Lady in Waiting Page 3

  But the estate wasn’t the same as it had been before the war. There was a prisoner-of-war camp in the park, first for Italians, then Germans, and the gamekeepers helped guard them. Carey and I were very curious and whirled around the outside of the camp on our ponies, spying on the prisoners. The Italians were charming, always waving and smiling, and became friends with my mother who, after the war, employed some of their sisters to work at Holkham: a lot of them decided to settle in England.

  The Germans weren’t so friendly, and Carey and I were terrified of them. They wore patches on their legs and arms—shooting targets should they escape—which the gamekeepers longed for them to do so they could put in their game book: “14 pheasants, 6 partridge, 1 German.” As far as I know, the prisoners never tried to escape—the Germans were far more frightened of the keepers than they were of the official guards.

  Holkham beach wasn’t the same either. We couldn’t picnic on the dunes because they were being used as a military practice ground, and the beach was covered with London buses and taxis on which the Royal Air Force practiced airstrikes. At the end of the war, the buses and taxis were just left there. There is a big sand dune now where they were, and I expect most people have no idea they are still under it, rusting away in their sandy tomb.

  The military also practiced drills all the way along the woodland near the sand dunes and on the marsh. There was a pond at the edge of the marsh where a wall was built for training the soldiers who, throwing smoke bombs in front of them, had then to jump blindly over the wall and into the pond. Carey and I would take great delight in watching and, getting carried away, we would shout, “Go on, jump, you cowardy cowardy custards! It’s not at all deep. It’s only a bit of water.” Within moments, a furious sergeant major would rush up, red in the face, yelling, “What are you doing, girls? Will you get away? You’re ruining my training!” at which point, we’d grab our bikes and scamper off, giggling.

  My childhood was a curious mix of carefree adventure in beautiful surroundings and a pressing fear of the war. By the time I was eleven, long days of playing with Carey were swapped for boarding school. In the autumn of 1943, holding a single leather trunk with my name on it, off I went by train to Downham—a small school in Essex for girls. Because of the war, most of the teachers had been called up or moved into jobs to help with the war effort. Left with slim pickings, I was hardly likely to learn anything at all.

  The school was in a big old house where we all had to sleep in the cellars for the first few terms because of the doodlebugs, which, overshooting London, would land very close to where we were: the plaster would fall from the ceiling into our bunks. It was terribly frightening, and after a strike, I would check to see if I was in one piece. None of our parents seemed very concerned.

  I felt rather alone and unsure. I had been away from my parents for three years and suddenly I was without them once more, and also without my governess, Billy Williams, and Carey, both of whom I adored. Gradually I did settle in, though, making friends, who included a girl called Caroline Blackwood, later the writer, and wife of Lucian Freud, who used to walk with me to lessons and lived in a perpetual daydream. The older I got, naturally, the easier the five years of boarding school became, and after two years, Carey joined me, which was a comfort.

  The headmistress, Mrs. Crawford, had a gung-ho attitude and, despite having a husband, lived with another teacher, Miss Graham. Having played cricket for Scotland, Mrs. Crawford tried to teach us girls to play. I hated it—I was always fielding a long way out, praying the ball didn’t come near and dreading the shout, “Quick! Catch, Anne!” whereupon I would inevitably drop it. The ball was so hard it hurt if it hit you. I did, however, enjoy lacrosse. A most aggressive game, it seemed to be made up of us all rushing about bashing people’s teeth out with our sticks.

  Our games mistress was called Ma P., though I thought she was really half-man. She was always blowing her whistle, whether to her dog or to us we never quite knew. She was the one who would get us into the swimming pool. It was always freezing cold but from June 1, like it or not, we would “jolly well get in.” I quite liked swimming and got some medals, including one for lifesaving, which involved Carey volunteering to be the body, wearing clothes and being dragged halfway along the pool underwater. I passed and she survived.

  Just before the end of the war, when I was twelve, my sister Sarah was born. Carey and I had known our mother was pregnant but when my father’s sister Aunt Silvia rang us at school to tell us the news, we burst into tears. We knew how desperately my father had wanted a son and heir, and with my mother almost dying in childbirth, there was no chance of them having any more children, marking the end of my father’s particular line of Cokes.

  Despite the huge disappointment for the family, we all adored Sarah, whom we doted on, treating her like a doll. It was great fun to have another sister although Carey’s and my childhood was separate from Sarah’s because she was so much younger than us. Once the school term had finished, we would rush home to see her, our mother proudly showing off the rabbit-skin coat she had made for Sarah. She obviously hadn’t cured it properly because the coat was completely stiff, so Sarah would sit in her pram, her arms stuck straight out, rather as if she was in a straitjacket.

  When we were home, my mother took charge, organizing every day with something active and fun that she would do with us all, an attitude that was rare. My school friends would remark on how amazing they thought she was, saying things like “I wish I could have a mother like yours. My mother never plays with me.” But after the holidays, Carey and I would return to school on the train, waving goodbye to our mother, knowing it would be months before we saw her again.

  In those days parents only came down to the school once a year, in the summer. There would be things like a “fathers’ cricket match” and a “mothers’ tennis match.” At one of these parents’ open days, after the assembly, the headmistress summoned all the girls to her study. Looking extremely cross, she said, “Something very serious happened during assembly, and unless the girl owns up, you will all be punished. A parent, Sir Thomas Cook…” the founder of the package holiday, incidentally “… was squirted in the back of the neck with a water pistol.”

  There was silence as everybody looked at each other, wondering what would happen next. But then Caroline Blackwood put her hand up rather slowly and said, “Well, actually, it was my mother who did it.”

  Her mother, Maureen, Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, had been wearing a hat with a sculpture of a duck in a pond with water in it. Every time she put her head down, the duck dipped its beak into the pond and, as she moved her head, the water sprayed the unfortunate Sir Thomas. Her hat was not the only extraordinary thing she wore: her shoes had see-through plastic heels with fish in them. They weren’t real, thank goodness, but no wonder Caroline was so eccentric.

  I was at school for two years before, in 1945, when I was thirteen, the war finally came to an end. I felt the most enormous sense of relief, although the atmosphere stayed tense. The nation had lost another generation of men and, with the economy taking a huge hit, there wasn’t a feeling of jubilation, only an awareness that life would continue being hard.

  Most of the staff from Holkham didn’t return after the war and suddenly my parents were left wondering how they would pay for the upkeep of the estate. My father was a very capable man, but the war had changed him. He had fought in the Battle of El Alamein and managed to survive malaria as well as escaping death back in London: on the morning of June 18, 1944, a migraine stopped him going to the Sunday service held at the Guards’ Chapel he often attended with his friends from the Scots Guards.

  During the service the chapel took a direct hit, killing 121 people, including a lot of his friends. It was the most serious V1 attack on London during the war and it added to my father’s burden of loss. His brother David had fought in the Battle of Britain and survived, only to die of thirst in North Africa when his plane was shot down in the desert.


  After the war, my father was even more anxious and easily stressed. At the end of his life, he was plagued by traumatic visions of his time in Egypt.

  Although the fighting had ended, my father was posted to Vienna to work with the Allied forces, and in the school holidays Carey and I were put on a train, organized by the Women’s Institute, with labels round our necks, and sent to Vienna. We had to pass through the Russian zone and were told not to look the Soviet soldiers in the eye when they inspected the carriages. I was utterly petrified of those men, holding my breath as I stared at the hems of their moth-eaten greatcoats and their black boots, shuddering as they loomed over us, speaking in Russian.

  We stayed in the British quarter in a house that had been requisitioned by Allied forces. By a strange coincidence the house belonged to Austrian friends of my parents, so my father had managed to allow them to stay in their own house, even though they had to move down to the basement.

  Rationing was strict and parts of Vienna were lawless. The Soviet soldiers patrolled the streets, hurtling down the wide avenues in horse-drawn carriages, piled high with belongings they had looted. The only good thing about being there was that my mother managed to charm some American officers into allowing her to buy dairy products and sugar—something that English people had hardly seen for years—from their PX stores in the American quarter.

  Despite the unrest, Sarah’s nanny would walk me and my sisters, with my father’s army orderly, to Hotel Sacher, which was famous for its cakes, especially its “Sacher Torte,” a chocolate cake with apricot filling. We had our fresh ingredients hidden in Sarah’s pram, and when we got to the hotel, I would hand the butter and eggs to the pastry chef, who would bake pastries for us that we then collected, hiding them in the pram until we got back to the house. To taste fresh, sweet pastries, especially as a child during a time when that sort of food was extremely rare and coveted, was wonderful. For those moments all the frightening Soviet soldiers were forgotten and what remained was simply the delicious taste—a huge and precious treat.

  Once we were back in England, I returned to school for a few more years, which were particularly tough because the winter of 1946–1947 was so cold: temperatures in England dropped to as low as −6 degrees Fahrenheit. With no heating in the school or at Holkham, we all got the most terrible chilblains that would swell and pop, the pain stopping us from sleeping.

  In 1948, when I was sixteen, I finished school. It wasn’t even a consideration that I should go on to university. Neither did I go abroad because there was no money for that—so, like all of my friends, I was sent to the first of my two British finishing schools, Powderham Castle. It was owned by the Earl and Countess of Devon, who had set up a scheme whereby twenty-five girls per year were taught how to run a big house—their big house—under the guise of what was called “domestic economy.”

  We were put on fortnightly rotations, shadowing different members of the household, and soon came to know which were bearable and which were not. We loved our time with the butler because he would let us drink the dregs of the wine that we had served guests, who were often our parents’ friends. They would peer up at us, amazed to see the daughters of friends pouring them more wine. The more we poured the more they drank, and the more they drank the more we got to finish off. The butler taught us how to clean silver, which was really hard work—all by thumb, rubbing and rubbing with pink vinegar paste. Our thumbs got terribly sore, but the silver looked wonderful afterwards.

  I didn’t mind shadowing the cook as a scullery maid—occasionally we were allowed to make drop scones or chocolate cake—or the stint with the gardener, as I enjoyed the flower arranging. But I didn’t like being with the housekeeper because she was an absolute stickler for making beds with hospital corners. I went with my friend Mary Birkbeck, who didn’t really like people, much preferring dogs and horses. We weren’t very interested in being taught social graces. Nor were we focused on finding out how to acquire husbands, and we certainly weren’t dying to learn how to run a big house. In fact, we soon made a pact: I did her sewing and work in the house, and she would do my gardening (not the flower arranging) and muck out the horse I had to look after. Any spare time we had was spent on the platform of Dawlish station, smoking. It was the only place we could buy cigarettes—keeping one eye out in case Lord and Lady Devon arrived unexpectedly on the London train.

  After months of rotations, we completed the course, and in 1949, I returned to Holkham. My grandfather died that year and I was left feeling very sad that we would no longer sit together listening to the gramophone in the long gallery. His death meant that my father succeeded to his title, becoming the 5th Earl of Leicester.

  I was seventeen and Carey was fifteen, and we spent that summer cycling to the cinema in Wells-next-the-Sea twice a week with our mother. My father took me around the tenant farms, treating me like a son, wanting to teach me about the estate. I was really glad and took an interest in getting to know more about the inner workings of Holkham.

  In the evenings Carey and I would go off to the local American aerodromes where the big bands would perform, in the skirts we had made from felt, which was just about the only material that wasn’t rationed. The American airmen taught us how to jive and we had enormous fun, dancing all night. The only problem was that our father insisted on locking the doors at half past eleven every night, which meant we always got back once the doors had already been locked.

  There was always a bit of a palaver getting inside the Park as the gate was locked—we had to break into our own house, which seemed rather odd, but my father never compromised. We came up with a plan: we’d park the car in the village, go through the gate, walk across the park with a flashlight, which would light up all the eyes of the deer, and get to the house. Once there, I would take up the coal grating and hand Carey the raincoat we kept with us for this very exercise. Carey would put on the coat and I would lower her down the coal chute to the bottom. Then she would go off to fetch an old man called Chris, who was known as “The Mole,” because he spent his life in the cellars, stoking the boilers and cutting up the wood—the house relied on heat from fires in every room, not central heating, which was too expensive. The Mole was extremely obliging and would come up with a key and let us in.

  That same summer, the Duke of Edinburgh, who had married Princess Elizabeth in 1947 and often came to Holkham to shoot with my father, rang up my mother one day with an unusual request. He explained he was inventing a new game, inspired by Battleship, and that, as part of the game, he needed photographs of Carey and me dressed up as maids. My mother thought nothing of it and my father, who was totally in love with the Royal Family, would have said yes to anything.

  Carey and I were both rather nervous of the very handsome Duke, who was older than us, very confident and rather intimidating. But he came around and was absolutely charming. I dressed up as a maid with a feather duster and Carey donned an apron, taking the role of cook. We made all sorts of funny poses as our mother looked on and the Duke took photos with great enthusiasm. I’m not sure what happened to the finished game: he never mentioned it again.

  At the end of the summer, I went to London for a few months to my second finishing school, where I learned more than I had in my whole time at Downham. It was called the House of Citizenship, run by Dorothy Neville-Rolfe, who happened to be a descendant of Pocahontas. The House of Citizenship was well known and it was Dorothy Neville-Rolfe who coined the phrase, “The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right place, but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the most tempting moment.”

  The whole point of this sort of finishing school was to perfect our conversation skills and to allow young ladies to practice the public roles we were one day expected to perform as wives to eligible men. We were taken to law courts, factories, hospitals, schools—everything to do with how the country was run. We also did history of art to boost our knowledge so we could engage in polite conversation. We would all sit i
n a room and Miss Neville-Rolfe would pick on one of us. “Anne,” she would say, “five minutes on one of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s bridges!” and I would have to stand up and speak for five minutes off the top of my head, never knowing what the topic would be beforehand. Having the confidence to be the figurehead of a community, make little speeches, and present awards was a skill that girls like me needed, coming in useful a few years later when my mother’s time was split between Holkham and London, and I stood in for her.

  When I returned to Holkham from the House of Citizenship, I was nearing adulthood. My father’s life as earl was in full swing and he was in the middle of the “Tail Enders”—shooting parties that marked the end of the season, beautifully organized by my mother, but never attended by her as they were male only, all my father’s surviving friends from the Scots Guards descending on the state rooms of Holkham.

  We girls were left to entertain ourselves—not that we minded because we would take our trays into the drawing room and watch television. It was still a novelty: small, like a postage stamp, black-and-white, and only one channel, the BBC, with just a single show each night.

  None of us ever questioned the distinct roles of men and women. We just accepted them. I simply understood what was expected of me. I had been prepared for all the things I needed to be able to do in my life as a lady. I didn’t compare my role to that of a man, or dwell on it in any detail. I followed my mother’s example, and I suppose I thought I would marry someone like my father and have a life like my mother’s. How wrong I was.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Traveling Salesman

  BY THE TIME I was on the cusp of adulthood in 1950, I had hardly seen Princess Margaret for years, our childhood friendship interrupted by the war. Gone were the days of jumping out at the nursery footmen together, and her admiration of my silver shoes. So much had happened since then. A whole life in merely a decade, it seemed. Inevitably we had grown apart: a three-year age difference in those days was big enough to put us on different trajectories.