The Great Silence (24 page)

The quality of this silence was strained, brimming over with pain. Tears streamed from the eyes of men and women.

As the two minutes ended there was a reluctance and uneasiness in resuming movement. This ending was not like the moment at the end of an examination in school, when chairs scrape back with audible relief, or of a church service, when the organ bursts into life and the congregation collects its belongings and re-engages with the daily business of living.

The moment that immediately followed the silence seemed to extend itself fractionally - before, as if in slow motion, hats were replaced, throats were cleared and the traffic once again began to move. This curious suspension of sound and movement had shown, as
The Times
commented, ‘a glimpse into the soul of the nation’.

The day after the Silence, the motionless tableau of a shattered country was unfrozen, at least on the surface. Many, including the Prime Minister Lloyd George, hoped that the Great Silence would prove to have been a moment of national catharsis, the result similar to a massive, instantaneously effective blood transfusion. But the following morning, only a day after the country had engaged in its collective act of remembrance,
The Times
carried an unsigned advertisement in the personal columns.

Lady of Gentle birth (clergyman’s widow) insane through overwork, poverty, air raids, loss of husband, brothers killed in War, has two children. Inquiries welcomed. Nomination to suitable home or financial aid wanted to give her reasonable chance of recovery. Will anyone help?

Silence had not proved to be a cure for her.

For others less traumatised, the
Tatler
of that week carried a notice for Clincher Motor Tyres showing a woman draped in furs and a man in evening dress sitting in a beautiful car. ‘When the old moon smiles these nights you can’t help smiling back’, ran the caption, going on to encourage the reader contemplating moonlit expeditions: ‘Moonlight no longer betokens the possible visit of “Gothas” and “Zepps”.’

That evening Lady Diana Cooper was still unable to stand without support as she appeared at the Albert Hall wearing eighteenth-century Russian costume for another Victory Ball. She was not enjoying the ball at all, immobile in her by now hated bath chair and confiding her misery to a very drunk but increasingly sympathetic Lord Beaverbrook in his private box, while her husband of five months had excused himself from the party and vanished. She was sure he was seeking out that annoying Diana Capel, the woman whose husband was rumoured to be having an affair with the clothes designer Coco Chanel, leaving his wife free to spend time with
her
husband. Duff had arrived at the ball wearing a false beard. His wife was annoyed to notice that earlier he had removed it during the course of the dancing and was looking more handsome than ever.

Outside, the snow began to fall across the country from Edinburgh
to Dartmoor, but inside the Albert Hall the partygoers celebrating the first anniversary of the Armistice appeared as gay and light-hearted as ever. Paper streamers decorated the walls, and balloons floated high up into the huge ceiling vault. All thoughts of another formal pageant or procession were abandoned because, as the
Sketch
pointed out, ‘Quite frankly people wanted to dance.’ Reserve was thrown aside. The outfits were mesmerising. Gentlemen in satin knickerbockers, ladies in pom-pom frocks and thigh-skimming dresses whirled around the huge dance floor. A Mrs Ashley was spotted by reporters for the society pages holding a giant powder box fashioned as an umbrella, her skirt an elegant powder puff. Mademoiselle Edmée Dormeuil came as a bunch of large hothouse grapes, ‘a full vine on her charming head’.

The time for national mourning was, Lloyd George continued to hope, now at an end and yet he sensed his optimism to be manufactured. At dinner with Duff Cooper a year earlier he had voiced those fears. He spoke to Duff of the long memories of the British. He spoke of those still alive who remembered the great famine of seventy years earlier, and ‘that one should never rouse those memories because it was a dreadful thing to fight against ghosts’.

In 1919 there were ghosts in every town and village of the country - the ghosts of those who had fought for their country and who had been denied the burial and homecoming that their relations knew was their due. The Silence had aroused old feelings just as receding memories had begun to settle. Some wished for a more permanent silence. Others chose to carry on dancing.

Early Winter 1919

The skies were filling with spectacular and record-breaking machines. Alcock and Brown’s recent crossing of the Atlantic by air in June was still on everyone’s mind when on 12 November a Vickers Vimy aeroplane departed from Hounslow airfield in Middlesex on a journey bound for the other side of the world. The Australian Captain Ross Smith, a pilot with an impressive flying record from the war, and his brother Keith Macpherson Smith planned to make the journey with twenty-one refuelling stops, including landings at Lyons, Rome, Cairo, Damascus, Basra, Bander Abbas, Karachi, Delhi, Rangoon, Bangkok, Singapore, and Bima, a distance of 11,340 miles. The journey felt like a means of escape to the other side of the world, to a continent where memories were not so clamorous. The Australian government offered a £10,000 prize for the successful completion of the journey.

On the same day Handley Page transport announced the production of an aeroplane large enough to carry fifteen people from London to Paris in two hours ten minutes and in considerable comfort. Passengers would be seated in velvet-cushioned armchairs, their feet resting on fitted carpets, their reading matter illuminated by electric light. The world seemed to be shrinking.

A month later a mesmerised audience watched as Sir Ernest Shackleton presented the extraordinary and heroic pictures of his attempt to cross the Antarctic and reach the South Pole. His 350-ton pine, oak and greenheart ship,
Endurance
, had left Plymouth on 8 August 1914 with a crew of twenty-seven men. England had been at war with Germany for four days. As the war continued, thousands of miles away the men of the
Endurance
struggled through the ice stacks, along needle-thin channels, using the ship as a battering ram as the ice floes, sounding like ‘heavy distant surf’, rose up into gargantuan
towers all around the ship. Icebergs measuring thirty-two miles long and a hundred and fifty feet high resembled avenues of hostile skyscrapers in which no human could ever take up residence.

Eventually ice had defeated the expedition. But to the lasting benefit of movie-going audiences, Australian cameraman Frank Hurley had made his way as fast as possible towards the listing, leaking, creaking, paralysed hulk of the ship. He dived into the freezing water of the hold, managing to rescue his films and photographic plates, smashing many but happily not all of them in his urgency to get back to safety.

The resulting film, entitled simply
South
, made the wintry London weather seem benign in contrast to the snow-bound beauty of the scenes shimmering on the screen, the ship’s intricate rigging frosted with icicles. The seventy accompanying sledge dogs, half mad with hunger, existed on seal meat, emperor penguins and bleeding steaks gashed from the barnacle-encrusted flanks of furious bull sea-elephants. The men of the expeditionary force chewed hard on their pipes as they stared into the camera lens. One man provided the company with the ‘vital mental tonic’ of a banjo, while arms were encased to the elbow in vast fur gauntlets. By the time of their eventual return in 1917, the crew had been out of touch with civilisation for nineteen months, protected from little except the knowledge of the grim progress of the war.

Audiences were amazed by man’s resilience as they watched the terrifying black and white pictures of Shackleton’s ship. First its rudder smashed, then the mast crumpled and finally the
Endurance
was lifted high up into the air by the force of the erupting ice below it, before sinking for ever into the freezing water.

Cinema and the taste for daring escapades provided one kind of release of emotion. Music and dance offered another. During the war the front covers of the
Tatler
magazine had mostly been devoted to black and white photographs of upper-class ladies, either newly widowed or in nurse’s uniform. But on 26 November 1919 the cover carried a full-coloured drawing of a smiling soldier in full uniform throwing his sweetheart into the air. As his dancing partner, she is wearing an elegantly and daringly short, floaty skirt and is tossing
back a glass of champagne as the bulbous stomached butler hovers nearby ready to refill her glass. At home gramophones were often contained inside a cocktail cabinet, and as the steel needle was lowered on to the thick wax record, the whole disc gently rose and fell seductively. The nation was in a mood to dance.

An ever-expanding troupe of five or six hundred freelance musicians would gather between noon and two each day in Archer Street just off London’s Shaftesbury Avenue to meet entertainment agents and hope for a booking at a debutante’s ball or for an engagement in one of the big hotels. New songs were being composed at the rate of five hundred a week and the players had to work hard to hold on to their individual repertoire of current melodies.

Grand dances in private house were being revived with gusto. A ball at Londonderry House in Park Lane had been held on 18 November for two and a half thousand guests, including doctors and nurses who had worked in the temporary hospital wards of the huge town house. The powerful hostess, Edith Londonderry, flanked by the Prime Minister and the leader of the Conservative party, stood at her usual place at the top of the celebrated double staircase – so wide that four guests could climb its stairs abreast. Edith wore a voluptuous black dress and her remarkable décolletage showed off to perfection the splendour of the family jewels. Her magnificent appearance more than made up for the shortage of flowers, a reflection of the wartime absence of gardeners.

Lady Cunard, the American wife of the shipowner Sir Bache Cunard and lover of Sir Thomas Beecham, had assumed the patronage of the Ballets Russes after the death of its pre-war promoter, the Marchioness of Ripon. On 4 December Emerald Cunard threw a fund-raising ball because, as she explained, ‘the State refuses to support opera in any shape or form in this country’. She decorated Covent Garden in crimson, violet, yellow and green. Lady Beaverbrook came dressed as a blue butterfly, but not one that the
Illustrated London News
correspondent felt a naturalist might easily identify. Ivor Novello, the 26-year-old Welsh entertainer, was characteristically bejewelled from head to toe and Lady Diana Cooper, at last liberated from her bath chair, although discreetly holding on to a walking stick, came as Queen Anne in a rose-coloured gown garlanded with silver ribbon.

Those young, in love, aristocratic and keen to dance gathered at the famous underground Grafton Galleries in Piccadilly, site of the controversial pre-war Post-Impressionist exhibition, which in the evening doubled as a fashionable dancing club. The Prince of Wales was a regular. Proprieties were observed. White tie and tails were worn, and carnations were tucked into buttonholes. Nude pictures on the walls were covered with tissue paper, and no alcohol was served. The confectioner Gunter’s would supply iced coffee and a brilliant pink drink called ‘Turk’s Blood’, the innocence of the refreshments confirmed by the presence of teatime cakes and sandwiches. A favourite song, ‘I’m Just Wild about Harry’, was often requested, as was the pre-war waltz ‘Destiny’, the last song to be heard five years earlier by young uniformed men before their departure for the front. The nostalgic sound of the waltz filled the gallery as the couples competed for the length of time they could continue twirling each other round. The evening at the Grafton ended with the playing of the National Anthem. But the night was not over for those who left for Rector’s, a club in a cellar in Tottenham Court Road where decanters of whisky were on offer in the gents’ cloakroom, and powerfully sweet-smelling white face powder was piled into bowls in the ladies’. Here the band was less restrained than at the Grafton dressing up in firemen’s helmets and circling the room while blasting out sexy tunes on their trumpets.

Dance was a recreation that all classes enjoyed. Dance halls up and down the country were attracting huge Saturday-night crowds as the saxophone blared out its foot-tapping, syncopated beat. The most spectacular of all dancing venues was to be found in London’s old Brook Green skating rink which had been turned into the largest dance hall in Europe. Nearly six thousand tickets had been sold for the opening night of the Hammersmith Palais, the low cost of entry putting the dance floor within reach of pockets unable to afford West End prices. Movers and shakers, twisters and twirlers from Ealing, Richmond, Hampstead and Bayswater came gliding into the enormous salon beneath a copy of a 2,000-year-old Chinese sign that announced you were entering ‘The Grotto of Peerless Height’.

Inside, the hall was decorated entirely in Chinese style with hand-painted glass and lacquer panels copied from old Chinese pictures
and hung all around the dance floor. Tall, black-lacquered columns, decorated with Chinese lettering signifying good luck, supported the pagoda-like structure that formed the ceiling. In the centre of the highly polished dance floor of Canadian maple was a miniature mountain, with water cascading from it on all sides although the sound of water was entirely eclipsed by the music. The two bands took up their positions at each end of the floor under two miniature temple-like structures. As soon as the band at one end stopped, the other would take up the tune.

No one was able to resist the lure of the floor. The
Daily Mail
described the varied mix of participants: ‘Women dressed as men, men as women; youths in bathing drawers and kimonos, matrons moving about lumpily and breathing hard. Bald obese perspiring men. Everybody terribly serious; not a single laugh or the palest ghost of a smile.’ The floor was never empty. If you had arrived alone, a steward would find you a ‘sixpenny partner’ and off you twirled, the newly met couple happy with the arrangement, one a little richer, the other no longer clinging to the walls in solitary disappointment.