The Lost Girls Read online

  The

  LOST GIRLS

  LOVE & LITERATURE IN WARTIME LONDON

  _______________

  D.J. TAYLOR

  For Nicky Loutit

  Contents

  A Note on Names

  Monetary Values

  The Cast in September 1939

  Introduction: An Evening in Bedford Square

  Part One

  1.The Wanton Chase

  2.‘The Little Girl Who Makes Everyone’s Heart Beat Faster’

  3.When the Going was Good: Lys, Connolly and Horizon 1939–45

  Interlude: Mapping the Forties Scene

  4.‘Skeltie darling . . .’

  Interlude: Glur

  5.Struggling to Go Beyond Herself: Sonia 1918–45

  Interlude: Angela

  6.Blinding Impulsions: Janetta 1940–5

  Interlude: Anna

  7.Cairo Nights: Barbara 1943–4

  Interlude: Joan

  Part Two

  8.Ways and Means: Lost Girl Style

  Interlude: On Not Being Boring

  9.Sussex Place: Connolly, Lys, Janetta and Others 1945–9

  Interlude: Office Life

  10.The Man in the Hospital Bed: Sonia 1945–50

  Interlude: Sonia’s Things

  11.The Destructive Element: Barbara, Connolly and Others 1944–51

  Interlude: Parents and Daughters

  12.The Invisible Worm: Cyril and the Women

  13.Projections: The Lost Girls in Fiction

  Interlude: Barbara’s Style

  14.Afterwards

  Finale: The Last Lost Girl

  Illustrations Insert

  Notes and Further Reading

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  A Note on Names

  One mark of the Lost Girls’ complex emotional lives is the number of surnames they managed to accumulate. Lys was, successively, Lys Dunlap, Lys Lubbock, Lys Connolly (by deed poll) and Lys Koch. Barbara began life as Barbara Skelton before re-emerging as Barbara Connolly, Barbara Weidenfeld and, ultimately, Barbara Jackson. Sonia was born Sonia Brownell, became Sonia Orwell (very occasionally Sonia Blair) and was briefly known as Sonia Pitt-Rivers. Janetta was at various times addressed as Janetta Woolley, Janetta Slater, Janetta Sinclair-Loutit (by deed poll), Janetta Kee, Janetta Jackson and, finally, as Janetta Parladé, strictly speaking the Marquesa de Apezteguia. To avoid confusion, I have tended to refer to them simply as ‘Lys’, ‘Barbara’, ‘Sonia’ and ‘Janetta’.

  Monetary Values

  For a rough estimate of their contemporary worth, the sums of money mentioned here need, depending on the year involved, to be multiplied by a factor of between 50 and 60. Thus Janetta’s £10 monthly allowance from her mother in 1939 would be bring in something over £600 in 2019. The fee for a 3000-word short story published in Horizon (6 guineas) in the early 1940s would be around £300. Janetta’s wedding present from her father (£50) when she married Hugh Slater would be the equivalent of £2750.

  The Cast in September 1939

  Lys, aged twenty-one. Clerical worker and part-time model. Known for her exceptional beauty. Married to Ian Lubbock, an aspiring actor.

  Janetta, aged seventeen. Recently left her mother’s house in the south of France and eloped to Geneva with a much older man.

  Barbara, aged twenty-three. Model and poule de luxe. Currently living at an address in Kinnerton Street, Mayfair, and at her cottage (the ‘Cot’) in Hastingleigh, Kent.

  Sonia, aged twenty-one. Nicknamed ‘the Euston Road Venus’. Involved in a relationship with the (married) artist William Coldstream.

  Glur (Joyce Warwick-Evans), aged twenty-two. Former model. Married to the writer and part-time advertising man Peter Quennell.

  Angela, aged twenty-seven. Janetta’s half-sister. Known for her erratic behaviour. Currently married to the society columnist Patrick Balfour.

  Diana, aged twenty-four. Daughter of the proprietor of a printing firm. Involved in a relationship with Cyril Connolly.

  Joan, aged twenty-seven. Daughter of Viscount Eyres-Monsell, former First Lord of the Admiralty. Recently married to the journalist John Rayner. Photographer. Friend of Cyril Connolly.

  ‘Anna Kavan’ (the pseudonym of Helen Emily Woods), aged thirty-eight. Writer. About to publish her ground-breaking novel, Asylum Piece. Travelling abroad, possibly in America.

  Cyril Connolly, aged thirty-six. Critic and man of letters. Author of a novel, The Rock Pool (1936) and a work of non-fiction, Enemies of Promise (1938). Married to Jean Bakewell, an American heiress. Film critic of Time and Tide.

  George Orwell (pseudonym of Eric Blair), aged thirty-six. Spanish Civil War veteran. Author of four novels, the most recent, Coming Up for Air, published in August 1939. Married to Eileen O’Shaughnessy and running a small grocer’s shop in Wallington, Hertfordshire.

  Evelyn Waugh, aged thirty-five. Novelist and travel writer. Author of – among other novels – Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930) and A Handful of Dust (1934).

  Nancy Mitford, aged thirty-four. Eldest of the five daughters of Lord and Lady Redesdale. Author of three novels, including Highland Fling (1931). Friend of Waugh and Connolly.

  Lucian Freud, aged sixteen. Grandson of Sigmund Freud. Studying at the East Anglian School of Art and Drawing at Dedham, Essex.

  Peter Quennell, aged thirty-four. Poet, critic and advertising copywriter. Currently married to his third wife, Glur. Friend of Connolly.

  Peter Watson, aged thirty-one. Son of Sir George Watson Bt, margarine millionaire. Art collector and philanthropist.

  Feliks Topolski, aged thirty-two. Artist. Of Polish origin, but resident in Britain since 1935. Illustrator of plays by George Bernard Shaw.

  Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit, aged twenty-six. Doctor. Spanish Civil War veteran. Married to Thora Silverstone.

  Stephen Spender, aged thirty. Poet and critic. Author of Forward from Liberalism (1937). Recently divorced from his first wife, Inez Pearn. Member of the Communist Party. Friend of Connolly and Watson.

  Brian Howard, aged thirty-four. Dandy, aesthete and former Bright Young Person. Author of a book of poems, God Save the King (1931). Currently living in the south of France.

  Frances, aged thirty-nine, and Ralph Partridge, aged forty-five. Second-generation members of the Bloomsbury Group. Living at Ham Spray, Wiltshire, formerly the home of Lytton Strachey. Friends of Janetta.

  Julian Maclaren-Ross, aged twenty-seven. Author and former vacuum-cleaner salesman. Known for his erratic behaviour. Living in near destitution in Bognor Regis.

  Robert Kee, aged nineteen. Studying at Magdalen College, Oxford.

  Farouk bin Faud, aged nineteen. King of Egypt.

  Introduction:

  An Evening in Bedford Square

  What, in short, was the point of Connolly? Why did people put up with frequent moroseness, gloom, open hostility? Why, if he were about in the neighbourhood, did I always take steps to get hold of him? The question is hard to answer. The fact remains that I did . . .

  Anthony Powell, Infants of the Spring (1976)

  It is just past seven o’clock on a rainy evening in the early part of September 1942 and twilight is falling over the Bloomsbury pavements. Here in the fourth year of war, Bedford Square is not looking its best. The railings from the vast private garden in its centre have been taken away, supposedly to be made into Spitfires, and half-a-dozen allotments have risen to displace the lawn on the northernmost side. Over on the western quadrant comes direct evidence of armed conflict: a bomb crater dating back to the early part of the Blitz and still not filled in, and several piles of rubble, so ancient now that there are knots of wild flowers growing out of the bare earth. Two or three of the houses are derelict, with boarded-up
windows and notices tacked to the front doors advising alternative arrangements for post. The air-raid wardens are on the prowl – there is a wardens’ post over on the corner of Gower Street – and all over the square the soft light gleaming from the frontages is being extinguished as the blackout curtains go up.

  Reaching the square’s north-eastern corner, on her way down Gower Street from the Underground station at Euston Square, Naomi stops to take her bearings. She is less than familiar with this part of the capital, or indeed with any part of it beyond the square mile or so around London Wall, where she works as a copy-typist for a firm of veneer and inlay importers. She is a tall, nervous-looking, red-haired girl in her very early twenties, and rather nonplussed at the prospect of the social experience that lies before her. Nevertheless, in the pocket of her Aquascutum mackintosh is a gilt-edged invitation card on which has been printed the words MR CYRIL CONNOLLY: HORIZON: AT HOME, the day’s date and an address, and Naomi is determined to put it to good use. Truth to tell, Naomi is not quite sure why she has come in search of the flat in Bedford Square, where Mr Cyril Connolly is at home, rather than going back to her parents’ house in Shepperton. George, an apprentice compositor for the printing firm that Mr Connolly employs, and the source of the invitation, had said it would be a lark and that afterwards they could go and have supper at a Lyons. But now George has gone down with influenza, leaving Naomi to make the journey on her own.

  Why is she here? Despite hailing from Shepperton, where such things as literary parties are unheard of, and working for the veneer and inlay importers at London Wall, Naomi, always keen on ‘reading’ and adventurous in her tastes, has heard of Cyril Connolly. There has been mention of him at the book circle she attends on Tuesday evenings above a shop in the high street. She has seen yellow-jacketed copies of Horizon, the literary magazine he conducts, at the railway station bookstalls next to the piles of Lilliput, Picture Post and the Strand Magazine. And in Shepperton public library she discovered a book he had written about the snares and pitfalls that lay in wait for young writers – snares and pitfalls that did not seem so very terrible to Naomi, who had been educated at the local secondary school and secretarial college, but were doubtless much worse when, like Mr Connolly, you had been to Eton and Balliol College, Oxford. The one photograph she has ever seen of him showed a fat, jowly man with a receding hairline and an oddly grumpy expression. All the same, Naomi is prepared to concede that over him, and his magazine, and his invitation card, and the tall houses of Bedford Square looming beneath the darkening sky, hangs an undeniable scent of glamour.

  Number 49 Bedford Square, on one of whose upper floors Mr Connolly and Horizon are at home, is on the southern side. There are one or two people disappearing through its front door, a faint noise of conversation borne on the breeze. Suddenly, all the conviction with which Naomi stepped off the Underground train at Euston Square and marched down Gower Street with her face angled against the rain dwindles away to nothing. This, after all, is Bloomsbury, rumour of whose depravities and moral laxness has carried even as far as Shepperton, and here she is, wearing an Aquascutum mackintosh, a calf-length floral skirt and a pair of the housemaid’s shoes that her mother thinks ‘sensible’ for daily use, carrying a bottle of red Algerian wine that turned out to be the only vintage procurable at the shop next to the Underground station, and with strict instructions from her mother to be home by ten. For a moment her courage fails her – in that flat there will be girls with half-crown accents and dresses that stop at the knee, of the kind she sometimes sees coming out of the Piccadilly restaurants, not to mention Mr Connolly and his clever friends; she will be exposed and ridiculed for having the cheek to infiltrate this citadel of culture when she should have been at home in Shepperton eating warmed-up shepherd’s pie and listening to It’s That Man Again on the radio. Then, for some reason, her sense of resolve renews itself and she crosses the road, skips past the skidding army lorry that threatens to swallow her up, climbs the stairs and arrives, rather flushed and short of breath, in the open doorway.

  Curiously, there is no one here except a formidably good-looking girl a year or two older than herself with a high-pitched voice and a Veronica Lake hairdo who shakes her hand and relieves her of the Algerian red. ‘It’s awfully kind of you to come bearing gifts,’ she says, waving her hand at an occasional table just inside the door, ‘but we’ve rather a lot already.’ And sure enough the table is crammed with what, even to Naomi’s amateur eye, can be identified as expensive bottles of claret and burgundy of a kind no longer available in shops. Naomi tries to explain about George and his influenza and the transferred invitation, but suddenly a tall, wavy-haired man in a grey suit and what looks like a Charvet tie has materialised between them, put one hand on the other girl’s shoulder and demanded of her in a high, stuttering voice: ‘My dear, who is this y-young person? She looks as if she should s-s-scarcely be allowed out. We shall have her p-p-parents accusing Cyril of spiriting her away for immoral purposes, and then where shall we be?’ Naomi is ready to shrink back in terror at this apparition, but the girl merely gives him an affectionate shove that sends him faltering back into the flat. ‘You mustn’t mind Brian,’ she says. ‘He’s a sweetie really, but he’s just been stood up by his boyfriend and that always puts him in a mood. Now do come in and hang up your things.’

  Obediently, Naomi attaches her mackintosh to one of the pegs in the hallway and proceeds in the direction of the noise. This is coming from a large, elegant space, which her mother would probably call a parlour but which she has an idea is more properly defined as a drawing room. Here music is playing from a gramophone and twenty or thirty people are talking at the tops of their voices. Cigarette smoke hangs in dense clouds above their heads. Another girl hands her a glass of wine and she realises that the fear instilled in her by the sight of Brian, who is what her father would call a nancy boy, has been replaced by simple curiosity. Looking round the room she sees that Connolly is standing with one elbow on a mantelpiece strewn with invitation cards, talking to a tall man with a toothbrush moustache who resembles an elongated version of Charlie Chaplin. With his bow tie, his tweed jacket and a pair of flannels that are starting to go at the knee, Connolly, she thinks, looks like a teacher in a film set in a boys’ private school. The women, oddly enough, are not as she imagined them. Several of them, for example, are wearing trousers, and at least one – tray of drinks in hand, and long, untamed hair falling into her eyes – is walking around the room without her shoes on. She notices that they talk to each other in drawling voices and have a habit of laughing at things that do not immediately seem funny. None of them – this is to be expected, she knows – takes the slightest interest in her.

  There are other guests flooding into the room now. A short, fat person in a bowler hat who looks already as if he has had too much to drink. A lean, blue-suited man with a quiff of blond forelock who says something to Connolly and is crossly rebuked. Beyond them, a sulky-looking woman with poodle-cut hair done up in kirby grips stands in the doorway for a moment, stares furiously around her for a second as if she hates the room and everyone in it and herself for being dragged into its devitalising orbit, and then disappears.

  Still, Naomi realises, no one has spoken to her or so much as noticed the fact of her existence. The feeling that she has wandered into a play whose script has been made available to everyone except herself is about to become embarrassing, when one of the women handing round drinks decides to take pity on her. Her name, she volunteers, is Liza; she works part-time in the Horizon office, which is not here in Bedford Square but around the corner in Lansdowne Terrace, and she is happy to explain who the people in the room are and their connection to Connolly. For example, the man with the stammer who terrified her in the doorway is called Brian Howard and, although one of Connolly’s oldest friends, rather a ‘scamp’. The elongated version of Charlie Chaplin is George Orwell, a frequent contributor to the magazine, whose work Connolly and ‘Peter’, the magazine’s prop
rietor, revere. The man with the unruly hair is Peter Quennell, who lodges in the attic, and Barbara, she of the poodle-cut and the furious stare who declined to come into the room, is the girl who lives with him there, and of whom Connolly strongly disapproves. And Naomi wonders what her father, who is puritanically minded, would make of parties fuelled by what is presumably black-market claret, attended by ‘scamps’ in Charvet ties who have been stood up by their boyfriends and men who live with their girls in the room upstairs.

  Liza proves unexpectedly talkative: Naomi suspects that she is pleased to have an audience. And so she chatters on – rather, Naomi thinks, like a tour-guide escorting a group of visitors around a museum. The man in the tropical coat with the swordstick clasped beneath his arm is a writer called Maclaren-Ross, whom Connolly admires but thinks is too often liable to cause trouble. The sharp-faced boy is Lucian, one of the magazine’s artistic discoveries, of whose grandfather – and here Liza gives a little laugh – Naomi may have heard. Naomi hasn’t. Neither, to her chagrin, has she heard of the fat man in the bowler hat, who is called Evelyn Waugh and apparently ‘terribly famous’. But queerly enough – or perhaps not so queerly, female solidarity being what it is – it is the women to whom her eye invariably returns. None of them, she deduces, is much older than she is herself. There are three in particular: the one who welcomed her at the door – clearly in charge of the proceedings, she thinks, as she keeps coming in to survey the room and make sure that people’s glasses are filled – the one with the helmet of brown hair that half covers her face, and a third girl, plumper than the others and slightly more conventionally dressed, who is having a loud argument with the boy named Lucian about something called significant form. Liza explains that the first girl – Connolly’s lady-friend, it turns out, although still apparently married to a man called Ian – is called Lys Lubbock, pronounced ‘Lease’, that the one talking to Lucian is Sonia Brownell – sometimes jokingly referred to as the ‘Euston Road Venus’ – and the one with bare, brown feet is Janetta (her surname for some reason currently in doubt), and that all of them are so devoted to Connolly that they have been known to bring him their ration books. And Naomi wonders why this dumpy, middle-aged man, who reminds her of the churchwarden bringing round the collection plate on Sunday mornings, should inspire such regard among a group of women who, she decides, really ought to be seated in restaurants overlooking the Pacific Ocean with Ronald Colman and Gregory Peck.