The Waterhouses lived in a grand house at 7 Wimpole Street, and Vidi and her sister lacked for nothing as they grew up. But Vidi was a rebel from an early age. As a young woman she became politicised by hearing accounts of appalling housing conditions in the East End of London, and began to help Dame Edith Ramsay, who was then doing pioneering work on this issue, along with Philip Toynbee and others. Vidi outraged her parents by selling furniture, mirrors and jewellery from her own bedroom, and giving the proceeds, along with much of her personal allowance, to housing projects in the East End. Later she caused more consternation by declaring that she was going to become an actress. There was a stand-off with Sir Herbert, and a compromise was eventually reached – she could go to RADA but only on condition she completed a more orthodox degree first. So she went to Somerville College in Oxford and did an English degree, and then on to RADA, where she gained a Gold Medal in her final year.
The greatest scandal, however, was yet to come. She had established herself as an actress, with a certain amount of success, both on stage and radio, when she met, and fell headlong in love with, Richard Gretton, an Oxford historian. Richard had written a successful three-volume series, A Modern History of the English People, which had made his reputation. But he also became one of the pioneering early writers of local history, having written an innovative work, The Burford Records.fn2 One of the unusual features of the romance was that Richard was in his fifties and Vidi was thirty years younger. But an even greater challenge was that Richard was already married – to Mary, another Oxford historian – and living a settled life in Burford. When it became clear that this was no passing affair, Richard eloped to Paris with Vidi in 1929, leaving chaos in his wake. Oxford barred him from ever holding a post in the university again, and Mary was devastated. The couple stayed in France, but the only work Richard could secure in Paris was as an occasional correspondent for the relatively liberal Manchester Guardian. Most of their living costs were met through Vidi’s familial wealth. My father and aunt were both born in Paris soon afterwards, and the affluent environs of their house near the Bois de Boulogne could not disguise the reality of being born ‘out of wedlock’ – then a serious social stigma.
A few years later Richard became seriously ill, and realising the best medical treatment was to be had in London not Paris, they returned to England in 1934, finding a house in Chalfont St Giles in Buckinghamshire, hoping this was far enough away from Oxford for the scandal not to follow them. Richard, by this stage, had developed stomach cancer and died in 1936, leaving Vidi effectively as a single mother, though one of independent means. The little family continued living at Hill House for three more years, but Vidi now felt very uncomfortable in the heart of conservative England. Any sympathy for the young widow was soon overtaken by vicious gossip when the story of her and Richard finally emerged, and life there became impossible.
Vidi started looking for somewhere more remote where they could live, far away from wagging tongues. Dody, her sister, lived in Aldeburgh (with her ‘companion’ Teresa – as such an arrangement was coyly termed in those days), and so had got to know Suffolk a little. In those days, years before the electrification of the railway and the subsequent commuterisation of Suffolk, it was still regarded as rather a dark county, untamed by the reach of the city, with overgrown hedgerows and many twisting lanes to explore. A world away from the suburban white fences of Surrey and Buckinghamshire. So, apparently, when Vidi saw a small photograph of the farmhouse for sale on the back of The Times, it was love at first sight. The price, for the Elizabethan farmhouse, barns and fifty acres of land, was just under £1,000. The 1930s was a period of extreme agricultural depression, and land prices were at historic lows. Vidi knew a bargain when she saw one, and snapped it up. My father loved the place the first time he set eyes on it; my aunt was completely horrified. She saw it as ‘uncivilised, wild and as far from London as it’s possible to be!’ – all aspects that delighted my father.
In time the place became a refuge for more than this small family. Vidi, appalled at how she had been treated as an unmarried mother herself, set up her own haven for ‘ladies in distress’. She encouraged unmarried young women who’d become pregnant, and had subsequently been thrown out by their own families, to come to the farmhouse as a sanctuary, for a few weeks or even months, some staying on long after the children were born. Later on, as well as supporting the rebuilding of the Catholic church in Hadleigh, she took up the cause of prison reform, and became a prison visitor. She’d been influenced by a book by a Catholic priest, The Company We Keep, which raised many questions about poor prison conditions in the 1940s. She wrote to the author, asking what she could do to help; the priest suggested she visit a young man in Chelmsford prison, who was in a bad state. His name was Gerald Caine, London Irish, Catholic. He’d been the getaway driver for an armed gang in London and had been sentenced to a long term. Vidi visited him, and they soon discovered a shared love of chess, among other things. On his eventual release a few years later, they got married, and Gerald came to live with her at the house in Suffolk. Another person seeking a fresh start, away from gossiping tongues. It is only as I’ve got older that I’ve begun to appreciate the magnificently unorthodox trajectory of my grandmother’s life – from the royal surgeon’s Wimpole Street residence to a cell in Chelmsford prison.
The Vidi I got to know as a child was already white-haired, bird-like, remote, and, though it wasn’t properly diagnosed until later, she already had Alzheimer’s. Gerald had left her so me years before, and so she now lived in the house alone. She spoke in what sounded to us like an impossibly posh accent from another age, and treated us with what seemed like Victorian formality. One day when our parents had (rather worryingly) left her to look after us for the afternoon, she insisted on cooking us sausages for lunch, even though she’d made us this meal an hour before. When my older brother explained we’d already eaten, her reply was imperious and sharp, an echo of Miss Havisham, as she snapped back: ‘I’m the lady of the house! And I decide when we’re having lunch, young man, do I make myself quite clear?’
Later my parents tried to explain to us that she’d ‘lost her memory’, a concept that was impossible to grasp for a child. When we lost things they could be found again, so there was always the sense that this loss of memory might just be a temporary state. It must have been much harder for my father, who was always very close to her. Years later he described playing chess with her – Vidi had always been an exceptionally skilful player, and curiously, long after other faculties had gone, she still was able to play chess with concentration. But on this day, towards the end of their game, Vidi had apparently told him: ‘You really must meet my son Mark, I think the two of you would get on terribly well.’
Although by this time – the early 1970s – she was clearly struggling, she had a fierce independence, and stubbornly refused to move out of the farmhouse. We would come over every Sunday to collect her for Mass. The house smelt musty and damp to us, and the pale green walls somehow were part of this too. In my mind the colour of the walls connected to an old Penguin edition of Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, which remained unfinished for years, on the small table by her chair in the sitting room. One Sunday, when my father was getting her ready to leave the house, I went through to the study with my brother, up the step past the ice skates and tennis racquets, relics from another era, and we found that the ceiling had collapsed. We ran back to tell Mark, and he thought we were just messing around, until we finally persuaded him to come and look. But the final straw was coming over one weekend and not finding her anywhere in the house. Eventually she was discovered sitting very calmly in the river at the end of the garden, completely unaware of how she’d got there, and suffering from hypothermia. At that point my parents knew that she couldn’t continue to live on her own any longer.