Mrs Guinness

by Lyndsy Spence

  Diana, too, was unsure of what to make of Bracken with his thick red hair and black teeth. An American guest echoed Diana’s thoughts when he said, ‘Everything about the man is phony. Even his hair, which looks like a wig, is his own.’ Bracken was said to be the illegitimate son of Churchill, and Randolph and his sister delighted in making teasing remarks about this unspoken subject. Diana Churchill confirmed this when she told Diana, ‘There’s a rumour that Mr Bracken is papa’s son.’ With a shrill giggle, Randolph added, ‘Mummy won’t call him Brendan because she’s so afraid he might call her Clemmie.’

  As always, the visit to Chartwell was never long enough and Diana soon returned to Asthall. She found fault with her daily life; Sydney’s running of the house – in contrast to Chartwell with its army of servants – and the company of her eldest sisters could not replace the stimulating conversations she had been privy to. Unlike most aristocratic families, David and Sydney could not afford to employ footmen; they could scarcely afford their small staff as it was. To pay their wages, Sydney kept chickens whose eggs she sold to London restaurants.

  The lack of disposable staff presented a problem as the girls grew older. To remedy this, Sydney and David agreed the girls could go out but only if they kept in a group. It was suffocating for Diana, who craved privacy, to venture out with her sisters trailing behind her. As she walked along the main road in the village, Diana daydreamed of a handsome young man stopping his car and proposing they drive together to the ends of the earth. ‘If some crazy individual had really suggested carrying me off in this way I am sure I should have gone with him,’ she admitted. In hindsight, David was not wrong in ensuring his restless middle daughter was constantly chaperoned.

  In 1926, a few months shy of her sixteenth birthday, Diana began to take notice of society and of her place in it. As a girl, and upper class at that, her options were limited. Unlike working-class girls, Diana would not have been encouraged to find employment, regardless of David’s threats about their lack of inheritance.

  When not at Chartwell, Diana was kept in the dark about most current affairs. At the breakfast table, David went through his normal morning routine of reading the newspaper, and it was through such second-hand tales that she learned of the latest developments. There was no reason why Diana should want to learn of the news, nor would she have been thought of as having a forward-thinking opinion, or, in fact, any opinion at all.

  At Chartwell, Diana had received a speedy education and she witnessed the heated political discussions first hand. Clementine thrived on debate, loud arguments and controversy, and all of her life she was actively interested in politics. It was a sharp contrast to Sydney, who supported the Conservative Party, not particularly for their manifesto – if she knew it – but because it was the accepted thing for upper-class women of her generation.

  Diana began to see the vacuity of her mother’s beliefs and she adopted the habit of slowly chipping away at the opposition – in the form of her parents – until an argument ensued. She was not so foolish as to challenge authority without having solid evidence to argue her case, but her parents seemed incapable of debate; David simply roared, and Sydney became silent, or vague. Diana longed for more and she felt a need to vocalise her views. This was encouraged by Churchill, who invited the ‘brats’ to sit in on his political debates and, unlike other children of that era, they were not shunned to another room or kept in the dark about current affairs. It was a foreign and exciting world for Diana and she absorbed the differing opinions on the General Strike; a seminal event in twentieth-century English history that had been intensifying for months.

  Flexing her newfound knowledge, Diana tried to engage her family in conversation about the strike, but was immediately silenced by her strike-opposing parents. Most of the aristocracy viewed the strike as nothing more than an inconvenience and some went so far to accuse the strikers, who were protesting their working conditions and meagre pay, of being criminals. Many echoed this sentiment, seeing it as nothing more than a hiccup in public services. Nothing much happened beyond the fact that the buses and tubes were driven instead by good-looking undergraduates.5

  Nancy and Pamela worked shifts at a local canteen serving tea and sandwiches to strike-breaking lorry drivers, and Nancy sought to turn a national emergency into a joke when she dressed up as a lecherous tramp to frighten Pamela. Disheartened by her family’s lack of interest in the strike, Diana eagerly accepted an invitation to return to Chartwell, the centre and source of her intellect.

  From Chartwell, Diana followed the progress of the strike with great excitement. Tensions mounted and Diana observed the many political debates going back and forth between Churchill and members of the Cabinet. Churchill and the Conservative government were unanimous in their agreement to oppose the strike. The prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, argued that the Trade Union Congress was using it as a political weapon and the most favourable way to retain social reform was through a parliamentary election. After four days of striking, the situation reached a pivotal point. However, there were no newspapers due to the print unions striking, and the public remained completely uninformed. To ease public worry, the government printed its own version of a newspaper, the British Gazette, edited by Churchill himself.

  It was a common view at the time, at least for those who opposed the Conservative government, that Churchill and other ‘militant’ cabinet members were hungry for a strike, knowing they had back-up workers to act in severe circumstances. Diana, too, felt it slightly unnerving that the government could swoop in and take over public services, so vital to everyday life, including the printing of a newspaper. She also suspected that this far-reaching control allowed those in power to keep a firm hand over everything that was fed to the mass public.

  From the late 1930s and onward, Diana held the belief that Churchill had been a warmonger.6 She was not yet aware of the rogue political parties stirring behind the scenes and she was oblivious of the appeal of the Communist Party to the working classes, who felt short-changed by the lack of sympathy from the (predominantly upper-class) politicians towards their working conditions.

  With an objective stance, Diana pondered her views on the General Strike; she had listened intently to Churchill’s argument against it and she learned, from limited resources – newspapers and second-hand facts – of the plight of the miners. After much deliberation, she decided that her sympathies lay with the miners. From the age of 16, Diana developed an anti-Tory stance and declared herself a Lloyd George Liberal.

  She returned to Asthall, eager to share her new worldly views. But righting the wrongs of society would have to wait. Diana was about to embark on another milestone in her young life. She was off to Paris for a year.

  NOTES

  5 Extracted from Daphne Du Maurier’s diary, as published in Daphne Du Maurier and her Sisters: The Hidden Lives of Piffy, Bird and Bing, Jane Dunn.

  6 ‘I think in his own character he is a person who enjoys war, and always saw himself as a great leader.’ Notes of a meeting held at the Berystede Hotel, Ascot, on Wednesday, 2 October 1940.

  4

  AN AGE WITHOUT A NAME

  Paris, caught between the world wars, was bustling with excitement. The epitome of the roaring twenties, the jazz age brought rich American tourists and bohemian writers alike to sample the cosmopolitan delights the city had to offer. At the age of 16, Diana was too young to indulge in the social outlets and too high born to experience the heady lifestyle had she been of age. The reconstruction of the Boulevard Haussmann, damaged by bombs during the First World War, was underway and Paris was once again a vibrant, metropolitan city not yet plunged into austerity by the Great Depression.

  David and Sydney brought their children to Paris under less than glamorous circumstances, but, nevertheless, it was viewed as an adventure. David managed to sell Asthall Manor and with the money he received from the sale he set about building his dream home, Swinbrook House. The final phase of building was not yet completed
and the family, along with their pet gerbils, decided to economise by taking cheap lodgings in the Villa St Honoré d’Eylau, a small family run hotel. The reality of living in Paris thrilled Diana, and she and her siblings clung to glamour through second-hand tales and the workings of their own overactive imaginations.

  The cautionary tale of the young fashion designer, Suzanne Geoffre, did not escape Diana’s attention. She was enthralled by the bizarre tabloid stories about Mlle Geoffre, who had approached a surgeon to make her calves thinner. The well-known plastic surgeon, Dr Leopold Levy, agreed to the operation, which went horribly wrong and resulted in the amputation of Mlle Geoffre’s leg. The trial between Mlle Geoffre and the plastic surgeon was played out in the press and the judge ruled in favour of the patient, stating that the surgeon should not have performed a dangerous operation in the name of beauty. The topic of beauty would govern Diana’s Parisian experience.

  Whilst in Paris, Sydney rekindled her friendship with the celebrated artist Paul César Helleu, who, in the years before her marriage, had immortalised her in a painting. Now this admiration transferred to Sydney’s children. Smitten by her offspring, his painter’s eye appreciated the fine colouring of their blonde hair and blue eyes, with the exception of Nancy, who possessed the dramatic colouring of black hair and green eyes. But it was Diana who charmed Helleu. She, in particular, he likened to a Greek goddess.

  If Chartwell had been an education for Diana, then Paris was an awakening. She also became conscious of her effect on French men and their blatant display of pleasure at her beauty. ‘Wherever I go I am looked on as the eighth wonder of the world, at last,’7 she boasted.

  In comparison to Diana’s youthfulness, Helleu, advancing in his sixth decade, was considered an old man, but his liberal outlook did not let something as trivial as their vast age difference prevent him from admiring her looks. ‘Tu es la femme la plus voluptuesse,’* he often praised her. From a cynical point of view it was hardly an appropriate adornment for Diana who, at 16, stood at the statuesque height of 5ft 10in, with a slim physique to match.

  Caught in the limbo between childhood and adulthood, Diana overlooked Helleu’s compliments, and her attention was absorbed by his drawing room. She found his collection of Louis XVI furniture, especially the chairs upholstered in white and grey silk, to be aesthetically pleasing. She was curious as to why Helleu hung empty eighteenth-century gilt wooden frames on his walls. His answer was far more peculiar than his action. He advised Diana that if one was not rich enough to possess the pictures one wished for, it was best to have empty frames and use one’s imagination. She thought this the height of sophistication. Diana was further elated when Helleu drew her into his confidence, telling her that he admired three things above all else: women, racehorses and sailing boats.

  Having come to terms with her middle daughter’s advanced intelligence, or perhaps as a distraction to save her from becoming bored, Sydney took the initiative and enrolled Diana in art lessons at the Cours Fénelon. During the customary interview with the headmistress, Sydney was asked of Diana’s vaccination history. Diana had never been vaccinated, Sydney confessed – it was one of her deepest aversions along with ‘murdered food’ (white bread, pasteurised milk and pork). ‘Then I regret she cannot come to the Cours Fénelon until you have it done,’ the headmistress said.

  ‘I am sorry,’ replied Sydney, unbending in her beliefs. ‘She cannot be vaccinated.’

  After a long pause, as Diana’s fate hung in the balance, the headmistress announced: ‘Oh, tant pis.’* Despite the protests and the prior stalemate between Sydney and the headmistress, Diana was eventually accepted.

  Ironically, given her restlessness at home, Diana had always been violently opposed to boarding school (such fears were founded on her notion that it would have a ‘zoo-like smell’). It was surprising to everyone, not least Diana herself, when she entered the Cours Fénelon art programme and found that she loved it. The ease in which she had settled into her lessons sprang from a bemused curiosity for her fellow pupils. The pupils, mostly from aristocratic French families, came from richer backgrounds than Diana, and she was intrigued by their habit of bringing a governess to sit next to them during lessons, or a footman, who was deposed to the cloakroom to wait amongst the satchels and coats until home time.

  Sitting in the classroom of over thirty pupils, Diana would gaze out the window at the Rue de la Pompe, and her habit of daydreaming contributed to her missing vital parts of the lessons. This point was proven when Diana and her classmates, escorted by an elderly governess, Mlle Foucauld, attended Cours Proper, where they were lectured to and questioned by visiting professors from the Sorbonne. When questions were directed at Diana, she desperately scanned the room for Mlle Foucauld, and tilting her ear, she barely heard the elderly lady whispering the correct answer. Although seldom given, the reply, ‘Très bien, Mademoiselle Meetfor’, was the one she longed to hear.

  Diana and her fellow pupils lived for their twenty minute break, given halfway through the school day. As the bell rang, the excitable girls charged down the staircase to the courtyard, interrupted by Mlle Foucauld’s exhausted cries, ‘Ne dégringolez pas les escaliers!’** It was Mlle Foucauld’s mission to turn the boisterous girls into young ladies. After the lessons, Diana walked 100 yards around the corner, to take afternoon tea with Nanny Blor and her siblings at the hotel. This ordinary advancement in being permitted to walk home alone meant the world to Diana, as it was the first time she had been allowed to walk without a chaperone, along a city street.

  This freedom was confined to Paris, as Diana learned when the family returned to England to spend the Christmas holidays in London. When David sold Asthall Manor, he garnered enough profit to afford a lease on an elegant, seven-storey townhouse at 26 Rutland Gate. Although both David and Sydney had little tolerance for city life, the girls were delighted by the house’s close proximity to Knightsbridge. The eldest girls were allowed to walk to Harrods without a chaperone, but once again, as in the countryside, they were only allowed out in a group. Under normal circumstances the thought would have provoked an argument from Diana about ‘life’s great unfairness’, but instead she bided her time and looked forward to returning to Paris for the new school term.

  In the new year of 1927, Diana prepared to travel to Paris, this time without her parents and siblings. Travelling alone in those days was strictly forbidden for a young, unmarried girl of her social class. The idea of sending a member of staff, or worse still paying for a chaperone to accompany Diana, troubled Sydney. Much to her relief, the journey coincided with Winston Churchill’s visit to meet Mussolini and he offered to drop Diana off in Paris on his way to Rome.

  Randolph accompanied his father and he was thrilled to see Diana again after her long absence from Chartwell. A year had made all the difference and Diana, who was always slightly taller than Randolph, towered over the diminutive boy. Randolph’s hope of cutting a dashing figure was further thwarted when he fell victim to acute seasickness, brought on by the rough Channel crossing. ‘Poor little boy!’ Churchill said when Diana told him of Randolph’s plight. She was struck by Churchill’s sympathy for his son; nobody pitied her if she was sick on the Channel.

  Upon reaching the Gare du Nord, Diana spied two elderly sisters with whom Sydney had made boarding arrangements. She summarised her immediate observations of the elderly sisters, ‘One of them is horrid and wears a wig, the other is downtrodden and nice.’ Pressed for time before catching his connecting train to Rome, Churchill swiftly entrusted Diana into their care and the three left for her new dwellings at 135 Avenue Victor-Hugo.

  The elderly sisters’ apartment was not luxurious in any sense of the word, and Diana was alarmed to discover the French taste, which she held in such high esteem, seemed to have been lost on her landladies. If the outside was grim, Diana thought the inside was strictly primitive. She was allocated a bedroom in the basement, its window level with the pavement, with tightly clamped shutters that were n
ever opened during the daytime lest a pedestrian should try to break in. The room was constantly dark, and as Diana lay in bed she could hear the hustle and bustle of footsteps on the pavement and the revolting chorus of men clearing their throats and spitting.

  The Dickensian surroundings extended to basic hygiene. Diana was permitted to bathe twice a week in a miniscule tin tub, brought into her bedroom for the occasion, whereupon a maid filled it with a scalding kettle, counteracted by a jug of cold water. The balance was never quite right and the bath to Diana’s dismay, was freezing. She wrote a long letter to Sydney, moaning of her discomforts and was sent enough money for an occasional bath at the Villa St Honoré d’Eylau. The elderly ladies thought this very extravagant and an insult to their hospitality. Owing to Diana’s displeasure with her living arrangements, a frosty relationship ensued.

  Despite the discomfort, Diana found the location useful with its close proximity to the Cours Fénelon, her violin lessons near the Lycée Janson and Helleu’s apartment. Diana walked to all three places without a chaperone and the freedom was intoxicating. Emboldened by this freedom, she took the first step towards adulthood and cut her waist length hair into a shingled bob – a popular trend in the late twenties. David affirmed to the Edwardian view of how women should look, preferring women with long hair and their faces free of make-up. Given her father’s stance, Diana would have hesitated to cut off her hair had she remained at home. When Nancy first cut her hair, David recoiled in horror, proclaiming that no self-respecting man would want to marry her. Sydney sided with David, and she commented, ‘No one would look at you twice now.’ Having learned of Diana’s rebellion, David teased that her new look was ‘a symbol of decadent immorality’.