Henry James called his formal education ‘small, vague spasms of school’. Like Anita, he had unsettled parents who didn’t attach much importance to steady routines. Marjorie Leslie regarded schools as useful establishments, like kennels, where you could plonk your children when you wanted to travel (she loved travelling) and where you could remove them when you thought that their company might be amusing for a while. One of Anita’s obituarists calculated that Anita had been educated, or not, by fourteen governesses and at seven or eight schools. The most successful of the governesses followed the Parents’ National Education Union (pneu) syllabus, designed for home schooling, and Anita, after much frustrated sobbing, finally learned to connect letters with sounds.
When she was in her early teens she was sent to the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Roehampton, outside London, the school notoriously described in Antonia White’s autobiographical novel Frost in May (1933) as ‘The Convent of the Five Wounds’. Antonia had been expelled from this house of horror when she was fourteen after the nuns had found her reading a novel. Books other than text books were prohibited. In an undated letter to her father, Anita thanks him for sending her two books, The Vicar of Wakefield and Hangman’s House:
But, incredible as it may sound, they (Mother Ward) would not let me read either of them. I protested and showed her your letter … but the old bug said that it was not a book for school. She was much shocked at [sic] Oliver Goldsmith and murmured ‘Well of course if your father likes to let you read such books out of school.’ Did you ever hear such bunk?
Resourcefully, Anita wrapped the books in a towel and hid them up the chimney. Another pupil at the convent during Anita’s time was Vivien Leigh and Anita later wondered whether the tuberculosis with which the actress was diagnosed soon after making Gone With the Wind in 1939 was due to the damp, cold, starvation rations and lack of exercise that made up convent life.
In her memoir The Gilt and the Gingerbread (1981) Anita made light of the experience – ‘I began to wonder what sort of lunatic asylum I had fallen into’ – but her letters to Marjorie at the time were plaintive:
Have a good time Mum and write to me a lot and don’t worry about my being so unhappy … the food is foul and occasionally gives even me violent indigestion but this week some mothers complained about it so that for a few days it was properly cooked … I don’t think three quarters of an hour a day out of doors is enough in the summer … I may be able to stand another term but I should much rather be with you where I could swim and work hard by myself.
The suffering convent girl was always concerned about her mother’s happiness: ‘My Own Darlingest Mummy, I do hope you are having a good time. Getting up for lunch, spend the afternoon buying expensive clothes, go out to tea, rest till eight, dress for dinner go out and come home at 6.30 a.m laiden [sic] with flowers diamond necklaces ect [sic].’ A fairly accurate account of Marjorie’s life as she jaunted around Europe, seldom letting Anita know where she was or writing to her, except to complain about her own poor health. But Anita loved her and felt that, as far as her schooling was concerned, she and Marjorie were in it together and that the convent must be endured so that she was seen to be getting an education responsibly provided by her mother. She invented private endearments and nicknames for them both (‘Bambipoo’ and ‘Mousita’) and illustrated her letters with charming drawings of mice and veiled schoolgirls. This undated poem, with the original spelling, shows her adoration:
O Mummy Darling
You are soft as a starling
And your sweet eyes
Are just like the skys
And your hair O your hair
Could ever fine gold be so rare.
And your feet O your feet
Why to see them’s a treat
But your hands so white
Are a wonderfull sight
O your lips so red
What sweet things they have said.
During her second term at the convent Anita worked hard and passed her Junior School Certificate. Marjorie, returning from a trip to Italy, paid her a visit and disapprovingly noticed the convent’s insanitary practices, although Anita didn’t tell her that the girls’ hair was shampooed only once, at the beginning of term, when their heads were fine-combed for nits. Soon after that visit Anita became ill, with a temperature of 101°f and was neglected in the sanatorium. She could bear it no longer: ‘O do bring me home, it’s awful here.’ A week later, an order arrived that she was to be sent home to the Leslies’ London residence, 12 Westbourne Terrace, Bayswater, in a taxi.
Her next school, where she was dispatched in 1928, aged fifteen, was an improvement – ‘a boarding school which actually possessed a library!’ This was the brand new Westonbirt College, housed in the former home of a Victorian magnate, where there were welcoming rooms with brocade curtains and open fires, as many hot baths as you liked and no restrictions on reading and writing. ‘You’re a darling to have sent me,’ Anita wrote gratefully to Marjorie, who was probably unimpressed that the staff were university graduates; she had chosen the school because it had featured in a magazine article. But she may have been relieved that her daughter would not have to wear the same navy serge dress every day for every activity, as had been the case at the convent and that Anita’s friend Winifred (Pooh) Paget, who had been a day girl at the convent, was going to Westonbirt too.
A school photograph of the Westonbirt intake in September 1928 shows lumpy-looking girls in grey suits and red ties, and teachers in academic robes with hair coiled around their ears in bluestocking fashion. I haven’t been able to identify Anita – the girls all look the same, squinting into the sun. She might have done well in this scholarly atmosphere had Marjorie, in need of a travelling companion, not taken her away after one term. One wonders what Anita’s teachers thought about a woman like Marjorie, who deposited her daughter at various schools ‘as if conferring a favour’ as Anita put it. Anita would have liked more time at Westonbirt but released from the classroom she was ‘now free to read and read and read’ and, true Leslie that she was, ‘to write and write and write’. The rare sightings of her razzle-dazzle parents, who were always somewhere else, turned her into an assiduous correspondent. Writing letters became a lifelong habit: she would often write six letters a day, repeating the same bits of gossip and news to friends and family, letters that were to prove useful when she began to write her memoirs. She was a haphazard diarist; telling herself about herself seemed like a waste of time, and experiences were for sharing. With little formal education, she had learnt to be observant: ‘I perceived people’s emotions and my memory became sharp,’ she wrote later. These were helpful attributes for the nascent biographer.
Throughout her childhood and teenage years Anita’s letters to Marjorie made it clear where she most wanted to be. From a letter written from Glaslough on 23 January 1929, to ‘My Most Beloved Mummy’:
Glaslough when I came to it at the age of ten was the heaven of all my twisted narrow little dreams – I adored it and when I was taken away to Paris or London I nursed a most savage and injurious idea against my surrounding [sic] in particular and civilisation in general.
In the same letter she apologizes for being surly and sulky and, she suspects, a disappointment to Marjorie: ‘I was selfish, I admit but only as a starving man is selfish for Glaslough was my bread and I was ravenously hungry.’ She wrote that she had turned over a new leaf, spread her interests beyond the woods and lake, dogs and horses, practises the piano (‘nearly 3 hours today’) and reads the newspapers, although she rails against ‘the world of governesses, convention and schools that dragged my defiant body along the foul byways of men’.
This letter, written when she was fifteen, is a more melodramatic version of those she wrote to her mother when she was much younger: ‘Please let me [stay at Glaslough]. It is so lovely and big and green here and the lake and boat and everything compered [sic] to dark little London.’ A similar letter to Shane, written miserably from Westbourne Terrace, tells him wistfully: ‘I do wish I was at Glaslough, I love it better than any other place.’ But she realized that she had to face up to the demands of the conventional world because the person she most admired insisted on it. This was Anita’s older cousin, Margaret Sheridan, the daughter of Leonie’s niece Clare, a woman so wild, and so neglectful a mother that one of her admirers, the writer Axel Munthe, later told Margaret: ‘The children – whenever I hear of Clare I say to myself: “The children, ach, the poor little children!”’ Another of Clare’s admirers, the great financier Bernard (Barney) Baruch, a scandalized witness to her escapades, said of Margaret: ‘I’d do anything for that poor kid.’ In 1976 Anita wrote an engrossing biography of Clare, an irresistible subject whose lovers included Charlie Chaplin, Lord Birkenhead, the Lord Chancellor and Lev Kamenev, Trotsky’s brother-in-law and a high-ranking Soviet functionary. Clare, a dauntless journalist and talented sculptor, was brought more spikily to black-hearted life in Margaret’s memoir Morning Glory (1961) written under her pen name, Mary Motley.
Margaret, like Anita, had been dumped briefly and unhappily in a convent (‘the Kensington snakepit’) and then inadequately cared for in both Europe and America while her mother embarked on sensation-seeking exploits. Her escape from her rackety childhood had been in reading. From the time that Anita first met Margaret in 1923, Anita did her best to catch up. From Westonbirt she sent Shane a list of the books that she had read during the year. They included Clare’s memoir Nuda Veritas, an early version of the kiss-and-tell memoir, which had been published the previous year, 1927, and Shane’s more respectable Isle of Columbcille: A Pilgrimage and a Sketch (1910), published by the Catholic Truth Society of Ireland. She told him: ‘I do truly try to educate myself and it is so important to be well-read like Margaret.’
While Anita was at Westonbirt, Margaret was in Algeria, where Clare had exotically chosen to live. The two girls wrote each other long letters: ‘Darling Margaret, Thank you so much for your last epistle of 23 pages’ begins one of Anita’s letters. The younger girl tried to persuade her cousin to become a Catholic: ‘Christ is essential. It is foolish and ungrateful after what he went through for us not to believe in him.’ They were two unhappy teenage souls. Anita to Margaret, from Glaslough: ‘À quoi vivre? you ask – the only answer is pour mourir. The climax of life is death.’ But she was at Glaslough, where she could never be unhappy for long: ‘O Margaret I am so happy here and it really is my home.’
On 25 January 1929 when Anita was fifteen, she wrote to Margaret, ‘my dear I think I’ve only just noticed it but I’ve lost all my looks, it’s quite extraordinary. I used to be so pretty and fresh.’ She then gives out about the recently established Irish Free State, ‘which forbids untenanted land being held by anyone’. This could prove a problem for the Leslies, who owned 35,000 acres of heather-covered hills and moors. She is furious when Margaret hasn’t written for a while: ‘You’re spoilt, Margaret, disgustingly spoilt, you do just what you like.’ But, although they are miles apart, the cousins founded a Hell Fire Club in June 1928. It had a proper uk-style cabinet, except with a President – A. Leslie. M. Sheridan is Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and for India and for Air. Anita makes Westonbirt sound like an early version of St Trinian’s, telling Margaret that one of the girls ‘had some interesting experiences around India Dock Road etc. She bought a lovely little dagger for 1/6d.’
Sometimes, during Clare’s long absences, Margaret stayed at Glaslough but she didn’t share Anita’s love of the place. Her letters to Clare belittle Leonie and Marjorie, who annoyed each other by moving ornaments about. For all her sophistication Leonie was very conventional and thought that the best choice for Margaret was to marry well, which meant wealthily. In Morning Glory Margaret wrote: ‘Great-aunt Leonie offered to present me at Court but Mama would not hear of it … It might be thought, with her Red reputation, that she was not being received!’ It was typical of Clare to cause a scandal by going to Russia as a guest of the Soviets and then express concern that this might count against her in English aristocratic circles.
1929 was the year in which Marjorie and Anita went to Bab-El-M’Cid, near Bisra, to stay with Clare and Margaret, a trip that had been happily anticipated by Anita. The visit was a disaster. Predictably, Marjorie and Clare didn’t get on. Marjorie was, at heart, a conventional matron. She travelled with her personal maid and complained that sitting cross-legged on the ground at mealtimes, in Clare’s white house built among date gardens, laddered her silk stockings. Clare had given up maids – and probably silk stockings – years before although, Anita noticed, she was not self-sufficient, since everyone in her orbit became her willing slave, so that Clare herself never had to boil an egg or make a cup of tea. Worse than the friction between the two grown-ups was that Margaret had become intensely Arabized, fasting during Ramadan, wearing Arab robes and being eyed up by the local tribal leader, who would gladly have added her to his collection of wives. She had left Anita far behind; the latter’s companion during this tense holiday was Margaret’s younger brother Dick, with whom she rode and climbed sand dunes.
On their return, Marjorie sent Anita to yet another educational establishment. For the next year and a half, for three days a week, she would go to Miss Wolfe’s school, just across the park from Westbourne Terrace, to study history, literature and French. Miss Wolfe was a former governess and her pupil-centred teaching methods were very advanced, with the focus on interesting books. ‘We learned a lot because all our studies interested her personally,’ Anita wrote approvingly. Jack fared less well: he was sent to Downside, the Benedictine monastery school, whose head was the terrifying and sadistic Father de Trafford.
Marjorie and Shane were settling down, although Shane’s biographer, Otto Rauchbauer, wrote frostily: ‘From the 1920s onward he [Shane] allowed himself sexual liberties in a society that was becoming ever more permissive.’ But there was no more talk of divorce from Marjorie, who seemed happy enough to travel extensively with her sister Anne and buy dresses in Paris. Her children, as they got older, got used to her frequent absences; Anita didn’t mind Marjorie spending Christmas in New York as long as she herself could spend it at Glaslough.
Anita, in her memoirs, describes herself and Jack as wild children, fighting until they drew blood and prone to dangerous japes such as creeping along the gutter, heedless of the forty-foot drop below, to pour jugfuls of water down the chimneys of the house next door. But at Glaslough they were well behaved. They loved and were loved by their grandparents, liked by the gamekeepers, foresters and dairymaids, and too engrossed in trawling for pike to get up to mischief, although Anita’s habit of climbing to the top of a sixty-foot Douglas fir caused an anguished Marjorie to wail: ‘Why have I such a daughter?’
When the older Leslies were away and Shane and Marjorie were in charge of Glaslough, exciting visitors arrived: W.B. Yeats, who walked around the lake declaiming his poetry, and a peer of the realm with his mistress who wore gold lamé trouser suits and drank cocktails. When Leonie was in charge, cocktails, mistresses and evening trousers were out of the question. Shane was now working for A.S.W. Rosenbach, the American bookseller known as ‘the Napoleon of the book trade’. Shane’s familiarity with Big House libraries and owners who were willing to sell them was an invaluable asset but helped to deplete the stock of rare books on this side of the Atlantic. He still wrote prolifically – novels, poetry, literary criticism – and continued his involvement with the Catholic Church and Irish politics.
Clare Sheridan, contentedly living near Bisra, at least for the moment, was not scandalizing her family as much as previously. Her 1920 visit to Moscow to sculpt the heads of the Soviet leaders had greatly embarrassed her cousin Winston Churchill, who was then Secretary of State for the Colonies, and had caused a temporary rift between him and Shane, who had known about Clare’s plans. But Winston’s cousins were soon forgiven, although mi5 remained convinced for some years that Clare was a Russian agent. Since she was scattily indiscreet, this seems unlikely.
Shane, hardly a family man, made this unfounded criticism of his mother and aunts: ‘The Misses Jerome never entered into British family life.’ It was Shane himself who didn’t pass through that particular door. Anita wrote: ‘I think we [Shane’s children] realised fairly early that our own father did not exactly dislike us – he would merely have preferred us not to have been born.’ To convey his boredom during rare family mealtimes, he developed a trick of closing both the upper and lower lids over his eyes, like a weary tortoise, causing an enraged Marjorie to leave the table. Anita’s two paternal uncles, Shane’s younger brothers, were more amenable. Seymour, born in 1889, had spent ten years of his childhood bedridden with a tubercular hip and emerged from that decade in the sickroom as ‘the best-read member of a hard-reading family’. He wrote books and a series of gossipy articles for Vogue, called ‘Our Lives from Day to Day’. He abandoned his literary career to become a successful fundraiser for Queen Charlotte’s Hospital. His younger brother, Lionel, only fourteen years older than Anita, had inherited from his mother the robust Jerome constitution. Having served as an officer in India at the end of the First World War, he decided to walk home, crossing the Himalayas en route. He then became an explorer in Labrador and wrote a book, Wilderness Trails in Three Continents, for which Winston Churchill supplied an introduction.
As well as these entertaining uncles, Anita was blessed with the kindest of great-aunts, Olive Guthrie, née Leslie, the owner of Torosay Castle in the Isle of Mull, where Anita and Jack were invited to stay when Marjorie was on her travels. The Leslies were well born and wealthy but their domestic arrangements, whereby they looked after each other’s children and never doubted that blood was thicker than water, were not unlike those of traditional working-class families as depicted in Michael Young and Peter Willmott’s superb study, Family and Kinship in East London (1954). Her unsatisfactory parents aside, Anita was taken up by her large extended family and, like her grandmother Leonie, kept them close throughout her life. The Leslies’ attitude to their relations was one of staunch tolerance, so that the nationalist Shane could live under the same roof as his unionist father and indiscreetly promiscuous Clare was constantly forgiven, although she once noticed her aunt, Jennie Churchill, looking at her ‘in a kind of overhauling way’.
Anita still did what she was told, and what was now prescribed was a period in Paris, the city where, it was hoped, poise and polish could be acquired by gauche aristocratic English girls. As important as these Parisian attributes was allure, although not so overtly on the ‘finishing school’ agenda. Anita was aware of her shortcomings in this department: ‘An odd streak in me remained resentful of any attempt to cultivate the art of alluring the opposite sex. This was what all mothers hoped of their daughters – maximum sex appeal with the minimum of sex experience.’ There had been previous attempts to make her prettier: ‘Asthma and recurring pneumonia had rendered me thin and unattractive.’ Her aunt Anne had taken her to Switzerland for animal gland injections. The result was that she grew two inches in a month and, inclined to sallowness, now had a sea-green complexion.
Lodged in the Rue de Longchamp, near the Eiffel tower, at the home of the Mesdemoiselles Armoury, with her friends Winifred (Pooh) Paget and Elizabeth Darrell, Anita’s health and appearance soon began to cause concern. She had never eaten a lot, as heavy meals seemed to bring on asthma attacks, but now she and her two friends took to serious dieting: ‘We all wanted to be thin and longed to look depraved.’ Word got back to Marjorie and on 30 November 1930 Anita wrote protestingly to her mother:
I DID NOT go three days on water in Paris … I am afraid that my bony legs must be an optical delusion [sic] as according to measurement they are exactly the same as for the last three year … I have no defence what so ever [sic] for my previous wish not to eat except that it was an interesting mental experience to see just how far my will controlled my body.
She ended by describing a visit to the Casino de Paris: ‘I thought Josephine Baker the loveliest thing I had ever seen on stage … how could you be disgusted by that perfect brown body.’
Anita, bony legs notwithstanding, was lovely too, tall and slender with the clear Leslie brow and slightly slanted eyes, the type of looks that would become more fashionable as the slinky fashions of the 1930s took hold. In Paris she was held responsible for the dieting craze that resulted in Pooh and Liz coming down with pneumonia and influenza and being brought back to London. Anita was moved to the home of an aristocratic Russian emigrée, Madame Lermantov, and enrolled at the Sorbonne. And then the good times began. Her youngest uncle, Lionel, was studying animal sculpture in Paris while living with a nightclub dancer whose stage costume was a covering of gold paint: ‘I had never met anyone like this. Nor for that matter have I done so since.’
She began to study French literature and, introduced by her Russian landlady to a very old French sculptor, Alfred Boucher, once an intimate friend of Auguste Rodin, she kept a diary in which she recalled Boucher’s anecdotes. This later became the seedbed of her first biography, Rodin: Immortal Peasant (1939), a lively, if highly fanciful, book. In 1931 she was reluctantly dragged away from this exciting milieu to prepare for the following year’s debutante Season: ‘After all, it just means dull expense and lots of clothes and “amusement”, which I don’t want.’ Meanwhile, there were country house parties, which she found distasteful if, as was often the case, they involved shooting: ‘I found it repellent that the shooters’ faces always looked so red!’ But, coming from a literary family, it wasn’t all ruddy-cheeked squires and tedium. She sat next to W.B. Yeats at a Dublin dinner party. At a house party in Oban, given by her great-aunt Olive Guthrie, she looked so leggy and dashing that the local people thought that she must be a film star.
She made some exotic new friends, among them the disreputable Tallulah Bankhead, whom she visited in Mayfair, ‘feeling tiresomely undecadent amongst ladies whose eyelids glistened with incandescent violet grease’. Another unlikely acquaintance was the American Gladys Marlborough, a ruined beauty, miserably married to the Duke. When their ghastly marriage ended in 1933, ‘I tried hard to appear sophisticated and one of my letters [to Gladys] ends, “Wishing you the best of luck in the divorce – with love – Anita”.’
Every debutante’s account of her Season tells a story of wretchedness and dismay. Even the flamboyant Clare Sheridan had been overawed by the weighty procedure of coming out. She wrote in Nuda Veritas: ‘I stood in ballroom doorways longing to be hidden in the crowd, cursing my conspicuous height and shrinking from introductions.’ During her own Season, being carelessly parented worked to Anita’s advantage. Marjorie seldom chaperoned her because ‘it bored her to see my sulks’. And Shane ‘would only go to balls which took place in grand private houses’. Indifferently watched over, Anita could evade the dull young men in the ballroom, appalling dancers every one, and attach herself to a livelier lad, a well-born bad lot who, unknown to Anita’s family, had been wiped off the high-society listings on account of, among other misdemeanours, having a drink-driving conviction and losing his licence. Anita became his evening chauffeur. She would sneak out of the ballroom and into the driving seat of his sports car. They headed for the Ace of Spades, a racy nightspot on the Great West Road. Then Anita would sneak back for the closing moments of the debutante dance. Clare’s parties in her St John’s Wood studio, where writers and artists dined on red wine and spaghetti and there wasn’t a suitable boy in sight, provided another welcome distraction from the stuffy Season.
Leonie, too, came to the rescue. When she was in London she took her wilting granddaughter to receptions at Londonderry House, where the guests were eminent statesmen rather than callow striplings or, if a dance was obligatory, she introduced Anita to ‘the most amusing people – never young however’. Every debutante was required to attend Royal Ascot: ‘When my turn came, she [Marjorie] had left London and Pa disappeared.’ Anita went by herself with two sandwiches in her handbag and got picked up by ‘an olive-skinned gentleman with roving – very roving – eyes’, who tempted her with several helpings of strawberries and cream. He was Aly Khan, son of the Aga Khan and the kindest and most courteous of men, but a potential source of scandal. At the end of the Season, thankful that ‘one could not be a deb twice,’ Anita reflected that ‘if my ambition throughout had been to annoy Mama, I had succeeded wonderfully.’
Marrying off their daughter to a rich suitor was important to the upper classes, since a wealthy husband’s money could alter the circumstances of an entire family. Clare Sheridan, daughter of the reckless Moreton Frewen, knew this well: ‘My father regarded me as an investment. If I married well I should have proved myself worthwhile.’ To this end, she was forbidden to see the brilliant but poor Wilfred Sheridan for years. There was less pressure on Anita to marry well, perhaps because the Leslies’ finances weren’t as dire as those of the Frewens, but parents and girls were mindful of the fate of unmarried women at a time when there were no careers to provide an alternative to matrimony. In The Gilt and the Gingerbread Anita tells the story of the six unmarried sisters of Lord Belmore of Castle Coole, Enniskillen, thirty miles from Castle Leslie:
Each girl had been given one London season and when she found no suitor of equal rank returned to the Irish demesne for ever … Nothing ever happened. Nothing could happen. One of the six sisters drowned herself in the lake and when the butler announced the news at breakfast, her brother, Lord Belmore, reportedly said, ‘Well, don’t stand there, man. Bring in the porridge.’
In 2008 I visited an exhibition called ‘The Last Debutantes’ at Kensington Palace. The last debutantes to be presented at Court made their debut in 1958, nearly three decades after Anita’s much-resented Season. By then a wider world than that offered by an early, wealthy marriage was on offer but you could still feel desperation in display stands of expensive frocks, walls papered with invitations, a film of girls being taught how to curtsey. Even the smiling debs photographed in their Dior and Balmain dresses seemed to be quivering from the ordeal.
I can’t imagine Anita quivering. Although her family would have been delighted had she landed a duke, she wasn’t seen as an investment. It was probably just as well since her recalcitrant personality would not have been suited to the narrowness of English aristocratic life, impressed as she was by titles. Anyway, she soon made it clear in a letter to Shane that she never wanted to marry, ‘although I might make quite an intelligent mistress – I don’t mind sacrificing my body but not my freedom’.