The Surprising Life of Constance Spry Read online

  Nevertheless, these works had an enormous influence on Connie’s developing ideas about flower arrangement. From them she took some of the essential characteristics that she carried into her own creations, their feeling for mass and line and their contrasts of texture and colour. She was inspired by their opulence and the care with which the individual personality of a leaf or flower was highlighted. But she rarely tried to translate flower paintings into her own living arrangements, because in her view they were quite separate art forms.

  While Connie was struggling to bring a sliver of enlightenment to the East End, in other parts of London the rich young things who had survived the war were swept up in a wild upsurge of fun and frolicking. They danced new dances, drank cocktails and held fancy-dress parties, bathing parties – any kind of parties, just as long as they broke the old pre-war conventions. Connie was not herself a party person, but she always enjoyed good food, cheerful, stimulating company and beautiful, though preferably informal, surroundings. Connie’s great friend from ‘Munitions’, Marjorie Russell, returned after the war to her job in advertising at J. Walter Thompson. Marjorie did like parties, and she had numerous wealthy and cultivated friends. She was always trying to drag Connie out of her country life or sweep her away from her ‘slummy school’ in the East End into her own glamorous West End milieu. Connie would sometimes be invited to make up the numbers for a dinner party while Jos babysat in Essex. London was full of ‘war widows’, respectable women on their own who needed a bit of fun and entertainment, some light relief from their lonely lives. No one enquired where Mr Marr was, and her relationship with Shav Spry, who was still in India, was a carefully kept secret. It is unlikely that Connie told anyone, except possibly Marjorie, about her past life. Friends often confided in her, but Connie mostly kept her personal problems to herself.

  When Marjorie’s friends heard that Connie liked arranging flowers as a hobby, they would beg and cajole her into decorating their homes when they were entertaining. Connie enjoyed the challenge and the freedom to experiment, using flowers picked from her garden or bought by the hostess. She was beginning to realize that she had considerable creative skills, which friends seemed to recognize and appreciate. Also, there were several people Connie had known in Dublin who were now living in London, and they too were asking for her flowers. Gradually she began to expand her social circle and her repertoire. Every weekday she spent at the school, but many evenings and some weekends she could be found at smart houses in town. It was a crucial further step from being a mine manager’s wife in Ireland to entering English society. It was almost as if Connie didn’t see herself actually belonging anywhere.

  Despite her professional and social success, Connie was missing Shav desperately and found their separation very hard to bear. Florence Thurston the sewing teacher, who was sometimes entrusted with posting a weekly letter to India, recalled that although Connie was always cheerful and bright with staff and children, when she was alone she often looked sad and anxious. In her office she kept a large box, crammed with hundreds of letters on fine India paper tied with pink ribbon. Despite their time apart, Connie and Shav forged a strong affectionate relationship through the regular exchange of news, views and descriptions of their very contrasting lives and surroundings.

  By 1923 Shav was at last due to come home. His two years in India had been spent as financial adviser to the government of Bengal, and on his return he was offered a job at a firm of London chartered accountants if he qualified, which he did.

  In the meantime Connie had been seeking a divorce from James Heppell Marr. Divorce in the 1920s was still relatively rare and could only be granted when one party was found guilty of adultery. If the husband was a gentleman, it was up to him to do the decent thing. James Marr took the blame for their divorce so that Connie’s career would not be affected; his own was already in ruins. He had returned from the war with a DSO but found himself, like thousands of others, unwanted and forced to tramp the streets of London looking for a job.

  Shav too was trying to organize a divorce from his wife Claire, for whom the news that her husband was leaving her and their children came as a complete shock. Connie and Shav between them were wrecking two families and the lives of four young children. Connie’s family was horrified. Indeed, Etty refused to stop thinking of Marr as her son-in-law and told Connie that if she divorced him she would never speak to her again; it is possible that she never really did. Connie might perhaps have felt she had little cause for self-reproach over the failure of her marriage, but her lack of consideration for Claire Spry was another matter. Although usually generous and kind, Connie also possessed a ruthless streak, and when she fixed on something, or in this case, someone, she was prepared to take what she wanted whatever the cost. It could be said that she paid for it later.

  While Connie’s divorce went ahead, there are no records of either a divorce between Claire and Shav Spry or of a marriage between Connie and Shav. Indeed, Marjorie Fletcher, Connie’s sister-in-law, later confided to her daughter the carefully guarded secret that Connie and Shav were in fact never married. ‘He just gave her his name,’ she told her. Divorce was a demeaning business that still carried a social stigma of disgrace and failure, and it is most likely that Claire Spry, to protect herself and her children, refused to grant Shav a divorce.

  Despite not being able to marry, Connie may have thought that her relationship with Shav would continue in the same spirit as during the years they were apart. Neither of them had found success in marriage, so perhaps they could just continue in an informal relationship. They were both middle-aged, with little prospect of further children, and Connie imagined she had found a relationship based on companionship rather than passion, a marriage of minds, if not in law, of mutual interests and support; a calm, peaceful place where she could be herself, living with a man who respected and loved her and understood her creative longings.

  Typically, she had not thought through the implications of ‘living in sin’ at a time when it was regarded as unconventional, if not downright unacceptable, especially for two people holding respectable jobs in education and accountancy. If the truth had come out, they would most certainly have lost their jobs. Of course, no one at Homerton School was ever aware of any changes in Connie’s private life; it was generally assumed that she was a war widow and she continued to be addressed as Mrs Marr. If she and Shav were to be together and remain employed, the only option was for Connie to change her name to Spry and for them to live together as though they had married. How many people were party to this deception is not known. Were Connie’s parents aware of the fact that their daughter was not only divorced, but now openly living with a married man? Did her son Tony know? For the rest of their lives Connie and Shav Spry kept up the pretence that they were a legally married couple. It would not be the only scandal in their lives that had to be kept under wraps.

  In 1925 Connie and Shav moved into a small Essex farmhouse. They both loved being in the country and it never occurred to them to set up home in London, which would have been far more convenient for their jobs. Since they now shared two good salaries, they soon found a larger home, the Old Rectory at Abinger, set in one of the most charming ‘mountain’ parts of Surrey. The house and garden were in a poor state of repair, which was just the challenge they wanted. They could indulge their passions for hunting for furniture in antique and junk-shops, and for gardening. They moved in on Boxing Day, ready to start a new life together and to look forward to what Connie hoped would be lasting happiness.

  She felt sure that the ‘strange little garden’ was haunted by the ghosts of nuns who had once walked inside its high-walled enclosure. The garden had been neglected since the war and was badly overgrown. It seemed grey and sombre, but Connie could see its potential and believed she could make it beautiful. She was single-minded and enthusiastic but realized that the Herculean task would require some strong young muscle-power. Walter Trower was a local boy who was engaged to Connie’s parlour m
aid Gladys. Though he had little knowledge of gardening, Trower was keen and needed a job. He applied to work for Connie and she took him on after agreeing to teach him all she knew. Like dozens of friends and employees who came into Connie’s orbit, he remained at her side, running her gardens for almost thirty years. They learned together, developing their knowledge of horticulture and growing in confidence and skill. Their relationship was not always harmonious: Trower’s passion for the plants in his garden was often at odds with Connie’s cutting raids. But they had a great mutual respect. Nothing Connie grew was wasted. When she moved, as she often did, the whole garden had to be moved too, a challenge Trower was expected to face each time without complaint.

  At Abinger they set about double-digging ‘three spits deep’ and filling the trenches with well-rotted manure. Soon their labours were wonderfully rewarded: ‘Never in all my gardening experience’, Connie wrote, ‘have I had such flowers.’

  Long borders of old-fashioned deep-red carnations scented the air with their clove-like perfume; tall Madonna lilies gently swayed in the evening light like the ghosts of the nuns. Much of the garden was on unworkable heavy clay. Connie recalled reading how Dean Hole, one of the great rose-growers, had improved his heavy soil by burning it. She would try that. When the bonfire was sufficiently hot, they damped it down with lumps of clay which gradually disintegrated into more friable material; this was then mixed with lime or sand. It was a long and arduous task, but once again Connie’s energy and resolve paid off and she and her new gardener were able to ‘raise some of the finest chrysanthemums and roses she had ever grown’. Connie and Shav had little money to spare for the garden, but as Trower recalled, ‘if there was a plant or bulb she wanted she’d go without things for herself or for the house’. She fell in love with the parrot and lily-flowered tulips that had recently come onto the market and rushed out and bought just two of each – all that she could afford. They grew their own vegetables and salads; the garden luxuriated with roses, flowering shrubs and herbaceous borders, while the house was filled with Connie’s experimental flower arrangements. As long as she continued to run the school at Homerton, flowers from the Abinger garden went up daily to decorate the classrooms. Every morning the clothes basket, filled with flowers, was strapped onto the carrier on the car and driven up to London by Shav.

  Word of Connie’s skills in flower arranging was continuing to spread, and more often than not the clothes basket also carried flowers earmarked for her private commissions – blooms for dinner parties, birthdays, weddings and cocktail parties. Connie loved doing them and was also glad of the money. She never charged very much, saying it was a wonderful opportunity to do what she most enjoyed, so why charge for it? These small commissions helped pay both for new plants and Trower’s wages.

  Daily life was tightly packed. Each morning Connie and Shav were up with the lark for the long drive to his office and her school in London, returning home ‘only just in time for dinner’ prepared by Gladys who had been upgraded to cook. At weekends they were free to indulge in gardening, country walks and entertaining. The Sprys were keen and hospitable hosts; every weekend there were lunch parties for their growing circle of friends from London and their new country neighbours. Shav, who had enjoyed several comfortable years of colonial life, had high standards. Like most men of his kind, he liked to live en grand seigneur, presiding in the dining-room at the head of a generous and tastefully laid out table. Connie on the other hand always preferred what she called her ‘kitchen suppers’; they were beautifully done, with delicious, fresh, often homegrown food enjoyed in the cheerful, gossipy, everyone-mucking-in atmosphere on which she thrived. Shav appreciated her homemaking skills and particularly admired her flower arranging, a hobby which always made the house so fresh-looking and beautiful – though as Connie liked to recall in her books, he was often alarmed by her predatory raids on the garden, armed with baskets and secateurs.

  Winter evenings were spent cosily by the log fire with Shav while he did the crossword out loud or read her ‘thrilling bits from the evening paper’ or regaled her with exotic stories from his time in India. As soon as the Christmas cards had stopped dropping through the letter-box and the seed catalogues began to arrive, Connie became totally absorbed. Armed with last year’s garden notes and with a good garden encyclopaedia to hand, she made lists of annual and vegetable seeds followed by biennials and perennials: ‘With these I am busy and utterly content.’

  Someone noted that there was little sign of children or teenagers in the home. Shav’s children never visited; Tony, now fifteen and away at school, often spent his holidays with the Cook family in Yorkshire. His father, unable to find employment in England, was obliged to take a post as a mining geologist in India where he would remain for many years, cut off from the one thing that mattered in his lonely life, his children Joan and Tony. Heppell Marr would sometimes join them in Yorkshire when he was home on leave, and they would spend idyllic days riding in the pony and cart that he bought for them. These were the few precious weeks when Tony and Joan enjoyed something resembling normal childhood. According to his second wife Vita, Tony was a very unhappy child who hated being sent away to school and longed for his father, whom he adored.

  Shav Spry was never a substitute for Heppell Marr. He had no strong paternal instincts and Tony would not accept him as his stepfather. In 1927 George Fletcher retired and left Ireland, with an honorary degree from Trinity College and considerable praise and affection from his peers in Dublin. George and Etty bought a near-derelict Elizabethan farmhouse at Great Hallingbury in Essex, which Etty made into an elegant and tasteful home, while George, who refused to stop working, became a member of various English educational committees and chairman of his parish council. If he was not with his beloved Cook aunts, Tony would go to stay with George and Etty in Essex rather than spend time at Abinger – which he never felt was home.

  One fine summer Sunday in 1927 Marjorie Russell brought a new lunch guest down to Abinger. Sidney Bernstein was a young, handsome, exquisitely dressed bachelor, a showman and the leading figure behind the exotic-looking new cinemas that were springing up around the country. Bernstein was entranced by the wild, rambling garden; he admired Connie’s flower decorations and listened approvingly to her very individual views on interior design and gardening. He was working at the time with a team of successful professional designers to create several new cinemas, but he saw in Connie the touch of an inspired amateur, a true artist.

  Bernstein invited her to lunch at his flat in Albemarle Street in London, where he complained that the flowers supplied by a West End florist bored him and begged Connie to take on the commission herself. At first she demurred – she had never accepted a regular commission before, and how was she to fit it around her school work? Another guest at the lunch was the theatre designer Norman Wilkinson, who was equally enchanted by Connie’s simple and direct views on flowers and design. It was a meeting of true minds. Norman was soon telling her about his commission to design the interior of Atkinsons’ newly built perfumery shop in Bond Street. He told Connie he planned to fill the shop windows with unusual displays of flowers and did his best to persuade her that she was just the person to take up the challenge. By the end of the meal both Bernstein and Wilkinson were cajoling Connie into thinking about turning professional, maybe even setting up her own little business. Bernstein decided to put on the pressure, announcing that if Connie accepted Wilkinson’s request to do the perfumery shop windows, he would give her the commission to supply flowers and pot-plants for the foyers of his new London cinemas – how could she possibly refuse?

  Connie was both elated and terrified. She was flattered and stimulated by the encouragement she had received from these creative and confident men. Wilkinson urged her to think of the Atkinsons’ windows as works of art rather than as a conventional florist’s commission. This, therefore, was what Connie saw in her mind: not a business deal but a creative challenge. Those cinema foyers and those enorm
ous, empty shop windows were blank canvases on which she might at last realize her long-suppressed artistic ideas. She rushed home to discuss things with Shav, hoping he would give her good financial advice about the probable pitfalls of setting out on a new career. It was a considerable risk, even with the promise of two commissions. It is possible that Shav agreed to it initially because he liked the idea of Connie giving up her work at Homerton School and becoming a ‘housewife’. With his Civil Service pension and accountancy work, he was earning enough – even after payments to his wife and children – to keep them both. He thought her flower arranging was an ‘artistic’ ladylike hobby; it eased her restless spirit and kept her amused. It is also possible that when Connie told him about the idea she underplayed the whole thing: just two little jobs that would take her to London for a day or two in the week with plenty of time spent at home and in their garden.

  Shav had no idea that servicing Atkinsons’ Perfumery and the Granada cinemas was going to be such a demanding full-time commitment that it would lead to a radical change in their lives. Had he firmly put his foot down and said, ‘No . . . stick to doing flowers for your girlfriends’, Connie at that point might have quietly acquiesced. But he did not. And Connie had made up her mind. Whenever she was fired up with something new and exciting, she revealed a fiercely stubborn streak; nothing was allowed to stand in her way. She was ready to move on, to face a fresh challenge and a new adventure. Somewhere, always at the back of her mind, was the knowledge that she was not his wife, not subject to his wishes and demands. She had long since discovered the taste for independence and for freedom to pursue her own inclinations, and she could, if she chose, disobey him. It is doubtful if she ever did openly flout Shav’s wishes, but the strange situation and its accompanying secrecy sometimes led to disloyalty on both sides.