Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (8 page)

Diana actually had a full nine months’ grace before Duff was dispatched to the Front. On 28 April, after he had marched with all the other newly recruited Grenadiers from Chelsea Barracks to Waterloo station, she bravely wrote to him that she had ‘adored his glorious spirits’, describing the tears she wept as ‘a great pride signifying only my complete love.’
⁶⁶
Left behind in London, however, waiting for his first letters to arrive from France, she felt only ‘listless and crippled’.

The war had become ‘a blind murderous treadmill, with no sign of the beginning of the end.’
⁶⁷
A generation had been laid waste for a cause that few could even make sense of (over two hundred local men from the Rutland estate alone had been killed at the Front). The sound of bugles signifying a military funeral was commonplace, and shrines to the civilian dead were appearing everywhere as the big cities, especially London, were bombed by the enemy.

Early in the war, the bombs dropped by Zeppelin air ships had done terrifying but limited damage. It had been the done thing among Diana’s set to ‘lift a glass and laugh [them] to inaudibility’; people even felt a certain pride in having watched a raid. From a safe distance there was a mesmerizing spectacle in the raking searchlights seeking out the enemy’s giant silver air machines, in the crack of an explosion followed by a sudden flare of fire. Now the raids were less frequent, but the new breed of German fighter planes, the Gothas and Giants, carried more lethal loads. In September 1917 Diana arrived at Arlington Street to find all the windows blown out, and ‘a crater the size of half a tenis [sic] court ten yards away in the park’.
⁶⁸
When caught in the middle of a raid in May 1918 she was no longer capable of ‘laughing’ away the threat. During a nightmarish three hours in which she was pressed among a crowd of cowering strangers ‘the London Bridge gun shook our marrows and a procession of victims, dead and mangled, passed in the darkness’.
⁶⁹

In this fourth year of the war Diana felt there was an ugliness to England now. The blackout-darkened streets had become home to all kinds of ‘thieving and vicing’.
⁷⁰
Conscientious objectors had always been targeted, but homosexuals, modern painters, poets and foreigners were now likely to be branded as potential traitors too. The legislation passed against aliens was more strictly enforced: Rudolph Stulik, Austrian proprietor of the Eiffel Tower, had already been interned, and Duff’s friend, the German-born singer Olga Lynn, whose real name was Lowenthal, lived in daily fear of being deported.

It was in this darkening atmosphere that Noel Pemberton Billing published his claims that a group of dissolute aristocrats, painters, Jews, intellectuals and female followers of Allan’s Cult of the Clitoris had been identified by the German Secret Service as targets for blackmail, and as potential traitors or spies. It created a scandal – Maud Allan brought a libel action against Billing – and many in Diana’s circle feared being named on the MP’s list. Diana herself received a threatening letter from a man who claimed to have evidence about her ‘in relation to a case now much before the public’.
⁷¹

There was an element of grim hilarity to the affair, as she described to Duff on 5 June. The Duchess remained convinced of Allan’s purity: ‘True to her school, she did not believe in the possibility of vice among women.’ More comically still, Diana reported, ‘Lord Albemarle is said to have walked into the Turf and said, “I’ve never heard of this Greek chap
Clitoris
they are all talking of.”’
⁷²

But there were few people left with whom she could share the joke. By January 1918 Edward Horner and Patrick Shaw Stewart, two of her last surviving officer friends, had perished, and her correspondence with Duff was erratic. In the long gaps between letters, she was tormented by visions of him left dead or dying. Even when letters came, the censors’ deletions left her imagining unspoken horrors. Work was her only relief. Soon after Duff left for France Diana had volunteered for a second term at Guy’s, hoping that the unrelenting drudgery would tamp down her terrors. It was only for a month – her mother remained fiercely opposed to public hospital life – but as a temporary distraction it had worked. The exhaustion shut down her imagination and the suffering of her patients put her own agony in perspective. She had to treat some severely burned children during this period, using the then-accepted method of pouring hot melted wax over their raw wounds. The children’s pitiful screams haunted her, but it was then, Diana wrote, that she learned not to cry.

*   *   *

During this bleakest of periods, Diana lived tentatively from day to day. Yet she was now convinced that when the war ended she wanted to be with Duff. Previously they had only joked about marriage, each unsure of the other’s feelings, but now Diana swore, ‘If death will only spare him we will live our lives together.’
⁷³
She swore, too, that she would no longer be intimidated by her mother’s disapproval, even though she knew it would be formidable.

The Duchess had indeed observed the growing intimacy between Diana and Duff with alarm and had even begun to interrogate Diana’s friends about the likelihood of an engagement, complaining to Katherine Asquith that she couldn’t sleep at night for fear of her daughter ‘marrying that awful Duff’.
⁷⁴
As far as Violet was concerned, Duff was awful in too many ways to count. His father, the late Sir Alfred Cooper, had been an eminent surgeon and friend of King Edward VII, but his area of expertise – venereal disease – was something from which she could only shrink.
*
Duff’s mother had been from a good family, but she had disgraced herself by leaving her first husband, living openly with her lover and, after the latter’s death, earning her living as a trainee nurse. In fact, it was when Alfred Cooper spotted Lady Agnes scrubbing hospital floors that he had recognized her as the lovely young woman he had admired in his youth and asked her to marry him.

Had she read of this romantic coincidence in a book, the Duchess might have found it charming. It was not, however, something with which she wanted her family to be associated. She feared that Duff, with his reputation for drink and women, had inherited his mother’s tainted genes, and it was hardly as if he had a compensating fortune. With an annual income of under £1,000 (his Foreign Office salary combined with his private allowance), Duff couldn’t come close to offering Diana the life that Violet had planned.

She rallied her friends – Duff was ‘a contemptible parvenu’ opined Lady Sackville – but Diana, who before the war might have quailed at the idea of marrying so far outside her mother’s expectations, had changed. And she believed that British society had changed too. As she wrote to Duff, ‘In a sense the world shapes to hide our possible squalor.’ With few servants and private cars available to anyone, it would be much harder for anyone to ‘pity our poverty’.
⁷⁵

She framed a virtuous picture of their future lives. While Duff volunteered his willingness to ‘break my champagne glasses, throw away my cigars, tear up my cards … study the habits of buses and the intricacies of tubes’,
⁷⁶
she began to contemplate money-making schemes. Her first idea was to set up a nursing home with financial backing from Moore. It was a very respectable way of earning a living, she pointed out to Duff, ‘without any notoriety or convention breaking for Their Graces to take exception to’. She even toyed briefly with a scheme to launch an aviation passenger business with the backing of her new friend, the newspaper magnate Max Beaverbrook. ‘Scruples must fade,’ she wrote firmly to Duff, ‘we must be happy.’
⁷⁷

It was hard to sustain that optimism while Duff was in danger, but against all the odds he continued to survive. In early October he was awarded a DSO for his courage in battle and given two weeks’ leave in Paris. Diana gave him loving permission to take every advantage of reprieve from the Front: ‘You know that I want your happiness above my own,’ she wrote, although she also begged him to avoid gambling, catching a disease or making love to anyone she knew (her friend Diana Wyndham, to whom she knew Duff was attracted, also happened to be in Paris).
⁷⁸

Less than a fortnight later she was ‘intoxicated’ to read in
The Times
that the war was almost over, and at the end of October Duff was, amazingly, back in London and in her arms. It was a rapturous reunion for both of them: ‘All that I had hoped of happiness for the last 6 months came true,’ wrote Duff in his diary.
⁷⁹
Yet while he had returned home unscathed, too many of their friends had perished for them to feel guiltlessly happy. On 11 November, the formal declaration of Armistice, Diana spent the day dutifully with her family, but she couldn’t bear to listen to the frenzied celebrations that roared through the London streets, writing, ‘After so much bitter loss it was unnatural to be jubilant.’
⁸⁰

She was worried too about Duff, who was showing symptoms of the Spanish flu that had begun wreaking carnage across Europe. Having eaten an early supper with her mother at the Ritz, she slipped away to his flat. Their mood together was sombre: ‘The dead were in our minds to the exclusion of the survivors.’ Yet it wasn’t only thoughts of their friends that darkened their spirits. ‘The war was over,’ Diana wrote. ‘My own battle had now to be fought.’
⁸¹
It was her and Duff now, ranged against the desires of her parents and the coercive forces of tradition and class.

Chapter Two

NANCY

While Diana was dedicating herself to a future with Duff, Nancy Cunard was tearing down the edifice of her own brief, unhappy marriage. Two years of being wedded to Sydney Fairbairn, an army officer and keen amateur cricketer, had left Nancy disgusted with the whole notion of matrimony. Even at her wedding party she’d felt a premonition of revulsion so acute that she had ripped the bridal wreath off her head and thrown it onto the floor.

To most of the guests assembled at the Guards Chapel, the entire event had a difficult and peculiar atmosphere. The ceremony had looked hastily arranged, lacking the traditional theatre of bridesmaids, pageboys and bouquets. There was awkwardness too about the arrangement of the family party, with Lady Maud Cunard accompanied by both her estranged husband Sir Bache Cunard and her lover Sir Thomas Beecham. And it was back at Maud’s Mayfair house that Nancy, flushed with champagne and self-consciousness, had made her startling gesture. She had been talking with Evan Morgan, the elegantly dissolute poet on whose Shelleyan good looks and slender talent she’d once had an unreciprocated crush. It may have been some snipe Evan made about her newly married status, or a comment about Sydney, but the chatter in Maud’s elaborately decorated drawing room suddenly faded as Nancy, her expression furious, yanked off her wreath of orange blossoms and tossed her hair free.

It had been a classic wartime wedding. The couple had met in early 1916, after Sydney had returned to England to recover from injuries sustained at the battle of Gallipoli. Little sign of what he’d seen and suffered was evident on his smooth, regular features; to the many women flitting around him at this time, Sydney appeared the handsome template of an officer and a gentleman.

Nancy for her part was normally attracted to men who appeared more foreign, poetic or louche, but Sydney had come into her life at a moment when his very English solidity was unusually appealing. The early years of the war had affected her deeply. Like Diana, she had suffered the deaths of close friends; like Diana she had been swept up in London’s atmosphere of heady fatalism. Yet Nancy was three and a half years younger; she was more emotionally fragile, and more chaotically in revolt against the grown-up world. She found it harder to put limits on the wartime saturnalia of ‘late hours at wild parties … of drinking in the Café Royal Brasserie with tipsy poets and “chaps” on leave.’
¹
After a party at the Fitz, her studio in Fitzrovia, she was liable to find herself in the arms of a stranger, not knowing what she had drunk or what she had done.

When Diana and Duff came to the Fitz one morning in July 1916, they found Nancy still ‘looking rather squalid’ from the night before.
²
Diana ‘was disgusted and saddened’ and Nancy, too, was beginning to feel that she needed rescuing. Sydney might not be interested in the books she read or care for the company she kept, yet his shoulders looked broad enough to offer her a safe haven from the confusion she’d created around herself.

He also offered her a haven from her mother who, while more relaxed over the matter of chaperones than the Duchess of Rutland, could still be censorious and domineering. Nancy enjoyed a rare degree of independence, yet Lady Cunard kept a tight leash on her financially, giving her money only if she remained tolerably compliant: putting in an appearance at her dinners and opera parties, and making a pretence of listening silently when Maud launched into one of her regular excoriations of her daughter’s shortcomings.

These, Maud considered, were many: the frequent disappearances to her dirty little studio, the oddity of her ideas, the peculiarities of her appearance. Lady Cunard, whose own style was meticulously and delicately fashionable, could be wounded to the quick by the sight of Nancy sauntering into the drawing room in a man’s waistcoat, her mouth a blood-red slash in a mask of white powder.