Only a woman as tough and brave as Ellie Morehead would embark on a sea voyage from Australia to England at the age of ninety. Aunt Ellie was determined, though, to attend the wedding in London of a great niece. She looked like a little old crone, shrunk to the height of Pamela’s shoulder, when the two women greeted one another in London in 1936.
Pamela showed her great aunt the first of her Mary Poppins books, typed on the typewriter that Ellie herself had given her. The old lady stroked the cover, opened the crisp pages, then read the dedication to “My Mother.” She turned away so Pamela could not see her face. Ellie’s eyes reddened and her voice was unusually low when she looked again at Pamela. Meg would have been pleased, the old woman said. Ellie liked the cover. Then in her old grumpy way she asked, was the inside as good?
Ellie Morehead returned to Australia the next day. From her home in Darling Point, Sydney, she wrote one last letter to her sister Jane, then living in England. The date was September 24, 1937. The letter ended: “I love you all. I have had a long and happy life. God bless you. Goodnight.” The last wavering strokes of her pen seemed to drift away like a plume of smoke. Ellie had died as her hand left the paper.1
In her will, the old lady had been generous to Pamela. As well as her equity in the Colonial Sugar Refining Company and the Commercial Banking Company, Ellie left Pamela a share in all her real estate and personal estate. Now Pamela had three secure sources of income: the money from Aunt Ellie, royalties from her Mary Poppins books, and regular payments from the articles she wrote as a freelance journalist for the New English Weekly.
She had been an occasional contributor to the journal since 1934, but in 1936 Pamela increased her output to three or four articles a month. Under the bylines “P. T.” and “Milo Reeve,” she reviewed many plays and films, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Peter Pan, from Snow White to King Lear. It was the age of the great stars of the London stage. She saw Ralph Richardson as Othello, Leslie Howard as Romeo and Alec Guinness as Hamlet. Dismissive of Chekhov, Eugene O’Neill, Noël Coward, the films of Walt Disney and many children’s writers, including A. A. Milne, Pamela praised most of Ibsen’s plays except Peer Gynt, which she dismissed as “a jumble.” Her sharp rebukes reveal an immature critic’s voice—the need to sound certain and authoritative at the expense of genuinely helpful or insightful comments. The only writers she consistently praised were G. B. Shaw and T. S. Eliot. By then, Eliot was a consultant and contributor to the New English Weekly.2 Glimpses of a more personal, everyday world peeped into her infrequent essays. She wrote of motor shows and dog shows (did she display her hound, Cu?), a picnic in winter, or her clapped out BSA sports car with its hole in the carpet and bent nail in the door.
With her new streams of income, Pamela had enough to buy the freehold of Pound Cottage from the Glynne Estates. Not only did she now own her own house, but she decided, like Mrs. Banks, to hire help. Pamela knew that little Doris Vockins, who lived with her big family a ten-minute walk away, was about to leave school. She went to see her mother. Doris, who was fourteen in 1935, left school on a Friday and started work with Pamela as a daily maid the next Monday morning.
Doris was impressed by Miss Travers and Miss Burnand, as she called them. Ever so happy, they seemed, and Miss Travers so pretty with her curly hair and lipstick and smart-looking slacks. Doris had a long list of duties. She started at 9 A.M. First there was the general housework, the cleaning, the fires to be lit in winter. The oil lamps and oil heaters had to be cleaned every day. There was no electricity. She pumped up the geyser in the bathroom for the hot water. Doris swept around the two big armchairs near the fireplace, then cleaned the long oak-paneled table. Cu kept her company, trotting around on his squat little legs.
The mail and newspapers came each day; the wind-up phone rang often with news from London. The kitchen was Madge’s domain. Doris was fascinated by how much pasta Miss Travers and Miss Burnand got through. The milk came from Mr. Firrell’s Forge Farm nearby. Miss Travers always made an early start with her writing. Doris lit the fire in Pamela’s new study, added to the house in 1936. “Bring me coffee at eleven,” she instructed Doris. At lunchtime, she liked a whiskey. Every morning she sent Doris outdoors to tickle the carburetor of her car.
Often Pamela talked of America. Doris never really knew where her boss was going next, or why she was going, only that she seemed to be forever traveling. When Madge and Pamela were both away, Doris would check on the cottage, making sure the locks were secure, running a duster around the furniture.3
In January 1936, Pamela joined Jessie and her children on a skiing trip in Switzerland. Jessie’s diaries at the time reveal a new intensity in her relationship with Pamela. The diaries are not proof of intimacy, but there are many allusions to a lesbian relationship. From 1936, these are not specific and could refer just to a close friendship. Later, in the 1940s, the references are specific but still not conclusive proof.
In the spring and summer of 1936, Pamela and Jessie together attended meetings in London conducted by Jane Heap, a lesbian disciple of Gurdjieff who confided in friends “I’m not really a woman.” Heap, who wore scarlet lipstick and masculine suits, and looked a little like Oscar Wilde, was an American who had edited the radical arts magazine Little Review in Chicago with her lover Margaret Anderson. Both women had then studied with Gurdjieff in Paris, but Heap had recently moved to London, on his instructions.
Heap and Anderson, along with their lesbian entourage, had been fascinated with Gurdjieff since they met him in New York in the 1920s. He in turn was fascinated by them, and in January 1936 formed a special lesbian group in Paris called the Rope, whose members and associates included Margaret Anderson, Georgette Leblanc and Elizabeth Gordon. (After Gurdjieff said he had metaphorically roped them together, Kathryn Hulme, one member of the group, said “We knew…even from the first day what that invisible bond portended. It was a rope up which, with the aid of a master’s hand, we might be able to inch ourselves from the cave of illusory being which we inhabited. Or it was a Rope from which, with sloth and lip service, we could very well hang ourselves.”)4
Unlike the members of the Rope, both Pamela and Jessie loved men, but their relationships with men were often frustrating in different ways. When they became close friends, both were feeling the loss of important men in their lives: Jessie with Orage’s death and Pamela with the death of AE a year later.
Jessie Orage’s diaries show that she spent many days with Pamela in 1936, going to the theatre and movies, having dinner, taking holidays together, or just talking, often all through the night. In May, Jessie went shopping for Pamela, who wanted some coral. Jessie wrote in a diary entry: “She wants to wear it for her melancholia.” A few days later, after Jessie found just the right piece, a coral hand token she bought from a man in Chancery Lane, she went down to Pound Cottage for a “delightfully mad afternoon and evening with Pamela.” Next day, they walked in the woods in the rain. And the day after, “Pamela and I did not get up ’til late.”
In the middle of the year, Pamela’s American publisher, Eugene Reynal, suggested she visit New York, Detroit and Chicago to promote Mary Poppins.5 Jessie accompanied Pamela to Southampton, where she boarded the Queen Mary. Jessie wrote in her diary, “I shall miss P. terribly.” Pamela rang Jessie from the ship and then the United States quite often, with Jessie feeling “great excitement” at each call. Pamela returned in December, ill with pleurisy, almost too sick to walk from the boat. In her luggage, she had an extravagant present for Jessie: a luxurious evening cloak. That New Year’s Eve, Jessie and Pamela went to King’s Hotel in Brighton. Jessie’s diary records: “P. and I have a room overlooking the sea. At 12, P. rang Madge and sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’ into the phone.”
Madge was hardly a disinterested party in this relationship. In 1937, tensions grew among the three women. The entries in Jessie’s diaries for this year reveal a complex web of emotions and references to other tumultuous relationships in Pamela’s life. In May, Jessie drove down to Pound Cottage to find “P. not very well having had an emotional week. Damn Madge. I’ve always been suspicious of her temper and the cruelty of her nostrils.”
Jessie recorded that Pamela had suffered several “dizzy spells” in June. On June 29, “P. and I drove back to London. P. seemed happy but became more and more silent, not completely, “til after she rang Madge.” After a summer holiday at a beach in Ireland, during which Jessie squabbled with Pamela, the two women met Madge in Dublin where Jessie also fought with Madge. The next month, Jessie wrote, “P. told me many things about herself she’d never told me. It pleased me very much…we talked in front of the fire. I understand many things now.”
Those many things remain frustratingly hidden, but it may have been that Pamela told of her love for Francis Macnamara who, in 1937, succumbed to marriage for the third time. His new bride was the woman who had been his sexy young house guest in London, Iris O’Callaghan. The couple went to live in Ireland. Francis was a serial lover who compartmentalized his affairs, ignoring the trail of broken hearts and adopting the position that each affair was just a game, and that his women should take them as lightly as he did himself. Each game ended more messily than he hoped. Pamela cared for him a great deal more than he ever knew. She carried a torch for Francis Macnamara for the rest of her life, forgiving him, preserving him in her mind as the perfect man, though she knew all along he was a Don Juan.6
• • •
Despite her intimate relationship with Jessie, the loss of Macnamara represented a serious passing of hope for Pamela, and left a great emptiness in her spirit. His place was filled to some extent by Gurdjieff, whom Pamela first met with Jessie in March 1936 when the women took the boat train to France, visited the vacant Prieure at Fontainebleau, then drove to Paris to meet Gurdjieff in Paris at his favorite Café de la Paix.
As Jessie wrote in her diary, “Gurdjieff didn’t know me at first. We went to his flat…Margaret, Georgette and Elizabeth Gordon there. Same old ritual, drinks to idiots etc., very good food cooked by G….Pam and I did all the talking. I found I felt quite indifferent to him.”
Pamela, though, was entranced. Here, in the Gurdjieff work she had already studied with Heap, was a philosophy that appealed to both her intellect and senses for different reasons. It satisfied many parts of her, from her need to set herself apart from others to her need to find relief from dreadful anxiety. The Gurdjieff way was clearly not for the strugglers of the world. Firstly, he demanded money and secondly, he insisted on more self-absorption and more time than strugglers could afford. Gurdjieff attracted the emotionally needy and most of all, he was a magnet for artists of all kinds, among them Georgia O’Keeffe, T. S. Eliot, Frank Lloyd Wright and Lincoln Kirstein, the rich associate and backer of the choreographer George Balanchine.
Pamela was a snob. The exclusivity of the Gurdjieff work for the fortunate few appealed to her. There were other attractions: the emphasis Gurdjieff placed on studying oneself, and his promise of peace partly through dance. The first rule of his work was to know thyself, to practice deep inner observation. The student was to ask, “Do I actually know myself in the here and now, know myself with objectivity?” The Gurdjieffians constantly practiced turning in on themselves. Negative emotions had to be banished as they worked daily on their inner health in order to become “conscious” and transformed. Students took mental pictures of themselves, watched their sensations, moods, emotions, thoughts. The idea was to experience non-desire over desire. Such introspection suited Pamela perfectly.
All this self-study ran in tandem with Gurdjieff’s ritualistic dances and movements. He had about a hundred of these, derived from sources in Turkey, Turkestan, Tibet and Afghanistan. The dances represented a kind of meditation in action or body semaphore. Among them were six obligatory exercises as well as dervish dances for men and prayers in motion. Throughout his life, Gurdjieff affected the humble persona of “an old dancing teacher,” but that affectation was close to the mark.
In her soul, Pamela was a dancer, too, not trained but instinctive. She found the calmness she needed as she executed Gurdjieff’s sacred dances in various halls of London. Through dance, she met and became close friends with Gurdjieff-trained student teachers, among them Rosemary Nott, who was also a pianist, and Jessmin Howarth. Pamela eventually called Nott her mentor; she loved to hear her play for the movements, particularly the obligatory exercises.
The Gurdjieff work undoubtedly helped calm her mind to some extent, but Jessie’s diaries show that Pamela remained in a state of high tension through many of the next few years. She appeared to be in a double bind with Madge Burnand. Both women needed one another, yet hurt one another over and over again. At the end of 1937, Madge sailed on the Queen Mary for a long break in the USA, but by mid-May of 1938 Jessie’s diary notes, “Pam very depressed. She dreads M.’s return.” A week later, “M. is putting her through it all right.” In October, Pamela visited Jessie in London and after dinner, “cried and cried.” Jessie thought she was crying because Madge had taken a job that meant leaving Pound Cottage, although she was not specific about the place Madge was to move to.
At the cottage, Doris knew nothing of all this anguish. But one day, she was astonished to find Miss Burnand had packed up and left. She hadn’t told Doris she was going, and Pamela never mentioned Madge’s name to Doris again.7
Now, even Doris was to be drawn into Pamela’s unhappiness and uncertainty. For several years, Pamela had observed how easy Jessie was with her children, how a mother and her child can be even closer than lovers, snuggling into one another, giggling, hugging, sharing nothing specific yet everything.
Pamela quietly, without saying why, arranged for a new bedroom to be built at the cottage, next to her study. She called on Mrs. Vockins up the road. Pamela summoned up all her acting talent. In her most persuasive and charming way, she suggested that as Mr. and Mrs. Vockins had seven children, and because Doris was already working at Pound Cottage every day, would it not be an excellent idea if she took one of the children off her hands, and formally adopted Doris?
The plan failed dismally. The Vockinses just wouldn’t have it. And Doris herself told her she definitely did not want to live at Pound Cottage, despite Pamela’s offer that she would show her the world. To that, Doris replied: “I don’t want to see the world!”
On January 13, 1939, Jessie’s diary noted: “Tempestuous day. P. sacked Doris. P. and I rowed again, she is so snide, rude to my children, and flares at them.”8
• • •
Pamela now felt in desperate need of someone to love and control. Her sisters in Australia meant little to her. She had no parents, no permanent lover, no children, and even Madge had gone. The adoption fantasy remained firmly in her mind. She told Jessie, who wrote in her diary in February 1939: “P. is disappointed because I didn’t support her idea of adoption wholeheartedly.”
All through spring the women talked of the plan, Jessie trying not to tell Pamela she thought the scheme quite harebrained. Her growing obsession that she must have a baby coincided with exterior stresses—the certainty that there was going to be a war involving all of Europe. Jessie’s diary entries began to alternate between the fateful dates of Hitler’s advance, and the minutiae of life in Pound Cottage and Jessie’s own home in London. The escalating tensions before the declaration of war were also recorded in a poetic and dreamy way by Pamela, in a series of articles she wrote for the New English Weekly. From as early as 1937, when she reported on how Edward VII’s coronation was celebrated in her village, Pamela had chronicled the doings of Mayfield for the New English Weekly. She referred to Mayfield as either as “a Sussex Village” or “M—.” In the series, subtitled “Our Village,” she made the personal universal, gently mocking the fusspots of Mayfield while painting a picture of an English country town as romantic as a Constable landscape. Only an outsider, an Australian who had dreamed of the “Mother” country, could capture the essence of a Sussex village as well.
On the day war was declared, Pamela clambered into her BSA and drove to Mayfield “to see how the village was taking it.” The place was in turmoil, “worse than market day.” The butcher’s boy ran past her shouting that an air raid was in progress. She watched in alarm as the tobacconist—a warden—hurried along the street in a waterproof cape, clanging a dinner bell. It turned out to be only a fire at the Frogling Farm. A local boy, John Eldridge, stood at his front gate to be greeted by two passersby: “You’d better get indoors, war has been declared!”
The frenzy of those days had a parallel in the messy breakdown of the friendship between Pamela, Jessie and Madge, who was to make a reappearance in Jessie’s diary that autumn. By the end of September, Jessie and Pamela were squabbling at Pound Cottage whenever Jessie came to stay. Jessie wrote: “I must be independent even if it means getting a house of my own.” The next month, when the three women met for a drink at a hotel, Madge was very reserved and silent. Then, in an explosion of awful anger, Pamela yelled “Madge, you’re a goddamned bitch!” The outburst was followed by ghastly scenes, with Jessie recording that Madge actually hit Pamela and Jessie.
• • •
Pamela by now was determined to adopt a baby, despite Jessie repeatedly telling her it was “a crazy idea.” On October 23, Pamela received a letter from Dublin telling her a certain infant was ready for collection. She wrote of the journey in the New English Weekly, not revealing the reason for traveling from London, with its “sandbags, blackened windows and carefully staged humiliating atmosphere of Safety First,” to the quiet, diurnal and “comfortably realistic Dublin” with its “soft radiant light.” In such a place it was “impossible not to melt into whatever is one’s true self.”9
Pamela had first gone to Ireland in 1924 believing it was her own spiritual homeland, so it was hardly surprising that she would return there fifteen years later to pick up a piece of Ireland for herself. Her adopted baby was not to be just any old Irish child, but the grandson of a great friend of Yeats, the publisher of AE’s works and a cousin of Francis Macnamara.
The baby’s surname was Hone. His grandfather, Joseph Maunsell Hone, was a central figure in the Anglo-Irish literary network, Ireland’s most distinguished literary biographer. He had founded Maunsell and Company in 1905, which published works by Yeats, Synge and AE, and knew all the writers worth knowing, among them Gogarty, AE and Hubert Butler. In 1939, when he was in his late fifties, Hone had written The Life of George Moore, and he was soon to write the first biography of Yeats.
Francis Macnamara often came to stay with Hone at his big old house at South Hill, Killiney, on the coast south of Dublin. The home, inherited from his wealthy father, was open to all the literary clan. With its five bedrooms and three living rooms, there was more than enough room for Hone, his American wife Vera, their three children and all their friends. Madge Burnand, who knew Hone through her father, stayed at South Hill in the 1920s and Joseph and Vera Hone’s daughter, Sally, remembered that Pamela was a houseguest from the late 1920s. Joseph liked her very much, Vera less so.
The baby Pamela was to adopt was more like Vera in personality than Joseph, who was as cautious and canny with money as Vera was extravagant. For many years the Hones spent their winters at the Grand Hotel in Gardone, near Genoa. Vera had accounts at all the best shops in Dublin. When the parcels and boxes arrived home Joseph complained, “You’re spending far too much money!” Although he was sociable, and amusing, Hone harbored a pessimistic, conservative streak. He gave his two sons names that had been in the Hone family for centuries. The elder son was called Nathaniel, after the best known of all the Hones, an eighteenth-century painter.
Nathaniel, shortened to Nat, lived life recklessly but with a certain style and great charm. He went to New College, Oxford, then in 1933, when he was twenty-one, inherited about £10,000. From then on, Nat lived the life of a rich young man about town.10 He joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, planning to take a group of Irish Republicans to fight for Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Or so he said. The plane he was piloting did not fly beyond Biarritz. His son wrote of the adventure: “He and the rest of the bibulous Irish brigade spent a week at the Imperial Palace instead, ambushing the champagne before flying back to Dublin.”
Nat was a publican’s nightmare, with a habit developed in the 1930s of moving around Dublin’s cocktail bars with a loaded .45 under his coat, blasting the tops off the brandy and Benedictine bottles.11 One day in the King’s Head and Eight Bells in the Kings Road, Chelsea, Nat met a nurse—Bridget Anthony, one of twelve siblings from a poor County Kilkenny family. Like her own father, the pretty Bridget (nicknamed Biddy) was very fond of a drink. She married Nat in August 1936. Biddy, a Catholic girl, was already pregnant.
When little Joe was born six months later, Nat and Biddy lived in comfort in Surrey. It seemed as though the inheritance would last forever. The next year, Nat and Biddy had another baby, Geraldine. Soon after, Biddy became pregnant yet again, this time with twins. She decided to go home to Ireland, to give birth in Dublin. Anthony Marlow Hone and John Camillus Hone were born on August 15, 1939. By now, the strain of raising four children on an ever-diminishing pile of money was beginning to tell. In the summer of 1939, with the war between Germany and Britain so close, the Hones decided the family must scatter. Little Joe Hone, only two and a half, was sent to his grandparents at Killiney. Grandmother Vera Hone wanted to bring him up herself, but old Joseph, still fussing about money, said he would not allow it.12 Instead, he was unofficially adopted by Joseph’s friend Hubert Butler and his wife, Peggy, at their family home in Kilkenny in the southeast of Ireland.13
Biddy had taken the twin boys straight from the Dublin hospital to the home of Joseph and Vera Hone. By now, and not surprisingly, Joseph was beginning to get rather fed up with all these children.14 But, they muttered, “Biddy, poor Biddy” could not cope, emotionally or financially. And Nat had told everyone, straight out, that he could no longer afford to keep all the children.15 Little Geraldine was sent to Biddy’s parents. But who would take twins? Joseph Hone knew someone who might take them off his hands—Pamela Travers, AE’s close friend and Macnamara’s castoff.
Nat’s sister Sally Hone, then twenty-five, remembers the scene when Pamela called. The baby boys, Camillus and Anthony, lay in two separate adult-sized beds in a guest room. Camillus was much better looking. Pamela gazed down on each one. Joseph said to Pamela: “Take two, they are only small.” Biddy also tried to orchestrate the choice. “You want to have Anthony, he is a gorgeous boy.” Camillus was crying. Anthony was not.16
On October 28, Jessie wrote in her diary “P. rang up from Dublin at 12. She is coming back Tuesday without the baby. She didn’t like him enough.” A fortnight later, Pamela confided in Jessie. She liked Camillus much more than his twin, the baby she was supposed to take. Just to be sure, Pamela had both babies” horoscopes prepared by an astrologer, an Edward Johndro of Fresno, California. The astrological chart for Camillus concluded: “All in all, it would be a rare thing to find better cross rays between a child and its OWN mother. So I would say, by all means, ADOPT HIM.”
Little Anthony was now dispatched to Biddy’s mother and Camillus made the crossing to England, with Pamela, in mid-December 1939. From then on, Pamela wore a wedding ring, a simple gold band signifying respectability. Five days before Christmas, “P. had bad night as Camillus screamed all the time.” The doctor came, but “she now talks of sending him to a babies’ home in Tunbridge Wells.” Jessie told Pamela it would be a mistake to send Camillus away as he’d settle down soon. On Boxing Day, though, he yelled constantly. Jessie recorded in her diary: “Poor Pam. P. asked my advice about sending him to TW to get his feeding right and have the rash on his face looked after. P packing for Camillus.”
• • •
A few months before Camillus moved to Pound Cottage, young evacuees from London had begun to arrive in Mayfield, complete with their little food kits of corned-beef tins and condensed milk. Pamela heard them complain of the “ ’orrible quiet down there. The condensed milk stood unopened on larder shelves, for, at the end of the year, it seemed the war was not going to arrive. On Christmas Day, Mayfield tucked into the usual Norfolk chickens and Stiltons.
The weeks of the phony war passed. While the locals blew the froth off their pints in the public bar, declaring there would be no real war, the main street was blacked out at night. That was fine. The locals always went home in the dark anyway. New rabbit guns could be seen in the saddler’s window. The petrol boy from the garage was in uniform and everyone tried on his steel helmet. They all had gas masks, too.
By early 1940 Mayfield’s comfy retired major, a gentle soul who had canvassed the village in search of the conservative vote, was appointed chief warden. Sporting new trousers, he ordered the villagers to black out those damned windows, immediately. Each day, the young men disappeared from the streets and shops and houses. Pamela saw that the ironmonger’s boy and the lad who drove the milk lorry had gone, “as leaves drop from a tree.”
Khaki filled the public bar and the saloon and leant with “a rattle of brass against the counter, elbowing out the regulars.” Pamela’s old gardener had returned from France after a series of adventures and limped the three miles to Pound Cottage to see her. They toured the garden, Pamela apologizing for the daisies and clover on the lawn. “Dainty, that’s what they are,” he said, “let them bide.” And, still, Mayfield stood serenely under “the great marquee of heaven.”17 The romantic image was washed away, eventually, by the sheer number of evacuees and the troop buildup in the area. Without a special pass, it was hard to get anywhere closer to the coastline of England than Mayfield.18
All through winter and early spring, Camillus remained fretful, in and out of hospital at Tunbridge Wells. On April 18, when he was eight months old, he was returned to Pound Cottage, still tiny for his age, still not able to sit up or turn over. Two days later he was back in the hospital again.
Jessie and her children spent most of their time at Pound Cottage, but in March Jessie told Pamela it was impossible to continue the arrangement. They fought more often than not. Jessie longed for her homeland.
By May, troops were billeted around Mayfield, patrolling the streets. German planes flew overhead; then bombs were dropped on nearby Ticehurst. A few days after the Germans marched into Paris in June, Jessie told Pamela she planned to leave England. She and her children would sail soon for New York. Pamela was “very sad,” Jessie wrote in her diary. A couple of days later she hoped to take Pamela too, but when the S.S. Washington sailed on July 7 with Jessie, her children Ann and Dick, and 150 other mothers and children, Pamela was not on board. Jessie wrote once more in her diary: “Darling Pam, so broken up and sad.” Pamela thought she should stay, although she yearned to follow Jessie.
At the dock in New York Jessie was greeted by a Gurdjieffian group, including Rosemary Nott and Jessmin Howarth. By the end of July, she opened her first letter from Pamela—“very distressing, if only I could get her over.” On August 3, another letter followed. This time, Pamela was on her way, via Canada. By now Mayfield was part of the front line, with planes streaming in from Europe and battles raging overhead. Some aircraft came down in and around Mayfield. Pamela asked the local real estate agent to rent out Pound Cottage, indefinitely.