Elizabeth Winthrop's Blog, page 5

Fetcham Park, my grandfather’s childhood home in Surrey

On May 20th, we took another train from Waterloo Station, this time to Leatherhead, Surrey to see Fetcham Park, the house where my grandfather, Arthur Barnard Hankey, spent his childhood.  We saw the famous ceilings and wall murals by Louis Laguerre (1663-1721) whose paintings can also be found at Blenheim Palace and Chatsworth among others.

The house was sold in 1924 and went out of the Hankey family. But the present owners, Sandra and Malcolm Young, and their daughter, Laura, were happy to have us visit. They gave us Hankey descendants a delicious lunch

and a tour of the tiny church and the graveyard where many of our ancestors are buried. They pointed out a door frame in the dining room that they’ve preserved with a sheet of plexiglass. Hankey children down through the decades stood against this wall to have their heights recorded. We found my grandfather with this notation. May 11. Arthur 1914.  5 ft 11 and 1/2 “.  They invited me to sign at the bottom of the same door frame. May 20, 2014. Almost exactly 100 years later. My grandfather never got much taller. Here he is with my mother, about to escort her into the church for her wedding. (She was 5’9″ but even accounting for her chic platform shoes, I have a feeling he might have been adding a few inches when he recorded his height that day in Fetcham.)

And here I am at the front door of Fetcham with my mother’s first cousin, John Barnard Hankey.

We have a tiny snapshot which shows my mother  “in her rompers” as she used to say,  collecting eggs one Easter Sunday at Fetcham with her older brother, Ian.

Other than that she has only one other memory of Fetcham. During the war, when she and her parents were living at 60 Pont Street, they often tried to get out of London on the weekends for a break from the grim, gray quality of the bombed out city.  Once they took the train to Fetcham which at that point had been leased to the University College of London for their Anatomy and Physiology Departments as their buildings had been bombed during the Blitz.

Air raid shelters had been dug in the front of the house, but other than that the place appeared much the same until my mother and her parents rubbed away the grime to peer in the windows of the old garage. Inside, in neat lines, lay the embalmed bodies of dead soldiers. The corpses, probably contributed by families to the medical school, were awaiting autopsies by medical students as part of their training. My mother reports that she and her parents returned to their Pont Street flat in London quite shaken by their country outing. They never went back to Fetcham.

 

My father, the British Army and a Wedding

One day, we took the train from Waterloo Station to Winchester where Christopher Wallace met us and drove us the short distance to the Green Jackets Museum. Christopher is the official historian of the Kings Royal Rifle Corps (also known as the 60th Rifles and the Green Jackets). For the last four years, he’s been a huge help to me as I’ve been researching both my father’s and my uncle’s experiences in the Regiment during the Second World War. We were delighted finally to meet one another.

My uncle, Ian Barnard Hankey, was a likely candidate for the Regiment as he was an English public schoolboy who turned 18 in November of 1939. Unbeknownst to his parents, he enlisted in January of 1940 while passing through Birmingham on his way from a Christmas holiday with his family in Kent to his school, Ampleforth College, in Yorkshire.

My father was a different story.  An American citizen, he was repeatedly rejected by his own country’s armed services because he was prone to white coat syndrome. Every time he got near an examining physician, his blood pressure shot up. No matter what strings he pulled, (and since his mother was Eleanor Roosevelt’s first cousin, he pulled some pretty big ones) the army kept thanking him for his offer of service and talking about a desk job. He’d just about given up the idea of joining the fight when he heard about the KRRC recruitment officer in New York.

The KRRC was actually “raised” in America in response to the disastrous defeat of General Braddock’s troops at the hands of the French and Indians on July 8, 1755. Recruited from settlers in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland and North Carolina and supplemented by volunteers from British and European regiments, the 60th Royal Americans, as they came to be called, were vital to the British cause during the War for Independence. They earned their motto, “Celer et Audax” (Swift and Bold) because they’d adopted “the colonial methods of equipment, simpler drill, open formations, and the Indian system of forest warfare.” *  So, in view of the Regiment’s American origins, the KRRC in 1941 decided to commission a select group of volunteers “from the States”. The earliest recruits joined the British Army before Pearl Harbor. By April, 1942, my father had been accepted into the regiment and was training in Winchester where the Green Jackets museum is now located.

Christopher gave us a wonderfully detailed tour of the museum so that we could see everything from an officer’s uniform during the War for Independence right through to the official notice of the Americans who stood with the British in World War II.

KRRC Americans

In this photograph, taken in North Africa in August, 1943, Stewart, my father, stands second from the left. After a long, dusty trip through North Africa, these five Americans ship out with the 8th Army to fight in Italy. They don’t see England again until March of 1944.

My father never met my uncle Ian,  the fellow member of the regiment and the man who would have been his brother-in-law. On August 31, 1942, the day my parents met in Yorkshire, my uncle Ian, a 20-year-old platoon officer, was killed in the battle of Alam El Halfa in the Western Desert.

Stewart doesn’t finish the war with the KRRC. In July, 1944, the American Army finally approves his transfer just before he parachutes into France with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) as the leader of a three man team sent to fight with the French Resistance.  Because the transfer comes so late, he is forced to borrow a uniform from his younger brother, John, (also in England training as a parachutist) and to ask Dick Franklin, the young radio operator on his team, to affix his First Lieutenant bars and crossed rifles in their proper place on his left shoulder. Franklin shows him the American form of salute and reminds him not to stamp his feet as is the custom in the British army. Just before he jumps, Stewart is  promoted from 1st Lieutenant to Captain.

In the space of four weeks, my father switched armies, was promoted and….

got married.

On June 20, 1944, he and my mother are wed in the side altar of St. Mary’s Cadogan Street

two hours after a V-1 rocket attack.

Some weeks later, he is crouched in a ditch by the side of a road in the Haute-Vienne section of France while his bride is back at work, decoding agents’ reports, alert to the whine of approaching “doodle bugs” in the skies above London.

What a way to start a marriage.

 

 

 

 

 

*From the Regimental Association History Site

My mother in London

So when we last saw my mother in early March of 1943, she’d just hopped on a train to London.

Standing in the queue at Harrods, her mother had learned from Rosie Tuffnall’s mother that Rosie was giving up her job to have her baby in the relative safety of the country. The job was Tish’s if she wanted it. At that point, my mother would have taken a job as trash collector if it meant she could get to London where all the action was. That fall,  her  Yankee admirer had managed to track her down and had even come to dinner at their small, top floor Pont Street flat,  but her parents wouldn’t allow them to go alone to tour the British Museum, and certainly not to the wild party my father gave at Christmas to mark his gazetting as a British officer. So he’d stopped calling. Never mind, she thought.  London was swarming with soldiers on leave from training, most of them eager to take a pretty young girl out to the nightclubs. And her parents would certainly let her go because all the nightclubs were in the basement, the safest place to be during a raid. My mother had a certain “come hither” look

about her which revealed the rebel inside the good Catholic girl.

So she moved into the little flat on the top floor of 60 Pont Street with her parents.

On March 17th, her seventeenth birthday, she took the tube from Sloane Square to 55 Broadway to report for duty. I’ll let her tell the next bit.

I went to Passport Control to sign in the first day and they said go up to the third floor and ask for Captain Hastings.  I got on the lift, went up and Capn.  Hastings greeted me. He said, “Welcome, Miss Hankey, I would like you to sign this” and he handed me the Official Secrets Act.  I was much too shy to say, why do I have to sign this to work for Passport Control?  After I signed it,  he shook my hand and said,  “Welcome to the Secret Intelligence Service.” He was in uniform and I didn’t question anything.  At which point, I was sent up to the Fifth Floor and told to go to a naval captain’s office. His name was Captain Russell.  His secretary, Miss Maureen Thring, was a civil servant, had been working all her life and was six-foot-three.  In those days, no female was six-foot-three.  There were two girls in the office already, and they needed a third because Rosie had to go down to the country. We were so young they called us ‘the nursery.’”

When her friend, Bee, finally graduated from the Carr-Saunders Secretarial School in June of 1943, Tish got her a job with the Army Division of MI5 in the same building on the floor below. Bee moved into 24 Pont Street, otherwise known as the Monkey Club,  a hostel for fashionable young women who were doing war work in London.

Every morning, the two young women walked up Pont and down Sloane Street to Sloane Square where they hopped on the Tube for the short ride to St. James Park, directly across the street from their office.

And most evenings, they went out partying at the nightclubs which had names like the Four Hundred (only the best regiments went there), the Churchill, and the Bagatelle.

There was one called the Bag O’ Nails

which was totally disreputable. Your father was a charter member of it, and so were all his friends in the Kings Royal Rifle Corps.  Milly Hooey was the name of the proprietor. 

Not long after she got back to London, my mother was invited to “come out” at the Queen Charlotte’s Ball, an annual event which remarkably, still exists. She wore this dress

and guess who was there,

 

escorting an older girl in a slinky black dress…

My mother spied him in the balcony, marched up the steps and invited him to dance. The rest is not exactly history or smooth sailing, but let’s just say that, from that moment on, things proceeded apace.

I find it easier to imagine my mother’s life in the rural countryside of England, where if you look in the right direction,

the views are unchanged and where many of the old houses have been preserved even though they now function as hotels, tourist attractions and wedding venues. London is a wild, bustling, cosmopolis where even a seasoned New Yorker like myself, can feel a little overwhelmed by the crowds, the sight of a double-decker bus squealing around the corner and the buzz of foreign languages in the tube.

My mother loved London and returned there from America as often as she could.  What does remain from her time are the 19th Century houses, the regular brick facades, the churches, the Tube, Hyde Park and so many other smaller gardens, many of them tucked behind iron fences and open only to residents.

London was grim during the war, but when I asked my mother if she were scared, she replied with a smile, “No. Isn’t it funny? You don’t believe anything is going to happen to you. You had that sense of immortality.”

 

War Memorials

As it’s Memorial Day in the United States, it seems the right time to describe our visit to one special cathedral in England.

When we went to Winchester last week to meet with Christopher Wallace, the historian of the Green Jackets Museum,(about which more in another post), he suggested at the end of our time with him that we go down to Winchester Cathedral to see my Uncle Ian’s name in the honor roll.  Ian Barnard Hankey, a 2nd Lieutenant in the Kings Royal Rifle Corps, was killed at the age of 20 in the battle of Alam El Halfa in late August of 1942.  We’d already seen his name in two places on the wall of his prep school in Yorkshire, but as Christopher explained, Winchester Cathedral is the home church

for the K.R.R.C. (also known as the 60th Rifles and the Royal Green Jackets)

and so the honor roll is kept in a special locked box.  “You will have to see the verger to get him to open the box. He’s often busy, so be insistent,” Christopher suggested.

The verger anticipated my request as soon as he heard my voice. “You’ve come from America to see someone’s name in the honor roll.”  I nodded.  He led us to this boxtook out a special key and opened it.

Inside, there is an implement, much like an ivory letter opener, that is used to turn the pages. “We’ll have to hunt through,” he warned. “It can take a while.”

Honestly, although he was amazed, I was not when the first page he opened revealed Uncle Ian’s name. This personal pilgrimage I had taken to trace my mother’s life in England has been filled with moments like these.

The entry is simple: I.B.Hankey, 1942.

“This is a special page,” the verger pointed out. “Only 25 names. Because there were so few Green Jacket officers of that rank killed in the Second World War, your uncle’s page is decorated with the Regiment’s emblem and motto. Celer et Audax.”

Swift and Bold.

All I could think in that moment was not swift enough.

After a long silent moment, the verger closed the glass case again, leaving Uncle Ian’s page open. I thanked him and settled into one of the wooden chairs to contemplate the space.

Human beings, when they set their minds to it, can create remarkably beautiful edifices.

It makes the insanity of war seem even more unbearable. My uncle’s life was cut off at twenty. I often wonder what he was like, who he might have been, what he would have thought of me, his niece, born six years after he died.

I took some comfort from the discovery that one of my favorite writers is buried in the same Cathedral directly across the Nave from Ian’s locked box.

Everywhere you go in England, the war dead are memorialized on the walls of the churches. Here are just four of the plaques from one corner of one wall of Trinity Church on Sloane Street in London.

 

In this blog post I received today from J. A. Moad II,  a former Air Force C-130 pilot and fiction editor for the War, Literature & the Arts Journal, he writes: “It’s as if these hard truths have been boxed up and buried along with the dead, locked deep inside the heart of Veterans, or woven into the fabric of some infinite war memorial and contained there to be viewed from a safe distance and then forgotten.” Moad has started a project to help veterans tell their stories so those experiences are not forever boxed up inside them.  Last week, because of his hard work, the Minnesota Legislature passed a bill designating October as Veterans’ Voices Month.

Uncle Ian is not here to tell his story which must be why I keep trying to do it.

The Mysterious Photograph

When I went to Ampleforth Abbey and College last week to show the monks and teachers the photographs my Uncle Ian

took during his short life, there was one that nobody recognized. It shows the roof of a church damaged by some kind of fire and it looks like this.As I mentioned, when the monks told me this wasn’t a photograph taken at Ampleforth, a small bell went off in my head, but it wasn’t until the next week that I remembered a story my mother had told me about their life during the war.

When the Hankey family was evacuated from Gibraltar to London in May, 1940, they took the top floor flat at 60 Pont Street,

directly across from a Scotch Presbyterian church called St. Columba’s. Here’s a picture of the church today from the end of Pont Street.

It looks nothing like the photo from my uncle Ian’s file.

Here’s a picture of the church the Hankey family  saw across Pont Street when they came to live in the flat.

And here’s a passage from the history of St. Columba’s which explains why it’s no longer there.

“Disaster struck on the night of 10 May 1941. An incendiary bomb dropped from an enemy aircraft destroyed the whole (church) building in a matter of hours, to the stunned bewilderment of the congregation who turned up for service the next morning. For more than a decade the large congregation continued to operate without benefit of building, using the facilities of Imperial College (Jehangir Hall) for Sunday services and the courtesy of local churches and Manse for other activities.

The spirit of the congregation during the dark days of World War II was sustained by the wise leadership and fervent preaching of the Reverend Robert FV Scott. From the morning of the blitz, when a lady parishioner had pressed her purse into his hands, saying, “Take this. We must rebuild. More will follow.” until the proud day in 1955, when the splendid new St. Columba’s was finally dedicated, Dr. Scott had nourished the faith and hope of the congregation and co-operated with the architect to achieve as fine a facility as any modern church could hope for.”

This is what my mother remembered about that night.

Ian was still in London on leave when they dropped the incendiary on the St. Columba’s church across the street from 60 Pont Street and he shinnied up the house across the street to try and put it out.  I remember him up on the roof throwing the sand on the church.  He gave up because it was hopeless.  The incendiaries were much more effective than fire and all the fire engines were down in the East End for what was really the second great fire of London.

On May 12, 1941,  Ian was posted to the 10th Battalion so for the preceding weekend, he was on leave at home.  And on May 11th, the day after his useless attempts to put out the fire, he climbed back up to the roof of Pont Street with his camera and took that shot of the smoldering embers of St. Columba’s. And it turns out his is the only photograph of the church roof from above. All the others that St. Columba’s owns are of the damaged interior

or of the church from down below after the fire. Note the missing roof.

When we showed a copy of Ian’s photograph

to the Rector, Angus MacLeod (whose great-grandfather, Donald MacLeod, was Rector of this same church in the 1880s),

he was thrilled.  As were we.  Another little mystery solved.

Angus then took us up to the church tower so we could look down on the roof of my mother’s house on Pont Street. And from there, we saw some of the best views of London.

The roof of Harrods

and the Shard and the London Eye.

The people we’ve encountered on this trip have been unfailingly generous and truly excited about the bits of history I’ve carried to them from across the pond, thanks to my mother’s memories and the photographs she saved.  So often, treasures come back to me as in meeting Angus MacLeod and seeing London from what felt like the top of the world. And finally, looking down on the building where my mother spent so much of her life during the war.

My mother goes to Secretarial School.. in a castle…

A week  after my parents meet at Allerton, my mother

and her best friend, Bee, are off to Stanway House in that distant corner of England that my father mentioned in his letter home after the weekend party in Yorkshire. Although Cheltenham is quite a long way from York where he is in training with the Kings Royal Rifle Corps, the county of Gloucestershire is only a two-hour train ride from London where soldiers in the British Army take their frequent, generous leaves. So it is possible that their paths will cross again.

However, to my mother’s despair, she is once again ensconced in a rural setting behind stone walls.

Granted as the website describes it, “Stanway House is noted for its mellow, peaceful atmosphere, created by its age (it was finished in the calm decade before the Civil War), by its stone (a delicious Cotswold stone known as Guiting Yellow), by its architecture (Jacobean mullions and gables and Cotswold slates).”

My mother described it this way. We were two to a room, but since my best friend was the daughter of Lord Mowbray, the Premier Baron of England, we were given the largest bedroom. Carr Saunders was the top secretarial school in London, but they’d been bombed out early in the war. So they rented Stanway House from the Earl of Wemyss and March. (The family name was Charteris.)  The house was built in about the 16th century. We walked up and down stone staircases that you felt had been worn down by the feet of time.  The students reported sightings of a ghost in the main part of the house, but I never had a visitation.

 Tish had barely settled in at Stanway when the news came of her brother Ian’s death

in the battle of Alam El Halfa in the Western Desert. Her parents traveled down from London to tell Granny Hankey at Whiteshoots the terrible news.

I went over to meet them. It had only been four weeks since I’d last seen my mother, but in that short space of time, her hair had gone completely white. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes I wouldn’t have believed it was possible that grief could create that physical change in a person so quickly.

Tish returned to Stanway. People were dying, life could be hideously short. Ian’s life was over before it had even begun. Don’t let that happen to me, she thought. She was going stir crazy, trapped for nine full months just when she thought she’d finally gotten away from the rules and bells of her Catholic convent school.

So she decided to throw a party.   As usual, my mother was the instigator, and Bee went along, unable to resist the force of her friend’s personality.

I ’d seen an ad in the Tatler for half kegs of hard cider, 20% alcohol, so I ordered one. The stationmaster phoned up one day and said, Miss Hankey, there ’s a half keg of cider down here. How are you going to get it up to Stanway?  It was two miles from the station to the castle, but of course I hadn’t thought of that when I put in the order. So I accepted his offer of a wheelbarrow, and Bee and I rolled that keg up the hill and then we had to roll it up that long stone staircase. With some difficulty, we “ bunged ” the keg which means to poke it and put the tap in. A good deal of cider escaped, but there was enough left over so we invited the other girls and the teachers.  It was a great success even though we all had awful hangovers the next day. Then, of course we had to get rid of the keg, but that was a good deal easier. We just rolled it down the hill, hanging on as best we could to the wheelbarrow.

Although we weren’t able to get into Stanway House because of scheduling, my husband and I spent a lovely hour circling the place. Like so many of these old estates, the house itself is surrounded by gardens, statuary, stables and even sometimes, a brewhouse.

At the entrance to the estate, a man was carefully clipping the grass around the gravestones with a pair of long-handled secateurs. 

Although the place must have been incredibly cold that winter and she was trapped in a rural valley, miles away from the excitement of London, my mother found herself once again, in a spectacularly beautiful stately home.

In all of these places, I’m actually happier not to see the interiors of the modern rooms. I have an easier time imagining my mother’s life by gazing at centuries-old stone walls, at perennial beds that could  have been planted seventy years ago and at the remarkably unspoiled views across the valleys of rural England.

The full secretarial course at Stanway took ten months. But Tish got a phone call a week before her seventeenth birthday letting her know that she had a job in London if she wanted it. She kissed Bee goodbye and jumped on the train.

At last, her real life was going to start.

Uncle Ian at Ampleforth

For now, we shall leave my mother and father, separated by wartime England, my father besotted by his beguiling Catholic girl, and my mother,

thrilled that she’s caught the attention of a much older, handsome fellow in her brother’s own regiment, the Kings Royal Rifle Corps. He’s an American, which she knows will prove problematic with her parents, and not a Catholic which will make things even more difficult.  In fact, she may never see him again, but they’ll always have that kiss in the Rose Garden at Allerton.  Nobody can take that away from her.

But now I turn my attention to her older brother, Ian Barnard Hankey. At the age of eight, in classic British upper class tradition, Ian was sent to boarding school in northern Yorkshire. Think Harry Potter as you imagine Ian, boarding the S.S. Mooltan of the P and O line in Gibraltar in early January of 1931. Although his parents took him to school for his first term, they decide he must get used to making this trip alone as he will be doing it three times a year. So the boy,

makes his way from Southampton Harbor, probably under the care of a fellow passenger from Gibraltar, to Kings Cross Station to board the train to York where he’ll be collected by carriage for the trip to Gilling Castle, the preparatory school for Ampleforth College.

Gilling Castle, renamed St. Martin’s Preparatory School, is now coeducational and accepts day students, but the facade of the building hasn’t changed at all.

Ian will stay at Ampleforth until he graduates in the early summer of 1940. On this personal trip into my mother’s life, I’ve traveled to Ampleforth, only forty minutes from Allerton Castle, to try and learn more about my uncle Ian who died in the war,  exactly six years before I was born.

On this excursion, I have a wonderful guide in Dan Davidson, an English teacher at the school, himself a graduate, and the son-in-law of the Stourtons who have graciously put us up for two nights at Allerton Stables. I’m continually struck by how strong the bond was between my mother and Bee Stourton, her best friend from the Poles Convent school. In memory of my mother’s friendship with their aunt and mother, Bee’s family have welcomed us with open arms, both in Yorkshire and in London.

Dan has arranged a tea at the Ampleforth tea room  with some teachers and two of the Benedictine monks from the Abbey including Father Edward who graduated from Ampleforth in 1951. They pore over the pictures I’ve brought with me, photos young Ian had taken while at the school, and identify the various sites. Then Dan gives us an extended tour of every place that Ian might have known while at the school. In the library, we find a picture of Ian on the rugby team in the 1940 Ampleforth Journal. At Gilling Castle Ian’s name is listed on two different plaques, commemorating the graduates lost in the war.

Dan is indefatigable.He urges me up a muddy slope (it’s been an especially wet spring in Yorkshire), to the upper lake where Ian took pictures of friends skating and then a photo of the college in the distance.

Here’s Ian’s photograph taken on a snowy day in the 1930sand 74 years later, mine, taken in the springtime, from the near side of the same lake. In both photographs, you can see Ampleforth College and Abbey in the far distance. Ian loved to take pictures and he must have handed his camera to friends so they could record his sporting achievements. His father pasted all these into a scrapbook.   Ian excelled at the long jumpand the relay race

among others.

One of the photographs I brought with me shows a church roof, clearly damaged by some sort of fire. “This is not Ampleforth,” Father Edward tells me.

“You’re absolutely sure?” I ask. “All these negatives came to me in one envelope from my mother.”

“Absolutely sure,” he says.

Then a detail from another of my mother’s stories stirs in my brain, but for the moment, I shove it aside as I’m trying to record every other detail of this too short visit to Ian’s school.

That evening in the chapel, we attend  Compline, the final service of the day, sung by the Benedictine monks. Raised a Catholic in the time of the Latin Mass and Gregorian chants, I am moved and comforted by this quiet restorative moment. Uncle Ian knelt here, I think, maybe in this exact pew.

It is the closest I feel to my young uncle who, because of the trajectory of a German Stuka on the last day of August, 1942, never got to have a life.

 

 

 

 

My Parents Meet

On this day, what would have been my father’s 100th birthday, I think it’s time to bring him on the scene. My mother

is visiting her best friend, Bee Stourton, the daughter of Lord and Lady Mowbray at Allerton Park in Yorkshire

and my father

is with the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, training in nearby York. He is twenty-eight and she is sixteen.

The Mowbrays have invited neighbors, friends and a couple of lucky American soldiers to come for the last party before the house is taken over by the Royal Canadian Air Force.This time I’ll let my father tell his side of the story.  This excerpt comes from a letter he wrote home to his parents in Connecticut.

The party starts in the drawing roomand moves on to the dining room where  my father sat next to my mother at dinner at this elegant table (photographed two days ago.)

We were asked to spend the weekend at the country seat of the 23rd Lord Mowbray and Stourton. The whole thing was like a fantastic expedition into early nineteenth century England; Lord M & S has the undisputed and enviable right to kiss the King on the cheek at sight. The house is a hideous great pile of Early Victorian gloom built on the site of the original castle, which burnt down. The grounds are incredibly lovely, including a) a large herd of deer  b) a curious domelike structure built by some duke to celebrate a minor victory  c) a garden chock-a-block full of incredibly delicious fruit, and  d) an artificial lake black with duck. The house is magnificently furnished, mostly in Regency furniture and Romneys and VanDykes.

            My friend George and I were a trifle dismayed when we saw all this – we had visions of sitting glumly round the throne, speaking only when spoken to, and dying for a drink. But not at all. After a short period of iciness, while the English aristocracy were obviously wondering what species of barbarians these Americans were, a first rate impromptu-party – the best kind – started, and lasted till two in the morning. During the course of it I fell fairly deeply in love with the seventeen-year-old daughter of a belted earl (or something of the kind), and according to immemorial Alsop custom, urged on by ten glasses of port, soft moonlight, and the scent of roses, I proposed marriage around 1:15 A.M. For the first time, however, I did not wake up in the morning feeling like leaping into the artificial lake. In fact, even in the cold light of day, it looked like a pretty good idea. But since she’s moving almost immediately to some distant corner of England (and corners of England can be awfully distant these days) and since she comes from England’s oldest Catholic family, none of whom have married a Protestant for eight or nine centuries, it seems unlikely that any hands across the sea union will develop. But she really is utterly charming. Perhaps she’ll convert me to God, where you have so miserably failed. Anyway, the whole weekend, what with love and solid comfort combined, was wonderful.

My journalist father  relied on facts as a reporter, but in his letters home from the war, he tended to exaggerate in the service of a good story.  To set the record straight, he’d mixed up my mother with her best friend, Bee. They were both Catholic, but Mummy was hardly the “daughter of a belted earl.” She was also only sixteen, but she may have lied about her age. She certainly looked and acted older.

A few years ago, I read his description of Allerton Park to my eighty-two-year old mother. “Not deer,”  she harumphed. “Highland cattle. He never did get that straight.”

The original house did not burn down. Alfred Joseph Stourton, the 23rd Baron Mowbray, tore down a lovely Georgian house  in 1843 in order to build this Gothic Revival “pile”.

My mother, never one to chatter and babble, made only one comment to my father during that dinner party. “You look like a criminal,” she said when she saw his close-cut hair.  And with that, he appears to have fallen madly in love.

They were caught kissing in the Rose Garden, my mother told me, only because Lord Mowbray, who was at the opposite end of the garden in the arms of his mistress, happened to notice them and reported it to his wife. The next day, Lady Mowbray wrote my Granny Hankey a stern letter, describing this regrettable incident and suggesting that “something must be done to curb Tish’s hot Spanish blood.” In all my father’s letters home describing his efforts to find his love again, he called her Moonlight and Roses  after a popular song of the time because he didn’t wish his mother to start querying her English cousins about this mysterious young girl.

However as my father sadly reports at the end of his letter home, this love seems doomed from the start as Tish and Bee were indeed headed to a distant corner of England. To prepare for war work, they’d enrolled in the Carr Saunders Secretarial School at Stanway House down in the Cotswolds a few miles from Whiteshoots, Granny Hankey’s house that I’ve written about in an earlier post.

On August 31, 1942, the exact same day my parents met at Allerton, a million miles away my mother’s only brother, twenty-year-old Ian Barnard Hankey, was dive-bombed by a Stuka

in the Western Desert on the first day of the battle of Alam el Halfa.  Although he died instantly,  it took weeks for the news to reach his parents in London.

Sometimes I wonder whether, on his way out of this world, Uncle Ian pushed Daddy in front of his sister.

You’ll have to take care of her, now. I won’t be here to do it

 

 

 

 

 

 

Allerton Castle

When my mother graduated from the Poles Convent School at the age of sixteen, she was invited to spend the second summer in a row in Yorkshire with her best friend, Bee. Bee’s mother, Lady Mowbray, knew it would be a comfort to my grandmother to have Tish out of wartime London. Even though the bombing had lessened in June of 1942, and it was never as bad as the months of the Blitz in 1940, London was still a grim and dangerous place. So off my mother went to keep Bee company in what she later described as “a ghastly pile” near Knaresborough in Yorkshire.  Allerton Park, (now known as Allerton Castle) looked like this…and these days, taken from another angle, it doesn’t look much different.

Here’s the way my mother described the place to me.

Allerton Park (pronounced Ollerton) was a ghastly pile up in Yorkshire, North England. It had something like 24 major bedrooms, a minstrel’s gallery and masses of other rooms. The great hall was 80 feet high.  It was an extraordinary place. I spent two summers there.

By 1942, all the regular servants had enlisted so there was very little staff. Bee and I used to be given the job of vacuuming. It was called Hoovering. You’d go up one way and down the other. You never repeated. It took us at least a day to do two floors.

Lady Mowbray had no idea how to cook so there was a kitchen maid, and a cook with a wooden leg who came part time, and then a series of schoolgirls who would come after work to clean the kitchen. For parties, they hired a retired butler who was about 85 and very feeble.

We must have eaten, but I don’t have  vivid memories of eating. I remember sitting at the dining room table but I don’t remember eating. Bee and I were always hungry. The kitchen was downstairs about half a mile away from the dining room. Breakfast we had up in the nursery where we slept.

We collected vegetables from the garden and other things from the hothouses.  Bee and I went down to the hothouses wheeling our way through the herd of Highland cattle who lived in the park.  Gilly Rue was the bull, and he didn’t like us going through his territory so we spent our time dodging behind enormous trees. Bee was terrified of the bull so I’d hide behind the tree and Bee would hide behind me. We picked peaches and grapes and figs and pears.

Here she is, coming out of the lower garden.

My mother knew Bee’s older brother, Charles, from her visits to Allerton.  Charles was educated at Ampleforth College (where my uncle Ian went to school and which I’ll be writing about in another post) and served as a lieutenant in the Grenadier Guards in the Second World War. Not long after the D-Day invasion, he lost his right eye near Caen.

In late August of 1942, the Royal Canadian Air Force requisitions Allerton as a barracks.  Lord and Lady Mowbray are to remove themselves to what is known as the Priest’s House on the property, and they decide to have one last bang-up party.  They engage the feeble butler, Lord Mowbray brings up all the best wines and Bee and Tish drag an enormous, filthy, silver epergne up from the basement and fill it with fruit and flowers for the center of the dining room table.  Lady Mowbray is distressed to note that the two girls, in their enthusiasm, haven’t really bothered to clean the object before they filled it, but the whole event is a bit “hunker-munker” as my mother described it.

Lady Mowbray’s brother-in-law, St. John (pronounced Synjin) Whitehead, is stationed in nearby York with the Kings Royal Rifle Corps (known as the Green Jackets) and he rings up to ask if he can bring along two Americans who have enlisted the regiment. “Certainly,” says Lady Mowbray. “The more the merrier.”

The afternoon of the party, St. John calls again.  “Harry Fowler was supposed to come,” he tells Lady Mowbray. “But he’s gotten sick, so might I bring Stewart Alsop instead.”

“I don’t know any of them,” Lady Mowbray says, “As long you’ve got petrol, you can bring anyone you want.”

And so the stage is set. Sixteen-year-old Tish’s life is about to take a major turn.

 

 

Whiteshoots Cottage

I’m sitting in our bedroom in Whiteshoots Cottage  in Bourton-on-the-Water which I thought until this morning was my great-grandmother’s house from the mid-1920s until her death in 1946.  But when I showed Verian, our lovely proprietor, the photographs of my great-grandmother’s house, she said, “oh, that’s just up the hill. I’ll ring the owners and see if you can go have a look.” She then produced an ancient photograph of the entire hill and pointed to the large house at the very top. That’s Whiteshoots House, she said.

Here’s the old photograph

and the one of the house I brought from my mother’s childhood scrapbook

and that same facade today.

The owners were very welcoming and we had fun comparing the house now to what it looked like then.

Here’s a photo from my mother’s album. And the same view this afternoon.

We stood in what I’m sure was my mother’s bedroom and looked down the valley towards the town of Bourton.

In the afternoon, Verian drove me over to see a nearby farmhouse built in the 1600s because she recognized it in a photo I brought titled “Cotswold Harvest.”

The house in the bottom left hand corner of the scrapbook page looks like this:

and today, Aston House looks much the same.

Apparently, in 1939, my mother and her brother helped bring in the harvest at Aston.

Mummy loved coming to visit her Granny Hankey in the Cotswolds, first as a child and then later, when she was enrolled in the Carr-Saunders Secretarial School in nearby Stanway House.   Here’s how she described Whiteshoots to me:

Ivy all over it, enormous garden, earwigs in the bathtub, perennial beds, a cutting garden surrounded by a hedge so nobody could see when you cut things. Big vegetable garden behind, tennis court, apple orchard. She named it Whiteshoots. In those days, everybody named their houses. Granny Hankey had the most enormous pile of not very good jewelry which she kept in leather cases in the top drawers of the big bureau in her bedroom next to some painted Chinese figures. She always let me open the leather cases and paw through the jewelry. Her bedroom, which overlooked the perennial border, had uneven floors and when you walked in the room, the heads of all the Chinese figures bobbed and waggled around. I felt as if they were guarding the jewelry.

The orchards have been replanted, the gardens are lush and well-tended, and the house is full of three generations once again. But there were sad moments for my family here. In September of 1942, soon after my grandparents learned that their only son had been killed by a Stuka in the battle of Alam Halfa in the western desert , they traveled down from London to Whiteshoots to tell Granny Hankey.  My mother again:

I went over from Carr Saunders to meet them. It was ghastly. My mother ’ s hair had gone completely white since I ’ d seen her last, only a few weeks before.

Granny Hankey died in 1946 at the age of 85 and Whiteshoots was sold not long afterwards.

Tomorrow we shall visit Stanway to see where my mother lived from September of 1942 until March of 1943 when at the age of 17, she started work as a decoding agent in the Naval Division of MI5. And then off we go to Yorkshire to see Allerton Castle so I can stand in the room where my mother and father first laid eyes on one another.

The journey continues.