The Lost Girls Read online

  But this was easier said than done. An attempt at reconciliation with Johnny ended with a terse telephone conversation conducted from a call-box at Paddington Station: “‘It’s too late, Angela,” he said, and coldly put down the receiver.’ René, temporarily re-admitted to the fold, wanted to introduce her to his parents at their château in Burgundy. Meanwhile, back in England, she had made a conquest of Patrick Balfour, then employed as the Evening Standard’s society columnist and an erstwhile homosexual, and accepted an invitation to stay in his house at Warwick Avenue: ‘I had nowhere else to go and what could be better . . . than to be with this kind, funny sympathetic person?’ A divorce from Johnny having been negotiated, they were married at Chelsea Register Office in February 1938. A somewhat makeshift air hung over the proceedings. ‘I suppose it’s not very romantic, but I think it’s the best thing for you at the moment,’ Mark proposed as they stood drinking champagne on the morning of the ceremony. Later that day Angela and her ‘safe temporary husband’ flew off to Paris to spend the first night of their honeymoon at the Ritz Hotel.

  More than one Lost Girl, in the course of her emotional career, experienced what might be called the Balfour Treatment: an attempt, initiated with the most praiseworthy of motives, by a domestically minded man to settle down with a woman of whom, whatever the uncertainties of her previous life, he imagined that something might be made, without realising that her temperamental flaws were liable to doom the scheme to disaster from the start. In Anthony Powell’s What’s Become of Waring (1939), a novel written at almost exactly the same time that Balfour and Angela decided to get married, a character named Captain Hudson jilts the respectable girl to whom he has long been engaged in favour of a fast-living journalist named Roberta Payne. Hudson, another character shrewdly observes, has made a great mistake: ‘There he was, engaged to a girl who suited him down to the ground. He meets a bit of hot stuff like Roberta and breaks off his engagement. Then he expects the hot stuff to behave like the girl he was engaged to.’ This, leaving aside the fiancée, was essentially what Balfour had done with Angela. What he wanted, according to his old friend Lees-Milne, was ‘a permanent Darby-and-Joan marriage around a cosy fireside, with plenty of children to come’ and what he got was . . .

  Well, what exactly did he get? Within a year of his marriage, the Hon. Patrick’s father died and he succeeded to the title of Lord Kinross. As Lady Kinross (in which capacity she was paid £100 to endorse Pond’s Cold Cream) and mindful of her husband’s job, Angela lived ‘a social sort of life, many parties where he might meet people who would be interesting to write about, first nights, newly-opened restaurants’. There were weekends away – to Madresfield Court to stay with the Lygons, to Oxford with Balfour’s old convive Maurice Bowra, to Tickerage, the Sussex mill house near Uckfield owned by the Wyndhams. A photograph from 1938 shows her in the midst of the Connolly circle: a line of partying figures, drinks and cigarettes to hand, that includes Patrick, the composer Constant Lambert, the journalist Tom Driberg, Cyril Connolly and Stephen Spender. There was also, as Angela cheerfully admitted, a fair amount of adultery: ‘I can no longer remember when I first started being unfaithful to Patrick.’ This reached a symbolic height on the occasion when she was summoned to Edinburgh to attend her father-in-law’s funeral and spent the overnight journey in a sleeper with her ‘very good-looking lover, a painter, called David something’.

  As with Barbara, the war placed no kind of barrier on her social life. Nursing training at St George’s Hospital alternated with nights at the Gargoyle, the Nest and the Café de Paris. But Patrick, his suspicions alerted by gossip overheard at his club and the illusion of a Darby-and-Joan marriage crumbling before his eyes, was already pressing for a divorce. His private life was at an end, he informed Lees-Milne in September 1940. ‘I have discovered a whole host of infidelities by Angela over the past year or more and I don’t really see it as any good going on with it. It seems that she is incorrigible & perhaps a little mad.’ Balfour had assumed that he ‘was going to be able to make some sort of job of her, but I see that I have failed, & that perhaps I could never have succeeded’.

  Balfour’s diagnosis was sheer vacillation. ‘I wish that one day you’d grow up and decide what sort of a life you do want,’ he told her at their valedictory meeting. But what sort of life did Angela want? The artistic ambitions kept up and she briefly attended an art school in Suffolk, where the youth with curly hair, a pointed nose and darting eyes who sat next to her turned out to be Lucian Freud. WAAF training took her to Kent, where, once again, a chance encounter sent her spinning away on a different course. Walking into a pub in Faversham, she saw an army officer standing in front of the fire whose long polished boots and Great War pilot’s wings ‘made him look as if he should be different or important in some way’. This was Major Robert Hewer-Hewett, invariably known as ‘Brasco’ from his military title (Brigade R.A.S.C. Officer), who claimed to have recognised her from the Pond’s advertisements, entertained her to dinner at the local pubs and before very long claimed to be ‘head over heels’ in love with her.

  There was a Mrs Major Hewer-Hewett and a couple of children, but such things were no impediment. Neither was a fourteen-year age gap (Angela had just turned twenty-eight, Hewer-Hewett was forty-two). Already pregnant by him, she was photographed by Beaton for his ‘Ladies in Wartime’ feature for the Tatler (‘As beautiful as ever,’ Beaton remarked, as the session began, ‘a little bit heavier, perhaps?’) shortly before undergoing an abortion at a Golder’s Green nursing home. Brasco, who stumped up the £50 fee, assured her that he would do anything for her and then promptly disappeared on what was represented as a secret mission to France. Angela assumed she would never see him again. Meanwhile, her WAAF training had moved on to radar work. Commended for her interest in her duties, she was transferred to an RAF station at Felixstowe. Unpunctuated letters followed hard on her heels (‘Come to me Angela come to me my darling love’). Preparing to take the train to meet him in London for lunch one morning after her night-shift had finished, Angela was struck by a curious feeling of déjà vu (‘my thoughts were in a feverish turmoil, just as they had been on that night in a hotel in Malaga five years before, when I had unwillingly left Johnny’). Waking up the next morning, and in her dazed state at first imagining herself to be back in Suffolk, she discovered that she and Brasco had eloped to a Maidstone hotel. Even for Angela, this seems to have been a step too far. ‘Oh Christ,’ she records herself thinking. ‘What have I done?’

  What followed has all the makings of a fictional picaresque in which war, bombs, death and relocation crowd in upon each other. It was May 1941 by now, the height of the London Blitz, but Brasco was ‘very gay in those days. He used to do imitations of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers, and the people used to hold their sides for laughing’. There was a difficulty with her mother and Janetta, who thought him common and to whom he reacted accordingly (‘they never saw this side of him, because with them he was stilted and wary and on the defensive. He said he knew what they were thinking: they were just waiting for the day when I would leave him’). On the other hand, Angela was forced to concede that she had never seen him read a book. Shortly after their elopement he was posted to Yorkshire, declaring that he would send for her when he had found a place for them to live.

  And so the cavalcade of Angela’s wartime life rolled on, sometimes with Brasco, sometimes without him, occasionally in a state of all-round contentment, frequently in conditions of near penury. Billeted in Dewsbury, and pregnant once more, she went to work in a factory. ‘So what was it like being married to a posh Lord?’ her landlady’s husband wondered, when her divorce case was reported in the News of the World. Brasco’s military career was coming to an end: after being posted to Scotland, he was invalided out with an injured leg. For a brief period some kind of ménage was established in the Surrey countryside near Woking. Jan, after gallantly attempting to get on with Brasco, gave it up as a bad job and left for Lo
ndon: ‘Oh darling, I just came to say goodbye. I don’t think I can live with Brasco any more. So it’s better that I should go.’ To Angela, about to give birth to a son named Mark, past and future seemed of no account when set against the chaotic present: ‘Already I was learning to live in the moment, to look neither forward nor back.’ In her memoirs the tragedies that engulfed the Woolleys in the early part of 1943 are recalled in brief, impressionistic fragments: Angela is clearly moved by the things that are happening to her, but reluctant to confront them head on. Sensation is always there to be grasped at, rarely put under the microscope.

  If the tribulations continued to pile up, then an instinct for self-preservation was usually enough to see Angela through. And whatever might happen, whether fetched up with a middle-class major or a French count, in a Spanish fishing village or a London backstreet, there were always friends and family connections on whom she could rely. The capital for Brasco’s painting and decorating business, optimistically embarked on early in 1943, came by way of a loan from John Sutro, the film producer, who had been at Oxford with Waugh, Balfour and Howard. But by the end of the year the creditors were massing. ‘We have about 40 men now, all doing bomb damage repairs etc! But there still doesn’t seem any money over to buy nice things with’, laments a letter to Janetta from the summer of 1944. There were frequent visits to the pawnbroker in Kensington Church Street, and once again Angela ‘learned to enjoy the happiness of the moment and to put my thoughts in a sort of container, and to look no further than a day, or even an hour’. Members of her family looked interestedly on. ‘Thank you so much for your news of Mark + Angela,’ the Revd Woolley wrote to Janetta early in 1945. ‘I can’t help mischievously wondering whether Brasco has paid some of his debts.’ On the day the war ended she was giving birth to a second son in Cornwall, where her ever-hopeful boyfriend had invested in a trawler. Shortly afterwards the business collapsed when Brasco was swindled by an associate. With the bailiffs at the door, Angela was forced to sell her Persian lamb coat to buy clothes for the children. ‘I’ve never had any luck with fur coats,’ she explained. ‘They’ve all gone, either in wars or revolutions or divorces, or else they’ve been stolen.’

  6.

  Blinding Impulsions: Janetta 1940–5

  Cyril Connolly has moved into Regent’s Park in a decent house of which he has taken every decent room; the rest go to a Mrs Lootit. I scared him by saying the crown authorities would expel them all for living in sin and have made up for it by the gift of a jardinière.

  Evelyn Waugh, diary, 1 July 1945, The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh (1976)

  Early one evening in the spring of 1942, Dr Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit left the Bloomsbury flat that he shared with his wife and their young daughter in Great Ormond Street and made his way down to a Surrey village outside Dorking, where a friend had invited him to a party. Even at twenty-eight, tall, thin and conspicuous – he described himself as ‘an ordinary but articulate young man’ – and apparently absorbed in the routines of his domestic life, Sinclair-Loutit had a considerable career behind him. After studying medicine at Cambridge he had enlisted in the Marxist International Brigades and served on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Returning to England, and taking up a position at Bart’s Hospital, he married Thora Silverstone, an operating theatre nurse who had been his companion since they met in Spain. Here in the third year of the war, already awarded the MBE for his services during the Blitz, he was working at the headquarters of the London Civil Defence Region. Like many another youngish and left-leaning man in the tightly knit world of wartime London, he knew Cyril Connolly: they had come across each other in Spain, and in the early days of the war Sinclair-Loutit had seen him wandering down Great Ormond Street on a visit to their neighbours, the Lubbocks. The events of the next few days were to draw him even closer to Connolly’s orbit.

  Sinclair-Loutit’s host at the party in Surrey was a man named Tom Wintringham, another Spanish Civil War veteran who, after monitoring the conflict as a war correspondent, had ended up commanding the British Battalion at the battle of the Jamara River, where only 225 of the 600 combatants survived the day’s fighting. Arriving at Wintringham’s house, Sinclair-Loutit discovered that he knew hardly any of the guests. On the other hand, one of the women made an instant impression. Over sixty years later, he could still remember their first encounter in almost photographic detail. ‘She was wearing white wool knitted knee-high stockings and she had straight hair, little make-up as well as an economic, accurate vocabulary. She was beautiful, and in her quiet manner she had immense presence.’ The girl – barely out of her teens, he divined – was called Janetta. Though not long married to a man named Hugh Slater, she was apparently ‘alone’. In the moment they met, Sinclair-Loutit experienced what he described as a ‘coup de foudre, a blinding impulsion’ altogether impossible to resist. As he later put it, ‘what passed between us at that party had presaged, in its total ease and in the idiom and intimacy of our contact, something that I was unable to deny’.

  Janetta was staying at an address in Dorset Street, Marylebone. Sinclair-Loutit acquired her phone number. Ten days later, in an agony of indecision (‘I had been sure of myself but I knew and feared the consequences of taking a road on which there could be no turning back’), he made the call. The telephone was answered on the instant – Janetta confessed that she had barely left the house in the week and a half since they had met – and Sinclair-Loutit’s fate was sealed. Faced with what he called the ‘all or nothing’ option, he went unrepentantly for the all, with the personal and social consequences that the throwing over of one’s wife and child in mid-twentieth-century England entailed. Old friends registered their disquiet. Janetta was widely regarded as a husband-snatching scarlet woman, unfit for polite company. ‘You came to London, you lived with Sinclair-Loutit, you were asked to give him up but you refused’, Diana remembered two years later when divorce proceedings were in train. Even worse, Sinclair-Loutit recalled, his betrayal of Thora and their child was also seen as a betrayal of political principle, the embarrassing spectacle of a tribune of the left abandoning his duty at the siren’s call of an upper-middle-class seducer. Happily, the object of these aspersions knew his Freud. ‘Many of those making this diagnosis were at least bourgeois stock and I realized that their reactions were best explained in terms of their own personal psycho-analytical state.’ In any case, such was the state of Sinclair-Loutit’s romantic excitement that he was prepared to put up with almost any insult flung his way. Janetta, he recalled, ‘made me feel a new and different person’.

  Janetta, at this point, had just celebrated her twentieth birthday. The social circles she and Slater frequented in the early 1940s, symbolised by her attendance at Tom Wintringham’s party, were impeccably left-wing, with a tendency towards Spanish Civil War veterans. Much of their joint contribution to the war effort in the first year of hostilities had been governed by lack of money. The stay in Devon came to an end when war regulations prohibited the transfer of the £10 a month that Jan allowed her daughter through a French bank; Slater’s income, too, was in jeopardy after his once-indulgent former lover, Elizabeth, decided to stop subsidising him. At first the couple decamped to Bristol to work in an armaments factory, but their prospects improved with the receipt of an invitation from Wintringham asking Slater to join him in setting up the Osterley Park training centre for the Home Guard. A blatantly political undertaking founded on the belief that the hundreds of thousands of local defence volunteers should constitute a ‘people’s army’, and strongly deprecated by military traditionalists, the scheme was warmly approved by a third Spanish veteran whom Janetta met at this time. George Orwell’s New Statesman review of Slater’s Home Guard for Victory! (1941) is not only highly enthusiastic (‘The best of the Home Guard manuals issued hitherto’) but notes that the book touches on political problems that are inseparable from the details of military organisation. ‘The reforms it suggests all have the implied aim of making the Home Guard more de
finitely into a People’s Army and breaking the grip of the retired colonel with his pre-machine-gun mentality.’

  A second review, filed for Horizon, claims that if the Home Guard achieves anything at all, it will be down to the efforts of ‘Mr Slater . . . and Tom Wintringham and his other associates at the various Home Guard training schools’. Orwell’s enthusiasm for Slater’s training routines is also a feature of some Home Guard lecture notes, compiled in the period 1940–1 and intended for his own comrades in the organisation’s Regent’s Park unit, where he officiated as sergeant (‘Describe method given by Slater . . . Pass on Slater’s hints . . . Emphasize agreement with Slater here’, runs the section on ‘Street Fighting’). The cumulative effect is enough to suggest that the Osterley Park set-up had a considerable influence on Orwell’s long essay The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941), with its insistence that ‘only a socialist nation can fight effectively’ and its implication that only a revolution in social and political life could bring the defeat of Nazi Germany.

  The success of the Osterley Park experiment had important consequences for Janetta’s private life. Anxious to regularise an institution that looked dangerously unofficial, the War Office drafted the highly experienced Slater into the army with the rank of private. When the absurdity of this was pointed out in the House of Commons by a Labour MP, he was promoted to captain. At the same time he was also encouraged to formalise his relationship with his teenaged girlfriend. The ceremony took place at Reigate Register Office on 6 December 1940. The Revd Woolley, whose permission Janetta had to obtain, sent a wedding gift of £50. Most of the evidence suggests that Janetta saw the marriage to Slater as a temporary arrangement. A diary dating from the early weeks of 1941, when they were living outside Dorking, combines remorseless domestic detail and the to-ings and fro-ings of guests (‘Papa brought apples and a mauve flower in a pot for Humphrey’) with accounts of trips to London, lunches at the Café Royal (‘Lucian Freud standing glumly waiting in hall for someone who never came’) and references to Connolly and his friends (‘C coming here Saturday . . . met Cyril in Lyons. Went to see Peter Wattie . . . Met Cyril in Majorca Restaurant but Orwell didn’t turn up. Peter Q did’). To the teenaged girl Orwell and Connolly seemed ominously alike (‘not an easy man to talk to,’ Janetta later recalled, ‘being, for me in the category of people who silently inhibit one with a strong message that every word you say is unbelievably dull and stupid. Cyril, with his silences, was very good at this’). Early in February she spent the day reading Enemies of Promise, ‘& thought a lot of it very good’. None of this interest in the intellectual life of the metropolis boded well for a relationship with Hugh, lived out in a Surrey community whose relaxations seem to have consisted of political debates with Wintringham and his wife Kitty (‘I won victory in supporting Orwell whom Tom is inclined to attack’). As early as April 1941 she was talking about the likelihood of its ending in divorce.