Chapter Eight ‘A Very Insecure Person at Heart…’ #2
My maternal grandmother, Ruth, had known (and greatly liked) my father for several years before his marriage to my mother. I have a letter that my father wrote to her, on 7 April 1954, eight weeks before my parents’ wedding, which testifies to the closeness they already enjoyed.
He was writing from the royal yacht, SS Gothic, which he calculated to be on the equator.
The ship had departed Fremantle, in Western Australia, a few days earlier, and was scheduled to reach England on 2 May.
This would conclude the new Queen Elizabeth’s Commonwealth World Tour of 1953–4, on which my father had accompanied her as her equerry.
He was openly excited at the prospect of being reunited with my mother after a six-month absence, and he was dreaming about the golden future that marriage seemed to promise: he once told me that he reckoned the happiest a person is ever likely to be in their lifetime is during their engagement.
My dearest Ruth,
As the day of our wedding draws ever nearer I feel more and more guilty at not being at home to help you with the preparations…
I’m looking forward to May 2nd with the most glorious anticipation, but as yet can’t believe that such a day as sees our reunion will ever dawn! I can hardly bear to think of such joy!
With all and every bit of my love to Frances,
Your loving son-in-law to-be,
Johnnie
It is wonderfully reassuring for a child to know that the parents who created them were truly in love, even – perhaps especially – if their marriage subsequently failed.
I have also found it a comfort to read my father’s personal diary for 31 May 1954 – the day before the wedding – in which he is ecstatic that this will be (he believes) his last ever day as a bachelor, before spending the rest of his life with my mother.
His euphoria at this time was reciprocated. I have the many free-flowing love letters that my mother wrote to my father, which are unrestrained in their adoration, passion, and in their longing for a blissful future together. But, twelve years later, the marriage was in ruins.
My mother maintained, later in life, that she was driven to divorce because – after John’s death – my father and the family doctor had encouraged her to submit to repeated physical examinations that she found demeaning.
At the same time, my mother’s family tree was examined in detail – and fruitlessly – for any physical abnormalities that might explain John’s condition.
If true, it must have been deeply humiliating.
Meanwhile, my father had supposedly said, after I was born, that I was such a fine baby that they should consider having another child.
She believed that being asked to contemplate a sixth pregnancy was unreasonable, while my father once said that he had just uttered the thought as a passing fancy, never a serious proposal.
My mother felt this was all so inconsiderate that – to her – it amounted to mental cruelty.
There was no hint, during an emotional divorce – when my mother was anxious to exit the marriage for a new life, as speedily as possible – that my father had exhibited any physical unkindness or abuse, of any kind.
After the divorce, although distraught at her departure, not once did he say anything against my mother to me – or, I believe, to my three sisters. I am for ever grateful for that rare selflessness.
My father had received support in the divorce from a surprising quarter – Ruth Fermoy, my maternal grandmother.
Up until this point, she had been exceptionally close to my mother.
Some commented that they shared the intimacy of best friends, and my parents stayed with my grandmother weekly in London, and annually in France.
In turn, whenever our grandmother was in Norfolk, she would stay with us at Park House.
My grandmother has been accused of being a snob, who sided with my father against her own daughter because of his social status.
That was certainly the line my mother adhered to after this hearing.
She felt so betrayed that she refused to speak to her mother for seven years.
Even after that, their relationship never fully recovered.
I believe that my grandmother’s intentions were most likely good.
That said, she might have been better advised to stand aside rather than bear witness against her own flesh and blood.
She seems, though, to have decided that it was her duty to be supportive of both parents and their children, and also to the truth, which she viewed as having been fatally compromised by my lovestruck mother.
My grandmother was an old-fashioned matriarch, realistic about human nature.
She once told me, in an adult tête-à-tête, that many marriages experience the husband or wife (or both) having an affair, but marital commitments should be adhered to because, she said, ‘Lust barely ever lasts more than six months, and you can’t throw away a marriage for something as transient as that. ’
Meanwhile, during the divorce one of my grandmother’s God-fearing sisters sent my mother a verse from the Bible that really hit home, and my mother mentioned it to me several times over the ensuing decades.
It was from Matthew, Chapter 18, about the wickedness of inflicting suffering on children: ‘But those who shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.’
Our mother encouraged us to think badly of our grandmother, because of her stance in the divorce. She liked us to call her nicknames: ‘107’, after the street number of her home in London’s Eaton Square, as well as ‘Hilda’, after an unattractive character in one of our Silfield School workbooks.
I also remember, with embarrassment, that Diana and I laid out holly leaves on Park House’s driveway in anticipation of one of her grandmaternal visits: we assumed that, as if in some cartoon, the holly’s spikes would puncture her car’s tyres. It all seems so mean-minded now.
After the divorce, we saw our grandmother often.
She clearly felt the need to step into the childcare vacuum that her daughter had left behind.
She bought Uphall, a house in Hillington, a village near to Park House, where she had us often to tea.
At Uphall she tried and failed to teach Diana and me mah-jong.
When she left us in her sitting room alone, we would go over to her grand piano – a memento of our grandmother’s days as a concert performer – and see how slowly we could get the metronome on top to sway.
The first time I realized that others saw a special quality in Diana would be at Uphall.
We were there while our grandmother hosted a drinks party during the King’s Lynn Festival, an annual cultural fiesta that she founded and chaired, luring famous musicians to perform in that quiet Norfolk town each summer.
A distinguished old man, seated in a worn velvet jacket, looked over at Diana and me, as we stood chatting with a neighbour’s child, Diana at our centre.
The old man smiled softly, held Diana in his gaze, and said in a light voice, rich with aesthetic delight: ‘And there we have it – a rose between two thorns.’
There was something about Diana, even then, that caught the eye.
*
The upset caused by my parents’ separation and divorce largely passed me by because I was so young.
While I was troubled when one of Park House’s cleaners told me my mother was away on holiday in Australia, and would soon return, my upset came from sensing for sure that I was being lied to by a trusted adult.
I realized instinctively that my mother was gone and, for whatever reason, would not be coming home.
It was much worse for Diana, being that crucial bit older than me. She, always more conscious of goings-on around us, possessed the alertness of a meerkat.
There was an attempt by my mother to reconcile with my father one Christmas after her initial departure, which I cannot remember. During this visit she apparently wore dark glasses most of the time in an attempt to disguise her tears from her children.
Then, with all hope gone, my father broke it to my two older sisters that their mother was leaving home.
He referred to Peter, who had recently lived for a few years on a sheep station in Australia with his wife and children, as a ‘cowboy’.
All this must have been very upsetting indeed for my sisters, while I, being so young, was spared the rawness of the break-up.
Diana had as a central memory of that time a day when my mother and her maid, Violet Collison (known by us children as ‘Collie’), were going round Park House collecting my mother’s things.
Diana shadowed them inquisitively, and my mother, surely without any wish to upset her youngest daughter, told her not to worry: she would, she said, return home soon.
What was meant as a distraction and a comfort instead turned into a very serious confusion. Diana took my mother at her word and would often sit on Park House’s front doorstep, by herself, awaiting my mother’s promised reappearance.
It never happened, and I believe Diana never forgave my mother for what she took to be a devastating let-down.