My 1950s gap year at the richest palazzo in Venice
One golden rule,’ said the artist Oliver Messel to the 25-yearold Gill Johnson in 1957, as they stood inside one of the most beautiful palazzos in Venice: ‘always be in the right place at the right time with the right people.’
Gill certainly was in the right place at the right time with the right people. Having left her junior job at the National Gallery and escaped from her unhappily married parents’ dungeon-like mansion flat in London, she was having a magical time as a live-in employee of the Brandolini d’Adda family, one of the wealthiest families in Italy. Her job, pleasurable and not demanding, was to look after and speak English with two of their young sons, Ruy and Leonello.
By a miracle of serendipity, she’d happened to wander in to the office of Universal Aunts in Belgravia to ask whether they had any jobs going for a nanny, preferably abroad. ‘I want an adventure,’ she explained, adding: ‘Anywhere but Paris.’
Paris was the city in which her fiance David Ross was living, and her parents would not countenance their daughter living unchaperoned in the same city as him. ‘He’s a penniless architect,’ her disapproving mother said to her.
It so happened that this vacancy in Venice was the one that had just landed on the desk at Universal Aunts. Gill was sent to meet Oliver Messel, the Italian family’s friend and referee for the job. Messel approved of her, and that was it.
Gill found herself in a paradise of luxury: one of 14 members of staff in the mirror-lined palazzo, working for the serene, flawlessly elegant and kind Conte and Contessa. The Contessa was the granddaughter of Giovanni Agnelli, founder of Fiat in 1899, hence the family millions. The Conte liked to ‘lie on a silk moiré daybed, propped up on coroneted white linen pillows, while taking a pedicure and reading a Russian novel.’ One of Gill’s jobs was to trim his eyelashes.
With wonderfully fresh prose, a mixture of a razor-sharp memory and extracts from letters to David and her parents, Gill evokes the gorgeousness of it all. It’s a tonic to read. The descriptions of the sound of water against stone on the Grand Canal, ‘a smacking, slapping, gurgling, splashing noise’ make you feel you’re there in the shimmering heat. On summer mornings, Gill and the children would be taken by motorboat to the family’s private cabana on the Lido, where they were waited on hand and foot by ‘a corps de ballet of waiters’.
One of the reasons the Conte and Contessa liked Gill was that she wasn’t desperate to fall in love with an Italian. She had already met the love of her life, at a ball in Mayfair in 1956. Gill took a few weeks off, met David in Paris without telling her parents, and they had a wonderful holiday together.
The international jet set was all around her. One day, she spotted a wistful-looking woman alone on the beach. She was sure it was the novelist Nancy Mitford – and it was. Nancy took a liking to Gill, approving of her addiction to the novels of Georgette Heyer. ‘The deeper I immersed myself in this world,’ Gill writes, ‘the more I recognised it as one to which I didn’t belong. It was time to get on with the business of living, which meant marrying a man with no money who lived in a hotel room in Paris.’