You’ll find Anita’s portrait in pastel hanging on the main stairs. The eldest child of Sir Shane and Marjorie Leslie, Anita became a famed biographer just like her father. Her books are delightfully readable perhaps because she wrote them living on a simple diet of smoked salmon and champagne.
Anita joined the Motor Transport Corps when the war came in 1939 and drove ambulances through the African, Italian and French campaigns. She rescued wounded French soldiers from behind enemy lines, and brought home French prisoners from the terrible underground Nordhausen concentration camp where they were building V1 and V2 rockets. At the end of the war, General de Gaulle awarded her two Croix de Guerre for her courage. She also smuggled herself in the boot of General Alexander’s car so that she could illegally attend the Potsdam Conference between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin.
After the war, she took over Castle Leslie from her brother Jack, and brought and restored the 15th Century ruin Oranmore Castle in Galway. In 1963, she passed Castle Leslie over to her brother Desmond, Sammy’s father.
When she died in 1985 and was buried under the great trees on the far side of the lake. As her coffin was lowered, she sent a 100mph whirlwind across the lake to signal her safe arrival on that ‘other shore’.
Also in Anita’s Room: the Pennsylvania Dutch sideboard is adorned with the self portraits and very biblical names of the Honeybourne family. The adjoining psychedelic bathroom was painted in 1970 by some visiting hippies who thought Castle Leslie was a ‘cool scene’.