Did You Really Shoot the Television? (8 page)

The children walked everywhere: ‘It is only by walking that one
gets to know a district and its inhabitants intimately. I knew every cottage, every bird’s nest, within our little territory. For me, the country was never a slow cabbagey sort of place, but was rich in incident. And, though I didn’t understand it at the time, I realise now that many of the country people we knew were absolutely cracked.’ A woman just up the road killed herself by drinking a bottle of disinfectant. A nearby farmer, faced by financial ruin, shot himself. The local vicar, ‘burdened with many children and a defeated wife’, lived in threadbare poverty and played tennis in his socks. The local gamekeeper commanded a special interest, because despite his gun and appearance of robust self-sufficiency, he was rumoured to be beaten by his spouse. As late as the 1920s, in southern England barely forty miles from London, Anne remarked that rural life was conducted in a manner far more closely resembling that of the mid-nineteenth century than that of the twentieth.

The Scott-Jameses possessed one mildly upmarket connection. Violet’s elderly aunt Eleanor Craven, Captain Brooks’s sister, a childless widow, maintained considerable state in a large flat in Westminster. Rolfe’s three children were dispatched to lunch with her on alternate Sundays. On these occasions, they were torn between delight in the delicious food and trepidation provoked by Aunt Eleanor’s stern formality: ‘She wore long black or grey dresses over petticoats, high wired Edwardian collars, a diamond brooch, doeskin gloves and highly polished buckled shoes over black open-work stockings, and her hair was piled into an elaborate coiffure which I later learned was a toupee.’ Any child who resorted to slang at her table – ‘top hole’, ‘ripping’, ‘She’s a beast’ – was sternly rebuked. Although Mrs Craven was deeply religious, with a horror of Roman Catholics, it was not faith which dominated her conversation, but etiquette: ‘A lady never makes personal remarks’; ‘A lady never mentions the food at luncheon’; ‘A lady always wears gloves.’ Bedspreads must be of real linen, writing paper die-stamped. Anne once arrived at the flat clutching
Tiger Tim’s Weekly
, her favoured leisure reading at the time. This was removed in the hall, and returned in stony silence on her departure.

During the winter, Aunt Eleanor decamped for three months with
her maid, a parrot in a cage and ten pieces of heavy leather luggage to rooms at Bath or Ventnor on the Isle of Wight. Anne and Marie were occasionally dispatched to spend a week with her, and found these experiences tedious. Their best features were substantial tips – Aunt Eleanor was generous to all her family offshoots, especially in their financial crises. In her company, however, ‘there was much kindness in the air, but not much laughter’.

At the Scott-Jameses’ home in Bayswater, strict economy prevailed, on the lines practised a generation earlier by Edward Hastings. To avoid running up electricity bills, they fed a slot meter with shillings. One night before a dinner party, Rolfe forgot to top it up. The house was plunged into darkness as soup was served. This was an embarrassment, for the guests included the visiting American editors of the
Christian Science Monitor
. The family never ate in restaurants, and took taxis only in cases of sickness or when burdened with luggage. Many of the girls’ clothes were second-hand. They never resented this, however, because Violet, Marie and Anne often received the cast-offs of a rich and fashionable godmother. They spent hours darning stockings and altering dresses. They shopped at Barker’s rather than Harrods. Save for Rolfe’s whisky nightcaps, alcohol was served only at dinner parties, but they found this no hardship: ‘We were a non-alcoholic family from preference, not principle.’ Their one notable luxury was the theatre, which they indulged enthusiastically, queuing night after night for seats in the pit. They also enjoyed annual seaside holidays in the wildernesses of Wales and Cornwall. The latter, especially, became one of the most beloved places in Anne’s life.

She was sent to school first at Norland Place in Holland Park, then to St Paul’s, where she became a star. She was one of those unusual people who adored her schooldays, which she found far more rewarding than home life. A precocious child in classes two years older than herself, she flourished academically, socially, athletically. She even enjoyed regular visits to a settlement in Stepney which St Paul’s helped to support, in a manner common to most public schools of the day. She played tennis for the school team and in 1931
won a classical scholarship to Somerville, Oxford. Her only subsequent regrets about her education were that she learned nothing of science, which remained a lifelong mystery to her, and that she was denied the smallest opportunity to form acquaintances with boys. ‘We complained bitterly to each other about the shortage of young men as dancing partners and had callow longings for a romantic friendship, Hollywood-style, with some charming hero who would kiss one lightly on the cheek, send one bouquets of flowers, and take one on platonic trips to Paris. So total was our innocence that I thought of marriage as a specially pleasant form of social life. As for homosexuality, I had never heard of it.’

Anne’s university life, however, proved much less happy. Oxford cast no more of a spell upon her than it did upon me, thirty-three years later. Having attended London day schools, she bitterly resented the confinement, under mediaeval rules designed to preserve chastity, which prevailed in women’s colleges in the early 1930s. She wrote later: ‘Oxford was a good place for female swots with their minds concentrated on their degrees, and doubtless for lesbians, although I never consciously met any. It was a tolerable place for the few who broke all the rules and led a heady mixed social life. For the others, it could be a lonely world, with every twinge of melancholy aggravated by the rain-washed spires, tolling bells, and miasmas from the river.’

Like so many adolescents, and indeed undergraduates, Anne felt that somewhere in the city, wonderful things were happening, to which she was not invited. She was dismayed to perceive that it was not only acceptable, but fashionable, for the university’s young men to cling to each other rather than to women: ‘The whole point of Oxford is that there are no girls,’ as Compton Mackenzie’s priggish hero Michael Fane says in
Sinister Street
. Romance was administratively impeded by the locking of Somerville’s gates at 10.30 p.m., which made it necessary for a girl to climb in over the wall, even if she had merely been to the cinema: ‘It was all so silly.’ In 2007 a book was published entitled
Singled Out
, tracing the fate of the generation of girls who found themselves without men after the slaughter of the First World War. Anne was deeply moved by it. Although a
decade younger than the women depicted in the book, she perceived herself, too, as a social victim of the period which it addresses.

In her second year she fell in love with a third-year Balliol undergraduate, with whom she conducted a passionate affair. In 2003, interviewed for
Desert Island Discs
, she was at pains to emphasise that even if there was not much heterosexual sex in the Oxford of 1932–33, she herself was not deprived. She was galled that this titbit was edited out of the broadcast, for she was always oddly eager that the world should know that she had enjoyed an active love life as well as a career. She and her lover drifted apart after he went down. In place of romance, she was obliged to rebuff two proposals of marriage, one from a spotty young historian, the other from a rugby Blue in whose face she laughed ‘with a callous contempt which makes me shudder with remorse to remember’. Another young man was sufficiently stricken to offer a charmingly original compliment. Years later, he described Anne to a friend as ‘the most orchidiferous girl I met at Oxford’. On her side, she said that the two most striking men she encountered there were Adam von Trott, later executed for his role in the July 1944 bomb plot against Hitler, and George Steer, who became a famous foreign correspondent, notably for his reporting of the Spanish Civil War. Both were, however, too mature, glamorous and remote to reciprocate her interest.

She was strikingly good-looking, though very conscious of her six-foot height, which made her socially uneasy. She forged some close and lasting friendships, but was much less comfortable with casual acquaintances. She sang in the Bach Choir, and developed a passion for Greek which, towards the end of her second year, assisted her to gain a First in Honour Mods. Then, for one unhappy term, she read Greats, and developed an allergy towards Philosophy: ‘I am a worldly person, loving people and places and art, but never happy wandering about in a haze of abstract ideas. My father kept telling me that philosophy enlarges the mind, but I chose to keep mine small.’ Confronted with the prospect of two more years’ study, to the fury of her parents and of Somerville, she dropped out. In June 1933, longing for London and a job, she quit Oxford.

For the first three weeks thereafter, she drove across Europe to Prague with two friends from university, in a car which they clubbed together to buy for £100. In those days, a journey so humdrum by modern standards was intensely exotic. ‘Along the road from London to Prague there is a necklace of antiquities, landscapes, local customs, changing languages, varied food.’ She was captivated by the Baroque wonders of Germany, shocked by Nazism. In a village in Bavaria, an old man spat at Anne and her friend Sally Graves, calling them painted whores. It was a relief to cross the frontier into Czechoslovakia, following little country roads to visit the churches and castles of southern Bohemia. They slept in farmhouses, once on straw in a barn. The others drank local beer, but Anne never touched alcohol until she was forty, a manifestation of her intensely disciplined character. ‘Few journeys have given me more pleasure than that first foreign encounter with no social obligations or business appointments, just unplanned days and companions who were always in good humour. I knew this would be my last carefree outing for a long time, for the serious business of job-hunting awaited me on my return.’

It was the depth of the Depression, a bad time to look for work. Overlaid on national circumstances was the fact that Anne was a woman – worse, an educated one. Few girls entered the professions or the City. A friend of her parents was a director of the biscuit manufacturers Huntley & Palmer. He agreed to see her, but said immediately at the interview: ‘We do not employ women, Anne, except at factory level, and we have no present intention of doing so. Women aren’t good at business, and it wouldn’t be fair on the men.’ She asked: was there not the humblest opening in the office? ‘No, only in the factory and that leads nowhere. Your mother tells me you went to Oxford. Frankly, that’s a disadvantage. There is no room in industry for educated women. The men don’t like them.’

She spent some weeks answering correspondence from readers at
Weldon’s
, a downmarket women’s magazine, and was appalled by the range of troubles which the letters revealed. She felt so sorry for the writers that she set out to answer them individually, and at length.
One girl was going to a dance, and wanted advice on what to do with a short, twenties style evening dress – there was no chance of affording a new one. Anne, already keenly interested in fashion, suggested that her correspondent should make a gathered overskirt of net, short in front and dipping at the back, of which she attached a sketch. Another girl described frightful monthly periods. Anne rang her own doctor, who advised that her correspondent needed medical help, fast. For Anne’s services as an agony aunt she was paid twenty-five shillings a week, and soon quit.

She spent a much happier spell as a temporary salesgirl at Harrods’ Christmas Toy Fair, though it was debatable whether she possessed the gifts for a hard sell. One of Anne’s social handicaps was an irresistible urge to tell the truth, in a fashion worthy of Saki’s hostess who told the cook that she drank. At Harrods, she blurted out to one customer: ‘This place is much too expensive for Christmas stocking toys – you want Woolworths.’ The millionaire publisher Sir Edward Hulton, later an important force in both Anne’s and Mac’s lives, came searching for a rocking horse for his ward, Jocelyn Stevens, aged two. ‘You want the smaller size,’ declared Anne firmly, with scant regard for the interests of either her employers or the infant Jocelyn. She loved the store, in those days shamelessly paternalistic. Yet the shadow of poverty hung heavy over most of its staff. In Harrods’ staff restaurant, prices were generously subsidised, but as Anne ate crumpets she watched men who confined themselves to tea. They came from homes where every penny counted, and deeply resented the injustice that women like herself should have jobs, while so many men lacked employment.

Only after six months of increasingly desperate job-searching did Anne strike lucky. She answered an advertisement in
The Times
for a personal assistant to the managing director of
Vogue
magazine, Harry Yoxall. She overdressed for the interview, in a bright tartan suit and choker of huge wooden beads. Yoxall, a tall, heavy, dyspeptic-looking figure in his late thirties, asked some penetrating questions and observed – with a bleak glance at the tartan suit – that he doubted whether Anne possessed the chic to work for
Vogue
. But
something impressed him. He offered her a month’s trial at three pounds a week, rising to £3.15
s
if she was retained thereafter. Part of the deal was that she must double as assistant to Yoxall and the knitting editor. She assured both that she was an accomplished wielder of needles, and on the way home bought a book entitled
First Steps to Stylish Knitting
.

She stayed at
Vogue
for seven years, the first three working on publicity for Yoxall, whom she came to respect deeply. Thereafter she advanced from sub-editor to copywriter, commissioner and then beauty editor. In those days in the media, she observed, there were no teenage columnists, nor indeed were young whizz-kids anywhere apparent. In every walk of life it was deemed necessary to work a passage through the ranks, to serve one’s time learning a trade. She was introduced to the vernacular of women’s magazine journalism, in which no cliché was left unstoned – ‘pencil-slim’, ‘nostalgic, ‘vibrant with colour’, ‘spiced with white’. Readers were sternly incited to ‘Take stock of yourself,’ ‘Re-think your dinner parties,’ ‘Look in the mirror and see what you can take off,’ invocations as familiar seventy-five years ago as they are today. After the first two years her salary rose to £5, and she earned an extra pound moonlighting as an advertising copywriter. She rented a one-room flat in Meriden Court, a block off the King’s Road, for £90 a year, and bought an old Morris Cowley. Off duty she read a lot – Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Hardy, Flaubert, Tolstoy – and became a regular concert-goer, often standing for two or three backbreaking hours in the Queen’s Hall to save the price of a seat. Bach was her first enthusiasm, soon supplanted by Mozart, a lifelong passion. Like all her generation, she adored cinema. She holidayed twice in France, learned to love it, and always regretted that she never mastered the language, nor indeed any other beyond restaurant level. Like most of her middle-class generation, she knew nothing of cooking.