The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me (29 page)

I do a lot of cooking and my cell stinks of delicious garlic. My next experiment is going to be a (very inferior) imitation of your Tito’s beautiful cake [in Rome] which was choc outside and sour cream inside – mine will have a sort of cheese that I make from milk. I am feeling very well because of the hot weather we are having – I will draw a veil over the winter here which lasted from September until the middle of June and which was an intensely painful experience. I promise when I get out if I ever do I will not be a prison bore or ever refer to it, but in case you want to know what it is like, it is an endless journey 3rd class abroad in a rather crowded train with a very bad restaurant car.

Diana claimed that the happiest day of her life was when she was reunited with her husband and they were put in married quarters in the prison grounds. (When Diana’s mother came by bus to visit, the conductor called out before the stop, ‘Holloway Gaol! Lady Mosley’s suite! All change here!’330 ) The Mosleys had a small garden where they grew vegetables and even fraises des bois, and the dark, ivy-covered walls reminded Diana of happier days at Gerald’s house in Rome.

Other Faringdon friends had also gone down in the world. The Marchesa Casati, deeply in debt, had fled Paris for London, where she now lived in very reduced circumstances, swathed in ripped black velvet and grubby ostrich feathers, her eyes like dark coal-holes staring from a dead-white powdered face. Gone were the startling pets and masquerades of her Roman days and the pythons in glass tanks that she had taken to Faringdon. It appears from later evidence that Gerald helped Luisa Casati financially, something that may well have begun at this vulnerable stage in her life. Although her old friends sometimes found her a pitiful sight, La Casati attracted a new, younger set of admirers, and survived the war into the late 1950s.

Winnie de Polignac had set herself up in a modest flat at 55 Park Lane, where, exiled from the glamour and influence of her musical salon in Paris, she bought an upright piano and comforted herself playing Bach. The atmosphere in London was hellish: thousands of citizens were dying in air raids, and many buildings – including the House of Commons, Waterloo Station and the British Museum – had been devastated. Despite her terror at the air raids, the Princesse de Polignac made her way through bombed-out, glass-strewn streets to concerts and literary events and took the train for weekends at Faringdon. The old exiled Princess was a regular visitor until her death of a heart attack in 1943, and would sit out on the porch in the sunshine, gazing into the distance, perhaps remembering her happier days with Violet Trefusis (the two were not invited together). The grand old lady had come a long way from mid-nineteenth-century New York and Singer sewing machines, via French aristocracy and belle époque Paris Lesbos, to being a major influence on European music. Now, a younger generation of British writers became acquainted with the powerful woman whom Violet Trefusis called ‘Oak’, amazed that she represented a direct link to Proust. James Lees-Milne described her sitting on a sofa, ‘immobile, with a hat on, like a large Buddha’. There was something ‘very godlike’ about her.331

Numerous Faringdon friends were among the well-heeled Londoners who moved into the Dorchester – ‘one of the SAFEST buildings in London’ as the hotel’s advertisement claimed, pointing out the eight floors of heavily reinforced concrete and virtually bomb-proof ground floor. A ‘glittering fortress during the Blitz’, the bar continued to serve champagne, the restaurant offered oysters and lobster, and dance tunes were played by the orchestra until late at night. Some said that spies and criminals mingled with the off-duty airmen, society ladies and politicians. Certainly American officials favoured the place, including General Eisenhower, who met Churchill there to discuss D-Day. At night, a cockroach-killer was employed to crawl about on knee-pads, making sure the vermin would not offend the illustrious guests.332

WINNIE, PRINCESSE DE POLIGNAC READING THE PAPER ON THE PORCH AT FARINGDON NOT LONG BEFORE HER DEATH IN 1943

Among the permanent occupants of ‘the Dorch’ were the two great hostesses Lady Cunard and Lady Colefax, who abandoned their fine London houses and established themselves on different floors. The rival salonniéres continued to gather what they could of the great and the glamorous, war or no war. Naturally, some old friends were now on active service, others evacuated and others too busy to be doing with Emerald Cunard’s teas or Sibyl Colefax’s ‘ordinaries’ – lunches at the Dorchester, after which guests would be presented with a bill for 10s 6d. But many of the old faithful did turn up, including those who continued to visit Faringdon, such as Harold Nicolson, Edith Sitwell and Cyril Connolly. Rumour had it that when the sirens announced a raid, Lady Cunard would crouch beneath the dining table amidst the gilt and ormolu in her seventh-floor suite and read Proust or Shakespeare to calm her guests.

Clarissa took up quarters on the Dorchester’s (understandably unpopular) top floor along with her old school friend Pamela Digby, now Churchill, having recently married Churchill’s son, Randolph, and famous for her astonishing success with rich and famous men. ‘At one time or another, there were friends and acquaintances on every floor,’ wrote Clarissa, who nonchalantly eschewed the bomb shelter for the foyer when the sirens went off. Cecil Beaton became a very close, lifelong friend, sending over boxes of flowers from Ashcombe and writing letters when abroad.333 He had turned away from the fripperies of fashion and royal portraits (claiming ‘I was sick to death of posing people round apple blossom’334), to snap bomb-wrecked streets, wounded babies and brave airmen setting off on missions. The Ministry of Information sent him all over the world on photographic assignments and he became the official photographer for the RAF.

In 1942, Doris Castlerosse, Cecil’s unlikely girlfriend of the 1930s, came back to London from the US and also moved into the Dorchester. Lady Castlerosse had left behind her American lover, Eleonor Flick Hoffman (of the Venetian palazzo), and was rumoured to have become bitter and ‘an acid misanthrope’.335 During a trip to Washington, Winston Churchill had invited her to dinner and strongly encouraged her return to England. It appears he was worried that his portraits of this notorious, if titled, courtesan might fall into the hands of an American magazine and affect his gravitas as Britain’s leader. Not long after seeing Churchill, Doris managed to obtain a highly elusive priority air ticket to London. Despite their bitter divorce dealings, Lord Castlerosse met his ex-wife at Waterloo Station and they dined together at the Dorchester before he left her there and returned home. (He would die the following year from a heart attack, allegedly after one of his habitually indulgent dinners.)

Doris then had a dreadful few days, sitting in her rooms, terrified at the bombs falling all around and the blasts from the huge anti-aircraft guns in Hyde Park, the three Churchill portraits still wrapped in brown paper. She sent a telegram to New York to try to discover whether she could obtain the money for some jewellery she had pawned there, only to find that the telegram was intercepted by British censors. Detectives turned up to question her about what appeared to be irregular financial dealings. She called friends and found them in an entirely different mood to previous times, critical that she had left Britain. Lonely and miserable, the ‘enchantress of the Thirties’ with a ‘jester’s cap of pure gold hair’ felt she had lost her magical charms. A few days later she encountered the Duke of Marlborough in one of the Dorchester’s carpeted corridors and he made a contemptuous remark about people who desert their country during war. Later she was found unconscious in her bed. Doris died some days later in hospital, aged forty-one. The coroner’s verdict was open, but described a death from self-administered barbiturate acid poisoning.336

OR MANY OF Gerald and Robert’s war-weary friends, weekends at Faringdon became an escape to another, forgotten era. It seemed almost inconceivable to find themselves back at this beautiful house, tucked up under satin eiderdowns in four-poster beds and fed with marvellous food. The war was provoking vast changes in society. The class system appeared to be crumbling and few imagined that large country houses filled with servants would be reinstated once the war was over. As James Lees-Milne travelled around England inspecting many of these increasingly dilapidated piles for the National Trust, he was aware that he was a witness to an entire way of life in its death throes. Evelyn Waugh agreed, believing that ‘the ancestral seats which were our chief national aristocratic achievement were doomed to decay and spoliation like the monasteries of the sixteenth century’.337

Nancy Mitford, meanwhile, had been a night fire-watcher, had worked in a canteen for French soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk, and then with Jewish refugees. At last she settled in a job with her friends Heywood and Anne Hill at their unusual Mayfair bookshop that was more like a private house filled with first editions, pictures and toys as well as the latest publications, and a much-loved meeting point for a large network of friends that included Jennifer, as well as Gerald, Evelyn Waugh and the Sitwells. Nancy adored her visits to Faringdon, where Gerald not only provided a refuge of comfort and glamour, but encouraged her to write, telling her she could not leave her room until she had written the required amount for the day. It was also the place where she received the devastating news that her brother Tom had been killed in action in Burma. Gerald went to tell her in her room, and said she mustn’t think of coming down for dinner, but Nancy insisted on acting as though nothing had happened.338 Despite this, Nancy later recalled her times at Faringdon like trips to Paradise.

I can remember, during the tedious or frightening but always sleepless nights of fire-watching in wartime London, that the place I longed to be in most intensely was the red bedroom at Faringdon, with its crackling fire, its Bessarabian carpet with bunchy flowers and above all its four-post bed, whence from beneath a huge fat fluffy old-fashioned quilt one can gaze out at the view, head still on pillow … Perhaps the greatest, most amazing conjuring tricks are reserved for the dining room. In this pleasant sunny white room, scattered with large silver-gilt birds and wonderful Sevres and Dresden china, a standard of culinary perfection has been maintained through the darkest days of war. Cook or no cook, raw materials or no raw materials, a succession of utterly delicious courses would somehow waft themselves to the sideboard, and the poor Londoner, starved, or sated with Spam, would see sights and tastes he had long ago forgotten to believe in.339

If old friends were astounded by Faringdon, the same was probably true of the American servicemen who were stationed there from 1942. The Nissen huts were vacated by the Royal Engineers and filled with ‘Yanks’, many of them black, as the US Army was segregated. The townspeople of Faringdon had become accustomed to unusual occurrences during the war, but the sight of so many assembled African-Americans impressed and sometimes startled them. Needless to say, the senior officers were white, and it was they who were billeted in the attic and basement rooms of Faringdon House. Gerald and Robert were able to keep the two main floors, but inevitably the atmosphere of the house altered. However careful they were, the soldiers could be heard as they trooped up the back staircase to their rooms, or as they drove their trucks to unload in the stable yard. There had always been an unpretentious, almost scruffy feel to the place and now, with little domestic help, pictures put away and blackout blinds to fix each day at dusk, the glamour was toned down. Gerald took over a ground-floor room, to the right of the hall, which had a dressing room and bathroom off it. He had his desk with piles of books and papers there, and he slept in an ornate painted Venetian-style day-bed, reminiscent of a boat, with gilded lions at its base.

The officers had their mess on the lower ground floor, but they were occasionally asked to dine with their hosts. Doubtless they had read the Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain 1942 that warned about British reserve: ‘On a small crowded island where forty-five million people live, each man learns to guard his privacy carefully.’ It discouraged bragging about American wages, criticising the food or making fun of British accents – ‘You sound just as funny to them.’ The weather was equally daunting: ‘At first you will probably not like the almost continual rains and mists and the absence of snow and crisp cold.’ And of course, ‘NEVER criticize the King or Queen.’ An introductory section entitled ‘Britain at War’ gives a useful picture of the general situation in 1942:

Every light in England is blacked out every night and all night. Every highway signpost has come down and barrage balloons have gone up. Grazing land is now ploughed for wheat and flower beds turned into vegetable gardens. Britain’s peacetime army of a couple of hundred thousand has been expanded to over two million men … Old-time social distinctions are being forgotten as the sons of factory workers rise to be officers in the forces and the daughters of noblemen get jobs in munitions factories.

But more important than this is the effect of the war itself. The British have been bombed, night after night and month after month. Thousands of them have lost their houses, their possessions, their families. Gasoline, clothes, and railroad travel are hard to come by and incomes are cut by taxes to an extent we Americans have not even approached. One of the things the English always had enough of in the past was soap. Now it is so scarce that girls working in the factories often cannot get the grease off their hands or out of their hair. And food is more strictly rationed than anything else.

Given the warnings not to misinterpret the dowdy clothes and un-soaped bodies, it must have been a surprise for these US servicemen to find their hosts not only stylishly arrayed, scented individuals who entertained beautifully, but able to place a fine spread on the table. Gerald described one such evening to Clarissa. ‘Two of the officers dined the other night. One (from Carolina) agreeable and prepossessing, the other a New Yorker lamentably dull and slow of speech. Others I have met ditto. I am told that it is regarded in America as politeness not to spare one a single detail. But it makes one feel like a motor car going up hill with the brake on.’ Despite the cultural gap, Clarissa remembered that the Americans ‘were a source of resigned amusement to Gerald’. He wrote to her again when they were snowed up, with only enough food for a couple of days: ‘If it continues we shall have to kill and eat a soldier. It might be interesting to try the major, who is thoroughly impregnated with whisky and might make an excellent haggis.’