It was a very deceptive wedding day. The 35-year-old bride, described by her cousin, the sculptor Clare Sheridan, as looking ‘very jeune fille’, was three months pregnant by a man whom she wasn’t marrying that Wednesday, 12 January 1949. Her marriage certificate stated that she was a ‘spinster and gentlewoman’, which wasn’t quite the case: after many years of pleading for a divorce she had recently disengaged herself from a previous husband. And gentlewoman seemed too mild a term for a woman who had published two books and been awarded the Croix de Guerre for her wartime service. So, radiantly flying her false colours, Anne Theodosia Leslie, known as Anita, married Commander William (Bill) Donald Aelian King, dso and Bar, dsc, who was thirty-nine. The marriage was solemnized at the Catholic Chapel of Sisters of the Holy Ghost in the grounds of Anita’s family home, Castle Leslie, Glaslough, County Monaghan. After the ceremony, bride and groom joined hands over ‘that notable relic the Great Bell of Cappagh Abbey and in presence of Clan and County sworn troth accordingly’, as Anita’s father, Sir Shane Leslie, put it in a typewritten declaration. He also wrote a lyric to mark the occasion, to be sung to the ‘Londonderry Air’:
An Irish winter brings a sight surprising –
A slice of silver Spring has seemed to bide:
Though Summer’s gold is gone, the flowers are rising
To greet Anita Leslie as a bride.
The old green lake is all a gentle glimmer,
The forest firs have kept a bridal wreath:
And though Demesne and fields are looking dimmer
The buds of Spring are coming up beneath.
So take each other now for worse or better
And laugh at gains or losses in the game:
Just take the sunny weather with the wetter
For Irish rain and sunshine are the same.
This was the wedding for which everyone at Castle Leslie, seat of the Leslies since 1665, had been waiting. Anita wrote to her best friend Rose Gardner:
I’ll always be so glad I gave them [the estate workers] my wedding – the event of their lives! 40 or 50 old employees with gnarled hands and eyes shining with such sincere wishes for our happiness – the thrill for them of the conservatory full of flowers and downstairs cups of tea and cakes and pipers to dance to till midnight.
One wonders whether the Irish Times report of the wedding struck a deliberately cryptic note when it reported: ‘Owing to the shortness of the notice over fifty guests were unable to come over from England, as well as many from America’ – ‘shortness of notice’ suggesting a shotgun wedding.
Anita’s son, Tarka, was born in Dublin on 26 June of that year, although his birth remained a secret until August, the month in which Anita declared he was born. This meant that the baby had two birth certificates with different dates. ‘Cache ton jeu’ was a favourite admonition of Anita’s American-born grandmother, Leonie Leslie, née Jerome, and Anita was also steeped in the traditional wiliness of the Leslies, a family that could then be described as thriving on secrets and lies.
Anita was born on 21 November 1914 at 10 Talbot Square in Bayswater, London, not far from Great Cumberland Place and a street known as Lower Jerome Terrace where Leonie and her two sisters, Jennie Churchill and Clara Frewen, Anita’s great-aunts, lived when in London. Anita’s parents were Shane and Marjorie, née Ide – ‘two more disparate beings could hardly be imagined,’ according to their daughter.
On Anita’s birth certificate Shane’s profession is given as ‘journalist’. He was also a poet and, since the Leslies were Protestant landlords, an unlikely Irish nationalist who had converted to Catholicism in 1908 at the age of twenty-three. For a time, Shane had considered entering the priesthood and, when his cousin Clare Frewen, later Sheridan, a beloved confidante since their teenage years, suggested that it was a restrictive thing to do, he told her: ‘I don’t want spiritual independence. I want intellectual anchorage.’ He eventually decided against the priesthood but changed his name from John Randolph to the more populist Shane and renounced ownership of the Leslie estates in favour of his younger brother Norman. The latter’s death in the First World War resulted in the sort of financial chaos that was to become familiar to future generations of Leslies, including Anita.
The worldly Leslies, outwardly at least, accepted Shane’s conversion. Embracing Catholicism was something of a fad among idealistic and spiritually delicate young men under the influence of the famous convert John Henry Newman. Not all Protestant families were as tolerant. After Gerard Manley Hopkins’ conversion in 1866, his father wrote: ‘The blow is so deadly and so great that we have not yet recovered from the first shock of it.’ Marriage to the elegant American socialite Marjorie Ide on 12 June 1912 made Shane less austere. His younger brother Lionel noted: ’When I returned from India in 1927 I found that a very surprising metamorphosis had overtaken him [Shane] and instead of a moody introvert a talkative society loving extravert had emerged.’ Shane himself was rather apologetic about this personality change. In his book Long Shadows (1966), he lamented the death of many of his male friends in the First World War since it had meant that ‘Fate cast me in the arms and converse of women against my will.’
Marjorie Ide was the pampered, high-spirited daughter of a self-made lawyer from Vermont, Henry Ide, who had become a judge in the Vermont Supreme Court, Justice of Samoa, Governor of the Philippines and, most enjoyably, the American Minister in Madrid. He was widowed young and brought up three little daughters. Marjorie was the youngest: golden-haired and leggy, it was said that she had turned down a hundred marriage proposals before Shane Leslie, who was lecturing for the Gaelic League and turned up at her sister Anne’s house, The Cedars, in Long Island. Anne was married to Bourke Cockran, the American politician who had schooled Shane’s cousin Winston Churchill in the art of oratory. The 27-year-old Irish poet seemed more interesting than those rejected suitors; for one thing, he went around in a kilt, the traditional Leslie one in saffron yellow, or in St Patrick’s Blue, either style probably a first for Long Island.
He was tall and handsome, moody and witty. In 1907 he had visited Russia and had stayed with Leo Nicolaevitch Tolstoy, who had urged him to become a vegetarian and learn how to plough. Shane was also prone to nervous collapses, which, along with the kilt and the Catholicism, didn’t endear him to Henry Ide, who would have preferred Marjorie to marry someone less poetic and properly American.
Shane and Marjorie might have settled in London contentedly enough – it offered a literary life for Shane, a shiny society one for Marjorie and the de rigeur pram rides in Hyde Park with a uniformed nurse for their first-born, Anita – had not the First World War dimmed all the lights for the Leslies, as it did for the whole of Europe.
Captain Norman Leslie, owner of the family estates, was killed near Armentières in northern France only two months into the war. He had been the favourite son, conventional, good-natured, an excellent polo player and a captain in the Rifle Brigade. Shane set off for France to find his brother’s body, which lay between the guns of two armies. He had it encoffined and cut a lock of Norman’s hair for Leonie. Most unsuitably, since he was an appalling driver, Shane was put in charge of an ambulance, landing several wounded soldiers in ditches. After a short spell of rolling bandages Marjorie sailed back to America with Anita, a lady’s maid and a nanny, where she stayed with the Bourke Cockrans in Long Island and Washington or with her father in Vermont. Shane, having given up the ambulance, went to the Dardanelles with a mule transport unit, where he had a nervous breakdown. His position as a loyal British subject and a committed Irish nationalist can’t have been easy to reconcile and may have had something to do with his frequent nervous collapses. Recovering at a hospital in Malta, he wrote a mournful book of reminiscences, The End of a Chapter (published 1917), its theme ‘the suicide of the civilisation called Christian’. Since he was of little use in the war effort, Leonie decided to take him to America to join his wife and his daughter.
There he turned out to be a convincing propagandist. He believed wholeheartedly that the war was just and England and her allies must win it, and that Ireland must be granted independence. In Washington he worked towards both aims, rightly feeling that there would be more chance of America entering the war on the Allied side if Irish-American disapproval of British policy in Ireland could be assuaged. He had excellent contacts on both sides: his cousin, Winston Churchill, who was First Lord of the Admiralty until his mismanagement of the Dardanelles offensive, his brother-in-law, Bourke Cockran, the British ambassador, Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, and John Redmond, the moderate leader of the Irish Nationalists. The Easter Rising of 1916 and the pitiless reprisals by the British caused Shane to despair but he was able to celebrate with Marjorie when America joined the war a year later.
He didn’t spend much time with his family – Anita remembers seeing him only once during her early childhood – but a son, Jack, was born in New York in 1916. Jack’s Leslie grandparents decided that he should be their heir and bonfires were lit at Glaslough to celebrate his birth. As with so many Leslie decisions, this one turned out badly.
Anita’s American childhood was privileged but unpleasant. Every afternoon she would be put into one of the eighty-two exquisite dresses bought for her by her childless aunt Anne and taken down to tea where she might meet Alice Longworth, the daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt. Her grandfather Henry Ide let her ride on his foot and she was much petted. But she began to suffer from severe asthma. Jack was another sickly child: like his parents, he came down with the Spanish flu, which killed millions just as the war was ending, and then got pneumonia and a mastoid on his ear that needed an operation. Winston Churchill inherited the robust Jerome constitution from his lustrous mother, Jennie, but the equally healthy Leonie, Jennie’s sister, doesn’t seem to have passed on this hardy genetic inheritance to Shane or his offspring, although the children’s fragility may also have been partly due to the stress of having Shane and Marjorie as parents.
Shane’s grandfather Sir John Leslie, 1st Baronet of Glaslough since 1876, had died in 1916 and his widow, the bookish, dissatisfied Lady Constance, lived in London, so Leonie and her husband, another Sir John, were delighted when in the summer of 1919 Shane and Marjorie decided to move back to Ireland. Anita claimed that Shane didn’t come near his children during the voyage; like his own father, he found children boring. At Liverpool they were met by Leonie, who was horrified by Jack’s bandaged ears and the special mattress required for Anita’s wheeziness. A train from Liverpool to Belfast, a smaller one, ‘the train to nowhere’, as Anita later called it, for the sixty-mile journey to Glaslough was followed by arrival in darkness at Castle Leslie to be fussed over by servants and carried upstairs to bed.
It was a strange time to be settling in Ireland, with the War of Independence raging, and many Protestant landlords fearing for their lives and the survival of their estates. The once-wealthy Leslies had unwisely invested their compensation money from the Wyndham Land Acts, which had transferred some of their land to their tenants, in Russian Railway Bonds and faced a problematic future. Yet there was a steely serenity about Jack and Leonie that allowed them to live peaceably with their Catholic tenants and with their fidgety son, the ardent nationalist. There is a story that in 1920, Sir John, quite deaf and short-sighted, inspected some armed troops in Glaslough village, thinking that they were loyalist Ulster Volunteers when they were in fact members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). That summer Marjorie took her seven-year-old daughter to the Donegal resort of Bundoran for some sea air. Since the railway station was blown up while they were there, they had no means of getting away. Anita rather enjoyed the drama (‘the atmosphere of vague danger seemed delicious’) but Marjorie didn’t. After several jittery days, a local man was able to drive them to a shooting box that the Leslies owned in the village of Pettigo in County Donegal. To Marjorie’s surprise, she came across her father-in-law who, civil conflict notwithstanding, had come there for a spot of trout fishing. Soon afterwards the younger Leslies moved to London where Shane, by now an experienced negotiator, became involved in meetings which, the following year, resulted in the treaty that established the Irish Free State, of which more later. Anita hated London, its tamed, boring parks and the mindless routines inflicted by her governess Miss Butler, a bombazine-clad religious fanatic. She missed her grandparents and the wooded lakeside where wildlife and changing skies made every day an adventure. She determined to live in Ireland, although decades were to pass before she was able to do so.
Not everyone who knows Castle Leslie falls in love with it. Shane certainly didn’t. His novel about the family seat, renamed Kelvey Hall but recognizably Castle Leslie because of its colony of rooks, woods and lake, was called Doomsland (1923) and dedicated to Marjorie. The Leslies had lived at Glaslough since 1665, when they bought the land with the £2000 given to the fighting bishop John Leslie by Charles ll. Their long tenure makes the Leslie motto ‘Grip Fast’ very appropriate. The castle in the Scottish baronial style was built in the 1870s for Anita’s great-grandfather, the Sir John Leslie who had the distinction of having a picture hung in the Royal Academy in the same year that he won the Military Grand Steeplechase. It stands on the site of an earlier building, incorporating part of it. Its dour and austere limestone façade surrounded by three miles of stone ‘famine walls’ was commented on by Shane: ‘No one who has seen Glaslough in Monaghan could believe it was merely the residence of Irish Squires.’
The forbidding Victorian building was softened by an Italianate Renaissance cloister that linked the main house to a single-storey wing containing the library and billiard room, and was the original home of Sir John’s impressive Italian art collection. Anita did not mind the dark cold of the castle. She loved the lake, said to be the finest specimen pike lake in Ireland, the ancient woods and terraces flanked by giant lime trees. She loved the scrambled Leslie ancestry of soldiering (the family could trace this back to Attila the Hun) and bookishness. Dean Swift had been a visitor and had written in the castle’s guest book: ‘Glaslough with rows of books/Upon its shelves/Written by the Leslies/All about themselves.’ The castle was not just full of books but of letters and journals relating to generations of Leslies and, in the attics, clothes and jewellery and mementos of every kind. When Anita began to write about the lives of members of her interesting family, her research materials were all around her.
There was a Bechstein in the drawing room, chosen for Leonie by the famous concert pianist and Polish prime minister, Ignacy Jan Paderewski, and a Della Robbia fireplace that Sir John had spotted as the fifteenth-century sacristy in Florence that housed it was being pulled down. When Jennie Churchill visited with her third, much younger, husband Colonel Montagu Porch, she and Leonie, excellent pianists, played duets, enchanting Anita and Jack. How dull London seemed after that. Great-aunt Jennie lived at 8 Westbourne Street and Anita passed her door on the way to her monotonous daily walk in Kensington Gardens but Miss Butler seldom allowed her to visit. No wonder that Jennie was regarded as a treat. Determined to always look on the bright side, she painted all the light bulbs in her house yellow, to reproduce sunlight. She and Leonie thought that mopiness was ill-mannered and in bad taste. ‘Smile dear, it costs nothing,’ Leonie would urge her sulky granddaughter.
Desmond Leslie, Marjorie’s third child, was born by Caesarian section in London on 9 June 1921 to very muted celebrations. Only days beforehand, Henry Ide had died in Vermont without either of his daughters by his side, since Anne Cockran had come to England to be with Marjorie. And then on the day of Desmond’s birth, Jennie Churchill died suddenly, following complications after breaking her ankle. Marjorie took flight. With the new baby, a nanny and a personal maid, as well as Anita, she went to San Remo on the Italian Riviera, a spot chosen partly because the sun and sea air might cure the little girl’s asthma. Anita went to school at the local convent where she played with the nuns’ pet rabbits, picked up a few words of Italian and was prepared for her first Holy Communion in that language.
Back in London, Marjorie discovered that her eight-year-old daughter was unable to read. It was Miss Butler’s fault. She had never conveyed to her pupil that letters represented sounds, so Anita just memorized the printed pages Miss Butler read aloud to her. In time, she knew Alice in Wonderland by heart and it was only when she was given the unfamiliar Alice Through the Looking Glass to read aloud that the game was up. It is hard to make excuses for Marjorie, a neglectful mother who saw her children as nuisances who cramped her style. ‘Why has God given me such children,’ she would complain when some naughtiness made her late for a dinner party.
Shane’s time was taken up with the negotiations that led to the Anglo-Irish Treaty. He had no recognized status, unlike Winston Churchill, who was Secretary for the Colonies and an official delegate to the peace talks, and his role seemed mainly to persuade various interested parties of the benefits of Irish Home Rule. Lady Lavery, the beautiful wife of the artist Sir John Lavery, entertained the delegates at her house in Cromwell Place, opposite the Victoria and Albert Museum. At one of her dinner parties, Winston asked Michael Collins, President of the IRB and its Director of Intelligence, if he could make sure that Castle Leslie wasn’t burnt down as his favourite aunt lived there.
Hazel Lavery was a femme fatale from central casting. During the treaty negotiations she was rumoured to have had affairs with both the charismatic and handsome Michael Collins and the Lord Chancellor, Lord Birkenhead. Her biographer, Sinéad McCoole, in Hazel: A Life of Lady Lavery 1880–1935, thinks that Shane wasn’t included in her long list of lovers, in spite of penning her love poems, sending her roses and, years later, writing: ‘She merely whistled to men and they obeyed as if it were a whip fashioned of her eyelashes.’
Shane was becoming an important literary figure. During the First World War a Catholic schoolmaster, Monsignor Cyril Fay, who had taught F. Scott Fitzgerald, gave Shane the manuscript of This Side of Paradise, which Shane recommended to the publisher Scribner. When Fitzgerald’s first novel was published in 1920, he became instantly famous and so grateful to Shane that he dedicated his next novel to him, ‘in appreciation of much literary help and encouragement’. The book, published in 1922, was called The Beautiful and the Damned and Marjorie asked her husband which he thought he was. She was no longer sure.
The aesthetic Irish nationalist was now intoxicated by the Jazz Age and attended wild parties with the actress Tallulah Bankhead who once, memorably, said: ‘I tell you cocaine isn’t habit-forming and I know because I’ve been taking it for years.’ Shane, an unlikely Casanova, retained the prejudices of Catholic Ireland, writing scathingly of James Joyce’s Ulysses in the Dublin Review (September 1922): ‘In this work the spiritually offensive and the physically unclean are united. We speak advisedly when we say that though no formal condemnation has been pronounced, the Inquisition can only require its destruction or, at least, its removal from Catholic houses.’
Although, outwardly, Marjorie seemed like a typical product of the Roaring Twenties with her bobbed hair, short skirts that showed off her long legs, shaking cocktails or dancing at the Embassy Club, a favourite haunt of the Prince of Wales, she took an old-fashioned view of her husband’s behaviour, referring to his conquests as his ‘band of alley cats’. She thought of herself as an exciting woman. As a young girl she had gone on an official visit to China with her friend Alice Longworth and had been instructed in captivating sexual techniques at the court of the Dowager Empress. Marjorie is supposed to have passed on what she learned at the Chinese court to her friend Wallis Simpson, who had caught the eye of the Prince of Wales. Shane’s lack of attention was insufferable and, although Marjorie had converted to Catholicism, she began to think about divorce.
Leonie was appalled. Her generation tolerated adultery if love affairs were conducted with tact, discretion and consideration but divorce was an upsetting experience for everyone, especially when the divorcing couple were parents. Shane and Marjorie were too absorbed in themselves to consider their children, leading to one of Marjorie’s characteristic flits. In 1925 she took the three children to Paris, where she attracted a rich American suitor, Major Logan. He longed to marry her but her Catholicism made her indecisive.
It was an unhappy and unsettling time for Anita and Jack. Walks in the Parc Monçeau were even more disagreeable than in Kensington Gardens. Anita’s asthma got worse and she had three separate bouts of pneumonia, while Jack had painful recurrences of abscesses on his ear that required operations. Convalescence was pleasurable. Anita wrote later: ‘Jack and I decided we liked being ill. Once the pain ended we preferred being in bed to out of it … It was safer.’
After some weeks, Shane appeared. He went down on one knee and offered his wife a bedraggled bunch of violets. The marriage was saved after a fashion and, within it, the children remained haphazardly parented.