The Lost Girls

by D. J. Taylor

  Peter Quennell continued to thrive as an all-purpose literary man. Leaving the Cornhill Magazine in 1951 he became co-editor of History Today and remained there for the next twenty-eight years. After securing his divorce from Glur, he took a fourth wife, Sonia Leon, invariably known as ‘Spider’, and then, once this marriage had disintegrated, a fifth, Marilyn Peek. This union, formalised in 1967, lasted until his death. His thirty or so publications included two well-received (and highly discreet) works of autobiography, The Marble Foot (1977) and The Wanton Chase (1980). He was knighted in 1992 for services to literature. An insight into the Quennells’ married life in their later years was confided by Selina Hastings to Anthony Powell. The former claimed to have witnessed Marilyn escorting her husband (‘almost handcuffed to her’) to a hairdresser’s in Primrose Hill and leaving him in the chair with the instructions ‘Will you cut its [sic] hair? Get rid of those whiskers and those disgusting hairs in the nostrils.’ Peter Quennell died in 1993.

  Feliks Topolski remained in the UK after the war, and in 1949 took British citizenship. The 3000 drawings of his celebrated Chronicles series appeared on a fortnightly basis from 1953 to 1979 and were exhibited around the world. In 1959 he was commissioned by the Duke of Edinburgh to design a mural commemorating the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. His son Daniel (1945–2015) twice represented Oxford in the University Boat Race. Topolski died in 1989.

  Stephen Spender’s autobiography, World Within World, was published in 1951. Of it Evelyn Waugh wrote, unkindly, that ‘At his christening the fairy godparents showered on Mr Spender all the fashionable neuroses, but they quite forgot the gift of literary skill’. He became co-editor of the literary and political magazine Encounter, and taught for some years in American universities before accepting a chair in English at University College, London. His Collected Poems appeared in 1983. In the same year he was awarded a knighthood for services to literature. Spender died in 1995.

  Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit worked for the United Nations for twenty-eight years, latterly in the World Health Organization. His long retirement was spent in Morocco, where he helped to establish RADIOCOM, a radio communications and electronic engineering company. Although he remarried and had two more children, he continued to regard Janetta as the love of his life. Sinclair-Loutit died in 2003.

  Robert Kee became a highly successful writer and broadcaster. His works of popular history included 1939: The World We Left Behind (1984) and 1945: The World We Fought For (1985). The Partridges’ lingering hopes that he and Janetta could re-establish their relationship were finally extinguished when, in 1960, he married Cynthia Judah. Cynthia’s novel A Respectable Man (1993), published after their divorce, contains an amusing and by no means respectful portrait of life at Ham Spray in the 1950s. Robert Kee died in 2013.

  Brian Howard spent most of the post-war period abroad in the company of his much younger boyfriend. Nancy Mitford, whom he visited in Paris, reported that ‘Brian came here with a terrible creature called Sam. I thought I would hurt myself with laughing.’ There was little amusement in Howard’s subsequent career. His literary projects remained unrealised and he became addicted to synthetic morphine. Following Sam’s accidental death, early in 1958, while staying in Nice, he committed suicide at the age of fifty-two.

  Julian Maclaren-Ross’s novel Of Love and Hunger, which dramatised his adventures as a vacuum-cleaner salesman on the pre-war south coast, was published in 1947. Hard-up, improvident and reduced to living in cheap hotels and furnished rooms, he described the 1950s as ‘a decade I could have well done without’. His longstanding obsession with Sonia reached its high point in 1955, when he informed a friend that ‘The toughest and wisest blokes in London are speculating on the outcome. The betting’s on me so far – though this is the most formidable girl I’ve ever met’. But the relationship – if that is what it was – came to nothing. Maclaren-Ross died of a heart attack in 1964. The posthumously published Memoirs of the Forties (1965) offer entertaining glimpses of the life he had led in wartime literary London when the going was good.

  Lucian Freud became one of the greatest artists of the post-war age. In 2008 his Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995) was sold at Sotheby’s in New York for $33.6 million, the highest sum then paid for the work of a living painter. The number of his children, from a variety of liaisons, was set at fourteen, although some authorities considered this to be a substantial understatement. Lucian Freud died in 2011.

  King Farouk’s popularity continued to wane. The Egyptian army’s poor showing in the Arab–Israeli war of 1948, which led to the creation of the state of Israel, was particularly resented by his subjects. Four years later he was deposed by the Free Officers’ coup, led by Muhammad Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser. After a brief period in which Farouk’s infant son was recognised as King Faud II, Egypt’s new rulers announced the abolition of the monarchy. For a while, the royal exile, together with his second wife – he had divorced the first in 1948 – lived in Monaco. They later removed to Italy. It was here, at a table at the Ile de France restaurant in Rome, on 18 March 1965, that Farouk collapsed and died, having been poisoned by an assassin allegedly sent by Nasser.

  Barbara last encountered him on a visit to Rome in 1953. At this point he was living with his Neapolitan mistress in the Grottaferrata area. The mistress, named Irma, was, according to Barbara, ‘a buxom, simple, friendly girl’ whose conversation turned on her dream of becoming a film star. Farouk, she reported, had become ‘a lonely, sagging figure’, whose ostracisation by Roman socialites was attributable not to his lax morals but to their finding him ‘boring’. As Barbara descended to her taxi on the final day of her stay, he summoned her back with the words ‘You’ve forgotten something.’ Her last glimpse was of him standing in the doorway ‘with his familiar mocking smile’ holding up a mislaid toothbrush.

  Peter Watson died in 1956 in mysterious circumstances, drowning in the bath after his boyfriend (and legatee) Norman Fowler failed to break down the door and instead ran out into the street to summon help. In the Sunday Times, Cyril Connolly paid tribute to the unique place his old friend had occupied in the world of modern art. As a young man, Connolly explained, ‘he stepped, gay and delightful, out of a charmed existence like a Mayfair Buddha suddenly sobered by the tragedy of his time to become the most intelligent and generous and discreet of patrons’. To Brian Howard, writing to his friend John Banting, ‘he was an angel, and never did or said a mean or ignoble thing his whole life long’. Howard claimed that he could ‘make a list of present-day celebrated painters and writers who owe their all to him. He wouldn’t even tell me their names . . .’

  Frances and Ralph Partridge continued to live at Ham Spray throughout the 1950s, entertaining their friends and doing their best to preserve the values of Bloomsbury in an increasingly uncertain world. Their relationship was cut short by Ralph’s death in 1960, after which Frances left Wiltshire to inhabit the first in a succession of Knightsbridge flats. She was plunged into grief for a second time in 1963 when her only son Burgo died unexpectedly of an undiagnosed aortic aneurysm. In the late 1970s, beginning with A Pacifist’s War (1978), she began to publish selections from her diaries. Nine volumes appeared in her lifetime, and she became a considerable literary celebrity. Her hundredth birthday was celebrated with a party at the Savile Club arranged by Janetta and other old friends. She died in 2004 at the age of 103.

  Nicky Loutit became a successful artist. She now lives on the Suffolk coast with her third husband, the writer Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy. New Year’s Day Is Black, a memoir of her early life, was published in 2016.

  After the closure of Horizon, Cyril Connolly’s immediate problem – aside from his relationship with Barbara – was lack of money. Stephen Spender’s diary from December 1951 records an occasion on which Sonia ‘provided a description of Cyril’s poverty since his marriage’. His material prospects began to improve when an invitation to review books for the Sunday Times led, in the spring of 1951, to a summons to join
its regular staff of critics. Thereafter, as one of the newspaper’s lead reviewers – the other was Raymond Mortimer – Connolly became an influential voice in the dissemination of post-war taste. Never prolific, and stung by accusations of laziness, he published several books in the post-war era. These included two collections of his literary journalism, Previous Convictions (1963) and The Evening Colonnade (1973), and The Modern Movement (1965).

  Once divorced from Barbara, Connolly showed himself anxious to marry again. ‘What you want is a lovely clean old man like me’, he told the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard. In the event his third wife was a young woman named Deirdre Craig, described by one of his biographers as ‘a tall, fresh-faced, whippet-thin girl in her late twenties, recently divorced and with two children’. The couple had two further offspring, a girl named Cressida, born in 1960, and, ten years later, a boy named Matthew. Barbara, hearing of Deirdre’s first pregnancy, regarded it as ‘the final blow’. The marriage prospered, although Deirdre occasionally complained about her husband’s continued intimacy with old flames. As he remarked to Barbara sometime in the early 1960s: ‘At the moment D. has whisked her [Cressida] off to Lewes after announcing that our marriage is finished as I obviously prefer you . . . she said that I was carrying your letter about in my wallet which I do because I can never remember your address. A Freudian lapse’.

  At this point the Connollys were living at Bushey Lodge in Sussex. They later removed to Eastbourne, from which Connolly, clad in a pinstripe suit and every inch the elder statesman of literature, would travel up to London each Wednesday to correct the proofs of his weekly article. A year after his seventieth birthday, celebrated with a lavish dinner at the Savoy, he suffered a heart attack while staying with Barbara at the Mas du Colombier, and was flown back to England. The expenses of his last weeks at the Harley Street Clinic and St Vincent’s Hospital in Ladbroke Grove were borne by his friend Sir Harry d’Avigdor Goldsmid, who remarked that ‘Cyril is dying beyond my means.’ The wartime world of the Lost Girls was briefly recreated around his deathbed, whose visitors included Janetta, Barbara, Sonia and Anne Dunn. Connolly died on 26 November 1974.

  What was the Lost Girls’ legacy? Did they, when it came to it, leave anything behind them other than the memory of a few vaguely scandalous high jinks and some doomed wartime love affairs? There were never enough of them to become a fully fledged youth movement and their influence on the cultural life of their time is largely retrospective, a matter of cameo appearances in post-war fiction and the diaries of 1940s-era literary life. Much of this was down to the highly artificial circumstances that had brought them into being. Without the war, the Blitz, Connolly and the office in Lansdowne Terrace, they lost both their animating spirit and their solidarity. The Barbara of the 1960s, working as a dental assistant in New York or hobnobbing with Warhol, is an interesting specimen of deracinated womanhood but she is not the Barbara of 1942, playing Quennell off against Topolski, turning up late at the headquarters of the Yugoslav government in exile and flitting like some malevolent wraith up and down the staircase at Bedford Square.

  None of this, though, is to minimise the Lost Girls’ importance to the life of their time, to the literary world of the 1940s and the landscapes that stretch out beyond it. In their spiritedness, their independence and their determination to be themselves, they offered a template for some of the female behaviour that came afterwards, and at the very least they constitute a link between the first wave of newly emancipated young women at large in the Mayfair society world of the 1920s and the much more self-conscious Dionysiac hordes of the 1960s and 1970s.

  Any attempt to label them ought to be resisted, if only because most of the nets set to pinion them have a habit of tugging free. Barbara, Sonia, Lys, Janetta and the others may not have been feminists, but their sense of their own autonomy was unusual for the era in which they found themselves, and if they were regularly suborned and patronised by men then they were also capable of turning the tables on their exploiters. Their unhappiness, it might be said, was part of the price they paid for being the people they were. As for their real significance, so much of it relies on intangibles – a way of talking, a way of dressing, a way of behaving, a bat’s squeak of individuality only discernible to those within their immediate circle. But every so often, in one of the great English novels of wartime life, in a Bloomsbury diary, in a letter sent back from a Cairo hotel to a Knightsbridge apartment, there comes a moment when the smoke clears for an instant and in the space suddenly revealed to view, glamorous, edgy and inimitable, a Lost Girl can be found making her presence felt.

  Finale: The Last Lost Girl

  April 2016

  Spring has come to Knightsbridge and the property developers are hard at work furbishing up their investments. The pillared frontages of the houses in Cadogan Place gleam with coats of fresh paint, most of the upper storeys sport billowing polythene drapes, and the parking spaces are jammed up with builders’ vans. At the far end, though, the atmosphere is appreciably more genteel and secluded. Real people live here, you suspect, rather than Russian oligarchs or those mysterious multinational corporates whose nameplates offer no idea of the materials in which they trade. One of them is Janetta, to whose ground-floor flat I am admitted by a polite Spanish servant. Within, all is high-end yet nicely understated opulence: elegant sofas, occasional tables on which copies of weekly magazines are neatly laid out. Here, too, are the thronged mementoes of a past life: Bloomsbury portraits; a bound set of Horizon; black-and-white photographs from sixty years ago; a montage of smiling grandchildren.

  It is a good decade-and-a-half since I last set eyes on Janetta. Back then she was in her late seventies, spry and voluble. Now she is deep into her nineties, bent, frail and less talkative, but with a hard grey eye still glinting vigilantly away. In fact, as terrifying elderly ladies met in the course of my professional duties go, I’d put her straight into the Deborah Devonshire/Baroness Warnock class. There is an immediate difficulty when I try to hand over the caddy-full of choice Fortnum and Mason tea, purchased on the way over from Piccadilly. ‘No . . .’ Janetta murmurs sadly, as she turns the shiny receptacle over in her hands. ‘No, I’m afraid. I really . . .’ Is there a problem with the tea, I nervously enquire. It turns out that Janetta only drinks Chinese, which this variety is not, with a squeeze of lemon. Well, perhaps some of her guests might like it, I suggest. She looks doubtful, and then, anxious not to appear rude, pronounces that ‘It’s got a very pretty tin.’

  The tea stowed away, we repair to the sofa, the tape-recorder – at which she darts several suspicious glances – between us. And here another difficulty presents itself. This is Janetta’s disavowal of the thesis I intend to propound. Having attended to Peter Quennell’s summary of the Lost Girls and been asked if it has any meaning to her, she instantly demurs: ‘No, none at all. I think it’s rather silly, really, because there weren’t odd girls in and out of Horizon. I mean, there was always Lys there the whole time devoted to Cyril and working like mad, and there was always Sonia . . .’ But did she not regard herself as part of the Horizon team? No indeed. ‘I hardly ever went to the Horizon office, I mean truly hardly at all. I mean, I remember that flat and perhaps ate buns there, but I never went to one of their dinner parties or anything like that.’

  Nevertheless, she consents to unpack her memories of first meeting the other members of Connolly’s ménage: of encountering Barbara at Topolski’s studio in Maida Vale; of being introduced to Sonia by Connolly at the height of an air-raid. ‘I think we were in one of those buildings in Piccadilly looking out of the window at . . . searchlights and things . . . He’d just met this new person he thought was rather fascinating.’ By this stage in the proceedings the thought of old scores needing to be settled has strayed into the conversation. There is, for example, talk of the portrait of Lys included in Michael Shelden’s account of the Horizon circle: ‘I mean she was not this fascinating, intelligent, wonderful person. She really was a bit of a nightmar
e.’ In slight mitigation, as with the tin of Fortnum’s bohea, Janetta concedes that ‘she was a very good typist’. As for Sonia’s role at Horizon, ‘well, she practically tried to make out she was its editor by the end’.

  And what about Barbara, I propose. Is it true, as has occasionally been alleged by Horizon’s chroniclers, that the other girls looked down on her for being insufficiently upper-middle class? ‘I didn’t get that impression at all,’ Janetta briskly returns. ‘No, I just thought her incredibly selfish . . . She didn’t hesitate to do anything because she didn’t care whether somebody was annoyed or cross . . . she just didn’t mind at all.’ Although precise details are withheld, it seems clear that some behavioural line was crossed at the time of the Connolly/Weidenfeld stand-off: ‘I mean, he was very nice to me always, Weidenfeld, but my relationship with him was totally buggered up by Barbara . . . God, she was a menace.’

  What does Janetta think of the relationship-buggering menace’s scorching volumes of memoirs? Here aesthetic approval and loyalty to absent friends, not to mention absent husbands, uneasily commingle. ‘Well, I’ve read those two books.’ There is a pause. ‘Well, I mean they’re very . . . they’re very clever and readable and they’re funny and they’re absolutely beastly about everyone. Well, one of the main people she’s beastly about . . . you know she finally married someone I had been married to . . . ?’ There is a split second in which the spectre of the six-times wedded Professor Derek Jackson, with his love of singing the ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’ in Austrian hostelries, and of whom Ferdinand Mount so memorably remarked that ‘to call his carry-on goat-like would be grossly unfair to goats’, looms menacingly between us. ‘And she was ghastly to him. Absolutely horrible to him.’