Gluck Diana Souhami (smart books to read TXT) 📖

the fashions and hypocrisies of time and place’.1 She found herself out of kilter with the times.

Commissions for portraits and flower groups still came from those who knew her and a clique of people remained as convinced as ever of her worth, but the sheer joie de vivre of the thirties was gone both from her and society’s élite. Art was now for public museums rather than for stunningly designed rooms in private houses and ‘Prints for Pleasure’ of the old masters were available for the average drawing room wall.

Society had drastically changed. Nationally, the postwar years were a time for reconstruction. The polarities of the thirties – joblessness, deprivation and hardship for many; money, daring and style for a few – were dulled. There was a Labour government and a spirit of egalitarianism. Few individuals now commissioned pictures of perfect blooms for their walls or perfect floral displays for their dinner-party tables. Constance Spry kept her shop in South Audley Street, but ‘weekly masterpieces’ of flower decorations for fantasy interiors like Atkinsons Perfumery were no longer wanted. She diversified into teaching homecrafts – cookery, housekeeping, flower arranging, gardening and needlework. With her husband Shav she bought a rambling Georgian house, Winkfield Place near Ascot, and opened it as a college for girls. She lectured nationwide and wrote books and articles for numerous magazines.

The Villa Hammamet in Tunisia, the setting for hedonistic summers in the thirties, got occupied by the Nazis during the war. Jean Henson was incarcerated in a Silesian prison, starved, and for years eluded the searches of the Red Cross. His wife Violet stayed imprisoned in the Villa, cooped in a couple of rooms. After the war the couple reunited, but the élan and magical years of endless summers, peacocks strutting in the marble courtyards and games of halma on the terraces were gone for ever.

Gluck’s brother, Louis, took over as Steward of The Fund in 1940 – the key job in administering the complex structure of trusts and investments, claims and practical problems of the Family dynasty. He lost his seat as Conservative MP for Nottingham East in the Labour landslide of 1945, but despite his parliamentary disappointments he was to hold a plethora of public offices: President of the Albert Hall, President of the Marylebone Conservative Association, President of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue, Chairman of the GLC. He was knighted in 1953. As the years passed he got more busy, autocratic, uncompromising and impressive. The jokiness shared by him and Gluck when young evaporated and they continued to try to avoid direct negotiations with each other over her financial affairs. There was a bond of kinship, Gluck stayed with him when in London, but they had lost common ground. She got on his nerves and he would turn the sound up on the television when she came in the room. When for years she ceased to paint, and herself got more autocratic, she no longer in his view justified her eccentricity.

And as if there was not enough to divide them, their mother, after the war, began evincing symptoms of madness. She became even more hyperactive, showed signs of paranoia, her moods changed erratically and she stopped looking after her appearance or eating enough. When she thought no one was looking, she slipped chicken legs or buttered rolls off her plate and into her handbag to avoid eating them, and the room she lived in at the Cumberland became chaotic.

Nesta resumed her fun-filled, glitzy life. She left Britain for good and went to Hawaii in 1948. Seymour, by then in his eighties, had had a stroke and wanted to live in the sunshine. Nor did Socialist Britain hold much attraction for them. ‘Big men made the world and great men inspired us, but it is the little man we fear,’ wrote a May fair friend to Nesta in the postwar years.

All initiative is being throttled. We are being taxed, controlled, regimentated and pestered by every petty little civil servant. Through laws our financial condition is being shattered … So my dear Nesta, stay on your little Island in the Pacific, stay there until this mad crazy world becomes normal again – or perishes.2

‘N. leaves for USA on Nieuw-Amsterdam train 4.35. Cannot settle to anything.’ was Gluck’s disconsolate diary entry for 26 August 1948. For weeks before the departure day she made a box, lined in satin, for Nesta’s poodle, Mr Chips, to travel in. Nesta came to the Chantry House and said her sad goodbyes four days before she left, while Edith discreetly walked alone on the downs.

The Obermers stayed for six years in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel on the beach at Waikiki before moving into a house on Diamond Head. They mixed in a rich ex-patriate community and friends on world tours to the Far East and beyond stopped by while their aeroplanes refuelled in Hawaii. It was light years away from the small-town gentrified life of Steyning, and her letters to Gluck began to show how different their lives now were:

… the dogs whined about six and as I let them out I realised it was pure and fresh – the dawn of the world. I opened the big windows into my fen and orchid garden and heard a furious ‘tr-trutting’ and saw my big tame (wild) red cardinal bobbing about in a vexed way on top of my wild birds’ food cage. I gave him lots of sunflower seeds, all in my nightdress which was no dress – and then walked down on the stepping stones all surrounded by violets to the beach and dug my toes into the cold sand, my head in the sun that came slanting through the palm trees. Everywhere was peace and sapphire sea.3

She used Hawaii as a base for travelling, and visited Britain each year. Money gave her freedom and she spent it easily on looking good, enjoying life and helping and entertaining her friends. She got her pilot’s licence and took up surfing and deep-sea diving.