The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me (32 page)

How are you feeling and are you sleeping better? Don’t worry about my clothes as I gave up that belt months ago, and now anyway would never be able to get into it! And I have a nice little red coat which looks quite pretty and keeps me warm – not that I need it here as the house is beautifully central heated except today, the coldest day of the winter on which the Americans have chosen to run out of coal. Very tiresome but we have electric fires so it’s quite warm.

Poor Robert is in bed with jaundice and as yellow as a tea rose, as you used to say to me when I had it! He isn’t nearly as bad as I was, I’m glad to say, but is a wicked patient and won’t do as he’s told and will send for Bovril when I’m not looking – his mother is staying here so she helps to keep him in order.

I’m sorry you’d read The Narrow Street. Wouldn’t you like to change it? Nancy Rodd [Mitford], who works at H.[eywood] Hill would change it any time.

Will you really be in London in January? It will be lovely to see you again. I do miss you darling, and hope this time you will be better and we will be able to go to plays together.

Take care of yourself, darling, and don’t get cold in this wretched weather. And all wishes for a Happy New Year from Robert and me.

Best love

From Jennifer

Best love to Daddy

As Jennifer waited out the last period of her pregnancy, numerous friends came to stay at Faringdon. There were old stalwarts like Coote Lygon (now a flight officer in the WAAFs, specialising in photographic interpretation) and Violet Trefusis, who put her nationality in the visitors’ book as ‘Bogus Aryan’. The most incongruous guest at the dining table was Pixie, Jennifer’s beloved old governess and lifelong ally. She surely brought warmth and encouragement at a time when the baby’s imminent arrival was making Jennifer very anxious. It was one thing to be a beautiful, suntanned bride in the summer, and quite another to be heavy with child during the dull, icy days of winter. It is tempting to speculate on the topics of conversation at mealtimes between Gerald and Pixie; two more different characters could scarcely be imagined. Robert laughed, scornful at needing one’s nanny at such an advanced age, and would later enjoy recounting inaccurate or scurrilous stories about the pious, ageing spinster.

Pixie was not the only special guest that February. Prim, Jennifer’s childhood friend from Oare, had had her first child three months earlier and came to stay with her husband, who happened to be one of England’s most glamorous actors, David Niven, and the only British star in Hollywood to return to join up. Having given up romantic leads in films, he lived out a real one instead. Spotting Prim dressed in the powder-blue uniform of a WAAF at the Café de Paris, he fell for her and the couple married within two weeks – nuptials arranged as rapidly as the Heber-Percys’. Prim’s fair ‘flower-like beauty’ could well have suited a screen role as the patient girl-next-door who gets her man in the end; Jennifer’s darker, more provocative looks would surely have her cast as the girl who gets in trouble. David Niven loved Primmie’s great kindness (‘She was incapable of saying an unkind word’360), but he craved thrills. Leaving the Rifle Brigade for more action with the Commandos, he joined the Army Film Unit, where in 1942 he starred as an RAF squadron leader in The First of the Few, and later, in 1944, appeared in The Way Ahead. Prim had meanwhile left the RAF and taken up war work building Hurricane fighters in Slough, but she gave that up and moved to London when she became pregnant with her first child. When David Jr was born, the infant was visited by stars such as Laurence Olivier, John Mills and Noël Coward, who as godfather gave him a silver cocktail shaker inscribed ‘Because, my Godson dear, I rather / Think you’ll turn out like your father.’

If Jennifer and Prim went back a long way, to lessons with Pixie in the attic at Oare and walks on the chalky Downs, David and Robert also shared youthful memories. Both had attended Stowe in the mid-1920s, when the school had just been founded and there were relatively few pupils. So they remembered each other as adolescents, though they had not been close. It is easy to imagine the two handsome Old Stoics drinking cocktails by the fire and recreating their headmaster, J. F. Roxburgh’s, rich, honeyed tone of voice that had fascinated them as pupils. Niven remembered him with great affection, particularly for the attitude he showed to Nessie, the exquisite seventeen-year-old London prostitute (a self-proclaimed ‘’ore with an ‘eart of fuckin’ gold’) whom the young Niven had loved from the virginal age of fourteen, and whom he had invited to visit him for picnics in the school grounds. On one such occasion, Nessie insisted on meeting the famous J.F. (‘Look, dear, ’e’ll never know I’m an ’ore. ’E’ll think I’m yer bleedin’ aunt or somefing …’) The suave headmaster showed no dismay at the unusual school visitor, and finished their discussion by saying, ‘David is very lucky to have such a charming visitor.’361

Perhaps Robert showed David a letter he had received from J.F. which congratulated him on his marriage. The Mad Boy had replied jokily,

Dear J.F.

It was fun hearing from you again and reading it aloud to myself in that mellifluous voice of yours which I remember so well.

Jennifer and I long to come and see you, and receive your blessing. You might read The Bride of Corinth to us.

Yours ever,

Robert H. P.

Doubtless Gerald was intrigued to meet Niven, an ideal man of the times – matinée idol with bright blue eyes and pencil moustache, as well as courageous soldier. Like Robert, Niven was sexually voracious and had ignominiously left the Army following an early attempt to start a career there after school. Unlike Robert, Niven was famously debonair and witty; he knew exactly how to sing for his supper at Faringdon, tempering society gossip (Noël Coward was far from being the only mutual friend) with a cultured and informed appraisal of the war. He would see enough action – including the D-Day landings – to remove any illusions about the romance of war, and claimed that he was scarred for life by his experiences. Jennifer and Prim would have secluded themselves for ‘women’s talk’, probably sitting in Jennifer’s bedroom. Though Prim was two years younger, she was one step ahead with motherhood and Jennifer was very apprehensive about the birth. Prim must have been nonplussed by Jennifer’s choice of husband – she was more conventional and didn’t share Jennifer’s wild streak – but she was kind and encouraging. Her answers would have been soothing: ‘Don’t worry, darling. It doesn’t really hurt. The birth will soon be over. Think what fun we will have together with our babies.’

Jennifer went up to London for the delivery and was admitted to the London Clinic in Harley Street. Her labour was difficult and long, and in the end she was completely anaesthetised and forceps were used. When she woke up, there was a perfect baby girl. ‘All the nurses and doctors keep saying how pretty she is,’ she wrote to her father a few days later, ‘and I must say I think so! She has a mass of brown hair and huge eyes and very long eyelashes!’ No jokes then about whether the grandfather would like to drown this baby in a bucket of water for not being male. Robert rose to the occasion and arrived at the clinic by taxi from Covent Garden, having bought up what looked like half the flower market’s supply. He filled Jennifer’s room to overflowing with hothouse blooms and scented spring flowers. There is no record of the Mad Boy’s reaction to his daughter, but the general consensus was that he was a proud father. And nobody could deny that the baby was beautiful. They decided to call her Victoria – the name of Jennifer’s Aunt Vera, but also a tip of the cap to the old monarch whose presence was felt in so many offbeat ways at Faringdon, and whose name suggested the old-fashioned dignity and security that was lacking in the turbulent days of war.

‘I am feeling wonderfully well and am delighted with my daughter who really is very sweet,’ continued Jennifer to Sir Geoffrey, although it wasn’t actually so easy. The new mother tried to breastfeed but the baby didn’t appear to be drinking well. The nurses weighed her before and after each feed and announced she was not putting on the required ounces. The challenge was enough to make anyone feel tense if not impotent and Jennifer was accustomed to being seen as inadequate since childhood. After three days, she gave up trying and little Victoria was given a bottle. Sugar was added to soothe the baby and cod liver oil for good measure. Jennifer later confessed that she had cried for three days at her failure.362

When mother and child returned to Faringdon after a couple of weeks, Jennifer’s former bedroom had been turned into the nursery and she moved into the Red Room across the landing, which had its own bathroom. A green baize door was put up to close off this section of the first floor and to muffle the sounds of the infant’s cries. Jennifer wrote to thank her mother for another ‘wonderful present’ (i.e. money) and to say she hoped her relationship with Victoria would be as special as hers with Alathea.

I’ve so much to tell you I don’t know where to begin. First of all the Nanny is an angel, though I hardly dare say it so soon. She’s obviously completely reliable and very intelligent too, about feeding etc – as she discovered poor little Victoria’s tummy was very upset, and her bottom was terribly sore as a result, so she has taken her off the sugar and cod liver oil and she is better already. They really should have told me all this in the Clinic and not sent her home in that state. I am thankful to have Nanny, as she is so sensible and is marvellous with the servants – Mrs Law, the cook, is mad about her, and can’t do enough to help her! I hardly dare say all this so soon, but my fingers are crossed.

The Nursery is the prettiest room I’ve ever seen. I can’t wait for you to see it, and Victoria looks so sweet in her cot. She has been lying out in the sun in her huge pram, and looks very well and beautiful

… It’s looking too beautiful here. The garden full of primulas of every colour, and grape hyacinths everywhere.

The head gardener [Mr Morris] has just died and now we have no gardeners at all except an old man, who’s really the woodman, and there’s such a lot to do at the moment – it’s very worrying, and we can’t get a land girl as there’s nowhere to billet her. How I wish we could get someone like Ackland [the gardener at Oare], but I suppose that’s too much to hope for.

In the event, the nanny didn’t turn out to be such an angel and there were several others over the first year or so. Baby manuals explained the ‘proper’ way to care for babies, which was a strict feeding regime on a four-hourly cycle, plenty of lying outside in a pram to get fresh air, and a strict avoidance of ‘spoiling’ their character by too much indulgence. This approach was not a natural one for Jennifer’s lenient character, but the nannies tended to make sure that both mother and baby accepted that ‘Nanny knows best’. Having been accustomed to this mantra since her own childhood, it was easy for Jennifer to surrender to Nanny’s command. Each time the nannies were sent away, Pixie was sent for to help out until a replacement was found.

CECIL BEATON’S PHOTOGRAPH OF THE NEW FAMILY WITH THEIR NANNY

If Robert had rejected Jennifer in the early months of their marriage, they appear to have established a modus vivendi after their daughter’s birth. Robert was busy on the farm and now that Mr Morris had died, he had to solve the problem of the gardens too. Jennifer was inevitably wrapped up with Victoria, even if she had help, and there were various visitors who came to stay and to admire the baby. It was Gerald’s reaction, however, that was the most surprising. During all his years at Faringdon there had been exotic bird calls, avant-garde music and, recently, the Yankee twang of American soldiers trooping up the back staircase, but none produced as unfamiliar, even disconcerting a sound in the house as a tiny baby’s cry. Gerald loved animals, but a mewling newborn was far beyond his remit. Some of his friends had children, but they were not of particular interest to him. (He would surely have chuckled in agreement with Nancy Mitford’s bon mot, ‘I love children – especially when they cry, for then someone takes them away.’) The green baize door had seemed like the erection of a barrier between him and the baby, but then something unforeseen happened: he liked the little girl. It helped that she looked so lovely, but it was surely heartening to see this new life, tucked under lacy blankets in her impressively sprung Rolls-Royce of a perambulator and pushed along the drive for walks. Gerald felt old, there was a war that seemed to be destroying everything he loved, but here was a small sign of hope.

‘Gerald was unexpectedly nice to babies,’ remembered Billa. ‘When Victoria was a child he was frightfully good and nice. I remember him discovering how to get the pram up the front steps. Can you imagine it? I remember him saying, “I’ve discovered how to do it by turning it around.” It was so unexpected of Gerald.’363 Friends were flabbergasted. Lord Berners pushing a pram! Whatever next?

Gerald asked Cecil Beaton to come and take pictures. Back from one of his many trips as a war photographer, Cecil swallowed his dislike of the ‘Horrid Mad Boy’ and obliged, setting up tableaux to capture the essence of this implausible new family. The props were familiar objects – a gilt cockerel, the portrait of Henry VIII that was ‘after Hans Holbein’, exquisite flowers that always flooded the house in the good old days and still managed to put in an appearance. In some of the pictures, the baby is held by her father or mother, who are both handsome but tense.

GERALD WITH VICTORIA. ‘GERALD WAS UNEXPECTEDLY NICE TO BABIES’, SAID BILLA

In some pictures Gerald takes on a grandfatherly mien. Sporting one of Mrs Beazley’s knitted skullcaps, he cradles the frothy-dressed little girl in his arms. This is the nearest he could ever come to having his own child or grandchild and he was enjoying it. The Sketch published some of the photographs under the title ‘Faringdon House-Party: Lord Berners and the Heber-Percys’. Robert and Jennifer (in giant sun-hat) are shown with the pram, his hand over hers on the handlebar. Cecil was probably revelling in directing them for his camera, forcing the Mad Boy to act like a responsible father, yet revealing the strain between the parents. Jennifer and Robert are looking in different directions, appearing almost stranded in a sunny tangle of overgrown garden by the orangery that Mr Morris’s demise had left like a romantic, eighteenth-century wilderness.