The Great Silence

by Juliet Nicolson

  When the procession reached Westminster Abbey the coffin was lifted from the gun carriage and carried in through the doors towards the west end of the nave, where one hundred recipients of the Victoria Cross formed a guard of honour. The grave was positioned so that for ever after no one, not even a king or queen approaching the altar at their own coronation, would be able to avoid side-stepping the grave of the man who had given his life for his country.

  No one from a foreign government had been invited to the final ceremony. But this was not only an exclusively British occasion. This was also a time for women – for queens representing their countries and for one thousand especially chosen mothers and widows of men who had given their lives for their country just as the unknown soldier had given his.

  The service was short. The Twenty-third Psalm and a reading by the Dean from the Book of Revelation followed Beethoven’s beautiful Equale for Trombones. Then the steel helmet, the webbing belt, the King’s sword and the flag were lifted from the coffin, and, unadorned, the heavy oak container was lowered into the permanent silence deep beneath the floor of the Abbey. The choir sang ‘Lead Kindly Light’ and the King was handed a small silver shell from which he scooped little handfuls of now dry earth: what once represented fear was now contained within a handful of dust. He scattered the earth on to the wooden lid, earth taken once again from the fields of France. The last hymn, ‘God of our Fathers’, was written for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee by Rudyard Kipling, a man whose son might well have been occupying the coffin in front of them. The final lines broke down all remaining restraint as the words ‘Lest we Forget, lest we forget’ sounded their agonising caution over all those present. Simplicity held the emotion at the appropriate level. All rhetoric would have seemed false.

  The watching women had managed until then to maintain their composure. All except one. Queen Mary was unable to maintain her self-control and her distress was plain for everyone to see. The Last Post sounded and the guard of honour passed by the grave. The slab of Tournai marble that was to cover the grave, was inscribed simply ‘An Unknown Warrior’, and the battlefield mud that was to be packed around the coffin (so that in Brigadier General Wyatt’s words ‘the body should rest in the soil on which so many of our troops gave up their lives’) were waiting to be put in position. Somehow it seemed important that the visitors to the grave should be allowed one last glimpse of the flag-covered coffin. The waiting queue already stretched back to the Cenotaph.

  After the service was over, back in Whitehall the people continued to move towards the Cenotaph with their tributes. Around the base of the new monument (already wholly invisible) were the flowers – elaborate formal wreaths made up of exotic species shining perfect against evergreen leaves; red roses, the symbol of love; violets bought from roadside hawkers. A tiny child approached the monument holding his mother’s hand tightly. As he bent to lay a posy among the mass of flowers already there, he shouted out in such a loud voice that, despite the huge sob that engulfed his words, the listening crowd thought they must have mistaken his age. ‘Oh Mummy,’ he cried, ‘what a lovely garden Daddy has got.’

  Winifred Holtby had not been to the unveiling of the Cenotaph that day. Nor had she followed the later procession that moved slowly past the monument. The whole event seemed to her both stagey and hypocritical, something of a sop to those who could not summon the strength or vision of their own to carry on. She could not bear ‘the nobler sentiments about the Unknown Hero and the rest of it when Ireland and Belgium were still staggering under men’s murderous ways’. The whole show seemed like ‘an appeal to sentiment to carry England away from the realisation of a practical evil’.

  But survival and youth combined to give the lucky ones the chance to hope and to look forward. This had been the war to end all wars, and in the beauty of those last autumn days when ‘the sun shines and the air is clear and frosty on the hills’ Winifred noticed something else that floated, visible if untouchable, in those valleys beneath the Oxfordshire hills where ‘every tree is aflame with vivid leaves and berries’. Amid the quietness of the valleys ‘the grey mist lies soft as an unborn dream’.

  Dreaming and hoping were the tenets of the present. Why, she wondered, must men spoil what is lovely in the world? In that moment, a glorious day in which alone in the silence of her own company it seemed that ‘every colour was clearer, every air was fresher than on ordinary days – as though the world was having a birthday’, she challenged anyone to contradict her when she cried, ‘How can one help loving it?’

  Dramatis Personae

  Nancy Astor (1879–1964) Britain’s first woman Member of Parliament, she took her seat in the House of Commons in December 1919. Remained MP for Plymouth until 1945. Rumours of Nazi party sympathies dispelled much of her earlier popularity. But her notoriety within the ‘Cliveden Set’ remained undimmed especially during the ‘Profumo affair’ of 1963.

  Violet Astor (1889–1965) Widow of Charles Petty-Fitzmaurice (killed in the war in 1914) and wife of John Jacob Astor. When in the 1960s her grandsons reached the age of 21 Violet retrieved the cufflinks that had belonged to her first husband (their grandfather) from a bricked-up recess in her private sitting room at Hever Castle and gave them to the boys as birthday gifts.

  Tommy Atkins (1892–1974) One time under-chauffeur, soldier, gas meter reader and would-be Vaudeville star. His first wife Kitty died in childbirth and soon afterwards he married his landlady Annie. They had a son Ronald and a daughter Eileen who acknowledges that she owes much of her theatrical gift to her father.

  Mary (Stearns, née) Beale (1917–) Mary grew up to marry Stanley Stearns, a local farmer, and they had four children, James, Michael, Richard and Linda She now lives within a mile of Bettenham, near Sissinghurst in Kent, where she is the life, soul and inspiration of the community.

  Vera Brittain (1893–1970) Writer, feminist and pacifist. Testament of Youth, Vera’s account of her war years and those immediately afterwards, was published in 1933 and continues to be a bestseller. In 1925 Vera married George Catlin, a political scientist and philosopher. Their son John (1927–87) was an artist, and daughter Shirley Williams (born 1930) is the distinguished Liberal Democrat peer.

  Coco Chanel (1883–1971) Most influential couture designer of the century and creator in 1925 of the iconic scent Chanel Number 5. Despite having many lovers she never married.

  Denis Clarke Hall (1910–2006) Younger son of the artist Edna Clarke Hall. Distinguished architect, who never lost his childhood love for the sea.

  Edna Clarke Hall (1879–1979) Painter, poet and beauty. Mother of Justin and Denis and wife of Willie, barrister and co-founder of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

  Lady Diana Cooper (née Manners) (1892–1986) Society’s beautiful eccentric. Daughter of the Duke of Rutland, wife of Duff Cooper, diplomat. Became something of a film star in the 1920s and later the glittering Ambassadress at the British Embassy in Paris following the liberation of that city in 1944.

  Duff Cooper (1890–1954) Politician, diplomat and author. Served as Member of Parliament in the 1920s; became British Ambassador to France in 1944.

  Victor Christian William Cavendish, 9th Duke of Devonshire (1868–1938) British politician. Between 1916 and 1921, served as the Governor General of Canada. Owner of several of Britain’s greatest houses including Chatsworth, Hardwick and Belton as well as Devonshire House which was demolished in 1924.

  Lucy Duff Gordon (1863–1935) Prominent Edwardian fashion designer. Sister of the writer Elinor Glyn. She opened branches of her prestigious London couture house in Paris, New York City and Chicago. Fashions changed and she died in poverty.

  Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965) Poet, playwright and literary critic. Received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. Among his most famous writings are the poems The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday and Four Quartets.

  HM King George V (1865–1936) Crowned King in 1911.
Son of Edward VII, husband of Queen Mary, father of Edward VIII and George VI, first cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, and grandson of Queen Victoria.

  Harold Gillies (1882–1960) New Zealand born, London based, widely considered as the father of plastic surgery and pre-eminent restorative surgeon at Queen Mary’s Hospital, Sidcup. Became mentor to his cousin Archie McIndoe, founder of the Second World War’s ‘Guinea Pig Club’.

  Lionel Gomme (1894–1922) Football-mad stonemason nicknamed Tiger and object of a grand passion of Lady Ottoline Morrell. Died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage in Ottoline’s arms, aged 28.

  Winifred Holtby (1898–1935) Pacifist and undergraduate at Somerville College, Oxford; friend of Vera Brittain. Among the first group of women students to be awarded a degree. Later became a journalist and novelist.

  Eric Horne (c. 1850–1935) Former butler to royalty and the upper reaches of the aristocracy. Compulsive diarist and author of What the Butler Winked at and More Winks – both bestsellers.

  Jeremy Hutchinson (1915–) The five year old with an amazing memory became a highly distinguished lawyer and life peer. Married first the actress Peggy Ashcroft and then June, daughter of Boy Capel, the one-time lover of Coco Chanel.

  T. E. Lawrence (1888–1935) British soldier who became known for his role during the Arab Revolt of 1916–18. His book Seven Pillars of Wisdom and the story of his camel-bound life in the desert, as portrayed by Peter O’Toole in David Lean’s 1962 film, have made him world famous as Lawrence of Arabia.

  David Lloyd George (1863–1945) War-time Prime Minister and Leader of the Liberal Party.

  Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869–1944) Leading twentieth-century British architect, who designed many memorials to the First World War including the Cenotaph in London’s Whitehall.

  HM Queen Mary (1867–1953) Wife of HM King George V and mother of six children including the future Edward VIII and George VI. Her youngest child, Prince John, died in January 1919.

  Tom Mitford (1909–1945) Schoolboy with an irresistibly winning manner. Only son of the second Lord and Lady Redesdale, Tom joined the army before the Second World War, served in the African and Italian campaigns and was fatally shot in Burma nine weeks before the war in Europe ended.

  Lady Ottoline Morrell (1873–1938) English aristocrat, patron of the arts and society hostess. Wife of former MP Philip Morrell, Lady Ottoline had many affairs including two years of passion with a young stonemason, Lionel Gomme (q.v.).

  Pam Parish (1916–) Pam was three years old when she observed the first Great Silence in 1919 on her knees at home in her village of Sidcup in Kent. Married during the Second World War to the distinguished psychiatrist Denis Leigh and mother of five children, she lives in Kent and continues to drive herself around the county she has known all her life.

  Nick La Rocca (1889–1961) Jazz cornetist and trumpeter and leader of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. According to La Rocca he was ‘The Creator of Jazz’, and he moved about the stage like a ‘filleted eel about to enter the stewing pot’.

  Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) English poet and author who wrote satirical anti-war verse during the First World War. Friend of the Bloomsbury group and cared for at the famous psychiatric hospital, Craiglockhart in Edinburgh, with contemporary and friend, the poet Wilfred Owen.

  Doris Scovell (1903–2008) Tweenie maid who ran between the upstairs and downstairs floors of smart Edwardian homes. Became a first-class cook and married Will Titley, the footman she had met in her earliest days in service. She died aged 105, her infectious laughter intact to the end.

  Lowell Thomas (1892–1981) American writer, broadcaster and traveller best known as the man who made Lawrence of Arabia famous by bringing his story through film and lecture to the American and British public.

  The Prince of Wales (1894–1972) Eldest son of HM George V and Queen Mary. Saw service in the First World War. Thereafter unofficial ambassador for Britain, spending months at a time touring the United States and the British Empire. Became King of the United Kingdom and the British dominions and Emperor of India from 20 January 1936 until his abdication on 11 December 1936. Married Mrs Wallis Simpson on 3 June 1937.

  Bibliography

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  Books and articles

  Ackroyd, Peter, T. S. Eliot, Hamish Hamilton, 1984

  Adams, Jad, ‘Private and Public Childhood: “Your Child Forever”’, English Literature in Transition 1880–1920 Vol. 49, no. 4, 2006

  Airlie, Mabel, Countess of, Thatched with Gold, Hutchinson, 1962

  Alexander, Caroline, ‘Faces of War’, Smithsonian, February 2007, pp. 72–80

  Alcock, John, and Whitten Brown, Arthur, Our Transatlantic Flight, Badminton Magazine, 1919, and Royal Airforce and Civil Aviation Record, 1920

  Alsop, Susan Mary, Lady Sackville, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978

  Arlen, Michael, The Green Hat, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1924

  Arthur, Max, Last Post: The Final Word from our First World War Soldiers, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005

  Ash, Edwin, M.D., Nerves and the Nervous, Mills & Boon, 1911

  Asquith, Cynthia, The Diaries of Lady Cynthia Asquith 1915–1918, Century, 1968

  Bailey, Catherine, Black Diamonds: The Rise and Fall of an English Dynasty, Viking, 2007

  Bailey, Hilary, Vera Brittain, Penguin, 1987

  Barham, Peter, Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War, Yale, 2004

  Barker, Pat, Regeneration, Viking, 1991

  ________ The Eye in the Door, Viking, 1993

  ________ The Ghost Road, Viking, 1995

  ________ Life Class, Hamish Hamilton, 2007

  Barrett, Michèle, Casualty Figures: How Five Men Survived the First World War, Verso, 2007

  Battiscombe, Georgina, Queen Alexandra, Constable, 1969

  Beaton, Cecil, The Glass of Fashion, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1954

  Beechey, James, and Shone, Richard, ‘Picasso in London 1919: The Premiere of The Three-Cornered Hat’, Burlington Magazine, October 2006

  Beeton, Mrs, Household Management, 1861

  Benson, John, The Working Class in Britain 1850–1939, I. B. Tauris, 2003

  Best, Nicholas, The Greatest Day in History: How the Great War Really Ended, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008

  Blythe, Ronald, The Age of Illusion: England in the Twenties and Thirties 1919–1940, Hamish Hamilton, 1963

  Bourchier, Christine, ‘Rituals of Mourning: Bereavement, Grief and Mourning in the First World War’, Department of History, University of Calgary, 2001

  Brittain, Vera, Testament of Youth, Gollancz, 1933

  ________ Testament of Friendship, Macmillan, 1940

  ________ and Four Friends, Letters from a Lost Generation: First World War Letters, Little Brown, 1998

  Brown, Jane, Lutyens and the Edwardians: An English Architect and His Clients, Viking, 1996

  Brownlow, Kevin, The Parade’s Gone By, Seeker & Warburg, 1968

  Brunn, H. O., The Story of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Jazz Book Club and Sidgwick & Jackson, 1963

  Buchan, John, These For Remembrance: Memoirs of Six Friends Killed in the Great War, privately printed, 1919<
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  Buckle, Richard, Diaghilev, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979

  Buckmaster, Herbert, Buck’s Book, Grayson & Grayson, 1933

  Carrington, Charles, Soldiers from the Wars Returning, Hutchinson, 1965

  Cartland, Barbara, We Danced All Night, Hutchinson, 1971

  Churchill, Winston and Clementine, ed. Mary Soames, Speaking for Themselves, Doubleday, 1998 (their personal correspondence)

  Clarke Hall, Denis, ‘Some Reflections on Sailing in a Very Different Age 1918–1938’, unpublished

  Clout, Hugh, After the Ruins: Restoring the Countryside of Northern France after the Great War, University of Exeter Press, 1996

  Collins, Michael, The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class, Granta, 2004

  Cooksley, Peter, The Home Front: Civilian Life in World War One, Tempus Publishing, 2006

  Cooper, Diana, The Rainbow Comes and Goes, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1958

  Cooper, Duff, Old Men Forget, Rupert Hart-Davis 1955

  ________ ed. John Julius Norwich, The Duff Cooper Diaries, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005

  Davenport-Hines, Richard, Ettie: The Intimate Life and Dauntless Spirit of Lady Desborough, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008

  De Courcy, Anne, Circe: The Life of Edith Marchioness of Londonderry, Sinclair Stevenson, 1992

  ________ The Viceroy’s Daughters: The Lives of the Curzon Sisters, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000

  The Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, The Garden at Chatsworth, Frances Lincoln, 1999

  Didion, Joan, The Year of Magical Thinking, Fourth Estate, 2005

  Duff Gordon, Lucy, Discretions and Indiscretions, Jarrolds, 1932

  Egremont, Max, Siegfried Sassoon: A Biography, Picador, 2005