kindhearted, and he gave out that he had been married to her in London; but of course that wasn't true, and I am sure now that she was just a tart that he had picked up somewhere. Mother had been much too weepy and religious to inspire a passionate devotion in any child; so I had soon got over her loss, and I grew to love Annie. She said she had always wanted a little daughter just like me, and my life with her was one long succession of lovely surprises and jolly treats. No doubt she was common, rather silly and the sort who is too lazy to earn her own living except by haunting dance halls and shady clubs; but the nine months she was with us were far and away the happiest of my childhood, in fact the only really happy ones I ever had, and I was inconsolable for weeks after she went away.
`The affair broke up because Father was getting on so fast. He felt it was bad for business for him to continue living in the sort of house more suited to one of his own foremen; so he bought another out in the town's best residential district. To me, at the time, it seemed huge, but actually it was just an eight roomed house with a garage and an acre or so of garden. Still, as far as we were concerned it was a great step up in the world; and although Father may not have been quite as keen on Annie as he had been at first, it was mainly because she did not fit into the picture that he ditched her.
`It was a few days before we were due to move that I found her in tears. She told me then that they had never been married and that he didn't consider her good enough for him any longer. But she didn't make a scene. She had more natural dignity than many better bred women whom I've met, and I'll always remember her walking out, dry eyed and smiling, to the taxi that was to take her to the station. I never saw her again.
`For me, her going robbed the new house of all its glamour, and very soon I came to hate the place. Father never again made the mistake of getting married, or pretending that he had divorced Annie and acquired a new wife. Instead, he replaced Annie with a girl who had been one of his secretaries. They never bothered to conceal the fact from me that they slept together, but to preserve the proprieties she was given the status of governess housekeeper. Her name was Delia Weddel, and she had been brought up in quite a good home, but if ever there was a bitch she was one.
`She was another blonde, but the thin kind, and strikingly good looking, until one came to realise the hardness of her eyes and the meanness of her mouth. Why she should have taken a hate against me I have no idea, but she made my life hell, and she was so cunning and deceitful that neither Father nor the daily woman we used to have in to do the housework guessed what was going on.
`As a child I was subject to sleep walking. That meant if sounds were heard in the night someone had to get up and put me to bed again. Annie used to do that so gently that I hardly realised it had happened, but Delia used to put me outside the back door until the cold woke me up. While I was there she would go upstairs, strip my bed and throw the clothes on the floor; so that when she let me in, shivering with cold, I had to make it again myself before I could get to sleep. Next day, too, she always gave me some punishment for having disturbed her, and, of course, that only made me worse.
`Then there was the agony of lessons. As she was officially my governess she had at least to make a pretence of teaching me. But all she ever did was to point out a passage in a history or geography book and order me to learn it by heart, while she read a novel or went shopping. It was torture, because I wasn't old enough to master things like that. I had got to the stage of reading only fairy stories and books about animals; yet if I couldn't say my piece at the end of the hour I knew that I was going to get my knuckles rapped. I would have given anything in the world to be back at kindergarten with the common little children, singing songs and playing games with bricks. But at that age a child is absolutely at the mercy of grown ups; so there was nothing I could do about it.
`A breakdown in my health saved me from Delia. Perhaps the doctor suspected what had led up to it. Anyhow, he advised that I needed sea air to build me up, and that as I was getting on for eight I should be sent to a boarding school at the seaside after Christmas. Delia was only too glad to be rid of me; so in January 1939 I was packed off to a school at Felixstowe.
`It wasn't a very good school. They fed us shockingly and cheese pared on the central heating, although it was quite an expensive place and supposed to be rather smart. I had a thin time to start with, too, because most of the other girls were awful snobs. When they found out that I had been at a National Kindergarten and spent my childhood in a back street, they christened me `the little alley cat and were generally pretty beastly. Still, anything was better than Delia, and from then on going back to her for the holidays was the only thing I really had to dread.
`Soon after war broke out the school was moved to Wales, and when I came home the following Christmas I found to my joy that Delia had gone the way of Annie. The house was being run for Father by a middle aged couple named Jutson. Their status was simply that of servants: she was cook housekeeper and he did the odd jobs and the garden. They have been with us ever since. Later I learned by chance that from 1940 Father was well off enough to have a flat in London. Or, rather, that he kept a succession of popsies in flats that were nominally theirs and used to stay with them whenever he went up; so I know very little about his later mistresses.
`The Jutsons are a respectable, hard working couple, but she is rather a sour woman. During the holidays and the Easter ones that followed she did what she had to do for me, but no more. I was fed at regular hours and seen to bed at night, otherwise I was left to amuse myself as well as I could. I think Father has always paid them well to keep their mouths shut about his affairs, because when I ask either of them why he was often absent from home,
or where he had gone to and when he was coming back, hey always used to say “Ask no questions and you'll get to lies ! ” And that has been their attitude ever since.
`That April the real war began and Father decided it would be best for me to remain at school for the summer Holidays. Many of the other parents felt the same way about their daughters, so more than half of us stayed on in Wales, and while the Battle of Britain was being fought we had quite a jolly time. We couldn't foresee it then, but 'or most of us that was only the first of many holidays spent at school. In my case I didn't see my home again for the next five years.
`As part of the drill at school I wrote to Father every week, and occasionally he sent me a typed letter in reply. it was always to the effect that producing war supplies Dept him desperately busy, but he hoped to find time to home down to see me soon. He did, about two or three times a year, but I would just as soon that he hadn't, as we had absolutely nothing to say to one another, and I could almost hear his sigh of relief when the time came for him a catch his train back to London. I must say, though, to always treated me very generously. He allowed me to take any extras that I wished, and I had only to ask for anything I wanted in one of my letters and his secretary could have it sent down.
`The summer that the war ended I was fifteen and I came home at last, but not for long. Apart from a few of Mother's old friends I didn't know a soul, and I hope I haven’t become a snob myself, but I seemed to have moved right out of their class. I no longer talked the same language as their children, and although I tried to get over that, father said he did not wish me to have those sort of people in the house. Within a fortnight I was at a dead end and Hopelessly bored.
`One day Father suddenly realised how isolated I was and took the matter in hand with his usual efficiency. He explained that his own social life was in London, but for various reasons he could not have me with him there; so some other step must be taken to provide me with suitable companions of my own age. He had found a place in Somerset that ran courses in domestic science and was open all the year round. His suggestion was that I should go there for the rest of the summer holidays.
`Anything seemed better than staying at home doing nothing; so I agreed. And I was glad I had. It was a lovely old house and most of the pupils were older than myself; so we were treated much more like grown ups than are the girls at an ordinary school. I liked it so much that I asked Father to let me go back there for good after one last term in Wales. That suited him; so I spent nearly the whole of the next two and a half years in Somerset. Occasionally, just for a change, I spent a week at home, and seven or eight times I was invited to stay at the homes of girls with whom I had become friends. My best friend lived in Bath; another one lived in Kensington, and with her I saw something of London; but such visits were only short ones and at fairly long intervals.
`I was perfectly content for things to go on that way indefinitely, but just before my eighteenth birthday the principal wrote to Father to say that as I had taken all the courses they ran and passed all the exams it did not seem right to keep me on there any longer. Faced with the same old problem of what to do with me, he decided to send me to a finishing school in Paris, and I was there until last December.'
Christina lit another cigarette, and added, `I forgot to tell you that in 1949 old Mrs. Durnsford died and Father
