by Cecil Beaton
August 15th
We started off to Norwich directly after breakfast — a dull day and a dull run.
Mama and I went to the cathedral. Papa waited outside. Norman architecture is so bare and subtle in colour. I should like to have a room at Cambridge built exactly like some of those hidden apses and chapels. It would be a long, massive room, all whitewashed stone with enormous arches and one or two theatrical but simple pieces of dull gold furniture. A huge fire could burn at one end of the room; a gold dining table at the other end might have a cloth of gold on it, with gold plate and red gladioli in tall vases. I’d have people come to lunch, just to terrify and impress them.
This reverie was followed by shopping. My mother is too impatient to wait for anyone, and as a result we spent a lot of time trying to find her. The Norwich shops didn’t inspire me to buy anything (I had no money in any case). Papa hovered in front of cheap clothes shops, looking at cheap hats. I went into Faith Brothers with him and did my best to influence him. But he bought a 4/9 hat that couldn’t have been more offensive, then left the shop all hunched up with the absurd little thing on his head. He smiled, thinking how clever he’d been to buy a hat for 4/9.
IN MEMORY OF BOBBIE HORTON
August 23rd
As I was printing some snapshots in the sun, Mrs Middleton came round with The Times. She showed me the obituary column: ‘Robert Schofield Horton, youngest son of Mr and Mrs Horton of Bolton House, near Rugby; at Fishbourne, Isle of Wight, of pneumonia, aged 21.’
Bobbie Horton! He is the first dead person I ever knew well. I kept thinking about him all evening long...
We first knew one another at St Cyprian’s. Bobbie was huge, delicate and red-headed. People laughed at him when he went down to his bath in the morning, wearing a grand Jaeger dressing gown and carrying a mammoth sponge.
At Harrow we shared a room during our first term. I tormented him with all sorts of mean tricks. I used to spill a jug of water on Bobbie and his bed when he wasn’t looking. Or I would rush up behind him as he sat on a chair, tip it over and yell with joy when he landed on the ground with a nasty click. Most malicious of all, I waited till he knelt down to pray, rubbing his feet together in the typical way he had. Then I would give him such a hit!
Bobbie was a gentle soul. Though bigger than I, he could rarely be provoked to hit back. Once, however, he jammed his huge sponge into my mouth and I bit it in two! I shall never forget his beady little eyes at that moment: all astonishment. After lights out on that particular night, I went on at him for ages; insisting that it was brutal of a great lout like him to bully a little thing like me. Bobbie, though in the right, took my cheek and then asked if I would come to breakfast tomorrow with him and his mother at the King’s Head.
Bobbie wanted our Harrow room to be pink; I wanted blue. To convince him I said, ‘Your red hair clashes with any pink.’ (I got my way the following term, when I had a room to myself and turned it into a blue nightmare. Even the window boxes were painted blue. My housemaster became furious, lecturing the whole house. ‘What are we coming to?’ he asked. His answer, ‘blue ruin’, became a house joke for weeks afterwards.)
Bobbie Horton is dead. He was the most unphysical, pi person that ever existed. He was the essence of everything nice and clean, of everything a well-brought up boy should be. His red hair was cut short and slightly greased. His pink and pale complexion was immaculate; his eyelashes and brows were interestingly pale; his slightly parrot-like nose indicated good breeding.
He dressed in quiet but sumptuous clothes, wore silk shirts and silk pyjamas.
I envied Bobbie many things: his prowess at tennis, his handwriting, so large and distinctive. Also, the Hortons were rich. Bobbie had fine quality luggage and ivory-backed hairbrushes with his monogram on them. He had Ovaltine, malted milk and chocolate or digestive biscuits which he generously shared with me. He had a picture of his mama taken by Rita Martin; it was framed in expensive leather and stood on his roll-top desk.
Bobbie was a lesson in perseverance. Though quite ignorant when he started at Harrow in the bottom form, he learned and remembered much. By the time he left, he’d caught me up. He became proficient at history.
It took a long time for Bobbie’s quiet virtues to be known and liked at Cambridge. There must have been many times when he felt lonely in that large, dark room of his. If I wanted something to do and couldn’t stand my own company any longer, I went to see Bobbie. In his own flustered and anxious way he played the considerate host, always so polite and careful to do everything right for his guest.
Thinking of Bobbie’s death tonight, I realise how terrified I’d been of death when I first went up to Cambridge. I remember thinking that I was going to die before I got there, because certain omens made me feel queasy inside. It had been the 3rd of the month — my lucky day. Yet written beneath the calendar for the day was a quotation from Joubert: ‘This life is cradle of the life to come.’ Strange that I should have noticed that: ordinarily I never look at calendars.
Why should Bobbie have died and not I or someone else? Poor Bobbie was absolutely sinless. I don’t believe he ever said or did anything bad — not because he was ignorant, but because he was incapable of doing so. Certainly his behaviour towards me could not have been kinder, and I don’t think he really liked me all that much. I hadn’t much in common with him; I made a bad tennis partner and talked viciously about people.
I wonder if Bobbie went to see me act in Henry IV? He always promised he would see me next time, but said he was so busy working he couldn’t spend an evening at the theatre.
The way I harp upon it, one would think I had lost my best friend. The truth is, Bobbie wasn’t an intimate friend. If I feel intimately touched, it is because of our common past, of the many adventures we’d been through together.
He bored me, but he was charming.
August 16th
Spent the afternoon in the woods, feeling edgy and tense. I found a fallen tree that was rather comfortable, then lay on it face downwards. The sun shone hotly. I propped myself up on my elbows and read about basilicas for a while. Then I decided to lie in the bracken, where I smelled the damp leaves, the cool moss and earth. It gave me a peculiar sense of being alone, aware of my body. I don’t know why, but I took my clothes off. It made me feel closer to things around me — the birds, a fluttering white moth, the stiff saplings. After a while, the sun sank behind a branch. I shivered and put on my clothes again.
I walked home, arriving late for dinner.
MEMORIES OF ARLEY
September 9th, 3 Hyde Park Street
I came back to find Modom making fudge. I ate a piece, had a bath and dinner. Afterwards, Reggie and I danced with Tecia and Nancy. The pater had to go to a committee meeting. The mater went to bed, as she felt ill.
Exhausted from dancing, we lay back smoking cigarettes and reminiscing about Arley, where Reggie and I had been to stay with Aunt Cada and Tecia[22] when we were perhaps ten years old.
I couldn’t remember as much as Reggie, but Arley remains in memory a lovely little village (now completely changed and trippery). Our holiday there seemed unlike anything we had known before. This was the real, pure country we never ordinarily saw. My parents, always more conventional than the bohemian Chattocks, felt bound to wear a ‘collar and tie’, so to speak. Most of our childhood was spent in suburbia; for summer we inevitably went to detestable seaside resorts, with asphalt paths and those oily shrubs that harbour horrible insects, and the slate-grey North Sea never far away.
Arley is a village in the heart of Worcestershire, with Arley Castle and (at that time) only a few dove-coloured stone cottages. The Chattocks used to take the curate’s house for weekends and holidays, until the 1914 war created a housing shortage that put an end to the arrangement.
The curate’s house, very small, had an outdoor earth closet that seemed surprisingly pleasant. In the next door cottage lived the keeper and his wife, who would lend a hand whenever we called over
the wall to her: ‘Mrs Co-oles!’ They kept a tame magpie that we used to tease.
Our garden was sweet-smelling, with a stile that led into the park and a quiet, mysterious wood from which rabbits emerged and sat twitching their noses in the twilight. Here, too, I had my first alarming glimpse of ferrets, with their pink eyes and sharp teeth.
Opposite the house, a low stone wall surrounded an apple orchard, where the twisted trunks of fallen lichen trees gyrated on the ground. In this orchard I painted my first ‘masterpiece’, a picture of Tecia sitting on the wall and making a daisy chain, with the orchard behind her in full blossom.
Arley was altogether an inspiring place for me to work. I had been given the box-room above the porch, where I could mess about to my heart’s content. I made a toy theatre out of three sides of a hat box and ambitiously put on my own miniature production of the musical comedy, Oh! Oh! Delphine!. First I cut photographs of the chorus ladies out of the Play Pictorial, painting their faces in full stage make-up. Then the evening dresses were washed with pastel colours and dotted with gold and silver liquid paint that had such a strong acid smell it remains in my nostrils to this day. I faithfully reproduced the rose and wisteria scenery, then turned an electric torch on to the tableau.
Characters were pushed on stage by means of tin clips attached to long handles. It remained only to make them perform, which I did by acting all the parts and singing the score myself.
Here, in remote Arley, my theatrical dreams flourished. And a prize addition to my gallery of stars was provided when Aunt Cada went away for a day, coming back with the week’s Tatler that contained a large photograph of my goddess, Isobel Elsom. She stood in profile, her long swan neck and prize-fighters chin straining towards a cluster of hydrangeas.
Reggie had more sporting interests. Often he played Red Indians with Tecia and Tess.[23] Sometimes I joined him for clock golf. And one day, in a more high-spirited mood, I very nearly killed him. I was swinging him in the hammock, higher and higher and higher. Crack! He fell out on to the top of his head. I shall always remember the sound. Apart from a terrific headache, Reggie was not hurt. But the incident terrified me; years afterwards, I would wake up in the night and relive it with horror.
Reggie, Tecia and I dredged up all these and other souvenirs tonight. Do you remember the way down to the village? Do you remember the Ferry across the Severn river? What about the fair at Bewdley? Oh, and the wild bamboos in the water garden of Arley Castle! And the peacocks on the old stone walls! Can you picture the Forest of Wyre? No, but I remember being aware for the first time of the shrimp redness of japonica. I remember the frogs in the well, the painted lady butterflies resting on a fallen tree trunk and flapping their wings lazily. Who could forget the evening peace of the garden, with Aunt Cada and cousin Ella smoking cigarettes, and only the hooting of an owl to disturb the serenity?
‘Mrs Co-oles, Mrs Co-oles,’ we used to shout. But I don’t remember what she looked like.
It was a perfect holiday. Reggie said, ‘The happiest time I’ve ever had.’
THE ASTAIRES
August 30th
There was a large crowd of people outside the theatre, and a pinned-up notice: ‘House full’. It was the last night of the Astaires in Stop Flirting.
I’ve seldom enjoyed myself so much. The music is bright and full of life; the whole show, modern and clever, goes with such a smack. A flashy orchestra played ragtime that made me almost sick with delight, while the chorus buzzed about mad with life.
I laughed terrifically at Jack Melford, who last time I saw him had given me double nausea. Helen Gilliland had nice shoes.
As for the Astaires, they are so indescribably loose limbed they can only be compared to animals. In fact, you could bend them into any shape without hurting them. Their dancing is ultimate, original and effective. The quick and witty steps could only be the invention of people who really observe and enjoy being alive. Some of the routines, so true and grotesque, are almost epigrammatic. There is one delightful bit where both dance together, doing not quite the same steps and stabbing out at both sides with their feet to create a precise and strong effect.
Adele is thin, energetic and such a little snip.
Fred makes the word ‘marvellous’ sound clean and manly. After him, I’d like to go home and cut off my hair; I’d like to change my whole self.
At the end of the evening Adele tried to make a speech, but broke down and gave a half cry and half giggle. Fred insisted, ‘Don’t be silly! We’ve got a bit more to say.’ Old charwomen shouted from the gallery, ‘Come back soon!’ Fred answered them all. Adele piped in her high little voice, ‘Don’t forget us!’ and everyone wanted to cry.
Christmas Eve
Nurse was away for the day, so Nancy and Baba had dinner with us. I kept ragging Baba and told her to go to bed. She chirped, ‘I thought you said dinner was only bearable when the brats came down!’
Dinner conversation certainly has been less awful lately, but tonight it seemed unfortunate. Mummie said she felt ill. Daddy suggested, ‘Let’s go and live on a golf course and lead the simple life!’
A little silence and Mummie replied, ‘Well, we do lead the simple life here,’ meaning we go out very little. Later she asked, ‘Are you going to the office tonight in the car or by train?’ Reggie parroted, ‘Are you going to the office again tonight?’ Daddy burst out, ‘Yes! To complete the living of a simple life!’ He was furious. He puffed and bit at his cigar and trembled. ‘I work my hardest at the office all day. I don’t mind that. But to be told we lead the simple life. It’s really too bad!’
Explanations followed. I felt very depressed. We left our parents in the dining-room. Later Mummie volunteered, ‘I’ll come to the office with you.’
My father, contrite, said, ‘Oh, no, no, no, of course not, no, no!’
Reggie said he’d go. ‘No, no, you needn’t come.’
I offered to bring my diary and write. ‘No, no.’
Well, Reggie went. Mother sat in a chair and talked. ‘We can’t afford this house. We’ll have to sell it and live in some cheaper place. Business has been bad. Ever since that brute of a Fox left, things have been getting slacker and slacker. Now you know Daddy has lost the American business. That brute Bowers has taken it away and given it to a man in Manchester. It’ll make an awful difference: half of our income gone. No wonder your father’s worried and edgy tonight. There’s a cargo of stuff from Finland which may mean a dead loss of six thousand pounds. That’s why he’s gone to the office, to see if any telegrams have come in.’
My spirits sank. I love this house, and I enjoy being a little extravagant. It’ll be a disaster if I’m not rich. I almost despise a man that isn’t rich. Anyhow, I’m sure I shall be. I felt very disheartened about Life with a capital L. If we do lose our money, I’ll not know how to look at people: Basil Bleck, for instance. I’ll have to put up with friends like Leonard Tregoning; he wouldn’t mind our being penniless. I’ll have to make do with such friends, but I like my rich ones more: they’re so polished and clever.
My mother sat on in the chair, looking lined and wretched. Then she took up a pile of presents to put on Nancy’s and Baba’s beds.
Papa and Reggie came back fairly cheerful. I dare not ask about the six thousand pound cargo.
A FAMILY CHRISTMAS
Christmas Day
I woke with a start. Very dark it was. Reggie called me to get up to go to church. Ugh-r-r-r! It was so cold. I lay in bed a bit longer.
Baba’s clear, throaty voice floated up from downstairs, excited and busy. Then she came into my room to give me my present, the one she had said ‘looks expensive’. It turned out to be a handkerchief; some sort of crêpe de Chine, black and yellow and red. Baba is clever with her presents.
Mummie and Reggie had already gone off to church. I ran all the way, with difficulty as the roads were icy. What a cold morning! The church was crowded, but by luck I saw Mummie and Reggie and sat next to them.
; The congregation looked the most dowdy imaginable — so dowdy they were almost exotic. Church was decorated with narcissi and poinsettias.
Mother nearly fell on the way home, but Reggie and I caught her without slipping on the ice ourselves. Breakfast, while Nancy and Baba sat about opening all their presents: a stumpy umbrella from Mama, a box of paints from Modom, fountain pens and books. Baba got twenty presents, Nancy just as many. Papa was pleased with the cigars. Nurse came in and crossly gave us agreeable things: me, a pot of pink dwarf tulips.
The family went out in the park, then came back. Nancy was in despair at having lost one of her new silk handkerchiefs. Reggie had given it to her, and she’d got such a good collection.
We had a small lunch of smoked salmon, Stilton cheese, mince pies with burning brandy. The brandy was so old it took ten minutes to light. Then we played little card games: Pitt, which I gave Baba for her present. It was a noisy game.
I sat in the drawing-room and read Antic Hay. It’s open and frank and cleanly dirty.
Papa was bored and wanted exercise. He started off on a walk to see the Willes.[24] One would think the Crosdales[25] and the Willes were the only people we knew!
Modom arrived soon after tea. There were hoots and screams for her. ‘Thank you a thousand times for the lovely present! Oh, Auntie, you are a naughty girl!’ People screeched and kissed. Then it was the Beaton family’s turn to give presents. Modom uttered a different scream for each parcel she opened. ‘Just what I wanted!’ Scream, scream. She was very pleased with the mincing machine.
Nancy came down in a new party dress, so pale and ordinary that one wouldn’t look twice. I ragged and teased her until she became desperate. ‘Nightgown,’ I said. ‘Disgusting, coming to Christmas dinner in a nightie.’