Her parents had met in 1895 in New York, where Sir Bache had come looking for a rich and fertile American wife. He was already forty-three and feeling the urgency of producing an heir for Nevill Holt, the magnificent estate in Leicestershire that he’d inherited from his grandfather, the shipping magnate Samuel Cunard. Living quietly in the countryside with his dogs, his horses and his hobbies, Sir Bache had failed to meet a suitable wife. But with the costs of running Nevill Holt rising every year, he was now willing to follow the example of so many other British aristocrats in offering his title as a trade for American money.
Miss Maud Alice Burke was dazzlingly desirable to Sir Bache on every count. Aged twenty-three, she was blonde, blue-eyed and spirited; her little bird-like body, piquant pink and white complexion, ready wit and inquisitive mind made most of the English women he knew appear stolid and dull. The fact that she came with a $2 million dowry, more than capable of plugging the bottomless expense of Nevill Holt, made her irresistible. The normally slow-moving, inarticulate Sir Bache was pitched headlong into the first sexual romance of his life.
As for Maud, she, too, was in a hurry to marry. Growing up in San Francisco, she’d had an unconventional family life. Her mother, widowed when Maud was in her teens, had surrounded herself with a succession of protectors, and it was to one of these, a rich and cultivated businessman called Horace Carpentier, that Mrs Burke had entrusted the education of her only daughter. Carpentier apparently made a habit of adopting young girls as protégées, and although there was no scandal attached to these relationships, they were unusual. Under Carpentier’s guidance, Maud grew both intellectually and socially precocious, and, in relation to other young girls of her generation, sexually aware. By the age of twenty-one she had entered into an affair with the Irish writer George Moore, whom she’d met on a trip to Europe.
It had been a passionate experience for them both: Moore was captivated by Maud’s intelligence and her unexpectedly challenging sexual confidence; Maud was excited by Moore’s experience of the world, his distinguished literary reputation and his evident desire for her. Yet she was no bohemian: she was seeking respectability as well as love, and in her first attempts to secure a husband, she made a fatal miscalculation. Returning to America, she met the grandson of the late King of Poland, and his enthusiastic interest led her to assume they were about to get engaged. She allowed gossip to leak into the press, only to discover that Prince André Poniatowski had his sights on another, more socially elevated girl. She was forced to issue a humiliating correction and was still smarting from this when she was introduced to Sir Bache in New York. Although he was neither brilliant, like Moore, nor regal, like Prince André, she convinced herself that the shy spark of enthusiasm in his heavy features held the promise of a romantic nature. Most importantly, Sir Bache Cunard would make her an English Lady.
Less than a year later, when Maud gave birth to Nancy on 10 March 1896, she knew she had made a mistake. But she remained undaunted. Declaring with brutal clarity that motherhood was ‘a low thing – the lowest’, and that she would never get pregnant again, she moved on to planning a brilliant social career for herself, with Nevill Holt as her theatre of action.5
The house itself was beautiful, a long grey-gold building of crenellated walls, towers and cloisters. Sir Bache revered its four-hundred-year-old history; indeed, Nevill Holt was the love of his life. But Maud thought it cluttered and gloomy, and since it was her money that was being used for its upkeep, she saw no reason why she shouldn’t remodel the house to suit herself. Ruthlessly, she stripped out the duller Victorian furniture; she introduced light and colour into the rooms with oriental rugs and modern silk upholstery, and she repainted walls and woodwork, including some historic oak panelling.
Maud’s renovations caused Sir Bache almost physical pain. He was beginning to feel like a stranger in his own house, even more so when Maud began to entertain on a grand scale. She held large dinners, trawling the best local families, including the Manners, for her guest lists, and organized weekend parties (or Saturday-to-Mondays as she learned to call them) for the smart new friends she met on her trips to London. Within a short time she was regularly playing hostess to writers like Eddie Marsh, Max Beerbohm and Somerset Maugham, as well as leading politicians such as Balfour and Asquith. According to the ambitious San Franciscan socialite Elsa Maxwell, it had become a ‘social benediction’ to be a guest of the vivacious Lady Cunard.6
Sir Bache had little in common with Maud’s new set. He disliked their loud, clever talk and the laxity of their morals. At Nevill Holt, sleeping arrangements for the guests were famously helpful to those engaged in love affairs. Increasingly Sir Bache took himself away to his workshop, where he immersed himself in the metalwork that was his passionate hobby, or disappeared on long shooting and fishing trips in Scotland. ‘I don’t understand what is going on in this house,’ he said, after returning home early and finding Maud’s guests still riotously installed. ‘But I don’t like it.’7
Maud, too, was often absent from the house, shopping, travelling or enjoying a discreet tryst with one of the many men rumoured to be her lovers. And as both parents diverged on their separate lives, little Nancy found herself stranded in the gulf between them. It was normal for children like her to be looked after by nannies and governesses, but not to be so deprived of family life. Diana Manners had grown up among a tumble of siblings, friends and relatives, and had had a doting, if occasionally distracted, mother. Nancy, however, was left on her own for weeks, even months, at a time, with only the staff to take care of her. An early photograph, taken when she was about five or six, shows her standing in the great doorway of Nevill Holt, a tiny figure, poignantly dwarfed by the grandeur of her surroundings.
Even when both her parents were home, Nancy rarely saw them outside the designated hour when she was taken downstairs in a white lace dress to be quizzed on her progress in the schoolroom. Nancy knew enough from the very few children of her acquaintance – her cousins Victor and Edward, and the Manners children at Belvoir – that this was not how other families behaved, and she harboured the guilty terror that her parents would have loved her better if she had been a boy. When Maud offered her chocolates from the lavish box that was always open by her side, Nancy sometimes averted her face, wishing for embraces, not sweets.
Later she described herself as a detached, solitary child, ‘wondering much in silence how life was going to be’.8 She didn’t know how to fill the huge empty spaces around her except, increasingly, with acts of rebellion and fantasies of escape. And she became more angry and more lonely with the arrival of the formidably named, and formidably disciplinarian, governess Miss Scarth.
Miss Scarth appeared suddenly when Nancy was about nine, replacing a high-spirited young Frenchwoman who had been much loved by Nancy, but considered ineffective by Lady Cunard. The testimonials Miss Scarth brought with her, including one from the mother of Vita Sackville-West, commended her as an expert teacher, but to Nancy she seemed a tyrant, rapping out French verbs and historical dates with the aid of a steel ruler, enforcing cold baths and porridge every morning and restricting her favourite outdoor treats, such as paddling in the large pond close to the house.
Scarth became a monster, the first of many in Nancy’s life, and her regime induced in Nancy an implacable hatred of authority. For the rest of her life she would associate food with punishment, haunted by the image of congealing food sitting on her plate and Miss Scarth’s insistence that she could not leave the table until every scrap was eaten. Hating her governess as she did, Nancy retreated inside her imagination, reading incessantly and writing secret stories and poems. In the grounds outside the house she created a world of private places: a hollowed tree, a ditch she filled with her special treasures – a strangely shaped flint or a pretty glass bottle.
During these childhood years her closest confidante was George Moore, or GM as Nancy learned to call him. Although he and Maud were no longer lovers, Moore was a regular visito
r to Nevill Holt, and to Nancy he became a substitute father. Sir Bache loved his daughter, but it was an awkward, baffled love. He had little idea how to communicate with her except on the subject of horses – at his insistence Nancy was taught to ride almost as soon as she could walk, and at the age of six she was ‘blooded’ in her first hunt.
GM, however, talked all the time. In his easy, garrulous way he quizzed Nancy about the books she was reading and the childish poems she was writing. When the weather was fine he took her on long walks through the grounds and local countryside. They made an odd couple – little Nancy in the absurdly smart outfits Maud insisted she wear, GM in his bowler hat and tightly laced boots – but Nancy considered Moore to be her ‘first friend’, and when she was old enough to understand the gossip that circulated (inaccurately) about him being her biological father, she half yearned for it to be true. Moore, too, was very fond of Nancy and worried that she wasn’t happy. Much as he adored Maud, he could see that she was an unnatural mother, and it distressed him to hear Nancy announcing with unnerving calm, ‘I don’t like Her Ladyship.’9
But still Nancy craved her mother’s presence. When Maud was away life was suspended: ‘Things will not be very bright,’ she noted in her diary after seeing her mother depart on yet another jaunt, ‘nothing much [will] happen.’10 When Maud returned the house was suddenly brilliant with weekend parties, games of tennis and croquet and bridge, and ‘beautiful exciting ladies … in shot silk and striped taffeta’.11 Nancy loved to spy on the adults and to be given her own special ‘duties’, checking the supplies of Russian cigarettes, books, sweets, writing paper and flowers in each of the guest’s rooms. If ever Maud had a whim to show off her daughter, Nancy was ecstatically compliant. She allowed herself to be dressed up as a Velázquez Infanta in black velvet and lace; she posed for one of Maud’s sculptor friends as ‘the soul of childhood’ with a little mob cap covering her fair hair and an owl perched on her shoulder. Willingly she showed off her prodigious stock of facts. Some smiled indulgently at this sharp-featured performing monkey, others felt her precocity bordered on the monstrous. When Nancy was older, Maud took her to London for occasional trips to the theatre and opera. Eddie Marsh was present when she saw her first performance of The Marriage of Figaro, and was startled by her peculiarly adult response to the production: ‘Between the acts Nancy said in her high little squeaky toneless voice, “The Count is exactly like George the Second. The Countess I should put a little later – about 1790.” What are children coming to?’12
Watchful and clever, Nancy began to accumulate other adult forms of knowledge. By the time she was a teenager, she had come to understand how barren her parents’ marriage was, and how different from the hot emotional flurries that disturbed the house when Maud had certain guests to stay. When she was fifteen and Maud announced that the two of them would be leaving Nevill Holt to live in London, she knew it was because her mother wanted to be near her lover, the conductor Thomas Beecham.
Musically brilliant, clever and rich – his grandfather had made a fortune manufacturing the ubiquitous Beecham’s liver pill – Thomas was everything that Sir Bache so disappointingly failed to be. Even though Maud wasn’t ready for the scandal of a divorce, she wanted to live as close to him as possible, and set up her new London residence in a large rented house in Cavendish Square.*
For Nancy, the break with Nevill Holt was distressing. She identified deeply with the beauty of the house and the swathes of woodland surrounding it. She loved her father, too, despite his remoteness, and felt keenly that Maud was wrong to exchange him for Thomas Beecham, a man she could not and would not like. On the other hand, she had been speculating for years on the kind of life she might enjoy when she was delivered from the schoolroom and the barbed tensions of her parents’ marriage. And when she was sent to Munich in the autumn of 1912, partly to improve her German and her music, but also to leave her mother free to enjoy Beecham, Nancy felt the first thrill of impending change. The family with whom she stayed were delightful, embracing her almost as warmly as if she had been one of their own children. Even more of a novelty was the degree of independence they allowed her. Nancy had arrived in Munich as an intensely literate, imaginative but emotionally starved sixteen-year-old. When she left she felt she had ‘[become] a woman’ and ‘tasted adult life’.
Less cherished by her were the months she spent at a finishing school in Paris. At seventeen Nancy felt she was too old for its ‘infantile’ lessons and rules, and in furious reaction she set herself a stiff and systematic reading course in Russian literature.13 Yet even though she was continually and frustratingly in the care of chaperones, she felt the romance of the city tug at her imagination. ‘My mysticism was in those streets,’14 she wrote to GM, as she described her delight in the ancient narrow maze of the Latin Quarter and told him of her visit to La Nouvelle Athènes, the café where Moore had once mixed with artists like Manet.
Nancy vowed she would return to Paris on her own, but that summer she was taken by Maud to Venice, a city that became her second love. Diana Manners and her mother were staying in the palazzo Maud had rented, and many of Diana’s friends had come out to Venice, too, including Duff Cooper and his sister Sybil, Raymond and Katherine Asquith, Billy Grenfell and Denis Anson. All members of the Corrupt Coterie, these young men and women were known to Nancy, if only by reputation, and she was fascinated by their clever chatter and capacity for fun. To her joy, they were happy to let her move in the slipstream of their brilliance as they bathed naked in the sea, swaggered around the streets of Venice in outrageous fancy dress and drank cocktails in bars down on the Lido.
This holiday was the first extended period Nancy had spent with people close to her own age, and it did much for her social confidence. By the time she returned to Cavendish Square she felt more equal to engaging with her mother’s London life and more willing to be curious about it. Maud had a clever eye for what was interesting and new. She was sensitive to the changes that were happening around her in art and music,* and she understood, as Violet never could, the significance of ragtime and nightclubs. She also knew how to exploit these changes, for it was by putting herself at the centre of the new modern London that Maud was able to create her own distinctive niche as a society hostess.
An American woman, separated from her husband, was always going to be excluded from the highest echelons of British society, and Maud was fully aware that the Queen had expressed her disapproval of the too-public affair with Beecham. But if most of the duchesses kept away from Maud, she could compensate by colonizing the world of culture. Her network was a bold mix of established figures like Beecham and Diaghilev and more radical iconoclasts, such as the writer and artist Wyndham Lewis, who had become a particular pet of Maud’s. Inspired by Marinetti’s Futurist movement and the spirit of the European avant-garde, Lewis had created a gratifying stir that autumn with the ‘menacing, geometrical and disturbing’ tableau* he had designed for a charity ball, featuring Eddie Marsh with his head encased in a conical tube and a box balanced on top.15 Capitalizing on that stir, Maud had commissioned Lewis to design a line of post-impressionist knick-knacks, which she could hand out as gifts to her guests.
Another of Maud’s protégés was the American poet Ezra Pound, who much impressed Nancy when she first met him, with his foxy beard, sweeping black cloak, broad-brimmed hat and checkered trousers. He dressed exactly as she thought a poet should, and as she listened wide-eared and wide-eyed to the bombastic and colourful conversations of Maud’s clever young men, she caught glimpses of a world of art and ideas into which she might one day gain admittance in her own right.
Warily, she entered into a new phase with her mother. Maud was difficult to love: she remained critical and brittle, channelling more of her warmth and energy into her relationship with Beecham and her social life than into her relationship with her daughter. But Nancy recognized her qualities. Maud allowed her an unusual amount of freedom to walk around London and meet with her new fri
ends, and much of what she cared about she recognized she had inherited from her mother: books, pictures, travel and a dedicated gift for clothes.
Maud had always enjoyed dressing Nancy up. Now, as her daughter approached her eighteenth birthday, it was clear she was going to be an even more enjoyable project. Maud’s delicate fairness and Sir Bache’s lanky height had combined to create a peculiar beauty in Nancy. She was slender, with long legs and long elegant hands; her features were small but finely chiselled; her skin pale to the point of translucence and her hair a thick tawny gold. Iris Tree recalled that even as a very young woman, Nancy had the ‘quality of crystal, neatly crisp, gracefully turbulent, arrogantly disruptive, brave’.
She was certainly formed to wear the new fashions: in early 1914, the all-important year of her season, Maud swept Nancy to Paris to shop for her coming-out wardrobe – new dresses for balls and garden parties, hats for Ascot, and a new leopard-skin coat, which Maud also had copied for herself. They looked superficially alike, mother and daughter – both blonde, both exquisitely dressed – but even in the rare mutual pleasure of this shopping trip Nancy displayed signs of intransigence. While Maud tried to persuade her into the large flowered hats and feminine shades she favoured, Nancy insisted on berets and turbans, and on dresses with sharper, bolder colours and cleaner lines.
They were small disagreements, but in the months that followed they became more frequent and more profound. The most fundamental battleground between them was Nancy’s season. Maud wanted her daughter to shine, as much for the sake of her own reputation as for Nancy’s marital prospects, but Nancy decided that the whole thing was a ridiculous charade. She sulked through her presentation at court, as resentful of the demure pink dress she had to wear as the tedious hours spent queuing to curtsey to the Queen. She grew rapidly and ungraciously bored by her round of debutante parties where, she argued, the same dance bands played to the same set of girls and the same dull young men, whose bland faces were as irksome to her ‘as their vapid conversation among the hydrangeas at supper’.16
Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation Page 7