The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery (38 page)

Wilson was being ironic.
Over the years, Sir John
, who was married with three children, had had numerous beautiful and well-connected mistresses, and had been cited as co-respondent in at least one divorce action. Before he met Moore, the large sums he lavished on women and other pleasures had kept him deeply in debt. Moore, who idolized him, put up the capital for the house; he also insisted on paying its running expenses. The arrangement suited Sir John perfectly: it saved him from further financial embarrassment and reduced the risk of scandal. Behind closed doors at number 94, and away from his family, who were living in the modest house he rented in Hertfordshire, he was free to pursue his amorous liaisons, and – entirely at Moore’s expense – to enjoy an extravagant lifestyle.

Before the war, the goings-on
at number 94 had been the talk of London. Moore, who was also married, had left his wife and children in America. Night after night, the two men entertained a succession of actresses and glamorous widows, some of whom became their mistresses. They also hosted dinner parties and dances to which they invited the most powerful, most fashionable figures of the day.
Winston Churchill
, Lord Haldane, the Duke of Bedford, the Earl of Warwick and the painter Sir John Lavery were regular guests. So was Herbert Asquith.
Unabashed
, they included their ‘feminine friends’ – as Moore referred to them – on the guest list.

In Moore’s eyes, by far the most prized was Lady Diana Manners. He had been in love with her since the summer of 1913. His interest had appalled Violet: ‘
Married!!
And black blood!!!’ she exclaimed to Charlie in May 1914.

Now – five months later – his infatuation offered an invaluable entrée to the field marshal.

Violet had heard the gossip. War had not loosened Moore’s hold over Sir John. To the irritation – and the bemusement – of the field marshal’s colleagues, shortly after he was made Commander-in-Chief of the BEF, he had appointed Moore as his personal adviser. A room was reserved for him at General Headquarters.
Whenever he visited
, Sir John insisted that he sit in on meetings and battle conferences. He had also placed one of his two Rolls-Royces at the
American’s disposal, with a driver on standby to ferry him to and fro from the nearest railway station, or to take him to the military headquarters and establishments that French had asked him to inspect on his behalf.

Frequently, Moore cut short his visits to the Front to return to London in the hope of seeing Diana; on the face of it, there could be no better candidate to lobby the commander-in-chief.

But Diana was not in love with him; moreover, she was barely speaking to her mother.

These were the dual obstacles confronting Violet after she read Lord Kitchener’s letter. As she pondered how to surmount them, outside in the courtyard of her house in Arlington Street, a footman was loading Diana’s suitcase into the Duke’s peacock-crested Rolls-Royce.

Diana was leaving home to join the nursing staff at Guy’s Hospital.

Swallowing her pride
, and at the very last minute, Violet decided to go with her.

The Duke’s chauffeur drove them to the hospital. The day was cold and grey. Cradled in the back of the car, wrapped in travelling blankets, they said very little. They had been arguing about whether or not Diana should accept the job at Guy’s for weeks.
Violet sat ‘sorrowing and silent’
, Diana remembered: ‘I felt ashamed of having triumphed, but not in the least apprehensive. I do not think my mother was at all proud of me; she just hated the sordid, unvirginal aspect of it all and the loss of authority and protection.’

The car was travelling eastwards. Anxious to avoid eye contact, both women concentrated fixedly on the scenes around them. Familiar places glided past: St James’s Park; Admiralty Arch; the Savoy Hotel; the Inns of Court along the Embankment; and the dome of St Paul’s. Then, suddenly, after crossing Southwark Bridge, they were in a different world. Turning off Tooley Street into the maze of streets behind the hospital, the car slowed to a crawl. Inside it, the tension increased.

They had entered Shad Thames.
Half a century earlier
, Dickens had described it as ‘the filthiest, the strangest, the most extraordinary of the many localities that are hidden in London’. A vast complex of Victorian warehouses, mills and factories, Shad Thames was situated behind St Saviour’s Dock. To Dickens, it was riddled with ‘every lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot and garbage’. One of the poorest districts in London, it was a place of ‘dirt-besmeared walls and decaying foundations’, where the windows, broken and patched, had poles thrust out ‘on which to dry the linen that is never there’.

Violet and Diana were seeing what Dickens saw. Shad Thames had changed little since he had written about it.
The buildings were black
with the grime of industry; the cobbled streets, close and narrow.
Stevedores wheeling trolleys and gangs of dockhands spilled out of the dingy alleyways that led off to the left and to the right. Craning their heads, they could see the prows of steamers projecting from the piers at the end of the streets.

Their progress was slow.
Huge wooden crates
were lined up against the walls of the warehouses; as the chauffeur inched the Rolls through the narrow streets, he had to stop and wait while the dockhands winched the crates up to the gantries above. ‘They swung them right over us. I thought they were going to fall on top of us!!’ Diana reported excitedly to her sister. The noise – the shouts and whistles from the cast-iron walkways that linked the warehouses high above, the sound of metal banging against metal, the clank of winching chains and the rumble of barrels being rolled across the cobbles – was deafening.
Large signs
were painted on the outside of the warehouses, which were named after the spices stored inside them. Cayenne Court; Cumin Wharf; the Cardamom Building: there was a warehouse for each variety. Centuries of spices had infused the brickwork of the buildings; the smell of the spices, and the stink from the mud and slime on the banks of the river, was overpowering.

This was the catchment area of Guy’s Hospital. The patients Diana would be nursing lived here in Shad Thames, and in the slums of Rotherhithe and Deptford that stretched to the east.

Diana had set her heart
on becoming a nurse almost as soon as war was declared. ‘How can I best serve my country in its crisis?’ she asked her friends. She had no experience or training in first aid, but nursing, she quickly decided, was the solution.

Her first intention
was to go out to France to nurse soldiers wounded at the Front. Her close friend Rosemary Leveson-Gower was already there, working in an ambulance unit which her mother, the Duchess of Sutherland, had taken out to Belgium. But Violet refused to allow Diana to go. Unable to broach intimate subjects with her daughter, she called on Lady Dudley, who was running a hospital for officers at Le Touquet, to explain to Diana that for an attractive girl to tend libidinous soldiers ‘long starved of women’ and
‘inflamed with battle’ could lead only to ‘Rape’. ‘I thought her ridiculous, and my mother ridiculous too,’ Diana remarked.

The hospitals and ambulance units run by Violet’s friends offered a means of leapfrogging the Voluntary Aid Detachment system; they enabled debutantes to go out to the Front without first completing their VAD training at hospitals in England. Violet’s opposition blocked this route for Diana. None of the grand society women would employ her without her mother’s permission.

Determined to succeed in her ambition, Diana applied for the job at Guy’s. It was a poor substitute for the romance and excitement of the hospitals at the Front, but once she had completed her training she could apply for a position in France independently of her mother.

Violet had put up every obstacle
.
First, she had tried
reasoning with Diana: work of any sort did not befit a Duke’s daughter, least of all work that involved tending the sick at a hospital whose patients came from slums in the East End. Then she had tried to put her off; the hours were long, the work exhausting, the dormitories where the nurses slept cold and uncomfortable. When this failed, she had tried to frighten her. ‘You’ll have to see operations!’ she told her. As Diana recalled, she even roped in Dr Hood, who had trained at Guy’s in the 1860s, to try and dissuade her: ‘
Old Dr Hood
, in my family’s pay, would pull out stories of the Guy’s of fifty years earlier – his Guy’s, when the doctors kept their old coats for operations. These coats lived in the theatre and were so stiff with old blood that they stood up like armour. The students were always fainting, he told me. Neither student nor nurse ever saw their first op. without passing out.’

There was nothing romantic or glamorous about the work Diana was going to do. Unlike other London hospitals, Guy’s did not admit wounded soldiers. She would be working on ordinary surgical wards, tending patients of both sexes.
The thought that
she would have to physically handle men – and working-class men at that – appalled Violet.

It took courage
– and a ‘stiff fight’, Diana recalled – to defy her. Her decision to go to Guy’s was courageous in other ways too.
Although she was twenty-two
, she had led a sheltered, pampered life. Cosseted and indulged, she was used to deferential servants. These – and the tenants on the Belvoir estate – had been her sole contact with men and women who came from a different class. She had never been on a hospital ward before and, as she admitted, ‘knew no more about nursing than Nanny’s plasters and doses’. Now she was to find herself in a world where she was a nobody, and where her superiors expected her to speak only when spoken to. She would have to be up by six, and in bed by ten; she was to be entrusted with only the most menial tasks and kept on her feet for nine hours with only brief breaks.

The hospital, a grand eighteenth-century building with quadrangles and cloisters, stood out amidst the squalor of Shad Thames. Situated a few streets back from the river, its entrance was marked by a pair of stone pillars, topped by sculpted globes. Founded in 1721 as a hospital for ‘incurables’, it was through these gates, beneath a crest of two angels, that the dying patients had been brought on stretchers. And it was through these gates, an hour or so before Diana’s first shift was due to start, that the chauffeur – with just inches to spare between the roof of the car and the crest of the angels – manoeuvred the Duke’s Rolls-Royce.

‘Guy’s looked very Dickensian
that afternoon beneath its dark drizzle,’ Diana remembered: ‘A few shivering nurses in cotton dresses were being blown about the wide courtyard and open arcaded passages. We rang the bell at a side entrance. The door was opened by an old housekeeper in black with a hospital cap. She was as dry and grey as cinders. She led us to an upper bedroom giving on to the courtyard. Here I unpacked my modest little trunk – some underclothes, some books, concealed cosmetics, clock, pencils and paper, and a pampering hot water bottle. Every movement was watched by the old house-Gestapo.’

After unpacking her suitcase, the moment came for Diana to put on her uniform.
‘My mother writhed,’
she recalled: ‘There was no long glass, but I later saw what was making my mother so appalled, for indeed I did look horrible. The dress was just off the floor and gathered at the back only. The print was of a minute and colourless mauve-and-white pin-stripe. The apron was cut to deform the
figure. There were the universal black stockings and flat black shoes. I was led away from my mother who left disconsolate.’

Diana, for reasons that had nothing to do with the job that lay ahead of her, was feeling equally disconsolate. A conversation had taken place in the car on the way to the hospital that she did not record in her account of their arrival there. But later that evening, after finishing her first shift, she mentioned it briefly in a letter to her sister Marjorie:
‘Mother was in a despairing blue
all the way here. We hardly spoke. As she was leaving, she said I must make nice to GM. If I won’t, J [John] will die.’

It is clear from what was to occur in the coming months that in telling Diana to ‘make nice’ to George Gordon Moore, Violet was asking her to seduce him.

It was a remarkable request, coming from a mother who kept her 22-year-old daughter on a very tight rein. There was hardly a moment when Violet did not have her under some form of surveillance.
‘I was still forbidden
to be alone with a man, except by chance in the country, or to go out anywhere on my own,’ Diana recalled. During the day, whether walking, shopping or visiting a friend, Violet insisted that she was chaperoned. In the evenings, if she went to a dance, a married woman had to take her and bring her home. Even then, she was unable to slip in unobserved.
At night
, Violet kept the door to her bedroom open so that she could listen out for her return: regardless of the hour, she demanded that Diana call in on her to recount details of the guests and her dancing partners.
There were other rules too
; she was not allowed to drink cocktails; she could go to the Ritz but no other London hotel; if, by chance, she should find herself alone with a man, even ‘hand-holding’ was banned (‘my mother felt strongly on this score’); and if she was invited to a house party in the country, to discourage her suitors from corridor-creeping, Violet instructed her to be sure to say at teatime on the day of her arrival – and in a very loud voice – that her maid always slept with her.

This regimen was designed for one purpose: to preserve Diana’s virginity for the royal prince, or wealthy aristocrat, Violet intended her to marry.
Most eligible was
the Prince of Wales. The future
Edward VIII was three years younger than Diana, but Violet was in no doubt that her daughter was eminently well qualified to be Queen and that this should be her ambition.
It was one that the Duke of Connaught
, Queen Victoria’s son, had encouraged. Shaken by the class conflict that had dogged the country in the years leading up to the war, he was of the view that Diana, already popular with the press, was the only woman who would keep the prince on the throne.
If this plan failed
, Violet had a list of other candidates. Before the war, Prince Adalbert, the son of Kaiser Wilhelm, was a favourite, along with Prince Paul of Yugoslavia and numerous Russian princes. Further down her list, among the ordinary English marquises and earls, there was the fabulously wealthy Lord Rocksavage – thought to be the most handsome man of his generation – and Bobbety Cranborne, the Marquis of Salisbury’s eldest son. Violet updated her list constantly; if any of her ‘eligibles’ were inconsiderate enough to marry elsewhere, she drew a skull and crossbones by their names.