Our place & me are put in our places
Our place may take what name it pleases –
It stares & stares, and all it sees is
That it is not a home.
Oh my dark & light brown daughters
When you go to find new places
Our place must face that it has no faces –
Tidiness, emptiness and peace is
All it has, and all it sees is
That it is not a home
Penelope put this poem away, in a drawer, without showing it to anyone, except these daughters. Its note continues to be sounded from time to time throughout the letters to her youngest child, the last to go away to find new places.
Now in her mid-fifties, she was working terribly hard: a full week’s teaching in two different jobs, three days at Queens Gate, Kensington, two days at Westminster Tutors, vast piles of exam-board marking as well as her own, with only Saturdays to spare for the mountainous research and writing of her first two books, the Burne-Jones and Knox Brothers biographies. After a difficult start (teaching R.E. at the stage school Italia Conti, remembered in At Freddie’s) she had become a valued and inspiring English teacher, the texts she was studying with her pupils – Jane Austen, but also Lawrence, Conrad, Forster, Joyce and Beckett, much modern poetry, philosophy, theory, history of art (we still have the tattered, meticulously annotated paperbacks) – all no doubt fuelling the future motor of her fiction. For, almost imperceptibly to her family, as she rarely spoke of work in progress, she was at last becoming what her old friends had always thought she would be: a writer, and this was confirmed by the acceptance of Edward Burne-Jones in 1973. It should have been an exciting and exhilarating time; intellectually and creatively it must have been, but personally it was a time of anxiety, loneliness and fear.
There had been ten years of comparative stability. Desmond and she had repaired their finances, made a rather stylish island home in their Clapham council flat, and seen their three children into and through Oxford. After the disasters of the previous decade, this had taken a great deal of persistence and bravery. Now they could say to each other: look, we have come through. A historian by training, he was able to help her in her research and they travelled happily together, at weekends and in the holidays, all over England, and to France, interviewing and absorbing atmospheres. In 1974 it became clear, though both delayed facing it (and their local GP was no help whatsoever), that Desmond was unwell. Penelope states barely in one of the later letters to Maria that she could not imagine living without one of her daughters nearby. The extent of her father’s illness, when it was eventually discovered, was kept hidden from Maria until she had completed her finals, but then she had to be told of his operation, in the reticent terms used in those days, which didn’t make anything any better.
Tina and I had married in 1973, and now we bought a three-storey house off Battersea Rise – the 25 Almeric Road of the letters – so that her parents could come and live with us. Desmond continued to go to work, growing frailer and thinner, but still as funny, endearing and patient. He died in the summer of 1976. In the first of the letters to her old friend, Maryllis, Penelope describes the morning of his death, at home, the district nurse reading to him: ‘such a kindly person, not much of a nurse but a very good woman, and she helped me to see him out of this world and read a Bible chapter, absolutely naturally, as only a West Indian could do’. In the same letter she reflects: ‘the truth is I was spoilt, as with all our ups and downs Desmond always thought everything I did was right’.
Penelope kept four close friends from her childhood and youth: Maryllis Conder (’Willie’), Jeanie Fisher (later Lady Talbot), Rachel Hichens and Janet Probert. Marriage, child-rearing, work and geographical distance separated them for long years after the war, but Jeanie and Maryllis in particular became a great support to her in her widowhood.
‘Your mother has been my dearest friend,’ wrote Willie to Maria. They met at Wycombe Abbey, ‘a terrible place’, as Penelope remembered it. She was thinking of its aping of boys’ boarding schools, the sport, the cricket, the rituals, but it was principally terrible to both of them because of their home-sickness: they cried themselves to sleep for the first three weeks of every term. English Literature, however, was inspiringly taught (’under Daisy’) and was a shared consolation. They would both go on to study it at Oxford, though Penelope’s great enthusiasm was Art and Maryllis’s Music. They sat together in class, laughed at the same absurdities, and Mops (as Penelope was always known to friends) would help Willie with her essays. At the end of their last term at Wycombe, Penelope’s mother, Christina, died. Her father, Evoe, was too grief-stricken to speak of her, and she went to stay with Maryllis and her family in Devon. ‘It was a painful visit,’ Maryllis said, ‘but she told me later that it had helped her.’ During the war, as young women, they would meet unfailingly every week for lunch. ‘How clearly I can see her walking down Sloane St with me in her cherry coat.’
It is a strange thing that some good friends (and even family members) don’t always welcome the transformation of a person known so well into a successful writer, almost as if they had been hiding something from them and had now to be seen in a different light. Maryllis emphatically didn’t fall into this category, but devoted a corner of her study to Penelope’s books and drawings, her idiosyncratic Christmas cards which gave such pleasure. She also kept a selection of her letters (’in my Mops letters file box’), which covers the last twenty-five years of her life. ‘You know what a wonderful letter-writer she was.’
Willie and her husband Mike had restored a beautiful small Jacobean manor house, ‘Terry Bank’, near Kirkby Lonsdale. It had always been in the Conder family and still retains some of its original furniture. It is a tranquil place in a serene setting. Here, or to their converted lighthouse on Alderney, they invited Penelope every year. ‘We had some very happy times together, unforgettable’. In the dramatic hillside garden they created on the bank behind the house they planted the Himalayan Blue Poppy (Meconopsis baileyi: The Blue Flower) in her honour. The letters provide a remarkable record of friendship and a continuing conversation. They discuss their children and grandchildren, plantings in their gardens. There is the occasional glimpse of Penelope’s busy literary career. They sympathise with each other over their ailments. Maryllis wrote to Tina after Penelope’s death that her mother had appeared to her at night in her room to console her and to tell her not to worry. It sounds the sort of thing she would do.
Another loving friendship of a whole life is detailed in the letters to Rachel Hichens (and her daughter Elizabeth Barnet, Penelope’s goddaughter). Each married a Cornish vicar, and they were and are rich in good works in a way with which Penelope had almost complete sympathy, only regretting that she couldn’t match it herself. Rachel was the daughter of the writer Alfred Ollivant. She and Penelope met through their mothers’ friendship, in Hampstead, when they were both about six years old. She told her daughter that she believed Penelope’s childhood to have been overshadowed by her mother’s illness. She worked at Bletchley Park during the war, where Dillwyn Knox was working on breaking the German codes. (He often tried to recruit his niece to help him, but unsuccessfully.) After both women married, they saw each other only occasionally, but Elizabeth often stayed with her godmother in London as a young woman, and found her and her family ‘so interesting’.
Mary Knox, Penelope’s stepmother (and illustrator of Mary Poppins, daughter of E. H. Shepard, illustrator of Winnie the Pooh and The Wind in the Willows) was only seven years older than Penelope, something that might have been resented, but wasn’t. They were frequent companions, so that letters were not really necessary. Nonetheless, many were written, though sadly only a few have survived. I hope they show how dear she was to Penelope, and to all the family.
These collections, which I am most grateful to have been given, depict Penelope as she was with those she loved, but inevitably those who ‘answered some of her long marvellous letters but kept none’ have had to be omitted: Jean Fisher, her friend from prep school, a source of practical kindness and help, as close a friend as Maryllis, if not quite such a kindred spirit – books were off limits;