The Life and Loves of Laurie Lee by Valerie Grove

Author:Valerie Grove [Valerie Grove]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849547680
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2014-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

In 1951 Kathy and Laurie moved from their Earls Court flat over the railway to 49 Elm Park Gardens, a tall brick Victorian house run by Chelsea Housing Improvement Society, which provided homes for impoverished artists. They should take paintbrushes and canvas along to secure their tenancy, advised Emma Smith’s local councillor husband, Richard Stewart-Jones. The Chelsea/Fulham border was still essentially a working-class area, and the square had an almost Mediterranean evening life – doorsteps spilling with families, children running in and out of the gardens. No. 49, a former ambassadorial residence, was divided into five flats. Other residents included Jane Lloyd, a painter, with her husband the artist Jeff Hoare, and the sculptor Elisabeth Frink, brigadier’s daughter, with her fine strong bony profile and helmet of hair. Her flat was a shambles, ‘the muddled aftermath of endless parties’.91 But her studio was ‘a white, quiet place, littered for action’, with ‘a scribble of notes and images, and the various bits of homely junk, plaster, wire, old newspapers and firewood, which she uses to build up her figures’, as Laurie said on television nine years later. The Lees first occupied the ground level, and later moved up to the top two floors, with their high ceilings, tall windows and fine plasterwork.

In the spring of 1951 Rosamond Lehmann wrote from Goldeneye, Ian Fleming’s house in Jamaica, where she was enjoying Noël Coward’s ‘enchanting astringent affectionate society’. By May, Rosamond and Laurie were reunited, with cuckoos and nightingales in attendance, ‘a moment of such pure happiness’, said Rosamond, ‘that it has given me back my life’. At her son Hugo’s wedding that autumn, Rosamond finally met Kathy (‘so sweet’) and Laurie played the piano. That evening Laurie, Rosamond, her daughter Sally and Willie Mostyn-Owen went to see Caesar and Cleopatra. Kathy was sure to understand, Rosamond said: and of course she did. She knew she had to share her husband with a wide circle, and must slot into his busy social life, or stay at home while he was out with old friends.

Anyway Kathy soon had a job which occupied her evenings. Nigel Dugdale owned a French restaurant named Père Auguste in Gerrard Street, for which he wrote droll ads in the personal columns of The Times. Pen had decorated it in dark red striped wallpaper with gold cherub wall-lights and a vaulted ceiling, and Nigel rightly envisaged that the nineteen-year-old blonde Kathy would make an alluring barmaid in black stockings and pinafore. She earned £3 10s a week plus tips. It was an amusing place where Dugdale would hold court, inventing puddings like Shusha Baskusha, a concoction of meringues and exotic fruits, borne in aloft with four lighted sparklers stuck into the meringue peaks.

During the Festival summer of 1951, Dugdale went on television to publicise Eccentrics’ Corner as ‘Major Oswald Murgatroyd, M. O. W. (Master of Wasp Hunting)’, the character he had invented in Time & Tide. Laurie took all his friends’ children – Dugdales, Devases, ffrench Blakes, Philippses – to the Skylon and the Big Dipper, which he loved.

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