The Great Silence (3 page)

Lack of evidence gave rise to an inability to believe in death. Ettie Desborough lost two sons in the war. The first, Julian, had been wounded and took two weeks to die, his mother at his hospital
bedside throughout. The younger son, Billy, was killed among hundreds of others in a military charge, his body never identified, buried among his fellow men and never again seen by his mother. She confided to her friend Cynthia Asquith that she had found the complete, sudden disappearance of Billy harder to bear than ‘the long loving farewell to Julian’.

Before the war people had tended to die in the place where they had spent their lives, surrounded by the people they had loved and the things they had known. A shopkeeper would live out his last days in the back of his shop, customers coming in to pay their respects but also to buy the things they needed for their tea. Life went on. There was something valuable in this way of dying at home, a comfort not only for the dying themselves but also for those who loved them. Death as with birth formed an integral part of living. And burial, and the ceremonial that went with it, was a fundamental part of that process.

A promotional film made by the Cremation Society called
The Great Purifier
, advocating a cleaner, ecologically sound alternative to burial, had failed to attract many supporters to the cause. After news had got out in 1879 about the experimental cremation of a horse in the country’s first cremation oven in Woking, the procedure had seemed doomed never to become established. The public distress caused by the disposal of the horse in such a manner resulted in the Home Secretary’s threat to prosecute Sir Henry Thompson, surgeon and President of the Cremation Society of England. The burning of a body, human or animal, was widely perceived by Christians to interfere with or even destroy all hope of resurrection, and although cremation was made legal in 1902, by 1918 only 0.3 per cent of the population chose to take up that option.

By the end of the war the absence of funerals and the strain of maintaining hope had exhausted the nation. The English habit of managing difficult feelings was to suppress rather than discuss them, as if by remaining silent the feelings would disappear. The bereaved feared to pass on their grief to those already burdened by grief themselves and friendship and intimacy suffered as a result.

Before the war, a young designer, Cecil Beaton, had noticed that ‘women were more hysterical’. The sight of a fire engine charging
down a London street, the white horses ‘trained to rush out at the sound of a big brass bell rearing and flaring their nostrils’ like stallions, was enough to make nursemaids scream and faint at the thought of impending tragedy. The restraint imposed by the rigours of war had banished all such public display of emotion. Now the phrase ‘before the war’ came to represent all that was untarnished: a benchmark by which to measure all subsequent standards and aspirations. Compassion became a rationed emotion reserved for only the most intimate of relationships as the individuality of death was submerged in the vast numbers of dead. This collective suppression of feeling often produced a deep underlying fury and in many cases prevented the full expression of mourning, resulting in the pain-filled and often angry silence of unspoken grief.

During the war a curious but widespread assumption had grown up that at the end of the war things would return to normal. Leading society figures, among them the Duchess of Devonshire and the Marchioness of Lansdowne, had founded the Officers’ Family Fund, a public morale-boosting exercise, designed to emphasise both the glory of sacrifice and the fact that death could on occasion be an opportunity to rejoice. Both had suffered in the death of Charles Fitzmaurice, brother to the Duchess and husband of the Marchioness. The two women had successfully campaigned for the abolition of wearing of black armbands in public; they favoured white to symbolise pride rather than grief in death.

But a little over a month before 11 November 1918 Cynthia Asquith had written about ‘the prospect of peace’. Her brother had been killed along with most of her male friends, and she anticipated the end of the war with a shudder of fear. ‘I think it will require more courage than anything that has gone before,’ she wrote on 28 September. ‘It isn’t before one leaves off spinning round that one realises how giddy one is. One will have to look at long vistas again, instead of short ones, and one will at last fully recognise that the dead are not only dead for the duration of the war.’

With the war over, a fragment of a famous sermon, taken out of context, was seized on by many who wanted to believe that this unbelievable thing had not happened. As Edward VII lay in state in his coffin in Westminster in the spring of 1910, Canon Henry Scott Holland
had given a sermon in St Paul’s on the finality of death. During his long meditation he commented on the curious phenomenon of the vivid physical memory of a recently dead person and the strength of the illusion that they have not really gone for ever.

Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged.

But he had continued by reminding his congregation that ‘the long horrible silence that fellow’s ... will cut its way into our souls’. Conveniently
these
words were rarely quoted.

Ignoring the emotional fall-out from the absence of men, an advertisement in
The Times
on 18 December 1918 now outlined a service for the ‘Training of War Wives’. The advertisement was addressed to recently demobilised women, or fiancées or wives of soldiers, and offered ‘an opportunity to perfect themselves in household accomplishments which will make the homes of the future ideal for family life’. But with the annihilation of a ‘golden generation’ a deficit arose of suitable healthy men to love and marry the surviving women. Men with shattered faces hidden beneath tin masks walked the streets, terrifying in their inability to make the mask laugh or cry.

When the emotion of shock began to lessen, people began to look for any possible means of escape from the ‘gloom, misery and deep unrelenting mourning’. The passion for movies, mostly of the thrilling and adventurous kind, filled an insatiable appetite for entertainment. Charlie Chaplin had become the most famous man on earth and movie stars, male and female, with all their attendant glamour, attracted and illuminated imaginations dulled by the relentless greyness of war.

But it was music and above all the exhilarating injection of jazz into tired souls that ignited the faltering heartbeat of the nation. Jazzing and its players arrived in England from America’s Deep South and transcended all class barriers. Saturday nights at huge and exuberant dance halls became a weekly obsession for all the country’s youth.

For some the search for spiritual and emotional well-being or simply for understanding was channelled into the creative paths of
writing and painting. For others, love developed in unexpected places, in relationships they might not have considered in the straiter-laced confines of the Edwardian age. The sun-carressed skin and muscular arms of the gardener and the delicate complexion of his lady employer suddenly presented both parties with an attraction no longer worth denying.

Technological progress, particularly in aeroplane and motor-car design, as well as the increasingly pervasive use of the wireless, arrived along with other trends in fashion and the arts from across the Atlantic. The post-war world was rapidly becoming unrecognisable in many ways to those who had lived and died before the war.

In this book I have chosen to look at the lives of several individuals for whom the years preceding and following the Great Silence were especially significant, among them a soldier, an undergraduate, a bohemian, a newly married socialite, a duke, a cook, an artist, a surgeon, a war hero, a ten-year-old boy, a four-year-old girl, a butler, a dress designer and the Queen. Wherever possible I have spoken to the individuals themselves, or to their immediate descendants, as well as consulting private diaries and letters, and other sources published and unpublished.

It was a time when trust had vanished. In a just world the good were rewarded and the bad punished, yet the experience of the war had shown this belief to be faulty. Marriage and parenthood were no longer certain bets. The country that people had fought for was no longer the self-assured place they had assumed it to be. Lloyd George, the Prime Minister, had promised that this would be the war to end all wars. Could he be right?

Fighting and death had only been part of it. The delayed response to sights and sounds, the mutilation, the hammering of the guns, experienced by those returning was just beginning. Would any of them recover? Would any of them find lasting peace? Would a healing silence ever come to them, as they lay awake at night, trying to forget? This is a book about the pause that followed the cataclysm: the interval between the falling silent of the guns and the roaring of the 1920s.

August 1914–November 1918

Arthur Tommy Atkins had been the under-chauffeur for the Marquis de Soveral, the rather rakish but hugely popular Portuguese Ambassador to the Court of St James. The Marquis, nicknamed ‘The Blue Monkey’ for the six o’clock shadow permanently visible on his swarthy chin and also for his naughty though delightful way with the ladies, had been a close friend of Edward VII and had maintained this intimacy with Edward’s successor, George V. The embassy Rolls-Royce was often to be seen waiting for its official occupant in the forecourt at Sandringham, and the driver and his deputy felt themselves to be hovering on the brink of a comfortable lifetime serving the great and good of the land.

Then war was declared. Tommy had since his schooldays fancied himself as something of a linguist and signed up with the London Irish Rifles to see a bit of the world. At the age of 22, he had hoped perhaps to visit Paree (’Well, that’s what they call it over there,’ he would explain) and to find a bit of ‘Ooh la la’. He had longed for adventure, his chauffeuring duties confined to keeping the Marquis’s Rolls-Royce in shining order and to prodding his boss, the elderly chauffeur, into staying awake at the wheel. Tommy’s dream was to learn to drive, but he had never dared ask for a lesson, after once getting caught taking the gleaming machine out for a sneaky illicit run.

Everyone called Tommy by his middle name because the combination of the two, Tommy and Atkins, had been the army nickname for British soldiers for over 150 years. There was even a Victorian music hall song, with a chorus that went

Tommy Tommy Atkins,

You’re a ‘good un’ heart and hand:

You’re a credit to your calling

And to all your native land;

May your luck be never failing,

May your love be ever true!

God Bless you, Tommy Atkins,

Here’s your Country’s love to you!

The real Tommy Atkins knew all the Edwardian music hall songs and being a natural showman would belt out ‘Up a Little Gravel Path’ and the old East End favourite ‘Have You Paid Your Rent?’ Tommy hoped that his feet would stand the trials of war. They were rather flat and to his secret shame he had developed a large bunion on each big toe. He thought the bony swellings might be hereditary and hoped that if he was lucky enough to have children one day he would not pass on the lumpy tendency. But he had not let on about the bunion problem to the other lads and had joined in lustily as they sang together ‘What a Great Holiday’ on the march towards the coast-bound trains.

A sudden overwhelming love for England and an accompanying duty to defend it propelled these young men into France and beyond. Maude Onions, a female signaller with the British Expeditionary Force in northern France, had befriended a young soldier who had been reluctant to join up. ‘I’m willing to lend a hand in this war business,’ he confided to Maude, ‘but when it comes to a change of career, it’s off. They want me to sign on for three years - and after that?’ he had wondered aloud to her. ‘Hawk penny articles, I suppose.’

Another army recruit, a gunner, explained to Maude the process involved in cleaning guns. Showing her the soft white lamb’s wool that he used to clean and polish the muzzles of the machine until they were spotless, he seemed to travel in his mind to ‘somewhere in England ... among the green fields’ and for a moment Maude glimpsed the real hardship of being away from home for so long. She heard his ‘mirthless laugh’ as he blurted out, ‘It’s hard to connect, isn’t it? My home is among the green fields in England ... rearing the sheep and lambs is part of my life’s work ... it’s hard to connect.’

In the countryside there was an old rural belief that a white feather in a bird’s tail indicated a bird of inferior quality, and in the autumn of 1914 a custom had sprung up for angry women to thrust a white feather into the lapel of any young man of fighting age who was seen in the streets out of uniform. Despite the fairly rare unwillingness to fight, based on conscience, religious grounds or simple sheer terror, the humiliation associated with failing to join up was often overwhelming and young men, even those officially unqualified to fight for medical reasons, felt compelled to sign on. And there was disappointment in rejection. Mr Bickham, a veteran of the Boer War, was turned down on account of his poor teeth. ‘They must want blokes to bite the damned Germans,’ he spluttered in disgust.

For those left behind, the older men, women and children, the prospect of war was bearable only because the ‘official’ word promised that the conflict would be over by Christmas. In the town of Salford large queues formed outside Lipton’s the grocers and the Maypole Dairy. The quick-thinking poor bought up huge quantities of sugar, which they sold off in small measures to those lacking the entrepreneurial spirit. Two thirds of Britain’s sugar was imported and people feared the imposition of rationing. Panic and greed set in.