Boys will be girls
Hugo Vickers
THE GIRLS OF RADCLIFF HALL by Lord Berners Montcalm, The Cygnet Press, £25, pp. 100 Here we have a rare spoof, first 'print- ed for the author for private circulation' 65 years ago. It has waited a long time to be reviewed. Now re-issued in an edition of 750 by Montcalm and the Cygnet Press, we can read a story previously confined to the inner circle of Lord Berners and some of the victims of his pen. It seems that only four copies have ever been seen by the experts and editors. I was shown Cyril Con- nolly's in 1980 and once borrowed a copy long enough to make a haphazard xerox, which I then bound in marble paper. My copy has only two advantages over the pre- sent edition, the errata: for 'Ethel Mannin' read 'Ethel M. Dell', and the spoof fore- word by the 'Bishop of Brixton', possibly deemed politically incorrect in this judg- mental age.
The Bishop tells us:
We follow the development of the various characters in the story with the same eager curiosity with which we watch the unfolding of the buds in our herbaceous borders...
The story purports to describe the antics of a girls' public school, not least the dormitory, with the habitual squabbles and jealousies which give those institutions their particular flavour. But the point about this novel is that all the characters are based on real people and every incident and amitie amoureuse is drawn from life. Each schoolgirl was a real-life male, and the only male character a real woman, of which more shortly.
Lord Berners wrote the book as Adela Quebec, a dig at Angela Brazil, who wrote over 50 novels about girls' schools in which the school mistresses possessed a morbid devotion to duty while their 'gals' experi- enced tiffs and jealousies and employed such slang as 'We must scoot!' In The Girls of Radcliff Hall Berners parodied himself as Miss Carfax, the headmistress. He wrote it in Rome in 1935, and Diana Mosley recalled him reading out the latest pas- sages, frequently collapsing in helpless laughter.
Bemers held court at Faringdon, where teasing .was the order of the day. Nancy Mitford portrayed him to perfection as Lord Merlin in The Pursuit of Love, his whippets adorned with diamond necklaces, and his parties filled with decorative young men. In Mitford's novel, Uncle Matthew complained, 'If we ask that brute Merlin to bring his friends, we shall get a lot of aes- thetes, sewers from Oxford, and I wouldn't put it past him to bring some foreigners.'
The guests at Faringdon comprised some of the most talented figures of their time, yet while actually in the house they were reduced to being part of a coterie in which their talents were largely eclipsed by the waspish interplay between them. This novel concerns the central figure, Lizzie, based on Peter Watson, here seen involved in numerous brisk love affairs while the other characters suffer pangs of jealousy and retribution. In his early days, Watson was a rich young man, whose family fortune was derived from soap. David Herbert, Daisy in this book, recalled that Watson's paternal Daimler contained two silver-embossed vases attached to each side of the back seat filled with sweet-peas or carnations, for which Herbert condemned him. Later, of course, Watson founded Horizon and became an important promoter of art and literature, but here he is seen in the hedo- nistic phase when he held Cecil Beaton in thrall and gave Robert Heber-Percy (Mil- lie) a car, after which Beaton insisted on being given one too.
Beaton was always said to be the one who hated this book the most, feeling more socially insecure and less well off than oth- ers in the group. When researching my biography of him, I was certainly misled by Robert Heber-Percy into believing that Beaton had destroyed most of the copies. I am sure that the editor, John Byrne, is right, in his postscript to this edition, to suggest that Heber-Percy (often called `Mad Boy') was more likely, and better placed as a resident of Faringdon and the boyfriend of Lord Berners, to have dis- posed of the copies. Nor can David Herbert have liked the book much. He is portrayed as the gossip who makes certain that every disobliging story and suggestion reaches the right ears, a role that he continued to fulfill in later life in Tangiers and elsewhere. I recall lis- tening to him putting down his old and infinitely more talented friend, Cecil Beat- on, as he compared Beaton's middle-class family and need to work with his own aris- tocratic origins. Small wonder that while Beaton continued to strive to the end, Her- bert was reduced to playing endless rounds of patience in his Tangerine home, waiting for the next dreary party or the telephone to ring with a suggestion of dark mischief.
Oliver Messel (Olive) is a minor figure in this book, while a man called Robin Thomas causes a lot of trouble as May Peabody, an American girl at the school. Robin Thomas was also a boyfriend of Peter Watson's. He was an American whose mother was a lesbian called Blanche Oelrichs, but known as Michael Strange, later the wife of the actor, John Barrymore. I think he committed suicide.
There is Jack Wilson (Helena de Troy), the theatrical producer, who was closely involved with Noel Coward. At this point, he was mixed up with David Herbert, and as a result of their affair Herbert was chucked out of the USA. Doris Castlerosse appears as Mr Dorrick, the dancing master, who fascinates Cecily (Cecil Beaton). In real life, Beaton was advised to make Wat- son jealous and did so by having an affair with Doris, who rather loved him. Lord Castlerosse once saw them in a restaurant and muttered, 'I never knew Doris was a lesbian,' while of the seduction of Cecil by Doris the late Daphne Fielding comment- ed, 'Cecil would not have had to do a thing!'
And so it goes on, and indeed so it went on, for in later life there were times when the group fell back into the petty jealousies of the past, behaving no better than school kids. When Cecil Beaton was taken to see Oliver Messel's house in the West Indies, he was asked his opinion and gave it: 'Well, really! Oliver ought to have employed a decorator!' When Beaton published The Happy Years, in which he gave a cruel, though not wholly untruthful, portrait of the unkind way in which Robert Heber- Percy treated Lord Berners in old age 'He was not even allowed his breakfast in bed. It was not long before, in desperation, he turned his face to the wall' — Heber- Percy seized his opportunity and knocked him down outside Peter Quennell's house. Shortly afterwards, Beaton, aged 70, suf- fered a severe stroke. I can remember the `Mad Boy', by then the sole incumbent of Faringdon, laughing gleefully about this incident without a jot of remorse.
Perhaps it is as well that the 'Bishop of Brixton's' final line in the lost foreword was not fulfilled: 'It is to be sincerely hoped that Miss Adela Quebec will gratify us with a sequel.'
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