First Lady Page 3
In an effort to earn her keep, Lady Blanche (who was also an excellent cook) wrote culinary articles for the newspapers, but she sometimes found herself too bored or distracted to put food on the table for her own offspring. She was frequently absent as well (presumably with her many lovers). Yet if her children sometimes wanted for maternal attention they rarely went short of learning. Their mother employed full-time Francophone or German governesses and other teachers were brought in as required. The only, rigidly observed, omission from their education was arithmetic, which Lady Blanche deemed ‘unseemly’ for girls.
Around 1898, when Clementine was thirteen, Lady Blanche decamped from London for rooms near the railway station at Seaford, just east of the Channel port of Newhaven. There she lived with her dogs Fifinne and Gubbins on the first floor at 9 Pelham Place, a terrace of modest grey houses, while Clementine, Kitty, Nellie, Bill and their ‘feather-headed’ governess stayed at number 11. Lady Blanche refused to muzzle her dogs, in contravention of strict new anti-rabies laws, and was once summoned to the magistrates’ court in Lewes. Although she emerged from the trial with the desired ‘not guilty’ verdict, perhaps due in part to the fact that one member of the bench was a personal friend, Clementine was troubled about her mother being ‘not very law-abiding’.9
This rackety existence could not have been in starker contrast to the four weeks the children spent every summer in the historic splendour of Airlie Castle. Here Lady Blanche’s mother, the Dowager Countess of Airlie, kept an unblinking vigil against lack of gratitude – a subject on which she had written an essay – insisting on the need to instil the virtue in young children as ‘otherwise they grow up louts’.10 She believed in fasting to ‘awaken the gifts of the Spirit’ but loathed unladylike pursuits; Lady Blanche, by contrast, allowed Kitty and Clementine to play croquet (practice that would later prove extremely useful) but only behind the gardener’s cottage out of Grannie’s sight. Lady Blanche may have had a fiery temperament but her natural rebelliousness permitted what were then unusual freedoms for her daughters. Not only did she hire bicycles for them back in Seaford (these being too expensive to buy), she allowed them to play bicycle polo on the rough grass opposite their lodgings too. Another beloved, unfeminine pastime was cricket, at which Clementine would in time become a decent player. She was also taught locally to play a creditable game of golf.
By now Clementine and Kitty were quite different: the former plain and awkward; the latter pretty and flirty – albeit impudent and ruthless with it. Clementine stood in her boisterous sister’s shadow, but never showed any jealousy towards her. In fact she found Kitty to be a comfort in a bewildering world. The star turn relied on a devoted support act, and while this role was far from easy it was nonetheless one in which Clementine came to excel. Like Lady Blanche, she was ‘dazzled’ by her sister, while Kitty shared her younger sibling’s ‘unspoken contempt’ for their mother’s ‘violent, ungovernable partiality’. ‘You mustn’t mind it,’ Kitty would counsel Clementine. ‘She can’t help it.’11
Clementine’s plight won sympathy from at least one of Lady Blanche’s friends – Mary Paget, a tender-hearted woman who often invited the girl to stay at her nearby home, West Wantley. Clementine adored the sixteenth-century manor with its ducks, chickens and boating lake, and envied the Pagets their stable family life. She considered Mary, who was her only real childhood friend, to be the most beautiful woman in the world. In truth, Mary was handsome, but plump with it and sometimes her stays would burst open while she was gardening. She also pinned into her rather sparse bun false grey hair which would habitually fall out among the flowerbeds.
Clementine’s fondness for this generous woman made her returns to Seaford all the more of a wrench at the end of the golden weeks spent in her care. Many tears would be shed and, noticing Clementine’s reddened eyes, Lady Blanche once angrily accused her of loving Mary Paget more than her. To which Clementine rashly replied: ‘Of course I do.’12 The Wantley trips were stopped.
With no real home or father, scant money and precious little maternal love, it is perhaps unsurprising that on the cusp of her adolescence Clementine entered an emotionally religious phase. She yearned for respectability and certainty and, in November 1898, she was confirmed in Kirriemuir Church, near Lady Blanche’s family seat, watched by her mother, grandmother and Mary Paget. Her piety became so fervent that on one occasion, after listening to a sermon on charity, she donated a pendant given to her by a relative, only to be admonished for giving away such a valuable gift and compelled to ask for its return.
By the summer of 1899 Lady Blanche was deeply in debt. Hozier had defaulted on even the meagre allowance he had agreed following the divorce, but governesses still had to be paid, and then there were the annual fees for Bill’s education at Summer Fields preparatory school in Oxford. Lady Blanche had wanted him to benefit from the sort of schooling normally expected by the grandsons of an earl, but her mother’s help extended only so far, and lawyers instructed to pursue Hozier by her brother Lord Airlie had drawn a blank. Moreover, Lady Blanche’s financial straits had been worsened by illness. Over the spring months she had suffered from quinsy, a nasty complication of tonsillitis involving abscesses on the throat. In an age before antibiotics, it was a serious condition and she was laid low, finding it difficult to swallow. She was hardly in a fit state to up sticks once again. Yet in the last week of July, out of the blue, the children were told they had just hours to pack all their possessions as the next morning they were moving to France.
Lady Blanche had long suspected that Hozier might try to snatch back Kitty and Clementine and it appears she suddenly had reason to suspect a strike was at hand. It was this fear that had motivated her curious decision to move to Seaford, as the town lay a mere five hours across the Channel from their destination, Dieppe. Such was the haste of their departure, however, that she had no time to make plans for what to do once they reached France. Family legend has it that on arrival she chose where to go by the toss of a coin. What we do know is that she hailed a cab for Puys and, upon spotting an attractive farm, La Ferme des Colombiers, along the way, ordered the driver to stop so that she might ask the owners if they had spare rooms. Luck was on her side and the family stayed there for the next two months, enjoying an idyllic summer of swimming and picnics. Clementine was living out of a suitcase once again.
In the autumn Lady Blanche moved her flock into town, renting a modest red-brick house at 49 rue du Faubourg de la Barre in Dieppe itself, where she wanted to enrol the girls in the school at the Convent of the Immaculate Conception. Already an adept Francophone, Clementine adjusted well to her new setting, but was keenly aware of her outsider status. When the nuns and other girls sided against the British following the outbreak of the Second Boer War in October 1899, she and Kitty played truant in protest, idling away the morning forlornly on the beach. Nonetheless, she enjoyed her surroundings. Much of her time was spent outdoors, and she became more athletic and confident, displaying a competitive streak on the hockey field, where she broke her stick during a particularly fierce bout with an opposing centre-forward.
Lady Blanche, too, made the best of her exile. She relished Dieppe’s bohemian lifestyle, which attracted foreign writers and artists such as Oscar Wilde, Max Beerbohm and Walter Sickert. She also enjoyed the casino, quickly becoming a regular. Needless to say, she lost money she did not have and, to Clementine’s shame, the family was forced to ask for credit in the local shops. She was learning all too young to deal with public humiliation, and it was difficult not to blame her mother for their plight. Here was the source of a lifelong puritan streak; her fear of the perils of gambling never left her – indeed, it would later come to haunt her in the most horrific fashion.
Clementine’s acute discomfort was not, however, shared by her mother. Still beautiful at forty-seven, Lady Blanche continued to walk proud. The Dieppois were intrigued by this titled lady who ignored the fashions of the day, replacing the customary hat perched on a b
un with a stylish mantilla and long plait down her back. Nor did Lady Blanche’s daughters escape her cut-price interpretation of la mode – when Kitty, Clementine and their younger sister Nellie went shopping in the markets they did so clothed in cheap gingham dresses.
Clementine was embarrassed by these deviations from upper-class norms but whatever their attire, the girls’ beauty was making an impact. While Kitty was still more striking, with her long dark hair and deep blue eyes, the slender, tall and fairer Clementine was finally beginning to blossom. The painter Walter Sickert, a frequent visitor, flirted with the older girl but he took Clementine more seriously. He once invited her to tea alone at his lodgings where he lived with Madame Augustine Villain, his mistress, model, landlady and the acknowledged queen of the Dieppe fish market. Madame Villain had several children who looked uncannily like Sickert, but he also seems, to Clementine’s horror, to have been involved with Lady Blanche. ‘She remembered terrible rows between her mother, Mr Sickert and the fishwife,’ recalls Shelagh Montague Browne, who later worked for Clementine. ‘It was a ménage. The fishwife would be throwing things in the market in a jealous temper. Clementine thought it all so unseemly.’
For all Sickert’s reputation at the time as a figure of, at best, questionable morals and as a painter of explicit nudes, Lady Blanche allowed her fourteen-year-old daughter to go un-chaperoned to his house. (Later in life Clementine herself developed a poor opinion of Sickert, once telling Cecil Beaton that ‘he was, without doubt, the most selfish human being I’ve ever come across.’13) Following her mother’s instructions, Clementine made her way up to Sickert’s room. Finding him absent and the place a shambles, she followed her instincts and tidied up, throwing away the remains of a herring on the table. When Sickert returned, he angrily informed her that she had discarded the subject of his next painting. She was terrified at first but they soon sat down to chat over brioches and tepid cider. By the time she emerged, her intelligence and poise had won his admiration.
One snowy winter’s night late in 1899, Lady Blanche’s fears were confirmed. She was with Kitty, Clementine and Sickert in her sitting room, which looked directly out onto the street. The fire was lit but the curtains not yet drawn when Clementine noticed a strange male figure at the window. Before she could look again, her mother had grabbed her and Kitty and pushed them both onto the floor. The mysterious man stared and stared through the glass while they continued to lie prostrate out of sight. When he finally turned away, they heard the doorbell ring, but as Kitty rose to answer it her mother sharply pulled her back down. After an interminable wait, they heard the man walk away at last, and Lady Blanche revealed to the astonished girls that he was Hozier, sending Kitty into the hall to see if he had left a letter.
Kitty returned with two, one for her, one for Clementine; they contained invitations from Hozier to dine and lunch with him at the Hôtel Royal on succeeding days. Clementine pleaded to be allowed not to go but her mother insisted they should, although their trusty French maid Justine would accompany them to and from the hotel.
After Kitty’s uneventful dinner, it was Clementine’s turn for lunch. This time, though, Hozier tried to send Justine away, insisting that he would escort his daughter home himself. Clementine directed imploring looks at her maid not to desert her, and during the meal of omelette and larks-en-brochette she was virtually speechless from anxiety. Hozier then delivered the dreaded news: she was to come to live with him, or rather with the whip-happy Aunt Mary.
Faced with this unthinkable prospect, Clementine’s shyness surrendered to a hitherto undetected determination and courage. While surreptitiously slipping on her gloves under the table, she announced calmly that her mother would refuse to allow her to leave Dieppe. The moment Justine returned, she rose from her chair and politely but firmly bade Hozier goodbye. In a fury, he suddenly barred her way, thrusting a gold coin into Justine’s hand and pushing her violently out of the door as he did so. Clementine was now trapped and alone with him once more, but when he moved to fetch a cigar, she valiantly seized her chance. She flung the door open and ran full pelt towards Justine, who was waiting uncertainly outside. The two girls scrambled away as fast as they could on the icy pavements with Hozier, swearing angrily, in pursuit. Only once they neared the safety of the house did he finally give up on them and turn back.
The bank manager and the captain of the Dieppe–Newhaven steamer later confirmed that Hozier had been planning to kidnap Clementine and take her back to England that very afternoon. Her quick thinking had saved her. As her future husband would later put it, Lady Blanche’s once timorous daughter had displayed an exceptional ability to ‘rise to the level of events’.
Scarcely had one crisis passed, though, before another came to test her. Just a few weeks later, in February 1900, Kitty contracted typhoid, probably from contaminated water. Clementine and Nellie were quickly sent away, making the long journey to relatives in Scotland alone. Fearing the effect on Kitty if she knew her sisters were leaving, Lady Blanche told them to say ‘goodnight’ rather than ‘goodbye’. The last they saw of Kitty, as they closed the door, was a silent and emaciated figure confined to bed.
With Bill already back at school in England, Lady Blanche was now free to pour all her energies into saving her sick child. She was helped by Sickert, who carried bucket after bucket of ice up to the girl’s room in a bid to reduce her raging fever. But despite all her mother’s efforts, Kitty died a month before her seventeenth birthday. The body was taken back to England, where Lady Blanche pointedly chose to bury her beloved daughter at the Mitfords’ home at Batsford rather than the family seat of Cortachy.
Clementine cut a lonely figure in the family now, for she was a young woman of nearly fifteen while the twins were three years younger and still children. Nor could her mother, who was never the same again, reach out to her. There was no enmity between them but in their grief there was a further distancing. Clementine was never to know the full, undivided warmth of a mother’s love and now she had lost the elder sibling who had understood and appreciated her. She became protective of her little sister Nellie, but Lady Blanche also transferred her attentions to her youngest daughter, leaving Clementine out in the cold once more.
Their time in Dieppe was now over. Less than a year after leaving England, the family was uprooted yet again, back to the picturesque suburban town of Berkhamsted, which offered cheap accommodation near a railway service to London and good inexpensive schools. They moved into an unpretentious Georgian terraced house on the high street, not far from where Clementine had stayed with Rosa Stevenson nine years earlier. She liked her latest home, with its long narrow garden running up the hill at the back, and, despite the tragedy of losing Kitty, she was about to embark on what were probably the happiest and certainly the most settled years of her early life. Only two months after her sister’s death, Clementine started at the local grammar school, Berkhamsted High School for Girls.
The experience was to change her outlook completely. Here she was fortunate to enjoy an education superior to that received by other aristocratic girls still tutored by governesses at home. A staff of clever, dedicated and often humorous female teachers quickly recognised her potential. Clementine was mixing with the largely friendly daughters of shopkeepers and doctors and both she and Nellie acclimatised quickly to all that provincial grammar school life entailed. Any awkwardness she might have felt in joining the school at fifteen, after her rackety aristocratic upbringing, and with precious little formal schooling behind her, seems quickly to have dissipated. She had a particular fondness for her French teacher Mlle Kroon, who would rouse daydreaming pupils with such lines as ‘Now you fat bolster, wake up!’ and she liked, too, the company of her classmates. Indeed, she would seek them out again in later life, and took the school magazine until her death. Seventy years after she left, Berkhamsted High was represented at her funeral.
On her return to England, Hozier asked to see Clementine once again. This time Lady Blanche acco
mpanied her to his house in North Audley Street, London, but as she was taking leave of her daughter Hozier came to the door. He flew into a rage at the sight of his wife, leading to an ugly scene in the street and further mortification for Clementine. She was not to know this was the last time she would see this ‘strange, violent yet most compelling man’.14 Despite his conduct, she came to regret that Hozier, who died in Panama in 1907 at the age of sixty-nine, a year before her wedding, would never meet her future husband.
Back in the safe and studious atmosphere of Berkhamsted High, Clementine continued to thrive. Starting in what would now be Year 11, she was quickly promoted to the Sixth Form for French, although Lady Blanche’s aversion to the teaching of sums resulted in a humiliating demotion to a lower year for maths. While Nellie was relaxed about her studies – preferring to devote her energies to captaining the girls’ cricket team – Clementine was highly competitive. Nearly half a century later, when she returned to give a speech on the school’s Commemoration Day in 1947, she spoke of the joy her education had brought her. ‘I loved it,’ she told the girls. ‘I felt I was out in the world, and on my own, away from the fiddling little tasks of arranging the flowers, folding the newspapers and plumping up the cushions.’
Prizes came quickly. In 1901, she won a solid silver medal for French presented by the French ambassador, and even Lady Blanche now recognised her daughter’s potential. The following year she treated Clementine to a trip to Paris with a former governess, Mlle Louise Henri. Having been told to stay as long as they could on £25, they eked out this sum by barely eating. Not only did they visit museums, lectures and art galleries but Mlle Henri gave Clementine thrilling glimpses of other worlds, pointing out famous music hall artistes in the street. Sickert, who turned up out of the blue one evening, also took her to meet the painter Camille Pissarro, who lived in a garret, and then to dinner in an elegant house where everything was ‘exquisite’ – the food, the furniture, the host’s manners. Clementine lapped up every minute; she now thirsted for worldly knowledge and experience.