An Audience with an Elephant (24 page)

When she married in 1958 and moved away, she lost touch to the point where, meeting Chairman Aldridge in the street, he affected not to recognise her and said he had no wish to be reminded of the old days. But in 1955, before the hen and Hungary cast their respective shadows, the future seemed assured. There were CND marches and there were discussions, at one of which Celia Yeates heard Will Warren say that, while Communism might not bring them immediate benefits, it would in time make their lives happier and more fulfilled. She recalls, ‘He and my father were very humane men, more like Christians really. And Will knew so much about the town. I’m sure it was him, I’m sure Will Warren wrote the Book.’

It starts like a 1950s documentary film. ‘Unsung, and unknown to most people, Thame is a market town on the boarders [
sic
] of Oxfordshire. . .’. But despite the odd misspelling and crossings-out, its aims are epic. ‘We have tried to depict the kind of person, influenced by Thame, who has made Thame what it is, and to indicate the people who are making Thame what it will be tomorrow. . .’.

And then the march past begins: Mrs Badger, secretary of the Folk Dance Club; Mr Tranter (‘an optician of some renown’); a Mr Castle, who, at the unveiling of the memorial to Charles I’s opponent, John Hampden, declared, ‘We can regard him as a forerunner of that great body known today as the British Legion’; also a remarkable, if unknown, bridegroom-to-be, who hearing his own banns being read out and being asked if anyone had any objections, stood up and objected himself (‘Strange incident in church’).

The town’s secrets were explored, like the classified work which went on in a shed behind the Black Horse, where gliders with a 2-foot wing span were built. These were ‘pilotless’, reported the
Book of Thame
, not stopping to speculate on how a man might have fitted into such a small aircraft, ‘and were towed by a Mr Eric Humphries at speeds of 120 mph in his Lagonda.’ But Thame on the whole was a great disappointment to its Communist Party. ‘It cannot be said that Thame is a hotbed of political controversy. . .’ the Book noted.

Still, its compilers kept a beady eye on the Conservative Party (‘It now controls the town as far as political parties are concerned’), an even beadier one on Labour (‘at the moment they do not appear to be active at all, but will doubtless reappear at the next election’), and the beadiest of all on the Primrose League, ‘that agency of darkness (Mrs F. Bowden, Dame President)’.

But history didn’t call – in fact, it never really did in Thame. Even in 1929, when it was thought that some 200 hunger marchers from Lancashire were about to pass through the town, they never turned up. The man who owned the town cinema went on showing only those films he himself wanted to see (and not
The Battle-ship Potemkin
), there were meetings of the Motorcycle Club, (‘almost all the members, whose average age is somewhere near 22, possess and ride motorcycles’) and the Town Ghost went on doing the washing-up. The chroniclers of Thame were reduced to such bizarre news items as the car which ran over a chicken in the town and, in so doing, squeezed out an egg.

But at the end of the second volume there was a vision of the future when Chairman Aldridge decided to stand for the town council, and the
Book of Thame
has his manifesto. He called for more sports facilities in the town, also a maternity ward in the cottage hospital. Whether he got them, and was elected, is a mystery, as is the end of the Thame Communist Party.

All that is known is that when, in 1962, Dennis Manners, a would-be Communist, now a retired agricultural contractor, moved to Thame he found no trace of the Party. Like the Gladstone League and the United Nations Association, the passing of both of which they recorded, the Comrades had gone and their own book does not record their passing. The
Book of Thame
alone survives, like a ship’s log found in the ice-cap of its dreams.

The Duchess

HE HAD LIVED
in a flat for a year. It was the first time she had done so, though not many members of the human race (or of its sub-species, estate agents) would call a Park Lane penthouse a flat. But to Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, anything with two bedrooms (a third has had to be set aside to accommodate shoes, clothes and press cuttings) represented the most abrupt change possible in lifestyle, short of jail or a tent. The human drama of it would not entirely overwhelm a hill farmer, watching the autumn rain close in, or a young couple trying for their first mortgage. No matter. It had not occurred to Her Grace that the world would be anything but fascinated by the fact that, after 30 years, she had found her Grosvenor Square house too large.

In the past the world always was. The young debutante Margaret Whigham in the 1930s announced her engagement to the Earl of Warwick, and it made headlines. The young bride Margaret Sweeny almost died in childbirth, and it was on the newspaper placards. Cole Porter’s hit
You’re The Tops
singled out human achievement, the Louvre, the sonnets of Shakespeare, the Mona Lisa, and

With her divorce from her second husband, the Duke of Argyll, the Duchess received the kind of press attention reserved for a war front. I was at University and we talked a lot about the Duchess of Argyll. She had entered folklore.

‘I was known long before that,’ said the Duchess coldly.

She had been married and divorced twice, given birth to two children (Brian and Frances, now Duchess of Rutland), travelled much and met many people. Apart from some months in the American Red Cross in London during the war, she had not worked. Yet her cuttings file in the library of the
Daily Telegraph
occupied three large folders. ‘The
Express
, I am told, has five,’ said the Duchess, and the commas clicked into place like rifle bolts. She had written an autobiography,
Forget Not
, and there were 400 names in its index, most of them people who were famous and/ or very rich.

‘Haven’t you read it?’

I had to admit I had not, then; but that I had read the cuttings. The pale face seemed to close on itself, and it was like a submarine about to dive. ‘My book is much
nicer
,’ said the Duchess.

It is.
Forget Not
is an amazing, breathless book. Her Grace comes over as a little friend to all the world, much sinned against, but totally cast down by each new sinning. Her first husband, the golfer Sweeny, runs after other women. Her second, the late Duke, becomes addicted to purple heart pills and leaves her. But she endures among the liners and the great hotels, helped by millionaires and film stars. Her world is softly crammed into an address book and is a charming, predictable place full of hosts. To visit Ethiopia was to stay with the Imperial Family and be given an armed escort against brigands. To visit Argentina was to stay with the grandchildren of General Rojas, who, says Her Grace, ‘liberated Patagonia from the Indians’. Had he still been around, one feels that Attila the Hun’s grandson would have figured in the photograph albums of Belgravia. Only once does a cold wind from outside blow through these pages. At dinner one night Her Grace confesses to anxiety over the miners’ strike, and for the first time you sense the Goths gathering in the long plains. But she is consoled by a fellow guest, an oil tycoon, who offers her the coal of America.

But not all is charm within her world. The divorce casts a long shadow, when the Duchess underwent a character assassination in public, unique in modern times. She quotes the description of her by the Duke’s counsel, the dying octogenarian Gilbert Beyfus. He said that at her birth good fairies had brought every gift, looks, riches, but that a bad fairy had also come: ‘I can’t withdraw the gifts showered on you, but I will give you my own gift. You shall grow up to be a poisonous liar!’

She was sued for slander by her step-mother and by her social secretary; her predecessor as Duchess of Argyll tried to get her committed to jail, as that famous title which once would have had 4,000 clansmen springing from the heather had the lawyers wriggling out of the woodwork. Her Grace, during the four years of petition and counter petition, became a sort of one woman Arts Council to the Bar. The divorce was reputed to have cost her £200,000.

It had everything: sex, money, titles, New York private eyes. There was even a Cabinet Minister submitting himself to intimate medical inspection in order to prove he was not the naked headless man in the photograph. At the time a leader writer on the
Sunday Telegraph
said that the Duke and Duchess of Argyll had done more for the established order than anyone in this century. He quoted Disraeli, that the revolution would never come until the upper classes started enjoying themselves in private. The Duchess wrote her account for the
Sunday Mirror
, the Duke his for the Sunday
People.
She had kept everything: the news stories, the gossip columns, the cartoons. It had, she said, come in very handy for her memoirs.

Oddly enough she remained fascinated by the press, probably in something of the same way that military chiefs are fascinated by their hard-faced counterparts on the other side. She took the
Daily Telegraph
and the
Evening Standard
every day, ‘and sometimes one of the other rags’. She read them in bed up until 3.00 a.m. The gossip columnists returned the compliment, but the beautiful deb their predecessors courted had become their prey. They recorded with glee her association with a charity ball to help the poor of Mayfair, and her attempts to open her house in Grosvenor Square to tourists (the lawyers were there again when her lessors objected): ‘They are invited to view the giant bed in which Her Grace slept, with, amongst others, the nth Duke of Argyll.’

Her portrait by James Gunn, at 10 feet too big for the penthouse, was to hang in an art gallery in Glasgow. ‘Not many people get hung in their lifetime,’ said the Duchess proudly. But one paper commented, ‘It looks like a woman who has lost her memory and wandered out into the garden unsuitably dressed.’ To some columnists it was always open season on Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, so it was clear that there was much more to Her Grace than charity balls and famous friends. A footnote to an
ancien régime
she might be, but you approached the Duchess across a minefield.

She rose to her feet, apologising for the deep black she was wearing. She had just been to the memorial service for Norman Hartnell, an old friend. Sure enough, in the papers next day there was a photograph of the Duchess with Barbara Cartland and the Bishop of Southwark. In dusty rooms in Fleet Street men cut out the photograph and added it to the folders.

The first impression was of physical frailty, as it apparently was in the thirties. She was small and pale, and very attractive, dark eyes glittering in an expressionless face. The elaborate black hair and the lipstick were both from three decades ago, but Her Grace, becalmed somewhere in her sixties, could have passed for a woman 20 years younger; the lawsuits and the gossip had not left a mark. But in the room behind her was a portrait bust, and you noticed at once the hard set of the jaw. The sculptor had seen Her Grace as a formidable woman.

The penthouse was on the top floor of the Grosvenor House Hotel, filmy curtains blowing out over the rooftops of Mayfair from a room full of Chinese antiques, a photograph of the Duchess in her Coronation robes, and one of Paul Getty. On the wall was a large oil painting of Arcady.

When I first arrived I had asked her brightly whether it had ever worried her, not having ever moved outside a certain circle. ‘Oh dear,’ said the Duchess. It was a tone headmasters used, and I remembered it. ‘I am awfully frightened this is going to be one of those left-wing articles.’ I had been in the room for three minutes. The same thought must have occurred to her, for she went on, ‘I can imagine what their lives are like; I mean, my father had tenants and I went to see them. They weren’t so very different. I am not interested in other people’s lives.’

Her father made a fortune in industry, and she was a deb. She seemed to like talking about that. ‘It was three years of absolute heaven. It was such a pretty era, the men in white ties. I know there was a Depression going on, but in a funny way we were helping to give employment. We didn’t drink. We didn’t smoke. And we were always chaperoned. There was no question of us living with anyone.’ She looked up. ‘These girls now, they lose everything and they gain nothing.’

She thought at the time it would last forever, the lunchtime dates, the afternoon naps and then the long dances of the night. ‘There were three of us, Rose Bingham, Lady Bridget and me. We were pretty, we were quite sophisticated and we were everywhere. We were like the poor. The press were our friends: Lord Castlerosse, Lord Donegall. They wore two hats, one the hat of a journalist, one that of a friend. Nowadays they wear no hats at all. But there was Society then, and we were it.’

Her father, she said, had been very strict over pocket money. How much? The Duchess looked at me. ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea to talk about money, do you?’