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

Harrods and Harvey Nichols, rested and saw the doctor, but nothing interested her other than living John’s life. She rescinded any vestigial motherly tasks. Miss MacLean met Andrea from the station, took her to the dentist and despatched her to her father.

In a display of independence Una read and commented on manuscripts for Audrey Heath, translated Le Grand Eunuque by Charles Pettit and wrote arch autobiographical sketches, unrevealing pieces on pets, clothes and on never settling in any house. ‘John wants me to do a book of them’, she wrote in her diary. ‘J worked till after 2.30 and so did I!’ John wanted Una, it seemed, to fill her time so as herself to be spared the oppression of constant service, constant scrutiny.

There was less intimacy between them. John was protective of Una’s health, insistent about standards of service to her in shops and restaurants, generous with presents, deferential to her views, mindful of her loyalty, but there was a sense of obligation about it all, a tightness of response. Gone were Una’s diary entries ‘We talked til late.’ John now worked most nights. Una noted the long hours with implied recrimination.

The General Strike was an interruption. They saw it as perpetrated by Communists. By way of solidarity with the ruling class, they volunteered to drive casualty patients to Charing Cross Hospital. With Bradley, the current chauffeur, they ferried a boy with a crushed foot to and from Peckham. Like knitting socks for soldiers such gestures of citizenship passed with the day.

By Sunday 17 May Radclyffe Hall had written 115 pages of Food. She breakfasted in bed then went to mass while Una washed the dogs. Then Audrey called and for hours Una read it all aloud. The story that far was of Gian-Luca’s forlorn childhood – absence of love, loneliness, compensatory desire. His mother dies giving birth to him, he does not know who his father is and his grandmother rejects him for causing her daughter’s death. ‘I have got myself,’ he says. He grows up in his grandfather’s store. There is an abundance of pickles, pasta and pane-tone, but not a book in sight. He joins the Free Library for ‘he loved the sound of words’. He reads Tennyson and Wordsworth and at Hatchards bookshop buys the Italian poetry of someone called Ugo Doria, whose writing gives him an ‘eerie feeling of familiarity’.

He works as a waiter at the Capo di Monte restaurant, reads Ugo Doria and falls for the Padrona, who has golden hair and blue eyes. She asks him to tea and he kisses the scar on her hand. He is sixteen.

A boy’s first love is a love apart, and never again may he hope to recapture the glory and the anguish of it. It is heavy with portent and fearful with beauty, terrible as an army with banners; yet withal so tender and selfless a thing as to brush the very hem of the garment of God. Only once in a life comes such loving as this, and now it had come to Gian-Luca.

Audrey ‘loved it’. It made her weep. ‘After tea we all went for a drive. John v. tired but v. happy,’ Una wrote. A contract was drawn up with Cassell. Newman Flower insisted the title be changed. He said everyone would think Food was a cookbook. Una took over: ‘Firmly rejecting John’s frenzied suggestions, I ransacked the local Smith’s for sources of inspiration and ended by finding what we required in Kipling’s Tomlinson: “I’m all oer sib to Adam’s breed that I should mock your pain.”’ ‘Sib’ is archaic Scottish for ‘related to’. Kipling was nowhere quoted in the book, so the title Adam’s Breed though Newman Flower approved it, remained as mysterious as the dedication ‘To Our Three Selves’.

John and Una’s only travel that summer was with Gian-Luca. In June Bradley drove them to Lynton in Devon. They stayed in the Valley of the Rocks Hotel. John wrote her book in bed. Una designed the jacket for it and read aloud Dracula and The Crossways of Sex. They visited the Convent of the Poor Clares and made friends with the reverend mother. The weather was sunny and John bought a No. 2 Brownie box camera and photographed the sky and the coastline.

Andrea was sent to guide camp. Back in London in July Una’s stony regard for her fifteen-year-old daughter grew stonier. Andrea had a boyfriend. Una summoned Dr Thomson. He ‘confirmed her suspicions’. Una ‘lectured’ Andrea, despatched her to Datchet to stay with Ida Temple and then to the Troubridges with whom Una was not on speaking terms.

By September Adam’s Breed was nearly finished. Audrey cried all the way home after another day of Una reading it to her. She said she could not bear to think how dull she would feel when it was finished. Una’s mother, to whom it was also read hot from the page, called it a great book, ‘finer and more interesting’ than The Unlit Lamp.

It was an Old Testament saga of suicide. It was all about redemption and suffering and it troubled mothers less than tales of lesbian love. In the second part of the book, Gian-Luca becomes head waiter at the Doric restaurant. (John and Una toured the kitchens of the Berkeley Grill in their quest for authenticity.) A ‘hard master’, ambitious for riches, he ‘carries within him the needs of an unloved child’. He meets Maddalena who wants him to find God. She is ‘tall strong-limbed and full breasted … her face was the face of a mother of men’. To please her, they marry in the Italian Catholic Church in Hatton Gardens. He does not desire her, but she gives him the home he craves: ‘Home is a place in which we are wanted, in which there is someone to whom we matter more than anything else on earth.’ He eats her pasta and tells her, as Radclyffe Hall might have told Una, ‘I love you far more than when I