Baba sold Little Compton in December 1949 for thirty thousand pounds. When asked the reason for the sale by the Evening Standard she replied: “The usual one in these days—high taxation.” She had also begun to travel widely. Her first visit was to Rome, where her friend Frank Giles, there with his wife Lady Kitty, was correspondent for The Times. But before this, there was a meeting with a former love.
“Left London on February 28, 1951,” runs her diary. “Grandi met me at Gare du Nord (endless conversations and wires had been coming). His looks are incredibly changed, no beard and face over life size, otherwise the same. I rather dreaded the meeting as so much has happened and I wasn’t sure how he would be. The worry was wasted. No one could have been more charming and there never can be a more delicious companion, talker and laugher so the journey was perfect.”
For Grandi it was something more. As his son confirmed, he remained in love with Baba all his life. “Meeting you at le Gare du Nord and being together in Rome has been simply wonderful,” he wrote to her afterward. “I see you there in the high carriage in the winter dim light, greeting me, recognising me: ‘Hello, Ge.’
“Yes it would have been paradise to go to Sicily together. But we must be grateful to Providence for having given us a Roman week, a ‘bit’ of us together every day of a whole week. Do you not think so?”
A week was all Grandi could spend with Baba: his home was now in Brazil. He had played a large part in the downfall of Mussolini in 1943 and had escaped any consequences by settling in Lisbon until the end of the war, when he moved to Brazil and reestablished himself in business.
As Baba’s diary records: “G leaves for Brazil tomorrow—such fun renewing our friendship—a rather terrifying thing to do but this week has proved everything I have thought in the past more than correct and I admire and am terribly fond of him.”
For Grandi it was more. He wrote to her from Rio, to assure her of his devotion. “No darling, I am not a ‘monster of faithlessness’ as you say in your last short note. You are always in my thoughts and in my heart. You always have been, believe it or not. Always. From long ago, from a sunny day in Kew Gardens a million years ago. Age, tragedies, have meant nothing.”
Grandi was not the only man in Baba’s life. Some time at the end of the 1940s she embarked on the last serious love affair of her life.
It was a choice that seemed extraordinary to virtually everyone who knew her: the Earl of Feversham, the son-in-law of her devoted admirer—and in the eyes of many, probably lover—Lord Halifax, a man so deeply moral that he would not have a divorced person to stay at Garrowby (unless he happened to be a master of foxhounds). “How does Baba think she can get away with it?” was the general reaction. One theory mooted was that Halifax was the man Baba had most loved in her life but because he was essentially out of bounds, as well as a semi–father figure, she turned instead to the engaging Sim Feversham. In any case, Halifax’s romantic passion for her had waned and the old closeness had vanished, even though they remained friends.
Baba and Sim Feversham had first met in the late twenties. He was two years younger than she, a good-looking man with the gift of making everyone he talked to feel that he or she was the only person in the world he longed to see. He had been brought up by a mother who had had numerous lovers and had trained as a probation officer; and both aspects were reflected in his attitude to life. He spoke in the House of Lords, he was president of the Probation Officers’ Association and chairman of the Mental Health Association; and he believed in enjoying oneself.
They made no secret of their relationship. They went on antiques-buying trips together, Baba helped to organize his daughter Clarissa’s large coming-out dance at Syon House—even choosing her dress for her—and she spent as much time with Sim as she could. They traveled frequently together. In Palermo in 1951, in the diary packed with the spelling mistakes about which Halifax had taken her to task in their wartime letters, Baba wrote, “Sim is the most perfect traveling companion and sightseer, we think and laugh alike and therefore adore every minute of each day.” After that month-long trip she set off home “with every mile anxiety growing. One couldn’t expect such a blissful month without having to pay for it.” Later that year, they visited France and Venice together.
He shared with Baba her perfectionism: it was Sim who decorated the house; Sim—rather than his wife, Anne, the Halifaxes’ daughter—who ordered the food when smart guests like the duke and duchess of Kent came to stay; Sim who had a passion for gardening. He was fun, amusing, imaginative and possessed of overwhelming charm.
By this time, Baba’s life with Fruity had degenerated beyond repair. It was time for a discreet parting. Advised by her lawyer, Baba went abroad for a full fiscal year so that she could save enough money in income tax (the top rate was then punitive) to set Fruity up in a flat on his own in St. James’s Court, an apartment block just off Piccadilly, from which he could easily walk to White’s. She left in January 1952 and did not return until April 1953. While she was away, Fruity was temporarily installed in Bepton, four miles outside Cowdray, in Sussex. He found it very lonely, though David would drive down in the family Humber on weekends.
Baba’s year abroad took her first to New York and then to South America and the Caribbean, where she was joined in March by Sim. By June she was in Paris, en route for Athens, where her old friend Charles (now Sir Charles) Peake was ambassador. She took Freya Stark’s house in Greece for August and September. Sim was her first visitor, for a long weekend; soon afterward, she saw Grandi again. “Since Roma last year Grandi Ge has had a bad year,” she wrote in her diary. “Brazil is killing him. He speculated and lost most of the money he had made; his health went to pieces, so he was harassed and depressed. Ge was only here a few days, dashing to Milan and Rome before flying to Brazil.” October to February 1953 was spent with her daughter Linda in Rome and at the end of February she moved on to Tripoli (where Sim came out on the twenty-eighth).
Her travels did not end after her return. Her next visit was to the Peakes’. It led to what would become the most important work of her life. While she was there, in August 1953, the Ionian earthquake struck. The plight of the survivors—one thousand had been killed, four thousand injured and ten thousand made homeless—especially the thousands of children wandering lost and crying, struck her so forcibly that she joined the Earthquake Committee. It brought her in touch with another earlier admirer. “I will work with Michael Lubbock when I return,” notes her diary. “How strange that our paths should cross again like this.” More important, it was to lead to what absorbed her for the rest of her life: her work with the Save the Children Fund.
In 1954 she went back to the Caribbean, and in the summer to Italy, Greece, Elba and Corfu. The following year she finally decided to divorce Fruity. For many years they had led separate lives, but divorce was a radical step and, apart from running counter to the advice given her by her beloved Edward Halifax, was a public admission that she had failed in one vital aspect of her life. It was done as quietly and unobtrusively as possible—and, once again, providence was kind. Baba’s uncontested divorce from her husband of thirty years took place during the three-month newspaper strike in 1955 (March 25–June 20) and so went virtually unreported.
Her family believed that her divorce was in order to leave herself free for remarriage with Sim Feversham but that he, happy with their present arrangement and with no desire to divorce his wife, took fright and left her.
It was not quite as simple as that. The trouble was that, for all his charm, Sim was an inveterate gambler. Although he did not gamble on the stock exchange, he did on just about anything else. He backed horses at impossible odds, played roulette at the Clermont Club, for which he would travel to London several times a week, and played games of chance through the night for high stakes in private houses. Several times on family vacations he found himself unable to pay household bills because he had gambled everything away at a casino the previous night; once he asked a fri
end to buy him half-size cocktail glasses, “as I can’t afford to pay for the Martinis.” As women of all ages found him irresistible, he was invariably forgiven, but his habit meant that any serious lady friend had to be able and willing to foot all the bills.
Baba had been prepared to decorate his cottage, Pennyholme, on the Yorkshire moors, either buying or lending him what it needed, as it was their joint love nest. Though she and Sim went on seeing each other after her divorce and he accompanied her for part of the time in 1955 on her travels to Greece and the Middle East, the end of the affair was in sight. One day, he pushed his luck too far. “Money’s your god,” said a disillusioned Baba, who was by nature somewhat tightfisted. It was the end.
For Baba this was a shattering blow. She thought she had found love again; instead, a deep humiliation was added to the guilt she felt at having divorced Fruity. When, only two years later, he was diagnosed with lung cancer, she returned at once to his side to nurse him. She was unstinting in her care: years later, she told her niece Vivien that the early years of her marriage were the best of her life, so good that even after the difficulties that came later “I would do it all over again tomorrow.”
When Fruity died on November 19, 1957, one of the first calls was from Sim Feversham. “It’s Sim—do you want to speak to him?” Baba was asked. “No. No,” she said, covering her face instinctively with her hands. “He’s absolutely the last person I want to talk to.”
Fruity’s death was mourned by many. When the news of his illness had leaked out, his figure was immediately included in a conversation piece being painted by Simon Elwes for the Coffee Room at White’s Club (on the commission of Lord Camrose). Only twenty-four hours before he died he had spoken to the duke of Windsor, who had been telephoning regularly for news and indeed had come over to see him on November 9 (when Harold Nicolson met him dining with Baba). He returned for Fruity’s funeral and from the Windsors’ house in the Bois de Boulogne came a letter from the duchess.
“Dearest Baba, we are sad about darling Fruity. We never had a better friend and the Duke really loved him as you well know . . . Thinking of you so much these days and talking over old times and laughs with Fruity—I send you my love and understanding and let me know if I can do anything for you. With my deep affection.”
The year after Fruity’s death, Baba moved from the Wilton Place house into an elegant flat in 65 Eaton Square (the house later used for the television series Upstairs Downstairs). Apart from family and friends, the main thrust of her life was her work for the Save the Children Fund, a commitment that lasted for more than forty years.
Into it she poured time, energy and much of her own money. When the Dalai Lama left Tibet with eighty thousand followers in late 1960 and the Indian Government asked the fund for help with the children who accompanied them, it was Baba who went to Simla in early 1961 at her own expense (as she did on all her travels for the fund) to discuss with the Dalai Lama what could be done for them. A school, he thought—and she began to look for premises.
By an extraordinary coincidence, the first house offered was one that her father had used on weekends more than half a century earlier. It was not entirely suitable, and eventually the fund bought Stirling Castle, where Baba had lived during her early married life in India, which could house five hundred children. From Lord Sieff (owner of Marks & Spencer) she begged five hundred suits of clothes and five hundred pairs of new shoes for the children, which he generously gave. As head of the fund’s overseas department she traveled all over the world, often at extremely short notice, to scenes of earthquake, flood and typhoon. She went to South Korea in the 1960s, and regularly to Saigon and Da Nang during the Vietnam War.
In 1968 she became vice chairman of the Save the Children Fund. Two years later, she flew out to India again, and spent seven days traveling by helicopter around the relief centers of a disaster area where a cyclone had struck.
In 1979, the year after her vice chairmanship ended, she traveled to America with Nigel Nicolson, who was going on a lecture tour. She was still every inch her father’s daughter, both in her readiness to accept unexpected discomfort—as Curzon had in his travels in the Pamir mountains—despite her love of creature comforts (she traveled when possible with her own silk sheets) and in her expectation that officialdom was at her beck and call. Baba, noted Nicolson, always had the grand manner. “Her Save the Children official comes to arrange our onward trip and helps with motels and air tickets. Baba treats him like a servant.” In 1975 she was awarded a well-deserved CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire).
Baba had an enormous number of friends, attracted by her vitality, her interest in other people, her elegance and gift for entertaining, because she liked to laugh and rarely complained—and because of her immense loyalty to friends. Yet even those who loved her most were aware of the obverse of this: an unforgivingness that neither the passage of time nor altered circumstances could change.
Its chief manifestation was in her hatred of the Mosleys, who had settled in France in 1951. Of Diana, the woman who she believed had taken her sister’s husband away from her, she refused ever to speak. For Tom it was a hatred of the “Hell has no fury, like a woman scorned” variety: despite all her efforts at helping him during the war he did not, as she had hoped, return to her afterward. Instead, prison had brought him and Diana still closer. Tom, who would have liked to have seen Baba again, finally persuaded her to lunch with him and Diana in 1956. The meeting was a complete disaster.
Baba died on August 7, 1995, aged ninety-one. At her memorial service (on October 12, 1995) Lord Carrington said: “Baba Metcalfe was a supreme example of someone who, right up until her death, interested herself in everything that was happening around her; in public affairs and personalities, and of course particularly in the future of children all over the world . . . she had, even in old age, great beauty, a commanding presence, composure and serenity; she had wit, and humour, and a very well-developed sense of the ridiculous which belied her somewhat imperious manner. She had style and taste, a keen mind and intellectual vigour right until the end . . . she was a grande dame in the best and proper sense.”
Like her two sisters, she had for years given time, energy and unstinting effort for the public good. After the tumult of their early years, this was the true heritage of their father.
Note on Sources
Most of the material on which this book is based is taken from the diaries and private letters of the Curzon sisters and interviews with those who knew them. Irene Curzon not only kept a hunting journal but a comprehensive daily diary, vividly describing her feelings and emotions and the behavior of those nearest to her, written up every night however late the hour. Baba’s diary, written sporadically, recorded important or interesting moments in her life. Fruity Metcalfe wrote comprehensively to his wife when he was away from her; also in the Metcalfe archive are a large collection of letters from Lord Halifax, some from Count Grandi (others were supplied by the archives of the Italian Foreign Office), and letters from the duke and duchess of Windsor. The diaries of Georgia Sitwell, Victor Cazalet and Robert Bernays supplied other valuable contemporary documentation.
Material on Lord Curzon’s life is readily available from the numerous biographies about him, especially the magisterial life by David Gilmour and the excellent earlier work by Kenneth Rose. His papers, from the private letters to the last detail of his household accounts, are in the Oriental department of the British Library. The Souls are described by Violet Bonham-Carter in The Listener of October 30, 1947, by Anita Leslie and in Ann Fleming’s letters. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt describes the Crabbet Club in My Diaries. Mary Leiter’s early life is admirably detailed in Nigel Nicolson’s Mary Curzon. The details of Mary Leiter’s marriage settlement are in file F112/67 of the Curzon papers. There is a description of the engaged couple in the St. James’s Gazette of April 5, 1895.
Mary Curzon’s will can be found in the Principal Registry, First Avenue House. Her letters and Cur
zon’s to her tell much of her story. The story of the dog at the Durbar is in Wilfrid Scawen Blunt’s diaries. Curzon’s early letters to the children are in the British Library and others are in the possession of Lord Ravensdale.
The story of the “I see . . .” game was described to me by Baba’s daughter Linda Mortimer (Baba had also done the same thing with her own children). There is a full description of Hackwood in file F112/715 in the British Library. Cimmie’s school is described in Janet Morgan’s Edwina Mountbatten: A Life of Her Own. There is an essay on her childhood by Irene in Little Innocents, edited by Alun Pryce-Jones.
Elinor Glyn wrote copiously of her feelings for Curzon, both in her diary and in writings about him, detailing the ups and downs of their relationship. Much of Curzon’s relationship with Nancy Astor is revealed in their correspondence; Nancy Astor’s papers are held at the University of Reading.
Linda Mortimer described the selection of Baba’s dog, a story she had often heard from her mother. Grace Curzon’s letters to Curzon are all in the British Library, as is the correspondence over Cimmie’s back problem (file F112/685). Curzon’s views on “woman suffrage” (apart from those printed in the newspapers of the day) can be found in file F112/39. Full details of Irene’s coming-out ball are in file F112/687. Comte Willy de Grune, who attended the Belgian royal family at Hackwood during World War I, reminisced of them and of his love for Irene and how well she danced to Baba’s daughter Davina Eastwood, when she and her sister visited him in Belgium. Arthur Rubinstein describes his weekend at Hackwood in his autobiography. Cynthia Asquith’s description of Curzon is illuminating, as is his own brief self-description (in file F112/531).
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