Those Wild Wyndhams (47 page)

In a devastating postscript, Perf Wyndham’s will provided that if he died without issue his heir would be Dick Wyndham, the younger of Guy Wyndham’s two sons. He thus doubly disinherited Guy on the one hand and on the other Dick’s elder brother George – whom, the family presumed, he had overlooked simply because he got on better with Dick, and never thought this provision in the will would come into effect. ‘Dear Percy never realized that when a will is made it is facing the possibility of death at
any
time …’ said Mananai. Clouds now belonged to Dick – barely eighteen years old. Guy and Minnie, who moved into Clouds with their teenage son (George was already serving in the army), were merely housekeepers until Dick came of age. It was a ‘crushing sadness … a mistake & absolutely contrary to the spirit of Papa’s & George’s Wills & in direct opposition to their wishes’, lamented Mananai, who of all the sisters felt Guy’s misfortune the most keenly. ‘I cannot bear to think that people might think this had been done intentionally & that there had been a split in our
united
family,’ she told Mary.
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Mary busied herself, moving between London, where Yvo’s Grenadier Guards were stationed in Chelsea Barracks – and Ego and Guy Charteris’s billets around the country. ‘I am living – here there & everywhere, like a soldier,’ Mary reported to Wilfrid Blunt in an undated letter written from Cadogan Square,
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recently returned from seeing Ego in Newbury, where Letty had taken ‘tiny little lodgings … like a dolls house’ near by. The night before Mary and Mary Charteris had dined with them, Ego ‘so
beautiful
in his khaki’, and George Vernon, a member of the Coterie and like another son to the family. Mary had brought down a picnic of ‘grouse! &
roses & champagne
… we had leopard skins stretched on a sofa, the piano acted as a sideboard … & we had a
feast
& talked camp shop – the arrival of transport, horses rifles – & the death of all the young friends who are giving their lives in France – it was a wonderful evening.’
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A few months later, Mary and Bibs visited Ego in Hunstanton, staying at the Le Strange Arms. This time (in a turn of events that seems delightfully apposite given the du Maurieresque name of the inn), Bibs was suspected by locals of signalling to the enemy when she left her window open, the light on in her bedroom and the blind flapping in the wind.
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At Cadogan Square, Mary started a ‘War Salon’ to amuse Yvo,
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filling the house with interesting guests – Hilaire Belloc, the
Observer
’s editor J. L. Garvin, Curzon and Balfour. At one of these gatherings in 1915, Cincie invented a new game: to discover everyone’s secret complex. To general hilarity, she decided that Balfour, now advising Asquith’s government on defence, and attending meetings of the War Council, formed in November 1914, ‘was obsessed with the notion that he had caused the War and was feeling, secretly, very worried about it’.
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At another, the Elchos, Charles Whibley and Lord Hugh Cecil debated Grey’s Commons speech that had brought England into the war. Whibley attacked Grey ‘for shilly-shallying … he didn’t even know himself which way his own speech was going to sum up’; Lord Hugh maintained that the war was ‘the inevitable, logical conclusion of the Entente Cordiale’, the speech ‘an absolute masterpiece’ of ‘Mark Antony oratory’ which was the only way Grey could secure the support of the Radicals for the war. Cincie agreed with Lord Hugh on every point.
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Mary found it difficult to engage in such discussions. From the war’s very beginning, she had felt desolate. ‘Hopeless’ reports of the war alarmed her – the ‘parallell [sic] lines & the germans [sic] living like trapdoor spiders – with the hills armed with Howitzers on cement floors!’
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She worried about Britain’s shortage of artillery shells which had been apparent almost from the war’s outbreak, and fretted that she was not doing enough war work, which might serve as talismanic protection for her own sons.
⁶⁵
More than ever, she was drawn to her boxes of papers, but this correspondence was capable of making her break down, sounding ‘so still and small a note, so faint and futile in the midst of the bloody horrors and the Hellish Din’. ‘Are all letters flattery?’ she asked Arthur. ‘If not, they have built me a pretty monument, but are they worth keeping? Who cares? And does anything matter? Except explosive
Big
artillery! The one thing we have not got.’
⁶⁶

In the early spring of 1915, with Mary ‘“out of sorts” mentally and physically’,
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her doctor, Halliwell, prescribed a rest cure at Stanway. For three weeks, she was confined to her room in total isolation. Yvo was highly amused to hear of this latest development: ‘How is your languid self’, he wrote to his sister Mary,

and how is Stanway, and how pray is that strange recluse or unspeakable monster, whom none may look on, closeted and communing with her spirit, dwelling on the heights until she emerge a full Mahatma? I suppose in the silence of the night the house echoes to the sound of beds, wardrobes and all manner of furniture being trundled round the room, and again to the rustlings of many sheet and blanket ‘manias’. She will awake after a month and find Mockett [the butler] waiting with a sheaf of telegrams to the effect that her three sons are at the Front, her eldest daughter doing time for card-sharping, her second eloped with a young cavalry officer, her youngest truant from school and God knows where. But she will have forgotten them, so what matter? With renewed zest she will wheel the grand piano round in the drawing room and wander off over the hills with a pack of wild and aggravated chows, till Stanway falls in ruins about her. What a curious sight Halliwell must be, entering the forbidden room like the Steward of Glamis?
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Shortly afterwards, on a cool April night, Mary, Mary Charteris, Bibs and Letty waved off ‘the Gallant Glittering Gloucesters’
⁶⁹
to Egypt in preparation for the Allied naval attack on Turkish forces in the Dardanelles. Allied control of the strategically vital strait would allow munitions to be shipped through to Russia. Britain’s Government also hoped that victory in the Dardanelles might persuade the neutral states of Greece, Bulgaria and Romania to join the Allied side, and provoke the collapse of the tottering Ottoman Empire. The night before the Gloucesters left, the two Marys, Bibs and Letty had dined with Ego and his friend and fellow officer Tom Strickland.
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As part of their kit, the two had been issued with ‘little bottles of iodine’ with instructions to apply instantly ‘to a fresh wound’. ‘It would hurt a great deal to paint all round a very large wound,’ remarked Ego wryly.
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Letty followed them out a week later, taking nineteen-year-old Mary Charteris with her as a companion, ostensibly to do VAD work. Two months later, Mary returned from Egypt to announce that she was engaged to Tom Strickland. They married in Egypt, in December 1915. The coincidence that their daughter should be married in Egypt was not lost on either Mary or Wilfrid.
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A week after Ego’s departure, Mary wrote to Arthur, distressed about the Gloucesters’ shambolic artillery:

these men have been mobilized since the very day war broke out, they contain the flower of England’s nobility (what a flowery Daily Mail phrase) … and the flower of the darling yeoman men who left their crops – and their sheep at the most critical moment … they go with guns bought from (scrapped by?) the Germans after the Boer War. Now my dear! You are in with everything … all their councils and hob nob and gossip with Kitchener the God of War and with all the Bosses, just you order some nice little (or big) right little tight little guns to be dispatched at once, to reach them before their horses are fit.
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Balfour had been on the Shell Committee, as the Cabinet Munitions of War Committee was known, since Easter, working with Lloyd George to rectify the ‘deplorable’ munitions output.
⁷⁴
Within weeks the ‘Shell Crisis’ and disaster at Gallipoli would force Asquith into a Coalition government. Balfour was brought back into office proper, as First Lord of the Admiralty, replacing Winston Churchill, disgraced after the Dardanelles.
⁷⁵

Arthur had always held the political fates of Mary’s male family members in his hands. Now, in a sense, he held their lives. Yet the tenor of Mary’s relationship with him during the war years was not markedly different to that of the decade preceding. At Downing Street, shut out by Asquith’s infatuation with the young Venetia Stanley, a close friend of Asquith’s daughter Violet, who had become the Prime Minister’s confidante and obsession, Margot agitated to be told official secrets in order to boost her own sense of self. Mary discussed developments with Arthur and was honest in her views. She only ever pressed him for information when it directly concerned her sons, and even then her tone was measured and humorous. She understood if Arthur could not give her information. She knew that, if he were able, he would.

Many women – and men – were capable of compartmentalizing to mourn loved ones lost in a war negligently handled by generals that they nonetheless believed was just and necessary. Looking back, it is incredible, near impossible, that women of this generation and class watched their sons being sacrificed in a war governed by their husbands and lovers without ever once breaking faith. Pamela and Mary were two of these women. Yet, for different reasons, they did not. For Mary, Balfour was only ever trying to improve a situation rendered parlous by the neglect of others, drawn back into service by the need of the country. She mourned when he was brought back to the Admiralty: ‘so weary, reluctantly obliged to shoulder a heavy burden because all the nation trusts him’.
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After the war, Pamela helped Grey write
Twenty-Five Years
, his staunch, quiet defence of his conduct as Foreign Minister that took Britain into the war. That she seems never once to have considered Grey culpable is unsurprising; even had such thoughts occurred to her, she would have excised them before they took root. She defended her own, even down to rubbishing Margot’s criticisms of Grey’s and Eddy’s wartime fishing habit. Margot proposed they should use the time in visiting the war wounded instead. Pamela replied, ‘I admit that the surface appearance of this fishing business, now, in Wartime, is ridiculous … I used to think the same as you – till I realized what a conventional view it was. It is not self-indulgence on his part, but relaxation – & [Eddy] needs relaxation … his way is in fishing, yours is in buying new clothes, mine is studying Psychological aspect of things.’ Unsurprisingly, Margot underlined the section alluding to her love of clothes in red ink.
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In her own published works after the war Pamela maintained that the conflict had been glorious. ‘War … meant for Bim Romance,’ she wrote. ‘He had been playing at it, and dreaming of it, and writing about it … now it was his, and it brought him freedom, and self-expression, and joy … it was this that met him on the threshold of manhood, something as great as this. Not only illusive pleasure and the empty tyranny of little things …’
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If her private façade differed, it was only that Pamela did not engage with the war at all: not the munitions crisis; the changeovers in power; or the failings of the generals. She kept aloof, within her own world, frozen until her son came back.

Both Yvo – ‘a joy-dispenser’, said Cincie
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– and Bim were part of a frenetic youth, squeezing out every moment of their lives. Pamela recalled that time as days of ‘colour and purpose’ for Bim,
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bombing around town in a two-seater crammed with people;
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arriving at Queen Anne’s Gate in a flurry of hairdressers, tailors, buttonholes of white gardenias ‘in silver-foil and cotton wool’, telephone ringing off the hook as he made plans for the next dance, the next dinner, the next play.
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They attended parties thrown by the American George Gordon Moore, nicknamed the ‘Dances of Death’, dancing all night to jazz and Hawaiian bands, fuelled by ‘rivers of champagne’ and surrounded by ‘mountains of red and white camellias’, believing, as Iris Tree, another Coterie member, wrote, that there was ‘something of myth and legendary revival, the glory of Greece, the grandeur of Rome’ in their antics.
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By night Diana Manners and Raymond Asquith’s wife Katharine doped themselves on morphine and ‘chlorers’ (chloroform).
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The Coterie’s brittle vivacity and grim humour appalled Cincie.
‘I’m sure there is an insidiously corruptive poison in their minds … I don’t care a damn about their morals and manners, but I do think … their anti-cant is really suicidal to happiness,’ she said. But Cincie was unusual in her sympathy for her parents’ generation, who were ‘an object of ridicule’ to the Coterie.
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Time took on double speed. Within a space of ten months two of Mananai’s daughters, Sibell and Madeline Adeane, clad in silk charmeuse and lacy veils progressed up the aisle towards a khaki-clad groom in St Peter’s Church, near Babraham.
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Nineteen-year-old Clare Tennant married Adrian Bethell, an officer she had met barely weeks before in 1915. She was divorced, and remarried to Lionel Tennyson, before the war was out. Margot complained to Pamela that the young were ‘uncultivated’ and immodest. Pamela defended them:

I think the ‘young females’ of the present day
as a whole
have shown good quality. They have set to work & they go cheerfully without the gaieties of the world, which at 17 & 18 are, or might be looked on, as their right. Clare & her particular little world are exceptional, thank goodness, & she has a certain little exuberance of folly & [irreverence] of nature that must bubble to the top, like scum on ham.
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In July 1915, worn out by his exertions, Bim came down to Wilsford on sick leave. He stayed for a fortnight, quietly recuperating. Pamela read aloud to her convalescent son. ‘Seeing him there again,’ she said, ‘among all the serene flowing of the currents of home life … it seemed to his Mother as if there must be some mistake, there could be no War … this must be the Summer Holidays, just beginning …’
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She took the opportunity to update the weight chart on which she recorded her family’s growth: Bim, David, Kit, Gan-Gan (for Madeline Wyndham was staying with the family at the time), Eddy (a mere 9 stone 8 pounds, the same weight as Madeline Wyndham), Roly, the family dog, and at the bottom, ‘Oliver – 2st 4lb’.
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