Angel Dorothy

by Jane Brown

  Twelve: ‘The Hasting Day’

  Fair daffodils, we weep to see

  You haste away so soon;

  And yet the early-rising sun

  Has not attain’d his noon.

  Stay, stay,

  Until the hasting day

  Has run

  But to the evensong;

  And, having pray’d together, we

  Will go with you along.322

  Dorothy’s diary for 1945 is an odd one out, a Smythson ‘Wafer’ diary, a lesser affair than her usual ‘Featherweight’, which speaks of austerity, or that some well-meaning person bought the wrong one. She is fifty-eight on 23rd January, which William, now happily at home and at school at Foxhole, and Leonard attempt to celebrate, but she brushes them aside. Her long absences and then her preoccupations with her talks and the evacuees have left the larger Dartington carrying on without her and she seems content to leave it this way. She is still the trustee and only begetter of the Arts Department, and Chris Martin’s natural successor, and after some deliberations his actual successor as arts administrator, was Peter Cox. Peter was in his early twenties, handsome with a rather leonine mane of hair; he had come down from reading history at Cambridge to be rejected by the army, the law, and apparently his family. The Martins had given him refuge and he became Chris’s amanuensis and then assistant, at £3 a week. Dorothy had come to know him well through Chris’s illness, and that final August afternoon when Chris died it was Peter who waited – sitting on the cathedral lawn working at a report – to drive her home. At first she was watchful of his youthfulness and of his ability to cope with capricious artistes, the touring company that arrived late, and the soloist who refused to play on the German-made grand piano, but she soon accepted that he was both determined and resourceful. She was also reassured by his early success at working with Imogen Holst.

  ‘Imo’, as those at Dartington called her (though not Dorothy), was Gustav Holst’s only child. She was in her late thirties, neat, round-faced, and often dirndl-skirted; she was full of musicality, and totally unselfconsciously would happily break into a jig if someone’s voice or a phrase from an oboe inspired her. She believed that everyone could sing, she was a brilliant teacher, and her small groups and classes brought music to wartime Dartington – ‘we sightsang unaccompanied every morning – Palestrina, di Lasso, Vittoria, from 9 a.m. to 9.30 – nobody dreamed of calling that compulsory, because it was such a joy’. There were songs in the sunny Courtyard and to the lunch queues and serenades to parting guests; they sang rounds, which Dorothy enjoyed, and Imogen had arranged two rounds by William Boyce as a Christmas gift to her and Leonard. Everyone, the land girls, evacuees, soldiers, convalescent airmen and Dartingtonians, all joined in her musical evenings.323 Peter Cox called this musical life ‘essentially organic, rooted in the Courtyard but growing out beyond its confines’. Together he and Imogen joined these roots to the flower of the musical world, bringing Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Clifford and Lucille Curzon, Alfred Deller, Joan Cross and other soloists to inspire and lead the students.324 Imogen believed that her most callow beginners could advance with Britten’s genius in conducting his own A Ceremony of Carols or, even more ambitiously, in performing Bach’s St John Passion with distinguished soloists. She still inhabited her father’s musical world with many of his connections, and yet ‘she felt it to be a great privilege, and a very real responsibility, to be the resident musician of an enlarged private household’. Dorothy cherished her ‘court’ musicians, and she was even persuaded to play the guitar for the orchestra; Imogen remembered ‘we found the happiest look on her face during the week was when she came out of the house swinging her guitar on her way’ to play – she was ‘awfully good’ and ‘very musical’ but her shyness restricted her. Also, Imogen said she understood well that Dorothy had so many other worries and responsibilities that were far removed from their Devon valley.

  The sudden death of President Roosevelt on 12th April 1945 from a cerebral haemorrhage came as a great blow. Dorothy’s immediate reaction was to cable sympathies to Eleanor Roosevelt; for herself she analysed her feeling of ‘the irreparable loss the world has suffered’ for he had been taken in the midst of his work for a durable peace. ‘In the struggle to hold together the great family of man,’ she wrote, ‘there is at present no outstanding leader – no one with the moral force and political wisdom who can speak on behalf of a powerful country, and help to dispel the clouds of fear and distrust that threaten to black out any hope of co-operation.’325 When VE Day was declared on 8th May, and Imogen and her students sang ‘Alleluia and Glory to God’ from the Porch tower, Dorothy was thankful but not cheerful. With the release of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, noted in her diary in the first week of August, she feared for ‘the euphoria of power’ in her own country, and felt FDR’s loss even more: ‘How can we get on without him? How can we hope for peace in the future without the guidance he gave? He was indeed the leader of democracy – all the world over, the focus of the democratic faith, and the source of international goodwill.’ Her ending was for Eleanor – his right hand – her ‘sustaining him in the hardest of times’ – ‘the part that you have played all along is perhaps one of the noblest parts a great woman has ever played’.326

  Dorothy was grasping at every large piece of paper she could find (the war shortage was evident) to write – scrawl in pencil – her emotional eulogy, and its purpose is unclear. Was it for a talk she never gave or was it just something she had to write? Was it the fate of the world or the loss of FDR that moved her so deeply? Once upon a time FDR and Willard were much alike, in stature, appearance and prospects, it was just that one had a future and the other had not. Of Franklin and Eleanor the attraction had always been Franklin, and if Dorothy had been a less just soul she might have questioned why Eleanor, not so rich nor so good-looking, not so intelligent (though perhaps less radical and more pliant) than herself, had been handed the role of ‘great woman’.

  Was she inwardly cursing her lot? Peter Cox glimpsed this harsher Dorothy one day:

  I was standing with her in the Courtyard and she called Thomas the butler over to give him some message. A minute or two later she saw that Thomas had stopped to talk to someone on the way back. Scarcely raising her voice she called across the Courtyard – Thomas, I asked you – the message was received like a bullet, Thomas scuttled back to his pantry.327

  Walter Thomas’s embarrassing moment belied his value, and his status; every difficult guest or importunate visitor could be calmed and charmed by his gracefully serving tea on the Loggia lawn. Emily, the once lost young seamstress, was now his wife, and greatly admired for her home-making skills, especially her flowers – natural arrangements of flowers, leaves and berries according to their season set in beautiful containers, often hand-thrown studio pots – which made such a memorable contribution to the atmosphere of the Hall, house and Courtyard rooms.

  When the evacuees, the army and the war workers had all drifted away Dartington sometimes seemed quiet, rather tired and careworn, the whole estate badly in need of a boost to recover from neglect and dilapidations. Dorothy could see this but she could not give the orders and she wrote rather tetchily to Leonard, ‘I don’t believe many people have a second chance like this,’ urging him to finish ‘the India job’ and come home to ‘give the best of your thought and vision to Dartington’.328 India had remained the subject on which they could never agree. Ever since 1929, she had vowed never to go again, nor did she, but Leonard’s visits had only increased with the war and looming Indian partition and independence. His association with Tagore, who had died in 1941 but was more revered and celebrated than ever, had made him acceptable as an agricultural adviser. More than that, Leonard’s war had brought him national as well as international distinction as chairman of Political and Economic Planning and for his work on all aspects of post-war reconstruction. Dartington was the platform for all he did but she felt he was taken away too much, her instinct bei
ng that Dartington must be seen to shine again, before they could influence the world outside.

  Her heart and her head told her that her best work would be to revive the garden. In the darkest days when survival seemed such a fragile notion she had started to write diary descriptions of the most wonderful flowering moments, and these she continued and elaborated into her Garden Notebooks:

  July 1945 – the smoke bush is a dream – Rhus cotinus purpureus – in full flower, like spun sugar dipped in claret. I love it madly. The group of blue hydrangeas in the Loop is a great success and Cornus kousa is my greatest joy of all. Cornus capitata is having a sabbatical! [This creamy flowered shrub beside the Sunny Border soon revived.]329

  Constance Spry had suggested that Percy Cane might be the garden designer for Dartington, and with the ‘spun sugar dipped in claret’ in flower, he made his first visit.330 Cane could not have been less like the lean and hungry pair of demi-gods Walter Gropius and Michael Chekhov who had both bewitched Dorothy; he was Essex-born, over sixty, a confirmed bachelor, practical and hard-working and uncharismatic. His private practice had been successful for twenty-five years and his gardens were well illustrated in many magazines and several of his own books. He liked to ease his planting out into the semi-wild, with mown paths curving through carefully sited shrubs and trees; a widening of the path into a mown glade was his favourite device.

  After an opening skirmish when she feared Cane wanted to change everything, even to deprive her of her treasured Davidia which she thought lovelier than any she had seen at Kew or Westonbirt, the dust settled: ‘Mr Cane came to help us over the contours... and showed us the advantage of intensifying the great heights and depths. He said you must take full advantage of the dramatic contrasts that have been smothered or lost to view.’ In the September, ‘We’ve started with a vengeance making the Glade from Upper Ranges down to the Heath Bank. The tractor pulls the trees with little effort. So far a larch has come down, 2 oaks, 1 fir.’

  In October 1945:

  Tremendous clearance is going on by means of the tractor. Great chunks of stuff pulled out of the Woodland and the Dell, and of course the new Glade. We are going to see our great trees (ilex, Spanish chestnuts, Scots pines and Turkey oaks) at last. I hadn’t realised how terribly cluttered they had been. These are the days! The perfect autumn days – absolutely still, slight frost in the morning – hot sun at mid-day and a deep blue sky.

  In the November she came back after a few days in London to find ‘a great change had taken place here – so many leaves have fallen. Only the beeches glow with sun on them – burnt orange. They are so wonderful – the beeches. And now two have been cut down – it’s agonizing (though they were rotten and dangerous).’

  Plan of Dartington's garden in the 1960s. The Great Hall is at A, the Porch Tower at B, the Elmhirsts’ house at C and the White Hart, the wartime dining room, at D. The East Courtyard rooms are at E and the West Courtyard rooms are at F, with the Entrance Arch and adjoining Barn Theatre at G.

  Clearing the Glade was opening the windows, letting air and light flow through – there was now an airy perspective from the Hall to the farthest Upper Ranges, and from the top of the grass sweep of the Glade one could look back, down into the depths of the tiltyard and across to the Sunny Border, which was planted along in front of an old stone wall. This Sunny Border was Dorothy’s personal garden, and no one dared touch it without her knowledge. On the opposite side of the path along the border stood the row of Irish yews known as the Twelve Apostles which she thought ‘may have been planted to hide an eighteenth-century bear-baiting pit in the tiltyard from the eyes of the children in the house’.331 At the top of the Heath Bank was her favourite look-out to the rolling green and wooded hills that in some lights seemed like the sea, and here Percy Cane built her a paved circular belvedere, the Whispering Circle. The only way down the steep bank was by Beatrix Farrand’s ‘little goat track’ for the agile, now replaced by Cane’s beautiful stone steps, ingeniously nine separate flights of graduated lengths, unadorned, and flanked with bays, magnolias and large heaths. These steps made a tour of the garden possible by connecting the Glade to the lower levels; everything was coming together and ever more often Dorothy noted, ‘How I bless Mr Cane!’

  Her confidence and happiness in her garden are self-evident, but Imogen Holst’s observation about her shyness stunting her musicality identifies the enigma that was growing around her, the shadow that fell over these crucial post-war years. The Dorothy that toured America speaking to hundreds of strangers in vast halls, and then came home to repeat her performances all over south-west England, did not survive the war. She could not face Dartingtonians en masse – at concerts in the Great Hall, on Foundation Days, at church on Sunday mornings she would slip quietly into her seat, and if a speech of welcome or thanks were required then someone else would have to make it, usually Leonard. She was as she had been before the war, as Michael Young had observed, a familiar presence, but one that nobody knew because of her shyness. 332

  The extent of her shyness was infinitely variable, a miasma distilled from inner doubts and outer circumstances, and elusive. Sheer physical exhaustion and the problems of finding a role amidst post-war chaos were the lot of many women, and she was by no means unusual in her affliction. So much was said about women winning their rightful place in society because of their war work, but society quickly resumed its misogynistic bias. The New Year of 1946 confronted Dorothy with two vivid illustrations of this as she set out for London early in January to meet Eleanor Roosevelt and to see the exhibition of paintings by Picasso and Matisse at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Her own Picasso ‘jeune fille’ with rosebud mouth and cherry cheeks was enchanting (and for all the head was on a table it could still be imagined as attached to the girl’s body) but these paintings were perplexing and puzzling with his overtly ‘distorted’ images of his muses and lovers. It would have seemed less threatening had he painted more men with their orifices rearranged and cubistic limbs. Attitudes would change but at the time they had been frozen by the war, there was controversy, and apparently a riot, as there had been in 1919, and it was unnerving for any woman to be surrounded with such violence inspired by every woman’s body.

  It might be thought that Dorothy’s ‘great woman’ who had been America’s First Lady for a dozen years, Eleanor Roosevelt, was immune from nerves and fears, especially as she was in London as an American delegate to the First Assembly of the United Nations held at Central Hall, Westminster. Mrs Roosevelt, told bluntly by her colleagues ‘that we did all we could to keep you off the US delegation’, knew well that she had to ‘walk on eggs’, and that as the only woman representing America to this ‘New World Organization’ she felt that ‘I was not very welcome’. She continued, ‘If I failed to be a useful member, it would not be considered that I as an individual had failed, but that all women had failed, and there would be little chance for others to serve in the near future.’333 Walking ‘on eggs’ was an interesting turn of phrase, for the complete absence of fresh eggs, even at Claridge’s, and the revolting powdered substitute, drove some of the American delegation to distraction. Mrs Roosevelt was overcome by a gift of fresh eggs, perhaps brought from Devon by Dorothy, who played her part in a gathering of American friends to cheer her visit.334

  It had been Christopher Martin’s friendship with Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, as well as Imogen Holst, that had enabled Dartington’s music making that now worked so well. Six months earlier in June of 1945, Dorothy and Leonard, Cicely Martin and Peter Cox had been at Sadler’s Wells for the first night of Britten’s Peter Grimes with Peter Pears singing the part of Grimes and Joan Cross as Ellen Orford. They had experienced the uncanny silence when the music died, which erupted into cheering and fourteen curtain calls. The opera was voted ‘thrilling’ and marking ‘the reinstatement of opera in the musical life of this country’.335 Ben and Peter (as even Dorothy called them) were easily persuaded to give a concert in Christopher Martin’s
memory at Dartington in the July, and during their visit the talk naturally veered towards Ben’s hope for an English Opera Group. There had been difficulties at Sadler’s Wells, and – at least in July of 1945 – Covent Garden and Glyndebourne seemed a long way from reopening. It was agreed ‘to give Benjamin Britten’s opera company a start at Dartington next April’. Dorothy promised £2,000, about one third of the estimated cost of the first production. Britten was diverted by his song cycle of Donne’s Holy Sonnets, a quartet for strings and a ‘small film’ which turned out to be The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. He began working on the new opera, The Rape of Lucretia, at the end of January 1946, with the April deadline slipping.336

  For some reason, possibly bad weather, she was unable to reach London for Maynard and Lydia Keynes’s Gala for the Arts Council which reopened Covent Garden on 20th February, all its red plush and gilt restored through superhuman efforts on behalf of the staff and volunteers. Though she saw a later performance of the sublime Sleeping Beauty with Fonteyn and Helpmann, Dorothy missed the gala night speculation about Glyndebourne’s reopening and of Ben’s new Lucretia, or she might have asked some questions. Lord Keynes died at Easter, on 21st April, and she mourned a friend as well as an ally who believed, as she did, in a liberal arts policy of ‘arts for all’ which had been expressed in his Arts Council’s motto, ‘The Best for the Most’. By this time she knew that Ben’s friend and producer Eric Crozier had made a visit to Glyndebourne and become so enraptured with John Christie’s plans for reopening on the grand scale that he had to stay overnight (borrowing a pair of Christie’s capacious green silk pyjamas); the next morning saw the birth of the English Opera Group, with directors Crozier, Christie and Britten. The opening production was to be The Rape of Lucretia and, in an extra slight, it was to be managed by Rudolf Bing, to whom Dartington had given refuge with Frederick Ashton and the Vic-Wells Ballet at the start of the war.