Valentine Ackland: A Transgressive Life

Valentine Ackland

Also published by Handheld Press

HANDHELD RESEARCH

1 The Akeing Heart: Letters between Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland and Elizabeth Wade White , by Peter Haring Judd

2 The Conscientious Objector’s Wife: Letters between Frank and Lucy Sunderland, 1916–1919 , edited by Kate Macdonald

3 A Quaker Conscientious Objector. The Prison Letters of Wilfrid Littleboy, 1917–1919 , edited by Rebecca Wynter and Pink Dandelion

Valentine Ackland

A Transgressive Life

Frances Bingham

This edition published in 2021 by Handheld Press

72 Warminster Road, Bath BA2 6RU, United Kingdom.

www.handheldpress.co.uk

Copyright © Frances Bingham 2021.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

ISBN 978-1-912766-41-3

Series design by Nadja Guggi and typeset in Open Sans.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Short Run Press, Exeter.

Dedicated to my dear mother

Caroline Bingham

1938–1998

Historian and Biographer

Illustrations

1.Valentine in her trousers, Chaldon, 1930s.

2.Looking inland over Chaldon towards the Five Maries …

3.… and the view seawards towards Chydyok, over the downs.

4.The husband (briefly) – Richard Turpin … and the lover – Bo Foster.

5.Young Valentine, her transition from Molly almost complete.

6.‘Don’t be afraid …’ – Newspaper cutting of Dorothy Warren.

7.Molly as a debutante.

8.The quintessential image of Valentine enacting her masculinity.

9.Valentine explores new freedoms.

10.Ackland family motoring.

11.Valentine’s lover – Sylvia asleep.

12.Valentine and Sylvia in the looking-glass at Frankfort.

13.Comrades in Spain – Sylvia, Asunción and Valentine.

14.Elizabeth Wade White’s passport photograph and signature.

15.‘Everywhere is the pattern of water’ – Sylvia fording the river, 1940s.

16.‘One love stays forever’ – Sylvia as she was in Chaldon in the 1930s.

17.Frome Vauchurch, the river front and deck overhanging the water.

18.‘She has done me much damage’ – Valentine’s sister Joan, in wartime uniform.

19.Valentine’s lighter with integral personal ashtray, chrome and crocodile leather.

20.The poet in her boyhood – Molly dressed for riding, aged 9, in 1915.

21.Advertising card for Valentine’s Small Antiques shop.

22.The inscription on Valentine and Sylvia’s gravestone, East Chaldon churchyard.

23.Memorial bookplate by Reynolds Stone.

24.Stele (detail) by Liz Mathews, shown in the National Poetry Library, London.

25.A manuscript poem by Valentine.

26.The garden at Frome Vauchurch.

27.Janet Machen with Valentine in Chaldon.

28.‘A view very like the one that Valentine and Sylvia saw’ – on the Dorset coast.

Contents

Illustrations

Introduction: It is Urgent You Understand

Chapter 1: Becoming Valentine

Chapter 2: An Essential Part of Me

Chapter 3: Valentine’s Trousers

Chapter 4: Sylvia’s Lover

Chapter 5: Comrade, Darling

Chapter 6: Dark Entry

Chapter 7: For the Duration Interned

Chapter 8: Lazarus Risen

Chapter 9: Lord Body

Chapter 10: Saint and Rogue

Chapter 11: The Good Englishman

Chapter 12: How Wild and Strange a Live Man Is

A Personal Note: The Quest for Valentine

Acknowledgements

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

Frances Bingham writes across the literary spectrum, focusing on gender-transgressive lives like her own. As well as editing Journey from Winter: Selected Poems of Valentine Ackland, she has also published fiction, plays, and poetry, including MOTHERTONGUE, The Principle of Camouflage, The Blue Hour of Natalie Barney (Arcola Theatre, London), Comrade Ackland & I (BBC Radio 4), and most recently London Panopticon (with images by Liz Mathews).

Introduction: It Is Urgent You Understand

Valentine Ackland, poet and inveterate self-mythologising autobiographer, is best-known for cross-dressing, and being the lover of Sylvia Townsend Warner; she was proud of both attributes, but saw herself firstly as a poet. Her life encompassed Communism and Catholicism, war-work and pacifism, a life-partnership and many affairs, and – above all – the contradiction of being a fine poet and remaining little-known. Even if she hadn’t written, Valentine’s life would have been a remarkable one, representative of that extraordinary generation in Britain whose intellectual maturity coincided with the mid-twentieth century, and who rose to the challenges of that time with such verve and courage. But she did write: poetry of witness, commenting on the political state of the world and the plight of the powerless individual; poetry celebrating the natural world while lamenting its loss to the encroachments of war and progress; love poetry of passionate complexity, and metaphysical poetry which meditates on the human place in the universe. This writing, by a poet deeply connected to her time and committed to interpreting its events and their impact on her own life, gives that life another dimension. Valentine’s work expands the history of one fascinating individual into that of a wider community.

Her own life Valentine saw as a story; she retold it to herself and others, in its various versions, almost obsessively, as though without narrative to sustain her she might vanish, become merely a blank page. Some autobiographers can swing like a spider on their linear plumb line, the straight story of their life so far; others circle earlier events at an ever-greater distance, rounding outwards like an ammonite growing. Valentine was the hermit-crab variety, carrying her past everywhere, embellishing it and inhabiting it, using it both as camouflage and display, yet ready at need to jettison it for a similar, larger version of heavy identity. Her willingness to shape her life story to different artistic ends, and the parallel text of her poetry (not explicitly autobiographical, but a translation of experience) makes writing her biography an unusual task.

The outwardly significant events of her life, their places and dates, are well-documented through multiple evidence, and duly appear in this book. The detailed record of an inner life, a writer’s creative narrative, is also here, often in Valentine’s own words. Autobiography offers insights (both intentional and unintentional) to the writer’s mind, the colour of her thoughts, the weather of her relationships, which is why I’ve quoted so extensively from Valentine’s writing on herself. She was well aware that her diaries were revealing, of her weaknesses as well as her humour and passion. Once, after quoting something self-complimentary she added ‘Of course I ought not to copy this, but no one will know until after I’m dead, if then, so what odds?’ ¹ This throwaway remark could be taken to apply to her entire life-writing oeuvre, so much of which is about her work, as well as the – sometimes dramatic – events of her life.

As Virginia Woolf ironically observes, in a frequently-quoted passage from Orlando: ‘life … is the only fit subject for novelist or biographer; life … has nothing whatever to do with sitting still in a chair and thinking … this mere wool-gathering; this thinking; this sitting in a chair day in, day out, with a cigarette and a sheet of paper and a pen and an ink pot. If only subjects, we might complain (for our patience is wearing thin) had more consideration for their biographers!’ And she completes the faux-diatribe by declaring that, as we all know, ‘thought and imagination – are of no importance whatsoever’. ² And yet, in Orlando’s life, as much as in Valentine’s, the invisible inner life of thinking and writing is as eventful as the outer life of action.

Apart from her books and (many but scattered) magazine publications, Valentine’s writing has been preserved in the Sylvia Townsend Warner – Valentine Ackland Archive. When I was first researching both authors, these papers were still in Dorchester Museum, housed in an attic lined with oak cupboards – a haphazard treasury; part library, part paper-heap. There are dozens of notebooks, ranging from large ledgers and leather-bound account books through diaries of every size and format to tiny memorandum books for the pocket. All of these are crammed with poems, both finished and unfinished (some in many versions), notes, quotes, diary entries, travel journals, accounts, lists, reminders, prayers, jokes, menus, fragments of ideas. There are also shopping-lists, used envelopes, telephone message-pads, old photographs and post cards, with poems scribbled on the back. The history of a writer’s mind is here. There are many boxes and files of typed paper: short stories, articles, a play, a novel or two, a children’s book, the poems and – of course – memoir and autobiography in many versions and revisions. Some of Valentine’s writing is not represented in the archive at all, some pieces are duplicated many times.

Also in the archive is the mirror-image of all this; Sylvia’s papers, just as varied and unchronological, often telling the same life story from the opposite viewpoint. There are also innumerable mementoes of a shared life: love-letters, Christmas cards, notes, postcards, telegrams, their hotel room reservation card for ‘Mr and Mrs Ackland’. There is an intense immediacy about these relics. The notebooks are covered in tear-stains, cigarette-burns, cat’s paw-prints, wine or coffee splashes; full of pressed flowers, dried leaves, cuttings and scraps, the feathers which Valentine picked up and kept, as they symbolised to her descending poems. The books smell of the river which ran past their damp house, the ghost of Gauloises cigarette smoke, the vanishing trace of scent from the writer’s wrist. On opening one of the rarely-disturbed oak cupboards, one was assailed by this fragrance of the past, slowly fading in the attic of a museum.

Valentine was strongly aware of this future; the imagined reader of her diaries is sometimes addressed with apparent directness: ‘It is growing dusk already and I must go.’ ³ No doubt this is why she cross-referenced her diaries, dated her poems (sometimes to the hour), and carefully noted revisions; some of her typed poems carry explanations of origin, such as ‘written at about the time Sylvia was writing The Sea Change’. ⁴ This is all most constructive, and her self-cataloguing certainly made the task easier when I was editing her poetry. But explanatory notes, asides, later added comments addressed to the future researchers Valentine evidently expected, can seem disturbingly personal. (Although one grows used to it, even I was startled, admittedly, when I received a letter in the post, the envelope unmistakeably addressed to me by Valentine’s instantly-recognisable typewriter. Fleetingly imagining that it might contain some imperious instructions, I opened it to find an affectionate letter from the inheritor of the machine.)

With such careful provisions made for the future, it can seem that the dead use us, indifferent as they must be to who we are; so long as we’re resurrection-men, we will do. By the same token, it’s often presumed that the writer of life stories is just a kind of grave-robber, ransacking the catacombs for choice relics. But our mutual aim – a considered life – should be a kind of time-travelling co-operation between the quick and the dead; an exploration of one character by another, completed by the reader’s participation. It’s easier than usual to imagine this ideal when writing about Valentine, an avid reader of even the most obscure biographies, who actually typed up volumes of her own diaries with numbered pages; so helpful. (When quoting Valentine’s own words, her characteristic long dashes and ampersands are in the original texts, but ellipses indicate a word or phrase left out, unless marked as original in the notes.)

I was first commissioned to write a biography of Valentine twenty years ago, in 2001, but a few years later the publisher folded and the book didn’t come out. In a way this was lucky, from a research angle. Then, I met people who are no longer here to be interviewed and was given generous access to the archive in its original form. Now, I have access to documents such as de-classified MI5 files and the Elizabeth Wade White Papers which weren’t available until more recently. So this new biography contains both up to date research and memories which are older, and closer to its subject.

Within the ever-expanding definition of biography I personally prefer those books about people’s lives – or aspects of them – which leave one with the sensation of having met, known, liked or loathed someone, in all their complexity and contradiction. So I aim to give the impression of getting to know Valentine as one does get to know people, through a mosaic of their own anecdotes (and those others tell of them), meetings with their friends and relatives, discoveries about their pasts, revelations about their thoughts. However, there is no fictional writing here. If there’s a conversation, it’s a conversation somebody noted down; if a fast car drives along a lane between summer hedgerows, it did.

Of course, we now know far more about Valentine’s life than one would ever know about a living person, and also far less; no amount of research and scholarship can replace the briefest meeting. My interpretation is, however, based on a premise she would understand; that many stories make up a life, not in its entirety, nor in any final version, but as it is lived – changeable, vivid, real.

‘Reading my own works’, the poem which gives this introduction its title, is addressed directly to the reader, that imagined other in the future who will hear Valentine’s voice and see her words. It’s an extraordinarily direct statement of the poet’s need to communicate and belief in the power of poetry, and a perfect introduction to her authentic voice, which rings with integrity and self-awareness, as it sounds out powerfully, compelling attention. This poem encapsulates the often conflicting emotions of writing; the joyful experience of reading her own work, the fearful possibility that creativity may be merely a mirage. As a commentary on Valentine’s entire poetic life, the poem is completed by its specific inclusion of the reader; we may pour her poem away only half-emptied, but our very existence offers some sort of hope that we may, just possibly, understand.

I hear my own voice, over the desert of days,

Across the sandy stretch of the war I see my own words;

And I had almost forgotten that once I could speak.

You who read words when you want them,

Who turn on the tap of a book, who pour a poem

Half-emptied down drain – It is urgent you understand

How bounteous the words looked, how coolly the mirage

Flowed over sand. ⁵

1.Valentine in her trousers, Chaldon, 1930s.

Chapter One: Becoming Valentine

One November evening in 1925, two young women from London arrived at the village of Chaldon, in Dorset. They brought with them two suitcases, a gramophone, and a wooden boxful of records; the bare necessities. Both wore trousers (‘unheard-of then except among perverts’), ¹ and had Eton-cropped hair, but this was the androgynous fashion of the moment; they were not a couple. The taller of the two, Mrs Turpin, had come to the country to recover from a recent operation to remove her hymen. Her friend Mrs Braden thought this was tremendously funny.

It was already evening when they reached Wool station, so on the dark journey to the village they would have sensed, not seen, that in turning off the main coast road they were entering an extraordinary hilly landscape. The winding, narrow lane was unmetalled in 1925, a mere cart track to an isolated place, and the cottage they had rented was all that two escaping Londoners could wish. Mrs Wallis’s was pleasingly primitive; tiny, lit by oil lamps and candles, with an earth closet at the bottom of the garden, and a sampler in Molly Turpin’s bedroom picking out the text ‘God is Love’. The two women had tea as soon as they arrived, followed by Bovril with cheese and biscuits for supper shortly after. Molly lay awake for a long time, in her delight at being alone in bed.

In the morning, she saw that they had approached the village along a valley. All around it, great shoulders of the downs heave up, and the little settlement is cupped in a hollow of hills. It seems cut off from the inland world. The drove lane labours up over an immense fold of the downs, skirts the Five Maries – a row of prehistoric barrows – close to the sky, with a view way across country, and drops sharply down to the coast road. Yet in the opposite direction, no road goes on towards the sea two miles beyond, for there are high chalk cliffs, and although the sound of the waves reaches the village sometimes, and storms can blow seaweed up to the sheep-fields, there is no way down to the beach here. The village itself, a few picturesque thatched cottages of pale local stone grouped round a triangular green, was obviously poor, but it had, most importantly, a pub, The Sailor’s Return.

The villagers observed these out-of-season visitors with interest. Rachel Braden, who had been there before, was shorter and curvier than her companion, and obviously ‘fast’, with a touch of theatrical glamour, if not quite a stage person herself. She was chatty, friendly, and argumentative. Her friend Molly Turpin, nineteen years old, almost six feet tall and extremely thin, could easily be mistaken for a youth (there was some discussion about her gender) and seemed more reserved, though very polite. She did not look well, being so thin and pale, but the two of them set off walking first thing in the morning, in the direction of the sea, taking some biscuits.

The inhabitants of Chaldon were quite used to artistic visitors renting their cottages. The place had been discovered by a sculptor, Stephen Tomlin, on a walking holiday in 1921. Tommy, as his friends called him, was a charismatic alcoholic (briefly married to Lytton’s cousin Julia Strachey), who caused emotional havoc with every gender wherever he went, and died suddenly in 1937, after having a tooth extracted. He admired the work of T F Powys, a hitherto unknown writer whose wife, Violet, was a local woman and who lived in the village. Visiting Theodore Powys had become a reason to see Chaldon; David Garnett (Duncan Grant’s lover in a uncomfortable triangle with Vanessa Bell), Sylvia Townsend Warner (unhappily in love with Tommy), Ralph and Frances Partridge, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and most of the rest of Bloomsbury passed through.

2.Looking inland over Chaldon towards the Five Maries …

Once the villagers had seen Lady Ottoline Morrell (the Bloomsbury patron and eccentric host of Garsington) in one of her outrageous hats, two women in trousers would not scandalise them. Chaldon was now fashionable; an artistic colony migrated there every summer, and in the 1920s the place was cheap, unspoilt, and beautiful. But beyond that, it had a special atmosphere, a sense of secrecy, of being entirely separate from the rest of the country, not on the way to anywhere.

3.… and the view seawards towards Chydyok, over the downs.

(The feeling persists; Dorchester taxi-drivers joke ‘Back to civilisation!’ with obvious relief as they turn out onto the main coast road from the narrow village lane.) ‘It was an extraordinary place,’ Valentine wrote later, ‘extraordinary things happened there and extraordinary people were to be found there: and [like Communism] to everyone according to his capacity it gave according to his need.’ ²

On that first day in Chaldon, Rachel set off along an imperfectly-remembered route, to introduce Molly to some of the residents. First they walked across the downs towards the sea, to a remote farmhouse called Chydyok where Theodore’s two sisters, Gertrude and Katie, were living. Gertrude, an artist, wanted to paint Rachel; Katie, a poet, was to fall painfully in love with Molly. Even in summer, Chydyok can seem eerie and windswept; in November it must have been grim. (I stayed there in January once, when the wind howled round the house and the ghosts of Powyses past seemed to grin from the sheep’s skulls on the mantelpiece. It was indescribably dour. Apart from the discouraging atmosphere, the lavatory was frozen, there was rat poison in the bedrooms and my hopes of a romantic weekend were dashed when my girlfriend discovered a dead mouse folded inside the sofa-bed. Our car, an aged Citroën 2CV, had managed the semi-vertical gradient on the farm track perfectly well, and only shown a tendency to slide backwards on the final icy mud-slope up to the house, but when we wanted to leave – early in the morning after a sleepless night in front of the sitting-room fire – there was something very wrong with it. I thought our despair at the idea of being stranded there was perhaps a Londoner’s response but, when we had escaped, there was general consternation that we had gone ‘to that terrible place’ in the dead of winter. ‘The walls drip with despair,’ a Dorset friend commented. At least neither of us had just had an unpleasant operation.)

Rachel’s walk continued, miles further on, to the coastguard cottages along the cliff path where Llewelyn Powys (another of Theodore’s writer siblings) lived with his wife, the American critic and author Alyse Gregory. She would later become a great friend, and ‘Lulu’ (as they called him) a boon companion, but on that day Molly could hardly speak to them for exhaustion. The journey continued round to Beth Car, Theodore and Violet’s house just outside the village, which Valentine later reckoned to be a ten-mile round trip. Theodore, whose writing was much admired by this period (and parodied so accurately in Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm), was a rural patriarch Molly came to revere greatly, but then she could only sit by his fire in silence. To meet so many of the Powys clan at once would have been an ordeal at the best of times, perhaps.

The next day, still feeling the ill-effects, Molly stayed at home. Rachel kept her company, dancing to the gramophone and high-kicking at the cottage beams; later, they tried to smoke the pipes they had acquired. Molly was starting to worry about imminently returning to her husband, Richard, at whose instigation she had undergone this medicalised rape. In hospital, when she was afraid before the operation, Molly had realised that she had no one to rely on. Neither her mother, her sister, her lover nor any friend had been able to help her escape from the terrible situation she was in; she had not even been able to extricate herself. Then, she had vowed to learn self-reliance, and quickly. For three days after the operation (which she found painful and humiliating) she refused to see her husband; to her surprise, the hospital thought this quite natural. When he did visit, he made her cry and a kindly nurse turned on him ‘like a tiger’, ³ and forbade him to visit again. Molly had to stay in the clinic for two weeks, rather than the expected one; before she went in she was unable to eat or sleep, drinking heavily, and physically run down. The nurses had protected her there, but now she had to look after herself. She wrote Richard a letter saying that she would never go back to him, and posted it at the village post office.

When Rachel heard what she had done, she was amused and excited, but she pointed out that Richard would arrive shortly. What could Molly do then? Molly said she would refuse ‘steadfastly’ to go back with him.

‘He is very dull,’ Rachel agreed. ‘He’s quite the wrong person for you, darling; I don’t know what sort of man you would like? Perhaps you’d rather have a woman?’

Molly already knew that she would, much rather, but she was amazed at Rachel’s perspicacity.

‘Do you love women, then?’ she asked.

‘Anything that comes!’ Rachel assured her. ⁴

Molly’s lover Bo Foster was a mutual friend; a charming, well-educated woman, ten years older, who lived with her parents and was very discreet. Molly had promised never to tell anyone about their relationship, but she could not resist talking about Bo, thus innocently confirming all Rachel’s suspicions.

Richard arrived on Saturday, wearing town clothes. They booked him a room at the pub in the next village. He was a fair, good-looking young man, slightly more cultured than most of the ‘nice, normal people’ ⁵ Molly’s family knew, and he was bitterly angry. (He did not know about Bo, any more than his wife knew about his male lover – but they were both well aware of the other’s preferences.) It was annoying for him to find Rachel in Chaldon, since he disapproved of her, but Molly had begged her not to leave them alone together. Richard was taken on the Powys trail, and kept at it till dark. Eventually he had to ask Rachel ‘Will you please let me talk to my wife alone?’ ⁶ It did no good. Molly remained, as she had said, steadfast, and Mr Turpin returned to London without his wife.

When Richard Turpin first met Molly Ackland six months before, in May 1925, he was deeply disturbed by his homosexuality, which he hoped to eradicate by marrying. Molly had been converted to Catholicism by Bo, and passed it on to Richard, who probably thought that religion would help, too. As for Molly, she was in a desperate situation; her affair with Bo, which she had romantically imagined would lead to a life together, was still secret. She was so unhappy at home that she had recently become engaged, by letter, to Rodric Heming, a tea-planter in Java she’d last seen eight years before, when they were both eleven. As the date for sailing to Java grew uncomfortably close, Bo still made no move which might defer it. On 9 July Molly wrote only two words in her diary: ‘Married Dick’. ⁷

They had known each other barely six weeks, Richard having proposed on their fourth meeting. When in answer Molly showed him the pearl engagement ring Rodric had sent her, Richard took it off her finger.

‘It comes off quite easily,’ he remarked. ‘I shall keep it and you can put on our wedding ring instead.’ ⁸

This at last was the tempestuous passion, carrying all before it, for which Molly had hoped. Otherwise, Richard’s behaviour did not come up to her expectations for a whirlwind romance; when Molly asked if he loved her, he answered ‘I suppose I do.’ However, this ‘disjointed and lukewarm’ courtship suited the ‘almost total unreality’ of Molly’s state of mind. She did not even consider whether or not she ‘felt desire’ towards Richard, perhaps because (as Valentine theorised later) her ‘body was wholly given over to Bo, whose love excited and satisfied’ her. Valentine described Molly’s confused feelings: ‘the situation was amusing; it was modern and emancipated … I was shy of him, anxious to impress him … anxious – above all – to appear sophisticated and competent to deal with this or any other situation.’ ⁹ Perhaps more importantly, if she sailed to Java it would mean a permanent goodbye to Bo, and Bo did not seem able to offer any alternative solution.

Richard was not the ideal saviour of the situation, but Molly accepted his offer. He kissed her, roughly, which she found utterly distasteful; her mother entered the room in time to witness the unwelcome embrace. Ruth Ackland – beautiful, widowed and rather silly – was not the woman to pass up such an opportunity for a scene:

(After much debate, and mention of the tickets for Java, the trousseau and wedding presents, it is agreed that Richard will only communicate with Ruth, until Molly has written to Rodric. Richard makes to exit.)

Having played her appointed role in the drama, Ruth was in high good humour, and ordered oysters and champagne for supper in honour of the occasion. Richard wooed her with flowers, presents and letters beginning ‘O Shenandoah [I love your daughter]’, ¹¹ and she became a staunch ally. Rodric was cabled, the passage to Java cancelled. (Molly sometimes wondered about that unimaginable life as Mrs Heming; Rodric was murdered, only two years later, by a Chinese workman.)

Richard probably thought that when he said to Molly ‘I haven’t kissed a young woman before’, she took his meaning, especially when he hinted at unmentionable vices. ¹² He underestimated Molly’s inexperience; she had been disablingly shy, but learnt to conceal this beneath a poised, apparently urbane, social manner. His social carapace was, less successfully, ‘a mixture of cringe and swagger’ ¹³ which by turns alarmed and impressed Molly. Presumably their very lack of sexual chemistry was an attraction; if they had been content with an unconsummated mariage blanc, it could have been a convenient partnership. Molly would have escaped from her family, and gained the freedom accorded to a married woman, Richard would have been protected from the dangers of his illegal preferences by a public appearance of heterosexuality. But Richard was not interested in a mutually beneficial arrangement; he wanted real conformity, normality, paternity. He was also apparently motivated by an exaggerated competitive instinct, and a public school determination to overcome all obstacles; any opposition made him frantically determined.

After the experience of kissing him, Molly was seriously put off the idea of marrying Richard, but the less enthusiastic she became, the more obstinately he insisted. At this juncture, her dangerous sister Joan – herself eight years older and recently married – gave Molly vehement advice:

She told me I must marry; never mind who – Richard as well as anyone else. I could not otherwise escape from my mother … Even if I did not think I loved Richard – or any one else – I must at least marry … Even if I did not love my husband (and probably I would) then at least I should be free from home. Look at her, she said, she was free. ¹⁴

Molly was desperate to escape from her past and have the opportunity to become her own person. She did not pause to consider that Joan was untrustworthy, even malicious, and that their characters were very different. Joan might be perfectly contented with such a situation, but Molly had a great need of love, and capacity for it. Neither did it occur to her that she might merely exchange one kind of bondage for another.

Molly telephoned Richard, and arranged to meet him at a restaurant.

‘I will marry you if you will marry me tomorrow,’ she told him. ‘I won’t if you put it off for a day.’ ¹⁵

Richard obtained a special licence, and caught the train to Devonshire, so that he could tell his mother the news. Molly was to drive to Ilfracombe, collect him there at midnight, then drive straight back to London, and be married on their return. Ruth accompanied her, bringing a hamper from Fortnum’s. Molly loved driving and they went fast, singing. (Just before they left, Molly telephoned Bo with the news, and was hurt that she made no attempt to stop her.)

They arrived in the small hours to find Richard standing in the dark street. He had changed his mind. His parents had never met Molly, there could be no Catholic wedding yet since they hadn’t completed their conversion. It was all impossible. Molly was enraged; it was now or never, she said. As far as the Catholic thing went, once the civil marriage had taken place, the church would hastily receive them whether they had finished their instruction or not, and marry them before they sinned by consummating their merely legal wedding. Forcing the issue by blackmailing the church particularly appealed to Richard, and he got into the car. (Ruth, whose recurrent cry to her daughter was ‘Why CAN’T you be simple?’, ¹⁶ must have been relieved.)

Molly and Richard were married at Westminster Registry Office that afternoon; the only untoward event was that Joan publicly refused to be a witness.

‘My husband has forbidden me to countenance this marriage,’ she announced, doubtless with great enjoyment. ¹⁷

One of Molly’s schoolfriends obliged instead, and the ceremony proceeded. That evening, when she was alone, Molly gazed with satisfaction at the ring on her finger. ‘There,’ she thought to herself. ‘I’ve done it.’ ¹⁸

She did it again, a week later, in Westminster Cathedral. (As she had predicted, their spiritual directors had swiftly enacted the rituals of reception into the church, and the marriage was performed by the Cardinal.) Before the wedding, Bo collapsed. She did not, therefore, attend, but insisted that Molly should wear one of her large and noticeable jewels. Molly was embarrassed by the whole event, which she refused to take seriously; on the way up the aisle she murmured to a friend in the congregation, ‘I’m fainting for a sausage.’ ¹⁹ This flippancy, most unsuitable to the formality of the occasion and the grandeur of the surroundings, was Molly’s childish form of denial as well as aspiration to behave like a Bright Young Thing. Immediately after the ceremony, to celebrate the end of familial authority, she had her hair cut in a short Eton crop. Her wedding dress, ‘the ordinary kind of thing, pretty and white’, ²⁰ had a medieval coif beneath the veil, so her haircut was concealed during the wedding reception.

When Molly appeared in her going-away clothes, Eton crop revealed, the sensation created was all she could have hoped. (It was still considered daring for a woman to have such short hair; on a bride it was outrageous.) One of the guests told her it was disgusting, which gratified her. Richard, however, was thrilled; ‘possibly,’ the worldly Valentine suggested, ‘because it made me look extremely boyish.’ ²¹ There was a postponement of the second wedding night, as there had been of the first, this time for a medical, rather than religious, reason. Richard needed a minor operation and, bizarrely, it had been arranged for the following morning. Molly hardly understood why this was going to be kept quiet, but she obligingly set off with Richard as though they were leaving for a continental honeymoon. They drove once round the park instead. This charade symbolised the marriage perfectly.

For a week all was well; Molly visited Richard in his nursing home and enjoyed the novelty of being addressed as ‘Mrs’. She saw Bo every day, and although they had agreed that they should no longer be lovers, this was a technicality. They had a heartbreaking parting when Richard left hospital, and Molly arranged for flowers to be sent to Bo every day during the honeymoon, with a daily love letter. These arrangements made, the newlyish-weds set off for Winterton in Norfolk, where the Acklands had a country house.

(Winterton was not a good choice. It was in Winterton, as a child, that Molly had first experienced the ecstasy of freedom, left alone to play on the beach, climb trees, and read. The Ackland holiday home, Hill House, was a large Victorian brick villa with extensive gardens, somewhat incongruously sited beside the beach, separated from