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

by Ritchie, Charles

  George Ignatieff1 was talking today about the “German smell.” He remembers that smell in the changing room at Amsterdam when he was playing hockey against a German team. He says it comes from their gross eating of coarse heavy meats.

  4 December 1941.

  Thinking over what I have written. What a pack of lies intimate journals are, particularly if one tries too hard to be truthful.

  This autumn has been curiously characterless. After being the centre of the world’s stage London has become unexciting. As soon as Russia was invaded and the direct threat diverted, the temperature of the town went down. We are not as heroic, desperate, and gay as we were last winter. London seems drab. The tension is removed – the anxiety remains.

  7 December 1941.

  The attack on Pearl Harbor has caused very human sardonic satisfaction to everyone I have happened to see today. This will take the Americans by the scruff of the neck and bounce them into the war. The picture is that of an over-cautious boy balancing on the edge of a diving-board running forward two steps and back three and then a tough bully comes along and gives him a kick in the backside right into the water! And only yesterday they were still hovering, saying they felt almost sure they might back us up if the Japanese attacked the Kra Peninsula, but they would feel happier if we could give a guarantee of the territorial integrity of Thailand before we invaded its territories. The President had a hot tip that the Japanese objective was Rangoon – but, lo and behold! it was Pearl Harbor. For years I have seen movies of United States reconnaissance planes (“the eyes and ears of the U.S. Navy,” as the announcers portentously described them) circling away from the U.S. base at Pearl Harbor to spy out the Pacific for just such an attempt as this. What were they doing when those five aircraft carriers sneaked up close enough to disgorge those planes? Mr. Massey says, “They have been living in a Hollywood world of unreality.” We listened to Roosevelt’s address to Congress on the wireless in Mr. Massey’s big office at Canada House under the great glass chandelier – the room where he told us of the declaration of war on Germany. Roosevelt was moving and had dropped his mannerisms. He sounded profoundly shocked and bitterly angry. His speech was exactly right.

  At the Admiralty they suggest, “Why not a British naval adviser on every American battleship.” At first the news of American unpreparedness and its results was an immense soulagement of a long-stored, carefully restrained grudge in this country, but when the number of U.S. battleships sunk began to come in an Admiralty official said, “This is getting past a joke.” I have not heard one word of sympathy for the United States here. The note of outraged American indignation at the treachery of which the U.S.A. has been a victim meets with no real echo here. It is like a hardened old tart who hears a girl crying because a man has deceived her for the first time. We have become very much accustomed to treachery – now let the Americans learn the facts of life and see how they like them.

  We Canadians feel all the same that once the Americans have got over the initial shock they will get on the band-wagon and will get into the war one hundred per cent and be producing tanks, planes, etc., by the million when the Japs are finished. The English have no real faith in the United States. Now it is our business to begin boosting the Americans here.

  17 December 1941.

  Reading Peter Quennell’s Byron in Italy. This is the irresistible Byron of the letters and of the early cantos of Don Juan. I can hardly imagine any man, certainly any young man, reading Byron’s letters from Italy to Hobhouse and Kinnaird without loving the writer. I do not know if a woman would be so delighted with them. I doubt it. One could hardly blame them, for no man can read about Byron without having his own egoism reinforced and without experiencing a frantic desire to show off and to find a woman to show off before. This deleterious influence at one time swept the entire European continent. But alas, what puny creatures we all are beside the Great Originals. Hamlet and Byron – the modern world is unthinkable without them.

  I enjoy my walks to the office in the mornings – the elegance of Grosvenor Street, the Maisons de Haute Couture, behind their ageing façades, Jacqmar’s interior seen through the long plate-glass windows with the soignées salesgirls drifting about among the lengths of patterned silk. It looks as a temple of fashion should look – dimly lit and solemn, but luxurious – a proper place to stir the imagination of the passing woman. Oh God, leave us our luxuries even if we must do without our necessities. Let Cartiers and the Ritz be restored to their former glories. Let houseparties burgeon once more in the stately homes in England. Restore the vintage port to the clubs and the old brown sherry to the colleges. Let us have pomp and luxury, painted jezebels and scarlet guardsmen, – rags and riches rubbing shoulders. Give us back our bad, old world.

  21 December 1941.

  Stayed in bed in my new flannel pyjamas reading Byron’s letters with a Christmas fog outside. I had not the will-power even to change the water in which Elizabeth’s flowers were dying. I liked the picture of Byron’s life at Ravenna playing with his animals writing to his friends, or sitting before the fire remembering the past which weighed heavily on him with Proustian power. I like the sketch of him yawning in the fog in Bennet Street on just such a day as this. I walked down Bennet Street today past where his lodgings used to be before they were destroyed in the last reprisal blitz.

  Elizabeth came to tea in her smart black coat with a pink flower in her buttonhole. She lay on the sofa as she likes to do in an oddly elegant and relaxed pose. She never sprawls – mentally or physically. Her long, high-bred, handsome face was pink from the outside damp. She had on her gold chains and bangles.

  On the way home tonight Raymond Mortimer said to me, “Oh Elizabeth, she has such charm and is so kind and makes most of one’s friends seem irremediably vulgar.”

  28 December 1941.

  Just back from Christmas – the Sitwells’ at Weston – my favourite house – fire in the bedroom with a view of a piece of lawn with conifer-shaped shrubs. White frost on Christmas day. We sang carols in the family pew in the stone, stone cold of the little church. It was only the family – Sachie, Georgia, and their son, Reresby, at home from Eton. At the moment I am happier with them than anybody. My sadness and staleness went away. Sachie is sensitive, lovable, and very funny – an ageless creature. He does not seem any older than his fourteen-year-old son. He has altogether escaped pomposity and has no desire to impress. The boy looks seventeen but he seems, too, no particular age and can talk about anything that comes along, but yet is a spontaneous, excitable child. Georgia sparks all talk with her wit and warmth and looks a young beauty. There is a magic about the place that must be distilled in some mysterious manner by Sachie.

  1 General Sir Archibald Wavell was then Commander-in-Chief of British forces in the Middle East and under the greatest pressure from Churchill to stretch his forces to the utmost. Field-Marshal Chetwode had been Commander-in-Chief, India, from 1930 to 1935, but was now retired.

  1 Pierre Dupuy was Canadian Minister to the French Government at Vichy.

  1 He was in fact killed in a plane crash while a training instructor with the RCAF.

  1 The representatives of the Allied Governments in exile in London.

  1 Massey’s appointment and Bennett’s peerage were announced in the Birthday Honours. Bracken, who was to become Minister of Information on 20 July, was then Churchill’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, and so may have been writing on Churchill’s behalf. Bennett’s actual title was Viscount Bennett of Mickleham and of Calgary and Hopewell.

  1 An old friend from Oxford and Harvard days.

  1 Germany had invaded Soviet Russia the day before.

  1 The House of Commons had been bombed on the night of 10 May 1941.

  1 Beatrice Lillie was in London after touring with E.N.S.A. entertaining the forces.

  2 Leslie Hore-Belisha had been Minister for War from May 1937 until January 1940. He held no office in the Coalition Government.

  3 Daughter of Lo
rd Rosebery, wife of the former British Ambassador in Paris.

  4 Second son of the 15th Earl of Pembroke. He served in the Navy during the war.

  1 Then a member of staff at Canada House, subsequently Canadian Ambassador to the U.N. and the N.A.T.O. His elder brother Nicholas was in the Russian and Scandinavian section of British Military Intelligence, and was chief of M.I.3C, 1943 to 1945.

  1942

  11 January1942.

  Elizabeth came to see me in the morning and brought me a cyclamen.

  She talked about women’s friendships, apropos of Virginia Woolf and her niece and Jane Austen and her niece, Fanny Knight. She says that every young woman has such friendships and that the older woman puts into them all the lyrical, poetic side of her nature and that she lives her youth again. The girl finds so much pleasure in being seen through the eyes of love and admiration that she may have a flirtation with a man simply for the pleasure of telling the other woman about it. This is all quite apart from Lesbianism.

  The river in the park was frozen today, and the gulls slid on the ice, looking as if they were doing it for fun, although it probably annoyed them. There was a wintry sun, what, for the lack of a nearer word for the colour, is called an orange sun.

  I had an embarrassing dinner with the Masseys. She was irritable and he was making Balliol answers to her haphazard remarks and beginning his sentences with, “But, my dear.” I did not know what to say or where to look, as my unfortunate face always gives me away. She said, “You have a very guilty look this evening.” I should have answered, “I always look guilty when anything unpleasant is said, even if I am in no way responsible for it.” It is an idiotic characteristic, but I cannot help it.

  13 January 1942.

  Miriam and I were talking about love. I said that the words “Do you love me?” said earnestly had a putting-off effect. Miriam said that on the contrary – this repetitious earnestness is a very good line for women. I said, “But it is such a bore.” She said, “Look how often it works with a man.”

  The sheets are cold and I have just drunk two glasses of ice-cold barley water – emblem of chastity.

  20 January 1942.

  I am reading Tristan et Iseult, the story reconstructed by Joseph Bédier from twelfth-century sources. It is giving me as much pleasure as it used to give the inhabitants of draughty, medieval castles when it was recited or sung to them by passing troubadours. It has the same variety of incident and lack of proportion as the scenes in old tapestries in which some detail in the foreground – a dog or a group of flowers – has interested the artist so much that it crowds out the knights and the castle. It is certainly one of the most enjoyable books I have come across.

  They have taken my chairs and sofa away to have them covered in “off-white” (as the manageress calls it). Meanwhile I have a temporary sofa which looks as if it belonged in an undergraduate’s room at Oxford.

  Elizabeth and I dined at Claridge’s. She was in an easy and cheerful mood. She said, “I would like to put you in a novel,” looking at me through half-closed eyes in a suddenly detached way like a painter looking at a model. “You probably would not recognize yourself.” “I am sure I wouldn’t,” I lied.

  A red-haired young man came up to me in Claridge’s and said, “I have met you somewhere before.” Neither of us could think where or how. He kept on coming back to our table while we were dining and suggesting clues which led nowhere. “Was it playing tennis in Surrey or dining with mutual friends in Cambridge?” In the end I remembered it was on a Sunday afternoon when I was staying with the Fullertons. He played Chopin in the drawing-room while we all sat around on chairs draped in dust-covers. There was a thick mist outside – we sat listening to him until dinner-time and after dinner he did ingenious and boring parlour tricks. Since then he has been shot down in an airplane, lost a lung, and gets six pounds and six shillings a week disability allowance. I think he must have landed on his head. He has a wild look in his eye.

  22 January 1942.

  Dined with Elizabeth at her house. She always manages to have unheard-of quantities of smoked salmon. The house was so cold that we put the electric heater on a chair so as to have it on a level with our bodies. Elizabeth was wearing a necklace and bracelet of gold and red of the kind of glass that Christmas tree ornaments are made of. Some woman friend had given them to her – she considered Elizabeth to be “a Byzantine type.” She had on a white silk jacket over a black dress. We sat on the sofa and talked.

  23 January 1942.

  I feel that this country cannot – in the end – escape the European civil war. My friends seem to me to be waiting offstage to take up their parts. James Peel is going to be the out-of-work ex-officer trained in methods of violence (and yet the most kindly creature), an adventurer and a patriot. There are other friends of mine of the same stamp mostly now employed in Military Intelligence who might qualify for a post-war secret police. My role is indicated – the diplomat who hangs on until the last moment, feeling it his duty to defend his country’s actions right or wrong, reluctant to give up his career.

  26 January 1942.

  Fascinated by the Tristan and Iseult legend. I have been reading Swinburne’s “Tristan in Lyonesse.” It is much too heavily upholstered, the passion is stifled in ninetyish verbiage. Occasionally a line strikes – Laurence Binyon is better with the same subject. But his last dialogue between Tristan and Iseult is flat. Nothing so far touches the twelfth-century French legend.

  27 January 1942.

  Heard the Prime Minister defend the Government’s conduct of the war in the House. It was the greatest speech I have ever heard. For an hour and a half he developed the central theme of the grand strategy of the war and at recurrent intervals sounded the note of his own desire for a vote of confidence from the House. It was an orchestral performance, lesser motifs interspersed were all handled with the same easy strength. To read it would be to lose half of it – the implications in his slightest side-glance were significant.

  One small thing that struck me before the Prime Minister got up to speak was the reception given to a question asked by a Labour M.P. as to why certain people were still allowed to have three or four domestic servants in their employ. The question was greeted with ironical laughter from Conservative M.P.s, the implication of the laughter being that there were no such persons. The Cabinet Minister who answered the question pooh-poohed it and said that he could not accept that such a situation existed. “Of course not,” laughed the Conservative M.P.s scornfully. Yet they must have known as well as I do (better, since most of them no doubt have still got three or four domestic servants of their own) that in any country house you choose to go into there are still domestic servants in threes and fours. A small thing but typical.

  George Ignatieff is shocked that behind closed doors in the War Office the MI boys express the hope that the Russians will be defeated and that three days later the German army itself will collapse. It is and has been all along the ideal British solution. The Russians know this as well as we do. It is the obvious reason for the so-called “mysterious peasant suspicions” of our Soviet allies. But it is not a state of opinion peculiar to this country. You would get just the same reaction in Ankara, Vichy, Rome, Madrid, Stockholm, in the State Department and in Wall Street.

  29 January 1942.

  Dined last night in the Guardroom at St. James’s Palace, a pleasant eighteenth-century white-panelled small dining-room. The lights were turned out during the whole of dinner. Candlelight from heavy Victorian candelabra and firelight. A perfect example of a Guards colonel passing the port says, “Will you try some of this Grocer’s Blood?” It was port of a kind you never taste these days. Politics consisted of railing at Hore-Belisha (of course, they say his real name is Horeb-Elisha). “If they put him back at the War Office I personally would lead a meeting at the head of the regiment and go and kick the little bugger out.” Around the table the young subalterns, a nice crowd most of them lately from Oxford, more interest
ed and intelligent than the peacetime Guards officer. One of them when the subject of genealogy was being discussed (his name was Cayzer) said something about his family’s claim to be descended from Julius Caesar, and in quite an inoffensive boyish way he said, “I believe the descent was quite well established.” “Nonsense,” said the colonel, “Your uncle paid the College of Heralds five hundred pounds to say so.” A very English evening.

  5 February 1942.

  Mr. Massey signed the Agreement for Exchange of Consuls between Canada and the U.S.S.R. at the Soviet Embassy. I had forgotten to provide for a seal so we had nothing to seal with on behalf of Canada. Otherwise everything went well. I feel I have played some part in getting this Agreement safely signed. Did my best to get into the press photographs. Actual signing was in the drawing-room full of yellow silk-covered chairs, with daffodils in a vase in the embrasure of the window and snow outside. Talked with S. of the Tass Agency and he said the war could be over this year if

  (a) We and the United States gave the Russians enough tanks and planes so that they could finish the job themselves, or

  (b) We would start an offensive in Europe.

  What was happening in the Far East was tragic but it did not matter in the long run if Germany could be knocked out. We must go for the weakest link in the chain. Afterwards we and “perhaps my country” (i.e. the U.S.S.R.) could go for Japan and finish her off.

  Elizabeth has gone to Ireland. Miss her even more than last time. I am getting dependent on her.

  10 February 1942.

  Lunch at the Royal Empire Society for a leading lady of the ATS. She made a speech afterwards about ATS work. I thought her a detestable woman, a hard-bitten clever careerist. Reminds me of the manageress of these flats. She has a soft voice and a piquant manner calculated to go over big with cabinet ministers and generals.