CHAPTER 9

IN THE summer of 1947 before the episode with Pino, Henrietta had managed to convince Hugo that she needed a healthy holiday with a girlfriend. The girlfriend chosen was, sadly, even then somewhat eccentric and has, in fact, since been committed to a mental home. However, in 1947 Pammie was able to serve Henrietta’s purpose by supposedly joining her on a ‘walking tour’. Weighed down with Hugo’s banknotes but nothing more athletic than a few flimsy nightgowns, Henrietta and Pammie embarked on the cross-channel ferry, blowing kisses to Hugo, and were met at Calais by Henrietta’s husband, with car, on leave from Germany. Pammie was sent back on the next boat. David and I contrived a holiday on the Cote d’Azur every summer, in addition to our Paris weekends, and our racing trips with Bira and Chula, so we drove down and we all four met up at our old stamping ground, La Reserve. We had all been friends in Sydney during the war. (David had told me he thought he’d been to bed with Henrietta before we had met. He was not sure having, it seemed, had quite a bit to drink, but he did remember a Chinese takeaway dinner in her apartment, and Henrietta disappearing to reappear in a black lace nightgown. The black nightgown had made such an impression that he was unable to concentrate on the remainder of the evening with similar clarity.)

Tam and Maggy Williams had rented a house down the coast; friends, Eliza and Tommy Clyde were at another one; and we all set about the business of procuring enough French francs for our holiday, it being the years of the £25 travel allowance. Only Henrietta had smuggled enough in. The rest of us were condemned to the nightly prowl at the Carlton Bar where we could meet Cedric Keogh, the leader of the pack of English law-breaking currency traders. He had direct access to one Max Intrator, who was to figure largely in the press headlines later that year. I had wangled an introduction to a Frenchman, Roger Peronnier, who came often to London, so Maggy and Tam and I acquired our francs from him. We were too late to save Eliza. She was the only one of us to actually write out a cheque direct to ‘Max Intrator’—handed to Cedric under the table and later published on the front page of the Daily Mail when Max Intrator was caught.

‘Duke’s Daughter in Currency Scandal’ blazed the headlines, and Eliza was reported as having changed £3000. In 1947 £3000 was a fortune. Eliza had actually changed £300, and was fined accordingly. She successfully sued the Mail; damages were awarded to her. She claimed only £300 and came out square: the Daily Mail, no doubt, could not believe its luck.

Living through the war had accustomed us all to living on the brink—of danger, of luxury, of penury. My new friends fitted perfectly into the framework of my upbringing. Few of us earned a regular wage; none of us had saved a penny; all of us dined nightly at the Ivy, the Caprice, the Savoy Grill, and drank champagne for breakfast. We took off across the channel to sunshine and more champagne and the Parisian shops with not much thought of the future bills to settle. Roger Peronnier helped to push these horrid thoughts further into the background as he seldom came to England more than twice a year. Settling up was ‘mañana’.

However, one day he arrived, unannounced, and it fell to me to telephone Tam with the request for a rendezvous. Tam had had a particularly bad day at the races and so the required £400 was a bitter pill to digest after an almost forgotten summer idyll. The francs with which he had furnished us had been well spent. The Monte Carlo casino was still the haunt of international gamblers like the famed Dolly Sisters, but they were equally welcoming to ‘les jeunes Anglais’ as long as bills were paid. On the night that David, Tam and Tommy had all gone ‘banquo’ at the tables, we were cleaned out. Offers to wash up were ignored, so all our passports were impounded, rescued the next day by Roger’s francs. Somehow Tam managed to scrape the sterling equivalent together: we all met for a forced welcoming drink for Roger in the Savoy Bar.

Roger pocketed Tam’s envelope, bade us all a courteous farewell and went up to his room and shot himself.

We were unable to find out if the £400 was still, neatly folded, in his pocket and could only, miserably, read the news headlines about his body. He had done us proud and we felt guilty that we had not given him a jollier send off…

* * *

I had my allowance from home. David had his Naval pay and the allowance of £5 per week given to him, and also to his cousin, the then Prince Philip of Greece, by their uncle, Lord Mountbatten. We decided that between us we could afford to rent a furnished flat of our own. Through friends we found a charming two bedroomed flat in the Kings Road for £8 per week, of which we paid half each.

As David was able to be in London only at weekends I had ample opportunity to make many new friends, and of these, one was to become central to my life. This was the photographer, Baron, then the first of the eminent photographers to be socially ‘acceptable’, barring Cecil Beaton. He owed this partly to his unique and lovable personality, partly to his connections, and not a great deal to his talent. In youth, he and the then young Dickie Mountbatten had both been in love with a fascinating French woman, Yola Letellier, and they had met at her feet in Paris. They had remained friends: in time, Uncle Dickie had introduced Baron to his nephew, Philip, and in turn Philip introduced him to David and me.

Baron (his full name was Baron Nahum, but he was always known as Baron) became one of my dearest friends: we spoke every day on the telephone until his death. Through him I met and mixed with many of the London characters of the 1940s, a third world to add to the royals and the theatre people—nights at the Pheasantry with Augustus John, who literally chased me ’round the table of the proprietor’s back room; at his studio with Feliks Topolski, where I experienced my first and last lesbian approach. Such was my Australian inexperience in those years that I didn’t fully realise its meaning. It was not at all unusual in 1947 for innocence to go hand in hand with a certain amount of experience. Vi Eaton, who, for years, lived a peaceful and workable ‘ménage à trois’ with husband and lover, was nonetheless totally ignorant of some facets, rather than the basic facts, of worldly life. Two homosexual men friends were coming to stay: bedrooms to be allocated, the supply of single beds a problem.

‘Let them share a double bed,’ said her husband, ‘That’s what they would prefer.’ Vi was astounded: ‘I always thought they did it standing up!’

Baron told me later that I had sat gingerly on the edge of a sofa acting like a Lady Mayoress of Kensington whilst a drunken Barbara Skelton attempted to pull down my pants. She sat on the floor at the feet of a tall, dark glamorous girl, another Barbara, whose second name I don’t remember but who was an habitué of our ‘circle’ because she was the girlfriend of a genial American living in London, Fred Tupper, then the PR representative of Pan American Airlines. The two Barbaras were enjoying themselves in what appeared to me a most curious fashion, indulgently watched over by Felix and Baron, before Barbara Skelton turned her attentions to me. Baron took pity on my prim lips, murmured protestations and firmly crossed legs and took me home. I don’t remember seeing Barbara again and now having read her books of reminiscences regret not having known her better, although perhaps not in the guise first offered to me. She went on to marry writer Cyril Connolly (twice) and publisher George Weidenfeld, and I never got into close sexual proximity with a woman again.

Baron was, in due course, to give me away at my wedding and become godfather to my daughter but he was indeed reputed to be at the centre of a very ‘fast’ world indeed. One heard lurid tales of orgies. With me he was a loving and gentle friend. We met when David had gone skiing for two weeks and asked Baron to look after me. Introductions to Baron’s friends opened up avenues of enjoyment; painters, writers, photographers—skimming the surface, I now realise, of a murkier world underneath, of which I remained innocent.

His best friend, the painter Vasco Lazzolo, discovered a magic pill which was supposed to make us all madly sexy. You put it underneath your pillow and at the crucial moment of intercourse you were supposed to pop it and inhale. David and I tried it once, it didn’t appear to do more than slow up proceedings. One was always losing them under the pillow. I think they were yellow and I expect they were the first primitive precursors of amyl nitrate: known, I believe, as ‘poppers’.

After the first year and the first flush of enthusiasm shown to me by David’s mother, an icy curtain had descended over her initial warmth. I never discovered the exact reason but have since been told that I was considered ‘fast’ and a bad influence on David, and indeed was the subject of a flurry of worried correspondence between his two aunts, Lady Zia Wernher and Queen Louise of Sweden.

I think the true reason for the cooling was that I had no fortune, or prospect of one, with which to augment his frugal Naval pay. The bad influence was farcical. Apart from Torbert, the fleeting Americans and the horrid experience of John Spencer, I certainly had known little else of the great wicked world. I was an innocent abroad and it was David who introduced me to a world I had not dreamed existed: louche photographers, popping pills, and new experiences.

I also tried, in a fashion necessarily desultory because of the frequent attraction of taking off on trips, to settle down. My parents never suggested, nor even hinted, that I should work, but the allowance needed to be augmented if the trips were to continue and the couture houses not given up. I looked around for work which did not entail regular hours, or even days, and which would allow me to come and go as I pleased. Needless to say, this led to a startling turnover in jobs.

A newspaper column seemed the ideal. I had written a precocious one for a time in Sydney, with copious and amateurish illustrations; this was little more than a weekly diary of my doings. I had no difficulty in persuading the same editor, Eric Baume of Truth newspaper, that I could provide a fascinating résumé of the week’s events in London. Delivery was on Wednesdays. Baron took the portraits which headed my column. I rose at 6 a.m. on Wednesday mornings and dashed off my few hundred words, culled mostly from my engagement book (a life crammed into tiny pages—Christian names only—sometimes luncheon or dinner on several consecutive days with a Mark, an Otto, or a Douglas. Who were they, one wonders, and where are they now? And how do they remember the forties? Perhaps, like me, they have difficulty remembering them at all.)

These working stints could never be considered taxing. The London of the ‘400’ and Ciro’s, Ascot and Henley co-existed alongside the London of the Pheasantry, the marvellous institution in the Kings Road, and the Gargoyle in Soho, a more bohemian, intellectual watering hole—and into this world I was introduced by Baron, and new friends. One of these—with whom I had, together with many of the available and unavailable women in London, a romance, deepening through the years into a friendship—was Mark Culme-Seymour. Mark was spectacularly good looking, hopelessly charming, and tended to marry the oddest people: elderly princesses whom he erroneously thought were rich, or waif-like creatures, even more adrift than himself.

The marriages did not last long. In between them, Mark and I spent many nights in the Gargoyle, some of those nights drinking with Guy Burgess and occasionally Donald Maclean, of whom I recall little except their drunken arguments.

The column continued for about a year. I tired of it before they did, probably because more intriguing opportunities opened up which did not necessitate the early Wednesday mornings.

More rewarding was a monthly travel piece I wrote for Sydney Ure Smith’s prestigious little magazine Art in Australia. This allowed me to push guilt to the back of my mind as I whirled off to Göteborg, Oslo, Belfast…Reading, fifty years later, some of these diaries and travel articles, I am struck by history repeating itself, swept back by memory into immediate post-war England, reminded of our material obsessions, deprivations and of our differing freedoms. Different ones, now: the crises are comfortingly the same—only the leading players have changed names.

The social jottings, now embarrassing to read, are nevertheless a pleasant memory jolt: the travel articles of more interest, not for my reactions but because they are history; I remember little of it. I went to Dublin with George Silk, to Paris with David, to Göteborg with Lars Schmidt: only reading through these old articles do I realise what we were experiencing and how little of it is left.

Not surprisingly, David, too, had his rare lapses from fidelity, but his, always confessed, were usually one-night affairs propelled by alcohol and devoid of romance. Emotionally, he never wavered in his loyalty to me. This did not mean I was not furiously jealous. As two of them were with Hollywood actresses after some celebrity party to which I had not been invited, I never met them, but the third was an eighteen-year-old bouncy blonde, introduced into our circle by Baron and generally considered anybody’s. At the party subsequent to David’s confession, I glared at her with hatred and contempt—both melting into liking on hearing her talking to Baron, Vasco and some friends. Painter Vasco had criticised Baron’s photographic skills. Sunny leapt to his defence.

‘How can you say that! He’s a famous photographer!’

‘Well,’ said Vasco, ‘that’s not saying much. I’m a famous painter but I’m not a very good painter.’

Sunny thought for a moment. ‘Oh, I see what you mean. I’m really not a very good fuck.’