Rosemary Verey. Barbara Paul Robinson
him and it worked all right. It was quite horrendous to be honest and truthful. You had to abdicate certain things.”5
For someone of Rosemary’s strength and independence, David’s reappearance and reassertion as head of household must have been extremely painful. They barely knew each other when he went off to the S.O.E. shortly after their wedding. Before that, their courtship had been nonexistent, their marriage sudden, and their life together brief and interrupted by his duties with his regiment. Rosemary had grown from a young bride barely of twenty-one years to a mother of two in charge of everything.
“We were separated for three years. When he came back he was a stranger. I had been caring for his children, but I had organized my own life. I had become self-sufficient. While he was away, for example, I always carved the Sunday joint. During the War you only had two ounces of meat each and you had to be rather clever at carving. But men traditionally always do the carving. When he came home, I still wanted to go on doing it. But I belong to a generation, taught by my mother, that you married someone and that was your life. You took care of him. He came first.”6
It must have been challenging for both of them. David had to adjust to civilian life and fit into his family. Rosemary recognized that it was “even more difficult for the men coming back. They had to get a job.” Rosemary had to learn to defer to him, step back from being head of the household, let him take charge, and set the course for the family. His first thought was to resettle the family in London where he hoped to find a job as an architect. Had David managed to settle the family in London, as he tried to do, Rosemary might never have considered a garden. It would be David who took the family off to Gloucestershire, and David who would initiate the creation of their garden.
London had been devastated by the blitz. More than twenty thousand Londoners had been killed and large areas of the City completely destroyed by the bombings. The couple spent a few months there as David sought to find work. They “were shocked by the war damage in London. No new building was taking place; it was all repairing bombed buildings, using utility materials.” But despite the need to rebuild huge areas of London, England was in the early stages of recovery, with food, fuel, and basic materials all severely rationed for the foreseeable future. The rebuilding concentrated on repairs and salvage, hardly challenging work for an aspiring young architect. Nor were there many jobs. Rosemary recalled that “although he was a qualified architect, the best salary he was offered was less than I paid my gardener, so he decided to accept a job from the Ministry of Housing as an investigator of historic buildings, listing these according to their architectural merit.”7
Rosemary’s future was completely dependent upon David’s decision. When he was assigned to Gloucestershire and the adjoining counties, the family moved back to a home in the environs of Barnsley and Fairford. They left London never to return to live there again. David would remain in this post for almost twenty years, eventually writing two highly respected volumes of the Pevsner’s Buildings of England series that are still in print.8
By contrast to the ravaged London, returning to the country must have seemed a deliverance. In the rural villages, life continued much as before. The Cotswold countryside, with its honey-gold stone buildings, gently rolling green hills with fields outlined by undulating stone walls, windbreak clumps of ancient trees, and hedgerows full of wildlife, was dotted with picturesque small villages, supporting an agricultural way of life. For most of the populace, life centered on their crops and their livestock. A strong class system persisted, with the upper crust still living in the manor houses and riding their horses and dogs in the hunt. The Church was at the core of village life, its steeple rising above the surrounding buildings. David was to study and inventory many of these historic churches in his new work.
David and Rosemary bought a handsome stone house called Hinton House in the village of Ablington, only a few miles down the road from the village of Barnsley. The house suited their needs. It had a lawn for the children that sloped down from the front door toward a lavender hedge, as well as a tennis court and a small paddock. As a passionate horsewoman and competitive tennis player, Rosemary felt that the house clearly met her requirements for happiness. Three loose box stalls held her horse and ponies for the children. They moved in December 20, 1946, the day before her twenty-eighth birthday. One wing served as the nursery where Nanny Verey could attend to the children, while Rosemary and David had their privacy and were left undisturbed. While Rosemary did continue to gain some experience growing vegetables at Hinton House, she focused her energies on her children, her horses, tennis, and other conventional social pursuits expected of a good church-going mother and wife.
Soon thereafter, their daughter Veronica was born in 1946, followed by Davina in 1949. Rosemary’s life took on the typical rhythm of an English country lady who, although not aristocracy, fit into upper-class country life or what one American friend dubbed the “squierarchy.” Nanny Verey helped rear the four young children while the Master and Mistress entertained in traditional style. As was true (and is still often true) of English country houses, Hinton House was barely heated and Gillian Sandilands remembered it “was an agony of uncomfortableness.” Nevertheless, following strict social conventions, the dinner guests at Hinton House were expected to appear in black tie. On one particularly stormy and cold weekend, the arriving guests had to walk over duckboards to avoid the floodwaters and get to the front door. Gillian, arriving from London, was quite unprepared for formal dress. “If it was a freezing cold house and flooded, you would not have thought it was the moment for black tie. I always used to wear [my husband’s] socks in bed.”
Both Rosemary and David hunted, although Rosemary with much more enthusiasm, greater skill, and more daring. The Church was at the center of their lives; David and Rosemary assumed important responsibilities that seemed only fitting for the son of a Vicar. David’s work took him traveling all around Gloucestershire and the nearby counties. In addition to parties and dinners, their social life included tennis and fox hunting. If nothing out of the ordinary had occurred, Rosemary would have lived a comfortable, conventional country life, unnoticed by the larger world.
In 1951, just five years after their move to Hinton House, David’s parents, Cecil and Linda Verey, decided to move into The Close, adjacent to Barnsley House, and give the main house to David. Rosemary and David sold Hinton House and moved into Barnsley, where they would live for the rest of their lives. The Close, originally a small stable and garage, was renovated for David’s parents. The young Verey family of six, plus Nanny Verey, moved into the main house. Rosemary’s godmother, Isabel Tait, sent them a large van full of antique furniture. “Thank Goodness,” said Rosemary, “I taught David the difference between good and second-rate furniture!” She felt David was reluctant to criticize his parents’ taste but that “his father went for the best, his mother the least expensive.”9 Given her own high standards, Rosemary was not one to settle for second best.
Barnsley House was a large, handsome, stone manor house dating from the William and Mary period that had served as a rectory but was privately owned when Cecil Verey acquired it in 1939 for his retirement. On subsequent garden tours, Rosemary never failed to point out the 1697 date carved in stone over the garden door with the initials B.B. for Brereton Bourchier, Squire of Barnsley, who built the house out of locally quarried, golden Cotswold stone. Eventually the Bourchier family moved on to build a far grander house in Barnsley Park on the northern outskirts of the village. Extensions to the 1697 building were added in the 1880s. Rosemary observed that the history of the house made her feel “ageless. This house has been here three hundred years. I’m a passing phase.”10
For someone of his class and educational background, it was perhaps predictable that David would have very little interest in financial matters: his interests were far more intellectual. David’s work for the Ministry of Housing did not pay handsomely, but as the only child in the extended Verey family, David inherited not only from his parents, but from his many childless uncles and aunts as well. Periodically, the financial coffers of the Vereys would be topped up by these inheritances. “He was always getting the jackpot every time.” Gillian Sandilands observed that David “wasn’t at all a striving person. You see, he always had just enough money not to have to bother. I mean if he had more money he would have done something more with it … and if he had less he would have had to do something about it, wouldn’t