The Great Silence (21 page)

The poet T. S. Eliot was struggling with his own form of
cafard
. The migraines suffered by his wife Vivien had been getting worse and Eliot himself had been suffering from bronchitis. He felt overwhelmed with ‘a weariness and emptiness’ when left alone with Vivien. His father had died at the beginning of the year and the death had nearly broken Eliot. He had begun wearing a family ring as a reminder of what he had lost. Virginia and Leonard Woolf had published his
Poems
in June, an emotional and intellectual mix of comedy, bitterness and regret and astonishing originality of phrase and rhythm. Leonard Woolf saw something of this clashing juxtaposition of language reflected in Eliot’s own physical appearance that was ‘Rather like a sculpted face - no upper lip; formidable, powerful, pale.
Then those hazel eyes seeming to escape from the rest of him.’ Eliot was pouring his disenchantment with life into the writing of a new, much longer poem,
The Waste Land
.

The
cafard
was seeping into every pore of society. Soon after the Prince of Wales had received his demobilisation papers from the army the question had arisen as to what he was going to do with himself. The Prince himself wanted to stay in the army. Life as a Grenadier Guard appealed to him. After spending several months on the Western Front, he had been profoundly shaken by the ‘relentless slugging match contested with savagery and in animal-like congestion’. He had become popular among his men, ‘a sort of cobber of ours’ as one soldier put it, and there was open affection for the young man with the ‘boyishly self-conscious slightly retiring face’.

After the Armistice he had visited Harold Gillies’s hospital in Sidcup. Leaving one of the wards that the patients themselves called ‘The Chamber of Horrors’ he came out ‘looking white and shaken’. But there was something beyond the life of the trench that put this particular soldier further apart from his family: first-hand experience of life as a commoner. This experience had widened the imaginative gulf that already existed between himself and his father, who wanted David to continue preparing for his eventual kingly duties: opening new roads, planting trees, and launching hospitals and ships. The Prince had his own word for these activities. He called them ‘princing’.

Lloyd George had come to the rescue that spring, proposing that the Prince should become a roving ambassador for Britain, travelling abroad to thank the countries of the Empire and other parts of the world for their enormous contribution to the war effort. He would be the supreme public relations representative who, with his youth, good looks, energy and charm, would broadcast to the world the value of Britain under a modern monarchy in a post-war world.

The King had agreed with Lloyd George’s suggestion but not without issuing a caution to the 25-year-old prince, who already seemed to be developing a disturbing propensity for enjoying himself. He told his son, ‘The war has made it possible for you to mix with all manner of people in a way I was never able to do. But don’t think that this means you can now act like other people. You must
always remember your position and who you are.’ But the Prince of Wales had found himself ‘in unconscious rebellion against my position’. He was not at ease during that first strange year of silence and detected in himself a growing sense of false gaiety as he found himself dancing through ballrooms that had only recently been full of wounded soldiers. It felt like a betrayal.

The heir to the throne was not alone in expressing his disillusionment with life. While the Prime Minister had hoped that the joyful scenes in the capital that had greeted the conclusion of peace negotiations would spread throughout the country, the impossible reality of post-war life continued to make itself evident in public demonstrations against the Government. Disillusionment had spread from the intellectual confines of London to the claustrophobic alleys of Cardiff’s ‘nigger town’. Here unemployment among the thousands of West Indian, Arab and Somali seamen remained particularly acute and in June had prompted an outburst. Racial tensions had interrupted national unity throughout the war, especially in places where colonial conscripts had taken up temporary residence in British military, air force and naval quarters. Now in July the streets again exploded in violence. Policemen were slashed in the face with razor blades, guns were fired and iron crossbars torn from lampposts were deployed as vicious weapons. The riots showed no sign of letting up throughout the summer.

By the end of July nearly two and a half million British workers were estimated to be on strike as bakers nationwide slammed shut their ovens and miners from Scotland, Northumberland, Durham, Lancashire, Wales, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire and Kent once again abandoned their pits. In Liverpool the troops were called in to put a stop to looting that erupted from a combined dissatisfaction with unemployment and price rises and a deep sense of identification with the Bolshevik movement. One man was killed and 370 were arrested as filthy children, sons and daughters of dockers and casual labourers, ran through the streets in their ragged clothes, offering to carry luggage for a few coppers. The poor were making it clear that they had suffered enough.

And the capital itself was not immune. Two days later, at what became known as the Battle of Wood Green, the police were
attacked by several hundred youths. Women became wary of answering the door, fearing they would find some angry, unwashed labourer waiting outside, begging for a cup of tea. In Lancashire 450,000 cotton workers left their factories for eighteen days, among them dozens of recently discharged and distressed soldiers unable to join the cotton workers’ union and therefore unentitled to strike funds.

Then the Liverpool police force again went on strike in search of union recognition, setting off four days of rioting, torching, unrestrained burglary and hand-to-hand violence in the city. The fighting took place up and down the length of Scotland Road near the docks, the centre of Liverpool’s working-class life. Children filled their pockets from the Mo-Go chewing gum factory while their parents tucked bottles of shop whisky into their bags. The Riot Act was read. Troops were sent in. The great bulks of a battleship and two destroyers moored in the Mersey; tanks powered their way down the streets of Liverpool against an arsenal of rocks until a bayonet-wielding charge forced a retreat. After the death of one man and the injury of hundreds, over two thousand striking policemen were dismissed with the pledge that they would never be reinstated. Demobbed soldiers took their place.

The energy behind the rioting evaporated when most of the Metropolitan police force chose to accept the Government’s increased offers on pay and pensions. Those few who remained unhappy with the deal had to capitulate when the Police Act made it illegal for a policeman to join a trade union, and against the law to strike.

Over in Ireland, the increasingly passionate desire for independence had resulted in the growth of a brutal regime. The new Irish Republican Army had appointed Michael Collins, the Sinn Fein member for Cork, as Director of Intelligence. He had set up an assassination squad called the Twelve Apostles who were beginning to establish contacts that would lead to the assassination of British agents.

In one small pocket of Britain, however, an unprecedented harmony had existed between British sailors, soldiers and airmen and those
from the West Indies. There had been so many volunteers from the Caribbean that it had not proved necessary to impose conscription, as had been the case in other countries. In many cases the enthusiasm to join the Allies had been so keen that men had paid for their own passage to Europe. In the cemetery at Seaford, on the East Sussex coast, nineteen gravestones carried the symbol of a sailing ship and the names of men who had formed part of the British West Indian Regiment. Not entrusted with officer responsibilities owing to the suspicion attaching to the colour of their skin, these men had continued to report to white men.

But the local inhabitants of Seaford found the men congenial and in December 1915 the
Eastbourne Chronicle
had reported that at a church service held by the Bishop of Lewes, fifty-three West Indian soldiers had come forward to be confirmed. ‘It was inspiring to see the reverent attitude of the soldiers,’ the paper observed, ‘who being 4,000 miles from home, discharged their duty to the Empire and found a welcome in the mother church.’ To make the occasion even more pleasurable, the Seaford branch of the Ancient Order of Foresters, discovering that some of the visiting soldiers were members of the same organisation, arranged for them all to pose together in a joint photograph.

One of the soldiers, Private 875 Eric Hughes, felt so at home with the local community that he took a chance on his romantic prospects with two sisters to whom he had taken a fancy, inviting them out to the cinema. But as the war came to an end and the flu epidemic cut into every town and village in the country, Seaford recorded its own casualty rate. Among those who died either from flu or a localised outbreak of mumps were seventeen members of the West Indian regiment. The town mourned these men in equal measure to their own people. A rare compassion and simple honest comradeship had overcome the prevailing prejudice.

Away from the drama of the Albert Hall, the summer fireworks and the explosions of unrest in the towns, rural England remained largely unaffected by the war. Up and down the country, from Yorkshire to Sussex, and just off the narrow village lanes that ran behind and through the backs of houses, brilliantly coloured cottage gardens were tended with the same loving attention they had always merited.
Chickens continued to run along the zinnia-filled flower beds with a timelessness undisturbed by war. In the peace and comparative silence of the countryside far from the capital, Leonard Woolf was reassured to see that farming practices endured with the ‘quiet continuity’ of centuries.

Here was an England, even after the Zeppelin bombardment of the later war years, that had been almost untouched physically. Children still swam in lakes, rivers and ponds, shot squirrels with home-made arrows, ate apples from the local orchard, and played marbles and, for ten-year-old Stephen Spender, it was a place where no one minded if you carried your innocent caterpillars around in a box with you.

Country people like the family of George Noakes in Lewes, East Sussex, continued to live off the land. One day his grandfather brought a basket of birds to the house in Bull Lane containing some sparrows and finches. That evening there was sparrow pie for dinner. Rook pie was another of George’s mother’s specialities and in the spring there was a further treat. ‘At lambing time it was lamb’s tail pie as all lambs’ tails were docked for cleanliness, and also to improve the meat’ so that, as George explained, ‘the nourishment would all go into the body. When the tails were left on they got very fat.’

David Garnett, a London bookseller and conscientious objector, left the city to visit his friend Harold Hobson, an electrical engineer who lived in a caravan in Teesdale, some fifty miles from Newcastle. There he felt himself melting back into the pre-war summers. Together Hobson and Garnett swam in the freezing pools of the rocky Tees stream. They bought hunks of the local cheese that tasted like the best sort of Wensleydale but with the added richness of Stilton. Only once did the reality of the last four years bring Garnett forward with a jolt into the summer of 1919. On Peace Day itself he had spotted a demobilised soldier sitting beneath a tree, holding a gun, his face filled with an expression of desperate unhappiness.

The beaches all along Britain’s coast were turning dark with the Sunday coat-wearing, sun-seeking crowds. Few had been able to afford to replace their dark wartime overcoats with something brighter or more summery, but standards and dignity were high especially among the poor and a day out required dressing in one’s best.
As the summer months grew warmer fifty thousand holidaymakers left London for Yarmouth and another three hundred thousand visitors went to find inexpensive pleasure on the beaches of Blackpool. During most people’s first holiday for five years, the local police station flung open the cells to provide floor place and somewhere to sleep for those who could not afford a room in the pricey and overcrowded boarding houses.

But the simple fun of the beach offered no solution to those mired in the
cafard
and who sought a more effective release from the truth of their feelings. Since before the war the press had been reporting a growing national concern over the increasing consumption of powerful and addictive drugs for pleasure. At the Victory Day Ball at the Albert Hall, Lady Diana Manners had led a procession of Society’s most prominent women watched by four thousand ticketed guests. Dressed as Britannia, she had appeared resplendent in her theatrical role. But not far away a tragedy had been developing. Another guest was Miss Billie Carleton, a modestly gifted but much loved actress, one of the ‘photo-portrait starlets’ whose picture frequently appeared in the popular press. Privately, Billie was a smoker of opium and a lavish consumer of cocaine. On the afternoon following the ball she was found in her bed at Savoy Court Mansions, just a block or two behind the hotel, her pupils already enlarged as the skin beneath her fingernails turned an ever-deepening shade of blue. A doctor had treated her with injections of brandy and strychnine but had failed to revive her.

At the inquest Billie’s maid confirmed that Miss Carleton had attended the Victory Ball, taking with her a golden jewel box full of white powder crammed into her evening bag. An actor friend told the court that it was ‘rather public property’ that Billie took drugs. The police confirmed that at the scene of death they found cocaine beside her bed and that the deceased’s pupils were dilated.

Mr de Veulle, a chief witness at the proceedings, was a man sometimes engaged, the court heard, in ‘the gentle art of dressmaking’ and sometimes following a career as an actor on the West End stage. He was cross-examined and in defence of his character denied that he was ‘a sort of young person’ and that he had ever ‘dressed as a girl
in his life’.
The Times
reported that Ada Song Ping Yoo, aged 38, of Limehouse, an Asian community stronghold, had been charged with supplying cocaine and prepared opium to Mr and Mrs de Veulle for what the court called ‘disgusting orgies’ that went on from Saturday night until Sunday afternoon at 16 Dover Street.