MARIE RADICE - A Tribute

We are here to recall with pleasure, admiration and affection the personality and life of Marie Radice, wife to my father Italo de Lisle Radice for seven very happy years; stepmother to me and my brothers Thomas and John; surrogate Auntie to John Ledgley when she was married to his father’s army friend Jonathan Carroll; lover of cats and dogs; expert on porcelain, Chelsea figures and antique furniture; Wagnerite; Essex girl; skilled chiropodist to thousands of pairs of feet.

Between us, we represent many of the phases of Marie’s long life. The Radice family came to know her through her marriage to my father in 1993, following my mother’s death in 1985. But also here are those who knew her when she was Mrs Carroll, especially ‘Little John’, who as a boarding schoolboy used to go to her and Uncle Jonathan for holidays; relatives of her mother Florence Elizabeth Rosalie Guise (née Bence) are among us; staff from Greathed Lodge where she was cared for so well over the last eight years; and friends such as Jan Agostini who got to know her when she and my father started to attend St Mark’s Church, Hamilton Terrace. Warm thanks to all of you for coming, and special thanks to the Revd. John Barrie, Vicar of St Mark’s, for so kindly agreeing to conduct this service, just as he did for my father when he died in 2000.

It is hard for any one of us to have a complete picture of Marie’s life, and we all come with our particular memories of her. We even differ as to how we pronounced her name: to my father she was ‘Marie’ [as in ‘marry’]; to John and Anne she was ‘Auntie Marie’ [as in ‘starry’]; and to others she was ‘Marie’ as the French would say it.

The very new life that she gave to my father in his last years is reflected in her choice of name for him: to her he was always ‘Italo’, whereas previously all friends and family had called him ‘de Lisle’ or ‘Lislie’.

I don’t know which pronunciation of her name she herself preferred. I like to think that with her love of clothes and furnishings and fine food she valued the French connection. Was her father, Benjamin Guise, who took tragically his own life on 12 October 1922 (less than a year after Marie was born), French? John tells me that Marie was unable to trace her father’s origins, but I think she did assume that he was French. On one of the tapes of her reminiscences that she recorded in recent years in Greathed Lodge, she says that when she and my father went to Paris, and he suddenly and dramatically developed the prostate trouble which brought them rushing back to London so that he could be operated on at King Edward VII’s Hospital, the purpose of their visit had been to look up ‘a French cousin’ near Fontainbleau. [1]

Marie was, rightly, proud of her life, of the distance she had travelled from her rural Essex origins, of her profession as a chiropodist, of her determination never to give in to the chronic asthma and bronchitis that afflicted her all her life long, made worse no doubt by the multiple sclerosis that was diagnosed early, laid her low from time to time, but which thankfully never progressed to an acute or paralysing stage. Everyone who knew her was struck by her zest for life, her keen curiosity about so many things, her glamour, her courage and her stubbornness. Jan tells me that Marie’s Bence cousins in New Zealand have mentioned what fun she always was, and my friend the composer Param Vir, whom my father helped a lot with accommodation when he was struggling to establish himself, remembers fondly ‘her wicked humour and the twinkle in her eye.’ I was privileged to be with her repeatedly during her final three days at King Edward VII’s Hospital (which she chose for her last illness partly because my father had been so well cared for there), and I also managed to get there minutes after her early-morning death. I shall never forget how her beauty as a young woman was suddenly, radiantly apparent in her motionless face with its perfect bone structure and eyes now peacefully closed.

Marie had a way with men. John Ledgley tells me that her husband Jonathan worshipped the ground she walked on, and in the hey-day of their marriage, when he successfully ran first the Eagle pub in Shepherd’s Bush, and then the Ordnance Arms in St John’s Wood, she lived in considerable style, with food ordered in from Harrods, time to attend courses on repairing antique porcelain, a lively line in buying and selling furniture, and many, much loved cats and dogs. (Jonathan’s exotic caged birds, however, she did not approve of, and according to her tapes she made him give them all away to the new aviary at the London zoo designed by Antony Armstrong-Jones.) The big sadness of her marriage was the loss of their only child. The pregnancy was terminated at eight months for reasons that she connected with her MS, though who knows what they really were? What a good thing, in view of this heart-break, that she had a professional outlet as a chiropodist, working at St Mary’s and D. H. Evans as well as privately. This was her mainstay too when Jonathan was killed in a road accident in Oman in 1978, after three or four years of working for the Sultan – running the officers’ mess and providing training in army catering to the Omani army. He had the rank of Captain there, which meant she received widow’s compensation for his death. She used the money to buy her flat in Brondesbury, where she built up a wide circle of chiropody patients. It was through that circle that she met my father.

Marie was keenly interested in all things medical, and I felt when I talked to her about medicine that she could easily, with different educational opportunities, have been a doctor or surgeon. During one of my last visits to her in Greathed Lodge I showed her a wonderful film about the neurosurgeon Henry Marsh (whom I was at school with) and the voluntary surgery he does in Ukraine. She was fascinated by the film, but characteristically complained that she wished it could have displayed – neatly on a dish – the brain tumour that Henry had brilliantly removed. Because of this interest, she very much wanted to leave tissue from her body for MS research, and I’m pleased to say that this wish has been honoured

Medicine, professional self-reliance, grit: much of this must have come from her mother, who had to battle hard to bring her up while working long hours as a district nurse. Marie’s reminiscences on tape – some of them typed up by friends – tell a rather harrowing story of her childhood, which seems to have been lonely and cheerless, the cottage at Chigwell being as damp and cold as the school she attended there.

Marie, I speak for all three of your stepsons when I say that you truly did make him happy. Your joint happiness shines out from the photos reproduced on the service sheet, one of them taken in the flat in Hamilton Terrace that you and my father restored with such love and care. This and the other photo were kept framed in your bathroom at Greathed Lodge. But I personally will always think warmly of you not only because you made my father happy. As I gradually got to know you better during my visits to Greathed Lodge, I became truly fond of you myself. I relished the visits – they were never just a duty. I came away from them invigorated. There was something life-enhancing about the way you were always elegantly dressed – ‘suited and booted’ as John put it. I can understand why my father fell for you. He told you he didn’t want a second wife as intellectual as our mother had been. But he certainly didn’t want a stupid wife, and you were not at all stupid.

You loved Proust – you took him to read during your last days in hospital – and you loved Wagner. My father, steeped as he was in Italian Opera, didn’t much like Wagner, but maybe you were able to bring him round a bit. The Siegfried Idyll, though, which was playing as we came in, written by Wagner as a birthday present for his wife Cosima soon after the birth of their son Siegfried, he did always love, so that was chosen partly for him. The music at the end of the service, however, is for you. It’s the last 12 minutes of Die Walküre, in which the king of the gods Wotan bids a poignant and tender farewell to his beloved daughter Brünnhilde, putting her to sleep and surrounding her with fire as a punishment for her disobedience in trying to protect the incestuous and adulterous lovers Siegmund and Sieglinde from the wrath of Sieglinde’s husband Hunding. I know you adored this music, and maybe you saw ENO’s famous production of the 1970s, whose recording we shall hear. I hope that all of us, Wagnerites of not, can find Marie and Italo in both the music and the words. How grateful too we can be – even as we miss them both – that the scorching intensity of Loge’s fire music gives way in the end to serenity and peace.

[1] At the reception after the funeral Peter Watson told me that this was a cousin on the Bence side who married a Frenchman – nothing to do with Marie’s father. He has also explained in subsequent correspondence that he has almost certainly identified Marie’s father as Benjamin Guise from Pirton, Worcs., born in 1876, shown in the 1911 census as a ‘wiresman’, and described in First World War lists as a Stoker 2^nd Class on HMS Diligence. This identification matches the facts that (a) Marie’s father was a Royal Navy pensioner (b) her grandfather was also a Benjamin, according to her parents’ marriage certificate (c) the age of her father on the certificate was corrected by the curate from 37 to 45. (Her mother was 30 at the time.) The various certificates that Marie kept in her room at Greathed Lodge confirm this background, though she rather endearingly promoted her father when she married my father. On the certificates of (1) her parents’ marriage in 1920 (2) her birth in 1921 (3) her short-lived marriage in 1945 to Harry Chivers (4) her marriage in 1960 to Jonathan Carroll (5) her marriage in 1993 to my father, Benjamin Guise’s occupation is given as (1) steward (2) steel construction erector (journeyman) of Acton (3) engineer (4) ship’s steward (5) ship’s captain. Probably the ‘French connection’ – which Marie kept alive by insisting that ‘Guise’ should be pronounced as in French – will never be conclusively proved.

Peter says the reason for her father’s suicide as handed down within the family was that his mother-in-law – Marie’s grandmother Rosalie Bence (née Warren) – took so strongly against him that he was driven into depression. It seems she was convinced that he was a bigamist with another family, on the basis of a photograph which ‘fell out of his wallet’. In fact, Benjamin Guise from Worcestershire had a stepmother who was only four years older than him and who was the mother of six step-siblings more than 20 years younger than him. Perhaps they were the family in the photograph.