The Years Between (1939-44)

by Cecil Beaton

  David was in charge of a motor-boat; a rope had wound itself around the propeller so that the engines were useless. The sea was choppy, they had only one pair of oars, and were afraid that they would get sucked under when their ship turned over. The bosun said, ‘We’ll sink now if we take one man more on board. We’ve capacity for sixty and there are ninety-nine of us already.’

  At first they became strangely callous about having to ignore the people in the water moaning ‘Help, help’, but later the full horror asserted itself. Yet even among the appalling dramas there were comic instances: when at last a destroyer picked up the survivors and they watched the old ship burning, the chief engineer arrived with a fluttering hat; the captain laughed: ‘What on earth’s the matter with your cap?’ ‘I thought the canaries would be safer in my hat than in their cage.’ The interest that was taken in saving the livestock was almost greater than in human beings. A bag was thrown on the deck, and out stepped three snarling cats. The destroyer backed under the burning ship to allow thirty cats to leap on board.

  There were two instances of bad behaviour: an American doctor, out of sheer terror, had refused to help, and in the choppy dark night an RAF officer sitting on a raft shouted to a female hospital nurse swimming towards him, ‘You can’t come here. You know perfectly well you can’t come on this raft. They’re only made for one man. You must swim to the next,’ and this nurse, swimming away, in a Cockney accent answered cheerfully, ‘Okay — is it far?’ A number of Red Cross nurses found their boat to be waterlogged, and they had to hold on tight to the seats not to be washed away with each wave that lashed over them. The matron, in veils, kept up a pep talk — only interrupted by the swish of waves — ‘We must all consider ourselves fortunate — (swish) — that we have been spared — (swish) — to carry out our tasks — (swish) and that we may be of help when we land — (swish) on Algerian soil.’

  EMERALD CUNARD

  Emerald Cunard has returned to bombed London from her native America with the feeling that she has now come hack where she belongs.

  In New York she was judged by her age in years — not admired for her ever youthful spirit. Her outspokenness made her many enemies, and few appreciated her wit.

  ‘I know I should look after my affairs, but I don’t. My house is burnt — and it wasn’t insured; and it’s all my own fault, and it’s all terrible,’ she chuckles with infectious gaiety.

  Now she has made a life for herself at the Dorchester in two rooms that are overfilled with outsize Buhl and ormolu furniture left over from her more spacious existence. Here she shows complete disregard for the deafening guns firing below her in the park, and pooh-poohs the danger of bombs.

  At first she was somewhat perturbed to discover the extent to which the war had encroached upon everyone’s lives, and restrictions irked her a great deal: it was acutely embarrassing sometimes to hear her complaints about the inevitable frozen and ersatz foods to the harassed waiter in charge of her dinner party. Yet she soon acclimatized herself to the changed atmosphere, accepting the fact that the old world of society in which she had thrived had gone for ever. In fact, Emerald has few regrets, and is as interested as ever in new people, new plays, and all the latest manifestations of literature and art, as well as the political scene.

  Since she is about the only woman attempting to entertain in London it is not difficult for her to ensnare Cabinet ministers and war leaders to drop in on their way home for a drink, or to sit at her dinner table, together with groups of writers, painters and decorative women, who are in transports of amusement at their hostess’s sallies as she describes her attempts to keep attuned to the times. ‘Now we’ve all got to learn to do things!’ enjoins Emerald, with that warm, cosy chortle that sounds like mice in the wainscoting. ‘I had the most interesting afternoon with the Princess! She told me how to cook! The Princess is a remarkable woman. I said, “Do you mean to say you can roast a chicken? And a duck or a partridge?” She said, “Yes,” and, what’s more, she explained all about it. Now, when you cook a bird you must let it sit on one side for ten minutes, and then on its other side. Then the juices don’t run down and dry the breast. Never cover the chicken or duck or partridge with fat. Put everything inside the bird — butter or fat or stuffing. Everything inside! And mind you baste it well. Oh, and then the things you can do with spatch-cock!’

  Emerald’s delivery of her lines is brilliant; confiding and surprised, with the emphasis on the last word of a sentence.

  ‘Oh, it’s much better to eat plain, simple food,’ she reminisces. ‘I once had a cook who used to serve chickens in melon, and put all sorts of unexpected things inside a potato! The potato was scraped out, and all that was left was the uneatable outside! So I went to her one morning and said, “Now, we’ve got to stop all this nonsense!”’

  Emerald’s frivolities are so entertaining that her audience is apt to ignore the scholarly mind which is her raison d’etre, in effect, the play-acting with friends during the evenings is only a preliminary for her real life of the mind. After her last guest has gone Emerald will read for six or eight hours until long after dawn has lightened her taffeta curtains. Perhaps she will suddenly wish to absorb the whole of Martin Luther, and his sermons will have more meaning for her than anything written today. Emerald confides, ‘My maid Gordon is such a snob. She never approves of any of my friends. Suddenly she started reciting Burns to me. I never knew she was fond of poetry. But she told me she always won the prize in class as a child and that she never forgets it. She reads nothing but poetry, except the Daily Mirror where she learns all the horrible things about my friends.’

  Characters in Flaubert or Proust will have more reality for Emerald than her little ‘Poppies’ or ‘Sheilas’. She will talk of some little ‘golden hoof’ — and you realize that she is living in mythology. This may be one reason why she is apt to judge contemporary mediocrity so severely. ‘But he’s not a cultured man,’ she explodes about some successful playwright. ‘I don’t suppose he knows one word of an ode of Horace!’ Returning from an American play that was enjoying enormous success, she whispers with disgust, ‘It’s for the servants! Really, we can’t watch people trying to lift up a Scot’s kilt to see what’s underneath. We all know what’s underneath: it can’t be anything new! It isn’t as if it were a sea anemone or a salamander.’

  Emerald’s lack of inhibition, together with her excess of enthusiasm, sometimes makes her an embarrassing companion in the theatre. In a loud aside she will punctuate the development of the plot with pointed comments. She once described her first visit to a theatre when, in San Francisco as a child, she was so appalled at the heroine falling for the machinations of the villain that she stood to her feet, pointed and, in her shrill pipe, shouted, ‘Don’t you believe him! He’s a snake in the grass!’ Her sotto voces today are almost as dramatic, while her curiosity about the performers is surprising. (‘Isn’t her hair lovely! Such a beautiful colour! It takes a little dye to make that effect!’ ‘Wasn’t it terrible about that poor Miss Enid Stamp Taylor! She slipped on a cake of soap in the bath, and the fall killed her!’)

  However, Emerald is a genuine lover of ‘Le Vrai Theatre’, and there is no little drama movement, housed in no matter what basement, of which she is not a founder member or subscriber, and she essays forth from her ivory tower to see any new play of promise, however far away, in the outer purlieus of London.

  In fact, she seldom goes out except to a play. A visit to the country to see Diana was a great exception. Diana, being unable to leave her farm and animals, must remain at Bognor. On arrival in the country Emerald tottered on her sparrow feet and said, ‘The view makes me dizzy!’ Her usual pastel-coloured feathers and veils had been discarded for a more rustic taste. Her simple country clothes comprised a leopard-skin coat, pearls, a beret basque and the usual exceedingly high-heeled shoes.

  ‘Oh! Diana, this is very interesting! How do you do it? These are your pigs? Very interesting pigs! How can you milk that cow?’
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  Emerald’s interest and curiosity were intense. ‘Do let me help, Diana! Do let me carry the pail!’

  Emerald teetered on her spindly little legs into Princess’s byre. The pail was brimful of milk. Emerald patted Princess’s nose, then leant over to pick up the pail. The ground was uneven and rough for Emerald, accustomed as she is to thick Savonnerie or Parquet de Versailles. As Emerald picked her way through the straw with the pail, Princess, interested in Emerald’s leopard coat, slowly butted her. Emerald’s legs, pearl earrings and milk pail, went flying. Diana kept a straight face and with stiff upper lip said, ‘Pity you hadn’t got your camera ready!’ Emerald, unhurt, but bitterly ashamed of herself, did not mind the loss of an earring so much as the loss of milk.

  Emerald has recently been telephoning to me a great deal. It was, at first, a shock to wake to answer the bedside bell at 4 o’clock in the morning. But Emerald is lonely, and after a moment’s readjustment, I lie listening in the dark until I am so entertained by some of her remarks that I switch on the light and make a note of them.

  Without her exquisite sense of timing her remarks lose much of their effect, but here are a few of her aphorisms:

  ‘Only a brilliant man knows how to be ridiculous.’

  ‘Oh, it was a most Lenten existence.’

  ‘Life and art never overlap.’

  ‘A witty woman can never keep a man. She can’t afford to laugh at the wrong moment.’

  ‘Never be sincere. The whole structure of society falls if you start to be sincere, and you can hardly ever afford to tell the truth. Very seldom can a wife tell the truth to her husband. It’s much too dangerous. You must always live in a very rigid convention.’

  Recently Emerald has fallen in love, and for hours she will talk in veiled terms of her unrequited romance. Tonight she held forth on the subject:

  ‘The greatest men I have ever known have never been able to put up with love. Why? It’s so distracting — and great men must never be disturbed at their work. George Moore used to sit all day in front of his papers, and if anyone called at his house he would tell them to go away. He couldn’t see anyone before sundown. One afternoon Mary Hunter arrived in Ebury Street and saw him, through the open window, having his tea. (He never had his tea in the drawing-room, but down in the dining-room.) She heard him saying to the maid who had announced her arrival, “I could not be more devoted to Mrs Hunter, but please tell her I don’t want to see her.” The poor woman never recovered.’

  ‘I think it better to be feared than loved. I remember Sir Thomas Beecham used to say, “I pray that one day I may be sent to prison so that I may spend some weeks undisturbed.” On many occasions he nearly got his wish, but he’s resentful of people who love him. He’s very grudging. He said, “I owe that woman a lot.” “Why?” I asked. “She gave me my very first Bible.” “When was that?” “At the time I must have been sixty-five. I owe her a lot, but I cannot love her.”’

  Discussing a well-known amoureuse, Emerald said, ‘She knew all the arts of seduction. She would often display her tongue: she didn’t put it out, but she’d let one have a tantalizing peep — just so that one should know she had a tongue. You forget that most people do have tongues because you never see them, but a tongue is a charming addition if you like a person.’ ‘And what about teeth?’ I asked. ‘Oh, teeth should never be a reality, only an indication.’

  Emerald would then say, ‘Now, when will you come to dinner? I’ll read out to you those who are coming on different nights. Now, do you want to be impressed? Laura Corrigan and Chips always want to be impressed.’

  After an hour and a half’s conversation Emerald would suddenly say, in a sweet and formal voice, ‘Well, I’ll say good night to you, and send you much love.’

  EMERALD’S DINNER FOR FIELD-MARSHAL WAVELL

  Emerald has an unconventional way of introducing her guests to one another. Sometimes she explains: ‘This is Poppy — everybody loves little Poppy.’ ‘This is our great poet from the Foreign Office.’ Once she had nothing to say about one guest except that her mother had been killed on the Underground.

  Tonight Lord Wavell, a newcomer to Emerald’s circle, was the figurehead for whom the gathering was being celebrated. The Field-Marshal looked a little nonplussed when Emerald introduced a bald-headed man: ‘This is Gerald Berners — he’s a musician, and a saucy fellow.’ ‘This is Dr Stewart, a worldly prelate, the final authority on Pascal and a professional beauty.’

  But the small party, under the aegis of such a brilliant entrepreneuse, soon acquired its own impetus, and before the synthetic ice-cream arrived we had recitations of Ronsard from Leslie Hore Belisha, followed by large slices of Browning and Dowson from the Field-Marshal himself. Gerald, perhaps determined to act up to his sobriquet, seemed intent on lowering the tone of the party and contributed a child’s nonsense rhyme about Pussy Cat. When conversation turned to famous last lines (‘Mehr Licht’) Gerald croaked Schubert’s last words. ‘Don’t let poor Tauber starve.’ Emerald, really shocked, piped her foghorn, ‘No! No! That’s nonsense! Charles II said that of Nell Gwynn!’

  Emerald talked with incredulity of her first years of marriage to Sir Bache Cunard. Arriving so young from America, England seemed extraordinary to her. Here she was, living in this huge house, Neville Holt, in Leicestershire, and ‘all we thought about in winter was hunting! Do you know, we all hunted every day. The doctor, and even the clergyman, wouldn’t think of anything else! But, by degrees, I used to ask musical people to the house. My husband didn’t like that one bit. One August evening my husband was away; there was a huge, round, hot moon, the nightingales sang in the wood — Neville Wood. It was so stifling and airless that no one could sleep. Suddenly, across the court someone put his head out of the window and gave the Valkyrie cry, and this was answered by someone singing a call from Gotterdammerung — and so it went on. When my husband came back he noticed an atmosphere of love. He said, “I don’t understand what’s going on in this house, but I don’t like it!”’

  ROMMEL ON THE RUN

  November 5th, 1942 (Ashcombe)

  Mummie hurried into my room. She pulled the curtains earlier than usual. No nonsense about lying in bed — however late I’d been writing last night. This was worth waking up for: the most exciting event of the war — the turning point: ‘Wonderful news! Rommel’s army on the run — in full retreat!’ The whole look of the war suddenly changed.

  CHRISTMAS AND NEW YEAR’S CELEBRATION — 1943

  January 1943

  After the third year of war it is extraordinary how many of the population are able to find time to eat and drink and be merry during the holiday festivities. We had at Loelia’s for Christmas a most wonderful succession of meals — always washed down with wine or even champagne. On New Year’s night Anne O’Neill and Esmond (Lord Rothermere) gave their usual joint party. This year it was more amusing than ever. A circular table around which sat Brendan, Emerald, Duff, Diana, lots of Berrys, sister Laura and her fiancé, Eric Dudley, etc., etc. After coffee, conversation became general. Brendan, for whom I have a tremendous admiration, has become much less pompous, and held the table with his magnetism and razor voice. Yet he found rivalry in Emerald, who would throw out fantastic comments with such brilliance of timing and technique as to create an extraordinarily funny effect.

  Brendan was attacked by other ministers for this morning’s Cabinet changes. Why should old William Jowitt get £5,000 a year? Was it because he was Labour? Why had Duff only £2,000 a year? Didn’t it pay to oppose? Why had Macmillan got sent to North Africa when he had rebelled against the Prime Minister a week ago, giving Oliver Stanley the Colonies? Why, it didn’t pay to be a supporter! Emerald started her line about it being a good thing to get Macmillan out of the country. He’s a dreadful man! Emerald tactlessly made her usual observation about Americans being uncivilized; when the presence of a young American soldier was pointed out across the table she smiled, ‘Oh, hallo,’ and gave him a charming wave. Brendan, v
iolently attacked by Duff, took his blows well — answered ‘my dear Child’, and gave us most amusing snippets of his erudition. He also showed how well informed he was on more personal matters — about the Archbishop who was spending New Year’s Eve quietly at home with his wife ‘with whom he wished to endear himself’. (It can be imagined that this remark called for a great many ribaldries.)

  That this was a collection of deeply responsible people with the fate directly or indirectly of many millions in their hands would have been impossible to gather from the light-hearted way they chaffed one another about getting paid. ‘Oh, you’ve feathered your nest nicely, Regional Commissioner!’ ‘Duff, why don’t you go off and be a spy!’ ‘Why, Child, you can say what you like about Master Churchill but he likes to make up his own mind!’ The New Year came in (in the form of John Julius[31] wearing pyjamas) with hopscotch and ‘Auld Lang Syne’.