travelled together to Suffolk, and for a week bicycled around Blythburgh, Walberswick, Southwold, Tony hoping that, surrounded by silence and sea breezes, by tall churches, fluent countryside and early spring light, they might somehow recover what they seemed to have lost. They returned to the Eyrie, and for most of that spring they remained together. But the atmosphere was fraught and Kippe was still in touch with Jack. On 4 April, having found Kippe in tears in Tony’s arms, Emile Cammaerts sent Jack a letter, begging him courteously but firmly to leave his daughter alone. ‘I don’t know whether you realize what a terrible strain your present relationship with Catherine imposes upon Tony,’ he wrote. ‘I feel certain that he will not be able to stand it much longer. He is no longer the cheerful and easy-going man we used to know.’ It was no good. Back in London Kippe and Jack went to see a divorce lawyer and, as Jack put it, ‘prepared suitable evidence for inspection by a detective on an appointed day’.
It was to be, by today’s standards, a brutally thorough separation. In the face of fierce opposition from his parents, who were about to lose their only grandchildren, Tony decided that it would be best for his sons if he removed himself completely from their lives. He was, after all, through no fault of his own, a complete stranger to them.
Both sons now speak of his decision with defensive pride: ‘It was,’ says Pieter, ‘a very brave thing for him to do, to give us up. He thought, and I’m sure he was right, that it would be less confusing for us.’ Michael compares Tony to Gabriel Oak – ‘a man who didn’t know the meaning of possessiveness or selfishness’. But Tony did not regard his actions as either brave or noble: ‘It was,’ he wrote towards the end of his life, ‘just the way it had to be.’ After bleak attempts to reignite his acting career in the West End, he emigrated to Canada, changed his name to Tony van Bridge, and eventually found work with Sir Tyrone Guthrie in Stratford, Ontario.
Despite all he had suffered, Tony remained, in a part of himself, devoted to his ‘Kate’. In his 1995 memoir, Also in the Cast, the pages about her glow. ‘I am glad that Kate and I married,’ he insists; and the reader cannot help but feel that the urge to set down those words for posterity was his chief motive in writing the book.
In November 1945, the month that Kippe’s affair with Jack Morpurgo began in earnest, the film Brief Encounter was released in British cinemas. We all know the story: a man and a woman, middle-class, in early middle age and married, meet by chance on a suburban railway station and fall in love. After much humiliation, guilt and anguish – played out against the strains of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 – they agree to part. So compelling were the performances by Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson that rumours flew about that they must genuinely be having an affair. But what impressed the Times critic was not so much the acting as the ‘heroic integrity’ at the centre of the film. In overriding their passions and returning to their dull but dependable spouses, the couple had, in the end, done ‘the right thing’.
All over Britain the opposite was happening. Since the end of the First World War divorce rates had soared. By the middle of the Second World War they seemed to be out of control. In October 1943, the month that Kippe gave birth to Michael, the archbishops of Canterbury and York had spoken out jointly against ‘moral laxity’, urging Christians to remember that promiscuity and adultery were sins that degraded personality, destroyed homes, and visited ‘years of terrible suffering’ on innocent children. But the divorce rates rocketed again that year and the next. In 1945, 15,634 couples divorced; and by the time Kippe and Tony’s decree nisi was granted the following year the number had nearly doubled to 29,829 – a misleadingly low figure, in fact, as by the middle of the year there were more than 50,000 service men and women waiting for divorces, and the Attorney-General had been forced to appoint thirty-five new legal teams to process their cases.
Behind these statistics lay innumerable tales of grief and heartache. Few divorces can have been less acrimonious than Kippe and Tony’s. It was, as Tony later wrote, ‘quiet and unsensational’. But it was, even so, ‘full of suffering on both sides’; and it left Kippe with a burden of guilt that she would carry to the grave.
She had inflicted great pain not just on Tony, whose decency and acquiescence can only have made her feel worse, but also on her parents-in-law. By running off with Jack Morpurgo she had proved all their misgivings about her well-founded, as well as depriving them of access to their only grandchildren. For weeks Arthur and Edith Bridge fought their son’s decision to give Kippe custody of the boys. She cannot have been unaware of their distress.
Then there were her own parents. Both Emile and Tita were children of broken marriages, and both, as a result, had an almost pathological horror of divorce. Ever since his father’s suicide, Emile had been haunted by the notion that there was ‘bad blood’ in the Cammaerts family and that it might one day resurface. On hearing the news that Kippe was to marry Jack, Jeanne remembers, Tita clung to the arms of her chair until her knuckles turned white, while Emile muttered, ‘I’ll kill that boy.’
They pleaded with Kippe to reconsider, employing all the arguments that Emile would later publish in a treatise on marriage, For Better, For Worse: adultery was ‘a sin’; second marriages were ‘sham marriages’; it put a child’s soul in danger to witness ‘division in the very place where union should prevail’. But, as her mind was made up, the chief effect of their pleading was to make Jack Morpurgo determined that they would play very little part in his and Kippe’s future. Though he generally disliked bad language, he referred to Tita simply as ‘the bitch’, and visited the Eyrie as seldom as possible. When he and Kippe finally married, in Kensington Register Office on 16 July 1947, not a single member of the Cammaerts family was present.
Kippe was forced to turn from her own family to the Morpurgos. Shortly after the marriage, she and Jack moved from his flat in Clanricarde Gardens, Notting Hill Gate, to 84 Philbeach Gardens, near Earls Court. The tall, terraced house was somewhat beyond their means, so Jack’s two spinster, schoolmistress sisters, Bess and Julie, moved in with them to help pay the bills and look after the boys. They were to remain a part of the household for the next quarter of a century, a Laurel and Hardy pair – Julie, who had been jilted when she was twenty-one, delicate and emotionally fragile; Bess big-hearted and controlling.
It was Bess who was deputed to take Pieter and Michael for a walk one afternoon, and to explain to them that Jack was now their father. A memory of their conversation remains with Michael, fragmentary but crystal-clear. ‘We were on a railway bridge. I must have said something about my father, and Bess said, “Well, you’ve got a new father now, you know.” And a train came by, and the steam came up in my face. And it just felt quite strange.’
Jack, in fact, never formally adopted Pieter and Michael; but he was determined to expunge the memory of Tony Bridge, and the boys implicitly understood that their real father must not be mentioned. From the summer of 1947 onwards, they took Jack’s surname. ‘No one ever said, “Jack is your stepfather,”’ Michael remembers. ‘And when my mother had two more children, Mark and Kay, no one talked about half-brothers and half-sisters. We were the Morpurgos: that’s what they told the outside world. We children were part of that story; that sham.’
Pieter was just five at the time of the divorce, and had recently learned to write out his full name, PIETER BRIDGE. One of his earliest memories is of being told that he was a Bridge no longer, and of toiling over the new letters M-O-R-P-U-R-G-O. But visitors had only to look at Pieter to see that he was not a Morpurgo. He was extraordinarily like his true father; a constant, vexing reminder to Jack of the man he had wronged. Like Farmer Tregerthen in Michael’s story ‘Gone to Sea’, Jack was ‘not a cruel man by nature, but he did not want to have to be reminded continually of his own inadequacy as a father and as a man’. From the start, he was unreasonably hard on Pieter, whom Jeanne describes as a ‘sensitive, shivering child’, and Michael was aware of being unfairly favoured.
Michael and Pieter outside 84 Philbeach Gardens.
Pieter and Michael, 1948.
Perhaps