When my husband and I became an item he told his friends to look me up on the internet.
One of them said to me that she’d never known anyone who figured on the internet before, and this prompted me to search my memory for people I knew who were described on the internet.
It turned out there were an awful lot – thanks partly to a career in journalism when I’d interviewed some amazing people..
Leaving aside the privilege of interviewing celebrities who were masters in their field, like Dr Spock and Dr Seuss, wonderful ballet dancer Robert Helpman, and David McTaggart, founder of Greenpeace, who I interviewed in Auckland harbour as he set sail on his first protest voyage to the French nuclear tests in the Pacific- the first story about Greenpeace – there were other categories .
There were the fascinating interviews with people like the Maori Queen, novelist Iris Murdoch and Aborigine tennis champion, Yvonne Goolagong.
There were the’ encounters’ – connecting through a best friend, with eccentric author, Barbara Cartland who wrote 723 books, chatting with Sir Edmund Hillary at a fundraising lunch for his local surf club, and watching as all eyes were riveted on the tall figure of Raine Spencer, Barbara Cartland’s daughter, and later Princess Diana’s reviled and then beloved stepmother, as she walked across the dining room at the Eagle’s Nest in the Hilton in Hongkong to talk to me. She had huge blue eyes, a complexion like porcelain, and oozed beauty and charm.
There was a conversation with Princess Alexandra, the Queen’s cousin at Government house, when she asked me how I coped as a solo mother and a full time journalist.
Prince Phillip joked about working above the shop, ( Buckingham Palace) when I told him I worked from home, and then on board Britannia there was the Queen, another woman with big blue eyes, and porcelain complexion.
She was asked by a fellow journalist when we were talking, what Kava, the Fijian drink she’d just sipped in the Islands, was like.
She was about to tell us, when she suddenly realised she would offend the people of Fiji, so she quickly quipped – ‘like a nice cup of tea.’
And then there were the friends, and when I looked them up on Google, I realised what amazing lives so many of them had lived.
Nicholas Groves – Raines was a lanky school mate when I knew him in the early fifties, famous at school in the Cameron Highlands in Malaya for catching numbers of what were known as buzz bombs. Big sticky beetles with large clicking wings which made a piercing buzzing sound as they flew. After storing them in matchboxes, he released them one morning during assembly, and we all shrieked and ducked and covered our heads with our hymn books to avoid the weirdly buzzing panic stricken creatures blundering around, getting tangled in our hair.
His google entry describes this mischievous youth as
‘an acclaimed Scottish architect and conservationist renowned for rescuing and restoring ruined and neglected historic buildings across Scotland. He has been celebrated for saving more significant historic listed buildings in Scotland than any other private individual. In 2017, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland.
Then there was John Blashford – Snell, a young officer cadet, who one lunch time took me punting on the lake at Sandhurst, and when the ancient craft began to sink midlake had to ignominiously tow me back to shore in his now soaking khaki uniform.
His Google entry describes him as a ‘renowned British explorer, former Royal Engineers officer, and author who has led over 100 expeditions worldwide. Famous for combining adventure with scientific research and humanitarian aid, he founded the Scientific Exploration Society and is the creator of the youth initiative Operation Drake/Operation Raleigh.
‘He led the first successful descent of the Blue Nile in Ethiopia, mapping the dangerous river and essentially pioneering modern whitewater rafting. He headed the British Trans-Americas Expedition, completing the first-ever vehicular crossing of the notoriously impenetrable Darién Gap swamp and jungle in Panama, and directed the first major scientific navigation of the Zaire /Congo River, focusing on medical research regarding river blindness.‘
The last I heard of him a few years ago in his eighties, he was looking for a medical officer to join him on an expedition to Mongolia!
Footie was my next famous friend, our lecturer in constitutional history at officer cadet school. Footie’s real name was Edgar Feuchtwanger, but generations of irreverent officer cadets had called him Footie for short. Later he and I became good friends and I loved him.
His Google entry among other things says Edgar, was a:
‘German-born British historian, who died at 100 year old at his home. As a Jewish child in 1930’s Munich, Feuchtwanger had an intimate view of the rise of the Nazi Party through the daily life of one of his closest neighbors, Adolf Hitler, and wrote the bestseller “I was Htler’s Neighbour” amongst many other books – ahistorian who was a vocal critic of Hitler and the Nazis.
A few years later, as a gay giddy twenty year old, John Gouriet swam into my consciousness.
He was my best friend’s boyfriend, a captain in the 15/19th hussars, and we had a fun foursome with my cavalry boyfriend. Later when we had all married other people, John became famous “as a right-wing political activist who campaigned relentlessly in the 1970s against what he saw as the abuse of power by trade “…one of these campaigns was known as Operation Pony Express when John organised the delivery of the post when Post Office workers went on strike.
In later years, John Adair was the man I wished I had plumped for instead of the other man I was seeing at the time. John’s Google entry describes him as a British academic who was a leadership theorist and author of more than 40 books (translated into 18 languages) on business, military and other leadership. I knew him when he was a lecturer at Sandhurst, and I was a lecturer at WRAC cadet school, and he was witty and kind and clever and a lovely dancer at summer balls.
David and Elspeth were friends in Hong Kong when as young marrieds we made a foursome, who since we had amahs to baby-sit enjoyed an interlude of partying, dancing in night clubs and having fun before my marriage broke down, and I lost so many friends. David’s very long Google entry reads in part:
‘Sir David Robert Ford, KBE, LVO was the fifth and the last non-ethnic Chinese Chief Secretary of Hong Kong and Deputy Governor of Hong Kong from 1986 to 1993 and was Hong Kong Commissioner in London until 1997 He was also very briefly Governor before Hong Kong was handed over to the Chinese.’
Andrew Grima’s Google entry said among other things that he was the most influential jewellery designer of the post-war period, widely regarded as the father of modern jewellery. Prince Phillip commissioned him to make lovely brooches and earrings for the Queen and Princess Anne.
I interviewed him when he came to buy pearls in Hong Kong, and we became good friends. He introduced me to high society and suddenly I was enjoying witty lunches at the home on the peak of Hong Kong’s then Chief Secretary, and dancing at balls in marble halls.
He was a big gentle dark haired man who had started life as an engineer, and on joining his father in law’s firm as an accountant segued into designing beautiful avant garde jewellery which set the tone for modern jewellery, snapped up by high society, pop stars, and everyone in between.
Too many other distinguished people passed through my life in Hong Kong to write about – French couturiers, singers, artists, musicians, dancers, writers, even a good, kind and talented diplomat who ended up being lynched on Shanghai station and then imprisoned in the besieged embassy in Peking, and who later became an eminent MP and knight of the realm . In the 60’s Hong Kong was a glamorous and stimulating place.
I finally ended up in New Zealand with my two children. Again, this life turned out to be full of fascinating people, among them a woman who became a close friend, Babette Hayes. She was French Syrian and after the war grew up in France and London, before emigrating to Australia. There she electrified Sydney with both her French gourmet cooking and cookbooks, and even more spectacularly as a pioneer of beautiful creative interior design.
One of her Google entries describes heras Australia’s first stylist, recognised for her ground breaking work in magazine styling and her committment to raising standards of interior design and decoration… She loved my house, and photographed it for the Australian magazine Belle.
Life in NZ was dramatic and traumatic in many ways, and among the extraordinary persons I became close to was probably this country’s blackest sheep, though, when I first knew him, I like everyone else was deceived by his persona- erudite, upright, art connoisseur, statesman, humanitarian.
In the end Bill Sutch was discovered to be a Russian spy, and though tried and exonerated in the 70’s, after his death and the crumbling of the USSR and opening the files, it was found that he’d been recruited in New York in the 50’s, when working at the UN at the height of the Cold War.
But perhaps the most colourful and incredible life I encountered was an admiral from the First World War. His Google entry merely records his distinguished military service, ending on a mission to Sydney in 1919, but that doesn’t even cover a fraction of his extraordinary life. After his first wife died, he roistered around the world on his yacht until anchoring in the harbour at Monte Carlo in the mid thirties when he was 68.
One night a 24 year old blonde socialite slipped off the deck of the yacht moored alongside, and joined the Admiral. Off they sailed, and had four children, besides the two from the Admiral’s first marriage. They rubbed shoulders with the likes of Noel Coward, and the Windsors and Barbara Hutton in the South of France, and after the war, when Monaco became too expensive, moved to a rambling villa by the sea in a remote fishing village in Spain. They took with them the speed boat given to Clementina, the youngest daughter, after she’d rescued Barbara Hutton’s son from a hideous water skiing accident in the harbour at Monte Carlo.
When I encountered them the Admiral was 92, Dora, his wife, 54, the two younger children nineteen and eighteen, and their tutor Mark, a fair haired handsome Canadian of 34. He was Dora’s lover, and looked after everyone, and also the wistaria shrouded villa. It was built around a courtyard, with lots of geraniums in big pots and a fountain, and they were all dependent on the ancient Admirals’ dwindled pension.
The following year everything had changed.
The Admiral had died, Dora was in London, and Mark was dead from polio.
After a delicious affair with one of the James Bonds – Shaun Connery – beautiful blue-eyed Clementina with waist length fair hair – married a Polish Prince. The eldest son was sailing yachts in the Mediterranean for millionaires, and the youngest son turned the charming villa into an exclusive Mediterranean getaway for aristocratic friends and contacts. Even now it still flourishes as a luxury hide away for the exclusive few.
The Admiral’s son by his first wife had died in a Nazi concentration camp after being captured and tortured as an SOE agent, and decorated for valour, while the eldest daughter had married a Spanish nobleman who was shot by Republicans as he opened the front door. She ended up in South America married to a millionaire. The lives of this intrepid family spanned both the world and history..
As Mae West once said, “You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
Looking back through my life, I’m amazed at these extraordinary lives. Poet Rupert Brooke wrote a poem ‘These I have loved’… I can’t say I loved all the people in this list of friends, acquaintances and oddities, but I have relished them.
And in another poem he says – “happiness crowned the room when you were there and you and you”… and again, I feel that these lives, though I haven’t loved all the owners of them, have added such fun and fascination and crowned mine. I feel, like Helen Keller ” that so long as the memory of certain beloved friends lives in my heart, I shall say that life is good.”
Food for threadbare gourmets
Only sausages in the fridge last night, so I fell back on a postwar childhood recipe.
It went down a treat.
Fry pieces of chopped bacon with onion and garlic. Add a tin of tomato baked beans and cooked sausages chopped into bite sized pieces. I added some tomato puree for extra taste and a little water to lubricate the mixture and served it with mashed potato creamed with lashings of butter and a little cream.
I had some cooked puy lentils from the night before, so I separated the onion bacon mixture and used the lentils instead of the baked beans for me – very good.
Food for thought
“The purpose of our lives is to be happy.” — Dalai Lama
#lives #history #famous people
ThesoundofwaterNZ 