People vied to secure her for their parties, because she was a guaranteed source of fun, and because she had also become beautiful, tall and very slender now, with a classical oval face and a dreamily opaque gaze (actually a consequence of mild shortsightedness) that was offset by her extreme social animation. When the writer Enid Bagnold first saw her descending a flight of stairs and sweeping the room with her ‘blind blue stare’ she recalled being ‘shocked – in the sense of electricity’.21 To young admirers who sent love letters and queued up to dance, Diana was ‘a goddess’, ‘an orchid among cowslips’. Older men were no less susceptible. One of her suitors was the legendarily wealthy American financier George Gordon Moore, who insisted that on a word from Diana he would divorce his wife. He seemed to move ‘in a shower of gold’, courting her with such astonishing presents as an ermine coat, a gigantic sapphire (reputed to have belonged to Catherine the Great), even a pet monkey called Armide with a diamond waist belt and chain.22
Diana thrived on both the presents and her notoriety. In response to an ironic marriage proposal from Duff Cooper, she described herself proudly as ‘very decadent, and theatrical & inclined to look fast – attributes no man likes in his wife’.23 She was also beginning to attract malicious comment. Those who remained insulated against her electricity criticized Diana as a flirt and ‘a scalp hunter’, and she received anonymous letters accusing her of corrupting the young men around her.
In truth, Diana had remained far more chaste in her behaviour than some of her peers. The publication in 1909 of H.G. Wells’s novel Anne Veronica had highlighted a trend among advanced young women to regard their virginity as a vexing encumbrance to adulthood. When the twenty-two-year-old Enid Bagnold allowed herself to be seduced by the writer Frank Harris, in 1909, she was delirious with relief. The painter Nina Hamnett wanted a plaque to be mounted on the house where she lost her own virginity. But if Diana was more cautious, she was also a far more public personality than these women. And in early 1914 the backlash against her supposed bad behaviour gathered momentum when the Coterie suffered its first brush with death. Gustav Hamel, a Swedish amateur flyer and racing driver who was close to the group, crashed his private plane during a flight from France to London. Shortly afterwards Denis Anson was drowned in the Thames during a late-night swimming party. ‘Mad youth’ was blamed by the press for both fatalities, and it was Diana who was identified as the prime instigator.
The report of Anson’s funeral appeared under the headline DIANA’S LOVE, and rumours spread through London that both Denis and Gustav had died while showing off for her benefit. Diana, already grief-stricken, suffered her first frightening experience of social rejection. Her name was dropped from the list for that summer’s Guards Ball,24 and people who had known her since childhood joined in the general condemnation. Lady Desborough, the mother of her friends Julian and Billy Grenfell, refused for a time to have her in her house, and Margot Asquith was loud in condemning her as a heartless flirt.
All this was very alarming for the Duchess. Over two years had passed since Diana’s season, and she was increasingly anxious about her youngest daughter’s prospects. The acceptable gap dividing youth from awkward spinsterhood was a narrow one, and it was intolerable to Violet that Diana might be seen to be unmarriageable. She still held unswervingly to the belief that wedlock was a woman’s sole source of security. If Diana could marry well and produce the necessary son and heir, she would then be free to embark on whatever private projects and love affairs she chose. Sir Henry had not been Violet’s own great love, nor she his: in accordance with centuries of upper-class pragmatism the two had discreetly found passion outside their marriage, Sir Henry with his mistresses and his fly fishing; Violet with her lover Harry Cust.
This cultured, handsome man, ‘the Rupert Brooke of our day’ according to Lady Horner, had for several years been the adored centre of Violet’s universe.25 She saw him in the late afternoon, when she could claim to be paying social calls. And constricted though the affair was, it had suited Violet well, allowing her to compartmentalize her life between duty and love. Such a balance, she assumed, would work equally for Diana as it would for her two other daughters. Both Letty and Marjorie had already found satisfactory husbands: Ego Charteris, son of the Earl of Wemyss, and Charlie Paget, now Marquess of Anglesey. Diana was the most beautiful of the three – Prince Paul of Yugoslavia had paid court to her, as had Lord Rocksavage – and Violet believed she could secure the most brilliant match of all. The Prince of Wales might be nearly three years younger than Diana, but a long engagement was always possible. Within the royal family itself there was enthusiasm for the match, for Diana’s popularity was regarded as a potentially useful asset to the throne. As for Violet, she couldn’t think of anyone who might make a more beautiful future Queen.
Yet Diana seemed uninterested in anyone but her own close circle, none of whom Violet counted as brilliant matches, and anxiety made the Duchess more vigilant and critical than she intended. The rule of the chaperone was a fact of life for all respectable unmarried women – even those sufficiently independent to attend university were not permitted into public lectures on their own – but Diana believed her own levels of confinement were absurd. The only hotel she was permitted to enter was the Ritz, which was just around the corner from the family’s London home. Every night the Duchess kept her bedroom door open to monitor the hour at which Diana returned, and the following day she expected an account of whom her daughter had danced with, who had accompanied her and who had driven her home.
Diana loved her mother, but her patience was running out, and by now she had acquired a piece of knowledge that made the Duchess’s vigilance look absurdly hypocritical. She had been eighteen when Edward Horner blundered into telling her the truth about her mother’s affair with Harry Cust and, even more startlingly, let slip that Harry was widely assumed to be Diana’s biological father. The physical evidence was compelling, Diana’s fair colouring and the shape of her face suggested a clear genetic resemblance, and once Diana was confronted with it she claimed to accept the revelation with barely a struggle. She had always liked Harry, and insisted that she found it amusing to think of herself a ‘Living Monument of Incontinence’.26
Yet it was still a shock, and it left her feeling more distanced, more questioning and more restless for escape. She was by then just twenty-two. A day could still be made ‘iridescent’, ‘intoxicating’ by a new dress or a ragtime tune, she could still relish the satisfaction of love letters, compliments and press cuttings. Yet beneath it all she felt the ‘grim monotony’27 of a life where she remained as financially dependent and physically constrained as a child. It left her with a vague and discomfiting ennui that she couldn’t even name, let alone address.
The notion that there might be some larger political context to her dissatisfaction was entirely foreign to Diana. As a child, she’d declared herself fervently grateful to have been born a girl because ‘somebody will always look after me’.28 As an adult she felt no identification with the suffragettes who had faced prison, even death, in their battle for the vote. At best she pitied them, at worse she mocked. During a country house party, Diana and her cousin Angie Manners staged the ‘hilarious’ stunt of dressing up in the purple, white and green colours of the WSPU, climbing on top of a garden gazebo and pelting male onlookers with cardboard biscuit boxes. Yet for all her political apathy, Diana would probably have concurred with the feminist Agatha Evans that there was a grim predictability in the lives of women who were ‘required to be gorgeous decorative and dumb’ while seeking husbands, and thereafter condemned to be ‘married matronly and motherly’.29
There were exceptions: Diana’s own mother was hardly matronly: some of the richer, more ambitious hostesses she encountered, such as the Marchesa Casati, Lady Cunard, or Lady Ripon, wielded some considerable social power. Perhaps if Diana had found a husband to suit both herself and her mother she might have become another Lady Ripon, a patron to the Russian ballet, or
hostess to some of the key cultural circles in London. But in August 1914, Britain went to war and Diana, along with the rest of the population, found her life and expectations thrown drastically off course.
* * *
She had been horrified and taken off guard by the declaration of war. Cocooned among her own small concerns she’d paid little attention to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in June, nor understood its effect on Europe’s political fault lines. She was far less well informed than the twenty-year-old undergraduate, Vera Brittain, who pondered fearfully in her diary what a modern war would be like: ‘Attack is possible by earth, water & air & the destruction attainable by the modern war machines used by the armies is unthinkable and past imagination’.30 And she knew much less than the crowd of women who flocked to London’s Kingsway Hall to denounce the war as the product of male rapacity and aggression.
But while Diana hoped that war might still be averted (naively wondering if the Coterie’s most influential friends might persuade Asquith to organize an international peace treaty), she couldn’t help but thrill to the enormity of this new drama and its liberating possibilities. Her first instinct had been to volunteer as a nurse in one of the Red Cross field hospitals close to the battle lines. Sentimentally, she cherished the idea of being near her male friends, who were already signing up for officer training. Competitively, she was determined not to be outdone by others she knew who were planning to nurse in France – among them Rosemary Leveson-Gower, who was engaged to her brother John, and her cousin Angie. And romantically, she believed she would have the adventure of her life.
Violet, however, was adamant in her refusal. She had never fully recovered from the death of Haddon, her first and most beloved child, and she could not countenance any threat to Diana. She was convinced her daughter would end up raped and left for dead by drunken soldiers; at the very least she would be working in appalling conditions. Rumours were already in circulation of the horrors facing young British VADs – one volunteer wrote home of having almost no hot water or light at the Salles Military Hospital in Saumur, and of nursing alongside filthy, disreputable orderlies, most of them soldiers who were ‘too mad or too bad to fight’.31 But Diana would not be budged from her determination to volunteer somewhere, so in October, angry, stubborn and wrung out from arguing, she embarked on her new life at Guy’s.
Most recruits found it rigorous. To Diana, coming from the spacious luxury of Belvoir and Arlington Street, it took all her courage to survive the first few days. From six in the morning, when the light bulb above her bed was automatically switched on, to ten fifteen at night, she was obedient to the orders of the professional nurses who patrolled the clattering, sterile wards. No allowances were made for her lack of experience as she disinfected surgical trays and handled bedpans. She was expected to work uncomplainingly through chilblains, swollen ankles, period pains and a level of fatigue she had never experienced before.
She was also thrust straight into the stink and gore of medical emergencies. Diana had tried to prepare herself by going into the kitchen at Arlington Street to watch a hare being eviscerated for the evening meal, but nothing could minimize the trauma of her first patients: a woman who’d had a cancerous tumour sliced out of her chin, another left with a post-operative wound in her side ‘from which a stream of green pus oozed slowly’.32
For Diana, the challenge of moderating her revulsion was complicated by social factors. She’d had little contact with anyone outside her own class, aside from family servants, and she found it impossible to sympathize with the more self-pitying of her male patients. She had been raised to believe in the virtue of the stiff and stoic upper lip, and to her these clutching, complaining men appeared like ‘whining Calibans’.33 Yet despite the blinkers of her social prejudice, Diana’s curiosity was captured by Guy’s, with its intriguing mix of official regulation and human messiness. She submitted herself willingly to every petty rule – in contrast to Enid Bagnold who in 1917 would write a swingeingly critical memoir of her time as a VAD and would leave hospital service for the more exhilarating challenge of ambulance driving in France.34 Diana also grew very friendly with some of her fellow nurses and was grateful to be included in their late-night ‘dormy feasts’. The novelty of sharing cigarettes and sweets, of enjoying ‘suppressed songs and laughter’ made her poignantly aware of her restricted upbringing – of all ‘the larks I had missed by never being a schoolgirl’.35
What her mother would have spurned as demeaning or squalid, Diana schooled herself to accept. She discovered surprising reserves of practicality and common sense, and she prided herself on her stoicism, on never taking a day off work except when she was seriously ill, on never fainting during an operation, and on no longer having ‘to turn away from repulsive things’.36 When Arnold Bennett caricatured her in his 1918 novel The Pretty Lady as the neurotic self-promoting do-gooder, Lady Queenie Paulle, she felt the insult keenly, believing that she had genuinely been of service as a nurse, and that she’d genuinely been changed by the experience.
The most prized aspect of her new life, however, was the autonomy it brought. Her off-duty periods were sparse – limited to three evenings a week and the occasional weekend – yet she was able to spend all of them with her friends, who took her out for taxi rides in the park or for dinner in the one restaurant in Southwark they considered decent. On those precious evenings when she ‘flew’ out of the hospital at five minutes past eight, ‘painted and powdered and dressed (as I hoped) to kill’,37 the knowledge that the Duchess had no idea what she was doing or with whom gave these modest but unchaperoned outings a beguiling enchantment.
Not only did Diana feel purposeful and in control, but for the first time she knew herself to be part of some larger, more collective experience. Women’s lives were changing, both for those like her, who had volunteered to become VADS, and for the new female workforce that was starting to tackle jobs and professions left vacant by Britain’s enlisting soldiers. It was a slow trajectory, but gradually women were moving beyond the menial or domestic labour that had been their traditional employment*. By the end of the war nearly two million would have proved themselves as bus drivers, glaziers, bank clerks and cashiers, motorcycle couriers, railway porters, tree cutters, farmers, stage managers, librarians, engineers, policewomen and teachers.†
In ways that couldn’t have been foreseen by the suffragettes, the war represented an astonishing moment for women to challenge their status as the weaker, decorative sex. Ethel M. Billborough, an affluent young Englishwoman, would write in July 1915, ‘Now everyone is living and no mistake about it; there is no more playing at things.’38 Violet, however, remained miserably resistant to this change. She hated the idea of her daughter working in so starkly uncongenial a place as Guy’s, and since Diana showed no signs of returning home, she embarked on a plan to manoeuvre her back, by overseeing the conversion of their London house into an officers’ hospital.‡ Other private homes were being given over to similar use, and 16 Arlington Street was certainly one of the most commodious in London. Even with the family still in residence, its ballroom and prettily gilded drawing room would be large enough to convert to a pair of twelve- and ten-bedded wards, while the Duchess’s own bedroom could serve as an operating theatre while she removed to a smaller room. Diana had only been at Guy’s for six months before her mother offered her a perfectly kitted out and very comfortable alternative.
She felt a profound ambivalence towards this latest instance of her mother’s manipulation. Even though the hospital was being run by professionals, it still had an irksome, Marie Antoinettish quality. As she later wrote, ‘Hospital life kids one into thinking one is indispensable and home life after it is wanton and trivial’39. Friends would drop by, bringing chestnut cream cakes and even a bottle of sherry for elevenses – a preposterous contrast to the diet of tinned eggs and stale fish to which she had recently grown accustomed. Aside from traumatic spikes of activity, when a rush of emergency cases was admi
tted, she was only on duty for an average of five or six hours a day.
On the other hand, moving back home had not resulted in Diana giving up her hard-fought independence: there was too much going on in Arlington Street for Violet to resume her old vigilance. In fact, she was soon to be absent for long periods of time, extending her new-found patriotism to the conversion of Belvoir Castle into an officers’ convalescent home. Violet had not yielded her adamantine certainties about propriety and marriage, but even she could see that talk of chaperones was futile in a world where well-brought-up young women were doing the jobs of the working classes, and where young men were being slaughtered at the Front.
* * *
During the six months that Diana spent at Guy’s, the war had remained a backdrop to her life – almost an abstraction. Her energy was consumed by the demands of nursing and nearly all of the enlisting men she knew were still safely confined to officer training camp. Yet after her return to Arlington Street, as hopes of an early victory faded, the war became horribly real. One by one the lovely, clever boys with whom she had danced, flirted and read poetry were being dispatched to the Front; and one by one they were perishing there. Julian Grenfell, who had thrilled to the idea of fighting for ‘the Old Flag … the Mother Country and … the Imperial Idea’ had died slowly and agonizingly in a dirty field hospital, his brain shattered by a splinter of shell.40 Diana’s cousin John, and her friends Charles Lister and George Vernon, had also been killed; the last, breaking Diana’s heart when she received the farewell note he’d dictated, ending with the painful scrawl he’d been determined to write himself: his initial G and the barely legible ‘love’.
Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation Page 4