The Trials of Radclyffe Hall by Diana Souhami (surface ebook reader .TXT) 📗

felt an affinity to Florence, ergo she had lived there in a previous life. She was a changeling from another age. What she wrote, who she was, whom she loved, were controlled by a higher power.

More temporally, holiday life frustrated her. Ladye was not enough. John missed Phoebe Hoare and resented being away. Thin and nervous, she criticized all plans and complained of ‘superfluous energy’ which she could not channel. ‘Travelling grows more uncomfortable and expensive every year. I think I simply hate it. What one endures in stuffy trains, filthy hotels and bad food is surprising.’

They got home to a stack of bills and the same domestic grief. Ladye was with Cara on 12 May for the birth of her granddaughter Karen. John was back with Phoebe. At Ascot a Miss Blomfield tried to speak to the King about women’s suffrage. Ladye had shingles and could not enjoy the racing. She lunched in one tent with General Upperton and Major Balfour, John lunched in another with Phoebe.

In London, John caught mumps. She banished Ladye to the Cadogan Hotel, partly to keep her safe from contagion, more out of a desire to be alone. A week later she rented a studio in Tite Street. She said it was a private place to work, but it was also a private place for her tryst.

Politics broke into this impasse like a tidal wave. At the beginning of August Germany declared war on France and Russia. The banks stopped paying out gold and men were mobilized. There were rumours of the requisitioning of trains for troops. London streets were full of territorial soldiers with ‘droves’ of horses to be shipped to the battlefields. John wondered if her horse Judy would be wanted. At night the city looked ‘sad and unusual’ with searchlights and darkened streets.

Bobby Clarke enlisted and Dolly worked for the Red Cross Hospital in Paignton, Cornwall. Phoebe and Oliver Hoare moved to Berkshire. John and Ladye packed up 59 Cadogan Square, leased it to Mr and Mrs Hamilton Bell, sacked the parlour maid and Ladye’s personal maid to save money and moved to Malvern.

John talked of turning the White Cottage into a home for wounded soldiers. She said she wanted to enlist, fight and, if needs be, die. ‘Had I been able to leave Ladye I would have done war work abroad.’ In her mind’s eye she was in uniform, shrapnel-scarred and adorned with medals. It was for Ladye she refrained. Or so she liked to think. ‘Once, when I suggested going to Serbia, she worked herself up into such a panic that I gave up all ideas of it.’

Foiled and stuck in Malvern, John did what she was best at – told others how to behave. She wrote and printed recruitment leaflets then drove round the town with Ladye distributing them. She scorned an ‘odious schoolmaster’ who was against his son enlisting and she put up Kitchener’s poster ‘Your Country Needs You’ on the walls of the White Cottage. When a passer-by annotated these, she wrote a fulminating letter to the Malvern Gazette: ‘What manner of men have we in these parts? Their women should be ashamed of them. Mr M. Radcliffe Hall.’

‘Recruiting is going up here’, Ladye wrote to Cara on 13 September. ‘It is largely due to Johnnie’s efforts. She made a really thrilling speech to women at Castle Morton without any notes. It simply poured out with no effort. I was quite taken aback at her eloquence.’

They took clothes for Belgian refugees to the Red Cross and went to lectures on home nursing and bandaging. John gave money and books for wounded soldiers and offered beds for them at the White Cottage. No soldiers arrived. And she and Ladye knitted mittens, socks and mufflers: ‘Johnnie knits too beautifully,’ Ladye wrote, ‘so evenly they look almost machine made. My efforts are much more unprincipled and vague!’ Johnnie’s efforts were short-lived. Such activities, she said, bored her. Her fantasy was as a frontline hero, not a caring sister, knitting, bandaging and giving comfort to men.

War brought her affair with Phoebe Hoare to an end, separated her from Dolly Clarke, curtailed her first nights at the Opera House and winters in the sun. Stuck in Malvern in Ladye’s exclusive company with the daily news of carnage, opportunity seemed to dim. She published a last book of poems, The Forgotten Island. Though unrhymed, ‘a new departure for me and one in which I took great interest’, they were as ever pastoral or about love, its passions, transience and pain. Composed at the piano, or to a tune on her mandolin, designed to be sung by ladies at afternoon recitals or teas, they were suddenly anachronistic in a cruel world and the volume sank without trace.

Then came another trial which precluded the recapture of their happy days. On 21 September John and Ladye went to London to finalize the subletting of their flat. Norman Serpell, their chauffeur, was to drive them to Malvern next day. They had a 22-horsepower Hooper limousine and they piled their luggage – a great deal of it – on its roof. Garry, the maid, travelled with them. They stopped for lunch at the Mitre Inn in Oxford and left at about three p.m. At the Burford crossroads, seventeen miles on, a small car driven by a Mrs Lakin, who was with her sister and niece, crashed into theirs. Serpell was travelling at twenty-five miles an hour, had the right of way and had sounded his horn. Their car smashed into a wall, knocked down one and a half tons of it and scattered the luggage.

The maid was stunned, Serpell hysterical and Ladye seriously hurt. Carried unconscious from the car, she had concussion, head wounds, broken ribs, and damaged vertebrae. She was taken to a Mrs Pigott at Burford Hill House. A Dr Cheattle shaved and stitched her head and Cara’s lover, Frank Romer, came from London with two nurses. For ten days she was very ill. On