Soon after Easter, George Dawson-Damer, brother of Fergus’s widow Christian, was killed. Elizabeth was shocked. ‘He was very nice, gay, good looking & very amusing. Its dreadful.’151 Bad news came even closer. On Thursday 3 May Lord Strathmore received a telegram at Glamis from the War Office to say that his son Michael was missing in northern France. He immediately telegraphed to Rose in London: ‘BAD NEWS. MICHAEL MISSING APRIL 28. WAR OFFICE WILL WIRE FURTHER NEWS. TELL MOTHER THEY SAY NOT MEAN NECESSARILY KILLED OR WOUNDED.’152
Michael was adored in the family, and for Elizabeth he had always been an admired and amusing elder brother.153 From Glamis she immediately wrote to Beryl, ‘I don’t know what to say, you know how we love Mike, and it would be so terrible if he’s killed. It’s horrid & selfish of me to write you a miserable letter, but I’m so unhappy, & added to that I cant help worrying about Mother in London. I thank the Lord that Rosie is there. It’s dreadful, and somehow I never thought Mike could get killed. If he’s all right, he must be, I’ll tell you. Your loving Elizabeth.’154 One can only imagine how Lady Strathmore must have suffered from this latest blow. But she knew how Elizabeth must also be feeling and wrote to her that very afternoon: ‘Isn’t this terrible news of darling Mikie – however Sidney has just been to the W. Office – with great difficulty was allowed to see the casualty lists – & in the R. Scots 16th Bat 2 officers were wounded, & nine missing, so that is all we can hear for the present – he may be a prisoner with the other 8, or they may all be killed. Goodbye sweet darling. I wish you were here.’155
Michael’s commanding officer, Colonel Stephenson, wrote to Lord Strathmore with more details: on 28 April Michael had been leading his company in an attack at the village of Roeulx, near Arras, when they were heavily counter-attacked. Some of the brigade’s troops were captured, but Stephenson did not know to which battalion they belonged.156 On 8 May he wrote again saying that there were reports from German prisoners that a considerable number of British troops had been surrounded and captured at Roeulx village. But there was still no news of who they were, and this would not be known until the lists arrived from Germany.157
Elizabeth found the waiting almost unbearable. ‘Somehow I never thought anything could happen to Mike,’ she wrote to Beryl; ‘everybody is so fond of him, but one forgets that doesn’t count in a War.’ Her mother was in a terrible state, she reported. Patrick was also at St James’s Square waiting for a medical board, and he too was in a bad way. She apologized for writing ‘such a depressed letter, and how I hope the next one will be mad & full of the usual rubbish. He [Mike] said in his last letter you know, “If I’m pipped, I think little John had better have my guns,” and so he knew they were going to have a bad time I suppose.’158 (John was Patrick’s son.) Feeling utterly wretched, Elizabeth took the train down to London on 7 May to be with her mother. By 12 May she was in bed with a temperature and a swollen face and neck, either one of her bad colds or perhaps, she thought, even measles.159
According to family legend, David was the only one who remained optimistic. He was thought to have some powers of second sight; he maintained, apparently, that he knew Mike was not dead because he had ‘seen’ him, in a house surrounded with fir trees, with his head bandaged.160 His sister’s anxious letters at this time make no mention of this, but if the story is true, David was proved right. On the morning of 22 May, the telephone rang at St James’s Square. It was Cox’s bank saying that they had just received a cheque drawn by Mike since he went missing. He was a prisoner of war. Elizabeth wrote at once to Beryl:
Ma Chère Medusa,
I’m quite and absolutely stark, staring, raving mad. Do you know why? Canst thou even guess? I don’t believe you can!
AM I MAD WITH MISERY OR WITH JOY?
WITH
!
!! JOY !!
!
Mike is quite safe! Oh dear, I nearly, nearly burst this morning, we had a telephone message from Cox’s to say they’de received a cheque from Mike this morning, so we rushed round, and it was in his own handwriting, & they think he’s at Carlsruhe. Isnt it too, too heavenly. I cant believe it, yes I can but you know what I mean, & how awful the last 3 weeks have been. Yours madly, Elizabeth161
A stream of friends and relations called at the house to give their congratulations on Mike’s survival. Barson, the devoted butler, naturally ‘had a good old bust-up in honour of Mike! Mosh (hic) aushpishush auccashun (hic). What o,’ Elizabeth wrote to Beryl as she lay in front of the fire drying her hair. She suggested they go to the theatre together to celebrate.162
Soon there came a postcard from Mike himself. Dated 4 May, it had taken over a month to be delivered. He wrote:
A postcard to let you know my address which is under my name. [It was the officers’ prisoner-of-war camp at Karlsruhe.] You can send me various things chiefly food, but I want an Auto-strop razor & lots of blades most of all. Did you get a letter from me? Got here last night after a long journey. I’ve arrived here with absolutely nothing except what I stand up in, but am getting a cheque cashed today. Nothing much to tell you of here I’m afraid but I hope I shall be able to write a letter shortly. Just going to have a bath, I’m perfectly filthy & a long beard. Love to all. Ideal Milk, butter & bread & tea would be good, also shirts, vests, drawers, socks, flannel trousers (grey). Mike163
Eventually Elizabeth received a long letter in Mike’s familiar bantering style, addressed to ‘My darling Buffy’ and written from a prisoner-of-war camp at Ströhen, Hanover. Two or three lines of it – apparently about the camp food – were heavily inked out by the censor. Mike hoped his sister was having a good time dancing with Captain Phillips and could remember all the steps of the foxtrot. Not surprisingly, food and drink were his main interest. He asked for a weekly supply of flour, dripping and baking powder to make scones, and also macaroni, Cadbury’s peppermint creams, plain chocolate and some cheap tobacco to roll his own cigarettes. He thought longingly of home: ‘PW must be heavenly now & I suppose the strawberries are ripe now. How I should love to be crawling flat on my stomach under a net! We don’t git no champagne, clarit, mosal or beeeer here wust look. I expect someone will censor that, at least I don’t suppose they will realise that it is Hertfordshire, and concerns wet things.’164
Mike received his first letters, from May and Elizabeth, at the end of June. ‘Great joy!’ To his consternation, however, the letters did not mention sending food.165 By August the message had got through: he wrote to say that he had received sixty-nine parcels.166 In September he was moved to comparative luxury at Neu Brandenburg, where he reported that he was able to bathe daily in a lake, and had a soft bed and a balcony;167 later he was transferred to Schweidnitz in Silesia. His letters to his mother show that Elizabeth continued to write to him with lively accounts of her social life, but her letters have not survived.168
On her return to Glamis in glorious weather in the middle of June 1917, Elizabeth found new patients – ‘sixteen strange shy enormous men’ lying on the lawn, she reported to Beryl. They politely saluted her and she talked to some of them at once, but she was more self-conscious than she had been when younger. ‘We are so mutually afraid of each other!’ The Clerk of the Forfar School Board had written to ask her to present medals and prizes at the school. She was terrified but her mother made it clear that it was her duty to agree. ‘I had to accept, and I know I shall die. It’s too dreadful, and the worst of it is, I KNOW Sister & the boys will want to come, oh it’s terrible. I dream, or rather have nightmares about it!’169 Beryl was evidently not much impressed with her nervousness and Elizabeth complained that she was ‘horribly unsympathetic … It’s too awful! Swine!’170 Afterwards she protested that she had been ‘petrified’. There were many speeches; ‘I, of course, made a long one, touching on many points including The Food Question, Education, Star Worship etc etc. It was greatly appreciated I assure you.’171
When she got to know the new soldiers, she liked them – as she usually did. Just one of them w
as ‘very good looking’. She was curious about people and was becoming more discriminating; she was meeting not only convalescent soldiers, but officers from the Dominions needing hospitality while on leave from the Front. As well as giving parties for Australian officers at St James’s Square, the Strathmores opened Glamis to them – and their Canadian and New Zealand counterparts. ‘One very “interesting” one yesterday,’ Elizabeth wrote. ‘That’s the only way I can describe him. Tall, blue eyes, very keen kind of face, clever & a terrific accent.’172 She was somewhat embarrassed by a New Zealander, Lieutenant J. B. Parker. ‘He is rather an old fashioned young man, & he paid me wonderful & weird compliments at all times.’ She asked him how he thought of so many polite things to say, and he replied that ‘he did’nt think of them, they came from his heart! I laughed. I could’nt help it! Poor young man – he’ll recover all right.’173
She was beginning to distinguish between men. ‘Its funny how dull some men are, whilst others are so interesting. On one hand a little pipsqueak, with pink cheeks & a toothbrush moustache, whose only conversation is about theatres, the War & himself. And on the other hand a man who could’nt look a pipsqueak if he tried, who has lived by himself & observed nature – there are such a lot of pipsqueaks!!! I shall be seventeen soon. Damn. I don’t want to get any older.’174
The rain that July was terrible; the crops at Glamis were flattened. Soon after her birthday Elizabeth took to her bed for two weeks with what seemed like severe influenza. It was her fourth bout of feverish illness that year and Dr Morris, the Glamis doctor, was concerned lest she had caught from the soldiers some kind of trench fever, which could affect the heart. He ordered her to bed ‘as my heart didn’t beat enough or something’.175 By the beginning of September she was still unsteady on her feet and ‘dash it all’ she was not even allowed to walk, let alone play tennis ‘as me ’eart is still weak’.176 At the end of the month she was still being dosed with raw eggs and brandy, and felt limp and tired.177
By 4 October, however, she had regained her spirits enough to enjoy a concert thrown by the soldiers at Glamis for the benefit of their colleagues at Forfar Hospital, who descended on the Castle for tea. It was a hilarious occasion.178 There was now something of a routine at Glamis. Elizabeth and her mother played and sang with the soldiers almost every evening. They would get through dozens of songs a night. One which they liked to hear her sing was ‘Wonderful Girl, Wonderful Boy, Wonderful Time’.179
Always the war continued to strike the heart – Patrick Ogilvy, third son of the Strathmores’ close neighbour, Mabell, Countess of Airlie, was killed on 9 October; his eldest brother, Lord Airlie, was home from the war ‘with very bad nerves’; and they heard that Zeppelins had dropped bombs all around St Paul’s Walden, breaking windows.180 Hopes for peace seemed to have disappeared; when General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, who had commanded the Second Army on the Western Front in 1915, came to lunch at Glamis in September, Elizabeth was depressed to hear that ‘he didn’t think that there was any likelihood of the War ending for some time’.181
She was ever more aware of the human costs of the war. The motors that took the rested soldiers back to Dundee still brought an inexhaustible stream of more wounded men to fill their places. One day she went to Dundee Infirmary herself to visit one of her favourite patients at this time, Private C. Morris. His chest had been crushed on the battlefield, and he had been sent back from Glamis for more treatment. He was in no doubt of what he owed Elizabeth and her mother. ‘I must say that I was never treated better in any part of the British Empire than I was treated at Glamis Castle,’ he wrote to her, ‘and I don’t quite know how to thank the Strathmore family for all the kindness they have shown towards me.’182 He finally recovered and Elizabeth was delighted when her parents offered him a job as a gardener at St Paul’s Walden.183
She found nothing so difficult as saying goodbye to men returning to the Front. At the end of November she had ‘a nerve racking and terrible experience – bidding goodbye to FOURTEEN men!’ Among them was a sergeant to whom she had taken ‘a violent affection’ at the last minute – he was dreadfully ugly but so nice that she ‘begged Sister to push him downstairs or give him a blister or something’ so that he could remain at Glamis. ‘It’s so dreadful saying goodbye, because one knows that one will never see them again, and I hate doing it.’
She always went to make her farewells after dinner, because the men would be driven away in the early morning and also because ‘Sister likes to show me off in evening dress, because they never have seen evening dresses which embarrasses me too dreadfully. They invariably look at my shoes, except the ones that gaze rapturously into my eyes sighing deeply all the while …’ She was aware how much she had changed since she was a child at the start of the war: ‘oh! the difference from Dec. 1914! I was just remembering this evening, that night when Mr Brookes, Harold Ward, Teddy Daird (in pyjamas) & I had a bun fight in the crypt, and David chased Nurse A round the Ward with cocoa & water to pour, & how it all got spilt on the floor, & her black fury!! It was fun – weren’t they darlings?’184
Meanwhile groups of Australian and New Zealand officers came and went, to mixed reactions from their young hostess. There was a Mr Stubbins, who insisted on trying to teach her all about motors ‘& I don’t understand & go to sleep’. To avoid him and other boring men, ‘Mother & I have to pretend that we are going away on Saturday! … It’s always worse when there is no male member of the family, I don’t count Father because he so rarely appears.’ Elizabeth was exasperated by Stubbins – ‘the first time I’ve ever scolded a man, & very successful it was. He was most penitent & I forgave him!! Just like a dog, the more you beat him (for a reason) the more he likes you – alas!’185 Few people elicited such negative reactions.
At around this time Elizabeth had what appears to have been her first proposal of marriage; it was from the New Zealander, Lieutenant Parker. He asked her if her birthday were between 1 and 10 August, claiming that he had read an astrological book from which he had calculated that ‘the’ person for him would be born between those dates.186 To Beryl she wrote Mr Parker had sent her ‘a – no, I don’t think I’ll tell you. I can’t.’187
She thought they would ‘be migrating south soon to the land of bombs & war alarms & “excursions” ’.188 In the event they had to stay at Glamis while a new ward of twelve more beds was created and an additional nurse recruited.189 But on 12 December, after tearful farewells, Elizabeth and her mother boarded the night train to London. When they arrived they heard that her sister Rose and Wisp Leveson-Gower had had a daughter. ‘Isn’t it exciting!’ Elizabeth wrote. ‘They’ll have to call her Wisperina or Wisperia or something!’190
At around the same time Jock and Neva also had a daughter, Anne, and Elizabeth hoped that she would help take the place of Patricia, their firstborn who had died aged only eleven months in June 1917. Jock had been invalided out of the army, joined the Foreign Office and been sent to Washington. To Elizabeth’s delight, Neva had written to say that her maid in Washington had met an English soldier who had been at Glamis: ‘He apparently raved about it, & its heavenliness, & about me, & said he’d never forget me (!!), and who do you think it was? Dear Sergeant Broadhead!! Isn’t that a curious coincidence? In all that huge continent, that the maid should have met a man who knew our family! He is training American recruits. Such a darling he was.’191
Christmas 1917 was spent quietly at St Paul’s Walden. Two weeks later, on 8 January 1918, Elizabeth went to her first ball.* She chose a dress, had her hair done and rushed around looking for shoes. ‘I’m going to my first real dance on Wednesday & feel rather terrified!’ she wrote to Beryl. ‘I’m sure I shall know nobody!’ She was astonished to be lectured by her mother and David who told her ‘that I ought to be more flirtatious. I nearly died of surprise. You know I daresay I’ve got rather quiet from having all those Australians and NZ (!!!) at Glamis, as one simply must sit on them!’192
She ‘trembled all afterno
on’ before the dance, as she reported to Beryl; but there is no doubting the excitement and pleasure it gave her. ‘I danced every single dance,* & Mother came to fetch me, & we departed at about 1.30. They had part of Ciro’s black Band … I enjoyed it very much. One could only dance with such few people tho’ because the dances were so long, but I loved it, and enjoyed it fearfully. Do you know I think my dress really looked quite pretty.’193 From his prisoner-of-war camp in Germany Mike wrote to Lady Strathmore saying he was longing to hear about the ball. Elizabeth had sent him her photograph with her hair up, and he commented, ‘what a pretty little thing Buffy has become’.194
On 7 February 1918 the Strathmores had a dance at St James’s Square. It began as a ‘tiny’ party to pay back people who had invited Elizabeth out. But it grew as ‘millions of people’ asked themselves and by the day itself ‘nearly everybody is coming. I really had no idea that the Strathmore family was so popular, it’s awful,’ she claimed to Beryl. A young naval lieutenant on whom she had taken pity at an earlier dance had rung her up ‘& we had a I-don’t-know-how-to-describe-it talk.’ She felt sorry for him. You know I’ve got a soft spot in my ’eart for a bhoy in blue, so ‘ave you, and he was so pathetic!’ She had written a four-page letter to Lieutenant Parker, ‘but I simply can’t get the last bit in! I wish I could talk to him, it’s so difficult writing … These young men do worry me so, I wish they wouldn’t. Do come round, & give me some more of your sage (?) advice!’195 Ten years later she was to meet Parker again in New Zealand.
Men were fascinated by her. At dinner a few weeks later she met a young man from the American Embassy named Morgan.† She thought he was ‘the cutest thing out. He fair gives me the goat – gee – he’s some kid – cut it out Rube – sling us no more of the canned goods, I’m fair up against this stunt, etc.’196 At Lady Hastings’s dance in March she danced with Lord Settrington and many others. Charles Settrington was the eldest son of the eighth Duke of Richmond, and the brother of Doris Gordon-Lennox, with whom Elizabeth began a long and close friendship at this time.197
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