The organisation of the Festival of Britain, held in 1951, was still a prize example of a triumph of logistics. The mums’ lunch was another ritual of the Season that had recently become the target for mild satire: How to be a Deb’s Mum by Petronella Portobello (‘who has been one’), a comic epistolary novel of debs’ mums strategies in launching darling daughters, had been published successfully the year before.
What were these gatherings of mothers really like? They were relatively small and intimate: twenty or thirty mothers meeting in a private house or flat, rarely in a club or a hotel which would have been considered rather nouveau, redolent of rootlessness. My mother held two lunches, rather crowded affairs, in our Limerston Street house. Coronation Chicken was inevitably on the menu: this collation of cold chicken in a creamy sweet-sour sauce was originally evolved by Rosemary Hume of the Cordon Bleu Cookery School and first served by the Constance Spry finishing school students at the celebration lunch in Westminster Hall for foreign delegates attending the Coronation. The recipe remained a staple of upper-class entertaining for many years to come. The debs’ mums’ lunches at Limerston Street would have been prepared jointly by my mother and our nanny, Isa. There were no upmarket takeaways in those days, and we did not employ a cook. The food was not, by today’s standards, at all sophisticated. The most popular pudding served at the lunches given by the mother of Thalia Gough, a deb of the next Season, was made by their daily woman from packages of Raspberry Frood Mousse whipped up with cream and decorated with fresh raspberries: ‘We used buckets and buckets as the Season wore on.’
Most debutante mothers were still young, although to us they did not seem it. The majority were in their early forties or even their late thirties, having married and borne children relatively early. Quite a high proportion were single mothers in the sense of being widows like my mother or divorcées. Many had suffered the emotional casualties of war, and were now remarried. It is striking how few of the 1958 debs’ mothers still had the same surname as their daughters. From the family point of view this was a confused scene. Our mothers were women of a certain social background, bound together by what Peregrine Worsthorne has described so well as ‘the invisible bonds of memory’: shared nurseries, shared day schools, their own now distant comings out and wedding days and christenings, divorces and bereavements, inextricably linked in the detail of their lives. They were linked by their appearance, nicely dressed in the printed silk suits with the hats, gloves and little clutch bags recommended by that season’s fashion editors ‘for lunching in town’. The most glamorous debs’ mothers were elegant and rangy, with the look of Osbert Lancaster’s Maudie Littlehampton, the charm of her silliness mingled with hauteur. These women sounded alike; helter-skelter in delivery with lavish use of ‘dahling!’ They were united in recognition of proper social values, of what constituted morally acceptable behaviour. Although many would admit that they themselves fell short of it, and some of the debs’ mothers’ lives were fairly rackety, these were the standards they upheld for their daughters. For all their vicissitudes they showed a crazy courage in rising above personal disaster, sexual betrayal, financial decline and what they foresaw (when they chose to think about it) as the end of England as they knew it. Like the Hoffnung cartoon of the orchestra still playing as the Titanic gradually, inexorably, sank into the ocean, our mothers dressed up, chattered on and planned another London Season. In their way they did their best.
After lunch, as the over-percolated coffee was distributed in tiny Wedgwood bone china cups, the business of the day began and the debs’ mothers rummaged in their bags for their little leather books. This was exchange of address time. Notes were made on dates and places of cocktail parties and balls planned for spring and summer. Names of nice reliable young men who could be brought in to balance up the numbers were discussed. Though such strategies would hardly have been needed in the days when the Season was small and self-sufficient, by the 1950s ‘the List’ as it was called, a kind of register of eligible debs’ escorts, circulated round the mothers. One version was headed ‘Jeunes Hommes’ although the mothers detected that some of the escorts (like Charles MacArthur Hardy) were already getting grizzled. Debs’ delights would be deleted once they got engaged. If there was, as has been claimed, the List’s corollary, a black list of young men to be avoided on the ground of their being NSIT (the code name for Not Safe In Taxis) or MTF (Must Touch Flesh) my mother did not divulge it. A futher categorisation of the young men was apparently VVSITPQ: Very Very Safe In Taxis Probably Queer.
Could an outsider break into this close circle of debs’ mothers? Yes, but only if she had a lot to offer. To some extent in the deb world of 1958 the cutlet for cutlet principle prevailed and a mother who was planning a really lavish ball could be forgiven for being Jewish – at a level of society in which a certain anti-Semitism was almost automatic – or in trade or ‘not quite right’ in other ways. She would certainly have needed extreme determination, and the hide of a rhinoceros, to enter this hyper-critical milieu in which social ineptitude was a running joke. Those who did not understand the unwritten rules were ridiculed. There were right clothes and wrong clothes for every occasion: I remember the horror when I proposed arriving in red shoes at a house party in the country. There were right words and wrong words, and the wrong ones would arouse a barely concealed shudder.
The question of language, intonation and accent was the hardest for a would-be ascender through the class structure to master. My mother and her friends were fascinated followers of the debate raging in the 1950s over ‘U and non-U’ language. This originated in a learned article by Professor Alan Ross entitled ‘Linguistic Class-Indicators in Present-Day English’, which first appeared in an obscure Finnish philological periodical Neuphilologische mitteilungen in 1954. Ross’s argument was that in the middle 1950s, as the old class demarcations of education and wealth had been eroded, distinctions of language were the sole remaining factors in distinguishing the upper classes from the middle and the lower classes. What had started as a relatively academic exercise in defining upper-class (‘U’) usage in relation to non-upper class (‘non-U’) became a much more widespread subject of controversy when the writer Nancy Mitford took up Ross’s thesis, expanded upon it and made it more amusing, in an essay ‘The English Aristocracy’ published in 1956, with cartoons by Osbert Lancaster, and a joke non-U poem by John Betjeman, the future Poet Laureate, under the title Noblesse Oblige. What follows is Mitford rewriting the professor on U versus non-U vocabulary:
cycle is non-U against U bike.
dinner: U-speakers eat luncheon in the middle of the day and dinner in the evening. Non-U speakers (also U-children and U-dogs) have their dinner in the middle of the day.
greens is non-U for vegetables.
home: non-U – ‘they have a lovely home’; U – ‘they’ve a very nice house’.
ill: ‘I was ill on the boat’ is non-U against U sick.
mental: non-U for U mad.
toilet paper: non-U for U lavatory paper.
wealthy: non-U for U rich.
She adds her own favourite examples of sweet – non-U for pudding – and dentures for false teeth, while reminding her readers that when, in her novel The Pursuit of Love, Uncle Matthew speaks of his ‘dentures’ he does it as a joke.
Can a non-U speaker become a U-speaker? In this linguistic minefield Ross concluded that an adult could never achieve complete success ‘because one word or phrase will suffice to brand an apparent U-speaker as originally non-U (for U-speakers themselves never make mistakes)’. Nancy Mitford, from her impeccably U viewpoint as Lord Redesdale’s daughter and with a trace of superiority towards Birmingham-based Professor Ross, was not entirely convinced about this, maintaining that usage changes very quickly and that she, in 1956, knew undisputed U-speakers who pronounced girl ‘gurl’ – ‘which twenty years ago would have been unthinkable’. However, she concluded, ‘it is true that one U-speaker recognises another U-speaker almost as soon as he op
ens his mouth’. So it was with the debs’ mothers and their close-knit coterie. Since then a proportion of upper-class children have adopted quasi-classless voices and deadpan intonation in a not always convincing attempt to counteract the cut-glass accents and exclamatory poshness of their parents. But in 1958 upper-class speech and vocabulary was still uniform, a bastion of U-ness, the last-ditch defence of social exclusivity.
While all this frenzied activity was taking place amongst the mothers, the debutantes themselves were staying hidden. We were still in training, most of us at so-called finishing schools in England or abroad. The Sketch editor wrote sanctimoniously ‘no girl would willingly give up this period during which she changes gracefully from a schoolgirl into a charming debutante’. There was the subtext by which a finishing school was considered a safe haven for a girl at a time of awakening sexuality. These were the days before the pill. The fear of impregnation was a real one for both mothers and their daughters. An early unplanned pregnancy would jeopardise the Season, not to mention marriage prospects. Pregnant debutantes were contradictions in terms.
One of the largest London finishing schools was the Monkey Club in Pont Street. The Monkey Club girls had a formidable principal, the Hon. Griselda Joynson-Hicks, daughter of the 1st Viscount Brentford. A rival establishment, ten-minutes’ walk away in Queen’s Gate, South Kensington, was named, in the same spirit, Cygnets House. Here cygnets were transformed into swans under the guidance of Mrs Rennie-O’Mahony, a war widow who had founded her school in 1945. The academic content of the course was very lightweight but girls were trained in social skills and public speaking. They were lectured on dressing to look elegant. Cygnets were expected to be expert at opening bazaars. At the annual Cygnets Ball, held at Claridge’s, attended by proud parents and their friends, the emergent swans would enter to the band playing Tchaikovsky ballet music from Swan Lake.
Other parents preferred to send their daughters to the continent. Finishing schools in Paris had more cachet, and for parents who remembered the city’s pre-war glamour, Paris was a sentimental link with their own past. The choice was between Mademoiselle Anita’s, where the girls attended classes by day and lodged out as paying guests with approved French families, or residential study-homes. The Comtesse de la Calle kept the biggest and socially the smartest of the live-in finishing schools in a villa near the Bois de Boulogne. Madame Paul Verlet at Les Ambassadrices in the Boulevard Berthier took in eighteen pupils. Madame Harel-Dare ran a smaller and, in theory, more artistic establishment at Neuilly. My mother, having had it recommended by the friend of a friend who already had a daughter there, settled on Madame Boué‘s Study-Home, a finishing school for a dozen or so English girls in a large apartment in Rue Erlanger, Auteuil.
I was the late arrival, in early January 1958, having stayed at boarding school to take my Oxford entrance. The other girls had been at Madame Boué’s since October. It might well be wondered why, after five years at Wycombe Abbey, having taken ‘A’ and ‘S’ levels, including one in French, I needed any further finishing. The need was never questioned. The finishing school was part of the pre-Season ritual as far as my mother was concerned. I think she secretly hoped I would acquire a bit more polish. Wycombe Abbey, though rock solid educationally, was not a soigné school. So I joined the little group of Madame Boué’s pupils travelling by boat train from Victoria and then by Channel ferry, a gaggle of English girls in headscarves and cashmere coats. When we arrived, exhausted, at the Auteuil apartment Madame Boué bustled to the door to greet her petite famille as she had done every term since 1920, only interrupted by the German Occupation. We were never told what had been the fate of Monsieur Boué but for many decades Madame Boué had been a woman on her own, like the principals of all the other finishing establishments, like Madame Vacani and her dance school, making a living from the perceived needs of the English upper classes. Her enfants were packed into Madame Boué’s flat, two or three per bedroom. The classroom was also the dining room. The salon was crowded with ornate stiff-backed chairs on which, in the evenings, we practised sitting gracefully and made far from fluent conversation in obligatory French.
During our time at the Study-Home the girls were marched along to watch Madame Boué receive a decoration at the local town hall. This was the insignia of a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Academiques, conferred for her services to education. She was overjoyed and her pupils were pleased for her. But I cannot really say the decoration was deserved. Education at the Study-Home was very rudimentary. Besides French conversation there were lessons in commercial French, given by Brigitte Bardot’s aunt, a faded, pinch-faced woman who referred to her niece with a fond anxiety. There was musical appreciation: after lunch on Tuesdays, a middle-aged Frenchman came in and played Charles Trenet on a wind-up gramophone. From time to time, Isabelle, the cook, would be prevailed upon to receive us for what passed for cooking lessons, adding to her already considerable burden in providing meals from a small ill-equipped kitchen for a dozen hungry girls. We were taken to the Louvre and planted in the crowd to listen to official lectures of interminable dullness. No escape, since Madame Boué sent a chaperone to guard us, a small, harassed and presumably very ill-paid woman whose bare legs would turn raw and purple in the cold. In the evenings we wrote up our journals, anodyne recordings of the day’s events, and stuck in picture postcards of buildings visited: the Sacré Coeur, the Saint Chapelle, Les Invalides. When Madame Boué settled down each night to her self-imposed task of checking through these journals did she ever wonder whether we were learning anything at all? I really do not think so. Give or take fencing lessons, dressmaking classes or a ballroom dancing course, this was the curriculum on offer at every other finishing school for English girls and its content and value was not scrutinised by parents for whom, on the whole, the education of daughters seemed of little relevance. Making a good and happy marriage was the thing.
Of the dozen girls in Madam Boué’s petite famille, six of us were going on to do the Season. The famille subdivided, as if by some unwritten law, into the smart girls and the rest. The ringleader of the smart set was Lady Sarah Jane Hope, a fair-haired snub-nosed young beauty whose father, the Marquess of Linlithgow, had been held at Colditz in the special wing reserved for potentially influential prisoners. Sarah Jane had the upper-class bolshiness one finds in the heroines of Nancy Mitford’s novels, banging out ‘Frankie and Johnnie were lovers’ on the upright piano in Madame Boué’s salon. Her bosom friend was Jane Holden, a strapping blonde from Norfolk who put herself over as the epitome of experience and sophistication. Jane told enviable tales of her rapturous evenings with ‘dreamy men’. The dreamiest of all was named as Henry Blofeld. When I met this legendary lover some years later both he and I were writing for the Guardian. He had metamorphosed into the cricket correspondent, familiarly known as ‘Blowers’, a convivial but hardly a Byronic figure in that hearty sports department where the men called out ‘Well caught!’
Life at the Study-Home had its frustrations and its longueurs. As teenagers we had all read the nihilistic novel Bonjour Tristesse written by the young Françoise Sagan. She was said to have composed it in the cafés round the Sorbonne where she was a student. Bonjour Tristesse caught the feeling of the times exactly when it was published in 1954. For girls growing up in England Sagan’s atmospheric story of Cécile, the doomy seventeen-year-old, living with her irresistibly attractive widowed father and observing his numerous brief love affairs, had been our education in Frenchness. We loved the novel’s mordant sexiness and the more rebellious could see themselves as Cécile, the symbol of disaffected youth. But Françoise Sagan’s Paris and the world of Madame Boué’s Study-Home had few connections. Apart from approved outings to the Sunday morning service at the British Embassy Church and stilted exchange tea parties with the pupils of the Comtesse de la Calle, our movements were restricted. Madame Boué was paranoid about preserving our virginity, even demurring about allowing us to visit the Musée Rodin in case the more eroti
c of his sculptures played havoc with our latent sexuality. She was obsessed with the dangers of the white slave trade, demonstrating the ease with which a chloroform handkerchief could be pressed over the face by villainous abductors lying in wait for English victims. We were virtually imprisoned in Auteuil. With colossal ingenuity, inventing a respectable evening party to which all had been invited, one of the petite famille provided an escape route and one evening we found ourselves in a poky flat on the Left Bank, drinking crude red wine with three amorous Moroccans. The Moroccans were so far outnumbered by the rather anxious and self-conscious English girls the evening turned out to be less than Saganesque.
Madame Boué would occasionally override her fears of abduction and rape and accede to girls’ requests for exeats with relations or with parents’ friends. A title would work wonders. She beamed with delight when Gabriel Waddington, a deb-to-be from Ireland, daughter of the racing trainer Nesbit Waddington, was fetched from the flat one night by Prince Aly Khan, though she would perhaps have been less approving had she known that her charge was being taken to the floor show at the Folies-Bergère. My mother’s cousin, the current Baron de Belabre, was also welcomed warmly. He and his wife invited me to weekend lunches at their immaculate town house in St Cloud. It was here I learned the lesson, inexperienced as I was, that it took very little for the elegant and elderly relation to turn into the seducer. So much for Madame Boué’s warnings of the white slave trade. This was sexual peril very close to home as Serge led me to the library, proffered a succession of leather-bound books with beautifully engraved pornographic illustrations, began to stroke and cradle me with what even I could recognise as enormous skill. What was I to do, half frightened, half enjoying? The decision was made for me by the sudden entrée of Genevieve, the Baroness, announcing tea, diffusing the drama with precision timing, as in a Feydeau farce.
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