Archives: Persephone Forum

 

 

The title is Julian Grenfell, His life and the times of his death, 1888-1915, but Nicholas Mosley, in his preface to the Persephone edition, readily admits that his book is as much, if not more, about his mother than it is about Julian. ‘We did have fun didn’t we?’, perhaps the saddest words in Nicholas Mosely’s moving and complex biography of Julian Grenfell, come from his mother’s obituary.  Ettie Grenfell, Lady Desborough, had lived her whole life by, what Cynthia Asquith, the daughter of her great friend, Mary Elcho, dubbed her ‘stubborn gospel of joy’. Those close to her had been required to live by it too, or, if they could not live by it, to pay full lip service to it.

Julian’s personal tragedy was not so much his early death, one, after all, among millions, but his life, and that was, for the most part, determined by his mother. When her son rebelled, she chose to ‘back her ideals’. Mosley argues that this was not inevitable, but the fact is that her life depended on those ideals. That was her tragedy. It was those ideals, social attitudes of her times, honed in her own exceptional way, that enabled her to pass through life without looking back into the darkness behind, or down into the abyss.

 

 

In matters of grief Ettie’s lessons started early. When she was only a year old she lost her mother, at two her father and at eight her brother. At thirteen she lost the grandmother she loved best. Recording these losses seventy years later, she wrote of ‘the wretched embarrassment of a child in grief; the shame of tears’.  Life was terrifyingly unpredictable but she had learned that while it might not be possible to control events – although in that regard she would do her damndest – , it should be possible to control the show of emotion, and the events themselves could always be rewritten, ‘everything, regardless of appearances, must be for the best, because to suppose otherwise would be unbearable’.

Ettie may have been self taught in cheerfulness, but the doctrine was one which she made sure was instilled into her own children at a young age. Julian was 2 ½ when his Nanny wrote to his parents, in India for several months, ‘Julian is really a changed child, he never cries about anything’. Later his letters from his preparatory school would be ‘consistent in their assurances of happiness’. In his first letters from Eton he writes ‘I am very well’, ‘I like it awfully’.

‘It would have been difficult to write anything different’, notes Mosley, (from the heart, one senses), ‘and to be approved’. His letters to his mother from Eton record marks gained, runs scored, goals won.

As he nears the end of his schooldays, Julian has become so adept at cheerfulness that he is teaching it. Writing to Ettie on the death of their old Nanny, he urges ‘surely the great maxim is to take everything and especially death, in the most natural and cheerful way that we possibly can, without letting ourselves be absorbed for one instant in the little petty things or forgetting the great mysterious background that there is to everything.’ Even on his own death-bed, he was able to appear cheerful, so much so that the doctors did not at first realise how ill he was. His mother in her account of his last days affirms ‘The thought that he was dying seemed to go and come but he always seemed radiantly happy…’ .  Ettie’s words bizarrely echo Julian’s own, in a letter to his sister six years earlier, about the death of their mother’s young lover, ‘she is happy about it all, radiantly happy’.

 

 

That Julian should write to his sister about their mother’s grief at the death of Archie Gordon, is no less surprising than the fact, unseemly to modern readers,  that both his sister, the fifteen year old Monica, and his brother Billy should have written her letters of condolence.  Julian also wrote, apologising for not being able to help her. The reason he couldn’t even begin to help, was that he was in the middle of what was clearly a nervous breakdown. ‘I feel as if I had been smashed up into little bits and put together again very badly with half the bits missing’, was how he described it to Marjorie Manners, with whom he was in love at the time. He had risked writing to his mother about his mental state, ‘I’ve tried your system of playing up, but miserably badly’. For Ettie, it was another problem to be swept under the carpet. When Archie Gordon’s successor, Patrick Shaw-Stewart, Julian’s friend and Oxford contemporary, wrote asking after him, Ettie replied ‘Juju isn’t a bit better, but we won’t go into that.’

And yet by the standards of the times, Ettie Grenfell was not a bad mother, any more than she was a bad wife. Married in 1887 at the age of 19 to Willy Grenfell, twelve years her senior, MP, outstanding sportsman and committee member, she had produced the required ‘heir and a spare’ by 1890. For a young woman, rich and beautiful, marriage in the 1890s meant freedom, not constraint. She was known as a model wife, a reputation that she guarded fiercely, he as a model Englishman, but ‘Willy was a conventional man, and lovers were conventionally acceptable if not too much about them was known’. In 1891 it was fashionable for a young married woman to have lovers and Ettie followed the fashion. The ‘rules of engagement’ were pretty clearly demarcated – ‘romance and passion, if they were to co-exist with ideas of fidelity and duty, had to remain largely in the mind’ – and Ettie’s rules were, predictably, exacting. There was a pattern to her ‘affairs’ :  ecstasy, dependence, loss, anguish, repentance, reassurance, ecstasy. It was cyclical and predictable.

 

 

The circle in which these fantasies were played out was a small and exclusive one whose members came from a few, extended and interlinked aristocratic families.  Charteris, Wyndham, Asquith, Grenfell, Horner, Tennant – husbands, wives, lovers, friends were chosen and exchanged largely within a group of like-minded men and women, who came to be known as the Souls, a name coined for them by Lord Charles Beresford in 1888, because ‘you all sit and talk about each other’s souls’. The name is misleading in suggesting both personal intimacy and lofty intellectualism. The women may have enjoyed intimate friendships, but the men were happier on a horse, or with a gun in their hands. Together their delight was in games, word games, charades, guessing games, games in which wit was valued as highly as erudition. Dinners, balls, weekends, hunting, shooting, and for the men politics, for they had their serious sides, made for a hectic round which left no time for boredom, nor for close inspection of the vacuity of their lives.

 

 

Children found what space they could in the dizzy social and sporting whirl of their parents. Often away for weeks, or months at a time, Ettie, sometimes with Willy, would descend, from time to time, like a goddess, on the nursery. For a few precious weeks she would be the perfect mother, spending more time with her children than was usual among her contemporaries. Together they climbed trees, played hide and seek, clambered over rocks. In the summer she would take them away, enjoying playing at the simple life with them. In her own way, and perhaps as far as she was able, she minded about them. When it was time for Julian to go away to school, she took him to look at three schools before deciding on Summerfields. She wanted him to be happy. She wanted it so much that she was blind, deliberately blind, to his unhappiness even at this young age. With heartless pride she described his first journey to school, ‘His fighting spirit leapt to the adventure, and he did not shed one tear, but he was sick several times on the journey from Taplow to Oxford.’

The messages were confusing. Love was given, then inexplicably and abruptly withdrawn. The same cycle of adoration followed by guilt, humiliation and ecstasy, that we saw in Ettie’s relationship with her lovers, who by the time Julian reached his last years at Eton were closer in age to him than they were to her, was repeated with her son. It is not surprising to find Julian writing ‘I can’t understand love’, ‘…this faculty of affectionateness has been left altogether out of my composition. I really believe this; things people say and do, and things in books, often seem incomprehensible to me’.

Pleasing his mother became even more difficult after Eton, when the weekly offerings of good marks, and runs scored inevitably ceased. ‘You implore me not to live the solitary life, and die of mortification directly I like anybody’, ‘You implore me to work, and cry if I don’t dance nightly’. Finally, and with great courage, he rebelled. In 1909, while still at Oxford, Julian wrote a short book of essays, which were nothing less than an attack on everything that his mother lived by and for.  In it he exposed the contradictory ideals with which he had been brought up, and which he was convinced would lead to a collective schizophrenia. He believed that society was beginning to search for a ‘competitive self-sacrifice just to prove itself not ludicrous’. But Ettie hated the book, and it marked the start of a long period of (intermittent – for nothing in Ettie’s life was ever consistent) conflict between them.

 

 

Ettie’s reserve in personal matters mean that we know little of her state of mind during this time, but one might wonder if she wasn’t going through an uncomfortable period of her own. She had reached her mid-forties, youth was behind her, her husband was loyal and trustworthy but hardly a fellow soul (small ‘s’). The heavy jawed man we see in the photograph with his family, whose idea of a suitable exhibit for the 1910 International Exhibition in Vienna was a room hung with animals’ heads, does not give the appearance of an enjoyable drawing room companion.

Four years later Europe would be at war and everything could fall into place, just as Julian had predicted.  The upper classes knew what they had to do.  The men had been steeped in classical literature throughout their years at school, and university. They had been brought up believing that war was a way by which a man could ‘prove’ himself. War offered the chance of achieving glory, alive or dead.  The women could prove themselves like the women of Sparta by giving up their sons ‘with anguish unrevealed/By eyes o’erbright and lips to laughter lent’, in the words of Arthur Jenkins.  Ettie could write to her daughter Monica when Julian left for France of ‘the anguish of this, and yet the uplift’.

Julian had joined the army after Oxford, partly to escape his mother’s wrath and certainly to get away from England. He had no illusions about war, but seems genuinely to have loved it. After India and South Africa, France was the real thing. ‘I’ve never been so fit or nearly so happy in my life before. I adore the fighting … I adore war’, he wrote to his mother.

Julian died from a head wound on 27^th May 1915, with his parents and Monica at his side. His brother Billy had arrived in France a week before. ‘I’m glad there was no gap’, said Julian. Billy would be killed on 30^th July. The Souls had met less and less after 1900, but they would come together, not so much to grieve but to delight in their losses. In 1918 Ettie wrote to Mary Wemyss (Charteris) who had lost two sons, ‘As these agonising days go on, one can feel almost glad that Ego and Ivo and Julian and Billy are safe in the dream of peace.’

In 1926 Ettie offered up her third and last son, not for her country this time, but to a motor accident. ‘We did have fun didn’t we?’ no wonder that plaintive question mark hangs there.

 

 

 

 Questions

Is it fair, or even possible, to judge them from our own viewpoint, informed by twentieth century psychoanalytical theories and notions of child rearing? Could Ettie have been a better mother?

If there was a collective death-wish driving Europe towards war, can it be explained? Is it conceivable that it could happen again?

Why is it so hard to accept Julian’s enthusiasm for war? Do we think less of him?

 

 A Footnote

Julian Grenfell was born on 30th March 1888 at 4 St James’s Square, near Picadilly. The house belonged to his great aunt, Katie Cowper, who shared in Ettie’s upbringing after the death of her parents.

From 1912 to 1942 the house was owned and occupied by the second Viscount Astor. Nancy Astor was the first woman to sit as a Member of Parliament in 1919. In 1942 it was requisitioned by the government and was used as the London headquarters of the Free French Forces. In September 1947 it became the home of the Arts Council of Great Britain. Subsequently, the building was used as a Court House for several years, first as a division of the High Court, then as a Criminal Court, then as the Employment Appeals Tribunal. Finally in 1996, the house was purchased and became the property and new home of the Naval & Military Club otherwise known as the ‘In and Out’.

To find out more go to http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=40548

 

 

 

In Vere Hodgson’s own words, Few Eggs and No Oranges is ‘the diary of an ordinary commonplace Londoner during the war years’.  As a diary it is honest but not revealingly introspective. It is, as the title page states, about unimportant people. And yet it draws the reader in, slowly at first, then gradually increasing its grip. The characterisation is sketchy, we learn little of the inner life of the diarist, the action does not vary much from day to day and we know what the end will be. What is it about The Diaries that holds our attention, and touches our emotions?

Vere Hodgson provides the answer in her introduction to the first published edition: ‘it records fairly accurately the hopes and fears and daily drudgery of an ordinary person during many weary springs, summers, autumns and winters’.   She edited the diaries herself for publication in 1976, savagely cutting the original, which had been started to keep her cousin in Northern Rhodesia informed about the war, and later distributed to other family and friends.  Impossible to know what was cut, but it seems safe to assume that she resisted the temptation to flesh out the people, that she did not take advantage of the benefit of hindsight to correct the various inaccurate predictions concerning the course of the war, and that she understood the power of repetition in building up a picture of the ‘daily drudgery’.

For the first hundred pages the published diary hardly misses a day. These entries cover the first months of the Blitz, during which London was bombed for seventy-five consecutive nights. It is true that they do not vary greatly from one day to the next. Hard to get into perhaps, but it is the record of the unchanging nightly routine that brings home the relentlessness of the bombing. Vere Hodgson writes about the casualties, and the destruction, that we know about from historians, but she tells us something else: what is was like to be woken by the air raid siren night after night, time after time, to drag oneself, and a mattress down the stairs, to sleep fitfully tight up against people who were at best acquaintances, then drag the mattress back upstairs at the ‘all clear’, only to repeat the process again an hour or so later. She tells what is was like to be tired all the time, to feel sick from exhaustion and ‘speechless with fatigue’ to make one’s way to work, to go on doing this day after day.

Almost imperceptibly the mood changes: by August the siren which in June had sounded so alarming, has been nicknamed Wailing Winny. By October she can write of a night which is ‘very gunny’, another which is ‘very blitzy’.

 

 

Vere, like others, is adapting to the war.  In January 1941 a plane flies low as she lunches in a café, ‘I never thought I should get used to having my lunch on a battlefield’.  By May a routine is well established at the Sanctuary: in case of an air raid, get everyone downstairs, turn off the gas and fill the bath (to put out stray fires). ‘It is amazing … how well our nerves keep on the whole. If we are bombed then they go a bit; but if we survive the night, we come up bright and smiling the next morning, very keen to exchange notes on the adventures of the night’. If the aim of the Blitz had been to break the spirit of the British people, it was not going to be allowed to succeed.

Vere was 39 at the start of the war, unmarried, a graduate of Birmingham university, an ex-teacher, working for The Greater World Association,  a welfare charity in Notting Hill Gate, living first in a bedsitter and then a flat close to her work. If she has a private life, we learn nothing of it. From time to time she entertains the dashing Barishnikov, who spends his points at Fortnum and Mason, or the German exile Dr Rémy, whose family is in Frankfurt, or Retsi, the Swiss accountant, for tea, and on one occasion she is given two tickets for the Albert Hall. The diary does not reveal to whom she gave the second ticket.

We know that she reads widely, listens regularly to the News, French and English and to the Brains Trust, takes the Daily Telegraph during the week and the Observer on Sunday, and is a keen cinema goer (brave given the number of bombs that fell on cinemas). Her admiration for Churchill knows no bounds, De Gaulle runs a close second. For the rest of the French nation she has little time. She admires the Russians. Unexpectedly for one so spirited, she complains frequently about her health, but is fit enough to jump from a 10ft wall during fire fighting practice, and tough enough to volunteer to be the ‘body’ dragged down the stairs during the same practice.  She is an energetic walker, taking regular Sunday walks, sometimes in pouring rain, through the West End and the City to look at bomb damage. Local damage is inspected on the instant: ‘I was told that bombs had fallen again in St Charles’ Square, so I took a bus there’, ‘… heard there had been a landmine last night in St Helen’s Gardens. Immediately took a bus.’

 

 

She is quite shameless about what might seem to us a rather ghoulish curiosity, so shameless that I think we can assume that bombsite viewing was not a minority interest. The picture of Miss Moyes  being pushed in a wobbly wheel chair on ‘a tour of the bombs she had not seen’ is, almost, funny, the brief description so vivid: the sides of the chair coming unscrewed with the vibration, Miss M having to dismount every time they crossed the road (in spite of everything, ‘she enjoyed the outing’).  When Vere hears that The Rowley Galleries in Church Street have been burnt out, she runs to see it, ‘remains of beautiful furniture and pictures all in the street’.  The bizarre aftermath of bombing never loses its fascination for her.  As late as July 1944 she records ‘A spot of excitement. No sooner had I reached my little flat than a Doodle came close in our direction. Roar grew louder … We took breath – heard the engine stop – and then the explosion.’ Hearing that the bomb had fallen in nearby Earl’s Court Road, devastating a crowded restaurant, barely pausing for lunch, she’s off to survey the damage. There is an urgency in her telling, such that we can almost hear her voice, giving us ‘the latest’.

Vere Hodgson notes down not what is, or might be, of historical importance, although those events are included, but what excites her, a bombsite, an extra ration of cheese, a trip to the Zoo with a party of children, the discovery of a hoard of Renaissance treasures from the Uffizi hidden behind mattresses in a villa outside Florence, de Gaulle’s extraordinary courage under fire as he walked the length of the nave of Notre Dame while German snipers took aim from the galleries.

As the diaries unfold her darting style become familiar and strangely endearing. The big picture and the small sit side by side. In the bitter winter of 1942 she buys a spare hot water bottle, ‘They say there will be no more for years; so I am keeping one in reserve until we get Malaya back…’.  The entry for 8^th September 1942 records the loss of 80,000 men in the desert and in the next line, ‘Plenty of blackberries – so we wallow in fruit’. In March 1943, from buying curtain material in Liberty’s, she moves seamlessly to the horribly wounded from Dunkirk, and in the written equivalent of the same breath, to the scarcity of biscuits, and her delight at finding soused herrings at 8d each – ‘no fish for months’.

In September 1940 she had written to Lucy, ‘food is the least of our worries’. Not for long. By November she is thankful for two eggs, the following February there are ‘No oranges at all, at all’, and cheese is unobtainable. In May she admits to disregarding the news, which ‘shows no sign of improvement, concentrating instead ‘on procuring food to eat.’ Food and the price of food becomes a leitmotif of the diaries, despondency about shortages, surprise and delight at unexpected availability. Prunes, spurned before the war, acquire rarity value and are eaten with pleasure. Macaroni is unavailable but figs make a surprise appearance. Stays in the countryside provide an opportunity to gorge on plums and cherries and fresh vegetables. The Hodgson family manage a goose for Christmas lunch in 1940, and again in 1941, but by 1942 ‘no turkey, no fowl, no rabbit, only the usual joint’ – Auntie Nell in London had acquired a hare, which ‘required a special license’.

 

 

Christmas in Birmingham and the Sanctuary Christmas Fair are two fixed points in these years. The flowering of the cherry in the street, the laburnum and the lime in the park mark the turning of the seasons and lift the spirits. But little could be taken for granted, and certainly not waking up alive, unhurt and in one’s own bed.  The cityscape changed almost from day to day during the bombing, good news was followed by bad, invasions do not go according to plan, but nor do train journeys. The Diaries remind us that adversity can take many forms.  The lack of a colander is preoccupying, finding a small double saucepan or a rolling pin at a reasonable price makes for a good day. An onion from the greengrocer, when all had been ‘booked’, is ‘a victory indeed’. The gift of sheets is worth more than rubies, when on the old ones even the patches had been patched, and new ones are unobtainable. Feast and famine were as unpredictable as the course of the war. In the final months, during the ‘little blitz’, there were fewer shortages, more food, more coal, more books in the library:  death and departures had made a dent in London’s population, there was more to go round.

By September 1944 the end is in sight.  The sirens have fallen silent. Soon there will no more bombs, the black-out will end, it will be possible to move around at night without a torch.  The nights on the stairs have come to an end. A hint of regret creeps in.  ‘We have all got friendly in my Flat residence due to the Fly Bombs. The Old Dears have lost their pernickety ways, and as we sat on the stairs, not knowing whether the bomb was going to drop on us, we became very much a band of brothers.’  Mollie Panter-Downes in Good Evening Mrs Craven put almost the same words into the lonely spinster’s mouth, ‘Those nights, terrible as they had been, certainly had had their compensations. It seemed to Miss Birch, looking back, that the inhabitants of Floor K had been one jolly happy family…’. There will be eggs and oranges in the shops once again, but something will have been lost.

Questions

Most of those who thought Few Eggs ‘hard to get into’ have returned to it and found it a compelling read. What is it that make one want to keep turning the pages?

“Wartime Spirit”- what does it mean?

There are so many questions that one would like to have asked of Vere Hodgson of wartime life. Is it possible to imagine how we might have behaved?