Last Curtsey

by Fiona MacCarthy

  In 1958 the first dance I went to in the country was Davina Griffiths’ at Orlingbury Hall, her family house near Kettering in Leicestershire. This was in mid-May. Over the next four months I danced in Hampshire, Surrey, Sussex, Warwickshire, Norfolk, Buckinghamshire, Cheshire, Gloucestershire, Kent, Oxfordshire and Somerset before proceeding onwards to Dublin and to Scotland in August and September. When country invitations clashed, logistics meant that you must settle for one dance or another, unlike in London where with ingenuity several parties could be managed in one night. However, country hostesses would often cooperate to ensure maximum attendance at their balls by running them together. There would be a sudden glut of parties in, say, Hampshire, one on Friday, one on Saturday. If you were an especial crony of the deb for whom the dance was being held you would be asked to join her house party: there was a certain kudos in staying in the house. Otherwise debs and young men would be farmed out around the other large houses in the neighbourhood, which could in practice be as much as forty miles away.

  The country house routine began with the letter of invitation from your house party hostess. Generally this letter would be addressed to you, but more old-fashioned country people would send it to your mother. For instance, in the wonderfully comprehensive collection of invitations relating to our Season kept by Margaret McKay, as she then was, I found one of those letters sent on deep blue paper from a good address in Shropshire to her mother saying: ‘Mrs. Wenger has asked me to have Margaret to stay for her dance on May 10th and this I am very pleased to do.’ Usually, especially in far-flung counties, the prospective hostess would be a total stranger, probably belonging in the ‘up-from-the-country’ category my Londonised mother so despised. Your hostess’s directions for the journey could be complex. To quote another letter sent to Margaret McKay, this time an invitation to Bembridge, Isle of Wight:

  This is just to tell you you are staying with us for the dance on 21st June. These are the plans: Waterloo–Portsmouth Harbour fast train 1.50 and 2.50. These are being met by private launches which leave on the Gosport Ferry pontoon. Should you not be on either of these trains you will have to come over on the ordinary ferry boat to Ryde – share a taxi or come out by a No. 8 bus – it stops at the post office and this house is very easy to find, anyone will tell you.

  Not surprisingly these optimistic travel plans very often went awry. One summer evening I thought I had caught a train to Newbury but discovered when I got to Reading that I was on the Didcot–Oxford line. I shot off the train and travelled on by taxi, panic-stricken, to find the whole house party just sitting down to dinner. I had somehow scrambled into my evening dress en route. In an age long before the mobile phone these ventures into unknown territory – geographical and social – could be testing to a deb’s initiative.

  In our mother’s generation house parties in the country were quite formal, very laboured. Robert Altman caught the mood precisely in his movie Gosford Park. A young girl would often be sent with her own maid who would unpack for her and dress her and also discreetly act as chaperone. If she did not bring a servant then a housemaid would unpack for her. In our own more makeshift days this was no longer usual. The lavish style of entertaining my sister and I had been startled by at Somerhill had become exceptional by 1958. You would not necessarily be going to a grand house. A private drive, even a short one, was more or less de rigueur: there were only rare occasions, a desperation billet, when debs found themselves staying in houses in a road. But the substantial halls and manors in which we mainly found ourselves were often a bit shabby, bashed around and dog-haired, in the days before ‘shabby chic’ became a style to aim for. In post-war Britain this was the real thing.

  House party guests would be instructed to arrive in early evening: late tea or early drinks time, according to the strictly timed rituals of consumption in such households. Sometimes there would be a little throng of you together since, as so helpfully suggested by your hostess, you had met up at the ticket office before travelling or located one another on the train. These were not always people you would ideally have chosen to spend a whole weekend with. ‘The other people who are coming to stop with us are Caroline Butler, Brian Dykes and Philip Fazil’: sometimes the heart sank. As soon as you arrived you were shown up to your room. You never knew whether you would be assigned a draped four poster or a camp bed in the now abandoned nursery. As a child, at children’s parties or church fêtes, I had loved the tense exhilaration of the lucky dip: pushing my hand down through the sawdust in the dustbin to extract a surprise package that might be a dud but might equally well be the thing I had most wanted. The charm or, to some, the nerve-racking quality of these country-house weekends was that they were always a total lucky dip.

  Though often architecturally fine and stacked with the inherited treasures of the ancestors, few of these houses were up to date in their equipment. There was a striking shortage of mod cons. In the hours before the dance the girls in the house party fought for the hot water for the bath, which was almost always dauntingly old world, freestanding on claw feet in a large unheated bathroom. The enamel would be chipping, with suspicious brown stains. The lavatory was enclosed in a mahogany surround, like a lumbering piece of furniture itself. The lavatory paper would be sitting there beside you, not on a toilet roll (perish the thought) but laid out neatly sheet by sheet on a china, often a willow-pattern, plate. Washed and dressed for dinner, the house party assembled in the drawing room, downed a lukewarm gin and tonic and moved through to the dining room. Country house food in those days was unexperimental, a formulaic matter of tinned consommé enlivened with a dash of Tio Pepe, chicken casserole and lemon rice pudding. Nor was it always even plentiful. Sometimes the guests got hungry. Night-time raids on the kitchen were not unknown. We could not blame the hosts and hostesses on whom we had been foisted, most of whom accepted the burden of a sudden houseful of quite unknown young people with extraordinary cheerfulness.

  Barn dance given for Mary Groves and Eliza Buckingham at Speen Farm, Buckinghamshire

  the two debutantes Eliza Buckingham (left); and Mary Groves (right) with their parents at the barn dance

  The dances themselves were the point of it, the glory of the Season as far as I and many others were concerned. There was an extreme excitement, tinged with nervousness, in arriving late at night, after dinner, at the house in the country where the ball was being held. Driving slowly past the gatehouses, up the drive and through the parkland to arrive at the brightly lit façade of what was very often a marvellous old house set in its own great gardens, part and parcel of England, resonant with history. The Brideshead factor, absorbed from Evelyn Waugh’s novel, was a strong one in 1958. Even when the dance was not in an ancestral home the English country setting gave it a special quality. In a sense the Season only came alive out in the country. People dressed less formally, more colourfully than at the London balls: the girls in their Frank Usher floral-printed dresses; the young men in dinner jackets with coloured cummerbunds, sometimes even white tuxedos, though these were regarded as just a little suspect, as my mother would have put it ‘Very Sunningdale’. Some of the dances held in old farm buildings in the country had a kind of timeless bucolic quality in contrast to the urban smartness of a dance held at the Dorchester or Claridge’s. The character of the evening was more local, the gathering more socially mixed, like a country party in a D.H. Lawrence novel or the dance that forms the climax of Rosamond Lehmann’s Invitation to the Waltz. These were parties which easily contained a lot of oddities, fringe figures: country doctors, inebriated clergymen, gawky second cousins once removed. The rather ramshackle marquees erected in the gardens gave the dances held within them a curious, and pleasing, improvisatory air. The debs’ delights’ rowdyism, so crass in central London, seemed acceptable, amusing even, far out in the country. The night when three young men drove a vintage car into the marquee of a coming out in Berkshire, scattering the dancers, overturning the drinks tables, seemed more like a scene from a gentle
Ealing comedy than proof of the viciousness of the upper classes. Everybody cheered. At these dances there was often an atmosphere of happiness hard to describe exactly, an innocent exuberance that disappeared completely over the next decade. In the last hour or two of a good party in the country, as dawn rose on dancing partners sleepily entwined on the dance floor in the garden, even girls who had their reservations about the Season felt fortunate indeed.

  These were the pleasures. But there were particular drawbacks attached to dances in the country. Because the guest list was more family and local there were likely to be fewer people that you knew than at London hotel dances. The young men could be gaucher and less practised on the dance floor. ‘The trouble with deb dances is that the men don’t dance very well’ as Elfrida Eden, a superlative ballroom as well as ballet dancer, acidly remarked. Nor were they always very entertaining talkers; obsessive interest in hunting, shooting and fishing was more to be expected in rural locations. It was all too easy to be landed for the evening with a clumsy-footed, non-rhythmic dance partner with a one-track mind. If your partner disappeared, as men did without compunction, there was a relatively smaller pool of male friends and acquaintances from which to find another. A girl without a partner could, albeit tearfully, take refuge with some dignity in the large impersonal Ladies’ Retiring Room of a London grand hotel, but your plight would be quite obvious in the more domestic setting of the first-floor bedroom which served as ladies’ cloakroom in an English country house.

  The journey back from the dance to the house where you were staying was a nagging worry. How would you ever again find the driver that you came with in the vast acreage of parkland, perhaps by this time secreted with a partner in the undergrowth? And, even once located, would he want to leave when you did? The other burning question was just how drunk would he be. At the time there were no strict rules against drinking and driving. Most debs’ escorts drove their cars when they were very drunk indeed. Dangerous driving was indeed regarded as a kind of badge of honour. One young man, his reckless left arm around my shoulder, told me as we skirted at top speed around Hyde Park Corner in the middle of the night that he had once killed a man while driving: hardly a confession to inspire my confidence. Such hazards were multiplied tenfold in the country; ‘… deb escorts drive at breakneck speed through the twisting lanes of Buckinghamshire’, the Evening Standard reported after Caroline Butler and Harriet Nares’s party at the Café de Paris in Bray. There were numerous reports of injuries that summer. Sandra Farley, at her dance, had a black eye and a cracked cheekbone sustained in a car crash only a few days earlier. Gay Foster’s dance, planned for June at Claridge’s, was postponed till the autumn since Gay was then in hospital, having been extracted from the wreckage of an escort’s car. Jennifer thought it worth telling the story in the Tatler that ‘After Sarah Norman’s ball at Sutton Place, the Hon. Shaun Plunket rescued Mr. John Hignett and his passenger Miss Sally Croker-Poole when Mr. Hignett’s car hit a lamp standard on the way home.’ So alarmed did the debs’ mothers become at all these accidents that Mrs Frederick Versen laid on a coach to return girls safely after the dance she gave for Alexandra at a house borrowed from friends at Englefield Green. How many girls availed themselves of Mrs Versen’s charabanc I do not know exactly, but it would have seemed a very tame end to the evening. I feel certain most debutantes would have preferred the risks.

  The other homeward hazard, besides drunkenness, was lustfulness. Men not safe in taxis were very much unsafer when driving their own vehicles very late at night on a lonely country road. ‘Shall we stop the car?’ was the inevitable question, either to be welcomed or definitely otherwise, according to one’s mood. Refusal could result in a hostile atmosphere. I was never actually ejected from the car of a drunken debs’ delight whose overtures I had rejected but it remained a possibility. Even back at the house there could be no relaxation. Two of my fellow debs, staying at Highclere Castle, took to sharing a state bed as mutual protection against the attentions of the marauding earl known to tramp his corridors in search of succulent young girls.

  These mid-twentieth century travels through the country, from house party to house party, from dance to dance, added up to an extraordinary new experience, gathering significance in retrospect. I was mostly in a haze of tiredness at the time. There was the basic human interest, to anybody curious, of arriving in strange households, identifying the members of the family and the often multiple hangers-on, gauging the relationships and emotional cross-currents, observing the ineffably peculiar ways in which people choose to live their lives. I have sometimes wondered whether it was this early, forcible immersion into the lives of others that made me a biographer. I loved the unexpected scenes, the often bizarre connections. There was a certain frisson, for a girl who had just curtsied, in sleeping in a bed the Queen herself had vacated only the week before.

  Beyond the domestic detail there was the broader pattern. Out in the country there was a sharper sense of the old feudal way of life than I had known in London. What emerged was a whole picture of a certain sort of Britain, a way of life enduring in the section of society which could roughly be termed ‘county’, still in 1958 with its framework of behaviour and accepted rural values more or less intact. Official records for that year show 966 hereditary peers, most with country estates, 25 peeresses, upwards of 1,000 baronets, plus a further 1,000 or so landed gentry with estates substantial enough to give them a position of local influence. The networks in the counties still kept to the old hierarchies, starting with the Lord Lieutenant in his role of the Queen’s local representative, organising royal tours and supervising the Territorial Army. Then came the high sheriffs, the masters of foxhounds, the bishops, the chairmen of the quarter sessions, the JPs. It was a network in which the aristocracy connected with the local country gentry and the largest of the landowners or farmers, the more presentable of whom might be invited to dinner at the Big House (but not often). This was a static and unquestioning society in which certain country landowners retained the hereditary right to choose the vicar and in which peers took part in the law-making processes of the country simply by right of birth.

  In 1873, an anxious Lady Minto wrote a letter remonstrating with her son Bertie, Viscount Melgund, who at the age of twenty-eight was not behaving in a manner fitting for an heir to an earldom: ‘… you are at the head of a family which has ties to the soil – traditions – and a reputation. … You can’t live a life of mere personal gratification much longer without doing yourself harm.’

  Well into the next century I was aware of such attitudes enduring. Your territorial privilege brought certain obligations of moral leadership. Whatever the temptations you did not let the side down. Even a failing marriage must, if at all possible, be endlessly patched up not just for the sake of the children. The likely effect on the few remaining servants, the gamekeepers and tenants, even the dogs and horses, came into the equation. This was an enclosed world in which the stiff upper lip ruled to an extent which would these days seem absurd. There was no talking things through. Excretion, menstruation and especially sex remained completely no-go subjects. These were people who faced death rather than endure a talking cure, a resistance which was as much social as psychological: the whole paraphernalia of professional unburdening to shrinks with foreign accents seemed impossibly embarrassing and very middle class. But this is not to say that English county people were emotionally deficient, as has often been assumed. My own Uncle Justin was a very good example of the man of hidden feelings. Justin, my father’s brother, was the almost archetypal retired army colonel who farmed in Wiltshire, upright and moustached. He was reticent in conversation. But with him as with so many of his contemporaries a strain of strong emotion underlay the silences. They felt deep loves and loyalties to their houses and their gardens, the tracts of land they owned, to the hunt, to their old regiments, and most of all their children. These were things that could easily move strong men to tears.

  With love of the land wen
t lineage. It seemed to me the county set drew a measure of security, in those uncertain times, in placing themselves and placing others. There was an obsessive preoccupation with genealogy. Arriving in a strange house you would be cross-examined about your father, your mother, grandparents, distant ancestors. Where was your father at school? What was his regiment? They were desperate to define you – in such terms as ‘Oh her grandmother was one of the McAlpines’ – as if family and lineage explained it all. In many of these households, other people that you knew, other houses you had stayed in, other dances you were going to, provided the main topics of conversation. There was an enormous expertise attached to it, an intimate knowledge of spellings, hyphenations and correct modes of address. Was it Fitzgerald with a small ‘g’ or a big one? Did Montagu-Douglas-Scott have two hyphens or none? And what about those terrible tongue-twisters of nomenclature Craven-Smith-Milnes and Twistleton-Wykeham-Fiennes? Why was Fiona’s grandmother the Marchioness of Bute whereas Carolyn’s mother was Marchioness Townshend? Where had the ‘of’ gone to? Such niceties, annoyingly mysterious to people on the outer fringes of society, were second nature here.