The Girl from Station X (14 page)

I now wondered why, since my grandmother had been so devoted to Anne’s father, she did not encourage her daughter to see more of
his
family – the exception being Aunt K. On
18 June 1932, at seventeen, Anne
was
sent to stay with the Windhams – her paternal grandmother was a Smyth-Windham – and the young went punting:

A lovely hot day, we took a picnic and started early in the punt, Ralph, Ruth, Pixie and I, we met some other people who were to join us later so we started off
downstream, it was
glorious
, I have never felt anything like it gliding on past lovely lawns, gardens filled with flowers and pretty houses right on
the river, it really seemed to me like being in fairyland!
. . .
We got back quite late punting and paddling. Ruth had to get off early to go and help Mrs Windham lay and cook the dinner
as they have no maid but do everything themselves. It was a glorious day.

June 19th.

It seems so funny that these people are my cousins, ‘Cousin’ Ashe is like a typical country parson (like the Maldens for instance). I can’t believe
that they are relations of mine, I have never thought of my father’s relations at all before or connected them with myself in any way. Mum’s relations seem the only
real
relations to me, I have their outlook, their standpoint and yet I have unfortunately the others’ looks, the greatest curse of my life is that I did
not take after my mother in looks. I like the Windhams though, they have been very kind to me, I like Ruth better than Pixie, I don’t know why but I feel I never could be real friends with
Pixie, she seems cold and standoffish, she seems somehow annoyed with me because I have nice clothes, money etc, and jealous of it, we don’t seem equal somehow.

That day Anne drove to Radley with Ruth in the old car, ‘Knocking Nellie’, that Ruth had bought for £3

who is famous all over Wargrave and
quite
one of the family! She went so fast that I was terrified and kept saying
‘Madonna mia’ and ‘Mamma mia’ over to myself all the time.

We played games after dinner. The Windhams have the same ‘family’ obsession that Aunt K has, they showed me endless portraits of Cousin so and so etc and when I told them
that I wouldn’t accept Cosmo Rawlins as a cousin they were quite shocked, I
love
shocking people!

I thought it was a pity that Anne had not seen more of these Windham cousins. My grandmother, who was overly obsessed with her own family, probably could not be bothered to pursue the
connection. However, as a married woman, my mother did see Ruth and Ralph, and I recall Ruth coming to stay with her two boys in Sussex.

Knowle. July 1934.

I am keeping this book only for my travels abroad, as I would rather travel than anything else in the world. I want to have a written remembrance of them, so that I
can live them over again in my mind.

I return to those loose pages I had found among Raymond’s things, my first inkling that Anne had written a diary. How my mother loved travel! The diaries described
Anne’s visit to America in 1936, when she was twenty-one, and Fife had proposed. I read now of her return voyage from New York to Southampton with Gig that November, during the Abdication
Crisis, which was by then all over the American newspapers but not the British – on 26 October, the
New York Journal
had printed an article headed
KING WILL WED WALLY
. Anne
related that Douglas Fairbanks Senior and his new wife, the former Lady Ashley, were on board the
Queen Mary
; so was the actress Merle Oberon. I love the writing paper with its coloured
picture of the ship.

November 8th 1936. Sunday. The Queen Mary.

Fairly rough, she is rolling a good deal and the weather report is gale. We walked round the deck and played Ping Pong. Everything cancelled, including
‘Swingtime’ which is disappointing . . .

Anne did manage to play a gambling game, Keno, during which a whole table of people fell on to the floor, slid the length of the room, then back again with each roll. All the furniture was roped
after that. A German freight steamer was reported sinking some way off and the
Queen Mary
rushed to her aid, too late – next morning Gig spotted a lifeboat with nobody on it. Another
ship had got there, but had found only one survivor. Anne boasted in the diary that, despite reports of the roughest seas for forty years, she had never felt a qualm of sickness the whole voyage.
Back at Knowle, she wrote:
The papers here are full of terrific reports of the storm and stories of how we raced to the rescue of the
Isis
. I only wish we had been in time, I never realised before how terrifying and how awe-inspiring a tragedy at sea could be.

In
The Times
of 9 November 1936, in my local library, I read about the doomed German ship, the
Isis
, and its survivor, found alone in a lifeboat – a deck boy, Fritz
Roethke, of Berlin, too exhausted when picked up to be able to give any information. That boy, the only one left out of a crew of forty, had withstood drowning in wild seas against terrible odds,
but my mother’s son, twenty-one years later, had died in her mother’s swimming pool, in a supposedly protected domestic setting.

But in the 1930s, Anne, in her early twenties – well off, curious and bold – had a life of adventure to look forward to.

In July 1937, she and Jean Whitaker – they had met at seventeen on the steps of a Mayfair house, both shy before their first debutante tea party – went to the Balkans. In Venice they
waited while their respective mothers made enquiries about whether it was safe to proceed – there were riots in Belgrade; in Venice, Jean and Anne spotted the recently abdicated King Edward
VIII and the former Mrs Simpson at the Lido, a month after their marriage. Anne’s diary describes ‘Wally’ sitting in a bathing hut in dark glasses and blue shorts. The former
king, in grey bathing trunks, sat beside her chatting, then had a dip in the sea with his equerry, Dudley Forwood. Anne and Jean soon decided to continue by train to Yugoslavia, where they were
paying guests of a Hungarian family, the Tallians, in the village of Novi Knezevac.

August 1st 1937. Novi Knezevac, Yugoslavia.

We played a game called Marocco after dinner which is like Spillikins, there is one piece called Mussolini which if you take it first is worth 50 . . . They all got
frightfully excited and chattered away in Hungarian, even the old Uncle trying to move some of the pieces . . . They talk about politics most of the time here . . . The Baroness has a horror of the
Serbian peasants, they walk around in what used to be the Tallians’ garden and are quite insolent, no Hungarians ever come there. There is a feast day almost every day here as there are
Serbian, Catholic and Mohammedan feasts, all celebrated by everyone. The government are now taking about 1000 in 10,000 an acre to give back to the landlords whose estates were confiscated . .
.

The whole mentality seems extraordinary to us and their outlook is quite another one. Whenever we come into the house here with dirty shoes, maids come with rags and clean them for
us.

At Novi Knezevac, Anne had encountered people who led a more feudal life than hers at Knowle. But, unlike those of Anne and her mother and stepfather, the Hungarians’
privileged lives were almost over.

Anne and Jean must have liked their new friends, because they returned the following summer, 1938, this time taking a Ford V8 from Knowle across the Channel, then driving it east, through
villages in Saxony, where inhabitants were already making ‘Heil Hitler’ signs – four months earlier, Nazi troops had marched into Austria and annexed it to the Third Reich. Anne
and Jean then drove to Novi Knezevac, where they picked up Bertha (Baroness Tallian) and her brother, Count Karolyi Magdelhelm, and went on, Anne and Jean still taking charge of the driving, as far
as Hotin, a town on the border of Soviet Russia.

July 30th 1938. Cernauti, Rumania.

We went back on our tracks and got to the river which is the boundary between Bucovina and Bessarabia, then we went onto a ferry made of planks and were pulled
across to the other side, where we struck on the stones and had to be pushed out by some peasants, when we found that we had a puncture and as usual an enormous nail stuck in the tyre. It has been
the same wheel every single time so far, the back right hand one and we have lost the round thing in the middle and a tool now! We put on a new wheel, which was fairly flat and drove into Hotin,
hoping for the best.

I was surprised and impressed by Anne and Jean’s practical ability. They had both had family chauffeurs. Perhaps these men had taught the girls how to change a wheel before they set
off.

Hotin itself is a queer place quite unlike any other town we’ve been to. Karoly says it is completely Russian . . . All the houses were joined together in one
long row, with the occupants sitting outside them. We were stopped by a policeman in the middle of the town, a very officious looking gentleman, who talked incessantly in Rumanian and a soldier who
looked exactly like the Tsar of Russia, in a khaki uniform. The policeman, who resembled a very unattractive animal, both in looks and in mentality, wouldn’t let us pass, but insisted that we
go back to the Police Station, however Karoly saw an officer in the street and leapt out and the officer got a permit for us to go to the Russian frontier. Accompanied by the policeman and another
Austrian soldier, we proceeded through the ghetto, which was rather interesting with wooden houses, obviously very old, down to a church, where we saw the Dniester, all my life I have dreamed of
seeing Russia, but somehow I never thought I would do it.

When I asked Jean, in her eighties, and very compos mentis, about their trip, she told me of the abject state of the Jewish ghettos and of the anti-Semitism of their two Hungarian companions. My
mother, it was clear, had not noticed these details, or considered them unimportant. It was Russia, which she would only visit for the first time nearly forty years later, which really caught her
imagination.

We were looking across the river . . . at Russia. People were bathing on the Rumanian side, but very few on the Russian where there was a village with little white
houses with thatched roofs. It all looked so calm and peaceful. As though nothing awful ever happened there. The soldiers on the Rumanian side were walking about, but on the Russian they never
appear, apparently, but are quartered in the houses, so that they can watch the people better who are trying to cross the frontier. If someone swims out too far into the middle of the river both
the Russians and the Rumanians fire at him, from each side. There is no bridge for miles here, and if they want to cross, signs are made by the soldiers to each other, and then a boat puts out. In
the winter apparently, the peasants there haven’t much to eat and they drive their carts across on the ice and live like that, then they are put in prison for a year and sent back to Russia,
where they are all shot. The great fields outside the villages belong to the state and the peasants have to till them, and they each get so much but it is not enough in the winter, and the old
people, when they cannot work, get nothing at all. There was a large building with two red flags in the centre of the village which was the local theatre and performances there are given three
times a week, all free. The church too we could see, all shut up and used as an arsenal now. The peasants are now allowed under Stalin, since about a year, to have their own little field of Indian
corn behind their houses, and a cart or two, so it is better for them, but before they were allowed nothing of their own at all and consequently starved sometimes. This large theatre in the middle
of a small village looked so incongruous somehow. We were standing on the rampart of an old Turkish fort and a soldier told us not to stand there too long as the Russians were quite apt to shoot if
they saw people there for long, as they might be taking photographs or something, in fact they had done it before, so we got down quickly. It all looked so peaceful I found it hard to believe that
so near to us was Soviet Russia, yet it was incredibly sinister somehow. It was practically dark when we left Hotin and drove back to Cernauti (Cernowitz).

We are staying near the Residenz, where the pretty woman was this morning.

Another pretty woman in a hotel! I was interested to see that, despite her often over-romantic obsession with Russia, she was able to observe precise physical details of the scene in front of
her and write it down as though she was a travel writer or journalist.

The journey back westwards was eventful: they were pursued by Romanian police for taking photographs, then on a mountain road in Montenegro an Italian chauffeur tried to bar their way, resulting
in Jean scraping the Ford V8 on rocks. Before arriving in Dubrovnik, they were shot at by bandits.

My grandmother, I read, had travelled alone to Dubrovnik by boat and train from England to meet her daughter and Jean. Anne soon spotted her mother in a hotel dining room, flanked by two young
admirers whom she had met on the boat. In those days, it seemed, despite their lack of shared intellectual interests, mother and daughter were often good companions.

I had long disliked my mother’s travelling, as she seemed to prefer it to being at home with us. I had been uneasy about her fascination with White Russians, Polish
officers who’d come over and fought with the Allies, dispossessed Hungarians; in other words, aristocrats who’d lost their positions, money and estates. (When, in my twenties, I
challenged her about this, my mother annoyingly replied that she felt more sympathy for them, as they had had further to fall.)