The Lost Girls by D. J. Taylor

Author:D. J. Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2019-10-01T16:00:00+00:00

If the world through which the Lost Girls wandered was one of living for the moment, of sexual recklessness and social opportunism, then there were other ways in which it differed from the arrangements of 1918–39. One of them was the high degree of intermingling encouraged by an environment in which the barriers of social class suddenly seemed a great deal less impregnable. The war novels of Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh, for example, are full of what, in an earlier age, would have been regarded as societal meltdown: middle-class subalterns polluting regimental messes with their ‘common’ accents; temporary gentlemen sweet-talking, and sometimes disappearing with, upper-class girls whom chance had sent their way. Whether in government offices or in the course of after-hours socialising, all kinds of unlikely people were brought together in circumstances which could throw their original affiliations sharply out of kilter. The eighteen-year-old Jaqueline Hope-Nicholson, who had acquired a secretarial job at War Office Intelligence, was startled to find Brian Howard cruising its chilly corridors and to embark on a friendship that at one point encouraged this life-long homosexual to hazard, ‘You know, sweety, you and I could get married.’ Nothing came of the proposal, if proposal it was, but such declarations were almost routine in a series of environments full of anxious and dislocated people taking solace wherever they could find it.

The social heterodoxy of the war took several forms. Most obviously, it allowed the men and women at large in Blitz-era London to expand their range, to contract alliances with people that they would be unlikely to have met in peacetime. Inspecting Sonia’s acquaintances in the later 1940s, for example, one finds everyone from novelists and painters to young Labour MPs and arts-world patrons. Even Barbara seems to have emerged from the war with a raft of attachments that would be useful to her in later life. To examine the Lost Girls’ social landscape as a whole is to marvel at the number of different levels it incorporated. There were Bloomsbury connections, mostly through Frances and Ralph Partridge, literary links to Horizon regulars such as Orwell and Waugh, oblique – sometimes less than oblique – hints of aristocratic drawing rooms, the donnish salons of Oxford and Cambridge, and City lucre. The standard description of this kind of world, the world in which, albeit in somewhat artificial circumstances and for a brief period of time, a duchess can exchange small-talk with a homosexual painter or a man-of-letters carouse with an up-and-coming tycoon in conditions that are agreeable to them both, is ‘High Bohemia’ (significantly, this was Waugh’s label for the world of the Bright Young People in which he was intimately involved in the late 1920s). Each of the Lost Girls, in their individual ways, washed up on the shores of High Bohemia in the 1940s, and the friendships they forged there would be invaluable to them once the decade was over.

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