The Great Silence (2 page)

There are others without whose professional understanding I would not have been able to tackle this period of history. I have been given unparalleled insights into the nature of grief by Patricia Anker and Julia Samuel. The wisdom that shines from them both is shot through this book. Kevin Brownlow’s knowledge of the early movie industry is unparalleled. Andrew Bamji has answered innumerable queries about the history and technique of plastic surgery and about Harold Gillies’s life. Roger Neil knows everything about Nellie Melba and practically everything else that happened in this period. Alison Thomas has been more than generous with the private papers as well as her knowledge of Edna Clarke Hall. Richard Shone has told me a great deal about art, artists, ballet and ballet dancers in England in the years immediately following the First World War.

Both Andrew Peppitt and Helen Marchant have been their wonderfully helpful selves and thanks also to Hannah Obee and Diane Naylor at the Chatsworth Archive.

I would also like to thank individuals at public and private libraries and archives, among them: Anthony Richards and Richard Slocombe at the Imperial War Museum; Rachel Freeman and Jamie Andrews at the British Library; Bret Croft and Harriet Wilson at Condé Nast library; Sophie Basilevitch at Mary Evans, Oriole Cullen at the V&A,
Susan Scott at the Savoy Archive, Steve Jebson at the Meteorological Weather Records Office, the staff at the London Library and the Fulham and Hammersmith Library.

The lonely business of researching and writing has been greatly cheered by the information and the suggestions, insights and encouragement of so many individuals and friends, among them Nigel ô Brassard, Kitty Ann, Philip Athill, Peter Bidmead, Georgie Boothby, Sarah and Kildare Bourke-Borrowes, Charlie and Arabella Bridge, Simon Brocklebank Fowler, Paul Calkin, Linda and Brian Clifford, Artemis Cooper, Richard Crook, Dee Daly, Andrew and Ellie Davidson, Atul Doshi, Sophie Dundas, Max Egremont, Jean Claude Eude, Sabina ffrench Blake, Lady Antonia Fraser (always the best of enthusiasts), Lady Annabel Goldsmith, Kevin Gordon, Ian and Victoria Hislop, Philip Hook, Glenn Horowitz and Tracey Jackson, Dr Jonathan Hunt, Brian Huntley Builders, Kathryn Irwin, Diana Kelly, the Hon. Mrs Charles Kitchener, Fiona Lansdowne, Katie Law (aka Marie Rose), Caroline Levison, Brian Masters, Charles Moore, Charlotte Moore, my lovely nieces Molly and Rosie Nicolson, my sister Rebecca Nicolson and my cousin Vanessa Nicolson (both such loyalists), Mark Norman and his staff, Cate Olsen and Nash Robbins (indefatigable champions of the written word), Mary Pearson, the late Harold Pinter, Shirley Punnett, Faith Raven, David Robinson, Stephen Robinson, Marilyn Stanley, Suzanne Sullivan, Kathleen Tessaro, Joanna Trollope, Aly Van Den Berg, Louisa Vertova, Claire Watson, Claire Whalley, Maggie White, Fred Windsor Clive, Gordon Wise, Wendy Wolfe, Joanna and Richard Woods, Henry Wyndham and the unmatchable duo Hugh Harris and David O’Rorke.

I would like to thank Linda Van for her unfailing helpfulness as well as all the other staff at Ed Victor Ltd, especially Charlie Campbell, Sophie Hicks, Maggie Phillips and Hitesh Shah. As an agent Ed himself devotes more time and encouragement to me than I could possibly deserve. He is the best.

Once again I have been more than lucky with my publishers at John Murray to whom I am immensely grateful, especially to my editor Roland Philipps, and to the indefatigable Nikki Barrow, Caro Westmore, James Spackman, Shona Abhyankar, Helen Hawksfield,
Amanda Jones and Sara Marafini. And I am grateful to Douglas Matthews for his masterly work with the index.

The enthusiasm and initiative of my researcher, Clementine Macmillan Scott has been exemplary. And I cannot imagine where I would be without the invaluable encouragement and friendship of Sarah Raven and Rachel Wyndham.

It is a rare thing for a writer to be lucky enough to have a brother who bestows the level of practical and emotional guidance that I have been blessed with in Adam. And when my preoccupation with the written word threatened to become overwhelming, the loving support of my daughters Clemmie and Flora did not waver once. I am indebted to my husband Charlie who has cherished this author unconditionally throughout the writing of the book. The book is for Adam, Clemmie, Flora and Charlie with my profound love.

Slowly, slowly, the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt, like a bruise which only slowly deepens its terrible ache, till it fills all the psyche. And when we think we have recovered and forgotten, it is then that the terrible after-effects have to be encountered at their worst.

D. H. Lawrence,
Lady Chatterley’s Lover

This is a book about silence, the silence that followed the ‘incessant thunder’ of the four years and four months of the First World War. At the heart of the book are three specific November days in which silence predominated: the day the guns fell silent in 1918; the day the two-minute silence, then known as the Great Silence, was first observed in 1919; and, a year later, the day when in 1920 the Unknown Soldier was lowered into silence beneath the floor of Westminster Abbey. But this book is also about a more general silence – the silence of grief – that crept into every corner of life during the two years that followed the Armistice of 1918, a time when vitality and youth had been swept aside by a massive, unanticipated mortality.

In one way this is a book about the relief that is brought about by the absence of noise: silence as balm, as a time for reflection and contemplation. But it is also about another kind of silence, the silence of isolation and fear, of the failure and the terror of attempting to articulate misery. It is a book about the silence of denial and of emptiness, of endings and of death. Silence can bring with it a vacancy that in its turn craves the distraction of the human voice or the obscuring impact created for example by music. These distractions can help to stifle the terror of being abandoned to the silence of the noisy mind. Even the silence of sleep can carry with it an added dread, for sleep ends in wakefulness. And as Siegfried Sassoon said, ‘to wake was to remember’.

During the summer of 1911, a record-breaking hot season three years before the outbreak of war, the strength of the sun had been sufficient to bleach out the pattern of purple pansies on newly married
Ethel Harrison’s dress. Already social fragmentation had started to make itself felt in a peacetime society that on the surface seemed ordered and secure. Women, trade unionists, both Houses of Parliament, the servant class, the poor and the rich were all either seeking or resisting change. Some said that the twentieth century did not begin until 1914, that the extended Edwardian idyll had lulled the English into a sense that not only was everything all right with the world, but that it always would be.

In fact the structure of society had been shifting, sometimes imperceptibly and sometimes, as the reign of George V got under way in 1910, with some drama. The suffragette movement had become increasingly volatile and disturbing. The force-feeding of imprisoned women, whose crime had been to fight for votes for the unrepresented half of society, had become more prevalent. Stones were thrown through windows of municipal buildings across the land; one suffragette tried to push the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, beneath a moving train, and in June 1913 the campaign for the voice of women to be heard in the democratic process resulted in tragedy. During the Epsom Derby Emily Davidson, at the age of 39, had thrown herself beneath the hammering hooves of Anmer, the King’s horse, her skull smashed, her brains – so it was reported – spilling out on to the grassy track, as Anmer did a complete somersault in full view of his owner. Just over six years later women would be voting and one of them, an American divorcee, would be representing a constituency in Parliament.

The outbreak of war had brought with it a healing unity; domestic problems were suppressed, while the country joined together to fight side by side against a common enemy, experiencing a new sense of community across the classes with so many suffering the loss of someone they loved. But with the end of the war, after the immediate relief experienced when the fighting stopped, divisions returned with renewed intensity. In moments of honesty many questioned whether the golden summers of the pre-war world had been as golden as memory willed them to be, or whether instead they had been the mere product of hindsight.

Social discontent returned, and in louder voice. Now, too, a series of new divides had developed: between the men who had gone to
fight and the women who had been left behind to manage family life; between those too young to have absorbed the real lasting impact of what had happened, and those who would never get over it. The gulf between those who had experienced the closest thing to hell on earth and those who had only glimpsed it was to prove almost impossible to close.

There were of course those for whom the war changed things for the better – in particular women, who won the right to vote immediately the war ended, though the right was still restricted to those over the age of 30 and conditional on owning a house or being married to someone who owned a house. But women’s expectations had changed. Seventy years before the Armistice a columnist in the
London Journal
had written that ‘a delicate reserve, a rosy diffidence and a sweetly chastened deportment are precisely the qualities in a woman that mostly win upon the affections of men’. It had taken war and the death of millions to bring about change, although some women, mostly of the older generation, hoped that the natural order of things would be restored. Exhausted by the effort of running the whole family show at home, they longed for the men to return and take charge.

Servants like Arthur Atkins, an under-chauffeur with no prospects, returned from the war determined not to resume his servile duties. Unemployment ran through society with a devastation similar to the 1918 flu epidemic, destroying lives as it spread. Not only had four million men returned from the army and navy looking for work, but a further three million munition workers were now without jobs. Means Test committees presided over by fat women cuddling even fatter pekinese talked about the national necessity for tightening belts. Unemployment meant poverty and an estimated 11 per cent of the population was considered to be living under such circumstances. Poverty meant misery. Nor were other sections of society immune to the taxes and the economic consequences of the conflict. Financial ruin had affected the fortunes of many of the richest members of the aristocracy.

But the class system survived the war in large part intact. Although some
men
retained a sense of equality because of shared experiences
between servant and master, aristocrat and postman, women had no such exposure to ‘the breakdown of tradition’. As the writer Barbara Cartland, then a young woman from the ‘gentry’ and on the brink of ‘coming out’, explained: ‘We lived in manless homes. We were brought up by women, and Edwardian women at that. We were fenced round with narrow restrictive social customs, nurtured on snobbery and isolated from any contact with, or knowledge of, people outside our own accepted class.’

This book aims to discover what happened to that peaceful prewar society after the intervening gash of the war years and the death or injury of more than two and a half million men. How had society changed and how were people adapting or failing to adapt to that change? In 1920 the journalist Philip Gibbs wrote of ‘fits of profound depression alternating with a restless desire for pleasure’. I want to know what kind of sound was made by the hinge that linked those two sensibilities.

The bereaved of 1918 were facing what the writer Joan Didion has since called ‘the unending absence’. The post-war world was in large part a world paralysed by grief. Such a small tidy word is incongruous for something so messy. Grief is an iceberg of a word concealing beneath its innocent simplicity a dangerous mass of confusion and rage. Bereavement follows stages, and if a cycle can be identified within these stages, then the comfort found in reaching the final stage is often dashed with the realisation that circles have no endings. The cyclical sequence of emotions said to be followed by a person in mourning can in practice be inconsistent and irregular, each part failing to fall into its proper place. Emotional effects can include at first shock, disbelief and denial, followed by guilt, self-reproach (Rudyard Kipling never forgave himself for the encouragement he gave and the strings he pulled to get his short-sighted son John sent to the battle that would kill him), loneliness, hopelessness, relief (and the guilt involved in
that
process), numbness and yearning. Disbelief, hope and denial sometimes jostle one another for pre-eminent position.

After the Great War, in Barbara Cartland’s words, ‘an atmosphere of gloom, misery and deep unrelenting mourning settled on practically
every house in the British Isles’. Formal occasions of remembrance designed to comfort often produced the reverse effect. Private anniversaries of the day someone was reported missing, the day a final telegram was delivered, wedding days and the day you last saw them all prompted memories so similar to the moment of actual loss that the healing cycle was derailed. In 1917 in
Mourning and Melancholia
Freud was emphatic about the flaw in the assumption that grief’would be overcome after a certain lapse of time’. After the shock of the impact of the news has softened, grief can be like standing with your back to the sea. Sometimes a warning rumble gathers momentum in the form of an approaching birthday or Christmas, bringing with it the fear of remembered happiness. On other days the approaching wall of water can appear without any warning at all. On the calmest, most settled sort of day, there is no predicting when a rogue wave in the shape of a snatch of music, a familiar phrase, even a shared joke, might suddenly roll in and threaten to topple you.

Bereavement can have profound effects on the body including exhaustion, uncontrollable crying, troubled sleep, palpitations, shortness of breath, headaches, recurrent infections, high blood pressure, loss of appetite, stomach upsets, hair loss, disruption of the menstrual cycle, irritability and visual and auditory hallucinations. The bereaved may turn to alcohol or drugs for the relief and numbing of suffering. All of these symptoms can occur even with the often-cathartic experience of a funeral. But there were no bodies to bury during the Great War. A decision had been taken in 1915 that no corpses of either officers or soldiers would be brought back from the front. There were simply too many for the authorities to be able to manage such a task. There was another reason too. Many of the bodies were unidentifiable, being so badly mutilated, although this detail was not often made explicit. The dead remained abandoned, drowned in the liquid mud into which they had slipped or been trampled, and were buried abroad either in the very place where they had lost their lives or in vast cemeteries – what Rudyard Kipling called a ‘Dead Sea of arrested lives’ - set up by the Imperial War Graves Commission.