CHAPTER ONE
Foreword
A very wise woman once said to me that there is more than one way to skin a cat. Even thirty years later I'm not entirely sure what that means, but the words have stayed with me, as so many others have done over the years, and I know precisely what they mean to me. At the time of course, the words were meant in an entirely different context but they're more than that now. They've became a mantra: a way of looking at life. That woman is dead now, I'm sad to say, but then so are many others. I suppose when one gets to my age it's inevitable that those around you start dropping like flies, but then, there's life too. Even now, as I pen these words, I watch little Sybil, smiling and happy and full of life, in the same garden I played in myself as a child. Of course, she's hardly little anymore. She's a young woman, as beautiful as her mother had been before her life was snatched from us. But more of that later.
Contrary to the belief of my mother-in-law, who believes all Americans are natural born attention seekers, and in the case of my mother perhaps she is correct, I prefer to remain out of the limelight. And who on earth would be interested in reading my story? My life has hardly been extraordinary, at least it doesn't seem that way now, with the world still reeling from the Second World War and, goodness, the hemlines – Violet would have another heart attack. But it has been happy. If there is one thing my life has not lacked for it has been happiness. Oh there has been sadness too: at times, abject misery, but the bad has been outweighed by the good. Pain has been outweighed by joy, and loneliness with love.
I've had a life filled with love.
I'm getting ahead of myself. My publisher - a friend of Edith's no less, and one much more suitable than Anthony Strallan - was very clear on how these memoirs should be structured, and as my daughter is the writer of the family it seemed churlish to ignore his advice. Introduction, main body, conclusion. It sounds very clinical when you put it in those terms, perhaps more suited to an academic text than to the story of my life, but it's been very helpful. My memory isn't what it used to be, you see. Oh, I remember the big things: births and deaths, my children, and moments of real, unabashed happiness. My life with her. But there's so much more, eighty years in fact, of happy tedium and blissful normality that have so sadly fallen through the cracks.
But I'll do my best, if you promise to be patient. I'll tell you a story of a world so different from your own that you'll scarcely believe it ever existed: looking at the world as it is now, I can hardly believe it myself. But it did. Though I'm sure you already know that. You must know: you've picked up the memoirs of an old woman, after all. Perhaps for academic interest? Though if you're expecting a historical commentary then you have undoubtedly selected the wrong book. I did not know Winston Churchill and my contact with anybody else of historical importance extends only so far as tripping over my skirts when being presented to Her Majesty, Queen Victoria.
She was not amused.
Of course, there was John Jacob Astor, though the last thing the world needs is another book about the Titanic. And Edith has warned me about dropping names.
Equally, if you're seeking a tawdry tale of a Countess and her lover then I suggest you look elsewhere. There has been enough scandal in the Crawley family without my detailing every extramarital encounter, though there was only ever the one.
No, this is not a book about Kings and Queens, nor sex, or even about the wars, though I can hardly gloss over the latter. It affected us all, after all, in more ways than one. It's a book about people - people I admired, respected, loved. People I shared my life with, in one way or another. This is the story of an American who spent her life in England, who struggled with homesickness every day. It's the story of a mother, a wife, a lover: not of a Countess, but of a woman, who witnessed the world shift and change around her.
This is the story of my life.