My Mother Lisa Zirner, Part II
My mother always said the Bacons were cold and liked to believe that Felix was the opposite, but then again, she knew him far less. Later, in Paris, she flirted with Judaism and used to receive regular visits from a woman attached to the community organisation. Her mother was distant, but she was already suffering from TB when Lisa was born. The pious Bacons were hardly thrilled that Katharine had run off with a Jew. I can remember as a child being embarrassed by mild expressions of antisemitism, or ‘Salonantisemitismus’, as the Germans would say. When we visited her in her flat in Ealing, my Great Aunt Frieda would utter something like ‘I am sorry about the flowers. I had to get them from the Jew by the station.’
Frieda was a kind woman for all that. I have a pastel of her by her father and she gave me the ‘death penny’ of one James Richard Austin, the man she would have married had he not been killed in the First World War. After James’s death she married no one, with the exception of Jesus Christ. Either Frieda was made my godmother or appointed herself, for she used to take me to the cinema and treat me to a Lyons Corner House tea when I was a child. Her sister Christine was far nastier. A bitter little woman who had devoted her life to serving the servants of God.
Katharine’s fellow escapee, Joan was the warmest of my grandmother’s siblings. She married a jolly man called Dr Anthony Marston Haddock, Principal of Leeds College of Music in succession to his father and the scion of a great musical dynasty in the city.[1] In the thirties, the Haddocks emigrated to the United States where ‘Tony’ became a speech therapist in Boston, and was said to have taught Grace Kelly to speak posh. I can’t watch High Society or Rear Window without congratulating Tony on his good work. In later life they moved to Boulder, Colorado with their two boys, Philip and Raymond. When they came to England, they would take us all out for steak. As a teenager I was detailed to take a girl cousin on a tour of London and show her the dome of St Paul’s. She wore a mini-skirt, and I had to climb a spiral staircase behind her. I don’t know who was most embarrassed. I suspect it was me.
When Lisa came to England, her grandmother and Aunt Christine became her legal guardians until she reached the age of twenty-one. I think Joan was Lisa’s godmother, as she was the closest of the sisters to Katharine, and Lisa maintained contact with her until she died at the age of 103. Joan was instrumental in having John Henry Bacon’s Fairytale[2] taken to Colorado where it is now in a public collection, before then we had it hanging in our flat in Earl’s Court. The picture is a group portrait of three Bacon girls: Katharine, Frieda and Christine. Lisa’s other godmother was Miriam Grey Wornum,[3] the wife of the architect George Grey Wornum who designed Parliament Square and the decorations for the Coronation of George VI. Miriam was apparently an art school-friend of Katharine’s and a very rich Jewish woman from San Francisco with an appropriate heart of gold. When she came to London, she used to stay in a serviced flat in Hill Street in Mayfair or failing that at the Ritz. She provided my mother with a small income, and probably paid for her time studying at the Regent Street Poly. She was generous to us children too. For Christmas we all received a £10 note, a fantastic sum for a child in c1960. I would buy antique weapons in the Portobello Road. My first purchase was a 1912 Wilkinson bayonet, which I still use to poke the fire. It cost 30/-. After that I moved on to swords and daggers. Most of these were lost with time. I remember Miriam saying that having dinner with us was like sitting with a family of Velasquezs. She died in 1989. The last time I heard from her was a letter thanking me for a copy of my first book which I believe my mother had sent her. She told me she was my ‘oldest fan’.
I don’t remember my great-grandmother Gangy, she died when I was three. In my mother’s descriptions of her she was four-foot-eleven-inches of pure malice, but she looked after her granddaughter after she arrived in Britain. I think Katharine went straight to the nursing home in Haslemere where she died. Lisa said the family sent her rosaries, as only penance could save her. Lisa was eight when she arrived in London. I confess I don’t know what they did with her at first. Possibly she was put in the primary school at the Sacred Heart Convent in Hammersmith or sent to board in Ramsgate? How often did she see her mother in Sussex? I didn’t get the impression that happened frequently. Katharine died on 26 November 1937, a few days before her fortieth birthday, and is buried in Haslemere.
Given that Lisa was only eleven in 1938, it is unlikely she would have been too aware of the dark clouds gathering over Europe. A month before her eleventh birthday, German troops crossed the border into Austria deposing both Chancellor and President and installing a puppet Nazi government. Even before the Germans arrived the Jews were targeted by the mob in Vienna and other Austrian cities, who forced them down on their hands and knees to scrub the pavements. Eichmann moved in, and his boss Heydrich made sure that between the two of them, the Jews felt the force of his broom: in six months they sent as many Jews packing from Austria as had left Germany in the previous five years. Over the next few months Lisa’s family were subjected to a whole host of indignities in the hope of driving them out, leaving their property and belongings behind them; but as the Evian Conference that summer showed, very few countries would grant them asylum. Gina Kaus managed to get Italian passports because the father of her two children had been born in Italy. Her books had been burned in Germany. She knew it was time to leave. She went to Hollywood.
Walter was rounded up in June and sent to Dachau on the second transport which included many Jewish jewellers. Later that year he was transferred to Buchenwald where he attended the notorious Christmas parade when the escapee Peter Forster was hanged. The prisoners stood in the snow for hours waiting for his macabre execution[4] and Walter lost fingers and toes to frostbite. He was released in April, possibly to celebrate Hitler’s fiftieth birthday, converted to Catholicism in the Augustinerkirche in Vienna and left, via Zurich for El Salvador, where he managed a coffee plantation. In the meantime, his Catholic wife had divorced him.
Other close relations suffered too: Felix’s first cousin, Otto Kranz, a drug addict and schizophrenic who had been in and out of asylums since his service in the First World War, was gassed at Hartheim. Kati’s son Martin would eventually die of neglect in a Jewish Sammelhaus in the Leopoldstadt. He was too ill to be sent to Auschwitz. Max’s cousins, the Budapest Zirners, were despatched to Auschwitz in 1944. Only one girl, Lydia, survived. She later emigrated to Sweden.[5] The Nazis took over the Modehaus Zwieback and used it to display good National Socialist fashions. Ella and her son Ludwig were robbed of all they had and left for New York. The SA even took the score of Schmidt’s opera Notre Dame although Ludwig was able to rip off the first page with its dedication and it remains in family hands. Ella’s drug addict son Hans Erich managed to find his way to Monte Carlo, while her daughter, ‘Kitty’ (Katharina Renée) who had married the Hungarian nobleman Hugo Erös de Bethlenfalva emigrated to Argentina where their childless marriage broke up. Katharine Renée died of TB in London in 1947.
As for Schmidt, he was highly revered in Nazi Germany and was promptly commissioned to write a eulogy to the Anschluss in the form of Eine deutsche Auferstehung (A German Resurrection). He may have been encouraged in this by his Nazi-loving second wife (his first wife died in Hartheim like Otto Kranz), but his heart does not appear to have been in it. The score was left unfinished at his death in February 1939, and yet he had continued to work on and complete scores for the one-armed Jewish pianist Paul Wittgenstein. The Nazis were presumably unaware of the fact that the Jew Ludwig Zirner was Schmidt’s son.
For as much as we know, Felix filled his days with the job of finding a safe haven. That involved standing in queues outside the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in the Prinz-Eugen-Strasse. He filled in the necessary forms and had the compulsory medical examinations. He said he was a widower with a daughter who was no longer living with him. He was not allowed to take more than a tiny sum of money out of the country but the Nazis allowed him to take some jewellery. Most of his property would have been absorbed by the ‘Reichsfluchtsteuer’ or emigration tax. On 4 July Felix obtained permission to travel to Argentina. The Viennese police could point to no impediment. He was not even believed to have been guilty of begging. His address was given as VI Gumpendorferstrasse 89.
By then it was clear that the aim was to get to Bolivia. Felix was fortunate in his first cousin, the agronomist and archaeologist Otto Braun, who worked for the massively rich Patiño family in Bolivia. Braun was involved in a scheme to import Jews and put them to work in agriculture.[6] The late cabaretiste Gerhard Bronner called Bolivia ‘the Rolls Royce of emigration’. By the end of August, he had obtained transit papers for Chile as well as the requisite papers for settling in Bolivia. Together with his Aunt Gisela Braun and her son Robert (Otto’s brother) Felix left Europe on a ship bound from Genoa which passed through the Panama Canal and docked in Arica in the far north of Chile some five weeks later. From there it was a two-day train journey to La Paz. His passport was stamped in Arica on 31 October and in La Paz on 3 November. Felix was safe for now, but Bolivia’s high altitude would take its toll: he had suffered from a bad heart since childhood. At 3,640 metres, La Paz was too high for him, and in 1941, he settled in the country’s second city, Cochabamba instead. Cochabamba was only a modest 2,558 metres up.
Lisa entered secondary school that year. She was sent to the Convent of the Assumption in Ramsgate[7], which had been built in 1864 to 1865 and was finally demolished in 1973. Ramsgate would have been directly under the flightpath German bombers took towards London. Pilots would then follow the Thames using the reflection of their lights on the water. Sensing danger, the school was sent on to Belmont Abbey in Herefordshire where there was already a Catholic boys’ boarding school. The girls were housed at some distance from the boys, but my mother said they used to find a place where they could watch them swimming naked in the River Wye.
Lisa did mention that there were Spanish girls at the school who had come to England because of the Civil War. They were diagnosed as anaemic and were allowed a small glass of port with their dinner. This would suggest that my mother was already boarding in 1938 or 1939, when the civil war ended. In our childhood, the only one of her schoolfriends we were exposed to was Farah Gutteridge, who was always described to us as an Egyptian princess. Her real name was Nabila Farah Karima Halim and it transpires that she was quite legitimately the daughter of His Highness Prince Muhammad Said Bey Halim, a descendant of Muhammad Ali and a cousin of King Fuad of Egypt.
What Farah was doing at a Catholic school I cannot say now. Her mother was called Morwena Bird, who was presumably Catholic? Farah was a loud, outspoken woman, and for many years pretty well my mother’s only female friend (she didn’t get on with women much). Much later we got to know Jennifer Paterson, who, towards the end of her life, became famous as a television cook. She told us that the girls felt sorry for Lisa because she had lost her parents and my mother used to stay with the Patersons at their house in the Thames Valley during the school holidays. Much later Jennifer explained to me the links between Lisa and a small number of my own friends whose mothers had all been at the same school at the same time.
When she returned to Chiswick, she was obliged to embrace the pious regime of her grandmother and aunts: mass three times daily at St Mary of Grace, where at school she went only once. She said she liked to go up to the top of the house to watch the bombing and the flak. In 1944, the church was hit by a bomb, Lisa said the blast brought down a ceiling in the house and she took refuge under the piano. The church was not put out of action by the bomb, the east aisle was walled up and the spiritual life of the Bacons went on as before.[8]
My grandfather died of slow endocarditis on 10 May 1943. He had demonstrated that he could make a living in Bolivia by restoring country churches and by his beautiful wood carving. He had a little team working for him, but his health declined. His effects were shipped back to his one child, Lisa: some valuable jewellery (including a wedding ring) from Gebrüder Zirner in Vienna which Lisa said Redmond pawned, a few ancient artefacts (I remember a portrait from an Egyptian mummy from the Roman period and a Roman mirror), some of his carvings along with a small amount of money. The Probate Registry in Llandudno ruled on 7 October 1944 that Lisa was Felix’s sole heir, and that he had left her £151/2/-, which she might inherit at the age of twenty-one.
The war in Europe ended in May 1945. Lisa did well in her School Certificate which she took that year and applied for a place at the Regent Street Polytechnic (now the University of Westminster) to study architecture. The inspiration behind this choice was almost certainly Miriam, who was living with her ailing husband Grey Wornum in Bermuda and New York. He died in 1957. Lisa also applied for British nationality. Up to now she had been stateless, having arrived in Britain with a ‘Heimatschein’, a document proving she was Austrian, but since then Austria had been swallowed up by Germany and Felix had had his nationality rescinded. She swore the oath of allegiance at the beginning of 1946.
Lisa failed her second-year exams at the Poly and enrolled at Chelsea Art School instead, carrying on the family artistic tradition established by John Cardinall Bacon, the father of John Henry Frederick Bacon and Katharine. My mother said she was taught by Robert Buhler, Edward Wakeford and Henry Moore[9], other names I have forgotten, but the first two used to come to tea, and I remember them. I am sorry to say the third name did not come to tea. In what must have been her second year at Chelsea a man in a raincoat was to be seen waiting for her when she left the building. This was my father, Redmond Joseph MacDonogh. Like her mother before her, she had led a sheltered life at home. She never mentioned any man who might have prefigured Redmond, and he told my brother he was the first.
Like my grandmother there was a moment when she abandoned herself to a man, in his case, a married man twelve years her senior. He might not have told her, but she learned in the fulness of time because she got pregnant and he had to obtain a divorce before he could marry her. Redmond Joseph MacDonogh was a former RAF officer. He was born in Dartmouth Park, North London to Joseph Michael MacDonogh, a minor civil servant working as a clerk in the General Post Office in St Martins Le Grand, and his wife Gertrude née Mornane.[10]
Redmond’s first marriage to Joan April Porritt of Rudheath House, Holmes Chapel Cheshire occurred in Norfolk on 4 September 1939. That month he lost nine months seniority[11] in the RAF and a month later, in October 1939, a full year.[12] His career was ill-starred. In May 1940, he finally exhausted the patience of his superior officers. There was talk of his having flown an aircraft to France without permission, but it is tempting to believe he slept with another officer’s wife. He was court martialled. For the next ten months he was a civilian pilot flying top RAF brass from A to B, but he was dismissed from that position too, for being bad at the job. For the rest of the war, he worked as a draughtsman in a factory. His first wife had already divorced him after the birth of a daughter. She married an army captain and emigrated to Australia. Over the next few years, he had three more children: one had an RAF connection. She might have been the reason for his court martial. Then there was a boy, the child of a woman working in the same factory, followed by a girl, produced by an Irish woman who had dropped out of Trinity College Dublin. Betty Gould, the mother of the boy, took Redmond to court and the judge ordered him to marry her.
Redmond agreed to wed Lisa once he had divorced his second wife. The situation naturally turned Duke’s Avenue upside down. Gangy was not pleased with her granddaughter’s choice of man, any more than she was with the idea of another baby conceived out of wedlock. My mother threw a bowl of porridge at her uncle Bernard who never spoke to her again. She said it was because he had insisted the child be taught Latin and Greek from its earliest years. Gangy made Lisa a present of the cookery book she had been preparing for her, composed of cuttings from newspapers and magazines (which I remember well) and on 9 March 1949, just over a month before the birth of her first son, my mother married. She was already living with Redmond at 12 Redcliffe Gardens, SW10.
Redmond was described as an actor on the marriage certificate, Lisa, an art student. The witnesses were Catherine Jane Stobart and Nicholas Parsons, the popular broadcaster and the voice behind ‘Just A Minute.’ Parsons was also made my brother’s godfather, but I never saw him, nor do I recall my brother ever having received as much as a birthday card from him. Shortly before he died, however, there was a pleasant exchange of letters between Parsons and my mother. Back then, Parsons and Redmond were close friends, both jobbing actors jostling for roles. Redmond appears to have started acting at the Theatre Royal, Bristol in 1945, performing in the play, Zoo in Silesia by Richard Pollock until the run finished in 1946. Another performer was Lionel Blair. He must have drifted back to London some time before the summer of 1948.
Once Lisa had received her diploma from Chelsea, they packed their bags and moved to Ireland where, for two years or so, they performed in repertory. My mother was still feeding a baby, but she apparently performed little roles in barns and church halls. She told me she even sang, which is not a very pleasant thought. Redmond directed and acted. My mother spoke to me about the relief of being in Ireland where there was plenty to eat, particularly meat. In England meat was still heavily rationed, like many other things. By August 1952, they had left for Scotland, as my sister was born in August 1952 in a home for unmarried mothers in Pitlochry. They returned to London sometime before my birth in April 1955. They lived in Dovehouse Street, a stretch of Georgian slums running parallel to Sydney Street, between Chelsea Town Hall and The Marsden Hospital. Before I was born, they moved to Edith Grove at the World’s End.
From acting and directing, Redmond began to write plays. Sadly, these have all been lost, but many were performed and with casts including famous actors and actresses. A quick trawl on the Internet revealed Nevada Pastoral, performed in the US. Then there were radio plays for the BBC Light Programme such as Five Days to Friday (Light 3.1.1962) with William Sylvester and Michael Gough, The Poisoner (Light 20.2.1963) with Hilda Kriseman, Sean Scully and Norman Claridge, Struggle to the Kill (Light 23.10.1963) with Robert Rietty, Peter Pratt and Cyril Shaps, and Mixture for Murder (Light 10.6.1964) with Norman Claridge, Gudrun Ure and Adrienne Poster. He even wrote poetry and was anthologised in a book of Second World War poets. One of the poems deals with a bombing raid over Germany; but he can’t have flown any bombing raids over Germany because he was thrown out of the RAF before any such raids were mounted.
Redmond undoubtedly had his talents, but he was a terrible liar. In the notice in the Telegraph for his first marriage, he describes his parents as being from Derrynavaha Co. Galway. Derrynavaha is in Clare, a hamlet containing a few houses about five miles west of Ballyvaughan in the Burren. Redmond’s father was indeed the son of a farmer from Derrynavaha (Gertrude was from Tipperary) but they lived in the Muswell Hill Road in London. He didn’t want people to know too much about his father, who was a lower-middle-class man in a watchchain living with his two unmarried daughters, who – according to the priest Alfonso de Zulueta – Redmond referred to as the ‘frigid virgins’.
He told my mother a whole pack of lies. Although Lisa vehemently denied it, I am convinced my mother was happy with Redmond for several years. I think things began to sour after I came along. According to Redmond’s script, he was the son or grandson of Lieutenant-General Sir George Watson MacDonogh,[13] a very successful Catholic soldier who had risen to become adjutant-general and who was instrumental in founding MI6. He had a brilliant mind, and read for the bar at the same time as attending staff college. But Sir George was certainly not a close relation and very probably no relation at all. His family was undoubtedly Irish once, but he was the son of an army surgeon, and born in Teesside in England. Sir George had been educated at Beaumont College in Old Windsor on the Thames near Eton. Before it closed in 1967, it was the grandest of all the British Catholic schools.
In his mind Redmond banished his parents to Derrynavaha (which would not have worried them too much as they stopped speaking to him after his first divorce) and hinted that his real father was Sir George. Instead of St Aloysius School in Highgate (its most distinguished old boy was the actor Peter Sellers, who was slightly younger than my father), he said he had also been educated at Beaumont. From Beaumont he told people that he had won an ‘open scholarship’ to read maths at Balliol.[14] I think my mother must have been taken in: for the product of a Catholic convent school, Beaumont was very grand indeed. The scales fell from her eyes, however, when she met the actor, Hugh Burden.[15] Hugh Burden had been head-boy of Beaumont at the time when Redmond was supposed to have been there. Hugh Burden told her that Redmond had never been to Beaumont. Burden was not entirely disinterested. He wanted my mother to leave Redmond, and promised to marry her, but he was undoubtedly right that Redmond had been lying to her and not just about his education. I note too that Hugh Burden’s first marriage broke up in the year of my birth when his wife ran off with another man.
I have no clear recollection of this time in my life, or indeed of Redmond. I used to think I could recall him spanking me, and of my cot in the kitchen in Edith Grove, but the others tell me that this was some later indoctrination. My mother did a painting of the staircase, and possibly I was remembering that. At some time in 1958, Lisa gathered up three children aged between nine and three, two cats and all her worldly goods and took a bus from World’s End in Chelsea to the Earl’s Court Road, where we moved in to number 152 near the junction with the Cromwell Road. On the way one of the cats went missing. It was Monty, son of Twee. We were lucky to find him a few days later. He was to die, a much-loved pet, when I was seventeen.
We had the ground and first floors of the house. There were two big rooms downstairs, and a small kitchen with a bathroom partitioned off at the side. I remember my mother washing my hair, scooping off the suds and tossing them into the bath. I enjoyed that; and her attempts at making jam that turned to rock and broke the knives of anyone who was foolhardy enough to try to chip a piece off. I think all three of us slept in the room that opened up onto a garden with a low-spreading lilac tree, and a prickly ash. I used to crawl along the wall under the ash and emerge as bloody as the scourged Christ. Once I fell off the wall and sustained a big gash on my knee and had to be stitched up. In the garden to the north was a concrete bomb shelter, which was full of rubbish but good for playing in. On the landing we had a lodger, a sinister Chinese man called ‘Ermintrude.’[16] Another lodger slept in the upstairs room at the back, while Lisa had the big room with a balcony which looked out onto a forecourt with old trees. This was later removed for road-widening. Upstairs there was another flat, inhabited by a Miss Stephenson whom my mother disliked.
Earl’s Court was hardly a glamorous place, but I remember a little antique shop on the corner, and the baker Beeton, which baked fresh bread of the English sort[17], and there was ‘MacFish’ for smoked fish like the kippers and haddock we ate then. I went to school with the Servites and later to a kindergarten next to St Stephen’s Hospital (now the Chelsea and Westminster) before going to Bousfield Primary School, where I joined my sister. My brother had already been packed off to a boarding grammar school near Ipswich which specialised in children from broken homes. Both my siblings were filched out of fee-paying schools at the time the marriage broke up. My sister was in a pre-prep called Falkner House off the Brompton Road while my brother did about eighteen months at the junior school at Highgate. I wonder now how they could afford that, and how they got there from the World’s End? Did he board?
Redmond complained to the priest at the Holy Redeemer in Cheyne Row, Monsignor Alfonso de Zulueta, that our religious upbringing was being neglected, with the result that Alfonso sent a nun round every Sunday to take us to mass, and I had to do my catechism with the Carmelites in Kensington Square. I drew on a book and was beaten by the Mother Superior. I was also baptised (late), and given Hugh Burden’s sister for a godmother (whom I never saw). My mother went back to art school at Goldsmiths to qualify as an art teacher. Sometimes she took me with her. I liked the double-decker trains that went to New Cross, and I can remember being taught to sew patches together to make a quilt.
Hugh Burden was still in evidence. How we hated him. He’d come round with cakes for us, which we were very keen to eat, but he’d pack us off to the bathroom to wash our hands first and we never came back. The promised marriage did not materialise, but he did make Lisa pregnant. She disposed of the child by herself. My brother knew what had happened and told me I’d had a little brother called ‘Peter’. The episode unleashed a flurry of great-aunts, with Frieda and Christine coming to the house and being particularly attentive. Miriam sent my mother off to Venice to recover. She came back wearing a soft leather jacket and tried to get me to eat salad, which I refused. She became very angry and lashed out at me. I don’t think I touched so much as a lettuce leaf again before my late teens.
After our Burden there was the painter, Adrian Ryan. My mother used to traipse off to his studio in Camden Town and we saw him rarely. I read recently that he had been in a triangular homosexual relationship with Lucian Freud and John Minton, but like Freud, he seems to have switched over to women by then.[18] Ryan was an Old Etonian and a proud direct descendant of Captain Bligh of Mutiny of the Bounty Fame. I had been taken to the film by Aunt Frieda. I disliked Ryan as a result. My mother’s relationship with Ryan nonetheless continued on and off for decades. Once, when we were locked out of our flat, I went to stay in his studio with Lisa. There were Picabias on the walls, and a large, well-thumbed stock of pornography. I was a teenager then and I found the collection compelling.
As well as painting at home, my mother began teaching art at Holland Park Comprehensive School, which in its idyllic location was attended by a lot of quite posh children from Kensington and Notting Hill, as well as some rather rougher types from North Kensington. Lisa said that when she turned her back to demonstrate something on the board, she would be assailed by volleys of paintbrushes. One of her pupils was Hilary Wedgwood-Benn, the later Labour politician. Mauvaise langues said he failed his common entrance exam to Westminster School. My mother naturally noticed him as his father, Anthony Wedgwood-Benn was a prominent politician then with his eyes on the leadership of the party. He had rejected his father’s viscountcy but had yet to contract his names to ‘Tony Benn’.
Trips to Ryan’s studio were often all-nighters. When she wasn’t there our art student lodger Jean must have fed us. For much of the time a fellow student called Mike Hoare was with her upstairs.[19] I suppose my brother was already boarding then. One evening my sister was not there either, and nor was Jean. I will have been around six. I was hungry and cut up a potato to fry, then clumsily tipped the hot fat down my leg. Someone took me to hospital to have my burns treated. I can’t remember who it was. Next door was a house owned by the racketeer Rachman. It was a brothel. One day I got back from school to find my mother was out. I had no key and couldn’t get in. The ladies from next door took me in and fed me. They seemed kind, all got up in their corsets and boas. When my mother came back, they handed me back across the adjoining balcony. Someone tipped off the social services, however, and after that they were often on the doorstep. I was probably lucky not to be taken into care.
When I was nine, we moved to 11 Ashburn Place. It was a big Victorian house and we had the basement and the ground floor. I slept downstairs in a damp room leading out into an area which went up to a big communal garden. My sister was next door, then there was the kitchen and a bathroom around a small courtyard. On the other side lived a housekeeper (not ours). Upstairs was my mother’s room and studio looking out on the garden, then a small bedroom where my brother slept and a larger room on the street which later became mine once the room downstairs was deemed too damp to live in. Two doors down were the Burleighs, a worn-out painter and his Romany wife, and three hooligan children with whom I knocked about. Rita, the novice nun who took us to mass, had had a skiing accident and was laid up at the time we moved. We did not leave a forwarding address. That was the end of our formal religious education.
[1] Giles MacDonogh, Blog 15 February 2021.
[2] Exhibited at the RA in 1906.
[3] https://www.architecture.com/explore-architecture/inside-the-riba-collections/ethel-day-miriam-wornum
[4] Described in MacDonogh, Hitler’s Gamble, 287.
[5] Her son, Zoltan is still alive and in contact with the author.
[6] See Leo Spitzer, Hotel Bolivia, 1999.
[7] https://www.janetandrichardsgenealogy.co.uk/convent_of_the_assumption.html
[8] https://brentfordandchiswicklhs.org.uk/the-parish-of-our-lady-of-grace-st-edward-chiswick-by-gilbert-hughes/
[9] Henry Moore is meant to have stopped teaching at Chelsea in 1939.
[10] My father, Redmond was born at 28 Cathcart Hill NW5, my great-grandfather, JHF Bacon lived for some time at 2 Cathcart Hill. Cathcart Hill is a five-minute walk from where I live.
[11] London Gazette 12 September 1939: https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/34679/page/6194/data.pdf
[12] London Gazette 3 October 1939, on the same page it is recorded that Guy Gibson (later VC) was promoted to Flying Officer. https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/34700/page/6659/data.pdf
[13] Redmond spelled MacDonogh ‘Macdonogh’ because that was how the general did it.
[14] Oxford and Cambridge colleges have been Church of England institutions since the Reformation. ‘Closed’ scholarships were awarded to certain schools which had binding relationships with particular colleges, such as Winchester with New College or Eton with King’s. To the best of my knowledge, there were no ‘closed’ scholarships for Catholic schools. Candidates might only win ‘open’ scholarships. Closed scholarships were abolished in the 1980s.
[15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Burden
[16] Almost certainly not his name. My mother gave everyone names.
[17] There was a second branch in the King’s Road.
[18] https://artuk.org/discover/stories/unholy-trinity-a-love-triangle-between-freud-minton-and-ryan
[19] They were firm friends for many years. Both Mike and Jean taught at the art school in Leicester
.