Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (10 page)

Watchful and clever, Nancy began to accumulate other adult forms of knowledge. By the time she was a teenager, she had come to understand how barren her parents’ marriage was, and how different from the hot emotional flurries that disturbed the house when Maud had certain guests to stay. When she was fifteen and Maud announced that the two of them would be leaving Nevill Holt to live in London, she knew it was because her mother wanted to be near her lover, the conductor Thomas Beecham.

Musically brilliant, clever and rich – his grandfather had made a fortune manufacturing the ubiquitous Beecham’s liver pill – Thomas was everything that Sir Bache so disappointingly failed to be. Even though Maud wasn’t ready for the scandal of a divorce, she wanted to live as close to him as possible, and set up her new London residence in a large rented house in Cavendish Square.
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For Nancy, the break with Nevill Holt was distressing. She identified deeply with the beauty of the house and the swathes of woodland surrounding it. She loved her father, too, despite his remoteness, and felt keenly that Maud was wrong to exchange him for Thomas Beecham, a man she could not and would not like. On the other hand, she had been speculating for years on the kind of life she might enjoy when she was delivered from the schoolroom and the barbed tensions of her parents’ marriage. And when she was sent to Munich in the autumn of 1912, partly to improve her German and her music, but also to leave her mother free to enjoy Beecham, Nancy felt the first thrill of impending change. The family with whom she stayed were delightful, embracing her almost as warmly as if she had been one of their own children. Even more of a novelty was the degree of independence they allowed her. Nancy had arrived in Munich as an intensely literate, imaginative but emotionally starved sixteen-year-old. When she left she felt she had ‘[become] a woman’ and ‘tasted adult life’.

Less cherished by her were the months she spent at a finishing school in Paris. At seventeen Nancy felt she was too old for its ‘infantile’ lessons and rules, and in furious reaction she set herself a stiff and systematic reading course in Russian literature.
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Yet even though she was continually and frustratingly in the care of chaperones, she felt the romance of the city tug at her imagination. ‘My mysticism was in those streets,’
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she wrote to GM, as she described her delight in the ancient narrow maze of the Latin Quarter and told him of her visit to La Nouvelle Athènes, the café where Moore had once mixed with artists like Manet.

Nancy vowed she would return to Paris on her own, but that summer she was taken by Maud to Venice, a city that became her second love. Diana Manners and her mother were staying in the palazzo Maud had rented, and many of Diana’s friends had come out to Venice, too, including Duff Cooper and his sister Sybil, Raymond and Katherine Asquith, Billy Grenfell and Denis Anson. All members of the Corrupt Coterie, these young men and women were known to Nancy, if only by reputation, and she was fascinated by their clever chatter and capacity for fun. To her joy, they were happy to let her move in the slipstream of their brilliance as they bathed naked in the sea, swaggered around the streets of Venice in outrageous fancy dress and drank cocktails in bars down on the Lido.

This holiday was the first extended period Nancy had spent with people close to her own age, and it did much for her social confidence. By the time she returned to Cavendish Square she felt more equal to engaging with her mother’s London life and more willing to be curious about it. Maud had a clever eye for what was interesting and new. She was sensitive to the changes that were happening around her in art and music,
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and she understood, as Violet never could, the significance of ragtime and nightclubs. She also knew how to exploit these changes, for it was by putting herself at the centre of the new modern London that Maud was able to create her own distinctive niche as a society hostess.

An American woman, separated from her husband, was always going to be excluded from the highest echelons of British society, and Maud was fully aware that the Queen had expressed her disapproval of the too-public affair with Beecham. But if most of the duchesses kept away from Maud, she could compensate by colonizing the world of culture. Her network was a bold mix of established figures like Beecham and Diaghilev and more radical iconoclasts, such as the writer and artist Wyndham Lewis, who had become a particular pet of Maud’s. Inspired by Marinetti’s Futurist movement and the spirit of the European avant-garde, Lewis had created a gratifying stir that autumn with the ‘menacing, geometrical and disturbing’ tableau
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he had designed for a charity ball, featuring Eddie Marsh with his head encased in a conical tube and a box balanced on top.
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Capitalizing on that stir, Maud had commissioned Lewis to design a line of post-impressionist knick-knacks, which she could hand out as gifts to her guests.

Another of Maud’s protégés was the American poet Ezra Pound, who much impressed Nancy when she first met him, with his foxy beard, sweeping black cloak, broad-brimmed hat and checkered trousers. He dressed exactly as she thought a poet should, and as she listened wide-eared and wide-eyed to the bombastic and colourful conversations of Maud’s clever young men, she caught glimpses of a world of art and ideas into which she might one day gain admittance in her own right.

Warily, she entered into a new phase with her mother. Maud was difficult to love: she remained critical and brittle, channelling more of her warmth and energy into her relationship with Beecham and her social life than into her relationship with her daughter. But Nancy recognized her qualities. Maud allowed her an unusual amount of freedom to walk around London and meet with her new friends, and much of what she cared about she recognized she had inherited from her mother: books, pictures, travel and a dedicated gift for clothes.

Maud had always enjoyed dressing Nancy up. Now, as her daughter approached her eighteenth birthday, it was clear she was going to be an even more enjoyable project. Maud’s delicate fairness and Sir Bache’s lanky height had combined to create a peculiar beauty in Nancy. She was slender, with long legs and long elegant hands; her features were small but finely chiselled; her skin pale to the point of translucence and her hair a thick tawny gold. Iris Tree recalled that even as a very young woman, Nancy had the ‘quality of crystal, neatly crisp, gracefully turbulent, arrogantly disruptive, brave’.

She was certainly formed to wear the new fashions: in early 1914, the all-important year of her season, Maud swept Nancy to Paris to shop for her coming-out wardrobe – new dresses for balls and garden parties, hats for Ascot, and a new leopard-skin coat, which Maud also had copied for herself. They looked superficially alike, mother and daughter – both blonde, both exquisitely dressed – but even in the rare mutual pleasure of this shopping trip Nancy displayed signs of intransigence. While Maud tried to persuade her into the large flowered hats and feminine shades she favoured, Nancy insisted on berets and turbans, and on dresses with sharper, bolder colours and cleaner lines.

They were small disagreements, but in the months that followed they became more frequent and more profound. The most fundamental battleground between them was Nancy’s season. Maud wanted her daughter to shine, as much for the sake of her own reputation as for Nancy’s marital prospects, but Nancy decided that the whole thing was a ridiculous charade. She sulked through her presentation at court, as resentful of the demure pink dress she had to wear as the tedious hours spent queuing to curtsey to the Queen. She grew rapidly and ungraciously bored by her round of debutante parties where, she argued, the same dance bands played to the same set of girls and the same dull young men, whose bland faces were as irksome to her ‘as their vapid conversation among the hydrangeas at supper’.
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Diana had been bored by her season, but she had been better trained to survive it. Nancy, however, saw no reason to conceal her truculence, especially once she had gulped several surreptitious glasses of champagne, bypassing the innocuous fruit cup that debutantes were meant to sip. To her delight, but Maud’s dismay, she failed to secure an invitation to the crowning event of the calendar, Queen Charlotte’s Ball. And the crosser Nancy became at having to endure it all, the more her contempt leaked into her relationship with Maud. She felt it was hypocritical of her mother to care about so meaningless a ritual while parading her association with radicals like Lewis and Pound.

The fragile bonds they had forged over the course of the previous year began to fray as Nancy started to disassociate herself from Maud. Her rebellion wasn’t exceptional – many young women, including Diana, felt an urgent need to define themselves against their mothers. It was part of the restless sense of freedom coursing through London just before the war. Yet Nancy was drawing on a long history of resentment and exclusion, and her antagonism towards Maud was far more murderous than Diana’s irritability with Violet. Around this time she was among a group of friends playing the after-dinner game Truth, in which each of them were asked to name the person they would most like to see enter the room. In a flat, cutting tone, Nancy answered, ‘Lady Cunard,
dead.
’
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Throughout the summer of 1914 she contrived a variety of small rebellions. She turned up late for her mother’s soirées and played truant from her own debutante engagements; sometimes meeting with Diana and her set to go drinking and dancing at the Golden Calf, but more often meeting with her new best friend, Iris Tree. She and Iris had known one another for years, attending a few of the same children’s tea parties and coinciding at the smart girls’ school in London that Nancy had briefly attended. During those years, Iris had found Nancy stiff and fierce, while Nancy had been cowed by Iris’s puppy-like exuberance. Now, however, they recognized one another as kindred spirits.

Iris, a year younger than Nancy, had become a student at the Slade School of Art; dressing in peasant smocks that had been woven at Roger Fry’s Omega Studio, and wearing her white-blonde hair in a short pageboy bob. Nancy, whose own hair was still unshorn, much admired this audacious alternative to the elaborate pompadours or loose, Grecian buns into which most girls their age styled their hair. And she admired even more the world of artists to which Iris introduced her.

Among certain girls of the middle and upper classes, art school represented a popular escape route from home. University places were still limited (only a thousand attended the all-female colleges at Oxford or Cambridge, and they were not permitted to receive official degrees until 1921). Even Diana, who had no artistic skills, had enrolled for a term at the Slade in order to get some privacy from her mother. Iris, however, was fully committed to her studies, as well as to the life that came with them. She had become friendly with a crowd of painters, including Alvaro ‘Chile’ Guevara and Nina Hamnett, and she was on close terms with poets Robert Nichols, Tommy Earp, Edward Wyndham Tennant and the Sitwell brothers.

As Iris introduced a dazzled Nancy to her circle, she also introduced her to a very new view of London, whose hub was the Eiffel Tower. This Soho restaurant had been a meeting place for writers and painters ever since its opening in 1896; run by an Austrian chef, Rudolph Stulik, its menu alone – aromatic, garlicky, Continental – seemed to waft Nancy towards a different more authentic world. Some nights the symbolist poet Arthur Symonds might be holding court, a veteran of fin-de-siècle decadence with his wide-brimmed hat, glass of absinthe and lugubrious gaze, but for Nancy, no matter who was present, every night held a promise. GM teased her about the new bohemian set she was seeing, dismissing their poetry and paintings as ‘chaos’. Yet his criticisms merely confirmed Nancy’s belief that this was how she wanted to live. In her adult poem ‘To the E. T. Restaurant’ she paid homage to the Tower and its milieu as her ‘carnal-spiritual home’; filled with ‘wits and glamour, strong wines, new foods’ and the ‘strange-sounding languages of diverse men.’

It was with Iris that she decided to rent the Fitz, as a place where they could spend unsupervised time together, reading, writing, drawing and seeing their friends. And it was with Iris, too, that she pored over the first issue
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of Wyndham Lewis’s heretical magazine
Blast.
Lewis had laid out his ideological agenda by dividing the modern world into angels and devils, a ‘Bless’ list and a ‘Blast’ list. The former included a provocatively rag-taggle mix of artists, suffragettes, music-hall singers and prizefighters, while the latter featured numerous despised establishment figures. Among them was ‘Beecham (Pills, Opera, Thomas)’ – and Nancy read that list as though it were her personal battle cry.

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In those last, sunny weeks of peace Nancy was suspended between different worlds. She was still finishing her season and still under Maud’s control, but she was also sneaking off to the Fitz and experimenting with a life about which her mother knew almost nothing. Initially, little changed with the declaration of war. At the Tower she listened to vigorous debates on the politics and aesthetics of war, with Lewis leading the argument that it was a necessary evil, a scourging of Europe’s bloated imperial powers. At Cavendish Square, meanwhile, she was being dragooned by Maud into the organization of charity events to raise money for the British troops. Photos taken of Nancy, posing in a toga and slippers for an ‘Omar Khayyām’ gala, reveal her as her mother’s still compliant, socialite daughter.

But as the predicted defeat of the Germans failed to materialize and the casualty figures began to climb, Britain stopped playing at war, and so did Nancy. Her first published poem, which appeared in the June 1915 edition of the Eton College
Chronicle
(then edited by her cousin Victor) was an elegy for soldiers lost in battle. And if its sentiments were as conventional as its language – ‘These die obscure and leave no heritage/For them no lamps are lit, no prayers said’ – they were inspired by real feeling. By now many of the men Nancy knew were being sent to the Front and death was acquiring a personal face.