Anita now spent more time in London, where she led a heady social life. ‘They all talk amusingly,’ her diary records, ‘but then London lives are unhealthy and to me unliveable.’ Patsy Jellicoe had established herself as a patron of the arts, throwing interesting parties for new friends, including the prima ballerina of her time, Margot Fonteyn, and writing and lecturing on Far Eastern Art and garden history. But her marriage to George was coming to an end. Anita’s undated diary entry: ‘[Fonteyn’s] amusing, witty Panamanian husband [Roberto “Tito” Arias] sought to cheer up Patsy who was given a black eye by George last night when she refused a divorce (for the sake of her four children).’ George persisted in trying to obtain a divorce and, in 1958, resigned from the Foreign Office to avoid scandal. He told an inquisitive reporter: ‘Half London must know I want to marry Mrs [Philippa] Bridge.’ He was able to do this, and start a new family, in 1966 when his marriage to Patsy was finally dissolved. He resumed a distinguished political career, becoming Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Lords, but it came to an end in 1973 when an involvement with call girls was exposed in the press. George said: ‘I behaved with incredulous stupidity.’
All this was in the future. In early 1958 a tearful Patsy waved goodbye to Anita as the latter sailed to New York on the Liberté for a social visit to New York, Philadelphia and Palm Beach.
Bill and the children had gone ahead to Andros Island in the Bahamas, staying at the house of Audrey Pleydell-Bouverie, who had created a beautiful garden. When Anita arrived there she was greeted by Bill and Peter Wilson, who seemed to be staying at the house, both men ‘dressed in tatters, Eton ties and naval jackets’, while her children introduced her to ‘a whirl of little black friends’. On 15 May Anita wrote to Shane that this holiday was ‘Bill’s first real rest since he took over Glaslough’, although he seemed to have taken quite a few recent skiing breaks. They had a wonderful time, ‘swimming in blue water, coral reef, snorkel-gazing at small brilliant fish, barracuda catching … hide and seek and calypso with negro children in garden! Heaven.’ At the end of it, they were seen off by Peter Wilson and Peter Gardner and his small daughter Fleur, ‘a brown-eyed Rose’.
This long holiday took place in term time. Tarka was now a pupil at the Boys’ National School at Oranmore but Anita took a relaxed attitude about his attendance there. She and Bill intended Tarka to go to Eton but were bypassing the traditional route of pre-prep followed by prep school, which most parents of future Etonians considered essential for passing Eton’s entrance examination. Anita paid the Oranmore schoolmaster to teach Tarka English grammar instead of Gaelic. When her son told her that, after four years of lessons, he had learnt only how to stand on his head in the hard playground, Anita decided that he was a natural Huckleberry Finn.
Meanwhile Shane, his Eton days long behind him, and short of money, was selling the library at Glaslough, a collection of books and manuscripts that had been housed at Castle Leslie since the late eighteenth century. The library’s contents were sold to John Fleming, a rare-book dealer who, like Shane, had worked with A.S.W. Rosenbach. Fleming paid £1500 and the collection was subsequently resold to the University of Chicago. Later Shane sold many of Winston’s books and letters, items much in demand as ‘Winstomania’, a term coined by Shane, took hold.
Back from the Bahamas, the Leslie-Kings went straight to Augustus John’s studio at Fordingbridge, Hampshire. John made two drawings of Anita, both so beautiful that Bill found it hard to choose between them. The one that Anita described as ‘tranquil instead of wild-eyed’ was shown on the cover of her 1983 memoir, A Story Half Told. She wears an expression both world-weary and faraway and has a perfect maquillage – dewy, red lips, long, dark lashes – and a soft cloud of hair. In the memoir published two years earlier, The Gilt and the Gingerbread, the cover portrait is by her former brother-in-law Serge Rodzianko, drawn during the 1930s, and Anita’s pretty face is a blank canvas, with none of the sexual allure of the later version.
There was less travelling during the winter months, when Anita hunted with the Galway Blazers. The Joint Master of Foxhounds (mfh) was Mollie Cusack Smith, who had given up a successful career as a London couturier during the Second World War to live in Ireland, where for thirty-eight years, from 1946 to 1984, she ruled over horse and hound. Bill and Anita hunted with the Blazers two days a week and with Mollie’s own pack, the Bermingham and North Galway Hunt, of which Anita became Joint mfh, for one further day. As well as hunting in Galway, every September Anita stayed with Henry McIlhenny at Glenveagh Castle, Donegal for more strenuous activity: ‘Lots of stalking – I seem to get fitter each year.’ If she got tired, a ‘Nature Cure’ diet of lettuce revived her. She had always associated food with asthmatic attacks and ate very little. Meeting her dashing wartime friend Gavin Astor, now ‘a plump red faced balding middle aged gentleman’, she noted in her diary: ‘Food and drink is really the destroyer of youth I suppose.’ In 1958 she doesn’t seem to have begun a new book of her own but helped Bill to write The Stick and the Stars, the first of seven books about his life of sea.
There were two unexpected marriages that year. Peter Wilson married Prim Baker, a former Wren and professional gardener. Audrey Pleydell-Bouverie, Anita’s hostess in the Bahamas, didn’t approve. Visiting Anita in London, ‘she held forth on Peter – his indiscreet tongue and “second rate snob-wife”!!’ On 30 May Shane married Iris Carola Frazer, née Laing, in London, ‘in great privacy in the little Catholic church round the corner’, as he described it to Clare. ‘Our chief thought is to pray for the souls of our dead spouses.’ Unlike Marjorie, Iris regarded Shane as a great literary figure and devoted herself to putting his papers in order, to help a future biographer. Another couple were having marital problems. Desmond Leslie had had many extra-marital affairs and had even fathered an illegitimate child but Agnes had put up with his infidelities. Now, during a five-week-long holiday in Kitzbuhl, he had met and fallen in love with Helen Strong, a tall, beautiful blonde who, it being a small world, had been staying with the Ruck-Keenes. Agnes and Desmond’s marriage continued unhappily for the next few years, with Anita an unwilling go-between. Once, when Desmond was lunching with her in London, ‘Agnes burst in tearfully to enquire where he was living etc and I tried to sustain a calm discussion of children’s holiday plans – it is trying not having any address at which to write to him.’
At Whitsun, at Oranmore, it was Tarka’s First Communion, ‘thrilled by his new suit and white socks covered with medals and amulets from all the convents around … Leonie was envious and dreadful all day’, Anita wrote in her diary. Afterwards the family went to Glaslough, ‘frantic with guests and cattle’. Among the guests was Rose’s stepmother, Derry Vincent, ‘who told me about Rose – that exquisite creature takes drugs – she loves me still but the lack of balance is too intense for us to communicate’. This was all Anita had to record about the woman she had addressed as ‘Darlingest’ for most of her life. During that Whitsun holiday Charles de Gaulle became president of France. Anita’s diary: ‘I believe implicitly in de Gaulle – He is so unlikeable and so uncompromising and so admirable – just the iron rod that can save France IF anything can.’ She chafed peevishly at the sluggishness of Glaslough:
Now I long to be in Paris/Algiers with my thumb on the pulse of Europe – oh it is a cage here – a beautiful prison in which one’s mind rots – But the children and their blooming fills my creative instinct. Only them – or I’d die of boredom.
Although she insisted that she could never live in London, ‘in a milieu of very smart women on stilt heels, their toes ruined by the new pointed shoes’, she went there often, having supper at ‘a bohemian club in Chelsea’, dining with politicians, where the talk was of the Westminster village rather than the cattle pasture.
On 10 June, although Anita and Bill were now in charge of three farms at Glaslough, Oranmore and Drumlargan, the last one needing to be ‘entirely rehabilitated’, they went to England: ‘I had asked Clemmie if I might bring Tarka to see Winston as at nine and a half he will take him in … I was sure the psychic import of Winston’s personality would register on a child’s mind.’ Clemmie had written that Winston was much changed, weak and deaf and that he wouldn’t remember what he did in the war. ‘I think he will though’, Anita wrote in her diary. The invitation for lunch at Chartwell was 6 July, so the Leslie-Kings made a round of visits to the English countryside before arriving at the Churchills’ house in its woodland setting in the Weald of Kent. At Audrey Pleydell-Bouverie’s home, Julians, in Hertfordshire, whose rose garden was admired as the most beautiful in England, ‘the house [was] set like a small jewel in the centre of its fountains and banks of flowers’. Audrey, old and frail, ‘whose wit has amused everyone from Queen Mary to Winston’, toured her garden in a wheelchair. After a kitchen supper at the house of her friends Aidan and Virginia Crawley, Anita wrote, ‘She cooks about like me’, which is to say atrociously.
In a long diary entry for Sunday, 6 June 1958, Anita wrote ‘Mustn’t forget this day!’ There was no chance that she would. They arrived at Chartwell to find Clemmie in bed with shingles and too ill to see them and her daughter Diana Sandys acting as hostess. ‘Tarka had been warned to be very good and only speak when spoken to and he watched Winston with huge eyes. At lunch he and I sat between Winston and Field Marshal Montgomery! Some company for a small boy to make conversation to!’
At the other end of the table with Bill and Diana sat Winston’s literary agent, Emery Reves (1904–81), a distinguished writer, publisher and art collector whom, in 1939, Winston had sent to America to boost pro-British propaganda. Emery was too brilliant for Anita. She described him as a ‘Hungarian Jew very clever who has lovely villa at Rocquebrune where Winston stays to the raised eyebrows of proper old ladies who don’t approve of Wendy R.’ Wendy, also at the table, was Emery’s mistress – they married in 1964 – and was a Texan-born Vogue model. Their villa, where Winston was a frequent guest, was La Pausa, built in the 1920s by Bendor, Duke of Westminster, for his mistress Coco Chanel. The ‘proper old ladies’ may have disapproved of Wendy Russell, as she then was, but she captivated everyone else. Noël Coward, another frequent guest at La Pausa, thought that Winston was ‘absolutely obsessed’ with this ‘most fascinating lady’, although he doubted that Winston would ever be unfaithful to Clemmie. Anita admitted that Winston found Wendy ‘restful’ and then, spitefully: ‘She exactly resembles a Peter Arno caricature of a gorgeous poule – huge eyes, huge mouth – startled stare – deliciously brainless and rather sweet.’ This waspishness may have been caused by the sight of Bill and Wendy ‘making eyes at one end of the table’.
There was a further lapse: ‘Monty was wonderful with Tarka – a bit too wonderful as it turned out – Soon the child was laughing and joining in all conversation – accepting the Field Marshall as his particular pal.’ After lunch, Monty and the over-excited Tarka romped in the garden. Just before the Leslie-Kings were about to leave, Tarka leapt out of a bush and
in front of the detectives (and Sunday sightseers by gate) gave the FM a hearty smack on the bottom!!! I nearly died of mortification – Bill didn’t see – we snatched the child up and drove off hurriedly leaving Monty with an expression of absolute surprise on his face – the expression Rommel never succeeded in putting there.
Six months later on 9 December, Anita wrote contritely to ‘Dear Cousin Winston’:
My little son will never forget his visit to you in July – (I fear ‘Monty’ will never forget it either but he whirred the small fellow up into such a state of excitement as if it were the eve of Alamein). Next day he said to me apologetically ‘But Mummy you never TOLD me General Montgomery was a GREAT MAN TOO!’ (But don’t tell the Field Marshall this).
Anita and Tarka’s next trip was to the south of France, where they were joined by Jack and Desmond. Desmond was a regular visitor to the Côte d’Azur and was able to get free entry for his relations at both the de luxe Beach Swimming Pool and the Casino – ‘once is enough’, Anita wrote. In France both Tarka and Anita got chickenpox. Weary and poxed, she collected two other small boys, Paddy Jellicoe and Mark Leslie, and took them to Glaslough, ‘where I collapse in my large silent green room’. Many years later, when Desmond and Helen’s daughter Sammy was running Castle Leslie as a hotel, she retained the family bedrooms as ‘heritage rooms’, with notes on each written by Desmond. For ‘Anita’s Room’ he described his sister as writing her biographies in bed ‘while enjoying a simple diet of smoked salmon and champagne’, an unlikely diet for a woman who disliked rich food. Anita would have appreciated the room’s current, very restful, décor: white curtains and bed cover and a white-upholstered ottoman. She would also have approved of the generous radiator.
In the winter of 1959 in London, Anita and Bill were guests at a dinner party given by Duncan and Diana Sandys. Also attending were Oswald and Diana Mosley (née Mitford), neither of whom seemed to bear any grudge against their hostess, whose father, Winston, had had the pair imprisoned during the war as being ‘a danger to the King’s realm’. Diana Mosley’s cousin, Clementine Beit, had once told Anita that Diana was ‘politically calculating and dangerous whereas Unity was only a romantic fool’. Diana was also captivatingly beautiful; Evelyn Waugh said that ‘her beauty ran through the room like a peal of bells’. And since Diana was ‘the only person of the party not drunk and looking charming I settled on a sofa with her and discussed her “exile” in France’, Anita recorded. Oswald, whom Anita had not met before, joined the two women on the sofa. ‘It’s curious he shows such a good brain and yet is so dislikeable.’ Duncan Sandys became provocative: ‘Why on earth did you want Hitler ruling here Oswald?’ The answer: ‘I didn’t want Hitler. I wanted myself.’
That edgy occasion took place thirteen years after the end of the war. The sight of two old enemies dining together gave Anita a sense of closure: ‘I had a curious feeling of Epilogue – “Here the story of the war endeth.”’ After the conversation on the Sandys’ sofa, Anita found it ‘easy to understand Winston’s weakness for Diana M. He sent her and her baby “comforts” while she was in prison and tried to arrange for her to have a daily bath, not knowing that there wasn’t enough water to ensure this.’ In a memoir, A Life of Contrasts (1977), Diana wrote, ‘It had been a kindly thought of Winston’s who had, I suppose been told that this was one of the hardships I minded.’ Not everyone took such a benign view of Diana. In The Sunday Times (19 July 2009) Max Hastings wrote of her: ‘It is extraordinary that some people regard her indulgently as the Mitford family’s “fun fascist”. She was an impenitent Nazi sympathiser until the day she died.’ As was her husband, a fact recognized by most people in England. Oswald’s son, Nicholas Mosley, commented in a remark reported in the New Statesman in 1979, a year before Oswald’s death, that his father ‘must be the only Englishman today who is beyond the pale’.
In London again in the spring, Anita lunched with Clemmie Churchill and Diana Sandys at a time when another Churchill daughter, the actress, Sarah, had been on a bender: ‘The inevitable publicity – resisted arrest – fighting-drunk in Liverpool and wouldn’t pay her 2/9 taxi fare. As Diana said “awfully hard to turn into a plus – one’s only hope is that in time it will cease to be news and she’ll get smaller and smaller space in the press.”’ Anita reflected: ‘Well we have 3 absolute drunks as Leonard Jerome’s great grandchildren – Margaret Sheridan, Sarah and Randolph.’ Life was simpler in Oranmore. At Whitsun, it was Leonie’s First Communion: ‘She drove all over Galway being given 2/6 in each cottage. Came back with 30/- very red in the face and baccante like shouting “They liked my dress the best – I’m the richest and prettiest of all.” An eye-opener to Protestant Bill.’
Anita had begun another book. Like so much of her work, it relied on previous research carried out by Shane, discoveries in the Castle Leslie attics and Anita’s inventive mind. It was a life of Maria Fitzherbert, the publicly unacknowledged wife of King George IV and, through her adopted daughter, Minnie (or Minney) Seymour, who had married George Dawson-Damer, the father of Anita’s great-grandmother, Constance Leslie, almost a relation.