The Girl from Station X (12 page)

The errant females, in their modern get-up, represented the emancipation that Anne would not experience herself for several years.

In August 1930, Anne was treated to another holiday, on Brioni, a fashionable island on the Adriatic side of Italy which was later taken over by Tito and used as his summer
residence. On Brioni, Anne developed another crush, on Mary, an American girl staying at the hotel with her sister. Mary sounds similar to Lady Ann – delicate and faun-like. Lady Ann’s
fan and ostrich feather were green and Mary’s eyes were
greeny hazel flecked with brown very expressive, always looked rather sorrowful.

Anne seems to have fallen head-over-heels for Mary, but only after Mary left – she had never actually spoken to her.
Oh dear I am
so
upset, my darling little American girl really has gone . . . I do want my Mary.
She went on to describe Mary in great detail, from memory:

very daintily made, eyebrows small thin but unplucked, eyelashes rather long, nose longish and straight, a well shaped small pretty little mouth, pretty teeth and a
pretty smile . . . quiet and inconspicuous. Her hair was done in a small bun fairly low down behind with curly bits coming over her ears . . . It was her smallness and delicateness that made her so
attractive with a small dainty face and pretty expression and she
must
be nice as she helped Lena
[a friend of both my mother and
grandmother]
oil her back without being asked to do it. Her colouring was rather pale though sunburned to a charming colour. I loved her so much I
do
wish she hadn’t gone.

Anne rhapsodised about Mary’s clothes:
a black lace dress with which she wore longish diamond earrings and a diamond necklace, a yellow chiffon evening dress, a pink afternoon
dress and a green Jantsein bathing suit with low back and dark green trousers (all in one) and white painted on belt and a green cap to match, besides beach suits.

An hour or so after Mary’s departure, Anne searched her empty cabin –
all I found was remains of Olio di Noce and 2 cigarette ends, I examined them.

This action, which to others might seem pathetic, came across to me as frighteningly predatory, in the light of other disturbing things that I half-knew about my mother and her secret longings
for members of her own sex. And indeed, the sixteen-year-old admitted:
it
is
funny how I have absolute passions for people I have never
even spoken to and I feel
so
miserable when they leave.

That same morning at Brioni, a young man broke his neck by diving into two feet of water. The diary’s reaction seems a bit callous – Anne writes more than once that she cannot
understand why he had dived just there and expresses irritation that an American guest, who didn’t know him, wept on the hotel housekeeper’s shoulder. However, the details that she
records – the man
limp and unconscious . . . bleeding . . . I felt sick
(her stepfather helped wash him before he was taken away; later they heard that he had died)
– imply that the incident made more of an impression on her than she admitted. Certainly, she often told me this story and warned me against ever diving without first checking the
water’s depth.

Anne’s long summer holiday continued. In late August 1930 – bemoaning her departure from
darling Brioni
– she and her mother and Chow travelled to
Ireland, to the coming of age of John McGillycuddy in County Kerry. This was the John who, for many years when I was a child and adolescent, would stay at 40 Belgrave Square while working for
Schweppes – his wife was in Ireland running his inherited estate.

After that, Anne and her mother and Chow proceeded to the Highlands to fish; Aunt K, then Angela from Sussex, joined them. Here is my mother, aged sixteen, in September 1930, five months after
being taken away from Queen’s Gate School, writing about herself during that long fishing holiday:

September 1st 1930.

Angela beat me 21–15 in the Ping Pong Tournament, I got in an awful temper and was beastly to everyone especially her, I felt miserable and I knew how badly I
was behaving too and yet I was too proud to show that I was wrong and had to wait till the others approached me first, I really have
the
most
loathsome character, I can’t think why anyone likes me at all . . . I am spoilt that is the truth of it, thoroughly spoilt and selfish only thinking of self self self all the time and how
badly treated I am and how I hate everyone else, I can see all this bad in myself and yet I make no effort whatsoever to stop it and behave better.

There is no more mention in the diary of American Mary.

I
n October 1930, Anne’s first term began at Madame Boni’s finishing school in Rome; these establishments, where girls from privileged
families would learn languages and be given a background of art and culture, were a rite of passage.

At Madame Boni’s Anne was kept busy getting to know the other girls, studying Italian and French, and going on outings, cultural and otherwise. She and fellow pupils shopped for presents
for a classmate’s birthday, thereby learning the Italian words for ‘address book’ and ‘silk’. They strolled in the Borghese Gardens and were taken picnicking to Ostia,
the ancient part of Rome, where Anne was particularly fascinated by the remains of Turkish baths with their heating apparatus. In the evenings she romanced about a pretty woman and her husband whom
she and her two roommates could see from their window:

October 18th. 1930. Madame Boni’s, Rome.

Last night we had great fun, it started by my seeing a quite nice looking Italian officer looking pensively out of a window opposite, presently we saw he was joined
by a girl of perhaps 20 or so, with fair hair and a fair skin, small, about the size of Peggie with a very pretty slight figure, she was rather pretty as far as we could see and looked rather
American, certainly
not
Italian, they talked together and then went in, of course we were thrilled scenting a romance at once, she came and looked
out of the window several times, she was biting her fingers and looked extremely worried, she had a ring with some blue stone, I think it was a sapphire and diamond ring on the fourth finger of her
left hand, she wore a tweed dress with hat to match. We can see a bedroom with two beds in it and we saw her unpacking assisted by a maid and patting down the beds in a most professional style,
another room we believe to be the dining room and third on the left a sitting room. I can see both the dining and bedroom from my bed. They are really rather exciting, we think they arrived last
night and that they had a terrific love affair and married against the will of their parents and this is the beginning of their married life, she is either English or American we
think.

October 24th 1930. Madame Boni’s.

I saw the young American wife opposite last night, she was staring out on the street in the same terribly melancholy and unhappy worried way that she always does,
she was dressed in black. I am
sure
that they are very unhappy she always looks as though she were going to cry any minute and at the Tennis he was
sitting on a seat with the little American, I know
not
his wife. No: I am now sure she is sorry that she married a foreigner and he is sorry
too.

Anne obviously enjoyed these speculations, usually about young women she hardly knew, and making up stories about them. There was that earlier reference in her diary of January 1930 to a story
that she had composed with her schoolfriend Noreen. She had also written a play called
The House Party
– my grandmother had made some suggestions for the plot.

And in Rome Anne’s curiosity about other worlds meant that she was not satisfied with mixing only with her English and American fellow pupils. She quickly expressed in the diary a longing
to meet some young Italians and, at the riding school, she made friends with Minervina, a half-Italian Catholic girl of her own age who led a protected life.

November 19th 1930.

I had a long discussion with her on religion. She told me that the Catholics believed in hell, purgatory and Paradise and that if you committed a mortal sin such as
murder or not going to church when you ought to (This is really one!) you went to hell and once there you could
never
get out. (God, what a thought,
I don’t believe there could be a God like that, I said so and she said yes, He was just.) She also believes that her sins are absolutely forgiven after she has confessed and she feels very
light hearted afterwards. I asked her what you said at confession and she said Oh things like ‘I have been disobedient’ . . . I’m sure she wants me to become a Catholic but not
for me, how could I believe in a God who sent one to hell for ever and ever? It is entirely against my ideas of God. She advised me that if I married a Catholic to study the Catholic religion and
then change if I like it better, and stay my own if I preferred it. Her mother was Protestant and became Catholic. She tried to impress upon me that sins really were forgiven if you confessed them
because you feel so happy afterwards; perhaps they are, if you believe. I don’t know.

My mother would have been brought up a Catholic if her Irish grandfather Michael had not lapsed. I was impressed by the way she was thinking for herself. Her curiosity about other religions was
evidence of an enquiring mind.

She also seemed to enjoy wholeheartedly the Italian culture and history she was introduced to at Madame Boni’s. The girls were taken to the opera, and to Venice and Florence, where Anne
enthused about the Medici collection:
vases, pots of precious stones inlaid with enormous pearls, emeralds, rubies etc. Tables of mosaic with pearls inlaid, little animals made of pearl
and precious stones, the richness and marvellous workmanship of the whole collection is indescribable, suffice it to say that I was simply astounded by it all.

I was struck by this passage, which showed the sixteen-year-old responding to art treasures with sensitivity and intelligence. I feared that my grandmother would not have been able to relate to
this side of her daughter, and I was annoyed on my mother’s behalf when I read how Madame Boni told Anne that she and Libby, an American pupil, acted ‘younger’ than the other
girls. It seemed to me that Anne, intellectually at least, was more advanced than some of her classmates, who, by the sound of it, were more inspired by boys and clothes than by history and
art.

The teenage Anne was not only interested in ancient history. She longed to get a proper view of Italy’s Fascist leader. She had observed Mussolini from a distance – once with her
fellow pupils at the opera, then at La Coppa di Mussolini, an equestrian event. A year after leaving Madame Boni’s, her wish was granted. In April 1932, she and my grandmother, on yet another
Italian holiday, were staying at the Excelsior Hotel in Rome, where Mussolini was giving a dinner for Franz von Papen, the conservative and monarchist German politician who two months later would
be made Chancellor of Germany. A whole portion of the hotel was barricaded off, guarded by
fascisti in plain clothes.
Anne eagerly asked two waiters and a concierge if she
could see Mussolini but they, and her mother, told her it was impossible. She then approached the hotel manager, who said yes –
I took Mum as well and we and three Italian people
were taken round behind the kitchens and saw him quite plainly through the glass doors at the banquet, he looked rather fat and had a very determined face . . . It was very thrilling, seeing him as
close as that. It is not often one sees him at all, especially foreigners like us.

I couldn’t help being impressed that my mother, who could be very shy – she always pushed me in front of her if we had to go into a room full of strangers – had overcome her
timidity on that occasion. The girl’s determination was that of a journalist getting a scoop. At only seventeen, she had an awareness of history in the making.

In October 1931, she had been sent to another finishing school, Ozanne’s, in Paris. Anne went reluctantly to this new one, fearing that she would not like it as much as she had Madame
Boni’s. Just before setting off, she wrote:

my last day in England till Christmas, going to speak and hear French all the time, study till I am nearly dead and live shut in with no air and no exercise and
with society girls who have no interests other than boys, balls and clothes, what a prospect! Angela, Carla
[the Italian girl my grandmother had found to spend the summer with Anne]
and I were so happy together, now it is over I realise what fun we had but nothing happy can last for long. My dream now is that we three should all meet in Rome at Easter, it would be
heavenly.

It is clear from this passage that Anne did not regard herself as a ‘society’ girl. Although she had loved her time in Italy, she also enjoyed English country life and regarded
herself as something of a free spirit, finding the idea of being encouraged to be ‘genteel’ at the Paris finishing school restricting. She was not going to make an effort at
Ozanne’s. After only five days, she wrote:
I don’t like it here, whatever I do I
must
try and persuade Mum to let me leave at
the end of this term.

Almost at once, my grandmother dashed over to Paris with Gig and took her daughter on various pleasure outings – Versailles, the Bois de Boulogne, the opera and a dress show, culminating
with two nights in my grandmother’s hotel – all, presumably, while Anne was supposed to be doing her lessons. I felt sorry for the two Ozanne sisters running the school; my grandmother
was undermining them by letting her insubordinate daughter get her own way.