Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (11 page)

Like Diana and so many others, she looked for ways to numb her anxiety. She worked harder at her poetry and at night she partied to excess. Evenings that began with cocktails at the Café Royal and merged into somebody’s party, somewhere, would nearly always end in a drunken haze: Nancy crooning the lyrics of her favourite ragtime song ‘Oh you beautiful doll’, a glass in her hand, her head resting on the shoulder of a man she’d only just met.

It’s unclear exactly when she became sexually active. Even before the war Nancy had been considered fast, testing out the powers of her newly adult beauty by flirting with men like Chile Guevera. Her justification was simple: ‘My mother’s having an affair with Thomas Beecham. I can do as I like.’
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Yet a young woman could be thought promiscuous simply for kissing too many men, and Nancy probably didn’t lose her virginity until well into the war. When she did, however, it was with an apparently determined disregard for her reputation.

Something wild and needy in her reacted to the atmosphere of war. Her imagination was haunted by pictures of what the men at the Front, her own friends, might be suffering. Many older officers maintained a degree of discretion over what they admitted to women at home, but some of the younger soldiers with whom Nancy and Iris mixed were less guarded. They were willing to hint at terrible things on the battlefield: at the stink, the madness, the noise of the trenches; at the carnage that could be inflicted on a platoon of soldiers ordered to advance into a thicket of barbed wire and machine-gun fire. These images gnawed at Nancy, making her ashamed of her own privileged safety, and the only way she and Iris could think of assuaging their guilt was by offering themselves to the men who wanted them.

They romanticized themselves wildly as ministering angels of war. Iris would recall the two of them watching the first bombs falling over London, seeing the ‘fires redden on sky and river, ourselves burnt out by the terrible gaieties of last encounters’; she would write of their ‘desires heightened to a brief fulfilment before sacrifice’.
¹⁹
Given the degree to which others exaggerated the extent of their ‘sexual charity’, it’s hard to gauge the exact nature of their behaviour, yet even if Nancy was not as intemperate as some claimed, the combination of alcohol, emotional dislocation and exhaustion had an extreme effect on her. There were days when she awoke from the previous night’s debauch in despair: in her 1916 poem ‘Remorse’, she excoriated herself for being ‘wasteful, wanton, foolish, bold’, of having ‘loved with grasping hands and lustful eyes’. She felt tainted as well as transfigured, and she was still only twenty.

It was in this mood that Nancy tricked herself into thinking she might love Sydney Fairbairn. He was an attractive, educated, even dashing man, and after the war he would go on to have an adventurous military career in North Africa and the Middle East. Although Nancy’s perceptions were later occluded by hatred, at their first meetings he appeared to offer her a chance of security and structure.

Nancy was writing in earnest now. The war had given her material and a theme, and in 1916 she had seven poems published in Edith Sitwell’s anthology
Wheels,
*
one of them giving the anthology its title. Her most current writing was indebted to T.S. Eliot, whom she had just met, and whose recently published ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ she idolized. It clearly inspired the lines in her poem ‘Remorse’: ‘I sit ashamed and silent in this room/While the wet streets go gathering in their gloom’.

If Nancy was hoping for a more ordered, productive life with Sydney, she was also compensating for the loss of Iris. Towards the end of 1915, Herbert Tree had gone to America to work on a film project in Hollywood and a Shakespeare festival in New York. Concerned for his youngest daughter’s reputation, he had taken her with him. Nancy missed Iris badly, and when news came back from America that Iris had fallen in love with an artist and photographer called Curtis Moffat and planned to marry, Nancy felt half impelled to do the same. She didn’t allow herself to think beyond the immediate convenience that marriage would bring. During wartime no one thought about the future. Sydney might soon be dead, and so might she.

Life with her new husband, of course, turned out to be even more trying than life at home. Sydney was very sociable, and when they had settled into the little house in Montagu Square that Maud had acquired for them, he took it for granted that his friends would all be welcome there. Many were officers on leave, and their conversations about sport and regimental matters seemed to fill every room. The few photographs taken of the newly married couple show Nancy as a blurred presence, half cancelled out by the wide shoulders, alert gaze and military moustache of her husband. They bore little relationship to the bright breezy publicity that had trumpeted the wedding, with prophesies that the very ‘original’ Miss Cunard was likely to be ‘one of the leaders of society after the war’.

Nancy was sufficiently dutiful to hide her growing dislike of her husband. Nor did she let Sydney see her relief when, in early July 1918, he was deemed sufficiently fit to return to the Front. During the six months he was in France, she wrote to him regularly – deceptively sweet, wifely letters tucked into parcels of sweets and other treats.

Yet no sooner had Nancy’s single life been restored to her than she embraced it with joy and relief. Iris was still abroad, travelling with Curtis and her new baby Ivan, but Nancy had recently become close to Sybil Hart-Davis, the older sister of Duff Cooper. Sybil was eleven years her senior, married with two children, and she appeared to Nancy to have created a fascinating balance between domesticity and independence. She was certainly a delightful mother. As Nancy watched Sybil romping in the garden with little Rupert and Deirdre she felt pangs for her own neglected childhood.

That summer Nancy and Sybil arranged to rent a house together in the Oxfordshire countryside near Kingston Bagpuize. They were anxious to escape the latest attacks from the German bombers, and Nancy hoped the tranquillity of the country would be good for her poetry too. Despite visits from London friends like the Sitwell brothers, Chile Guevara, Mary and St John Hutchinson, and despite long, shambolic parties, with jugs of cheap wine and off-duty soldiers from the local training camp, Nancy remained true to her resolve. Shutting herself away in the drawing room of the Kingston Bagpuize house, smoking cigarette after cigarette, she enjoyed weeks of productive writing.

When Nancy was working on her poetry, she felt restored to her best self. But that summer, the pleasures of creativity were also infused with the energy of her first passionate affair.

Peter Broughton-Adderley had been the only friend of Sydney’s who Nancy had liked. He’d visited Montagu Square in 1917 and impressed her with his literary enthusiasm as well as his obvious sweetness of character. He was also friendly with Duff Cooper and Diana Manners – another point in his favour – and when he was home on leave that summer, she invited him to stay for a weekend.

He stayed for the rest of his leave, and the delight Nancy found in him is evident in a description she wrote of the two of them reading George Moore’s latest novel together in the garden at Kingston Bagpuize: ‘My love and I sitting in a tree, and under a tree, read aloud to each other several days running from
The Story Teller’s Holiday,
the beauty of the writing, the mood of the book and our own and everything about those hours being unaccountably moving.’
²⁰

For the rest of her life Nancy associated Peter with that book, and with the belief that during the summer of 1918 she had experienced what true love was like. But at the end of that golden summer Peter was recalled to France, and it was on a chilly morning in late October that Nancy was woken by Sybil – Peter had been shot in the stomach and had died of his wounds. Her grief at the news was huge and consuming, and it may have been one reason why her hatred of Sydney grew so obdurate. He was alive and Peter was dead.

If they had had some sort of future, perhaps Nancy would have exhausted her feelings for Peter, just as she quickly exhausted her small stock of affection for Sydney and tired of so many others. Yet for years she continued to think of him as the only man ‘whom I loved entirely and wanted to live with’. Some of her friends were equally convinced that a life with Peter might have settled Nancy and given her a chance of ordinary happiness. When she lost him, they believed it dealt a blow to her already fragile equilibrium, from which she never recovered.

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When the war ended, just a few weeks after Peter’s death, Nancy hated the rest of the world for its callous jubilation. Another grieving young woman, Vera Brittain, heard the sound of ringing bells and cheering crowds as a death knell for ‘the lost youth that the war had stolen’, a reminder that ‘the dead were dead and never would return’.
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Many of them were lovers, husbands, fiancés, and when the flags were put away there were women everywhere who, like Nancy, felt that their hopes for the future had been buried in the mud of the battlefield.

Ruth Holland would recall their anguish in her 1932 novel
The Lost Generation.
For her heroine, Jinnie, ‘Something had snapped. Instead of a life that was like a splendid tune in her ears, with ordered sound and movement, a definite form … she was surrounded by a mocking terrifying jumble of discords in which she could find no sense at all … it was as if she had lost the key and could no longer read the signs of life around her.’
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For many such women, marriage and motherhood had been the only life they had imagined. Yet in Britain alone, the female population now exceeded men by two million. Many soldiers were also coming home from the war with their lungs scarred from poison gas, their limbs and faces shattered, their minds traumatized. With an entire generation of men so terribly reduced, young women were warned that there was a mere one in ten chance of finding a husband.

In a very short space of time, pity for these ‘superfluous’ women turned to alarm. The
Daily Mail
opined hysterically that they represented ‘a disaster to the human race’, while in more measured terms,
The Times
judged that they presented a problem ‘so far-reaching and so immense that few have yet considered its import’. Certainly there were obvious signs of instability as returning soldiers found themselves having to compete with a new female workforce for their old jobs. And with the imminent prospect of women’s suffrage, male commentators began to actively censure the post-war generation. Behaviour that had been overlooked in the war – smoking, drinking, wearing makeup and flirting in public – was vilified and it was now that the idea of the flapper became evoked as a threat.

In material terms, Nancy was far more fortunate than most of her peers – she had no need to work for a living and no children to worry about – but she also had nothing to distract her from her grief. And when she succumbed to the Spanish flu virus that was sweeping through Europe, it hardly mattered to her if she lived or died.
*

Death, she felt, would at least save her from the complications of disentangling her life from Sydney. He had returned from the war in January, when Nancy was still lying feverish in her mother’s new house in Grosvenor Square. It had been communicated to him, presumably by letter, that she wanted to end the marriage, and he had been both incredulous and furious. By early April, when Nancy was nearly recovered, she was still terrified of confronting him, and it was partly to dodge Sydney that she agreed to her doctor’s recommendation of a change of scene, embarking on a long trip down to the South of France, and accompanied by Marie Ozanne, the one friend she had made at her finishing school in Paris.

Nancy’s spirits were low, but as she and Marie neared the Riviera she felt the tonic effect of new horizons. Poetry was still beyond her – illness and grief had left her mind ‘like a disordered room littered and scattered with useless furniture; the clumsy ungainliness of words’.
²³
But she was filling her diary with traveller’s impressions, practising her eye and her pen as she observed the texture of a stormy sea (‘little black waves tumbling on like a helpless baby and sudden patches of transparent stillness’), the quality of clouds over a mountain, the carved cloisters of the cathedral in Arles.
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Stimulating as these new landscapes were, however, Nancy still found that the simplest remedies for despair were drink and sex. Among the several men with whom she had affairs in France were St John Hutchinson, who followed her out from London, and an amorous singer called Paul, whom she met in Nice. Nancy embarked on each sexual tryst with a determined expectation of pleasure, an ‘immense jolly Rabelaisian mood, strung up to any vulgarity’.
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Yet just as she had during the war, she suffered extreme moments of reaction when she felt ‘agitated, flimsy, unstable’.
²⁶

‘Oh God shall I ever get into any
mood
here, and not be finding it forever incomplete,’ she fretted in her diary.
²⁷
The see-sawing volatility of her emotions made her weak and queasy, and in late May, when she returned to London, she was still in a fragile state. Her first impressions of the city were bleak: ‘Everyone dead,’ she wrote in her diary: ‘Denny, Edward, Patrick, Raymond, George, Billy … and the lovers of last year.’ When she went to the Ritz she felt ‘exhausted and trembling at heart’, because there was no one she recognized in the hotel bar or lobby.
²⁸

There were survivors, of course, and Nancy was strong enough now to return to her old haunts, the Café Royal and the Tower, and to be drawn into a new round of parties, where she could rely on getting ‘buffy’ or ‘blind’. There were new lovers, too, among them an American called Jim McVickar, of whom Nancy grew fond and with whom she recorded precious moments of ‘abandon’.