He was a little dull but he was also a man of integrity, decency and kindness. Ettie never regretted her decision, though she felt that matrimony should be anything but exclusive and ran a bewildering galaxy of lovers (stopping short, Davenport-Hines thinks, of adultery: she was ‘a philanderer, playing up her cultural interests and seeking emotional intensity rather than physical excitement.’)
The most intense of these relationships was with her sons — above all, Julian Grenfell, that paradigm of everything that was most distinguished and most odious about the English upper classes in the early 20th-century. Julian’s celebrated poem, ‘Into Battle’, with its — to most contemporary eyes — sick exultation in war for the sake of war,
And he is dead who will not fight;
And who dies fighting has increase
seemed to Ettie everything that was most sublime and noble. (It is a tribute to her remarkable flexibility that she became so close to Siegfried Sassoon, whose view of war could hardly have been more different.) Two of her sons were killed in the trenches; Ivo, the youngest, was to follow in a car accident in 1926. One by one, all the young men whom she had loved were killed. Patrick Shaw-Stewart, one of the dearest, survived to 1918. After his death, Ettie pleaded to Duff Cooper:
Duffie, you will always care for me a little? You see, nearly all the young are gone now who really cared for me and who I adored.
She had always battled with hereditary depression; now her relentless determination to enjoy life was tested to the full. However dislikeable she may have been in certain ways, it is impossible not to admire the gallantry with which she kept the flame of happiness burning so long as she lived.
One problem in writing about someone who is primarily a hostess and a
leading figure in society is that the author will end up with endless catalogues of guests at grand weekends (a solecism which Ettie would have deplored — she went only to Saturday-to-Mondays) and dinner parties. Davenport-Hines cannot wholly avoid the danger, but his book provides a rich and satisfying portrait of an age that now seems infinitely remote and of one of the most remarkable of the women who were at
the heart of it.
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