Stepsister Sue Riley’s Memories of John

John had one other sibling, his stepsister, Sue Riley. Sue was the daughter of John’s father Pat’s second wife, and was much younger than John and his brothers, and therefore didn’t live with them growing up. Sue was kind enough to share her story here:

My father was in the Middle East, and when he came back, my mother decided either she didn’t love him or that he was a bit strange… Wartime here was very difficult, and when a lot of men went off to the army or went abroad, they came back changed, and maybe their wives didn’t understand.

So I only saw my father twice in my life: When I was four, my father left, and I saw him once again when I took my son to meet him around 1974.

Growing up, I remember always being rather short of money, but we were quite happy. My grandfather was a bank manager (which, in those days, was quite an influential position) in a small town and he found a wonderful grace-and-favour house for us just opposite Lincoln Cathedral.

After the war—about 1947—Pat was stationed near Lincoln (I’m not sure which regiment he was in, and he was maybe still in the reserves), and my mother met him at an army event. She used to go and volunteer where the officers were staying near Lincoln. I think they had some evenings where quite a lot of young women in Lincoln went to help with the meal and maybe also had a dance.

I remember Uncle Pat (as I called him then) came to stay at our house. He was quite dour. He didn’t talk very much, and it was quite difficult. I was around seven years old and I had no experience of having a father. In fact, I’m a very bad map reader and I can’t change plugs and I can’t do all the things that fathers teach their children, because I never had a father to do those kinds of things with. But Pat was kind to me. And I think he helped pay for my education—what there was of it—and certainly all the Maxtone-Grahams were just wonderful. I think there’d been a lot of boys in the Maxtone-Graham family, so a little girl with pigtails was a new adventure. And I was quite nice when I was that age. I’m not so nice now, but I was quite nice then.

When I was about twelve, my mother married Pat, and we went to live in Number 45 Tregunter Road, where he had been living alone and where he had a housekeeper who came in every day.

By then, he had come back from New York, where he was on the stock exchange, and [John’s mother] Ann had gone back to America. I don’t know if Ann and my mother ever met. When I was about 18, I went to stay with John and Katrina, and I met Ann. I had lost all my luggage and Ann, very kindly, thought “how dreadful for an 18 year old to be in New York with no luggage!” So she sent me money to buy clothes.

When my mother and I moved to Tregunter Road, there were no boys around. I think [John’s twin brother] Mike was probably the first one of the Maxtone-Graham brothers I met.

I think my mother thought it was better that I went to boarding school. She was embarking on a new marriage, and what was she to do with this then twelve-year-old? I wasn’t unhappy there, but I wasn’t particularly happy either. I think I just existed.

I’ve always been quite sensitive to sort of attractive surroundings — I’d always liked nice food and pretty things and my mother was a great homemaker, but this was a spartan school and I was always cold. They had no heating. They had cloaks and very bad food and there was a lot of running everywhere, a lot of lacrosse… All of the things I wasn’t very good at. Mike came down to see me at school, and the other girls couldn’t get over it. I went up in their estimation!

I never resented Pat, but I wished that he had been a bit closer to me, or I closer to him, because he didn’t talk much to my mother. He drove my mother to drink and nowadays, looking back, I think he was quite a depressed person. I think now he would’ve perhaps sought some sort of help, because often he wouldn’t speak for two or three days. When he came in from the office in his smart suit and bowler hat, he would hang up his bowler hat, go up to the sitting room, and read a book. And never spoke.

My mother didn’t help matters by drinking too much, and Pat didn’t know what to do. So that was quite uncomfortable living with them.

I’m really sad that I didn’t have a better relationship with Pat — not that it was bad — but it was really, I would say, a non-relationship. But the great joy for me was knowing all the Maxtone-Grahams, because through Pat I got to know Robert and Claudia and Ysenda and Aunt Rachel.

I never lived with the boys at Tregunter Road, and then we moved from Tregunter Road because it was too big and also—it seems funny today—but my mother rather liked Harrod’s, and in those days our house was a bit far from Harrod’s. You couldn’t walk there. It was SW 10 in Tregunter Road and Alexander Place was SW 7, so there’s quite a difference, and these big Victorian houses in Tregunter Road were really too big for what my mother and Pat needed.

I think they sold that enormous house for something like 4,000 pounds and then bought Alexander Place from an Anstruther. I think that maybe the Anstruthers owned several houses, but it was a curious coincidence that my mother and Pat should have bought this house from them. (Joyce Anstruther married John’s Uncle Tony, Pat’s brother, and wrote “Mrs. Miniver” and other books under the pen name Jan Struther.) Number 17 Alexander Place was a quite elegant house, and my mother and Pat enjoyed the neighborhood. But I do remember being in the sitting room at Alexander Place when the news came in by telegram that Peter (John and Mike’s older brother) had died.

Pat had a funny telegram address—in those days, telegrams had an address and it was “PAMAGRA.” Not that I had ever met Peter, but of course it was a terrible thing for Pat and for my mother, and I think Pat was just more silent than ever, really. But I was eighteen or so and I was so interested in my pathetic little life that I couldn’t sort of understand at that age really just what it’s like. I was much more interested in who I was going out with that evening, that sort of thing.

I went off to France when I was eighteen. I’ve always had a great passion for being in France, and I stayed with a “Madame,” a very nice lady who had about six girls from different countries, and I had French lessons, all in the morning. There was another French family with lots of boys, and so we danced in the evening and it was wonderful. We had picnics in the summer and skating in the cold weather.

I was there for about six or seven months, and Mike and his first wife Beth came to see me there in Blois. Mike might have been on his honeymoon, and they were making a trip to Paris and then they came to see me.

I had really caught the French bug, so when I came back, I joined the airline Air France, because I spoke reasonable French. I worked there when I was about nineteen or twenty.

Then I wanted to get married and get away. In those days (1960, ‘61), all my age group—20, 21, 22—we all got married very young, which would never happen nowadays. So a group of us were getting married at that sort of age and so I married John Kenchington, who was very amusing and very smart, but he wasn’t very good husband material.

When I was married, Pat gave me away and paid for the reception and everything. He was very generous in anything that he did for me. And I think I always felt very aware of that. Not that he would ever have mentioned money — far too vulgar — but I was aware that my life was better because he enabled me to do the things I could do.

People didn’t like John Kenchington and nor did I. Or at least, I did for the first fifteen years, and then I’m afraid to say, it all fell apart. He was a clever man, but not a very kind man. It was a shame. But I was lucky — I had a second chance.

John Riley was very special. He had four children, and I’m very close to his children, and they’re very good to me. They live in the country, and I go out most weekends to have lunch with them.

There was one odd thing that happened with John Kenchington: In 1961, when I met and married him, my mother and stepfather Pat didn’t know anything about this man, since I’d met him in Germany.

Then Pat remembered that he had met John Kenchington’s father, also named John, in New York when they were both on the stock exchange. Pat and John MG’s mother Ann became friends with John and Dorothy Kenchington. They had something in common, because both couples consisted of an American wife married to an Englishman on the New York Stock Exchange. They had dinners together, had maybe even been pregnant together, and so they exchanged baby things, one of which was a high chair. So John, Mike, and my first husband John Kenchington all sat in the same high chair.

Pat died in May 1965. There wasn’t too much money left, but enough, and my mother sold a small cottage in the country that she had, and kept living at Alexander Place.

We moved to Camberwell (a neighborhood in London) in 1984 when I married John Riley. I got to know John Maxtone-Graham really well when he stayed with us there. It was a big house, so John and Mary could have the top floor, and they used to stay a couple of months there every summer.

We loved having John and Mary, and we were in France quite a lot so he and Mary could have the house to themselves, and then when they went to Paris, they used our flat in Paris so they could see Sarah and Bernard. (John’s eldest daughter and her husband.)

John Riley and I had a barge on the Seine. She was moored about two hours by car from Paris, in a place called Auxerre, and each winter we drove down and brought her to Paris.

It took five days from Auxerre to Paris. It was hard work, and we didn’t get off the boat because we wanted to get to Paris in four and a half or five days’ time. So we had to motor quite hard and had to have enough food on the boat to last us, but we were usually with four people so we could manage quite well.

We had one wonderful summer when Mike and Diana and John and Mary all came to Paris, I think for John and Mike’s 80th birthday. They all joined us on our boat in Paris when we were stationary, and it was lovely.

One year we decided to pick up Guy and maybe Sarah and Bernard, to go sail down the Seine. We moored up near a boat, and a dog fell in. John Riley jumped off the boat to save this dog. He brought it up on board, and he gave it back to the owner of the boat. John Riley was very upset because the owner never said “Thank you.” But I think it was Guy who helped, because John Riley wouldn’t have been able to get the dog on the boat unless Guy was there, because Guy, being very tall, could help pull John (Riley) up.

Wherever John (Maxtone-Graham) came and visited us, he was amazing, the way he was always thinking of games and amusing the children. He was wonderful at that. He made everything very light, and that’s why we loved having him stay with us, because it was always such fun. He and Mary would cook one night, or I would cook, and we always had a nice time.

And John always found something to mend, like there was always a book that needed re-covering or a bit of china that needed mending. He was full of doing those sorts of things. Both Robert (John’s first cousin, son of Tony) and he were very good at that.