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

by Ritchie, Charles

Dined at the Conservative Club. Gossip about Stalin – they say he wishes Cripps would not come and bore him by talking communism to him.1 Stalin hates bores but takes a great interest in the Windsor-Simpson story. He cannot understand why Mrs. Simpson was not liquidated.

  16 February 1942.

  Maisky, the Soviet Ambassador, to lunch – very amiable with an amusing attractive face. Madame Maisky won the Masseys’ heart by taking an interest in the claret and talking about the days of her courtship in Omsk. When they left the Masseys subscribed to the opinion that they were “a dear little couple.”

  17 February 1942.

  A cold wind blowing all the dust in the streets. I went down to the House of Commons to hear the Prime Minister make his speech on the escape of the Gneisenau and Scharnhorst.2 The House in an agitated and restive mood, a series of short speeches and questions. A fumbling about for a voice in which to express the wish for a new deal. A fag-endish, nervous, inconclusive semi-debate, the rattling together of dry twigs that only wanted a flaming voice to stir them into a blaze of public indignation. The Prime Minister, strained and tired, keeping his voice low and being very patient and restrained in a perfectly obvious manner like a parent dealing with naughty children and determined not to lose his temper. The control snapped when he spoke of the House being in a mood of “anger and panic.” At the word panic an angry wave of protests spread through the House.

  27 February 1942.

  Dinner with George Ignatieff and a friend of his, an instructor from Harvard. If the Russians win and Europe is Sovietized, at least to the Rhine, the English socialists will want a socialist England to join up in some sort of federal union with the countries of the “New Europe.” On the other hand, the governing class here pin their hopes more and more on the United States. Which way will England go? If history and geography can be relied on, I should say with Europe, and what about Canada? Probably under the United States’ umbrella, where some of our professors of economics have been telling us for years we ought to be. I cannot imagine going back to the old small-town Canada with its narrow, intense, local interests and sitting down under it again.

  My brother Roley’s mess is a depressing place.1 They live in slum conditions – they have taken over an ugly, characterless country house in Sussex. The mess is beaver-boarded – I suppose to protect the panelling – not a picture on the walls, just dirty beaver-board. Three uncovered dirty old sofas, each adorned with the person of a pot-bellied, bored, senior Canadian officer in a recumbent position, with a glass of brassy whisky in hand. A few hard wooden chairs with younger and equally bored officers seated on them.

  Politics have caught up with me at last. Here I am reading G. D. H. Cole in preference to Rimbaud. (Rimbaud’s phrases are time-fuse bombs – I read them without understanding and their meaning explodes later in my mind.)

  3 March 1942.

  Elizabeth was discussing her method of writing the other night. She says that when she is writing a scene for the first time she always throws in all the descriptive words that come to her mind. She overdoes the situation, puts in everything which will heighten the effect she wants to get, like, as she says, someone doing clay modelling, who smacks on handfuls of clay before beginning to cut away and doing fine modelling. Then afterwards she cuts down and discards and whittles away. The neurotic part of writing, she says, is the temptation to stop for the exact word or the most deliberate analysis of the situation when one should hurry, get the general effect and then come back and write over, but sometimes one gets stuck like a needle in the groove of a gramophone record and cannot stop going over and over one point.

  She says that characters must not be made to say things which fit into situations intellectually conceived beforehand. The best writers of dialogue in English, she thinks, are Jane Austen and E. M. Forster in Howards End.

  Sat with Miriam in her room at Claridge’s while her maid curled and brushed her hair – felt like a French abbé in an eighteenth-century boudoir print.

  I wish I could get a job for Mrs. Elliott Smith – poor old girl. I think one should do one’s best to provide for one’s friends if one is in office. I cannot bear the assumption of impersonality by civil servants. I am all for nepotism and jobs arranged over the luncheon table by feminine influence, etc., etc. – provided it is not at my expense. Still I would take a chance on that.

  7 March 1942.

  For some time now I seem to be getting more and more greedy about food. It may be partly due to having considerably less to eat, but the way I wolfed my food at the Masseys’ tonight was rather too much. What a curious and fascinating character Mr. Massey has – that blend of acuteness and superficiality. He has enormous susceptibility to more phoney forms of charm. What he loves in life is delicatezza – the pleasant surface style. He is a puzzling person because behind his London Times leading article official views and his carefully polished manner there lurks an ironic appreciation of things as they are and of himself as he is. When he has a decision to make – disappointingly – he always decides in favour of the conventional. His charm is remarkable. It springs, as charm so often does, from his own insecurity. He is painfully easy to hurt or ruffle and full of prévenances for the feelings of others if he happens to like them. If not, he is ruthless. Sometimes I have been stifled by the too strong atmosphere of the Masseys’ love of power, but I am very fond of them and diverted by them. Their relationship to each other is the most admirable thing about them. I never expect to have another chief who is so personally sympathetic – after all, I share so many of his weaknesses. His critics may have a great deal on their side, but he is so much more interesting as a personality than they are.

  6 April 1942.

  Weekend in the country. Nancy Mitford staying there – witty in a high-pitched, restless way, clever, and giving off that impression of courage which some people convey even when making small talk around a tea-table. She belongs to the world of Evelyn Waugh’s novels and to the set of which Evelyn Waugh is a member. They have a definite tone of their own. They are all now in their thirties or early forties and were the bright young things of the 1920s. Except for one or two who have become Roman Catholic or Communist they are as bored by religion as they ever were. In the arts they admire Baroque and Regency (in architecture cathedrals and Tudor beams are their aversion), Mozart in music, in literature anything that shows style and exuberance – nothing that is soulful, formless, or introspective. In love as in conversation a flavour of insolence is appreciated. With both sexes the thing admired is to do what you want just as long as you want to and not a moment longer. Hence the speed with which people change partners in this game, which requires a good eye, a cool nerve, and a capacity to take punishment as in any other kind of sport. Toughness is the favourite virtue. Any form of cry-babyishness (wistful yearnings, hopeless passions, plain self-pity) is taboo except among pansies, in whom it is recognized as an innate characteristic which does not affect their essential toughness. In this little world almost none are stupid. Some have “dumb” husbands or wives whose excuse for existence is that they are rich, good-looking, or superlatively bed-worthy. There are also a few “holy idiots” tolerated who are “rather sweet” and who are often rich and sometimes American and who pay the bill. Their gossip is so frank, so abundant, and so detailed it is a wonder that their lives are not even more complicated than they are. Discretion is looked upon as a paltry virtue like thrift. Their closest friends’ reputations are ripped to pieces at the tops of their voices usually in a restaurant. Among themselves they practise a mixture of delicate sympathy and charming attention, alternating with dive-bombing attacks of brutal frankness. Rows are frequent but seldom lasting. They stick by each other in misfortune with the loyalty the English usually show to their friends.

  13 April 1942.

  I am reading Barometer Rising, Hugh MacLennan’s book about the Halifax Explosion.1 It is the first time that anyone has succeeded in giving the feeling of the town and the poetry peculiar to the place,
the dreariness and yet the fascination of those fogbound days when the town is smothered and shut in, half asleep, half in a slow trance, snow running in the gutters, horses on the cobblestones of Water Street, the sound of trains whining over the uneven rails, the recurrent melancholy of the foghorn, the feeling of the sea – February in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

  In the afternoon I went with Elizabeth to Hampstead. On the way back, walking through Keats Grove and the quiet French provincial streets full of flowering shrubs, Elizabeth talked about Virginia Woolf, saying how tall and graceful she looked wearing some flowing dress of mauve or grey. Elizabeth said she had a sort of “fairy cruelty” but she did not know how much she could hurt. There were many forms of being hurt about which she knew nothing. She had never been humiliated herself although she used half jokingly to say how shy she was and that she could never go into a room full of strange people without feeling that they thought her odd. In fact, she had always lived in a sort of Chinese world of intelligent, complicated people who had made a cult of her. From that world she never issued – she led a guarded life.

  Elizabeth met a female admirer last night at dinner who said to her, “To meet you is like meeting Christ.”

  14 April 1942.

  Dined with the Masseys – Margot Asquith was the big attraction. I was amazed – I had expected her to be pretty gaga and to have the depressing job of trying to reconstruct the original from among the ruins, instead of which I am inclined to agree with Mr. Massey that she is still the best woman or perhaps man conversationalist in England. What put her on her form was the presence of Sir Andrew Duncan, the Minister of Supply, who was there. She arrived in full war-paint, crossed swords with him at the close of the fish course, and carried on a duel all evening. Her enjoyment of her own skill is still infectious. Her vanity is stridently insistent, but she has a streak of humility – a sort of refreshing honesty running through all her boasting. I believe she is considered an old nuisance, but I think she is a phenomenon. She brought with her a protégé, a boring German Jew editor. She said she brought him because he was such a remarkable man that she wanted the Masseys to meet him, but he hardly got a word in and looked, I thought, slightly bitter about it. He has probably had a good dose of Margot, who is obviously like all these entertaining Edwardian relics an impossible woman at close quarters.

  I must add that we each had a filet mignon for dinner – one week’s meat ration for three people! How?

  16 April 1942.

  David Cecil had dinner at Elizabeth’s. I was charmed by him, his quick responsive flicks of attention, his irony and his wit, his contempt for the middle-brow, the snob, and the inflated personality. At one point in talk he said, “One does not often have to put one’s foot down, but I feel it is useful to have a Foot to Put Down.” I like him and Cyril Connolly best of Elizabeth’s literary friends.

  Later in the evening Stephen Tennant came in. He and David had a lovely little conversation – effusive, sprightly, and prickly.

  Lunched with Anne-Marie at Claridge’s. She looked pure Paris. When I asked her how she did it she replied that first, she always dressed her age (forty-nine), never a year younger and that gave her an extra five years’ margin, second, she always wore black, and thirdly, she attended to detail. She said that every Englishwoman should be presented with three more clothes-brushes than she has at present and told how to use them. Her territory at the country house where she is living with rich friends has been invaded by a parasitic bugger called Mr. Midge. Anne-Marie says that he has “cried his way out of the army.”

  30 April 1942.

  Dined with the Masseys off salmon-trout and asparagus. Mrs. Ronnie Greville was there – sitting up in a bath chair with her feet dangling on to a footstool. Her small hands covered with diamonds, and with her painted face – she looked like a monstrous baby – something in grand guignol. This was also the impression given by her having only one eye – the other is dead and blind – and that one eye raked the table round – illuminated by intelligent malice. The conversation was on a royal plane during a great deal of dinner, highly aristocratic titbits of scandal. (Lady Y who has run away with the groom. Lord X who has eloped with his stepmother.) Resigned prophecy that Cripps will be the next Prime Minister. The old girl is kept alive by her sleepless snobbery, her still unquenchable zest for the great world. She is a lowland Scot, and the lowland Scot from Boswell on is the most insatiable animal on earth when it comes to worldly glitter and bustle. I should know – I am one.

  10 May 1942.

  Yesterday was a day of flowers. The tulips are out in St. James’s Park – they are at their time of perfection – not one has fallen out of the ranks. Three unattractive little girls were picking the faded bluebells that grew on the bank above me and stuffing them into a shabby leather handbag that must have belonged to one of their mothers. It irritates me that since the railings have gone people pick the flowers and trample the grass in the parks until it becomes hard dry earth. The lilac is out. It gives me a feeling of urgency – its time is so short – only about a fortnight.

  Something of the panic of middle age is coming over me. It is the bald spot beginning on the back of my head. This morning I combed the longer hair from the sides back over the place where it is thin. I felt as if I were adjusting a wig which the wind might blow out of place. I seem surrounded by nice but ugly girls.

  19 May 1942.

  Went to the House to hear Attlee on the war situation. He treated the House to an insulting meagre string of platitudes. The Members were impatient and rather badly behaved like schoolboys when the headmaster is away and a weak under-master is temporarily in charge. L., who is in the Dominions Office says, “I now serve under Attlee who would be ideally suited as an assistant manager of a bank in a small town in the south of England.”

  Margot Asquith waylaid me in the passage outside the gallery wearing a green tulle dress and a brown fur hat, her make-up dashed on with a careless hand, rather gaga – but only when the wind blows nor-nor-west.

  24 May 1942.

  A perfect May day. Elizabeth and I went to Kew. It is hardly worth my while to describe the scene or dwell upon the dreamlike state in which we drifted among ravines of rhododendrons and azaleas. It was a day like a page from one of her books, the involved relationship between the two people who are wandering among the flower beds. They sit together on a bench to look across the narrow muddy Thames at the set-piece of Syon House and discuss projects of happiness, voyages they may never take, childhood, but never Love. There is sun and then a shower – they take shelter under the green tent of a weeping willow and go together through the modest, white-panelled rooms of Kew Palace where hang the framed embroideries of dead princesses. Then tea among the devitalized inhabitants of Kew in a room full of small tables each with its white tablecloth and its groups of whispering, mumbling people who are bound by some spell not to raise their voices, not to laugh, and not to gesticulate. At moments I could see Elizabeth peering about her – her head a little back, her eyes half closed (how affected it sounds – how utterly unaffected the gesture was) focusing on the memories of the place.

  Elizabeth has been going to an Austrian psychoanalyst to be cured of her stammer (which is so much part of her). So far it seems to me that she has told him nothing while he has told her the story of his life. This hardly surprises me.

  25 May 1942.

  My feelings are mixed when I read speeches like that of Wallace in the United States – “this is the century of the common man.” Apparently we are to devote ourselves after the war to bringing the blessings of mass production, hygienic American civilization, and American uniformity and materialism to the world.

  26 May 1942.

  I had lunch with Nancy Mitford. She fluted away in her light, modish voice, being amusing and looking so distinguished with her beautiful head and thin arms. She says there is no use speculating on what will come out of Europe after the war because no one dreamt of fascism twenty years ago and somethin
g equally unexpected is brewing now. Yet one ought to have anticipated fascism – all the signposts were there and had been for the previous one hundred years. I had drinks with Billy Coster – his politics are wonderful. He blames everything on “Mr. Morrison, the Duke of Bedford, and the Archbishop of Canterbury”1 and thinks it would be possible with the scientific use of gas and the RAF to exterminate at least fifty per cent of the German people.

  2 June 1942.

  I went to see Elizabeth this afternoon and found her standing on the balcony of her sitting-room that looks over Regent’s Park. The tall, cool room is full of mirrors and flowers and books. She wants to dedicate her next novel to me. I hope she will, and that it will be her best.

  Later we walked out into Regent’s Park. It was a blazing June day – we sat on the bank by the canal watching the swans “in slow indignation,” as she says, go by.

  Of what is her magic made? What is the spell that she has cast on me? At first I was wary of her – “méfiant” – I feared that I should expose my small shifts and stratagems to her eye which misses nothing. Her uncanny intuitions, her flashes of insight like summer lightning at once fascinated and disturbed me. Now day by day I have been discovering more and more of her generous nature, her wit and funniness, the stammering flow of her enthralling talk, the idiosyncrasies, vagaries of her temperament. I now know that this attachment is nothing transient but will bind me as long as I live.

  5 June 1942.

  Some slightly drunk and defiantly cheerful American soldiers were piling into a taxi tonight in Berkeley Square shouting and in general throwing their weight about. Surprised looks on the faces of two elderly English gentlemen of military bearing who were waiting to cross the square – an “old-fashioned look” – contempt concealed by policy.

  11 June 1942.

  Dined at Nesta’s – J. was there. I drew him out to see what his line is at the moment and he gave me my money’s worth. He says that Russia will be defeated this summer which he thinks is highly desirable. After that we and America will defeat an exhausted Germany. He thinks that is the secret plan of the War Cabinet. There would be two stages in Germany’s defeat, the first will be that the German General Staff will get rid of Hitler and offer peace and to liberate the occupied countries. He says that the masses in the occupied countries do not hate the Germans – it is only the intellectuals. Hatred of the Germans would disappear if their troops were actually withdrawn, etc. His immediate concern is that the British people should be warned of the approaching collapse of Russia. He asked me what my reaction to the fall of Moscow would be. I said, “Blank dismay and discouragement but not despair.” “Ah,” he said, “that is what I am afraid people’s reaction would be.” I might have asked him if he expected me to hang out flags in the street. I do not say the man is a German agent but his line of talk, though a farrago of nonsense, is about the best a German agent in England could produce at the present time. I do not think it would be at all a bad thing to lock him up. I think it is monstrous that he should still be printing his bloody pamphlet. He gave me a lift home in his ostentatious Rolls-Royce, which must be the only one of its kind left in London and which is usually parked outside Claridge’s or the Ritz.