Theodora's Story, Part One

3 April 2007

I remember it as a story that unfolded in my childhood, so that’s the way I’ll tell it. I shall probably be embarrassed by its lyricism , tomorrow. I’m embarrassed by it in advance indeed: I’m almost certain to go over the top in a Barbara Cartland sort of way to some extent. But then you see, it was a Barbara Cartland sort of world we lived in then, we children of the Forties and Fifties. It was also a rather grey and unromantic world in many ways; the war had just ended, and the great romance of the century had involved a king who gave up his throne for a woman whom nobody very much liked. Looking back on it now, I can see that the course of history might have been very different, had Mrs Simpson been prettier. The great British public has a forgiving heart, and Wallis might have lived to become queen after all, if only she’d looked just a little bit more like Theodora……

That is to jump the gun though, before I’ve even started. To begin at the beginning: it was 1948, and I was nine years old and in love with princesses. But I lived in New Zealand then, and since we had no princesses of our own, I was obliged to look for them in story books; or in the picture magazines that came from England – or sometimes on the newsreels at the little local cinema, which we called the picture theatre, and which was the only living visual record we had, in those long ago pre-television days.

There weren’t many princesses around just then, I seem to recall. Princess Elizabeth had married the year before, it’s true; bringing a splash of colour and romance into those drab, immediate post-war days. But the real princesses were not to come until several years later; when I was seventeen, and under the spell, successively, of Soraya of Persia, Grace Kelly of Monaco and Jimmy Goldsmith’s Isabella Patino. Isabella wasn’t a princess at all, of course, any more than Theodora had been, six years earlier… But it must have seemed to me that in both their stories were more of the elements of fairy tale to be found, than in those of many a real princess who came later.

What was it about Theodora, I wonder, that made her shimmer so, for me, on the cinema screens of my ninth year? ( I have to remind myself, here, that the girl whom I knew as Theodora then, is still alive today, in the person of the old lady at the end of the footpath about whom my window cleaner was so very disparaging the other day. Whichever way one looks at it, there’s a transition that will have to be made,here, and it’s not going to be a simple, or a comfortable one. I’m going to have to make it any day now, for all that: the word among the shop-keepers and the dog-walkers being, that Lady Macauley and her daughter always return from Italy some time in early April…)

To return to 1948 though, and the way I remember it - how into the gloom of those early post-war years, banishing the spectre of Mrs Simpson, and eclipsing even the romance of the married Princess Elizabeth, came the Lady Theodora Thane, who seemed to combine in her one young person, all the luminous blonde beauty of Grace Kelly, with the high romance of Soraya of Persia and the enchantment of Jimmy Goldsmith’s forbidden Isabella. Theodora’s was a forbidden love too, and at first I must have been rather puzzled by it. There she was, young, beautiful, an earl’s daughter; she seemed to have had all the good fairy's best gifts bestowed upon her – she danced, and sparkled for an hour; and then she took it into her head one day, to throw it all away and marry Jack Macauley; a Yorkshireman twice her age, who had made his fortune from the manufacture of boots, and shoes, and saucepans, and of whom her family passionately disapproved.

Remembering it now, I wonder how it was I didn’t find something vaguely disappointing about Theodora’s choice of lover. Jack Macauley was taller than Prince Rainier, it’s true, and more rugged-looking than the Shah – but in all other respects he must have seemed a curious choice, for a young girl who might have married anyone. He was already married, besides. He had been married young, to his childhood sweetheart in the north; he was the father of several adolescent children, and was obliged to go through all the public spectacle of an acrimonious divorce, before he could marry Theodora. None of these things seemed to count against him in the press and public estimation of the day, however. And nor, it would seem, in mine. In my recollected nine-year-old self, I can find nothing to suggest that I found him wanting in any way. I daresay his wealth had much to do with it. People will forgive almost anything in a man, it seems, if only he has millions enough; and Jack Macauley’s millions were almost legendary in scale by then….

I think it’s probably best if I break off at this point, though. A thousand words is more than enough for any blog, and there’s so much more to tell. I’d like to be able to tell it all, if I can, before the old lady returns who, astonishingly, is still Theodora. Bill has just come in from his vegetable garden, besides. He’s digging a plot in which to grow cabbages, out there in his tiny back garden. I see it as an excellent development on the whole. He must have had too much time on his hands, before; else why would he have preoccupied himself so, with the condition of my blog? But he’ll want his coffee now (I’m trying to encourage him to go to Starbucks for it). So I’ll put this aside for today, and come back again tomorrow, or just as soon as I have marshalled the rest of the remembered facts ….