Last Curtsey

by Fiona MacCarthy

  We saw a lot of Uncle Terry. He came on summer holidays. He spent Sunday evenings with us, arriving in good time to mix a perfect dry Martini, wielding the cocktail shaker with some of the male expertise he brought to fencing. After dinner my mother and he would sit companionably, listening to Noël Coward on the gramophone. He did not stay the night. Whether he and my mother were actually lovers both I and my sister Karin, Terry’s god-daughter, are still unable to decide. There was a story that they had once taken a room at the Savoy intending to make love there but the packet of French letters Uncle Terry had brought with him appeared to have been sabotaged. He tried one, he tried another, but all of them had holes in. This seems to me convincing, tallying with his general practical incompetence, as does the sequel that he and my mother dissolved into laughter so helpless all ideas of congress had had to be abandoned. They shared a wild and physically abandoned sense of humour, sitting shaking with hysteria through Marx Brothers’ films. In their close but not overtly passionate relationship the night at the Savoy may well have proved a turning point. Perhaps after this debacle they had not had the heart to try again.

  From this it will be clear that my Uncle Terry was not an obvious choice to be lecturing a debutante on how to navigate the Season and keep herself intact. There was an added reason in that, unknown to my mother, he had made a mild attempt to seduce me a year earlier, having taken me out to dance and dine at a Spanish restaurant in Old Brompton Road while my mother was abroad on holiday. He had invited me back to the flat where he lived with his housekeeper, Miss Hunt. The housekeeper, a rather strict and formidable figure, I suppose had gone to bed. Where Cousin Serge had made a pass at me while showing me his etchings Uncle Terry had asked me to come up and see his ivories, a collection of miniature oriental carvings which he brought one by one out of their display case, pointing out each tiny detail as a way of coming close. Inwardly I was horrified. This was my mother’s friend, the nearest thing I had to a father. With what seems to me now extraordinary sangfroid, even ruthlessness, I stood up, pushed past him, fetched my coat and left. Typically of the non-confrontational world I was brought up in, the episode was never mentioned afterwards, not by Terry, not by me. Instructed by my mother to tell me about sex the best that he could manage was, ‘A pretty girl like you needs to be careful.’ Poor Terry. His heart was hardly in this tricky assignation.

  Our beliefs, such as they were, were based on the assumption that men preferred a virgin bride, that the virgin state would actually enhance our chances. In my own teenage generation in the fifties holding on to your virginity for your eventual husband was, for most debutantes, an article of faith. It was not just a matter of simple ignorance or the scare of getting pregnant, though both these entered the equation. We were so unprepared in the mechanics of seduction that being alone with a young man brought on wild panic. One ex-deb now tells the story of how she returned home after a dance to her room high up in a house in Redcliffe Gardens bringing her escort with her. When he started to embrace her she flung open the window, yelling, ‘Taxi! Taxi!’ The taxi arrived instantly and she pushed him down the stairs.

  Beyond the fear of the unknown there was something far more mystical, close to religiosity, in our sheer determination to keep ourselves unsullied, whatever the temptations. You knew who the ‘fast’ debs were – the Fleurs, the Carolyns, the Pennys – who danced closer than the others and disapproved of them instinctively. Rumours of errant debs who ‘disappeared’ to have abortions struck horror in our hearts. When one of the more persistent debs’ delights, an attractively world-weary young man called David Dickinson, tried to persuade me to sleep with him, saying (probably quite rightly) that it would do me good to lose my sexual inhibitions, I bombarded him with letters in defence of my chastity like the stubbornly virtuous Pamela in Samuel Richardson’s eighteenth-century epistolary novel of that name. I suppose I was embarrassed to discuss such a delicate question face to face. I have lost sight of the sort of arguments I mustered but I know that they were prim ones and that these were the letters of a self-righteous debutante.

  A certain sexual and social overlapping was beginning. It was by no means at the pitch it would reach in the next decade, in which Christine Keeler, the nightclub dancer and call girl, so fatally attracted both the Russian Naval Attaché and the Minister for War under the benevolent aegis of Lord Astor. But what became a lethal combination of snobbery and sleaze was already visible during the Season of 1958. So it was that one night after a dance I found myself in a lavish, rather flouncy flat off Shepherd’s Market. I had come with Giles Havergal, one of my favourite dance partners who later became famous as director of the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow. The gathering that evening in the low-lit flat could have provided him with an atmospheric period piece. Giles himself, then a Guards officer at Caterham, had driven up that evening with Nicky Simunek who was also in the Guards but had not been made an officer. The affably roguish Simunek was not just not safe in taxis. Simunek was unsafe anywhere at all. Also at the party, if you can call a party this disparate collection of about a dozen people, some still in ballroom clothes, lolling listlessly on sofas or stretched out on the floors entwined with one another, drinking a lot of vodka, I dimly recognised another deb, Gillian Gough. Gillie Gough was a tall girl of horse-faced splendour who had been one of the models whom Cardin had hand-picked to take part in the Berkeley Debutante Dress Show. Gillie’s mother, Mrs Gough, had threatened to upstage her daughter’s debut by becoming ‘secretly engaged’ to a Dutch rubber magnate, Mr Freddie Harttman, as the Daily Express divulged under the heading ‘Deb’s Mother to Remarry’. Gillie too was a little more raffish than the rest. Who brought her here I do not know. It was a night of many mysteries. Nominally in charge of the proceedings, perhaps the owners of the flat, were two Piccadilly tarts. Bedroom doors opened and closed again. Shadowy half-dressed people came and went. If this was an orgy it seemed a little joyless and to my relief no one invited me to join it. I sat apart from the action, the impregnable virgin, like the figure of virtue in a medieval tapestry.

  What I find most interesting is that, pace David Dickinson, the chivalric ideal of the virgin-unto-marriage was actually upheld by the majority of men. For our escorts, as indeed for us, the routine of arousal then denial was hardly satisfactory. The mating game without the mating was an arid occupation. But young men on the whole accepted the dead end of heavy petting, enduring the inevitable sexual frustration, going off to seek relief by masturbation or a desperate visit to the Bag o’ Nails, a brothel conveniently placed near Wellington Barracks and referred to as ‘the Bag’ by Guards officers. Most of our dance partners were gentlemanly gentlemen. In 1958 there were still traces in our escorts of the old aristocratic code of honour which included protectiveness and gallantry towards the fairer sex and left them unwilling to perpetrate upon a well-bred young girl a fate which they would not wish upon their sisters. They might try it on, but deep in the psyche was their feeling that intercourse with a nice girl, the kind of girl you’d want to marry, was a species of defilement. They respected the refusal more than the assent. It is also worth remembering that, by the laws of averages, some of the debs’ escorts were homosexual, even though in that age of spectacular lack of sexual awareness, they were not, as I remember, recognised as such. At bottom, so to speak, not everyone desired us. The surprise of recent years has been the gradual emergence as bona fide gays of reluctant debs’ delights who, at the time, simply did not realise their sexual orientation lay elsewhere.

  *

  In 1958, the spring and early summer was a time of international political turmoil with states of emergency declared in both Aden and Ceylon, tensions worsening between the Turks and Greeks in Cyprus, rioting by the extremist Europeans in Algiers. Closer to home, British unemployment figures were worsening, with the decline in jobs attributed to innovations in technology; the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was gathering support; in May and June a two-month bus strike caused commotion in the capital; gr
owing panic about overdressed and law-defying Teddy Boys was highlighted by a Times article ‘Age Succeeds Class as a Barrier’. The debs danced on, oblivious to all this, and when not dancing appeared at a whole sequence of social events that made up the London Season: the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition; the Chelsea Flower Show; the Fourth of June at Eton; Trooping the Colour; Royal Ascot Week. I was at all of these, feeling an increasing terror that this could be a life’s work. Standing around for ever in silk dresses, hats and gloves. As the old ladies died off there were the young ones to replace them in this endlessly repetitive and time-consuming cycle of seeing and being seen.

  The Royal Academy Private View at Burlington House was the official beginning of the Season. In 1958, for the first time, ‘modern’ paintings – formerly in a ghetto of their own – were hung side by side with the traditional. John Bratby’s Adam and Eve and Nell and Jeremy Sandford now appeared in juxtaposition with a Winston Churchill landscape of Cap Martin and Anthony Devas’s portrait of the Queen. Not that paintings themselves were the focus of attention in what was less an exhibition than a huge midday cocktail party without cocktails, a gathering of the aristocracy and diplomats, the politicians, artists and literary figures who comprised the then establishment in days when the great and good were standing fairly firm and Sir Mortimer Wheeler and Sir Malcolm Sargent (both at the exhibition) were still counted as the celebrities. My escort Clive Muncaster, a tall, thoughtful and immensely shy young man, was the son of a then well-known painter, Claude Muncaster, a leading light of the Royal Watercolour Society who specialised in landscapes and seascapes. In 1946, the year after war ended, Claude Muncaster had been commissioned by the Queen to paint a series of pictures of Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral as her personal celebration of victory. In the year when Clive was courting me his father was showing, in an exhibition of the Society of Aviation Artists, a meticulously detailed panoramic landscape of England viewed from an aeroplane, an interesting reminder of how long the wartime imagery of RAF dawn patrols and Spitfires was lingering in those years after the war. I found Claude Muncaster’s work distinctly worrying. I distrusted such painstakingly realistic painting, being at the time more of a Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth girl. My favourite of the paintings that we had at home was a semi-surrealist Paul Nash watercolour cryptically entitled Ballard Phantom, showing a twisted seashell on a mysterious shore. Unfairly perhaps I projected my doubts about his father’s work upon the unsuspecting Clive. It was a repeat of the feelings that had overwhelmed me when an earlier suitor – Paul, the boy who kissed me at the annual Bradfield dance at Wycombe Abbey School – had invited me to Stratford to meet his mother who, as it turned out, ran a picture gallery which specialised in very brightly coloured historic narrative: minstrel boys, carousing monks, Cavaliers surprised by Roundheads, lurid princes in the tower. That early episode suggested that love was less a question of sexual than aesthetic compatibility. I was convinced then that I could never love a boy whose mother dealt in paintings of drinking cardinals.

  The centrepiece of the Royal Academy exhibition was John Merton’s portrait of the young Countess of Dalkeith. The painting received the academy’s rare ‘A’ award, signifying unanimous acceptance by the selection committee, the first time this award had been given since the war. John Merton was a popular gentleman portraitist, described in the Sketch as having ‘less the appearance of an artist than of a typical “English soldier” – which, in fact, he was for many years’. Colonel Merton’s Queen Anne house and studio was said to be not far from ‘the famous military training-ground of Salisbury Plain’. His subject, the Countess of Dalkeith, was formerly Jane McNeill, daughter of a judge, John McNeill, QC, who had married the Scottish earl, heir to the Duke of Buccleuch, in 1953. The aristocratic married couple now lived at Eldon Hall in Melrose, Roxburghshire. The earl held the historically resonant appointment of Brigadier of the Royal Company of Archers, Her Majesty the Queen’s Body Guard for Scotland. The painting is a quasi-Renaissance composition of the countess swathed in satin standing on a columned terrace with a vista of meadows and mountains. The impression is of feminine beauty and decorum in a setting of territorial power. There is a leavening touch of domesticity in the smaller portraits of the countess in the upper niches in which she appears petting a fantail pigeon and a Siamese kitten which is perching on her shoulder. The painting now looks anodyne but in its period it made a statement of considerable emotional force. At a time when they were threatened, this was a defiant celebration of upper-class values. The carefully-coiffed countess is a woman as she should ideally be, representing aristocratic correctness and serenity in an increasingly ungracious modern world. Her rewards are fame, status and the jewels at her neck.

  The Countess of Dalkeith (later Jane, Duchess of Buccleuch). Portrait in oils by John Merton

  The countess herself was at the Private View, face to face with her own portrait. Her mother-in-law, the Duchess of Buccleuch, was with her. Mrs Rennie-O’Mahony, who attended the academy with thirty of her finishing school cygnets, no doubt extracted a timely lesson from the painting: ‘Tread carefully and this could be you, my girls.’ To the debutante world the Dalkeith portrait was both comforting and aspirational. It made an impact far beyond, raising debate and stirring argument about styles in portraiture as representative of post-war British culture and society. Along with Annigoni’s portrait of Queen Elizabeth, it reminds us of the lingering romantic yearnings of the time.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  My Dance at the Dorchester

  With that streak of wilfulness with which the upper classes used to like bewildering the lower orders, the Fourth of June at Eton, a kind of open day for parents and old pupils, was not necessarily held on the 4th of June. In 1958, however, name and date had coincided. The 4th of June was a Wednesday and for once the sun was shining on what had originated as a gala in honour of George III’s birthday and evolved into an erratic combination of public school speech day and Thames-side fête champêtre.

  Victoria Bathurst Norman at the Fourth of June at Eton

  Falling as it did in the busiest weeks of London dances the Fourth of June at Eton was a welcome change of scene for the debs thronging around in the role of schoolboys’ sisters or recent Old Etonians’ chosen girlfriends for the day. Events followed a programme evolved over the centuries. There were the speeches in Upper School where sixth-form boys wearing their formal dress of knee breeches declaimed passages from Aeschylus and Milton, Racine and Oscar Wilde. Visitors to the exhibition in the Drawing Schools were invited to admire a hundred selected paintings by Eton boys including two watercolours by Prince Richard of Gloucester, one depicting a desert scene with snake charmer, another an expedition to the Arctic. Lavish hampers were unloaded from the boots of parents’ cars and picnic parties involving several generations of Etonians were held in the lush grass along the riverbank. ‘Hulking young Old Etonians drank champagne from the bottle and called their mothers Mummy’, William Hickey’s Daily Express column reported the next day. On Agar’s Plough – the cricket pitch – the school team was defeated disastrously by the visiting team, the Eton Ramblers, drawn from old boys of the school captained, as always, by an ancient and bewhiskered Old Etonian ‘Buns’ Cartwright who had played for Eton fifty years before. As we watched, the school team was dismissed in its first innings for a total of 100 with four ducks while the band of the Grenadier Guards played comfortingly on.

  The great set piece of the day was the procession of boats, first recorded at Eton in 1793, for which the oarsmen still dressed up in Nelsonian sailors’ uniforms of white trousers and blue jackets, their straw boaters winsomely decorated with English country garden flowers. The moment of drama in the procession comes when each boat draws level with the crowds assembled on the banks of the Thames and the oarsmen stand up, with the synchronised movement of a chorus from The Boy Friend, lift their oars on high and raise their boaters to the audience. To our horror, one of the boats overturned, depositing its crew i
n the river. ‘Jolly boating weather’ as the song goes: yes indeed. Such small debacles were intrinsic to the Fourth of June at Eton, entering the folklore, strengthening the fellow-feeling of this all-day picnic party for the then elite. In entering Eton, as the old Etonian Henry Blofeld put it, ‘you were going into a sort of educational freemasonry which had its own language, its own rules, its own dress and its own way of coping with the world’. All the guests at the Fourth of June knew or at least easily recognised each other. It was a completely inbred scene, replete with the elegance of privilege, the sense of belonging to the best club in the world. Eton was the school that nurtured England’s rulers. ‘The Tory Ministers of 1990 picnic by the Thames’, as the Daily Express prophesied, none too accurately. Mrs Thatcher’s government was not a predominantly Old Etonian one.

  Eton families revolved around the Headmaster, Dr Robert Birley, himself an Old Rugbeian who had, through his office, absorbed an altogether Old Etonian gloss. In his tail coat, silk top hat and rolled-up black umbrella, Dr Birley appeared the perfect benign figure of authority, Mrs Birley at his side in summer floral printed silk. The Duchess of Gloucester steered her young sons round the cricket pitch, boys dressed in Eton uniform of black tail coat and stiff white shirt with carnations in their buttonholes. To the dismay of the debs’ mothers the Duke of Kent was once again escorting Janet Bryce. Eton ‘characters’ made their statutory appearances: Lord David Cecil, the Oxford professor, wearing a bowler hat which emphasised his birdlike features; the Duke of Marlborough in a ducal three-piece pin-striped suit worn rumpled with suede shoes; the Irish Catholic intellectual Sir Shane Leslie in his saffron kilt and bonnet. There was a certain splendour, a rather cranky beauty in the scene as the sun went down and the crowds kept milling round, still drinking champagne and waiting for the fireworks. Towards evening I remember an encounter with a rather maudlin Randolph Churchill, shadow figure of his father, the son without a role, swaying his way through a dusky Eton glade. What made the scene so poignant was the sense that it was passing, that this upper-class cohesiveness was already under threat.