The Trials of Radclyffe Hall

by Diana Souhami

  John was like a faded wraith. Thin and weak on her legs, she took barbiturates three times a day which affected her coordination and thinking. Her speech was slurred and she kept falling asleep. The entire row of her eyelashes had turned in on the eyeball and her face twitched in a nervous spasm.

  They all loaded up a hired car with as much luggage as would go on it and set off for Lynton in Devon. Petrol was rationed. John had been going to Lynton since 1919 and she thought it would be safe from attack. There was a Catholic church there and the convent of the Poor Clares of the Reform of St Colette, the eventual legatees of half her capital.

  They took four rooms at the Cottage Hotel. John needed help to dress and to wash, so she had a bell in her room which she rang for service from Evguenia or Una. She knitted scarves for soldiers and seemed out of it. Una guarded her like a spider.

  Evguenia’s plight was terrible. A prisoner of circumstance, she was now captured by all that she had tried so hard to resist. This war was worse for her than the Russian Revolution. Her fate was the more cruel in that freedom had seemed to be achievable. Now she was caught between John’s demands and Una’s vitriol. Her horror at the prospect of being incarcerated with them was intense. She developed a rash all over her face and body which Una said was from eating sweets.

  Evguenia had alien status. She could not move even to a different county without police permission and agreement from John who was her guarantor. John refused to contemplate separation because of risks of air raids or German invasion. She worried even if Evguenia went out for a walk. She tried to prevent her, saying she would ‘attract undue interest or attention’.

  When Evguenia received letters, John wanted to know who they were from. She wanted to be nursed by Evguenia and asked her to massage her shoulders. Una then said Evguenia’s ‘ignorant interference had done definite harm’. John sprained her left ankle, asked Evguenia to bandage it, then let Una redo it. She was in pain and asked Evguenia to sleep in the same room with her. Evguenia agreed to do so for a night. Una then wanted to sleep in Evguenia’s bed. She claimed the mattress was harder than her own. John gave her permission. Evguenia shouted at her, ‘“You fool, you blind fool,” glared at us both, her face which is now a mass of spots, urticaria, plus sweets and temper, positively swelled and bloated with fury, her eyes like jet beads and rushed out of the room banging all doors within range. I really do not know what I am to do.’

  Una knew exactly what to do. More of the same and then more of the same. All her symptoms of malaise disappeared. For the first time in years she was enjoying life. Evguenia’s desperation compensated for the loss of Florence, the Forecastle, Smallhythe. ‘Florrie is surly, morose, spotty and melancholy and gives us, thank God, not much of her society’, she wrote.

  Evguenia stayed in her room for hours and ate alone. She heard Mrs Baker had died. Had she kept that connection she would probably have been a beneficiary of her will. John’s bank informed her that because of currency restrictions she was unlikely to be able to pay Evguenia an allowance were she to go to France. Evguenia ‘cried herself into swollen frightfulness and hints at suicide’, Una wrote. John told Evguenia she could not bear to think of her exposed to danger or illness and thrown on her own financial resources. She asked her to go with them to Italy if the war allowed. Evguenia said she would not do so for any reason. Una saw this as proof of her lack of love: ‘The rain pours down, the icy wind howls and I see all chances of keeping our home in commission vanishing down Florrie’s moloch maw. She is infinitely the strongest of us three, since John is handicapped by affection and I by scruples, while she knows not the meaning of either.’

  Evguenia sought the help of a Dr Anderman. She went to him and cried. He tried counselling John and Una. He told Una not to fuss over John all the time or ask her every minute if she was comfortable or in pain. He advised John to get out of doors and said Evguenia’s rash was nervous and that she needed to get away. ‘My suspicions are confirmed,’ Una said, ‘that she has posed as the nerve shattered victim of an elderly hypochondriacal malade imaginaire and her hysterical accomplice to whom she is the indispensable bond slave.’

  Anderman she dismissed as ‘that Cossack Jew’.

  36

  At the Wayside

  Una refused Evguenia any domestic task then criticized her for not doing anything to help. When John caught a cold Una dosed her with anti-phlogiston, cough mixture, Sanatogen, malted milk and cocoa, took her temperature four times a day and would not leave her ‘because of the risk of Florrie making her ill in my absence’.

  John then had gastric trouble for which she was given morphine. Dr Anderman thought she might have an ulcer and advised a stomach X-ray. He told Mrs Pidgeon, the proprietor of the hotel, that with ‘thoroughly nervous patients’ it was worth spending money on reassurance. Evguenia was thoroughly nervous too. She was admitted to hospital in Barnstaple. Una described her as a ‘horrible spectacle with blotched skin. The bill for Evguenia is £15. All for nettle rash caused by temper.’ She wrote malicious couplets about her:

  I may despise the tender heart and bite the hand that feeds.

  But I never despise the cheque book that supplies my daily needs.

  ‘God curse you’, Evguenia said to her.

  A succession of doctors advised Evguenia to move away from John and Una. She moved to Exeter, got a job in a psychiatric hospital nursing German prisoners and stayed at the Osborne Hotel. Una described the hospital as full of drugged lunatics scowling in armchairs. Evguenia, she said, ‘languidly served meals to Nazi spies and Jew Bolshies’ and was not nursing anyone. John called it a ‘fearful asylum place among the loonies’ and insisted Evguenia leave. Which she did, but not to go back to Lynton. She returned her nursing badge, and enrolled to study art and French literature at Exeter University.

  As late as March 1940 they were all hopeful that it would still be possible to leave England. John Holroyd-Reece, who was in France, thought he could arrange visas and the London Passport Office extended all their exit permits. John hoped the Bank of England would relax the rules about allowing money to be taken out of the country. But Hitler invaded Denmark and Norway, Mussolini joined forces with him and Italy became enemy territory. John and Una said Mussolini had been baited by the British government and the British press. They worried about their possessions in the via dei Bardi and about Fido in quarantine in Paris.

  It was a bitter English winter. Snow swirled. ‘Our hours are spent indoors behind tightly shut windows’, Una wrote. She wore two vests, a woollen body belt, a flannel shirt, long-sleeved sweater, jodhpurs, a leather waistcoat and a lined tweed riding coat. At night she slept with two hot water bottles, three blankets, an eiderdown and rug.

  She and John moved with their gas masks, the canary and John’s mandolins to the Imperial Hotel, Lynton, run by Mr and Mrs Chivers. John had a large bedroom and a sitting-room with views of the sea and the moors. She bought an antique desk in Barnstaple and hoped to start writing again. She was immensely relieved that Evguenia was safe and in the same county and that she could provide for her. Here, she felt, after all their vicissitudes, was proof of God’s care and guidance.

  Suppose you had gone out of England at the beginning of the war – where should we be now? I ask you – I could not have got money to you & I would not be permitted to draw enough money (had I joined you) for all of us to live on – a nice state of affairs. Well, my Pig here you are in my dear country and for that I do thank God, and perhaps one day it may also be your country, who knows? …

  P.S. Darling, if as you tell me, you only stayed when war broke out because you had promised me not to go in the event of war – then thank you. By so doing you have saved me fearful anxiety.

  Evguenia was lonely in Exeter. Her skin complaint did not clear up. She spoke of John being all she had, and admitted to crying when they parted. She promised to go to Lynton if John became ill or ‘SOS’d’ for her. They wrote to each other every day. John felt that at last she was p
rotecting her. She sent her £25 a month and more for heating. As ever, she was pathologically fearful about her safety. She told her to check out people’s political views before having anything to do with them because the university was ‘simply bursting with Reds’, and she sent her a police list of towns ‘prohibited to alians’. ‘Now please no Russian Blues over these forbidden areas’, she said. It was significant of God, she thought, that Lynton and Exeter were not on the list.

  Dr Anderman told John to avoid worry and to lead a calm life. She worked at the Merano book, finished a first draft and with Una rode ponies, Harmony and Titbits, on the moors. Evguenia visited at weekends and stayed with a Mrs Widden. She socialized in a way that John and Una did not. ‘Florrie plays badminton with the local bourgeoisie who are just her calibre’, was Una’s way of putting it.

  In the summer of 1940 Hitler’s blitz on Britain began. Italy formally declared war on Britain, and Paris was occupied by the Gestapo. Churchill broadcast to the nation and said Britain would fight until victory was assured. There were air raids and nightly blackouts. A German bomber plane was brought down four miles from Lynton. On an evening when Una saw a chink of light through a neighbour’s blind, she rapped so hard on the window she broke the glass and cut her wrist.

  Exeter became a prohibited area for Evguenia. She moved again to Lynton and stayed with Mrs Widden. She felt trapped. John feared she would be captured if Hitler invaded.

  John and Una became dissatisfied with the Imperial Hotel. The Devonshire cream was sour. Mr and Mrs Clivers tired of their complaints and asked them to leave. They moved to a house called the Wayside, owned by Jack and Molly Hancock. All their possessions were sent from Rye but there was nowhere to put everything and their rooms looked like those of people who have come down in the world. Lord Tavistock’s aviary got bombed, so they reclaimed Charlotte, the maligned grey parrot. They acquired a Pekinese from Barnstaple and Fido arrived from Paris, very fat, but ‘crazy with joy’.

  Only John persisted with the fantasy that these new quarters would turn into a home for what she perceived as her family. ‘As Evguenia has for years refused to make a family life with us she must now continue to make one of her own’, was Una’s view. She did all she could to exclude her then criticized her for staying away. She objected to the way she played with Jane, John’s spaniel. The dog looked out for Evguenia, who took her for walks. Una said she could not be trusted to keep the dog away from a neighbour’s Labrador so Evguenia was stopped from taking the dog out. She hated the way it stayed shut in the bedroom, whining. Una saw her concern as a pose, a way of undermining John: ‘The implication is that John is cruel, confines Jane unduly, under or over feeds her, is too fussy over her, neglects her, is at fault because of her determination never to let her off the lead where there are dangerous traps, or traffic.’

  Una fed John’s anxiety so as to make John provoke Evguenia. She became very good at it. Evguenia made a friend, Doris Woolley. Together they went to art classes and the cinema. Doris Woolley had lived in Cornwall and knew Dod Procter and the Newlyn group of painters. Una implied that Evguenia was having an affair with her. John watched and questioned Evguenia who lost her temper. Una then accused Evguenia of making John ill.

  On a day in September when Evguenia went to Lynmouth with Doris Woolley, John told her to get a taxi home. Evguenia did not want to. John began weeping at the prospect of her being killed or arrested. Una told Evguenia she would get a taxi. ‘Are you a nurse or a fool?’ she said. Evguenia said she had to move to a different town. Una called Anderman. He sat for an hour with John and the following day took her for a drive. He tried to persuade her that it would be for the best if Evguenia left Lynton.

  Few options were open to Evguenia. She had lost her friends, possessions and the city where she felt at home. Her status in England was fragile. There were only certain districts in which she was allowed. She was entirely dependent on John who retained her papers and was officially responsible for her. And John, never emotionally rational, was now ‘mercurial to an inconceivable degree’. She said she wanted to die and would welcome a bomb on the house. She had written nothing since she stopped smoking in May 1939 and felt that she would never write again. Tired and wretched, she spent much time in bed or sitting by the window knitting blankets in blue and green.

  Una knew the root of her malaise: ‘This woman has fastened herself on to us, sucking every ounce of gain she can, sabotaging John’s health and spirit. This woman is callously killing my John.’

  John would not let Evguenia go and Una made it hell if she stayed or tried to leave. She found out what Evguenia wanted then made sure she did not get it. She referred to her as a swollen sheep tick, a mass of blubber, a white slug, an insignificant amoeba, a bloated Tartar polypus. She urged John to cut her allowance to £200 as a means of keeping her in line and to write to Harold Rubinstein about changing her will.

  When Evguenia said she was going, John got ‘cardiac pain’. Una went to the police. The Chief Inspector told her Evguenia could not move unless John appointed a deputy guarantor, with police consent, to act for her. This guarantor must live in the same town or village as Evguenia and accept financial and all other responsibility for her. ‘So there goes another thread from Florrie’s garment of emotional blackmail. She must do exactly as John appoints.’

  Evguenia ‘launched a broadside’ against Una. Her jealousy, she said, was intolerable. She wrote to the Home Office and was granted leave to apply for national work. But she needed a reference from John. Una told her ‘it was our duty to inform the Home Office that Evguenia had twice been in a sanatorium. No government or concern would want to risk an outbreak of tb.’

  Dr Anderman was again called. He said Evguenia was fit to work anywhere.

  We demurred pointing out that she had broken down formerly and that John was therefore worried at her having applied to the Home Office and giving her as a reference. He was most insulting, implying that John might wish to speak ill of her in order to prevent her obtaining national work away from Lynton. When John told him he had no business to make such implications he left the house.

  Una took John to the police station. The police reiterated that no application for residence from Evguenia would be entertained without John’s permission.

  In June 1941 Germany invaded Russia. Una hoped they would mutually exterminate each other. At mass she felt inspired by the ‘unearthly beauty’ of the nuns singing ‘like angels’. Confession, though, seemed a waste of time with Father Parkin ‘yawning with boredom over her trivial sins’ and telling her to say the Apostles’ Creed once more. Adept at working the black market, she got vegetables, chicken, sugar, chocolate, boiled sweets. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘we may as well have them as leave them to the Jews at the Valley of the Rocks Hotel, who fall like locusts on any supplies, ready to outbid any gentile.’

  When Churchill announced the alliance of Britain with the Soviet Union, John and she resolved that at the war’s end they would leave England, never to return. ‘Henceforward we, a Christian people, are the allies of the openly professed Godless Russians.’

  Una refused to speak to Evguenia or be civil to her in public. She seemed now to control John who became alarmingly limp about any effort. All John looked forward to in the day was to go down to Evguenia’s lodgings for an hour. At the end of July, Evguenia told her she had obtained a police permit of absence for a fortnight and was going to Oxford with a friend for a holiday. John became faint and lightheaded. A Dr Nightingale told her she had an anxiety neurosis. John asked if he would pass her for life insurance and he replied that he would not. Una put it all down to ‘the USSR Destroyer Florrie’. She thought it ‘simply inconceivable’ that Evguenia could go away knowing John’s condition and her own ‘pallor and emaciation’, how single-handed she had to list the laundry, groom and exercise the dogs, clean the birds, mince the meat, prepare the bread sauce.

  Charlotte the parrot developed a monotonous and persistent whistle. She k
ept it up for hours on end. Una covered her cage to shut her up, so Charlotte spent most of her time under a blanket in the dark.

  John feared Evguenia had gone for good. She went to her lodgings to see if she had taken her belongings. She had not. On her mantelpiece was a letter. Evguenia had asked Mrs Widden to give it to John on her sixty-first birthday on 12 August. It thanked her for her goodness and generosity and expressed the hope that one day she would understand Evguenia better.

  Evguenia returned to Lynton on the last day of her two-week police permit of absence. John called to see her. Evguenia told her she hoped to do an engineering training in Gloucestershire, organized by the government who gave placements after it. John hurried back to Una:

  I advised John and for once she took my advice and put her foot down flat sending by Mrs Hancock a note to the effect that it was only fair to make it quite clear that if Florrie persisted in attempting any unsuitable schemes such as that proposed her allowance would not be reduced but would cease all together there and then.

  Evguenia then asked John if she wanted in writing to disclaim any financial responsibility toward her. John assured her that she did not. But Una wanted just that. She sensed she was winning this protracted battle. Income tax was ten shillings in the pound. John’s wealth was not what it was. Sex and money were John’s expressions of power. If Evguenia had neither, the relationship might break.

  John’s eyes got worse, with ingrowing lashes and a kind of crusty conjunctivitis. In August 1941 she went to Bath to see a Dr Tizzard. He chainsmoked, was a seceded Catholic and dabbled in spiritualism and psychic things. ‘We think he is unquestionably inverted,’ Una said. He intended somehow to cut away the skin round John’s lashes. He was going to do one eye at a time under local anaesthetic with a week in between.