Chelsea leaves it late... and I love it!
Pumpkins, ripe fruit, VERY bizarre spectacles — and not a spring bud in sight. The verdict?
WHAT on earth is this? Pumpkins? Here at the Chelsea Flower Show? It’s like finding reindeer on the race card at Royal Ascot. Just around the corner, I stumble across an apple tree. It contains what can only be described as apples.
Yet I have to look high and low for anything resembling a rose. As for a splash of blossom, forget it.
No one can remember the last time that the jewel in the Royal Horticultural Society’s calendar featured a Halloween theme. That is because it hasn’t happened before in the 108-year history of this event.
According to the organisers, it will not happen again, either.
However, having wreaked havoc with pretty much everything else in life, the coronavirus has succeeded in shunting the 2021 Chelsea Flower Show from its time-honoured slot in verdant, luscious May to mellow, fruitful September.
So let us make the most of this magnificent autumnal one-off.
Because while this may be a very different sort of show from the usual, it has lost none of its magic.
It’s just that this year’s event is not so much blooming marvellous as drop dead gorgeous. Indeed, one or two of these trees may have dropped the lot by the end of the week.
Chelsea is, traditionally, the great harbinger of our summer. It is the first fixture in that glorious and timeless succession of famous British summer traditions which we like to call ‘the Season’ – Wimbledon, Henley, Glorious Goodwood, Cowes and a Highland Games to finish.
Except, this year, the organisers took a bold decision. Having lost the 2020 event entirely to the pandemic, they were preparing for May 2021 when there was a surge in Covid cases over the winter.
So they cancelled again. Rather than lose yet another year, an emergency meeting of the RHS council decided to hold the event in September. Third time lucky and all that.
‘For about a week afterwards, everyone was saying “it will never work, it will look terrible, utterly impossible”,’ says Helena Pettit, the RHS director of gardens and shows. ‘Then, after giving it some thought, they were all saying: “what a wonderful one-off opportunity”.’
Talking to those exhibiting here, I sense that many are thoroughly enjoying this change of scene.
‘I probably shouldn’t say this but I prefer September,’ says Tom Massie, creator of the Yeo Valley organic Garden, one of the main show gardens in competition this year. ‘Spring is always hyped up and full of expectation. This is about fruit and berries and autumn tones.’ He points to the seedheads on the various grasses around his plot, the hawthorn berries and the bright yellow rudbeckia. None of them would be on the menu if he was building this garden in May but they lend a hazy, relaxed feel to a garden which also features a giant glass-bottomed, egg-shaped hide in autumn colours. Hanging from a tree, it is designed for observing woodland wildlife as the nights grow longer.
Nearby, I meet Naomi FerrettCohen who has created an NHS Tribute garden. It was the idea of oxford University’s John Frater, professor of infectious diseases, as he drove back from a Covid shift at the city’s John Radcliffe Hospital in mid-pandemic.
‘We were losing staff at the time and yet everyone kept on turning up for work. It seemed that we just had to mark this moment,’ he explains. So he contacted Naomi and they applied for a place at this year’s show. The result is a charming sunken garden with soothing rills and pools and some exuberant late-flowering plants like the red and yellow kniphofias, otherwise known as ‘red-hot pokers’.
‘I just remember when the call came through to do this and we all had that feeling of everything falling off a precipice. This is a response to that,’ says Naomi. However, her original May plan for avenues of roses had to go straight in the compost bin when the date was switched.
Another medical garden, Robert Myers’s celebration of Florence Nightingale’s bicentenary, includes medicinal shrubs like Chinese rhubarb and echinacea alongside walls lined with facsimiles of her gardening notes.
Nearby, I find the Finnish Soul Garden, full of autumnal scenes from the Baltic. Taina Suonio’s homage to her motherland not only includes something which looks remarkably like a Christmas tree but there is a thickly-berried rowan, a fruit-filled apple tree and a fully-functioning sauna. She shows me into the glass-fronted hot room – above the mandatory icy pool for cooling off – and chucks some water on to the coals.
They instantly sizzle and fume. Authentic, certainly, but it doesn’t feel very summery.
The change of date has meant that some well-known growers are not here at all.
The main marquee, the Grand
Pavilion, is usually overflowing with tulips, roses and fresh veg of every hue. A lot of regulars simply have nothing worth showing at this time of year.
This has allowed plenty of others to make their debut, though. Much of it looks like a very elegant Harvest Festival.
I meet Stanley Jackson of the New Forest whose Agrumi topiary stand has some magnificent hedge sculptures of animals – including a horse in mid-jump.
He has never been able to get a stand here before. Nor have Foster’s Exotic and Unusual Plants
from North Lincolnshire, with their rich display of cacti and ‘succulents’. It’s the same for Driftwood Bonsai of Doncaster. ‘I feel I’ve got a stomach full of kittens,’ says owner Mark Whitworth.
‘My wife and I have been building up this business for 22 years and just to be at Chelsea feels like a dream.’
Another knock-on from the pandemic are whole new sections of the Chelsea showground saluting the lockdown passion for smallscale gardening after millions of cooped-up townies turned to horticulture by way of therapy. There is a display of ‘container gardens’ – small, urban plots where the planting has to take place above ground level.
Even smaller are the ‘balcony gardens’, crammed with colour and life.
WhACkIEsT of the lot are the house plant studios, packed with potted specimens to see us through the winter. Paul holt of the N1 Garden Centre has not just filled a woodland hut with autumnal plants and pumpkins but is actually dressed head to toe in pumpkin yellow.
There has been no sign of the Queen here this year. Much as she loves Chelsea she also loves her Balmoral break.
Other members of the family were here yesterday, however, to see the Queen’s Green Canopy Garden, celebrating her upcoming Platinum Jubilee. Theatrical royalty also turned up in the form of Dame Judi Dench.
I even met a hollywood name manning a trade stand. Film director Guy Ritchie so loves outdoor cooking that he has now designed a new heated table/stove/barbecue/grill all-year-round alfresco dining unit.
he has also put his money where his mouth is by manufacturing it. Models range from the £3,300 portable four-seat ‘Wildtable’ up to a £51,000 tented dining room the size (and price) of a small house.
‘The caveman in me just loves cooking outdoors but you always have the issue of heat – too much or not enough – and smoke,’ he explains. ‘This deals with both.’
There is one other rather pleasing aspect of this year’s show for those who do have a ticket.
Thanks to Covid, the crowds have been reduced by 40per cent (with an extra day bolted on to make up for it). Overall, it all feels quieter, slower and less corporate. Next year, it should be back to normal, we are told. some may not necessarily regard that as a good thing.
ON hER return to Moscow from five months in the U.S. seeing her family, Eleanor Philby sensed something was going awry in her marriage. her husband, the spy Kim Philby, affected to feel as warm as ever towards her and strove to be kind and solicitous. his language was endearing, even syrupy.
But behind all that, she wondered whether the person for whose love she had chosen to go into exile was closing down and shutting her out.
Once again he was taking refuge in heavy drinking. Clearly there was a big problem she was not
privy to. The secretive man who for 30 years had betrayed his country before defecting to the Soviet Union was keeping some revelation from her.
All he would tell her was that he had fallen out with his old friend Donald Maclean, his fellow Soviet spy and defector to Moscow, after Maclean claimed that Philby might still be working for the British. Maclean’s wife Melinda was also finding
her husband more and more difficult and weepily confided to Eleanor that she was no longer sharing a bedroom with him.
Eleanor trusted Melinda and asked her outright if she thought Philby still loved her. Melinda replied enigmatically: ‘he did, until a while ago.’
it was not good news. The Macleans had known Philby longer than she had, and Melinda was well placed to confirm she wasn’t imagining the distance there now was between them.
Eleanor hoped a trip to leningrad to celebrate both Christmas and their wedding anniversary might help, and Philby seemed happy to go along with it, as long as there was plenty to drink.
But while they were away he was distant and impatient, snapping at her for her failure to
assimilate the Soviet way of life. ‘his courtesy was gone,’ she noted, as he upbraided her sneeringly for ‘always looking so damned smart’.
These days his kindness seemed directed to others rather than to her. increasingly, he seemed concerned by Melinda’s difficulties rather than hers.
During a weekend at the Macleans’ dacha outside Moscow,
a drunk Philby fell and broke his wrist. Back home in their flat, Eleanor was angry with him for refusing to get it treated but instead dosing himself with even more alcohol. She had had enough,
she told him. What was going on?
PhilBy could dissemble no longer. he told her Melinda was desperately miserable. Donald was impotent and he felt a need to make her happy. it was the admission of adultery Eleanor had feared.
But there was more. With breathtaking gall, he added: ‘i don’t want you to leave. Of course you can
stay on. you know i’m very fond of you, and Melinda understands my very special feeling for you.’
Eleanor asked sarcastically if he wanted her to be ‘the assistant housekeeper’ looking after their pet birds, but otherwise her anger and upset were held in check. She put down what was happening with Melinda as simply an aberration, born only of her having been away in America for so long.
She did, though, wonder if she been a victim of politics. had the Russians told him to get rid of her? They never trusted her — she was too American and never really fitted in. They had been paranoid when she went to the States.
in the end, she decided simply that kind old Kim had fallen for some age-old womanly wiles. her fury was directed more at Melinda, who, she convinced herself, had seduced her blameless husband.
But Philby was far from blameless — and deadly serious in proposing that he and the two women
should live as a threesome under one roof. A friend of Eleanor’s reveals: ‘having begged Eleanor to join him in Moscow, he now wanted her to stay with him while he also took up with Melinda.’
it was a stunning slap in the face. Remarkably, Eleanor tried it for
about a fortnight, but it was never going to work. She couldn’t bear that he had a new favourite, as he made clear. he gave Melinda a book
with the inscription: ‘An orgasm a day keeps the doctor away.’
if he felt any squeamishness about cheating not only on his wife but on his friend Donald, it was
quickly overcome. Double-dealing had been his way for so long, it was now second nature to him.
he still spoke most romantically to Eleanor, not wanting to hurt her feelings. But he showed no shame,
contrition or even acknowledgement of his responsibility for what she had gone through for their love.
She tried to make this new arrangement work. Philby was now
very ill with tuberculosis and pneumonia, and Eleanor visited him in hospital. But Melinda was visiting him too, at different times.
Enough was enough, Eleanor decided. Those embers were never going to flame up again. She told
him she was leaving. She might, she said, go back to her roots and live in ireland — which he thought an excellent idea, as there was no
extradition between the UK and the irish Republic at that time and he hoped he could come to visit.
As farewell presents, he gave her his most prized possession, his Westminster School scarf, and a letter, calling her the best friend he would ever have. She read it endlessly.
As she left for the airport on May 18, 1965, she asked one of his colleagues to give him a letter she had written. it said that if he ever reconsidered, she would come back, but he had to understand how manipulative Melinda had
been. She could not live in the same city as her.
BACK iN london, the marriage over in all but name, Eleanor struggled. She stayed with a variety of concerned friends, to whom she poured out her hurt in endless chats. Now pretty much dependent on alcohol herself, she would get drunk as she tried to make sense of the man who had so comprehensively betrayed her.
‘i challenged him,’ she told them. ‘i asked him if it ever came to a really life-or-death choice between me and the children on the one
hand and the Communist Party on the other, who would win. he looked at me in disbelief and just said “the Party, of course”.’
yet Melinda moving in was the real deal-breaker. Eleanor could live with playing second fiddle to the Communist Party — but not to Melinda.
how much had Eleanor really meant to Kim? Was he essentially the ‘copper-bottomed bastard’ that Mi6’s John Sackur described, who knew nothing of loyalty and love, least of all to women, and moved on when he got bored?
Certainly he was unfaithful to wives litzi, Aileen and Eleanor. yet it has also been claimed that he was never truly unfaithful but was, rather, a serial monogamist because his extramarital relationships took place only once the marriages were over, even if not in law.
Typically, though not always, it was he who did the deciding, not the women.
Eleanor was undoubtedly special to him. his love letters to her are extraordinarily affectionate and sentimental. in Beirut, where they
met, they were regarded as the happiest couple in town, two people obviously, totally, charmingly at ease in one another’s company.
FOR him, she represented the straightforwardness and simplicity that were so far from his own situation, his mind haunted by the countless contradictory untruths he had spun. She didn’t chivvy him and didn’t try to change him.
She would gaze at him admiringly at parties, and when he misbehaved — bottom-pinching and so on — would sometimes tick him off but would also chide others for doing so, explaining that he meant no harm. it was ‘just Kim’.
The trouble was, she didn’t fit his plan. She didn’t buy the Soviet
dream. Moscow hadn’t grown on
her and she didn’t much mind who knew it. She still adored her husband but, tiresomely, she retained a mind of her own. She felt imprisoned in a suspicious country.
Back in London, old friends from Beirut continued to help Eleanor, allowing her to sleep on their sofa or in their spare room for the odd week. Mentally bruised and bewildered, she had lost not only her husband but also her teenage daughter Annie, who was living with her father in the U.S. She had nowhere she could call home.
For a while she did move to Ireland, as she had told Philby she would, taking a flat just outside Dublin. There she painted, while she tried to let the emotional tornado in her subside.
Long-distance relations with Philby remained civil, even amicable. He wrote, making gently disapproving remarks about the liking she had expressed for The Beatles, which, he teased, hinted at her acquiring alarming capitalist tendencies. She sent him — with considered piquancy — one of the band’s singles — Help!
He also sent occasional cheques, although, humiliatingly, these were drawn on Melinda’s account. But the sentimentalist in him clung to the marriage. He told her he thought there was no need for them to divorce unless she was planning to marry again.
She began writing her memoir, which was intended not as a scoresettler but a gracious portrait of a love affair with a man whose mind, she discovered too late, was elsewhere. One reason for writing it, she explained, was to come to an understanding of how she could have had a marriage that had been ‘perfect in every way’ even though her husband ‘shut me out of a whole side of his personality’.
Her book, called The Spy I Loved, revealed to the public for the first time Philby’s intensely affectionate side. But the reviews were hostile, focusing on his bad aspects. Philby himself was extremely put out by it, feeling betrayed that she had quoted from his love letters to her without his consent.
In 1968 Eleanor returned to the U.S., concerned about her health and alcohol intake. With the help of her book advance, she bought a house near San Francisco not far from the sea. It was somewhere to put her feet up at last. She enjoyed a renewed and loving, trusting relationship with her daughter.
But just a few months later, she died. Neighbours, after knocking on the door to no response, forced their way in. A malignancy in her throat had caught up with her.
AS FOR her husband, he lived on in the Soviet Union for another two decades, in a small flat, where he pored wistfully over English newspapers and the cricket scores, living in hope of the arrival of chutney, mustard, marmalade, kippers and decent whisky.
Philby insisted that the deprivations he suffered in Moscow were insignificant, and that he had no regrets about the choices he had made. But a KGB colonel who knew him confirmed he was thoroughly unhappy. He felt ‘a complete disillusionment from Soviet reality. He saw all the defects and that the people were afraid.’
He also felt personally let down. When he defected, he imagined he would be rewarded by being made a KGB general, or put in charge of the KGB’s work in Britain. This did not happen, for a simple reason: Moscow never trusted him.
They could never be sure whose side he was really on, fearing that one day he might change sides and return to the West, taking all his secrets with him. He was designated a mere agent, rather than an officer, of the KGB, an important distinction. He was not allowed to work in its Lubyanka HQ and was constantly observed.
He was baffled by this. ‘I was full of information that I was keen to hand over,’ he once said, ‘and I wrote countless memos, until I realised that no one wanted them, no one even read them.’
Kim’s relationship with Melinda broke down and she returned to her husband in 1968. Philby drank as heavily as ever and slashed his wrists in a suicide attempt.
In 1970 he met fellow mole George Blake, who introduced him to Rufina Ivanovna, a Russian woman of Polish heritage 20 years his junior, originally as a possible companion for one of Philby’s sons.
THEy hit it off, and the pattern of hurling himself into a relationship repeated itself, the pair marrying at the end of the year. He reduced his drinking and found many more consolations in domesticity. His mood improved. The KGB also eased up on him and he gave lectures to young recruits.
But Rufina recalled a sense of melancholy about him when he walked Moscow’s streets. In his own head — and to his fourth wife — he was the epitome of a wellmannered English gentleman and would always hold doors open for others, for instance.
‘He was often lost on the subway and I couldn’t find him,’ she recalled. ‘He did not consider his work in vain but he was brought to tears. He was very worried when he saw the poor old people. He would help countless old ladies across the road, or carry their bags. He would keep saying: “They won the war. Why are they so poor?” ’
He died in 1988, having latterly restricted himself to two glasses of cognac a day, for fear that Rufina might leave him if he allowed himself any more. He was given a KGB funeral and his contribution to the Soviet Union was praised.
Not surprisingly, there was no mourning for him in the West. ‘The world is well rid of him,’ said one former MI6 colleague.
Murray Sayle, the first Western journalist to track him down in Moscow and interview him, mused that what Philby found attractive was the idea of having a secret self, inaccessible even to his friends and his wives.
What he was really in love with was deceit in pursuit of a forlorn ideal. It was a lesson Eleanor learned too late.
ExtractEd from Love and deception: Philby In Beirut, by James Hanning, to be published by corsair on September 30 at £25. © 2021 James Hanning. to order a copy for £22.50, go to www.mailshop.co.uk or call 020 3308 9193. Offer valid until 2.10.21, UK p&p free on orders over £20.