The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me

by Sofka Zinovieff

  After her mother died in 1941, Clarissa became very ill and was hospitalised with a kidney complaint. The final part of her convalescence was spent at Faringdon, in the womb-like cosiness of the Red Room, with its wine-coloured wallpaper, damask curtains and four-poster drapes. Sleeping long hours in the red bed, she found it hard to wake in the mornings. ‘Once, Robert came and banged on the door and told me it was one-thirty. There were lunch guests. “We’re all waiting for you,”’ he shouted, with more vehemence than was necessary. ‘I was mortified,’ Clarissa remembered sixty years later. Perhaps it was then that Robert accepted Clarissa – an exhausted, orphaned girl who slept the days away and was not about to take his place. ‘He realised I wasn’t after anything,’ she said. Robert, too, suffered his own bereavement that Christmas, when he received the news that his father had died. He travelled to Shropshire for the funeral, where his thirty-seven-year-old brother Algy was now Lord of the Manor. This confirmed Robert’s distance from the old family seat; Faringdon was now his home and his future.

  During 1942, when Clarissa was back at her Foreign Office job, she continued to go down to Faringdon by train as often as possible. She was usually collected from the station by Mr Webb, the local taxi driver who regularly drove Gerald after William Crack joined up. Sometimes, though, Robert would take the wheel and, if Clarissa could run rings around him with cultured dinner-party conversation, he evidently managed to get back at her with his unreformed technique on the roads.

  Dearest Gerald,

  Just to thank you for a lovely weekend. We left you telephoning hard. Robert nearly killed a dog on the way to the station – the train was gone. Our journey to Didcot hell-for-leather in Mr Webb’s Rover was a sort of ‘Destry Rides again’ – the car made a noise like the first aeroplane, only chance remarks were possible – I remember screaming ‘Not another dog!’ as we nearly killed a second one – we caught that train by a fraction of a second. Mr Webb was sweating and shaking.

  Gerald sent letters to Clarissa reporting on his latest work. ‘Publishers are delighted with Cleo [The Romance of a Nose] and want to get it out before Xmas. But I doubt if they do as printing etc is getting more difficult.’ He thanked her for gifts with his usual humour: ‘Dearest C, Thank you so much for the lovely chocs. Robert and I fell upon them as cannibals might fall upon a missionary.’ He also sent picture postcards upon which he had drawn or added inappropriate comments. On Fra Angelico’s The Annunciation, with the Angel Gabriel and the Virgin holding their hands crossed over their abdomens, Gerald wrote around the edge: ‘HOW ODD THAT WE SHOULD BOTH HAVE TUMMY-ACHES. IT MUST HAVE BEEN THAT MELON.’

  Gerald’s wicked humour was clearly back on form by the time Dottie Wellesley published a slim book of poems with the Hogarth Press in 1942. Separated from Gerry Wellesley for twenty years (though they never divorced) and known since diplomatic days in Rome, Dottie took her writing very seriously and had been encouraged by her hero, W. B. Yeats. Lost Planet and Other Poems is grandly ambitious – the verses of an educated woman who does not shy from speaking of planets, eclipses, myths, ancient stones or from using anachronisms – ‘thou hast’ features quite regularly. This earnestness was too much for Gerald, who went through the book pencilling in cheeky comments and cartoons on every other page. The poem ‘Mars’ has ‘-Bar’ added to the title. When Socrates, in an ‘Elysian land . . . beyond the Pleiades’, is called a ‘wilful old tease’, Gerald adds:

  Variants

  That pessimist sour

  Old Schopenhauer.

  That awful creature

  Friedrich Nietzsche.

  Better the bottle

  Than Aristotle.

  Throughout the volume, the numerous references to bones and stones are underlined or given asterisks, particularly the allusions to ‘a phallic stone’. Dottie’s ‘Epitaph for Everyman’ was too much. To the verse ‘No bud of flesh, nor of spring, / No cross, no thought in stone, / Shall give Man anything / More beautiful than his bone’, Gerald adds his own little creation beneath:

  Bone Sweet Bone see pp 16, 17, 24

  I sit alone

  On the Phallic Stone

  And moan

  And gnaw

  My Bone –

  My beautiful Bone.

  Gerald was greatly amused to hear in the spring of 1943 that Dottie had behaved disgracefully at a grand poetry reading in Bond Street in the presence of the Queen. Given in aid of the Free French, it featured illustrious poets such as T. S. Eliot, Walter de la Mare, Vita Sackville-West and the Sitwells, all performing in alphabetical order. Dottie had allegedly got so drunk that she was not given her turn (which as ‘Wellesley’ was last). There were tears, insults, and Dottie hit Harold Nicolson with an umbrella while Vita (who had already done her reading) tried to soothe her and ultimately succeeded in taking her away in a taxi. Gerald later wrote to Edith Sitwell, joking that ‘Dorothy Wellesley is suing Harold [Nicolson] for saying she was drunk – whereas it was merely a Dionysiac Frenzy. I am mad at having missed it all.’

  F CLARISSA WAS Gerald’s new best friend, he also remained loyal to his old ones – a defining characteristic throughout his life. Another clever beautiful young blonde woman he was close to was now in prison – Diana Mosley. In May 1940, Oswald Mosley had been imprisoned under Defence Regulation 18B – as a threat to national security – and Diana was interned in June. Gerald and Robert were among the few people who wrote in support on her first day in Holloway. ‘What can I send you?’ asked Gerald. ‘Would you like a little file concealed in a peach?’ What Diana and her friends did not know was that her sister Nancy had been summoned to the Foreign Office to give her opinion on whether Diana’s friendship with Hitler and various other Nazis made her a threat to the country. Nancy announced that she considered Diana ‘an extremely dangerous person’, something that probably sealed her sister’s fate, but Diana only discovered this decades after Nancy’s death, with the declassification of MI5 documents in 2002.

  Despite Gerald’s depression and the warnings of Oxford friends that he was putting his own reputation in danger, he also went to visit her. Conditions of indefinite internment at F Block in Holloway were not pleasant, and Diana had been forced to leave behind her eleven-week-old son, whom she was breast-feeding. Gerald brought her Floris bath essence, which must have offered new olfactory delights wafting along the bleach-scrubbed prison corridors. He also sent her a copy of Far From the Madding War. Even after a year of incarceration, her tough joie de vivre remained intact. In a tight, girlish script that filled the page, she thanked ‘dearest Gerald . . . for the ‘wonderful book which made me simply scream with laughter so that the walls of my cell echoed with my laughing . . .’ Her politics may have been abhorrent, but it is hard to deny the witty courage of Prisoner D. Mosley 5433E1/12, who sends her ‘fondest love’ to Robert, Penelope Betjeman, Roy Harrod ‘or anyone who might like to have it’.

  I do a lot of cooking and my cell stinks of delicious garlic. My next experiment is going to be a (very inferior) imitation of your Tito’s beautiful cake [in Rome] which was choc outside and sour cream inside – mine will have a sort of cheese that I make from milk. I am feeling very well because of the hot weather we are having – I will draw a veil over the winter here which lasted from September until the middle of June and which was an intensely painful experience. I promise when I get out if I ever do I will not be a prison bore or ever refer to it, but in case you want to know what it is like, it is an endless journey 3rd class abroad in a rather crowded train with a very bad restaurant car.

  Diana claimed that the happiest day of her life was when she was reunited with her husband and they were put in married quarters in the prison grounds. (When Diana’s mother came by bus to visit, the conductor called out before the stop, ‘Holloway Gaol! Lady Mosley’s suite! All change here!’330 ) The Mosleys had a small garden where they grew vegetables and even fraises des bois, and the dark, ivy-covered walls reminded Diana of happier days at Gerald’s house in Rome.

/>   Other Faringdon friends had also gone down in the world. The Marchesa Casati, deeply in debt, had fled Paris for London, where she now lived in very reduced circumstances, swathed in ripped black velvet and grubby ostrich feathers, her eyes like dark coal-holes staring from a dead-white powdered face. Gone were the startling pets and masquerades of her Roman days and the pythons in glass tanks that she had taken to Faringdon. It appears from later evidence that Gerald helped Luisa Casati financially, something that may well have begun at this vulnerable stage in her life. Although her old friends sometimes found her a pitiful sight, La Casati attracted a new, younger set of admirers, and survived the war into the late 1950s.

  Winnie de Polignac had set herself up in a modest flat at 55 Park Lane, where, exiled from the glamour and influence of her musical salon in Paris, she bought an upright piano and comforted herself playing Bach. The atmosphere in London was hellish: thousands of citizens were dying in air raids, and many buildings – including the House of Commons, Waterloo Station and the British Museum – had been devastated. Despite her terror at the air raids, the Princesse de Polignac made her way through bombed-out, glass-strewn streets to concerts and literary events and took the train for weekends at Faringdon. The old exiled Princess was a regular visitor until her death of a heart attack in 1943, and would sit out on the porch in the sunshine, gazing into the distance, perhaps remembering her happier days with Violet Trefusis (the two were not invited together). The grand old lady had come a long way from mid-nineteenth-century New York and Singer sewing machines, via French aristocracy and belle époque Paris Lesbos, to being a major influence on European music. Now, a younger generation of British writers became acquainted with the powerful woman whom Violet Trefusis called ‘Oak’, amazed that she represented a direct link to Proust. James Lees-Milne described her sitting on a sofa, ‘immobile, with a hat on, like a large Buddha’. There was something ‘very godlike’ about her.331

  Numerous Faringdon friends were among the well-heeled Londoners who moved into the Dorchester – ‘one of the SAFEST buildings in London’ as the hotel’s advertisement claimed, pointing out the eight floors of heavily reinforced concrete and virtually bomb-proof ground floor. A ‘glittering fortress during the Blitz’, the bar continued to serve champagne, the restaurant offered oysters and lobster, and dance tunes were played by the orchestra until late at night. Some said that spies and criminals mingled with the off-duty airmen, society ladies and politicians. Certainly American officials favoured the place, including General Eisenhower, who met Churchill there to discuss D-Day. At night, a cockroach-killer was employed to crawl about on knee-pads, making sure the vermin would not offend the illustrious guests.332

  WINNIE, PRINCESSE DE POLIGNAC READING THE PAPER ON THE PORCH AT FARINGDON NOT LONG BEFORE HER DEATH IN 1943

  Among the permanent occupants of ‘the Dorch’ were the two great hostesses Lady Cunard and Lady Colefax, who abandoned their fine London houses and established themselves on different floors. The rival salonniéres continued to gather what they could of the great and the glamorous, war or no war. Naturally, some old friends were now on active service, others evacuated and others too busy to be doing with Emerald Cunard’s teas or Sibyl Colefax’s ‘ordinaries’ – lunches at the Dorchester, after which guests would be presented with a bill for 10s 6d. But many of the old faithful did turn up, including those who continued to visit Faringdon, such as Harold Nicolson, Edith Sitwell and Cyril Connolly. Rumour had it that when the sirens announced a raid, Lady Cunard would crouch beneath the dining table amidst the gilt and ormolu in her seventh-floor suite and read Proust or Shakespeare to calm her guests.

  Clarissa took up quarters on the Dorchester’s (understandably unpopular) top floor along with her old school friend Pamela Digby, now Churchill, having recently married Churchill’s son, Randolph, and famous for her astonishing success with rich and famous men. ‘At one time or another, there were friends and acquaintances on every floor,’ wrote Clarissa, who nonchalantly eschewed the bomb shelter for the foyer when the sirens went off. Cecil Beaton became a very close, lifelong friend, sending over boxes of flowers from Ashcombe and writing letters when abroad.333 He had turned away from the fripperies of fashion and royal portraits (claiming ‘I was sick to death of posing people round apple blossom’334), to snap bomb-wrecked streets, wounded babies and brave airmen setting off on missions. The Ministry of Information sent him all over the world on photographic assignments and he became the official photographer for the RAF.

  In 1942, Doris Castlerosse, Cecil’s unlikely girlfriend of the 1930s, came back to London from the US and also moved into the Dorchester. Lady Castlerosse had left behind her American lover, Eleonor Flick Hoffman (of the Venetian palazzo), and was rumoured to have become bitter and ‘an acid misanthrope’.335 During a trip to Washington, Winston Churchill had invited her to dinner and strongly encouraged her return to England. It appears he was worried that his portraits of this notorious, if titled, courtesan might fall into the hands of an American magazine and affect his gravitas as Britain’s leader. Not long after seeing Churchill, Doris managed to obtain a highly elusive priority air ticket to London. Despite their bitter divorce dealings, Lord Castlerosse met his ex-wife at Waterloo Station and they dined together at the Dorchester before he left her there and returned home. (He would die the following year from a heart attack, allegedly after one of his habitually indulgent dinners.)

  Doris then had a dreadful few days, sitting in her rooms, terrified at the bombs falling all around and the blasts from the huge anti-aircraft guns in Hyde Park, the three Churchill portraits still wrapped in brown paper. She sent a telegram to New York to try to discover whether she could obtain the money for some jewellery she had pawned there, only to find that the telegram was intercepted by British censors. Detectives turned up to question her about what appeared to be irregular financial dealings. She called friends and found them in an entirely different mood to previous times, critical that she had left Britain. Lonely and miserable, the ‘enchantress of the Thirties’ with a ‘jester’s cap of pure gold hair’ felt she had lost her magical charms. A few days later she encountered the Duke of Marlborough in one of the Dorchester’s carpeted corridors and he made a contemptuous remark about people who desert their country during war. Later she was found unconscious in her bed. Doris died some days later in hospital, aged forty-one. The coroner’s verdict was open, but described a death from self-administered barbiturate acid poisoning.336

  OR MANY OF Gerald and Robert’s war-weary friends, weekends at Faringdon became an escape to another, forgotten era. It seemed almost inconceivable to find themselves back at this beautiful house, tucked up under satin eiderdowns in four-poster beds and fed with marvellous food. The war was provoking vast changes in society. The class system appeared to be crumbling and few imagined that large country houses filled with servants would be reinstated once the war was over. As James Lees-Milne travelled around England inspecting many of these increasingly dilapidated piles for the National Trust, he was aware that he was a witness to an entire way of life in its death throes. Evelyn Waugh agreed, believing that ‘the ancestral seats which were our chief national aristocratic achievement were doomed to decay and spoliation like the monasteries of the sixteenth century’.337

  Nancy Mitford, meanwhile, had been a night fire-watcher, had worked in a canteen for French soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk, and then with Jewish refugees. At last she settled in a job with her friends Heywood and Anne Hill at their unusual Mayfair bookshop that was more like a private house filled with first editions, pictures and toys as well as the latest publications, and a much-loved meeting point for a large network of friends that included Jennifer, as well as Gerald, Evelyn Waugh and the Sitwells. Nancy adored her visits to Faringdon, where Gerald not only provided a refuge of comfort and glamour, but encouraged her to write, telling her she could not leave her room until she had written the required amount for the day. It was also the place where she received the deva
stating news that her brother Tom had been killed in action in Burma. Gerald went to tell her in her room, and said she mustn’t think of coming down for dinner, but Nancy insisted on acting as though nothing had happened.338 Despite this, Nancy later recalled her times at Faringdon like trips to Paradise.

  I can remember, during the tedious or frightening but always sleepless nights of fire-watching in wartime London, that the place I longed to be in most intensely was the red bedroom at Faringdon, with its crackling fire, its Bessarabian carpet with bunchy flowers and above all its four-post bed, whence from beneath a huge fat fluffy old-fashioned quilt one can gaze out at the view, head still on pillow . . . Perhaps the greatest, most amazing conjuring tricks are reserved for the dining room. In this pleasant sunny white room, scattered with large silver-gilt birds and wonderful Sevres and Dresden china, a standard of culinary perfection has been maintained through the darkest days of war. Cook or no cook, raw materials or no raw materials, a succession of utterly delicious courses would somehow waft themselves to the sideboard, and the poor Londoner, starved, or sated with Spam, would see sights and tastes he had long ago forgotten to believe in.339