Of Betty – a woman who wanted to be loved

Memories of Old Cornwall: The past remembered – an occasional note by William Morris. Photograph shows Elizabeth Narcissa Marie Paynter (1907-1980), Daughter of Colonel Camborne Haweis Paynter, in 1926 (aged 19), now held in the National Portrait Gallery.

We were not poor. My father was always fighting for the next buck to keep the local paper going that he’d bought in South Wales, so money was a constant issue. But we were most assuredly not poor. There were those that were. But Cornwall is no bad place to be poor. It still has the lowest average wage in Britain. It has always been impoverished. Mining and industry have lifted it at times. Fishing too. Farming was never a source of big bucks for the labourer. But tourism is the main killer. Seasonal work at low wages goes hand in hand with the high house prices associated with areas that have lots of tourism. Not that I’d begrudge anyone Cornwall. We were incomers ourselves to a degree, holiday Cornish with our parents living and working away in South Wales and London.

No, Cornwall is not just for the Cornish. It belongs to the world. ‘Though its few industries, mining when it’s viable, fishing when it’s allowed, should perhaps be better encouraged by the establishment upcountry if it were to be a fairer world.

No we were not poor, though many were. But nor were we rich. And my, the rich in Cornwall were, in those days, something to behold.

There were three big families in the Cornwall of my childhood. The St Aubyn’s, who fought on Cromwell’s side to crush the Cornish Royalists and were sold St Michael’s Mount and much of the hinterland of Mounts Bay at a pittance as a reward, a reward never taken away from them on the restoration of the crown. They were mostly a respectable lot. They keep their estate to this day. Then there were the Bolithos who owned much of the property and land on the backroads around Penzance. They were a little wilder. They lived in a beautiful house but young Billy Bolitho sold all he had to fund a lifestyle that was wild even by the standards of those profligate days for that profligate class in West Cornwall. He died young of drink, poor charming devil that he was, as might we all but for the grace of God so who’s to judge him?

And then there were the Paynters. Wildest of the wildest. And they were the ones we, as children, knew best. Or, to be specific, we knew one Paynter, Betty Paynter, a woman, an eccentric woman, who would swan into and out of our lives, now and again, and of whom I was very, very fond.

Colonel Paynter, her father, owned all of the western tip of Cornwall. The land around Lamorna and out to Land’s End. And he had just one daughter, just the one child, much spoilt and much loved. Her name was Elizabeth Narcissa Marie Paynter, known to all as Betty.

Now the big families of West Cornwall have a look to them, acquired no doubt in part through inbreeding. They have sharply sculpted aquiline noses, and long fingers. And they carry themselves well with that ramrod backbone that we would all do better to cultivate. Betty Paynter had that look in spades.

Some say Betty was one of the world’s great beauties in her youth. A head-turner. A real stunner par excellence and I can well believe it. But I never knew her when she was young. Others are less kind and claimed that she was never as much of a beauty as she was cracked out to be. My Moms friend, the author Mary Wesley, was close to Betty and probably a little jealous of her judging by the catty way she described her, “Betty was not beautiful but she had a fine slim figure, huge dark eyes, thick black hair and a large nose that she had broken while out fox hunting. She also possessed an inexhaustible sexual energy that made her very attractive to men.” Whatever the case, she was very vivacious and attractive as far as I could tell. She was cruelly taken advantage of by a predatory older man when she was little more than a girl. At the age of seventeen she was seduced by the 51 year old Guilemo Marconi, the Anglo-Italian radio millionaire, who exploited her like he exploited so many women and then cast them aside. When she came of age she was married off by her family to the Belgian aristo, Olaf Poulsen De Baedermecker, but that didn’t last long. When I was a boy she was past her prime. But she was still, in her way, quite glorious, though perhaps a caricature of what she once must have been. Us kids had a name for her. Unkindly, we called her Cruella De Ville behind her back. But we still loved her.

She would swan in, her cigarette in a long, long cigarette holder, her lips a gash of red, her posture that of a princess, leaning back a little when she stood.

We were all “darling” to Betty. “Darlings,” she would call us children. And she would advise us on this or that nugget of wisdom and we would listen and nod, as she would tell us what she wanted us to know. I can hear her now: “White sugar, darling? Poison darling. Never touch it. Poison darling. Absolute poison.”

Why was Betty Paynter in and out of our lives? Well, I guess for the obvious reason that she was, and always had been, sweet on my father, Claud Morris, who she worshipped and adored. You could see it really. It was almost painfully obvious. He was her unrequited love.

So she would come by from time to time and out would come the little sandwiches, either cucumber or cress with the crusts cut off. And of course everything was perfect. So for Betty, the tea was poured first, the milk added after, in the posh manner, rather than vice versa as was the custom of my Cornish grandmother.

And later still, after anecdotes of days gone by, the gin and tonic would be provided. The British, it seems to me, have come late to the table when it comes to the skills required to mix drinks. The slices of lemon would be thin and delicate for Betty. Thin and delicate like her. Only in the airforce have the British learnt how to mix a good gin and tonic. The key secret being lots of lemon in chunks and lots of ice.

But back to Betty Painter. It was whispered by my Gran that old Colonel Paynter had wanted my father to marry Betty and thus be her salvation. It was not to be, for which I, for one, must be grateful, for had it been, I’d not have existed. Life turns on a dime very often. But I doubt such a match could ever have been. My father was at heart, a socialist, and could probably never have fully married into Betty’s crowd and what she stood for. Though he certainly came close.

Today Britain has ceased to be a class-based society so people forget what it once was, the old us and them divisions. There are some who, even now, would cling to the old labels claiming, with pride, to perhaps come from a “working class” or conversely a “privileged” background. And in a sense they may. But the great chasms that once divided society, the divisions between the haves and have nots, no longer exist in quite the same way.

Poverty still exists of course. The crushing poverty of the disempowered and lamentably neglected ultra-poor. A few years ago I well remember reading that the highest “child poverty” index in Britain was that for Marazion, a picture postcard village opposite St Michael’s Mount. Who’d have thought it? But then you realise that there are estates for the poor up behind the holiday homes for the rich, where the only work is making beds for tourists on changeover day. There are a few little villages like that up and down the coast. From Port Isaac to Porthcurno the tale is not dissimilar. But Cornwall is a good place to be poor all the same.

But where were we? Yes. Class. Cornwall, indeed Britain as a whole, is no longer a class-based society. Not in the old way. My father told me once how, then as now, the children would gather in the square in Ludgvan Churchtown to watch the men and women in their bright coats, pinks they call them, though they are red, with their horses and hounds and whippers-in, for the stirrup cup for the Boxing Day hunt. Those hounds are big beautiful dogs. They are never much kept as pets. The instinct to hunt is too strong in them. But my, they are fine animals. And one Boxing Day, all those years back, my father was unintentionally in the way, as a small boy might be on such an exciting day. And the Master of Hounds leaned from his horse and lashed him out of the road with his whip. A small thing that whipping but my father carried it with him the rest of his days, and it was perhaps what made him a socialist.

No, my father could never have married Betty Paynter, but marry she did, from her fine house in Lamorna. Boskenna they called it. It was the place Daphne Du Maurier wrote of in her book, “Rebecca”. In every detail really. Just reverse the roles. Make the girl wealthy and the man poor. And you have it. So it was that in the fullness of time, rich Betty Paynter marred a down on his luck but eccentric local solicitor called Paul Hill.

How quickly could you spend a fortune? It can be done surprisingly fast. With Paul it was mad scheme after mad scheme. The wildest of them all was to build vast acres of glasshouses on the estates at Lamorna to cultivate flowers to be flown to London by air. Half a fortune went on that one. The other half on good living and such. Soon, in any case, it was all gone and all that was left was to sell the furniture. And there was so much of it that it kept the antique shops of Penzance going for the best part of a decade. But eventually that too was gone and Betty was reduced to a flat in Pendarves Terrace or some such street in back of Penzance where, now and again, I would visit her perhaps on an errand for my father or sometimes on my own account, for she treated me kindly.

She once gave me a little bronze horse, which she told me was given to the owners of the entrants in each of Lord Derby’s Epsom Derby races, one of which had been a Paynter horse perhaps. She told me the name but that I can’t remember though I treasured the bronze until it was lost or someone took it, as people do, unkindly, though not meaning to be unkind. But such is life. Anyway, Betty was in reduced circumstances as was Paul. They were separated now, later in life. And I would invariably find Paul, when and if I looked for him, which I did on occasion, propping up the bar at the Farmers’ Arms at the top of Causewayhead in Penzance, a pub he liked for being more Cornish I guess than the tourist pubs down town. Still is I think. A dingy place but loveable. It hasn’t changed. Little does in Penzance.

So then what? Well, Paul got it into his head that Betty had taken a lover. She may have done. I have no idea. Or more likely, she liked Paul to think she may have taken a lover. The man concerned lived in the same house as Betty I believe, but in a different flat. Anyhow, one dark night, Paul tanked himself up at the Farmers’ Arms, and then marched across Penzance with a shotgun. And yes. He shot the man dead. Whether he truly meant to kill him, I am unsure. He shot the man dead in any case. Shot him in the leg either deliberately or because he was too drunk to aim straight. And the man bled to death there on the landing in Betty’s house.

Which should have been the end of Paul. He was remanded in custody for murder and taken to Bodmin Assizes where they put him on trial. It was the sensation of the day and you can no doubt read all about it in back issues of the Cornishman newspaper. Anyhow he’d go down for it for sure, wouldn’t you think? Not a bit of it. Catch a Cornish jury condemn a Cornishman for murder for a crime of passion with a Cornish judge? Impossible. Paul was declared innocent as, in so many ways, he most certainly was.

And what happened to them, Paul and Betty? Betty Paynter died and was buried in Spain. I always thought it was Majorca but my mother said it was Alicante where she had a little bolt-hole, a flat she escaped to in the winter. My mother says she should have been brought home to be buried. I am not so sure it matters that much as long as we remember her. And Paul? They say he walked off the end of the Albert Pier or some such in Penzance. There was always controversy about how Paul died. An accident perhaps. Perhaps he’d been spending too long in the Farmers’ Arms that afternoon. Or perhaps he just missed his Betty. She was, after all, his obsession. Is there a postscript to this business? They had children. Grandchildren too, by all accounts. I remember the daughter, as she went off to boarding school from Penzance Station. She was her mother’s child. Beautiful, with those effete delicate features of the Cornish nobility. Sonja I think she was called. They all live up country now. Time they came home. We need to bring back some of our exiles. We need our memories around us.