The Lost Girls

by D. J. Taylor

  Lys hung on until the end, overseeing arrangements for the final, double number of December 1949–January 1950 and assisting with the last rites of closure when, as Connolly theatrically described it, ‘We closed the long windows over Bedford Square, the telephone was taken, the furniture stored, the back numbers went to their cellar, the files rotted in the dust. Only contributions continued inexorably to be delivered, like a suicide’s milk.’ Elsewhere there were other long windows closing, and other furniture going into storage. Lys’s letters from the early part of 1950 are full of intimations of the damage done to her in the eight years she and Connolly had been together. ‘Please forgive me for going away’, begins a note from early spring, ‘but I feel if I stay I shall have some kind of a breakdown, which would only make you feel guilty, and therefore hate me . . . My feelings have been played around with so much that nothing remains except a desire to escape.’ ‘P.S.,’ runs a codicil, ‘Please ask Mrs Shaw to do laundry . . . I’ve put everything in the box. Her wages will be £2. I’ll leave some money for you on Sunday.’ Even in the depths of her despair, Lys was determined to keep an eye on Connolly’s domestic wellbeing.

  Friends of the couple who had been disposed to poke fun at the relationship knew where their loyalties lay. Nancy Mitford, to take the most obvious example, might have been endlessly amused by Lys’s strivings on Connolly’s behalf, but she liked her, sympathised with her and, somewhat perversely, wanted her to obtain a prize that she suspected to be scarcely worth the having. ‘I love Lys . . .,’ she told Waugh in reply to his letter about Connolly’s Whitsun stay, ‘it would be a horrid shame if he turned her off now.’

  No doubt the small girl who lived at Sussex Place thought so too. During Lys’s absence in Italy, Nicky had taken to visiting the Connollys’ rooms after breakfast. Now past her sixth birthday, she had developed a talent for mimicry. One morning she fixed her eye on Connolly and informed him, ‘Now I’m going to be Lys.’ The middle-aged man in the dressing gown looked fascinatedly on. ‘Get up Cyril and go to your office,’ Nicky shrilled at him. ‘You’re lazy. Now come along to the office with me.’

  Interlude: Office Life

  Goodness the things sent in were dull.

  Janetta, remembering her time at Horizon

  If a certain amount of the Lost Girl’s time was spent in West End watering holes or in the bedsitters and furnished flats of Chelsea and South Kensington, then far more of it was eaten up by daily attendance at her place of work: at institutional tower blocks allied to the war effort; at requisitioned hotels occupied by Balkan governments in exile; above all at the Horizon office. Lys laboured there, on and off, for nearly seven years, Sonia for almost five, Anna for two. Diana and Janetta helped out when required. Cumulatively, the whole enterprise can sound horribly depressing: unending, infinite: thousand upon thousand of hours employed in the not terribly exciting job of answering telephone calls, typing letters, administering Cyril’s hectic social life, fraternising with the other employees – these included an editorial assistant named Benedicta and the business manager, Mr Harris – eyeing up the bundles of manuscripts that arrived each day in the morning’s post, dealing with callers, and . . . doing what exactly?

  That so little survives of Horizon’s daily routines is, from one angle, a consequence of their utter mundanity. However dazzling the lustre that shines off a literary magazine, what goes on in its editorial sanctums is tedious in the extreme, and for every contribution that might just find a place in the next issue but four there are generally two or three dozen that are sent back by return of post. The glamour is all abstract, and the reality a mixture of half-drunk cups of coffee, intermittent raids on the petty-cash tin and the reek of cigarette smoke. Janetta recalled trackless hours ‘putting rejection slips into stamped envelopes & slightly less abrupt ones into any more promising mss’. And so the countless letters that Lys and Sonia despatched to Connolly when he was away from the office are horribly matter-of-fact: word counts; advertising slots; subscriber offers; whether or not to accept Antonia White’s new story lest she take it elsewhere. Reconstituting the interiors of Connolly’s two command centres at Lansdowne Terrace and Bedford Square is more or less impossible. Maclaren-Ross’s famous sketch is more interested in the editor, ‘the folder with my stories which lay upon his desk’ and the prospect of lunch at the Café Royal, than the rooms in which he sat. Natasha Litvin, equally understandably, is beguiled by high-end paraphernalia – Spender’s Picasso, his gramophone, his boxes of records – not the piles of page proofs and the rectangular brown envelopes. The late-period photographs of Sonia and Lys at work show, well, what you would expect – desks, cane chairs, telephones and efficient young women waiting for the next call, the next importunate young writer bursting through the door with a parcel in his hand.

  So, what went on at Lansdowne Terrace and Bedford Square? What did Lys, Sonia and the others actually do? Anna Kavan once mentioned trying to get hold of ‘cake’, forties-era slang for cocaine, for her colleagues but there is no other evidence that drug-taking was a part of Horizon’s daily round. On the other hand, there is general agreement that the atmosphere of the office was irradiated by the presence of its proprietor. Spender would recall Connolly’s complaint that Sonia loved no one but Peter Watson, that he, Connolly, would always know if Peter were there as Sonia reserved 70 per cent of her smile for him. Not that the editor himself was a permanent fixture. Connolly usually arrived after lunch, by which time his handmaidens would have spent a good five hours dealing with whatever the morning had thrown up. This was Lys’s favourite time: ‘People were always coming by to talk. London seemed a lot smaller then, especially in the early part of the war when so many people left to avoid the bombing. But life went on, and you could never tell who would turn up.’

  And who were these visitants, Horizon’s passing trade, Connolly’s friends and protégés come to file copy or simply exchange small-talk? Lys remembered a violently hungover Evelyn Waugh, regular appearances from Dylan Thomas, who came to borrow money from Watson, and occasional visits from Orwell, whose habit it was to argue with her about Connolly: ‘He thought that Cyril shouldn’t go to fancy dinner parties at the Dorchester when there was a war on.’ Years later Lys decided that Orwell’s disapproval of his editor’s vigorous social life was merely a way of flirting with her, that the glint in his eye denoted faint romantic interest rather than the twinge of conscience. ‘He was more handsome than his photographs make him appear,’ she thought. As for the visitors, no aspiring literary man or woman received Horizon’s call with anything less than profound satisfaction. But for his encouragement, Angus Wilson informed Connolly a quarter of a century after the acceptance of his first short story, his writing might have petered out ‘as the unfertilised hobby of a man who was looking for some means of self expression but never found it . . . I know that my life would have been emptier and more futile if I had never written . . . None of it could I have done without your encouragement and I must be only one of many’.

  Experienced Connolly-watchers often noted an element of performance. The editor, it was said, knew the effect that his personality produced on people and played up to it. Together he and Watson were a formidable team. ‘They are the best people one could possibly work with,’ Anna Kavan decided, ‘intelligent, sensitive, tolerant, even a little gay occasionally, wh. is quite something right now.’ Undoubtedly, the faint air of being part of a public spectacle rubbed off on his assistants. What began as routine could transform itself, almost without warning, into a highly self-conscious ritual, in which supporting roles were expected to be gamely filled, and cues instantly supplied. The suspicion that one was acting in a play under Connolly’s direction could occasionally be a bit too strong for comfort. Older visitors were sometimes less than impressed. It was Evelyn Waugh, on a visit to London in October 1949, who telegraphically remarked to Nancy Mitford that he had seen ‘the inside of Horizon office’. What enticements were on offer? Waugh noted only ‘horribl
e pictures collected by Watson & Lys & Miss Brownell working away with a dictionary translating some rot from the French’.

  10.

  The Man in the Hospital Bed: Sonia 1945–50

  Boots’s boule de suif what was her name? Sonia something is engaged to marry the dying Orwell and is leaving Horizon so there will not be many more numbers to puzzle us.

  Evelyn Waugh, letter to Nancy Mitford, September 1949, in The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh (1996)

  One evening early in the autumn of 1949, on his way through the West End, Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit stopped for a drink in a Charlotte Street pub. It was four years since his relationship with Janetta had stumbled to a halt, but the London world he inhabited was still full of the friends they had made together in the early 1940s. Here among the Charlotte Street bohemians, the advertising copywriters and the used car salesmen – Warren Street, home of the second-hand motor trade, was a stone’s throw away to the north – another of these old connections loomed into view, when a pale, buxom girl at the bar revealed herself as Sonia Brownell. There was something odd about her, Sinclair-Loutit thought, a hint of nervousness and suppressed agitation. She was getting married, she explained. Then, out of the blue, she asked him: could he lend her £5? This, too, was odd, Sinclair-Loutit deduced, for the way in which she made the request seemed somehow loaded, ‘her manner indicating that she had no intention of paying it back’. As a medical man with an interest in psychology, he decided that borrowing the money had something to do with stress, that here in the weeks before her wedding this was her way of dealing with the state of chronic emotional upset in which she found herself. He never saw her again, and the loan remained unpaid.

  One of Connolly’s first tasks as Horizon prepared to greet the post-war world in the autumn of 1945 was to introduce his new editorial secretary to the magazine’s contributors. In the case of George Orwell, this was technically a re-introduction: Orwell was a Horizon mainstay, a fixture of its columns since the appearance of ‘Boys’ Weeklies’ in 1940, and Sonia had almost certainly become acquainted with him three or four years before. As their mutual friend Celia Paget put it, she ‘couldn’t not have come across him’ in the early days at Lansdowne Terrace. As Sonia remembered it, their first meeting had taken place at one of Connolly’s dinner parties in 1941, shortly after she had read a library copy of his first novel Burmese Days (1934), lent to her by Diana Witherby. Orwell’s memory of their conversation is not recorded, but Sonia had been far from impressed, recalling that when dinner was served, ‘he was very quiet and said something about you’ve put foreign stuff in the food but sat down and enjoyed it’. The accepted version is that their re-encounter took place shortly before Christmas at Orwell’s bolthole in Canonbury Square, a cold and comfortless flat that was also home to his adopted son Richard, then eighteen months old, and the boy’s nanny Susan Watson. The plan was for Connolly and Sonia to be entertained to drinks, but they arrived to discover that the sherry had run out: Susan had to be despatched for a fresh bottle. Alternatively, they may have met earlier in the autumn, as Michael Sayers, who had shared a flat with Orwell in Kentish Town in the 1930s, remembered introducing them at a Horizon dinner on the grounds that his old friend ‘needed looking after’.

  Whatever the precise circumstances of the reunion, Sayers was right. Orwell badly needed looking after. Here in the latter part of 1945, his career had reached a watershed. Animal Farm, published in the summer, had been a considerable success – the first book he had ever written to have sold more than a few thousand copies – but even before it had appeared in the bookshops his personal life had been thrown into turmoil, when his wife Eileen, undergoing what was alleged to have been a routine operation, died on the operating table, leaving him with the care of a baby in sight of his first birthday. However traumatised by his wife’s death, Orwell was determined to do his best by Richard, although visitors to Canonbury Square noted that the domestic arrangements sometimes had a rather cack-handed air, and that paternal enthusiasm for the job in hand was frequently undercut by lack of attention to detail. Would it not be a good idea to close the bathroom window, the wife of a friend invited to watch Richard having his bath diffidently suggested, as freezing January air blew in to mingle with the clouds of steam? And why not dry the child beforehand rather than simply scooping him up in a bath towel and carrying him off along an unheated passage to the sitting room?

  Orwell accepted these suggestions with the same matter-of-factness that he greeted compliments about his manifest absorption in the business of child-rearing: he had always been good with animals, he explained, without irony, to a sympathetic friend. None of this, though, could compensate for the emotional desert in which he found himself, or subdue his curious psychological response to Eileen’s death. This was to propose marriage, more or less on the spot, to any remotely suitable young woman who came his way in the course of his daily life. The first of these candidates was Arthur Koestler’s sister-in-law Celia Paget, who admired his work but wanted nothing to do with him romantically. Another was a girl named Anne Popham, who inhabited another flat in the Canonbury Square block. Given the slightness of their acquaintanceship – they had done no more than exchange the occasional word on the staircase – Miss Popham was startled to receive an invitation to tea, and even more surprised when her host sidled meaningfully up to her to enquire: ‘Do you think you could take care of me?’ It was in this fraught and emotionally charged atmosphere that Sonia came properly into Orwell’s life.

  What did she make of it? As anyone who knew Sonia well might have predicted, all her fundamental instincts of duty and fellow feeling were aroused by the sight of the lonely widower and his adopted son in the freezing flat. She took to calling round on Susan Watson’s day off to babysit and cook in rooms that, as she later recalled, stank of ‘cabbage and unwashed nappies’: Anne Popham discovered her there one day, very much at home and talking to her host about Stéphane Mallarmé. On the other hand, the respect in which, taking her cue from Connolly, she held Orwell as a writer – a prodigious talent who showed every sign of becoming more successful still – was seriously undermined by his physical shortcomings. She later confessed to being ‘appalled’ by his advances, and although there was probably a brief affair in the early part of 1946, like Celia and Anne she turned down the inevitable proposal of marriage with barely a second thought.

  But there was something else about Orwell that Sonia, bustling around the Canonbury Square flat as the short winter afternoons faded into twilight, may not have grasped. Once the psychological effect of his wife’s death had been discounted, his life seemed full of purpose. As well as being absorbed by the responsibilities of looking after his infant son, he was also brooding about a new novel and planning to relocate to the Scottish island of Jura where, he fondly imagined, the book could be written and Richard brought up in a world of unspoilt landscapes and clean air. On the other hand, the man busy planning a future as a part-time Hebridean smallholder was also seriously ill. In February 1946, shortly after l’affaire Popham, Susan Watson, hard at work in the kitchen and disturbed by noises elsewhere in the flat, found him walking down the passage with blood pouring from his mouth. Following her employer’s instructions, she fetched a jug of chilled water and a block of ice from the Frigidaire, wrapped the ice in a piece of cloth and placed it on his forehead, and sat holding his hand until the bleeding stopped.

  Clearly, Orwell had suffered a tubercular haemorrhage. Equally clearly, medical help had to be summoned. But here Susan ran into a problem that many of Orwell’s friends had been forced to contend with over the years, especially when his health was in doubt: his resolute inflexibility of will. Admitting to TB would have meant immediate hospitalisation; the priority, he reasoned, was to start work on what would become Nineteen Eighty-Four. By the time the doctor arrived, Orwell, well wrapped up beneath the bedcovers, and deflecting awkward questions, was able to pass off his illness as a bad attack of gastritis. Amazingly, the impos
ture worked, and he spent the next two weeks in bed, maintaining the pretence, to Koestler and other friends, that he was suffering from a severe stomach complaint – ‘quite an unpleasant thing to have, but I am somewhat better and got up for the first time today’, he informed Anne Popham, now in Germany working for the Control Commission.

  The letter to Anne, addressed to ‘Dear Andie’ (‘I call you that because it is what I have heard other people call you’), is an immensely gloomy performance, apologising for the embarrassment he had caused (‘I thought you looked lonely and unhappy, and I thought it just conceivable that you might come to take an interest in me . . .’) and claiming that ‘There isn’t really anything left in my life except my work and seeing that Richard gets a good start.’ At the same time, as he readily conceded, neither of these interests made his loneliness tolerable. ‘I have hundreds of friends, but no woman who takes an interest in me and can encourage me.’ As it turned out, the woman who would eventually take an interest was nearer at hand than he thought.

  From its earliest days, and for all its editor’s monomania, Horizon had always been a geometry of people. Connolly; Watson; Spender; Bill Makins, the first business manager; assorted helpers and sponsors: all these had played some part in shaping the face that the magazine presented to the world and the kind of cultural currency in which it dealt. Here in the post-1945 era, even more so as the decade wore on, some of the angles began to shift. It was not so much that Connolly had lost interest in his creation – he enjoyed being the editor of a highbrow monthly, and relished the prestige that came with it – more that the circumstances of the post-war world conspired to divert his attention from what most observers would have regarded as the one true business of his life. Despite, or perhaps because of, his non-combatant status, Connolly had taken the six years of hostilities hard. ‘FUCK THE WAR’, runs one of his letters to Janetta. In their aftermath, pleasurable diversions loomed on all sides. There was a newly liberated Europe to re-explore. America beckoned. There were books to write, or rather – as Connolly was no less a procrastinator than he had always been – to think about writing, and women to cultivate. All this made him much less interested in Horizon’s day-to-day management, its finances and even the writers and artists who appeared in its pages. When travelling abroad, he became an increasingly erratic correspondent, all too ready to assume that those left behind him had the situation in hand. It was in this atmosphere of drift, laxity and the want of a controlling purpose that Sonia came into her own.