‘Selling knickers in the High Street’ (From Harrow Times)

‘Selling knickers in the High Street’

12:25pm Friday 16th September 2011 in Interviews By Melanie Dakin

Born at Shalford Cottage on Orchard Drive, Cassiobury, Susan Kennaway spent only a decade in Watford before being shipped off to Africa at the outbreak of World War Two. Her book, The Yellow Duster Sisters, begins as she and her sister Gyll are whisked past Clements (most recently TJ Hughes) department store.

Their grandfather, Henry Edmonds, had acquired the store in 1913 and established it in Parisian-style with gleaming wooden cabinets. In the book Susan describes the place as “a draper’s store of some significance in the right part of town“.

“I remember my father saying it was very important to have something in the window but I thought the windows were too full,“ recalls Susan. “My father said that was the way to sell things but I thought one or two more quality items would be more attractive.

“The last sight I remember of England in 1939 was the shopfront of Clements. My sister, mother and I were driving past the shop while daddy stood out front and saluted wearing his pinstripe suit.“

A man with artistic leanings, who had lived in Paris, Susan’s father Bertram Eric Edmonds referred to his profession as ’selling knickers in the High Street’ and apparently was a bit of a rogue. Their mother attended the dance studio of the Women’s League of Health and Beauty in Clarendon Road wearing “silky shorts and bright red tap dancing shoes with taffeta bows“. Sadly, all the gaiety of their privileged life departed as war raged in Europe.

“We were evacuated at the beginning of the war and by the time we returned in 1944, daddy had sold the house in Watford and moved to Fairford in Gloucestershire where his family were from. We never went back or saw our house and I never saw any of my friends from Whitefriars School again. We did go back to see our wonderful Swiss nanny, Alice, who lived at 74a Mildred Avenue.

We were evacuated at the beginning of the war and by the time we returned in 1944, daddy had sold the house in Watford

Susan Kennaway

“Daddy had a chauffeur, named East, and he used to write to us in Africa, then one day the letters stopped and we never knew if he’d been killed or not.“

Susan has had an eventful as well as turbulent life. In December 1968, her husband, the famous Scottish poet and writer James Kennaway died tragically at the age of 40. He suffered a heart attack at the wheel while driving back to Gloucestershire from London. Susan was 38 years old and had four children. She coped with her loss by selling the film rights for one of James’s books and opening a restaurant, Pinks, in a barn at the bottom of her garden in Fairford. Her first book, The Kennaway Papers was a tribute to his life.

“Not long after my husband died I did an interview with the Watford Observer and I still have a picture of me holding up a copy of his book The Cost Of Living Like This that was taken for the paper in about 1969.“

Susan went on to become an activist – sitting on committees for nature conservation and she was involved in the Fairford Peach Group and subsequently CND. At the age of 50 she married again and moved to France.

Aged 81, Susan has decided to provide this memoir of a family divided by war. She has an ease with language that intimates that although there were tears at the time they just got on with it, but in hindsight the trauma of a broken home, albeit a very well-heeled one, became more apparent.

“When we returned home from Africa it was very difficult and everyone had rather forgotten about us. Three weeks later we were packed off to boarding school.“

As for Clements, TJ Hughes closed its doors this summer, although there is still a Clements home furnishing store in Charter Place. Susan’s brother Dick, who became managing director of the firm in 1951, passed away in 2002.

“I always wondered what happened to the shop after he died. I did a lot of things at Clements. I restyled the directors’ dining room, which used to be a little flat that my father used. They were extremely spoilt as the cook I hired was a very agreeable girl and would get in whatever they wanted.

“I also upgraded the staff canteen. I got a scene director to paint a canvas mural covering all of one wall, but it didn’t last forever.“

The Yellow Duster Sisters is published by Bloomsbury, price £16.99, www.bloomsbury.com