Bronwen Astor: Her Life and Times. Peter Stanford
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slightly more than that – a challenge.’ Erica made Bronwen believe that her wild eyes and strong bone structure could be assets for a model girl, but the same problem that had blocked her path as an actress-her height-also made it seem unlikely that she would succeed in a world where short women were the most highly prized. (Dawnay, for example, was a petite, curvaceous blond.) And there was also the issue of her squint.
Diana de Wilton was another who could see beyond such eventually minor details to glimpse an unconventional beauty in Bronwen. De Wilton in particular was struck by her mannerisms. ‘She had this way of standing and walking. She had poise. When I look at our student photographs she had a way of placing her hands and turning her head that I now see made her a natural for modelling.’
Back in London after the Christmas break, Erica and Bronwen might well have forgotten their dream had they not read of a competition for budding model girls in Vogue. It was a diversion, but, bored by their everyday lives, they went at it wholeheartedly and had their portfolios made up by a high street photographer in Kensington. It was, they knew, a million-to-one shot, and their number did not come up. Modelling was put to one side and there it might have remained but for a tragic accident which changed the course of Bronwen’s life.
Soon after Easter 1952 Erica Pickard was standing on the open platform of a London bus when it swung round a corner. She was reaching over to press the stop bell and lost her grip. She fell out on to the pavement, cracking her skull against the curb as she tumbled. She was rushed to St Bartholomew’s Hospital in a coma. Her friends and family kept up a vigil at her bedside, but three days later she died at the age of just twenty-two.
‘It had a devastating effect on all of us,’ says Diana de Wilton. ‘I can only liken its effect on our group to the effect of Princess Diana’s death on the whole nation. We were used to older people dying, but when someone young, someone you know dies, then you realise your own mortality for the first time.’ For Bronwen it went further. It thrust her overnight into adulthood and precipitated a complete re-evaluation of her life and beliefs.
She was distraught. Of the four friends, she and Erica had grown the closest in the year after leaving Central. ‘I went to the funeral at Golden Green crematorium. When the coffin disappeared behind the screen, I heard this unearthly scream. It took a while for me to realise that it had come from me. I had to go back to school to teach straight away afterwards. One day, six weeks later, at tea I saw this piece of cake on my plate and couldn’t remember taking it. That’s when I realised I had been on auto-pilot. It was as if I had suddenly come round from concussion.’
Physically it may only have taken her six weeks to get over the shock, but the mental turmoil caused by Erica’s death was to remain with her for many years, pushing her ever more in on herself as she struggled to work out what the tragedy had meant. ‘I hadn’t realised that death could be so sudden. I’d lived through the war. I knew that people died. Yet Erica’s death changed everything.’
In coping with her grief, Bronwen turned naturally to the Pickard family. They clutched her to their bosom and tried to persuade her to take over Erica’s London flat in Golders Green and to apply for Erica’s job as a way of escaping the horrors of Dorset. She was reluctant, unwilling to step into the dead girl’s shoes at this vulnerable moment. She had fallen out with the Torkingtons and, if she was to stay in teaching, would need to start looking for another job. Yet she wasn’t sure teaching was for her. She liked one-to-one encounters but hated the classroom. And at least at Croft House School the timetable had been relaxed. Elsewhere the very sides of teaching she disliked the most – the discipline, the regimentation – would loom larger.
More broadly, Erica’s death focused her attention on the monotony of her day-to-day life. Was this how she wanted to spend her time here, however long or short? If she died tomorrow, would she feel fulfilled? Or was she in danger of falling in, after a brief period of rebellion, with the plan mapped out for her by her own family?
She knew she had to make a decision but was unsure which way to turn. The catalyst came from an unexpected quarter. She was invited to dinner by her old tutor from Central, L. A. G. Strong. ‘I said the usual thing, “Why this, why Erica, what now?” And he said, “Why did she choose you as her best friend?” And it was as if a light was turned on. As we talked I mentioned our idea of being model girls. I began to realise that one way to cope with Erica’s death was to follow that dream. She had given me the courage and confidence to try it, she had made me think it was possible. It wasn’t so much that over dinner I thought, “Oh yes, I can be a model girl”; it was that he set me thinking about what inner qualities she had recognised in me and what I should now do with them.’
Much later she was to realise that living out their daydream was a form of grief therapy, a way of blocking out the unanswerable questions that had suddenly descended on her after Erica’s death. Ultimately it was those questions that initiated Bronwen’s conscious spiritual journey, for the loss of her friend touched directly – as no event in her hitherto short life had – on the spiritual dimension that she had long been aware of, but which she had kept carefully hidden away and separated from her student friends and her family. ‘I think my father realised, though we never talked about it. And Gwyneth. But my mother and Ann had no inkling and even if they did, they would have had no sympathy.’ To this day Ann remains resolutely sceptical about Bronwen’s religious experiences.
Bronwen had taken tentative steps to reveal this inner dimension to her friends, knowing that she could no longer keep it bottled up. Leading a double life was, she came to see, unsatisfying. Some of her crowd had been unreceptive. Others had noticed but could not follow it up. Diana de Wilton, for instance, vaguely noted Bronwen’s tendency, whenever performing a passage for voice-training at Central, to choose something spiritual, like a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem. Yet she was never taken into Bronwen’s confidence.
On the surface there were few other clues. As a student Bronwen drifted away from any sort of formal church attendance. What she had experienced, she convinced herself, had little to do with organised religion. But with Erica it was different. ‘From the very start, all my insights into this parallel world had been about love – ‘Only love matters” is what I had heard that first time at the birthday party when I was seven. And it was so painful when Erica died, that I thought I had to stop loving. But equally I knew I couldn’t harden my heart. For a while I just shut down. That was my way of coping.’
And she might have remained ‘shut down’, closed to this other world, perhaps for ever, had not her meeting with L. A. G. Strong prompted her to follow her heart. Having a go at modelling became a small part of what was ultimately a wider liberation and discarding of conventional restraints that helped to form her later self. It was the outward sign that something had changed within her, but she did not know quite what for another eight years. Modelling gave her the space to find out.
Although hitherto she had had little inclination for books, after Erica’s death Bronwen became an uninhibited and often daring reader, working her way through a constant stream of sometimes enlightening and some disappointing texts – history, fiction, science, religion, psychology. Occasionally in the course of her life she has come across a book that has changed the way she thinks or opened up another perspective. Having, by her own choice, missed out on a university education, she has taught herself through books.
She was introduced to the writings of Georgei Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1874–1949) and his sometime disciple Peter Demianovitch Ouspensky (1879–1947). Both had died recently and she was directed to them, casually, by someone she met at a party. ‘You can imagine what I was like at parties then, very intense, always wanting to talk about ideas and only interested in people if they had something interesting to say.’
In the late 1940s and early 1950s among a younger generation of readers reacting, it has subsequently been suggested, to the recent world war with an abnormal degree of introspection and an over-eager and sometimes naive search for alternative paths, Gurdjieff and Ouspensky achieved the sort of cult status later enjoyed by Indian mystics in the sixties. They were, for Bronwen and many others in that period, a revelation and a first introduction to psychology.
Both were Russian, though Gurdjieff had Greek parents. Both were fascinated by the