Mary Wesley

Mary Wesley became famous for three things: for having published her first novel at the age of 70; for capturing the atmosphere of wartime England, particularly wartime London, more vividly than any writer since Rosamond Lehmann and Elizabeth Jane Howard; and for writing frankly about sex . . . upper-class sex in particular. She was baffled when many readers were shocked that someone her age could write like this.

People are startled by my books because they think, how can an old woman write about sex? As though one forgets it, as though it isn't in everything you see, breathe, watch – because sex is so enjoyable and so funny – how could one forget it? The idea that people go on being sexy all their life is little explored in fiction. What do people think "happy ever after" means? It goes on and on; it doesn't end.

The wartime books exemplified Mary Wesley's particular style. In them, her distinctive authorial voice was fully formed. The crisp, unselfpitying realism of her first novel, Jumping the Queue (1983), had not been to everyone's liking and the book's plot – an ageing widow attempts suicide, but rediscovers the will to live through a mutually dependent sexual relationship with a criminal on the run – put many readers off. Initially, sales were slow. James Hale, who became her friend and editor, had accepted the book after a string of rejections.

"Her agent at the time was Tessa Sayle," he recalls.

She had apparently sent Jumping the Queue all round London but without success. I was newly arrived at Macmillan as fiction editor and I just saw something in it. There was a quirkiness of voice, an originality and a directness of narrative that was new. I did say to the agent (not being at all aware how poor Mary was at the time) that I wanted to meet her so she came up to London – I learned later that Tessa had lent her the fare, otherwise she couldn't have afforded it. I was immediately struck by her, as anyone would be. When I'd read the book she asked me what I wanted to change and I said, "Not a word."

From the start, Wesley was recognised as a serious writer. Hale says that

She got reviewed in all the papers. What's unconventional about her characters is that they follow their own hearts and don't descend into hypocrisy. Her viewpoint was never judgemental; always sexually liberated – unusual in someone of her age – with a willingness to laugh a great deal. Laughter occupied every page and every half hour of her life.

Wesley took the Second World War as background for her second novel, The Camomile Lawn (1984), and her fifth, Not That Sort of Girl (1987). She also set two of her last books, A Sensible Life (1990) and Part of the Furniture (1997), during those years. She may have become identified in the public mind as a chronicler of the war, but her other six novels varied widely, though always set against backgrounds and among the sort of people she knew best. These covered a broad spectrum, from upper-class twits to a murderer on the run; the murderer proving more admirable than the twits.

In life as in her books, Wesley never gave a fig for convention. "I've seen a dinner party thrown into disarray," Hale recalled, "by her saying she didn't think it was incumbent upon children to love their parents, or vice versa." This was an opinion no doubt based on her childhood experiences. No single character in her books "is" Mary Wesley, though Calypso in The Camomile Lawn perhaps comes closest, but traces of the author can also be found in the lovely, amoral Hebe, heroine of her third novel, Harnessing Peacocks (1985). Hebe has two supreme gifts – she is a great cook and an even better lover – and uses both to support herself and her illegitimate child. This had no parallel in Wesley's own life – for one thing, she disliked cooking – but it does reflect her disregard of bourgeois morality. Her last agent, Rachel Calder, said:

She wanted to write about the sort of people she knew best – partly herself but also other people who weren't like the image – much wilder women who insisted on having their way and suffering the consequences. She was a passionate

woman who clearly thought she should be able to be herself all her life and she never spoke of regrets.

She was born Mary Aline Mynors Farmar in 1912, the last of three children, in Englefield Green, on the edge of Windsor Great Park, in a country house built by her grandfather. Her father was Col Harold Mynors Farmar, a distinguished soldier who at 18, as a young officer straight from Sandhurst, took part in the battle of Omdurman. He also survived Gallipoli, almost the only member of his regiment to stay alive. Her mother was Violet Hyacinth (née Dalby), whose grandmother had been a Wellesley, the name Mary later adapted for her writing career.

Her mother and father were happily married, but they were not particularly good parents. They had hoped for a second son and Mary always felt like an inconvenience to her distant, undemonstrative and self-absorbed mother. Fortunately – like many emotionally starved children of her class and generation – she had a marvellous nanny, Hilda Scott. "She was much more a mother to me than my mother; she took me on from the moment of birth." This nanny was summarily dismissed when Mary was three because her mother thought it was time the older siblings had a French governess. The first Mary knew of this was when her nanny, carrying a coat and her suitcase, came in tears to say goodbye. "It was incomprehensible to me, because I hadn't been warned. I've never felt secure again." The departed nanny always kept in touch, however, and Mary looked after her in old age until she died aged 100. Neither parent thought girls needed to be educated, so Mary and her elder sister had endless governesses – she counted 16. When she asked her mother why they never stayed long, the answer was, "Because they don't like you, dear."

Then came the First World War and her father went off to fight. Although she was only a child, Mary recalled that war vividly; the coming and going of wounded relatives and her mother blanching at the sight of a telegram boy. In 1926, her parents went to India, dumping the 14-year-old Mary in a school she'd never seen, where she was left for 18 months to fend for herself.

I was bored rigid. I grew up totally ignorant . . . the school taught me nothing. I read non-stop but was never taken to the theatre, opera, concerts, cinemas – nothing. When my mother got back and realised how unhappy I was she sent me to Queen's College in Harley St where I was taught French literature and Greek history and loved it.

Then, after only two terms, I was despatched to a finishing school in Paris but after foolishly telling my mother we weren't very well chaperoned I was swiftly removed and sent to a domestic science college, where I did not learn to cook. There was no money to do a proper season so I was just presented at court.

By then – 1930 – Mary Farmar had become an exquisitely beautiful young girl. A photograph of her as a débutante shows huge intense dark eyes, flawless skin and a most beautiful sculpted mouth. She insisted,

I was no beauty – my jaw was too square for that – but I was pretty. I was always in love, or what young girls think is love. I went out with everyone who asked me, if I liked them – all sorts of young men, who were appalled by my ignorance.

This frivolity was partly curbed when in 1930, seeking to remedy that ignorance, she got her father's agreement for her to attend lectures at the London School of Economics in anthropology and international politics. She found these fascinating, not least because they were peopled by angry Czechs and Yugoslavians.

The men I went out with, the intelligent ones, were very left-wing, if not actually Communist – popping off to fight in the Spanish Civil War. I went to bed with somebody when I was 20 and it was a catastrophe because neither of us had done it before. [There is a scene very like this in The Camomile Lawn.] Afterwards you were always absolutely terrified lest you got pregnant But in those days men didn't assume you'd sleep with them – now they assume you will.

Sixty years later, when she was almost 80, the LSE made her an Honorary Fellow, which pleased her very much.

In 1938 Mary gave in to her mother, who was scandalised by the life her daughter was leading, by marrying Charles, second Baron Swinfen, a suitable man 10 years her senior, although she didn't love him.

I'd got my love life into a terrible muddle so I married somebody who seemed secure and nice and kind and was all those things; but I shouldn't have because it didn't last. I told him I wasn't a virgin, but it didn't put him off. I think he was in love with me, though I was terribly young and ignorant in terms of experience and mind. Marriage is always a toss-up – you can't win, but a happy marriage is not the norm.

It is wartime terror, exhilaration, sudden sex and sudden death that her novels capture so well. But they also describe the loneliness and constant anxiety of young women evacuated with their children to live in unfamiliar houses and tackle unfamiliar chores. This was not at first the fate of Lady Swinfen, by now mother of a son, Roger, who had been born in 1938.

When war broke out she was in London, where she soon found a job at the War Office, in a section that later became part of Bletchley Park, the code-breaking centre. She found it joyful and eccentric and liked the people she was working with very much. She continued to work at Bletchley until her second child was due. She and a friend – also pregnant – left London at the end of 1940 and went to live in south-west Cornwall.

The friend had a daughter, Mary a son, and they shared a nanny, both women hoping to go on seeing their friends in London. In practice, for the last years of the war Mary stayed in the country with her two little boys, Roger and Toby. This period was recreated in The Camomile Lawn. Its heroine, Calypso, the fictional character most like Mary herself, was to turn up in later books, by then with a much-loved husband who plants a forest that spells out her name in trees. For Mary, as the war dragged on, it became a time of acute shortages, made worse by the death of her friends.

Even before the war ended she had told her husband she would not be coming back to him. It was a painful and difficult time; the divorce was slow because Lord Swinfen didn't want to be cited for adultery. In the end she persuaded him to divorce her for desertion, but this meant they had to wait three years and were forced to lie and pretend they never met, despite constantly bumping into one another at the Ritz.

The divorce came through eventually, Swinfen soon remarried and he and Mary remained on good terms until his death in 1977. But her family was horrified that their daughter was now a divorcée – the word in those days had raffish sexual overtones – and even more horrified when, just before the decree nisi at the end of 1944, Mary met Eric Siepmann. The Siepmanns were German.

The family originated from Hamburg but had come to England in 1890. During the First World War Eric's father was shunned and called "a dirty Hun", an insult he never forgot. Eric himself was a naturalised Briton and had been a Winchester and an Oxford scholar but this made no difference to Mary's parents, who were appalled when they set up house together.

They said, "But he's half German!" – it was ghastly. They cut me out of their

wills, schwoosh! and an aunt wrote and said, could they have the family lace back? I hardly ever saw any of them again because I was so aghast at their behaviour. It mattered, yes; I minded it awfully.

By 1945 the war was over and as soon as Eric was demobbed he joined Mary and her sons. Wesley's stolid C of E parents had yet another shock when the two became Catholic converts, with the writer Antonia White – then a good friend – as an unlikely godmother. Eric's wife was refusing to divorce him so Mary took his name by deed poll. They lived together for seven years. In the late Forties he became a foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times and with help from Ian Fleming, Mary contrived to join him in Germany. They came back to England in 1949, Eric's divorce was finally granted and they married in 1952. Their son Bill was born in 1953, when Mary was 41. The family lived in Devon in a house overlooking a moor, where they were desperately hard up.

Although the house was paradise for my sons and all their friends, in the end we simply couldn't afford to keep warm, so we moved. All our lives we kept dodging back to the country and trying to write books. We pullulated with ideas but if one didn't come off Eric would move on to another, so he was very disappointed at the end of his life; he felt he hadn't achieved enough. If he didn't like a job he'd just leave, walk out, without waiting to get another one. It was rather nerve-racking. One minute you'd be secure and the next . . . whoops!

Despite these financial hardships, Mary felt fulfilled at last. It was years before she could bring herself to talk about her husband's comparatively early death. Siepmann's car was crushed in an accident when a lorry dropped its load of planks.

They brought him home to me and he was lying on the bed with his hair full of glass and all he could say was "Tim [our dog] is dead, Tim's dead." This accident gave him the sort of shock that can trigger Parkinson's Disease and five years later it started.

It's a horrible disease and in the end I was glad when he got pneumonia and died. That was in 1970, when he was 68, I was 57 and Bill was 16 – an awful age at which to lose your father. After that nothing happened for a very long time. There were some things that only he and I would have found funny and I miss that, and the companionship. I miss his mind.

After Eric Siepmann's death, Mary had no money except for a widow's pension and was very broke for a long time. "I was desperate, counting the pennies, thinking, 'Can I afford a stamp?'" Five years later, she began to surface from her profound grief and started to write Jumping the Queue, about the aftermath of a beloved husband's death. In the 1970s, hoping to earn some money, she had published three children's books as Mary Wesley, but had not until now attempted to write for adults. Rachel Calder says:

Her energy was prodigious: she had always been writing, even before she started being published, but had never managed to get the whole thing together, though I'm not sure how hard she tried. But clearly she went into a burst of activity; it was part of her grieving and getting over his death. Eric is present in many of the books – their meeting and affair is echoed.

Tessa Sayle, after five rejections, showed the typescript to James Hale at Macmillan. He read it in a week and accepted it instantly. Mary Wesley was overwhelmed by the £1,000 advance. Within 10 years, that sum would be multiplied a hundred times, making her one of the richest and most successful writers in England. The public was at first slow to recognise her gifts but the novel was well-reviewed, one critic observing: "Jumping the Queue, brimming over with confidence and black humour, is Mary Wesley's brilliant début."

The 1980s and early 1990s were a time of prolific creativity. Between 1983 and 1990, Mary Wesley wrote a book a year – a remarkable work-rate for anybody, but astonishing for a woman in her seventies. Her first commercial success came in 1984 with The Camomile Lawn, based on her experiences in the second half of the war when she was living in south-west Cornwall. It was to become her most popular novel, partly due to the successful television drama series in which Calypso was played by the young actress Jennifer Ehle.

Wesley was bemused when the public began to clamour for her books. "One's both pleased and wants to be private. I'm so grateful to the people who like my books and yet I find it extraordinary." She became a much sought-after celebrity on the literary circuit. Well into her eighties, Wesley continued to look remarkably young for her age, her eyebrows and cheekbones still beautifully arched and her eyes an unfaded deep blue.

It took several years before Mrs Siepmann metamorphosed fully into Mary Wesley, and perhaps she never did. Until the end of her life she continued to list herself in Who's Who under her married name. After her fourth book, The Vacillations of Poppy Carew in 1986 (about a woman who inherits a great deal of money), each one appeared instantly on the best-seller list. Wesley was now earning a not-so-small fortune from six-figure advances, TV dramatisations and foreign rights. Did she enjoy being rich?

My dear, the relief of not being poor is so absolutely terrific! I try and remember now what it was like being poor and send cheques when I can. I never lend; it makes both sides resentful; it's best to give and say nothing more about it.

She gave away much of her money to family and friends (she especially enjoyed spoiling her grandchildren) and to charities such as Amnesty and Prisoners of Conscience.

Her own way of life hardly changed. She stayed in her small, secluded house in Totnes, in Devon, travelling a bit more and indulging her fondness for cashmere sweaters. She welcomed people who didn't hold traditional, Establishment views and loved being interviewed by Christopher Hitchens and Patrick Marnham (The latter is writing her biography). At the same time she resented the intrusion of journalists sent to try and ferret out the private life that they suspected must have inspired the colourful love affairs depicted in her novels and she sharply rebuked the Daily Mail for "harassing" her.

In 1987 she wrote Not That Sort of Girl, about Rose, who maintains her equilibrium and the happiness of all concerned despite sleeping with two men at once: her devoted husband Ned and her lifelong admirer, Mylo. Auberon Waugh thought it should have won the Whitbread Prize. Wesley's imagination, given its head at last, brimmed with ideas. In 1988 came Second Fiddle. James Hale explained:

The incest theme was again explored in this account of a young man trying to write, encouraged by an older woman who turns out to be the child of a brother and sister. By now Mary had begun to have characters from one book turning up in others, and readers loved recognising them.

Wesley recalled her own childhood when in 1990 she came to write A Sensible Life. It opens in 1926 with a 10-year-old girl, Flora Trevelyan, "a thin, lonely child with huge eyes and an extensive vocabulary of French foul language". Ignored and unloved, she is the child of a civil servant posted to India and a self-obsessed mother – a couple suspiciously like Wesley's own parents – while Flora surely has undertones of Mary herself.

She was by then 80 and her output was beginning to slow down. In 1993 she published A Dubious Legacy, of which her editor said:

It's not like any of her others: a curiously telling and certainly very quirky novel. It's about a man who has inherited a house in the country from his father and also inherited a woman whom his father had rescued from Cairo just before the war. He marries her, and she turns out to be a madwoman.

An Imaginative Experience, published in 1994, has an equally improbable premise. Sylvester Wykes, a traveller on an InterCity train returning to London, hears the brakes hissing as the train stops in the middle of the countryside. A woman has pulled the communication cord. She leaps from the train and races to the aid of a sheep stranded on its back, unable to rise, in a field. Who could fail to read on?

In 1997 Mary Wesley produced her final novel, Part of the Furniture. Once again harking back to the war, it is about a girl who runs away from London after a bombing raid and goes to the country to become a landgirl. This completed her trilogy of war novels. After it came Part of the Scenery (2001), a collaboration about the West Country illustrated by the photographer Kim Sayer, with Wesley contributing her memories and anecdotes of a part of England that she had known and loved almost all her life. A year short of her 90th birthday, she was brisk about the penalties of growing old.

I don't think about age – I just find it annoying that I get very tired. I'm jolly lucky that I'm healthy and have got a good constitution. I've got plenty to do, I'm fiercely independent and very fortunate that I love living alone. If I can't live with Eric I don't want to live with anyone else.

In her last months she was suffering from gout and a blood disorder, her slow decline made briefly joyous by the marriage in February of her son Toby Eady to the Chinese writer and broadcaster Xinran.

Angela Lambert