by Ronald Weber
And Lisbon [she asked him]—you were there for many months. Did you find the Portuguese in general—or which classes in particular—as friendly to the British as tradition states them to be? Do you think it is a hotbed of international political intrigue, with a great many Nazi agents? And on which side do you think is public opinion mostly?
To which Douglas responded:
I noticed no Nazi agents in Lisbon, though there may have been thousands of them. The few Germans I met were refugees. And the few Portuguese avoided politics like the plague. And the few newspapers were censored, and therefore no guide to the country’s political feelings.
While living with Neil Hogg and acutely aware of his indebtedness to him, Douglas came up with an idea for a piece of writing that he could offer as a gift of sorts. It would take the form of an almanac with aphorisms culled from his published books, such as he could locate them in Lisbon, for each day of the year. Once the idea took hold, he developed a routine of working each morning—the flat empty with Hogg at the embassy—walking about Lisbon in the afternoon, and eating with Hogg and others in cafés in the evening.
He had some fifty copies of An Almanac printed in Lisbon, and toward the end of 1941 he began sending them off to friends. Nancy Cunard called the one she received a “darling little volume” and noted that “One good thing came out of Lisbon, that collating of thoughts and epigrams from your various books, ascribing one to every day of the year, at random—for such is An Almanac. A nicely-worded dedication too: ‘To Neil Hogg—Small Return for Great Kindness.’” About the same time the publication was ready for distribution (it would be reprinted in Britain in 1945), Hogg learned of his transfer to England, and Douglas faced the prospect of getting along on his own. Hogg left in early January of the new year, but only a week passed before a place finally opened up for Douglas on a flight to London. He had been in Portugal nearly a year.
*
Polly Peabody shared Hugh Muir’s early assumption that Lisbon would be, as she put it, “an ideal reporters’ hangout” since it was teeming with people with stories to tell—and like Muir she soon learned that Portuguese censorship would curb the few trustworthy tales she uncovered. She was only a correspondent-in-waiting, however, and getting the job she longed for meant reaching England and rejoining the war she had just escaped. An American who had spent much of her childhood in Europe and considered it her true home, she had no hesitation in doing so. Her immediate problem was getting a ticket on a flight to London, and after a long delay in Lisbon and with no work to do, she had almost decided to “take out my citizen papers, and be done with it.”
In getting to Portugal, Polly Peabody had not followed a typical refugee path, nor was she a typical refugee. When war began in 1939 she was, as her name seemed to imply, a young socialite living contentedly in New York. Unable to ignore what was happening abroad, she at once volunteered as an ambulance driver in France; after she was turned down she funneled her disappointment into helping organize a medical relief committee for Finland. In March 1940 she sailed from New York with the American-Scandinavian Field Hospital, a complete surgical unit with twenty-eight medical personnel, two ambulances, and enough food and supplies to last six months. News stories at the time identified Peabody as one of the five-member committee of the hospital and added that she would be one of two commissioners in charge of supplies and the canteen.
The original plan to work behind Finnish lines abruptly changed with Finland’s armistice with the Soviet Union, and the ship’s destination switched to Norway. Here the field hospital was set up and operated in war-zone conditions until the Nazi advance forced evacuation to neutral Sweden. With the medical operation now blocked by German occupation from relocating in French territory, Peabody set off on her own, hoping to reach Switzerland and then France by making a long journey east from Sweden. To her surprise, she got all the visas she needed to travel by planes and trains from Stockholm to Moscow to Bucharest to Milan to Geneva, where she learned of the Franco-German armistice. Any shred of illusion she had of France as a bulwark in the war was now gone.
She stayed for a time in Geneva on the off chance the International Red Cross could help get the field hospital from Sweden to France. (Never able to leave Sweden, it was eventually packed up and returned to the United States.) Then she decided to enter France herself and try to join some organization working with refugees. While leaving Geneva she happened to see staff members of the League of Nations on their way from Switzerland to Lisbon by bus, and she stored in her mind the possibility of taking that route to safety herself.
Wearing a Red Cross uniform and carrying a duffel bag, she worked her way through escaping refugees and wandering French troops and finally reached Vichy. She stayed for more than a month, helping with the wounded in hospitals and supporting herself by drawing money from the United States, before leaving for Paris in a Red Cross car. Occupied France shocked her: German troops and emblems were everywhere, the troops smart-looking in their uniforms and rigidly correct in their behavior. The road to Paris, on the other hand, was a cemetery of wrecked cars, abandoned artillery pieces, and shattered homes.
In Paris she worked for three months as a Red Cross ambulance driver with the American Hospital in Neuilly, delivering food and clothing to prison camps. When the Germans put tighter controls on ambulances going to the camps, the Red Cross shut down the operation, leaving her without a job and, winter coming on, no coal for heat. The time had come, she realized, to take the Lisbon route.
A train took Peabody to Biarritz, where she stumbled upon a distant cousin who was on his honeymoon and driving through Spain to Portugal to, improbably, deliver the diplomatic Rolls-Royce of the American consul in Le Havre to his new post in Lisbon. Peabody immediately became the third member of the party. The road jam of refugees from St. Jean-de-Luz to Hendaye kept travel to a mile a day, but once across the border the Rolls rolled through Spain loaded down with luggage and cans of fuel.
Lisbon was reached at dusk, and Peabody was introduced to the city’s display of light. “The sight of a million lights,” she wrote, “blazing in the sky went to my head: it was champagne: it made me dizzy. Lisbon was like a beacon emerging out of the European blackout. It looked like a dream-city.” “The whole place,” she added, “resembled a Christmas tree. I wanted to blow the trumpets and throw confetti and sing and dance. Light after darkness. It was thrilling!” When she came to her hotel, the Pálacio in Estoril, she had the feeling she was aboard an opulent ocean liner: “In the bar, after the third Martini, I could almost feel the gentle roll of this incredible refugee ship.”
Over time the wonders of Estoril and Lisbon receded, revealing the gloom and frustration of refugees searching for visas and transport while worrying if their funds would endure. Portugal was paradise for those living there, Peabody decided, but purgatory for those waiting to get out. Some refugees sold at small prices the works of art they had brought with them to settle hotel bills or buy transport tickets. The same was done with jewelry and cars. Fifty pounds would buy a Rolls-Royce or a Bentley; when a car would not sell for any amount it was abandoned. There were stories of women dangling large sums in front of American sailors in hopes of marriage and American citizenship. For the truly desperate the last chance was always the gambling tables of the Estoril casino.
Waiting herself for transport, Peabody whiled away the time watching the traffic in the busy Lisbon harbor. Ships of various nationalities moved in and out—British freighters with mounted guns and patched hulls, Spanish and American vessels unarmed and painted white—and the docks and warehouses were stuffed with shipments from Portugal’s colonies that were difficult to move on to former trading partners because of the British blockade. Seeing a relative off on a New York–bound ship stuffed with passengers caused her to abandon thoughts of going anywhere by sea.
Nothing, not even wild horses [she wrote], would have induced me to take a trip on one of those refugee ships. They packed the poor refugees on
so tight that you couldn’t have run a piece of dental floss between them. Truckloads of mattresses were brought down to the pier before sailing time, and were stacked on the decks. Needless to say, there would never have been enough lifebelts or lifeboats to take care of all the passengers in case of disaster; as it was there was barely enough food.
Occasionally Peabody reversed course in her Lisbon wandering and went to the airport at Sintra to observe people coming in on British planes. The men, usually outfitted with homburgs and carrying briefcases and umbrellas, hardly seemed to have come from bombed London. When a rumpled figure appeared among them with plaster dust in his hair, she assumed he was an American war correspondent. The more exciting flights to observe were the Clippers arriving and leaving on the Tagus, though Peabody knew from her fellow blocked refugees that the appeal of the flying boats could rapidly fade amid an array of delays. Repeatedly she saw those holding tickets leave their hotels at dawn and drive to the departure area, “only to be back again at noon.”
something always went wrong—the weather was bad at Horta: the mails were too heavy: an important diplomat was awaited by the next plane from London. Once the Clipper didn’t go out for three full weeks, and each night of those three weeks each passenger went to bed thinking that he might be called to leave the next morning. At the best of times it would have driven anyone crazy; in wartime, when the majority of the Clipper passengers had a mission to fulfill, the delay was well-nigh unbearable.
To conserve money, Peabody switched from the Pálacio to a small boardinghouse while continuing her wait for a London flight. Back in the war zone in Norway she had developed a connection with the United Press by filing a news story with the wire service’s Stockholm bureau, and in Lisbon she had cabled the UP’s New York office and learned it would put her to work in England if she could get there. Doing so had come to seem nearly hopeless, leaving her on the verge of remaining in Portugal, when on Christmas Eve a call at last came: she should be at the Sintra airport at four o’clock the next morning.
In England, her thirteenth country reached in wartime, Polly Peabody would set to work reporting on blitzed London.
*
The British writer Ronald Bodley decided he enjoyed Portugal so much he would stay long enough to turn out a travel book about it, though a singular one that would also tell his personal story of refugee flight. That the present market for tourism to Portugal was at best weak was not a consideration. A dashing life of many headlong ventures had already led Bodley from Eton and Sandhurst to an Indian regiment to a wounding on the Western Front in World War I. After retiring from military life as a major, he took his friend T. E. Lawrence’s advice to live among the Arabs and spent seven years with Bedouins in the Sahara (giving rise to a New Yorker item about him called “Bodley of Arabia”). And along the way he had found time to churn out fiction, biographies, and travel accounts.
In 1939, with war looming in Europe, Bodley had spent the first half of the year in Hollywood as a screenwriter for Charlie Chaplin before leaving for Paris with the idea of trying his hand at a play. All seemed peaceful in France, and he was confident war would be avoided. When proved wrong he was in Biarritz and working on his play in the company of Lorna Hearst, a daughter-in-law of William Randolph Hearst and Bodley’s collaborator on a biography of the Arabist Gertrude Bell. After he went up to Bordeaux to see Hearst off to New York on a ship filled with frightened American tourists caught in France, he traveled to Paris to see for himself the situation there.
In the calm of the phony war Bodley found social life unchanged, with the playwright Jean Cocteau a neighbor in his hotel and Colette living somewhere above him. Then the Wehrmacht marched into the Low Countries. With a friend who had a Packard roadster and was going to Biarritz, he set off from Paris, the car carrying the owner’s black cook as well as his household silver, books, and enough luggage to see him through six months. Bodley and his friend anticipated a more or less pleasant outing that would include dining in Chartres and a hotel for the evening in Tours; instead they found themselves in a frenzied sea of refugees. “It was a heartbreaking spectacle,” Bodley wrote, “and we drove on in stunned silence, while the negress wept shamelessly.”
He spent a tranquil period living with his mother and American stepfather in their home near Bayonne until, with German troops south of Bordeaux and his mother and her husband refusing to leave, he set off again, now in the company of three British women, previously unknown, in a car belonging to one of them. The four had passports but no visas. On the bridge between Hendaye and Irun they joined in the snail-paced procession between opening and closing gates. Here fate intervened in the person of a fellow Etonian, now with the British embassy in Madrid; with his help, and after thirteen hours stuck on the bridge, Bodley and the women crossed into Spain with transit visas.
All hotels in Lisbon were filled with refugees and visitors to Portugal’s centenary celebration, but another old Etonian, now a military attaché at the embassy, came to the rescue and found a room in Sintra. This the women occupied while Bodley happily settled for a straw mattress in a place above a shop. The next morning, walking about Sintra, he felt an exhilarating sense of being free to do as he wished. Escaping from Paris to Lisbon he had known only apprehension; sightseeing was the farthest thing from his mind. Now he was liberated “to be a tourist, to rush round and see things, fling myself into the past, gaze at ancient walls and lovely scenery.”
With his road companions off to England by air, the first gazing Bodley did was upon his fellow refugees, usually with a highly jaundiced eye. Many he discovered began to “react disagreeably once the danger of persecution [was] no longer imminent”; they turned into “ungrateful hobos” who complained bitterly about their Portuguese hosts. The Americans among them who had lived for years in France now “looked forward with unbelievable horror to being obliged to live in the country [the United States] which had made it possible for them to lead easy existences in Europe.” In the American consulate and the Lisbon shipping offices there were unpleasant scenes as refugees tried to gain advantage by “brandishing bribes or telling sob stories.”
American consular officials seemed to Bodley hardworking as well as tactful and sympathetic in the daily drama of dealing with mobs of refugees. But skullduggery could go on without their knowing. Bodley told of an attractive woman, a Madame X, who had arrived in Lisbon as a threadbare exile but within a short time was employed by the American consulate to interpret the languages and dialects of Middle Europe. Her wardrobe and appearance rapidly improved, a transformation not entirely accounted for by her linguistic position. Over time her work evolved into that of an informal receptionist, and Bodley, as a “regular ringside spectator” at the consulate, realized that while some refugees waited for days, others Madame X would immediately usher in for an interview with an official. Outside of work, he also saw her dining and dancing with refugees who appeared in “urgent need of American consular assistance.” It was obvious to him that Madame X, having found a lucrative sideline, was quite content to stay on in Lisbon.
In a boardinghouse he moved to, Bodley found it possible to live adequately and dine well on little money. For some formerly prominent refugees, their long stays in such crowded quarters had the salutary effect of making them grateful for their good fortune. But for others the boardinghouses were yet another source of loud disappointment: “These would ceaselessly complain, and never miss an opportunity to tell the pension proprietors who could understand them … how many baths there were in their homes, and the important people with whom they had been on intimate terms.”
Although technically a refugee who needed his passport stamped every month by police while avoiding questions about why he was still in the country, Bodley considered himself an author living in Portugal and gathering material for his combination escape tale and travel guide. From Lisbon he branched out for touring to Coimbra, Porto, and the far north of Minho, then turned about to the country south of the Tagus
and reached Algarve. When he returned to Lisbon the city seemed no less congested with refugees, causing him to propose to some who had been waiting months for visas or ship passage that they might follow his example and travel a bit. As he noted, his “suggestions were not even considered, and attributed to a kind of British bluff in moments of crisis.”
When after several months Ronald Bodley left Portugal for New York, he chose a Portuguese ship to lengthen as long as possible his link with the country—a mistake, as it happened, since it revealed him to himself as yet another whining refugee. The ship was an ancient liner (“an 8000-ton, 8000-year-old ship which would take twelve days to cross the Atlantic!”), cots had been added to cabins costing extravagant amounts, the food was terrible, and the tablecloths were dirty. The Portuguese explained their illegitimate profiteering by saying they were doing only what other shipping lines did, which was admittedly true. But there was no excuse, as Bodley archly saw it, when they proved themselves unprepared for proper moneymaking by failing to meet the need of “quite a number of optimists” aboard the ship who “wanted to see the New Year in with appropriate toasts,” only to find “there was hardly a bottle of champagne to be had and not one lump of ice!”
*
Frederic Prokosch’s clandestine Lisbon of fiction was one Marya Mannes knew from experience, if only briefly and at modest depth. She was a latecomer to wartime Lisbon, arriving just three days before the Normandy landings in June 1944. A decade earlier she had given up a promising editorial career with Vogue magazine in New York to live with her husband in Italy, where he painted and she turned to an earlier interest in sculpture. With the war the couple had returned to the United States, where Mannes’s husband became a navy pilot and she joined a group gathering information from refugees of occupied countries who were now in New York. She concentrated on those from Germany and Austria, seeing if they might prove useful to the Office of War Information as broadcasters, writers, researchers, or for intelligence work. Dossiers on those who seemed in any way suspicious she turned over to the OSS.