The Girl from Station X (8 page)

The loose sheets were muddled up. I turned to one written in October.

October 14th 1936. Tallwood, Lutherville, Maryland.

Fife insisted on taking me for a walk . . . walking back through the cornfield he suddenly told me he was so much in love with me that it drove him nearly crazy and that he had never
felt like that about anyone before although he had had lots of affairs and he asked me to marry him. I didn’t know how I felt at all, but he looked so attractive and was so perfectly sweet
saying he would live anywhere or do anything in the world. I had never had anyone love me with quite such an unselfish love before and it made me happy.

I said I couldn’t become engaged to him and raised all sorts of objections about different nationalities and living in America which I don’t think I could do although I
am half in love with him I believe, anyway we finally left it that we would discuss it later the whole thing rather frightened as well as surprised me, although I had half suspected it and knew he
was in love with me before he did! I felt terribly nervy and Fife noticed at dinner and insisted on taking me home. He was most terribly upset and phoned the doctor. I went to bed and Doctor Buck
came and talked to me calmingly and said I was alright, merely exhausted he gave me a sleeping draught and Nancy came and slept in the other bed.

October 15th 1936. Virginia.

Left with Fife still very concerned about 11.30. After Washington we stopped and discussed things, finally deciding that he should go back to Rio and that I should
go out there, he kissed me two or three times, I don’t know whether I love him or not. I wanted him to kiss me and I am very fond of him indeed.

I had known already that Fife – brother of Leith, my American godmother – had proposed to my mother. I also knew that he was very blond, which my mother had always found romantic.
(When, at twenty-four, I had brought my blond boyfriend to meet my parents, my father declared later: ‘Your mother’s nearly having an orgasm over him!’)

I had met Fife, then an elderly man, while staying at our cousin Peggie’s. His blond hair was white and he had divorced the wife he had married after my mother turned him down. He had
reminisced to me about my mother and seemed to still regard her in a romantic light.

Now, reading these bits of her twenty-two-year-old’s diary, I found myself half-wishing that she
had
married Fife. Surely she would have been happier in America, near her cousins
and Aunt Dita, who was more maternal than my grandmother? Aunt Dita, like my grandmother, was very generous; during the war she had insisted on opening her house in Long Island to over forty
children from England, to escape the bombing.

In my experience, my mother was always extremely uncomfortable around small children, despite having had four. In this diary of 1936, however, she had written tenderly about Dita (then known as
Deedie), who must have been about five.

October 21st, Westbury, Long Island.

I walked round the garden with Aunt Dita and Deedie, Deedie is really very sweet and Aunt Dita wasn’t spoiling her a bit, in fact being quite stern I thought.
Later Dita found a little toy car in the garden and all in one breath asked me how many gallons of gasoline I thought it would hold and then said she thought a fairy must have left it
there!

This was Dita whom my mother had tried to attack with a walking stick in 1995.

The next day I was back at her old house. My mother was peaceful in her new home a few miles away but my stomach pains had started again and I felt overwhelmed by the tasks
ahead. My brother had not come when we arranged, and I spent another day sorting, Mrs Anderson and Molly on one floor and me on another. In the late afternoon, as I was about to leave, Mrs Anderson
and Molly came down from the attic with a large box. I opened it to find that it contained over thirty exercise books. My mother’s handwritten diaries.

I placed them, with the bag of Luftwaffe passports, in the boot of my car and drove away.

Then an offer was made for my mother’s house, by the first viewers. That night I had a dream – I was springing over snow at my childhood home, several yards high in the air. I
bounced upright over fields and streams. I was leaving all that sludge behind me. That picturesque house, with its undercurrent of unhappiness, had had, for many years, an atmosphere of emptiness,
of nothing much happening – and also a kind of brooding quality, something unpleasant waiting: my father’s illness, his alarmingly quick death, Nicky’s going downhill, my
mother’s drunkenly falling and breaking her limbs, her incoherent phone calls to me, her aggressive dogs – the last basset bit Mr Anderson in the arm, resulting in eighteen
stitches.

But the house was full of books, most of which I had enjoyed at a young age – volumes of Proust, my father’s Evelyn Waughs, Jessica Mitford’s sophisticated memoir
Hons and
Rebels
, Diana Holman-Hunt’s charming and funny autobiography
My Grandmothers and I
.

However, a kind of disorientation persisted under the veneer of civilisation offered by these, and by other objects in the house – my mother’s Spanish bulls, her palomino china
horses, her watercolours of Venice. There was her wardrobe of elegant clothes: suits from the exclusive boutique Lachasse, two fur coats, evening dresses, one of peacock blue. There was her
dressing table with lipsticks, scents and powder compacts (although my mother, in later years, wore little make-up) and the silver ashtrays, candlesticks and cigarette boxes in our cold blue dining
room. My mother had a lovely garden, with ancient walls, an old moat with two little towers, yew hedges, lavender, white and red roses, peonies and delphiniums. It was even used in a
children’s TV film,
Tom’s Midnight Garden
, and I’m sure many envied it. But inside the house, the piss-stained carpets and the endless supply of alcohol were indications
of my mother’s despair.

Now, at last, that place where she spent so much time drunk and unhappy was sold. And I had her diaries.

Part 2

Running on Stones

July 1st 1914 I was born, 1915, my father was killed, during the war we were in London, Mum working in a canteen and in a hospital, all I remember is in the night
being taken out of bed and carried down to the kitchen where I slept on the table. Mum feeding the dogs with biscuits but they refused to eat, sitting shivering with fright . . . me seeing a huge
silvery grey shining object in the sky and being told it was a zeppelin.

Armistice Day. Buckingham Palace, the pram was squashed in two by the crowd. I sat on a man’s shoulder. I remember the Royal Family on the balcony, and thinking that Princess
Mary was waving to me especially, I remember the streets lined with flags, when the man put me down Mum asked me why I hadn’t said thank you and I replied: ‘I have not been introduced
to him.’! My age was then 4.

The thrill of reading this almost gives me vertigo. Suddenly I’m looking down a magic kaleidoscope, I’m tasting the sweet centre of a honeycomb. This, at last, is
my mother’s life that I never knew. I did not remember her ever recounting these memories; perhaps she forgot them later. I felt privileged to read them.

The scraps, which she wrote aged sixteen, just after starting at Madame Boni’s finishing school in October 1930, last for three pages and, as often with such very early memories, are not
totally chronological. The little girl seems to have lived for a while with her Aunt Lin (one of my grandmother’s sisters) in Sussex, about ten miles from Knowle. Lin’s second son
David, a few years older than Anne, wore
a dress of bluish-mauve silk: every evening we used to be dressed up and sent down to the drawing room. I was so shy I hated it; I used to look
upon David as a hero. We ate porridge out of fascinating bowls in the nursery and David had a real Jaeger dressing-gown which I envied very much.

Then, back to when Anne’s brother was still alive:
Knowle – a tent in the grass where we used to have tea. Nah and my little brother Raymond in the
tent.

My mother never told me that she had any memories of Raymond. I knew only that, like my brother, he had died very young and Nah, who had looked after him, told me that he had never been able to
sit up. Then the diary jumps forward, to my grandmother’s wedding to Anne’s stepfather. Anne, at five, is the only bridesmaid:
standing during the service near Grandma and
Grandpa, carrying a bouquet of blue delphiniums, bigger almost than me, Grandma taking it from me and me sitting with them.

I was glad that she had her grandparents’ protection on what must have been a difficult day. By now, she is an only child again.

Driving from station in old Ford, always used to start on the 3rd crank, 3 was my lucky number. Raymond died aged 3, so made it unlucky, so changed it to 4 . . .
Someone had told me that little boys were found in tulips, I always longed for a little brother, and I used to pray for one and go and look in the tulips every morning. I remember wondering why
anyone ever died, why they didn’t just keep on moving so that they couldn’t.

When I read about her searching for a little brother, her own having died, I pity that little girl, almost against my will, for the first time. My mother and I, I realise with a shock, have a
tragedy in common, the death of a brother when we were still so young ourselves. But I did not remember her ever commiserating with me directly over
my
brother Raymond’s death. She
always talked of him as
her
possession. It was her tragedy, hers exclusively. My father went along with this. It was sacrilege in our family to think otherwise.

Hearing about Grandpa’s death driving along Frant Road. I was singing ‘Oh Gin I were a baron’s heir.’ I said I would always keep that tune
sacred to him.

She had told me this anecdote more than once, about her maternal grandfather Michael dying when she was six, almost boasting, it seemed to me, and I had cringed at her sentimentality. But now,
when I read about it in her diary, it seems sincere.

Always loved getting to Knowle . . . Aunt Elisa gave me my ivory monkeys . . . Angela and Mollie in tam o’shanters, green and red . . . Hated when time came
for them to go home.

Angela, two years older than Anne, lived across the road from Knowle with her parents, brothers and sisters. Angela’s father had been a great friend of my grandfather. My grandmother, I
knew, had encouraged Angela to be friends with Anne, clearly anxious that her only child should have a companion to play with.

The memories continue – my mother is handing me a beautiful, fragile thing, a fan full of colours like a peacock’s tail – here is Nah, all in blue, on her first night at
Knowle, by mistake putting the delighted child in the bath still in her
bedslippers
.
Nah lends the little girl a woolly dog that she had bought for her nephew:
I loved it so much that she had to give it to me instead of the donkey brooch which she had got for me.

Was this the beginning of Nah spoiling Anne, thus setting a pattern for life? It was certainly an example of the child attaching herself to possessions. Perhaps my grandmother was preoccupied
with pleasing her second husband, supporting him in his army career, planning with him the Knowle gardens with their crazy paving, the row of white rose trees she nicknamed ‘The
Bridesmaids’, choosing with him Italian urns, planting the apple orchard and the little box hedges leading to the swimming pool. Together they had designed the house’s new wing with its
green and white bathrooms, their huge tubs with feet like lions’ claws. Maybe my grandmother, despite making a beautiful home and garden for Anne, did not spend enough time with her little
daughter.

In 1922, Anne attends school at Camberley – her stepfather, Chow, is still in the army and must have been posted there – and he, Anne and her mother go home many weekends. (She
writes, I noted with pleasure:
always loved getting to Knowle
.) In 1924, Chow is in another army posting, near a Roman camp. Anne recalls larks singing on the downs, and
riding on those downs with Chow – perhaps she did sometimes enjoy being with her stepfather, whom she later clashed with. That year, aged ten, she goes to Palm Beach – this must have
been when she stayed in America for nearly twelve months with Aunt Dita; I knew that Anne went to school there, as she’d recounted how she had had to swear allegiance to the Stars and Stripes
each day at prayers. More memories now, of America: trips up the Loxahatchee,
Nah fell out of boat
, the American song
Swanee, Annie Laurie
, then,
finally, back home in England:
Hope Cove, Susan ate all the biscuits. Angela and David frightening me about tidal waves . . . teasing me, escaping from them by running on stones –
they couldn’t run – then bursting out crying, just like a girl.

This image, of the little girl, pluckily running on pebbles, then bursting out crying, seemed to sum up some of the disparate elements in my mother’s character: her physical bravery and
defiance but also her vulnerability and loneliness. And perhaps also that rueful comment –
just like a girl
– betrayed even then her ambivalence about being
female.

And was not that secure sandy beach at Hope Cove, with the child’s imagined threat of the tidal wave, more unsafe than it first appeared? For sometimes, even in the sheltered bay itself, I
knew that there would be wild storms, and enormous waves would crash over the sea wall on to the road, hitting the harbour master’s white thick-thatched house the other side. And the old
lifeboat house, at the top of the slipway so close to the beach, was evidence that the lifeboat would often have to be launched at a moment’s notice. Indeed, just beyond the Bolt Tail, so
beautiful in June, with pink thrift springing up all over the grass, its red cliffs and blue-green silken sea beyond, was ‘The Race’, a dangerous current that my mother often spoke of,
treacherous to boats. On my own holidays there as a child, my mother, despite loving Hope Cove itself, would talk darkly about Bantham, a few bays along, where she would take us at low tide to play
in huge sandy pools and, when we were older, to surf. She warned us often of the dangerous undertow at Bantham and would announce, almost with relish: ‘A whole troop of Boy Scouts was drowned
there!’