My office in Canada House was on a scale to match the car. It had been the dining room of the old Union Club from whom the Canadian government had originally purchased the building. I knew the room well from the years when Vincent Massey had been High Commissioner and I, as his private secretary, inhabited the adjacent cubbyhole. How often had I trod the acres of carpet that separated the entrance from the outsize desk behind which the small figure of the High Commissioner was seated. How often had I stood looking over his shoulder while he peered dubiously at the drafts of speeches I had written for him. It was under the great chandelier that hung from the middle of the ceiling that he had stood when, in 1939, he had announced to the staff Canada’s declaration of war. Vincent Massey had been a distinguished representative of Canada. He was a well-known and respected figure in political, social, and artistic circles in London. He had dignity without pomposity, intelligence and charm. Here I now was in his place; it remained to be seen what I could make of it.
The times had changed, and so had the relationship between Britain and Canada. In the days of Vincent Massey the Canadian government, under the leadership of Mackenzie King, was obsessed by the suspicion that Whitehall was plotting designs against our nationhood and trying to draw us back into the imperial framework. Our attitude, however, was ambiguous, as Mackenzie King himself demonstrated when he chose as the title for his own book on Canada’s war effort, Canada at Britain’s Side.
Now, in 1967, the ambiguity had been resolved, but what had taken its place? We no longer harboured fears of British dominance. We had finally emerged from the motherhood of the British Empire, only to struggle for breath in the brotherly embrace of Uncle Sam. There were still enduring ties, rooted in history and common institutions, which gave Britain a special place in the affection of Canadians – at any rate of Anglo-Canadians. We were allies in NATO, fellow members of the Commonwealth, owing allegiance to the same Queen. There was extensive trade between us; there were innumerable special links between groups – professional, business, and cultural. Every spring, London was inundated by our fellow countrymen. They came for the historic sights, for the theatre, for the charms of London and the English countryside, sometimes to visit scenes where they had served in the war or for reunions with friends and relatives. The affection for England was there, but British influence was gone. No future Prime Minister was ever likely to call his book Canada at Britain’s Side. We and the British were excellent friends who had known each other for a long time, but we were no longer members of the same family. If our attitudes had changed, so had those of the British. With their loss of influence had come some loss of interest. Canadians were well liked in England; Canada was esteemed. There remained the bonds of the past, but our future was no longer any concern of theirs. If our preoccupations were with the United States, theirs were increasingly with Europe.
The relations between the Canadian and the British governments in the years when I was in London were, for the most part, untroubled, or, as they say in official communiqués, “cordial and friendly.” They offered no challenges or ordeals to a Canadian High Commissioner. After Washington, this was a rest cure. The drama was not in London, it was in Paris. It was French policy, with its impact on the future of Quebec, that was of absorbing interest to the Canadian government.
The advent of Pierre Trudeau as Prime Minister in April 1968 did not affect our relationship with the United Kingdom. There was a very different style and a shift of emphasis, not of policy. Mike Pearson was well known and liked in London. He was also a strong supporter of the Commonwealth and of NATO. Trudeau at first showed no great enthusiasm for either. While his somewhat flamboyant behaviour on his first visit to England in January 1969 got plenty of press notice, his official contacts with the United Kingdom government went smoothly and satisfactorily. He and the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, got on well together. It gradually became apparent that, despite the talk then prevalent in government circles in Ottawa of our military withdrawal from NATO, nothing of the sort was seriously contemplated; also, the Canadian government would continue to play a positive role in Commonwealth affairs. Nor did the coming to power of the Conservative government in Britain in 1971 make any real difference to Canadian–United Kingdom affairs. The new Conservative Foreign Secretary was Alec Home. I had never experienced anything but friendliness from George Brown when he held that office in the Labour government, but Alec Home was quite exceptional in his wisdom, tolerance, and charm. Our day-to-day relations with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office were conducted with Dennis Greenhill, an effective and sensible realist. At Buckingham Palace the Queen’s secretary, Michael Adeane, I had known since Ottawa days when he had been an A.D.C. at Government House. One of the most astute of men, he is also the best of friends.
In Marlborough House, the seat of the Commonwealth Secretariat, the Canadian Secretary-General, Arnold Smith, a former colleague in the Department of External Affairs, deployed his enthusiasm, skill, and patience in dealing with problems more difficult and demanding than those which faced the High Commissioner.
There was a large and competent staff at Canada House, among whom I counted some very good friends. It often occurred to me that the place could function quite satisfactorily without any High Commissioner at all. The atmosphere of the office was congenial. I had with me, in Geoff Murray, Jerry Hardy, and Louis Rogers, very able Deputy High Commissioners. We had entered a new age of administration. The monstrous growth of regulations, the avalanche of forms and bureaucratic paraphernalia, created a jungle in which I was lost. I had been trained in a simpler era when External Affairs was smaller. The change was inevitable, but I could not get away from the conviction that self-regulating bureaucracy took up too much time which should have been devoted to the formulation and execution of policy. There was too much harness and no bloody horse! Louis Rogers, who had come to Canada House after being our Ambassador to Israel, understood both policy and administration. He controlled his impatience with my administrative ineptitude and enlivened the working hours by his sardonic wit. His wife, June, was stimulating in talk, lovely to look at, the daughter of my old chief, Hume Wrong. I had known her since she was a child.
As there were few policy questions at issue between our two governments, the functions of the High Commissioner were largely those of a representative and a reporter. There were speeches to be made and ceremonial occasions to attend. There was also the multifarious daily business involved in our close trade, cultural, immigration, and tourist relations with the United Kingdom. There were frequent – all too frequent – visits of Canadian Cabinet Ministers and delegations of officials; there were press conferences and briefings. There were close contacts to be maintained with the Agents General of the provinces in London, and with the Canadian colony there.
There was reporting on the British political and economic situation for the inattentive ears of Ottawa. There are few echoes of these reports in the London diaries, which reflect a varied and lively social life and scarcely dwell at all on the public events which formed the substance of dispatches to Ottawa now lying dormant in the files of the Department of External Affairs.
The years I spent as High Commissioner in London, although enjoyable personally, were not an inspiriting period in British history. The country was wracked by strikes and industrial disputes. Under uninspired political leadership the nation seemed increasingly fragmented, with every group pursuing its own particular interests. Yet the notion that England was a “sick society” was a superficial judgement. The country was indeed suffering from social and economic ailments which took forms peculiar to England. But the disease was to spread to other industrialized nations, including our own. Throughout the stresses and strains of these years the underlying strength of British character and British institutions remained intact. The English themselves were – as they had always been – kindly, ironic, and stoical. Britain remained one of the most civilized countries in the world, if civilization is to be judged by standards of tol
erance and humanity.
2 October 1967.
London is a fever of hope deferred. Some day (?) I shall get on top of this job, lead my own life, make my mark. What mark? A first-class reporter who knows all and everyone; a counsellor whose counsel is sought; host at a present-day Holland House; loved but not inconveniently, sought after but not pressed, liked and respected by my own government but at a distance; no more ministerial visits; good cook, interesting books, no chocolate-covered chairs in the “guest suite”; reputation of a brilliant speaker but never having to justify it by making any more speeches; taken as natural by the young.
6 October 1967.
Yesterday was quite different. I walked in Hyde Park under a cloudy sky. Damp oozed from the grass beneath my feet. I carried an old borrowed umbrella, tied together with a rubber band. I had just been reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. It had reopened a way of feeling and seeing that belonged to its time – an anarchic mixture of exhilaration and sadness. As the seagulls scattered and swooped over the park expanses, restlessness and dead wishes stirred. I thought, too, of Life (and we know how Virginia Woolf loved talking of Life).
I went into the Griffin in Villiers Street, near Charing Cross Station, to meet Elizabeth [Bowen]. It is perhaps to become our London equivalent of the Plaza Bar in New York. We sat drinking, talking, and eating cold beef sandwiches. She looked – and was – extraordinarily young (there must have been some quality in the day that made it a pocket in time, a day out of the steady progression). She began to talk about the figures of Bloomsbury she had known in her youth – Virginia Woolf, the Stracheys. It was a sudden outbreak of her old brilliant, individual, visual talk, which has been muted lately. She made me see the ingrowingness of that little Bloomsbury world, their habit of writing endless letters to each other, of analysing, betraying, mocking, envying each other. She spoke of the kind of pains of jealousy and treachery which they inflicted on each other. She thinks that that kind of intellectual, professional, upper middle-class, like the Stracheys, tends more to corruption than any other class and that, in that sense, they are “clogs to clogs.” Elizabeth is approaching the last chapter of Eva Trout. God knows how it will be received. Her delight in it is catching. The people she can’t now bear are those who say nostalgically to her, “I did so love The Death of the Heart.”1
In the afternoon a Brigadier and his wife came for drinks, she a tiresome woman with that air of tucking away what you say to her with disapproval, as if she would take it out of her bag when she got home and, if necessary, report it to the Proper Authorities.
27 October 1967.
Went to Colchester for the Colchester oyster feast. Rather fun, these little excursions and getting glimpses of the endless groupings of English life. This week the Distillers in the city, and the Warrant Holders’ Banquet, and now this little world of Colchester. All the local worthies and bigwigs – Ted Heath,2 who made a speech and spoke of the typically Essex faces in the audience. I looked down from the high table at the long, pale faces with very pale blue eyes and colourless hair and total lack of expression – Essex types? It rained. I don’t care for Colchester oysters and I noticed that neither the Mayor nor the Aldermen touched them. I sat next Lady Allport, wife of the man who heads the Mission to Rhodesia, and did not charm her, which was a pity as she did rather charm me. Next to her, on her other side, was the head of the Boilermakers’ Union, whom she described as a “very cozy character.”
1 November 1967.
Popski’s attitude towards us has changed since his long incarceration in kennels during the quarantine period on his arrival in England. I think we made a mistake in visiting him when he was caged up in the kennels. He greeted us with frantic excitement, but when we walked away from him he was in despair. I believe that he came to think that we had deserted him and never forgave us.
Since he has been released and come to this house, he lives by preference most of the time in the kitchen. When we call him he comes, allows himself to be patted for a moment, is perfectly polite to us as though we were distant acquaintances. I am sure he bears us a deep grudge for – as he thinks – abandoning him in prison.
5 November 1967.
It is at this precise time — 11 a.m. – that Sylvia is going into the operating room. She fell day before yesterday and broke her hip. The doctors said that she could either remain in bed for six weeks without moving, so that the bones might heal naturally, or have a pin put in to hold them together. She chose the latter, as she couldn’t bear the prospect of the total inaction. I am unreasonably nervous and depressed about this operation, which I am told is quite a routine one. How much she means to me, and how lonely I should be without her, how much married I have become. The thought of the actual operation sickens me. The weather is depressingly black, the house deadly silent (this house, like the house where Lytton Strachey spent his youth, has developed elephantiasis, disproportionate swollen growth).
6 November 1967.
I went to the banquet in the Guildhall given for the President of Turkey and sat next Mrs. Mulley, who is the wife of the Minister of State at the Foreign Office. Her husband was a Cambridge don, but it bored him, so now he is a politician. How does one make that transition? Politicians always seem to me a race apart, like actors, and I am surprised to find that they nearly all once plied ordinary trades. The laundry had sent someone else’s shirt back and I wore a collar sizes too big for me, but no one knew or cared.
Sylvia has come out of the operation. It has gone very well. She was already sitting up a few hours after regaining consciousness and asking for newspapers.
21 November 1967.
Mike Pearson has arrived, and Maryon. I felt such affection, attraction, for them when I saw them arriving at the airport. He seems happy at being here, and young – much younger than I am. Lunch with Blair Fraser3 at the Travellers. This was my day for liking people, although I have always liked him and find him admirable. With us elderlies much depends on the day, state of fatigue, health, etc. We have our recoveries, and can be almost human.
Mike’s press conference very dreary; it dragged and he knew it. The British press uninterested – no angle for them.
3 January 1968. Doodles to replace a diary.
I can pray for myself but it seems a presumption to pray for others.
“ ‘Damn’ braces, ‘bless’ relaxes” – Blake.
I cling to rationalization like a man hanging on to his pants to prevent them falling down.
The burrows of the nightmare, the stuff that dreams are made of; endless riches piled in those caves of sleep, mixed with rubbish and wildly comical juxtapositions. This is what Buñuel is after in his films, and catches, and the lewd delights!
The Turner Venetian scene over the fireplace “floods the room with colour” – and it does.
Wheeler-Bennett would be the best to do Vincent Massey’s biography, but he cries out for Proust, a Canadian Proust.
Is there any point in balancing one’s prejudices with “fair-mindedness”? Why not turn purple with prejudice and passion, make no allowance? Why not give way to envy, and to blind loyalty too? Come on, join the human race.
20 January 1968.
Garwood, the butler, has his endearing side, also an infuriating side. Last evening I said to him, “General Anderson would like a dry martini on the rocks.” He made a martini with ice in the shaker and poured it. I said, “That is not a martini on the rocks.” He said, “Yes, sir, it’s just the same, not to worry. I have a reputation for my martinis.” “I was restrained from pursuing the argument by the presence of a guest” (as Mr. Pooter4 would have said), but the guest, Bill Anderson, said when Garwood had left the room, “He certainly won the battle of the rocks.” I laughed, pretty grudgingly. As a General, Bill has a sharp eye for victories and defeats.
Garwood and Popski make a pair. I don’t know how two such egotists get on together. Garwood recognizes Popski’s tactical skills, sometimes calling him “the General” or “Your Royal
Highness,” at others addressing him good-humouredly as “you silly old fool.” Popski has been given the stone out of an avocado pear and will not let anyone go near him in case they try to take it away from him. He bangs it on the parquet floor, making a considerable racket for a small dog with a small object.
21 January 1968.
Beryl Saul and her two sons are staying here. Her husband, Bill, who was my Military Adviser in Paris and of whom I was fond, died suddenly two weeks ago at forty-eight years old of a cerebral haemorrhage. She is in a state of shock. Her eldest son is a parachutist in the British Army, just back from Aden. His batman was shot in the back by an Arab terrorist. “He was the most innocent boy I ever saw, wouldn’t have hurt a fly. What were we fighting for in Aden anyway? Was it worth his life?” The second Saul boy wants to join the Department of External Affairs. Both had been brought up in the Canadian military tradition, as of course was Bill Anderson, who dined with us last night. So we have been seeing quite a lot of the Canadian military. They are the descendants of the old Canadian Permanent Force, the class and kind of people I was accustomed to in Halifax in my youth – Canadians modelled on a British tradition.
22 January 1968.
Called on Polish Ambassador in the morning. He is pessimistic about British recovery. He says that the United Kingdom has for years had the lowest rate of investment in Europe, so there is no base for a recovery founded on the export drive. England, he says, is hampered by her class system and is not drawing upon all the human material available in the country. I questioned this latter bit but I don’t know if I am right. This seems to me a democratic society, but what does one mean by that? British society seems pulverized, its different segments living unto themselves, innumerable private pockets and groups and individual interests. The only solidarity seems to be that of the young against the old, and vice versa.
Storm Signals : More Undiplomatic Diaries, 1962-1971 (9781551996806) Page 10