Siren Years : A Canadian Diplomat Abroad 1937-1945 (9781551996783)

by Ritchie, Charles

  ALSO BY CHARLES RITCHIE

  An Appetite for Life

  Diplomatic Passport

  Storm Signals

  My Grandfather’s House

  Copyright © 1974 Charles Ritchie

  Originally published in hardcover by Macmillan of Canada 1974 McClelland & Stewart trade paperback edition published 2001 by arrangement with The Estate of Charles Ritchie

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  National Library of Canada cataloguing in publication data

  Ritchie, Charles, 1906-1995

  The siren years: a Canadian diplomat abroad, 1937-1945

  eISBN: 978-1-55199-678-3

  1. Ritchie, Charles, 1906-1995 – Diaries. 2. Diplomats – Canada – Diaries.

  I. Title.

  FC581.R5A3 2001 327.71′0092 C00-932577-8

  F1034.R573A3 2001a

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  75 Sherbourne Street,

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  FOREWORD

  1937-1938

  1939

  1940

  1941

  1942

  1943

  1944

  1945

  EPILOGUE

  FOREWORD

  It was with adolescence that the diary addiction fixed its yoke on me – a yoke which in the succeeding fifty years I have never been able entirely to shake off, although there have been merciful intervals of abstinence. The habit had begun even earlier – had sprouted furtively when I was a schoolboy. Its seed was perhaps already sown when I would write on the front of school books, Charles Stewart Almon Ritchie, King’s Collegiate School, Windsor, Nova Scotia, Canada, North America, The World, The Universe, September 23rd, 1918, 3:17 p.m. – an early compulsion to fix myself in space and in time. Once given over to this mania there was no cure for it. With obstinate obsessiveness I continued to scribble away. Now the toppling piles of my old diaries are mountains of evidence against me, but I still postpone the moment to destroy them. Their writing and subsequent concealment were intentionally secretive – to have them discovered and read would have meant to be caught in the practice of “solitary vice.”

  The diaries included in this book begin in Washington in 1937 and end in Ottawa in 1945 but are in the main my record of the years I spent in London during the Second World War. They show the scenes and people described as viewed by an outsider–insider – one immersed from boyhood in English life but not an Englishman.

  The writer was during these years an officer of the Canadian Foreign Service but these are not diplomatic diaries in any sense of that word. The deliberate exclusion of official business from the record leaves the odd impression that I was floating about London in idleness. One might well ask not only, “What was his war effort?” but “What did the Canadian Government pay him for?” The answer is that I was an obscure and industrious junior diplomatic official who was thrown by chance and temperament into the company of a varied cast of characters who lived those years together in London in the stepped-up atmosphere of war, with its cracking crises, its snatched pleasures, and its doldrums. The diaries are personal – too personal to see the light of day? I once would have thought so. Now thirty years later the personal seems to me to merge into “we” of wartime London days. I resist any temptation to patronize or justify the writer. His faults, follies, and errors of judgement show plainly enough. To paper them over would seem a smug betrayal of my younger self. The diaries are as I wrote them at the time, save for occasional phrases which have been altered for the sake of clarity.

  While I spare the reader a leisurely tour of my origins, childhood, and early manhood, a brief backward glance may be helpful in making the narrative and the narrator more comprehensible.

  I was born at our family home, The Bower (which crops up from time to time in these diaries), then on the outskirts of Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1906. The Halifax of those days – at any rate the Halifax of my mother and her friends – looked back to its past as a garrison town and a base for the Royal Navy. I was brought up in an atmosphere – which must be incomprehensibly remote to modern Canadians – in which everything British was Best and “Upper Canada” was a remote and unloved abstraction. Yet my family had been in Nova Scotia for four or five generations. Their devotion to Crown and Empire was a romantic fidelity, quite different from the satisfied acceptance of the English by themselves as English. They might look to England but it was hard for the individual Englishman to pass through the eye of their needle. They were Nova Scotians first, Canadians second. They were North Americans with a difference and they clung tenaciously to the difference. They belonged to Nova Scotia, the land where memories are long, legends, loyalties, and grudges unforgotten, a land where a stranger should tread warily.

  My mother was widowed when I was ten. My father, twenty-five years older than she, was a barrister and a brilliantly effective one, to whom the law, which he had in his bones from generations of lawyers and judges, was a devotion. My mother was left with two boys to bring up, my brother Roland and myself. She tackled the job with love and a touch of genius. Never possessive, she held us by the magnetism of her personality.

  Our home always seemed full of people coming and going, relations and near-relations, friends young and old, and those whom my mother was sorry for or thought to be lonely. Then there was our own coming and going as a family to and fro from England in the slow boats from Halifax to Liverpool, until England began to seem the other half of one’s life.

  Our education never stood still in one place – in and out of schools – on and off with tutors – now at a preparatory school in England, then back to Nova Scotia, then to an Anglican concentration camp of a boarding school in Ontario.

  It was in 1921 while at the squalid age of fifteen I was incarcerated in this establishment that an envelope emblazoned with the Arms of Canada reached me as unexpectedly as the invitation to Cinderella to attend the court ball. The letter within was from Sir Robert Borden, then Prime Minister. He and my father had been law partners and lifelong friends. His kindly letter now informed me that he hoped in due course to see established a Canadian Foreign Service and that hearing (from my mother) of my interest in international affairs he suggested that one day I might be interested in such a career. Thus was planted the germ of an ambition.

  As for my later education it seemed destined to extend to infinity, from King’s University in Halifax to Oxford – to Harvard – to the École Libre des Sciences Politiques in Paris and back to Harvard. In no hurry to earn my own living, I was in danger of becoming a perpetual student. There were intermissions, a short-lived spell of journalism in London, an amateurish but exhilarating bout of teaching French irregular verbs in an “experimental” school in Canada, but no set
tled profession until the Victorian Gothic portals of the Department of External Affairs opened in August 1934 to receive me as an acolyte third secretary.

  The Department of External Affairs at that time was small, as was Canada’s place on the map of international politics. Its future was being shaped by a handful of unusually gifted men who shared the belief that Canada had its own role to play in the world and a conception of what that role should be. They worked together without feeling for respective rank, without pomposity, with humour, despising pretence, intolerant of silliness, and scathing in their contempt for self-advertisement. They were my mentors and later to become my friends.

  My first posting abroad in 1936 was to the Canadian Legation (now Embassy) in Washington. At first this was a sunny and enjoyable interlude. Not overemployed, the diplomatic bachelor had a full and easy hand to play in that sociable city. It was by fits and starts that the approaching war made its presence felt. Ominous newspaper headlines came and went and then business continued as usual, but by 1938 reality was coming inescapably closer. The Americans whom I knew in Washington and the American papers which I read were vehemently opposed to the appeasement of Germany. Their anti-Nazi feeling was more intense than what I was to meet on arrival in England. They felt that compromise with this evil was immoral and unforgivable. Perhaps they understood the implacable nature of the enemy better than the rest of us did. But there was this difference: emotionally committed as they were, it was not their war that was at stake.

  In January 1939 I was transferred from Washington to the Office of the High Commissioner for Canada in London. The London to which I came turned out to be less concerned with the likelihood of war than the Washington I had quitted. We were permitted, indeed encouraged, to hope that the danger had passed. Whether anyone fully believed this is another matter. People behaved as if they did.

  Nowhere was this state of mind more firmly ensconced than at Canada House and in this the High Commissioner Vincent Massey accurately reflected the views of his Government and in particular of his Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King – himself a fervent supporter of the Munich settlement.

  On my arrival at Canada House I found that in addition to my diplomatic work I was to act as a private secretary to Mr. Massey. Despite occasional explosions of irritation to be found in the diaries, I was devoted to him. I was attracted by his personality, his sense of drama (he was a born actor), his susceptibility, the alternations of closeness and coolness in his dealings with people, and the delight of his company. It was not an uncritical devotion, but no man is a hero to his private secretary, especially a private secretary who was not himself cast in the heroic mould.

  It was impossible to think of Vincent Massey without his wife, Alice. The contrast between them was as striking as their deep mutual attachment – his fastidiousness, her impulsiveness, his discretion, her outspokenness. There was a physical contrast too between his meticulous almost finicky gestures and her exuberant smiles and greetings. She was a handsome woman: prominent eyes of piercing blue, abundant reddish hair piled high. He had the austere visage of an Indian chief belied by his small, frail-appearing form. She was, or seemed to be, the stronger nature emotionally and physically. She wore herself down in the war by hard work for Canadian servicemen in England. I see her plodding along Cockspur Street laden with provisions for the Beaver Club, which the Masseys founded for Canadian soldiers, sailors, and airmen, or at her desk writing hundreds of letters to the relatives of Canadians serving abroad.

  The Masseys made their successive homes my second homes. When I was bombed out in the blitz they put me up as their guest in the snug safety of the Dorchester Hotel where they lived at the time. Their sons, Lionel and Hart, were my friends.

  The second in command at Canada House was Mike Pearson, the most stimulating of companions in and out of the office. He was at the beginning of a career which was to see him become Prime Minister of Canada. In all the changing scenes of that career he remained the same Mike I knew in those days, incapable of self-importance, ready in wit, and undaunted in the pursuit of his objectives and ideals.

  The position of the High Commissioner and his staff in wartime London was not made any easier by the ambivalent attitude of our own Prime Minister Mackenzie King. Canada at Britain’s Side was the title he chose for his own book on Canada’s war effort. The title was certainly justified by the contribution made by Canada to the defence of Britain and to the conduct of the war. Yet Mr. King was obsessed through these years by the suspicion that Whitehall was plotting designs against Canada’s independent nationhood and trying to draw us back into the old imperial framework. Unfortunately for us at Canada House the Prime Minister came to believe that his representative, Vincent Massey, had succumbed to these sinister British influences. Even Mr. Massey’s successes in London were held against him. He had during his time there consolidated his personal and official position in the inner bastions of pre-war London. Cabinet ministers, editors of newspapers, directors of art galleries, the higher ranges of the peerage, not to mention Royalty itself, enjoyed his company and respected his views. This did him no good in the eyes of his own Prime Minister, who reacted with intense irritation to the Masseys’ familiarity with the Great.

  To mutual resentment was added a difference of political views. Vincent Massey was a stout defender of Canada’s interests, but he believed in Canada as an actively participating member of the British Commonwealth. Mr. King emphatically did not. Whatever the rights and wrongs of their respective opinions, the resulting estrangement between them put the staff of Canada House in a difficult position. The disembodied presence of the Prime Minister brooded over us. It was not a benevolent influence. In the flesh he was thousands of miles away, but he needed no modern bugging devices to detect the slightest quaver of disloyalty to his person or his policies. Perhaps through his favoured spiritualist mediums he was in touch with sources of information beyond Time and Space.

  As will be seen, these discords did not unduly affect the diarist. London scenes and people and the conduct and misconduct of his own life were too absorbing.

  In these diaries people appear and disappear. For a time one character occupies the centre of the stage only to vanish as if down a bolt-hole. Intimacies develop quickly and sometimes dissolve as quickly. Wartime London was a forcing ground for love and friendship, for experiments and amusements snatched under pressure. One’s friends came and went, some to war zones, others evacuated to the country. There was an incessant turnover of occupations from civilian to military and sometimes back to civilian. People drifted apart and together again as the war pattern dictated. This sometimes leaves the diary record disconnected. Situations are left up in the air; questions are not answered. All one can say is that this is what that life was like.

  A diary is not an artistic creation. It has – or should have – a breath of immediacy but at the expense of form and style. Life is not transmuted into art. Anyone who wishes to see how that miracle can be achieved should read the work of genius set in the London of those years, The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen.

  1937–1938

  1 July 1937. Washington.

  The Canadian Legation is housed in the former home of a millionaire, one of the palaces in such varied architectural styles which line Massachusetts Avenue. The Legation is both office and also the residence of the Minister, Sir Herbert Marler, and his wife. Sir Herbert is an impressively preserved specimen of old mercantile Anglo-Saxon Montreal. He looks like a painstakingly pompous portrait of himself painted to hang in a boardroom. He is not a quick-minded man – indeed one of my fellow secretaries at the Legation says that he is “ivory from the neck up.” Nevertheless he has acquired a handsome fortune and his successful career has been crowned with the diplomatic posts of Tokyo and Washington and with a knighthood.

  I am acting as a sort of a private secretary to him for the time being. He is extremely nice to me although each has habits which irritate the other. He has large squa
re hands of immaculate cleanliness with the largest, broadest fingernails I have ever seen on a hand. When reflective or puzzled he has a habit of snapping the end of his index fingernail with his thumb making a distinctly audible clicking sound while gazing meditatively into space. This little repetitive clicking echoes through the large panelled office ornamented with elaborate carved foliage in the manner of Grinling Gibbons. I stand attentively before him awaiting his command and choke back the words, “For Christ’s sake stop doing that.”

  If he is unconscious of my irritation I have been equally unconscious of a trick of my own which must madden him. One day last week Lady Marler drew me aside and said that the Minister had wanted to speak to me about something personal but had asked her to do so instead. Her manner made me wonder whether it was halitosis or a moral misdemeanour of mine which had offended him, but she said, “His Excellency would much appreciate it if you would stop whistling in the hall outside his office.”

  The Marlers are quite strong on the use of the word Excellency. Once when they were leaving the Legation with their small son I heard Sir Herbert say to the chauffeur, “His little Excellency will sit in the front with you.”

  There are two other junior secretaries at the Legation with me. We share offices on the top floor. When I arrived they told me that it was a tradition in the Legation that the most newly arrived officer must walk along an extremely narrow parapet running under the office windows. I obediently climbed out of the window and took a few precarious steps looking down at a drop which would have brained me if I had faltered. Then I climbed back in again to be told that I was the first person to be such a bloody fool as to believe this story.

  16 July 1937.

  Staying in the house in Georgetown which Dudley Brown has lent me. Woke in a state of stupid irritation with Dudley’s Negro manservant who had neglected to call me. He is a handsome creature with a peculiarly rich voice and a glib talker. His name is Vernon.