LONDON SOCIETY AND ITS FOLLIES
Society is the “head” on the tankard of civilization; if you did not
want it, you should not have poured so fast.—HENRICOURT:
_Kleptomania_, Bk. IV, Part II, ch. 37.
We spent our honeymoon in Algiers. The time passed all too quickly,
since the office was unable to spare me for more than a month. Print
shall not profane these sacred memories. It is enough for my readers to
know that early in the next year, 1945, I gave up the active part which
I had hitherto taken in the management of the business, and became
something of a sleeping partner. We took a house in Chiswick, which had
the advantage of being a central as well as a fashionable quarter. We
bought Greylands, and added to it a little, taking great care, however,
not to spoil the character of the house—our needs, indeed, were
comparatively simple. Two covered courts, a ferro-concrete drome, and a
new smoking-room for my women guests proved, in the end, to be all that
was necessary. It was at Greylands that my two sons were born, Francis
James, the second and last Lord Porstock, in 1946, and Gervase
Linthorpe, who never lived to succeed him, in 1947. But I have, perhaps,
spent too much space already in purely domestic chronicles; my readers
will be expecting by now some account of the world of London as it was
forty years ago. Did I say “the world” of London? Only a very tiny bit
of it, I am afraid; for we all live in small worlds, and perhaps in some
ways there is none smaller than that which is called “Society.” Yet, for
a later generation, it is easy to understand why Society, in this sense,
should be of particular interest. For, after all, it is the leisured and
the more elaborately differentiated class who reflect most faithfully
the fads and the follies of their time.
The fads and the follies! I remember bluff old Lord Billericay, when we
were having one of those terrifying smart conversations at Edith St.
Briavel’s, being called upon to contribute his definition of what one
meant by Society; to which the only answer he would give was, “I have no
respect for a Society which doesn’t see that Tommy Lieberts is a fool.”
And yet, when I look back at the salons of those days, and think how the
beauty that thronged them has faded, and the wit and inspiration that
then seemed so novel has become flat and insipid, and the serious
questions which we discussed have either been platitudinously answered
by now or have ceased to be questions at all, I sometimes think the only
thing that lives about us is our follies. For these are only the pastime
of a moment, and, passing with the moment, they escape by their very
briefness of duration the desecrating hand of time. I suppose we were
foolish. Manners, language, and even thought had become artificial, as
the result of a long spell of European peace and prosperity: I suppose
it is always so until a war comes to waken us up to a sense of
realities. Let me try and remember, then, some of the charming fools I
knew.
The people with parlour tricks! Perhaps the most extraordinary of these
was Algy Fearon, whose sole accomplishment was to giggle. When he was
young, it was treated as a disease; by inoculation when the inoculation
craze was in vogue, till his poor little system (he was only eight at
the time) was running all over with cachinnococci, as I think they
called them—but nothing would stop Algy laughing. Then he went to a
mind-cure man, who I believe tickled him unmercifully in the hope that
he would have enough of it that way—but nothing would stop Algy
laughing. Finally he made a virtue of necessity, and took his degree at
Oxford without being sent down more than twice, and came up to London to
go into business. To his intense surprise, he became the lion of the
hour. Hostesses scrambled for him, and almost got to the point of
writing on their cards “to hear Mr. Fearon laugh.” About half-way
through dinner, he would break down with no warning whatever, and roll
from side to side in agonies of merriment—and every one else had to join
in. You couldn’t help yourself. He went out to South Africa afterwards,
but I never heard that he was cured.
And there was Irene Hopgood (Frank Hopgood’s sister), who was a princess
of make up, and would never go out anywhere except in a disguise. It was
very exciting work asking her to a dinner-party, because you never knew
how she would arrive: I have known her dress up as a waitress, and I
have known her come through the window in short skirts pretending to be
a burglar! And there was old Lady Frances Holly, who still did
“knitting” and “embroidery,” and carried about a large bag with her
containing the materials of her craft. And Dick Crawshall, who still
rode one of the old bicycles that you propelled with your feet; one day,
for a bet, he rode it all round Selfridge’s, the assistants looking on
quite calmly and imagining that it was some new child’s toy of which he
was giving an exhibition for the benefit of customers. And Blanche
Engelstein, who carried about with her a little bag of what she called
“compliment cards,” which she presented to the best-dressed woman in the
room, and the maker of what she thought the best remark of the evening,
and so on.
The people with affectations and fads! I think it was Georgina Grosheim
who introduced the idea of having your teeth carved, like ivory. It
would have been painful to have this done in my father’s day, when
people wore their own teeth! The vogue had quite a long run, though I
never went in for it myself. The old Duke of Michigan, who was a great
dandy, used to have a different set for every day in the week, all very
elaborately carved. Children were so fond of looking at them and asking
him “What’s that story about?” that he said he always went home from a
children’s party with a jaw-ache. Somebody tried to introduce coloured
teeth, but these were never a success. Lady Jacynth Drysdale was one of
the few who were bold enough to appear in them, and even she stopped
when she heard of Archie Lock’s remark about her: “I can’t bear it when
that woman laughs, because it always reminds me of what I dropped last
night at snooker.” The tattooing fashion did not come in till after the
forties, and at first it was only done in small spirals round the arms.
I never cared for tattooed backs; but they were so common at one time
that when it went out, late in the sixties, we all had to take to
high-necked dresses again; till then, we wore those low necks you see in
the old _Punch_ pictures—I mean in the evening. Another unsuccessful
experiment was made in the fifties, when women took to cutting their
hair quite short, like men; I have still a chromograph of myself with my
hair like that: but it was never becoming, and I fancy it was only an
excuse when the doctors condemned it as unhealthy—there was a malicious
story that Adèle Hopps, the American beauty who afterwards became
Duchess of Lutterworth, bribed Dame Mary Sitwell, the most famous scalp
specialist of the day, to issue this pronouncement.
There were affectations of language, too, such as the custom (which
originated, I believe, in the Smethwick family) of putting in a G
wherever two vowels met at the end and the beginning of words, so that
you talked, for example, about “a stuffy gatmosphere,” or “The India
Goffice.” And there were affectations of dress which we have, perhaps
fortunately, forgotten. In the early fifties it was quite common to see
a Parisian lady going about with live birds in her hat, or an English
dandy wearing bracelets, or an English lady of fashion with a “beauty
patch” of black on her cheek—a revival from the seventeenth century. The
mercy of these things is that they go out almost as quickly as they come
in; I daresay our grandchildren will laugh at our powdered wigs and our
trailing dresses!
There were still interesting old survivals from an earlier period in
costume. I remember old Lord Sandham still going about in a starched
collar, and, I rather believe, starched cuffs. He was very proud of
himself for still having his own teeth, which he used to attribute to
the fact that he had never chewed gum in his life, or rather, not since
they broke him of the habit in his nursery. He was proud, too, of never
having been up in any kind of aircraft: and the story is told of him
that when he first came up to London after the first moving platforms
had been put in in Piccadilly and elsewhere, he and an equally
countrified friend walked for about a quarter of an hour up the slow
platform, thinking that they were getting to their club, when they were
really standing quite still! I can still see Sir Mark Adgate, too, with
his watch in his waistcoat pocket, tied on to the end of a gold chain,
with which he used gravely to take it out whenever he wanted to know the
time. Mrs. Grant (better known as “Phyllis Meadowes”) was the last woman
I ever saw wearing ear-rings. I believe my own uncle, Lord Trecastle,
was the last man who appeared in fashionable society with a beard and
moustaches. In his generation, of course, to be clean-shaven meant a
considerable personal effort: the depilatories then known were either
harmful to the health or painful in their application, and it was only
by scraping with a sharp razor every morning that the unwelcome growth
could be removed. But indeed, I have lived through extraordinary changes
in the matter of toilet elaborateness. Towards the end of the thirties,
owing, I believe, to the great number of Anglo-Indians who came back
after Home Rule was granted, the bath became a perfect obsession, and
hardly any men thought they could get on without washing all over with
water and soap twice a day. It may be imagined how slow and cumbrous
this process was! And yet all this time we never used anything but a
vacuum cleaner for our carpets and curtains—as if carpets and curtains
were more entitled to the benefits of civilization than Man!
We had also (as what fashionable Society has not?) our dare-devils; the
people who were always taking on eccentric bets and issuing fantastic
challenges. I suppose physical courage among men tends always to
decline; or is it that the objects over which we are called upon to
exercise physical courage differ from one generation to another? I
suppose, if you come to think of it, helico-driving needs nerve; and yet
we would shrink from some of the tests to which our fathers put
themselves. I have seen, as late as the forties, a man jump a
five-barred gate on horseback.[7] One of the most reckless men in London
was John Ducie, who accompanied a friend’s helico from London to Paris
hanging on by his hands, and on another occasion drove his old
motor-bicycle through a hundred yards belt of some new gas that was
being tried at Aldershot, holding his breath all the way. He also
challenged a friend to see how many volts of electricity each could
stand, and I forget what fantastic record he achieved. The curious thing
about him was that he did not in the least care how high or how low the
stakes were: one heard that his London-to-Paris flight was only for a
bet of five pounds. Dame Louise Merewether was another of these reckless
challengers: it was she who shot the tide-trap water-race at Greenwich
in a canoe, and, as Archie Lock said, all but got turned into electric
power.
And then there were the sheer follies that were devised from time to
time by adventurous hostesses; a sad witness to the jaded palate that
demanded them. There was Angela Nuneaton’s midnight picnic in Hyde Park:
all the guests had to climb over the railings, and there were a good
many accidents: Archie Lock looked round him and said that dresses were
being torn very low this season. It was only the bursting of a champagne
cork that attracted the attention of the police; and even so very few of
us were caught. Then there was a rather macabre breakfast party,
organized by Trevor Hodgkins, who was something or other at the Zoo; we
had it in the hyena run on the Mappin terraces, to the intense interest
of the regular inhabitants. I didn’t care for it much; laughter at
breakfast always seems to me out of place. I think the jolliest parties
we had were the more ordinary picnics on Hampstead Heath: my mother
always imagined that these must be desperately vulgar, because in her
younger days Hampstead Heath used to be the playground of the democracy!
It was Sybil Linklater, I think, who started the idea of revolving
ball-rooms, which caught on so about this time; I never could see much
fun in it myself. There used to be a story of Sir A. F. (I will not give
his full name), who was all too much addicted to the liquid pleasures of
the table: it was said that he set out one night after dinner for
Sybil’s, and by mistake got into the next house, where there was also a
dance on; he proceeded to dance there the whole evening without
discovering that the floor was not revolving!
But I suppose if there is one thing more foolish than the deliberate
follies of Society, it is the way people take up strange hobbies of the
intellectual kind—movements, crazes, philosophies. Not that so much
intellect is wasted on these as used to be wasted on cards when they
used to play games of skill: I remember, for example, the Petheringtons,
who were very old-fashioned, used still to play “bridge”: and by that
time they could calculate so exactly what was bound to happen in each
game that they always threw down their hands after the second round. But
it is the clever people, and the clever women especially, in Society who
seem to become the prey of all the most outrageous impostors. There were
still Spiritualists in those days, and if all they said was true they
had got far beyond the stage of merely evoking the spirits of the dead:
they held commerce, in a quite matter-of-fact way, with the souls of
people yet unborn, who appeared to have an exact knowledge of what was
going to happen to them when they came to earth. I attended a séance
once at which we had a most fascinating interview with a future Emperor
of Transylvania, who proved at the end of the evening to be under the
impression that it was somewhere in China. The Spiritualists also
discovered a special kind of control in the fifth degree (at that time
you always had a series of seven “controls” between you and the person
you were speaking to), which they called _pani’s_; these were said to
read the future like a book. But when they got the Derby winner wrong
three years running, the last time with a horse which was not even
entered, their public credit was somewhat blown upon. People used to be
very superstitious, too, in those days: I remember, for example, that
Louise Merewether would never take her helico out if she had seen a lame
man that morning; and a friend of hers, whose name I forget, told me
that she never went to church, but she always kissed her hand if she met
a clergyman, because it brought her good luck at oogle.
But, without reckoning actual superstitions, what impostors we used to
encourage! You would get a card to tell you that Sapphire Countess of
Leek would give an At Home to meet Dr. Breder—Dr. Breder was a little
German-American who believed that you could live for ever if you ate a
raw tomato before each meal. Or you would be invited to hear a lecture
in some fashionable boudoir from Mrs. Spink, the Eugenist, who wanted to
introduce a system of scientific totemism into England to regulate
marriages: I never could understand myself how the principle worked. Or
you would call at a friend’s, and find that you had come in in the
middle of a long dissertation by a coal-black man in a frock-coat who
was explaining the essential superiority of Kaffir to Christian ethics.
I was not fond of such movements myself. But, having told so many
stories against other people, I must give some account of a very amusing
_faux pas_ I myself made, which caused many of my friends to cut me dead
for a long time and almost made it necessary for me to retire from
London Society altogether.
I was having tea with Angela Nuneaton one afternoon when there was a
whistle at the tube, and when she had listened to it she asked if I
minded a very curious little man coming in, called Holbeach Griggs, who
had invented a system by which you could read people’s thoughts as soon
as you looked at them. I said, foolishly, that it sounded rather a rag,
so we unslipped the door-catch, and a moment or two later the dictaphone
announced Mr. Holbeach Griggs. He was a weedy-looking little man, with
nothing mysterious or “Have-you-seen-this-man?” about him. I was
introduced, and said I supposed it was a sort of lip-reading he did, by
watching the expressions on people’s faces, like Sherlock Holmes in the
Watson story. He said not a bit; his system depended on immediate
thought-transference: and the fun of it was that the more the other
persons tried to conceal their thoughts, the more clearly you could
detect them, “because of the inhibition,” he said. It was foolish of me,
but in those days, when we were still quite new to the idea of carrying
a wireless installation in your umbrella, anything seemed possible in
the way of communication with other people: and besides, if what the man
said was true, it was obviously a good thing to be first in the field
and get ahead of your friends with it. So I not only asked the wretched
little creature to give me lessons, but invited him to come round to
Chiswick for one of my Fridays and show off (I was always at home at
Friday luncheon in those days). He said he would come, and I went away
and forgot all about it.
The worst of it was that Angela Nuneaton had heard me say that I was
going to take lessons, and the little man said two lessons did the
trick. So she went about telling everybody (she always told everybody
everything) that I had taken lessons and everybody must be very careful
what they thought about while I was present. A day or two later I got a
nasty shock when I met Georgina Grosheim at the theatre, having quite
accidentally booked seats next to hers. She just looked round to see who
it was, and then bolted from the theatre, although it was only half-way
through the first reel. Of course I couldn’t understand it at all at
first; and when I dropped in to supper afterwards at Lady Humbledon’s,
neither of the men next to me spoke a word to me, and the girl on the
other side of the table looked away and blushed whenever she met my
eyes. She came up to me afterwards, and said, “Oh, Lady Porstock, you
must really excuse me for thinking such dreadful things at dinner, but I
couldn’t help it, I really couldn’t!” Then of course I saw what was
happening, and heard that she had heard from Angela; so I assured her
that I’d no notion what she was thinking about during supper. To which
she replied, “Oh, Lady Porstock, it’s so sweet of you to say that,” and
went out of the room—I could see at once that she didn’t believe me.
I don’t think it would have been so bad, only Archie Lock, who always
had a terribly misplaced sense of humour (he paid for it, poor fellow,
when his father disinherited him), saw his chance of scoring off us all,
and proceeded to make it known that he had been to Griggs (whom he’d
never met in his life), and had taken lessons; he added that Griggs had
told him he had a strong natural gift for mind-reading. Then he used to
go about, like a silly ass, starting with surprise when he passed some
casual stranger in the street, and saying “How awful!” He met Georgina
Grosheim before she had heard about this, and he greeted her with “Oh,
Georgina, don’t think that!” upon which (he used to declare) she made a
dash for the very fastest part of the moving platform and was whirled
away down Bond Street. I met him at a dinner-party, or rather I sat
about four places off him, and I noticed the fool caught my eye several
times and smiled at me, but never realized what he was up to until he
came to me afterwards and said, “Thanks so much, Opal, that was a
ripping conversation we had at dinner, wasn’t it?” At which almost
everybody present looked daggers at us, and the man who had been sitting
next to me turned scarlet.
It was terribly awkward for me. I never saw the horrible little man
again, and Angela didn’t know his address; nor did anyone. The more I
swore I had never taken lessons, the more people thought I was trying to
spare their feelings, and (probably) that I was saying the most dreadful
things about them behind their backs. I remonstrated with Archie, but he
was in one of his most idiotic moods, and wouldn’t talk to me at
all—just made faces at me, as if I was understanding exactly what he
meant. Then there began to be trouble, because somebody, Heaven knows
who, repeated a piece of scandal about a woman I knew, which we all
thought quite baseless, and she came to hear of it: upon which she
marched straight off to me and said it was a monstrous breach of trust
for me to have repeated what I saw her thinking about the other day,
because she was thinking it strictly in confidence. Several things
happened like that, which reduced me to despair, and besides, I began to
get such a very bad opinion of my neighbours. Archie Lock swore that he
had looked hard at a man in his club one day, and the man immediately
left for South America.
If only people would have taken it the other way, and tested me, they
could have seen at once that I had no unusual powers; but they were all
too frightened, especially because Angela had repeated the idea that it
was the thoughts you tried hardest to hide which became most obvious to
the mind-reader. Then people began coming to me very quietly and asking
me either to tell them Mr. Griggs’s address or to give them lessons
myself. And when I explained that I couldn’t do either, they took it
very badly: and one friend of mine, who was always very jealous about
her husband, cut me dead ever after she failed to get the “secret” out
of me. Of course my real friends believed in me, but it is surprising
how few one’s real friends prove to be on such occasions! Porstock was
away in America, and I was too proud to ask him to come back. What
amazed me was the credulity of the most intelligent people about it. I
was actually asked to a very important Foreign Office dinner, where I
was put next to the American ambassador; and I was asked afterwards,
very confidentially, what he had been thinking about!
Archie Lock got tired of the situation, and suddenly advertised that
_he_ would give lessons. He got as many as two hundred names straight
away. He meant, I gather, to tell them all that they were fools and that
the whole thing was a hoax. And then suddenly he had a bad helico-crash,
and was in hospital for six weeks, during which I had to bear the brunt
of it alone. Both my servants left me, and I found it impossible to get
new ones, until, very good-naturedly, some nuns offered to come in and
“do” for me. I cannot explain what a relief it was when at last news
came from America that Holbeach Griggs had been arrested for obtaining
money under false pretences. He denied the charge, but they turned the
“inquisition-machine” on to him, and it registered him guilty. I think
he may well have been the only person that machine did examine
accurately, for it was always a fraud to my mind: anyhow, if anybody
ever deserved such a condemnation, he did! Then he confessed, and I am
glad to say that Society pardoned me. But even so, there were a dozen or
so of my acquaintance who had given themselves away to me so badly that
they would never meet me again.
Well, I hope we learn from our follies. Certainly, if we do, London in
those days was an admirable school. It must not be supposed that,
because I have filled up a space of eight years in my life with such a
recital as the foregoing, I was spending all my time in vanities. For
the most part of my time I was at Greylands, learning to love and
respect my husband more every day, and busying myself about the training
of my two boys. But it was, so far as real work or real achievement
goes, a sort of doldrums in my busy life; and I will leave it to a fresh
chapter to explain how in 1953 my life became once more a life of
activity, and of more important activity than hitherto, because my
unassuming personality had to come before the public eye.