Reference: Email message from Caro Handley - 19 August 2025

I think your father wasn't keen on Lorna because she was not very nice! Beautiful but horribly unkind to my mother - slightly less unkind to Janie (as we knew Mum's older sister) because Lorna considered her prettier. The girls were sent back to the UK to boarding school at the ages of 3 and 4 and they didn't see their parents again for four years. English relatives would take them during the holidays, or sometimes they were left at the school. When they got back to India my mother was eight and there was a small boy of four there - their brother who they had not known about. They were soon shipped off to boarding school again, this time in the foothills of the Himalayas, where they spent nine months a year, only travelling back home to Patna for the three month holiday. Later the girls were sent back to school at Cheltenham, Nick had also been sent to boarding school, and Lorna, having had plenty of affairs during the marriage, left Herbert and went to live in London, I think in the late 1940s. They never divorced because she didn't want to lose the title, but she lived with a man called Cyril for years.
Of course Herbert shouldn't have married her when he was 39 and she was 18, but that was acceptable in those days - his younger brother Eric, who helped develop fighter planes during the war but who was also a Soviet spy - never prosecuted because he was too technically valuable to the government - also married an 18 year-old when he was 40.

Herbert retired to Kenya in the early fifties. Mum, aged 20, went out there to join him in 1951, which is when she met my father. They married in April 1954 and three days later Herbert suffered a huge stroke. Mum wanted to care for him but it wasn't possible and he was brought back to England to a care home where he remained, completely paralysed, for five years before he died on May 1, 1959 aged 69.
My mother left my father and moved back to England in 1960. I was five, my two brothers 19 months and 6 months. My brothers and I used to go out to Kenya once a year to see our father, and sometimes he came back to England but he lived in Kenya for the rest of his life - like your father he didn't like the English cold.

I have no grandmotherly recollections of Lorna, on the rare occasions when we saw her she mostly ignored me as she wafted into our London flat on a cloud of perfume and alcohol - she was a heavy drinker. She ended up in a care home in south London with throat cancer, Mum visited her every week and I often went with her. Lorna died on July 13 1984 aged 73. Mum and I raced to be with her and arrived just after she had died.
Families, huh! Interesting but complicated.
Best Wishes
Caro