It took Lady Sarah Graham Moon two marriages, five sons, a lesbian admirer and one very famous act of revenge to find the perfect man. After 60 years spent suffocating in the upper classes, she did a Lady Chatterley and moved David Denyer, a gamekeeper, into the house. She called him her “Lord Del Boy” and the pair raised chickens and gun dogs and enjoyed dates at the local tip. For the first time in her life she was happy.
In February she found him dying by the back door. “Just there,” she says, pointing to a spot beyond a jumble of wellies and wax jackets. “I found him on his back, lying on top of a gun. He was obsessed with the bloody jackdaws in the roof and kept a gun to hand so he could have a pot at them. He died quietly with his head in my lap. One tiny wound and no blood. His final word was ‘Gun’.”
Although her eyes are moist, the 68-year-old’s voice remains brisk and unfussy throughout this, her first interview since the tragedy. Old girls in this corner of the Hampshire countryside don’t do excess emotion.
“Death is all around,” she booms. “We shoot dogs and we kill rabbits. Of course it isn’t very nice but there’s no use crying great crocodile tears. When David died I didn’t go into hysterics or streak down to the hospital to see his body. He’s dead and that’s that.”
Her no-fuss attitude should not surprise you. Moon and drama are old friends. Today she sits grandly on an aged velvet chesterfield, surrounded by dog portraits and stuffed birds, but it was with similar pragmatism that, 14 years ago, she became notorious for wreaking terrible revenge.
When her second marriage to Sir Peter Graham Moon crumbled, he moved a younger woman (“Not that much bloody younger,” sniffs Moon) into the couple’s Berkshire village. When he failed to turn up to see his wife one day, she calmly snipped the sleeves off 32 of his Savile Row suits, trashed his BMW with a can of white paint and deposited rare wines from his cellar on doorsteps around the village like a milkman.
Moon became an instant media star and remains the patron saint of scorned spouses everywhere. She had a column in The Sun, wrote a book, set up the Old Bags Club for other dumped wives and was even asked on the Oprah Winfrey Show. (“I think Oprah expected me to cry or something,” she snorts. “She asked me if I wanted a hug. I said, ‘Get away from me, you loon. I’m English’.”)
Always ready with a quip or a put-down, she was the spokeswoman for revenge, but in reality getting even had very little to do with it. “At the time everybody put my actions down to feminist retribution and jealousy, but it wasn’t like that at all,” she says. “It was sheer terror.”
So she was the original desperate housewife? “Desperate ex-housewife, more like,” she chuckles. “My future looked ghastly. I knew at 55 I was too young to be a widow and too old to remarry.”
She says she can’t stand all these newly single older women harping on about how fabulous later life can be: “They can protest all they want but they should just face facts — you’re past your sell-by date at that age. You have too much baggage, you look bloody awful and you’re not desirable. Life doesn’t begin at 60 or 50 or whatever. It’s terrifying.”
Particularly, she believes, for women of her class and background. Before she met the handsome gamekeeper, Moon says she spent her whole life indentured to ghastly upper-middle-class and aristocratic men: “I’d gone straight from my father’s house to my husband’s bed with no time to lose my virginity on the way.
“I’d never handled money or paid a bill. Every week I would knock at the door of Peter’s study and he’d give me my allowance.”
Even in the 1990s? “Yes, because women like me — upper-middle-class — are cut off from everything. We have our horses and dogs and gardens, but we don’t work or bring in money. Our status is practically Victorian.”
Moon was born Sarah Smith in Poona, India, to a military family. She spent her war in Egypt (she took ballet classes with the Greek royal family), then returned to England to board at Benenden school, in Kent, “where we were taught exactly nothing of use”.
In 1956 she was in the last line-up of girls to be presented at court: “Henrietta Tiarks was leading deb, along with that girl who became the Duchess of Rutland. I was 18 and the whole thing seemed utterly pointless — curtsying, flower arranging and so on. The debs’ delights were pretty ghastly, too. Chinless wonders the lot of them, but so long as they had a good background mama seemed happy.”
After this “lousy preparation for life in the 20th century”, Moon took the only option open to her — marriage. She remembers her first husband, Major Antony Chater, “looking terrific in his mess kit but it was lust, not love”, she says. “And after a year [it was] just bloody awful.” The couple had three sons by the time she was 24. They remained with their father after the divorce.
In 1965 she met Sir Peter Graham Moon in a London restaurant. A former rally driver, again lust got the better of her. Their 27-year marriage was “deeply dreary” as she was moved around various country homes while he toured the world and went through his inheritance setting up failed businesses.
Moon eventually reached for the scissors when he moved a mistress, Amanda Acheson, into a house just down the road from her. “At first I refused to speak to the press, but after a while they were the only people who called me and I was so lonely,” she says. This meant she received little in the way of money from the divorce. Her husband was very angry at how she had shamed him. Instead her brother gave her handouts from a sum their mother had left them. That ran out and by the mid-1990s the society beauty found herself living in a basement flat in Swindon, Wiltshire.
“The house was owned by a homosexual vet,” she says, her eyes going very wide. “In fact the whole place was filled with homosexuals and lesbians. I wouldn’t have minded but the lesbians kept wanting me to be a lesbian, too.” When one of the sapphos got too fervent, Moon says she “got very embarrassed and middle-class about the whole thing and barricaded myself in the kitchen”. The time had come to move on.
A few months later, raising gun dogs near Andover, Hampshire, Moon describes how the knight in battered wellies walked into her life. “He was unlike any man I’d ever met before. For a start he had a moral code — one woman at a time, no gossiping, no getting in debt. He had a Rabelaisian sense of humour but I didn’t mind the belching so much. I quite liked it really,” she says, sheepishly.
In the season Denyer, who was working class and originally from Norfolk, worked as a gamekeeper but dabbled in all sorts. The pair discovered a mutual love for chicken farming and buying junk at auction and worked on the beating wagon together. He turned her garden into a dump, but Moon would lovingly hand him tools and parts as he reconditioned old washing machines in the driveway. He called her “Your Ladyship” and tugged his forelock whenever she got too haughty.
“I couldn’t stop saying ‘I’m so happy, I’m so happy’ out loud,” she laughs. “We were from completely different worlds but somehow we spoke the same language.”
Maybe toffs just make terrible husbands? “Well, David had morals, unlike Peter, who is supposedly so well bred. But then Peter is like a lot of men of that class. Despite his title, despite his huge inheritance, despite his fantastic blood, he was incredibly insecure and it made him boast. Driving huge expensive cars, wearing top-of-the-range clothes and screwing young women — it’s all part of the cover-up for upper-class men.
“I was brought up to think such men were gods, but then came the ghastly day I realised they’re all total shits really . . . and then I met David.” Her eyes moisten again but her upper lip doesn’t even quiver: “He didn’t have time for any of that nonsense. He was totally straightforward.”
Last month an inquest returned an open verdict on Denyer’s death after a firearms expert all but ruled out the possibility of it being an accident. The court heard how the 71-year-old’s knees were wrecked with arthritis and he had become depressed with a worsening heart condition. Coupled with his excellent knowledge of guns (he had 10), suicide was deemed the likely cause. Moon strongly disagrees.
“If David had wanted to kill himself he would have done it properly,” she says, holding an imaginary rifle to her chin. “He wouldn’t have made a botched shot like that, and he wouldn’t have done it two feet from the back door. I imagine he picked up the gun by the barrel and tripped with his bad knees.”
And now she is on her own again? “Oh don’t be dreary,” she thunders. “At least he left me feeling more confident than the last one did. David asked me to marry him, you know, but I said no. I thought two bad ones was quite enough.”
Do you regret it now? “Yes,” she says, surprising herself. “You see, he had the qualities I’d always been looking for, only they came in the most unexpected package.”
