ANOTHER VOICE
A journey into the water that is under the earth
AUBERON WAUGH
0 thers have lost sisters before. Every. day people lose husbands, wives, parents, children and friends they have loved, whose loss reduces every perspective to dullness, misery and pain. In many cases they carry the pain around with them for the rest of their lives. At moments like this, one realises that under the surface of polite society there is a great well of sadness and bereavement, an aspect of the human condition which is as inescapable as it is seldom remarked, yet looming larger in many people's lives than any of the things they pretend to think important. The only excuse for allowing my own howl of anguish to be heard is to give those as yet unbereaved a glimpse into the hellish blackness lying under the surface of their lives before they sensibly turn away and think of something else.
My sister Margaret was crossing the street in North London with some friends on the night of Tuesday 28 January when she was struck by two cars and killed instantly, as we now learn. Her death removed a sister from her five siblings, a wife from her husband,a mother from her five children, a cousin, niece, sister-in-law, daughter-in-law, aunt, close friend or merely admired acquaintance from the limited circle of those who were lucky enough to have known her. None of these people, I imagine, has the slightest curios- ity about the identity of the unfortunate drivers, nor any particular anxiety to know how the disaster occurred or how it could have been prevented. The removal of her strong personality from our midst will mean something different to all these people, even if they share the same numb- ing sense of sadness. All I can do is to set down what it means to me.
'As a result of these accidents,' wrote Margaret in a postscript to Christopher Sykes's biography of Evelyn Waugh (Col- lins, 1975) 'I became his official favourite, a position neither resented nor sought by my siblings and one which carried with it the risks of disproportionate disfavour as well as the advantages of privilege.'
The accidents to which she refers were her removal from the nursery at an early age to escape from a cruel nanny and her removal from a first convent school where she was unhappy. But they do not explain her position in the family as official favourite to my father and unofficial heroine, eventual favourite, to the rest of us. She was the only person who could humour him when he was disgruntled, cheer him when he was melancholy, amuse him when he was bored. Her weapons were the usual charms of a pretty girl with a warm and affectionate nature, to which were added an original wit and complete fearlessness.
A second convent school, St Mary's Ascot, proved equally uncongenial to her so she eventually came to live at home — always taking her younger sister Natty with her — and attended the local convent school of St Joseph's Taunton. There she achieved instant recognition, being appointed Captain of Hockey as soon as she put her foot in the door. The headmis- tress also wished to make her Head Girl, but Margaret, with her usual modesty, demurred. Eventually the day came when she wished to borrow a nun's habit to attend a fancy dress party in Oxford and, with the cheerful pragmatism which has always been a hallmark of the Catholic Church, a deal was struck. She had her nun's habit, the nun had her Head Girl.
Although always a happy and cheerful establishment, St Joseph's did not then — it has since closed — count among the great academic high-flyers, and after leav- ing school Margaret went to work for the Jesuit Fathers in Farm Street, where she worked in the Office of the Vice- Postulation for the Forty Martyrs of Eng- land and Wales under Philip Caraman. Her social life centred around a group of young men whom my father insisted on identify- ing as her 'low friends', although they are all now pillars of society: Robert Oakeshott, James Hughes, the Keen brothers . . . . They were known as 'the scoffers' — not, I think, because they showed any exaggerated tendency to mock, but rather in reference to the amount of food they ate whenever they came as guests to delight their West Coun- try friends. All of them remained her friends for life. They were all to be seen, 25 years later, among the 200 or so people who braved the sleet and rain to travel down to Somerset and stand on an icy, windswept hillside at Combe Florey last week. Philip Caraman gave the panegyric:
She who was so ineffably dear to her family, deeply loved by her friends and fiercely loyal to them, so uniquely cherished in the circle in which she moved, enviable for her gifts, constantly surprising in her originality . . . .
It was from the fringes of this group that she chose her husband, Giles FitzHerbert, a dashing Irishman who abandoned his promising career in business to join the diplomatic service, where he is now Minis- ter in Rome. Although they were never rich, there was always a crazy grandeur about her lifestyle. At an age when her more successful contemporaries might have been thinking about buying a Volvo or a country cottage, she bought a huge mansion in Devon to which she would drive down, with her husband, five chil- dren and elderly Irish nanny all packed into a tiny Renault 4 van.
Never an indulgent mother, she decided at an early stage that children are better off without toys and often seemed to have difficulty reconciling herself to the idea that they need clothes or food. As she adored them, they adored her and have all grown up as enchantingly original, intelli- gent and secure as she was. The warmest and most welcoming of hostesses, she entertained her friends endlessly and apparently effortlessly in Devon and Lon- don, always using odd plates and even odder glasses. The odd plates were often a talking point. 'You get a good view of the plates in this house,' a guest remarked once. She took such teasing in good part, but it would never have occurred to her to put more food on them than she thought suitable. Yet it seemed the most natural thing in the world to her, when she took a fancy to an American word game call Spill 'n' Spell, involving 15 plastic dice, to commission a set in solid silver from her friend William Phipps, the silversmith.
Eventually, finding diplomatic life irk- some, she spent more time in London and Devon, to the great delight of her friends. No doubt she would have written other books — including, I would like to think, a memoir of her father which would have been coveted by biblophiles for as long as anyone can read. But there is something strangely suitable about the one memonal she left, a life of her grandfather, Aubrey Herbert, the aristocratic model for Buchan's Greenmantle. In her fearless- ness, warmth and generosity of spirit, her total absence of vulgarity or affectation or any form of self-consciousness, she be- longed more to his world than to our own.
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