The Years Between (1939-44)

by Cecil Beaton

  THE YEARS BETWEEN

  1939-44

  Cecil Beaton’s Diaries

  Volume Two

  TO THE MEMORY OF REX WHISTLER

  Table of Contents

  Part I: Ashcombe, 1939-40

  Part II: London and New York, 1940

  Part III: Air Raids, 1940

  Part IV: Friends and Relations, 1940-1941

  Part V: With the RAF, 1941

  Part VI: Acquaintance, 1941-2

  Part VII: Middle East, 1942

  Part VIII: Homeward Bound, 1942

  Part IX: London Interlude, 1942-3

  Part X: India and Burma, 1943-4

  Part XI: China, 1944

  Part XII: Going West, 1944

  ALSO IN THE CECIL BEATON’S MEMOIRS SERIES

  Foreword to the New Edition

  I welcome the republication of the six volumes of Cecil Beaton’s diaries, which so delighted readers between 1961 and 1978. I don’t know if Cecil himself re-read every word of his manuscript diaries when selecting entries, but I suspect he probably did over a period of time. Some of the handwritten diaries were marked with the bits he wanted transcribed and when it came to the extracts about Greta Garbo, some of the pages were sellotaped closed. Even today, in the library of St John’s College, Cambridge, some of the original diaries are closed from public examination, though to be honest, most of the contents are now out in the open.

  The only other person who has read all the manuscript diaries is me. It took me a long time to get through them, partly because his handwriting was so hard to read. I found that if I read one book a day, I had not done enough. If I did two in a day, then I ended up with a splitting headache! This in no way deflected from the enormous enjoyment in reading them.

  Altogether there are 145 original manuscript diaries dating from Cecil going up to Cambridge in 1922 until he suffered a serious stroke in 1974. A few fragments of an earlier Harrow diary survive, and there is a final volume between 1978 and 1980, written in his left hand. 56 of these cover his time at Cambridge, some of which appear in The Wandering Years (1961). 22 books cover the war years, and were used for The Years Between (1965), and nine books record his My Fair Lady experiences, some of which appear in The Restless Years (1976) and were the basis for Cecil Beaton’s Fair Lady (1964). These six volumes probably represent about ten per cent of what Cecil Beaton actually wrote.

  The diaries attracted a great deal of attention when first published. James Pope-Hennessy wrote of Cecil’s ‘thirst for self-revelation’, adding that the unpublished volumes were surely ‘the chronicle of our age’. Referring to Cecil’s diaries, and those of Eddy Sackville-West, he also commented: ‘We could not be hoisted to posterity on two spikier spikes.’

  I have to tell the reader that these volumes were not always quite the same as the originals. Some extracts were rewritten with hindsight, some entries kaleidoscoped and so forth. Certain extracts in these six volumes were slightly retouched in places, in order that Cecil could present his world to the reader exactly as he wished it presented. And none the worse for that.

  Hugo Vickers

  January 2018

  Part I: Ashcombe, 1939-40

  September 1939, Ashcombe, Tollard Royal, Wiltshire

  I feel frustrated and ashamed. This war, as far as I can see, is something specifically designed to show up my inadequacy in every possible capacity. I am too incompetent to enlist as a private in the army. It’s doubtful if I’d be much good at camouflage — in any case my repeated requests to join have been met with, ‘You’ll be called if you’re wanted.’ What else can I do? I have tried all sorts of voluntary jobs in the neighbourhood, helping Edith Olivier organize food control, and the distribution of trainloads of refugee children from Whitechapel. I failed in a first aid examination after attending a course given by a humorous and kindly doctor in Salisbury. Now I start as night telephonist at the ARP centre in Wilton.

  September 18th

  Our squad is on duty from eleven at night until 8 a.m. On arrival at ugly, Victorian-Gothic, Fugglestone House, we study maps of the vicinity and check our individual tasks. But we all express the hope, for more reasons than one, that there will be no air raid tonight. We have been only rather vaguely briefed in our duties; at the sign of an alarm I am bound to get hopelessly entangled with all the various wires and plugs at the switchboard. Mr Lush, the Town Clerk, is here in case we need help, and Mr Keating, a retired civil servant, is our rather quavering lead. We are an odd assortment and I fear not of marked efficiency, all tweed clad, and country folk (except myself), with rugs, top boots and thermoses of cocoa and Bovril. There are two gentlemen farmers from nice grey stone houses in the neighbourhood, and a grey, hatchet-faced, older woman with a balloon-cheeked debutante daughter. Lady Pembroke, her face drained white, has come across from the big house in grey flannels and heavy overcoat, accompanied by Smith, the Pembroke butler, lobster-coloured, deep-voiced and with perhaps enough ballast to keep our whole group afloat. During the watch he sits quietly, imbibing a crackling pipe and blinking in front of him. When, at early dawn, the switchboard gives us a false alarm, Smith, although dozing at the time, is the first to be on the spot.

  Grouped together in this room, reinforced against blast with stanchions of rough wood and sand-bags and curtained with the heaviest felt, we gradually settle down to read, the women to sew; each has a turn to be on a truckle bed for an hour’s sleep. It is a boring, dispiriting job, and it is difficult to find volunteers to fill it. We are resigned to be together for the duration of the war; a pretty grim prospect.

  I lie listening to the others talking. They have the friendly easy personalities that you find only in the countryside. Full of human sympathy, they have a stolid sense of the humorous. They know how to be serious too, and when discussing politics are not ashamed of a cliché.

  After midnight the radio is silent, but for the whispering sounds it gives out, like those of a peat fire.

  Another hour to go. As I sit on the window-sill watching the others staring at mental pictures of war deprivations, cold, and general cheerlessness, my esteem for them is very high. It hurts almost as much to muse upon pain as to endure it. These civilians are suffering the anticipation of wounds to those they love the most. How gallant they are! Yet in the early grey dawn how much older and greyer they appear. Even the pullet-like debutante has grown overnight to maturity, and Captain Myddelton has become like an actor who, in the last act, puts on a grey wig and must appear thin in his clothes and walk with a stiff gait. Dear old Mr Keating, wrapped in a fishing coat, is suddenly a little Methuselah.

  Noises of heavy boots and whistling come from the rooms above. Down the carpetless stairs the fire brigade and first aid squad return to duty. The first night of the watch is over.

  December 3rd

  It is just three months since that Sunday morning when, at 11.15, here, in this small sitting-room, the radio told us that we were at war with Germany. Slow tears trickled down my mother’s cheeks on to the needlework rug she was making: every time I look again at those pictures I was pasting into an album I hear again Mr Chamberlain’s pewter-grey voice.

  The radio became the focal point of all our days. Each bulletin brought more news than we had known in a decade. Yet the catastrophe we braced ourselves to face did not happen; a quiet stalemate was achieved on the Western front and the undramatic weeks of waiting were perhaps the dreariest of all our lives — a numbing continuation of anxiety and boredom. Like states of ill health we fortunately forget the mental anxieties through which we pass. By degrees we’ve accustomed ourselves to the fact that we are at war and try to go on leading our own ordinary existences as best we can.

  Blackout material is
now tacked to the orange and yellow striped curtains, one of the wall-lights flickered on the blink and then went out. Since Graham, the manservant, got a job in the Air Ministry, and with Mrs Graham, her cat in her arms, has bidden us farewell, there is no one to mend it. The front door bell is also broken.

  We try to get used to restrictions, shortages and irritations, but it is being a long, hard winter.

  March 1940

  To amuse the troops on the Plain, as well as keep up our own spirits, some friends and neighbours organized a pantomime. Success greeted Heil, Cinderella, but not before much suffering. To control and keep together a troupe of amateur actors is to weave each night a Penelope’s web. Unlike professionals, who are seldom prevented from appearing, some of our company were always laid low with unexpected diseases or overwhelmed by accident.

  This has been the coldest winter in living memory. Snow fell on the day of our dress rehearsal, and for weeks thereafter we might have been in Alaska. While understudies were thrown on stage, the missing principal would be floundering in a snowdrift or, having slipped on the ice, being bound in a plaster cast. Yet somehow a troupe was put together and went by omnibus to strange moonlit camps on icebound Salisbury Plain whence Blenheim bombers in the middle of the night were flying off to Kiel and Cuxhaven. The enlisted men paid sixpence for their tickets, and they liked our show.

  Sometimes we would arrive to find the familiar theatrical clothes nailed up in readiness in a wooden outhouse, and our scenery hoisted to a canteen stage not much larger than a Punch and Judy’s. The excitement of the theatre keeps one warm under ordinary conditions; but to exchange one’s thick woollen clothes, in a below zero Nissen hut, for cotton motley was as great an effort as to plunge into an ice bath. Small wonder that, the prevalent flu epidemic apart, most of us were struck low with every throat and chest malady. At each performance some new piece of bad news greeted us, ‘Margaret’s[1] off tonight.’ ‘Maggie Hyde’s[2] feeling terrible.’ ‘David’s[3] ricked his back.’ However, undeterred, we planned an elaborate tour. We went to south coast towns, through ice and snow and at last reached our goal in London — to hand over quite a large sum to the ‘Cigarettes for the Troops’ fund.

  The rush of the pantomime is over. It has been our lives for nearly four months, bringing an evening’s respite from boredom to a great number of troops, and more jealousy among the performers than is ever known in the professional theatre. But now the scenery is folded into crates, the clothes packed away in baskets — to lose their life for ever; if they are ever opened again they will have become old theatrical rags — never to resume that life they had during their brief span.

  It is always a sad moment when a communal effort, even as small as this, is suddenly over. But once the decision was made to close the play I had no regrets. For at last I have some work that purports to be of ‘national importance’! The Ministry of Information has given me an interesting variety of photographic jobs; some are intended to encourage blood donors or to lure women volunteers into the services. Others show shipbuilding and the making of munitions or aircraft. My camera has brought me into contact with the war leaders and members of the Cabinet, for I have been entrusted with their ‘official portraits’. Some of these visits are pretty awe-inspiring, others are merely footling, but it is a good opportunity to break new ground and illustrate ‘England at war’ from many points of view.

  EDITH OLIVIER, MAYOR OF WILTON

  Have been photographing the tanks and army training on Salisbury Plain — a valid excuse for staying at Ashcombe and wheedling an extra gallon or two of petrol. As a result I have been running into Wilton almost every day.

  On Saturday afternoon Edith Olivier, the popinjay Mayor of Wilton, in Her Worship’s robes, complete with entourage, was the magnet for me and my camera. The scene staged in the front court of Wilton House was of traditional fantasy — which is almost the same as perfect taste — and the spectacle was splendidly unaccustomed in these khaki days.

  No half measures for Madame Mayor: she was clad in black and scarlet, complete with tricorn and buckled pumps, and contrived to combine, at the same time, the appearance of a Hogarthian lawyer and a blackbird. Her attendants were top-hatted, one carried the Charles II mace, and the Beadle, in scarlet stockings, although grown wizened and grey, still looked like a child. In the course of ten minutes Edith postured in a hundred ways as she processed at the head of her retinue. Her staccato movements were accentuated by her pointed nose and long pointed toes.

  The tweed-clad Pembroke family came out from the ‘big house’ to enjoy the scene. This encouraged further the histrionic performance of the Mayor who strutted like a peacock — a peacock doing a goose-step — and many another balletic gyration to the huge amusement of her audience. The Pembrokes sniggered, snorted, dug each other in the ribs, bent double, then roared with laughter. Suddenly, as the dark ink sky opened itself in a violent downpour, to the accompaniment of a thunderclap, they all disappeared.

  The storm in no way fussed Madame Mayor, who continued to dominate her little group of attendants under the vaulted arches and stone columns of the porter’s lodge. The sunshine returned and the photograph sitting came to a jubilant finale.

  Later, as I watched dear Edith walking over the green lawns towards her chalet in the park, I realized how easy it is to take for granted someone who towers above the usual run of humanity. And Edith does just that. She is a woman in whom a taste for the fantastic in life and the arts are combined somehow together with a deeply religious sense and practical goodness. At the age of sixty she is the inspiring and stimulating companion of many young people: Rex Whistler is the person she worships most in the world, and he relies upon her friendship and devotion above all others. But her friends consist of a strange heterogenous company — actors, bishops, archaeologists and professors. Her passionate interests range from tapestry to prison reform, to organizing a concert, to birdwatching or a study of the stars.

  As Edith tripped so jauntily across the lawns gesticulating and discoursing with enormous gusto and intensity to a relation (who was felicitously wearing a plum-coloured dress to complement the Mayor’s scarlet cape), she somehow seemed even to reduce to smaller proportions the great, but transient, earls and countesses painted by Van Dyck in the near-by double-cube room.

  The diary she writes throughout the long nights, and into which she pours her heart, is a testimony to her vitality and indefatigable enthusiasm for life.

  PETER WATSON

  In the absence of telephone and telegram the art of letter writing is again practised. The war has made correspondents of us all. The old postman lumbered over the Downs past Wingreen[4] and brought a tidy packet of letters. One envelope was written in familiar handwriting: ‘Tell me if you come to London. It is too long since we have seen one another.’ The war had brought my elusive, enigmatic and charming friend, Peter Watson, back from France where he has been living for three years: the only pleasant news since the declaration.

  We went out together, and our evening was a long voyage of re-discovery. Peter has changed a lot. The skin is stretched tight over his cheekbones, his hair is untidy, and the elegant tweeds he used to wear with such ambient grace are replaced by ‘off the peg’ Macintosh and round-toed shoes. He is no longer a ‘play boy’. The days of big cars are over for him: ‘I now dislike all forms of speed.’ He is tired of most things that rich people buy. He bicycles to and from his work as a clerk in a first aid station: he leads a very poor life in comparison to former days. It has impressed me to discover, by degrees, that from a rather negative character he has become an authority on his own. Having been a dilettante he is now a real critic. He relies less on his charm and sex appeal. He is never bored, for he has a relish for imbibing new things every day. He has read much with intensity and concentration, and his knowledge is now substantial. But others can educate themselves — it is Peter’s instinctive taste and sensibility that, to me, make him unique.

  Our relationship, too, h
as changed: he is now the leader in the direction of the arts, whereas he used to be my pupil. When I showed him his first Matisse he said it meant nothing to him; now he has outstripped me in knowledge and appreciation. Of course I put up a pretence at holding my own, and on this evening-out expressed strong views on subjects about which I really know little, even contradicting him violently about paintings, music and people on which he has become expert.

  But my pretence was very palpable and must have made the evening difficult for him. It is sad when such a friendship as we had grows apart, and a one-sided attempt is made to get back to former intimacy.

  Peter seemed thoroughly disillusioned by the French and his Parisian circle, but he harbours no resentment against their being such fair-weather friends. Apropos people’s ages, he said the year meant nothing to him: he had no idea, for instance, how old I was. ‘And you?’ I asked. ‘How old are you?’ He was thirty-one that day. We walked back to Peter’s hotel where he fumbled for his words. ‘Well, good-bye — nice din.’ But when I said, ‘Well, I’m glad you’re back home,’ he snarled, ‘Well — err-yess-er.’ The moon was full, and London looked unlike itself with the barrage balloons above like silver spawn.

  Part II: London and New York, 1940

  WAR LET LOOSE

  May 11th, 8 Pelham Place, London[5]

  It was a particularly idyllic early evening. Cyril Connolly paid a visit. London was looking defiantly beautiful, its parks with their blue vistas of Watteauesque trees — so different from the trees that grow in the country — and its gardens behind the railing a mass of lilac and blossoming trees. As Cyril was about to leave, we stood at the front door enjoying the opalescent evening light. The sun made the barrage balloons very bright gold, and the Gothic towers of the Victoria and Albert Museum at the end of the road and the peach blossom trees in the Williams’s[6] garden opposite were seen in an apricot haze. We remarked on the paradox of the scene. Nothing here was indicative of the turmoil in the world today, a turmoil created by one gangster. We could feel the peace and repose of the evening so forcibly that it was almost tangible, or something that one could eat.