A Mother-Daughter Relationship

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31001, 5 March 1966, Page 4

A Mother-Daughter Relationship

A Mirror for Mama. By Vivien Winch. Macdonald. 186 PP-

To those who possess it, great feminine beauty can be destructive of the homely virtues. This was particularly true of the famous VictorianEdwardian beauty, Mrs Howard St. George—a veritable goddess, six feet tall, and the spoilt child of George Baker, a millionaire American banker. The lovely Evelyn never fully received her father’s forgiveness for marrying her Irish husband, and her exclamation when he eventually left her a million pounds—“ Only one?”—gives some indication of her attitude to money. Mrs St. George, did. however, mother five children with commendable serenity. The last one, Vivien, arrived in 1912, being several years junior to the rest. In this book Vivien de-

scribes with pathos, humour and deep insight into human character the love-hate relationship which developed between her and her mother, and lasted until the latter’s death in 1938.

From babyhood the child was treated rather like a pet monkey, dressed in bizarre garments, and put through a series of poses for the amusement of Mrs St. George’s circle of celebrities —to such an extent that Michael Arlen described her to herself years later as having been “an impossible, precocious brat.” This she obviously was, but the fault can hardly be laid at her door.

“Mama” had many amiable eccentricities, one of which was a passion for animals varying in size from elephants to marmosets. One baby elephant and two infant giraffes were imported by her as domestic pets, but had to be sent to zoos at short notice. At the other end of the scale

she was wont to nurture (literally in her bosom) such endearing pets as a pint-size alligator, and when it emerged from her corsage at a dinner party, one of the guests had screaming hysterics and vowed that she would immediately sign the pledge. Other animals figure in these chronicles including an agreeably mad wire-haired teisier, belonging to Vivien’s malionaire grandfather who, whoever he heard a plug pulled in what the author calls the “loo," would rush madly to this inconspicuous apartment and plunge head-first down the bow] in search of an imaginary rat. Rescued as soon as possibly from a watery grave he had to be dried “with a monogrammed bath-sheet.” Notwithstanding these light-hearted revelations the book has a serious import. The list of Mrs St. George’s admirers (there is no overt suggestion that any of them were lovers in the modern sense) was limitless, the most ardent of them being the artist William Orpen (“Oppi” to the family). A tiny man himself, he drew some delightful pictures (reproduced here) of a meek midget accompanying the magnificently tall Evelyn, her height surmounted by one of those vast hats of the period—faintly reminiscent of Gainsborough, but also of the headgear of a coster Pearly Queen. His attitude in these revealing portraits is that of a dog-like, self-effacing devotion. The frontispiece also shows “Mrs St. George in her heyday,” swathed expensively in diaphanous draperies, and wearing (of course) another immense hat. To modern tastes the face is less remarkable for its beauty than that of the girl, Vivien, at the age of 25 which is arrestingly lovely.

Mrs Winch has done her best to reveal the odd-mother-and-daughter relationship, making every allowance for her mother’s sorrow at losing a favourite son in the 1914-18 war and the unhappiness caused her by the inevitable parting from her husband which was only due to the remorseless selfishness displayed by both. The break between husband and wife was followed by one between the girl and her mother. Vivien at sixteen was much in love with a boy of her own age and her mother’s casual] enquiry whether she was (in polite phraseology) “enciente" by him, shocked the child’s virginal soul to the core, and the relationship was never the same again. This is no ordinary book of society reminiscences of a bygone age. though the devotees of such literature will no doubt enjoy it To the serious reader it is a moving human document, and the illustrations are particularly good.