Читать книгу Blow by Blow: The Story of Isabella Blow - Tom Sykes - Страница 15

When Issie left Heathfield, she spent the summer working at Laura Ashley, where, as her shop-floor colleague Phil Athill recalls:

She was utterly incapable of measuring the materials we were selling and gave people as many metres as they liked. Likewise wallpaper – anyone asking for advice as to how many rolls they needed for a certain space was in deep trouble and I can imagine that ‘Laura Ashley’ is a black name to this day with most of the customers who fell on us.

From Laura Ashley in Sloane Street to her mother’s flat at 17 Cadogan Square is a short 10-minute walk. But for Isabella there was a problem getting inside. Her mother, as her friend Charlotte Greville remembered, treated her ‘like a child’ and refused to give her a key to the flat.

When Isabella caught pneumonia, her mother offered to take care of her, but was then called out of the country. Hearing of this situation, her father’s sister, Aunt Rosie, invited Issie to convalesce with her at Balbair, their cosy Highland house next to the river Beauly, 10 miles from Inverness in the Highlands.

Evelyn was never once invited to any of Rosie’s homes, but Issie jumped at the chance, keen to spend some time with Rosie’s husband, Lord Shimi Lovat, her beloved ‘Uncle Shimi’.

Lord Lovat had become a legend for his exploits in the Second World War. He had been a leading figure in the Commandos, and an inspirational leader

Lovat sacked Evelyn Waugh from the Commandos – and was satirised by Waugh in his brilliant Sword of Honour trilogy about the war.

At D-Day, Shimi had led his Commandos on the first wave at Sword Beach in Normandy, armed only with his sporting Winchester rifle. Accompanying him was his 21-year-old personal piper Bill Millin. To encourage his men, Lovat ordered Millin to play ‘The blue bonnets from over the border’. The Germans ignored Millin, thinking him a lunatic transvestite. It was an exploit worthy of Hollywood, and in 1962 Darryl Zannuk produced The Longest Day, in which Lovat is played by Peter Lawford.

Lovat was famously handsome and vain. It was said that he would admire the reflection of his beauty in the silver cutlery.

In the mid-1960s, Uncle Shimi had suffered a series of heart attacks. Afflicted by that perennial fear of the British upper classes, the payment of death duties, he had made over the Lovat estates, which stretched across 165,000 acres of Scotland from the east to west coast, to his eldest son Simon, Master of Lovat and Isabella’s first cousin.

Isabella was to develop a close and loving relationship with her aunt and uncle, and they with her. When out walking with Uncle Shimi, he would ask her to be silent and then name all the birds that were singing. In the House of Lords, Uncle Shimi had urged potential explorers to stop irritating ‘Nessie’, the Loch Ness Monster in which he professed to believe.

Before traveling up to Inverness to stay with her aunt and uncle, Isabella found time, despite her pneumonia, to have her hair frizzed to look ‘more Fraser’. During her childhood, the Lovats’ youngest son Andrew Fraser had once stayed at Doddington to go to a local ball. On his return after the ball, the tipsy Andrew had demolished a stretch of post and rail fencing in his car, but what Issie really remembered was his frizzy hair.

Flora Fraser remembers meeting Issie on her first trip to Inverness:

She was staying with Uncle Shimi and Aunt Rosie at Balblair and Uncle Shimi was tickled pink by her, especially when she asked for crème de menthe to put on her porridge. I have an image of her hearty laughter at a picnic up the glen. Huge pale eyes, pale hair and scarlet mouth, nursing a bloody Mary in a tartan mug. She was recovering from pneumonia, so she had a Fraser hunting rug hung round her shoulders.

Benjie Fraser remembered his first meeting with Issie during this stay. It was at Kiltarlity church during the midnight mass Christmas Eve service. As the youngest member of the Fraser clan, he had the task of taking around the collection plate in the church. Dressed as a punk in his neon green jeans and leopard stripes and a nose ring, he passed Issie, who whispered to him, ‘I hope you’re not keeping any of that for yourself?’

Uncle Shimi, Aunt Rosie and the rest of the extended Fraser clan were to be emotional rocks for Isabella throughout her life. They became a surrogate family, which made it even harder to bear when, later, they were engulfed in tragedy themselves.