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

by Ritchie, Charles

  5 September 1940.

  Visit to the Canadian Headquarters installed in an ugly country house surrounded by repulsive yew-hedges. General McNaughton1 holds forth surrounded by a Greek chorus of red-faced generals and brigadiers whose inertia (dating from the close of the last war) is troubled by his incessant darting vitality. They dare not meet that eye. He may or may not be a great man. He is a prima donna. The star of the party was R. B. Bennett, in a ponderously playful vein. Conversation was not brilliant – food none too good – atmosphere creaking with military courtesies enough to make the hackles rise on the back of any good civilian like myself.

  6 September 1940.

  Lunched with Sir J. M., Scotland Yard, to talk about internees.2 He is “liberal-minded,” slightly malicious, a rather donnish sort of elderly civil servant with a passion for the science of finger printing. Very nice to me – rather stern with the Club’s temporary waitresses.

  Met that ballet dancer in the street. I wonder? She has magnificent pools of greenish eyes in a naïve, shrewd, American face – slight golden down on her cheek bones and the strong neck of her craft. She adopts a sort of little-girl trustful posture towards me and wears a small white bow in her hair.

  7 September 1940.

  Dinner with R. B. McCallum, my former tutor at Oxford, at the National Liberal Club, a portentous place, vast and gloomy with walls of dark green and brown tiles. The dining-room is like the main hall of a railway station with an enormous marble statue of Gladstone at one end of it. The whole place is the morgue where the remains of the Liberal Party might be laid out. Our conversation was appropriate. He began by saying that he had that day been motoring through the industrial suburbs off the Great West Road. “A cheering sight,” he said. I suppose I may have winced at this description of that nondescript waste of dreary, characterless little houses. “You,” he went on, “and other lovers of the picturesque may lament the green fields and pretty villages which once stretched about London, but remember that those villages housed a desperately poor population of agricultural labourers. You may say that the factory workers’ houses which now stand there are ugly and depressing, but remember that the fathers and grandfathers of these workers lived four or five in a room in some filthy slum where misery, dirt, gin, and incest flourished. Now these people have attained respectability, the dearest craving of the working classes. That is a great achievement. You with your apocalyptic talk of the spiritual deadness of the babbitry ignore all this, but it is the triumph of our civilization, and we are too slow to praise it. You talk to me of our failure to turn the Industrial Revolution to good account in human terms, but when war broke out we were busily engaged in doing just that, although I admit that the pace was slow and that there was still a great deal of slack to be taken up.”

  13 September 1940.

  A week of air raids. Our ears have grown sharp for the sounds of danger – the humming menace that sweeps from the sky, the long whistle like an indrawn breath as the bomb falls. We are as continually alive to danger as animals in the jungle.

  During a raid the silent empty streets wait for the shock like “a patient etherized upon a table.” The taxis race along carrying their fares to the shelters. A few pedestrians caught out in the streets make their way with as much restraint as possible to the nearest shelter, keeping an eye open for protection – for friendly archways. They try to saunter but long to run.

  In the parks the fallen leaves lie thick upon the paths. No one has time to collect them into bonfires and burn them. The paint is beginning to peel off the great cream-coloured houses in Carlton House Terrace and the grand London squares. The owners will do nothing about it until “after the war.” London is beginning to look down-at-heel and a bit battered. Every now and then one comes upon a gap in a row of houses or a façade of shops. In the gap is a pile of rubble where the bomb has hit. I suppose gradually there will be more and more such gaps until the face of London is pitted and furrowed with them.

  The other night I was caught on my way home from Chelsea in a heavy barrage with falling shrapnel and turned into a public shelter to wait until things were quieter. There were half a dozen old women of the Belcher charwoman variety, two conversational old men in battered bowlers, and a drunken Irish maid-servant who kept mocking the English for their credulity and stupidity, “You English, sure you’re the dumbest nation on earth. Now do you believe all this you read in the papers about how many German planes were shot down. Don’t you see it is all propaganda now.” Her harangues were greeted with sardonic amusement. These people were all cold and all sleepless. They had spent three nights in this shelter and outside was the recurrent roar of the barrage. Their homes in Chelsea have been badly pasted. The shelter itself was a feeble affair giving no protection from bombs. But their stolidity was unshaken. Their retort was the Englishman’s immemorial reply to danger – irony. The kind of joke which hinges on the thought, “Well it ain’t the Ritz exactly.” They were not afraid but they did want one thing – “a cup of tea.”

  14 September 1940.

  The attacks on London have only been going on for ten days. So far people are steady, there has been no panic. But they are depressed. Everyone is suffering from lack of sleep and nervous tension. There is some feeling that the poor are taking it the hardest and many complaints about lack of shelters. The ideal thing from Hitler’s point of view would be to continue this all winter and then to attack in the spring. Is he strong enough to wait? That is the question hanging over us. His raids certainly have not been a spectacular success, but they are making a dent all right.

  My new girl is a ballet dancer. She is an American girl who studied ballet in Paris and is now dancing with a Polish company in London. She seems very dumb. We were walking along Jermyn Street the other day and by way of conversation I said, “This is a great street for tarts.” “What are tarts?” I nearly fell flat on my face in the street and then I explained it was an English term for prostitutes. She clucked her tongue disapprovingly. She has been in England six months and she does not know what a tart is. Sometimes she seems almost halfwitted. She looks exactly like all ballet dancers. She has ivory, pale skin and a hard body like an athletic boy. The extraordinary thing about her are her eyes which are enormous – the eyes of a tragedy queen. She herself says she feels her eyes “do not seem to belong to her.” She seems very truthful and quite without artifices.

  15 September 1940.

  The luxury restaurants of the West End are dying on their feet. I went into the Apéritif the other night for dinner. It was completely empty. Groups of tired-looking waiters muttering together in corners, the bartender brooding over his deserted bar. Miss Lily who does the accounts was listlessly turning over the pages of The Tatler. “My gawd – what freaks!” she observed studying the wedding groups. She too looked tired and strained, and there was an edge of excitement and irritability beneath her carefully casual Mayfair manner.

  16 September 1940.

  It has come to a state where none of us can be sure that we shall meet each other the next day and we begin to look for a gap in the party. Bombs have been raining around here, Berkeley Square, Park Lane, and Regent Street. So far none in St. James’s Street or Pall Mall,1 but this must be pure luck, and there is more than a chance that we shall get it in the next week. Life is “nasty, brutish and short.”

  I went to the lunch-time ballet. It was wonderful to see Les Sylphides and the meticulous attention that went to each movement and step. The permanent importance of an art compared with the noisy, accidental crashing of tons of high explosives. Aesthetic standards are the only ones that stand up in these times. They are not mixed up with the current political-moral mess – not mouthed by Hitler nor by the Archbishop of Canterbury – not understood by either, although the first knows enough of them to hate them. In this world there is still an escape – not away from reality – but back to reality.

  Drove home through the endless mean streets around the Battersea Power Station – glass
out of all the shop windows – gaps and piles of rubble in every street – signs saying “Police Warning – Unexploded Bomb” at almost every street corner, but still women coming out of pubs with mugs of beer. Children still playing in the streets and a patriarchal old man with a beard sitting serenely on a porch looking at the sunset. Yet this thing is beginning to get people down. There are desperate faces of fatigue, not so much the danger as the sleeplessness and the dreary discomfort, the long Russian-style queues waiting for the buses, waiting to get into the shelters.

  In the Dorchester the sweepings of the Riviera have been washed up – pot-bellied, sallow, sleek-haired nervous gentlemen with loose mouths and wobbly chins, wearing suede shoes and checked suits, and thin painted women with fox capes and long silk legs and small artificial curls clustering around their bony, sheep-like heads.

  This is one of those stimulating nights on which I feel a complete immunity from fear. I put it down to brandy – a blessed drink which the war has made me discover. I walked home down St. James’s Street under a brilliant moon to the usual orchestra of guns. There were autumn leaves thick on the street, leaves on the pavements on St. James’s Street! It is like the Fall of Rome! These minor symptoms of dissolution make one sad. No tarts anywhere. If I had met one I should have been compelled to go home with her. The barrage seems lighter tonight and the bombs more frequent.

  22 September 1940.

  The moment I stepped out of the station I smelt the familiar smell of Oxford. What nonsense the woman was talking the other day when she said that it did not matter if a city were destroyed physically, if its soul lived. Cities are nothing without their bodies. When you have destroyed Paris and Oxford what happens to their souls? Oxford rebuilt in this age! It would be easy to see what it would be like by looking at the new Bodleian Extension – that blankly commonplace hulk which they have dared to plant in the face of the Sheldonian. That is the most distressing thing about Oxford – for the rest the changes are temporary. The streets surge with people – air force pilots and mechanics, soldiers, civil servants, evacuees from the East End and from the West End too, refugees from Europe – French, Austrian, Polish.

  In the George Restaurant where aesthetes willowed and whinneyed, where hearties roared and roistered, the tables are taken by heavy-bottomed foreign women or local tradesmen turned majors (Oxford restaurant proprietors must be in seventh heaven). Occasionally one sees a few undergraduates up here on some kind of course edging their way with a self-consciously aloof air among this rabble. Absurdly enough one’s own face instinctively takes on this same expression of superiority.

  I walked back today part of the way from Marston under a rainy grey sky appropriate to an Oxford Sunday (indeed in my experience rain and Sunday are inseparable in Oxford). In the village street a group of little girls were collected under an umbrella held by the tallest of them. Two ancient dames dressed alike in black with touches of mauve at the throat and clutching prayer books and ebony walking-sticks trundled timidly to church, glancing up and down for fear of cyclists. Earlier I had met the vicar bicycling along a country lane with his black straw hat pushed on the back of his head. All this made me remember that life in England has not been touched – that the raids are only superficial wounds. I stood waiting for my bus in Marston churchyard. I could hear the organ grinding out the music for the evening service and could see lights in the church windows. Outside in the churchyard was a modest war memorial “Lest We Forget” and lower down “Their names are recorded within the Church.” The bus lolled slowly up the hill.

  That night after dinner I went for a short walk, passing the gate of Christ Church – went in – Tom Quad was deserted and I walked through to Peckwater. Mist hung thickly over the buildings, and the damp smell of the Thames valley filled my nostrils. There were chinks of light at a few windows where the blackout curtains were not tightly drawn and the rickety music of a gramophone came from one corner of the Quad where a family of evacuees were living. Inevitably I thought of that night at Oxford when I penetrated the Quad for the first time. I felt at once sad and quite unsentimental – sad and impersonal.

  These two days in Oxford have passed in a trance-like state of convalescence. The absence of noise makes me feel as though I were in a dream. The misty atmosphere, the grey sky, the slight persistent rain and the ghost-like familiar notes of the clock in Tom Tower have induced a state of mild hypnosis. I have been passively suspended without will or desire. The hope of happiness and the wish for gratification seem memories, as if I were already in some dim Lethe.

  25 September 1940.

  Two Poles and a Hungarian journalist for whom I got visas to go to Canada have been drowned in the City of Benares by enemy action on their way to Canada. One of the Poles, the Manager of the Gdynia Shipping Line, was a pleasant, pale man with spectacles who looked like a young professor. His wife and family had gone to Canada and he was going out to pay them a visit. The Hungarian was a very unattractive individual with whom I had had “words” before he left. Tony Balásy says, “There was a man moving heaven and earth to get out of the country because he was in such a panic of fear and then he meets with this dreadful end. That is fate.” Tony has no use for cowards or, as he calls them, “people who do not control their nerves.” He is a very nervous person but totally disciplined. He is rather proud that he has never been in an air-raid shelter and always sleeps in his own bed. He does this from conviction and on principle. I do the same from laziness. If we were both caught in our beds by a bomb no one would know how much more praiseworthy Tony’s motives were than mine.

  28 September 1940.

  This new American girl of mine is a starry-eyed little number from Portland, Oregon. She tells me that she comes from a fine family in Portland and that they have a lovely home there and she has a brother called Bugs because he is interested in the study of insects. She has taken a course on flower arrangement and says that in her opinion “simplicity is more elegant than anything else.” She says she could not bear to marry a man she could not look up to and respect and he must be in a good position. She despises everything to do with ballet (she is a ballet dancer by occupation) because it is not respectable and the men she meets there she treats with scorn because they have not a good position by Portland standards.

  Weekend with Ted Achilles of the United States Embassy. In the party was Colonel Lee, U.S. Military Attaché, with old-fashioned bristling moustache, the sort who I am sure likes a woman with a figure – “none of your new-fangled ideas.” Very optimistic about English victory – thinks the war is going along very satisfactorily; a Secretary of the United States Embassy, a bullet-headed obstinate type with the habit of lowering platitudes into the conversation which really make one pause and look in embarrassment at one’s boots. The Air Attaché described the new flying Fortresses – four-engined planes – ten times the size of the Hurricane and Spitfire. They think the Germans are making a poor showing in the air war.

  6 October 1940.

  Weekend with H.L. at his house on the slope of Hog’s Back. You could not have a more perfect example of the eccentric, comfortable, self-absorbed bachelor. Everything in the house has its own story. Nothing can be moved from its place without upsetting the owner. His taste is his own. It includes baroque, wooden, gilt candelabra, varnished copies of Italian primitives, small plaster figures of St. Francis of Assisi and the Christ Child and (the clou of the collection and of the collector) a painting in oils of a very handsome young American man. H. by occupation fills a prosaic job, but once at home he lives a life of play-acting and dressing-up. He came down to breakfast this morning in a pair of impossibly tight riding-breeches, a tweed coat and a kind of silk stock arrangement. He was not going to ride – it was just his idea of a “costume.” With pride he showed me a silk and velvet dressing-gown which he had made for him at the cost of two hundred dollars; it was given to him as he says “by a man with more money than sense.” Portly and priestly in appearance, ecclesiastical in taste,
exuberant in dress, he is a slave of food and comfort. These are provided for him by a Scottish housekeeper who rules him by her concentrated attention on his stomach. A man of a dozen fads, he is a medievalist, an authority on local history, a believer in herbal pills, an ardent Anglo-Catholic, and a student of yoga. If you open a drawer anywhere in the house you are likely to find a crucifix or a string of beads. In the bathroom every kind of unguent cream and bath salts flourishes exuberantly. There are even glass pots of powders and creams. A bath becomes a minor sensuality. His beds (by a special bed-maker) are so vast and deep that, as he says, “You have to be rescued from them in the morning.” In the end this concentration upon his manias, this obsession with comfort, this minute regulation of time and food and sleep are oppressive and even frightening. One smells the sexual repression through all the smokescreen of his whims. One scents the possessive tyrant in the genial host. He swells in one’s eye by the very force of his obsessions into a sort of magician in whom kindliness and malice are mingled, but who has long since lost all real connection with the world of men in which he moves with such false affability.

  9–11 October 1940.

  How much does this continual danger to our lives make us forget our smaller fears? Do we still suffer from shyness, or feel that a cold in the throat may turn into pneumonia? If we do, I think it is more by habit than by conviction. We are accustomed to our familiar fears; in the same way even in the midst of a bombardment with planes droning overhead and the noise of the barrage I can sleep quite comfortably, but if through this monstrous uproar I hear the still, small voice of a dripping tap, I get out of bed unable to sleep until the sound is stopped.