That's the way the story goes
Raymond Carr
A TWENTIETH CENTURY LIFE by Frances Donaldson Weidenfeld & Nicolson, f18, pp. 256 There is an essential message in this book. Love and cherish your friends and they will love you, always provided you are prepared to overlook their faults. Added to this are some simple rules of thumb. Rule number one: avoid philistines. 'Interesting' people are interesting, not only to oneself, but if one is an author, to one's readers. Rule two is to seek any expert advice on hand from friends and acquaintances. On farming matters Lady Donaldson consults her neighbour, Sir George Stapledon, the John the Baptist of ley farming. On the social ranking of Royal Duchesses, when writing her biography of Edward VIII, she turns to Alastair Forbes, 'because he knows much more than I do about this sort of thing'. Rule three is to take risks in life, in the confident expectation that overdrafts will melt away. If you are, as Lady Donald- son admits she is, 'a fearful prefect by nature', and as her book shows, you will lead a full and purposeful life especially if you marry (after one bosh shot, imposed by an anxious mother) a man like Jack Don- aldson 'who likes everybody', inheriting from his clerical forbears 'the doomed but sustaining ambition to do good in the world'.
Lady Donaldson is the daughter of Freddy Lonsdale, the son of a Jersey tobacconist. His success as a playwright in the 1920s gave him and his daughter the entrée into high society. She became an ornament of the Embassy Club, in my time replaced by the Four Hundred as the favourite night club of the beau monde. She played golf with Lord Beaverbrook, who taught her to read the English classics; she met the Prince of Wales and did not take to him; she stayed with Oliver Stanley, a serious-minded conservative politician who claimed to spend .£1,000 a year on gin; she enjoyed an amine amoureuse — such asexual attachments were customary for young virgins in the 1920s — with Lord Grantley's heir.
It is to her undying credit that she felt morally uncomfortable in this entertaining but complacent, self-satisfied Tory world with its indifference to the degrading poverty that surrounded it. It was on a trip to visit the Stanleys that she observed that unforgettable spectacle of the 1930s: the unemployed hanging about the street corners. Her reaction was what one might expect from a sensitive and intelligent person. After marriage and reading John Strachey (the influence of whose attack on capitalism and praise of the Soviet model seems, in retrospect, one of the more curious intellectual phenomenon of the time), she joined the Labour party and sub- scribed to the Left Book Club. Yet old habits died hard. As she frankly admits, ignorant of the most elementary household tasks, she could not face life without servants and it comes naturally to her to think of her relationship with her farm manager 'as the same as my relationship with a nanny'.
During the war she took up farming. Given proper advice, this did not constitute an intellectual challenge, but it did demand a capacity for hard work and indifference to mud and the lack of hot water. One's admiration for a lady who could pitch wheat all day and stook wet oats is unbounded. She paints a depressing picture of farming as a languishing industry. The truth is that farmers had had the stuffing knocked out of them; like everyone else, they lived in dread of the future. In debt to the bank, they shrank from improvement. The rural mind resisted cost benefit analy- sis. To seek a future profit by following Stapleton's advocacy of ley farming ploughing up permanent pasture and reseeding — was to take an unacceptable risk.
Her farming life provided Lady Donald- son with the material for two successful books. Her present account is based on the daily wartime letters to her husband. Those not fascinated by farming practices at the onset of the second agricultural revolution can turn to the lively portraits of the author's friends. They are members of a recognisable establishment that stretches from Evelyn Waugh on the right to Tony Crosland and the Healeys on the left.
'Working or non-working, Sir?'
Waugh's penchant for the well born was partly the Proustian fascination for the out- sider of a world inhabited by those endowed with the easy assurance given by great expectations enjoyed from birth the erosion of this aristocratic self- confidence is one of the author's acute sociological observations. Waugh, she argues, only liked 'the more intellectual of the smart', and in any case was too rude to be a successful snob. Given my disastrous relationship with Waugh — he called me a drunk in a letter to a mutual friend, which was a bit thick coming from him — I must accept Lady Donaldson's charitable portrait of a man who could gulp down the family ration of bananas in front of his children.
If Lady Donaldson has some reservations about Tony Crosland's gifts as a politician, he was to her the towering intellectual that the present Labour party so sadly lacks. He became a close friend of the Donaldsons as their guest when he was nursing a con- stituency where the then Duke of Beaufort 'ruled in the manner of an archduke of a small principality'. The Donaldsons were ostracised as 'Reds', as was Tony, whom my Gloucestershire future parents-in-law refused to accept as my best man. His faults are not concealed. He could be 'extraordinarily tiresome' and downright rude. Most moving of all these portraits is that of Ann Fleming. Her unrepeatable success as a hostess came to her because her great object was to give pleasure to friends to whom she was intensely loyal. These are qualities shared by Lady Donald- son. Richard Crossman got a well deserved flea in the ear when he laid into Hugh Gaitskell in her presence. Given the present day obsession with the goings on of the Royals, the three chapters on her experiences as the biographer of Edward VIII will appeal to a wide public. It is odd, as she remarks, that the abdication crisis did not long hold the attention of the working class and to her own class it pro.: vided a 'particularly enjoyable nine days wonder'. There was no prurient press to exploit this, the most astonishing and polit- ically important of royal romances. It is explained, Lady Donaldson argues, by the Duke's quest for the 'ideal mother figure', whom he found in the improbable figure of Mrs Simpson. Freda Dudley Ward, the Duke's companion as Prince of Wales, told Lady Donaldson that she was never in love with him, he was 'too slavish'. The Duchess was illegally denied the title of Royal Highness. The royal family feared that 'this wisecracking, purely pleasure loving, twice divorced woman' might remarry. If she has 'a down' on the Windsors, a wonderful generosity and optimism shines through this book. I met her at luncheon just after she had migrated to the SDP. 'You must be one of us', she shot at me across the table. Only a fixed determina- tion to see the best in everyone could have led her to think that.
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