The Lost Girls

by D. J. Taylor

  Who was to blame for this impasse? Connolly, being Connolly, seems to have assumed that all three parties in the transaction were at fault. If he had been unfaithful to his wife, then both wife and mistress were guilty of failing to understand his complex emotional needs. On the one hand, Jean ought to come back to him. On the other, she ought to acknowledge how difficult it was for him to give up his current way of life. Or as he put it in a letter from July 1939, ‘If I gave up [Diana] I should feel you had bullied me, unless there were many things you would also give up.’

  Meanwhile, the news from beyond the Sloane Square window was becoming steadily more alarming. Europe was preparing for war; Connolly, able-bodied and still in his mid-thirties, wondered uneasily what the authorities might have in store for him. It could not be any worse than the hackwork that was currently paying his hotel bills: there was a particularly chastening week, in the summer of 1939, when, in his capacity as the New Statesman’s film critic, he was reduced to reviewing Tarzan Finds a Son. Trapped between two women, unable or perhaps only unwilling to decide where his destiny lay, his professional life in tatters, the wider world about to erupt in conflict, he was self-evidently a man at a crossroads. It was against this unpromising backdrop that Horizon, one of the greatest literary magazines of the twentieth century, was born.

  2.

  ‘The Little Girl Who Makes Everyone’s Heart Beat Faster’

  Cyril liked cool girls in a warm climate.

  Michael Wishart, High Diver (1977)

  Stephen Spender’s diaries are full of leisurely re-imaginings of the friends he had made in the course of his long and eventful life. In January 1981, forty years and more since they first came across each other, he found himself unexpectedly thinking of Janetta. Spender remembered meeting her in 1938, when she turned up in London ‘wearing a trousered suit in dark velvet and carrying a shepherd’s crook’. Dark blonde, slender and enigmatic, her unusual costume giving her a faintly androgynous air, she was, he thought, ‘a dream person’. That night Spender lay awake thinking of her – ‘fantasizing, as they say, because I was still married to Inez [his first wife] and I did not think of having anything to do with her’. A year later they ran into each other again, had dinner and walked in the twilight along Oxford Street as far as Selfridges department store before saying their goodbyes. From the vantage point of his eighth decade, Spender was conscious of a golden opportunity gone missing. He ‘would have asked her to go home with him’, he recorded, had not timidity stayed his hand. But there was something else – faint, intangible, but decisive – holding him back. ‘She was still very attractive,’ he decided, ‘but she had become the Janetta I’ve known ever since: not the girl-boy shepherd-shepherdess, but the mysterious elusive woman she’s been ever since.’ Spender died in 1995, by which time he and Janetta had known each other for nearly sixty years, but all the evidence suggests that, of all his many meetings with her, none was quite so memorable as the first.

  If Spender’s raptures over the sight of a teenage girl in a trouser suit armed with a shepherd’s crook can seem slightly exaggerated, then this, it should straightaway be said, was the effect that Janetta tended to have on people. No literary or artistic bohemian of either sex who chanced upon her in her mid-century heyday seems either to have forgotten the experience or to have been anything other than transfixed by her company. Frances Partridge’s diary from May 1945 records her old friend David Garnett coming back from a party where he had met ‘an amazingly, almost embarrassingly beautiful girl, who turned out to be Janetta’. The Bloomsbury man of letters Gerald Brenan, to whom she was introduced at the age of fourteen, promptly informed Frances’s husband Ralph that ‘she sets my heart on fire’. The artist Feliks Topolski, no slouch when it came to judging feminine beauty, declared himself ‘bemused’ by her ‘sublimity’. To Patrick Leigh Fermor, she was ‘beautiful in a way that grows, rather than bursts out on one’. Even in old age the compliments kept coming: ‘very attractive and tall, and this wonderful bone structure, not wearing make-up’, a woman who encountered her in her eighties recalled, ‘you’ve got to be very beautiful to get away with that’.

  Comparisons with her contemporaries – most of them, inevitably, made by men – are instructive. Lys, everyone agreed, resembled the fashion plate she once had been. Sonia, with her pink-and-white complexion and her tendency to plumpness, looked like a Renoir painting. Much of Barbara’s allure hinged on her ability to arrange her clothing in ways that, as one ex-boyfriend put it, made her ‘appear more naked’. With Janetta, the effect of her presence in a room, or in front of a camera, is less straightforward. The photographs of her that survive from the 1930s and 1940s – many of them taken by Frances Partridge – convey not so much a formal record of her beauty as a terrific sense of something burrowing away beneath its surface. In one she broods furiously out of a tangle of tied-back hair. In another, she hunches over what looks like a recorder as the writer Eddie Sackville-West and the Partridges’ infant son Burgo look on. (Frances captioned this portrait ‘Music, Poetry and Innocence’.) In scarcely any of them can she be seen to smile.

  There was little in Janetta’s early life to hint at the bohemian worlds through which she was later to wander. For all the memory of a long-dead aunt with artistic leanings who had exhibited at the Paris Salon, the Woolleys were soldiers and clergymen and – a fact that became sharply apparent in the years after her birth – casualties of the First World War. Her mother, Jan, had originally been married to a regular army officer and South Africa veteran named George Culme-Seymour. There were two children, Mark and Angela. After Culme-Seymour’s death on the Western Front in the spring of 1915, his widow, then living in Tedworth Square, Chelsea, consoled herself with the frequent visits of his younger comrade, Captain Geoffrey Woolley. ‘Young, good-looking and unsophisticated’, according to his much more worldly stepdaughter, Captain Woolley came, as he discreetly put it, ‘to entertain the hope that we should marry when the war was over’. Sanctioned by the bride’s father-in-law, who confessed that he had always yearned for such an outcome, the wedding took place in June 1918, after which the family decamped to Oxford, where Geoffrey studied for the priesthood, and then to Rugby School where he took up a teaching post. Although two more children followed in quick succession – Rollo in 1920, Janetta on New Year’s Eve 1921 – Jan later told her elder daughter that she knew the marriage had been a mistake a week into the honeymoon.

  As befitted his lack of sophistication, Captain Woolley was a modest man, candidly acknowledging that, on joining the army in 1914, he ‘had no high ideas of my own fitness or prowess because I really combined a strong sense of duty with a timid nature’. Despite these shortcomings he won a Homeric Victoria Cross when, after a disastrous attack on a fortified hill three miles south-east of Ypres, finding himself stranded in a bomb crater, he managed to bring the surviving soldiers under his command safely home. What he came to think of his wife, his family and especially his daughter may be inferred from his autobiography. Sometimes a Soldier (1963) is a supremely odd book, and its oddity lies in the author’s reluctance to say anything about the people who were closest to him at crucial stages in his life. The career of pious good works and dutiful self-sacrifice – the chaplaincy of Harrow, respectful attendance on the Duke of York’s scheme to bring public school boys and their working-class equivalents together on summer camps – winds diligently on, but once the story reaches the 1920s there are only half-a-dozen incidental references to Jan, and Janetta, extraordinarily, is not mentioned by name.

  What had gone wrong? What had happened to separate the Revd Woolley, as he now was, from Jan and Janetta? The answer seems to have lain in Jan’s determination to break free of some of the constraints of her highly conventional upper-middle-class existence. There were frequent trips abroad, plausibly explained away as a consequence of her undeniably bad health, but the root cause of the breach was a straightforward distaste for the life that Geoffrey expected her to lead. Meeting wife a
nd daughter for the first time in the 1930s Frances Partridge noted how they seemed to have turned their backs on conventional family arrangements. As for Janetta, who professed to find her father ‘bogus’, the explanation lay in her undisguised contempt for religious belief. When Geoffrey came to preach at Downe House in Berkshire, where she had been sent to board, this hostility led to her being banned from attending the service. What seems never to have been more than a patchy education came to a temporary halt in 1936 when her mother decided that the pair of them should live together in southern Spain. Janetta’s ambition here in her early teens looks as if it was inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes: ‘I knew my mother had taken out an insurance policy that would give me £300 when I was 21, and I thought I was going to buy a donkey and walk across Europe.’

  If Jan and Janetta itched to meet less conventional people, then Torremolinos, where they rented a house in the early spring, was the place to find them. The coast around Málaga had not yet been built up, and the fishing villages were full of English visitors come to paint and write. As well as being ‘charming and tiny’, Torremolinos, Janetta remembered, contained at least half-a-dozen expatriates, with not a tourist in sight. The migrant population included the Bloomsbury literary man Gerald Brenan, who lived with his wife Gamel at nearby Churriana. Gerald already knew Angela and her brother Mark; when Angela arrived in the area with her husband Johnny Churchill, the Brenans were introduced to her mother and half-sister. By the time the Partridges arrived in Málaga for a brief stay in early April 1936, Gerald – always keen on young girls – had fallen under Janetta’s spell. She was, he fondly assured Ralph, ‘a little girl who makes everyone’s heart beat faster’. Frances and Ralph were similarly beguiled. Frances’s diary for 12 April notes that they ‘walked to Torremolinos . . . Tea with Mrs Woolley and Janetta.’ An afternoon’s conversation was enough to reveal the family’s situation: Jan determined to spend her time out of England; her children finding their father old-fashioned and repressive. Jan the Partridges liked (it was a measure of Mrs Woolley’s emancipation from her previous life that Ralph shortly afterwards had an affair with her), but Janetta they found captivating. Already the roots of Frances’s lifelong obsession with her younger friend were firmly in place.

  But the Woolleys’ Spanish idyll was short-lived. On 16 July the army mutinied in Morocco; two days later the rising spread to the mainland and much of Andalusia fell to Franco’s Nationalists. Brenan, visiting Málaga on the morning of 18 July, saw soldiers marching down the main street on their way to proclaim martial law. There were workmen massing in the side-streets and the sound of gunfire. After an attempt by the Nationalists to seize the municipal buildings had been fought off, working-class Republicans swarmed into the town, setting fire to the houses of the bourgeoisie. Thinking that his daughter Miranda would be better off in England, and supposing that Jan and Janetta would be on their way home as soon as possible, Brenan made his way to Torremolinos. Here he discovered that the Woolleys, too, had been caught in the city as it went up in flames and were lucky to escape. Happily by this time the outside world had begun to take an interest in the plight of Málaga’s British community. The Times offered daily bulletins, informing its readers on 19 July that the ‘principal danger spot’ was Andalusia ‘as it is there that the insurgents stand the best chance of uniting their forces’. By the following day there was talk of a destroyer setting out from Gibraltar ‘to help in the evacuation of British subjects in the event of necessity’.

  The Governor of Gibraltar, Charles Harington, had a particular reason for ensuring that the Woolleys were swiftly conveyed to safety: he was a distant connection of Jan’s. It would be very tempting to regard the rescue operation that followed as a grandiloquent personal gesture backed by the resources of empire. As Janetta put it: ‘My mother was apparently a sort of relation of the Governor and he sent a destroyer to collect us.’ On the other hand, Harington was a fanatical right-winger and Franco-ite – official bulletins from the Rock had already begun to refer to the elected Republican government as ‘Reds’ – determined to do his duty to the British population of southern Spain as quickly and conspicuously as possible. On 25 July The Times reported that a navy vessel was ‘proceeding to Malaga to evacuate 60 British subjects there’. By this time the situation on the ground was serious. The Brenans’ house had been searched by an anarchist patrol. When the destroyer arrived off Torremolinos the ‘very smart motor boat’ despatched to take off the expatriate community was refused permission to land by left-wing activists. In the end, the Woolleys were allowed to take a bus to Málaga. Here, in the company of twenty or so other British passport holders, they were finally allowed to depart.

  Back in England, Jan and Janetta soon gravitated to the Partridges’ Wiltshire fastness of Ham Spray. A photograph from around this time shows Frances cutting Janetta’s hair in a makeshift barber’s chair set up on the lawn. Jan, Janetta and Rollo were there at Christmas 1936, after which Jan decided to return to warmer climes. Taking an apartment near Marseilles, she re-installed Janetta, now turned fifteen, at Downe House senior school. The depth of the Partridges’ emotional involvement in her life may be gauged from Frances’s engagement book, which is sprinkled with information about Janetta’s movements and school arrangements. Increasingly, Ham Spray became her base, where she passed her half-terms and holidays in the company of what amounted to surrogate parents. When the summer came and she went to visit her mother, Ralph spent the best part of a week fetching her back.

  The roots of this devotion are not easily explained. The Partridges, as Frances’s voluminous diaries attest, were shrewd, sophisticated people, great practitioners of Bloomsbury scepticism, frequently unimpressed by the company who came their way, subjecting them – at any rate on paper – to minute interrogations of motive and comprehension and sometimes not liking what they discovered. Janetta, on the other hand, seems to have won their sympathy almost at a stroke, a combination of interest and affection that produced what Frances’s biographer calls ‘a quasi-parental love for a beautiful, strong-minded girl on the threshold of adulthood’. Brenan, who had also relocated to England with his family, looked longingly on. Wanting to stay at Ham Spray at Christmas 1938 but finding it once again tenanted by Jan and her family, he wrote to tell Frances that he envied her ‘the lovely Janetta’.

  Gradually Janetta, whom the Partridges now christened ‘Wolfie’ or ‘Wolfers’, was moving closer to the social circles occupied by Cyril Connolly and his friends. Her education came to an abrupt end in the summer of 1937 when she persuaded her mother to remove her from Downe House (‘a very silly decision,’ she later recalled. ‘I was very ignorant and [the] school had been very good to me’). Opting to enrol at Chelsea Polytechnic with the aim of studying art, she was soon installed in the house in Warwick Avenue occupied by her half-sister Angela, now married to Patrick Balfour. Sustained by Balfour’s job as a gossip-columnist, the couple led an extensive social life, and their teenaged lodger (‘half fascinated and half angry’) was frequently invited down from her roost in the attic to mingle with their guests. The fact that some of these new associates had aspirations that went well beyond friendship was probably brought home to her by an episode that took place early in the New Year of 1939.

  Once again, Christmas had been spent at Ham Spray, where Janetta had celebrated her seventeenth birthday. Three weeks later she, the Partridges and another couple, Heywood Hill (proprietor of the bookshop in Curzon Street) and his wife Anne, were booked to travel to St Gervais in the French Alps for a skiing holiday. A few days before they were due to leave, the normally indefatigable Frances fell ill. Giddy and nauseous, she encouraged husband and friends to leave without her on the assumption that a few days’ rest would see her right and allow her to join them later.

  There is a suspicion that Ralph had been less than sympathetic. ‘My sweetest love,’ entreated a missive penned en route, ‘I have been so beastly and disagreeable
to you – do try to forgive me . . . as I’m going I shall try to enjoy myself.’ Janetta added a plaintive codicil: ‘Ralph is pink and miserable looking and I do feel it’s so awful for you being left there . . . Ralph’s in despair and I’m ready to burst into tears.’ Over the next few days consoling letters sped back and forth between St Gervais and Ham Spray. The local doctor was doing his best, Frances told her husband. Burgo, the Partridges’ three-year-old son, was building a snowman, and Ralph and Janetta must have fun. ‘I am so glad you have Wolfers to keep you company,’ she declared, ‘because no-one could be better.’ Not to be outdone, Ralph wrote back assuring her how much he missed her. ‘I am not cut out to go away from your side,’ he gallantly deposed, ‘without you I’m quite lost and hopelessly discouraged.’ Not long after this, thinking herself recovered, Frances set off for Paddington through the late January snow, only to find that her dizziness had worsened to the point that she could scarcely stand. She wrote a long letter to Ralph (‘Please darling do not be disappointed and do not not not think of coming home. Just keep on enjoying yourself with sweet Wolfers’) and returned to Ham Spray, Burgo and the nanny.