One Hundred Summers Read online

  Granny Joyce had three beloved brothers – Ron, Charles and Harold – and an equally adored sister, Dora. When looking through the sepia photographs of their youth I find it extraordinary to think that I touched that era personally, if a little reluctantly. My childhood memory of visiting Uncle Ron and his ancient wife Doff still haunts me. A doddering maid would serve us thick, slithery slices of hot, all-too-tongue-like ox tongue. I’d agonise over my plate, attempting to slip bits of tongue under the damask tablecloth towards Ron’s pack of snuffling Pekinese dogs.

  Throughout the 1890s and into the twentieth century, the girls were educated at home by a governess. It’s fascinating to trace family characteristics back a generation or two and see so clearly where the seeds of our own interests were originally sown. Having never experienced the rough and tumble that comes with going to school, the shy, gentle Joyce failed to develop the thick skin required to survive outside her closed society. Freedom from a strict curriculum allowed her to follow her interests in botany and entomology, and she retained a deep knowledge of the natural world around her. Her other passion was photography: she was happiest when viewing the world through a camera lens. The sisters spent many days together in their timeless landscape – Joyce with her camera and butterfly net and Dora with her sketchbook and watercolour paints.

  As with many other Edwardian boys from the landed classes, the brothers became adept at fly fishing, deer stalking and grouse shooting. With so few neighbours to play with, the young Bailey family forged close bonds with each other. Joyce’s photographs capture the pleasure they all took in each other’s company and their sense of fun.

  Invergloy House was remote, but local suppliers were up to the challenge of catering for their Highland customers. Uncle Ron told us that buying a new suit would entail a number of visits from the tailor in Fort William, who would ride his bicycle out for three consecutive weeks for the fittings, returning on the fourth week with the finished suit and a bill for £2.

  ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’ might have been the Bailey family motto. Most injuries were dealt with at home, with plucky Emma Edith, Joyce’s mother, regularly sewing up the children’s open wounds with fishing gut, after one of the all-too-frequent accidents that resulted from their adventurous lives.

  Joyce’s life in Invergloy, so idyllic as a child, became increasingly lonely and isolated when she was a teenager, as her three brothers left home in quick succession. Harold, who was much older, had gone off to fight in the Boer War, while the other two went to London to seek their fortunes. The grand houses in the area would have held an annual ball, but these were few and far between, so the opportunities for the young Bailey girls to find romance were rare.

  One weekend in January 1910, Ron travelled home to Scotland from London on the sleeper train. Accompanying him was his new friend, old Harrovian Francis (Frank) Addison. Frank was still adjusting to his new circumstance: his father, who had been a senior partner in the law firm Linklaters, had recently died, leaving him a healthy legacy of £20,000. The family still lived in a grand house in one of the elegant terraces built by Robert Adam overlooking Regent’s Park.

  The boys were full of expectation as the pony and trap pulled up to collect them for the four-mile homeward journey from Spean Bridge, along the banks of Loch Lochy. I wonder how Ron had described his sisters to Frank. I wonder if he’d had romance in mind, or if he simply wanted to bring his friend home for the weekend, to share a spot of shooting and stalking. I also wonder whether Frank had been honest with Ron about his recent diagnosis, or if youthful optimism meant that having a terminal disease was the last thing he wanted to dwell on.

  The weekend was clearly a success. The family made plenty of fuss over Ron’s new friend, keeping the fires burning with fragrant pine logs and providing lavish Scottish fare. Both girls giggled and flirted coyly, escorting the boys on their hunting trips and showing off their photos and paintings. Frank was bewitched and was soon writing letters of overwhelming tenderness to the shy and innocent Joyce. Less than a month later, she visited her brother in London with every intention of meeting Frank once more and by the following October, the young couple were engaged.

  Joyce clearly knew that Frank was dying. Knowing the story now, I was fascinated when my cousin Michael showed me the young couple’s wedding portrait. Joyce looks serene with a hint of an enigmatic smile and a sly angle to her head that emphasises the elongated chin that made her fall just short of beautiful. Handsome Frank looks equally content but he also looks utterly exhausted, his eyes lost in blackened sockets and his skeletal body shrouded in a morning suit that is two sizes too large. On Joyce’s right stands her cousin and maid of honour, Mildred Higgs. Mildred’s family owned Scaitcliffe, the boys’ preparatory school that was one day to provide miserable memories for my brother Richard. On Frank’s left is his old friend and Joyce’s dear brother Ron, his head leaning towards Frank. His lopsided smile seems a touch tentative for one known for his mischievous delight in life.

  A year before the wedding, Frank had been diagnosed with diabetes. The technique to manufacture purified insulin was to be developed in 1922, just a decade later, but for Frank there was no cure.

  The Bailey family, including Joyce, must have been aware that this marriage was destined for tragedy, but I like to believe that their young love overwhelmed all sense. This was certainly a love match but, when weighing up the pros and cons of committing to Frank and his health, Joyce would have also taken into account the promise of a future of financial security, in an era when women didn’t have the vote and were dependent on their husbands for support. And what’s more, Frank offered her a swift escape route from her crushingly dull existence at Invergloy.

  Her sister Dora’s story, on the other hand, fulfilled Joyce’s worst fears. The girls’ mother didn’t leave her side and prevented her poor daughter from meeting up with other young people. As the years passed her confidence trickled away; Dora was to remain her mother’s companion for decades, and a spinster for her whole life.

  Frank and Joyce moved into the five-bedroomed, Georgian Tilhill House, just off the picturesque village green in Tilford in Surrey. Joseph, their son, was born in July 1912. Frank had intended to commute to London to work but soon realised that this was unfeasible. Type 1 diabetes is a disease that affects the immune system. The first indication that something is wrong is an unquenchable thirst, followed by a continual hunger – but however much you eat, you are unable to sustain a healthy body weight. Your breath becomes foul and your moods become unpredictable.

  At the time of his wedding, Frank was experiencing extreme fatigue. When little Joe was born a year later, his father’s eyesight was poor and his kidneys were failing, along with his good humour. Frank stayed at home, devoting his time to his son and his wife. Joyce remained gracious throughout Frank’s illness, nursing him until his painful death. The couple’s short love story was encapsulated by Frank’s funeral in the spring of 1914. Ron, his loyal friend and brother-in-law, gave the elegy. Frank’s mother, recently widowed herself, sat weeping throughout. Joyce sat with baby Joe on her lap, quietly staring at the coffin that contained the body of her young husband. It was a tragic scene that would soon be repeated with alarming frequency all over Europe.

  Whether the build-up to the Great War, the conflict that was to become the most devastating conflict known to humankind, had impacted on this family, which was suffering its own personal drama in Tilford, I’m not sure. We can only surmise that my young, widowed grandmother allowed little of the outside world to unsettle her tenuous hold on stability, which she needed to cling to for the sake of her fatherless toddler. With barely any support from Frank’s grieving family, and with her parents hundreds of miles away in Scotland, Joyce had to garner all her own resources. Her practical and disciplined upbringing in Invergloy gave her the strength to continue; thanks to this resilience, a new chapter in her life was about to begin – with, some would say, unseemly haste.

  Ye
ars after her death, a neat pile of twenty letters, tied up with ribbon, was discovered in a secret compartment behind her writing desk. Feeling unable to destroy the letters herself, the grieving Joyce had written a note in her careful script: ‘Could anyone who finds these letters please burn them.’ It amazes me that the bundle had passed through various family members’ hands and no one had opened it; I’m afraid that when I saw the note I couldn’t resist. I poured myself a cup of tea, guiltily untied the pink ribbon and read the letters slowly. Forgive me, dear Grandmother – I’m going to include one here, for these letters are too tender to remain hidden from view.

  20 Harley House, Regent’s Park NW

  18 October 1910

  Little Woman,

  I am quite silly tonight, silly with happiness; how I am, not having left you an hour ago, already sitting down to write to you! I have often laughed at this particular form of foolishness in others, and now I am being guilty of it myself; you can laugh at me as much as you like but I am going to be silly tonight, and I don’t care a bit! Don’t you imagine though for one minute, young woman, that I am going to write to you every day, like most people do when they get engaged; not a bit of it, once a month is about all you need expect from now! But tonight I am off my head, not responsible for my actions, and all because I know now for certain that you love me; you must be very careful of giving me your love Joyce, when you see what an evil effect it has on me! I can’t resist the joy of writing my first love letter to you now, however foolish you may think me; I have longed and longed for this moment, and now I won’t be ashamed of it.

  Do you know, little woman, that once or twice, when my heart was nearly breaking and everything seemed black, I have sat down and written to you just as I wanted to; simply poured my heart out on paper to you to try and get some little relief; you never got any of those letters, as I always tore them up directly after they were written, and I am not quite sure that they did me much good, but I had to do something to appease the longing: don’t think that my brain is going, after reading this confession, I don’t really think it is. I loved you so, little woman, and I was so helpless, and could not say a word.

  Oh Joyce, my darling, nothing matters to me now; now that I know for certain that you love me; I want to live badly, oh so badly, to try and show you how much I love you, but whether I live and get quite well, or whether I die soon, it does not matter to me now; I think I can stand anything as long as I have your love; and if ever that is denied me, well, then there won’t be anything left for me to live for.

  My darling, I love you; be quite, quite certain of that, whatever may have happened before, and whatever may happen in the future, never doubt that I love you more than anything else on this earth.

  Frank

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  MUSEUM OF CURIOSITIES

  Our story moves swiftly on, for one of the guests at Frank’s funeral was my grandfather, George Branson.

  George was born on 11 July 1871 in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk. His father, James Branson, was a barrister and would later become a judge, a senior acting magistrate, in Kolkata in India. George’s mother, Mary Ann Branson, née Brown, was born in India to an English father and Indian mother, a marriage that colonial prejudice of the era would have regarded as fairly controversial. Family albums show joyful pictures of George, his three brothers, their sister and one adopted sister, Olive (the daughter of an uncle who lived in India) acting the fool, cross-dressing, playing games, sailing and travelling. The family was clearly a happy one.

  The Branson line was not particularly illustrious. My father once said that the only family claim to fame was that one of our ancestors was the first ‘Marian Martyr’, the protestants who were burnt at the stake in Smithfield Market, in the reign of Queen Mary. As children we were proud to know that the ill-fated Captain Robert Scott who died with his team while attempting to be the first to reach the South Pole, was my great-grandfather James Branson’s first cousin. Scott became a hero in Britain, a symbol of grit and determination for the country’s youth as they marched off to war.

  Open the cupboard on any family’s past and dislodge a fact or two, and incredible stories begin to tumble out. There is something reassuring in knowing that your past is littered with unusual personalities. The historian Susannah Stapleton contacted me recently; she’s writing a book about my great cousin Olive, my grandfather’s adopted sister, a fine artist who gained notoriety by coming to an untimely end. ‘I remember feeling very pleased with myself,’ Dad once told me about the moment that he was summoned to his prep school headmaster’s office to be told the distressing news. ‘Although I’d barely met Olive, as quick as a flash I brought my hands to my eyes and began wailing and was given the rest of the day off lessons.’

  In fact, her death was quite the cause célèbre in its day, but it wasn’t until Susannah filled me in on the details that I realised how grizzly her end had been. Olive was forty-four when her body was found submerged in a water tank near her house in Provence. She had been shot between the eyes. It was never ascertained whether it had been murder or suicide, or indeed whether it was the shooting or the drowning that killed her. All evidence pointed towards her twenty-six-year-old French lover, but when he was tried for her murder he was found not guilty, perhaps an inevitable verdict when a jury consists of local townspeople and the defendant is the owner of the town’s only bar.

  Susannah also sent me a press cutting from The Standard dated 11 February 1912, which features both a picture of Captain Scott’s departure for his final expedition and a story relating to cousin Olive’s stepmother, Grace Branson. Grace, who had married Olive’s father, was a militant suffragette who was twice arrested for smashing windows alongside Sylvia Pankhurst. On 11 April 1913 she gave this restrained description of their time together while on hunger strike in Holloway Prison:

  Twice a day they fed me with the tube down the throat. I resisted every time. I clutched and held on to the bed with my legs and arms. They put me flat on the bed. Then they held me down, each of the wardresses holding a leg or an arm. There was one very strong big one who held my head between her two hands. When she was there I couldn’t move at all. There were always two doctors, one of them took the gag and owing to the gap in my teeth he was able to get it in. The gag fixed, they began to insert the tube. I resisted it with my tongue as long as I could.

  My grandfather George had three remarkable brothers, Bill, Jim and Fred, who would go on to play an enriching role in my father’s formative years. Bill, Jim and Fred went to Bedford Grammar School, where their contemporaries included Harold Abrahams, the Olympic sprinter featured in the film Chariots of Fire, and John de Vars Hazard, who disappeared while taking part in Mallory and Irvine’s 1924 British Mount Everest Expedition. There was also their cousin Lionel Branson, who joined the Magic Circle and became known for debunking spiritualism as a mere conjuring trick, disappointing many who believed they were in contact with their loved ones who had been killed in the war.

  George went on to study Classics at Trinity College Cambridge. He was clearly in possession of a profound intellect: after being articled to a firm of solicitors called Markby, Stewart & Co, he swiftly became a member of the Inner Temple, was called to the Bar and joined the Northern Circuit. Writing books on the London Stock Exchange helped make his name as a barrister before he became junior counsel to the Treasury in 1912.

  Joyce and George married with little ceremony in 1915. A lavish gathering was not only inappropriate so soon after Frank’s death but also unseemly during the war. Still struggling with grief and wishing to start this new chapter on a fresh page, Joyce asked George to call her by her middle name; from then on, she was known as Mona. George, at forty-three, was exempt from service but, worryingly for Mona, her brother, 2nd Lt Ron Bailey, was fighting at the front with the Royal Engineers. He was mentioned in despatches from General Allenby in 1917, for gallant service in the field; the letter was signed by Winston Churchill, who was then Secretary of State for War.
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  1916 was a busy year. George was junior counsel for the prosecution in the trial of Roger Casement, perhaps the most notorious trial during the First World War. Casement’s story had all the elements to capture the imagination of the nation. He had joined the British Colonial Service as a young man and was appointed British consul to the Congo in 1891. By all reports he was a charismatic, beautiful man. Having witnessed colonial atrocities inflicted against indigenous people, he had grown to distrust imperialism and became a poet and humanitarian activist who was knighted for his investigation of human rights abuses in Peru. After retiring from the Colonial Service in 1913, he became involved in Irish Republicanism and, with German support, planned an armed rebellion against British rule in Ireland. It was a messy affair. Casement soon suspected that the Germans were toying with his plan. Weakened by malaria, he was arrested in Tralee Bay in County Kerry, and tried for high treason.

  His defence was that, realising that German support was not forthcoming, he had landed in Ireland to call off the operation. The prosecution never had a watertight case, as the uprising hadn’t been planned on British soil. Many pleaded for clemency, including George Bernard Shaw, Arthur Conan Doyle and William Butler Yeats. Prior to the start of the trial, extracts from Casement’s diaries were maliciously leaked, several of which depicted lurid homosexual scenes with native boys (later known as The Black Diaries). Whoever leaked the offending passages had hoped to influence the trial against Casement; decades later, it has been suggested that the diaries were fabricated for this purpose, but at the time there was no doubt of their authenticity.