Indian Summer Page 9

  The rest of the tour passed in relative calm, with the only story being the gossip about Dickie Mountbatten and Edwina Ashley. Edwina had finally reached the east she had dreamed of, and swiftly discarded her chaperone. She arrived in the riot-torn city of Bombay to realize that she could only afford a third-class train ticket to Delhi. It would have meant sitting, eating and sleeping on bare boards for two days, clumped together with poor Indians and their livestock. Edwina was happy to do so, but the clerk flatly refused to sell the elegant young Englishwoman a third-class ticket.69 This functioned as a useful opportunity for the handsome former prince Dickie to come gallantly to a fair maiden’s rescue – he sent to her aid an Indian Army colonel, who put her on the mail train.70 Her beau met her at the station on 12 February, and they fell happily into each other’s arms. Two days later, there was a St Valentine’s Day dance at the Viceregal Lodge. Mountbatten wrote in his diary: ‘I danced 1 and 2 with Edwina; she had 3 and 4 with David, and the 5th dance we sat out in her sitting-room, when I asked her if she would marry me, and she said she would.’71 Edwina chose an old Indian ring from Schwaiger’s art gallery.72 Three days later, Dickie was off with David to Patiala. The Vicereine, Lady Reading, dispatched a dismissive letter to Edwina’s father. ‘I am afraid she has definitely made up her mind about him,’ she wrote of the happy couple. ‘I hoped she would have cared for someone older, with more of a career before him.’73 Dickie did not believe that his youth was a problem. ‘I have never really sown any wild oats,’ he confessed to his mother, ‘and as I never intend to, I haven’t got to get over that stage which some men have to.’74

  On 17 March the Prince of Wales boarded the Renown at Karachi, and sailed for Ceylon and Japan. The breath that had been held since his arrival in Bombay exactly four months before could finally be let out. ‘Regret not unmingled with relief may be said to sum up the feelings of most loyal subjects of the British Crown, on the occasion of the departure of the Prince of Wales from our shores to-day,’ commented the Statesman. ‘Probably the feeling of relief is predominant.’ It concluded that ‘the reception accorded to His Royal Highness has been such as to make every true friend of this country hang his head in shame.’75 A sense of shame and depression would be felt on both sides. The prince’s tour had revealed the acute unpopularity of the British in India. Gandhi’s campaign against it had revealed the weakness of the alternative.

  CHAPTER 5

  PRIVATE LIVES

  ON 18 JULY 1922, LORD LOUIS MOUNTBATTEN MARRIED THE Hon. Edwina Ashley at St Margaret’s Church, Westminster. It was the wedding of the year.1 Policemen linked arms to hold back the crowd of 8000 people, which had not been deterred by the drizzly London weather.2

  The guests included most of the royal family, led by Queen Mary, imposing in plumes, feathers, and fat strands of pearls; and her seventy-seven-year-old mother-in-law, Queen Alexandra, stylish in a jewelled turban and a long coat edged with black fur. The groom arrived, looking impossibly tall, slim and handsome next to his diminutive best man, David, the Prince of Wales. The bride debuted in a gown of silver tissue. Among her bridesmaids were the four sisters of Prince Philip of Greece, wearing gigantic lace bonnets.3 (Just weeks afterwards, a coup in Greece would nearly be the end of them. They would be saved by the timely intervention of the British Foreign Office, with the future husband of the British Queen cradled in an old orange crate. Mountbatten, in later years, would do little to discourage the story that it was he who had organized the rescue – but this was pure fantasy.)4 The newlyweds emerged to great cheers from the crowd, and went on to host a reception for 1400 guests at Brook House, before driving off towards Edwina’s country house in the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost that the bride had bought the groom for a wedding present.

  Despite her position as the heiress to an immense fortune, Edwina had been brought up with austerity. She had always travelled third class (apart from when an Indian railway clerk had prevented her from doing so) and existed on a modest allowance. The first time she was allowed to have lunch with a man unchaperoned was when Dickie took her to Claridge’s after they became engaged; the first time she used make-up was when she wore a pale pink lipstick on her wedding day.5 After she married, the economies ended. During the five indulgent months of their honeymoon, Dickie and Edwina went to stay with Dickie’s uncle, the Grand Duke of Hesse, and toured Europe in the Silver Ghost. The jewellery Edwina received as wedding gifts attracted so much attention that Dickie took to sleeping with a gun under his pillow. When a thief broke into their bedroom, in Angoulême, he made enough of a kerfuffle while scrabbling around in the bedsheets for it to scare off the would-be felon.6 From Europe, the newlyweds sailed to New York, and crossed the United States, ending up in Hollywood. They stayed at Pickfair, the Beverly Hills mansion owned by movie stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. The Fairbankses were away, so Charlie Chaplin graciously stepped in to act as their host. Chaplin offered them a unique wedding present: the chance to star in one of his short films. The plot was inspired by the couple’s true life adventures, for Edwina plays the victim of a gang of jewel thieves. She is saved by Chaplin in trademark guise as the little tramp, and by a prettily made up Dickie.

  Edwina’s vast wealth and Dickie’s social connections allowed the Mountbattens to live the most fashionable of lives. Edwina indulged Dickie’s fantasies of naval glory by giving him a special suite at their London home, Brook House in Mayfair, modelled on a ship’s cabin. The walls and ceilings were enamelled in white, and fake pipes and cables artfully arranged. Portholes were carved out of a wall, and electric fans blew through them to lull Dickie with a gentle sea breeze. He slept in a bunk, complete with brass rail to prevent him from falling out, should a typhoon strike Park Lane. There was a life-size mannequin of an admiral, dressed in a selection of relics of Prince Louis of Battenberg, including his hat, uniform and decorations; an imposing sight indeed in a newlywed’s bedroom. Edwina’s suite, meanwhile, was filled with lace, silk and swansdown.7 Dickie was allowed in only sporadically. ‘Slept with Edwina!!’ he would write triumphantly in his diary after one of these rare intimacies.8

  From the outside, the Mountbattens looked like the most golden couple in London. But it took only two years of marriage for Edwina to tire of having plighted her troth exclusively to Dickie. Dickie was deeply attached to the Navy, and spent more of his time fussing over it than over her.9 When he did fuss over her, he fussed too much. Dickie had come from a happy, intimate home, and wanted to recreate a family in which everything was a team effort. Edwina had grown up in a household in which privacy and independence had been the norm, sometimes to the point of dysfunction. Dickie’s marital behaviour was exactly the opposite of what Edwina wanted: starving her of attention for months at a time, then smothering her with domesticity.

  The couple had two daughters together, Patricia in 1924 and Pamela in 1929. Often they had the young Prince Philip of Greece to stay after he began his education at Cheam prep school in 1930.10 Behind this illusion of wedded bliss, Edwina embarked on a long and ostentatious series of affairs. These started very early on, even if one discounts the claim Charlie Chaplin once dropped into conversation about Edwina having made a pass at him during her honeymoon.11 Dickie’s posting to the Dardanelles aboard HMS Revenge in 1923 left his young wife alone to the gaudy pleasures of London’s night life, and she – still quite recently emancipated from her maiden existence – made the most of them. ‘Went to see David at St James’s Palace,’ Dickie wrote warily in his diary on 3 December 1925. ‘He had a queer story about Edwina.’12

  There would be many more queer stories to come. In October 1926, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a lurid story entitled ‘A Royal “Spanking” for Gay Lady Mountbatten’. Though not quite as scandalous as it sounds to modern ears, the article was damaging enough. It contained a list of her misdeeds, which were said to have included an inappropriate Charleston with Fred Astaire, and a florid description of the rebuke she had allegedly received from Queen Mary.13 By the
n, Dickie knew all too well that his wife was doing more than the Charleston with some of her ‘ginks’, as her admirers became known. He was devastated. His younger daughter, Pamela, later said that he had nurtured a romantic dream about ‘a wife that was purer than pure’, whom he could put on a pedestal and would support his career indefatigably: ‘And then, of course, he finds that she’s not like that at all.’14 He wrote Edwina a piteous letter:

  I wish I knew how to flirt with other women, and especially with my wife. I wish I’d sown more wild oats in my youth, and could excite more than I fear I do. I wish I wasn’t in the Navy and had to drag you out to Malta. I wish I had an equal share of the money so that I could give you far handsomer presents than I can really at present honestly manage. In other words, I’d like to feel that I was really worthy of your love.15

  ‘I feel I’ve been such a beast,’ was Edwina’s typical reply. ‘You were so wonderful about everything and I do realise how hard it all was for you, altho’ I know you think I don’t. I feel terribly about it all.’16 But the terrible feeling never prevented her from doing it again. Edwina did not bother to be secretive about her affairs, and hints of her liaisons were scattered through newspaper headlines, gossip columns and the memoirs of nightclub hostesses.17 In 1928, the Mountbattens called in the newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook to help quash an American divorce case in which Edwina would have been cited as co-respondent.18

  Despite the Mountbattens’ marital dramas, the marriage did not break up. There had been a decisive row, with Edwina sitting in her bath, sobbing, and telling Dickie that she wanted to be free. Dickie agreed to leave the next morning, and retired to bed. His cool reaction worked: it was Edwina who came to his room to make up. They agreed to stay together, though with, effectively, an open relationship.19 Dickie had realized, with a commendable grasp of reality that would elude him in his working life, that he could not have his wife to himself. Edwina would be allowed her boyfriends: and Dickie, somewhat perfunctorily, would take a girlfriend. He met Yola Letellier, the wife of a French newspaper owner, at a polo game. According to Dickie’s younger daughter, Pamela, ‘He didn’t fall head over heels, but he found her very attractive, to flirt with, to dance with, and to enjoy life with.’20 Though it may have been adultery in a technical sense, Dickie’s relationship with Yola would demonstrate his instinctive urge for fidelity. They would stay together, in one form or another, for decades.

  Edwina was furious about Dickie’s consolation affair. ‘It was all right for her to have her own boyfriend, but she wasn’t so keen on my father having his girlfriend,’ remembered Patricia. ‘She suffered from this dreadful jealousy all her life and even when she didn’t want him herself she still hated the thought of him with anyone else.’21 Edwina swiftly and unhelpfully befriended her husband’s girlfriend, going to great lengths to create trouble. On one occasion, Dickie arrived in Paris for a weekend with Yola to find a note saying that Edwina had taken her to Austria.22 When he complained, Edwina let rip in the most unreasonable tones. ‘I have never in any way tried to pinch her from you’, she wrote angrily. ‘I don’t want our friendship spoiled … by this ridiculous attitude you have been taking up: jealousy, hurt feelings, and all over nothing.’23 But the person in the marriage who suffered most frequently from jealousy was Edwina. She was jealous of Yola, extracting a promise from Dickie not to marry her if he were widowed; she was jealous of the Navy; she was even jealous of her own daughters. Even when Patricia was a grown woman, she had to conspire to meet her father in secret to avoid incurring her mother’s wrath.24

  In contrast to her intense jealousy towards women, Edwina never showed any sign of the least resentment towards the men in her husband’s life. There was quite a number of them; and there have been persistent rumours that he was homosexual. Several of his closest friends were gay, including Noël Coward, Tom Driberg, and a left-wing ex-Guards officer called Peter Murphy who virtually cohabited with the Mountbattens for many years. Coward had met the Mountbattens after their trip to America with the Prince of Wales in 1924. He had always had a ‘hero-worship for the Royal Navy’, and the friendship blossomed despite the fact that the two men were quite different.25 ‘Temperamentally we were diametrically opposed,’ Coward admitted; ‘practically all our interests and pleasures and ambitions were so divergent that it was difficult to imagine how, over such a long period of time, we could have found one another such good company.’26 And yet they did. By the 1930s, they were close enough that Coward went on holiday with the Mountbattens in Gozo: ‘I spent one of the gayest months I have ever spent with him and Edwina in Malta’, he later wrote; it should probably be assumed he meant ‘jolliest’.27 Coward passed his time lounging around at the Mountbattens’ house, the Casa Medina, stripped to the waist, and tanning himself to a dark teak finish.28 On his return to England, he wrote a thank-you letter to Dickie, addressing him as ‘Dear dainty Darling’, and went on:

  I could not have enjoyed my holiday more … Please be careful of your Zippers Dickie dear and don’t let me hear of any ugly happenings at Flotilla dances.

  Love and kisses

  Signal Bosun Coward

  (I know Bosun ought to be spelt ‘Boatswain’ but I don’t care!)29

  The fact that Mountbatten was not threatened by gay men does not automatically imply that he himself was gay; it could be taken to signify the opposite. His reaction on being told that one of his servants was gay was characteristically unflustered. ‘Of course,’ he replied. ‘All the best valets are.’30 The conclusion drawn by most of those who knew him was that, while he enjoyed flirtation with everyone, Dickie was not terribly interested in actually having sex with anyone.

  As their marriage floundered, the Mountbattens’ separate pursuits grew ever more important. While Edwina partied, Dickie invented things. He became obsessed with time-saving devices. He equipped himself with elasticated shoes, had his braces stitched permanently to his trousers, and wore a buttonless waistcoat that could be pulled on over his head like a jumper. His valet even reported that Dickie invented a ‘Simplex’ shirt with built-in Y-fronts, ‘that he could slide into like a stretch suit’. Edwina had started to find her husband tiresome and unattractive.31 But her extramarital social life was not making her happy, either. She was by no means the only person to notice that London in the 1920s was a whirl of overcrowded parties that felt empty. It was a theme of the time, most memorably captured in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, but also occupying any number of less celebrated literary works such as Jig-Saw, the first novel by Edwina’s friend Barbara Cartland. Noël Coward’s party farce Hands Across the Sea was a straight parody of the Mountbattens; apologetically, he sent them six tickets for the premiere in recognition of the fact.32 Edwina’s life was a constant rotation of luncheon-parties, garden-parties, cocktail-parties, dinner-parties and weekend house-parties. When she was not at parties, she was planning parties, or buying new dresses for parties, or carrying on illicitly with the men she had met at parties, or recovering from the hangovers she had incurred by going to too many parties. The Mountbattens often received three or four invitations for the same evening. ‘To those who knew her best it seemed she was just burning up energy because she did not know what else to do with it,’ commented one semi-authorized biographer.33 As she approached thirty, she began to plot an escape. She planned to travel the world, and her first choice of destination – Moscow – betrayed the stirring of a new political interest in her mind.

  Mohandas Gandhi had suffered greatly from his retreat after Chauri Chaura. In his absence, control of Congress had passed to Motilal Nehru and C.R. Das. At the end of 1922, they had formed a group called the Swarajya Party within Congress, aiming at a swift transition to dominion status. This was well supported in India, but the British Home Member of the Indian government, Sir Malcolm Hailey, put a stop to it. The ‘responsible government’ stated as the aim of British policy since 1919, he said, did not imply a fully responsible government, nor one that had dominion status. ‘It ma
y be,’ he said during the debate, ‘that full dominion self-government is the logical outcome of responsible government, nay, it may be the inevitable and historical development of responsible government, but it is a further and final step.’34 Indian hopes were dashed again.

  Motilal Nehru followed Jawahar’s lead, and gave up everything for Gandhi: his legal career, his fine clothes, his Western dining room, his stable of horses and his wine cellar. Only one trapping of his former life remained. ‘I have done all these things for you, Bapu,’ his daughter Betty remembered him saying to Gandhi, ‘but I am an old man and accustomed to my ways. Whether you like it or not, I am going to have my two pegs [whiskies] before dinner.’35

  Meanwhile, the relationship between Gandhi and the younger Nehru was intense, fraught and semi-paternal. The two men had wildly different political and philosophical ideas, but a peculiarly potent sympathy with each other, both emotional and practical. Gandhi needed a link to the temporal world; Nehru needed a guru. It suited Gandhi well to groom this young radical, for he had found no serious political heir among his four sons. In fact, by the middle 1920s, his relationships with them had become extremely difficult. When eighteen-year-old Manilal was caught in an embrace with a young, married Indian woman, Mohandas coerced her into shaving her head, and extracted from Manilal a vow of lifelong chastity.36 In 1926, still languishing under his vow, Manilal fell in love with a Muslim woman called Fatima. Mohandas was outraged. ‘Your desire is against your religion’, he wrote to Manilal. ‘It would be like putting two swords in one scabbard … Your marriage will be a great jolt to Hindu–Muslim relations.’37

  Manilal did not marry Fatima, though he was finally released from his vow at the age of thirty-five, and married a Hindu woman. It was then the turn of Mohandas’s third son, Devadas, who fell in love with Lakshmi, the daughter of Chakravarty Rajagopalachari, one of the leading lights of Congress and a member of the Brahmin caste. The fathers would only agree to the inter-caste marriage if Devadas and Lakshmi waited for five years to see if their feelings changed. Happily, they did not. The couple married in 1933.38