The Great Silence: Britain from the Shadow of the First World War to the Dawn of the Jazz Age

by Juliet Nicolson

  Scarcity such as was known in her grandmother’s kitchen was not generally met with in the basement of the Marchioness’s house; there was, it seemed, almost always plenty to go round. But on this particular day Doris was taken aback at the quality of the raw ingredients. Unwrapping the layers of newspaper, she found herself looking at a whiskery face in need of a haircut. The insolent-looking eyes stared out of the complete head of a calf, daring Doris to reject it. But there was no question about it. Remembering the lessons she had learned from her grandmother, Doris was determined the lunch should go ahead.

  Putting on her hat and coat she took the number 22 bus up to The Times bookshop in Wigmore Street, behind Selfridges department store. One of the new cookery writers, Agnes Jekyll, had a constructive way of dealing with shortages. In her recipe ‘For the Too Fat’ she suggested a meat jelly that would reduce the disadvantages of being overweight, a state which she considered ‘unbecoming, fatiguing and [which] impairs efficiency’.

  But there on a high shelf was a copy of the condensed edition of the famous book that Doris was looking for, by the cookery writer she had heard her grandmother mention. In the index to Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management Doris found the recipe for Boiled Calf’s Head. The price of the book was marked at half a crown, a week’s wages. She took it back to Hill Street, and after carefully consulting the instructions, began to prepare the dish.

  Into the pot went the head, water, a handful of breadcrumbs, a large bunch of parsley, a knob of butter, pepper and salt, a tablespoon of lemon juice and a pinch of cayenne pepper. After four minutes of hard boiling, Doris grabbed the foam-flecked ear and heaved it from the pan before dismantling the warm head, chopping out the tongue, spooning out the eyes, ‘the worst part of it’, and snipping off all the whiskers before finally removing all the fine bones, until the head looked, Doris thought, ‘as if it had been run over’. After returning it to the pot for three further hours of cooking, Doris skilfully put the baggy thing together again, puffing out the cheeks with whole boiled onions and carrots and cooking the tongue separately as a side dish. Would that it had been so easy to restore a facially damaged soldier with a few vegetables and a little culinary care.

  The lunch was judged to be a triumph, and made the more so by the exquisite taste of the calf’s head. Doris was launched on a career as a cook and the Marchioness was hardly able to believe her good fortune. The new cook began to develop her own instinct for recipe excellence and six rabbits were sent down every week from the Marchioness’s Scottish estate so that the household could enjoy ‘Rabbit Doris’, a dish soon famed throughout smart London dining rooms.

  Doris’s career was on the ascendant and before long she had left the Marchioness for a new job at 146 Piccadilly, where she wore a cotton dress and a huge white apron, the required uniform for her job as assistant cook to the grumpy but talented French chef. Doris, known for her irrepressible laugh that continued to ring out long after everyone else had stopped, developed a formidable air of authority for one so young. She was proud to tell her family that she was never asked to wear the cap, the lowly headgear reserved for menial staff. Doris was going up in the world. And best of all she spent all her working days and most of the others with the dashing footman, Will Titley.

  For the remainder of the war there was no shortage of food at number 146. The large country estates owned by the family continued to provide all the fruit, vegetables, game and meat that they needed. After the war Doris had remained at 146 even though the French chef gave her and Will a difficult time, believing romance should be kept out of the workplace. But Doris held her own, feeling that ‘everything was going well for women when Nancy Astor was elected’ and that a French chef should not interfere. They had watched the fireworks together on Victory Day when a usually cheerful Doris had whispered to Will, ‘I won’t let myself cry. If I started crying I might never stop.’ Her uncle, her mother’s adored brother, had been killed by a sniper on his way to the trenches in September 1914. To cheer themselves up they went to the movies at Hyde Park Corner.

  Movies were affordable to all and Charlie Chaplin remained universally adored, long after cardboard cutouts of his bowler-hatted figure had been hauled up to the front by soldiers. Half the population of 1919 went twice weekly to the cinema where the doorman might be dressed to match the main feature. A vampire, a gladiator or a cowboy might offer a warm handshake of greeting. Inside, the steady crunch of peanuts combined with the noise of sucked oranges added to the other sound effects provided by the pianist who sat beneath the screen. In the big theatres a full orchestra accompanied the screenings. The programme was satisfyingly varied, catering to all tastes, and included a newsreel, a slapstick comedy and a travel feature before the main film itself. In the less sophisticated theatres with only one projector there was a slight delay between reel changes but no one minded the wait.

  Doris and Will, the courting couple, considered Chaplin a bit ‘past it’ in 1919 but had enjoyed Broken Blossoms, one of the most popular films that winter, directed by D. W. Griffith and starring the much-loved actress, Lillian Gish. The lyrically affecting story of the relationship between a beautiful young girl and a Chinaman living in poverty in London’s Limehouse district was playing to packed theatres. The innovative close-ups of Lillian Gish, filmed through gauze, revealed ‘a child with a tear-aged face’. A rare note of contemporary realism was injected into scenes in which policemen were seen reading newspapers with headlines telling of ‘only 40,000 casualties’ as they remarked to each other that the casualty figures were ‘better than last week’.

  Griffith introduced elaborate colour tints, and for further depth the screen itself was washed with coloured lights. The subtitles alerted the viewer to the condition of the Chinaman as he walked through Limehouse ‘with perhaps a whiff of the lillied pipe still in his brain’, an atmospheric druggy haze drifting over the scene. Usherettes in Chinese dress guided the moviegoers to their seats and caged birds were suspended from the cinema’s proscenium arch. Lillian Gish became so popular that her name was adopted into the shorthand of cockney rhyming slang, and Billingsgate market resounded to cries of ‘Would you like a nice bit of Lillian for your supper?’

  Doris and Will were huge cinema fans and had heard that synchronised words were soon going to be tied in to the silent pictures. But their favourite days were the ones when they left London for the clean air of the countryside. One morning they took a train down to Brighton and spent an unforgettable day out at the seaside. Their picnic included a smart blue tin of transparent crispy slivers of fried potato, a new product sold by a grocer, Frank Smith, who masterminded the frying from his Cricklewood garage. There were other new conveniences. Food in tins included exotic fruit from California and fillets of violently pink salmon. In the kitchen of 146 Piccadilly there was ‘real artificial cream’ in a pot that proved very convenient when the fresh supply from Scotland failed to arrive.

  In March 1920 at the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition the size of the ideal kitchen on display had been reduced and a new servant-free machine that washed dishes with its own in-built plumbing was introduced. The most astonishing exhibit was the All-Electric House with an electric towelrail heater and a heated pot for shaving water in the bathroom, a hair dryer, curling tongs, a milk steriliser for the baby and a massaging vibrator for tired arms for mothers exhausted by carrying the child round all day as a result of the shortage of nursemaids. In the scullery there was a washing machine with a basket that allowed the clothes to spin around while draining, while in the parlour an electric cigar lighter and a sewing machine that spun at the touch of a switch all drew admiring crowds.

  The Daily Mail Cookbook of the year included a helpful sequence of diagrams for the cracking and separating process of eggs. Many women had not learned the technique, having never entered the kitchen before. With fewer servants more involvement from the mistress of the house was necessary. Little known practical tips for handling a new world were offered. A lit
cigarette allowed to smoulder in the hand was an infallible way of clearing nasty lingering onion smells.

  Mills & Boon had published a perfect guide for the novice housekeeper. Life Without Servants, subtitled The Rediscovery of Domestic Happiness, was by a writer ready to identify themselves only as ‘A Survivor’. The tiny volume measuring four by three inches, designed to fit handily into any pocket, was aimed at those who could not find a good servant or who could not afford the inflated prices of domestic staff in 1920. Further titles in the Mills & Boon series of miniature books designed to offer practical help of other kinds to their post-war readership included A Little Book for Those Who Mourn compiled by Mildred Carnegy and Nerves and the Nervous by a doctor called Edwin L. Ash.

  Eileen Rafter was determined to escape from the domestic drudgery that she saw all around her. Eileen lived in Liverpool and the ever busy Merseyside docks had inspired in her a wish to see the world. Eileen had no ambition to go into service or to be a housewife, and would only marry, she told her mother, if she managed to ‘land an Admiral’. That way, she explained, she could travel abroad on beautiful ships and visit exciting places. Otherwise she would stay firmly single and be in charge of her own life.

  Clothes were her passion. The ragged black shawls and greasy braided hair of the older women who lived in the houses in her street filled her with horror. Their manner of dress had remained unchanged for three reigns. But standards in Eileen’s own home were different. One day she remembered looking up at her elegant mother who was dressed for the ballet, wearing a hat ‘with a jaunty little veil thing hanging off it, which was just to keep the flies off, but I thought to myself “oh she looks so lovely“’. The creamy panama-coloured broderie anglaise hat that Eileen herself wore each week to church in Birkenhead was so fussy that the lacy folds had to be ironed every Sunday. Mrs Rafter was a wonderful dressmaker and would make up patterns from the Weldon pattern book, but adapted under her young daughter’s direction so that from the age of ten Eileen was the self-appointed ‘style-setter’ of the Rafter family. ‘This dress has two frills at the bottom, but I think it would look better if you leave one of them off,’ Eileen would advise her mother and Mrs Rafter would oblige.

  As soon as she left school Eileen had applied for a job in a shop. Answering an advertisement in the Liverpool Echo for a cashier in Lewis’s department store, Eileen soon became anxious that she ‘would get a big bottom’ if she remained sitting down in the glass box for days on end taking the money, and reading poetry in between transactions (‘a novel would have been too frequently interrupted’). Here she learned the secrets of the commissions system and soon, after smiling winningly at the manager through the tiny window between her own office and his, she found herself employed in the haberdashery department selling the new silk stockings. She had worked out from behind her cashier’s desk that the commissions there were far higher than in the gloves section or even in the newly popular cosmetic department.

  Shortly afterwards Eileen was transferred to the London branch of Lewis’s where she slept in service block accommodation with other girls. Her room had a sofa that turned into a bed if you pulled it apart. ‘It was very new and very strange.’ But Eileen’s eye for the stylish had impressed the dress buyer, Mr Leak, so much that he took her with him to Paris to view the collections and put her to work making sketches of the designs she saw there. The plan was to bring the drawings back to London and make copies of the clothes for important customers.

  One evening in Paris Eileen was taken to dinner for pressed duck and champagne in the grandest of all Parisian restaurants, La Tour d’Argent. There, feeling herself to be well on the way to a lifetime’s career in fashion, she renewed her intention to avoid the double horrors of domestic service and marriage. Her mother was proud of her child. She could never have imagined such a life for herself.

  14

  Surviving

  Late Spring 1920

  Adam Thorpe, born in the wonderfully sunlit year of 1911, wished everyone would forget about the war. In the early months of 1920, on successive rainy Saturday afternoons, Adam had travelled with his family from village green to village green, standing around in the mud listening to the bugler playing the Last Post as the all too familiar sound ‘cut across a silence like the silence in a church before the coffin arrives’. On each of those cloud-filled Saturdays Adam had watched as the white sheets covering the still shapeless object fluttered to the ground to reveal memorial stones dedicated first to his grandfather, then to his uncle and finally to his own father and the other men of the village who had fallen with them. He watched the grief of his grandmother, his aunt and his mother and, with some impatience, wondered whether life would always consist of looking backwards.

  Lucy Neale was still unable to believe she would never again feel the rough khaki uniform of her father’s jacket brushing against her cheek during an embrace. Only when ten-year-old Lucy went to bed at night and remembered to say her prayers did her adored father’s absence seem believable. In tears she would say her prayers just as he had taught her, but she found it almost impossible to sleep without receiving his kiss on her forehead or hearing the words ‘Goodnight, Lulu, God bless you.’

  For some the return of a parent did not add to the comfort of life at home, especially if the lack of a job contributed to lack of money. In the overcrowded homes of the very poor tension had intensified since the Armistice. Henry Freedman slept upside down in the same bed as his two brothers, trying to find space for his head between two sets of toes that agitated his hair all night. Despite the mass of bodies, they were cold, and a dusty red brick warmed in the fireplace joined them under the sheets. The ever present smell of carbolic and sulphur that hung over the bed was never strong enough to deter the bed bugs and the walls were covered in tiny insect-sized bloodstains indicating the moment when the squashed creatures had finally met their end. A stinking pot-pourri of tea, manure, tobacco, sweat, soup, fried fish and poverty rose up to the bedroom floor. Jobless men clustered on benches outside in the street, bored and apathetic.

  Women struggled to find enough money to feed their children, starving themselves so there was more to go round, paying the doctor with precious ounces of butter, dreading the knock on the door that would bring the debt collector. Cleanliness was a mark of pride, but in the soot-filled back alleys of the cities there was little chance that the heavy sheets that had taken so long to wash would be clean by the time they had dried in the filthy air of the back yards. Keeping the dirt out of the house was a daily challenge. Outside taps, the only source of domestic water, would freeze over in cold weather. The temptations offered by the moneylender led only to further debt, but sometimes desperation won. Outside in the streets smells continued to identify the different areas of London’s commercial districts. Commercial Road itself was thick with smoke from the cigars that were rolled in the factories there; from the furniture-making warehouses in Curtain Road came the smell of linseed oil and turpentine.

  Unemployment had become the axis on which fear of destitution and shame balanced precariously. For the majority of the poor the ending of the war had not improved life. It was a world full of insecurity. And the middle classes developed a new contempt for the poor. Those who had enough money to celebrate their survival found the spiritlessness of the malnourished and the cynical hard to tolerate.

  But children have a way of ignoring or not noticing the hardship that adults endure. Street games in the East End remained constant before, during and after the war. Empty cocoa tins threaded with a piece of string to form a support provided makeshift stilts. Hopscotch grids were chalked on to the pavement. Skipping was accompanied by rhymes handed down from parent to child. The click of marbles and the thwack of conkers in season were heard up and down the back streets, accompanied by childish laughter.

  Away at boarding school Tom Mitford lived a lucky life that knew nothing of hardship. The spring holidays, at home at Asthall Manor in Oxfordshire, were the happy confirm
ation of the end of a long winter. While food at Lockers Park in Hemel Hempstead was not quite up to Savoy standards, Tom was relieved that the quantity had not suffered much even during the war years. What is more, he was allowed all sorts of dishes that he was never given at home; his mother, known to him and his sisters as Muv, had a rule that ‘what was good enough for Moses was good enough for us’. The Mitford children therefore craved all the foods that were forbidden to the ancient Israelites, including bacon, lobster, pigeon, rabbit, hare and mackerel.

  The girls who remained at home considered it most unfair that Tom was allowed some of these delicacies while away at school. And he never tired of detailing for them all the delicious things he had to eat there. ‘The other day we had fried bacon for breakfast,’ he wrote in his weekly letter home, adding, ‘sometimes we have brawn.’ And in case his sisters did not quite absorb the full joy of such a dish he emphasised that it was ‘Oh! So Good.’ As the sisters sat around sighing with irritation, Tom had not finished. Often, he told them, he was given ‘sardines and sometimes tongue and sometimes ham and sometimes HOT ham for lunch’. The latter dish was ‘scrumshus’. Other people’s parents also understood what a growing boy needed. On a day out with the mother of his friend Gore, Tom was allowed two large helpings of roast chicken as well as one and a half sausages.

  His mother responded at once to the barely concealed hint. Tom’s next single-page letter was dominated by exclamation marks of gratitude for the ‘LOVELY’ cake, which the Asthall cook had baked for him, although he adds at the end to his mother that ‘Sometime no matter when, I wish you would make me a cake with your own hands.’

  Despite the superior standard of food at school, Tom was looking forward to the holidays, and to days filled with pony riding, mucking about with his sisters and as much cake as he could eat. And there was something else to look forward to. Everyone had told him that his mother’s expected baby was bound to be a boy. Although he got along well with his sisters, coming exactly halfway down the family in order of age, after Nancy and Pam and before Diana, Jessica and Unity, it would be good to have someone in the family who could play football properly and be an ally against Nancy in particular who was such a brag. Tom often got his own back on her by replying in Latin to the show-off letters that she wrote him at school in Greek, and none of the sisters could compete with Tom’s repertoire of thirty card tricks. Only his father was a match.