The Lost Girls Read online

  ‘There’s gin in the other room if you want some,’ says Liza, who clearly intends to make an evening of it, but Naomi shakes her head, for the glass and a half of red wine she has drunk has gone to her head, the clock on the wall above the mantelpiece a foot or two beyond Connolly’s head is showing ten to nine, and it is a long way back to Shepperton. Unhooking her mackintosh – which in her absence has acquired a streak of cigarette ash running down one of the arms – from its peg, she sees that Lys is standing in the doorway, arms crossed over her chest, examining Connolly with a look of unfeigned admiration, like a mother watching a small child take its first tottering steps across a carpet.

  Outside the rain has stopped and the square is black as pitch: a wind has got up and is crazing the tops of the trees in the wild garden. The ARP wardens have all gone away. She reaches the small semi-detached house in Shepperton at three minutes past ten, to be soundly scolded by her mother, told that George is feeling better and has telephoned to ask after her, and sent upstairs with a cup of cocoa to the bedroom she shares with her younger sister. Gladys, who is seventeen and works in a munitions factory, is already in bed with her face shiny with cold cream and her hair done up in curl-papers. ‘Did you have a nice time?’ she asks – a bit sleepily – as Naomi (who has almost resolved to buy herself a pair of trousers, whatever her mother may say) steps out of her shoes and divests herself of the calf-length floral skirt. ‘Very interesting,’ Naomi says, with the memory of Connolly, Lys, Brian and the others rampaging through her head. ‘Not really your kind of thing, though.’

  None of this happened. Naomi, George, Gladys, the semi-detached house at Shepperton – none of them exists. Neither, as described, does the party at 49 Bedford Square on that damp September night in 1942. On the other hand, something very like it with most of the same personnel took place dozens of times in the 1940s, and while there is no absolute proof that Orwell, Waugh, Quennell, Lucian Freud, Dylan Thomas (another Horizon habitué) and Julian Maclaren-Ross ever stood together on Connolly’s drawing-room carpet in Bedford Square, there is every chance that they did. Connolly, it scarcely needs saying, was a convivial man, who enjoyed having his friends around him and spent much of his time blurring the distinction between his personal and professional life. And so the history of Horizon is as much about parties and luncheons, drinks at the Ritz Bar and the Café Royal, as it is about earnest editorial conferences and words being put on paper. But although long stretches of it are concerned with his habits, achievements and influence, this is not a book about Cyril Connolly. Rather, it is a study of the women who formed a substantial part of his circle during the Second World War and the years that followed it, the women who fizzed in his slipstream, the women whom at various times he employed, fell in love with and very often schemed to marry, and over whom he cast a spell so prodigious that when he died, over three decades later, they came in relays to sorrow over his hospital bed.

  A study of the women. Plenty of books have been written about Connolly in the four-and-a-half decades since his death: two full-length biographies, histories of Horizon, editions of his journals and his journalism, to add to the reissues of his one indisputable masterpiece, Enemies of Promise. Only Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell, among his immediate contemporaries, have done better. Much less attention has been paid to Barbara, Lys, Sonia, Janetta and the other girls who during the 1940s and in varying degrees after it were the handmaidens at his court. There are obvious reasons for this. Connolly was at the centre of the world that sustained him. Horizon was his creation, his project, his personal mission, a vehicle for writers who, with certain exceptions, were cut from his own cloth, which is to say men of the same age and the same social and intellectual background. Of the ninety or so contributors brought together in The Golden Horizon (1953), the anthology in which Connolly celebrated the best of the magazine’s ten-year crop, exactly seven were women. He was, in terms of the rarefied landscape through which he moved, a titanic figure, to be flattered, deferred to and appeased: a target for ridicule and spiteful gossip, perhaps, but also a grand literary panjandrum in a world where grand literary panjandrums mattered. Evelyn Waugh, to take an obvious example of the deeply ambiguous terms on which it was possible to live with Connolly, might have spent twenty years exchanging injurious tittle-tattle about him with Nancy Mitford, but no one was more conscious than Waugh of the debt he owed him or the respect with which he ought to be treated.

  Much of the literary history of the 1940s, consequently, consists of watching Connolly in action: gliding from party to party, from romantic conquest to romantic conquest, from high profile commission to high profile commission. It is easy enough, in the course of this grand promenade, to miss the women, but they are always there: arranging Connolly’s life for him, doing his chores, typing his letters, opening his mail, conciliating his whims and occasionally risking his serious displeasure by striking out on paths of their own. What gives Barbara, Lys, Sonia, Janetta and the others their fascination is, on the one hand, the pungency of their individual personalities – they were strong-minded, intelligent women who for the most part lived their lives as they chose – and, on the other, the things they represent. From one angle they are a way into a certain kind of war-era bohemian life in which glamour and sophistication and something very close to poverty are inextricably combined, where the dinner at the fashionable restaurant gives way to the sleepless night in the unheated bedsitting room, where boyfriend a is a peer of the realm while boyfriend b is a penniless painter. A world, more to the point, of recklessness and unreliable contraception, where love affairs have a habit of ending in the abortionist’s clinic. From another, they exemplify a unique moment in twentieth-century British social history in which a tiny group of upper-middle-class young women broke free from the restrictions of their upbringing and achieved a degree of personal freedom that would have been unknown to the generation before them. Naturally these liberties came at a cost, and personal fulfilment and public success were very often accompanied by deeply felt private hurt.

  All these journeys – individual and communal – were given greater potency by the fact that they took place in wartime and were pursued – sometimes literally – to an accompaniment of falling bombs and the slither of telegrams falling through the letterbox. ‘For the undamaged survivors, the 1940s were a magical period’, a woman at large in wartime London once affectionately recalled, but again the survival came at a cost; sometimes the damage could take years to declare itself. If there is another factor that unites Lys, Barbara, Sonia, Janetta and their friends it is the sense of personal trauma: of promising relationships cut short by circumstance; of lives not falling into the comfortable grooves that the people living them anticipated; of freedom, self-reliance and self-determination, but also vulnerability, isolation, pain and loss. Peter Quennell, who christened them ‘the lost girls’, admired their courage and their tenacity while at the same time noting their detachment and the intensely precarious nature of their lives.

  And then there is the question of milieu, background and association. Outwardly conventional upper-middle-class young women the majority of the Lost Girls may have been, but their trajectories reach out to encompass vast stretches of mid-century experience. The last decades of the Raj; the late thirties art world; haute couture; second-generation Bloomsbury; wartime Cairo; left-wing politics – in each of these very different worlds, their modishly shod feet left an indelible print. Finally, there are the careers they fashion after the wartime world of Horizon, Connolly’s parties and bomb-cratered streets is over. In time, the Lost Girls will go on to write and appear in novels, have affairs with dukes, feature in celebrity divorce cases and – in the case of Sonia – marry one of the most celebrated writers of the whole twentieth century.

  For the moment all this lies in the future. But its origins can be found here in the Bedford Square drawing room in the early years of the Second World War, as the plumes of cigarette smoke rise to the ceiling, the black-market wine i
s brought out from its hiding place, Connolly’s contributors carouse and, from their various vantage points – from brocaded sofas or high-backed chairs or treading barefoot across the carpet – the Lost Girls look on.

  Part One

  1.

  The Wanton Chase

  To be a young man these days. What wouldn’t I give for that! Think of the time they have. No chaperones; bachelor girls with flats and latchkeys. People say that the modern girl knows how to look after herself. I fancy that’s just what she does know . . .

  Alec Waugh, “Sir,” She Said (1930)

  Of all the phantom party-goers assembled in Cyril Connolly’s Bedford Square drawing room on that September evening in 1942, the guest most familiar with Lost Girl routines was Peter Quennell. Even at this early stage, with the third year of the war only just complete, Quennell could have happily taken on the task of compiling a full-scale gazetteer of their haunts, homes and affiliations. It was not merely that, in the shape of his third wife Glur, he was precariously married to one Lost Girl, or that, in the form of Connolly’s fellow-lodger Barbara Skelton, he was in hot pursuit of another. It was simply that the life he led – vagrant, rootless, opportunistic – was almost expressly designed to place him in their company. The territory he stalked – the room in someone’s flat, the early evening drink in the Ritz Bar, the Bloomsbury party – was theirs, and most of his complicated social existence was spent in a world which they themselves inhabited. Several of Connolly’s biographers have noted his role as a kind of one-man introduction service, guiding his friend into the orbit of women he would later live with, marry or fruitlessly pursue. It was Quennell, after all, who had introduced Connolly to Lys, just as a month or two later he had introduced him to Barbara. Both encounters would turn out to have a serious impact on Connolly’s ever more convoluted emotional life.

  Even more significant was Quennell’s practical experience of what a relationship with a Lost Girl could be like when the chips were down. The letters he exchanged with Barbara around the time they moved into the Bedford Square attic can make melancholy reading. ‘I have been hoping I might get a letter from you,’ runs a desperate entreaty from sometime in early 1942. ‘Naturally I don’t deserve one, but it would have been nice.’ An earlier note conveys all the pained displeasure of the prospectively abandoned. ‘WHAT’s this about going to the country and never wanting to see me again?’ And then there is the letter sent from Quennell’s desk at the Ministry of Economic Warfare on New Year’s Day 1943, addressed to ‘Skeltie darling’ and acknowledging the dismal truth that ‘Writing to you is like masturbation – it produces a feeling of relief but ultimately does no good. Up to a point I can enjoy myself without you, but – why I don’t quite know – you have become a part (tho’ often an uncomfortable part) of my life, & (in spite of all my good resolutions) I find myself missing you . . .’ If it was hell to live with Barbara, who was quite capable of throwing the kitchen crockery about when roused, then not living with her could be even worse. Quennell’s romantic life in the early 1940s is, consequently, hedged about with deep unease, the awareness that what he wanted made him miserable barbed by a lurking suspicion that not having it would make him more miserable still.

  Forty years later, in one of the volumes of discreet and gentlemanly memoirs with which he beguiled his old age – books so discreet and gentlemanly that much of the female cast appears under pseudonyms – Quennell sat down to conceptualise the tiny part of the wartime demographic he had spent so much of his time observing four decades before. The Lost Girls, he decided, were ‘adventurous young women who flitted around London, alighting briefly here and there, and making the best of any random perch on which they happened to descend’. Almost immediately, though, there were distinctions to be drawn. Quennell’s wandering female tribe were not ‘lost’ in the Victorian sense of the word – that is, seduced, abandoned and thrown out of doors by outraged parents. Most of them, he concedes, came from highly respectable families with whom they kept intermittently in touch and from whom they could solicit funds when the going got tough. Neither, at least in the context of the notoriously rackety 1940s, were their private lives particularly dissipated. ‘What distinguished them – and used to touch my heart – was their air of waywardness and loneliness.’ They were ‘courageous’, Quennell thought, living in the moment, ‘perfectly capable of existing without any thought for past or future’.

  Of all the accounts of Lys, Barbara, Sonia, Janetta and their satellites, this is the one that comes closest to establishing what they were really like, the air that they carried around with them, the shimmer of the personalities on display, and the curious sense of detachment that attends their progress through the drawing rooms and basements of wartime Bloomsbury. In her portrait of Sonia, Hilary Spurling suggests of the women who helped out at Horizon, answered Cyril’s letters and hovered over his engagement diary that ‘all of them were in some sense sports from the upper-middle-class typing pool, freelancing energetically between the constraints of school and marriage’. But this, you suspect, is to domesticate them, to impose a degree of social homogeneity that did not in the end exist, and to ignore some of the factors that both gave them their individual sheen and brought them together as a distinctive social unit. The Second World War drew thousands of young women to London to work in government offices or factories, to live in hostels or furnished flats, spend their leisure hours in pubs and cheap restaurants and chase an existence that their mothers’ generation would have thought inconceivable. The novels of the 1940s are full of them – pale, brightly lipsticked Sheila in Monica Dickens’s The Fancy (1943), say, who escapes the confines of her Home Counties upbringing for a job in munitions and an affair with a married man. But Sheila, for all her determination to carve out a life of her own, is not a Lost Girl. Theirs was a far more exclusive status, in which a whole host of factors, ranging from looks to social connection, combined to produce a figure who is more or less unique.

  What were a Lost Girl’s defining characteristics? How, at a distance of nearly eighty years, can we identify her and separate her from the crowd? One obvious factor was her date of birth. Most Lost Girls tend to have born at around the time of the First World War. Angela Culme-Seymour (b. 1912) was one of the more senior members; Janetta (b. 1921) the most junior. Another factor was her startling – at times almost outrageous – beauty. ‘Mais que tu as devenue belle,’ one of Sonia’s early boyfriends is supposed to have told her. A man briefly entangled with Barbara in the 1950s noted that ‘to catch her eye was more or less to enter into a conspiracy’. The normally dispassionate Frances Partridge thought that Janetta had ‘the most beautiful female body I have ever seen’.

  These attractions were difficult to keep under wraps. The Lost Girl’s portrait appeared in Vogue. She modelled dresses for celebrated couturiers such as Schiaparelli or Norman Hartnell. She appeared in fashion magazines endorsing hand and face cream. To beauty could be added, for the most part, high intelligence, which had, by and large, little formal grounding. Although there were brief appearances at art schools and technical colleges, no Lost Girl seems to have attended a university or indeed stayed in education much beyond her mid-teens, and such learning as she acquired tended to be picked up on the hoof: a friend recalled Sonia gambolling around Connolly like a Labrador puppy as they walked down a street together, rapturously absorbing each new pronouncement that he let fall. For all her sulks and sarcasm, Barbara was remembered as, deep down, possessing an odd streak of seriousness, a half-buried intellectual twist that allowed her to combine a relish for causing trouble for its own sake with a genuine shyness, uncertainty and eagerness to learn.

  In most cases these deficiencies were down to a fractured and oppressive family life that the majority of Lost Girls spent their adolescence scheming to escape. If only Lys was a bona-fide orphan, then the others tended to be the product of one-parent families in difficult circumstances, in some cases sent prematurely into the world by relatives with whom t
hey had dramatically fallen out. Barbara left home to live in a YWCA hostel at the tender age of fifteen. The newly liberated Janetta could be found lodging in a room on the upper floor of a house owned by her brother-in-law and attending Chelsea Polytechnic. Standards of parental responsibility were not high. Angela remembered her mother telling her when she was in her mid-teens that ‘From now on you must be free to do anything you want.’ What sort of thing? her daughter innocently wondered. ‘Well, when you’re older, you must have lovers. You’re so pretty you should have heaps of them.’

  None of this was calculated to encourage a settled existence or a hankering for conventional life. Freedom and the lack of parental constraint gave the Lost Girls a welcome sense of independence, but it also made them vulnerable, pliable, easy prey for less than scrupulous older men. Outward self-confidence very often disguised a deep-rooted naivety, an inability to judge the people they knocked up against or the codes by which they operated. Asked why, at the age of seventeen, she had allowed herself to be seduced by a man old enough to be her father, Janetta is supposed to have answered that she assumed it was ‘what one did’.