Susie settled back at Elsfield with her mother and Lilian Killick in 1940, accepting evacuees, organising classes for schoolgirls, worrying about her sons (all of whom came through the war), distributing the many ‘comforts’ sent over by church members in Ottawa, and giving hospitality to Canadian troops stationed nearby. Her mother died that August, aged eighty-two, and her death was much regretted, for she had been a solid rock. Susie remained close to Anna and Walter Buchan, visiting them regularly until their deaths, respectively, in 1948 and 1954.
However, without JB writing books and selling film rights, the house became too expensive to run and, in 1954, she retired to small-town life in Burford. She sold JB’s library of 4,500 volumes to Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. His speeches, scrapbooks, book manuscripts* and much of his correspondence also went to Queen’s, while most of the rest of the material was deposited later in the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh.
Susie kept herself occupied by writing pleasant, perceptive fiction as well as sprightly memoirs of her early life, now much mined for telling detail by social historians. She also worked hard to keep her husband’s memory green, putting together The Clearing House,** an anthology of his writings, and John Buchan by his Wife and Friends. She invited Janet Adam Smith, one of those clever undergraduates who came to tea at Elsfield in the 1920s, to write what turned out to be a masterly and highly readable biography. She received JB’s fans kindly, and concerned herself – mostly at a distance, since she never learned to drive a car – with her fifteen grandchildren. But the house on the hill in Burford was cold and stiff and terribly empty of life. How much she must have missed the quick step in the hall.
While working on this book, I have been haunted by my grandmother’s predicament in her long widowhood. I have also had moments of unease about setting her properly in the story, since she so plainly did not want to be there. Her habitual discretion, so obvious in the letters and such a virtue in the wife of a public man, was the reason why she is such an indistinct figure even, or perhaps especially, in the biographies (despite Janet Adam Smith having had many conversations with her), and only glimpsed intermittently in her children’s memoirs. It suited her for all the attention to be on JB, but I knew that the story could not be told once more without ushering her gently into the light. As Alec Maitland wrote to her when JB died: ‘without your love and sympathy and understanding he could never have done what he did or indeed have been what he was’.1
I came to know her best once I was old enough to drive the thirty miles to Burford. Mourning the untimely death of my mother, I was in sore need of a cheerleader – a role, I now realise, she was born to play. I have a sheaf of encouraging letters from her, including one wishing me luck in my Oxford and Cambridge entrance examinations; she told me she had long been sorry not to have gone to university, from which she would have undoubtedly benefited. Her tenacious desire to write and be published is testimony to that.
She would sit, straight-backed and stately, in a winged chair by the fire in the sitting room, puffing delicately on a cigarette, which she held by the tips of two of her long fingers. The cigarettes were the Canadian du Maurier brand, in a distinctive red and silver square cardboard box. Sadly, I never saw the gold cigarette case, with the Royal crest picked out in diamonds, that the King gave her in 1939; no doubt it was locked away in a safe. Her eyes were rosemary-blue, her golden-grey hair as fine as floss silk, her hands blue-veined and slender, and her cheek, when I kissed her goodbye, as soft and yielding as velvet. She had an unusually sweet smile. Her voice was smoke-deep but musical and she spoke as she must have done when she was a ‘young gairl’, calling me ‘dawling’ and referring to Canada as ‘Cenedaa’.
I can still conjure the prickle of embarrassment I felt nearly half a century ago when, after lunch one day, she asked me to go upstairs to her bedroom to help her undress, as she wanted an afternoon rest. For a buttoned-up teenager this was a trial, even though it consisted of no more than helping her take off her dress, necklace and shoes. It occurs to me only now that, for a woman who had the services of a lady’s maid for much of her life, being helped to undress by a young woman must have seemed perfectly natural.
She became progressively deafer as she aged, and I was sometimes faced with an alarming ear trumpet, into which I alternately bellowed and whispered. Despite that, she was a very good listener, asking me what I had been doing, what I was reading, where my studies were taking me, what flowers I liked. She sent me books of German poetry and encouraged me to learn some of Heine’s poems ‘because they are so elegant’. She gave me H. G. Wells’ The New Machiavelli, and told me that the house on fire during the dinner party in the book had belonged to a cousin of hers. Even here she was reticent: I had to consult Wells’ autobiography to discover that the cousin was Harry Cust. (It is possible that she didn’t want to proclaim that particular connection.) She also gave me her books of memoirs to read, in lieu of telling me about her earlier life. When she was very old and rather frail, I would go out into the garden, pick anything that was flowering and bring it in to talk to her about it. As far as she was concerned, these visits were about me, not her; listening to other people was, after all, how she had spent much of her life.
In 1976, the year before she died, I was working in Holland, and came across an English-language copy of Montrose in the local library. I gratefully abandoned my grim Dutch-language studies and read it through like a novel. I wrote to tell her how fascinated, thrilled and, frankly, appalled I had been by it, and she replied that she had always been careful (far too careful in my view) not to force JB’s books on his grandchildren, but was very happy that I had found his non-fiction for myself.
I sometimes wonder why my grandmother talked so little about my grandfather to me. Surely it was not because I wasn’t listening, since my dealings with her were profoundly respectful. (No one at my school had a Granny remotely like her and she was the family matriarch.) Now, having spent so much time in her company over the last four years, I see that it was an unassuageable grief that struck her dumb. I perfectly understand, although I am very sorry for it. When she spoke, it was so often with a dying fall. JB’s death had, in that inelegant phrase, knocked the stuffing out of her. She needed his energy to shine brightly. In any event, she probably thought that he revealed himself so completely in his works, that the answers to my timidly unspoken questions simply required me to read them with care and an open mind. And, since she could see what kind of person I was, she must have thought that, one day, I would feel impelled to go looking for him.