Frances Partridge reaches her century
Anne Chisholm
hen Frances Partridge, diarist, translator and keeper of the secrets of old Bloomsbury, learned, earlier this year, that she had been awarded the CBE, she was characteristically clear-eyed and self- deprecating about the whole business and remarked, 'Rather ridiculous really to be given a medal just for being so old.' Never- theless, she allowed that she was really quite pleased, and three weeks ago put on her best dress and a wide-brimmed hat and went off to the Palace with her grand- daughter Sophie and two great-grand- daughters to be decorated by the Queen for 'services to literature'. They celebrated afterwards with a lunch in her local Lebanese restaurant. This week, on Wednesday 15 March, she reached her 100th birthday, and marked the occasion with a lunch at the Ivy and a party for 150 friends and admirers at the Savile Club.
It has struck me, as I have made regular visits to Frances in her pretty, civilised London flat over the past year to talk to her about her life and times, that she very much prefers to be occupied. Suggestions that she might put her feet up more often are brushed aside, although she will con- cede that her energy is not quite what it was. Nevertheless she endeavours to go for a walk every day, to the shops or perhaps round nearby Belgrave Square even when it is so windy that she has to hold on to the lamp-posts; she was never a large or heavy person and now she is tiny, slightly bent and not always steady on her pins. She has always loved to walk and swim, although to her annoyance she was advised not to swim in the chilly English Channel last summer.
The other thing she tries to do every day is work, preferably on something connected with writing. This is not easy, as although her hearing remains excellent her eyes are not so good; but equipped with strong lights and huge magnifying lenses, she nevertheless attends to her considerable correspondence, keeps up her diary (five volumes have so far been published and all are in print) and, as Spectator readers know, writes the occasional elegant expert book review. She has a short rest after lunch, provided by her housekeeper Vera, who comes each morning, when she listens to music, and in the evening a friend may call, or she may summon a taxi and go out. Her mantelpiece, below a serene and glow- ing painting by Duncan Grant, always car- ries a row of invitations to dinners, publishers' parties, gallery openings and lectures.
In recent months, many of them were connected with a rush of events linked to the Bloomsbury exhibitions held late last year at the Tate and Courtauld Gallery. As the very last representative of the inner cir- cle, someone who indeed lived with Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington at Ham Spray in the 1920s and married a man who had worked for Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, it was inevitable that she was suddenly especially sought after. She lent one of her Duncan Grant paintings to the Tate, and the National Portrait Gallery put on a small selection from her photograph albums, including a charming snap of her afloat in a large rubber ring in the Ham Spray swim- ming pool, with a parasol and, as a glimpse of breast indicated, without a swimsuit. When an overexcited journalist pressed for details of naked caperings, she did not turn a hair. They usually swam naked in the summer; after all it's so much nicer . . . and yes, many of her friends were homosexual or bisexual . . . wasn't that quite usual too? I read the resulting piece to her with faint trepidation. 'It could have been a lot worse,' she rightly remarked.
What disconcerted her rather more was the mean, hostile note in much of the criti- cal comment on the Bloomsbury exhibi- tions; but she was not exactly surprised. She has lived long enough, after all, to see the friends of her youth reviled, ignored, rediscovered, celebrated and now attacked again, this time for elitism, self-indulgence and lack of originality. As she pointed out in a spirited defence of them all in a radio interview, this strikes her as exaggerated. They were not a smug elite at the time, after all; they were young and trying to do something new, and experimenting and having a good time.
Frances Partridge, as readers of her well written, intelligent and humane diaries know, believes strongly in having a good time even (or perhaps especially) against the odds. If she has a message for the rest of us — and she would shy away from so solemn a thought — it would be that life for all its cruelties is a rich and wonderful gift and worth celebrating. She has always held on to this belief, even when the deaths, very close together, of her dearly loved husband and their only son 40 years ago almost drowned her in sorrow. It is her love of life and her instinct for survival that have made her an excellent diarist and brought her legions of fans who have never met her and know little and care less about Bloomsbury; they write to her endlessly, and have been known, to her slight alarm, to turn up on the doorstep with bunches of flowers.
For them, as for those lucky enough to know her as a friend ( and there can be no one more beloved as a friend, whose com- pany and conversation are more in demand), it is natural to wonder how she does it. How has she managed to live a full century, suffer bitter private grief, share in the misery and upheaval of two world wars and massive social change and arrive at the age of 100 still so sane, so humorous and kind? One thing is clear; even in extreme old age, she holds to her lifelong conviction that this life is all there is, which is of course what makes it so precious and so important to live decently and well. She does not fear death, she told me once; sometimes she thinks she would not very much mind going to sleep and not waking up again.
But when she does wake up, almost every day still brings her a pleasure so keen that the tiresome weaknesses and limita- tions of old age hardly matter. It might be the arrival of a friend, or the sight of a red camellia in flower on her balcony, or the pale spring sky over London, or an inter- esting conversation about the new film of Proust's Time Regained, which she saw and enjoyed the other day (and remembered rushing to buy the book, of course, when it first came out in 1927). If pressed, as she quite often is, for something more practi- cal, more precise, a tip on how to reach an age most of us dread in such encouraging, such admirable form, she recommends a glass of whisky every evening.
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