Alun and Kathleen Pugh, the tragedy of their son’s premature death left a lasting scar. Ann Hibbert remains convinced that the grief her mother felt damaged her health and eventually contributed to the stroke she suffered many years later. For Bronwen, though, David’s death, while regretted and mourned, was something she could recover from. The age difference between them had meant that the two had never been close. However, the loss of her brother may have had one lasting effect on her life. Alun Pugh had made no secret of his ambitions for his children. His son had not satisfied him. His eldest daughter had chosen marriage and a supporting role over a career of her own. Gwyneth was happy taking a back seat. Bronwen’s natural ambition-apparent but carefully reined in as she went to Central – may have been sparked by the desire, in some way, to make good her beloved father’s disappointment.
Bronwen soon fell in with a crowd at Central. She made up a foursome with fellow students Diana de Wilton, Erica Pickard and Joan Murray. They were an oddly symmetrical quartet – two tall, two short, two fair, two dark. While they all came from middle-class backgrounds and shared a similar sense of humour and a youthful determination to be frivolous whatever the gloomy national outlook, the four had contrasting but complementary characters. Diana de Wilton was a reserved, unconfident, convent-educated Irish Catholic from Tunbridge Wells, brought up by adoptive parents, while Joan Murray, small, witty and outgoing, had a Scottish father and French Jewish mother. It was Erica Pickard, however, who was the pivot of the group. The other three all regarded her as their special friend. Bronwen Pugh, even as a student, still lived in the shadow of others – her sisters, the glamorous Virginia McKenna and, within her own circle, Erica.
In Erica – as with Joan Tuker – Bronwen was again drawn to the third of three daughters, though this time there was no hint of romance in their friendship. And like Bronwen, Erica was trying to break the family mould. Her two elder sisters had become doctors. She was determined not to follow in their footsteps. There was, friends remember, something compelling and unusual about Erica. For a start, her family lived in Geneva, where her father taught at the university. She had spent the war years in America and that experience also contributed to her standing out from her peers.
‘She arrived with this American preppy look,’ Diana de Wilton remembers, ‘skirts and jumpers and blouses with little collars. We were all still in twin set and pearls, though under Erica’s influence we soon changed. And she was freer in thought, much more adult. I’d been to a convent where there was no freedom of thought, but Erica would take me to Quaker meetings “to broaden my mind”. I used to worry that I was committing a sin.’ Erica also had a more mature attitude to men than her three friends – all of them straight out of protective all-girl schools. ‘She was freer in her thoughts about boys and sex and those things,’ says Diana de Wilton. ‘Not that any of us were in any way experienced, but she was just less buttoned up. We tried to follow her lead.’ While the other three all lived at home, Erica enjoyed the freedom of her own flat in Golders Green, shared with one of her sisters.
All four – with the possible exception of Erica Pickard – were naive and unworldly in their dealings with men. For Bronwen there would be great romantic crushes that faded before the man in question even realised she was interested. If he then made a move, she would already have passed on to another equally unrequited passion. Men, in general, were regarded as desirable but optional and often little more than a subject of amusement. Alun Pugh’s efforts to introduce his daughter to eminently suitable but sensible young barristers across the dining table at Pilgrims Lane therefore failed to move her. ‘They would always be saying, “Well, what about so-and-so, there’s nothing wrong with him?” One of their candidates became known to us all as “poor Smith” because he was always wanting to take me out and I wasn’t interested. It wasn’t that I didn’t want romance, but I had no wish for anything serious, let alone thoughts of marriage.’
Despite being a young eighteen in many ways, she had a clear and unfashionable view that life had to be about more than marriage and settling down. ‘We had men friends, but they were never intense partnerships at all. We’d often swap boyfriends between the four of us. And then we’d drop them really just because we felt like it. It was all very innocent and casual. We were far too inhibited for it to be anything more serious. There was no pill so you didn’t have sex. Nice girls like us didn’t do it for fear of what might happen. If you did then it would be the person you intended marrying and I wasn’t thinking about marriage at all.’ Only later did her father tell her that she had left a trail of broken hearts in the Inns of Court.
Outside hours, the four young women would head off to the coffee bars and salad counters that were just starting to open up in the capital. There they would bury their heads in fashion magazines, planning what dizzy dress-making heights they would aspire to over the weekend with whatever they could get on coupons, though Bronwen now recalls that she invariably looked tatty. In the evenings they frequented the West End theatres – half a crown in the gods and then a long walk home. Laurence Olivier was a particular favourite of all four, while the link with Christopher Fry through Central got them into the first night of his celebrated verse play Ring Round the Moon at the Globe in 1950.
Otherwise there were parties, though Bronwen was twenty before she stayed out all night – at a sleepover at Joan Murray’s. ‘My parents were never strict, but if I was going to be late I’d tell them where I was, whom I was with and when I would get back. I always made sure that I was there on time.’ She began smoking, more because it was the done thing than through any overwhelming addiction, and enjoyed the occasional drink, though seldom to excess. Though she had ambitions to be a free spirit and mould-breaker, the Pughs’ youngest daughter gave her parents few sleepless nights.
The four young friends would often congregate at Pilgrim’s Lane. On one occasion Alun Pugh took his youngest daughter and her friends to court for the day. ‘We had asked him something about the law,’ says Diana de Wilton, ‘and he had then decided we should see what goes on at first hand. He was a very kind man, and charming too, but he could still be a little bit frightening. I remember him asking me what books I liked to read. I was only nineteen and shy and said, “Rebecca”. “Oh,” he said, “can’t you think of anything better than that?” I felt so ashamed.’
The unspoken assumption all through the course at Central was that it would lead to a career in teaching. Towards the end of the final term there was a tour of Home Counties’ schools, with the students producing and performing Companion to a Lady, The Harlequinade and the obscure Second Shepherd’s Play. Bronwen’s role was mostly on the production side.
After passing her final examinations and getting her diploma in June 1951, she turned her mind to finding a job. A selection of vacancies was displayed on the school noticeboard and she got the first post she applied for – at Croft House School, Shillingstone, in Dorset. That enduring lack of planning again played a part in her life for, had she made any preliminary enquiries, she would have realised it was a place to be avoided. Croft House was an odd set-up, run in their home by an eccentric, elderly couple, the Torkingtons, known to their disgruntled staff (for reasons that are now obscure) as Caesar and Pop. Miss Pugh’s classroom was in a greenhouse.
The pupils were all girls and had originally come to Croft House to keep the Torkingtons’ own daughter company as she was educated at home. It had subsequently grown in size but lacked any strong guiding principle beyond keeping its young ladies occupied during the school term. It was certainly not an outstandingly academic environment. When any girl passed her school certificate, it was announced at assembly and everyone clapped in surprise and awe. Such an achievement was something out of the ordinary. More often than not, a pony club rosette was all a girl had to show for five years at Croft House.
To her surprise, Bronwen found she enjoyed teaching. Or she enjoyed working with individual pupils. In front of a class full of disgruntled and unmotivated girls, however, she soon realised that her father’s ambitions for her to be a headmistress were misplaced. ‘My classes ended up uproarious, with me laughing
