It’s always worth popping into Oxfam on Kensington High Street and this week I was rewarded with a paperback copy of Wait For Me!
It is the autobiography of the youngest of the Mitfords, Deborah Duchess of Devonshire. She wrote it when she was ninety, in 2010. In 1919 her father, Lord Redesdale, felt compelled to sell the Batsford estate that he inherited from his father in 1916. He sold it to the Wills family who still own it. He only moved about fifteen miles, to Asthall Manor, where Debo was born in 1920.
Meanwhile back at Batsford in 1920 the Willses needed a tenant for Malcolm House, a substantial house at one of the entrances to the estate. My grandparents were living in Ireland; my father had been born in January 1920. My grandfather had returned from the War which made him a potential target in “The Troubles”. Indeed, the local priest warned him that the Fenians were coming for him that very night. Discretion being the better part of valour, the family left that afternoon for Dublin and England. They discovered Malcolm House and rented it from Sir Gilbert Wills, later Lord Dulverton, until 1938 when they moved back to Barmeath, which had been empty for some years.
During those years between the wars when my father was growing up, my grandfather hunted, shot and fished while my grandmother took up gardening. Incidentally, salmon were bigger in those days. He landed a 41 1/4 lb fish on the Wye. He was unusual in having an over-and-under shotgun. When I was introduced to a friend’s father a few years ago in Gloucestershire, he asked if I was related to the Bellews who had lived at Batsford. He remembered my grandfather coming to shoot because of his unusual gun and because he was such a good shot.
My grandmother knew Heather Muir who was creating her famous garden at Kiftsgate. She called a viola Jeanie Bellew as a tribute to my grandmother. I saw it in the garden there when I visited a few years ago.
My grandparents were friends of the Redesdales, Debo’s parents. My grandmother said that she told Lady R that she had enjoyed Nancy’s latest novel. Lady R’s response was “yes, isn’t it killing, simply killing”. That’s a turn of phrase that seems to have fallen out of use. Debo remembered my grandparents.
