The whole correspondence over the next three years is full of lengthy passages like this in which they both – but particularly Roy – reassured one another that they still loved each other as much as, or even more than, ever. Once, feeling ‘rather statistical & mathematical today’, Roy drew ‘a little graph showing the intensity of our respective curves over 18 months’.10 His lifelong compulsion to measure and compare was applied even to the emotions.
Jenkins did not mix easily with his fellow trainees and kept himself largely to himself. One with whom he did become friendly, Gordon Scotney (later a headmaster), remembered that Roy found the gunnery training ‘intellectually satisfying’:
But I soon became aware that he was a bit different from the rest of us. A copy of Hansard arrived every week, and he would go off to his billet to read it alone. He never mentioned it, and I never asked him about it.11
Roy soon learned that trying to talk politics in the mess was not productive. Years later he recalled thinking that the death in office of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Kingsley Wood, in September 1943 would make a promising topic of conversation with a hitherto unknown group of fellow officers – he had just been transferred to a new unit – only to find that ‘none of them seemed to have heard of him’.12 Politics, then as now, was a minority interest.
It was while doing gunnery training at Alton that Jenkins had an experience which never ceased to haunt him. He described it lightly to Jennifer at the time:
I performed a most prodigious feat yesterday & fired the gun that sent a round 1½ miles off the range! Actually it was entirely the fault of No. 1 (I was No. 3) who loaded charge 3, instead of ch. 1, with the result that it went about 6000 yards instead of 2500. It was a miracle that it didn’t land on the railway station . . . For all I know it may still have killed off a few innocent people.13
In fact someone was killed – the Colonel’s driver, no less; and Roy was not sure that it was not his fault. Five decades later he confessed the episode to a colleague: it evidently still worried him.14 Ironically this was the nearest he came to firing a shot in anger during the war.
Meanwhile Jennifer was working hard for her tripos, suffering the same mixture of panic and apathy that Roy had experienced a year earlier. ‘The one thing that comforts me,’ she wrote selflessly on 17 May, ‘is that you got a First and I’d rather I got the Third than you, if one of us had to’.15 In fact she got a good Second, but she allowed herself no time to celebrate. She got a job almost immediately as a supervisor in a Hoover factory in Tottenham that had been adapted to making propellers. This was quite a test of her mettle: a twenty-one-year-old girl straight down from Cambridge thrust into disputes over working hours and absenteeism with recalcitrant, often Communist, shop stewards. Wartime industrial relations were not always characterised by patriotic cooperation. Often she had to work nights, which made it harder to get time off to coincide with Roy’s leaves and meant that she was frequently exhausted when they did get together. She found digs with a Mrs Stutchbury in Muswell Hill. ‘The big advantage is the ’phone,’ Roy wrote – not that telephoning during the war was either easy or private.fn1 And it was not certain that he could stay. ‘Is the woman horribly moral,’ he wondered, ‘or would she allow us to use the room?’17
Contraception was still a problem for unmarried couples in the 1940s. ‘It might be easier than we thought,’ Jennifer had written while still at Cambridge. ‘I think I’ll see if old Havelock [the American sexologist Havelock Ellis] is in the Girton library after the exams.’18 By September she was trying to make an appointment with a doctor who was only available in working hours. But clearly a frontier had been reached:
I definitely want to culminate Darling if you can bring yourself to forget the extreme English miss-ish-ness of the Dartington mefn2 and if you think it won’t make me even more of a split personality when you think of me. Seriously though, I think we have reached a stage where not doing so creates a barrier and even tends to drive us apart slightly. We both want to so much, and we both presumably find our present stage increasingly unsatisfactory, so that that in itself unconsciously makes things just slightly difficult. Also we have gone along very naturally up to now, enjoyed each new stage very much, and it becomes definitely unnatural to stop now. Also psychologically at the moment we are both a bit on the defensive about it. I quite agree that we need a night together for the first time and that there’s no need to hurry unduly, particularly as the 2nd Front now looks as tho’ it’s off for a bit.19
The Second Front was a constant worry. Soon after Jennifer had started at Hoover, Roy got his commission and was posted to the 55th West Somerset Yeomanry, stationed at West Lavington on the edge of Salisbury Plain, with the expectation that they might be sent abroad quite soon. They lived under canvas and did gunnery exercises in pouring rain. ‘The bloody, god-forsaken regiment is part of an armoured Guards division,’ Roy wrote, ‘containing among other things the 2nd Coldstreams. It all sounds horribly, horribly shock troop & I wasn’t at all prepared for supporting tanks.’20 The abortive raid on Dieppe in the middle of August 1942 seemed to presage further landings. Roy wondered if he should start learning Danish or Dutch. These weeks, he recalled, were ‘the peak of my strictly military career’.21 When nothing happened, however, army life became merely uncomfortable and tedious, with nothing to do in the evenings except drink and smoke around sixty cigarettes a day.fn3 He tried to keep up his political interests by reading Hansard and running classes for the Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA); he also represented one of his men who was up on a driving charge. (Later in the war he acted for another before a court martial.) But he was disappointed not to be appointed an Intelligence officer; and he was soon angling to be transferred to a civilian job. Arthur used his contacts to try to find him another opening at the American embassy, but soon gave it up as hopeless. In December Roy had hopes of landing a staff job in London, a prospect that briefly excited Jennifer:
It would be absolutely wonderful if you came to live in London . . . We might even think about getting married sooner than we had thought. If you get a captaincy and staff pay you should be able to afford a ring with a little assistance from me!25
In fact none of these possible escape routes came to anything.
Instead his unit moved just after Christmas 1942 to more comfortable quarters near Bristol, where they had very little to do beyond some rather desultory drilling. A typical letter in January 1943 described what he called ‘an energetic week’:
We had a 5-mile run on Monday afternoon and another today, in boots, denims and tin hats this time. On Wednesday I played a bastard but extremely suicidal form of rugger & then went to Bristol to see my mother. She stayed until 7.45 and I then went back and had a long & solitary dinner at the Grand and then caught the 9.45.26
Never one to stint on his food, Roy always made sure of a good dinner whenever he could and made a point of telling Jennifer where, and often what, he had eaten and what wine he had drunk. ‘You know Darling,’ she told him once, ‘you must be fundamentally more extravagant than I am as it’s what one does alone that’s the test: I would never go to Isola by myself – it somehow wouldn’t seem right.’27 But her mild protests never stopped him. He still did not socialise much with his fellow officers, but preferred to go out on his own, or else stay on his bed, reading voraciously. ‘I was remarkably ill-read when I got my Oxford degree,’ he wrote years later, ‘but much less so when I emerged from the army.’28 Among other things he got through Proust for the first time and most of Trollope.
That spring he had much more leave: they congratulated themselves on six consecutive weekends, as well as longer spells together in both Ponytpool and Henley. Yet this seems to have been an exceptionally tense period, partly because Tony, having joined the Parachute Regiment, was about to be sent to North Africa (‘He is rather depressed about the prospect, not unnaturally,’ Roy reported to Jennifer)29 and insisted on seeing Roy in Oxford before he went; and partly due to an
extraordinary storm in a teacup occasioned by Roy’s former tutor, Thomas Balogh, a notorious womaniser, then unmarried, who made a play for Jennifer. The two strains came together in a letter Jennifer wrote in March:
I don’t know why I felt so depressed this evening but I did. It was partly I suppose because Tony was on embarkation leave, partly because he, you and I are an awkward trio, partly because we had such a short time together and that not completely in harmony . . .
I suppose that the reason why you were slightly peeved about the Tommy incident was my lack of courage in making it clear that you were the only person who matters. And of course you were right – I was rather cowardly tho’ I don’t know why . . . I’m not perfect and a dislike of disagreeing with people does sometimes make me appear rather faithless. It’s not a sign that I love you any less – and if you just tell me it will be OK.30
But Roy was more than slightly peeved, and some days later, after a couple of unsatisfactory phone calls, sent her an astonishingly disproportionate démarche:
My darling Jennifer . . .
The obvious way to start the main part of this letter would be to tell you my reactions now but, as you appear to treat them with such indifference, I don’t very much want to entrust you with further statements of emotional weakness. When I told you that I had answered Tommy by saying that I was going to marry you it made my eyelids burn with tears, for some odd reason, and I looked at you and you gave me exactly the right sort of look and I felt that we were closer together than we had been all day. You changed your attitude and more or less said that you had every intention of making the wildest professions of loyalty for me.
But then he had somehow convinced himself that she did not really mean it, but was merely being polite:
I can’t for one moment claim that, as a result of all this, I don’t love you or that I consider a final break (the BB, do you remember?). Were it peace-time I should probably make no attempt to see you at all soon, but time is today much too pressed for that and I need you far too badly to be without you for long. Nevertheless I now believe:
(i)That you are psychologically extremely selfish.
(ii)That you are very far from being proud of your love for me.
(iii)That you have very little moral courage and moral honesty.
(iv)That you are very much less sensitive than I believed . . .
(v)That our mutual frankness is at least half a myth . . . I can honestly say that, at the moment, I do not know whether or not he tried to or did kiss you . . . If so, how beautifully you would develop the argument that it was the best way to get rid of him.
But after all this he concluded that ‘if you don’t see Balogh again, my relationship with him is made impossible’!
If this was not bewildering enough, he finished by sending utterly conflicting messages:
If you love me, after reading this, there is only one answer, a very simple one, to this & the week-end problem, but I am so tired of watching you fail to find the right answer to these problems that I shall probably phone you tomorrow or Friday night & make the arrangements myself. I want you so much that I have not the strength of will to waste even a possible twelve hours.
This letter is probably a much nastier one than the silly note that I wrote from Oxford, but it is a much more serious one and I am quite sure that, in a year’s time I, at least, will not laugh over it. I have just read it through & I still believe every word of it & also a lot more that I have not said.
It is now 1.15 a.m. & you are probably asleep long ago.
Roy31
We cannot know how rows of this sort were resolved; but it evidently ended happily, since a few days later Jennifer was talking of buying an engagement ring. She continued to see Balogh, which was apparently what Roy wished. But in April she wrote that Balogh had been so persistent that she had finally told him that she was going to marry Roy: she hoped Roy would not be cross, but she had no choice!32 Many years later Roy recalled the incident philosophically to Balogh’s biographer:
Thomas was keen on Jennifer . . . he was rather an old satyr . . . She was only twenty and Thomas was forty-five or something but I think she, though not swept off her feet, was mildly flattered and retains an affection for him.33
In fact Balogh was only thirty-eight in 1943, while Jennifer was twenty-two. But they did all remain friends through the 1950s and 1960s, despite adhering to different wings of the Labour Party, and Roy was godfather to one of Balogh’s children in 1957.
A week later Jennifer told Roy that while visiting her brother in Cambridge she had indeed bought a ring – an unusual inversion of convention:
I wish you had been there to see it and approve, but I hope you will like it. It is small and square – three small diamonds – cost £12-12-0d. It was a little over our price, but I thought it was worth it as I couldn’t see anything else I particularly liked.34, fn4
Soon after this they spent a week together in Pontypool, when they presumably told his family. ‘It was a lovely week,’ Jennifer wrote, ‘and we were very, very happy together, loved each other very, very much. It is so good to be together for a few days after having had only odd days and parts of days for so long . . . The day at Monmouth was very good . . . and then in the field at Chepstow, and the castle at Abergavenny, and above all – just the house and garden.’36
Roy’s parents warmly approved of Jennifer: Arthur used to take her for lunch or dinner in London, though Hattie was sometimes upset if Roy devoted all his leaves to seeing her instead of coming home. When Roy failed to write or telephone they would ring Jennifer to make sure he was all right. Her parents were more difficult. Sir Parker Morris (he was knighted in 1941) thought that Roy was distracting Jennifer from her work and wrote to tell him so. Jennifer was furious. ‘I feel so angry that I can hardly hold my pen firmly. It really sounds a most hypocritical letter. The stuff about taking my mind off my work is of course stuff and nonsense . . . What is very much more likely to take my mind off my work is not seeing you and therefore feeling miserable and trying to work out wild schemes of meeting.’37 Her relations with her parents were never as easy as Roy’s with his.
About this time, however, she managed to secure a much less stressful job as a temporary civil servant in the Ministry of Labour, where she started at the beginning of May. It was good timing, she told Roy, as it avoided a lot of congratulations from her workmates. ‘It would be a little difficult to explain that we had really been engaged for nearly three years.’38 The new job was all about training ex-servicemen for new careers after the war. ‘We are quite high up and are treated politely, which is more than I ever was at Hoovers! . . . It seems so funny after being treated as the lowest of the low at Hoovers.’39 The work itself varied between periods of boredom with too little to do and others when she had too much to cope with. Once, in June 1944, she wrote that she was trying to sort out which professions and which training course for each profession should be covered by different schemes. ‘It is taking a long time, but I rather enjoy getting muddles straight – and this is an awful muddle.’40 But the Ministry gave her much more time for social life and her letters in 1943–4 are full of reports of lunches, theatre-going and tennis. Later that year she left her digs in Muswell Hill and moved to Chelsea to share a flat with two girlfriends in Markham Street just off the King’s Road.
Meanwhile Roy too moved again, to Sussex – another cushy posting with the Leicestershire Yeomanry billeted in a mock-Elizabethan housing estate at Angmering-on-Sea. Here he saw a much more classy side of the army than he had encountered hitherto. ‘Several of the officers occasionally turned up in top boots and breeches and there was more wine in the mess’;41 while the battery commander, Robin Wilson, was a man of some social position, whose pretensions in retrospect amused him. But at the time, as an impatient young socialist, Roy found him hard to take:
Meals are intolerable. He never seems to turn up till about half an hour late and you hang about waiting for him. Then you aren’t al
lowed to leave the table till he finishes an extremely leisurely meal. It may be alright for other members of the Battery, but I think that I have something better to do than sit sheepishly around a table while a rather 2nd class Leicestershire country gentleman finishes his coffee.
Moreover he thought his new men inferior to the West Somersets. ‘My sergeants were really quite well educated – the best specimens of the L.M.C. [lower-middle class], those here are just typical army toughs, with a really bad spirit.’42
Sussex did have the advantage that it was easier to get to London to see Jennifer, or for her to come to Brighton, most weekends. In May they both managed to attend some of the Labour Party conference, which during the war was held in the Central Hall, Westminster. Then in August Roy got a temporary staff job for six weeks as ADC to General Walter Clutterbuck, based in Haywards Heath. It was ‘quite a compliment’, Jennifer wrote, and ‘would seem to be an opportunity for getting something else better . . . I expect you are living in very comfortable quarters now and eating well. I hope you are not drinking too much? . . . If you ever do get any time off, Haywards Heath is extremely near – 45 minutes from London.’43
Roy did go to London at least once in his staff capacity. He had no time off to see Jennifer, but dined at Bentley’s, the famous fish restaurant off Piccadilly. ‘The fact that I had never heard of it is just another example of the enormous gulf between the military and us,’ he reflected. ‘Living in a Mess with senior regular officers really is extraordinarily revealing & in some ways they are far worse than I ever believed possible.’44 But by the end of September he was back with his battery and finding it ‘very bleak’:
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