The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me (34 page)

The first mystery is Anna Karenina. Why is Jennifer recalling the famous horse-race scene, where Vronsky falls and his beloved dark mare is injured and has to be shot? Could Jennifer have seen Robert ride and fall at the Grand National in 1937? Might they have had some sort of relationship then? It is hard to associate Jennifer and Robert with such an intense love story as Tolstoy’s, but perhaps there was a time of high passion. ‘The pain’ is surely Robert’s rejection after the wedding, and ‘the speechlessness’ with the ‘Famous, Renowned and old’ sounds like a Faringdon re-run of what Jennifer had suffered at her father’s dining table in her youth. It must have been a strain making conversation at dinner with the Princesse de Polignac or various Sitwell siblings, when Robert was sulking across the table and she would have preferred a quiet evening to talk to her reluctant husband, or at least an escape to a party with cocktails and dancing.

Half a lifetime after the events, Jennifer appreciated the small kindnesses of Frederick Ashton and Maurice Bowra (albeit with ‘slight but loving malice’). The ‘three in bed’ sounds as though it might be with Robert and someone else, but is anyone’s guess, and the herbs and ‘the Toy’ remain unexplained. The van became a symbol of Jennifer’s ignominious departure – a sign that she was packed off with her baby, flung out into a world of war and uncertainties without ceremony. This story became a tragicomic one, repeated over the years by Jennifer and then Victoria, the bathos marking the finale to their Faringdon era. The most painful sentence is the part referring to Jennifer’s intimate belongings that she forgot to pack. How did she find out about Cecil Beaton and Clarissa Churchill reading the letters and laughing? Jennifer was well aware that Clarissa did not appreciate her presence at Faringdon, but after all she had suffered, the image of the two friends cackling as they leafed through her silken knickers to fish out her most private, hidden correspondence must have been a devastating humiliation. Perhaps it was not like that at all, but the shameful, burning soreness it left is clear.

Jennifer had sent a telegram to her parents, and although Oare was closed up, they made a part of it available to her. She and Victoria were not to be alone; Billa and her two young sons, Henry and Dominick (aged five and four), were to join them there, leaving Roy behind in Oxford. He would be able to go over for some weekends and the arrangement would not only provide Jennifer and Victoria with company but give the young boys some space and country air. Billa’s letters to her husband indicate that they were installed at Oare by mid-July and the leitmotif is ‘poor Jennifer!’ with just a touch of irony.

Poor Jennifer has got Victoria on her hands now, & the daily who cooks the breakfast has been called up. However I think we shall get someone else. The village are very shocked because we have 3 dailies. It is quite absurd as they only come for a few hours each. Anyhow I don’t care if they die of shock, so long as I don’t have to work! Yesterday we made some lovely strawberry jam … Poor Jennifer is very exhausted having had to look after Victoria for a fortnight which makes me laugh! Luckily her nanny comes on Saturday.374

The house may have been mostly closed, but the two mothers and their three children made themselves at home for the best part of the next year. Each time the nannies left, Jennifer sent urgent telegrams to Pixie begging her to come and help – which she did. Despite being out in the middle of the Wiltshire countryside, they were not isolated. American soldiers came over in Jeeps to take Jennifer and Billa to parties and there were expeditions to Stonehenge and Avebury. Prim and David Niven visited when David was on leave, bringing their son with them, and Violet Wyndham was close by and remained a treasured and broad-minded friend in whom Jennifer could confide. At Oare, they kept donkeys, made quince jelly and went for walks along the lanes that Jennifer had loved as a child. When their old friends Peter and Glur Quennell visited, they cooked jugged hare, using the blood, according to the traditional recipe. When the bottom fell out of the casserole, they merely scraped up the dark stew and served it as though nothing had happened. The two women were thrown into a panic when ‘Sir Geoff’ came to stay in his own home, and he cannot have been thrilled by the idea of three noisy children, though he always liked his only granddaughter. Indeed, according to some, Victoria was the only person in the family who was not afraid of him.

VICTORIA WITH JENNIFER AT OARE

Robert sometimes came over to visit, acting as though everything was perfectly normal. He felt guilty as well as relieved at his failure to make a good husband and father. Jennifer was less resilient, and Billa was known to snap: ‘Do stop bursting into tears.’375 Billa confessed to Roy that she herself was not always happy at Oare. ‘I get terrible moods of horror about myself and see myself as ugly, useless, unpopular etc which is all just absurd and unreasonable as I have got endless devoted friends.’ She also had to cancel one of Roy’s visits in late September because Jennifer was miserable: ‘I don’t see much hope of the weekend as though I have hinted dozens of times Jennifer is in a very depressed state and says she doesn’t want anyone for the weekend. It seems such a shame as the weather is lovely and it really is heavenly here.’

It was not long, however, before Jennifer acquired a lover; she might even have met him before she left Faringdon – the timing is unknown. Michael (‘Mickey’) Luke was a handsome boy of nineteen. The son of a diplomat, he had left Eton the previous year and was commissioned into the Rifle Brigade where he learned to drive tanks and work big guns. According to the story, a duty officer spotted him reading Proust and quickly transferred him to military intelligence instead. His black wartime witticism ‘It’s awfully chic to be killed’ was used by Anthony Powell in A Dance to the Music of Time, but some found him ‘too charming for his own good’.376 He and Jennifer were soon embroiled in a passionate affair.

Billa’s letters to Roy describe the early trysts. ‘Our little soldier came to dinner last night, he writes poetry and draws, both very badly but is so sweet, just like an undergraduate. We cooked some salmon for dinner which Jenny had bought in London.’ On a later occasion, ‘Mickey stayed nearly a week; how he gets so much leave no one knows. He is a dear boy, so sweet and sensitive and angelic with the children.’

When the situation with nannies allowed, Jennifer would dash up to London for crazy nights with Mickey at the Gargoyle Club. All the usual suspects would be there, watched over by Brian Howard, ‘forked tongue and cloven hoof, swivelling on a bar-stool waiting to release his unexpended venom on suitable prey’.377 On one occasion, Jennifer and Mickey arrived, with Mickey in the Rifle Brigade’s dress uniform, to be greeted by Howard: ‘How wonderful to see you, Jennifer. And you’ve brought your chauffeur!’378 He might have been young, but Mickey had fallen deeply in love. Although Jennifer loved him too, it was never an easy relationship. He became increasingly obsessed, threatening suicide if he couldn’t see her and throwing jealous scenes because she would not commit herself more fully. If Robert had been stand-offish and cold, Mickey took things to the other extreme.

Billa quickly became disenchanted with Jennifer’s ‘young man’; the couple’s heavy drinking and what she called ‘misbehaviour’ became tiresome. It was clear that Mickey wanted Jennifer all to himself, to the extent that he was sometimes even jealous of Victoria. Billa also found the explicitly erotic nature of the relationship hard to cope with – Mickey had transformed their cosy matriarchal household into something unstable and combustible. Once, Francis Wyndham was visiting Jennifer at Oare when she was getting dressed up to go to London to meet Mickey. Francis and Billa admired Jennifer’s clothes and she laughed: ‘Of course, it will all be torn off when I get there.’ Billa looked revolted and said to Francis, ‘Isn’t sex disgusting!’ ‘Billa was very possessive about Jennifer’, recalled Francis. ‘She was bossy but adoring – it was a very unequal relationship … Jennifer was very liberated and enlightened on sex … and Billa was jealous of Mickey.’379

While Jennifer was starting to enjoy life again with her young soldier, Robert was doing very much the same thing himself. At around the time that Billa’s first letter was sent from Oare in July 1944, a dark-haired, twenty-six-year-old officer called Hugh Cruddas began signing himself into the Faringdon visitors’ book. Robert had met Captain Cruddas in London, possibly at some sort of military reunion, and was taken with the sweet-natured young man. Hughie, as he was known, was the son of a lieutenant colonel in the Indian Medical Service. He had been wounded in the leg, then captured in North Africa in 1941, then imprisoned in an Italian POW camp near Parma. When Italy surrendered in 1943, he and many others escaped into the nearby hills before the Nazis arrived to escort the prisoners to Germany. Along with two companions, Hughie walked the 500 miles down through German-occupied Italy to reach the Allies in Bari. Back in England, he had got engaged to Juliet Heygate, a twenty-four-year-old RADA-trained actress who had been a driver and then a subaltern in the Army. But in early June 1944 a notice was placed in The Times: ‘The marriage arranged between Captain H. Cruddas and Miss Juliet Heygate will not now take place.’ It seems possible that the Mad Boy played some part in this cancellation.

‘Gerald couldn’t have minded Hugh Cruddas because he was so sweet, nice and pleasant,’ remembered Clarissa. ‘He wouldn’t have impinged.’ If Clarissa had not been impressed by Jennifer, she was no more so by Hugh, though he was easier to stomach: ‘He was a sort of non-character as far as I was concerned.’380 Hugh’s gentle ways and good nature quickly made him a regular visitor and then a part of the household. ‘The Captain’ (as he was known by estate staff) had many practical attributes, including an interest in arranging flowers, and he was famous for mixing marvellous Bloody Marys. It wasn’t long before he was taken on as ‘Farm Manager’, with his name printed on the Berners Estates Company paper, but he would never achieve anything like an equal partnership with Robert. The Mad Boy was soon treating Hughie badly, as he seemed to with almost anyone he was close to, yet he didn’t quite break up the relationship.

Maurice Bowra, in a characteristically mischievous yet intriguing analysis, commented on this new Faringdon set-up with a Shakespearean parallel. He suggested that if Gerald could be viewed as King Lear, Robert and Hughie were Goneril and Regan, the two ruthlessly grasping, older daughters, while Clarissa was Cordelia, the virtuous, loyal youngest. John Betjeman would be cast as the Fool.381 Although it was an acidic joke, there must have been those who thought that Robert was abusing Gerald’s love for him by bringing first a wife and then a boyfriend to Faringdon. There is no sign, however, that Gerald was upset by this domestic development; indeed some have suggested that he took rather a liking to the fresh-faced captain, even to the extent of annoying Robert. When Hughie went to Tripoli in Lebanon, Gerald wrote him a letter which shows no sign of jealousy or tension: ‘Is it very Oriental or just sordid and suburban? Beverley Nichols was here last weekend. He taught Robert Backgammon which is maddening as Robert is trying to teach me and I think it is the most boring game in the world and anyway I can’t count. Robert misses you very much and whines as poor Shine [a dog] did when Robert was out of the room.’

Later, there is evidence that Hughie provided a useful element in Faringdon’s second, but longer-lasting, menage a trois – as the butt of jokes. Both Robert and Gerald were inveterate, sometimes cruel, teasers and it was irresistible to pick on the genial Hughie. In 1948, Gerald wrote to Diana Mosley, mentioning her older sister: ‘Nancy has I’m afraid been rather naughty making mischief with Hugh. She told him a lot of things that Robert and I were supposed to have said about him which, even if we had said them ought not to have been repeated. But, as David Herbert said, all one’s friends do make mischief. With Nancy I think it is “anything for a shriek!”’

HEN PEACE WAS DECLARED in May 1945, Gerald and Robert were at Faringdon with guests for lunch. Elizabeth Bowen described the scene as the fountain on the back lawn was turned on for the first time since 1939:

After lunch we all went out and stood on the terrace; Robert did something to the fountain; there was a breathless pause, then a jet of water, at first a little rusty, hesitated up into the air, wobbled then separated into four curved feathers of water. It was so beautiful and so sublimely symbolic – with the long view, the miles of England, stretching away behind it, that I found myself weeping. I think a fountain is much nicer than a bonfire; if less democratic.382

The end of war gave hope for some sort of fresh start in a country that had changed so drastically over six exhausting, tragic years. And yet, despite the relief, joy and dancing in the streets, much of the bleak, frugal atmosphere continued. There was a sense of disorientation for many who had been used to living on the edge, ready for death or disaster. Now, there was a vacuum. Cyril Connolly was deeply gloomy about post-war England: ‘Most of us are not men or women but members of a vast seedy, overworked neuter class, with our drab clothes, our ration books and murder stories, our envious, stricken, old-world apathies and resentments – a careworn people.’383 With Attlee’s Labour government voted in, some believed that the era of the grand country house was over. The buildings were often dilapidated, the owners had run out of money, taxes had been hiked up to bewilderingly high levels for the better-off, and staff who had left to join the armed services didn’t usually want to go back to domestic service. There was a sense that the rigid class divisions of the first half of the century could not continue in a modern society that was developing a proper welfare state and free health care for everyone.

At Faringdon it was possible to cut back without doing anything too radical. The house in London was sold and via Foro Romano was let. Faringdon itself was a mignon country estate and had always had an unkempt edge. ‘Any room of Gerald’s would be in the same muddle,’ remarked Robert.384 ‘There was luxury but it was rather uncomfortable,’ remembered Rachel Cecil, who often came over with her husband from Oxford. ‘It wasn’t very grand or highly organised. Things were quite in a mess … A very pretty room but it wasn’t quite like a bedroom. You’d have nowhere to hang your clothes.’385 The house didn’t need large numbers of servants to function perfectly well and in any case there were evidently enough local men who returned from the armed forces and needed employment.