Meanwhile, I went up to London to see Aunt Madge, and there she was still living all by herself in that house near Westminster Cathedral.
‘Aren’t you afraid of burglars?’ I asked.
She told me she had never given them a thought. I looked astonished.
‘Then it’s time you did,’ I said. ‘The things one reads in the papers every day scare me stiff. It’s always elderly women living on their own in big old-fashioned houses who get attacked. I hope you keep the chain on the door and never answer the bell after dark.’
She admitted there had been a burglary in a neighbouring street.
‘There you are,’ I said. ‘The brutes are going to start on this district. If you took paying guests, and had a man in the house, nothing would happen. Besides, living alone like this, you might fall and break a leg. Nobody would find you for days.’
I suppose it took me about three months to make the poor dears realise – Father, Mother, and Aunt Madge – how much happier they would be if they pooled their resources and all lived together in the house in Victoria. It was much the best thing for Father, because it meant that he was near to the best hospitals if his health cracked up. It did, too, the following year, but not before I had found myself a job as understudy in a West End theatre.
Oh yes, I was stage-struck, I admit it. You remember Vernon Miles, the matinee idol before the war? He was the heart throb of my generation, like the pop singers for the teen-agers today, and I was mad about him like everyone else. The family were settling in with my Aunt Madge in Victoria – I had the two top rooms as a flat – and I used to go and wait outside the stage door every evening. In the end he had to notice me. My hair was blonde and fluffy in those days, not touched up as it is to-day, and I was really pretty, though I say it myself. Wet or fine, every evening I was there, and gradually it became a sort of joke with him. He started off by signing my autograph book, then he used to say good night and wave, and finally he asked me into the dressing-room for a drink with the rest of the company.
‘Meet Old Faithful,’ he said – he had a great sense of humour – and they all laughed and shook hands with me, and I told him there and then that I wanted a job.
‘You mean you want to act?’ he asked.
‘I don’t mind what I do,’ I said, ‘as long as I’m inside a theatre. I’ll help pull the curtain up and down, if you like.’
I think the audacity of this really did the trick, and the way I wouldn’t take no for an answer, because Vernon Miles did make a job for me as assistant to the assistant stage manager. Actually, I was a sort of glorified messenger girl, but it was a foot on the ladder all the same. And what it was to be able to go back to the house in Victoria and tell them I’d got a job on the stage with Vernon Miles!
Besides the stage directing part of my work, I under-studied the understudies. Happy, carefree days they were. The best part, though, was seeing Vernon Miles every day. I was always one of the last out of the theatre and managed to leave at the same time as he did.
He stopped calling me ‘Old Faithful’ and nicknamed me ‘Fidelity’ instead, which was more complimentary, and I made it my business to keep away from the stage door all the fans who wanted to pester him. I did the same for other members of the company, and some of them got very jealous. There can be quite a lot of ill-feeling backstage one way or another, which the stars themselves don’t see.
‘I wouldn’t like to be you,’ I said to Vernon Miles one night.
‘Why not?’ he asked.
‘You’d be surprised,’ I told him, ‘the things some of them say behind your back. They flatter you to your face, but it’s a different thing when you’re looking the other way.’
It seemed only fair to put him on his guard. He was such a kind, generous man, I hated to think of him being put upon in any way. He was a bit in love with me, too, though nothing serious. He kissed me under the mistletoe at a Christmas party, and he must have been a bit ashamed of himself the next day, because I remember he slipped out of the theatre without saying good night.
I waited in the passage every evening for a week, but he always managed to have someone with him – until the Saturday, when I knew there was no one in the dressing-room, and I knocked on the door. He looked quite scared when he saw me.
‘Hullo, Fido,’ he said – it had got to Fido by now – ‘I thought you’d gone home.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I wondered if you wanted anything.’
‘That’s very sweet of you,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t think I do.’
I just stood there, waiting. If he really felt like kissing me again I didn’t mind. It wouldn’t be out of his way to drop me in Victoria, either. He lived in Chelsea himself. After waiting a moment or two, I suggested this, and he smiled, in a strained sort of way, and said he was terribly sorry but he was going out to supper at the Savoy, in the opposite direction.
And then he began to cough quite badly, putting his hand to his heart, and said he was afraid he was going to have one of his attacks – he suffered from asthma, you remember – and would I call his dresser, he would know what to do. I was really very alarmed and I called the dresser, who came at once and put me outside the room and said Mr Miles would have to rest about twenty minutes before going to his supper engagement at the Savoy. I think the dresser was jealous of my friendship with Vernon Miles, because after that night he was always on guard by the dressing-room door and was almost offensive when I tried to hang about outside. It was all very petty and silly, and the atmosphere in the theatre became quite different, with people whispering in corners, and not speaking, and looking the other way whenever I appeared.
Anyway, my stage career was cut short, what with Father’s death (he had an exploratory operation for stomach pain, and although they found nothing organically wrong he died under the anaesthetic), and Mother of course was very distressed. She was fond of Father, in spite of all that nagging, and I had to go home for a time to try and keep the peace between her and Aunt Madge.
The authorities ought to do something for elderly people. It’s really terrible, I kept telling them both, how there is no sort of provision for those with failing health. Any day, I said, either of them might get the same sort of pain that Father had, and be whisked off to hospital, and perhaps kept there week after week with nothing wrong. There ought to be hostels, with hot and cold in every room, and a restaurant, and a staff of nurses, so that elderly people could relax and not be worrying about themselves all the time. Naturally I didn’t grudge giving up my stage career to look after them, but where would the money come from to keep Mother when Aunt Madge had gone?
Well, that was 1939, and the pair of them were nervous enough then, so you can imagine what it was like when war broke out and the bomb scare started. ‘They’ll go for Victoria first,’ I said, ‘because of the station,’ and in next to no time I had both of them packed off to Devonshire. But the terrible thing was that the boardinghouse they were staying in at Exeter received a direct hit. They were killed instantly, and the house in Victoria was never so much as scratched. That’s life, isn’t it? Or perhaps death, to put it correctly.
I was so shocked by the tragedy of poor Mother and Aunt Madge being wiped out by a single bomb that I had a nervous breakdown, and that was really how I came to miss being called up when they started putting girls and young women in the Services. I wasn’t fit for nursing, either. I took a job as secretary to a dear old blind millionaire, to try and get my strength back. He had a huge house in Shropshire, and you’d hardly believe it, but, although he became devoted to me, he died without leaving me a penny.
His son came into the place, and his wife didn’t like me, or rather I didn’t like her, so, as the war in Europe was over, I decided to go back to London, and I got another secretarial job with a journalist in Fleet Street.
It was while I was working for him that I made contact with various reporters and other newspaper people. If you’re mixed up in that world you can’t help hearing a lot of g
ossip, and so on, however discreet you are – and no one can call me indiscreet. Scrupulous as you may be, there are limits to what one person can do to quash scandal, and it wasn’t my business, even if I’d had the time, to track down every story to its source and find out whether it was true or not. The best I could do, with all the rumours that I heard, was to insist that they were rumours and mustn’t on any account be passed on.
It was when I was working for the journalist that I met Kenneth. He was the other half of Rosanke. Everyone knows Rosanke, the dress designer and haut couturier – whatever you care to call it. I suppose they rank about third in the top ten. People think to this day that it’s run by one person, a sort of recluse, shut away in an ivory tower, but the truth is that Rosanke is, or was, Rose and Kenneth Sawbones. The way they put the names together was rather clever, don’t you think?
Rose and Kenneth Sawbones were brother and sister, and I married Kenneth. I admit that Rose was the artistic one of the pair. She did the designing, and in fact all the creative work, and Kenneth ran the financial side of the business. My journalist boss had a small interest in Rosanke, just a few shares, but still it paid him to get Rosanke into the gossip columns, which he did very effectively. People were sick of the uniform fashions of wartime, and Rose was clever the way she laid such stress on femininity, hips and bosoms, and so on, and clinging lines. Rosanke went to the top in next to no time, but there is no doubt that it was helped by the push it got from the press.
I met Kenneth at one of their dress shows – I was using a press ticket, of course. He was pointed out to me by a journalist friend.
‘There’s the ke in Rosanke,’ said my friend, ‘and he holds the tail end, and no mistake. Rose is the brains. Kenny just tots up the figures, then hands in the cheques to his sister.’
Kenneth was good-looking. The Jack Buchanan type, or perhaps you’d call it Rex Harrison. Tall and fair, with bags of charm. The first thing I asked was whether he was married, but my journalist friend told me he hadn’t been caught yet. He introduced me to Kenneth, and to Rose too – they were not a scrap alike, although they were brother and sister – and I told Rose what my boss planned to say about them in his paper. Naturally she was delighted, and I had an invitation to a party she was giving. One thing led to another. Rosanke was definitely in the news and getting bigger publicity every day.
‘If you smile on the press, the press smiles on you,’ I said to Kenneth, ‘and once they’re on your side the world’s your oyster.’
This was at a tiny party I was giving for them, on the understanding that Vernon Miles would be there to meet them. I’d told them how well I knew him, and they hoped to dress his next play. Unfortunately he never turned up – another attack of asthma, his secretary said.
‘What a go-ahead girl you are,’ said Kenneth. ‘I’ve never met anyone like you.’ And he finished off his fifth martini. He drank too much, even then.
‘I’ll tell you another thing,’ I said. ‘You’ve got to stop letting your sister push you around. Rosanke’s pronounced all wrong. You want the accent on the ke.’
He sobered up at that. He lowered his glass and stared at me.
‘What makes you say that?’ he asked.
I shrugged my shoulders. ‘I hate to see a man kowtow to a woman. Especially when the man has the brains. It’s laziness, that’s all. One of these days you’ll find the ke dropped out of Rosanke, and you’ll only have yourself to blame.’
Believe it or not, he took me out to dinner, and I heard the whole story of his childhood and how Rose and his mother had always preyed on him. They were devoted, of course, but, as I pointed out, the very devotion was the worst part about it. It had turned possessive.
‘What you need,’ I told him, ‘is to stand on your own and beat the big drum.’
The result of that dinner was rather extraordinary. Kenneth had a big row with Rose. It was the first they had ever had, he told me afterwards, but it must have cleared the air, because things were on another footing inside the business from that time, and Rose realised that she hadn’t got it all her own way. Some of the model girls said that the atmosphere had changed and was spoilt; but that was just because discipline was tightened up and they had to work longer hours.
Kenneth proposed to me in a traffic jam. He was driving me home after a party – I still had the house in Victoria, Aunt Madge had left it to me in her will. We came to a block where the lights had stuck. There must have been something wrong with them.
‘Red for danger,’ said Kenneth. ‘That’s you.’
‘You flatter me,’ I told him. ‘I’ve never thought of myself as a femme fatale.’
‘I don’t know about fatale,’ said Kenneth, ‘but here we are stuck, which is pretty much the same thing.’
Of course he had to kiss me – there was nothing else he could do. Then somebody must have cleared the lights from a main switch. I saw them first.
‘You know what green stands for, don’t you?’ I asked him.
‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘all clear. Go ahead.’
‘Well, I’m not married either,’ I said. ‘The way’s clear.’
To be perfectly honest, I’m not certain that he wasn’t the teeniest bit taken by surprise. You know how cautious some men are, and maybe he wanted another day or two to bring himself to the point. However, of course word got round in no time that we were engaged, and once that kind of thing creeps into the papers it’s so difficult to deny. As I told him, it makes a man look a cad and it’s very bad for his business. Besides, it gives people all sorts of ideas when a dress designer is a bachelor. So we were married, and I had a lovely dress on the firm. The only unromantic thing about the wedding was having to become Mrs Sawbones.
Kenneth and I were very much in love, but I had an uneasy feeling, right from the start, that the marriage wasn’t going to work out. For one thing, he was so terribly restless, always wanting to move on from one place to another. We had flown to Paris after the wedding, intending to stay put, but when we’d been there a day he said, ‘Dilly, I can’t stand this. Let’s try Rome.’ So off we had to go, there and then, and we hadn’t been in Rome two days before he suggested Naples. Then he had the wild idea of wiring for Rose and his mother to come out and join us. On the honeymoon! Naturally I was hurt, and I told him that if it got into the press that he’d had to take his family on his honeymoon, Rosanke would be the laughingstock of London. I suppose that shook him, because he didn’t suggest it again. But we didn’t stay in Italy long, because the rich food disagreed with him.
Married life . . . what I could say about it, from within! I don’t suppose I remember one night, during the six years we were together, that Kenneth didn’t have too much to drink. He got so that he couldn’t stand and he couldn’t speak. He had to go off on a cure three times, but they never did any good. He would seem quite all right in the Home – he tried a different one each time – and then, as soon as he got back to me, off he would be on the bottle again. What I suffered!
No, it didn’t make much difference to the business of Rosanke, because once Kenneth started drinking Rose dropped him from the partnership and put a paid accountant in his place. She made Kenneth an allowance – she had to – but it wasn’t safe to let him have anything to do with the finances.
I had given up my job, naturally, when I married, but with Kenneth always in and out of nursing homes I had to do something towards expenses, so I kept in touch with my friends in Fleet Street. Nothing official. Just snippets now and again. It helped, being sister-in-law to Rose. You wouldn’t believe how much goes on in the fashion world. The buyers hear a lot of backstairs talk, and the model girls too. If customers only realised that every little slip of the tongue gets repeated, they’d cover their lips with sticking plaster every time they went near a fashion house. Anyway, I knew several of the buyers, and most of Rosanke’s model girls too. Rose herself wasn’t particularly discreet when she was discussing customers inside the family, so I heard a number of stories
one way and another that afterwards broke in the press and made headlines. I can’t bear gossip, but whispers have a knack of coming true. What’s wish fulfilment today is fact to-morrow.
‘I think you’re a saint,’ my friends would say, ‘keeping up a home for Kenneth Sawbones, when he’s an alcoholic. Why don’t you divorce him?’
‘He’s my husband,’ I told them, ‘and I love him.’
I believe I could have kept Kenneth off the bottle if only we had had a family. It was not for want of trying, heaven knows. Each time he returned from the Home I would do my best. But it never worked out . . .
Finally, and this was the heartbreak of the whole tragedy, he wrote from the nursing home he had gone to for a fourth cure – away up in Yorkshire it was, too far for me to go and see him on a day trip – and said he loved one of the nurses there, and she was pregnant already, and would I divorce him?
I went straight away to Rose and his mother with the news, and they said they were not surprised. They had felt something of the sort was bound to happen in the end. They said Kenneth was not responsible for his actions and it was very sad, but the best thing for all concerned was to let him go.
‘How am I going to live?’ I said. I was nearly out of my mind, as you can imagine. ‘Six years I’ve been a slave to Kenneth, and this is his return for all I’ve done.’
‘We know, Dilly,’ said Rose. ‘It’s been hard on you, but then it’s a hard world. Of course, Kenneth will have to pay you an allowance, and I’ll look after you too.’