I still cannot quite realize what is happening, and feel as if I have been through a succession of awful nightmares. I do realize what a dreadful time it is for all of you who have to go on living the same life from day to day and all the time having this dreadful blackness hanging over you, but I know you will realize it is really for the best and that we must come out alright in the long run.
At the start of this war, Harry was thirty-six. Within days he was sleeping on straw in a farmer’s shed, and by the end of the month he was in action, soon confessing to have cut buttons embossed with a crown off the uniform of a dead German and handing one of them to a fellow officer as a souvenir. In France for the entire duration of the war, he kept a diary and wrote letters to Vere that are vividly descriptive yet free from anything like literary effect. With extreme modesty he does not dwell on the occasions when he was mentioned in dispatches. “Found a pair of new boots and 25 cigarettes in each boot from Vere. Boots v. comfy,” is a typically restricted entry. He asked her to send fifty cigarettes every other day, and also, “some Brand’s meat lozenges and chocolate and acid drops and tobacco each week.” Vere quoted another Coldstreamer telling his wife that “H. P-J. comes down here every other night from the Trenches. He is always splendidly cheery about everything.” Vere’s nerves soon went. “I cannot any longer stand the thought of you remaining in those trenches.” She would lobby to get him a safer posting. “You can trust me not to say anything I ought not to say … you are having a million million harder time than dear old Alan.” The latter was soon imploring him to accept the offer of a staff job “in fairness to Vere. When you consider the intense relief it would be to her, I feel that your personal feelings ought not to weigh … take it, do, old boy.” As a staff officer at headquarters of the 38th (Welsh) Division he found himself at Amiens. The Eton College Chronicle published a list of 209 Old Etonian officers from the top ranks downwards who held a dinner at the front in October 1917, and his name appears at Table 7. When the Second Coldstream returned to Victoria Barracks on 25 February 1919 many of the officers including the colonel had been killed and of the thousand or so non-commissioned officers and men who had marched out only fifteen survived and just two had served with the same company throughout the war.
Alan Dawnay made his name as a member of the Arab Bureau, the wartime think-tank in Cairo influencing British policy in the Middle East. He was the liaison officer between the Egyptian Expeditionary Force commanded by Field Marshal Allenby and Faisal, the son of Sherif Hussein and leader of the Arab revolt in the desert against the Ottomans. Faisal’s champion was Lawrence of Arabia. Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence’s account of this campaign, is a masochistic psychodrama that has established the lasting misperception of Arabs as victims of betrayal and the British as traitorous victimisers. He achieved this effect by describing his British colleagues in language that compacts praise with denigration. Alan Dawnay, for instance, was “Allenby’s greatest gift to us – greater than thousands of baggage camels…. His was a brilliant mind, understanding to a degree, feeling instinctively the special qualities of rebellion, and developing them.” “To a degree” conveys “not at all.” Writing from an address in Heliopolis on 10 July 1916 to congratulate Harry on his Military Cross, Alan Dawnay came clean about Egypt as he found it. “This is not a nice country, the people are too loathsome and one gets so tired of the desert.”
Guy Dawnay was thirty-seven in 1914. A staff officer with Sir Ian Hamilton at Gallipoli, he reported to London that the expedition was a disaster, and he recommended evacuation. Maurice Hankey, Secretary of the War Council, found Dawnay, “disagreeable and too big for his boots.” Lord Kitchener, the Minister responsible, took Dawnay’s side and drew the line under this military disaster. Dawnay then joined the Arab Bureau, and in Seven Pillars Lawrence heaped his usual destructive praise on him. “Dawnay’s cold, shy mind gazed upon our efforts with bleak eye, always thinking, thinking. Beneath this mathematical surface he hid passionate many-sided convictions, a reasoned scholarship in higher warfare, and the brilliant bitterness of a judgment disappointed with us: and with life.”
Granny Vere never spoke to me about her brothers. Controller of Programmes at the BBC in the mid-Thirties, Alan committed suicide in 1938. Guy became a successful businessman, founder of the investment bank Dawnay Day and chairman of Armstrong Whitworth. I could well have met him and his descendants but we had all gone our separate ways. One day my father gave me a pair of Arab jars about a foot high, the bronze metal beautifully worked, with holes for sprinkling at the top of elegant elongated necks. They had been the gift of Lawrence of Arabia to Uncle Alan, he said. Take out the stoppers and these jars have a lingering perfume of rosewater.
SIX
Here He Is!
“IT WAS NO ACCIDENT, Pryce-Jones, that you have lived near three royal palaces,” runs a private joke in Where Engels Fears to Tread, Cyril Connolly’s unsurpassed satire of the bourgeois writer mimicking a revolutionary proletarian in the heyday of the fellow-travelling Thirties. The first of these three was Buckingham Palace. On 18 November 1908 Alan was born in his parents’ house in Buckingham Palace Road. Harry and Vere will have taken it for granted that they had to do for Alan whatever had been done for them. A dutiful couple, they were bound by the conventions to which ladies and gentlemen of their generation subscribed without question. To the end of his life, Alan spoke about the limitations of his parents. He couldn’t help patronizing them. The best that parents of this kind could do wasn’t good enough.
Vere overdid motherhood. She dealt in superlatives. Things were either uniquely wonderful or uniquely dreadful. A series of miscarriages hadn’t helped what Alan summed up as “the nervous tensions that beset my mother.” Alan thought himself spoiled “in the sense of being humoured,” and at the same time neglected. Photographed as an infant, he had been put into a layered lace dress like a girl’s, and for a portrait when he was about ten he wore a pale blue velvet suit with an elaborate lace collar. Delighting in his gifts and precociousness and fearful of the roughness of other boys, Vere felt too protective to send him to school. She preserved the youthful poems that he had no trouble writing; she listened to him playing the piano, her very own Bechstein grand; she considered him a genius.
A Harley Street specialist by the name of Maurice Craig obligingly told her what she wanted to hear, writing to her in April 1917.
I am certain that at the present moment school would be the worst thing in the world for him and I speak from the experience of constantly seeing school tried. I should let him do no lessons till he is nearly ten…. Music lessons ought to be very short and difficult exercises kept down to a minimum. I strongly advise that he should be kept away from parties and entertainments…. The main point in bringing him up is to retard mental development and keep the physical if possible a little ahead of the mental, though I am afraid this will be very difficult.”
Thirty years later, her opinion hadn’t changed. She wrote to Alan, “You, of course, were the most brilliant child who has ever been born into this world, in any country, and in your case I am still sure we were wise never to let you go to a private school at all.”
Alan grew up with the sense that he was numbered among those with the means and the standing