It was not unusual for established couples in certain circles to indulge in extramarital affairs, sometimes with the acknowledgement and acceptance of the other spouse. Often these affairs were homosexual in nature. Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson were a well-known example, as well as the Vereys’ close friends and neighbors, James and Alvilde Lees-Milne.11 If Rosemary did have lovers, there was never any rupture in her marriage.
Rosemary herself acknowledged that theirs was a deep friendship rather than a passionate love match. But if the gossip about her affairs is at all true, nothing has publicly surfaced or come to light.12 Perhaps Rosemary herself enjoyed encouraging others to conjure up these alliances. To some extent, it may have been her passion for horses and her love of the hunt that led to such speculation. The English maintain that “hunting and adultery go together like eggs and bacon.”
Shortly after moving into Barnsley House, Rosemary grassed over her mother-in-law’s flower borders, although her in-laws were living right next door in the attached Close. She did leave a small corner for them to enjoy. But where there had once been formal borders of roses, ponies and children now frolicked instead. Rosemary had no second thoughts, feeling the substitution of grass for flower borders allowed “more space for the children to play croquet, cricket and all their other things on the lawn.”13 She also concluded that with a lack of gardeners, her mother-in-law’s herbaceous borders had grown “a bit weedy” and that they “were too large and too far from the house to be thoroughly enjoyed.”14
Instead, Rosemary and David concentrated their attentions on building a tennis court and adding a swimming pool. On a typical day, they invited local friends to come for a day of tea, tennis, and dinner. Christopher Verey recalls that he and his siblings could never beat his mother at tennis. Not until she played with her grandchildren did she finally concede defeat: rather than risk losing, the ever-competitive Rosemary gave up the sport completely.
Rosemary was not alone in grassing over an existing garden. “After the War, people went back to the great houses, the manor houses. But they were faced with no servants in the house, and how would they live? Most of them just contracted back and couldn’t cope. And then the gardens. They turfed them over. It was contraction, contraction.”15 People were learning to make do, to live without the support of servants, or at least without as many as before. Penelope Hobhouse, who became a famous garden writer and designer herself, recalled, “After the War people gave up. People like my parents-in-law just gave up.” One of the first things they abandoned was the labor-intensive garden.
According to custom, and as is still the case for people in a certain slice of British society, Rosemary and David sent their sons away to school at the ages of eight and ten shortly before moving into Barnsley House. The boys lived at Heatherdown, their “public school” in Ascot, and came home only on holidays; they were not permitted to go home for the weekend. Eventually Charles and Christopher would go on at the appropriate ages to attend Eton, as their father had before them.
Girls were a different matter. Rosemary decided to keep her daughters at home and teach them herself. Her daughter Veronica recalls that many girls of families in the grand houses of the countryside were kept at home with a governess to teach them suitable social skills along with their lessons. The Vereys were in no position to hire a governess, so Rosemary took on the role herself, using a syllabus provided by the Parents’ National Education Union to help Britons living abroad in the extended Commonwealth deliver a proper English education to children in countries without a suitable English school.
Gillian Sandilands recalled that Rosemary had enough confidence to think that “she could teach anything.” From her military childhood and her own years at Eversley School, Rosemary remembered and insisted on “very strict discipline – 9 A.M. until 5 P.M., but with regular breaks and time for ponies. The first ten minutes were for exercises to warm us up, then Bible reading and on to history, geography, and current affairs.” Rosemary learned along with her daughters. “I learnt more during the 1950s than I ever did … in the years to come.”16
In looking back, Rosemary described herself as an “obedient wife. I don’t know if I was a good mother.”17 When she later asked her daughters their views on home schooling, she found that it had pros and cons. The children didn’t learn to rub shoulders or socialize with other children. Possibly it made them more inhibited and maybe shy. On the other hand, she believed they discovered it is fun to learn, and in order to learn, they had to concentrate on what they were doing. Focus and concentration would always be important to anything Rosemary undertook.
Her younger daughter, Davina, described her childhood as “very old fashioned … a mix of almost post-war progression with a hint of pre-war (almost pre-First World War) life style. I didn’t go to school until I was nine [and Veronica almost twelve] … most of our time was spent out of doors. My parents’ relationship with employees and children was both intimate and distant at the same time. There was still a lack of equality that is hard to imagine nowadays; although society had started to change, Gloucestershire was still a backwater.” Davina thought Rosemary had a very natural way with her children and was “a very common-sense mother,” but she could also be demeaning. Given her own high standards, Rosemary must have been a demanding and tough tutor for her girls. Years later, when she was quite frail, she was still chastising Davina in front of company for failing to load the dirty plates in the dishwasher exactly as required.
Rosemary and David had different priorities. For David, the hunt was a way of life rather than a pleasure, but for Rosemary it was her passion. While David rode well, he never enjoyed the hard work of grooming the horses and pulling on his boots. Rosemary loved to ride and found the hunt exhilarating. She believed “that hunting develops a spirit of independence. You are out in the countryside, suddenly alone. Who will help you? You must follow your own line if you wish to survive.”18
But it proved to be a horse that almost killed her. In 1953, Rosemary had a serious accident that would change her life. She and a friend were getting some horses ready for the Christmas hunting when Rosemary mounted a horse not yet fully broken. “It reared over backwards so swiftly that I was still in the saddle as it fell,” Rosemary recounted. When Rosemary was extracted from underneath the horse that had rolled over on her, they discovered that among her injuries, she had a badly smashed femur. She was sent off to the hospital with an injury so severe it required a plate to be inserted. She was in traction for over three months. It was not clear if she would ever walk again.
With the boys safely away at school, David took the girls and Nanny Verey to live with Rosemary’s parents in London while Rosemary remained in the hospital in traction. She recalled, “Pain is difficult to remember once it leaves you, but I do remember the pain.”19 When she returned home, she refused to give up riding entirely. Never prone to complaining or sharing her inner feelings, Rosemary was always matter of fact in recounting this episode even though her injuries would adversely affect her health later in life. She continued to ride and hunt, although perhaps with a bit less enthusiasm and greater caution. As someone who never enjoyed doing anything by halves, she eventually gave it up entirely, leaving a void in her life that allowed her interest in the garden to grow.
His Royal Highness