It was definitely our mothers’ intention that we should remain virgins until we married – and not just because they were old-fashioned and prim, but because many of them were also very Christian. And from our point of view, quite apart from the general pressure on virtue, you might very well have a baby: and that was quite a consideration: that would have been damaging. But the trouble is, that men like sexy women. And so the women who were sexier were likely to ‘go a little way’, and in due course that might lead to ‘going all the way’. So your mother had the idea that a man wanted you to be a virgin, but the men didn’t always seem to think so. It was all very confusing.
Sarah Norton (mentioned by many escorts of 1939 as one of the loveliest debs in Society) says today,
Sex was something we didn’t understand at all. I was never told about it by my mother and, even though I was brought up on a farm, I never associated it with humans. I thought if you held hands for too long you’d get pregnant! Later on I knew that it was all right to be given a discreet kiss by a man labelled on the mums’ list as ‘NSIT’: not safe in taxis. We knew what the more daring girls were doing. They were the ones who usually went out into the shrubbery at dances and these girls had a ‘reputation’ because the boys always talked. We were amused by it and always giggling, but as far as I was concerned it was all much too frightening for me to do it. I remember saying about one girl, ‘The trouble with her is, she’s crossed the Rubicon.’ However, these incidents never – as far as I know – resulted in pregnancy.
You were supposed to go to the marriage bed as a virgin. There was no such thing as birth-control so if a girl got pregnant, she married almost immediately. I don’t remember ever hearing the word ‘abortion’ mentioned. If a girl did have a ‘reputation’, then when she got engaged his parents wouldn’t be very happy about it. Not that we were in any way frustrated – quite the opposite: we were having a very good time.
Anthony Loch has reflected on this innocence among young women who were, in many other respects, thoroughly poised and sophisticated, and concludes:
As regards morals, girls were not so knowing as nowadays, having been spared television and films with a high sex content. Even a good-night kiss tended to be a hasty rather than a torrid business, and not even a matter of course. I do not suggest that debutantes were not aware of the facts of life, and no doubt in some cases had been able to read Lady Chatterley’s Lover on the sly, but the plain fact is that the pill had not been invented and drugs in one form or another were not common currency. It was even rare to see a girl clearly the worse for drink. As for the young men, whatever they did about sex, the debs were not an accepted target for serious business.
The girls may have been having a very good time: but what about the men? Only one man who was around during that Season has mentioned the obvious expedient – keeping a mistress – and he evidently took it for granted that you would keep her in Paris, which must have added to the already considerable expense. So this was a solution open to few. It is true that, if the girls were younger than their years in 1939 – at least by today’s standards – so too were the men. They were only recently schoolboys, and may often have been closer to homosexual adventures than to marriage. But many more seem to have found the friendship and camaraderie of university or regiment a fulfilling, if platonic, substitute for sexual relationships. Lord Haig confirms this:
The awful thing is that I think a lot of the young men in those days were not terribly interested in the opposite sex. One had the feelings and had relationships and so on but not in any practising way – not outgoing at all. One was simply so taken up with serious problems – you know, of life, and responsibility – and my great relaxation and fun were always horses; so that the physical thing … well … Obviously one was enchanted by the whole aesthetics of it – the marvellous dinner-parties and lovely bands and lights and so on, all going on in lovely houses; aesthetically, the dances were a wonderful experience that you couldn’t but absorb with the greatest enjoyment. But as for the debs: they were just a sort of great mass of sweet young ladies. The beauty of the dance convention was that you were always handing them on to someone else! I’m no authority on what their sex life was like and what they did, but I would think there was very little cohabitation between the sexes. Certainly for my generation that was so. It made the whole thing very unreal. And then, apart from anything else, on top of all these deb dances I was doing my Finals and also playing polo in the Oxford University team round all the tournaments. So all that burned one’s energies out a bit!
Lord Hood also found that relationships tended to happen within the context of a group, and for two people to pair up as a couple was fairly unusual:
The idea of attaching yourself to one person has developed recently but it didn’t apply so much then, I wouldn’t have thought. You probably knew a group of people particularly well, and you went in a group to a dinner-party and then you went on to the dance. But it was considered rather unusual – and indeed the mother would probably disapprove of her daughter always dancing with the same young man.
Dinah Brand also retained the impression that it would be unusual for a girl to confine herself to just one partner:
Quite a lot of girls had several people around, and they would be flirting with five or six, probably. I think it was more fun in that way. You were seen with a lot of different young men, without that terrific emotional commitment which is quite hard work for a young girl: besides which there was always the risk that she was going to be the loser. They might go off with someone else. For us, it didn’t usually get so involved – although at times, of course, there were terrific upsets and tears. But mostly you may have thought you were madly in love, but it hadn’t got the same deep emotional thing, and not the physical pull at all. But on the whole you just met loads of people and emerged with far more friends than when you went in. That included men, too – you certainly made male friends, in the platonic sense, and you kept them for years.
There were, inevitably, a number of young men who were predatory. Did they pester the virginal debs? Or did they concentrate on those desirable commodities, the very few girls with a reputation for being fast? Basil Kenworthy thought they did. ‘In general, yes. The news would get around that so-and-so is easy. But to be fair, the girls, the majority of whom were virtuous, were respected by the young men, because they were so innocent. But their innocence sometimes made them rather boring. The fast ones were more amusing.’ Nevertheless, the girls were not allowed by their mothers to forget that, in the end, making a good marriage was the underlying aim of the Season, and the imminence of war as well as the fairy-tale atmosphere of the dances resulted in some very early engagements. Basil Kenworthy is quite unequivocal about this:
These very rapid engagements which took place between couples who had only been acquainted for a few weeks largely took place because of the romantic surroundings. Here you had a girl who had been produced from the hot-house for the debutante season; she had expensive clothes, sometimes good jewellery, she had always been to the hairdresser on the day of the ball, usually the young men had had too much to drink and there was romantic music, everyone felt good, they were unaware of any depression outside in the world, or disaster – for the time being it was a ball. And I think that had a big effect. Sometimes they fell in love and sometimes they thought they fell in love.
The other big category was that of people marrying girls who lived in the property next door. I think that happened in many cases; but of course they had known the girls from babyhood, the parents approved, obviously it would be an advantageous marriage as well as a marriage for love. And finally, there were gold-diggers of both sexes.
Elizabeth Lowry-Corry talked eloquently of the paradox created for girls who had been brought up to believe implicitly that they must marry well – someone of their own kind – yet whose adolescent longings made them dream of marrying for passionate love:
I think we were both very worldly and yet unworldly
, in that we wanted to marry within our own class, it seemed important to us and we were conscious of class; but at the same time we wanted to have a great passion. I can’t think where those tremendously romantic ideas came from, but we certainly had them. Being beautiful was terribly important. My mother was extraordinarily beautiful, and my brothers were very good-looking, so I didn’t see myself standing beside some undistinguished-looking chap. Your eye has got to be caught, to trigger this passion we were all looking for.
Some couples did fall in love. Everyone from 1939 remembers Lord Andrew Cavendish (now the Duke of Devonshire) and Deborah Mitford. She had come out the year before; she was attractive in the unmistakable Mitford fashion, with piquant, witty expressions offset by classic English country looks, while he was the beau idéal: tall, dark and handsome with that air of detachment that would be called indifference in all but the aristocracy. But the main thing that was memorable about them was that they were so obviously, romantically, appropriately in love. They suited each other so well, they looked so right together. They were, says one deb wistfully, ‘the most romantic couple I’ve ever seen – very young and obviously hopelessly in love. They were so ethereally and beautifully dressed and they were so much in love and I wasn’t a bit jealous, I just thought it was beautiful.’ Another recalls seeing Debo draped wearily at the foot of a long flight of stairs in the hall of some great house. ‘What are you doing, Debo?’ she asked. ‘Oh, same as usual,’ sighed Debo; ‘waiting for Andrew.’ It is such a trivial exchange – why should she have remembered it? Perhaps because Debo Mitford epitomized what every girl would have liked to be. She was lovely to look at, popular, well connected, wonderful company – and she had found a man whom she loved and who was highly eligible.
Those two did not marry until 1941, but several debs married almost as soon as war broke out. One was Margaret Clifton-Brown, one of the great beauties of the Season, whose father was mp for Newbury. She had known her husband-to-be all her life but, as he was nine years older than she was, their relationship was neighbourly until the Season began. Then, inspired perhaps by the attention which other men were always paying her as much as by the sight of the gawky country cygnet suddenly transformed upon the picturesque lake of the Season into a swan, he fell in love with her. Their feelings for each other progressed so rapidly that by August they had become engaged.
We decided to get married when he was posted back from Liverpool to Windsor. He rang me up and said, ‘Come over,’ and I went and he proposed and I accepted. Then I had to get home on a train with no lights, hoping no one would attack me, and I was so excited and happy that I went to the wrong station and had to go to a policeman, who took me home in a police car. I got married in a flurry ten days before war broke out – I didn’t get anything new except a veil. There wasn’t time. I was ridiculously young. We had six months together – longer than we’d expected; he thought he would be sent abroad immediately – and then he went away and I didn’t see him again for four and a half years.
Rosamund Neave was another deb who married in a rush as war broke out. Her future husband also lived locally; she too had known him for years; but it was not until the night of her own dance, very early in the Season, that they began to fall in love. For her the Season was heaven after that: the most wonderful background to their relationship, ensuring that they would see each other often while their commitment to each other gradually developed and became a certainty. They married six days after the outbreak of war.
The women who were debs in 1939 consider themselves fortunate to have been spared the sexual pressures that their daughters and, even more, their granddaughters have had to learn to cope with. Young men were rarely importunate. If a girl had a reputation for being ‘naughty’ or even ‘wicked’ (to use their own terminology) she might find herself being propositioned – and she might accept. Her contemporaries would be curious, might even in an odd way envy her, but they were not censorious. The innocent girls were protected by their innocence, and very rarely had to ward off the demands of an over-heated young man. This was not only true within their own class. Lady Cathleen Eliot remembers with incredulity that all during the war she used to hitch lifts back from London in the small hours of the morning with lorry drivers, and nobody ever made sexual approaches to her. ‘There I would be, done up to the nines in evening dress, dripping with diamonds – well, not exactly dripping, but I did have a lovely pair of chandelier diamond earrings that I had inherited – and none of them ever laid a finger on me. Quite the reverse: they used to share their sandwiches with me. You couldn’t risk that today.’
Rosamund Neave recalls her outrage on the one occasion when a young man overstepped the mark:
This was at a very well-known country house where I had gone to stay for the weekend. A young man came into my room and said, ‘You know this is it. You know this is it. You know I want to sleep with you.’ I got very frightened because my hair was in curlers and so I said, ‘No, I’m not going to sleep with you and I do not like you, will you please go away.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’ll go away if you meet me tomorrow morning, outside this house …’ And so the next morning, early, when the housemaid came in I said, ‘Would you please tell your mistress that I wish to go home; I’m not feeling very well.’ And so that’s how I got out of it.
But this incident is exceptional. By and large, debs were allowed to refuse any sexual advances.
The summer was now reaching its climax: sporting, social and political. Wimbledon was well into its second week, and a dull, wet week it was. Even the men’s singles final sounds boring, in the account in The Times: ‘Somehow we had a touch of Edgar Allan Poe in the Centre Court: the unfathomable Riggs deliberately finished off his man by slow torture, and if it was of absorbing interest to students of stroke and strategy, those who like a dash of blood and sawdust with their tennis went out to tea.’
The deb dances continued, with the prospect of four outstanding ones in the country to round off the three last months of nightly froth and sparkle. On 5 July – the night after the American Independence Day Ball at the Dorchester, at which the Kennedy family headed the cast – there were three dances. Rhoda Walker-Heneage-Vivian, the bright girl from a castle in Wales who had done the Season on what was, relatively, a shoe-string, describes hers:
It set my father back £600, which was a vast sum in those days. [Today’s equivalent would be £12,000.] I wore the best of my seven evening dresses: an ice-blue satin one, with a brocade evening coat. Seven dresses sounds an awful lot, but it was nothing, compared with some debs. The dance was heaven … the first time I had been the most important person … and I carried a huge bouquet of stephanotis and wore long white gloves.
On the same evening, Margaret Clifton-Brown’s mother gave a small dance for her (‘only about 300 people’) which she says she did not enjoy at all. It was marred by the fact that the man who was very soon to be her husband was not given leave by his regiment to be there:
By the end of June, early July, people were making the most of what they deemed to be their last hours on earth. Because of the awful slaughter in the First World War, a lot of the men thought the same thing was about to happen to them.
My parents were elderly, and one had to try to keep any worries away from them. So the dance went ahead, even though by then an awful lot of people were training hard and – like my friend – couldn’t get away for the dances. So my wonderful slinky silver lamé dress by Norman Hartnell was a bit wasted.
I’d done the Season mainly because it was my parents’ wish, although I would have liked to take up nursing, and still wish I’d done so. I didn’t get a chance to nurse during the war because by then I was already married and my son was born at the end of 1940. So I spent the war trying to run this rather wet and boggy farm in Norfolk. It was very quiet and dull and lonely, although I had great support from all the kindness of the village people.
Our son was four and a half years old before his father saw him, and although as t
ime went on they came to love each other their first year together was very difficult as they were both so jealous of each other.
But that’s leaping ahead a long way. The Season: to me, after my experiences in Austria, it all seemed unreal. One had to suppress that feeling and just keep going as long as possible. One didn’t want to seem to panic. But I suppose, if I’m honest, I didn’t really enjoy the Season. I hadn’t got my heart in it. It was all so artificial – a frivolous waste of time.
The second of the three great dances which took place in July, in the closing weeks of the Season, was held the following evening, Thursday the 6th, for Rosalind Cubitt. It was a very good dance and – with over a thousand guests – a very crowded dance. But the thing that made it remarkable, that everyone remembers with elegiac clarity, was its setting: Holland House. This great house, the first part of which was built at the beginning of the seventeenth century, but much added to during the passing years, was like a country house in the middle of Kensington, with grounds so vast that Lord Ilchester, its owner, held pheasant shoots there. The house features over and over again in the political and social history of the last three centuries. It was a centre of intrigue during the war between the Cavaliers and Roundheads – the first Earl of Holland lost his head for his ultimate loyalty to the royal cause – and was for a time a meeting place for Dr Johnson’s circle, since Joseph Addison lived there for some years. The lovely and fascinating Lady Holland made it a great Whig centre at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was a house redolent with history; and its own history ended violently in 1942, when it was bombed to destruction by the Luftwaffe. Ros Cubitt’s coming out ball, attended by English and Spanish royalty, was thus its last great social occasion; and the beauty of the house has been preserved, like a still from some great historical film like the Russian War and Peace, in the minds of the guests who were there on 6 July 1939.
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