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

by Juliet Nicolson

  She had been sharply aware of the rhythm of the academic year, enjoying ‘burlesques and school discipline and Dostoevsky and porridge’ in the spring, when ‘the air is frosty and the road is dry’, and moving on to the matchless exhilaration that fills an Oxford undergraduate’s summer days. Against a background of champagne and punts, love and poetry, anything that life, glorious life might offer seemed within her grasp. Winifred had heard some exceptional lectures during the Trinity term. The poets Hilaire Belloc and Laurence Binyon had come to the University to speak about the business of writing poetry and plays, but it was the talk on the craft of the short story given by John Masefield, the Poet Laureate, that Winifred had enjoyed most. In fact it was the best talk she had ever heard. The Schools hall where he spoke was ‘crowded from end to end’. Admission was by tickets, so coveted that they quickly sold out, resulting in more cheating than ‘in a card sharper’s den’. The lucky seated undergraduates, including Winifred, were delighted by Masefield’s ‘charming personality’ and his ‘glorious’ sense of humour.

  Afterwards down on the banks of the River Cherwell Winifred and her friends had filled their arms with wild roses and watched the darting, hovering blue dragonflies and ‘a flurry of bees and swallows’. England was free at last ‘of the blight of war’. Just as the busy life of the High Street had resumed and the bicycles ‘swarmed once again’ through Carfax at the junction with Broad Street, so Winifred was pleased and calmed by the rhythm of the river where she watched ‘some very admirable and astute little water rats bustle in and out among the flags’.

  Robert Graves had moved to live at Boars Hill near Oxford, after taking up his place at St John’s as an undergraduate. That summer, he had taken a short holiday with his wife Nancy. They had bicycled to Dorchester, passing the now empty army camps near Stonehenge that had been built to accommodate a million men. They had spent some time with Thomas Hardy who on 2 June had celebrated his eightieth birthday. They had discussed the dangers of the overworn phrase in poetry. Hardy urged Graves to omit ‘the scent of thyme’ from one of his recent poems. Graves begged to be allowed to keep it. They discussed how the local church had once been for Hardy the musical, literary and artistic hub of village life. He told Graves how the clergyman on whom he had modelled Mr St Clair in Tess of the D’Urbervilles had written to the War Office to object about the brass bands sent to disturb the discipline of the Dorchester barracks. The older poet confided to the younger something that had been troubling him. Out gardening one day, the full realisation of a new story had come into his head as he pruned a rose bush. Character, plot, sensibility, all were assembled in his mind. Hardy continued to chop down the wayward branches, unintentionally eliminating something more than he had intended. On returning to the house he found that the entire story had evaporated irretrievably. He told Graves of an essential rule for so many writers. He reminded the younger man of the evanescent imagination which needs to be tethered to paper and pinned there if it is not to escape.

  After the euphoria of the summer when fine weather eases the pain in men and women’s souls and the autumn term was imminent, Winifred wrote to a friend in some despair, ‘England’s in a horrid mess ... we’re all running after the moon.’ The result of everyone fighting for ‘rights’ when it seemed to Winifred that although ‘they don’t know what they are, they intend to have ‘em’ was that the tally of lost working days in the nearly two years since the end of the war was now, according to government estimates, nudging over sixty million. On 18 October a group of unemployed servicemen from the North of the country came down to London, arriving in Whitehall just as a meeting between Lloyd George and the mayors of the London boroughs was being disbanded. Emotion could not be contained as the startled mayors saw angry men rushing towards them waving the Red Flag and lobbing bricks at the Georgian windows of Downing Street. The police arrived and charged, injuring forty men.

  But Winifred deplored the way the Government was universally condemned for every problem both personal and financial, along with the accompanying sense that everyone deserved ‘pensions, indemnities, two shillings a week rise in wages, cheap coal, electric massage, twopence a case divorce and railway transport’. She thought people behaved as if Lloyd George had found a gold mine in the back garden of his official residence. Men were not living up to the standards women imposed on them as heroes of war.

  A few months earlier Vogue had thrown up its hands in disgust at the extremes to which ‘old and decrepit’ men would go in the pursuit of eternal youth. ‘When they show signs of senility [they] are to have the glands of young and skittish monkeys grafted onto them and hey presto! They will immediately become hale and active.’What on earth was to follow, Vogue mused? ‘Will they take to the trees? Will tails begin to sprout?’ The magazine could only imagine what future generations might think of this lunacy, a folly comparable in absurdity to the notion of reviving the bowler hat, musical comedy, or even Cubist painting!

  But the search for beauty and eternal youth was on the increase as seldom before. The Sketch joined in the derision concerning the claims that the grafting of the interstitial gland of the monkey could bring back lost youth. Will Cabinet ministers begin tangoing across Downing Street, the newspaper wondered? ‘We weep’, wrote Winifred, half laughing, ‘because we can’t make archangels out of men all in a hurry, forgetting it has taken a good many thousands of years to make a man out of a monkey.’ The legacy of primates was further evident to Winifred when, having thought that ‘now and then we see his wings sprouting, we weep to find that the only superfluous excrescence on his person is a remnant of his monkey’s tail!’

  By a grim irony, on 25 October, in the very same week that primates were causing Winifred to puzzle over man’s aspirations and just as the Illustrated London News was reporting the rising fashion for monkey fur as a trimming on hats, Alexander, King of Greece, died from the effects of blood poisoning caused by a bite from his own pet monkey.

  The absurdity and unpredictability of life continued to trouble Virginia Woolf. In her diary that day she questioned, ‘Why is life so tragic, so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss? I look down. I feel giddy. I wonder how I am ever to walk to the end.’ Everywhere she looked she saw unhappiness and resistance to change. Although continuing to meet her Bloomsbury friends at gatherings of the quasi-nostalgic Memoir Club they had founded in the spring, she spent much of her time at Monk’s House in the village of Rodmell in Sussex which she and Leonard had bought the previous summer. She was working on a new novel, Jacob’s Room, and consciously shifting her writing away from the more traditional style of her previous two novels, The Voyage Out and Night and Day.

  On 11 October the Prince of Wales returned home from another long promotional tour abroad, to face a parental dressing down for allowing his picture to be taken with his new aide Louis Mountbatten in a swimming pool. ‘You might as well be photographed naked,’ his father expostulated. Yet at Oxford there was a general feeling that the time had come to cast off prejudice and inhibition. The increasing recognition of the invaluable role women had played in the war was hard to ignore even in establishments and professions that had previously done their best to do so. Winifred went so far as to surmise that there were only three anti-feminists left in the world: the Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon, the lawyer Lord Birkenhead, and Mrs Humphry Ward, president of Britain’s anti-suffrage movement. The Sex Disqualification Bill had become law the preceding December just after Lady Astor had taken her seat. Women solicitors had formed their own ‘1919 Club’ in celebration of the new law that allowed them to practise for the first time and Oxford University had incorported the membership of women in the University into its statute.

  On 20 October Winifred was pleased to boast that she and her great friend Vera Brittain had been welcomed into the Sheldonian, the beautiful golden-stoned theatre sitting proudly at the centre of Oxford’s academic nucleus of buildings, to take part in the matriculation ceremony and to be ‘initiated int
o the mysteries of degrees at last’. Shining in the sunshine, the scarlet hoods of the students were out-glamourised in their vibrancy by, Vera noticed, ‘the wine red amphilopsis which hung with decorative dignity over walls and quadrangles’.

  Cambridge had not yet agreed to allow this huge gender barrier to be demolished, and on that sunny autumn day in Oxford only a few of the 4,181 male students were gathered for their own academic crowning and the few looked so abashed they might have been interlopers. As the Principals of the five women’s colleges, who were all to be awarded MAs as part of the process of raising the status of women in the University, processed up the aisle of the theatre there was ‘rousing applause’. Ghosts of women long dead, ‘women who did not care whether they saw the end so long as they had contributed to the means’, beamed down on their protégés. But this was a show, an act of theatre in which the players strutted and posed, the women adopting expressions of’demure severity’ while the men ‘assumed an attitude of determined conviction that nothing special was happening’. The atmosphere was ‘tense with the consciousness of a dream fulfilled’. The Vice Chancellor became so agitated by the novelty of the proceedings that he mistook his mortarboard for his Bible, and matriculation took place with the help of a tap from his hat.

  The women, among them a young published poet, Dorothy L. Sayers, who had left university in 1916 and now returned to claim her degree, stood in their specially designed caps and oversized gowns. Perhaps the sight was not particularly glamorous but it certainly incorporated, according to Winifred, ‘the visible signs of a profound revolution’. Later that Friday the High Street was filled with the unprecedented sight of women on bicycles, wearing their flimsy female versions of mortarboards with their ‘deplorable habit’ of slipping down over one eye, and trying not to get their unfamiliar gowns caught in the spokes. Male undergraduates responded with courtesy. One newly gowned young woman grasped a young male hand, exclaiming in ecstasy that she had waited decades for this day, only to receive the polite response that she did not look her age.

  Winifred’s friend Vera Brittain, who had interrupted her time as an undergraduate at Somerville to become a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse, had returned to the University, changing her degree course from English to history. There was another reason for her return. With the deaths of her brother, his greatest friend and her own fiancé she found herself deprived of ‘the alternative lives that I might have lived’. She had been absent from Oxford for four years and in the seclusion of her grief found the atmosphere ‘abnormally normal’. The students seemed determined to continue with the gay life that had preceded the war. At the age of only 26 she had become one of the huge number of suspiciously regarded spinsters who, verging on the outer age limit for marriage, were thought, without the fulfilment of children or sex, to be running the risk of going mad. The only thing, she told Winifred later, that held her to life was her own personal ambition to succeed.

  One day in her first term after returning to Oxford, Vera had been attending a history tutorial with the Dean of Hertford College when a young woman burst into the room. Her physical appearance, bronzed by the summer sun in contrast to the small pale Vera, was astonishing. Dressed in a striped coat with an emerald green hat sitting on top of golden hair that seemed to illuminate the dull atmosphere of the study ‘like a brilliant lamp irrepressibly shining in a dark corner’, the figure glowed with ‘the vivacity of health and unquenchable spirits’. This was Vera’s first encounter with Winifred. She took an instant and contemptuous dislike to her, behaving with ‘barely concealed hostility’. Soon they clashed fiercely and publicly at the debating society. Vera confused Winifred’s ease with life with superficiality, and in her turn Winifred had been taken aback at Vera’s sense of superiority towards anyone who had not experienced the agony of war at first hand.

  Another Somerville undergraduate, Hilda Reid, was struck by the contrast in the two young women. Winifred was full of fun and ‘very good company’ while Vera was prone to melancholy, ‘a very little creature with wet brown eyes’ who found thunder and mice equally terrifying. And Winifred’s all-embracing nature, her open-mindedness towards people, her passion for reading, for writing poetry, meeting men, buying clothes and involving herself in politics had the result of enraging Vera still further. Winifred’s vitality, she found, had the effect ‘of a blow upon my jaded nerves’.

  But eventually Winifred’s strength of personality warmed the silent, angry older woman. One day when Vera was ill, an uninvited visit from Winifred to her sickbed brought grapes and gentle sympathy. And Winifred brought more. There was an apology for the argument at the debating society and an exchange of reminiscences about the camp at Abbeville. Vera began to change her mind and lose her distrust of this vibrant and compassionate individual.

  On the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1919 the two women had accompanied each other to observe the two minutes’ Great Silence at Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford and to remember those they had loved. The pain of the service was eased for both of them by their growing friendship. By the spring of 1920 the two had became inseparable.

  This unlikely friendship gave Vera a lifeline, a reason for living. From June 1918 when her brother Edward was killed in Italy until that April of 1920 she had not known anyone ‘to whom I could speak spontaneously or utter one sentence completely expressive of what I really thought or felt’. Winifred had changed that. But even Winifred was ignorant of how profound an effect the war had made on Vera. After a day spent walking in the fields around Box Hill and laughing together at the poets Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves and Roy Campbell, who kept a shop and wore red leather slippers and lived on goat’s milk and cheese, Vera would return to her room and to her solitary nightmare. She dreamt that her face was changing and that in the morning she would wake to find that she had been transformed into a witch or that she had grown a full beard overnight. Rushing to the mirror she would see her own hairless face staring back at her in relief and horror combined. Terrified of uncovering a suppressed awareness of the ‘thinness of the barrier between normality and insanity’ she did not even dare tell her friend about the nightmares she suffered. The truth remained a shared secret between her sleeping and her waking self. She drifted ‘to the borderland of craziness’ but was too frightened to admit it.

  A daytime fear haunted her as well. Her new lodgings in Keble Road that Trinity term of 1920 were overrun with mice. Images of the sights and sounds and smells and fears and cries of pain that had filled the trenches and which she knew so well from Roland and Edward reverberated around her room. ‘Armies of large fat mice’ transformed a sanctuary into a prison. And what is more the room was filled with five separate mirrors. Dreading a sudden appearance of five identical hags as if on a Macbethian heath, she would cover her eyes to avoid seeing her own reflection. Fearful that the mice would re-emerge in the middle of the night, and desperate to prevent a recurrence of the dreaded visionary hairy growth, she would barely sleep a wink all night.

  Vera was unaware that only a few miles away Robert Graves was imagining Beowulf ‘wrapped in a blanket among his platoon of drunken thanes in the Gothland billet’. Nor was she aware that in the middle of one of the English literature lectures Graves would ‘have a sudden very clear experience of men on the march up the Béthune-La Bassée road’ and that the smell of the French knacker’s yard nearby would rise up from the desks of the lecture theatre and swamp him. Gradually the fear began to recede as her mind concentrated on her own writing and her new life-enhancing friendship. Hope and trust were proving to be the cures for grief.

  18

  Acceptance

  11 November 1920

  No one who had lived through the war and lost someone they loved had been able to ignore the moments of false hope which were still capable of flaring up. The sound of a postman tipping the letterbox flap, the bark of a dog at the click of a garden latch, a knock at the door, the ring of a telephone – the cruel mind-game of false hope f
lourished in a context where there was no proper evidence of death.

  The Lutyens monument, with its coffin-like presence, provided a receptacle in which, in the imagination of those still grieving, a body could be laid. For nearly eighteen months the temporary wooden Cenotaph had been acquiring increasing poignancy and significance not only for all who saw it but for all those denied a body and a coffin in which to place it.

  To be in the silent presence of the Cenotaph, the mind paradoxically was free to express anything it chose. Here at last was a tangible object on which to focus personal grief. Lacking any inner substance of its own, it seemed to be the silence of grief made visible, the absence of the missing men made real. For a Christian, the very emptiness of the Cenotaph held a symbolism like that of Christ’s tomb after the Resurrection. Comfort came in many guises and for some the Cenotaph carried with it a suggestion that the dead were perhaps not finally dead, but had risen again to a better life. The Morning Post noticed that ‘Near the Memorial there were moments of silence when the dead seemed very near.’

  Despite being a construction of wood and plaster, the monument in its colour and size resembled something permanent, substantial. Its presence interrupted the flow of six lanes of traffic, but suggestions that it be moved to Parliament Square were dismissed. Lutyens had designed the thirty-five foot high Cenotaph to dominate the great sweep of road that is Whitehall and his wish was respected.

  Every day since the unveiling, the base of the monument had been concealed by the bouquets, garlands and wreaths heaped upon it. Further armfuls of flowers were continually laid at its foot – flowers brought from country meadows, from allotments, from back gardens and great estates. Here at last was a place where the mourning could begin and the horror recede. Here was a place where four years of pent-up sorrow could at last express itself, and where the bereaved could gather to remember. Passengers on the top deck of passing London buses removed their hats in salute.