Читать книгу Emma’s War: Love, Betrayal and Death in the Sudan - Deborah Scroggins - Страница 9

SHE WAS BORN in India, where her parents, Maggie and Julian McCune, had met and married in 1962, and the direction of her life, like theirs, was pounded and shaped by the ebbing tide of the British Empire. Maggie, a trim and crisp former secretary, still calls herself an ex-colonial, though the sun was already setting on colonialism when she was born in 1942 in Assam. She published a memoir in 1999 called Til the Sun Grows Cold about her relationship with Emma. The child of a loveless marriage between a British tea planter and an Australian showgirl who met on board a wartime ship, Maggie spent a lonely colonial childhood as a paying guest at various English homes and boarding schools. Emma’s father, Julian - or ‘Bunny’, as Maggie called him - was an Anglo-Irish engineer who had knocked around Britain’s colonies for at least a decade before he and Maggie settled down in Assam.

Theirs was an unfortunate match from the start. Maggie, shy and wounded, was only twenty-one when she was introduced to Julian on a visit to her father in India. She married him, she admits in her book, mainly to escape England and the hard-drinking mother whose theatrics she despised. With depths of neediness her husband never seems to have fathomed, she wanted nothing more than to bring up lots of children in the safe and conventional family she felt she had been denied as a child. Julian, fourteen years older, was a charming sportsman who thrived on admiration. He also liked his whisky. He seems to have been unprepared to bear any responsibilities beyond excelling at shirkar, the hunting and fishing beloved of British colonial administrators in India. Perhaps their marriage might have survived if they had been able to stay in India, where Julian, simply by virtue of being an Englishman who had attended some well-known public schools, was able to provide the luxurious lifestyle they had both come to expect.

In Maggie’s words, life was ‘heavenly’ for the British hired in those days by London tea companies to run the Assam tea estates. The British lived in comfortable bungalows, the adults attended by Indian servants and the children watched by Indian nursemaids. The men began work at six o’clock in the morning, but after two hours they broke for breakfast. At noon it was time for lunch, and after lunch everybody took two ‘golden and silent’ hours of siesta. After siesta, Maggie writes, ‘there was a little more work to do, leaving time for tennis, a round of golf or a chukka or two of polo before the sun sank. Then the sun-downer drinks parties began, followed by dinner and dancing’ at the club. But by the time Emma was born in 1964 and her sister Erica in 1965, it had become plain that the postwar world was going to have a lot less room for people like the McCunes.

For India, as for so many other colonies, the end of the Raj in 1948 was only the beginning of the slow and subtle process of loosening Britain’s control over the country. In the first few years under the new Indian government, the British tea companies operated pretty much as they had under British administration. But by the late 1960s, they were under pressure from the government to replace British employees with Indians. Julian lost his job supervising the maintenance of the equipment used to grade and prepare tea leaves. Maggie’s father was pensioned off and decided to return to England. In her book, Maggie says that she and Julian enjoyed mixing with people of all races in Assam, but the only Indians she mentions socializing with were the petty royals for whom the dissolution of empire was almost as much of a disaster as it was for the British. Julian talked about emigrating to Rhodesia or South Africa, where many of their British friends from India had already gone, but Maggie worried about moving to another refuge that might prove temporary. She wanted to spare her children the uncomfortable colonial sense she had always had of never quite fitting in England. She wanted ‘Home’ to really feel like home for them. In 1966 the McCunes decided to move to Yorkshire, where Julian had gone to school and had family. Emma was two.

There was an old manor house on the windswept edge of the Vale of York that Bunny McCune had never forgotten in all his years of wandering. Julian’s parents were dead, but his mother had come from Leeds, and as a boy he had attended Aysgarth School in North Yorkshire before going on to Winchester College. Cowling Hall, a long, thin brick-and-plaster Queen Anne mansion not far from Aysgarth on top of a hill overlooking a spectacular view of the Yorkshire Dales, had first captivated his imagination when he was a schoolboy. The house was shaped like an L, and the oldest part had been built from the ruins of a despoiled abbey. It was empty when the McCunes arrived. Local people said it was haunted. A child had died in the house, and a man had suffered a nervous breakdown. It was an imposing, if dilapidated, piece of architecture, but in the winter a bone-chilling wind whistled right through it. The house was so cold that Maggie tells in her book of warming butter for toast by the coal fire in the drawing room. But with six bedrooms, it was more than big enough for what would become a family of six - Jennie was born in 1967 and Johnny in 1970 - and Julian had to have it. He had already invested his inheritance in a franchise he planned to set up in North Yorkshire for a firm marketing closed-circuit-television monitoring systems. Charmed by Julian’s manners, the titled owners of Cowling Hall agreed to rent it to the McCunes for the nominal sum of six pounds a week.

A number of Aysgarth old boys still lived in the area, and these former classmates helped the McCunes settle into North Yorkshire’s county set. Wensleydale is the heart of James Herriot country, a misty green landscape of ancient stone villages and black-and-white cows that occupies a large place in the sentimental imagination of England. Bunny hunted and fished in the area’s magnificent forests and streams; Maggie organized cricket teas and was elected to the local cancer research committee. There were ponies for the children: Maggie saw a moral purpose in such outdoor pursuits. ‘Ponies are such good discipline,’ she told me once. ‘When you come back from riding, you can’t just think about yourself. You have to brush down the horse.’ And there were the all-important public schools. After attending the local primary, Emma became a weekly boarder at Polam Hall in Darlington. Emma is positively radiant in photographs from these years, her cheeks freckled and ruddy as she poses in front of Cowling Hall or astride her pony, Misty.

Julian and Maggie were a popular couple. If Julian had one talent - and by all accounts, it was an unusual talent in a place as rigid and class-bound as North Yorkshire in the 1960s - it was for striking up friendships with people of wildly different backgrounds. ‘Julian was a thorough gentleman,’ Peter Gilbertson, an old schoolmate from Aysgarth, reminisced many years later. ‘He could go into any worker’s cottage or any stately home with his boots on and his spaniels at his heels, and he’d be fine. He’d put two bottles on the table and say, “Right! We’re having a party.”’ Among their close friends, the McCunes counted Bedale’s local squire and his wife, the doctor and the vicar. Maggie, who had been raised Catholic, converted to the Church of England. Julian, whose political views Gilbertson describes as ‘conservative - very conservative’, became the treasurer of the local Conservative Association. The genteel McCune façade was impeccable, and Emma’s father seems to have felt that this really ought to have been enough. Like so many upper-middle-class public schoolboys of the period, he had been educated to serve the empire. He really had no other skills. After nearly twenty years abroad, he was at first baffled, then angry, to learn that in the Britain to which he had returned his social graces and his old school tie would not by themselves translate into a sizeable income. As Maggie later wrote, his indifference to work, easy to overlook in India, was harder to ignore in Britain. When his security franchise failed to prosper, he went to work for a cousin selling farm equipment to large landowners. After a year or so, the cousin fired him. Julian never discussed business matters with Maggie, and he did not tell her when he lost his job. Nor did he look for a position he considered beneath him. Instead, he pretended he was going off to work each day. After saying good-bye to her and the children, he would drive to a nearby river, park his car, and sit in it reading newspapers. Maggie never guessed that he was unemployed until his cousin finally phoned her to say he had fired Julian more than a year earlier for being ‘bone-idle, a scrounger, and a liar’.

When Maggie confronted him, Julian acted as if he were above worrying about money, the opinions of others or even the law. He was arrested for drunken driving. He took up with a woman who lived in the local village. He was taken to court in Leeds for debt. He continued to come home with expensive presents that Maggie had no idea how he bought. Then he was charged with using his position as a treasurer of the local Conservative Association to steal Tory funds. When a judge asked Maggie why her husband had not appeared with her in court the day the two of them were summoned for failing to pay the rent at Cowling Hall, she had to tell him that Julian was too busy fishing for salmon on the river Tweed. In 1975 local bailiffs evicted the McCune family from Cowling Hall. Maggie and the children went to live in a cottage on the grounds of Aysgarth School; Julian retreated to a crofter’s hut high in the Dales, where he found occasional work as a farm labourer. Emma was ten when the family broke up. ‘Her childhood ended there,’ her mother writes.

The very night Maggie discovered that her husband was having an affair with another woman, she happened to be reading one of Emma’s favourite childhood stories, Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘Thumbelina’. The tale of a tiny girl rescued by a swallow from having to marry a mole, then flown to the warm lands of the south, where she became a princess, must have recalled to the McCunes the magical days in Assam, before they were exiled back ‘Home’. As their troubles mounted in England, perhaps it was only natural that the family should recall their years in India as a time and place in which they had been free to be the aristocrats that Julian, at least, felt himself to be. After a few drinks, Julian was wont to regale the local pubs about how, in India, he had been able to take the law into his own hands and do as he pleased. He loved to tell the story of how he had got himself out of jail after accidentally hitting a sacred cow with his car in Calcutta. He never could get used to how the roguish behaviour that his fellow expatriates had found so entertaining in India met with disapproval in England. When he invited the Yorkshire policemen who had caught him driving drunk to join him for a brandy before their court appearance, an English judge was not amused.

It was not Julian’s assumption of superiority that bothered his Yorkshire friends. Imperialism had not gone out of fashion in that part of the world. People did not mind if Julian complained about missing his Indian servants at the same time as he boasted about having ‘given service to the colonies’. They didn’t care if he saw it as his right to live like a lord. After all, some of his old school friends were lords. No, it was not Julian’s pretensions that set him apart from the society in which he found himself. It was his inability to maintain them. ‘I just think he was born too late,’ Gilbertson said sadly. ‘He should have been born forty years earlier and with a hell of a lot of money’ In the end, much of it did come down to money. To Maggie’s intense anger and humiliation, Julian pleaded for leniency at his embezzlement trial on the grounds that he stole to finance his wife’s extravagance. The two were divorced in January 1976. A few weeks later Julian killed himself.

Emma, who was eleven, was visiting the city of York the day it happened. Her father had never stopped seeing her. Indeed, he was the more playful of the McCune parents, forever taking the children out for a ride or a shooting expedition while Maggie fretted over how to buy groceries. That weekend he had invited Emma to go to the horse races with him, but she decided to go to York with her sister instead. She later told friends how much she regretted not going with him that day. She said she always wondered if she might have saved his life. With Julian’s death, the days of pony school and ballet lessons were truly over. Maggie and the children entered a period of their lives as grim and cheerless as the bleakest Yorkshire winter. Maggie, who had not worked outside the house during her marriage, embarked on a heroic struggle to support all four children. For a while, she had to pump petrol at the local service station to make ends meet. At last she found a job as a secretary to a headmaster at a state primary school in nearby Catterick Garrison. In her book, she chronicles the family’s series of moves from borrowed cottages to a grey cement council house before she and the children finally landed their own small semi-detached house in the village of Little Crakehall.

As the eldest child, Emma went from being the petted darling of Cowling Hall to becoming her mother’s second-in-charge. Maggie leaned on her to help with the housework and look after the other children. Emma had to learn to shop and cook and sew. She also had to console her mother, who was so depressed and angry and fearful that she came home from work each evening longing to crawl into bed. ‘After my father died, Emma was like my mother’s husband,’ her brother Johnny remembers. One of Emma’s friends from Kenya said that Emma told her she dreaded coming down to the kitchen in the mornings as a teenager to see the list of chores her mother would leave for her. The family worried constantly about money. None of the houses they lived in had central heating, not even the Little Crakehall cottage that Maggie bought and lovingly restored. The electricity was on a coin meter, and occasionally it went off because they did not have enough coins. It was so much like one of those fairy tales in which a princess is brought low that Emma might have lain in the freezing room she now shared with her sisters, dreaming of Thumbelina and a swallow who might spirit her away to somewhere warm where her rightful identity would be restored.

Despite their reduced circumstances, the McCunes remained part of the Yorkshire gentry. Maggie’s closest friends continued to invite her and the children to fancy dress balls at their Georgian estates. They and Maggie’s sister even helped with fees so that Emma could stay in public school, first at a Richmond convent, then at Godalming College in Kent. Maggie writes in her book that she hoped everything would come out all right if her children could just stay in the same schools and keep the same friends. ‘I think education is the most important gift you can give your children, don’t you?’ she told me. Emma was a hard worker, and she was good at organizing people and getting them to do what she wanted, but her strengths were not academic. Several of Emma’s friends from Yorkshire have grown up to be well-known writers, editors and artists; among this rich and clever group, Emma was considered a slow student. ‘Dippy’, ‘not very well read’, ‘not very articulate’ are some of the less charitable phrases they privately used to describe her intellect. Emma knew what they thought and resented it. Intensely competitive, she was frustrated and disappointed when her test scores were not as high as those of some of her friends.

She came off better outside school. Her set liked to show off, riding to hounds, holding extravagant parties and challenging each other as to who was the most adventurous. They all intended to live dangerously; reckless behaviour was part of what they regarded as their aristocratic sensibility. (Typical of the epic tone was a young man who rented the entire town cinema so that he and his friends could watch the 1948 movie Scott of the Antarctic over and over again. He went on to become a UN ambassador and to write several books about Arctic exploration.) This was an arena in which Emma shined. Even as a teenager, she loved hearing people gasp at her latest exploit. At an age when most people want only to fit in, she strove for glamour. Unlike her strait-laced mother, who favoured straight skirts and wore her hair neatly pulled back, Emma loved dramatic costumes with big hats and lots of jewellery. Once when she couldn’t afford to buy a gown for a grand party, she made one for herself out of black plastic bin liners. After passing through a gawky stage, she blossomed into a long-legged beauty, with pale freckled skin and a slow, seductive manner of speech. A classmate at the Convent of the Assumption school in Richmond remembers the entrance Emma made at a party when she was about sixteen. ‘Emma arrived wearing a striking black-and-white dress she’d made, and long evening gloves. The dress was long and straight. Everyone else was wearing conventional ball dresses, and no one could take their eyes off Emma. Our duckling had become a swan.’

Still, Emma knew that in clubby North Yorkshire she would always be her father’s daughter. Behind the admiring glances lay pity. The condescension stung. North Yorkshire is a place with long memories. The sound one most often hears in its pubs and mansions and brick Georgian hotels is the deep ticking of grandfather clocks. Emma’s school friends all remember hearing the gossip about Maggie and Julian. More than twenty years later I had no trouble finding neighbours who recalled every detail of Julian’s disgrace. ‘Their father’s downfall was quite a scandal,’ said one of Emma’s friends. ‘It must have been very painful for them to have stayed there.’ None of the McCunes stayed in Yorkshire any longer than they had to. Maggie herself moved to London as soon as her youngest child went off to boarding school.

When I first met Maggie in 1997, I asked how she thought her husband’s suicide had affected Emma. She paused. We were having lunch at a restaurant near St Paul’s Cathedral, where Maggie then worked as a secretary to the registrar. I was interviewing her for a magazine article about Emma. Maggie comes across in person as rather shy and reticent; several times in her book, she mentions moving through her life as if it were ‘a strange dream’. That day she was particularly reserved. She had already warned me that she did not want to talk about Julian. ‘I think it made her less materialistic,’ she said finally of his death, and she made it clear that the subject was closed. Some of Emma’s friends think Julian’s suicide might have helped create a split in Emma’s psyche between the sensuality and freedom she linked with her father and abroad, and the discipline and frugality she associated with her mother and England. Though as an adult Emma seldom talked about her father, she knew that in Yorkshire she would always be the girl whose father started out as an empire-builder and died living like a tramp in a crofter’s cottage. ‘She had a lot to hide, and she hid it well,’ said one childhood friend. ‘She knew everyone would always know, but no one would ever say anything.’ Whatever the reason, by the time Emma was offered a place to study art and art history at Oxford Polytechnic in 1982, Africa already beckoned to her.