A hint of scandal had hovered about Diana’s elegant head ever since a dinner party the year before at which one suitor, the novelist Maurice Baring, had felt it worth his while to set his hair alight, until it fizzed and singed. He had asked Diana to join him in ‘the game of risks’ in which, blindfolded and with increasingly trembling hands, he hacked off crusts of bread from a loaf with such a sharp knife and at such speed that he sometimes missed the bread and hit his fingers, which began to bleed. Diana was supposed to express horror, but Baring felt himself better rewarded when he took off the blindfold to see the expression of amusement on her face. She felt ‘half-mad with hilarity’.

  By the time she was 17 Diana had been banned from the distinguished hostess Lady Desborough’s house because her excessive behaviour made her parents’ friend shudder. But her intelligence, her sense of fun and her beauty enabled her to get away with almost anything. Violet Keppel, a fellow debutante, inspired perhaps by reading too many of Elinor Glyn’s best-selling romantic novels, wrote that Diana’s beauty lit up the room. ‘So must the angel have looked’, sighed the envious Miss Keppel, ‘who turned Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden. With a face like that she should, I thought, carry a sword or trumpet.’

  The Devonshires’ Derby Night Ball on 31 May had been (as it was each year) hugely ‘jolly’. Lady Curzon, a cousin of the former Viceroy, came as the self-proclaimed ‘Queen of Beauty’, a turquoise crown on the small golden head that ‘flowered proudly on her long throat’, one of several hundred guests, including Queen Mary herself, beginning to revive in the gay atmosphere after a long day on their feet at the races. Diana and her family had dined with the Marlboroughs and arrived at Devonshire House at about eleven. The house was hidden from the street by the high brick wall built as protection from a potentially threatening mob whose homes were destroyed after the Great Fire in 1666. The casual passer-by could have no idea of the size of the eighteenth-century yellow brick Venetian-style house and huge forecourt byWilliam Kent that lay behind it, large enough to entertain seven hundred Royal persons, aristocrats, politicians, writers, artists and self-made millionaires. It seemed that only the poor were excluded.

  Guests were invited to walk up the crystal staircase to the first floor, where the Saloon, the Great Ballroom and the Smaller Ballroom had all been decorated for the evening. That night, beneath two enormous chandeliers hanging from giant rosettes in the white, gold and yellow room, Cassono’s popular orchestra was already belting out the new hit of the summer, ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’. At some parties a military band ablaze in the red and gold emblazure would be asked to play, moonlighting from official Army tattoos. The Earl of Lonsdale and the Rothschild family had their own private bands. Lord Rothschild was known to enjoy wielding the conductor’s baton himself. Vorzanger’s Austro-Hungarian musical group were Diana’s favourites, and her young men friends were invited to practise the czardas, a Hungarian folk dance, in the ballroom at Arlington Street.

  The standard of dancing at parties was not always high, though many of the debutantes had taken dancing lessons from the current master of the correct step, Monsieur d’Egville, who impressed on them the importance of never reversing during a waltz when Royalty was present. But the older generation were oblivious to the inhibitions of the modern style, anxious to perpetuate the gaiety of the first decade of the century. ‘We were on the go’, exclaimed Mrs Hwfa Williams, ‘with a sort of frenzied madness of pleasure-seeking throughout every one of our waking hours.’ For Mrs Williams and her friends there was ‘an infinite sweetness in the air they breathed’, and while as Diana observed, ‘gambolling does not go with weary faces and unlimber limbs’, nevertheless elderly bejewelled peeresses swept by on the arms of their ‘dear old prancing partners jangling with orders and decorations, coat tails flying.’ One young guest, Osbert Sitwell, thought them ‘like roses that linger in flower well past September, as if refusing to relinquish one of the last summers of their lives.’

  After a few hunger-inducing hours of dancing, guests left the ballroom in search of the red-and-white-striped marquee reached by a special temporary staircase constructed from inside the house for the night. Filling a corner of the three-acre garden, and on the opposite side from the tennis court where the Duke enjoyed a daily game, the supper tent was lit with twinkling red, white and blue fairy-lights. The supper menu for balls never varied, prepared by a stretched kitchen staff supplemented with chefs from local restaurants, and Diana was wearily familiar with the dishes before her. The choice was guaranteed to include ‘quails too fat to need stuffing, and chaud-froids with truffle designs on them, hot and cold soup, lobsters and strawberries, ices and hothouse peaches’, all piled high on Sèvres plates.

  Occasionally Mrs Rosa Lewis, proprietor of the Cavendish Hotel in Jermyn Street, was engaged to provide a more varied and mouth-watering supper. The most celebrated cook in the land, she often commandeered Number 27 Grosvenor Square, an empty house that could be rented out for private parties. Here, at Lord Ribblesdale’s ball for his daughter, Rosa not only cooked for the seven hundred guests but organised the flowers, the lighting, the servants, and the wine. She was much in demand for balls, dinners, wedding breakfasts and christenings, as well as country Saturday-to-Monday house parties, where meals were prepared in kitchens the size of small cathedrals. At Mr Waldorf Astor’s Hever Castle in Kent, where much of her time away from her London hotel was spent, Rosa was proud to boast that the menu always included foie gras. She had become a great favourite of Sir Edward Grey and had been working at the Foreign Office since 1909, catering for ambassadors’ dinners. A party at the Colonial Office on 27 May was considered a particular triumph because Rosa had provided a budget-conscious Government department with an eight-course dinner at the bargain cost of £1 7s. a head. For this excellent price, she had ended a diplomatically thought-out menu triumphantly with ‘Canapés à l’Américaine’. Guests invited to pre-ball dinners by Mr Lloyd George, Mr Balfour, Lord Ribblesdale or the painter John Singer Sargent could always look forward to Rosa’s cooking. Regulars at her hotel took special pains to show this pretty, vibrant cockney woman their appreciation. She had her own favourites, among them Lord Northcliffe, who would send her French scent and soap from his annual holiday in Cannes. That summer of 1911 Lord Ribblesdale, more than just a good friend to Rosa, was travelling abroad with an unchallenging lady named Miss Willing, and had lent someone else his room at the Cavendish. ‘You can make love in this room because that’s beautiful,’ Rosa told the interloper, forgiving and protective of her errant lover, ‘but you can’t drink beer in it. He hates the smell.’

  The most exalted ‘customer’ of them all had died the summer before, however, and the new King was not expected to become a patron of Rosa’s establishment. When she heard the news of Edward VII’s death, Rosa gathered all the guests and servants in the hall and led them in procession down to the wine cellars. She unlocked an inner door, and the small group could just see the priceless bottles racked up along the dim, cool walls: Veuve Clicquot 1904, Château Pontet Canet, Château Haut Brion, Cachet du Château 1888, an 1820 Martell brandy, a Courvoisier from the year of the Battle of Waterloo. Rosa could see the light glinting on the foil of the Irroy 904. These bottles had been reserved for the late King. The group stood in solemn silence, allowing the memory of the hotel’s most distinguished guest to fill the cellar, then Rosa locked the door and led the procession back out of the cellar, leaving instructions that at least in her lifetime the small inner door should never be opened again.

  A less rarewine, the delicious pink champagne ‘Oeil de Perdrix’, fizzed temptingly in crystal flutes at the Devonshire House Ball. Debutantes were not supposed to drink alcohol, but behind her mother’s back Diana accepted her first cocktail of cherry brandy in a sugar-rimmed glass. It tasted so delightfully amusing and daring that she helped herself to another and found herself propelled away from her peers and into the adult world, ‘all my old fears allayed, confident in high humour and ready for the world and whatever it gave.’ The huge rooms of Devonshire House had been filled with flowers collected from the Chatsworth gardens and greenhouses earlier in the day and brought down by rail from Derbyshire. There were rose trees in full bloom draped with rose-coloured electric lights, and bamboo palms with their stems bound in alternating pink and scarlet ribbons. In the centre of the room hung a gleaming electric star. Candles still shone their gentle muted light on the tables, and neither Diana nor the older Countess of Fingall liked the new electric bulbs which had come to dominate and coarsen the atmosphere of most large parties, making it ‘much less beautiful’ and giving it a ‘crude blaze’ that robbed ‘the fabulous crowns and jewels of their smoulder and sparkle.’

  Every night during the month of June there would be three or four ‘Bals Blancs’, given by the parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, guardians and benefactors of the girls making their debut that year. Some thought it curious that the Duchess of Rutland had planned no special party for her youngest daughter, but there were not many rules or expectations by which Diana or her mother felt bound. In the spring, in the country, Diana had attended the occasional Hunt Ball, occasions intended to provide a dress rehearsal for innocent and inexperienced girls only recently released from the schoolroom and not yet introduced to the conventions of smart London social functions. ‘Overnight one was magically transformed,’ recalled Violet Asquith, who had made her debut a few years earlier, ‘. . . from a child into a grown-up person.’ Lady Cynthia Asquith remembered how the whispering sound made by the train of her first long dress seemed to suggest that it had a life of its own as it pursued her heels down the stairs, producing the ‘queerness of suddenly no longer being able to see my feet.’ Reluctantly coiffed and evening-dressed, Diana endured the hour-long journey to her first Hunt Ball with eleven other girls who lived nearby, all of them squashed into the Rutland family’s own horse-drawn bus. For Diana ‘there was no pleasure in it’.

  Diana despaired of her ‘deplorably dressed’ fellow debutantes, ‘innocent of powder with their shapeless wispy hair held by crooked combs.’None of them seemed to have any sense of style, or to know how to dress. Gloves reaching above the elbow to the upper arm were obligatory, and as it was expensive to have a new pair every night, they usually reeked of cleaning fluid. Shoes of pink and white satin, too difficult to clean, were scuffed and smudged from the accidental tramplings of clumsy dancing partners. Some of the debutantes’ mothers shopped at the new department stores of Debenham and Freebody, Selfridges, and Peter Robinson. Sometimes a dressmaker was employed to come to the house and copy magazine illustrations of designs by the celebrated first couturier Charles FrederickWorth, dead for more than fifteen years but still popular with the older generation. Diana, however, had her eye on the far more pacey clothes produced by his apprentice and successor Paul Poiret, the current French arbiter of fashion, who had established a considerable following with his sexy, clingy dresses. Curiously, Poiretwas also the designer responsible for the inhibiting and controversial hobble skirt and, paradoxically but ‘in the name of liberty’, the man who ‘proclaimed the fall of the corset and the adoption of the brassière.’ The freedom he offered was eagerly welcomed behind locked bedroom doors, where time was often precious to illicit lovers. Poiret well knew that in the era of the elaborately laced corset, ‘undressing a woman is an undertaking similar to the capture of a fortress’.

  Many of the grandest women shopped at Lucy Duff Gordon’s salon, Madame Lucille in Hanover Square. Royalty, Ellen Terry, Mrs Asquith and duchesses crowded into the soft, rich-carpeted and grey-brocade-curtained rooms for the innovative ‘fashion shows’ in which the models Dolores and Hebe wafted up and down Lucille’s catwalks wearing gowns with names like ‘When passion’s thrall is o’er’ and ‘The sighing sounds of lips unsatisfied’. There was a special underwear room where customers could try on Lucy’s silky nothings while reclining on an exact copy of a bed that had belonged to Madame de Pompadour. As some women had begun to flout convention by smoking in public, the matching accessories and evening purses that now appeared on the arms of the models were designed to contain not only the essential inquisitive lorgnette but also the new smoking apparatus of cigarette lighter and long holder. There was a practical side to these elegant holders, for they prevented flakes from the loosely rolled cigarettes attaching themselves unattractively to the lips.

  There were other establishments run by titled ladies, their motive not always simply financial or the alleviation of boredom but sometimes the satisfaction of charitable instincts. Both Lady Auckland with her millinery shop and Lady Brooke with her underwear shop provided employment for women who would otherwise have been working in the atrocious conditions of London’s factories and workshops. The Countess of Warwick had a much-visited underwear shop in Bond Street, and so that customers might be quite certain of the exclusivity of the service to be found there the words ‘The Countess of Warwick’ were painted in large letters on the shop window. Lady Angela Forbes called her George Street flower shop ‘My Shop’.

  Diana and her two elder sisters Marjorie and Lettie were passionate about clothes and dressing up, and relished any opportunity to put on a costume remotely theatrical. The arrival at Rutland House one day of a new and exotic guest, Princess Murat, ‘a fascinating surprise and totally different from anything we knew’, was responsible for Diana becoming ‘an inspired dressmaker’. The Princess made her entrance in a Poiret-designed chiffon evening shirt worn over a skirt cut like an eastern djella-bah (the Islamic gown with long sleeves and a hood), and edged at the hem and neck with braid. Diana copied Princess Murat’s clothes for her friends, adding a customising touch of her own, using fur at the cuffs instead of braid. She charged a 25 per cent mark-up on the cost of material, and with the profits bought herself much-wanted first editions of her favourite writers Meredith, Wilde, Conrad and Maupassant.

  Most of Diana’s ill-dressed fellow debutantes were intimidated by the prospect of being launched into an unknown society containing the unfamiliar presence of boys. HereDiana had the advan-tage: not only did she have an elder brother (a second had died when she was two years old), but her elder sister Marjorie had held hair-brushing sessions during her first season to which Diana and the young men who admired Marjorie most were invited. But even Diana was a little intimidated at the beginning of the season, describing herself as ‘extremely insecure but could not help showing off, a surface glitter, wanting and trying to shine through thick miasmas of shyness.’ She also considered herself conspicuously tall and fat. In an attempt to lose weight and become more streamlined she would strap herself into a jockey’s rubber jacket and a light boxing-glove and shut herself into her black-painted bedroom at Belvoir where she battered away at a punch-ball hung from a hook in the ceiling. There too she danced alone to records on the gramophone with ‘a mahogany megaphone three feet across’ that Nellie Melba, a friend of her parents, had given her as a present. ‘I felt that I wasn’t clever which I so longed to be. I felt that people over-estimated me and that I should be found out and cause disillusion.’ During the first parties of her official ‘Season’, the horror of being a wallflower in the ‘confused mass of seething people, where everyone seemed to be being crushed or pushed or complaining of the heat or making banal conversation’, was ‘unendurable’. Diana and the other rejects would creep away from the dance floor and skulk downstairs to the cloakroom, pretending to look for their maids to have a stitch or two sewn into a torn dress. Lady Desborough’s daughter Monica Grenfell considered the 38 balls she was to attend that season to be little more sophisticated than ‘glorified children’s parties’.

  Neither did the chaperoning parent always enjoy herself. The Countess of Fingall went ‘as a dutiful mother’, but it was with reluctance that she ‘shook hands with people I had never seen before and ate their wonderful food in their own houses or at The Ritz and sat on the bench with the other dowagers.’ She felt like a guilty parasite. And there was little opportunity for the older women to relax, for they felt compelled to keep an eye on their daughters at all times. ‘All the girls collected after the previous dance and the sitting out interval in a cluster to be claimed by their next partner,’ explained Monica Grenfell, ‘so our mothers knew who we were dancing with, and who we were dancing with too often.’

  Nor were the men always up to scratch. Some were terrified of the ritual to which they were involuntarily committed on the chance of finding a wife. Lady Fingall watched as a Mr Charles Hervey, white as a sheet, was dragged onto the dance floor by his mother. Diana had decided views about many such ‘eligibles’who were steered in her direction. Lord Dudley was ‘slothful’, Bobbety Cranborne wholly unacceptable with his ‘loose gaping mouth and lean mean shanks’. Lord Rocksavage, despite the glory of his looks, was dismissed without a thought: he had no conversation and had only ever been heard to say ‘Oh’, ‘Really’and ‘Right-Ho’. An admired and alarming fellow debutante, Vita Sackville-West, had scuppered that peer’s chances of being taken seriously. ‘Dim to a degree,’she had pronounced as she sloped off in secret to spend the evening in bed with her friend Rosamond Grosvenor.

  Women of a certain class and upbringing were expected to be ‘gorgeous, decorative and dumb’ until their engagement, and thereafter ‘married, matronly and motherly’: so Agatha Evans, a well-known feminist, told her 25-year-old niece Edith in a tone of high disgust. From her unwavering position as suffragette agitator on her local MP’s doorstep, waiting daily to ambush the poor man as he went in or out of his own house, filling the hours in between by reading The Times, Aunt Agatha never ceased to warn young Edith of the perils of a pompous husband. Lady Diana Manners’s views were in total sympathy with Aunt Agatha’s.