Those Wild Wyndhams

by Claudia Renton

  In her own published works after the war Pamela maintained that the conflict had been glorious. ‘War … meant for Bim Romance,’ she wrote. ‘He had been playing at it, and dreaming of it, and writing about it … now it was his, and it brought him freedom, and self-expression, and joy … it was this that met him on the threshold of manhood, something as great as this. Not only illusive pleasure and the empty tyranny of little things …’78 If her private façade differed, it was only that Pamela did not engage with the war at all: not the munitions crisis; the changeovers in power; or the failings of the generals. She kept aloof, within her own world, frozen until her son came back.

  Both Yvo – ‘a joy-dispenser’, said Cincie79 – and Bim were part of a frenetic youth, squeezing out every moment of their lives. Pamela recalled that time as days of ‘colour and purpose’ for Bim,80 bombing around town in a two-seater crammed with people;81 arriving at Queen Anne’s Gate in a flurry of hairdressers, tailors, buttonholes of white gardenias ‘in silver-foil and cotton wool’, telephone ringing off the hook as he made plans for the next dance, the next dinner, the next play.82 They attended parties thrown by the American George Gordon Moore, nicknamed the ‘Dances of Death’, dancing all night to jazz and Hawaiian bands, fuelled by ‘rivers of champagne’ and surrounded by ‘mountains of red and white camellias’, believing, as Iris Tree, another Coterie member, wrote, that there was ‘something of myth and legendary revival, the glory of Greece, the grandeur of Rome’ in their antics.83 By night Diana Manners and Raymond Asquith’s wife Katharine doped themselves on morphine and ‘chlorers’ (chloroform).84 The Coterie’s brittle vivacity and grim humour appalled Cincie. ‘I’m sure there is an insidiously corruptive poison in their minds … I don’t care a damn about their morals and manners, but I do think … their anti-cant is really suicidal to happiness,’ she said. But Cincie was unusual in her sympathy for her parents’ generation, who were ‘an object of ridicule’ to the Coterie.85

  Time took on double speed. Within a space of ten months two of Mananai’s daughters, Sibell and Madeline Adeane, clad in silk charmeuse and lacy veils progressed up the aisle towards a khaki-clad groom in St Peter’s Church, near Babraham.86 Nineteen-year-old Clare Tennant married Adrian Bethell, an officer she had met barely weeks before in 1915. She was divorced, and remarried to Lionel Tennyson, before the war was out. Margot complained to Pamela that the young were ‘uncultivated’ and immodest. Pamela defended them:

  I think the ‘young females’ of the present day as a whole have shown good quality. They have set to work & they go cheerfully without the gaieties of the world, which at 17 & 18 are, or might be looked on, as their right. Clare & her particular little world are exceptional, thank goodness, & she has a certain little exuberance of folly & [irreverence] of nature that must bubble to the top, like scum on ham.87

  In July 1915, worn out by his exertions, Bim came down to Wilsford on sick leave. He stayed for a fortnight, quietly recuperating. Pamela read aloud to her convalescent son. ‘Seeing him there again,’ she said, ‘among all the serene flowing of the currents of home life … it seemed to his Mother as if there must be some mistake, there could be no War … this must be the Summer Holidays, just beginning …’88 She took the opportunity to update the weight chart on which she recorded her family’s growth: Bim, David, Kit, Gan-Gan (for Madeline Wyndham was staying with the family at the time), Eddy (a mere 9 stone 8 pounds, the same weight as Madeline Wyndham), Roly, the family dog, and at the bottom, ‘Oliver – 2st 4lb’.89

  A month later, Bim was specially selected to serve at the Front, despite being just eighteen. Edward Grey was honest with Eddy Tennant: ‘The selection of Bimbo … is a great honour & compliment but a great trial for you & Pamela. There is no way out of the trial & I pray that all may be well.’90 The drumbeat was growing ever faster with George Vernon, Guy Wyndham’s elder son George, Julian and Billy Grenfell, Violet Rutland’s son John Manners and Charles Lister, son of the Ribblesdales, all among the recent dead. Bim left for France barely a week later, with a photograph of Pamela in his breast pocket. Less than a month after that, Mary suffered the same blow. She had stayed in London to be with Yvo, whose leave had been cancelled. In the late afternoon, Yvo, ‘dog-tired’, took himself to bed for a nap. Mary went to see Evelyn de Vesci for tea. When she got back to Cadogan Square at about 7, Yvo answered the door. Still in his ‘flame-coloured, Turkish’ dressing gown, his hair tousled with sleep, he held a scrap of paper in his hand. ‘I’ve got my warning,’ he said ‘in a voice tense with suppressed excitement’. All Mary could think was how young her son looked. She telephoned Evelyn. ‘Don’t let him out of your sight,’ said Evelyn, ‘not even for a moment.’91

  The young officer: a charcoal of Bim in khaki, by John Singer Sargent.

  Plans were made for a fleeting visit to Gosford, where the rest of the family were making a last visit before the house shut up for the duration of the war; that summer, Connor the agent had made it clear that this was the only way to meet death duties on Lord Wemyss’s estate, and that it was ‘out of the question’ to attempt ‘living in two houses’.92 The night that Mary and Yvo were due to leave, London was cast into confusion by a Zeppelin raid. Mary was dining with Arthur when ‘the row’ began. ‘I am responsible, and the guns are quite inadequate,’ said Arthur.93

  Zeppelins were still an awesome and eerie novelty, their strange beauty illuminated by the copper glow cast across the sky by flaming buildings and the boom of the defensive guns. King’s Cross Station was pitch black and plunged into confusion as Mary waited for Yvo, who had been at the theatre with friends.94 They missed the sleeper, managing to get on a train that left at 4.55 a.m. Yvo slept on the train. Mary could not. ‘[H]e looked so white and still,’ she later recalled, ‘and though I said to myself, he is still safe, he is still alive and under my wing, yet all the time as I watched him sleeping so peacefully there lurked beneath the shallow safety of the moment a haunting dreadful fear, and the vision of him, lying stretched out cold and dead.’95

  They were at Gosford for just hours – arriving late afternoon and leaving at eleven that night. The party was avid for details of the ‘Zep’ raid. Angela Forbes asked Yvo whether he had been scared. ‘Not a bit, after all why should one be presumptuous enough to imagine one would be killed?’ Angela thought the reply typical of Yvo: ‘he was born with the rare gift of seeing things in perspective’.96 That afternoon, Yvo went for a walk with Mary Charteris in the woods. The two were close as twins, and Yvo could speak to Mary more frankly than anyone. ‘You know I probably shan’t come back?’ he said. ‘Oh don’t say that!’ she replied. They both knew the odds97 – as everyone there did, and the atmosphere of forced gaiety could not conceal it. ‘Poor Bibs looked too desperately miserable, never taking her eyes off his face,’ said Cincie. That night she slept with her little sister in their mother’s bed.98 Recollecting Yvo’s brief visit Angela Forbes later spoke of the ‘Spartan’ courage of parents ‘who did nothing to thwart the enthusiasm of their boys’.99 It epitomizes how insensitive Angela could be. For, short of pulling strings to get them out of combat and into a staff position – which would be considered a dishonourable and deplorable dereliction of one’s patriotic duty – there was nothing these parents could do to stop their sons going.

  Almost before Mary knew it, the day of Yvo’s departure came. His train was scheduled to leave at 8.30 a.m., and they had a hurried, early breakfast at Cadogan Square, before making their way through the crisp autumn morning to Charing Cross. The station was a scrum, packed with English and Belgian soldiers, nurses in their starched white uniforms, luggage underfoot, and friends and family hanging over barriers to see their loved ones off. There Guy Charteris joined them, and friends of Yvo’s, including the ‘hell-kitten’ and Coterie member Nancy Cunard. Yvo’s kitbag was stuffed so full that they had had to stand on it to squash it all in, and his mess-tin was crammed with coffee, sugar and tea. In the mêlée, Mary spotted a doctor she knew. ‘I flew to him and
said “Yvo is here,”’ she recalled. ‘Dr. Atkyns spoke most kindly and said I was to tell Yvo to go to him if he was ill or if he wanted anything.’100 Mary was entrusting her tall fair son, still just eighteen, to the care of anyone she could find. Just before Yvo stepped up into the carriage, ‘he took out of his pocket the grenade [the ornamental badge worn by the Grenadiers] off his uniform, which was taken off when the less conspicuous ones were put on, and thrust it into my hand’.

  Mary stood among the waving throng, her arms hanging by her sides, the grenade clutched in her hand, and watched the train move slowly off amid clouds of steam. As the train picked up pace, the other officers in Yvo’s carriage crowded to the windows to wave goodbye. For a moment Yvo was lost from sight. Then, wrote Mary, ‘Yvo leapt high into the air,’ allowing Mary ‘one more last glimpse of his beloved face’.101

  THIRTY

  The Front

  Madeline Wyndham spent the war shuttling between Clouds, Stanway, Babraham and Wilsford to stay with her four surviving children; ‘the anxiety is almost more than I sometimes can bear … all those that I love best in the world Mary, Guy, Madeline & Pamela all & each one on the rack of anxiety & of torture of heart & mind …,’ she wrote to Wilfrid Blunt in October 1915, shortly after Yvo’s departure.1 That spring, Mary had visited Clouds, arriving with Guy Wyndham to find their mother ‘waiting in the dusky hall; her darling eyes as big as an owl’s with anxiety. Two telegrams lay waiting, she had watched them for hours without daring to open them, they were of no importance but I realized from the gulp in Guy’s throat, after he had read them, what a strain it is nowadays to get a telegram.’2

  Half a century later and in a different world, Tommy Lascelles, a Coterie member who considered the Charteris and Tennant families ‘the salt of my earth’,3 wrote a cautionary note to his grandsons:4

  If you read any of my war letters, you may feel that it wasn’t as bad as it has been painted. Don’t get that idea. In our letters, most of us deliberately omitted references to the many horrors and cruelties of war – to the dreadful sights one saw, to the hideous discomforts one had to endure, and the never-ending pain of the casualty lists. Such things were, obviously, better not talked about to friends who understood them well enough; but they were there all right. So in letters home, one tried to recount only the lighter happenings, which, thank God, were there too.5

  To Yvo and Bim, war at first still did seem really like a great game. Yvo wrote to his family of having ‘one’s legs swung onwards by a thousand singing men’ on night marches, and forays under darkness across no man’s land to look at the German trenches returning with puttees torn from the barbed wire.6 He joked that, like a child waiting for Christmas, he could not wait for the cold weather to require him to use his new waterproof kit. He met up with Bim for ‘tea’, and the cousins compared notes on their experiences thus far, enjoying the contents of the hampers from Fortnum & Mason (‘the soldiers’ twin saints’, said Bim) that Pamela sent her son along with almost daily letters.7

  For the first month in France, Bim, known to his men as ‘the Boy Wonder’, was well behind the lines of combat, digging trenches and learning how to set traps out of barbed wire. ‘It is rather fun making these entanglements and imagining the Germans coming along in the dark and falling over these things and starting to shout whereupon you immediately send up a flare … and turn a machine gun on to them as they struggle in the wire. It sounds cruel, but it is War,’ he wrote to his thirteen-year-old brother David in September.8

  Yvo likened war to a fairground. The German rockets were ‘as good as any Roman Candles I have seen on the 4th of June’, he said.9 But it was a grotesque hall of mirrors that he evoked when he wrote to Cynthia from the ruins of Vermelles after a three-day stint in the trenches near Loos. A shell had landed on his billet that morning, almost burying him with falling earth and brickwork; and the town itself was little more than rubble. ‘I think one of the effects of this war will be that people will give up their feelings for ruins, qua ruins … there will be no more parties to Wardour Castle from Clouds,’ he predicted. He had a good mind to buy up the whole town and turn it into an amusement park like London’s White City: ‘with flying-boats from the ruined shaft-heads – a maze made out of the trenches and rifle-ranges with dummy Huns peeping from the windows and ruined walls – shells filled with chocolate bursting at intervals throughout the grounds. I shall lay the suggestion before George [Gordon] Moore.’10

  The devastation of the landscape had shocked Charlie Adeane when he visited France that summer in his capacity as Honorary Treasurer of the Royal Agricultural Society, investigating how agriculture in war-ravaged areas might be restored. The blasted landscape was even more desolate than he had anticipated. What shells had failed to bring to rubble, the Germans had burnt. Charlie found villages deserted, only a few survivors living underground or huddled in the corners of a ruin. ‘The marvel is that cultivation should be carried on,’ he said, describing the sight of old men, women and children stoically loading carts and driving reapers through fields in which ‘the soldiers’ red kepis [caps] hang on wooden crosses … where they fell, and show like red poppies above the corn’. In a sun-bleached landscape, Charlie found himself outside a small church, almost the only building left standing, listening to the lusty singing of a congregation of French soldiers within. The service ended, the men streamed out, surrounding Charlie and his companions, while the shout rang out ‘Mort aux Boches!’11

  The trenches were still worse. Trench life was ‘an exact inversion of what is natural to man,’ said Yvo.12 Men lived underground, worked through the night, and slept, with interruptions for meals, at what intervals they could during the day.13 Their hours were punctuated by the sickening boom of shellfire (‘an incomparably dreary sound, rather human – as though it loathed its mission’) and the sinister death-rattle of machine guns.14 Yvo, who turned nineteen while he was at the Front, was a platoon commander, the lowest officer’s rank. He, like most, had already grasped the disparity between the shallow, stinking, swampy Allied trenches and those of the enemy. ‘The Germans have dug-outs 27 feet deep, with a long periscope going up the trench with a machine-gun run up and down on a winch and fired by means of a periscope at the bottom (at least so they tell me), so they don’t stand to lose many men, even in a bombardment,’ he told Cincie. He had also grasped the essential futility of trench warfare. ‘I don’t see that there is any military advantage in the line being a mile nearer Berlin, unless a gap is made through which troops can be poured to stop the enemy establishing himself in a second line,’ he said.15 ‘This war … seems weary of its own melodrama and does not know how to give up.’16

  Still, ten days later, when Yvo was ordered to rally his men, holed up in a shallow trench, into a fresh – and clearly suicidal – attack, he did not demur. He led his men ‘over the top’ and died in a fusillade of bullets: instantly, so his commanding officer said.17 He had been at the Front for not quite five weeks. Bim heard the rumour of his cousin’s death the next day. ‘Osbert [Sitwell] and I are miserable about it, for no more lovable person ever stepped,’ he wrote to his mother, hoping against hope it might not be true.

  But Bim himself was holed up in a front-line trench, under heavy bombardment from shellfire. He had had no more than four hours’ sleep in seventy-two hours, and was sufficiently discomposed, as the ground around him shook and rumbled and debris showered over him, to allow his nerves to show, if only momentarily:

  I used to think I was fairly impervious to noise, but the crash upon crash, and their accompanying pillar of black smoke simply upset me, as they pitched repeatedly within 30 or 40 yards, and some even nearer. I don’t think I showed I was any more frightened than anyone else. Perhaps I wasn’t … I was very glad to get a letter from Daddy which seemed cheerful about the war. Please thank him for it …18

  Bim appears to have been entirely unconscious of the irony of this juxtaposition.19

  The news of Yvo’s death reached his fami
ly the next day. Hugo’s brother Evan Charteris, hearing the news at the War Office, had arranged that the Elchos be informed by telephone rather than telegram. It took Cincie several moments to comprehend the full import of the blurred voice at the other end of the receiver telling her the call was ‘about Yvo Charteris … you must be prepared for the very worst’.

  Cincie’s diary entry of that long, awful day records a family devastated: Bibs, huge-eyed, ‘petrified’ and disbelieving; Mary Charteris, for whom Yvo was ‘practically her life’, ‘frozen’ at her dressing table, ‘mechanically greasing’ her face with cold cream as she prepared to leave with Letty for Egypt the next day; ‘Poor Papa … most piteous – heartbroken and just like a child – tears pouring down his cheeks and so naively astonished … I think he really loved Yvo far the most of his children, and was so proud and hopeful about him’;20 and Mary, who had missed the telephone call while ‘closeted’ in confabulation with Sockie, Bibs’s governess, but guessed the news as soon as she saw Cynthia’s face. ‘… I think she really expected it … She was wonderful, quite calm after the first moment of horror. About five minutes afterwards she said something so sweet and natural, just what one feels when one is dazed: “What a bore!”’21

  Ego wrote to Mary from Egypt, a frank letter that acknowledged in bald terms what this war had become:

  Darling Mum,

  I have absolutely nothing to say. When your own mother and brother are concerned it is futile to talk about sympathy, and the one consolation for me is that – if any comfort is to be extracted, or if the best thought is of any use, which of course it is – your soul is big enough, large enough for that purpose … The only sound thing is to hope the best for one’s country and to expect absolutely nothing for oneself in the future. To write down everyone one loves as dead – and then if any of us are left we shall be surprised. To think of one’s country’s future and one’s own happy past. The first is capable of vast improvement – as for the second, when all is said and done, we were a damned good family. Qua family as good as Clouds … I am so awfully sorry for Papa who loved him … He must write his sons off and concentrate upon his grand-children who thank God exist …