What color the wind
… As a child, Penelope [Fitzgerald], aka Mops or Mopsa, far outshone her older brother, Rawle. Her precocity was noted in Punch by her father: ‘“What colour is the wind?” inquired Priscilla. She had me there.’ When she was five, the family moved to Hampstead, ‘a place of high thinking, plain living and small economies … ham-and-beef shops, old bookstalls and an amazing number of cleaners and repairers’. When she was eight, Penelope was sent away to Deerhaddnn School in Eastbourne, which she hated, then to Wycombe Abbey, on a scholarship, at 13. Her triumphant ascent to Somerville, Oxford, like ‘generations’ of her family before her, in 1935 was shadowed by the death of her mother that spring from cancer. She worked hard and played hard: she was in a set known as ‘Les Girls’ and acclaimed as a BLONDE BOMBSHELL in an Isis headline after her effortless rendition of ‘daguerreotype’ in the first ever Oxford-Radcliffe transatlantic spelling bee.
… In 1960, Penelope and her husband Desmond moved back to London, into Grace, ‘an old wooden barge which for many years had carried cargoes up and down the east coast under sail, but was now a battered, patched, caulked, tar-blackened hulk’. Grace was moored on Chelsea Reach, then as now ‘one of the very grandest parts of London’. The boat was cold, leaky, rat-infested and insanitary, ‘a total disaster area … mortifying and chaotic’, in the words of Valpy, who came home from school as seldom as he could get away with. The girls lived off ‘fried potatoes, fried eggs, toast’ and went to school only intermittently – a visitor remembers finding them risking electrocution, toasting bread on an upturned electric fire. The girls remember catching their mother eating blackboard chalk from a packet. ‘I feel I need it,’ she said.
To ‘keep things going for the girls’ Penelope started working as a teacher, first at Italia Conti, the stage school drawn on for At Freddie’s, then at Queen’s Gate in Kensington and at Westminster Tutors. Her children remember her constantly tired and fraught and bad-tempered, ‘at her wits’ end’. She started sleeping on a day-bed in the living area; she’d never share a bed with her husband again. One night Desmond fell off the boat, struck his head and gashed it open, leaving a scar and a dent there ever after. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to think about if I’m not going to worry about him all the time,’ Nenna the abandoned wife says of her hopeless husband in Offshore.
In 1962, Desmond was caught stealing money from his chambers. He went to court that summer and appears to have been put on probation, though there are persistent rumours that he went to prison. Penelope never talked about it, and around this period was pushing her friends away. In December 1962 he was disbarred, and six months later Grace sank, destroying pretty well all the Fitzgerald family papers. The girls, luckily, were out; the cat was clinging to the mast; Desmond was nowhere to be seen. The next day, Penelope turned up to one of her teaching jobs looking ‘more than usually dishevelled’. ‘I’m sorry I’m late, but my house sank,’ she is reported to have said.
