‘Leslie-King. At midnight on November 5, at Oranmore Castle, quietly in her sleep, the author Anita Leslie, beloved wife of Bill Leslie-King and mother of Tarka and Leonie. Funeral at Glaslough Friday 8 November.’ (The Irish Times.) Tony Whittome wrote an obituary for The Times in which he said that Anita ‘represented all that was most captivating and individual about the Anglo-Irish aristocracy’, while David Holloway, the literary editor of The Daily Telegraph, wrote that Anita ‘was at her most effective in her books about her relations.’ Anita had left highly idiosyncratic burial instructions:
In accordance to the beliefs of my Red Indian ancestors I wish to return my body to the earth that made it. Feeling the breath of god in the trees I gladly give my physical remains to the roots of the great Irish forest beside the lake at Glaslough, which I have always loved – the grave to be unmarked. I would prefer to be buried without a coffin – just tied to a board – but if that is complicated take the lid off. And let those who love me not imagine I am where my cast-off body lies. That goes to the good earth. If you wonder where I am, listen to the trees whispering.
The perfect resting place was found, between two young lime trees, standing like sentinels beside the lake she loved. Anita was laid out in Castle Leslie’s gallery, surrounded by flowers and candles. The next day, there was a small, quiet funeral at the local Catholic church, before the journey to the edge of the lake. Volunteers had worked frantically to clear fallen branches and potholes from the lakeside avenue, so that mourners could reach the site beside the lime trees. In a letter to Tony Whittome, Desmond described a heavy rain sending everyone scurrying back to the Castle, from where they saw a sudden 100 mph gust of wind bending the trees double. Then the party began, with De Danann playing and the Irish Anthem of Peace sung. On 24 April of the following year, a Requiem Mass for Anita was held at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Farm Street, Mayfair.
Bill also wrote to Tony Whittome. He said that after the funeral he had stood beside Anita’s grave at dusk, listening to the rooks coming home to roost, and had been inspired to write the following: ‘Farewell my love/the spirit flies, we cannot follow/Deep in our bones we know/There is a tomorrow/When we shall fly and meet at Heaven’s Gate.’ Anita, controlling her family from beyond the grave, had left the written instruction: ‘No mourning, no tears.’ Bill complied, writing to Kathleen Abercorn, ‘We must pick up the bits.’ In his case, this meant continuing to hunt with the Blazers, of which he was the oldest member.
He also wanted to get Anita’s third volume of autobiography published and sent a typescript to Tony Whittome. Bill told Tarka that Anita had done ‘a lovely rewrite of Love in a Nutshell’, but her account of more recent events was disappointing: ‘I hoped that she would recover and make a better fist of it.’ Nothing more was heard of the typescript and, by the time I started my research, Tony Whittome, then still at Hutchinson after forty years, had forgotten about it until I showed him a copy of Bill’s letter of 1985, asking for a meeting to discuss it. A search of the Hutchinson files revealed a few typewritten chapters and some handwritten ones, none of them publishable. Anita had pilfered material not just from Love in a Nutshell but from her previous memoirs and her diary entries and arranged it in a rambling, chaotic way. Little wonder that Tony, who retired in 2010, put off discussing it with Bill.
The Revenue Commissioners, that fickle outfit, decided that Cousin Randolph wasn’t tax exempt. A furious Bill drafted a letter which, wisely, he didn’t post. It was signed off, ‘I hope that God will forgive you your gross trespass.’ The ‘Revenue Vultures’, as he called them, had warned Anita that any future claims for tax exemption must be backed up by receipts but their letter had arrived at Oranmore three days before Anita died, which was Bill’s explanation for the absence of receipts. Anita’s books soon went out of print, apart from Jennie, which a small publisher, George Mann Books, reissued in 1992, paying an advance of £750. More recently, Bloomsbury has reissued Train to Nowhere, the wartime memoir that I consider to be Anita’s masterpiece.
Glaslough’s shaky fortunes improved when Desmond and Helen’s daughter Sammy, who had qualified as an instructor with the British Horse Society when she was seventeen, took over the running of the estate in 1991 at the age of twenty-four. She started by opening a tearoom in the leaky conservatory and gradually restored the castle into a prizewinning country house hotel, which became famous, in 2002, when it hosted the wedding of Paul McCartney and Heather Mills. It now caters for about sixty weddings a year. In 2004 Sammy repurchased the equestrian centre, which Desmond had sold, and, in 2005, the Castle Leslie Estate won the Sunday Times Best Country House Hotel award. Those former houseguests who remember Anita’s lunch of half-cooked baked potatoes and mouldy chocolates must find it hardly credible that Castle Leslie is now a gourmet’s paradise. The journalist Kevin Myers listed the dishes served on the opening night of the Castle Leslie Gourmet Circle: ‘Quail eggs set in consommé, timbale of Glaslough pike on a bed of spinach … chicken creperettes with lardoons … petit pot de crème with praline.’ Until his death in 2016, Jack acted as a very idiosyncratic and popular tour guide at Castle Leslie.
Desmond died in Helen’s house in Antibes, in the south of France, in 2001. Agnes died in 1999, after a long and happy relationship with Maurice Craig and professional success as a cabaret singer, collaborating with Marc Almond, Elvis Costello and Tom Waits. Helen Leslie, the inspiration behind the equestrian centre, died in Antibes in 2011. Bill, who continued to live at Oranmore Castle, died in October 2012, at the age of 102. He was buried beside Anita at Glaslough. Oranmore village has spread towards the city of Galway in a rash of new housing estates but, on its seaward side, the castle still soars in grey remoteness under the wild skies.
The Leslies continue to fascinate. Writers, other than themselves, now fill the shelves with books about this extraordinary family. They feature in Agnes’s memoir, The Fun Palace (1996), in Fortune’s Daughters (2004) by Elisabeth Kehoe, subtitled ‘The extravagant lives of the Jerome sisters’, and, in 2009, a further biography of Jennie by Anne Sebba. Shane Leslie: Sublime Failure by Otto Rauchbauer appeared in the same year, 2010, as did Robert O’Byrne’s Desmond Leslie: The Biography of an Irish Gentleman. Anita who, in her lifetime, was the best known of the writing Leslies, has been somewhat overlooked. I have tried to bring this brave, interesting and complicated woman into the limelight.