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

by Ritchie, Charles

  21 December 1940.

  Evening with the ballerina – some progress to report. We dined, thank God without music and away from the frowsy hotel atmosphere at a small but expensive restaurant in Shepherd Market. She felt, I think, that we were rather slumming. As usual she talked an immense amount about “Mommy and Daddy,” and at one stage of dinner I was sunk in such a stupor of boredom that even she noticed it and I had to pull myself together and begin talking rapidly, desperately, and at random. The night was cold and starry outside, with quite a heavy blitz. We walked back to the flat. She has more sense and feeling than one would give her credit for at first. What is shocking about her is the contrast between her romantic looks and her flat commonplace mind. Her mainspring in life appears to be an intense desire to show that she comes from the right side of the railroad tracks. Like many completely uninhibited bores she wins in the end by sheer persistence. She has talked to me so much about people I do not know or care about, her family, the members of the ballet company, etc., that I am beginning to feel I do know them and find myself taking an interest in their doings. Later in the evening we went out to Lyons’ Corner House, where we were joined by two RAF pilots, both DFCS, one drunk, Irish and very funny. The RAF have a line laid down for them – the gay, brave, young pilot with a joke on his lips, irresponsible, living to the full because they may die any day.

  22 December 1940.

  Dined with Alastair Buchan at Pratt’s Club – the best sole in London, that is to say in the world. I always enjoy Pratt’s, the atmosphere of open fires and easy unbuttoned chat, the equality where cabinet ministers sit around the table and argue with subalterns – the décor of red curtains and the stuffed salmon caught by His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh in 1886. The other night a rather tight, junior lieutenant back from the Middle East was dining there. Anthony Eden began holding forth at length on the Mediterranean situation. This youth, after listening for some time, turned to a friend and said, “I do not know who that man is but he is talking awful balls.” Immense satisfaction of all members.

  25 December 1940.

  Spent Christmas Eve in the country, came back on the morning train to London on Christmas Day – waited of course for nearly an hour at Horsley Station for the train. How well I know those English country stations in the morning after a weekend when you have tipped the chauffeur and told him not to wait and you walk up and down the station platform in the raw air that smells of babies’ diapers, with a little view of the railway line and fields and a couple of cows, fields rough-surfaced and untidy seen at close range, although a billiard board of green if you flashed over them in a plane; or a flooded meadow, mist hanging about the trees. Two porters whistling and stamping, a lady in a fur coat taking leave of her rosy-cheeked niece, who wears tweeds and no hat – “My dear, remember when you come to London there is always a roof.” Then the soldiers – bold-eyed Canadians with a slouch and a swagger, New Zealanders with overcoats hanging untidily, Australians often with girls, and English soldiers going back to London saying goodbye to plain, sensible, loyal wives wearing spectacles and sometimes carrying babies. The soldiers from the Dominions are invading armies of irresponsible younger brothers. The English soldiers look at them not unkindly but with a sober ironic air – puppies and old hound dogs. London was deserted.

  29 December 1940.

  Walked home tonight by the pink light of an enormous fire somewhere in the City. Heavy blitz. I dined alone at Brooks’s. Read R. G. Collingwood’s book on Roman Britain – sandy but with oases. I also tried unsuccessfully to put into dispatch form some intuitions of how things may develop in this country after the war, provided, of course, that we win it. Funny, though reason may tell me that that is open to doubt, I never really contemplate our not winning. It is eerie tonight, the streets are so light from the fires and so completely deserted and silent now that the planes seem to have passed. Was that a distant barrage or somebody moving furniture upstairs? No, the only sound is the tinkle of ambulance bells in the empty street. This is not very pleasant. I think I will have a whisky and soda. Supposing that some day one of these days I just was not there to meet Billy for lunch at the RAC The others were there – Billy and Margery and Hart but not me. Now – that was the barrage, and I can hear a plane right overhead. The man at the Club said that a lot of our fighters were up tonight. That was a bomb that time. When the building shakes from the floor upwards it is a bomb.

  Spent last night at Stansted. We went to church this morning. Lord Bessborough reading the lessons – “The flesh is as grass and like grass shall wither away.” He read it well – the rustic choir boys piped up “Come All Ye Faithful” – clear voices like a running stream. The clergyman ranged from arrangements for the local paper chase to God’s purpose. An iconoclast – he announced that God had other preoccupations in addition to the defence of the British Empire. We should will victory – call on the power of thought – pause for a minute every day before the BBC announced the news. It bothers me this talk about calling on the power of thought and willing things to happen to our advantage, as if we were trying to force a lock when, had we the key, it would open itself.

  1 Stanley Baldwin had been raised to the peerage when he ceased to be Prime Minister in 1937. He was popularly blamed for Britain’s unpreparedness for war, and rather ostracized at this time.

  2 He had just succeeded to the title on 11 February, when his father, John Buchan, first Lord Tweedsmuir, had died while Governor General of Canada. He served with distinction in the Canadian army during the war. His younger brothers, William and Alastair, were also friends of mine.

  1 Sir John Simon had been an M.P. since 1906 and was then Chancellor of the Exchequer.

  1 The Earl of Athlone was about to take up his post as Governor General of Canada.

  1 He came to England with the Canadian army and was wounded in Normandy in 1944; he later became a judge of the Supreme Court of Canada.

  1 Formerly a Liberal M.P. and Parliamentary Secretary to Lloyd George, he was a keen supporter of the League of Nations.

  2 The Dunkirk evacuation from 27 May to 3 June brought over 300,000 men, French as well as British, to England.

  1 Bennett, who had been Canadian Prime Minister from 1930 to 1935, was now living in retirement. He was created Viscount Bennett in the Birthday Honours in June 1941.

  1 The great house of the Dukes of Devonshire; it has in fact survived, and the present Duke lives there.

  1 Younger son of the 4th Marquess of Salisbury, Fellow of New College, Oxford, and later Professor of English Literature at Oxford. The description is in his book, The Young Melbourne.

  1 General A. G. L. McNaughton was officer commanding the First Canadian Division, and later the First Canadian Army. He resigned in 944 to become Minister of Defence.

  2 Part of my work at Canada House was concerned with the arrangements for transferring suspected enemy aliens from British internment camps to Canada.

  1 I had moved again to a furnished flat off Pall Mall.

  1 My cousin Mary Adlington.

  1 Frank and Margery Ziegler; he was an old Oxford friend of mine.

  1941

  10 January 1941.

  The ballerina was rather sweet really. We had breakfast in the Mayfair Hotel – rashers of bacon and great cups of American coffee. She did look beautiful this morning. People turned around in the street to look at her.

  12 January 1941.

  Reading Gide – the best antidote possible to the triumphant commonplace of an English Sunday. Not even the Blitzkrieg has been able to break the spell which the Sabbath casts over the land. One could not fail by just putting one’s head out of the window and smelling and looking and listening for two minutes to recognize that this is Sunday. In my mind’s eye I can see the weary wastes of the Cromwell Road beneath a sullen sky where a few depressed pedestrians straggle as though lost in an endless desert. One’s soul shrinks from the spectacle.

  Symptoms of Sexual Happiness


  1. I look at people, men and women, from the physical point of view, not by class or taste but in terms of the senses. Which ones are out of the stream of sex? (How easy it is to see these!) And why? 2. I am temporarily cured of my mania for seeing things in a straight line. I admit and enjoy confusion. The relief is enormous. 3. Time no longer seems to be slipping away from me. I am happy to spend it carelessly. 4. Other people do not seem worth the usual effort. I cannot help treating them casually, often interrupting them and not listening to what they say. 5. I definitely am very much less amusing. The ballerina leaves today with the ballet company on tour. I am looking forward to early and varied infidelities during her absence.

  12 January 1941.

  Walked across Grosvenor Square to dine with Lady Malcolm at Claridge’s. A London evening – damp air and mist. The guns in Hyde Park reverberated above the square and further away the guns in St. James’s Park replied. Clouds slid past a full silver moon.

  Lady Malcolm is really only interested in the work she is doing at the canteen at the Beaver Club and in her struggle for power with the other women workers. “We are gettin’ along very nicely.” (She is Edwardian about her g’s.)

  Her son-in-law, Basil Bartlett, was there, the playwright now in Military Intelligence, clever and amusing, and Thesiger, the actor – looking at him Lady Malcolm murmured to me, “Cooks perfect petits pois à la française and always wears a pearl necklace under its shirt – rather sweet – don’t you think?” He was too, with his cosy humour. You felt – there is a talented old creature who does not give a damn one way or the other but will not be bullied. (That was when Basil was trying to force us all to drink white wine because he was eating salmon, although the rest of us obviously wanted red with our fillet of beef.) “I am for red,” said Thesiger, with a light flick in his tone, and red it was. He told us about the time in London about 1900 when it used to be the fashion to go down after dinner and sing patriotic songs outside Buckingham Palace to cheer Queen Victoria up. (It must have been during the South African War.) People would give dinner parties to go on to Buckingham Palace. One night he was there among the crowd singing with some friends – a foggy, misty London night with the front of the Palace (not the present façade – that was added later) lit up by gas jets. Suddenly there was a light in one of the windows, then the window opened and onto the balcony stepped two huge footmen bearing each in his hands vast lighted candelabra – “and between them,” said Thesiger with feeling, “and between them a little black figure of a woman.”

  Then Lady Malcolm told us how when she was a little girl King Edward VII came one afternoon to see her mother (Lily Langtry). When she was brought into the drawing-room by her nurse he said to her, “Would you like to go for a drive, my dear, in the Park?” He did not ask her nurse if she could go – he asked her and she was sent out in his carriage with his monogram on the door. People in the streets took off their hats as she drove by alone in his carriage. She had to make up her mind whether to acknowledge their bows – as though she were a little princess – or whether to stare at the horizon. She decided on the latter. Thus began a career of doing the right thing.

  14 January 1941.

  Lunched with Tony Balásy, who told me that he resigned from the Hungarian Diplomatic Service when Hungary joined the Axis in November. It must have taken more guts than I gave him credit for to break the chain of twenty years’ habit, especially for such a cautious creature of habits. Now he is going back to his beloved United States without a job and with the somewhat dreary prospect of perhaps doing some writing on political subjects to earn himself a living. He quoted to me a sentence from Roosevelt’s speech, “Those who prefer security to liberty deserve to lose both.” He says he could not go on any longer without his heart in it. What makes it harder is that he was to have been appointed Hungarian Minister to Washington. I asked him if some people in his Foreign Office would sympathize with him. “The consensus of opinion in Budapest will be the fellow is a damn fool, but maybe in 943 they will say that Balásy is a shrewd fellow.” I admire him for what he has done and doubt if I would have had the nerve to do the same.

  Last night was the Russian New Year. I took D. out to dinner and we walked home in brilliant moonlight – no blitz. Passing through Grosvenor Square we found the door to the square garden open and went in. There is a tennis court in the middle concealed by trees, very convenient for the square dwellers, but very disappointing to me. I had hoped for a little lake with even a few birds living on a miniature island. It would be impossible to explore a secret garden by moonlight with a woman like D. without a stirring of excitement. I kissed her. From the sensational point of view it was a sensation.

  15 January 1941.

  A routine day, worthy but not inspiring. This is the way my “Better Self” would like me to behave all the time. Went to a War Office meeting in the afternoon. Waste of time. We all repeated what we had said a month ago about prisoners-of-war. It is so hard to resist the temptation to score at a meeting of this sort. One is giving a sort of performance, one has an audience, as one talks one becomes possessed by the wisdom of what one is saying and the folly or wickedness of those who oppose one. I find myself getting angry and aggrieved about something which does not matter a damn, when the only thing that does matter is to find the essential and stick to it. The general in the chair, the “tactful” type of soldier who thinks he is conciliating the touchy susceptibilities of the “colonials,” and wears a soothing smile while he is determined to get his own way. The only technique with such a man is to flatter him in his own coin and never give an inch.

  29 January 1941.

  I am ashamed of the dispatches we send to Ottawa. They give an officialese picture of England at war without conveying any sense of the cross-currents. Above all they leave out any pictures of the social changes stirring just under the surface. Mr. Massey does not want the Government at home to glimpse these abysses lest they should be disturbed in their belief that they are fighting for the survival of political democracy, liberal ideas, and human individualism side by side with the traditional England. He thinks that anything that disturbs this set-piece might weaken the war effort and distract our will. (He says that my dispatches read like socialist speeches!)

  I dined the other night with Anne-Marie, one of the largest landowners in Romania, now on the German blacklist and unable to get any money out of the country. She is clever, full of wit and disloyalty. In her spare time she has dabbled in the arts, gambled on the Black Bourse, and conducted a good many highly personal political intrigues and vendettas. I met her at the Ritz Bar where she holds court every day, surrounded by half a dozen cosmopolitan perverts, smooth young French success boys, professional photographers, English and White Russian interior decorators. Throughout the evening she was always tipping and ordering and changing tables and bullying the waiters. At intervals soft-spoken young men appeared at her table, kissed her hand, murmured a sentence of greeting in French, and slid away again. Meanwhile she sat smoking cigarettes and darting her lizard head from side to side as she observed the company – “Cherchée et pas trouvée,” she remarked as a young woman came in wearing a dress more remarkable for elaborate effort than for effectiveness.

  30 January 1941.

  If we cannot be strong enough to make peace with Germany within two years, Europe will go communist when the Germans do break. Our only chance is to be so strong in planes and navy that with the assistance of the blockade German power will collapse. We cannot alone defeat Germany militarily on the continent of Europe.

  The papers are full of butchery in Romania. Rivers of hate, flowing blood all over Europe. How difficult it is for us comfortable creatures to understand all this hate, all this will to cruelty – that people who have lived next door to each other in a street in some small town for years should – the minute the policeman’s back is turned – fall on each other like hyenas and butcher each other. What years of bitter, suppressed loathing and fear must lie behind that. />
  1 February 1941.

  It is a relief to plunge into the warmly-coloured, variegated women’s world of Colette, whose novels I am reading, to turn one’s back on this man-made time when duty and team spirit are the dreary necessities for survival. Never have I so thanked God for women as in these months. While they still care more about their clothes, their children, and their lovers than about the war it is still possible to breathe even in this constricted atmosphere.

  Anne-Marie received me in her bedroom at the Ritz – marble mantelpiece, red satin panelling, rose-shaded lamps, and a big double bed standing high off the ground – a period piece cosmopolitan Ritz style 92. It exactly suits her. We were joined by a young lieutenant who, talking of a friend of his, said, “He has such an adorable sense of humour.” “Now, there I do not agree,” she said. “Funny, yes, but no sense of humour, you cannot bully him.” Her equation – sense of humour equals niceness equals susceptibility to being bullied.

  It is getting very hard to obtain matches. It becomes a game to see how long one can make a spill of paper last. I go to buy some shaving-cream and the man at the hairdressers says, “It is the pots for the cream that are our difficulty. The shop in the City that supplied them was burnt out in the last blitz.” It is the same with our office stationery – shops that kept it have been blitzed. At the Indian restaurant they give you curry without onions that tastes like hot mud. There is a shortage of French novels and French wines, of glass for spectacles, of rouge. I do not speak of necessities like butter and eggs. In fact there is a shortage of everything except potatoes, bread, and fish, and I believe the last is too expensive for the poor.