Freya Stark (7 page)

Increasingly, however, Freya was invited out. Wartime Delhi, like Cairo and Baghdad, was very gay. Once again, Freya was a particular success among the young soldiers on leave in the several camps around the city. At one dance, Lady Wavell went to some length to gather a decent number of attractive young girls. The soldiers clustered around Freya, who, having hurt her knee scrambling over a temple, lay reclining like Madame Recamier on a sofa. Billy Henderson was sent over to disperse the crowd. Ten minutes later they were back at Freya’s feet.

Those who knew Freya in Delhi all speak of her
clothes. Billy Henderson recalls with particular clarity a lemon-coloured raw-silk suit, with a coat worn rather long over the skirt; on her head, Freya had placed a pheasant, a bird made into a hat. Peter Coats, controller before him, wrote in his autobiography
Of Generals and Gardens
, that her ‘poke bonnets, aprons and a hat with a clock-face on the crown were second only to Gandhi’s fast as a topic of conversation’. Certainly she made their lives more fun. She enticed them out to take her for drives or to visit buildings they had never even heard of. And her obvious delight in picnics – especially in Simla, staying in Viceroy Lodge, when large parties, waited on by footmen, would gather among the rhododendrons in the hills – infected all around her.

Freya was in Simla for the June conference with Gandhi and Nehru, having driven up overnight with Billy Henderson in his open Austin Seven, stopping at dawn for breakfast in a maharajah’s garden in the foothills. Though she had, of course, no official role, her charm and forthcomingness pleased the Indians, who had already been much disconcerted by Wavell’s lack of conversation, and, wrote Coats, ‘her tact and quick wit … glossed over some awkward moments. Her clothes, dirndls, sun bonnets, Tibetan aprons and Jaipur jewellery … a constant joy.’ Though even Freya could do little on one occasion when Lady
Wavell, emerging from a daydream, announced to Nehru over tea that she hated circuses because of the captive animals. ‘Captive?’ said Nehru, who had come to the conference straight from a British gaol. ‘Yes,’ said Lady Wavell, vaguely, unaware of everyone’s frantic but wholly unsuccessful efforts to start up another topic. ‘Behind bars, you know.’ ‘Yes,’ said Nehru.

As for the work, it remained very hard to describe precisely what Freya did. She did travel down to the south, on a regal outing of her own, staying in residencies, meeting rajahs and British ladies, tasting the last of the great Victorian Anglo-Indian splendours. And evidently her talks were admired, for Wavell wrote to her: ‘You don’t know what a success you have been with the people you have met since you arrived in India. On all hands I have been congratulated on getting you to help.’ By mid-April, however, she was complaining that she had been thrown ‘as it were into the arms of philanthropy, for which I have a natural repugnance unless its stern features relax into some human face’. She now concluded that what was needed was a group of four salaried women and a clerk, with a voluntary committee in Delhi to act on their recommendations, while the women ‘goodwill messengers’, as she named them, travelled, making contact with women working all over the country. What, precisely, these women
were meant to be working at was never explained. Of her own role, Freya was later to say only that it had been a ‘happy unproductive half year’. By July she was off, having watched the progress of liberation across Europe and into Northern Italy. ‘Freya left,’ wrote Billy Henderson in his diary. ‘Alas. Alas.’

Freya had entered the war a traveller and a writer. She emerged from it a public figure, widely regarded throughout the Arab world, a friend to Cabinet Ministers and generals. Those who had not seen her for six years found her greatly changed. ‘I look at her in astonishment,’ wrote Mrs Granville to Lady Lawrence, two family friends, ‘for she has so improved with years. She is
much
better looking. She is a little stouter and somehow it suits her, but she has such an air of assurance, a woman of the world accustomed to being made much of,
and
she looks so much happier … There is not a line on her face … She does look very foreign, but of course she is … the last garment I asked about was made in Delhi when she was staying with the Wavells. Her jewels, lots of them – were very foreign and her coat was a goatskin from Cyprus.’

Some of this, of course, was the confidence that came from being consulted and listened to and from work which had been visibly successful: in Cairo,
especially, the Brothers of Freedom had become a well-established movement (and was to remain so, until disbanded with the abrogation of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty, when fighting broke out in the Canal Zone in 1952). Freya was now fifty-two. Six years of attention and command had strengthened her. Her style, in speech as in writing, had become more definite, her views more pronounced. She could now, complained a friend, be haughty.

More importantly perhaps, six years of war had made her an extraordinary number of friends, not only among great men, but with a younger generation of Middle East experts, who were to become constant companions and guests. Whether in Baghdad or Tehran, Cairo or Delhi, she had been feted and admired in the very world she liked best; that of soldiers and statesmen. Many of her friends regard those years as the best of her life. The attention would have pleased anyone; for Freya, after such solitary struggle, it was comforting to be so prized. Not surprisingly, perhaps, her spirits now dropped a little. ‘What’, she wrote apprehensively to Cockerell, ‘shall I do with myself after the war?’

Freya returned to Asolo to find herself regarded, not altogether admiringly, as a spy. What else, the villagers seemed to imply, could she possibly have been doing as a woman during five years of war in the Near East? Her reception was friendly, but a little wary. Caroly Piaser, who had met Freya briefly before the war, and who had run Flora’s silk factory in her absence, turning it over to more practical wartime work, could remember only that before leaving for London in 1939, Freya had said to her: ‘We’ll meet again in 1945. We’ll stay poor; but we won’t lose the war.’

The Asolani were indeed poor. Everywhere there
was hunger, intense dreariness; the valleys were full of burnt-out houses and people felt extremely bitter about forty-eight local young men, hanged on the trees of nearby Bassano as the SS pulled out. To make things worse, in the middle of August, a hailstorm, accompanied by a sudden tornado, destroyed all crops, including the tomatoes and fruit. There was very little to eat.

Early on in the war Casa Freia had been taken over by six fascist generals, who cut down the laurels by the front door to make a field of fire against the partisans advancing up the road. But in comparison with neighbours’ houses, which had been ransacked of all their furniture, the place had been barely touched. Freya arrived home in time for the peace celebrations of 25 August. She borrowed a very faded Union Jack to hang alongside the Italian flags in the street, and joined a group of young British theologians, studying to become priests while they waited for demobilisation, for ‘Te Deum’ in the church. Objecting that the civilian food ration was not sufficient to keep a mouse alive, she started a successful system of barter with local peasants; a farmer promised honey, a herdsman a little butter. Corn was obtained by ferrying black-market sacks across the Po at night. For the moment, Freya had much to occupy her, and, as she wrote to Wavell’s
daughter Felicity: ‘I am having a reaction against Work which makes it impossible almost to do anything at all except potter around the garden, deciding where to plant stocks and delphiniums.’

In any case, her war was not quite over. In October the Ministry of Information offered her a car, a driver and £100 a month to travel around the towns of northern Italy and set up reading centres, with English magazines and books, to restore a spirit of warmth to Anglo-Italian relations. Her boss was Michael Stewart, Political Attaché in Rome; he gave her ‘the pride of the fleet’, a car captured from the Germans. (It was later stolen from her by two GIs.)

Complaining a bit that she had been ‘badgered’ into it, Freya was none the less pleased to be on the move, not least, perhaps, because she hoped to do better for the British in Italy than they had done for themselves in the Middle East. There, she reflected dispiritedly, they had failed because of their want of conviction in what they were saying, and their ‘neglect of disinterested service’.

Early in December she set out for Bolzano, Merano, Bressanone and Trento; two weeks later it was Cremona, Milan and Turin. Wherever she stopped, she gave little speeches, and talked to local priests and school teachers about the need to build
up Culture and not ignore the Left. The weather was dismal, with thick fog; the roads were sometimes impassable, pitted beyond use by armoured vehicles. But the trips were not without fun. Freya had developed a taste for Marmora powdered marble, and asked a new friend, Osbert Lancaster, to come with her to study the baroque churches in order to design marble baroque bathrooms for Casa Freia. Lulie Abul Huda, a visitor at the same time, went with them. In each new town, Osbert Lancaster would set off with one Baedeker towards a baroque building, Lulie Abul Huda with another in search of renaissance churches, while Freya, laden with pamphlets, went off to teach the Italians about democracy. Her mission of persuasion accomplished, she would join them in the café, saying what a good meeting it had been, and off they would go to a delicious lunch of rich northern black-market food, all the sweeter for the austerity of Asolo.

The job lasted six months. Freya celebrated the true end to war with a walk in the Dolomites, her first climb for over twelve years. Her legs ached, but she was relieved to find that she could still do it.

Both
East is West
and her mother’s
An Italian Diary
were out and selling. Freya now needed a new
book. Pausing in Paris for a first post-war Schiaparelli dress, explaining that ‘I am sure the way to enjoy life is to live in obscurity with frequent escapades,’ she reached London in October to talk to Jock Murray. What she had in mind was a collection of essays, her ‘own Everywoman philosophy’, to be called
Perseus in the Wind
, on themes ‘beyond our grasp, yet visible to all, dear to our hearts and far from our understanding as the constellations, a comfort for the frail light they shed’. ‘You must first have something you wish to say and then you must say it,’ she had told a gathering in Baghdad some years before. ‘But it must be what
you
want to say. Courage is the first virtue of style; the courage of one’s own belief.’ There was much Freya now wished to say; and she had never lacked courage.

First, though, she had finance to arrange. Six years of war had freed her from continual anxiety about money. Back in Europe, with a longing to decorate her house and buy herself new clothes from the Paris collections, she needed to find a new way to bring in an income. What she wanted first, however, was a fur coat.

Jock Murray at his desk

To Jock Murray, she now put what appeared to her an extremely sensible proposal: £4,000 immediately for a mink coat, in return for the copyright to all her books when she died.
Already somewhat in disgrace for being less than totally enthusiastic about
Perseus
, he now fell further by appearing dubious, protesting that it would surely be unsafe to own such a coat. The board at Murray’s were altogether more sceptical. They vetoed the mink and offered £1,500. Freya crossly turned it down, saying she felt like Julius Caesar when the pirates asked too little ransom. ‘I have decided,’ she wrote to a Baghdad friend, Gerald de Gaury, ‘never to save anything
ever
, and to collect things that are beautiful and precious whenever I can as a protest against this dreary evenness.’

In September, Stewart Perowne sent Freya a telegram asking her to marry him. She replied accepting. Stewart was being sent by the Foreign Office to Antigua and the plan was that as soon as her marble bathrooms in Asolo were in place she would go out to join him. On the 14th, she wrote to Nigel Clive, her p.g. in Baghdad. ‘Such a peculiar thing has happened: I have promised to marry Stewart. I have not written to anyone to tell them yet; but I must say so at once to you, for you are very dear to me, nor do I feel that this or anything else will affect it … It is one of the happy things that Stewart likes the people I like. We have a common world to set out in.’

Not all Freya’s friends were surprised. For all her
brave words to Venetia Buddicom in the early thirties – ‘Life is easier for married people: but I think it ought if anything to be richer for us, so long as we take it with full hands and not with the inferiority sense which has often ruined the lives of spinsters’ – Freya had always wanted to marry. Fretted over by her mother, obsessed often by feelings of being plain and unattractive, she had returned again and again in letters to the theme of being alone. True, Freya was now fifty-four, Stewart forty-six. But he was charming, witty, a good Arabist, and could expect, if not an embassy, at least some fairly prestigious Foreign Office posting. What was more, as she pointed out, they shared a common world.

The marriage took place in London, in October, and a crowded reception was held at John Murray’s at 50 Albemarle Street, in the room in which Byron’s letters had been burnt. Jock Murray gave her away. Freya, deep at work on
Perseus
, had just finished a chapter on love. The couple returned to Asolo, to a house filled with tuberoses. By the 25th Stewart was off to Barbados and Freya began arranging her life so that she could join him. To Cockerell, she expressed some alarm at what she had done: had it been possible, she wrote, ‘I would have done like an unwilling horse at a jump and taken the nearest gap in the nearest hedge.’

To anyone she was fond of, Freya had always written letters. Stewart now became her daily confidant. Evidently he was a poor correspondent, for soon she was complaining that she had no news of him. Uncertain about what to wear in post-war colonial gatherings, she announced that she had packed five big straw hats, four parasols, two fans and some mittens. When a letter came, it expressed concern about money. Freya replied sternly: ‘I
never will
devote to Ordinary Life’ the extra income from a book. ‘It is the stuff one’s dreams are made of and, however poor I have been, I have always devoted it to dreams.’

By early February 1948, Freya had reached Bridgetown, pleased to be able to report that the half white coral, half dark lava island was pretty and sweet smelling. But Barbados was not Freya’s sort of place, nor was her role, that of wife to a middle-ranking member of the colonial office, likely to satisfy her. After nearly a decade of public admiration and attention, polite conversation with diplomatic wives who had never heard of her was not enjoyable. By the end of the month, she was writing sadly to Jock Murray of a ‘sort of caged feeling’. Stewart, she said, had been turned into the perfect civil servant. ‘I do think there is an element of
darkness
in the Government Service; it makes people think themselves important, a
frightful
thing to do.’

Freya did not enjoy Barbados, nor was she happy with Stewart. In April, she decided to go home, hoping to patch things up with Stewart later. Her letters to him from Asolo were subdued; as the months went by they became warmer, less accusatory, as if, separated from him physically, she could again believe in the romance of their late marriage. ‘Do you know,’ she wrote to him in July, ‘that all my life I have lived in a sort of Eden, with no sense of personal insecurity (moral I mean) or danger? Now since marrying you I have suddenly become aware of how precious it all is.’

Perseus in the Wind
, twenty essays on such themes as beauty, death, and sorrow, not unlike her earlier essays from Baghdad, but more literary and more assertive in tone, was now out, to a very mixed reception. Wavell wrote to say that it was ‘like a casket not of jewellery … but of pieces of jewellery with jewels in beautiful or quaint or cunning settings and often so pleasantly unexpected’. Others were less admiring: ‘May we not feel,’ asked one reviewer, ‘that if we are going to have almost unadulterated Great Thoughts for 169 pages they ought to be very great indeed?’

Freya had now started work on her autobiography, sorting and bringing together the immensely long personal letters she had written to Cockerell from
Cyprus in 1942 when she referred to all she had forgotten as ‘strips of black unfathomable water between ships’. Cockerell, who greatly enjoyed managing people, spurred her on. On her wedding anniversary, 7 October, Freya sent Stewart a telegram: ‘Love to you darling and many thoughts, particularly today.’

In Asolo, Freya settled to a way of life that suited her perfectly. She had friends to stay, people she had not seen since before the war, and her newer Middle Eastern colleagues, coming to Asolo for the first time. There were expeditions to show them the Palladian villas along the Po, evenings at the Fenice in Venice, picnics in the Dolomites. In the evenings, guests played Scrabble, over camomile tea, or grappa, the fiery spirit of Northern Italy, which Freya, no drinker herself, considered as settling as a tisane. Increasingly, she blamed Barbados for the difficulties of their marriage; what she and Stewart needed, she told friends, was a posting to the East ‘big enough for one to keep one’s own scale of values’.

On good terms again, Freya was writing to him almost daily. In October she outlined her perfect day: ‘a fine morning, all alone, walk with Checchi round the garden, post arrives and then three hours spent over the writing of English (the article is done
and goes by surface). A little meditation after lunch under the wisteria, looking at the Japanese anemones now like a white and pink halo round the pool, and then a heavenly walk all by myself for one and a half hours in and out of the slopes of the Rocca … It was a day sweet and heavy like honey, a white sky, and all the country sounds, voices and laughter, animals, the crackling noise of carts in the plain below … Rory Cameron came over to find refuge from what he calls “the hard glitter of Italian hospitality” and sat for one and a half hours talking about India and Moguls and Hickey, very agreeably. And then a bath and a little chat to you, and soon dinner.’ There was Caroly Piaser next door in the silk factory, to talk desultory business with; in the house itself Emma, the cook, who had come to Freya as a young maid just before the war, and her husband Checchi, the gardener. It was a pleasing and solid routine, and if Freya was at the same time worrying at doubts it was in her disciplined nature to keep them firmly suppressed. Most revealing, perhaps, are the passages for
Traveller’s Prelude
that she was writing at about this time concerning her mother, when she came to marry her father in remote Dartmoor in 1880: ‘It is far better to know the limits of one’s resistance at once and put up as it were a little friendly fence around the private ground.’