Cherry (41 page)

Ashton habitually played the role of man of the family. The canon was dead, and except for Mildred, Peter’s wife, the sisters were husbandless. (Until Cherry married, Ashton’s son, also Peter, was the heir to Lamer.)

On hearing the news, he announced authoritatively that his brother-in-law should be in a mental home. Soon he was crunching up the drive with Mr Webb, a solicitor at Farrers’, and Dr Henry Yellowlees, OBE, physician for mental diseases at St Thomas’s Hospital in London, lecturer in psychological medicine and Harley Street consultant.

The grim little group gathered under Loch Tulla, sipping tea and waiting for Yellowlees to pronounce while Ashton, his jaw set, jabbed the fire with the poker and sized up the furniture. The identification of neurophysiological and neurochemical factors in psychotic disorders was a long way off. Diagnosis depended not on science but on handwriting. Yellowlees gravely asked the patient if he would care to write a line or two. The gently sloping hand with which Cherry contentedly obliged was all the evidence Yellowlees needed to diagnose ‘general paralysis of the insane’. Antipsychotic medication did not yet exist, and the three visitors agreed that immediate incarceration was the only solution. Yellowlees already had a mental hospital in mind. It was The Retreat in distant York, a pre-Victorian asylum where he had served as physician superintendent.
⁵⁸

Angela, intimidated and afraid, felt certain that the harmless delusions would pass without intervention, but after another visit from the tyrannical Webb she understood that she was in danger of being overpowered. In desperation she set out down the avenue of limes and hurried over to the old rectory, where an appalled Charlotte propelled her along the garden path to the revolving hut, where they found the master sitting in his wicker chair at his flap-top table in the glow of the electric heater, fingering his portable typewriter. He had never heard such rot. Inserting a fresh sheet into the portable, he clacked off a sharp letter to Webb and Yellowlees for Angela to copy out. After insisting that Cherry was not mental-hospital fodder, the letter ended, ‘Please stop coming here.’ When he had whipped out the sheet he looked up at Angela. ‘I’m going to add a PS saying Yellowlees is a bloody fool!’ he said with a glint in his eye. It was the only time she ever heard him swear.

‘The Shaws were wonderful,’ Angela remembered. ‘They turned it from something nightmarish into something quite manageable. They were so normal and nice.’

A week later she went to London for a meeting with Webb, Ashton and Yellowlees, accompanied, for moral support, by her father and Noël, who first took her for a fortifying lunch at Marshall and Snelgrove’s department store. On Christmas Eve she rang Yellowlees and told him she didn’t want to see him again. ‘You may think you are doing the best thing for your husband,’ he retorted, ‘but in fact you are doing the worst.’ Soon afterwards she received a letter from Webb that ended, ‘We should be so upset if anything were to happen to you’, implying that Cherry might murder her.

Webb continued to telephone, Ashton to insist and Yellowlees to send in his bills, and then they all gave up. As for Cherry, he quickly recovered. He never knew about the intervention of the Shaws, and had a memory blackout covering the whole delusional period. Some months later, when someone mentioned Pearl Harbor, he was amazed to hear of it.

The live-in staff disappeared, called elsewhere by the remorseless demands of war, and the Cherry-Garrards were left with only a daily. Angela mastered the solid fuel Aga, learned to operate the water pump and made her own butter, a quarter of a pound at a time. They both liked it when the daily went home and they were alone. Evelyn was baffled at the idea of surviving at Lamer without the platoon of servants she had deployed. ‘But who brings you your tea in the morning?’ she wrote incredulously to Angela. ‘We think you are a very wonderful person,’ she wrote again when she heard that Angela had helped with the fundraising for ‘Wings for Victory’ week and joined the village branch of the Women’s Volunteer Service, ‘and how you get through that amount of work I cannot imagine.’

The winter of 1941/2 was another severe one, and Cherry had trouble with his hip. He had been prescribed poultices, which had to be scooped from the tin, heated and applied with a spatula. This, like everything else, was Angela’s job, and the wretched poultice was always either too hot or too cold. ‘We think he [Apsley] is very lucky to have you,’ wrote Evelyn, though she had no idea just how lucky. Besides his hip, for months he could hardly write because of the arthritis in his fingers. His spirits lowered. Angela would lure him into the village with promises of something interesting to see, but he had never enjoyed playing lord of the manor and was increasingly uncomfortable in the role. His waistline had thickened, his skin was a matt grey and he began to shamble. Still only in his late fifties, he behaved like an old man, and looked like one too, though his hair, distinguished now with grey wings, remained thick and full for many years. In his dealings with Raymond he was markedly less in control, and when the publisher suggested another edition, Cherry wrote wanly, ‘I have thought it over carefully and feel that it is best to leave it. I am sorry.’

He went down to London each week to be treated at a Harley Street practice with radiant heat massage, another course of injections and physiotherapy from a woman who kept bees on the roof. After an especially bad bout of arthritis he took to carrying a hot-water bottle around with him, and this was soon followed by an inflatable rubber ring which enabled him to sit without discomfort.

They were not permitted to stay at the Berkeley for more than a week, as wartime regulations forbade it, so Cherry decided to rent a flat near Harley Street, despite the fact that most people were trying to move out of London, not into it. On a damp and sooty autumn afternoon in 1942 he and Angela looked at several possibilities in the nine-storey Dorset House in Gloucester Place, on the southern edge of Regent’s Park and the northern edge of the West End. A colossal structure built on an acre of the Portman estate, Dorset House was like a liner sailing magisterially north, its geometric, blocky façade and banked curves the epitome of thirties chic. The main entrance was dominated by two large carved stone reliefs called
Eating
and
Washing
, which depicted stylised figures engaged in those domestic activities. They were the work of Eric Gill, one of the finest English craftsmen of the twentieth century. The Dorset House board of directors had vetoed Gill’s other two suggestions,
Sleeping
and
Drinking
, on the grounds that the images might be morally suspect.

Small, modern flats were in fashion in the thirties. A survey in the
Financial Times
which featured Dorset House began, ‘The large private house in the West End has seen its day’, and went on to assert that these flats reflected ‘a new mode of living’. Built by the famous property man Claude Leigh and opened in 1935, Dorset House had been marketed as ‘London’s most up-to-date block’. The 185 flats were aimed at wealthy types who had better things to do than eat in, and as a result they all had poky little kitchens. ‘Optional Service will solve all your servant and entertaining problems’, ran the advertisements. Despite a trace of snobbery over its unfortunate location north of the park (Hyde, of course), Dorset House still attracted theatrical people and minor members of the royal family. One day a year or two later, as Cherry and Angela waited on a couch in the hall for Shaw to arrive, King George and Queen Elizabeth marched in. Cherry leapt to his feet, shoving his rubber ring down into the couch. The royal couple sailed past and entered the lift, on their way to dinner with a cousin who lived on the ninth floor.

The vast building was empty. Because of its multitudinous wings and winglets it did not have miles of institutional corridors smelling of Jeyes cleaning fluid. It was a friendly place, with attractive modern features such as central heating and letter chutes in which tenants could deposit their mail. The Cherry-Garrards chose No. 23 East, a sixth-floor, one-bedroom flat underneath Bertrand Russell, his third wife Patricia Spence, known as ‘Peter’, and their small son Conrad. It was going at the controlled rent of £220 a year. The small living room had two sets of floor-to-ceiling bay windows, one set looking out onto Gloucester Place, then a two-way street. Outside, an ornamental balcony with green metal railings overlooked the roof terrace of the first-floor flats, Dorset Square and the increasingly skeletal London skyline beyond. The other windows faced Melcombe Street and the grey rooftops to the north, including that of the Alliance Française, under which the exiled de Gaulle was making his wartime broadcasts.

Like a cruise ship, the building was self-contained. The ground floor was encircled by small shops that included a newsagent, a fishmonger, a chemist and a grocer with a dairy to which milk was delivered by pony and cart. On the other side of Gill’s figures, porters sat in a cubby-hole adjacent to a spacious art deco entrance hall lined with couches, and glass double doors opened onto a restaurant with murals of rural scenes under which a bridge club met on Thursdays. Cherry liked it all very much. At last he had another little hut, without any responsibilities.

So they started a new life in London in a harsh year on the home front. Cherry’s Winchester contemporary Stafford Cripps, recently promoted to the War Cabinet, banned motoring for pleasure. A limit of five shillings was imposed on restaurant meals (though this was frequently evaded), sporting events were curtailed, soap was rationed to a bar a month and the icing of cakes was forbidden. But the hotels, swarming with American soldiers, still held dances, and Londoners queued outside cinemas to watch
Casablanca
or Noël Coward’s
In Which We Serve
. Cherry perked up. On Saturday afternoons he went to the Athenaeum and sat among the purple faces and salt-and-pepper suits. In the unaccustomed darkness of the blackout he and Angela walked gingerly through the quiet West End streets to literary events with Harold and Vera Raymond, and on Sunday afternoons they went to concerts at the Wigmore Hall. They watched the restricted wartime cricket at Lord’s, just a few minutes’ walk from Dorset House, and took the tube to Wimbledon for the odd tennis match: ‘He loved showing me things he had seen alone before he met me,’ Angela remembered. ‘It was fun being married to him. Between his illnesses he really enjoyed life. He could be such a happy person.’ With Pussy and Jasper Harker, their most faithful visitors, they strolled up Gloucester Place and, slipping through the circle of white stuccoed Nash terraces, into Regent’s Park and over the footbridge to the rose bushes of Queen Mary’s Garden. There, all through the war, they watched short-trousered boys playing at rescuing their mothers from burning houses. In the evenings they sat by the Bertrand Russells under the restaurant’s friezes, eating tinned sausages and swimmy vegetables followed by dry pastry tarts with ersatz cream.

Angela went to Soho on the underground, the tunnelled walls of the stations plastered with imitation Cubist advertisements, and queued for the dark coffee Cherry liked. GBS walked across town for tea when he came out of hiding in Ayot; the porters loved to see his loping figure at their cubby-hole. When there was no butter to be found, which was often, Angela made him macaroons from unrationed peanut butter, and they soon became a leitmotif with GBS, permanently on the lookout for a target for his merciless jokes, although he always ate the macaroons. The three of them sat around the wireless to hear the latest news from the front. The reports had become part of the fabric of their lives, and so had Tommy Handley’s breathless slapstick
ITMA
(
It’s That Man Again
).

They spent increasingly long periods in London, returning rarely to Lamer, where the estate staff thought they must have gone quite mad. Jim Hyde had taken over from his father as gardener and handyman, and he went down to London by train to deliver fruit, vegetables and pheasants to flat 23. Angela missed Lamer. She would casually mention that the rhododendron that flowered like a crinoline must be in bloom, or wonder if the woodpecker was loitering by the summer house, trying to tempt Cherry back to Hertfordshire. It seldom worked.

When the sirens went off they heard the clicking footsteps of the woman in the flat opposite as she fled to Baker Street tube station in her high heels, but they sat it out. A few small incendiary bombs fell on the roof, though they caused only a small amount of damage. Dorset House was a steel-framed building promoted for its safety (‘
WARTIME WORRIES SOLVED
’), and Cherry was quite unconcerned about the planes that throbbed overhead. He was much too preoccupied by his injections and, at a more profound level, by the inner battlefield. That held greater terrors than all the bombs in the world. What else would have induced him to move to the capital at a time when every other free man in the country was doing all he could to get out of it? He picked his way to Harley Street among shards of glass and clouds of brick dust, past Queen Anne houses with the walls ripped off that boldly displayed their private life to a distracted world. The row of cottages opposite Dorset House had been bombed in the Blitz, and the workmen setting up a water supply in the ruins found a cat living in the rubbly sockets. Lazarus, as he was named, would cross Gloucester Place and stroll into Dorset House to mew outside the doors of the flats. He soon became the tyrant of No. 23. At night, sprawled on the carpet, he made protesting noises when the gas fire became too hot for him, and Angela was obliged to get up and turn it down.

The difficulties of wartime travelling gave Cherry the perfect excuse to avoid family events. Of his five sisters he saw least of Edith, who continued to flit between churches, handing out money and accosting strangers to ask if they had been saved. The second eldest of the sisters, Elsie, a devoted employee of the Church Army, was at least staunchly Anglican. To general astonishment, when she was well into her fifties she announced that she was to be married. Like Lassie thirty years before her, she wed a vicar (Peter Ashton gave her away), and she settled down with her Fred to a happy old age in a cottage in Bramley in Surrey, he doing the cooking and she the gardening. Cherry was surprised to discover that he liked his new brother-in-law.