The Trials of Radclyffe Hall

by Diana Souhami

  Marguerite, the abiding evidence of rash desire, the recipient of her mother’s rage and disappointment, was shunted about for her first six years. She was assigned to Nurse Knott who dressed her in frills and curled her hair. She remembered an Atlantic liner, Nurse Knott vomiting, the bathroom of Grandmother Diehl’s Philadelphia home where the taps gushed hot and cold water and the bath was panelled in mahogany. And then, on a certain November day, she remembered standing on the steps of a house in Notting Hill, west London, a glass window patterned like in a kaleidoscope over the door.

  This house was to be home for a while. The woman who owned it wore black satin. She and Nurse Knott drank tea and talked of their dislike of Marguerite’s mother. Marguerite persisted in enquiring why and was ushered to bed. On the first-floor landing was more stained glass: a dragon and St George with a knife. The nurse explained that the saint was killing the dragon and if Marguerite did not behave he would come down and kill her too.

  Mother was usually absent or suffering a headache or a rage. She wore exotic clothes, smelled of perfume, laughed a lot, but cried more. She played the piano and sang in a high soprano voice. Her moods were unsettling, her temper short. Household problems enraged her. She screeched at the servants, withheld their wages and summarily turned them and their possessions out of the house.

  Grandmother Diehl came to stay. To her, Marguerite said she owed her moments of childhood happiness. ‘Without her I think I must have died of sheer starvation of heart and spirit.’ She had long, coiled-up hair, blue eyes, spoke in a soft drawl and was used to a house without men. Her father had died when she was a child. At seventeen she had married Edwin Otley Diehl, a stockbroker. She had her daughter and two sons, but when widowed at twenty-three took her children to live with her mother.

  She called Marguerite sugar plum, which somehow turned into Tuggie. ‘To her I was Tuggie til the day of her death.’ She took her to matinées, read Dickens aloud, took her shopping at William Whiteleys department store where the green stair carpet was woven with yellow globes of the world. She did not scold and was never unkind. Through her Marguerite said she discovered ‘an altogether new sensation … a sensation that made you discontented unless you were with the person you wanted to be near. A sensation that made you want to look at them and admire them and be praised by them and kissed by them. It was no less a factor than love.’

  Her grandmother wrote down her efforts at poems and praised her ‘inordinately’. When Marguerite asked why her mother cried and was disliked by Nurse Knott and why her father had gone, Grandmother Diehl, however circumspectly, always tried to reply.

  ‘If she and I could have lived alone I feel that we two would have been content.’ Here was the fantasy mother who talked of heaven, God and love, was soft-spoken and attentive and who made her feel worthwhile. But she kept disappearing to America. And between them was Mary Jane Hall. ‘The influence of my mother was so potent that it held my grandmother perpetually in chains.’

  Mary Jane’s tyranny ruled, her ungovernable tempers and ever-changing moods. In the Notting Hill sitting-room she and Grandmother Diehl talked of money, the Case and Radclyffe, a man whom Marguerite associated with all that was worst in the world. It was Radclyffe who prompted her mother’s invective. Grandmother Diehl would say, Do be careful, the child is in the room. Mary Jane, in subdued rage, would then spell words out, not speak them. Which exasperated Marguerite, for she was dyslexic – a disability associated with birth trauma – and though she could memorize stories, poems and songs, spelling eluded her and she had difficulty learning to read or write.

  Mother’s attention was unwelcome. Sometimes she clasped and kissed her, called her her poor, poor little girl, cried into her neck and made the front of her dress wet. Marguerite recoiled, so her mother wept the more and said that even her own daughter did not love her. Then abruptly she would stop and tell Mrs Diehl to get ready to go to the theatre. ‘Why Mary Jane,’ Mrs Diehl would say, ‘you’re up and down like a thermometer.’ And Marguerite, alone in her room, learned to hate her.

  Revenge and venality sustained Mary Jane. The Case went on for years with legal wrangling over custody and money. In an initial decree for separation, granted on 25 February 1882, Rat was ordered to pay £1,250 a year. Mary Jane then took her case to the Chancery division of the court to claim on Marguerite’s behalf against the grandfather’s will. She delayed divorce fearing Radclyffe might remarry and his father’s money pass to other legitimate children. In a second hearing one third of his inheritance was awarded to Marguerite to be administered in trust. Against this settlement Mary Jane’s allowance was reduced to £750 a year. This allocation of funds was to cause inordinate bitterness from mother to daughter in later years.

  The marriage had been a disaster, its disintegration was cruel. Marguerite was its victim. Mary Jane denigrated her husband and all his relatives and denied her daughter contact with any of them. Marguerite saw her father no more than a dozen times. Another of her abiding fantasies was that life would have been better had she been brought up by the Halls at Derwent.

  There were few visitors to her mother’s house. Social graces were not demanded of Marguerite nor learned by her. No one troubled much what she did. She had lessons with her nurse in the mornings and a walk in Kensington Gardens. She needed special tuition which she did not receive. She liked to hear stories read aloud, she learned rudimentary arithmetic and to sing and play the piano. But she could not read or write. She stayed confused as to which letter was which.

  Without children to play with she invented Daisy, an imaginary friend. She protected Daisy from the stained-glass dragon and played with her in the park. Daisy admired all Marguerite did. Her advent alarmed Nurse Knott, who suggested to Mary Jane that her daughter needed friends.

  Told to desist from this game, Marguerite had a temper tantrum and bit her nurse on the hand. Ushered to her mother’s bedroom, where her mother was brushing her hair, she refused to say her imaginary friend, her alter ego, did not exist. More than a game, it was an exercise in consolation, an endeavour to repair a fractured world. Her father had called her Daisy, and a Marguerite is a genus of daisy. Her mother saw in her face and manner an image of the man she loathed. She pushed her to the bed and beat her with the silver hairbrush. When she had finished she consigned her to the nurse and slammed the bedroom door. ‘It was a hard whipping given and received in temper, an unfortunate whipping.’ It was one of many administered while her mother was out of control. Its predictable effect was to inspire her daughter with defiance, hatred and rage.

  In 1886 Grandmother Diehl returned to Philadelphia. Marguerite was to go for her summer holiday to Marlow-on-Thames with her mother and nurse. Her grandmother would stay on alone for a while in the Notting Hill house, then sail. Marguerite pleaded with her to take her too. Her grandmother cried, bought her a caged canary called Pippin and told her to be a comfort to her mother.

  ‘Life all at once became blank, empty, awful.’ Marguerite was separated from the only person she loved. Mother, with her beatings and exhortations, was best avoided. Father, the worst person in the world, had disappeared. Her mother said she was like her father, ergo she was bad.

  She retreated inwards, was solitary, watchful, strange. She did not know how to play with children, trust a parent or how to feel safe. In the inchoate world of childhood, responses were formed by her and reactions made. She took into her feelings all that happened, sought control of her world, made emotional equations, disturbed connections, that echoed on into the books she was to write and the adult life she chose. Dark forces informed her early years. Abandonment elided with insecurity, hatred of her mother with aggrandizement of herself. Unfairness called for justice and violence for revenge.

  2

  Sing, little silent birdie, sing

  Marlow provided consolation. Marguerite picnicked in the meadows with her nurse and went boating on the river. ‘It was delicious to go to bed in the twilight and to lie there listening
to sounds in the garden beneath, the twittering of birds in the trees, the strains of a distant band playing on the deck of a passing steamboat.’

  Mary Jane seemed happier. In London, a child and an ever-present mother cramped her style. The Marlow hotel was comfortable and anonymous and Mr Rutland, a young man in white flannels with black curly hair and a red face, took her out at weekends in a smart carriage. Nurse Knott disapproved and nor could Marguerite like him. His visits meant periods of peace and good temper, but he laughed too much and called her a queer little fish.

  The holiday ended abruptly. Mr Rutland visited when Mary Jane was with another suitor – a portly one with side whiskers who gave Marguerite chocolates. There were raised voices from Mary Jane’s sitting-room and the sound of her tears. The men left hurriedly, Mr Rutland to his carriage, the one with side whiskers to the steam launch on the river. Nurse Knott and the housekeeper were instructed to pack. They were all to leave for London on the afternoon train. In whispers, the servants complained of their employer’s tantrums, the unscheduled departure, the hurry and discomfort. The nurse said she would give notice were it not for the child.

  On the train, Marguerite questioned her mother. The portly gentleman had, she was told, gone to France. Mr Rutland was not to be mentioned again. Her mother gave the London taxi driver an unfamiliar address. Marguerite asked where they were going and was told to be quiet. She persisted in a keening monotone – Where are we going, I wonder? Where are we going I wonder? – was warned, then hit. They arrived at new lodgings, a small house in Bayswater, and she was sent to bed.

  Her mother lived in a chaotic world of impulsive actions, tantrums, resentments and sexual intrigue. Her egotism ruled. Marguerite was conscious of frustration and evasions over issues intrinsic to her own life. To resist her mother and to assert a personality of her own, she developed an implacable obstinacy, a refusal to kowtow or comply.

  She particularly disliked her mother’s bedroom, where often she was chastised. It had magenta curtains and wallpaper with bunches of pink roses: ‘A foolish indefinite sort of room with too many trifles, too many ornaments, too many chairs, too many pictures all inferior, too many colours, too much of everything and too little of anything that really counted.’

  On an autumn morning when she was eight she was summoned to it and told that next day she would go to school. She was to be good and make nice friends. Nurse Knott took her to Whiteleys and bought her a black pencil-box with a gold pagoda and Chinamen on its lid, short and long pencils, an Indiarubber, a white bone pen-holder, a tortoiseshell penknife, a brown leather satchel, a shiny black mackintosh, a grey skirt and cotton blouse. They were possessions of promise. That night Marguerite kept them in sight on a chair by her bed.

  The schoolroom seemed long. At the far end was a blackboard with a pointer. She was allocated a desk. The head teacher assessed her new pupils to assign them to classes. They began with reading aloud. Marguerite listened to the competence of the other children. As her turn came near, she had a panic attack. ‘Even simple words presented insurmountable difficulties.’ The text was indecipherable. The teacher commented in surprise that she could not read at all. Tests in writing, geography and arithmetic were all equally incomprehensible, equally humiliating. She was put in the lowest class.

  It was a day that stayed with her. Her dyslexia was neither recognized nor understood. The ramifications of it were huge. She was imaginative and from the age of three had been inventing rhymes. But her manner of reading and writing was unpredictable and laborious. She floundered academically. In later years as a writer she was either dependent on lovers to make sense of her spelling, or she dictated to typists. She had difficulty in deciphering her own writing and for years could not use dictionaries. Even after winning literary prizes she hid her original manuscripts and talked of destroying them out of embarrassment over her inability to spell.

  Walking home at the end of that first day at school her satchel felt like a ton weight. Her mother asked her how she had got on. All right, she replied. She was rebuked for her diffidence and sent to her room. Problems at school and home made her naughty. Her naughtiness was responded to with beatings and she became withdrawn and asthmatic.

  Mary Jane grew more irritable by the day. She was socially isolated. The English climate oppressed her with its winter fogs, sunless days and long black nights. She breakfasted alone by the light of a gas-burner. Servants, perpetually hectored, gave notice. There was an atmosphere of exasperation ‘like an unpleasant electric current’.

  And the Case dragged on. Mary Jane wanted to divorce Radclyffe, get his money and see him punished. She spent afternoons ensconced in the drawing-room with a solicitor or private detective. In 1886 she ‘ascertained’ that Radclyffe was living at the Norfolk Hotel, Paddington with an unnamed woman. He moved with this woman to a house in Eastbourne. Mr Bowles, manager of the Paddington hotel, agreed to give evidence. Mary Jane sued for divorce on the grounds of adultery. The decree was granted in November 1887, seven years after the separation. Dispute over alimony and custody continued.

  One afternoon in 1887 when Marguerite came home, her mother was arguing with a fair-haired man in a tweed suit and white spats. His voice was dictatorial. He kissed Marguerite and smiled at her. He was Radclyffe Radclyffe-Hall, her father. His invisibility had proved another problem at school. She had not known how to explain it and it was one more issue to mark her out as strange. ‘She knew that she would like to have a father. She had been to tea with other children once or twice. Apparently they all had fathers … A father seemed to give one a certain importance in the world she noticed.’

  One girl’s father was a colonel in the army. Another’s was a mayor with a gold chain and fur on his gown. Another’s drove to the city each morning in a green phaeton with grey horses. Marguerite admitted that she did not know what her father did and could not remember having seen him. She was teased. One wag, who had seen Hall above a sweet shop in the Portobello Road, suggested this was his occupation.

  Excited by evidence of a real father, his smile and blue eyes, she hoped to see him more. He gave her a boat to sail on the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. He promised a cream-coloured pony that never materialized. He invited her to stay with his mother in Devon and to learn to horseride.

  Mary Jane wept and said she would see her daughter dead and buried rather than let her near Esther Hall, who had insulted her and accused her of ruining her son’s life. The scene ended with Radclyffe slamming the front door in rage. His subsequent efforts to see Marguerite were blocked. She was told he was wicked and that she should say he was dead.

  She had imagined ‘a kind, self-satisfied, important father like the other children had’. Instead, there was Radclyffe who swept into her life then disappeared, leaving confusion behind him. But she kept faith with her fantasy. Thoughts of him and of the kind of life she imagined she might have had with him stayed with her as wistful regrets.

  She thought other children were talking about her and laughing at her behind her back. Her personality fragmented into aspects of the family psychodrama. She thought that, had she been Radclyffe’s son, he might have stayed or taken her with him. Her mother was proof of how unsatisfactory it was to be female. In later years she played at being faithful husband, protective mother, indulgent lover, then subverted these roles like a troubled child.

  The decree absolute for the divorce was made on 4 December 1888 by Sir Charles Parker Butt, a high court judge at the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand. Marguerite was ten. Her father was found guilty of ‘adultery coupled with cruelty to the petitioner’. The case was written up in The Times and the Telegraph and his name blackened. He sailed to France in his yacht after this finding. He sent Marguerite a signed photograph of himself in hunting clothes, which she kept on her desk. She blamed her mother for his absence. ‘She it was who had driven father from the house with bitter angry words.’

  Mary Jane Hall set about repairing her own social position. She
wanted marriage. Her daughter was an encumbrance and proof of emotional failure. Her past, in society’s terms, was littered with indiscretions. ‘The men who came to the house did not often bring their wives or sisters.’ She wooed her singing teacher, Alberto Antonio Visetti, known as ‘the Maestro’. Her voice was off-key and her capacity for practice poor, but she was pleasure-loving and dramatic and he fell for her.

  Flamboyant, mercurial, half-Italian, Visetti was forty-three and had a reputation as a ladies’ man. As far as Mary Jane knew, he was unmarried. He was a founding professor of the Royal College of Music in London and a respected teacher. Photographs of his successful students lined his studio walls: Louise Kirkby-Lunn, Muriel Foster, Keith Faulkner. He had studied at the Milan Conservatoire, had played duets with Charles François Gounod, written a life of Verdi and a three-act opera, Giselda.

  A maverick character given to status fantasies, ‘a touch of “the grand manner” went with his every word and action’. He claimed his father had been an Italian landowner with a castle in Salano, Dalmatia (in fact, he was the village organist). He said he had received music scholarships from the governments of Austria and Italy and a knighthood from the King of Italy and that he was attached to the court of Napoleon III.

  He had wide-set brown eyes, a straight nose, closely clipped beard and dapper clothes. Mary Jane was impressed by the glamour of his artistic reputation, his smart clientele, his innumerable love affairs and broken engagements. ‘She felt as she mounted the altar steps that she did so over the prostrate form of countesses, marchionesses and duchesses. This man, or better still this lion, was seemingly chained at last. The end of the chain was firmly held in her ridiculously small hand.’