Excerpts

1 LONELY GIRL Sylvia's elder sister Dorothy - later better known as the Bloomsbury painter 'Brett' and the third in D. H. Lawrence's ménage à trois in New Mexico - recalled being wheeled in a double pram with Syv by their nurse in Hyde Park one day and being told to wave to their father, Reginald Brett, who was out walking with a friend. Reggie wondered to his friend why those children were waving at him. 'Perhaps they are yours,' the friend ventured. Reggie Brett, who succeeded his father as the second Viscount Esher in 1899 when Sylvia was fourteen, was a fabulously well-connected man, the confidant of Queen Victoria, King Edward VII and King George V, and of every prime minister from Rosebery to Baldwin. Yet he was a remote and often cruelly insensitive father to his children when they were young, apart from his younger son Maurice, whom he worshipped. Girls, in particular, were 'tiresome things until they are grown up', as far as Reggie was concerned. For her part, as the youngest child, Sylvia felt that 'nobody loved me and that I was the cuckoo in this illustrious family nest. It even seemed to me that my father's voice altered when he spoke to me, as if he were forcing his words through cubes of ice.' For as long as Sylvia could remember, a steady stream of luminaries trooped through her family home, Orchard Lea, in Windsor Forest. This dark, rambling house was completed a few months after Sylvia was born, in 1885, to Reggie's hideous if fashionable 'Tudorbethan' design, with lead casements and low oaken ceilings. Lord Rosebery learned to ride a bicycle in the garden there during his time as Prime Minister; Kaiser Wilhelm II admired the house so much that he ordered similar ones to be built in Germany; and Queen Victoria came so often that she had her own special entrance built - it was also much used by Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. 'It was a curious life for children,' Sylvia recalled. 'The house was almost continually filled with famous people ... At meal times we would sit dumbly listening to conversation of such a brilliant order that we became imbued with a kind of dull despair, and inferiority complex ... I would sit there like an anaemic suet pudding, suffering the tortures of stupidity.' She also remembered spending 'a great deal of my childhood crying my eyes out in a ten-foot by twelve ivy-papered lavatory at the top of the house'. Starved of parental love (her mother, by Sylvia's account, was usually too occupied with her 'wifely adoration' to give the children her full attention), young Syv sought it instead from her genial grandfather, the first Viscount Esher. (William) Baliol Brett, as he was before his elevation to the peerage in 1885, was a curate's son, descended, according to family legend, from William Brett, who built Brett's Hall in the County of Warwick during the reign of Henry III. He was a useful amateur boxer and captained the 'lightning' Cambridge crew that beat Oxford by a dozen lengths or more in 1839. Irresponsible and fun-loving as a young man, he subsequently knuckled down and excelled at the Bar, thanks to a remarkable memory and determination, driven to a great extent by his adoration of his French wife, Eugénie, who was forever urging him to forge ahead in his career. Elected Conservative MP for Helston in Cornwall in 1866, he was Solicitor-General in Disraeli's brief administration of 1868, and in 1876 made a Lord Justice of Appeal. Seven years later he was appointed Master of the Rolls, the second most senior post in the judiciary of England and Wales, and on his retirement in 1897 he was created a viscount, a dignity not given to any judge, Lord Chancellors excepted, for mere legal conduct, since the time of Sir Edward Coke, the great seventeenth-century judge. Baliol's last letter to his wife, written from the Lake District while on circuit, is a moving testament to his steadfast devotion: The lake and its hills were lovely as ever. This morning when I was going for my before-breakfast walk, the ground and the hills were covered with snow - still with the woods and hedges marking dark patches and lines, and the hills of every shape, and the lake dark in the midst of it all: it was only a new beauty in these dear lakes. I thought of nothing but you my loved and lovely one, and how happy and most happy I was there with you in the pride of your youth and beauty: and I felt again all the deep gratitude I ever feel and felt for you for having given them both to me with a loving kindness that seems to have no bounds. How gloriously happy were those days, when all was love and hope! Now, with me, all is the same love, but instead of hope is the feeling of the present. There is now in life, to me, a sense of sadness! It is I suppose, that I can no longer hope anything in myself; I know myself for what I am. For you, my love and my enchantress, you are my only hope, and my only real happiness. If I see you bright and happy, it is as Heaven; if I see you otherwise, the light is out of the sky. As a young girl Sylvia would sit on her grandfather's knee 'stroking the snow-white hair that grew like a soft halo around his head' and implore him to marry her. 'What about your grandmother?' he would ask. 'Don't you think we had better ask her first?' But Sylvia was afraid of her grandmother, and told him that this had better be a secret between the two of them. Though by then a severe old lady in a partial brown wig, invariably slightly askew, Eugénie Brett had once featured in the popular annual Book of Beauty (1848), her then handsome features rendered by Count d' Orsay, the lover of the book's editor Lady Blessington. Eugénie's mother Fanny (née Kreilssamner) claimed to have been the widow of Louis Mayer, a fellow Alsatian whom she had followed to Waterloo in 1815 with her one-year-old daughter. Widowed during the battle, she subsequently married Colonel John Gurwood, a veteran of the Peninsular War, who had made a name for himself by capturing the governor of Ciudad Rodrigo. Wellington awarded him the French governor's sword for this feat, but Gurwood spent his later life paranoid that others were questioning the true extent of his heroism. Severely wounded at Waterloo, he became the Duke's private secretary and was largely occupied editing his despatches until he cut his own throat on Christmas Day 1845. Family legend had it that Fanny was a vivandière and that Eugénie had been born on the field of Waterloo. Doubtful about Fanny's past, the scrupulous Gurwood had refused to let her near the Duke or other important English friends and made her stay behind in their hotel while he went into society. Instead she and Eugénie drifted into the more bohemian set centred on Gore House, where Lady Blessington and Count d'Orsay held court to an exotic assortment of émigré writers and artists. In the early years of their marriage, Gurwood had also required that Fanny leave the young Eugénie behind in Paris, thereby inviting gossip about the girl's legitimacy (some whispered that her father was Napoleon). One consequence of this was that Eugénie's admirers tended to want her as their mistress but not their wife. By the time Baliol Brett declared himself, she was nearing thirty; yet even then, busy as she was with attending the London and Paris seasons, she made him wait until he was earning enough from his briefs to support her. They married after an engagement lasting eight years and in 1852, while living in Kensington, she gave birth to their first child, Reginald Baliol, Sylvia's father. Young Reggie spent his early life between London and Paris, and, in his memoir Cloud-capp'd Towers, he later recalled: 'As a child, in a poplin frock, I had been seated on the lap of a wizened old man who had once played the violin before Marie Antoinette. Later in my great-aunt's [Fanny Kreilssamner's sister Isabelle] house, I had been presented to a stout, dark-skinned man with masses of grizzled hair, an enormous hat held curiously between his knees. It was Alexander Dumas [whose mistress his great-aunt had been]...' Later still he had been kindly treated by the venerable Comte de Flahault, 'who, as Napoleon's aide-de-camp, had accompanied the Emperor home from Moscow, and ridden that tragic ride alongside his master away from the field of Waterloo'. Inevitably, perhaps, the boy became keen on history. He slept with one of the brown volumes of Southey's Nelson under his pillow, and before the age of twelve had read all of Hume's History of England, and all bar one of the Waverley novels. From Cheam, Reggie was sent to Eton, where he soon came under the spell of William Johnson, a famously short-sighted and absent-minded master who was said to wear three pairs of spectacles, one on top of the other, and was once observed, so the story goes, hurrying down Windsor Hill, grabbing at a hen in the belief that it was his hat. 'Tute', as the boys called Johnson, was nonetheless a brilliant scholar - he was a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge - and an accomplished poet, best known as the author of 'They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead', translated from Callimachus, and much anthologised. He also wrote the Eton Boating Song, and was among the finest teachers in the history of the school, albeit with a notorious propensity towards favouritism. He steeped his disciples in the Greek and Latin classics and modern literature he approved of, and taught them the complementary ideals of romantic bisexual love and high-minded service to Empire. He based his ethical teachings on the classical Greek philosophers, but how far Johnson himself stuck to the Socratic ideal of restraint from passionate physical acts is unclear; he eventually resigned from Eton under a cloud in 1872, two years after Reggie had left the school, and changed his name by deed poll to Cory (that of his grandmother), saying it would save time in writing. Johnson held Reggie Brett in the highest regard: 'I have loved other Eton boys,' he wrote to him in 1869, 'but none so great as he, so devoted to the public good, so exalted above me.' At the age of sixteen, when he first came to Johnson's notice, Reggie had received a letter from his tutor counselling him to 'be unworldly; don't worship celebrities, like simple people, honest people'. Some time later there was frank jealousy over 'my sweet Elliot', as Johnson referred to the future Sir Francis Elliot, GCVO, and Minister to Athens: 'I envy you being kissed by him,' Johnson wrote to Reggie, 'If I were dying like Nelson I would ask him to kiss me. I kissed his dear foot last Tuesday on the grass of Ankerwyke.' For Reggie, though, Elliot was a dalliance. He would have deeper and longer lasting love affairs at school, most profoundly with Charles 'Chat' Williamson, a lifelong friend, a frequent and often long-term guest at Orchard Lea, and an adored confidant of Sylvia. Johnson predicted to Reggie in 1869: 'Some day, not long hence, you will be steeped in love for a woman as not to comprehend the old affection for boys.' Yet while he did go on to marry, and very happily, Reggie never ceased to indulge in intimate liaisons with (usually younger) members of his own sex. His busy love life did not prevent him from passing the entrance examination for Trinity College, Cambridge, but leaving Eton was a terrible wrench, as his grandson, Lionel Brett, later explained: 'Floating in a dodger on the silent Thames then at the height of its elmy beauty, friendships were formed which were to last a political lifetime ... To have to leave this hedonist's paradise, even for Cambridge, was heart-rending for my grandfather. Years later, the recollection reduced him to tears. It seemed a threat to his private life and created a distaste for the public arena that was to be his best-known characteristic.' Another characteristic of Reggie Brett's was the powerful appeal he held for older women. While at Cambridge, he was taken up by Lady Ripon, the mother of his friend Olly de Grey, and he often stayed with her and her husband, the former Viceroy of India. A rich semi-invalid, Lady Ripon shared her husband's radical Whig views and their combined influence persuaded Reggie to reject his father's Toryism and eventually throw in his lot with the Liberals. Through the Ripons, Reggie also came to know Sir William Harcourt (who also happened to be a friend of his father's), who was then Whewell Professor of International Law at Cambridge and later served as Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer under Gladstone. Constantly at Harcourt's side was his son Lewis, 'Loulou', an ultimately creepy figure whose mother had died when he was born. Eleven years Reggie's junior and only nine when they first met, Loulou became one of his dearest friends; as Secretary of State for the Colonies, he would also be a potentially useful ally for Sylvia and her husband in relation to Sarawak. However, he became more widely known as a lustful pest to adolescent boys and girls, including on several occasions Sylvia's sister Doll. William Harcourt lent Reggie rooms at Nevile Court during his time at Trinity, and later conspired with Lady Ripon to usher him into politics in 1878 as private secretary to Lord Hartington (later the eighth Duke of Devonshire), then leader of the Liberal opposition, thus launching him on his remarkable career. Though he consistently turned down jobs that brought responsibility, Reggie was an extraordinarily influential manipulator behind the scenes in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. His love of scheming, in his case usually for the good, certainly seemed to rub off on his daughter Sylvia, if not his diplomatic finesse. 'Who is Lord Esher?' his friend W. T. Stead asked in 1910. 'Something bizarre, inexplicable, abnormal, something that does not fit in with our notions. He is a man of original genius who has carved out a unique place for himself in the world of affairs, and who in doing so has discarded almost all the usual steps and stairs by which in this country men ascend to the highest positions. He runs after nothing, but all things seem to run after him.' Esher's guiding theme, according to his grandson, was 'that as against decadent France and isolationist America only the British Empire could save the liberal values of the West from "Prussianism" '. As early as 1906 he saw the 'certainty' that Britain would have to fight Germany, and while in the popular mind he is most associated with having invented the modern jubilee and coronation, his more important achievement was the Defence reorganisation of 1904, which abolished the Commander-in-Chief, set up the Committee of Imperial Defence (of which he became a permanent member) created the Army Council and thus 'solved the vexed problem of dual civilian and professional control'. In 1909, following the success of his Territorial Army recruiting drive, Edward VII wrote to him: 'You are a wonderful man; everything you touch succeeds.' When, during the First World War, the new machinery was put to the test, Esher was in Paris acting not only as the political adviser to Kitchener and Haig but also as the confidant of the French General Staff, the only effective liaison between the two Allied governments. Before reaching these heights, however, the young Reggie Brett had been, in his father's eyes at least, a wastrel. For four years after coming down from Cambridge he had drifted about the grand houses of England and Scotland (his parents' choice of school had paid off in this respect at least) without any apparent inclination to take up a profession. During this time he shared lodgings with his friend, the novelist Julian Sturgis, at Brayfield on the Thames. The house belonged to Sturgis's American cousin Elizabeth Van de Weyer, the only surviving daughter of Joshua Bates, the American partner of Baring's Bank, and the widow of Sylvain Van de Weyer, who had been the principal founder of the Belgian monarchy and later the Belgian Minister at the Court of St James. From time to time Reggie would go with Sturgis to play tennis and dine with their landlady, who lived nearby in a vast Tudor-Gothic mansion called New Lodge, which had been built by her father as a wedding present on land granted to them by Queen Victoria. It was there that Reggie first set eyes on the youngest of the Van de Weyer daughters, Nellie, then aged thirteen. By the summer of 1878 he was telling friends that he and Nellie had an arrangement to marry and, although she was still only seventeen at the time, it was an arrangement that neither of them would ever repent. According to Lionel Brett, this mousey girl was 'intelligent enough never to bore him, to defer to his own intelligence, and to know that all her life she would play Second Fiddle'. And Reggie's biographer James Lees-Milne noted that, despite her youth, Nellie was sufficiently intuitive to know what she was letting herself in for: 'Mr Brett sends word that I shake hands in a most unbecoming fashion,' she wrote in her diary in 1875 soon after their first meeting. This is very likely. I have never studied the becoming, which he apparently does to a very great extent, both in himself and others ... He wishes to improve himself and everybody: he is quite right ... Some men have such capacities for loving too. But I think I should like the same privileges allowed to me - and this is just what men are not strong enough to give. All women should take this view of married life and not be so exacting. The greatest praise a husband of mine could give me would be to say that he did not feel in the least tied down; or any more encumbered than when he was a bachelor. This is not speaking with the ignorance of a girl for I shall act up to it when married, if I do marry. True to her word, throughout their marriage she doted on Reggie to the extent of alienating most of her children. 'She would not settle down in a room until she discovered which chair he wished to sit in,' wrote Sylvia. She never went anywhere, or accepted an invitation without consulting him ... All her letters were shown to him, both the ones she wrote and the ones she received. They were so profoundly one, it seemed a sacrilege to break in upon their devotion. Is it surprising, then, that we were afraid to approach too near; is it surprising that we felt sometimes a little unwanted and alone? My mother was sweet to us always, and attentive, but all the time we could see she was listening for him, and waiting for him. Her affection for us was a detached affection, it was an effort to tear her thoughts from his. Only Maurice could venture near, and if we ever wanted anything, we would always send Maurice to ask for it, because we knew we should get it without comment. Reggie for his part made no attempt to conceal his foibles from his future bride. 'Why you have thrown yourself away upon one who is the converse of you in all things still remains a mystery,' he wrote to Nellie shortly before their marriage. Very sincerely I feel quite unworthy of you, and I think you must be a kind of St Theresa, a reforming soul. Some day, like [George Eliot's] Romola, you will find me out and you will hate me. Are you prepared for this? It astonishes me that I can write to you so easily and in this strain. You are the only girl with whom on writing I have felt on equal terms. I mean that I am sure of your not misunderstanding me and there is no necessity for elaborate detail. Does this please you or not? It is, I am sure, very unusual between a man and a woman who have anything to hide. True confidence is a heavy burden and very few men and women can bear that of those they love. But you have led me to think you stronger than most women and I have very little fear for the future. Do nothing and say nothing lightly to weaken my faith in you ... Do not, I ask you, start thinking too well of me, for I dread disenchantment. A further letter providing her with the opportunity to pull out met with a straightforward reiteration of her love for him. 'And do not think to frighten me with with your two-sided character - show me which side you please. I should like you as much when your whole life was laid bare as I do now, when, as you say, you have humbugged me.' Reggie and Nellie married on 24 September 1879. A decade later he wrote to her: 'I expected ten years ago, happiness in subsequent times; but not such uninterrupted happiness.' And some thirty years after that: 'You have been everything to me, the love and joy of my life.' In February 1880 Reggie Brett was elected as Liberal MP for Penryn and Falmouth. He stayed on as private secretary to Hartington, who after the Liberals' election victory declined Queen Victoria's invitation to form a government, content to serve under Gladstone, whose Irish policy in particular he felt deserved his support. Hartington was now appointed Secretary of State at the India Office, a move that gave Reggie valuable experience of Eastern affairs and his first go at pulling the strings behind the scenes (it was, for instance, through him that his old mentor Lord Ripon was appointed Viceroy of India). Hartington's subsequent acceptance of the War Office helped develop Reggie's expertise in the field in which he would make his most important mark. Meanwhile his marriage to Nellie, whose parents had been close friends of Queen Victoria, had brought him for the first time into the Queen's private circle. On his own initiative he began sending her (via her private secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby) confidential memoranda on India; Victoria's replies to these notes began a relationship that was to become ever closer as the years went by. According to Lees-Milne, who read all their correspondence: 'The better she got to know him, the more she was charmed by his engaging manner.' Their familiarity was undoubtedly made easier by the proximity of the Bretts' new country house, Orchard Lea, at Winkfield, three miles from Windsor Castle at the western limit of the Great Park. This was built on land bought from Nellie's brother Victor, and it was completed shortly after the birth of the youngest of Reggie and Nellie's children, Sylvia Leonora. Sylvia was born at the Bretts' town house, 1 Tilney Street, in Mayfair, at 5.10 a.m. on 25 February 1885. 'There was nothing momentous about my arrival into the world,' she wrote later, 'beyond the fact that I weighed only five pounds, which must have been an intense relief to my mother who had already at the age of nineteen produced a boy of over ten pounds.' The heavy boy was Sylvia's middle brother Maurice, born in 1882, a year after her elder brother Oliver and a year before her sister Dorothy. By her account, Sylvia, too, soon became 'fat and phlegmatic and, from the time I began to think ... obsessed by the idea that I was never really wanted'. She became a 'morbid child because I was so ugly. And they kept telling me so.' Photographs from her early childhood, however, show a far from ugly face - round, with bright, inquisitive eyes, albeit not always shown to their best advantage by pudding-bowl haircuts. Into adolescence and early adulthood her features grew more angular and, although she would never be described as a great beauty, and despite her tendency to do down her appearance in exaggerated terms, she was attractive in a pixieish way, with slim, boyish looks that were much coveted at the time and an alluring gaze that alternated between dreaminess and determination. Dorothy, a comparatively haughty child, remembered her little sister as small and timid, 'not exactly ugly, but homely ... every time she tried to walk, we would knock her down'. Required to fetch and carry for her elder siblings, Sylvia was often in tears. 'She did not know how to defend herself,' wrote Dorothy. 'I don't know how to describe it, just feeble.' The first person Sylvia could remember clearly was a nurse called Mrs Jukes 'and the deep hatred I felt in my soul for her ... She was short and ample-figured, and unrelentingly severe. She used to beat us with little sticks with dogs' heads on the handles of them, and the degree of naughtiness was made known to us by the breed of dog she made use of. For slight offences we were beaten with a pug ... but when we had been outstandingly wicked and disobedient she belaboured our backs with the pointed nose of a greyhound.' Mrs Jukes once used a stick to beat to death Oliver's pet bullfinch, whereupon Oliver chased her around the nursery table with a carving knife. By Sylvia and Dorothy's accounts she variously drank too much, chased their mother out of the nursery whenever she ventured into it, and locked the children up in a black cupboard among her clothes, which smelled of rotten apples. She eventually resigned in a huff after the children were sent on a seaside holiday and she was not sent with them. The children saw little of their father, who, according to Sylvia, was 'too preoccupied with affairs of State', although during the first decade of her life he withdrew, ostensibly at least, from public affairs. The slaughter of his great friend General 'Chinese' Gordon at Khartoum shortly before Sylvia was born had affected Reggie deeply and, offended by the government's hostility to his hero, he resigned as Hartington's private secretary; later that year he lost his seat in the general election and in 1886 he turned down the editorship of the Daily News. Instead he settled down at Orchard Lea to write Footprints of Statesmen during the Eighteenth Century in Britain (1892), followed by Sketches of the Queen's Prime Ministers (1896), while at the same time decorating the house, entertaining lavishly and indulging his passion for the turf, as breeder, owner, trainer and, disastrously, punter. Left to their own devices for most of the day, the Brett children were brought down from the nursery to the drawing room an hour after tea to see their father 'sitting at a writing-table surrounded by books and papers, wearing a black velvet coat and smoking an eternal cigarette'. Later in the evening they would sit on the floor in their mother's room and watch her dress for dinner. Sometimes Nellie read aloud to them, and she taught Doll and Syv to crochet because she hated seeing them idle. Sylvia feigned industry, hooking and hooking at a piece of wool until she was found out. 'My whole life at that time seemed made up of petty deceptions to conceal from my parents how dull and unenlightened I was.' She dreaded her father asking her questions such as 'Who is Prime Minister?' and 'What relation is the Prince of Wales to Queen Victoria?' Apart from her grandfather, the man Sylvia adored most of all as a young girl was Reggie's friend and political ally, the newspaper editor and spiritualist W. T. Stead. Stead appears in the first photograph of her autobiography Sylvia of Sarawak, dressed in a satin-collared frock coat, with a long white beard and intense, disapproving gaze, above the caption, 'My First Friend'. Sylvia remembered Mr Stead striding along the corridors of Orchard Lea deep in conversation with her father, yet always knowing when it was the children's bedtime. At the stroke of six he would 'go down on all fours, and start growling like a bear. With a shriek of delight I would clamber on his back and away he would go, still on all fours, up the stairs and along the passage to bed, with me digging my heels into his sides and pinching his shoulders and shouting at the top of my voice: "Get along, you naughty, naughty bear." I loved Mr Stead,' she recalled, 'he seemed somehow to belong specially to me.' As a girl of six or seven Sylvia may not have been told - at least she does not mention - that in the year she was born, Stead had been sent to Holloway Prison. In a series of articles in the Pall Mall Gazette entitled 'The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon', this crusading son of a Congregationalist minister from Yorkshire had scandalised Victorian society with his exposé of child prostitution in London; with sub-headlines such as 'Confessions of a brothel-keeper' and 'Strapping girls down', the story also provided titillation. The resulting outcry helped bring in the Criminal Law Amendment Act, raising the age of consent to sixteen and increasing the legal protection for impoverished young girls. But Stead, a leading exponent of what Matthew Arnold called 'the New Journalism', and one of the most influential newspaper editors of any era, became one of the Act's first casualties. In order to make his exposé stand up, he had paid £5 to the parents of Eliza Armstrong, aged thirteen, had her medically examined to establish that she was a virgin, then sent her to a London brothel, where the proprietor dazed her with chloroform (a common practice at the time) and prepared her for use by his customers. The first 'customer' was Stead, who took her to a Salvation Army hostel in Paris for five weeks while he told her story in the Pall Mall, deploring the ease with which such girls could be procured. For his pains he was convicted of abduction under the new Act, and sentenced to three months' imprisonment. Former colleagues such as Bernard Shaw excoriated Stead over this put-up job and his career never really recovered, though he continued to air his rabidly puritanical views whenever the opportunity presented itself. He also intensified his interest in 'spirit walking', as Sylvia called it, conversing with Wellington, Disraeli and Palmerston and seeing himself incongruously as Charles II. He and Sylvia would often talk about death and the 'great hereafter' and he promised to come back from wherever he went in order to see her. 'You will be certain to know me,' he assured her, 'on account of my carpet slippers.' Long after he came to his end, in 1912, on the Titanic, where he was 'last seen' calmly reading a book in the First Class Smoking Room - or alternatively, helping women and children into lifeboats - as the ship went down, Sylvia would look out of the window 'towards the long green slopes of the garden where he had so often walked' to see if she could see him. Although Sylvia failed to catch sight of him, in the year after his death W. T. Stead appeared to mediums as far afield as Melbourne and Toledo, and was photographed peering over the shoulder of one Archdeacon Colley. In her second autobiography, Sylvia recalled that she and Dorothy were made aware at an early age 'that women were only brought into the world to become the slaves of men', omitting to observe that she could have had worse preparation for her later marriage to a sexually incontinent absolute monarch. Each morning, as young girls, it was her and Doll's duty to lace up their brothers' boots, so that for years to come Sylvia could not look on a boy wearing such footwear 'without having an intense desire to smack his pugnacious bottom'. The girls' sense of inferiority magnified when the boys were sent away to school ('I used to pray to God that they would never come back'), while they stayed behind to be educated at home. For the holidays Sylvia and Dorothy would often be packed off to the Isle of Wight to stay with Reggie's sister, Aunt Violet, her husband William Dudley Ward and their five children. Reggie later came to regard Dudley Ward as a fiendish drunk, though as far as young Sylvia was concerned he was 'a great, big, rollicking, laughing kind of man' who took her sailing and gave her money for decorating the dining-room table with flowers. Back at Orchard Lea the torment for Sylvia resumed, exacerbated by what she saw when she measured herself against Doll, who as a young girl was prettier (only later did she develop rabbit teeth), more confident and more rebellious. When they built wigwams in the garden, Sylvia was always Maurice's squaw and was often kept in the wigwam all afternoon on the basis that she was too ugly to come out; Dorothy, on the other hand, was allowed to roam wherever she wanted, but mainly because Oliver could find no means of keeping her in. 'It was a constant torturing thought to me that she had all the graces I so lacked,' wrote Sylvia. Dorothy did not take well to governesses, refused to learn anything, and smacked their faces if they dared to remonstrate. Hence there came a succession of varying nationalities (one was dismissed, according to Dorothy, because her nose twitched at dinner) until their parents gave up on the idea of having anyone at all. For a while Nellie endeavoured to teach the girls herself, giving them long lists of spellings and the capitals of countries to learn by heart, and testing them while she was dressing or having her hair done. Such exercises struck terror into Sylvia, who resorted to copying all the answers out and hiding them in her handkerchief, while the maid, Miss Vaughan, who brushed her mother's hair in front of the mirror, conspired to obscure the reflection of what she was up to. As unalike in nature as they were in appearance, the Brett children would mostly play by themselves, Sylvia recalled, 'secret games we concealed from one another'. Occasionally, though, as well as building wigwams, they would all pretend to be cows, stripping birch branches bare apart from a bunch of foliage at the end and tying them around their waists as tails. One of them - usually one of the boys - would be cowman, but the game would nearly always end in dispute because no one would volunteer to be milked. During Ascot races, when traffic queued past Orchard Lea, they turned somersaults and cartwheels on the grass verge outside their gate, then held out their hands for pennies; as they grew older and less adept at acrobatics, they threw roses into the carriages as they went by. According to Sylvia, their parents frowned on their ever meeting other children 'for fear of mental contamination' - Doll put it down to the fact that 'Pupsie and Mumsie could not stand the boredom of children around' - as a consequence of which she found she had no idea how to behave with young people. Apart from their Ward cousins, virtually the only other children the young Bretts came into contact with were those of Princess Beatrice, Queen Victoria's youngest daughter, and her husband Prince Henry of Battenberg (who died of malaria in 1896). They would often go across to Windsor Castle to play with the wild young Battenbergs, running noisy three-legged races down the corridors of the castle, and when Sylvia was seven she and Doll joined the dance classes that Queen Victoria had arranged for her grandchildren. 'It was only a very small attendance, but I presume select,' wrote Sylvia. The Brett sisters keenly looked forward to these dance classes, which were effectively their only social events; they attended once a week, dressed in their best party frocks and sashes, brown silk stockings and bronze shoes. The teacher was a bad-tempered old lady called Mrs Wordsworth, who, so the children whispered, had a wooden leg and a glass eye. The children sat around and chattered until the arrival of Queen Victoria, who would enter the Red Drawing Room with a flourish, her black crinoline giving her the appearance of gliding across the parquet floor, and sit in 'a big throne chair' on the side, tapping her cane to the music and nodding encouragingly at the children. Sylvia claimed that the Queen made her stand out in front of the class because of her shapely legs. The lessons ended with a march-past in time to music, and curtseys and bows for the Queen. Later, when Sylvia was a teenager, the young and unruly Prince Edward (the future King Edward VIII and Duke of Windsor), Prince Albert (George VI) and Princess Mary would come over with their tutor to play at Orchard Lea. On one such visit eight-year-old Prince Edward, always known to his family as David, was discovered to have killed a neighbour's ducklings and laid them out beside the lake, whereupon a furious Reggie made him go and apologise. On another, he harnessed Prince Albert and Princess Mary to the Bretts' wagonette, while he stood on the driver's seat cracking a long whip. When Reggie yelled at him to get down, Prince Edward just laughed and shook his head defiantly, at which point his tutor pulled him down and smacked him on the backside. By the time Sylvia was seven or eight her father was growing restless and short of money. The sumptuous decoration of Orchard Lea was more or less complete and he had also spent a great deal on entertaining and racing, running up debts of £3,000. His father reminded him that he ought to be able to rub along on a private income of more than £4,0001 but agreed to bail him out provided he gave up betting and owning racehorses. Deprived of these pleasures, Reggie began to channel some of his energy into new close friendships, forming a passionate though platonic attachment to the Marchioness of Stafford (later Duchess of Sutherland), and becoming infatuated with a fifteen-year-old schoolboy at Eton, Teddie Seymour, who stayed for months at a time at Orchard Lea. There Reggie, apparently unconcerned by what his children might make of it all, would send him to sleep by combing his hair with his hand - 'a thing he adores'. Their relationship, which lasted three years, became common knowledge at Eton, where boys were warned against taking walks with Mr Brett. Sylvia, who had already been chided by Doll for ogling the guards at Windsor Castle, also fell for Teddie, 'so good-looking', she later recalled, 'with his golden hair and blue eyes, and lovely laughing voice ... Of course he was spoilt by my father and he could do exactly as he liked. I used to fetch and carry for him like a spaniel. There was not a thing I would not have done for him ... Doll and the boys would laugh at me for my devotion.' With time on his hands Reggie also found himself more drawn to the company of his political friends, including Lord Rosebery, a fellow Etonian protégé of Johnson, who famously said of him, 'He is one of those who likes the palm without the dust.' During his time as Prime Minister (1894-5), Rosebery leaned heavily on Reggie for advice, constantly urging him to come over to Downing Street for late-night discussions or long walks in Hyde Park. When, in 1895, he made Reggie Secretary of the Office of Works, the Chief Whip (Tom Ellis) described it as 'simply execrable ... a man with about £6,000 a year with five houses in town and country who has always left his party in the lurch'. Yet it proved an inspired appointment. Reggie now yearned for more responsibility, and the job of overseeing all public buildings, palaces and royal parks appealed to his love of art and history while also providing him with the very welcome opportunity to further his contact with the royal household. As well as managing sweeping changes to the palaces and the layout of the Mall, he put his stamp on a remarkable series of state occasions over the next seven years. When he organised the celebrations for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, in the hot summer of 1897, the children watched proceedings from a friend's balcony, and particularly enjoyed seeing the soldiers who were lining the street fainting in the heat. On another occasion a tent that Reggie's office had put up in the garden of Buckingham Palace proved too stuffy and guests began to feel groggy. Reggie was in court dress at the time, with a rapier at his side, and this he promptly drew and thrust through the canvas so as to provide ventilation; there came a terrible shriek when he very nearly pierced a housemaid who was peering through a crack on the other side. Overall, though, the Diamond Jubilee went off notably well, and it was followed in the next few years by the funeral of Gladstone, the opening of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the funeral of Victoria and the Coronation of King Edward VII. The impressive elegance of each occasion was thought to owe more to Reggie than to any other individual, so that he came to be seen as the inventor of modern ceremonial. Throughout this period, Sylvia, Oliver and Dorothy received scant attention from their father, who was by this time beginning to show pronounced favouritism towards his younger son Maurice - or Molly, as he came to be called. On the face of it, it is hard to understand why this pug-faced boy should have been, as Lionel Brett put it, so 'grossly spoiled as a child and absurdly flattered as a young man'. 'There is no position, however lofty, which you will not some day be qualified to fill,' Reggie told him. 'Your beloved breast has been broadened by Providence for the stars which some day will cover it.' Lionel Brett could only assume that the extraordinary intensity of Reggie's feelings resulted from the fact that the affectionate and impressionable Maurice, who was not exceptionally clever, readily accepted the acolyte status Reggie imposed on those whom he loved. Oliver, on the other hand, who was as clever and independent as his father, always refused to do so, and accordingly Reggie never really warmed towards him. The girls, meanwhile, were simply 'written off from an early age as plain and tongue-tied, and therefore made so'. Looking back in 1936, two years after Maurice died, Sylvia regretted various instances in her dealings with her brother, 'enacted out of passion or rage or revenge ... and an intense desire to have everything in life I could get, and have it in my own way - I was jealous of everyone and everything, and most of all I was jealous of my father's evident preference for his youngest son. I simply could not see what he had in him that I myself lacked, and I longed to see him as the underdog and myself climbing in his place.' She remembered once leaving a glass door ajar on a gusty day, knowing that Maurice, who was playing nearby, would get the blame when it slammed shut and shattered, as it duly did. Maurice was summoned to the library by his father and severely caned, while Sylvia 'listened at the door to his tears and rejoiced'. She also recalled how Maurice's 'black devil-moods' as a young boy distressed their father so much that he would 'retire into his room: the more deaf Maurice was to reason, the longer my father remained incommunicado, with my mother pleading with him outside the door to come out and pacify his son'. When Maurice went to Eton, in 1895, Reggie began a stream of letters to him that would later be bound in red leather and run to thirty-five volumes. On Office of Works notepaper, he addressed his thirteen-year-old son: 'My Sweet Fatty, What a duck you are ...' and asked questions such as 'Anybody captured your heart, my Fatty? George perhaps?' Maurice was in fact heterosexual (he had a thing about actresses and later married Zena Dare), though for a time he professed to be interested in other boys, possibly as a means of pleasing his father, who in turn came to depend emotionally on his younger son. In the spring of 1897 Reggie wrote to tell Maurice that Teddie Seymour 'may be on his way to India for 4 years!! This will make a change in my life - and I shall have to turn more than ever to you, Maurice, will you go on filling up chinks?' Two weeks later, he wrote: 'I wonder whether we shall stick together, Molly. It all depends on you!' Reggie snatched any opportunity to spend time with his son, 'a walk up High St with your dear arm in mine', a tantalising glimpse at the station, 'a very sweet half hour under the trees by Fellow's pond ... You don't know what you are to me with your dear eyes and your murmured confidences.' He told Maurice that he dreamt of him at night 'and not infrequently by day', and that 'Sometimes you have a frigid fit! Then I am miserable!' When he felt his love insufficiently reciprocated, he turned stalker: I couldn't resist, inspite of a sore head and heart, coming down to you last night, and standing concealed by the shadows of the elms, while I called you by that old whistle. I saw your dear figure pass down the passage after a long wait. You were not in your room before supper, when I first got there. Then I got a good glimpse of your face. When you opened the window, I thought I would show myself for a moment but decided I wouldn't ... then you went to prayers and I went gloomily home. Still I had seen you, Molly. Will you remember, years hence, how passionately you were beloved; with a real romantic passion which someday you may feel for someone else. Occasional letters tell of a physical dimension to Reggie's love for his younger son, as when he reminisced to Maurice in 1901: 'It is many days now - how many since you used to drive home with me sitting always by choice, on my knee - and ever since those days - now years ago - no unfaithful thought has ever crossed my mind ... I was almost certainly the first human being who kissed you at all, and quite certainly the first who kissed you passionately. I love to linger on these facts.' But Maurice, for his part, seems to have preferred not to do so, and although he told his father, 'I don't think you can imagine how dear you are to me,' two years later he informed him that he had had an erotic dream about the actress Ellaline Terriss - 'the sweetest night I have ever known in dreams'. For the girls, meanwhile, the overriding feeling was one of being excluded. In a vain attempt to win the affection of her father, Doll began to evince a preference for boys' clothes and for playing boys' parts in plays. But at least she was close to her mother, whereas Sylvia felt she had nobody, especially after her beloved grandfather Lord Esher died in 1899, aged eighty-three. To make matters worse, she was told that on his deathbed he had sent his blessing to her brothers but not a word to herself or her sister; only the brothers were allowed to attend the funeral at Esher parish church, where he was buried in the graveyard. Feeling more isolated than ever, Sylvia took to talking to the portraits that hung on the walls at Orchard Lea. Other events, too, may have contributed to her sense of isolation. When the children's great-aunt, Louise Van de Weyer, had died, in 1896, it was to Dorothy, whose artistic sense was more in tune with 'Aunt Lou', that she left most of her money - £20,000 in trust via her mother, providing her with a modest income for life. Aunt Lou had also left a Stradivarius violin to Reggie, which he promptly sold, spending the proceeds on adding a large room on to Orchard Lea, known as the Gallery. By her account - and here we only have her word to go on - in the midst of her childhood despair Sylvia tried to commit suicide three times, though she was characteristically hazy on the dates. In her second autobiography she was 'a girl barely twelve years old' when she set out to destroy herself; interviewed on television shortly after the book came out, in 1970, she said that she 'must have been seven or eight'. Whenever it was, she confessed to having been 'too much of a coward to do anything violent, and besides, I was in that state of mental peculiarity when the desire for a bedroom scene and the weeping remorse of those around me grew and grew into a vivid picture that very soon became an obsession'. She first experimented with ptomaine poisoning, buying a tin of sardines from the village shop, opening it and leaving it on top of her wardrobe for seven days, before washing the mouldy contents down with water. When that failed - her father remarked on how well she looked the next morning - she sought to catch pneumonia by lying naked in the snow on the turret outside her room. That, too, left her feeling perfectly healthy, so finally, and equally unsuccessfully, she lay all night in bed wrapped in soaking towels and stockings, trying to bring on consumption. 'I pictured myself in diaphanous negligee wasting away before my parents' eyes, coughing blood.' Given Sylvia's subsequent reputation for innaccuracy, particularly about herself, it is tempting to suspect that these stories were at least exaggerated, designed to add drama to her memoirs, which she was eager to sell. In any case, by her account again, she soon concluded that she was not destined to die, and subsequently made up her mind that she would 'live flamingly and electrify the world'. Copyright © 2007 by Philip Eade Text illustrations copyright © 2007 by Emily Faccini Preface copyright © 2014 by Philip Eade Excerpted from Sylvia, Queen of the Headhunters: An Eccentric Englishwoman and Her Lost Kingdom by Philip Eade All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.