Those Wild Wyndhams (52 page)

Margot was scathing: ‘Pamela, poor dear, has reached her religion through spiritualism … a random slap on the ear in a dark room has convinced her of the existence of God.’
³²
Yet reports of these trials, in which magistrates tried to get to grips with whether ‘spirits’ might be ‘lying’ to the mediums who were their conduits, showed the ambiguity of society’s attitude towards spiritualism. It suspected it was nonsense – but it could not quite be sure. Pamela, seeing herself as a guide for others, wanting to allow them to enjoy the ‘supreme joy’ she found in this communication, encouraged those still unsure.
³³
In November 1916 she took Mary to a séance with a man in Tavistock Square. Mary told Cincie she was ‘agnostical’, thinking ‘perhaps one ought just to give a chance to the theory that the middle-man may still be necessary for communication – more on account of Yvo than Ego’.
³⁴
In fact, Mary wanted to believe far more than she let on to her cynical daughter. In December, she took Cincie to a further session at Tavistock Square. It was disastrous. The medium accused a mistrustful, uneasy Cincie of acting as a mental ‘screen’ and ‘got hopelessly on the wrong track about me, thinking my husband had been killed’, said Cincie.
³⁵
Mary could not stretch her credulity further. Pamela indefatigably continued to send her reports of sittings with Mrs Leonard whenever Ego and Yvo made an appearance.
³⁶

In 1914, Pamela had responded to war’s outbreak by scooping up another child. An exchange from 1918 suggests that she responded to Bim’s death in a similar way. In 1918, Marie Stopes published
Married Love
, and shortly afterwards
Wise Parenthood
,
a birth-control manual popularizing the contraceptive diaphragm. One of
Married Love
’s controversial propositions concerned artificial insemination. Stopes believed that for many reasons – ‘the husband’s actual sterility or the lack of mutual adjustment in their organs, or from an ill-understood lack of chemical affinity’ – an otherwise loving couple might not be able to have a child. Since husbands might object to their wives ‘yielding’ their bodies to another man, Stopes’s solution was artificial insemination: ‘there are sufficient records in the medical profession of success … for it to offer much hope’.
³⁷
She added, helpfully, that ‘Where the injection is undertaken by a woman doctor, the husband need have no feeling that his wife has been violated’ at all.
³⁸
Her theories were contested in the preface by her editor, William J. Robinson, informing readers that successful artificial insemination was so rare that the method ‘is never likely to acquire a great vogue’.
³⁹

Among Stopes’s papers in the British Library is a tantalizingly brief exchange of just two letters between her and Pamela in July 1918, shortly after publication. In the first, Stopes refers to an intimate conversation between the women the day before:

the more I think of it, the more undecided I am. You ask a thing I could only do for a most
intimate
friend, as
so
much is involved – I really do think you should find the right person
yourself
because you know
heredity
is a very very important factor – & how could I take such a responsibility? Supposing you were ever to regret any developing trait how would you prevent a feeling that you trusted me & I was somehow responsible?
⁴⁰

Pamela replied that day:

I quite see that you might view the matter we discussed
as you do
. It is worthy of you – and as I might expect … Thank you with all my heart … I don’t yet fully know how much tension I am undergoing in keeping this longing in control, because I have a strong will! I must just wait & see. Meanwhile because of my talk with you I have felt much helped, & happier … I have never spoken to anyone as I did to you. I believe I was not misguided in my confidence?
⁴¹

With Pamela, almost nothing is too strange. These letters fit exactly a surmise that she had, however tentatively, suggested that Stopes should artificially inseminate her with sperm from a donor of Stopes’s choosing, and Stopes shrank from being responsible for determining the paternity of any child Lady Glenconner might bear. So far as it is possible to tell, the idea was dropped, but there remained an understanding between the two women, and a deep gratefulness towards Stopes on Pamela’s part.

The young continued to die – and the old. Harry Cust succumbed, suddenly, to pneumonia in 1917, and a death that once would have been seismic for the Souls passed almost unnoticed in the context of seas of crosses in France. Pamela placed memorials to Bim in Salisbury Cathedral, in the church at Wilsford and in the kirk at Traquair near Glen.
⁴²
Madeline Wyndham raised a plaque in East Knoyle church ‘In Memory of my Five Grandsons who were killed in the Great War’.
Her faith had become ever more determined in the war’s bleak years. She now lived, said Pamela, ‘in close communion with all those who had gone before’.
⁴³

Mary suffered the evisceration of public appearances, laying foundation stones for a Garden City for disabled soldiers at Longniddry and memorial stones to her sons at Stanway and Gosford. Solace for her was Stanway – a place saturated with her sons’ spirits
⁴⁴
– playing over ‘might-have-beens’, trying to work out what would have happened with better scouting at Katia, or if Yvo had never switched from the Rifles to the Guards. She and Ego’s widow Letty cherished David and Martin, Ego’s two small sons.
⁴⁵
‘I get through
bit by bit
(and nobody
need
ask one how, because one cannot tell them),’ she told her mother. But after 1916 everything was an afterthought.
⁴⁶

At 11 a.m. on 11 November 1918 came the Armistice and the guns finally fell silent. Once again raucous crowds filled the streets. For those who had fought, the forced celebration was far removed from the innocence of four years before. ‘This was the moment to which I had looked forward for four years, and now that it had arrived I was overcome by melancholy. Amid the dancing, the cheering, the waving of flags, I could think only of my friends who were dead,’ said Duff Cooper, one of the few Coterie members to survive, who married Diana Manners the following year;
⁴⁷
‘I had expected riotous excitement, but the reaction of everyone, officers and men, seemed the same – flat depression,’ said Oliver Lyttelton, son of Alfred and D.D.
⁴⁸
‘Even when you win a war you cannot forget that you have lost your generation,’ said Tommy Lascelles, who, like Duff Cooper, had seen most of his friends die.
⁴⁹

So these officers stood frozen among the celebrating crowds, and the mothers of the dead thought only of the sons they had lost. ‘All day the thought of you has burnt in my innermost heart. Victory, & you & I look in vain for our Victors,’ Ettie wrote to Mary.
⁵⁰
‘No one can feel light of heart … we miss our shining victors in the hour of victory,’ echoed Mary in her diary.
⁵¹
The survivors had now to endure the peace, which Cincie thought ‘will require more courage than anything that has gone before. It isn’t until one leaves off spinning round that one realizes how giddy one is. One will have to look at long vistas again, instead of short ones, and one will at last fully recognize that the dead are not only dead for the duration of the war.’
⁵²

Among Pamela’s papers is a printed pamphlet from July 1920 issued by F. S. Graham, a North Yorkshire game dealer. Mr Graham was pleased to announce that he would be importing Hungarian partridge from Czechoslovakia, and French partridge eggs. The widespread shortage of wild duck eggs – the result of farmers having to kill off wild ducks during the war – was also being put right. There was one further message: ‘The late war has brought about such a wonderful change in the titles and names of proprietors and tenants of shootings, and in gamekeepers names that it is necessary for me to revise my list of customers names and addresses … therefore my annual booklet will, this year, reach many addresses for the last time, unless I hear of a desire to have it continued.’
¹
In 1918, Mary was fifty-six, Mananai and Pamela in their late forties. The war had brought an end to their way of life as conclusively, and briskly, as shutting the covers of an old hardback book.

Dick Wyndham, Clouds’ heir, survived the war, although his elder brother George did not. In 1919, his mother Minnie died in the Spanish Influenza epidemic. Guy was bereft. ‘Bitter waters have rolled over Clouds,’ said Mary. ‘It began with the death of a little child – my Colin – then Papa George Percy – and four other grandsons of mamma – and now Minnie – most unexpected (and I venture to say uncalled for!) & soon we shall have to lay here the tired heart & body of darling Mamma,’ Mary told Arthur.
²

Madeline Wyndham was now over eighty, and ever more living in another world. Weeks before, Mary had spent ‘2 nights holding my mother’s hands, talking of people long since dead and roaming with her through strange realms of phantasy and delirium in what
seemed
a
death chamber
, or birth into
another
world’.
³
It was decided that she should live permanently at Babraham, since the Adeanes, with ever increasing duties within the county, were the most frequently at home. In 1915, Charlie had been appointed Lord Lieutenant of Cambridgeshire, and in 1917 President of the Royal Agricultural Society, thus turning his energies towards ‘matters concerned with food production’.
⁴
Mananai proved herself indefatigable in her work throughout the war, always conscious that what had caused her such pain for so long – her inability to bear a son who lived – had saved her from seeing a grown son die. Nonetheless, the Adeanes still visited London, and could no longer afford to keep two houses running full time. The sisters agreed that when their mother was in sole residence she would pay for the kitchen staff, and her guests would pay their own way. Charlie, who had darkly visualized his house being turned into a permanent rest home for his mother-in-law’s multitude of elderly relations and friends, was relieved. Mananai was scrupulously fair: ‘When I come down to see Mamma I will pay my Board as she will be running the kitchen,’ she explained to Mary.
⁵

A decade before, such a proposal would have been unthinkable. But now death and taxes, which had risen throughout the war and were increasing once again, seemed to herald the break-up of estates everywhere one looked. The wrecking ball was a familiar sight in the streets of Mayfair and Piccadilly, demolishing the private palaces in which the Wyndhams had danced to make way for natty blocks of flats with en-suite bathrooms and all mod cons.
⁶
‘England is changing hands … Will a profiteer buy it? Will it be turned into a school or an institution? Has the mansion house electric light and modern drainage?’ asked
The Times
in 1920.
⁷
Even Eddy was feeling the pinch. ‘I could afford to give you a large allowance when taxation was upon a more moderate scale than it is now … [but] income tax and super tax are for me about 11/- in the pound so you will see … how I am financially situated,’ he said to Margot in 1919, explaining why he could no longer accede to her persistent requests for more money. ‘[U]nfortunately everyone thinks that I am very rich and forget the obligations under which I stand …’
⁸
The Glenconners’ charitable obligations and benefactions were considerable. Most recently, in 1918 Eddy had gifted to the nation Dryburgh Abbey, the monastic ruins where Sir Walter Scott is buried. The only condition was that an existing annual service of thanksgiving be maintained. Scott was one of Pamela’s favourite writers, and the decision was undoubtedly precipitated by her.
⁹

Mary spent the post-war years fighting for her past. From the moment the war had ended, Hugo was itching to reopen Gosford
.
¹⁰
In the autumn of 1919, Stanway was let for the first time. Mary spent a fortnight there prior to the letting, ‘working like a galley slave a charwoman and a cabinet minister all in one’ to prepare the house; ‘now poor Stanway is swept and garnished and the people come in October’, she told Arthur.
¹¹
During the war, and in reflection of her greater responsibilities as Countess of Wemyss, Mary had begun to employ a personal assistant, Miss Wilkinson, known (like her maternity nurse) as ‘Wilkie’, who stayed with her for the next twenty years.
¹²
Wilkie became invaluable to Mary as she struggled with the Sisyphean task of trying to maintain 62 Cadogan Square, Stanway and Gosford. ‘Three houses in these days, will take every drop out of my body, every grain of energy out of my soul I never go out of my office, night or day,’ Mary complained to Arthur in 1920, contemplating an American let of Gosford for five weeks in August that would allow the Wemysses to live there for September and October, but required Mary to supply the servants: ‘an awful task – but not I think quite imposs [sic] if one puts one’s back to it’.
¹³