by Mary Soames
Last week I went to a Tyrolean Ball, it was great fun and very rowdy. I did not retire to bed till nearly midnight.
Please give my love to all my animals, also remember me kindly to Friendly.
With tender love from
MARIA
Friendly was one of my bottle-fed lambs who remained as a pet: he proved to be singularly unattractive as an adult—and far from “friendly” in disposition. We were all delighted when eventually he was banished, having nearly knocked my father over.
Reviewing my letters to my parents all these years later, I see that in writing to each of them I covered a different spectrum of news and views: to my mother I reported my now developing social life in greater detail than when I wrote to Papa and, when staying in other people’s houses, I usually gave her details of the menus. Playing around in her bedroom in my childish years while she was conducting her daily conference with the cook had impressed upon me unconsciously what great importance she attached to having good food, and the detailed trouble she took to achieve it.
Through the winter of 1934–35 when my mother was away on her long voyage, I wrote her very newsy letters, covering my daily life in great detail, and including a lively account of the stay-at-homes’ Christmas. In the previous summer my father’s contemporary and great friend Sunny Marlborough (who had been so kind to me when I was ten and given me Jasper, the Blenheim spaniel), had died, aged only sixty-three, and had been succeeded by his son John (Bert) as tenth Duke. Bert was in his late thirties, and he and his wife Mary (Cadogan) continued in a younger generation the kindness and hospitality of his father; they had invited the Chartwell cousins to Blenheim Palace for the first Christmas of their “new reign.”
I was enormously excited at the prospect of staying away (without Nana) with Papa and the “Big Ones,” and wrote daily hour-by-hour accounts of our visit. Sarah had been made responsible for shepherding me and our maid, May, from Chartwell by train to Oxford, and we met up with the rest of our party—Papa, Diana, the Jack Churchills, and the Prof—at Blenheim, where a large party of guests was assembling. My generation of Spencer-Churchill cousins consisted of Sarah, then aged round thirteen; Caroline (my near contemporary at elevenish); Sunny, then the only son, who was nearly eight; and five-year-old Rosy. “The children are all sweet and I like them very much,” I wrote to Mummie on the evening of the twenty-third, just after we had arrived. I reported that the
luncheon menu was
1) Curried eggs on toast & ham
2) Beef or Pheasant
3) Crepes Suzettes. Plain pancakes. Mince Pies.
4) Cheese, coffee, fruit, Wine.
The things that I had are underlined.
After lunch I changed into my kilt, & went and bicycled. About 4.15 we came in and changed for tea, I put my white silk on§ … then we had supper [presumably in the schoolroom].
The Menu consisted of—
1) Minced chicken with a creamy sauce & mashed potato
2) Fruit salad & cream
3) Fruit.
Then I went to bed.
On Christmas Eve I hunted in the morning, but, as I told Mummie,
… I came home in time for lunch.
MENU
Oeufs en Cocottes Parisiennes. Roast Chicken. Cutlets.
Canary Pudding & Jam
Ground rice.
After luncheon we went & rode our bicycles.
In the garden there is a most beautiful waterfall [Capability Brown’s Grand Cascade] I do wish you were here it’s such fun!
In the afternoon Clarissa & Peregrine arrived & we had a cinema.
In the evening one of the maids fainted. Then we had supper.
MENU
Fish & Chips & Lemon
Orange Mould.
Then we hung up our stockings & went to bed.
I of course weighed in with a full account of Christmas Day, which started for me when I woke at “4.40 a.m.! & opened my stocking.” I then descended on Sarah’s room, where I found my parents’ presents—a clock and a pearl for my add-a-pearl necklace. A long inventory then followed of the presents with which family, “Cousin Mary,” and “the cousins” had showered me. That night all ages were allowed to stay up for dinner with the grown-ups: “after tea we all rested. Then I got dressed for dinner, not one of us were [sic] late. The table decorations were lovely, after dinner we all danced till 11 p.m.!” I remember this quite well—my cousin Blandford (Bert, the Duke) danced with me and, tiring of fox-trotting, I threw some cartwheels, somewhat hampered in my style by my first long dress.
Boxing Day was of course given over to sport: “After breakfast we took various forms of exercise. Cousin Blandford went shooting, but Papa (who by the way didn’t want to shoot) complained of indigestion, & stayed in bed!”
I would also spend the next Christmas at Blenheim. That year it was Winston who was the “wanderer”: he had planned a long “working holiday” to grapple with volume three of his major work Marlborough: His Life and Times, combining this with finding winter sunshine and scenes to paint. Clementine had been with him during the first part of his travels in Spain in early December, but she returned home for Christmas, which she and I spent at Blenheim. It was a brief visit, as she and I were on the eve of our first skiing expedition, but a very enjoyable one: during those two Christmases at Blenheim, I established links with my cousins—especially with Caroline—which would last our lifetimes.
Winston, meanwhile, was not very happy in Tangier, for although he had congenial male political company (Lord Rothermere and Mr. Lloyd George), the weather was odious and he missed Clementine and a family Christmas. However, it was on this trip that, searching for sunshine, he found it in Marrakech, which was to become a favourite holiday place for him thereafter.
Diana and Randolph continued through my teenage years to be remote figures. Randolph went (somewhat briefly) to Oxford, which he left to go to America on a lecture tour; thereafter politics and journalism chiefly occupied him. His spasmodic visits to Chartwell became always associated in my mind with shouting, banging doors, and rows: I tended to keep out of the way.
Diana was entirely benevolent towards me, but was chiefly London-based, although coming down to Chartwell for weekends. She quite often made country-house visits with her mother, and she went with both Winston and Clementine to America for the winter months of 1931–32—that disastrous visit when Winston was knocked down by a car on Fifth Avenue and quite badly injured. I was of course thrilled when Diana became engaged to John Bailey in the autumn of 1932: I thought him very good-looking, and I enjoyed the general brouhaha of the wedding plans. I was one of her bridesmaids on 12 December at St. Margaret’s, Westminster, where our parents had been married. Our dresses were really ravishing—white tulle over silver lamé—though I remember the camellias in my wreath pressed painfully into my head.
I was deeply upset and shocked just over two years later, when, early in the New Year of 1935, Nana told me Diana and John were going to be divorced. I had seen them only as a romantic and glamorous couple—and my religious feelings were also strongly assaulted: marriage was “till death us do part.” Clementine was away just then on her Rosaura voyage, and it was Nana, as well as Winston, who kept her in touch with the divorce proceedings. Although Nana herself must have been greatly upset by the situation, she loyally went to court with Diana when her case was heard. Proceedings were conducted according to the usual contemporary hypocritical formula of fake adultery, with the man “behaving like a gentleman” and supplying the incriminating evidence with a paid prostitute: the grounds of “irretrievable breakdown” of a marriage were not heard of then. Naturally at the time I did not know or understand any of this.
From my early teens I began catching up with some of my older cousins (although of course the actual difference in age between us was the same). Peregrine was kindly disposed, but always rather silent; he was Sarah’s boon companion and it was only much later in my life that I got to know and appreciate him. But
Johnny, his elder brother, was the greatest fun: the exact contemporary of Diana, and therefore thirteen years older than I, he was an artist, and in 1933 and 1934 he spent much time at Chartwell, where his uncle had commissioned him to decorate with frescoes (in which genre he specialized) the walls in the loggia depicting the triumphant campaigns of John, first Duke of Marlborough. During his visits I came to enjoy his company very much: he was almost an acrobat, and I was amazed and delighted by his handsprings and somersaults, which he obligingly performed at my request. He was also very jolly and played the piano very well; I seem to remember he was particularly fond of the Meistersingers. In 1934 he married a most beautiful girl, Angela Culme-Seymour. The following year, in August, they both came to stay at Chartwell, with their sweet baby of a few months—Cornelia Sarah.‖ I thought them the most romantic couple, and I think I had my first perception of erotic passion from them: swimming in the beautifully translucent pool, I was showing off my aquatic prowess and approached Johnny and Angela underwater when I saw them kissing passionately—her long black hair was loose, and bubbles arose from their embrace. I was at once puzzled and entranced. The ravishing Angela, however, fell under a cloud of deep disapproval among Johnny’s relations and friends when, the following spring, while she and her husband were living in Spain, she bolted off with a lover, abandoning not only Johnny but their year-old baby.
Much later she recorded her impressions of the Chartwell world:
He [WSC] loved his cat, who was given the most delicate titbits and lashings of cream. I sat next to Clemmie sometimes, and she was very good at taking notes whenever she thought Winston needed to be reminded of something or have something done … She was very kind and friendly … I liked Sarah who was learning to dance the first time we went there, but now was under a cloud having married a comedian called Vic Oliver.a Mary seemed to be an extraordinarily self-possessed girl, always smiling, or anyway looking happy.1
And then, on my mother’s side, there was the Stanley/Ogilvy cousinage. Sylvia Henley and her three daughters (all older than I), and her younger sister, Venetia Montagu, and her daughter Judy, were intimates, and have already featured in these pages. My mother’s Scottish Ogilvy kin were, in my generation, the now famous Mitford tribe of six sisters and one brother—Nancy, Pamela, Tom, Diana, Unity (Bo-Bo), Jessica (Decca), and Deborah (Debo), all born between 1904 and 1920. Nearest in age to me, though still a year or two older, were Decca and Debo; Unity, born in 1914, was Sarah’s exact contemporary. Their parents, Lord and Lady Redesdale—Cousin David and Cousin Sydney to me (although later known to a worldwide audience as Muv and Farve)—were in the 1920s on pleasant, but not very close, terms with Winston and Clementine. The Mitfords lived largely in the country near Oxford, but they had a London house, 26 Rutland Gate, from where Cousin Sydney launched her daughters upon the social world. Tom and Diana were the same ages as our Diana and Randolph (who was at Eton with Tom), Pamela only a little older, and the five of them were close friends—indeed, Randolph was deeply in love with Diana, who, with Tom, often stayed at Chartwell. When Diana Mitford married Bryan Guinness in January 1929, our Diana was one of her bridesmaids.
I remember once lunching with my mother at Rutland Gate and being somewhat bewildered by the sheer numbers of Mitfords of all ages, all of whom seemed to speak at once! It was sad for me that I was not destined to “discover” my matching-in-age Mitford cousins Decca and Debo until over forty years later: from the early thirties our families became distanced by the loudly proclaimed political views of Unity and Decca, who declared themselves respectively to be ardent supporters of fascism and communism. Diana fell in love with Sir Oswald Mosley (Tom), who had founded the British Union of Fascists, and in 1933 she left Bryan Guinness and, living in a house of her own, openly pursued her love affair with Mosley—a situation which shocked her own parents as well as society at large. That same year Diana and Unity went to the first of the Nuremberg rallies, where their ardour for the Führer was predictably fanned, and they gave numerous interviews to the press, though it was not until February 1935 that Unity, now twenty-one and living as a student in Munich, actually met Hitler. She quickly established a friendly relationship with the Nazi leader, and she and Diana became part of his accepted circle. Back at home, Lord and Lady Redesdale were “absolutely horrified” by their daughters’ association with, and acceptance of hospitality from, “people we regard as a murderous gang of pests.” Both their parents went out on several occasions to Munich, but were quite unable to moderate Unity’s outbursts and embarrassing behaviour. On one occasion, Unity introduced her mother to Hitler: she was much disappointed that Sydney Redesdale was not overcome as she had been by his charisma, and “does not feel his goodness, and wonderfulness radiating out like we do.”2
The Redesdales’ mortification was of course exacerbated by the constant publicity which their daughters’ conduct (especially Unity’s) attracted; but although Winston and Clementine must have felt genuine sympathy for their situation, inevitably the families saw less and less of each other—the more particularly since from 1933 Winston was growing increasingly hostile to Hitler, the Nazis, and all their works. But up to 1935 Tom Mitford’s name still appears several times in the Chartwell visitors’ book—and Diana, who had always been a favourite, was invited to luncheon with my parents in the late summer of 1936: it was the first time she had been to their house since her divorce, and since she had been living openly with Tom Mosley and had adopted his political views. Diana had just returned from Germany, where she and Unity had attended the Olympic Games in Berlin as Hitler’s personal guests, and Winston evidently wanted to ask her about Hitler: Diana tried to persuade him that it would be a good idea for the two men to meet—she thought they would get on well together—but Winston would not entertain the idea.3
The following year it was Decca’s turn to seize the headlines, when she eloped to France with Esmond Romilly: she was nineteen and he eighteen. They had met towards the end of January 1937 at the house in Wiltshire of a mutual cousin, Dorothy Allhusen. In July 1936 the Spanish Civil War had broken out, and within a few weeks Esmond had joined the International Brigade: that December he had taken part in the Battle of Boadilla del Monte, and was also sending home dispatches to the News Chronicle. The conditions were appalling, and in early January he had been invalided home with dysentery. Released from hospital a few weeks later, Esmond went to stay with Mrs. Allhusen, where Decca was also a guest.
Decca had for some time been following her rebellious cousin’s career (much of it gleaned from overheard nannies’ gossip) with keen interest and admiration—particularly his running away from Wellington; being herself a communist, her sympathies were naturally with the Loyalists, and she was thrilled by Esmond’s involvement in the war in Spain. That weekend the cousins fell in love, and shortly afterwards they eloped together. Their intention was to get married at once, but they soon discovered that, both being minors, they could not be married without parental consent. Unabashed, they headed for Bayonne (on the French-Spanish frontier), where they waited to obtain Decca’s Spanish visa.
The ensuing brouhaha was followed ecstatically by the press (for whom the combination of rebellion, romance, politics, and the peerage was irresistible): and it was, of course, the subject of much family concern and comment. Although I hardly knew Decca, I was very fond of Esmond, despite his teasing and tormenting, and so I followed the saga avidly in the press (hunting through the columns of the several newspapers which were daily on offer at Chartwell) and through the grown-ups’ generally disapproving conversation: and although I was primly shocked by “the young people’s” conduct, secretly I did think it tremendously dashing and romantic. I had earlier been thrilled by Esmond’s joining the International Brigade—although thinking it was wrong-headed politically, as of course I was influenced by “home opinions.” My father, who had always been opposed to communism, was more sympathetic to General Franco and the Falange, but he was repelled by the accounts of the
brutalities committed by both sides, and was quite sure that both Britain and France should maintain the strictest neutrality. “Neither of these Spanish factions expresses our conception of civilisation,” he wrote. He thought, moreover, that the Spanish war took the public eye off the principal threat for the future; and he fully appreciated as the war progressed that the participation of German and Italian airpower had sinister implications beyond the horror of the bombing of Guernica in April 1937, which so profoundly shocked public opinion in the Western democracies, and gave the first inkling of what air attack held in store for civilian populations.
Hoping to stop the marriage, Decca’s parents caused her to be made a ward of court: but eventually Sydney Redesdale, who had herself visited the runaway pair in Bayonne (where they had returned after a short time in Spain full of adventures and discomfort), became convinced that nothing would persuade Decca to change her mind, and the Redesdales withdrew their official objection. Esmond and Decca were married in a civil ceremony in May, at which both Sydney and Nellie Romilly were present. To my naïve understanding, it seemed that all was well that ended well.
* * *
* The politician Walter Guinness (1880–1944), created first Baron Moyne in 1932.
† A large new woodshed had recently been completed: the brick columns and piers were largely WSC’s own handiwork.
‡ Ernst Rüdiger, Prince von Starhemberg (1899–1956), Austrian nationalist and conservative politician. From 1934 to 1936 he was leader of a right-wing grouping of parties known as the Fatherland Front and became the country’s Acting Chancellor, though by 1937 he had been ousted from power.
