No Country For a Woman

PRELUDE

CAST INTO THE DARKNESS

By June 1916, the grimness of the Great War was changing the face of Britain's cities. Since the first air raids, a year earlier, London's Underground stations were becoming unofficial shelters for thousands and locals were wearily becoming accustomed to the dreary inevitability of blackouts. Conscription was newly in force, prompting angry demonstrations in Trafalgar Square. But every now and then a reminder of life as it was and might be again, of hope triumphing over misery, would appear above the parapet and give people a reason to smile.

On 22 June, a vision in a gold and white wedding gown paused outside St Paul's Church, Knightsbridge, to let the sunlight catch the gold leaves of her headdress and smile a greeting to reporters, before joining the waiting groom. Lady Dorothy Rachel Melissa Walpole, aged 27, petite and bold, wanted to make a statement to those naysayers who held little hope for her happiness. She proudly claimed to be the first London bride to wear a gold wedding dress, her decision typical of her originality, even though the cost meant it would be her only evening frock for the foreseeable future other than those she made herself.

If Dolly, as she was known, was a bright display, her fiancé was a more sober reminder of the times. Captain Arthur Frederick Hobart Mills, nearly 29, wore the uniform of his regiment, the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry. At 6ft 2in tall, with dark brown hair and heavy-lidded brown eyes, he was a handsome figure and part of the British Expeditionary Force in France until he was shot in his right ankle, an incident he described in his recently published book, With My Regiment,1 and which had seen him invalided back to England.

Not only was the wedding dress unusual, but the ceremony was too, in which tradition played little part. Their engagement had been announced just a couple of weeks earlier and no wedding invitations were issued; instead, The Times announced simply that all their friends were welcome at the church. Unusually, the bride had no bridesmaids, a decision that was unlikely to offend anyone. When Dolly was 4, her only sibling, Horatio, had died at the age of 2 and she 'tactlessly remained the only child'.2

The groom's best man was a cousin and fellow officer, and on that side too, there was no one who could reasonably be upset by not having a role to play. His parents' only child, Arthur was 2 when his mother died; his father, the Reverend Barton Reginald Vaughan Mills, had remarried and now Arthur had three half-siblings, George, Agnes and Violet, all of whom were present.3

The ring that Arthur placed on Dolly's finger was fashioned not from traditional gold but from lead, taken from the bullet that had wounded him. After the ceremony, there was no formal reception, although that was not unusual for wartime. Apart from Dolly's dress, the simplicity of the occasion was commended by the newspapers as being a splendid example of frugality in the face of an uncertain wartime economy.

While the event was covered by much of the press, a further break with tradition was glossed over, if it was mentioned at all - the fact that the bride was given away, not by her father but by Arthur's uncle.4 It was not that her father was dead, far from it, but Robert Horace Walpole, 5th Earl of Orford, did not approve of his daughter's choice of spouse, and Dolly could not look to her mother, Louise, for support, for she had died too soon.

The real reason for the simplicity of the wedding had less to do with sensible wartime husbandry than the fact that the earl would not pay for it. Worse than that, he had disinherited Dolly. The groom's lack of a title had likely not impressed him, yet Arthur was from an aristocratic family. His late mother, Lady Catherine Mary Valentia Hobart Hampden, was a sister of the 7th Earl of Buckinghamshire and Arthur's great-grandfather had been the 6th Earl. In the county of Norfolk, where the Walpoles and the Hobart Hampdens had owned estates for generations, the families were practically neighbours. From the age of 13, Arthur had been educated at Wellington College, a highly respected and forward-looking private school in Berkshire. If it was of any relevance to Dolly's future happiness, his father was the grandson of a baronet and his stepmother the daughter of a Scottish peer.

But for the Earl of Orford, whose ancestors included Britain's first prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, and his son, the literary giant Horace Walpole, known as much for his eccentric house, Strawberry Hill, as for the first gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, it seems that Captain Mills, in a family to which Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson had also belonged, had insufficient status or prospects. Certainly, Arthur's financial position played a major part in the earl's disapproval. As Dolly explained:

I fell in love, with a young man possessing most of the world's assets except money. But that 'Except' had a capital 'E.' It was the one unforgivable sin, and was visited with everything old-fashioned and unpleasant that nothing but the Inquisition or an old-fashioned family could have devised. Marriage or disinheritance, that was the choice that lay before me, exacerbated by the advent of the Great War.5

Three years of 'family warfare' had preceded her wedding, ending in what she called a draw: on the one hand, she had done what she had intended, on the other, she was 'definitely cast into utter darkness, to become the Outlier that I have ever since remained'. Her marriage was a brave move on her part: 'I had no trousseau, we had no prospects and no money, scarcely enough even to pay for the wedding celebrations.'6 Her first novel, Card Houses, was to be published a few months after the wedding,7 but there was no telling yet how well it might sell.

Dolly had ignored the advice of those who recommended a registry office, choosing instead a church wedding, 'and a fashionable one too', so that if it came to it, it would be her 'last defiance to a sceptical world'. Having never arranged a wedding before, and with no one to help her, she was desperately tired on the day but considered it well worth the trouble and money it had cost, 'for it proved even an Outlier has friends and well wishers angelic in their kindness and good will'.8

Indeed, the earl's attitude had not deterred the attendance of around 100 family members and friends, mostly from the upper echelons of society. Arthur's family was well represented, with his other uncle, the Earl of Buckinghamshire, heading the maternal side, while a good number of Walpole relatives supported Dolly. Among them were Ralph and Meresia Nevill, two of the children of her late great-aunt Lady Dorothy Fanny Nevill. Another colourful and clever Walpole, she had survived the scandal of being caught in 1847 with a notorious rake who refused to marry her, hurriedly marrying instead her much older but kindly cousin, Reginald Nevill, and becoming a multi-talented and well-known figure in Victorian society, even though the Queen herself banished her from court.

The creatives and eccentrics on the Walpole side of the family gave Dolly an interesting heritage and a wealth of anecdotes, which made her an amusing raconteur. Both her parents were avid travellers, taking their daughter with them as she grew older and showing her a fascinating world which expanded her already curious mind. Her French-educated mother, Louise Melissa Corbin, was the daughter of American mining and railroad magnate Daniel Chase Corbin, whom Dolly visited as a child and came to love the USA as her second home. 'The great expanse of the Far West, the grizzly bear in the Yellowstone Park [.] the war dances of Red Indians,' she recalled, 'the Mormons of Salt Lake City [.] stories of hold-ups in the newspapers [.] all these added fuel to the youthful fire of adventure.'9

This love of travel, combined with her literary ability, would prove to be a lifeline. In their first year of marriage, she had what she called her 'first taste of the economic problem'. Despite her burgeoning talent, including the publication of her first poem when she was in her teens, she had been expected to marry well, as were most young women of her background, without the need to worry about 'petty household and personal economies and makeshifts', and she was raised for that destiny. She had never learned how to do her hair without her maid or how to mend holes in her stockings. Her first attempt to lace up her own boots gave her 'a headache and an intense desire to cry'. 'In fact,' she admitted, 'never had there been such a useless young creature, till necessity turned me into a very fair Jack-of-all-trades.'10

When Arthur rejoined the war to serve in the Palestinian campaign, Dolly faced grim months of financial worry and 'grinding anxiety in a world where nothing seemed stable, where the future did not bear dwelling on'. She soon acknowledged that she did not have it in her 'to remain placidly in the background of life as "just" the wife of a poor man, however charming or clever he might be'. She also became increasingly aware that her 'purely decorative upbringing' had left her ill equipped to contribute usefully, and she saw other young women doing heroic things at home and in France. 'Something hammered insistently in my head that I must...