The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me

by Sofka Zinovieff

  If old friends were astounded by Faringdon, the same was probably true of the American servicemen who were stationed there from 1942. The Nissen huts were vacated by the Royal Engineers and filled with ‘Yanks’, many of them black, as the US Army was segregated. The townspeople of Faringdon had become accustomed to unusual occurrences during the war, but the sight of so many assembled African-Americans impressed and sometimes startled them. Needless to say, the senior officers were white, and it was they who were billeted in the attic and basement rooms of Faringdon House. Gerald and Robert were able to keep the two main floors, but inevitably the atmosphere of the house altered. However careful they were, the soldiers could be heard as they trooped up the back staircase to their rooms, or as they drove their trucks to unload in the stable yard. There had always been an unpretentious, almost scruffy feel to the place and now, with little domestic help, pictures put away and blackout blinds to fix each day at dusk, the glamour was toned down. Gerald took over a ground-floor room, to the right of the hall, which had a dressing room and bathroom off it. He had his desk with piles of books and papers there, and he slept in an ornate painted Venetian-style day-bed, reminiscent of a boat, with gilded lions at its base.

  The officers had their mess on the lower ground floor, but they were occasionally asked to dine with their hosts. Doubtless they had read the Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain 1942 that warned about British reserve: ‘On a small crowded island where forty-five million people live, each man learns to guard his privacy carefully.’ It discouraged bragging about American wages, criticising the food or making fun of British accents – ‘You sound just as funny to them.’ The weather was equally daunting: ‘At first you will probably not like the almost continual rains and mists and the absence of snow and crisp cold.’ And of course, ‘NEVER criticize the King or Queen.’ An introductory section entitled ‘Britain at War’ gives a useful picture of the general situation in 1942:

  Every light in England is blacked out every night and all night. Every highway signpost has come down and barrage balloons have gone up. Grazing land is now ploughed for wheat and flower beds turned into vegetable gardens. Britain’s peacetime army of a couple of hundred thousand has been expanded to over two million men . . . Old-time social distinctions are being forgotten as the sons of factory workers rise to be officers in the forces and the daughters of noblemen get jobs in munitions factories.

  But more important than this is the effect of the war itself. The British have been bombed, night after night and month after month. Thousands of them have lost their houses, their possessions, their families. Gasoline, clothes, and railroad travel are hard to come by and incomes are cut by taxes to an extent we Americans have not even approached. One of the things the English always had enough of in the past was soap. Now it is so scarce that girls working in the factories often cannot get the grease off their hands or out of their hair. And food is more strictly rationed than anything else.

  Given the warnings not to misinterpret the dowdy clothes and un-soaped bodies, it must have been a surprise for these US servicemen to find their hosts not only stylishly arrayed, scented individuals who entertained beautifully, but able to place a fine spread on the table. Gerald described one such evening to Clarissa. ‘Two of the officers dined the other night. One (from Carolina) agreeable and prepossessing, the other a New Yorker lamentably dull and slow of speech. Others I have met ditto. I am told that it is regarded in America as politeness not to spare one a single detail. But it makes one feel like a motor car going up hill with the brake on.’ Despite the cultural gap, Clarissa remembered that the Americans ‘were a source of resigned amusement to Gerald’. He wrote to her again when they were snowed up, with only enough food for a couple of days: ‘If it continues we shall have to kill and eat a soldier. It might be interesting to try the major, who is thoroughly impregnated with whisky and might make an excellent haggis.’

  The town of Faringdon changed with the presence of the 100th and 101st Ordnance Battalions. The roads were lined with vast piles of ammunition under camouflage tarpaulins – the stock-piling of shells and detonators ahead of D-Day. Young boys would approach the Americans guarding them, asking, ‘Got any gum, chum?’ The retort, often as not, was ‘Got an older sister?’ Some of them did, and there was a marked increase in the social life of Faringdon, with dances and parties livening up the gloomy evenings. The GIs offered not only chewing gum, but silk stockings and unusual items from their fantastic rations. Daphne Fielding (whose home at Longleat was now a US military hospital) particularly recommended American cough mixture, which ‘tasted rather like Cointreau but acted like bath-tub gin’.340 Gerald also reported her as saying she ‘was “keeping up the morale of others by letting down her own morals” which seems to me a very amiable form of war-work . . .’341

  The Americans were famously good as dance partners and more. ‘Overfed, overpaid, oversexed and over here’, complained disgruntled or anxious local males. British soldiers were ‘underfed, underpaid, undersexed and under Eisenhower’, retorted the in-comers.342 The well-fed young Americans were not only appreciated by women, but also some men. Quentin Crisp eulogised their bodies bulging ‘through every straining khaki fibre towards our feverish hands’, and their voices ‘like warm milk’. ‘Never in the history of sex was so much offered to so many by so few.’343

  When the winter got terribly cold the men living in Nissen huts had a tough time. Their quarters were heated by pot-bellied stoves, with only a bucket of coke per day as fuel, and they approached Robert to see if he could help. He told them they could take the stump of a large tree that had fallen by the lake, combining a charitable act to the soldiers with help in clearing the awkward obstruction. The Americans roped in one of their explosives experts to help speed things up and the ensuing blast was so strong that, while it blew the tree stump to conveniently sized pieces, it also shattered some of the house’s windows.

  IKE MANY PEOPLE, Jennifer was getting tired after three years of war, with its fears, bereavement and tedious discomfort. On her twenty-sixth birthday, she wrote to her mother, thanking her for what would have been an unlikely present during peacetime. There was probably also a cheque – despite her maladies, Alathea was always generous and good at sending money. Jennifer tries to be interesting but sounds drained: there’s not enough to eat, it’s hard to stay healthy and friends are dying – Eric Ravilious, the painter and family friend, would soon disappear on a reconnaissance flight.

  6 Beaumont St

  29.3.42

  My darling Mummy,

  Thank you a million times for your sweet letter and the huge cheese, darling, which you really shouldn’t have sent me. I’ve never felt so rich in my life, and it will really help tremendously. Thank you so very much, my darling.

  I was very upset about poor Peter, and haunted by the times we were together – all that first summer of the war. He was so sweet and gay, I can’t believe he’s dead. It all seems so real again, and I can’t think of anything else. He had such a sweet character, and was always such an angel to me and I’m afraid I made him rather unhappy at one time. I can only pray that he’s a prisoner – I think there may be a chance of that.

  I have had flu again and feel rather run down and wretched but the weather seems nicer and that makes me feel better. If only I could get away for a bit, I think it’s just tiredness that makes me get all these coughs and so on.

  Have you read Evelyn’s new book [Put Out More Flags]? Bits are very funny, I must say. You will laugh at the evacuees, – monsters – called the Connollys!!

  I am so glad daddy seems better and is having quite a gay time. I’m sure that’s the important thing for him, to see lots of people and go out a lot.

  Oh darling I feel depressed and sad and wish I wasn’t getting so old. I know it isn’t old really, but one feels a hundred sometimes. I am reading Proust again and had forgotten how very funny he is sometimes – about Francoise and Tante Leonie. I do love it.

&
nbsp; Bless you darling. Write when you can. I long for news of you and you seem so far away.

  All love,

  From Jennifer

  While Jennifer gives her mother the impression of a quiet, maybe lonely existence in Oxford, her life was actually much more complex. She gave at least one cocktail party at her flat, which was judged a great success by her Oxford friends, and she remained as daring and open to new encounters and love affairs as she had been before the war. She often went up to London, where parties and nightclubs were going strong, despite, or even because of, the difficult circumstances. The Gargoyle Club, in Meard Street, Soho, was already a favourite place for the sort of smart bohemia in which Jennifer felt at home. Opened by David Tennant in the 1920s, it began as a place for eating, drinking and, especially, dancing. At the suggestion of Matisse, the walls were covered in small squares of old French mirrors, cut up to produce a general sparkle, and there was lots of red plush and gold. During the 1930s, it was chic but not flashy; the Prince of Wales and Wallis Simpson preferred grander places like the Embassy Club. The clientele at the Gargoyle included artists, musicians and writers and the club had a reputation for beautiful people, tolerance and intrigue; it seemed that half the clients were running off with one another’s lovers at any one time. Its atmosphere was described by one fervent admirer as ‘Mystery suffused with a tender eroticism’.344

  During the worst of the Blitz, in the winter of 1940–41, the Gargoyle closed for a period, but it soon reopened and became a haven for many people in Jennifer’s (and the Faringdon) circle. ‘It was very difficult to stay away, and seemed like a never-ending party night after night and with constant changes of partners,’ wrote Patrick Leigh Fermor, a regular, like many of his fighting friends, when they were in town. ‘Hangovers were drowned like kittens next morning in a drink called a Dog’s Nose or a Monkey’s Tail: a pint of beer, that is, with either a large gin or vodka slipped into it. It worked wonders.’345 Across the glittering room (some of the small mirrors now blown off by bombs), one might spot Dylan Thomas, Constant Lambert or Lucian Freud, not to mention a few secret-service chaps like Guy Burgess and a sprinkling of Europeans who had sought refuge in England, such as Arthur Koestler and George Weidenfeld. And, as usual, Brian Howard (lately moved on from MI5) would be calling out cattily from the bar.

  Jennifer often saw Cyril Connolly at the Gargoyle, where he revelled in the intrigue at night and appreciated the cheap lunches in the day. Both of them moved easily between more alternative or artistic people and the smart, upper-class set and it was the ideal place for meeting contributors to (and readers of) Horizon, which was increasing in influence and success. Cyril had found new strength and courage in fighting his own war to keep European civilisation alive. The writer Peter Quennell described being caught in an air raid with his friend in a London street, bombs going off all around. ‘And Cyril simply stood inside a doorway calmly waiting for the raid to end. I was visibly frightened, thinking any minute a bomb might hit us, but when Cyril saw the expression on my face he just looked at me and said, “Be calm. Really, you know, we’ve all had interesting lives.”’346

  Cyril and Jennifer also shared something new in common. Cyril had fallen in love with a much younger woman, Lys Lubbock, a former model, who soon became indispensable in the Horizon offices (her speedy typing was legendary) and in running a home for them both. Despite rationing, numerous guests were invited to parties and meals at their flat in Sussex Place near Regent’s Park. Evelyn Waugh admired Lys’s wartime skills in acquiring such rare luxuries as lobster and truffles and in cooking exquisite meals. When the war ended, the Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen wrote to thank Cyril for all he had done. She had worked as an air-raid warden and had had her London home bombed, but she deeply appreciated how he had kept a valuable ‘evidence of continuity’ through publishing Horizon and how his parties had ‘real spirit’.347 Privately, she had also noted that with ‘3 little girls in slacks’ scurrying about doing all the work, Cyril looked ‘rather like a Sultan in a harem’.348

  When they met, Cyril was thirty-seven and Lys twenty-two. She was also married, though she soon left her husband, and when Cyril was slow-footed in obtaining his own divorce and marrying her, she deftly changed her surname to Connolly. Lys’s ex-husband was a handsome, dark-haired, struggling actor, Ian Lubbock. He was also Jennifer’s boyfriend.

  Most accounts of Jennifer’s life suggest that she threw herself freely into the wild fray of the civilian’s war, where love was grasped more readily in the face of death, and drinking, dancing and casual kisses could become a kind of private battle or at least a refusal to surrender. ‘It came to be rumoured . . . that everybody in London was in love,’ wrote Elizabeth Bowen in The Heat of the Day. ‘Life stories were shed as so much superfluous weight.’ Malcolm Muggeridge referred to the Blitz as ‘a kind of protracted debauch, with the shape of orderly living shattered, all restraints removed, barriers non-existent’.349 In some ways, Jennifer had already been fighting her own battles as a part of a campaign to escape the cold, critical environment of her parents; it was not just the war that encouraged them. Despite her various love affairs during the early 1940s, Ian Lubbock appears to have been involved with her for up to a year, in 1941–42; her friends knew him as her regular boyfriend. It is tempting to imagine that Jennifer and Cyril laughed about their taking up with opposite elements of a couple – there was an implicit intimacy to it that would have appealed. They surely giggled over drinks in the early hours at the Gargoyle, comparing notes. Neither relationship was to last very long and Evelyn Waugh commented in his diary with perception: ‘I read Connolly’s Unquiet Grave, half commonplace book of French maxims, half a lament for his life. Poor Lys; he sees her as the embodiment of the blackout and air raids and rationing and compulsory service and Jean [his ex-wife] as the golden past of beaches and peaches and lemurs . . .’350

  Ian’s presence in Jennifer’s life was strengthened when, like many London actors, he left the capital and joined the Oxford Repertory Players. The troupe performed at the recently opened Oxford Playhouse, just down the road from Jennifer’s flat in Beaumont Street. A year younger than Jennifer, Ian had the sort of mixed background that appealed to her. His manner reflected his schooling at Eton; his father was a teacher there and came from an illustrious old Norfolk Quaker family. Ian’s mother, on the other hand, was the classical pianist Irene Scharrer, who often played with the more famous pianist Myra Hess and who had Jewish origins. Ian was charming, though he was already known to drink too much, and his pursuit of an acting career was not going as well as he hoped. It must have seemed like a break when Ian was given a supporting role in a play by Lord Berners, to be given its ‘world premiere’ (as the Oxford Magazine put it) at the Playhouse in June 1942.

  The Furies was a lightweight farce based on the story of Alfred Eversly, a writer, who tries to escape the pressures of an oppressive Mayfair social life by moving to Cornwall, and when that fails, takes off to Haiti. The furies are three ageing, aristocratic hostesses, based apparently on Gerald’s old friends Lady Colefax and Lady Cunard. They pursue the writer, who has taken up with and then marries Vera de Pomeroy, a ‘tart’ who shares a liking for jewellery and sugar daddies with Doris (née Delavigne) Castlerosse. ‘Marry him? Good God!’ comments Miss de Pomeroy about a former admirer; ‘That stingy little rat! He’s as rich as hell and all he ever gave me was a diamond bracelet I had to look at through a magnifying glass. He doesn’t know how to handle the girls.’ Ian Lubbock took the minor role of Simon Montague, the writer’s assistant – ‘a good looking young man of somewhat ingenuous appearance’ – who accompanies Alfred on his escapes and hopes to marry his daughter, Monica.

  Many of Jennifer and Gerald’s Oxford friends were in the audience and lots of them had lent a hand in the production in one way or another; A. L. Rowse typed up the manuscript, Robert brought over furniture for the stage from Faringdon and Daisy Fellowes was said to have produced the curtains.351 ‘A disting
uished audience hugely enjoyed themselves,’352 and the Oxford Times admired Lord Berners’s ‘gossamer-like wit, fast-moving comedy and admirably-observed characters’, even if it did find the play far-fetched. Moving among some of Oxford’s finest minds cannot be said to have prompted Gerald to write a subtle play. The women are all either money-grubbing young things or monstrous regiments of cackling ‘old trouts’, and the language is absolutely of its age: ‘Papa darling, she’s absolutely divine. Gosh I think she’s swell,’ opines Monica, before she is corrupted by the pornography-reading ‘tart’. Possibly Gerald was working out his own internal battles between enjoying the superficial joys of society and dedicating himself to his art – ‘Sometimes I feel like Orestes pursued by the Furies,’ complains the hero – but the prevalence in the play of gin fizzes, Rolls-Royces and weekend trips to Paris places the victory firmly with the former.

  OBODY HAS EVER come up with a very convincing explanation of how it happened that, only a month or so after The Furies was performed in Oxford, during the heatwave of early July 1942, Jennifer and Robert got married. Ann Jennifer Evelyn Elizabeth Fry, aged twenty-six, ‘Spinster’, listed her profession as ‘Typist (Hospital)’ on the marriage certificate. Robert Vernon Heber-Percy, aged twenty-nine, put his as ‘Land Agent’. The ceremony took place at the Chelsea Register Office on the King’s Road, and the only known wedding photographs are the three in the Tatler and Bystander. A small piece records the fact that Mr Robert Heber-Percy and Miss Jennifer Fry were married ‘quietly’ in London, with a reception afterwards at Claridge’s. The picture of the nuptial pair is unfortunate; both look frozen with fear. Jennifer is pretty in a light summer frock, though the unusual plumed white fascinator only emphasises her anxious dark eyes. Robert is immaculate in a double-breasted suit, but his arms are clamped to his sides, his hands clenched. Perhaps the photograph was taken at a bad moment and they were smiling and laughing the rest of the time.