LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER TWELVE

       Wolf

      In the autumn, after her convalescence in the Highlands, Issie went to the Oxford and County secretarial college in Oxford – aka the Ox and Cow – to take a secretarial course. Evelyn, of course, made it clear that he was paying for this course only because it would enable her to earn her own living.

      The Ox and Cow was located at 34 Giles Street, a Georgian terrace in the centre of Oxford. According to her roommate Christine Selby, Issie had a penchant for wearing dresses from the 1920s, set off with a red or green beret. She also smoked cigarettes through a cigarette holder.

      Evelyn may have hoped Issie would meet a nice suitor at Oxford – instead she met Wolf.

      Wolf was a dark-haired, Old Etonian history scholar at Christchurch College, whose wildness is legendary amongst their contemporaries. He is described by one Eton friend as ‘coming from another age – a buccaneer Elizabethan’. He seems to have been always in trouble: he was expelled from Eton a couple of weeks before the end of term for drinking beer, and then later from Oxford for setting alight the curtains in the rooms below his own. A friend says that Wolf never considered that ‘actions have consequences’.

      Issie fell head over heels in love with Wolf and lost her virginity to him at 17. She said it was an unpleasant physical act, but it was an important milestone in her life, breaking her schoolgirl vow to save sex for marriage. Issie, when telling me about the event, pointed out with a certain pride that she was not ‘pumped and dumped’; she and Wolf were to remain together for the next two years. It was for Issie, her friend Mosh Gordon-Cumming remembered, an important relationship into which Issie channelled her love.

      Wolf was given to stealing cars – ‘he invented joyriding’ one contemporary recalls – and his nefarious activities also included siphoning off petrol from cars parked on Oxford’s streets in the dead of night, helped by Issie. One of Issie’s Heathfield girlfriends remembers:

      Wolf was rather like a pirate; totally wild and unpredictable and rather dangerous and frightening. When you got to know him he was adorable, though. I think he was probably slightly mad.

      One night riding on his motorbike in London, they went to eat at a restaurant called ‘Up all Night’ on the Fulham Road. The restaurant was closed, and Wolf, incensed at the false claim contained in the name, threw a brick through the window before roaring off through the quiet streets of Chelsea. Issie, riding pillion and clinging to his waist, loved every moment of her new life.

      Wolf was a rebel, but his love was also a wonderful escape for her from the hurt and sadness of home. She only once invited Wolf to stay at Doddington. Evelyn loathed Wolf – understandably, especially when he later went out with Issie’s sister Julia. When he would ask his daughter how she planned to get to Doddington, Issie would reply, ‘By motorbike.’ Wolf arrived after the long four-hour journey from London and, to Issie’s thrilled delight and her stepmother’s great annoyance, trampled motor oil into all the carpets.

      At the end of her year at the Ox and Cow, she and Wolf moved into a grim basement flat in Oakley Street, Chelsea, with her friend Christie Saunders and her boyfriend. Christie remembers that there was almost nothing in the flat. With no money, and egged on by Wolf, Issie set about furnishing it by theft.

      When, years later, Issie bought her 4.10 shotgun, I helped her fill in the form. It asked if she had any criminal convictions and she told me the story of the stolen sofa for Oakley Street. After dinner with her friend Minnie Scott at Minnie’s mansion block off the King’s Road, Issie asked Minnie if she minded if she took the plastic sofa in the block lobby. Minnie told Issie that she had no objections. Issie and her two friends in their high heels were halfway up the King’s Road with the sofa when a police van arrived and they were all arrested and taken to Chelsea police station. Issie merrily recounted to me how her rather shocked, pale, girlfriends spoke in low voices to give their names – with titles and grand addresses in Scotland and Wiltshire.

      The girls got off with a warning – though Issie mentioned something to me about probation. To her irritation and complaints, I insisted that she put this into her shotgun-licence application form. It proved to be no bar to her getting her shotgun licence.

      Issie was not totally faithful to Wolf. At Oxford she had a fling with Tim Hunt, curator for the Andy Warhol Foundation of the Visual Arts, who later married Tama Janowitz, the author of Slaves of New York. When he and Tama got married, we went to the party they gave in London. Her ‘relationship’ with another Oxford student was even more fleeting. Aghast at learning that he was still a virgin, Issie, ever the fixer, said, ‘Well, we’d better get that sorted’, and promptly sorted it out for him.

      Issie also had a casual affair with the gentle son of a Viscount, a brother of one of her schoolfriends. It was a relationship of which her father approved. He knew the family well. From this pleasant man, Issie learnt how to go duck shooting and tread in the divots between polo chukkas. When we were married, Issie would sometimes wonder if she would not have been better off marrying him and settling down to a quiet life.

      ‘But Issie, would he have married you?’ I would ask. Issie would sigh and think it may have been a possibility – and then we would move quickly on to the next drama in our lives.

      To support herself when she was living at Oakley Street, Issie resorted to many odd jobs. She worked at a telephone switchboard, and when she worked as a cleaner with her friend Camilla Uniacke they both dressed up with hankies on her head. Once as a dare she went to a porn magazine and showed them her bosoms but, thankfully, she was not taken on.

      The King’s Road played a large part in her life at this time. She drove up and down it in a friend’s blacked-out mini looking at boys and listening to Barry White.

      Although Isabella had a punk-inspired look at the time, she was not into the music of punk. Issie went to her first concert aged 19 on 15 July 1978 at Blackbush Airfield in Fleet, Hampshire. ‘The Picnic at Blackbush’, as it was billed, was attended by some 200,000 people. Bob Dylan headlined, with support from Eric Clapton and Joan Armatrading.

      I was there too, aged 14. It was my first rock concert and it was the first time I know of that Issie and I were in the same place. I walked the several miles from Fleet railway station to the gig, where I was intrigued by the sight of old hippies frying up sausages for their small children in the sun. This was not what I had expected of a rock concert. I was into punk music. The same year I went to see the Ramones.

      After two years together, Wolf told Issie that he did not love her any more. She threw her things together in a tearful scene and moved out of Oakley Street, but, as she told her friend Mosh Gordon-Cumming, who found her sobbing in the Kings Road with a suitcase, ‘she had nowhere to go’.

      Issie’s greatest demon – the fear of homelessness – was already hard at work.