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

Theodore Goddard then wrote that Mrs Visetti was ill. She had gone to Monte Carlo for the summer. Standing on a chair in her hotel room to reach the top shelf of her wardrobe she had overbalanced, brought the wardrobe down on top of herself, and broken three ribs. She needed money for a nurse, daily visits from a doctor, hotel bills and incidental expenses.

John wrote that she could not and would not afford more than seven guineas a week. Mrs Visetti’s doctor replied that she was depriving her mother of medical care and perhaps wished her to end her days in a charitable institution. John summoned Rubinstein, who came to Rye for the day. He told her to ignore her mother’s upheavals and not to be drawn. Una hoped Mrs Visetti would die. ‘John is genuinely broken-nerved where she is concerned and always has been’, she wrote.

Such requests for money unnerved John whose income was halved. Her stockbroker told her the country was in for a difficult ten years. To save on chauffeur’s fees, she bought a Harley Saloon 12 Deluxe. Dark brown and black with hide upholstery, she called it the Squirrel, or Squiggie, Una’s nickname, took driving lessons and seemed to want a journey, an essential change of scene.

Friends changed partners or had affairs. Ida Wylie visited with Joe Baker, an American with whom she was in love. Joe Baker was sixty, wore pince-nez, had gallstones and had left her partner of twenty-five years to live with Ida. Evelyn Irons had parted from Olive Rinder and was now with someone called Joy McSweeney. Christopher St John, who was in her late fifties and odd in manner and looks, was besotted with Vita Sackville-West. Friends were embarrassed and thought her unhinged. Ethel Smyth called Vita a rotter for leading Christopher on. At a Smallhythe barn show John talked to Vita, who sympathized over the banning of The Well of Loneliness.

Una deplored these infidelities and spoke of her own model partnership. But three months after her operation she seldom got up before noon, she laboured up the stairs and was absorbed in her digestive troubles, nausea and headaches. She ate runny boiled eggs, junkets and milk with Bovril in it and could do no chores. John had to walk the dogs and see to the stove.

John said the Church now held the only romance left in her life. She spent long hours in her study. She reworked short stories written when she lived in the White Cottage, Malvern, with Ladye, added new ones and hoped they would be published as a single volume.

The lead story was ‘Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself’. She had written it in 1926 ‘shortly before I definitely decided to write my serious study of congenital sexual inversion The Well of Loneliness’. In a preface that hit back at Chartres Biron, she said readers would find the nucleus of Stephen Gordon’s girlhood and ‘the noble and selfless work done by hundreds of sexually inverted women during the Great War’.

Miss Ogilvy has thin lips, an awkward body, flat bosom, thick legs and ankles and rocks back and forward on her feet when agitated. She only takes her hands out of her pockets to light cigarettes and drive her battered war ambulance in France. As a child she loathed ‘sisters and dolls’, liked the stable boy, catapults, ‘lifting weights, swinging clubs and developing muscles’ and insists her name is William. Her mother calls her ‘a very odd creature’. Her relationship to men is ‘unusual’. Three of them want to marry her – attracted to her strangeness. Her two sisters fail to find husbands, are neurotic and sexually frustrated and look on her as their brother. She provides for them on inherited money, they live in Surrey, she gardens and, at the age of fifty-five has no friends.

Then comes the Great War: ‘“My God! If only I were a man!” she burst out, as she glared at Sarah and Fanny, “if only I had been born a man!” Something in her was feeling deeply defrauded.’ While her sisters knit socks, Miss Ogilvy struggles with officials because she wants to go to the front-line trenches and ‘be actually under fire’. She crops her hair and loves the uniform and her trench boots. She becomes a lieutenant and is ‘competent, fearless, devoted and untiring’.

Back home she refuses to grow her hair and snaps all the time. Her sisters think it is shell-shock. And then one day she packs her kitbag and goes to a small island off the south coast of Devon owned by a hotelier, Mrs Nanceskivel. It is a time-warp journey to an erotic past. Mrs Nanceskivel shows her some old bones of a man shot in the Bronze Age. Miss Ogilvy has a moment of awakening and that night dreams she is covered in zigzag tattoos and body hair and is wearing a fur pelt round her loins. By her side is a virgin with brown skin, black eyes and short sturdy limbs. ‘Miss Ogilvy marvelled because of her beauty’, then takes her off to the cave where bracken is piled up for a bed. The girl

knew that the days of her innocence were over. And she thought of the anxious virgin soil that was rent and sown to bring forth fruit in season, and she gave a quick little gasp of fear:

‘No … no …’ she gasped. For divining his need, she was weak with the longing to be possessed, yet the terror of love lay heavy upon her. ‘No … no …’ she gasped. But he caught her wrist and she felt the strength of his rough, gnarled fingers, the great strength of the urge that leapt in his loins, and again she must give that quick gasp of fear, the while she clung close to him lest he should spare her.

Outside the cave throughout the night big winged birds swirl around and ‘wild aurochs stamped as they bellowed their love songs’. In the morning