The Lost Girls Read online

  The same thought had occurred to Frances Partridge who, whenever Hugh was brought down to Wiltshire, welcomed him, as she candidly acknowledged, for Janetta’s sake ‘while thinking him hardly good enough for her’. There is a glimpse of the couple in late September 1940, when they arrive at Ham Spray for the weekend ‘to have a rest from the bombing’. Frances noted that Janetta ‘with the most remarkable candour and realism said that she felt far more terrified than she would have believed possible, and flung herself on the floor trembling all over’. Six months later Janetta rang to announce her arrival at Hungerford Station and the news that Hugh was in camp (‘and it is horrible trying to live alone’). She also filed a report of a recent dinner party in Fitzroy Square where, with an air-raid in full spate, Cecil Beaton stood at the window marvelling at the spectacle: ‘It’s too fascinating, too extraordinary.’

  The Partridges were also keeping up with other members of the Woolley family. Jan was trapped in German-occupied France, having failed to make her escape in the summer of 1940, but there was an ominous visit from Janetta’s brother Rollo, then training to be an RAF pilot. Frances recorded that her Great War veteran husband wondered whether the young man ‘fully realizes the suicidal nature of his career. I don’t know.’ Rollo came a second time, shortly after he had passed his pilot’s exams: ‘He touched both R. and me very much by his friendliness and charming manners and I suppose by the pathos of his position.’ But their principal concern, as ever, was Janetta. In the summer of 1940, Frances had noted that she was ‘someone of whom I am fonder and more closely linked to than anyone except R. and Burgo’. Slater, clearly, was a short-term expedient, an also-ran in the high-class emotional steeplechase on which Janetta now seemed launched. But who was to succeed him? For the next twenty years, Frances’s diaries come crammed with analyses (and, for the most part, pained dismissals) of likely candidates for her young friend’s hand, hugely exacting yardsticks that the vast majority of aspirants had little chance of satisfying.

  Most of the Slaters’ married life seems to have been lived out in hotels, which Janetta disliked. With Hugh, increasingly immersed in his military career (‘restless & impatient’), detached, critical and also, his wife suspected, drinking too much, Janetta found herself drawn to the smart London world to which she had been introduced by Connolly and his friends. The maisonette at Drayton Gardens was a perpetual lure, as was her new friend Diana Witherby, now more or less detached from Connolly, whom Janetta admired for her ‘wonderfully clear & perceptive mind’ and her ‘great sensitivity’. By the summer of 1941 the two women were sharing a flat in Dorset Street, NW1. Slater arrived there one evening to have the situation explained to him – a sad and rather touching figure, Janetta recalled, ‘without the superiority and arrogance which had begun to exasperate me’. By early 1942 – about the time of the Dorking party – Frances was able to congratulate herself that Slater had finally been dispensed with: ‘The slight veil that swathed her during her subjection to Humphrey has floated away, and I am confirmed in my view that she is one of the most intelligent, beautiful and sensitive young creatures I know.’ Come mid-May, she notes that Janetta has written asking ‘if she could bring her new friend Kenneth for the weekend’. Nothing was said; the young lovers were welcomed into the Ham Spray fold; but Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit, alas, was not what the Partridges had in mind. Thereafter, though treated with every politeness, his candidature was suspect. Were the relationship to go wrong, it was abundantly clear whose side Frances and Ralph would take.

  Here in the summer of 1942, these intimations of disquiet ran far below the surface of what appeared to be an idyllic relationship. Janetta admired her new partner’s war work among the bombed-out houses, and found him ‘enormously practical & organised & brave’. She found a flat near Regent’s Park, filled it with some Woolley family furniture from the store where it had lain since Jan departed for the south of France, and subsidised the rent by persuading Diana to occupy the spare room. Some of her time seems to have been spent at Osterley Park, rather less of it helping out at Lansdowne Terrace. Janetta would always maintain that her practical involvement with Horizon was negligible, but she remembered sifting through the piles of unsolicited manuscripts and she was certainly present at one famous episode in the magazine’s history when the December 1942 number was found to contain Julian Maclaren-Ross’s short story ‘This Mortal Coil’, from which Connolly had forgotten to remove several appearances of the word ‘bugger’.

  The Curwen Press, fearful that any scandal arising from this lapse might compromise their government contracts, were aghast and a censoring party, consisting of Connolly, Watson and Janetta, set off by tube to the printing office at Plaistow to erase the words by hand. As they reached the East End an air-raid began and the train came to a halt, leaving them ‘horribly vulnerable in that sea of railway lines’. (Orwell refers to the ‘bugger’ incident in an ‘As I Please’ column for Tribune, 6 December 1946: ‘Recently it has become possible in England to print the word in full in a book, but in periodicals it still has to be B dash. Only five or six years ago it was printed in a well-known monthly magazine, but the last-minute panic was so great that a weary staff had to black the word out by hand.’)

  None of this was enough to stop Janetta being gathered up by the war effort. Sometime in 1942 she was conscripted into the ARP, and set to work at the Rising Hill First Aid post, on the boundary between Islington and Finsbury: ‘I went to Islington and sat in the basement of a school and was supposed to bandage people when they got hurt but nobody got hurt at all; I never bandaged anyone.’ If this employment was short-lived, it was probably because, within a few months of setting up home with Sinclair-Loutit, she discovered she was pregnant. As with Slater, there was talk of an abortion, but Janetta decided she wanted the baby (‘This time something inside me had physically taken over’). Frances’s diary from early November records a ‘lovely visit’ from her, in which she talked about ‘dreading’ not doing her best for the child and wanting to have it without anaesthetic. Meeting her again in London a few months later, Frances – more protective than ever – was in ecstasies over her attitude to impending motherhood. Old-style Bloomsbury had never been very keen on the idea of what Lytton Strachey had called le petit peuple gate-crashing the seemly pursuits of their elders and Janetta’s determination not to become a tiresomely adoring mother secured her warm approval. ‘One finds very few people these days to hold out against children and say they aren’t suitable company for adults’, Frances enthused.

  Simultaneously, there came warning signs from a personal life that would be increasingly subject to trauma. One of them was the return of Jan, whose slow journey from German-occupied France via neutral Lisbon was advertised in a letter to the Partridges. The effect of this ordeal on Jan’s habitually frail constitution was catastrophic: ‘I’m so thin that I rattle in the bath, and my bones have actually come through my skin in some places’, she told Frances. Janetta left a heartfelt account of meeting her on the platform at Paddington: ‘Tall & very thin & very brown, with her characteristic slightly bent & awkward stance. Oh, how I hugged that thin body.’ She arrived at Ham Spray in May 1942, reporting that conditions in France were bad, with little to eat and the street cafés devoid of anything to drink or smoke but still crammed with people desperate for company (‘I used to take a fan and fan myself, so as to have something to do’). Watching her depart after a second visit in August, Frances thought her appearance, hair belling out under a little blue cap ‘like a young man in an Italian fresco’, strangely poignant. ‘As she turned to wave one saw her fine eyes set in a deeply-wrinkled face; they have lost none of their beauty with age and even gain by the contrast.’

  The tragedies that struck in the early part of 1943 can be followed in Frances’s diaries. Janetta was anxious about Rollo, now serving with the RAF in North Africa. In the second week of January came a postcard from Janetta and a letter from Jan conveying the same news: that Rollo was missing and that the
Revd Woolley, who also happened to be in North Africa, believed him dead. ‘Rollo always seemed to have a doomed air, as if he knew himself not to be long for this earth’, Frances grimly reflected.

  Hastening to London, the Partridges found Jan with her husband’s letters on the table before her. As passionately convinced of the non-existence of God as they were about the futility of war, Frances and Ralph were unimpressed: ‘Geoff’s letters were maddening: instead of definite details about the exact wording of the report, he wrote crazily about feeling Rollo near him, and the stars, and God, and how kind everyone was being to him. So much for his Christianity.’ On the following day, they had lunch with Janetta at the Ivy – ‘her courage was as remarkable as Jan’s, but different’.

  Worse was to come. A month later a telegram arrived at Ham Spray announcing that Jan was dead. Telephoning Janetta, a shocked Frances learned that her mother had been recovering from influenza, suffered a relapse and died shortly afterwards in hospital to the bewilderment of her carers. Janetta reported that ‘when I took her there I suddenly saw that she was dying. The hospital couldn’t understand why she had died and said she should have had every chance, but seemed to have no resistance at all.’ The suspicion was that Jan, already enfeebled by her journey back to England, traumatised by Rollo’s disappearance and convinced that he would never return, no longer had the will to live. Janetta had lost both mother and, potentially, brother in the space of five weeks.

  Friends tried to raise her from the pit of depression into which she quickly subsided and remained for many months afterwards. ‘It was appalling how much I cried,’ she remembered. ‘Everything, everywhere brought on uncontrollable floods of tears.’ There was more trouble before the funeral, when Jan’s brother, the Conservative MP Ian Orr-Ewing, shouted abuse at her over the telephone. He had probably heard something ‘about all his sister’s family being thoroughly disreputable’, Janetta deduced. Those who offered consolation were grimly aware of how little comfort it would bring. ‘Rollo you will get over,’ Connolly later assured her, ‘for it is not so much what he was as what he might have become . . . you will get over that. Jan is a different matter . . . Try writing down your worst moments of regret & nostalgia – it makes them seem worse at the time but it helps to get them out of the system.’

  Absolute proof that Rollo was dead – a letter from the Revd Woolley revealing that his papers had been found on the body of a dead soldier – arrived in early May (the ever-observant Frances noted that Sinclair-Loutit handed it over in ‘rather an off-hand way’).

  A month later, in June 1943, Janetta went into labour and produced a girl named Nicolette, having shortly beforehand changed her name to Sinclair-Loutit to produce what her partner termed ‘a nice elegant birth certificate’.

  By this time the couple had moved from their original lodgings to a much bigger flat above a shop named ‘Claire’s’, selling handmade chocolates, opposite the gates of Regent’s Park. The atmosphere, as Sinclair-Loutit remembered it, was determinedly Gallic, with French earthenware bowls and café au lait much in evidence. There were dinners with Elizabeth Bowen, who lived nearby at Clarence Terrace, a trip to the Wigmore Hall to hear Natasha Spender give her first recital, and a social life in which Connolly and his Horizon cronies played a significant part. Sinclair-Loutit would recall the memory of Orwell, eating alone at the Majorca in Soho, seeing them pass by on the pavement and calling them inside, ‘though it would not be me he wanted to talk to’. (Orwell, who had fought with the Trotskyist POUM militia in Spain, was eternally suspicious of Sinclair-Loutit’s International Brigades Marxism.) And there was a curious encounter with Lucian Freud, then in the Merchant Navy, whom Janetta invited to dinner to discuss his worries over the receipt of a summons to an army medical: he and Sinclair-Loutit devised a strategy in which Freud painted his black shoes white, and by dint of constantly drawing attention to them, was diagnosed psychiatrically unfit for military service.

  In Sinclair-Loutit’s recollection, he and Janetta were blissfully happy, living as they chose, untroubled by social convention: ‘It was our affair and ours alone.’ Nineteen forty-three, he later decided, ‘was the happiest year of my life’. Janetta, he recalled, ‘had an admirable mastery of the small things of life, so our days were comfortable and trouble free. With her, problems vanished as soon as they emerged’. Janetta herself was less sure. Childcare was hard work, she decided, made worse by Connolly’s ‘jeering “pram in the hall” attitude’. But Sinclair-Loutit was convinced that he dwelt in a domestic nirvana. Even the Partridges, he thought, had come to accept him, ‘treating my emergence into their world with tolerant kindness’. If there were any seeds of doubt they lay in the fact that, as Sinclair-Loutit acknowledged, all this domestic harmony made him ‘absurdly self-confident and far too pleased with myself’.

  Meanwhile, the tocsin of family history clanged in his ears. There had, after all, been ‘two generations of bolters’. Would Janetta make a third? But the catalyst for the unexpected downturn in their relationship turned out to be poor, dead Rollo. Sinclair-Loutit had liked the younger man, and considered him an ally. The arrival of his personal effects in the mail had a sobering effect, making him feel ‘how undeserved was my relative security’. This realisation coincided with a summons, sometime late in 1943, to an interview with Air Vice-Marshal Sir Victor Richardson and the news that he was being considered as a candidate for a staff officer’s job in the Balkans.

  Whoever obtained the post would proceed to it by a rather circuitous route. The immediate need, Sinclair-Loutit discovered, was for an Allied Military Liaison Officer based in Cairo. But this would be an interim step, leading – it was assumed – to United Nations agency work in Yugoslavia or Romania as the Allies set about the task of cleaning up parts of Eastern Europe previously occupied by the Nazis. Still haunted by the memory of Rollo, dead in the skies above Tunisia, Sinclair-Loutit expressed an enthusiastic interest. Janetta, on the other hand, was furious, detecting in his behaviour only ‘a perverse reversal of all our priorities, a silly incomprehensible seeking for adventure on my part for which our little family would have to pay the price’. It was an interesting and exciting job, she later reflected, ‘and there was every reason to say yes, except for me’. None of this boded well, but after looming alarmingly above the horizon for a week or two the spectre of separation then dwindled away to nothing. There were no further instructions from the authorities and life in the Regent’s Park flat and at Ham Spray went on more or less as before. Frances’s diary for late 1943 notes that ‘Janetta and family are here’, while mother and daughter enjoyed a three-week holiday in the spring of 1944 in which ‘Nicolette slept in the garden, crawled all over the lawn and grew fatter, browner and more energetic before our eyes’.

  Then, without warning, in the third week of July, Sinclair-Loutit’s embarkation orders came through. There was one last weekend at Ham Spray, but the newly appointed Lieutenant-Colonel, Military Liaison Office attached Minister Resident Cairo, was given to understand that his departure was regarded as ‘a desertion’. The Partridges, too, were appalled, and Sinclair-Loutit was glumly aware that in their eyes he qualified for the ‘pacifist anathema’. The embarkation order directed him to Newquay, where a plane would take him to the Middle East. Arriving at the Cornish town he spent three days wandering the streets and awaiting instructions, telephoning Janetta several times but never being able to have a proper talk, owing to the blanket of security that hung over his impending journey. On one of these excursions he found a glazed earthenware figure from 1820, a ‘sweetheart’s token’, that he thought might appeal to his lost love, and commissioned the shop to post it to her. Then on 24 July, dimly aware that he had created a problem that it might be beyond his ability to solve, he left England for the Middle East. A letter sent just before he embarked assured Janetta ‘how much I think + think about you + how I long to hear from you + how I remember that last warm ½ hour with Nicky roaring with laughter at the edge of the bed’.<
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  Like many another military man posted to North Africa in the 1940s, Sinclair-Loutit enjoyed his time in Cairo. He stayed at Patrick Balfour’s flat with its view over the Ibn Tulun mosque and, in the intervals of assembling what was to become the first units of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) Yugoslavia, relished the ‘extraordinary liveliness’ of a city that made London seem dowdy by comparison. These diversions included the presence of Topolski, a notorious gossip, whom Sinclair-Loutit blamed for ‘spreading piquant stories about myself when he returned to London’. A stream of letters sped back to Janetta at the Regent’s Park flat, but he was conscious that the issues that really mattered to them were unlikely to get an airing, given that she ‘could never get over her disapproval of my being so willing to depart overseas’. ‘I can feel your warmth + kindness so well,’ he wrote in mid-August, ‘please don’t get unhappy – please don’t hate me for not being there.’