The Girl from Station X (10 page)

In another album are photographs of my mother as a baby. The baby has a strong face and does not look happy, unlike photographs I have seen of myself at that age (also taken at Knowle), where I
am usually smiling.

My mother’s very first existing diary starts on 1 January 1930, when she is fifteen. She is an only child, living at Knowle with her mother and stepfather. Her life is that of a girl who
has everything done for her, clothes washed and ironed by maids, stockings darned by Nah, a fire lit in her bedroom, meals cooked, beloved pets, horses to ride cared for by a groom. There’s a
beautiful garden with a croquet lawn, tennis court and swimming pool, there are walks in the woods, golf lessons, indoor and outdoor games, frequent holidays abroad, dances, even a car for her to
drive when few cars were privately owned.

I am excited by the diaries’ density, the hiddenness of a whole period of my mother’s life – and, more importantly, her inner life – that I knew nothing about.

Jan 10th 1930. Knowle.

Went to Burdett-Coutts’ dance, enjoyed myself tremendously. Danced every dance . . . Saw pretty girl with lovely green fan. Discovered she was Lady Ann Cole.
Two disgusting snaly females horrified me, very bad types, Mum thought so too . . . Snaly Female’s name was Kitty Duval, they live near Wadhurst. Another girl with that party Mum thought the
most vulgar of the lot, I am sure I have seen her somewhere before. I think it was on the boat going to America.

Jan 11th.

Feet jolly sore after dance. Went hunting. Meet at Black Ham. Mum drove me there in the Austin, arrived late, saw Lady Ann again, she is staying with Miss Foster so
is Lord Mulgrave who I danced with last night. I am very taken with Lady Ann, must get to know her some time. Very good run, jumped lots of hedges, lots of people fell off. Looked up Lady Ann and
Lord Mulgrave in the Peerage, she is the eldest daughter of the Earl of Enniskillen, her name is Ann Florence, she was born in 1910, so she must be nineteen or twenty, has two sisters, one born in
1914 the same year as me, her name is Frances Jane and the other in 1917. Their seat is Florence Court, Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, so she is Irish like I am, the old Peerage
gives this as the seat of her grandfather who is now dead and their residence as Pettypool Hall, Sandway, Northwick, so I don’t really know where they live.

I shall go to the meet instead on the chance that Lady Ann may be there again.

Jan 13th.

Lovely day for hunting, meet is at Park Corner somewhere near Groombridge, I do hope Lady Ann will be there but I doubt it, however I will soon see. Simply masses of
trees have blown down in the night one fell right across the drive just missing Billy as he was walking home. One fell on the stables and one on the cow-sheds. Lady Ann was not at the meet, so I
presume she has gone home. Had great fun in spite of this though it was a great disappointment, lots of jumps.

Jan 14th.

Golf Lesson today at Nevill. Was tired so did not play round after lesson, I drove home alone in the Austin, the first time I have driven alone except in Scotland,
it was great fun. Saw Mrs Sprague who looked horrified at seeing me driving silly fool! Hang it all I am fifteen and a half. Golf with Angela great fun, saw Billy there, he seemed quite annoyed I
called him Billy still I don’t care. Lost one ball and two tees, drove one Angela lent me into the pond luckily it was a floater, Angela also drove one into the pond. We discussed the
Burdett-Coutts’ dance. Apparently she is gone on Mrs Freeman Thomas who was Maxine Forbes Robertson of the great acting family, a sister of Jean Forbes Robertson’s, she was at school
with Jill and she has a glass eye, I didn’t admire her at all. Personally, she didn’t touch Lady Ann in my opinion, but a lot of people seemed to admire her. Anyway Angela liked Lady
Ann too, she also hated the snaly females whose name is not Duval but De Valois, they are wards in Chancery so that partly explains why they behave as they do, no one looks after them, the other
one is called Judy. What seems funny to me is that I heard one of them at the dance talking about her father, which is extremely odd if they really are wards in Chancery. Tonight Mum said she would
like some false eyelashes and that she would then look like Lady Ann Cole, so that beastly Gig must have told her that I am in love with Lady Ann. Secrets are never kept in this house worst
luck!!!! Today Mum suggested that I should join the dancing class at school, I think I will as I wish to dance well, in fact I wish to do everything well now in order to be able to when I next meet
Lady Ann, for I am sure I will sometime, I can ride and play Tennis quite well, my golf is bad but I am trying to improve it, I can swim and play Croquet quite well too, and I am learning Bridge,
but I certainly dance badly but that will be remedied by next winter. Mum suggested my taking a few Spanish lessons at the Berlitz School in preparation for our trip to Spain at Easter. I should
simply love to do so. I am sick of the thought of returning to school, gosh won’t it be boring, I want to go to more grown up dances where I meet people like Lady Ann, everything is too
babyish.

Jan 16th.

Ha ha I should have been at school this morning. Thank goodness I am not anyhow. Apparently we are going to lunch with the Potters today. Had a very amusing time at
the Potters, Lally and Joan are awfully nice and very amusing, they are coming to lunch here tomorrow and then going on to a Movie in Tunbridge Wells. They asked me to go too but dash it all I am
playing golf with Henry Havard. Dash Henry I am sick of him. Have just heard from Miss Houghton she returns to the flat on Monday at 6.30pm, she is going to Chester, cheers and laughter!!!!!!!!! I
shall write at once and ask her to get all knowledge possible about Lady Ann. On the way home I saw a gravestone in a churchyard with what looked like Ann Cole on it, it gave me such a fright, it
is a funny coincidence though, I must look next time I pass that way and see if it really was Ann Cole on it.

Jan 19th.

I can hardly believe that I go back to London tonight, worst luck . . . Have started writing a new story entitled ‘Three’s None’ which is a sequel
to ‘Two’s Company’ that Noreen and I started writing together. We wondered what we were going to do this afternoon but the dogs settled that problem for us, Jerry and Polly went
hunting and Nah, Gig, Mum and I went to look for them. I wandered all over the woods . . . It was lucky we got Jerry because he would have certainly come home with that lung trouble again and we
could not have brought him up to London. I just hate being back in London again. Gosh won’t school be boring? I can hardly bear the thought of it, in fact I am miserable, I simply must see
Lady Ann again soon or I shall die. Never mind, the thought of her cheers me up I’ll see her alright if I make up my mind to by Jingo, and I have made up my mind alright. Hurrah, I am quite
cheered up already and so Goodnight!!!!!!

These passages revealed much about my mother as a teenage girl. As well as showing me her privileged life among the country gentry, it describes her fascination with a young woman she meets at a
local dance. Lady Ann Cole, with her long eyelashes and lovely green fan, seems to have been the spur for Anne to start her first diary, and for me it is also the first indication of my
mother’s lifelong romantic interest in other women.

I wonder too about those snaly females. Was not fifteen-year-old Anne, who presumably had invented the adjective ‘snaly’ just for them, more interested in them than she admitted? On
one hand was the nineteen-year-old graceful and demure Lady Ann Cole, whose family was in
Debrett’s
, and on the other were the snaly females, rumoured to be wards of Chancery,
temptresses, serpents in the Garden of Eden. Even then, I believe, Anne’s conventional side was at war with the experimental, sexual part of her nature. These De Valois girls did intrigue
her. Anne’s playmate Angela had also hated them, according to Anne’s diary. The two snaly females do come across as more confident than the ladylike Ann Cole, who sounds shy and
ethereal. Several of the women that my mother would later become interested in would display the self-assurance of those two. Lacking in confidence herself – certainly when I knew her, though
not, it would appear, in these very early diaries – she seemed to need that quality in others.

After that dance, and indeed for many months, Anne romances about Lady Ann Cole and tries to see her again, enlisting the help of her Aunt K, who has a friend who knows the girl’s mother,
Lady Enniskillen. But Lady Enniskillen is rumoured to be a religious fanatic who attends an odd church called The Sanctuary behind Harrods and is therefore considered unapproachable. Anne also
consults her Aunt Lin, who reports that Lady Enniskillen is in an asylum
–
isn’t that the absolute limit? She must have got hold of the wrong end of the
stick.

Anne also heard the
filthy news
from her old governess, Miss Houghton, that Lady Ann’s grandfather was a
disreputable penniless Irish
peer
who had done nothing for the county of Cheshire, where he lived most of the time. (My teenage mother then sensibly wrote in her diary that he could not have done much for Cheshire
if penniless, adding that she didn’t care about Lady Ann’s relations, she loved her anyway. She had confided in her mother about Lady Ann’s father and I was amused to read that my
grandmother had said that she was sure she would have liked the penniless old roué.)

At fifteen, Anne attends Queen’s Gate School in London as a day girl; my grandmother has a flat in Carlton House Terrace, 40 Belgrave Square being occupied by her widowed mother,
Margarita, known by Anne as ‘Grandmoods’. But that January of 1930, for no stated reason, my grandmother allows Anne to return five days late for the spring term – the girl even
goes hunting on what should be her first day back. Still at Knowle, Anne plays badminton, has golf lessons, hunts and enjoys herself with her dog Jerry, her pet squirrels and her turtle doves. And
she has Nah and Gig to go for walks and play indoor games with, and indulge her. Back at school several days later, despite getting up at
the unearthly hour of night, cold dark awful
UGH!!
, Anne appears to enjoy many aspects of it, not least the companionship of the other girls. She is pleased to be sitting next to Zoe, worried that Noreen is absent, and looking
forward to the
Bandarlog
, a school activity involving amateur theatricals. She chucks blotting paper pellets in class and throws herself into the dancing lessons, despite
admitting in the diary that she is by far the worst. However, after only a few days, she develops a sore throat and temperature and, on the doctor’s advice, is again off school and back at
Knowle. She then does not return to school for seventeen more days. The last few days, when she’s better, she goes hunting with Will, the Knowle groom. Unfortunately her mare Kitty falls on
her and injures her leg – resulting in another delay. She finally returns to school on 10 February, and is soon writing of how glad she is that her leg is better – now she can play in
the school team in a lacrosse match. She still often dreams of her heroine –
I
do
want a green ostrich feather fan like Lady
Ann’s
and admits –
I never felt any attraction to any of the male sex . . . I only think of boys as friends and no more . . . in fact as a whole I utterly scorn
men and boys. I suppose I am very odd and old fashioned or stupid but I can’t make myself feel any different, I am sure I
can
love too, because
I have always had love affairs, only with women, never men. Isn’t it odd?

It is clear from the innocent tone of this that Anne sees no reason to be ashamed of her attractions towards other girls. And indeed, because of her comparative isolation, she probably does not
know that many girls of her age experience them.

She does, however, perceptively guess that her negative attitude to men may arise from her experiences of her stepfather:
I should hate always to live with one man, they’re so
boring and fussy, of course Chownie is the example I have of this, he drives me mad always, I can hardly bear to be in the same room with him sometimes and he has hurt my feelings dozens of times,
once at a dinner party at Aunt Lin’s, I shall
never
never
forgive him for
that.

Again, I felt sorry for her never having known her own father. It was unlikely that she would have regarded him as boring and fussy. I knew from various cousins that Chow had been irascible, and
my mother’s former playmate Angela had told me that the young Anne felt constantly undermined by her stepfather’s criticism. My grandmother once confided to me that she had hoped that
her second husband and her daughter, both interested in the arts, would have that in common. But Anne, I realised, perceived her stepfather as controlling and harsh, and he could not get anywhere
with her.

I have a photograph of little Anne at her mother’s wedding to Chow, where she was the only bridesmaid. I showed it to my son when he was twelve. He looked carefully at the little girl in
her white dress, with her artificially curled hair, glaring at the camera, then declared, with absolute conviction: ‘Your mother was away from love.’

My mother, at only five, had lost her father and her little brother. She had then lost her mother to a stranger – a man.

I
n April 1930, Anne holidays in France and Italy. She and her mother go from Dover to Calais on the Golden Arrow boat – the
Canterbury
– then, in France, meet up with my grandmother’s sister Dita, Dita’s husband Jay, and their daughter Peggie. All five of them then travel on the famous fast
‘Train Bleu’ to Cannes. There they lunch and bathe, and try to visit Grandmoods, who is renting a villa near Monte Carlo, but she is out. Later Anne’s mother goes with her sister
Dita to see their mother while Anne, Peggie and Anne’s Uncle Jay explore the town.