The Wandering Years (1922-39)

by Cecil Beaton

  ‘Yes, very.’

  And he bounded off like a spring lamb.

  My hands were scratched with thorns, my only pair of trousers torn from brambles and barbed wire. I staggered past the grey-stone farm and continued for a long distance, looking for a way from the cliffs down to the seashore. I tripped up over roots, but each time managed to regain my balance before falling and dropping the blackberries.

  At last I reached a cleft where one could scramble down without too much difficulty. Then I came a real cropper, tumbling squash on an eiderdown of blackberries. Hundreds spilled from the upturned basket and trickled down the cliff.

  My hand was cut. Blood mingled with blackberry juice. It was useless to try to collect the fallen treasure: it would be too crushed and dirty to eat. Damn! To have an accident within four yards of safe, sandy ground. Why hadn’t I fallen at the beginning of the day?

  The way home seemed interminable now. I trailed along the shore, dripping blood. My feet sank in the sand. At Waterloo House, Mrs Childs of Charmouth produced iodine and a strip of clean linen. ‘There’s no harm done. We must give you a good tea.’ And she did! Jam tarts which I heaped with Devonshire cream.

  This evening I looked over the typescript. I can think of nothing more to add to it. There’s no point in staying on here if I can’t work. Why not admit defeat? I’ll go home tomorrow with one act under my arm. And if my father wonders why we didn’t finish this opus, well, after all, Barrie wasn’t able to continue with Shall We Join the Ladies!

  Part VII: London: New Directions, 1926, 1927 and 1928

  Perhaps word had got around that my charges for home-made photographs were modest; certainly it became apparent that the new friends, whom I photographed, had friends also interested in being perpetuated by my Kodak, for the front door bell now never ceased to ring. Although this brought complaint from Loins that he was run off his legs, it meant for me a steady trickle of ‘cash’.

  It was Allanah Harper, more than anyone else, who showed me a London life less conventional than the one at home, and gave me my first glimpses of the ‘illuminati’.

  I had first noticed Allanah — bored and cow-like, dressed in an apricot tube at a ball, at the Hyde Park Hotel. But Allanah had broken away from the debutante world, and, much to her mother’s disapproval, discarded her ostrich feather fan and silver kid-shoes in favour of a highwayman’s cape and buckles. She now made a niche for herself in the half-worlds of Chelsea and Bloomsbury, and gave me the key to that fascinating other-life for which I had always been searching.

  My appetite was uncurbed for closer acquaintance with those glorious people whose works were published by the Hogarth Press, who painted in mud colours or lived in Gordon Square in rooms decorated by Duncan Grant. I longed to be included among those fortunates who eat at the Eiffel Tower or at Boulestin before going on to a Private View of Marie Laurencin or Gaudier Brzeska at the Leicester Galleries. I hankered to be one of the ‘first-nighters’ of the Phoenix Society or at the expressionist German film ‘Dr Caligari’. Surprisingly, I succeeded in making friends with some of these splendid creatures: Raymond Mortimer included me at a luncheon in his dining-room with walls covered with varnished foreign newspapers. Talk was not of Mr Baldwin and unemployment but of ‘Les Six’, D. H. Lawrence, Lydia Lopokova’s marriage to Maynard Keynes, and Lady Ottoline’s contretemps with Siegfried Sassoon. The blood seemed to quicken through my veins and I sensed a marvellous freedom of the spirit. The glow on my horizon was not fashionably muddy but rose-dawned.

  October 18th 1926, 61 Sussex Gardens

  I worked on a book jacket most of the morning. Whenever I felt stale and yawny I went upstairs and danced energetic Charlestons to the gramophone, wishing I were on the stage. In the evening, Allanah Harper rang me up to go with her to a dance. I arrived before Allanah — so embarrassing — to find an incongruous, anonymous crowd who had got together for no apparent reason. A fair-haired woman, who had seen me on the Lido, took compassion on me. She introduced me to the host, an equivocal, furtive little man of sinister complexion.

  It was an inexplicable assortment of people — one or two fat debutantes in taffeta, with fat dowagers whose dresses smelled of camphor. One woman, whom I discovered was named the Countess Lovatelli, seemed to be disguised as a tree. She stood smiling enigmatically, wrapped in green and gold brocade with a wreath of smilax on her green turban. I made futile conversation with a Lady Parker and her dull-as-ditch-water daughter. I wished Allanah would come. The fair-haired lady who had seen me at the Lido smiled every time I looked up.

  At last Allanah! But with her was a nameless man with pale canary hair parted in the centre, looking like a plump Victorian housemaid. I took a violent dislike to him. He struck me as being a pig and an unpleasant personality to boot. His buttery lips and cheese-smelling nostrils reminded me of a dairy shop.

  Allanah — a nice, dimpled baby — was the favourite of the evening. Everyone rushed up to her. I could hardly get a word in edgeways. Lady Dean Paul monopolised her, a magpie spectre, with her hair half white and half black. Eventually Allanah looked surreptitiously around her, murmured something about this being a bore and shouldn’t we go to the Gargoyle.

  Then we spotted Teddie Gerrard, the retired revue star. I hadn’t seen her for donkey’s years, but used to think her the last gasp in the days when she innovated backless dresses and huskily croaked, ‘We’re so glad to see you’re back, dear lady!’ (That was in my favourite Palace revue, Bric-a-brac.) She looked like a panther, then; hard and cruel eyes turned up at the corners. She was the essence of sex appeal.

  Tonight, Teddie Gerrard seemed more remarkable than ever before. Her skin was burnt a cigar-leaf brown and was as firm as an Arab boy’s. She wore a dress of black satin with white-bead embroidery, also short, white kid gloves and diamond bracelets. Tight round her neck were the largest false pearls I have ever seen. Her hair was bound up in black satin. I stood agape, watching her from the top of some stairs. She was quite drunk, quite unaffected by the years — a perpetual tomboy. She hooted with foghorn laughter. She sat on someone’s knee, tried to be a vampire and toppled over backwards on to the floor, hurting her elbow.

  Dancing began. I jigged with good old Allanah, pure and sane. Then I found myself partner to Teddie Gerrard, who whirled me round the room singing at the top of her voice and shocking the last of the dowagers off to their beds. I felt a little wild and unrespectable, dancing with this drunken houri! But our abandon inspired Lady Dean Paul’s daughter Brenda to rival us with an energetic and hilarious Charleston.

  Teddie Gerrard doubled up and tried to do likewise, but couldn’t. She yelled in her hoarse voice, ‘I only do that sort of thing when I’m paid for it!’ She then became more and more tight, rushed round the room waving her arms and (without being paid) sang songs of days gone by. She took delight in teasing Allanah, dashed up saying, ‘You’re a great, fat lump! Lump, a great lump! Great, fat lump!’ Once or twice, beside herself, she shouted out such obscene retorts as ‘balls!’ Then, through the alcoholic veil, she realised she had over-stepped the bounds. Her eyes would pop and she’d cover her open mouth with a gloved hand.

  She then assumed dignity as she surveyed the scene through lorgnettes. This prompted her to clutch my face and say, ‘Oh, you’re beautiful, beautiful! Look at your eyes! you’ve got no lids! Neither have I. That makes the space between your lashes and brows so marvellous! Augustus John says it is the most important part of a face. You’ve got no eyelids and neither have I. Oh, I adore beauty!’ She clutched my face again, turning it to see me in profile while Allanah and the ‘dairymaid’ giggled. Teddie Gerrard decided to start a club for people without eyelids and made me a charter member: ‘I’m giving a little party here tomorrow. You must come!’

  Her exit was spectacular. Too drunk to walk, she pretended that her little toe hurt, then lurched up the stairs. Her cloak was given to her. She pulled it over her back as though it were a bath towel. There followed a deafening crash
and Miss Teddie Gerrard had vanished.

  Attention now shifted to Lady Dean Paul, who played her own compositions at the piano. ‘I’m drunk,’ La Poldowska, or whatever she calls herself professionally, candidly remarked to her audience. Yet in spite of this confession Lady D. P. remembered everything she had ever written — Femme Laide. The Caledonian Market Suite, Midnight Blues, and one vulgar but effective number called Those Cud-Cud-Cuddle Blues.

  We danced, we played Nuts in May, we did Viennese waltzes and lancers and a Children’s Dancing Class. Everyone ‘talked common’ — the smart thing to do at the moment: ‘That’s a bit of all right; I don’t mind if I do; oo-er!’ How tiresome it becomes. I looked at Allanah and appreciated her nice baby air among all these fly-blown revellers.

  I came home in a taxi, sharing it with the ‘dairymaid’. I suspected he was a sponger and, sure enough, he borrowed ten shillings from me.

  October 19th

  I got ready for Teddie Gerrard’s party, shaving carefully in case she should clutch at my face again.

  Off again in a taxi to Yeoman’s Row. (How is it that one goes twice to the same place, by the same route, and yet the fare on the meter is different?) I met Allanah on the doorstep. Together, we faced the music.

  Teddie was all dressed up to the nines again. She wore an embroidered silver dress and a tiara. She looked thoroughly sheepish as she met my eye.

  Two old men, who had been drunk last night, arrived and started to get drunk again tonight. The ‘dairymaid’ sidled in. Irene Dean Paul tottered about, looking like a Marie Laurencin poodle in a checked, tailor-made suit with a pink blouse. She said, ‘I’m a disgrace. I’m not dressed, I’m not clean, and my head wants re-dipping!’ There were now about two inches of white hair showing at the roots.

  With Teddie Gerrard tonight was her young lover. I’d met him on the Lido, but he didn’t utter then or now. He always looks completely miserable. I suppose it is his pose, or else he’s blasé. At sixteen he was reputed to be the most precocious youth ever, driving racing cars and having affairs with all the most famous beauties in continental casinos. Now he gives the impression of an unhappy puppy, bored and insolent. Teddie Gerrard is mad about him.

  At dinner I sat next to Allanah. Teddie Gerrard, despairing of her silent lover, chipped in on our conversation about Gertrude Stein.

  After dinner Lady Dean Paul played as usual. It was impossible to believe we weren’t in hell, repeating last night’s festivities all over again: the same people, the same dark room and the same dingy things in it.

  Then we danced. Once Teddie’s silent lover forgot himself so far as to do a Charleston and stand on his head. But he soon went back to a sofa with a wrinkle on his forehead, there to be pawed by the old vampire. I didn’t feel best pleased with Teddie Gerrard tonight, partly because it wasn’t my face she was clutching!

  Butter lips shared my taxi home. This time he borrowed a pound.

  November 22nd

  Baby Jungman started to taunt Eleanor while she was being photographed. ‘That’s right. Put on the well-known Lady Eleanor Smith, wistful expression.’

  Later, when I was trying to photograph the two heads together Eleanor mocked Baby in return. But instead of employing her usual hyperbole, ‘I would have you know you’ll be the cynosure of all eyes!’ Eleanor made grunting noises like a pig, and jabbed Baby viciously in the ribs with a wicked elbow. They then both became two peevish children fighting: ‘Oh, Baby, turn your ugly face away, you annoy me.’

  ‘Shan’t.’

  ‘Shall.’

  ‘Shan’t.’

  ‘Shall.’

  ‘Oh, dry up.’

  ‘Your face makes me sick.’

  ‘So does yours!’

  This made the photographer’s instructions somewhat of an irrelevant interruption.

  November 23rd

  I went to Selfridge’s and was bitterly disappointed at the negatives of Eleanor. With all that badinage, she moved just as most of the pictures were snapped. Also, I took any number of them out of focus! In my excitement at having ‘got’ Lord Birkenhead’s daughter, I lost my head and misjudged the distance. Life is hard for a climber!

  November 27th

  Cyril Connolly paid me a visit, though I’ve hardly seen him since our days of friendship at St Cyprian’s.

  Odd that a person so devastatingly intellectual should give the impression of so little aesthetic sense. He falters when talking of pictures.

  Cyril is devilishly amusing. He can be very scathing about other people, but I think he likes me! We talked about the paintings in body colour on brown paper I used to do at St Cyprian’s, also our intrigues against Flip. We discussed book covers. Cyril asked me to do a wrapper for the psychological travel book he is completing.

  I showed him photographs. They obviously didn’t interest him very much.

  BABA AS HELPMATE

  December 4th

  I made preparations for a whopping batch of enlargements. I mixed acids in four different wash basins, spread an old mackintosh on the carpet and wrapped the usual scarlet flannel shirt around my bedside light bulb. What an amateur darkroom! But it works — sometimes.

  Baba and I set to printing cheerfully after dinner. We distracted ourselves from the labour by talking ghastly French or imitating poor Auntie Jessie. Modom is an invitation to mimicry, yet one never exhausts her idiosyncrasies. She speaks in a sing-song, mysterious voice, employing slang expressions. She has the excitable yet humble naïveté of a child. The slightest thing amazes her: the women in the bus are ‘so well dressed!’ She screams with pleasure at receiving a postcard or just looking out the window. She enjoys working people up, like a tot telling a fairy story. She relishes mentioning awful things.

  Shortly after ten o’clock, Baba begins to yawn audibly. I take this as a hint that she wants to go to bed. She goes, but I continue by myself. Sometimes I am unable to stop. I get cold and stiff; my joints crack. Then the batch of photographs is taken to the bathroom, where they are left swirling up and down and round in a basin of running water. I clear up the mess in my bedroom. I am as careful as possible not to drop acid on the green carpet.

  The floor boards creak horribly, which I fear will waken my father, whose snores can be heard from below. Later, the running water is stopped, the prints are put on an upturned screen, I open wide the window and sink into bed.

  December 5th

  The whole day spent mounting and retouching last night’s enlargements. My back ached with leaning over so much. Photographs sap all my energy; but once I’ve started I go on in a state of coma, doing the dull spade work without thinking.

  After dinner Baba and I again set to work enlarging, doing a number of prints on shiny paper — these for the press. The enlarger light was switched on for the exposure. One, two, three. Sometimes the negative was so opaque that we had to count up till forty. The light switched off, we then slipped the paper into the acid. Our technique has certainly improved. We used to get such poor results, as I am not a bit scientific and never keep a record of time exposures. In fact, I am ashamed of being so inept at the technical side of the game.

  At last Baba dropped a yawning hint. I hate to see her go, but even ten o’clock is late for a gangling schoolgirl. Yet I won’t feel guilty: I pay her fivepence an hour.

  I went on by myself; and later, in an experimental mood, decided to make dada-like designs by placing various objects on sensitised paper. It was my first attempt at this sort of thing. I experimented with shapes and textures, using glass animals, vases, bits of flowers and scattered birdseed.

  Excited by the results, I crept downstairs to the drawing-room and conservatory to collect suitable loot for further endeavours. If anyone had encountered me on the stairs, they would surely have thought me a burglar laden with bits of chandelier, wire netting, a dishcloth, pieces of cotton, matches, vases, brooches and spiky coral necklaces.

  I created any number of designs. Each effort encouraged another. It was fasci
nating to produce such contrasting tones and subtle textures, much finer than the results from any lens photograph.

  At five o’clock I went to bed. My brain buzzed with new ways to employ this method.

  December 6th

  I took photographs of a spoilt rich woman who had been sent to me by Billie Williams. I was alarmed to discover she had a glass eye that somehow always looked in the opposite direction to her good one. Yet I tried to find the kindest angles.

  When the pictures were heavily retouched and mounted, I telephoned to her. The message came back: please to go round and show them at once. I went, feeling a little uneasy. I waited with the package in a florid drawing-room. Then the lady clacked in in bedroom slippers, a gasper wobbling on the end of her lips.

  ‘Let’s see.’ With her one eagle eye she pierced the proofs. ‘Ow, I like that! Ow, that’s a good one! Ow, they’re lovely!’ I felt overwhelmingly relieved. I came away a quarter of an hour later with a cheque for seven pounds ten in my pocket! A good day’s work done already, and it was still only eleven-thirty.

  EDITH SITWELL

  December 7th

  Allanah was to bring Edith Sitwell to lunch. Afterwards, I’d take photographs. Edith arrived, a tall, graceful scarecrow with the white hands of a mediaeval saint. At first I felt she was ‘making conversation’, but soon she relaxed completely. She told stories with measured flourish and effect. A great actress, she can keep a room in fits of laughter.

  I had expected Edith Sitwell to be ethereal and beyond worldly concepts. But to my surprise, she embarked upon a pungent assessment of people and events. She fired comic broadsides at Drinkwater and Squire, also shaking a little pepper on Ethel M. Dell, Hannen Swaffer and Tallulah Bankhead. Gradually, I found her formidable aspect less striking than her sympathetic girlishness. In spite of her cadaverous appearance, her complexion is as fresh as a convolvulus, and she has a disarming girlish manner of not being able to contain her laughter.