At Guy’s, Diana had been nursing civilians, but at Arlington Street the carnage of the trenches was literally brought home to her in the maimed and shell-shocked bodies delivered to the wards. Sometimes in the middle of changing a dressing, assisting at an operation, or quieting a patient from his screaming nightmares, Diana would find herself weeping helplessly, unable to bear the senseless misery.
Hours later, however, she would be drinking and dancing. The miseries of war had released a heady fatalism in London, and with it a greed for life. Men might be dying, coal, oil and petrol rationed, food and new clothes in short supply,* yet these were times when it felt like a moral duty to grab at every available pleasure, to party in the face of death.
To Diana it was as though the pleasure-seeking principles of the Corrupt Coterie had acquired a new apocalyptic energy. Every night, as long as there were no emergencies to attend, she went out with friends: those who’d remained in London, and those who were home on leave from the Front. The press still tried to keep track of their doings, and it was with a note of desperation that a columnist would write in September 1916, ‘Have you noticed that we have hardly any mention of Lady Diana Manners, Miss Nancy Cunard and their friends? This will never do.’41 But, in truth, much of their wartime entertainment had to be kept from the papers because it was frankly illegal. One of Diana’s favourite haunts was the Cavendish Hotel, a notoriously lax establishment, famous for allowing rackety parties and illicit, after-hours drinking. Frequent police raids were made on the Cavendish and on more than one night, Diana had to hide outside in the back garden until the coast was clear. She came even closer to scandal in December 1915, when she was caught drinking brandy at Kettner’s Restaurant after 10.30 p.m.; she was saved from prosecution only by her friend Alan Parsons ‘having a word’ with Sir Edward Henry, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, who promised the ‘matter would go no further’.42
She knew her behaviour was risky, but she found it addictive: the exhilaration of being ‘dangerous, dissipated, desperate’ kept the nightmares of war at bay.43 In 1916 she was at an exceptionally louche party given by an American actor, and was delighted by the reaction of Duff Cooper, who bumped into her there. Duff was shocked to see her in a room full of ‘the lowest kind of actress and chorus girls’, and he thought she was ‘probably the only virgin’ present.44 But for Diana, his discomfort only enhanced the pleasure of going slumming; carelessly she said she’d wanted to see how low she could go ‘without losing caste’.45
The most extravagant expression of this wartime hedonism was seen in the parties that George Gordon Moore started to host for Diana and her friends in the autumn of 1914. They were on a preposterous scale. The ballroom in his enormous house on Lancaster Gate was redecorated each time with a new theme: images from the circus, the Wild West, Aubrey Beardsley’s erotica or the Ballets Russes. Even the dinner tables were works of art, laden with purple orchids and the kind of rare wartime delicacies that only Moore’s deep pockets could supply – avocados, terrapin and soft shell crab.
The drinking was more excessive still, with vodka and absinthe spiking the flow of champagne (whisky was still considered unacceptable for women, even behind Moore’s ‘barred doors’). There was dancing to ragtime and to the tropical twang of Hawaiian bands, and it continued until the breakfast eggs and bacon appeared at dawn. Or rather it continued until Diana decided she was tired and wanted to go home, at which point Moore would abruptly command the band to stop and ask the rest of the guests to leave.
Everyone knew these parties were essentially for Diana’s benefit, but very few realized how very complicated and compromised her relationship with Moore had now become. During these first months of the war the financier had grown even more powerful. Money flowed to him from mysterious ventures – he was reputed to be the owner of public utilities in four American states as well as in Canada and Brazil – and his wealth gave him entrée into the highest social circles. He was especially close to Sir John French, Commander in Chief of the British forces in France, with whom he shared his house, and it was for this reason that Violet, who had always loathed Moore, now actively encouraged his interest in Diana. She was desperate to keep John, her one remaining son, safe from the trenches, and her plan was to use Moore’s influence with French to secure John a staff position at GHQ.
Diana felt herself to be in an intolerable position. Before the war she had been guiltily impressed by Moore’s generosity, but she had hated it when George Gordon Ghastly, as she called him, had tried to kiss or caress her. Big and loud with his ‘straight black hair, flattened face and atomic energy’,46 he could not have been more physically repulsive to her. Yet her mother, in a shocking aberration from her normal practice, was now telling Diana to suppress her antipathy and be ‘nice’. As she recalled, ‘To get my brother to GHQ was her obsessive hope. She thought that only I could coax the boon out of Moore.’47 Not only was Diana expected to use up some of her precious free time attending the parties Moore threw for her, she had to tolerate being seated next to him at dinner, having endearments muttered thickly into her ear as the two of them ‘shuffled and bunny hugged’ across the dance floor, and accepting his goodnight embrace.48
John was due to be sent out to France in late February 1915, yet the week before, when no word of a desk job had yet arrived, Diana apparently had to coax a little harder. She was at home, recovering from the measles, when Moore came into her bedroom at about three in the morning. The Duchess certainly knew he was there, and although there is no evidence to suggest that Diana allowed Moore to make love to her, this was far more intimacy than she had ever previously granted him. It was surely no coincidence that Sir John French had just written to Violet to assure her that a ‘good plan’ had been formed: and that despite John’s own determined resistance he would eventually be removed from his position at the Front and transferred to the safety of GHQ.
Diana felt soiled by the whole business: in a letter to her friend Raymond Asquith she had described Moore’s physical advances as ‘sullying … mutilating and scarring’.49 Even more distasteful was the hypocrisy of her own mother who, normally so fastidious, had been willing to put her in so compromising a position. Yet if Diana recoiled inwardly, if her resentment against Violet acquired a new core of rage, she didn’t alter her life. She continued her ‘friendship’ with Moore without any obvious break, and in some way she came to rationalize it as part of her war effort. However repellent Moore was to her, physically, his parties had become a highlight of London entertainment, especially for officers on leave. As Diana recalled, most of her generation now felt they were ‘dancing a tarantella’, infected by the need to keep moving to forget the horrors of war.50 Moore’s parties provided that hectic oblivion, night after night; and it was for a very good reason that they became nicknamed the Dances of Death.
If Diana’s circle had become addicted to the distractions of dancing and drinking, she herself began flirting with other addictions too. When the strain of nursing and the exhaustion of partying became too much, she increasingly quieted her nerves with a dose of ‘jolly old chlorers’ (chloroform) from the local chemist or with an injection of morphine. Everyone was doing it. While hashish and the very new import, cocaine, had dubious associations with crime and bohemia, morphine was deemed purely medicinal. Packets of paper impregnated with the drug were marketed as gifts for the boys in the trenches, whilst to those waiting at home it was a catch-all remedy for insomnia, anxiety and every variety of physical discomfort.
Diana craved the ecstatic stillness she got from morphine, the feeling that she had become ‘utterly self-sufficient … like a Chinaman, or God before he made the world … and was content with, or callous to the chaos’.51 She came to crave that detachment even more urgently when Raymond Asquith, one of the dearest of her friends, was due to be transferred from officer training camp to the Front in the spring of 1916.
Raymond was fourteen years older than Diana and had long been the undisputed leade
r of her male friends. ‘We all liked him the best,’ she admitted simply.52 He was handsome, poetic and clever, and although far out of her orbit when she was a teenager, he had been tender towards her earnest precocity and towards her star-struck parroting of his opinions. Even though he had got married in 1907 to Edward Horner’s sister, Katherine, the bond between them had grown. Diana felt most naturally herself in Raymond’s company, and it was almost inevitable that as she became older, their intimacy deepened into something like love.
Neither would do anything to hurt Katherine, and their relationship remained perfectly chaste, but in the destabilizing atmosphere of war, restraint was harder to maintain. Before Raymond’s departure to the Front became imminent, Diana raced down to visit him at his training camp in Folkestone, careless of what anyone might think. She might have loathed Moore’s groping, but she longed for Raymond’s touch. They met in a local inn, and what passed between them was clearly passionate, for afterwards he wrote, ‘Even into this foul and dingy inn the recollected glory of your beauty flings its unquenchable beam – and your darling darling charity of last night.’ Diana responded to her own ‘darling’ Raymond in equally impetuous terms: ‘I have loved so utterly your last two beseeching letters. I was longing for you to claim me again, and now you have done it fully.’53 They did not become lovers; whatever ‘charity’ Diana offered to Raymond, the affair was not consummated, and that fact allowed her to believe she was doing nothing to injure his wife. On the contrary, her love for Raymond made her feel closer to Katherine, and it was with the latter that she shared a desperate, pain-numbing needle of morphine on the night that Raymond was transferred to France.
Nor did Diana let her secret emotions interfere with the continuing drama of her public flirtations. She was constantly in the company of other men, and while this was a diversion and a camouflage for her true feelings, it was also part of wartime culture. Diana believed it was only honourable to take care of her officer friends when they were on leave, allowing men like Patrick Shaw Stewart to kiss her, accepting their declarations of love as though they had an actual future together.
Again, everyone was doing it. Between 1914 and 1918, across all the social classes, there was an increase in sexual activity outside marriage as soldiers on leave sought out physical consolation and many more women seemed willing to offer it. Some of these couplings led to hasty weddings, some to unwanted children. With birth control remaining clumsy and inadequate, thick rubber condoms for men, toxic douches for women, the proportion of illegitimate births during these years rose by 30 per cent in Britain alone.
Diana, however, retained some of her former caution. Even though she’d learned to scorn her mother’s hypocrisy in matters of sex she was scared to risk her virginity, even for the sake of a doomed officer. She fully expected to keep this carefully tended asset for the night of her marriage, and in moments of candour she admitted to herself that she was rarely tempted otherwise. Diana found sensual delight in many things, in dancing, drinking and in lovely clothes, but while the teasing dance of seduction was delicious to her, she recoiled from the more committed, messy prospect of sex. Even when she liked a man enough to allow him up to her bedroom in Arlington Street when the Duchess was absent, she kept their love-making within very specific constraints.
Of these men it was Patrick Shaw Stewart who demanded most, begging Diana over and over again to let him into her bed, even if she would not marry him. But it was Duff Cooper to whom she permitted the most. Duff had the advantage of being constantly on hand – his government-protected work in the Foreign Office kept him in London, and out of the army. But in ways that Diana found hard to identify, he was also very attractive to her. He fell far short of Raymond’s heroic beauty, his head was too large for his small feet and hands, and the downward cast of his eyes had an almost melancholic aspect. In the company of strangers he could also seem bookish and gruff. Yet, alone with close friends, and especially with women, Duff came alight with a witty, passionate ebullience and he had a power to charm that was disturbingly effective.
Duff adored women and, thanks to his close relationships with his mother and sister, he understood them well. He also prided himself on being a sexual connoisseur capable of running simultaneous affairs with a chorus girl, a titled lady, or the wife of a painter. However, he had long claimed that Diana was his ideal and, even before the war, had been writing her archly sentimental letters, in which he cast himself as her adoring troubadour: ‘As for loving you best in the world, I think that might happen all too easily. I am really rather frightened that it will, for I feel that you would be terrible and have no pity.’54
It was in a similarly extravagant vein that he wrote to her on 23 June 1914, concluding with the unknowingly but horribly ironic farewell, ‘Goodbye, my darling – I hope that everyone whom you like better than me will die very soon.’55
Death, of course, did come very soon, and Diana was increasingly reliant on Duff to console her as, one by one, the men with whom she had danced and flirted before the war were killed or injured at the Front. He was tenderly protective of her grief, writing to her in 1916, ‘Your little face was so thin and sad tonight and I wished so to be alone with you and tell you how I loved you.’56 He discovered too that his initial flamboyant devotion was deepening into a more adult kind of love. After a day spent visiting St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey in March that year he wrote in his diary that she had opened his imagination to ‘lots of things … I had never noticed before … The pleasure of doing that sort of thing with Diana is indescribable.’57
And while Diana still yearned for Raymond, she began to fall in love with Duff. Even his bad habits had a charm for her. He gambled and drank too much, and incorrigibly lusted after other women, yet it gave her a pleasurable feeling of release to fight with him over his flaws. Sometimes Diana worried that she lacked passion, that her deepest emotions were blocked. Even in the most bitter wrangles with her mother, she rarely shouted or slammed a door. Rowing with Duff, however, she felt her emotions pour out in a satisfyingly clear current: during one argument in 1915 she actually hit him, and hit him so hard that his lip bled.
The ugliness of the scene aroused her, even more so the reconciliations that followed. With many people Diana was nervous of being forced into intimacy; dogged by her childhood fear of appearing shallow or dull she much preferred playing to a crowd. Alone with Duff, however, it was easy to talk and react, and with him too she felt a rare sexual confidence. He clearly desired her, but the fact that he never forced himself on her encouraged her to become more creatively responsive. One evening he came to her room as she was getting dressed for a tableau vivant – a popular entertainment during these years, in which decorative young women posed in costume to raise money for the war effort. Diana was wearing an ornate Russian headdress and ropes of pearls, and when Duff begged her to undo the bodice of her dress so that he could admire her, half-naked, in her finery, she gave him a performance worthy of Maud Allan.
Duff found Diana’s combination of seduction and chastity to be very aphrodisiac: ‘She … understands the game and how to play it … There is a great deal to be said for the love making that sends one away hungry.’ Blind to the irony of his own double standards, he noted that her dance of withholding and yielding kept his feelings at an exquisite pitch. The women who allowed him ‘excessive intimacy’ inevitably produced in him a reaction of ‘contempt or disgust’.58
Diana was grateful for Duff’s tact, yet she was beginning to fret about her cautious and self-conscious virginal state. She judged herself to be lacking in poetry and generosity, especially when compared to the behaviour of some of her friends. Two in particular, Iris Tree and Nancy Cunard, were apparently using the war as an excuse to abandon all social restraint. Although a few years younger than her, they ran with the wildest crowds at the Café Royal and the Eiffel Tower restaurant in Soho. They rented a secret studio in the bohemian district of Fitzrovia, where they held riotous parties, and were often
in the company of male strangers, with whom, it was said, they were recklessly intimate.
Diana was in some ways irritated by their behaviour, which she considered extreme and naive. When she visited their studio she was appalled by its squalor – the beds were unmade and the floor was littered with the detritus of parties: empty champagne bottles (broken at the neck to save the trouble of pulling a cork), overflowing ashtrays and, in the bathroom, traces of blood, semen and vomit. But she was reluctantly impressed by the number of lovers that Nancy and Iris appeared to take. ‘They have more courage than me – and can seize an opportunity and hug and crush it against their palates irrespective of the taste and they are very happy while I go starved, and hesitating and checking my every impulse for fear of losing my pedestal of ice.’59 She felt old and anomalous. Another more passionate woman would surely have yielded to Duff’s seduction. Another woman would surely have made love to Raymond while she’d had the chance in Folkestone.
But such a chance would never come again, for on 15 September 1916, Raymond was shot on the battlefield of the Somme as he was leading his men out of their dugout. His was only one of hundreds of thousands of lives claimed by that summer’s most bloodily futile battle. All over Europe women were receiving letters and telegrams, informing them of the deaths of their husbands, sons or lovers. Yet Diana could think only of Raymond. The pain was excruciating: ‘My brain is revolving so fast, screaming, “Raymond killed, my divine Raymond killed,” over and over again.’60 After the deaths of other friends, she had been able to weep for a few harrowing hours, then stoically return to her nursing and the nightly tarantella of denial. The loss of Raymond, however, was unendurable.
Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation Page 5
