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

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Storm Signals : More Undiplomatic Diaries, 1962-1971 (9781551996806) Page 12

by Ritchie, Charles


  Unless we do propose to be the champions of the Africans and assume a new Commonwealth leadership there is nothing much in the way of a role for us. Our posture should be a sensible middle-of-the-way realism, using the Commonwealth as an opportunity for numerous bilateral contacts, showing a general disposition that it should continue and being willing to contribute to this end. The Commonwealth has links in a world where there are not too many, and can help in finding compromises provided these are not so illusory as to rebound against their originators. As to the Monarchy – in the Commonwealth context – it is a useful limited device.

  20 August 1968. On holiday in Chester, N.S.

  This south shore of Nova Scotia with its mixture of small fishing villages and sea inlets sparkling in sun and wind, squat white farmhouses sheltered by trees and set in rough meadows, has a flavour all its own, never pinned on paper by painter or writer. And the small towns, some with almost as many wooden churches as there are wooden houses, look a standing invitation to peace and suggest the alternative of a life in which retired hours could pass swaying in a hammock in the shelter of a verandah. Gulls float and settle, a colony of them on a hillside; solid big-bellied fishermen rear chunky big-bellied sons who already as children have the promise of their fathers’ strength.

  King Street runs down to the sea, quite a steep hill at the top which descends gradually at the end. On the right-hand side of the street stands this small shingle house in which we four people live – Roley and Bunny and ourselves. I love the house as if it were my own, especially my bedroom, which I would change for no other. It is absolutely as plain as an anchorite’s cell, with white painted table and dresser, a chair of unpainted wood, a square mirror hanging on the wall which faintly distorts the features, a hard square bed, and that is all. And I am happier here than anywhere. Outside, the tree-lined street; above, the blue of a sea sky and a glimpse of the blue of the sea itself. Sailing boats in the harbour, and the islands beyond – Quaker, Saddle, and, farther away, Tancook, to which the ferry goes twice a day and once on Sunday. In the gardens of Chester grow nasturtiums, in colours that defy their poor-genteel neighbours, the petunias – colours that pierce the eye and make the heart beat faster – gay, brilliant common nasturtiums in borders and bowls, planted round rocks or even telephone poles. By the roadside and at the foot of meadows near the sea are wild roses, smelling of rose, while the tame ones in gardens are scentless.

  21 August 1968.

  What a curse is the tiresome gambit of “being offended” which infects some people. At any one time you may rely upon it that someone you know is in a state of “being offended” with someone else. The injured party conveys this state by degrees of coolness, huffiness, and standing on dignity. “Being offended” leads to the second stage – Hurt Feelings. It can be most easily softened by a stroke of misfortune suffered by the offender. In that case, the offended one can, magnanimously, forgive all, but the offender must not hope to escape unscathed if he attempts to continue serenely on his way with a casual apology for the offence.

  I should know. I have just “offended” an old acquaintance here. I have also burned the bottom of the electric kettle.

  22 August 1968.

  Suffering from crisis agitation and the sense of being cut off here. I know that I can contribute nothing, but I feel so restless that I take no more real pleasure in this holiday. The Czech crisis has been the focus of my restlessness. The thought of those brutes of Russians moving into Prague, stamping out individuals and liberties, reimposing that suffocating regime, makes me almost physically sick. I should think some kind of protest must be registered by the helpless U.N. If we have resolutions about “war-mongering Rhodesia” and don’t mention the invasion of Czechoslovakia, except under our breath, the U.N. should shut up shop.

  23 August 1968.

  The holiday is over. From one day to another Chester has lost its charm for me. I know every board in the board wharf – which is rotting and which is firm; I know every knot-hole in the wood; I know each of the six wild roses in the sloping field. If this euphoric peace, rest, and happiness lasted with me for little more than two weeks, what will my retirement be like?

  27 August 1968. Ottawa.

  Back in Ottawa for three days of consultations. Woke early in my small room at the Château Laurier hotel. How is it that the Department of External Affairs always manage, in the friendliest way, to get the worst accommodation in any hotel or on any airline? But my window, which will not open, looks out on the canal locks and, on the other side of the canal, above the screen of trees, the Gothic towers, conical green copper roofs, and iron fretwork pinnacles of the East Block point upwards to an overcast sky. I took my morning walk round the poop-deck of Parliament Hill overlooking the river and towards Eddy’s pulp factory and the Gatineau Hills beyond, the same walk I have paced at intervals for thirty-five years, in every weather and at every turning of my career, in decision and indecision, in panic and exhilaration. Parliament Hill has not changed. The only addition to its population of frock-coated Victorian statues is a monstrously comic – or comically monstrous – version of Mackenzie King, sculpted apparently in shit in the style favoured in Communist countries at the height of the Stalin epoch. It could be a work of revenge by an inspired enemy.

  28 August 1968. Ottawa.

  A brilliant early autumn Canadian day. I bolted into the French-Canadian Roman Catholic cathedral for a few minutes to seek sustenance, only to find myself involved in a funeral service, and escaped just before the corpse. One day in Ottawa has gone a long way towards destroying the health and spirits built up in three weeks in Nova Scotia, and I have yet to have my interview with the Prime Minister.

  In the Ottawa “Establishment” there is uneasiness; they don’t quite know what to expect from Trudeau. They feel a distinctly cool breeze blowing. Many of them now realize that they are getting older and suspect that they soon may be considered out of date. They cluck nervously.

  29 August 1968. Ottawa.

  I saw Trudeau yesterday. I was talking in his outer office to his secretary, a young French Canadian, when, by a change in his expression, I realized that someone had glided silently into the room and was standing behind me. I turned, and it was Trudeau, looking like a modern version of the Scholar Gypsy in sandals and open-necked shirt, as if he had just blown in from Haunts of Coot and Hern. He is physically altogether slighter, lighter, smaller than his photographs suggest. His air of youth – or is it agelessness? – is preternatural in a man of forty-eight. It is really impossible to connect him with the Office of Prime Minister. The manner is unaffected and instantly attractive; the light blue eyes ironical and amused, but they can change expression, and almost colour, to a chillier, cooler tone. What is behind all this? After this talk with him I am not perceptibly nearer the mind or motive. I rely on others. Some speak of his great intelligence, his power of organizing Cabinet; others speak of his pragmatism; yet others of his Thomist cast of thought. The truth is that all are baffled by an enigma, and so also am I.

  30 August 1968. Ottawa.

  The Prime Minister began our interview by asking me whether I thought that the Department of External Affairs was really necessary and, if so, why? I said that I viewed the Department as an instrument for the protection and advancement of Canadian interests abroad and not as a seminar to discuss abstract policy considerations. I think that Trudeau has got it into his head that the Department is divorced from the real interests of Canada and is embarking on international projects which have no firm basis in Canadian needs, and that this has been characteristic of the Pearson era.

  I find the climate in Ottawa very anti-NATO. There is a great deal of talk of neutrality for Canada based on the Swedish model. Marcel Cadieux12 is not in favour of these trends and told our new Minister of External Affairs, Mitchell Sharp, that we had “no expert on neutrality” in the Department. The British connection is far from popular. I am told that a visit by the Prime Minister to the United Kingdom mi
ght “cover his Anglo-Saxon flank,” as he must do some things which will annoy the British.

  1 September 1968. London.

  Back in London, in a dazed condition after a sleepless night on the plane. This house has an uninhabited look and one sees how quickly, when we are gone permanently, it will take on the featureless face of an official residence. It’s partly the way the servants “place” furniture – always in straight lines – so that a woman’s first gesture on coming home is to give sofa and chairs a pull and a push, to bring them into a nest-like form. But there is no wife here to “build a nest,” as Sylvia remains in Canada for a few more days. Also, no flowers in the house.

  I look at London with indifference, and the blank August residential streets show no response. It is hard to believe that only a month ago the place abounded in friends and acquaintances, the telephone rang incessantly, and every post contained notes and invitations.

  2 September 1968. Hythe.

  A girl got into the railway carriage where I was seated alone waiting for the train to start from Charing Cross. I knew from the instant that she appeared that she felt herself embarking on an adventure, perhaps going to meet a lover. She was pale, dark eyes enlarged with excitement, anticipation, nervousness. (It turned out in later talk that she was on her way to Deal to stay for the first time with her young man and to meet his family.) She was so charged with feeling that at random she shot some arrows in my direction. I closed my eyes in pretended sleep and opened them to find her dark glance looking directly into mine. Then two women got into the carriage and planted themselves for the remainder of the journey, one with elephantine knees.

  Elizabeth was waiting for me at the station exit at Folkestone. I heaved my suitcase, heavy with whisky and shoes, into the back of her car and off we drove to Hythe. I find her subdued in mood and wonder if she is ill, exhausted perhaps by her permanent cough. I seem to do all the talking. Do I ever give her a chance? The weather is sunless and cool, with a wind that bangs all the doors in this house.

  5 September 1968. London.

  Dined with the Hardys and found myself face to face with their son, a boy of eighteen – me at the age when I wrote my early diaries.13 I imagined myself skinned alive by his electric eye. What would he write in his diary? Myself – a gabbling, infinitely old parrot, quite outside the range of human sympathies. At the same time, his physical shyness was such that he could not bring himself to draw his chair into the group of the conversation and was no doubt cursing himself for his own gaucherie.

  6 September 1968.

  People talk of a second childhood, but am I having a second adolescence? Sylvia returns tonight, and a good thing too. This bedroom is beginning to stink of self. Walking round Grosvenor Square the other evening I contemplated, as a task for my retirement, the editing of my own diaries. They seem to me at the moment so trivial as to be completely unpublishable, even if they were not full of indiscreet or unpleasant references to “living persons” which would cause hurt feelings.

  7 September 1968.

  This morning I have been having an early walk in the park. It is blazingly fine and already hot. A couple of youths waking up in their sleeping bags and putting their heads out of their cocoons. I might like to sleep like that in the park all night, coiled up in a sleeping bag. I read some of Harold Nicolson’s diaries. Diaries are unlovable things and in the long run put one off the writer.

  My young cousin Mary Carscallen has been staying the night and has just left, bubbling with her adventures on the Continent, where she and her girl friend have been roaming. Another pair of adventurers – this time male – hove in view in the persons of another cousin, young Roger Rowley, and his friend Larry O’Brien. These two sports have shaken the dust of Rockcliffe from their feet and are questing.

  I have been looking, for the first time in years, at my old diaries. They summon up for me impressions, memories, colours, rooms, faces, which are not visible on the written page. It is like reading a play which I have seen acted with the original cast and others have never seen.

  Dinner at the Painted Hall, Greenwich, for Finance Ministers. Reception at the Banquet Hall, Whitehall, for Athlone scholars. Lunch at the Beefsteak.

  25 September 1968.

  The Burmese Ambassador called and kept on saying, “Difficult world; very, very difficult,” and sighing. Burma probably has plenty to sigh about.

  Went to Gatwick Airport to meet our Minister of Finance, Benson. Reception for them here in the afternoon. I made a presentation of Canadian books to the University of Birmingham’s representatives and had them to tea. Nice librarians – another world, full of intrigue too. Read Powell’s Afternoon Men and was back in my own twenties. Did Time ever string ahead indefinitely like that – time to be endlessly wasted, time for interminable hesitations and endless conversations?

  1 October 1968. Plymouth.

  Sylvia and I are here on an official visit to Plymouth. We are staying in this house which used to be Lady Astor’s and has been left to Plymouth on condition that nothing in it should be changed. Every snapshot remains in place, and her copies of the works of Mary Baker Eddy, with salient passages underlined in red by her. An old housekeeper, Florrie, who dates from the Astor regime, goes with the house, which is in a terrace facing on Plymouth Hoe and the sea beyond. The house, although not a bit ghostly, gives one a soothing sensation which could also be stifling – a sensation of silence and immobility. Everything, once and for all, sealed into its place. This seems all the stranger when one looks at the faded photographs of civic occasions which line the walls and in which the figure of Nancy Astor, like an electric marionette, seems always to be springing about in gesticulation or protest. It is odd to think of that disturbance which must perpetually have swept through this house being displaced by this dead calm of ticking clocks and great cow-like objects of mahogany furniture. I find that to leave the house is like pulling oneself with effort out of a quicksand which could engulf one.

  Well, we shall be gone in five minutes, and the Plymouth episode over. Mayor and Mayoress, store managers and newspaper editors, the librarian and the city clerk, will all vanish down a hole in my memory and only the feeling of this silent house facing the level grey sea will remain, and a sense of old-fashioned comfort and permanence which could change to one of being walled up, breathless, in the past.

  16 October 1968.

  St. James’s Park on a fine autumn morning. The pelicans flapping their great wings in the sun and yawning at each other (at least it looks like a yawn – it may be part of a courtship ritual for all I know). I have been rereading those diaries written when I was eighteen. They have stripped away layers of accumulated experience and exposed nerves which I thought dead but which are all too much alive. I started reading them with detachment, but I soon wanted to change them, to leave out this or that which just would not fit in with my later edition of my own youth. Then I began to realize that I was not reading the diaries of a stranger to see if they had any literary interest, but was involved in a more dangerous enterprise. Now I cannot get away from that adolescent that was – and is – myself. How silly he is, and how sharp; how early the twig was bent into the worldly posture; how powerfully, when I thought myself alone, was I the subject of influences and policies on the part of others; how little have I later achieved, except the damning diary. What has it all amounted to, these forty-five years since I wrote in my bedroom at The Bower as now I write in my bedroom here in London? My “career” – the work and interest – yes; the achievement I count for little. Only love in one form or another, social exhilaration, solitary walks, and a few books, have left traces. Everything else has slipped between my fingers. As for God, I lived without Him all my youth, and was I better or worse for that?

  18 October 1968.

  I don’t know what has got into me this morning. I am itching with old grudges and angry retorts which I didn’t make at the time. They got under my skin like splinters and have stayed there, only coming out la
ter. Perhaps this mood has been brought on by reading Tolstoy’s life, that cantankerous old monster. I am beginning to be bored and overpowered by Tolstoy – there is so much of him.

  Walked in Regent’s Park with Sylvia. Ducks and dahlias, roses not yet bitten by the frost, and in the upper canal discovered the hideout of the black swans. Lunched with Arnold Smith. Our professional interests differ: he wants to keep the Africans in the Commonwealth; I am interested in relations between Canada and Britain. But I like him personally very much.

  20 October 1968.

  Donald Mallett to lunch – a friend, perhaps the last of them for me. Went afterwards to the Balthus pictures at the Tate – the claustrophobia of adolescent afternoons, young girls enclosed in curtained rooms singly and in pairs, all slouched in chairs day-dreaming mindlessly, erotically; a Paris street scene that I would buy if I could.

  Splendid reviews in the American papers of Eva Trout. I am so delighted from every point of view. Also, having been, in these “unfashionable” years for [Elizabeth] as a novelist, always a continuing believer in her genius, I feel such satisfaction at this chorus of praise.

  Young Roger Rowley staying in the house. He, Eliza, and Peter Elliston for dinner last night. A bizarre evening for me, as I had just been soaked in the early diaries in which Peter played the central part. “What,” I said to him, “have we two to show for our lives, not in terms of ‘success’ or ‘failure,’ but in living?” “Nothing, nothing at all,” Peter said in his new dry voice of realism. Yet the next moment he was off on a fantastic saga of embroidered invention just as rococo as his youthful extravaganzas.

 

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