The spring and summer of 1915 brought death upon death to Nan and Bron Herbert’s circle. First, and most distressingly, Barrie’s adopted son George Llewelyn Davies died at the Front on 15 March, killed by a bullet through the head while listening to instructions from his colonel. He was 21 years old. Barrie received a letter from George two days after his death. As he wrote bleakly to a friend, ‘This is now the common lot.’15 A week after George’s death Rosy Rapture opened in the West End, but the playwright wasn’t present for the first night. Instead Barrie took George’s brothers Michael, 14, and Nico, 11, to stay at Wrest Park–it was the best place he could think of in the circumstances. Wrest’s domestic servants were stricken by the news. George–exquisitely mannered, handsome, athletic–had been doted on during his visits. Barrie’s whole demeanour changed almost overnight. There was a ‘deep hoarded sadness in his blue eyes’, remembers his personal secretary Cynthia Asquith; ‘an impenetrable shell of sadness and preoccupation’.16 I can see Hannah’s mouth tremble as she clasps his hand. ‘Oh Mr Barrie. It is a terrible thing.’
More and more headline news was affecting those at Wrest Park Hospital. On 18 May Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, fiercely criticised for failures such as the munitions shortage and the abortive attack on the Dardanelles, asked his Liberal Cabinet to resign and a coalition government was formed. ‘As far as I am concerned’, wrote Bron to Nan, ‘it is a happy release.’ Despite his age (39) and his wooden leg, Bron pulled the necessary strings to join the Royal Flying Corps and train as a flight commander.
On 26 May their cousin Ettie lost her 27-year-old son Julian Grenfell, who died at Boulogne Hospital with a splinter of wood in his brain. Two months later his younger brother Billy, 25, was killed at the Battle of Hooge. ‘I feel as if all the scaffolding of life was crashing about me daily’, wrote Maurice Baring to Nan.17
In any war the human response to horror, anxiety and grief is often to act in extremis. Norms of behaviour get forgotten. Opportunities are clutched at wildly. Confessions are made; risks are taken. Falling in love, however inappropriately, might have seemed to Hannah Mackenzie and Cecil Argles the only way of forgetting the nerve-jangling uncertainties of the time.
Photographs taken by Nan in the grounds of Wrest Park during the summer of 1915 depict a slightly crazy fairground atmosphere. While Zeppelins began their raids on London, uniformed soldiers were photographed astride ‘Major Wingfield’s camel’–a pale, proud beast with one hump and fuzzy pelt; or sitting six abreast on small donkeys and Shetland ponies (all hunters having been requisitioned for the war). Others are dressed as women (a very beautiful, slim ‘nurse’ coyly holds the hand of laughing young Nurse Cockburn), or posing in medieval tights and tabards. As the weather grew warmer, hospital beds were dragged out to line the wide terrace outside Ward A. Here, handsome soldiers lounged under improvised shades like subalterns in some colonial outpost. It was a summer of camel rides and amputations; of poisoned lungs and bowling parties. Nothing was remotely normal any more–although the Bedfordshire Times tried hard to keep a rousing, patriotic tone as it reported each and every event at Wrest Hospital, Silsoe.
‘On Saturday a cricket match took place in the splendid grounds of the hospital between teams representing the Mother Country and Colonials. It was a splendid game, played in the sporting spirit that soldiers love, and was greatly enjoyed. The Mother Country won by 74 runs.’ The Greenfield troop of Boy Scouts ‘were allowed to distribute the cigarettes among the soldiers’.
Away from the cricket and croquet matches, the oompah tunes of the Ampthill Camp brass band and the gimlet eye of Sergeant Major Kingsley, Wrest was a paradise for lovers. It was here that Nan’s cousin Ettie learnt to flirt so adroitly at house parties in the 1880s and 1890s. ‘You never came to an end of the lovely surprises in those huge pleasure-grounds’, she wrote; ‘the little hidden pavilions, secret Lovers’ Walks, Chinese hedges, the long canal encircling all.’18 Arthur Balfour, writing to a female friend in 1891, depicts Wrest as the perfect setting for clandestine assignations: ‘Shady alleys, delicious yew thickets, ponds, summer houses and gardens make it perfect for all conversational purposes. Every taste, and every “systeme” is suited.’19
How far did Cecil Argles dare pursue his passion for Hannah Mackenzie? Or was it, rather, the other way round–was Hannah the corrupting influence on this married man? She was, according to her great-nephew, a woman who ‘did things to excess’. She drank, she smoked, she pushed a joke to its extremes. She lived life boldly. Hannah was now 33 years old, but she did not fit the contemporary image of spinster. She was a dab hand at making scones and Scotch pancakes, but she was not one to knit or read mind-improving books in her spare time. ‘An old maid is only an old maid when she makes up her mind that she is one and gets upon her shelf unaided’, ran an article in Woman’s Life, 1920, in response to the acute shortage of marriageable men after the war. ‘Girls get married so late in life sometimes that no one can really be called an “old maid”. Cupid’s bow and arrow are waiting for everyone.’20
The stereotypical spinster housekeeper was required to keep an eye on her girls: to safeguard their virtue vigilantly. Yet that summer of 1915, Hannah Mackenzie’s focus was not on her housemaids, and her mistress spent most of her time in the operating theatre. With no one to peel those young maids away from girl-starved Tommies and push them back to their duties, the domestic harmony of Wrest Park Hospital began to unravel.
I would love, at this point, to produce a snapshot of a forbidden moment under the weeping willows. Dusk is falling: Argles turns, trembling, to Hannah, pulls her slim waist towards him, speaks of his passion. And there is Nan, slowly stalking them with her Kodak, her matron’s apron stained at the hem with cut grass–Nan the hunter, who later writes of ‘a most marvellous rabbit stalk’ in her diary.
But I can’t. We do not know what led to Hannah’s downfall–whether there was a specific unforgivable incident. It’s possible, of course, that our housekeeper did not reciprocate the land agent’s feelings; that she was embarrassed by his attentions; that his spaniel eyes were the talk of the basement corridors and it was undermining her authority. It appears that the violence of Argles’s crush had, in the end, made Hannah’s position untenable, just one year into the job. Nan’s daughter paraphrases this part of her mother’s diary in the scrapbooks. She (or Nan) is tight-lipped, and the language she uses is extreme. But what exactly did she mean? ‘In 1915 the domestic situation had become dangerous and disorderly and it was obvious that Hannah Mackenzie would have to be replaced.’
It is unclear whether Hannah herself is the cause, or whether she is unable to handle the insurrection. Probably it was a combination of the two. On 1 July the housekeeper was forced to place two advertisements in The Times to replace the scullery maid and third parlourmaid, teenage girls who had fallen foul of the regime. Did the word ‘dangerous’ hint at sexual impropriety?
It was the disorder that Nan, in the final analysis, could not bear. She was fanatically systematic and she would not have her ‘A1’ hospital compromised from the basement up. Yet she was not a natural manager of people, and as with the sacking of Miss Martin she could not bring herself to have an honest chat with Hannah. First Nan waited until Hannah’s ally J. M. Barrie left for Scotland on holiday (where he found it ‘as bare of population owing to this war as if this were the month before Creation’).21 Then, seeing that there were very few wounded soldiers coming in, she decided to close the hospital for a month for general repairs. This gave her the plausible excuse she needed to talk to Hannah Mackenzie.
If this were a J. M. Barrie play, our second act ends abruptly with the denouement between Nan and her housekeeper. ‘August 30 1915: Settled Hannah’s “holiday” and installed King in catering department. All day job.’