I sat next to Margot Asquith at dinner. We talked about the place of the bed in marriage. She is too old and there is nothing left but senile vanity and play-acting. Once with a trace of her old verve she said, “The man who never falls in love is filleted.” She horrified me by saying, “I should like to live forever.” I was thinking at the very moment how tragic it must be for her not to have been able to die before now. She wore a black tricorne hat with a long black crêpe veil, a shrilly bright green silk jacket and a flaring skirt of black and white tartan silk. She looked like a witch – a surrealist witch – in a modern fairy tale.
1 My diary lapsed during much of 1943.
1 Sir Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists, had been detained under regulation 18B in May 1940. He was released in November 1943.
2 In October 1943 the Lord Chief Justice quashed the sentence and severely rebuked a magistrate who had ordered an eleven-year-old boy to be birched.
1 C. M. Bowra, classical scholar, was Warden of Wadham College, Oxford; Mortimer, a literary critic, was then working for the French service of the BBC; he had long ago given up Roman Catholicism (see Bowra’s remarks below).
1944
17 January 1944.
Just back from a weekend with Roley at Bournemouth where his regiment is stationed. He is a local legend in the regiment and he lives up to it. Dark, restless, warm-hearted, caustic, and above all natural. He has captured the imagination of the men in his regiment by being more alive than any of them.
In the morning I went for a solitary walk down the steep Bournemouth streets full of soldiers and airmen. I think I was the only male civilian in Bournemouth under eighty. The whole atmosphere of the mess was like a school just before the holidays – high spirits, jokes, and friendliness. They made the discomforts, most of which are avoidable, seem fun. With dozens of soldier servants they live in unimaginable squalor. Nowhere a picture or a curtain or even an armchair, but plenty to drink – cars right and left – the slipshod cheerful untidiness of bachelor life lived in common. An atmosphere in which even the most pompous, touchy or old-maidish get into the habit of taking jokes against themselves and resigning their privacies. Also like school – the photographs of wives and mothers and children beside every other bed. I think what has cheered them up so much is the consciousness that they will be joining in the coming invasion of Europe.
18 January 1944.
The news of Jock Colley’s death – killed in the RAF–a lamb to the slaughter.
19 January 1944.
Talked to George Ignatieff about this ghastly raid on Sofia where we have wiped out the whole centre of a town, which has no shelters, is built of wood, and is inhabited by people most of whom seem to be pro-Ally. The horror of these destructive attacks on the cities of Europe! It is such a revolting way of waging warfare and no one seems to try to realize what we are doing. It may be necessary, but at least we should accept the guilt and not send out brave, callow youths as our scapegoats to bomb in our names while we treat the news like a cricket score. If the clergymen were worthy of their salt they would make themselves unpopular by voicing our inner doubts about this methodical slaughter.
19 January 1944.
Dined with dearest Elizabeth and Cyril Connolly. He was suffering from a sore throat, but he said when he began to say critical things about his friends his voice came back to him.
27 January 1944.
Our minds much occupied with the incident of Lord Halifax’s speech in Toronto.1 It was not a speech calculated in terms which could appeal in Canada. It was ineptly put and showed no understanding of our psychology. It ought to have been argued in terms of Canadian self-interest. Mr. Massey says that the Prime Minister told him, “In peace-time I would have gone to the country on it.” Yet Halifax’s general argument is hard to answer.
Might it not be more satisfactory if we gave up being in the Empire at all and concluded a self-respecting alliance with England? Of course that would not be practical politics – it would divide Canada. But it is important that the loyalty theme, making sacrifices for the Home Country, should not be stressed – they are preaching to the converted and enraging the unconverted. Also the combination of Lord Halifax, Tory Toronto, and an Empire Club is so unfortunate as a starting point for a debate over the future of Canada.
2 February 1944.
Mr. King says that Empire conferences should be for consultation and co-operation but not for the formulation or preparation of policies.1 Presumably he means that you have a talk but commit yourselves to nothing. While one can agree with him about the dangers of formal machinery, surely that does not mean a totally negative attitude, and how in hell can you co-operate unless you have something to co-operate about, and what can you co-operate in except in plans and policies? The question really is the spirit in which you approach Commonwealth problems. The proper approach it seems to me would be to try to arrive at common objectives towards which we can all work in our separate ways. Where some or all of us can co-operate closely and in detail over plans let us do so without trying to enforce policies on members to whom they do not appeal. Let us have in mind how best these Empire plans can be merged in the wider objectives which the U.N. will have set before them, but Mr. King does not want to work through the Empire towards broader affiliations. He mistrusts the whole thing.
9 February 1944.
I did not think I was still capable of the friendship I feel for George Ignatieff and I am touched by his demonstrativeness. He has a noble and generous nature.
18 February 1944.
Elizabeth says that she works around to getting what she wants like a cat trying to get out of a room, and like a cat forgets in the middle what it was she wanted and remains standing vaguely gazing into space.
Victor Gordon-Ives2 killed in Italy – he was looking forward to enjoying life if there was anything left for an Eton and Oxford young man to enjoy after this war. He used to say how much he envied us having lived in the gay twenties. He did not have a chance – only twenty-two – straight from school into the army. Oh hell!
2 April 1944.
Dined with Nancy Mitford. She is a queer mixture of county and sophistication – you never know which reaction you are going to strike. She talked about Chatsworth where she has just been staying – says that the wind in the corridors blows your hat off like in an underground and that the portraits are being ruined by the breaths of the evacuee orphans who are occupying the house – that they have fat legs in black stockings and are always charging about playing hockey in the state rooms.
20 April 1944.
On Sunday morning at six o’clock Mary Rose Thesiger and I were walking through Hyde Park. It was only four o’clock by the sun and had the desolating stillness of four a.m. We walked down to the bridge with the ground mist still rising. The Park guns looked forlorn and powerless like the débris of some long-forgotten war – débris resting in a deserted field, yet still sinister like prehistoric remains.
When we got to the bridge we lit cigarettes and looked out over the Serpentine stretching to dreamlike mist-enshrouded distances grey and silent. The dawn wind came up – a woman passed with a small boy in a school cap. Why were they there in the Park before dawn on Easter morning, 944?
22 April 1944.
Went down to the House of Lords and heard a pretty thin debate on the Empire. They just do not know much about the subject. There was one old bugger who made me feel like personally establishing a secession group in Canada – Lord W. who had had “three hundred lads from the Dominions” stay with him since the war began. “My imperial conferences, my friends call them.” Patronizing old Pecksniff!
No one in the House showed any real understanding that Canada is a nation with a soul of its own. They all say it but none of them really understand it.
7 May 1944.
Lunched with Elizabeth in the downstairs grill in the Ritz. There were pink tulips on the table with pinkish lights. It was odd coming into it from the sun
light and wind. We talked as we did when we first got to know each other. It was one of those times which we shall both remember afterwards and say to each other, “That fine, windy Sunday in spring when we lunched underground in the Ritz.”
12 May 1944.
Perhaps it is the invasion. We live for D-Day, and after D-Day I suppose we will settle down to some way of living – the same way but with everything shifted a bit. After each of these crises – September 1939, June 1940, September 1940, there has been an adjustment – like a building that has been just missed by a bomb. It “settles” a little – one or two cracks appear. It is still standing the next day, and you are so surprised to see it there that you only notice later that a bit is gone off the cornice and the drawing-room ceiling is sagging badly.
I met my brother, Roley, last night. He appeared in his beret – the first time he has worn it. He said it was to impress me that he was a Commando now. We walked up the towpath from Richmond to Kew. It was a beautiful evening – the enormous chestnut trees in full bloom – the May-trees dusty with white. Before he came when I was sauntering among the people waiting for him I felt a premonition, “That last time I saw him at Richmond.” When I met him in the hall of the Elephant and Castle Hotel it was like meeting him in a dream – just that touch of irrelevance, “Why Richmond? What were we doing there? Why was he wearing a beret and looking so brown?” – the sort of questions one asks oneself when one wakes up.
28 May 1944.
Reading Lady Ottoline Morrell’s1 memoirs which should certainly be published. They have the same mixture of vitality and silliness as George Moore’s memoirs of a young man, and for all her wild fumbling she has an artist’s gift for describing people and places. At one point she brings in Henry James who said of Clive Bell, “that little soiled piece of humanity,” and on being invited to meet an ageing actress, said to his hostess, “A tightrope, a banister, backstairs – anything to save me from meeting that battered mountebank, dear Lady.”
6 June 1944.
D-Day has come. It had become a hallucination – something like the Second Coming or the End of the World. Roley has not yet gone. He rang me on the telephone yesterday. I hope Peter1 will be all right.
The soldiers who have been left behind in London look forlorn and subdued. The town seems empty. The gaiety and sense of pressure and excitement have gone. There is a morning-after feeling abroad. The taxis have become plentiful again and the drivers are beginning to be quite polite now that the American debauch is over.
7 June 1944.
The relief of having got home from that party. Not Daniel escaping from the lions’ den, not Marie Antoinette escaping from the Paris mob can have felt a more profound sense of deliverance than I do. The scene – a converted mews, a vast underground saloon – like the vestibule of a cinema or like the anteroom of Hades – light percolating only from the ceiling. In this “luxurious interior” the most deadly effort at social gaiety ever perpetrated. In a space which could have held four hundred people was collected a handful of American officers mixed with a smattering of peculiarly snobbish women – endless dry martinis, interminable whisky. The final touch for me was added by a lame American with silver hair and dignified appearance who was a “specialist on Russia” and who was in the last stages of gin-intoxication. He got it firmly into his head that I was a spy, and when I said that I could not understand Russian he said angrily, “Don’t you try to pretend with me.”
Mary Rose has a collection of Victorian Valentines thrust in the drawers of an old cabinet and a scrap book of her life. I understood more about her when I saw the photographs of her and her two sisters acting in the play that J. M. Barrie had written for them when they were children. Then I saw the connection with her “little girl” dresses – the schoolgirl dresses that she wears to the 400 Club. She poses as a lost girl and she is one. She and Stephen Tennant are companion pieces – those exquisite children growing up in a world of taste and imagination, of green lawns, strawberries and cream, footmen and whimsicality – those last blooms from the hot-house. The photographs of the pre-war débutante with a half-boiled guardee-peer – the fashionable marriage and now this strange lost child – this cheerful little waif – and anyone – a waiter, a policeman, a man or woman – would come to her help if she needed them.
9 to 14 June 1944.
At this point I became unendurably restless and determined by hook or crook to get to the Normandy beachhead. This was strictly forbidden to all civilians, as the landing had only taken place on 6 June and troops were still landing. However, I had the inspiration to sell Mr. Massey the idea that a message of good wishes should be sent to the Canadian troops in Normandy from Mr. Mackenzie King. I then drafted the message in Mr. King’s name and induced Mr. Massey to get the Prime Minister’s approval. Admiral Nelles of the Royal Canadian Navy arranged a passage for me on a troopship, but said that I would have to arrange my own landing in Normandy as it was impossible to obtain permission for a civilian to land.
I left London on Wednesday, 14 June, in the company of Lieut.-Commander B., Royal Canadian Navy, who had been told off by the Admiral to look after me. He was a tiresome little man, in appearance and also temperament not unlike Mr. Mackenzie King, a neurasthenic bachelor whose job was to look after the Canadian personnel on the large troop landing craft which are about two hundred and fifty tons and have eight diesel engines. There are about twenty of these manned by the Royal Canadian Navy and the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve, who had been serving in combined operations with the Royal Navy. B. described these men as “his children” and spoke feelingly of how they were neglected by the Canadian authorities and bullied by the Royal Navy, of how they had been given ships in bad repair and expected to keep them in order. The officers and crews were of an average age of nineteen. I was to get to know a good deal more about these landing craft and their crews.
B. and I took a train to Portsmouth that night and we repaired to a hotel on the front at Southsea which had been taken over by the Royal Navy – its lounge serving as an unofficial meeting place where officers newly arrived from “the other side” sat in wicker chairs drinking beer and talking shop. B., who had a violent anti-English complex, on being asked for his identity number by the woman at the reception desk said, “Canadians do not have identity numbers – you people know nothing about us do you? Except that our boys fight for you and we feed you.” The woman flushed and looked embarrassed. I did the same. My natural dislike for B. was tempered by my feeling that as he was my naval guide and I was completely off my own ground I must bear with him.
15 to 17 June, 1944.
Thursday, 15 June, was fine – we started off to join our troop-ship Prince William, going first by ferry to Ryde and thence by Jeep to Cowes, which consisted of a narrow winding street packed with the Royal Navy. It was at this point that I first became conscious of my civilian clothes. (I was later to be the only male out of uniform to be seen anywhere in the course of my time in France, except for the Norman shopkeepers and peasants.) I was eyed with curiosity and – not quite – hostility. It was apparent to all that I must be some sort of a bloody nuisance, most probably a journalist. Not for the last time on the trip I longed for the protective colouring of khaki. We took off for the troopship in a small troop-carrying craft guided by a remarkably pert young RCN officer who treated me in the slightly insolent manner common among junior officers to civilians until they have gauged by the behaviour of their seniors what their attitude should be. This cue was readily and warmly given by the Commanding Officer of the Prince William, Captain Godfrey, and in addition my old friend, Rastus Reid, now an Admiral, was on board.
The first day we went over to lunch with the Captain of the sister cruiser, the Prince Henry, and I had my first insight into naval rivalries. The Captain of the Prince Henry was a six-foot Irish-cop type called Kelly. He was Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve, not Royal Canadian Navy, not in fact a Straight Striper. I soon discovered that the RCNVR hate th
e Royal Navy as being stuck-up, stuffy, and superior. They also hate the Royal Canadian Navy whom they consider quite rightly to be an imitation of the Royal Navy. The Royal Canadian Navy for their part pride themselves on the accuracy of their naval tradition, admire, albeit slightly resent, the Royal Navy, and look down on the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve. These and other naval mysteries have been revealed to me in the course of this visit.
That evening B. and I returned in a small landing craft to Portsmouth for me to obtain a landing pass. A tall florid officer with a calm naval manner received me with relaxed politeness but no actual enthusiasm. He remarked casually that he was not a Cook’s Tourist Agency. It was not a promising beginning, and although he became exceedingly amiable when he had seen my papers he would not give me a pass. He said it would get him into trouble with the army authorities. I asked what would happen if I succeeded in landing without one. He painted a depressing picture of my being taken up by the Military Police and shot on sight as a spy. I must say that I was wearing just the sort of raincoat that a spy always seems to wear. It was a dirty old Burberry, but in each pocket I had placed a bottle of bourbon whisky for use as bribes. They clanked about a good deal in the course of the interminable jumping from one small craft to another during my travels. Depressed by the refusal of the pass, I repaired to the bar, where I ran into John R., a large young man, dark, with a look of Indian blood, in the RCN, and this was fortunate as his acquaintance was very useful to me. Later on that night I returned to spend the night on board the Prince William. The navy atmosphere was novel and cheerful – more fun than the army, suffering less from strain than the air force – in fact, not suffering from strain at all. That night they had a party on board – a formal dinner, then schoolboy jokes and horseplay. At the end the party got rough and the younger ones debagged B. It was then that I realized with satisfaction the dislike of B. was not restricted to myself but was shared by all his “children” of the combined operations.
Siren Years : A Canadian Diplomat Abroad 1937-1945 (9781551996783) Page 20