Eyrie’, near Radlett in Hertfordshire, had what seemed to Michael countless rooms, and was set in a large garden with a tennis lawn, an orchard and a dovecote. Yet money was always short. Kippe’s mother, Tita, was a large, imposing woman who gave Michael his first inklings ‘of what God might be like’. Before her marriage she had been a Shakespearean actress. She had a voice so deep and tremendous that she was on one occasion invited to read Grieg’s Bergliot over a full orchestra conducted by Sir Henry Wood, and on another given the part of Abraham in a mystery play at the Albert Hall about the sacrifice of Isaac. Her mother, Marie Brema, had been a professional opera singer, the first from England to appear at Bayreuth. She created the role of the angel in the first performance of Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, and was once summoned to Buckingham Palace to sing for Queen Victoria. Both mother and daughter were close friends of Bernard Shaw, and when he came to write You Never Can Tell Tita was his model for the feisty and formidable Gloria (‘a mettlesome dominative character,’ in Shaw’s own description, ‘paralysed by the inexperience of her youth’). But neither Tita nor her mother had their heads turned by success. Both were fervent Christian Socialists and most of the money they made on stage was poured into Brema Looms, a workshop providing employment for crippled girls from London’s East End.
In 1906 Tita, who in her late twenties had never so much as kissed a man, had met and fallen in love with a Belgian poet, scholar and nationalist, Emile Cammaerts. There were differences between them. Emile, who had spent much of his youth in an anarchist commune, spoke very little English, and was an atheist. Tita set about tackling both problems with a forcefulness that alarmed Shaw – ‘For Heaven’s sake,’ he warned her, ‘do learn to discriminate between yourself and the Almighty’ – and she succeeded. A Brussels spinster was engaged to teach Emile English (they began their lessons by teasing out Othello, line by line) so that by the time he and Tita were married in 1908 his English was fluent. He had also converted to Christianity with a zeal that would never leave him. As there was little prospect of Tita’s pursuing her stage career in Belgium, and as she felt she must look after her mother, they settled in London, before moving, as their family grew, to Radlett.
Tall, and with a fine, monumental head that would have sat happily amidst the emperors’ busts that ring the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, Emile Cammaerts became revered in academic and literary circles both for his intellect and for his passionate devotion to Belgium. Invalided out of the First World War with a weak heart, he threw his energies instead into composing fiery, defiant, patriotic poems to encourage his compatriots. Lord Curzon translated his work; Elgar set his ‘Carillon’ (‘Sing, Belgians, Sing’) to music. He was Belgium’s Rupert Brooke. When his fourth child’s birth coincided with a significant Belgian victory over the Germans, he named her after the hamlet, De Kippe, where this had taken place.
Emile Cammaerts, 1943.
But while his Belgian patriotism remained central to him – he went on to become Professor of Belgian Studies at the University of London, and was appointed CBE for organising an exhibition of Flemish art at the Royal Academy in 1927 – Emile Cammaerts also, over time, assumed many of the trappings of the English establishment. He was a member of the Athenaeum, a regular writer of letters to The Times, a close friend of G. K. Chesterton and Walter de la Mare, and such a pillar of the Anglican Church that he considered, in his later years, taking Holy Orders. He was widely loved, and on his death in 1953 the Principal of Pusey House in Oxford described him as ‘a man as near sanctity as I have ever met’.
To Michael, as a small boy, Emile Cammaerts seemed ‘all that a grandfather should be’. He had a flowing beard, thick, tweed suits and heavy brown shoes. He emanated jollity. His theme tunes, in Michael’s memories, are Mozart’s horn concertos, to which he would bounce his grandchildren on his knee; and he had about him what his Times obituary would describe as an air of ‘enchanted innocence’. Though he had made his career as an academic, his earliest published works had been plays for children, and he had written a study of nonsense verse. He would delight Michael with recitals of ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat’, ‘The Dong with a Luminous Nose’, and, most memorably,
There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, ‘It is just as I feared! –
Two Owls and a Hen, four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard!’
Emile Cammaerts’s reputation was considerably greater than his income, and with six children he and Tita were forced to run the household at the Eyrie along strict make-do-and-mend lines. Jeanne remembers Tita’s darning broken bed springs with 15-amp fuse-wire; and avoiding, wherever possible, spending money on clothes, either for herself or for the children. There was principle at play here, as well as economy. Personal vanity was, in Tita’s book, a vice second only to gossip. She had what Jeanne describes as ‘an almost Islamic desire to hide her figure’, and ‘would happily have dressed herself in sacks’.
There was one area in which indulgence was encouraged. The early lives of both Emile and Tita had been bleak. Tita’s father had separated from her mother soon after her birth, abandoning her to a lonely, rootless existence, trailing with her diva mother round the concert halls and opera houses of Europe. Wildly unfaithful, Emile’s father had, similarly, left his mother, just before his birth, and had, finally, shot himself. Both Emile and Tita, as they grew up, had sought security and comfort in beauty – the beauty of the natural world, and the beauty of art.
At the Eyrie they set out to create a home in which their growing brood would be surrounded and sustained by music and painting and books. ‘Every meal,’ Jeanne laughs, ‘was a seminar.’ Even games of rummy and racing demon bristled with moral and intellectual competition. In the red-linoed first-floor nursery, parents and children gathered round a huge black table to read Shakespeare plays – Tita making a memorable Othello. On Sunday mornings, after church, they congregated by an oak chest filled with postcards of religious paintings by Giotto, Leonardo, Fra Angelico. Each in turn, the children were invited to pick out a postcard and to talk about what it told them of the life of Christ.
With such a rich diet of culture, there was little appetite for material comfort. Asked to choose between a new stair carpet and a gramophone recording of Schubert’s trios, Jeanne and her siblings voted unanimously for Schubert.
Sitting in an armchair in an old people’s home in Oxford, Jeanne, now in her late eighties, looks back with gratitude and love on the home that her parents created: ‘They had no model to go on, but they were trying to make a perfect world for us.’ And to some extent, for a while at least, they succeeded.
But, of the six children, the plain living and high thinking at the Eyrie suited Kippe least well. Her gifts were intuitive rather than intellectual, and at St Albans High School, though she shone on the lacrosse field, the teachers made it clear that she was a disappointment after her academic sisters. She was, perhaps, slightly dyslexic. During the family readings of Shakespeare she stumbled over her parts, and this was bitter to her because she had, in fact, a natural feeling for words and characters. The frustration and humiliation she suffered as a result led her to bully her younger, brighter sister, Jeanne.
Kippe went along with the family ethos of goodness and self-denial, but only intermittently. Sometimes she would tell her siblings that she had set her heart on becoming a nurse, and would post her pocket money penny by penny into the church poor-box. Jeanne remembers her reciting with feeling lines from W. H. Davies:
I hear leaves drinking rain;
I hear rich leaves on top
Giving the poor beneath
Drop after drop …
But increasingly Kippe recognised that what she really wanted was to act. She was so taken up with playing parts, in fact, that her sense of self was fragile.
Unlike her mother, moreover, Kippe minded about her appearance and her clothes. She had a natural taste for glamour and flamboyance, which was denied expression; and the passion that had made her such a thrilling playmate as a child proved, as she began to grow up, more dangerous