Singled Out (4 page)

and sitting restlessly in the drawing-room at Craigdarroch waiting for news

wasn’t an option. They went for a long walk together; absorbed by the

intensity of their companionship, Gertrude barely noticed that she was

soaked to the skin. The next day German troops crossed the French frontier,

and on  August  Britain declared war on Germany.

The Craigdarroch party broke up. Carlyon awaited orders from the War

Office; Gertrude went for the summer to her aunt’s home near Dumfries,

where she lived for the daily newspaper. She heard that Carlyon had been

posted to the th Hussars, part of the Expeditionary Force; in the first



Singled Out

autumn of the war he was among the troops fighting on the Marne and

Aisne against the German advance. By now the lists were beginning to

appear across the country. Killed, wounded, captured; the systematic

destruction of a generation of young men was pitilessly getting under way.

One December evening in  Carlyon arrived unannounced at the

London flat where Gertrude, her mother and aunt had just finished dinner.

He had been in the very thick of the Allied retreat, and was able to give a

full account of his battle experiences. He had, he confessed, been terrified under fire, but he was British, and not showing his fear had been paramount.

Carlyon’s account of the campaign was ostensibly optimistic: the German

offensive had been halted, an Allied offensive would soon follow; he too

had risen in his career and was to be given a safer posting. Eventually

Gertrude’s mother and aunt said good-night. ‘May I stay a bit longer?’ he

asked. When they were alone, Carlyon dropped his breezy stance and confided to Gertrude that he felt profound gloom about the way the war was going. The casualties were appalling. The German army was superior to ours

in every way except for the British fighting spirit. Our commanders however

were at a loss, and lacked coordination with the French. Finally, having

exhausted talk of the war, the conversation turned to their shared past, and those carefree summer days now disappeared for ever. It was close on one in the morning before Carlyon left to walk back in the dark to his club.

That night Gertrude didn’t sleep. She now recognised that she loved

Carlyon with her whole being. But in accordance with the conventions of

the time, neither of them had given each other any hint as to their feelings.

As childhood friends, their manner to each other was always warmly affectionate; his letters ended ‘with love’; his departures were marked with a kiss. But these were the endearments of habit, not passion. Gertrude made

up her mind, in that long sleepless night, that she must never tell him of

her love. ‘No hint of it should distract him from his job. It must be a private affair unrevealed to anyone. And so it remained.’

After that there were a few brief occasions when they were together.

She saw him in summer  and again in October; he was in hospital

recovering from rheumatic fever acquired in the trenches. On Christmas

Eve  she dined with him and his parents and heard that he was being

posted as an intelligence officer to the Western Frontier Egyptian Field

Force. ‘I breathed the balm of his safety that Christmas.’

Relieved, Gertrude went back to her war work selling toys to raise

money for refugee children. In her spare time, like women across the

country, she knitted khaki socks for soldiers. Meanwhile there were still

parties; still bridge, still horse-riding and concerts. To some it seemed that
Where Have All the Young Men Gone?



the worse the killing became, the gayer and madder grew the social whirl;

like many young women at that time Gertrude saw no point in malingering.

Early in  she joined the volunteers pushing trolleys to feed the

munitions workers at the Woolwich Arsenal canteen. She also managed,

by skilfully dodging troop movements, to fit in an extended holiday with

friends on the French Riviera; it was there that ‘I made a new interest –

prehistory . . .’ The Palaeolithic remains of the Rochers Rouges behind

Menton were being excavated by a party of French archaeologists, and

while there Gertrude talked her way into helping out as a ‘bottle-washer’.

But away from the Riviera sunshine the war continued to take its

inexorable toll. The angel of death was abroad. Later that year the nation’s resolve was tested when , British soldiers died horrible and futile deaths on the Somme between July and November, , of these on the first day alone. Barely a family in the land was unaffected, nor was Gertrude’s family exempt from loss; two cousins were killed, both only sons, and she joined the weeping congregations who packed London’s churches at this time. The celebrated preacher Maude Royden drew crowds to the Temple, where in

her beautiful voice she told the sorrowing multitudes, ‘They died conse—

crated lives.’ Still, Carlyon was safe in Egypt. For Gertrude, the fearfulness of the casualties nearer home only served to intensify her relief that he had been posted – reluctantly – to such a comparative backwater. A bout of rheumatic fever seemed a small price to pay for staying out of the trenches.

Now she heard from him that he had recovered and had been given

charge of a crack corps of racing camels, which under his command were

to patrol the western edge of the Libyan desert against surprise attacks. The post required great daring and stamina; the Muslim tribes in the area were renowned for their barbarity, and the desert was notoriously inhospitable.

Everything that happened after that was reported to Gertrude via a

contact at the War Office, General Creagh. In September  Carlyon

and a four-man patrol were sent to investigate rumours of tribal movements

under Turkish command near the Baharia Oasis, an area of unmapped desert

west of the Nile. The Baharia Oasis is overlooked by immense rocky cliffs;

the patrol made its approach to their edge across arid, craggy terrain. Three men stayed hidden behind an outcrop to guard the camels while Carlyon and the other officer set out to reconnoitre on foot. They never returned.

Twenty-three days of agonising suspense passed before reliable reports

were received as to their dreadful fate. Carlyon and his fellow officer didn’t get far from the patrol. They had been stalked and shot dead by Senussi tribes-men, who then stripped and horribly mutilated the infidel corpses, leaving them exposed on the rocks. The bodies were duly recovered and Captain 

Singled Out

Carlyon Will Mason-MacFarlane – ‘an officer of the most brilliant promise’

– lies for ever in the British Army Cemetery at Minia in Middle Egypt.

With him lay buried all Gertrude’s hopes, all her desires, and all her secrets.

The crown and joy

Just as today religion, the law and economic factors combine to drive

women away from the altar, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth

century those same factors joined forces to push them firmly and unquestioningly down the aisle. The world that Gertrude Caton-Thompson grew up in was a world that expected young women to marry. Not as a means

to an end, not as a foundation or basis for other activities, but as ‘the crown and joy of woman’s life – what we were born for’. To most observers it was self-evident that ‘marriage is the normal mode of life’. In any case,

what else were all those accomplishments for? Why go to the expense of

dressmakers and milliners, balls and hunts, other than to ensure that women

like her appeared to best advantage in front of a range of potential suitors?

It is impossible to over-emphasise the fundamental importance of the

marriage market in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Britain.

Like some immutable law of physics, society decreed that energy expended

on females must be compensated for by suitable marriage; in due course a

further expenditure of energy went to ensure that the daughters of that

marriage, in their turn, repaid the input by suitably marrying. ‘Nothing

would have enchanted me more than a pretty wedding, and a romantic

young husband, preferably a duke. I wished to do the very best for my

family . . .’ one young woman growing up in the pre-war period remembered. Thus the world went round. E. M. Delafield (who went on to create the immortal
Diary of a Provincial Lady
) drew on her own experiences as a pre-war debutante when she wrote her novel
Thank Heaven Fasting
(),*

the agonising story of Monica Ingram’s early years on the hamster-wheel

of fortune.

* The title comes from Shakespeare’s
As You Like It
, Act III, Scene V: Rosalind: But mistress, know yourself, down on your knees, And thank Heaven, fasting, for a good man’s love:

For I must tell you friendly in your ear, –

Sell when you can; you are not for all markets:

Cry the man mercy; love him; take his offer.

E. M. Delafield, incidentally, was a pseudonym for Edmeé Elizabeth
Monica
Dashwood (my italics), which suggests that the novel has strong autobiographical undertones.

Where Have All the Young Men Gone?



For girls of Monica Ingram’s class, conformity with the ideal of maidenliness was imperative. This meant not just the possession of accomplishments, but decorum and fragility, a propensity to faint and blush, modesty and reticence. Having equipped her daughter with these limiting attributes,

Monica’s conscientious mother has drummed into her from an early age

that her only future is as the mate of a suitable man:

‘My darling, never fall in love with a man who isn’t quite,
quite
– ’ Mrs Ingram had said, at intervals, from the time Monica was fifteen.

Monica takes her mother’s admonitions to heart. Every conversation

with her friends boils down to the central obsession of their lives: will they capture a husband? The men they meet are ‘any good’ or ‘no good’

according to whether they are available for marriage. Their favourite fantasy topic is weddings. How will the bridesmaids be dressed? What colour will one choose for one’s going-away frock? As for doing work of any kind – fainting and blushing hardly counted as qualifications in the job market.

Besides, everyone knew that work was for failures, for the girls who hadn’t

managed to find someone suitable. Knowing about science, French verbs

or mathematics did not enhance the featherbrain image that these girls so

carefully cultivated. It was essential not to frighten men off.

Unfortunately Monica does just that. She gets romantically involved

with a cad, whose lack of serious intentions marks him out as being very

far from ‘quite,
quite
– ’. This transgression is catastrophic – or nearly. It soon becomes horribly, scarily apparent that society now perceives her as ‘soiled’ by her adventure; suitable men start to give her a wide berth. With a kind of forced desperation, Monica continues to display her wares at the familiar seasonal occasions. The high-maintenance appearances have to be

kept up, but as time passes and no buyer so much as sniffs at her, the

situation becomes heartbreaking. Mrs Ingram now finds it necessary to

make face-saving disclaimers implying that at twenty-five her daughter

doesn’t wish to marry – ‘She says she doesn’t care about men. Well, of

course, some girls are like that . . .’ – or that as an only child she has

renounced marriage in order to devote herself to her widowed mother.

The reality, which poor Monica cries herself to sleep over nightly, is that

she is a failure and men do not find her attractive. Terror strikes as she

realises that the years are slipping by and life’s one goal has eluded her.

Occasionally, with a close friend who is still, herself, also on the shelf,

she tries to stare her future in the face:



Singled Out

‘Why can’t one have a career, or even work, like a man?’ Monica asked

helplessly. ‘I know everybody would say that it was because we hadn’t been able to get married – but they’ll say that anyway.’

‘There isn’t any work for girls of our kind,’ Frederica asserted. ‘Not any that we should be allowed to do. The only way is to become religious, and go and do some kind of good works, with a whole crowd of old maids and people who don’t belong to one’s own class.’

And Mrs Ingram is damning:

‘When all’s said and done, there’s only one job for any woman, whether she’s stupid or clever, and that is to be a good wife to some man and the mother of his children.’

‘And there aren’t enough men to go round!’ exclaimed Monica bitterly.

E. M. Delafield prolongs her heroine’s agony for  pages until, like

the cavalry galloping up at the last minute, she grants poor Monica a

reprieve in her final chapter (ironically entitled ‘The Happy Ending’) in

the shape of Herbert Pelham. This balding, middle-aged, bulgy-eyed suitor

has been lurking inconspicuously in the Ingram orbit for some time, dismissed as being hopelessly unglamorous, but finally, in desperation, accepted as – literally – the answer to a maiden’s prayer. Forget love, forget dreams of romance, forget social disgrace. Herbert Pelham may not be attractive, lovable or even very nice, but he is not a grocer or even a doctor, and he

is definitely ‘quite,
quite
– ’. As the novel ends Monica walks down the aisle suffused with blissful relief that she has escaped shame and reproach, and with only one remaining prayer in her heart: ‘. . . that she might be a

good wife to Herbert Pelham, and that if ever they had a child it might be