Georgette Heyer Read online

  They did not discuss their feelings much. Sylvia must have been aware of Georgette’s emotional struggles and did her best to provide support, but this was not always simple. The distance between mother and daughter had grown over time and Georgette’s close relationship with her father had sometimes meant excluding Sylvia, who was now expected to be both mother and father to her children. George’s place was not easy to fill and without him to provide for them Sylvia also had to make do financially. She was forced to rely on the income from her share of William Watkins Limited (a few hundred shares bequeathed to her after her father’s death), whatever other investments they may have had, and on George’s Separation Pay (the amount paid to the families of the soldiers on active service), which was less than thirty shillings a week. Her unmarried sisters may have also helped, having come into some money the previous year after their mother bequeathed Fairfield, “its contents and any money in the bank” to Ellice, Josephine, and Cicely. Annette Watkins had died on 9 June 1914 while the Heyers were in Paris, but Georgette’s beloved Grannie had remembered her favorite grandchild. The only other bequest in her very brief will read: “To my granddaughter Georgette Heyer, my watch and chain.”

  By the end of 1915, Georgette had lost both her grandmothers to old age. Alice Heyer suffered a stroke two weeks before Christmas and the family traveled to Worthing to be with her and Georgette’s grandfather. George Heyer was now eighty-three and facing the prospect of losing his beloved companion. He and Alice had been married for over fifty years and George had always treated his wife “as if she were a queen.” In her memoir his daughter later recalled that although their mother was a plain woman their father had brought his children up to believe she was beautiful. Now Alice was seriously ill with little hope that she would recover.

  It was hard to think of her grandmother dying, but the impending tragedy also brought some days of happiness for Georgette and her family, for her father came home from France to be with his mother in the last week of her life. It was a bittersweet time for everyone. Alice Heyer died on 21 December and George stayed in Sussex just long enough to organize his mother’s affairs before leaving to resume his military duties in France. His family returned to Wimbledon and a new address at 19 Homefield Road.

  These were gruelling years for everyone as the war raged across Europe and the Middle East. On 1 July 1916 the Battle of the Somme began on the Western Front with an appalling loss of life. Georgette was almost fourteen and aware of many of the horrors being experienced by soldiers and civilians on and around the battlefields. She wrote to her father regularly, regaling him with stories from home and telling him about her activities and those of her brothers. It was part of the unspoken protocol of the time that she should write cheerfully, without reference to her fears for his safety or concerns for those they knew.

  By the end of November, fighting on the Somme had killed or injured more than one million Allied and German troops. Over 146,000 British soldiers were dead or missing and more than 400,000 were wounded. The nation was devastated by a tragedy unlike any it had ever known. The sense of waste and the effects of the horrifying casualty lists would linger on long after the War ended. Christmas 1916 was a somber time, with many families in mourning. In Britain the general feeling of loss and hardship was only exacerbated by severe food shortages.

  The war years were a period about which Georgette chose to write very little. Only in Helen does she mention them and even then her heroine merely records her reactions to the early months of the conflict, before an abrupt leap of time moves the story forward four years to find her contemplating the peace. Helen is deeply affected by the War but finds talking of its horrific realities impossible. The deaths of several of her friends at the Front are touched on briefly but, by the end of the conflict, her father returns home safely and life—albeit an irrevocably altered life—goes on. Although Georgette’s own father was not at the Front he was not completely shielded from its horrors, for the War took its toll even on those who enjoyed the relative safety of a job behind the front lines.

  George was a Requisitioning Officer for the Directorate of Hirings and Requisitions attached to Second Army Headquarters. The Directorate was responsible for “business relations with the French” and for “the obtaining of sites and buildings” used to accommodate officers and men. George’s fluent French and personal charm made him highly effective in gaining entrance to buildings needed by the Army and in overcoming the protests and resistance of their owners, many of whom never forgot “the persuasive English officer with his perfect French.” Popular with his fellow officers, George was well known for his “irrepressible optimism and unfailing good temper” and for regularly devoting “his few spare hours to serving friends less happily quartered.” In October 1916, he was promoted to the rank of Captain with an increase in pay and responsibility.

  At home Georgette and Sylvia did their best to maintain a positive demeanor in the face of increasingly bad war news. In 1917 Sylvia took the children to Bognor Regis to live, for a respite. The move may have been prompted by Boris’s continuing poor health (he suffered from a mild form of hemophilia). Bognor was by the sea, only ten miles from George’s father at Worthing, and Sylvia must have hoped that the change would do them all good. Although Boris was of an age when most boys went to school, Sylvia continued to teach him at home, despite having received a generous offer for a reduction in fees from Sir Thomas Hughes, the Chairman of Governors at King’s College School. It was not the school’s usual practice to offer discounts to former masters but Sir Thomas felt that some concession should be made in the case of George Heyer’s son, since George was “not only an Old Boy and ex-master, but one who deserved well of the School.” Mindful of Boris’s health, however, Sylvia declined the offer and neither Boris nor Frank went to King’s.

  In the middle of 1918 the Heyers moved back to Wimbledon, to a new house at 11 Homefield Road—just a few doors from their old address. This was to be the final year of the protracted conflict that was called “the war to end all wars” and it was to be a long and difficult one. Food rationing was introduced in January and in April conscription was extended to include all able men between the ages of seventeen and fifty-one. There were work stoppages and strikes throughout the year in Britain, while on the Continent the fighting continued and the numbers of casualties grew greater by the day. It was a time of considerable strain and hardship, which took its toll on all but the most resilient. The only good news to reach the family from France came in May with news of George’s promotion to Staff Captain and his transfer to the General List—a small recognition of his abilities as an administrator.

  Georgette turned sixteen in August 1918 and was rapidly growing out of school. She had completed her studies at the Oakhill Academy that year and moved to Wimbledon’s most prestigious girls’ school, The Study. This school had a reputation for excellence in female education but the narrow curriculum and emphasis on sports held little interest for Georgette. Her time there was brief; too short for her to make her mark scholastically or develop any enduring friendships. Years later all that a fellow student remembered about her was that the family name was pronounced “higher” and changed after the War.

  On 11 November 1918 the declaration of peace saw wild celebrations across Britain. For those families whose loved ones had survived the terrible conflict the relief was overwhelming. Georgette and Sylvia waited impatiently for news of George’s return. He finally left France for England on 5 January 1919 and arrived in Wimbledon to a rapturous welcome and a new job at the War Office. It was wonderful for Georgette to have her father home again with time to talk and make plans for the future. He brought the house to life, renewing old acquaintances, playing tennis and bridge, reading, writing, and making them all laugh. If he was affected by the horrors of the War, as most men of his generation were, he kept that part of his life separate, choosing only to remember and talk about his experiences and memories when in the company of his brother offi
cers. George was awarded an MBE for his war service, one of the early recipients of the medal established in 1918 by King George V to honor those who had served in noncombatant roles during the conflict.

  George’s father did not live long enough to know of the honor. He was eighty-eight when he died on 25 April, soon after his son’s return from France. After his wife’s death he had remained in the family home cared for by George’s sister, Ilma. George Heyer was Georgette’s last surviving grandparent; his passing marked the end of an era. He left his estate to be divided among his four children and George invested some of his inheritance in the stock market during the short-lived postwar boom. The extra money also made it easier for Georgette to participate in the glamorous London social scene which came abruptly to life again at the end of the War. As she grew into young womanhood Georgette gradually became less shy; by seventeen she had begun to enjoy going out to dances and parties and meeting new people.

  In 1919 she met two young women who shared her literary interests and with whom she would become lifelong friends. Joanna Cannan and Carola Oman had known each other since childhood. Each was the daughter of an Oxford don and had grown up in Oxford where Joanna’s father, Charles Cannan, was Dean of Trinity College and later Secretary to the Delegates (Chief Executive) of Oxford University Press. Carola’s father was Sir Charles Oman, the Chichele Professor of Modern History, Fellow of All Souls College and the British Academy, President of the Royal Historical Society, and author of A History of the Peninsular War in several volumes. Georgette was just seventeen when she first met Carola and Joanna who, at twenty-two and twenty-three respectively, might have been expected to disdain a close friendship with a girl not yet out of her teens. It says much about Georgette’s intellect and literary education that she was accepted as an equal by the two older girls.

  The three young women met in Wimbledon, where Joanna had come to live after marrying Harold Pullein-Thompson (later known as “Cappy”) in June 1918. Georgette already knew Harold through his friendship with her father. According to Harold’s family, she had even fallen in love with him in her early teens, despite the sixteen-year age difference. He was a dashing figure, tall and handsome with dark blue eyes, black hair, and a neat military mustache, the sort of man who made an instant impression on women. Joanna Cannan had been love-struck on first meeting the handsome Captain of the Queen’s Royal West Surrey Regiment at a dinner at her home in Oxford. Years later her eldest daughter, the novelist Josephine Pullein-Thompson, wrote that:

  Mamma always admitted that she was bowled over by Cappy’s good looks, by his assured manner, and his ability to hail taxis and summon head waiters. At thirty-four he was so different from the undergraduates who had previously courted her; and though she refused his first proposal of marriage, when later, on leave from France, he asked her again, she accepted him.

  Harold was Georgette’s first real-life romantic hero. While his marriage may have brought an end to her adolescent crush, it marked the beginning of her friendship with his wife, Joanna, and her friend, Carola Oman.

  They were all ardent readers and keen to make their mark as authors. Carola already had some success as a minor poet with an anthology of war poetry, The Menin Road and Other Poems, published by Hodder & Stoughton in October 1919. Like her friends, however, she wanted to write novels. Carola was five when she wrote her first story, a short cautionary tale entitled Coral and the Bear. She was six when she visited a wishing-stone patronized by Queen Victoria at which Carola’s wish was to write a book. Like Georgette, she grew up reading Shakespeare and had even tried writing sonnets as a girl, submitting them to magazines in the hope of publication and refusing to be deterred by the rejection slips that followed. Later, Carola and Joanna both went to Miss Batty’s School for the daughters of Oxford dons (later called the Wychwood School) where they created a forum for their literary ambitions by producing a secret school magazine called the I.M. Both girls wrote avidly during their teens, trying their hand at poetry, plays, and prose and always aspiring to see their work in print.

  After their first meeting in 1919, Georgette, Joanna, and Carola met often to discuss their ideas and read their latest works aloud to each other. They were three clever, literate young women: all could have gone to university, taken degrees, and carved out successful careers for themselves in academia. Carola’s younger brother Charles went to Oxford, but neither she nor her sister Dulce was raised with any expectation of a tertiary education, despite their father’s eminent position at the University. Similarly, Joanna did not think of going to Oxford, even though she had grown up amidst its colleges and “dreaming spires.” Before the War, she had aspired to be an artist and, after leaving school, had gone to Paris to be “finished.” She took art classes, fell in love with the city, and hoped eventually to embrace the life of the Parisienne artist with a room in a garret and free love. The War put an end to her dream and in 1914 she returned to England to become a VAD nurse. After her marriage she began writing again and when she met Georgette was hoping to be published (like her sister May Cannan). Ironically, it was neither Joanna nor Carola who was to publish a novel first, but the youngest of the three, Georgette.

  1 Georgette’s unnamed school friend wrote to Jane Aiken Hodge after the publication of The Private World of Georgette Heyer in 1984. In her letter she gave a detailed description of her friendship with Georgette. Unfortunately, the letter was lost and all that remains from it are the quotations which were included in the paperback edition of the Hodge biography. I have tried various avenues of research and enquiry to try and discover the identity of the unnamed correspondent but to no avail. In her letter she said she was the daughter of a High Court judge who was a widower, that she had attended the Oakhill Academy with Georgette and visited her home regularly over a period of a few years. Although there were several High Court judges who lived in Wimbledon for some or all of the relevant period my research has failed to find a candidate who was a widower with a daughter of the right age.

  Part II

  “FIRST CRACK OUT OF THE BAG”

  1920–1930

  4

  Of course, if you’re just going to do a grand romance, culminating in dark deeds in the ancestral house, with the maximum amount of wax candles, whispering brocades, & dying splendor, that’s quite all right.

  —Georgette Heyer

  Georgette had always loved making up stories. From an early age her imagined characters enlivened her childhood as she gave them life and a stage on which to strut in her games and story writing. In her letter to Jane Aiken Hodge, the friend from her school days described how she used to spend Saturdays at Georgette’s house where the two girls were free to make full use of the drawing room for their games and play-acting. The room “was tacitly regarded as our private domain and there we acted play after play…all dialogue completely impromptu, of course, but the plots always produced by Georgette.” In later years, this friend would recognize a number of those early plots in Heyer novels, including The Black Moth, The Masqueraders, and Beauvallet. Many of the characters and stories imagined in childhood stayed with Georgette throughout her teens, shifting and changing with their creator as she lived through the War years and gradually emerged from adolescence into young womanhood.

  Partly because she grew up in an era in which letter writing was considered de rigueur for a well-bred person, and partly because of the War, the business of writing came naturally to Georgette. She had written regularly to her father while he was stationed in Rouen, and cultivated the art of writing as she spoke and penning sentences which exactly captured the mood of the moment. Her descriptions of daily activities, social encounters, her brothers’ antics, and her own thoughts and feelings helped her to develop her talent for dialogue and for recreating humorous scenes from life which she hoped would make her reader laugh.

  Georgette wrote mostly with a fountain pen and gradually developed a small, neat handwriting which sometimes became illegible when she was annoyed or in
a rush. When she was young her handwriting was rounded and open, as she grew older it became more angular and idiosyncratic with lowercase e’s that looked like a’s and a tendency to run some of her consonants together. Not for the adult Georgette the affectation of green or violet ink for her letters; dark blue or black ink was her preference and she generally favored small-sized writing paper. Although in her adolescence she must have been writing stories and essays for school and probably for personal pleasure, there is nothing to indicate where she wrote, at what time of day or night, or how often. Her father returned to his writing almost immediately after coming home from the War and was frequently to be found composing articles, essays, poems, and short stories, all with a view to publication. He was an encouraging mentor and it is not difficult to imagine father and daughter enjoying their shared passion for writing, discussing points of grammar or Georgette’s next story.

  She was a natural storyteller, with the gift of knowing just how to please her audience and how best to create the intense desire to know “what happens next?” She often told stories to her brothers and in her early adolescence she and Boris would sometimes join forces to create amusing plots or situations which they would then act out. They shared a similar sense of humor and, in the tradition of their grandfather George, would think up pranks to try out on their family and friends, or even on unsuspecting strangers. One of these was to travel up to London where they would board a bus and Georgette would take on the role of worldly-wise older sister escorting her young brother “just up from the country” about town. He would ask about some building or other and she would deliberately offer an explanation that was rich in detail but totally incorrect. The game was to see how long it took before some “officious but well-meaning fellow passenger” corrected her. Another game which they both enjoyed was to ride a London bus in the guise of two uninformed visitors who, upon being asked for their fare, would name a destination in the opposite direction and when told their mistake would descend from the bus in feigned horror while all the while trying not to laugh. As an adolescent, Georgette already possessed a robust sense of humor and often saw the ridiculous side of human nature.