Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (6 page)

She was also thrust straight into the stink and gore of medical emergencies. Diana had tried to prepare herself by going into the kitchen at Arlington Street to watch a hare being eviscerated for the evening meal, but nothing could minimize the trauma of her first patients: a woman who’d had a cancerous tumour sliced out of her chin, another left with a post-operative wound in her side ‘from which a stream of green pus oozed slowly’.
³²

For Diana, the challenge of moderating her revulsion was complicated by social factors. She’d had little contact with anyone outside her own class, aside from family servants, and she found it impossible to sympathize with the more self-pitying of her male patients. She had been raised to believe in the virtue of the stiff and stoic upper lip, and to her these clutching, complaining men appeared like ‘whining Calibans’.
³³
Yet despite the blinkers of her social prejudice, Diana’s curiosity was captured by Guy’s, with its intriguing mix of official regulation and human messiness. She submitted herself willingly to every petty rule – in contrast to Enid Bagnold who in 1917 would write a swingeingly critical memoir of her time as a VAD and would leave hospital service for the more exhilarating challenge of ambulance driving in France.
³⁴
Diana also grew very friendly with some of her fellow nurses and was grateful to be included in their late-night ‘dormy feasts’. The novelty of sharing cigarettes and sweets, of enjoying ‘suppressed songs and laughter’ made her poignantly aware of her restricted upbringing – of all ‘the larks I had missed by never being a schoolgirl’.
³⁵

What her mother would have spurned as demeaning or squalid, Diana schooled herself to accept. She discovered surprising reserves of practicality and common sense, and she prided herself on her stoicism, on never taking a day off work except when she was seriously ill, on never fainting during an operation, and on no longer having ‘to turn away from repulsive things’.
³⁶
When Arnold Bennett caricatured her in his 1918 novel
The Pretty Lady
as the neurotic self-promoting do-gooder, Lady Queenie Paulle, she felt the insult keenly, believing that she had genuinely been of service as a nurse, and that she’d genuinely been changed by the experience.

The most prized aspect of her new life, however, was the autonomy it brought. Her off-duty periods were sparse – limited to three evenings a week and the occasional weekend – yet she was able to spend all of them with her friends, who took her out for taxi rides in the park or for dinner in the one restaurant in Southwark they considered decent. On those precious evenings when she ‘flew’ out of the hospital at five minutes past eight, ‘painted and powdered and dressed (as I hoped) to kill’,
³⁷
the knowledge that the Duchess had no idea what she was doing or with whom gave these modest but unchaperoned outings a beguiling enchantment.

Not only did Diana feel purposeful and in control, but for the first time she knew herself to be part of some larger, more collective experience. Women’s lives were changing, both for those like her, who had volunteered to become VADS, and for the new female workforce that was starting to tackle jobs and professions left vacant by Britain’s enlisting soldiers. It was a slow trajectory, but gradually women were moving beyond the menial or domestic labour that had been their traditional employment
*
. By the end of the war nearly two million would have proved themselves as bus drivers, glaziers, bank clerks and cashiers, motorcycle couriers, railway porters, tree cutters, farmers, stage managers, librarians, engineers, policewomen and teachers.
^†

In ways that couldn’t have been foreseen by the suffragettes, the war represented an astonishing moment for women to challenge their status as the weaker, decorative sex. Ethel M. Billborough, an affluent young Englishwoman, would write in July 1915, ‘Now everyone is living and no mistake about it; there is no more playing at things.’
³⁸
Violet, however, remained miserably resistant to this change. She hated the idea of her daughter working in so starkly uncongenial a place as Guy’s, and since Diana showed no signs of returning home, she embarked on a plan to manoeuvre her back, by overseeing the conversion of their London house into an officers’ hospital.
^‡
Other private homes were being given over to similar use, and 16 Arlington Street was certainly one of the most commodious in London. Even with the family still in residence, its ballroom and prettily gilded drawing room would be large enough to convert to a pair of twelve- and ten-bedded wards, while the Duchess’s own bedroom could serve as an operating theatre while she removed to a smaller room. Diana had only been at Guy’s for six months before her mother offered her a perfectly kitted out and very comfortable alternative.

She felt a profound ambivalence towards this latest instance of her mother’s manipulation. Even though the hospital was being run by professionals, it still had an irksome, Marie Antoinettish quality. As she later wrote, ‘Hospital life kids one into thinking one is indispensable and home life after it is wanton and trivial’
³⁹
. Friends would drop by, bringing chestnut cream cakes and even a bottle of sherry for elevenses – a preposterous contrast to the diet of tinned eggs and stale fish to which she had recently grown accustomed. Aside from traumatic spikes of activity, when a rush of emergency cases was admitted, she was only on duty for an average of five or six hours a day.

On the other hand, moving back home had not resulted in Diana giving up her hard-fought independence: there was too much going on in Arlington Street for Violet to resume her old vigilance. In fact, she was soon to be absent for long periods of time, extending her new-found patriotism to the conversion of Belvoir Castle into an officers’ convalescent home. Violet had not yielded her adamantine certainties about propriety and marriage, but even she could see that talk of chaperones was futile in a world where well-brought-up young women were doing the jobs of the working classes, and where young men were being slaughtered at the Front.

*   *   *

During the six months that Diana spent at Guy’s, the war had remained a backdrop to her life – almost an abstraction. Her energy was consumed by the demands of nursing and nearly all of the enlisting men she knew were still safely confined to officer training camp. Yet after her return to Arlington Street, as hopes of an early victory faded, the war became horribly real. One by one the lovely, clever boys with whom she had danced, flirted and read poetry were being dispatched to the Front; and one by one they were perishing there. Julian Grenfell, who had thrilled to the idea of fighting for ‘the Old Flag … the Mother Country and … the Imperial Idea’ had died slowly and agonizingly in a dirty field hospital, his brain shattered by a splinter of shell.
⁴⁰
Diana’s cousin John, and her friends Charles Lister and George Vernon, had also been killed; the last, breaking Diana’s heart when she received the farewell note he’d dictated, ending with the painful scrawl he’d been determined to write himself: his initial G and the barely legible ‘love’.

At Guy’s, Diana had been nursing civilians, but at Arlington Street the carnage of the trenches was literally brought home to her in the maimed and shell-shocked bodies delivered to the wards. Sometimes in the middle of changing a dressing, assisting at an operation, or quieting a patient from his screaming nightmares, Diana would find herself weeping helplessly, unable to bear the senseless misery.

Hours later, however, she would be drinking and dancing. The miseries of war had released a heady fatalism in London, and with it a greed for life. Men might be dying, coal, oil and petrol rationed, food and new clothes in short supply,
*
yet these were times when it felt like a moral duty to grab at every available pleasure, to party in the face of death.

To Diana it was as though the pleasure-seeking principles of the Corrupt Coterie had acquired a new apocalyptic energy. Every night, as long as there were no emergencies to attend, she went out with friends: those who’d remained in London, and those who were home on leave from the Front. The press still tried to keep track of their doings, and it was with a note of desperation that a columnist would write in September 1916, ‘Have you noticed that we have hardly any mention of Lady Diana Manners, Miss Nancy Cunard and their friends? This will never do.’
⁴¹
But, in truth, much of their wartime entertainment had to be kept from the papers because it was frankly illegal. One of Diana’s favourite haunts was the Cavendish Hotel, a notoriously lax establishment, famous for allowing rackety parties and illicit, after-hours drinking. Frequent police raids were made on the Cavendish and on more than one night, Diana had to hide outside in the back garden until the coast was clear. She came even closer to scandal in December 1915, when she was caught drinking brandy at Kettner’s Restaurant after 10.30 p.m.; she was saved from prosecution only by her friend Alan Parsons ‘having a word’ with Sir Edward Henry, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, who promised the ‘matter would go no further’.
⁴²

She knew her behaviour was risky, but she found it addictive: the exhilaration of being ‘dangerous, dissipated, desperate’ kept the nightmares of war at bay.
⁴³
In 1916 she was at an exceptionally louche party given by an American actor, and was delighted by the reaction of Duff Cooper, who bumped into her there. Duff was shocked to see her in a room full of ‘the lowest kind of actress and chorus girls’, and he thought she was ‘probably the only virgin’ present.
⁴⁴
But for Diana, his discomfort only enhanced the pleasure of going slumming; carelessly she said she’d wanted to see how low she could go ‘without losing caste’.
⁴⁵

The most extravagant expression of this wartime hedonism was seen in the parties that George Gordon Moore started to host for Diana and her friends in the autumn of 1914. They were on a preposterous scale. The ballroom in his enormous house on Lancaster Gate was redecorated each time with a new theme: images from the circus, the Wild West, Aubrey Beardsley’s erotica or the Ballets Russes. Even the dinner tables were works of art, laden with purple orchids and the kind of rare wartime delicacies that only Moore’s deep pockets could supply – avocados, terrapin and soft shell crab.

The drinking was more excessive still, with vodka and absinthe spiking the flow of champagne (whisky was still considered unacceptable for women, even behind Moore’s ‘barred doors’). There was dancing to ragtime and to the tropical twang of Hawaiian bands, and it continued until the breakfast eggs and bacon appeared at dawn. Or rather it continued until Diana decided she was tired and wanted to go home, at which point Moore would abruptly command the band to stop and ask the rest of the guests to leave.

Everyone knew these parties were essentially for Diana’s benefit, but very few realized how very complicated and compromised her relationship with Moore had now become. During these first months of the war the financier had grown even more powerful. Money flowed to him from mysterious ventures – he was reputed to be the owner of public utilities in four American states as well as in Canada and Brazil – and his wealth gave him entrée into the highest social circles. He was especially close to Sir John French, Commander in Chief of the British forces in France, with whom he shared his house, and it was for this reason that Violet, who had always loathed Moore, now actively encouraged his interest in Diana. She was desperate to keep John, her one remaining son, safe from the trenches, and her plan was to use Moore’s influence with French to secure John a staff position at GHQ.

Diana felt herself to be in an intolerable position. Before the war she had been guiltily impressed by Moore’s generosity, but she had hated it when George Gordon Ghastly, as she called him, had tried to kiss or caress her. Big and loud with his ‘straight black hair, flattened face and atomic energy’,
⁴⁶
he could not have been more physically repulsive to her. Yet her mother, in a shocking aberration from her normal practice, was now telling Diana to suppress her antipathy and be ‘nice’. As she recalled, ‘To get my brother to GHQ was her obsessive hope. She thought that only I could coax the boon out of Moore.’
⁴⁷
Not only was Diana expected to use up some of her precious free time attending the parties Moore threw for her, she had to tolerate being seated next to him at dinner, having endearments muttered thickly into her ear as the two of them ‘shuffled and bunny hugged’ across the dance floor, and accepting his goodnight embrace.
⁴⁸

John was due to be sent out to France in late February 1915, yet the week before, when no word of a desk job had yet arrived, Diana apparently had to coax a little harder. She was at home, recovering from the measles, when Moore came into her bedroom at about three in the morning. The Duchess certainly knew he was there, and although there is no evidence to suggest that Diana allowed Moore to make love to her, this was far more intimacy than she had ever previously granted him. It was surely no coincidence that Sir John French had just written to Violet to assure her that a ‘good plan’ had been formed: and that despite John’s own determined resistance he would eventually be removed from his position at the Front and transferred to the safety of GHQ.

Diana felt soiled by the whole business: in a letter to her friend Raymond Asquith she had described Moore’s physical advances as ‘sullying … mutilating and scarring’.
⁴⁹
Even more distasteful was the hypocrisy of her own mother who, normally so fastidious, had been willing to put her in so compromising a position. Yet if Diana recoiled inwardly, if her resentment against Violet acquired a new core of rage, she didn’t alter her life. She continued her ‘friendship’ with Moore without any obvious break, and in some way she came to rationalize it as part of her war effort. However repellent Moore was to her, physically, his parties had become a highlight of London entertainment, especially for officers on leave. As Diana recalled, most of her generation now felt they were ‘dancing a tarantella’, infected by the need to keep moving to forget the horrors of war.
⁵⁰
Moore’s parties provided that hectic oblivion, night after night; and it was for a very good reason that they became nicknamed the Dances of Death.