Wheatley returned to a new house, ‘Clinton’ in Palace Road, Streatham. His father’s fortunes had recovered, and this was a step up from Becmead Avenue.
Wheatley’s father did not send him back to Germany after Christmas. He may have thought Wheatley was getting insufficient training – he never attended wine tastings in Mr Kayser’s office – or simply that he was having too much of a good time. In a revealing expression, Wheatley writes that perhaps “the cloven hoof … was now coming out in me.”
Instead Wheatley worked in the business in South Audley Street. Local customers included the Duke of Portland, the Duke of Westminster, Lord Howard de Walden, the Rothschilds, and the gold and diamond millionaires Jack and Solly Joel, who would buy 500 crates of Clicquot and Pommery champagne for each new vintage.
The grander wine merchants disdained to stock mineral waters and beers, so the Wheatleys did a profitable trade in them. The beer was for servants and staff, with whom the area was teeming, far outnumbering their employers. Wheatley would spend the morning working in the cellar, bottling, labelling, and bottle-washing, and then at noon – in a striking instance of his still equivocal social status – he would go upstairs to serve at the beer counter, “patronised daily by numbers of lower servants, caretakers, porters, etc.”
*
Wheatley and Douglas continued trying to pick up girls at the Golden Domes cinema, and it was on a Saturday afternoon, in July 1914, that Wheatley first saw a girl named Barbara Symonds. Blue Hat was only a premonition of Barbara, who would obsess him for five unhappy years.
Wheatley and Douglas saw two girls and talked to them leaving the cinema. As they walked along, near where one of the girls lived, they were spotted by the mother of one of the girls, who now had to invite them in. She was called Marjorie Claridge, and while they were at the Claridge house having tea Wheatley chanced to be alone with Barbara for a few moments and suddenly kissed her. Neither of them said anything, and as soon as she could Barbara ran from the room. Nevertheless, when Wheatley left the house he was in love.
They struck up a relationship, but it was lukewarm on Barbara’s side and wheedlingly desperate on Wheatley’s. His nervous, posturing, manipulative letters have none of the easy charm of his letters to Hilda:
My dear Bar,
I wonder what you are thinking now as you open this letter, perhaps you are annoyed and wish you had never seen me but perhaps you’re not, anyway we will hope for the latter …
… Mother either has or will send you an invitation to tennis for Saturday, and now I am going to hold you to promise that you will do your very best to come …
So do come I’m sure you won’t be so crule as to refuse, besides look at all the time I’ve spent on it… .
So I am sure you’ll come won’t you, you can’t imagine how sick I shall be if you don’t all the life will of gone out of the game if you’re not there I shall be thinking of the might of been all the afternoon …
Pleading might alternate with jokes (“you said you could not come, but I beg to differ and as you are not a suffragette you will realise that a man always knows what’s best”), followed by further pleading and manipulative arguing.
They would sometimes go to picnic in Shirley Woods, with Barbara on the pillion of Wheatley’s motorcycle and Marjorie in the sidecar as a chaperone. Despite Barbara’s overall lack of enthusiasm, there were one or two romantic interludes, treasured by Wheatley:
… I hope you don’t get into trouble about being late I know I was a bit of a rotter to keep you so long but I don’t think you can blame me can you Bar you were such a darling girl and I was so head over heels in the honey pot, you really were a sport to come that afternoon and you cant think how I appreciated it …
But altogether it was hopeless and Wheatley was reduced to jealousy when he had to watch Barbara being driven off by a friend in a car (“I did in a couple of ice creams and half a dozen cream cakes to soothe my temper which was not of the best …”). Before long he was back to arguing his case:
… you say you can’t get out but I have been under the impression for some time that where there’s a will there’s a way … there is no pleasure unless there is some difficulty to overcome first … it is only by overcoming difficulty that we get pleasure, the stolen fruits are always sweetest …
Do come it is so simple for you …
In one letter Wheatley tells Barbara of an accident he has had on his motorcycle. Charmlessly boyish, his account is unlikely to have cut much ice with Barbara. Colliding with a horse-drawn van, Wheatley slammed on his brakes so hard that his back tyre exploded “like a cannon,” but he doesn’t care because he is fully insured.
Less cheerfully, after Wheatley and Douglas managed to repair the tyre, “I saw you at the window, and you stared at me as if you diddent know me and of course that brought me bad luck as straight off the whole tyre collapsed again …”
And so it would go on, painfully, for the next five years, with the remote possibility of marriage as “the dominant decent thought in my existence.”
*
Cousin Laurie, meanwhile, was filling in some gaps in Wheatley’s sexual education. Wheatley divided girls into two categories, lower-class ones who were available and ‘decent’ middle-class girls who were not. But Laurie let him in on several great secrets, one being that women of different classes were in some ways just the same. More than that, Laurie told him that women masturbated, and thought about sex often, just as men did. Better yet, Wheatley believed that women consented to sex only with great reluctance, as a favour to men and to reward their devotion. But this was not the whole truth, explained Laurie: the fact was that some of them, sometimes, actually liked it.
This was exciting news to Wheatley, and certainly something to think about.
*
A couple of weeks before Wheatley first met Barbara there was some news from Sarajevo. On 28th June 1914 the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the Austrian throne, had been murdered by a Serbian assassin. This kind of thing – anarchists with bombs – was well known to happen abroad, and at first nobody thought much about it.
Austria demanded reparations from Serbia, then Germany backed Austria, and Russia backed Serbia. It began to look as if there might be a war, although not involving Britain.
However, important Austrians and Germans in London were being warned by their embassies that they should return home. Among them was Baron Rothschild, a man in his seventies who lived on Piccadilly, where he had been born. Despite his Austrian baronetcy he was very English, and the War wrecked his life. One morning he was in Wheatley’s wine merchants, probably settling his bill, and put a ticket on the desk almost as an afterthought. It was a ticket for his box at Covent Garden, if Wheatley wanted to go to the opera. He couldn’t use it himself, because he was leaving that day.
And so the Wheatleys were present at the last night of the Covent Garden Opera that season (“in an assembly which we regarded as far above our station”), on the evening of Tuesday 28th July 1914. It was Aida, with Emmy Destinn in the title role, but – as at the German air show – Wheatley was more impressed by the audience.
Queen Alexandra was in the Royal Box, with her cousin the Empress Marie of Russia, the Princess Royal (Princess Louise), and Princess Maud (Queen Maud of Denmark). For Wheatley, “the spectacle on stage was far outshone each time the lights went up by that of the auditorium … hundreds of women were clad in every shade of silk and satin; some had velvet cloaks, others furs of ermine or Russian sable. Pearls which must have totalled thousands hung in ropes round their necks. Diamonds, rubies, sapphires and emeralds which must have been worth several million pounds glittered and scintillated from their hair, ears, necks …”
That night at the opera crowned an era for Wheatley. King Edward had died in 1910 but the Edwardian era really lasted until 1914. It might even be said that the nineteenth century lasted until 1914, and although Wheatley disliked a good deal about the Victorians – their religion, their hypocrisy, their unacceptable levels of poverty – the Edwardian period seemed to promise a world that would combine modernity and improved social conditions with the best of the previous century.
It was all swept away after 1914. The War killed over ten million, and more than that, this conflict between civilised countries, most of them with high literary, artistic and intellectual cultures, undermined the idea of ‘progress’ in a world that had, until then, seemed to have been growing steadily better since the Enlightenment.
It was an unnecessary conflict, and in the few weeks after Sarajevo it could have been avoided. There were many who thought it was virtually impossible, because of the international credit system; many of London’s foremost bankers were German. Like the people in the royal box, the British and Germans were cousins, with their closely related royal families. The Kaiser was a Colonel of British Dragoons, an Admiral in the Royal Navy, and a member of several London clubs, from which he had to resign when war broke out.
Far from being “the War to end all Wars”, it would lead directly to the rise of Hitler. Democracy was battered in its aftermath, with totalitarian regimes taking hold in Russia, Italy, and Germany. To Wheatley, it was “the greatest tragedy that has befallen mankind since the Goths and Vandals brought about the Dark Ages by the destruction of the Roman Empire.”
Gerald Hamilton, the original for Christopher Isherwood’s Mr Norris, remembered “There was nothing about life before 1914 which I didn’t like. Nothing. Then there was gracious living and happiness everywhere. Fools and their wars have spoilt it.” This is only one version of the Edwardian era (in contrast, Claud Cockburn remembered it as beset by anxieties about revolution, which no doubt helped drive the booming thriller industry of the day) but it is the version that Wheatley subscribed to.
This sense of the Edwardian Eden lies behind much of Wheatley’s writing, particularly in The Second Seal – which deals with the opening of the First War, and has the Duke de Richleau involved with the Serbian secret society of the Black Hand – and more generally in the luxury of his books. Wheatley quotes Talleyrand on the French Revolution: “He who did not live before the Revolution cannot know how delightful life can be”.
The middle classes enjoyed an exceptional standard of living before the First War, and this warmed Wheatley’s nostalgia for pre-War entertainments and extravaganzas like the Anglo-French Exhibition at Olympia, the London Pageants, and the Christmas Fun Fair at Olympia. At an April 1914 banquet for the Wine and Spirit Trades Benevolent Society, young Wheatley had a twelve-course dinner with Moselle and hock, Mumm’s Cordon Rouge champagne, Chateau Lafite 1899, Graham’s 1897 Port, and Martell’s 40 year old Cognac.
That night at the opera, for Wheatley, epitomised the old world, and he was there to see the curtain come down on it.
*
As one curtain fell, another was rising. The third of August 1914 was a Bank Holiday, and Wheatley went out on his motorcycle to see Douglas Sharp and Cecil Cross, who were both troopers in the Westminster Dragoons, a relatively elite territorial regiment (socially, not martially) full of young men who had their uniforms cut by their own tailors. It was the annual camp, at Goring-on-Thames, and Wheatley went down for the regimental sports day, riding through the traffic-free open country between London and Reading.
After the sports they went to the Swan Hotel in Streatley for dinner. Eating outside, overlooking the Thames, Wheatley prepared a “peach bola” of the kind he had learned to make in Germany, and then showed them the “Rainbow” cocktail, carefully pouring red curacao, white kummel, yellow chartreuse, green creme de menthe and yellow Benedictine into a tall glass so that they stayed in coloured strata. Then they went out on a boat along the river, past the courting couples in punts, and the weeping willows. Somewhere in the distance a wind-up gramophone was playing.
Wheatley was no longer the life and soul of the party when he realised what time it was; he was in trouble with his dreaded father, who had refused him a key and instead waited up to let him in, on the understanding he would be no later than ten o’clock. Wheatley decided to stay out all night, making the excuse next day that the bike had broken down and he had slept in a barn.
His friends told their sergeant that Wheatley’s bike had broken down, and got permission for him to stay in their tent. Wheatley lay awake, worrying about his father. Suddenly a head and a lantern came in through the tent flap, telling everyone to get up. It was still the middle of the night, but there was an emergency parade. Wheatley’s friends thought it was probably a training stunt, like a fire drill, and he waited in the tent for them to return. They did, soon enough, only to tell him the camp was breaking up and he would have to leave. The British Army was mobilising for war.