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220 pages

English

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Sherman's Wife is Julia Camoys Stonor's blackly humorous childhood memoir. Her mother, Jeanne, came from an impecunious Catholic aristocratic family and careened her way through the bedrooms of Mayfair, Madrid and Rhode Island. Her father was Sherman, the half-American 6th Baron Camoys whom Jeanne effectively blackmailed into marriage. Jeanne insisted that she and Sherman spend their honeymoon with one of her lovers, Hitler's foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. Once installed at the Stonor Park estate, Jeanne set about acquiring money and power through any means possible, including but not limited to theft, sexual blackmail, and murder. In this frank and unflinching portrait of English upper class life in the 1940s, Julia Camoys Stonor manages to evoke Mommie Dearest and Brideshead Revisited in equal measure.

Sujets

Philosophie et théologie

Memoir

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Publié par	Stonor Lodge Press
Date de parution	13 septembre 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781909270428
Langue	English

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Extrait

SHERMAN’S WIFE
A wartime childhood amongst the English Catholic aristocracy
JULIA CAMOYS STONOR
First published in 2006 by DESERT HEARTS www.deserthearts.com PO Box 2131 London W1A 5SU England
©Julia Camoys Stonor 2006, 2012
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
eBook ISBN: 978-1-909270-42-8
Caution
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
* * *
Dedicated to Sherman & Mildred, Crista, Jock & Donald
Contents
Mama
"Don’t Be Such an Effin’ Bore!"
A Memory of Jeanne’s Childhood
"Straight from the Horse’s Neck"
A Memory of Reggie
Land Gels and Pussies
"My Soon-to-Be Four-Balled Baron"
A Memory of Gytha
The Joyful Mysteries of the Swastika
A Memory of Commandant Mary Allen
"Uncle Fernan Was a Mere Marquis"
A Memory of the "American Heiress"
"Nineteen Furniture Vans Sailin’ Past My Window"
Tobacco, Meths and Tia Maria
A Memory of a Dinner Party
"Was Mr Hitler a Gun and Uncle?"
A Memory of Julia, Mildred and Sherman
"Gothic is In, Roman is Quite Out"
"Tinker, Tailor, Knackerman, Thief’
"Simply Not Done South of the Border"
"A Most Frightfully Devout Cartholic"
"To Catch a Millionaire or Two"
A Memoryof Stonor, 1940-1950
Tinker, Tailor, Tutor, Traitor
"I’m All for Formaldehyde"
Afterword
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Sherman and Jeanne on their wedding day, July 14, 1938
From 1939 until 1945, Stonor Park and its annexe Assendon Lodge were war zones. Jeanne made sure of this. Deprived (but only to a certain extent) of the full drama of life in the raw in London, she recreated its heady atmosphere as nearly as she could in the country. And this she did most successfully, using all the props of the large, prosperous, ancient lands, villages and mansions that belonged to her husband (absent on active service and, as Jeanne pointed out, "in foreign parts, thank God!") and his family...
1
Mama
"Heil Hitler!" shouted Mummy as she pushed Daddy down the stairs at Assendon Lodge. He stood at the top of the stairs, slim, with long hands, and a gold ring on his little finger, his uniform khaki wool, with bright brown leather straps crossing from shoulder to chest, a silver bugle badge on his shoulder, laced shoes burnished to the same chestnut as his belt. I could smell the sweet aroma of his hair oil he poured it from a silvered lime glass bottle surmounted by a small crown from where I crouched beneath the stairwell, stopped in my tracks on the way to the kitchen.
"Get the hell out of here and back to your battlefield, Shermie. You’re totally useless and absolutely de trop round here. The sooner I’m rid of you the better!"
Mummy rubbed her hands together, her scarlet finger nails glittering. A lighted cigarette clung perilously to her clenched lips.
Daddy flew backwards down the stairs.
At the bottom, he picked himself up off the floor and dusted himself down, smoothing the crease on his trousers. Slowly, carefully, he walked back to the war through the tradesmen’s entrance. A small gust of air blew by me as he went.
2
‘Don’t Be Such an Effin’ Bore!’’
One rainy day in 1945, before we had left Assendon Lodge for good, I was on my morning walk with Nanny and the second nanny, Nana to the ever-enticing sewage works at Lower Assendon. As the bus from Pishill and Russells Water to Stonor sped by past us, I caught sight of Mummy’s face, frozen in fury and embarrassment, glowering out of the window.
I couldn’t hear my mother, but I could see her lips moving as she continued to glower and scowl at me. Seated bolt upright, alone on a seat in the grey-painted wartime bus, Mummy was dressed in full uniform, her pageboy hair smoothed into place beneath a navy blue peaked cap, a silver whistle on a white lanyard was draped over her shoulder epaulettes. Bright scarlet patches of rouge matching her lipstick rose high on my mother’s dead white cheeks, lightly dusted in palest green powder a mixture, which she had specially prepared at Elizabeth Arden on her visit to London. Blue spectacle lenses glittered in their blond tortoise frames and Mummy’s hands tapped impatiently at the window ledge as the bus sped past. I cringed at her stare.
But Ruby Heath could explain nothing to me in the kitchen of Assendon Lodge. "There, there, Miss Julia," she said soothingly. She couldn’t bring herself to tell me that this was the first time in her life that my mother had travelled in a bus with the "common people" as she called them.
Instead, Ruby rubbed her hands on her flowered pinafore and continued making jams and jellies and feather-light sponge cakes. I licked the yellow pudding basin clean with greedy fingers.
"‘Victorias’ those cakes are called," explained Ruby busily dusting them with icing sugar.
A few weeks later I found myself in a similar position, standing close to Mama-who-was-Mummy in the green and cream kitchen of Assendon Lodge as I watched her every move as she attended to a new batch of scones. Only recently had my mother announced her change of name: "In future and startin’ immediately, WE are to be called MAMA. Daddy is now PAPA. And both with the accent on the final A!"
The few children I occasionally saw from the Rainbow Inn or at the Catechism classes and Sunday services at Stonor chapel who stood from one foot to another frozen with cold and fright, only ever called their parents "Mummy and Daddy". It puzzled me, and the person I used to know as "Mummy" receded into the distance.
But now, in the kitchen and hovering close to the hem of Mama’s navy-blue serge police skirt, I edged ever closer to the magic of her presence. She reached down into the oven to scoop up the sand-coloured scones baking there. Very slowly she swung round with the white-hot tray of perfectly formed golden cakes, then drew without warning the thin tin rim across my lips, sending a searing pain into my mouth.
I lurched sideways, dressed in my best smocked linen frock, a hand clutching my scorched mouth, my heart shaking. Mama laughed casually, a light tinkling sound. Sharply she called to Ruby: "Come immediately and cope with the child!"
Turning on her heel, my mother laughed over her shoulder, a cigarette leaning out of the corner of her mouth. "For God’s sake, Julia dear, stop makin’ such a fuss about nothin’. You really are nothin’ but a God-awful borin’ brat. Just shows what useless stock Sherman’s Stonor blood is, and all your useless inheritance to boot."
And once again Ruby, with her curling red hair and comforting arms, consoled and soothed me. "There, there, poor Doodo," she said as she bathed my tear-stained cheeks and blistered lips.
Mama herself cried only rarely. The first time I saw her cry was after her experience falling off a bicycle that caused such a crisis. But she seemed more angry than sad as tears streamed down the rouge, making rivulets and runny lines in the thickly applied Elizabeth Arden green powder.
Dressed in an afternoon frock of green and white seersucker, Mummy, now Mama, had taken her seat bolt upright on a brand-new black bicycle. It stood on the gravel beneath the drawing-room window at Assendon Lodge. A lighted cigarette ("my Philip Morris, ha, ha, olé!") leaned sideways out of Mama’s scarlet-painted mouth. Her long fingernails were an even more intense red as she leaned over the curved handle-bars.
I had watched intently as she wobbled forward unsteadily on the bicycle a few feet before Uncle Eric St Johnston, Chief Constable of Oxfordshire, gallantly gave her a push and encouraging shove from behind. There was a shrill shriek as she skidded wildly and crashed to the ground. There followed a cascade of tears and a torrent of words, mosdy in Spanish.
"If this is your idea of playfulness, Eric, then you are more of a goddamned fool than I already know!" Mama stormed.
I started crying too as I was more upset that Mama had cut her knee. And even more since her contraband American silk stockings were laddered from heel to toe.
Supported by Uncle Eric, who was such a frequent visitor, his arms supportively around her, Mama staggered into the kitchen shouting at me as she went: "Shut up, shut up! You’re such a humiliation to me you silly brat. Don’t you dare tell anyone. And stop cryin’ this minute. Fetch the first-aid box you effin’ idiot. And get me a Horse’s Neck at once. You’d better make it quick," ordered Mama. She put her bleeding leg up on the kitchen table.
The only people I could dare to tell would be Ruby or Joyce, my day nanny Several other nannies had just recently been sacked with louder-than-usual shouts from their employer. "You’re sacked, you’re sacked. You can leave in half-an-hour. On second thoughts that’s not soon enough, you can leave immediately," Mama would announce scornfully. "References you said? Certainly not. How dare you? Get out, get out!"
Nannies, one after the other, packed and left rapidly. But they still had to stand outside the gate at Assendon Lodge, come rain or shine, to wait for the Pishill and Stonor bus to take them into Henley. Joyce would then come to fill in, from the Rainbow Inn, a black-and-white Tudor beamed building opposite the gate of Assendon Lodge. Its low-hung brilliantly painted sign of a rainbow in a glowing arc swinging in the breeze was magic to me.
Daughter of the pub keeper Archie Froud, Joyce was pretty with dark curly hair, vivacious and kind. I loved her dearly, and the day she left to be married to Arthur, a demobbed airman, I cried. But she had me for her bridesmaid, dressed up in one of Granny Camoys’ wartime presents from Newport, Rhode Island. It was my favourite, a striped yellow and white cotton dress, t