In 1942 the Eastern Times recruited a new editor, a lieutenant who had been a journalist in Fleet Street, so Anita had more time to ride in the mountains of Lebanon, which in early spring were covered with wild flowers. She recorded that ‘Our horses [were] the last of the Cavalry Division sent out in 1940,’ which means that Paul was with her, since he was training those horses, but, as usual, she doesn’t mention him. She made an interesting new friend: the famous singer Amal al-Atrash, Emira of the Druzes, better known by her stage name Asmahan, with whom Aly Khan and every Allied officer who met her became smitten. The only man she loved had been banished to England, where she was not allowed to follow him, and so was contemplating a return to her previous career. She told Anita: ‘What does it matter where I go? I am destroyed. I have nothing to care about. I will make films again.’ According to Simon Sebag Montefiore in his book Jerusalem: The Biography (2011), the Emira was ‘an Eastern Mata Hari who allegedly spied for all sides during the war and met a mysterious death in a car accident in 1944’.
Another visitor to Anita’s flat in Beirut was Miranda Lampson, the former femme fatale of the mtc, renowned for leaving a yellow cotton mop in her bed to simulate her blonde hair, while she crawled under the barbed wire for an evening’s forbidden entertainment, telltale shreds of silver lamé fluttering behind her. She said that her uncle, the us ambassador to Egypt, had forced the abdication of King Farouk. Anita could be as ditsy as Miranda: assigned to cover a visit to the Middle East by the Duke of Gloucester, she managed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time wherever she went but was appreciated by the ranks lined up for inspection: ‘Hey there … look at the Dook’s girlfriend. We ’ad to leave ours behind.’
But this year was far from light-hearted. Later, Anita wrote to Rose that 1942 was ‘the most emotional of my life … it was frankly the first time I’ve ever loved with my whole heart and mind without any doubt or hesitation.’ The man in question was Colonel Philip Parbury, an Australian whose division was fighting in the Middle East. They had met in Syria, where Philip was attending a course at the Staff College, only ninety miles from Beirut. ‘During four long months we met every weekend – such luck during a war,’ she wrote to Rose. In the best romantic tradition, Anita and Philip ‘waded knee-deep through a sea of wild larkspur and hollyhock and saw the snow-covered mountains of Persia, and explored great ruins that were the first cities of the world.’ And then Philip failed to get a posting in Egypt and had to go back to Australia. Before that he had a week’s leave and Anita ‘tore down to Palestine in the hottest khamsin of the year to say goodbye to him – broiling nerve-racked days’. They parted in Gaza – ‘a queer Arab town where Samson and Delilah hung out – and I returned dazed and heartbroken to Beirut.’
June was a wicked month. On the 21st, Tobruk fell to General Rommel’s forces, after two years in British hands, and German forces reached the outskirts of Alexandria. At the British Embassy in Cairo there began a burning of secret papers. Most of Anita’s French friends were killed on the battlefield and – a farcical element among the slaughter – Paul turned up again.
Anita had moved from her flat to a villa outside Beirut, beside the French military prison, which – the flat, not the prison – had ‘several palatial unfurnished rooms and a bar’. Her housemates were Patsy O’Kane, recently escaped from China on the diplomatic ship, along with a trunkful of glamorous frocks, and Anita’s cousin, Lilah Fortescue. Anita was delighted when Betty Holberton visited, less so when Paul did, although his visit was inevitable since the exuberant Russian couple who owned the villa were his friends. With Anita’s help, he had been given the job of training the local Syrian cavalry with the Free French but soon lost it because the Russian ambassador to London had told General de Gaulle that employing Paul was ‘considered an unfriendly act to the Soviet’. A year later (6 July 1943), Anita wrote to Rose:
It was a pretty situation – Paul stranded, disappointed, pathetic, helpless, getting on my nerves, penniless, jobless, fell into a stupor. The moment he arrived I asked for a divorce. He wept and then promised one at the end of the war – this predicament made it impossible to force things.
The same old story.
The damp summer heat of Beirut along with Paul’s irritating presence made Anita determined to leave. She took up an invitation to join the Trans-Jordan Frontier Force as an ambulance driver. The Frontier Force, which was set to replace British forces in the lands over the Jordan, was in the command of a man whom Anita described as ‘a tremendous friend of mine’, Colonel Peter Wilson of the Royal Dragoons. Anita was not another Emira of the Druzes but several men were in love with her, Peter Wilson among them. There is an old adage that war consists of long stretches of boredom punctuated by terror. Courting Anita, almost under the eye of her jealous husband, kept boredom at bay. It was a thrilling game, something between a lark and a challenge, which sometimes involved lovers, or would-be lovers, having to jump from hotel balconies.
Anita loved her time in the Frontier Force; driving through the wilderness, sleeping out under the stars. It made her realize that ‘as well as being mad as a coot, I’m wild as a desert fox!’ She noted the sombre sadness of the Jews, who found it difficult to settle on the land and – something she was more responsive to – the Arabs’ ‘merry, irresponsible outlook on life’, which reminded her of the Irish. She recruited ten Arab girls as clerks, an experiment that failed because, as she wrote in Train to Nowhere (1948), ‘the Palestinian hq would not authorise them unless they joined the ats, which they refused to do for fear of their “reputation”.’ Anita’s published account notes: ‘In the autumn of 1942 I had to leave Transjordan and resume working with the Eastern Times in Beirut.’ But a letter to Rose tells a different story. ‘The whole venture ended on account of malicious old women gossiping in Jerusalem about me and the ats pounced on the Arab girls.’ What with her relationship with the Commanding Officer and lovers jumping off balconies, there was a lot to gossip about.
Another visitor to the villa was the Leslies’ friend and neighbour General the Hon. Sir Harold R.L.G. Alexander, who had been brought up at Calendon, only three miles to the north of Castle Leslie but situated in the Six Counties. Winston’s favourite general, he was now Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean. To his colleagues, ‘Alex’ was not considered too bright: ‘bone from the neck up’ according to one of them. In those dark days, with German forces pushing eastwards towards the Suez Canal and the Axis taking control of most of western Europe and Russia, Alex remained unflustered, looking, according to one commentator, ‘as if he had just had a steam bath, a massage, a good breakfast and a letter from home.’ Not so General Montgomery, the man in charge of the Eighth Army, which was about to take on Rommel’s Afrika Korps. Unlike the charming Alex, Bernard Montgomery was said to be ‘as quick as a ferret and about as likeable’.
The battle of El Alamein, fought one hundred and fifty miles west of Cairo, began on 23 November. Before it, Montgomery sent a message to all his men: ‘Everyone must be imbued with the desire to kill Germans, even the padres – one for weekdays and two on Sundays.’ After ten days of fighting and forty-three thousand casualties, Rommel’s army was decisively beaten. Winston said: ‘Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein, we never had a defeat.’
Winston wrote in Closing the Ring, the fifth volume of his history of the Second World War: ‘Who in war will not have his laugh amid the skulls.’ He could not abide joylessness, neither could his cousin Anita. Although she loved Philip – ‘I wonder if I will see him again – it will be a hurtful lonely world for me if I don’t,’ she wrote to Rose – there were pleasant distractions. Even Paul occasionally forgot his woes and, divertingly, walked around on his hands while singing the Rodzianko March. Among Anita’s suitors was one who referred to himself as ‘number four admirer’. His name was Bill King, a submarine commander who had taken charge of his first submarine at the outbreak of war, when he was twenty-nine, and, by the spring of 1940, had sunk four transport and supply ships during the Norwegian campaign, for which he had been awarded seven medals for ‘daring, endurance and resource in the conduct of hazardous and successful operations in His Majesty’s Submarines against the enemy’. He wrote later:
I did not know that I was beginning a routine life which would go on week after week for six years; that my world would be bounded by the chart-table, the periscope and the bridge during almost all that time; that the smell of diesel oil, chlorine and unwashed bodies would be continuous and that our every day was to be passed below water in a damp fug that would be cold in N. Europe, warm in the Mediterranean and an inferno in the Tropics.
He could have added that he slept in his oilskins so as to be ready for an emergency and nibbled bismuth powder to cure his duodenal ulcers.
Bill had emerged from the steel coffin of his submarine in the early spring of 1943 and was spending his leave in Beirut because his Commanding Officer, Captain Philip Ruck-Keene – ‘Ruckers’, had based his submarine flotilla there. Ruckers thought that making the exhausted submariners ski from one end of Lebanon to the other would do them good. And an even better cure for Bill would be to introduce him to Anita. Ruckers explained:
She’s an ambulance driver whose unit got dissolved for insubordination or something and now she’s up here in charge of a troops’ newspaper – obviously makes a glorious muddle of everything she touches and is the most undisciplined, disorganised person I’ve ever seen in my life. I would like you to meet her … she is such a contrast to the Navy.
Bill later commented, ‘These were the first words I ever heard concerning my future wife.’ Bill and Anita were fine and fearless skiers. Anita learnt that Bill could be depended on to look after her safety and Bill discovered something admirable about his skiing companion: ‘She had really reduced doing what you want, against any odds, to a fine art.’ At the end of his leave, he wrote to her: ‘I did not realise that I was in love with you until the day I left … All my love and many kisses (even if they are not wanted).’ Cured of his ulcers but with a bad case of heartache, Bill left Beirut to find a third submarine to command, claiming that his enemies were ‘the sea, the Admiralty and the Germans, in that order’. He would not see Anita again until the end of the war.
In May Anita stayed in Jerusalem with Paul, who was organizing a horse show. He was now training mules for General Alexander. Mules are ideal wartime pack animals; they can carry as much as three hundred pounds seven hours a day, for twenty days. They are committed to self-preservation, snacking instead of over-eating, so that they remain nimble enough to climb mountain roads. They are still used by today’s armies. Although absent, Philip was still classed as Anita’s number one admirer, Paul number two and Bill number four but it was admirer number three, Peter Wilson, who was the most important to her in the summer of 1943. Her grandmother Leonie had died in August and she was at a low ebb, writing to Rose: ‘I and my girl friends here are sick of just falling in and out of love – we want to do something heroic like capturing a tank.’ Instead, she gave in to Peter’s demands to get pregnant. ‘P [Peter] wants me to marry Philip but begs me to give him a daughter to bring up first. It’s all such a clamour!’ An extraordinary plan, even if she wanted to repay Peter for his many kindnesses. I suspect that this was an example of akrasia, being alarmingly against her better judgement. She did get pregnant but, in September, lost the baby, which she had referred to as ‘my little gift scheme’:
Incredible complications followed … and every sort of horror was envisaged from tumours to complete removal of machinery. Don’t let anyone know as Ma would drop dead if she heard … There is nothing radically wrong – just weakness.
That November there were riots in Beirut, with the French arresting the popular President Khoury in a brutal manner. Sentries were posted in the garden of Anita’s villa and soldiers from the Rifle Brigade drove her to the office of the Eastern Times ‘in a command car bristling with guns’. Rose was having a different kind of war, working as a vad (non-registered nurse) while based luxuriously in her Belgravia house. In 1943 she married for the second time, to a fighter pilot called Michael Bell-Syer, but it soon became clear that she had not really settled down.
Anita wanted to leave the Eastern Times for good. She found a job in the Red Cross, assisting Pamela Wavell, whose father was about to become Viceroy of India. The two girls drove supplies to isolated field hospitals in Lebanon and Syria, Pamela’s Red Cross uniform being a snowy white dress and white picture hat. These journeys were probably spying missions. On 23 March 1944 Patsy O’Kane married George Jellicoe who, at the age of twenty-five, had won a dso, mc and the Croix de Guerre as a Commando. Before the wedding, Patsy had had to disengage herself from another attachment in Egypt – ‘poor Peter Wilson, who was flying to Cairo, has had to take back the ring and dismissal letters,’ Anita wrote to Marjorie. The wedding was held in the Italian chapel in Beirut, the reception at the villa, its garden scented with orange blossom, and the honeymoon in Cyprus, where Richard Coeur de Lion and Berengaria had honeymooned.
After three years in the Middle East, Anita asked the Red Cross hq in Cairo to be sent to Italy. In May she boarded a hospital ship at Alexandria, travelling light, since all she owned were ‘my uniforms, some Damascus sandals, Aleppo sheepskins and a hoard of memories’. This was the published account of her departure but she told Rose the real story. She had become pregnant again and ‘in the end one did the brutal sensible thing – Peter minded terribly and so did I … it was a really ghastly goodbye’.