The Trials of Radclyffe Hall by Diana Souhami (interesting novels to read txt) 📕

wonder why it is so much easier for me, and I believe for a great many English women, to love my own sex passionately rather than yours?’ Ethel Smyth wrote to her friend Henry Brewster in 1892.) She went to tea with John and Una, then dinner.

Una invited her mother to Chip Chase. It was an invitation calculated to discomfort. Una now had a lifestyle which Minna could only envy. House guests for Una had the status of intruders. She wished to be alone with John. Jane Randolph, once wooed and conquered by Marguerite, braved their daunting exclusivity for a weekend in autumn 1920. Now Jane Caruth and widowed for a second time, she found no chink of space for herself. Una remarked with satisfaction on her heavy jowls, upholstered clothes, her ‘cranky, prim and hyper-critical strictures’. Jane Caruth deplored the metamorphosis of Marguerite into John. She disliked her short hair, pipe smoking and Una. ‘Great relief getting rid of Jane Caruth’, Una wrote in her diary.

On holidays from the St Leonard’s convent, Andrea was a bewildered guest. Troubridge wrote ‘blustering and offensive’ letters about Una’s treatment of her. She was met from the train by Miss Maclean, the housekeeper. Her treats were visits to Ladye’s mausoleum, mass at Brompton Oratory and shopping at Harrods and Gorringes. When a school report gave her conduct as ‘fairly good’, she was lectured and questioned before breakfast by her mother and John. The qualification had something to do with a girl called Cicely Coventry. John and Una drove to the convent to see Mother Emmanuel and Sister Theodore. Cicely was then expelled.

Una rejected Andrea because she did not please John. Pleasing John was the measure of all that was acceptable. But John wanted Una’s undivided attention. Any mothering was to be for herself. She paid Andrea’s school fees and provided her with a room at Chip Chase, but she had no interest in her and did not want her around. Andrea received no encouragement or affection from her, nor was she allowed to oppose her in the smallest way. As the years passed she disliked the perception of her mother as lesbian. It embarrassed her. She worried that she might herself be perceived as ‘like that’. She said Toupie Lowther ‘gave her the willies’ because she was ‘so obvious’.

Dogs took precedence over daughters. A former drawing-room at Chip Chase, panelled with wood and fitted with linoleum, became a kennels for griffons and dachshunds. Fitz-John Minnehaha was their prime griffon. His relatives were Pipe of Peace, Atthis, Hankie and Gorgo. John and Una were members of the Kennel Club. They reared and judged the best of the breed and accrued prizes and trophies. Their dogs were a quest for genetic perfection. Those with faults went elsewhere. Prudence, a spaniel, they gave away for being unaffectionate. Olaf, a Great Dane, got sores and was shot on the lawn by the vet. ‘Olaf went over’, Una wrote in her diary in February 1920. She assumed the whirring sounds she and John heard in the night came from his journey to the spheres.

Theirs was one of the most successful kennels in the country according to an article in the Queen titled ‘The Fitz-John Dachshunds: The Kennels of Una Lady Troubridge and Miss Radclyffe Hall’. It pictured them, though their names were transposed, with ‘Our Dogs’ Champions Brandesburton Caprice and Champions Fitz-John Wotan and Fitz-John Thorgils of Tredholt. Caprice was ‘the type breeders should aim for’, said the Queen.

Ideas of the best of the breed informed Radclyffe Hall’s political thinking too. She took the package of Conservative politics, allegiance to the ruling class, inherited status, antipathy to communists and Jews (not her ‘one or two really dear Jewish friends’ and her solicitor and doctor, but ‘Jews as a whole’). It also affected her view of feminists and lesbians. Her friends were ones with money and creative ambition.

It was twelve miles to London. They went by car for Una’s daily appointment with Alfred Sachs. They then had lunch with Toupie, tea at the Savoy, or a matinée at the Alhambra. John bought Karma, a parrot, from the Army and Navy Stores and cockatoos from Harrods. She got her pipes and cigarettes from Dunhill and had her hair cropped and waved at Truefitts of Bond Street, hairdresser for gentlemen.

Una bought their books at the Times Bookshop: Peter Pan, Susan Lenox and the ‘shockers’ John particularly liked. Five times Una read aloud John’s favourite novel, Ford Madox Ford’s Ladies Whose Bright Eyes. It featured a shining knight who spanned fourteenth century and modern times, spurned bourgeois comfort and extolled love and great adventure. It appealed to John who thought she remembered her own medieval incarnation. It was dedicated to Ford’s lover, Violet Hunt, for whom she had once so pined.

It was a pattern for Radclyffe Hall to house herself in style, extensively refurbish, purchase antique furnishings, take on all the paraphernalia and responsibilities of domesticity – servants and pets – get the whole place just so, and then sell up. She moved on impulse then rationalized why: the journey to town was tiring, the area suburban, the house too costly to run, she wanted to be nearer to Toupie and the theatres, she needed the social exposure of London.

At root was a subversion, a restlessness. No house was ever right for long and no home was Derwent, the ancestral manor with herself as heir and squire. She wanted always to be somewhere other than where she was. If it was town it should be country, if it was Paris it should be Florence. ‘The minute my house begins to “vamp” me – houses do become vampires – I run from it’, she said. ‘Somehow the household arrangements of a hotel don’t clamour for my attention: that happens only in my own home.’

She had moved into Chip Chase in April 1919. By July 1920 she was wanting to move out. She worried about the cost of running the place and the number