Last Curtsey

by Fiona MacCarthy

  Our sheltered environment kept us unaware of the disturbances in Paris through that winter: the riots at St Nazaire shipyard; the worsening crisis in Tunisia; the warfare between rival Algerian terrorist groups in France, with many killed and wounded, strangled corpses left lying in suburban Paris streets. What we registered more keenly in Madame’s Study Home was the death a few weeks earlier of Christian Dior. The great couturier had died at the end of October 1957 at the age of fifty-two. His introduction of the ‘New Look’ in his first postwar collection in 1947 had helped regenerate the depressed French textile industry by demanding yards of fabric for its full-skirted designs. The New Look, with its nipped-in waist and blatant femininity, had become a symbol of the resurgence of Paris as the capital of elegance and style. Madame Boué mourned him deeply and, sensing the enormous post-war impact of Dior’s creative genius, so I think did we.

  Madame Boué’s Study-Home constituted a bizarre prelude to the Season, a Paris winter in which our girlishness was frozen. There was no development: we remained as we had come. Yet those months at the Study-Home had made a bond between us. Later in the Season, coming across Sarah Jane or Sally or Gabriel or Coral at a party, we would greet one another like old soldiers with peculiar shared memories, veterans of an arduous posting in far lands.

  *

  When we returned in March the mothers’ lunch parties were ending. Reflecting successful contact making and campaigning, the invitations were beginning to come in. ‘Caroline has 300 invitation cards on her mantelpiece,’ Caroline Butler’s mother, Mrs Derek Hague, told an enquiring journalist. ‘I’ve answered half of them – being a deb’s mum is hectic.’ Invitation cards, to be up to standard, were of very stiff white cardboard with slightly embossed lettering following the formulaic

  Mrs Arthur Nicoll

  at Home

  for her daughter

  Miss Rachel Nicoll

  at the Savoy – River Room

  Even though Mrs Nicoll was clearly not at home, or not in her own home, the lack of logic was not noticed. These invitations had a gravity, a lingering sense of serious purpose in a young girl’s debut. No light-hearted little sketches of party balloons and – horror! – flat-bottomed champagne glasses emanating bubbles. There was ‘U’ and ‘non-U’ even in invitation cards.

  Some of Annabel Greene’s many invitations to debs’ luncheons, tea parties and cocktail parties in the spring of 1958

  Back from Paris we were thrown straight into the debs’ own luncheon and tea parties. The time had now come for the girls to meet each other. These gatherings followed the same pattern as the lunches for the mothers, being all female affairs, but they tended to be larger and would often be held in a club or a hotel. There were two hundred debs at the first luncheon I went to, a party given in the Park Suite at the Dorchester by Lady Lowson, the ex-lord mayor’s wife, an energetic and eternally youthful-looking woman who, when asked by a reporter whether she found planning her daughter’s Season arduous, gave the withering reply: ‘I had enough practice organising receptions at the Mansion House.’ Lady Lowson had already launched her elder daughter, Gay, whose satisfactory engagement to the Earl of Kinnoull would be announced in 1961. Her attention was now focused on her younger daughter, Melanie, for whom she had already held a London cocktail party. A ball at the Savoy had been announced for May. No effort had been spared. In terms of the 1958 Season this was the ultimate in coming out.

  I knew every nook and cranny of the Dorchester since my great-grandfather’s firm, McAlpines, had built it and the family owned it. I had been in and out of the hotel since early childhood. All the same I found this first debs’ luncheon party very daunting. My hostess, slim and gracious in her pale-grey sack dress, following the latest style; Melanie standing beside her in coral pink greeting the long line of her contemporaries who, though only seventeen, behaved like thirty-five. Most wore hats and carried gloves, balancing their black leather or suede handbags on the elbow. Since this was a fork luncheon you needed expertise in juggling your plate and fork and glass. Whatever the demands, these girls exuded confidence, though some have since admitted to feeling very nervous at the start of the Season. My own reservations centred on my lack of social graces: I was a solemn girl, a reader, a Shakespeare fanatic, and I could not do the chatter. The idea of a whole summer of frivolity alarmed me. Also it dawned upon me there were far too many Fionas: Fiona Crichton-Stuart, Fiona Freeman, Fiona Pilkington, Fiona Sheffield. Even Melanie Lowson, my young hostess, had been christened Melanie Fiona. All right, there were even more Penelopes or Pennys. But Fiona, chosen by my mother after the poet Fiona Macleod, a name I had always regarded as original, was appearing overused by 1958.

  There were two or three weeks of this forced fraternisation among the debutantes. Not all lunches had the discreet formality of Melanie Lowson’s at the Dorchester. More were a matter of twenty girls assembling with friendly hoots and giggles in a little house in Chelsea and sitting on the floor. Sitting on the floor was a feature of the Season: it was lucky we were agile. I had two debs’ lunches of my own at our home in Limerston Street where I have a feeling my mother’s staple Coronation Chicken made a reappearance. I went to a debs’ tea party given by the girl whose dance I would be sharing, Jennifer Burness. Up to then, strange as it must seem, I had not even met her. All arrangements had been made by our two mothers while I was away in Paris. The tea party was an elegant affair for five or six girls sitting round the mahogany table in the downstairs dining room in the Burness house in Cadogan Square. The manservant poured our tea from a Georgian silver teapot. It was hardly believable that we were still teenagers. The scene was positively middle aged. Jenny was tall, dark, beautiful, languidly friendly. We would always be kind to one another but were certainly not soulmates. Her cronies were worldly girls whom I immediately identified as by far my superiors in social expertise.

  This was especially true of a friend of Jenny’s, Countess Carolyn Czernin. Carolyn was the daughter of Count Manfred and Countess Maude Czernin. The Count, from an aristocratic Polish family, had been an ace war pilot, fighting with the RAF. Carolyn, although only sixteen when she made her debut, was already suggesting the world weariness of having endured a hundred complicated love affairs. Carolyn was cool before the word had acquired its current adulatory connotation. She gave the impression then, and later, of knowing exactly how to handle men. Even now Countess Carolyn remains a potent figure in my personal mythology. I was and am still haunted by her as the paradigm of the woman of experience, the sort of woman with whom I could not conceivably compete.

  In between this multiplicity of social engagements it was shopping, shopping, shopping. I had only very recently discarded my school uniform of navy serge gymslip and Wycombe Abbey blazer with the words ‘In Fide Vade’ (Go Forth in Faith) emblazoned on my bosom. I had other clothes for holidays, but little that was suitable for this highly competitive would-be grown-up life. My mother and I scoured the shops for cocktail and dance dresses. The dress for my own dance was to be made at Worth but, like most of the clothes of my contemporary debutantes, the remainder of my wardrobe came not from couturiers but ‘off the peg’ from the eveningwear departments of the Knightsbridge department stores: Harrods, Woollands, Harvey Nichols. For deb’s mothers and their daughters Harrods, in particular, became a way of life, almost a home from home with its familiar routines. We would rendezvous in the Banking Hall, with its capacious green leather chairs, then eat a light lunch in the Silver Grill before descending the escalators to the fashion floors. My mother’s generation had a touching faith that Harrods, in those days – unlike now – a very dignified department store, could meet all possible customer requirements, from christening robe to shroud. Besides the department stores, mothers and daughters went on searches in the local ‘Madam’ shops. Our mothers’ favourites were Nora Bradley in Knightsbridge or (slightly more downmarket) Wakefords in King’s Road with its buxom, blonde and heavily mas-caraed sales ladies, alternately flattering and bul
lying, telling you that you looked lovely when you obviously didn’t. Left to myself I much preferred Bazaar, the more modern and informal fashion shop which Mary Quant had opened in King’s Road in 1955. But the style of the Season was still conservative, fixed in the gracious-lady idiom. Our full-petti-coated cocktail dresses and our ballgowns mostly bore the more conventional labels of Frank Usher, Jean Allen, Susan Small.

  The shopping list was long. A minimum of six dance dresses, of which one must be white for Queen Charlotte’s Ball in May. Two or three of the dresses needed to be long and relatively formal, for the grander balls in London; the others could be short, for dances in the country. Debs also needed several day dresses in silk or chiffon, suitable for Ascot, Henley, the Fourth of June at Eton. Further necessities were shoes and gloves and handbags and especially hats in what was not only the year of the last curtsey but also the year in which the wearing of hats for social occasions was done with a conviction that would not be seen again. Some girls had hats specially made by, for example, Aage Thaarup, the Queen’s milliner, or by Simone Mirman. But once again the department stores were the main source for our straw cartwheels, those fashionable hats shaped like upended flower pots and little toques with tulle on top.

  There were also the underclothes. Enduring long blush-making fittings by large sales ladies in small box-like cubicles in the lingerie department, the debs of 1958 were equipped with corsetry. Even so-called Youthcraft Girdles were garments of horrible complexity, more like a suit of armour than mere underclothes, encasing our young bodies in what was advertised as a ‘firm but flexible elastic net’. These panty girdles had detachable gussets and suspenders. Were they specially designed to discourage intercourse? As would-be seducers from the fifties still remember they were hideously difficult to negotiate.

  Elizabeth Arden’s ‘Blue Grass’ perfume; Yardley ‘Feather Finish’ cream powder for restoring perfection to the face; Goya’s ‘Kiss Again’ lipstick. The brand names of that period bring back with sudden clarity those few busy, worried weeks at the beginning of the Season, weeks of unprecedented acquisition and, for my mother, alarming expenditure. The more ingenious debs’ mothers managed to cut corners, for example having ball dresses run up out of old curtains. Tessa Prain, a deb of our year, had an ally in a society dressmaker whose clients brought in their couture clothes for alteration. The dressmaker surreptitiously made a toile. So Tessa wore Balenciaga copies through the Season and we all remember how fabulous she looked. But there were many mothers who showed signs of mounting anxiety, faced with an outlay they could not easily afford.

  In a Tatler article in April 1958 Judith, Lady Listowel gave a detailed analysis of what a Season actually cost, comparing the minimum possible outlay with the cost of a money-no-object Season.

  Shoestring Deb De Luxe Deb

  mums’ luncheons £25 £100

  dinners £60 £600

  debs’ teas etc. £10 £50

  mum’s dresses £80 £500

  Ascot tickets £14 £14

  hairdressing, taxi, etc. £50 £250

  deb’s 4 cocktail frocks £50 £250

  “ 7 evening frocks £90 £450

  “ 2 Ascot frocks £30 £120

  “ 6 pairs of shoes £22 £60

  “ 4 handbags £10 £25

  “ 24 pairs of nylons £10 £12

  “ suit £12 £48

  “ coat £15 £50

  “ evening wrap £6 £30

  “ 5 pairs of gloves £4 £16

  cocktail party ----- £600

  dance £225 £5,000

  Total £713 £8,125

  Today’s equivalent totals would be about £11,000 for the shoestring budget, more than £120,000 for the deb de luxe. Lady Listowel ends her article by saying that the level of expenditure was really not the issue. The decisive fact is what any given girl will make of her own Season:

  I know girls who have been brought out on a shoestring, and had the time of their lives. I have seen poor little rich debs weep in the cloakroom because they were ‘lost’ – they had no young men to dance with …

  It was indeed a world in which only the fit survived.

  * These were the days when London telephone exchanges were still local, defined by names not numbers.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Cocktail Parties

  The early weeks of preparation in the choosing of the wardrobe, issuing of invitations, the visits to the hairdresser, the primping and the preening, had been a purely female tribal ritual. It was only once the curtsey had been made and the debutantes were formally certified as nubile, or to put it more crudely, let loose upon the market that we were to catch our first sight of the ostensible object of the exercise. From mid-March, at cocktail parties, we began to meet young men.

  These parties began in presentation week and continued into April. Some were held in private houses but more often they took place in a hired room in a hotel or London club, the Cavalry Club being a favourite venue with families who almost all had equestrian connections through their regiments, their hunts, horse-racing, polo playing. It could be embarrassing to admit you had no horse. Some hostesses sought out more original locales. One early cocktail party, given for Penelope Agnew, daughter of the managing director of Punch, was held in the Punch offices. The phrase ‘enjoying a joke’, overused by desperate caption writers in the social magazines, now took on a new meaning as the debutantes were pictured ‘laughing over an old volume of Punch’.

  Usually cocktail parties were from 6.00 to 8.00, though a few were cocktail dances, going on into the night. The cocktail dance was a recent innovation which met with disapproval from the old guard who felt that boundaries were getting dangerously blurred. Cocktail parties would sometimes feel a little bit half-hearted, the staking of a claim in the Season by a hard-up or lazy mother who felt an obligation to the launching of her daughter but who hoped to get away with cocktails instead of a full-blown dance. Only the hostess with the mostest would invest in a cocktail party in addition to a dance. A cocktail party held early in the Season would advertise a girl’s credentials and ensure she was invited to the most important dances. Girls given cocktail parties in addition to dances had an immediate entrée to the ranks of the top debs. My mother, having fixed the date for my joint dance with the Burnesses to be given at the Dorchester in June did not, so far as I remember, contemplate a cocktail party. There was a sense of betrayal in our household when the covertly ambitious Petie Burness sent out her invitations for a cocktail party for her daughter Jenny to be held in presentation week.

  Allegra Kent Taylor and Pamela Walford at their joint cocktail party at 6 Hamilton Place

  What formula did these London cocktail parties follow? They were not for the faint-hearted. Hot and crowded, semi-formal in their dress code with girls in scoop-neck satin, men in uniform dark suits with old school or regimental ties. Apart from the debs’ parents, a few middle-aged friends and some elderly relations, these were essentially parties for the younger generation to meet and greet each other, everybody trying hard. Although nominally cocktail parties, the drinks served were not sophisticated, less a matter of a sidecar or a James Bond-style Martini than a sticky gin and orange. The canapés kept coming round on silver platters: little squares of cheese and pineapple on cocktail sticks; miniature sausages, warmed up and slightly charred; tiny chicken vol-au-vents, twirls of smoked salmon in brown bread and a horrible invention of the period, the ‘dip’, a cream cheese mix the consistency of porridge into which you dunked a strip of raw carrot or a stick of celery. The chatter was continuous and shrill. The sound of the Season once heard was never forgotten. The boom of anecdotes, the ebb and flow of shrieks and murmurs: a brittle, self-confident yet melancholy sound that issued from the drawing rooms of Knightsbridge and Belgravia on London summer nights. Lady Antonia Pakenham, the future Antonia Fraser, remembered the effect these sounds of revelry had had on her when she was still too young to do the Season:

  As I listened to the noise of the cockta
il parties drifting out of the open French windows, it was like the sound of the hunting horn in the ears of the hound puppy not yet old enough to join in the chase. It excited me; and it filled me with anguish at the same time.

  The cocktail parties gave us our first sight of the fathers, presumed to be somewhere in the City while the mothers held their luncheons and the debs their teas. The reluctant deb’s father was becoming a stock figure, exemplified by Evelyn Waugh whose daughter Teresa was presented in 1956. The entry in Waugh’s diary for 15–16 March shows a typical male irritation at these complex rituals in which the females set the pace:

  Irene Ravensdale was giving a cocktail party for debutantes. I thought I could be helpful to Teresa so offered to take her. Since Laura [his wife] had fittings at dressmakers I was obliged to take the early train which was crowded – Thursday being a day when the Duke of Beaufort does not hunt.

  Waugh was staying at the Hyde Park Hotel:

  I was not dressed when Teresa arrived to use my room between a debutante tea and cocktail party. I fled to Whites, drank a lot of Bollinger ’45 and felt better. At Irene’s house there was a crowd so dense I did not attempt to enter the drawing room but sat with the butler in the hall.

  Fathers kept to the outer reaches of the Season. Their role was mainly that of the financier of an enterprise that was, in its detail, left almost entirely to their wives. Fathers of country debutantes only rarely inhabited the flats and houses which their wives had taken for the Season, coming up to London when summoned for a party at which their presence was considered necessary, retreating the next morning back to their estates. Cocktail parties, being briefer and less onerous, were more acceptable than fully fledged deb dances to fathers who, according to Gladys Boyd, the Sketch’s social editor, ‘often studiously avoid all “deb” dances except their own’.