A Tuscan Childhood by Kinta Beevor

Author:Kinta Beevor [Beevor, Kinta]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-49218-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

Our new life at Poggio Gherardo was far from assured because my parents’ financial state of affairs became even more precarious. Under Aunt Janet’s will, Alick Ross received an inheritance of £30,000 from her marriage settlement, but he had run up huge debts on the prospect of inheriting Poggio. This was what had persuaded Aunt Janet to change her will to save the property from being sold with all its contents. She could not forget how her brother Maurice Duff Gordon, my mother’s father, had frittered away his inheritance and lost Fyvie Castle.

Once Alick heard that Poggio was to go to John he launched a ruinous lawsuit to contest the will, which he lost. Following his defeat and subsequent impoverishment after another failed business venture, my mother renewed the allowance that Aunt Janet had given him and later helped the wife he abandoned. He then disappeared from England. After the Second World War we heard that he had last been seen in Budapest in 1941. Nobody knows his exact fate, whether he died in his bed or perished in a German or Russian camp.

Defending the will was an expensive process, but worse was to come. Italian law declared that leaving property to a great-nephew was to leave it outside the immediate family. This meant that the maximum inheritance tax of 40 per cent would have to be paid. And a closer inspection of the farms revealed the degree of reinvestment needed to make them viable. Some of the cows proved to be at least thirty years old.

In 1930 my mother went to Rome to negotiate with the tax department. All she achieved was an extension of the time in which the inheritance duties were to be paid. Returning in the train to Florence, she could think only of the question of raising money to save Poggio. The idea came to her of starting a school for English girls, but instead of a ‘finishing school’ it should be a ‘beginning school’ for art studies and appreciation.

My father’s initial reaction was one of horror. It was bad enough, he said, to have one overexcited school-leaver in the house – I was by then eighteen and had just left Downe. To have the place filled with chattering young women struck him as intolerable. But my mother reminded him of all he had said about the teaching of art as a subject and how badly the English went about it. Here at last was his opportunity to do something. Cornered by his own past pronouncements, he soon came round to the idea and finally adopted it with enthusiasm.

Plans were made. The upstairs rooms at Poggio on the south side looking out over the gardens and farms towards the Duomo would be redecorated. The idea was to have about ten girls at a time, but at one stage their number rose to seventeen with some of them quartered in the villino at the south gate. Professor Scarafia, a friend from the university, taught them Italian

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