Gay Byrne, the popular Irish broadcaster, chose The Gilt and the Gingerbread as his top Christmas book buy for 1981 and so did Montgomery Hyde in Book Choice magazine. Once the first print run of four thousand copies had sold out, Hutchinson, unaccountably, allowed the memoir to go out of print, losing the Christmas market. Anita, who scorned to use an agent, wrote in anguish to the now retired Harold Harris, who reproached Hutchinson’s managing director, Brian Perlman, but to little avail. The situation was made worse when Anita noticed that Molly Keane’s novel Good Behaviour was on sale everywhere. She and Molly, two quirky chroniclers of a vanished Anglo-Irish world, had appeared on television together but, while Anita’s book quickly became unprocurable, Molly’s was sold to an English television company and, adapted by Hugh Leonard, aired the following year. In the spring, Anita, a staunch royalist, was cheered up by receiving an invitation to the ‘Authors of the Year’ party at Hatchards bookshop in Piccadilly, to be attended by Her Majesty the Queen.
In June 1982 Anita brought the sybaritic Roy Miles to Glaslough for a two-day visit. Accustomed to delicious food, he was surprised that Sunday lunch, which Anita cooked, consisted of half-cooked baked potatoes. When these had been eaten Anita disappeared for a while and then came back with ‘dessert’, a box of chocolates mouldily past their sell-by date. The chocolates had been given to her some time ago by Anthony Whittome, her new editor at Hutchinson. She wrote to him: ‘Your chocolates proved delicious and fed us all on Sunday when I blithely organised lunch in the old dining room prior to Roy’s departure.’ Roy found Anita’s frugality as baffling as she found his extravagance. When he flew back to London from Belfast after that unsatisfying lunch he paid £20 for the convenience of a guaranteed seat, shocking Anita, who always flew standby.
That autumn was the last one that Anita, Bill and Tarka would spend a week stalking at Glenveagh; Henry McIlhenny had gifted the estate to the Irish state and was moving permanently to his house in Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia. ‘The only person in Philadelphia with glamour’, Andy Warhol called him. Anita wrote to Roy:
I suffered from the disappearance of all pictures … the Stubbs and all the Landseers have gone to Philadelphia and to me who had grown accustomed over 35 years to look up and see them it was most melancholy – Of course he is right – life must be lived and it’s no good as Michael Rosse said ‘letting houses kill you’.
Did it occur to her that Glaslough too was a murderous sort of house?
There were two general elections in Ireland in 1982. In the first one, on 18 February, Charles Haughey’s Fianna Fáil government was narrowly returned. Anita’s opinion: ‘Charlie H & Co all crooks but very merry ones’. In the second election, in November, the merry crooks were defeated and Garret Fitzgerald became Taoiseach, for the second time, in a Fine Gael-Labour coalition. Anita’s view: ‘Fitzgerald is the best brain in Ireland but hamstrung by always being in coalition.’ Uncertainty in the Republic, terrorism in the North persuaded Tarka to shed some of his responsibilities at Glaslough. He sold Dawson’s Lodge to his uncle Jack for 24,500 Irish punts. The plan was for Jack to rent it out. He commented: ‘As a last resort the Gardaí might make suitable tenants.’ Tarka, living in Dorset, working in County Monaghan, had double loyalties. In December he attended a ball at Knightsbridge Barracks in aid of the dependants of those members of the Queen’s Lifeguard of the Household Cavalry who, on 20 July, had been killed by an ira bomb as they rode out to Whitehall. At about the same time he contributed to an event, held in County Monaghan, for the destitute families of imprisoned members of the ira. Agnes, living in Dublin, begged Anita to get Tarka away from Glaslough. Anita wrote to Jack: ‘It is such a worry – I really hate him living there at all – and wonder if he realises the constant danger.’ Of course, he did; he had told her that he felt like a man with his feet caught in cement but it was hard for Anita to admit that ‘the huge effort I made to save something of Glaslough for him is just a handicap’.
Another cold winter. At Oranmore, four big dead rats were found under the floorboards in Bill’s bedroom. ‘The maddening thing is this,’ Anita wrote to Tarka:
I had arranged with McNally 2 years ago to lay electric cables in the cement so as to have ONE warm room here independent of central heating and he ordered the cables and then went broke and IF we lay cement now it’s impossible to lay cables later … we have given up the idea of underfloor electric heating … It is so cold here – the sea frozen and hail showers … the newer roof over the old water tank has cracked … a real job has got to be done with cauldrons of hot tar and it will cost several hundred so do send me that cheque as soon as possible … The really BAD leaks over big kitchen. I can hope that all rain water came in through there and NOT via the exit pipe which is ungettable at.
Oranmore was getting too much to cope with. Even the ponies were irksome – ‘I really can’t see any joy in riding around here anymore – Glaslough is different.’ Hunting no longer appealed to her; there was too much travelling to different meets and the post-hunt parties weren’t as lively as they used to be – ‘all so old except Min Mahony and his wife! “The county” is vanishing into the mists of old age.’ The new owner of one of the old Big Houses failed to put in an appearance: ‘She isn’t “county” and besides I think she had some row with Anne Hempill over who was most important in the Pony Club.’ Sir Oliver St John Gogarty observed that ‘The true county families are born concussed’ but Anita felt comfortable with them, at ease with their neighbourly gossip and lack of intellectual rigour. In January Anita and Bill were both in bed with high temperatures, rising from their sickbeds to carry feed to the horses and inspect the leaking roofs. Anita wrote plaintively to her son: ‘You say you have no time to talk to me here but I’ve got a lot of things to discuss.’ She pined for Cleveland Square: ‘I can’t tell you how much better I feel in London than here – I think because it’s drier – If it wasn’t for Heather [Leonie and Alec’s small daughter] I’d spend most of my time there.’
Anita’s wartime memoir, A Story Half Told, was published on 25 April 1983 and was celebrated with a party given by Roy Miles at his house 3 Trevor Square in Knightsbridge. Six hundred pounds worth of champagne was served, a rare event at book launches, which are usually held dismally in publishers’ offices, with tepid white wine the only drink on offer. Hutchinson paid £100 towards the cost of the party, in recognition that Anita was now a valuable literary property. Her latest advance was raised from £3000 to £3500 and the print run increased to five thousand. Since previous books had not been tax exempt, she transformed her advance into non-taxable expenses. Harold Harris had had misgivings about the book. He had been sent an early typescript, which prompted him to write to Tony Whittome:
It is bad enough having a dyslexic author without her appointing a dyslexic typist! Both of them use dashes where a full stop, a comma or a semi-colon would be appropriate … I am bound to say that I found it a very eccentric book indeed … the whole book is lifted from Train to Nowhere. It is only slightly paraphrased, some of the stories are cut out and some have had one or two comments added, not always to their advantage. I really don’t know why she went to the trouble of writing it all again instead of asking Hutchinson to re-publish the old volume. But there it is and this is the result. One can only hope that no-one will notice.
No one did. None of the enthusiastic reviewers realized that A Story Half Told was Train to Nowhere lite. It had been thirty-five years since the earlier book was published and it had been out of print since 1953. When she wrote it, she had been a disconsolate young woman, adrift in the post-war world. Now she was a well-known biographer of popular, frothy biographies of high-society figures. Readers picked up her books expecting to be amused and Hutchinson knew this. When her publisher sent Anita a rather skittish blurb for her approval, she reproved them: ‘My war was with the Fighting Troops – it wasn’t a society outing.’ But she was aware that her readers expected from her something akin to society outings and the rehashed memoir was more Anita-ish than the original, with more gossip and more detailed character sketches of the terrifying and glamorous Mrs Newall and the glorious Miranda Lampson. Some of the more macabre episodes were left out, such as the exhausted French woman being allowed to shoot dead two even more exhausted German soldiers in reprisal for the killing of her son.
Anita also added an untruthful ending: Bill proposing to her, almost immediately after the war, beside the lake at Glaslough. There had been a marriage proposal in that particular spot: in the spring of 1918, Montagu Porch had proposed to the much older Jennie Churchill, so Anita had just changed the personnel. The tone of the new book, with its touches of girlish gaiety, would have been inappropriate in 1948 but were appealing in 1982, as was the jacket illustration of Augustus John’s portrait of Anita, all long lashes and heart-shaped red lips. As in Train to Nowhere, Anita’s wartime story is less than half told. She doesn’t mention Paul stalking her all over the Middle East, her love affairs, abortions and bouts of depression; this is a very upbeat war story.
Critics liked the moments of lightheartedness. Anne Johnstone in the Sunday Standard: ‘It might not be going too far to say that Anita Leslie has done for the Second World War what Robert Graves did for the First in Goodbye to All That. Like that classic, it is both horrifying and hilarious. It is packed with gems of observation.’ Victoria Glendinning in The Times Literary Supplement: ‘It is as if Angela Brazil had collaborated with Noël Coward. Anita Leslie was conspicuously brave and effective, and she was awarded the Croix de Guerre. Yet she has the frivolity, and the style, to describe “her” war as “frivolous” … Anita Leslie was, is, a chic type.’
The chic type was ill again. On 1 May 1983 she wrote to Jack: ‘Darling I’ve been so sick – a virus pneumonia I think.’ The cause of the illness was her research on a planned biograpy of Randolph Churchill, who had died in 1968. Anita had gone to Colchester to interview Randolph’s last love, Natalie Bevan. Her return train had been delayed and she had spent hours on a freezing platform. In June she had a temperature of 102° every night for three weeks but refused to see a doctor, not even the one who believed in nature cures and was recommended by Sheila Chichester. Anita applied cold compresses until her temperature returned to normal. The 93-year-old Lady Diana Cooper, who had loved Randolph, rang Anita to tell her that she was praying for her to get well so that she could finish writing the book.
Anita was aware of Randolph’s faults: drunkenness, abominable rude-ness, an inflated sense of his own importance. But she thought that these character flaws were outweighed by fearlessness and intelligence. As she researched more deeply, she found that dishonesty had to be added to the list of sins; after the war, Randolph had rented a house in Oving and left without paying the bills. In her biography, she writes only: ‘Unfortunately, there had been some misunderstanding about Oving,’ but she was rattled, having believed Randolph to have an honest nature, the reason for his outspoken lack of tact. She felt that her own health was failing and, that August, made her will, naming her children as her executors, with Tarka her literary executor and legatee. She left her land at Glaslough to Tarka’s son William, although she had previously told Tarka that she didn’t own anything there, and the Oranmore lands to Leonie’s daughter, Heather Oriel. A flawed document, it made no provision for any future grandchildren.
Eccentric Anglo-Irishness was much in fashion, with television adaptations of Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour and The Irish RM by Somerville and Ross. In the greedy, ostentatious 1980s, Chekhovian stories of people in dusty diamonds and threadbare frocks drifting around their half-ruined estates during the last gasp of the British Empire had a nostalgic charm. An Irish media company, McDonagh Associates, thought that Anita, the epitome of Anglo-Irishness, would be the perfect subject for a television series and Tony Whittome agreed. In an internal memo, he wrote: ‘I too have long felt that there is enough in Anita’s amazing life story and her scatty aristocratic backgound to carry significantly more media exploitation than we have so far been able to arrange.’ McDonagh Associates wanted Hutchinson to cooperate in the venture but this was a step too far for the publisher. Although the media company paid £250 for a six-month option on Anita’s memoirs, it couldn’t raise the production money and the option was allowed to lapse.
Financial success eluded Anita. Not granted tax exemption, she also discovered that, even though she had a British passport and a uk publisher, because she lived in Ireland, she was not eligible to receive Public Lending Right (plr), a scheme under which authors are paid a small sum on every library borrowing of one of their books. In poor health herself, she gave comfort and advice to a languishing Roy Miles:
My diagnosis is that your LIVER is delicate. You’ve played it up with rich banquets and nerve strain combined … go 2 days on grapes only to purify your blood stream … only one disease exists – IMPURE BLOOD STREAM. So IMPURE BLOOD AND false values is [sic] all you have to worry about.
The final sentence of this letter to Roy could have been written by Jennie Churchill, it is so chirpily optimistic: ‘And remember the Chinese saying that each day is wonderful when the sun rises and there isn’t an earthquake or flood.’
By 1984 the 78-year-old Jack Leslie had been living in Italy for thirty years. It had become an unsettling country: in 1978 the outgoing prime minister, Aldo Moro, had been kidnapped by the terrorist group, the Red Brigades, who killed his five bodyguards and, fifty-five days later, Moro himself, leaving his body in the boot of a red Renault car. There was more street crime, robbery and political viciousness. Jack’s orderly domestic life was also affected. He recounted in his memoir Never A Dull Moment (2006) that, one evening, his manservant, Italo Deidda, ‘went out to the nearby fish shop and bought some polpi (small octopi) and ripe nectarines for lunch. After eating the delicious cooked polpi I wondered why he did not bring in the nectarines. Then I went to the kitchen and found Italo dead on the floor.’
Fearful of further calamity, Jack decided to spend even more time at Glaslough. He bought a half-share in the village gate lodge from Agnes and started to negotiate for the paddock behind Dawson’s Lodge. But his family was at war. Desmond wrote snarling notes to Tarka:
All the gates to this estate belong to me … If you want to make this beautiful estate look like a tinker encampment, please stick to your own areas. But now that we are a recognised, tax-exempted National Monument, a far higher standard will be required of you and everyone living within the walls.
Hostility within the walls and increasing danger at its gates. From London, on 15 June 1984, Anita wrote to Kathleen Abercorn. Tarka had just arrived with stories to tell:
A lorry of explosives was captured by the 2nd class gardai who hadn’t gone down to guard Reagan in Galway! [The US president had visited Ireland earlier that month.] Apparently, this lorry was taken at gunpoint from the flustered family who owned it … Apparently, the mortars on it were about to go off – they’d intended to point them all at the barracks at Middletown! Tarka says the ‘boyos’ ran away in the dark when they saw a policeman waving a torch.
Later that year the entire village of Glaslough had to be evacuated. ‘Such incidents do not even warrant a line in newspapers here’, Anita wrote to Kath, ‘here’ referring to the uk, whose government tried to ignore the embarrassment that was the Irish border as much as possible, which was what Anita did too. The letter to Kath was mainly about her growing collection of grandchildren. Leonie had given birth to a ten-pound baby boy in March, and Jane was expecting her second child the following April. ‘Bill and i dote over all our grandchildren and are I think – excellent grand parents!!’ Bill’s book Dive & Attack, about his war years, had been published the previous year and Anita’s biography of Randolph, for which she had interviewed fifty people, was due out in April – ‘I understand him and why he was a drunk.’ In the Cleveland Square flat the balconies, built in 1860, were falling off and the plumbing didn’t work but Anita was used to decaying buildings; they were part of Anglo-Irish life.