1939 Read online

  The luckiest debutantes were those who came from a large and united family, for they would keep bumping into aunts, cousins, older sisters – comfortingly familiar faces among the mêlée of strangers; girls like the Hon. Lucy Lyttelton, daughter of the fourth Lord Lyttelton and niece of Mrs Gladstone. She was seventeen and a half when she entered London Society in the early summer of 1859, and her diaries brim with exuberance and with a touching humility. She was so anxious to please, so easily pleased. ‘I believe it was a dull party,’ she wrote, having just returned from some official function at the Admiralty, ‘but we were much amused.’23 London was a merry-go-round of parties and her enthusiasm found new stimulus every day:

  London, 24 May. A little past 3 a.m.! Our first ball is over. We danced much more than I expected: M. [her sister Muriel, fourteen months older] 6 times and me 4: twice with Reginald Yorke, Ld. Skelmersdale, and Mr Something Stone. It was fearfully crowded. I saw [here follows a list of names] … – shall I ever remember them all ?

  26 May. ’Tis 1 a.m. after a most delightful party here, of which I must at once tell the great event. I was introduced to the Due d’Aumale, the descendant of the old race of French kings. Low was my curtsey, most gracious was his bow, and oh! he spoke to me, and I said, ‘Oui, Monsieur!’ I thrilled.

  28 May. About 1. We’ve been to the Opera! Gazza Ladra at Covent Garden, Lord Ward’s box. There being no ballet, Papa let us go. I believe I was slightly disappointed, but it was because I don’t know the music well enough, and I must always know it well to be properly worthy.

  3 June. ¼4 a.m.! and this is written, ill or well, by the light of dawn: mad and dissipated I feel. We have been to Ly. Derby’s ball, which, truth to tell, was very dull: hot crowds of chaperones and old gentlemen, and the dancing a fierce struggle with all-surrounding petticoat.

  5 June. My energy is certainly great. I walked to Trinity Ch Vauxhall in the morning with Papa, on the top of yesterday’s perpetual tramp, and the night before’s dissipation. Ain’t a bit tired.

  6 June. A little past two, after the pleasantest home ball, that’s to say dance, or it was carefully distinguished from a ball by its smallness, absence of champagne, and substitution of modest p.f. [pianoforte] and harp for band…. I danced everything but one, valses of course excepted, but I can only remember five partners. I think I must have had more than that.24

  And so she rattled on, lively and excited despite the restrictions (perpetual chaperonage; valses forbidden to an unmarried girl), until the great day of her formal presentation. In her account of this, her first London Season, a great deal of what Lucy Lyttelton describes would have been the same eighty years later, in 1939. Her emotions, the ceremonial, the graciousness of the Queen: it is all practically interchangeable.

  London, 11 June. A very memorable day. … We were presented at 2 o’clock; and after all the frightful bathing-feel [a Lyttelton family word meaning nervousness] and awestruck anticipation, behold ! it was a moment of great happiness to me. The look of interest and kindliness in the dear little Queen’s face, her bend forward, and the way she gave her hand to me to be kissed, filled me with pleasure that I can’t describe and that I wasn’t prepared for. … I feel as if I could do anything for her !25

  Within a very few weeks she was becoming harder to please, and even a touch waspish:

  4 July. We had a prim luncheon at Ly. Windsor’s, where nice Victoria Clive sang the tunes that all old cows have died of. For the first time, two balls ; duty first, and pleasure afterwards.26

  But with discrimination came improved descriptive powers. This scene at a ball could have stood for thousands of balls through many decades:

  Mrs Hibbert’s was the most lovely thing I have ever seen in its way: a tent in the open air for ante-room, from whence you descended by a flight of steps into the ball-room, at the top of which you could stand and see the dancing like a magic picture. A smother of flowers, and cool atmosphere.27

  The 1860s and 1870s were probably the last years in which the upper class was still to all intents and purposes one large, interrelated tribe. In 1910 Lady Dorothy Nevill wrote in her Memoirs, ‘Society, in the old sense of the term, may be said, I think, to have come to an end in the eighties of the last century.’ It is a recurring vanity to believe that one’s own time was the best time, the only real time; but there is much evidence to suggest that Lady Dorothy was right. By the end of the nineteenth century the invasion of industry and commerce, of Jewish financiers and American millionaires’ daughters, had diluted the aristocratic exclusivity of Society.

  One consequence of this change was that Society became more demanding, more cynical, even cruel. If its members could win entry by wealth, or on merit or beauty (like Lillie Langtry) or for talent and coruscating wit (like Oscar Wilde) rather than simply attain it by inheritance, then Society would be ruthless to those new members who did not continue to earn their keep. The English novelist Ouida (the pen-name of Marie Louise de la Ramée) spelled it out brutally in her novel Friendship, published in 1878:

  People must make themselves agreeable to be agreeable to the world; yes, and eat a good deal of dust too, that I concede. If they are high and mighty by birth and all the rest of it, of course they can be as disagreeable as they choose, and make others eat the dust always. But if not, there is nothing for it but to toady…. Society is not to be despised. It is pleasant…. We are not brilliant, nor powerful, nor original ; but when we are not murderous, we are pleasant, pre-eminently pleasant; we know how to gild things, we know how to gloss them…. Now, you see, you people who will live on that rock in the midst of the sea only disturb us. That is the truth. You make us think, and Society dislikes thinking. You call things by their right names, and Society hates that.… You shudder at sin, and we have all agreed that there is no such thing as sin…. adultery is a liaison, lying is gossip, debt is a momentary embarrassment, immorality is a little slip, and so forth ; and when we have arranged this pretty little dictionary of convenient pseudonyms, it is not agreeable to have it sent flying by fierce, dreadful old words.… We do not care about anything. Only give us a good dinner and plenty of money and let us outshine our neighbours. There is the Nineteenth Century Gospel.

  Elsewhere, Ouida defined it even more unequivocally: ‘Society always had its fixed demands. It used to exact birth. It used to exact manners. Nowadays it exacts money. Have money and spend it well (that is, let Society live on it, gorge with it, walk ankle deep in it) and you may be anything and do anything.’

  Something else changed Society radically in the closing years of the nineteenth century: the arrival of the motor-car. It widened people’s social circle because it was now possible to drive fifty miles for lunch or an evening party. The train had been the great stimulus to country-house visiting; the car enabled people to visit one another for less than a weekend, and heralded the Edwardians’ ceaseless entertaining. Previously, people were visited at home almost entirely by their relatives (hence the necessity for a London Season, to widen one’s circle) or by local acquaintances. From the 1890s onwards began an era of frantic party-giving: children’s parties, firework parties and above all fancy-dress parties. Hundreds of pounds were spent on fantastically elaborate costumes designed to be worn once only: the French Ambassador’s wife at the Court of Catherine the Great ; endless Antonys and Cleopatras, mythological gods and goddesses tricked out with breastplates and dubious classical drapery. All this was encouraged by the portly, pleasure-loving figure of the Prince of Wales, soon to become Edward VII.

  The last years of Victoria’s reign were also the last when strict social precedence was observed, whatever the inconvenience. One debutante from that time recalled, with an exasperation that the years had not dulled,

  At these dinner-parties [i.e. those given before a dance] they never kept the older people together as they do now, but all had to go exactly according to rank, so we used to find ourselves going in to dinner with the most dreary old lords, and any young man who happened to b
e a duke or a marquess was sure to have to take in the hostess, however old and fat she might be, which was very hard luck.28

  Lady Clodagh Anson was presented by her aunt in 1898, at a ceremony which had altered not at all forty years later, except that fewer royalties would have attended:

  Queen Victoria held the Drawing-rooms in St James’s Palace in those days in the daytime, so that everyone looked too ridiculous for words sitting all dressed up in evening gowns, veils and feathers at eleven o’clock in the morning in their carriages along the Mall. Crowds came to stare at them, and their comments were very unflattering sometimes. The actual Drawing-room (it was called a ‘Court’ then) was in quite a small room with a door at each end. The Queen sat on a low chair, and as she was very small indeed, you had to make a deep curtsey to get down low enough. She put out her hand which you took and kissed, and if you were a peeress or a peer’s daughter, she kissed your cheek almost at the same time. All the other royalties stood in a close line next to her, which was very convenient, for you really pulled yourself up by their hands, which you shook in turn as you made less and less deep curtsies all along the line; sometimes there were eight or ten of them, and when you got to the last you shot out of the far door.29

  By the time Queen Victoria died in 1901, a very old lady whom people were beginning to believe must be immortal, the shape and conventions of the London social Season, its events and priorities, were set: and changed little for the next fifty years. Manners changed, yes. The Bright Young Things of the 1920s picked Society up, twirled the old lady around to the sound of jazz, and set her down again breathless, scandalized and secretly thrilled. Customs changed; drugs had become fashionable during the war years, morphine and cocaine being much used as antidotes to the unbearable casualty lists. The practice of swearing came in briefly but had gone again by the thirties. Sex came in with contraception, even though it was largely confined to girls in their twenties, well past the debutante stage, and precautions were of the Marie Stopes variety. But it remained de rigueur to pretend to one’s family that one was a virgin bride – as indeed the more decorous still were.

  Down the generations, one wave of girlhood after another was launched upon the river of Society. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was a quiet English river, the sweet Thames, running softly, and it led into rural backwaters. By the eighteenth century it was already gathering momentum, becoming more sophisticated and treacherous. In the nineteenth century it began to be fed by the effluvia of factory, brewery and commerce by which, to the many people who shared Lady Dorothy Nevill’s old English views, it was polluted. By the beginning of the twentieth century it had become an international waterway, swelled by foreign tributaries, its flow thickened by political undercurrents and checked by the rapids of war. Yet in 1939 Society showed no signs of silting up. It was only in retrospect that people spoke of that year as the last real Season. At the time, not only debutantes but also their parents were often serenely unconscious of the imminent turmoil. None would have forecast that, less than twenty years later, the ritual of presenting debutantes to royalty as a signal that they were now marriageable by their peers, would end for ever.

  Chapter Three

  The Childhood of the Debs: Preparing to Be a Beautiful Lady*

  ‘There were Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Circus parties, almost naked parties in St John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming baths.’ So wrote Evelyn Waugh in Vile Bodies (1930). The decade of the twenties into which the debs of 1939 were born was determined to forget what had happened in the previous decade: for the facts were too terrible to remember. The years between the two world wars were dominated by a sense of guilt: 745,000 young Englishmen died and 1.6 million were wounded between 1914 and 1918 ; 9 per cent of the male population under forty-five was killed, and the proportion was much higher among the upper classes. The parents of the dead took refuge in a steady, secret grief, comforting one another with memoirs and slim volumes about the sons they had lost and mourning, too, the lost, polished frivolity of the Edwardian era, with its talk of patriotism and Empire.

  The guilt of the generation who survived, or had been too young to fight, manifested itself in a decade of almost hysterical hedonism. If one image seems to freeze-frame the jerky cavortings of the twenties, it is that of a nightclub populated by stick-insect people with tendrils of cigarette smoke spiralling up from long slender holders held with scarlet nails between lurid lips – an image of pitiless unreality. These were the years of parties and, above all, nightclubs ; the years in which nightclubs were invented. The Embassy was one of the most exclusive:

  To this room night after night for years the fashionable society of London came … dukes and earls and princes and their wives and the women they loved, writers, actors, press-lords, politicians, all the self-made men from the war who were trying to break into society, all the riff-raff and the hangers-on .… Early in the evening, when the whole room could be seen with a relatively unimpeded vision, it would have been possible for an acute observer to watch the rules of an older society being gradually broken down.1

  One factor that broke down this old Society was the shortage of upper-class males for its daughters to marry. At least one girl in ten – and in practice more like one in eight – had no corresponding young man because the war had finished him, in one way or another. These girls, who had never envisaged any future for themselves except as wives and mothers, had to lower their standards or stay single. Several things happened in consequence. Chaperones all but disappeared for several years. Young women became far more predatory and overtly sexual than their mothers would have dared to be. They dressed in exaggeratedly revealing fashions; danced well, lived fast and furiously, were ‘good sports’ and good conversationalists and good fun. The tables had turned, and it was now the young women who were pursuing an ever-dwindling pool of young men. They married if they could, often with scant regard for the old standards of eligibility. The first of these marriages produced the debutantes of 1939.

  By the late 1930s, the excesses of the twenties were distinctly démodé; indeed they were frowned upon. Robert Fossett, in a letter written in May 1939, spoke disparagingly of the Bright Young Things:

  They were never very bright, and, thank God, they are rapidly ceasing to be very young. Some of them are not so bad and they are perhaps to be pitied rather than abused. But they are a portent and a menace. They are the first generation that was brought up without parental control, without discipline, without the fear of God.… They rant and rant about Fascism, but then seem to imagine that you hold up a panzer division with a couple of vermouths, a hang-over, and a dirty joke.2

  Predictably, once they had paired up and settled down, these Bright Young Couples turned into models of conventional parenthood, bringing up their own children as nearly as possible in exactly the same way as they themselves had been brought up. For the upper classes this meant nannies and nursery-maids and the whole hierarchy of domestic servants which stratified every household: literally as well as figuratively. Helen Vlasto, a debutante of 1939, remembers her childhood home thus:

  The house seemed divided by its different floors into several worlds. We children belonged at the top of the house, though our large, sunny day nursery was one floor down, alongside our parents’ bedroom. Right down below the ground floor, with its elegant public rooms, lived the maids, surrounded by kitchen, scullery, pantries, store cupboards, and a massive coal cellar. … Sometimes, if we could manage it undetected, we would go down the dark twisting stairs to the warm welcome of the servants’ hall, and the sort of sweets we wouldn’t have been given upstairs. … One thing superbly linked the top of the house with the basement, and vice versa, and that was the speaking tube. ‘Go and whistle down and ask Cook nicely for another plate of bread and butter, there’s a good girl,’ Nurse would say. Having whistled, if you stayed absolutely s
till, holding your breath, you could hear feet coming along the stone floor towards the speaking-tube in the kitchen, and there was the fun of giving Cook the message and replacing the whistle in the stopper. … After tea was the time for washing sticky fingers and faces, and for a quite painful hair-brushing from Nurse, in her hurry to get us going downstairs. This was the lovely time for doing things with our parents, and often for being polite to visitors in the drawing room.3

  Warm, safe, cosy memories, the stuff of a protected childhood, more sheltered than the writer could possibly have known. The same stratification could be found on a vaster scale in the most privileged households of all. Describing Cliveden at this time, Michael Astor (whose cousin Dinah Brand and first wife Barbara McNeill were both debutantes in 1939) is describing not just a household but practically a village:

  The large English country house and estate has now nearly vanished except as a spectacle for sightseers who today are usually invited to view the corpse now that the spirit has left it. It used to be a community made up of many component parts. There was the life of the house with its many different departments – housemaids, kitchen, pantry, etc; the various offices which attended to the house – carpenters, coachmen, electricians, plumbers, etc., and the life of the gardens, the farm, the dairy and the woods. Cottage and mansion enjoyed a corporate existence.…4