Freya Stark

by Caroline Moorehead

  However ill at ease and hostile she felt, Freya clearly disguised it, for she was not disliked by the Americans in return. On the contrary, her particular style, forceful and gracious, and her English air of cultured certainty, went down very well among the ladies arid on the platforms, where she had become a fluent speaker. Writing of Freya’s reception in California, Lucy Beach remarked to a friend in London: ‘You know I’ve not seen Freya for six years, and I found that she has grown very much. She has great poise and authority. But she is the same dear person, quite unspoiled …’

  The tour ended in Boston, at the end of April. Apart from a brief visit to Canada, to see the farm her father had left her, Freya had been to New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston and Newport. It was not easy for anyone to assess quite what she had achieved, though her visit had not passed unnoticed or unreported and two rabbis and a member of Congress had requested her removal.

  In the House of Commons, Brendan Bracken, Minister of Information, was questioned by a Liberal MP called Geoffrey Mander as to whether Freya had been sent to the United States to spread pro-Arab propaganda. Brendan Bracken replied that she had gone at the invitation of the Oriental Institute of Chicago and that he would certainly put on record ‘that she has nothing to do with propaganda for Arabs or anyone else’.

  Freya herself had reached the conclusion that in the States the British technique over Palestine should be that of a relay race, with one Arab expert taking over when the last became too visible in the Zionist spotlight. She now planned to retire to the Devonshire moors to write a short and popular book on the Arab question. Her last official function was to give a talk on Boston radio; after which, to her chagrin and confirming all she felt about America, the announcer thanked her and promised listeners a ‘circus of performing animals’ for the next day.

  Freya was never absolutely clear about the purpose of her next wartime occupation, a visit to India. In the autumn of 1944, having spent the summer months in a hotel in Chagford writing East is West, she received an invitation from Lady Wavell, since 1943 Vicereine of India, to go out to Delhi, where a committee of the Women’s Voluntary Services had been formed to try and think up ways of involving Indian women in the war. It had, wrote Lady Wavell, a programme ‘beyond me and anyway I haven’t the time’. The Wavells and Freya were by now good friends, with affectionate letters passing regularly between her and the Viceroy, who filled his pages with verse and doggerel, both charming and funny. Lady Wavell was not a letter writer. Though never at her best with women, and increasingly impatient with administration, Freya agreed, asking only that she be allowed to return to Europe once Italy was liberated. Before leaving she wrote to a friend, Austin Harrison, that she hoped the new job was not going to consist of running the WVS as ‘my one aim and function in life is to de-organise the organised, especially women. Organisation is becoming a sort of nightmare.’

  Early in February 1945, Freya left England by flying boat in the company of three generals, the party having been delayed for nearly a week in Poole harbour by ice. She reached Delhi when the weather was at its best, hot days, cold nights; the roses were out; the gardens of the Viceroy’s house had been opened to the public and were full of ‘families, which makes them cheerful … astonishingly like a Persian miniature, especially when the chuprassis with a pointed cap sticking up from their turban and scarlet coats come wandering by’. The Wavells were away, so Freya joined the amateur artists and went painting with one of the ADCs, Billy Henderson. In the afternoons she made excursions to photograph a palace or a temple, or visited the bazaar, to bargain for a piece of jewellery or early coin.

  It was not, in fact, her first visit to India. In February 1943, wishing for a break from the Brothers and Sisters of Freedom, Freya had come to spend a few weeks with the Wavells; she had liked what she saw, approving of the ‘solid Victorian feeling – everything good, nothing of careless rapture’. Something of a mystery surrounds the end of that visit. Freya had expressed a wish to drive from Delhi to Tehran and on Wavell’s orders a car had been found for her. Whether she bought it, as she always claims, or was only lent it, as others maintain, when she reached Tehran she sold it, at an enormous profit, a transaction greatly frowned on by officials from one end of the Near East to the other – cars were in acutely short supply. (Another version had it that the car had belonged to the MoI, and that after being rebuked, Freya cabled London with the words from Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’: ‘If you can make one heap of all your winnings and risk it on the turn of pitch and toss …’) The affair had been put down to Freya’s unique mixture of mild unscrupulousness and disregard for officialdom; in Delhi it was the subject of many affectionate jokes.

  When the Wavells returned to Viceroy House immense formality came with them. Though Wavell was a very different figure from his predecessor, Lord Linlithgow, and as easygoing as the former Viceroy had been orderly, as representative of the King there could be no relaxation from the most rigid attention to etiquette. Matters of rank, title and precedence were presided over by four ADCs, two of whom were always on duty; curtseying and bowing were compulsory and at the end of State dinners the ladies left the dining room in pairs, pausing at the far end of the hall to form up and curtsey. Freya remarked that curtseying had a ‘devastating effect on conversation’ and that splendour cast a blight, ‘a loveless thing that the human soul has difficulty in digging its roots into’.

  Her words were somewhat disingenuous. Freya liked pageantry and grandeur; this was her sort of place. For all the complaints that she found it hard to discuss Hamlet among a lot of silent ADCs, ceremonial was always something she much enjoyed. Lutyens’ Viceroy House, last of the great palaces of its kind, was not exactly beautiful, with its sandwich-like layers of cream and reddish stone; nor was it precisely comfortable, with marble corridors the length of railway stations, so poorly lit there had to be artificial light all day, while the trees in the garden were expressly pruned low, on Lutyens’ orders, so that guests had to carry their chairs round with them from one patch of shade to another. But life within had all that Freya desired. There were 300 servants. She had a pleasant set of rooms and ate whenever at home with the Wavells, whether informally in the small dining room, occasions on which she excelled, for Wavell had no small talk, and wished only really to discuss poetry, military history and golf, the first two of which were ideal for her; or on State occasions, when a turbanned servant stood behind every chair. It was at one of these banquets that she found herself seated next to Mountbatten. She considered him very good-looking, but was distressed when she realised that he was totally uninterested in her, coming to life only when two pet cranes were brought in to be fed. ‘True British trait,’ she remarked a little sourly, ‘to prefer animals to conversation.’

  Increasingly, however, Freya was invited out. Wartime Delhi, like Cairo and Baghdad, was very gay. Once again, Freya was a particular success among the young soldiers on leave in the several camps around the city. At one dance, Lady Wavell went to some length to gather a decent number of attractive young girls. The soldiers clustered around Freya, who, having hurt her knee scrambling over a temple, lay reclining like Madame Recamier on a sofa. Billy Henderson was sent over to disperse the crowd. Ten minutes later they were back at Freya’s feet.

  Those who knew Freya in Delhi all speak of her clothes. Billy Henderson recalls with particular clarity a lemon-coloured raw-silk suit, with a coat worn rather long over the skirt; on her head, Freya had placed a pheasant, a bird made into a hat. Peter Coats, controller before him, wrote in his autobiography Of Generals and Gardens, that her ‘poke bonnets, aprons and a hat with a clock-face on the crown were second only to Gandhi’s fast as a topic of conversation’. Certainly she made their lives more fun. She enticed them out to take her for drives or to visit buildings they had never even heard of. And her obvious delight in picnics – especially in Simla, staying in Viceroy Lodge, when large parties, waited on by footmen, would gather among the rh
ododendrons in the hills – infected all around her.

  Freya was in Simla for the June conference with Gandhi and Nehru, having driven up overnight with Billy Henderson in his open Austin Seven, stopping at dawn for breakfast in a maharajah’s garden in the foothills. Though she had, of course, no official role, her charm and forthcomingness pleased the Indians, who had already been much disconcerted by Wavell’s lack of conversation, and, wrote Coats, ‘her tact and quick wit … glossed over some awkward moments. Her clothes, dirndls, sun bonnets, Tibetan aprons and Jaipur jewellery … a constant joy.’ Though even Freya could do little on one occasion when Lady Wavell, emerging from a daydream, announced to Nehru over tea that she hated circuses because of the captive animals. ‘Captive?’ said Nehru, who had come to the conference straight from a British gaol. ‘Yes,’ said Lady Wavell, vaguely, unaware of everyone’s frantic but wholly unsuccessful efforts to start up another topic. ‘Behind bars, you know.’ ‘Yes,’ said Nehru.

  As for the work, it remained very hard to describe precisely what Freya did. She did travel down to the south, on a regal outing of her own, staying in residencies, meeting rajahs and British ladies, tasting the last of the great Victorian Anglo-Indian splendours. And evidently her talks were admired, for Wavell wrote to her: ‘You don’t know what a success you have been with the people you have met since you arrived in India. On all hands I have been congratulated on getting you to help.’ By mid-April, however, she was complaining that she had been thrown ‘as it were into the arms of philanthropy, for which I have a natural repugnance unless its stern features relax into some human face’. She now concluded that what was needed was a group of four salaried women and a clerk, with a voluntary committee in Delhi to act on their recommendations, while the women ‘goodwill messengers’, as she named them, travelled, making contact with women working all over the country. What, precisely, these women were meant to be working at was never explained. Of her own role, Freya was later to say only that it had been a ‘happy unproductive half year’. By July she was off, having watched the progress of liberation across Europe and into Northern Italy. ‘Freya left,’ wrote Billy Henderson in his diary. ‘Alas. Alas.’

  Freya had entered the war a traveller and a writer. She emerged from it a public figure, widely regarded throughout the Arab world, a friend to Cabinet Ministers and generals. Those who had not seen her for six years found her greatly changed. ‘I look at her in astonishment,’ wrote Mrs Granville to Lady Lawrence, two family friends, ‘for she has so improved with years. She is much better looking. She is a little stouter and somehow it suits her, but she has such an air of assurance, a woman of the world accustomed to being made much of, and she looks so much happier … There is not a line on her face … She does look very foreign, but of course she is … the last garment I asked about was made in Delhi when she was staying with the Wavells. Her jewels, lots of them – were very foreign and her coat was a goatskin from Cyprus.’

  Some of this, of course, was the confidence that came from being consulted and listened to and from work which had been visibly successful: in Cairo, especially, the Brothers of Freedom had become a well-established movement (and was to remain so, until disbanded with the abrogation of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty, when fighting broke out in the Canal Zone in 1952). Freya was now fifty-two. Six years of attention and command had strengthened her. Her style, in speech as in writing, had become more definite, her views more pronounced. She could now, complained a friend, be haughty.

  More importantly perhaps, six years of war had made her an extraordinary number of friends, not only among great men, but with a younger generation of Middle East experts, who were to become constant companions and guests. Whether in Baghdad or Tehran, Cairo or Delhi, she had been feted and admired in the very world she liked best; that of soldiers and statesmen. Many of her friends regard those years as the best of her life. The attention would have pleased anyone; for Freya, after such solitary struggle, it was comforting to be so prized. Not surprisingly, perhaps, her spirits now dropped a little. ‘What’, she wrote apprehensively to Cockerell, ‘shall I do with myself after the war?’

  MARRIAGE

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Freya returned to Asolo to find herself regarded, not altogether admiringly, as a spy. What else, the villagers seemed to imply, could she possibly have been doing as a woman during five years of war in the Near East? Her reception was friendly, but a little wary. Caroly Piaser, who had met Freya briefly before the war, and who had run Flora’s silk factory in her absence, turning it over to more practical wartime work, could remember only that before leaving for London in 1939, Freya had said to her: ‘We’ll meet again in 1945. We’ll stay poor; but we won’t lose the war.’

  The Asolani were indeed poor. Everywhere there was hunger, intense dreariness; the valleys were full of burnt-out houses and people felt extremely bitter about forty-eight local young men, hanged on the trees of nearby Bassano as the SS pulled out. To make things worse, in the middle of August, a hailstorm, accompanied by a sudden tornado, destroyed all crops, including the tomatoes and fruit. There was very little to eat.

  Early on in the war Casa Freia had been taken over by six fascist generals, who cut down the laurels by the front door to make a field of fire against the partisans advancing up the road. But in comparison with neighbours’ houses, which had been ransacked of all their furniture, the place had been barely touched. Freya arrived home in time for the peace celebrations of 25 August. She borrowed a very faded Union Jack to hang alongside the Italian flags in the street, and joined a group of young British theologians, studying to become priests while they waited for demobilisation, for ‘Te Deum’ in the church. Objecting that the civilian food ration was not sufficient to keep a mouse alive, she started a successful system of barter with local peasants; a farmer promised honey, a herdsman a little butter. Corn was obtained by ferrying black-market sacks across the Po at night. For the moment, Freya had much to occupy her, and, as she wrote to Wavell’s daughter Felicity: ‘I am having a reaction against Work which makes it impossible almost to do anything at all except potter around the garden, deciding where to plant stocks and delphiniums.’

  In any case, her war was not quite over. In October the Ministry of Information offered her a car, a driver and £100 a month to travel around the towns of northern Italy and set up reading centres, with English magazines and books, to restore a spirit of warmth to Anglo-Italian relations. Her boss was Michael Stewart, Political Attaché in Rome; he gave her ‘the pride of the fleet’, a car captured from the Germans. (It was later stolen from her by two GIs.)

  Complaining a bit that she had been ‘badgered’ into it, Freya was none the less pleased to be on the move, not least, perhaps, because she hoped to do better for the British in Italy than they had done for themselves in the Middle East. There, she reflected dispiritedly, they had failed because of their want of conviction in what they were saying, and their ‘neglect of disinterested service’.

  Early in December she set out for Bolzano, Merano, Bressanone and Trento; two weeks later it was Cremona, Milan and Turin. Wherever she stopped, she gave little speeches, and talked to local priests and school teachers about the need to build up Culture and not ignore the Left. The weather was dismal, with thick fog; the roads were sometimes impassable, pitted beyond use by armoured vehicles. But the trips were not without fun. Freya had developed a taste for Marmora powdered marble, and asked a new friend, Osbert Lancaster, to come with her to study the baroque churches in order to design marble baroque bathrooms for Casa Freia. Lulie Abul Huda, a visitor at the same time, went with them. In each new town, Osbert Lancaster would set off with one Baedeker towards a baroque building, Lulie Abul Huda with another in search of renaissance churches, while Freya, laden with pamphlets, went off to teach the Italians about democracy. Her mission of persuasion accomplished, she would join them in the café, saying what a good meeting it had been, and off they would go to a delicious lunch of rich northern black-market
food, all the sweeter for the austerity of Asolo.

  The job lasted six months. Freya celebrated the true end to war with a walk in the Dolomites, her first climb for over twelve years. Her legs ached, but she was relieved to find that she could still do it.

  Both East is West and her mother’s An Italian Diary were out and selling. Freya now needed a new book. Pausing in Paris for a first post-war Schiaparelli dress, explaining that ‘I am sure the way to enjoy life is to live in obscurity with frequent escapades,’ she reached London in October to talk to Jock Murray. What she had in mind was a collection of essays, her ‘own Everywoman philosophy’, to be called Perseus in the Wind, on themes ‘beyond our grasp, yet visible to all, dear to our hearts and far from our understanding as the constellations, a comfort for the frail light they shed’. ‘You must first have something you wish to say and then you must say it,’ she had told a gathering in Baghdad some years before. ‘But it must be what you want to say. Courage is the first virtue of style; the courage of one’s own belief.’ There was much Freya now wished to say; and she had never lacked courage.

  First, though, she had finance to arrange. Six years of war had freed her from continual anxiety about money. Back in Europe, with a longing to decorate her house and buy herself new clothes from the Paris collections, she needed to find a new way to bring in an income. What she wanted first, however, was a fur coat.