Autobiography Page 13

  After a dazzling dinner Duff and I sought the moonlit beach and tipsily staggering down a fragile wooden stairway that led to the shingle, fell like Jack and Jill down the rickety flight. My ankle I thought to be twisted, but it hurt too much for twist or wrench or tendon. I was carried back to the hotel and the doctor who was summoned thought my leg might be broken. Consternation! I did not remember how many fibs I had told at home. I had certainly not admitted that Duff was of the party, and how the goodness could I have broken a leg on a sober Sunday evening? And what passing witness might there not be who would betray me?

  They drove me up to London the next day in writhing pain. Hospital experience made my new lies plausible. It was a Pott’s fracture, I diagnosed, liable to happen to anyone getting clumsily out of a car in a hurry. The others had seen it happen. It seemed incredible to them that so normal a twist could break a bone, but Pott’s fractures were like that. The X-ray confirmed my diagnosis, and ice-bags and Sir Arbuthnot Lane, my surgical hero, were sent for.

  One of Sir Arbuthnot’s specialities was bone-plating, and my delight was great when he decided to operate on me. So I went to a nursing home in Manchester Street and a four-inch piece of silver was screwed across the break.

  There, nursed and entertained by adorably witty Irish nurses for several weeks, I held my court—and what a fantastic court it was and what a lot going on at it! Venetia’s trousseau was brought to show and with it as a present two vines trained on to trellises. Some pinioned budgerigars arrived to perch on the grapes. Shopmen brought wares for approval, and plenty of balloons floated at different levels, some buoyant against the ceiling, others multi-coloured floating imperceptibly down as their gas seeped out. Banks of flowers, bells, bows, crystal pistols, masks and witch-balls, fortune-tellers—strangers even came to have a look at the nonsense of the town and, in a narrow hospital bed in the middle of the room, the greatest nonsense of all. Soon out of pain but tied by the leg to a “cradle,” ringletted in emulation of Mary Pickford, the “World’s Sweetheart,” pillowed and counterpaned with a hundred muslin frills to look like Aubrey Beardsley’s Rape of the Lock, I lay there for five weeks.

  The war at that moment was not overwhelmingly terrible for us, though Julian Grenfell had been killed earlier in the year. Ego was still comparatively safe in Egypt, and Letty with him. Billy Grenfell, one I dearly loved, was still alive, so were the Herbert brothers and Tommy Bouch, though all in France. Patrick, Charles Lister and George Vernon were in Gallipoli.

  It seems today so extraordinary, even inhuman, to have been able to divorce one’s spirit from the funereal reality, but all survivors of that most wasteful of wars will tell the same story. A resilience was bred to sustain the battered people. Any pause gave us a momentary allegro supported by the resolve to keep the living buoyant.

  Mr Asquith came to delight me and swell me with pride before the nursing staff. Venetia and Edwin came straight from their marriage ceremony, Venetia in aigretted beauty and Edwin in unaccustomed smart and painful clothes, with tight new boots.

  Often into the sickroom’s frivolity came the two Sitwells in their unsuitable uniform. Curiously ignorant of such conventional things as the army, I did not know before the war what a Guardee was. I remember asking Lady Cunard, who told me I would find out when I sat next to one that night at her dinner. My Guardee opened the conversation by asking me if I thought much of Stravinsky. It was Osbert. He brought to my sickbed his very young brother Sacheverell, and also Ego’s youngest brother Ivo, an enchanting child-soldier predestined too soon to die.

  They took me in a wheel-chair all over the British Museum. The nursing home gave up their rules and schedules. Meals at all times, dinners on my bed, a girl in the stocks and jolly nurses made a fine rendezvous for soldiers and other girls:

  Shall we come up to you now, or are you snowed under by the usual blizzard of nurses? What for food? A cold bird? A cold fish? A cold peach? Or the cold fruitless moon? Just jot down anything that occurs to you.

  Maurice Baring sent me a daily trifling or sentimental keepsake. He was splendid too for Gunter’s ices. Mr Birrell came always for reading aloud, Alan and Duff after office hours, the girls at all hours, and even the friends of friends to see the silly sight.

  On August 12 we had grouse for our greed and at ten p.m. Sir Arbuthnot Lane, visiting another patient in extremis, looked in to say goodnight and found eight of us round my bed, picking birds’ bones and drinking champagne. He looked pleased enough and joined us in the ices and the hilarity. He was a rare man.

  In a few weeks I was up, my leg two inches shorter than the other and viced into a shining Hessian boot, one of a pair. Defying crutches, I limped around in freedom. My mother ran, as well as the Rutland Hospital, a convalescent home at Belvoir which kept her part of the time in the country. I had limped to Welbeck Street to have dinner with Alan Parsons on the night of the first Zeppelin raid. In a trice we were on the roof of his house to watch the fun and being hauled off it by an old char who thought us foolish. So I hobbled off with Alan to Downing Street for latest news, and on to Olga Lynn’s to hear other people’s tall stories about the raid. The tallest was of “the Zepp being so low that I saw their horrid German faces in the searchlight.” That “they passed right over where we were” every one of us said and believed. Then more champagne, Olga to sing Debussy’s Enfants de France, Basil Hallam to dance with, and heights, and the fearful depths.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Dances of Death

  LOOKING back on these nightmare years of tragic hysteria, it is frightening to live them again in memory. People stung by the tarantula doubtless forget the mania forced upon them. The young were dancing a tarantella frenziedly to combat any pause that would let death conquer their morale. If one of them fell with pain, he was tenderly lifted and treated, but strangling tears must not stop the salutary delirium. It was even encouraged.

  I read a letter from Patrick written in 1915:

  Naval Brigade

  O it’s fun to be a sailor and to be going to fight the Turk. No mud, no cold, very little danger and infinite glory of avenging the Paleologi and entering Byzantium.

  I am not 1000 miles from the plains of Troy, where I expect to meet the enemy, and before meeting him I feel impelled, on the exceedingly off chance of his registering a score on my cautious retiring person, to tell you just as far as three lines will carry me what I thought of you this winter. I thought, one may say, everything.

  You know several of us have been thought ill of in connection with this war. Evan once told me in no measured terms that R. and I had. In the same way eminent women have described our parties as the “dances of death” and others have cast doubts on your professional career. Still others have cast doubts on (a) my (b) N’s (c) E’s sobriety on various historic occasions. In fact those of us who survive this war will without doubt undergo yet a little more opprobrium than we are already used to. This makes it the more essential to keep our mutual admiration. What I say is that I have never seen you one half so glorious as in these times. You were (and by God’s grace are) surer of yourself, more central, more indispensable, fairer, wittier, more seductive, than I have ever known you before, and I have known you wellish since 1907 and it is saying a good deal. If one circumstance or another has prevented my making this as clear to you as I could have wished (the most permanent and irritating circumstance is the number and assiduity of your first-line lovers) that makes it all the more imperative that I should now make it clear beyond the shadow of a doubt.

  Darling Diana, just in case I should be killed I do want to impress it on you that you have practically the burden of this generation on your shoulders. Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and SALT it, and encourage the good and cause the undesirable to writhe, and never say that you forgive little moral obliquities only because their perpetrator comes straight from the trenches.

  Wine helped and there was wine in plenty—it was said too much. George Moore’s dances of dea
th flowed with the stuff. They became more frequent as leave became regular from the training centres and the trenches of France and the Middle East. The parties were left to the Coterie to assemble. Parents were excluded. We dined at any time. The long waits for the last-comers were enlivened by exciting, unusual drinks such as vodka or absinthe. The menu was composed of far-fetched American delicacies—avocados, terrapin and soft-shell crabs. The table was purple with orchids. I always sat next the host, and the dancing, sometimes to two bands, negro and white (and once to the first Hawaiian), so that there might be no pause, started immediately after dinner. There were not more than fifty people. We kept whirling to the music till the orchids were swept away in favour of wild flowers, for breakfast eggs and bacon which appeared with the morning light. The noise of carts rumbling to Covent Garden called a revelling group, singing catches, to board them.

  I should have liked to have danced all night with Basil Hallam, being a little in love with him—Basil Hallam, the original of “Gilbert the Filbert, the Knut with a K.” The Coterie loved him dearly. Harsh things were said about his dancing in London at the Palace Music Hall, instead of marching to war. He had an infirmity which he did not choose to use as an excuse, so he joined the captive balloons and was killed in France.

  George Moore used to dismiss the band when I left the party. “When you leave, the place is a morgue,” which meant my staying too late and unwillingly. I wanted to leave at a reasonable hour, drive twice round Regent’s Park with a swain and be dropped home at an hour compatible with hospital duties next morning. I wonder if the young go round Regent’s Park as often as we did? I suppose not—they go to coffee bars and dark night-clubs. But then that “little house on wheels,” as we called our taxi, represented the only complete immunity from surveillance that I knew.

  Coming home in daylight, I must by law call in on my mother to report my lies about the guests and my partners, but of George Moore my mother could not disapprove. He had become, through French’s position as Commander-in-Chief, a man of omnipotence. My mother’s obsessing hope being to get my brother to G.H.Q., she thought that only I could coax this boon out of Moore. The parties were the delight of my friends but I, who could not like him because of his passion for me, found the position acutely painful. To get my brother to G.H.Q. would answer my mother’s anguished prayer and my own. “To me the war’s the General, England’s you” was Moore’s theme, so it should not be too difficult.

  He would do all I asked and he had extraordinary power—power great enough to arrange transport for Sir John and Lady Horner, their daughter, Sir Arbuthnot Lane, a special nursing sister, my mother and me, when we heard that Edward Horner was gravely wounded in France. We all travelled across the Channel, blown up in Gieves waistcoats against drowning by submarine attack, and landed at Boulogne. There waited a G.H.Q. car to take the family, surgeon and nurse at full speed to the front-line hospital. Edward was desperately ill, had an operation to remove a kidney and was brought back to Boulogne in the dead of night on a stretcher bound for England.

  The scene is marked in memory’s eye like a familiar picture—outside the station, pencils of searchlights and a procession of stretchers that seemed never-ending to me, looking at each sick face for the one I sought. And then there it was—very, very ill and looking ecstatic. The bearers broke the procession and laid the stretcher down, and round we crowded, crying with relief, to see our precious Edward alive and due to recover.

  “O darling, this is heaven,” he said.

  Against the march of the sick and the wounded returning home, tramped, in the dark, the men from England bound for the trenches. I wondered if they looked with envy or dread at those on stretchers.

  It was, I suppose, natural that this privilege—worse, favouritism—was considered outrageous by the many. One cannot but sympathise with their deprecation, but which of those many would not have grasped at the same chance? I could not mind therefore my portion of the blame.

  Naval Brigade

  So swings the military pendulum, and now I hear of a party at George Moore’s on Friday, and I suppose it’s about 9 to 1 on getting there. But (like a good sailor) I pray and prey on the feelings of my Company Commander who also has loved.

  The Commander-in-Chief himself would look in on the revels at Lancaster Gate. He would not stay long. My mother and I used to lunch there when he was home from G.H.Q.—small parties of importance, politically demure and low-voiced. Moore’s twinkling little black eyes would catch mine, both of us hoping my mother took this to be the normal tone of the house.

  So Brother John went to G.H.Q. There was great rejoicing and blessings upon Moore’s head. He needed them, because although he was the most loyal and selfless worker in the Allied cause, the fact that America was still a neutral and he in the innermost councils of England gave the papers a chance to libel him. There was a case in court in which the Commander-in-Chief himself was made a witness. I was there but I cannot remember anything except Moore’s winning it.

  In the autumn of 1915 we had to suffer more losses, hard indeed to weather. George Vernon, that dependent boy we had so cherished and petted as one does the youngest and weakest of the family, got dysentery at Suvla in Gallipoli and died, too slowly, in a hospital in Malta. I wrote to Patrick:

  Poor darling little George, always spoilt and pampered, with more frailties than any of us. No one knows what it cost him to be brave. He told me he would be woken in the night by a frozen sweat of fear and dread of being afraid. Yet Henry Bentinck, his Colonel, writes that his courage was proverbial. His fears then were unfounded; he was not more afraid than the bravest. It bears no thinking of, his dying in Malta, conscious of death and wondering if we even knew, and then, if knowing, we loved him? And, if loving him, we were not by now half-callous to loss?

  Billy Grenfell, the titan cherub who outshone his brother Julian in scholarship and athletics, was killed in France. Charles Lister, after many woundings, died in Egypt.

  Days were very heavy, heavy with one’s own heart and the hearts of others. The Rutland Hospital expanded, taking in another twelve officers. More girls and young widows I knew came to work as V.A.D.s. For me it was not whole-time work. I had plenty of leisure to be with Duff quietly.

  Now with the Hospital running full tilt my mousy intriguing little Italian maid left me. Her name was Adelina and she would pass me letters, however unimportant, between a pair of gloves. In her place arrived Kate Wade, a little older than me, more courageous and balanced and much taller. She was to become my friend and the cornerstone of my home. She was to maid and support me and my husband and my son through many vicissitudes and adventures for forty years “not out.”

  Having only my bedroom in our hospital-home, I spent most of my free time in Duff’s flat, or in the houses of our well-wishers—the Parsonses, the Montagus and Katharine Asquith. There was no longer a Tree house. Sir Herbert Tree had died, Iris was married at eighteen in America, and Felicity too had a family. Duff and I used to cry together in his flat at 88 St James’s Street—cry secretly, and then brace ourselves to the sad revelry.

  A haven was the Montagus’ house. We had given Edwin all our affection, ragging him for his gloom and forcing him sometimes to be carefree. We seem by letters to have been there several times a week. Hospital goodnights said, I would tear out of the house (with luck ahead of the warning howl of the maroon) and run down St James’s Street to Duff. There we would split a half-bottle of champagne and then stroll past the birds and the swards of St James’s Park to 24 Queen Anne’s Gate (“The Green Griffon,” Mr Birrell called it), to the stimulating company and all that was left of the loveliest and the best.

  Last night at Edwin’s I survived a double-barrel spike from Margot: (1) “What a pity that Diana, so decorative, should let her brain rot.” (2) to Duff, “I’m fond of Diana. I know you are. She’s pretty and amuses Henry, but she reminds me of what I most dislike—German-Greek.”

  But it was an amusing evening. Venetia had
brought two of the old flower-sellers’ baskets from Piccadilly Circus, packed high with spring flowers, for the drawing-room. Mr Asquith at his happiest asked a riddle: “What is it God never sees, kings rarely see and we always see?” Raymond improved on the real answer, “An equal,” by guessing: “A joke.”

  The Parsonses we would also frequent, but those delightful literary evenings are too well described in Old Men Forget for me to re-tell them here.

  Now people returning from Egypt told of Letty’s confidence in Ego’s safety. He had been missing since April. She had reasons of rumour to hope that he was a prisoner, but the rumours were to prove false. She returned in May, cruelly anxious but wearing a brave face, stalwart in her hopes. Soon we were to hear the glorious official news that he really was a prisoner in Turkey. Radiant with relief and thankfulness, she sent innumerable parcels of food and clothes, books and daily letters. Our own joy was out of bounds. We couldn’t care for anyone else’s safety, least of all Kitchener’s.

  I remember, a few days after the torment of anxiety had been stayed, going to St Paul’s Cathedral and standing godmother, beside Duff the godfather, to Raymond’s little son. The Dean was officiating and Margot held the child at the font. She wanted to whisper to Dean Inge that Kitchener had been drowned, but he was too deaf to hear. After two attempts she broke into the service and bawled the story into his ear. It was dramatic, and I found myself hurrying directly after the ceremony to some big charity function at the Caledonian Market, praying that I should be first with the news. I was not. It had preceded me and already when I arrived the inevitable false rumour “Kitchener safe and sound!” was being shouted out by a man on stilts while the crowd sang spontaneously, though not with one voice, “Now thank we all our God.”