Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot

"... the disastrous honeymoon he and Vivienne spent at Eastbourne. Vivienne had looked forward to her 'second honeymoon!' with Tom, as she told Thayer Scofield in an excited letter, which suggests that her initial experience of marital relations in the three weeks she and Tom had spent together in the studio flat, before he left for America, were not an unmitigated failure. She hoped for a rapturous reunion with the bridegroom from whom she had parted so soon after their marriage, imagining that, having solved their money troubles and made his peace with his parents, who were furious about his 'secret' wedding, he would turn to her with new ardour."

"Eliot's response to the threat of Vivienne's messy and demanding proximity was to escape, to withdraw into 'icy urbanity'. Maurice recalled that Tom spent a night in a deckchair on the beach at Eastbourne, while a distraught Vivienne locked herself in her bedroom and apparently damaged the room. The couple returned early from Eastbourne, Vivienne insisting on bringing the soiled sheets home with her in a laundry basket to be washed at home; the manageress of the hotel wrote to complain that the sheets had been 'stolen'. 'Tom went mad,' recalled Maurice."

"Snow was falling as Eliot, Maurice and the Fabers travelled to Pinner on a bleak winter's day for the funeral. She was buried in Pinner Cemetery, her grave close to her mother's, although her wish had been to be buried beside her father in Eastbourne. The headstone, ordered by Maurice, reads: 'In Loving Memory of Vivienne Haigh Eliot, Died 29th January 1947.' The stonemason carved the wrong date. No one troubled to correct it."

Quotes taken from 'Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot' by Carole Seymour-Jones