The first upheaval in Idina Sackville’s life came early. She was four years
old and her younger sister had just been born. Her father chose that moment
to run off with a cancan dancer.
The year was 1897. Idina’s parents had married each other for entirely
practical reasons. Her mother, Muriel Brassey, had wanted to become a
countess. Her father, the 8th Earl De La Warr, known as “Naughty Gilbert”,
had wanted Muriel’s money.
His parents had disapproved of his marriage into a family that had made its
money in the railways. As if to prove their prejudices right, Muriel now
launched what was seen as an attack on the upper-class Establishment by
divorcing Gilbert. She devoted the rest of her life to another man: George
Lansbury, the future leader of the Labour party.
The divorce immediately set Idina and her siblings well apart from their
peers, for it was extremely rare, even though, among a significant tranche
of the upper classes, adultery was rife.
Her parents’ divorce also set Idina the example that an unsatisfactory husband
could be divorced, and it introduced her to the idea that husbands and
fathers can leave. Both patterns of behaviour Idina herself would repeat,
while reaching out for constant physical reassurance that she too would not
be left alone.
Years later she would become the central figure in the infamous Happy Valley
set in Kenya, whose debauchery would lead to the so-called White Mischief
murder of Lord Erroll, one of her former husbands. When she was a girl,
there was no hint of what was to come. But by the age of 25 she would be one
of the most notorious figures in English society, known as the Bolter. How
did it happen?
Idina spent her adolescence debating workers’ and women’s rights with the
politicians who visited her mother’s home. But by her mid-teens she clearly
decided that she wanted to make the most of the advantages she had in the
marriage market.
For young women of that era, real freedom came only with marriage. In Idina’s
case, joining the marriage market was far from straightforward. Socialism,
suffrage and divorce had earned Muriel a reputation as a class traitor.
Moreover, the desire for political change had been very firmly ingrained in
Idina from a young age.
Nonetheless in 1913 she married a 21-year-old cavalry officer, Euan Wallace,
one of the richest bachelors in Britain – rich enough for his social
ambitions to withstand marrying a girl from a scandalous family.
Euan was a social animal. He liked to go out and about incessantly, noting in
his diary with whom he had lunched, teaed and dined. He and Idina appeared a
perfect couple. They were both glamorous and seemingly dedicated to a
nonstop social life. But for Euan this was the be-all and end-all. For Idina
social life was no more than passing entertainment: what she wanted was
adventure.
Newly wed, Idina completed her introduction to sex, an activity for which she
not only discovered she had a talent, but which she clearly found so
intensely enjoyable that it rapidly became impossible for her to resist any
opportunity for it. She was pregnant within the first month.
At the beginning of 1914 Idina had everything in place for a magnificent life.
She had the man she loved, and soon they would have a child. They were one
of the most sought-after couples in town. The only financial worry they
might ever have would be that they had too much money rather than too
little. They had a London home in Connaught Place, near Marble Arch, and a
vast house of more than 100 rooms was being built for them at Kildonan,
Euan’s family estate in Scotland. In the age of the house party, it was
designed to cater for every creature comfort their guests might require.
But on June 28, 1914, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was assassinated
in Sarajevo. Soon the world was at war. As Euan set off for the front in
France, a line of 20 horse-drawn carts laden with stone was on its way to
the Kildonan building site. By the time the war ended, both the world they
were building their house for – and Idina and Euan themselves – would change
irrevocably.
In the autumn of 1914 Idina gave birth to a son, David. At Christmas, Euan was
invalided home temporarily with a leg wound. The excitement of war was
already dissolving into desperation to seize any remaining moment. Each
night, he and Idina scampered to a dance. Euan, proud bearer of not just
dashing good looks and an immense fortune but also a war wound and a mention
in dispatches, found himself surrounded by a flock of femininity longing for
a dance, at the very least. He was not a man to resist working his leg back
into shape on the dancefloor. In a succession of other women’s arms, he
showed Idina the direction her marriage would eventually take when,
following the established pattern, he took lovers among her friends.
Her own childhood having been shaped by her father’s departure, Idina clearly
settled upon a strategy to keep her marriage together. This was not to hide
the extent to which she, too, was in demand. At the beginning of March 1915,
as Euan rejoined his regiment in France, Idina – pregnant once again –
accepted an invitation to sit for the society painter William Orpen. Orpen
was a flirt, and more. Ninety years on, electricity still fizzes from the
portrait.
The plans for Kildonan provided for a door in Euan’s dressing room that would
let him slip away unnoticed to an assignation. When Idina next met the
architect, a staircase was sketched into the plan for her bedroom. It would
allow a friend to slip upstairs to her unseen. Unlike her mother, Idina was
not going to allow herself to be left while her husband was out having fun
elsewhere. If Euan wasn’t going to be there, Idina needed somebody else to
be.
In the year after their second son, Gerard, was born, Euan found it hard to
come home from the war. The long months in between were lonely. Idina took
other lovers. All, as was quite proper in the circumstances, were transient
and discreet.
She was still in love with Euan, however, and when in February 1917 he was
allowed a few days’ leave, she braved the U-boats in the Channel and went to
stay with him at the Ritz in Paris – where they enjoyed a vast bouncing
double bed.
Idina next saw him in London four months later. Euan’s duty was to have as
good a time as he could and Idina’s was to keep him entertained with a
frenzy of social and sexual activity.
After a perfect weekend, the trouble began. Idina’s sister, Avie, came to
lunch, bringing with her a beautiful friend. Barbie Lutyens was 18 and the
oldest child of the most renowned architect in Britain, Edwin Lutyens. She
was tall and slender with endless legs, ice-blue eyes and dark hair. Her
skin was porcelain, her jaw sculpted – and her determination like steel.
Barbie was embarrassed by her family. Despite his fame, her father lurched
from financial crisis to crisis. She wanted a rich husband and a glamorous
social life.
Two days later Barbie reappeared with Avie for tea. It was not a long visit,
but it was long enough: Euan was hooked. Barbie appeared on every single
page of his diary for the rest of his leave.
Idina had not yet lost Euan. Two months later, after another night in Paris
with him, she wrote in his diary: “Little One [as she called herself] the
only woman, wicked little creature”, reminding him that no glacial beauty
could offer what she did in bed.
She fell ill that winter, however, with bronchitis that was on the verge of
turning pneumonic. When Euan arrived home in March 1918 to attend a
four-month staff course, he was disappointed to find she was not yet well.
Barbie filled the gap.
“Dina felt too tired to go,” he wrote after a visit to the theatre, “so I
picked up Barbie and she filled the vacant seat.” From then on, he was
constantly going “to Barbie’s” and having fun with her friends.
Barbie wanted a rich husband, however, not a rich lover. Fooling around in bed
with a man would not guarantee her position in society. Misbehaving in that
way was for the girls who did not have to make her journey up the social
ladder. So while Idina lay ill in bed and Barbie kept herself just out of
reach, Euan began an “Edwardian friendship” with somebody else.
Morvyth Ward, the daughter of the Earl of Dudley, was a statuesque English
beauty who called herself “Dickie”. She was not as beautiful as Barbie but
she was both attractive and lively and, unlike Barbie, was socially and
financially secure. She became part of the gang.
Euan, Barbie, Avie, Dickie and friends would dance to the gramophone and piano
downstairs while Idina lay ill in her bedroom. Euan and the girls enjoyed a
long weekend at Dickie’s family home, Dunkeld, in Scotland, without Idina.
Stuck in bed, she was powerless to do anything but watch. It was not her style
to protest. Nor was it the done thing to play the possessive wife. All the
same, she felt there was something very wrong about her husband being
targeted by women who wanted not just to sleep with him (which she could put
up with) but to take him away from her altogether and marry him.
After returning to the war, Euan no longer bothered to write to Idina. It was
to Dickie that he wrote. Besotted and hoping for some sign of a future
together, she wrote back.
Before the war, an unfaithful Edwardian husband had shown his love for his
wife by putting her first in public and only, and discreetly, making love to
married women. Extra-marital affairs had been accepted because, as nobody
divorced, they could not break a marriage. But the situation had now
changed. People were starting to divorce and husbands were having
potentially marriage-breaking affairs with unmarried women.
Given her own childhood, Idina clearly decided that, if her marriage was going
to fall apart, it would at least be she who did the leaving rather than
being the one left behind.
She had a friend called Olga Lyn, a professional singer, who kept open house
for actors, artists and high society. There was always some sort of party
going on at Oggie’s, as her friends called her. There, in a haze of
cigarette smoke and champagne, Idina met Charles Gordon. Like Euan, he was a
good-looking Scot. He showered her with attention and sympathy.
With the prospect of her husband returning to her appearing unlikely, she
slept with Charles not just once or twice but again and again and again. At
first it was covert. But crossing town at unearthly hours was tiresome. They
began to go out together, ceasing to care what anyone said.
They moved into the Metropole hotel in Brighton, where they could lie side by
side and whisper of the life they might have had if Idina were free. Charles
told her about East Africa, which he had visited: of gardens of Eden
clinging to the slopes of its mountains; limitless fresh, sweet food that
came in harvests not once but two, three, four times a year; and wide, open
plains where animals ran free, uncaged.
It was already clear that there was not much of the war left. Euan would soon
be home. Idina had to consider the prospect of trying to rebuild a life with
a man whom she loved but who might any day leave. Like Euan, she could
simply drift from lover to lover. But she feared what old age might bring.
Her paramours would cease to visit. Euan, if he hadn’t already left her for
another wife, would be in some mistress’s arms.
Idina was only 25, yet the life she had been planning with her husband
appeared over. She was young enough to start again and, in the aftermath of
a war that had broken both a continent and a generation, everyone who could
was starting over, including several of Idina’s closest friends. Somewhere
there had to be a better life than this one.
Idina suggested to Charles that they go to Africa, where they could live the
English idyll that this terrible war had fought so hard to destroy. They
could spend their mornings riding, their days farming and their evenings
under the stars.
On November 11, the day the armistice was signed, Idina wrote to Euan asking
for a divorce. He received the letter on the French-Belgian border and
hurried back to England. She was waiting at home. “Important discussion with
D after tea,” Euan wrote.
She did not want to remain married to a man who had so openly forgotten he had
a wife. Euan would easily find witnesses to win him a divorce from her. This
came as a relief to Euan: if Idina had tried to divorce him by claiming
desertion, he would have been thrown out of the Life Guards.
He tried to persuade her to stay: Idina would be giving up a fortune. But she
clearly didn’t give a damn about money.
The children were more difficult. Euan was the one with the money to give them
the best lives they could have. Besides, no gentleman wanted his children
living in another man’s house. Even if he had seen them just twice in the
past 12 months, he certainly was not going to allow Idina to take them to
Africa. What they needed was an English education.
For the past four and a bit years, Idina had been the one making sure the
children were well, taking them to the doctor, taking them to the seaside,
finding somewhere for them to live when fevers struck and bombs fell, hiring
and firing nannies, nursery maids and cooks. Yet if she refused to leave
them with Euan, he could refuse the divorce.
All the same, an unhappy mother was not a good mother. And now that the war
was over, they would have Euan. When he was there he was very good with
them. Africa was not a place for children. Painful though it might be,
giving her boys to Euan seemed the best thing for them.
But Euan didn’t just want the children to stay with him. What they needed was
stability. If Idina insisted on leaving with Gordon, she would have to go
and never return. She couldn’t hop in and out of their lives.
The following night, Euan had “another talk to Dina lasting two and a half
hours”. He was prepared to have her back on a sole condition – that she
never saw Gordon again. If she did, he would divorce her and she would never
see the children. He gave her two weeks to decide.
The deadline passed before Christmas. He asked a friend to see her. She was
not coming back. That night Euan caught the sleeper to Scotland, where he
had already made preparations for a discreet divorce. He stayed there 48
hours and returned to a large dinner at the Ritz followed by the usual play.
And then he and Barbie slipped away together alone.
“We just danced together all the time.” Long, lean, beautiful Barbie, swinging
around him, curling up on his shoulder. Lately he had been seeing Dickie;
but poor Dickie was ill at home in bed.
Three months later, on the last Thursday in March 1919, Idina married Charles
Gordon at Chelsea register office. Within a week the newlyweds had sailed
for Kenya. Idina had bolted.
© Frances Osborne 2008
Extracted from The Bolter by Frances Osborne, published by Virago at
£18.99. Copies can be ordered for £17.09, including postage, from The Sunday
Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
