Fault Lines. David Pryce-Jones
alone of the children to Montreuil and after a happy evening together “ever so tenderly told her the nannies had to be pensioned off. First she turned to stone and said nothing.” Just seventeen at the time Poppy then screamed, “We are always alone, nobody loves us but Nanny, she is everything to us,” and went on, “You do nothing but laugh since my father’s death.” Since that death, Mitzi wrote expertly shifting the blame, this was “the most cruel blow I have had. I left her.”
Back at Royaumont three days later, with what she considered “a world of tenderness,” she told the nannies that they had to leave. Nanny Stainer replied, “You will never manage to part me from the children.” Jessie was even more blunt, “I don’t know why I listen to your palaver,” and banged the door. Whenever this scene was mentioned in years to come, Jessie would emphasise that she could never have left the children. And next morning Poppy returned to the charge, “For seventeen years you have done nothing but kill me!” To Mitzi, she “was like a lunatic for days.” Fault lines were out in the open.
In fashionable places such as Naples, Capri and Venice, offering museums, opera houses and five-star hotels, Mitzi had only to announce her arrival with Frank for them to receive invitations from other rich or prominent local people. At the time Egypt was effectively governed by the British almost as though it were a colony, and some with social aspirations were in the habit of going out there for a winter season. Frank was one such, travelling to Egypt as before with his old lover Paul Goldschmidt. Wherever he was, work proceeded in his absence at Montreuil. The “dream house” proved too small and inconvenient. A footbridge from its garden led over a sunken street to a park and a row of cottages. Mitzi had bought the park and three of the cottages, which were then pulled down. Supposedly an architect, Frank had designed a much larger new house to be built on the site. His original drawings, it is said, omitted a staircase, and Frank had wanted to have shutters and windows that opened outwards. Mitzi told me one day that Frank had gone ahead with the building regardless of expense at the height of the Depression. As the works were nearing completion, a bill of particulars shows that she still owed just over two million francs. She was fretting about paying when a letter arrived from Hungary with a huge payment to compensate for laying a railroad across one of her properties. By the end of 1932 she and Frank had moved into Montreuil, and in January 1933 they had a civil marriage in the town. In the same month that Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, Mitzi became English; suddenly, thanks to Frank, “my country has ever been England.” A short year later, she had accommodated herself to “Our England … each time you are in London you feel, if possible, prouder to have an English passport.”
The change of nationality was accompanied by conversion to the Christian faith. She would be free from those Jewish nerves that were always troublesome. In her diaries she persuaded herself that she wasn’t escaping but once again was quite right to be doing what she wanted to do. “It’s queer how in my heart I never felt driven to the Jewish religion. I only protect the race the moment anyone attacks it, but I don’t like them.” In June 1933 she asked herself, “A Hitler, who can understand?” In common with many frightened and wishful Jews everywhere, she was interpreting Nazism as the personal aberration of Hitler. She and Frank could visit Bayreuth and drive through Nazi Germany as though it was still the country they had always known and the stormtroopers and swastikas were local colour, not worth a second glance. The danger was apparently unimaginable even to someone so well travelled and cosmopolitan. Yet what the new British and Christian Mary Wooster imagined was the final step in a welcome process of assimilation was only impersonation.
Marriage to Frank drove the somewhat pointed hinting of sexual repression out of her diaries. “I thought that our oneness was something so wonderful that physical union could not better it,” she had confided to herself. She told Father Cardew, the priest who received her into the church, that the relationship with Frank had not been physical, and he took it that Frank had displayed the manners of a gentleman, waiting until he had made an honest woman of her. At Montreuil on 17 May 1934 and still confiding to herself as usual, she resorts to explicit language, “The first time I was yours at last was on a 17th. The first time in our new house.”
Long after Frank’s death, in the fumoir at Royaumont, we were gossiping about some contemporary of Mitzi’s who was said to have had an affair with her gardener. “Quand on a eu Frank on n’a pas besoin du jardinier” (When one has had Frank there’s no need for the gardener.) Mitzi’s sudden vulgarity seemed altogether out of keeping, the kind of thing she thought people ought to be saying in those liberated days. As though passing off the wisdom of a lifetime’s experience, on other occasions, and especially to her grandchildren, she was in the habit of stating as it were ex cathedra: “Homosexuals make the best husbands.”
FIVE
Reputed Father
Heb dduw heb ddim, ddu a digon – the Pryce-Jones motto
I WAS BORN in Meidling on 15 February 1936, in the corner room on the first floor where Poppy had also been born exactly twenty years earlier. Whether my first name acknowledged Jewish or Welsh antecedents was apparently much discussed in the house. What it might mean socially or culturally for me to have a surname that is identifiably Welsh was never raised either at a personal or an abstract level. I was twenty before national service took me to Wales for the first time and then only to practise platoon attacks at Trawsfynnydd, a military training ground with a nuclear power station in the distance. In the village there I wrote a cheque to a man with exactly the same names as myself.
Marriage brought me to the land of my Welsh fathers. Clarissa’s parents, Harold and Nancy Caccia, lived at Abernant in the Wye Valley, and we acquired Pentwyn, a cottage nearby but much higher on the edge of Eppynt, the open hill with a view of the Black Mountains fifty miles away. Time was when Clarissa had ridden up on her pony and formed a wish that one day she would live here. One room had a bath that had never been plumbed in. The slates were sliding from the roof of a separate building, once a barn. A long time later, we had made a home, and Clarissa’s mother called it Pen-trianon. I was weeding the minute garden when a neighbour telephoned to say that Princess Margaret was staying with her, and she was about to bring her round to show her the barn.
More incongruous still than the royal party in this isolated retreat was the visit of Svetlana Stalin. Cursed by her parentage, tempestuous by nature, she existed in a perpetual storm that might break in any direction. A circle of friends wished her well, and among them were Laurence and Linda Kelly, both historians with experience of the Soviet Union. During a meal in their house I invited Svetlana to Pentwyn, never thinking she’d accept. My nerve failed when we picked her up as arranged in a hotel in nearby Hay, and I apologized for the cottage’s lack of amenities. Does it have running water, she asked. Having said point blank that she refused to talk about her father, she would come down from her room and talk exclusively about him, tormented that she couldn’t help loving a father whom she knew was a monster. At moments, a tiger gleam in her eyes gave her an uncanny look of Stalin himself. In another mood, she took over the kitchen with a special recipe for chicken. When she had retreated to Wisconsin for her last years, I sent her a novel of mine and got back the title page, torn out without further comment.
Not long before he died, Alan stayed at Pentwyn. He wanted to pay a last visit to Dolerw, the Pryce-Jones house at Newtown where he had spent childhood holidays. It was raining that day and he refused to put on a coat because, “I don’t get wet, I’m Welsh.” Links had survived. He had been President of the Montgomeryshire Association, and he had promoted R. S. Thomas whose early poems with their angry mourning for a lost Wales had been published locally in Newtown.
Like Meidling, Dolerw is the monument of a self-made man out to show what he can do and expecting to be admired for it. Welsh gentry lived here in the eighteenth century. Briefly the house came into the possession of Charles Hanbury-Tracy, a local grandee and Liberal Member of Parliament. From the 1870s onwards Pryce Jones, as he was originally called, transformed Dolerw into a large Italianate villa complete with a tower. He and his wife, Eleanor Morris, had four daughters and four sons, the youngest of them all being Harry (1878–1952), father of Alan. Another of the four sons, my great-uncle Victor, sold the lease in 1947 and