No Chance of a Warm Light Room
Madame Tussaud Waxworker Extraordinary was the only book that Anita wrote just to make money and she probably wouldn’t have agreed to write it if Tarka hadn’t needed a new car. The book was sponsored by Madame Tussaud’s Limited and, under that organization’s agreement with Hutchinson, Anita was given a £4000 advance plus £500 for every thousand copies sold, as well as 25 per cent of the revenues from subsidiary rights. The downside of this deal was that the book was to be co-authored with Lady Pauline Chapman, archivist and researcher at Madame Tussaud’s, who had spent twelve years researching the life of Marie Tussaud, née Grosholz (1761–1850), referred to by Anita as ‘the odious subject’.
For a biographer who could always find redeeming features in her subjects, however lecherous (Leonard Jerome), financially idiotic (Moreton Frewen), or promiscuous (Jennie Churchill), Marie presented a challenge. Anita wrote furiously to Harold Harris:
I must ask if a TRUTHFUL biographical representation is desired. (If I were writing for Hutchinson I’d lash out!) or just a nice readable story for school children. Is one permitted to say anything not-all-that-endearing about Mme. T? For instance when the lovely Princesse de Lamballe whom she had known was cut to pieces in prison and her head brought to Marie to model do I tell the TRUTH – that her genitals were mounted on a pike and also paraded through the streets? And even less savoury episodes? You realise she actually did a death mask of the King’s severed head (he had been a kindly friend to her for 8 years). And there is not a word to explain her callousness – TERROR? Pressure from her uncle who sounds to me an absolute bastard? The cold objectivity of an artist trained only to ‘see’ the physical features of people? This is a GUIDE BOOK. I don’t leave out what offends. But tell me!
The sickening episode of the paraded genitals made it into print along with other horrors of the French Revolution. But it wasn’t Anita’s style to present anyone as completely black-hearted, so we have: ‘What could she [Marie] have felt as she tinted the hair and painted the wax to exact colourings of the face she had known so well?’ This soft approach was all Anita’s doing. Pauline Chapman rather admired ‘the odious subject’ for not letting sentiment stand in her way. Anguished letters from Oranmore were sent to Hutchinson. From Anita to David Roberts, 14 January 1978:
She [Lady Chapman] is certain that Marie was NOT scared of handling the guillotined heads of people she knew well!! I feel that any human being must have been cut to the quick – quite different to handling bits of body of strangers! … Lady Chapman thinks of her [Marie] as ‘the first career woman’ but aren’t we all rather tired of the avalanche of career women.
And to Harold Harris:
I can’t do more with it. As I rewrite – Antoinette and the king become more and more interesting and tragic and Marie Grosholtz a more dismal little bore obsessed with waxworks! … Being a successful determined businesswoman does not make Marie Tussaud interesting!!
Anita objected to Pauline Chapman’s preferred title, ‘Madame Tussaud – History Maker’. Waxworker Extraordinary was substituted but in nearly every other way Lady Chapman’s view prevailed: that Marie was an out-and-out professional, concerned only in doing a great job of work, even when her studio was awash with aristocratic blood. The jacket flap sets the tone: ‘Shrewd and independent, she [Marie] ranks among the first great career women of modern times, for she built up her business unaided in a man’s world.’ The book admiringly mentions that Marie seems to have taken no holidays and that ‘She deserved her fortune. She had worked every yard of the way.’ She was also everything that Anita most despised – a solemn, ambitious workhorse, unlike the feckless aristocrats who lived for pleasure and whom Anita loved for their gaiety, extravagance and wit. But hard-working career women, shouldering their way into a man’s world, were currently fascinating: in 1975 Margaret Thatcher had become the first woman to be elected as leader of the opposition and was soon dubbed ‘The Iron Lady’ by the Russians. The book was an unhappy collaboration, which was perhaps why the authors’ correction bill came to £222. One error survived: Marie settled in Baker Street, ‘surely next door to Sherlock Holmes’.
The name of Madame Tussaud was internationally famous, so the book was reviewed everywhere, not always kindly, from The Times Literary Supplement to Tit-Bits. Some reviewers retold the Tussaud story, hardly mentioning the book, while others hurled brickbats. In British Book News, 1 January 1979, Carole Angier wrote: ‘ … alas, the story is in the “must have been” genre of biography … it is marred by careless writing and psychological speculation’. This upset Lady Chapman but Geoffrey Chester of Hutchinson reassured her: ‘Carole Angier’s reservations are at once understandable and “unfair”. Sophisticated reviewers may well find the speculations and asides irritating, but they bring the heroine alive for the general reader, which is precisely what was intended.’ Other reviewers were as dismissive as Carole Angier. Brian Cleeve in the Irish Sunday Press, 1 November 1978: ‘They tell us that she “shuddered” or that she was “fairly shaken” and so on. But how do they know?’ In Books & Bookmen, November 1978, Maurice Richardson predicted snootily, ‘It ought to sell like a shilling barrel of oysters.’ Although the book didn’t find an American publisher, when Anita accepted an invitation in 1980 to speak to a women’s club in Chicago, that ‘dismal little bore’ Marie Tussaud was what her audience most wanted to hear about.
The lawsuit against Thames Television was settled in Anita’s favour on 11 January 1978. She was awarded £1100 but, over the five-year dispute, had accrued solicitors’ fees of £1800. ‘So I won nothing – lost a little – but moral victory!’ Anita wrote to Jack and she gave Seymour £100 out of her non-existent winnings. This wasn’t the whole story. I am indebted to Julian Mitchell, who wrote the book linked to the television series and found himself involved with a litigious Anita. He allowed me to see his diary entries relating to the lawsuit and in 2013 told me, ‘I can still feel very angry at the trouble she [Anita] caused me.’ While Julian was writing his book, Anita promised to let him see some family letters if she could use a photograph of Lee Remick on the cover of the newly reissued paperback of her own Jennie – an impossible request to grant and one that would have caused confusion between the two titles, which was the very situation that Anita claimed she was trying to avoid. Before writs started to fly, Anita was friendly enough. Julian’s diary entry for 24 May 1974: ‘Tues: dinner at Anita’s … usual raw meat to eat. Anita is so thin, I can’t see how she manages to live at all, she looks so brittle.’ But by the end of the year, they were no longer on speaking terms, since Anita had resorted to the law, seeking compensation for the ‘passing-off’ of the tie-in book. A furious diary entry from Julian on 4 January 1975:
I had to go through all the letters again – Anita’s claiming she made it a condition of letting us use the letters that the book was to be called A Portrait with Letters, which is simply untrue … I have two letters and a postcard from her commenting on the book, and two letters from old Seymour, neither mentioning the title – it’s all so mean and stupid, when her book has benefited hugely from the series.
And on 20 October: ‘Apparently her claim is based entirely on letters from titled people in castles who got our book instead of hers. Why didn’t they buy it before, I want to know.’ Anita reduced her demands to complaining only about the rival book’s jacket and even apologized to Julian, who remained unmollified.
Anita claimed to want nothing more than a warm, light, quiet room in which to write but, since she gave keys to the London flat to several friends and relations and let everyone know when she was in town, Cleveland Square was never going to provide comfortable solitude. In June she wrote to her stepmother, Iris, urging her to use the flat whenever she liked: ‘I feel the important thing about the flat is availability.’ Desmond was about to stay there for one night and so was Leonie, on her way back from Germany where De Danann was touring. Agnes was a regular visitor. Her career was now thriving and she was part of a group called The Radiators, described in The New Yorker, when it broke up after thirty-three years, as ‘one of the world’s greatest bar bands’.
From Oranmore, Anita wrote often to Roy Miles. In 1978 she described the Graham Sutherland portrait of Winston, painted in 1954, commissioned by both Houses of Parliament to mark Winston’s eightieth birthday and subsequently destroyed by Clemmie because of its unflattering candour: ‘If only Clemmie had left it hidden for 50 years for some other generation to judge – but she cared only for Winston and his moods – that was why she was such a wonderful wife.’ Anita and Bill had seen the portrait before its destruction and thought it brilliant: ‘Sutherland … paints the actual psyche – and when a man is old and has lived deeply it isn’t the wrinkles and jowliness you see – it is his mind.’
She was cross that Leonie, who was teaching at art college in Galway – ‘one day a week only and it is quite enough for her’ – had been asked to become a full-time etching ‘professor’, something that sounded too much like a career woman for Anita’s tastes: ‘There is no reason why she should not work away with her press for pleasure and because she is creative.’ In her letters to Roy, Anita sounds lonely. Oranmore was always kept ready for Tarka to hunt there but, when her son could get away from farming at Glaslough, he went to England to be with his wife. Leonie was often on tour with Alec and Bill went skiing at Kitzbuhel as often as he could. ‘So,’ Anita wrote, ‘all I have to arrange is meals and walks for the dogs.’ She was dismissive of the television series on Lily Langtry: ‘The lack of formality in public renders flat the informality in private.’
In spite of her dislike of professional women, Anita admired Margaret Thatcher, although she did not think that she would ever become prime minister, since Penelope Aitken, mother of the Conservative mp Jonathan, had told her that Mrs Thatcher’s family thought her health too delicate to stand the pressures of the job. On 28 March 1979 Mrs Thatcher brought a vote of no confidence in James Callaghan’s Labour government before the House of Commons. The Government was defeated by one vote – 311 votes to 310 – in what the bbc called, ‘one of the most dramatic nights in Westminster history.’ Anita was delighted that it was Northern Ireland’s sdlp (Social Democratic and Labour Party) mp, Gerry Fitt, whose abstention brought down the unpopular government, which was held to blame for a series of strikes and petrol shortages known as ‘The Winter of Discontent’. Anita to Jack: ‘It’s just like the old days when Irish Nationalists controlled the balance.’ Two days later, Airey Neave, the Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary, was killed when a car bomb planted by the Irish National Liberation Army exploded under his Vauxhall Cavalier as he was leaving the House of Commons car park. More violence was expected during the election on 3 May but the day passed peacefully enough. The Conservatives won with a 43-seat majority, making Margaret Thatcher the first British female head of government. Far from being in delicate health, she bloomed robustly and claimed to need only four hours sleep a night.
Anita read the recently published Irish Country Houses by Mark Bence-Jones, an Anglo-Irishman after her own heart of whom, on his death in 2010, an obituarist wrote: ‘His admiration for the upper classes and grand houses made him seem a man born in the wrong century.’ Of the book, Anita wrote to Jack:
WHAT a plethora of beautiful country houses covered this land but all within demesne walls with the hungry Irish outside – A cruel history unforgotten and instead of pride in the wondrous ruins hatred remains and they all think their hideous bungalows ‘lovely’.
At one impressive Irish country estate, Glaslough, the equestrian centre, in spite of its situation on the border, was becoming increasingly popular with European visitors, who enjoyed long cross-country rides, pike fishing on the lake and the superb scenery as well as the weekly drinks parties and barbecues hosted by Desmond and Helen. Guests didn’t seem to mind that the house itself was grubby and dilapidated but Jack, who now spent much of the year at Castle Leslie, did. He complained to Iris that ‘the house in general has another year’s dirt on top of last year’s and the windows are still unwashed’, but the estate was engaging enough to win, in 1979, a tourism award ‘For the best individual effort’.
There were ongoing rows with Tarka over access rights, which sometimes stymied Desmond’s plans to sell some of his holdings to developers. Under Irish law, Desmond was legally married to Agnes and Helen had no right of inheritance, which, Desmond explained to Tarka, was the reason he had to sell his assets. Anita to Jack: ‘Tarka got out his crying handerchief.’ She had poured money into Glaslough on her son’s behalf, selling all of her aunt Anne’s jewellery, except for one emerald ring, but Desmond always needed more. Anita to Jack:
If only I had not made over the estate to Desmond 19 years ago the company would own 1000 acres still – worth £2000 an acre – and we would all be millionaires! But the pressure of family feeling that Desmond and his sons ought to own the family home and Bill’s exhausted disgust at trying to deal with Desmond made me take an unwise decision. I felt it in my bones it would be the end of the place and it very nearly has been. BUT I COULD NOT PROVE IT in advance.
Towards the end of 1979 Anita wanted a month by herself in London so that she could finish the first volume of her autobiography, but there were visits from Agnes, now billed as ‘The German cabaret legend’ and her pianist, who regarded Anita’s flat as a convenient rehearsal room, and from Desmond, who, since Anita had given him a key, would arrive without warning. Anita to Iris: ‘I’m suffering from fatigue.’ She had been booked to give a lecture on Clare Sheridan to an American group staying at Renvyle in Connemara, but she lost her voice due to exhaustion. An icy winter had left Oranmore without fruit or vegetables and a substitute diet of tea, bread and marmalade was not nutritious. Anita was also helping to care for Leonie’s first baby, Jessica, who, because of bungled birth procedures was brain-damaged. Margaret Glynn, who had looked after Anita’s own children, now looked after this special child who brought Anita nothing but joy, perhaps the greatest she had ever known.
Although she was very tired, at the end of September, Anita, with Bill and Tarka, walked the nine miles from Oranmore to Ballybrit racecourse outside Galway to see Pope John Paul II during his three-day visit to Ireland. Bishop Eamon Casey of Galway, who had organized the visit, and the popular singing priest Father Michael Cleary entertained the crowd of 280,000 until the Pope’s helicopter zoomed out of the grey sky. Anita, sitting on a wall, waved her yellow and white scarf in tribute to the white and gold papal flag, then made the long walk home past deserted farms and cottages, whose owners were all at Ballybrit. Some years later, both Bishop Casey and Father Cleary were found to have fathered children with vulnerable women and Bishop Casey admitted to stealing money from the diocese to support his illicit family.
Tarka and Jane decided to move into the old stables at Glaslough for part of the year, although, as Anita told Iris, ‘the gloom of farming in that rain is I can see getting Tarka’s spirits down’. The London flat was proving to be a financial headache. Tarka was the nominal owner but it was Anita who paid the hefty bills for heating and maintenance and negotiated with the other leaseholders for a share of the freehold. She had given keys to so many people, most of whom didn’t keep account of their phone bills, that she had to put locks on the telephone receivers. She also came to an arrangement with one of her neighbours, Joseph Corvo, a leading practitioner of a foot massage technique, Zone Therapy, and nicknamed ‘Joe the Toe’ by Bill, whereby, on Thursday mornings, he treated twenty patients in Anita’s flat, in return for giving free treatments to Anita, her family and friends. Anita might as well have tried to write her books in Piccadilly Circus. At Oranmore she came down with a bout of bronchial asthma, her first attack in years.
At the end of January 1980, three armed men stole a car outside the Castle Leslie equestrian centre and used it to kidnap a Mr Foster, whom they had mistaken for a member of the British security forces. They treated him roughly, before realizing their mistake and freeing him. He was found on the road six hours later, counting himself lucky not to have been shot. Anita to Iris: ‘Glaslough has now become horribly dangerous … Life is one long worry – and over it all looms the likelihood of Word War iii.’ Lord Rossmore, at nearby Rossmore Castle, ‘said that for the first time he felt the absolute hopelessness of trying to live there’. But Anita spent the summer at Glaslough, helping Tarka and Jane get in three thousand bales of wet hay with the help of just one farmhand, Jack Heaney. He had worked there for forty years, couldn’t handle a tractor but could lift a bale of hay that Anita only managed to roll along the ground. Jack was entitled to the full agricultural wage of £50 a week, unlike the farmhands of Anita’s childhood, who received less than £3. It annoyed her that other people’s enterprises were profitable. To Harold Harris: ‘The village hotel-pub (which I sold for £1,000) does a roaring trade outside our gates – A turn-over of £20,000 a week – wedding parties – Bar packed every night – and the 1840 Agents house is a Riding Club for continentals at £200 a week! It’s a mad world.’
She wrote to Betsan that although Glaslough had ‘become the most dangerous place in Europe … five men were shot dead within a mile of the house last winter’, Tarka and Jane loved farming there. She was, as she did so often, deluding herself. Tarka and Jane were expecting their first baby and wanted a safer haven than a home on the Irish border. Tarka did some creative cattle-dealing and bought Pentridge House, in the gentle Dorset countryside. Anita disapproved and showed her displeasure by misspelling the name of the house when she wrote to him. To everyone else she pretended that Pentridge House was a godsend. To her friend and neighbour Tim Gwyn Jones, owner of Lough Cutra castle in Gort: ‘Thank heavens! Tarka/Jane have upsticked and bought a house near Salisbury that they fell in love with at first sight – only 10 acres – just right in size. Damnably expensive but just where they want to be.’ She didn’t visit Pentridge until 1985, when Tarka’s daughter was born, commenting only: ‘It’s really rather nice.’
The police had advised Tarka and Jane to move out of the Glaslough stables, which they had lovingly restored, because the stable block was a ten-minute walk away from the farmyard and screened by wooded avenues. But it wasn’t the ira that torched this dangerously isolated homestead but the brand new flue for the wood stove. Irish wood is the worst possible fuel because it’s usually damp and exudes resin, a cause of chimney fires. Malfunctioning heating appliances caused the Leslies more trouble than violent republicans. Fires became blocked, boilers broke down, resulting in icy rooms and passages. The owners of Big Houses spent much of their lives in a quest for warmth. In the early 1980s Desmond described most of Castle Leslie as being ‘an energy-saving, environmentally-friendly deep freeze, which is why no one with any pulmonary troubles can survive there in winter’. Oranmore Castle wasn’t much warmer. Anita, thin and inclined to bronchitis, would have sold her soul for central heating. She wrote to Tim Gwyn Jones that she would love a visit but although there was a log fire in the Great Hall and the south door had been permanently sealed she advised him to wear ski togs.
On 2 March 1981 a second wave of hunger strikes by republican prisoners began in Northern Ireland. Over the summer ten men starved themselves to death; one of them was Bobby Sands, who had been elected as the anti-H block candidate on 9 April. He died on 5 May after sixty-six days on hunger strike and ten thousand people attended his funeral. The hunger strikes were overshadowed by the engagement of the Prince of Wales to Lady Diana Spencer and their wedding on 29 July. At a ball given by the Welsh Guards to celebrate the royal engagement, Jane wore the Fitzherbert tiara, the last of the Leslies to do so before it was sold at auction in 2010. In May, just before the publication of her first volume of autobiography, The Gilt and the Gingerbread, in which the young Rose Vincent featured entertainingly, Anita was told of Rose’s death. She had assumed that Rose had died years before, ‘And yet’, she wrote to Anita Burgh, ‘to learn that she no longer breathed on this earth made the most extraordinary sensations arise’. Rose, once ethereally slender but grown plump in middle age, had spent her last years in Rome, moving from hotel to hotel with her borzoi dogs. Anita was horrified to hear this. That month, there was an ominous lull in ira violence but many people, including Anita, expected renewed trouble in June, when London would be packed with tourists, in England for the royal wedding.
Jack had somehow convinced Tarka that he still had some ownership rights at Castle Leslie, infuriating Anita, who wrote to her son: ‘Remember that Jack no longer owns anything at Glaslough … Jack’s assent to the selling of any object he does not actually own means nothing whatsoever … You must realise the facts of legal ownership.’ Jack had the same gift of losing money as his two siblings. To help pay off some of Desmond’s debts, he had sold a house in Rome near to the one he lived in. Anita continued her letter to Tarka:
Meanwhile Rome property has soared and if he still owned that house it would be worth 1 million $ but he doesn’t! He has over £10,000 sterling a year to live on and the Badia [Jack’s country house in Tuscany] – he owns nothing else – Desmond owns Castle Leslie and the gardens and you own the land. I now own nothing but Oranmore Castle and its 16 acres. Pa has sold out and owns nothing in Ireland!
Anita then turned her attention to the dinner party that Tarka and Jane were planning to hold at Cleveland Square on 1 June:
I suggest starting with avocado pears filled with caviar, then chicken purchased hot and just cooked from Selfridges and salad, then tinned fruit salad strewn with fresh fruit and endless biscuits and cheese? But its YOUR show and you and Jane must do it as you like – I won’t appear (except to work in kitchen!) It quite amuses me to see young people stuffing.
And then the magnificent pay off: ‘I am dining out on June 1st with my old cousin Duke of Portland – the last duke and duchess – But can help you till 8 pm.’
The summer was darkened by the death of three-year-old Jessica Finn in August. Anita wrote to Harold Harris:
I feel I must let you know – and NO sympathy is required because it’s been the most extraordinary and wonderful experience of my life … I believe she came to us for a great scoop of love – not for a full life with all its complications and since she left I feel her strong vital spirit as never before.
And to Anita Burgh: ‘Since she has gone Jessica means more and more to me – She just dipped into human form for a time to get something she needed – and never for one moment have I felt it was cruel chance.’
In October Anita made a six-day trip to New York, as the guest speaker at the Churchill Library Memorial Lunch, a fundraiser that attracted wealthy sponsors. Not a woman to do things the easy way, she flew back standby on Air India to save the well-heeled committee money. Tarka and Jane’s son William was born in London on 22 November and started life in Cleveland Square before he and Jane went to Hampshire to stay with her mother. From cold, damp Glaslough, Anita wrote to Harold Harris that she realized that it was no place to bring a baby: ‘I’ve always adored my house but can see that now it’s in a war zone … So I can see that whatever England’s problems it has something to offer and the isolation of Glaslough no longer appeals.’ She had managed to get back to Oranmore before snow blocked all the Monaghan roads and was enduring the usual wintry conditions of the Atlantic coast. To Harold: ‘The gales blew – then we had huge waves and feared inundation by the sea but tide abated just in time – electrics and telephone broken but now mended and the men discovered rats had chewed through the lines as well!!’
As always, Anita had financial problems. Although her biography of Jennie Churchill had been given tax exemption, subsequent books hadn’t, the Revenue Commissioners who decided such things having judged them ‘non-creative’, unaware of how many of the scenes and conversations in them were very creative indeed. Anita intended to fight the judgements book by book, a costly and irksome business. ‘It is so exhausting to be suddenly faced with such an unexpected dilemma,’ she wrote to Harold. The ways of the tax exemption committee were impossible to fathom; literary biographies could be denied the exemption, while ghost-written memoirs by politicians and sports stars were accorded it.
That winter at Oranmore, Anita and Bill carried kettles and buckets of hot water to the cows’ ice-covered drinking troughs. At Castle Leslie, Desmond and Helen tried, and failed, to light the wood stoves with damp wood. Tarka’s cattle, under cover in the farmyard, had to be given water from the lake since the water-tank, installed by Tarka’s great-grandfather, had cracked from the cold. It was impossible to drive even as far as the lodge gates. In this year of birth and death, violence and change, the September publication of Anita’s memoir, The Gilt and the Gingerbread, was hardly noticed by the chilled and overburdened family. It was dedicated to Fleur and Rebecca – Rose’s daughter and granddaughter. Rebecca was the daughter of Rose’s son Peter Burgh and his former wife Anita. The jacket reproduced a pastel portrait of Anita Rodzianko, as she then was, by her brother-in-law, Serge Rodzianko. She looks so dreamily pretty, so untouched by life that it’s hard to believe that the portrait was conceived during her hellish first marriage.
Anita’s writing was always best when she stayed close to home. The memoir ambles through Leslie family history, not altogether truthfully but always delectably. Only someone whose grandmother constantly admonished ‘Smile dear, it costs nothing’ and whose great-aunt advised ‘One must always pretend the sun is shining even when it isn’t’ could write with such a determined lack of self pity. Anita had enough material to write a misery memoir but, fortunately for her readers, not the inclination. She shrugged off the general unlovingness of her parents, apart from the observation that her father would have preferred his children not to have been born. As for being abandoned in the detestable Roehampton convent, there is only the mock-tragical comment: ‘The incarceration was complete, as if we were in prison.’ She doesn’t quote from her anguished letters to Marjorie, written from the various unsuitable schools where she had been dumped. Those woeful notes from a neglected and humiliated child would not have been ‘amusing’ to read.
Anita was not the first writer to describe the nastiness of the debutante Season but was perhaps the first to so exactly pinpoint its ideal in the afore-quoted: ‘This was what all mothers hoped of their daughters – maximum sex-appeal with the minimum of sex experience’. She writes lovingly of Castle Leslie, which ‘blinked its sixty plate-glass windows at the lake’ and, like its chatelaine, Leonie, gave Anita a sense of belonging. ‘An Irish childhood does something to one’s toes, causing invisible roots to grow into the soil,’ she maintained. The last chapter of the book, ‘War 1940’, noted the end of the phoney war and the start of the killing, which would continue for six years. ‘How lucky I was to be husbandless, childless, unloving and unloved.’ Not quite true but, to quote Sir Leslie Stephen, editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, ‘No good story is quite true,’ and The Gilt and the Gingerbread is a very good story.
‘Anecdotal’, ‘conversational’, ‘entertaining’ were the words reviewers reached for. In Books & Bookmen Brian Masters complained that ‘There is little sign of a struggle to build a work of literature.’ Anthony Powell, in The Daily Telegraph, struck by Marjorie’s attitude towards her daughter’s education, got to the heart of the matter: ‘Perhaps the chief point that emerges is how greatly all children dislike not being given an opportunity to learn.’ In the Irish Sunday Independent, Ulick O’Connor appreciated the stories about Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough, described by Anita as ‘hideous yet exotic, surrounded by a moving carpet of King Charles spaniels’. He thought the book was ‘a charming autobiography’ and looked forward to a second instalment in which Anita would continue ‘to paint for us a unique picture of a society in its dying years’. But, when this second memoir was published two years later, there was little about declining Big Houses and their impoverished owners. It was all about troops, prisoners of war, ambulance drivers, battles and wartime leaders – a picture of a society in its fighting years.