Darling Pol

by Mary Wesley

  At night a small diplomatic colony goes to 2 or 3 parties every night. I was taken up by Bank Manager with lovely Spanish wife, and British First Secretary (Clinton-Thomas) with mad Italian wife – he, a gentleman, member of Travellers, mutual friends etc – so I joined their quartet and went to parties every night, and I must say I enjoyed it.

  The routine of all Filipino parties is Phase 1: Women sit, apart, Men stand, apart, drinking whisky. This lasts 2 hours. Phase 2: Buffet supper. Food may be good. Sexes mix. Phase 3: Guitar, colour films or merely radio.

  Hong Kong seemed Paradise on return, with its trim British tidy streets and monuments, immaculate Victorian Club where I drink (milk and soda), with a view of a green bay crowded with craft from liners to junks …

  Be GOOD (even if I was gay in Manila!).

  I love you –

  Eric

  Hamburg 13: Nonnenstieg 9 – 27.10.52

  It was really wonderful to be met by Meg [an English friend] yesterday saying there are two letters waiting for you from Eric. Six days from Hong Kong, just before you left for Tokyo …

  I am still tired from the journey which was long but comfortable. Everybody was sick on the boat except me …

  Richmond and Roger saw me off from the filthy inferno of Liverpool St. and the scene changed at once on reaching the clean tidy Hook – and German trains nothing but smiles, helpfulness and good manners …

  In London Richmond was the kindest of hosts and looked after me well. He has taken fishing for Toby who, he says, can go alone whenever he wants and is going to fix Roger up to learn to shoot with a keeper through his own keeper in Essex who comes from near us and knows everyone in Broughton …

  I’ve run out of ink. I hope you can read this …

  Harry was sweet to me in London and gave me a further introduction to a Dr Karl Blessingfn23 who is now Unilever and used to be banking, who is a present day big noise. Harry says Schachtfn24 is getting old. Meg tells me he’s been refused permission to start his bank here but is starting it in Kiel, I hope to meet him …

  From what I’ve seen today Hamburg is very prosperous and Harry told Richmond who was consulting him about doing business with West Germany that there is a lot of money to be made if you are prepared to put in the capital …

  Meg is making me very comfortable … I forgot to tell you Dunlop is now Consul as well as Land Commissioner. Dindi has just rung up. I am lunching with her tomorrow …

  [In London] I was rung up by Pauline which profoundly upset me, ridiculous as I know you think it, to me she is like an intoxicated crow, the harbinger of evil …

  Remember me constantly as I do you, not only as your dear little wife but most loving mistress, lover, friend and company, existing like the fork without the spoon until your return …

  I missed Nesta Obemer in London who was only there ten days to clear up her affairs and turn her cousin Miss CoOptimist out of the house as she appears to have gone off her top proclaiming Biddy slept with every man who came to the house and with Felix Green [sic] especially and that I did too – with Felix Green!fn25

  Biddy very upset as she said the chief recipient of these attacks was poor Elena Green.fn26 Nesta said Miss CoOptimist had always been known as ‘Sexy Annie’ and Biddy was not to mind. Nesta’s gone to live in some other island for a year … Samoa I think.

  My sweet precious love, remember me even when dancing with Spanish ladies. I am very jealous as you never dance with me, and remember me with loving lust as I do you. Thank you for eight lovely years. I pray for eighty more … I put in what was said about Mr Green because I had a pang when you said you ‘were gay in Manila’.

  Je t’aime,

  M.

  Hong Kong – 31.10.52

  … Tokyo proved to be totally without interest, a flat alternation of shacks and shoddy skyscrapers … I went straight to Jardine Matheson, who are the Kings out East (or were) and met Erik Wates, the managing director, who had a lunch of ‘notables’ … I was invited, and driven there in a grey Rolls-Royce. The ‘high-ups’, most of them ‘of the blood’ (imperial), were pleasant … My man is called (Viscount) Kano …

  Three days later at Erik Wates’s invitation, I moved into his (and Jardine Matheson’s) house, the most comfortable in Tokyo, and had the grey Rolls put finally at my disposal …

  He is a strange, lonely interesting man … some of Richmond’s bachelor ‘tics’ and mystery … His love seems to be Vi St Aubyn, who has married someone else; but it doesn’t seem to matter too much … I said you probably knew her. There was an Augustus John of her on the writing table; and she ‘knew all the gypsies from Penzance to Polperro’ … We made friends, and he interests me. An ‘old China hand’ whose father is still inside China (he never mentioned this to me – highly characteristic), whose uncle rode a famous ride out of Pekin in the Boxer rebellion, and whose own heart is still inside China (where he ran mines with 60,000 employees) and therefore probably broken. He was marvellous with his servants, laughing with them and not at them … His Chinese servants here, in Hong Kong, I’ve discovered, refuse to work for anyone else (he left 3 months ago) so he goes on paying them! …

  It is 6.30 and there is a mother of pearl sunset behind the islands … Do not worry about typhoons and wars, which are powerless because I love you. (And anyway, they’re interesting.) …

  Further instalment tomorrow … includes the Kibuki [sic] Theatre – a staggering experience where the leading danseuse was a man of over 60 …

  Key to photo: Eric and ‘Kikki’ (Baron Kikkawa, Master of Ceremonies of the Imperial Household) … taken inside the Imperial Palace … to which no one, Japanese or European, is admitted …

  Hong Kong – 1.11.52

  I have packed in my 3 cases comfortably, and blessed your name. (They now contain 3 new suits, 12 new shirts, 1 new pair of shoes!) But it has left me no time for the promised Japanese saga. I must go out to dinner with John Keswick and his wife, née Elwes, and get up at 5.fn27 So this brings you all my true love, and a further promise to write from Saigon …

  Hamburg – 3.11.52

  Last night Meg, Michael (Parker) and I went to Fledermaus …

  It was all very hommisch and the singing was quite heavenly. As the Opera refuses to divulge more than three days ahead what they will present, it’s difficult to know what more I shall see. Michael took us to the Rathaus for dinner afterwards and it was prima. Carp au bleu …

  No response alas from the Schacht. He is in Kiel. He is reported to be universally unpopular and suspected by all and sundry but I must find out more when oh when I meet some Germans!

  5.11.52

  Schacht has written that he will telephone when he gets back so he has responded. [Marion] Dohnofffn28 [sic] not yet back from Luxemburg and if she were she would be writing editorials about Eisenhower’s landslide, oh dear oh dear I had so hoped for Stevenson.

  I lunched yesterday most deliciously at the Four Seasons with Bridget Bernsdorf who is most extremely nice and a good person. She says the Germans are afraid of Schacht because he is so clever and that when Bismarck said the Germans fear nothing except God he really meant they fear everything but not God. She is so moved by the Godlessness that she made a vow to go to church every Sunday not just at Christmas and Easter. She says it’s very boring and no one goes except the refugees. She’s going to ask me out to Schloss whatever it is. She had a cosy war as her husband was a raging Nazi. She has two children. The eldest is at Salem.fn29 They are Protestants.

  Last night Meg had a party and I put Michael Parker and Ingeborg [Siepmann, Dindi’s daughter] together. She also made a great impression on Doctor Dunlop who was so captivated that he wouldn’t leave. I made him talk to her in French and his French is terrible, Swiss accent. He got rather mixed up, or perhaps his drinks did as he ended up by asking whether I was born in Hamburg and when I said mildly that I was English he was deeply puzzled …

  Hamburg – 7.11.52

  Tonight I am dining chez Grafin Donhoff
who beguiled me into putting off the Siepmanns until Monday on the grounds that she couldn’t alter her parties. I gladly connived, to the fury of the Siepmanns who have, on receiving this kick in the stomach, organised a huge dinner in my honour for Monday instead …

  Prince Zoln, whom I’ve not been allowed to meet again as his wife has pink eye … says that now Schumacherfn30 is dead there will be a coalition at the next election …

  Bridget Bernsdorf says the habit of work which has supplanted religion is so deep that now after fifteen years in Germany she cannot play tennis on a weekday without a deep feeling of guilt … She says she is ashamed and shocked at the way all the Germans have just dropped their English Occupation friends the minute the necessity to get bottles of whisky and lifts in cars stopped. Bridget being English is I think extra sensitive on this point.

  Chez Donhoffs we had a very good dinner, Blue Carp again, and met the banker Eric Warburgfn31 in whose bank Paul Ziegler worked, a very clever international jew, Michael Thomasfn32 (who we met and distrusted in Berlin), who talks English better than us and has now English nationality and works for ‘Big Steel’, is domiciled in Italy but travels all the time like you, and a charming couple whose name I never grasped but will be easy to retrieve as he is the chief of the Anglo-Iranian Oil here … I liked Marion Donhoff very much, she is rather of the superstrata and was feeling refreshed by a visit to Luxembourg where everyone was dealing on a high international plane. She got rather distressed when a shouting match developed between Thomas (who does not ring true to me) and Oil who took up a blatant dictatorial capitalist attitude over the new concessions made by Adenauer to the Trade Unions, and said that neither he nor any of the big companies would do other than cheat and circumvent!

  Marion D. is a very great friend of Kurt Hahn’s and is helping him found the new schools over here. He, Hahn, is having a nervous breakdown …

  They all talked a lot about the American elections pumping Warburg who lives there … I was able to give a perfectly false impression of knowledge by murmuring that Nixon was the danger and Warburg says that is exactly it. Pourvu that nothing happens to Ike.

  I got the impression that Marion Donhoff enjoys and rather trades on her sense of power from Die Ziet [sic]. ‘I have not denounced him in my paper,’ she said of Otto John.fn33 ‘Of course, if I did, he would be thrown out of his position [censor’s orange crayon].’ I told her what John had said to me during the Mansteinfn34 trial and perhaps she is now a little less likely to denounce than before …

  Write next my treasure to Broughton …

  Unusually, the following very long letter from Mary attracted close attention from the British censor who suddenly woke up. His orange crayon accompanied the underlined sentences.

  Hamburg – 10.11.52

  … At last this morning your letter of the 1st greatly delayed because the Germans lick off the stamps (and probably steam it open too). Both your letters have been treated so and the English authorities then make enquiries and fill in forms before delivery …

  How fortunate we are to have Harry. Tomorrow I am lunching with Doctor Schacht whose secretary came through on the blower this morning and said in accents of awe that Dr S. wanted to speak to me. There was such a long pause that I got cold and rang off, instantly to be rung again. ‘Mrs Siepmann, you are very difficult to get hold of, please hold on, Dr S. wishes to speak to you,’ whereupon I replied tartly that I wasn’t used to being kept waiting and the old gentleman materialised instantly. Report tomorrow …

  Yesterday I had tea with Dr Dunlop. A bon enfant, more Hamburger than the Hamburgers. I put him through a brisk catechism and he talked for three hours. Very interesting but strictly limited to his own province. After leading him through every subject I wanted him to hear about he suddenly asked anxiously whether I was going to write articles when I got back to England and was obviously reassured when I said not.

  What I do appreciate is that both Germans and English alike look down their noses and positively click with annoyance when I say I am to meet Dr S. To begin with none of the English have met him except Dunlop who he goes and teases occasionally, and to go on with the Germans, all behave as if they were afraid he might ‘put something over on them’. The press hints that he is off to Mossadeghfn35 [sic] again.

  When you get this I shall be home again. Leaving here the 18th and going straight through to Pebble and Broughton … I must go on with my reportage of how I see things here. To begin with what we know already is forever in the foreground. The intense materialism and complete Godlessness of the people. The gap between rich and poor is far too large and very few of the people who could and should, concern themselves with it.

  Even the Socialists have to a large extent ignored the working classes and their living conditions and meléed themselves with foreign affairs instead. The intellectuals are largely returned emigrés or east german emigrés who in consequence of their floating position carry less weight. There is no new literature, no new painting. Any creativeness there may be goes into building and industrial design and here there is splendid optimism for the new buildings are nearly all of glass. Those prescious [sic] few like Trügel and Donhoff are working for something more but they too are surrounded by far too many emigrés …

  The young are still holding back and keeping out of politics. Old Dunlop, like a prep school master who thinks it a good thing the boys are so keen on football and so do not masturbate, says the young men are keen on sport and sailing and leave politics to the old and the trade unions.

  To me this is the eagle head of irresponsibility being reared again … Even Donhoff says ‘oh the Nazis were dreadful common people, we had nothing to do with them, we kept away’. A coalition is expected at the next elections … the Internationals [press] predict what you predicted three years ago – a close pact between America and Germany leaving the rest to go hang.

  11.11.52

  … Another letter from you this morning, no licked stamps this time and I am just returned exhilarated by lunch with Schacht. Lunch lasted from one till four and not a dull moment. Of course I shall love him for ever because he laughs at my jokes. He is also a fearful old flatterer, beginning by saying as we sat down in the restaurant after the waiter had exclaimed ‘Ach! Herr Doctor Schacht and Frau Schacht’, ‘All the same I hope someday you will meet my wife because like the Siepmann family I cannot tolerate anyone unintelligent near me.’

  As I am both inquisitive and indiscreet I made him talk. He was nothing loath. He is very good company, very spry for seventy five, he has a young wife and two little girls of ten and twelve in Munich, also very funny. I enjoyed myself thoroughly, ate a large lunch and drank a very good Moselle which was just what I needed after tottering to bed at three from the Siepmann party of which more anon.

  He, Schacht, is just finishing writing his memoirs … Harold Nicolson [reviewed] the first book kindly and justly apparently, and Schacht now says he will ask him [to translate the memoirs].

  A propos Persia, he says that when he got back some six weeks ago he went straight to Dunlop and asked whether he could make a reportage of his visit with the suggestions he had made to Mossadeq to Kirkpatrick.fn36 Dunlop was evasive and nothing was done at all. I said he should on future occasions write to Harry. He loves Harry and adored Norman.fn37

  He sent you salutations and says he hopes to meet you.

  He is an extraordinary man with tremendous vitality and an enormously wide outlook, deeply suspect on all sides because he is obviously cleverer than anyone else and most uncompromising. He has a slight persecution mania as he has been harried and imprisoned quite a lot, but I would rather be with him than against him and I took a fancy to him so that’s the safest Bismarck Herring [private code for German lover] there could be!

  Last night the Siepmanns had a dinner party of twelve for me which I enjoyed …

  Ricardo looks about seventy from overwork and is just starting Menière’s disease like Charly [Charles Siepmann]. He (Ricardo)
makes twelve thousand pounds a yearfn38 of which he spends four, saves four and four goes in taxes. We had a sumptuous dinner and oceans to drink …

  Apparently I have done a ‘good’ thing by introducing her [Ingeborg] to Michael Parker as she was quite éprise. I rather like Ricardo as everything pours out and he has no pretentions [sic]. The party was I suppose rather dull except for this intelligent woman but I enjoyed it as one enjoys an American musical. All the women were very pretty and all the men jolly unattractive. I drank enough to say what I really think which was fun and not enough to be really rude – only a little …

  Any tiny toys for Christmas stockings greatly appreciated. German toy shops rotten this year and if you do not bring me a ruby and a length of Chinese silk bring me back your love intact because mine grows and the appetite too and I love you most deeply and with joy.

  Tonight I am going to hear Fidelio and I shall listen for you. Je t’embrasse avec passion … take care of yourself, for me, with extra care –

  M.

  Hamburg – 13.11.52

  … My visit which began so slowly because every single person I wanted to see was away is ending on a far higher note. In my letter yesterday I wrote of Dr Schacht, who is wonderful … I was told yesterday that he would die for a bon mot and it is obviously true. I am bewitched by the old rascal. I am making notes for you as I did in Berlin, for your return …

  Last night Harry’s friend Blessing and his wife took me to hear the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Clemens Krauss. I who have not a musical soul sat through the Seventh Symphony with the tears spurting, a feeling of fearful joy in my heart and nearly clapped my rings off my fingers!

  At the end the crowd roared and would not go away and shouted and clapped and stamped and cried and Blessing says they never do this in Hamburg – so Krauss came back and for sheer fun gave us ‘The Blue Danube’.

  We tottered into the (Unilever) Mercedes and dined at Halali. I thought the other guest, a Herr Getchman, was going to have a fit. He has just been released by the Russians and looked as though he would burst with emotion. However, liberal doses of Moselle to wash down oysters and pheasant calmed him a little …