Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (5 page)

Such activities would have been considered distressingly compromising by Violet – and that, for Diana, was largely the point. Her desire to become ‘incomparable’ was no longer coloured by her mother’s standards; she wanted to be bold and bad – ‘Unlike-Other-People’.
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As she remembered it, ‘There was a general new look in everything in those years before the first war – a Poiret-Bakst blazon and a budding freedom of behaviour that was breaking out at the long last end of Victorianism. We felt it and revelled in it.’
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On the nights that Diana was able to escape her chaperones there was not only dancing in the Golden Calf, but illegal, moonlit swims in the Serpentine or the Thames; expeditions to pubs in the Limehouse docks and the occasional weaving ride on the back of a motorbike. Her new sacred texts were by Aubrey Beardsley, Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde and Max Beerbohm, and on their inspiration, she and her friends began calling themselves, with only a hint of irony, the Corrupt Coterie. They coveted new sensations and transgressive ideas whilst affecting a style of cynicism and profanity: ‘Our pride was to be unafraid of words, unshocked by drink and unashamed of “decadence” and gambling.’
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In reality much of the Coterie’s behaviour was little more than cultivated naughtiness. They invented after-dinner games, like Breaking the News – acting out scenes in which well-known women were informed of the deaths of their children. They staged exhibitionist stunts: Denis Anson faked epileptic fits; Maurice Baring set his hair alight during games of Risk; while Diana herself braved official censure by attending a formal reception at the Duke of Westminster’s with a set of fake medals pinned mockingly to her dress.

These mild acts of rebellion, however, brought a euphoric sense of daring and also a degree of public notoriety. The fact that several members of the Coterie had eminent parents made them very interesting to the press, and Lady Diana Manners was most interesting of all. Inwardly she might feel herself to be a ‘blancmange’, unable to match the cleverness and originality of her friends, but outwardly she seemed to scintillate. In a roomful of people it was Diana who held the floor in after-dinner games of charades or parentage, who galvanized everybody into impromptu dances to the gramophone, who scattered smart nonsense around the conversation.

People vied to secure her for their parties, because she was a guaranteed source of fun, and because she had also become beautiful, tall and very slender now, with a classical oval face and a dreamily opaque gaze (actually a consequence of mild shortsightedness) that was offset by her extreme social animation. When the writer Enid Bagnold first saw her descending a flight of stairs and sweeping the room with her ‘blind blue stare’ she recalled being ‘shocked – in the sense of electricity’.
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To young admirers who sent love letters and queued up to dance, Diana was ‘a goddess’, ‘an orchid among cowslips’. Older men were no less susceptible. One of her suitors was the legendarily wealthy American financier George Gordon Moore, who insisted that on a word from Diana he would divorce his wife. He seemed to move ‘in a shower of gold’, courting her with such astonishing presents as an ermine coat, a gigantic sapphire (reputed to have belonged to Catherine the Great), even a pet monkey called Armide with a diamond waist belt and chain.
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Diana thrived on both the presents and her notoriety. In response to an ironic marriage proposal from Duff Cooper, she described herself proudly as ‘very decadent, and theatrical & inclined to look fast – attributes no man likes in his wife’.
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She was also beginning to attract malicious comment. Those who remained insulated against her electricity criticized Diana as a flirt and ‘a scalp hunter’, and she received anonymous letters accusing her of corrupting the young men around her.

In truth, Diana had remained far more chaste in her behaviour than some of her peers. The publication in 1909 of H.G. Wells’s novel
Anne Veronica
had highlighted a trend among advanced young women to regard their virginity as a vexing encumbrance to adulthood. When the twenty-two-year-old Enid Bagnold allowed herself to be seduced by the writer Frank Harris, in 1909, she was delirious with relief. The painter Nina Hamnett wanted a plaque to be mounted on the house where she lost her own virginity. But if Diana was more cautious, she was also a far more public personality than these women. And in early 1914 the backlash against her supposed bad behaviour gathered momentum when the Coterie suffered its first brush with death. Gustav Hamel, a Swedish amateur flyer and racing driver who was close to the group, crashed his private plane during a flight from France to London. Shortly afterwards Denis Anson was drowned in the Thames during a late-night swimming party. ‘Mad youth’ was blamed by the press for both fatalities, and it was Diana who was identified as the prime instigator.

The report of Anson’s funeral appeared under the headline D
IANA’S
L
OVE
, and rumours spread through London that both Denis and Gustav had died while showing off for her benefit. Diana, already grief-stricken, suffered her first frightening experience of social rejection. Her name was dropped from the list for that summer’s Guards Ball,
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and people who had known her since childhood joined in the general condemnation. Lady Desborough, the mother of her friends Julian and Billy Grenfell, refused for a time to have her in her house, and Margot Asquith was loud in condemning her as a heartless flirt.

All this was very alarming for the Duchess. Over two years had passed since Diana’s season, and she was increasingly anxious about her youngest daughter’s prospects. The acceptable gap dividing youth from awkward spinsterhood was a narrow one, and it was intolerable to Violet that Diana might be seen to be unmarriageable. She still held unswervingly to the belief that wedlock was a woman’s sole source of security. If Diana could marry well and produce the necessary son and heir, she would then be free to embark on whatever private projects and love affairs she chose. Sir Henry had not been Violet’s own great love, nor she his: in accordance with centuries of upper-class pragmatism the two had discreetly found passion outside their marriage, Sir Henry with his mistresses and his fly fishing; Violet with her lover Harry Cust.

This cultured, handsome man, ‘the Rupert Brooke of our day’ according to Lady Horner, had for several years been the adored centre of Violet’s universe.
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She saw him in the late afternoon, when she could claim to be paying social calls. And constricted though the affair was, it had suited Violet well, allowing her to compartmentalize her life between duty and love. Such a balance, she assumed, would work equally for Diana as it would for her two other daughters. Both Letty and Marjorie had already found satisfactory husbands: Ego Charteris, son of the Earl of Wemyss, and Charlie Paget, now Marquess of Anglesey. Diana was the most beautiful of the three – Prince Paul of Yugoslavia had paid court to her, as had Lord Rocksavage – and Violet believed she could secure the most brilliant match of all. The Prince of Wales might be nearly three years younger than Diana, but a long engagement was always possible. Within the royal family itself there was enthusiasm for the match, for Diana’s popularity was regarded as a potentially useful asset to the throne. As for Violet, she couldn’t think of anyone who might make a more beautiful future Queen.

Yet Diana seemed uninterested in anyone but her own close circle, none of whom Violet counted as brilliant matches, and anxiety made the Duchess more vigilant and critical than she intended. The rule of the chaperone was a fact of life for all respectable unmarried women – even those sufficiently independent to attend university were not permitted into public lectures on their own – but Diana believed her own levels of confinement were absurd. The only hotel she was permitted to enter was the Ritz, which was just around the corner from the family’s London home. Every night the Duchess kept her bedroom door open to monitor the hour at which Diana returned, and the following day she expected an account of whom her daughter had danced with, who had accompanied her and who had driven her home.

Diana loved her mother, but her patience was running out, and by now she had acquired a piece of knowledge that made the Duchess’s vigilance look absurdly hypocritical. She had been eighteen when Edward Horner blundered into telling her the truth about her mother’s affair with Harry Cust and, even more startlingly, let slip that Harry was widely assumed to be Diana’s biological father. The physical evidence was compelling, Diana’s fair colouring and the shape of her face suggested a clear genetic resemblance, and once Diana was confronted with it she claimed to accept the revelation with barely a struggle. She had always liked Harry, and insisted that she found it amusing to think of herself a ‘Living Monument of Incontinence’.
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Yet it was still a shock, and it left her feeling more distanced, more questioning and more restless for escape. She was by then just twenty-two. A day could still be made ‘iridescent’, ‘intoxicating’ by a new dress or a ragtime tune, she could still relish the satisfaction of love letters, compliments and press cuttings. Yet beneath it all she felt the ‘grim monotony’
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of a life where she remained as financially dependent and physically constrained as a child. It left her with a vague and discomfiting ennui that she couldn’t even name, let alone address.

The notion that there might be some larger political context to her dissatisfaction was entirely foreign to Diana. As a child, she’d declared herself fervently grateful to have been born a girl because ‘somebody will always look after me’.
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As an adult she felt no identification with the suffragettes who had faced prison, even death, in their battle for the vote. At best she pitied them, at worse she mocked. During a country house party, Diana and her cousin Angie Manners staged the ‘hilarious’ stunt of dressing up in the purple, white and green colours of the WSPU, climbing on top of a garden gazebo and pelting male onlookers with cardboard biscuit boxes. Yet for all her political apathy, Diana would probably have concurred with the feminist Agatha Evans that there was a grim predictability in the lives of women who were ‘required to be gorgeous decorative and dumb’ while seeking husbands, and thereafter condemned to be ‘married matronly and motherly’.
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There were exceptions: Diana’s own mother was hardly matronly: some of the richer, more ambitious hostesses she encountered, such as the Marchesa Casati, Lady Cunard, or Lady Ripon, wielded some considerable social power. Perhaps if Diana had found a husband to suit both herself and her mother she might have become another Lady Ripon, a patron to the Russian ballet, or hostess to some of the key cultural circles in London. But in August 1914, Britain went to war and Diana, along with the rest of the population, found her life and expectations thrown drastically off course.

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She had been horrified and taken off guard by the declaration of war. Cocooned among her own small concerns she’d paid little attention to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in June, nor understood its effect on Europe’s political fault lines. She was far less well informed than the twenty-year-old undergraduate, Vera Brittain, who pondered fearfully in her diary what a modern war would be like: ‘Attack is possible by earth, water & air & the destruction attainable by the modern war machines used by the armies is unthinkable and past imagination’.
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And she knew much less than the crowd of women who flocked to London’s Kingsway Hall to denounce the war as the product of male rapacity and aggression.

But while Diana hoped that war might still be averted (naively wondering if the Coterie’s most influential friends might persuade Asquith to organize an international peace treaty), she couldn’t help but thrill to the enormity of this new drama and its liberating possibilities. Her first instinct had been to volunteer as a nurse in one of the Red Cross field hospitals close to the battle lines. Sentimentally, she cherished the idea of being near her male friends, who were already signing up for officer training. Competitively, she was determined not to be outdone by others she knew who were planning to nurse in France – among them Rosemary Leveson-Gower, who was engaged to her brother John, and her cousin Angie. And romantically, she believed she would have the adventure of her life.

Violet, however, was adamant in her refusal. She had never fully recovered from the death of Haddon, her first and most beloved child, and she could not countenance any threat to Diana. She was convinced her daughter would end up raped and left for dead by drunken soldiers; at the very least she would be working in appalling conditions. Rumours were already in circulation of the horrors facing young British VADs – one volunteer wrote home of having almost no hot water or light at the Salles Military Hospital in Saumur, and of nursing alongside filthy, disreputable orderlies, most of them soldiers who were ‘too mad or too bad to fight’.
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But Diana would not be budged from her determination to volunteer somewhere, so in October, angry, stubborn and wrung out from arguing, she embarked on her new life at Guy’s.

Most recruits found it rigorous. To Diana, coming from the spacious luxury of Belvoir and Arlington Street, it took all her courage to survive the first few days. From six in the morning, when the light bulb above her bed was automatically switched on, to ten fifteen at night, she was obedient to the orders of the professional nurses who patrolled the clattering, sterile wards. No allowances were made for her lack of experience as she disinfected surgical trays and handled bedpans. She was expected to work uncomplainingly through chilblains, swollen ankles, period pains and a level of fatigue she had never experienced before.