The Great Silence (40 page)

He dealt with burns, with injuries from dog bites and injuries incurred during boxing matches. One woman who had been badly burned in a car accident allowed Gillies to persuade her husband to donate the skin from his bottom to make the necessary large graft possible. The husband took great pleasure in telling Gillies that whenever his mother-in-law kissed her daughter goodbye he felt as if he was ‘getting his own back’.

But even Gillies, who had seen almost every variety of physical deformity, was challenged when a housemaid arrived in his consulting rooms and ‘crossed the room with great lumbering strides and vaulted on to the couch like a rugby player’. Since entering service at the age of 15 this unfortunate woman had always been acutely embarrassed when undressing in front of the other maids, and became bewildered when she found herself head over heels in love with the laundry maid. Gillies’s examination revealed that she was suffering from hypospadias: the ambivalent appearance of her genitals had meant that she was wrongly identified at birth as a girl. Under Gillies’s surgical guidance she became the muscular husband of a farmer’s daughter.

Interventions in nature’s handiwork were on the advance and Gillies was fascinated by the news that Serge Voranov, a Russian-French
surgeon, had on 12 June successfully infused a few youth-endowing slithers from a baboon’s testicles into the tissue of a human scrotum. Meanwhile the 424 pages of the book with 844 often frightening and detailed illustrations that Gillies had been working on was complete and
Plastic Surgery of the Face
was published at a price tag of three guineas. Immediately it became the authoritative text and doctors expected no more comprehensive book on the subject to be written in their lifetime. The
British Medical Journal
had ‘no hesitation in saying that this is one of the most notable contributions made to surgical literature today’.

On 27 October 1920 a celebratory dinner was held at the Savoy to mark the centenary of the renowned stationers W. H. Smith, who had maintained a shop in the Strand since 1820. During the sumptuous dinner a letter from Lord Northcliffe was read to the assembled company congratulating the firm on its role in pioneering the ‘trading in books and newspapers at railway stations, a system now universal the world over’. Much cheering followed and then Lord Riddell, former proprietor of the
News of the World
and representative of the press barons at the Paris Peace Conference, read a special poem:

There are gold smiths and silver smiths

The choice one of the tribe

There are blacksmiths and white smiths

Whose arts I can’t describe

There are tin smiths and the smiths of iron shoes

But the best smiths of all the smiths

Are the ones that deal in news.

The eulogy brought smiles and tears to the eyes of the toughest tradesman present.

At Oxford, male undergraduates that autumn were steadying themselves for the day when their female counterparts would join them in the Sheldonian Theatre. Women students were to receive their degrees for the first time. Nearly two years after scenes of uncontrolled chaos during which a woman had hitched her skirts above her waist in celebration of the first day of peace, Oxford had grown calm. Winifred Holtby had been startled by the beauty of the city
that summer. The exuberant undergraduate, ‘superbly tall and vigorous as the young Diana with her long straight limbs and golden hair’ as her friend Vera Brittain saw her, had missed the ancient stone buildings and the hidden courtyards. She had missed the delicious sense of mystery and privilege in pushing open the small wooden doors set within the large college gates, and stepping over the threshold into the perfect grassy quadrangles beyond. Winifred had interrupted her studies at Somerville in 1918 to spend a year in a signals unit crammed into a hut at Abbeville in France; she was delighting once again in the contrasting freedom and space that she had found on returning to Oxford in the autumn of 1919 to complete her history course. This last summer the buttercups had been so prolific she had never seen the like and the whole city seemed affected by the brightness of the season.

She had been sharply aware of the rhythm of the academic year, enjoying ‘burlesques and school discipline and Dostoevsky and porridge’ in the spring, when ‘the air is frosty and the road is dry’, and moving on to the matchless exhilaration that fills an Oxford undergraduate’s summer days. Against a background of champagne and punts, love and poetry, anything that life, glorious life might offer seemed within her grasp. Winifred had heard some exceptional lectures during the Trinity term. The poets Hilaire Belloc and Laurence Binyon had come to the University to speak about the business of writing poetry and plays, but it was the talk on the craft of the short story given by John Masefield, the Poet Laureate, that Winifred had enjoyed most. In fact it was the best talk she had ever heard. The Schools hall where he spoke was ‘crowded from end to end’. Admission was by tickets, so coveted that they quickly sold out, resulting in more cheating than ‘in a card sharper’s den’. The lucky seated undergraduates, including Winifred, were delighted by Masefield’s ‘charming personality’ and his ‘glorious’ sense of humour.

Afterwards down on the banks of the River Cherwell Winifred and her friends had filled their arms with wild roses and watched the darting, hovering blue dragonflies and ‘a flurry of bees and swallows’. England was free at last ‘of the blight of war’. Just as the busy life of the High Street had resumed and the bicycles ‘swarmed once again’ through Carfax at the junction with Broad Street, so Winifred
was pleased and calmed by the rhythm of the river where she watched ‘some very admirable and astute little water rats bustle in and out among the flags’.

Robert Graves had moved to live at Boars Hill near Oxford, after taking up his place at St John’s as an undergraduate. That summer, he had taken a short holiday with his wife Nancy. They had bicycled to Dorchester, passing the now empty army camps near Stonehenge that had been built to accommodate a million men. They had spent some time with Thomas Hardy who on 2 June had celebrated his eightieth birthday. They had discussed the dangers of the overworn phrase in poetry. Hardy urged Graves to omit ‘the scent of thyme’ from one of his recent poems. Graves begged to be allowed to keep it. They discussed how the local church had once been for Hardy the musical, literary and artistic hub of village life. He told Graves how the clergyman on whom he had modelled Mr St Clair in
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
had written to the War Office to object about the brass bands sent to disturb the discipline of the Dorchester barracks. The older poet confided to the younger something that had been troubling him. Out gardening one day, the full realisation of a new story had come into his head as he pruned a rose bush. Character, plot, sensibility, all were assembled in his mind. Hardy continued to chop down the wayward branches, unintentionally eliminating something more than he had intended. On returning to the house he found that the entire story had evaporated irretrievably. He told Graves of an essential rule for so many writers. He reminded the younger man of the evanescent imagination which needs to be tethered to paper and pinned there if it is not to escape.

After the euphoria of the summer when fine weather eases the pain in men and women’s souls and the autumn term was imminent, Winifred wrote to a friend in some despair, ‘England’s in a horrid mess ... we’re all running after the moon.’ The result of everyone fighting for ‘rights’ when it seemed to Winifred that although ‘they don’t know what they are, they intend to have ‘em’ was that the tally of lost working days in the nearly two years since the end of the war was now, according to government estimates, nudging over sixty million. On 18 October a group of unemployed servicemen from the North of the country came down to London,
arriving in Whitehall just as a meeting between Lloyd George and the mayors of the London boroughs was being disbanded. Emotion could not be contained as the startled mayors saw angry men rushing towards them waving the Red Flag and lobbing bricks at the Georgian windows of Downing Street. The police arrived and charged, injuring forty men.

But Winifred deplored the way the Government was universally condemned for every problem both personal and financial, along with the accompanying sense that everyone deserved ‘pensions, indemnities, two shillings a week rise in wages, cheap coal, electric massage, twopence a case divorce and railway transport’. She thought people behaved as if Lloyd George had found a gold mine in the back garden of his official residence. Men were not living up to the standards women imposed on them as heroes of war.

A few months earlier
Vogue
had thrown up its hands in disgust at the extremes to which ‘old and decrepit’ men would go in the pursuit of eternal youth. ‘When they show signs of senility [they] are to have the glands of young and skittish monkeys grafted onto them and hey presto! They will immediately become hale and active.’What on earth was to follow,
Vogue
mused? ‘Will they take to the trees? Will tails begin to sprout?’ The magazine could only imagine what future generations might think of this lunacy, a folly comparable in absurdity to the notion of reviving the bowler hat, musical comedy, or even Cubist painting!

But the search for beauty and eternal youth was on the increase as seldom before. The
Sketch
joined in the derision concerning the claims that the grafting of the interstitial gland of the monkey could bring back lost youth. Will Cabinet ministers begin tangoing across Downing Street, the newspaper wondered? ‘We weep’, wrote Winifred, half laughing, ‘because we can’t make archangels out of men all in a hurry, forgetting it has taken a good many thousands of years to make a man out of a monkey.’ The legacy of primates was further evident to Winifred when, having thought that ‘now and then we see his wings sprouting, we weep to find that the only superfluous excrescence on his person is a remnant of his monkey’s tail!’

By a grim irony, on 25 October, in the very same week that primates were causing Winifred to puzzle over man’s aspirations and
just as the
Illustrated London News
was reporting the rising fashion for monkey fur as a trimming on hats, Alexander, King of Greece, died from the effects of blood poisoning caused by a bite from his own pet monkey.

The absurdity and unpredictability of life continued to trouble Virginia Woolf. In her diary that day she questioned, ‘Why is life so tragic, so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss? I look down. I feel giddy. I wonder how I am ever to walk to the end.’ Everywhere she looked she saw unhappiness and resistance to change. Although continuing to meet her Bloomsbury friends at gatherings of the quasi-nostalgic Memoir Club they had founded in the spring, she spent much of her time at Monk’s House in the village of Rodmell in Sussex which she and Leonard had bought the previous summer. She was working on a new novel,
Jacob’s Room
, and consciously shifting her writing away from the more traditional style of her previous two novels,
The Voyage Out
and
Night and Day
.

On 11 October the Prince of Wales returned home from another long promotional tour abroad, to face a parental dressing down for allowing his picture to be taken with his new aide Louis Mountbatten in a swimming pool. ‘You might as well be photographed
naked,’
his father expostulated. Yet at Oxford there was a general feeling that the time had come to cast off prejudice and inhibition. The increasing recognition of the invaluable role women had played in the war was hard to ignore even in establishments and professions that had previously done their best to do so. Winifred went so far as to surmise that there were only three anti-feminists left in the world: the Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon, the lawyer Lord Birkenhead, and Mrs Humphry Ward, president of Britain’s anti-suffrage movement. The Sex Disqualification Bill had become law the preceding December just after Lady Astor had taken her seat. Women solicitors had formed their own ‘1919 Club’ in celebration of the new law that allowed them to practise for the first time and Oxford University had incorported the membership of women in the University into its statute.

On 20 October Winifred was pleased to boast that she and her great friend Vera Brittain had been welcomed into the Sheldonian, the beautiful golden-stoned theatre sitting proudly at the centre of Oxford’s academic nucleus of buildings, to take part in the matriculation
ceremony and to be ‘initiated into the mysteries of degrees at last’. Shining in the sunshine, the scarlet hoods of the students were out-glamourised in their vibrancy by, Vera noticed, ‘the wine red amphilopsis which hung with decorative dignity over walls and quadrangles’.

Cambridge had not yet agreed to allow this huge gender barrier to be demolished, and on that sunny autumn day in Oxford only a few of the 4,181 male students were gathered for their own academic crowning and the few looked so abashed they might have been interlopers. As the Principals of the five women’s colleges, who were all to be awarded MAs as part of the process of raising the status of women in the University, processed up the aisle of the theatre there was ‘rousing applause’. Ghosts of women long dead, ‘women who did not care whether they saw the end so long as they had contributed to the means’, beamed down on their protégés. But this was a show, an act of theatre in which the players strutted and posed, the women adopting expressions of’demure severity’ while the men ‘assumed an attitude of determined conviction that nothing special was happening’. The atmosphere was ‘tense with the consciousness of a dream fulfilled’. The Vice Chancellor became so agitated by the novelty of the proceedings that he mistook his mortarboard for his Bible, and matriculation took place with the help of a tap from his hat.