BRENDA CHRISTINE DANIEL LEROY
1935-1978
By her younger sister Gwyneth
My earliest memories of my big sister Brenda are inevitably jumbled with those of her identical twin. They were equally brainy, uncannily, with perfectly similar tastes – they’d even send the same birthday cards from different ends of the country, choose the same exam questions, craft the same answers, get the same results. But where her twin was lighter, funny, slightly whacky and great fun. Brenda was in it all for earnest. Looking back, it is just as well – she plundered the world with characteristic thoroughness and made the best of her tragically short life.
Before they went to university, the twins were always together, leaving the rest of us swirling around the perimeter until Mum and Dad split them up during the holidays. Even the old photos show the twins almost always tucked one either side of Mum, arms through hers, my oldest sister to one side, my brother and I – the little ones – consigned to the outer fringes.
There’s a marvellous snap of the four of us girls with Mum, in Oxford, in 1954, with the twins and Mum in the centre. It says everything about Brenda, even from that early age – she was not yet 20. Brenda stands like a member of the Royal Family, looking into the camera with the fixed smile of a princess. Her gloved hands are in repose in front of her stomach, one cupped in the other. She was a princess. A lady if there ever was one, like my mother.
I was so proud of Brenda – proud of both the twins. They were clever. They won scholarships. They were two years ahead of their year at school, and went off to Cambridge and Oxford when they were just 17. She and her twin always set the standards and the pace. (My school regularly reminded me of that.) Brenda mastered the register for the viola, which always foxed me. The twins were also ahead of me at Guides. Brenda and I did a few badges together that the others skipped.
I liked that sense of companionship we were building up during our teens. Like her twin, she was scholarly, and wide-read, and hugely knowledgeable, an old head on her shoulders. Where Deirdre was the entertainer, in a strange way Brenda was the sheet anchor. She held us all together, a steadying force in the family. We’re the worse off without that. We were the worse off too when her twin left for Australia. A family can only stand just so many holes in it before it begins to feel wrong.
Brenda had a strong, true voice, but without the natural vibrato of our mother’s. She would practise Kathleen Ferrier’s version of ‘Blow the Wind Southerly’ and took singing lessons for years, when the rest of us would have given up. It paid off. She delighted us all. I can still hear her as clearly as if she’s standing in the room beside me.
The countryside in particular thrilled Brenda, a trait I only became aware of in later years, when her twin had left for Australia and she spent increasing amounts of time with her other two sisters, me and my oldest sister who lived in Oxfordshire. Brenda was a whirlwind of enthusiasm to see, know, understand, learn. She missed nothing, every little thing captured her attention and was to exclaim over and point out to my children. Each leaf, each tiny stone mattered, was taken seriously, interested her, delighted her. Every sunset, landscape, panorama of clouds, had her craning to gaze and rapturise. Every building would be swept into her net, studied, evaluated.
She taught me how. She was, in many ways, a kind of mother to me, my tutor and mentor. My brother and my other sisters were all tied up, Geoffrey abroad, Deirdre in Australia, and Ryllis with her busy teaching life and her own children. Brenda was the only one able to spend time with me, and I loved it.
There was never any rancour, although Brenda could get pretty irritated. But that’s allowed – just like her twin, Brenda was one of those people you could call ‘nice’ and ‘good’ without any possibility of being misunderstood. More, she was a thoroughbred, a natural aristocrat. And like a lady, she had a good sense of what makes other people tick. If she didn’t know, she’d set about finding out. It seemed quite appropriate when she discovered she had married into the ancient aristocracy of the Holy Roman Empire, and was in her own right a ‘Marquise.’ Her wedding mantilla and her rings were part of that inheritance – as well as the odd chateau here and there.
Her sensibility was a priceless quality she offered other people, and because she didn’t have the distractions of children, alone in the family she developed an astute appreciation of our father. He could be pretty bristly, but she worked him out, offering him a considerate listening ear. It did him a power of good, although my mother found it hard to bear, feeling shut out. In part this was because Brenda shared Dad’s interest in finance, something that bored my mother and the rest of us rigid.
Brenda never thought about herself, never talked about herself, never burdened us with her own life. Even her dying was private, something that was never mentioned. She went to her grave not knowing that we knew the score. It wasn’t her style. What she wanted or thought didn’t come into it and she probably would have seen it as selfish to talk about it. She was ‘out there’ in her mind, engaged in her world. The focus of her universe was the world, and I don’t think she saw herself as the centre of it.
While still at home in Norwich, Brenda became deeply religious, along with her twin. I was wickedly horrible about it and used to tease them dreadfully. I’d also deliberately try to break their concentration when they was doing their homework. Where her twin would gasp with exasperation, Brenda would fix me with a lowering glare in her own unique Lello fashion – just like my mother when she was full of distaste or annoyed. In fact, of the twins, Brenda was most like my mother in her looks – the spitting image as we would say – and a lot like her in nature, but less passive, more get-up-and-go about her with a deal more energy. Both the twins had huge energy. I used to marvel at them.
The twins both spent a lot of time abroad, in France and Spain, and would bring home ‘exchanges’ to fill our house in the summer holidays. They both built up a goodly network of friends and contacts in this way. When Brenda went to France she became quite a socialite. She smartened her fashion sense, and because they were a two-income household, had plenty of money to spend. She’d come home to see me, a true Parisienne with beautifully cut hair, smart skirts and blouses or dresses, and shoes, handbags, jewellery and perfume to kill for.
Brenda was good for me, much better than Guinness. When we were little, she had a cloth doll I wanted for myself. As a war-time baby, I lost out on things like that. I think Brenda realised this, and didn’t mind me playing with it, but I had to remember the doll wasn’t mine. That was Brenda to a ‘T’ – a stickler for precision, more so than Deirdre, who was more relaxed in such things, but a stickler for tidiness instead. Brenda would debate with huge seriousness (and sometimes ferocity) what was right and wrong. She could be mighty school-marmish, but that is a family trait, and also normal in the circles we moved in, middle-class Norwich, with its upper-crust attitudes. Deirdre, though, was her foil, more humorous, more flexible.
When Brenda went to Cambridge and her twin to Oxford, this threw us into closer contact because Oxford, where her twin was at St Hughs, was further way. In fact, this was a turning point and while my relationship with Brenda went on evolving, Deirdre drifted further away. She soon married and had three children, and a busy life in Essex, then moved to Surrey, then left for Australia. Brenda, though, was free to circulate round the family.
I thought seriously about following Brenda to Girton, but it wasn’t to be. She graduated and went on to teach Spanish and French. By then I had taken the swift route to adulthood and married young. I visited her in Tunbridge Wells when I was about seven months pregnant. She taught at the girl’s grammar school, and was lodging with the very young widow of a commuter killed in the Lewisham train crash. It made a big impression on me, seeing how tenderly Brenda dealt with her. I think it helped the poor woman a lot.
When my first baby was born, Brenda came to visit me several times in my new house in Nottingham. I have one snap of her holding the baby, so naturally, so joyful. It’s sad not be able to imagine her with her own. Once, in the summer of 1960, my little girl was creating a racket rather than going to sleep in her cot. My severe sister stomped upstairs, opened the door wide, ordered in her strong and most basso profundo voice, ‘Go to sleep,’ and the mite reared up in shock, then did.
When my second baby was born, the midwife once mistook Brenda for me (how, I’m not sure, as she was dark with brown eyes and I was fair with blue eyes), and told her to get back into bed. But it says something about just how often she visited me in my wanderings around England with my RAF pilot husband. She was with me when I lost my second baby in early pregnancy, and made sure I was okay before leaving. She came again to Lincolnshire (after getting the date wrong, a frequent occurrence). She stayed with us in Ripon regularly. By then, she had taught at Wycombe Girls’, gone back to do an MA at Essex, been engaged and nearly married once (she pulled out a week before the wedding), and been to Sweden on a British Council scheme to teach English. There she met her lovely French husband. They entered our lives in a big way. She later went to teach at Birmingham University, while her husband went back to France to find a house and work.
After her twin had gone to Australia, I think Brenda found a good sense of community and substitute, a kind of resonance in my household. My four children were growing up nicely. She took beautiful photographs of them, turning some into transparencies. She posed with them. She lectured them, took them to museums and art galleries, always teaching, as she did all her nieces and nephews, including my oldest sister’s children in Oxfordshire. My then-husband was an Oxford Classics graduate with a keen mind, and entertained her in long academic debates. But she ‘liked the set-up the way it was’, she said, when I divorced. Yet she continued to do her best to help me as a mother. My children were welcome at her home in Paris, and she did all she could to foster their interests and advance their education, especially their grasp of languages. She did the same for all her nieces and nephews – we weren’t particularly singled out for this. I sometimes think it must have been quite a blow to her when her twin left the country taking her children away.
When she was alone in Birmingham, a terribly difficult time for her, I saw more of her. She became very low and distressed about her childlessness and letting down her French family, as she was married to the oldest son and felt she should provide them with an heir. She’d ring me up crying, sometimes in the night. I’d ache to get on a train, or hit the road in my car and go to stay with her until she felt better. It wasn’t possible, though, because I was teaching and my children needed me, but I was glad she felt she could do that. I only wished I had a solution for her.
It was perhaps around this time, with her mind free, that she escalated her interest in our family history. She settled on the Lello thread. She was the first person in the Lello clan to start the search, long before her Tassie cousins. Her technique was to drive around England, look in the telephone directory, then ring everyone with the Lello surname. She scored a few hits that way. But like all of us in my bit of the Lello family went up the blind alley of looking only in Ludlow for the ancestral trail. She’d be tickled pink if she could see just how much family history has emerged in recent years. Although knowledge on the English Lellos was around in the Tasmanian family, she was never told this, perhaps because Mum was kept in the dark. The Internet, with its no-secrets facility, would have thrilled her.
Brenda’s vulnerability came home to me early like an arrow, when she returned from an exchange trip to France. I was twelve, and she was fifteen. She joined me, late, at Guide camp (her twin was still away), but within hours was in the sick tent. I was terrified. She was white and immobile, and very hot. I was charged with taking her home to Norwich on the bus. Every jolt made her wince. She shut her eyes and went all the way to Norwich leaning back, obviously terribly ill. We had no telephone at home. The house was empty, so I ran across the road to the phone box and called the hospital. They sent a doctor out. By the time he arrived, Mum was home. Brenda was whipped away for an appendectomy.
It was a 6-week job in those days, a seeming aeon, because by then Brenda had found a special place in my heart. I missed her equally when she got scarlet fever and was put into an isolation hospital near the cemetery. I used to go up there after school and hoot at her through an old cow horn my brother and I had found. She didn’t hear it, but I thought it might comfort her to know we were out there, hooting and rooting for her.
In Paris, Brenda found a job she did really well, as a multi-lingual translator for a reinsurance company. When she told me about her ‘lumps’ and the early treatment some back-street man had given her at her own instigation (he prescribed early hormone therapy that aggravated her condition), it was as if someone had brought a cleaver down upon us. I knew this was it. I knew she knew too. She was casting about desperately. This sense of desperation went on, but she never lost hope. Death wasn’t on her agenda.
The pace of contact hotted up. She wrote endlessly, telephoned, and visited. I remember in a particularly manic phase after chemotherapy, Brenda tearing round Marks and Spencer in Bromley, spending vast sums of money, buying several spare wigs. And racing ahead of all of us at Hengistbury Head in Dorset, so that Dad in a panic ran after her, in case she shot over the cliff at the end.
When she went into hospital in Paris for pre-emptive surgery, then into early experimental chemotherapy (rather than have the mastectomy she’d have had automatically in Britain since chemotherapy was in its very early stages and still viewed as a risky option in England), she seemed to gain extra spirit, making more and more effort to see us. Nothing was too much trouble. My children were marshalled into exchange trips to France, watched over, sent books, discussed with me as if they were hers. All her nieces and nephews were hers, in a way – I always felt she had a special place in her heart for them – the children she could never have.
She came to Windsor, to Bracknell, and later to Kent. In return I saw her many times in France, and finally in the hospice at Bligny. It was heart-breaking to see this wonderful free spirit caged, queuing for her day, not talking about that, but showing me, with the same sense of wonder and curiosity as if her body didn’t belong to her, the sores, the damage, the irretrievable wreckage of that beautiful immaculate being. I didn’t see her again as I was ill and in hospital myself.
Her twin came back from Australia to spend some weeks with Brenda in England once she was sent home to die. I’ve never asked, but that must have been a very precious and agonising time for them both. Deirdre’s job and children called her back, so when Brenda died she was alone with our parents. Alone too, on the other side of the world, was her other half.
I was actually talking to my mother at the very moment it happened, and in a way I think that was meant to be. My father called out in alarm, giving her time to work out what had happened. She rang me back within seconds.
A chasm opened in the family. It has never healed. It’s as if we couldn’t, and still can’t, function in the same way without her, like trying to take a walk, and finding the earth is wide open one step ahead. There are plenty of good ways round, but the consciousness is always there that something’s wrong.
Since we moved to the area where my parents lived and Brenda died, I tend her grave just down the road from our house with special loving care, not just because both my parents followed her into it, but the day she was buried comes alive whenever I am there.
That hot August day, when dozens of people converged on Highcliffe, a pair of white butterflies chased and danced in the sunlight around the cortege on the way to the cemetery. Brenda would have laughed and rejoiced to see them. I think she did, actually.
Brenda was, I can say without any hesitation, a remarkable, beautiful, brilliant woman, the shining jewel among the five of us. If that sounds unfair to her twin, I don’t think her twin would disagree, and as for losing half of yourself, that’s another story. Even the thought is unbearable.
But it was quite a stroke of luck to be her baby sister. Besides, it’s not everyone who is graced by having a Marquise, a princess, as her mentor.
Dorset
May 2005