by Jimmy Burns
Of the original close group of Catholic friends, Harman Grisewood, by contrast, was working flat out and almost to the point of exhaustion at the BBC, a key link man between the Corporation and Churchill’s war effort. In his letters to Madrid, Jones also reported on the occasional visit by Bernard Wall, down from Oxford where he was working as a researcher on a ‘secret Foreign Office project’.
Periodically Jones dined with Douglas Woodruff, the former Times leader writer who was now writing regular leaders for the Tablet as its editor, strongly supportive of Spanish neutrality and Britain’s ongoing relations with Franco, while his wife Mia helped coordinate nursing support across London. Jones shared occasional leisurely lunches with his literary patron, Hilaire Belloc, the religious apologist and social prophet who had lived his life with an irredeemable grief and an embittering sense of failure. Belloc lived in Cheyne Row, around the corner from Burns and Grisewood. With the local church named after the recently beatified Catholic martyr Thomas More, this small part of Chelsea had developed into a faith-based community in the heart of London.
Belloc was looking older than his seventy years. Italy’s declaration of war had struck at the old Catholic’s heart, while the fall of France, where his beloved daughter Elizabeth lived, had filled him with anxiety. It was only several months later that he heard through his one-time disciple Burns that she was safe. Burns sent word that Elizabeth had crossed into Spain, before making her way back to England. Belloc, meanwhile, continued to urge the Pope to speak out against the Nazis but the head of the Catholic Church continued to confine himself to generalities.
Meanwhile, Eric Gill was working on his autobiography despite periodic bouts of sickness. Unaware of the cancer beginning to creep up on him, he was busily making plans to emigrate to America with his family to join Graham Carey in the founding of ‘another cell of good living’. He had lost none of his mistrust of industrial society and its ability to create a proper human world. He now saw war as a death wish once again made reality, with mankind drifting towards self-destruction.
Months before the start of the war, Burns and two other Gill disciples, Harman Grisewood and Rene Hague, while on their way to visit the sculptor, had narrowly escaped serious injury if not death when the brakes on the MG sports car Burns was driving failed, leaving the vehicle to crash into a brick wall on the outskirts of London. Hague put the three friends’ survival to divine providence. ‘Now, that’s the sort of accident I like – just time to make an act of contrition,’ he had remarked after stumbling out of the crippled car, good-humouredly.
And yet the accident was an omen of sorts. For the extended community of family and friends that had stayed at Pigotts and which Burns had come to know so intimately had long been in a process of dispersal, and in the case of one of its female members, disintegration.
At the time of the accident, Gill’s one-time model and apprentice and David Jones’s muse, Prudence Pelham, was suffering from depression and was under treatment for a creeping multiple sclerosis that would eventually lead to her death in 1952, at the age of forty-seven.
‘What a real sod and bugger this neurosis is for this generation – it is our Black Death, all right,’ wrote Jones.
Prudence’s husband Guy Branch was flying increasingly dangerous missions with the RAF and had once been reported missing, only subsequently to reappear. The news had been brought to Glebe Place by Paul Richey, brother of Mike, who was on short leave from duties with Bomber Command. Richey had turned up to borrow Burns’s sports car for an outing with a girlfriend. As he watched the car disappear down the King’s Road, tooting as it went, David Jones recalled the day when Burns had taken him and two other friends for a drive to one of their favourite country pubs, only to misjudge a curve and end up in a ditch, laughing their heads off like schoolboys breaking rules. Those days of carefree merriment seemed gone for ever. Those who got drunk and made love now did so in the knowledge that their days might well be numbered.
Mike Richey had tried as best he could to keep in touch with the network of Catholic friends that Burns had helped build up in the run-up to the war. Earlier in the summer he had written to Graham Greene with some critical comments on The Power and the Glory, arguing that he had found the novel too long and the portrait of the priest theologically unconvincing. Greene wrote back defending his work: ‘You are objecting to him (the priest) on the same grounds as people who object to a book because it has no nice characters. The answer is: they are not meant to be nice.’ It was a courteous exchange nonetheless, born from a growing friendship. Greene extended an invitation to Richey to come and visit him when he was next on leave, before adding, ‘You certainly live now in a stranger world than the priest’s.’ Mike, the younger of the two Richeys, was in some secret part of the ocean, blowing up mines while avoiding German U-boats when he wrote to Greene. Soon afterwards, while on shore leave, he visited Jones at Glebe Place. ‘He looks like a young lion with a blue anchor tattooed on his vest and hairy fore-arm – he’s just the same,’ Jones wrote to Burns.
Richey collected a gift Burns had organised for him before leaving for Madrid. It was a brandy flask inscribed with the legend: love to Mike from David [Jones], Tom [Burns], and Ann [Bowes-Lyon]. The flask was later lost at sea.
Letters continued to arrive at Glebe Place for Burns, and Jones took care to sift them. One letter arrived with Burns’s name neatly typed on a large brown envelope. Jones opened it and saw that it came from Burns’s tailors in Jermyn Street, Mayfair. It was an unpaid bill with a warning of imminent legal action to recover the debt. Jones rang and secured an indefinite deferment after telling the manager that his friend was on ‘a top secret mission of huge national importance’.
‘I bet it is bloody hot in Spain,’ Jones wrote to Burns days later. ‘I think about you a lot and wonder how you are liking it all. It’s weird to think of you there. Rum when chaps are away doing something quite different and all looks the same – the room etc – as if you might walk in any moment and say, “Come on, Dai, let’s have a pint – I’m absolutely dying for a quick one.”’
It was bloody hot in Spain but that was not what most concerned Burns in those early days in Madrid. It was his conscience. In a letter to Jones he confessed to feeling wonderfully suited to the heat and the shade, the long lunches, the two-hour afternoon siesta, then the long, balmy evenings, drinking and dancing and feeling that the Spanish lifestyle was good for the soul. But it was then that he remembered how he had left London just as the capital and the entire country was bracing itself for an onslaught by Nazi Germany. He had settled in Gaylord’s – just as the Battle of Britain had entered its preliminary stage. German attacks had also begun on convoys of merchant ships, those which his friend Mike Richey had volunteered to protect with his minesweeper.
Then the Luftwaffe began bombing RAF bases in southern England, before turning on London. Burns thought of Paul Richey, and Prudence’s Pelham’s husband Guy, flying Spitfires off the English coast. Both were eventually shot down. Paul survived but Guy was lost in action. He thought, too, of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, from whom he had not heard since leaving London but who, he imagined, were now closer to mortal danger than he was.
Waugh’s tortuous search for military employment had finally borne fruit the previous November when his application to join the Royal Marines was accepted. Months of indoctrination in military history and training followed until the end of May 1940. Then, while stationed at a tented camp at Bisley, near Aldershot, he received a message to call Burns. It was Saturday 25 May and his old friend and publisher – at the time Burns was still at the MoI – had somehow managed to track him down to the Swan Hotel in Alton, where he was spending a romantic weekend leave with Laura Herbert, his second wife. ‘We went to church, read P. G. Wodehouse (who has been lost along with the Channel ports), watched old men in panama hats play bowls, and forgot the war. Burns made strenuous efforts to get in touch.’
Three days later, on his return to Bisley
, Waugh received an official summons to report ‘soonest’ to the MoI. Arriving there on 28 May, he recorded:
‘I found the news of Belgian surrender on the streets and women selling flags for “Animal Day”. Had hair cut and bought pants. Went to M of I [Ministry of Information] where Graham Greene propounded a scheme for official writers to the forces and himself wanted to become a marine; also Burns. I said I thought the official writer racket might be convenient if we found ourselves permanently in a defensive role in the Far East, or if I were incapacitated.’
Waugh’s biographer Christopher Sykes described the Official Writers Scheme typical of the ‘empty-headed utopianism of the “Phoney War”’ which was already out of date by the time it was proposed. Within weeks Waugh had been appointed an intelligence officer with 8 Commando brigade and was on his way to Freetown in Sierra Leone as part of an Anglo-French attempt to wrest Dakar in Senegal from the Vichy government and install General de Gaulle and the Free French in its place.
The operation turned into a military fiasco late in September 1940. But long before then Burns had fixed in his imagination the image of Evelyn bravely fighting battles to which he was physically and psychologically unsuited, a heroic example which darkened his own early days in Madrid with a sense of guilt. That he should feel like this was somewhat ironic for, unknown to Burns, it was his mission in Spain that Waugh had looked to with some envy at a time when Madrid was filled with Germans and Aldershot had no Germans at all. Waugh had learnt of Burns’s sudden appointment from their mutual friends Douglas and Mia Woodruff during an evening in London on leave, drinking champagne. ‘They [the Woodruffs] were full of tales of the interesting jobs all my friends are getting – Tom [Burns] in Madrid, Chris [Hollis] in Washington. I felt sad to be going back to the confusion of the marines.’
As things turned out, Waugh would reach West Africa only after Graham Greene had got there first – although neither they nor Burns could have predicted how their respective lives would unfold in the weeks and months after their unsuccessful attempt to engage with the Official Writers Scheme.
The guilt that Burns sometimes felt at leaving London for Madrid was accentuated by the German aerial offensive on the capital which began on 7 September 1940 and continued every night until 2 November that year.
The horror of the Blitz was brought home to those who had shared the vigorous literary life of the 1930s by news of a heavy air raid on a leading publishing house in Paternoster Row, near St Paul’s. It was there, while working for Longman, that Burns had shared an office with the employees of Burns & Oates, the firm named after its founder, his great-uncle James. It was there, too, that Burns had signed up Greene to write The Lawless Roads and discussed other publishing ventures with Waugh.
News of the bombing reached Burns through Douglas Woodruff, whose offices had also ended up reduced to ashes and rubble of broken brick and stone, and charred furniture. Burns also heard about the bombing of Greene’s house in Clapham. Miraculously, Greene had been staying at his studio in Bloomsbury with his mistress while his wife Vivien and the children were in Oxford. As Vivien later remarked, not without a sense of enduring pain and betrayal caused by the love of her life, ‘Graham was saved by his infidelity.’
Burns would later come to reflect with sadness that the destruction of Greene’s house in Clapham, where Vivien had once cooked him and her husband a generous meal, had come to symbolise the beginning of an end of a marriage he had suspected was doomed to failure because of differences of temperament and expectation.
He would learn belatedly that Greene’s job at the MoI had come to an abrupt end in September 1940. Greene was allowed to leave by the Ministry’s new Director General, Frank Pick, on the grounds that his position in the writers’ section – ‘an absurdly hilarious time’ according to Greene – was no longer necessary. As his friend and publisher, Burns rightly sensed that Greene’s ignoble exit from the MoI was providential. It allowed him to draw on material for further novels, and paved the way for his eventual recruitment by MI6 and a posting in early December 1941 to Freetown, Sierra Leone.
In the letters Burns wrote back to London during those months in 1940, he had Greene among others in mind when he told his friend David Jones how bad he felt to be enjoying his posting to Madrid when all the other ‘chaps’ and the world generally seemed to be having such an ‘awful time’. But he also reflected on how the ‘love thing’ he felt for Ann Bowes-Lyon was not about being ‘above and beyond or below and besides’, it was on a different plane. And there was a part, deep within him, that confessed to wanting nothing else but Ann. As he wrote to Jones, ‘Hell, bugger them all. I will be as near to Ann Bowes-Lyon as I bloody well can be, even if she does not write another letter back and is completely indifferent. Empires can crash and the lands be waste – let the buggers get on with it – I must be near the extraordinary girl – I can do no other come what will.’
A Catholic with a conscience needs a co-religionist to set him free. So it was that David Jones came to act as Burns’s informant, confessor and counsellor. Jones’s surviving letters to Burns gave a vivid if sometimes rambling account (one letter was fourteen pages long) of how the London they had experienced together was changing under the impact of war. Right up to the beginning of September, Jones continued to visit their favourite pub on the embankment, the Cross Keys, and hear mass at the Church of the Holy Redeemer in Cheyne Walk, where the statue of her patron Thomas More served as a constant reminder of Catholic witness and martyrdom for the faith. ‘We get raid warnings a good bit at any old time in the 24 hours, one has got quite used the sound of the old sirens, occasional bumps and “noises off” etc. It is a bloody curious type of war … odd in many ways, everything goes on as normal except that if one makes an appointment it may get put off if there is a warning.’
Then the bombs started falling and Jones found it increasingly difficult not to write more graphically about the devastation they caused. He and the rump of friends that remained in London clung desperately to old habits and old haunts. On 14 September 1940, Harman Grisewood, then working as the BBC’s assistant director for programme planning, married Margaret Bailey at the Holy Redeemer in a ceremony attended by Jones and three other friends. They celebrated with a champagne lunch at the Hyde Park Hotel and a visit to the zoo during an air-raid warning. There was no one there except for the animals. They ended the day having tea back at Grisewood’s home at 61 King’s Road, before he went off to the BBC on night duty.
It was, as Jones put it, ‘very phantastical now, this curious compound of ordinary private life in the old haunts, mixed in with the violent stuff.’
Despite the Blitz, Burns’s dark tabby, Tim, for ever immortalised in his letters to Ann, seemed to flourish, his coat full and glossy as he devoured pieces of liver bought for him by Jones from the local butcher. Ethel continued to cook meals for Jones and tidy up after him, thanks to the cheques Burns sent from Madrid. She was by now also working part-time in an air-raid shelter.
Number 3 Glebe Place survived the Blitz unscathed physically, but bombs hit a house across the street, the crypt of the Holy Redeemer, and the local public library on the King’s Road, killing dozens of civilians. Jones made plans to evacuate his paintings. Wherever he walked he saw a church damaged, books burnt. Winston Churchill had no doubt that the ultimate scalp the Luftwaffe was seeking was St Paul’s Cathedral because of its iconic status. It all added to Jones’s growing sense of seeing Hitler as an anti-Christ, destroyer of faith and art.
In a letter to Jones, Burns said he felt that what he was living through in Madrid was ‘uncontemporary’ in the sense that it seemed existentially dislocated from the horror sweeping through Western Europe.
Jones tried to put Burns’s mind at rest. ‘I think you ought to do whatever you bloody well feel inclined to do, and, sweet Tom, don’t let it get you down. It is difficult for anyone else to know a person’s mind. Anyway it is not a moral question. But it would seem that if you can be of use
in any place, stay put. We’ve all got ourselves to think about – and by doing what we can best do and most want to do, ourselves, we best do what is best for the jolly old “community” in the end. I’m sure of that … to an on-looker, however intimate, you seem to possess all of the requirements and qualifications for the kind of job I imagine you are doing.’
In fact, for all his years in publishing, cudgelling authors of the likes of Waugh and Greene, inherent empathy with the Catholic faith, and networking abilities extending from the higher echelons of Whitehall to Buckingham Palace, nothing could have quite prepared Burns for the job he found himself doing in Madrid.
His tasks went well beyond the normal duties of a press attaché. In peacetime this would have been reduced to keeping tabs on what the local media were reporting and acting as an information service, if not informal tourist office, on UK affairs. Such duties were neither relevant nor practical in Spain after the outbreak of the Second World War, given the censorship imposed on the Spanish media and the pervading influence of the Nazis based in Madrid, not least in the areas of propaganda and secret intelligence.
6
Of Princes, Priests and Bulls
When Burns arrived in Madrid in the early summer of 1940, the youngest member of the Spanish government was Pedro Gamero del Castillo, a Minister without Portfolio whose anaemic sounding post belied the influence he had at the highest level of the regime. Gamero was a rising star within the Falange party who had served as governor of the Andalusian capital of Seville after its ‘liberation’ by the Nationalists during the Civil War. Gamero was also a close ally of Ramón Serrano Súñer, the Secretary General of the Falange, Minister of the Interior and Franco’s brother-in-law, the most powerful figure in the regime after Franco himself.