Welstor Farm, in one of its houses. Frances would use this as a base for holidays, while continuing in her job in Malvern. The farm had been a second home for years, enjoyed with her father, but now her double bereavement of losing him and also losing Beara brought deep pangs of sorrow. While Frances had several cousins in the Whitley family, they were much older than she. Their kinship nonetheless brought some comfort.
Everything in Frances’s life had changed, just a few days before her nineteenth birthday. Her father’s death and the new somewhat makeshift arrangements in Welstor gave a deep sense of rootlessness. While Frances returned to Welstor as her new base for several years, it was all so different from the security she had known up to then, with Claude Whitehead acting as father and mother, a rock in her young life.
Colleagues at the RRDE, sensing something of her devastation in losing her father, showed kindness. As a way of giving her a break, she was sent to Cambridge for two weeks, to work at the Cavendish Laboratory, then under the direction of the Nobel laureate, Sir Lawrence Bragg. Wartime Cambridge, which escaped bombing, remained much as it had been before the war, affording few concessions to the nation’s new realities, at least on a superficial level, beyond the appointing by each college of its Air Raid Precaution (ARP) volunteers. Frances stayed in the Garden House Hotel, situated within easy reach of the Cavendish Laboratory, where she was set to work entering data into its huge computer. The hotel offered a welcome change for a fortnight from her not-very-comfortable digs in Malvern, which she shared with a fellow Malvernian also working at the RRDE. Here the young women had only a small baby Belling on which to cook, and mice could be seen running up the curtains.
A move to Lambeth
As the war finished, Frances’s role at the RRDE came to an end. While wondering what lay ahead, she accompanied her mother on a short holiday in the New Forest. Here she went out riding every day. During the week, she found herself riding in the company of Oliver Gibbs-Smith, who served as both vicar of St John’s Wood and the Archdeacon of London. As they talked, Frances spoke of her desire for a change, perhaps a move to London. The Archdeacon put her in touch with an architect friend in the Ministry of Works, Colonel Tweddell, whom he knew was looking for a secretary.
Frances had received some secretarial training in her final year at school, and she was offered a job in the Ministry of Works, based in Lambeth on the south bank of the Thames. The Ministry had been formed in 1943 originally to handle property requisitioned for use in the war; then in the post-war years it carried responsibility for government building projects. The construction of thousands of new homes, to replace those which had been bombed, was a pressing need, nowhere more so than in London, where the housing stock was seriously depleted. In 1945 a new surge of building began. In the UK over 150,000 prefabricated homes – flats, terraces, semi-detached houses – were constructed, mostly in London. They could be erected in comparatively few man-hours without dependence on bricks, and proved a popular temporary solution to housing needs. The first block of flats in London, functional and pleasantly designed, was opened by the Minister of Works in February 1946. While prefabs were intended as a stop-gap solution for families, some were to remain for decades, and a few into the new century.
From this point onwards, Frances returned less frequently to Devon. She found a bedsit near Earls Court in West London. Frances’s mother and Sylvia Dunsford were by now living in Ardingly, a picturesque village thirty miles south of London, in West Sussex. Frances would go and stay with them and their Alsatian dog, Carlo, at weekends. In due course, further change would come, in a direction Frances could not have anticipated.
12. Dorothy Whitehead, three years younger than Claude, moved into Beara to help run the household after Evelyn left home.
CHAPTER FIVE
Switzerland and Cape Town: 1947–51
The early years of peace time brought immense relief to everyone. For many it would mean a gradual path through the 1950s to home ownership and slowly to greater prosperity. For those who had lost loved ones, there would be massive personal adjustment. As life returned to a new semblance of normality, Evelyn and Sylvia, instead of resuming a comfortable life in Britain, decided in 1947 to move overseas.
Sylvia Dunsford had cousins living in Switzerland who suggested to them that they should move there. The idea appealed to Evelyn as she had spent a year at a Swiss finishing school and had loved it, so they decided to settle in Montreux, on Lake Geneva, where Sylvia’s relations lived. At their invitation, Frances, now aged 21, decided to leave her job in London and to go with them. The house in Ardingly was duly sold, and Evelyn and Sylvia found a spacious flat overlooking the Chateau de Chillon.
It was not an easy time for Frances, who was still grieving the loss of her father. She had no work permit so enrolled at the town’s School of Languages, and was glad to use time to improve her French. Under-employed, and with the rawness of bereavement, her days hung heavily, even depressingly. Frances played tennis, learned to ski, and took Carlo the Alsatian for walks in the local woods. While a couple of boyfriends at different times lifted her spirits, her life overall seemed empty; she felt she was drifting and she missed her father’s counsel.
Two years after arriving in Switzerland, in 1949, more change would come. Through Sylvia’s cousins, Sylvia, Evelyn and Frances had got to know a husband and wife from South Africa, with whom they spent much time. In talking with them a new idea surfaced, that of another international move. Evelyn and Sylvia were persuaded to explore a move to South Africa, with a view to purchasing a sugar-cane farm in Natal and employing a manager to run it. The prospect sounded very attractive.
Such a venture would require financial assistance from Evelyn’s mother, back in Paignton. Beatrice Eastley was surprised at the plan and sensed it had been Sylvia Dunsford’s idea. But Evelyn’s voice tended to be the dominant voice when it came to moving, and it was her wanderlust which would take them out of Europe. Having to leave Carlo behind, with a Swiss maid, was a painful loss for all three women. The Alsatian had been a faithful friend.
They travelled by train to Venice, where they boarded a boat to Durban, sailing through the Suez Canal. Having no particular guidance on where to settle, they travelled first up to Zululand. The terrain and the culture were not easy for westerners. Frances’s father had grown up in South Africa, and would have returned to the Johannesburg goldmine if he had not been injured in the war, and met Evelyn Eastley in his convalescence. But Evelyn had no experience of the country. She, Sylvia and Frances learned as they went. On one occasion they were told a black mamba snake had wound its way under their car. This is the fastest and longest snake on the continent, and its venom the deadliest.
They were advised to travel to Cape Town, where they first took a flat in the Oranjezicht area. Then for a short while they lived on a snake farm belonging to people with whom Sylvia and Evelyn had fallen into conversation as they travelled. An unusual setting indeed for such women, but the travelling trio needed somewhere to stay while they searched for a farm to buy, and accommodation was available here. The snakes were kept in pits, where they were bred so they could be ‘milked’ for venom, which would then be used to create an antivenom. It was a very different kind of life from Beara days.
A fruit farm in Paarl
In due course Evelyn and Sylvia learned of a fruit farm which would soon be for sale in Dal Josafat, near Paarl, in the Western Cape Province, thirty-five miles northeast of Cape Town. Paarl was the third-oldest town in South Africa, after Cape Town and Stellenbosch, following the arrival of the European settlers. The area is known for its scenic beauty and its fruit-growing heritage. It would become the focus of international news in February 1990, when Nelson Mandela completed the last days of his prison sentence in the Victor Verster Correctional Centre, where he was given a house. It was from Paarl that the last straight of the nation’s journey began to achieve multi-racial elections and abandon
