The Years Between (1939-44)

by Cecil Beaton

  ‘May I turn on this light?’ I asked, thinking it might help my photography.

  ‘Oh, but are we allowed to turn it on?’ The old man knew vaguely that we were at war and must conform to the blackout rules, but he couldn’t quite understand that it was only at night that the light must not be switched on if the windows were unguarded.

  ‘Now we can go down on to the terrace in the garden,’ he suggested. But the procedure of getting the old man out of his deep chair was a laborious one. Sickert would lean forward to hoist himself to his feet, then start talking about his father and the doctor who operated upon him when he was a small boy, about Islington and the Trinity, and then, oh dear, he’d sink against the deep leather back again. However, eventually he was upright and on his feet. Sickert’s study was next door: again a huge bookcase and leather chair. The tables and floor were papered with leaves of the various books he’d been studying. Ingres was everywhere, and there were certain illustrations with the edges turned back for special reference. Sickert was himself reading a French book on Millet, and the margins were enlivened by his pencil notes. Written in a very fair and sure hand were his reactions: ‘Comme il a raison!’; and the various prices mentioned as having been paid for certain pictures were annotated. Meissonier was always selling pictures, it appears. So Sickert wrote: ‘Le cher Meissonier toujours réussi.’ And he would translate the French francs into pounds, so that for one picture Meissonier received 10,000 francs — or, as Sickert wrote, ‘Forty bloody pounds.’

  A long digression was staged in the hallway while engravings of Venice — Sickert’s great joy — and Sylvia Gough’s paintings were shown. The garden was below and to reach it we must all descend a winding stone staircase that presented many hazards. ‘This is something that has got to be done,’ Sickert laughed. ‘We have to go down it — that’s the only way of getting to the garden — and then we have to come up again — a lamentable state of affairs!’ Sickert was not at all sure on his feet, moved in little jerks with a heavy use of his stick, and as he hobbled about he took great trouble to avoid stepping on one particular flagstone which, he then explained, was something to do with the ‘waterworks’. There was an awful stench of urine, and I gradually realized that poor old Sickert no longer has any control over his bladder; his heavy blue tweed trousers were stained with dark wet patches that must make him feel terribly uncomfortable.

  Once out in the garden, the terrace, effulgent with a jumble of nicotianas, petunias, asters and stocks, gave hundreds of opportunities for photographs, and for Sickert’s mind to run free in its fancies. His wife listened attentively to everything he said. He was trying to be gallant and uxorious: he threw his thumbs in the air with a jerk and said, ‘This is the job for the husband — no one is going to interfere here!’ Then he laughed with salacious enjoyment at a story he told of a girl in the neighbourhood who had gone out and got her skirts somewhat torn. ‘And after that, she continued in that life.’ Suddenly he sang Deutchsland über alles, and asked if I liked music — oh, how he liked music. And did I like Canonbury Crescent in Islington? To him it was so beautiful — as all things rounded were beautiful, like those two hills over there. He pointed with his stick to the distant landscape. ‘Do you see those two thick trees! They have seats under them, and every afternoon tea is served.’

  The terrace on which the Sickerts were now walking had featured in some of the master’s most recent pictures: they conveyed the spirit and essence of quiet English country atmosphere and light. Suddenly Sickert took a dislike to a certain path, ‘It is too wet; it can never be dried up’ — and he stumbled when the flagstones were uneven: once he nearly fell headlong into the nicotianas. Like a toddler, he was afraid of going too near the parapet of the terrace. Then, stopping in his tracks, like an old actor, he started to recite, and sing snatches of early songs. Then he would enjoy some happy formal laughter: laughter that did not arise from amusement but was created for its own sake.

  Sickert’s mind was now darting unexpectedly in every direction. ‘Do you patronize Despenser?’ (or some such name). ‘No, who is he?’ ‘He was Whistler’s tailor, and I like your suit and your trousers. It appears they were very much impressed by a wet cucumber.’ The Trinity were often on his lips, and suddenly he threatened he would write to Queen Victoria to overthrow the State.

  In spite of his infirmities his brain is powerful and grandiose. He used beautiful English, and spoke in a flowery way that is no longer fashionable, but no less delightful. ‘Do you observe where that little bust of Queen Anne has been on the bookcase? It seems that her head has been purposely struck off with a walking stick.’ And: ‘You wish to remove that rose branch? And for what other purpose, pray, is a penknife?’

  We all had tea in a blue lattice tea house. The artist’s hand was steady as the cup was raised to his lips. Sickert enjoyed being host. ‘Can you stay to dinner? Well, come to lunch. Come and have a meal — after all, a meal is a meal. Show them everything!’ ‘Everything?’ ‘Yes, all turned up!’ Mrs Sickert laughed. We all laughed.

  After a short sojourn in a red and gold wallpapered room, hung with miscellaneous Sickerts, we drove away. Although we had welcoming invitations to return to meals it may be that the war will prevent our seeing the old man again.

  In his happiness with his wife there is a smooth and mellow friendship, made more poignant with a certain play-acting as master and mistress occasionally stage little scenes of obedience and revolt.

  Sickert is living almost entirely in the past of his youth, with only a few flashes of the war of today. He is completely happy for his pictures are always with him and he sees everything in terms of painting and more pictures to be made.

  DIANA AT THE DORCHESTER

  Pelham Place

  I go to see Diana at the Dorchester. She lives in a bilious-coloured suite on the top of the hotel. Her old maid, Wade, comes up from the bowels of the building to make some tea in their own pot: war-time room service is not all that it should be. Sibyl Colefax then appears. Diana washes out her own cup, finds there is not enough hot water. A half-empty cup of very strong tea is refused by Sibyl who explains she had never really wanted it. Then Venetia Montagu comes in. ‘What, no tea?’

  ‘Have a drink — or no?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh!’ says Diana, rather flummoxed.

  Search is made for a corkscrew. A bottle of sherry is about to be opened when the sirens sound. A gale is blowing, the windows rattle and the wind howls down the fireplace where an electric stove is embedded. The park guns below fire to crack your head. We go downstairs.

  In the lobby the scene is like that on a transatlantic crossing, in a luxury liner, with all the horrors of enforced jocularity and expensive squalor. The people are the same as those we always see on board: Mrs Simon Brand and Harriet Cohen. But now they are prepared for an all-night vigil with rugs, torches, cushions. Diana is nervous: she darts, every so often, with inquiries to the hall porter. As she staggers down the lobby like a doll with its legs put on sideways, the fellow passengers point, ‘That’s Lady Diana — doesn’t she look Bohemian!’ (Diana is a ‘day-dream’ dresser. She wears velvet slacks, pearls, neckerchief, yachting cap and a fur cape.) Duff is late. Why hasn’t he come home? Has he had a heart attack, been ran over, bombed? Then the Minister of Information arrives. He reminds me of a little pug dog. He stands staring boss-eyed with surprise at the whole scene. Diana totters towards him. Instead of saying, ‘Evening, darling,’ she stands at bay ten paces from him and snorts and snarls while he snarls back. They throw a few statements at one another, then dash lovingly into the elevator.

  NO 10 DOWNING STREET: MRS CHURCHILL

  September 1940 (Pelham Place)

  I often forget the address to which I have to go, so that a taxi driver looks on superciliously while various door bells are rung in vain. Today no such difficulty: No 10 Downing Street is a number even I could not forget. I was going for the Minister of Information to photograph Mrs Churchill —
possibly the great man as well: but that was indefinite. A breathless skivvy showed me up to the secretary’s room and left me. For the first half-hour I beguiled myself prowling around, looking at the stacked files of newspaper articles and accounts of speeches, and the boxes with their ordered headings. It was enjoyable to note the presents sent to the Prime Minister from fans, with letters thanking him for what he was doing for the nation. But I was anxious to get to grips with my electrician, already established in the drawing-room, so in a fever I used the house telephone to ask to be freed from my imprisonment.

  The suite of rooms where the pictures were to be taken had tall ceilings, with long windows looking on to herbaceous borders. Here, in the heart of London, bees were wafting in through the open curtains, and the quiet was a country quiet. It was the hottest day of the loveliest summer (climatically) we remember, and the rooms were a delight with sun streaming in from beneath the blinds on to bowls of sweet peas from Chartwell. There were some fine English portraits, Adam fireplaces and Georgian silver. Mrs Churchill has typically arranged the rooms with her usual pale colours of pistachio green and palest salmon pink. Pamela,[11] enormous with child, announced the imminent arrival of Mrs Churchill who appeared with her hair set for the occasion like Pallas Athene. Mrs C. announced that Winston was not able to be photographed. He was inspecting New Zealanders somewhere. This was a disappointment but, at the same time, a relief. If I had felt that, at any moment, he might come through the door I would have been most uneasy, for he has a paralysing effect on me.

  Mrs Churchill, a bright, unspoilt and girlish woman, is full of amusing and shrewd observations about people and the afternoon’s photography passed breezily and easily. She insisted on showing me the whole house, and I was an avid sightseer. The three reception-rooms give on to a small passage room which Philip Sassoon turned into a dining-room where Mr and Mrs C. have their evening meal, the big parties taking place in the panelled hall next door. Mrs C.’s own bedroom with chintz flowers is as pretty as any country bedroom, and all the corridors and bedrooms look like part of a manor house. On the pale-coloured walls were Sickert sketches and Nicholson still-lives, family photographs and Victorian sketches. The Prime Minister’s bedroom was simplicity itself. A small single bed: some drawings of his family and his mother by Sargent: a bedside table mounted with telephones galore: boxes of cigars: a wash basin with shaving soap and brushes in evidence: a few books: some files of Parliamentary speeches, and that was all — except for the view from the windows on to the Horseguards Parade and the Admiralty. Mrs C. pointed out a truck full of pigeons. These are being trained in case all else fails. Pigeons to send last-minute SOS’s — in extremes we revert to the primitive.

  While we had a break from photography for tea Mrs C. talked of the terrible days when France was cracking and Winston had to keep bolstering up the French. But Winston had been so convinced of France’s weakness that he had to refuse them the help of all our own fighter squadrons lest we ourselves be wiped out. They are, Mr and Mrs C., both pro-de Gaulle, whom they consider a great engineer-officer responsible for many new methods of mechanized warfare. He is full of courage, the maker of many magnificent speeches, but a difficult man to get along with.

  Mrs Churchill recalled having sat next to the General at luncheon. During one of the many silences Mrs Churchill pondered on how difficult must be the life of Madame de Gaulle. Her daydreams were interrupted by the General addressing her: ‘Vous savez, Madame, it must be very difficult, Madame, being the wife of Mr Churchill.’

  LONDON UNDER FIRE

  October 12th

  One still feels a sinking of the heart at the sight of ever more bomb damage: windows blown in and tumbled wreckage of rubble in the road. A small dwelling — its front cut away — gives a doll’s house effect, with the parlour, where the evening meal was being eaten on the cloth-covered table, a teapot and bowl of tomatoes exposed to passers-by. Pictures have been knocked crooked by the blast. Skyed high in the air remain the useless bath and lavatory with the pathetic little roll of toilet paper still affixed to the door, and the staircase leads to an upper floor that no longer exists.

  James[12] is writing a book called London Under Fire for which I am doing the photographs. Besides the vandalistic damage, we must show the tenacity and courage of the people, and we do not have to look far. Signs are posted: ‘We have no glass, but business continues.’ As soon as the worst rubbish is cleared away, the notice appears ‘Open as usual’.

  Londoners have had one month of this so far, and they must look forward to a whole winter of it. The planes arrive each night at dusk. One hears the drone, then the bangs, crunch, zumphs of the bombs. The AA gunfire, which is gay and heartening, is like a firework fiesta: and then an interval. During the lull one tries to read a book, but one’s thoughts wander, and soon the hum of more approaching planes is heard. The zumphs come perilously near, and one leaves the chair for a vantage point under the lintel of a door. The restless night continues.

  By degrees many people have grown accustomed to being frightened. For myself, most evenings I have beetled off to the Dorchester. There the noise outside is drowned with wine, music and company — and what a mixed brew we are! Cabinet ministers and their self-consciously respectable wives; hatchet-jawed, iron grey brigadiers; calf-like airmen off duty; tarts on duty, actresses (also), déclassé society people, cheap musicians and motor-car agents. It could not be more ugly and vile, and yet I have not the strength of character to remain, like Harold Acton, with a book.

  In the infernos of the Underground the poor wretches take up their positions for the night’s sleep at 4 o’clock in the afternoon. The winter must surely bring epidemics of flu, even typhoid. The prospect is not cheering, and Churchill makes no bones about the ardours of the future. The electric trains are bombed, so typists fight their way on to extra buses. Telephone exchanges are out of order, and hardly a clock has its face intact. Yet the life of the city manages, more or less, to continue as if in normal times. Nothing can really dash the spirits of the English people, who love to grumble, and who, in spite of their complaints, are deeply confident of victory.

  In the absence of printed posters, the newspaper sellers chalk up their version of the news. ‘Tragic Death of James Joyce.’ One old man at South Kensington had written: ‘Bomb in cellar — horrible mess.’ Another outside Waterloo Station had scrawled, ‘We are winning!’

  PAMELA CHURCHILL

  Week-end with Pamela Churchill. She has just moved into a Queen Anne rectory house at Hitchin which she shares with her sister-in-law Diana (Sandys). The object of my visit was to take the first photographs of Winston Junior who is now five weeks old. When the great man saw his grandchild for the first time, he bent down and kissed him, and said, ‘What sort of a world are you being born into?’

  Pamela, with Raeburnesque red curls and freckles, was looking radiant and triumphant. But she had been through a turmoil — for the child had been long overdue. The air raids had not hastened it, yet they had unnerved her. One day the doctor was hurriedly called — in vain: no luck! In desperation Pamela caught her white Pekinese dog, dressed it up in the expected child’s clothes, and sent it out of the room to Mrs Churchill. What a joke! Mrs Churchill rushed to Winston with the dog dressed up. ‘Look — look what a surprise I’ve got for you.’ Winston at once asked, ‘Is it a boy?’ Pamela realized more than ever how important it was to Winston for her to give birth to a son. But the one person who did not take the story well was Randolph. When it was related at Max Beaverbrook’s, Randolph was profoundly shocked.

  The child was born in deep secret at Chequers, with bombs falling all round. The London house is now evacuated: the back staircase is unsafe, and the ceilings have come in in a few rooms.

  Diana Sandys, like the rest of her family, has this reverent worship for Papa. ‘Papa is so kind and gentle, is better, is more good than anyone!’ A. J. Balfour had said it: ‘You, Winston, can forgive — I can only forget!’

  D
iana told me of the terrible rumpus there had been at No 10 when Winston was broadcasting his recent bolstering speech to France. (‘Et les poissons aussi, meaning that the fish were fat, according to rumour, on the German soldiers that had been drowned in the ‘false invasion’ of Britain.) The Churchill family were assembled around the radio waiting and gossiping, the knobs were all prepared — and then, Time! An aunt pressed a knob to turn the radio on, but it was the wrong one. Someone else switched to Radio Normandy and then to Rome. The feathers flew: Mrs Churchill grabbed the radio and broke it and, after an hysterically chaotic scene, everyone rushed upstairs to listen in to the remainder of the speech on a servant’s set.

  Diana described the results of her sister Sarah’s nasal operation. Sarah was still black and blood-red, swollen and unrecognizable, four days after her ordeal. Diana went to call on her sister and, at first, Sarah hid behind a fan. When, at last, she dropped the fan Diana’s jaw dropped, but she managed to spurt out the sentence she had prepared on the way up the stairs: ‘Oh Sarah, you have been going it!’

  Finally the nose was ready to be seen, and Winston made a call to scrutinize it at Westminster Gardens. The great man shuffled backwards into the room, blowing his nose. He turned to the fireplace, his back to Sarah, and addressed the chimneypiece: ‘Now, Sarah, whatever happens, Sarah, remember, I shall always love you more than anything on earth. Now you’ve had your nose altered, and I want to see what it’s like.’ He turned: ‘Oh? Oh — Oh, charming! Charming! Not my old Sarah, of course, but still — very nice. Now then, what were we discussing? Victory, of course...’