Fiona MacCarthy
LAST CURTSEY
The end of the debutantes
320pp. Faber and Faber. £20.
0 571 22859 3
“The first time I pushed my way into a London Ballroom I was so horrified that I could scarcely believe my eyes. I looked again, hoping they were deceiving me, but alas! They were not. I looked near at hand. Dreadful! I looked to the other end of the room. Ghastly! How was it possible for mortal men to be so ugly?” So said Lady Mary Pakenham in her wonderful memoir, Brought Up and Brought Out, written, on the brink of the Second World War, with an eye to the prospective annihilation of everything it described. It was one of the first memoirs of “the season” produced with a sense – proleptic in this case – of the “coming out” ritual as more anachronistic than can be accounted for by the mere process of ageing.
In the 1950s, 60s and even 70s there were more such, written by very old ladies, inviting the reader to peer indulgently at this quaint mating ritual of a bygone age. But then, suddenly they stop altogether, and no one writes about being a debutante any more. Who knows an ex-deb now? Who is one? They are as rare as Mosley’s Blackshirts after the war. Yet Vanessa Redgrave was a deb; so was the Marxist revolutionary Teresa Hayter, whose own memoir Hayter of the Bourgeoisie is strangely silent on the subject of her season; so was Holly Eley (née Urquhart), for many years an editor on this paper; so was Fiona MacCarthy, biographer and sometime writer for the Guardian, where she lived in dread that her shameful secret would be discovered. Last Curtsey, her book on the subject, is brave as well as good and well written; not just because she has outed herself as “out” (taking these others with her, by the way), but because she has decided to treat the subject with respect, sympathy and historical rigour. She has not tried to distance herself from the episode or define herself as a reluctant or even exceptional debutante; in fact she has made every effort to write this history from the losing side. She uses the language of the tribe – “debs’ delight” – without any prophylactic parentheses; she writes without malice or derision of men whose “strong emotions” and attachments were for their houses and their gardens, “to the tracts of land that they owned, to the hunt, to their old regiments, and most of all to their children”; she engages with the social minutiae of the English upper class with the mind of one bred to its arcana – and so has produced a social document of immense value and rarity.
MacCarthy was a deb in 1958, the last year of Court presentations. She discusses the reasons for the termination of the ritual from the point of view of those whom it affected. It was “failing in its duty to uphold social distinctions”, she says. Into the pure serene of the landed gentry a coarser mixture was thrown: daughters not only of plutocrats but of Jews, stockbrokers, minor trade. Impoverished peeresses in rented accommodation were selling their entrée to court to heaven knew whom. “We had to stop it. Every tart in London was getting in”, snapped Princess Margaret. Of course, this “invasion” and the instinctive, defensive reaction – to close the doors and wipe the hands – were a reflection of the situation at large. Fiona MacCarthy shows an anxious, eroded upper class trying to maintain pre-eminence and restore the patterns of life it had enjoyed in the 1930s.
Things were not the same. In the London season of Mary Pakenham, the private houses had ballrooms and the debutantes had chauffeurs. In 1958, the season took place in a world of rent, share, hire and borrow. Many county families had sold their London houses and had nowhere to stay in London. Taxis picked up MacCarthy’s friends from the service flats their mothers had rented for the six-week season, and set them down at the ballroom entrance of London’s grand hotels. Even so, the cost was tremendous: each deb had to give a tea party, a cocktail party and a dance for several hundred. The clothes alone were pauperizingly expensive: cocktail frocks and ballgowns, matching shoes, bags, hats and long white kid gloves. A Tatler article of 1958 put the cost at between £713 and £8,125 (£11,000 and £120,000 today), depending on lavishness. This was the price of securing status for the next generation. It may seem preposterous, but it’s cheap compared with the cost and fuss of the private education that performs the same function today.
The season lasted for four months, first in London, then in the country. While there were some egregious extravaganzas among the parties, most occasions – the luncheons, tea parties, dances – were largely organized so as to be as much like each other as possible. The food was the same, the drink was the same, conversations were the same; the debs wore the same clothes as their mothers and their mothers wore the same clothes as one another. The decoration in the private houses was so similar, both in the choice and arrangement of the furniture, that MacCarthy would become quite disoriented and forget what house she was in. She sees this as a symptom of beleaguered tribalism, part of an urge to protect the fortress of privilege with a thicket of shibboleths: “Those who did not understand the unwritten rules were ridiculed. There were right clothes and wrong clothes for every occasion . . . there were right words and wrong words, and the wrong ones would arouse a barely concealed shudder”. This is certainly true, though one should bear in mind that there was not so much to buy in 1958, and identity was not defined by individual taste as it is now. Conformity in matters of dress, habits and possessions prevailed in all classes, and a terrace street in Peckham, prised open at the front, would doubtless have exposed a comparable consistency.
As an accomplished historian and an insider, MacCarthy is very good at identifying the anthropological details that really tell this story. In the counties and shires she perceives that the demands of “living in the country” were regarded as work, their obligations far more onerous than those of competing professional or business interests; and how the upper class will defer to a house before its inhabitants. When the very rich Lord Cowdray bought Parham Park, an Elizabethan manor house, he filled it with the house’s family portraits, not his own. In country houses MacCarthy finds a respect for custom and long usage so comprehensive that it even applied to jokes, which acquired a kind of long-service award from multiple retellings. Here, all change is for the worse. “[They] saw a virtue in recurrence. The routines of the [country] household linked in closely with the seasons, from the winter to the summer, from the long days to the short days, from seed time to the harvest, as it was and as they hoped against hope it always would be, the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate”, she writes, which recalls us to the whiff of the farmyard that hangs about the whole deb thing – manifestly so in terms like “the season” and the rankly agricultural “deb of the year”.
I could have done with more of that earthiness. If this book has a fault, it is in MacCarthy’s diffidence over matters of sex. As Mary Pakenham’s dismay makes clear, the coming-out season is principally concerned with eligibility for marriage; yet there is no sense that this meant anything to MacCarthy or even, in this account, to the other debs. When girls were crying in the loo for lack of dancing partners, it wasn’t just because they were failing at the task; it was because nobody fancied them. It must have been heartbreaking. But Fiona MacCarthy, whose own sexual destiny manifestly lay elsewhere, can’t quite take it seriously. Here, the historian has engulfed the girl, and Last Curtsey loses something from her loss.
