THREE

THE GREAT WAR

It must be wonderful to be in England now. I suppose the excitement is beyond all words … It reinforces one’s failing belief in the Old Flag and the Mother Country and the Heavy Brigade and the Thin Red Line and the Imperial Idea which gets rather shadowy in peacetime, don’t you think?

Julian Grenfell’s awful exultation at the coming of war found its echo among others of Diana’s acquaintance. Herbert (‘Beb’) Asquith, Raymond’s younger brother, was another who found the moment provided a new purpose for him and welcomed it wholeheartedly. Among her closest friends, however, there is no evidence of that eagerness for war which Nicholas Mosley, in his biography of Grenfell, detected among the British upper classes. For Raymond Asquith at the Bar, Patrick Shaw-Stewart in Baring’s Bank, Charles Lister in the Diplomatic Service, all that was involved was an interruption to a successful career. Duff, as a clerk in the Foreign Office, was not allowed to join the army, but he would have been as unenthusiastic as any of his friends. None of them believed that the interruption could last more than a few months; nor were they, outwardly at least, preoccupied by the danger involved; but they all regretted the necessity. Men like Edward Horner and George Vernon were less dedicated to their careers, but they were still getting too much fun out of their peacetime lives to relish this distraction.

Nobody in Diana’s circle seems to have asked whether the war could have been avoided, still less whether it was just. For Diana it was enough that Britain was involved – ‘there it is and what do I do?’ She did however feel that she should make a positive effort to end the fighting before it was too late. On 7 August 1914, she wrote to Edward Horner:

I think it’s up to the Coterie to stop this war. What a justification! My scheme is simple enough to be carried out by you at once. It consists of getting a neutral country, either America or Spain or Italy or any other you can think of, to ask each fighting country to pledge their word – on condition that each one’s word is given – to cease hostilities, or rather suspend them totally until a treaty or conference is made. That they should then meet, agree not to dissolve until a decision of Peace is come to … It seems to me an admirable suggestion. For God’s sake see to it, backed by Patrick and the P.M. How splendid it would be! ‘Who stopped the war?’ ‘Oh, haven’t you heard, Edward and Diana, members of that Corrupt Coterie!’ You mightn’t believe it, but this is written more seriously than I’ve ever written. Do see to it! God, if I were only Judith or Jael or Salammbô or Corday or Monna Vanna – or at worst the crazy Kaiser’s mistress.

As Diana herself remarked when she quoted the letter in her memoirs, it might have been written by Daisy Ashford. But it would be wrong to ridicule the generous impulse. Behind the naiveté, the touching belief in the powers of her circle of friends, there was an appreciation of the need to avoid disaster which was signally lacking in those in authority. If more people had felt the need to act, rather than to wring their hands and deplore the passage of events, the lives of millions might have been spared.

Edward Horner had no illusions about his capacity to head off Armageddon. Within a few days of war being declared, he was off with the North Somersets, taking with him his mother’s two best hunters, a valet and a cook. Soon, stripped of all such agreeable appurtenances, he would be in France. Julian and Billy Grenfell and Tommy Bouch followed him there. Patrick Shaw-Stewart, Charles Lister and George Vernon were destined for Gallipoli. Ego Charteris joined the Gloucestershire Yeomanry and also set off for the Middle East. Raymond Asquith enlisted in a shadowy body called the London Volunteer Defence Force which, since it did not exist and would probably never be allowed to exist by the War Office, guaranteed its members the certainty of staying alive at least until after Goodwood, 1915. In fact, in spite of his vigorous efforts to the contrary, he did not go to France until October of that year. ‘Isn’t it awful,’ said Diana to John Simon when she met him, ‘looking very juiceless’, in the street. ‘Raymond is going out next Wednesday.’ ‘No, I think it’s quite right,’ replied Sir John, with all the confidence of a desk-bound cabinet minister. ‘The time has come now when one can only feel sorry for those who are unable to go.’

The Coterie had disintegrated; all that was left was Duff and Alan Parsons in Whitehall and the women bemoaning the disappearance of their admirers. Diana wished to do more than keep the home fires burning. ‘How can I best serve my country in this crisis?’ she asked Duff. ‘How but by writing hourly to me?’ Duff replied, but this was not good enough. Yet, service with the army and navy was almost impossible; other varieties of employment, such as work in an armaments factory, inconceivable both to her and her mother. There remained nursing, a vocation both useful and compatible with gentle birth. But nursing did not mean the same thing to everyone. For the Duchess it conjured up visions of some sequestered grange, an ethereal being in white gliding through the wards, a smile here, a kind word there, perhaps a laying-on of hands. Emptying bed-pans and dressing wounds would be left to some resident Caliban. Diana would accept no such nonsense. If she was going to nurse then she would do it properly.

Her first intention was to go to France, where various field hospitals were being set up behind the lines and where, incidentally, she would be near some of her dearest friends. Her mother was outraged and called in Lady Dudley, who explained that for an attractive girl to mingle with the libidinous soldiery so far from home could lead only to Rape. Diana was unconvinced but reluctant to defy her mother altogether. Similarly short shrift was given to a project to join Maxine Elliott, Lady Sarah Wilson and Lady Drogheda in their barge on the river Yser where, reported the Prime Minister, they conducted ‘some unnamed mission of philanthropy. What a Trinity! I am told that Diana Manners feels tempted to join the gentle bargees.’

A compromise was reached. Diana would not go to France but she would leave home and do a serious job of nursing in a London hospital. On 3 October she applied to be admitted to Guy’s and end her ‘life of grim monotony’. ‘I shouldn’t think they’d have me,’ she wrote gloomily to Raymond Asquith, ‘even if I get out of the castle with their Graces’ love-crown still on my brow.’ Asquith was disturbed by her resolve and sceptical about her motives. ‘I can’t help thinking that it is not a thing like the Slade School to be lightly undertaken as a mere essay in parent-dodging. The contract is lengthy, the drudgery unbearable and the uniform disfiguring … A hospital has all the material discomforts of a nunnery without the spiritual glamour of chastity.’

Guy’s Hospital is at Southwark, south of the Thames; a stark Victorian barracks with eighteenth-century trimmings, probably warmer than Belvoir Castle but in every other way making the ducal seat seem a paradise of comfort. Diana expected to be ‘lonely and sick in the extreme’. Although she was now twenty-two she had led a sheltered life, never sleeping from home except in carefully selected house-parties, chaperoned everywhere, cosseted and indulged in one way, stiflingly repressed in another. She was used to a world of deferential servants, admirers assuring her that she was the centre of the universe, parents guarding her from any tremor of impurity. Now she found herself transported to a world where she was nobody; subjected to strict discipline; expected to speak only when spoken to; dressed in a stark and unbecoming uniform; called at six, lights out at ten-fifteen; entrusted only with the most menial tasks; kept on her feet for nine hours with only brief breaks for meals; most taxing of all, confronted constantly with pain and misery.

The hospital viewed with some suspicion this gorgeous apparition. Nurses were not expected to feature in the newspapers or to have a retinue of elegant young men waiting regularly outside the gates for their emergence. The Prime Minister was not supposed to inquire about their welfare. After her first visit to her family in Arlington Street she was summoned to the Matron’s office and given a severe rebuke for gossiping about hospital matters. If she was thought to be picking at her food or in any other way showing herself superior to her surroundings, she was at once slapped down and reminded of the sacred nature of a nurse’s vocation; she was nothing, the task was all. She would not be accepted until she proved that she could do as good a job as any other nurse, and keep on doing it after the novelty had worn off.

Diana did prove herself and she was accepted. She never became the selfless sister-of-mercy of the visionary’s dream. ‘They put me in a men’s ward of unsurpassed horror and filth,’ she complained in November 1914, ‘and then kept me at work till 10 o’clock, which brings it out at ten hours at a stretch in one stinking bolting-hutch of beastliness. What I bear from these thirty whining Calibans!’ But Diana became a hard-working, conscientious and thoroughly competent nurse. Her conduct-sheet was immaculate. She had enough curiosity and interest in others to make her a sympathetic bedside presence, yet was sufficiently detached not to be harrowed by their sufferings. She was physically strong and had an inner toughness that was even more important. She remarked after a few months that she had ‘lost the instinct to turn away from repulsive things’. She took the whining Calibans for granted, never convinced herself that they were Ferdinands in disguise, but grew fond of them and did a professional job of tending to their needs.

As a V.A.D. – member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment – Diana had in fact no right to claim professional status. To her pleasure, however, she found that she was soon treated as a not particularly expert but still capable member of the nursing staff. She recorded proudly that she was allowed to give injections, intravenous and saline, to prepare for operations, cut abscesses and even once say prayers in Sister’s absence. Time spent in the kitchen at Arlington Street watching the disembowelling of a hare proved well spent when she attended her first operation and survived without coming anywhere near to fainting. It was hard work, but she was doing it well, more than holding her own where her friends had forecast disaster. Her role was extravagantly publicized:

I’ll eat a banana

With Lady Diana,

    Aristocracy working at Guy’s

was one of the boasts of that hero of the music hall, Gilbert the Filbert, the Colonel of the Knuts. For once Diana genuinely deprecated her notoriety; she had no wish to ruffle feelings at the hospital or earn the disapproval of the terrible Matron. The publicity seems to have done her no harm; she was well liked by her contemporaries and one at least of those who worked with her remembers her as friendly, unassuming and cheerful in the most gruesome circumstances.

Satisfied though she was with her life at Guy’s, she could not resist temptation when the chance again offered to work in France. This time it was her mother who championed the idea. The Duchess had decided it would be appropriate for somebody in her station to open her own hospital. She raised a substantial sum of money, employing Diana as fund-raiser, and acquired a suitable château near Boulogne. The necessary refurbishment was almost complete when the Red Cross changed their minds and refused to sanction the hospital’s opening. The château was turned into an Army School, but two years later, when Patrick Shaw-Stewart was posted there, it still boasted a ‘Marquess of Granby Ward’, a ‘Marjorie Ward’ and a ‘Diana Ward’. ‘Incidentally, some humorist has inserted an N before the T in “Violet Ward”,’ reported Shaw-Stewart.

Frustrated, the Duchess decided that Arlington Street should be turned into a hospital for officers. Diana was enthusiastic about the project. She would have been ready to return to Guy’s, but a few months back at home had shown her the advantages of a looser regimen. Her friends were all-important to her, their appearances in London were short and unpredictable; if she were cooped up in Southwark and only allowed out every two or three nights for a couple of hours she might well miss them altogether. At Arlington Street with a Sister and two trained nurses on the staff, Diana could do useful work as a V.A.D. yet enjoy relative freedom. With her sister Letty and one of her closest friends, Phyllis Boyd, also on the staff, she could be sure of congenial society and, incidentally, feel pleasantly superior to it because of her more thorough training. Her own bedroom was needed for the hospital so she moved upstairs to what had formerly been a servant’s room. Her exile delighted her. Her new quarters might be humble but they boasted a separate telephone on which the Duchess was no longer able to listen to her daughter’s calls.

At Guy’s Diana’s social life had been snatched in odd hours rescued from the rigorous routine. At Arlington Street her two lives constantly flowed over into each other. Friends would drop in at all hours, Alan and Duff would pay regular visits on the way back from their offices, the ebullient ‘Scatters’ Wilson would arrive from Rumpelmeyer’s, with packets of cream cakes and bottles of sherry. One Friday in August Diana recorded that she had had to stay in because an officer had ‘suddenly had to have a rib cut out of his side, the which was flung into a sewer instead of being fashioned into a woman, and from his side came a cataract, two basins full of flowing poison, and now he’s gasping restlessly, poor man.’ The job done, she left for dinner at Wimborne House and a ball given by the Duchess of Sutherland. Another evening she left a dinner at the Cheshire Cheese so as to help in an emergency operation, then rejoined the party two or three hours later at Alan Parsons’ house in Mulberry Walk. She did not find it too difficult to put the horrors of hospital life behind her and throw herself into a different world. She might have been a less competent nurse if she had failed to do so.

When things were slack at Arlington Street she would occupy herself elsewhere. With Katharine Asquith she would go down to the East End to provide an evening meal for workers in munitions factories. She appeared regularly in the tableaux vivants and displays of mime which so enraptured Londoners in the first decades of the twentieth century and which raised large sums for charities. Except for brief periods when the hospital was crowded in the wake of some bloody battle, her life was not physically a taxing one. In his novel The Pretty Lady Arnold Bennett portrayed Diana as Lady Queenie Paulle: beautiful, aristocratic, highly-strung, expensive, ruthless. Queenie did ‘practically everything that a patriotic girl could do for the war’; she sat on a dozen committees where she seemed far more at ease than the elderly men who surrounded her, ‘her thin, rather high voice, which somehow matched her complexion and carriage, had its customary tone of amiable insolence.’ She was a busybody who, with discipline and application, might have done great things, but who through flattery and self-indulgence had been transformed into a neurotic sensation-seeker, dangerous to others but ultimately still more dangerous to herself.

Bennett had never met Diana when he wrote his novel. His portrait caused great indignation to her friends. ‘Monstrous and abominable,’ Tommy Bouch described it, ‘not even witty … If I wanted to I am sure I could draw you better than that, with a cruelty which would be far more hurtful, but not so crude and mistaken and heavy-handed.’ Diana did not condemn it so forthrightly. She could see the resemblance between herself and Queenie, and found the tricks of speech, the attitudes of mind, even some incidents of which Bennett could not possibly have known, disturbingly familiar. What she felt unfair was the portrayal of her wartime activities as centring round a group of committees on which she was supposed to play a leading role. Diana hated committees, rarely contributed if she had to attend one and kept such occasions to a minimum. She did a worthwhile job which Queenie Paulle would have considered dull and degrading and, incidentally, felt that she got a lot more fun out of life than her alter ego. Queenie Paulle died in the end, cavorting on a London roof-top in an air-raid. Diana might have cavorted too, but she would have taken cover fast enough when the shrapnel began to fall. Life offered far too much to risk it with foolish bravado.

*

For life, even though England was at war, was filled with pleasures. Some of them, indeed, she owed to the war. Guy’s, servitude in one way, had meant freedom in another. What she did with her spare time, whether she had any spare time, the Duchess could not know. In fact she did nothing very dramatic; sometimes she dined alone with a man in a restaurant, but she had neither energy nor inclination for anything more daring. Her freedom, however, seemed all-important. With her return to Arlington Street, the Bovril Duchess, as Cynthia Asquith called her, began to reassert her maternal rights. Diana reacted with hostility. By the time she and her mother went to France to investigate the setting up of the hospital, tempers were already frayed. Once Diana complained angrily because the Duchess made a noise turning over the pages of Le Matin:

She said tonight sadly ‘Does everything I do make you uncomfortable?’ By Jove, it does, every bloody thing: squabbling with the Base Commander over the rent of the château; forcing useless and unwelcome objects – calendars, napkin-rings etc – on the officers; standing always in Princess Louise’s way in hopes of a word; ‘Vous savez, Monsieur, je suis très importante’ to all barrier-keepers; worst of all that staring at and questioning of the wounded. That eternal asking them where they are wounded, and the answer is always ‘Buttocks, lady’, or ‘Just here’ with an ominous pointing index, or else a crimson face and a trembling lip from a sensitive man who wants no one to know he has lost both legs and a hand.

Once back in London both sides settled down to a war of attrition. The Duchess never shut her bedroom door and insisted that Diana should always look in before she went up to her room, however late it was. Whatever state she was in, Diana always forced herself to sober up before returning. And then the lies would begin: ‘The Wimbornes’ ball is only just over, Lady Drogheda drove me home’, when in fact for the last hour she had been in a taxicab driving round and round Regent’s Park with a man. By day Irene Lawley provided the most regular alibi when Diana did not want her mother to know that she was seeing Duff or some other friend. Both sides hated the sordid ritual. Diana felt cheap and ashamed while the Duchess deemed herself betrayed. She sickened of the fight but could not bring herself to let go, while Diana never braced herself to the point of brazen defiance. In the end the Duchess was bound to lose. As the hospital became better established, so she lost interest in its running and spent more and more time at Belvoir, now a convalescent home. Standards were not what they had been. Provided Diana did not marry any of the young men with whom she was no doubt misbehaving, then the Duchess would leave her in peace. What else could she do except retreat from the field and keep her armies intact to fight the final, all-important battle?

*

In December 1914 Billy Grenfell described ‘a bust’ in London, ‘mostly with the remnants of our little clique’. Raymond and Katharine Asquith, Patrick Shaw-Stewart, Duff and Diana were there, ‘the latter looking very handsome’. ‘There is a sort of “Lights-Out” and “Eyes Right” air about London which makes merry-making incongruous. Though why should one not cull the fruit of the days that may yet remain?’ The circumstances could hardly have been more ripe for unbridled culling of any fruit in sight. The men, conscious that this might be their last chance, were out to make the most of it; the women, oppressed by a sense of debt to those who were going out to die for them, felt guilt in denying them any pleasures. The sharp division between military and civilian, the immunity of London to attack in the early phases of war, meant that the soldier on leave from the front enjoyed a far more privileged position than his equivalent in the Second World War. The miracle is that so many of the taboos of polite society survived more or less inviolate.

Not that much remained inviolate at ‘Fitz’, No. 8 Fitzroy St, the studio in which Nancy Cunard, Iris Tree, Phyllis Boyd and a few more of Diana’s friends held court. Often the inhabitants would urge her, ‘Come to Fitz, Diana.’ Always she refused, a little jealous of the freedom the others enjoyed, the excesses they no doubt perpetrated, yet too frightened to accept the invitation and anyway doubtful whether it was quite her sort of thing. Once she went round to help clear up after a party. Champagne bottles broken at the neck to save the trouble of drawing the cork, pools of blood and vomit, frowsty unmade beds, a black velvet divan thick with dust: squalor disgusted her and she never visited the studio again. Yet she could not escape a feeling of regret that, in sexual matters at least, her friends had stolen a march on her.

In every other way her conduct was far from prudish. At Arlington Street she had easy access to drugs and every chemist was ready to sell on the flimsiest excuse goods that now would have to be ordered on prescription. Chloroform was the easiest to obtain. Aubrey Herbert was reported to be ‘in a state of frenzied resentment and irritation against Diana, who rasps his war nerves’. After a dinner in which she had been particularly vociferous she suddenly announced: ‘I must be unconscious tonight.’ A taxi was sent off to a nearby chemist and soon returned with a packet. ‘Jolly old chlorers,’ Diana exclaimed, at which point Aubrey Herbert removed his wife before the orgy started.

Another time, when Diana was dining with Edwin and Venetia Montagu, a message was sent to Savory and Moore in St James’s requesting a supply of chloroform. Lady Diana Manners, the chemist was told, was having trouble with her eye. The conscientious Mr Savory, or perhaps Mr Moore, decided the Duchess should be informed of her daughter’s plight and within half an hour Diana’s mother was ringing at the door of the Montagus’ house in Queen Anne’s Gate. She was relieved to find Diana’s eye was safe. ‘But then comes the tangle. What for were we wanting the stuff? I felt Edwin crimson through his black, myself an unclouded sunset, and heard a muddled muck of unorganized loud-lying tongues.’ The dog was in great pain, Venetia had neuralgia, finally everyone agreed that Edwin Montagu’s hay-fever had been causing him trouble. The Duchess can hardly have been deceived, but politeness forbade any protest. She must have found it more difficult to restrain herself if she realized that Diana sometimes indulged her taste alone at home. Duff and Raymond Asquith arrived at Arlington Street late one night in August 1915, and demanded to see Diana. After some expostulation they got in, to find Diana, in Duff’s words, ‘slightly under the influence of chloroform which she’s been taking to cheer herself up’.

Morphia was another favoured refuge if the pains of the war became too great. Katharine Asquith was a staunch champion of this drug. In December 1915 Diana told Raymond Asquith that the only moments of pleasure she had found in the last month had arisen when she and Katharine had lain ‘in ecstatic stillness through too short a night, drugged in very deed by my hand with morphia. O, the grave difficulty of the actual injection, the sterilizing in the dark and silence and the conflict of my hand and wish when it came to piercing our flesh. It was a grand night, and strange to feel so utterly self-sufficient – more like a Chinaman, or God before he made the world or his son and was content with, or callous to, the chaos.’

The habit was never regular enough for it to become addictive, but it was dangerous for all that. Three weeks later she had another orgy with Katharine Asquith and spent the next day in bed with an alarmingly violent hangover. ‘I hope she won’t become a morphi-neuse,’ commented Duff. ‘It would spoil her looks.’

Alcohol proved equally seductive. Champagne was the stock drink, consumed in such quantities and so much associated with the hysteria of war that for all her life thereafter Diana viewed it with distaste. Vodka and absinthe were other possibilities, usually resorted to in the early hours of the morning. Whisky and gin were almost inconceivable drinks for a woman: to reduce oneself to a stupor with morphia was risky, perhaps immoral, but to drink a whisky and soda would have been common – a far worse offence.

Outside the houses of their friends, the Cavendish Hotel was the favoured resort of the group. Diana was forbidden by her mother to enter Rosa Lewis’s notorious establishment, which made it far more enjoyable, and two or three evenings a week would start in the Elinor Glyn room, with the impressively ample purple couch, or end up swirling tipsily around the corridors in search of diversion. Upstairs an old gentleman called Lord Kingston was taking an unconscionable time a-dying. ‘Come and cheer up Lord Kingston,’ Mrs Lewis would say, and off they would traipse to stand round the bedside of this unfortunate dotard and try to think of things to say. Then it was: ‘Let’s have a bottle of Lord Kingston’s champagne.’ Lord Kingston was too weak to protest and every so often a monumental bill was prepared and sent to everybody whom Rosa Lewis could remember having seen in her hotel. Usually somebody paid. Lord Ribblesdale and Sir William Eden were among the regular residents who got drawn into the revels. The former, in youth a most dashing figure, was one of the many elderly gentlemen who found Diana’s charms irresistible. Once she was rash enough to dine with him à deux in a private room at the Cavendish and reported: ‘a very severe rough and tumble with him at the goodnights. It was an uglyish scene, but I won, and ruffled him a good deal … O, the audacity of senility! It is the children’s menace. How they mousle them, touzle them; they are so fond of children.’

Brushes with the police occurred from time to time. At the Cavendish there were few problems. The guests would take refuge in the garden at the back while Mrs Lewis, with a firm ‘Leave it to me. I’ll cope with that,’ would settle the intruders with a mixture of bribes, blandishments and muttered references to friends in high places. Elsewhere England’s licensing laws could cause more serious trouble. At 10.30 one December night Diana, Alan Parsons, Viola Tree, who was soon to marry Alan, Duff Cooper and Edward Horner were dining at Kettner’s restaurant in Soho. Three glasses of brandy were on the table when the police burst in. They took the names of the men and, having seen Diana try to hide one of the glasses, asked her name as well. Diana lost her head and, after some hesitation, answered ‘Miss Viola Tree.’ The police were suspicious but noted down the information. ‘It was all rather unpleasant,’ Duff recorded in his diary, ‘and Diana was very frightened of what the consequences might be.’ Predictably there were none. Next day Alan Parsons spoke to Sir Edward Henry, Permanent Under Secretary at the Home Office, and was assured that the matter would be overlooked.

In part at least Diana’s somewhat raffish life-style was designed to shock – her mother in particular but also the bourgeoisie or, for that matter, the staider sections of the aristocracy. The latter did not always prove easily shockable. At dinner with the Horners the conversation at one end of the table turned to sodomy and somebody told the story of the officer who had buggered his batman in a shell hole between the British and German lines. Old and deaf Sir John Horner called down the table to ask what was causing the laughter. His son Edward tried to turn the conversation but Diana insisted on repeating the anecdote. Sir John thought for a moment. ‘He must have been an uncommonly handy feller,’ he grunted.

Duff saw Diana at a party in the Grafton Galleries, where all the other women seemed to be the lowest kind of actresses and chorus girls. ‘She was probably the only virgin there.’ Afterwards he took her to task. ‘She said she wanted to prove she could do these unconventional things without losing caste. She quoted Lady Ripon as having done the same. I said that Lady Ripon married first, to which Diana answered that she must surpass Lady Ripon by doing what she pleased before she married. One must not imitate the best but improve on it.’ Her consuming wish to be different, to excel if possible but at all costs to stand out from the ruck, marked her no less at twenty-two or twenty-three than it had done five years before. There might be many reasons for regret or shame, but the ultimate failure was to be inconspicuous.

Some people felt she tried too hard. ‘I am not up to her glare‚’ wrote Cynthia Asquith after a weekend with the Howard de Waldens at Chirk. ‘I prefer more of a mental twilight – her exuberance is too much of the electric-light.’ Yet to most people her presence was a guarantee of exhilaration. No party was dull if Diana was there; she might go too far, but at least she was going somewhere and those who went along with her were sure of being well entertained. ‘Dear Diana, what a snag you are in our lives,’ wrote Tommy Bouch. ‘Why shouldn’t we have a happy party without you? Why does everything fall flat as soon as you slip away?’ An electric light can indeed be embarrassingly bright, even garish, but the dark when it is turned off is not necessarily preferable. Cynthia Asquith was an intelligent and attractive woman but she knew her own light burnt low compared with Diana’s and the knowledge vexed her.

Some of Diana’s friends shone with equal effulgence. Nancy Cunard was one. She was the daughter of Maud Cunard, a celebrated hostess who in 1926 was to surprise her friends by announcing that Maud was a dull name and that she wished in future to be known as Emerald. Nancy’s father, Sir Bache, was a shipping millionaire who devoted most of his energies to hammering silver and carving coconuts preparatory to mounting them in ornate cups. He spent several months manufacturing a collection of pony-sized horse-shoes which he then mounted on the gate so as to read ‘Come into the garden, Maud’ – a touching gesture which signally failed to charm his wife. Lady Cunard was an intellectual snob, a Mrs Leo Hunter whose knowledge of literature and music was genuinely profound but who collected celebrities with the eagerness of a greedy child in a sweetshop. Except as a provider of worldly goods she had no use for the amiable, affectionate, slow-witted Sir Bache; for very different reasons she was beginning to look with equal distaste on her daughter Nancy.

Nancy Cunard had been destined to rebellion almost since the moment of her birth. Rich, elegant, dazzlingly blonde, she defied the world in which she belonged. No one was more quick to perceive injustice and fight to remedy it; sometimes it seemed that if no cause for battle existed she would set out to invent one. More intellectual than Diana, and more sluttish, she inspired in her friend a vague unease, compounded of admiration and disapproval. ‘Well, Maud,’ Margot Asquith is supposed to have rasped a few years later, ‘what’s Nancy up to now? Is it dope, drink or niggers?’ In 1915 or 1916 niggers were in the future, but dope, drink and promiscuous sex all bulked prominently in her life. Duff and Diana called on her one morning at eleven. ‘We found Nancy not yet dressed, looking squalid, having been very drunk the night before. Diana was disgusted. Nancy’s dégringolade is so complete that I find it rather romantic’

Nancy Cunard, Diana and Iris Tree, wrote Janet Flanner, ‘formed an inseparable trio of beauties – a kind of Mayfair troika of friendship, elegance, intelligence and daring’. Diana was never as close to Nancy Cunard as that would suggest, but Iris Tree she loved dearly. In the casual relish with which she took to sex and in her intellectual turbulence, Iris was closer to Nancy but she possessed a warmth, a naiveté almost, that was lacking in her friend and which Diana found wholly endearing. For most of her life Diana seemed to be protecting Iris, smoothing her path; rescuing her from the results of her wilder follies; and there was no surer way to Diana’s heart than to require her help. They enjoyed each other’s company with rich enthusiasm; when they met after a separation it was with an explosion of laughter and gossip and catching-up so extravagant that it seemed they could never bear to part again.

Venetia Stanley was another star in Diana’s firmament. Tall, strongly built, formidably intelligent, she was lacking in seductive charm. She had the reputation of rendering even the most virile man impotent. She was handsome in her way; Laurence Jones wrote that she ‘rode like an Amazon and walked the high garden walls of Alderley with the casual stride of a boy. She was a splendid, virginal, comradely creature.’ Herbert Asquith, the Prime Minister, found her splendid and comradely at least. He was devoted to her, made her his confidante and wrote her letters of startling indiscretion in which personal revelation and official secrets were nicely blended.

In July 1915 Venetia Stanley married Edwin Montagu. Montagu was Jewish and immensely rich, a member of Asquith’s Government and a man of power. His long, bony features were so pockmarked that Katharine Asquith, playing tennis on a particularly dilapidated asphalt court, remarked that it reminded her of Edwin’s face. His eyes were sombre and unhappy; his mood oscillated between gentle melancholy and despair; ‘My fires give no heat,’ he would mournfully remark. Diana and her friends appreciated his humour, relished his wealth and generosity, and accepted him as one of themselves. He was little older than Raymond Asquith, yet seemed of a different generation; he yawned like a hyena after dinner; in Katharine Asquith’s phrase ‘he had no thread to his personality’.

The Montagus’ marriage and the couple’s installation in Queen Anne’s Gate were of great value to the Coterie since they provided a base where they could meet free from intrusive chaperones, more comfortably than in the Cavendish Hotel. Three or four nights a week Diana would dine there, Duff would also often be there, as would Alan and Viola Parsons, Katharine Asquith and whatever other members of the group might be in London. Edwin Montagu appeared genuinely pleased to see them, possibly finding that an influx of talkative friends eased what quickly proved to be a difficult marital relationship. Diana believed that Venetia had married Edwin ‘for her days rather than her nights’, and quickly found that the latter were more troublesome than she had expected. Being resourceful as well as ruthless, the burden did not prove intolerable to her, but it was evident to anyone who knew the couple well that the marriage gave little pleasure to either party. Nor did their friends feel that there was anything to be done about it. ‘It is no use our trying to put the Montagus right,’ wrote Katharine Asquith, ‘as they don’t exist at all.’

Venetia’s defection had left the Prime Minister distraught. Since Diana had first got to know him well in Venice, she had become very attached to Mr Asquith. She enjoyed the schoolmaster in him; the solemnity with which she was made to recite the first line of Baedeker’s guide to Northern Italy, ‘Over all the movements of the traveller the weather exercises its despotic sway’; the endless questioning on who wrote what and in which play did so-and-so appear. At one point before the war the Duke so disapproved of the policy of the Liberal Government that Diana was forced to visit Downing Street without his knowledge, yet she continued to go, mainly to see the children but also for the pleasure she gained from her meetings with their father. Once war was declared party differences were largely forgotten. The Prime Minister described the Duchess of Rutland and Maud Cunard descending on him in the Cabinet room ‘like an Atlantic tornado. The Duke wants to have the vacant Garter – which he doesn’t in the least deserve and which I certainly shan’t give him.’ He was sure, he told Venetia Montagu, that this plot had nothing to do with an invitation to lunch which he had recently received from Diana. Probably he was right, Diana had as little as possible to do with her mother’s scheming. He sat next to her at dinner a fortnight later. ‘She is a gifted creature,’ he noted, ‘oddly enough, according to her own account, rather lacking in real joie de vivre and much handicapped by her family and some of her surroundings. I think she rather likes me, but I am not sure.’

Two weeks later they were side by side at dinner again. The Duchess was a champion of the campaign for enforced teetotalism in wartime; a crusade which had with some reluctance been espoused in Buckingham Palace. Somewhat dubiously Diana raised the question. ‘How do you feel about putting down champagne?’ she asked. ‘Let’s put it straight down!’ answered the Prime Minister, and drained a deep glass. ‘The King is pretty guarded about his pledge,’ Diana told her brother John. ‘I don’t think it will come to much with all the cabinet sots and swiggers – but God help England if it does! It is the cornerstone of their brains.’

Then came Venetia Stanley’s engagement to Edwin Montagu. Mr Asquith visited Diana in bed where she was recovering from an accident. He made evident both his distress at Venetia’s desertion and his affection for Diana. Next day a letter arrived; prominently marked ‘Personal’ and with the instruction that any reply should be similarly labelled. Somewhat daunted by the letter’s contents, Diana that evening consulted Duff:

Diana is quite certain that Venetia was his mistress, which rather surprises me. This letter, which was rather obscurely expressed, seemed practically to be an offer to Diana to fill the vacated situation. She was in great difficulty as to how she was to answer it, partly from being uncertain as to its meaning and partly from the nature of the proposal it seemed to contain. She was anxious not to lose him but did not aspire to the position of his Egeria, which she felt sure would entail physical duties that she couldn’t or wouldn’t fulfil. I advised her to concoct an answer which would be as obscure as his proposal and leave him puzzled.

Duff never liked Mr Asquith; partly because of his designs on Diana; perhaps still more because the Prime Minister did not have much time for him: ‘He is oblivious of young men and lecherous of young women.’ Diana, however, though she managed to avoid any close entanglement, grew fonder and fonder of him as he grew more drunken and pathetic and power slipped away from him. At the end of 1916 she was reporting to Katharine, his daughter-in-law, ‘The feeling today seems to be that the old boy cannot eat dirt by remaining lopped of his war powers. His form on the other hand is perfect, detached and bobbish, but I fear lately too conspicuously buffed. Poor darling, I know what he feels.’ One of the things he felt was that it was high time Diana married, but when he broached with her the possibility of finding a suitable mate she replied that he would have first to produce another son like Raymond – a riposte that surprised and slightly shocked him.

Margot Asquith was another matter. She professed great affection for Diana and abused her liberally as proof of it, ‘What a pity that Diana, so pretty and decorative, should let her brain rot!’ ‘Diana’s main faults are that she takes money from men and spends her day powdering her face till she looks like a bled pig’; such comments were duly passed on and caused, if not distress, then at least irritation. ‘As bridge twelve hours in the twenty-four cannot really make the brain active, she should keep her comments in her pocket,’ she retorted crossly to Patrick Shaw-Stewart. One weekend Mrs Asquith put Diana off at the last minute, which, since Duff and Alan Parsons were to be in the party and Diana had already thrown over another hostess in Margot’s favour, was by no means well received. Viola Tree, already staying with the Asquiths, rose in Diana’s defence.

‘It’s really a dreadful thing to have done. Diana isn’t accustomed to being treated like that.’

‘I thought she wasn’t accustomed to being received at all,’ retorted Margot.

‘Well, I expect Duff and Alan will both chuck. There’s nothing for them to come for now.’

‘Chuck! Surely they won’t be as middle-class as that?’

To which Viola retorted that Margot was both middle-class and a chucker. To make matters worse for Diana, Duff and Alan did not chuck; but she had the satisfaction of telephoning the Asquiths at 3.15 a.m. to report that fourteen Zeppelins were overhead and she was in imminent danger of her life.

There were many weekends when nothing arose to keep Diana away. At Walmer Castle the rooms were numbered. ‘I have been asked my number by the Prime Minister, his secretary, Hugh and Patsy. I keep my powder on through the awesome nights.’ Margot stamped around the castle with skins of bears and filthy hearthrugs ‘which she threw over the shoulders of her guests, muttering that she had nursed five sisters and three nephews through consumption and she knew what was needed’. At Bognor the Asquiths wolfed their lunch so as to get to the bridge-table and played all through a blazing summer weekend, boxed up in a den overlooking the pantry. Diana was in disgrace for bathing after dinner in a near hurricane; ‘at which they had an unequalled blue, more fuss made at the risk than we made when Denny drowned’. At the Wharf, the Asquiths’ country house, Lady Ottoline Morrell called one afternoon when Diana was there. ‘All these people seem curiously apart from real life,’ she commented, ‘as if they had no comprehension of what goes on except in their own little “Set”.’

Though Diana was not prepared to help her mother in a campaign to secure a Garter for the Duke, there were times when she felt bound to cooperate in her plots. John Granby, Diana’s brother, was ‘the last male issue of our noble house and the trenches were certain death’. The Duchess was determined to get him into a staff job where he would be in relatively little danger. Sir John French, the Commander-in-Chief, was a friend who could have fixed the matter with a stroke of the pen, but a more oblique approach seemed desirable. French’s closest friend and confidant was a sinister American adventurer called George Gordon Moore – George Gordon Ghastly as Duff and Diana called him. Moore showed every sign of being in love with Diana, Moore’s influence with French was unlimited, Moore said that Diana was the only living soul of whom French was jealous because he feared she might over-stimulate his friend. If Diana would offer Moore even modest encouragement, then Lord Granby’s future would be secure. So she did ‘and the results were excellent. John got on the staff, wore a red-and-gold band on his hat and was a bit despised.’ Hearing of this, Edward Horner at once asked Diana to intercede for him, too. The difference was that he wanted to be detached from the staff and sent to the front line. This too was done.

The trouble was that Diana loathed Moore. She was sickened by his physique, which was that of a squat and podgy Red Indian. She could hardly understand a word he said. She despised his vulgarity and ignorance of all she had been taught to find civilized. She was terrified by his obsessive love. He was said to be divorcing his wife in America so as to marry her. Diana had an awful feeling that he might succeed. ‘I was very young and couldn’t cope at all.’ To Raymond Asquith she described his passion as ‘that vile torrent of gravy and steaming, putrefying blood’ compared to the ‘rainbowed ornamental fountain’ of Duff’s affection.

Once, in a side room of Moore’s house, he got her to himself, pinned her arms to her sides in a bear hug and kissed her greedily. Fearing rape she wrenched her arms loose and tried to strangle him. But Moore had been a pugilist in his time, ‘the windpipe clutch which I did not relax for an easy three minutes proved useless and his throat muscles pulsed to the, to his mind, stimulating caress’. In the end he released her and she stormed from the house: ‘O Raymond, it was so sullying, almost mutilating and scarring. I can still fancy I see the traces on my features.’ Duff took her home and she protested, with a nice sense of melodrama, that her lips were not worthy of him any more. Duff took out his handkerchief, gave her lips a perfunctory wipe and said he thought that would do nicely.

By her standards, she was making unusually heavy weather of what was neither a particularly violent nor an unprecedented assault upon her virtue. There was indeed an element of self-mockery in her protests, but she was genuinely frightened by Moore and had found the experience a disagreeable one. There were compensations, however, in Moore’s friendship, beside the doing of good turns for friends and relatives. He lavished presents on her: an ermine coat, a monkey with a diamond belt, a set of Maupassant bound in morocco, a cream poodle with pompoms on each buttock and shaved shanks and shins, a gigantic sapphire said to have belonged to Catherine the Great. ‘All this had to be accepted,’ she wrote drily to her son many years later. ‘Not difficult to accept, you’ll say, but I really did hate him.’ The Duchess, who believed in spoiling the Egyptians as well as making use of their talents, urged her to take anything that was offered, and Diana never needed much urging to accept a present.

It was in Diana’s honour that Moore gave a series of parties nicknamed ‘the Dances of Death’, because no one knew which man would be alive when the next dance was held. Negro jazz and Hawaiian bands were summoned from afar; decors created from Bakst or Beardsley for the evening, vanishing at dawn like an insubstantial pageant; rivers of champagne, mountains of red and white camellias. At the heart of the revels, dazzlingly white and fair, Diana ruled. Her presence, wrote Iris Tree, ‘always brought to such feasts something of myth and legendary revival, glory Greece, grandeur Rome plus the clowning escapading of Villon. After one of these revels we came home on a horse-drawn hay-cart – how? – from where? – the dance-tunes singing through our limbs as we mounted into country sunlight.’

Pleasant though it was to be the centre of attention, Diana could have done with less of these evenings. For one thing, Moore would turn down the lights and dismiss the band the instant she left, thus forcing her to linger on or cut short the pleasure of the other guests. For another, her friends were not disposed to pay more than scant attention to their host, and he for his part wanted only to dance with her. She had to sit next to him at dinner and let him ‘murmur love or Chich-techicher-chich-chich hotly in my ear as we shuffled and bunny-hugged around’.

When she escaped from Moore it was as often as not into the arms of Basil Hallam. Hallam was that rarity, a music hall performer who even by the exacting standards of 1915 could pass muster as a gentleman. He was slim, elegant, lacking in conversation but with a dreamy charm. His hammer-toe prevented him marching to war but did not impair the magnificence of his dancing. He was distinctive, romantic, pleasantly absurd. Diana adored him in a quiet way and called him ‘her little stick of barley-sugar’ – though more to annoy George Moore than because she thought the metaphor appropriate. Night after night he would linger to the end of the party and then take Diana home at 4 or 5 a.m. with two or three circuits of Regent’s Park to allow time for professions of love. He was jeered at by some who did not know why he had not joined the army and was given his quota of white feathers at the stage door. Diana too came in for a share of the abuse. ‘Is it you or your sister who is most responsible for keeping shirkers and cowards like Basil Hallam from fighting for his country?’ asked an indignant Dubliner. ‘You are no better than a traitress!’

‘Life is much as you remembered it,’ Raymond Asquith told Edward Horner in April 1915.

There is desultory speculation in the Coterie as to whether Dotty is in love with Hallam. Hopes are entertained by some; doubts by others – but not I think by Hallam. On the whole my own impression is that her beauty is increasing and her humanity dwindling – a double portent which you may find it hard to picture. I am training myself to admire her as a natural object – the Alpine sunset, the Pink Terrace in New Zealand – instead of the damned unnatural and extremely provocative one she really is.

Asquith’s accusation of inhumanity was echoed by many of her friends. ‘You, the Soul of Souls, yourself have no soul,’ wrote Tommy Bouch accusingly. ‘You told me I ought never to have taken you seriously and now I know you were right.’ Those who loved her and wanted her exclusive love in return were maddened by her determination to remain detached; her eagerness to offer friendship; her refusal, perhaps inability, to do more. ‘I can’t understand your form of loving people,’ wrote an agonized Edward Horner. ‘I can’t constitutionally believe in your loving me and a couple more.’ George Vernon was maddened by the vision of Diana surrounded by George Moore, ‘Duff hazarding his all. Edward buying licences. Michael [Herbert] and his oiliness. Raymond and his insinuations. Claud and his persistence, and you apparently distributing your favours to all with impartiality mixed with a curious caprice.’

Diana, now aged twenty-three, would in many ways have liked to commit herself, even though she might live to regret it, but when it came to the point she found herself unable. To George Vernon she wrote:

Nellie Hozier is off the hooks to a man with a head injury but I’m still on them – and likely to be till I wither and grow sour and unpalatable. Felicity [Tree] too is ‘off’ with Cory-Wright, while Iris quenches a dozen blue-flies’ thirst, and God knows her face betrays her. Nancy too is in the same boat of so-called iniquity, with better show yet a smuttier name. God help them both! They have more courage than me – and can seize an opportunity and hug and crush it against their palates irrespective of the taste and they are very happy while I go starved, and hesitating and checking my every impulse for fear of losing my pedestal of ice which was never of any worth to those who saw it and considered fabulous by strangers.

One can find several reasons for her reluctance to quit her chilly pedestal. The marriage of her sister Marjorie Anglesey was going through a disastrous passage while the other marriage which she observed most closely, that of Venetia and Edwin Montagu, was hardly an advertisement for matrimony. In an age when any man you loved today might be dead tomorrow, restraint seemed the minimum required by prudence. Though flirtation could be delightful, the pleasure did not seem to increase with physical intimacy. But perhaps the most important single factor, one which she hardly admitted even to herself, was that she compared all other men to Raymond Asquith and found them wanting.

For a woman who fears commitments and who likes to share responsibilities, a relationship with a securely married man has obvious advantages. At several points of her life Diana was part of a well-ordered triangle. The Asquiths hardly provided this, yet her deep and lasting friendship with Katharine and her love for Raymond provided a tangle of loyalties and affection which seems curious to the outsider and must at times have perplexed even the protagonists. When Raymond was away she wrote to him two or three times a week and he responded with lyrical enthusiasm: ‘I swear that you are easily the Queen of Corpse-Revivers. A dozen syllables of your electric illiteracy would suffice to raise Lazarus’; ‘There is life in every word you write, Dilly; I can see the sap pulsing in the syllables, the vowels sing together like the morning stars, and the i’s toss their heads to heaven like daffodils in March.’ Diana shared a special place with his wife: ‘You and my beloved Katharine are the only women my vocabulary can’t more than cope with.’ When Raymond realized that he had no photograph of his wife to carry into battle he wrote to protest. ‘I have got a dinky little photo of Dilly and if that is found on my corpse instead of a picture of you, I know you will give me a wigging in the next world.’

Everyone, it seems, was satisfied. Yet one wonders if Katharine can really have had the self-effacement not to resent the precious hours of leave which her husband devoted to their friend; whether Diana did not sometimes wish that she could have the prior claim. Sometimes Katharine seems to have betrayed at least a flicker of jealousy. It must have been in response to some such protest that Raymond Asquith wrote to his wife in April 1915:

I felt quite guilty when my writing to Dottie made you whimper. I hardly ever do write to her, I hardly ever see her except in public, and it is not she but Fawnia [his nickname for his wife] whom I love. At the same time she flashes and dazzles and provokes ‘animated adoration’ and transient moods of guilty passion and licentious rhetoric which ‘blaze high and quickly die’. I think you make insufficient allowance for moods and for the imperative necessity of indulging them and – in the dingy times in which we live – of artificially stimulating, fostering, and cherishing the faintest spark of abnormal excitation. Whatever you may think of Dottie as an ideal, as a fact she is a very remarkable creature and it would be a gross abuse of opportunity not (as A. Bennett would say) to ‘savour her with every fibre of one’s palate’. But enough of Dilly. I don’t think of her much except when I see her, whereas I consistently feed my mind upon the perfections of the Fawn.

The tone of this letter is somewhat defensive, yet it is probably a fair representation of his priorities at the time. The following months saw a growth in the frequency and intensity of his correspondence with Diana. She meant far more to him than ever before. That Raymond Asquith never betrayed his wife in any legal sense of the word is certain. Whether she might ever have felt herself betrayed, whether their marriage might have been one day in peril, must always be a matter for speculation. The children of that marriage believe firmly that it would not, that the honesty between their parents was total and the relationship so strong as to be unshakeable. Certainly to have shaken it would have caused Diana deep distress. Yet her love for Raymond was so passionate that it could only with the greatest difficulty have been contained. She was to have many years of deeply happy married life, yet she was never to feel again an emotion so intense or so impetuous.

In February 1916 Raymond Asquith was sent briefly on a course to Folkestone. Diana went down there for the night and next day he wrote in ecstatic vein: ‘Even into this foul and dingy inn the recollected glory of your beauty flings its unquenchable beam – and your darling, darling charity of last night – a sponge of bitter wine held upon a broken reed to the lips of a crucified fool … For four hours – or whatever the day’s ration may be – I never wittingly remove my eyes from you, and yet at the end it is only as if a shooting star had flashed like a ribbon across a Stygian night.’ A gap in the correspondence follows but Diana wrote a few weeks later: ‘My darling, darling Raymond. I have loved so utterly your last two beseeching letters. I was longing for you to claim me again, and now you have done it fully, leaving no crumbs for another, thank God!’

Compared with this, all her other relationships seem to some extent artificial. Yet to the other men involved they were real enough. Patrick Shaw-Stewart was constantly battering at her to marry him or, failing that, at least to go to bed with him. ‘You, you see, always want to keep (1) me (2) your old virginity. Whereas I always want to get (1) your heart and soul (2) your worshipful body.’ On one occasion she evidently let him go a little further than usual. He woke up next morning feeling like a cock ready to crow vaingloriously, though only if ‘you divided the cock’s harem – which probably runs to a score – by twenty, left him with one infinitely desirable hen who happened to be a bit of a freak, and compelled the poor old bird to read “yearly” for “hourly”’. Even his modified triumph only endured a short time: three weeks later he was leaving a house-party rebuffed, ‘a perfect specimen of the draggled male … Anyone might have cried to see me: amazing, isn’t it, how women have the heart to inflict such terrible damage?’

Duff, who respected Shaw-Stewart’s pertinacity, was always nervous lest his rival should wear Diana down and triumph by sheer will-power. Back from Salonika on his last leave, Patrick Shaw-Stewart hastened to Belvoir to have another try. ‘Pray God with me for courage to face this great ordeal and to let me triumph‚’ Diana telegraphed to Duff. But could God be relied on in so delicate a matter? Duff waited in agony for twenty-four hours, but one glance at his friend’s face when they dined together on Shaw-Stewart’s return from the country was enough to reassure him.

Probably he had more to fear from Edward Horner, for Diana could always be melted by a man’s frailties, and of these Horner had many. ‘I want only to remember how I love you, which is difficult when I think of your limpness,’ Diana wrote sternly, but in fact Edward’s limpness was his strongest card. Like all her would-be lovers he was hot for certainty. ‘When you say you love me, what do you mean?’ he demanded. Did she want to lie beside him, and more, most nights? Would she like to be with him whenever she felt expansive and whenever she felt sad? If not, she did not love him. Inevitably the answer was a dusty one, but there was an irresistible sweetness about his fecklessness. Duff loved him, but was inclined to dismiss him as a serious threat. Raymond Asquith was more perceptive. When Edward was on the point of departure for the Middle East, Raymond wrote:

The plain fact is I do not like your doting so much more fondly on old E than on me and being so much more wretched at his going than you ever are on mine. I grudge those two days on the hearthrug – the sobbings and the huggings and the vowings that he was the only man you cared a fig for … I fear, I very much fear, that you are Wendy to the rest of us and ‘wonder wife’ to old E. I don’t say it’s surprising, still less culpable: on the contrary it’s almost too dreadfully natural to be worthy of a woman of your calibre. I only say it’s surprising, still less culpable: on the contrary it’s almost too Edward but only against God and the world for not making me younger, richer, wittier or more beautiful.

It would be tedious to list the full roll-call of those who at least professed their love for Diana. Sometimes it almost seems as if she was so well known to be inaccessible that men tried out on her endearments that would have been dangerous on a more susceptible target. To be in love with Diana was to be member of a club, not particularly exclusive, perhaps, but boasting many distinguished members. Tommy Bouch wrote from France: ‘Here is one more victim for you, and be honest – you like making victims.’ George Vernon called her ‘unique, blood-maddening, love itself incarnate, and you will yet drive me to my grave. My eyes grow hot when I think of you.’ Claud Russell continued to propose to her at monthly intervals. To all of them she was evasive; not repelling bluntly but offering little hope. She felt bound, she told Major Bouch, to share her favours: ‘To make the many happy, what alternative is there?’

There was no such play-acting about her relationship with Duff. Viewed in retrospect there seems to have been an inevitability about their wooing, in spite of its many vicissitudes and the rival claims on their affections. As early as April 1914, after a late supper at the Cavendish in which Diana had been absorbed with Basil Hallam and Duff making noisy love to Marjorie Trefusis, ‘Diana said to me in the hall that though we both had our stage favourites, we really loved each other best, and kissed me divinely.’ There were many moments in the next five years when each one doubted whether marriage with the other was desirable or even feasible, yet they both found it curiously difficult to imagine being married to anyone else.

Duff had the great advantage over his friends of being permanently in London. Though he did not feel any shame at being held to his job in the Foreign Office while most of his friends went off to the war, it was not a wholly enviable position. It was difficult not to feel at a disadvantage when the other men at a party might be dead a week later fighting for the cause of one’s country; difficult not to concede that they had the right to attentions which one felt would normally be bestowed elsewhere. Duff was furiously resentful when Diana let Patrick Shaw-Stewart take her home after a party, but it was the last night of Patrick’s leave. He protested, but felt a cad as he did so. Nevertheless, the fact that he was there, permanently available in times of grief or stress, the one dependable point in a shifting world, meant that his position in Diana’s life became gradually more secure until in the end it seemed inconceivable that he should ever be removed.

His behaviour in the early years of the war was not likely to render him more eligible in the Duchess’s eyes. He gambled heavily. At a typical evening of chemin-de-fer in Duff’s rooms, Alexander Thynne lost £198, Sybil Hart-Davis and Sidney Herbert £472, Diana £30 while Edward Horner won £598, Jack Pixley £76 and Duff £51. Sybil and Sidney couldn’t pay, so Duff’s winnings disappeared. There was no such dispensation two nights later when he lost £242.

He drank as much as ever and behaved when drunk with the irresponsibility of a teenage undergraduate. One night he deposited Diana and Katharine Asquith at Arlington Street. ‘A great wave of buffiness came over Duff as we left.’ He decided that he must at all costs rejoin the women. Laboriously he clambered over the high spiked railings that then divided Green Park from Piccadilly, and tottered down the garden walls that flanked the park, trying to count off the houses between the Ritz Hotel and the Duke of Rutland’s London seat. ‘With a soaked besotted brain’ he finally put all to the hazard, scaled a wall and found himself in a strange and silent garden. He crossed the paling into the next garden and again into the next, leaving behind him a trail of battered flowers and betraying footprints. Finally he arrived at the palatial splendours of Spencer House, realized he had gone too far and began a precarious retreat: ‘Poor Love, not remembering that at best he would have found his vain, weak nails baffled by Mother’s pane. It was “love’s light wings” all right – but he paid for them with a new coat shredded and good trousers tattered.’

When drunk his natural pugnacity was redoubled. Dining one evening at Verrey’s with him and the Raymond Asquiths, Diana complained that a man at the next table was staring at her. Duff turned and hurled insults at the back of the offender’s head: ‘You cannot mean that miserable, ugly, little man has dared to look at you?’ A few minutes later Diana said he was looking her way again. Once more Duff wheeled in rage, to find himself face to face with Sir William Tyrrell, until a few weeks before Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign Office. ‘Lucky for me that he is a fallen man and he was dining, I think, with a prostitute.’

The Duchess was horrified and outraged by such exploits; Diana horrified and delighted. Duff might be aggressive, bad-tempered, inordinately demanding, yet he was never dull. His style of love-making inclined rather too far towards the hyperbolic to suit contemporary taste. ‘My dazzling, many-coloured angel,’ he wrote, ‘I am wasted with desire for you. I am utterly undone. Oh wonderful cold red heart so pitilessly entrenched behind the miraculous shield of warm white flesh, you give me no peace, you possess me to the very entrails. Your heart is harder than a tiger’s claws, but your skin is softer than the Virgin’s heart.’ And then again: ‘You beautiful, blond, white-breasted bitch. How desperately people adore you. Oh dear, devilish Dilly, I never saw so many swine cast before one pearl.’ Such fin-de-siècle extravagance did not ring as false in 1915 as it would today, but Diana found that a little of it went a long way. On the whole she preferred him in cool Augustan mood:

The word ‘love’ means little to most people, but to me – nothing. I have read that it should interfere with a man’s sleep or even trespass upon his enjoyment of his meals, which, for my own part, nothing but thoughts of my figure have done. But I find that I miss you most inconveniently and the thought of not seeing you at champagne-time is as exasperating as it would be for the moth to miss his candle of an evening.

A lover who could leap from Dowson to Henry Higgins in the course of a few days might not inspire confidence but at least he was never the same for long enough to grow stale.

The unpredictability was not all on one side. Diana was as versatile as Duff and in her infinite variety lay much of her attraction. One evening they went to a concert of Spanish music at the Aldwych Theatre, Diana wearing Spanish hat and shawl. Afterwards they returned to Duff’s flat where Diana stripped to the waist, danced and sang arias from Carmen. Then they contentedly ate biscuits and drank white wine before the fire. A fortnight later they took a picnic to the Sussex downs. Duff sat on a little knoll, while Diana, feeling the need for exercise, ran round and round him. ‘She looked strange and romantic in her smart London clothes, transplanted to this lonely rural scene. I laid my head in her lap and she read to me “Atalanta in Calydon”.’ They went on to spend the weekend with the Asquiths, where Diana insisted on going prawning, went into the sea up to her waist, caught nothing and adored it. They matched each other in their capacity for getting fun out of life; Diana more adventurous, more indifferent to discomfort or the risk of being thought a fool; Duff more reasoned, more cultivated in his appreciation.

The simplest pleasures became sublime when they were together. After a typical Coterie dinner one night in October 1915, Duff and Diana walked back to 10 Downing Street with the Raymond Asquiths:

We all loved each other so much. It was very beautiful. We dropped Raymond and Katharine, then Diana and I sat down, or rather lay on the steps that led down from Downing Street into Horseguards Parade. There we remained under the shadow of the damned old Foreign Office, under the very window where I worked by day, locked in each other’s arms for quite a time. It was odd and romantic and delightful. Then we walked on very slowly and with many delicious pauses. We embraced under the lamp in the middle of the Parade, and under the dark trees of the Mall, and in St James’s Street. Finally we sat again on the steps of Lord Zetland’s house in Arlington Street and exchanged the most wonderful kisses of all. A memorable night.

The stern rules of pre-war chaperonage had indeed been forgotten. Diana held obstinately to her refusal to let any man deprive her of her virginity before her marriage, but this still left much scope for mutual satisfaction. Again and again Duff recorded that they had gone further than ever before, ‘and with such art and distinction’. ‘She is the only woman with whom excessive intimacy never breeds the slightest shadow of contempt or disgust. This is, I think, not only because we never proceed to extremes. With most women the further one goes, the more one is disillusioned; with her exactly the opposite happens. She assures me that she has never abandoned herself with anybody else in this fashion and I am inclined to believe it. How I adored her. I don’t suppose there is any more beautiful thing in the world than she naked to the waist.’ Once, when the Duchess was away, they derived particular pleasure from invading her sitting-room, lighting the fire and making love in front of it: ‘Diana almost naked with her hair down is a memory to warm and thrill me when I have one foot in the grave.’

The relationship was far from wholly straightforward. Diana had no intention of committing herself irrevocably: yes, she loved Duff; yes, perhaps, she loved him more than anyone else; but she was not really sure, it was all very difficult, how could anyone think straight in the middle of a war? Duff, for his part, suffered from the common masculine complaint of doubting whether it is possible to be in love with anybody who is in love with oneself. When Diana retreated he was in hot pursuit, if she advanced towards him he nervously recoiled. ‘I don’t know whether I’m in love with her or not‚’ he wrote only a few weeks after the lyrical episodes just described. ‘I fancy not, but I have far more fun with her than anyone.’ He could easily contrive to be in love with three or four women at the same time – and go through the appropriate motions with half a dozen more; sometimes indeed it seemed that making overtures to a woman was an automatic reflex, as another man might reach for his gun when he saw a pheasant, or his glass when he saw a bottle of wine. ‘I think my heart is made of paper,’ he wrote ruefully. ‘It catches fire easily, flames beautifully, but it is all over in a minute and another firmer, harder, slightly smaller one is born in the ashes.’

Even when the course of true love ran at all, it was afflicted by periodic tempests. One evening in the Cavendish Duff so enraged Diana that she struck him in the face and made his lip bleed. In return he gave her what he described as ‘the gentlest tap on the cheek’, whereupon she stormed out of the hotel. Duff luxuriated in the expiation of his sin. ‘I left you last night with the mark of your fingers on my face, which I need hardly say I enjoyed and [which] tingled deliciously for hours … Bless you, my sweet, and bless your strong cruel hand.’ Not long afterwards Duff detected in Diana doubts about his love for her and wantonly fed her fears. That evening on the way to the theatre he rashly admitted that he had been playing with her. Indignantly she slapped his face, jumped from the cab and ran home. Usually such rows were followed by equally fiery reconciliations which both enjoyed, but Diana had less stamina than Duff and could not always endure the quarrels which seemed to him a natural part of any love-affair. ‘Duff dear,’ she wrote towards the end of 1916:

I can’t bear it at all. You will no longer help me with my moods or be patient with my tired ways. You will not even let me lie quietly without raging at the little I sometimes needs must deny you. There is so rarely a night spent together that we do not make hideous with our complaints of one another. Tonight was a climax. I kept calm long enough to remind you not to berate me. I did not check your ill-temper, but augmented it. You ridiculed me till my heart shrank from myself, then you stopped it beating by trying to step out of a fast taxi, and then you ground it to atoms by telling me I caused you all possible pain. So we will rest from each other for a little and if possible return together restored to peacefulness.

This time it took two days of abject apology before reconciliation was achieved.

Duff demanded from Diana a fidelity that he had no intention of offering her himself. When he felt she was paying undue attention to Michael Herbert – once again a soldier about to return to the war – he abused her roundly, calling her vile and treacherous and, worst of all, common. Diana knew the violence of his temper and was usually ready to let the storm die out, but on this occasion she was stung to protest. ‘You have no more love in you than a penny-in-the-slot machine‚’ she scribbled furiously on the back of an envelope. ‘I am tired, tired of your incessant rending of me … It is not for you to borrow my epithet “common” to use against me, you who behave more like a street dog, with your conspicuous sensuality, and loud fighting snarls.’

Duff was inclined to take it for granted that Diana would marry him if only certain financial and familial problems could be regulated. As early as 1914 he had told her that she was the most remarkable woman of her generation. Sir Richard Steele had said of somebody that ‘to love her was a liberal education’. Duff sought to improve on this by saying that to love Diana was to love one’s own age in its highest manifestation. He had found the mate God meant for him: ‘But God’s schemes never quite come off and it seems highly improbable that I shall ever marry you.’

The main difficulty was money. Duff believed that if enough of this was available, the Rutlands’ other objections could quickly be overcome. But British aristocrats expected their daughters to be maintained in the style to which they had been accustomed, and Duff could hardly support a dustman’s daughter, let alone a duke’s; could hardly provide her with a bungalow, let alone a Belvoir. From the Bachelors’ Club, on the wings of burgundy, Duff put forward a scheme by which he would realize all his capital – perhaps £10,000. On this they would live for a year in great style while Duff gambled heavily. If he won, they would live happily ever after. If he lost, he would kill himself by subtle means and Diana could live on his life insurance: ‘What is there wrong with my plan?’ Diana thought there was a lot wrong with it. She was not yet finally convinced that she wanted to marry Duff, certainly she did not feel inclined to defy her parents. Elopement, even for a woman of twenty-three, was a drastic step and Diana valued her comfort and her connections too highly to risk them except as a last resort.

Meanwhile things got more rather than less difficult at home. Someone, probably a servant but perhaps one of Duff’s disaffected mistresses, had begun writing to the Duchess, reporting that Diana went alone to Duff’s fiat. The Duchess said nothing of this to Diana but spoke to Claud Russell, who passed on the news. Duff found Diana wretched with worry and reluctant to visit him again. He dined alone. ‘If only,’ he wrote disconsolately in his diary, ‘we had some money and could marry.’

*

Early in July 1915 Duff and Diana, with the Raymond Asquiths and the shortly-to-be-married Montagus, went for a weekend to Brighton. After dinner Duff and Diana decided to ramble romantically on the moonlit beach. They were not extravagantly drunk but far enough gone to make the navigation of a flight of steps a hazardous undertaking. Down they tumbled and Diana broke her leg. She was carried to the hotel and, two days later, by ambulance to London. The Duchess was told that she had unluckily slipped getting out of Edwin Montagu’s motor-car, no mention was made of Duff’s presence at the weekend party, but somehow he and Nancy Cunard were allowed to make up an incongruous trio with the Duchess in the ambulance escorting Diana to the nursing-home. Sir Arbuthnot Lane, one of London’s most eminent surgeons, was summoned to operate. Duff was disturbed by the choice: ‘I have always understood that his speciality was not legs. I had heard that he was one of those ambitious people who look higher. I can only hope that he will keep his ambition under control during the course of the operation.’ In fact Lane did a workmanlike job, but the fracture was a complicated one and it was nearly two months before Diana left the nursing-home in Manchester Street.

It was one of the happiest periods of her life. Her leg caused her some pain but morphia dulled the agony and, taken in company, helped to create a festive atmosphere. Her friends rallied to visit her and life was a perpetual party. Sir Arbuthnot, looking in at 10 p.m. on his late rounds, found Edwin and Venetia Montagu, Raymond and Katharine Asquith, Duff and several others eating lobster and cold grouse and drinking champagne. When Cynthia Asquith called at a more conventional time she found Lilian Boyd, Jacqueline de Portalès, Katharine Asquith and Felicity Tree in attendance. Diana ‘was lying really looking exquisitely gleaming in a lovely primrose crêpe-de-chine nightdress on a very successful theatrical bed, surrounded by flowers and air balloons. Ice-coffee, strawberries, chocolates and nectarines were strewn all around her. The chief topic was the desirability of mothers, and the best methods of circumventing them.’ The Prime Minister, Augustine Birrell, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, Maurice Baring – well over two hundred different friends and acquaintances flowed past the sick-bed.

To be cosseted, loved, flattered, made the centre of attention, above all to be wholly free from responsibilities, was close to heaven for Diana. She might not have been content for long with such inactivity – there were too many things to do, people to see, places to visit – but at that time a return to the womb was what she wanted most. She feared the moment when she would have to plunge back into real life, and as the moment of departure neared, so her apprehension heightened. ‘It’s bloody autumn in this room – fewer flowers and more faded, decreasing balloons, blasé nurses and in my heart the panic of recovery and all it entails.’ She had created an artificial world inside the nursing-home – bright, cosy, secure – and she did not wish to venture forth.

For outside her world was disintegrating. As one by one those whom she loved most dearly were killed in battle, so she grew to fear that all would go, that the war would never end, that nothing would survive. To those emerging from the carnage of the trenches, the lot of the civilian left behind in London must have seemed truly enviable. To Diana, resolutely smiling so as to make more enjoyable the last leaves of her friends, waiting with sick apprehension for the telegram that would tell her there was no need for further fear, it sometimes seemed as if her fate was the unhappier one.

First of her friends to die was Julian Grenfell. Diana had never been particularly fond of him, nor was she one of those who thought ‘Into Battle’ the finest flower of English poesy. She had too much commonsense not to suspect that while he who would not fight might indeed be dead, he who would fight was likely to be dead a great deal quicker. She did not doubt the necessity for young men to die for their country, but she could not share Grenfell’s heroics or glorify death in the way of her far dearer friend Maurice Baring: ‘I am sorry for us but not for him. For him it is a privilege and a prize before anything he can have dreamed before the war.’ Julian Grenfell’s death seemed to her a pitiful waste, and the waste became tragic when his brother Billy was killed two months later. She had written to Billy Grenfell from the nursing-home only a few days before – ‘Misfortune has empire over me and is relentless, first with measles and then with a double fracture of the tibia and fibula … complaints have lost their value when all complains.’ Her moans read pitifully thin when the letter was returned to her unopened. ‘There was nothing more glorious ever born than Julian and Billy,’ she wrote to Lady Desborough. ‘As their mother I should have been mad with pride; that you will still be.’

Even before Julian Grenfell had died, however, war had obtruded into the heart of the Coterie. In May 1915 Edward Horner was severely wounded and moved to a hospital near Boulogne where his life was said to be in danger. Diana appealed for help to George Moore and within forty-eight hours she, Sir John and Lady Horner, Edward’s sister Katharine Asquith, the Duchess of Rutland, Sir Arbuthnot Lane and a special nurse were on the way to France. At the time Diana gave no thought to the abuse of privilege which her journey represented and was indifferent to the criticism. It was not even a case of one law for the rich and one for the poor, grumbled many whose sons and husbands were left to die alone, it was one law for Diana Manners and another for the rest of mankind. ‘One cannot but sympathize with their deprecation,’ she wrote many years later, ‘but which of those many would not have grasped at the same chance?’ For her the exercise was fully justified when Edward, being carried into the hospital on a stretcher, opened his eyes to find all those he loved best around him and murmured ‘O darling, this is heaven!’

Edward Horner did not die, but Charles Lister did, from wounds received at Gallipoli. Patrick Shaw-Stewart wrote in despair when he knew his friend was dying. ‘If Edward, George, Raymond, Ego and I are left, we can yet reconstruct a makeshift universe. But I suppose at least one more of us is bound to be killed.’ Within two years not one but every one was dead.

George Vernon was the next to go – ‘Poor darling little George, always spoilt and pampered, with more frailties than any of us.’ On 26 October 1915 Diana wrote to him: ‘George, my pretty, please contrive to get a dash of dysentery and be posted home for two months.’ By a bitter stroke of irony he had already taken the first part of her advice and was in hospital in Malta. On 10 November he lost consciousness, briefly revived and asked the nurse to write down what he knew would be a last message. Hardly able to raise his voice above a whisper he dictated: ‘Darling Dottie: Goodbye, darling. Love. Love. Love. Goodbye sweetest, God bless you.’ Then he took the pen and tried to write his name. He got as far as G, gave up and began to scrawl ‘Love’. Halfway through the word his strength was exhausted, the pen wavered and straggled to the bottom of the page, his head fell back on the pillow and he died.

When Diana heard the news she summoned Duff and they lunched together at the Hanover Restaurant, trying with mulled claret to dull the edge of pain. Later that night she scrawled a note to him: ‘My darling. It’s 11 and for two hours I can’t stop crying. If only you were by me, I would. O Christ, the misery, and the morphia not working. O Duff, save yourself. If you die where shall I be? My poor George. If only I could stop crying.’ It was the worst blow that had so far struck her and she was herself surprised by the intensity of her reaction.

‘I didn’t realize quite what George’s death would mean to you,’ wrote Letty from Egypt where she had followed her husband Ego Charteris. Her moment of agony was soon to follow. Ego was missing, reported a prisoner, then discovered to have been dead all the time. Letty was prostrated. She lacked the resources to deal with such a tragedy. ‘I don’t believe I’ve got any brains – only a heart, oh, such a heart. No philosophy, no religion. Ego was my religion!’ Diana was called back from a country visit to succour her sister. She wrote next day to Edward Horner:

What the despair is like you cannot think. 10,000 times would I sooner bear it, or see you or any of us (except Katharine) in such torture than poor darling Letty. She lies still all day and night moaning gently and with the prettiest babble – ‘Sweet, sweet, Ego. How can I face the long years? What shall I do with all his clothes? What does one do?’ – till I feel more desperate than her and would love her to die. I know in her mind she is dreading herself, dreading never knowing love again, never having more children – but perhaps my eyes are out of proportion for tears.

*

It was about this time that Basil Hallam wearied of the white feathers and sneers and joined the Balloon Corps. His balloon was shot down by a German fighter and he fell 6,000 feet. Raymond Asquith watched his death and wrote with chilling nonchalance: ‘He came to earth in a village half a mile from where I stood, shockingly foreshortened, but recognizable by his cigarette case.’ For Diana it was just one more blow but a cruel one. She was dancing to Alex and his all-black band when the news was whispered to her. For once she broke down in public and fled the room.

Her spirits now seemed permanently low and the battle to keep up a good appearance became increasingly exhausting. To Edward Horner she complained that her will had become a mere cypher, it could hardly impel her to open her eyes in the morning, let alone to go out in search of pleasure. To read, to think, even to talk seemed gargantuan tasks. ‘My mood is maudlin. I cry so often, even at parties, and have to go home, and at night for loneliness.’ Yet she never allowed her grief totally to conquer her; when she felt that it was her duty to appear in public and put on a good face, she could still do so. Duff recorded one evening at Belvoir when she broke down just before dinner and doped herself with brandy and sal volatile. ‘She is strange and wonderful in the way she takes her sorrow, treating it like an illness which must be got over as soon as possible, doing all she can to be cheerful, laughing and talking till tears come like a sudden seizure and she has to give way. She tells me that when she cannot stop crying she reminds herself that in a comparatively few days she will cease to wish to. I think this is a new way of treating grief and perhaps the best.’

The severest test was still to come. On 19 September 1916 came the news of Raymond Asquith’s death. After his last leave he had written to her from France:

Your beauty and the deep despair of parting from it made me spin like a whipped top. The chance that I might never see you again seemed, like all chances, negligible, but the certainty that I should not see you again for several months, like all certainties, was – and is – as black as hell and as heavy as the hand of God. In those blessed ten days I had moments so dazzling that an eternity of torment could not square the reckoning. I had almost persuaded myself of impossible things and then suddenly I felt I was dragging you patiently but painfully through a valedictory routine staled for you by heaven knows how many reluctant repetitions … I know that I have pitched my claims immoderately high, that I have been exacting and rapacious beyond decency or wisdom, but before your beauty I am utterly helpless and can do no otherwise.

For Diana, Raymond’s claims could never have been pitched too high; she might not concede all he wanted but in her heart she felt that he had a right to it. His last letter was posted only two days before he died: ‘In an hour or two I leave the particularly odious place where I now am for one infinitely more odious. I fear it is a case of a peerage or Westminster Abbey.’ From a man who habitually belittled the dangers to which he was subjected, such a prophecy, however flippantly worded, inspired terror in the recipient. She did not often pray, but she spent much of the next two days on her knees, once in church before a lighted candle. Her state was so desperate that it came almost as a relief when the news arrived. The pain, she said, was physical: ‘a sensation never before felt … my brain is revolving so fast, screaming “Raymond killed, my divine Raymond killed” over and over again’. She was experiencing a despair far more absolute than anything she had endured before. ‘I have lost with him my energy and hope and all that blinds one to life’s horror. I loved him a little better than any living soul and the near future seems unfaceable.’

Almost her first impulse was to rush to the aid of Katharine; Katharine who loved her husband so totally, whose moon revolved perpetually around his sun, who had no Duff, no Patrick, no Edward in her life to offer consolation. She travelled to Mells where she discovered her friend crouched in a dark room over the fire, ‘too dead a thing to seek death, only craving to die from numbness’. She found some relief in trying to rescue Katharine from the blackest pit of misery, but her own grief grew no less sharp and she could not escape a nagging irritation that in the eyes of the world the widow was the one with the greatest right to mourn.

‘Raymond adored you,’ wrote Patrick Shaw-Stewart. ‘I hesitate how much I may say so when I think of Katharine.’ So far as Katharine was concerned, no such caution was necessary. ‘I love you and bless you always,’ Katharine wrote. ‘How could I have minded you loving Raymond and his loving you so much? It was in the fitness of things.’ Diana for her part comforted herself with the thought that she had not wholly lost Raymond; her feeling for him lived on in her love for his wife. ‘You are more Raymond than anything else, than his writings or his letters or his expressed thoughts remembered, and so you are more loved by me than anything or anybody.’ The two women did not always see a great deal of each other; their different patterns of life inevitably put a barrier between them; but each was always to regard the other as her dearest and closest friend.

Diana was a fighter, not one to lie down under the blows of fate. She knew what it was to live with depression, but recognized that in time it would pass. She fought the pain of Raymond’s death, fought it with all the resolution of one who knew life must go on and was determined to live it to the full. A month later she wrote to Patrick Shaw-Stewart:

The emotion of misery seems to me so squalid, low, devitalizing into stagnation and dregs, not purifying and spiritual as the last generation determined to think … Strange that grief should be so infinitely the biggest emotion. In no ecstasy that we know of can there not be found a thousand touches of chance that will reverse our state: physical pain, however slight; sudden uncertainty of pleasure and its never forgotten wings. Whereas in sorrow nothing can lighten one’s darkness, appearing as it does certain and unending. It is only energy of life and love that will drag us through … My darling Katharine has not got it; I have, thank God!

Her energy of life and love was never to burn so low again until Duff died thirty-seven years later, but on both occasions it dragged her through.