The Girl from Station X (37 page)

Anne was now back with her relations in Long Island after ten years’ absence, chatting happily to Peggie, whose own marriage to the
youth
whose photograph Anne had
seen on Peggie’s hotel dressing table in 1930 was foundering. Anne noted how beautifully dressed her relations were compared to everyone in England, and had to stop herself stacking plates,
as she was now used to doing, and allow her aunt’s maid or butler to do it. She quickly got used to the luxury of en suite bathrooms at Aunt Dita’s and noted that, in that milieu, the
women had got
doing nothing down to a fine art . . . making oneself attractive seems to be almost a career here
. This was an incredible contrast to Anne’s life for
the previous six years.

On 11 June, Joe Darling turned up in New York and she spent the evening with him.
He says he thinks I love him more as a friend and less as a woman than he had hoped. I’m not
in love with him physically now as I was with Alan – wish to God I were!

The next few months in America were full of friends and relations – she saw Leith and Leith’s brother, Fife, whose wife, Anne wrote triumphantly, seemed jealous of her – and
confusion over her relationship with Joe. She could not help making comparisons between America and England, both during the war and after. She went fishing with Uncle Jay in Canada, where, to her
surprise, she was glad to see
the old Union Jack flying in Montreal airport. I feel strangely proud of being English since the war, a feeling that I had never had before, now I feel I
really belong.
At the fishing camp in Quebec, near the St Lawrence River, Anne washed her own hair for the first time in her life. She was nearly thirty-two. She had not done so even
during the war, probably relying on a weekly hairdresser, as many women did then.

Joe Darling’s wife was in debt. He told Anne that he would marry her at once if she wanted, but would rather wait six months till things got sorted out. He then, to her amazement, asked
her to visit him – and his wife – in Washington!
He got me worked up to a fine state and I can’t think now.

She did not go. On 6 July, she set off by train with Peggie and Clippy (wife of Peggie’s brother Ben) for a long summer holiday. Anne listed all the states they passed through, ending up
at the Valley Ranch in Wyoming. Forty-five miles from the nearest town – Cody, home of Buffalo Bill – it was
a series of wooden huts in amongst the cottonwood . . . we sit
in a large building all together at long tables and there are 2 bells . . . at mealtime, you rush in, in case all the food’s eaten up! This makes me feel at home.
Anne, again,
was half-nostalgic for her life during the war.

In late July, Joe Darling travelled 4,000 miles to see her at the ranch, just for one night. He declared that he could not imagine life without her and begged her to follow him east and be with
him again in the US before he left once more for Germany.

Anne in the end decided not to go. Meanwhile my grandmother, by now extremely worried about her daughter’s liaison, had written to her older sister, Anne’s Aunt Dita, begging her to
get
her
daughter Peggie to have
a straight talk
with Anne. Peggie, nine years older, obligingly gave her younger first cousin the following advice, which Anne noted
in her diary:

‘unless you are absolutely crazy about him and admire him v. much, don’t marry him, but carry on an affair to give you confidence as that is always a
good thing, & he is obviously crazy about you’. ‘If you admire Joe then marry him.’ I told Peggie that I was now down to 2nd best in a marriage choice
[Anne had
not yet met my father]
and she said ‘well then, that leaves you with a great no. of choices, marry someone who you admire, even if you are not madly in love with them and you
should be v. happy.’

My mother stayed on in America six more months. She was sometimes homesick for England and tired of
talking trivialities
; she wrote, perhaps with prescience, that
to hear the conversation of Uncle Jay and Cousin Joe, on worldwide subjects, is like listening to children and it is terrifying to think they have such a terrific control of finance and
hence, such power
. But on the whole, she enjoyed her time in the USA, shopping, playing tennis at the exclusive Long Island Piping Rock Club, throwing a cocktail party with Peggie in
New York, and having a fling with Sam Winslow, whose family were friends of her American cousins. Occasionally, Anne encountered friends from ‘the old country’ engaged in more serious
tasks. One, Harold Zink, sent her his book

‘Government & Politics in the United States’ with the following inscription: ‘Dear Anne, I should be v. pleased if the presentation copy in
some measure dedicated my appreciation of your friendship, especially during the somewhat trying days in London in 1944–1945. Your companionship & remarkably fine conversation were
greatly valued then & will not soon be forgotten. With best regards – Harold.’

Another intellectual friend from Britain, Charles Brackenbury,

got me a seat to hear the Security Council and it couldn’t have been more fascinating. The debate was a continuation of an adjourned debate on an accusation
brought by the Ukrainian Union of Socialist Soviet Republics against the ‘Greek monarchists for violating the Greek/Albanian frontier’ . . . Sir Alexander Cadogan made a very pleasant
and dignified speech, in the true tradition of the British Foreign Office, subtle and funny too. I felt rather proud of the whole thing as he had more poise than the rest put together and the
manner I knew so well at home. Charles half offered me a job at the U.N.

Not many women, or men either, would have found such a debate
fascinating
, and it showed Anne’s predilection for this type of work, in diplomacy, perhaps. If she
had been of my generation or, better still, my daughter’s, and intent on a career, she might have seriously considered Charles’s offer. Aunt Carrie, an older woman at the Valley Ranch,
had asked Anne what she would do when she got back home and when Anne replied that she would work either in a bookshop or in the UN, Aunt Carrie said:
‘You must do something
intelligent, otherwise you will be miserable.’

In her last few months in America, Anne hardly mentions Joe in her diary; by September 1946, he was back in Germany.

Torn about whether to return home, Anne then waited for my grandmother to come to America for Christmas and in the end stayed on there until February 1947. On 6 February, with the words,
hangover and trying to pack everything, which is agony
, the last immediate post-war diary, written in America, ends, with Anne still indecisive about whom to marry,
despite having had more proposals, from Joe, Sam Winslow, Bartie Bouverie (widowed husband of Aunt Lin’s daughter, who was run over and killed in the London blackout) and Harold Zink.

I
had now finished reading my mother’s wartime and immediate post-war diaries. It quickly became clear that, back in England in early 1947
after America, Anne stopped writing a diary and, as she had in her late teens, seemed to think it worth writing one only when abroad.

My own diaries were different; I recorded my daily life and, just days after my daughter’s birth in London in August 1981, had typed details of my new baby on another of my cheap, brightly
coloured portable typewriters, observing that her plaintive cry reminded me of a little bird’s.

I knew that I had been taken to Spain aged six weeks, so even if my mother had not written about my early babyhood in England (I assumed that, after my birth in King’s College Hospital,
London, my first weeks were then spent at Knowle), she would surely have written about me once she and I had moved to Madrid. I felt upset that those first five ‘Spain’ diaries were
still missing and I started rummaging again in the various boxes that had come from her old house.

In my studio, where I had put all the photograph albums from her old house, I now found notebooks about her four pregnancies. One, before the birth of one of my brothers, began:
Awful stitch in my right side
.

I found details relating to my own birth, including advice on contraception – a cap. There was no mention of the actual baby, me, although my Baby Book (handed to me by my mother a couple
of years before she got Alzheimer’s) was conscientiously filled in by both my parents, including the day that I found a four-leaf clover on the common outside North Heath House. The clover
was still there, a faded brown-green, stuck to the page with Sellotape, my mother’s proud words in capital letters beside it:
FOUND BY ELISA, ENTIRELY BY HERSELF AT NORTH HEATH,
CHIEVELEY, NEWBURY, BERKS IN OCTOBER 1953 WHEN SHE WAS 3 YEARS AND 10 MONTHS OLD. AVS.

I also came across a small brown envelope, on which my mother had written:
Remnants of the Grand Duchess Olga
. Inside were tiny scraps of white material, nothing to prove that they had
ever belonged to the Grand Duchess, the Tsar’s sister. It was a bit creepy.

In one album was a set of photos of my younger brother’s twins, my mother’s second lot of grandchildren. She had scribbled in pencil on one page the page’s measurements,
presumably to make sure that her grandsons’ photos would fit. In this respect, at least, she was serious about being a grandmother, although I could not help recalling an unpleasant occasion
when she refused to have the little boys to lunch, making all sorts of excuses.

Beside her twin grandsons was a photo of my mother alone, holding in her arms a clutch of toy dogs. This bizarre apparition, of a woman in her seventies with her hair awry, looking already a bit
mad, who could have been enjoying herself getting to know her grandsons but preferred a set of toy dogs, was horrible to me.

My search in this studio for the Spain diaries proved fruitless. I moved to a room above the toolshed, a room now full of my mother’s old books, many about Russia. Here at last, after some
hours searching, I found in a box an exercise book, with
Students MSS Book
printed on its hard grey cover. Inside, surrounded by stickers from Air France and Eastern Airlines (‘The
Great Silver Fleet’), was my mother’s handwriting in pencil:
August 22nd 1947. Anne Hamilton Grace. France, Switzerland, Italy, Luxemburg & Belgium.
In biro
she had then added:
‘& Spain’.

I turned the pages and to my excitement found the following entry:
January 15th 1950. Up v. early and off to Northolt with Chow and Mum, Elisa (my child) and Nanny Benny. The a/c
took off at 7 a.m. just after a brilliantly red sunrise. I felt sad at leaving Nah and Gig and my mother. Elisa was asleep in her Karri-cot . . .
This was the start of our lives in
Spain.

Further back, I found an entry that was almost equally exciting:
June 1st 1948. This was or is my wedding day – I have dreaded it all my life, but when it came, it wasn’t
nearly as bad as I thought and I wasn’t really very nervous . . .

I now began reading through the whole of this very thick diary, hoping to find at least a few details of my parents’ courtship. My mother did not seem to have been madly in love with my
father, I noted with disappointment, though I was not surprised. But it soon became clear again that Anne had recorded only separate chunks of her life – when out of England. I did, however,
find that on 23 September 1947 Anne had written:
Who am I to marry? Micky, John Guest, Mike Lloyd, Sam or Willy Segrave? All I know is that I must marry someone soon, as I’m lost
at present and rather lonely.

Instead of accepting any of them, Anne went on a motoring trip, with her Belgian friend Yseult de Jonghe, into mountain villages in Italy; in one remote place, San Felice Curceo,
a
little fairytale village
, there was still a notice up in German stating that looting was punishable by death –
it was a rude shock to imagine the Germans in such a
place . . . I hid my nails in shame
,
the scarlet incongruous and superficial in such a setting. From one house came the sound of a man singing, savouring the queer despair of the East. How
Oriental still is Southern Italy.

She describes she and Yseult at Lago de Bolsena among ox carts laden with barrels of grapes, the oxen
with long horns, gentle beasts, fat and well fed looking and as white as
snow.
She and I would see these, though not as well fed, pulling carts near Comillas, only a few years later.
We passed a funeral in one place, just a small hearse with a
flock of children carrying flowers following behind
. Naturally, I could not help thinking of Raymond’s small hearse – which I never saw. What bad luck awaited my
mother.

She and Yseult motored on to visit Princess Borghese in her
palagio
near Burgo San Lorenzo during the grape harvest, seeing peasants, tall with blue eyes, bare feet and
kind
of white berets
, who shared 50 per cent of the profits of the wine with the Principesa, despite its being
all very feudal.

Back in Rome, Anne saw Madame Boni of the finishing school –
she lives in the past and is very depressed
– and attended diplomatic parties, writing that she
loved the Embassy life. And:
I was told by everyone at the Walmsleys that I was ‘the type Slav’ as usual!
My mother always loved being thought Russian.

Anne’s last entry, on the day of her return across the Channel back to Knowle, records the drowning of Aunt Dita’s little granddaughter in America. The child died in a family
swimming pool, as Raymond would. Aunt Dita, like my grandmother, had lived at Battle Abbey; perhaps it really was cursed. Frustratingly, Anne’s diaries now stopped for a while, in keeping
with her routine of only writing them when abroad.