head of her young family. She was apart from David again until he returned at the end of the war on Guy Fawkes Day, 1945. With her young sons, Rosemary left Barnsley House and hired “a real old-fashioned nanny to help manage the children.”2 According to custom she was referred to by her employer’s last name as Nanny Verey, joining the young family and staying for the following sixteen years. Rosemary moved them all into a cottage she rented in Fairford, not far away from Barnsley and the larger town of Cirencester, in the lovely Cotswolds countryside about two hours drive west of London. It was “a tiny house, always an agony of cold.”3
With most of the men gone, many of Rosemary’s school friends joined the Wrens and other war-related organizations. Some even took on the jobs that became available with so many men off fighting. Had she chosen not to marry, or possibly married but gone on to complete her University degree, Rosemary’s life might well have taken a very different tack. Instead, she embarked upon family life in the country. One of her American friends, Arthur Reynolds, observed that Rosemary really “withdrew and became a mom during the War.”
With fuel in short supply, Rosemary enterprisingly began to drive a goat cart around the village of Fairford. Everyone had to do their part for the war. There was a major push to encourage people to grow vegetables. Almost everyone turned their flower gardens and lawns over to food production. Rosemary grew food for her own small family and probably shared some of her produce with her neighbors. A Mr. Wall from the next village came every Saturday to help her. She described him as “a countryman and a natural teacher … he had me growing cabbages and leeks and taking cuttings of the chrysanthemum plants he had given me.”4
At the end of the war in 1945, Winston Churchill was defeated by Clement Attlee and the Labour Party. To conservative Rosemary, “it seemed as if the bottom had dropped out of my world and that before long we might be a communist state. But there was always hope – and my seeds came up in spite of Attlee’s theories.”
When David returned from the war to resume his place in their lives, Rosemary found the adjustment difficult. Her own conventional upbringing required her to give up being in charge and defer to her husband, even though during his absence, she “had carved the roast. I had changed.… He had changed. And you had to say, right, I have married this man because I loved him and I must still love him and it worked all right. It was quite horrendous to be honest and truthful. You had to abdicate certain things.”5
For someone of Rosemary’s strength and independence, David’s reappearance and reassertion as head of household must have been extremely painful. They barely knew each other when he went off to the S.O.E. shortly after their wedding. Before that, their courtship had been nonexistent, their marriage sudden, and their life together brief and interrupted by his duties with his regiment. Rosemary had grown from a young bride barely of twenty-one years to a mother of two in charge of everything.
“We were separated for three years. When he came back he was a stranger. I had been caring for his children, but I had organized my own life. I had become self-sufficient. While he was away, for example, I always carved the Sunday joint. During the War you only had two ounces of meat each and you had to be rather clever at carving. But men traditionally always do the carving. When he came home, I still wanted to go on doing it. But I belong to a generation, taught by my mother, that you married someone and that was your life. You took care of him. He came first.”6
It must have been challenging for both of them. David had to adjust to civilian life and fit into his family. Rosemary recognized that it was “even more difficult for the men coming back. They had to get a job.” Rosemary had to learn to defer to him, step back from being head of the household, let him take charge, and set the course for the family. His first thought was to resettle the family in London where he hoped to find a job as an architect. Had David managed to settle the family in London, as he tried to do, Rosemary might never have considered a garden. It would be David who took the family off to Gloucestershire, and David who would initiate the creation of their garden.
London had been devastated by the blitz. More than twenty thousand Londoners had been killed and large areas of the City completely destroyed by the bombings. The couple spent a few months there as David sought to find work. They “were shocked by the war damage in London. No new building was taking place; it was all repairing bombed buildings, using utility materials.” But despite the need to rebuild huge areas of London, England was in the early stages of recovery, with food, fuel, and basic materials all severely rationed for the foreseeable future. The rebuilding concentrated on repairs and salvage, hardly challenging work for an aspiring young architect. Nor were there many jobs. Rosemary recalled that “although he was a qualified architect, the best salary he was offered was less than I paid my gardener, so he decided to accept a job from the Ministry of Housing as an investigator of historic buildings, listing these according to their architectural merit.”7
Rosemary’s future was completely dependent upon David’s decision. When he was assigned to Gloucestershire and the adjoining counties, the family moved back to a home in the environs of Barnsley and Fairford. They left London never to return to live there again. David would remain in this post for almost twenty years, eventually writing two highly respected volumes of the Pevsner’s Buildings of England series that are still in print.8
By contrast to the ravaged London, returning to the country must have seemed a deliverance. In the rural villages, life continued much as before. The Cotswold countryside, with its honey-gold stone buildings, gently rolling green hills with fields outlined by undulating stone walls, windbreak clumps of ancient trees, and hedgerows full of wildlife, was dotted with picturesque small villages, supporting an agricultural way of life. For most of the populace, life centered on their crops and their livestock. A strong class system persisted, with the upper crust still living in the manor houses and riding their horses and dogs in the hunt. The Church was at the core of village life, its steeple rising above the surrounding buildings. David was to study and inventory many of these historic churches in his new work.
David and Rosemary bought a handsome stone house called Hinton House in the village of Ablington, only a few miles down the road from the village of Barnsley. The house suited their needs. It had a lawn for the children that sloped down from the front door toward a lavender hedge, as well as a tennis court and a small paddock. As a passionate horsewoman and competitive tennis player, Rosemary felt that the house clearly met her requirements for happiness. Three loose box stalls held her horse and ponies for the children. They moved in December 20, 1946, the day before her twenty-eighth birthday. One wing served as the nursery where Nanny Verey could attend to the children, while Rosemary and David had their privacy and were left undisturbed. While Rosemary did continue to gain some experience growing vegetables at Hinton House, she focused her energies on her children, her horses, tennis, and other conventional social pursuits expected of a good church-going mother and wife.
Soon thereafter, their daughter Veronica was born in 1946, followed by Davina in 1949. Rosemary’s life took on the typical rhythm of an English country lady who, although not aristocracy, fit into upper-class country life or what one American friend dubbed the “squierarchy.” Nanny Verey helped rear the four young children while the Master and Mistress entertained in traditional style. As was true (and is still often true) of English country houses, Hinton House was barely heated and Gillian Sandilands remembered it “was an agony of uncomfortableness.” Nevertheless, following strict social conventions, the dinner guests at Hinton House were expected to appear in black tie. On one particularly stormy and cold weekend, the arriving guests had to walk over duckboards to avoid the floodwaters and get to the front door. Gillian, arriving from London, was quite unprepared for formal dress. “If it was a freezing cold house and flooded, you would not have thought it was the moment for black tie. I always used to wear [my husband’s] socks in bed.”
Both Rosemary and David hunted, although Rosemary with much more enthusiasm, greater skill, and more daring. The Church was at the center of their lives; David and Rosemary assumed
