Among the knot of mainly women at the villa, perched in the hills above Piccola Marina, was Elsie Mendl, who had just staged another of her wonderfully eccentric balls. The Circus Ball, as it became known, was complete with clowns, jugglers and sword swallowers. As Vogue magazine reported: At midnight, Elsie had appeared along a torch-lit pathway, dressed in pink tights and a spangled tutu, her hair dyed a brilliant electric blue, on the back of a white elephant. It would become known as the last great ball of the pre-war era, something the women on Capri had suspected. Europe had feared war for the last five years and now it was clear that Hitler would not be appeased and Britain would not capitulate to his demands. Life was about to change.
26
“I’M NOT CRYING; THERE’S RAIN IN MY EYES”
Sheila would always have vivid and haunting memories of the day that her younger son, Peter, graduated from RAF Cranwell as a pilot. She was proud of his “wings” but worried, as any mother would, that if war happened she might never see him again: “We lunched at a hotel in Nottingham, both feeling deeply, trying to be brave and make jokes, not quite knowing what to say to each other. I looked at him carefully, trying to memorise every detail of his dear face. One never knew. After lunch we went to the cinema. The film was Walt Disney’s Snow White . . . As we came out the newsboys were calling ‘Chamberlain back from Munich. Peace in our time’. I burst into tears. The next morning I went to church and thanked God.”
It would be another nine months before war finally came to Europe and this time there were no cheering crowds in Trafalgar Square, just air-raid sirens and a call for Sheila and her neighbours to report to Marylebone Town Hall to be fitted for a gas mask, as she later reminisced: “I have never been able to make anyone understand how air raids made me feel. To me, it is almost like being in love; as one’s heart beats fast and one’s pulse races—not altogether unpleasant. Perhaps love and fear are stimulated from the same gland!”
A month before the declaration of war, when Sheila had been on the island of Capri, she and the other society women had discussed not whether war was inevitable but when it would begin and where they might go to be safe. Many of the others had chosen the safety of the United States but Sheila, who might have opted for the isolated security of her homeland Australia, had decided to return to London, and to take up a role in the civilian response to the conflict they all expected.
With two sons and a husband going to war it was not a difficult decision for Sheila to return to volunteer nursing, the same role she had taken in Egypt with her mother during the Great War. The maternity wing of the Great Royal Northern Hospital, for which she had raised so much money through the Derby Ball over the years, had been relocated from Central London; there was a need not only to keep pregnant women as safe as possible from the expected bombing raids, but also to rationalise civilian medical services and free up beds for convalescing soldiers. Euan and Barbara Wallace had agreed to convert their grand Sussex manor house, Lavington Park, into a temporary maternity facility, and it was here that Sheila would initially volunteer. The comforts of life in a London mansion would not be difficult to put aside, even if it meant living in a dormitory with six other women and working eleven-hour days assisting medical staff.
She was already there on September 8, just five days after Britain’s entry into the war, working the 8 a.m.–9 p.m. shift during which she had helped to deliver a baby girl, which the mother promptly named Sheila. The next morning—her forty-fourth birthday—Sheila was bathing her infant namesake when there was a telephone call from Buffles. After fobbing him off while she finished drying the child, Sheila took the phone:
“Good morning, thank you for remembering my birthday,” she said.
There was a silence at the other end, then Buffles said quietly: “I have some bad news for you.”
Her heart seemed to stop in that moment: “It’s Peter isn’t it?”
Buffles sighed: “Yes.”
“He’s dead.” She didn’t ask; she didn’t have to.
“Yes.” It was all Buffles could muster.
The details of his death would remain sketchy, even more than seventy years later. Officially, he was deemed to have died on active service, not in combat but flying a Hurricane L1631 in a night-time accident in the skies above the green fields of rural England.
The official telegram followed the next day, words pasted in strips which ended: “The Air Council express their profound sympathy in your bereavement. Signed Under Secretary of State Air Ministry”. It would be one of the first of thousands of telegrams that would have to be sent to distraught parents over the next six years.
Sheila would keep copies of the newspaper tributes that followed what was one of the first deaths of the war: “Erskine was one of the best pilots we had,” one unnamed senior officer was quoted as saying. “His zeal and courage were quite amazing. He died young but got more out of life than men many times his age.”
Peter St Clair-Erskine, just short of his twenty-first birthday, was a rarity among his generation—a child of the early 20th century who knew only peace in his lifetime. But this statistic did not tell the real story of a young man born on October 30, 1918, amid the euphoria of an end to the horrors of the 1914–18 war.
The guns had been silenced, replaced by bells of rejoicing, but that did not prevent Sheila’s younger son from growing up in a period of constant turmoil. His first years were spent in a society struggling to rise from the ashes of conflict and his teen years were economically ravaged by the consequences of the subsequent era of excess.
His private world may have been one of privilege, but that was largely an adult concept in a culture which barely acknowledged children, who were nursed and cared for by paid nannies and maids until the age of seven or eight, when they were sent away to boarding school. The more privileged the family, it seemed, the less children saw of their parents. The notion had always bothered Sheila who lamented that she preferred the American system which kept children in the bosom of the family for longer.
Neither was there enough wealth to hide the difficulties of his parents’ marriage. His mother had always been worried about the family finances, complaining to her errant husband about not having enough money to buy gloves and coats for him and his brother in winter, at a time when his father was continuing to gamble his way into bankruptcy.
Peter and Tony had done what was expected of them. They had attended the right schools and, as the seeds of political discontent began to spread through Europe once more, they had chosen careers that would allow them to play their parts in the anticipated conflict. Peter had gone into the RAF after leaving Eton while Tony had studied at Oxford and later joined the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, where his father and grandfather had served.
Sheila was determined to see Peter’s body and, against advice, went to Northolt Air Base where the accident had occurred, where she was shown into a tiny whitewashed room: “He was lying there covered with the Union Jack. They told me not to lift the flag—I obeyed this order. I ran my hands up and down his body. It was explained to me later that he was broken into small pieces and put together for my benefit (which was a nuisance for them!)”
Sheila struggled to hold herself together: “Buffles said I must be a brave Australian; a Waltzing Matilda. I tried to live up to this idea of me. We buried Peter with full military honours and with a squadron of RAF [officers] firing salutes into the air. Then the ‘Last Post’ and pipers. The wailing of the pipes seemed to tear one’s heart to pieces.”
After the funeral she returned to Lavington, determined to keep working, despite being “dazed and exhausted with sorrow”. She would recall: “One had to pull oneself together and appear to be normal because we had our work to do.” If anyone caught her crying she would explain: “I’m not crying; there’s rain in my eyes.”
Her stoicism could clearly be seen in a letter she wrote a few weeks later to her close friends Georgia and Sachie Sitwell. She was grateful for their best wishes but
adamant that life had to move on: “Thank you both so much for your sweet and sympathetic letters about my little Petsie. One’s friends’ thoughts and love help so much—I am here for a few days (Cram Hill Hotel, Bath) and then return to work at Lavington. Very much love to you both.”
Duff Cooper was one of the hundreds who offered their condolences over the next few weeks. Unlike his attempts of five years earlier to kindle an illicit romance, this note was retained by Sheila: “Darling, All my deep sympathy and love are with you. Thank heaven for your high, gay courage that will help you to bear this and to face everything. Duff”
News spread quickly back to Australia, where Peter Loughborough’s death was reported widely. In a comment to The Australian Women’s Weekly, Sheila said: “We’ve all got to do everything possible to end the struggle as soon as possible. All my family are working, but it was most difficult for me to say goodbye to my eldest son, Anthony, when he went off . . . in the British Expeditionary Force.”
Sheila’s almost sanguine acceptance of her son’s death reflected the attitude of a community faced with the stark truth that war would produce many tragedies and they would almost certainly strike most families, privileged and poor.
The Wallace family, as wealthy as it was, would be among the worst affected. Gerard, the younger son of Idina Sackville, was killed in action in August 1943 and David, whom Sheila had reunited with Idina, was killed in August the following year. Then two of the sons of Euan and Barbara—Edward and John—died in 1944 and 1946 respectively.
Day-to-day life had obviously changed dramatically. This time there had been anticipation of war long before it arrived and the city had not only prepared physically for conflict but also psychologically.
In mid-October 1939, around the time Peter St Clair-Erskine should have been celebrating his twenty-first birthday, Vogue published an article—“London under Arms”—which was intended to capture the spirit of the sand-bagged city facing its second “war to end all wars” in a generation:
This is no kiss-the-boys-good-bye affair. There is no flag-wagging; no champagne hysteria; no jingo braggadocio; no God-speeding the brave boys in Khaki on their way to the front—and glory. We go into it cold sober . . . Too many of us remember the last war, or grew up in its shadow, to have any illusions left on that score. It is an unlovely, bloody business that we must face again so best get on with it and least be said.
To begin with, all theatres, cinemas, nightclubs and dance halls were shut down. But after a while some theatres began opening again, at odd times and in odd places. Audiences trooped out to the fringes of London, to suburban theatres such as Golders Green, where John Gielgud’s exquisite production of The Importance of Being Earnest was now being housed. Brighton theatres were considered accessible and safe. Cinemas were playing to capacity at 2.30 in the afternoon, and opening their doors at 10 a.m. As Vogue observed: “The Café de Paris and Quaglino’s are full again—with every other man in khaki and some women in uniform.”
Despite her outward resilience, Sheila struggled privately with Peter’s death. She had seen death close at hand while nursing in Egypt but this was different. She shifted out of the hospital and into a small hotel outside Bath to be alone with her grief. Hundreds of letters from well-wishers arrived but she could not bear to read them. It was Poppy who eventually, gently forced her to face the reality, reading letters out aloud. They both cried but it was a healing of sorts.
Sheila went back to London, to Hamilton Terrace, and began to see a few friends and return to volunteer work and the war effort. She was even summoned to Buckingham Palace where the King and Queen spent an afternoon with her in private, talking about the past and their children. It touched Sheila deeply: “The Queen has infinite charm,” she would write of the day. “It seemed strange to realise that ‘Prince Bertie’ was now ‘The King’.”
In March 1940, six months after Peter’s death, she got a cable from her brother Roy. Their mother had died suddenly. The world turned again but her response was typical: “I was beginning to feel slightly recovered and now another blow. I felt I couldn’t bear it but, of course, one can.”
In the European summer of 1939, against a backdrop of a city preparing for war, Tony Loughborough had teamed up with a young American to do the rounds of the parties and hunt for girls. They called themselves “Ross Kennedy” and preferred chasing blondes and women slightly older than their twenty-two years. Tony was eleven days older than Jack, the son of the US Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Joe Kennedy, who had made his entrance into London society at the send-off for Joachim von Ribbentrop back in March 1938.
Tony was keen on Jack Kennedy’s younger sister, Kathleen, better known as “Kick”, although he had competition among the legion of young aristocrats who flocked to London for the Season. He became close to the family, often joining golf rounds with Joe Senior and his two sons, Jack and young Joe, and listening to the ambassador’s views on how to strike a peace deal with Hitler, which had made him unpopular with the British Government and were not unlike the views of Edward VIII. Kennedy Sr found a supporter in the young peer, more because of his belief in free speech than because of any shared idea that Britain should concede to Hitler’s demands. It would be an enduring friendship between the two families, both of which were to face tragedies over the next decade.
Tony was staying with the Kennedys the night his brother Peter died. In the space of four weeks between August and September 1939, he had lost his grandfather and his younger brother, followed six months later by his Australian grandmother. He had also assumed a heady title, as the 6th Earl of Rosslyn, but this had meant little to him, given his sense of loss and that, at the time he got the news, he was sitting at the Staff College at Camberley, awaiting the inevitable call to war and possible death.
He was commissioned into the King’s Royal Rifle Corps in June 1940, and given the rank of captain, but he was still at the college early in December 1940 when he wrote to Jack Kennedy, who had returned to the United States to study at Harvard University, where he produced a thesis examining the British Government’s failure to avoid the current war with Germany. Kennedy’s paper had just been published in book form, under the title Why England Slept, which provided Tony Rosslyn with his reason for writing:
“My dear Jack,” he began and proceeded to congratulate his friend on the thesis which he said was beautifully written:
Most American writers do write beautifully, a fact which has never ceased to amaze me when one takes into consideration the pernicious phrases that they use in conversation. But its chief plus, I thought, was the completely fair attitude which you adopted toward every variety of individual or institution mentioned in the book. There was no prejudice, sarcasm or egotism to be found anywhere, which is most unusual in any author under 70. The result was a helpful, friendly, impersonal commentary on past events which comes as an oasis in the desert to one who has been reading the free press in England, where “freedom” is presumably another word for “licence”.
The young man then targeted unseen military censors, revealing his keen intellect and desire to express himself freely:
I suppose it would be possible to write you a fairly interesting letter were it not for the fact that the censor’s pencil covers over everything one says. I see that your father has been getting into hot water with the press. I don’t suppose that that deters him much. As you know, I spend my life looking around for someone who says something different to the next man and, even if he didn’t say it, it’s something to be known as capable of doing so. I therefore number myself among the large but inarticulate body of people in this country who are sorry that he’s given up his post in London. And that is not only because his resignation robs me of the pleasure of seeing his family again.
The letter also revealed his fondness for Kick who, in the sad Kennedy tradition, would die in an aircraft accident in 1948:
You might tell Kick that while passing through Grosvenor Square the other day, I obs
erved that the corner of the balcony where I sat and delivered a lecture on the approaching fate of Europe to her at a dance, has been totally demolished by a bomb. The rest of the balcony is intact so the next time I have occasion to deliver a lecture to her, we’ll have to sit at the other end.
Tony would write again in July 1941, asking for a copy of a speech that Jack had given and referring again to Why England Slept:
I read your book yesterday again. The moral, if anything written by a Kennedy can be said to have a moral, would seem to be “speak the truth”. Am I right? If [British Prime Minister Stanley] Baldwin had spoken the truth before the election, he would have been thrown out. Labour would have gone in. Either their peace policy would have succeeded (result, no war) or failed (result Tories back with mandate to rearm). In other words Churchill was right but too keen. Englishmen don’t mind killing people, but they don’t like eating them.
Sheila would recall her own friendship with Joe Kennedy before he resigned suddenly as the Battle of Britain raged. “I stayed several times with Ambassador Joe. His wife Rose and the ‘Kennedy kids’ had all gone to America. Joe was lonely and depressed; he saw too much of Mr Chamberlain! He told me England was finished, and that he could arrange for us all to get out. I replied ‘Nonsense!’ (or words to that effect!!)”
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