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Maria Amelia Guise
2.X.22 – 29.I.04
A great Spirit
Her Eulogy
The word that
immediately springs to mind when thinking of Marie Guise is
formidable. She was a powerful woman and to the very end, the
phrase “little old lady” would have seemed ridiculous applied
to her. Despite the physical limitations brought on by her three
major strokes, she remained strong, strong in heart and mind,
strong in. her opinions, strong in her resolve, strong in her
affections. This strength was something she had developed in
herself from an early age. As for so many of her generation,
growing up during the Depression, her schooling had come to an
abrupt halt at an early age - in her case when she was fourteen
and she had taken her chances in the market place of employment,
learning shorthand and typing, becoming like her elder sister
Yvonne a secretary in the days when young women in that job were
still addressed by their surnames, and contributing to the
household in which, her father, an engineer, had been unemployed
for a decade. She immediately proved her quickness of wit and her
diligence and prospered in her work.
She was already a
veteran of some three years in the workplace when the Second World
War broke out. By now her father a tempestuously temperamental
Dane, whose dark good looks and some of whose sharpness she had
inherited, was dead of heart disease, and her gregarious and
charismatic mother, Vera, who had worked in a bewildering range of
occupations to keep the family alive, made their home open house
to the newly enlisted soldiers and sailors and airmen on their way
to the front or back home on leave. These six years, during which
Marie did firewarden duties, debarred from any more official work
by her alien status (she remained technically speaking Danish
until after the war), were in some ways a highlight of her life,
as foe so many Londoners: a terrifying time, as bombs fell and
doodlebugs whined through the skies, but a time of gaiety and
sudden intimacy, awash with cheap booze and food rustled up from
pooled ration books, the possibility that any one of their large
circle might never be seen again; a time for entertaining
chain-smoking, piano-playing Armenian airmen, for intense
short-lived romances, for listening to purple passages of romantic
music in candlelit front rooms. Marie, with her striking features,
her hour-glass figure, her sharp wit and her enviable ability to
drink everyone under the table and then be the first up to make
breakfast, was the object of many a young man's attention, though
she and her sister and brother always played supporting roles to
their enchanting but often demanding mother who took centre stage
as of right.
The war was in some
ways an unreal period, a drama, a romance, where life and death
were both experienced more vividly. The toll of the young dead,
Marie's older brother Tony among them was terrible, but the memory
of the gallantly, the camaraderie, the laughter, the informality
of that time remained in her mind as an ideal of how life might
be. With the war over, Marie started to explore her professional
options, and landed a job as secretary to a remarkable woman, Lily
Wassermann, who had come to England to create a branch of the
Swiss engineering firm Eutectic. Lily saw the potential of her new
secretary and advanced her rapidly as the British branch grew.
Marie’s grasp of management structures was exceptional, and by
the early nineteen sixties she was Company Secretary, an uncommon
position for a woman at that period. Too challenging as it turns
out, for the male hierarchy of the now American based company. An
edict was issued barring women from central executive positions,
which was pretty rich, since two women, Marie and Lily Wassermann,
had seen them create the highly successful English operation.
Reluctantly, Marie allowed herself to be moved sideways to become
Export manager of the company, but once in the job she ran it with
rare vigour, commanding the respect and sometimes the fear of her
salesmen.
This was the period
when she became truly formidable. Her appearance was fiercely
handsome, her long, long black hair which naturally fell below her
knees, arranged in a striking pattern of two adjacent circles on
the top and a bun at the back. I don't know where she got this
design from, but it gave her an imperious quality which was
confirmed by the fierce red of her lipstick and the enhanced
eyebrows, a touch of Joan Crawford with something of the Wicked
Queen from SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARVES. It took her a good
hour to assemble herself in the morning. I as a boy used to watch
spellbound as she skillfully deployed the dozens of Kirby grips
required to achieve the effect, the while uttering various
colourful and furiously muttered oaths: she was never at her best
in the morning, but she would no more have left the house without
her warpaint on than fly.
On the daily train to
Feltham, she would comfortably dispatch the DAILY TELEGRAPH
crossword before arriving. She then devoured the rest of the paper
on the way back. She was exceptionally well informed about world
affairs, about the economy, and about the political situation. On
the whole, her own political stance was somewhat to the right of
Attila the Hun. She adored Margaret Thatcher, on account of her
gender, her common sense and her capital C Conservatism, though
even she was sometimes suspected of being a dangerous red. Marie
was interested in power and attracted to it; her favourite piece
of music was the end of the first act of TOSCA, when the all
powerful head of the Roman secret police, Scarpia, expresses his
desire for the singer Floria Tosca while the choir sings a mighty
TE DEUM to which he scandalously adds his voice. To Marie, Scarpia
was the sexiest character in all opera. She herself was often
balked of power, at the office, due to the cabal of men
intimidated by her authority, and generally in the world due to
her lack of qualifications. She had withering contempt for men as
a breed, though she was deeply attracted to them on the physical
level. She had many relationships, many of them - in the phrase of
the time - unsuitable. It had become clear from an early stage
that her mother, afflicted with various vague conditions, would
need looking after permanently, and Marie, with her unflinching
sense of duty, knuckled down to the job, though she never
pretended that it was a labour of love. They were utterly at odds
temperamentally. But Marie continued to make the house and
particularly the beautiful garden. For relaxation she liked
nothing more than to sit down with friends and a bottle of whisky
and laugh, quite bawdily when the mood struck. At these evenings,
as often as not on a Friday night, Marie and her mother at last
became a good team - a bit of a double act.
Marie loved music, and,
unlikely as it may seem, her earliest dream had been to be a
ballerina, but of course there was no money for any such
indulgence. She was not a great reader, nor a theatre-goer, nor
was she a traveller, housebound on account of her mother, to some
extent, but in truth not especially interested in other cultures,
other climates. She left England once only, to go to Zurich for a
board meeting, and came back the same night. She was technically a
Roman Catholic, but never a very enthusiastic churchgoer, though
she loved a drink and a laugh with the priests. For her, God was
to be found in flowers and above all in animals. She worshipped,
the word is not too strong her pets, a long succession of pampered
pussies, most of whom grew dangerously portly under her loving
regime. For her, they were, in Auden’s words, the entirely
beautiful. In general, she thought the human race a bad lot, but
curiously enough, she had a very special gift for friendship, and
her friends loved her with a particular intensity, which amounted
to devotion. She was extraordinarily lucky in her neighbours, over
the years, on both sides of her house in Pinfold Road. In
particular, in her last years the twin blessings of Nick Bell at
No 2, unendingly generous with his time and energy, and at No 6
the family of Christina Matthews brought her meals, gossip, advice
and huge affection which continued to her dying moments, Christina
talking to her as she lay unconscious, assuring her of all the
arrangements that had been made in impeccable order as Marie would
so ardently have desired. She could be astringent, demanding,
haughty, harsh in judgement, but there was about her a splendour,
a magnificence, a bigness of spirit that made all that bearable,
almost fitting.
The end was serene. On
the day before she died, she had a return to consciousness and she
and Nick chatted and laughed and admired some pussycat photos
he’d brought to show her. As she sat at the top of St Thomas'
Hospital, looking out over the Thames at the House of Commons
bathed in golden light, it started to snow, and this must have
been the last sight she ever saw, a gentle engulfing whiteness
softly descending from above. The following day, she died in her
sleep. I arrived at her bedside two minutes later. The nurses, the
wonderful, diligent, respectful nurses, who could not have
laboured harder for her than if she’d been a Prime Minister or a
Queen, had arranged her on the bed, and I sat with her motionless
form, her face now clear and strong again after all the fretful
turmoil of the pneumonia which beset her at the end, and her still
unlined features seemed to be those of a monarch or a warrior,
noble, powerful, beautiful. Of course, in life she would have made
a scathing joke or uttered a dismissive curse had I said any such
thing, but the woman in whose presence I sat that night was the
stuff of which greatness is made. Life, as it so often does,
balked her of her fulfilment, but anyone who knew her would
understand what I mean.
Simon Callow
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