Those Wild Wyndhams (46 page)

This was doubtless true. The sons of the elite who were not already, like Ego, part of the armed forces – Ego had held a commission in the Gloucester Yeomanry, a Territorial Army cavalry regiment, since 1912, and left Stanway to join them on 6 August 1914 – mostly joined up as soon as they could. Bim Tennant, who had quit Winchester in June, planning to spend several months in Germany before entering the Diplomatic Service, joined the Grenadier Guards at the age of seventeen – having, said Pamela, ‘the distinction of being the youngest Wykehamist to take up arms in defence of his country’, and still a year below the official age for enlistment.
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Guy Charteris was gazetted into the Shropshire Light Infantry, subsequently moving to the Scots Guards. With difficulty Mary persuaded Yvo Charteris – who on 4 August had stood in a London street with shining eyes, reading the proclamation of war pasted to a lamppost
¹⁴
– to see out his final term at Eton. In the early spring of 1915 he joined the King’s Royal Regiment, and then the Grenadier Guards. Raymond Asquith’s initial decision not to join up was seen as a dereliction of duty. By 1915 the pressure of the metaphorical white feather was such that he joined the Grenadier Guards as well.
¹⁵

War offered the patricians an opportunity to lead the country that half a century of political reform, ideological advancement and agricultural crisis had taken away. They had been abused by the radical press and politicians for their reactionary attitudes, their idleness, their parasitical lifestyles. This was ‘the supreme opportunity’ for an embattled class ‘to prove themselves and to justify their existence … to demonstrate conclusively that they were not the redundant reactionaries of radical propaganda, but the patriotic class of knightly crusaders and chivalric heroes, who would defend the national honour and the national interest in the hour of its greatest trial’.
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All their years of hunting and shooting, and controlling and caring for their tenantry, had equipped them to perfection. And so, infamously, Ettie’s son Julian Grenfell, a professional soldier, and a warrior so bloodthirsty that it would not be a surprise to discover him cannibalistic, declared from Ypres in October 1914: ‘I
adore
war. It is like a big picnic …’
¹⁷

Aristocratic women were also enthusiastic about their war effort. They besieged the London hospitals, asking for positions as probationers. Shops selling domestic uniforms experienced a run on caps and aprons.
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First-aid classes were set up in the ballrooms of the great houses of London; plans were made to turn stately homes into convalescent homes and hospitals; and at Charing Cross Station a line of Rolls-Royces idled as the ladies inside them waited to greet and transport Belgian refugees arriving on the trains.
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Stanway’s Belgian refugees, Monsieur Beyart, his wife, his mother-in-law and his three-year-old twin girls, were installed above the stables, to the disgruntlement of the coachman Prew and his wife, who were induced to move.
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Mary described M. Beyart as a ‘charming Belgian notaire’,
²¹
but in fact the Beyarts became notable for their ‘ingratitude’, said Angela Forbes.
²²

Angela herself used Stanway as a dumping ground for her children while she made her way to France to volunteer in a hospital. A few months later, armed with £8 worth of provisions from Fortnum & Mason, and, in her own words, ‘hardly’ able to ‘make a cup of tea’,
²³
she set up a canteen in the waiting room of Boulogne’s railway station, which became known as Angelina’s, and its proprietor as ‘la dame avec la cigarette’ for her largesse with her Woodbines.
²⁴
Angelina’s was totally shambolic – for some time, washing up was done in one tin pail, in which Angela also washed her hair – and a roaring success.
²⁵
Angela’s raucous
Memories and Base Details
records the throb and thrum of wartime Boulogne – the ‘gigantic hub of the war machine’ – where hospitals and canteens mushroomed and trainloads of soldiers rattled in at odd hours. There was red tape to battle, generals to wheedle, the Red Cross to be prevailed upon for more supplies and petrol. Angela found the war invigorating – better for her than the days of peace.
²⁶

Angela was one of many women previously accustomed to hopping across the Channel for gambling at Biarritz or golf at Le Touquet who now made the journey equipped with bandages and tin cups, setting up makeshift hospitals, ambulance units and canteens.
²⁷
The Duchess of Westminster and Lady Dudley established field hospitals at Le Touquet; the dowager Duchess of Sutherland, whose ambulance unit was driven out of Belgium by the German advance, set up a 160-bed hospital in Calais. Further afield, Lady Muriel Paget, wife of Arthur, organized an Anglo-Russian hospital on the Eastern Front. These redoubtable grandes dames, accustomed to getting their own way through influence and charm, were wearisome to the authorities in their aristocratic disregard for rules. They were also shameless: in the earliest weeks when nurses still outnumbered patients, ‘body-snatching’ was common as ambulances from competing hospitals vied to get the best cases.
²⁸
France was not considered suitable for their daughters: the injuries, fresh from the battlefield, too gruesome for them, their virginity too precious to risk. Publicly prim reference was made to men ‘not being able to control themselves’. Privately, there must have been concern that young women, freed from the confines of their upbringing, might throw off their own moral code.

Stanway was turned down by the authorities as unsuitable for a hospital.
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A Voluntary Aid Detachment hospital was set up at nearby Winchcombe. The VAD’s volunteers, who provided field nursing services, were predominantly middle- and upper-class women. Medical professionals were initially sceptical, believing them to be ‘playing’ at a serious job, but many volunteers disproved them, and did excellent service in England and in France. The Winchcombe Hospital was a short drive from Stanway in the pony-trap. Eliza Wedgwood, a nearby neighbour, was Commandant. Mary and her daughters (including Bibs, just twelve in 1914) all volunteered, as did Mananai’s eldest, twenty-five-year-old Pamela Adeane, who stayed at Stanway for several months before being reluctantly dissuaded from going out to France (‘I think everybody thinks France is too much for me, perhaps so’). She moved to the Queen’s Hospital, a military hospital in Frognal, North London specializing in ‘heads & jaws’. It was hard work, requiring immense courage and a stomach of steel. Pamela thrived there: ‘I believe one is more useful in a military hospital … they do wonderful things here.’
³⁰
She lost a lover in the war, spent it nursing and did not marry until 1919, when she was nearly thirty.

Winchcombe’s atmosphere was informal and convivial. Cynthia chatted to Sister Awde as she stirred porridge on night duty; Bibs peeled potatoes in the kitchen, sulking at not being considered old enough to help in the wards. When funds ran low, Mrs Patrick Campbell organized a charity matinee in London that raised £400, enough to keep the hospital going until the end of the war.
³¹
In
Family Record
, Mary presented a rose-tinted view of the hospital as the family’s second home, with Hugo taking convalescents for drives.
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In fact, Hugo was mostly with Angela in France, while Angela’s daughters remained at Stanway: ‘he told me that he didn’t care when I went to London[,] that he didn’t mean to be there much!’ Mary told Arthur in the spring of 1915.
³³
On the rare occasions he returned, he was ‘carping’ and ‘critical’ about efforts at Winchcombe and Stanway, conducting small feuds with Eliza Wedgwood.
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Mary reproached him for his behaviour when he was ‘so full of admiration & sympathy about everything Angela does’.
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She felt keenly that Stanway’s war effort was less glamorous than Angela’s.
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Pamela Tennant recalled the war’s opening months as possessing a curious sense of unreality, like ‘the early morning, before the world was numb with pain and broken, before things were stale and tired as they became’.
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Both Bim and fifteen-year-old Kit, a naval cadet at Dartmouth, were still too young for combat – an officer could not officially go to the Front until the age of nineteen. There is a stillness to Pamela’s descriptions of herself at the time, almost as if she were frozen. Reading her account in her memoirs of the mothers who ‘lay awake’ at night and ‘listened’ to ‘the quiet sound of feet, the measured beat of soldiers going by, company after company’, thinking of what lay ahead, the sense is that she was speaking of her own experience.
³⁸

In this limbo, one of the most curious incidents of Pamela’s life took place. In October 1914, she wrote to Mary of ‘The adopted baby’: ‘very good and nice – as far as he goes’, in some ways even ‘better than [a baby] of my own … for one thing, it is such a relief … to be able to hear with perfect equanimity of a Baby having a rise of temperature!’ Joking aside, Pamela said, ‘he is a great solace. I love babies – I like their ways & their ridiculous hands, & perfect feet’, and he had ‘incidental value’ for her ‘in deflecting some of dear [Nanny] Trussler’s zeal from Stephen’.
³⁹
This is Pamela’s only letter to Mary mentioning this child, whose name was Oliver Hope.

Pamela had long had a habit of scooping up children. Bim’s ‘village boys’ were often more frequently at Wilsford than in their own homes. Pamela’s granddaughter, the author Emma Tennant, has recounted her surprise on hearing from an elderly villager that her grandmother had ‘adopted four children in all: Mary and Tossie and Roger’, in addition to Oliver.
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In Pamela’s relatively few surviving letters to Eddy, she mentions at least two instances of taking in a child when their parents could not cope – the bigamous curate’s son,
⁴¹
and
after the war a small South African girl whose mother, abandoned by her husband, was struggling to maintain her family and hold down her job at the War Office.
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Oliver was different. He was the only one of Pamela’s patchwork assortment of strays who actually lived full-time at Wilsford, and the only one left an annuity in her will – £50 per annum.
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Wilsford School – which Oliver attended briefly from summer 1918 to winter 1919 – records in its register his birth date as 7 July 1912, meaning he was just over two when he was adopted.
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The official story, insofar as there is one, is that Oliver was the son of a ‘tinker woman’ named Hope who died giving birth in Salisbury Infirmary.
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A search for boys born to a woman of that name between 1910 and 1915 yields no results in the England and Wales birth registers. While it is not impossible that the birth simply escaped registration (particularly in a Gypsy community), the hospital element makes a record more likely. It adds to the mystery surrounding this child, whose very name sounds like a fairytale, and whose story peters out into a welter of rumour. He entered the Merchant Navy at a very young age (either running away, or being sent by Christopher, according to who is telling the story),
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and then disappeared so effectively that most of Pamela’s descendants did not know of his existence.
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The surmise, by Emma Tennant, is that round-faced, dark-haired Oliver, similar in looks to both Bim and Pamela, was in fact Bim’s illegitimate son, from a fling with an artist’s model when he was little more than fifteen,
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already very good looking and advanced for his years.
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While unproven, it is entirely plausible that Pamela would have scooped up her son’s illegitimate child. A decade on, she tried to do exactly that with an illegitimate daughter born to her son David with the actress Hermione Baddeley.
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The timing – taking on this child exactly as Bim faced danger – may be coincidental, but it lends force to the supposition.

In September, when the war was barely a month old, Perf Wyndham was ‘shot
dead
through the head’,
⁵¹
leading his men on a charge out of a wood at the battle of the Aisne. ‘How
glorious
the death is,’ said Mananai, ‘
no
suffering, no
knowing
he must die.’
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Bim echoed these sentiments in a poem that Pamela distributed to all the family:

Balfour heard the news from an acquaintance while lunching at the Travellers Club. He waited to see confirmation in the casualty lists published daily in
The Times
before writing to Mary. ‘We live in the perpetual knowledge that our friends are in hourly peril … and we bear the news [of their deaths] as best as we can,’ he said.
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In those early days, when death was still a shock, not yet a near inevitability, it was strangely easy to believe in its heroic glamour. Cynthia Asquith later wondered how she had mourned these losses so intensely while still swallowing ‘the rather high-faluting platitude that it was all right for them – that they were not to be pitied, but were safe, unassailable, young, and glamorous for ever’.
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Mary found it difficult from the start. After hours writing to her family in sorrow and loss over Perf’s death, she wrote to Arthur last of all, with ‘a pen made of lead’, unable to dissemble further:

it doesn’t seem like sending youths to war, it seems more like a shambles … despite one’s feelings of pride that they should ‘die in their glory’ the lads that will never grow old … there are times when the feeling of ‘exaltation’ ebbs and fades away and leaves one feeling utterly blank and flat and miserable and grim. It seems such a sickening waste …
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