The Girl from Station X (22 page)

When I was a teenager, my mother had told me with some relish how, during the war, a lesbian had propositioned her. ‘But I told her: “I’m sorry, I’m not that kind of
person!”’

She seemed very proud of her reply but I sensed that there was something not quite true in the story. I suspected that, susceptible to flattery, and also perhaps attracted to this woman, my
mother had led her on and, shocked when something physical was suggested, had then done an about-turn, taking the moral high ground.

That August 1941, Anne romantically describes Stirling Castle:
standing on a high crag in the half light before the dawn . . . like some old German fairy tale of knights and
beautiful princesses; we half expected it all suddenly to vanish
.
She writes of her pleasure about getting away from the war on the Isle of Mull:
it seems exactly like
peacetime again . . . the smell and the noise of the sea outside one’s bedroom window at night are heaven
. But she goes on:
at present I am not at peace with myself
. . . herewith hangs a tale, a sordid enough little tale . . . last Sunday when Angela and I went out to lunch . . . she told me . . . that she was addicted to sexual relations with
women.

The seductress was her colleague from the Leighton Buzzard office. The diary tells of how, apart from seeing Angela at work, Anne had also noticed her on the local train accompanying a certain
girl. Soon, though, Angela began carrying Anne’s suitcases for her:
Like some rare poison, I was fascinated by the unknown . . . And I do not even know what such people
do!

There is, frustratingly, no physical description of Angela, nothing like those sketches of Lady Ann Cole or American Mary, and nothing even to indicate whether my mother considered Angela
good-looking. The older woman, though, had other qualities that hypnotised Anne.

Angela’s proposition, when it came, was low key. She said that
some people could not live without affection
and that she had found her
way of
life
was the only way of getting it, but that she valued Anne’s friendship so much that she would rather not risk losing this and have her do something that she would regret.
All together it was put in a very subtle way and the supposed viciousness of it all was masked.

Angela comes across in the diary as powerful, possibly unstable, and intent on following her own wishes. In her dealings with Anne, she used flattery, something to which my mother was always
susceptible –
ever since Angela first met me, she thought that I had so much charm and personality
. At twenty-seven, Anne, despite all her foreign travel, was still
in many ways vulnerable and innocent. She was also curious about people and about new experiences. Angela, no doubt genuinely attracted by the younger woman, must have hoped to take advantage.

Anne wanted to disapprove but, probably in recognition of her own feelings, couldn’t ultimately bring herself to. Despite her judgemental word –
viciousness
– had Anne been as repulsed as she later pretended, she would surely have ended the association then.

She was ambivalent –
Like some rare poison, I was fascinated by the unknown.
She
was
fascinated, but also scared, and she would experience this dichotomy
much of her life, in other areas also. As the war went on, she was expressing increasing impatience with the narrow life that she was expected to lead at Knowle, and ultimately marry into. While
loving her home’s physical beauty and security, the old-fashioned existence led there by her mother and stepfather also proved to be a sort of cage for her spirit. Making friends with Angela
was another way for Anne’s adventurous nature to break loose. For, despite her reservations, she went on seeing Angela, even several months after Anne’s starting her new job at
Bletchley, and well after Angela had left the Leighton Buzzard office nearby.

November 3rd 1941.

Dined with Angela at the 5 Bells. We had a great discussion on psychology. They are all talking about putting her on a court martial at the station on an absence
without leave charge. She told me that she had only come back because I had said that I didn’t think it was a good way to do things and that she felt she could have let me down if she had
stayed away. She also asked me if I would care to be seen about with someone ‘whose reputation stinks’. She asked me, too, if I ever did anything that I wanted, as she didn’t
believe that I did, and said that I didn’t give anything out and was the most nervous person she had ever come across ‘Full of nervous habits’, that I was ‘wild by
nature’ and unstable. She told me that she was possessive and jealous by nature.

My mother always liked being described as ‘nervous’ and ‘sensitive’. She seemed to think that she was different, and superior, in this respect to my father and me. As for
wild by nature
, she would have liked that too.

When I was a child my grandmother used to sing the song ‘I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside’, changing some of the words:

Oh look at Mum with her legs all bare!

Dancing in the fountains at Trafalgar Square!

There was something defiant about this image of my mother, dancing alone in the fountains in a public place, breaking the rules. That idea of her as a dashing wilful tomboy
stayed with me as something to be emulated. It also showed her capacity for enjoyment and for adventure, something that I admired and later, because of her alcoholism and general decline, I often
forgot. I suppose it was partly this adventurousness that made her go on seeing Angela Griffiths. Also, with a stepfather whom she found restricting, perhaps the idea of women being able to enjoy a
life without men was inspiring.

On 12 November, she and Angela stayed up talking together until 4 a.m. Anne then decided that Angela had given her the best analysis of her character and capabilities, ever.
Anne proceeded to set down in the diary Angela’s ‘analysis’ of her – that Anne’s conscious was
completely at war
with her subconscious, and
that she presented herself as the person her mother wanted her to be, while suppressing her real nature. More alarmingly, Angela also accused Anne of being sadistic – and an even greater
masochist.
My face is sadistic too, and this is what intrigues A. about me to a great extent, I believe.

Angela told her that she was like a lump of clay, to be moulded into something worthwhile. She emphasised that Anne would
always need a person, though, to do that moulding and cannot
stand alone.
Presumably Angela hoped to be the one to do the ‘moulding’.
In all the talks we have had, A. says she has never been bored for a moment and I can
say the same about her, although she shakes me up and disturbs my mental equilibrium in an annoying way at times.

How different that admission is from my mother’s dismissive references to Angela years later – the ‘official’ version that she gave to me.

Angela Griffiths
was
a bit sinister, I thought. She was hoping to seduce Anne, and being so understanding was one way to achieve this. At the same time, I felt that her analysis of Anne
and her relationship with her mother was correct.

My grandmother was quick, witty, interested in politics and current affairs, but basically non-intellectual, occupying herself mainly with her garden and dogs. Like many leisured women of her
generation, she painted watercolours. But she could not understand why her daughter was learning Russian or why I wanted to write a book. She certainly was not sympathetic about her
daughter’s other ‘passions’ either. I recall her saying to me when I was in my teens, disappointment and bafflement in her voice: ‘Your mother has always had these crazes
for women!’

Perhaps it was her own lack of maternal instinct that had nourished her daughter’s longing for these ‘women’ who kept cropping up throughout Anne’s life. Many of them
took on a quasi-maternal role – I recall my mother’s pleasure when she told me that Posy, an older friend from Majorca, had repacked her suitcase for her during a group holiday in Peru.
Then there were Anne’s other mother substitutes – Mrs Welsh, Nah, Gig and Aunt Dita. Perhaps Mrs Hunt, her landlady, also performed such a role, as did her Peruvian godmother, Kata.

Anne was somewhat unworldly and, indeed, in many ways remained so for the rest of her life. She had no father, brothers or sisters, and her mother, who was lacking her daughter’s
intellectual curiosity, could not be her soulmate.

Before he died, Anne’s father had published a short book,
Finance and War
, and his sister, Anne’s Aunt K, had managed, with perseverance, to get the diaries of the Empress
Marie Louise, Napoleon’s second wife, translated from French into English by Frédéric Masson and published by John Murray in 1922 – this I learned from a box containing
her letters to and from various publishers and literary agents. It was presumably from her father and his sister that Anne had inherited her intellectual leanings.

My grandmother, I knew, would have been horrified by any whiff of the illicit in her daughter’s friendships. I remember her dismissal of Nigel Nicolson’s
Portrait of a
Marriage
– his account of the extramarital affairs of his two homosexual parents, Nigel Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West – as ‘that dirty book’. She preferred her close
relations to be respectable. However, perhaps it was a different matter concerning admirers or friends, for one of my grandmother’s beaux, Colonel Malone – Cecil l’Estrange Malone
– had made a fiery speech in the Albert Hall on 7 November 1920, been charged with sedition under Section 42 of the Defence of the Realm Act and jailed for six months. ‘What are a few
Churchills or a few Curzons on lamp posts compared to the massacre of thousands of human beings?’ was the line that had landed him in prison. He had also been the first Communist Party member
in the House of Commons. My mother had told me that Malone had taken my grandmother pub-crawling round the East End, which she had enjoyed. I remember him and his second wife in a bubble car in
Belgrave Square, he driving, she in the sidecar. And Dita recalled that when Malone had complained about the discrepancy between his and my grandmother’s incomes – she had just bought a
racehorse – instead of being discomfited, my grandmother had simply replied: ‘Cecil, why not get a greyhound?’ But I suppose her flirtation with the outré Malone was
different from having a daughter who was a lesbian.

My mother did not see Angela Griffiths for six months. Then she visited her in Eccleston Street, not far from Belgrave Square, where Angela was sharing a flat with
her present girlfriend, a Mrs Mandeville
–
one of the most depraved looking women I’ve ever set eyes upon.
I was excited when I read
this. My mother’s attitude to lesbians was a peculiar mixture of fascination and fear, and here it was manifested again. She added:
I suppose I should have been ashamed to have
been with such people, but I just am not and don’t feel that way, so there is nothing to be done about it.

This shame was surely connected with her awareness of my grandmother’s notions of ‘how to behave’. Anne, while fighting against her own impulses, was clearly fascinated to meet
women who had openly chosen that path. She wrote at some length in the diary about this encounter, trying to be honest, but not fully understanding her own reactions. She was shocked, yet
intrigued, by the two women sharing a bedroom, but added primly:
there was no feeling of vice about the place, which I can usually sense at once.
This surely implies that,
with some part of her, she already felt that romantic friendship and even sex between women were natural. Yet she was clearly very conflicted, since earlier she had described Mrs Mandeville as
one of the most depraved looking women I’ve ever set eyes upon.

Three days later, Anne recorded more about her reaction to that visit.
These crazes for people are a part of my nature that I can’t do without. I have had them ever since I
remember. I suppose it is an adolescence that I have never grown out of or a result of sexual repression. Feeling is all that really matters, I’m convinced, to a nature like mine, which is
highly emotional. Angela disturbs me more than anyone I’ve ever known.

She had written
people
rather than
women
, though all the time I knew my mother, it was only for women that she had these
crazes.

Anne was to be proved wrong about the apparently harmless nature of the relationship between Angela and Mrs Mandeville. On 25 September 1942, my grandmother wrote to my mother
at the Hunts’ saying she had read in a newspaper that Angela Griffiths had just given evidence at an inquest; a woman had fallen down a lift shaft at a block of flats and died. Neighbours had
reported hearing sounds of a quarrel, but Angela had denied this, merely stating that she hadn’t realised that the lift wasn’t there. Anne, who had not yet seen the newspaper article,
summarised her reaction:
I must say they are a pretty rotten crowd. Out on my autocycle, which I adore!

I read this more than once, noting how, after absorbing that shocking news, Anne had retreated, taking her mother’s cue and dismissing her former friend, and the deceased, as that
rotten crowd.

Perhaps there was something deeply escapist in my mother’s nature which rendered her inadequate in dealing with upsetting events and the implications that they held about past
relationships. For, instead of exploring the matter in her diary, her secret place, she had backed off, ultimately dismissing her intense friendship in one paragraph that ended with that peculiarly
frivolous – and, in the circumstances, chilling – sentence, the last time she would ever mention the incident in her diary:
Out on my autocycle, which I
adore!