The Holy Father approached me. I walked towards him and fell on both knees … he held out his hand for me to take and I just noticed the ring, as I kissed it, to have a large dark stone encircled with lesser gems, not diamonds … All the while he smiled in the sweetest, kindliest way so that I immediately fell head over heels in love with him. [The Pope handed him a ‘not very expensive’ medal.] In turning to leave I noticed a cardinal slip into his hand, held out behind with desperately waggling fingers, another little envelope for the next guest.
Humour is ever-present. Occasionally you are not quite sure whether you are laughing with him or at him. In June 1942 he writes of his friend and sometime lover, James Pope-Hennessy (the royal biographer later killed by ‘rough trade’):
Jamesy said he wanted to sleep with a woman, and expressed misgivings. I said it was as easy as falling off a log. The moment these words were out of my mouth I realised how discouraging they must have sounded.
In 1944 Lady Sibyl Grant, the châtelaine of Pitchford Hall, Shropshire, looked ‘like a clairvoyant preserved in ectoplasm’. In 1946 Lady Hinchinbrooke was ‘like a very jolly able-bodied seaman’. In 1947 escorting Sibyl Colefax through a theatre crowd was ‘rather like bowling a hoop’. In 1948 the monde of Chips Channon and Peter Coats (nicknamed Petticoats) was no more that of Doreen Colston-Baynes ‘than the Crazy Gang would be Queen Mary’s’. In 1949 Christopher Warner, a tall, dark and handsome friend of Lees-Milne’s future wife, was ‘a tea-leaf-fortune-teller’s delight’. James Pope-Hennessy figures again in a comical diary entry of October 1949:
Jamesy amused me by telephoning. ‘You know the picture of an 18th-century house which I am leaving to you in my will?’ ‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘Well, I am ringing you up to say that I have sold it and it is in Appleby’s shop window if you want to buy it.’
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.