Review of The Marchioness of Peru vol 1 by Creina Francis, pub. 2022
“In London, Bennie enjoyed dining with Peru’s Consul to the Court of St James, Oscar Victor Salamon. He was a small, swarthy man with a cynical charm, permanently scarred in his inner being by a short sojourn at an English public school. He lived in a service apartment whose food he despised, but he had a solution for his guests, “First I give them an absinthe, and then they do not know what they are eating.”
This quotation encapsulates several features of The Marchioness of Peru: family memories, a certain exotic flavour and an eye and ear for humour and eccentricity. We have here the first volume of a family memoir, centring on the author’s grandmother but radiating out from her to both her ancestors and descendants - she is used quite satisfyingly as the fulcrum of the narrative. She was a widely travelled person, as were other members of her family (one of her sisters was christened Korea because that was the coast her parents happened to be sailing by when she was born), and this volume mostly concerns her time in England, New York and Peru. The next promises her later adventures in Africa.
Bennie (Ethel Burford, née Harnden, but she did not feel “Ethel” suited her) was an interesting woman who lived in interesting times. This memoir has been constructed partly from surviving letters and diaries and the memories of other relatives, but mostly from conversations with Bennie herself near the end of her life. She was clearly a great reminiscer, but not an organised one; she would talk for hours but “could not be brought to sit down and coherently write the story of her life from beginning to end”. This may actually be just as well: most people’s lives are more rambling than coherent, and the method of composition has given this memoir a conversational tone that sets it off well.
Her grandfather was a ship-owner; her father a ship’s captain whose wife often sailed with him, so it was unsurprising their children also had the travel bug and now have descendants all over the world. “For the first eighty years of Bennie’s life”, the author remarks matter-of-factly, “she was always going somewhere by ship.” After a childhood in the north of England, she spent some of her young womanhood in New York, but the real focus of this volume is her time in Mexico and Peru, as the wife of Bill Burford, an electrical engineer who worked in the oil industry. They had married in 1910 and spent most of the next quarter-century in South America, mainly Peru.
I don’t want to give away too much about the actual events of her life; suffice it to say that three things emerge very clearly: the characters of the protagonists, the manners and values of the time, and the author’s writing style. Both Bennie and Bill, Bennie especially, had been somewhat emancipated by their travels from the insularity of early 20th-century England, and this openness of outlook served them well in a strange country, particularly when Bennie developed worrying symptoms and decided to consult a local doctor rather than the procession of drink-and-drug-addicted incompetents who comprised the British medical establishment in the oilfields. The couple did not share the prejudice that made it “unthinkable for a Mexican doctor to examine a white woman”. In other ways, though, Bennie was ill-suited to life as a company wife, since she got on better with men than women and had no desire to join in the culture of tennis-playing and tea parties that constituted social life.
What one might call the period flavour comes over very strongly. Time and again the reader is brought up short by the difference between those days and our own, for instance when Bill’s sister marries and her period unexpectedly starts on the wedding night; “The virgin groom […] was incensed. He actually believed that women came on heat as predictably as dogs, and swore that his new wife’s family had played a deliberate trick on him.”
But perhaps what makes the greatest impression is the author’s sharply observational, laconic style. Describing an incidental character: “He was a short bow-legged man, with a fine handsome face and a hard business brain that caused him, for professional reasons, to worship in several churches.” Or when Bill, taking advantage of the manager’s absence, “built on a large extension which was a most modern, efficient kitchen, and an eyesore for miles around”. It sounds rather like the way Bennie herself might have spoken or written, which in the circumstances would not be surprising. This memoir was written mainly for the members of a widely distributed family and was privately printed. But because it deals with unusual individuals in eventful times, it would interest most readers, so we may be glad that it’s also available on Kindle here.
The impetus to write this book came from a family conversation about the fact that Bennie had destroyed much of her correspondence with Bill. Frank, her son, argues that this was her right, but his daughter disagrees:
“Look how interesting the letters are between Josephine and Napoleon! If anybody had worried about their privacy then, we wouldn’t have them now.”
Other family members object that “Bill and Bennie were not Napoleon and Josephine!” whereupon the author has a sudden realisation; “But they were. To us they were our own personal family equivalents of Napoleon and Josephine.” There is a lot of truth in this, and though it does help that they led unusual lives, it is a reminder that all personal memoir is part of the story of its time, and to be treasured accordingly. I shall certainly look forward to the second volume.