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Edward II, Marlowe
Joss’s first word was ‘Josh’, which he liked to say over and over again. His parents, humouring him, made a pet name of it: ‘Josh Posh’. The child enjoyed the rhyming sounds, and would wander about chuffing ‘Josh Posh, Josh Posh’ like a confident, well stoked steam engine.
(#litres_trial_promo) Not much is known about his early schooldays. Fortunately, some of Lady Kilmarnock’s albums and scrapbooks – a doting pictorial record – have survived. Through these we catch glimpses of Joss’s development from birth until the age of eight along with the progress of his brother and sister, Gilbert and Rosemary. Interspersed with snapshots, Lady Kilmarnock pasted in miscellaneous scraps – raffle tickets, billets for the Ostend – Dover mail boat in which the family sailed regularly to and from Europe; picture postcards from all manner of places; the sheet of order for the ‘Blessing of the Sea’, a ceremony at the beach, La Digue at Middelkerke; old theatre programmes; invitations; press cuttings and menus. These provide an overview of her own activities with her husband, as well as those of the formative years of their offspring. Resonating through Joss’s boyhood were not only the sounds of the bagpipes and the clatter of hooves on cobbles, but the sighing of string quartets; and tempering the salty air of Scotland’s east coast was the smell of newly baked apfelstrudel – although there was never any suggestion that strudel was better than oatcakes or shortbread. The first eight years of his life are laid out in the albums – sometimes chronologically, sometimes not – as if from time to time Lady Kilmarnock has been called away suddenly, her peaceful contemplation of past events disrupted, perhaps, by the children themselves.
The Kilmarnocks did not enjoy the stability of a permanent home during Joss’s childhood. Perhaps their peripatetic existence brought the family all the closer emotionally as they followed Lord Kilmarnock’s career across Europe, having to get to know new places and make new friends at every stage. It certainly made for diversity, and Joss must have acquired a precocious polish and sophistication from such a varied exposure to life abroad. He would never settle in Britain, thanks to the wanderlust acquired in childhood.
Joss’s first home was in Belgium, from 1901 until 1904, at 8 rue du Taciturne in Brussels, where his father was 3rd Secretary at the British Legation.
(#litres_trial_promo) In May 1904 Lord Kilmarnock was posted to the British Legation in Vienna and promoted to 2nd Secretary two years later. From October 1907 he worked for some months at the Foreign Office in London and then in Stockholm until his posting to Tokyo, which came through in early 1913. He was promoted to First Secretary in July of that year, while in Japan. After his return, in 1915, he was sent back to the British Legation in Belgium, then based in Le Havre because of the war. Joss’s parents spent three years in Le Havre, then in July 1918 they were off to Copenhagen. From January 1920 until mid-1921, Lord Kilmarnock was Chargé d’Affaires in Berlin. His final posting was as British High Commissioner on the Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission, in Coblenz.
The Kilmarnocks’ life at the British Legations was very grand – celebrating the King’s birthday, dining with the Empress Eugénie de Winterhalter or the Habsburgs at the Vienna Hofburg, meeting the Duke of Teck or Lord Boothby on some diplomatic errand. Regular callers at the rue du Taciturne during Joss’s infancy were Prince and Princess Albert of Belgium, with their sons Princes Leopold and Charles. (Crown Prince Leopold would be in the same year as Joss at Eton and accede to the Belgian throne in 1934 when his father’s reign was cut short in a mountaineering accident.)
(#litres_trial_promo) Early exposure to the faubourg life ensured that Joss would not grow up to be a conventional Englishman. His ability to master foreign tongues came naturally, his acute ear helped along by the chatter from his mother’s maids be they Austrian, Flemish, French or Scandinavian. His sense of tone, pitch and modulation was almost faultless. He was a gifted mimic, a talent which he enjoyed showing off. If he went too far, the Kilmarnocks would remonstrate, somewhat indulgently, at his high spirits, ascribing them to ‘the Mrs Jordan coming out’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Joss was fluent in English, French and German even before going to school.
In Brussels, one of the earliest snapshots of Joss was taken while he was being wheeled in his pram along the Bois de la Cambre at the end of Avenue Louise, as Princess Clémentine en promenade dashes by in her carriage and pair. A swansdown and satin bonnet is tied firmly under his chin; Joss’s fine blond locks were otherwise kept off his face with a ribbon. In a photograph of him taken when he was three, dressed in white flounces and mounted on a donkey, posing for the camera, one could be forgiven for mistaking him for a little girl. Sailor suits came later. Lady Kilmarnock’s boys wore frocks of white lawn, pin-tucked, embroidered or frilled, and with puffed sleeves.
(#litres_trial_promo) A stark change in Joss’s appearance occurred when he was four when Lady Kilmarnock decided his hair could be barbered. Almost unrecognisable, he suddenly looked like a real little boy, dressed in shorts, a warm, dark double-breasted coat with silver buttons, boots and a cap.
Throughout Joss’s boyhood Lord Kilmarnock perpetually had ideas in development, from light sketches to full-length plays. In March 1903 he had staged the Dîners de Têtes at the Café Riche in Brussels, and had been working on a tragedy set in a classroom, for six men and three women, The Anonymous Letter, which would be published the following year.
(#litres_trial_promo) Few realised that Joss’s father was a published dramatist. He had always written under his nom de plume ‘Joshua Jordan’ – a tribute to his actress forebear – but now, with new-found confidence, he would publish under the name Victor Hay, Baron Kilmarnock. Two more of his titles were staged in the suburbs of London during Joss’s twenties – The Chalk Line and The Dream Kiss.7
In April 1904, Lady Kilmarnock warned her two little boys that the bulge in her stomach was a baby, so that their sister’s arrival would come as no shock. Rosemary Constance Ferelith Hay’s christening caught the imagination of the press when the entire family descended from Scotland upon Vienna. The newspapers announced that Princess Charles Fürstenberg and Lady Muncaster were her godmothers; her godfathers were her uncles, Victor Mackenzie of the Scots Guards (Lady Kilmarnock’s brother) and Lieutenant the Hon. Sereld Hay RN. ‘Ferelith, it may be remembered, is the title of the book published last year by Lord Kilmarnock,’ one columnist observed. Princess Charles Fürstenberg was the daughter of a lady-in-waiting to Emperor Franz Joseph’s wife, Elisabeth. The Kilmarnocks and their children went to Hungary many times to stay with the Fürstenberg family. In due course, the Fürstenbergs’ daughter Antonia married the Duke of Schwarzenberg, whose palace in the heart of Vienna stood just round the corner from the British Legation.
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In Vienna the family occupied an apartment in an enormous house which dwarfed the tiny church next to it, standing in the quiet, tree-lined Metternichgasse. Life was more sophisticated among the Viennese than among the Belgians.
(#litres_trial_promo) Sunday mornings in Vienna would see the Kilmarnocks among the congregation at the Stefans-kirche at the same service as the ageing Emperor Franz Joseph, and they would dine at the Belvedere with him too.
(#litres_trial_promo) One of the earliest pictures of Joss in Austria shows in the background Château Neuville, where the family stayed at Huy twice a year. Joss became accustomed to café society, the cobbled streets, the Spanish Riding School and the shop windows displaying Sachertorte, a favourite Viennese delicacy. He would have walked across one of the city’s most beautiful squares, the historic Judenplatz, where the composer Mozart had once lived, with its plaque – ‘Angry flames raged through the city and atoned for the dreadful sins of the Hebrew dogs’ – marking the spot where in 1421 eight hundred Jews killed themselves following the accusation that they had used the blood of babies in religious ceremonies. Joss came to know the buildings of the Ringstrasse, returning there later as a budding diplomat, when he was saddened by the changes in its inhabitants wrought by the Great War.
Like other Edwardian children, the Hay offspring travelled with an entourage, although Lady Kilmarnock seems rarely to have left them for long periods in the sole charge of nannies. Photographs of annual gatherings at Slains display, in fading sepia, images of themselves, their friends, their maids, their cooks, their grooms, their clothes, their pets – including Bonci their father’s Jack Russell terrier.
One of Lady Kilmarnock’s own sketches of Joss stands out particularly from the pages of her albums, apparently inspired by an incident in the garden of Walls, the house in Cumbria that belonged to Joss’s grandmother, where the Kilmarnocks fetched up each year. Named after the remains of Roman ruins in the grounds of Muncaster Castle,
(#litres_trial_promo) Walls was a typically gloomy Victorian pile, all the more so for being ‘tucked away in a wood’. The sketch captures much of Joss’s impulsive nature; one of his chief characteristics was his unpredictability. Lady Kilmarnock portrays him as a cavalier in miniature, complete with sash and double lace collar.
(#litres_trial_promo) For all her adoration of him – Joss was her favourite child – she seemed to sense that his spontaneity might prove to be his undoing. In front of his outstretched toe lies a huge carved stone head, severed from its body. It looks as if Joss has just toppled this massive object, twice his own size. Her caption ‘Josh Posh on the warpath’ reinforces the idea. With uncanny maternal insight, her portrait of Joss unwittingly foreshadowed trouble ahead.
Joss’s childhood, however, was very secure. Whether at Huy or touring in Italy, where Castello di Tersatto, Monte Maggiore, was their watering hole, the company that Lord and Lady Kilmarnock kept was wealthy, aristocratic and powerful. Inevitably, their hosts and hostesses held influential positions in Europe or in Britain, and conversation with old money oiled the wheels of diplomacy. From an early age Joss learned the importance of communication, and at his father’s elbow absorbed the workings of the Foreign Office, which endowed him with every advantage when he eventually followed in Lord Kilmarnock’s footsteps. The ‘right’ castles, the ‘right’ schools, the ‘right’ reputations, the ‘right’ clubs, the ‘right’ expectations – all these influences bolstered Joss’s confidence such that he never felt bound by convention. His independence led him later to break with social constraints, taking him into other worlds far beyond the confines of his noble roots. In Joss’s book, the rules of the aristocracy were there to be broken.
A formal photograph of Lord Kilmarnock, taken in the year of Joss’s birth, shows a severe man whose preoccupations were often melancholy and who took his responsibilities seriously.
(#litres_trial_promo) But he was not as forbidding a husband and father as he looked. His writing shows that he lacked neither humour nor perception. Thanks to his love of literature and his imagination, his children learned all the family traditions and legends before they could read. Indeed, encouraging them to learn about the historic struggles of the Hays for themselves would probably have been a good way of introducing them to reading. One wonders whether Joss felt any need to live up to his heroic ancestors. His initiation into Latin and Greek was undertaken early by his father, and it was from him that he inherited his lively sense of beauty – although perhaps at first he would be too readily inclined to see beauty in mere decoration. His sense of the theatrical was an appetite whetted and nurtured by both his parents.
Joss’s mother was handsome and big-boned, given to flirtation, prone to flattery, and of the sort who improved in looks as she grew older. She tended to keep press cuttings about herself, as if requiring proof of her own persona; often such entries were restricted to remarks about her jewels ‘… a superb tiara and necklace of diamonds and pearls’. It was she who taught Joss that pearls must be worn next to the skin, for otherwise they lose their lustre, a statement he repeated often as an adult.
(#litres_trial_promo) Lady Kilmarnock’s coiffure, her gowns and her hats were intended to catch the eye. As a small boy, Joss would stand in her dressing room while the maid brushed her long dark hair, piling it elaborately on to her head, before she dressed and departed for dinner with his father by horse-drawn carriage.
(#litres_trial_promo)Watching his mother’s toilette, handing the hairpins to the maid as she worked, mesmerised Joss as a small boy and sparked a lifelong fascination with this private ritual. Before going to bed, the well scrubbed little Joss would arrive in her rooms to kiss Lady Kilmarnock goodnight. She would playfully check that his face, neck, hands and teeth were clean. Extracting a promise that he had done his ablutions properly, before dispatching him to the nursery to say his prayers she would occasionally insist, out of principle, that he wash his face again. Joss loved the smell of his mother’s soap on the sponge or flannel hanging over her wash-basin, and would breathe in the scent.
(#litres_trial_promo) His mother’s maxim, ‘Cleanliness is next to godliness’, had a lasting effect on him. He was to become fastidious to a degree and like a Continental male, would pay particular attention to his hands and feet, undergoing regular professional manicures and pedicures.
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For the first eight years of their marriage Joss’s mother doted on her husband and her children, with whom they both believed in sharing everything. Even in Europe, Slains would never be far from the conversation. All three children visited their Scottish home regularly, and Lady Kilmarnock kept their memories of it alive through postcards. Like all children, Joss and his siblings loved to be terrified as long as they knew that they were perfectly safe, and while in Scotland they enjoyed their introduction to the turbulent family history, with its legends of ghosts and mistletoe, brought to life during walks to local beauty spots made famous by Johnson and Boswell. They would stand on former battle sites and on the lofty cliff at Port Erroll, four miles north of the earlier Slains stronghold. Earthy smells permeated the grasses and flowers through which wild rabbits scampered among the dunes as the sun rose over the icy North Sea. They would go to look at a local curiosity, a strange rock near the shore, where sea-fowls congregated, or peer into ‘Bullers o’Buchan’, ‘a huge rocky cavern open to the sky, into which the sea rushes through a natural archway’. Or they would clamber along the bed of a small stream called the Cruden that fell into the sea at Slains, giving its name to the neighbouring bay – Cruden Bay means ‘Blood of the Danes’, an epithet through which the children learned of the slaughter said to have taken place in the days of Malcolm and Macbeth. As Bram Stoker had discovered, the history of the Errolls was as ‘full of dark rituals, rumours of fertility cults and blood sacrifice as anything that he might have dreamed up for Dracula’.
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Victor Kilmarnock’s dramatic inclinations would have helped him to convey to his children the family’s mistletoe legend – mistletoe was the Hays’ ‘plant badge’.
(#ulink_885b18fe-a15b-5a76-8e42-d712f32d523d) According to Thomas the Rhymer’s prophecy, recorded in Frazer’s The Golden Bough, it had grown upon an ancient oak that stood on the Erroll land in Perthshire, and the fate of the family was held to be bound up with the mistletoe that grew on this great oak. For centuries the Hay family had danced around the tree at Hallowe’en. Soon after the 10th Earl’s death in 1636, his Perthshire lands had to be sold off to pay his debts, and somewhat symbolically the oak collapsed.
Lady Kilmarnock’s hoard of cuttings from The Times and other newspapers constitutes more than milestones in the professional life of Joss’s father: they are indications of her pride and affection, her steadfast interest in everything undertaken by ‘Vic’, be it the landing of a fine salmon, speaking well in public, shooting the largest stag of the season or receiving a good book review. Their annual interludes in Scotland contrasted sharply with life on the Continent. Once the royals had departed for Balmoral and Parliament was in recess, just before the Glorious Twelfth, Joss’s family partook of gentlemanly pursuits, taking to the glorious tracts of heather to stalk, to shoot and to fish – luxuries that drained the Hay purses like those of other old Scottish lairds.
(#litres_trial_promo) Joss’s father went deerstalking at Braichie Ballater, a village on Deeside near Balmoral. His wife faithfully recorded Vic’s prowess and annual bag: ‘Spittal Beat 1 stag 13 stone 13 pounds = 6 points’ or ‘Horne Beat 1 stag 15 stone = 7 points’.
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Blood sports would leave Joss cold – one cannot help but wonder whether his repulsion for killing began in Scotland with the display of these huge dead beasts. He was never squeamish, but unlike his father or his contemporaries he would never kill for the sake of killing.
In the sincere belief that he was preparing his son for the wilder excesses of the Scottish calendar – ‘Burns’ Night, the St Andrew’s Ball at Grosvenor House, the Caledonian Ball, and of course Hogmanay – Lord Kilmarnock introduced him to whisky before he was six. ‘Have a sip,’ he would say whenever the decanter was lifted while Joss was in the room. But Joss did not want a sip.
‘No, thank you.’
‘Come on, just a little sip,’ cajoled his father. ‘Try.’
‘No, thank you, sir.’
‘Just try.’
His father’s ‘lessons’, while well intentioned, constituted an early conflict, and since often the first exercise of power is in denying someone something, it is not difficult to imagine Joss’s private satisfaction when he discovered that one could reject a request, even from one’s father. However, since the boy was well mannered, he would eventually give in and take a sip, just to have done with the matter. That scene was to be re-enacted many times. Joss’s acute sensitivity to smell meant that he was never able to stomach the odour, let alone the taste, of whisky. His adult drinking habits would be confined to the occasional sip of wine, and even then, more as a courtesy to others who were drinking than for his own pleasure.
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For all his delicacy in the matter of hunting and drinking, no one ever called Joss faint-hearted. He would become an excellent shot, riding well and hard on the polo field; and by the age of seven, when in England, he rode to hounds with his parents, going out with packs such as the Marquess of Exeter’s – accompanying them at Guthrie, Lumley Castle, Burghley House and Clifton Hall. Once the choice was his alone, he preferred going out on foot with draghounds or playing ball games – polo, football, squash racquets, tennis and cricket – and he would excel at each.
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As time went by, Joss’s brother and sister could not help noticing that Joss was the apple of his mother’s eye. No doubt she loved all three deeply, but her partiality eroded any chance there might have been of Joss and Gilbert being close. Their aloofness towards one another affected Rosemary too. Joss was unshaken by their baby sister’s arrival. Nearly four years old when she was born, he was already certain of his place, tending to feel more loved, more sure and more deserving of his mother’s attention than either of his siblings. Not surprisingly, Gilbert and Rosemary grew closer, regarding themselves as a pair. Enjoined against Joss, they may actually have had an easier ride as youngsters, and they would remain close as adults, although by then Joss had disappeared to Africa. Gilbert would become a quiet, reliable family man – to an almost plodding degree – never quite managing to live down the differences between himself and the more flamboyant Joss.
Joss’s interest in clothes and dressing up was due in part to his father’s interest in things Thespian – dancing, literature, music, costume and even lighting. Naturally, all productions by the Kilmarnocks were put on for charity. Joss was the audience to everything in rehearsal at home and thus became au fait with the underpinnings of stage production. In plays such as ‘Le Cours de Danse de Monsieur Pantalon’ his parents performed the Highland schottische in kilts for ‘the assembled distinguished company of Viennese society’. Joss’s father adapted this entertainment from the classic Harlequin and it would become integral to Joss’s Christmas activities. Lady Kilmarnock’s fund-raising in Brussels was undertaken with a Monseigneur and Madame Le Comte de Flandre, with whom, heading the Committee for the Scotch Kirk, she instigated fetes, ‘fancy fairs’, dinners, balls and masquerades. Joss developed his astonishing eye for detail as a child through watching his parents as they debated issues such as: should Harlequin dress in the ‘torn’ or in the ‘patched’, or in the stylised Victorian pantomime costume?
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Joss would soon slip into playing, posing and speaking in the style of whichever country he and his family happened to be living in. At home he was encouraged to cast inhibitions away; because he was funny his parents enlisted him to mimic or join in as the adults went through their lines, singing songs and doing dance routines. The importance of make-up, lighting and – most vital of all for an actor – timing Joss learned from his father, as well as how to draw upon the classics, recasting men in drag, setting an ancient piece in modern costume, giving a fresh twist to an old theme. One day Joss would give several hundred weatherbeaten colonials the impression that they had stepped into the Opera House in Vienna.
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The effects of these theatrics learned from his parents would be revealed in many ways later on. His interest in costume would border on fetishism. His mother’s fine clothes and sophistication triggered an acute awareness of female attire and scent in Joss – always the first attributes he noticed in a woman.
Lady Kilmarnock was hardly ever far away from him during his childhood, and when she was he must have felt her absence acutely. He was seven years old when she suffered something akin to a nervous breakdown, following the miscarriage of her fourth child, a son who had been born prematurely. Lady Kilmarnock needed privacy during this period of misfortune – the family had been staying with Count Hugo and Countess Ilona Kinsky in Bohemia at the time of the tragedy. Determined never to forget the loss of her third son, she marked the infant’s passing in a sketch in purple ink – mourning the tiny ‘Sacha Louis’ suspended in a shawl from the beak of a miniature stork, and recording his name in mirror writing. Her children were quite unaware of the disaster. Their mother was confined to bed, while they were taken up with the world of the gymkhana and polo matches at the Kinskys’ at Chlumetz, Bohemia. The Kinsky family were passionate equestrians: ‘The great challenge of every year … was the steeplechase of Pardubitz.’ In Europe this competition was recognised as the world’s most difficult course and so it was an occasion when ‘they could show off their prowess on horseback to the full – in other words – the Kinskys could win outright’.
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Lord Kilmarnock played a good deal of polo himself, and on his eighth birthday Joss was among the spectators at the Parc Club in Budapest, where his father was competing. He would develop a good eye for the ball, though his reflexes were to be more mercurial. Joss would later help to improve standards of polo in Kenya, establishing and encouraging new young teams.
The event that inspired Joss’s lifelong passion for beautiful cars also occurred in Hungary, on an earlier visit to Budapest when his parents took him to the Magyar Automobile Club, an event ‘with floats and fancy dress’. Joss experienced first-hand the dramatic changeover from horse-drawn traffic to automobiles. His mother’s hats now had to be clamped on with netting and veils as they charged through Bohemia, faster and faster, a journey that was repeated the following spring when Joss found himself again sitting in the back of an open tourer en route for Lauschin Castle to stay with his parents’ friend, Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis, whose later love affair with Rainer Maria Rilke in Italy at Duino inspired his Duino Elegies.
(#litres_trial_promo) Before going on to Pardubitz they stayed at Csazany Streczhof, attending ‘a peasant wedding’ at Ivanc where Joss’s parents are pictured with a stuffed bear.
(#litres_trial_promo) His father was already in the habit of buying expensive automobiles of the latest design. During the next decade motor-cars would epitomise the tremendous romantic appeal of speed, power and status. Once Joss was allowed to get behind the wheel himself, he would be as discriminating as his father – his favourite model of all was to be the 1937 black Straight Eight Buick.
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Every jaunt made by the Kilmarnocks tended now to be interpreted in mileage and horsepower. Their digressions took them on trips to Paris, Grasse, Gorges de Loup, Nice, Cannes and Monte Carlo. Whenever in Monaco, they stayed at the Hermitage Hotel so as to have a flutter at the opulent Casino Salle. Perhaps thanks to the example set by his parents’ busy lives, as an adult Joss was always highly organised, sticking punctually to a packed routine.
Whether the loss of Sacha Louis was so mentally dislocating that Lady Kilmarnock afterwards lost all motivation for keeping records we can only surmise, but the pages in her album dwindled to emptiness at this time. The last photograph shows Joss and Gilbert with Gustav Adolph, a grandson of Gustav V of Sweden, sharing a sledge and dressed in Fair Isle caps and pullovers against the icy blast, while staying with the King’s family.
(#litres_trial_promo) Lady Kilmarnock seems to have been at a watershed in her life with Vic, too. The following March, 1909, he packed her off to Bournemouth for complete rest by the sea. Once she had recuperated, the pattern of Joss’s pre-bedtime audience with her resumed seamlessly. Kissing his mother goodnight would remain important to him, and their closeness may have seemed to border on the incestuous when Joss kept up these childhood routines into his twenties.
(#litres_trial_promo) The obsession with his mother may provide a clue as to why he was drawn towards older women. Joss was always on excellent terms with his darling mother and Lady Kilmarnock never became disillusioned with him, through all vicissitudes.
Mother and son were to be parted again in 1914, when Lord Kilmarnock was posted to Tokyo as First Secretary. If her absences were difficult for Joss to adjust to at the time, they also seem to have taught him valuable lessons. He gained more independence, and learned that love can endure absences; even after a long bleak year of separation, their mutual affection was as strong as ever. Indeed, Joss’s close relationships would tend not to be affected by distance or time, enduring for life despite long absences.
Between 1909 and 1911, Joss and Gilbert were taught by a private tutor in Stockholm. Harder parents than the Kilmarnocks could have dispatched their sons off to English boarding school at a far earlier age. However, Joss was ten and Gilbert eight by the time they were sent to A. M. Wilkinson’s School, Warren Hill, in Eastbourne, to prepare them for entry into Eton.
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In 1911, the summer before the boys started boarding, the Kilmarnocks were in London for the coronation of George V on 22 June, where Joss acted as page to his grandfather, the 20th Earl. As a doting mother, Lady Kilmarnock must have been miserable at the thought of her sons’ impending departure to Eastbourne, where rules and conditions could have come only as a rude shock to two little chaps who had never before been exposed to the bleakness of boarding school. A cousin of Lord Kilmarnock’s, part of the Foley branch of the family, who lived at Westbrook Meads near the boys’ prep school, ensured steady communication about their progress and welfare.
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In 1910 the 20th Earl took out a five-year lease on Barwell Court, a manorhouse in Surrey. He had finally admitted financial defeat: the upkeep of Slains was too much. Plans for selling it were now mooted and a drift southwards must have seemed logical. Possibly, the Earl wanted to be closer to the family, with his grandsons at boarding school in the south and his elderly mother Eliza living in her grace-and-favour apartment at Kew. At any rate the house became a base for Joss and Gilbert and was given as their home address on their school records.
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Barwell Court’s colourful history appealed to the boys. In the early sixteenth century it had belonged to Merton Priory. Then during the Reformation the manor had been surrendered to the Crown, with the rest of the Catholic priory’s possessions. Henry VIII had allegedly kept a mistress here. The cellar housed a four-foot-deep pond, or ‘underground fish larder’, where the monks had kept fish for their Friday meals. Barwell Court’s park was made for exploration by boys of Joss’s and Gilbert’s age, with its noble trees, a ‘nut walk’ and a ‘pond teeming with carp … where once upon a time, it had teemed with dace and tench’.
(#litres_trial_promo) While Joss was living there he became fascinated by the Foley family history. Richard Foley was a famous seventeenth-century industrial spy. Originally a village minstrel, he earned his nickname ‘Fiddler Foley’ by carrying stolen papers into England from Europe in his violin case.
(#litres_trial_promo) Posing as an iron-worker, he wandered through Belgium, Germany, Italy and Spain, working in various foundries where he collected technical information on ‘splitting’, an iron-forging process that was a carefully guarded secret. Eventually after years of cribbing information, Foley smuggled enough technical data back home to be able to construct a ‘splitting machine’, an ‘invention’ on which the fortunes of the Foley family were founded. After his death in 1657, Fiddler Foley’s ingenuity earned him a place in the annals of British spying, as well as hoisting the Foley family into the landed gentry of Worcestershire.
(#litres_trial_promo) Coincidentally, a Francis Foley was the MI6 resident at Berlin in 1939. In fact he would be there with Joss in 1919, and it was Francis Foley who learned that the German Army were experimenting with a cipher machine called Enigma.
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Gerald Hemzy Foley, 7th Lord Foley, another distant cousin of Joss’s, had already been at Eton since 1909 and would be expected to guide him through some of the nastier rites when he joined the college.
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Meanwhile, Rosemary’s compensation for having had her brothers wrenched away from her was the gift from her parents of Cherry, a King Charles spaniel puppy. With them and her nanny, Rosemary boarded the SS Lutzgow, embarking in February 1913 for Tokyo and life as an only child, clutching a bevy of dolls. Perhaps the withdrawn nature she manifested in later years was formed during her separation from Joss and Gilbert; she was to become a solitary young woman.
(#litres_trial_promo) Lady Kilmarnock is pictured on deck of this German ship – ‘writing letters … on our way to Japan’. Much of her correspondence will have been addressed to her sons. None has survived the years. All signs of depression seem to have been banished: carrying a stylish muff of cheetah skin, she looks rejuvenated at the prospect of Tokyo. There she played tennis every afternoon, often partnered by a Captain Butt whose name features more and more frequently until, in due course, he accompanied Joss’s parents on all excursions, which tended to be dominated by temples, cherry trees in bloom, lacquered bridges and parasols. As she revelled in the company of young officers, Lady Kilmarnock was showing signs of not wanting to accept her age.
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She and her husband returned from Japan to England in the summer of 1914 just before the outbreak of the First World War to see Joss into Eton for the ‘Michaelmas half’ – Eton jargon for the autumn term starting in September – for which the preparation was elaborate. The correct top-hats, black coats, white ties and shoes could be obtained only from monopolist establishments in Eton High Street. Windsor Castle stood sentinel above the town.
Joss would spend his free time wandering around Windsor’s streets with friends, buying ices in the summer half, looking for books. One of the highlights of that Michaelmas half was when he and Sacheverell Sitwell spotted some ‘Bohemians leading a bear around on a chain’ about Windsor. The boys were witnessing part of the great gypsy coppersmith invasion of those years in England.
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Eton’s aim was to prepare its pupils for the service of the British Empire abroad as administrators, soldiers or diplomats – hardly necessary in Joss’s case. Boys boarded in houses known by the initials of their housemasters – Joss’s housemaster was Raymond Herney de Montmorency.
(#litres_trial_promo) Activities of the house were organised by the house captain, who was assisted by a group of boys known as ‘the library’.
Joss’s own bedsitting room, in which he was supposed to do three hours of prep each day, like every other boy’s was furnished with a ‘burry’ – a desk with drawers – and one easy chair. Fagging did not begin at once, but usually by October most newcomers would have had their share of the horrors associated with bullying.
(#litres_trial_promo) Ablutions were bitterly cold, leaving hands and feet clean but more freezing than ever. A can of water would be delivered – the allowance was half an inch per bath – which was already cold and made icier as it hit the porcelain. Joss was left with a lifelong appreciation of luxurious bathrooms. He would select the most modern fittings for his own, insisting upon scalding-hot water in abundance.
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While no precise record of his academic achievements survives, Joss’s ability to quote liberally from the classics in later life suggests that he was an able pupil. He studied modern languages as well as Greek and Latin.
(#litres_trial_promo) He was astute at mathematics. He shared classes – known in Eton parlance as ‘divisions’, invariably abbreviated to divs – with children destined for a life of wealth, position and privilege: Prince George of Teck was one of his contemporaries, along with Ian Douglas Campbell, 11th Duke of Argyll, Alan Colman of Reckitt & Colman, Wilfred Thesiger and Gubby Allen, ‘a great athlete and cricketer’.
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A high percentage of Old Etonians would be reunited later in Kenya, among which were Derek Erskine, Fabian Wallis and Ferdinand Cavendish-Bentinck.
(#ulink_ab61ddd6-9065-57db-9317-f484b65c77bc) Other Old Etonians would find themselves in Joss’s company again when he was Kenya’s Assistant Military Secretary on account of postings to Nairobi, such as Viscount Gerald Portman and Dickie Pembroke, ‘a nice P. G. Wodehouse guardsman’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The Highlands of Kenya had a reputation for attracting rarefied members of English society.
Eton’s claim of making boys into men would resound and backfire when Joss turned fifteen. Already good-looking and tallish for his age, he was causing comment. He had suddenly shot up in height, developing into an almost Aryan-looking youth with well defined bones, a handsome high-bridged aristocratic nose, blond hair beginning to darken, blue eyes and a strong jaw. The pellucid eyes compensated for his rather too small mouth and would always be his most distinguishing feature. His hair was brushed back from his temples, with his parting low in the fashion of the day; his hair was so fine that he could keep it tidy only by slicking it down with brilliantine, darkening it further.
Joss’s strongest asset was his gaiety. His smile and the light of enjoyment would not be kept out of his hypnotically pale gaze – nor would they fade in the memories of those who loved him. Many would remark on his playfulness. He learned early and quickly to hide his inner, vulnerable feelings and concealed them behind a knowing, adult expression which gave the impression of hauteur. This sophistication would have been seductive to boys with less self-confidence, and may well have been another factor in Joss’s popularity.
Only months into the Great War, Eton began to notice the drain on its older pupils as they enlisted. Twenty new boys, led by Joss’s friend Prince Leopold, arrived from Brussels in November 1914 to ‘fill some of the empty rooms’. His greatest friend at Eton was Hubert Buxton, who would for ever remain loyal to Joss’s memory. Hubert became head of the Eton Society, better known as ‘Pop’ – the self-electing oligarchy of senior boys who were the admiration and envy of the entire school. But Joss would not be there to benefit from Hubert’s position. In their first year, Joss and Hubert began their joint hero-worship of Pop’s former head, the Hon. Denys Finch Hatton, whose reputation for ‘athletic and intellectual prowess’ sprang from his days at Eton.
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For the duration of the war Eton’s gaudy summer rituals were to change. Plans were amended for 4 June – ‘Eton mess’, strawberries and cream mashed together, was now a thing of the past – and a quiet lunch took place instead; a game of cricket followed, but fireworks were cancelled and so was the Henley Regatta.
