Most of Issie’s contemporaries were given a special present of some value for their eighteenth birthday – a pen, a piece of jewellery or maybe even a car.
Evelyn gave Issie a Bible. It was inscribed, ‘Follow in thy father’s footsteps’, and accompanied by a birthday card telling her she was ‘Off the books’.
It was a joke, but a bad one at Issie’s expense. Evelyn did, of course, continue to pay for certain expenses for his daughter, but he was letting her know in typically brutal fashion that she was now financially responsible for herself. Isabella’s early life had been very privileged, with cooks and staff to look after her things at home, and for Issie this was financial abandonment by the man she loved. She always remembered that thoughtless birthday card – it fed her demon of financial insecurity.
But now that she was 18, her arguments with Rona cooled somewhat, especially when she managed to persuade her father to lend her the farm Ford Fiesta. Despite the fact that the farm car ‘had straw sticking out of it’, she loved being able to drive herself around the country as she pleased. As she had been driving the car on the farm roads for years, she was a good driver and never had any accidents.
Even as a teenager Issie was the life and soul of any party, and she loved parties, particularly if they were grand and glamorous ones. Because she was so funny and lively she swiftly became much in demand on the stately home circuit even though, or perhaps because, her behaviour was so outrageous. Hugh St Clair, whose father was a Gloucestershire MP, remembers Issie dancing ‘semi-topless, howling with laughter in front of my stuffy father at Gloucestershire teenage parties’.
Because of Issie’s precociousness, she was often invited to the same parties as Evelyn and Rona, and, wittingly or not, Issie often embarrassed them at these events. At the famous Sitwell home of Renishaw, at a party for Alex Sitwell, which they all attended, Issie was thrown naked into the swimming pool. Issie told me that Evelyn and Rona ignored the scene. I understood by the way she told me the story that she was actually trying hard to get their attention and love by her provocations.
One of Isabella’s party pieces involved performing ‘feats of extraordinary strength’. Issie was petite – just 5′2½″ – and her strength astonished unsuspecting onlookers. When she stayed with her Heathfield friend Lady Sophia Pelham at Brocklesby Park, she carried her father, the 18-stone Lord Yarborough, twice around the long dining-room table. She particularly enjoyed arm-wrestling much bigger people, as well as humiliating fitness fanatics who, unlike her, worked out. Much later in Paris, in the late 1990s, at an exhibition of ‘Sex and the British’ at Thadeus Ropac’s gallery, I watched with amusement as serried ranks of tough, tattooed YBAs lined up to arm wrestle Issie – and were easily beaten by her one after the other.
Although the debutante season was in the process of becoming an anachronism, it still existed in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But, to Issie’s great disappointment, there was no suggestion by Evelyn and Rona of Issie becoming a deb, still less of her officially ‘coming out’ in society with a big party. Needless to say, Rona made quite sure that her stepsisters, by contrast, were given lavish coming-of-age parties in the castle at Doddington.
When Issie left Heathfield, she spent the summer working at Laura Ashley, where, as her shop-floor colleague Phil Athill recalls:
She was utterly incapable of measuring the materials we were selling and gave people as many metres as they liked. Likewise wallpaper – anyone asking for advice as to how many rolls they needed for a certain space was in deep trouble and I can imagine that ‘Laura Ashley’ is a black name to this day with most of the customers who fell on us.
From Laura Ashley in Sloane Street to her mother’s flat at 17 Cadogan Square is a short 10-minute walk. But for Isabella there was a problem getting inside. Her mother, as her friend Charlotte Greville remembered, treated her ‘like a child’ and refused to give her a key to the flat.
When Isabella caught pneumonia, her mother offered to take care of her, but was then called out of the country. Hearing of this situation, her father’s sister, Aunt Rosie, invited Issie to convalesce with her at Balbair, their cosy Highland house next to the river Beauly, 10 miles from Inverness in the Highlands.
Evelyn was never once invited to any of Rosie’s homes, but Issie jumped at the chance, keen to spend some time with Rosie’s husband, Lord Shimi Lovat, her beloved ‘Uncle Shimi’.
Lord Lovat had become a legend for his exploits in the Second World War. He had been a leading figure in the Commandos, and an inspirational leader
Lovat sacked Evelyn Waugh from the Commandos – and was satirised by Waugh in his brilliant Sword of Honour trilogy about the war.
At D-Day, Shimi had led his Commandos on the first wave at Sword Beach in Normandy, armed only with his sporting Winchester rifle. Accompanying him was his 21-year-old personal piper Bill Millin. To encourage his men, Lovat ordered Millin to play ‘The blue bonnets from over the border’. The Germans ignored Millin, thinking him a lunatic transvestite. It was an exploit worthy of Hollywood, and in 1962 Darryl Zannuk produced The Longest Day, in which Lovat is played by Peter Lawford.
Lovat was famously handsome and vain. It was said that he would admire the reflection of his beauty in the silver cutlery.
In the mid-1960s, Uncle Shimi had suffered a series of heart attacks. Afflicted by that perennial fear of the British upper classes, the payment of death duties, he had made over the Lovat estates, which stretched across 165,000 acres of Scotland from the east to west coast, to his eldest son Simon, Master of Lovat and Isabella’s first cousin.
Isabella was to develop a close and loving relationship with her aunt and uncle, and they with her. When out walking with Uncle Shimi, he would ask her to be silent and then name all the birds that were singing. In the House of Lords, Uncle Shimi had urged potential explorers to stop irritating ‘Nessie’, the Loch Ness Monster in which he professed to believe.
Before traveling up to Inverness to stay with her aunt and uncle, Isabella found time, despite her pneumonia, to have her hair frizzed to look ‘more Fraser’. During her childhood, the Lovats’ youngest son Andrew Fraser had once stayed at Doddington to go to a local ball. On his return after the ball, the tipsy Andrew had demolished a stretch of post and rail fencing in his car, but what Issie really remembered was his frizzy hair.
Flora Fraser remembers meeting Issie on her first trip to Inverness:
She was staying with Uncle Shimi and Aunt Rosie at Balblair and Uncle Shimi was tickled pink by her, especially when she asked for crème de menthe to put on her porridge. I have an image of her hearty laughter at a picnic up the glen. Huge pale eyes, pale hair and scarlet mouth, nursing a bloody Mary in a tartan mug. She was recovering from pneumonia, so she had a Fraser hunting rug hung round her shoulders.
Benjie Fraser remembered his first meeting with Issie during this stay. It was at Kiltarlity church during the midnight mass Christmas Eve service. As the youngest member of the Fraser clan, he had the task of taking around the collection plate in the church. Dressed as a punk in his neon green jeans and leopard stripes and a nose