The Trials of Radclyffe Hall

by Diana Souhami

  John and Una took a twin-bedded room at his Church Street Medical and Surgical Home. They also had a room at the Francis Hotel for Pippin the canary who had gone bald and Jane the Spaniel. Una filled the nursing-home room with flowers. She seemed in her element, ‘our two narrow beds awaiting us’. She had her own platinum needle for injections ‘in place of the communal fishhook’ and supplies of calves’ foot jelly and Brands Essence.

  Evguenia, she told John, could not possibly visit. There was not a room for her in the whole of Bath, and any tears or movement of John’s facial muscles might lead to scarring. Evguenia wrote every day, often twice a day. ‘If you want me of course I will come’, she said. John dictated to Una daily letters for Evguenia. Una amended these as she felt fit. ‘I write daily to the brute giving her reports and details to which of course she is completely indifferent if she troubles to read them.’

  Tizzard operated on 25 August and said the eye must stay tightly bandaged for five days. John vomited, her eye haemorrhaged, she was in pain and the bandage kept getting soaked in blood. Una antagonized the staff. She phoned Tizzard while he was in the operating theatre. When the nurse tried to sit John up, Una said,

  I am sorry Miss Goodrich, I have spoken to Mr Tizzard on the phone, and he says the patient is not to be moved until he comes. She looked as though she would kill me and said, very violently, Lady Troubridge I must speak to you, come outside this room at once. With a word of reassurance to my poor John I followed her, and she flew at me, and said I was presuming on her authority and she would not have it. I replied, quietly, that I was very sorry if I had transgressed against etiquette but that in each emergency the haemorrhage, the vomiting, moving the patient, I had had no alternative. The first two occasions she was unobtainable and no one else would consent to call up the surgeon. The third time Mr Tizzard had given definite orders. Then she demanded that I should use the visitors’ telephone and not the dialling one and I replied that I had only been told two days ago of its existence or I should never have spent threepence each on twopenny local calls. Fearing that she would vent her spleen on John or turn me out I apologised profusely for having been in the right.

  When she said she did not know why Tizzard was making all this fuss about this operation, I replied, ‘I think Mr Tizzard realises what it would mean to his career if one of the best known writers in England left this house with her eyes damaged by his surgery. I am bound to say that she had no reply.

  John’s eye was a mess. Given a mirror she was incredulous and felt she had been disfigured for life. The scar was inflamed, the lid sagged and did not close when she slept. The lashes started growing in again, the eye still twitched and she still had conjunctivitis. Nor as time passed did it heal. She was not going to let Tizzard touch her other eye. She was prescribed hypnotics, bromides and barbiturates. Una applied an ointment called Pancovaine with a glass rod.

  Back at the Wayside Evguenia left cakes and chrysanthemums for John’s return. She called every day to be as helpful as was allowed She was working in an army canteen and had made friends with a Mr Benn, ‘a very distinguished man of letters’, she called him. He told her positive things about ‘communism and the new re-born Russia’.

  I was happy to hear someone so certain about the outcome of the war because the Russians would push the Germans back. My political views were non-existent but if anyone said something silly about Russia it was always galling for me to hear. I suppose one never forgets the country where one was born.

  John was adamant that she must not see Mr Benn. The police, she said, were watching him for subversive Bolshevik activities and Evguenia had now done for herself socially in Lynton. Evguenia reminded her that ‘we Bolshevists are now the allies of England.’ She was needled by condescension to her refugee status, the jibing about Russians being a primitive race. At the Wayside she said only fools failed to understand what the Soviet Union was trying to do. John said, ‘May I ask if you are calling me a fool?’ Evguenia said, ‘No it’s that woman there who is a fool.’ John said, ‘You must not speak of Una like that.’ Una said she would summon Dr Nightingale if Evguenia did not leave. Evguenia said she was welcome to do so, she was going to Oxford on 18 November, she had rented a room in a house where there was no telephone, she intended doing a course in interior design or perhaps shorthand and typing and she would go without her allowance if it came to it.

  John wept which made her eyes ‘like raw meat’. Una gave her barbiturates and prompted her to send a letter to Evguenia chastizing her for her friendship with Mr Benn, her provocation about Oxford, her ‘deliberately and with full medical knowledge doing her utmost to make a scene’ and cutting her next month’s allowance by £5.

  Then follows endless and unceasing discussion of Evguenia. What will she do, or not do. Can she be prevented. Should she be prevented. Is she being misunderstood. Why can’t she be contented. Couldn’t she work here. And so on, and so on, until exhausted and drained once more by this insignificant amoeba, the writer of The Master of the House, The Well of Loneliness, Adam’s Breed, and I, a woman of no mean intelligence and some character stagger to bed, though not to sleep.

  Next day John lost all control with Una. It was her fault if anything happened to Evguenia. She, John, would never get over it. She ordered her from the room and sent Ivy the maid with a note for Evguenia asking her to call. She begged Evguenia to change her plans. If she did, she would increase her allowance to £300 again. Evguenia said the chief constable assured her she could return to Lynton when she wanted. She would come for holidays and hoped John would visit her in Oxford.

  The day before she left she had lunch at the Wayside. At John’s request there was soup, roast lamb, redcurrant jelly, sprouts and roast potatoes, baked apples with apple jelly, Swiss pastries and coffee. ‘She sat there fat, bloated and slit eyed’, Una said.

  In December 1941 John went to London to see Lord Dawson and Dr Williamson Noble about her eyes and general health. She and Una booked in at the Rembrandt Hotel, Knightsbridge, opposite Brompton Oratory. Dawson told her there were two components to her illness, one organic, the other depressive. Her gums were infected and her lungs in a bad way from all those years of smoking. Noble advised against further operations on her eyes. He said entropium was a difficult condition to treat, that the spasm in her eye was incurable and that it was better to endure pulling out lashes than to have another drooping lid. John had given him a copy of The Well of Loneliness which he was reading.

  John told Una she wanted to see Evguenia in London. There was a flare-up. ‘I simply prayed and implored and also protested’, Una wrote in her diary. ‘She capitulated. She said she must be fair to me and she gave me her promise. The Mongol idiot is to come for a day and then is to be told to remain away.’

  On the day of Evguenia’s visit John waited eagerly for her from early morning. At lunch Una took off her spectacles ‘so as to avoid seeing her horrid face’.

  37

  John’s Calvary

  John was very ill in the Rembrandt Hotel. A chest infection developed into pneumonia and pleurisy. She became irrational, spoke of malevolence all around her and asked constantly if there was post from Evguenia. Una got out her relic of the true cross, made the sign of the cross over her, then put the relic on the mantelpiece behind a lit candle. She gave her Bengers with brandy and told her Evguenia was ‘a primitive undeveloped creature, incapable of any true impulses or affection’.

  Una’s grip tightened like a vice. She forbade Evguenia to visit. She told her to write cheering letters every day, send affectionate telegrams and not to mention anything worrying or refer to symptoms of her own. Una’s signature was now on the cheque for Evguenia’s monthly allowance. ‘I am acting on John’s authority at the Bank.’ She read Evguenia’s letters aloud to John with her own intonation and omissions. ‘The bitch doesn’t even write every day and when she does the letters have about as much feeling in them as flat soda water. Even in this dire stress she does not seem to try e
ven to ape humanity.’ Evguenia turned up at the hotel unannounced. Una told her to stand inside the door of John’s room. When she tried to approach the bed, she was ‘removed’.

  Una kept guard night and day. She sat beside John, holding ‘her dear tired hand’. She made professional nursing impossible. The night nurse said, ‘I don’t see why Lady Troubridge should be in here at all.’ The day nurse quit. John cried when she heard she was leaving. When her replacement wanted time off, Una would not allow it. She took the woman into her own room so that John could not hear.

  I told her that the patient was not so well on account of her having upset her. I told her quietly that she must not raise her voice as the patient would hear her and she need not trouble about an evening off as I had already arranged for a new nurse. She flew into a rage and stormed. Then I went straight to the telephone and obtained a new nurse from the Cowards agency … I called the nurse from her room to mine told her to pack her case, bring me her account, and to go at once.

  Una went out only to get food, which John did not want. She waited outside Harrods in the mornings for the food hall to open. At the meat counter she grabbed one leg of a poussin while another woman grabbed the other. ‘And I triumphed and bore it off.’ She won the contest for sea kale and was ninth in the queue at the toffee counter. The new nurse thought it would be better if she arranged Miss Hall’s food. Una told her Miss Hall would starve if left to her efforts.

  Una wrote daily notes to Evguenia, ostensibly on John’s behalf, about expectoration, purée potatoes, John’s nerves and how she, Una, had to keep her very quiet. The main problem, Una told Evguenia, was John’s bowels. ‘She is terribly flatulent’ with ‘an absolutely unmanageable irregularity of her bowels’. Glycerine suppositories, hot ginger drinks, olive oil and turpentine enemas did not work and English doctors were hopeless.

  For six weeks John saw no one but Una. She was desperate to see Evguenia. ‘I am almost too depressed to live’, she wrote of herself when well enough to do so.

  These are grim days for the whole world and my own troubles pour heavy upon me – there is so little to look forward to, or so it seems to me. I am patient, or try to be, but so many dreary weeks in this damned hotel bedroom – all too awful … But Piggie Hall is coming on Friday & perhaps will cheer me up – yes, yes, it will cheer me up – it will go out to buy Pig-pants & so on. No more now dearest.

  Your John

  Father Munster came to give her communion and she asked him for an interpretation of the text ‘Make Ye Friends to Yourselves of the Mammon of Unrighteousness’, but received no satisfactory reply. Evguenia sent boiled sweets, urged her to attempt a little more each day and arranged to spend holidays with her. She told her she was finding shorthand difficult but had made friends in Oxford.

  Una described herself as ‘simply stuttering with anxiety’ at the prospect of her visit. John cheered up because of it. Evguenia slopped over her with a lot of soft soap, Una said. When she left, John became depressed again. She pined for past time and asked Evguenia to pray for her. ‘Don’t you remember how you & I went to the Easter mass in the Russian church in Florence? That seems a very long time ago and to think about it makes me want to cry a few tears which are strictly forbidden me as you know.’

  She kept harking back to her mother’s neglect of her in childhood. She told Una she was still in love with Evguenia and wanted her to come to Lynton. ‘Oh how weary I am of these four walls,’ she wrote, ‘& how I do long for a breath of fresh country air with Royal Chinkie Pig very pompous & self-important taking me for a walk! Can’t you see it with its crown over one ear & its hoofs polished?’

  When John was well enough to return to Lynton, Evguenia arranged to take her holiday, go down in advance, prepare things at the Wayside and to be there to meet her. En route she stayed for three nights at the Rembrandt. While there she and John had a row. As Una put it: ‘the dreadful creature stood at the foot of John’s bed, fat and pasty and bloated, her eyes glinting like boot buttons a sneering smile on her blubber lips while she bullied my miserable John.’

  The substance was that John again began insisting that Evguenia live in the same county, if not the same town. Evguenia again said she could not and would not. She had to be free to go where there was available work. At Una’s instigation John then had a letter delivered to her: if she insisted on living in a different county her allowance would be cut to £100 a year, and this amount would be dependent on her letting John know her address at all times.

  Evguenia replied that she would keep herself. John panicked. Una then wrote a letter that began ‘Evguenia’ and was signed ‘Una V. Troubridge’:

  I think it only right to repeat what I have already told you. Lord Dawson warned me that John had been in a very low state when she fell ill, that she had been ‘very, very ill’, that her convalescence could only be a very lengthy one. He is sending her to Lynton to recuperate & if in such circumstances you decide to go away without keeping her informed of your address (& this at a time when air raids are frequent) and if the strain breaks her down & she dies it will be your doing & on yr. conscience all yr life.

  Evguenia replied that she would always let John know her address. But she did not go to Lynton. She took a job with the Red Cross in Basingstoke, 160 miles away. John longed for her. She asked her to wear an identity disc inscribed with Radclyffe Hall and the Wayside address. And she asked to be given as next of kin. ‘Always do this my little, little Piggie because that is what I am to you … You can bandage my soars a little if you will definately promise always to give me as your: Next of Kin. Promise this darling, because you do know, don’t you, that I am your next of kin.’

  It was cold at the Wayside. Una slept in the same bed with John and counted the number of times a minute she breathed in and out. She pulled out her ingrowing eyelashes with the aid of a magnifying glass and a mirror fixed on her forehead. John could not eat the milky puddings, ox tongue, calf’s head and sheep’s head brawn she proffered. She began smoking again, said she had lost her hold on life and could not clearly recollect past events. She broke her other ankle and had her leg in plaster of Paris up to the knee. For long hours she sat in dull depression, knitting a patchwork blanket or staring into space. On a day when she could not find a business paper she threw things out of cupboards in a desperate way.

  Una had a nightmare in which John was a man in a gloomy bedroom. A creature covered in bandages came in and threatened them both. She woke to find Jane had diarrhoea and wanted urgently to get out of the house.

  None of Evguenia’s jobs lasted. After nursing at Basingstoke she moved to Evesham in the West Midlands working for the BBC World Service on French and German broadcasts. She visited Lynton to tell John about it and urged her to be pleased. She would get £300 a year plus bonuses. But John fretted until two in the morning. Una overheard her telling Evguenia that after the war she wanted them all to go to Florence with a view to settling there. But when Una said she longed for Italy, John would not commit herself unless Evguenia would come too.

  John felt like a prisoner and looked forward to nothing. She worried about enemy planes over the Midlands and was fearful that Evguenia might go out without a raincoat or rubber boots. She got paler, thinner and weaker and seemed like an empty shell. Her eyes were sunk in her head and she was cold even in a warm room. ‘And all because that dough faced idiotic moron makes her indifference brutally obvious and because she has taken a job which makes it impossible for them to meet more than once or twice yearly.’

  On days when the postman brought no letter, John closed off with depression. Una felt overwhelmed that after nine years, with John sixty-two and herself fifty-five, ‘this dreadful alien woman’ still ruled their lives.

  Evguenia lost the BBC job after a few months. She had found it arduous, could not hear clearly through earphones and her English was not good enough. John was relieved. She increased her allowance to £300 a year again with no conditions. But she asked her to avoid cities
and in particular London because of fogs, air raids and her lungs.

  For herself, her only travel was to London to see doctors and dentists. She had more teeth out, more X-rays. Una took her to a service for the sick in Horseferry Road Church, held simultaneously with one in Lourdes. John sat near the altar with the ailing and moribund. In the afternoon they bought a cockatoo called Victoria from Harrods. It was winged but had not lost the instinct for flight and it kept toppling over. It was soon described as a vulture and given to the vet at Taunton.

  As Christmas 1942 approached John’s thoughts were of Evguenia’s visit. A driver was to meet her train at Barnstaple on 15 December. Una was sent out on missions to acquire turkey, plum pudding and black market delicacies. But then Evguenia suddenly got a job with the Foreign Office. ‘I have had very many disappointments in my life but never one quite so bitter as when I got that telegram’, John wrote to her. ‘I saw myself as one returned by the skin of my teeth from the grave and no RCP here to welcome me back.’

  Evguenia was not allowed to divulge the nature of her work, or where she was living. Letters from her arrived opened by the censor. Letters to her were addressed to a box number at Western Central District Post Office, London. ‘What has happened seems like a mad kind of blackout’, John wrote. She watched for the postman, phoned a mutual friend Marjorie Hatten for news and worried that Evguenia might be sent overseas.

  On Christmas Day Evguenia asked Mrs Widden to deliver white chrysanthemums and a pot of white heather to John. ‘I am touched to the heart’, John said. Father Parsons, the new priest, came to lunch and ate the Christmas fare and drank the Australian burgundy.