by William Boyd
After about six weeks I asked to see the governor—I said I had a confession to make. Some days passed. Then one evening I was led downstairs to one of the big drawing rooms on the ground floor. It was half empty but here and there were some tatty but rather fine pieces of furniture. A tall lean man in his fifties, with hair so severely combed it looked painful, stood before the fireplace in a light grey double-breasted suit.
‘Habla ingles?’ I asked and, on being assured that he did, I told him everything: that my name was Logan Mountstuart, that I was a lieutenant in the RNVR attached to Naval Intelligence and that I had been sent to Switzerland to pre-empt the flight from Europe of important Nazis at the end of the war. All I asked was to be put in touch with some consular official who looked after British interests or even Alien Dulles, head of OSS in Bern. Everything could be quickly sorted out.
The man looked at me and smiled. ‘You really don’t expect me to believe this nonsense, do you, Señor Peredes?’
‘My name is Logan Mountstuart.’
‘Who is Ludwig?’
‘He was my contact in Geneva. I never met him.’
‘That is a lie. Who is Ludwig? Where is he?’
I protested I knew nothing more of this Ludwig-person. Guards were called and I was taken back to my room.
And so my life continued. I never saw this man again, although I made regular requests (I now believe he was Colonel Masson, head of the Swiss Military Intelligence). Boredom reached new levels of intolerability. My one distraction was that I began to keep a small farm of insects that I found in my room—silvery woodlice, a cockroach, some small brown ants—which I herded together in a small packet made from a corner of the blanket of my bed. I named them all (though the ants were hard to tell apart) and during the day I would let them roam, closely supervised, about the room. It passed the time quite effectively. They kept escaping, of course, and I kept having to replenish my stock, but each escape was a small moment of vicarious freedom for myself, as if it were me wriggling through a crack in the floorboards or under the skirting when my back was turned. From time to time I made requests to see figures in authority, but all in vain.
I descended into a form of tolerable apathy—which I believe all prisoners experience. You surrender your individual spirit to the routine of the institution. I had no idea where I was, what I was being held for (apart from spying, I suppose) or what benefit accrued to the Swiss nation from my expensive incarceration. I had faith—almost as naively trusting as religious faith—that efforts were being made to release me and that Freya knew what had happened to me and that I was alive and well. I realized I would just have to wait.
And then suddenly, in the late summer, I was given smoking privileges. A few ounces of loose tobacco and some cigarette papers. I learned to roll the thinnest cigarettes, thin as cocktail sticks with a few shreds of tobacco tightly packed. When I wanted a light I had to call a guard. I began to hoard my spare cigarette papers. In the washroom was an old sooty stove used to heat the water for the showers and the baths. On my way out I would scrape some flakes of soot off the outside with my nails. This soot, when mixed with urine, formed an acceptable if pungent ink. I had a safety pin holding my trouser fly together—my pen. I had pen and ink and paper. And thus began ‘The Prison Diary of Logan Mountstuart’. It took me hours to write a few sentences, scratched in laborious minuscule handwriting on my slips of cigarette paper, but for the first time since my arrest my old spirit began to stir and ease itself. I was a writer again.
§
October. Peregrine (one of my woodlice) has died. Found him in the morning curled in a tight ball and when I tried to unwind him he broke in half. Poor Peregrine, he was the most docile and least adventurous of my insect crew. Lurid, fiery sunset over the lake. Terrible pangs, a physical ache, missing Freya and Stella. Surely they must know I’m alive, at the very least. My request for writing materials turned down again with no explanation. The guards accept your requests without demur and always apologize when they return empty-handed. NID must be aware I was taken. The mysterious ‘Ludwig’ knew where I was staying. (How? Was he outside the hotel, saw me arrive and followed me to the Cosmopolitan?). He would have reported I was picked up. At night I sometimes hear the drone of heavy bombers heading north to Germany. Intense gustatory memories of the apple pie I had at lunch the day I was arrested—the last sweet thing I ate. The taste of freedom? Apple pie.
14 November. Hugo told me the date today. I call him Hugo but have no idea if that is his real name. He won’t tell me. All the guards now refer to me as Gonzago, despite my protests. Hugo seems to be on duty every three or four days. I ask him in French how the war is going and he smiles and nods and says ‘tres bien’. One has a sense of the guard rota being as well organized as everything else in this place. This afternoon I banged on the door for five minutes until a guard came. I demanded to see the governor. Request denied.
Today I went downstairs to meet ‘someone from the embassy’. Interestingly, it—was three days since my vain demand to see the governor. You think you have been refused, but it’s just that they operate very slowly.
The man introduced himself as Sefior Fernandez and said he was from the Spanish consulate in Lausanne and was responsible for Uruguayan affairs. He said I was only the fifth Uruguayan to visit Switzerland since the war began. I told him my story and my true name. But if you are British, he said, looking disappointed, you are no longer my responsibility. Can you get a message to my wife? I asked. Of course, he said, your wife in Montevideo? No, I said, in London. He spread his hands, ‘es muy dificil’. I told him Freya’s name and begged him to write down the address, which he did,’eventually. ‘Just write one line,’ I said. ‘Tell her I’m alive, that’s all. Can you do that?’ He gave a nervous smile and said he would try.
§
[1945]
§
January. The new year passed in solitude and silence. I wrote a poem to Freya on a slip of this paper, then rolled some tobacco in it and symbolically smoked the cigarette. I’ve been in this place nearly a year now and am beginning to be tormented by some unpleasant suspicions. I’m growing convinced that there is a link between my arrest and incarceration and what happened in the Bahamas. I’ll never forget the Duchess’s words: we still have powerful friends. For example, why was I recalled so quickly after the de Marigny arrest? And just who is this Colonel Marion who dreamt up ‘Operation Shipbroker’? How come Ian knew so little of what was going on? I mull over the chain of events and dislike the questions that are raised: what about the police who were waiting for me at the Hotel du Commerce? Or the speed with which my parachute was found? Just filthy luck or some darker force operating?
§
This life is like a slow but gentle torture and for me the most terrible aspect of my imprisonment is the loneliness. For the first time ever I feel truly lonely: I’m without the comfort afforded by others, my loved ones, my friends. It’s not a question of solitude: one can bear solitude, but no one likes to feel lonely.
Sexually my libido is subject to some crazy rhythm. Sometimes I masturbate six or seven times a day with all the unreflecting prowess of an adolescent schoolboy. Then three weeks will go by without a lascivious thought entering my head.
I’ve abandoned my insect ranch: they die from cold—or when I put them near the radiator they die from heat.
It’s most peculiar possessing so little in the world. You could say that the dothes I wear, my bed and its bedding, my table and chair, my chamber pot (and its rag for arse wiping), my tin of tobacco and my thin sheaf of cigarette papers and my safety pin represent the sum total of my worldly goods. And they can’t really be described as my possessions—they’ve been lent to me. I think of my duttered house in Battersea, my thousands of books, my paintings, my papers, my crammed drawers and wardrobes…Suddenly to have my world, my stuff, reduced to this meagreness makes me feel without ballast, without identity.
§
The lake as I see i
t from my window has many moods and this modest view has become the focus of my aesthetic being. All beauty, all transcending thoughts, all stimulae and evaluation derive from this circumscribed panorama of Lake Lucerne. I think if they were to brick up this window I’d go mad within hours. Today the angle of the sun makes the lake a sheet of burnished silver. High thin douds mist the sky’s blue ever so slightly. I can see half a field of corn shading from pale green to the first hint of ripening sand-yellow. I wish there was a road and some human traffic. I can watch the birdlife for hours and once, just once, I saw a small steamer with a thin scarlet smoke stack come into view, turn and sail back beyond the window edge.
Hugo let slip today that there is a new director of the prison. I asked to see him. Request denied.
§
August. At about two in the morning I was wakened by the rise and fall of a siren and I thought at once it was an air raid. Two guards came in and ordered me to get dressed. I was hurried downstairs and pushed through the front door and on to the gravel. Three other prisoners were there: we blinked and stared at each other like Victorian explorers meeting in the jungles of Africa, shy and tongue-tied. Others joined us, fetched out from the various floors of the big house: eleven in all, identically dressed in grey tunic, black trousers and heavy dogs. The alarm was genuine—there was a fire in the kitchen. Some sort of fire appliance was driven round the back of the villa and we could hear shouts and breaking glass. It was the most excitement we’d had in months and the guards were restive and curious. While they were distracted by the fuss, I turned to the man next to me and said, in English, ‘What’s your name?’
‘Nicht verstehen,’ he whispered, ‘Deutsche.’ So this was the enemy. ‘Englander,’ I said. He looked at me, baffled, then pointed at another man: ‘Italiano,’ he said. A guard shouted to silence us. Who are we, I thought? What are we doing here in this villa by Lake Lucerne so strictly and solicitously guarded? What have we done?
§
August. As usual my denied request to see the new director produced its familiar tardy results. I was led down to the drawing room and introduced to a young American with round horn-rimmed glasses. ‘I don’t exactly know what to do with you, Mr Peredes,’ he said apologetically. I went through the rigmarole of explanation again. ‘This is a security—intelligence—matter at root,’ I said. ‘If you could get the OSS to pass this on to London, then I’m sure something could be worked out.’ Then he told me that Dulles had dosed down the OSS. ‘Since when?’ I said. He blinked at me, surprised: ‘Since the end of the war in Europe.’ He told me the war was over, had been over for some months, and I felt both sudden panic and huge relief. The end had to be in sight now—but why were we still being held incommunicado like this? I gave him Freya’s name and address and implored him to send a message saying I was alive and well. He said he would do his best. Please, I said, as the guard led me to the door, just do that one thing for me. ‘Battersea, England?’ he shouted after me as the door dosed. ‘Battersea, London,’ I shouted back. I hope he heard.
§
I catch fewer and fewer glimpses of my fellow prisoners (glimpses were all I ever had), and this infrequency means that I’m beginning to worry that I’m left alone in this villa. I asked Paulus (another guard I’ve christened) what was going on now the war was over and he said, ‘Oh, they keep us busy.’ I asked to see the director but was told that the director was now based in Beme. I said that if I didn’t get to see the director I would go on hunger strike. ‘Hey, Gonzago,—‘ he said, looking hurt. Tranquilo, hombre.’
§
15 December 1945.1 left the villa by the lake last night dressed in the freshly laundered clothes in which I had been arrested. I was supplied with official-looking documentation, a form of temporary identification paper issued by the Ministry of the Interior, which announced that I was one Gonzago Peredes, citizen of Uruguay. I was driven in a truck to a railhead at the Italian border, where I joined a group of two hundred other displaced persons (mainly Croats and Romanians) and we were put on a dosed train for Milan. We were interned awaiting interrogation in an internment camp (campo 33) near Certosa. My days in the villa by Lake Lucerne were over. Finally I was on my way home.
§
[NOTE IN RETROSPECT. 1975. My recent reading has now convinced me that the circumstances of my arrest and incarceration in Switzerland 1944-5 were complicated by a moment of panic that occurred in Swiss military intelligence. From the beginning of the war the Swiss had a spy planted at the heart of the Nazi regime and received a flow of first-rate intelligence material from this source. In 1943 a security blunder had put this secret link at risk and the Swiss became increasingly uneasy that they were being fed compromised information and that a German invasion of Switzerland was growing more and more likely, with the aim of making the country an impregnable lynchpin in the Germans’ wider plan of ‘Fortress Europe’. This state of high sensitivity did not really begin to subside until after D-Day on 6 June 1944. My dandestine arrival in the country in early ‘44 could not have come at a worse time. I had parachuted into a snake pit of paranoia, military trepidation and raw nerves. Everything about me—the Uruguayan connection, the mysterious ‘Ludwig’, my own admission that I had come to contact high-ranking Nazis—made me the object of massive suspicion. Whoever betrayed me could have had no idea of the consternation I would cause.]
Wednesday, 19 December
Campo 33. Certosa. Strange to be accumulating possessions again. My own suitcase, a change of dothing, a shaving kit, some American magazines—signs of my re-entry into the real world. I managed to speak to a British liaison officer called Crozier this afternoon. An intelligent man, he could see that my story was true, however fantastical it seemed on first hearing. I almost wept with joy when I saw credulity replacing scepticism in his eyes. He said he would cable London immediately. I asked him to cable Freya also and handed him a letter I’d written to her. He promised it would be delivered and gave me a notebook and pen and ink He suggested that I write everything down in the form of a memorandum while the details were relatively fresh and warned me there would be some strenuous debriefing and interrogation up ahead before I would be sent back home. So tonight I will write down all I can remember about the ill-fated ‘Operation Shipbroker’. But after my conversation with Crozier my heart was distinctly lighter: I walked back through the swarming camp towards my hut, through the riff-raff, the dispossessed and les miserable! of Europe, looking about me with a fond and benevolent eye. Hitler is dead, evil vanquished, we have won the war. Logan Mountstuart’s life can begin again.
The Post-War Journal
The post-war journal is a strange and often disturbing document, not surprisingly, given the desperate circumstances that met Logan Mountstuart on his return to England in late January 1946.
The brutal facts are these.
When LMS did not check into the Hotel du Commerce in February 1944 and was arrested the next day he effectively disappeared from the surface of the earth as far as NID was concerned. The last person who could testify to having seen him alive was Flight-Sergeant Chew—who had watched him step out into the night air through the hatch in the side of the Liberator bomber. The contact ‘Ludwig’ reported that LMS had never gone to the hotel as arranged. All attempts at discovering what had happened to him were fruitless. (This makes one wonder who the ‘Ludwig’ was that sent the message to the Hotel Cosmopolitan—giving some credence to LMS’s persistent accusation that he was betrayed).
In NID, after a few weeks of total silence, it was assumed that LMS had met with a fatal accident or been killed—a fate that befell many agents who parachuted into Europe. The parachute could have failed to open; he could have made a landing on a mountainside and broken a leg, fallen into a lake or been dropped in the wrong place—in occupied France rather than Switzerland. None of these could be discounted and as the days went by NID feared the worst.
In March, Freya Mountstuart was visited by Commander Vander-poel, who inform
ed her that her husband was missing, presumed dead. He told her only that LMS was an NID agent and had parachuted ‘somewhere in Europe’ on a secret mission. The effect on Freya can be imagined. The devastating news was confirmed when she was awarded a war-widow’s pension. To all intents and purposes Logan Mountstuart was dead. LMS’s mother was informed and so was Lionel. A mass was held in Brompton Oratory attended by a few friends (Peter Scabius, notably) and some colleagues from NID (Plomer, Fleming, Vanderpoel).
Freya and her young daughter now had to cope as best they could. Some months later, probably in August, she met Skuli Gunnarson, twenty-nine years old, a member of the Icelandic Liaison Committee based in London. They began to see each other socially and in October they became lovers. Freya’s letters home to her father and brother mention Skuli with increasing frequency. Stella also liked him a great deal, it was reported.
In December, Freya married Skuli Gunnarson and he moved into Melville Road. Mercedes Mountstuart was a witness to the wedding and toasts were drunk to LMS’s memory at the small party held afterwards in a room above the Lamb and Flag, Battersea.
In late January 1945 Freya discovered she was pregnant. Two days later she and Stella were killed by the blast from a v-2 rocket as they were walking home after infant school. Thirteen other people were killed in the explosion.