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Setting her novel in the relative calm of a fashionable Italian lakeside resort in the early 1900s, an epoch she describes as ‘particularly loaded with femininity’, Gladys Huntington leads us to expect a tale of no more than mildly unhappy love affairs between never less than pretty women in elegant frocks and at least averagely good-looking and well-mannered men.

 

But Madame Solario  is not an Edwardian novel, it is a hard-edged mid-twentieth century novel, boldly addressing a taboo area of female sexuality. We shouldn’t be surprised that Gladys Huntington, or her publishers, or both, opted for anonymity. Without suggesting that any of them might have been the “Anon” in the original publication, critics have compared her writing to Henry James, Edith Wharton, Elizabeth Bowen, Ivy Compton Burnett, while French critics have gone further, putting their money on Sybille Bedford, Françoise Sagan, and Winston Churchill as possible authors (the argument for Churchill being based on the mood of some watercolours of the South of France, and a scene in which the eponymous heroine draws linked Cs in the sand).

‘The evening steamer was just coming in, and everyone was out in front to see what new arrivals there might be. It was one of the events of the day, a social event, a “meeting’. Lake Como 1906. Though the head of the lake connected to all the capitals of Europe, Cadenabbia  on the western shore could be reached only by water, a zig-zagging journey of ‘incredible slowness. Guests of the nearby Hotel Bellevue daily scrutinized the landing stage for fresh faces, new boating companions, fellow picnickers, dancing partners, and old friends. Lords, Ladies, Counts, Marchesas, and the occasional Princess mingled with the occasional Mr, Mrs, Miss or Colonel. A limited group of people gathered for a limited time – September was ‘the month’ earmarked in the social calendar – in a space limited by the length of one’s stride, oarsmanship,  or a steamer timetable.

Into this almost classical setting, into this multi-national circle – English, Hungarian, Italian, American – Gladys Huntington places a young Englishman, an Oxford graduate, with little experience of the world, a Russian cavalry officer – a womanising gambler (possibly based on the father of Huntington’s adopted children) – and an outstanding beauty of uncertain nationality, with a scandalous past, and a limited moral compass, soon joined by an older brother, her near equal in looks, but far exceeding her in depravity. The beau monde unexpectedly meets a sinister, disruptive force.

His travelling companion having been taken ill in Switzerland, and quarantined for a month, Bernard Middleton, the young innocent, finds himself unexpectedly alone in Cadenabbia. Shy, but opinionated and quick to leap to conclusions, Bernard’s is the voice of the first and third parts of the novel. We see only what he sees, and he is a man of little imagination, and limited emotional intelligence.  Huntington evokes his turn of phrase brilliantly and with humour, as he takes his first steps among his fellow guests at Hotel Bellevue, introduced to him, and to us, by the avuncular Colonel Ross, who ‘was as cheerful as if he were to be personally congratulated on all the good points of the place and its society.’

 

 

We could be reading Bernard’s diary entries, or letters home, as he describes a middle aged woman ‘who had a stony face and talked in accurate French to several people who sat with her in a corner of the hall. She might be important but she was not French.’ Or others who ‘spoke English to each other, but were certainly not English.’ He takes against the Russian roué, Kovanski, on sight, ‘his prominent eyes had a disagreeable stare, and he knew at once that he did not like the man or the stare.’ He knows very little of young women, particularly young foreign women, but confidently notes of Hungarian Ilona, ‘one could see at once that she was unhappy’. His manner is inept, but Bernard is ‘a very pleasant-looking young man, of a good height [always important], with reddish hair’ and has a very nice smile. The girls, ‘even the Americans’ seem to like him.  ‘It had been taken for granted that, being English, he was what they called “timid”.’ Middleton, as they, being modern young women, call him, is quickly swept up into a whirl of boat trips, and excursions. Had it not been for Madame Solario his month by the lake might have been a gentle rite of passage, a safe awakening of first young love.

Hoping to find Ilona, Bernard eavesdrops on a conversation between her mother and the Colonel: ‘“Madame Solario is coming back tomorrow”. “Ah, vraiment?” Countess Zapponyi replied a little sharply.’ Clearly both the Colonel and the Countess are acquainted with Madame Solario, the Countess evidently having some reservations; but the name overheard from behind a column, as yet, means nothing to Bernard.

Hints and whispers and snippets of gossip slowly coalesce like pieces of a blurred jigsaw, several missing, or blank. The picture we have of Madame Solario is as gossamer thin and shifting as her tulle wraps, or her underlayered lace dresses. We don’t learn where she is coming backfrom, nor what she has been doing: asked if she has had ‘an amusing time’, she replies simply “Yes, thank you.” Is she English, American, South American, Swedish perhaps? Once again Bernard is clear: ‘One could tell at once that she was English-speaking by birth, but yet there was at times a faintly un-English flavour to her speech that pointed to the probability that she had lived most of her life abroad.’ As for her age? ‘She was not a girl, not young in his sense, though he knew she could not be more than twenty-seven or eight …’ asserts Bernard. We can’t be sure .

 

The only certainty is her startling beauty: fair, ‘a little above medium height’; ‘there was a softness in everything she did, and even the prosaic act of eating was invested with grace.’ A rare authorial intervention adds a period detail that would have escaped young Middleton,

‘In those days the great, equalising power of cosmetics and beautifying inventions had not yet been let loose, and Madame S’s complexion and colouring, and the arc of her eyebrows, and the wave of her hair (that morning under a hat made up entirely of crisp, pleated frills of lilac muslin) were not being counterfeited by everyone who wished; they were rare, like noble birth. The high rank of her beauty had to be met with something of awe.’

The hat of course is another period piece, and Madame Solario has one for every occasion. Seen first in ‘a hat trimmed with velvet pansies in shades of mauve that deepened into purple’, then in ‘a large white hat – what was called a restaurant hat – [a restaurant hat?] – with a transparent brim and a huge pink rose in front’,  for boating ‘a hat of natural straw’, for travelling ‘a small blue hat that had a pair of birds wings for trimming’ and a large hat-box one assumes.

 

 

Her hats are the brightest pieces in the puzzle, in stark contrast to her favoured choice of white for her dresses and blue for her shawls, not by accident surely, the traditional colours of the Virgin Mary. There is nothing about Natalia Solario that is not planned, even the softness that so impresses Bernard.  Boating on the lake, he takes the oars, but Natalia – or is it Ellen, or Nelly, even her name is uncertain – takes up the steering ropes, ‘ “I shall steer”, she said, with a pleased look …”’

The boating trip is not the bonding experience that he had dreamt of. Unhappily, aware of the fact that she does not share his feelings, he realises ‘that she was as good as alone in the rowboat, and that in his youth and shyness she found simply an absence, welcome for the time, of the attentions that pursued her.’ Quite perceptive, but far from the whole story. Madame Solario is using him in ways that he cannot begin to understand. She has whitewashed out the scandal of her past – that her stepfather was in love with her (so delicately phrased), when she was not yet sixteen and her older brother, Eugène, effectively disappeared after attempting to murder him. As the French gossip who eagerly reveals all puts it ‘tout est comme si rien n’était ni ne fut’. Bernard, unsurprisingly, doesn’t believe a word of it.

 

Reading Madame Solario I was reminded of lines from Josephine Hart’s 1991 novel Damage,‘Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.’ Madame Solario has survived. Her brother has survived more: the loss of his father, the shame of his mother’s humiliation by his step-father, her death, his exile, poverty. In what may be the final throw of the dice, he arrives in Cabenaddia, having spent the last of his funds on new clothes, and new luggage, ready, with the connivance of his sister, to get what he can from the comfortably moneyed clientèle of the Bellevue. ‘The social life of the hotel was a forcing-house for situations; the opportunities to see, meet, succeed, fail, and recover never stopped from morning till night.’ Together Eugene and Natalia, brother and sister, make a handsome couple, a dazzling pair, opportunistic chancers without a scruple between them, ready to make use of, or, if necessary destroy, anyone who comes within their orbit: the name Solario says it all. With masterly sleight of hand Gladys Huntington draws her readers into the charmed circle. It is hard to dislike these monstrous characters.

Eugene is the more damaged, the more dangerous, Natalia softly complicit. And Bernard is both victim and unwitting enabler of their eventual flight. Blithely over confident, he has ignored Colonel Ross’s kindly advice to be careful with foreigners, ‘we don’t quite understand them – they don’t play to the same rules you know’, and is baffled by the warning he receives from a wise Milanese doctor to ‘get on to solid ground as soon as you can’.

“…  you may know that geologists speak of faults when they mean weaknesses in the crust of the earth that cause earthquakes and subsidences.”

Having pulled on his gloves he was energetically buttoning them.

“And I will tell you something out of my own experience. There are people like ‘faults’, who are a weakness in the fabric of society; there is disturbance and disaster wherever they are.”

Bernard can think only of mountain climbing and crevasses, not of his adored Madame Solario, and her equivocal brother.His month by the lake has taught him nothing. Madame Solario is no ‘bildungsroman’. He is blind to their machinations, and naïvely, ignorantly, unaware of the nature of their relationship. By way of a footnote, the French translation is more explicit than the original: ‘the stress he was under was so great’ is rendered as ‘la violence du désir’. Huntington frequently wrote diary entries in French. She must have known.

 

Triggered by a need to set the record straight on an old love affair, Tirzah Garwood began the first draft of her autobiography in March 1942.  She was recovering from a mastectomy, an even more radical operation then than it is now, with a longer period of convalescence, which, with the life-affirming optimism that pervades Long Live Great Bardfield, she declares she very much enjoyed: ‘… it has made it possible for me to write this account of my life which otherwise I should never have had time to do.’ The first handwritten draft was completed by the end of May – more than four hundred pages in just over two months. ‘This is gunpowder,’ warned her husband, Eric Ravilious, fearful (with reason) that her ‘indiscretions might lead to trouble’ or horrify their children.

 

 

When she came to type up the manuscript in February 1943, Eric Ravilious was dead. Sent to Iceland in his capacity as War Artist, within a matter of days he was declared missing, then presumed dead, after the plane in which he was a passenger came down in the Arctic Ocean. Self-censoring, perhaps mindful of his warning, she cut many references to her personal life, and to Eric’s affairs, and to hers. Happily for us the original notebooks survived. Her daughter Anne, eighteen months old when her father was killed, and not yet ten when her mother died in March 1951, has seamlessly pieced together the typescript and the notebooks into a vivid (self) portrait of her mother, her father, their marriage, and their circle of friends, and an age, an inter-war period of radical change, questioning and rejection of conventions, social, sexual and artistic.

 

 

Tirzah rattles through her early years – actually she rattles through most of her life –  pausing to expand on events or people who were important at the time, or amusing in retrospect. In a vivid example of childish puzzlement at the behaviour of adults, she recalls a shared governess who encouraged her charges to make wool balls. ‘One of the little boys died  and as I was very quick at making wool balls and loved doing them, I finished his off as well as my own. One day I was dumped on his mother’s doorstep and told to give her the ball; quite unembarrassed, I explained that I had finished Michael’s ball and was very surprised to be so effusively thanked and kissed for something that had after all been a pleasure to me.’  And she sympathises retrospectively with her piano teacher, who started every pupil off with Grieg’s Albumblatt, ‘I suppose the whole business of teaching being painful, it was less painful to hear one piece continually murdered than a large number. Once he kissed one of his pupils and after that we had to have a chaperone in the room during our lessons. In spite of this, he managed to marry one of the girls after she had left and then quite suddenly he died.’ Speaking in her child’s voice, or that of the knowing adult, her style is so immediate, so matter-of-fact, and her wit so succinct and so dry, that we might be reading a collection of letters, or eavesdropping on a conversation, as she recounts the attempt of the headmistress of her smart boarding school to join with another, less prestigious  – ‘she had as much hope of amalgamating West Hill to a school full of girls who talked with Midland accents as she would have if she tried to amalgamate it with the Tiller Girls.’

 

 

Tirzah’s background was traditional upper middle-class, with a dash of eccentricity: nannies, governesses, boarding school balanced by a streak of dottiness in her father. Colonel Garwood was a man of frequent and changing obsessions: at various times an enthusiastic amateur poet, playwright, actor and archaeologist. He shared a (competitive) love of painting with Tirzah’s mother, who was also an accomplished photographer. They put up no resistance when she chose to go the local art school, and when, aged twenty, she decided to move to London, they were easily persuaded, seemingly heedless of the fact that she was quite unprepared for independent living – on arrival at the Ladies’ National Club in Kensington, she had to be taught by a fellow resident how to make tea. Her father’s one anxiety was that she would ‘soon start living with that fella Ramvillas’.

Ravilious was not the son-in-law the Garwoods would have chosen. Her first “love”, a Cambridge educated civil servant, son of a neighbouring military family, was more to their liking. Tirzah offers a wonderful pen-portrait of the prevailing ideal, the young man of her older sister’s dreams: in the 1920s, ‘for a man to pass the test of being attractive was a tricky thing. They must have been to a public school and be able to dress well, a soft hat turned up was the sign of a boob and a bowler hat was seldom tolerated except in London. They must not be too handsome, hair set in waves was very wrong and of course it was better to be athletic than clever. Height was almost essential, if men were small they must be very rich, very amusing or  a double blue.’ Bob Church ticked most boxes.

Eric did not. He was the son of a Methodist preacher with an unpredictable temper and an uncertain income. His mother, having held the family gently together, had hoped that her youngest child might, on leaving Eastbourne Grammar School, ‘go into something steady like the Post Office.’ That he might become an artist wasn’t even thought of – his friend Edward Bawden’s parents having hoped their son would carry on the family ironmongery business, were similarly disappointed. Tirzah met Eric when she was seventeen and he was twenty two. Having rejecting his mother’s plans for him, and studied at the Royal College of Art, by 1926 he was commuting regularly from London to teach at Eastbourne College of Art, where she was a student. With typical frankness Tirzah describes her first impressions: ‘He had a smart double-breasted suit and shy, diffident manners not unlike those of a curate and, with my family’s training behind me, I quickly spotted that he wasn’t quite a gentleman.’ In spite of this, she soon recognised that: ‘Bob stood for my family’s idea of a life and Eric for my freedom and independence’, freedom not just to pursue her own career, but, as it later turned out, to pursue her own love affairs, as Eric pursued his. Recording their marriage in 1930, she writes: ‘I felt quite sure I was in love with Eric by now and we neither of us felt apprehensive at having to make so many solemn promises.’ They did, in their fashion, love each other until death parted them, but both must have had their fingers crossed when it came to the bit about ‘forsaking all others’.

The ‘set’ to which Ravilious introduced her had at its core the ‘year of 1924’ at the RCA, a group which, in addition to Eric himself, included Edward Bawden, Enid Marx, Percy Horton and Peggy Angus, and a growing number of friends and lovers. Andy Friend in his book Ravilious & Co writes that ‘friendship merged or sparked into love, often regardless of marriage ties, with predictable complications, and their ethos was predominantly heterosexual, rural and national.’ This set didn’t live in squares (or love in triangles).

In his introduction to Ravilious & Co, Alan Powers described the mood of the group as being ‘one of levity and hedonism both in life and art, a release from the oppressive weight of growing up during the First World War that was noted as characteristic of a whole generation.’ Tirzah and Eric’s life together was to be book-ended by two wars. The urgency of her writing reflects the times in which they were living, working, and loving.

Extra-marital affairs were far from unusual amongst their friends, and they seem to have been remarkably frank with each other concerning their own, and exceedingly tolerant. When Eric falls in love with Helen Binyon, daughter of the poet Laurence Binyon, Tirzah is phlegmatic,  ‘I knew that under the same circumstances I should in all probability have behaved in the same way and I couldn’t blame Helen for taking him away from me, because Diana [Low] had already done so.’ Contemplating an affair with John Aldridge, she asks Eric’s opinion: not a good idea, he says, but seeing that she has made up her mind.… Further consulted, Eric draws the line at her having a baby with Aldridge: ‘and I saw that it wasn’t really a good idea.’ One would like to know more of that conversation!

 

 

‘I had been so pleased with the discovery that I could still be fond of Helen although she and Eric were in love with one another and that I could love Eric and Bob [she briefly resumed her pre-marital love affair with Bob Church] and John all at once and for different reasons even though they loved other people as well because my loving them was the important thing and not my possessing them. I didn’t believe in that hateful term ‘Free Love’ because obviously you have some sense of responsibility towards those people you love. Oh how I detest blame.’  Philip Larkin was wrong, sexual intercourse did not begin in 1963.

‘… It seems almost impossible that people could cram so much work and entertaining and visiting into one year …’ to which she might have added love-making. Tirzah is writing about 1933, but the same comment might apply to every year. Though they had first a flat in Kensington, then a house by the river in Hammersmith, the young couple seem to have been always on the move, dividing their time between London and Great Bardfield – first in a house shared with the Bawdens, Edward and Charlotte, not easy housemates. Then, in 1934, for £50 a year, half their London rent, they rented their own house nearby. Bank House had gas (they would put in electricity), a bathroom and a lavatory – luxuries, especially the lavatory. Previously they had made do with water pumps and outdoor privies, shared with visitors, who arrived often and in numbers too large for the available beds, requiring eiderdowns to be spread out by Tirzah on the sitting room floor. When Eric embarked on his first affair, poor Tirzah blamed herself, ‘I was no fun and did nothing but housework’. Little wonder.

Staying away offered some respite, new images for Eric, and a chance for Tirzah to do her own work. Peggy Angus apparently didn’t mind her installing a paper marbling bath on the copper in the scullery of her Sussex cottage, because she ‘provided the wallpaper’. Tirzah’s marbled papers are very beautiful. But where did they wash up?

 

 

The period details are both wonderful and puzzling. A second home in Essex meant a three and three-quarter hour coach journey, or train and hired bicycles. A ‘shiny black Morris Eight’ bought for £70 made the journey to Wales easier when Eric wanted to paint mountains, but home comforts there were not. In the early days of their marriage, a ‘char’ came in daily, but missing three fingers, was unable to cook. Eric fried the breakfast bacon and Tirzah did the rest. They played rummy to determine who would wash up, which sounds more fun than loading a dishwasher. More than once Tirzah cheers herself up buying silk to make French knickers. Did our mothers or grandmothers do that?

 

 

There isn’t a page in Long Live Great Barfield which doesn’t surprise, make one smile with amusement or delight at this tender picture of a complicated marriage, perfectly summed up in Tirzah’s thoughts after Eric’s death: ‘…I had never felt unfaithful to him if I loved other people because so long as he knew and approved of them, there was no necessity. The good thing about our marriage was that we had at any rate been truthful towards one another.’