Horatio, Ophelia, Gertrude, and, for all I know, the Ghost in mute dialogue. The producer had the commercial idea of selling equally mute chorus parts to society girls from New York. In addition to responding to Bernhardt, Beatrice had to ensure that those fashionable young ladies remained in line and did not fall off the stage. She obtained a free place on one night for her beautiful younger sister, Adrienne Warren.
She remembered Sarah Bernhardt’s elocution and her professionalism. She also remembered her temperament. On one occasion, Bernhardt thought the curtain had been brought down too quickly, cutting short her applause. She turned on the stage manager and addressed him in the tones of a French Queen and the language of a French fishwife. The man operating the curtain understood the drift of her remarks, if not the precise words, and retorted by whisking up the curtain. With absolute fluency, the divine Sarah switched from her tirade to gracious acceptance of the applause of her audience. When the curtain came down, she resumed the tirade.
It was in Chicago that Beatrice first met the novelist Edna Ferber. Ferber introduced her to the Algonquin round table, and used her as copy. There is a great deal of Beatrice’s character and experience in Kim Ravenal, the youngest of the three generations of actresses in Showboat. Kim even does the elocution exercises Beatrice had taught at Wadleigh.
In 1917 a strange incident had occurred. Beatrice was at a party with some other young women of the theatre; Edna Ferber was there. One of the girls produced a Ouija board; Beatrice had a healthy Catholic distrust of the occult, had never used a Ouija board before and never touched one again. For a while the board seemed to be pointing to random letters; the young women were asking it to say whom they were going to marry. Finally the board did start to spell out recognizable words. It pointed to the letters: GOG MOG MAGOG. None of the young women knew what these words might mean, except for Edna Ferber, who said that Gog and Magog were two wooden statues of giants, to be seen at the Guildhall in London. The word ‘MOG’ remained unexplained.
On the recommendation of English actors, Beatrice decided to broaden her experience with a Shakespearian season at the Old Vic, London. She sailed for England in April 1920. There was still a post-war shortage of shipping. She booked her passage on a German liner, the old Imperator, which had been confiscated by the Allies at the end of the war. The ship had not been perfectly converted from wartime use as a troopship, and there were still German notices forbidding Other Ranks to enter the Officers’ quarters. Beatrice had to share a cabin with a young French woman who had been establishing some New York contacts for her dressmaking business. They found each other agreeable company for the voyage, and the dressmaker gave Beatrice a silk slip, which I remember seeing as a child in the 1930s. The young dressmaker was Miss Chanel.
Beatrice landed in England and went to stay with an old friend, Rosamund, who was living at Parkstone, near Bournemouth. Rosamund said she was giving a small dinner party, which would include Fletcher Rees-Mogg. She told Beatrice that Fletcher was an excellent golfer – he had a handicap of two at the Parkstone Golf Club – and a stickler for punctuality.
I have some fifty volumes of my English grandmother’s diary. It records the progress of my parents’ courtship:
10 MAY: E. F. [Edmund Fletcher Rees-Mogg] and Ed and Rosamund and Miss Warren dance. [This was either their first or second meeting.]
11 MAY: Rosamund and Miss W. (charming American) dine here. F. to works 9 to 10.30 – she and I chat, pianola.
15 MAY: F. takes Rosamund and Miss W. and me to Stonehenge. Much wind! Tea under stones!
19 MAY: v. lovely. Rosamund and B. Warren dine.
20 MAY: F. takes B. Warren to town lunch Lyndhurst, tea Sonning
26 MAY: Bea Warren comes
29 MAY: Sat 1 p.m. Fletcher and Beatrice announce their engagement.
‘Sonning’ is almost certainly a euphemism for ‘Maidenhead’. My father gave Beatrice Warren dinner on 20 May at Skindles road-house on the Thames, where he proposed. Beatrice always thought that it was slightly embarrassing to have become engaged in Maidenhead. They might well have thought that Sonning, a few miles away on the Thames, would sound less embarrassing to my grandmother’s Victorian ears. At all events, the time from their first meeting to the engagement was about a fortnight. She was twenty-eight; he was thirty.
They were to be happily married for forty-two years, and to have three children, two girls and a boy. They had, so far as I know, no fundamental disagreements. In their early letters they express surprise that such a gift of love and mutual understanding should have come to them.
They were married on 11 November 1920, by the Catholic priest, in the drawing room at Shoreacres, the Warrens’ home in Mamaroneck. They returned to England after an American honeymoon. Beatrice was not to see the United States again until after the Second World War.
Chapter Two
The Young Officer
My father was one of the young officers who survived the First World War. In the spring of 1914, he had caught pneumonia while working as a schoolmaster at a school in Lancashire, where he taught Latin, Greek and French. He was left with a strained heart. When, that August, he volunteered for the army, the doctors listened to his heart and rejected him as unfit. This, in all probability, saved his life.
Instead he went out to France by volunteering to drive the Charterhouse ambulance, which had been subscribed for by boys and parents at his old school. He was already a first-class amateur engineer and mechanic. He spent some months working at a French hospital at Arc-en-Barrois, but was subsequently commissioned in the Royal Army Service Corps, where he ran a mobile transport unit.
This was neither safe nor non-combatant. A fellow officer wrote that he woke every morning uncertain whether he would be called by his batman or St Peter. However, it was obviously less inevitably lethal than service in the infantry. It was also surprisingly modern. Apart from ambulance work, Fletcher’s unit was the first to take mobile X-rays into the front line. His experience of X-rays proved valuable when I was X-rayed in utero at the Clifton Nursing Home. The matron scrutinized the X-ray and told my parents that I had two heads. My father had seen many more X-rays than she had, and commented briskly: ‘Nonsense, woman, you don’t know how to read it.’
His unit was also attached to the earliest tanks, which, on average, broke down every 60 yards or so. Their job was to mend the tanks while under fire. My father considered that he had had an easy war. He shared the infantry’s resentment of the inadequacy of the staff officers who did not visit the front line.
Like many young officers from the landowning class – one finds the same attitudes in Anthony Eden’s memoirs – his war experience left him with a strong feeling that he ought to try to repay the privileges he had enjoyed. Some of his friends after the war were men who had been wounded, or suffered from shell shock, or had taken to drink as a result of their war experiences. For them he felt great compassion. His first cousin, Colonel Robert Rees-Mogg, a good professional soldier, had been an aide-de-camp to Field Marshal Allenby and ridden into Jerusalem in his entourage in 1917. Robert was torpedoed on his way back from Palestine, suffered from shell shock and amnesia, and never recovered. I can remember him visiting us at Cholwell, our home in Somerset, in the middle 1930s, a friendly, tall man who had lost the thread of life. Two other cousins were killed, out of a group of five, one at Gallipoli, the other in the last German advance in 1918.
I now think that I underrated the whole question of what my father had been through in the First World War. He felt, as many of those who survived did, a considerable guilt for being a survivor. The war made him feel that he should not compete in the world against people who needed the jobs. He felt that, as he had a reasonable sized estate and a reasonable income, he was in a position to lead the life of a quiet country gentleman without seeking employment and that is what he did. It was a life in which there was a lot of voluntary work and he made jobs for himself in farming which gave him an instinctive pleasure: he liked growing things; he liked having pigs; he liked having hens and he liked growing daffodils. It just about paid the wages of people who might not otherwise have had jobs during the slump.
My father inherited the long, solid,