Among the Bohemians by Virginia Nicholson Page A

and the Partridges – was that Ralph liked heterosexual sex and Carrington didn’t.However, it was important for Carrington to keep Ralph within the ring-fence in order to secure Lytton’s all-important happiness – for he was in love with Ralph.Carrington thought Ralph would stray if his lusts were unrequited, so, according to Frances Partridge, she colluded in providing him with a spot of extra sex:
    When they were living in Tidmarsh there was a very juicy girl called Annie who worked for them, blonde… and Carrington was quite capable of egging Ralph on to make up to Annie in order to get something done, or to soothe her down after she’d had too much to do, or too many people’s sheets to change… and he would certainly give her a kiss… Carrington loved secrets, and I think the situation of the mistress of the house egging him on tickled them both.I don’t think he minded at all; she was always encouraging him to have affairs, because the worry was that otherwise he would leave Lytton…
    Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782) was a favourite Bloomsbury text; its depiction of a sexual laboratory where dilettante scientists carried out combustible experiments on unsuspecting victims exactly suited the Blooms-bury spirit of mischief.They loved the intrigue and gossip which made an aphrodisiac of daily life.‘What a pity one can’t now and then change sexes!’ lamented Lytton Strachey.‘I should love to be a dowager Countess.’ ‘You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing’ (quoted by Arnold Bax in his memoirs) could have been a Bohemian motto, were it not that even those taboo activities were tried by some of the freer-spirited among their number.The conventional world was fall of confining prohibitions, unmentionable acts, undoable deeds, but Bohemia was emancipated from limitations; yet even in this there was a kind of morality, almost a political correctness.The matter-of-fact Naomi Mitchison took the line that it was wrong to condemn; she was way ahead of her time in this.What married middle-class lady writer would be as relaxed as she was when asked by a friend to tie him up and beat him…‘… which I did, making fierce faces and quite enjoying it myself but not, I expect, hurting him as much as he might have preferred.Why should we insist on certain patterns of conduct?’
    Ethel Mannin’s broadmindedness was stretched to its limits however when the obese and repellent Dr Norman Haire, who had made a fortune from fitting intrauterine devices and was secretary of something called the ‘World League for Sexual Reform’, asked her whether she had ever tried bestiality: ‘In response to my reaction of horror [he] asked calmly, “Why not?” and added, with an unusual smile, “They say you can train a peke to do anything!”’
    The sculptor and typographer Eric Gill is now known to have had incestuous relationships with all three of his daughters, and yet, as his biographer has demonstrated, there was almost a spirit of innocent experimentation at work in him.The Gill daughters appear to have been psychologically   undamaged,   and   perhaps   this   was   owing   to   their   father’sunexploitative, unthreatening approach.He wanted to know, to prove, to explore, to celebrate; he saw no moral contradictions in marital infidelity, in being a Catholic who disapproved of birth control and of homosexuality, yet indulged in incest, troilism – and bestiality.His capacity for egocentric delusion on the grand scale was quite extraordinary, and yet relatively harmless.Gill’s erotic art speaks of a man guiltlessly in love with the sheer wonder and beauty of sex and the human body.
    To have got away with such preposterous behaviour for as long as Gill did and remain married – which he did – indicates an unusual degree of compliance on the part of Mary his wife.But Mary was more than just tolerant; she believed herself blessed