The Great Silence (7 page)

Walking through the rain on 11 November 1918, with some fellow Voluntary Aid Detachment nurses, Vera slowly registered that the streets were brightly lit for the first time in four years. Her joyless-ness grew with the same speed as the elation that surrounded her. No adored brother and no longed for fiancé were here to celebrate with her; there was therefore nothing to celebrate. That evening, finding it impossible to recapture ‘the lost youth that the war had stolen’, she too realised for the first time ‘with all that full realisation meant’ that the world had altered irrevocably and that ‘the dead were dead and would never return’.

The novelist and spiritualist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was sitting in the lobby of the Grosvenor Hotel in Park Lane. Exactly two weeks before Maude Onions’ signal had gone out along the wires, Conan Doyle’s son, weakened by a wound he had suffered in the war, had caught influenza and died. As Sir Arthur sat in the lobby, still barely able to register the catastrophic news, he saw a well-dressed woman push her way through the revolving doors of the hotel. Carrying a Union flag in each of her hands, she slid into a solitary waltz, slowly, elegantly and silently making her way around the large lobby before spinning her way back through the circling door, then out again into the street.

The novelist Arnold Bennett welcomed the damp foggy day because at least it was ‘an excellent thing to dampen hysteria and bolshevism’. He had noticed that in places there was a sort of madness in the air. Siegfried Sassoon was disgusted by what he saw. The poet was on sick-leave in Oxford where in the Cornmarket he saw that a woman had tucked her skirts right up to her naked waist and was playing to the cheering crowd, waving a Union flag at the army and navy cadets with unashamed abandon. Taking the train up to London, Sassoon found ‘an outburst of mob patriotism ... a loathsome ending to the loathsome tragedy of the last four years’.

The morning’s peace announcement had come as something of a surprise and so it was not until later that many of the celebrants found their stride. But for some the effort was beyond them.

Ottoline Morrell, hostess, socialite, bohemian, friend of Virginia Woolf, felt ‘too numb to respond’ to the news, her thoughts turning to the distress of the young children of German prisoners of war as she wondered how she could contribute to their new life in England. Perhaps she could arrange Morris dancing or carpentry lessons in the village hall where she lived at Garsington in Oxfordshire? That evening she emerged with the painter Mark Gertler into Charing Cross Road from a performance of the ballet at the Coliseum and was confronted by a disturbing scene in the street. The lifeless arms of a very drunk young boy with one leg were being hauled over his crutches by two ‘rough, thick set’ men but the arms would not stay in place. As the limp youth collapsed, his companions tried to drag him along the ground. Ottoline and Gertler crossed the road towards them but the men spoke angrily, snapping at them to go away and leave them alone. War’s contribution to this young man’s life, Ottoline wrote later in her diary, had been to ‘maim him in body and ruin him in soul’.

The Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev was back in London on Armistice night and had dined with the writer Osbert Sitwell in Swan Walk in Chelsea. After dinner the party went up to Trafalgar Square where they found a packed crowd ‘sometimes joining up, linking hands, dashed like the waves of the sea against the sides of the Square, against the railings of the National Gallery, sweeping up so far even as beyond the shallow stone steps of St Martin’s in the Fields’. Packed between the flag-waving, hat-brandishing revellers, cigarettes stuck to their lower lips, mouths opened wide to yell out the cheers, Sitwell examined Diaghilev’s reaction to the scene. ‘With something of the importance of a public monument attaching to his scale and build, bear-like in his fur coat, [he] gazed with an air of melancholy exhaustion at the crowds’.

Diaghilev often appeared exhausted. Excessive consumption of food seemed in particular to sap his energy. The French couturier Coco Chanel had noticed how, forehead already perspiring, the impresario would not even bother to remove his white gloves before helping himself to a proffered box of chocolates, continuing to ‘finish the box, his fat cheeks and his heavy chin wobbling as he munched ... his trousers held up by a couple of safety pins’.

Cynthia Curzon (known as Cimmie to her friends), younger daughter of the former Viceroy of India, was also in Trafalgar Square, straddling a stone lion, a Union flag wrapped around her shoulders, watching the German guns (that had been brought into the square from the Mall) being set alight. While Cimmie joined in with all those around her belting out the rousing words of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ into the night air, a dark-haired officer of athletic appearance stood watching her, a look of despair on his face. On her descent to the pavement he challenged her elation.

‘Do any of you think for one moment of the loss of life, the devastation and misery?’ he asked a somewhat abashed Cimmie. The officer introduced himself. He was Oswald Mosley, and at the age of 21 was standing as Coalition candidate for the Harrow seat at the following month’s general election.

Doris Scovell, assistant cook, was out on the town that night, her hand tucked into the crook of the arm of her sweetheart, the footman Will Titley. They had both been given the evening off from their domestic duties below stairs at the grand house at 142 Piccadilly. The night of 11 November 1918 was an occasion for courting couples to go out and celebrate.

Not far from number 142, a celebratory evening at the Savoy was threatening to get out of hand as delirious members of the RAF swung from the chandeliers. The following morning the dustbins of the hotel contained 2,700 smashed glasses. Nearby in Regent Street an exuberant young woman was sitting on the roof of a taxi waving flags that she had snaffled from the shelves of Selfridges department store. Restaurants and cafés that had been closed after three hours each evening for the last four years remained open to revellers until 11.00 p.m. by special order of the Prefect of Police.

At the Apollo Theatre the production of
Arlette
starring Miss Winifred Barnes was interrupted as Herbert Buckmaster, husband of the actress Gladys Cooper, watched a young man leap from a box on to the dress circle tier. Landing neatly on the stage, he threw himself into the leading lady’s arms and gave her a resounding kiss. The audience ‘howled with delight’.

Violet Keppel was in a mood to feel ‘a reckless sense of combined release and anti-climax’. Despite the death of so many of
Violet’s friends, making her accustomed to requiring ‘superhuman courage to open a newspaper’, the end of the war coincided with the intense flowering of a great love affair. Although the object of her passion was in bed alone being monitored with some concern by her husband after an outbreak of flu, nothing could diminish Violet’s personal happiness that day, not even the absence through illness of her lover Vita Sackville-West.

On the evening of the ceasefire David Garnett, a pacifist who had been working as a farm labourer at Charleston, the East Sussex farm of the painter Vanessa Bell, found the London streets milling with lorryloads of ecstatic factory girls, bearing the yellow stains of acid that had leaked over their hands and faces as they made up the munitions. Exhilarated by the sight, Garnett met up with the artist Duncan Grant and together they went to a flat in the Adelphi to join the critic Clive Bell, the painters Roger Fry and Dora Carrington, the economist Maynard Keynes, the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova (who had come straight from her performance in
Schéhérazade
at the Coliseum) and Lytton Strachey, the fêted author of the recently published biographical sketches
Eminent Victorians
. Osbert Sitwell and Diaghilev arrived at the party directly from Trafalgar Square and Sitwell watched in surprise as ‘the tall flagging figure’ of Strachey ‘with his rather narrow angular beard, long inquisitive nose … iigg[ed] about with an amiable debility’. Strachey, Sitwell concluded, was ‘unused to dancing’. Sitwell’s brother Sacheverell was there too, confusing the uncomprehending Diaghilev, whose most fluent expression in English was ‘more chocolate pudding’, and who could not understand why Sacheverell insisted on catching the last train to Aldershot. ‘Who was this Aldershot? She must be very beautiful.’

Soon D. H. Lawrence arrived with his wife Frieda but Garnett was shocked by his friend’s appearance. The light had left the famous novelist’s eyes and Garnett’s loving greeting was received with a flatness bordering on indifference. Another friend, Cynthia Asquith, had noticed that the war had given Lawrence the appearance of someone in ‘acute physical pain’. Grief and anger combined to prompt him to confess to her that his soul had been ‘fizzling savagely’, and despite ‘radiant lucid intervals’ Cynthia Asquith thought him to be in a state of’delirium’. Garnett, hurt by the rebuff and incapable of an
articulate response, gathered Carrington into his arms and whirled her into the centre of the room as someone began to play on the piano.

But Lawrence’s presence was impossible to ignore and Garnett returned to hear him speak. ‘I suppose you think the war is over and that we shall go back to the kind of world you lived in before,’ Lawrence snapped, in a tone of deep scorn. ‘But the war isn’t over,’ he continued, answering his own question. ‘The hate and evil is greater now than ever ... It makes me sick to see you rejoicing like a butterfly in the last rays of the sun before the winter ... hate will be dammed up in men’s hearts and will show itself in all sorts of ways which will be worse than war. Whatever happens there can be no peace on earth.’ And with his words joy and merriment left the room.

Later, at Waterloo Station Sacheverel Sitwell, who was trying to catch the last train to Aldershot, saw groups of women staggering along the platform, so drunk that they had to be rolled along ‘like milk cans and piled into the guard’s van’.

The Countess of Fingall, the half English, half Irish society hostess, was also unable to see the promised benefits that a British victory would bring. ‘I used to think and say during the war that if ever that list of Dead and Wounded could cease, I would never mind anything or grumble at anything again,’ she recalled. ‘But when the Armistice came at last, we seemed drained of all feeling. One felt nothing. We took up our lives again or tried to take them up. The world we had known was vanished. We hunted again but ghosts rode with us. We sat at table and there were absent faces.’

Monica Grenfell, the sister of Julian and Billy who had both lost their lives to the war, wrote to her mother Lady Desborough that day of how she felt there to be ‘agonising sadness in this calm after strife’.

There had been no armistice celebration in East Peckham in Kent where kindly Elizabeth Tester managed the village laundry. Despite her son Edward’s efforts to be brave, his letters from the trenches had been profoundly upsetting. Mrs Tester sensed the loneliness barely concealed between the jokey but highly accomplished line drawings. Ted, as he was known by all those who loved him, always had
a talent, she told her friends, but the drawings and the cheery requests for a pot of his mother’s home-made jam, the thought of which ‘makes my mouth water’, did not deceive his mother. Occasionally his homesickness slipped right through the bravado. ‘I don’t think I shall grumble much about anything when I get back again,’ he had written to his mother. ‘I shall know how to appreciate a good home.’

And then, after 2 October 1916 Edward had fallen silent. At the urging of her husband Robert, on 15 November that year Elizabeth Tester had sent a letter to the Chaplain of the 11th Battalion of the Queen’s Regiment to ask if they knew where Ted could be contacted. The final letter from France arrived just before Christmas, but it was not from Ted. Instead the Commanding Officer wrote to tell Mrs Tester that her ‘much liked’ son Edward had been killed by a shell on 21 October. Two years later his father Robert, who had suffered for many years from a weakness of the lungs, confided to his remaining daughter that with the death of Ted he had ‘lost the will to live’.

A broken-hearted man, Robert had succumbed to the vicious influenza that had started to appear in communities up and down the country. Two of the Testers’ other children, Arthur and Daisy, had never known about the war, as both were too fragile to live beyond their second birthdays. Bobby, the youngest boy, was suffering from a condition that severely restricted the maturing of his mind. But Norah, the eldest child, despite the loss of her brother and her fiancé in the trenches, was eager to help her mother. They both loved children. And Elizabeth had a canny business sense that helped to ensure her decimated family would remain clothed and fed. They would continue their prewar practice of taking foundling children into the laundry. The small sum paid to them by shame-faced relations for looking after children conceived but unwanted would be a help. And if Elizabeth was to face life without her husband, or Ted, Daisy or Arthur, at least she could show her love to those children denied a loving home.

Ten-year-old Tom Mitford, lover of food, books and football in that order, was halfway through the autumn term at his boarding school in the country when the ceasefire came. For three days the pupils of Lockers Park in Hemel Hempstead had been practising singing ‘O God Our Help in Ages Past’ in preparation for a service to be held just after the announcement. A collection would be taken
for the school Memorial Fund, and plans for a memorial window dedicated to the pupils who had died in the war were already under discussion. But in his weekly letter to his mother, Tom was more preoccupied with the cigarette cards that he collected than in the declaration of peace, begging her to send the cards as soon as possible so he could show his friends a complete set of fifty ‘gems of Belgian architecture’ and the matching collection of ‘military motors’.

His mother was not resistant to his request, and it made a change from the usual weekly plea for cake. No one was capable of refusing Tom anything, even if he coveted something that already belonged to someone else. His sisters knew of the trick that he had been perfecting since the age of seven and which between them was referred to as ‘The Artful Scheme of Happiness’. Tom was so practised at getting his own way that he could make his voice ‘positively sag with desire’. But annoying as he could be, the five daughters adored their only brother and always showed that they, in his eldest sister Nancy’s words, had missed him ‘dreadfully’ when he returned for the holidays. His mother secretly hoped that she might one day have another child and that it would be a brother for Tom.