Storm Signals : More Undiplomatic Diaries, 1962-1971 (9781551996806)

by Ritchie, Charles

  For my own part I made no substantial contribution to this meeting of minds. Mike was more than capable of dealing with the President without advice from me. We had only one long talk the first evening of our visit, when we had a walk by the seashore and he outlined some of his preoccupations about the coming talks. He had come accompanied by a squad of officials from Ottawa to whom he could turn for factual information. Otherwise he played it by himself and, as usual, played it skilfully.

  At dinner the talk was lively and far-ranging, settling in the end in a discussion of the future of Germany. Of the distinguished company assembled at Hyannisport I most enjoyed that of Annette Perron, the Prime Minister’s indomitable secretary. We had travelled the world together with an earlier Canadian Prime Minister, Mr. St. Laurent, and we had a cheerful reminiscent reunion over several post-dinner drinks.

  I was installed in Bobby Kennedy’s house in the Kennedy compound and retired to bed in an atmosphere of outdoor sport and Roman Catholic piety, surrounded by pictures of sailboats and by crucifixes.

  1 July 1963. Washington.

  Our National Day prompts the question: can our country survive as an independent, united sovereign state – a reality, not a fiction? Or must we fall into the embrace of the U.S.A.? We struggle in the net, make fumbling attempts to find our way out, but all the time are getting deeper in, in terms both of our defence and of the control of our economy. Diefenbaker tried, in relations with the U.S., to be a sort of pocket de Gaulle. It didn’t work. We have not the will or the means to be sufficiently exorbitant.

  When I asked an old pal of mine how he kept so cheerful he said, “I see life through rose-coloured testicles.”

  The woman next to me at lunch yesterday said of her son, “He isn’t as bright as his father, but he is so beautifully oriented.”

  “Poetry strips the veil of familiarity from the world and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of its forms.” Shelley, A Defence of Poetry. “The veil of familiarity” … sometimes it lifts for a timeless moment as it did for me this early morning when I came back from my walk in the park to find the house still sleeping. I entered it like a stranger and saw all things afresh – walking through the silent rooms wondering, fingering like a child in a house of mystery. I look about me to take solitary possession. The only motion in the shrouded stillness is the light breeze sifting in from the empty gardens. A cardinal flashes past the window on its way to the drinking bowl.

  Talking of poetry and poets, this book of Doris Moore’s about Byron leaves a trail of questions behind it. She defends the poet fanatically, but doesn’t her record work against him? How was it that he left behind him such envy, hatred, and malice among those who knew and survived him, so that for decades the rows among them raged on? Was he unlucky in his loves and friendships or did he carry some poison with him? Men and women were carriers of the Byron infection. Thirty years after his death his wife, his sister, Caroline Lamb, could not get him out of their systems and re-fought his battles.

  The influence of the dead on the living – what an endlessly fascinating subject. I believe that my two uncles, Harry and Charlie, one dead the year I was born, the other hardly known by me and dead when I was a child, have by their legends influenced me more than any living man. There must be a medium to carry the current from the dead to the living, sometimes a living survivor, sometimes the written word. My mother was such a medium. The dead lived through her talk. Even their voices and gestures were in the room with you. These were private ghosts, known only to a few. Byron, by the genius of his personality, greater even than his poetry, has changed countless lives … usually for the worse? But he gave them a role to play and a sense of freedom in playing it, even if most were pinchbeck performers. The Byronic virus lasted more than a hundred years – is it now finally extinct?

  2 July 1963.

  Blazing heat. Woke up early to the whirring sound of the air conditioner and the conviction of the airlessness in the street outside where no leaf stirred. Heat kept at bay by air conditioners is like pain frozen out by a local anaesthetic – in both cases, you know it’s there.

  Yesterday the Canadian Club had a reception of three hundred people in this house. There are quite a lot of lonely, homesick Canadians living in this town, many of them government employees who come from small places in Canada and are not having so very much fun in this gracious city and missing their friends and relations at home. We sang “O Canada,” standing about on the terrace with the written songsheets in hand. Very few people knew all the verses. Sylvia said it moved her and made her want to cry. It was moving when sung like that by a group of Canadians abroad and in the open air and without music. It sounded less like a national anthem than a Highland lament or a nostalgic French-Canadian song full of pride and yearning, not at all martial. It was a good party. How hot the servants were, and how hard they worked. Colin was in his element, ordering everybody about, and old Isobel, the cook, was cheerful, her wild hair hanging about her in elfin locks.

  6 July 1963.

  The Americans are intensely irritated by our new Budget,14 which is being attacked in violent tones by the press. I lunched today with Bill Armstrong at the Jockey Club. He is a good friend to Canada in the State Department and not at all averse to making it known that in this role he has much uphill work to do. At one point he said that when he was arguing with the other American officials for an understanding of Canada’s position over the Budget, they said to him, “What Canadians need in financial questions is a psychoanalyst’s couch.” But then, to the Americans, the irrationality of their allies and their own rationality is an absolute assumption. To do Armstrong justice, he glimpses this. As for our position on this and on nuclear weapons, I am not far from sharing American bewilderment over our tergiversations. These must be called typically Canadian, the reflection of a divided mind. How else was our country held together in the first place? How else will it be held together in the future? Only some do it more expertly than others. If Canada cannot logically work as an independent, unified nation, we are all the same determined to make it work.

  Went down in the afternoon to the State Department to see Bill Tyler, who told us nothing about Kennedy’s visit to Europe except that the President had lost his suitcase en route with his father’s tortoise-shell shoehorn in it, and had found it again on return to New York.

  Perhaps, after nearly five years in the United States, I have quite unconsciously begun to accept American assumptions more than I realize. At any rate, I see their difficulties through their eyes, for to the Americans almost everything, and certainly any development in international affairs, constitutes a “problem” to which there must be a “solution.” And what spurs them on is the feeling that there is a Russian boy in the class, perhaps more hard-working, who may come up with that “solution” first. Hence they are incapable of leaving anything alone. Also, any “solution” offered is better than none at all. I cannot see that the United States policies which protected and enriched the Western world are wrong. I think they have a more grown-up understanding of the danger of nuclear war than any other government except the Russians’. I share some of their irritation with the ceaseless needling and ungenerous pettiness of many of their allies who depend upon them and vent on them their own resentment of the fact. I think the Americans are right to be continually alert to the Communist danger from which they saved Europe by the Marshall Plan and by the presence of their forces there. Nor do I think they have been guilty in their relations with Canada. I think they have been patient, considering their power. And yet, yet, the more I concede them to be right, the more I am subject to fits of what I think claustrophobia. They are everywhere, into everything – a wedding in Nepal, a strike in British Guiana, the remotest Greek island, the farthest outport of Donegal, the banks of the Limpopo. All countries’ private and domestic affairs are of interest to the Americans; in all do they, in a measure, interfere. Everywhere they carry with them their own sense of their own
superiority, their desire to improve, to preserve, to encourage what is deserving, to obliterate what is “feudal,” “reactionary,” “Communistic”; to advance, with banners flying, The American Way of Life, which of course we all must know is the way of progress and enlightenment for all mankind.

  8 July 1963.

  Had a letter today from Joe McCulley, who was Headmaster of Pickering College, Newmarket, Ontario, when I was there teaching French in 1931. It made me think of that time which I so much enjoyed, although I was a damn bad teacher, sometimes going to sleep in the middle of one of my own classes. One difficulty was my own very uncertain grasp of the subject I was supposed to be teaching. I could speak and read French but my knowledge of the finer points of French grammar, especially the irregular verbs, was so shaky that I had to mug them up the night before I went to class. There was a boy, Llyn Stephens, who knew them better than I did. He would sometimes interrupt as I was teaching, to correct me. Much later in life he became Counsellor at our Embassy in Bonn when I was there as Ambassador. It was a repeat performance. His knowledge of German was far superior to my own, but he no longer corrected me – at any rate in public.

  Pickering was an experimental boarding school, founded originally by Quakers. There were no punishments, no compulsory games, and the minimum of discipline. Surprisingly, the system worked remarkably well. This was largely due to the personality of the Headmaster. Joe was then a blond, handsome six-foot crusader, overflowing with enthusiasm. At the same time he had a glance which missed nothing that went on in the school and from which no adolescent subterfuge was concealed. He ruled by magnetism combined with a domineering instinct for command. It seemed unlikely that I should become a friend of this hearty extrovert, yet friends we were. After the school day was over I would often repair to his study, and over a bottle of rye whisky we would talk together for hours. The dramas, personalities, and intrigues of school life gave us plenty of food for conversation. After the second or third whisky we would launch out into wider fields. He would expound his Rousseau-esque vision of the perfectibility of human, and particularly boys’, nature. All that stood between the most recalcitrant or idle boy and his happy and fruitful development was the narrow prejudice or brutal mishandling of his upbringing. In vain I pleaded the influence of heredity, as against environment. In vain I argued that while vice might be curable, stupidity was incorrigible. He swept all such objections before him and sometimes, in the final stages of the evening, would recite to me in sonorous tones Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” We parted, warmed not only by whisky but by the glow of friendship. Not all the masters shared my enthusiasm for Joe. Some questioned his scholarly qualifications, others resented his technique in discussion, particularly an irritating phrase of his in argument – “Let me clarify your thinking.”

  My happiness in those early days at Pickering was in part a happiness of contrast. My own experience in the conventional Canadian boys’ schools I had attended was deplorable. I had been a miserable schoolboy, untidy (glasses mended with bits of string), uncoordinated in athletics (the English sergeant-major used to say, “Come and watch Ritchie on the parallel bars. It’s as good as Charlie Chaplin any day”). I was a natural bully-ee (if that is the word for the bully’s butt). I was always late for classes, so spent hours doing detentions – i.e., writing moral maxims in copperplate – a social misfit cursed with an English accent from my prep school in England; a garrison-town colonial Nova Scotian among the alien herd of smug Upper Canadians. At Pickering I felt that I was getting my own back on a system which had bruised me. So I had a lot in common with those of the boys at Pickering who had themselves either been expelled from or left under a cloud the schools they had previously attended, to come to the freedom and ease of Pickering. Also, having been unpopular as a boy, I found myself popular as a master. Somewhat adolescent myself for my age – I was twenty-four – I shared the rapid transitions of adolescents from hilarious spirits to inspissated gloom. Mentally grown-up, I was temperamentally adolescent. The boys had a sort of cult for me, treating me as something between a mascot and their own freak, in some cases almost their friend. They sensed that I was not interested in improving or influencing them and that I had none of the schoolmaster’s way of measuring them. I sought amusement, incident, personality among them as I would have done among my own contemporaries. In the classroom I rarely had trouble in keeping discipline because I viewed classes as they did, as tiresome routine that had to be got through. I was not an inspiring teacher, but the boys did just about as well in exams in my subject as in any others. With younger boys from the Junior School, whom fortunately I rarely had to teach, I could establish no relationship. They found me incomprehensible and uninteresting. Their jerky restlessness, always clattering, banging, and shouting, made me tired, and I never seemed to have the answers to their incessant questions.

  Miss Ancient, or Anan as she was always called, was the school matron. It was through her that I had first heard of Pickering College. She had been first my father’s secretary and later my brother’s governess. At Pickering her sitting-room was a refuge from schoolrooms and school corridors, and from the permanent company of schoolboys and masters – an undilutedly male world. After my early-morning class I used to join her there for coffee and gossip. She was then, I suppose, in her forties or fifties, tallish, flat-chested, and her sympathetic dark eyes gazed somewhat reproachfully at the world through gleaming pince-nez. She was the soul of sincerity, upright and conscientious in all she attempted; an intelligent woman with something touchingly clumsy about her gestures. “My fingers are all thumbs thith morning,” she would say in her thick lisp. She and I became friends in those sessions in her sitting-room. I think of her with affection and with sympathy, for her life as the plain daughter of a penniless clergyman had not been an easy one. She had finally found a haven at Pickering where her devotion to the Headmaster was so total that a word of praise or recognition from him made her day, as his occasional impatience with her fussing ruined it. She took a darkly suspicious view of the masters’ wives, particularly any one of them who attracted Joe’s favourable attention or failed to give full recognition to her status as school matron. In particular she resented one, a beautiful woman with an opulent figure whom the older boys much lusted after. “I suppose,” said Anan, “that she has what they call thex appeal.” She spoke as though it were an unpleasant, perhaps contagious, disease. Anan’s own duties included charge of the school sick-room. Herself stoical, she had no time for malingerers; one half-Aspirin was her maximum cure for all forms of pain, and she had an awkward, impatient touch on the sufferer’s pillow.

  Almost all the other masters except Joe and myself were married men. I often spent my evenings dining and drinking in their hospitable houses. I made friends among them and in the course of doing so learned to understand the rewards and frustrations of the schoolteaching career, and to admire the devotion they brought to it. I got rid of my mistaken preconceived notion that schoolmastering was a secondary kind of occupation – “Those who can, do, those who can’t, teach” – and came to see it as being important and engrossing. Yet as I moved into my second year at Pickering I was increasingly restless. The atmosphere of youthfulness, at first stimulating, began to be oppressive. Boys were perpetually barging into my sitting-room and lounging about talking and sprawling. No sooner had I got rid of one lot than there was another knock on my door. I began to get bored with their company. They sensed this and seemed to become more boring. Boredom breeds bores. Then, too, it was more and more apparent to me that the teaching profession, admirable as it might be, was not for me. I lacked the wish to mould or to instruct. I saw myself an old crustacean washed over by successive tides of youth. My practical dilemma was that despite years of expensive education I had no qualifications for any alternative job, and 1931 was a notoriously bad year for the unemployed. My only resort was to return from attempting to educate others to being myself further educated. I applied for a fellowship at Harvard, where I
had already spent one year as Commonwealth Fellow on leaving Oxford. There were two fellowships on offer: one to proceed to France to explore the significance of the word “sensibilité” in eighteenth-century French literature, the other to advanced studies in the origins of the First World War. I coveted the first and obtained the second. It was to prove a turning-point, for had I been delving into “sensibilité” in the cafés of Montpellier I should not have been in Boston to take the examination for the Department of External Affairs and ergo I should not now, as an aging Ambassador, be sitting at my desk in Washington wasting the government’s time with this excursion into the past when I should be studying the statistics of Canadian lumber exports.

  5 August 1963. Halifax, N.S.

  I am here on another brief visit to see my mother, who has been increasingly ill lately. She varies much from day to day. Suddenly today the clouds of melancholia and weakness parted, and she was restored to me as she used to be. It was like something happening in a dream. She had returned to take possession with her full nature of that decrepit old body which an hour before had seemed to belong to an equally decrepit old spirit. I was in the presence of a really fascinating woman. It is sad to know that by tomorrow this former Lilian will have disappeared again into the shadows, but it was worth coming here to be with her for these few hours. Does her brain suddenly clear? What part does boredom play in her afflictions? These questions may be important for oneself some day, if one lives long enough to be in the same case. The doctor says she “talks between the lines,” which is a good description. She talked today of religion. She is of two minds about it. She prays without really believing, a process which I share with her. She said to the Dean, fixing him with those extraordinary eyes which even now have not lost all their power, “Do you really believe that Jesus Christ is here in this room with us when you are giving me Communion?” She said the Dean answered that she mustn’t worry her mind with such questions. “He couldn’t really answer me and I shouldn’t have asked him. He has his living to make, like everybody else. Being a clergyman is his occupation. How else, at his age, could he earn his living? Anyway, I dropped the subject and offered him a glass of sherry. He accepted, which showed he was a human being.”