Victory in Europe Day, 8 May 1945, was marked in this corner of East Sussex by a party held at Tilton House by Lord and Lady Keynes for their workers, local soldiers and friends. In torrential evening rain, beer, biscuits and cheese were handed out to the Wellers, Wests and Higgenses and all farmhands, surveyed by a giant effigy of Hitler made by Quentin. Vanessa and her family hovered awkwardly on the outskirts, listening to ‘a painful episode of songs by the Dolt which reduced nearly everyone to ill-suppressed giggles’, as she wrote to Angelica. ‘He assured us with deep passion and very flat notes that he would stand by us whatever befell.’ Peter John Higgens, about to turn ten, remembered ‘a bonfire on the hill, bananas and oranges, chocolate, a bran tub with treats’, and in the midst of it all Lord Keynes, walking around like a squire, ‘distinguished-looking with a little moustache and bushy eyebrows’. He also remembered seeing Mrs Bell smile ‘for the first time’ when Charlie, a cockney chef working at a nearby army camp, swooped in and gave her a smacking kiss.
By Vanessa’s sixty-sixth birthday at the end of the month, Grace had been twenty-five years with Mrs Bell. A general election was called that July, the first for ten years. Election posters were stuck up in the porch: ‘Vote Labour’ for Vanessa, Duncan and Quentin, ‘Vote Liberal’ for Clive. Remarkably, Walter was also allowed space by this egalitarian household: he pinned up ‘Vote Conservative’. Grace professed herself to be ‘in between’. The house newspapers were similarly divided: The Times for Clive, The Daily Worker for Quentin and the Express for Walter. Vanessa’s investigations into working-class ‘specimens’ had gathered pace during the war. She had taken a businesslike interest in pig breeding and joined the local Pig Keepers’ Council–unlike sentimental Grace, who treated the pigs like pets and hated them being killed, though she jointed and salted them down herself on the scrubbed kitchen table. ‘The curious thing’, Vanessa wrote to her daughter, ‘is that though these rustics can really hardly read or write…they are in some ways very sharp indeed–too sharp, you may think.’
On 5 July 1945 Clement Attlee’s Labour Party won a landslide victory, their first majority government. Post-war reforms were pushed through with determination. Labour Party membership had risen fourfold between the wars (the Rodmell branch was hosted monthly by Leonard Woolf at Monk’s House). Labour promised full employment, a National Health Service and a ‘cradle-to-grave’ Welfare State. Its campaign message ‘Let’s Face the Future’ had tapped into the nation’s impatient mood for change.
In 1949 Grace suffered a series of headaches, but, like so many women used to putting up with complaints because medicine cost money, she did nothing about it. Vanessa Bell insisted she saw a doctor at the new NHS surgery in Lewes, all upholstered waiting-room chairs and free magazines. On her return Grace was found in tears in the hall: in a desperate voice, she announced she had just shut a toad in the door. Vanessa got the charlady, Mrs Stevens, to remove the corpse and asked what the doctor had said. Grace had asked for new glasses but had not mentioned the headaches, as she’d heard that Mrs Carter, the cook at Tilton, was going stone deaf, and she thought by comparison her headaches could not be mentioned. ‘I very nearly made Grace go straight back to tell the doctor her own symptoms’, wrote Vanessa to Angelica with fond exasperation. ‘I suppose Grace will just go on being Grace.’
How did Vanessa, now an austere, silver-haired 70-year-old, view her housekeeper? Though Grace was 46, Vanessa still instinctively thought of her as the willing, flustered girl from decades back. She had never become ‘Mrs Higgens’ in her mistress’s mind; never taken on that dignified mantle of the upper servant. Grace had kept the same hairstyle she’d worn to her job interview–bobbed, held with a side clip–and its girlishness made her look slightly batty, grey as she now was.
Forty-six: this was properly middle-aged in 1949. Grace was in the autumn of her life, and her character was not going to change. She was who she was: easily startled, prone to inappropriate shrieks of laughter, soft-hearted. She was the sort who would pull the babies’ pram into the kitchen (‘Poor little darlings’), when Angelica left her twins out in the cold for their nap: the sort who would give George the postman a daily cup of tea and a bun and listen to his news. Grace found it hard to sleep and would lie in bed reading–‘all kinds of books, as many books as she could’ said her son–well into the small hours. She was garrulous, sociable and tactile, throwing out her hand and giving you a push when something made her laugh. She had a horror of grubbiness, loved neat and cheerful flowerbeds, spoke passable French–and was quietly ambitious for her only son.
Her pocket diary for June 1947 notes that ‘Peter John sat for exams’. This was the all-important Eleven-Plus, the exam that would see him go either to grammar school or to Lewes County Modern. He passed, and Grace got bolder still. She settled on Christ’s Hospital, a boys’ public school in Horsham some twenty miles away, with a tradition of funding pupils from poorer backgrounds. It is an ancient school with an esoteric uniform (belted long blue coats, knee breeches, yellow stockings); the sort of school her employers might have chosen for their own children. Perhaps she was told about it by Duncan, Clive or Vanessa–or perhaps not, as they seem to have lumped Peter John together with Walter as another dolt. I imagine Grace catching the cross-country train from Lewes, her beanpole son in slightly too short grey flannel trousers with his hair smarmed down. Grace would have been in her customary hat (she never went on a journey without a hat), gloves and clip-on earrings. She always wore earrings. Outwardly, she would have been calm and confident, but her hands clasped tightly on her handbag would have hinted at her anxiety.
Peter John did not get into Christ’s Hospital. He failed the interview. ‘So, young man, are you looking forward to joining our historic school?’ asked the patrician headmaster, leaning back in his chair and fixing Peter John with a kindly yet unwavering stare. ‘No, sir,’ Grace’s son had replied. ‘Actually, I’m not. I’m happy just where I am. I don’t want to move at all.’15 And Grace had her ambition for him crushed in one sentence. It had all been her own idea–but he was her husband’s son.
John dropped the ‘Peter’ from his name, went to Lewes County Modern and became head boy, for though he wasn’t the brightest, he was the best at sport. ‘John 36 runs against Ringmer’ reads Grace’s diary one summer’s day after that fated interview. ‘John’s lip split by cricket ball’ a couple of years later. Sport was his salvation–in a way that it had never been for Quentin Bell, overweight, uncoordinated and miserable at public school. For all Grace’s fierce ambition, perhaps John had known instinctively what was right for him.