Telling Tales: The Fabulous Lives of Anita Leslie By Penny Perrick

For shame. A mere ten months after being sacked from taking Denis O’Brien’s shilling at The Sunday Independent for book reviews, I am now back in saddle with a book review in today’s Sunday Times, thus taking Rupert Murdoch’s shilling. I’m still waiting for The Guardian to come knocking.

Telling Tales: The Fabulous Lives of Anita Leslie

By Penny Perrick

(Lilliput Press, €20 p/b)

The Anglo-Irish Leslie clan are nowadays best known as the purveyors of stately pile Castle Leslie, which entered the wider public consciousness when the wedding of Paul McCartney and Heather Mills took place there in 2002. But the Co. Monaghan estate, Glaslough, has been in the family since 1665.

  Anita Leslie (1914-1985) was the eldest child, and only daughter, of Shane Leslie and his American wife, Marjorie Ide. That made her the elder sister of perhaps more well-known figures Jack (1916-2016), Ireland’s most famous octogenarian dance music aficionado, and Desmond (1921-2001), variously Spitfire pilot, electronic music pioneer, novelist, UFO enthusiast and grand-scale womaniser.

  Jonathan Swift, a regular visitor, wrote: Here I am in Castle Leslie/With rows of books upon the shelves/Written by the Leslies/All about themselves, and in this respect Anita followed the family tradition, as a prolific producer of anodyne but not terribly well-researched biographies of her famous relatives, among whom numbered cousins Winston Churchill and sculptress Clare Sheridan. However, her subjects also included Rodin, Francis Chichester and Madame Tussaud, and she authored several volumes of autobiography.

  Penny Perrick, a former fashion editor for Vogue and columnist for The Sun and The Times, does much to generate sympathy for her privileged and somewhat ditzy subject, who, according to her publisher, ‘never quite got the hang of spelling and punctuation’. The Leslie children - and, as a girl, Anita in particular - were woefully neglected by their parents. Shane, an Irish nationalist and Catholic convert (which did nothing to curb his philandering) seems to have had little interest in having children. Anita wrote: ‘I think we realised fairly early that our own father did not exactly dislike us – he would merely have preferred us not to have been born.’ Similarly, Marjorie ‘regarded schools as useful establishments, like kennels, where you could plonk your children when you wanted to travel…and where you could remove them when you thought that their company might be amusing for awhile.’ The worst of these ‘kennels’ was the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Roehampton: books other than school books were prohibited, and Anita had to hide a copy of Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield up a chimney.

  There followed a stint at a finishing school in Paris, the horrors of the debutante season, and attempts at acting. But Anita, although tall and attractive, acknowledged: ‘An odd streak in me remained resentful of any attempt to cultivate the art of alluring the opposite sex.’ She subsequently wrote to Shane that she never wanted to marry, ‘although I might make quite an intelligent mistress – I don’t mind sacrificing my body but not my freedom.’ Eventually, in 1937, she made a disastrous first marriage to a penniless Russian aristocrat émigré, Paul Rodzianko – the only explanation for which seems to be that it was done to get back at Marjorie.

  World War 2 was when Anita came into her own, and could be said to be the only time in her life when she knew what to do with herself, or made herself useful to others. Initially, she enlisted in the Mechanised Transport Corps and trained as an ambulance driver to get away from Paul - ‘Only I could invent this way of running away from a husband.’ Although pursued by Paul, who finally granted her a divorce in 1948, she served in Egypt, Syria (where she edited a troops’ newspaper), Italy and France, and became the only woman to win both the Desert Star and the Croix de Guerre.

  The war brought several affairs, which became quite messy, and at one point she declared that she wanted to marry two men: Australian Colonel Philip Parbury, who later jilted her, and Colonel Peter Wilson, who fathered her first child, Tarka. In 1949 she married Commander Bill King, with whom she raised Tarka and their own daughter, Leonie, although Wilson continued to live near Oranmore Castle in Galway, which Marjorie had bought for Anita after the war.

  Much of her later life was preoccupied with the vicissitudes of maintaining the two draughty, leaky, dilapidated castles, and a flat in London, as well as the horses and hunting associated with the Ascendancy classes. She also became the classic ‘mother-in-law from hell’ for Tarka’s wife Jane, micro managing her children’s lives. Indeed, Anita was not without her dark side, and Perrick does not shy away from recounting her virulent pre-war anti-semitism. She regarded Jews, along with intellectuals and the professional classes, as ‘clever’ – not a compliment to someone who insisted that everything should be ‘delightful and amusing’.

  In some ways, the book’s style can mirror that of its subject: it contains no index or footnotes, and will therefore be of little use as an academic biography. However, it is a readable account of a life that, if not exactly well lived, was rarely boring, and a time when, as they say, one half didn’t know how the other half lived.

The Clash At Trinity

I went with my school friend Rory. The beginning of 5^th Year, the ‘77/’78 academic year, post Inter Cert. We were the only punks in the school. He still liked The Rolling Stones, I still liked Bob Dylan. Our classmates were welcome to their Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd albums, as far as I was concerned. I took their ‘punks can’t play’ sneering and condescending jibes as a badge of honour.  They couldn’t go and see their favourite bands in the Exam Hall or Junior Common Room in Trinity. Interestingly, by the time of The Clash’s ’78 gig the same time the following year in The Top Hat, a few of them were in attendance.

I can’t remember what I wore. I was more interested in the music, the phenomenon, than the fashion – even if fashion was part of the phenomenon. Getting the look right came later. Up until then, most info came from the NME, which I’d been reading religiously every week since Christmas ’76. There was also a great Dublin fanzine called Heat – they had a hagiographic review of The Clash’s first album in an issue before the Trinity gig, and an extensive and even more hagiographic feature/live review it.

I’d been to a few concerts previously (how come my parents let me out at night at that young age, when most of my contemporaries would have been safely at home?): the post Wilko, John Mayo Dr. Feelgood at the National Stadium; Gary Glitter at The Carlton cinema; I seem to recall that a nascent Boomtown Rats had even played at our school hall. I still regard The Clash at the Exam Hall, Trinity College, on October 21^st, 1977, as my first real gig. Or rather, the night I discovered what all the fuss was about, what rock’n’roll could do to you. There’ve been great gigs since, but you never forget the first time.

Specific memories of the gig? We went to the first show (clearly, I must still have been required to be home by a certain time). I stood in the front row, stage left. All the songs were short, less than three minutes, guitar solos a rarity, Mick Jones and Paul Simenon as active as front men as Joe Strummer, a three pronged attack spearheaded by the singer. The one song longer than three minutes, which had a guitar solo, was the cover of Junior Murvin’s ‘Police and Thieves’.  During the instrumental break Jones and Simenon stood on either side of the drum riser, and then jumped off together: it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. At the end, I jumped on stage and asked Mick Jones for his plectrum, which he immediately handed to me – before I was unceremoniously pushed back into the crowd by a member of student security.

The thing that struck me most, even much more than the music and the performance, was how there seemed to be no barrier, literal or metaphorical, between band and audience. It seemed to me that there were as many people on stage as in the audience, and the band didn’t mind. No more idols, no more hero-worship. This was the new ethic: we were all in this together. Hence, why so many people in attendance went home and woke up the next morning, thinking about how they could form their own bands.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!

What a sad fuck Brian Boyd is

What a sad fuck Brian Boyd is. The kind of smart-arsed idiot who, when asked if he's from the north of Ireland or the south of Ireland, says he's from the East of Ireland. How witty! So he used to go to Labour Party meetings in London in the late '80s? Bit of a fledging Blairite, then? Maybe he should stick to bigging up U2. Like Bono, he sold out long ago - if he ever had anything to sell out of.

Donald Clarke on music? Mr. Boyd on politics? It's like the staff of an old secondary school: a degree in anything allows you to teach anything. The Irish Times must be on its last legs.

http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/brian-boyd-jeremy-corbyn-islington-labour-and-me-1.3060698

Edit

It's So Funny Because It's True #2

http://waterfordwhispersnews.com/2015/05/08/the-5-best-amy-huberman-articles-on-the-irish-independent-today/

Independent: it isn't.

It's Funny Because It's True

It's so true:

http://waterfordwhispersnews.com/2017/01/03/irish-independent-confirms-amy-huberman-has-won-9-oscars-for-new-rte-tv-drama/

Independent News And Media takes another hit.

Independent New and Media Chiefs In Showdown At Montrose.

Ah, the poor paranoid things. Only the biggest media organisation in Ireland is being picked on and discriminated against.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/ireland/inm-chiefs-in-showdown-at-montrose-6mkhqrj9f

Rise Like A Phoenix From The Ashes

For any of you who missed it (which I suspect is quite a lot), here's the tiny piece in The Phoenix which The Sunday Independent got all hot and bothered about, and which cost me my book reviewing gig of 18 years standing there. What a paranoid organisation.

THE PHOENIX FEBRUARY 10, 2017

IRISH TIMES literary correspondent

Eileen Battersby would not have been

displeased at her newspaper’s review last

autumn of her first novel, Teethmarks

on My Tongue, penned by Katherine

A Powers – “remarkably accomplished

work … excellence … dark wit” and so

on. She will also be pleased the Sunday

Independent has chosen, so far, not to

publish a review commissioned over three

months ago.

The review by Desmond Traynor, an

occasional reviewer at the Sindo, is less

complimentary than Powers’s critique and

describes the heroine, Helen’s chronicle

as “self-involved and repetitious to the

point that it resembles listening to someone

running off at the mouth with a bad case

of logorrhea”. There are other, more

withering comments in Traynor’s review

but mercifully the Sindo has failed to

publish it.

Sindo literary editor Madeleine Keane

declined to comment when Goldhawk

innocently inquired why the review had

not yet been published. But it seems editor

Cormac Bourke decided not to. There

was a time when the Sindo would jump

at the chance to dish it to those IT snobs.

Is Bourke’s reticence part of the Sindo’s

new and less provocative approach to rival

media?