t 8 a.m. on 16 December 1914, Scarborough was awoken by enemy shells, fired by three German battleships so close inshore that the inhabitants could see the sailors who were working the guns. The shelling went on for nearly an hour. Scarborough Castle, the Grand Hotel, three churches and numerous houses were badly damaged, while eighteen townspeople were killed or mortally wounded and many more seriously hurt. Panic-stricken men, women and children ran into the surrounding countryside.
Sir George was at Wood End, which was damaged by shrapnel during the bombardment (Osbert says his father insisted that the Germans shelled Scarborough because they knew he was there). He took shelter in the cellar while, true to form, Lady Ida stayed resolutely in bed. After this Sir George decided that he and his wife should live as far away from the sea as possible, which meant Renishaw, where they spent the rest of the war – their longest period of unbroken residence.
Osbert had been only too glad to be recalled to the Colours by the Grenadiers on the day before war was declared. It meant an escape from the ghastly life that his father had been planning for him at Scarborough Town Hall. He ordered his ‘soldier-servant’ Robins to pack his evening clothes, which would of course be needed when the British occupied Berlin; but instead of going to France with the British Expeditionary Force, he fell ill and was left to guard the Docks, missing the Mons Campaign.
Having recovered, he received his marching orders two days after the Scarborough bombardment. ‘My darling Boy,’ wrote his mother, ‘I miss you too dreadfully, it is all too awful – Darling, I could not stand seeing you leave . . . if ever I have been hard or cruel or unkind, please forgive me and realise I adore you and if it was in my power I would do anything in the world for you.’1
He went into the line near Fleurbaix just before Christmas, shortly after his battalion had been given a severe mauling. He recalls how shaken he was by ‘the first sight of the flying fountains of dead earth, the broken trees and mud, and at the first sounds, growing ever more ominous as one drew nearer to the bumping and metallic roaring which resembled a clash of comets . . .’.2 The routine was four days in the trenches, then out for four days’ rest before going in again. Sir George sent him antiseptic soap, waterproof boots and tins of Keating’s flea-powder – ‘tell me what you want, just as a schoolboy does, and I’ll see to it’.
In March 1915, Osbert was recalled to London in case he should be needed as a witness at his mother’s trial. In November the previous year, her suit against Field had been heard in the King’s Bench Division. Field, stated Lady Ida’s lawyers, had defrauded her of £7,775. Anxious to conceal he was an undischarged bankrupt, he offered no defence. Judgement and costs were awarded to the plaintiff after a short hearing; but it was a Pyrrhic victory, as Field was penniless and could not pay.
Worse still, the heirs of the moneylender Owles (who by then had died) wanted to be repaid his £6,000. But Sir George remained fully convinced that there was no need to settle. When a prosecution for fraud was brought against Field and Lady Ida early in 1915, instead of paying the money – which he could easily have afforded – Sir George and his lawyers made the mistake of thinking his wife could not possibly be found guilty; it was not as if she had been signing cheques in someone else’s name. They were unaware of the letters that she had written to Field.
The trial took place at the Old Bailey in March. In his statement to the court, George revealed the strain his marriage had put on him. ‘She was seventeen years old when I married her,’ he said. ‘It was clear that her education had been neglected, but I thought her mind and character would develop if taken out of those surroundings. Ever since the time of her marriage she has been quite unable to appreciate the value of money. She has never understood business matters and she has never been able to appreciate the liabilities into which she has from time to time become involved.’3 He described how often he paid her debts, after she had promised she would never ask him again.
Medical evidence was produced to show the defendant was not responsible. Dr Salter, who had attended Lady Ida for twenty years, described her as suffering from nervous problems, including insomnia, loss of memory and even an inability to walk – in 1911 she had been confined to her room for three months. Any calculation of figures was beyond her, he insisted, her mental development having been ‘arrested by serious illness in childhood’. Dr Vernon Jones, who had also treated her for twenty years, stated that Lady Ida’s capacity for understanding business matters was nil and that she was ‘incapable of acting alone in any important matters . . . an easy prey to anyone who advised her or sought to guide her actions’.4
What Sir George had not taken into account was Mr Justice Darling, who had little sympathy with the rich while less privileged people were suffering from wartime privations and the daily shock of casualty lists. He turned against Lady Ida after her letter asking Osbert to find ‘some boy’ to guarantee her loans was read out in court – on the face of it, a damning piece of evidence – and refused to take into account the doctors’ testimony.
On 13 March he ensured, with a summing-up overstating the case against her, that she was found guilty of conspiracy to defraud. He then sentenced her to three months’ imprisonment in Holloway. She had been condemned as an accessory for aiding and abetting Field, without any allowance for circumstances.
Despite his age, Julian Osgood Field got eighteen months’ hard labour, served at Wormwood Scrubs. He never recovered, dying alone in a room in the slums of Kilburn in 1925 and leaving just over £13.0s.0d. – as Osbert, always a good hater, gloatingly records in an appendix to Great Morning.
A horrified George sent a twenty-eight-page document to the Home Secretary, arguing that a miscarriage of justice had taken place.
The truth is that Lady Ida has no knowledge of the world, no education, no knowledge of affairs. It is a poor maimed brain . . . incapable of acting alone. Lady Ida’s power of resistance and independent action may be judged from the fact that in the first of these transactions she was dragged, feebly protesting, to Leslie, the moneylender whom she knew had half ruined her mother eight years before. Everyone who knows Lady Ida knows that under pressure she will plead guilty to mistakes and faults she has not committed.5
But there was no mercy, and Ida’s experiences in Holloway cannot have been all that different from those of Oscar Wilde in Reading Gaol, even if she was treated with a certain degree of respect. Yet she was tougher than Wilde. When a local doctor’s wife proposed calling on her, Lady Ida refused to see the woman, saying that she was someone whom she would never have received at Renishaw and did not see why she should do so at Holloway. She also declined the Archbishop of Canterbury’s offer to visit her, as it might embarrass both of them.
‘Mother came out yesterday and I went to see her at Aunt Millie’s,’ Edith reported to Sachie on 19 May, Lady Ida having been released early. ‘She seems absolutely unchanged; rather nervous, it is true, but she actually made jokes about the life in there.’6 Lady Ida went straight home to Renishaw to recuperate. Lying in the next bedroom to her daughter, she called out during the night, ‘Edith, have you ever been happy?’ When Edith said, ‘Yes, haven’t you?’, her mother replied, ‘Never bird-happy, but I have three very nice children.’7 After that, relations were better between them.
Sachie was sent home from Eton by an understanding housemaster. He never forgot his mother’s ‘calm and dignity during, and after, the extraordinary and unlikely tragedy that befell her’.8 Nearly sixty years later, he wrote of ‘a terrible time in our family . . . which was to tie the three of us together, two brothers and sister, in our determination to live, and leave a mark of some sort or kind’.9 This was the period when he wrote his first poems.
Sir George’s failure to save their mother from going to prison intensified Osbert’s hatred. Not only was he horrified by Lady Ida’s imprisonment, but he sympathised with her extravagance, which he had inherited, if not to the same manic extent. By now, he was quarrelling more than ever about money with his father, who increasingly feared his son and heir might already be far along the road to inevitable ruin.
Osbert went back to the trenches, this time with the Grenadiers’ second battalion, with whom he served for nearly a year. Rats and mud were ubiquitous, the water came up to his knees and he lived on hot rum to ward off the cold. Sleep was impossible – once, after being pulled out of the trenches, he slept for an unbroken eighteen hours – and he developed a horror of moonlight after seeing a young soldier shot in No Man’s Land.
The boredom was as bad as the menace. He said that in ‘these coffin like ditches where death brooded in the air’ one day was as sad, cold and hopeless as the next. He developed ‘a sort of careless courage’, but it dismayed him whenever he heard a brother officer who felt the same way remark, ‘The Boches won’t get me now! I’ve been out here too long.’ He noticed that men who said this were dead within a few days, even hours. The one thing that saved him from going mad was reading – Dickens, Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky.10 Like more than a few others, he would later claim that the war had been his university.
In autumn 1915 he was in a reserve battalion at the Loos offensive, during which the British used gas for the first time. Shortly after occupying a German trench he saw really savage hand-to-hand fighting at bayonet point when the enemy counter-attacked. Still only twenty-three, he was promoted to captain. His platoon remembered him as brave and efficient, and were grateful for the trouble he took to see they had decent rations – and for buying them a Christmas dinner out of his own pocket.
In January he wrote his first poem, ‘Babel’. (The original, written in the trenches, survives at Renishaw.) It was not a very good poem, but it gave him a sense of having found a purpose for his life – if he lived. He spent the rest of the war turning himself into a poet.
Despite casualties all round him, with guardsmen – some of them school friends – pulped into bleeding fragments, hung out to die a lingering death on the barbed wire or maimed for life, Captain Sitwell bore a charmed existence. But in April 1916 he cut his finger, and the ubiquitous mud ensured blood poisoning. After several weeks in a hospital behind the lines he was shipped home, still seriously ill, to convalesce at Renishaw, where a qualified nurse was engaged to look after him – ‘which aroused the strongest feelings of competition in my father’.11
George, too old to fight, was serving his country in a different way. From 1916, damage done by German submarines to British shipping meant food was in short supply and had to be rationed. Farmers were paid subsidies to grow crops or produce meat on a bigger scale, so Sir George put 2,000 acres under the plough, supplying bumper yields of potatoes. His son sneered at the sight of his father driving round the estate in a dog cart with his agent; yet not only was Sir George’s produce useful but, because of the subsidies, it brought in a lot of money.
Although Osbert rejoined his regiment, he never served in France again despite repeated requests to do so. This was either because the medics diagnosed a weak heart, or because Lady Ida’s scandal had given his senior officers the impression that he lacked the ‘moral fibre’ to command troops in action. In any case, he was thoroughly disillusioned with the war.
He followed Siegfried Sassoon’s example in writing anti-war poems that appeared in the Nation. His disillusionment was expressed in his ‘World-Hymn to Moloch’ of 1917:
In spite of all we’ve offered up
Must we drink and drain the cup?12
When a former foreign secretary, Lord Lansdowne, provoked outrage by sending a letter to the Daily Telegraph urging the Allies to stop fighting and negotiate, Osbert wrote (from the Guards’ Club) to congratulate him. He also admired Sassoon’s public protest against a war that had turned into one of ‘aggression and conquest’.13
Meanwhile, Sacheverell joined the Grenadiers straight out of Eton. Diana Manners never forgot meeting him just after he did so, ‘a tall innocent boy in uniform – looking to my older, pitying eyes too tender and frail and quite unfit for the fearful trenches of Flanders’.14 However, bouts of severe ill health kept him away from the Front, in a training battalion at Aldershot. He spent much of the time with Osbert in London, where they leased a house at Swan Walk, Chelsea (paid for by Sir George), giving parties for their new intellectual friends and going to avant-garde art exhibitions and the ballet.
Sometimes the brothers went home to Renishaw – as did Edith, with whom they kept close contact. In 1916 she and Osbert published a slim volume of verse, only twenty-eight pages, which they called Twentieth Century Harlequinade – from a poem by Osbert. Both brothers contributed to the six anthologies of verse, Wheels, that Edith brought out between 1916 and 1921. Other contributors included Aldous Huxley and, less impressively, Nancy Cunard and Iris Tree. The slim volumes attracted attention, and helped the three Sitwells to acquire a place among the period’s avant-garde poets.
Edith was definitely the leader, however, publishing Clowns’ Houses and The Wooden Pegasus, and by 1920 she had become fairly well known. She also produced an elegant little book in prose, Children’s Tales from the Russian Ballet. She was trying to write verse in a new way, using simple, almost nursery-rhyme language combined with the imagery of French symbolism, looking for assonances and dissonances. The result was undeniably original.
Osbert and Edith also devoted a lot of time to what would today be called networking, cultivating anyone prominent in literature or art. Among the writers were a subaltern in the Manchesters, Wilfred Owen (who was killed just a week before the Armistice); Siegfried Sassoon; Lytton Strachey; Robert Graves; Aldous Huxley; and the ‘Super-Tramp’, W. H. Davies – who, rather surprisingly, became a great friend of Osbert. As for artists, Osbert had dinner with Augustus John and Wyndham Lewis at the Eiffel Tower restaurant in Fitzrovia, while Edith met Nina Hamnett, who took her to see Walter Sickert.
Others included Oscar Wilde’s friend Robbie Ross, and Sir Edmund Gosse, a highly influential critic who had ‘discovered’ Rupert Brooke. (On first seeing Gosse, Huxley described him as ‘the bloodiest little old man I have ever seen’.) Osbert invited Gosse to dine at St James’s Palace when he was Captain of the Guard. Another whom he wined and dined was the immensely successful novelist Arnold Bennett, who helped him become literary editor (with Herbert Read) of a quarterly, Art and Letters, although this ceased publication after barely a year.
Osbert failed to make much impression on Bernard Shaw or H. G. Wells, however, despite entertaining them lavishly. Others, too, had reservations. Referring to Wheels, in a letter to his brother of August 1917, Aldous Huxley sneered unpleasantly that ‘the folk who run it are a family called Sitwell alias Shufflebottom . . . I like Edith, but Ozzy and Sachy are still rather too large to swallow. Their great object is to REBEL.’15 Huxley would come round, but only for a time. Even so, when the twenty-year-old Sacheverell published his first slim volume of verse, The People’s Palace, the following year, Huxley – perhaps with tongue in cheek – called him ‘le Rimbaud de nos jours’.
On Armistice night 1918 the Sitwell brothers gave a small dinner party at Swan Walk for the great Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who bemusedly asked Osbert, ‘Qu’est que c’est, cette Aldershot? C’est une femme?’ when Sacheverell ran off to catch the last train. They had invited Diaghilev without having any idea that Germany was on the verge of collapse – even in November, many thought the war would continue for another two years.
The evening that they spent entertaining Diaghilev asserted their determination to be in the avant-garde, now that the Great War was over. ‘It’s quite evident, if you read the family letters, that we’ve been working up to something for a long time, for well over a century,’ Sir George had told Osbert.16 That ‘something’ was about to happen.