Blue Eyes and a Wild Spirit E-Book

Jane Wellesley

• Herausgeber: Sandstone Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 777

Beschreibung

Dorothy Wellesley was a poet, gardener, traveller and heiress; she was also bisexual and a rebel. She became the lover of Vita Sackville-West, wrecking her marriage to the Duke of Wellington. She was the intimate friend of W.B. Yeats in his final years. On the fringes of the Bloomsbury Group, she had a unique view of these iconic writers and artists. The biography draws on unpublished material, including private Wellesley family papers and hitherto unknown source materials. This is a riveting story of a complex and fascinating woman.

Leseprobe

By the same author

Wellington: A Journey Through My Family

First published in Great Britain in 2023 by

Sandstone Press LtdPO Box 41Muir of OrdIV6 7YXScotland

www.sandstonepress.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

Copyright © Jane Wellesley 2023

Editor: Moira Forsyth

The moral right of Jane Wellesley to be recognised as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

ISBN: 978-1-914518-23-2

ISBNe: 978-1-914518-24-9

Cover design by Ryder Design

Ebook compilation by Iolaire, Newtonmore

In memory

of

my father Valerian and aunt Eliza

Contents

List of Illustrations

Prologue

Chapter 1: Shadows of the Moon

Chapter 2: You’re Only a Silly Gurl!

Chapter 3: Ropes of Pearls

Chapter 4: How Nice To Be a Boy!

Chapter 5: A Man’s Mind a Woman’s Nature

Chapter 6: Blessed by Luck in the Man I Married So Hastily

Chapter 7: After the Road Ends

Chapter 8: Wine Coloured Like a Pansy

Chapter 9: The Rocks Ahead

Chapter 10: When I am Dead Will You Forgive Me Then

Chapter 11: Fierce Strindberg Things

Chapter 12: Passionate Impulses

Chapter 13: The Blue Bird

Chapter 14: Soft Crevices Lined with Hooks

Chapter 15: Penns Had Waited for Me All My Life

Chapter 16: Black Shadows and the Moonlight

Chapter 17: A Soul Falsely Compounded

Chapter 18: My Dear WB

Chapter 19: Yeats Greatest of Friends I’ve Not Forgotten Thee

Chapter 20: Amica Amicarum

Chapter 21: No Loving Friend To Defend Me

Chapter 22: All Wrong for a Poet To Be a Duchess

Chapter 23: Hearts of Stone

Epilogue

Permissions

Acknowledgements

Select Bibliography

Endnotes

List of Illustrations

Unless otherwise stated all images are © Wellesley family

Robert (Bob) Ashton as a young man

Lucy Cecilia (Cissie) Ashton (née Dunn-Gardner) on the Minerva

The Minerva in the Bay of Naples, 1887

Cissie and the 10th Earl of Scarbrough. Reproduced by kind permission of the Earl of Scarbrough

The crew of the Minerva. Reproduced by kind permission of the Earl of Scarbrough

Dorothy (Dottie) Ashton and Robert (Scamp) Ashton aged 3 and 4

Dottie aged 7

Lucy Cecilia, Countess of Scarbrough, 1902. © Lafayette / Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Dottie with Nobbie

Sir George Dashwood Taubman Goldie. Private Collection/Bridgeman Images

Dottie, Scamp, Robin Hollway (first cousin) and Lady Serena (Mitey) Lumley. Reproduced by kind permission of the Earl of Scarbrough

Watercolour of a lily painted by Dottie in Oberammergau, 1904

Dottie, c. 1913

The Balliol Second Eight, 1914. Reproduced by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Balliol College

Baroness de Forest, 1909. Private Collection

‘Scamp’ Ashton, c. 1911

Gerald (Gerry) Wellesley, c. 1913

Dottie’s wedding clothes, 1914. Cutting from a Sandbeck album

Lady Eileen Wellesley, 1918

Rupert Brooke, c. 1917. Lebrecht Authors/Bridgeman Images

Dottie with Valerian, 1916

Gerry and Valerian, 1916

Dottie with Eliza and Valerian, c. 1921

Sherfield Court. From The Architectural Review, November 1923

Violet Keppel, 1919. Photograph by Bertram Park, Camera Press London

Harold Nicolson, c. 1920. Private Collection, Photo © Tom Graves Archive/Bridgeman Images

Vita Sackville-West c. 1925. Prismatic Pictures / Bridgeman Images

Dottie, 1910

‘Mitey’, Lady Serena Lumley, (later James)

Dottie, Geoffrey and Virginia Woolf, 1924. © National Trust Images

Valerian and Eliza, with Nigel and Ben Nicolson at Sherfield, 1926. © National Trust Images

Dottie and Vita, 1927

Vita and Dottie, drawn by Marjorie Jebb, 1927. Reproduced by kind permission of Virginia Scaretti

The Blue Bird, 13th Century Persian Figure of a Falcon

Virginia Woolf. Private Collection Prismatic Pictures /Bridgeman Images

Dame Adelaide Livingstone. © Science and Society Picture Library, photograph National Portrait Gallery, London

Hilda Matheson by Douglas, 1920s. © National Portrait Gallery, London

The Toilet of Venus by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, a panel for the dining room at Penns, 1929. Southampton City Art Gallery, Southampton Cultural Services (SOTAG 1972/10). © Estate of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. All rights reserved, DACS 2023

Valerian with sunstroke by Rex Whistler, 1934

Penns-in-the-Rocks by Rex Whistler, 1934. © Stratfield Saye Preservation Trust

Page from Eliza Wellesley’s visitors book with W.B. Yeats’s signature

Yeats with Dottie at Penns, c. 1935

Dottie and Brutus, c. 1936

Penns garden with Dottie, Goacher the gardener and Brutus, 1930s

Eliza with her mother, c. 1935

Dottie by William Rothenstein, 1936. © Stratfield Saye Preservation Trust

Eliza as a debutante, 1937

Eliza. From The Tatler, June 1939

Eliza and Tommy Clyde, 1939

Diana, Marchioness of Douro, later Duchess of Wellington, née McConnel, c. 1945

Valerian, c. 1945

Valerian’s and Diana’s wedding, January 28, 1944

Dottie. Photograph from Selected Poems by Dorothy Wellesley, 1949

Ruth Pitter c. 1925. Photograph courtesy of Win Murrell

Prologue

In 1936 W. B. Yeats cited my grandmother as having written ‘perhaps the most moving philosophic poem of our time’. Yet by the time she died twenty years later, Dorothy Wellesley had become invisible to the public, and isolated from her family. I was five when she died, yet she never met me, or saw me. As I grew up, she was rarely talked about, and, in a house that was filled with family photographs, there were no images of her. Gradually it became clear that even in death she was not a welcome presence, that she had been exiled. Of course I became fascinated by her, precisely because of this alienation. Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson were among the very small group of people to attend the interment of my grandmother’s ashes. ‘I feel how wasted that fierce little life was and how little anybody cares,’ Harold wrote in his diary. This book is my attempt to redress that view.

CHAPTER ONE

Shadows of the Moon

When Dorothy Ashton was a little girl she loved being at sea on her father’s yacht Minerva. The best times were when the weather was rough, and the brass cannons that sat on the deck of the ship would start to trundle up and down. She was furious when an interfering grown-up would lash them to something solid. In her mind’s eye the cannons were not just objects, but animate beings, with their open brass noses aggressively facing out to sea. She loved the adventure, even the danger of it all. And she loved it when her father took the helm, and she saw the great cream-coloured sails billow and flap, and then fill with air as the yacht sailed towards the horizon. One day, when they were sailing round the Scottish coast, they dropped anchor by a tiny island encircled by rose-coloured sand, and she and her brother were taken ashore to explore this wild, uninhabited piece of land. The image of that ‘blessed isle’ would stay with her forever, invoking a warm glow of memories suffused with innocence and joy.

I wonder if the Minerva – at the time one of the world’s fastest yachts – was part of the attraction when Cecilia Dunn-Gardner decided to marry Robert Ashton. The wedding on 17 February 1887 brought together ‘Bob’s’ vast inherited fortune – derived mostly from property and cotton mills – and ‘Cissie’s’ social ambition. Aged twenty-six, Cissie was the eldest of six siblings and had three younger unmarried sisters, so the pressure would have been on her for a few years to find a suitable suitor. Bob, just shy of his fortieth birthday, was a widower with a ten-year childless marriage behind him.

Quite how my great-grandparents met I do not know – their backgrounds were very different, though both contained unconventional elements. Bob’s public profile extended little beyond being known as ‘a very rich man’, but in Cissie’s case, society would have been aware of a major scandal. Cissie’s grandmother, Sarah Dunn-Gardner, a Fenland heiress in her own right, in 1807 married Lord Chartley, the eldest son of the Marquess Townshend of the day. A minor of seventeen at the time, it appears that Sarah was forced into the union by her parents. Essentially it was a marriage of convenience – joining money with aristocracy – but Sarah wanted romance as well. And there was another issue: she accused Lord Chartley of ‘impotency & not being formed as a man shd. be’. The accusation was cited in the legal documents that were prepared for an annulment, Sarah’s claim being that her marriage had never been consummated. Not long after the wedding, a contemporary gossip columnist had written, ‘Lord Chartley is a very effeminate young man, — sometime He wore pink ribbons to His shoes, — & having married a young Lady only a few months ago, He is said to be upon the point of separation from her.’1 But Sarah decided to take things into her own hands, and before the proceedings began, she eloped to Gretna Green with John Margetts, a brewer from St Ives whom she had met in her parents’ house. Aside from Sarah’s passion for John, she was following in the footsteps of her mother, Jane, who had eloped to Gretna Green in her day. But of course Sarah’s marriage was a bigamous one, and when she and her lover fled north of the border to tie the knot, she was pregnant with her first child.

Inevitably the scandal leaked out into society – even the King was known to have discussed it – and Chartley’s father, the Marquess, disinherited his son, who fled the country and ended up living in Italy with his Italian male lover. Years later, a man who was employed by Chartley in England as his secretary, and claimed to be his confidant too, remembered, ‘His Lordship was in such distress of mind about the peculiar charge made against him by Lady Leicester [Leicester was another Townshend title], that he expressed his anxiety to submit to a personal examination . . .’ However, the secretary added, ‘I believe the result was favourable to Lady Leicester’s contention.’2

In 1811, on the death of his father (who was not able to prevent the title passing to his son), Chartley technically inherited the Marquessate, and, since he was not divorced from Sarah, she had the right to call herself Marchioness Townshend. However, if any of the servants used her title, she railed at them: ‘Never call me by that detestable name.’ In spite of her protests, though, all her children, having started life as Margetts, became Townshends through baptism in 1823, and the eldest son, John, started to call himself Earl of Leicester. This irregular set-up continued until John became the elected MP for Bodmin, and as the supposed heir to a peer, he was now entitled to sit in the Lords Chamber – on the steps of the throne. This was a step too far for the Marquess’s real heir, his brother Charles, who sought redress in 1842 by petitioning the House of Lords to declare all Sarah’s children illegitimate.

During the sensational case that followed, friends and staff were cross-questioned about the minutiae of the domestic arrangements between Sarah and Lord Chartley before the elopement with Margetts. Essentially the testimonials from the witnesses were about one issue: could Lord and Lady Chartley (as they were styled when they married), ever have had sex? Had they ever been close enough – whether in the same room or country – for the possibility of that happening? The thousands of words uttered in the Lords Chamber, and reported in lurid detail by the press, established that there was no possibility of sexual intercourse ever having taken place, and therefore all the children were by Margetts, and thus illegitimate. Lord Brougham (the famous QC and former Lord High Chancellor), who represented the Townshend family, was at pains not to apportion any blame to Sarah, or indeed to her eldest son. He blamed Margetts, as well as Sarah’s father, for instigating the deception in the first place, believing Sarah to be under their complete control.

The issues of money, class, and the status of women in society blur the plain facts of the case: Sarah may have been an heiress in her own right, but that did not prevent her from being used as a chattel, particularly when she was sold off by her father to gain a pass key to the aristocracy. A later commentator, writing about the case, expressed considerable relief that the action of the Marquess’s real heir, in petitioning for the bill, prevented the passing of ‘the noble estates’ and a castle owned by the Townshends, to a ‘spurious and supposititious race, the children of a brewer at St Ives’.3 John Margetts died in June 1842 just before the lawsuit was opened, so was spared the public airing of dirty linen, but his children, all by now established members of society, were horrified by the wide and detailed coverage of the case. William, the second son, wrote a letter to The Times objecting in the strongest terms to inappropriate language deployed by one noble Lord in relation to his family – words like ‘vagabond’ and ‘conspirator’ – calling the attack, ‘foul and calumnious’.4 It was even more excruciating for the eldest brother, John, sitting in the House of Commons as the Earl of Leicester.

The coda to the story is that the Marquess died on 31 December 1855, in his Italian villa near Genoa where he had lived for many years as ‘Mr Compton’, a name he derived from another of his titles. Regarded as a pitiful figure, he had no contact with his family. It is hard to judge the character of Chartley. He suffered directly from the prejudices of the time concerning homosexuality, and it was that and the indignity of his wife having run off with another man that caused his father to disinherit him, which in turn meant that in England, he was pursued by debtors. In the eyes of society, he was mired in scandal and had forfeited his right to lead a normal life. Ten days after his death, Sarah, formally his widow since they had never been divorced, married under special licence one John Laidler, an assistant to a linen draper in the West End of London. He was more than thirty years younger than her. She died on 11 September 1858, and was buried in Kensal Green cemetery. Laidler lived on for another eleven years, and since he chose to share Sarah’s grave, I assume that he never re-married, and that the Marchioness’s last attachment was a love match.

Cecil, the youngest son and last child of Sarah and John, was at Oxford at the time of the case, calling himself Lord Cecil Townshend, and it can be assumed that the intimate details of his mother’s sex life being trawled over would have been a source of deep embarrassment for him. He was father to Cissie and therefore is my great-great-grandfather. I am intrigued by the fact that when Cecil was christened, his middle names were Mina and Bolivar – presumably after the Spanish and Venezuelan revolutionaries, respectively Xavier Mina and Simon Bolivar. Why did his parents name him thus? Both men were revolutionary heroes of the people, who fought to rid South America of their Spanish master. They met once in Haiti, in 1816 when the older Bolivar was impressed by the young Spanish adventurer. Each invited the other to join their expedition, but they went their separate ways and, shortly after this meeting, Mina was executed by the Spanish. By 1825, the year of Cecil’s birth, Bolivar had succeeded in ousting the Spanish from much of the South American continent, and was widely hailed as the great hero of the Hispanic wars of independence. Everything I have gleaned about Sarah suggests that she was headstrong and romantic, with a strong measure of rebelliousness running through her veins, so she may have liked the idea of giving her youngest child middle names that placed him firmly outside the hierarchies and snobbery of the British aristocracy.

My grandmother savoured the details of the Townshend story, and wrote about it in her memoir, Far Have I Travelled.5 She learnt from family sources that John Margetts was a very handsome man and a fine rider. He also had some poetry in his veins – his grandfather was Rowland Rugely, whose translations of verses from La Fontaine had been published in 1763. Naturally my grandmother admired Sarah’s independent spirit, but when she looked at a portrait of her, she thought she detected both cruelty and power in her expression. She relished too the impact the case had on the prim Victorians, who, while deploring the scandalous and immoral behaviour of the bigamous Marchioness, could not get enough of the story. And she hailed her great-grandmother for loving John ‘with an ardent passion that is given to few’. But equally, my grandmother thought, the scandal ruined the careers of the three sons, and had an even worse effect on one of the daughters, who ended up in a mental asylum, where she persisted in using the name Lady Lavinia Townshend. Aside from her mental state, Lavinia and her sister also had to accept that, as per the practice of the day, it was the sons who inherited Sarah’s properties and fortune. After the trial was over, and the eldest son, John, reverted, alongside his brothers, to being plain Mr Dunn-Gardner, he became an eccentric recluse, who amassed an extraordinary collection of silver and other works of art, but prided himself on spending only £5 a year on clothes, which he wore until they fell apart. He also put together a fine and erudite library, as did Cecil, who could boast a Shakespeare first folio.

Cecil joined the Light Dragoons, and was one of the few who survived the charge at the Battle of Balaclava. John was deeply disapproving of Cecil marrying a girl of Huguenot extraction, from an ‘impoverished family’ – Emma Renison. Named, it was said, after Emma Hamilton, my grandmother described her as being ‘gay, uneducated, vivacious’. Emma had shining golden hair, and my grandmother attributed her own beautiful skin and complexion to her. Cecil devoted himself to a scholarly life, including translating Aramaic passages from the Bible into Greek. Highly religious by nature, he rarely entered a church, and preferred to go through a whole service at home – kneeling, and alone. I wonder whether Cecil’s resistance to being in a church owed something to a deep-rooted shame about his illegitimacy. Certainly among the various generations of Dunn-Gardner relatives, my grandmother could recall varying degrees of sensitivity about the infamous Sarah. One could not bear the name to be mentioned, another moved pictures of Sarah and her mother, Jane, before the arrival of any visitors. In the latter case this seems rather unfair since Jane’s ‘crime’ – if such was Sarah’s – was that she eloped to Gretna Green to get married.

In my grandmother’s memoir, she reached even further back on her maternal family tree. ‘There has always been a tradition that the family descended from Henry VIII by Mary Boleyn, the sister of the fateful Anne.’6 That this ‘descent’ was confirmed by the College of Arms added to Dorothy’s enjoyment of it.

I arise from the Fen on the Distaff side,

Where original sin is original pride;

And got, thank God, in original sin

By Harry 8 out of Mary Boleyn.7

D. W.

The social scandal lurking in Cissie’s family tree would not have bothered Bob Ashton. Considered to be an eccentric man, he had flouted conventions and had his own run-ins with the law. Born in 1848, he came into a huge fortune through his great-uncle. From what can be gleaned about his early life, his upbringing was at the very least rackety, with little education, and after his father died when he was very young, whatever parental control there might have been disappeared completely. Both he and his older, and only, brother Philip had the freedom to develop some wild habits and, knowing they were going to come into great fortunes when they came of age, they had a habit of borrowing large sums of money from their father’s butler, with the promise to pay it all back when their inheritance came through. Both boys sought out the company of people who would have been considered of lower rank. Much of the money they borrowed went towards their shared passion for ballooning. The two of them would drift over the land, crashing into the grounds of some of their landed relatives at any time of the day or night. These respectable members of their family found their behaviour embarrassing, especially if they had guests staying.

On one occasion, when the brothers were attempting to cross the North Sea in their balloon, they got entangled in a large oak tree growing in the park belonging to one of these relatives. ‘They wanted to dine with us on the way,’ Dorothy was told many years later by the member of the family. My grandmother wondered if the boys were deemed to be ‘too eccentric to be given dinner’. When Bob jumped out of a four-storey building onto a blanket, no doubt he was practising for his adventures in the sky. Philip went to Cambridge, but he left without a degree, which was unusual for those times. However, it was revealed after his death, at the young age of twenty-eight, that Philip developed a habit, referred to in a newspaper as ‘indulgence in stimulants, at times allowing it to obtain complete mastery over him’,8 and that may explain his exit from Cambridge. However, Bob got a degree from Oxford, graduating in 1868, so if inclined towards his brother’s way of life, at this point the stimulants did not have complete mastery over him.

When he came of age in August 1869, to mark the occasion, Bob’s estates in Cheshire celebrated with pomp and ceremony akin to welcoming a member of the Royal Family – cannons were fired, there were toasts, fireworks, a brass band and triumphal arches. The address to the ‘Young Squire’ had all the rapturous praise and obsequious salutations one might expect on such an occasion, and the speaker looked forward to a ‘time when we may welcome you at Wervin with a wife at your side, and to celebrate the birth of a long line of descendants’.9

The tenants did not have long to wait. In 1873 Bob married a young woman called Mary Aburrow, the daughter of Edward Aburrow, a famous cricketer of the day, and took her back to Chester, where once again everyone on his estates was treated to a sumptuous dinner, dancing and fireworks. No one on the estates would have been aware of questions of propriety hanging over the marriage, but Ashton family lore relates that Bob and Mary had lived together before they tied the knot. Not long after the marriage, when the Ashtons were staying in Brighton for the season, they were barred from attending a society ball. When Bob heard that he was being accused of having contracted an ‘imprudent marriage’, he threatened to sue the man he believed to be the perpetrator of this slur on him and his wife – the local mayor and dignitary, Sir Cordy Burrows. The case never came to court, but the exchanges between the lawyers reveal the allegations that were made involving the ‘disreputable’ lives of the Ashtons. Bob seems to have been instinctively litigious, and there were instances of him trying to take others to court, sometimes over quite minor matters, such as disputes to do with household bills. But he was also instinctively generous, and in the marriage settlement he gave a large collection of jewellery to his bride-to-be.

I suspect that Bob’s childless marriage to Mary was a love match, and that when her death notice appeared in 1884, he was sincere in referring to her as his ‘beloved wife’. Perhaps it was partly to assuage his grief that soon after Mary’s death Bob bought the yacht Minerva. It was to the grieving widower that Cissie threw her cap, and clearly Bob found it hard to resist Cissie’s blue eyes, fair skin and flaming red hair. But no impropriety would have preceded the Ashton marriage this time round – the Dunn-Gardners were far too wary of scandal for Cissie to risk this.

So when my grandmother’s parents, Cissie and Bob, stood together at the altar of St Stephens in South Kensington on a cold winter’s day in February 1887, the entwining of the Ashton and Dunn-Gardner family trees would pass to the generations that followed a complicated mix of social aspirations and insecurities, fuelled, in the first instance, by massive wealth. Cissie’s father, who made his eldest daughter’s wedding an exception to his antipathy about attending church services, gave the bride away, and all three of her sisters were bridesmaids, wearing dresses of cream satin, topped with straw hats trimmed with lace and satin. The bride wore ivory-white satin, and the scent of orange blossom and myrtle that graced her train and bouquet would have lingered in the church after the ceremony. The most sensational, and memorable, aspect of Cissie’s bridal outfit was the jewellery – a magnificent set of diamonds and sapphires that were a gift from her future husband, and the start of a large collection of gems that Cissie would amass through her life with Bob.

After a reception at the Dunn-Gardner’s house in Prince of Wales Terrace, South Kensington, Cissie donned her travelling outfit of ‘pale grey plush and cashmere’, with a mantle trimmed with ‘skunk’,10 and the newly-weds set off for Folkestone, where they stayed a few nights. The day after the marriage, Cissie wrote in her journal, ‘A wet day. Didn’t go out. Amused ourselves as best we could indoors. Strange to say we didn’t quarrel nor were we bored with each other.’ After crossing the Channel to France, they travelled on, via Paris, to Marseilles and boarded the Minerva, to begin their sixteen-week honeymoon.

The yacht had its own story. It was built in Cowes in 1875 for Thomas Broadwood, of the piano-making firm Broadwood and Sons, and one of the specially installed features of the yacht was an ornately decorated upright piano. Weighing 383 tonnes, the yacht was hailed as one of the largest, if not the largest steamship yacht afloat. The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News11 carried a full-page image of it, and paid special attention to Mrs Broadwood’s ‘boudouir’, which had been ‘decorated and fitted in the Pompeian style’. Three years into his ownership, it was sold on to the Marquess of Conyngham, a Liberal Peer who sat in the House of Lords. But once again the Minerva ownership was short-lived, and, when Conyngham died in 1882, the Earl of Pembroke bought it, though Conyngham’s widow kept the piano. Ashton acquired it from Pembroke in 1884. Though she was already considered to be a masterpiece, he set about giving the yacht a makeover: she was ‘stripped, caulked and re-coppered’, and repainted and redecorated throughout.

Cissie thus never had to face the Pompeian boudoir, but she did have to cope with the choppy waters, and it soon became clear that she was not blessed with good sea legs. To begin with she had loved the yacht – ‘just like being on land in one’s own house’, she thought. But when the sea got really rough she had to flee to her cabin, and ‘Oh, how bad I was, I would have given anything to have been just dropped overboard.’ They went to Cannes and Nice, and dropped anchor at Monte Carlo where they visited the casino. After Menton and Genoa they headed for Elba, but by now, with the rolling of the yacht, Cissie was ‘utterly unhappy and sick of life’. And when Cissie thought she was doing wonders by staying on her feet, Bob reckoned that no one could be ill in such a ‘calm sea’. ‘I felt awfully small after this not too comforting remark.’

When he was not on his yacht, Robert Ashton’s main residence was Heywood Lodge in White Waltham, Berkshire, an imposing yellow brick three-storey house standing in its own grounds, and it was here that the Ashtons returned after their honeymoon.12 Cissie’s diaries indicate that to start with, she was clearly content to be in the countryside, where a lot of work was done on the garden, and family and friends visited them. And when the bright lights of London beckoned, the Ashtons stayed at the fashionable Alexandra hotel in Knightsbridge, or the brand-new and glamorous Metropole in Piccadilly. However, Cissie wanted her own London home to entertain in. ‘Even in those days you were more or less ambitious and quite naturally were determined to profit by your advantages,’13 a social commentator later wrote – and it was not long before she persuaded Bob to buy a house in London’s sought-after Park Lane. The area was largely popular with the nouveau riche, and Bob would certainly have felt at home among the millionaire mine owners and financiers.

Cissie ended her 1887 diary with, ‘The last hours of the old year! Goodbye, goodbye old year! The happiest one of my life!!!’ Her intense happiness owed much to the fact that she was pregnant. On 18 March 1888, she gave birth to a son, whom she would adore and worship for the rest of his life. The baby was christened Robert Cecil Noel, but from an early age everyone called him ‘Scamp’, and this nickname survived not only into adulthood, but in the family, he is still referred to by that name. By the end of the year, Cissie was pregnant again, but sufficiently confident to go on a cruise on the Minerva in the early summer of 1889, sailing round the Western Isles of Scotland – so the sound of the sea was ringing in my grandmother’s ears even while she was still in the womb.

Dorothy Violet Ashton was born at Heywood Lodge on 30 July 1889. Not long after her birth, the Ashtons moved to a new country residence – Leybourne Grange in Kent, situated between Maidstone and Sevenoaks. An estate agent of the day described it as a ‘most complete family mansion, seated in a finely-timbered park, and having 28 bed and dressing rooms, two bathrooms, seven reception rooms’.14 It also boasted gardens, glasshouses, and stabling for twelve horses. If Bob wanted to host country pursuits, shooting was available too. What my grandmother remembered most vividly about the years at Leybourne were the rides through the country lanes of Kent, with her mother driving the phaeton, drawn by two black horses called Shrewsbury and Talbot, the long white ends of the reins held in her white-gloved hands. ‘She looked very beautiful and radiant and young, with her golden-red hair piled up and a little hat on top of her head,’15 she recalled. Scamp always sat in the middle, wedged between the warmth of his mother and his sister. Dorothy wrote that she did not mind always being on the outside, because she could see their mother better, but this has a hollow ring to it: she knew from a very early age that her mother preferred Scamp.

It is plain from my grandmother’s memoirs that much of her early childhood was an idyll, apart, that is, from the ‘horror of the food one had to eat when one didn’t like it, and the misery of the daily walk’.16 She may have hated the walks but there was magic in exploring the woods with her brother, and playing in the deserted summerhouse. She writes about ‘leaves, leaves soughing, leaves lit, or heavy and silent before a storm, leaves pattering under thunder drops, oak leaves with intricate edges, limes leaves honeycombed by caterpillars, mulberry leaves rough like the chins of old men who kissed one, young chestnut leaves like hanging fingers, young beech leaves lovely beyond belief’.17 In her mind, when she wrote about that time, it was always summer.

Indoors, there was one place Dorothy loved. Her father’s study was stuffed full of objects: compasses, telescopes, magnets, charts of ocean currents, photographs of the moon’s landscape. When she sneaked in to say goodnight, he showed her his books about the moon, the stars and the sea. ‘Sometimes he told me the legend of Atlantis, of the Sphynx [sic], or the Golden Fleece, or the Phantom Ship,’ she remembered. It thrilled her that he could measure for her the length of the shadows of the moon. ‘Doubtless I was his favourite child.’18 There was enchantment in the conversations this little girl had with her father. And here began her education – albeit one that revolved round Greek mythology and the mysteries of the universe. He stretched her young mind, encouraging her to look beyond the horizon.

Dorothy and her brother called their father Oyster ‘because he was so silent with grown-up people, and seemed to shut himself up whenever they were near’. He would walk for hours round the garden, ignoring anyone who might have been within sight or earshot. But my grandmother delighted in shouting out this name when she met him walking in the woods, his eyes fixed on the ground, his hands behind his back. At sea her father seemed more ‘normal’. When he took the helm, he became active, rather than the dreamy, silent figure that he morphed into when he was land-bound.

These rose-tinted memories precede the single most important and devastating event of my grandmother’s early years. When she was just three days short of her ninth birthday, her father died at sea, and with him went the innocence of her childhood. When Cissie sent for Dorothy to tell her the news, Dorothy did not believe her. On the evening before the funeral, she addressed her father by saying out loud, ‘You must wake up quickly, they are going to bury you tomorrow.’ A letter from her was found under his pillow, so she knew that her words had been with him when he died. My grandmother described her young self as being ‘wrapped in black but suspicious grief’.19 She had convinced herself that her father might be feigning death: he was like a fragile and solitary ghost to her, so detached from reality as to be capable of playing a prank like this on his fellow human beings.

In the last two years of his life Dorothy had scarcely seen her father: ‘He was ill and lived chiefly on his yacht,’ she wrote in her memoir. Strangely, nearly twenty years earlier, Bob’s brother, Philip, had also died on his yacht. In Philip’s case it is pretty clear from the details that emerged later that drink, if not directly the cause of death, certainly contributed to it. Was my great-grandfather an alcoholic? That he removed himself more or less completely from the family in the last years of his life gives credence to this. Also, the long list of ‘debts’ due at his death – covering all the normal household expenses, plus items that reflect the Ashtons’ lavish lifestyle, include ‘£573.6s.6d’ to a ‘wine and spirit’ merchant by the name of Fearon. In today’s money that would be over seventy-five thousand pounds, and notwithstanding that it probably covered the bills for several houses, that still suggests a very high level of alcohol consumption. The monies owing to Garrards Jewellers pale in comparison. When I track down his death certificate, it leaves little room for doubt: cirrhosis of the liver, alongside mitral disease of the heart. The certificate also indicates that Bob was not alone on the yacht. Cissie’s youngest brother, Francis Dunn-Gardner, was with him, and he informed the authorities of the death, which occurred in the early hours of the morning. Might my great-grandfather’s death have been the culmination of a late-night drinking session with his brother-in-law, who, though half his age, seems to have been a regular drinking companion? And there is no doubt about the cause of Francis’s death eight years later: ‘Alcoholism 12 years and cirrhosis of the liver’.

Robert Ashton lit up his daughter’s early childhood and, when he was gone, Dorothy would gradually become aware that his influence on her was ‘deep and prolonged’. When she was old enough to try to understand his character, she wondered if he had realised that some people laughed at him behind his back. Others took advantage of him financially, his silent ways implying that he was unable to master the practicalities of life. Throughout her life she would seek out people who had known him, and would come across stories about him that helped to form a clearer view of him. If her father sensed that a person understood and appreciated what mattered to him, he would open up; if he felt the intensity of a physical warmth, he would drop his guard. Though she does not reveal who they were, my grandmother in her memoirs cites two women, one an historian (albeit, she alleges, of ‘inferior historical biographies’), the other a ‘carnal and beautiful woman’ with ‘the humanity that accompanies the type’. It is safe to assume that neither of these was his wife Cissie, whose absence from these accounts of Bob speaks volumes.

My grandmother believed that her father’s sensibility was derived from his paternal grandmother, a lady who suffered from chronic arthritis, and lived the life of an invalid, imprisoned by her ill health in a room at the top of the house. She devoted her entire life to doing translations into English of obscure German philosophers, and Scandinavian myths, which suggests that she was both erudite and literary. ‘She was the sweetest woman personally I have ever known,’ one person told Dorothy. My grandmother laments the fact that her grandmother had no literary ambition and the translations had never been published. In spite of every effort to do so, Dorothy never managed to trace the originals.

My grandmother likened her father to the hero of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, a novel about a good man out of place in a world where people he meets assume that his simplicity is a reflection of his stupidity. Some individuals told Dorothy that her father never said anything interesting, and even went so far as to offer the opinion that he was not ‘quite right in his mind’. This was in stark contrast to Dorothy’s memories of her beloved father. Though he rarely engaged people in conversation – aside from his young daughter – he did have the habit of talking to himself, which Dorothy concedes must have been very trying for her mother. I suspect that society and its conventions bored him, and he lived in an internal world of his own creation. Occasionally, however, if he was sitting at a dinner table and heard someone make an inaccurate statement relating to history, geography or general knowledge, he would rap the table and correct them.

From the picture my grandmother paints of her father it seems possible that he was on the autism spectrum, with all the brilliance and originality, and behavioural challenges that can accompany the condition. When she was writing her memoirs in the 1950s, the disorder had been identified just a few years previously, but she would almost certainly not have been aware of this. I also suspect that my great-grandfather may have found that alcohol acted as a successful coping strategy, masking autistic difficulties. For Dorothy he remained a ‘dreamer without purpose’, and a ‘poet without words’. He kindled in her a thirst for knowledge, and a fascination for the mysteries of the universe. And perhaps his unspoken poetry lurked in her psyche, reinforcing her urge to write – even in proxy for him, her lost parent.

CHAPTER TWO

You’re Only a Silly Gurl!

One morning, not long after the death of their father, Dorothy and Scamp were summoned to their mother’s bedroom. Still wearing her dressing gown, Cissie knelt on the floor in front of them – an uncharacteristic gesture of intimacy – and holding out her arms, declared, ‘I’m going to marry Lion. We’re going to live at Sandbeck for ever!’ Lion was their nickname for the Earl of Scarbrough (the family name was Lumley), who had been a familiar figure in their lives for as long as they could remember. He often visited them at Leybourne, and they in turn would stay regularly at Sandbeck in the West Riding of Yorkshire, one of his ancestral seats. However, in her memoirs Dorothy wrote that her father never accompanied them on the Yorkshire visits. ‘He always sailed on his yacht, Minerva,’ she wrote. This hints at something that my grandmother would never have written, but is gossip that has descended down the generations: for some years, before the death of her husband, Cissie had been having an affair with the Earl. The Ashtons would have become friends of the bachelor earl (known as Dandy by his friends) through their yachting life – Scarbrough was a keen sailor and a member of the Royal Yacht Club, and in a family album, there are photographs of them all together on the deck of the Minerva. Given his solitary, introspective nature, Bob may not have minded. But if he knew his wife had been unfaithful to him, could this have aggravated the alcoholism that undoubtedly he suffered from, and was the primary cause of his death? Aside from the vast inheritance that then passed to Cissie – the probate value of Ashton’s estate was in today’s money over sixteen-and-a-half million pounds, and the bulk of it went to Cissie – there was also an insurance policy that paid out today’s equivalent of a million-and-a-half pounds. Cissie was now herself a great catch.

Despite the fact that Dorothy liked Lion, and would become very fond of him, she cried when she heard the news that they were going to live somewhere else, and a sense of utter desolation descended upon her when they drove through the gates of Leybourne Grange for the last time. She seems to have suffered some kind of mental and physical breakdown, and this at only nine years old. Her mother had taken a small house as a staging post before moving after her marriage to live at Sandbeck, but all that Dorothy remembered from those days was being ill in bed with a high fever, visited by recurrent nightmares of being suffocated. ‘It was as if great swellings, purple coloured, swelled and swelled up all about and around me.’20 When she was recuperating, her mother came into her room, and laughingly said to the nurse, ‘It’s a good thing she’s better . . . we don’t want to lose her too!’ Dorothy found her mother’s sense of humour disconcerting, and determined to get well at once, but this traumatic passage in her life left her with a stammer which lasted for many years.

The society newspapers gushed over the news of the forthcoming nuptials, one describing Mrs Ashton as ‘one of the most picturesque and beautiful figures of the London season’.21 She was acclaimed for her ‘Titian-red’ hair, ‘every lock of it her own’, and her beautiful white skin. Her great wealth inherited from Ashton was widely commented on, and attention drawn to the ‘marvellous jewels’ given to her by her late husband, including priceless emeralds and pearls. Cissie was certainly able to deliver to her new husband an extraordinary dowry, which would have been, at the very least, a welcome replenishing of the Lumley coffers. When Scarbrough inherited the title from his father in 1884, the family estates were in a bad financial state, and he was forced to let Sandbeck for several years.22 Cissie’s granddaughter, Lady [Ursula, née James] Westbury is in no doubt – ‘her money certainly saved the Lumleys’.

The wedding took place in early April 1899, in Christ Church, Piccadilly, the bride dressed in pale grey crêpe de Chine, the colour of the outfit assuredly a nod towards her recent widow’s weeds. Even so, there was disapproval in some quarters that the nuptials were taking place so soon after the death of the bride’s first husband. Her outfit may have been relatively restrained but Cissie still managed to show off some of the diamonds and pearls. Dorothy was dressed in a white coat, trimmed with fur, and a white felt hat, with her brother Scamp carrying their mother’s train. After the reception at 21 Park Lane, again part of Cissie’s Ashton dowry, the newly-weds hastened to Sandbeck for their honeymoon, where they received a warm welcome from all those who worked in the house and on the estate. The children followed soon after, bringing with them a retinue of pets, including Dorothy’s pony Nobbie, and their Newfoundland dog, Gyp. From the start, Lion asked gently that they call him Daddy, and their fondness for him ensured they were happy to do this. Soon a whole bevy of new aunts came into Scamp and Dorothy’s lives: ‘subdued ladies, who spoke in thin, rather low voices’, Dorothy remembered. They all had titles, from birth and marriage, and they were steeped in the prejudices and dictums of the mid-Victorian era. They were a very different species from the Dunn-Gardner aunts. Cissie had three sisters, mention of whom crops up regularly in family letters, and even my father’s generation talked about the ‘aunts’.

Maude was a talented harpist, and apparently played for years in an orchestra in Vienna, though strangely under an assumed name, which might be due to the Townshend scandal effect. She travelled all over Europe, carrying her harp on her back. Violet started out as a singer, performing at La Scala Opera House in Milan, but later she decided to become an artist, and she studied in Paris, where she lived in the Quartier Latin. She knew both Rodin and Degas, the latter offering her any of his sketches she would care to take. The tale does not reveal why she refused this offer, though perhaps she did not wish to be seen to be taking advantage of such a friendship, or be in his debt in any way. Flora, widowed in 1896, devoted herself to bringing up her only child Robin. As for the grand aunts, I think that my grandmother felt that these ladies rather disapproved of her, though Constance Lumley, married to Scarbrough’s brother Colonel Osbert Lumley, was an exception. ‘You must call me Connie, not Aunt Constance,’ she told the little girl, who was touched and grateful for this informality and kindness. She was less keen on her new family electing to call her ‘Dottie’, a name she already disliked, but unfortunately it stuck with her for the rest of her life.

Scarcely had the children had time to get used to their new lives when the Second Boer War broke out and Scarbrough joined the Imperial Yeomanry, to fight for King and Country. For his wife there was little contest between duty to husband or children: she went to live in the Cape for a year and a half. Dottie was left in the hands of a ‘thin tall governess from Luxembourg’, and during term time Scamp was away at boarding school. But Cissie’s long, controlling arm reached back over the seas, instructing the governess to give her daughter four or five hours’ extra tuition a day, which to Dottie must have felt like a punitive measure. The governess earned her charge’s eternal gratitude by ignoring the instructions from the Cape when her pupil became hysterical, almost ill, reciting the day’s lessons while sleepwalking.

When Scarbrough returned unscathed from the war, having been mentioned in Dispatches, for some time afterwards Cissie insisted on having a service every morning in the small private chapel, as a thanksgiving for her husband’s safe return. My grandmother described the scene, set in the ‘really hideous Victorian chapel’, when the entire household were forced to attend. ‘In order of precedence: the butler, the housekeeper, the head housemaid, the six footmen, the groom of the chambers (whose sole duty was to attend to the writing tables in the house), the coachman, complete with wife, the grooms, the gardeners, and so on.’ She goes on to point out that ‘everyone knew their jobs and place’, and she included her parents in that, ‘His Lordship’ attending to his County and Estate duties, and her mother to her household responsibilities, though she claims that her mother hated ‘duty’, being by ‘nature a Bohemian’. The curious anecdote she deploys to illustrate this is that Lady Scarbrough would visit any estate workers who were sick, ‘carrying, as always, a cherry stick with a spud at the end’, which she would use to tap on the stones or path, calling out, ‘I’m coming to see you, but there’s no great hurry.’23 Raw potatoes were said to ward off germs.

At Christmas there was the Servants’ Ball, where the dancing would begin when Lord and Lady Scarbrough took to the floor with, respectively, the housekeeper and the butler, Dottie partnered the Groom of the Chambers, and Scamp chose ‘the prettiest housemaid he could find’. My grandmother reckoned that neither party enjoyed this tradition, and the staff were relieved when the family left the Ball and the revelry could begin.

Like many stately homes, Sandbeck had its ghost stories, and one of the servants, ‘an old and drunken housekeeper’, delighted in regaling the little girl with the gruesome details of a serving maid who had been incarcerated and starved to death by a forebear of the current Earl, and a stable boy who had murdered a garden boy out of love for one of the laundry maids, who then cut her own throat. Scamp would add to his sister’s torment by bringing back from school his collection of gory tales of ghosts, delivered with hideous grimaces and the assurance that ghosts were ‘spirits of bad men or murdered women and you can’t get away from them anywhere!’ Dottie found herself too frightened to sleep. But when she was a little older, she insisted on staying on her own at another Scarbrough property – the fourteenth-century Lumley Castle, in County Durham, which boasted its own company of ghosts. Dottie wanted, she remembered later, ‘to frighten myself till I should be frightened no more’.24

In 1902, in the honours list for Edward VII’s coronation, Scarbrough was appointed an aide-de-camp to the King. It was an opportunity for Cissie to show off her newfound social status, and she was photographed by James Lafayette – the most commercially successful portrait photographer of the day – in full peeress garb: silk and velvet robes, topped with one of her Ashton tiaras. Cissie fulfilled her duties as chatelaine of the Scarbrough houses, but in one respect she would judge herself to have failed her husband: when she married the bachelor earl, he would certainly have hoped she would deliver him an heir. But she had been less than honest about one important factor: just shy of forty, she had lied about her age. Had she confessed to her future husband that she could not claim to be good breeding stock, would the marriage have gone ahead? At the time (and arguably it is still the case in some aristocratic families), the provision of a boy to step into the title and ensure the continuance of the bloodline was regarded as a crucial element in a matrimonial match. There is a rather tragic rumour in the family that Cissie may have had a miscarriage at some point, and that the baby was a boy.

But Cissie did provide her husband with a girl, christened Serena, who was born in 1901. In the final stage of her mother’s pregnancy, unaware of the reason, Dottie had been sent away to stay with the family of her nursery nurse, Alice, who had hitherto been considered by her charge to be the enemy since she tended to side with her mother, and also with the ancient Nannie, a fearsome woman nicknamed Wa-Wa. Named after the wild goose in Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha, she was more like an evil witch from the Wizard of Oz, ‘a staid old pepper-pot shape of a woman’, who would advance towards Dottie, muttering maledictions like ‘You’re only a silly gurl, half dwarf, get out of my sight, you drive your own mother half wild’.25 It did not bode well when on the journey down to Norfolk, Alice muttered, ‘You’ll have to put off your pretty stuck-up ways with servants and all, and live as I lived as a child, and good for you too.’26 In the event Dottie had a wonderful time staying at the working mill. Alice, in her home setting, softened in her attitude, and her entire family welcomed their young guest in a warm and generous way. She found the fresh, straight-from-the-land food delicious. The flat, buttercup-filled marshlands and waterways were wonderful to explore, and above all she relished the freedom, and the sense that ‘no one here would ever tease or bully me’. In contrast to her own mother, Alice’s seemed like the ‘embodiment of laughter and kindness’. When she returned to Sandbeck her mother must have noticed the improvement in her health, since a stay at Alice’s Norfolk Mill would become a regular fixture when Dottie was ‘peaky’.

Though Dottie’s first instincts may have been jealous ones, she immediately fell in love with her new sister. Serena, who would be nicknamed Little Mite (later just Mite or Mitey) became hugely important to Dottie, the connections between them extending far beyond their blood ties. Around this time, when Dottie was about eleven, another figure entered her life, who would emerge as the adult that had the greatest influence on the latter days of her childhood. Sir George Goldie (at the time known for being the ‘founder’ of Nigeria) was a close associate of her stepfather. From the moment she met him he became her firm friend. With his beaky nose and emaciated appearance, to her young eyes he looked like a cross between a vulture and an Egyptian mummy, so she called him ‘Rameses’ [sic]. It was Goldie who first encouraged her to write poetry, urging her to study form, and to restrain her imagination by writing sonnets. ‘See to your manner, your matter will take care of itself.’ Goldie despised the way children were brought up to ‘think that fame, position, recognition by the public, are proper objects of ambition’. All his life he regarded ‘self-advertisers, from Caesar to Napoleon, as the worst enemies of human progress’.27

Goldie also believed in phrenology, a pseudoscience developed in the eighteenth century that claimed you could judge character by identifying the shape of the head. ‘Bumps are indicative of character,’ he told her. ‘Feel mine!’ she exclaimed on one of their walks, as she tore off her scarlet tam-o’-shanter, allowing Goldie to entwine his ‘gnarled and purple talons’ through her hair. ‘You’, he declared, ‘have the three bumps of temper, pride and combativeness more developed than anyone I have ever known.’ Goldie’s pronouncement seemed to excite Dottie; I suspect it even encouraged her to cultivate these traits. She was his eager listener. There was between them a ‘kinship of temperament’.28 When she longed to continue their walk into the untamed bit of the park, where the wild deer ranged through the long grass and bracken – ‘I like the park after the road ends’ – he replied, ‘You always will.’

‘Early childhood was coming to an end. With its passing an inner melancholy began to settle upon me.’ Though Dottie reflected that this could be put down to approaching adolescence, she believed that it was more to do with the conviction, deeply embedded in her psyche, that she was an ‘unmanageable, unattractive and plain child’. Up until this time, her instinctive excitement and curiosity about life had won the day, combatting the snubs and complaints from the ‘grown-up people’.

Now something else emerged that would become my grand mother’s touchstone through life: ‘From one day to another I discovered poetry.’ Dottie described the moment as being like Pandora’s box opening, and all the ‘miseries of the world’ flowing forth.29 She discovered that writing her own verse gave her incredible relief from all the anxieties that had beset her. She started to question everything, and realised the need to experience something herself before forming a judgement. She started to read avidly, waking up early to furtively take advantage of Sandbeck’s impressive library. But once again she was thwarted when a housemaid found her asleep on top of the library ladder. She was scolded and forbidden to do it again. But rebellion seeped out through other means, once again encouraged by Goldie. She and Scamp and their cousin Robin were violently opposed to the Christian religion, a stance that they knew would horrify their parents but was in tune with Goldie’s agnostic views. Out of the earshot of the Christian grown-ups in the house, Dottie would proclaim her opinions, ‘Church people are so immoral,’ she shouted, as she banged her fist on the schoolroom furniture. ‘They tell you to be good, because if you aren’t you will be punished afterwards. They bribe you to live decently by promising eternal happiness if you do. And a jolly sort of happiness they propose to give you too, after spoiling your life for you first.’30 This invective delighted her elderly mentor, who guffawed with laughter, and went on to tell her stories of the nineteenth-century Titan battles over Darwinism, as expounded by the scientist Thomas Henry Huxley (in Darwin’s corner) and the politician William Gladstone, who believed in the Genesis version of creation. It was probably Goldie who gave Dottie a copy of The Martyrdom of Man by William Winwood Reade. ‘This brilliant, ill-constructed, impassioned book, became my Bible,’31 she wrote later. The young Dottie developed a habit of reading the profane passages out loud, as she rode around the estate on her pony Nobbie, seemingly undeterred by the prospect of meeting one of the Scarbrough employees, or even a relation. Goldie, the eternal adolescent, would observe her from the sidelines, recognising something of his younger self when Dottie ranted about her most recent clash with authority, ‘It’s a disgrace, it’s snobbish, it’s intellectually dishonest.’

As she grew older, in their conversations no topics were out of bounds: politics, philosophy, poetry, sex, travel, science, or human relationships. Above all, Goldie cautioned her about the pitfalls and disillusions of love. Unlike many from his buttoned-up generation of Victorians, he overcame the British reserve to talk openly, even explosively, about his feelings. Later my grandmother would see that he had character flaws: ruthlessness, sometimes an indifference to the feelings of others, a contempt for sentimentality, an intolerance of incompetence. Often Goldie’s response to Dottie’s railing at the injustices or hypocrisies of life was carpe diem: ‘Never mind! Seize the day.’ No doubt aware that she hated the name Dottie, he called her M. A., from Miss Ashton. ‘M. A., don’t cry for the moon!’

Other than when Goldie was around, my grandmother considered that she grew up in a Philistine atmosphere, where ‘artists were unknown, poetry merely “funny”’. Fortunately she loved country life, so she could escape this disapproving atmosphere by being outside – riding, fishing, rowing. She and her cousin Robin would take the Lady Dainty