My extraordinary friend and mother-in-law
Henrietta Garnett
_Frances Partridge, the writer and diarist and one of the last links to Bloomsbury, died on 5 February at the extraordinary age of 103. She would have been 104 on 15 March, For longer than anyone, she provided a direct connection to the past and could recall that lost world as vividly as though she had just stepped out of its front door. One of the most unexpected results of her longevity is that her death is strangely shocking, as though one had looked out of the window only to find that the familiar outline of the landscape is altered and the hill has vanished.
Born Frances Marshall at Bedford Square in 1900, she came from an interesting and cultured family who made a considerable fortune in the 19th century from their linen mills near Leeds before they moved to a large estate in the Lake District. Earlier MarshaIls had been friends of Tennyson, Ruskin and Thackeray. Frances could remember Conan Doyle coming to dinner with her parents, and could dimly recall Henry James looking like an old butler at his house in Rye. Her father, the architect, William Marshall, was a friend of my great-grandfather, the writer and editor and father of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, Sir Leslie Stephen, and used to go on Leslie's famous 'Sunday Tramps'. When Frances gravitated to the Bloomsbury Group, it was a natural and adjacent move.
Frances was the sister-in-law of my father, the writer, David Garnett, by his first marriage to her elder sister, the illustrator, Ray Marshall. Years later, she became my mother-in-law through my marriage to her only child, Burgo. My earliest memory of Frances is of her standing on the landing of the elm staircase at Hilton Hall, a lovely Queen Anne house on the edge of the Fens, which belonged to my father. I cannot have been more than two or three years old, Frances was in her late forties. She held out her arms and I rushed into them and planted a huge kiss on her cheek. The velvety softness of her skin, already crisscrossed with the finest wrinkles like a shelled walnut, impressed me. She smelled of flowers but not of scent. Everything about her was pleasant to touch. She wore jewellery in satisfying quantities: rings and brooches with glittering, coloured stones and heavy necklaces made of silver and gold. I knew at once that she was quite delicious and very pretty. Her hair was dark and short, her teeth were very white and her dark eyes gleamed with fun and intelligence. Her clothes were often patterned in golds and greens and browns. She asked a great many questions and took my childish concerns quite seriously. There was nothing phoney about her interest: it was perfectly genuine.
Later, I realised this interest in other people was crucial to understanding Frances's pungent character. Her boundless curiosity was marked by preferences for literature, music, philosophy and botany. Her profoundly articulate intelligence led her to find out as much about the ordinary details of life as about the abstract. She was as much at home with a woman queuing for a bus on a drizzly morning, or showing a child the charm of a daisy-chain, as she might be discussing the ethics of suicide with Arthur Koestler or debating, with Freddie Ayer, the possi
bility that sheep might think. She didn't tolerate fools and could be doggedly stubborn, but rationality and reason were the order of the day.
After the catastrophic events which culminated in the death of Lytton Strachey and Carrington's suicide in 1932 a tragedy which has become part of our modern mythology — Frances married Ralph Partridge, and they were extremely happy at Ham Spray, a beautiful house decorated by Carrington before Ralph met Frances. It is indicative of how well Frances adapted to her new environment that, although she was never inhibited by it, the general look of the house remained intrinsically the same. Frances had acquired the Bloomsbury aesthetic as well as its ethos. When, after Ralph's death in 1960, Frances decided to sell Ham Spray, she recreated its atmosphere in her flat in Belgravia. The rose-pink walls of her sitting-room were hung with paintings by Carrington, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and the quince-yellow bookshelves contrasted with the gold and malachite mosaic of a cat made by Boris Anrep, which filled the fireplace.
Frances couldn't have been more welcoming to me when Burgo and I got married in 1962, and she rejoiced when our daughter, Sophie, was born the following year. When Burgo died three weeks later, from a totally unexpected heart attack, I don't think Frances would have survived had it not been for the existence of her tiny grand-daughter and the strength of the friendships she had spent so many years cultivating. The importance Frances placed on friendship should not be underestimated.
Being with Frances and my father at his cottage in the south-west of France provided occasions for torrents of talk and cascades of conversation of a high order, frequently very funny indeed. Frances's sense of humour was as original as it was infectious. It stemmed directly from the acuteness of her perceptions and the trouble she took to exercise her mind. Frances and my father had known each other since she had left Cambridge. She brought out the best in him and they gave themselves up to the delights of perfectly uninhibited conversation. There were tremendous discussions about Turgenev and Flaubert, writers we all three held in terrific esteem. We also shared a love of botany. Frances and I went for walks, returning with wild flowers and specimens of symbiosis. We all three spent hours categorising and identifying. Frances was a born teacher and one of the most stimulating people it has been my good fortune to know. Here and now I declare my infinite gratitude to my extraordinary friend and mother-in-law. Frances Partridge.
0 Henrietta Garnett
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