The Girl from Station X (40 page)

Another important aspect of life in Spain was the close friends that she and also my father made there. Natasha’s father, like hers, had been killed in 1915,
fighting the
Austrians.
Natasha had also sensitively asked Anne if she missed America. It must have been Natasha who introduced my parents to the Infantes, a couple closely related to both the
Spanish and the English royal families. Natasha’s cousin – Alfonso – was, my mother wrote,
an Orleans Bourbon and a first cousin of Alfonso XIII
(the
former King of Spain). She was particularly impressed that the Infante
took out the 1st Spanish pilot’s license in 1910 and still flies today.
His wife Beatrice was
one of the last grandchildren of Queen Victoria, and sister to Queen Marie of Romania. Better still, the Infanta had spent a great deal of time in Russia! (I recall her, from when I was seven, as
very thin, wearing black, and rather stiff compared to her warm, informal husband, who took me with him into the garden to see his aviary and brushed off my attempts to call him ‘Sir’,
as my mother had instructed me to do.)

On 21 April 1950, my parents made the first of several visits to the Infantes’
palacio
at San Lucar de Barrameda in the south. My mother loved the Infantes’ historic and
royal connections and would often tell me the Infanta’s tale of a tea party she had attended as a child, given by her grandmother Queen Victoria for all her grandchildren, ending in a lesson
to the oldest about not being greedy.

My mother kept in close touch with home, making the occasional visit to London and Knowle. In May 1950, Aunt K came, and she and my mother drove via Avila to Alba de Torres,
where
Aunt K was really thrilled to bits at seeing it and read out about my great-grandfather, Sir John Hamilton, defending it against the French during the Peninsular
War.

My mother sometimes travelled with my father for his naval duties. They went frequently to Gibraltar, once in July 1950, when in the harbour she saw four American destroyers and an aircraft
carrier.
22nd July 1950. Watched the carrier and the destroyers leave this morning from my balcony. Thank God for the strength of America which is the only thing in the world today that
gives one any feeling of security.
My mother expresses here her views unequivocally. My father, who hated the way America was so business-driven, would probably not have taken this
attitude.

In Gibraltar, my parents met the new British admiral, Lord Ashbourne, and saw the Barbary apes on the Rock. After meeting the consul, Mr Russo, they flew back to Madrid via Tangier, where my
mother bought an American movie projector –
(Bell and Howell) which I have wanted for ages.

This must have been the projector on which she later showed her films of me and Raymond, in Spain, and among the poppies at North Heath.

E
arlier that July, I read, I had been sent with Nanny Benny to Knowle. I was now shocked to see that I then had not seen my mother for two months.
No wonder I loved Knowle, though; I was there so often. My mother was able to feel completely secure in placing me there with my nanny, grandmother, Nah, Gig, Katherine, Mr Tash and Frank –
Frank, who, four years later, would teach me and Raymond the two times table in the garage, with a chart he had made specially. He would deliberately say the table wrong, so that we would then
shout out the correct answers.

My mother saw me again, two months later, in England, on 11 September 1950:
Elisa is awfully sweet and crawls all over the place and manages to stand up holding onto things. She
understands quite a few things you tell her to do and loves animals and flowers.

Nine days later, she learned she was pregnant. She wrote that she hoped for a son. Anne does not record any marital arguments; the only thing that she baulked at was the idea of being obliged to
have her next child baptised Catholic as I had been – like most non-Catholics in those days who had married ‘Papists’ (my father’s flippant term), she had had to agree
before marriage that the children would be brought up in the Catholic faith. In the diary, she writes angrily that she does not think it right for children to be brought up with a different
religion from their mother and even declares:
It may end in divorce from Willy.

In this early period of their marriage, however, Anne appears close to Willy and often in the diary admits to missing him when he had to go on naval duties – did she ever tell him so, I
wondered, or was she too reserved?

My mother wrote lyrically about many of the sights she saw, but, each time she returned to Madrid, seemed overjoyed at seeing me again:

8th October: Elisa is sweeter than ever, she still does not walk at all though she occasionally stands.

18th October: ‘Cute Things’ thrilled at seeing a horse, made clicking noises in her mouth and jumped up and down as though she was riding.

My father too was involved with me:
22nd November 1950. Bulldog’s birthday. He pushed Elisa for an hour and she went to sleep.
It was unusual
then for a man to be seen pushing a baby. My father didn’t care what people thought and obviously loved me.

Two days later, I had my first birthday party; my grandmother and Gig came out for it: ‘
Cute Things’ behaved admirably and smiled all the time and was very amiable with
her guests.
I have my mother’s photograph, in which Eleanor Brewer, future wife of Kim Philby, stands behind her daughter Annie’s chair at my birthday tea. Eleanor was then
married to Sam Brewer, a
New York Times
correspondent. When Philby was unmasked as a Soviet spy in 1963 and fled to Russia, she would be abandoned by him in Beirut.

Anne sounds happy in the run-up to our first Christmas in Spain – it had snowed earlier that month and she wrote of cold bright weather, shops full of Nativity figures for cribs and carts
of holly pulled by donkeys. She even gave up a social lunch to look after me all day on Nanny’s day off, as she didn’t want me to catch Julia’s cold. She bought me a little
Christmas tree, but she left me on Christmas Day itself for Paco’s, where Miss Ettie let off a whoopee cushion and a two-day-old, very white, lamb sat in Paco’s hall. On 27 December,
though, she was back with
Cute Things. Elisa is sweeter than ever.

I had been used all my life to my mother’s many departures and returns. Now I saw that this pattern had been set from when I was a baby. Because of these frequent absences, followed by our
joyful reunions – each time I must have been relieved, as well as happy, to see her again – I must, from very early on, have perceived my mother almost as a magic lady with whom I must
not misbehave or else she might go for good. I must not displease her. I was, by her accounts, a good-natured baby and toddler, but I also wondered if I had perhaps been
so
good
out of fear that one day my mother really would not come back. Perhaps this was the reason why, as an adult, I had tended to reject men who offered me love and stability and
instead was drawn to those who were emotionally withdrawn, married, unstable or, as in the case of foreign correspondents, often away working. Like my mother, these men were always dancing away,
out of reach.

But, despite all her absences, Anne, I saw in these ‘Spain’ diaries, came into her own as a mother when Raymond and I began to show imagination, verbal ability, and physical
boldness. As I grew older, she noted down details of my development, as mothers tend to do. At fourteen months, I took eight steps,
the first time I have seen her really walk . .
.

January 19th 1951. Cute Things sweeter than ever calling Mama and Dada and ‘Poor Bow-Wow’. She walked quite a bit in the garden . . .

January 21st 1951. My father’s birthday. I hope Cute Things will grow up with some of his traits . . . Cute Things a shameless flirt, she loves men and boys!
. . . Elisa ignored Willy after he spoke to her in a loud voice and was determined not to give him a nut, smiling to herself all the time.

My mother was taking me out more, to the zoo, to the country road beyond the Escorial and to the Casa de Campo for picnics. We were often together.

March 21st 1951. Wonderful sun again. All our trees in the patio are out and the apricot tree is in full bloom. Spent the day with Elisa.

April 25th. Baby could be born any day. Had Elisa all day. She was v. sweet and good and full of fun – smiling and playing happily all day.

May 1st 1951
[a week before Raymond was born].
Took Elisa to the Casa de Campo – she stood and refused to move, holding up her skirts
and saying: ‘Prickies!’. She loves going in the car and talks like anything, picking up new words all the time.

I read all these extracts about myself as though my mother was passing me a bowl of cherries. I hoped that they would never end. I was overjoyed to have these records of that time when I –
then Raymond – had been loved, when my mother and my father had been happy. I spent several weeks reading and re-reading them; I wanted to never leave them. They showed my mother at her most
pleasant; after Raymond’s birth she became even more maternal, upset that she could not breastfeed him, calling him ‘my Spanish love’ and changing my own pet name from ‘Cute
Things’ to ‘my old love’, and relating how I had shouted for ‘Yaymond’, my new brother.

Unfortunately, I could not help noticing references to my parents’ drinking; apart from falling and tearing some ligaments after a reception to welcome the new British Ambassador and his
wife, my father also slept in his clothes after a Burns Night dinner. He broke his arm on a visit to Gibraltar, although Anne does not say whether or not that was caused by a drunken fall. As for
her, she was sick after too much Spanish gin in Barcelona; my father guessed that the British consul there had swapped it for the superior English gin allocated for entertaining, which he was
probably flogging on the black market.

Anne spent twelve days in hospital after Raymond’s birth and, as I did after my first baby was born, wrote her diary about the baby:
an amusing little face and nuzzles like a
puppy. Elisa saw him and seemed thrilled with him. I love the little chap already.
She recounts how my father brought her gold and ruby earrings
to match the brooch/clips
he gave me when Elisa was born
and notes that Raymond was born on a Tuesday, Tuesday’s child being ‘full of grace’. (She christened him ‘Raymond Roderick
Grace’, perhaps for this reason, and because it was her maiden name.) She described hearing the
burritos
from her hospital bed each morning at 7 a.m. and how this
would be one of the things she would remember about Spain – perhaps this was why she had bought those two donkeys when we moved to Sussex. In the same hospital was the celebrated English
bullfighter Vincent Charles – ‘Vicente’ – who visited Anne in her hospital bed. Women were mad about him with his
gypsyish looks
. She found him
modest and childishly endearing.

Doreen now arrived from England to look after me while Nanny Benny dealt with the new baby.
Elisa likes her and calls her DingDong.
Anne had to give up breastfeeding and
agonised over this. She was behaving almost like a ‘normal’ mother.

In early July 1951, my mother took us on a seaside holiday to Zarauz. She described delightedly my chatter on the train:
Elisa thrilled with everything, ‘Moo-cow fight’,
‘Bull-fight’, and ‘Trainy-puffer’. She really is a joy to take around.

In San Sebastian, she witnessed a child’s funeral; other children held white ribbons attached to the little coffin. Reading this, I could not help thinking that I should have been given a
role like that at Raymond’s – in certain aspects, the Spanish Catholic Church got it right.

At the seaside that summer, Minervina, the girl from the riding school outside Rome in 1930, visited us at Zarauz. She was now the Duquesa de Diario Sforza and, after attending the smart
Montellano ball
in Madrid, was on her way to Lisbon to see the King of Italy. The other visitor was Millie, almost certainly Anne’s great love from Bomber Command.
There was no inkling in the diary of Anne’s former feelings for her; instead she complained that Millie, now married to a Freddy Scott, had turned anti-American.

Now, gratifyingly, my mother was focused on me, worried that I had been ill, then relating how she had taken me to see the boats in the harbour in my pushchair –
I was proud to
be seen with her . . . she is a joy to take about and is so interested in everything and so funny and sweet.

The whole tone of my mother’s diaries now is more confident – dubbing characters she met at Madrid parties that autumn
a tough baby, a tart, a soaker
and
vain as a peacock
, and she seems, apart from intermittent health problems, to be enjoying every aspect of her life, which included arranging a portrait of me by a French
artist which I have inherited. I am in a white dress and scarlet shoes and hold ‘Grandma’, the toy panda my grandmother gave me.

On New Year’s Eve, my parents attended a glamorous ball given by an aristocratic Spanish couple, Pepito and Millie Elda, Anne cock-a-hoop that they and one other couple were the only
members of the British Embassy there. She danced the Lancers, and she and my father went to bed at 5.30 a.m.

On 15 January 1952 my mother noted that two years had passed since she had arrived in Spain with me. Churchill had been voted in again as Prime Minister in October 1951; in
October 1950 the American government had resumed relations with Franco and now Churchill wanted to follow suit, taking up his country’s special relationship with Truman. My mother wrote that
the Ambassador
, Lord Balfour, wanted my father to stay on in Madrid; he had just heard that he would be relieved as naval attaché that October. There is no mention
of how that decision was reached; it seems most likely that his superiors in the navy had decided it, and this would overrule any request by the ambassador.