by D. J. Taylor
. . . My own first encounter with this distinguished figure came in 1975 when I visited him in retirement at Birch Grove. A single log burned fitfully in the grate: to hand on a nearby table lay the newly published biography of his old political associate, Sir Oswald Looney. ‘My dear fellow, do come in,’ he remarked, when he met me at the door, ‘you’ll find the boiler in the little room at the foot of the stairs.’ Happily, once this mistake had been cleared up, he entertained me with the most fascinating reminiscences of Sir Jolyon Gore-Urquhart, assistant chief whip during the reign of the legendary ‘Boffles’ Hardwick (1952–53) with whom, as a schoolboy, Macmillan had enjoyed many a game of Eton Fives. ‘Here young man,’ he said, pressing something into my hand as I got up to leave, ‘I should like you to have this.’ No ten-shilling note was more cherished, and I have it still . . . [continues for thousands of pages].
MARIE ANTOINETTE
ANTONIA FRASER
The new year of 1776 produced climactic conditions of unprecedented severity. Mist rose. Fog enveloped. Snow fell. Ancient sledges, their harnesses sedulously polished, their runners gleamingly refurbished, were prettily sent forth to bowl once more over the roads near Versailles. Yet ensconced in her sylvan bower, solitary, detached from both maternal caresses and husbandly affection, Marie Antoinette knew that in her heart there burned an unquenchable flame. The flame of Venus.
This flame did not, however, resemble the amorous conflagrations so wantonly stoked by less discreet members of the royal entourage, those bold females of whom the memorialist Baron d’Armagnac remarked, ‘levity distinguished their affiliations as brevity distinguished their wit.’ The Comte de Frou-frou, a venerable thirteenth lord of the powder closet and hereditary bearer of the rouge pot, was typical of the kind of older man who appealed to the young Queen as an amusing companion. Such, in fact, was his reputation as a raconteur that Marie Antoinette is said by an anonymous frequenter of the Jardin Anglais to have listened enraptured to his account of having slain a peasant whose singularly odiferous nature had offended his olfactory senses . . .
It is, of course, a grotesque misrepresentation, a mere tatter’s garnish, to suggest that Marie Antoinette, news of the indigency of the populace having reached her royal ear, should unthinkingly have proposed that her multitudinous subjects should, as the historical primers of a later century had it, ‘eat cake’. Whatever comestibles she may have thought appropriate for satisfying the culinary requirements of her people – whether grouse, caviar or pâté de foie gras – it can be confidently asserted that ‘cake’ was not among them.
It was at this point that her eye, ever restless in its sequestration, fell upon the Duc de Doremi, whose shapely calves had long excited the ladies of the royal bedchamber. In fact, it was in this elegantly furnished rendezvous on the morning of 17th December that . . . [continues for a further 500 pages].
THE SECRET LIVES OF SOMERSET MAUGHAM
SELINA HASTINGS
. . . But it was in 1938, as storm-clouds gathered over Europe, that life at the Villa Mauresque, Maugham’s sumptuous Riviera hideaway, reached a zenith of luxe, volupté et sodomé. With its nine acres of annually renewed lawns, manicured each morning by a platoon of scissor-wielding houseboys, its regiment of Nubian bodyguards, its immaculately accoutred yacht the Epicene moored in the adjoining bay, and its pack of timber wolves ready to be unleashed on poor people who rang the bell in search of fragments of discarded pâté de foie gras, the villa was a magnet for Maugham’s galaxy of stylish and well-connected friends.
As Lady Bobo d’Armagnac, a fixture at ‘Morrers’ during this time, recalled in her delicate memoir Still Waits the Cab, ‘Willie was really the most divine host, for whom nothing was too much trouble. I particularly remember the family of rare Peruvian guinea-pigs that he’d had sent over from Fortnums and trained to balance cocktail-glasses on their noses, so that they could carry very dry mint-flavoured martinis out to the guests as they sat on the terrace. Really, you know, he put the art into smart, and it’s something he’s never been given credit for.’
Although leaving the day-to-day running of the establishment to his attentive secretary Gavin Mincing, who as Lady Bobo recalled in her stately way, ‘was always about his person’, Maugham was always prepared to treat those staying at the villa to shafts of his legendary wit. When the celebrated actress Tabitha Fishcake, star of Don’t, Darling, Don’t, remarked of her recent trip to Spain that it had rained incessantly, Maugham took only a moment to remark, ‘Mainly on the plain, I imagine’, to the great amusement of Charlie Chaplin and the Duke of Windsor, who sat nearby.
On another occasion the distinguished physicist Sir Horace Faulks committed the unpardonable solecism of arriving at the gate without an appointment. Barely looking up from the game of Snap on which he was engaged with Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Greta Garbo and the Mahatma Gandhi, Maugham instructed his butler to ‘tell Sir Horace that I am not at Ohm’, a sally which caused the Mahatma to laugh so uproariously that his false teeth fell out into the brie en gelée which even that notorious ascetic had been prevailed upon to sample.
As an enthusiastic sponsor of his friends’ careers, Maugham was always keen to entertain young men of wit, charm and vivacity of whom, as he put it, ‘something might be made’. Visitors at this time included the Hon. Peregrine Joyboy, author of Droop, Dahlias and Lost Amidst Loosestrife, Hyacinth ‘Frisky’ Frisk, of whom Maugham observed enigmatically ‘Hyacinth will undoubtedly go far on those legs of his’, and the rising young interior decorator Antoine de Frou-frou. In his somewhat catty memoir, Payment Deferred, the Hon. Peregrine recalled that he ‘only had to look at my collection of Cartier cigarette cases to remember just how much I owe to Willie’.
It is also interesting to note that Maugham wrote a great many highly successful stage plays, several of which were turned into Hollywood films, and a number of best-selling novels, which for some reason hardly anyone reads these days . . . [continues for hundreds of pages].
THE MITFORDS: LETTERS BETWEEN SIX SISTERS
CHARLOTTE MOSLEY
NANCY TO DIANA, 4 JULY 1925
Having a frabjous time down at Swinners*. Fruity and Wog** are here and everything is simply too killing, darling. There was a bit of an awkward moment when Farve shot a gamekeeper – you know how ‘pushing’ the working classes are becoming these days – but happily Ye Ancient Retainer was just divine about it and said he was proud to have his blood (of which there was rather a lot – don’t get squeamish, Nard) shed by a gentleman, so that was all right.
Much love always, darling, Naunce
UNITY TO JESSICA, 1 APRIL 1936
Dearest Corpse-Chafer,
Berlin is awfully splendid. The Badger* has found me this jolly flat, previously tenanted by some Jewish people who had the misfortune to fall under a train. Too gamboge** of him, I thought. Do tell Debo that the lamp-shades are made out of real human skin, which must have cost a fortune. Goebbels, whom I don’t think you’ve met, has been too sweet and comes round every evening to play Canasta.
Must go now darling as I have bayonet practice at 6.
Ever your loving Bobo
DEBORAH TO DIANA, 19 MAY 1942
Darling Nardy,
Thanks frightfully for the Heavener hankers* – the lady who blows my nose for me was simply prostrate. I forgive you being a Fascist for that.
Hope prison isn’t too awful darling. Everybody is being terribly grim about you being a traitor, but I tell them all not to be so beastly to my poor Nard.
Best love, Debo.
JESSICA TO PAMELA, 13 JANUARY 1958
Look here Woo,
It is simply too vile and foul of you to suggest that I stole Muv’s photo album in order to illustrate that Life magazine article ‘Why Two of My Sisters Were Nazi Loonies’ and you must consider us on non-speakers herewith.
Decca
DIANA TO DEBORAH, 25 FEBRUARY 1988
Darling Debo,
Such a beastly review of the Betj book i
n the Sunday Times by that ghastly little man Carey, saying he was vindictive, snobbish and disloyal. A nobler, funnier man never lived. Could anyone honestly believe that when he wrote that poem about ‘The working classes smell/I’m sure they’ll go to hell’ he wasn’t making a joke? The more wonderful you are the more you are resented, it seems to me.
Had a delightfully understanding phone call from Andrew [Wilson] which was too good of him. Agreed with me that he couldn’t see why everyone was still so interested in us. Just a set of poor, country girls, growing up in the middle of nowhere with Muv and Farve and no money to speak, never knowing what would become of us, not in the least interested in publicity or grand events, but simply hounded by the newspapers . . . [continues for hundreds of pages].
*Their country house at Swinbrook, Gloucestershire
**Possibly Sir Wogan Cavendish-Dilke-Fortescue (1873–1945), landowner and drunk
*Hitler
**From Krapisch, the Mitford private language, meaning “good-natured”
*Apparently the gift of a set of matching handkerchiefs
COLD CREAM: MY EARLY LIFE AND OTHER MISTAKES
FERDINAND MOUNT
It is an odd, sequestered childhood I live here in the cottage beneath the Wiltshire downs, seeing no one, preserving my embarrassed modesty with days of brooding silence, indulged only by my grandmother’s nanny Miss Fothergill, who will later go on to look after David Cameron and marry the Duke of Northumberland.
‘What a quiet life this is,’ I remember saying to Siegfried Sassoon, or perhaps it was T. S. Eliot – I can’t remember – at about this time. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Sassoon remarks – in fact, now I remember, it was Eliot – ‘Let’s ask Graham and Evelyn here what they think.’ But what Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh think is lost in an invitation from a tall man with a moustache, who may have been Harold Macmillan, to come and play horsey-horsey on the lawn.
Although I never think to complain about it, it is a queer hand that fate has dealt me. Of course I am What You Didn’t Miss Part 94.indd 195 completely useless at everything: shy, diffident, lonely, intellectually uncertain, an eternal victim of self-doubt and the mauvais quart d’heure. We have no money and my father is an amateur jockey. ‘If I believed for one moment in discussing affairs of a personal nature,’ I tell my friend Prince Michael of Kent, when we meet at our exclusive prep school, ‘I should be jolly miffed about all these terrible handicaps.’ Sometimes I wonder how, in the face of these disadvantages, I manage to win a scholarship to Eton, write several well-regarded novels and edit the Times Literary Supplement. It can only be down to luck.
I am sixteen, gauche, spotty, inexperienced, dumb . . . [continues], standing with my mother before the Leaning Tower of Pisa. ‘I say,’ she says, staring shrewdly at the crowd of tourists. ‘I’m sure I know that chap. Isn’t it the Pope?’ ‘No,’ I venture, a dim memory of one of the guests at my uncle Tony the famous novelist’s house rising in my consciousness. ‘Surely it’s Charlie Chaplin.’ ‘Don’t be silly,’ she says. ‘It’s Oofy Ffiennes-Twistleton.’ And so she explains about Oofy Ffiennes-Twistleton, whose real name is apparently Canteloupe-Castleton, and whose mother was Amanda Fyfe-Farthingale (née Parakeet), Viscount Voletrouser’s step-daughter, and the time passes very pleasantly.
I have no idea why I am asked to work for Mrs Thatcher, as I have no real political convictions and cannot write for toffee, but somehow here I am pouring her tea in 10 Downing Street and trying to look enthusiastic. ‘That’s a very bad cold you have there, Ferdy,’ Mrs Thatcher says.
‘It’s really nothing, Prime Minister,’ I tell her. ‘There are some aspirins in my bag,’ she goes on. In my haste not to draw further attention to myself I accidentally dislodge several vases of cut flowers over her skirt and set off the fire alarm. Fortunately Mrs Thatcher is jolly decent about this, and we settle down to discuss the Falklands War.
FRANCES PARTRIDGE: THE BIOGRAPHY
ANNE CHISOLM
. . . The advent of the Second World War would offer the sternest test of the values that Bloomsbury held dear. Almost immediately the first of many crises presented itself when Ethel Furbelow (‘Mademoiselle fourrure-dessous’ as Frances and Ralph amusingly nick-named her) the maid-of-all-work at their agreeable Wiltshire residence Wiseacre Cottage gave notice of her intention to leave their employ for a munitions factory on the very day that Frances was due to read a paper to Bloomsbury’s prestigious Trifle Club on the hitherto unexplored subject of Lytton Strachey’s maternal great-aunt.
Quietly furious (‘The silly woman should remember that her first duty is to civilising principles and not to making aeroplanes in which a lot of bestial young men can fly around killing each other, rot them’) Frances resolved to make the tea and hand round the Bath Oliver biscuits herself. The evening, she recorded in her diary, was a triumph (‘The sight of Venetia’s sweet pale face under the shadow of the rhododendrons as we discussed whether Lytton’s sleeping with Bobo was actually a betrayal of Constantia or an humane act of reconciliation brought home to me all the things that it is important not to fight for. I felt that I had made a small, yet infinitely important point’) although she notes that she was ‘terribly shaken’ by Lady Stultitia Blodwyn’s contention that ‘battle dress is really rather fetching’.
Was all that Bloomsbury stood for to be carelessly flung into jeopardy? Frances was honest enough to admit that the behaviour of certain of their friends deeply shocked her. When the young balletomane Cyril Simper decided to enlist in the Sadler’s Wells Rifles (remarking that he would ‘list for a lancer, for who will sleep with the brave?’) she was roused to fury (‘it is simply a self-pleasing gesture, what Virginia in her devastating way would call the bath of least resistance’). What was needed, she believed, as the Panzers swept west over the Maginot Line, was rational discussion and mutual acceptance of opposing points of view. The arrest and internment of the Fifth Columnists Sir Hugo Jackboot and his wife Lady Fruitella, with whom they had enjoyed so many summer picnics on the lawn at Rantingdon, brought her no comfort (‘It is simple barbarism. If Hugs and Fruity want Germany to win, why shouldn’t they be allowed to say so, I wonder?’).
Neither did public disquiet over Lord Howler’s inflammatory broadcasts on Berlin Radio (‘I can’t say I like the man, but he is undoubtedly sincere in what he believes. Of course, the asses can’t see that’). Sometimes the war seemed painfully close, as on the occasion when a soldier from a platoon passing through the village knocked at the door and asked if she could spare a tea-bag. ‘Frankly the sight of his silly, red, pert and somehow condescending face made me feel quite sick. I wished Ralph had been there to impress upon him the consequences of his folly, but alas he was on the telephone to his stockbroker.’
But Bloomsbury, for all the strains imposed on its way of life and its traditional recreations, was still Bloomsbury. In a landscape of Stygian darkness, some beacons still shone hesitantly through the murk. The decision of the distinguished novelist Milo Camp, author of Dadie, I Hardly Knew You and Dividend Payment, to leave his wife’s death-bed for the solace of the much younger Sadie Dinge brought a certain amount of soul-searching (‘We decided that it was important Milo should feel himself valued at this difficult time, that there was no point in criticising a state of affairs of which we were ignorant, and of course everyone knows what Milo is like’). In December 1941 (‘The Americans have entered the war – of course this is simply frightful’) she was able to record that she and Ralph had discussed Freudian analyses of dreams (‘He maintained that a forest, of course, represented pubic hair; I said what if it were just a forest?’) and written a very interesting article for the New Statesman. ‘It seems to me that if we can preserve one civilised outpost amid the reek and decay of our civilisation, then we shall have been true to ourselves in a way with which Lytton and Virginia would readily have sympathised . . . [continues for a very long time].
JOURNAL
ANTHONY POWELL
MARCH 2000
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Tuesday 28 March
Woke up to find myself dead, on reflection a not wholly disagreeable state. In fact a certain status conferred: Shakespeare, Kipling, Stendhal, others one could think of, all passed through what must be admitted a disconcerting process. Absence of ‘essentials of life’ – Debrett, Daily Telegraph, etc. – obvious drawback, tho’ not, one suspects, insuperable.
Wednesday 29 March
Arrival in Heaven. Rather a business. A great crowd of supplicants, none of them known to me, finally disposed into some kind of order by arrival of imposing figure in flowing blue and white robes (the Hon. G. H. Lyttelton’s house colours). This I took to be Archangel Gabriel, tho’ no formal introduction. Elysian fields, glimpsed beyond gates, not unlike lower meadows at Eton. General impression – soaring pediments, arches etc. – not at all unfavourable in point of view of architectural style, tho’ could have done without interminable piped ‘sacred’ music.
Thursday 30 March
Dinner for new arrivals. All perfectly tolerable. God – venerable figure, curiously like Andrew (Devonshire) – perfectly all right once one gets to know him, at pains to put guests at their ease with jokes about ‘fiery furnaces beneath’ etc. Wine Ambrosia 2000 (I did not see the label). Conversation about war, pestilence, death etc. – not subjects on which I am outstandingly hot – but was pleased to discover that attendant cherubim distant connexion of my mother’s Lincolnshire Cherry-Bymme offshoots.