Bronwen Astor: Her Life and Times. Peter Stanford
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was born on 6 June 1930, delivered by caesarean by the family GP in the Catholic hospital of St John and St Elizabeth in London’s St John’s Wood. Her early years were dominated by Frederic Truby King, the New Zealand-born Dr Spock of the 1920s and 30s. Kathleen Pugh followed the methods he advocated in books like The Feeding and Care of Your Baby. Baby Bronwen was on a strict regime of four-hourly feeds, with nothing in between. Picking up the child and cuddling it was not recommended by Truby King in case it encouraged spoiling or over-attachment. ‘A Truby King baby,’ the master wrote of his own methods, ‘has as much fresh air and sunshine as possible. The mother of such a baby is not overworked or worried, simply because she knows that by following the laws of nature, combined with common sense, baby will not do otherwise than thrive.’
Kathleen Pugh was certainly not overworked since the bulk of practical child care fell on the family’s nanny. In spite of their progressive ideas, the Pughs – in line with the middle-class norms of the age – maintained a full complement of domestic help: a maid, a nursery nanny, a cleaner and a part-time gardener. When Bronwen was three, Bella Wells was taken on to look after her, leaving Kathleen Pugh free for most of the day.
Bronwen was not, her sister Ann recalls, a particularly attractive child. ‘She was all eyes, teeth and pigtails. When she was about four, she went off on her bicycle with my mother and when they came back my mother was very upset. Bronwen had had a bad fall. She had managed to pull the muscle at the side of her eye. It left her with a squint which later had to be corrected by surgery, but she still wore glasses.’ There were as yet few signs of her future career on the catwalks. She had to wear a patch over one lens of her glasses to strengthen her eye muscles and later she wore braces to pull her protruding teeth back into line.
She was also, Ann remembers, infuriating. ‘She was always very lively. She’d hide behind the door in the dining room and then when you went in for lunch leap out and say boo! Or else she’d be crawling under the table tickling your feet. She was always on the move, dressing up, play-acting, getting over-excited.’ Bella Wells’s memory is of a very determined three-year-old. ‘On the first day I arrived I took her out in her pram and she just kept saying, “Now can I get out? Now can I get out?” She wanted things her own way.’ One of Bronwen’s greatest delights as a small child was to watch the fire engines going down Hampstead High Street, bells ringing and lights flashing. Her earliest ambition was to be a fireman. It appealed to the theatrical side of her nature. ‘There was the drama of it all, I suppose, and that thing of rescuing people. It must always have been a part of my psyche.’
While Bella Wells was devoted to her charge, mother and daughter had from the start a difficult relationship. Kathleen Pugh’s regret at not having a boy was explicit and was overlaid by personal frustration. She had wanted to find something challenging to do outside the home but Bronwen’s arrival delayed the day when she could seek once again the sense of self-worth that she had enjoyed as a volunteer nurse during the war. She was an intelligent woman: to her husband’s breakfast-table lessons in Welsh she would add her own questions to the children on mental arithmetic. They all learnt early how to keep accounts of how they had spent their pocket money.
Kathleen had finished school at sixteen and, with her staff leaving her with too little to occupy her time in the Hampstead house, she grew bored and occasionally, Ann remembers, impatient with her youngest daughter. Though she had forward-thinking ideas about women’s choices – she had her own car at a time when two vehicles in the family was unusual – Kathleen was by nature a reserved and private person. She mixed with neighbours but had few close friends among them; she found some of the more academic residents of Pilgrims Lane intimidating. She warned her youngest daughter against Dr Donald Winnicott, an eminent child psychiatrist (and the greatest critic of the Truby King method of child-rearing) who lived in the same road, for fear, Bronwen suspects, ‘that he might carry out some strange experiments on us’.
Rather than her reserve throwing her back on her role as a mother, however, it appeared only to exacerbate Kathleen Pugh’s restlessness. Sometimes she could be fun. She taught her youngest daughter to fish – a hobby Bronwen pursues with gusto to this day in the salmon rivers of the Scottish borders. ‘We started off one holiday in Suffolk with a simple piece of string and a weight. You threw it in and waited to see if you caught anything. I must have been six when I caught an eel and I was so pleased.’
Another treat was to raid the dressing-up box with Kathleen or put on a play in the drawing room. Again there was a theatrical element. Their mother was a woman, her daughters recall, who liked, indeed expected, to be entertained by her children; she could grow exasperated if they failed to perform. Yet any frivolous side to her character was strictly rationed. She had an unusual and occasionally cutting sense of humour and for the most part, despite all the Pugh’s progressive ideas, was for Bronwen a rather Victorian figure, distant and dour. She had had a strict Nonconformist upbringing and passed aspects of it on to her children. She would remind them of phrases like ‘the Devil makes work for idle hands’ and circumscribed their lives and her own with peculiar self-denying ordinance like never reading a novel before lunch. Her favourite children’s book was Struwwelpeter, a collection of often brutal, gloomy moral tales about such character as ‘poor Harriet’, who was punished for her wrong-doing by being ‘burnt to a crisp’.
‘My mother was, I now realise, not very child-orientated,’ says Bronwen. ‘I found being with her agony. There was one terrible time when Gwyneth and my father were both away and I had to be with my mother on my own for two weeks. I can only have been six or seven at the time, but once I realised what was happening, I went into a catatonic state. She had to call the doctor. I just sat unable to move for three hours. I was in such a state of shock at the prospect of two weeks on our own. Now it sounds like nothing but then it was a lifetime.’
Siblings experience their parents in different ways and while Bronwen found her mother a cold, distant figure, Ann remembers an entirely separate person with great affection. ‘My mother was not a cuddly sort of person but she was kind and caring.’ Such a divergence of views is not uncommon in brothers and sisters, depending on their temperament and their position in the family. Parents who are strict with their older children, perhaps daunted by the serious business of forming young minds and possibly, at an early stage in their careen, anxious over material matters, become indulgent, relaxed mentors to their younger children, self-confident in then-behaviour and sometimes cushioned by greater financial resources. In Bronwen’s case there was certainly more money around when she was a child and Ann retains the distinct memory that her youngest sister was spoilt and indulged. Yet Bronwen was also aware of a new anxiety in Kathleen Pugh – her desire to break out of the confines of being a stay-at-home parent, which contributed to the temperamental clash between mother and daughter.
Kathleen’s difficult relationship with her youngest and most independent daughter reflected her tense dealings with her own mother, Lizzie Goodyear, who lived on in her Bromley house to the age of ninety-one, surviving her husband by twenty-two years. ‘My mother was scared of my grandmother,’ says Bronwen. ‘I used to be taken to tea when she had to go and visit her mother as a kind of distraction. Out would come the silver and the maid and the cucumber sandwiches-the complete opposite of the way my mother ran our house. So it was wonderful for me but I sensed my mother was terrified.’
Bronwen’s picture of the house in Pilgrims Lane as one that was lacking in warmth is also qualified by Bella Wells, the nanny. ‘There was no hugging or kissing or anything like that. But then not many people would do that then.’ Much later, in an academic paper she wrote ‘Of Psychological Aspects of Motherhood’, Bronwen reflected obliquely on her own experiences: ‘Assuming the child is wanted from the moment of conception – and many of us are not – and is the right gender – again, many of us are not’, the mother’s love, attitude and behaviour are ‘more fundamental to the child’s early formation than that of the father’.
Her perceptions of the absence of that love from her own mother left a deep scar. ‘I could entertain her – go shopping with her, do the crossword – but she made me feel like a thorough nuisance. I’m still always apologising for being a nuisance. I try to stop now that I know. I had my handwriting analysed recently. “Oh, but you’re still running away from your mother,” the graphologist told me.