Daughter of Empire (8 page)

I was particularly enamoured of the glass orangery in which grew orange and lemon trees, reminding me of Malta, as well as camellia and gardenia. The third Lord Palmerston, Queen
Victoria’s prime minister, had held parliamentary meetings in it nearly one hundred years before. It was quite awe inspiring and I felt strangely honoured to be there. Lottie and I ran
around, discovering parts of the house and gardens, for a week – though there were times when I panicked, overwhelmed by the sheer scale of everything, worried I might become lost in all the
space or swallowed up by the high clipped hedges. My father was away with the
Kelly
, Bunny with the Coldstream Guards, and although my mother had finally been able to volunteer her services,
she had yet to find a position that could fill up her time and employ her ample amounts of energy and drive. When we weren’t at school, she, Patricia and I rattled around the large house with
the dogs. My sister and I expected things to be very low key for Guy Fawkes’ Night because fireworks were banned, but our mother surprised us by taking us down to the cellars and letting off
indoor fireworks, allowing us to run about giggling and waving sparklers in the dark, underground passages. When it was time to go back to school – Buckswood had been evacuated to Rhyl in
North Wales as a safety precaution – I still hadn’t explored the house fully.

A lot of knitting went on that winter. My mother was given duties in the Depot for Knitted Garments for the Royal Navy and at school we spent a great deal of time knitting for the brave
soldiers, sailors and airmen who were risking their lives for us. Actually I felt trebly sorry for them – for being away from home, in danger, and also for having to wear the garments we made
for them. I couldn’t believe anyone would actually wear the scarves, socks and balaclava helmets we were producing. But it wasn’t only at the Depot that my mother worked – she had
also joined the Joint War Organisation of the Red Cross and St John Ambulance – and it seemed that all this work was changing her. There was a bounce in her step, she loved planning and
organising and making things happen, and she had the skills, charm and presence to make a difference, propelling her towards every opportunity that came her way. She looked dashing in her uniform
and cap, forever set at a jaunty angle. Our new Brook House had been bombed, so the family’s London base was now a small house in Charles Street, Mayfair. The depot my mother was supervising
was in Belgravia, so it meant that she could walk between the two in a brisk fifteen minutes. She had to call in the help of as many people as she could, including Zelle and Isa, and I
couldn’t help worrying that accident-prone Isa might fall foul of some knitting needles.

I noticed my father looking at my mother with a new sense of pride, telling us that she had found her ‘purpose in life’. He, on the other hand, was a bit down.
Kelly
was
making only short forays out of Portsmouth, and desperate to be at sea for longer, my father often found himself at home with time on his hands. At the end of January, he took Patricia and me into
Southampton to have our photographs taken. We were each to have a turn wearing his naval ‘monkey jacket’, the plan being to chart our growth through a series of photographs. In my
first, the jacket came down to the floor but Patricia, being fifteen, was showing rather a lot of leg. At the first attempt, the photographer obviously did not understand the purpose of the project
because the prints arrived showing only our faces and upper bodies. Enraged at this incompetence, my father took us straight back to have our feet included. With an image of me smiling gleefully
from my father’s monkey jacket, this photo was to become one of my favourites, though it did come back to haunt me when my father came to Buckswood to show some lantern slides on the Royal
Navy. I never forgave him for proclaiming, ‘And this, girls, is the final slide – a picture of a monkey in a monkey jacket.’

By April 1940 there was mayhem in the seas around Norway and the Battle of France was brewing. HMS
Kelly
was ordered to sea. I went with my sister to have lunch on board the ship before
our father departed. He showed us his cabin – which as always was decorated in exactly the same way as his bedrooms were on land; his desk was full of instruments and his bookshelves crammed
with a complete war library of manuals and memoirs of service chiefs. I was worried that he had no novels – I would have been lost without mine – and planned to send him some while he
was away. The day was tinged with a sense of foreboding, and although he made it enjoyable for us, the officers even giving us presents, I felt unsettled. When I got home, the only way I was able
to express my fears was to scribble a note along the margin of my diary, in tiny writing as if I didn’t want it to be real: ‘Daddy has gone to sea. Good luck to him.’

Within a couple of weeks, Chamberlain resigned and Churchill took his place. Hitler’s troops stormed through the Low Countries into France, horrifying the adults around me. I now wrote in
my diary that ‘Daddy is having some awful adventures in the North Sea’. When he came home in May 1940 I realised that this was no escapade – the
Kelly
had been torpedoed.
What I didn’t know at the time was that twenty-seven men had been killed and many more injured and that the blast had ripped a hole in her side that a double-decker bus could have been driven
through. When she finally reached the Tyne, crowds cheered her all the way up the river. I later learned that my father had evacuated the rest of the crew from the ship, then he had crept back with
only six officers and twelve men. Miraculously in a perilously listing ship, through three hundred miles of hostile seas, they had met with no further grave injury, despite being attacked by an
enemy torpedo boat and strafed by German fighter planes. When I was taken to the cinema to watch the newsreels, I was immensely proud to see my father’s heroic actions on the screen. We were
all hugely relieved to have him back safely.

I knew, though, that my parents were worried about Bunny, who was fighting in northern France, and Yola, who was back at home, especially when Zelle told me that ‘Paris has fallen’.
My mother had heard nothing from Bunny for a while and from Broadlands we could see the flares from the explosions around Calais, twenty-two miles away across the Channel. Each distant flash made
us anxious for the safety of our beloved Bunny.

It was in June 1940, when I was told, quite out of the blue, to pack my things at school and sent to meet up with my parents in London, that I knew things were about to change. On leaving
school, I had stopped off overnight at Broadlands and thought there was something odd in Hanky’s expression as she waved me off, but wasn’t quite prepared for the look on my
parents’ faces as I entered the drawing room in Charles Street. Even though they were doing their best to hide it, they were clearly upset and, more worrying for me, so was my sister. Even
Zelle was on the verge of tears. I thought someone close to us must have been killed in the war. They sat me down and my mother held my hand as she explained that Patricia and I were being sent to
America until the end of the war. We were going to stay with someone very kind, a Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt, in New York. My father asked me to sign passports and other documents and told me that
while Zelle didn’t have the right paperwork to come with us just yet, they were doing their best to sort things out so she could join us.

I was so taken aback that I forgot to ask why we were being sent away, but I did manage to ask whether Lottie could come with us. Later, my sister explained that we were going because our
great-grandfather, Ernest Cassell, had been Jewish, which meant that we were one eighth Jewish. I nodded wisely but didn’t really understand why that meant we had to leave our country and my
beloved Lottie. I imagined it had something to do with Hitler but I didn’t know for sure.

After frantic preparations – though my sister found time for a perm and even I was allowed to have my sides done – we said a very sad goodbye to my father, who had been given only a
short leave from his ship to see us off. When we stood by our pile of trunks and cases in the hall to say goodbye to our mother, we were very tearful. She told Patricia, ‘When you get there,
you must shake hands, the Americans do so all the time . . . and wear a bit of lipstick.’ With that, she pressed a pink lip salve into my sister’s hand. She held us tight. She
didn’t need to say ‘Look after Pammy’; it was axiomatic that Patricia would care for me.

We left late that afternoon on a crowded train. Our parents had booked us passage from Ireland to the United States aboard SS
Washington,
the last ship to take children across the
Atlantic before the crossing became too dangerous. Our distant cousin David – not my favourite little boy after he had bitten me following an argument in which he claimed that I had taken
food for his dog and fed it to Lottie – and his Swiss mademoiselle were travelling with us as far as New York, and while at first we weren’t happy about this, it was Mademoiselle who
saved us when our paperwork was questioned in the west of Ireland. The officials were convinced only when they got hold of the British Consul in Dublin, who verified our identity.

The ship was so full that some of the passengers had to sleep in the drained swimming pool. We shared a cabin with two other girls and a boy. The whole experience felt a bit unreal, but it soon
turned into a great adventure: the very fact of being on a ship; the deck tennis; ping-pong; shuffleboard and crazy golf. Not to mention all the animals below decks that I could pet and talk to.
After a week at sea, Mademoiselle woke us up at dawn so that we could go out on deck as we sailed up the Hudson river. The Statue of Liberty was much taller than I had imagined. I had only ever
seen pictures in magazines or on newsreels, so seeing it in reality was thrilling. Clearing customs, I was given my first taste of what being an ‘alien’ meant. Having been born in
Barcelona, I was made to stand in a different queue from Patricia and the rest of the English evacuees. The customs official told me – in a voice that I recognised from a hundred Hollywood
movies – that under no circumstances could I work in America.

Cousin David and his mademoiselle left to meet their host family and an extremely well-dressed woman introduced herself as Mrs Vanderbilt’s secretary. Even my childish eyes could see how
fashionably she dressed, far better than anyone back home. She guided us into a waiting car and we were whisked towards 640 Fifth Avenue. The façade of Mrs Vanderbilt’s residence was
enormous and imposing and the inside was no less so. The hall was cavernous, all marble floors and surfaces, and the huge malachite vase that was even taller than my sister made me feel like Alice
in Wonderland. (Years later I was to see it again in the entrance hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.) A small queenly form – Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt was quite unlike anyone we had met
before – came into view. She wore a long silk dress with a bandeau swathed around frizzy grey curls. ‘Ah, Patricia and Pamela, welcome to New York, my dears.’ Our hands shot out.
‘Good afternoon, Mrs Vanderbilt,’ we said. ‘Oh, please,’ she said, taking our hands (but not shaking them), ‘girls, you must call me Aunt Grace.’ I wasn’t
sure I would be able to manage that – she seemed so imperious. ‘And this is my niece Anne.’ A glamorous lady in stockings, heels and lipstick stepped towards us with an
outstretched hand. ‘Anne is nearly your age, I believe, Patricia,’ Mrs Vanderbilt added. For a second our eyes rounded with surprise. The ‘girl’ could easily have passed for
thirty. Beyond Mrs Vanderbilt, at quite some distance, I could see footmen in dark red livery darting here and there. I thought: America is going to be very different.

6

A
ll through that hot summer of 1940 we were shunted between the Long Island summer houses of New York’s kind society hostesses. While we were
getting used to our new surroundings, unfamiliar American expressions and new routines, the society hostesses were apparently trying to come to terms with how badly dressed we were. Mrs Deering
Howe was so disturbed by our appearance that within a few days several new dresses arrived. Patricia was disapproving – not only was there a war on and we shouldn’t be concerned with
such trivialities, but she knew at once that our mother would in no way wish us to accept these gifts. I thought they were divinely pretty and desperately wanted to keep them. But it was not to be.
We had to decline the offer and wait for some money to come through from our parents.