Growing up Edwardian

I wonder if I have ever stayed in an English house that didn’t contain a creased and dog-eared book by Osbert Lancaster. In my childhood his collections of pocket cartoons were always a disappointment: the comic sketches on their covers promised hilarity, but the jokes inside – no doubt wonderfully topical in their day – meant little to me. His architectural books, which I noticed as I grew older, seemed forbiddingly esoteric. Not until I acquired parents-in-law who owned almost his entire oeuvre did I discover the memoirs that convinced me of his brilliance: All Done from Memory (1953) and With an Eye to the Future (1967) are remarkable not just for their wit and powers of observation, but for their highly individual take on Britain’s path to two world wars.

It is during the night-time air raids of the summer of 1944 that All Done from Memory begins. Rather than await his fate indoors, Lancaster wanders the empty streets of west London, revisiting the scenes of his Edwardian childhood. Notting Hill, where his family once lived, has long been abandoned by the wealthier classes and become a land of seedy flats and bedsits; his book, he tells us, should be seen not primarily as autobiography but as ‘a memorial plaque to a vanished world’. The fact that in our own time Notting Hill has been reclaimed by the rich (though not always with respect for its original architecture) adds a dash of irony to his endeavour. At the heart of the book is a series of portraits of characters from his childhood, each brimming with eccentricity and occasionally certifiable madness (as in the case of the clergyman who tells his largely female congregation that heaven has no place for women). There is Cousin Jenny, who lives in a Victorian time-warp, obsessed with European royalty; Mrs Ullathorne, once a beauty at the court of Napoleon III, her hands ‘criss-crossed with the purple hawsers of her veins’; and, most disturbingly, Colonel Hook, whose study – stuffed with mementos of colonial campaigns – betrays a top brass quite unprepared for the mechanized horrors of the imminent Great War. Lancaster has an almost Trollopian sense of social gradations, and deftly analyses the decline of the urban upper-middle class to which his family belonged. (The invention of the motor car, he explains, tempted people away to the country at weekends, so destroying a pattern of city life which was focused on the local church.) But while he claims that all children are snobs, it is working people who most cheer the young Osbert’s world – ‘A mother’s love is all very well,’ he declares, ‘but it is a poor substitute for good relations with the cook.’ Among the supporting characters are an Italian organ-grinder with his monkey, Kate the housemaid with her fund of political slogans, and ‘the old gentleman who came out on winter evenings to play the harp by the foggy radiance of the street lamp’. It’s significant that each chapter takes its title from a popular song, for the one thing that people from all walks of life share is a passion for the music-hall. The onset of war in 1914 is given a rare nuance by his family’s love of all things German. His mother’s ancestors were immigrants from Hesse, while the Lancasters prided themselves on speaking the language fluently and found in Germans ‘all those virtues that they most admired – discipline, industry, physical courage and simple, unaffected Evangelical piety’. When hostilities begin, on Osbert’s sixth birthday, he and his parents are at the seaside, and the first thing he notices is the mysterious absence from the beach of four plump bandsmen in Prussian uniforms who would normally be playing extracts from Tannhäuser. His memories of the war itself are few, but the opening chapter of With an Eye to the Future evokes a London overwhelmed by gloom, made still deeper by his father’s death in action. Even when writing of his darkest moments, however, his humour is never dampened for long: sent to a Swiss TB clinic with strict rules on alcohol, he notes in the dimples of melting snow ‘the tell-tale necks of the bottles lightly cast from upper windows during the winter storms’. He is above all a master of the elegant, periphrastic sentence steeped in gentle irony – never more tellingly deployed than in this description of his difficult mother:

Partly, perhaps, because of a lonely childhood passed mainly in the company of her elders, and partly thanks to a lifelong inability to suffer fools gladly, and admittedly in some measure due to the unshakeable conviction that she knew far better than those concerned what made for true happiness, my mother’s circle was always small and steadily contracted as the years went by and her attitude to life became more managerial.

But he is also adept at the swift, acerbic aside: Sybil Thorndike plays Joan of Arc as ‘a particularly maddening Girl Guide at a rather difficult stage of her development’, while on the Riviera the gossip columnist Elsa Maxwell lurks ‘like Grendel’s mother in her mere, ready to pounce on the first worthwhile celebrity to swim past’. His powers of description are equally impressive. As an artist as well as a writer, he has an extraordinary eye for detail and awareness of different perspectives. He notes, for example, that the mouth is far more revealing than the eyes, and that the surest hallmarks of an era are not its fashions or buzzwords but its gestures – ‘a particular fluttering of the hand or trick of standing’. A crowd of churchgoers are defined by their hats (‘a mass of elaborate, pale-shaded millinery’); an Oxford don is characterized by his furniture (‘suits of Japanese armour in which whole families of mice had made their homes’); and a well-travelled relative by his esoteric collection of ornaments (‘masterpieces of tortured ingenuity’). Lancaster is especially fascinated by uniforms, with their many varieties of epaulette and aiguillette – though this does not blind him to the preening vanity of their occupants. With an Eye to the Future follows a stricter chronology than All Done from Memory, taking us from the end of the First World War to the beginning of the Second, with Lancaster progressing from prep school to Charterhouse, then Oxford and the Slade, before embarking on his career as an illustrator. But, as in the earlier book, he has little interest in analysing his own development, preferring to chronicle the Zeitgeist; when he does write about himself, it is with the same amused irony he applies to others. He has particular fun with the craze for the occult which characterized the beginning of the century. His mother was among the many seekers of ‘Hidden Wisdom’, and an enthusiastic reader of magazines which peddled it. The National Messenger and Banner was a favourite, counting an implausible number of naval officers among its contributors and rich with ‘that certain knowledge which a close study of the Great Pyramid alone afforded’. He is more indulgent towards the 1920s – a decade whose frivolity, he argues, was outweighed by its creative vitality, with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes to the fore. As a chronicler of taste he has few rivals, and although Evelyn Waugh had left Oxford by the time Lancaster arrived, the ‘Varsity Drag’ chapter of With an Eye to the Future can almost be read as a glossary to Brideshead Revisited, explaining the students’ shifting enthusiasms. It has its own cast of memorable characters, including the racing man who summons an invigilator during Finals to place his bets on the 2.30 at Newbury, and a clutch of poets: Louis MacNeice with his ‘air of bored and slightly arrogant detachment’; Stephen Spender, ‘type-cast for the young Apollo golden-haired, a role to which he brought all the touching grace of a dancing bear’; and John Betjeman, resembling ‘a rather down-at-heel Tractarian hymn-writer recently unfrocked’. If the book has a hero, it is one whose reputation epitomizes the vagaries of history: Lancaster’s schoolfriend Ronnie Cartland, long since eclipsed by his eccentric sister Barbara (who appears here as a seductive flapper) and her sentimental novels. Irresistibly charming, deeply sophisticated and prodigiously energetic, Ronnie seemed the personification of a Bright Young Thing; but he also possessed a deeply serious side, ‘distinguishing him in the final analysis from the typical Saki hero on whom he might have been thought to have modelled himself’. Elected as a Tory MP at just 28, he was to make his name in the Munich Crisis as a courageous enemy of appeasement, only to be killed in action two years later. Lancaster himself professes little interest in politics, which makes his observations on the darkening mood of the 1930s all the more intriguing: while the First World War caught most people by surprise, the auguries that preceded the Second were hard to miss. His social engagements include a dance given by Diana Mosley for her sister Unity Mitford in 1932, the atmosphere of which brings ‘a presentiment of coming, and probably unwelcome, change’ – confirmed by the sight of a comatose Augustus John being carried out by two footmen. The age of aesthetes has given way to that of politicians. Extraordinarily, though, passion for German culture runs high among Lancaster’s friends until well into the decade, fostered in part by guilt over the punitive terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Moreover, he explains, ‘such radical movements as those represented by Kurt Weill and George Grosz . . . encouraged the belief that there was a reliable, built-in opposition to the nightmare ascendancy of lower middle-class nationalism’. The delight with which sophisticated Germans greet Hitler’s accession comes as a profound shock, as does the appetite for appeasement among British grandees. The book ends, artfully, back where Lancaster’s story began in the streets of west London, as the news comes through that Poland has been invaded. The writing is only part of the memoirs’ allure, for both volumes are of course peppered with Lancaster’s enchanting illustrations. One of my favourites shows a dozen tiny schoolboys being led along the seafront at Littlehampton: none is given facial features, yet each miraculously has his own personality. Elsewhere we see the infant Osbert being doted on by women in enormous hats; a gallery of dimwitted monarchs encrusted with orders of chivalry; tweedy dons and menacing lap-dogs. All are, as illustrations should be, a distillation of the books’ beguiling prose – reminding us that, in a dangerous world, an eye for mankind’s absurdity is an invaluable aid to survival.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 59 © Anthony Gardner 2018