SAUCY secrets of Britain’s naughtiest novelist
So many lovers she lost count, three sons by three different fathers ... Mary Wesley’s bedroom antics were wilder than any fiction
The novelist Mary Wesley had an unusual way of getting to sleep on restless nights. While some people counted sheep, she counted her former lovers, and she certainly had plenty of those, especially during the war. An exquisitely beautiful young woman, she once spent a night with a previously unsuccessful admirer who had been maimed in World War I — because he had ‘wanted it so long it seemed cruel to deny him’.
More usually, mutual attraction played its part, as when she met a ‘huge Free French pilot with unusually large feet who left his pants in my bed to be found next morning by the housemaid’.
She also had an encounter with General de Gaulle’s head of intelligence and ‘two vague nights’ with a Spitfire pilot who was killed shortly afterwards, exemplifying the fragility of life which encouraged such hedonism.
‘We had been brought up so repressed,’ Wesley said. ‘War freed us. We felt if we didn’t do it now, we might never get a chance.’ By the time peace came, she admitted, there had been so many men, ‘one woke up in the morning, reached across the pillow and thought, “Let’s see. Who is it this time?” ’
These experiences inspired her to write The Camomile Lawn and the three other wartime novels among her ten best- selling books, a remarkable achievement given that she did not become a published author until she was 70.
Described as ‘Jane Austen plus sex’ they have delighted millions of fans. But her determination to live on her own uncompromising terms was far from entertaining for her three sons, all born to different fathers.
The second of them was the renowned literary agent Toby eady, and the obituaries published following his recent death from cancer at the age of 76 are a reminder of the extent to which Wesley was, by her own admission, ‘a selfish and bad mother’.
From his London office, eady represented clients, ranging from the art historian nun Sister Wendy Beckett to Bernard Cornwell, author of the Sharpe novels. But he spent much of the Seventies in New York, a move he made to get away from his mother who, he said, interfered too much in his private life. Ironically, it was the same complaint Wesley levelled against her own parents.
The youngest of three children, she was born in 1912 in an imposing house on the edge of Windsor Great Park. her father, Colonel Mynors Farmar, was a distinguished soldier and her mother, Violet, a descendant of the Duke of Wellington.
Violet often told Wesley she loved her older brother and sister more than her and once, when she asked why she’d had so many governesses as a child, her mother replied that: ‘None of them liked you, darling.’
After finishing school in Paris she attended a domestic science college in Malvern, Worcestershire, where the constant cry of her friends was ‘have you discovered any facts yet?’ By that they meant the facts of life.
Wesley’s answer was soon ‘yes’. Shortly after she was presented at court in 1932, she and a young man named Peter hope spent a night at a hotel in North Wales, where they swam naked in the sea and swore eternal love.
She had attempted to keep this outrage secret, but her infatuation was too obvious. Violet, an avowed Protestant, was horrified by the thought of her daughter marrying a Catholic like hope.
WESLEY was sent to India to live with her mother’s older sister Susan, wife of a colonel whose regiment was stationed there, but she was soon back home in disgrace.
One evening five young men had turned up at the Colonel’s house, all expecting to take her to a ball. She explained she had ‘felt too shy to say “No” to any of them.
In 1937 she placated her scandalised mother by marrying the wealthy but ‘ remarkably boring’ young peer Charles ‘Carol’ eady, 2nd Baron Swinfen. But the marriage quickly proved a mistake. On their honeymoon there was ‘puzzlingly, no sex’ and they only slept together eight times in the following two years.
Somehow Wesley managed to conceive Carol’s heir, Roger, who was born in December 1938, but after that she considered her wifely duty done.
With the outbreak of war, she left Roger with an aunt in the Suffolk countryside, and was recruited by the War Office to decipher German codes. Although still living at her marital home, colleagues remembered her putting on her mink cape and hat and cycling off to the Ritz for afternoon assignations with various boyfriends.
Often these were men she met while out with Betty Paynter, a friend who mixed in the same fast circles. One Battle of Britain pilot remembered Wesley as ‘a very, very pretty girl with raven black hair and a deep laugh. She and Betty used to hunt in pairs. They were deadly.’
Through Betty she met Czech emigre Paul Ziegler and had an affair, first with him, then his married brother heinz, who was nine years her senior.
In 1940, during a conversation about the most entertaining ways to live, Wesley told heinz the most ‘amusing’ thing a woman could do was have several children by different men. She then set about getting pregnant by him, being careful to conceive at a time when the baby could have been her husband’s. When Toby was born in February 1941, her husband Lord Swinfen accepted him as his own, but by then the marriage was a formality and that year she and her sons joined Betty Paynter at Boskenna, the sprawling Paynter family home near Land’s end.
With Toby’s father heinz away serving in Bomber Command, and her husband busy with his duties as an air-warden in London, she took ‘a variety of lovers, each of them transient’. These dalliances increased when in May 1944 she learned heinz’s Wellington had been shot down. She recalled that she ‘went quite mad and had a whole lot of affairs’.
She finally tired of her wartime lifestyle after a fling with writer Simon harcourt-Smith, who persuaded her to stay with him and his wife in London and suggested a threesome one night.
Mary declined, deciding that they ‘ looked very silly, lying together naked in their canopied bed’ and recalled a commotion as she waited for a taxi, with Mrs harcourt-Smith sinking her teeth deep into her husband’s calf.
her way of life had become excessive, she decided, with ‘too many lovers, too much to drink . . . I was on my way to becoming a very nasty person’.
Salvation, of a kind, came in the form of eric Siepmann, a married journalist who eventually became her second husband. They met shortly before the end of the war, but his wife refused to give him a divorce and they did not marry until 1952.
SON William was born a year later, another strand in the complicated web of parentage which she only confessed to her son Toby when he was 18.
In 1969, Siepmann, a heavy drinker who was occasionally violent towards her, committed suicide at their home, and on the night after his death Wesley told her first son Roger — who until then had believed Toby was his full brother ——the truth.
This attempt at family bonding at a time of crisis achieved exactly the opposite.
After Lord Swinfen’s death in 1977, Roger attempted to cut his half-brother out of the inheritance, resulting in bitter legal action that lasted five years.
According to her biographer, Patrick Marnham, it was Mary Wesley’s anger at this betrayal that provided the energy for her late-flowering career as a writer and, by a strange coincidence, the news that the case had been resolved in Toby’s favour came in May 1982, on the day her first novel, Jumping The Queue, was accepted for publication.
The rift with Roger never fully healed, but Toby proved more forgiving of his mother, who remained unconventional even in old age.
In the eighties she had an affair with Robert Bolt, screenwriter of Doctor Zhivago and Lawrence Of Arabia. Twelve years her junior, he was keen to marry her but she refused, explaining that: ‘There are men you want in your bed but you don’t want in your head.’
She died of cancer in December 2002 at the age of 90. In the last months of her life, those caring for her included her second and third sons Toby and William, and Toby’s wife, who had survived an awkward encounter on first meeting her future mother-in-law.
‘What does Toby think of me?’ Mary Wesley had asked, and Toby’s wife had replied honestly.
‘he considers you a best friend but not the best mother.’
For one awful minute, Wesley fell silent. Then she nodded: ‘That’s fair,’ she said.