The Wandering Years (1922-39)

by Cecil Beaton

  It was half past two when I left Rex. I felt chilly. I had to wake up Daddy and bathe his eye, as he had poked it badly when looking for a tennis ball. He had visited the oculist several times, but was still in agony.

  IN AN AEROPLANE

  September, undated

  Englebrecht, a Dutchman whom I saw a lot of at Cambridge, has for several years been asking me to see Holland under his guidance. I agreed at last; but as I could only spare a weekend, decided to save time and take an aeroplane. There has been a daily air service to Holland for the past five years and more. It would be ‘modern’ and commendable of me to go this way; also daring and adventurous.

  On the other hand, what if there were an accident and I did not return? I have never wanted to die less than I do at the moment.

  I made the decision and bought my ticket. This morning I woke early, shaved in cold water, dressed in a hurry, rushed down before breakfast was ready and waited about with queasy stomach. I wrote important letters in case of my demise until the coffee was ready. My father tramped in, a mass of leather from riding in the Park. He greeted the news of my departure with surprise. ‘By aeroplane, really! Hm! Hm!’

  I motored to the Victoria Hotel, whence the bus takes one to the Croydon aerodrome. I arrived early and waited in the hotel lobby, feeling unreal. The sensation was very likely helped on by my having taken Mothersill to prevent air sickness.

  The aerodrome proved large, clean and new-looking. Distant aeroplanes could be heard starting their engines. My fellow passengers were mostly Dutch, stolid and ugly. The men had short hair and bad complexions. One woman, typically Dutch, looked like a fat pig with silky skin and red hair worn in a soft, old-fashioned way. Atop her head a beaver hat was perched high; and her clothes were unbelievably dowdy.

  Everyone was excited. The Dutchmen laughed. We marched towards our aeroplane — no turning back now. I chose a good seat and stuffed cotton wool in my ears. The engines started, buzzing and roaring and racing to a deafening whirr. I laughed aloud. Two blocks of wood were pulled from under the wheels of the plane and off we went. I bent my head forward, touching the window to see everything there was to see. It was like being in a large limousine as we raced round an enormous field on two rubber wheels with the engine going all-out. The rubber wheels whirled round madly, like runaway motor wheels. Then I knew we were ascending: in an instant the grass field had sunk away from us, became smaller and smaller.

  Our rubber tyres still revolved jerkily, but with less force and rapidity. Slowly they slackened and stopped. No longer did we depend on them: we flew of our own accord.

  The most incredible things were happening outside the window. Everything seemed so unreal as to drive fear out. We scarcely moved, yet below passed a slow procession of absurd scenes: bird’s-eye views of churches, town halls, villas, main roads and by-roads peopled with infinitesimal specks. It was impossible to realise that that doll’s town below could be the world one lived in. Minute toy houses, complete with Lilliputian back yards, marked out tennis courts, ponds, a patch of grass worn away where a horse was tied. These things surely belonged to an elf. Washing, hung on a line, looked like the smallest fragments of broken china; sheep might have been fairy lice; and country lanes were mice’s tails across green velvet.

  Certainly it was impossible that real people should inhabit those tiny boxes; that people should be born, live and die in such confined smallness, eating, sleeping, visiting the lavatory and having love affairs down there. Such a pretty microcosm could not contain any unpleasantnesses. Each cart-horse and labourer looked so finely wrought and elegant; nothing was clumsily hewn; coarseness and squalor had disappeared, leaving a pattern of exquisite delicacy.

  I couldn’t believe we were high in the air. Flying gave no sense of proportion at all. Sitting in a quietly purring limousine, my body seemed just the same as ever — the skin round my fingernails dry and jagged, my overcoat covered with the usual bits of fluff, yet the world outside had been transformed.

  Now, according to the map, we were over Kent. Motionless blue smoke hung over a wood: it was a little cloud. And now for the sea — a thrill, this! It was a motionless blue carpet, occasionally flecked with white feathers of waves. Below us a small moth glided across the water smoothly and steadily. This was the shadow of our own aeroplane, cast by a bright sun. The sea changed colour every minute — from blue to pale green, then dark again. Hovering white specks proved to be seagulls. Lighthouses were no more than golf tees painted scarlet.

  In a minute, it seemed, the moth had crossed the Channel and traversed the coast of Belgium. Occasionally our limousine encountered an air pocket, swooped up and down and gave one the sensation of being on the Giant Racer. The red-haired Dutch lady laughed and lay full length on the floor.

  The scenes below now comprised small square ‘samples’ of tailors’ materials pieced together to make a patchwork quilt for a midget’s bed. Tweed, corduroy and poplin were combined in different tones of browns and fawns — and occasionally a sere yellow.

  Lor’! The patchwork flew up at us — nearer, nearer, nearer! The aeroplane turned sideways. The big rubber tyres were no longer motionless in mid-air, but whirled madly round and round again. Suddenly they were carrying the aeroplane with them, revolving slower until they stopped. We had arrived.

  Fellow passengers laughed at one another, pulled orange-waxy cotton wool out of their ears and lumbered out. There stood Englebrecht waiting for me — my cicerone in a foreign land. And with him was a nice, dowdy lady, who must be his mother.

  LONDON

  This was to be the great party time: scarcely a night without some impromptu gathering. Quite often fancy dress taxed one’s resourcefulness but added to the fun.

  Loelia Ponsonby, Zita, Baby, and others of the Guinness contingent, organised ‘stunt’ parties; paper chases, find-the-hidden-clues-races, bogus impressionist exhibitions, and bizarre entertainments based on the fashion of the latest Diaghilev ballets.

  Loelia, of the raven’s wing shingle and magnolia complexion, had a quiet retiring manner, yet was a great ‘animatrice’. Greedy for more intelligent forms of amusement than those surrounding the Court circles in which she lived with her parents at St James’s Palace, she, for many years before her marriage to the Duke of Westminster, enjoyed devising ingenious ways of eking out her income while living at a spanking pace. She was the first to give parties at which the guests were bidden to make a contribution, not only by giving impersonations or doing a particular ‘turn’, but also providing something high in the gastronomic scale such as oysters, a croute of foie gras, or a bottle of champagne. Under Loelia’s baton, the Bright Young Things were not only bright but talented. The name, however, when taken up by the gossips, soon acquired a stigma. A ‘bottle party’ became synonymous with drunkenness and squalor, and no longer had any connection with its charter members long before a not very ‘bright’ middle-aged woman shot someone under a piano.

  Meanwhile Mrs Beatrice Guinness had ordered breakfast foods and the Embassy Band for the King of Greece and Charlie Chaplin, while Mrs Brigit Guinness was planning an ambitious costume ball complete with a ballet on a raft. For me life had suddenly appeared easy. Friends seemed all important, and of them I now had my share. Yet, without my fathoming the reason I realised, on occasion, that I generated hostility among certain strata of people who did not know me. Perhaps my manner was innately effeminate. But surely not flamboyantly so?

  Nevertheless, this hostility boiled over every now and again, particularly one late-summer’s evening, when the self-assurance I had been building was dashed in cold water at a ball given among the glories of the Vandyke portraits, Kent gilt furniture, and ruby velvet of the Double Cube room at Wilton.

  A DUCKING AND OTHER MEMORIES

  The festivities were to celebrate the coming-of-age of Lord Herbert. Edith Olivier had asked me to stay in her house in the Park for the event. After dinner our party walked along the river and over the illuminated Palladian bri
dge, across the smooth lawns to the house, in the gloaming the Inigo Jones façade looked its most noble with the long range of tall lighted windows.

  It was a grand occasion, and I was over-awed. I remember Mr Rudyard Kipling with his plebeian moustache: his flat chest was pasted with medals. And a more handsome couple could seldom have been seen than Lord and Lady Anglesey! she looking so cool and wistful, with white face and black hair, and carrying the weight of the world and a tall spiked tiara on her poetical head.

  I walked on the lawns in a dream.

  How beautiful the night scene was! How calm and visionary! But my reveries were short-lived. Suddenly they became a nightmare.

  Out of the darkness a group of tail-coated young men surrounded me and, without a word of explanation, highjacked me across the lawns at enormous pace towards the river. I remember my head was raised in a Guido Reni agony which seemed to be unending, in the panic that assailed me, the emotions of humiliation and shame were stronger than those of fear. The black night whirled past me, bat-like, as the phantasmagoria journey continued, until abruptly, with a vicious thrust from all my attackers, I was catapulted into the darkness. With a tremendous splash and plopping of stones, I found myself standing hip deep in the Nadder. Too stunned to know what to do, in my startled misery, I merely stood silent. This had the effect of a clever ruse: my enemies now became somewhat apprehensive lest their treatment of me should have ended in my complete disappearance. The group above me on the river bank murmured, ‘Do you think the bugger’s drowned?’ I continued to stand motionless in the water. Someone — I think it was Roger Chetlock — shouted, ‘Are you all right?’ I did not answer. More murmurs. But perhaps I feared further retribution, if some would-be rescuer were to plunge after a supposedly drowning man and find him no worse off than wet to the white waistcoat. ‘Where are you? Are you alive?’ Eventually, in a rather dead voice, I replied, ‘Yes, the bugger’s alive,’ and I trudged up the stones and mud into the comparative light of the lawns. My attackers had vanished.

  The night was still comparatively young. I was determined not to leave the ball. While the water ran down my legs and oozed out of my shoes, I remained by a window of the Double Cube room making conversation to an eminent Field Marshal... Later I danced with some of Edith’s young nieces. They did not seem to notice my damp trousers, or that the squelching soles of my feet dragged without their accustomed smoothness across the parquet.

  Walking home, as dawn lightened the skies, down past the river that I had come to know so intimately, I joined airily with the others in a post mortem on the party. ‘Yes, it was a glorious ball. The best I’ve ever been to.’ About one thing I was determined: the incident would never be mentioned by me. So far as I was concerned, it had never taken place. Although Edith’s servant must have been surprised to find my soused clothes next morning, she did not draw my attention to them, nor did Edith ever allude to my shame; and her tact increased my love.

  A week or so later in London, Roger Chetlock, accompanied by a self-consciously giggling Katie Maitland, came up to me in the interval of some theatre and taunted me: ‘I haven’t seen you since Wilton. You remember Wilton? That place of the Pembrokes in Wiltshire? On the Nadder, I believe. I think you were there for the ball, weren’t you?’ Katie Maitland waggled her kiss curls in a delirium of amusement.

  Years later, there was some sort of wry compensation, when, out of the blue I received a letter from Roger Chetlock, saying that he’d heard I was a collector of Victoriana, that if I was interested he had a number of paperweights for disposal. I let him off scot-free.

  It was, however, quite surprising to me that some of my attackers eventually became close friends.

  Perhaps this experience confirmed a lesson I had been taught the very first day I had been to school: that however terrified one may be, one must never show one’s quaking fears. If it is possible to put up an authoritative front or assume an aggressive attitude in turn, then the bully himself will be the first to collapse.

  I was not a particularly puny boy, but I was an excellent bait for bullies, for I failed to conceal an inner fear that marked me out as a prospective victim. On the very first morning that Reggie and I set off to the day-school, Heath Mount, Hampstead, I tried not to disclose to my younger brother my dread of the Dickensian cruelty we were probably about to face. But, as we walked along Hampstead Heath with our emerald green caps and satchels, my stomach was queasy at the prospect of having my knuckles slashed with a sharp ruler by some sadistic master, or my backside swiped until it bled. It was with relief, on that cold autumn morning, that I heard the whistle blow for the eleven o’clock break. Half the morning, at any rate, had passed without disaster. The masters I now knew were not sadistic. Now the entire school was let out to rampage over the asphalt playground. The older boys formed their own posses of interest, others were playing the hearty games continued from last term. All the new boys seemed rather lost and did not know where to go; but none looked more ill at ease than myself. Suddenly, out of nowhere, the bullies arrived. They had recognised their quarry in me. Growling like wire-haired terriers, they were large and solid, with hairy stockings and rough tweeds. Their leader was a boy half the size of the others, wearing Barrie-esque green tweed knickerbockers. Recognising from a distance that I was the most obvious lamb for the slaughter, the leader, having darted silently towards me at great speed, halted a few inches in front of me with a menacing wild stare, while the bigger boys circled me and growled louder. He then stood on his toes and slowly thrust his face with a diabolical stare, closer and closer to mine, ever closer until the eyes converged into one enormous Cyclops nightmare. It was a clever inauguration to the terrors that followed, and my introduction to Evelyn Waugh.

  But the ‘breaking-down’ process, the preliminary to the bullying proper, had not yet been completed. After the Cyclops eye had several times been retracted only to be brought back again in its symbolic horror, Waugh then stood baring his teeth at me. By the time the physical onslaught began, fright had mercifully made me only half conscious. That the tortures were devilish in their invention I can be fairly certain, since they were conducted under such expert leadership. Exactly what torments were endured I have forgotten; however, twenty years later, during the war, when I found myself in China in some military mess, a huge grey-haired major, middle-aged and respectable, came up and said, ‘Well, Beaton, I haven’t seen you since the days at Heath Mount when Evelyn Waugh and I were beaten for bending your arms back to front.’

  Part IX: America, 1929 and 1931

  I was still living with my parents, and continued to take photographs in the drawing-room. Sometimes photographic lights and strangely improvised décors had not been cleared away before guests arrived to lunch or tea with my mother. The surprised visitor would see a room through which a tornado might have passed, leaving scorched tinsel, mountains of crumpled American-cloth, spilt water and empty vases on the floor, and various W. Heath Robinson arrangements of dead gypsophila hanging from billiard cues balanced on wooden towel racks.

  The conditions for work were hardly ideal, yet the results were successful enough for me to be able to summon almost anyone to look pleasant and watch the birdie. Only Queen Mary and Virginia Woolf were reluctant to do my bidding.

  Why, at this busy and exciting time, when new vistas were opening for me every week, did I want to discover a whole new world by visiting America? Since childhood it seemed to me that my father was always in the process of leaving for, or returning from, business-trips to the United States. He was reticent about his experiences in this land which seemed to be all dollars and honey, but his shiny sepia snapshots of life in the South showed glimpses of Pensacola and Mobile that looked inviting, folly, prosperous families laughed on verandahs, or in garden hammocks, surrounded by servants and palm trees.

  He would also bring back the theatre programmes with their illustrations of Laurette Taylor of the surprised crescent eyebrows, of Hazel Dawn, the ‘Pink Lady’, or Les
lie Henson in Tonight’s the Night. These invested my father for me with a little extra stardust and first whetted my appetite for Broadway.

  More recently the glowing reports of New York from Beverley Nichols conveyed the impression that any visitor would be welcomed with the same fanfare as the author of Twenty Five and these doubtless influenced me to look for the pot of gold on the other side of the Atlantic. But whereas on two continents Beverley Nichols was a full-scale celebrity, I had achieved only a small notoriety in England. This would not have preceded me across the waters. It was perhaps rather foolhardy, armed with a No. 3A pocket folding Kodak and a crate of water colours, to set sail towards a land where only half a dozen souls knew of my existence.

  November 3rd 1929

  It was still grey outside when Papa called me with some joke about, ‘Get ready for the Skylark.’ I felt cold, empty and quivery as I dressed and packed the last necessities — also some odd bits of tinsel and cotton for possible future backgrounds.

  The luggage was strapped on the car. Across the road a tweeny sleepily shook a rug; a policeman trundled by, a few carts moved slowly, cats and dogs appeared. Gradually little clerks in black were hurrying Citywards, and a few buses had started. By degrees the light became less fogged. When we passed the rear of Buckingham Palace, there was a throng of scurrying bowler hats. By Westminster Bridge the crowds were thicker. The day’s hubbub had begun.