26 YEARS LATER … A WEDDING

Roots

“My Mother is getting married” my 13-year-old daughter, Domino told her teacher. “How lovely, who is she marrying?” the teacher asked, “My father” came the reply.

After such a bewildering 18-months or so I felt a longing for something reassuring, something anchoring. Not just for me but for my kids who like everyone else had been shaken by the pandemic. “Let’s get married,” I suggested to David one evening after supper with the kids at home, on the tiny island in the Bahamas where we live and where we had spent lockdown as a family. David had asked me to marry him 25 years ago when I found out I was pregnant with our son, Felix. But in my fiercely-independent-woman phase I never accepted, although I felt strongly, Felix and our children that followed, should carry his last name, except of course Wesley, our adopted son, who arrived in our lives already named.

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Having lived a fairly unconventional life together on a small island in the Bahamas for more than two decades, we decided that our wedding should be very conventional. We chose the Brightwell Baldwin church in England where I was christened and where my father is buried, just along the lane from my mother’s home where I grew up and where she still lives.  

Now, what on earth do you wear to your own first wedding at the age of 54? I was acutely aware of finding something that wouldn’t be too ridiculous. So, I asked my friend Emilia Wickstead to help me create a dress that would be just that. A little Grace Kelly-esq but with a definite modern twist I suggested, she understood at once, demure high neck, an exaggerated waist band with a swivel under the bustline, and sculptural silhouette with a voluminous skirt. The key moment came when Emilia showed me a small swatch of ivory colored French lace. That was it. That is what would define my wedding dress. The only slight disagreement we had was around the shape of the underarm. I wanted it to be very, very fitted, only possible by cutting the sleeve and adding a seam. Emilia fought hard against this; she was adamant that the beauty of the design would be lost with a seam. Somehow through the brilliance of her seamstress and a lot of cups of tea, parking tickets and fittings we were able to achieve the look without adding a seam. I also wanted to be able to slip into the dress zip myself up and dash right off. No hooks, frills, or complications. And on my wedding day I was able to do just that, zip it up and dash right out.

Pulbrook & Gould, the London based florist, who had made the wedding bouquets for my mother in 1960, created one for me and my bridesmaids. When discussing the flowers, the creative director at Pulbrook asked me if I had ever held a floral bouquet before, “Oh yes” I said “I may not have been a bride, but I was almost professional as bridesmaid. I did it nine times” “Ah, so then you know how to hold it correctly. Pubes not boobs” he said, demonstrating the direction the flowers should face. I wanted the bouquet to have a little wildness to it, and a lot of fragrance. Rosemary, lavender eucalyptus, mingled with tuberose, jasmine, hydrangeas and roses. We had to include Love-in-the-mist and old man’s beard because that made me giggle. Phlox, Japanese Anemones, Blue bee, Lizzyanthus and Erygium were also added. Cream in color to match the ivory French lace fabric with hints of pale blue. Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. Here was the blue.

It was certainly special having my own daughter at my wedding as my chief bridesmaid.  And unusual. She wore a simple elegant dress with sweet, capped sleeves in a matching ivory color, also created by Emilia, uncomplicated and ideal for corralling the 5 other page boys and bridesmaids. I invited my goddaughter Inés de Givenchy and Christian Louboutin’s two twin imps Paloma and Eloise to also be bridesmaids, with a brace of page boys to lead them in, Kit Fraser and Fraser Flint Wood, godson, and nephew respectively. With a lot of encouragement from Domino this little entourage followed me silently into the church and down the aisle with the eyes of a hundred guests on them.

Having suffered with my own small retail business during the pandemic I knew how important it was to support local businesses, so I asked Kitty, our 17-year-old local celebrity baker to bake us 100 rolls with our initials stenciled into the brioche for lunch after the church service. A year earlier after an intense bout of depression Kitty had found solace in baking bread and together with her father, she opened the now renowned Orange Bakery. Our friends and neighbors at Nettlebed creamery would churn us some cheese to accompany Flea St. George’s homemade sourdough. Claire, our own Top Banana, would cook dinner the night before and after the church service we would all slip across the road into the family run Lord Nelson pub, for Bloody Mary’s, Pimm’s and lunch.

As everything we were doing seemed to be happening out of order, backwards even, (25 years and 5 kids later we decide to get married?) we hosted dinner and dancing the night before the wedding, with the idea that everyone would be much more relaxed in church the following day, not just because of the mild hangovers but because of the comradery from dancing in a field altogether the night before. And what a dinner it was. Everyone felt jubilant and excited. It had been so long since any of us had been at a wedding or even a party. The evening ended with Christian Louboutin impressively swinging like a fevered burlesque dancer, round, and round and round the tent pole at such a dizzying rate we all thought the tent would come crashing down.

Dinner and dancing, church, and lunch had completely different moods but each equally a celebration of unflinching love. Dinner was arranged at one long table stretching down a grassy avenue under a gypsy-like canvas tent, lit by hundreds of candles. Babylon Flowers, headquartered in Cuxham, the next-door village, came on board to help. They only use locally grown flowers and they added as much as possible from my mother’s garden. I don’t think they thought I was serious when I said I hoped we could create an overhead hanging garden that could travel the length of our tent. But they did. Sensationally so. No one could fail to admire this stretch of garden peppered with white roses and magnolias. Wooden trestle tables were laid up with napkins that I designed, white on white sea ferns and dominos, hand block-printed in India, with a tiny gold thread trim, produced by Pomegranate Inc, and gold-rimmed water glasses, also a collaboration with Pomegranate.

Wesley MC’d throughout dinner, our son Amory made a speech and said his father was his hero who was cool, so cool he even made balding look cool and that I was smart and silly, gracious and adventurous, and also the family Rottweiler, “If you are ever stuck in a tricky situation just get the family Rottweiler out and in seconds the problem disappears.”   My brother, Ashley, made a toast, and presented us with a totem pole on which he had painted all of our initials. Don’t you always expect a totem pole as wedding gift? In fact, we had asked all of our kids, cousins, family and friends with us to make a donation to the Global Empowerment Mission, a foundation who I work closely with. At the end of dinner my sort-of-niece (the daughter of my cousin Tim Knatchbull who feels closer than a cousin) sang with a voice to melt hearts. As the words of Songbird drifted across the night air, I could feel love all round us.  I wore a long white dress designed by Naeem Khan who I had known since I was a naïve 20-year-old model living in New York. Naeem’s workshop had individually hand sewn lengths and lengths of satin ribbon to create meandering patterns. Naeem insisted I flew to New York for a fitting, he wanted perfection. Domino came with me, a lovely excuse for us to be alone.

The night before the wedding, I slept at my mother’s house, David was with our four sons, his two brothers and his best man. Wesley drove me to the church in David’s 1966 Mercedes Cabriolet, and Felix walked me down the aisle, before folding back my veil and handing me over to his father. (I had debated about wearing a veil, the symbol of virginity because let’s face it, I had lost that a while ago, but it also felt like a simple very bridal gesture). The service had all the trimmings of an English wedding, complete with a choir and an organist leading us through a series of uplifting hymns. Conrad, read a moving passage by Morgan Harper Nichols, an African American Christian writer ending with the words ‘And I hope this reminds you, your story is far from finished yet and you are allowed to find peace here, even before you know what happens next.’ And David’s closest friend Charles Finch read appropriately the psalm of David, which had been printed in out in David’s own elegant handwriting in our Order of Service.

As the bells rang David and I walked out from the church, confetti was thrown, hand-picked and dried from the roses in our garden the summer before and the clouds parted just enough to let through the sun.

My fingers entwined in David’s, and on one, now a simple gold and diamond band from Charlotte Chesnais, which we had chosen together in Paris a few months earlier – on the inside organized in secret by David the words Amor Vincit Omnia.

Love Conquers All.