The Great Silence: Britain from the Shadow of the First World War to the Dawn of the Jazz Age

by Juliet Nicolson

  There a pony and carriage was waiting to carry the family ‘along narrow granite lanes between stone walls and hedges and verges covered with wild flowers’. At one moment at the top of a hill, the horses paused panting at the exertion, while Edna and Denis caught their own breath. For there, glimpsed for a tantalising moment between the fields, was the gleaming open sea, before it vanished again behind the curve of the hill. Eventually they were down on the shore, their cottage only a pebble’s skim from the water’s edge. And there was Willie’s sailing boat, waiting to carry them out to sea.

  Willie had taught his young sons to be confident sailors. As the summer warmth began to plump out the air, Denis would spend his days in the dinghy ‘rowing out to sea trailing for mackerel, sometimes from dawn to dusk, rowing for hours, going miles out until the land appeared a haze’. His mother’s trust in his safe return was absolute, even after he came back one evening to tell her that he had broken an oar and had pulled up a floorboard in order to row himself home. Being alone in the water did not scare him. In fact, he recorded that ‘isolation at sea’ fascinated him and he would spend all day, totally naked, the boat bobbing over the waves, his clothes stashed under the seat to keep them dry.

  One day his solitariness was interrupted when he spotted an old man with a bald head and a whiskery face swimming along near him in the open sea. As Denis rowed cautiously nearer the ancient figure, it suddenly vanished. Whether it was a walrus, a seal, or some mysterious gentleman from the bottom of the ocean who had not been expecting human company, Denis never knew. Anchoring off Nare Point, he would let down his line, and fall asleep knowing that the boat would rock and wake him the moment he got a bite. Hauling up a resistant conger into the boat meant that he occasionally ended up flat on his back. But he loved bringing home the catch for his mother to cook for supper. One day at anchor he heard a loud drumming and saw the clear dark blue water turning a deep black. All around him silver flashes were moving on the surface of the water. Entranced, he realised ‘I was in the middle of a shoal of surfacing mackerel.’ The unpredictable magic of the sea never disappointed him.

  During the final years of the war it had been Edna’s habit to record the children’s daily activities in her diary in the smallest detail. She had recorded the day Denis came into the kitchen with cabbage leaves covered in caterpillars; she had recorded her visit to the boys’ school where she was appalled by the art teacher who told her that she could not get the children to draw Bo Peep ‘properly’. She had recorded Denis telling her on the final Easter Day of the war, ‘It will not be a happy Easter in Germany or Austria or Italy or France or England or in fact in the whole world – nobody is so happy as before the war – even children!’ Edward Thomas had been killed a year earlier, on Easter Monday.

  Now, as the memory of the war began slowly to recede, she recorded the detail of her children’s lives on canvas. Justin had joined them for the school holidays, and throughout those summer months Edna drew their seaside life, dashing off her crayoned drawings almost as if she had an accelerating device on a camera. In dozens of water-colour and coloured pencil images she caught the speed and constant movement of a child’s daily activity in scene after scene, as the boys fished, swam, lay in the sun at Gillian Creek or stood on the top of the cliffs, pummelled by the wind. She drew them as they peered over into rock pools, in red shirts looking out at the sea from the dinghy, in blue shirts staring at sunlight flickering over the shallow pools. She painted them with tenderness but without sentimentality. There were pictures of Denis in the dinghy, of both boys on Lorna Doone, the half-decked sloop, of Denis with his lobster pots and of Justin leaning over the gunwale. There were pictures of the boys together, in the cottage eating an apple or by the sea, filling the hours with all the absorption of small boys fascinated with the drift and swell around them and with the abandoned riches that lay scattered on the shore.

  Feather or shell or it may be

  The white bleached wood cast up from the sea,

  A smooth fine stone, blue glass or a flower,

  Gathered and loved in an idle hour.

  The habits of that holiday were as simple and uncluttered as the drawings. Wearing a sleeveless dress, graceful and bare-legged among the nettles, Edna hung the washing out to dry, singing as she did so in her pretty voice, fetched water from the well before sitting round the kitchen table drinking tea out of unmatched cups, or having lunch at funny hours, free to do so without the critical scrutiny of Willie to inhibit her. And she began to get well.

  17

  Trust

  Early Autumn 1920

  The summer was over having once again brought triumph for France on the grass courts of Wimbledon. Last year’s 20-year-old champion Suzanne Lenglen had won the women’s singles trophy for the second year running in a skirt apparently several yards shorter than the preceding summer. Now the autumn with the inevitable echoes of a new school term brought new beginnings.

  Mrs Roberts had managed the family grocery shop in Salford since the war, and had saved £100 cash in the bank. The shop itself she estimated to be worth another £450 and with this money she hoped to leave the impoverished streets of her neighbourhood and move to her dream house near a park and within walking distance of a library. She hoped to find a place with a small garden, and to have ‘a few decent years’ with her family. This thought gave her ‘courage to go on’.

  Ottoline was savouring her own victory. Despite the lengths she went to keep her feelings discreet and at least outwardly disguised, her friends noticed a new effervescence about her. Ottoline and Tiger had at last consummated their love. In her diary she wrote without fear or shame, ‘I have loved to give – now I am allowed to receive. It is a miracle.’

  D. H. Lawrence and Frieda Lawrence had once been frequent Garsington guests, and in the huge gloomy spare room with its sloping floor and its view over the courtyard at the front of the house darkened by the high yew hedge, ornaments were thrown in tempestuous arguments audible throughout the house. Husband and wife would reappear downstairs and, according to their discomforted hostess, ‘sit about with their arms around each other’s necks’. The novelist Katherine Mansfield had described Frieda to Ottoline as ‘that immense German Christmas pudding’. But Ottoline no longer spoke to Lawrence. She had learned through friends of his impending betrayal of her in the character of Hermione Roddice in his new novel Women in Love, due to be published in New York in November.

  Mark Gertler, delighted by the happy transformation in his previously dejected hostess, was friendly with that other Garsington regular, Dorothy Brett, who in turn remained friendly with Lawrence. Rumours that Ottoline was sleeping with the gardener had reached the novelist who had not forgotten the Baroness Bolsover (Ottoline’s mother) and her deep but platonic affection for the Bolsover estate gamekeeper. Nor had he forgotten what the gamekeeper was called. Mellors might be an excellent name for a fictional character, he thought. But Ottoline was writing her own true version of events and asked ‘whoever reads this in years to come’ that they should not ‘mock or laugh’.

  One other relationship appeared to have reached a resolution that summer. After nearly two years of an existence powered by intense sexual passion, Violet Trefusis had been forced to relinquish her lover. Vita Sackville-West had returned to her husband Harold Nicolson and to her two small boys, Ben and Nigel. The French soldier’s uniform, including the fake blood-stained bandage worn by Vita during the war, had been packed away in a trunk in the attic at her home in Kent. Vita and Violet had not once been recognised as they walked in disguise, arms entwined lover-like, through the streets of Piccadilly. Harold, who had retrieved his wife by following the two women in a biplane to a hotel room in Amiens, hoped the affair was well and truly finished. It had nearly destroyed his sanity.

  The mental health of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was, however, of growing concern to friends, critics and the public in general, who were convinced that he was still living firmly in his fictional world when h
e began work on a piece for the Strand magazine about the nature of fairies. On examining some photographs of two girls playing with winged sprites at a waterfall in Cottingly in Yorkshire, he considered them ‘remarkable’. Others considered that the pictures were clever but demonstrable fakes and that Conan Doyle was slightly mad.

  Diana Cooper was looking forward to the autumn. During the summer she had spent many weekends convalescing at her aunt Norah Lindsay’s house at Sutton Courtenay in Berkshire. Here Diana could almost recapture the feeling of life before the war when her aunt would dress in tinsel and leopard skin. At last the constant pain in Diana’s damaged leg was beginning to ease, and she and Duff had found a new house in Bloomsbury’s Gower Street. Duff’s warning that excessive use of morphine might damage her looks had been enough of a deterrent to keep her use of the drug within safe limits. And there was an alternative. Alcohol, the socially acceptable anaesthetic, was equally effective in numbing pain, fear and lingering grief.

  The Coopers were always short of money and Diana’s face, unlike the poor plain dairymaid at Belvoir, as Diana had once observed, was indeed her fortune. A £12,000 offer from a movie producer for a small part in The Glorious Adventure: A Restoration Melodrama would hopefully lead to a lucrative career in the cinema. The war had also left Diana with a growing terror of illness. In July a hardness in her breast convinced her that she was dying of cancer. Despite her doctors’ assurance that there was nothing to worry about, Diana’s almost hysterical anxiety was only tempered when the King of Spain made an extravagant pass at her at a dance given by the Earl of Pembroke, thus confirming to Diana that her looks were firmly intact. All further thoughts of cancer left her head.

  As trust in healing and in a more permanent future began to settle on the country, people were starting to lay plans. Gabrielle Chanel began to investigate whether she could create a distinctive bottled scent with a subtlety that would produce an entire evening’s worth of evaporation. Chanel deplored the harsh intensity of existing perfumes that began the night with an engulfing strength before vanishing within an hour of application.

  Nick La Rocca, the curly-haired, shoulder-shrugging sensation of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, was preparing to return to America. He felt he had had a lucky escape. In between playing engagements at the Hammersmith Palais de Danse he was rumoured to have found romance with innumerable English lovelies, but on the day of his departure, 8 July, he had been alarmed to see the furious face of Lord Harrington, the father of one of the loveliest ladies of all, chasing him down the Southampton boardwalk, a loaded shotgun in hand, shuddering with rage at every step he took.

  Death, the war and the call to arms were all beginning to feel a little more distant. On 9 June the King had opened the Imperial War Museum at Crystal Palace, mainly staffed by ex-servicemen, where John Singer Sargent’s huge and horrifyingly evocative painting Gassed had been hung in a prominent position near portraits by William Orpen of Earl Haig and Marshal Foch. A museum, not a current newspaper was the proper place for it now.

  Harold Gillies was still looking to bring hope to the damaged. After completing thousands of facial operations over the last few years, he had left Sidcup in the summer. He was delighted by the Government’s recent decision to give the full disability allowance for ‘very severe facial disfigurement’: the same sum given to those who had either lost two limbs or a limb and an eye, or suffered total paralysis. He was already feeling some nostalgia for the beautiful grounds at Sidcup where he would often relax by sketching his own watercolours. He had been happy in that place, practising his golf swings in the corridors between the aisles of beds. In order to recover from three years of intensively draining work, he was spending time with his wife Kathleen in a small cottage at Hothfield near Maid-stone in the Weald of Kent. There he had been writing a medical textbook and in the afternoons he would fish, coming to know ‘the wonder of the mayfly, nightingale and nightjar’.

  Earlier in the year Gillies had been staying at a hotel in Yorkshire and happened to notice that the chambermaid had a disturbingly malformed nose. Leaving the page proofs of his book on the desk in his room open at the pages in which he described the ways in which he could improve noses, he went downstairs for dinner, leaving the room empty for the chambermaid to come and turn down his bed. A few weeks later he was not surprised to see her standing in front of him in his consulting rooms.

  His awareness of the distress caused by deformity went well beyond the urgent cases on which his efforts had been concentrated for the last four years. Cleft palates, harelips, car accidents, birthmarks, and even botched attempts at plastic surgery made lives miserable, as he well recognised: ‘the link between the psyche and the surgeon becomes more and more evident’. An amazing variety of cases came to his surgery for help. A woman, who had breasts that hung huge ‘like vegetable marrows’ right down to her waist, had never felt able to swim or even to dare to dance with a boy in case his arm encountered the pendulous growth. Gillies removed the equivalent in weight to four large sacks of flour and his infinitely lighter, more agile and happier patient was married within months. A factory worker whose glorious long hair had been caught in a machine was scalped so severely that ‘a red Indian could not have done it more thoroughly’. She was provided with a new forehead after Gillies used his miraculous pedicle technique, unrolling the new flap of skin ‘like a carpet being laid’. To the amazement of her colleagues she was back at work within weeks of leaving hospital.

  He dealt with burns, with injuries from dog bites and injuries incurred during boxing matches. One woman who had been badly burned in a car accident allowed Gillies to persuade her husband to donate the skin from his bottom to make the necessary large graft possible. The husband took great pleasure in telling Gillies that whenever his mother-in-law kissed her daughter goodbye he felt as if he was ‘getting his own back’.

  But even Gillies, who had seen almost every variety of physical deformity, was challenged when a housemaid arrived in his consulting rooms and ‘crossed the room with great lumbering strides and vaulted on to the couch like a rugby player’. Since entering service at the age of 15 this unfortunate woman had always been acutely embarrassed when undressing in front of the other maids, and became bewildered when she found herself head over heels in love with the laundry maid. Gillies’s examination revealed that she was suffering from hypospadias: the ambivalent appearance of her genitals had meant that she was wrongly identified at birth as a girl. Under Gillies’s surgical guidance she became the muscular husband of a farmer’s daughter.

  Interventions in nature’s handiwork were on the advance and Gillies was fascinated by the news that Serge Voranov, a Russian-French surgeon, had on 12 June successfully infused a few youth-endowing slithers from a baboon’s testicles into the tissue of a human scrotum. Meanwhile the 424 pages of the book with 844 often frightening and detailed illustrations that Gillies had been working on was complete and Plastic Surgery of the Face was published at a price tag of three guineas. Immediately it became the authoritative text and doctors expected no more comprehensive book on the subject to be written in their lifetime. The British Medical Journal had ‘no hesitation in saying that this is one of the most notable contributions made to surgical literature today’.

  On 27 October 1920 a celebratory dinner was held at the Savoy to mark the centenary of the renowned stationers W. H. Smith, who had maintained a shop in the Strand since 1820. During the sumptuous dinner a letter from Lord Northcliffe was read to the assembled company congratulating the firm on its role in pioneering the ‘trading in books and newspapers at railway stations, a system now universal the world over’. Much cheering followed and then Lord Riddell, former proprietor of the News of the World and representative of the press barons at the Paris Peace Conference, read a special poem:

  There are gold smiths and silver smiths

  The choice one of the tribe

  There are blacksmiths and white smiths

  Whose arts I can’t descr
ibe

  There are tin smiths and the smiths of iron shoes

  But the best smiths of all the smiths

  Are the ones that deal in news.

  The eulogy brought smiles and tears to the eyes of the toughest tradesman present.

  At Oxford, male undergraduates that autumn were steadying themselves for the day when their female counterparts would join them in the Sheldonian Theatre. Women students were to receive their degrees for the first time. Nearly two years after scenes of uncontrolled chaos during which a woman had hitched her skirts above her waist in celebration of the first day of peace, Oxford had grown calm. Winifred Holtby had been startled by the beauty of the city that summer. The exuberant undergraduate, ‘superbly tall and vigorous as the young Diana with her long straight limbs and golden hair’ as her friend Vera Brittain saw her, had missed the ancient stone buildings and the hidden courtyards. She had missed the delicious sense of mystery and privilege in pushing open the small wooden doors set within the large college gates, and stepping over the threshold into the perfect grassy quadrangles beyond. Winifred had interrupted her studies at Somerville in 1918 to spend a year in a signals unit crammed into a hut at Abbeville in France; she was delighting once again in the contrasting freedom and space that she had found on returning to Oxford in the autumn of 1919 to complete her history course. This last summer the buttercups had been so prolific she had never seen the like and the whole city seemed affected by the brightness of the season.