Nineteen forty-eight had started out hopefully enough. At the beginning of the year Anita had written to Marjorie: ‘I won my case yesterday and have a decree.’ Within two weeks of her divorce Anita left Oranmore and Peter Wilson, and sailed to America with Marjorie and Jack, then met Philip in San Francisco, ‘on the express written understanding’, or so she wrote to Rose, that ‘it was to decide the course of our lives’. The couple visited Rose’s brother Bill Vincent in San Francisco and confirmed their engagement to him, but it wasn’t that simple. Philip had managed to become engaged to another girl at the same time, Eileen Sybil Phipps, a niece of the Duchess of Gloucester. Anita supposed, reasonably enough, that the other engagement had been broken off, since Philip showed her the plans of his house in Australia and wanted her to decide which walls to knock down. However, at the same time, the other fiancée was buying her trousseau.
Anita, looking forward to getting married and a new life in Australia, flew back to London. Philip arrived in England soon afterwards and insisted that she stay with Rose at a house she was renting at Frensham, a small town near Guildford in Surrey, since, if it were known that Anita was in London, there would be a scandal. Philip then came to Frensham and told Anita he could only think of one way of ‘playing it now’, which was to gain time by shamming a broken leg. Rose’s doctor, Teddy Sugden, obligingly set Philip’s leg in plaster. Philip then urged Anita to fly back to New York, where he would join her later.
‘I still never doubt he would follow but get rather jumbled,’Anita wrote to Bill Vincent, in a mournful account of the proceedings. Too jumbled to follow Philip’s instructions, she stayed in England. Philip took his bogus broken leg to Hermione Ranfurly’s house and she agreed to let him stay on condition he told her the whole truth. In fact he told her that Anita was in America, and then fetched Eileen for inspection. On reading his engagement announcement to Eileen in The Times, Hermione called Philip ‘a sneaking shit who has never loved anyone in his life’ and turned him out of her house. Anita, at Frensham, collapsed with nervous frustration. Rose went to London to confront Philip, who told her that he thought he must go through with the marriage to Eileen. He wrote Anita ‘a footling epistle’, which said that he loved both Anita and Eileen equally.
Although Anita mentioned some of the consequences of this extraordinary jilting to Bill Vincent – collapsing in hysterics in the Ruck-Keenes’ London flat and having to be given morphine by the ever-obliging Dr Sugden, being carried to a nursing home where the Duchess of Gloucester’s ladies-in-waiting came to question her about Philip – she didn’t tell Bill the whole story. At Frensham she had tried to slit her wrists. When she was back in Ireland, devotedly looked after by Peter Wilson, she wrote to Rose: ‘I could have sworn that at least I was in my own clothes but find Rosie’s dear little white angora jacket ruined! That is the final straw – in Rose’s jacket!’ She tried to analyze what she had done, writing to Rose:
It was the fact that I had idolised Philip and idol to unbelievable trickster was a mighty fall – I had for 6 years selected him as the chevalier sans peur et sans reproche – to find a schzophrenic [sic] and the basest kind of liar was more than my reeling brain could stand.
Philip’s behaviour is arguably harder to understand. What was the point of proposing marriage to two girls when, sooner or later, leg in plaster or not, he was bound to be found out? Philip had had a particularly tough war, returning to Australia from the fighting in New Guinea ill and skeletally thin. Perhaps suffering had affected his sanity, as it did so often to those who had to survive the peace somehow.
While Anita was still recovering in London, Rose left the uk to avoid paying £20,000 income tax. Peter Wilson was sent for to bring the addled Anita back to Oranmore, a labour of love willingly undertaken. Back in Ireland, Anita insisted that she had made a complete recovery. She wrote to Shane: ‘Just a line to tell you I am completely over my breakdown and off to Glaslough … the moment I could bear to face the fact of Parbury’s baseness I could laugh it off.’ And to Rose: ‘I’m over it over it over it … Once I could force myself to realise coldly he was everything I did not want him to be than [sic] suddenly I began to laugh at myself for being “had” – so completely unutterably “had” – led up the garden path of history.’ She delighted in her surroundings, or said that she did: ‘The castle is lovelier than ever – what lights – what flowers – baby seals – kittens – gorgeous vegetables to eat.’ And, above all: ‘The reality of dear Peter … one person with one mind – a straight gaze, eyes 2 inches apart.’ She was about to go to Glaslough where ‘with enormous pleasure I am going to give the cowboy chaps I had made in Wyoming for Philip to Peter instead!!!’
Peter’s way of celebrating Anita’s recovery was to frantically socialize, something that he usually tried to avoid. He and Anita called on neighbours, planned a lunch out, a trip to the Balinrobe races and a dance where Anita would wear a spectacular American evening dress. They were both deluded in thinking that all was now well. How could a woman who had expected to fly to Australia and begin married life with the man she had loved and yearned for for six years, settle down contentedly in the mouldering Irish castle she had longed to escape – and with a man she didn’t love? It was beyond endurance.
Philip Parbury’s wedding took place on 7 July 1948, an occasion that Anita marked by swallowing a bottle of aspirins and other tablets, washed down with half a bottle of whiskey. By the time Peter found her, she was going cold. Peter made her vomit to bring up all the drugs. He was convinced that she hadn’t meant to kill herself but wanted a few hours of oblivion to get her through the day. By that stage he was as exhausted as she was. He hired a nurse for a few days and realized that it would be a long time before Anita was over it, over it, over it. But the Leslie way was to make light of things. Anita told Rose: ‘Mummy has written a really funny letter: “Her needs were so modest – one Australian bounder with hookworm – not a peer or millionaire …”’
Peter stayed at Oranmore when Anita went to Glaslough and, once away from him, she appreciated him less. To Rose:
I realised 2 years ago we could never share life – he likes so much that I don’t and to share a home with him drives me nearly mad – not to mention the complications of his wife and son … see I can’t marry him and settle – he is too old – it wouldn’t work – it doesn’t work now! … I am the destruction of his happiness … So once again I have got to organise a cleavage and desert poor faithful Pete.
Another man was causing her problems too. Her brother Jack, who had cracked up in the prison camp, was again nearing breakdown and Anita felt that she was ‘the only bolster that poor conflicting mind has between him and the world’. She took him to see ‘a famous doctor’ and resigned herself to looking after him indefinitely. These were not ideal circumstances for a woman recovering from a suicide attempt.
So much happened during July that Anita didn’t mention the August publication of Train to Nowhere. It is hard to know when she wrote the book while restoring a castle, losing a lover and coping with family problems. The book was subtitled ‘An ambulance driver’s adventures on four fronts’, carried a foreword by Alex, now Field-Marshall the Viscount Alexander of Tunis and was dedicated to Jeanne de L’Espée and the ambulancières of the 1st Armoured Division, and to the memory of Lucette and Odette Le Coq.
It is an extraordinary, unforgettable book and reviewers recognized Anita’s ‘impersonal integrity’ and her unique point of view – ‘a terse, keen reticence and the summing up of deadly situations in a line or two …’ (The Times). It sold out quickly, was reprinted twice and then went out of print. For some years after the war, people wanted to read only about situations with which they were already familiar: Dunkirk, the D-Day landings, the death of Hitler. It was too soon to offer new revelations. In 1949 Elizabeth Taylor’s fine novel A Wreath of Roses was published. In it, a man admits to a woman whom he has just met that he is writing a book about the war. Her reaction is this: ‘“The war and his experience in it”, she thought. “Unreadable!”’
Viscount Alexander expected as much. In his foreword, he wrote: ‘Our gallant French allies’ … contribution to the war is too little known by the world at large.’ Even now, after a spate of books and films about the war, few of us are familiar with the 1944 Allied invasion of southern France, the exotic and slightly crazy Zouave troops who served in the French infantry, or the suffering of French civilians under German bombardment, stumbling out of their bombed houses, carrying dead babies in their arms. It is telling that when Anita revised her wartime memoir in 1983, she left out the episode of the exhausted French woman shooting two German prisoners, realizing that even forty or so years later, it was too distressing to read about. As Christopher Hitchens wrote: ‘Real history is more pitiless even than you had been told it was.’
Train to Nowhere is lightened by the appearances of the ambulancières in their red lipstick, their hair somehow styled in complicated rolls even when there was hardly any water to wash in, turning up on parade with their legs browned with tanning lotion to give a boost to dispirited soldiers. Twenty years after Anita’s book was published, another book by a female soldier appeared: the Israeli Yael Dayan’s A Soldier’s Diary. Yael, daughter of a general, shares Anita’s view that women in the front line are a gladdening and civilizing influence – the way they hang bits of mirrors on trees to fix their make-up distracts from the shock of war. The French female soldiers of the 1st Armoured Division, many of whom, like Anita, were awarded the Croix de Guerre, did not even have the right to vote. That came in 1945, long years after the overprotected British servicewomen had been part of the electorate.
It would appear that there were no publication celebrations. The Leslies were concerned about Jack, who was now having sleep treatment for his nerves. At the end of August Anita removed him from a nursing home as his treatment there sounded alarming: ‘10 days unconscious and 4 of hallucinations caused by some drug that sweeps debris out of the mind!’ It had been a bad idea to expect Jack to settle down to managing Glaslough straight from a prison camp. ‘It’s been the ruin of him and now we are going to have a long tricky time to get him balanced mentally.’
Shane was now ‘running (?)’ as Anita put it, the estate, while Marjorie spent a lot of time in America, her arrivals and departures causing disruption. Anita wished that she would make up her mind where she wanted to live, although she herself was as indecisive as her mother. She wrote to Rose: ‘I don’t know what to do with myself. I can’t bog down at Glaslough – can’t spend another winter here [Oranmore] with Peter – it’s too futile. The alternative is to try to get some sort of job.’ And then, not for the first time: ‘Peter does worry me – he is so irresponsible and unreliable about his own affairs.’ He was now farming at Oranmore in a small, and loss-making, way, devoting all his time and energy to four bullocks and seventeen acres. ‘There is a constant fuss on,’ Anita complained to Rose, begging her to come and stay.
Instead, in November, Anita went to stay with Rose in Paris, in Rose’s suite at the Hôtel de Vendôme. She attended a reunion with some of her wartime colleagues, and went with Rose to the couture shows. Rose paid all of Anita’s expenses and bought her a coat that cost seventy pounds. It should have been a happy escape from the blustery west of Ireland but it wasn’t because Rose looked so ill, which was the way that Anita felt. But she wasn’t ill; she was pregnant.