The Bolter (15 page)

Euan (right) and friends (at Dunkeld)

Avie, Dickie, and Barbie (at Dunkeld)

Off for a ride over the Scottish hills

The Black Gang

Off for walk

Picnic time

Dickie, Barbie, and Avie letting their hair down

Ten days later, in the second week of May, Euan received a letter from Dickie Ward inviting him to Dunkeld, her family’s sporting estate in Scotland, for the coming long bank-holiday weekend. Dickie was not as beautiful as Barbie but she was both attractive and lively and, unlike Barbie, was socially and financially secure. Her father was an earl and her family was in possession of not only, like Euan, a vast industrial fortune, but also of a country home regarded as one of the very finest houses in Europe. Witley Court in Worcestershire was a palace. Dickie’s grandfather had reputedly spent more money on the house than had been spent on any other home in Britain or even in Europe. It had endless bedrooms and rows of columns, sweeping staircases, and balustrades linking them. Its gardens were laid out in great vistas of fountains and marble statues. An invitation to Dunkeld was not an invitation to Witley. But it was a first step along the way.

Euan rang Avie that morning to ask if she would, in effect, chaper-one him. She “said she would decide by tea-time.” When she agreed Euan proceeded to telephone Idina. This was his first mention of her in his diary for three weeks and it would be the last for another three. He told her that he would not be coming home for his leave after all.

It was not Idina’s style to protest. She was clearly still proud and it was not the done thing to play the possessive wife—indeed, it would have been humiliating to do so.

On Friday, 17 May, Euan and Avie boarded the early-evening sleeper to Scotland. They reached Dunkeld at seven-fifteen the next morning and were met at the station by Dickie and Barbie in the car. On reaching the house they changed and walked over to the stables. By mid-morning the four of them, and another man, Ralph Burton, who was also staying, were riding out with a picnic lunch. For three days they lived the old, prewar life. They went for “glorious rides over the hills,” fished and swam in the River Tay, played furious tennis on grass and hard courts, booby-trapped one another’s bedrooms, and took the gramophone outside after dinner, danced until the early hours, and bonded themselves in a group that Euan tells us they named the Black
Gang. On Euan’s last day, Monday, the Black Gang spent several hours lounging in the shade as they posed for photos to commemorate the weekend. “The best 3 days I have had for many months,” he wrote.

There were more “best days” to come. One week later, back in Cambridge, Euan “got a long wire from Dunkeld, suggesting Maidenhead on Sunday.” He immediately wired Dickie to accept.

Chapter 8

I
dina and Avie were both asleep upstairs at Connaught Place when, on Saturday,
i
June, Euan arrived shortly after eleven at night. One of the servants let him in but, before his footsteps had passed the first floor, the doorbell rang again. It was the Black Gang: Dickie and Barbie, together with two more of its members, Dickie’s brother Eric Ednam and a friend of theirs called Lionel Gibbs. The four of them swarmed up to the drawing room, chuckling and whooping, and lifted the lid of the piano. Euan dashed upstairs. It was six weeks since he had last seen Idina but he came back down with Avie, leaving his wife undisturbed. This Saturday night the “usual party”
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was at his house. But, aware that Idina was trying to sleep upstairs, he pushed them out after half an hour.

The next morning Euan picked up Dickie at ten-thirty and drove her to Paddington. By eleven, Euan, Dickie, Avie, and an admirer of Avie’s called Mike were on the Maidenhead train. Shortly after noon, having signed in at the Boat Club and selected a punt, Euan was punting them upriver: “We lay under the trees and ate strawberries for a bit.”

This time Idina followed her husband and her sister’s friends. In the six weeks since she had last seen Euan she had recovered considerably and was now clearly determined to join in his social life. She dressed and picked up the telephone. Shortly afterward, she piled into a car with Barbie, Dickie’s brother Eric, and a couple of others and arrived at Maidenhead Boat Club in time for lunch. Euan’s punt came back to
meet them. They ate in the packed dining room. “Saw lots of people at the Club,” wrote Euan, “quite like old days.”

After lunch they all went out in a flotilla of punts. They drifted in and out of the shade, closed their eyes, dangled their hands in the cool water, and listened to the quacks and whistles of the birds floating by. Then they bumped into another gang, “the Grenfell party,” and the calm was shattered. The men pushed the punts to the banks, the two sexes disappeared behind their own bushes and emerged, the women in bloomers and camisoles, the men in underpants if anything at all, and “had a good bathe.” Idina, having been regularly tossed into the English Channel from her mother’s mixed-sex bathing beach in Bexhill since the age of three, and keen to prove that she was on her way to being as fit and well as any of the other girls, plunged in.

The Black Gang decided to stay and dine at the club, leaving Euan to go back to London ahead of them in order to reach Cambridge that night. He had agreed to travel there with Idina’s brother, Buck. It was Buck’s eighteenth birthday. Buck had, in anticipation of the date, long planned to remove himself from Eton that morning and, as a conscientious objector, head immediately to Great Yarmouth to enlist as an able seaman on a minesweeper.

“Dina and I went back by the 5:22 train,” wrote Euan. The following week Idina was taking the children to the seaside for a month and this train journey was her opportunity to try to persuade him to join them. They were going to Frinton in Essex. Several other people she knew were taking houses there with their children. It was not far from either Cambridge or London. The boys would love to see him. So would she.

Idina was not a woman who either pleaded or threatened. She just made things sound as enticing as she could. But at this point her life and Euan’s were running in barely parallel grooves. First Euan’s absence had left Idina to build a life for herself and her children on her own. It was a life that Euan had played no part in, and the names of her own new friends held little attraction for him.
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And when she had been ill, he had built his own life—and had done so with such success that he now appeared to forget that he had a wife and children.

The next weekend Euan went not to Frinton but to London to see the Black Gang. He arrived by teatime on Saturday and went to Dorchester House. He “dined with Eric E at Claridges—party 12. Ave, Dicks, Barbie etc etc,” went to a show, and then, with Idina away in Frinton, held “the usual Saturday night party” at Connaught Place: “danced to the gramophone for 2 hours.”

Euan didn’t go back to Cambridge until Monday morning. On Sunday the dozen of the night before headed off for Maidenhead again. There, after a long lunch, and much to the consternation of the more traditional members of the Boat Club, they hired a motor launch and towed several punts up the river behind it. At the end of the day they squashed six into each car and motored back to London, ending up again at Connaught Place: “good dance to gramophone until 1:30.” At 1:30 a.m. Euan left his own party and took a taxi to the hotel at Liverpool Street Station. He went to bed at five past two and was woken less than three hours later to catch the 5:53 train to Cambridge. It slunk him into the station at eight-fifteen, so he had time enough to rush back to his room and emerge again as though he had been there the night before. However, despite his efforts at discretion, Euan’s weekend exploits had not gone unnoticed by his senior officers. Sunday’s japes at Maidenhead had alerted a wide audience to the activities of the Black Gang.