by Paula Byrne
Apart from trying to set up a meeting with a priest, he asked his friends to visit her and sent his daughter Meg, whom she adored, to see her. Meg loved looking through Maimie’s scrapbooks of the 1930s and chatting. They often went to dinner at the Hyde Park Hotel. By this time Maimie had a new job working at Sloane Galleries Antiques on the King’s Road. When this fell through, she took a position at Ede Car Hire, writing to Evelyn to recommend the company. It was a far cry from driving down to Mad in her father’s sleek Packard. In 1963 Evelyn, in all seriousness, suggested that Maimie should take over the position of hostess at the Cavendish Hotel, following in the footsteps of Rosa Lewis, ‘The Duchess of Jermyn Street’.
Maimie was, in Evelyn’s words, ‘very poor, and pretty’. He often sent her cheques for her birthday and Christmas. In the early days of their friendship he used to write her cheques for thousands of pounds with a message: ‘Here is some money in case you are poor’, knowing that she would never cash them – this of course was a joke, the rich daughter of Lord Beauchamp needing money from a poor, aspiring writer. But in these last years, he gave her money in earnest. He always asked with great tact whether she would mind accepting cash rather than a present for Christmas.
When Maimie was seventy-one she was interviewed for Harpers & Queen in relation to the Granada television adaptation of Brideshead. She was living in an unprepossessing basement flat in juggernaut-begrimed Redcliffe Gardens in Earls Court – still in surroundings that eccentrically combined style and disarray. A once rather grand gilt table was strewn with clutter, indeed every surface was covered with junk – pieces of string, old magazines, pipes – as though the contents of drawers had been tipped out. Maimie was elegantly dressed and ‘remarkably pretty with hair the shape and colour of an overblown white rose’ as she sat poised on a ‘threadless urn-shaped sofa’ with Mister, her Pekingese, gnawing an old bone at her feet. She had, observed the interviewer, Julie Kavanagh, the ‘self-possession and nonchalant disregard of convention that seems natural in people of great beauty and privilege’. Although it was only four in the afternoon, Maimie offered her visitor vodka: ‘It’s so much nicer than tea, I always think.’ Kavanagh saw the vestiges of the anarchic streak and enormous sense of fun that had so appealed to Waugh and sustained their long friendship. Maimie said that the motto that summed up her relationship with Evelyn was that inscription on the sundial at Madresfield: ‘The day is wasted on which we have not laughed.’
Lady Mary Lygon died of cancer on 27 September 1982. Coote had nursed her throughout the illness. Her friendship with Evelyn Waugh endured for over thirty years, from his arrival at Mad to his death. Her Pekingese, Grainger, has his name perpetuated in Black Mischief, Scoop, Incident in Azania, Put Out More Flags and Work Suspended.
Elmley, Mona, Sibell, and Dickie
Elmley, the last Earl Beauchamp, lived out a dull life as a ‘backwoodsman’ in the House of Lords. The high point of his year was the Three Counties Agricultural Show. He died in 1979, leaving Mona as chatelaine of Madresfield. She lived on for another ten years, riding around the estate either on a tricycle or in a powder blue Rolls-Royce with a cocktail cabinet in the back.
In the early part of the Second World War, Lady Sibell’s husband, Mike Rowley, served as a fighter pilot with 601 Squadron. But in the course of 1940 he developed a brain tumour and Sibell took him home to care for him. Meanwhile in Germany, the true Mrs Rowley found herself in the awkward position of being an enemy alien by virtue of her marriage to a man who was married to someone else. A letter to Rowley was smuggled out of Germany, but Sibell made sure her husband never saw it. She wrote to the address given by Eleonore – that of a friend in neutral Switzerland – with the news, entirely false, that Rowley had been killed in action.
Mrs Eleonore Rowley survived the war and in 1949 got a divorce on the grounds of her husband’s adultery with Lady Sibell. This meant that a decade after their bigamous marriage she and Mike could remarry legally. But the wartime deception still rankled, so in 1951, short of money, Eleonore sued Sibell in London, claiming that the letter stating that Rowley was dead had caused her, as his lawful wife, deep shock and had affected her heart. The jury found in her favour and awarded her damages of £814. There was also a story that Eleonore had blackmailed Sibell for £2,000 before the court case.
The following year her husband really did die. Sibell moved to Gloucestershire, less than an hour’s drive from Mad. She was subsequently cited in a divorce case brought by Mrs Anne Warman, of Salwarpe Court, Droitwich, against her husband, Francis Byrne Warman. Sibell also had romantic involvements with Lord Rosebery and Lady Mairi Bury.
She devoted the rest of her life to her one great passion: hunting. As Master of the Ledbury Hunt, she was for many years the only female Master of Foxhounds in the country. Whereas Coote always rode side-saddle, Sibell sailed astride over the big ditches and fences of the Gloucestershire and Herefordshire countryside. The secretary of the Ledbury Hunt, who worked closely with her, was Major Peter Phillips, whose son would become a renowned three-day eventer and the husband of Princess Anne. In 2005 Sibell was to be seen on the lawn of Madresfield, at a meeting of the Croome Hunt, the last before the imposition of the hunting ban. She died later that year, at the age of ninety-eight.
Youngest brother Dickie never spoke about his parents. He shunned the aristocracy, preferring the middle classes. He married a vicar’s daughter. They had two daughters, one of whom, Lady Rosalind Morrison, moved into Madresfield after a protracted legal wrangle following Mona’s death in 1989.
Coote
Lady Dorothy Lygon was on leave in Venice on VE Day, which was celebrated there with fireworks. At the end of the summer, she was shipped home from Naples. The following year she was demobilised. Hers had been a good war. Whereas Maimie’s life had been shaped by her good looks, Coote got by on her toughness and intelligence. Her work as a flight officer and then a photographic interpreter in the WAAF was well respected and the war had given her the opportunity to travel throughout Europe.
When peace returned, she followed a variety of paths. She farmed in Gloucestershire, but that seemed constricting after the horizons opened during the war. She accordingly went to work as a governess in Istanbul for six months and then moved to Athens to serve as social secretary to the British ambassador. She lived for a while on the Greek island of Hydra before returning to England to work as an archivist at Christies. She was loved by young and old alike.
She remained friends with Evelyn until the end of his life. They shared book talk as well as smutty jokes and frivolity, and he encouraged her to write about her life. She sent him a story, based on her Istanbul experiences, about the misadventures of a governess called Miss Coote. ‘I could try to write my autobiography as you suggest,’ she said in a letter, ‘but Elmley, Mona, Blondie and Lady Sibell would never speak to me again, let alone any other friends or relations, who might also fall by the wayside, and while I don’t really care about E and M, I feel some consideration otherwise.’ Nevertheless, she told him that she was trying to write about her ‘nursery days with a vague idea of following it up with adolescence and the summer I spent with Boom in Venice when Hughie died, as 3 more or less self-contained essays cum documentaries. Do you think this is feasible?’ He got her an advance of £300 from Chapman and Hall, but the book was never finished.
In one letter he noted that she did not appear to be greatly cast down by the death of her uncle, the Duke of Westminster, the architect of the family’s misery. Even gentle Coote was delighted by the death of Boom’s nemesis.
When she was a governess in Istanbul in 1956, she had looked after a little girl called Julia, daughter of a Mr Rochester. She very much liked her but thought she was hopelessly spoilt. The youngest child in the family wet her knickers at the sight of Coote, who rather fancied the young Greek servant and felt that the Rochester family were like something out of an Ibsen play (‘problem children and even more problematic parents’). When Coote first left for
Istanbul, Maimie wrote to Evelyn with a playful turn on the ‘Mr Rochester’ connection: ‘Poll came before catching the Night Ferry. I am sure that didn’t happen to Jane Eyre before leaving Lowood.’
After many years of travel, Coote settled down near Faringdon House in Oxfordshire, the home of Lord Berners, who had left the house to his long-term lover and companion, the notorious ‘Mad Boy’ Robert Heber Percy. Coote knew both men, as they were friends of her father’s and had often visited Mad.
Robert Vernon Heber Percy was born in 1911, the youngest son of Algernon Heber Percy of Hodnet Hall in Shropshire. He was nicknamed ‘the Mad Boy’ on account of his outlandish behaviour. He was handsome, elegant, high-spirited and a notorious homosexual – although that did not stop him marrying a girl called Jennifer Fry in 1942. They had one daughter, with whom Jennifer left home two years later. A divorce followed in 1947.
Mad Boy had met Lord Berners in 1932, when he was twenty-one. They were lovers for eighteen years, inseparable save during the war and the brief period of Heber Percy’s marriage. When Berners died in 1950, he left Faringdon to Robert.
Faringdon was Mad World all over again, what with its flock of doves dyed in pinks and blues, and pewter tankards full of champagne. Mad Boy crashed cars and smoked furiously, burning holes in his stylish and expensive suits. There was a dog cemetery with one of the tombstones inscribed ‘Towser: A short life but a gay one.’
Coote was fond of Mad Boy, on account of their shared passion for horses and entertaining. They had in common many friends and a taste for outrageous stories. They had been to many of the same places – Venice, for instance, where Heber Percy had lived with Berners, and where Coote had visited Boom. Berners worked for a time at the consulate there and was once asked to respond to a report in an Australian newspaper saying that Venice used to be a luxurious place but now it was full of nothing but beggars. He said that the only possible explanation was a misprint – ‘for beggers, read buggers’.
By 1984, Mad Boy’s health was failing and Coote nursed him through a bad fall. Paddy Leigh Fermor, the great travel writer who had often crossed paths with both the Lygons and Evelyn (he was a major player in the battle for Crete), visited Coote at Faringdon and noticed that they were close. However, neither he nor any of their friends could hide their shock when Coote announced that she was marrying Mad Boy. They married the following year, both aged seventy-three.
But Mad Boy had a loyal and ferocious Austrian cook/housekeeper, Rosa Proll. Her food was legendary, notably her summer puddings and her Pudding Louise, a confection of hot marrons glacés, boiling raspberry jam, and ice cream on top. Rosa was devoted to Heber Percy and left the house in high dudgeon when Coote became mistress of Faringdon. The fact that Coote was an excellent cook added insult to injury.
Rosa has been blamed for the failure of the marriage, but her influence cannot have been the only reason. For all the shared love of the hunt, Mad Boy and Coote were not exactly a natural couple. After all the years that Maimie and Evelyn had joked about possible suitors for their beloved Coote, not even they would have guessed in their wildest dreams the bizarre finale to her romantic life.
What possessed her? Some said it was a marriage of convenience to avoid death duties, but those who knew her best simply said that she was flattered and wanted to be married. Yes, Robert was homosexual, but so was her own father. Boom’s problem, she thought, was not his sexual orientation, but his choice of a wife who didn’t understand homosexuality. She would be different. The decision was, however, a disaster. Coote spent her honeymoon alone after Heber Percy turned against her, outraged at the thought that he might actually be expected to sleep with her.
After the marriage failed she retreated to her nearby bungalow, where she was happier. It seems that they never divorced, for she signed herself Dorothy Heber Percy in her will. In 2000 she helped a small press to republish a book by Lord Berners called The Girls of Radcliff Hall, a mischievous, racy, fictional evocation of life at Faringdon, in which all the boys (including Heber Percy) become girls at a boarding school, with Berners as the headmistress.
Coote died in 2001, at the age of eighty-nine. She had been busy planning her ninetieth birthday party. Despite all the trials and tribulations of her life, she had an admirable stoicism and resilience. Whereas the bigamy of Sibell’s husband and Maimie’s marriage to a penniless philandering Russian prince caused enduring distress, Coote’s union with a notorious homosexual was a brief aberration. She had the happiest life of all the Lygons, filled with laughter and the love of friends. Even in her seventies she would think nothing of driving from Oxfordshire to the south of France for a party.
There is a wonderful glimpse of her in August 1990, at the twenty-first birthday celebrations of Debo Mitford’s grandson. Debo, of course, had made the best match of all the Mitford girls – to the Duke of Devonshire. The party took place at Chatsworth and, like a throwback to Elmley’s twenty-first at Mad, it lasted for three days. The celebrations began with an evening garden party for over two thousand people. The third day was for charity. Sandwiched between, was the main event, the ball. The grandchildren insisted on the formal dress code, much to Debo’s amazement (though a few wore skimpy dresses, ‘the sort that JUST covers the telling bits of body and show vast thighs, as if anyone wants to see them’). Debo herself wore ‘a big crown of a tiara and felt like Mrs Toad of Toad Hall’. The young people were ferried from London in buses, with dinner served en route. There was only one gatecrasher, a ‘beautiful, goat-like, tall creature’ called Jerry Hall, some sort of model. Coote was there. She spent much of the night talking to old friends such as Paddy Leigh Fermor, though she could not have helped thinking of the old days at Mad.
In 1997, the BBC made a documentary about the changing fortunes of the British aristocracy. They interviewed Coote and Sibell, who were still following the Ledbury Hunt (though by car, not on horseback). Lady Sibell is tall and elegant, Coote large with spectacles. They talk about Evelyn and remember that he came out to hunt a couple of times, though it wasn’t a great success. They also talk about how they were ‘relentless about disturbing’ him when he was trying to work in the old nursery at Mad. Coote wonders how he ever managed to finish his books.
Then she reads aloud the description of the chapel at Brideshead as the camera pans around Boom’s chapel at Mad. They show family scrapbooks, beautiful photos of the ‘Beauchamp Belles’. And they talk of Boom’s exile for being a homosexual, Coote saying wistfully but stoically that it was ‘quite, quite, quite an upset’. In the chapel they comment how the flowers in the stained glass have faded a little and recall how they were required to hold artificial doves when they were being painted for their frescoes. They talk about the wild weekend parties and then about how the war ended the world they knew. For Coote, it was an enormous watershed in everyone’s life, while Sibell just says ‘Never the same again.’
Evelyn
Ann Fleming killed Evelyn Waugh. She broke his spirit by passing on a piece of gossip. In November 1961 he went abroad with his favourite daughter, Meg. She was his last great love. In Trinidad they had stayed with Lord Hailes, Governor-General of the West Indies. In a move of unprecedented and uncharacteristic spite, Ian Fleming’s wife Ann let Evelyn know that the Haileses had found him a great bore. This was a shock from which he never fully recovered.
It came on the heels of a similar incident that Evelyn himself recounted to that other noted wit, Nancy Mitford. Evelyn had been accosted by a man in White’s (his gentleman’s club in Piccadilly) who told him that nobody wanted to speak to him because ‘you sit there on your arse looking like a stuck pig’. Evelyn, always slightly on the edge of persecution mania, became convinced that he had become boring. Nancy was furious about the Fleming incident: ‘what makes Ann tell you that some friend of an expatriate … finds you a bore? The very last thing anyone could reproach you with.’ But he was still upset a month later and tried to explain to Nancy precisely what this meant to him. The fin
e distinction that he stressed was that he had lost the ability to recognise his own dullness:
I must explain about boring the Haileses because it has been what young people call ‘traumatic’ … The crucial point is that I was confident they both enjoyed my visit … I talked loud and long and they laughed like anything. Now I find I bored them. Well of course everyone is a bore to someone. One recognises that. But it is a ghastly thing if one loses the consciousness of being a bore. You do see that it means that I can never go out again.
He was quite serious about this. Nancy tried to comfort him: ‘Do try and get it into your head that whatever else you may be you are not a bore.’ But, never one to forget a criticism, Evelyn brought it up again with Nancy two years later, referring to himself as ‘the man who bored the Haileses out of Trinidad’. Then yet again, in 1965, four years after it happened, he wrote to Diana Cooper: ‘I first realised I had become a bore when the Haileses remarked on it to Clarissa. I had thought I was particularly bright with the Haileses. Traumatic.’
Evelyn’s wit was legendary – often cruel but always hilarious – and he had made his career on being funny. He could be nasty, snobbish, cutting, acerbic, as his letters attest. But he could never have been accused of being dull. Not only did he have a life-long fear of boredom itself, but, in common with many of his generation, he had a pathological fear of becoming that most dreaded of things – a bore. Two other events added to his unhappiness towards the end of his life. His favourite daughter married and the reforms of the Second Vatican Council ‘knocked the guts out of him’.
Ann Fleming, despite this aberration, was a loyal friend and she would have been upset to know how deeply Evelyn was hurt by the Hailes incident. Her friendship with Evelyn ‘was a relationship giving nothing but joy’. She sketched one of the best descriptions of Evelyn in later life. For her, he was a great comedian like Charlie Chaplin – the little man, the figure of fun. She thought that like all great clowns ‘he affected a grave demeanour of manner, he seldom laughed aloud, and a smile was very rewarding’.
