Wheatley arrived back in England on the 15th May 1918. He was put on a hospital train for Charing Cross, then carried on a stretcher to a waiting ambulance. Each ambulance carried two “stretcher cases”, and the other man was badly wounded; he was all but inanimate, and Wheatley never saw his face, which may have been a mercy.
The journey in the ambulance turned into one of the high points of Wheatley’s life. Leaving the station, the ambulances went left down the Strand and into Trafalgar Square, then up the Haymarket to Piccadilly. Visible as he sat up at the window, Wheatley found that people in the crowd were cheering.
There is a morbid side to the cultification of military ambulances – on a slippery slope towards the wheelchair rallies for Hitler, which were to be a feature of German life within a few years, with hundreds of prosthetic arms punching the air – but that day it seemed entirely innocent. Women blew kisses, and the traffic in Piccadilly was so slow that they bought flowers from the flower sellers who were then clustered under the statue of Eros, throwing them in bunches at the ambulances. Wheatley waved back, looking out of the window like a hero or a monarch, and found he was laughing and crying at the same time.
*
He had truly arrived back in England; “dear old England.” He was taken to a charitable hospital for officers in Regent’s Park run by a wealthy woman named Mrs Hall Walker. Sussex Lodge was her own house, and she appointed herself matron, employing doctors and nurses from Guy’s Hospital and a French chef.
Hilda Gosling was now at Girton, and Wheatley wrote to her explaining that he wasn’t yet allowed to get up properly but spent every day in pyjamas and dressing gown, sitting in the garden, “which is perfectly gorgeous, it is about twice the size of Chatham House garden or more, with the most beautiful green lawn surrounded by great chestnut trees.”
Hilda had met a man and, continuing his association of sex and sin, Wheatley writes “I hear your news in re the Devil with much surprise.” As for himself, he told her he was “greatly in arrears in paying Old Nick his just dues, in oats”. He was able to pay these a month or so later, when he was allowed out for the afternoon. He made for the Regent Palace Hotel off Piccadilly Circus, where the lounge was known as the best place in London to pick up women. He caught the eye of an attractive brunette and managed to get into conversation. She was called Marie, and before long Wheatley put his cards on the table: “I told Marie that it was a year since I kissed an English girl and I wanted to kiss her, but I could not do it there and had no idea when I would be let out of hospital again. It was a good plea from an invalided officer.” (It was not unlike a plea for what is sometimes known as a ‘sympathy leg-over’; a direct approach not unknown in Wheatley’s fiction).
Wheatley took Marie to Kettners in Soho, in those days a great restaurant. It had been founded fifty years earlier by a former chef to Napoleon III, but aside from the food Kettners was in business as a maison de rendezvous with short-stay bedrooms and “private dining rooms” or cabinets particuliers.
What were cabinets particuliers like? Ann Veronica, eponymous heroine of H.G.Wells’s 1909 novel, is taken by a man called Ramage to a private dining room where she dimly apprehends an “obtrusive sofa”. They are welcomed by a waiter with “discretion beyond all limits in his manner”, who later closes the door “with an almost ostentatious discretion”, after which Ramage locks it before pouncing. Again, in Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark, the heroine is taken to a private dining room with red furniture and red lampshades, with a bedroom discreetly en suite behind a curtain, where the waiter closes the door “as if not coming back”.
Private dining rooms must have been prime locations for what is now known as ‘date rape’, although most girls probably understood what they were about. At the same time they were a genuine amenity, like the ‘love hotels’ of Japan, and they were popular with officers on leave.
Wheatley installed them in a private room and ordered a bottle of champagne. Marie, he says in his autobiography, “proved incredibly passionate and while gasping with pleasure kept on sighing: ‘Oh, Dennis darling, do be different!’ ” It is not clear what she meant by this; perhaps she wanted him to him to be “different” from all the other men who had used her. She may have been more of a veteran of the private dining room than Wheatley suspected.
When it was time to say goodbye, Marie asked Wheatley for her “present.” This was a shock to Wheatley’s self esteem (“it had never occurred to me that she might be a tart”), and an embarrassment, because after the room and the champagne Wheatley had no money left. Wheatley took her address and sent her some silk stockings, for which she wrote him a “glowing” letter of thanks and continued to write “very sweetly” now and then; “So I was able to flatter myself that it had not been altogether a commercial transaction.”
They never saw each other again, but of his two hours in bed with Marie, Wheatley was to write fifty years later “I can recall the two hours … more clearly than I can a casual affaire with any other girl.” This is a mystery, because in his almost contemporary sexual list there is no mention of Marie and no one who corresponds to her, and yet the circumstantial details – the “do be different”, the disappointment at finding she wanted a present, even the silk stockings (“two pairs … one pink and one pale blue. That seems a strange choice now …”) – have a distinct ring of truth.
After eight prostitutes in France, Wheatley had returned to London to have “Baker St. little fair girl”, “Tavistock Sq. (soulful)”, “Gt.Portland St. (ring)”, “Dolly W. Fair” and “Oxford Terrace” [now Sussex Gardens], along with “Brixton. On bus”, and “Victoria (middle age)”. They are all ticked, so Marie is probably a composite figure, a fictional amalgam of other women he had at this time; or, just possibly, perhaps their transaction affected him emotionally and he didn’t list her in his usual way.
*
Around the end of June, Wheatley left the hospital to go to a convalescent home, the Prince of Wales Hospital for Officers at Staines. Wheatley made a new friend at the Prince of Wales Hospital, a cheerful and chubby tank lieutenant known as ‘Tanks’ or ‘Tanko’ Moate. His time there was also enlivened by a rich and charitable woman named Mrs Mosscockle, who would entertain officers to lunch on Sundays at her Windsor country house, Clewer Park.
Mrs Mosscockle had literary aspirations, and had published several volumes of verse. The matron would select which officers should go, seemingly less by whether they deserved a treat and more by whether they would do the hospital credit. The social class of officers had declined considerably as the war had gone on, and although he had been a bounderish “temporary gentleman” at the start, Wheatley’s social polish was now higher than average and he was often chosen.
Mrs Mosscockle’s other hobby was motoring, and she owned a Rolls-Royce with a gas balloon on top. The purpose of this Heath Robinson device was to save petrol by reducing the weight of the car, although if it had any effect at all, apart from increasing air resistance, it must have been to slightly weaken the traction of the tyres against the ground.
On certain Sundays Wheatley and two other officers would take the train to Windsor, where the Rolls-Royce would meet them at the station. After lunch Mrs Mosscockle would walk them to the river, where she had a full-sized steamer, suitable for a couple of hundred passengers. The steamer would then take them down to Maidenhead and back, while they ate strawberries and cream on deck.
Wheatley and Tanko were also keen on messing about on the river in a punt. They met a cheerful girl called Peggy, and went punting with her most days. On another occasion, recalling his extrovert exploits in Germany, Wheatley spotted a “luscious blonde” and deliberately fell in the water to attract her attention, but she was married, and the results went no further than “a jolly tea and drinks afterwards”.
*
Unfortunately the love of Wheatley’s life was still Barbara Symonds, to whom he had posted a bottle of scent while he was at Sussex Lodge. He continued to suffer, and when things reached a particularly low ebb the following year, he wrote that “ever since I was seventeen it [i.e. the hope of one day marrying Barbara] has been the dominant decent thought of my existence, however remote the possibilities of gaining her affection.”
Barbara had started to thaw towards him, or so it seemed, and even to encourage him a little. And then Wheatley had his memories:
Lady Dear
Thanks very much for your little letter, it came I think from the Barbara with a very large heart – the girl who drove with me one night a very long time ago, from Kettners to Victoria and kissed me of her own accord, – and who once wrote me a letter forgiving and forgetting after I had behaved like a brute and a beast, – who once, when I was very hard up went one evening to the pictures with me and when on the way home we paused beneath a tree and I asked her if she did not care just a little, replied. “Yes, I think I do – a tiny bit.”
While Wheatley was at Staines, Barbara wrote to say that if he “really” wanted to take her out, she wouldn’t mind dinner at the Waldorf, followed by a play at the Gaiety Theatre. But she added “Perhaps the river scenery will cure you of your (imaginary) wound without much effort on my part. It’s really quite time you recovered, don’t you think?” This imaginary wound was the one Wheatley felt Barbara had inflicted on his heart.
Things went so well that Barbara even came to visit Wheatley at Staines, bringing her friend Dot with her to make a foursome with Tanko; the four of them had lunch and then went out on the river. Things were going beautifully, but the following month disaster struck. Wheatley and Tanko had taken the two girls out for the night, and the four of them were in the back of a car, being driven to drop the girls back in Streatham. Wheatley kissed Barbara, and then discreetly put his hand inside her dress. She seemed not to object until Tanko and Dot were out of the car, when she suddenly turned on him and accused him of treating her like a Piccadilly tart. “How dare you?” she said, “How dare you?”
Wheatley’s world must have fallen in. He got down on his knees and actually grovelled for her to forgive him, but it was no good. A few moments later she had let herself out of the car, slamming the door, and she was running up her garden path into her house.
Wheatley sent letter after letter, drafting and redrafting them before they were posted. After a few days a letter arrived back from Barbara, now on her summer holidays: “I would prefer to say no more about Thursday night,” she wrote, “if you are sorry it is no use crying over spilt milk and it cannot happen again. I regret the incident more than I can say and shall do my best to forget it entirely.” In the end Wheatley was forgiven, for better or worse, and his passion crawled on.
*
Shortly after the death of Ready Money Wheatley, from cirrhosis of the liver in July 1918, Wheatley was sent for another Medical Board examination and they found him fit enough to go to a ‘Light Duty’ camp at Catterick. Duties were very light indeed, and included dancing classes. On Saturday evenings Wheatley could practise new dances such as the Boston and the Bunny Hug, but sadly there were not enough women to go round, and the men usually had to dance with each other. Wheatley drew the line at this.
Wheatley’s duties also allowed him to finish Julie’s Lovers, the novel he had begun on the Western Front, and his father paid to have it typed up. It was sent to the publisher Cassells, but they rejected it.
It was at Catterick that Wheatley saw the end of the War. He was a keen armchair strategist, following the progress of the War on maps, and when the news came in early November that Austria had fallen, he judged that things were nearly over, winning a bet on it when the Armistice was announced. Celebratory drinking was the order of the day, and Wheatley charged about the camp hiccuping and shouting “Victory urges me to shout, HOORAY! Victory urges me to shout, HOORAY!”
Wheatley had taken a gamble to get him to London for the victory celebrations, applying for service again as a fit man, simply to get the two week’s leave that automatically preceded such service: the only danger being that he might then be required to do the service itself. His leave got him into London four days after the Armistice, with the “mafficking”-type celebrations still going strong. People roamed the streets waving Union Jacks and singing, and great bonfires were lit in Trafalgar Square, damaging the lions at the foot of Nelson’s Column. These bonfires were still alight when Wheatley arrived on the scene.
His gamble paid off, and he was never ordered to report for duty (or notified that he was discharged). In later life he liked to joke that his file might still be gathering dust somewhere in the Army bureaucracy, marked “on leave.” After Christmas at the Grand Hotel in Brighton with his parents and sister, he rejoined the family wine business in January 1919.
*
Barbara still continued to be his “dominant decent thought.” Wheatley had been sending her presents, despite her kindly objections. He sent her scented cigarettes tipped with rose leaves from the Bichera de Paris, a scent shop opposite Aspreys, and chocolates: Barbara told him she was using the chocolate box ribbon for her camisoles (“I was thrilled,” wrote Wheatley, as no doubt he was meant to be).
From Catterick he sent her some sheet music, chosen with the help of Tanko. Never very musical, Wheatley asked Tanko to choose a couple of songs, but the third was his own: “it is neither classical or good style … but when it is played softly and slowly in the evening when things are quiet and I’ve got a cigarette on, I am afraid I’m idiot enough to think the chap who wrote the words meant it for something better than for the King of Comedies to make a farce of.”
One of Wheatley’s all time favourite songs was “If You Were The Only Girl in the World (and I were the only boy”) from The Bing Boys are Here, a 1916 musical show at the Alhambra. It was particularly popular with young officers on leave, and would always remain associated with London in the First War. It starred George Robey (“Crown Prince of Mirth”) as Lucifer Bing, and his masterstroke, although the show was a comedy, was to sing the show’s great song, with its very distinctive tune, sentimentally ‘straight’ (“I would say such wonderful things to you / There would be such wonderful things to do …”). The song that Wheatley sent to Barbara was probably something in the same line, and quite possibly this very song.
After the Armistice celebrations Wheatley and Tanko took Barbara and Dot out on Friday and Saturday night, but on the Monday a letter arrived from Barbara reminding him that she was still serious about not letting him maul her in the taxi home, and if that was what he wanted then he should go out with someone else.
Later in November Wheatley and Tanko took the girls to a Thanksgiving Ball at the Cannon Street Hotel, and he saw quite a lot of Barbara around this period. Despite his quiet exit from the army, Wheatley revelled in the beautiful uniform of Blues he’d had made that October, a few weeks before the War’s end, with its high collar and its red stripe down the outside of each leg. He felt this really “cut a dash.”
*
Wheatley was effectively ‘dating’ Barbara now. Ever the strategist, he composed a long memorandum for himself, ‘Rules of Procedure in re B’, i.e. regarding Barbara. This peculiar work of planning and would-be control has around fifty points inscrutably numbered from 1–8, 1–4, 1–12 all the way down to 19–11, 19–14, 19–21. Some of them have a weirdly homiletic, ‘fortune cookie’ quality that suggests they may be gathered from somewhere else.
“Make a secret with her,” Wheatley advises himself. If need be, “If she wants a secret, invent one rather than have nothing between you”. When things are not going so smoothly, “Don’t make her go into long explanations rather let a misunderstood remark pass, and look wise.” And of course, “Do not discuss deep subjects that she is unlikely to understand.”
When it comes to flattery, “Don’t flatter too thickly”; “avoid generalities and go into details”; “Mention any new clothes but don’t forget her old ones.” Better yet, “Praise her for what she hath not.” Failing all that, “If flattery is useless, make a quarrel, but see that you are in the wrong.”
Along with a few elaborate dicta, such as item 8.5 (“A poem to the foolish, a conundrum to the wise, a kiss to the chaste, and a handclasp to the unchaste”) much of Wheatley’s list is entirely reasonable (“Do not talk too much of yourself ”; “Avoid underhand methods”; “Never make either her or yourself look ridiculous”). At the same time, there is a calculating or even would-be predatory streak in it, such as “Don’t propose when she has on a new frock or when she is happy” (15.9), followed by “But when she is ill or weary and needs someone to comfort her.”(15.10).
It was nothing short of a campaign, as 19.10 suggests: “If she give the many reasons she can be persuaded, if but one the case is hopeless.” “Persevere and be patient,” Wheatley advises himself. “Don’t be deceived by the undemonstrative”, but at the same time, “Don’t hurry, she goes into love as water little by little”. Later, “Do not go timidly to work, when you have worked her up, go in and win”; “By her eyes only can you tell if she means her commandments to be broken or not. Never take no for an answer.”
And where did all this planning get Wheatley? It got him nowhere.
As we have seen, Wheatley’s nervous calculations with beautiful Barbara never had the charm of his spontaneous fun with plain Hilda, and he strikes one bad note after another. On one occasion, he wrote and told her that his love for her – because it stopped him chasing loose women and prostitutes – was actually saving him money:
if it had not been for your kindness since my return from France, I should not be as I am, floating along pretty well, but instead heavily in debt … and the prospect of the devil of a row with the Pater … after our little lunch together at the Piccadilly it was quite obvious that if we were going to be friends it was not fair to you for me to have anything to do with any of the ladies of Vanity Fair … anyhow it’s an expensive pastime, and through you dear little girl although I hate to consider you in the tawdry light of a financial speculation … I’m a jolly sight better off …
Wheatley knew he lacked the light touch, and he knew why:
A man can only be cheery and amusing, really sympathetic and helpful, if he has nothing on his mind, but when he is worrying and worrying until he is almost ill, he becomes hopelessly dull and uninteresting because being depressed to the very depths he cannot possibly be gay and light hearted – at least, I can’t, perhaps super-men could, and I am very ordinary.
Things had taken a serious turn for the worse at the beginning of January. When Wheatley had returned from Brighton after Christmas he met Barbara, and she told him of the new man in her life, Cyril, whom she hoped to marry. Barbara now sought to convert Wheatley into a confidant, complaining to him about Cyril’s “lack of ardour”.
Despite item 7.5 of his Rules – “If she talks much of another you have no rival & Vice Versa” – Wheatley was in misery. He drafted a long letter, with a last desperate offer of marriage or parting (“unless I cut adrift I shall get on the rocks and do something foolish. My love for you is so great that I must have all – or nothing.”)
Without you I know that I shall never reach real happiness, the want of you started when I looked into those wonderful eyes of yours across the Claridges tea table when we were young and ever since I have known that you were the only girl in the world.
This waiting – thinking – waiting is killing me by inches, you are literally never absent from my thoughts – and my thoughts since Jan 1st 1919 have been Hell! – the people cannot understand why I have become so dull and apathetic, why I never go out and enjoy myself, and when I do go out, why I return home more depressed than ever, my pals all wonder what has happened to the cheerful lad I used to be – if they could only know all the desperate longing that I have for you …
Wheatley now worried that she might not have been serious, because she thought he wasn’t serious, and he put his cards on the table:
… to prevent the least possibility of a mistake I tell you now that I love you, adore you, and that if you would become engaged to me, now, I mean properly engaged, with rings blessings etc., and at once, I would give you a life times love and devotion. I swear to you that you should never regret, entrusting yourself to me, and that my every thought should be for your happiness.
This did little good, and the worst was yet to come.
*
Wheatley’s lungs were still bad, and his father sent him on a cruise to Madeira. They had a rough time crossing the Bay of Biscay, where conditions were so bad that the captain changed course to lessen the risk of capsizing, so the ship would cut the waves front on, instead of being hit from the side. Three days later, Wheatley felt privileged to see the literal source of a metaphor, pouring oil on troubled waters: “the Captain had a large barrel of oil poured overboard. The effect was astonishing. Within a few minutes the rough seas for a mile around the ship subsided.”
There was unrest in Portugal, with prisons thrown open and a general strike, so Wheatley was pleased to see a British destroyer conspicuously present and flying the White Ensign in Lisbon harbour: “woe betide anyone who dared to lay a hand on a British subject or his property,” he writes in his autobiography. “Those were the days.”
Madeira impressed Wheatley chiefly by its corruption, with the Governor giving his blessing to the illegal gambling scene and taking a rake-off. The real power seemed to be Mr Blandy, of the drink shipping dynasty, who gave Wheatley a tour of his estates. It was also in Madeira that Wheatley got into serious difficulties while swimming, close to a harbour wall he was unable to get a grip on, and nearly drowned.
The relief he felt at finally hauling himself out alive must have been tempered by a letter that he received in Madeira from his friend Cecil Cross. He had introduced Barbara to the good looking Cecil in those happy months before Christmas, and now Cecil was writing to say that he felt a terrible cad but he was obsessed with Barbara, and the two of them were engaged.
This destroyed Wheatley’s friendship with Cecil, but on his return he continued to see and write to Barbara. In one of his letters he wrote
If ever you chance to be in any difficulty or trouble which your father and brother or husband cannot sweep away for you I shall be very happy to help you in any way that I possibly can, because whatever may happen to me whether I marry or not no man can love one girl, and want her, and think of her, for five long years as I have of you and afterwards completely forget and be unresponsive to her in whom his whole soul had been centred during the first years of his manhood, so of you ever need a friend, remember,
Your Unchanging,
Dennis
Fast-forwarding a moment, we find Wheatley in June 1922 re-reading his draft of this letter and putting heavy brackets around “(because whatever may happen to me whether I marry or not no man can love one girl, and want her, and think of her, for five long years as I have of you and afterwards completely forget and be unresponsive to her in whom his whole soul had been centred during the first years of his manhood)”.
He then scrawls heavily and almost vengefully:
the years have gone
all wrong all wrong
I have forgotten
June 1st 1922 / Dennis
*
But for now, there was little comfort. What cheer there was, perhaps, was centred on the fact that Eric Tombe made a grand re-entrance into Wheatley’s life.