The Great Silence (20 page)

Lowell Thomas, by now comparing Lawrence to Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh, capitalised on the diffidence of his hero, introducing his show with words suggesting that Lawrence was at that very moment ‘somewhere in London, hiding from a host of feminine admirers, book publishers, autograph fiends and every species of hero worshipper’.

Not everyone believed Lawrence’s protests that he was not entirely enjoying his sudden celebrity The eminent playwright George Bernard Shaw thought he was making a mistake by trying to disguise ‘his genius for backing into the limelight’. However, Lawrence had abandoned the Arab headdress that for a few months after the war he had continued to wear, and instead adopted clothes that were as anonymous as possible, a trilby or untidy tam o’shanter helping to shield him from intrusive fans.

Lloyd George had been delighted with London’s grand parade of thanks, but not far from the official ceremonies, in Luton in Bedfordshire, there was an indication that marching bands and an upturned catafalque would not be enough to restore England to a state of contentment. That day, driven to despair over the levels of unemployment, a group of cap-wearing ex-servicemen torched the Luton town hall where the Mayor was holding a celebratory lunch. After raiding a music shop, the rioters dragged pianos into the street, pounding on to the keys the rousing tune of’Keep the Home Fires Burning’ with appropriate irony. Further disturbances in Wolver-hampton, Salisbury, Epsom, Coventry and Swindon had also interrupted the day of peace. Reporting these events the
Daily Herald
detected a country-wide ‘epidemic of violence and atrocious murder’.

But the centrepiece of the Peace Parade remained in people’s minds. On the following Monday
The Times
had printed a letter suggesting that it would be a pity to consider the Cenotaph ‘an ephemeral erection’, given the simple dignity that it evoked. It wondered whether ‘a design so grave, severe and beautiful’ might be refashioned into stone and kept on permanent display.

Ten days after the Peace Parade a smaller ceremony took place in one of the poorest parts of London’s East End. In June 1917 a new form of enemy warfare had overtaken the Zeppelin airships. To children the glinting light of the approaching Gotha bombers made them appear as ‘huge silver dragonflies’. Eighteen children, an entire class of five and six year olds at the Upper North Street School, had been killed by a bomb dropped from the sky in the first ever daylight raid. After a joint funeral in which the East End came to a halt while the coffins placed on eighteen horse-drawn
hearses had been smothered under eiderdowns of white flowers, the children had been buried in a mass grave.

Life in Poplar had not improved much since the war. Unemployment and poverty was so acute that after disturbing reports of starvation, the borough’s counsellors devised a scheme by which the rates would be diverted towards a food voucher scheme. And no one had forgotten Poplar’s worst day. On 23 June 1919 a statue was unveiled in Poplar Recreation Grounds just off the East India Dock Road. The occasion was heartbreaking for the memories it revived. Friends of the dead children gathered around the marble and granite monument, their faces as white as the stone figure of the angel that surmounted the memorial, with wings spread wide and high to the sky and hands clasped in prayer. One child, Jack Brown, now aged eight, could not get the memory of the smell that morning two years earlier out of his mind. He had thought at first it was roast rabbit. Now he knew it was the burning flesh of his friends. The Mayor of Poplar, the Reverend William Lax, paid tribute to the children who he said had ‘suffered for the country as any men who have perished in the trenches, or on the high seas or in the air’.

Despite the harsh penalties of the Peace Treaty, anti-German feeling remained unconfirned. Condolence cards had been handed out among the crowd that day with the words ‘In memory of the victims of the Hun death-dealers’. The Peace Parade and the cult of heroes like Lawrence diverted attention from the restlessness that loitered in the lives of the general population.

Late Summer 1919

A new phrase was hovering over the candle-lit dining tables of intellectual society. People were talking of a tendency to
avoir le cafard
, a lingering dissatisfaction with life, a sense of being down in the dumps for no identifiable reason. The phrase had also crossed the Atlantic where Lucy Duff Gordon was anxious about the future of her couture business. People did their best to forget: the older generation moved house, the well-off travelled, and Lucy watched the young people who ‘went to victory balls, danced all night, got hilariously drunk and went to bed in somebody else’s house’.

And yet happiness was elusive. With an honesty rarely expressed at the time, Lucy saw that ‘those who were not under the spell of hectic gaiety were bored and listless’. The recent past was an inescapable fact and even the combined amnesiacs of drink, drugs and sex could not effect a permanent reprieve. Previously unspoken of subjects were bursting through taboos.

Just before the end of the war, Marie Stopes, a clear-eyed and handsome 37-year-old academic, had published a book that brought the advantages of contraception into the open. Her own marriage had never been consummated and she had divorced her husband as
virgo intacta
. Motivated by her own personal ‘misery, humiliation and frustration’ she pledged to help other women. Astonishingly, her own lack of sexual experience did not diminish her understanding of the importance of sexual love. At first her book was turned down by a publisher who told her ‘there are few enough men for girls to marry and I think this would frighten off the few’. But in 1918 she was able to put her own advice into practice when she married for a second time. Humphrey Roe was a wealthy and generous manufacturing magnate and it was Stopes’s
new husband who provided the funding to get her book into print.

Married Love
was addressed to the vast majority of women who were neither simply maternal nor unashamedly ‘loose’. During the war soldiers had returned on leave to the open arms of their sweethearts, the limited time making many unmarried couples less cautious than they would have been in peacetime. Thousands of illegitimate births might have been avoided if contraceptive advice had been available. Instead a conspiratorial silence surrounded the origins of many new babies. Gladys Wearing’s husband and her son had both been killed in the early days at the front. To the puzzlement and delight of Gladys’s goddaughter, Pam Parish, and Stella her sister, Gladys arrived one day at their house pushing a pram out of which peered a baby girl. The baby they were told was called Zaidee. There was then a lot of grown-up talk and an assumption that curious young ears were not listening. But after being begged for an explanation, Mrs Parish confided to her astonished children that Gladys had adopted the child born to her elder brother’s sweetheart. Conceived on one of his leaves home, the stigma of illegitimacy had been too powerful to ignore. A solution had been found in pretending that Gladys’s illegitimate niece was her own adopted child. To Pam and Stella’s further consternation they heard that Gladys had fallen in love with their neighbour, Stuart Lloyd. Gladys did not seem to mind that half of Mr Lloyd’s mouth was missing and to the horror of the Parish sisters Gladys seemed positively to enjoy kissing Mr Lloyd’s poor bashed-in face.

A central part of Marie Stopes’s message was the use of proper contraception rather than the chancy rhythm and withdrawal methods. She spoke to the poor on whom unwanted pregnancies had the greatest financial impact. Childbirth itself was a dangerous process. Although anaesthetic was available to the rich, the poor made do with gripping on to a knotted towel as the primary form of pain relief. If the mother was lucky enough to have a hospital birth, there were no facilities available for staunching a haemorrhage except perhaps with the ward curtains, hastily ripped down. Infection was uncontrollable.

Contraception was the better way and abstinence and withdrawal were the cheapest and most popular methods. And when they failed, abortion was the alternative and final resort. Condoms were only
used in special cases. They were expensive, and their frequent reuse after thorough washing with soap and water meant that holes often developed in these thick, de-sensitising sleeves. Dutch caps were also available and, according to one disillusioned user, were ‘thick rubber things made from something like car tyres’.

The medical establishment was sceptical about contraceptive devices. The Royal Society of Medicine warned that the use of all forms of contraception was ‘deleterious and dangerous’. The Society also believed that a popular paste, called Volpar, the shorthand for Voluntary Parenthood Paste, carried the risk of producing deformed children. Pessaries made of lard, or margarine combined with flour, or even coconut butter mixed with quinine, were thought to have some success. Marie Stopes herself recommended the use of a large flat sponge soaked in olive oil which was ‘an absolutely safe domestic condiment found in most homes’.

Purges made of pennyroyal, a herb that contained a uterine stimulant, compounds of aloe and iron, scalding baths, gin and excessive exercise were all popular methods of ending a pregnancy. The most determined even swallowed a thimbleful of gunpowder hoping for a satisfyingly explosive effect. The death of the unborn, unwanted child often included the death of the mother as well.

Marie Stopes, however, was determined to establish her belief that the use of contraceptives removed the anxiety of unwanted pregnancy and therefore made sexual intercourse all the more enjoyable. A second book,
Wise Parenthood
, was published in the same month as the Armistice, in time for returning soldiers to take notice. A rhyme, as familiar as the household copy of the book that now lived on the top shelf of thousands of wardrobes, soon reached children’s playgrounds.

Jeanie, Jeanie full of hopes

Read a book by Marie Stopes,

But to judge from her condition,

She must have read the wrong edition.

After the war many widowed or sorrowing, or indeed jilted women craved the warmth and sexual companionship of a man. But there were many whose reunion with their husbands had been
disappointing, particularly when the dreadful experiences of war had caused so many men to retreat into silence and despair. Even previously happy relationships became a casualty of the conflict. Marie Stopes’s books brought honesty and hope to thousands of these women. But Stopes was unequivocal in addressing
Married Love
to both sexes, dedicating that book to ‘young husbands and all those who are betrothed in love’. The book was in part made up of practical information, including the answers to such questions as ‘In what position should the act be consummated?’ (’Looking into each other’s eyes, kissing tenderly on the mouth, with their arms round each other.’) Marie Stopes also addressed the psychological difficulties that sexually active men and women of all ages encountered. Her supreme law for husbands was to ‘remember that each act of union must be tenderly wooed for and won’.

In one gentlemen’s club, where men professed themselves wholly uninterested in buying the book, the demand for the library copy was so huge that members were restricted to one hour of reading before being asked to hand the book on. Marie Stopes received five hundred letters a day consulting her on all sorts of personal problems: just under half of them were from men. The open language she used when discussing the pleasure of a healthy sexual relationship was successful in its intention to ‘electrify’.
Married Love
sold two thousand copies in the first two weeks after publication and was reprinted seven times that year.

Michael Arlen, an Armenian Jew, was beginning to write a novel,
The Green Hat
. He too was interested in the restlessness of the postwar world and the idea that in order to overcome numbness and to feel truly alive you needed to live to excess. Writing about the desire for the unidentifiable, endlessly elusive answer to satisfaction he listed what would
not
provide the answer.’It is not chocolate, it is not cigarettes, it is not cocaine, nor opium nor sex. It is not eating, drinking, flying, fighting, loving.’ But Arlen was unable to offer an alternative. ‘Life’s best gift, hasn’t someone said,’ he concluded unsatisfactorily, ‘is the ability to dream of a better life.’

The Marquis of Londonderry, Under-Secretary of State for Air in the House of Lords, found that the experience of being at the controls
of his own aeroplane ‘smothers or partially smothers things I won’t let myself worry about. Literally and metaphorically it is very beneficial.’

Philip Gibbs was also frightened that a lasting sense of calm would remain out of reach. Censored for so long over the truth of what he had seen at the Western Front, he wrote these words in his book
Realities of War
in August 1919:

Five years after another August this England of ours, this England which I love because its history is in my soul and its blood is in my body and I have seen the glory of its spirit, is sick nigh unto death ... Those boys, lovely in their youth, will have been betrayed if the agony they suffered is forgotten and ‘the war to end war’ leads to preparations for new, more monstrous conflict.

As early as 1915 there had been some question about how the war would be referred to by future generations. As usual
The Times
provided the platform for discussion, printing a letter from the editor of
Burke’s Landed Gentry
who considered inadequate the 1915 term ‘The European War’ as it ‘ignores a very important part of the fighting in which this country is concerned in China, South Africa, Asiatic Turkey and elsewhere’. Another correspondent suggested using the phrase ‘The Great War’, although in 1918 an American professor about to embark on writing a history of the conflict had settled on ‘The First World War’, a title that was accused of cynicism, but was chosen ‘in order to prevent the millennium folk from forgetting that the history of the world was the history of war’.