by D. J. Taylor
Gradually the evening unfolds. The host introduces his wife (‘a big, smiling blonde with wide apart front teeth’) with the assurance that ‘She has a first rate pussy and if she likes you I’m sure we could arrange something good.’ Having sat through the first two films, one of which involves a flagellation scene at a girls’ school, Melinda finds herself alone with an over-excited Darcy in a blacked-out room. Desperate to escape she sprints back along the main hall (‘deserted except for a naked man asleep on the floor’) to the front door but finds it locked shut, mounts a chair and tries to get out through the skylight and is eventually thrown out into the street by the host. Glancing back at the house as she turns the corner, Melinda sees ‘a row of angry men silhouetted in the doorway; each one in a threatening attitude; some were waving clenched fists while others just stood naked and grim and shivering’. Given that much of A Young Girl’s Touch is barely ornamented autobiography, there is every reason to suppose that this happened exactly as described.
If the Lost Girl’s daily round can seem uncomfortably frenetic, a matter of snatched assignations, exhausted late-night carousing and the relentless grind of unappetising day jobs, then this was a consequence of the wider atmosphere in which it was conducted. These, after all, were lives lived during wartime, the world of the London Blitz (September 1940–May 1941) and, as hostilities drew to a close, the V-1 and V-2 flying bombs which could fall almost without warning, reducing a row of terraced houses to rubble; a world from which no one who moved in the Horizon circle emerged without some degree of psychological damage. In the aftermath of a bomb blast in which they had seen a woman killed in front of them, Connolly and Lys came across a severed hand lying in the street. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t written for a few days,’ Sonia explained to Coldstream from her ambulance station at University College Hospital in September 1940, ‘but life here is so odd at the moment that it’s difficult to concentrate on anything.’ The peculiar atmosphere of London in the early 1940s – its sinister individuality, its lurking sense of existential dread – is a constant of almost every diary written at the time, whether by a young woman or anyone else. ‘I am melancholy and terrified of the celebrated Blitzkrieg,’ the twenty-two-year-old Penelope Fitzgerald wrote in mid-October 1939. ‘I start at noises in the street, sleep with my head under the bedclothes and listen to the owls hooting.’ Twelve days later she noted her feeling of inertia in a world of panic-stricken movement: ‘Everybody seems to be so mobile nowadays, and to flash to and fro past or through the metropolis leaving me glued to my desk.’
Fitzgerald, who was working at the BBC, recreated her time there in the novel Human Voices (1980). Here the barrage balloons tethered above Green Park ascend like a flock of sheep in the evening light, ‘fixed and grazing in the upper air’. The breeze is full of ‘fine, whitish dust’. At night people in transit through the murky London streets count their steps in the darkness, passing ‘doors with tiny slits of light, just enough to catch the eye’. In an atmosphere of constant uncertainty, civilians survive by focusing on their everyday routines, deliberately excluding from their minds the thought of ‘helpless waves of flesh against metal and salt . . . the soundless fall of a telegram through a letter box’. If you can’t face living your life day by day, Fitzgerald observes at one point, ‘you must live it minute by minute’. This compulsion to ‘live for the moment’ is a feature of Lost Girl reminiscence. ‘People don’t realise how strange it was to live in London in the war, with so many things happening and such uncertainty and desperation’, Janetta recalled. At bedrock level, life during the Blitz was simply a question of facing up to a series of unrelenting logistical demands: getting from place to place in the blackout; securing transport to take you through the bomb-cratered streets. As for the psychological consequences, Janetta thought ‘people behaved very differently and recklessly and with a sort of abandon . . . because there was always a possibility that every single thing was going to go wrong’.
Inevitably, much of this abandon had a sexual side. The novelist Mary Wesley, at this point in her late twenties and employed in tracking Soviet and German call signs from an MI5 office near St James’s Park, later remarked that however much she might have been ashamed of the fact, the war offered young women from her upper-middle-class background the prospect of an intensely exciting time: danger, exhilaration and a degree of sexual freedom that would have been unthinkable in the days before 1939. By 1941, the mother of a child who was not her husband’s, Mary was living in an ancient manor house near Land’s End and making hay with the personnel of the nearby RAF base. ‘War is very erotic . . .’ she remembered. ‘We thought why the hell shouldn’t we do what we want . . .? They were all going to get killed . . . It got to the state where one reached across the pillow in the morning and thought, “Let’s see. Who is it this time?”’
If none of the Lost Girls ever quite reached these heights of promiscuity, then some of them came fairly close: Angela, after all, had two illegitimate children while still married to Balfour, and the roster of Barbara’s boyfriends in the early part of the war – even the ones whose trails endure – runs comfortably into double figures. Questioned about contemporary morals by Frances Partridge, Janetta called up ‘a (to me) dreary vision – of hopping into bed at the smallest provocation, no gradual approach or Stendhalian crystallization, much unkindness, that utterly useless emotion jealousy, of course, and desperate attempts to preserve a cynical outlook’.
On the other hand, there is a suspicion that at least some of this behaviour is exaggerated. ‘Whenever things were hard, they simply sent Sonia out to sleep with a few advertisers or possible backers’, Stephen Spender is supposed to have told the publisher John Calder of Horizon’s financial arrangements, but Spender always denied it and lodged a note to this effect in the Orwell Archive after Sonia’s death. Equally, you have a feeling that an environment of blackout curtains and falling bombs was only an incidental stimulus to such free and independent spirits as Angela and Barbara, and that they would have behaved in exactly the same way whatever might be going on in the world beyond. Certainly, the Barbara of the 1950s does not seem so very different from the Barbara of 1941. All the same, the romantic pass-the-parcelling of the 1940s left ineradicable scars. The interior damage wrought by Barbara’s several abortions meant that she was never able to have children. And hanging over the question of Lost Girl sexual behaviour is the unignorable fact that most of the judgements passed on it were made by men, for the most part men with axes to grind. The myth of Sonia’s lesbianism, for example, was apparently put about by Connolly in retaliation for her refusal to sleep with him: the only Lost Girl with authentic lesbian tendencies was Barbara, who remarked of one of her experiences in this line that ‘I just saw her as a man with breasts.’
There is a wider question here, which lies at the heart of young women’s emotional lives in the 1940s. However liberated and self-determined, what was the degree of freedom that they actually managed to achieve? On the one hand they were independent spirits suborned by no one (‘their lives went as they wanted them to’, Janetta remarked of Barbara and Sonia), who believed that they were making their own choices. On the other, it is difficult to proceed very far through the tangle of their romantic careers without divining just how little they liked being on their own and how few inner resources they harboured when it came to coping with isolation and abandonment. ‘They felt you had to have a man in your life otherwise you had no justification’, Glur’s daughter remembered of her mother’s circle. ‘Without one, you were somehow a second-class citizen.’ Men could be taken or left, picked up or walked away from on a whim, and yet it was men who authenticated you, supposedly made your lustre shine brighter, could confirm or deny the sparkle of the personality you brought to the society in which you operated. All this offered a dilemma that some Lost Girls took decades to solve. There is a suspicion that Barbara never solved it at all.
Meanwhile, there was the practical question of how that independent, fr
ee-spirited life might be lived in a wider world where, for the most part, traditional moral standards still applied and hotel receptionists shook their heads over unmarried couples who applied for a night’s lodging. Years after her affair with Connolly, married now and with a small baby, Diana wrote a rather revealing letter to Janetta canvassing the advantages of taking the name of the man you were living with rather than marrying him. ‘I absolutely agree with what you say about name & marriage,’ Diana assured her friend. ‘For so long now ever since I was 18 I have been false-naming & though I haven’t minded all that, it is a relief from strain now to have to wonder whether it might be bloody; as I’ve had scenes in hotels etc.’ The interest of Diana’s letter lies in its disavowal of anything that might be construed as a mercenary motive. ‘I suppose if one was nasty & wanted money one would get more from a husband but life is not worth living if one has to get married for that! How dreadful it would have been to have had to divorce Cyril instead of just going – it was bad enough as it was.’ In the vast majority of cases, what seems to have mattered most to the Lost Girl was not material comfort but her own autonomy.
If the world through which the Lost Girls wandered was one of living for the moment, of sexual recklessness and social opportunism, then there were other ways in which it differed from the arrangements of 1918–39. One of them was the high degree of intermingling encouraged by an environment in which the barriers of social class suddenly seemed a great deal less impregnable. The war novels of Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh, for example, are full of what, in an earlier age, would have been regarded as societal meltdown: middle-class subalterns polluting regimental messes with their ‘common’ accents; temporary gentlemen sweet-talking, and sometimes disappearing with, upper-class girls whom chance had sent their way. Whether in government offices or in the course of after-hours socialising, all kinds of unlikely people were brought together in circumstances which could throw their original affiliations sharply out of kilter. The eighteen-year-old Jaqueline Hope-Nicholson, who had acquired a secretarial job at War Office Intelligence, was startled to find Brian Howard cruising its chilly corridors and to embark on a friendship that at one point encouraged this life-long homosexual to hazard, ‘You know, sweety, you and I could get married.’ Nothing came of the proposal, if proposal it was, but such declarations were almost routine in a series of environments full of anxious and dislocated people taking solace wherever they could find it.
The social heterodoxy of the war took several forms. Most obviously, it allowed the men and women at large in Blitz-era London to expand their range, to contract alliances with people that they would be unlikely to have met in peacetime. Inspecting Sonia’s acquaintances in the later 1940s, for example, one finds everyone from novelists and painters to young Labour MPs and arts-world patrons. Even Barbara seems to have emerged from the war with a raft of attachments that would be useful to her in later life. To examine the Lost Girls’ social landscape as a whole is to marvel at the number of different levels it incorporated. There were Bloomsbury connections, mostly through Frances and Ralph Partridge, literary links to Horizon regulars such as Orwell and Waugh, oblique – sometimes less than oblique – hints of aristocratic drawing rooms, the donnish salons of Oxford and Cambridge, and City lucre. The standard description of this kind of world, the world in which, albeit in somewhat artificial circumstances and for a brief period of time, a duchess can exchange small-talk with a homosexual painter or a man-of-letters carouse with an up-and-coming tycoon in conditions that are agreeable to them both, is ‘High Bohemia’ (significantly, this was Waugh’s label for the world of the Bright Young People in which he was intimately involved in the late 1920s). Each of the Lost Girls, in their individual ways, washed up on the shores of High Bohemia in the 1940s, and the friendships they forged there would be invaluable to them once the decade was over.
Once again, there are substantial qualifications to be made. However tightly drawn together by occupation or social life, the Lost Girls were, at heart, very different women, whose idiosyncrasies seemed abundantly clear to people who knew them at the time. Waugh, for example, revered Lys both for her cooking and her appearance (‘beautifully neat’), treated Sonia with grudging respect (‘quite presentable’) but regarded Janetta as a dangerous left-wing nuisance and Barbara as not much more than a prostitute. Among these four, Sonia was probably the toughest-minded and the cleverest, while remaining a target for criticism from men who found her bossy, interfering or, having had their advances rebuffed, declared that she was frigid. There were also complaints about a relish of life beyond the English Channel that led her to pepper her conversation with Gallic phrases and encouraged a small child, meeting her for the first time in the late 1940s, to deduce that she was a native Frenchwoman: ‘given to using French instead of English whenever she thought she could make a literary effect, or to impress Cyril’, Woodrow Wyatt remembered. Janetta, meanwhile, was the most artistically minded – she went so far as to illustrate a book on child-rearing in 1946 – and also the most instinctively radical. ‘My mother’s circle was left-wing, arty, intellectual’, one of her daughters remembered. When Waugh remarked to Nancy Mitford a few months before the war’s end that he feared Connolly had ‘lived too much with Communist young ladies’, Janetta would have been one of the prime suspects. But in a political world keen on orthodoxy and resolute toeing of the party line, close friends tended to stress her reluctance to be told what to think or do. Frances Partridge believed that ‘though surrounded by communist-minded young, she still is . . . an individualist’.
Matched against the intellectual playmate of the great and the left-inclined bohemian, Lys seems much more conventional, much more consciously ladylike (Janetta’s daughter Nicky remembered writing an essay for her school magazine ‘about playing at posh ladies’ inspired by the thrill of watching Lys in action), keener on creating the kind of domestic environment in which Connolly would feel comfortable rather than jousting with his highbrow friends. Friends recalled her practical skills, her resourcefulness, her practised attention to detail. It was Lys who, wherever she happened to be established with Connolly, saw to such mundane necessities as paying the tradesmen and seeing that the milk was delivered. But if, like Sonia, she was a regular victim of male condescension (Quennell’s letters to the Egypt-bound Barbara carry slighting references to ‘little Lys’, who ‘continues to twitter dutifully in the background’), then some of her sharpest critics were other women, who found her horizons too limited and her conversational style too tame. Janetta complained that her role in Connolly’s life was simply to take the lead from him and echo what he said. Lys’s somewhat high-pitched voice led Diana to nickname her ‘Squeaks’. Barbara, too, was bored by her company. ‘He [Connolly] was very sweet with Lys,’ runs a diary entry from late in 1941, ‘who was as tiresome as ever, trying to make the apt reply to everything.’ ‘Lys is very pretty,’ sniffed the Bloomsbury bluestocking Frances Partridge, on meeting her in 1946, ‘and she prattled of housewifely things, like linoleum and dry rot.’
Barbara, the most wayward and the least sortable of the group, attracted even less in the way of sisterly solidarity. As Connolly’s biographer Jeremy Lewis has noted, for all her devotion to him there was a way in which she never really belonged to his world. ‘She was a good deal cleverer than most of the upper-class groupies who hung on his every word, and unlike them she could put pen to paper to lethal effect; but she was, in the last resort, considered to be both common and tarty, and as such she remained an outsider.’
Something of the deep suspicion, sometimes amounting to outright disdain, with which many of Barbara’s contemporaries regarded her may be divined from Frances Partridge’s admittedly second-hand account of a winter weekend she spent with some friends named Robin and Mary Campbell at their house in Stokke, Wiltshire in the early 1950s. After sulking in her room and refusing to come down to meals, Barbara asked to be taken to the station first thing on Monday morning to catch an early train to
London. The Partridges, who happened to be delivering their own house-guest Janetta to the same station later in the day, were surprised to find the Campbells on the platform,
their faces lavender with cold. Robin told me in tones of stifled horror that they had got up at seven and called Barbara, only to be told . . . that she was sleepy and had decided to take the next train. So there they were, but Barbara refused to get into it, saying that she had left some kind of basket behind at Stokke. ‘She’s going on the 1.17 though,’ Robin said between clenched teeth.
Writing up the visit in her diary, Barbara was unrepentant: ‘a horrid four days at the Campbells. I never wanted to go but was tricked into it.’ Indifferent to the company – her fellow guests included the philosopher A. J. Ayer – unimpressed by the cuisine (‘A succession of meaty-coursed meals into which we all troop like penancing monks’) and resenting the arctic atmosphere of the unheated house, she decided to invent a Monday morning dentist’s appointment. Then, in a moment of classic Skelton negligence, she took two strong sleeping pills and fell into a stupor, further antagonising her hostess by leaving the fire on all night. ‘Come again when you’re not so cross,’ Mary Campbell instructed as she waved her off. According to Barbara’s account, she ‘spent the rest of the day crying from one train to another’.