Who were the lost girls?
Every so often in one of the wartime novels by Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell or Nancy Mitford, there comes a moment when the central characters slip to one side and the centre stage is occupied by some very diff erent people. The distinguishing mark of this bright and infallibly wellspoken chorus is that it tends to be made up of women: young, rackety, well-bred, bohemian women who spend their nights sheltering from the Blitz in friends’ basements or meeting unsuitable men in seedy nightclubs and their days working as secretaries for upmarket magazines.
Waugh’s Unconditional Surrender (1961) has a chapter set in the Chelsea offi ces of the literary monthly Survival, whose editor, ‘Everard Spruce’, can be found seated among his assistants: The secretaries were dressed rather like him though in commoner materials; they wore their hair long and enveloping, in a style which fi fteen years later was to be associated by the newspapers with the King’s Road. One went bare footed as thought to emphasize her servile condition. They were sometimes spoken of as ‘Spruce’s veiled ladies’.
Just as Spruce is transparently based on Waugh’s friend Cyril Connolly, editor of Survival’s real-life equivalent Horizon, so the identity of the ‘veiled ladies’ would have been instantly apparent to anyone who had ever attended one of Connolly’s legendary parties. Already, even in the autumn of 1943, when Unconditional Surrender begins, they were part of a recognisable Metroland demographic, a small but signifi cant fraction of the thousands of 20-somethings vagrantly at large in war-era London, known as the ‘Lost Girls’, characterised by the writer Peter Quennell as ‘adventurous young women who fl itted around London, alighting briefl y here and there, and making the best of any random perch on which they happened to descend’.
The perch might be a bed-sitting room in Eaton Terrace, or a bomb-damaged Bloomsbury flat, and the temporary companion might be a Polish airman or an English viscount, but like Virginia Troy in Waugh’s Sword Of Honour trilogy, the Lost Girl – tough, unsentimental, well able to look out for herself – usually ended up getting the better of the bargain.
Who were the real-life Lost Girls? The most famous of all – certainly the ones Quennell was thinking of – were the women associated with Cyril Connolly. They included a blonde, good-looking girl in her early 20s called Sonia Brownell; dark-haired Lys Lubbock – Connolly’s other half for most of the 1940s; Barbara Skelton (usually described by her admirers as ‘pantherine’) who at one point cohabited with Quennell in an attic above the Horizon offices; and the slightly younger Janetta Woolley. If anything united this sorority, it was their bohemianism. Sonia’s connections with the painters associated with the Euston Road School (Adrian Stokes, Victor Pasmore, William Coldstream) led her to be christened the ‘Euston Road Venus’. From her mid-teens onward, Janetta is a fixture of Frances Partridge’s diary accounts of high-minded, partner-swapping Bloomsbury.
At the same time, beneath their surface suavity there were great wells of unhappiness and trauma into which unwary onlookers might plunge. Barbara, the daughter of an Edwardian-era gaiety girl, had been seduced in her teens by a millionaire and ended up in Paris working as a model for Schiaparelli. Sonia, according to her biographer Hilary Spurling, never really got over an incident from the mid-1930s when she survived a boating accident on a Swiss lake by pushing away a drowning boy who would other- wise have dragged her to her death. Janetta’s RAF fi ghter brother Rollo had been killed in North Africa.
Naturally, these events followed them into later life. The Lost Girls, once they moved on beyond their brief wartime orbit, were not the kind to settle down. Sonia went through two marriages. There was a brief, deathbed liaison with George Orwell, which ended on his death in January 1950 (‘G Orwell dead,’ Waugh wrote to his friend Nancy Mitford, ‘and Mrs Orwell presumably a rich widow’), followed by an equally shortlived union with the homosexual Michael Pitt-Rivers – after which she set up as ‘the Widow Orwell’, bitchy, cantankerous and often drunk, dying in nearpoverty in 1980 after her accountants had squandered most of her fi rst husband’s royalties in inept investments. Barbara’s husbands included Connolly and the publisher Lord Weidenfeld (from whom she was rapidly divorced, with Connolly named as the co-respondent) and her conquests everyone from King Farouk of Egypt to the writer Bernard Frank, with whom she lived tempestuously in the south of France. Jeremy Lewis’s memoir, Grub Street Irregular, off ers an unforgettable account of her in old age – foul-mouthed, irascible and selfi sh (‘Well, you’re no use to me, are you?’) but quite devoid of self-pity.
By this time, th e Lost Girls had begun to take on a second and well-nigh mythical existence in the pages of fi ction. Farouche, man-eating Barbara has been plausibly represented as the original of Pamela Widmerpool in Powell’s A Dance To The Music Of Time, who revenges herself on her abandoned lover X Trapnel by throwing the manuscript of his unpublished novel into the Regent’s Canal.
As well as starring in Dance as the literary girl about town Ada Leintwardine, author of the controversial novel I Stopped At A Chemist, Sonia is the model for the pretentious literary lady Elvira Portway in Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, and it is possible to identify Janetta as ‘Frankie’, Unconditional Surrender’s unshod secretary, from later references in Waugh’s letters to ‘Mrs Bluefeet’, with whom Connolly shares a house in Sussex Gardens.
Connolly, always sensitive to imagined lampoons, was stung by Sword Of Honour’s account of the Horizon office, and Waugh was forced to provide reassurance: ‘As for secretaries, Lys was beautifully neat and, as I remember her, Miss Brownell was quite presentable.’
Here, as elsewhere in his cannibalisation of real life, Waugh was being disingenuous. Writing a novel about wartime England, albeit a counterfactual England in which Edward VIII remains on the throne, I realised that there had to be a part in it for Horizon (here reimagined as a magazine called Duration) and also for some attendant Lost Girls among its editorial staff . None of them is drawn from the life. On the other hand, one incident happened exactly as represented. This followed a complaint from the printers about a short story by Julian Maclaren- Ross that began with the sentence, ‘Fact is there was bugger all I could do with it.’ Time was pressing; there were no funds to reprint the several thousand copies that had just arrived from the warehouse. In the end, the Lost Girls, seated on the offi ce fl oor, peering out from beneath their abundant hair, had to change the off ending word to ‘damn’ by hand.
The Windsor Faction, by DJ Taylor, is published by Vintage, priced £8.99
Waugh’s Unconditional Surrender (1961) has a chapter set in the Chelsea offi ces of the literary monthly Survival, whose editor, ‘Everard Spruce’, can be found seated among his assistants: The secretaries were dressed rather like him though in commoner materials; they wore their hair long and enveloping, in a style which fi fteen years later was to be associated by the newspapers with the King’s Road. One went bare footed as thought to emphasize her servile condition. They were sometimes spoken of as ‘Spruce’s veiled ladies’.
Just as Spruce is transparently based on Waugh’s friend Cyril Connolly, editor of Survival’s real-life equivalent Horizon, so the identity of the ‘veiled ladies’ would have been instantly apparent to anyone who had ever attended one of Connolly’s legendary parties. Already, even in the autumn of 1943, when Unconditional Surrender begins, they were part of a recognisable Metroland demographic, a small but signifi cant fraction of the thousands of 20-somethings vagrantly at large in war-era London, known as the ‘Lost Girls’, characterised by the writer Peter Quennell as ‘adventurous young women who fl itted around London, alighting briefl y here and there, and making the best of any random perch on which they happened to descend’.
The perch might be a bed-sitting room in Eaton Terrace, or a bomb-damaged Bloomsbury flat, and the temporary companion might be a Polish airman or an English viscount, but like Virginia Troy in Waugh’s Sword Of Honour trilogy, the Lost Girl – tough, unsentimental, well able to look out for herself – usually ended up getting the better of the bargain.
Who were the real-life Lost Girls? The most famous of all – certainly the ones Quennell was thinking of – were the women associated with Cyril Connolly. They included a blonde, good-looking girl in her early 20s called Sonia Brownell; dark-haired Lys Lubbock – Connolly’s other half for most of the 1940s; Barbara Skelton (usually described by her admirers as ‘pantherine’) who at one point cohabited with Quennell in an attic above the Horizon offices; and the slightly younger Janetta Woolley. If anything united this sorority, it was their bohemianism. Sonia’s connections with the painters associated with the Euston Road School (Adrian Stokes, Victor Pasmore, William Coldstream) led her to be christened the ‘Euston Road Venus’. From her mid-teens onward, Janetta is a fixture of Frances Partridge’s diary accounts of high-minded, partner-swapping Bloomsbury.
At the same time, beneath their surface suavity there were great wells of unhappiness and trauma into which unwary onlookers might plunge. Barbara, the daughter of an Edwardian-era gaiety girl, had been seduced in her teens by a millionaire and ended up in Paris working as a model for Schiaparelli. Sonia, according to her biographer Hilary Spurling, never really got over an incident from the mid-1930s when she survived a boating accident on a Swiss lake by pushing away a drowning boy who would other- wise have dragged her to her death. Janetta’s RAF fi ghter brother Rollo had been killed in North Africa.
Naturally, these events followed them into later life. The Lost Girls, once they moved on beyond their brief wartime orbit, were not the kind to settle down. Sonia went through two marriages. There was a brief, deathbed liaison with George Orwell, which ended on his death in January 1950 (‘G Orwell dead,’ Waugh wrote to his friend Nancy Mitford, ‘and Mrs Orwell presumably a rich widow’), followed by an equally shortlived union with the homosexual Michael Pitt-Rivers – after which she set up as ‘the Widow Orwell’, bitchy, cantankerous and often drunk, dying in nearpoverty in 1980 after her accountants had squandered most of her fi rst husband’s royalties in inept investments. Barbara’s husbands included Connolly and the publisher Lord Weidenfeld (from whom she was rapidly divorced, with Connolly named as the co-respondent) and her conquests everyone from King Farouk of Egypt to the writer Bernard Frank, with whom she lived tempestuously in the south of France. Jeremy Lewis’s memoir, Grub Street Irregular, off ers an unforgettable account of her in old age – foul-mouthed, irascible and selfi sh (‘Well, you’re no use to me, are you?’) but quite devoid of self-pity.
By this time, th e Lost Girls had begun to take on a second and well-nigh mythical existence in the pages of fi ction. Farouche, man-eating Barbara has been plausibly represented as the original of Pamela Widmerpool in Powell’s A Dance To The Music Of Time, who revenges herself on her abandoned lover X Trapnel by throwing the manuscript of his unpublished novel into the Regent’s Canal.
As well as starring in Dance as the literary girl about town Ada Leintwardine, author of the controversial novel I Stopped At A Chemist, Sonia is the model for the pretentious literary lady Elvira Portway in Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, and it is possible to identify Janetta as ‘Frankie’, Unconditional Surrender’s unshod secretary, from later references in Waugh’s letters to ‘Mrs Bluefeet’, with whom Connolly shares a house in Sussex Gardens.
Connolly, always sensitive to imagined lampoons, was stung by Sword Of Honour’s account of the Horizon office, and Waugh was forced to provide reassurance: ‘As for secretaries, Lys was beautifully neat and, as I remember her, Miss Brownell was quite presentable.’
Here, as elsewhere in his cannibalisation of real life, Waugh was being disingenuous. Writing a novel about wartime England, albeit a counterfactual England in which Edward VIII remains on the throne, I realised that there had to be a part in it for Horizon (here reimagined as a magazine called Duration) and also for some attendant Lost Girls among its editorial staff . None of them is drawn from the life. On the other hand, one incident happened exactly as represented. This followed a complaint from the printers about a short story by Julian Maclaren- Ross that began with the sentence, ‘Fact is there was bugger all I could do with it.’ Time was pressing; there were no funds to reprint the several thousand copies that had just arrived from the warehouse. In the end, the Lost Girls, seated on the offi ce fl oor, peering out from beneath their abundant hair, had to change the off ending word to ‘damn’ by hand.
The Windsor Faction, by DJ Taylor, is published by Vintage, priced £8.99