A Year in the Life of Downton Abbey: Seasonal Celebrations, Traditions, and Recipes (17 page)

King George V and Queen Mary with the Prince of Wales and the Princess Royal standing beside them.

The day after a presentation, all the names of those who had been presented were published in
The Times,
so there was absolute clarity for all as to who was ‘out’ and who was not. There then followed a round of balls, dances, luncheons and suppers in tandem with the London Season (explained in more detail in the
next chapter
), with each girl throwing an event of her own, whether a full-blown ball in her family’s London palace, as the Crawleys did for Rose, or a small tea party for the less ambitious or rich. These weren’t always, perhaps, as much fun as they sound. Margaret Haig Thomas, the Viscountess Rhondda, described her coming out: ‘For three months I went, accompanied by my mother, to a dance most nights of the week, varied by an occasional political At Home.’ She claims the tedium was only alleviated by the supper table.

The chief concern for the mothers was to invite the right sort of men to the dances. While a girl would try not to be seen at the round of debs’ dances for more than two years running without catching a husband, a man might go on attending without shame for as long as he remained a bachelor. The men were under no illusion as to the reason they were invited; Lord Byron, in the Regency years, had called the season ‘a marriage mart’, and so it was. Lady Diana Manners declaimed it further: ‘We poor creatures suffered great humiliation, for between dances we joined a sort of slave or marriage market at the door.’

English asparagus is unparalleled in flavour – use the freshest you can find to make this tart, which is perfect for a starter or light lunch. If you prefer, you can make several smaller tartlets.

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

Sift the flour into a mixing bowl with a large pinch of salt. Crumble in the butter and rub into the flour to give crumb texture. Add the iced water, one tablespoon at a time – just enough to bring the mixture into a ball of dough with your hands.

Dust the worktop and a rolling pin with flour. Roll the dough out thinly into a circle that is large enough to fill an 8 inch tart tin or dish. Carefully lift the dough circle into place and press it into the tin. Trim the edges with a knife. Prick the base all over with a fork, fill with baking beans and bake in the oven for 20 minutes.

Snap off the hard parts at the end of the asparagus, and trim the ends with a knife to neaten. Wash the spears well and place in a pot of water that will hold them horizontally. Bring to the boil, simmer for a few minutes until half cooked and drain.

Remove the tart from the oven, remove the baking beans and return the pastry to the oven for a further 5 minutes. Leave the pastry shell to one side while you prepare the filling.

Beat the eggs in a mixing bowl. Stir in the cream and then the Parmesan until well combined. Season with salt, pepper and nutmeg.

Dry the asparagus spears with paper towels. Arrange them in a fan in the bottom of the pastry shell, tips facing in. Carefully pour the egg mixture around the asparagus until the tart shell is almost full. Sprinkle the thyme leaves over the top. Bake in the oven for about 40 minutes, until golden.

Serve the tart hot, cut into wedges, with a green salad.

Lady Rose with Mrs Dudley Ward, a well-known mistress of the Prince of Wales.

The women of the 1920s seem to have been rather dismissive of the available men. Mary Clive, the daughter of an Irish earl, wrote in her memoir,
Brought Up and Brought Out:
‘It was of course considered very vulgar for a man to dance well (like talking French at school with a French accent) and, if by any chance one did meet a man who did it beautifully, one was absolutely safe in writing him off as a bounder.’ Mothers and chaperones passed between each other the list of ‘deb’s delights’, those young men who could be relied upon to make up the numbers and behave themselves. In later years, the list included those who were not to be invited unless absolutely desperate – they might be marked as NSIT (‘not safe in taxis’) or MTF (‘must touch flesh’). Lucinda Gosling writes that if the numbers were really short, notices alerting male students to forthcoming debutante balls would be pinned up in the medical and law faculties of universities. The students would be sure to come, if only for the free food and drink (some things never change).

The difficulty for many of the girls was that despite the fact that the intention was to find a husband, it was nigh on impossible for anything romantic to happen under the beady eyes of the mothers and chaperones sitting round the edges of the dances. The actress Joyce Grenfell wrote that even in 1928, if her parents were not also going to a dance she had been invited to, she would be escorted by the family maid.

Why were the women so keen to collude with this set-up? Largely because, for the upper-class young girl, marriage was her escape route out of the family home; her means of independence and the chance to build a power base of her own. Choosing a husband from the men presented to her during the balls and parties of the season meant she was more likely to fall in love with ‘the right sort’ than not. It wasn’t that marriages were arranged so much as it was hoped that if you put your daughter in the right circles, you stood a better chance of gaining a son-in-law with a title and money. But whereas upper-class girls before the First World War were very sheltered from boys before they came out and were likely to marry the first man they kissed, by the 1920s, spending time together was miles easier. It was becoming more accepted that a girl might pick and choose whom she liked and maybe even spend time with a possible suitor before making a decision But even this level of daring did not go much beyond the holding of hands and a stolen kiss or two.

MARY:
‘The older I get, the more I feel we do these things very oddly. Even now we must decide whether to share our lives with someone without spending any real time with them. Let alone … you know.’

Mary’s reputation, of course, almost foundered to the point of rendering her unmarriageable after she succumbed to a seduction by the devastatingly handsome Kemal Pamuk that ended tragically (he died in her bed, in the first series). Perhaps she didn’t really understand what she was letting herself in for when she admitted him into her bedroom; perhaps she thought she could keep it a secret. She wouldn’t have been the first – it is based on a true story, told to Julian years before he even thought of
Downton Abbey
– and it was bad luck that it ended the way it did. But although men and women of the world would have known such things went on (that is, sexual relations outside of marriage), they would have found it profoundly shocking in an earl’s unmarried daughter.

Remarkably, it was almost entirely the opposite for the working classes. When the governess, Lettuce [
sic
], confesses to the nanny, Emily, in
Tea by the Nursery Fire,
that she is illegitimate, the nanny’s biographer writes: ‘Emily thought nothing of that. In Easden [the village where she grew up] any girl who walked out regularly with a boy took it for granted he would only marry her last minute. No bride ever reached the altar without obviously carrying her groom’s baby.’ Confirming this view is Edwin Lee, the butler at Cliveden, who came from a farming family and remembered that no man would risk a barren wife. He tells the tale of two village women gossiping sometime in the late nineteenth century.

‘I hear Hilda Brown is getting married.’

‘Is she? I didn’t know she was pregnant.’

‘She isn’t, bloody snob.’