BOOK: Frances Osborne, "The Bolter"

Frances Osborne: The Bolter. London: Virago, 2008. 9781844084807. xiv + 319 pp.

Sackville is a name that, to me, will always be associated first and foremost with hobbits, but I'll do my best to banish this association from my mind for the rest of this post. The Bolter is a biography of Idina Sackville, whom I must have first heard of years ago as being one of the central figures of the “Happy Valley set”, a group of more or less rich white settlers living dissolute lives in 1920s and 1930s Kenya. She is mentioned, but not by name, in David Cannadine's Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, where we read on p. 441 that Joss Hay, the future Earl of Erroll, “married a twice-divorced woman in 1923”; so the first time I heard her name must have been in the two books about the murder of Lord Erroll that I read in 2005. In any case, I'm glad that I have now read The Bolter; the louche glamour of the Happy Valley is not the only interesting part of Idina's life, and there seems to have actually been a rather nice person behind all that scandalous reputation.

*

Idina's background was more impressive than I had expected (well, not that I had had any definite expectations one way or another). Her father was a somewhat impecunious aristocrat who could trace his family back to the Norman conquest (and one of whose ancestors gave his name to the state of Delaware; pp. 17–18);* her mother, by contrast, was from a family who got rich in the railroad business only a couple generations earlier. Her parents divorced around 1900, when this was still considered highly scandalous. Her mother spent lavishly in support of a curious combination of causes: theosophy, women's suffrage, and the career of a Labour politician named George Lansbury. Idina herself, as a young woman, was briefly involved in the suffragist movement (p. 33).

[*Another famous relative on the Sackville side was the writer Vita Sackville-West, who was a second cousin of Idina's; p. 287.]

Idina's first husband, Euan Wallace, was by all accounts handsome, charming and very rich. At first it seemed like a perfect life of non-stop partying in their seven-floor house in London (p. 41) and the sprawling country house they were building in Scotland (p. 43); but then WW1 broke out and they were separated for long periods while Euan was at the front. Towards the end of the war Idina was ill for several months and Euan found himself new company to party with, friends of her younger sister (pp. 85–6); soon he was clearly more interested in one of them, Barbie Lutyens (daughter of the famous architect), than in his wife. Idina, for her part, also got herself a lover and wanted to marry him. Euan agreed to a divorce, but with it Idina lost not only access to her husband's money but also to their two sons (pp. 106–7).

Idina and her new husband, Charles Gordon, moved to Kenya where life was cheaper and the British government was handing out farmland to WW1 veterans through a sort of lottery (p. 122). Charles won a big plot of land and they started building a farm there, but it soon turned out that their personalities were too poorly matched: she was too driven for him, he was too laid-back for her (p. 127).

They divorced in 1921, after about two years of marriage. Idina moved to London and threw herself into an impressively hedonistic lifestyle, had numerous lovers and became sufficiently notorious that a thinly disguised version of her even appeared as the protagonist of a bestselling novel (p. 134). After a few years, she met Joss Hay, who became her third husband; he was from an old Scottish noble family but had even less money than Idina (p. 139). Their marriage was considered scandalous by the standards of the time, partly because Idina had already been divorced twice before and partly because he was ten years younger than her. On the positive side, neither of them particularly expected the other one to be faithful, which probably improved the prospects that their marriage might last (p. 140).

They moved to Kenya, bought some land and started building a farm. Contrary to my expectations, Idina took farming quite seriously (p. 149); but she and Joss also hosted numerous parties, ranging from respectable ones for distant acquaintances to much wilder ones for a closer circle of friends, where drugs and alcohol flowed freely and people drew lots to decide who would get to sleep with whom that night (p. 157). This sort of lifestyle even had political implications: the white settlers in Kenya wanted to convince the British government to let them have a bigger say in running the colony, but this would be a hard sell if they “were seen to be a bunch of wife-swapping sybarites” (p. 159) :))) Gossip about “the Happy Valley” even reached the foreign press (p. 173). But what was perhaps even more troublesome for Idina and Joss was that they were spending a lot more money than they could afford (p. 161).

Eventually, Joss left Idina for another woman (and, in the process, got himself horsewhipped by her jealous husband; p. 185). Bankers foreclosed on Idina's farm and she moved to England where, among other things, she had an affair with Oswald Mosley (p. 186; that was a few years before he became notorious by starting his own fascist movement). In 1930 she got married for the fourth time and moved back to Kenya with her new husband, one Donald Halderman, and started yet another farm; but not being the wife-swapping type, he took to threatening her lovers with a gun, and she left him after three years (p. 198).

Idina managed to briefly re-establish contact with one of her sons, David, whom she had not seen for something like fifteen years. By now he was a student at Oxford, keenly moved by the injustices of the world and committed to a kind of christian socialism; but in the end he decided to study ancient Greek history rather than become a priest (p. 223).

Idina returned to Kenya and a life of partying, although by then “the old Happy Valley set were sinking into a haze of drugs and alcohol” (p. 226). She travelled to Rwanda with her friend, the travel writer Rosita Forbes (p. 227), and to Greece with her son David, who had by then graduated (p. 230). She had a few more boyfriends, but it was not until 1939 that she married for the fifth (and last time), to an RAF pilot named Vincent Soltau (p. 234). Only half a year later, they were separated by the outbreak of WW2: he was posted to Egypt and travel between there and Kenya was not exactly easy in wartime; but Idina still cared for his two children from a previous marriage (p. 276). They divorced at the end of the war (p. 279).

Idina lost a lot of people during the war. Joss, her third husband, was murdered in 1941 (the case was never quite cleared up); less than a month later, Euan, her first husband, died of cancer, aged just forty-eight and with a promising political career; later that year, Alice de Janzé, an old friend of Idina's, committed suicide (pp. 239–42). Idina had a brief but happy reunion with her other son, Gerard, when he was posted to Mombasa as a pilot in 1943*; but after a few months, he went missing on one of his airplane missions (p. 248). David, meanwhile, was parachuted into Greece to help its resistance movement, and got killed by the Germans (p. 250).

[*Leading to one of the funniest passages of the book, when a senior officer upbraided Gerard for being seen in the company of such a notorious woman: “ ‘she's old enough to be your mother.’ / ‘She is my mother,’ was the reply.” (P. 246.) :)))]

After all these shocks, Idina had a nervous breakdown (p. 252), followed soon afterwards by womb cancer (p. 256). She managed to re-establish relations with her daughter, who by then was a grown-up woman herself. Idina's circumstances in the post-war period were getting somewhat straitened, so that she couldn't even afford to travel to England every year. Despite an operation, her cancer returned; she died in 1955, aged sixty-two, and was buried in Kenya.

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This book was a very pleasant read, and from its style I was not surprised to find that the author's next book was a novel. At the same time, she never goes so far as to invent whole conversations and the like, as some biographers do; her narrative always sticks to facts such as could be found in her sources. It was also nice to see how well-researched this book was. The author is a great-granddaughter of Idina's (though her eldest son David), so she could get much material from all sorts of extended relatives; she interviewed people who had once known Idina, as some of them were still alive in the early 00s when she was researching this book; she even visited one of Idina's old farms, now inhabited by a large Kenyan family (p. 270).

ToRead:

• Annie Brassey: A Voyage in the ‘Sunbeam’. A book by Idina's maternal grandmother, who spent a long time sailing in the South Seas, together with the whole family. Mentioned here on p. 19.
• Dorry Kennard: A Roumanian Diary (1918), a book “about her travels alone in Rumania” (p. 95). The author was a friend of Idina's.
• Michael Arlen: The Green Hat (1924). A novel whose protagonist is based on Idina; mentioned here on p. 134. It was also made into a movie starring Greta Garbo (p. 10).
• Rosita Forbes: Appointment in the Sun (1949). The author was a travel writer and a friend of Idina's; this book covers, among other things, a 1937 trip to Rwanda, on which Idina was also present (p. 227).
• James Aldridge: The Sea Eagle (1944). A novel “about a man fighting with the Greek guerrillas”, mentioned here on p. 253.
• Nancy Mitford: The Pursuit of Love; Love in a Cold Climate; Don't Tell Alfred. Three novels featuring a character nicknamed “the Bolter” and based on Idina (p. 9). This is also what the title of the present book refers to. But it strikes me as a bit unfair to Idina; sure, she bolted from some of her husbands, but some also bolted from her.