The day started with Nanny drawing the curtains in my bedroom to let in the sun. ‘Come on sleepy-head, let me get your togs on,’ she said fondly, dressing me in girl’s clothes as was the fashion in the late ’thirties.
I lived in two rooms, the day nursery and the night nursery, at the top of a house in a quiet tree-lined street in South Kensington. Breakfast was with Nanny and Mrs Reeves the cook in the basement kitchen; my parents ate theirs in the dining room on the floor above. Father, who had the square jaw and rugged handsome looks of an action hero, champed on salted porridge behind his newspaper while Mother chattered brightly and unsuccessfully. Finishing his oats in silence, he slipped a climbing rucksack over his suit and set off for the Daily Telegraph in Fleet Street, today as every day ‘by Shank’s pony’, as Nanny put it.
My own walk came later in the day. Pursuing a life which, even then, inclined to be more idle than his, I took it in a pram. Through streets almost free of traffic Nanny and I walked down the Fulham Road past run-down shops selling hardware and artists’ materials, a dairy with a stable, and the Boucherie Chevaline, a horse butcher, though we never went down Park Walk as she said ‘rough people’ lived there.
After lunch I took a nap and played with my toys in the day nursery while Mother visited art galleries and exhibitions and met for tea at Harrods or Fortnum’s with her numerous and all much richer cousins. I was taken to join her when she returned. ‘Hello, my little treasure,’ she cried in her piercing upper-crust voice as Nanny brought me in, ‘And have you been utter utter blissikins today?’
‘More trouble than a barrel-load of monkeys, I do declare,’ said Nanny, and I’d be delivered over.
Mother was a thin dark-haired woman with a delicate bird-like face, a nervous distracted manner, and a small inheritance. She was uncomfortable with touch or people too close to her. She read to me from Babar the Elephant or we did a jigsaw puzzle until Father came home. We shook hands as he wished me goodnight.
Nanny took me upstairs, put me in nightdress and tucked me up. ‘Now off to the land of Nod,’ she said.
One of eight children of a Leicestershire farm labourer, Nanny had gone into domestic service at the age of fifteen, working for Mother’s cousins in their country house. She’d had to provide her own uniforms and trunk; her family had gone short to buy them. Her wage was £12 a year, paid quarterly in arrears. She had risen from the job of skivvy, getting up at 4.30 am in order to clean the grates and lay the many fires, to that of nursemaid. She went to work for my grandmother in Eaton Place in 1909, on my mother’s birth, remaining with Mother until her death in 1973, by which time she was earning a wage of £5 per week which often went unpaid. Throughout those sixty-four years of unbroken service Mother had no idea in which drawer her own underclothes were kept. As a child it was Nanny who raised me, not my parents, and her I loved, not them.
Our weekends were passed at the country houses of relatives, usually at Dumbleton in Worcestershire. We drove there in the rickety car Father had bought for £20. Nanny and I travelled in the back with the luggage; Mother rode beside Father, wearing around her neck a dead fox with angry red eyes and a cruel jaw snapped shut on its own tail. ‘I wish you wouldn’t overtake,’ she said at times, ‘It uses up a frightful lot of petrol.’
Dumbleton was a twenty-bedroom Victorian Gothic pile set in a park containing its own church, cricket pitch, pavilion and lake with water lilies and a punt. It belonged to Mother’s uncle, who was First Lord of the Admiralty, and Aunt Sybil.
Uncle Bobby, Viscount Monsell, had risen to eminence and wealth from unpromising beginnings. The sixth child of an impoverished Irish family, his grandfather, a clergyman, had written the rousing hymn ‘Fight the good fight with all thy might’. Entering the navy as a midshipman at the age of fifteen, Bobby set out to fulfil its exhortation to ‘lay hold on life’ in his own way. Almost wholly uneducated, he possessed enormous charm. Barbara Cartland, who knew him when she was a debutante, called him the most handsome man she had ever met. Inspired not only by the hymn but through the example of his father, who had wed an heiress, he married an heiress of his own when only twenty-two. For his bride Bobby chose Sybil, the large, ungainly, pathologically shy only daughter of the Birmingham industrialist who had invented the zip fastener.
A gregarious and witty man, he enjoyed entertaining. At weekends Aunt Sybil sat at the foot of a table set for twenty-four, picking distractedly at her food and tortured by embarrassment while trying to think of something, anything, to say to those beside her, as from the other end of the table gales of delighted laughter reached her from the charmed circle of animated guests grouped around her husband.
Appointed First Lord in 1932, Uncle Bobby’s job and social life kept him mostly in London while Aunt Sybil remained at Dumbleton giving birth over the years to four large children of which Graham, the only boy, became Comptroller of Military Intelligence during the war and, according to Mother, a Soviet spy. Uncle Bobby did not play a major role in their upbringing for family life failed to enthral him and, in time, he left Aunt Sybil to marry a younger and smaller woman.
By then he’d retired from his country’s service. The summit of his political career was to negotiate and sign for Britain the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935, criticised by Sir Winston Churchill as ‘a most surprising act … it effectively removed all restraint to German naval expansion and set her yards to work at maximum activity’. In the Second World War which followed, it resulted in the deaths of hundreds of British and American seamen and the loss of countless tons of Allied shipping. The German negotiating team was led by von Ribbentrop, who was a frequent guest at Dumbleton during the protracted negotiations in the course of which he and Uncle Bobby became close friends. Indeed the house’s drawing-room curtains, a set of heavy velvet drapes covering the french windows and decorated with a bold motif of Nazi swastikas, were a personal gift from von Ribbentrop at the conclusion of the agreement and proved of such enduring quality they still hung in place thirty-five years later when I visited Dumbleton after it had been bought by the Post Office for use as a residential country club for its employees.
But as an infant I was unaware of Uncle Bobby’s illustrious career. I spent the weekend segregated upstairs in the nursery, while Nanny’s life centred on the servants’ hall. I was a year old apparently before I had the pleasure of meeting Uncle Bobby face to face. The story is Mother’s, for I don’t remember the occasion, but it seems that one morning I was in my pram on the gravel sward outside the house attended by herself and Nanny when Lord Monsell stepped out the front door in tweed suit and hat, carrying a cane and pair of gloves, about to start on his own morning constitutional around the park. Sitting in my high pram I was on my part equally well dressed in an attractively embroidered lace smock and looking my best. As indeed was Mother, who positively glowed with pride in the little treasure she’d borne into the world.
Emerging from the house, the First Lord threw a brief glance towards our little group before setting off briskly in the other direction. But Mother wanted to share her bounty. ‘Oh good morning, Uncle Bobby,’ she carolled as he was about to step off, ‘Do come and see my little baby.’
He balked, then very reluctantly he approached, though no closer than was absolutely necessary. Stopping well short of the pram, he leaned forward a little to examine what was inside and his handsome features contorted into an expression of the utmost revulsion as he looked at me. ‘Ugh!’ he exclaimed in a shudder of intense disgust, then turned and walked away.