The Great Silence (15 page)

Friends or even complete strangers were wary of the Queen’s visits to their houses and her propensity to covet their possessions. In advance of her arrival they would hide anything that suggested itself as remotely enviable or indeed small enough to be carried away. The Queen would stand in front of an object that had caught her attention. ‘I am caressing that little jug with my eyes,’ she would say
to her host in a voice that with years of practice now succeeded in being both factual and full of yearning.

Mary continued to defer to her husband’s preference that she should dress as she always had, in the fashions set at the end of the last century by his own mother. An experimental phase of wearing wide-brimmed hats instead of the tight-fitting affairs she had made her own received a cursory look of disapproval from her husband and was swiftly abandoned. And although she had started taking dancing lessons from a master of movement, Sir Frederick Ponsonby, who was also Keeper of the Privy Purse, this innocently rebellious gesture of interest in the new rage for dance came to a halt when one day the King walked in on the lessons, the displeasure on his face unmistakable. Only with her close friend Lady Airlie did Mary feel able to have fun, laughing with her over cartoons in
Punch
, and sending her slightly risqué comic postcards concealed in an envelope, and posted to Ashley Gardens, Lady Airlie’s Westminster flat. If Mary’s eldest son had come into the drawing room at Windsor to find these two middle-aged women singing ‘Yes We Have No Bananas’ at the top of their voices, or seen his mother, dressed in green and white brocade, assuming momentarily the character of a grasshopper while jumping round the room playing the rhyming and guessing game of Dumb Crambo, he would have been astonished.

On Saturday 18 January 1919, the day on which the world’s politicians and heads of state sat down to start negotiations for the Peace Treaty at Versailles, death burst in upon the very core of Mary’s life. The Queen had spent the early days of the month happily at York House in Sandringham with her family around her as relaxed as the royal family had ever been. She had even transformed the ballroom into a temporary cinema. Noting the state of the weather, as she unfailingly did at the beginning of her daily diary entry, she remarked that Saturday had been a lovely day and that she had walked over to see her new tenants at the Mill House, a local vicar and his wife, before being driven back by her daughter to York House for lunch. At half past five, just after tea, the telephone rang. Mary answered. Lalla Bill, the nanny who cared for her youngest son Prince John, was calling in a state of terrible distress.

‘Our poor darling little Johnnie had passed away suddenly after
one of his attacks,’ Mary wrote in her diary in her firm hand that evening. ‘The news gave me a great shock.’

Johnnie, an epileptic, was thirteen and a half. As a very young child he had been known as the mischievous one, the family jester, whose behaviour endeared him to many but exasperated his disciplinarian father. Johnnie was in the habit of putting glue on door handles and pins on chairs. He would daub himself like a Red Indian with paint from his paint box. He loved to go shopping and relished an outing to see a Punch and Judy show. But his ebullience had given way to concern as his academic progress slowed down and the unpredictable fits increased in frequency. For the first few years of his life he had always been included in family photographs, grinning impishly in a sailor suit, but since the outbreak of war Johnnie had been kept out of the public eye. The shame of having a sick child was compounded by George V’s view that illness was an inappropriate state for a member of the royal family.

Johnnie went to live near Sandringham House in Norfolk, under the care of his nanny, Charlotte Bill, whom he called Lalla. She cherished the small boy, encouraging him in his love of music and drawing, and taking him out for long walks, although she made sure that the other end of the long rope that he wore round his waist was firmly attached to her hand, in case he should fall into a sudden fit. And although Mary visited her youngest child whenever she could, wartime demands meant that neither of Johnnie’s parents saw him very often and the violence of his fits distressed his brothers and sister so much that they kept away from him. But the devotion of Lalla, and the quiet companionship of his lonely, widowed grandmother Queen Alexandra, had sustained him. On the afternoon of Johnnie’s death his mother found Lalla ‘very resigned but heartbroken’.

The British press, from whom the true nature of Johnnie’s illness had been kept since its diagnosis nearly ten years earlier, were full of sympathy for their Queen when the news of his sudden death was broken to them. Queen Mary’s energy and dedication to the injured and bereaved during the war years had been consistently noted and appreciated. Monday’s edition of the
Daily Mirror
devoted its entire front page to the death of the Prince.

Johnnie was buried in the graveyard at Sandringham three days later. Years of restraint even in her private diary meant that Mary only allowed herself to write that the funeral was ‘awfully sad and touching’; she ‘missed the dear child very much indeed ...’ A suppression of the natural instinct to weep at the loss of life during the past few years and now even at the loss of her own son had become instinctive. As the country’s figurehead she had adopted the national way of dealing with grief – life must go on. To register more would be to unleash the restraint that made it possible to go on. And this national restraint, this setting an example, was also her own particular private habit. She had learned to suppress.

Death had not yet finished with the survivors. An influenza virus more deadly even than the war itself was on the loose. It attacked and killed within the day.

When the virus first appeared in the summer of 1918, it produced only the old familiar indicators of flu, including sweats, headaches, pain in the eyes, back and limbs. But unusually these signs were followed by a sense of immense depression and at this stage the flu became unrecognisable from previous incarnations. When the virus entered the body it was transformed into something almost invariably fatal. The drama of the sickness was reflected in an explosion of colour. First the skin turned a vivid and almost beautiful purple, reminiscent of the heliotrope flower or of polished amethyst. Then the lungs and all the other major organs became filled with a thick scarlet jelly that choked the afflicted. Death occurred as the victims drowned in their own blood and bodily fluids. Even if a sufferer recovered, the illness could leave behind a lingering sense of misery and hopelessness.

The massive operation of sending the Allied forces home meant that millions of young men were dispersing all over the world. Thousands were carrying the flu virus picked up in the fatal incubating grounds of the trenches. Spain was the first country to report massive casualties of the epidemic. In the very act of welcoming a soldier home from abroad, a family was often unknowingly embracing the bearer of a new kind of fatality. Although troop movement was the
main agent of the spread of the disease, the huge crowds that gathered together in celebration at the end of the war had undoubtedly encouraged the infection.

No one knew how long the epidemic would continue. The newspapers, worn out with sustained stories of death over the last four years, seemed barely able to acknowledge what was happening. Reports of the advance of the disease appeared well down the page and deep within the body of the newspapers. On 3 January 1919 Mrs Susannah Jones, wife of ‘Stoker’ Jones, an officer in the Royal Navy, died from influenza in her eighteenth year. Mr and Mrs Jones had been married for one day. There was an air of resignation in the reports.
The Times
suggested that the swift spread of the epidemic might have been a result of ‘the general weakness of nerve-power known as war-weariness’.

James Shaw of Worcester Road, Manor Park, a crane driver at the docks, recognised the flu symptoms while going to work. Without his wage there would be no money to look after his two daughters, Lucy aged seven and Edith May aged two and a half. So he took his safety razor and cut Edith May’s throat. Lucy wriggled from under him as he was halfway through the job and ran bleeding from him. Exhausted by a war that he had thought would never end and with all hope for a happy future destroyed by an illness that had almost certainly come to claim him, he put the razor to his own throat. The poor suffered no more than the rich. The mortality rate in Chelsea and Westminster was 6.1 per thousand and 5.2 per thousand, while in Bermondsey and Bethnal Green it was 5.6 and 5.1. No one was exempt.

Sudden death was not unfamiliar to the English, accustomed as they were to the alarming rate of infant mortality. Scarlet fever, pneumonia, tuberculosis, diphtheria, appendicitis and septicaemia carried children off with accepted regularity. Nor were flu epidemics an unusual occurrence. There had been serious and fatal outbreaks in 1900, 1908 and 1915, and the very familiarity of the condition meant that the eruption of the illness that began in 1918 was all but ignored at the beginning.

The origins of the 1918 strain of flu were unclear. It was thought that animals or perhaps chickens or birds had passed the virus
through to pigs before it had emerged in its final dreadful mutation in humans. Occasionally both adult and child managed to survive the infection. In March 1919 Winston Churchill, the newly appointed Secretary of State for War and Air, was in Paris for the Peace Conference. His wife Clemmie had given birth to Marigold, their fourth child, four days after the Armistice and Churchill was content to think of his family back in England, the baby under the dedicated care of their Scottish nanny Isabelle.

But Isabelle had come down with the flu, and in her delirious state had taken the four-month-old baby into her bed. Clemmie found nanny and child tucked up together with the Scottish woman talking ‘fast and loud in an unearthly voice like a chant for several hours’. There were still few doctors available. Many of them had not returned from their war duties and Clemmie’s own attempts to nurse Isabelle failed. The nanny died at 5.30 the following morning after catching the disease. Clemmie was terrified. Her own temperature hovered at a dangerous 102 degrees. ‘I long to see you,’ she wrote to her husband, ‘I am unhappy.’

While Marigold and Clemmie began to recover, another anxious mother in Sidcup, Ethel Parish, began to feel the extremes of hot and cold. She went shivering and alone to her bed but when her own child, Pam, began showing signs of the illness, the three-year-old baby of the family was carried in the arms of her aunt into the darkened room to join her mother. Delighted to be reunited with her adored mother they were left alone. Against the odds they both survived.

Joanna Selby-Bigge was a year older than Pam and less fortunate. At the age of four she was not as robust as Pam. Joanna was the adored child of her parents, Rachel and John, both former students at the Slade. After serving in the ranks in the Macedonian Mule Corps, John had begun a new life as a chicken farmer at King’s Sutton in Northamptonshire. When Joanna died shortly after her fourth birthday, the use of superlatives seemed to be the only way to remember her by. On the beautifully carved headstone her parents chose the few and the best words they knew to describe their daughter.

Joanna Annabella Lewis Selby-Bigge

Jocundissima

Dilectissima

Amantissima

Born May 1915

Died July 1919

Two days after Maude Onions had sent out her signal, the British Medical Council held a conference to discuss how to respond to public anxiety about this new threat. The conference’s conclusion was that ‘carrying on’ was the best possible course. The medical establishment could offer little alternative, except the customary recommended salvation for everything, including fear: a good tot of whisky. Doctors were not the only scarce medical resource. An estimated three fully trained nurses (as distinct from volunteers) were available to help treat every million people in England and nurses themselves were not immune to the disease. Six nurses at Great Ormond Street Hospital alone had died of the virus in the last few months. And as the influenza victims took second place to the 10,000 wounded and shell-shocked men still lying in hospital six months after the ceasefire, the suffering public felt themselves to be very much reliant on their own resources at home.

The depleted medical team did their best to try and contain the crisis. The Government’s Chief Medical Officer issued some precautions. People were advised to wear a small gauze mask across their mouth, to eat well and to try drinking half a bottle of light wine or taking a glass of port after dinner. Hot baths were thought to help and a decrease in the use of tobacco seemed to have some beneficial effect. Older people were accustomed to warding off illness and used their own remedies. Opium, rhubarb, treacle, laudanum, vinegar and quinine were all thought to have their own special curative powers.

In February 1919 Robert Graves was finally given his demobilisation papers. Aware that he was going down with the new killer flu he went as soon as he could to join his new wife and baby at Hove in Sussex where the Welsh maid was enjoying noticeably robust health, due she swore to the leg of a lizard tied in a little
bag round her neck. The nurse who looked after Graves during the worst of his infection spent much of her time staring at the waves crying, ‘Sea, sea, give my husband back to me’, even though the missing husband had not been shot or even drowned, but simply unfaithful.

Oxo spent millions on advertising their meaty drink supplement as a good way of increasing nutrition and ‘fortifying the system’. Healthy sceptics thought the illness psychosomatic. Fear itself was felt to be a possible predisposing agent of infection, so doctors discouraged people from dwelling on the subject, or even using the word ‘pandemic’ which itself might induce panic.

For the first time since records began, the death rate had been overtaking that of births. Just before the 1918 Armistice one third of the police force had become ill simultaneously. Sober-suited council employees took off their ties and became gravediggers. Coffins that had been stockpiled during the war, as there were no bodies to put in them, were suddenly in short supply. The Leicester railway workshops turned to coffin manufacturing and Red Cross ambulances were employed as hearses.