by D. J. Taylor
And even before her trip to the altar came evidence of a different kind of person, more at home on the margins of inter-war era literary life than letting rip among the Gloucestershire fauna. Spring 1937, for example, found her on a trip to New York in the decidedly mixed company of Peter Quennell – already married to Glur but keenly interested in his fellow traveller – and Tom Driberg, the Express’s gossip columnist. Driberg’s ‘William Hickey’ column commended her fashion sense, for coming down to dinner wearing a purple dress, a scarlet and gold Eton jacket and ‘a single extraordinary earring. It consisted of a bunch of 42 small gilt safety pins.’ One by one, the marks of Lost Girl affiliation stack up. By the late 1930s, she and Rayner were weekending at Tickerage Mill. As an accomplished semi-professional photographer, proficient enough to have her work featured in the Architectural Review, she took the celebrated group portrait of Dick Wyndham, Angela Culme-Seymour, Connolly, Spender and their friends. Above all, she was a chum of Connolly’s, and as such a fixture of the King’s Road dinner parties he gave with Jean. ‘The Connollys are marvellous people to know,’ James Lees-Milne wrote of one of these gatherings:
They are quite rich, about £1,200 p.a. I should think, and they like to spend it all on their friends. They are both extremely intelligent; he is brilliant, untidy, dirty and ugly. They give lots of dinners at which 8 or 10 people sit down to the most gorgeous meals . . . They never go to cinemas or plays after, instead one sits round the fire and drinks . . . Above all they know and invite all the people one likes best in England.
On this particular evening, the favoured few included Nancy Mitford and her husband Peter Rodd, Quennell and Glur, John Sutro, Lady Dorothy Lygon, the writer Christopher Sykes and his sister Angela, the Countess of Antrim, the publisher Kenneth Rae . . . and Joan. If Connolly admired her photographs – he was to print her picture of the bomb-wrecked Chelsea Old Church in Horizon – then he relished her stupendous good looks. As the 1930s went on she joined Diana and Janetta at the hub of his personal myth, a constant stimulus to his romantic day-dreaming and the alternative worlds where he wandered endlessly with the women of his choice; when she married Rayner he remarked that it was the unhappiest day of his existence.
The Rayners began their married life in a flat in Blue Ball Yard, off St James’s Street, Piccadilly, but from an early stage they were an integral part of the Connolly circus. They stayed with him at Driberg’s house at Bradwell in Essex. When the Blitz came and their new home near the Gray’s Inn Road was bombed out, they relocated to a flat in Palace Gate next door to Peter Watson. For Joan it was the wartime Lost Girl life in excelsis, in which days spent working for the Holborn Division of the Red Cross alternated with evenings in bohemia and a fair amount of extra-marital dalliance. Connolly, naturally, was included. With her marriage in ruins, abroad looked a better bet than war-torn Bloomsbury, and, after training as a cipher clerk, she followed Barbara’s route to Cairo and became yet another of the lodgers in the house shared by Patrick Balfour and Eddie Gathorne-Hardy. Come September 1945 she was working in the Athens Embassy as secretary to the press attaché, Osbert Lancaster, making the best use of her opportunities and reflecting on the considerable distance she had managed to travel from her early life. ‘I can’t complain,’ she wrote brightly to Balfour, ‘as I am having a gay time here and I do think Greece comes up to my expectations. There is also a delicious pagan atmosphere of NO GUILT, which I appreciate very much having suffered too much of it on account of my upbringing.’
Part Two
8.
Ways and Means: Lost Girl Style
On New Year’s Eve she was meeting Darcy at the Ritz. Arriving at seven o’clock she seated herself in a corner of the bar and ordered a crème de menthe. This evening she had taken trouble with her appearance, mascaraed her eyes and combed her hair so that it overlapped the high cheek collar of the pleated dress that she wore. She felt self-conscious waiting alone.
Barbara Skelton, A Young Girl’s Touch (1956)
Not many photographs survive of day-to-day life in the Horizon offices. Judging by the uniformity of the dress styles on display, most of them date from a single shoot, in all probability from the autumn of 1949 shortly before the magazine’s closure. In one a bow-tied and besuited Connolly stares rather absently out of the high windows onto Bedford Square. You get the feeling that it is all the same to him. Governments will rise and fall, literary magazines will come and go, but still middle-aged litterateurs will be able to smoke their cigars and exult over their collections of Sèvres china. In another, some kind of editorial conference is in progress. Connolly looms over a table. Lys sits to his right in modish, tweed-jacketed profile. Sonia, at the opposite end, throws out an elegant hand that almost obscures the fourth participant in the tableau – a balding bespectacled man stationed alongside Connolly who looks as if he may be the writer T. R. ‘Tosco’ Fyvel. In a third, Sonia and Lys are sitting side by side in cane-backed chairs, Sonia in close-up, Lys placidly regarding her from the further end of their shared workspace. Each is sporting an elaborate Veronica Lake-style hairdo of ridges and swept-back scallops.
As for their clothes, Lys’s costume looks like a home-grown approximation of Dior’s celebrated ‘New Look’, variations on which had begun to flood the London rag trade a couple of years before. Sonia, in jersey and sensible skirt – there is a suspicion that the photo was taken on her last day at work – looks pensive, clearly exercised by the thought of one kind of life coming to a close as another kind grinds inexorably into gear. Behind them, somebody unidentifiable with a great deal of fuzzy hair is labouring away at a desk. Each element of this portrait – from the sitters’ get-up, to the attitudes they strike and the way they address the camera – raises the question of what might be called Lost Girl style. What did they look like? How did they talk, and what did they talk about? How did they spend their leisure time, and who with? What were the dimensions of the world they inhabited, and how did they attempt to make sense of it?
As ever with the Lost Girls, nearly every generalisation that can be made about them as a collective unit needs some kind of qualification. Seated in the office at Bedford Square, telephone to hand, and Connolly (presumably) lurking in the editorial sanctum, Lys looks, as she always does, like a fashion-plate; Sonia seems a touch less modish, more like a girl on a country weekend who fears that the central heating may not live up to expectations. Most contemporary or near-contemporary observers who reported back on Lost Girl style were concerned to emphasise their bohemianism: a make-do-and-mend approach to dress that in most cases was the result of sheer poverty. Quennell, puzzling over the question of Barbara’s elusive charm, noted her habit of bundling her graceful body into a ‘blue horse-blanket coat’ and piling up her brown hair into ‘an untidy poodle coiffure’ secured by half-a-dozen badly placed clips. Here in the early 1940s, when a substantial percentage of women sported perms or three-day sets, unruly hair was a signature mark of the bohemian’s disdain for propriety. Feliks Topolski remembered Janetta’s hair ‘overhanging her face and shoulders’; he deduced that she was ‘one of the progenitors of this bohemian, later universal style’. In the same way, Evelyn Waugh’s fictional account of the Horizon staff notes that they ‘wore their hair long and enveloping in a style which fifteen years later was to be associated with the King’s Road’.
Physically, the Lost Girl tended to be tallish, slim to the point of skimpiness, her good looks accentuated by habitual pallor. Spender’s description of her in her early twenties – the Renoir face, the cupid’s mouth – is trailed by ‘a bit pale perhaps’. There were occasional complaints (exclusively from men) about Sonia’s plumpness and the size of her legs: ‘They were enormous, quite inappropriate for what was on top’, Woodrow Wyatt cruelly alleged. When the going was good, or in Barbara’s case when the significant other possessed the necessary resources, an innate sophistication immediately declared itself that found expression in the usual appurtenances of upper-class female style. In a w
orld of rationing and clothing coupons, Peter Watson, for example, kept Sonia supplied with French perfume and silk stockings from America. In these circumstances, only the best would do: Barbara, when she was presented with ‘Soir de Paris’ en route to Egypt, was quick to sneer at what she regarded as ‘French tart scent’. In general, bohemian tendencies in dress were usually extinguished by the onset of prosperity. In the mid-1940s, Janetta had once arrived at Topolski’s studio on a bicycle with a rucksack strapped to her shoulders, but by 1947 Evelyn Waugh could report to Nancy Mitford that she ‘has a new look: silk stockings, high heeled shoes, diamond clips everywhere’. Frances Partridge’s diaries monitor this upward path. Spotted at a party in 1949 she is ‘looking lovely in a dress of grey watered silk’. A year later she is ‘looking so trim’ in a camel coat with ‘new shoes, skirt and pullover’. By 1951, with a new and well-heeled husband in tow, she is reported as wearing ‘nothing but a little short green corduroy jacket over camel’s hair trousers’, the acme of Attlee-era ton.
As to how a Lost Girl might communicate, the words she might employ and the emphasis she might choose to put on them, these were products of the mid-twentieth-century middle to upper-middle class, the daughters of public school masters, army officers and old India hands, with a vocabulary and a vocal style to match: not quite the world of Nancy Mitford perhaps, in its caste-sanctioned prohibitions, but running it close in its emphasis on laconicism, understatement and irony, a clipped precision that could occasionally shade into outright disdain. One of Barbara’s boyfriends remembered her habit of dropping shrewdly perceptive comments into the conversation in ‘the flat, monotonous drawl of a ventriloquist’s dummy’. Disparagement was conveyed in Edwardian nursery-talk: ‘beastly’, ‘awful’, ‘ghastly’, ‘maddening’, ‘madly’ (to Janetta, the sight of people falling over in the winter slush was ‘madly dangerous’), ‘desperately’ (Barbara’s ‘desperately depressed’ or ‘desperately dejected’); a pressing personal dilemma – the arrival of one boyfriend, say, while another was still on the premises – might be described as a ‘pickle’; the death of a close friend or major trauma might be greeted with the comment that ‘I minded most frightfully.’
If this suggests a damming up of sentiment, a determination to batten down the emotional hatches and repress any feelings that might be stirring within, then most Lost Girls were happy enough to call a spade a spade when the circumstances demanded it. Sex was ‘fucking’; a homosexual ‘a bugger’; menstruation ‘the curse’. ‘A touch of commonness is absolutely indispensable, don’t you think?’ Barbara once pronounced. Janetta, too, had her no-nonsense, abrasive side. Angela remembered an evening in 1942 when she and her half-sister, together with Jan, Brasco and Sinclair-Loutit, went out to dinner. ‘Did you see me, darling, driving along in my fast open sports car?’ Sinclair-Loutit wondered. ‘Yes we did.’ ‘What did I look like – rather dashing?’ ‘You looked an absolute shit,’ Janetta told him.
Naturally, there were widespread individual variations, some of them nearer to traditional upper-class flamboyance (Glur’s cry of ‘Darling!’ as she greeted a friend was thought to echo through the average drawing room like a klaxon), others closer to middle-class neurosis. Sonia, in particular, could sometimes come across as a rather earnest schoolgirl. There is a (possibly apocryphal) story of her being chased round the garden by a lustful fellow guest at a country weekend and finally taking refuge in the pond. ‘It isn’t his trying to rape me that I mind,’ she is supposed to have told Quennell, as he helped her from the water, ‘but that he doesn’t seem to realize what Cyril stands for.’ A not terribly well-informed schoolgirl, either: certainly a tactlessly worded rejection letter that winged out from the Horizon office to the distinguished American poet Theodore Roethke (‘It seemed to us that your poetry was in a way very American in that it just lacked that inspiration, inevitability or quintessence of writing or feeling that distinguishes good poetry from verse’) caused lasting offence. In contrast, Barbara’s epistolary style is blunt, rueful and matter-of-fact. ‘Thank you very much for having us to stay,’ runs a thank-you letter to a hostess from the early 1950s. ‘I am sorry you had to do so much work and never a complaint. So unlike me.’
There would always be plenty of thank-you letters. Apart from Lys, who spent nearly a decade in Connolly’s company, the Lost Girl was essentially peripatetic, moving from place to place and billet to billet as the demands of work, romance and inclination took her. If Barbara’s trail is so difficult to follow in the 1940s, it is because she lived at so many addresses, an eternal passage migrant continually flying from nest to nest. In the nightmare world of the Blitz, with its bombed-out flats and constantly shifting personnel, the practical difficulties of working out where one might be staying on a particular night, or how to make contact with the person you were supposed to be spending it with, could be all but insuperable. Quennell’s letters to Barbara are full of these impediments: rooms that may or may not be available; beds that may or may not be free. For all that, the Lost Girl’s professional beat still had its boundaries, its oases and its favoured ports of call, its routines and its attendants. She tended to live in places where rents were cheap and accommodation easier to procure: Bloomsbury, or its margins; Chelsea; South Kensington, with occasional forays beyond. Rising early, or in Barbara’s case, sometimes not, she would proceed to her place of work – between 1939 and 1945 this would often be a government office – to answer telephones, take dictation or attend meetings. Lunch would be eaten at her desk, in a staff canteen or, if there were a male escort available, anywhere from a Lyons restaurant to the Ritz Hotel. Then came a long, fatiguing afternoon in a badly ventilated office dense with cigarette smoke, whose tedium was relieved only by the promise of the evening’s entertainment.
As for how the Lost Girl occupied her leisure hours, this, too, depended on her current level of prosperity. One of the distinguishing marks of most Lost Girl existence is its lack of funds. Barbara’s lifestyle would not have been sustainable without men to subsidise her meals and offer her presents. Diana’s letters from the early 1940s are a litany of sorely needed £2s, of 30 shillings that are owing, meetings with unfriendly bank managers and County Court judgements on unpaid debts. Angela was an habitué of the pawnbroker’s shop, while even Sonia and Lys – employed by government ministries during the war and less reliant on handouts – were used to living on a shoestring. Yet, once a sponsor declared himself, their surface life could seem relatively upmarket. Janetta recalled how much she liked dining at the White Tower in Percy Street, provided that there was someone to pick up the tab. With a rich boyfriend on hand to settle the bills, Barbara seems to have spent much of the early part of the war in ceaseless transit from one upmarket Mayfair watering hole to another: the Ecu de France, the Coq d’Or, the Curzon Street Sherry Bar. Lunches might be taken at the Berkeley Hotel or the Café Royal, evenings spent at private establishments such as the Theatre Club or the French Club.
Two or three years later, on the other hand, in the company of the famously improvident Quennell, her haunts became more bohemian: nightclubs such as the 400, the Jamboree or the Nut-house. Quennell’s diary records a grim-sounding evening spent at the Jamboree in January 1943, ‘the whole room wrapped in a hot clammy grey fog that seemed to be rising from the floor: in all directions prostrate drinkers; a woman with cascading blonde hair . . . being carried from a table’. Desperate for entertainment, most of those present scarcely noticed what onlookers diagnosed as the ‘tenseness’ of a social world made up of smoking, drinking and sleep deprivation. Slightly more congenial, perhaps, was the Gargoyle Club at 69 Dean Street, founded by David Tennant in the 1920s and intended both as a chic nightspot for dancing and a daytime refuge for the avant-garde, where, as the original press release put it, ‘still struggling writers, painters, poets and musicians will be offered the best food and wine at prices they can afford’.
Thus conceived, the club managed to combine an authentic smartness with a sentimental
attachment to bohemia. Honorary membership was available for the ‘deserving artistic poor’. No less an authority than Matisse, asked to advise on décor, had suggested that the walls of the main room on the first floor should be covered with a mosaic of mirrored tiles assembled out of the fragments of antique French looking-glasses. All this had a magnetising effect, and most Lost Girls and their consorts can be found at one time or another at the Gargoyle, drinking at the bar with elderly Soho celebrities such as Nina Hamnett or Augustus John or taking to its teeming Saturday night dancefloor. Barbara, Sonia and Janetta were all seen there at one time or another. As ‘Mrs Peter Quennell’, Glur was photographed there by a society magazine at one of Tennant’s parties in 1939 talking to Lady Julia Mount. It was by its lift shaft, sometime in 1941 or 1942, with Barbara looking on, that Quennell and Topolski came to blows.
If the focus of Lost Girl life was essentially metropolitan, then there were several rural retreats where weekends and holidays could be spent. Barbara had her cottage in Kent; Janetta her bolthole at Ham Spray. Tickerage, the Sussex mill house near Uckfield owned by Dick Wyndham, was another favoured locale: Peter Watson rented it for a year in 1944; Connolly and Lys spent Christmas there in 1947. Weekends there offered a tantalising alternate world where the privations of wartime London instantly disappeared. ‘Had a heavenly 2 days in the country with my bosses Connolly and Peter Watson,’ Anna Kavan reported early in 1944. ‘It snowed the whole time so that one could hardly go out at all, but I can’t say how marvellously peaceful and relaxed one felt with no alerts, no bombs, no queues, no crowds.’ And beyond clubland and the country weekend lay an alluring landscape of taxi rides to parties in far-off suburbs, vagrant journeys through the outer London dawn and a series of entertainments that ranged from the questionable to the downright illegal. A Young Girl’s Touch, for example, has Melinda being taken by a man named Darcy to an address in Chelsea to watch a pornographic film. On arrival she is shown into a room where several people are gathered around the projector, ‘two well-known actors, a famous cartoonist, a popular second-rate portrait painter and a black-marketeering restaurateur on intimate terms with the host’. Also present are some ‘sexually avid young women stimulated by social success, grateful if in return they were occasionally taken to an expensive West End restaurant’.