Pen promised to write the moment she arrived. She was worried about leaving her mother but her grandmother, Gar, had told her, ‘I’ll look after your mummy for you, don’t you worry, my darling.’ Her Uncle Jac and Aunt Eileen were close by in London, too, and her mother had told her repeatedly that she would be quite all right. But it must have been an awful wrench. Pen was just fifteen years old. She had watched her mother sink into a state of depression and become reliant on alcohol during the divorce from Penelope’s father. She must have worried how she would bear up under this even greater pressure of not knowing whether Geoffrey were alive or dead. So far, Catherine seemed to be staying strong without any recourse to drink, but even so, it was a worry. Pen would also miss her cousin, Patricia, hugely. The girls had always been close and had become allies in the strange new circumstances of their wartime lives.
Patricia was to stay on at their evacuated school, where she missed her cousin terribly. The ponies went back to Highclere, as did Patricia for her holidays. She had troubles of her own. Her parents were living in London since her father was an MP and spent long evenings in the House of Commons. The workload and strain of being in such a position of responsibility during wartime was starting to tell on Bro. He was becoming utterly exhausted. Patricia knew her mother, Eve, was worried about him.
Pen and Doll arrived safe and sound in New York, where they stayed for a few days before travelling to Arthur Wendell’s house. The city must have seemed almost overwhelmingly carefree compared to London, which was gripped by anxiety about the outcome of the aerial battle being fought over its head. New York was pure heady glamour next to the austerity of wartime London, with its blackout and air-raid shelters and gas masks, not to mention its rationing. Pen didn’t go short when she was with either of her parents (after all, there was caviar for dinner at the Ritz throughout the war) but school food was very plain indeed. Now she and Doll enjoyed trips to the cinema and the shops, and lunched with Tilly. Pen was pleased to see her, and to receive some money that her papa had sent her, care of her stepmother. One hundred dollars was a fortune to a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl. She (or perhaps Catherine, on her behalf) might have been a bit put out if she had discovered that Porchey had sent Tilly $2,000, with instructions to share it with Pen when she arrived. Strictly speaking, of course, Tilly did.
Even had she known, Catherine had far bigger things to think about. Her son spent much of the summer at Highclere training with the Local Defence Volunteers, or the Home Guard as they were rechristened before long. Two and a half months earlier, when the threat of a land invasion had looked alarmingly imminent, Anthony Eden, Secretary of State for War, made a wireless broadcast calling on all men between the ages of seventeen and sixty-five who were not in military service but wished to defend their country, to enrol in the LDV at their local police station. A wave of patriotic enthusiasm carried 250,000 volunteers to sign up in the first seven days; by the beginning of August, 1.5 million men were enrolled. Catherine was proud of Henry, of course, but the knowledge that, at seventeen, he was now just nudging into the age bracket that made him eligible to serve in the military was terrifying to her. The Home Guard was one thing, but she didn’t know if she could bear it if he were to join the regular Army. She was relieved when the academic year started again and Henry went back to being a schoolboy at Eton.
In his absence there was tremendous excitement for the Guard and everyone around Highclere when a German Heinkel plane crashed near the estate. It had been damaged by anti-aircraft fire near Bristol and was trying to get home. The crew of five bailed out as the plane went down and the Home Guard were called out to search for any survivors. Two Germans were picked up almost immediately, and then a member of the search party who had gone to relieve himself in some rhododendrons in the Park inadvertently found two more. The last German airman was caught a few days later when, preferring capture to hunger, he decided to hand himself in. A passing lady motorist found him on a roadside close to Highclere Castle and drove him to Newbury Police Station, where she asked them to give him a good meal.
The war in the air was entering a terrible chapter. On 7 September the Luftwaffe launched a massive night-time raid on London. They bombed the city for fifty-seven consecutive nights. The Blitz, in which sixteen British cities suffered major attacks, went on for eight months, between September 1940 and May 1941, and claimed about 40,000 lives in total.
Londoners had been preparing for such an attack—but it was still devastating when it came. After two weeks, Catherine’s nerves were at breaking point. Gar decided they should move out of the city to somewhere safer, for the sake of her daughter’s health. It took some effort to persuade Catherine that any news from the Navy about Geoffrey would find them, that there were central information systems they could access. Catherine was also anxious not to give up her voluntary work for the Navy League, serving lunches in their canteens. Gar made enquiries and discovered that she would be able to continue down in Torquay, on the Devon coast. At the end of September, Catherine, Gar and Mrs van Celst, Catherine’s housekeeper at Wilton Crescent, moved to the Imperial hotel, situated atop the cliffs overlooking the bay.
By the end of October 1940, the Luftwaffe had lost the Battle of Britain, defeated by the heroic efforts of the RAF fighter pilots. Operation Sea Lion, the German plan for an invasion of England, was mothballed. The British public rallied; for the first time in long months of despair and disaster, there was a definite sense that the war could be won. The Americans started to think so, too, despite Ambassador to London Joseph Kennedy’s pessimistic bulletins to Roosevelt. Now the word was that Britain could survive, and deserved every support in her efforts.
The Blitz continued but at the end of 1940, the nation could look back on a year in which so much had been sacrificed and conclude that perhaps it had not been in vain. Catherine wrote to her daughter, went up to London to visit her son and to see friends. Porchey phoned her several times and thought she seemed in reasonable form, all things considered. Catherine tried to summon up the strength to begin a new year without Geoffrey, still lost in the limbo of not knowing what had happened to him. Her waiting was almost over. On 8 February 1941, Catherine Grenfell received a letter from the War Office. Her eyes clouded as she struggled to read the words. ‘All hope of his having been rescued must be abandoned. Your husband, Lieutenant Commander Geoffrey Seymour Grenfell, must now be presumed to have lost his life.’
16
Coming Through Darkness
Once Catherine had read the letter from the War Office, she handed it to her mother and went immediately to bed. The wait was over and now there was no hope left, nothing to be done. For the next three days she drank the tea that Gar brought her and responded calmly when asked how she was feeling, but she refused to speak to the friends who had started to telephone to offer their condolences. Gar was half frantic with worry.
When Catherine did get up, the first thing she did was cable Penelope, and then her cousins in America, via Arthur. ‘Dear Trois Anges, Have just received official announcement that darling Geoffrey was killed in gallant fight against great odds … Please tell family.’ Arthur duly passed on the news. To his cousin Edith he wrote, ‘I met Geoffrey two years ago. He was a splendid man in every particular, devoted to Catherine.’
One of the first to write to her was Porchey, who knew how wretched she would be but trusted in her ‘faith and nobility of spirit’. He was going to see their boy at Eton, and ended the letter with ‘all love, God bless you’. Catherine had already written to Henry. The letter is touching for the way her pride in Geoffrey’s bravery is already the dominant theme she clings to. ‘It is a very fine story,’ she tells Henry. He wrote by return, trying to cheer her up, urging her not to be too ‘miserable, I am sure Uncle Geoffrey would not want you to be.’
Countless friends, including Almina and the Duke and Duchess of Kent, wrote to express their sympathy for her loss and their admiration for Lieutenant Commander Grenfell. ‘I hope one day
the story of [Juniper’s] action will be told.’ ‘I feel so sorry for you losing him, because he was such a good chap.’ Dr Johnnie, who had been part of Highclere’s life for forty years, penned a note in a spidery hand offering his prayers and best wishes. Sibell Lygon wrote from Madresfield inviting Catherine to stay and saying she was ‘so sad that those months of anxiety should end like this.’
Geoffrey’s father was not very well and Catherine was worried about when to break the news. Geoffrey was Riverdale Grenfell’s only son. In the end she managed to compose a brief but heartfelt note. Her father-in-law wrote to Catherine that he was ‘suddenly overwhelmed by pride … pride that he belonged to me and you. [He] belongs to that brave band of Grenfells who have given all they could to their country and to all those who loved them.’ She had brought great happiness into Geoffrey’s life and must always remember that she still had him and Olive [Geoffrey’s stepmother]. ‘Darling, we do both love you so.’
Catherine’s first few attempts to reply had to be abandoned when the page became blotted with tears. Eventually she managed, ‘He taught me to think the right way and to face the world anew. I will try to keep that spirit of gaiety and courage in my heart for ever.’
The Grenfell family knew what it was to read the worst news in the world. They understood the anguish that Catherine felt at not being able to bury the man she mourned because he had died in the seas off Norway, just as his cousins had died in the sea of mud in northern France. Julian Grenfell and his brother—that ‘brave band of Grenfells’ referred to by Riverdale—had perished in the last war.
In her reply to Geoffrey’s father, Catherine enclosed some lines from a poem written about Julian, who was killed at Ypres in 1915.
Because of you we will be brave and gay
Remembering you we will be brave and strong …
And you will speed us onward with a cheer.
And wave beyond the stars that all is well.
Catherine and Gar stayed on at the Imperial hotel. Catherine loved the sea-sprayed air and listening to the sound of the waves on the cliffs below. As long as she was by the sea, she felt connected to the waters off Norway where her husband lay. Now, more than ever, she wanted to keep up her involvement with the things that had mattered to Geoffrey. Every day she left the hotel and walked down into Torquay to work in the Navy League.
Her family were worried that she would collapse under the strain, or that she would turn once again to alcohol to numb her pain. But Catherine seems to have been determined to live out her assurance to Geoffrey’s father that she would honour her husband’s memory by keeping in her heart the courage he had taught her. She and Gar would sometimes settle themselves in the hotel bar and watch the sun set into the sea. Prompted by her mother, Catherine would recount the details of her day down at the League over a gin and tonic. There might have been a second but there were never more than two. Gar could write to Pen, who felt the burden of being so far away very keenly, and tell her that her mother was impressing everyone with her fortitude.
On 2 April 1941, Catherine received notice of her war widow’s pension and read again the words ‘the late Lieutenant Commander Grenfell’. She felt her resolve not to give in to despair faltering and decided that it was time to return to the refuge provided by her beloved Catholic nuns. Gar went to Wilton Crescent in London. The Blitz was still raging but, with Catherine in safe hands, she wanted to be near her son, Jac, and her grandchildren.
The rituals of worship, the peace and quiet for reflection, the nurturing atmosphere of the retreat all healed Catherine’s mind, and her soul. She was grateful for the loving support she received and started to think seriously about converting to Catholicism. The stumbling block, and it was a big one, was the Church’s refusal to recognise divorce. As far as the Catholic Church was concerned, Catherine was still married to Porchey and her subsequent marriage to Geoffrey was invalid. The nuns treated her with nothing but kindness and sympathy as they talked to her about her loss, but the institution’s inability to recognise the fundamental importance of Geoffrey in her life made her hang back from taking the steps to convert.
Catherine spent two weeks at the convent in Highgate, north London, before returning home at the end of April. She went straight to Ovington Square, where Geoffrey’s housekeeper of many years was at the door to receive her. Charged by Geoffrey with caring for his wife, in Catherine’s absence Miss Thorn had looked after the house, which was immaculate despite the devastation across London. Fewer bombs fell in the western districts than in the east, which was nearer the major target of the docks, but no part of the city was spared. Bombs had been dropped on landmarks such as Buckingham Palace, Downing Street, many of London’s great churches and in front of the Bank of England. Catherine hailed a cab from the station and picked her way through dust and debris, horrified by the blackened craters where houses had been, the bomb sites that still smoked.
It must have been an emotional homecoming. Outside was destruction; inside too, since she was alone. But at least she was back in the house where she had been so happy for one sweet year, surrounded by her beloved’s possessions, his clothes hanging in the wardrobes still carrying his scent, his books on the shelves where he had left them.
Catherine knew she could not stay in the house, that it would have to be sold. She spent a few days dealing with Geoffrey’s trustees and arranging for things to be packed up and moved to Wilton Crescent. How fortunate that she had retained that home of her own. Then, not yet able to face her former life in town, she decided to take a lovely quiet house called Byeways, just outside Ascot, so that she could be close to Henry at Eton. Catherine felt she needed the calm of the countryside, to pick the berries in the hedgerows and collect wood for her fire. She volunteered at a canteen in Windsor and spent as much time as possible with Henry. She did small things to make herself content and put off all major decisions for later, as she relearned how to live alone.
Catherine took comfort from good news, wherever she found it. Penelope’s letters (and her school reports) cheered her. They were full of accounts of how hard she was working at Foxcroft and how much she enjoyed America, despite her longing to come home. Henry was happy and well, though Catherine had asked him not to talk to her about his plans to join up when he left school later that year. She would have to bear it when the moment came, but she didn’t want to think about it until then.
There was good news too, on the course of the war. The last major bomb attack on London occurred on the night of 10 May, the day before Catherine’s departure for Windsor. The Blitz was over and the country had survived with its manufacturing capacity, Air Force and spirit intact, despite the terrible loss of life and destruction of homes and livelihoods.
The immediate problem was money, or lack of it. Britain was fighting the war virtually single-handed and it was costing a fortune. Churchill made an appeal to Roosevelt for financial and material support in December 1940, to which the President responded by exchanging fifty destroyers for ninety-nine-year leases on British bases in the Caribbean. This decision triggered a debate in the United States over whether the nation should actively support the Allies or maintain its neutrality. A majority of public opinion favoured support in the form of loans, but without active intervention in the conflict. On 11 March, Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease legislation into law, and the transfer of billions of dollars’ worth of supplies began.
It was a critical moment for Britain, with the attacks on convoys in the Atlantic sapping its ability to keep fighting. Churchill wrote in his diaries that the threat of the German blockade was perhaps his greatest fear. Rationing had been in place since January 1940, but the self-sufficiency programmes in food and other agriculture instigated at the outbreak of hostilities were only now starting to yield results. Britain needed more of everything: food, steel, armoured vehicles, ships, munitions. Churchill was overjoyed at the conclusion of Lend-Lease. He knew that the Americans had effectively entered the war on the side of the Allies.
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When Porchey returned to Highclere, in the wake of the 7th Hussars being disbanded in the summer of 1940, he found virtually the whole estate had been requisitioned for the war effort. Porchey was disconsolate. Tilly had left him, Pen was about to set off for America and once more he was searching around for a way in which he could contribute. For the next four months, in between fruitlessly importuning Tilly to come back, he had to be satisfied with helping wherever he could at home. There was a lot to do.
As well as the nursery school in the castle, which now numbered fifty-five children and sixteen staff, there were hives of activity in every corner of the estate. Agriculture was a major focus, as it was up and down the country. The Dig for Victory campaign had urged the nation to turn vegetable gardener in their back yards, with impressive results. There were 1.7 million allotments yielding fresh produce by the end of the war. The bigger estates were subject to compulsory land-use orders. When the government directed that any potentially viable arable land must be ploughed up, Highclere’s gardeners and tenant farmers took to the paddocks, the cricket pitch and the golf course. Most of the land was very poor and the wheat harvest scarcely justified the efforts involved so, under the watchful eye of the Potato and Carrot Division of the Ministry of Food, the Highclere staff concentrated their efforts on extending the castle’s kitchen gardens. Before long they were supplying vegetables to schools, hospitals and shops all over the local area.
The stud had been in government hands since the beginning of 1940. The buildings housed a constant stream of different battalions as they carried out training exercises. RAF Bomber Command requisitioned another part of the estate, on the far side of Siddown Hill, as a practice area.
Lady Catherine, the Earl, and the Real Downton Abbey Page 22
