In the eyes of its inhabitants at least, Great Britain in the last decade of the nineteenth century was unequivocally the leading country of the world. With the benefit of hindsight it is possible to see that already the economic base of Britain’s prosperity was being eroded, the will to dominate was failing; yet no such doubts assailed the island people. Confident that their empire was of unparalleled extent, that their navy was the size of any two others put together, that a third of the world’s trade travelled in British boats and was financed with British money, that Britons never would be slaves, they surveyed the future with the arrogant complacency of a master race. The world was their oyster and they would devour it as they chose.
For many Britons, it was a question not of oysters, but of bread and water. The country was edging towards democracy but all its wealth and almost all its political muscle was still the perquisite of the middle and upper classes – at a generous estimate the top quarter of the population. The time was not far distant when the working classes would learn how to use their power but to the late Victorian it seemed that the rich man would live permanently in his castle, the poor man at his gate.
The landed gentry and aristocracy had lost the exclusive power which once they had enjoyed but their share of the nation’s resources was still extravagantly large. Ninety-nine per cent of the land in private hands was held in substantial units, and of this a huge preponderance had been passed on within the same family for two or more generations. In the countryside the rule of the squire was still one of vast authority. The nouveaux riches flexed their muscles and increasingly asserted their grasp on the machinery of government but the traditional upper class remained blandly confident that it was the true, the destined ruling cadre.
Within this already exclusive group some fifty or sixty great families preserved a status glorious out of all comparison with lesser mortals. Russells and Cavendishes, Cecils and Howards, Pelhams and Bentincks, they had ruled the country for centuries and could not wholly disabuse themselves of the conviction that it was still their fief. Their palaces, their possessions, their vast estates were the envy of the world. They were not parasites; many were conscientious landlords, if remote from the preoccupations of their tenants, and they made a substantial contribution to the running of the country. Nor were they wholly caste-ridden; even marriage out of their order was tolerated provided the financial incentive was sufficiently attractive. Some of them were cultivated; most of them were tolerably polite, even to members of the lower and middle classes. Their pride, however, was overweening; their self-confidence astonishing; their inbred sense of superiority daunting to all who did not share their advantages. The world, by and large, took them at their own valuation.
It was into the heart of this innermost elite – the cream of the cream of the cream – that Lady Diana Manners was born.
*
Her mother was a Lindsay, granddaughter of the 24th Earl of Crawford. The Lindsays were a swashbuckling crew of considerable wealth and great antiquity. Diana’s grandfather, Colonel Charles, swashbuckled as lustily as any of them. A ‘fine, bearded, swarthy Crimean colonel’, as Diana’s sister Marjorie described him, he was a favourite with Queen Victoria; Master of Horse at the vice-regal court in Dublin and an intimate friend of Louis Napoleon. He married above his intellectual station Emilia Browne, daughter of the Dean of Lismore: a blue-stocking beauty with orange-tawny hair and ‘a perfect oval face with cream and apricot colouring’. They were not rich by the standards of their friends but they lived in considerable style in a country house near Wantage, where Diana’s mother, Violet, was born.
From her early childhood it became clear to everyone, including Violet, that the Lindsays had produced something of a prodigy. ‘The most beautiful thing I ever saw,’ Mrs Patrick Campbell described her; tall, slender and moving with a dreamy elegance that complemented her pre-Raphaelite features and ivory complexion. But her looks were not her only advantage. Encouraged by her mother, she developed considerable talents as a sculptress and draughtsman: Rodin was to compare her sculpture to that of Donatello; Watts her drawing to Holbein’s. Neither authority could be called entirely objective, but she still deserved to be taken seriously as an artist. She played the piano competently and sang Lieder and romantic ballads with skill and feeling. Without being an intellectual herself, or even widely read, she commanded the respect of intellectuals and instilled a vague unease in the more philistine sections of the upper classes. She attended the original dinner party at which Lord Charles Beresford is supposed to have turned on Arthur Balfour and complained: ‘You all sit talking about each other’s souls. I shall call you “the Souls”’; and though the innermost membership of this amorphous body remained predominantly male, she was a camp follower of the Souls so long as they existed.
An artistic temperament, pre-Raphaelite appearance and taste for high Bohemia did not preclude prudent pawkiness. She fought ferociously and without scruple for her own interests or the interests of those she loved, and never allowed her romantic urges to interfere with the serious business of life. As a girl she cherished an unrequited love for a neighbourhood hero forty years older than herself, Lord Wantage V.C. When Lord Wantage married an heiress she repined briefly, then addressed herself to the task of making the most suitable match in Britain. She found her mate in Henry Manners, great-nephew and heir-presumptive to the sixth Duke of Rutland.
Cecils might be more clever, Pagets might make more row, but there was something awe-inspiring about a Victorian duke. They enjoyed a status second only to that of royalty, superior in some ways in that royalty remained mysteriously remote while dukes were divinity incarnate. Their grandeur, though not dependent on, was invariably linked with great material possessions, and the Manners were among the wealthiest. They owned 30,000 acres of land in Leicestershire, 27,000 in Derbyshire, 6,600 in Cambridgeshire, 1,100 in Notts, 760 in Rutland. Their rent roll was £97,000 a year; their income from coal mines substantial and growing rapidly; their principal seat, Belvoir (pronounced Beaver) Castle, among the most massive, if not antique, of ducal palaces. Their achievements were less conspicuous. As a family the Manners had never done very much. The seventh Duke, Henry’s father, had admittedly turned down the chance to be Viceroy of India and Governor General of Canada but this, though not unimpressive, may reasonably be felt negative as an exploit. He had, however, risen to be Minister of Works and a member of the Cabinet, a status never attained nor indeed aspired to by his son.
Henry Manners was better than a dull dumb duke, but only just. He had his qualities. He was an exceptionally handsome man with charm and graceful manners. Though subject to furious tantrums – he once dashed an entire breakfast service to the ground when told that Princess Beatrice of Battenberg was coming to lunch – he was generally kindly and tolerant. He was, however, almost entirely without ambition; when he married he was private secretary to Lord Salisbury and this was the zenith of his public life. His principal interests were dry-fly fishing and fornication; pursuits requiring much dexterity but not intellectually demanding. Beaverbrook spoke of him as ‘a man of considerable stupidity’ and most references to him by his contemporaries are couched in terms of more-or-less affectionate contempt. There is no reason to doubt that Violet Lindsay was in love when she married him, but it seems unlikely that her love would have been bestowed in this quarter if he had not been a future Duke of Rutland.
Marital fidelity was not a virtue highly esteemed among the British aristocracy. Many husbands kept women on the side; once the wife had produced an heir she often felt that her work was done and she could now relax. The only requirement was that one should not be caught out; in Mrs Patrick Campbell’s no doubt apocryphal phrase, ‘It doesn’t matter what you do in the bedroom as long as you don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.’
Violet Manners dutifully settled down to bear her husband’s children. A girl, Marjorie, came first; then followed a son and heir, Robert, in 1885; another boy, John, next year and Violet in 1888. By this time the marriage had seen its best days. Whatever sexual delights it had once offered had faded and no sense of companionship had replaced them. Instead they organized their lives in a pattern that made the marriage tolerable to both of them. Lord Granby, as Henry Manners became after the death of the 6th Duke in 1888, developed a keen interest in the stage, concentrating his attention on the most attractive actresses. At one point he was strongly drawn to Gladys Cooper, sending her flowers with affectionate notes: ‘Dear and Beautiful One. I am venturing to send you some half-dozen “Daffys”.’ His most lasting liaison, however, was with Violet Vanbrugh, a performer whose acting skills were limited but whose physical charms were outstanding. He had a child by her, left her £200 in his will, and for several years devoted to her much of the affection that might more properly have been granted to his wife.
Lady Granby did not repine. After some tentative forays she took herself a lover, Montagu Corry, later Lord Rowton, a dashing young man-about-town who was alleged to have won his place as Disraeli’s private secretary by his aptitude for singing comic songs while simultaneously performing a strenuous dance. More importantly, he was hard-working, tactful and devotedly loyal to his master. He was loyal to his mistress, too; long after their liaison was over his house provided an asylum to which surplus Manners children could be despatched when need arose.
Corry, however, was no more than a sighting shot for what was to be Violet Granby’s most passionate and lasting love. Harry Cust was an altogether more striking object of her affection. He was a nephew of Lord Brownlow and a man of charm, intelligence and outstanding beauty. At Eton a master who taught all three reckoned that he was more likely to become prime minister than either Rosebery or Curzon. He entered parliament and shone there, but his performance was marred by its fatal facility. He found it all too easy, became easily bored and was distracted by the delights of that social life for which he was so admirably fitted. Literature, he decided, was more his forte than politics. He wrote minor verse and, in 1892, was offered the editorship of the Pall Mall Gazette. Here too he shone at first, gathering contributors such as Kipling, Balfour, Alice Meynell and H. G. Wells. Wells, in particular, admired him greatly, inscribing The World Set Free to ‘Harry Cust: Noblest and best of Editors, Inventor of Authors, Friend of Letters’. Yet even Wells was disconcerted when he arrived at the editor’s office to find it apparently empty. Then the sound of sobbing disclosed Cust ‘prostrate on a sofa indulging in paroxysms of grief’.
For Cust was as self-indulgent in his emotions as he was over drink or women. The last, in particular, dissipated his energies and blighted his career with scandal. He could never resist trying to seduce them and they frequently succumbed. ‘He was the Rupert Brooke of our day,’ wrote Lady Horner. ‘Gold-haired, wellborn, a poet. Irresistible.’ Unusually, for a professional womanizer, he was well liked by men; a member of the sternly masculine Crabbet Club and a participant in the celebrated nude tennis match in which he and Curzon beat George Wyndham and Scawen Blunt. His charm did not always work, however. Among his juniors in particular there was sometimes a feeling that he was a tiresome poseur; ‘an old bore,’ Julian Grenfell described him trenchantly, ‘with vulgar hair and disgusting habits’.
When Violet Granby grew to know him well in the late 1880s, Cust was already the hero of a celebrated scandal involving Lady de Grey and Lady Londonderry and had had his name linked – fairly or unfairly – with a score of women in London society. Lord Granby can hardly have been pleased at his wife’s liaison with this notorious philanderer, but he had his own fish to fry and at least must have felt confident that the couple would stick to the rules and avoid any show of flagrant passion. Lady Granby, indeed, handled the affair with immaculate discretion, concealing her private meetings with Harry Cust under a cloak of tea-parties with her great friend Lady Tree. The relationship throve for several years until Cust grew bored and began to look elsewhere. Nemesis struck in the guise of Miss Nina Welby-Gregory, pretty daughter of a Lincolnshire neighbour whom Cust seduced more or less from force of habit. Miss Welby-Gregory pretended, or possibly believed that she was to have a child by him; Cust married her under protest and at once abandoned her; no child came, and Nina was left adoring but disconsolate. For years she dressed and tried to behave like Violet Granby in the hope she would win back her errant husband. In old age and decrepitude Cust did indeed return to her and she looked after him devotedly till he died.
*
Diana Manners was born on 29 August 1892, at the family’s London house in Bruton Street. No one can prove that she was Harry Cust’s daughter but her parents’ contemporaries took it for granted that she was. It is dangerously easy to convince oneself that a likeness exists where one expects it to do so, but Diana does seem to have had the features, build and colouring of Cust far more than of the swart and stockier Manners. From the moment that the possibility was pointed out to her she herself never doubted that it was the truth, writing some time during the First World War: ‘I am cheered very much by Tom Jones on bastards and like to see myself as a “Living Monument of Incontinence”.’
Whatever his private feelings, Lord Granby accepted this new addition to his family with dignity. His youngest daughter was christened with due pomp: Diana after Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways, Olivia, Winifred after her godmother the Duchess of Portland, Maud after her other godmother Lady Tree. Her godfather was Arthur Balfour, an unsatisfactory choice since he forgot his responsibilities until Diana reminded him of them when she was thirteen and he Prime Minister. ‘Oh, fancy that,’ said Balfour, and changed the subject. The only curious feature about her birth is that Lord Granby – who, to save endless reiteration, will in future be referred to without qualification as her father – failed to register it. When asked why, he is said to have replied that he didn’t think girls counted, an explanation rendered less convincing by the fact that he had previously done all that was necessary in the cases of Diana’s elder sisters.
Almost Diana’s first memory was that of being held by her mother and looking down at the pale and wasted face of her elder brother. She was only just two when the nine-year-old Haddon died and the event meant little to her. John, the second son, a studious, good-natured, slightly colourless child a year younger than his brother, now took his place as eventual heir to the dukedom, but it was her sisters who meant most to her. Marjorie, the firstborn of the family, was almost eleven when Haddon died, a child of unusual talent who excelled at anything she touched – drawing, painting, singing, acting. She was restless and already unconventional, showing signs of a taste for the rackety and Bohemian. She craved love and admiration, yet resented it, at once tearing up the picture on which she was working if anybody presumed to praise it. Raymond Asquith, five years her senior, was intrigued by her: ‘she is so puzzling, illusory, impalpable, whimsical and dissatisfied – a mixture between a monkey and a moonbeam. I doubt if anyone will ever be much in love with her, but she is a capital companion.’
The three elder children – or two after Haddon’s death – were in the schoolroom during Diana’s infancy; she and her sister Letty composed the nursery. Letty, four years Diana’s senior, should in fact have been with the first wave of children, but she was held back to provide a companion for her little sister. Letty was ‘a plain baby,’ wrote Marjorie, ‘who could not compare with us great-eyed, tangled-haired, almost eastern-hued babies, added to which she, so Mother was given to say, was disagreeable, unloving, a cry-baby and worse’. Whether for these reasons or because she was preoccupied with the other children, Violet Granby felt little for Letty and lavished her love on her youngest child. Letty cried so much that the German governess decided that the corners of her mouth were beginning to droop and tied her chin up with a ribbon. Yet underlying her childish misery was an obstinate determination to make the best of things. Loving and trustful by nature, all her geese were swans, all her reverses for the best. Cynthia Asquith noted her ‘stern sense of duty about the maintenance of good spirits’; ‘Are we down-hearted? No!’ was her constant refrain.
For Diana, Letty’s companionship was of inestimable importance. She ‘was my be-all, my day spring, my accomplice’, Diana wrote in her memoirs. An imaginative child, Letty was the narrator of endless sagas, pointless and protracted to those grown-ups who casually overheard them, to Diana the most exquisite romances. She had a fine sense of the macabre. When Aunt Kitty drowned herself in the lake at Belvoir the children were told she had died of a chill but Letty ferreted out the truth and gleefully passed it on to her sister. Diana was not discomfited; she had not much liked Aunt Kitty and her suicide was an event rather than a tragedy. Always Diana was ready to welcome anything that would stir things up and upset the even tenor of her ways; the drowning of an aunt was better than nothing.
*
Of the house in Bruton Street where she was born she had only the haziest recollection. A dapple-grey rocking horse in the nursery had a habit of bucking savagely and inflicted wounds on the elder children but Diana was forced to content herself with watching wide-eyed from a corner. A nanny with an anachronistic zeal for saving the washing-up, mashed mutton, cabbage and potatoes into a thick paste and poured lemonade on top of the resultant mess, but Diana was still perched in a high chair sucking fingers of bread dipped in milk.
It was Cockayne Hatley that provided her first real home. A large but unpretentious ivied house near Potton in Bedfordshire, it belonged to Lord Brownlow and had been Harry Cust’s holiday home as a child. Characteristically, neither Lord nor Lady Granby saw anything odd about Lady Granby’s lover providing the family with a roof. ‘The celestial light shone most brightly at Cockayne Hatley,’ were the first words of Diana’s memoirs, and for all the children this ugly, friendly, rambling house, rubbing shoulders with its church in a tiny village on the edge of nowhere, left a bright image of fun and laughter and unclouded skies. Roaming the fields with a nursemaid Diana encountered a notice reading: ‘No Birds-Nesting’. ‘Poor birds,’ she observed. ‘What harm do their nests do?’ – thus exhibiting for the first time a lifelong tendency to assume that no sign prohibiting a course of action could possibly be aimed at her.
By the time Diana was six Hatley was abandoned. Her father had acquired a London house more than large enough for all the family. No. 16 Arlington Street was substantial even for an heir to a dukedom. It had splendid rooms by William Kent and one of the largest ballrooms in London. It lay at the end of Arlington Street, far from the hubbub of Piccadilly and sheltered even from the calm of its cul-de-sac by the eighteenth-century cobbled courtyard and grand wooden gate. Today it has been subsumed into the Overseas League and sadly mangled in the process but in 1900, even though the Granbys only had nine living-in servants and entertained with what their neighbours felt to be striking informality, it was held to be one of London’s finest residences. The Duke of Portland, an ardent admirer of Diana’s mother, put up the £20,000 needed to buy the freehold and was repaid year by year.
In Arlington Street the nurseries were tucked discreetly away in their own wing up a wooden staircase on the fourth floor. In The Woodhouse, Rowsley – a name descriptive of surroundings rather than building materials since the house was basically stone and Jacobean – child and adult lived far more cheek to jowl. It was here that the family spent every summer and it took over the arcadian role that formerly had been filled by Hatley: ‘We have had a swing put up in the field, I love it, Letty loves it and Marjorie loves it but yells hard if she goes high. You can’t think how happy we all are.’ Diana took over a dark panelled room, filled it with ‘curious bottles, coloured and crusted with incandescent sediment from elixiral experiments, delicate gold scales, George Meredith’s palsied head’, and called it the necromancer’s room – a title it still bears today. It was here that she first became aware of her disinclination for organized or, indeed, orthodox religion. Every Sunday, dressed in a fawn coat with highwayman’s cape and a wide-brimmed felt hat with silver galloon cockade, she would parade with the rest of the family and bump in a wet and smelly hired fly down the mile-long drive to Rowsley. There she endured an hour or more of torment as the Reverend Mr Parmenter droned through the service: ‘I never remember applying myself to prayer or to listening. I was only wondering, how much longer, O Lord?’
The Woodhouse was an appendage of the Haddon estate, centred on Haddon Hall, the immeasurably romantic second seat of the Manners family. Haddon had long been deserted in favour of Belvoir Castle some forty miles away. Though Diana only spent occasional holidays at Belvoir until her father succeeded to the dukedom in 1906, it always bulked large in her mind. She would have been a singularly unimpressionable girl if it had not. Rearing grandly on its hill which dominates the Vale of Belvoir, the castle is the paradigm of all those stately homes erected to prove that the upper classes still had the upper hand. It was built by James Wyatt in the early nineteenth century, a sighting shot for his nephew’s subsequent work at Windsor and supporting the comparison extremely well. Augustus Hare visited it a few months after Diana’s birth:
How I like all the medieval ways – the trumpeters who walk up and down the passages and sound the dressing time; the watchman who calls the hours through the night; the ballroom, always ready in the evening for those who want to dance; the band, in uniform, which plays soft music from an adjoining room during dinner.
Diana described in her memoirs the castle which she remembered as a child and showed that it had changed little during the intervening years. The long corridors, so icy in winter that overcoats were worn to go from one room to another; the Belvoir fire-brigade, under the leadership of the domestic chaplain; the white-bearded gong-man whose solitary function was to announce the time of meals; the lamp-and-candle man; the water-men, ‘the biggest people I had ever seen, much bigger than any of the men of the family … they had stubbly beards and a general Bill Sikes appearance’; the coal-man, Caliban to the life; fifty indoor servants; sixty horses in the stables; vast Gothic halls; a dining-room to seat eighty; a staircase up which eight men could advance abreast: it was the quintessence of grandeur and yet somehow a stage-set, the whim of an antiquarian aristocrat with limitless funds. The pomp was formal yet fantastic. Julian Grenfell visited the castle in 1914, after many anachronisms had been swept away, and commented: ‘Isn’t it an absurd thing, really, that there should still be places like Belvoir? It’s just like a pantomime scene. And even the owners can’t take it quite seriously.’ Diana cherished it, yet she never took it quite seriously. All her life she was to love dressing up, surrounding herself by the extravagant, the exotic, the exaggerated. Never was she deterred by the fear that people might say she was going too far. Belvoir went too far. Whether it formed her inclinations or merely fed them, there could hardly have been a more splendid backcloth against which to enact her childish fantasies.
For most of Diana’s childhood Belvoir was the home of her grandfather and his second wife. The duke was an exquisite old gentleman, model for Henry Sidney in Disraeli’s Coningsby, always beautifully dressed, as Marjorie remembered, in ‘corded riding breeches, pale-coloured riding gaiters and a lovely gold serpent chain threaded round his slim waist. He had soft, immaculate white collars and shirt-cuffs and impressive coral links and buttons, and his shock of shining white hair, sleekly parted on one side, swept back over his handsome clearskinned forehead.’ Belvoir was crowded with artistic treasures which the duke surveyed with mild curiosity, once producing from a bureau drawer two miniatures by Cosway and one by Hilliard and speculating whether they might have any value. His wife wrote books on temperance and pressed port and brandy on invalids or those in need of cheering up. On Sunday evenings grandchildren and servants were made to sing hymns to her accompaniment on the harmonium: ‘It was bad, very; “Son of my Soul” drawled to agonizing pitch.’
For Diana her grandparents were lovable but remote, nor could a late Victorian father be expected to impinge forcibly upon his offspring. Because of his fierce temper the children always approached their father with some circumspection, asking the butler first whether it was a propitious moment to talk to His Lordship. Diana would address him with slightly glutinous sentimentality: ‘My darling one … When do I see you again, my sweet? Goodbye, my sweetheart. Lots and lots of love. Your ever-loving Diana snubnose.’ Her father responded affably to such overtures but took little interest in her upbringing. The children were aware that their parents’ marriage was not a particularly harmonious one and Diana attributed some part of the sense of insecurity that has always haunted her to her childhood fear that her mother and father were about to divorce and desert their family. She craved protection and the certainty that she would never have to cope for herself. At The Woodhouse she remembered sitting under the piano while her mother played, thinking: ‘O, I’m glad I’m a girl. I’m glad I’m a girl. Somebody will always look after me.’ Her most private prayer every night was: ‘Let me live till eighty and don’t let poppa or mother die before me.’
She was considered plain as a child, podgy with a bump on her nose and a bony protuberance in the middle of her forehead, known in the family as ‘the unicorn’s horn’. ‘Diana will never make a beauty’, Letty remembers an aunt pronouncing sadly as she surveyed the lumpish six-year-old. ‘Plain but decorous’ was the verdict of a contemporary. The only crime she could remember committing as a child was stealing pennies from a pile in the hall intended for the crossing-sweeper. When she broke things she found it hard to own up or apologize but always did so in the end with a flood of no doubt therapeutic tears.
Her education was extensive but individual. She could read and write by the age of four but never learnt to spell – an accomplishment which she considered at the best otiose, at the worst slightly common. Twenty-five years after her husband was ennobled she was still capable of addressing her son as ‘The Vicount Norrich’. She had a passable acquaintanceship with the multiplication tables but never grasped the principles of long, or even short division. Fractions, or still worse decimals, were far beyond her ken. Her reading was omnivorous and she was encouraged to learn much poetry by heart – bribed, indeed, since her pocket-money was often made conditional on her performance. Her mother’s only criterion was that the poetry should be good. The first poem she prescribed was Marlowe’s ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’:
Come live with me and be my love
And we will all the pleasures prove.
The tradition was carried on to the next generation; at the age of six her son was holding a dinner-party enthralled with his rendering of ‘How Horatius kept the Bridge’. History was a staple of life; the Gods of Greece and Rome as familiar as her own family; ‘Latin, the use of the globes, the acquiring of algebra, ancient or modern philosophy – all such branches of learning were undreamed of in our curriculum; so were domestic science, cooking, preserving and the rest.’
Nursery and schoolroom were at first somewhat distant. ‘The ladies Violet and Diana Manners,’ read a note written shortly after their father became Duke, ‘request the honour of the Marquis of Granby at their tea-party on Friday 9 July at 4 o’clock to meet the Hon. Maynard Greville, Miss Lois Sturt and Miss Elizabeth Asquith.’ An element of self-parody does not conceal what was by modern standards a curiously formal relationship. As John Granby grew older, went to Eton, became enmeshed in a masculine world of guns, rods and horses, he had still less time to spare for his sisters. Instead Marjorie grew closer. In spite of the difference in age the three girls were singularly united. Together they acquired all those accomplishments considered appropriate for daughters of the aristocracy; not ‘cooking, preserving and the rest’ but singing, drawing, painting, sewing and embroidery. The sewing, in particular, had its practical aspects; the girls were never encouraged to think of themselves as rich and did far more work on their own clothes than most contemporary teenagers would deem within their grasp.
They played together too, all those interminable after-dinner games that had been so beloved by their mother and her circle: literary consequences, clumps, charades, dumb crambo, qualities, analogies. Happy hours were devoted to considering what would have happened if Sir Roger de Coverley had met Madame Bovary in a conservatory, or to enacting in pantomime: ‘It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good.’ Diana was too young to compete full-bloodedly in these arcane pursuits, but she bobbed along contentedly behind her sisters, sharpened her wits and learned to make the best use of limited resources.
Anything involving dressing up and acting was especially popular. At Belvoir there was a huge chest crammed with good things; ‘a cornucopia spilling out skirts and hats, a few yellow plaits for Wagner, helmets, swords, ballet-shoes, deer-stalkers, boas, Ophelia’s straws and flowers, jackboots, wimples and wigs’. Diana’s first theatrical experience was to be dressed up in a lacy costume and sing a song of the Netherlands Lass. Then she played Prince Arthur in King John, pleading vehemently to her sister Letty that she did not want her eyes to be put out.
She went to her first opera when about twelve – La Bohème at Covent Garden sung by Melba and Caruso. The two great singers were by now so podgy that they could scarcely kiss standing up, but Diana was overwhelmed. At her insistence Melba was invited to Arlington Street and soon became a close friend of the family. ‘She would bring me smiles and trinkets from Australia and fondle me, and for a birthday O! wonder of wonders! from the great Melba came a huge horned gramophone simulating mahogany with all her records.’ Both Lady Granby and Marjorie drew the prima donna: she preferred Marjorie’s effort because ‘it showed sadness’, an attribute of which, in her cheerful way, she was inordinately proud.
Diana’s mother was concerned in all things theatrical and was abetted in her interest by her closest friend, Lady Tree. The Trees played a great part in Diana’s childhood, indeed in her life. Maud Tree, an actress of minor ability but a formidable wit, was the wife of Herbert Beerbohm Tree, the actor-manager whose baroque productions and still more flamboyant style of acting filled His Majesty’s Theatre in the early years of the twentieth century. The Trees were socially no match for the Manners but Violet Granby, though elitist to a fault, demanded talent or money rather than breeding in her friends. Noble blood was estimable, essential certainly when a match was being considered for a daughter, but if its possessor was dull or stupid then he would get short shrift in Arlington Street. The Trees were at the top of the theatrical pyramid and exceptionally good company – that was enough.
Every Christmas the Trees would come to stay at Belvoir. The ritual was unvarying. Sir Herbert, who hated the country and believed any rustic must be either criminal or idiot, would arrive with the family on Christmas Eve. That night a telegram would arrive: crisis at His Majesty’s Theatre, he must return at once to London. Contentedly he would set off for his mistress’s arms on Putney Hill. No one was deceived, least of all Lady Tree, but the proprieties were satisfied.
There were three Tree daughters, two of whom became so closely integrated with the Manners that they might have been sisters. Viola was almost the same age as Marjorie, but her easy-going nature and Diana’s precocity ensured that she became as much a friend of the youngest daughter as of the eldest. ‘Wonderfully large, loose, surprised and disordered,’ Cynthia Asquith called her, and the vision of a high-spirited and coltishly graceful cart-horse emerges from the many descriptions of her. For Marjorie and Diana she was the ideal companion: adventurous, inventive, endlessly enthusiastic. At a party, or for a single performance on the stage, she could be magnificent but she lacked the discipline to make an actress of stature and her career was to fizzle out in mediocrity.
Iris, her sister, was almost as much Diana’s junior as Viola was her senior, but age was never an important consideration for Diana in the selection of her friends. Blonde almost to the point of being albino, bulky and graceless in movement, Iris possessed – said Osbert Sitwell – ‘a honey-coloured beauty of hair and skin that I have never observed in anyone else’. Diana Daly said that she could never decide whether Iris was ‘wildly attractive or utterly repulsive’ and her indecision was not unusual. The one reaction Iris never inspired was indifference: her hunger for new experience, contempt for comfort and convention, reckless questioning of traditional values, made her disapproved by many but loved by her friends. ‘Quelle famille de serpents!’ remarked a French governess, as she shook the dust of the Trees’ house from her feet. If the judgement be fair, Iris was the worst snake of them all.
The Manners rented a cottage at Aldwick, near Bognor and, from the time Diana was six, the Trees every spring and summer used to take rooms in a house nearby. Marjorie described what was, for the whole family, something close to Arcadia:
Bathing by moonlight! Walking as far as one dared up the long, narrow path to the moon, the alfresco dinners with a lamp on the table and no moths or insects ever to trouble us. Herbert in grand form, Max [Beerbohm] in sweetpea-purple and mauve smoking-suit – the fun of it. Primroses like a carpet and tamarisk for a wall, and the beat and suck of the tide, and the rooks overhead fussing, and Maud reading aloud, and sometimes Harry Cust with his wit, out-vying Maud and hers, and laughter and youth – Oh God! – and then we sang and drifted to bed … The first motor too – either Maud or Herbert brought it triumphantly down from London. A Panhard, one mouse-power. The door at the back like a pony cart. Excellent car on the straight, but stopped dead and ran back at the slightest incline.
Bemused, entranced, half asleep, Diana would linger on the fringes of this enchanted circle, praying that nobody would notice her and send her off to bed. Here she first fell in love; with Claude Lowther, an exquisite dandy forty years her senior who found the Manners style of living so disturbingly homespun that he once sent ahead of him his bed and bedding, saying that it was ‘hideous but comfortable and without fleas’. He wrote the eight-year-old Diana a love-letter on Bromo lavatory paper and she thought him the most beautiful and funniest man on earth. Sex was a fact of life for Diana, with no immediate application to her daily activities. Edwardian country-house parties were arranged according to the traditional precept: ‘à chacun sa chacune’. Diana remembered trailing behind her mother while the bedrooms were allotted for a grander-than-usual weekend. ‘Lord Kitchener must have this room and then, of course, Lady Salisbury must be here’; and then, later that evening: ‘If you are frightened in the night, Lord Kitchener, dear Lady Salisbury is just next door.’ The relationship between her calf-love for Claude Lowther and what dear Lady Salisbury presumably felt for Lord Kitchener seemed obscure to Diana, but the matter would no doubt become clear in time.
*
When she was ten Diana fell ill. Though diagnosis then was in its infancy, it seems that she suffered a bad attack of a form of paralysis, known as Erb’s Disease. At one time her life was despaired of. Letty reported that she had just seen their mother weeping. Diana asked why. ‘Because of you. You’re going to die young!’ For several years she led the life of an invalid; cosseted, carried from place to place, confined to darkened rooms, poked and peered at by a succession of specialists. She was treated to a course of galvanism, ‘a big box of plugs and wires and Ons and Offs and wet pads clamped upon me that I might tingle and jerk’. Whether because of or in spite of this remedy, her wasted muscles gradually recovered their strength.
Though she was liberally indulged during her illness, she was never permitted the luxury of self-pity. With a doctor pain was a suitable matter for discussion since it might be an aid to diagnosis; to complain of it otherwise was common. Diana inherited the attitude from her mother and applied it ruthlessly throughout her life to herself and her friends. Ann Fleming, in agony, once tried to escape from a dinner-party at the last moment. Diana was outraged: ‘Only housemaids have pains!’ Obediently Mrs Fleming attended the dinner and was operated on next day for a dangerously twisted gut. Patrick Leigh Fermor suffered from a raging abscess in the ear. ‘There’s no such thing as a pain in the ear,’ said Diana severely. ‘Only a little ache.’ At ten, she never lamented the fate that confined her miserably to bed while her friends and sisters were enjoying themselves; she took it for granted, and developed the tastes for reading, talking and brooding that were to mark her life.
Brooding was part of her nature. Diana had a singular propensity to expect the worst. ‘When I was six,’ she wrote to her mother, ‘and you were late, I used to be sure of your murder and lie awake all night … Quite as young as that I can remember catching my breath often at the dread of family ruin or Father and you separating.’ Her own health inspired equal pessimism. ‘Pretty bad,’ was her invariable reply when asked how she was, not piteously or even regretfully but with the calm resolve of one who faces facts. Every ache was cancerous, every cough tubercular. ‘If I hadn’t heard you were safely back at Chantilly, I would be frantic for fear you were dead as a smelt,’ wrote Martha Gellhorn many years later. ‘Have all the pains and anguishes gone? Was it anything like the year you decided your heart was weak or the year you had cancer? It’s awful to enjoy your ailments as much as I do, but they’ve always been so wonderful, so fatal and so sad that I cannot help liking them.’ At ten Diana was convinced she was going to die, accepted it stoically, and speculated only on the degree of pain that would be involved.
Suppressed emotions must some time emerge. It is tempting to find a link between the rigorous self-discipline which Diana learned as a child and the bouts of black melancholia to which she was prone throughout her life. Far too little is known, however, about the causes and nature of depression to allow any such thing to be more than speculation. Equally right might be the close relation who believed that she suffered from being too much the favourite child, weighed down by an impossible burden of loving expectation. Arnold Bennett told Lord Beaverbrook that her melancholy was that of any talented woman who feels herself under-employed. And who could contradict Duff Cooper when he wrote: ‘If the osteopath says your melancholy is caused by a lack of blood in the brain, he doesn’t seem to me to say anything unreasonable. I think your depression has a physical cause’? All that is certain is that from the period of her childhood illness, she suffered from bouts of irrational misery, sometimes lasting a few days, sometimes several weeks, in which all was intolerably black, nothing seemed worth while, even to drag herself from bed to bathroom seemed an unbearable, a pointless effort.
Diana believed that she could pinpoint the moment at which the first fit of depression afflicted her. Aged ten or eleven she walked down the stairs at Arlington Street glowing with contentment, all right with the world. A few moments later she was going up again in darkest misery, asking herself, ‘Why was I happy when I went down? Why am I so unhappy now?’ She never found the answers. But though she feared and resented her disability, she took a modest pride in it, deeming it a distinction which she felt – probably wrongly – was shared by few of her friends. When somebody suggested that her sister Marjorie was also a victim she was indignant: ‘Marjorie doesn’t suffer from depression. She’s just had an unhappy life!’ Diana accepted depression as any other ailment, a subject for regret but not self-pity. She soon evolved a technique for preserving a façade of jollity while secretly in darkest gloom. Her mother, who would have claimed to know everything of importance about her, never suspected the truth. If she had, she would have been uncomprehending and unsympathetic. Only housemaids moped.