Authors: Elizabeth Jane Howard
This sort of thing went on for days; she couldn’t leave it alone.
We were on our own all day as Bill was in London. She followed me around the house, from the dining
room to the drawing room, even to my bedroom, to which I’d attempt to escape. In the evenings when Pete came back she was sunny and interested in everything he’d done that day, and
blandly courteous to me.
I found some ways to escape her. I’d go to the woodshed and chop firewood. ‘Where have you been all the morning?’ she would say at lunch. And ‘You’re not to be
trusted, are you?’ One afternoon, I asked the gardener if I could help clear the herbaceous border, and he said he’d no objection. This was soothing work, and I was interested enough in
it to feel distracted from her disapprobation. But she discovered what I was doing, and followed me, and stood on the gravel path telling me what a worthless, shallow little creature I was.
‘I know that,’ I said desperately one day. ‘Why do you go on about it?’ But she couldn’t stop. She told me what a bad mother I was, and I said I knew that too. She
brought up my youth – maybe as an attempt at reconciliation – but by then I’d become savage and retorted that I wasn’t
so
young, had
never
been as young as she
thought. There is nothing more awful than feeling that you have nothing to lose.
There was no escape from Fritton. I couldn’t drive, and in any case there was no petrol. Eventually I told Pete that K didn’t like me, and I was finding the days alone with her very
difficult. He must have said something to her, because after that she maintained a guarded truce. It occurred to me that what she’d wanted was a full-blooded confession on my part, with my
saying how dreadfully badly I’d behaved and begging for forgiveness, but this I couldn’t or wouldn’t do. I think a great deal of her anger was about Wayland, but she
couldn’t bring herself to mention that. I think it was during this visit that Pete did an oil portrait of me. I have a small photograph of it, but the painting has gone. It was a terrible six
weeks and I left to go and see Nicola.
Clifton Hill came to an end. Pete was expecting to get command of a destroyer and to be sent east to fight the Japanese.
We were to look for another house in London. There
was an enormous choice at that time because so many had been deserted during the bombing, but I was entirely inexperienced in looking. I’d been brought up in Kensington and didn’t look
much beyond it. The choice eventually boiled down to a house on Campden Hill Square, but it cost six thousand pounds and was in need of much repair, or a smaller house in Edwardes Square for eight
thousand that had nothing much wrong with it. We opted for no.8 Edwardes Square. Dosia and Barry had moved to Bedford Gardens, which was comfortingly near.
The idea of leaving Peter had crossed – or, rather, skidded – more than once across my mind, but it was a thought so terrifying I was unable to confront it for long. I told myself
that life would be different and better when he wasn’t away all the time, that in a house of our own we could make some sort of life, which up until now hadn’t been possible. Nicola and
Nanny would be able to live with us, since there would no longer be any fear of bombs.
The house, built for refugees from the French Revolution, was pretty. It had a long narrow dining room, a beautiful drawing room on the first floor and a large bedroom at the top. But the back
had been built on to in a nasty modern manner, with mean proportions and ugly windows. Two hideous bathrooms had also been installed, in black and a strident dark pink. However, there was enough
room and we didn’t have much money. I bought a William Morris wallpaper of tiger lilies for the bedroom, painted the drawing-room walls white and bought lengths of red and cream damask
cotton, which I cut in strips and machined together to make stripes. I bought a large oval gilt-framed mirror in Portobello Road for thirty shillings, and Harold Craxton found me a beautiful old
Blüthner concert grand. Otherwise the house was furnished with what Pete had had in his lighthouse, plus bits that the family gave or lent us. Nicola had a day nursery on the first floor and a
night nursery in which she slept with Nanny at the top.
Before we moved in, we stayed at Leinster Corner, the Kennets’
London home. This wasn’t as awful as Fritton because Bill was there, and sometimes Wayland. Enough
time had passed for us to meet as friends. K had assumed her former, affectionate, slightly patronizing behaviour towards me and I was grateful for the truce. She also knew that Wayland had had
affairs with several girls, so there was no tension between us.
It was during this time that I got a job, briefly, at Ealing Studios, run by Jill’s father Michael Balcon. I had an interview with him, which was conducted at cross-purposes: I discovered
that although I thought I was being seen for an acting job, he thought I wanted a scriptwriting one. However, he let me be an extra in a film they were making with Frances Day and Tommy Trinder. It
was a farcical Roman epic, and I was to be one of the many slave girls. This entailed getting up at about five a.m. every day and catching the tube to Ealing, where my hair was washed and pinned up
in rollers. Then I went to Makeup to apply dark pancake foundation, huge false eyelashes and a large fictitious crimson mouth. We were dressed in yellow satin bras and tiny yellow satin skirts,
edged with gold fringe. This done, we waited. The first day we waited in vain. Eventually, we got on to the set, which had a large bath filled with milky liquid – meant to be ass’s milk
– in which Frances Day was made to immerse herself. In a dark corner one day I came upon Tommy Trinder, clad in a very short toga. He was doing a little dance, lifting his toga and muttering,
‘Now you see it, now you don’t.’
E. M. Forster used to come to dinner at Leinster Corner. He was an old friend of Bill, who, I was told, had got him to write
A Passage to India
. He was a small man, with a soft moustache
and an enigmatic smile – I thought he looked like an H. G. Wells character. He liked to be amused. He was curious to know what happened in a film studio. I regaled him with tales of Tommy
Trinder, of the deck-chairs with people’s names on them, and the huge dark coils of cable that lay all over the floor like writhing anacondas.
One day Bernard Shaw came to tea. It was a cold spring day, and
he’d walked across the park. He took off his muffler and laid it on a spare chair. During tea he told
the story of his wife’s death. He made it a riveting drama, without any hint of what it might – or might not – have made him feel. He was devoted to K and wrote many letters to
her. A postcard I particularly remember simply said, ‘The nearest I’ve come to homosexuality is with you.’ He said a great deal of his time nowadays was spent arranging what was
to happen after his death.
I was still constantly plagued by sore throats, and when, after a particularly bad attack, I went to see a doctor, I was told it was high time my tonsils came out. They were removed on VE Day,
and I remember sitting in a chair in the theatre at University College Hospital, with two men bending over me, being given some anaesthetic, and feeling the most blinding pain just before I passed
out. I came to to the sound of people singing and cheering in the streets below, and the distant thuds and bangs of fireworks. I felt pretty ill for some days, and could hardly speak.
‘It’s always worse when you’re older,’ they said.
During my stay there, a nurse came in and said I had visitors – they were only in London for the day, and particularly wanted to see me, if only for a few minutes. They turned out to be
Myfanwy and her husband. They’d brought me a bunch of very yellow daffodils. Conversation was rather stilted – we were shy with one another – until Myfanwy said suddenly,
‘We’ve come to thank you for what you did. We’re both so grateful.’ I asked how their baby was, and she said he was fine; her mam was looking after him while they were away.
‘She’s never been to London before,’ her husband said. He was very much older than his wife. They didn’t stay long. ‘ We mustn’t tire you,’ one said. I
felt extraordinarily grateful to them.
When I was out of hospital, still feeling very weak and with no energy, it was decided that I should have a fortnight’s holiday in the Isles of Scilly, and that Marie Paneth would come
with me. She was writing a book about a children’s project in Paddington, and I’d
begun a longish short story that was turning into a novel. So off we went by train
and then two boats to St Mary’s and thence to St Martin’s. It was my first real holiday for years and the island was a revelation to me. It felt wonderfully foreign, had no roads and
consisted of three settlements called Lower, Middle and Upper Town. We lodged with a Mrs Bond – there were 105 people on the island, I later discovered, all called Bond. We had a bedroom each
and slept in feather beds, and there was a little parlour where we ate and wrote. They grew flowers and tomatoes on the island and its fields were striped with brilliant gladioli that looked
wonderful against the background of gorse and heather and grey rocks. The sea creamed round the rocky shores and the air smelt of salt and honey.
We went for walks, collecting shells and wild flowers, and when we came back to have baths, we found that Mrs Bond had arranged the shells in beautiful patterns in the fireplace, and put the
flowers in water on our table. We wrote, and read to each other in the evenings. I wrote at a tremendous rate in those days; Marie was far slower, but her book was awfully good, I thought. She
thought my heroine was rather snobbish. I’d begun to realize that Marie was very left wing and I’d always lived in Conservative circles.
I told her that my marriage was very difficult and I didn’t know what to do, and she was sympathetic about that. She was very much into psychology, had known the Freud family, and
attributed many of my quite light-hearted observations to some murky ill-feeling and bad motive. Then, one day, I said, ‘Marie, why do you always think I mean something else that’s
nastier than what I do mean?’ She stopped after that.
She told me that her marriage had come to an end some time ago, and that she’d had a lover, the love of her life, who was now a famous psychiatrist working in New York. He was married, but
they’d lost touch since the beginning of the war.
One day we took a boat to visit another island, St Agnes, and while we were moored there, a calf was loaded on board. As we set
off, a cow plunged into the sea and began
swimming after us. The boat increased speed, and the cow was left further and further behind until we lost sight of her, but she didn’t stop swimming. I couldn’t bear it, because I
couldn’t stop the boat and return the calf to its mother. ‘It’s what happens, Janie, it’s life,’ Marie said. I felt that she knew about life, and I didn’t.
One evening, when we were having supper, Mrs Bond came in and said someone had come to say that there was a telephone call for me. There was only one telephone on the island, in a box at the end
of the village. I ran all the way because I was afraid that something awful had happened to Nicola.
It was Pete. ‘I have a bit of a problem,’ he began. He’d been invited to stand for Parliament at the coming election, a fairly safe seat in Wembley, but he also had the chance
of commanding a destroyer in the war against Japan. Which should he do? Which did he
want
to do? Well, he rather liked the idea of being an MP, and it would mean he could stay at home. On
the other hand he’d wanted this command for a long time and would be promoted from lieutenant commander to commander, which was given to few in the RNVR. Mummy thought he should stand for
Parlia-ment, he added. On the whole, he thought that perhaps he should, but he wanted to know what I thought. I said I thought he should opt for Parliament – I felt it was what he wanted me
to say. ‘I expect you’re right.’ He said it with evident relief. ‘Only it will mean, darling, I’m afraid, that you will have to cut your holiday short, because I shall
need you to come and make speeches with me, or at least shake hands with people – that sort of thing.’ So back we went.
I knew nothing whatever about politics, party or otherwise. I don’t think Pete did either, but he was a war hero, a natural leader, and very good at making speeches and subsequently
skating over thin ice if he was asked awkward questions.
The three weeks leading up to the election were a nightmare to me. We campaigned from morning till night. I got used to having
to have four teas with the wives of Wembley
worthies, to answering the same questions again and again, to trying desperately – and sometimes failing – to remember people I’d met before, the previous week. A Liberal and a
Labour man were standing against him, but everyone we met thought Pete would easily get in. K got some big guns down to speak for him, including my cousin Donald Somervell, who was Home Secretary
at the time.
The day came, the vote and then the count. Pete lost by 225 votes out of a poll of around twenty-five thousand. He was a good loser and was the first to congratulate the Labour Member. So that
was that, and we were back to the destroyer.
But he didn’t get that, because two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan and the war finally ended. At the time I and many other people had little or no idea of the dreadful implications of
those bombs. There was simply a sense of enormous relief that it was all over. London was shabby, people were exhausted by the years of small daily privations: what to eat, how to keep warm, and
the threadbare exhaustion from hard work and sleepless nights. And the grief of losing sons, husbands and lovers was terrible. Relief at the prospect of peace and a government that was to implement
the welfare state was predominant.
However, the knowledge that Pete wasn’t going away and that I had to face up to a chronically married life induced feelings in me that were ambivalent and, some of them, unworthy.
We now had a household that consisted of ourselves, Nanny and Nicola, Mrs Mackie, the cook, and a series of secretaries – they didn’t live in – who came to help Pete with the
enormous and varied correspondence. It was my job to order meals. Mrs Mackie was a rotten cook, but all that Mrs Lines, the domestic agency from which I obtained her, could provide. I also had to
arrange dinner parties and keep the peace between Nanny and Mrs Mackie, who didn’t like each other. Pete went out quite a lot, and I’d go to see my friends.