Closet secrets: my late mother had a female lover

My mother had always been secretive so, in 1997, when I discovered her diaries in the attic of her East Sussex home, it was thrilling. She had suffered from Alzheimer’s for five years, and I wondered if, besides her career as a working woman during the war, they would also reveal something about the various crushes on women that had occurred in her life. Every few years throughout my childhood and adulthood, she would embark on a new, intense friendship with a woman. But she never told us, her family, what these friendships really meant to her.

The diaries began in 1930 when my mother Anne was 15 and living in Sussex, and conjured up a world of hunt balls, tennis parties and upmarket travel through France and Italy. A few teenage ‘crushes’ were described — she fixated on one Lady Ann Cole, with green eyes and a green fan, after a dance in January; then in the same year, in August, on Brioni (now Brijuni), an island off Croatia, there was American Mary, ‘delicate and faun-like’. In spring 1932, my mother, 17, while staying at the Hôtel Imperial in Paris, romanced about a young widowed Italian contessa.

The diaries continued through the war when my mother was in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), including stints at Bomber Command and Bletchley Park, ending in post-war Germany and a romance with an American soldier. I had always remembered my mother’s tale of how ‘a lesbian during the war’ had tried to seduce her. She had replied: ‘I’m sorry, but I’m not that kind of person!’ She seemed proud of her haughty brush-off but I, then 16, sensed that this was not the whole truth. My grandmother’s contribution had confused me further: ‘Your mother knew a woman during the war who made a pass at her, then murdered her girlfriend by pushing her down a lift shaft!’

I had found in my grandmother’s bookshelves the novel The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall. Published in 1928, then subjected to an obscenity trial, the story is related by a ‘mannish’ woman, Stephen, whose mother is disgusted when she discovers that her daughter can only fall in love with her own sex. The novel depicts ‘inverts’ — the term introduced by the sexologist Krafft-Ebing and used by Hall — as tragic, and I was struck by its poignant last sentence: ‘Give us also the right to our existence!’ I was sure that my mother had bought the novel, then left it at her mother’s when she married my father in 1948.

In spring 1941, she was stationed at 60 Signal Group HQ, an intelligence centre at Leighton Buzzard, part of the Air Ministry: ‘About ten of us on a watch, quite a few nice ones, Angela Griffiths…’ On 11 May, Griffiths failed to appear in the office. The air raid on London the previous night was reportedly the worst yet: Whitehall was enveloped in smoke from still- raging fires, Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament had been hit, and those trapped in the shelters were heard crying while rescuers worked to get them out. Angela eventually turned up, eyes red from burning cinders, hands cut by broken glass, having been in a flat that had taken a direct hit.

My mother was a vivid chronicler of the damage inflicted on London. A few days later, she wrote: ‘Up to London… In Eaton Place, there was a house on the corner which had had the whole of one side removed by a bomb… I could see all the cooking utensils and china standing on the table ready for use. It was this that seemed to bring home to me suddenly what it all meant and I felt quite sick and hurried away feeling somehow that it was indecent to expose people’s private lives... I was only to be confronted by the damage to St Peter’s, Eaton Square, where the clergy-man was killed, and which, although all the walls still stood, was labelled as “dangerous”. It seemed like a nightmare and I was glad to leave.’

That August, on leave on the Isle of Mull, my mother wrote more intensely about Angela Griffiths and her advance, which had happened earlier that month: ‘She said some people couldn’t live without affection and had found that her way of life was the only way of getting it, but that she valued my friendship so much that she would far rather have my affection as a friend than risk losing that and have me do something I would regret afterwards.’

As I had suspected, my mother had not simply rejected her. Instead: ‘I was fascinated by the unknown… like some rare poison.’ She was also flattered. ‘In all the talks we have had, A says she has never been bored for a moment, and I can say the same about her, although she shakes me up and disturbs my mental equilibrium…’

Griffiths left the services and in May 1942, my mother, now at Hut 3 at Bletchley Park, on her day off visited Angela in a flat in Eccleston Street in Belgravia. She was sharing the only bedroom ‘with her present girlfriend, a Mrs Manderville I think her name is… one of the most depraved-looking women I’ve ever set eyes upon.’ But my mother then recorded that she was not in fact shocked by the shared room — she had been upset, after Griffiths had left Leighton Buzzard, to have lost contact.

The next mention was on 25 September 1942: ‘Angela Griffiths had given evidence at an inquest on a “lady” who had fallen down a lift shaft at some flats. Neighbours said they had heard sounds of quarrelling just before, but that Angela had said there had been no quarrel, merely she hadn’t realised the lift wasn’t there! I must say they are a pretty rotten crowd!’ My mother, presumably unnerved, had no more meetings after that with Angela Griffiths.

Wanting to find out more, I tried the Westminster and Pimlico Gazette archives off Victoria Street, close to 40 Belgrave Square, where my grandmother stayed during the war while working in a canteen at St James’s Palace. (Her father had taken on a 100-year lease of this grand house in the late 1800s after making money in South America.)