Heathfield is situated just 15 minutes by public bus from Eton College. This made for a handy supply of well-bred boys for the Heathfield girls, as the socially obsessed Evelyn noted. The close links between the girls of Heathfield and the boys of Eton were strengthened because the headmistress, Mrs Parry, was the wife of an Eton housemaster.
Issie made full use of this extra-curricular benefit, joining the Caledonian Society, which was invited for annual dances at Eton, providing an ideal excuse for illicit snogging. Issie’s first boyfriend was her Cal Soc dance partner Cosmo Fry, an artistic scion of the Quaker Bristol chocolate family. She would go to Eton at weekends to watch him play soccer, yelling ‘Come on Cosmo!’ from the sidelines. Cosmo found that Issie’s vociferous attention usually made him want to ‘find somewhere to hide’ on the pitch.
Issie also spent time with Cosmo watching plays at Eton in the Farrar Theatre, an ugly 1970s building that dominates the parade ground at the north end of the school. Issie and Cosmo would snuggle up for a whispered chat during house plays.
They corresponded with each other, and on one occasion Cosmo, who was also dating another girl at Heathfield, accidentally put his love letters in the wrong envelopes. The next time Issie met him she asked him knowingly, ‘Am I your only girlfriend?’
She let Cosmo squirm for a few moments, then said, ‘It doesn’t matter, Cosmo – the other girl is my best friend.’
Staff at Heathfield turned a blind eye to romances with Eton boys, especially as such affairs were usually strikingly innocent. Issie and Cosmo’s relationship involved nothing more sexual than a few snatched snogs. Issie and Rosie even took a schoolgirls’ vow not to have sex before marriage.
Issie’s other big crush at Heathfield was, somewhat bizarrely, on the school chaplain. Climbing up a ladder to change the hymn numbers in chapel, Issie would deliberately raise her skirt hoping to entice the poor chaplain, the Reverend Dick Stride. Reverend Stride, however, was an upstanding and decent man who remained true to his calling, and nothing improper ever occurred.
But Issie’s interest in religion was piqued by her attraction to the hapless vicar, and she was immensely proud when, in her final year, she was appointed Head of Chapel.
This was a real expression of trust in Isabella by the school authorities, because religion was important at Heathfield, which is a High Anglican institution. The chapel is visually very impressive: a Gothic building with stained-glass windows, with a white timbered vaulted ceiling lit by flickering electric candles mounted on iron chandeliers, each decorated by a cast fleur de lys, the school emblem. The high pews face each other and have the names of all the pupils of the school, past and present, formally carved into them. The chapel is attached to the main building by a covered brick and timber passage, simply adorned with a pale-blue enamelled classical ceramic circular plaque of the crucifixion.
Girls attended chapel twice a day, and whilst the regular gatherings were informal, more like a school assembly with prayers, full-length services on Sundays were steeped in ceremony and sacrament. On saints’ days the girls dressed in long white dresses, with white tights and lace caps, and incense was often burned in the chapel. Issie had the job of cleaning the incense censers during the summer holiday, a responsibility that triggered a lifelong love of incense and the associated paraphernalia.
The mystical and medieval rituals of the church as practised at Heathfield left a lasting impression on Isabella. In the vestry she would drink the blood of Christ, and then await a terrible punishment to befall her.
Heathfield nurtured Isabella’s taste for glamour. Socially the school was exclusive and international. Isabella’s contemporaries included a niece of the Shah of Iran (Nazak), daughters of Indian industrialists from Bombay (Aswani), a daughter of a major Greek shipping tycoon (Maria Niarchos), the offspring of a Hollywood actress (Liza Todd-Burton, Elizabeth Taylor’s daughter) and the daughters of several earls, including Warwick (Charlotte Greville) and Yarborough (Sophia Pelham). The wealthy and successful of England and its admirers were represented at Heathfield, and it was a world in which Issie – who was just 5ft 2½ inches tall and nicknamed ‘Titch’ – felt comfortable, as did Evelyn. According to Issie, ‘My father enjoyed coming to functions at Heathfield as there were so many people he knew.’
Another reason why Evelyn liked Heathfield is because he didn’t have to pay for it. Vera had left money to pay for her Broughton grandchildren’s education.
I have just one of Issie’s school reports, from the Lent term in 1971. Although it was written just a year after she went to Heathfield, I recognise acutely the depiction of her personality. The teachers speak constantly of her effort, her desire to please her teachers, her helpfulness and good-natured character. I particularly like two comments. The English teacher remarks:
I am very pleased with the improvement in Isabella’s work. While losing nothing of her gaiety, she has behaved in a more mature way in class.
And her geography mistress reports, ‘She has been much more controlled in class.’ That must have been a real effort for Issie!
Isabella was reported to be making ‘excellent progress’ in both her fencing class and her ballroom-dancing classes. The headmistress wrote:
Isabella has an enchanting character. She is one of the most genuinely good-hearted people in the school and although occasionally she talks too much, it is always in a good cause. She is always doing good to others and generally being a little ray of sunshine.
A little ray of sunshine. That phrase again.
Isabella kept only one other school report in which the headmistress wrote that she would make ‘an excellent lady of the manor’. She would show it to me and laugh about her teacher’s prescience after we married, as she set about restoring and reviving our ‘manor’ in Gloucestershire.
Heathfield has a system of awarding ‘bows’ at the end of each term. These are coloured badges worn by the girls on their jumpers, given out for ‘Striving to maintain the high tone of the school, forgetfulness of self, readiness to help others, and self control at work, at play and in conversation.’ A blue bow could be awarded to girls in their first three years at school, and Isabella was awarded a blue bow in the summer term of 1971 and then re-awarded it in the Michaelmas term of the same year. In 1972 Michaelmas term, she won the Senior Cheerfulness prize.
Issie was clearly very happy, but there was another, more vulnerable side to Issie as well. As Rosie observed, Issie ‘crumpled easily, and people didn’t always see that’.
The whole school ate together in the dining room at Heathfield. As with most boarding schools in the 1970s, the food was not up to much. Each week there was the ordeal of finding out who you were sitting next to or whether you would be ‘floating’ – meaning you could sit where you liked. At lunchtime the girls would receive with excitement their letters and communication from the outside world. One lunchtime in 1974, Issie opened that bombshell letter from her mother saying that Evelyn wanted a divorce. As her parents’ marriage broke messily apart with much recrimination on both sides, Issie developed a tendency for melodrama. Teresa de Chair remembers that Isabella had difficulty getting to the dining room for breakfast and that she would get hysterical when cockroaches were found in the dining room and scream about their size. She dropped the nickname Titch and earned a new one, ‘Huffy’. She became increasingly temperamental, theatrical and dramatic.
Issie was to win no more prizes for cheerfulness at Heathfield, as her world imploded.
If Issie’s relationship with her