by Ann Bridge
Then I went back to Sloane Street to dress – and while I was dressing, Sybil Thesiger burst wildly into my room waving a bundle of evening papers. ‘My dear, they’ve done it! It’s here, in the evening papers! He’s reinstated! Minna saw it in the Star and telephoned!’
Poor Sybil – I treated her very badly. This was her first inkling of what I had known for ten days, and she expected my joy to be as great as hers. But I was merely cold with fury and dismay at the blow to my plans dealt by this unexpected announcement. I looked at the paper. Yes, sure enough – question and answer in the House that very afternoon: Mr O’Malley had appealed for reconsideration, and H.M.G. had decided not to accept his resignation but to impose the sanctions we knew about. Mr Ponsonby was the questioner; Sir Austen had replied. And then a string of quotations of the better-known lies in the Report, including the one about seniority.
This was a facer. Owen was at Denton, but I knew that he would have telegraphed at once if he had heard anything sooner. Now there was no time for the Press, no time for anything. I ran down to the telephone in my dressing-gown and tried to get hold of Billy Cooper; he at least might do something. He was out. He might be in at 7.30 – he would be in at 8. I left a message telling him to ring up Sloane Street as soon as he came in. Then I finished dressing. Billy had not rung up. I went off, still fuming, in a taxi to Soho, where I found Charlie and Ursula both waiting and rather pleased. I was as horrid to them as to Sybil, and spent most of the time when I should have been appreciating Charlie’s excellent celebratory dinner telephoning despairingly to Billy Cooper’s house or marvelling bitterly at this latest effort of the Secretary of State. It seemed to me then, and seems to me still, a most marked piece of discourtesy. I have never found out what moved Sir Austen Chamberlain to it, but the facts are that he only caused the official telegram to Owen announcing his reinstatement to be despatched from the House of Commons when the question and answer had been put and given and were in the hands of the Press. I know nothing of public life and may well be wrong, but I should be sorry to think that this is usually considered a fair and courteous procedure.
I spent a rather distracted evening, grumbling at poor Billy Cooper for not being there when he was wanted – most unjustly. For he was at the Club when the news came through on the tape machine, and chanced to see it. He took a taxi to the Spectator office and hurriedly arranged for a gobbet to go in that same night in the Spectator – collected his letter to Geoffrey Dawson and drove on to Printing House Square, where, somehow or other, he managed to get into The Times an admirable little paragraph which spoke of the ‘further information’ which had made it clear that the original sentence had been unreasonably severe.
Next morning, I rang up Arthur Ponsonby for information. He was very nice. Locker-Lampson (Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs) had, he said, arranged with him days before that a question should be asked as soon as required by the Foreign Office; in fact, they had typed out question and answer together, so that Mr Ponsonby might be ready to act when required. On the previous day between 12 and 1, he had received an urgent note requesting him to ask the agreed question as a private notice question as soon as the House sat that afternoon.
What follows is not really fair to Mr Selby, who was merely doing his duty by his chief under a system which clings to a belief in the mysterious efficacy of truth administered in homoeopathic doses. A little bewildered by what I had heard from Mr Ponsonby, which made the silence of the Foreign Office to O.O’M. more inexplicable still, I rang him up.
‘Well, Mrs O’Malley, I hope you’re satisfied. It went off very well – very well indeed, I thought.’
I said it was rather a bombshell.
‘Ah yes, Mrs O’Malley, but Ponsonby had been waiting to put this question – waiting for days, you know; we couldn’t keep him hanging about any longer.’
‘I’ve just been talking to Mr Ponsonby,’ I said. ‘He told me that Mr Locker-Lampson sent him an urgent chit yesterday at lunchtime, asking him to put the question at once.’
For once Walford lost his nerve, and I heard a rather horrified ‘Good Lord!’ at the other end of the telephone. It still seems to me infinitely odd, this optimistic official assumption that everything said will immediately be believed, and that no one not an official has the wit to find out the truth.
In all this vexation I am glad to think that I never for a moment questioned Sir Warren Fisher’s good faith. I thought it astonishing that he should not have known that the question was impending, before I had heard Mr Ponsonby’s account, but I did not in my very angriest moments accuse him of having kept me in the dark deliberately, as John said. As for Sir Warren, he read the announcement at 7.30 next morning in the train outside Glasgow. For a few minutes, he said later, he was angrier than he had been for years, vexed by the idea that I should think he had been deceiving me. For I had told him freely all my wishes and plans for the Press while we lunched the day before, and he had assured me that there was no hurry. He wrote me a rather distressed little note from Glasgow: ‘At the best you must think me an amazing fool’; he could of course have no means of guessing to what distance such a bang would frighten the canary. I wrote and assured him that it was not Mr Knox’s fault – he had mentioned, with a certain asperity, his intention of ‘finding out’ why he had not been told in advance. He has told me since that he considers the action of the Secretary of State to have been both peculiar and discourteous, and further that the answer to the question should have been – and if he had been consulted would have been – fuller, and should have given some form of démenti or explanation.
Chapter XIV
This really should be the end of the story. But it is not – quite. One afternoon some weeks later – it was 16 May, to be exact – I was having tea with Sir Warren at the Treasury, and, as often happened, we were discussing why the Board of Enquiry had taken the line it did about O.O’M. Sir Warren’s position was always the same – that they had believed – and that Owen had given them good reason for believing that he was fencing with them; that he had ‘strolled in and pretended not to know what it was all about’.
‘After all,’ he said on this occasion, ‘he had ample warning – he had been suspended, and you can’t give a man a more serious warning than that.’
I said that he had never been suspended – I was sure of it.
‘That is impossible,’ said Sir Warren. ‘I, myself, told Sir Austen Chamberlain and Sir William Tyrrell that Gregory, Maxse, and your husband were all to be suspended, when we first met to discuss the holding of the Board of Enquiry. It was at No. 10, late in January; Baldwin was there, and Austen, and Winston, with Tyrrell and myself – no one else.’
I assured Sir Warren most positively that no formal notice of suspension had ever reached Owen – he had received nothing but a letter from Nevile Bland asking him if abroad to return from leave, in order to hold himself in readiness to give evidence before the Board of Enquiry. Maxse and Gregory he knew were suspended, but he was not. On the receipt of Nevile’s letter, he went up to town, saw Nevile Bland, and asked to see Sir William Tyrrell. Sir William refused to see him – a refusal which was presumably the foundation for the insinuation contained in the Report’s remark that Mr Villiers had made a ‘voluntary statement’ to Sir William Tyrrell – the implication being that Mr O’Malley had not. It is not of course easy to make a voluntary or any other statement to the head of your office if he refuses to see one of his own men at such a crisis in their own and official affairs, as I pointed out to Sir Warren.
Sir Warren was very much roused by this. ‘If that is really so,’ he said, ‘it was a most monstrous breach of discipline. My orders were perfectly explicit.’ He said that the fact of Owen’s knowing that his two friends were suspended and that he himself was not would naturally have given him an entirely false idea of his own position, and that this put a completely different complexion on his attitude when before the Board. He went so far as to say that if he had known
of this while the question of penalties in the revised verdict was still sub judice, he would never have agreed to five years’ loss of seniority.
My despair at this last blow can be imagined. The most powerful weapon of all had been put into my hands too late to be of any use. A few days later I consulted Sir Claud Schuster. He said that the facts most certainly ought to be placed on record, in case they could be used later as a reason for overriding the seniority business. He drafted a letter (which for obvious reasons I do not include here) which he said he would send to Sir Warren if I wished, but he thought there were disadvantages to that plan.
‘It would be better to see him – but that is just the trouble – it is so difficult to see him.’
I assured Sir Claud that there was no particular difficulty about seeing Sir Warren – in point of fact I was dining with him that night.
‘You’re dining with him tonight?’ asked Sir Claud. ‘Will you be able to talk to him? Shall you be alone?’
Yes, I should. (I was staying with him, as a matter of fact, but I didn’t tell Sir Claud so.)
‘Oh well,’ he said, looking at me in an odd way, half amused and half, I thought, shocked – ‘Oh well then, you get him to do it. Make him draft something and then show it to me.’
I promised to. But Sir Warren was too sharp for me this time. He kept me dangling and worrying over that record for three months, and it was only in September that at last he read out to me in his room in the Treasury what he had written in his own hand. It is very adequate, and mentions without comment the fact that Sir William Tyrrell ‘did not think it necessary’ to see one of his own men in such an emergency, and when the subordinate had asked for an interview. He promised to keep it safely, and when the appropriate moment arose to show it to Sir Ronald Lindsay, who had replaced Sir William Tyrrell in July.
In June the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Winston Churchill, sent for O.O’M. to work for him privately, arranging material for the last volume of his book, The World Crisis. So the summer found Owen installed at No. 11 Downing Street, running in and out of the Foreign Office and Treasury collecting documents – an arrangement which, as Angus Graham wrote, ‘puts the fools’ cap, like a crown, on the whole bloody business.’
And that is the end of the story, so far as I know it. There is much that is still strange and unexplained. Why did the Government really change their minds and reinstate O.O’M.? Were they merciful? Or were they a little afraid, as more facts came out? Why did the Board of Enquiry, having read Owen’s memorandum of protest, turn down his appeal for reconsideration on Tuesday of one week, and endorse it on Tuesday of the next. ‘Because Mary Anne asked them to!’ was Albert Napier’s reply when Owen put these questions to him. But what a reason, if it was so! And if not, what was the reason? Most odd of all is Sir Warren Fisher’s position. Criticism, and even analysis, must seem ungenerous on our part, since from the moment that we first met him he has shown us an almost quixotic generosity. But the fact remains that, having set his hand publicly to statements which we challenged, which he now knows to be untrue, he has never yet moved a finger to contradict them. He can apparently rest content to know that these inaccurate or false public statements of his have injured our good name, without attempting to correct them. And, at the same time, his personal kindness to us has been immense.
‘La promptitude à croire le mal sans en demander les preuves est un effet de l’orgueil et de la paresse. On veut trouver des coupables, mais l’on ne veut pas se donner la peine d’examiner les crimes.’ Probably de la Rochefoucauld has hit it, as usual.
As I write these words, I am sitting in the very room at Chateau d’Oex in which, just eight months ago, I opened Owen’s telegram telling me of his resignation. These pitch-pine walls have achieved an intimacy which no living person has known – they watched a despair and a misery unseen by any eyes. I left them with our life in ruins, poverty and disgrace confronting us like giants; I come back to them with our life much what it was before – disgrace wiped out, Owen’s work still before him, and the future as much assured as any man’s may be. There is comfort in this. The worst the world as such can do to anyone was done to us, and it left our souls undamaged. A little courage, a little energy, and the worst the world could do to us was undone. In our next rough passage let us remember this one.
‘Secunda adversa fortuna vicissim, sed amor virtusque semper.’
Part Three
Chapter I
That is the end of the story as I wrote it at the time, once more out at Chateau d’Oex, in October of the same year. A good deal had happened in the meantime. Owen and I had gone up to Scotland in the late spring on a tour of architecturally exciting houses, planned for us by the late Mannie Forbes of Cambridge, with letters of introduction to the owners – Marchmont, Lennoxlove, Keir, and so on; from this Owen was recalled by the summons from Winston Churchill, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, to go and spend the rest of the year en disponibilité working on preparing material for The Aftermath; living with the Churchill family, and being paid roughly the same salary that he would have been getting in the Foreign Office. Jane, who after a spell with Bichard had been given a place at a school in Norfolk, suddenly had to have a major operation, and was ordered to spend the winter in Switzerland, in her turn, with a trained nurse in tow; our tenants still showed no signs of vacating Bridge End, and the sensible thing seemed to be to take both her and Grania back to dear Madame Juvet at Chateau d’Oex, where we knew our way round, and were sure of comfort, kindness, and decent food at a very reasonable cost. (Patrick had gone to West Downs Preparatory School after Easter, a rich friend having guaranteed his fees for a year, before Winston took Owen on to devil for him.) Another letter to William Strang describes our circumstances there, even to the interior of those pitch-pine walls – and throws more light on Sir Warren Fisher.
Villa Prima-Flora,
Chateau d’Oex.
28.10.’28.
‘My dear William,
I am a thankless creature. Yes, I did get your first letter and was very glad of it. I only haven’t answered it because of my unusual incompetence – or perhaps my usual competence. You know Owen always complains that I can only think of one thing at a time, and I have been thinking of getting settled in according to my ideas. Now I am settled in. Jane has Latin coachings twice a week from the best man here (and enjoys them) – and the best man here is doing it for 2/3rds fees because he likes us all so much. (Gold-digger! I hear you mutter.) And she and I share French lessons from old Tante Blum, a naturalized Boche who is nearly as much of a fanatic at the job as Jeanne de Hénault – I’m sorry, William, but Tante Blum is only charging half-fees because I was polite to her in German last year! The Fairy Woman (this was Patrick’s name for Grania) is going to a small French school every morning with great success; and I can hold up my head over that, because she is paying full fees – frs 30 a month – and my cheque last week from the Manchester Guardian covers that till Christmas. So there!
As to the rest, the husband of my blanchisseuse has made me a nice solid beech-wood table for my typewriter, and a cupboard and bookshelves combined for my wall – and I have made myself some curtains to cover my towel-horses and things, and a table cover to match, in bright blue and yellow checks; and I’ve hung all Jane’s Chinese Scrolls in her room and all my family, neatly passe-partout-ed, in mine; and bought red and brown jugs for 50 centimes which we keep full of autumn leaves, and had the French Dictionary re-bound for frs 4; and altogether we are quite civilized.
And now I’ll answer your letters. The first: first. I was deeply interested in what you told me about Don. With – or to – you I don’t suppose any of it is pose, and I am frightfully glad that he is so much master of his fate, and so content. I am glad he said no good of W.T. I didn’t tell you that I had a most amusing morning the day I left England at the Treasury, with Warren and P. J. Grigg. [Later Lord Grigg; at this time Private Secretary to Winston Churchill.] I was calling on Warren by
request, and Grigg came in and stayed an hour; he was very good value, mostly discussing Warren’s character, to Warren’s great joy – and he instanced Warren’s child-like faith in Tyrrell as a good example of the failure of his methods with people. Warren vowed that Willie was a good fellow and a dear thing; and Grigg and I fairly shouted at him in unison that to him every one was a good fellow and a dear thing, and that he seemed to see no difference between the Tyrrells and the Crowes of this world. I like Grigg. Do you know him?’
That letter was written in the late autumn, but there are one or two earlier ones from London and Scotland which also throw light on the difficulties I was encountering with Fisher, from whom it was difficult to disentangle myself at once, and on my own reactions to the strain of my blitz-campaign, once it was over.
Chez Warren.
May 22, ’28.
‘My dear William,
Here is your guinea and thank you so much. He was too busy for lunch and I really ought to go home, so I’m off at 11.15.
Nothing is any good. Blut-bad entirely inefficacious. I tried sincerely and can’t do it. Either I’m not man enough to hit as hard as is necessary, or else the situation is such that nothing but time can alter it.
Goodbye dear William. Never believe I don’t try to be honest.
Love from
M.A.’
Keir,
Dunblane,
Scotland.
June 7, ’28.
‘My dear William,
Why should I want letters from little Connor, if you will write me such good ones yourself?
I can’t answer you properly, even now. I am lying in a vast Chippendale bed (genuine) with a contemporary wallpaper and red damask hangings (original), and on the perfect table at the foot is lying the unique copy of Blake’s Jerusalem, printed by himself and coloured by hand by him, for me to turn over at my leisure. There’s a Ribera over the bed. The whole house is like that. We came here to tea to see the Anrep mosaics and the Blakes – but before tea was over, it was settled that we must stay, to give me time to do it leisurely – and the car had been sent to Stirling to fetch our traps from the Hotel. I believe I’m a sort of intellectual gold-digger! I don’t want diamond bracelets; but I do want to look at Blakes and El Grecos, quietly and privately, and I just set about it, and, as you say Connor does, get what I need and want. It’s so easy. But isn’t that being a parasite?