Armistice Day 1921

Cavendish Mews is a smart set of flats in Mayfair where flapper and modern woman, the Honourable Lettice Chetwynd has set up home after coming of age and gaining her allowance. To supplement her already generous allowance, and to break away from dependence upon her family, Lettice has established herself as a society interior designer, so her flat is decorated with a mixture of elegant antique Georgian pieces and modern Art Deco furnishings, using it as a showroom for what she can offer to her well heeled clients.

 

Today is the 11th of November: Armistice Day*, and like so many of the citizenry of London, both Lettice and her maid, Edith, have addended the remembrance service at the Cenotaph** on Whitehall in Westminster. Only three years since the cessation of hostilities, the service caused an outpouring of grief amongst those who lost someone in the Great War. As the pair enter through the front door of Lettice’s flat together, Edith goes to walk through the service door back to the kitchen.

 

“Do you mind awfully, Edith,” Lettice asks quietly. “If we don’t stand on ceremony just at the moment?”

 

“Miss?” Edith queries, looking oddly at her mistress who looks a father forlorn figure standing in the vestibule in spite of her stylish black sheath coat with fur trim and elegant purple felt hat adorned with flowers.

 

Lettice looks up at Edith, her eyes red from having shed tears for the lost. “I know it isn’t conventional, but would you care to join me in the drawing room for a glass of sherry?” She smiles hopefully. “I could do with the company.”

 

“Of course, Miss,” Edith replies awkwardly, obviously uncomfortable at the idea of being treated as an equal by her mistress. “If that’s what you wish.”

 

Lettice leads the way into the drawing room. “Please sit.” She indicates, like the gracious society hostess she has been raised to be, to one of her white upholstered Art Deco tub chairs with a vague wave before walking into the adjoining dining room where she opens the black japanned cocktail cabinet and withdraws a faceted decanter of sherry and two small sherry glasses. Returning to the drawing room she places them on the low table between the two chairs and pours a little golden amber liquid first into Edith’s glass and then her own.

 

Edith perches nervously upon the edge of her seat, self-conscious about her second hand Petticoat Lane*** three quarter length coat and self-decorated black straw hat, which look smart when she is in her parent’s kitchen in Harlesden, but feel shabby to her amidst the refined elegance of Lettice’s Mayfair drawing room. As Lettice shrugs off her own coat and throws it carelessly onto the Chippendale chair by the china cabinet, Edith smooths her coat across her knees nervously.

 

“Please do feel free to take your hat off, Edith.” Lettice remarks as she unpins her own from her head and places it on the black japanned table next to the sherry decanter.

 

“Yes Miss.” Edith replies deferentially, withdrawing the long hat pin from her own hat, allowing her to remove it and place it upon the stool next to her.

 

Lettice takes up her glass and quietly sips her beverage before remarking, “It was so sad, wasn’t it Edith?”

 

“Well, it wasn’t that long ago that we were still at war with the Kaiser, Miss.” Edith gently picks up her glass and takes a very small sip.

 

“Yes, only three years.” Lettice muses. “Although in some ways I feel like the pre-war world was a lifetime ago. Don’t you Edith?”

 

“Me Miss?” Edith nearly chokes on her mouthful of sherry, surprised to be asked her opinion by her employer. She ponders the question for a moment before replying, “Not really Miss. Days like today make me feel like I’m still living in the shadow of the war.”

 

“But the world is moving on, and things are different. The world seems to move at a faster pace.”

 

“It certainly does, Miss.”

 

“And is perhaps more unsettled than its pre-war self was.” Lettice muses, licking her lips.

 

“The war shook down the order of things, Miss.”

 

“Yes,” Lettice agrees. “As women, we have more emancipation now than we did before the war. Even you, Edith, with your more conservative views of our place in the world, cannot complain about your new-found freedoms.”

 

Edith feels a blush fill her cheeks. “Well, I must confess, that’s true to a degree. My friend Hilda and I can go to the Palais de Danse**** without a chaperone now.”

 

“We proved that we’re not the weaker sex, taking men’s jobs and doing difficult work like nursing during the war.”

 

“Did you nurse during the war, Miss?”

 

“Yes. Part of Glynes***** was converted to a convalescent home for soldiers injured on the front, whilst we lived in the remainder.”

 

“Oh, you must have seen some terrible things, Miss.” Edith gasps.

 

“I suppose so.” Lettice says dismissively. Her face clouds for a moment as she contemplates the maimed men wheeled around the hallways and gardens of her childhood home over those few terrible years of the war, missing arms, legs, even part of their faces. Then she remembers the men who looked perfectly healthy and normal, but who screamed like banshees in the night or cowered beneath their beds like babies at the slamming of a door. Shellshock was what the Glynes village doctor and the matron from London had called it. She blinks the memories away quickly before she starts to cry. She takes another sip of her sherry and then smiles across at Edith. “I try not to think about it now.”

 

“These were a good idea.” Edith tugs at the bright red cotton poppy****** pinned to her lapel, a blue ribbon trailing from it upon which is written ‘British Legion Remembrance Day’. “I feel like I’m doing my bit for the veterans, widows and orphans of the war, even if it only cost a few pence.”

 

“Yes,” Lettice smiles at her maid. “Wasn’t that so poignant and moving?”

 

“The men and women queuing up to leave floral tributes at the Cenotaph, do you mean, Miss?”

 

“Yes.” Lettice replies wistfully. “The women especially. So many women.” Her voice trails off.

 

“So many people lost someone.” Edith says, falling silent for a moment as she sips some more of her sherry. “Did you lose anyone, Miss?”

 

“Me?” Lettice asks. “No. My eldest brother, Leslie, held a desk job here in Whitehall during the war, and my other brother, Lionel, was involved in strategic movements in France, or some such, which kept him well away from the front.” She puts her glass down on the coffee table. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if my father didn’t have something to do with that.”

 

“But you lost friends?”

 

“Oh yes Edith, so many friends. My mother is hosting her first Hunt Ball since before the war after Christmas, and I suspect she is finding it much more difficult to fill the room with eligible young men for me than she did when my elder sister had come out into society.” She studies her maid for a moment. “Did you?”

 

“Lose friends, Miss? Yes, ever so many.” She nods sagely.

 

“No. I mean, did you lose someone special?”

 

“Well my brother Bert served in the navy, but he came home alright,” Edith pauses and takes a larger sip of sherry in an effort to quell the emotions building within her chest. “But now you mention it Miss, yes, there was someone special I lost.”

 

“A beau?” Lettice asks. She quietly feels ashamed that she knows so little about her maid’s personal life. She knows she has parents who live in Harlesden, but this is the first that she has heard of a brother, and she never considered that Edith might have had a sweetheart at some stage in her life.

 

Edith drains her glass before placing it down with a slightly shaky hand on the table. “His name was Bert too.”

 

“Oh! I’m so sorry Edith!” Lettice gasps, her eyes widening. “I… I had no idea.”

 

“Oh, you weren’t to know, Miss.” Edith assures her employer as she blinks to keep her tears at bay. “My mum says I shouldn’t talk about him as there’s no point crying over the past. What’s done is done.” She sniffs. “Perhaps she’s right.”

 

“Do you have a photo of him?” Lettice asks, intrigued by her discovery about Edith’s past.

 

“Yes, I carried it with me today. I carry him wherever I go.” Edith reaches down and picks up her small green handbag off the floor and opens it. She fumbles through its contents, finally settling on what she is looking for. “This is Bert.”

 

Edith hands a slightly dog-eared sepia studio portrait of a rather handsome looking young man in a suit to Lettice. Carefully taking the photograph between her elegant fingers, Lettice stares down at the image before her. Although he is sitting stiffly and was possibly ill at ease dressed in his Sunday best when the photograph was taken, it cannot hide the kindness in his eyes, or the cheeky smirk that plays at the corners of his mouth. She suspects he might have been what Bramley, her father’s butler, would call “rather a lad”. His youthful face implies that he was no more than twenty when his likeness was taken. She chews the inside of her cheek as she tries to imagine what he must have sounded like.

 

“Bert was a postman. That’s how I met him.” Edith smiles sadly as she looks over at the photograph of Bert in Lettice’s hands. “He used to deliver mail in our street. We never had much post, but he’d find an excuse to stop if he saw me. This was before I had my first live-in post as a maid, so I was still at home.” She chuckles. “He even confessed to me that he used to come down our street even if he had no letters to deliver, just in the hope that he’d catch a glimpse of me and stop for a chat.”

 

“How old were you?” Lettice fills Edith’s glass again and then tops up her own.

 

Edith takes up her glass. “I was fourteen and he was eighteen. Mum said we were both too young to be tethering ourselves to one another, what with all our lives ahead of us, especially as Mum had started making enquiries about live-in posts for me after I’d cut my teeth skivvying for mean old Widow Hounslow for a year. His mum wasn’t too keen on him courting me either. She had expectations of Bert. She always felt that being employed in a steady job with the post office, he could make a successful career for himself, and could do better than a local girl with a dad who baked biscuits and a mum who laundered clothes. But we didn’t care. Bert fancied me, and I fancied him, and that was all that mattered to us.” She blinks back more tears, but cannot stop a few from spilling from her eyes and running down her cheeks. She opens her handbag again and withdraws a small white handkerchief, neatly embroidered with her initials in violet thread, and dabs her cheeks. “Then the war came, and Bert took the King’s shilling*******, like so many young men his age,” Edith sighs and sniffs again. “So that was that.”

 

Lettice pauses a moment, glass to her lips, before she asks, “How…er… how did…?”

 

“He died at the Battle of Passchendaele, Miss. He only had another year of the war to go, silly blighter. I always told him to keep his head down, but I suppose he was only following his captain’s orders. They all were.”

 

The pair of women fall silent, the air thick between them with unspoken words and unanswered questions.

 

“I read his name on the list of casualties posted up outside the post office,” Edith continues. “There’s irony for you.” She pauses and then looks directly into Lettice’s face. “His mother didn’t even have the courtesy to come and tell me herself. She disliked me so much, she let me read it on the high street where I broke down in tears and made a scene of myself in public, to my shame.”

 

“No, not to your shame, Edith!” Lettice assuages. “It’s only natural that you should cry over the loss of your sweetheart.”

 

“I just wish she’d told me. I would have cried in private at home. I could have maintained my dignity.” Edith blushes red with shame. “All those women and girls around me, looking piteously at me, whispering “she’s one… she’s lost someone” before turning away.”

 

“Didn’t any of them help you?”

 

“Mrs. Carraway, our neighbour two doors down, had just been at the fishmongers, having heard a roumour that there was some plaice to be had, and she saw me all distraught. She took me home to Mum.”

 

“Oh that’s awful, Edith.” Lettice reaches out her hand to her maid’s, but Edith withdraws it out of reach, uncomfortable with the familiarity and the sense of pity. Lettice pretends to have been reaching for her hat to cover her clumsy faux pas and toys distractedly with a lavender silk flower on its brim, tugging at the petals. “What a terrible thing to go through.”

 

Lettice pushes the photograph back across the table to Edith, who reaches down and picks it up. Without looking at it, she slips it back into her purse.

 

“Don’t you have a frame for that?” Lettice asks kindly. “It’s a shame to see the edges getting tattered.

 

“I wanted one, but like I said, Mum said there is no point carrying on about the past, so even though I wanted to, I never did.” She pats her handbag. “Still, it’s safe enough in here.”

 

Lettice nods and takes up her glass again.

 

“Now if you don’t mind, Miss,” Edith remarks, clearing her throat and sniffing once more. “I should really get on with my work.” She stands and picks up her hat, mustering her dignity. “I have lunch to prepare, and it won’t make itself.”

 

“Yes,” Lettice replies, looking up. “Yes of course. Well, thank you for sitting with me, Edith. And thank you for…”

 

Her sentence is cut short by Edith as she replies. “Oh, that’s quite alright, Miss. I hope you are feeling better.”

 

“I feel a little better now, Edith. I think I might just sit here and read for a little, recollect my thoughts, before luncheon.”

 

“Then I best be getting back to the kitchen, Miss.”

 

Lettice watches as Edith walks quickly around the tub chairs, following her with her eyes as she makes her way through the dining room and through the green baize door into the servery and the kitchen. She sighs as she sinks back into her chair, quite stunned by the revelations of her maid. The silence of the room is only broken by the gentle ticking of the clock on the mantle and the distant thrum of London traffic along Regent Street. And then she hears it: the quiet sobs of her poor maid, maintaining her dignity by crying for her lost love in private.

 

Lettice picks up her glass again and takes another sip. How lucky she considers herself to be to not have been engaged either before, or during the war, for it saved her so much heartache.

 

*Armistice Day or Remembrance Day is a memorial day observed in Commonwealth member states since the end of the First World War to honour armed forces members who have died in the line of duty. It falls on the 11th of November every year. Remembrance Day is marked at eleven o’clock (the time that the armistice was declared) with a minute’s silence to honour the fallen. Following a tradition inaugurated by King George V in 1919, the day is also marked by war remembrances in many non-Commonwealth countries.

 

**The Cenotaph is a war memorial on Whitehall in London. Its origin is in a temporary structure erected for a peace parade following the end of the First World War, and after an outpouring of national sentiment it was replaced in 1920 by a permanent structure designed by famous British architect Sir Edwin Lutyens (1969 – 1944) and designated the United Kingdom's official national war memorial.

 

***Petticoat Lane Market is a fashion and clothing market in Spitalfields, London. It consists of two adjacent street markets. Wentworth Street Market and Middlesex Street Market. Originally populated by Huguenots fleeing persecution in France, Spitalfields became a center for weaving, embroidery and dying. From 1882, a wave of Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution in eastern Europe settled in the area and Spitalfields then became the true heart of the clothing manufacturing district of London. 'The Lane' was always renowned for the 'patter' and showmanship of the market traders. It was also known for being a haven for the unsavoury characters of London’s underworld and was rife with prostitutes during the late Victorian era. Unpopular with the authorities, as it was largely unregulated and in some sense illegal, as recently as the 1930s, police cars and fire engines were driven down ‘The Lane’, with alarm bells ringing, to disrupt the market.

 

****The Hammersmith Palais de Danse, in its last years simply named Hammersmith Palais, was a dance hall and entertainment venue in Hammersmith, London, England that operated from 1919 until 2007. It was the first palais de danse to be built in Britain.

 

*****Glynes is the grand Georgian family seat of the Chetwynds in Wiltshire, and the home of Lettice’s parents, the presiding Viscount and Countess of Wrexham and the heir, their eldest son Leslie.

 

******The remembrance poppy is an artificial flower worn in some countries to commemorate their military personnel who died in war. Veterans' associations exchange poppies for charitable donations used to give financial, social and emotional support to members and veterans of the armed forces. Inspired by the war poem "In Flanders Fields", and promoted by Moina Michael, they were first used near the end of Great War to commemorate British Empire and United States military casualties of the war. French national Madame Guérin (1878 – 1961), known fondly as “The Poppy Lady from France”, established the first "Poppy Days" in 1921 to raise funds for veterans, widows, orphans, liberty bonds, and charities such as the Red Cross. Today, the remembrance poppy is mainly used in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, where it has been trademarked by veterans' associations for fundraising. In these countries, small remembrance poppies are often worn on clothing leading up to Remembrance Day/Armistice Day, and poppy wreaths are often laid at war memorials. In Australia and New Zealand, they are also worn on Anzac Day.

 

*******To take the King’s shilling means to enlist in the army. The saying derives from a shilling whose acceptance by a recruit from a recruiting officer constituted until 1879 a binding enlistment in the British army —used when the British monarch is a king.

 

This upper-class domestic scene is different to what you may think, for it is made up entirely of 1:12 size dollhouse miniatures.

 

Fun things to look for in this tableau include:

 

Lettice’s purple toque covered in silk flowers and lace, which sits on the coffee table is made by Miss Amelia’s Miniatures in the Canary Islands. It is an artisan miniature made just like a real hat, right down to a tag in the inside of the crown to show where the back of the hat is! 1:12 size miniature hats made to such exacting standards of quality and realism are often far more expensive than real hats are. When you think that it would sit comfortably on the tip of your index finger, yet it could cost in excess of $150.00 or £100.00, it is an extravagance. American artists seem to have the monopoly on this skill and some of the hats that I have seen or acquired over the years are remarkable. Miss Amelia is an exception to the rule coming from Spain, but like her American counterparts, her millinery creations are superb. Like a real fashion house, all her hats have names. This hat is called “Shona”. Edith’s black dyed straw hat with purple roses and black feathers was made by an unknown artisan. I acquired it as part of a larger collection I bought from an American miniature collector, Marilyn Bickel.

 

The photograph of Bert on the table was produced by Little Things of Interest Miniatures in America. It is a 1:12 miniature replica of a real photograph, printed on photographic quality paper and remarkably detailed for something so small.

 

The vase of red roses on the Art Deco occasional table are beautifully made by hand by the Doll House Emporium. The vase on the mantlepiece was made by Limoges porcelain in 1950s. It is stamped with a small green Limoges mark to the bottom. I found it along with two others in an overcrowded cabinet at the Mill Markets in Geelong. The vase is filled with hand made pink roses produced by Beautifully Handmade Miniatures in Kettering. Beautifully Handmade Miniatures also produced the hand made green glass comport on the coffee table, which is made from genuinely hand blown glass.

 

Lettice’s drawing room is furnished with beautiful J.B.M. miniatures. The Art Deco tub chairs are of black japanned wood and have removable cushions, just like their life sized examples. To the left of the fireplace is a Hepplewhite drop-drawer bureau and chair of black japanned wood which has been hand painted with chinoiserie designs, even down the legs and inside the bureau. The chair set has a rattan seat, which has also been hand woven. To the right of the fireplace is a Chippendale cabinet which has also been decorated with chinoiserie designs. It also features very ornate metalwork hinges and locks.

 

On the top of the Hepplewhite bureau stand three real miniature photos in frames including an Edwardian silver frame, a Victorian brass frame and an Art Deco blue Bakelite and glass frame.

 

The fireplace is a 1:12 miniature resin Art Deco fireplace which is flanked by brass accessories including an ash brush with real bristles.

 

On the left hand side of the mantle is an Art Deco metal clock hand painted with wonderful detail by British miniature artisan Victoria Fasken.

 

In the middle of the mantle is a miniature artisan hand painted Art Deco statue on a “marble” plinth. Made by Warwick Miniatures in England, it is a 1:12 copy of the “Theban Dancer” sculpture created by Claire-Jeanne-Roberte Colinet in 1925.

 

The carpet beneath the furniture is a copy of a popular 1920s style Chinese silk rug, and the geometric Art Deco wallpaper is beautiful hand impressed paper given to me by a friend, which inspired the whole “Cavendish Mews – Lettice Chetwynd” series.

Done