Deborah Scroggins - Emma’s War - Love, Betrayal and Death in the Sudan

The very night Maggie discovered that her husband was having an affair with another woman, she happened to be reading one of Emma’s favourite childhood stories, Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘Thumbelina’. The tale of a tiny girl rescued by a swallow from having to marry a mole, then flown to the warm lands of the south, where she became a princess, must have recalled to the McCunes the magical days in Assam, before they were exiled back ‘Home’. As their troubles mounted in England, perhaps it was only natural that the family should recall their years in India as a time and place in which they had been free to be the aristocrats that Julian, at least, felt himself to be. After a few drinks, Julian was wont to regale the local pubs about how, in India, he had been able to take the law into his own hands and do as he pleased. He loved to tell the story of how he had got himself out of jail after accidentally hitting a sacred cow with his car in Calcutta. He never could get used to how the roguish behaviour that his fellow expatriates had found so entertaining in India met with disapproval in England. When he invited the Yorkshire policemen who had caught him driving drunk to join him for a brandy before their court appearance, an English judge was not amused.

It was not Julian’s assumption of superiority that bothered his Yorkshire friends. Imperialism had not gone out of fashion in that part of the world. People did not mind if Julian complained about missing his Indian servants at the same time as he boasted about having ‘given service to the colonies’. They didn’t care if he saw it as his right to live like a lord. After all, some of his old school friends were lords. No, it was not Julian’s pretensions that set him apart from the society in which he found himself. It was his inability to maintain them. ‘I just think he was born too late,’ Gilbertson said sadly. ‘He should have been born forty years earlier and with a hell of a lot of money’ In the end, much of it did come down to money. To Maggie’s intense anger and humiliation, Julian pleaded for leniency at his embezzlement trial on the grounds that he stole to finance his wife’s extravagance. The two were divorced in January 1976. A few weeks later Julian killed himself.

Emma, who was eleven, was visiting the city of York the day it happened. Her father had never stopped seeing her. Indeed, he was the more playful of the McCune parents, forever taking the children out for a ride or a shooting expedition while Maggie fretted over how to buy groceries. That weekend he had invited Emma to go to the horse races with him, but she decided to go to York with her sister instead. She later told friends how much she regretted not going with him that day. She said she always wondered if she might have saved his life. With Julian’s death, the days of pony school and ballet lessons were truly over. Maggie and the children entered a period of their lives as grim and cheerless as the bleakest Yorkshire winter. Maggie, who had not worked outside the house during her marriage, embarked on a heroic struggle to support all four children. For a while, she had to pump petrol at the local service station to make ends meet. At last she found a job as a secretary to a headmaster at a state primary school in nearby Catterick Garrison. In her book, she chronicles the family’s series of moves from borrowed cottages to a grey cement council house before she and the children finally landed their own small semi-detached house in the village of Little Crakehall.

As the eldest child, Emma went from being the petted darling of Cowling Hall to becoming her mother’s second-in-charge. Maggie leaned on her to help with the housework and look after the other children. Emma had to learn to shop and cook and sew. She also had to console her mother, who was so depressed and angry and fearful that she came home from work each evening longing to crawl into bed. ‘After my father died, Emma was like my mother’s husband,’ her brother Johnny remembers. One of Emma’s friends from Kenya said that Emma told her she dreaded coming down to the kitchen in the mornings as a teenager to see the list of chores her mother would leave for her. The family worried constantly about money. None of the houses they lived in had central heating, not even the Little Crakehall cottage that Maggie bought and lovingly restored. The electricity was on a coin meter, and occasionally it went off because they did not have enough coins. It was so much like one of those fairy tales in which a princess is brought low that Emma might have lain in the freezing room she now shared with her sisters, dreaming of Thumbelina and a swallow who might spirit her away to somewhere warm where her rightful identity would be restored.

Despite their reduced circumstances, the McCunes remained part of the Yorkshire gentry. Maggie’s closest friends continued to invite her and the children to fancy dress balls at their Georgian estates. They and Maggie’s sister even helped with fees so that Emma could stay in public school, first at a Richmond convent, then at Godalming College in Kent. Maggie writes in her book that she hoped everything would come out all right if her children could just stay in the same schools and keep the same friends. ‘I think education is the most important gift you can give your children, don’t you?’ she told me. Emma was a hard worker, and she was good at organizing people and getting them to do what she wanted, buther strengths were not academic. Several of Emma’s friends from Yorkshire have grown up to be well-known writers, editors and artists; among this rich and clever group, Emma was considered a slow student. ‘Dippy’, ‘not very well read’, ‘not very articulate’ are some of the less charitable phrases they privately used to describe her intellect. Emma knew what they thought and resented it. Intensely competitive, she was frustrated and disappointed when her test scores were not as high as those of some of her friends.

She came off better outside school. Her set liked to show off, riding to hounds, holding extravagant parties and challenging each other as to who was the most adventurous. They all intended to live dangerously; reckless behaviour was part of what they regarded as their aristocratic sensibility. (Typical of the epic tone was a young man who rented the entire town cinema so that he and his friends could watch the 1948 movie Scott of the Antarctic over and over again. He went on to become a UN ambassador and to write several books about Arctic exploration.) This was an arena in which Emma shined. Even as a teenager, she loved hearing people gasp at her latest exploit. At an age when most people want only to fit in, she strove for glamour. Unlike her strait-laced mother, who favoured straight skirts and wore her hair neatly pulled back, Emma loved dramatic costumes with big hats and lots of jewellery. Once when she couldn’t afford to buy a gown for a grand party, she made one for herself out of black plastic bin liners. After passing through a gawky stage, she blossomed into a long-legged beauty, with pale freckled skin and a slow, seductive manner of speech. A classmate at the Convent of the Assumption school in Richmond remembers the entrance Emma made at a party when she was about sixteen. ‘Emma arrived wearing a striking black-and-white dress she’d made, and long evening gloves. The dress was long and straight. Everyone else was wearing conventional ball dresses, and no one could take their eyes off Emma. Our duckling had become a swan.’

Still, Emma knew that in clubby North Yorkshire she would always be her father’s daughter. Behind the admiring glances lay pity. The condescension stung. North Yorkshire is a place with long memories. The sound one most often hears in its pubs and mansions and brick Georgian hotels is the deep ticking of grandfather clocks. Emma’s school friends all remember hearing the gossip about Maggie and Julian. More than twenty years later I had no trouble finding neighbours who recalled every detail of Julian’s disgrace. ‘Their father’s downfall was quite a scandal,’ said one of Emma’s friends. ‘It must have been very painful for them to have stayed there.’ None of the McCunes stayed in Yorkshire any longer than they had to. Maggie herself moved to London as soon as her youngest child went off to boarding school.