mother’s nor daughter’s anxieties were softened when, six weeks before the wedding, as Philippa was assembling her trousseau of slim-waisted summer frocks, Nigel presented his bride-to-be with a small brown book. The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy by Jacob Burckhardt, a distinguished Swiss historian, had been published in 1860, and was described on the jacket as ‘the standard work on life and manners in the Renaissance between Dante and Michelangelo’. A section at the back carried black-and-white reproductions of paintings of popes, doges and Carpaccio’s depiction of the English ambassadorial party arriving at the Venetian court painted between 1495 and 1500. Nigel had inscribed the flyleaf of the densely printed pages: ‘To Philippa from Nigel. A pre-honeymoon present June 10th 1953.’
Homework was expected of her. We found the book on a shelf in Nigel’s bedroom after he died. Certain passages had been highlighted by him in the margin in pencil, but many of the flimsy pages were still suspiciously new-looking, suggesting that apart from the places containing Nigel’s annotations, the book had probably never been opened again.
Nigel favoured the beautiful Christchurch Priory on the coastal flats in the heart of his Hampshire constituency as the church in which to be married, but Pam insisted that her only daughter should follow her own footsteps up the aisle of St Margaret’s, Westminster, one of London’s grand society churches. Photographers from the press were waiting to record the first sight of the new Mrs Nicolson, who emerged from the church on the arm of her husband in a gown of oyster satin looking young, happy and cautiously confident. Following close behind were the respective mot
hers, Vita in a black straw hat, pearl necklace and sensible flat shoes, Pam in strappy toeless sandals and an incongruous dark enveloping coat despite the July weather. Both looked miserable. The fathers were all merry buttonholes and cheerful optimism. A reception for six hundred people was held at the Fishmongers’ Hall, courtesy of Gervaise’s elevated position there. The guests were largely members of the constituency and Hampshire locals. Harold and Vita knew no one and stood in the shadows, Vita feeling especially out of place and, as Nigel wrote in his diary, looking ‘as timorous as a doe caught by the hunt’.
* * *
On the first night of the honeymoon at Sissinghurst, the excuse of tiredness postponed for the nervous couple what on the second night was described by my father as ‘an ordeal’. He rated his own ‘performance’ as ‘adequate’, hardly the trumpet blast and clashing of cymbals a virginal bride in love might expect, even wish for. Philippa had married a man who although twelve years older had almost as little sexual experience as she did. Nigel’s hopes that, without previous comparisons, Philippa would not notice his inadequacy and humiliation may have been realistic at first, but practice did not dispel his unease nor her disappointment. While his sexual inhibition and reticence and even distaste remained causes of lifelong secret shame for him, they became an increasing source of frustration and distress to Philippa. In an interview about his parents’ love life given to America’s NBC network in the 1970s at just about the moment his own marriage was ending, Nigel declared that ‘the most important lesson of all is that the sex element of a marriage, anybody’s marriage taken over a lifetime, is about 10 per cent’. Poor Philippa.
For the remainder of the honeymoon, their first holiday together, the newlyweds had planned to drive through the northern towns of Italy, but after a few days in Venice they reached Verona, that most romantic of cities, where their car hit a tractor full on. Their injuries were minor but the car was a write-off, so they came back early to Shirley House, their first home together, a small white farmhouse in Nigel’s Hampshire constituency. That autumn the local doctor confirmed that Philippa was to have a baby. With almost audible relief, Nigel observed in his diary that Philippa was ‘engrossed in something at last’. Impending motherhood brought contentment and focus to her life and even some temporary softening of the relationship between Nigel and Pamela. On the night of 9 June 1954, Pam stayed at Shirley House playing dominoes with Nigel downstairs as the drama unfolded upstairs in Philippa’s bedroom. Ten decorously punctual months after the wedding a daughter was born. They called the baby Juliet, the name chosen in part as a neat reflection of Philippa’s love for her Border terrier Romeo. All seemed well enough until a few months later when a frail-looking Philippa was diagnosed with tuberculosis, the disease that had weakened her mother. But much had changed since Pam’s day, and the dramatic surgery that had been necessary to treat Philippa’s mother a decade before had been replaced by a new drug-based treatment that became a familiar element of our family life. Despite medical progress, the convalescent period for TB remained severe. After two weeks of observation at St George’s Hospital at Hyde Park Corner, my mother was allowed home. But she did not return to Shirley House. Instead, she moved into her parents’ home a few miles away, an adult daughter in isolation in her childhood bedroom, forbidden to touch her own infant daughter or even to be in the same room as her, for fear of handing on the infection. There was to be complete bed rest for four months with as little movement as possible.
Deprived of her own home and of her independence and separated from her new baby, Philippa was quite unable to bloom in any way, least of all in the way that my father had predicted or at least hoped she would. A misty black-and-white photograph taken from the bedroom door shows her slight figure far in the distance, propped against the pillows, wearing a woollen bedjacket edged with a collar of swansdown, the photographer, perhaps it was my father, allowed no nearer than the door. Her bed tray straddles her blanket-covered knees, its supports made of open wicker baskets into which an unfinished tapestry has been tucked. A few months later a picture of me looking apprehensive sitting on her knee reveals her thinness as she holds me with some caution. Maybe the picture was taken to record our reunion? She had just returned home to Shirley House.
Gradually Philippa began to feel better and to put on a little weight, but most nights Nigel remained in the separate bedroom into which he had moved during her illness. As she continued her long convalescence, she went on regular beneficial visits to the healing sunshine at her parents’ villa in the South of France. At Villa Arabe Philippa was able to recuperate from her illness and join her parents’ friends who came to snooze on sunloungers on the large terrace far from the cold English climate.
My father stayed at home. Busy with his parliamentary career, Nigel became involved with many of the social reforms of the 1950s. In 1955 public compassion was running high for Ruth Ellis, a glamorous, peroxide-blonde, twenty-eight-year-old nightclub hostess who had shot her boyfriend. Her defence counsel maintained that the boyfriend had driven Ruth to the point of insanity. While Ellis acknowledged that she had pulled the trigger, she was adamant about what had happened that day. ‘It was quite clear to me that I was not the person who shot him. When I saw myself with the revolver I knew I was another person.’ Her ‘crime passionnel’, it was argued, should not carry the death sentence. But Ruth was hanged in Holloway Prison on 13 July and the abolition of hanging became the fierce focus of public and parliamentary debate. The American novelist Raymond Chandler, who was living in Britain, wrote to the Evening Standard about ‘the medieval savagery of the law’, voicing the opinion of many, including several parliamentarians, my father among them.
On 4 September 1957 the Wolfenden Report was published, recommending reform of the law that made sex between men illegal. Homosexuals were regarded by many as deviants and the witch-hunt in America for gay men and women known as the Lavender Scare became every bit as virulent in 1950s Britain. The Home Secretary, David Maxwell-Fyfe, had pledged there would be ‘a new drive against male vice’ and to ‘rid England of this plague’ that resulted in the imprisonment of a thousand men a week. A neighbour and friend of Philippa’s from before her marriage, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, had been convicted and jailed for a homosexual affair in 1954, and Nigel, at heart a liberal and, in this case especially, his parents’ son, was fully supportive of the legal changes, antagonising many members of his party and more seriously his profoundly shockable and conservative Conservative constituents. His disillusionment with the way the Conservative government led by Anthony Eden was handling the volatile situation in Suez became the most serious cause of his moral separation from the government. When he abstained in the crucial vote of confidence in Britain’s invasion of Egypt, he alienated himself from his constituency irrevocably.
Two years after Philippa had been given the all-clear from tuberculosis, a son, Adam, was born. Her gratitude for his safe delivery was reflected in her invitation to the family doctor, ‘Doccor’ Howard, to be a godparent. Breastfeeding was forbidden for fear the agitation would exacerbate the currently dormant TB. Otherwise, for a while, our growing family seemed happy enough. But despite the arrival of Adam and the apparent domestic contentment of life at Shirley House, Philippa was drifting away from Nigel, squeezed out from his attention by the demands and anxieties of his work, and not interested enough in that work to make herself a sympathetic companion with whom he could share those worries. ‘I wish I was like Romeo,’ Nigel wrote as early as 1957 when he realised he was losing her. ‘Romeo just has to look at you with loving eyes.’
* * *
When my left-leaning father, reactionary Bournemouth’s unlikely MP, was forced to resign his seat over his disagreement with the government during the Suez crisis, there was no longer any need to live near his old constituency. My parents closed the gates to Shirley House on 12 January 1961 and my father saw my mother’s eyes fill with tears. They were moving to London, away from the rootedness of home
. And in London everything began to go wrong. London left Philippa disorientated. She was thirty-two years old, a mother of two and a two-hour car journey away from her parents, and her upbringing, domestic circumstances and age disqualified her from taking part in the revolution that was going on in the clubs and pubs and restaurants and houses and flats and attics and cellars of Swinging Chelsea. Nonetheless, she tried to join in as best she could. Her skirts became a little shorter, and she smoked Benson & Hedges cigarettes that came in a gold box and which she lit with a little flourish and a click of a Dunhill lighter, blowing out the smoke while she spoke, very glamorous, very Julie Christie. She listened to Chubby Checker and Herb Alpert on the record player in the sitting room of our small terraced house. She zipped through the Chelsea streets in a lavender-coloured Triumph Herald, a ‘racy coupé’, as described by the manufacturers, a sexy Italian-inspired number that had been on the market for only a year and could turn on a sixpence just like a London taxi.
From the outset of their marriage Nigel had kept a dressing room of his own at Shirley House with a single bed in it. He had moved out of Philippa’s room when she became ill and had never gone back. His ‘distaste for the ultimate act’, he wrote in his confessional memoir, had become so entrenched that it was no longer due to ‘squeamishness but to the fear of revealing my inadequate potency’. In London he maintained his own tiny bedroom next to Philippa’s large, airy double-windowed room, one half of her silky bedspread forever intact in its perfect unruffled smoothness. Each morning my father pushed his bed into a vertical position, as he had once done as an Eton schoolboy, where it was held against the wall with clips to give him more space to move around.
In 1962, two years after Penguin’s successful case to publish Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and after narrowly winning a censorship battle themselves with the Director of Public Prosecution, Weidenfeld & Nicolson brought out Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita. If Nigel was professionally preoccupied with censorship and sexual boundaries, the interest also spilled into his private life, but not the part he shared with Philippa. Tucked into the springs of the upended mattress of his monastic single bed was a pile of magazines with pictures on the covers of young women wearing bathing suits that were too small and too tight for them, their hair in high ponytails, smiling in a very friendly way indeed at the camera. A copy of the uncensored, sexually explicit Penguin edition of Rabbit, Run, John Updike’s first Rabbit novel, had been squeezed between his classics books on the top shelf of his bedroom. Every day he went to work at his publishing office. Like Philippa, he travelled. But his expeditions were infrequent and conducted for work rather than play. He was at home a lot, and despite Philippa’s loneliness, his presence, his all-consuming career, his critical intellect and his failure to make love to her swamped, stifled and depressed her. He recorded in his memoir that, in her frustration, she would often become angry with him, and once she bit his thumb. Yet his awareness of his contributing part in an obviously disintegrating marriage appears in the diary to be nonexistent. My mother seemed unable to find her way through the claustrophobia of her situation. With marriage she had escaped the imprisonment of daughterhood only to find herself once more trapped, the pain of loneliness forcing her into isolation and apparently preventing her from recognising that rewards might have been found in motherhood. A month after we moved to London, she returned to her familiar if unsatisfying sanctuary, leaving her children to settle into new schools as she flew off alone to the South of France.
A House Full of Daughters Page 15
