The Scarlet Nightingale

by Alan Titchmarsh

  That particular Sunday, a warm and sunny end-of-summer’s day, had hardly seemed a suitable day to declare war. In Rosamund’s mind, war meant winter – grey skies, rain, snow, sleet and slithering rivers of mud – not blue skies and birds singing.

  Air raid sirens had sounded that night and Celine was convinced that they would be ‘bombed to bits’ if they did not immediately take to the air raid shelter. Rosamund was torn; her aunt refused to budge from Eaton Square – ‘I would rather die alone in my house than in some ghastly underground shelter with the heaving masses of humanity,’ she explained, momentarily forgetting her usual dictum that all men were equal under the Lord. Rosamund stayed with her. There were no planes growling overhead that night, and no explosions. It would be the best part of a year before ‘the phoney war’ came to an end and the first bomb fell on London.

  There were compensations, though at first Rosamund found it hard to regard them as such.

  ‘Today we visit Mr Hartnell,’ her aunt informed her.

  ‘Who is Mr Hartnell?’

  Celine giggled, eavesdropping on the conversation between Venetia and her niece as she tidied away the newspapers and magazines in the drawing room.

  ‘Celine knows, but then Celine keeps a weather eye on those magazines she is sorting out,’ said Aunt Venetia with mock asperity. ‘Mr Hartnell is a dressmaker – a couturier,’ she added with a nod to Celine. ‘And rather a good one.’

  ‘He makes dresses for the Queen,’ added Celine, clearly impressed.

  ‘And you need a new dress?’ asked Rosamund of her aunt.

  ‘No, my dear. You need several.’ She noticed her niece’s surprised expression. ‘There is no need to look like that. He won’t hurt you. It is quite a painless process; you might even come to enjoy it. It is time you had your first ballgown.’

  ‘Ballgown!’

  ‘Goodness me, the girl has ears. Yes; ballgown. You’ll need more than one but we can start slowly. And you’ll need some daywear as well.’

  ‘But what’s wrong with the clothes I have? They are perfectly serviceable – and comfortable.’

  Venetia looked heavenwards and then threw a glance at Celine. ‘You have been too good at your job, Celine. My niece has a sense of rural frugality that does her credit. Alas, it will not wash in London society.’ She turned again to Rosamund. ‘Celine can come with us; she has an eye for these things.’ Venetia winked at Celine, who looked as though such excitement might actually cause her to burst. ‘Ooh-la-la!’ she murmured, and Rosamund laughed at her pantomime expression, at the same time nervous of the implications. Ballgowns and daywear. She really would have to behave like a grown-up now.

  I suppose I had begun to be seduced by ‘the bright lights of London’, which, it seemed, were about to be extinguished just as I had come to enjoy them. And I did enjoy them – even though I never expected to. At first, when Aunt Venetia would take me to some couturier to have a fitting for a smart two-piece suit, or a ballgown – a ballgown! I had never dreamt of such a thing – I would be embarrassed and annoyed at such a pointless waste of money. But, rather to my surprise, I began to enjoy myself in the brief twelve months of peace that remained before the outbreak of war. I was, after all, an eighteen-year-old girl, and eighteen-year-old-girls – most of them at least – are rather captivated by fashion.

  I determined before very long that as this was the life I had been plunged into as a result of circumstances beyond my control, I had better make the most of it. The events of 1938 had convinced me that nothing would or could last forever. If ever anyone had been made aware of the wisdom of that Latin phrase Carpe diem it was yours truly, Rosamund Hanbury, at the age of seventeen.

  Aunt Venetia must have been secretly delighted. She was clever enough to offer tantalising glimpses of a way of life that only an ungrateful wretch would have turned his or her back on. I might not have approved of all its excesses, but I convinced myself that I deserved a little light relief after the loss of both my parents – and the house and the land that I so loved – and for the time being, I would throw caution to the wind and enter into the spirit of things.

  At first I was relatively circumspect. I insisted that my clothing – although fashionable – should also be practical. I could see the barely-suppressed smile on my aunt’s face when she took me for fittings, and when Mr Hartnell in his smart pinstripe suit and exquisitely furnished salon in Bruton Street would look me up and down and scratch his chin before saying to my aunt, ‘I think we have just the fabric, Lady Reeves.’ He was a charming, polite gentleman, but I found those early fittings to be enormously intimidating. Here, after all, was the man responsible for dressing our new queen. Elegant, slender young women would sweep up and down in front of us in the most glorious gowns that I felt I could never carry off. But I did grow a little, and eventually managed to look quite passable, I think.

  I was taken to a Mayfair salon to have my hair properly styled – my long, fly-away blonde locks cut shorter and curled at the ends. I remember coming back and staring at myself in the looking-glass, realising that as well as cutting off my hair, I had somehow cut off my previous life. The person who gazed back at me had a seeming degree of sophistication that I found hard to reconcile with what I knew to be inside. I wore silk stockings – a strange sensation after bare feet or thick woollen socks. Thanks to Celine’s encouragement, I also took to poring over fashion magazines – Vogue, McCalls and Harper’s Bazaar – even the society pages of my aunt’s newspapers. I might not have approved of all such goings-on, but it captured my imagination, this hitherto unknown tableau of life, which in Devonshire, I barely knew existed.

  Celine watched as I tried on my new clothes in front of the looking glass. That was the one thing that convinced me to make the most of this new life – the thrill and the pure joy that Celine evinced not only in watching me wear the creations of Mr Hartnell and Victor Stiebel, but her own pleasure in handling them. It was as if she, too, had been allowed to spread her wings and fly – no longer confined to caring for the workaday attire of country folk whose idea of dressing up was a floral dress kept for the weekend. My guilt at such extravagances was tempered by Celine’s pure delight and the sparkle in her eyes when she asked me to walk up and down in front of her wearing a new day or evening dress. She would clasp her hands to her mouth and murmur, ‘Mon dieu! C’est parfait!’

  It was all part of a transformation of a kind, but one that I was determined would not erase ‘the real me’, for I remained loyal to what I like to think was an innate sense of justice and down-to-earth common sense.

  Once I had got over my initial lack of confidence, I would go with Aunt Venetia to visit her friends – other fashionable women who would chew over the latest topics of conversation – some unspeakably frivolous, others of national importance – and bit by bit I began to know my own mind, courtesy of a wide range of opinions that came my way, as disparate as they were colourful.

  I had little time for gossip – not least because I knew so few of the individuals in question – but gradually, as the principal players in my aunt’s circle became more familiar, I began to differentiate between idle, unfounded chit-chat and well-informed opinion. I soon learned whose thoughts and judgements I valued and whose I could ignore as ill-founded speculation. Occasionally I would be asked for my own view on a particular person or situation, and took care to think before giving an answer. I was not at all sure if my own opinions were really of any interest or importance to my aunt’s friends, or if they were simply being polite in including me in their conversation. To this day I am uncertain.

  In the evening we would most often dine in. There were supper parties, usually for six or eight, for Aunt Venetia maintained that larger numbers would split the table into factions which precluded her from understanding all that was going on. It is something I have come to believe in and practise myself. More frequently – and certainly once the bombs began to fall – we would dine alone; my aunt and I discussing the events of the
day in much the same way as Celine and I did each morning.

  Dear Celine; what would I have done without her? Like me, she took some time to recover from the shock of my parents’ sudden death, but eventually she formed her own circle of friends in London – most of them connected to the social circle of my aunt – dressers and lady’s maids, of which there were still a few around before the outbreak of war. And in the grander households, a skeleton staff would hold the fort even when conscription came in and many of the men joined up.

  Celine’s duties were not arduous. I think Aunt Venetia considered that she had done quite enough work bringing me up; now she was acting as my confidante and companion. Her duties around the house at Eaton Square were quite light – arranging flowers and helping lay the table for dinner – so she had a degree of freedom which allowed her to act as a French teacher to several of Aunt Venetia’s friends’ daughters. She would go round to their houses of an afternoon and come back to regale me with stories of how slow to learn her new charges were, and how their accents were simply execrable. ‘Do you know, one of them said to me, “Daddy says it is important that my accent is not too good because that way it helps to keep the Froggies in their place”? I ask you. The very nerve of it. I had to bite my lip. Zut!’

  In our private conversations we invariably spoke in French, not least because in some way that seemed to make them more private, more intimate. But, for all our closeness, I could sense that Celine was beginning to keep a respectful distance between us. I had a feeling that although we had grown up together, and could say almost anything to one another, she knew that we were becoming different. We inhabited the same universe, but were in different orbits. In Devonshire we seemed to be cut from the same cloth; now there was a kind of divergence between us which, although unspoken, was mutually acknowledged. But along with this grew a determination on my part that we would not become too distanced from one another. Celine, I knew, was concerned that she should not hold me back; her reticence was one based on affection for me and a desire to avoid standing in my way. I feel a certain wistfulness about this, for it seems that Celine looked upon me as though I were like Wendy growing up and leaving Peter Pan and his childish exploits behind. Not that there was anything childish about Celine, apart from a lifelong love of jam sandwiches, which she never lost …

  On those evenings before war was declared, when Aunt Venetia and I dined out, she would whisk me off with her to The Ritz, or Quaglino’s, where we would enjoy supper with a couple of her friends – most usually a husband and wife, such as the royal courtier Sir Basil Flynn and his wife, or Lord and Lady Belgate who had a large estate in Somerset and an imposing house in Belgrave Square.

  The ‘country mouse’ began to turn into a young lady who could ‘hold her own at the dinner table’ as Aunt Venetia would say, so much so that on occasion she would look in my direction and clear her throat gently, implying in her own subtle way that I had said quite enough for the time being. But those occasions were rare, and I think that for the most part she was quite proud of the way that her charge was opening up – rather after the fashion of a rose in the sunshine. Sometimes, when I was declaiming rather too passionately, I would catch her out of the corner of my eye, smiling and checking the reaction of her friends as they listened to me expressing my feelings on subjects upon which ‘nice young ladies’ were not really expected to have opinions.

  The most dramatic event of those early years of the war was the evacuation of Dunkirk. It created in us a mixture of pride and despair, if you can understand that contradiction. In late May and early June of 1940, the Germans advanced on the Allied forces and pushed them across northern France towards the English Channel, forcing the British Expeditionary Force into the sea. Day after day we listened to the news on the wireless, our hearts in our mouths for fear of what might happen to ‘our boys’.

  What could have been a complete disaster was averted by the arrival, not only of naval vessels to pick up the evacuees, but also around 700 ‘little ships’ – all kinds of craft, from steam packets and fishing smacks to tiny pleasure boats – that set out from England to rescue our soldiers. There were many fatalities, of course, but over the space of eight days more than 300,000 Allied troops were saved. It made us feel that even those of us who had not enlisted were able to do something for the war effort. Celine found the whole operation heartbreaking, for the land she thought of as home was now totally in the hands of the German army. It made her, if anything, even more patriotic.

  Once I had turned eighteen, and when I had quite clearly proved that I was capable of standing on my own two feet, my aunt announced that it was time I enjoyed the company of people my own age. There were places I could go with ‘the young’ – the sons and daughters of her society friends. These were respectable young men and women who would ‘know the ropes’, as she put it, and who would be more likely than some of her own intimates to introduce me to the intricacies of the life that I was now expected to lead. The Café de Paris was a favourite watering hole for the sons and daughters of society. The champagne was good – if pricey – the food delicious, and the music of the very best.

  Until that point I had never fallen in love. How quickly that was to change.

  Chapter 5

  LONDON

  JULY 1940

  ‘London is a modern Babylon.’

  Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred, 1847

  ‘Shall we?’

  Rosamund looked up to see Harry Napier smiling and holding out his hand. The band at the Café de Paris had struck up a popular Cole Porter number – ‘Begin the Beguine’ – and Harry was a good dancer. Rosamund smiled back, took Harry’s hand and followed him to the dance floor. His arm was round her waist and his cheek thrillingly close to hers. She had known him (from afar at least) for just a few months – quite long enough to fall madly in love. She hadn’t thought he’d even noticed her properly. She felt herself blushing as he steered her gently round the dance floor.

  ‘Do you like Cole Porter?’ he asked.

  Rosamund nodded.

  ‘Me too.’

  Rosamund felt her throat tightening. This was the first time that Harry had ever asked her to dance. Normally it would be the rather eager Billy Belgate who asked her. Billy was a sweet, stocky lad who was good fun in a brotherly kind of way with his blond curls and smiley eyes – ‘Come along, Ros, old girl,’ he would say, ‘let’s trip the light fantastic’ – and he would whisk her around the floor, his patent leather shoes glinting in the spotlights. But Harry was something else – tall, dark and brooding, he could melt a girl’s heart with the raise of his eyebrow.

  Billy, the son of Lord and Lady Belgate – Aunt Venetia’s friends – had been charged with looking after Rosamund and introducing her to a group of people her own age – mainly the sons and daughters of the nobility. He was a nice young man, given to bursts of enthusiasm about jazz and the latest fashions, but he was not Rosamund’s idea of the perfect match. Not that her aunt was in any way matchmaking; simply making sure that her niece was well integrated into London society. Harry Napier was a part of that set but seemed always to be standing on the edge of it, rather bemused by the often raucous excesses of his friends. She had hardly spoken to him, let alone danced with him, and he always seemed to be coupled with a girl called Henrietta who barely gave Rosamund a second glance.

  ‘So how are you enjoying it? London, I mean.’ Harry’s voice had a velvety quality, but there was a naturalness about him which Rosamund found captivating. There were other men in ‘the set’ who were bristling with self-confidence: ladykillers of the first order. But Harry was different. He might have been tall (six feet three inches), dark (a full head of rich, lustrous hair) and handsome (a long face with a firm mouth and a square jaw; his eyes green and his smile … melting) but it was his total lack of self-awareness that Rosamund found so engaging. Of course, the fact that he was good-looking and that every girl in the room seemed to glance at him or go out of her way to brush past him, di
d help to give him a certain magnetic quality.

  ‘I think I’ve got used to it,’ Rosamund replied. She noticed the envious glances from other girls around the floor and blushed slightly.

  ‘Not your scene really then?’

  ‘It wasn’t. But … well … here I am and I might as well get used to it.’

  ‘That sounds a bit resigned. Does it bore you?’

  Rosamund was suddenly aware that she might have sounded rude, ungrateful even. She stammered out, ‘No! No, not at all. It’s just that it is so different from Devonshire. From life on a farm. But I think I’m beginning to enjoy it.’

  ‘Good.’

  The music’s lilt set her heart beating faster, and the gentle pressure of Harry’s hand in the small of her back left her feeling sure that he must feel it through the fabric of her dress.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we’d better make the most of it. I fear it won’t last.’

  ‘It’s been awfully quiet so far,’ responded Rosamund.

  ‘It may have been quiet here, but it’s hotting up in Europe. I fear we’ll be next.’

  ‘You think so?’