Grandmother’s diary revealed an illicit affair
When novelist Salley Vickers read her late grandmother’s diaries, she discovered the story of a passionate but hopeless affair
There was always something of an air of mystery about my father’s mother. For a start, while we lived in a small rented flat and my father, through his political affiliations, was more than once out of work, “Darling”, as we knew her (she never countenanced any version of “grandmother”) lived in an elegant house in Mayfair.
On her rare visits, she arrived by taxi, smelling of a scent made up for her at a Paris parfumerie. She was attractive rather than beautiful, always stylishly dressed in well-cut suits, silk blouses and jewellery that she had designed herself.
As a young woman she had been a successful writer of stories and plays. Early on, she decided that I was a writer, too. Perhaps her belief is what made me one, or perhaps she recognised some potential in me. Either way, it bred a feeling of kinship with her. From the beginning there was a sense that we were sharers in each other’s secrets.
I used to visit her in her tall Mayfair house and I would climb four flights of stairs to the “nursery floor”, where the Chinese silk wallpaper ended. It was there that she escaped to write her diary and that, together, we unpacked the boxes from Brow.
Near Hindhead in Surrey, poised on the edge of the Devil’s Punchbowl (hence its name), Brow was large for a cottage, with grounds where my grandmother had several ponds made. These, to her delight, were visited by grass snakes, and where frogs, toads and newts thrived.
I went there only four or five times before it was sold, when I was eight, and have a dim but potent memory of meeting there a man dressed in brown cords, with brown hands and a brown face, clearing one of the ponds.
The man was “Marshall” (I never knew his first name), whom she employed to look after the cottage and grounds. Perhaps the nuance with which I remember her mentioning him is born only of hindsight, but if I am adept at reading atmosphere, it must be a gift I learnt from her, because I always knew there was a secret about Brow.
My grandmother, Linda, came from a somewhat illustrious family, the Lindemanns. Her parents were wealthy and two of her brothers acquired fame. The eldest became a general; her middle brother, Frederick, an acclaimed physicist and colleague of Einstein’s, was a close friend of and scientific advisor to Churchill during the Second World War and honoured as Viscount Cherwell; the youngest, Septimus, became a Paris playboy and intelligence agent during the war.
“Darling” had none of the exciting opportunities of her brothers. She poured her psychological acuity and creativity into writing, but her mother, Olga – a society beauty and, I suspect, a rather cruel woman – considered it unfeminine, obliging my grandmother to publish pseudonymously and to give a post restante address to receive her earnings. I imagine this was the seed of her secret life.
Her first husband, my grandfather Vickers (killed in the First World War), came from a respectable Northumbrian family, but her second husband was a different kettle of fish. He was a Kirkpatrick, inordinately proud of his ancestor, a follower of Robert the Bruce. According to the story, an enemy of the Bruce, “the Red” Comyn, had taken sanctuary in a church, whereupon the ancestral Kirkpatrick drew his dagger and entered the church declaring “I mak siccar” (I make sure) and stabbed him through the heart at the altar. This motto and crest – a hand holding a bloody dagger – my step-grandfather had stamped over the Vickers initials on all the silver, very much as he stamped on my grandmother’s heart.
Her family, who rightly judged Kirkpatrick a snob and a fortune hunter, disowned her when she married him. Worse still, the fortune she was left by her first husband was legally forfeit under a condition of his will on any remarriage, passing to my father while still a minor. Years later, he surrendered his right to this and all his own fortune when he joined the Communist Party. But during his childhood the only money my
Having been ostracised once by her family, her courage failed her
grandmother had was as his trustee. With it, using my father’s health as a cover, she had bought Brow. And Brow became her bolthole, where, I discovered, her secret life flourished.
Clearing through her things after her death in 1978, aged to my father’s surprise 91 (she had always knocked a couple of years off her age), I was pleased – yet somehow unsurprised – to discover a series of letters sent by Marshall to her Mayfair address. Some had cover notes, “Madam, the first white violets”. I found the same violets, pale and tissuey, pressed in her locked diary. It makes the saddest reading, describing nights of “sheer bliss” when “M loved and loved me” and anguish over whether to leave her husband.
For years, it transpired, she ricocheted between Brow and Mayfair, never able to leave the marriage she had defied her family for – “Oh I lack the courage…” – and yet never able to leave her lover. “I wake feeling wretched,” she writes. “Want nothing but comforting or to be alone. It is over three years now and nothing makes any difference. And yet all is pulsing life. Starvation instead.”
And then there are the moments of respite at Brow where she works in the garden, collects frog spawn and drives in posts with Marshall. “I arrived numb. And he put his arms round me and everything floated away and I had this impression of oblivion and at the same moment he said ‘It would be nice to be dead like this.’ He held me so long and fast and loved me so often and so much into the late hours of the morning that it is difficult to feel ordinary.” Most poignantly, “And after all lips cling to lips, the same words spoken: stay with me, never part from me, life is dead without you.”
But she did part from him. In 1937 she describes travelling by train with my step-grandfather in the company of an obnoxious crony: “I look out on the spring country flashing by and thru’ my mind runs this again and again
‘Which is the truth: your sleep Or their awakening?
This quickening into life,
Or my heart breaking?’
And alongside this rings the idiotic surface-swimming small talk, ‘The old duke used to drop his H’s on purpose – Lady Charlotte at Rye – such a pretty girl, they have a son now – I wonder whether you knew etc, etc.’ I have smashed myself.”
Having been ostracised once by her family, her courage failed her. Perhaps she couldn’t face the notoriety of leaving a husband and absconding with someone of “lowlier” station, though she never fitted the station she was born to.
My father, it emerged, had been dimly aware of the affair, but never spoken of it. Having seen how cruelly she was treated by his stepfather, I think he, too, was secretly pleased that she had found some kind of happiness, however fleeting.
The real tragedy, perhaps, is that in a fit of self-destructiveness she sold Brow (not in truth hers to sell). The decision killed Marshall, my father later discovered, though it is unclear whether he committed suicide or simply died from a broken heart.
I now own many of the treasures that I unwrapped with my grandmother from the boxes from Brow. It was only in my company that they were unpacked. I think she wouldn’t mind my now unpacking her secret.