There exist further considerations why Patrick should have taken care to maintain a convincing semblance of marital relations with Elizabeth, until the time he and my mother first set up home together in (or conceivably before) September 1943. There are indications that they lived apart in Chelsea for much of the time before that.[fn3] This could have arisen from the contemporary propensity of landladies to disapprove of unmarried couples cohabiting in their premises.
During their first two or three years together it seems Patrick continued at times apprehensive that my mother might drop him as suddenly as she had taken him up. Her family and friends strongly disapproved of their liaison, her background could scarcely have been more different, and those closest to her wondered what she could see in the penniless aspirational writer.[fn4] Were she to desert him, where could he turn if not to his wife and children? This hypothesis is not entirely speculative. In his intensely autobiographical novel Richard Temple, the hero’s upper-class inamorata Philippa Brett (who is unmistakably based on my mother) unexpectedly deserts him at the conclusion for ‘a tall, thin soldier … this was the hour of the fighting man and now he seemed splendid – Sam Browne, decorations, gleaming buttons here and there’. London in the early Forties was filled with dashing young officers from British and Allied forces, who were only too anxious to make the most of their leave in town.
It is not necessary to assume that Patrick was being entirely hypocritical, were he to have been influenced by such a consideration. As I have suggested, it is likely that he continued to nurture a residue of guilty affection for his pretty and loyal young wife.[fn5] Such things have happened, and in these precarious circumstances it is not inconceivable that he was concerned to keep his options open.[fn6] However, once he and my mother had set up house together, such apprehension naturally dissipated.
As has been seen, the apparent discrepancy between Elizabeth’s assertion that she and her husband lived together until 1942 and his actual absence in London is further accounted for by her having throughout their marriage become accustomed to lengthy absences on Patrick’s part. This, she explained to the court in 1944, arose from his being obliged to earn a living by acting as a courier abroad. When Richard was too little to remember much, Patrick had lived initially for over a year in the family home at Gadds Cottage. That he was in fact leading a double life remained completely unknown to his betrayed wife.[fn7] This in turn suggests that he maintained sufficiently regular contact with his family during 1941 and 1942 to allay suspicion. Indeed, it seems reasonable to suppose that his weekly £3 postal order was generally accompanied by a letter. (One of the surviving letters he wrote to Elizabeth before they left London makes it clear that they had corresponded every week during his protracted absence at his parents’ home in Sussex.)[fn8] Had he vanished altogether from 1940 onwards, it is plainly inconceivable that Elizabeth could have considered him as ‘living with’ her for another two or three years. Indeed, another versifying letter from Patrick describes in jocular vein one such visit. The date of his arrival is given as 14 June, and allusions suggest that the year in question was 1941 or 1942.
Fortunately, this reconstruction of the relationship between husband and wife at this time is not entirely dependent on informed reconstruction. In an affidavit drawn up in 1949, Elizabeth drew the court’s attention:
to the piece of paper now produced to me marked ‘C’. I cannot recollect the date when this was written but it is in my husband’s handwriting and was written to me when he was concealing his whereabouts under a British monomark. At that time he had not begun to adopt the attitude of hostility he has since shown and he was proposing that I should take a job as a Matron at a Boys School: he regarded me as eminently suitable for such a position and pressed me to seek for such employment. This is corroborated by the portion of one of his letters exhibited. The other side of the same piece of paper gives some clue as to our relations at that time before these unhappy difficulties arose [in 1943, when she belatedly learned that Patrick and my mother were living together].[9]
Unfortunately the letter alluded to is missing from the file in the Public Record Office. Nevertheless, its tenor is clear from her reference. Elizabeth regarded their marital relations as continuing cordial throughout the time Patrick returned to London from the autumn of 1940 onwards.
There was no occasion in court proceedings for Elizabeth to explain why she departed Gadds Cottage after nearly three years. Although her existence was throughout penurious, it had undergone no material change by the time she sought refuge with Patrick’s brother Godfrey in Norwich at the beginning of 1942. By far the most likely reason for the move is that Richard had now reached an age when it was time for him to begin his schooling. This would not have been practical at their home in the remote Suffolk countryside, where Elizabeth was tied at home by the presence of her sick infant daughter. At the same time, we know that Patrick continued throughout Richard’s childhood and youth profoundly concerned that he should obtain a good education, where possible at a private school. It seems likely, therefore, that his letter suggesting that Elizabeth seek employment at a boys’ school was written about this time.
Her practical knowledge and maternal nature might be expected to have afforded sufficient qualification for employment as a preparatory school matron, which would in addition be likely to enable her to have her son educated at the school free of charge. Whatever the reason for her not adopting this course, it seems probable that Patrick’s letter (which Elizabeth regarded as attesting to continuing affectionate relations between them) was written on the eve of January 1942, when his wife adopted the alternative measure of going to live with Patrick’s brother Godfrey and wife Connie outside Norwich.
This said, we are still left with Elizabeth’s plaintive declaration that her husband ‘refused to see her [baby Jane] or offer any sympathy’ at the time of the child’s tragic death. This is a distinct but nonetheless grave charge, not to be lightly dismissed (although it is not at all the same as the groundless accusation that it was discovery of the little girl’s spina bifida that caused Patrick to leave home).
Ironically, Elizabeth’s heartfelt complaint implies that Patrick, prior to this tragic climax, had been seeing Jane and evincing sympathy for her plight. Nevertheless, that he was absent at the time of her death remains a serious charge. Given that he had hitherto manifested effective concern to allay any suspicion on his wife’s part, it seems possible that a particular reason arose for his absence at so poignant a moment.
What that reason might have been will probably never be known for certain. However, the cause of a temporary absence on Patrick’s part on this tragic occasion may be illumined by an inscription ‘for Mary, she being sick in the Hospital of St Bartholomew the Less. 30th March 1942’, written by him in a fine folio volume[10] he gave my mother the day before Jane’s death. How serious was my mother’s ailment, and how long did it endure? Beyond this, we simply do not know what was the situation of the couple in London at that time.
Since no response by Patrick to Elizabeth’s accusation survives, speculation on the issue must remain as tantalizing as it is unprofitable. Naturally, he could not have given his wife what was probably the true reason, which would have made it all the more reprehensible. Nevertheless, he and Elizabeth continued for some time after this date on sufficiently amicable terms to discuss questions relating to Richard’s education in London.[11]
A further material consideration lies in the fact that Elizabeth, while undoubtedly a good woman and devoted mother, was capable of considerable confusion over aspects of her relationship with Patrick. A single instance may possibly stand for others. In a court affidavit dated 26 April 1949, she declared that Patrick ‘treated me very repressively, not allowing me to have a newspaper, to visit a cinema or to listen to a wireless’.[12] Here her memory was undoubtedly at fault. Shortly before their departure for Gadds Cottage in 1939 (where the issue could no longer arise, there being no opportunity of visiting a cinema
in their bucolic retreat), Patrick wrote to Elizabeth from his parents’ house at Crowborough, declaring his love for her and enquiring solicitously about her and their daughter: ‘Will Campaspe be at the créche now? If she is you might go to the cinema as an escape from unhappiness.’[fn9]
It is unfortunate, too, that pages have been abstracted (stolen by an unscrupulous reader?) from the official file of Patrick’s court submissions relating to his divorce and custody proceedings. Since the missing pages comprised part of Patrick’s testimony, much more would be known of his side of the dispute had they been preserved.
As I would again emphasize, it is not my purpose to espouse a partisan view of the dispute between Patrick and his wife, but to cite the evidence showing that the principal charge against him (that he deserted his family on discovering the nature of his daughter’s illness) is demonstrably false, while other factors are at the least insufficiently clear to allow of glib judgements over half a century later.
Finally, one other element in this unhappy story may throw light on Patrick’s feelings at the time. Dean King compounded his account of Patrick’s supposed callousness by asserting that his abrupt departure from Gadds Cottage was unaccompanied by any provision for the family’s welfare: ‘Whatever the reason, one day he simply left, never to return, leaving his eldest brother Godfrey and his wife Connie, when they heard what had happened, to drive out and rescue the stranded family …’[fn10]
Since the whole account of Patrick’s ‘simply leaving’ on the eve of Elizabeth’s removal to Norwich is demonstrably fictitious, it seems probable that it was in fact he who appealed to his kindly brother Godfrey to provide the family with a temporary haven.
Three months later, immediately after Jane’s death, Elizabeth departed for ‘London with Richard to find employment’. What there was no occasion to mention in her subsequent affidavit was how, being possessed of such scanty resources, she managed with apparent facility to find somewhere to live in the distant metropolis. Her new home, where she was to spend the rest of her life, was a small upstairs flat in 237, King’s Road, just around the corner from the house in Upper Cheyne Row where Patrick and my mother were to install themselves in the following year. The choice of Elizabeth’s residence was not the result, as might appear, of pure chance. It cannot have been coincidence that close friends of Patrick occupied the ground-floor flat of number 237. They were Francis Cox, an artist whom Patrick had known since his bachelor days in Chelsea, and his wife. When his son Richard was christened in 1937, Patrick conferred on him the additional name Francis, from which it appears that Cox was godfather to the boy. When Patrick and my mother moved to Wales after the War, they invited Cox to stay. And when my mother visited London during that time, it was with him and his wife that she lodged at 237, King’s Road. Thus the Coxes were friends of Patrick rather than Elizabeth, and in the circumstances it is surely likely that it was Patrick who arranged with them to provide accommodation for his wife and son.
Aspects of this unhappy story undoubtedly remain discreditable to Patrick. However, the question addressed here is whether the widely canvassed allegation be true that he deliberately abandoned his wife and children in 1940, simply because he was chillingly unprepared to associate with a grievously ailing infant daughter. The belief that this explains his departure from Gadds Cottage only appeared credible in consequence of Dean King’s fanciful claim that Patrick and my mother first met, in what were in reality entirely imaginary circumstances, during the late summer of 1941. King’s erroneous speculation that Patrick had left Gadds Cottage the year before of necessity implied that his departure could have had nothing to do with his love affair with my mother. In fact, with the correct dates restored, and Patrick’s continuing support for and affectionate relationship with his wife attested on oath by Elizabeth herself, it can be seen that their final rift arose from a combination of exceptional circumstances obtaining from the onset of war, Patrick’s desperate need to obtain an income sufficient to support his family, and last (but certainly not least), his and my mother’s growing involvement in their passionate covert love affair.
Thus, there is not the slightest justification for asserting that baby Jane’s cruel affliction provided the reason for his departure from Gadds Cottage. In fact, a likely contributory explanation of Patrick’s sustaining the pretence of a continuing marriage so effectively as to deceive his wife for two and a half years, up to and after their daughter’s death, is that he could not bring himself to sever relations so long as the infant Jane remained alive.
Appendix C
Patrick’s Sailing
I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face in the grey dawn breaking.
John Masefield, Sea Fever
In the first volume of this biography I gave reasons for concluding that Patrick had not, as he claimed on several occasions, sailed as a young man on board ‘an ocean-going yacht’.[1] Today, I feel my dismissal requires modification in the light of evidence of which I was then unaware. The issue would not of course invite particular concern were it not for the fact that, in the eyes of Patrick’s small but persistent band of detractors, it provides a prime justification for damning him as ‘a liar’.
My present reservation reflects the general consideration that absence of evidence does not constitute evidence. A striking example may suffice to illustrate this, while also enabling me to correct an error perpetrated in my previous volume.
Here I adduced reasons for discounting Patrick’s recollection of having attended a preparatory school at Paignton, near Torbay in Devonshire. I have since found that Patrick was right, and I wrong. I had overlooked his brief diary entry for 8 November 1981, in which he describes a visit he made to Devonshire with my mother, which settles the matter decisively:
… so to Paignton, where (in pretty bitter cold) we walked upon the faintly familiar sand, looking at the perfectly familiar Thatcher [a large rock at the tide line] – thro the unknown town to a naturally unknown pub where we ate a pasty & asked the way to Grosvenor Rd. – no boyhood there alas.
In view of the allusion to his ‘boyhood’ familiarity with the town, it would be perverse to doubt Patrick’s assertion that he attended a school there.[fn1] The concluding reference incidentally also suggests that the school had ceased to exist.
I would further emphasize that the brevity of Patrick’s allusive references to his early sailing is of a piece with his broader concern to preserve his life before he married my mother in 1945 as secret as possible. His concern to preserve his privacy is far from unique among authors.
What previously persuaded me that Patrick had not, as he declared, engaged in his youth in a voyage or voyages in a ship under sail was the following entry in his diary for 12 October 1991:
In the afternoon we walked beyond Dugommier [the fort above Collioure], M[ary] going well … Then going down into P[ort-]V[endres] we saw a fine vessel on the further quay & went to look: the barque Belem, built at Nantes in 1898, 50m + long, 8,60 wide, 500 tons, drawing 3,8m. (These figures may be wrong: I did not note them at the time,[fn2] but she sails tomorrow at 11 & I hope to check them before then.) … 58m long 8.80 wide 3.6 draught 750 tons crew 16(?) built 96 sold to D of W 1914 then to Sir A.E. Guinness ocean-going yacht until 52 then navire ecole à Venise 1979 Caisse d’Epargne (Ecureuil) 85 to NY (S of Liberty) 12 staysails & jibs 10 square sails can make 12k under sail.
Next day:
Early I went to PV, checked the Belem’s measurements & contemplated her rigging. Then we went a little before 11 & she was making ready – people gathered but not too many – & almost on time she cast off & motored towards the jetty. We had scarcely hoped to see her set any sail, but a slight N breeze had sprung up & as she passed out of the port she did so with 3 fine staysails. We c
ould not tell her direction but at all hazards hurried up the devilish Béar road: & there suddenly she was far below, heading SE under courses, topsails & most fore & aft sails, looking perfectly lovely, the staysails white interrupted curved Ds catching the sun between the square sails – lovely proportions – an entity. We moved farther up; she moved farther out, setting the topgallants & eventually remarkably broad & deep royals. Her course was erratic at 1st … but eventually she settled for I suppose Cap Creus & sailed gently (3 or 4k?) into the blue. Such joy. (& in such a horrible, horrible world).
From this I gained the impression that it was the first time he had encountered the vessel. If so, it would be incompatible with his claim to have sailed in her during his youth before the War. On reflection, I do not now feel that my reasoning was altogether decisive.
Closer consideration suggests the possibility that Patrick may not have realized that it was the same vessel as that in which he afterwards claimed to have sailed more than half a century before. Under the Hon. Arthur Ernest Guinness’s ownership she had been rechristened Fantôme II, reverting to Belem some years after his death in 1949.[2] As was seen in the last chapter, a passing allusion in 1999 indicates that it was aboard Fantôme II that Patrick believed himself to have sailed in his youth – a name he failed to mention when inspecting the ship at Port-Vendres in 1991. Could it be that after long years he did not appreciate that the Belem was in fact one and the same with Fantôme II, in which he claimed to have sailed in his youth?
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