Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

by Diana Souhami

  Summer manoeuvres ended when news came that Germany had invaded Belgium. The journey home, usually a matter of state cabins and leisurely farewells, was chaotic. The privileged class became ‘mere units of a struggling crowd, pushing and shoving to board the last boat back to England’. Mrs Keppel, still La Favorita, was allocated two cabins by the purser. In London the banks were shut and 16 Grosvenor Street closed with no food ready. George went to his club, the Marlborough, and Mrs Keppel and her daughters walked across Berkeley Square for boiled eggs, coffee and toast at the Ritz.

  War interrupted their lives. It put a stop to foreign travel, the casino in Monte Carlo, essential trips to Worth in Paris. It brought an unwelcome dimension of rationing, shortages, restrictions. It curtailed Violet’s flirtations with men. It was difficult to get engaged, however insincerely, between 1914 and 1918. For young men conscription was hard to avoid. Harold Nicolson was exempted on the grounds that his work as a civil servant was ‘indispensable’ but he was an exception. Conscripts died at a rate of 5600 a day. ‘It required’ Violet said, ‘superhuman courage to open a newspaper. George Vernon, Volley Heath, Patrick Shaw Stewart, Raymond Asquith, Bim Tennant, one after the other were struck down.’ First to go was Julian Grenfell, who only briefly wrote poems about the joys of battle. He had wooed Violet, Sonia said, with ‘poetry and pugilism’:

  He would arrive at Grosvenor Street dressed in an old sweater and crumpled grey flannel trousers with frequently a black eye, and, more than once, a split lip (having been boxing the night before).

  At a ball patronized by the royal family he locked himself in the ladies’ cloakroom with Violet. Once Sonia heard her calling for help from her sitting room at the top of the house. ‘His courtship was too spectacular,’ Violet wrote. ‘Father was infuriated by his dress, his recurrent black eye … Julian was banned … The war was imminent; he was one of the first to go. The war saw to it that we never met again.’

  George Keppel rejoined the army and was made a captain, then a major and sent to France. His weekly letters to Violet and Sonia detailed route marches, outdoor sports, kit inspections and parades. He did not mention the horrors of battle. He spent his fiftieth birthday in the trenches. Alice sent out a hamper from Fortnum and Mason. When it arrived rats had eaten the cake and delicacies packed in cardboard. He asked that in future she send tinned food.

  Mrs Keppel displayed support for the war effort but kept allegiance to her notions of civilized life. For about a month she did secretarial work at a hospital in Étaples run by Lady Sarah Wilson. Violet served in a canteen in Grosvenor Gardens – until fired for confusing cleaning powder and cocoa. Sonia served soup in Lady Limerick’s Canteen for Soldiers at London Bridge.

  Back in England Mrs Keppel rented a house at Watlington Park, Oxford, for weekends. It was a nice house, Osbert Sitwell said, with beautiful grounds and views of the Chilterns. And at Grosvenor Street she gave mid-week lunch parties for women friends, politicians and service chiefs. Winston Churchill, Henry Asquith ‘or some leading soldier like Sir John Cowans’ were among those attending these. ‘It was tacitly understood that the conversation should remain on a light level with the darker shades of war excluded from it.’

  But the dark shades of war were not entirely excluded. The bright colours of Bakst were eclipsed by the stark canvases of Paul Nash; the jingoism of Julian Grenfell was followed by the epitaphs of Wilfred Owen. When there were zeppelin attacks on London Violet and Sonia slept on camp beds in the drawing room among the Louis XV consoles and tapestry chairs, Persian carpets and Chippendale mirrors.

  George Keppel came home at Christmas 1915, his appearance altered, his shoulders rounded from crouching in the trenches. ‘Mamma did her best to entertain him,’ Sonia said. She invited pretty women to dinner, arranged theatre outings and games of bridge. But George seemed abstracted and found Grosvenor Street and armchair politics hard to bear. Men like him did not tell women how terrible this war was. ‘Even Mama stung him sometimes,’ Sonia wrote. He was irritated when she contradicted him then said, ‘Well after all Georgie darling, Winston told me so.’ He was most at ease with Sonia with whom he liked to sit in his living room in silence by the fire. ‘Is it awful at the Front, Papa?’ she asked him. ‘Not too good, Doey,’ he replied.

  They spent Christmas at Crichel but without the ritual exchange of Fabergé. Gerard Sturt, Lord and Lady Alington’s son, paralysed from the waist down from wounds inflicted in France, was a reminder that the halcyon days had passed. Never happy at Crichel he had wanted to leave but was now dependent on his family. On Christmas Day tension between him and his father was high. There were difficulties as to where his nurse should have her meals and because he had asked for his own sitting room. Lord Alington complained his wheelchair pulled tacks from the carpet and took up room at the dinner table.

  He stumbled over Gerard’s dog and in temper said,

  ‘You and your dog are nothing but a nuisance in this house.’

  ‘Then obviously the solution is for me and my dog to move elsewhere,’ Gerard replied.

  ‘Which I hope will be to us in Grosvenor Street,’ Alice said. ‘You can have your own sitting room and we can put up your nurse. As for you Humphrey you ought to go down on your knees and beg Gerard’s pardon. And then pick the rest of the tintacks out of your beastly carpet with your teeth.’

  Gerard moved to London to the house of a friend, Mrs Julie Thompson, not to Grosvenor Street. He died at Crichel from his wounds on Armistice Day, 11 November 1918.

  * * *

  In spring 1916 Mrs Keppel managed to get to Paris to buy clothes. For Sonia’s sixteenth birthday party she bought her a dress by Jean Lanvin of royal blue tulle edged in mink. She sent out invitations: ‘Mrs Keppel At Home 31 May 1916 Dancing 9.30’. The naval Battle of Jutland began that night. In a display of patriotism, she told the band to play the national anthem and the guests to go home.

  In August George was posted to Ireland to train soldiers. He found a house for the summer at Connemara for Alice, her brother Archie, Ida, Violet, Sonia. The morning bugle calls disturbed Alice’s sleep and she asked George to cut Reveille or have it an hour later. ‘There’s a war on, Freddie darling,’ he said (her middle name was Frederica), ‘and I’m not here to train the men to lie in bed.’

  A month later a telegram brought news of the death of the nineteen-year-old son of Ida and Archie. Archie went to bed. Mrs Keppel sent for George. Sonia sat with Ida who was embroidering something in greens, yellows and blues. In the hall they heard Alice say to George, ‘Poor Archie, poor darling Archie, luckily dear Ida doesn’t feel things like Archie.’ When Alice came into the sitting room Ida did not look up from her embroidery.

  To Quidenham, where the Keppel family motto was ‘Do not yield to misfortunes’, came news that Violet’s cousin Edward was killed at Ypres. Another cousin, Rupert, was for three years a prisoner of war.

  Violet saw little of Vita during the war, though sometimes they had tea together or went to a matinée. ‘At her own sarcastic request,’ she was godmother to Vita’s son Benedict. In late August 1916 Vita and Harold stayed at Watlington Park. In the party were Osbert Sitwell, Lady Lily Wemyss, Daisy de Brienen, the Hwfa Williamses, Lord Ilchester. They all played poker and games when it rained.

  Violet took drawing lessons at the Slade but seemed without direction. She was expected to marry but could not take the idea seriously. She found another unlikely fiancé – Osbert Sitwell. He had, she said, ‘a schoolboy adulation’ for her mother, who teased him because he adored her so:

  The idea of matrimony crept insidiously into our conversation. Everything to do with Osbert filled me with awe: his magnificent ancestral home, Renishaw, his dim and mysterious mother, his unknown ogre of a father … his fascinating but intimidating sister Edith who made me feel uncouth and ungraceful, his more accessible brother ‘Sachie’.

  Edith Sitwell, according to Violet, was sure the marriage would work.

  At Christmas Osbert Sitwell was
among the house guests at Polesden Lacey. Maggie Greville had turned the north and west side into a convalescent home for King Edward VII’s Hospital for Officers. She kept the rest for herself. From there Violet wrote to Vita of tangles with another man, too. She said she hated being at Polesden but her mother would not let her remain at Grosvenor Street when she herself was away. Osbert complained to Vita’s mother that he was ‘very unhappy’ about the way Violet treated him.

  Lady Sackville for her part was perturbed when all the male staff from Knole were called up. She asked Lord Kitchener to help:

  I think perhaps you do not realise, my dear Lord K, that we employ five carpenters and four painters and two blacksmiths and two footmen and you are taking them all from us! I do not complain about the footmen, although I must say that I had never thought I would see parlourmaids at Knole! I am putting up with them, because I know I must, but it really does offend me to see these women hovering round me in their starched aprons, which are not at all what Knole is used to, instead of liveries and even powdered hair! Dear Lord K., I am sure you will sympathise with me when I say that parlourmaids are so middle class, not at all what you and me are used to. But as I said that is not what I complain about. What I do mind is your taking all our carpenters from us. I quite see that you must send my dear Lionel to Gallipoli; and he would be very cross with me if he knew I had written to you. Of course all the gentlemen must go. There is noblesse oblige isn’t there? And you and I know that – we must give an example. You are at the War Office and have got to neglect your dear Boome which you love so much. I think you love it as much as I love Knole? And of course you must love it even more because the world says you have never loved any woman – is that true? I shall ask you next time I come to luncheon with you. But talking about luncheon reminds me of parlourmaids and I said I would not complain about them (because I am patriotic after all), but I do complain about the way you take our workmen from us. Do you not realise, my dear Lord K, that you are ruining houses like ours? After all there is Hatfield where Queen Elizabeth spent her time as a young princess, and that is historic too, just like Knole, and I am sure Lord Salisbury would tell you he was having frightful difficulties in keeping Hatfield going, just as we are having in keeping Knole. What can you do about it? It seems to me a national duty, just as important for us as keeping up the army and our splendid troop. I do admire them so much. Do help me all you can.

  She briefly offered Knole as a hospital ward but when five Belgians were assigned to her decided they were spies in German pay and that Knole would be bombed. She contacted the local police and had them taken away.

  Violet visited Long Barn and mocked the cosiness of the Tudor architecture – low ceilings, small leaded window panes, oak beams, sloping floors. Excluded and betrayed by Vita’s family life she denigrated it if she could. Here, married and committed to a man, was the girl to whom she had sworn to stay true, declared her love and given the doge’s ring. In June 1917, when Harold phoned her to say Vita could not go to a party, Violet ‘was so disappointed’. But she jumped at his suggestion that he should not go either. ‘Damn that little too too,’ he wrote to Vita, ‘it hates me and misses no opportunity of letting me down.’

  That summer Violet formed a new friendship. Pat Dansey lived with her elderly uncle Lord Fitzhardinge ‘a crochety ogre’ in Berkeley Castle, Gloucestershire, a medieval castle dating back to 1153. She weighed seven stone, had dark hair, a brittle manner and a stutter. Violet intrigued her by confiding her love of Vita. She invited Violet to the castle, allocated her the Blue Room, showed her the dungeon where Edward II was murdered, told her of how when young she would sit like a mouse in the Great Hall listening to her uncle and his cronies in their evening hunt clothes talking about vintage wines and playing whist. Violet liked the grandeur of Berkeley and its haunting sense of the past. Pat had formed a relationship with the Duke of Argyll’s granddaughter, Joan Campbell. This relationship was to last a lifetime and took on the closeness of marriage. But it did not preclude Pat’s interest in other women. She told Violet that she loved her and gave her photographs of herself. ‘I used to invent the most erotic pastimes to appeal to her taste,’ she said to Vita in later years.

  PART TWO

  Portrait of a Lesbian Affair

  TEN

  Mrs Keppel and her daughters moved as guests from stately home to country house as the war went its way. In April 1916 they were at Cassel’s seaside home at Branksome Dene, Bournemouth – ‘all chintz and white paint’, sea breezes and games of piquet. He was there with his sister and granddaughter Edwina – who in 1922 married Queen Victoria’s grandson, Louis Mountbatten. His only daughter Maudie had died in 1911.

  Despite the ‘old undercurrent’ Violet’s meetings with Vita were of the social sort appropriate to good friends. In March 1917 they went to a matinée at the Garrick theatre, in May they saw the Russian exhibition at the Grafton Galleries, in September Violet stayed at Long Barn and they went for walks together.

  In October Violet and her mother were at Coker Court near Yeovil, Somerset, a Tudor house owned by Dorothy Heneage who was rich, hypochondriacal and sympathetic to Violet. From her Violet heard that Vita intended renting out her Ebury Street house for the winter. She feared if that was so they would meet infrequently:

  I simply can’t get on without a periodical glimpse of radiant domesticity and you will become smug to an intolerable degree if the vagabond – what Dorothy calls ‘rackety’ – element as supplied by me, is indefinitely withheld from you. We mustn’t let it happen. We are absolutely essential to one another, at least in my eyes!

  She had she said ‘a sudden craving’ for Vita’s company. Her letter was at Lady Sackville’s Hill Street house when Vita returned with Harold from a weekend at Knebworth, Hertfordshire, the country estate of Lord Lytton, Parliamentary Secretary to the Admiralty. Guests included the portrait painter Sir John Lavery, Sir Edward Marsh MP, Sir Horace Rumbold, Ambassador to Switzerland, Sir Louis Mallet, Ambassador to Turkey, and Osbert Sitwell.

  The following week Harold sought treatment for a venereal infection caught from a male guest. From the Foreign Office he wrote to Vita in anxiety and distress. He warned if he had passed it to her she would need treatment. He feared they might have ‘a bloody time ahead’. The implication was that they had had sex together after he became infected. Afraid of her rejection he wrote of ‘untidy or crawly tadpoles’, the end of his bright sunlit world ‘like a searchlight going out’. ‘And I shall be left all alone and dim’. He asked her not to leave his anxious letters lying around and said nothing in the whole world mattered to him but her, ‘my whole soul, my darling’.

  Vita was in the clear. Harold’s doctor forbade him to have sex with her, even protected sex, for six months. He was disappointed. There was a holiday coming up and ‘it is a part of holiday isn’t it?’ By 20 April 1918 there would be no risk and the doctor was ‘frightfully opty about it not happening again’.

  Vita had pause for thought. Married four years, she had two children – Nigel was born in 1917 (a second son had been born dead in 1915) – Harold was ‘a sunny harbour’, their relationship ‘open, frank, certain’. She was pleased to be a mother, he was even more pleased to be a father. ‘We were in fact,’ she wrote in 1920, ‘a nice young couple to ask out to dinner.’

  Her desire for women was muted by marriage, she had no lovers, her life focused on writing, her house, garden, husband, family. Harold for his part had not told her about his sexual encounters with good-looking intelligent young men of his own class. They were boffes de gaîté, ‘a jolly vice’ and held no promise of commitment or obligation. But he must have felt some compulsion of desire for they were against the law. He was ambitious, a diplomat and not a man lightly to put at risk his career, civil liberty, marriage and social position. The ruin of Oscar Wilde in 1895 showed the destructive power of the law. Harold told Vita she was the only one he loved. He cherished his domestic life and hoped for a daughter to complete the uni
t. Neither he nor Vita wanted an airless marriage, they were independent of each other by circumstance and choice. But on the Knebworth weekend when he caught the clap, whatever the tactful disposition of bedrooms and brass-framed names on the doors, Vita was in a room in the same house.

  At the beginning of April 1918 Violet wrote again to Vita. She asked if she might come and stay at Long Barn. She hoped to travel by train to the Slade some mornings but was afraid of air raids in London after nightfall. Vita wanted to work but felt she could not refuse. Violet arrived on 13 April with an architect friend, ‘Bear’ Warre. Harold returned to town.

  Five days later on 18 April, two days before the six-month curfew on marital sex was through, Vita put on trousers of the sort issued to Land Army women for the war effort. She had bought them for gardening. Their effect prompted a symbolic liberation on a par with long hair for poets, earrings for gay waiters, cockatoo hairdos for punks,

  in the unaccustomed freedom of breeches and gaiters I went into wild spirits … in the midst of my exuberance I knew that all the old undercurrent had come back stronger than ever and that my old domination over her had never been diminished.

  Breeches, gaiters, undercurrents and domination had their way. Violet and she dined alone, talked until two in the morning, then kissed in the dark. Violet wore a red velvet dress ‘exactly the colour of a red rose’. Her skin was white, her hair tawny, she was, Vita wrote, ‘the most seductive being’. Vita confessed her ‘duality’, her gentle ‘feminine’ feelings for Harold, her rougher passionate feelings toward women. Violet talked of how she had loved Vita since childhood. She lay on the sofa, took Vita’s hands, parted her fingers and counted the points of why she loved her. ‘I hadn’t dreamt of such an art of love…’ Vita wrote. ‘I was infinitely troubled by the softness of her touch and the murmur of her lovely voice.’