Chapter 2

The It Girl

We catch up with Pam again at Charlton in mid-summer 1932. 'An exquisite night for love and romance, with a harvest moon. Utterly wasted .' She is walking alone morosely down Witches' Lane, where Eleanor and she used to catch glimpses of Mrs Pocky, the bad-tempered old 'witch' of Charlton, past the buried Roman camp and the hollow tree which was a postbox for local lovers. She is musing about the last year, and the things gone wrong. She was dissatisfied with her writing and had kept it to her diary, which at times became rather literary. Above all, although she never spoke of it, she must have been missing FE. But a lot had gone right as well.

Her life had been crammed with social events ever since she returned from Paris the year before, taller, slightly on the plump side and with her hair set short in fashionable corrugated waves. As an up-and-coming socialite, aged 17, she fell into the coy new American category of 'sub-debutante', 'made necessary', according to the Bystander,1 'by the charming precocity of girls like Lady Pamela Smith and Miss Penelope Dudley Ward.'a Sub or not, from a very young age she had been firmly assimilated into the smart set.

But she complained that it had become 'exceedingly monotonous', with a diet of the same faces day after day; an exotic one it seems from a distance, often in the company of much older people such as Emerald Cunard, the Sitwells or Lord Berners.b She had also embarked on a  relationship with one older man and was being courted strenuously by another. Both in their different ways had unusual pasts, even for a girl with a tingling background like Pam's.

Brendan Bracken was an eccentric and awkward bachelor, with a pseudo-colonial and fantastical history. He had been packed off to Aus­tralia at the age of 15 by his Irish mother and was booted out on his return at twenty-something by her second husband. He had re-invented himself many times. Posing as 'an orphaned Australian' he got a job teaching at a Collegiate School in Liverpool, where he got away with spanking the boys with a gym shoe; then, in a shrewd career move he became five years younger and infiltrated a minor public school as a sixth form schoolboy, where he excelled in history, and got the all-important school tie. An outlandishly forceful and colourful figure, pink-skinned with a large mop of bright red hair, he was later used by Evelyn Waugh (perversely with black hair) for Rex Mottram in Brideshead Revisited. His rise up the greasy pole of society and the newspaper world was puz­zling. Pam probably met him when he was about 30 at the house of her friendly protector Max Beaverbrook, the puckish 'Beaver', who used to write inviting her as his 'little Pamsie'. He must have been an oddball, a novelty, a rather exciting challenge after the boring toffs and debs' delights she had been meeting, whom she'd sniffed at in an interview for Queen magazine, 'This Debutante business as I see it'. He laughed gratifyingly at her jokes, slapping his thigh.

Bracken had done pretty well. He had become a close friend of Winston Churchill - he encouraged the rumour that he was his natural son - and Mrs Churchill distrusted him as much as she did FE. Ironically, in his turn and time FE had distrusted him too: 'keep that red charlatan away from me!' He had also become an MP and magazine publisher and moved in a chauffeur-driven car and was soon squiring Pam around to grand political dinners. Just like old times, she may have thought.2

Pam admitted to her diary that she had done some of the running in bringing him on, but soon felt it had got out of hand. Considering her feisty character, she was curiously passive about it. She confessed to Freddy's friend, Frank Pakenham that she didn't like him kissing her but he was physically too strong to resist. She seemed to describe him as a difficult-to-manage husband, having tantrums in restaurants, throw­ing plates etc., and watched his reaction covertly if she was chatting to another man; which she sometimes was, in particular to an attractive and moody young journalist, Frank Owen, with whom she managed a couple of 'clandestine' dates on pub crawls in Fleet St - 'I must be careful.'

Yan Yan took to BB as Pam's official beau. She told me about one visit of his to Charlton, when after dinner she went to her bedroom, feeling she should leave the young couple together, only to be kept awake by BB's booming voice perorating about politics below, answered at slightly lesser length by Pam's shrill one. He got comfortable with the whole family, boosting Eleanor's latest book and helping their aunt Joan with Anthony's school.

The trouble was Pam didn't fancy him, and he was looking to settle down while she had no such intention. In due course he proposed and was rejected, kindly. She knew he was self-conscious about his looks, as she told Charles Lysaght, his biographer, but nonetheless at some point there was an ugly clash. 'I am in such a rage tonight . that swine Brendan has had the inconceivable impudence and bad taste to write to Mother [to invite himself for the weekend]. After the way he has behaved it is the worst bit of nerve I have ever heard . I'll see him in hell before I'll be polite to him until I am apologised to. Damned Aus­tralian bastard.' Later on, evidently, they made up - a few months later she was ragging him at a lunch party about his 'alleged mistresses'. In the early 1940s he became godfather to both my cousin Juliet and my brother Nicky in our close-knit Smith-Berry family, and there were some affectionate little notes from him I discovered in her papers. She seemed to have lost touch with him in later life, because after his death she went to the launch of the book by Lysaght, who remembers - 'I was struck by her genuine sadness about BB, talking about his final years, mentioning that all his clothes were old; it was as if she came to the house and looked at them after his death in 1958.'

At around the same time Pam was being pursued by a married admirer, older and even more persistent, Christopher Tennant, the 2nd Baron Glenconner, Laird of Glen, aged 35. He had met her at the coming-out party of her friend Liza Maugham, the daughter of the novelist. In photographs of the time he had something of her future husband Michael's features, and the same shy, guarded look; maybe sometimes she went for the same type. He wrote to her almost daily and sometimes more. 'I don't know what he is about. He courts me just as if he was an unmarried man. It is all very odd.' She tried to be discreet, but had confided in her friend Sheila Berry, who teased her: 'What's happening with your married beau? Have you got all his letters tied up with ribbon?' Reading through the letters - which ran over two years3 - I found that his unrequited feelings, passionately and simply expressed, come off the near-illegible little pages as something almost of myth, like ancient Egyptian wax tablets. Maybe she never again received such declarations of love as his. She did indeed keep them tied up with ribbon for more than 40 years, through four moves of house, hidden in a dog basket.

He was the square businessman member of his family, as he admit­ted. 'Going up in the train I read Nancy Mitford's book called Highland Fling . I thought the characters were pretty hopeless in some ways, but very amusing company. It made me feel I lead too serious & dull a life.' His eccentric brother Stephen Tennant (Shelley in Yan Yan's Hyde Park pageant) had been brought up by their Souls motherc more or less as a girl and his son Colin later became the wayward and outlandish laird of Mustique. 

What was not in the letters, and he may never have told her - or if he did, she must have been awestruck - is in a little memoir now in the Imperial War Museum.4 A heroic tale; but it showed the extent of the gulf between them. Aged 15, at the beginning of the First World War, he was sent straight to sea from Dartmouth as a cadet. The boys slept in hammocks four decks down, next to the gun room teeming with cock­roaches. Their rations, mostly, were ships' biscuits so thick and hard that they had to be broken with a hammer and soaked in fatty cocoa. He described a hair-raising climb up the mast in the Bay of Biscay: 'As midshipman of the forenoon watch I was ordered to climb into the crow's nest to keep a lookout for submarines. . wearing rubber sea boots an oilskin and a sou'wester it was difficult to cling to the mast and slippery rungs in the howling gales of wind and rain as we plunged and rolled. At one moment I was over the ship itself, at the next right over the huge surging waves .' And still as that young boy he saw action in Gallipoli, and the storming of the old Turkish fort of Sedd-al-Bahd, where he was sent in charge of a cutter to take a party of 12 marines to beach. All this at an age when Pam was partying in London and pouting in her boarding school.

In a...