The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me (21 page)

Alathea and her three sisters were brought up to be cultured, literary women, learning languages and reading politics and history as well as all the regular lessons. Yet they were only too aware of the disaster of their gender – the family’s wealth was tied up with the Burghclere title and the lack of a son meant that both the barony and the money would disappear. (When an uncle famed for magic tricks came to visit, the young Gardner girls would beg him to turn them into boys.) Given these family tensions, it was a relief to Alathea’s parents when their second daughter agreed to marry twenty-seven-year-old Geoffrey Fry.

Geoffrey was a member of the Bristol-based family that had made its fortune in the nineteenth century with the popular drink Fry’s Cocoa. As ‘Manufacturers to H. M. The King’, Fry’s produced the famous Five Boys chocolate bar that was moulded to show five versions of a little boy’s face, moving from ‘desperation’ through ‘pacification’ to ‘Realisation “It’s Fry’s.”’ Geoffrey’s wealth came from the chocolate factories but he was no swaggering industrialist. He didn’t have as many titles as the Gardners and Herberts, but he was an educated, sensitive man – a contradictory mix of belle époque aesthete with a Quaker background. His father had been Sheriff of Bristol and he counted among his ancestors Elizabeth Fry, the ground-breaking campaigner for prison reform.

Geoffrey studied Classics at King’s College, Cambridge, where he was close to Rupert Brooke; he was not the only man or woman in love with the alluring poet whom Yeats described as ‘the handsomest young man in England’. The two men had a long correspondence that Geoffrey later donated to the university library. It was a terrible loss for him when Brooke died en route to Gallipoli in 1915; Jennifer remembered the poet’s photograph in an oval, silver frame by her father’s bed throughout her childhood. Tragedy continued when Geoffrey’s only brother, Harold, was killed in France the following year, months after Jennifer’s birth. Geoffrey did not serve in the war, probably because of delicate health, but he became involved in politics, serving as (unpaid) private secretary to the Conservative Prime Minister, Andrew Bonar Law, and then between 1923 and 1937 to Stanley Baldwin, throughout his three periods as Prime Minister.

The few photographs of Alathea and Geoffrey together show an appealing couple, with furs, fine clothes and self-absorbed, sensitive intelligence. Geoffrey was quite a dandy, with superb tailored suits topped by debonair cloaks and hats, and his favoured oval Turkish cigarettes. He was, however, a prickly and critical husband and father, and the household was not a happy one. Alathea’s sisters told the story that when, on her wedding night, the bride had knelt to say her prayers by the bed as she always did, the groom laughed. Alathea’s piety, inherited from her mother, was only one element of difference in a marriage that was strained.

According to Jennifer, her father used to tell her how disappointed he had been when she was born and he discovered that she was not a boy. ‘I wanted to put you in a bucket and drown you like a kitten,’ he joked cruelly. Jennifer was left-handed, something Geoffrey had suffered with as a child, when pedagogical practice encouraged tying his left hand to his high chair so he would use the right. But this shared trait did not endear his daughter to him. And by the time Jennifer was old enough to be taunted and rejected by her father, her mother had become a reclusive semi-invalid and was also largely unavailable to her daughter. Still beautiful and dressed exquisitely, Alathea spent much of her time in bed, attended to by the best doctors and nurses, staying in clinics and convalescence homes and taking therapeutic trips to warmer climes.

During their many years of marriage, both Geoffrey and Alathea took their breakfast in bed, but in separate rooms. Impatient and nervy, Geoffrey hated dawdling. Chafing to get on with the day’s endeavours, he would down his breakfast tea and hurriedly gobble a boiled egg and brown toast with honey. Alathea, on the other hand, followed her ‘tea and bath ceremony’, with hours in her spacious bathroom, followed by dressing, applying delicate make-up and choosing her jewellery, which usually included a long string of pearls. She read in her room, answered letters, and if it was a good day she’d be ready in time for lunch. Her movements were slow and when she stood up, she leaned back slightly, one slender hand placed lightly on her chest. She was always late.

ALATHEA FRY GAZING AT A BUST OF DANTE

When Geoffrey commissioned Walter Sickert to paint Alathea’s portrait in 1934, the celebrated avant-garde artist sent a photographer to snap the Hon. Lady Fry in bed as she took breakfast. When Sickert had completed the work, Geoffrey was instructed to ‘meet his wife’s portrait off the train’ and found an unconventional depiction of his wife staring wide-eyed from a mass of pillows and bedding – a pose which truly captured her in the place she came to inhabit most, and was thus closer to her essence than the many more graceful, highly stylised, photographic portraits that exist.248

As with so many children of her milieu, Jennifer was largely cared for by nannies. By the age of five she had already been through nine, several of whom had been unkind and violent. She was hit and shut in the cupboard, and at the age of three was smacked for dancing on the grass in her white boots. It seemed wrong to worry her fragile mother with these things; ‘Don’t disturb Mummy’ was the watchword of the house. Even a peep around the door to see the bedside table covered with potions, pills and a jug of home-made barley water was discouraged. Decades afterwards, Jennifer wrote part of an autobiographical short story about ‘Miss Jane’ being summoned to say goodnight to her mother. The young girl dreaded the darkened room, the smell of scent, the lack of response.

Mummy was everything. Beautiful, frail, dressed in satin negligées, sometimes a yellow Spanish shawl. A nurse in a white uniform stood like a sergeant by the door. In her hand was a syringe, negligently but obviously held. ‘Do come in, dear, Mummy wants to say good night.’ On the pink draped bed, swathed in lace and satin, her mother lay. Jane sat on the bed as near as she dared and gazed at the beautiful lost face. She tentatively put her hand on her mother’s arm and then kissed it, where the veins were blue. The arm was swiftly withdrawn and Jane felt she had committed some unknown sin.

Like countless mothers of the time, Alathea was denied the opportunity to look after her child and had little else to occupy her. The figure of the sick mother, neurotic, fainting, depressed and ‘ill’ on a couch or in her bedroom is a staple of the reality and fiction of the time and was often linked to ‘a profound sense of uselessness’.249 Alathea’s reliance on various drugs was only increasing. Many later surmised that it was Geoffrey who contributed more than the nannies to his wife’s malaise. His unkindness was never of the noisy or physical variety, but there was an unhappy vacuum left by his criticism and undermining emotional absence.

The family had been based in a large apartment near Berkeley Square in London, but when Jennifer was four, they acquired a Queen Anne house in Wiltshire. Built of ornamental black and red brick and surrounded by walled gardens, Oare House is tucked below the Downs near Marlborough. Set high enough to have stunning views of the undulating Vale of Pewsey, it is still low enough to feel intimately connected to the avenues of old trees and lush meadows of grazing sheep that surround it. The square eighteenth-century building was wonderful, but not quite big enough for the Frys, who wanted a drawing room ‘large enough for dancing’, a substantial library for all their books, good-sized bedrooms and a modern kitchen to replace the old one in the basement. Geoffrey called in the fashionable Welsh architect Clough Williams-Ellis, who added two new brick wings in two phases. A 1928 Country Life article shows that the collaboration was a great success. There was an atmosphere of almost austere elegance to the new neoclassical drawing room and Ionic-columned library that contained ‘a handsome set of Empire chairs covered in rose and wine coloured velvet’. Huge windows flooded the rooms with light. Alathea’s spacious bedroom was a shrine to her delicate tendencies – a place it was tempting never to leave. There was ‘an amusing bed of her own designing’, hung with Shantung silks which ‘combine mauves, yellows and black’. The walls and ceiling were ‘sunlight’ painted and the effect was both ‘restful and bright’.250 In contrast, Geoffrey’s dressing room was a modest room along the corridor, where he slept in an austere single bed. It always smelt of aftershave. Clough Williams-Ellis designed new gardens, loggias and walkways, a swimming pool gleaming turquoise amidst swathes of bright greens, and even wooden garden furniture and a lead gutter hopper that commemorates the Frys’ creation with their initials: ‘AF, GF, 1925’.

OARE HOUSE TODAY. JENNIFER’S NURSERY AND BEDROOM WERE ON THE TOP FLOOR OF THE MAIN PART OF THE HOUSE, WHILE ALATHEA’S BEDROOM WAS AT THE END OF THE RIGHT-HAND WING, ADDED (WITH THE LEFT) BY CLOUGH WILLIAMS-ELLIS IN 1925

Jennifer and her nanny were kept far away from the airy new wings, on the attic floor of the main house. A steep, narrow staircase wound up to the low-ceilinged nursery and bedrooms for employee and offspring – a child-sized realm looking down to the gardens and across to the chalk swellings of the Downs. It was much too far to shout and be heard by either parent, let alone envisage going to visit them in the night, though as Jennifer grew older she appreciated the expanses of roof terrace above the recent extensions that were perfect for hiding or sunbathing. The child was miserable with her various nannies, and saw herself as ‘the orphan on the top floor’, but she loved rural life. Later she recalled in a stream of consciousness ‘the lanes and hedgerows on the way to Huish. The wild garlic and wild flowers – vetch, scabious. The mystery and sinister atmosphere of the village s… Biblical names – Zebedee. The white road to the church past Mr Strong’s farm. Elderberries, slightly dusty. Gophin Wood with King John’s treasure buried nearby … the Post office with sweets in glass jars and liquorice bootlaces.’

Geoffrey was often away for his work, but when he was at Oare he strode about the grounds organising the gardens, planting rare shrubs (never with variegated leaves – terribly vulgar), putting in avenues, and saddening his wife and daughter by cutting down trees to open up some vista or other. When she wasn’t in bed, Alathea was frequently absent, as testified by the many letters Jennifer wrote to various European spas and hotels to her ‘Darlingest Darling Mummy’ with ‘very best love’ from ‘Baby Mink’ or ‘your loving Black-Panther’. Their relationship was one of pure adoration from a distance, unsullied by bad moods or temper, which never got an opportunity to be expressed. ‘I wish I was on the ship with you,’ wrote Jennifer aged about seven. ‘Thank you for your lovely letter. I love porpoises they salute so beautifully … Harvey has put my swing on a different branch and it goes much better and higher.’

When Jennifer was seven or eight, Alathea missed her daughter’s birthday celebrations.

My Sweetest Mummy

Thank you so much for the watch and book, it looks so interesting. I had lots of presents. A baby doll and books, a Hymn book, some little knifes and forks and spoons. A little case with a thimble and knife and scissors. A post card album. Some chocs from Mr and Mrs Baldwin, a toy theatre. The Birthday cake was lovely. We had a treasure hunt.

Tons and Tons of love and kisses from

Jennifer

As Jennifer became more aware of herself physically, she felt very insecure about her looks; round-faced and more curvaceous than her wafting mother, she felt galumphing and unattractive. Even worse was the wretchedness brought on by her father, whose criticism and impatience – ‘drumming and snapping at us’ for being slow – could make meals a particular misery. If a child ate toast with two hands, Geoffrey would snap, ‘One hand, not two, like the monkeys at the zoo.’ In later life, Jennifer described the tensions associated with the dining room.

There was so much to eat in those days, and no choice not to eat it unless you were a rebel. If you were an unconfident only child you ate too much, too quickly, especially on Sundays, after church, when you were cross questioned on the sermon, often in the midst of a luncheon party of elderly but not entirely unsympathetic politicians and the occasional local writer. It was a nerve-wracking and silencing experience, and one which has had a lasting effect on my feelings and behaviour.

One autumn evening when Jennifer was about six, she was in the hall having tea – the house was still unfinished and this was the most convenient place to sit by a fire. ‘We were awaiting the arrival of the new governess,’ she wrote. ‘I was very nervous as I’d been warned by the last nanny she’d give me “what for”. “You wait,” she said as she stomped out.’ With the arrival of Miss Beatrix Smith, soon to be known by all as ‘Pixie’, Jennifer’s life changed unrecognisably. ‘It was instantaneous love,’ she wrote. When Pixie’s cases were carried up to her bedroom near Jennifer’s in the attic, the young charge helped her unpack. Although Pixie was not beautiful, and would never compare to Alathea for elegance or style, she had an open face and clear blue eyes and she loved nice clothes. Jennifer was delighted at all the outfits that emerged, and was allowed to try on the new governess’s different hats.

‘Happy times started, and soon reading and writing and walks under the lime trees where she would find fairies in the roots and tell stories.’ The nursery room became a cosy haven rather than a lonely exile. There was a blackboard, a wooden table and shelves of books: E. Nesbit, Frances Hodgson Burnett (Pixie read The Secret Garden aloud and The Little Princess was a firm favourite) and the Red, Blue and other coloured Fairy Books, whose illustrations Jennifer tinted with watercolours where her mother had not already done so at the turn of the century.

Gentle, kind and exuding Christian goodwill to all, Pixie was to remain Jennifer’s doting and unmarried fairy godmother for the rest of her long life (she died aged a hundred). She became a substitute for an inadequate mother, a cold father and the lack of any siblings. Jennifer always claimed that ‘Pixie saved me.’ Certainly, she gave her the love and security previously missing in a life that otherwise looked fortunate and privileged.