Gluck

by Diana Souhami

  All my love and don’t forget this is a very private letter! She is so annoyed at the moment about your name and the Queen that she’s not writing to you. But you know well enough it all means nothing and I really do think she is ill and tired into the bargain – though happy!

  Much love dearest Meteor

  Nesta

  Gluck must have wondered quite whose exhibition it had been. The Meteor was unable to leave her alone at centre stage. Out of a desire to promote Gluck’s reputation, and perhaps her own, she had made an undignified display. Her actions left Gluck uncertain as to where her own worth lay. The inference of her mother’s determined efforts was that artistic worth could be got from Buckingham Palace or the national galleries. Gluck wanted her pictures to speak for themselves. They were all that she had to say. If they were to receive praise she wanted it freely given, not coerced. She had asked her mother unambiguously not to interfere. Her words had gone unheeded. Gluck could defend herself by changing her name and her appearance, but she could not change her mother who caused her to fight with superhuman force for a will she might call her own. She could not achieve her mother’s standards of perfection. Nor, for that matter, as the years took their toll, could she either in life or art achieve her own.

  ELEVEN

  ‘THE BRIND AND THE WHEEZE’

  After the razzmatazz of the Bond Street show, Gluck’s first thoughts were to take time off for a holiday with Nesta: ‘The hoar frost on the trees and bushes would fascinate you. What pictures you would conjure up here. Another year you too must come.’ So Seymour Obermer had written from St Moritz in January 1937, to Gluck as she pined in her Hampstead studio for his wife. The next January Gluck joined them in the mountains. She conjured up no pictures in Lenzerheide, but was crazy about Nesta’s forte, skating:

  Grand Hotel Kurhaus, Lenzerheide

  February 20th 1938

  Mother darling

  … skating has taken such a hold of me that I can think of nothing else.… Nothing like an absorbing new occupation for putting things in proper perspective. Yesterday I tried to waltz with Nesta and it didn’t go too badly. She is a crack skater – quite the best here. In fact she has given the professional teachers many tips.… It is such a graceful, lovely thing and so rhythmic to go round with the music which consists of a gramophone with loudspeakers and very good records – so you see my horizon though limitless is also bounded and I almost dream skating at the moment – you must forgive the obsession. My ankles, which I always had thought too weak are getting stronger …

  I have only been on the ice three weeks next Monday. I have a lesson every day professionally, so something ought to ‘marche’ soon. On Friday we are going to take an expedition to the top of the mountain – Nesta on skis with two other skiers and Seymour and two Englishwomen we met on the rink and I on snow shoes. There is apparently a marvellous view at the top.

  Goodbye my dear … I have literally no news because my whole existence at the moment is concentrated on skating …

  Always your very loving Hig

  The following year the trio went again to the same place. Seymour evidently accepted Gluck as a holiday companion. The months during which the world rumbled toward war were, for Gluck, happy, hedonistic, low on work and high on fun. In the early thirties she had entered Constance’s world of hard work and high style. Now she moved into Nesta’s life of outdoor sports, house parties and no work routine at all. She spent more time at The Mill than at Bolton.

  Sporting crazes came and went. Horseriding in Plumpton followed skating in Lenzerheide, ‘Fourth lesson – learnt about bridles and saddling at stables’ was her diary entry for 20 September 1938. A couple of days later she wrote to her mother (23 September 1938): ‘Riding goes on apace – Yesterday, my 5th lesson – I rode some events with other pupils and came in first twice. I shall hate stopping to come back to London.’ And, to complete the country image, she acquired a dog, a Weimaraner:

  Mother darling

  … I have a stupendous piece of news for you! I have a dog!! It is one of the most beautiful creatures you have ever seen. Its father is a champion.… It has the sweetest nature and will be a grand guard when I go out sketching.… I have always loved dogs as you know, but felt I ought not to have one until life seemed more settled. Now I feel the moment has come.

  Now comes the very important part of this letter and please don’t forget about it. Nesta has given him to me – but we have told Seymour and everybody that you have given him to me because it seemed more politic from every point of view – She has been far too generous really and he is a ‘show’ dog and for that reason she felt she would sooner no one knew she had given him to me. You are the only person to know and you must never divulge the secret. I expect all this will amuse you, but with your experience of people and life you will certainly see eye to eye about it I know.

  The dog, Zar, in his short life became uncertain as to quite where home was. Perhaps Gluck was uncertain too, despite her claims to feeling settled. Those who knew her in her later years say she had little rapport with animals – that she was sharp with dogs and they disliked it.1 Zar was boarded out for a good deal of the time. And Nesta seemed uncertain as to quite whose job it was to look after Gluck, if looking after was what was needed. An arrangement had been made, to mollify Seymour, whereby Gluck spent alternate weekends away from the Mill House with Nesta’s mother, who lived in the nearby village of Uekfield but this became problematic and. before long Nesta was writing to the Meteor with another proposal:

  Dearest Meteor

  … I’ve been thinking hard about you and Gluck and the summer. As you know, she has been spending alternate weekends with me and with my mother. My mother is rather a society-fly-about really … She is the kind who took up Gluck like so many have done and now Gluck has made herself at home and lays down the law a little (you know!) she does not take into account the workings of genius, but is getting a little restive. Nothing is wrong yet, but I, knowing my mother, can see it coming! I have said nothing to Gluck about it naturally.

  Now. She has often bemoaned the fact that your life and her life are so utterly apart … and suddenly last night I thought what a marvellous idea it would be if you got a house in the country and let her come down every other weekend to you …

  … If you did this you would have to find the house on your own and when it was all ready say casually, ‘I’m trying this for a month come down some weekend!’ I know that really she would far rather be with you than anyone. My mother’s is only a pied a terre.… The country which Gluck says is very paintable is Rye and round that part of Sussex. Or where there are very large fat trees! If you think anything of the idea tell me and I will keep my eyes open …2

  What the Meteor thought of the idea is not on record. But it came to nothing and on the face of it more houses and seeing more of mother, were not what was needed.

  However unsettled her sporting life, Gluck was having fun. She spent a good deal of time trundling back and forth between Hampstead and Plumpton in her 1935 Hillman, registration BUL 700, to which she was devoted. It kept going wrong but the Meteor, for the most part, footed the repair bills. The summer of 1938 was spent holidaying, mainly with Nesta, in Dorset, Devon and Cornwall. ‘It’s rather fun to mess about like this before I start work again in earnest,’ Gluck wrote to the Meteor (23 August 1938). She stayed for a week with Nesta’s friends the Hollendens at their South Devon home, Matt’s Point. (Lord Hollenden had bought Gluck’s picture of the chestnut branches, ‘Adolescence’, at her 1937 exhibition.)

  It is one of the most spectacular places I have ever seen. The house is halfway down a cliff.… And then there are hundreds of steps and paths down to the sea and swimming pools in the rocks and beaches and caves – the whole headland belongs to them so it’s peaceful and untroubled and quite lovely.… It’s just possible I may do some work here …

  And a couple of months were spent at the ‘Letter Studio’ with a host of house guests. Wor
k remained a possibility.

  A gruff word from Ernest Dawbarn of The Fine Art Society, in October 1938, went unanswered: ‘I hardly feel that what we have left from the exhibition does justice to you, and thought, perhaps, by this time you might have been able to let us have one or two new pictures.’ The only picture she recorded working on between the end of her 1937 exhibition and the outbreak of war was a commissioned portrait of Peter Giffard in January 1939. He was seventeen and she did a profile of his knobbly Adam’s apple, chin and nose with his hair like a thick thatch.

  The Giffards lived in Chillington Hall, Wolverhampton, inherited through the direct male line, for nine centuries, from Walter Giffard. He, so the legend ran, came to England when William the Conqueror invaded – riding alongside him as it was his hereditary right to hold William’s stirrup when he mounted or dismounted his horse. His reward for this, and presumably other services of conquest, was Chillington and all its lands. Some years ago Gluck’s picture, still at the Hall and in its original stepped frame, was affected by a form of mould which made the hair colour fade.

  Gluck took three weeks over the portrait then hastily packed for six weeks in the snows of Lenzerheide with the Obermers. This time she took up skiing as well as skating. She had seven lessons before breaking her thumb, which ended her sortie into winter sports.

  After skating, skiing and riding came sailing – for a while. She bought a boat and a 3/6d how-to-do-it book from Lillywhites, put the boat on her car roof and drove it down to the lake at Plumpton:

  August 9th, 1939

  Mother darling

  … The day before yesterday having practised different rope knots and read my book I felt I must go a stage further, so rang up a friend of Nesta’s, a retired Colonel cracked about sailing who came across in his old clothes. It was blowing and pouring and we spent a happy messy wet afternoon crouched in the boat on the lake. He was very sweet – a bad limp and a big tummy and was like a boy about it all – from 3.30 to 5 pm he sat crouched and could hardly stand up when he got to land. He taught me a lot and said he wants to take me sailing at Newhaven. Isn’t it exciting. He gave me a small examination at teatime and I didn’t make any mistakes. I have been dreaming knots and tackle and am truly very thrilled about it. I have always loved water and boats and it’s like a very pleasant dream come true.… It’s done me no end of good to have something so bracing to be interested in as I must get fit and less jumpy before I can paint again …

  As soon as I give this to the postman you can imagine me rushing to the boat – so ‘yo ho ho and a bottle of rum’, Quite crazy you see, as usual. Goodbye darling. Take care of yourself. Forgive all this nautical news – as Nesta said in a lovely spoonerism the other day “The brind and the wheeze” are calling!!

  My best love as ever

  Always your loving Hig

  Gluck moved as far as she could into Nesta’s life. They went to the Plumpton Races at weekends, to the Dog Show at Olympia where Zar was exhibited, to cocktail parties, Glyndebourne, art exhibitions and the first nights of the theatre people whom they knew. At times Gluck noted the precise number of hours and minutes of the week she and Nesta had spent together, with the rueful implication that these might have been more.

  For most of 1939 they worked together hectically on a fund-raising project of Nesta’s. This was to raise money for the Heritage Craft School, in Chailey, Sussex. The school, dependent on charitable finance, provided education and hospital care for disabled children. Nesta’s idea was to organize an exhibition of antiques, loaned by Royals and aristocrats, which the public would pay to see. It was a project after the Meteor’s heart. The title, which took up a quarter of the headed paper, read:

  EXHIBITION OF ROYAL AND HISTORIC FURNITURE AT 145 PICCADILLY

  Graciously loaned by

  THEIR MAJESTIES THE KING AND QUEEN AND QUEEN MARY THE DUKE OF CONNAUGHT, K.G., PRINCESS LOUISE, DUCHESS OF ARGYLL PRINCESS ALICE, COUNTESS OF ATHLONE, PRINCESS HELENA VICTORIA AND OTHER MEMBERS OF THE ROYAL FAMILY AND OTHER OWNERS IN AID OF THE HERITAGE CRAFT SCHOOLS, CHAILEY, SUSSEX

  Princess Alice was President of the exhibition and Lord Hollenden its Chairman. 145 Piccadilly was the London home of George, Duke of York, until he became King in 1937. Nesta whisked Gluck from palaces to stately homes persuading the rich and regal to lend their chattels. But Gluck had no history of interest in collecting money for charitable ventures, that was her mother’s domain, nor any true zeal for organizing exhibitions other than her own. ‘Life seems to start at 6.30 and go on to midnight these days,’ she wrote to her mother in May 1939. ‘I am never in after 9 in the morning at Bolton House and don’t get back till about 11.30 or 12. What a life! There’s one consolation, it can’t go on for ever but must stop soon –’

  And stop it did. The exhibition opened on 28 June 1939. It ran for two months, raised a substantial amount for the Heritage and earned Gluck more Royal notice – from Princess Alice who wrote commending her on her ‘marvellous triumph, ability, untiring energy and self sacrifice for Chailey’. On the 3rd of September Gluck’s laconic diary entry was ‘War declared. N. at BH.’ She spent the next few days returning the Royal furniture, closing the exhibition at 145 Piccadilly, and packing up Bolton House to go down to Sussex. She appeared more concerned at not seeing enough of Nesta, than at the threat of war. ‘Saw N only by own efforts for a few minutes after Wednesday.’ ‘Stay night only by saying too tiring to leave so early for meeting next day’ were her disgruntled diary entries. Gluck’s preoccupations were with Love and Art and her own feelings. Her battles were within and her war was to come a little later.

  Within weeks, Bolton House was commandeered by the Auxiliary Fire Service. She handed the whole thing over to her Trustees to sort out, kept the studio as a London pied-á-terre and moved in with Nesta’s mother, Mrs Sawyer, while searching for a house close to Nesta’s to rent. Mrs Gluckstein, mindful of the hints Nesta had dropped of her mother being less than enamoured of Gluck as a house guest, wrote to thank Mrs Sawyer. ‘I do not want thanks when it is a pleasure to me to have Gluck,’ Mrs Sawyer replied.

  The upheaval and uncertainty unsettled Gluck and she felt Nesta was not helping all she might. ‘My looks say I am well, my spirit is a mess at the moment and my body and nerves almost at the end of their tether’, she wrote to her mother (24 September 1939). But she soon found a house and because of petrol rationing got herself a bicycle, which she quickly learned to ride. Nesta bought a motorbike, which she rode round the lanes at alarming speed.

  ‘Millers Mead’, in Plumpton, was about two minutes away from Nesta. It was small, not at all on the scale of Bolton, and a simple outhouse in the garden was to serve as Gluck’s studio. She took it ‘for the duration’ at a rent of £218.8.0d a year and moved in with a married couple, the Fitzgeralds, as her servants. There were numerous letters to mother, appealing for an iron, a bell for summoning the servants, a supply of liquor – six bottles of claret, Chateau Durfort Vivens, 1929, six of hock and a quantity of spirits – cans of salad oil, a bedside table and a lawn mower. She got hens and hives of bees and prepared herself for the privations of wartime.

  And she began working again. A commission came from the Bougheys, cousins of the Giffards. They lived in Mailing, a big early-eighteenth-century house on the Sussex Downs, near Lewes. Their twenty-year-old son, John, had been called up to fight with the Coldstream Guards and they asked Gluck to do his portrait before he left. Though they lived only eight miles away, because of petrol rationing she moved in with them to do the work, eighteenth-century style. She was nervous about the commission. She did not know them and it was, as she put it, ‘my first painting for many moons’.

  Her stay was a success. ‘I have never met such sweet and kind people as these’, she wrote to her mother (14 October 1939). She found it a strain for she was out of practice and anxious to do her best. They turned the fives court ‘a vast echoing building’ into a studio for her. She stayed for two weeks and Nesta called over a few times to
see how she was getting on. It is not technically one of her better portraits, but with its background of oak leaves the Bougheys felt that it caught the boy’s patriotic spirit. And it perhaps symbolized the broad shouldered, innocent-eyed young men who were to fight and, as in John Boughey’s case be killed, in the war against Hitler.

  Of the visit, John Boughey’s sister, Hermia, remembers candlelit dinners, her father opening special bottles of wine, a great deal of laughter and Gluck’s lively conversation. And their mother, Lady Boughey, wrote Gluck a long letter of thanks both for the consolation of the portrait and for what she felt to be ‘the great and wonderful gain of a friend … which is precious and I know enduring.’ The family were to remain devoted and lifelong friends of Gluck’s.

  The next commission came from Nesta. It was a portrait of her mother, Ethel Sawyer, known to friends as Boo. Gluck began it while staying with Boo in October 1939 and finished it when she moved into her new studio at Millers Mead. Boo was elderly and at times illness made her tearful, but in her portrait she puts on a brave face. She looks the epitome of a respectable English gentlewoman: veiled hat, no-nonsense smile, pearls, mayoral collar and bright if rather watery eyes.

  Gluck could have picked up any number of portrait commissions. The war sharpened people’s awareness of the tenuousness of human life and they wanted consoling images of those whom they loved. The solicitor who drew up the agreement for the renting of Millers Mead was impressed with Mrs Sawyer’s portrait and wanted one of his eldest son. The Maufes hoped for three – of Prudence, Edward and their son. Friends of the Bougheys offered her commissions. Word went round about her work. ‘Not that I want all these portraits,’ she wrote to the Meteor, ‘as you know I find them a terrible strain, but just the same it’s marvellous in these difficult days and I am grateful really to help my diminishing income.’