The Girl from Station X (38 page)

Then, on 1 June 1948, in the same book, came that entry. I read it again:
This was or is my wedding day – I have dreaded it all my life, but when it came, it
wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought.

My mother was on a train to Paris with my father on the first night of her honeymoon. Otherwise, I realised, even her wedding day would not have been recorded. As it was, I would probably still
never know exactly why, out of those five suitors listed on 23 September 1947, she had finally chosen my father, the last name on that list.

Anne and Willy were married at St James’s Spanish Place Catholic Church on 1 June 1948. I read how Peggie’s daughter Dita came from America to be chief bridesmaid and was very
helpful. There was a reception at 40 Belgrave Square, followed by a small cocktail party at Claridge’s, given by Bartie, that previous suitor of Anne’s.

My mother’s only comment about my father on the day, then night, of their wedding was:
Love in a sleeper is not as bad as one might think!
She must have written
this the following morning, still in the sleeper, or in the Hotel Continentale in Paris, where they stayed two nights before flying to Nice. I imagine that she wrote the diary in secret, concealing
it from my father. My parents’ honeymoon lasted three weeks and Anne stayed close to her new husband’s side, even when he gambled in the casino at Cannes, something she found
boring.

Six months later, though – there was a gap in the diaries after their honeymoon – I saw that, after taking my father to America for Christmas that year to introduce him to those
American relations who had not attended their wedding, Anne was back to her independent ways. Instead of returning with her new husband on 28 December, when he had to go back to his work in the
navy – I guess this was when he was stationed at Plymouth and my parents had rented a house on Dartmoor – Anne lingered in America for almost another month, despite my father sending
two telegrams urging her to return.

As a result of the second telegram, she did not give in to Aunt Dita’s pleas to go down to Palm Beach, and I concluded that this was the turning point (or so he thought) that my father had
boasted to me about: ‘I told Aunt Dita, “Anne is
not
going to Palm Beach, she is coming home with
me
!”’ adding, ‘I wanted to go on doing spermia with
your mother.’ (‘Doing spermia’ was the phrase that I had invented after trying to puzzle out a leaflet that my mother had given me, aged nine, about the facts of life. I had had
to ask my father for a further explanation, knowing that my mother would be too inhibited. He had obliged, at the dining-room table, when she was absent.)

There was another reason why my father wanted to go on ‘doing spermia’ with Anne, apart from sexual desire, I saw from Anne’s diary; they were trying to have a baby and she had
had a miscarriage only three months before this trip to America. She writes of her sadness in her diary of 5 January 1949 from Peggie’s flat in New York, where she stayed after a visit to
Leith’s in Maryland, during which she
disgraced
herself by getting drunk at a large dinner party –
Leith and everyone couldn’t have been
sweeter about last night’s business – she really understands the reason.
(Leith, who had married eight years before Anne, already had three children.) On getting her period
the following day, Anne wrote plaintively, referring to her recent miscarriage:
Everything I see seems to remind me of it all over again and everyone I meet seems about to produce a
child . . . I am so depressed I don’t know where to turn.
I felt sorry for my mother’s sadness and her fears – after all, she was already thirty-four, old in those
days to have one’s first baby – but I couldn’t help noticing the alarming reference to her having got blind drunk at Leith’s and, in the manner of most alcoholics, blaming
her lack of self-control on something else – the miscarriage.

I also could not help being critical of her treatment of my father, to whom she had now been married for eight months, although she did write in her diary after his first telegram of 4 January
1949, begging her to return on the 17th:
I miss him terribly as a matter of fact and did not realise how much I depend on his love and companionship.

I could not help feeling angry with my mother over what I saw as her abandonment of my father in these weeks. After all, he must also have been upset by the miscarriage of his first child; he
even used to claim to have been ill in sympathy when my mother gave birth to me, and he had had to stay working in Spain. But perhaps my father wasn’t a good listener. He had a kind heart,
but was indefatigably masculine, charging about like a bull with his head down, shouting and swearing. Also, Anne had always found it easier to confide in women – and in her diary.

My parents, I knew, had been introduced to each other by Alice, the widowed cousin who had taken her teenage children to America in the war. Alice’s daughter Maureen told
me years later that my grandmother, still worrying about her daughter’s liaison with Joe Darling, had begged her and Alice to find Anne a suitable husband. Actually, Anne’s diaries
reveal that, although Joe was still pursuing her as late as autumn 1947, after she met my father, she had lost interest; she recorded
a wire from Joe, to ask me to call a hotel in
Luxemburg, which I did. He is staying there till tomorrow afternoon, if I had known, we were almost next door to each other, still, I don’t care much
.

The introduction of my future parents was a success; after the dinner, Willy took Anne out dancing. My father’s version to me was: ‘I took her out to a nightclub and bit her on the
ear.’

My father was a sensual man and perhaps this had attracted my mother initially; she was physically undemonstrative. She certainly admired his war record; he was decisive, while my mother was
often tortured by indecision. Perhaps it was a relief for her to at last relinquish control to someone who knew what he wanted – in this instance, to marry her. He was original but not
bohemian, good fun and entirely without duplicity; my parents’ friend Rosemary Blake-Tyler, who was based in Madrid with her husband when my parents and I were there, told me that my father
had been ‘a breath of fresh air’ in the Embassy. My mother would have appreciated this. Also, she must have known that very soon it would be too late for her to have children.

William Francis Roderick Segrave was born on 22 November 1907, in his parents’ house at 40 Onslow Gardens, London SW7. He had a caul – an extra membrane of skin that envelops the
head of a few newborn babies – which was considered lucky, particularly for a sailor; the superstition was that you could never be drowned. Willy was the son of Vice-Admiral John Roderick
Segrave, and as a boy was sent to Dartmouth Naval College, to take up his father’s profession. The Admiral was descended from a Norman family dating back to Nicholas de Segrave, who had
fought at the Battle of Lewes for Simon de Montfort. They remained Catholic during the Reformation. My grandfather had a distinguished naval career; he was attached to the peace conference in The
Hague in 1907, was naval attaché in Vienna in 1914 and was then in command of the armed liner
Drama
, which in March 1915 took part in the sinking off San Fernandez of the
Dresden
. In 1920 he was for three years chief of staff of our naval representation at the League of Nations. He was given the Légion d’Honneur for his services to the Allied
cause.

His wife, Mary Stephanie Ricardo, was from a Sephardic Jewish family which must at one time have converted to Catholicism. According to my father, his mother was such an observant Catholic that
she would ring him when he was a young midshipman to remind him of various holy days of obligation – he referred to these as ‘holidays of obligaggers’. He also, in an infuriated
tone of voice, would tell us children how his mother would use ‘one sponge for her bottom, another for her face’. I do not know how he knew this, nor why he found it so disturbing; a
Jewish friend of mine told me that her mother had done the same and that it was a Jewish custom. However, my father and his sister Rosemary had been told that their mother, unlike her two older
sisters, could not possibly be Jewish, because when she was born her father had syphilis, was in a wheelchair and was too old to sire a child. Charlie Chaplin was seventy-three when he fathered a
child and the oldest father I have found on record is Nanu Ram Jogi, aged ninety – so I regard this story about my grandmother’s non-Jewishness as a possible unconscious display of
anti-Semitism.

My father was a handsome man who certainly did not look English. A boyfriend of mine, seeing a photograph of him taken in Madrid in 1952, said that he looked like a South American general. With
his dark eyes, dark hair and swarthy looks, my father could also have been Greek, or from anywhere around the Mediterranean – or, indeed, Jewish. He was tallish and well built, with broad
shoulders, and would charge about the house shouting commands as though still on the deck of a ship, making personal remarks.

‘You’re like a ruddy little prima donna!’ he would declare, when, aged thirteen, I changed my outfit several times a day. He was referred to as ‘The Commander’ and
‘Bang Bang Bugger Man’ because, while shooting, he would often miss the pheasant and yell, ‘Bugger!’ Other expressions he used at home and out of it were ‘Shit and
Derision’ and the even worse ‘Christ on Crutches’. He also frequently said ‘fuck’, a word not commonly used then in mixed company; indeed, my mother commented that,
despite having worked six years in the WAAF, she had never heard such language used in front of women and children until she met my father.

Anne’s diary entries ceased temporarily after that return from America in January 1949. I must have been conceived in the rented house on Dartmoor shortly after that.
Then, luckily for me – or I would have had no written records of my early childhood – there was that entry on 15 January 1950 when she, I and Nanny Benny flew from Northolt airport to
Madrid’s Barajas airport:
Arrived at Madrid airport at 1.10 English time, (2.10 Spanish). As I stepped out of the plane, following Elisa who was being carried by the air hostess,
I heard Willy’s voice saying: ‘I don’t know if that’s my child, how the hell can I tell?’

M
y father had been made naval attaché in Madrid in October 1949 and started working there several weeks before I was born. Now I read in my
mother’s diary that, after she arrived, she and my father – and presumably me and my nanny – went to stay in the Hotel Velasquez, very near what would soon be our new home.
Willy had brought me some lovely flowers, carnations and camellias.
Next day she saw the house where I would spend my infancy and pronounced it
heavenly far
nicer than I expected, with an enormous patio and a palm tree and flowers and v. light & big rooms, more like a country house.

Despite her various wartime jobs, some in admin, my mother did not have a clue how to run a household and my grandmother, all too pleased to let Chow run Knowle, certainly had not taught her. It
was Natasha, the Russian wife of Charles Johnson, First Secretary to the British Embassy, who, when our new house was vacant a week later, rushed to my mother’s aid, lending her pillows,
helping her unpack and going with her to buy kitchen utensils. Without Natasha, who quickly became a close friend, Anne confessed she would have been at a loss.

At first, she was homesick, missing her mother, Nah (
my crone
) and her collie, Roy, which her friend Cynthia had given her as a wedding present. She wrote nothing about
me, her first baby, I saw with chagrin, until, at last, on 28 January 1950, when I was two months old:
My little bird is so sweet and hardly ever cries. She has the most enchanting,
sudden and crooked smile and is so good-natured. She sits out in the patio in her pram most of the day.
I was gratified, and struck by how, in the diary I kept just after my own first
baby was born, I had also likened her to a bird.

Like most infants in that social milieu, I was looked after by my nanny; Nanny Benny was a Scot with jet-black hair who, my father insisted, was really a witch who flew over Madrid on a
broomstick on her days off, when my mother had her first experience of looking after me alone.
February 22nd 1950. Nanny’s day off. Cute Things screams like anything when I change
her nappy, it isn’t half as easy as one thinks . . . Willy and I pushed her down the Castellana for a walk.

I was pleasantly surprised to read that my mother
had
occasionally changed her children’s nappies, or, at least, mine. My Aunt Rosemary had been sure that her sister-in-law had
never done such a thing, and, indeed, I had not been able to visualise my mother performing such a task, assuming that, when Nanny was not there, she had got Julia the maid to do it. But it was
true that I had retained that very early memory of my mother trying to master the buttons on my blue ‘cherry’ dress and laughing happily, so perhaps that was also when she had fumbled
with her first nappy.

Her diary extracts – my father would often push me down the Castellana so fast that my mother couldn’t keep up – are the only documented glimpses I have of my parents as a
normal married couple with their first baby. My father was the more outwardly affectionate. I remember how he would swing me up on to his shoulders, where I would play with the medals on his white
naval jacket. He often embraced his wife too, though later, after Raymond died, I recall her always pushing him away. In Madrid, the diary shows that my physically undemonstrative mother did
nickname her husband ‘Bulldog’, which, given her love of dogs, must have been a compliment, and I still have an almost life-size bulldog that barks throatily when you pull his chain,
from that time in Madrid.