The Girl from Station X (13 page)

But despite her mother’s efforts to convince her of the delights of Paris, Anne did get her way. Her wilful obstinacy, and my grandmother’s compliance, gave me an insight into their
relationship for, on 12 December 1931, after only two months there, Anne was allowed to leave Ozanne’s and return to England. It was a mistake, which she soon realised, for she wrote in her
diary of the possibility of going to America with her mother in January:
nothing is decided yet. I should love to go in one way and in another I want to go back to the
Os’.
It seems from this that Anne was in need of an adult to impose structure in her life. Gig, unlike Nah, had sent Anne a firm letter while she was still at Ozanne’s,
advising her to stick it out, saying that she would be glad in the long run. But my grandmother was not one to enforce discipline and, in addition, Anne had terrified her mother by having a
fainting fit and several high temperatures while at the school. Once again I lamented, as Anne often did herself, the early death of her father; I was sure that he would have been firmer, and he
had certainly had more experience of normal life and its obligations to pass on to his daughter than her mother had. I thought again of his letter to her for her first birthday.

My grandmother indulged her only daughter. Anne was sent to Paris again the following spring – this time with Nah – to live in a hotel. A French governess came daily and Anne spent
her leisure time with Vivienne Worms, a girl of her own age, half-English and half-French, whose English mother my grandmother knew. The girls enjoyed themselves riding, chatting, playing with
Vivienne’s family dogs, shopping, and going to films or to the opera, where Anne heard the famous Russian bass Chaliapin singing the role of Prince Galitzky in
Prince Igor
.

That April of 1932, while staying in the Imperial Hotel in Paris with Nah, Anne again started fantasising about a young woman, this time a fellow hotel guest, Contessa Oddone di Felleto. She and
Nah examined with a torch the shoes left outside the Contessa’s door for cleaning. The hotel manager then told them that she was a widow of a much older husband, and would often spend five
weeks at a time enjoying herself in Paris.

April 29th 1932. Hotel Imperial. Paris.

I saw her again today on the steps of the hotel dressed in a green shirt and hat and black short fur coat rather made up, she looked as though she had fair hair and
blue eyes.

I noted that the young women who fascinated Anne were small, like my grandmother, and had her colouring. Perhaps a psychoanalyst would say that her attraction towards them stemmed from her not
having had enough attention from her mother as a very small child; Gladys, grieving for Anne’s father, and perhaps for her infant son, had, when her daughter was five and needed her mother
most, deserted her and gone abroad, to work in Sicily for the Mesopotamia Comforts Fund, a humanitarian relief effort for civilian victims of the First World War.

After the Contessa left Paris, in an uncanny repeat of her behaviour on Brioni in August 1930, Anne managed to get into the young woman’s vacated room. There, consumed with curiosity, she
held up a piece of blotting paper with her writing on to the mirror to see if she could decipher what she had written, and pocketed a photograph of the Contessa that she had left behind.

Reading about my mother’s early life was, for me, a look into a grand, now somewhat unreal era. Those who passed through the lives of her and my grandmother sounded like characters from a
novel by Henry James: Princess Bibesco (daughter of Henry Asquith, former prime minister of England, who acquired her title when she married a Romanian diplomat); Contessa Suardi Patrizzi; Degna
Marconi, daughter of the inventor of the commercial radio and telegraph system; aristocrats such as Lord and Lady Goschen, Lord Cavan, Lord Mulgrave and, of course, Lady Ann Cole and her mother,
Lady Enniskillen. I assumed that my grandmother, who always maintained that she was basically middle class like her father, knew these aristocrats as a result of his social ambition, and because,
through his hard work, she and her sisters were heiresses. My grandmother was also pretty and lively and, despite having been shy as a girl, had, my mother told me, later been dubbed ‘The
Asp’ because of her quick, sometimes malicious, wit.

I had had a glimpse into this old-fashioned grand world during my own childhood, when I was taken every so often to 40 Belgrave Square. It was a mark of my great-grandfather’s social
ambition that he had taken such a house on a hundred-year lease, for Belgrave Square (laid out by Thomas Cubitt for the 2nd Earl of Grosvenor and constructed in the 1820s) was one of the grandest
squares in London, occupied mainly by aristocrats. Number 40 became my great-grandfather’s London house and the imposing Battle Abbey, also rented, was his country residence.

My main memory of that Belgrave Square house is of soot. I don’t think it was ever cleaned. On the front hall floor was a mosaic of Medusa’s head, serpents weaving in and out. In the
little sitting room were two brocade sofas, one dark gold, the other royal blue, and a bookcase full of old books, many about South America, where my great-grandfather had made his fortune. (My
mother was furious when her mother later sold those books in a job lot without consulting her.)

On the dining-room walls were deer heads with antlers. A white linen tablecloth was always on the table. On the sideboard were little bottles of Schweppes orange juice with an odd metallic taste
supplied by John, the family friend from Ireland who used to stay there while working for Schweppes in London, as a thank-you for my grandmother’s hospitality.

Also in the dining room were two gloomy pictures, one of Highland cattle under a dark sky and another of a shipwreck. Underneath was written: ‘The Sea is His and He made it.’

The house had six floors and most of its rooms were unoccupied. On the first floor was a ballroom, with an old sedan chair. Dances were still given there occasionally for young female
relations.

Above was my grandmother’s bedroom, which had been her mother’s, with pretty painted green furniture and a bowl of false fruit. I had loved touching the cloudy purple grapes and the
gleaming glass orange. Below the attic where maids had once slept were two adjoining bedrooms, for my parents and me, whenever we visited London. I used to love gazing at two paintings in my
parents’ room, one of a shepherd boy lying on his back in moonlight, another of a hare under a full moon. I had seen these two again in that stable flat at my mother’s.

My high old bed at number 40 was brass, the wallpaper of garlanded pink roses. On the wall was a long tinted photograph of a cormorant on the bank of a river in Florida. I used to stare at it
and imagine what it was like up that river.

In the basement was a bad-tempered old Scottish cook, Eva, and white-haired Bessie, her hair done up in a bun, in the traditional maid’s costume of black and white. At full moon Bessie
talked to herself in different voices. I would lie in bed hearing her close the curtains next door. The voices were just too low for me to hear what they said. If Bessie was interrupted, she would
stop at once and address whoever it was in her normal voice.

The ghost of my great-grandmother Margarita was supposed to have been glimpsed standing outside her old bedroom so, if I was alone, I would always rush past, bounding up the huge staircase with
its mahogany banisters three steps at a time.

My mother recalled Grandmoods as a ‘fun’ old lady who stuck out her tongue at policemen from her carriage in Park Lane and at Christmas would always bite her liqueur chocolate in
half so that the liquid shot out, despite everyone at the table shouting ‘Stop!’ My grandmother, however, found her mother a fusspot and said she had ‘hated’ her South
American women friends, who ‘ate sweet cakes and chattered like birds’. There was one called Paca she detested; Paca was always sticking her finger down my grandmother’s throat
and saying: ‘The child’s not warm enough.’

This old-fashioned world was part of my mother’s heritage. Then there was her lifelong romance with Russia, which may have started when she went with her French governess to hear Chaliapin
sing:

May 23rd 1932, Paris.

‘
Prince Igor’
was really wonderful with Chaliapin in the part of Prince Galitzky, the place was crowded
with Russians . . . Russian is rather a fascinating language, it sounds like a mixture between Italian and English . . . ‘With a Smile you can get anywhere’ is my new motto, it is
especially so out here on the continent, people will do anything for you if you are amiable and pleasant and it is quite natural too. Nah was saying to Mademoiselle that I always get all I wanted
like that and she said, ‘Yes, I can quite believe it’.

Anne had missed the sarcasm in that remark. She had just written grandly in her diary:
I am accustomed to doing what I like.

It was a Russian who had assassinated Doumer, the President of France, shortly before this, on 6 May 1932. Anne wrote excitedly of attending the President’s funeral procession in Paris, of
how she and Mademoiselle had fought their way through the crowds to the first floor of a house in the Rue Souffroie, from where they watched the procession, which included the Prince of Wales
– the future Edward VIII –
walking between the Duke of Aosta and Prince Paul of Serbia, he looked very small and insignificant, his busby made him look even
smaller.
Women fainted and children screamed and the only people who kept their heads, Anne wrote, were the English Boy Scouts. Despite the assassin having been Russian – she
wrote that she would have been deeply ashamed had he been English – her fascination with Russia continued, and that summer, at a dance near Knowle, she met her favourite dancing partner of
the whole evening – Prince Serge, a Russian,
tall and fair with a kind smiling face. He told me he had only escaped from Russia in 1920, he has no money now.

This obsession with Russians would sometimes cloud my mother’s judgement later in life. (Four months later, Paul Gurvulov, the disturbed Russian assassin of the French President, was
guillotined.)

At the end of May 1932 Anne left Paris, to continue her life of pleasure – not unusual for girls of that background. In the years before and after her nineteenth birthday
– celebrated by a coming-out ball in July 1933 – Anne and her mother, sometimes accompanied by Chow, travelled to Cap d’Antibes, Portugal, Palm Beach, the Caribbean on a cruise,
Switzerland and Austria to ski, and to Budapest the month that George V died.

I had known that my grandmother and mother had travelled, but had had no idea of the extent of it. It was almost like reading about the lives of strangers, it seemed so exotic. Besides travel,
Anne had beloved pets, sporting and cultural activities, indoor games and a cast of playmates and relations. It would be easy to assume that the girl – well off, clever, athletic,
good-looking and interested in so many aspects of life – had a golden future. But perhaps there was already something lacking. Was such a hedonistic existence suitable for someone with her
nervous, volatile temperament and lively mind?

I found myself wondering what her life would have been like if her father had lived. After all, he had said in that letter for Anne’s first birthday: ‘
don’t forget to have
an aim in life people without them are always unhappy – besides which you have no business to help consume the world’s produce and give nothing in return’.
And Aunt K, his
sister, had managed Knowle for her widowed father when she was only eighteen, whereas my grandmother was happy to let Chow, or her housekeeper, do it. As for Anne’s stepfather, I knew that,
after leaving the army, besides running the Knowle farm, Chow had sat on all sorts of committees and also on Lewisham County Council. He had never stopped working, even after he got cancer;
Katherine had told me. Chow was also artistic – Knowle was full of his drawings and statuettes – and he had designed much of the garden with my grandmother, as well as planning the
water gardens in the woods. If Anne had been his own daughter, he might not have allowed her mother to be so indulgent to the girl. But it was clear from the diary that Anne did not listen to
him.

Here is Anne in Rome in 1931, still at Madame Boni’s, after an Easter outing with her mother and stepfather. Another pupil, Esmé, and her mother, Mrs Mackinnon, had turned up at the
same restaurant, with Madame Boni. Esmé’s father, like Anne’s, is dead.

April 7th 1931. Rome.

Mum went out to play golf with the others to make up a mixed foursome for a competition although she didn’t want to go, I agree with Mrs Mackinnon who advised
me not to give in to my husband all the time as it was very bad to give in always to men as they took all, and more, willingly. Both parties I think should give in equally, I can see I shall have
to be careful who I marry but really Chownie is
so
getting on my nerves I could scream, all I do is long to get away from him all the time, always a
row everywhere we go and grumbling all the time and I hate the way he speaks to Mum and he is so selfish too and Esmé doesn’t see why I should be obliged to like him, after all he
isn’t my father, and I feel no blood ties towards him, Esmé thinks he is very tiresome too, it is
such
a relief to get away from him
into peace and quiet with people who don’t snub you and make you feel what a fool and what a baby you are, I often think how different my life and character would have been had my father
lived, how I wish he had, all my life I have almost looked on him as a god and spoken to hardly anyone about him and Esmé feels the same about her father, we talked together, the subject is
sacred to both of us.

It appears from this that Anne, understandably, did hero-worship her dead father. Also, she must have been affected by her mother’s lasting sorrow at his death – at every Armistice
Day, on 11 November, Anne was made aware that her mother was thinking of him and Anne herself quickly learned to respect that date. All this must have made it more difficult for her to like her
stepfather.