The Last Englishmen

by Deborah Baker

“Stomach pump and many horrors,” Nancy said of her stay in University College Hospital. In the morning the doctor she’d been seeing began sternly:

  “Either you promise to …”

  “I promise,” she replied before he could finish.

  Within a month of leaving hospital Nancy was assigned to ambulance station no. 49, on St. Pancras Way at the back of Camden Town. In twice-weekly letters to Louis, she itemized her complaints. The men, retired taxi drivers or ex-army officers, were not in the least tempting. It was too icy to practice driving (never her strong suit), so the work involved sitting in a circle around an electric fire from 3:30 to 11:30 p.m. knitting woolens for soldiers. This, too, proved a challenge: she soon disgraced herself by not following the pattern.

  The ladies were all refined and deadly and spoke only of getting home to their hubbies and home fires. For Nancy, a little of her Percy Street room went a long way. The winter was the coldest in ninety years. Ice on the tracks prevented coal deliveries. Everyone and everything was frozen, including the war. She said nothing to Louis about her attempt to end it all, and nothing at all about Sonia.

  George Washington Hotel, 23 Lexington Avenue,

  New York City, September 3, 1939

  Having heard from home that John was going out for the RAF, Wystan sent off a cable, accusing his brother of doing so to spite himself, as if he had nothing to live for. He begged him to wait for his letter before signing up.

  Wystan had once written that a writer’s duty was to “make action urgent and its nature clear.” In 1938, as with Spain in 1937, he’d been ready to sacrifice everything. He believed death would solve his “problem.” But he had changed since he’d left England, and his ideas about where duty lay changed with him. He no longer had a death wish, no longer aspired to become a he-man. He had burst into tears when war was declared, and took that as a sign he was not meant to be a soldier.

  But what argument could he use with his brother?

  The day Hitler invaded Poland, Wystan renounced all his previous fiats. His new credo was, “We must love one another or die.” The primacy of love underlay the four-point argument he set out in his letter to John.

  Point 1. If John had found a love that made him happy and then made the choice to sacrifice it, that would indeed be heroic. What difference did it make that Sheila was Bengali, or that Chester was a Mister not a Miss? John had another life ahead of him—“don’t imagine you won’t find it.” The search for that life trumped whatever compelled him now.

  Point 2. The war was a showdown between the Nazi-Soviet war machine and Big Business Imperialism. Wystan failed to see what use John had for either. Letting his hatred of the Nazis drive him into the arms of England made as much sense as letting his hatred of the British Raj drive him into the arms of Hitler. “This war is not our war,” he insisted, as if he might decide that for them both.

  Point 3. As a member of the intellectual elite, John’s duty was to understand what was happening. With that he might incubate in his own life a brighter future. “It went without saying that this would take as much courage and hard work as flying an aeroplane.” He begged John to stay in India or find a way to come to America.

  In California Wystan and Christopher had studied yoga with a California swami. This was Point no. 4. Leaving aside the mumbo jumbo, Wystan said, there was a great deal of profit in Raja Yoga. If a pacifist position is taken, every effort must be made to be genuinely nonviolent in one’s private as well as one’s public life. Louis MacNeice, struggling with whether to stay in America or return to England and join up, had parted company with Wystan here. He didn’t see how pacifism could be justified, given that they weren’t pacifists at the time of Spain and Munich.

  Left unsaid in all four points was Wystan’s fear of losing John.

  John had just been to the cinema to see Edward G. Robinson in Confessions of a Nazi Spy when the declaration of war came over the wireless. He asked himself if Wystan was right. Was he joining up to spite himself? He decided: no, he wasn’t. And when Wystan’s letter arrived, he answered it point for point. Yoga held no interest. Making war to create a new order from the ruins was hopeless. Even the idea of a war to end Nazism meant nothing to him. With Sudhin now his closest friend and Sheila his lover, he certainly didn’t believe in racial superiority, an English Blut und Boden. England’s cause for him meant the cause of Sugar Loaf near Abergavenny, the burrows on the Downs, the Cotswolds, the Roman Wall, and the Pennine Fells. For these relics of childhood, he would give his life. Nothing else. He hoped his ability to read maps and fly planes would prove useful.

  Sudhin knew that he and Sheila were together, at least for now. There had been an awkward drunken moment when Sudhin, sensing John’s ambivalence, tried to renew his claims on her. Later, he’d written a letter of profuse apology, begging John’s forgiveness and expressing his hope that John’s relationship with Sheila and their friendship with him could continue on as before.

  Since then John and Sheila had spent nearly every evening dancing at Firpo’s till the wee hours. After sleepless nights in her arms, John would drop her back at Bright Street at dawn, driving the car in his bedroom slippers. He would continue on to the Dum Dum aerodrome to practice takeoffs and landings. By ten he was asleep on his desk.

  But after a month of this he felt he needed to get a handle on himself. The late nights would have to stop. His nerves were shot. He hadn’t qualified in the first round of the RAF pilot’s test, having failed to nail a three-point landing. His hands shook and there was a hollow in the pit of his stomach. He hadn’t told Wystan the real reason he was enlisting, knowing he would disapprove. He wanted to see himself in an airman’s uniform; he wanted to fly a Blenheim bomber.

  Were he and Sheila of the same race or living somewhere other than Calcutta they might have had a chance to be happy. But the bald truth was, they weren’t. And he’d rather die than brave the hostility of those English who would view his relationship with an Indian with the same revulsion as the Nazis. Sheila would soon be off to Bombay for an exhibition of her paintings and that would be the end of it. The RAF would keep him from falling back into the mire.

  Sheila had the right attitude: nothing really mattered.

  Stay in America, John had written Wystan. Nothing he could write would save England. Only the wholesale murder of the bunglers on Downing Street and the twits in A Class bungalows orchestrating the evils and bloodshed in India would accomplish that. If Wystan decided to become an American, he wouldn’t judge him.

  Others would. Questions would be raised in Parliament as to why W. H. Auden was not returning to England in his country’s time of need. But long before His Majesty’s Government decided to take up the fight against fascism, Wystan had fought it and lost. He was surrendering his weapons and retiring from the field. As he had broken the contract he imagined he would be the first to honor, he expected no forgiveness.

  Viceroy’s Palace, New Delhi,

  September 3, 1939

  Viceroy Linlithgow had been unable to assemble the All India federation of provinces and princely states as called for in the 1935 Government of India Act. No matter how eloquently he had appealed to the nizams, nawabs, rajahs, and maharajas of India to surrender their sovereignty and sign the Instruments of Accession, the princes had hemmed and hawed. They knew full well Churchill had said they weren’t to be forced. This was one measure of the extent to which the viceroy’s office practiced the diligent performance of good intentions and what might generously be termed a delusion of candor. The charade had ended that summer when a large coalition of royals flatly refused. Then Hitler invaded Poland and Linlithgow promptly declared war on India’s behalf.

  “Confronted with the demand that she should accept the dictation of a foreign power, India has decided to stand firm,” he said, thereby reminding everyone there was only one foreign power dictating anything where India was concerned. He was fully prepared to cite chapter and verse from the 1935 act giving him the right to do
so, should anyone object.

  The viceroy and the Secretary of State for India both assumed that Gandhi’s belief in nonviolence would mean he could not be drawn in to support the Crown, though of course they didn’t know for certain as Linlithgow had never raised the subject with him. To Linlithgow’s surprise Gandhi, speaking only for himself, offered his unconditional support for England. The prospect of London being bombed had upset him. “I was greatly struck with the depth of real feeling … Gandhi showed at this part of our conversation,” Linlithgow reported, “his emotion at times being so marked as to make it impossible for him to continue.”

  Jinnah, who had by then shuttered his London law practice and sold his house in Hampstead, had a cooler head. Having simmered for two years watching Congress rule in the eight provinces, with two non–Muslim League governments in power in the Muslim-majority states of the Punjab and Bengal, he welcomed the abandonment of the All India federation and was thrilled to be invited to the viceregal palace to weigh in on what role India was to play in the conflict. The war provided Jinnah a lifeline out of political irrelevance and a new hearing for his dream of a separate nation for India’s Muslims. He was calling it Pakistan.

  Nehru had been making speeches condemning Hitler since 1936. He’d visited Spain in 1938 and had been in London to witness Neville Chamberlain’s capitulation at Munich. He was on record expressing his full support for the Western democracies, should it come to war: “I should like India to play its full part,” he had said, assuming Congress leaders would be consulted. When they weren’t, he asked Linlithgow what England’s war aims were, suggesting, without actually saying so, that a written commitment to a free India would be the price of his support. Congress then sat back to see how far the viceroy would go.

  What sort of ultimatum is couched as a polite request for imperialism to commit suicide? M. N. Roy had thundered. An occasional visitor to Sudhin Datta’s Parichay adda, Roy had cut his teeth as a boy of fourteen on terrorist intrigues of the Bengal underground. He had founded both the Mexican and Indian Communist parties. When he ran afoul of Stalin he returned to India and was promptly arrested. During six years of imprisonment, Roy rethought his political philosophy and upon his release made common cause with Nehru and Congress. He also became a close friend of Sudhin’s.

  Roy had pressed Nehru to remain neutral. The smart move, he held, was to maintain Congress’s power in the provincial ministries so as to protect Indian civil liberties when war was declared. Yet when Nehru finally learned that all His Majesty’s Government was prepared to offer was a seat on an advisory war committee and perhaps one or two on the Viceroy’s Executive Council, he ordered Congress members to resign en masse. Roy was appalled. And when Nehru demanded complete and immediate independence, he threw up his hands. Predictably, Linlithgow turned away to embrace Jinnah as the perfect obstacle to any further engagement with Congress.

  Meanwhile, in London, in the wake of the Narvik naval disaster of April 1940, a Conservative politician and former Times correspondent named Leo Amery stood up in the House of Commons and, after a mesmerizing itemization of the government’s many failures, turned to Chamberlain and paraphrased Oliver Cromwell’s denunciation of the Long Parliament. “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!” A fine moment. When Winston Churchill formed a new government, he made Amery, his contemporary at Harrow, the new Secretary of State for India.

  Germany’s blitzkrieg over the Continent soon led Amery to rethink His Majesty’s Government’s India policy. He floated offering India dominion status after the war. At first Churchill roundly denounced the spectacle of His Majesty’s Government running after Gandhi. Then he saw that the mere suggestion of dominion status was acting as a cat among pigeons. “Winston rejoiced in the quarrel which had broken out afresh between Hindus and Moslems, said he hoped it would remain bitter and bloody,” his private secretary wrote assiduously in his diary. In the end the War Cabinet decided that the time had not come to give anything away. Following Churchill’s lead, they agreed: “We must remain firm as a rock.”

  49C Hazra Road, Ballygunj, Calcutta,

  June 21, 1940

  Sudhin had never spoken to his father about the rift in his marriage. A child would have provided some solace, but he and Chhabi remained childless. His father might have wondered if Sudhin’s brother, a young widower, had become overfamiliar with Chhabi. In a joint family household such things happened. Or maybe his father had intuited his recent heartbreak. Whatever the reason, Sudhin knew his distress did not go unnoted. Perhaps this was behind his father’s decision to rent a south Calcutta flat for the couple. There he and Chhabi might have a degree of freedom from joint family life.

  The adda regulars left Hatibagan for Hazra Road reluctantly. Hiren-da promised he would continue to supply sweets from his secret sources in north Calcutta. South Calcutta confectioneries were universally disparaged. Sudhin furnished the Hazra Road parlor, not with settees and tea tables, but in the traditional Bengali way, with mattresses on the floor covered in white sheets and bolsters upholstered in colorful silk fabrics. Hand-block saris hung from the doorways. Only the books remained the same.

  A month after the move, that veteran of revolutions on three continents made an appearance. Since the outbreak of war M. N. Roy had made more enemies than allies. Perhaps this accounted for his sullen temper that day; the great revolutionary uttered not one word. After he left, Hiren-da said he had been hoping someone would ask him, in all innocence, the real reason he had left Russia. Hiren-da couldn’t believe Stalin would really have executed the man Lenin had hailed as “the symbol of revolution in the East.”

  “Manabendra can speak to the point when he wants to,” Sudhin said, disappointed that Roy hadn’t proved a more forceful ally in his arguments with Hiren-da. “He just wasn’t in the mood.”

  “Yeeees, he can be rude,” Minnie Bonnerjee drawled.

  The secret diarist noted that with Minnie around no one else could get a word in. Conjectures about the European war had whipped back and forth between her and Roy’s foreign wife, leaving the younger, less worldly poets too intimidated to say anything. The diarist had recently begun warming to Minnie, though he still heartily disapproved of women smoking.

  As Germany began its European offensive in the spring of 1940, members of the adda began choosing teams. On Fridays the fireworks could be heard from down the street. Separate arguments started up in different corners; England and France here, Russia there, India near the sweets table; everyone at cross-purposes. They no longer got carried away citing the advantages of kurta pyjamas over Western attire or the intricacies of the inswings and off cutters of the Town Club’s fearsome star bowler. Instead there were white-hot debates over the respective strengths of the various European navies and air forces. Sudhin, whom they all depended upon to lighten the most entrenched views with sly quips, was unusually silent or, the secret diarist noted, unaccountably irritable.

  Apropos of England’s dithering, someone told a joke about a dying old man being tended by his loving family. After months of waiting for him to die, they were at their wits’ end. Then a mad man passing by the scene shouted, “He’s done for, just burn him!” Everyone laughed but Sudhin.

  Sudhin had long taken England to task for its failure to rearm and contend with Hitler’s growing menace. When the bombing of Warsaw began, he had felt certain that England would come to the immediate aid of the Poles. When that didn’t happen, he agreed with Lindsay Emmerson of the Statesman that once Belgium was attacked, swift military action would be taken. But it was not until mid-April 1940 that his confusion over England’s war objectives was dispelled. It was simple: England wasn’t going to lift a finger to defend Europe. This realization, coming on the heels of heartbreak, distressed him deeply. Even an atrocious pun from some fool at adda, something about “Narvik” and “nerve weak,” failed to ignite his exasperation. But it was the invasion
of France and the fall of Paris that proved his final undoing. Sudhin had introduced the work of Paul Valéry and André Malraux to Parichay: Stéphane Mallarmé was his poetic ideal. France stood for something unshakable.

  When the talk turned to France’s sudden downfall clouds of pipe smoke billowed ominously around the adda’s most ardent Francophile, as if he were about to combust.

  “France’s collapse does not mean that it wasn’t as strong, militarily, as Germany, just that it was more peace loving,” he said. Sudhin laughed bitterly before replying.

  “Did it not occur to the French that some defensive preparations might be required?”

  The man had no answer. No one did. Congress, too, had faltered in the wake of the fall of France. A new initiative to cooperate with the war effort was being discussed in meetings of its working committee. Friday-night adda continued, seemingly rudderless.

  Someone ventured that if Hitler were now to invade England, Russia would swoop down on Constantinople. A few heads swiveled to see Sudhin’s response, but he had gone to look for a book on his shelves. “Germany would have to establish air supremacy before invading,” Sudhin finally said, returning to his seat. “Though its air force is large, its planes are too slow to evade the much faster Spitfires. They will never reach London.”

  The question of what India stood to gain if Britain were to be defeated was taken up. It was narrowly decided that at present India would not be well served by Britain’s defeat, but the future was another matter. Many were eager to entertain the prospect of the English being taken down a peg or two.

  “The British are calling Dunkirk a huge victory,” Sinbad Sinclair had told Sudhin. Sinclair was yet another of Sudhin’s sahibs. A silver-haired Oxonian with hairy knuckles who worked for Burmah Shell, he was a gifted talker. His wife, Elinor, was something of a memsahib, Sudhin said, but had excellent legs.

  “Never before in history have so many people been transported from one place to another in such a short period and at such a limited loss of life,” Humphry’s friend from Oxford, Susobhan Sarkar, chimed in. “I have no hesitation in congratulating the British authorities on such an absolute success.” This was intended as an olive branch. They had all begun to worry about Sudhin. He’d been needling Hiren for weeks.