by D. J. Taylor
Nearly forty when the Second World War broke out, the battered survivor of many an agonising breakdown and painful rehabilitation, Anna – Helen Emily Woods, as she was baptised – exhibits all the classic features of Lost Girl ancestry. Her father was a Tyneside landowner; her physician grandfather had attended Queen Victoria; but to cancel out the domestic grandeur – the family lived at Holeyn Hall near Newcastle – came bumper helpings of neglect and unhappiness. Starved of parental affection and left to the care of nurses and relatives, she was despatched to an American boarding school at the tender age of six. In her early teens her father, for whom she had warm feelings, committed suicide by plunging from the steps of a ship bound for South America. ‘By dying he seemed deliberately to have destroyed this hope and condemned me to lifelong loneliness’, runs a line in one of her unpublished short stories.
Having apparently ignored her in infancy, her overbearing mother now began to interfere in her daughter’s life. Among other interventions, shortly after the end of the Great War she persuaded Helen/Anna to turn down the offer of a place at Oxford and – she was now eighteen – marry a man who may very well have been one of her own former lovers. Shortly afterwards the teenage Mrs Donald Ferguson was shanghaied out east to Burma to a married existence whose only memorial is a scene in her third novel, the ominously titled Let Me Alone (1930), in which the heroine resists her husband’s advances on their honeymoon out of sheer physical loathing. There was a son named Bryan, a return to England and marital estrangement.
Already the patterns of Anna’s life seem set in stone: a fear of oppression and constraint; a hankering after bohemia; an urge for independence and space to write and paint – her pictures were proficient enough to be exhibited at the Wertheim Gallery in London in the 1930s; and a deep-rooted inner disquiet. In her mid-twenties, in the paralysing depths of a love affair with an artist named Stuart Edmonds, she tried to kill herself. A second attempt saw her packed off to a private clinic in Zurich. Meanwhile, there were books – half-a-dozen novels, published in an eight-year stretch under the name of ‘Helen Ferguson’ – several of them containing barbed little hints of the mirror through which she saw herself and the things she needed from life. Beryl in her first novel, A Charmed Circle (1929), runs away from her father’s vicarage to live in a room in Knightsbridge and work for an upmarket female milliner. Is this what Anna wanted? Who can tell.
Plenty of novelists from the inter-war era wrote about vicars’ daughters pining to escape the thraldom of country rectories: one thinks of F. M. Mayor’s The Rector’s Daughter (1924) and Orwell’s A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935). On the other hand, not many of them were full-blown heroin addicts, as Anna had become by the mid-1930s. If her literary career can ever be said to have taken off, then it did so in 1940 with the publication of Asylum Piece – her first book as ‘Anna Kavan’ (the name of the disgusted newlywed in Let Me Alone), frankly autobiographical, Kafka-esque and, in its designating of the characters by their initials, thoroughly avant-garde. As ever, the course of her life seemed entirely detached from whatever else might be going on around her. While the world slid into war she went off travelling – to Norway, America, the Antipodes. At one point, staying at a hotel in San Francisco with a man who announced his intention of returning to New Zealand, she found herself on the fourteenth floor ‘trying to decide whether to walk out of the window or swallow a large number of sleeping pills which I kept by me for this sort of emergency’. The sleeping pills won out, and she travelled home via Singapore and Fiji. But worse was to come. Back in England she discovered that Bryan was missing in action: there was another suicide attempt, after which she was installed at St Stephen’s Hospital under the care of the psychiatrist Dr Karl Bluth, who became her mentor and also, as her biographers dutifully point out, her supplier.
The introduction to Connolly seems to have come on the back of Asylum Piece’s success. In early 1943 the magazine accepted her short story ‘I Am Lazarus’ and shortly afterwards she was installed as a secretary-cum-editorial assistant in place of Lys, then temporarily absent at her government ministry. Like most of the Horizon girls, she took a shine to Watson, who enjoyed her company, sympathised with her afflictions, introduced her to his gay friends and was sufficiently impressed by Dr Bluth to join the patient roll himself. It was Watson who, one day in the spring of 1943, arrived at Lansdowne Terrace to find her seated at her desk with one arm dangling limply at her side after overdoing her daily fix and sent her home so that Dr Bluth could be summoned to effect one of his ‘cures’. Not to be outdone, Connolly encouraged her to join his team of reviewers, and got her to write on Virginia Woolf, Denton Welch, Henry Green and Aldous Huxley.
The job lasted until Lys’s return to full-time duties; the reviewing continued until the relocation to Bedford Square. And then, for some reason – in fact, a very obvious reason – Anna’s Horizon days came to an end. By the summer of 1944 her ill health had reached the point where Watson felt compelled to contact her mother – Mrs Tevis, as she had since become, was then in South Africa – to warn her that there was a strong chance her daughter might die. A letter despatched to Connolly from Torquay, where she had been sent to convalesce, maintains that its author is ‘much better physically and have decided to come back to town tomorrow’, complains about the boarding house in which she has been quartered (‘It’s filled with old ladies of 95 who relate details of their illnesses all the time’) and asks Connolly not to suspect her ‘of coming back to buy coke. I just feel a craving for a short spell of comfort.’
The letter ends on an optimistic note: ‘I ought to be well enough to come back to work in about a week: if you want me anymore.’ But shortly after this the review-page assignments dwindle away and the trail goes cold, or rather swings off into the bleak institutional hinterland that invariably lay beyond the edge of her engagements with literature and art. There were still books to delight the critics – her short-story collection I Am Lazarus (1945) was judged a success – but a year after the war’s end she was undergoing another detox at Sanitorium Bellevue in Kreuzlingen: the appearances on a masthead otherwise occupied by Waugh, Orwell and Huxley ground inexorably to a halt.
7.
Cairo Nights: Barbara 1943–4
It is worth remembering that most English-speaking people in Cairo at this time were under thirty, and involved in the immensely significant task of winning the war. It gave their world a glamorous, magazine feature quality; and within it, women were a privileged minority.
Artemis Cooper, Cairo in the War 1939–1945 (1989)
Here in the summer of 1943, the Mediterranean was still closed to most non-military shipping. The preferred route to Egypt took in a voyage to the west coast of Africa, followed by a transcontinental aeroplane flight. As the ship headed north to its rendezvous with the rest of the convoy, Barbara’s sense of geography began to desert her. ‘We are now passing a long stretch of land rumoured to be either Scotland or the Isle of Man’, she informed her diary. All the evidence suggests that she was in low spirits. When Melinda, her alter-ego of A Young Girl’s Touch, takes ship at Liverpool she is immediately ‘afflicted with a deep sense of melancholy, and so intense was her feeling of isolation and loneliness that she could have cried out with despair’. Visiting the dining room she notes ‘with misgiving the oblong table set for six or eight’, reflects that ‘this would be her life now on for several weeks’ and slinks miserably off to bed in her cabin without bothering to eat. Then, on the third day, when the ship reached the north of Scotland, the Hebridean scenery began to have a soothing effect. Diary and novel contain a near-identical account of the curious feeling of exhilaration Barbara/Melinda experiences as the convoy assembles in the grey North Sea.
It was a bright, palpitating morning with a clear, blue sky and hot, caressing sun; going through the minefields each ship followed close behind the other, the last making a great spurt forward before the file broke up and fell into formation. After facing north the convoy glided int
o position and with perfect timing veered due west. There was a short gun practice from each one in turn and the passengers were ordered to take cover. Trace flashes gleamed in the sunlight as the machine-guns fired and curling puffs of smoke dissolved into the cloudless sky.
When the firing stops and calm is restored, Melinda discovers that she ‘could not have felt more content and rested. She had not a single care or unpleasant association to mar her state of mind’.
Meanwhile, there were letters following Barbara south. Anguished importuning letters that urged her to remember the lovers she had left behind and hasten to reassure them of her regard. To judge from the evidence of surviving correspondence, Topolski seems to have been allowed to see her off from London but, not to be outdone, Quennell wrote from Tickerage assuring ‘My darling Skeltie’ of the enormity of the gap she had left behind. Three more letters followed in quick succession, the second offering a gloomy conspectus of bachelor life in a deserted Bedford Square (‘Mrs Pope [the charwoman] is taking a week’s holiday & Mrs Lubbock has gone off to stay with her aunt; & Cyril and I are alone & helpless . . . No one to make the beds or remove tea-cups or cigarette ash or old copies of the Daily Mirror. . .’) but claiming to be in ‘fairly good spirits’, and the third issuing an ultimatum: ‘No more letters will you get from me – till I get at least a post card.’
By this point Barbara was somewhere off the west coast of Africa. Here she endured ‘several days of gloom and persecution, imagining the dried-up officials consider me stuck up’. At Freetown, where the ship remained in harbour for some time and the passengers were forbidden to disembark, she commissioned an obliging purser to replenish her stock of hair-grips, cold cream and perfume: ‘He returned frightfully pleased with himself, laden with vanishing instead of cold cream and bottles of Soir de Paris.’ But already a trail of emotional havoc had begun to wind itself around the ship, extending from captain’s table to armaments store, as male members of the crew competed for Barbara’s favours. The ‘inevitable amorous complications’ culminated in a fist-fight between the purser and a French sailor named François who was sometimes put on duty in the gun turret. In its aftermath, both suitors ordered her to choose between them. For such an experienced man-handler as Barbara, this should have been an easy call. She offered to toss a coin, which François called correctly. Then, seeing the purser skulking grimly about the ship, she decided she felt sorry for him and told him to forget about his abandonment. But this act of charity had unfortunate consequences.
Later I found François sitting in a deckchair in the sun, reading, and confessed what I had done. He immediately rose in a fury, dragged me off to a remote corner of the ship, banged my head very hard against a spare engine that is being exported to the Congo, threw two of my combs in the sea and then ran as fast as he could in the direction of the kitchen.
This confrontation with François raises a question about Barbara that hangs over nearly all her dealings with men. Was she a victim or an aggressor? An agent or a patient? The answer seems to be that she was a mixture of both, sometimes desperate for male company and resigned to the power that the male sex wielded over her, at other times anxious to devote her energies to demonstrating just how shaky were the foundations on which that power rested, but at all times capable of giving quite as much as she got. There is a suspicion – confirmed by other episodes later on in her career – that she was attracted to violence and violent men and stimulated by physical conflict, that she enjoyed seeing just how far she could provoke her other halves and was prepared to put up with some of the likely consequences. Significantly, within the week she was slipping out to meet François on deck at midnight: ‘He interpreted my amiability as encouragement and tried to hurl me against the rails.’ On the other hand, her account of being beaten up by the French sailor has a comic side, what with its ingenuous supporting detail about the engine that is being exported to the Congo and the combs tossed into the sea. To this can be added the scent of fatalism – men are awful, but what can you expect once you become involved with them? – and also, it has to be said, an overwhelming sense of boredom.
Freetown to Takoradi. Takoradi to Lagos. Picturesque lagoons and mangrove swamps. Bright mornings and overheated nights. The doubtful reputation that Barbara had by now acquired was enhanced by the behaviour of the travelling companions with whom she shared a cabin. Joan, a married woman off to join her husband, and Sheila had standing dates with two of the ship’s officers. Even Audrey, the fourth member of the ménage, a prim girl who wore large sunhats and spent most of her time disinfecting the premises with insect repellent, was somehow suspect. ‘On entering the dining room, we arouse immense interest, particularly at breakfast, when each of us troops in looking increasingly dishevelled.’ Having exhausted the possibilities of the purser and François, Barbara now ‘made friends’ with a young Russian engineer called Vladimir, who was twice caught by Audrey trying to climb through the porthole.
Finally at Lagos, they disembarked and were put on the two-day flight to Cairo. All signs of human habitation vanished from the ‘flat red country’ and the view from the plane’s windows became ‘rocky, sandy and desolate’. Conditions were cramped, and Barbara found herself sharing a mattress with a rabbi on his way to Israel (‘You go Cairo? Me go Televiv’) who spent much of the journey sedulously combing out his beard. Like the ships manoeuvring in the North Sea, the sight of Cairo stirred something in her and produced an intensely felt descriptive passage in her diary.
Cairo was oppressive, dusty and colourless. Trams ran in all directions hooting, limp little donkeys loaded with fruit trailed along the gutters surrounded by horseflies. The pavements were crowded, women with frizzy black hair hurried along on taloned cork sandals, and tarbooshed men shuffled with limp arms or stood picking their noses and spitting into the dust. Gary carts drawn along by bony, glistening horses clopped by full of American soldiers on leave.
She took a taxi to the British Embassy, where an elderly lady showed her the deserted cipher room: ‘Lipsticky cups of half-drunk tea were scattered about amongst used carbons, despatch books, partly chewed slabs of chocolate and countless cigarette ends.’ Later, a second taxi ferried her to the Continental Hotel and a fellow-cipherine showed her to her room. After examining the view from her window onto the square nearby, where Gary cart and taxi drivers congregated in a ‘spitting huddle’ and moustachioed men in uniforms sat in basket chairs drinking lemonade, she pulled down the blinds, climbed onto the bed and lay staring at the ceiling.
Cairo in the early autumn of 1943 was an odd mixture of movement and inertia, grandeur and subterfuge, shameless opulence and stark privation. The war in Egypt had officially ended with the surrender of the Axis forces in Africa four months before: Allied military interest was now concentrated on the Italian campaign, which had moved into gear on 10 July with the landings in Sicily. Politically Egypt – a British protectorate since 1914 – was administered by the government of Mostafa El Nahas: corrupt, ineffective and, it was thought, ripe to be overthrown by an opposition that had tolerated British occupation during the battle against the Afrika Korps but were now turning against the ambassador, the recently ennobled Lord Killearn. Little of this intrigue would have registered with the great mass of English men and women – military personnel, civil servants, intelligence experts – currently on the Cairo staff, who regarded the city as they would any other outpost of empire. The British garrison was housed in the Citadel of Muhammed Ali, a vast administrative centre that included married quarters, tennis courts, stables and training grounds. Officers spent their leisure time at the highly exclusive Gezira Sporting Club or such expatriate watering holes as Shepheard’s Hotel, founded as long ago as 1841, with its Moorish hall and pillared ballroom.
Violet Powell’s grandmother once observed that if you sat in the lobby at Shepheard’s for long enough, almost everyone you had ever met in your life would eventually walk by. Certainly, most of the memoirs written about wartime Cairo emphasise its c
urious intimacy: delighted cries of recognition sounding across hotel foyers; friendships begun in childhood on the Wiltshire Downs eagerly renewed in the shadow of the pyramids. Off-duty officers and their dates enjoyed a vigorous social life – dinner at Fleurent’s, the St James’s or Le P’tit Coin de France, say, followed by dancing at the Scarabee, the Deck Club or the Kit Kat. The Continental, at which Barbara was now installed, had a celebrated rooftop restaurant complete with dancefloor, cabaret, belly-dancers, acrobats and a ‘Mr Cardyman’, who did card tricks. It was open season for husband-hunting – there were stories of girls who kept wedding dresses in their kit-bags on the off-chance of striking lucky.
At the same time, none of this gracious living could altogether subdue the background of dust, noise and squalor that Barbara had noted on her arrival. Artemis Cooper has observed of Olivia Manning’s The Levant Trilogy (1975–80), which draws on memories of the time that she and her husband Reggie Smith spent in Egypt between 1940 and 1942, that ‘the feeling of what it was like to be in wartime Cairo is not, for her, the pleasant recollection of glamorous parties where all the men were in uniform: it is the physical sensation of enervated liverishness, brought on by the heat, which makes everything seem tawdry and insubstantial.’ Lawrence Durrell and his wife Nancy were similarly unimpressed: ‘Such a country,’ Durrell complained, ‘cripples, deformities, ophthalmia, goitre, amputations, lice, flies.’
Astride the summit of this mountain of dirt, clamour, antiquity and imperial prestige sat the larger than life figure of Egypt’s titular ruler, King Farouk. A mere seven years into his tenure – he had succeeded his father, King Faud, at the age of sixteen – Farouk was already a legendary presence in his country’s life, and gossip, rumour and scandal attached themselves to him like iron filings obeying the magnet’s call. Many of the stories told about him had to do with his incorrigible appetite: put on a diet by his father in his early teens he was supposed to have eaten food put out for the palace cats. Others took in his enthusiasm for collecting: hunting trophies, cars, pornography, jewels, weaponry, coins and matchboxes all attracted his magpie’s eye at one time or another, and his private rooms were full of negligently accumulated junk. Still more revolved around his enthusiastic womanising: though married a month before his eighteenth birthday to the sixteen-year-old Safinaz Zulficar and the father of two small children, he liked showing off the row of latchkeys which admitted him to his girlfriends’ apartments. Overshadowing them all came a weird streak of eccentricity, symbolised by the occasion on which he announced that he intended to present a gift to the royal princesses, George VI’s daughters Elizabeth and Margaret, which could be distributed to children in British hospitals. When embassy representatives arrived to inspect the benefaction, they discovered that Farouk had ordered 230 lb of chocolates from Groppi’s, Cairo’s most famous café, had them piled up on a large table and now stood waiting to sample them, flavour by flavour.