READING ROMANCE
In November 1945, my father went to a London dinner party and found that he had been placed next to a slender, hazel-eyed girl with pale freckled skin and red-gold hair. With the writer Ludovic Kennedy sitting on the other side of her, she had little time for an arrogant but shy young man with a small head, round spectacles and neatly slicked hair. Nevertheless, she smiled. My father, smitten, noted in his diary that he had fallen for Rosemary Scott Ellis, the youngest daughter of Lord Howard de Walden, and that she had agreed to dine with him at the Savoy. (This was not such an extravagant invitation as it sounds; London’s best hotels offered low-budget meals to keep their restaurants filled during the frugal war years.)
I want to like my father at this crucial stage of his life. I want to see him through my mother’s (by slow degrees) admiring eyes. To do so, I must overlook a gloating note in his diary about a FitzRoy family wedding at which (‘ha! ha!’ he wrote) he sat in a grander pew than some of the envied ducal cousins. I need to forget that the future of the House lay so near to his heart, and that he must have known that he was in with a chance to save it, if he could but charm this millionaire’s daughter into backing his passion with substance.
I know that there must have been an element of calculation, but the diary tells a different story. From that first meeting at a dinner party, my father lost all sense of decorum. He did not behave like a cunning opportunist. He behaved like a man under a spell, or overwhelmed by love.
He could think of nothing but Rosemary. When they went dancing, he was tortured to see her smiling at another man. When she casually addressed him as ‘darling Georgey’ and suggested that he might care to visit her Welsh home, he accepted by return of mail and told his diary that he would treasure the endearment until the end of his life. When she cancelled a dinner date the following week, he announced that he was ready to kill himself with grief. When she consoled him with an invitation to a drinks party, he sent her a copy of Antony, his favourite book, together with a declaration of unconditional love.
Her answer, to his dismay, was a rebuff. ‘I must admit I do think of other things than you,’ she told him, and warned him that her feelings were less passionate than his own. ‘But if because of this you must go into a monastery, I pray you, don’t consider it.’ The following week, however, she reminded him of his promise to visit her in Wales: ‘I am ordering and beseeching you to come here,’ she wrote, and added that he had best bring his riding things. (She rode every day; my father did not dare admit that he had never yet sat on a horse.)
‘I hope you’re not going to criticise me for sending him back that awful book about Antony Knebworth,’ my mother says. ‘I did try to read it, but really!’
The reason for my mother’s air of indifference was simple: she was in love with another man. Shortly before Christmas, this other suitor told her that he was about to propose to someone else. If his first choice turned him down, he was willing to marry my mother. Passing the news on to my distraught father, she told him not to give up, as she was also fond of him. ‘I do like being truthful,’ she added.
A week later, her lover’s engagement to his first choice was announced.
‘And what if he had chosen to propose to you? Would you have married him?’
‘Don’t be so difficult,’ my mother sighs. I’m answered.
The fickle lover’s engagement was announced on 15 December. The following day, my mother lunched with my father at Claridge’s. She wore her favorite rust-coloured suit; a matching beret was pulled aslant on her red-gold curls. My father, enchanted, told her she looked ravishing. They went to the Tate gallery and discovered that they both hated the Pre-Raphaelites. Later, they had dinner at the Mirabelle.
‘We did live it up, didn’t we!’ My mother is beaming at these remembered pleasures.
A night of dancing ended in a passionate embrace across the small front seats of my father’s Morris Minor (this was the occasion on which the policeman knocked vainly at the driver’s window). A week later, flushed with love, they drove out of London on the winding road to north Wales. There were storms along the way when my mother refused to wear a diamond brooch on which my father had spent most of his savings.
‘That was mean of you.’
‘Well!’ My mother sips her wine and gives me a little sideways look.
‘Not good enough?’
‘You’ve seen me wear it. Perfectly nice.’
I’ll never be able to make the word ‘nice’ sound so lethally dismissive.
It’s mid-October 2005. I’ve persuaded my mother to visit Chirk Castle, and to act as my guide. She hasn’t been there for over forty years; I’ve never seen it before. I need to imagine the impression it might have made on my father when he arrived here on a chilly night in December 1945.
‘Where’s the sweetshop gone?’ cries my mother, gazing with distracted eyes at a village restaurant that announces itself as the Chirk Tandoori. I’m staring past it at the war memorial, and the clean-cut bas-relief of a soldier marching, head bent, into action. I can’t believe it.
‘Eric Gill? For a village memorial?’
‘Why not? He used to come and stay. Pa asked him to do it.’ Of course. What could be less remarkable than that Eric Gill should come to Chirk for a weekend and turn a small commission into one of the finest war memorials in the country?
We drive on a winding road up a hill – ‘Mountain! Welsh mountains, Miranda!’ my mother admonishes me – so that I can admire the Roman aqueduct spanning the broad flanks of the Ceiriog valley. Returning, we pass between gates as proudly delicate as peacock tails, opening the way to a drive that twists like a strangling rope around the castle hill. Mist swirls in and wreathes back, to show a flock of black sheep cropping grass, a view of distant slopes and, rising above the trails of wispy cloud, a square, four-towered castle of grey stone. Sedate as a hearse, we cross the narrow drawbridge on which, during the war, my grandfather parked a horsebox to keep invaders out. Below, grass smooths the banks of the old defensive moat. (‘I remember it filling up with snow,’ my mother says with delight. ‘I jumped in and lay there for three hours, quite snug, with a little hole to breathe through. I cried when they came and pulled me out.’ She was five years old.)
This wasn’t just a house. It was a world. As I register the splendour of its scale, my mother, smiling, walks back into the past. I climb the winding stair to my grandfather’s refuge, a stone room with six-foot embrasures and broad views across the Ceiriog valley. My mother talks eagerly to the curator about a keeper’s pet owl and the laundry room where she kept two angora rabbits. I peer down narrow slits through which oil was poured on to the heads of medieval intruders; my mother has found the walk above the castle chapel from which she dropped paper streamers upon the bald head of a visiting minister. I’m down in a dungeon, contemplating the life of Henry V’s twenty French prisoners, kept in windowless gloom fifty feet below the tower where my grandfather, centuries later, would hide from view. She’s walking along the Long Gallery, recalling the elaborate family pantomimes in which she, as the youngest child, invariably took the smallest part.
Sitting in the Chirk Tandoori that night, while rain beats against the windows, we replay our favourite moments from the day. Mine was climbing an airy flight of stairs to the upper drawing-room, still lit by candles and the silvery reflections of the long glasses on its walls. I didn’t need to close my eyes to see the little girl squaring up to the artist in her lemon-yellow frock, centre stage. Nothing had changed.
‘And yours?’ I ask. I’m sure she’ll pick the garden where she walked beside Rudyard Kipling, listening to the stories he shaped to fit the setting. I’m forgetting that her last companion at the castle was a haughty tabby cat. The moment she chooses is the one in which, stalking out of the mist and along the gravel path, a grey tabby advanced to whisk a bushy tail around my mother’s calves, before vanishing behind a wall of clipped yew.
Her eyes are shining at the memory. ‘He was welcoming me home, wasn’t he!’ And she reaches forward to pat my hand. ‘I’m glad we came!’
I’ve asked my mother whether, back in 1945, she was told about the deferred sale of Thrumpton. Her memory is only of the fact that my father talked about the House with a tenderness that touched her heart. She had just become aware that her family were about to lose their own home. Chirk, which had never belonged to them, was about to be reclaimed, in its newly repaired and improved state, by its owners, the Myddleton family. This was to be her last Christmas at the Castle.
Of course, as she is quick to point out, she had no expectation then that my father would inherit a splendid house of his own. All she can tell me is that the misery of leaving Chirk allowed her to understand, at once, the intensity of his feeling. This was a bond, and a strong one.
The proposal was made, accepted, and announced to the family within hours of the young couple’s arrival at the castle. (The letters and diaries are annoyingly reticent, stating only that George made an offer and was accepted.) My grandfather, descending from his turret, gave a cautious nod. He could rely on Margot, who was arriving from London the following day, to establish how they should react.
‘She [Margot] seemed quite pleased,’ my father noted hopefully in his diary; in fact, Margot was not pleased at all. Aching from his introduction to riding, and sleepless from a night of embraces on the drawing room sofa (‘nothing more,’ my mother says sharply), George had been briskly ordered to account for himself, his income and his prospects. It was delightful to see him so aglow with love, Margot remarked acidly, but how, at the modest age of twenty-two, did he plan to support their daughter? My father had no immediate answer; prudently, he kept Thrumpton out of the picture at this stage. He described his bank work; Margot’s expression chilled. Rosemary was extremely delicate and sensitive, she informed him; a nervous breakdown had weakened her stamina; with no experience of handling her own finances, she needed a husband who would shoulder responsibilities, cherish and protect her. Was George Seymour, a mere bank clerk, that man?
Margot’s scepticism acted as a spur to my father’s love. ‘Precious Rosebud, I will love you and take care of you as long as we live, forever,’ he wrote before he left. En route to join his parents for a quiet family Christmas in Norfolk, he found time to dispatch two telegrams and three long letters to his fiancée. They had been apart for just two days.
An exchange of photographs: Rosemary to George . . .
and George to Rosemary. My father was proud of his elegant hands, and liked them to be admired.
My mother’s elusiveness had given her the lead in the relationship during the first two months; now, my father began to establish control. He did so by one of his most effective techniques: the letter. My mother had always enjoyed writing spontaneously: she was not used to writing to order, or to a required length. ‘There! I’ve written five pages!’ she told her fiancé with evident pride; the following day, she was reproached for such clear evidence of her indifference. Love, for my father, was judged by the volume of words in which it was expressed. Two pages of heartfelt passion were worth less than four of modest intensity. To let a day pass without writing was proof of a cold heart.
Keeping pace with my father’s own almost relentless flow of letters was hard work; my mother remained saucy and unsubdued. ‘I still adore you,’ she wrote a week after their engagement, and added that her cat did not feel the same way. When George sent her, unsolicited, a large and solemn studio photograph of himself, she told him that she had given it to her maid, who thought he looked sweet. (‘There’s another conquest you’ve made, you Casanova!’) This could be dismissed as girlish teasing; my father was more seriously alarmed by a letter that announced the arrival of a new country neighbour (‘26, with a vast house, servants galore and lots of farms’). Her mother, Rosemary added, thought him quite perfect. She did not say for what purpose, but it wasn’t hard for an anxious lover to guess. George was already conscious of his fiancée’s passion for farming and her attachment to Wales.
‘Who was it?’ I ask, inquisitive. ‘You don’t mention his name.’
‘Can’t remember,’ she says, a touch too briskly. She couldn’t – could she – have made him up? I can’t guess. The more of this story I write, the more I realise how little I know about the sharp-witted, strong-willed old woman who has been my chief companion for the past two years.