Those Wild Wyndhams (49 page)

Still, ten days later, when Yvo was ordered to rally his men, holed up in a shallow trench, into a fresh – and clearly suicidal – attack, he did not demur. He led his men ‘over the top’ and died in a fusillade of bullets: instantly, so his commanding officer said.
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He had been at the Front for not quite five weeks. Bim heard the rumour of his cousin’s death the next day. ‘Osbert [Sitwell] and I are miserable about it, for no more lovable person ever stepped,’ he wrote to his mother, hoping against hope it might not be true.

But Bim himself was holed up in a front-line trench, under heavy bombardment from shellfire. He had had no more than four hours’ sleep in seventy-two hours, and was sufficiently discomposed, as the ground around him shook and rumbled and debris showered over him, to allow his nerves to show, if only momentarily:

I used to think I was fairly impervious to noise, but the crash upon crash, and their accompanying pillar of black smoke simply upset me, as they pitched repeatedly within 30 or 40 yards, and some even nearer. I don’t think I showed I was any more frightened than anyone else. Perhaps I wasn’t … I was very glad to get a letter from Daddy which seemed cheerful about the war. Please thank him for it …
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Bim appears to have been entirely unconscious of the irony of this juxtaposition.
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The news of Yvo’s death reached his family the next day. Hugo’s brother Evan Charteris, hearing the news at the War Office, had arranged that the Elchos be informed by telephone rather than telegram. It took Cincie several moments to comprehend the full import of the blurred voice at the other end of the receiver telling her the call was ‘about Yvo Charteris … you must be prepared for the very worst’.

Cincie’s diary entry of that long, awful day records a family devastated: Bibs, huge-eyed, ‘petrified’ and disbelieving; Mary Charteris, for whom Yvo was ‘practically her life’, ‘frozen’ at her dressing table, ‘mechanically greasing’ her face with cold cream as she prepared to leave with Letty for Egypt the next day; ‘Poor Papa … most piteous – heartbroken and just like a child – tears pouring down his cheeks and so naively
astonished
… I think he really loved Yvo far the most of his children, and was so proud and hopeful about him’;
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and Mary, who had missed the telephone call while ‘closeted’ in confabulation with Sockie, Bibs’s governess, but guessed the news as soon as she saw Cynthia’s face. ‘… I think she really expected it … She was wonderful, quite calm after the first moment of horror. About five minutes afterwards she said something so sweet and natural, just what one feels when one is dazed: “What a bore!”’
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Ego wrote to Mary from Egypt, a frank letter that acknowledged in bald terms what this war had become:

Darling Mum,

I have absolutely nothing to say. When your own mother and brother are concerned it is futile to talk about sympathy, and the one consolation for me is that – if any comfort is to be extracted, or if the best thought is of any use, which of course it is – your soul is big enough, large enough for that purpose … The only sound thing is to hope the best for one’s country and to expect absolutely nothing for oneself in the future. To write down everyone one loves as dead – and then if any of us are left we shall be surprised. To think of one’s country’s future and one’s own happy past. The first is capable of vast improvement – as for the second, when all is said and done, we were a damned good family. Qua
family
as good as Clouds … I am so awfully sorry for Papa who loved him … He must write his sons off and concentrate upon his grand-children who thank God exist …

Goodbye darling – I love you till all is blue.
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For his family, Yvo’s death was the point of no return. Whatever happened in the war, they could never go back to the lives they had lived before. For Cincie, it destroyed the familiar platitudes of glamour: ‘I am haunted by the feeling that [Yvo] is disappointed. It hurts me physically,’ she wrote in her diary.
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‘Not little Yvo,’ Ettie Desborough wrote to Balfour.
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The following months felt to Mary as though ‘all the universe was rocking round one’.
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She bore the return of Yvo’s kit, his empty clothes ‘the most poignantly pathetic of all the heartbreaking angles & sharp turnings one has wearily to take’, she told Wilfrid Blunt.
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‘Mary has a lion-heart, it will make her able to triumph even over this, & prove herself indestructible,’ Ettie had written, but Yvo’s death had eviscerated Mary,
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had ‘taken … all that I ever had of high worldly hopes & aspirations’, as she put it to Blunt.
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Mary refused to dissemble. ‘No one can maintain that it is not tragedy,’ she told Arthur from Stanway as the family faced its first Christmas without Yvo:

– pure and unadulterated, that it is draped in all the glamour of romance … does not mean the price is less to pay … and although the houses are not ruined or the harvests burnt here in England, still the long cruel tentacles of this deadly war has stretched its icy claw and reached each house and hearth … if you hold yr breath you hear the sound of widows weeping, sisters sobbing and the ceaseless falling falling of the mothers’ tears, the whole air is stifled, surcharged with sadness, which eats into the soul … I will not believe that sadness is not sadness – or say it is God’s will and all is for the best!
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In the autumn of 1915, in her mid-forties, Pamela fell pregnant. She rejoiced in this late, unexpected pregnancy. It gave her ‘new courage & joy & hope – & bridged one over an Autumn & winter of [illegible] anxiety about Bim & Xtopher’, she told Mary.
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In her poem ‘Hester’,
describing this time, she is Demeter-like, fecund, as the land around her during:

nine months’ joy of happy life,

Of quiet dreams and blessed days,

Of peace that even calmed the Strife,

And steeped her in a golden haze …
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Pamela was no longer frozen while the world moved around her. Now she was blooming while the world held its breath. Strings had been pulled and for the duration of Pamela’s pregnancy, Bim was given a staff position under Brigadier John Ponsonby (commanding the 2nd Guards Brigade), away from action.
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The decision was justified by concerns about Pamela’s health. Nonetheless, Bim took the position reluctantly. ‘My duties are to copy out recommendations for medals into books, and to check figures … Also I inspect the billets and rifles and gas-helmets of the Orderlies, telephone clerks and cyclists. Quite a large portion of my work is telling the General the date,’ he told his mother.
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He whiled away his time performing in shows for the troops: two-hour rowdy affairs each evening involving ‘Pierrot business’, ‘Sketches’ and songs. He procured a motorcycle and ‘tiff-tiff-ed’ his way across the countryside; read the large packages of books Pamela sent him; and prepared his own poems for publication –
Worple Flit
, a slight, forty-page volume, published by Pamela’s publishers Blackwell later that year. Pamela’s son was safe, her child was about to be born. But the moment was to prove as fleeting as she might have feared. Hester was born on 24 May 1916, and died a few hours later.

‘It has been dreadful – so overwhelming a sense of loss – at times I can hardly stand up against it,’ Pamela confessed to Mary.
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She had Hester photographed by H. C. Messer’s studio in Castle Street, Salisbury – the waxen child, eyes shut, nestled among broderie anglaise – and sent the image to all her family and friends. Photographing the dead was not in itself uncommon: Percy Wyndham was photographed in his bed after death, surrounded by his favourite books and pictures.
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Pamela’s widespread dissemination of the image at a time of mass grieving was.

Pamela had always established a monopoly on loss. During the Harry Cust episode, she never spoke, nor apparently thought, once of Nina. When Drummy died, she acted as though she alone could have saved him, almost entirely ignoring the fact that he had been engaged to another woman. But her behaviour on Hester’s death, as her own family’s sons died around her, tries the empathy of the biographer most. Pamela had suffered a terrible loss. She reacted as though she were the only person to have suffered loss in the world. She bombarded grieving families with pictures of her own dead child, and everyone who would listen, including Bim, in France, with pages about her grief. Perhaps the most difficult element is that Pamela paid lip-service to self-awareness. ‘I try to dwell on how much all the World is suffering now – & how deep the sorrows of others,’ she said to Mary, but she employed these thoughts as consolation, not as perspective.
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It is doubtless this behaviour that gave rise to another myth surrounding Oliver Hope’s origins – disseminated, among others, by Susan Lowndes – that having buried Hester at Queen Anne’s Gate Pamela made her way to Salisbury Infirmary, saying to the Matron: ‘I’ve lost my baby, have you any orphans?’
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The Lowndes family had a strange fascination with laying claim to and denigrating Pamela’s memory. This, as is evident from Pamela’s earlier references to Oliver, is no more than a florid romance. But such was her behaviour that the story of a high-handed aristocrat mad with grief could almost be true. Pamela was not the monster of myth. She had simply been so long spoiled that she could not see anyone else as more than a circling planet and herself the sun. But as she dwelt at length on her grief and pain in her letter to Mary she did rouse herself enough to recognize her sister’s ‘anxiety – & dear Letty’s’ and add, ‘I long for you both to get good news.’
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Some six weeks previously, Mary had spent Easter at Stanway with a large group of family and friends. They had good weather, and games of tennis. But the ‘parliaments’ in Mary’s boudoir focused almost exclusively on the war; and a flippant discussion at lunch on the necessity of post-war polygamy now that all the young men of their acquaintance were being wiped out left thirteen-year-old Bibs, recorded Cincie, ‘seriously distressed’. A further blow was struck at both sisters’ hearts that afternoon on receipt of letters from Connor the agent enclosing the sum of ninety-seven pounds: their shares ‘of Ickey’s [Yvo’s] little fortune’. In the gloaming, Cincie walked with a desolate Bibs up to the Pyramid. Stanway, as always, was magical in the dusk. But ‘Mamma is
miserable
– it’s really like a broken heart. What
can
one do?’ said Cincie.
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That night Mary had a ‘dream-vision’: ‘The atmosphere of the room seemed to quiver with excitement – I felt the stress and strain and
saw
as if thrown on a magic-lantern sheet, a confused mass of black smoke splashed with crimson flame … like a child’s picture of a battle or an explosion.’ Among these ‘flames and smoke’ she ‘saw Ego standing, straight and tall’. His profiled face was set and stern, his eyebrows and moustache dark against his pale face. It seemed as though ‘he was exercising his forces with all his might and main’. A brilliant golden banner swathed his chest in spiral folds, and ‘seemed to protect him’. ‘I felt that something had happened,’ Mary said later, ‘but I knew not what, it was below the level of consciousness.’
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She spent the rest of the weekend in a reverie.

Mary’s dream was on the night of Saturday 22 April 1916. Three days later
The Times
reported a small battle at Katia, in the Sinai, after a surprise attack by hostile forces at 5 a.m. on Easter Sunday. The day after that, Mary received a cable from Letty: the Gloucesters had been involved, Ego slightly wounded, and both he and Tom Strickland captured. ‘I can’t bear it for Mamma,’ said a dismayed Cincie, knowing that Ego himself would be ‘miserable’ at having been ‘captured at his very first engagement’ – ‘so like his pathetic luck’.
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But, despite best efforts, the details that trickled through over the next few days did not add up to any coherent story.
The Times
reported a ‘Stiff Fight’ by British cavalry against enemy forces of up to 3,000 – Germans, and Turks on camelback, in conditions of mist and fog.
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But the war correspondents’ conjecture could not be confirmed because, as Mary said, ‘
all
’ at Katia that day ‘were killed & taken’,
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their fates obscured as much as the battleground that day. The trickle of news guttered out, to be replaced by ‘lots of confusing Egyptian rumours’, prismed through the Chinese whispers of the well-meaning and those for whom Lord Elcho’s fate was simply bavardage. At a dinner party in London Mary overheard Mrs Keppel say that a syce (an Arab servant) had sworn that after the battle he had watched by Lord Elcho’s body for hours.
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Mary later said of her ‘dream-vision’ that ‘it helped me to
wait
and kept me outwardly calm’.
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But inwardly she was ‘terribly worried, over-tired and nervy’.
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She pressed Balfour for ‘the private account of what happened to the Yeomanry (Glos. Worcs. and Warwicks.) on Easter Sunday … it’s so maddening not knowing’.
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Almost a month after the battle the Elchos were ‘inexpressibly relieved’ to receive confirmation through the American Embassy that Tom Strickland was a prisoner in Jerusalem and being taken to Damascus. But the cable was silent about Ego. The next day, in early May, Mary went to Truro to stay in Miss Jourdain’s Anglican convent ‘for a rest’, taking with her a crucifix as an offering (the former governess had become a nun).
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The uncertainty continued. A list procured by Hugo of prisoners at Constantinople did not bear Ego’s name. More frustratingly still, Tom Strickland’s letters to his wife Mary, delivered by the Red Cross, made no mention of Ego. On 10 June the Red Cross telephoned with the message ‘Lord Elcho at Damascus. No details’, which rendered the family ‘wild with joy’.
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Two weeks later the message was countermanded: the Red Cross had sent the wrong name.
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