At the other end of the scale, there can be no doubt that the paying classes, by the luxury and frivolity of their lives, showed equally little preparedness for a great emergency. Mere wealth seemed to be the only passport to Society, and blood counted for nothing: the old hereditary aristocracy who could trace their honours back to the beginning of the century were swamped by a crowd of new creations. No doubt in many ways we were more civilized than our fathers; the coarse old type that would fill a quarter of a glass with whisky, or motor at breakneck speed along country lanes, had disappeared; it was hard to imagine the rude days (which I can just remember) when the ladies left the dinner-table half an hour or so before the men, “leaving the gentlemen,” as it was called, “to their wine.” But if we had lost some of the coarseness, we had also lost much of the salutary sternness and moral earnestness of my young days. In the twenties and thirties the Divorce Court, although it was already fairly busy, did still carry with it, even for non-Catholics, a certain savour of impropriety. The novels and the plays of the period, although many of them offend our modern taste by the coarseness of their expression, must, by comparison with our own, be freed from the charge of suggestiveness. We gambled in those days, but you still had to go abroad to do it on a large scale; there was no wireless installation to report the winning numbers on the tape machines of our West-End Clubs.
Family life, too, meant far more to us in the early part of the century than it did in the sixties and seventies. Even in London, husband and wife would share the same flat and entertain each other’s friends. When they paid visits of pleasure, to hunt, or to fish or to shoot deer (they were not content to photograph them as we do!), they often travelled together; and there would have been something ludicrous in the idea of a husband and wife meeting one another unexpectedly at a country-house party or at a dinner. Fathers would take an active interest in the education of their children, and sometimes even be called in to reprove them for a fault. Girls, until the age of seventeen or eighteen, usually lived with their parents, and did not go about without somebody to take care of them. Boys did not expect to be provided with latch-keys until they were twenty-one! For myself, I never had one until I set up my own establishment; nor did I feel aggrieved at the deprivation. I do not mean that all these things are particularly important; and indeed, the old tradition seems fussy and unnecessary to us nowadays; but this strictness of guardianship did stand for symbol of a certain orderliness and discipline of behaviour, which I miss sometimes, I am afraid, among the young ladies and the young gentlemen of a later generation! There was something to be said, after all, for the rugged old Puritan school which wore dark suits on Sundays, thought chewing unladylike, and held that night-clubs were “not the thing” for young girls.