“I was brought up to sit on top of the pyramid of my fortune. I was taught nothing practical, but after the war when it became necessary I turned into an excellent business woman. I must have had that from my mother’s side – where the money came from. So you see I am a mixture of everything, only I have no Jewish blood.”
5 May 1941.
I have just got back from a day in the country lunching with Loelia, Duchess of Westminster. She is witty, worldly, and sensible. She lives in a house full of rococo white china and pretty little eighteenth-century chandeliers and lovely abundant flowers, and is herself opulently handsome, with dark eyes and an independent swing of the hips. If there was a revolution she would open an interior decorating establishment on Fifth Avenue and do handsomely out of it. People like her just cannot lose.
I spent last evening at Margery Ziegler’s. I shall remember that funny little converted box of a house and her window-boxes of dust-laden pink carnations and blue front door and the little drawing-room full of flowers and the slum neighbours going to and from the pub with caps pulled down over their eyes, and the river at the end of the street. She loves the house and has stayed in it all through the blitz, although it is only a box of bricks, and it is just luck that it has not already collapsed about her ears with all the land-mines that have fallen around it – for it is almost under the shadow of Lot’s Road Power Station, one of the principal German objectives. If there is an air raid I always think first of her sleeping on a mattress down in the passage below the level of the area railings, quite sure that she is not going to leave her own house to live anywhere else.
We are all publicly agreed that it would be better to be dead than to be defeated. On this principle any one of us would risk his life tomorrow. Yet do we really feel this to be true? I do not. Yet if necessary I would act on it.
21 May 1941.
I do not know how to account for the extraordinary feeling of happiness and of completeness which I have felt in this past year in London. I have a premonition that it must mean that I have gone as far as I can go – that I am being shown happiness like a stretch of fair landscape that I have been in search of for a long time but that once having seen the promised land I must lose it. Tonight sitting in the park in a deck-chair, smoking a cigarette, watching the searchlights, smelling the lilacs, I felt – this is too much – retribution must follow.
I dined with the Masseys – if only their enemies could see them like that they could not help being touched. Their love for each other is the most attractive thing about both of them.
25 May 1941.
Dined with Lady Malcolm after the ballet – Orpheus and Eurydice, music by Gluck – so unbelievably badly done that the only thing to do was to treat it as a joke, and even as a joke it was too long, choreography infantile, costumes ludicrous, dancers ugly, graceless, and amateurish – they do not even know how to get across the stage, much less any technique – practically no dancing in it and I must say it is music which makes no impression on me at all. The only interesting thing was Constant Lambert’s face – he was at the piano – a remarkable face – sensitive, highly intelligent, and, I think, repulsive.
Well, I got Jack Grant out to Canada today with his wife and child. I have paid that debt in a way certainly never expected. I remember this time last year when he came reeling into my office. He was in the Bomber Command and had been going up in France six and seven times a day and making night flights over Germany. In a few months he had aged years from a boy into a tired man – so dizzy with fatigue that he did not know if he was coming or going. I wrote him off as one of the war’s losses – never thought somehow that he would come out of it alive. Here he is a year later with a wife, a superbly healthy son, and a good job, on his way to Canada out of the war – and what is more the desperate look which he has always had – the look of a man who is gambling against himself – has gone. He is a responsible husband and father. I thought of him as a tragic figure, a man who cannot compromise successfully with the world or his fate and so butts his head against stone walls. He is going as a Training Instructor with the Air Force. Now he is safe unless, of course, his ship is torpedoed on his way to Canada or he is killed in an accident.1
30 May 1941.
I took the ballerina to lunch at the Ritz. She was a little nervous of the place and kept her checked mackintosh on in the bar because it was new and under it she was wearing an old tweed suit. I told her today that I was falling a little bit in love with her and so I am a little bit. She is my perennial type. When I die they will find some woman’s name written on my heart – I do not know myself whose it will be!
1 June 1941.
I like to remember the mornings after I have spent a night out when I have got up very early to be away before the daily charwoman arrives and standing in the damp grey morning air waiting to get one of the first buses with the people starting out for their day’s work coughing and gossiping and grousing and waiting stolidly – patiently – for the bus – working men with coat collars turned up and stout women going scrubbing who spent last night at the local. I am unshaven and drifting and happy and with all the pores open to physical sensation and the tight core of will melted. Then to get into my smart pseudo-New York flatlet that always smells of whatever they clean the carpets with, and I have a hot bath and sausages for breakfast to celebrate the fact that I feel fine.
Love affairs. In my youth (that is until this year, for my youth was one of the protracted kind) I used to be bewildered by my own lack of feeling in affairs of the heart. I felt that my love affairs were not up to scratch. I did not yearn or suffer enough – not nearly enough. I still feel that – I believe it to be a much more common state than people suppose. For to hear me talking of my loves you would think me to be a creature of burning passions and palpitating feelings, particularly if I am telling a woman of my ecstasies and sufferings in love’s lists. This is just advertising one’s own temperament by exaggerating what one is capable of feeling in love. Most other people knowingly or not must employ the same trick. It is true that promiscuous love-making knocks a lot of the nonsense out of one, and at the same time it “hardens a’ within and petrifies the feelings!”
2 June 1941.
The common people of England deserve a few breaks and if it is socialism they want they should have it. I would trust them to make any form of government into something tolerant and tolerable.
5 June 1941.
It has begun to thunder – that is what I have been expecting all evening without knowing what it was. I walked alone in the park. It was hot for the first time this year and everything was in bloom at once – lilacs (white lilacs leaning over the garden wall at Apsley House), hawthorn everywhere, and chestnut. The grass is long and shaggy – people have trodden paths across what used to be smooth preserved lawns. There are cigarette boxes and papers everywhere, but the trees are in full magnificence and there are lovers on the grass and solitary ladies reading lending library books in their deck-chairs, and old dirty human bundles of tramps, and everywhere soldiers. I think of last year walking in the parks after Dunkirk when they were full of the remnants of half the armies of Europe with foreign voices and tired strained faces. Again we are on the edge of something momentous. And next spring?
7 June 1941.
The mournfulness – more than that – the terror of being alone is upon me. I am really frightened of these walls. I do not like the way my self seems to expand and fill the whole room when I am alone like this. I am more frightened than I dare to write.
We have had a little Scottish factory manager here who has escaped from Lille telling us about conditions in the north of France, the extent of the sabotage and the decline in morale of the Germans stationed in France. This is all to the good and gives one the much-needed refreshment of realizing that the Germans have their own difficulties and the hope that if pressed they might crack under them, if only we had the power to press them. From what one can piece together from unoccupied France it
is rather different there. The richer people are adapting themselves to the new life. They no doubt vastly prefer the socially safe Pétain regime to the Blum government – they have not, apparently, been ruined financially by the defeat of France. It is the same kind of situation in Romania and probably all through central and south-east Europe. The richer classes are not doing too badly – business is good. They are picking up the strings of their lives again and cushioned by cash are accepting the inevitable. There is greater freedom to travel in Europe and conditions are coming around to a new kind of normalcy. “You cannot,” says Basil, “get the rich down.” People who are adapting themselves like that must wish for German victory – a British success means continuation of the war indefinitely, more destruction and danger, more interruption of business, and finally the probability of a social upheaval. The lower classes and the city intelligentsia are pro-British. But this class line of sympathy is blurred in thousands of cases by other elements, patriotism, race (e.g. the Jews), and individual temperament and experience.
I was talking to an officer of the United States Embassy who has lately been transferred from Berlin. I detect in him what I find in most people who have lived on the Continent since the war began, an unexpressed but apparent acceptance of the invincibility of Germany. He has been in Berlin during our raids there and says they are nothing – nothing at all – compared with German raids on London – that of course one knew already. Some believe that the German crack up will come in the end through the lack of inner toughness of the German people – their nervosity. They picture the fat men sitting around the bar at the Adlon Hotel in Berlin wiping their brows with their handkerchiefs and saying, “Ich bin nervös.” I tried that picture of the German temperament on my American friend who said it applied to the older generation but not to the young men. He obviously feels that the Germans understand the nature of war much better than we do and says they throw themselves into it one hundred per cent because they want to get it over with and see that is the only way to do it.
With the Americans more than with most people nothing succeeds like success. If we are defeated in the Middle East this summer, if Germany then proposes peace and we have to turn to the United States and say, “It is up to you – do we continue the struggle or come to terms?” that will be America’s hour of testing. We went through the same test and after failing twice came through with the goods in the end.
12 June 1941.
Went with Vincent Massey to the Conference of Allied Representatives1 held at St. James’s Palace in a long saloon panelled in rather worn green silk and hung with copies of royal portraits. Winston Churchill delivered a melodramatic and moving oration and made a historic occasion of what could so easily have been just a formal gathering of politicians and diplomats sitting around a green baize table (“quite like a meeting of the Council of the League of Nations” as Belinski, the Pole, said). The Prime Minister made one see it as the assembly of all the duly constituted governments of Europe who had sought refuge in the embattled fortress of England and who would in due course issue forth to deliver their oppressed lands from the heel of Hitler. He indulged in one of his usual diatribes against the Nazis with all his usual relish. These terrific castigations always make me feel a little uneasy. He so obviously enjoys piling into Hitler and the Nazis – and you feel it is just too easy for him. Also you wonder if he won’t one of these days overdo it and reduce the whole thing to a music-hall level. He is very near the music-hall sometimes, but he always manages to get away with it. One of the secrets of the hold of his oratory over the English people is that he makes them feel that they are living their history, that they are taking part in a great pageant. He gives them his own feeling of the continuity of English history. All the same there are murmurs. Crete was a blow to his prestige, already one hears again that phrase which used to be ever on the lips of Tory back-benchers, “Churchill, oh yes – but he lacks judgement.” The Tory wives are beginning to say that again now, and that shows that their husbands have begun to say it to them again, although they dare not say it in public – yet.
Mr. Massey was made a Privy Councillor today – it was Churchill’s own idea and Mr. King concurred. The Masseys are so excited and happy about it. It is really touching the way Mr. Massey reacts to praise and recognition. He is so open about it like a schoolboy who just cannot resist ice-cream. Brendan Bracken wrote and told him that few men living had done more for the Empire.1 Certainly the Empire has no more loyal servant. Bennett’s peerage provides me with the headache of writing to him. Lord Stampede of Calgary is the best title suggested.
Crossing the park I took a minute or two off and sat in a deck-chair beneath two May trees of varying hues of pink – under a parasol of blossom. I thought that I would like to spend the day drifting through the parks without object and without personality, watching the lovers, looking at ducks and flowers, listening to the bands – neither imposing myself on other people nor receiving their imprint and above all not having to observe with precision, not making mental notes – just drifting – as if into a sunny impressionist picture where everything swims vaguely in light and colour.
16 June 1941.
It really is most interesting about Billy Coster1 brought up in the smart Paris-American world of Ritz bars, promiscuity, and snobbishness. He now finds the only real fun he gets out of life is serving behind the bar in a small pub in a poor street in Chelsea. The people he enjoys being with are Bill Epps, the local plumber, and Millie Lighthouse, the barmaid at “The Surprise.” Those social charms which he would not dream of displaying at Newport are lavished upon the working people who come in for a half-pint. They obviously love him, and I suppose it satisfies his need of affection. I think he would do well to marry his barmaid, but then I am all for experimental marriages – where other people are concerned. In my advice to others I notice that I scorn worldly considerations and always counsel them to take a chance – a chance that nothing would induce me to take myself. I was thinking tonight at dinner with Billy how much more difficult it is to talk freely to one’s friends than it used to be when one was young. There was a time when I would have told Billy quite freely anything about my private life – and now – no. The things that one cannot talk about accumulate each year – each month there are more things that one suppresses. One grows more polite, more guarded – why? How I cling to the few people to whom I still speak freely, yet no doubt they despise me for it.
Mackenzie King has been putting on the most remarkable display of panic – was invited to come to the get-together of Commonwealth Prime Ministers. He has cabled the longest apologies to Churchill. 1. He cannot leave the country because of the problem of unity. 2. Labour difficulties. 3. Conscription. 4. External Affairs. 5. Possibility of the United States coming into the war. 6. Needed to campaign the country. 7. Knows nothing about strategy. I do not know why he does not add that he cannot leave because he is having his front parlour repapered and is needed to choose the design. When he says that anyway he does not think the meeting would serve much purpose he is on surer ground – in fact he may be quite right on the whole position. But what maddens one is that it is such a demonstration of cowardice, personal and political. If the cables were published surely he would be dished politically.
As someone has said (General McNaughton) he must be a very brave man to refuse to take the risk of coming. He cuts such a figure. It has put Mr. Massey in a spot – although he thinks that King should come, he does not want to put himself on record as opposing or supporting or confirming King’s line – lest he should be made the public scapegoat – and at the same time the ball has been thrown to him, and he is in trouble if he will not play. Personally I would feel very tempted to try to put King on the spot, but that would be shortsighted. 1. The issue is not important enough – it does not involve anything really essential to winning the war. 2. Much as one would enjoy putting a spoke in the old hypocrite’s wheel, the fact remains that there is no one who could take his place with an
ything like the same chance of keeping the country together. He is easy to rail at but not easy to replace.
We had an interesting Canadian lunch the other day – Graham Spry and I, and three Conservative army officers, all imbued with contempt for Mr. King and all agreed that the Canadian war effort is nil compared with what it might and should be. Graham, an ex-socialist, agrees with them on the last point and in fact considers that Canada has relaxed its efforts since September of last year. Certainly, unless King’s telegrams are entirely bluff, the situation at home must be very tricky. Now we need a few victories or else some bombing blitzes on North America to make us know what we are up against.
X. was talking about Churchill yesterday and said that when he first met him he was not impressed. It was in Canada – he was recovering from his accident in New York and was drinking too much brandy. Then he met him again a few years ago at lunch. He dominated the table with his compelling monologue which fascinated everybody, although he did not agree with his argument which was a scathing attack on the lower classes – the plebs – for whom he had no use. In summing him up he said, “He has plenty of spirit but no soul.” In fact he is an old pirate and if things go wrong people will find out and will turn on him and he will end in disgrace and they will forget that he is the only thing that kept England – so far – from a Vichy Government.
Siren Years : A Canadian Diplomat Abroad 1937-1945 (9781551996783) Page 13