The Lost Girls

by D. J. Taylor

But there was another vital point of connection that marked out the Lost Girl hurrying across the Bloomsbury square or being stood lunch by some rapt admirer at the Café Royal from the thousands of other young women at large in wartime London. This was the kind of man with whom she associated, might live with or, in exceptional circumstances, marry. The social catchment area from which Lost Girls drew their significant others was by no means extensive. Although there were occasional interludes with men met in government offices, or rich admirers who might fall into the category of ‘sugar daddy’, the Lost Girl’s boyfriend tended to be a writer, an artist or at any rate a man who existed on the fringe of these interconnected worlds. So comparatively restricted was the talent pool, that they were very often the same men. At least three of the principal Lost Girls had affairs with Arthur Koestler. All four are thought at some point in their careers to have shared a bed with Lucian Freud. Two of them married the millionaire physicist Derek Jackson.

  Freud, still in his teens when he began his lady-killing progress, was very much an exception to the standard protocols of Lost Girl romance. Most Lost Girls came from homes whose male parents were either absent, surrogate or disliked. If it overstates the case to suggest that Barbara, Lys, Sonia and their friends were in search of father figures to fill the emotional gaps that had yawned through their childhoods, then it is a fact that most Lost Girls’ boyfriends were ten or even fifteen years older than their companions at the Ritz Bar or the Café Royal. Naturally, much of this imbalance was down to demographics, specifically the absence from their social or professional circles of young men: the Lost Girl, after all, tended to take possession of her London bedsit at a time when most of her male contemporaries were still at school or university. But there is still a sense of their looking upwards, wanting to acquire knowledge and expertise from practised operators in the generation above. An added complication was that nearly all of these came with baggage – abandoned wives, former mistresses who might make trouble, pending divorce cases, children needing financial support. None of this made for an easy ride.

  As for the attitude that they brought to these relationships, pragmatism, often extending to an outright fatalism – the sense of things being done because it was expected they should happen – abounded. There was a general feeling that the present should be grasped at, while the future could take care of itself. The Bloomsbury diarist Frances Partridge recalled Janetta noting of her first wedding that it was ‘an unimportant ceremony, and will remain so until I want a divorce’. Impulsive, affectionate and at times dangerously alluring, the Lost Girl could sometimes be spoilt, unpredictable and uncomfortably farouche. The records of her progress through wartime bohemia are crammed with split-second desertions, lightning throwings-over, affections transferred from one man to another at the drop of a Cartier cigarette case. It was Barbara, reproached by one of her boyfriends for the rows, suspicion and ill-feeling that characterised their relationship, who replied, without apparent irony, ‘I like things to be difficult.’

  Most social historians, handed evidence of a group of young people behaving in an unusual way, tend to diagnose the emergence of a youth cult. With the Lost Girls, this kind of categorisation would be a mistake. As well as being numerically insignificant, they were also narrowly exclusive. Even if it could be proved to exist, the club they were a part of was distinguished not by its membership rules or admission fees but by much less tangible prescriptions of dress, style and demeanour. Unlike most youth cults they did not propagandise their activities, and the publicity they attracted came long after the world they diffidently ornamented had ceased to function. All the same, it is impossible to follow Barbara’s impulsive trail through the South Kensington bedsits for very long without suspecting that, in however extreme a form, she is a manifestation of a sociological process that had been going on for upwards of sixty years: the process by which young women from middle- and upper-class families began to break away from the circumstances of their upbringing, go out into the world and forge some kind of life for themselves – a life, more to the point, that could be lived on their own terms and among companions of their own choosing.

  Anxieties about the greater freedom allowed to young women and the increasing licentiousness of their behaviour had been a subject of public debate on both sides of the Atlantic since at least the mid-Victorian era. In fact, the first use of term ‘Lost Girls’ dates from as far back as 1889, when a Mrs J. G. Fraser wrote an article in an American magazine called the Congregationalist entitled ‘Our Lost Girls: A Mother Sadly Regrets that She Can Not Have the Training of Her Daughter’ and lamenting the fact that modern adolescents seemed more interested in exchanging visits with their friends than the solace of family life. In Mrs Fraser’s bewildered wake, the lexicon of aberrant teenage behaviour steadily expanded its range. ‘Flappers’, ‘bachelor girls’ and their American cousins the ‘bachelorettes’, ‘New Women’, ‘the Modern Girl’ – each of these new-fangled social categorisations seemed to offer a kind of moral quicksand on which the unwary turn-of-the-century young woman was ripe to founder. The culprit, most conservative commentators agreed, was modernity itself: the economic developments that encouraged young women to seek employment rather than sitting at home; the movement for women’s education; the blandishments of a burgeoning world of popular entertainment that valued theatre and cinema above what were increasingly seen as the quaint consolations of the familial hearth.

  Nearly all these social groupings were so broadly defined as to call most of the judgements that could be made about the women who reposed in them seriously into question. ‘Flapper’ had originally been a late Victorian term for an underage prostitute. By the early 1900s it had become generalised to the point of vagueness. In Ian Hay’s bestselling Edwardian novel Pip: A Romance of Youth (1907), for example, a ‘flapper’ is simply a gawky teenage girl not yet launched into society, frivolous, inexperienced and highly impressionable. Thus, young Miss Elsie Innes, introduced to its hero a few months before she has put her hair up, is described as being ‘in the last stages of what slangy young men call “flapperdom”’. Later, at a cricketing house party, one of the guests is ‘a solitary “flapper” of fifteen, who, untrammelled as yet by fear of Mrs Grundy, was having the time of her life with the two callowest members of the Eleven’. In much the same way, W. N. P. Barbellion’s The Journal of a Disappointed Man (1919) has a diary entry from 1908 recording a beach-side encounter with ‘a pretty flapper in a pink sunbonnet’. Come the post-war era, the definition had grown broader still, to the point where almost any woman under the age of thirty who went to parties or led a vaguely pleasurable life could be drawn into its catchment area. A Punch cartoon from the early 1930s, for example, shows a ‘very young flapper’ exulting in the atmosphere of a room where several young people are frenziedly dancing the Charleston, while a ‘mature ditto’ advises that she ‘should have seen the cocktail parties of the dear old Twenties’.

  None of this, clearly, has much to do with Barbara, Sonia and their friends. The ‘Bachelor Girl’, on the other hand, who turns up in English fiction at about the time of the Great War, offers a much sharper twist on the ancestral thread. Voluable, hard-headed and independent-minded, the heroine of Leonard Merrick’s short story ‘The Tale that Wouldn’t Do’ (1918) is characterised as ‘an extraordinarily nice girl, with seventeen faces. She changes them while she talks . . . If she didn’t laugh at orange blossoms, you might approve her.’ As well as disapproving of marriage, loathing her more domestically minded opposite number the ‘Chiffon Girl’, and believing that she can live on equal non-sexual terms with male ‘chums’, the Bachelor Girl has marked bohemian tendencies (‘I was a kid,’ she nonchalantly explains, ‘about nineteen – just beginning to paint.’) For her, the ideal life consists of freedom from parental constraints, drawing lessons in Parisian art schools and the chance to wear slightly unusual clothes.

  Nothing, of course, is quite so relative as emancipation: to the girls of the 1940s maga
zine office the degree of freedom obtained by their Edwardian predecessors would have seemed scarcely worth the having. Nonetheless, however limited the concessions they may have won from disapproving parents, their very existence was enough to remind the people who observed them in action just how much the world was changing. Musing on the early life of T. S. Eliot’s first wife Vivienne Haigh-Wood (b. 1888), for example, Anthony Powell immediately marked her down as ‘one of those slightly (only very slightly) “liberated” girls, mildly highbrow, of immediately pre-first war period’. As a small boy – Powell was born in 1905 – he could actually remember having witnessed some of them at large in Edwardian society and ‘the great to-do made about their drinking and smoking. The fact that, even as a child, one was aware of the slight difference they represented.’

  If the newly emancipated middle-class girl had begun to make her presence felt in the drawing rooms of the pre-1914 era, then the Great War propelled her out into the world at large. Urgently in demand to nurse wounded soldiers, staff canteens or otherwise assist the war effort, hundreds of thousands of young women who would previously have filled in the time between school and marriage with low-grade clerical work found themselves living away from home in conditions which even the most vigilant parent would have been hard pressed to supervise. As a disillusioned paterfamilias in Alec Waugh’s “Sir,” She Said (1930) grimly puts it:

  ‘Forty years ago a father had the running of his daughter’s life. Today she runs her own. You haven’t got to find eligible young men for her. It’s she who’ll find ineligible ones for you. We used to talk about the latchkey as being the symbol of emancipation. It isn’t now. It’s a cheque-book that’s the symbol. As soon as a girl’s got a banking account she’s free, and most of them have it. It’s the war that did it. The war telescoped events. A process that should have taken fifty years got compressed into a third of a decade. Parental authority had to go when girls were W.A.A.C.S. and W.R.E.N.S. working at canteens, in camps, driving lorries, keeping their own hours. You couldn’t keep any control over their acquaintances then. You just didn’t know what they were doing. When the war was over they weren’t going to give up that freedom.’

  Tracking the adventures of two sisters named Julia and Melanie Terance around post-war London, Waugh’s novel might be described as a study of the consequences of female emancipation. Twenty-something Julia works in a Mayfair dress shop and inhabits her own flat. Late teenage Melanie, though still living at home, enjoys an independent lifestyle, which consists of overspending her allowance, gadding about in restaurants and nightclubs, and coming home at three o’clock in the morning. As for their romantic entanglements, the elder sister is secretly conducting an affair with a married man, while the younger, over whose apparent indiscretions Julia dutifully frets, marries a highly suitable American after a whirlwind romance. Over both their heads hangs the warning of the double standard, which allows men to amuse themselves while ostracising women thought to have behaved badly, and the misery of their mother, who sadly concludes that ‘The modern daughter ran her own life . . . Nor was there any real, compensating comradeship. Girls did not want mothers who would be mistaken for their sisters.’

  Julia and Melanie are not Lost Girls. However liberated they may seem to a disapproving older generation, their ambitions are only a slight variation on existing arrangements. At bottom, all they really want is true love and a conventional upper-middle-class marriage: the life their mother leads but with just a little more glamour and shine, a little more personal fulfilment and self-determination. Neither do they suffer from the unsettled domestic background, with its unremitting catalogue of deaths, desertions and problematic second marriages that was the Great War’s legacy to post-war family life and which sent many a genuine Lost Girl on her way. Consider, for example, the early career of Lady Violet Pakenham, whose father, the 5th Earl of Longford, died at Gallipoli when she was three. The sixth child of a seven-strong brood, Lady Violet was brought up with her younger sister Julia according to the prescriptions of her mother’s Victorian girlhood. But in the era of jazz, nightclubs and freak parties, motherly vigilance could only go so far. If an annual allowance of £400, courtesy of a paternal trust fund, brought her daughter a measure of independence, then the discovery that Lady Longford was terminally ill could only widen the gap. By her early twenties, Violet had solved the problem of parental disapproval by continuing to live at home but assuming that her mother’s prohibitions had no bearing on the rackety social life that she now began to pursue.

  Freed from parental shackles, the twenty-one-year-old girl set about sampling London nightlife. While there were invitations to debutante dances and hunt balls, in keeping with her status as an earl’s daughter, there were also excursions to Soho clubs and bottle parties given by people with whom earls’ daughters rarely came into contact. There was a memorable evening around this time when she and her current boyfriend pooled invites to see how many entertainments they could attend by dawn: the total came to eleven. By day Lady Violet might be found at such upmarket retreats as the Savoy Grill or the Berkeley Hotel, but her after-hours haunts – the Bag O’Nails, say, or the notorious ’43 in Gerrard Street – were unrepentantly louche. A thinly disguised version of the latter is, after all, the setting for Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder’s drunken night out in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945). Meanwhile, relatives looked disbelievingly on. Her elder sister Mary, an art student in whose studio Violet had posed naked, remarked that ‘she went to nightclubs and bars and seemed to have done anything she chose’. By 1933, with her mother dead, she was living at the family home in Rutland Gate with two of her sisters, entirely free from adult supervision. None of this makes Lady Violet a Lost Girl, or even a prototypical version of one: within a year she was safely married to Anthony Powell. On the other hand, the circumstances of her early life are a classic Lost Girl’s breeding ground. They were also, at least in the context of recent English social life, highly unusual. From the nude modelling to the small-hours visits to Gerrard Street or even the term spent at LSE, hardly any of the activities to which she applied herself would have been permitted a woman of her upbringing before 1914.

  Neither would most of the high jinks embraced by the members of the one inter-era youth cult with which the Lost Girls had some definite connection. These were the Bright Young People, the pleasure-seeking gang of blue-blooded socialites and arts-world bohemians whose well-publicised entertainments and ‘stunt parties’ made them a fixture of newspaper gossip columns in the late 1920s. Certainly, there were one or two Bright Young Women whose exploits exceeded anything that Barbara managed to carry off. Elizabeth Ponsonby, daughter of Arthur Ponsonby, Labour leader of the House of Lords, the model for ‘The Hon. Agatha Runcible’ in Vile Bodies and the despair of her highly respectable parents, featured as a principal witness at the inquest of a man who had driven his car off the road while being hotly pursued by one of her former boyfriends. Brenda Dean Paul, ‘the society drug addict’, appeared at Marlborough Street Magistrates’ Court in November 1931 to answer seven charges of offences against the Dangerous Drugs Act, was bound over for three years and, having absconded to France, ended up in Holloway prison.

  At the same time, the links between the Bright Young People and the Horizon circle were more than those of faint behavioural resemblance. Connolly himself had operated on the group’s highbrow fringe, selling snippets of gossip to magazine editors and being snapped at fancy dress parties. In the aftermath of the ‘Mozart Party’ held at the Burlington Arcade in April 1930, when half-a-dozen exquisites in period costume escaped into Piccadilly, and were photographed alongside some bewildered workmen pretending to dig up the pavement with a pneumatic drill, he can be seen in wig and knee breeches quizzing the spectacle through a lorgnette. Patrick Balfour, too, was a paid-up Bright Young Person, and, as the Daily Sketch’s ‘Mr Gossip’, a key figure in metropolitan social life of the late 1920s, while Brian Howard was burlesqued into the scene-swelling
Johnnie Hoop of Waugh’s Vile Bodies, who spends his time designing outsize party invitations. (‘These had two columns of close print: in one was a list of all the things that Johnnie hated, and in the other all the things he thought he liked.’)

  The Bright Young Women went about their daily lives in a blizzard of media attention. Brenda’s autobiography was serialised in the News of the World; her French trip was marked by newspaper posters proclaiming BRENDA’S LATEST ESCAPADE. Elizabeth’s wedding to a suitor named Dennis Pelly in March 1929 attracted lavish press coverage. The long-suffering Lady Redesdale, mother of the Mitford sisters, is supposed to have remarked that if she saw a headline that began PEER’S DAUGHTER IN. . . she knew, instinctively, that one of her children was involved. All this worked its effect, on the one hand alerting newspaper readers to the fact that there existed a group of well-bred and well-connected young women who seemed to have cut themselves off from the supervising forces that had previously regulated female lives, and on the other encouraging their awareness of similar behaviour in less exalted social circles. By the late 1930s, consequently, the Lost Girl – although she was never referred to as such – had become a recognisable ‘type’, particularly in upmarket fiction, whose cast list frequently includes a girl in her late teens thrown mysteriously on her own resources, parentless or at any rate detached from the family home, staying with relatives not entirely confident of their ability to deal with her, or living in hotels or boarding houses, and doing more or less as she likes.

  Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart (1938), for example, has a starring role for sixteen-year-old Portia, an orphan who returns to London after her father’s death to live with her much older half-brother Thomas, a product of the old man’s first marriage. Her new life is lived out mostly in the company of Thomas and his wife Anna, a somewhat fastidious man of letters named St Quentin and brisk, brash family friend, twenty-something Eddie, and its uncertainty lies in her difficulty of comprehending what the people she comes into contact with are ‘like’. Taking everyone she meets at face value, rarely suspecting that their inner lives may differ from what appears on the surface, Portia, who at sixteen is ‘losing her childish majesty’, is eventually plunged into crisis. Bowen, you deduce, is captivated by Portia, of whom it is most commonly said that she is a ‘sweet kid’, wants to establish what makes her tick and why she behaves in the way she does.