The two Evelyns, whom Nancy Mitford described as looking like a pair of fresh-faced schoolboys, got married in secret. The bride wore a black-and-yellow jumper suit, Harold Acton was best man, Robert Byron gave the bride away, and they drank champagne cocktails at the 500 Club afterwards. When Lady Burghclere did find out she was ‘quite inexpressibly pained’.
‘SHE-EVELYN’ WAUGH, JENNIFER’S AUNT
The newly-weds were known by their friends as She-Evelyn and He-Evelyn and they dashed about to the sort of parties that Waugh would dissect with loathing in Vile Bodies and were written about in all the fashionable gossip columns. She-Evelyn had several bouts of bad health, as He-Evelyn described to Harold Acton, writing from Oare. ‘The last 3 weeks have been very distracting with Evelyn in bed and my flat in possession of nurses and doctors. We have got away at last and we are staying in my brother in law’s house in the downs near Marlborough in great peace and luxury.’
In his diary Waugh noted his amusement at finding Marie Stopes’s Married Love fallen down behind the architecture books in a small study. He also commented on the atmosphere of the house: ‘There is an epicene preciosity or nicety about everything that goes better with cigarettes and London clothes than my tweeds and pipe.’253 Some months later, when She-Evelyn got double pneumonia and was critically ill on a Mediterranean cruise, it was Alathea who wired them money.
Two of Evelyn’s sisters had already made disastrous marriages (Juliet’s had lasted twenty-four hours and Alathea’s relationship with Geoffrey was hardly contented), but Waugh was devastated when only fourteen months after the wedding, he announced the shocking news ‘that Evelyn has been pleased to make a cuckold of me with Heygate* and that I have filed a petition for divorce’.254 Waugh confided in the writer Henry Green, ‘There is some odd hereditary tic in all those Gardner girls – I think it is an intellectual failing more than anything else.’255
The separation lost She-Evelyn many friends, including Nancy Mitford, to whom she had been close and who had stayed at Oare with her. The other ‘Gardner girls’ took their sister’s part, and when Jennifer gradually learned the details, she believed that her youthful aunt had come out badly from the scandal. Evelyn claimed that she had married Waugh believing he would help her get away from the depressing restrictions of upper-class life – the ‘huntin’-shootin’-fishin’’ brigade with their snobbish cliques and narrow obsessions. In reality, her husband appeared to be mesmerised by the aristocratic environment she disdained, and wanted nothing more than to belong to these circles – something even his friends teased him about, and that emerged in his subsequent alliance and fascination with the Lygons at Madresfield, not to mention his penchant for the grandest London clubs.
S A TEENAGER, Jennifer continued to feel the physical and emotional awkwardness that had dogged her childhood. She had fabulous legs that she was proud to show off and what she considered an embarrassingly large bosom that she tried to disguise. As she developed a sexual awareness of her own, she also began to understand more about her parents’ complex relationship. In Jennifer’s unfinished short story about Jane, there are strong clues as to how she discovered Geoffrey’s secret: ‘When Jane was fourteen, her mother started confiding unsuitable stories about her love affairs, her husband’s homosexuality. It explained the presence of certain ambiguous young men in the house, her mother retiring to her room.’
Geoffrey’s rejection of his daughter and his lack of interest in his wife reflected not just a cruel and misogynistic streak, but a fundamental attraction to men. Jennifer began to notice how many young men came to visit and to stay – some of them students from Oxford, others involved in the political world. Eventually, she deduced that some were his lovers. Jennifer’s Aunt Evelyn later claimed that on one occasion Alathea had ‘walked in and found Geoffrey in bed with a boy’. Although Evelyn was unspecific about the age of the boy, the shock of witnessing what was, after all, a criminal act was inevitably severe. It can only have served to make Alathea feel even more unwanted and unhappy.
Geoffrey’s work as private secretary to Stanley Baldwin meant that he aligned himself with the highly conventional Conservative leader, whose influence in the decades after World War I was such that some called it the Baldwin Age. First cousin to Kipling, Baldwin was a generation older than Geoffrey – a representative of the old, rural England that had been rejected by many of Geoffrey’s blood-spattered contemporaries, disillusioned by war and its aftermath. Significantly, however, Baldwin’s elder son, Oliver, was homosexual, and Baldwin was a close and loyal friend to Lord Beauchamp (Coote’s father) and lived close to Madresfield, where he was a frequent visitor.
GEOFFREY FRY: BOOKISH, BISEXUAL AND COLDLY CRITICAL OF HIS WIFE AND DAUGHTER
It was Baldwin who made Geoffrey 1st Baronet Fry of Oare in 1929 for his contribution to politics. Nevertheless, Geoffrey was cut from different cloth to his employer; a sensitive man who was interested in the arts and who had a strong sense of classical elegance. While his work propped up an old-school political system and social world, his personal leanings were influenced by his homoerotic impulses and his love of the ancient world and poetry. His obsession with Rupert Brooke was only one indication of this. Sir Geoffrey also invited a stream of cultured literary and artistic people to Oare, and commissioned work from Eric Ravilious, who painted some beautiful watercolours of the gardens and some fashionable murals of tennis players for their London house. Jennifer remembered that Ravilious had taken quite a shine to her and her mother, which annoyed Geoffrey.
Jennifer realised she would never live up to her father’s expectations. His love of the ascetic and of classically orientated young men only emphasised her girlish frivolity and her increasingly feminine figure. While Geoffrey hoped she’d be studying Latin verbs in the library, she would be sunbathing on the roof terrace, and if he hoped she might at least take after her mother in terms of wafting, delicate sophistication, she’d be bursting out of a sexy frock, ready to go to a party. Jennifer’s closest friend was Primula Rollo – a blue-eyed, fair-haired classic English rose. Prim lived near to Oare, in a house called ‘Cold Blow’. Geoffrey had commissioned the building from Clough Williams-Ellis for Prim’s parents, who were his friends – her father was a solicitor and worked for Geoffrey. Although Prim was two years younger than Jennifer, she often joined schoolroom lessons with Pixie. As they got older, the two girls would go to dances together, sometimes chaperoned by Pixie, whom they would shamelessly mislead so they could get up to mischief – although Prim was not as naughty as Jennifer. If not exactly prim, she was the kind of teenager who was chosen to be head girl at her boarding school. Jennifer did not get anywhere near being head girl. ‘I had Latin verbs drummed into me, as well as Mathematics at St Paul’s Girls’ School. All I longed for was to learn Italian, study Ballet and lead my own life,’ she wrote. After less than four years at the school, she left just after her sixteenth birthday.
When she asked her father if she could study Italian, he replied, ‘Whatever language you learn you will speak stupidities, as you do now, in your own language.’ Instead, Jennifer was sent to Vienna to learn German, accompanied by a toothy young governess – a vicar’s daughter – to keep bashing on with the Latin lessons. If Geoffrey hoped that this trip would drum some sense into his flighty daughter, he had misjudged her capacity for adventure. Jennifer’s frank and witty description of her experiences gives a picture of how she blossomed away from home.
JENNIFER AGED ABOUT SIXTEEN
I stayed in a family who took me to their hearts as my parents were incapable of doing. We sat round their Biedermeier table drinking china tea with lemon and a dash of rum, ate Sacher Torte and filling Austrian meals. Wiener Schnitzel, sauerkraut, the best potato purée. They took me to concerts and the opera – my first introduction to Wagner – The Ring in its entirety – where I met my first lover . . . He was a Hochgeboren [highborn] count – a painter – and he asked if he could draw me. I was a pretty dark girl with slender leg
s, and wore flat red shoes with ankle straps which were unusual and admired. He painted me half naked in a kimono and re-christened me Kotoro. He saw me as a Geisha, and I was flattered and enchanted by his attentions. As I had never been allowed so much as a sip of wine at home, I was easily seduced. Also by the elderly uncle of the family, a kindly roué who put an arm round my waist on the one occasion I was alone in the salon, kissed me, gave me a glass of Liebfraumilch, and there I was on the Biedermeier chaise longue, my knickers skilfully removed, being really made love to for the first time.
. . . I floated from cathedral to café, on to a gallery and then to my rendezvous as a Geisha. There in his studio, my kimono hung on the side of an Art Deco screen, I was soon in it – at first primly draped as a Japanese virgin, then one breast exposed and then taken on the floor in various positions.
Escaping the governess was easy – Jennifer just said she was going to a museum or a shop, and the new-found freedom was intoxicating. When the Viennese sojourn drew to an end, she begged her new family to keep her on, weeping each night with dread of returning to England. Like Gerald many years earlier, she had begun to discover new pleasures far from home, released from her family’s expectations and repressions. Gerald had also been sixteen when he went to France and began to develop into the person he wished to be. Although Jennifer’s experiences might have been more daring, they both shared a powerful sense of awakening. Such was Jennifer’s misery when she left that she became sick and feverish on the journey home. On her arrival in London she was put to bed ‘without seeing my parents, who had unexpectedly gone to the south of France’. When Geoffrey and Alathea returned, the governess was dismissed for neglecting to supervise her charge, although Jennifer never learned what they found out.
OT LONG AFTER Jennifer’s catalytic trip, she fell in love again – this time with a young man her father had met on his way to a conference in Canada.
He was a regular soldier, an Olympic athlete and very handsome. I tossed and turned in my bed, fantasising, but he was too correct and my father seemed to disapprove of my schwerm as it was called in Vienna. Innocently one day, as I was sitting on my mother’s bed, I said, ‘Why is father so irritable and disapproving when I look at John or speak about him?’ She turned her immense blue eyes on me, slightly twisted her star sapphire ring and said, ‘Men sometimes love each other.’
Jennifer was also discovering more about Alathea’s secrets.
My mother’s only pleasure in life was visits from the doctor, new clothes and jewellery and occasional escapades of which I was made aware by servants’ gossip and glances in the other direction when I came into the room. Dim young men came and went . . . Once a very attractive young man with red hair came to stay. He was a nephew of a Cambridge friend of my father’s, and this was the excuse, as he had no money or room. He had a brief romance with my mother – Her Last Attachment she called it, and they went to New York together. I hope she was happy. He told me years later he had been in love with me.
Pixie had sustained Jennifer through her childhood and continued to give her the affection and stability her parents were unable to offer, but her natural innocence prevented Jennifer confiding in her about what were increasingly daring adventures. Pixie still acted as chaperone, and Jennifer continued to run circles around her adoring governess. Fortunately she found the perfect friend in Violet Wyndham. Violet was old enough to be Jennifer’s mother, but understood all about problematic families, and offered a perfect haven of fun, sympathy and intelligence to Jennifer at Parliament Piece, her home not far from Oare. Violet’s mother was the novelist and literary hostess Ada Leverson, famous for being a supporter and friend – ‘The Sphinx’ – to Oscar Wilde before and after his disgrace. Though sought after in her salon, the Sphinx was less of a success as a mother, which doubtless gave Violet insight into Jennifer’s problems at home.
Photographs from the time show Violet tall and willowy in chic outfits, draped with fox furs and accompanied by dachshunds. Nobody quite knew her age; like Jennifer when she got older, Violet forged the date of birth on her passports. She was, according to her son, Francis Wyndham, ‘social but not snobbish’. Married to a much older man who ‘only wanted to play bridge’, she provided dinners and weekend house parties for a range of interesting, attractive and often younger people. Her house was the only place in the vicinity that Jennifer’s parents approved of her visiting, and the teenager started to spend a great deal of time there. More significant for Jennifer than the social gatherings was the fact that Violet was a wise older woman – almost a substitute mother – who was a sympathetic, dependable and crucially non-judgemental confidante. If she gave advice, it was likely to be: ‘You should always go to a party, even if you don’t feel like it.’ And Jennifer tried to follow that. As a Jew living among a class of English people who were easily anti-Semitic (even her friend Diana Cooper called her ‘Auntie Nose’ behind her back), Violet probably also knew what it was to feel different – an outsider within an elite. Gradually, as Jennifer came to trust Violet, she arranged to meet her boyfriends at her house, and started to invite along her own friends.
If her Aunt Evelyn had been the perfect 1920s party girl, Jennifer’s more voluptuous figure, feminine dresses and flirtatious ways made her the ideal version for the 1930s. With her penchant for sunbathing and easily tanned skin, she followed the fashion for sun worship that marked the decade: sun baths for their ‘health-giving rays’ and the use of new-fangled suntan oils were all the rage. One of her favourite songs was Cole Porter’s ‘Experiment’, its promotion of curiosity and personal rebellion perfect for this stage of her life. Some saw Jennifer as giddy and superficial: ‘She had a throw-away manner. Passing herself off as frivolous was her way of managing her life. But it was deceptive, and covered somebody much more thoughtful,’ said one friend who knew her for decades.256
In 1934, Alathea managed to get out of bed to ensure that her daughter went through the traditional rite of passage for girls of her background and had a London season. Like Jessica Mitford, who described it as ‘the specific, upper-class version of a puberty rite’, Jennifer was not excited by the idea of being a deb. Her coming of age was closely allied with creating a distance between her parents and herself, but she went along with the convention of ‘coming out’. There were interminable balls, dinners and race meetings, and in May, the eighteen-year-old was presented at Buckingham Palace. Along with a crowd of other young women in long white dresses and evening gloves, virginal in their lack of jewellery, she queued up to make the deep curtsey to the sovereign that they had all been practising. In July, The Times reported ‘Lady Fry’s small dance’ for her daughter, where the ‘decorations consisted of roses, sweet peas, carnations, delphiniums and clarkia’. Jack Harris’s band played the latest fashionable dance tunes, like the slow foxtrot ‘You Forgot Your Gloves’: ‘You forgot your gloves / When you kissed me and said goodnight, / So I’ve brought them, you see, / But don’t thank me, it’s quite all right.’
JENNIFER, 1930S PARTY GIRL. SHE WAS VERY LIBERATED AND ENLIGHTENED ON SEX AND WAS ATTRACTED TO MEN WHO WERE ‘QUEER’
As she changed from girl to woman, Jennifer remained close to Prim, her childhood friend, but also fell in with a crowd of young people who were more decadent – beautiful and mostly upper-class, they had been to good schools and had their photographs in Tatler. She was particularly attracted to men who were ‘queer’, as she put it – not necessarily the ‘roaring pansies’, but those who could play it either way, using ambiguity to their advantage. She was often attracted to the same men as those that caught the eye of her gay friends. Good looks were important to her and smooth-skinned, limber youth was preferable to the macho style of the alpha male. Jennifer’s notebooks from when she was undergoing psychoanalysis in her sixties describe her sexual development at this time. In one passage, she turns from the first person to a note-form in the third person to depict how she deliberately encouraged an admirer to make love with her, ‘and has f
irst real violent orgasm. Has never known of the clitoris or that form of pleasure, but from then on uses it to full advantage, alone, with girls, but not with great success with men though enjoys love making and thinks herself in love with one or another.’
PRIM AND JENNIFER ON A SHIP HEADED FOR HOLIDAYS
If Robert had occasional flings with women but was basically gay, Jennifer had occasional flings with women but was basically heterosexual. Jennifer ‘had a gay sensibility’, said one friend, ‘and on the whole, she liked beautiful boys. She could be quite explicit and quite camp.’257 Another friend recalled that ‘She was very liberated and enlightened on sex – rather as people are now. She would have casual sex as well as love affairs. She might go down to the docks in the East End after a party – sometimes her men friends would use her as bait. She liked to peep into that world, and sometimes she’d pick someone up too. She liked the idea of “rough trade”, even if it wasn’t something she did very much. She wasn’t sordid.’258
Treading a delicate line between sexual ambiguity and getting involved with men who were never going to end up with a woman, Jennifer fell in love with Hamish St Clair Erskine. A dark-haired, finely built dandy and the son of the Earl of Rosslyn, he was described by Harold Acton as ‘an elegant and amiable young social butterfly’.259 Hamish preferred boys but was happy to string girls along. He had already made Nancy Mitford miserable for years, with their engagement that everyone except Nancy seemed to realise was hopeless. Despite Nancy’s perspicacity, she entertained the common but often erroneous belief that Hamish’s dalliances with men were youthful peccadilloes, and as in many similar cases, they would surely be replaced in the long term by marriage, children and family life. Whether or not Jennifer had the same illusions is unknown, but she was certainly involved with him.
The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me Page 18