A Stone in the Shade, by Violet Powell – review

Evelyn Waugh once recalled the anguish with which he greeted Edith Sitwell’s announcement that ‘Mr Waugh, you may call me Edith.’ I experienced similar misgivings on the occasion, some years ago, that Lady Violet Powell suggested that I might like to call her ‘Violet’. It was not that Lady Violet — Violet — made the least fuss about her title (‘as unswanky a Lady as could be imagined’, Kingsley Amis once declared); merely that she was the relict of a man whose eye for the social niceties made Lady Catherine de Bourgh look like a bumbling amateur. It was as if George Orwell, knocked into at some Fitzrovian party, had invited you to call him ‘Eric’.

A Stone in the Shade, 15 chapters’ worth of autobiography left unfinished on her death in 2002, takes its title from the vantage point to which Violet would retire, sketchbook in hand, in the course of foreign holidays. It begins in the early 1960s when, with the death of her father-in-law unexpectedly freeing up capital — ‘Now you’ll have to worry about surtax’ was the bank manager’s parting shot — she and her husband Anthony Powell were able to contemplate the idea of overseas travel. By chance Colonel Powell’s obsequies coincided with the arrival of a brochure advertising Swan’s Hellenic Tours. Athens, Beirut, Portugal and Morocco followed in quick succession.

It would be wrong to call these agreeable Mediterranean jaunts — copiously illustrated from the sketchbooks — voyages of discovery, for the Powells take social baggage with them, and the meanest rock on the road to Petra usually conceals a vacationing stockbroker that ‘Tony’ messed with at Eton. ‘It was said in my grandmother’s time that if one sat outside Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo everybody one had ever known would pass by,’ Violet writes at one point.