The Years Between (1939-44)

by Cecil Beaton

No, she’d done that last night. She couldn’t keep on appearing in that garb.

  For an eternity the bridge continues. Diana is scared, cold and desperate. Once more she explores the corridor, this time wearing high cork soles and heels to her shoes. Carefully she mounts a table and jumps. The whole house rocks. The bridge players rush upstairs, followed by Ian Fleming shouting to know if an incendiary bomb has fallen on the roof? Diana has raced to be in bed and appears drowsy by the time the door is opened.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ they ask. ‘Must have been jolly near!’ But the required result is obtained and Duff stays with her. When he asks, ‘Was that you, Diana, who made that noise?’ Diana lies, ‘Certainly it wasn’t!’

  She told this story to Hutchie[13] and myself, sniggering and biting the air like a little child, on condition we swore we would tell no one. But I did not swear to exclude it from my diary.

  THE SPHINX

  How fortunate to have known, even a little, the Sphinx, Ada Leverson, who has already gone into history as the friend who with superb courage helped Oscar Wilde in his darkest hours. Perhaps none of us today realize quite what courage it took on her part, also that of her husband, to support Wilde at a time when feeling ran so high against him. His name was such anathema that even pet dogs could no longer be called Oscar.

  When I met her in the company of Osbert Sitwell, for whom she cherished a passion, she was an aged figure in large black picture hat and long black trailing dress. Her hair was pale yellow and her face and neck so heavily powdered that some of the flecks had fallen on to her bodice.

  I was extremely timid at this early age, and I found her wry smiles and lascivious winks somewhat alarming. No need. It was merely that the Sphinx was intrigued by all good-looking young men, and she used to write postcards to say I had eyelashes like ostrich feathers.

  The Sphinx had great zest, and in her declining years never declined. Ever ready to accept any invitation or proposal, her youthful enjoyment of a jest was not dulled by the years. She had at least one good new joke a week. She knew this joke was good and preserved and polished it for the delight of her friends. I remember a little poem about Osbert Sitwell and Adrian Stokes, also a conundrum ‘what is the difference between Oliver Messel and Oliver Twist’, but I fear neither the poem nor the answer to the riddle are printable.

  Of course the Sphinx also adored Sacheverell Sitwell, and when he became engaged to Georgia the Sphinx was obsessed with jealousy and curiosity. She was determined to be the first to see ‘the new wife’ on the return from her honeymoon. The Sphinx winked and asked, ‘Well, Georgia, how did it go?’ To which Georgia, furtively looking to left and right, answered in a hoarse whisper, ‘Perfectly, thank you, but I want to ask you four questions — quickly now, Sphinx. What is the difference between romanticism and classicism? What is behaviourism? Who is Harry Melvill[14]? And is Julie Thompson[15] received?’

  STEPHEN SPENDER

  Stephen Spender was at dinner with Cyril Connolly. Stephen is a genuine character and one must admire his pristine integrity, but it is strange that a poet should be so insensitive to his audience. At the table he leant forward and in super-sibilant tones held forth: ‘I do think, Cyril, some encouragement should be given to these Czech poets. Their poems are, in my humble opinion, very remarkable. They are Marxist in theory — but their Marxism is a safety valve, a check — and these Czechs need a check on their emotions. Some of them are slightly Kafka-ish — but Ida Crispi says she thinks they are remarkably interesting, and Albert Sessions,[16] whom I saw yesterday, thinks the same. So we must do something to encourage Czech poets.’

  He continued, ‘The men at the fire station where I work for 148 hours each week were very much interested when I lectured to them about these poets. But then they are highly sensitive and listen to anything that I tell them. They like me — but they think of me as just number three on the pump drill. They don’t know that I go off and make money by writing. They would hate me if they knew I made money. But I do — in my spare time, and during the time I’m supposed to be on duty too. I ought to be on duty now, as a matter of fact. But, anyway, to return to the subject of my making money, I wrote an account of an altercation between Joan and John Rayner to illustrate the present day mentality as bearing on tensions in modern war-time in spite of the teaching in secondary schools and the absence of essential fats — and I got three guineas for it. If I admitted it at the fire station the boys would be furious, for there’s nothing that causes such a deep intellectual and spiritual rift as money.’

  DIANA AT BOGNOR

  Bognor

  Duff has been ill for some days with a cocci infection. Three doctors have been brought in to look after him. At last his temperature is normal, though he has become deaf in one ear, and he is sufficiently recovered for Diana to send me a wire to come after all to Bognor. I’ve missed her deeply. It is a month since she left London and had to give up her work at the canteen. Each morning at 7 o’clock she walked through the park to do the breakfasts at a canteen. If, as a result of the previous night’s raid, the gas was off and no hot water available, she had to improvise some sort of cooking.

  She has been such a boon to have at the Dorchester and made the hotel life seem less squalid, and the evenings dining with her — while the blitz burst outside — have been delightfully escapist. Always a live wire, surrounded by interesting people and bits of news, Diana, nevertheless, became more and more unnerved by the horror of the bombing, for she is at heart a pessimist, and although she refused to show it, was terrified. Bravery does not consist of not being frightened, but to hide your terror is courageous. Diana pretended to take everything in her stride, and played up with bravado until she became positively ill. She, more than the doctors, knew she must quit.

  The small Regency house in Bognor has been part of her life since her childhood holidays. Later her mother bought the beloved property, and now it is Diana’s haven. Although even here the sirens sound thirty times a day and night, it is a comparatively peaceful existence for her running the place as if it were a farm.

  Diana has bought a cow called Princess — a feminine equivalent of Ferdinand, for there never was so clinging and affectionate an animal as Princess. Twice a day Diana milks her, at 7.30 am and 6 pm. Princess delivers enough milk to keep the household and to make one large cheese every other day. The goat, less docile, produces milk that makes equally good cheese. Diana’s hens produce ten eggs a day, and the pigs, named after the St John Hutchinsons, their children and children-in-law, are extremely clean for pigs.

  But there is no nonsense about Diana posing in Le Hameau. ‘To begin with, it gave me a mental hernia to put my hand inside a rabbit and pull out its insides. Now I give a good tug and don’t mind, and it’s the same skinning a hare.’ It is hard work. Every day, by breakfast time, Diana has been looking after the farm for two hours. After breakfast she motors into Bognor with a trailer attached to the car to see about a hen house, or she collects swill from the neighbours, or the fish for the pie from the bus stop.

  The latter part of the morning is spent in the dairy with large bowls of blue and white china, butter muslin nets and spotless efficiency. Here she sets about the technical jobs of cutting whey, taking temperatures and heating to certain degrees large bathtubs of milk, which with the addition of rennet drops from a calf’s innards will be eventually turned into the required number of cheeses and arranged in rows on the storeroom shelf.

  Like everything she takes up Diana works with enormous, business-like enthusiasm. Many amateurs set about their latest hobby with most elaborate equipment, little patience and no knowledge. Not Diana: her house is now littered with dogeared, second-hand textbooks on bee-keeping, on chickens, cows, goats. Her equipment consists of improvised utensils. A tinselled red embroidered Mexican saddle bag is filled with heavy stones. This, she considers, placed together with a log of wood on a wooden tray, makes a suitable enough press for the cheeses.

  The guests — who may come dow
n to keep her company while the Minister is busy at his desk — help bring the swill pails, add bone meal to the animals’ fodder, or measure the dairy nuts for Princess. Diana makes all these chores such fun, and gives the impression that the animals’ food is every bit as good as her own. Diana galvanized me into collecting in sacks some hay she had earlier cut from a neighbour’s field. The job was a pleasant form of relaxation and an accompaniment to conversation, but, that task finished, there were many more to do while she fed the Khaki Campbells — her latest addition to the farm: a dozen ducks.

  At the end of a long day she cooks the dinner. We sit at a table covered with pale lime green Macintosh. The fish pie is highly flavoured with a lot of onions. The news is turned off directly the raids start.

  Moments of pleasure and relaxation are savoured to the utmost in this cluttered personable house — so live a picture of its owner — with the pale limedrop cushions, the grey-lilac walls, the Empire mirrors and candlesticks, the taffeta-bowed muslin curtains and the cases brimming over with books. It is a house feminine in its colour but broad in its effects. There is no time for arranging nick-nacks for, as soon as The Times crossword puzzle has been completed, there is some mending to be done. Diana sews some yellow fringe from discarded dining-room curtains. She picks at the yellow braid and twists it around thumb and little finger in the professional way that drapers’ assistants had perfected when she watched them, awestruck, as a child. Enough twilight remains for Duff to read aloud some stanzas of Andrew Marvell, and to compare Cowper’s description of Cromwell to Hitler. Then early bed and a lot of books on the counterpane.

  Diana has always been attuned to the time and circle she adorns. Today she is beautiful in the only way she could be admired at this moment. Wearing dungarees of blue canvas, flecked and splashed in many colours, her head tied up in a kerchief over which she wears a straw hat, she manages artlessly to look as beautiful as she did in The Miracle. Hard-working and vital, close to essentials and yet, in her simplicity, so highly civilized.

  It is a lovely picture: Diana, in her garden grown wild with gangling flowers blossoming under the trees, or scything the paddock: Diana, painstakingly putting entries into the farm ledger or, after carefully reading the instructions supplied by the local decorator, successfully hanging paper on the walls of an improvised guest room.

  Dorchester Hotel

  The bombing of London has slackened. Each week becomes more like war-time and less like war. Prices soar, commodities are more difficult to come by, and for the ordinary person the difficulties of housekeeping must be deeply depressing. All essentials are taxed or rationed: tea, butter, eggs, bread, bacon and onions. For those that can afford to, it is cheaper comparatively, to eat in hotels. But the luxury hotels are in cruel contrast to the existences being eked out under the arches in the Commercial Road and on the Tube platforms.

  Moura Budberg dined and we found that with the help of a good bottle of claret the evening went easily. Wars, we agreed, knocked one from one level of age down to another. The Russian revolution had kicked Moura from youth to middle age (and had completely cut off her romance with Bruce Lockhart who joined us from a neighbouring table for coffee). This war was knocking her to old age. It has already aged us all so much, and to look around the Lansdowne House tonight was a ghastly revelation. Girls who used to be frivolous, fatuous and fast, and whom I had known dancing all night at the Embassy Club, were now dried-up old hags blinking at another generation at play. One or two lanky-limbed airmen were out for a quiet evening with some unsmiling granite-jawed ghouls who were no doubt tonight’s substitutes for romance. These apparently casual young colts seemed quite content — for they are cynical about everything, including fighting dangerously for a future that possibly holds nothing for them, or getting into the hay with a dried-up old trout.

  Maybe civilization advances in ratio to the horrors it invents. (The drowning or burying of old ladies in their shelters under their bombed homes makes Goya’s Désastres de la Guerre look like picnics.)

  This war seems to have been faced by England in a calmer, more cold-blooded mood than in 1914. Today there is no fanfare of drums, few pulses throb to the bugle-call that summons heroes to lay down their young lives for a freer and better world. The new VC’s are calm, unassuming young men who deprecate their bravery in a way that is new. The cold, patient, brave bomber pilot has come to be regarded as the paragon — rather than the reckless fanatic.

  And, thank God, that ghastly recruiting racket with hitches singing ‘We don’t want to lose you but we think you ought to go’, and handing out white feathers is a thing we are spared.

  For the present lack of hysteria we must be forever thankful.

  AUNT JESSIE

  Ashcomhe

  This last spell of London has been frustrating because it was so difficult to get any work done. Not that the bombing was bad: it has let up a bit. But life at the Dorchester is unnerving, Pelham Place is no longer habitable: the street is roped off with an unexploded bomb in the vicinity. So I am particularly blessed to have Ashcombe as a retreat. There has been no petrol for gallivanting in the neighbourhood, so I have stayed looking at books, reading, eating and sleeping. Perhaps I do not fully realize the vast benefit of this quiet. For four days I have been nursed and coddled here, tended with care and sweetness by my mother and my Aunt Jessie.

  At last, Aunt Jessie, so hard-working and so full of life, is showing physical signs of age. It is hard for her to discover that her body is not as young as she feels herself to be. No child has greater enjoyment of this world. The smallest little details afford her acute excitement. Having been pampered and rich, accustomed to the highest echelons of the diplomatic world, she is now an impecunious widow. Yet she is a lesson in courage and simplicity. We walked as far as the sweet snowdrop wood, my only outing of the cold, sunny week-end. ‘What do you think this is?’ I asked in a somewhat blasé manner, handing her a piece of metal. Aunt Jessie was filled with awe. ‘Oh, it’s a thunderbolt!’ she shouted, ‘Oh! Oh! Oh! But we’re standing on the snowdrops! Let’s go in quickly. It’s such a shame, now they’ve come out this far, to spoil them.’

  Later Aunt Jessie said, ‘I’ve failed terribly this winter! I can feel it. I know. I’ve coughed so much it’s tired my old heart. I realize I’ve not got many days left now. I’ve been to the bank and got out £300. I’ve given some to my church, and put some aside for my funeral expenses. It always costs so much to die, and one has to have some ready money. Oh no, I’m failing very fast.’

  NAPIER ALINGTON

  September 22nd 1940

  A milestone has gone. Napier has died. It is still too soon to realize it. His frail carcass had been wracked with appalling tubercular coughs for many years. Yet his system was of such ironlike strength that, whereas most other people would have succumbed long before, he had hung on. Sometimes he looked desperately ill, like a pathetic wastrel, but he was always courageously ready for fun. Now that the inevitable has happened, one wonders why the impossible should not have continued: It is perhaps more shocking when someone near extinction for so long suddenly disappears.

  Napier had always a great preoccupation with death, and felt that each summer was perhaps his last. When Juliet and I bade him good-bye at the Ritz before he left on a mission to Cairo, he had said maybe this was the last time we’d meet. How beastly of me to consider that he was being a little theatrical!

  None of his generation was more readily loved than Napier. Throughout the world, no matter what city he happened to alight upon, he exuded such warmth and charm that everyone threw their friendship at him. He treated such exuberance with kindness. In turn he was devoted and, genuinely devoted, to hundreds of people. But his friendship never became facile; it was never turned on just in order to chalk up another victim. Although he had such a large, warm heart his smile and charm were not circulated indiscriminately. He was easygoing only until he came across something of which he did not approve. Suddenly he could show anger an
d his granite sense of right and wrong. But for someone so sparkling and brilliant he was exceptionally benevolent; nearly every lame dog found a Samaritan in him.

  I was not one of Napier’s intimates, in fact I felt always a little removed from him, perhaps on account of my considering myself so much less genuine and sincere than he was. But Napier could not bear to be alone, and whenever I was at Ashcombe he would call me from Crichel to join him and his myrmidons. Sometimes the company he would invite encouraged him to sit up and drink all through the night, but the weakness in his nature was also encouraged by his illness, and lately he had seemed to wish, by any means possible, to escape the harsher unpleasantnesses of the way the world had gone.

  Napier had always a spontaneous exhilaration and enthusiasm, a boyish glee in whatever surprising circumstances he found himself. In spite of the responsibilities and conventional ties of Crichel he was able to be as free as a bird, and felt just as at home in Persia as in France. He appreciated the nuances of luxury but could put up with any squalor. No matter where he found himself, he always behaved just as he wished. In New York exalted circles were scandalized, but in London he never became déclassé; however much pitch he wallowed in, it never stuck.

  Today, when we motored through the sad rain to Crichel for the memorial service, I felt desperately miserable that we were not going over just once more to bask in his charm and enjoy the comic situations he created with the help of such a diversity of people surrounding him.

  Crichel, with its noble porticoes, ornamental lakes, gazebos and Adams decorations, was still beautiful. All the things Napier has done with such exuberance to improve the place were paying their dividends today. But without Napier’s glowing spirit to welcome us, Crichel could never be the same. (Maybe the house will remain empty for ten years or more — until Mary-Anna, his small daughter, God willing, comes back to live there.)