Diana did prove herself and she was accepted. She never became the selfless sister-of-mercy of the visionary’s dream. ‘They put me in a men’s ward of unsurpassed horror and filth,’ she complained in November 1914, ‘and then kept me at work till 10 o’clock, which brings it out at ten hours at a stretch in one stinking bolting-hutch of beastliness. What I bear from these thirty whining Calibans!’ But Diana became a hard-working, conscientious and thoroughly competent nurse. Her conduct-sheet was immaculate. She had enough curiosity and interest in others to make her a sympathetic bedside presence, yet was sufficiently detached not to be harrowed by their sufferings. She was physically strong and had an inner toughness that was even more important. She remarked after a few months that she had ‘lost the instinct to turn away from repulsive things’. She took the whining Calibans for granted, never convinced herself that they were Ferdinands in disguise, but grew fond of them and did a professional job of tending to their needs.
As a V.A.D. – member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment – Diana had in fact no right to claim professional status. To her pleasure, however, she found that she was soon treated as a not particularly expert but still capable member of the nursing staff. She recorded proudly that she was allowed to give injections, intravenous and saline, to prepare for operations, cut abscesses and even once say prayers in Sister’s absence. Time spent in the kitchen at Arlington Street watching the disembowelling of a hare proved well spent when she attended her first operation and survived without coming anywhere near to fainting. It was hard work, but she was doing it well, more than holding her own where her friends had forecast disaster. Her role was extravagantly publicized:
I’ll eat a banana
With Lady Diana,
Aristocracy working at Guy’s
was one of the boasts of that hero of the music hall, Gilbert the Filbert, the Colonel of the Knuts. For once Diana genuinely deprecated her notoriety; she had no wish to ruffle feelings at the hospital or earn the disapproval of the terrible Matron. The publicity seems to have done her no harm; she was well liked by her contemporaries and one at least of those who worked with her remembers her as friendly, unassuming and cheerful in the most gruesome circumstances.
Satisfied though she was with her life at Guy’s, she could not resist temptation when the chance again offered to work in France. This time it was her mother who championed the idea. The Duchess had decided it would be appropriate for somebody in her station to open her own hospital. She raised a substantial sum of money, employing Diana as fund-raiser, and acquired a suitable château near Boulogne. The necessary refurbishment was almost complete when the Red Cross changed their minds and refused to sanction the hospital’s opening. The château was turned into an Army School, but two years later, when Patrick Shaw-Stewart was posted there, it still boasted a ‘Marquess of Granby Ward’, a ‘Marjorie Ward’ and a ‘Diana Ward’. ‘Incidentally, some humorist has inserted an N before the T in “Violet Ward”,’ reported Shaw-Stewart.
Frustrated, the Duchess decided that Arlington Street should be turned into a hospital for officers. Diana was enthusiastic about the project. She would have been ready to return to Guy’s, but a few months back at home had shown her the advantages of a looser regimen. Her friends were all-important to her, their appearances in London were short and unpredictable; if she were cooped up in Southwark and only allowed out every two or three nights for a couple of hours she might well miss them altogether. At Arlington Street with a Sister and two trained nurses on the staff, Diana could do useful work as a V.A.D. yet enjoy relative freedom. With her sister Letty and one of her closest friends, Phyllis Boyd, also on the staff, she could be sure of congenial society and, incidentally, feel pleasantly superior to it because of her more thorough training. Her own bedroom was needed for the hospital so she moved upstairs to what had formerly been a servant’s room. Her exile delighted her. Her new quarters might be humble but they boasted a separate telephone on which the Duchess was no longer able to listen to her daughter’s calls.
At Guy’s Diana’s social life had been snatched in odd hours rescued from the rigorous routine. At Arlington Street her two lives constantly flowed over into each other. Friends would drop in at all hours, Alan and Duff would pay regular visits on the way back from their offices, the ebullient ‘Scatters’ Wilson would arrive from Rumpelmeyer’s, with packets of cream cakes and bottles of sherry. One Friday in August Diana recorded that she had had to stay in because an officer had ‘suddenly had to have a rib cut out of his side, the which was flung into a sewer instead of being fashioned into a woman, and from his side came a cataract, two basins full of flowing poison, and now he’s gasping restlessly, poor man.’ The job done, she left for dinner at Wimborne House and a ball given by the Duchess of Sutherland. Another evening she left a dinner at the Cheshire Cheese so as to help in an emergency operation, then rejoined the party two or three hours later at Alan Parsons’ house in Mulberry Walk. She did not find it too difficult to put the horrors of hospital life behind her and throw herself into a different world. She might have been a less competent nurse if she had failed to do so.
When things were slack at Arlington Street she would occupy herself elsewhere. With Katharine Asquith she would go down to the East End to provide an evening meal for workers in munitions factories. She appeared regularly in the tableaux vivants and displays of mime which so enraptured Londoners in the first decades of the twentieth century and which raised large sums for charities. Except for brief periods when the hospital was crowded in the wake of some bloody battle, her life was not physically a taxing one. In his novel The Pretty Lady Arnold Bennett portrayed Diana as Lady Queenie Paulle: beautiful, aristocratic, highly-strung, expensive, ruthless. Queenie did ‘practically everything that a patriotic girl could do for the war’; she sat on a dozen committees where she seemed far more at ease than the elderly men who surrounded her, ‘her thin, rather high voice, which somehow matched her complexion and carriage, had its customary tone of amiable insolence.’ She was a busybody who, with discipline and application, might have done great things, but who through flattery and self-indulgence had been transformed into a neurotic sensation-seeker, dangerous to others but ultimately still more dangerous to herself.
Bennett had never met Diana when he wrote his novel. His portrait caused great indignation to her friends. ‘Monstrous and abominable,’ Tommy Bouch described it, ‘not even witty … If I wanted to I am sure I could draw you better than that, with a cruelty which would be far more hurtful, but not so crude and mistaken and heavy-handed.’ Diana did not condemn it so forthrightly. She could see the resemblance between herself and Queenie, and found the tricks of speech, the attitudes of mind, even some incidents of which Bennett could not possibly have known, disturbingly familiar. What she felt unfair was the portrayal of her wartime activities as centring round a group of committees on which she was supposed to play a leading role. Diana hated committees, rarely contributed if she had to attend one and kept such occasions to a minimum. She did a worthwhile job which Queenie Paulle would have considered dull and degrading and, incidentally, felt that she got a lot more fun out of life than her alter ego. Queenie Paulle died in the end, cavorting on a London roof-top in an air-raid. Diana might have cavorted too, but she would have taken cover fast enough when the shrapnel began to fall. Life offered far too much to risk it with foolish bravado.
*
For life, even though England was at war, was filled with pleasures. Some of them, indeed, she owed to the war. Guy’s, servitude in one way, had meant freedom in another. What she did with her spare time, whether she had any spare time, the Duchess could not know. In fact she did nothing very dramatic; sometimes she dined alone with a man in a restaurant, but she had neither energy nor inclination for anything more daring. Her freedom, however, seemed all-important. With her return to Arlington Street, the Bovril Duchess, as Cynthia Asquith called her, began to reassert her maternal rights. Diana reacted with hostility. By the time sh
e and her mother went to France to investigate the setting up of the hospital, tempers were already frayed. Once Diana complained angrily because the Duchess made a noise turning over the pages of Le Matin:
She said tonight sadly ‘Does everything I do make you uncomfortable?’ By Jove, it does, every bloody thing: squabbling with the Base Commander over the rent of the château; forcing useless and unwelcome objects – calendars, napkin-rings etc – on the officers; standing always in Princess Louise’s way in hopes of a word; ‘Vous savez, Monsieur, je suis très importante’ to all barrier-keepers; worst of all that staring at and questioning of the wounded. That eternal asking them where they are wounded, and the answer is always ‘Buttocks, lady’, or ‘Just here’ with an ominous pointing index, or else a crimson face and a trembling lip from a sensitive man who wants no one to know he has lost both legs and a hand.
Once back in London both sides settled down to a war of attrition. The Duchess never shut her bedroom door and insisted that Diana should always look in before she went up to her room, however late it was. Whatever state she was in, Diana always forced herself to sober up before returning. And then the lies would begin: ‘The Wimbornes’ ball is only just over, Lady Drogheda drove me home’, when in fact for the last hour she had been in a taxicab driving round and round Regent’s Park with a man. By day Irene Lawley provided the most regular alibi when Diana did not want her mother to know that she was seeing Duff or some other friend. Both sides hated the sordid ritual. Diana felt cheap and ashamed while the Duchess deemed herself betrayed. She sickened of the fight but could not bring herself to let go, while Diana never braced herself to the point of brazen defiance. In the end the Duchess was bound to lose. As the hospital became better established, so she lost interest in its running and spent more and more time at Belvoir, now a convalescent home. Standards were not what they had been. Provided Diana did not marry any of the young men with whom she was no doubt misbehaving, then the Duchess would leave her in peace. What else could she do except retreat from the field and keep her armies intact to fight the final, all-important battle?
*
In December 1914 Billy Grenfell described ‘a bust’ in London, ‘mostly with the remnants of our little clique’. Raymond and Katharine Asquith, Patrick Shaw-Stewart, Duff and Diana were there, ‘the latter looking very handsome’. ‘There is a sort of “Lights-Out” and “Eyes Right” air about London which makes merry-making incongruous. Though why should one not cull the fruit of the days that may yet remain?’ The circumstances could hardly have been more ripe for unbridled culling of any fruit in sight. The men, conscious that this might be their last chance, were out to make the most of it; the women, oppressed by a sense of debt to those who were going out to die for them, felt guilt in denying them any pleasures. The sharp division between military and civilian, the immunity of London to attack in the early phases of war, meant that the soldier on leave from the front enjoyed a far more privileged position than his equivalent in the Second World War. The miracle is that so many of the taboos of polite society survived more or less inviolate.
Not that much remained inviolate at ‘Fitz’, No. 8 Fitzroy St, the studio in which Nancy Cunard, Iris Tree, Phyllis Boyd and a few more of Diana’s friends held court. Often the inhabitants would urge her, ‘Come to Fitz, Diana.’ Always she refused, a little jealous of the freedom the others enjoyed, the excesses they no doubt perpetrated, yet too frightened to accept the invitation and anyway doubtful whether it was quite her sort of thing. Once she went round to help clear up after a party. Champagne bottles broken at the neck to save the trouble of drawing the cork, pools of blood and vomit, frowsty unmade beds, a black velvet divan thick with dust: squalor disgusted her and she never visited the studio again. Yet she could not escape a feeling of regret that, in sexual matters at least, her friends had stolen a march on her.
In every other way her conduct was far from prudish. At Arlington Street she had easy access to drugs and every chemist was ready to sell on the flimsiest excuse goods that now would have to be ordered on prescription. Chloroform was the easiest to obtain. Aubrey Herbert was reported to be ‘in a state of frenzied resentment and irritation against Diana, who rasps his war nerves’. After a dinner in which she had been particularly vociferous she suddenly announced: ‘I must be unconscious tonight.’ A taxi was sent off to a nearby chemist and soon returned with a packet. ‘Jolly old chlorers,’ Diana exclaimed, at which point Aubrey Herbert removed his wife before the orgy started.
Another time, when Diana was dining with Edwin and Venetia Montagu, a message was sent to Savory and Moore in St James’s requesting a supply of chloroform. Lady Diana Manners, the chemist was told, was having trouble with her eye. The conscientious Mr Savory, or perhaps Mr Moore, decided the Duchess should be informed of her daughter’s plight and within half an hour Diana’s mother was ringing at the door of the Montagus’ house in Queen Anne’s Gate. She was relieved to find Diana’s eye was safe. ‘But then comes the tangle. What for were we wanting the stuff? I felt Edwin crimson through his black, myself an unclouded sunset, and heard a muddled muck of unorganized loud-lying tongues.’ The dog was in great pain, Venetia had neuralgia, finally everyone agreed that Edwin Montagu’s hay-fever had been causing him trouble. The Duchess can hardly have been deceived, but politeness forbade any protest. She must have found it more difficult to restrain herself if she realized that Diana sometimes indulged her taste alone at home. Duff and Raymond Asquith arrived at Arlington Street late one night in August 1915, and demanded to see Diana. After some expostulation they got in, to find Diana, in Duff’s words, ‘slightly under the influence of chloroform which she’s been taking to cheer herself up’.
Morphia was another favoured refuge if the pains of the war became too great. Katharine Asquith was a staunch champion of this drug. In December 1915 Diana told Raymond Asquith that the only moments of pleasure she had found in the last month had arisen when she and Katharine had lain ‘in ecstatic stillness through too short a night, drugged in very deed by my hand with morphia. O, the grave difficulty of the actual injection, the sterilizing in the dark and silence and the conflict of my hand and wish when it came to piercing our flesh. It was a grand night, and strange to feel so utterly self-sufficient – more like a Chinaman, or God before he made the world or his son and was content with, or callous to, the chaos.’
The habit was never regular enough for it to become addictive, but it was dangerous for all that. Three weeks later she had another orgy with Katharine Asquith and spent the next day in bed with an alarmingly violent hangover. ‘I hope she won’t become a morphi-neuse,’ commented Duff. ‘It would spoil her looks.’
Alcohol proved equally seductive. Champagne was the stock drink, consumed in such quantities and so much associated with the hysteria of war that for all her life thereafter Diana viewed it with distaste. Vodka and absinthe were other possibilities, usually resorted to in the early hours of the morning. Whisky and gin were almost inconceivable drinks for a woman: to reduce oneself to a stupor with morphia was risky, perhaps immoral, but to drink a whisky and soda would have been common – a far worse offence.
Outside the houses of their friends, the Cavendish Hotel was the favoured resort of the group. Diana was forbidden by her mother to enter Rosa Lewis’s notorious establishment, which made it far more enjoyable, and two or three evenings a week would start in the Elinor Glyn room, with the impressively ample purple couch, or end up swirling tipsily around the corridors in search of diversion. Upstairs an old gentleman called Lord Kingston was taking an unconscionable time a-dying. ‘Come and cheer up Lord Kingston,’ Mrs Lewis would say, and off they would traipse to stand round the bedside of this unfortunate dotard and try to think of things to say. Then it was: ‘Let’s have a bottle of Lord Kingston’s champagne.’ Lord Kingston was too weak to protest and every so often a monumental bill was prepared and sent to everybody whom Rosa Lewis could remember having seen in her hotel. Usually somebody paid. Lord Ribblesdale
and Sir William Eden were among the regular residents who got drawn into the revels. The former, in youth a most dashing figure, was one of the many elderly gentlemen who found Diana’s charms irresistible. Once she was rash enough to dine with him à deux in a private room at the Cavendish and reported: ‘a very severe rough and tumble with him at the goodnights. It was an uglyish scene, but I won, and ruffled him a good deal … O, the audacity of senility! It is the children’s menace. How they mousle them, touzle them; they are so fond of children.’
Brushes with the police occurred from time to time. At the Cavendish there were few problems. The guests would take refuge in the garden at the back while Mrs Lewis, with a firm ‘Leave it to me. I’ll cope with that,’ would settle the intruders with a mixture of bribes, blandishments and muttered references to friends in high places. Elsewhere England’s licensing laws could cause more serious trouble. At 10.30 one December night Diana, Alan Parsons, Viola Tree, who was soon to marry Alan, Duff Cooper and Edward Horner were dining at Kettner’s restaurant in Soho. Three glasses of brandy were on the table when the police burst in. They took the names of the men and, having seen Diana try to hide one of the glasses, asked her name as well. Diana lost her head and, after some hesitation, answered ‘Miss Viola Tree.’ The police were suspicious but noted down the information. ‘It was all rather unpleasant,’ Duff recorded in his diary, ‘and Diana was very frightened of what the consequences might be.’ Predictably there were none. Next day Alan Parsons spoke to Sir Edward Henry, Permanent Under Secretary at the Home Office, and was assured that the matter would be overlooked.
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