Diana had been bored by her season, but she had been better trained to survive it. Nancy, however, saw no reason to conceal her truculence, especially once she had gulped several surreptitious glasses of champagne, bypassing the innocuous fruit cup that debutantes were meant to sip. To her delight, but Maud’s dismay, she failed to secure an invitation to the crowning event of the calendar, Queen Charlotte’s Ball. And the crosser Nancy became at having to endure it all, the more her contempt leaked into her relationship with Maud. She felt it was hypocritical of her mother to care about so meaningless a ritual while parading her association with radicals like Lewis and Pound.
The fragile bonds they had forged over the course of the previous year began to fray as Nancy started to disassociate herself from Maud. Her rebellion wasn’t exceptional – many young women, including Diana, felt an urgent need to define themselves against their mothers. It was part of the restless sense of freedom coursing through London just before the war. Yet Nancy was drawing on a long history of resentment and exclusion, and her antagonism towards Maud was far more murderous than Diana’s irritability with Violet. Around this time she was among a group of friends playing the after-dinner game Truth, in which each of them were asked to name the person they would most like to see enter the room. In a flat, cutting tone, Nancy answered, ‘Lady Cunard, dead.’17
Throughout the summer of 1914 she contrived a variety of small rebellions. She turned up late for her mother’s soirées and played truant from her own debutante engagements; sometimes meeting with Diana and her set to go drinking and dancing at the Golden Calf, but more often meeting with her new best friend, Iris Tree. She and Iris had known one another for years, attending a few of the same children’s tea parties and coinciding at the smart girls’ school in London that Nancy had briefly attended. During those years, Iris had found Nancy stiff and fierce, while Nancy had been cowed by Iris’s puppy-like exuberance. Now, however, they recognized one another as kindred spirits.
Iris, a year younger than Nancy, had become a student at the Slade School of Art; dressing in peasant smocks that had been woven at Roger Fry’s Omega Studio, and wearing her white-blonde hair in a short pageboy bob. Nancy, whose own hair was still unshorn, much admired this audacious alternative to the elaborate pompadours or loose, Grecian buns into which most girls their age styled their hair. And she admired even more the world of artists to which Iris introduced her.
Among certain girls of the middle and upper classes, art school represented a popular escape route from home. University places were still limited (only a thousand attended the all-female colleges at Oxford or Cambridge, and they were not permitted to receive official degrees until 1921). Even Diana, who had no artistic skills, had enrolled for a term at the Slade in order to get some privacy from her mother. Iris, however, was fully committed to her studies, as well as to the life that came with them. She had become friendly with a crowd of painters, including Alvaro ‘Chile’ Guevara and Nina Hamnett, and she was on close terms with poets Robert Nichols, Tommy Earp, Edward Wyndham Tennant and the Sitwell brothers.
As Iris introduced a dazzled Nancy to her circle, she also introduced her to a very new view of London, whose hub was the Eiffel Tower. This Soho restaurant had been a meeting place for writers and painters ever since its opening in 1896; run by an Austrian chef, Rudolph Stulik, its menu alone – aromatic, garlicky, Continental – seemed to waft Nancy towards a different more authentic world. Some nights the symbolist poet Arthur Symonds might be holding court, a veteran of fin-de-siècle decadence with his wide-brimmed hat, glass of absinthe and lugubrious gaze, but for Nancy, no matter who was present, every night held a promise. GM teased her about the new bohemian set she was seeing, dismissing their poetry and paintings as ‘chaos’. Yet his criticisms merely confirmed Nancy’s belief that this was how she wanted to live. In her adult poem ‘To the E. T. Restaurant’ she paid homage to the Tower and its milieu as her ‘carnal-spiritual home’; filled with ‘wits and glamour, strong wines, new foods’ and the ‘strange-sounding languages of diverse men.’
It was with Iris that she decided to rent the Fitz, as a place where they could spend unsupervised time together, reading, writing, drawing and seeing their friends. And it was with Iris, too, that she pored over the first issue* of Wyndham Lewis’s heretical magazine Blast. Lewis had laid out his ideological agenda by dividing the modern world into angels and devils, a ‘Bless’ list and a ‘Blast’ list. The former included a provocatively rag-taggle mix of artists, suffragettes, music-hall singers and prizefighters, while the latter featured numerous despised establishment figures. Among them was ‘Beecham (Pills, Opera, Thomas)’ – and Nancy read that list as though it were her personal battle cry.
* * *
In those last, sunny weeks of peace Nancy was suspended between different worlds. She was still finishing her season and still under Maud’s control, but she was also sneaking off to the Fitz and experimenting with a life about which her mother knew almost nothing. Initially, little changed with the declaration of war. At the Tower she listened to vigorous debates on the politics and aesthetics of war, with Lewis leading the argument that it was a necessary evil, a scourging of Europe’s bloated imperial powers. At Cavendish Square, meanwhile, she was being dragooned by Maud into the organization of charity events to raise money for the British troops. Photos taken of Nancy, posing in a toga and slippers for an ‘Omar Khayyām’ gala, reveal her as her mother’s still compliant, socialite daughter.
But as the predicted defeat of the Germans failed to materialize and the casualty figures began to climb, Britain stopped playing at war, and so did Nancy. Her first published poem, which appeared in the June 1915 edition of the Eton College Chronicle (then edited by her cousin Victor) was an elegy for soldiers lost in battle. And if its sentiments were as conventional as its language – ‘These die obscure and leave no heritage/For them no lamps are lit, no prayers said’ – they were inspired by real feeling. By now many of the men Nancy knew were being sent to the Front and death was acquiring a personal face.
Like Diana and so many others, she looked for ways to numb her anxiety. She worked harder at her poetry and at night she partied to excess. Evenings that began with cocktails at the Café Royal and merged into somebody’s party, somewhere, would nearly always end in a drunken haze: Nancy crooning the lyrics of her favourite ragtime song ‘Oh you beautiful doll’, a glass in her hand, her head resting on the shoulder of a man she’d only just met.
It’s unclear exactly when she became sexually active. Even before the war Nancy had been considered fast, testing out the powers of her newly adult beauty by flirting with men like Chile Guevera. Her justification was simple: ‘My mother’s having an affair with Thomas Beecham. I can do as I like.’18 Yet a young woman could be thought promiscuous simply for kissing too many men, and Nancy probably didn’t lose her virginity until well into the war. When she did, however, it was with an apparently determined disregard for her reputation.
Something wild and needy in her reacted to the atmosphere of war. Her imagination was haunted by pictures of what the men at the Front, her own friends, might be suffering. Many older officers maintained a degree of discretion over what they admitted to women at home, but some of the younger soldiers with whom Nancy and Iris mixed were less guarded. They were willing to hint at terrible things on the battlefield: at the stink, the madness, the noise of the trenches; at the carnage that could be inflicted on a platoon of soldiers ordered to advance into a thicket of barbed wire and machine-gun fire. These images gnawed at Nancy, making her ashamed of her own privileged safety, and the only way she and Iris could think of assuaging their guilt was by offering themselves to the men who wanted them.
They romanticized themselves wildly as ministering angels of war. Iris would recall the two of them watching the first bombs falling over London, seeing the ‘fires redden on sky and river, ourselves burnt out by the terrible gaieties of last encounters’; she would write of their ‘desires he
ightened to a brief fulfilment before sacrifice’.19 Given the degree to which others exaggerated the extent of their ‘sexual charity’, it’s hard to gauge the exact nature of their behaviour, yet even if Nancy was not as intemperate as some claimed, the combination of alcohol, emotional dislocation and exhaustion had an extreme effect on her. There were days when she awoke from the previous night’s debauch in despair: in her 1916 poem ‘Remorse’, she excoriated herself for being ‘wasteful, wanton, foolish, bold’, of having ‘loved with grasping hands and lustful eyes’. She felt tainted as well as transfigured, and she was still only twenty.
It was in this mood that Nancy tricked herself into thinking she might love Sydney Fairbairn. He was an attractive, educated, even dashing man, and after the war he would go on to have an adventurous military career in North Africa and the Middle East. Although Nancy’s perceptions were later occluded by hatred, at their first meetings he appeared to offer her a chance of security and structure.
Nancy was writing in earnest now. The war had given her material and a theme, and in 1916 she had seven poems published in Edith Sitwell’s anthology Wheels,* one of them giving the anthology its title. Her most current writing was indebted to T.S. Eliot, whom she had just met, and whose recently published ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ she idolized. It clearly inspired the lines in her poem ‘Remorse’: ‘I sit ashamed and silent in this room/While the wet streets go gathering in their gloom’.
If Nancy was hoping for a more ordered, productive life with Sydney, she was also compensating for the loss of Iris. Towards the end of 1915, Herbert Tree had gone to America to work on a film project in Hollywood and a Shakespeare festival in New York. Concerned for his youngest daughter’s reputation, he had taken her with him. Nancy missed Iris badly, and when news came back from America that Iris had fallen in love with an artist and photographer called Curtis Moffat and planned to marry, Nancy felt half impelled to do the same. She didn’t allow herself to think beyond the immediate convenience that marriage would bring. During wartime no one thought about the future. Sydney might soon be dead, and so might she.
Life with her new husband, of course, turned out to be even more trying than life at home. Sydney was very sociable, and when they had settled into the little house in Montagu Square that Maud had acquired for them, he took it for granted that his friends would all be welcome there. Many were officers on leave, and their conversations about sport and regimental matters seemed to fill every room. The few photographs taken of the newly married couple show Nancy as a blurred presence, half cancelled out by the wide shoulders, alert gaze and military moustache of her husband. They bore little relationship to the bright breezy publicity that had trumpeted the wedding, with prophesies that the very ‘original’ Miss Cunard was likely to be ‘one of the leaders of society after the war’.
Nancy was sufficiently dutiful to hide her growing dislike of her husband. Nor did she let Sydney see her relief when, in early July 1918, he was deemed sufficiently fit to return to the Front. During the six months he was in France, she wrote to him regularly – deceptively sweet, wifely letters tucked into parcels of sweets and other treats.
Yet no sooner had Nancy’s single life been restored to her than she embraced it with joy and relief. Iris was still abroad, travelling with Curtis and her new baby Ivan, but Nancy had recently become close to Sybil Hart-Davis, the older sister of Duff Cooper. Sybil was eleven years her senior, married with two children, and she appeared to Nancy to have created a fascinating balance between domesticity and independence. She was certainly a delightful mother. As Nancy watched Sybil romping in the garden with little Rupert and Deirdre she felt pangs for her own neglected childhood.
That summer Nancy and Sybil arranged to rent a house together in the Oxfordshire countryside near Kingston Bagpuize. They were anxious to escape the latest attacks from the German bombers, and Nancy hoped the tranquillity of the country would be good for her poetry too. Despite visits from London friends like the Sitwell brothers, Chile Guevara, Mary and St John Hutchinson, and despite long, shambolic parties, with jugs of cheap wine and off-duty soldiers from the local training camp, Nancy remained true to her resolve. Shutting herself away in the drawing room of the Kingston Bagpuize house, smoking cigarette after cigarette, she enjoyed weeks of productive writing.
When Nancy was working on her poetry, she felt restored to her best self. But that summer, the pleasures of creativity were also infused with the energy of her first passionate affair.
Peter Broughton-Adderley had been the only friend of Sydney’s who Nancy had liked. He’d visited Montagu Square in 1917 and impressed her with his literary enthusiasm as well as his obvious sweetness of character. He was also friendly with Duff Cooper and Diana Manners – another point in his favour – and when he was home on leave that summer, she invited him to stay for a weekend.
He stayed for the rest of his leave, and the delight Nancy found in him is evident in a description she wrote of the two of them reading George Moore’s latest novel together in the garden at Kingston Bagpuize: ‘My love and I sitting in a tree, and under a tree, read aloud to each other several days running from The Story Teller’s Holiday, the beauty of the writing, the mood of the book and our own and everything about those hours being unaccountably moving.’20
For the rest of her life Nancy associated Peter with that book, and with the belief that during the summer of 1918 she had experienced what true love was like. But at the end of that golden summer Peter was recalled to France, and it was on a chilly morning in late October that Nancy was woken by Sybil – Peter had been shot in the stomach and had died of his wounds. Her grief at the news was huge and consuming, and it may have been one reason why her hatred of Sydney grew so obdurate. He was alive and Peter was dead.
If they had had some sort of future, perhaps Nancy would have exhausted her feelings for Peter, just as she quickly exhausted her small stock of affection for Sydney and tired of so many others. Yet for years she continued to think of him as the only man ‘whom I loved entirely and wanted to live with’. Some of her friends were equally convinced that a life with Peter might have settled Nancy and given her a chance of ordinary happiness. When she lost him, they believed it dealt a blow to her already fragile equilibrium, from which she never recovered.
* * *
When the war ended, just a few weeks after Peter’s death, Nancy hated the rest of the world for its callous jubilation. Another grieving young woman, Vera Brittain, heard the sound of ringing bells and cheering crowds as a death knell for ‘the lost youth that the war had stolen’, a reminder that ‘the dead were dead and never would return’.21 Many of them were lovers, husbands, fiancés, and when the flags were put away there were women everywhere who, like Nancy, felt that their hopes for the future had been buried in the mud of the battlefield.
Ruth Holland would recall their anguish in her 1932 novel The Lost Generation. For her heroine, Jinnie, ‘Something had snapped. Instead of a life that was like a splendid tune in her ears, with ordered sound and movement, a definite form … she was surrounded by a mocking terrifying jumble of discords in which she could find no sense at all … it was as if she had lost the key and could no longer read the signs of life around her.’22
For many such women, marriage and motherhood had been the only life they had imagined. Yet in Britain alone, the female population now exceeded men by two million. Many soldiers were also coming home from the war with their lungs scarred from poison gas, their limbs and faces shattered, their minds traumatized. With an entire generation of men so terribly reduced, young women were warned that there was a mere one in ten chance of finding a husband.
In a very short space of time, pity for these ‘superfluous’ women turned to alarm. The Daily Mail opined hysterically that they represented ‘a disaster to the human race’, while in more measured terms, The Times judged that they presented a problem ‘so far-reaching and so immense that few have yet considered its import’. Certainly there we
re obvious signs of instability as returning soldiers found themselves having to compete with a new female workforce for their old jobs. And with the imminent prospect of women’s suffrage, male commentators began to actively censure the post-war generation. Behaviour that had been overlooked in the war – smoking, drinking, wearing makeup and flirting in public – was vilified and it was now that the idea of the flapper became evoked as a threat.
In material terms, Nancy was far more fortunate than most of her peers – she had no need to work for a living and no children to worry about – but she also had nothing to distract her from her grief. And when she succumbed to the Spanish flu virus that was sweeping through Europe, it hardly mattered to her if she lived or died.*
Death, she felt, would at least save her from the complications of disentangling her life from Sydney. He had returned from the war in January, when Nancy was still lying feverish in her mother’s new house in Grosvenor Square. It had been communicated to him, presumably by letter, that she wanted to end the marriage, and he had been both incredulous and furious. By early April, when Nancy was nearly recovered, she was still terrified of confronting him, and it was partly to dodge Sydney that she agreed to her doctor’s recommendation of a change of scene, embarking on a long trip down to the South of France, and accompanied by Marie Ozanne, the one friend she had made at her finishing school in Paris.
Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation Page 8
