On 12 September 1964, her little brother Johnny, aged 2½ died in an accident in the garden when he fell into a body of water.
Issie was supposed to be looking after him. She was five years old.
‘Everything went wrong for the family after the death of that little boy,’ recalled Issie’s now 94-year-old godmother Lavinia Cholmondley (pronounced ‘Chumley’) when she was interviewed for this book at Cholmondley Castle in 2009.
Confusingly, there are conflicting versions of the events that led to Johnny’s death.
Issie had told me about it the first time we met, at a mutual friend’s wedding in 1988. She told me that Johnny was chasing a ball and followed it into the swimming pool, which had been built by her father to celebrate a good harvest that year. After inhaling water, he vomited up a half-digested baked bean – it was ‘nanny’s day off’, Issie said, so dinner had been from a tin – and choked on it. She said that she remembered the smell of the honeysuckle, and Johnny stretched out on the lawn. ‘My mother went upstairs to put her lipstick on,’ she said. ‘That explains my obsession with lipstick.’
A local press announcement about the birth of Isabella’s baby brother. In the photograph is Helen Broughton with her new son, John Evelyn, Isabella and Julia.
Issie knew this was a pivotal moment in her life, and, with typical disregard for the comfort zones of polite society, she would often describe the events of Johnny’s death – the swimming pool, the ball, the honeysuckle and, above all, the lipstick – to relative strangers. She would even talk about it to newspaper interviewers, prompting her mother, Helen, to retort that the story about the lipstick was, ‘An awful, unfounded lie.’
The version of Johnny’s death told by Issie’s stepmother, Rona, whom Evelyn married just under a decade after the accident (he and Helen were divorced in February 1974) is very different. Rona related this account at a meeting in the Sloane Club in London 2009:
Helen went inside to do something, not put on lipstick; that was a very cruel thing for Isabella to say. But she went in to do something, I don’t know what. And when she went inside, she said to Issie, ‘Keep an eye on Johnny,’ or ‘Watch out for Johnny’. So Isabella was playing with John, but then somebody who was coming down the lane stopped at the gate and called Issie over to the gate. Issie went over, and while she was over there – it happened. He choked on a piece of dry biscuit and suffocated, and then fell in a small pond, not a swimming pool. And then everybody blamed each other.
Had Issie felt responsible for what happened to Johnny?
‘No,’ replied Rona. ‘There wouldn’t have been anything she could have done anyway. She was five years old.’
But such rational reasoning doesn’t always stop people, especially small children, from feeling the emotion and burden of guilt, does it?
Rona conceded, ‘She felt blamed.’
By who?
‘She wasn’t blamed by her father,’ was all Rona, now 70, and cautious to the end, would say. ‘By someone else.’
Memory, of course, plays tricks us on all, but it is quite extraordinary how Isabella’s story and Rona’s story (presumably relayed via Evelyn) diverge. Isabella very deliberately painted her mother as self-centred and vain by constantly reiterating the detail about her not being present because she was applying lipstick. When she told me the story of Johnny’s death, it was always portrayed as a result of him falling into the swimming pool. Indeed, she added more and more detail to the story – how the pool had then been filled in by her grief-stricken father and another built to replace it. I was therefore amazed when, after we were married, Evelyn used to tell me that Issie swam like a fish as a child in the pool.
Never did Issie tell me about being called over to the gate, or about being asked to watch Johnny.
As her husband, I, of course, believe Issie’s account unquestioningly over that of her stepmother, which I never heard until researching this book. Rona was not there at the time and would have heard it secondhand, years and years after the event. And yet, when I recall how Issie recounted this horrific, defining event of her childhood, it is impossible not to notice the foundation stones on which Issie built both her personal myth and her dark aesthetic was being laid.
All the elements of the black fairy story that she told to and about herself are there: the indifferent, heartless mother, the father more interested in his drinks and his friends than his son, and the terrible irony of the fatal pool being built to celebrate the harvest.
Isabella remembered her mother blaming Evelyn, her father. Helen once told the story of Johnny’s death to a cousin of Isabella’s who herself had just been bereaved. Later, the cousin told Isabella and I that Helen blamed Evelyn – despite the fact that, even in her telling, the death of Johnny was clearly an accident.
When I was researching this book I discovered a contemporary report of the accident from The Times, dated Monday 14 September, 1964. It was headlined ‘Heir to Baronetcy found Drowned’:
John Evelyn Delves, aged two, heir of Sir Evelyn Delves Broughton and Lady Broughton, of Doddington Park, near Nantwich, Cheshire, was found drowned on Saturday in a shallow ornamental pool which was being built in the garden of his home. The boy was heir to a baronetcy dating back to 1660.
Mr Giles Tedstone, farm manager to Sir Evelyn, said today, ‘Sir Evelyn and Lady Broughton had been having tea with their children and friends on the lawn and the children wandered off afterwards to play. Lady Broughton missed young John a couple of minutes later and he was found dead in the pool.’
Artificial respiration was tried and Sir Evelyn then drove the boy to hospital but it was too late. The pool was only 18 inches deep and has now been filled in.
Lady Broughton is expecting another baby in a few months time. They have two daughters aged five and three.
The following day an inquest was held in Nantwich. Evelyn attended the inquest, and The Times also reported on it. At the inquest it was ruled that his son and heir had died of asphyxiation.
Dr John Heppleston, pathologist, said that a post-mortem showed that the death was due to a blockage of the windpipe by food, caused by vomiting which had followed immersion in water.
Questioned by Sir Evelyn, Dr Heppleston said it was possible that the boy slipped or fell into the water and the shock made him vomit. He could have been dead within part of a second.
Mr Leonard Culey, West Cheshire deputy Coroner, recording a verdict of accidental death, said by a chance in a million the shock of the water made the boy sick and he asphyxiated. It was a case that could not have been foreseen.
Isabella looking down at the grounds of St John’s Church, Doddington Park - the church where her brother John Evelyn is buried.
Whatever the exact sequence of events, there is no disputing that Johnny’s death, as well as traumatising Issie for life, destroyed the family utterly.
Evelyn’s reaction to Johnny’s death was extraordinary. Rather than trying for another son, he apparently became convinced that the death of John was a sure sign that the Delves Broughton line should come to an end with him.
The death of John, he appears to have decided, was to be the end of it all. It was a resolution from which he never wavered.
Johnny was buried in a small leather casket in St John’s Church in the grounds of Doddington Park, next to General Sir Delves Broughton, who built the church in 1837. Helen and Evelyn commissioned a stained-glass window in memory of their lost son. Isabella thought the window was ‘ugly but along the right tracks’. She respected their gesture of love.