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Frances Osborne: Sympathy for the bolter

20.02.08 Benedicte Page

Most families have black sheep of one kind or another, and Frances Osborne's is no exception. No, we are not talking about her high-profile politician husband—Osborne is married to George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer—but her great-grandmother, Idina Sackville, subject of her new book, The Bolter (Virago, May).

Idina was the five-times-married doyenne of Kenya's Happy Valley set, the infamous seductress of "White Mischief", and the inspiration for the Nancy Mitford character "The Bolter" in The Pursuit of Love. So scandalous a figure was she after leaving her first husband and two young sons in 1919 to run off to Africa with another man, that when Frances was an impressionable teenager, her parents tried to shield her from knowledge of this disreputable relative.

"My mum says she felt she didn't want my sister and myself to think of her as an exciting role model because she was a bad woman," Osborne says. "This woman who received her guests naked in a green onyx bath, then got out and dressed before them all; who would organise after-dinner games to work out who was going to end up in bed with whom. When I was 13 and trying to understand about the adult world, this was irresistible. But I can see why they didn't want us to think that life was glamorous."

Osborne turned to Idina's story after publication of her first book, Lilla's Feast. Idina's tale was well known, not least because one ex-husband, Josslyn Hay, Earl of Erroll, was shot dead in the infamous Happy Valley murder case. But Osborne had the advantage of unique access to the diaries of Idina's first husband, Euan Wallace, as well as letters and, of course, the family's own stories.

What emerges in The Bolter is a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of a woman whose escapades brought her no happiness. By the time she embarked on the book, Osborne had two young children of her own. "I was thinking: ‘How unhappy do you have to be to leave your children, or was Idina just thoroughly bad?' There were also all these comments from people, saying: ‘She was really very sweet and maternal', and then I found her letters which had been shoved in a suitcase after my grandfather died, with all this emotion pouring out. I thought: ‘There's something more here.'"

Osborne's research showed that Idina's first marriage—to dashing young millionaire Euan Wallace—conformed to Edwardian upper-class mores: in a union of money and property, once heirs had been provided to inherit, both parties were generally considered free to take lovers with impunity. In Idina's case, her husband strayed when she was incapacitated by illness, but—much more seriously by contemporary standards—he showed no great enthusiasm about resuming the marriage once she was well again. Osborne thinks Idina, hurt and confused, misjudged her reaction: "I had to keep on reminding myself how young they were. She was 25, and when you're 25 you think what's broken can't be mended. With a bit more experience you make things work."

Into Africa

Until 1923, a woman could not divorce her husband for being unfaithful. If Idina wanted to leave the marriage, the easiest solution was to let him divorce her. "That was the escape route, and there was very little chance of getting the children. Also, she would think, what was in the children's best interests? To go and live in Africa with their mother, the subject of a huge scandal, or with a father who had infinite resources, for the two years before they went off to boarding school? The selfish thing would be to say: ‘I want them with me, and I'm taking them to Africa.' "

Idina's life in Kenya was astonishingly louche. The weeks might be devoted to farming, but at the weekends there were bed-hopping parties, and infidelity was so much a part of life that, while married to Josslyn, Idina invited her friend Alice de Janze out to Africa purely to give her husband someone new to sleep with and prevent him straying beyond her control. Osborne describes the move as "desperate and sad and crazy", but sees the Happy Valley's scandalous reputation in dispassionate terms: "What the whole Happy Valley set were doing was a continuation of the pre-First World War morality, but they stopped hiding it—they didn't bother to be so discreet. But Kenya was smaller, and they were seeing a lot more of people who didn't necessarily behave in that way—and times were changing, and they weren't."

Idina found lasting happiness with none of her partners, and, though reunited with her sons towards the end of her life, both predeceased her. But ultimately, Osborne says, Idina's tragedy rested on that first scandal, the first "bolt": "You set off down one route and you have to go down it, and it stops being a choice."

Authors Todays Picks Benedicte Page Frances Osborne

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