The Ka of Gifford Hillary (7 page)

The Le Stranges are one of those very old families which have seen lots of ups and downs. At present they are in a ‘down’ from which I think it unlikely that they will recover. One of them had come over with the Conqueror, and they had done very well for themselves in Norman times. Under the Plantagenets a line of Barons Blackmere had been posessed of great estates, and held numerous castles for the Crown. But they backed the wrong horse in the Wars of the Roses and for a hundred years or so wilted into little more than country gentry. Under Henry VIII they had popped up again, as they were close connections of Sir Thomas Boleyn.

Sir Thomas’s principal claim to fame was that Bluff King Hal, having seduced both his daughters, became so crazy about the younger of them that he divorced his wife and made her Queen. Papa’s reward for his complaisance was to be created first Viscount Rochford then Earl of Wiltshire, upon which the lady’s brother took by courtesy the lesser title. The cousins Le Strange were brought to court and secured some valuable pickings. But their luck did not last, as the lively young Queen was accused of jumping into bed with several gay sparks, among them Rochford. So both sister and brother had their heads chopped off on Tower Hill, and the rest of the family fell into disgrace.

Yet in the long run the Le Stranges got a big boost as a result of the King’s amour and the incest of which Anne
Boleyn was accused. By the first they had become kinsmen of Anne’s daughter, afterwards Queen Elizabeth, and by the second the Earl of Wiltshire was left heirless; so that on his death the peerage fell into abeyance. Half a century later another handsome Le Strange persuaded the Virgin Queen to revive both titles in his favour, and, in addition, wheedled some very profitable monopolies out of her.

For the next fifty years the family were in clover; but when the Great Rebellion broke out they naturally sided with the King, so they lost everything and had to go into exile. Charles II restored most of their lands to them, but on his death they once again backed the wrong horse by siding with Monmouth against James II; and two generations later they made another blunder by joining Bonny Prince Charlie in ’45; so from 1685, for about a hundred years, they were very much under the weather.

Then there had come a sudden revival, obviously due to the Earl of the day having married the daughter of a Sheffield Alderman. This heiress brought into the family not only a considerable fortune but also business acumen. Her son cashed in on the industrial revolution and by the time Queen Victoria came to the throne the Le Stranges were once more immensely rich. But by the middle of the century, probably without realising it themselves this time, they had begun to go downhill again.

To all the extravagances to which the more empty-headed of the Victorian nobilty were prone they took like ducks to water. Scores of servants, a plurality of houses, ceaseless entertaining, grouse moors, yachts, villas in the South of France, cards, horses, and secret establishments for pretty ladies, reduced them in three generations from great landowners to titled people of only modest fortune.

Courage they had never lacked; so two of them fell in the 1914 war. The double death duties administered the final blow to the already crippled estate. The family seat, the town house and the last acres all had to go. In 1918, at the age of eighteen, Bill came into the title. Of course, he had been educated at Eton and was already an ensign in the Life Guards; so his friends were mainly young men with extravagant tastes who did not have to worry much about money. In the circumstances one can hardly blame him for having dissipated,
during the early twenties, the few thousands that had been saved from the wreck.

In 1923, as a means of averting bankruptcy, he had married an American heiress; but he was much too transparent a character to disguise for long that his heart was not in the match. He must have been extremely good-looking. I’m told that when it was discovered at Eton that his first name was Annibal, his school fellows had nicknamed him ‘handsome Annie’. Anyhow, women had fallen for him like ninepins and he had had scores of affairs; yet the fact remained that the only person he had ever really loved was a second cousin of his, the lovely Lady Angela Chippenham, and she was just as much in love with him.

The young American wife soon tumbled to the situation, and she was not prepared to keep her coronet at that price. One cannot blame her, but I think she might have been a little less malicious about it. Not only did she throw her Earl out on to the pavement from their flat in Grosvenor Square, but nothing could persuade her to refrain from citing Lady Angela.

Actually I don’t think Lady Angela minded, because
it
meant that she would get Bill for keeps. Proud as they make ’em, she refused to deny the charge and said some pretty cutting things about plain little girls who thought they could buy love with dollars. As soon as the divorce came through Bill made an honest woman of her; but her family were by no means wealthy, so he had to leave the Guards and try his hand at commerce.

As a peerage was still something of an asset for shop-window dressing in the business world of those days, he managed to keep himself afloat; but only just, because he was too lazy to make the best of his opportunities, abhorred routine, and got so bored with his jobs that he chucked most of them up after a few months.

Meanwhile, his wife had presented him with a son and daughter. Fortunately in 1928 Lady Wiltshire was left by an aunt the income for life on quite a tidy sum. It was anyhow sufficient for her to meet the expenses of a medium-sized house in one of the streets off Belgrave Square and to educate the children; but in 1946 she died from injuries received in a car smash, and her income reverted to another member of her family.

The four years that followed proved far from easy ones for Bill. His boy, who enjoys his second title, Rochford, and is known as Roc, was then nineteen, and Ankaret was two years younger. From 1928 onward Bill had been quite content to let his wife foot the household bills, while he devoted such money as he could pick up to shooting, fishing, a little mild racing and such other pastimes as he had been brought up to enjoy. At her death he suddenly found himself up against it.

Roc was far from being a young man of promise. He had all his father’s bad points and few of his good ones. In fact he has turned out to be about as decadent a specimen of the British aristocracy as one could find if one raked the shadier West End night-clubs for a month.

To do his National Service he was, of course, put into his father’s old regiment, the Life Guards; but he failed to get a stripe, much less graduate for a N.S. Commission. When he came out Bill got him a succession of jobs in the City; but he could not hold down any of them and, as his father could afford to give him only a very small allowance, he took to downright dishonesty.

For a time he got along by sponging on his friends and borrowing all he could from them without the least prospect of being able to pay them back. Having exhausted all such sources, he then got engaged to a rich widow twice his age and pawned her jewels without her knowledge, counting rightly on the fact that she might throw him over but would not face the humiliation of bringing an action. Next, he got in with a set of rogues and lent himself to a little bogus company promoting. He escaped from the results of that only because he had the luck of the devil; and twice, since I married Ankaret, I have had to come to the rescue financially to save him from being sent to prison. Recently he seems to have become a bit more canny and is now picking up a living at some sort of job in the film industry; but one never knows from one day to another when we shall suddenly be told that he had started issuing dud cheques again.

After Lady Wiltshire’s death the house had to be given up, and Bill had Ankaret left on his hands. But his problem about what to do with her was solved by the ‘family’ rallying
round. One of her aunts undertook to present her, and, while none of her relatives could afford to give her a permanent home, they agreed to have her to stay in turn for long visits until Bill could make some suitable arrangement for her to live with him.

Even if he could have earned enough money, I don’t think he would have attempted to do that; because having unloaded Ankaret suited him very well. He settled down in a small bachelor flat and salved his conscience by occasionally buying her a few clothes or sending her a cheque for pocket money. In consequence, after her coming-out season the poor child had practically to live in her boxes, mostly at country houses but occasionally in London.

Being young and healthy she took it quite philosophically; but from one point of view it was most regrettable. She has a real flair for art and four years of this unsettled existence deprived her of all chance to study it properly. Had she spent them at the Schools I am sure that by now she would have made a name for herself; as it is she can draw really beautifully, but her paintings lack something which only a mastery of technique can give. That apart, such a life is far from being a good background for a girl of her age and temperament, as no one was really responsible for her, and, providing she behaved tactfully, the different relations with whom she stayed all allowed her to do more or less as she liked.

Being Ankaret, she soon started to make the most of her chances; and, as she told me sometime after we were married, there had been quite a number of occasions on which, between visits, she had spent week-ends with young men at discreet country pubs without her relatives ever getting to know of it.

I imagine that most girls in such a precarious situation would have done their damnedest to hook the first likeable man who came their way and was in a position to give them a comfortable home of their own. No doubt, too, in view of the devastating effect that Ankaret had on men her relations had never anticipated that her rounds of visits to them would continue for as long as they did; but until she was over twenty-one, and met me, she never became even temporarily engaged.

I suppose that fairly frequent changes of scene and company,
coupled with her self-taught painting and her clandestine love affairs, kept her reasonably contented. Anyhow, expensive clothes, jewels and rich furs were no temptation to her, because she had everything a woman needs without them; and she never bothered her beautiful head about the future. I well remember that if on parting I ever said to her ‘God bless you, darling’ her invariable reply was, Thanks; He will.’

What she saw in me that she had not found in other men I have no idea; but she did not take very long about making up her mind after I’d asked her to marry me. She asked only one night to think it over; then next morning in the garden of Ewefold Priory, where we were both staying, she said:

‘I’m not a woman’s woman, so sooner or later it is quite possible that you may hear catty remarks to the effect that I have a past. I shall neither admit nor deny them; so you must believe them or not as you like. But one thing I don’t think anyone will accuse me of is being a gold-digger. All the same, I feel that I have certain obligations to my family.’

She told me then, perfectly frankly, about her father and brother, and went on: ‘I’m afraid that any attempt to turn Roc into a respectable citizen would prove quite hopeless; so all I ask for him is that should he land himself in further messes you will do what you can, within reason, to save him from being sent to prison. Daddy, on the other hand, is a very different matter. It isn’t altogether his fault that he has been reduced for some years past to living on a shoe-string; and as he gets older his situation is bound to get worse instead of better. He has never even hinted that I could help him by marrying a man with money; but I have always felt that if I did have a rich husband I ought to ask him to make the old boy an allowance of a few hundred a year. He has become used now to living quite modestly but I would like him to have enough not to have to worry where his next quarter’s rent, or the subscriptions to his Clubs, are coming from.’

The night before she had admitted that she loved me, and now she added that she felt differently about me from any other man she had met; so it must be that she was really in love for the first time, and she did want to marry me. But if, after what she had said about her family, I would prefer to forget that I had asked her, she would perfectly understand.

In view of the very special feeling that I had aroused in her, it seems most unlikely that she was making any mental reservations about being unfaithful to me later on; so the way she put matters to me could hardly have been fairer and I willingly agreed to do something for Bill.

Had we been living in pre-war days I could, with my present income, quite well have afforded to give him five hundred a year without embarrassment. But the coming of the Welfare State has made a difference to men in my position that few people of moderate incomes realise. In the 1930’s, ten thousand a year meant everything for which one could reasonably wish. Now, Income and Super Tax bring it down at one fell swoop to the three thousand five hundred mark; and as a pound today buys less than six and eightpence did then, the actual purchasing power remaining is less than twelve hundred.

Even that must sound pretty good to most people; but there is not much to spare if one has a largish house to keep up and an ex-wife and two children to provide for. In addition I was about to marry again; and to a girl who had not a penny of her own.

Nearly all my capital is tied up in my own Company, and I certainly did not feel like selling out a large block of my shares to form a Trust fund for Bill. The obvious way out was to put him on the Board, which would net him five hundred a year in Director’s fees. Perhaps that was slightly dishonest, because I knew he couldn’t really pull his weight; but that is what I did, and how he came to be there.

I feel that I have devoted a lot of space to my father-in-law, although he played little part in the events that follow. But it has enabled me to give an account of Ankaret’s background, and that is important.

Now for the last, and most junior, of our Directors: my nephew, Wing Commander Johnny Norton. He is the only child of my half-sister, Betty, and she was the only child of my father’s first marriage. As she was fourteen years older than myself and ran away from home when she was twenty, I have only the vaguest memories of her.