Rosemary Verey. Barbara Paul Robinson

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СКАЧАТЬ Gloucestershire and the nearby counties. In addition to parties and dinners, their social life included tennis and fox hunting. If nothing out of the ordinary had occurred, Rosemary would have lived a comfortable, conventional country life, unnoticed by the larger world.

      In 1951, just five years after their move to Hinton House, David’s parents, Cecil and Linda Verey, decided to move into The Close, adjacent to Barnsley House, and give the main house to David. Rosemary and David sold Hinton House and moved into Barnsley, where they would live for the rest of their lives. The Close, originally a small stable and garage, was renovated for David’s parents. The young Verey family of six, plus Nanny Verey, moved into the main house. Rosemary’s godmother, Isabel Tait, sent them a large van full of antique furniture. “Thank Goodness,” said Rosemary, “I taught David the difference between good and second-rate furniture!” She felt David was reluctant to criticize his parents’ taste but that “his father went for the best, his mother the least expensive.”⁹ Given her own high standards, Rosemary was not one to settle for second best.

      Barnsley House was a large, handsome, stone manor house dating from the William and Mary period that had served as a rectory but was privately owned when Cecil Verey acquired it in 1939 for his retirement. On subsequent garden tours, Rosemary never failed to point out the 1697 date carved in stone over the garden door with the initials B.B. for Brereton Bourchier, Squire of Barnsley, who built the house out of locally quarried, golden Cotswold stone. Eventually the Bourchier family moved on to build a far grander house in Barnsley Park on the northern outskirts of the village. Extensions to the 1697 building were added in the 1880s. Rosemary observed that the history of the house made her feel “ageless. This house has been here three hundred years. I’m a passing phase.”¹⁰

      For someone of his class and educational background, it was perhaps predictable that David would have very little interest in financial matters: his interests were far more intellectual. David’s work for the Ministry of Housing did not pay handsomely, but as the only child in the extended Verey family, David inherited not only from his parents, but from his many childless uncles and aunts as well. Periodically, the financial coffers of the Vereys would be topped up by these inheritances. “He was always getting the jackpot every time.” Gillian Sandilands observed that David “wasn’t at all a striving person. You see, he always had just enough money not to have to bother. I mean if he had more money he would have done something more with it … and if he had less he would have had to do something about it, wouldn’t he?”

      It is hard to know what goes on inside any marriage, especially between two people with as different temperaments as David and Rosemary. Her friend the sculptor, Simon Verity, believed that Rosemary “genuinely adored David. He wasn’t really man enough for her in some ways. She was just fierce and he was just gentle and intellectual and a little vague.” Another friend, Arthur Reynolds, thought it “immediately obvious that Rosemary was the masculine force and David was the feminine force in the couple. He had a high-pitched voice that was very recessive. His passion was for architecture, but he had no idea about money and he thought it was vulgar to discuss it.” David and Rosemary were “friends. It was a deep friendship but Rosemary made no secret of her affairs with lots of men that took her fancy. She didn’t see in David a great love in that sense. She saw them as two people who were getting on in life together and making it work together.… I think it was conventional in a certain element, a certain intellectual element.”

      It was not unusual for established couples in certain circles to indulge in extramarital affairs, sometimes with the acknowledgement and acceptance of the other spouse. Often these affairs were homosexual in nature. Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson were a well-known example, as well as the Vereys’ close friends and neighbors, James and Alvilde Lees-Milne.¹¹ If Rosemary did have lovers, there was never any rupture in her marriage.

      Rosemary herself acknowledged that theirs was a deep friendship rather than a passionate love match. But if the gossip about her affairs is at all true, nothing has publicly surfaced or come to light.¹² Perhaps Rosemary herself enjoyed encouraging others to conjure up these alliances. To some extent, it may have been her passion for horses and her love of the hunt that led to such speculation. The English maintain that “hunting and adultery go together like eggs and bacon.”

      Shortly after moving into Barnsley House, Rosemary grassed over her mother-in-law’s flower borders, although her in-laws were living right next door in the attached Close. She did leave a small corner for them to enjoy. But where there had once been formal borders of roses, ponies and children now frolicked instead. Rosemary had no second thoughts, feeling the substitution of grass for flower borders allowed “more space for the children to play croquet, cricket and all their other things on the lawn.”¹³ She also concluded that with a lack of gardeners, her mother-in-law’s herbaceous borders had grown “a bit weedy” and that they “were too large and too far from the house to be thoroughly enjoyed.”¹⁴

      Instead, Rosemary and David concentrated their attentions on building a tennis court and adding a swimming pool. On a typical day, they invited local friends to come for a day of tea, tennis, and dinner. Christopher Verey recalls that he and his siblings could never beat his mother at tennis. Not until she played with her grandchildren did she finally concede defeat: rather than risk losing, the ever-competitive Rosemary gave up the sport completely.

      Rosemary was not alone in grassing over an existing garden. “After the War, people went back to the great houses, the manor houses. But they were faced with no servants in the house, and how would they live? Most of them just contracted back and couldn’t cope. And then the gardens. They turfed them over. It was contraction, contraction.”¹⁵ People were learning to make do, to live without the support of servants, or at least without as many as before. Penelope Hobhouse, who became a famous garden writer and designer herself, recalled, “After the War people gave up. People like my parents-in-law just gave up.” One of the first things they abandoned was the labor-intensive garden.

      According to custom, and as is still the case for people in a certain slice of British society, Rosemary and David sent their sons away to school at the ages of eight and ten shortly before moving into Barnsley House. The boys lived at Heatherdown, their “public school” in Ascot, and came home only on holidays; they were not permitted to go home for the weekend. Eventually Charles and Christopher would go on at the appropriate ages to attend Eton, as their father had before them.

      Girls were a different matter. Rosemary decided to keep her daughters at home and teach them herself. Her daughter Veronica recalls that many girls of families in the grand houses of the countryside were kept at home with a governess to teach them suitable social skills along with their lessons. The Vereys were in no position to hire a governess, so Rosemary took on the role herself, using a syllabus provided by the Parents’ National Education Union to help Britons living abroad in the extended Commonwealth deliver a proper English education to children in countries without a suitable English school.

      Gillian Sandilands recalled that Rosemary had enough confidence to think that “she could teach anything.” From her military childhood and her own years at Eversley School, Rosemary remembered and insisted on “very strict discipline – 9 A.M. until 5 P.M., but with regular breaks and time for ponies. The first ten minutes were for exercises to warm us up, then Bible reading and on to history, geography, and current affairs.” Rosemary learned along with her daughters. “I learnt more during the 1950s than I ever did … in the years to come.”¹⁶

      In looking back, Rosemary described herself as an “obedient wife. I don’t know if I was a good mother.”¹⁷ When she later asked her daughters their views on home schooling, she found that it had pros and cons. The children didn’t learn to rub shoulders or socialize with other children. Possibly it made them more inhibited and maybe shy. On the other hand, she believed they discovered it is fun to learn, and in order to learn, they had to concentrate on what they were doing. Focus and concentration would always be important to anything СКАЧАТЬ