The Final Curtsey (12 page)
Authors: Margaret Rhodes
George VI, Denys’s mother and Queen Elizabeth at our wedding reception
My wedding dress was of white brocade and I wore the Elphinstone tiara. My dress was made by a Miss Ford who had an establishment just off Bond Street; my mother had had her clothes made by
her for years and so she thought it would be sensible if we used her services. I had three adult bridesmaids; two friends from my teens, Jeannine and Marigold Bridgeman and my cousin Diana
Bowes-Lyon, as well as two little girls, my nieces Jenny Gibbs and Susan Wills.
The King and Queen attended, which was especially important to me, because the King was my Godfather. There were huge crowds in Parliament Square and for the first time in my life I became, in
that much overworked present-day description, a celebrity. The whole day went by in a blur of hymns and music; champagne, voices; people, people, people and clouds of confetti. We caught the night
train to Edinburgh, where the Carberry chauffeur met us with a car we had been lent by my father. We drove to Birkhall which had been lent to us by the King and Queen, who had also hired a cook for
us for the first part of our honeymoon. I had a tremendous affection for the old house, which held many happy childhood memories for me, and we had a wonderfully peaceful time. Then we set off to
the south of France, where Patrick Plunket had rented a villa, perched on top of a hill, high above the Mediterranean. We had another blissful two weeks there and I learnt to gamble in the local
casino. The green roulette tables fascinated me and with beginner’s luck I actually made money. For a while I fostered the illusion that a casino was as good as a bank.
We returned to London, only to repack our bags to set sail for New Zealand for my introduction to Denys’ relations on the other side of the world. We made landfall at Christchurch after
five whole weeks at sea. There was a tremor of excitement at the arrival of Queen Elizabeth’s niece, and much to the amusement of Denys’ aunt Maire Hutton and his cousins, we had to be
photographed and interviewed by the press. Auntie Maire, the sister of ‘Tahu’ Rhodes, was married to a sheep farmer called George Hutton, who had been Lord Plunket’s ADC when he
was Governor of New Zealand. They were a wonderful couple and it was a deliciously eccentric household. They had dreaded my arrival, expecting a posh ‘Pom’ but they soon discovered that
their fears were groundless. Auntie Maire was large and untidy and always wore big felt hats, crammed on to her head at any old angle. She darned the heels of her stockings with whatever coloured
wool came to hand. They had no help in the house and Uncle George did his own washing in a bucket of cold water. Soap didn’t enter into this rudimentary laundry. It felt like there was mutton
for breakfast, lunch and tea. We herded the sheep, riding pensioned-off polo ponies, fished, shot and explored, sleeping in the back of a van we shipped out from England. We also went into the
barely explored areas in the deep south of South Island. This meant a sixteen-mile trek up a river carrying our kit, crossing smaller rivers supported by two lines of wire, one for our feet and the
other for our hands. It was a hair-raising experience when the rivers were in flood.
Our home for ten days was a one-room wooden shack shared with our guide and fellow shooter. It was, in retrospect, an odd way of spending a honeymoon. Each day we climbed through virgin forest
to reach the bare hilltops where the deer roamed. It was tough work and Denys succumbed to a knee injury so I went off alone. One day I heard a stag roaring not far away. I roared back, having been
taught to do so by our family stalkers. The stag took the bait and approached at an angry and inquisitive trot. I shot him and then skinned him with my not very sharp pen knife, in the way I had
learnt by watching the stalkers at home. It was something of a feat. Deer were regarded as pests in sheep-rearing country and culling was encouraged and organised officially by state governments. A
dollar bounty was the going rate for just a tail and obviously much more for a whole skin. I reckoned I was entitled to at least ten dollars, but did not claim it.
But being the niece of the Queen Consort of New Zealand had its obligations — or drawbacks. We were invited by an organisation glorying in the name of the Pioneer Women of New Zealand to a
reception in our honour in Christchurch. The very thought of it sent a chill down my spine, but there was no possibility of refusal, however polite. It was a memorably ghastly event and to my
dismay we were greeted by a pipe band which preceded us up the drive of a large suburban house where the rituals were to be staged. The gathering included all the great and the good of South
Island, brought to order by the forceful President, a Miss Wigley, who made a speech of welcome. Her best friend, whose name I can’t remember, was in attendance. In the middle of the
discourse the ‘best friend’ turned round to do some vital thing she had forgotten. The Wigley barked at her: ‘Don’t turn your back on royalty.’ The ultimate
embarrassment was the line-up, when all the guests shook our hands and either bowed or curtseyed, probably after a rehearsal conducted by the President. The cousins, acting as sub-royalty for the
day, clustered in the background doubled up with laughter, but fortunately the Wigley, who by then was in ecstasy, failed to notice.
We returned home in June 1951. Our honeymoon, extraordinary though it may seem these days, had lasted nearly a year. We looked at various houses and found in those days that prices dropped like
a stone when you looked in the south west. We fell in love with a rather dilapidated former rectory called Uplowman near Tiverton which had been used by American troops during the war. My darling
father bought the house for us for £8,500. I had my first baby, Annabel, in February 1952 in London. She decided to arrive late at night and with labour increasing we set off for the hospital
in North London via Hyde Park. We swished in through the gate at the top of Exhibition Road, but to our horror, not least that of the expectant mother, we found the gate at the other end firmly
shut. It was an awful moment; was my baby to be born in a car? I really needed to get to the hospital and a midwife quickly. Then we had a stroke of fortune; a policeman turned up out of the blue
and after giving Denys a short lecture on the opening and closing times of the park, produced a key, wished us well and let us out.
Once I was in the hands of the midwives Denys took himself off to Whites, his club in St James’s Street, in search of strong drink. This was well before the days of fathers being
encouraged to observe every twist and turn of a birth, and personally I did not want him there; it was woman’s work, I reckoned. Anyway a delicious little girl duly arrived, perfect in every
detail. Back at home Annabel was looked after by a monthly nurse who was very efficient but impossibly grand. She name-dropped duchesses she had attended and seemed on intimate terms with many
fathers in the membership of Whites. We soon acquired a local farmer’s daughter as a nursery maid. Three more children arrived, Victoria, born in London in 1953, Simon, in 1957 at home and
Michael, in 1960. For a short time we had a nanny and a nursery maid as well as a live-in couple. In those days the wage for a couple was £7 pounds a week and for the nursery maid
£3.
Our family home in Devon had thirty acres. The house was three-storied, had six bedrooms and a small flat for the married couple who cooked, cleaned and did the gardening. Mr and Mrs Mallet
stayed with us for twenty-five years helping us to bring up the children and get on with our lives. We did all this on £3,000 a year, which was the income from my Elphinstone marriage
settlement.
A family group at Uplowman, painted by Terry Whidborne, Denys’ first cousin
I had married a very attractive pauper. Denys did not then have a conventional job, but as I had grown up in a household where none of the men actually had salaried positions it seemed the
natural order of things and it was good to have the father of the house around all the time. We were incandescently happy and worked like beavers to create a garden. We had a couple of cows and
we turned the barn, once the village school, into a deep litter hen house and turkey run rearing the birds for the Christmas trade. We also kept a pig called Percy which lived on the household
scraps. When the time came for poor Percy to go to the slaughterhouse I was distraught. The worst moment was when I went to pick up his corpse from the abattoir. The dead pigs were hung from
their back legs, but I recognised Percy at once and felt even guiltier. I was obviously not cut out to be a livestock farmer.
We loved Uplowman. It was a wonderfully relaxing environment and nobody seemed to mind if I went shopping with my hair in rollers and a cigarette clenched between my teeth. Denys would shut
himself away in the summer house and write books in the style of Hammond Innes, published by Longmans. He also went on expeditions for an organisation engaged in desert locust control in the Sudan,
Somalia and Kenya and later undertook a search for uranium in Tanzania. His books were largely based on personal experience. One of them,
The Syndicate
, was turned into a rather awful film
which seemed to have little relationship to the book. Denys received the princely sum of £500 for the rights and we went to see it at the Electric Cinema in Tiverton. We rather wished we had
not been included in the credits.
We also entertained our friends and family. The Queen, Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret came for the weekend. Each of them put up their detectives in the local pub, where on one occasion
Margaret’s policeman made very extensive use of the bar facilities. When the Queen came to stay there was more than usual collaboration with the local constabulary and coppers lurked in the
bushes round the house. A footman came to help with the breakfast trays, and the Queen’s Dresser was allocated one of the children’s rooms, who after eviction had to camp out elsewhere.
In the evening we played ‘the Game’ with one person acting out the title of a book, a saying or a song which had to be guessed by the others.
Denys at Uplowman, 1960
Memorably one of the other guests, David Stirling who was responsible for the setting up of the Long Range Desert Group, later to become the SAS, was told to act
The Taming of the Shrew
which involved this immensely tall man pretending to be a mouse running up the Queen’s skirts. We were crying with laughter but David got quite huffy because we thought his acting was not
of Old Vic standards. On the Sunday of the visit we all went to church in the village which delighted our old vicar. I put my foot down at housing Margaret’s Dresser and assumed an older
cousin role. With our growing family there just wasn’t room. Margaret could be a demanding guest, and on one occasion, when she brought her husband, Tony Armstrong-Jones, the lavatory seat
in their bathroom came apart. I assume that Tony must have sat down heavily. They wanted a replacement installed at once, but it was just not possible over a weekend and we firmly told them so.
For a couple whose every whim was pandered to, they took it quite well and there were no more complaints.
Left to right:
Annabel holding Penny, Michael, Denys, Victoria and Simon in Scotland