Innovative and industrious, Sayers was perfectly suited to her job. She liked the way the copywriters were collectively known as the ‘Literary Department’, and the buzz and gossip of office life reminded her of student days in the common rooms of Oxford. Philip Benson and his management team regarded her highly, and some thought Dorothy’s talents might one day take her all the way to the boardroom. Her colleagues regarded her as eccentric but gifted, an outspoken bluestocking with a startlingly earthy sense of humour. None of them knew she was nursing a secret which she dared not allow to leak out.
Disaster had struck at a time when life brimmed with exciting possibilities. Publishing her first detective novel fulfilled a long-held ambition, and although sales were modest, Benson’s had raised her salary to six pounds ten shillings a week, and promised a bonus. Even her troubled love life had taken a turn for the better. Although a man she adored had deserted her, a new lover turned up to offer the sexual satisfaction she craved. She nicknamed him ‘the Beast’.
But then the worst happened. With ‘the Beast’, she overcame her loathing of contraceptives, but despite her precautions, something went wrong, and she fell pregnant. When she broke the news to ‘the Beast’, he flounced out in a temper, pausing only to blurt out that he already had a wife and daughter. Sayers had slept with him on the rebound, and she dared not tell her friends about her humiliation. Confiding in her elderly, respectable parents, who were the embodiment of Victorian values, was equally unthinkable. Her father, an elderly vicar, would be horrified, while her mother had no time for babies. She had no confidence that Philip Benson would sympathize. Probably he would sack her. Money was tight, and she dared not risk being thrown out of work.
Overwhelmed by shame and misery, she thought about parting with the child to an orphanage or a charity for waifs and strays. Adoption was impossible; it would not become legal for another three years. In despair, she contemplated abortion, but quite apart from the fact that it was a crime, and highly dangerous, her religious faith made such a ‘solution’ unthinkable.
She had first encountered ‘the Beast’, alias Bill White, when he rented a small flat above hers. Seeking work in the motor trade, he had left his wife Beatrice and young daughter Valerie in an attic flat in Southbourne, near Bournemouth. He stained the wooden floor of Sayers’ sitting-room for her, and took her for trips on his motor-cycle. After teaching her fashionable dance-steps – the bunny-hug, the shimmy and the black bottom – he accompanied her to a dance at Benson’s, wearing a borrowed dinner jacket. Two lonely people, with not much in common, each craving a little fun. She lent him cash, and even introduced him to her parents. The fun stopped the moment she told him about the baby.
With a chilling mixture of cheek and selfishness, Bill asked his wife to help him wriggle out of this calamity. Shocked as she was, Beatrice White agreed, and met up with Sayers. It was an excruciating encounter. They were both tormented by distress and embarrassment, but they were also sensible and decent women whose only mistake had been to fall for an unworthy man. A problem needed to be solved – so what should they do?
They talked things over constructively, without wasting time on recriminations. The outcome was a pragmatic deal. Sayers promised not to see Bill again, and to have the child fostered. Beatrice arranged for Sayers to stay in a guest house at Southbourne, and for her brother, a doctor, to attend the birth at a nearby nursing home. Meanwhile, Beatrice moved into Sayers’ flat in Great James Street, and forwarded her post, so that Sayers could correspond from her London address. This meant she could keep everyone in the dark about the truth of her absence. She cobbled together an excuse to explain to her mother why she would not be home for Christmas. The baby was due to be born at around the turn of the year.
She was a good liar. Once she summoned the courage to ask for time off, the hierarchy at Benson’s accepted what she said at face value. So did her parents. Resting in bed at Southbourne, Sayers scribbled away at Clouds of Witness, her second book about the aristocratic detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, and mapped out the future in her mind. On New Year’s Day, she wrote to her much-loved cousin Ivy Shrimpton, asking if Ivy and her mother, both experienced and trustworthy foster careers, would look after another infant. She didn’t mention she was the mother. Two days later her son, John Anthony, was born.
When Ivy agreed to look after him, Sayers told her the truth. Her parents must not be told, she insisted. The news would mortify them. Giving birth to an illegitimate child was not, she told Ivy, the kind of ‘ill-doing’ which her mother would tolerate. The Sayers were proud of their clever, lively daughter, and she could not bear to let them down. Perhaps she underestimated their love for her, but Ivy proved utterly reliable. The Sayers went to their graves without ever learning that they had a grandchild. Bill White had no further contact with his son John Anthony. Within four years, he had met someone else, and divorced Beatrice. After that, he never saw his daughter Valerie again either.
To the end of Sayers’ life, the existence of her child was known only to Ivy and a handful of trusted confidants. Beatrice kept quiet too. Not until Sayers died did she tell Valerie that she had a half-brother. Valerie and John Anthony never met, because by the time she plucked up the nerve to contact him, he was dead.
Did anyone else guess the truth? At first, Sayers congratulated herself on managing her absence from Benson’s with the utmost discretion, although on returning to work, people noticed she had put on weight. One colleague at least, it seems, saw though the mysterious ‘illness’. Suspecting what had happened, he tried to make mischief, terrifying Sayers with the threat of exposure.
Courage was a quality Dorothy Sayers never lacked. Her tormentor had no hard evidence to support his guesswork, and she faced him down. Somehow she found the strength to say, ‘Publish and be damned’, and made sure he kept his mouth shut. Her secret was secure. Later, she would take her revenge on him, but not until it became safer to do so.
Before and after Benson’s, Oxford played a pivotal role in Sayers’ life. She was born in the city on 13 June 1893. Her father, an ordained priest, had been a contemporary of Oscar Wilde at Magdalen College, but his life followed a much less exotic course than Oscar’s. When his daughter was four, he was offered the living at Bluntisham, in East Anglia’s fen country. Oxford and Fenland provided the settings for two of Sayers’ most admired novels, Gaudy Night and The Nine Tailors. After the Godolphin School in Salisbury, she won a scholarship to Somerville College, where she studied modern languages and medieval literature.
The feminist and pacifist Vera Brittain, an Oxford contemporary, described Sayers as ‘a bouncing and exuberant young female’. That bounce and exuberance never deserted Sayers, despite the blows that rained down on her over the years. Tall, thin, and with a neck that earned her the nickname ‘Swanny’, she stood out from the crowd, and made up for her lack of natural beauty with a flamboyant taste in clothes. She liked to wear a three-inch-wide scarlet riband round her head, and earrings in the form of miniature cages containing brightly-coloured parrots. Often she strode down the High, smoking a cigar while a cloak billowed around her.
Her busy social life included attending a lecture by G. K. Chesterton, whom she admired as a man, as well as for his detective stories. She also developed crushes on Dr Hugh Allen, director of the Bach Choir, and Roy Ridley, a handsome Balliol student who later became the college’s chaplain. Ridley was the physical original of a fictional Balliol man, Lord Peter Wimsey.
In August 1914, oblivious of the tense political climate in Europe, she set off for a long holiday in France, which was duly interrupted by the outbreak of war: for all her intellectual gifts, she could be hopelessly naïve. The following year Douglas Cole (like Chesterton, a future Detection Club colleague), a co-editor of Oxford Poetry, accepted one of her poems for publication. Before long, she produced a slim volume