CHAPTER 11
I was engaged to be married several times, but when I had to choose between the man and the motor the car always won. They all wrongly assumed that I would give up motorsports when I married and I had to tell them that this was not the case. A lot of the time I said yes to a proposal to prove to myself, and my mother, that I could get a man, but really I had no intention of settling down.
I was very young and dress designing when one of my brother’s friends brought his fiancée into our showroom. I made a few dresses for her, and when they were ready they would come in together to collect them. One day, he came in to collect a dress and asked me to go for a coffee with him and he told me it was all off with his fiancée. After that we started to go out now and again, but as far as I was concerned he was just a friend. To tell the truth, the thing that attracted me was his Triumph TR2 sports car, which he let me drive! I was driving down the old Belfast Road, near St Margaret’s on the way to Drogheda, when we came to a very sharp right-hand bend and at the speed I was going there was no way I was going to make it. I spun round and round in the middle of the road, luckily hitting nothing, and ended up facing the way we had just come. He didn’t say a word; I could do no wrong as far as he was concerned.
He got it into his head that we should get married and I was noncommittal and humoured him until one day I came home to find a strange woman sitting in the drawing room with my mother. The woman smiled when she saw me and said that she had flown in from Mexico because she had to bring the veil for the wedding. She said it was a family heirloom, which couldn’t possibly be trusted to the post, so she had brought it personally. ‘Who is the veil for?’ I asked, bewildered. ‘Well, you, of course,’ she replied, ‘when you marry my nephew. It’s a family tradition and he told me you were getting married very soon.’ I told her she had made a mistake, and walked out. Apparently she stayed for ages, trying to persuade my mother that I should marry her nephew. She was going to leave him a lot of money and she would love it if he married me.
I didn’t see him again until years later, when I went to do the RAC Rally in England. He was in the hotel at Heathrow standing behind a huge potted plant in the foyer with a crash helmet on and driving gloves, just staring at me. People told me he had been there looking at me for a long time before I noticed him. I told him I had to go to a team meeting and that was the last I ever saw of him.
I was older, but not much wiser, when I was coming back from a rally in Switzerland and the airport was closed because of heavy fog. The only way to get back to London was to take the train and boat. I got on the very crowded train in Geneva and walked up and down the corridor, looking for a seat. I saw a carriage with all the blinds down, peeped in and saw there were two young men inside. I opened the door and asked if I could come in. They looked me up and down and said certainly, and in I went. The train took forever, so at the end of the journey I had become very good friends with one of them. His name was Peter and he was in the British Army. When we arrived in London there was what they used to call a ‘pea souper’, a fog so dense you couldn’t see a hand in front of your face. Of course there were no taxis running and my companion walked with me to a little hotel in Piccadilly, where Rootes always put me up when I was in London.
I saw quite a lot of Peter over the next few months and he even brought me home to meet his parents. Every time I was in England we would meet up, and he said it would be a good idea to get married. It was a whirlwind romance that ended as quickly as it began: he thought he was in love and I was sure I wasn’t. He gave me a ring that had belonged to his grandmother to seal the deal. It was a scrawny little thing and not at all attractive. When I got back to Dublin I decided that I didn’t want to be a British officer’s wife and sent the ring back in the post.
I went out for a while with a journalist who wrote the William Hickey gossip column in the Daily Express. We were engaged and spent a lot of time in Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club as he watched the comings and goings of the current celebrities. That was great fun and I enjoyed the society life until the evening of a cocktail party in the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair. The party was rapidly running out of alcohol and so my fiancé said that, as he knew some Russians were having a party in the suite below and they would have plenty of vodka, he would ask them. He decided the quickest way to get to the floor below was to swing his legs over the balcony and clamber down. I saw him for the complete idiot he was and promptly terminated the relationship. There were others after him, but the romances never lasted long and I always made a point of returning the rings – that’s only fair.
When I was in Ireland I loved taking part in the autocrosses, a race where the circuit is laid out and cars compete against each other on grass, sometimes very wet grass. Slipping and sliding in a wet field and racing on grass is great fun. I was good at it, having had plenty of practice with my dad in our field as a child. It was at one of these events that I met my husband-to-be. It definitely wasn’t ‘love at first sight’, but I was attracted to him. He was tall and dark-haired and seemed to be confident in himself.
Our first date, in the Horseshoe Bar of The Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin, didn’t go well because he had just broken up with his fiancée and told me how badly it had affected him. I didn’t want to be a shoulder to cry on, but I felt sorry for him and just listened – with hindsight I don’t think he ever really got over her. We started going out together, as much as my rallying and racing commitments allowed; I always seemed to be off somewhere, and he had a business to run. Eventually, we became engaged in 1969. By that time I had achieved success in America, Canada, the UK, France, all over the place, and over time I think he became jealous and resentful.
We had decided we wanted to buy a house together, and when we were out one evening with friends in a pub we were talking about it. One of the men was an auctioneer, and after a considerable number of drinks he told us of a farmhouse for sale. We decided to go and see it there and then, semi-drunk in the semi-dark. In the twilight the house looked wonderful, a big square house with outhouses all around, and we shook hands on it. We went back the next day and I was horrified at the state of the place but saw it as yet another challenge.
The house, Macetown, was on 40 acres of land and was going for a song. No wonder it was going so cheaply: it had no bathroom and no running water, just a well in the middle of the yard. The man who owned it had 13 children and I don’t know how they managed. My future husband said that it was the thing to do to live in the country. Not that he had any experience of it – he was brought up in Ballsbridge, Dublin 4. That’s how it happened, I suppose; we had bought a house together, and financially it wasn’t feasible for me to go it alone. The only sensible thing was to marry the man, which was the done thing at the time.
I made three appointments at the church to be married and it was only on the third occasion that I went through with it. I had no formal wedding dress and didn’t want one. On the day I was to be married, on 28 August 1970, I went into town that morning and bought a pale green dress and jacket in Switzers of Grafton Street – nothing fancy, which was unusual for me. At the Church of St Peter’s and St Paul’s in Dunboyne, Father Ripson, the parish priest, asked me was I sure I was doing the right thing because he knew that I had changed my mind twice before. I really didn’t want to get married, but I went ahead anyway.
My father stood outside the church when I got married. My mother didn’t come at all; she said he wasn’t good enough for me. She didn’t like him in the beginning and made no bones about it, so, like many a daughter before and since, the more she protested, the more I just wanted to assert my independence and have a life of my own. Many years later, my husband ended up being very good to my parents and gave them both jobs, which they loved.
Terry Balfe, a lovely man who worked for Irish Shell, brought us to the Glenview Hotel in the Glen of the Downs for our wedding reception, and we went off for a few days’ honeymoon with some of his friends and a man from Northern Ireland. There was very little romance in our marriage, but it was convenient. I continued my career and in between rallying all over the world I threw myself into trying to make Macetown habitable.
The first thing that had to be done was to knock down most of the existing building. When the builder came out with a big ball on the end of a chain to start work, before he began he asked had we got permission to do this? Permission? I didn’t know I needed permission. I drove to the planning office in Dame Street and rushed in to get someone, anyone, to give me the required authorisation. The girl at the desk said it would take at least three weeks to get an appointment with the appropriate person. Just then that ‘appropriate person’ came out of his office and recognised me; I suppose I was at the height of whatever notoriety I ever had then and he was delighted to have the opportunity to help me. No doubt the story was told at many a dinner party afterwards. I explained my predicament and told him that the man with the wrecking ball was there ready to go, costing £180 per day, and I needed his go-ahead. He checked to see if there was a preservation order on the property, and when he found there wasn’t he said that he would have to see the house personally.
We got in my car and drove to Clonee. He took one look at the house, decided it wasn’t habitable and told the wrecker to work away on the demolition. The first bang nearly brought the whole lot down, it was so rotten! An architect friend of mine drew up plans and the work proceeded. The house that eventually emerged was stunning, with wonderful views from every window.
With the house completed, we had a proper wedding reception with around 60 guests, including Charlie Haughey and his wife Maureen. Although I had sent the invitation, I didn’t really expect them to come and I was flattered when they arrived. Charlie Haughey was a leading Fianna Fáil politician, who went on to become Taoiseach no less than three times, and Maureen was the eldest daughter of Seán Lemass, a well-respected politician in his day. Maureen was a lovely woman and I worked alongside her for various charity events over the years.
We employed caterers for the occasion and there were drinks galore. Everyone had a great time and it was the beginning of a long period of entertaining friends and relations. The party was a success and everything went very well until we went into the little room we had put aside for the wedding presents. That room had long, low windows out to the garden, and when we went to open our gifts they were all gone. I don’t know what people must have thought because I couldn’t write thank you letters for wedding presents I had never seen. One guest asked me later whether I liked the dinner service she had given me; she was quite put out because she had taken a lot of time selecting it. Apparently, it was beautiful.
We were robbed again in that house when the thieves came into the bedroom, on the ground floor, and took the curtains and matching bedspread, which I had made myself, along with whatever valuables they could lay their hands on, including many of my trophies.
I regretted marrying my husband almost from the beginning. I think he was jealous of my career and he could not hide it. He couldn’t deal with my success and it didn’t help that in company people would call him ‘Mr Smith’, which really annoyed him. I never said I would give up my career when we married, so I never understood what he expected of me. I thought that being a successful driver was part of my attraction for him, but I must have been very wrong. He never tried to adjust to my way of life and got very sulky when my motoring friends came to the house. We would all be talking rallying – what went on yesterday, what was going to happen next week – and he just didn’t want to join in.
We had rows and the next morning he would apologise, tell me how much he loved me and expect things to carry on as normal. I should have left him the first time I realised what kind of man he was, but I didn’t have the courage. It’s difficult for others to understand if they have never been in a disastrous relationship such as mine. When I was leaving to go on a rally, instead of wishing me good luck, he would say, ‘Off on another ego trip?’ He constantly put me down and undermined my confidence with remarks which I found hurtful. It makes me want to cry now as I write this because there is no way I would allow any man to speak to me like that today. What a fool I was!
There are so many instances of his cruelty but I remember Grosvenor House as being one of the most unpleasant. I was invited to be the guest speaker at Grosvenor House in London for a celebratory dinner for the racing fraternity. Graham Hill was there, along with many other well-known racing drivers of the time. Rootes were delighted that I had been invited to the event and told me to buy myself a dress, money no object, which I did. I bought a beautiful lilac Grecian-style gown, which went over one shoulder, tight-fitting with a train, and shoes to match. Vidal Sassoon did my hair and I thought I looked really well.
We were staying at the Grosvenor and as I came out of the bathroom, ready to go downstairs to dinner, my husband looked me up and down and told me I looked dreadful and that he always hated that dress, even though he had never seen it before. Stunned and humiliated, I cried and the tears ran down my face, ruining my make-up. I tried to pull myself together but I must have looked dreadful when I went down to meet everyone. I was supposed to make a speech but I just couldn’t do it. It was one of the worst nights of my life.
For my birthday one year my good friend Cecil Vard, who had helped me so much in my early career, gave me a beautiful basket of flowers. My mother and father were horrified when in a fit of temper my husband kicked the flowers into the garden. But he wasn’t just jealous of other men, he was jealous of my success and the attention that brought me. I was asked by a newspaper to take part in a competition, ‘Whose smile is it?’, but he felt that would bring me even more publicity. We had a terrible row the evening before the event and as a result I had to pull out.
There are so many times when he made my life a misery. I’ll never forget that holiday in Tenerife when he accused me of flirting with the band. The men on the stage were dressed in Tyrolean costumes and were so small they would hardly have come up to my waist! I could tell you a million stories, but the outcome would usually be the same. ‘Oh darling, I love you so much,’ he would say the next day, ‘we will never fight again’ – until the next time, he should have said. I always say to the young girls I’m teaching in my driving school in Goffs, if your boyfriend is jealous, get rid of him right now. If they tell their parents, they probably think. Who is this strange woman? She’s supposed to be teaching them to drive, not advising them on their love lives, but having gone through it all I know that jealousy is the most awful, ruinous thing in a relationship. I often asked myself why he wanted to marry me in the first place. Maybe he thought that I was going to make loads of money and keep him in style. Why didn’t I leave him? I don’t know. Maybe I thought that I had made my bed so I had to lie on it. It was 1970s Ireland, remember: I had nowhere to go and no confidence in my ability to manage on my own.
I have been pregnant four times and miscarried each time. One of those miscarriages was an ectopic pregnancy, which can be fatal if not recognised in time. I was taken to Blanchardstown Hospital and I was so ill that before the operation I was given the Last Rites. This was the nearest to death I have ever been, despite all my racing and rallying over the years.
I never wanted to have a child but my husband insisted that he wanted children and so we went to the Catholic Protection and Rescue Society of Ireland in South Anne Street to register to adopt a child. We were sent to a place in Gormanstown, County Meath, and brought into a room where there were babies in cots. The nun told us the ages of each of the children. My maternal instincts were aroused when I saw one little girl with the most beautiful eyes – eyes are always important for me – and I thought she could be the one. My husband had different ideas. He had picked out a redheaded boy, who, when I looked at him, screamed his head off. We signed all the necessary papers and produced the required documents. After a few weeks had passed I rang the adoption agency and asked when we would hear something about coming to collect the child, only to be told that my husband had telephoned them to say that he had decided against proceeding with the adoption. He hadn’t bothered to tell me.
After some years at Macetown, my husband decided that anybody who was anybody was living in Dublin and so we sold our lovely house in Clonee and bought a town house in Eglinton Road, Dublin 4. We got very little for the farm, which I had made into a beautiful home, and the 40 acres of arable land. Had we waited a few more years we would have made millions, but there you go, that’s the story of my life.
I was so unhappy in the new house. I hated it – I had to go to the very top floor to get a glimpse of the mountains. The last straw was when my cat Blackie went missing. I loved that cat and searched everywhere for her until one day I had a call from Hughie, the man who had bought our farm: a cat had arrived at the house and he thought she might be mine. She was more brown than black, he said, and very thin and scrawny. I knew directly I saw her that it was my Blackie but Hughie wanted to be sure and asked me if she had any particular habits. When I told him that she would scrape her claws at the hall door window to get in and when the ashes had cooled down in the dog grate in the lounge she would curl up in them, we both knew it was her. Cats are funny that way: they seem to love their territory more than their owners, and Blackie had found her way back home.
Hughie’s daughter, Mary, who had meningitis, had become so fond of her by then that I said they could keep her. I reckoned that if she managed to get back there once, she would do it again. I love animals and have had cats and dogs all my life.
So there I was in Eglinton Road with no cat, no mountains, and I was miserable. I saw a lovely old farmhouse in Kilternan, a few miles outside Dublin, and while I was away on holiday in Marbella I asked my husband to go and look at it and put a deposit down if he agreed with me that it was an ideal place for us to live. He rang to say that he was coming out to join me in Marbella, that he had bought the house and that my mother agreed that it was lovely. By this time she had settled her differences with him and they got on very well. He arrived with the brochure of the house he had bought, but it wasn’t the one in Kilternan that I had looked at. Instead, it was ‘Four Winds’, a house on the Blackglen Road, Sandyford – the wrong house, the house that was to cause me so much grief, where everything went so awry and where in the end I had to get a priest to perform an exorcism.
It was a large bungalow and one side of the house had been built into the side of the mountains. It was designed like the letter ‘H’, with a little pool at the back of the house. A few weeks after we moved in, I fell into a huge manhole at the side of the house because the cover was off for some reason. That house brought nothing but bad luck.
When I had my last miscarriage, I was admitted to Mount Carmel and stayed in hospital for a few days because I was so weak. My husband hadn’t come in to see me and I knew something was wrong because he always liked to make a good impression in front of my mother. She said that he had telephoned to say that he had gone out with the lads on Friday night and was hungover.
Despite my mother’s protests, I insisted on being brought home that day; my instinct told me something was wrong. On the hall table I found a return ticket to London and I knew for sure he had been seeing someone else. It transpired that his former girlfriend was in London and he had been over to see her – she was the woman he had been engaged to before he met me.
Despite all of this I tried my best but in the end my husband was the one who walked out. We went to a solicitor, a separation agreement was drawn up and we parted. I was left poorer financially, but at least I was rid of him. Three years after, he got a divorce in Haiti and I was informed by an official letter. I put my own affairs in order when the ban on divorce was lifted in Ireland in 1996.
During this unfortunate marriage I continued racing and rallying. I suppose you could say I was well-known, in a minor celebrity kind of way, which my husband resented. I was away a lot of the time and my motoring friends kept me going, especially Pauline Gullick. She was one of the best co-drivers I ever had and our times together on the East African Rally in 1974 were unforgettable and a distraction from the misery of my marriage.