Basil Street Blues (6 page)

Norah’s Will fills a few of the empty spaces in her life and plants some signposts over this lost territory. Whatever immediately happened to her when The Links was sold late in 1899, she was according to the Census living at Beaufort House at Ham in Surrey at the beginning of 1901. The house was occupied by a Dr William Simpson Craig who was replaced as its occupant by his son-in-law Dr Macnamara in 1907, the year Norah made her Will.

When probate was granted in the summer of 1914, Norah’s estate was valued at £11,992 16s, which would be equivalent to approximately half-a-million pounds at the end of the century. The chief beneficiaries were indeed Dr and Mrs Macnamara who continued living at Beaufort House until 1920. But Norah’s Will gives a good reason for allowing what money she controlled to pass out of the Holroyd family. For fifteen years she had been able to ‘enjoy the income’ of a one-third share in her father’s residuary estate. But because she was dying unmarried, her capital would pass to Pat and Fraser. For this reason ‘I do not consider it necessary,’ she writes, ‘to bequeath to my said brothers or either of them any portion of the savings accrued or which may accrue in my lifetime in respect of the income of the said share and I have for that reason made the dispositions hereinafter contained without reference to my said brothers.’

But there is no malice against Pat and Fraser whose sons and daughter are each left a specific gift – for one nephew ‘my gilt Empire clock’; for another ‘my sleevelinks and tie clips’; and for her niece ‘my gold watch and chain’. All of them receive £100 on their twenty-first birthdays. But my father, who was born four days before his aunt made her Will, is not mentioned; and, since there was to be no codicil, nor did Pat’s daughter born in 1908 receive anything. The implication is that Norah’s contact with her brothers’ families had grown more distant during the last six years of her life.

Her largest legacy of all – £1,400 – goes to ‘my friend Frances Mary Macnamara wife of the said Eric Danvers Macnamara’ who is himself merely given ‘my gold ring set with two diamonds and my crescent scarf pin’. Unless Norah’s solicitor had advised against the impropriety of leaving the bulk of her estate to a married man, the conclusion any reader of this testament reaches is that the special friend of this woman with the watch chain, tie and cufflinks, was not the doctor but his wife.

Dr Macnamara was a well-known psychiatrist who practised in Harley Street. He ‘devoted his life to mental disease’, his obituary in the
British Medical Journal
states, ‘...even his domestic life had many associations with his special study’. Norah Palmer Holroyd was almost certainly the subject of one of the papers he published in medical journals and encyclopaedias on neurological and psychopathological matters – on paralysis, insomnia, the use of morphine and what was called ‘functional insanity’.

Whatever he believed her to be suffering from, her death certificate at the Marie de Vernet-les-Bains in the Pyrenees provides no cause of death. It is as if she simply gave up living. She died at four o’clock in the afternoon of 22 October 1913 at the Hôtel du Parc, an ‘établissement thermal’. There appear to have been no friends with her. The note of death is of a life unlived, ‘célibataire’, ‘sans profession’, signed at ten o’clock the following morning by two local Frenchmen and the mayor. There is no more.

After his sister’s death, Fraser increased his holding in Rajmai Tea to 1,752 shares, and continued to hold this special number, with a nominal value of £10 a share, until the decline and fall of his own fortunes.

In the late eighteen-nineties my grandfather fell into the company of a large, noisy, ramshackle Irish family. The Corbets had been brought up in the Sunday’s Well district of Cork and were utterly unlike Fraser’s own family – indeed that was probably their principal charm. There were eleven Corbet sisters and one brother who, to compensate for his solitary condition, had been blessed with fifteen Christian names which his sisters were obliged to learn by heart: Roland, Hudson, Sands, De Courcy, Blennerhassett… He sailed away to the United States, built up a chain of garages and eventually perished under a car.

The sheer femininity of these vivacious Corbet girls, with their waspwaists and prominent busts, their bright eyes and lilting voices, seems to have bewitched Fraser after the invalidism of The Links, the heavy male world of Uppingham and his worrying time at Cambridge. Though apparently penniless, these Corbets were always laughing. My grandfather was enchanted by their happy-go-lucky ways.

He had been introduced to them by a new friend Stephen (nicknamed ‘Nipper’) Anderson who was to become a partner in the Magor family’s tea merchant company. ‘Nipper’ Anderson was on the verge of being engaged to the beautiful Alice Corbet and would take several years advancing to the verge of marrying her. When Alice came over from Ireland to see him, she brought with her a selection of her sisters: Iley, who played the piano so delightfully; Ida, who had escaped from a convent and gone on the music hall stage; Lizzie, the jolliest of the lot of them, famous for her punctuality (she once turned up for a train half-a-day early, fell asleep in the waiting-room, and missed it); Lannie, who would one day emigrate to Australia; and the very pretty and petite Adeline.

Their parents were both dead. If you spoke to Ida she would tell you that their father Michael Augustus Corbet had been a dedicated physician, and how her mother had died transporting medicines on horseback through the snows of winter. If you questioned Adeline, she would whisper of their father’s unmitigated brilliance as a poor professor at Cork University. Each sister had her own story; and all relished the others’ repertory of stories. On Adeline’s birth certificate – she was born at 6 Lower Janemount in Cork on 13 July 1876 – her father’s profession is given as ‘Traveller’ which means neither gypsy nor hedge scholar, but commercial traveller.

The eldest of these Corbet girls is Minnie. She has married the huge and friendly Tom White, director of a pharmaceutical company, and lives in Bray, County Wicklow. They have no family of their own but act
in loco parentis
to Minnie’s unmarried sisters, the delicate Atty, the mysterious Sloper and others. But these sisters are rapidly getting married. When ‘Nipper’ Anderson hurried over to Ireland soon after Fraser’s father’s death to meet the rest of Alice’s family, he took Fraser along with him. It was a holiday he needed. There were picnics by the sea and sunny days at the races, trips up to Dublin, walks around the magical waters of Glendaloch, and always the congenial company of this tumultuous family teeming with enjoyment.

Alice, as we know, is to be engaged to ‘Nipper’ Anderson. Lizzie has recently married and, as Mrs Parsons, gone to live in Bristol. Ida’s career as a singer in the music halls is being brought to an end by some passionate love letters from an older man, William Temple, whom (despite the disapproval of his mother, ‘old Lady Temple of Leeswood’) she suddenly marries. Even the youngest sister of all, Lannie, will soon be engaged to a champion cyclist and billiards player. Romance is in the air and there seems no time to lose. Fraser’s attention is caught by the next youngest sister, Adeline, a slip of a girl with a sensuous curving mouth and elaborate, altitudinous hair. She is called ‘Bang’ by her sisters: Fraser they call ‘Josh’.

Bang and Josh were married on 4 April 1899 from Lizzie’s new home in Bristol (her husband acting as one of the witnesses). Bang took only one year off her age (making herself a romantic twenty-one instead of twenty-two) on the marriage certificate, and gave her late father’s profession innocuously as ‘Gentleman’. There is no evidence that she went to Eastbourne and saw The Links which was being sold that summer. She was soon pregnant and living in her new home, the Red House, at Datchet, near Windsor in Buckinghamshire. They had chosen Datchet because her sister Ida now lived there.

On 7 January 1900 Bang and Josh’s first child was born – a son whom they named Desmond Sowley Holroyd. But after sixteen weeks he was to die of bronchial pneumonia. Fraser, who was with his son when he died, was once again the ‘informant’ and signed the death certificate.

Two years later Adeline gave birth to a daughter. She and Fraser had gone down to stay with Bang’s sister Lizzie at Bristol for the birth, and Yolande Phyllis was born at Lizzie’s home in Victoria Square, Clifton, on 22 April 1902. The house was alive with Corbet sisters, and Alice won the contest to sign Yolande’s birth certificate as one of the many ‘present at the birth’.

Everyone agreed that it was ‘unfair’ to have only one child. Lizzie had three; so did Lannie; and also Ida. Adeline’s next child, a son whom they christened Kenneth De Courcy, was born at the Red House on 16 December 1903. And that, Adeline decided, was enough. Of course married women were expected to have children – it was their duty. But Bang was in many ways hardly out of childhood herself and never really would be. She was not naturally a loving mother. Her children got so much in the way of the exciting social life she was beginning to enjoy in England. She employed a young Welsh nurse, Kate Griffin (whom the children called ‘Nan’), to look after Yolande and Kenneth; and in 1906 the family left the Red House and moved nearby to Meadowcroft, a house in Bolton Avenue, New Windsor, not far from the castle. But then something unexpected happened. ‘It was here that I was born in 1907,’ writes my father, ‘– an evident mishap.’ The date of his birth was 20 October 1907, and after some debate they named him Basil De Courcy Fraser. What comes through a close reading of my father’s account, written near the end of his life, is his sense of being unwanted: an outsider at home, a reject at school, an exile during later life, and inferior to his elder brother and sister. ‘I was a sickly infant with a pidgeon [
sic
] chest and a frail hold on life,’ he wrote. ‘Nan sat up night after night looking after me, and there is no doubt that I owed my continued presence in the world to her. I saw little of my mother.’

The photographs of him at Windsor from infancy through childhood show him more ill-at-ease than ill. Aged one month he lies awkwardly on a cushion between Yolande and Kenneth who are more interested in the photographer than their new sibling. Later he is being held in place on a pony between the others’ smarter horses; and later still he perches precariously on a
chaise-longue
to make a pretty threesome. For these are studio portraits which the proud parents will pass round their friends. Kenneth puts up with this business quite well – he is like someone holding his breath until the ordeal is over, yet still in command of himself. Basil’s round face looks vulnerable and bewildered – but then he is the youngest. It is Yolande who appears in her element. She ‘makes eyes’ at the camera, puts an arm round her younger brother, sits elegantly on her horse. Or she poses alone, bare feet dangling from a podium. And there she is again, reclining on a sofa, studying a flower, standing small and defiant on a bench in the garden. Like her Aunt Norah she focuses, she comes alive, while her brothers look rather wooden or lost.

The children saw a good deal of their mother’s sisters and their husbands over these early years, but little of Uncle Pat and his family. He had come back from South Africa with his wife Coral and their son Ivor, been appointed a captain in the Militia in 1903 and gone to live in Hampshire. Here, on 17 November 1908, his daughter Verity was born. My father could not remember going to Ropley Manor, his Uncle Pat’s home in Hampshire, and he believed that his Aunt Coral disapproved of Fraser’s marriage. The two brothers maintained a rather furtive friendship despite the gap that was appearing between their two families and that would widen over the years.

However, there were plenty of Corbet aunts to entertain the children. Aunt Iley, the pianist, was living not far away at Reigate in Surrey; and jolly punctual Aunt Lizzie they would sometimes visit in Bristol. But my father remembered most vividly going to play at Datchet where his Aunt Ida, the ex-music hall singer, and her husband from the zoo lived. Were the paddocks there really ‘full of Zebras, Giraffes and Wildebeasts’ as he imagined? ‘There was an awful lot to see if one was lucky,’ he insisted. There were those bright birds flying in the aviary and animals at the end of the garden (‘small ones of course and I’ve forgotten what they were now’), and a big pond flashing with red and yellow fish in the sunlight. ‘Halcyon days!’ he exclaimed, recovering with his childhood excitement his authentic childhood spelling.

There were three Temple daughters with whom my father sometimes played at Datchet. One, prim and religious, later married a man connected with cigarettes (‘Passing Clouds’ they were called) and had numerous daughters herself; another took after her father and devoted her life to horses and dogs; while a third, reviving memories of her mother’s music hall days, travelled far, gambled long and had, we were told, a child by Rex Harrison. Not a bad family record.

Fraser and Adeline would occasionally leave Nan in charge of the children and go to Ireland where they became ‘Josh’ and ‘Bang’ again. There are some exuberant pictures of these holidays with the Corbet sisters, showing them on bridges and rocks against a waterfall or the sea, then in woods with their bicycles and in jaunting carts with horses. And there is one of Josh in his three-piece suit and watch chain, a pipe in his mouth, jumping high in the air. He loved these trips to Ireland and was thinking of buying a house called Greystones near Minnie and Tom White at Bray.

The family sometimes kept photographs but never letters and seldom postcards unless the pictures took their fancy. There is one postcard from this period, kept because the picture was drawn and coloured in by my Aunt Yolande. Written from Brocket, a large, newly-built house at Maidenhead into which the family moved in 1912, it was posted to her mother in Ireland. It tells of an air balloon which ‘came right over our house. Nanny was so excited and called Yolande so many times that I thought the house was on fire.’ The card is addressed to 8 Prince of Wales Terrace, Bray, and was probably written early in 1914 when Josh still had ideas of moving to Ireland. But the Great War changed his plans, and a little later Tom and Minnie White came instead to live near Maidenhead.