by Ian Buruma
Wagner pops up in the most unexpected places. In August of the same year, Bernard embarked on a trek through Kashmir with two “coolie-bearer-guides,” one old cook with a dyed red beard “who knows his stuff,” eight ponies, and a number of “pony wallahs.” It was the kind of experience he relished, bathing in ice-cold rivers, picking fresh walnuts from the trees, and sleeping under the stars. The only thing he missed in the Himalayan Hills was the company of his wife. Writing by the light of a hurricane lamp on the night of August 21, he says, “As the sun set, one end of the valley with its rather green hills & light clouds looked like the opening stages of the ‘Ring’ and I almost expected Fafner and Fasolt* to appear before Wotan & the remainder of the gods, while at the opposite end, the rather rugged sinister rocky mountains with the sun’s waning light reminded me of the last act of ‘Gotterdämmerung’ & I waited to see Walhalla go up in flames any minute in the distance and Brünnhilde mounted on her white steeds riding to her destruction. It’s been a grand day walking through this happy valley through rice fields and past all the wild flowers that grow in the English countryside.”
So here we have it: Wagner’s Valhalla with the sweet odors of England.
—
One of Bernard’s duties was to inspect the military hospitals of northern India, all the way to the border of Afghanistan. To amuse Win, he recounts some of his adventures. On the way to Srinagar in Kashmir, he visits a lunatic asylum and reports on March 26, 1943, “The superintendent is one of those Indians who seem to regard life as rather a joke—I know the type so well now—and so, as he took me round, problems and difficulties that I mentioned as possibly arising in his particular work dissolved into a chuckle and a contented shrug of the shoulders on his part. He is a good man in many ways to be at the head of an asylum.”
Together they watch a man who has lectured to an empty room for the last twenty years. Bernard observes that what he has to say does not seem entirely unreasonable.
In a station near Agra, in April, he looks up an old schoolmate from Uppingham. They used to collaborate on exams in history and divinity. His name is Dyer, now Major Dyer in the regular army. A keen violinist, Major Dyer was just playing the Brahms Violin Concerto on his gramophone when Bernard arrived, bringing back many pleasant memories. Major Dyer happened to be the son of Reginald Dyer, the man who, fearing an Indian rebellion, massacred more than a thousand unarmed civilians in Amritsar in 1919. “So much for Dyer,” writes Bernard on April 3.
He visits the famous Residency in Lucknow, which, he writes on June 6, “stands in grim ruins with the Union Jack flying steadfastly on its tower flagstaff. Here was made the famous stand against the Mutiny in 1857 when close to 3000 were invested for six months—soldiers, women & children . . . It was about here that the march sings ‘The Campbells are coming, Hurrah, Hurrah.’”
On the North-West Frontier, he meets Pathans. The Pathan, he declares on August 20, “takes life much more as a joke but is often thoroughly untrustworthy. He is also said to have peculiar habits which we don’t consider very nice.”
Bernard’s political opinions on India are cautious and on the whole absent from his letters to Win. When she asks him what he thinks of the appointment of Field Marshal Wavell as the new viceroy of India, he answers, in the same letter quoted above, that he is a good choice. “An Indian Viceroy would be quite impossible with the existing Hindu-Muslim rivalry, apart from any other consideration and these are manifold . . . The reaction of the Indian soldiers to the appointment is good. The average Indian civilian is, shall we say, I should think resigned.”
Quite who is the “average Indian civilian” remains a bit hazy. But Bernard’s report of an encounter with “a young civilian Mahomedan” in March 1944 makes it clear that the end of the British Raj, and even the way it would end, was already a common topic of discussion. On March 18, Bernard is on an overnight train to Agra. The Muslim, an engineer, shares his carriage. They engage in a long discussion. “His politics,” writes Bernard, “were interesting. He thought the British should clear out, even though he said it would almost certainly mean civil war. In the same breath, he spoke about improved economic conditions for the Indians, little heeding that the one would postpone the other indefinitely. The Hindus outnumber the Musulmen by 3 to 1, and the latter are frightened that their interests would never be served if representatives in the central national Government were in that proportion. So they want a trial of strength as to who should have the power. He agreed that this was not an ideal manner of beginning a new regime but had no other solution. What’s to be done with a country which thinks in these terms and he is a well educated man?”
Wavell was directly involved in the most dramatic event during Bernard’s time in India. A famine in 1943 caused the deaths by starvation, malnutrition, or disease of roughly three million Bengalis. The reasons are still disputed. A cyclone in January destroyed many rice crops. Government statistics on food production were highly unreliable. The Japanese occupation of Burma cut off rice supplies. The hugely expanded Indian Army needed to be fed. Provincial governments were often corrupt and refused to divert food to other parts of India. Lord Linlithgow, the viceroy before Wavell, was convinced that there was no shortage in Bengal and that people were simply hoarding rice and grain. Some historians blame Winston Churchill, who blocked shipments of grain to Bengal because the “sturdy Greeks,” who were also going hungry, were more in need, in Churchill’s view, than the wretched Bengalis.
Much of the news on the famine was allegedly suppressed in Britain. But it was Win, in a letter sent on November 18, when the hunger was most acute, who brought it up. Her main concern was Bernard himself: “Are you affected by the famine trouble in Bengal, although it is not your district? For heaven’s sake take precautions against cholera and other diseases.”
Bernard answered a month later in an airgraph, dated December 15. “Yes,” he writes, “the Bengal mess is certainly tragic. I read the Indian minister of food’s statement in the assembly. Most has to do with provincial lack of cooperation, a weak governor & the normal Indian’s absence of charity from his character. Much [unreadable] has gone on at the unfortunate starving multitudes’ expense.”
Bernard might have mentioned a lack of charity on Churchill’s part too, but that would not have occurred to him. Churchill was the epitome of everything he and Win admired.
When General Wavell took over as viceroy from the hopeless Linlithgow in the summer of 1943, this inspired a peculiarly optimistic letter from Bernard, written on October 31, when the famine was still raging in Bengal. “Good old Wavell,” he writes. “It needed a soldier to wake up the slow-moving & ineffective Provincial Indian legislature & take active steps to put an end to all the misery in Bengal.”
He was not wrong. Lord Wavell did open up reserves of grain and soon after the new year the worst would be over. There was more good news, not least on the Eastern Front, where German armies had been routed at Stalingrad and Kursk: “Amazing these Russians are,” writes Bernard, “and we are not doing badly. I read a good address which [General] Montgomery sent to his old prep school . . . in which he explains how N. Africa & the campaign in the Mid East & Sicily, etc. had been the turning point of the war. Win, do you think we dare to hope that the Bosch will be defeated in the early part of 1944 & the Japs at the end of it. I still have visions of Christmas at Mount Pleasant in 1944.”
Win, as always, is less easily buoyed up. She feels that their forced separation might be a kind of punishment. December 8, 1943: “Perhaps we were too happy, too secure in our great love & our comfortable circumstances.”
She could not face the new year without feeling deeply worried. John was now almost old enough to be called up. On December 26, Boxing Day, when the whole family except Bernard is gathered around the Christmas tree in Mount Pleasant, Win writes, “My heart bleeds to realise that the day is drawing ever nearer, when [John] too must leave me to plunge into t
his devilish vortex. I dare not look into the future, & can only half-heartedly join in the merry chatter about future plans and hopes, because at the back of my mind there is always that secret dread: ‘Is there going to be a future?’”
Eight
THE BEGINNING OF THE END
Win had said it before, but never quite as succinctly as on March 2, 1943: “Today, while I was gardening, a time when many thoughts and philosophies run through my mind—I said to myself there are just two things in this world which make me proud and eternally thankful. One is that I am an English woman, privileged to live in and for the most wonderful country in the world, and the other is that I won the unique and faithful love of such a man as you.”
Reassured that the family would almost certainly be spared a fate that was still easy to imagine a year or two before, Win’s patriotism was boosted even more by her gratitude. It was boundless: not only had England not rejected her in the way that Germany had done to her own relatives, but she felt strongly that England had saved the lives of her family. Which was why she couldn’t really abide people who didn’t share the same feelings. When one of the hostel children, Peter Hecht, hopes to go to university to study medicine, and expects Bernard and Win to pay for his further education, she writes, on January 1, 1944, that this is out of the question. He lacks the ability, there isn’t the money, and “I also reminded him that he owes a debt to England before he thinks of his own future.”
But there were limits even to Win’s readiness to suffer for her country, let alone its empire. When E. M. Forster said that given the choice between betraying his friend or his country, he hoped he would have the guts to betray his country, he spoke as a humanist. Personal loyalty should be valued more highly than loyalty to an abstraction. Some might say that “country” is not an abstraction, especially when it has to be defended against a mortal danger. Win would no doubt have thought that. But personal considerations tempered even her patriotic zeal.
In May 1940, when she heard that Bernard would be pulled out of Narvik, she wrote that her country was worth more than her private happiness, more even than Bernard’s return, which, if necessary, had to be postponed for England’s honor.
I don’t think she would have put it quite like that four years later. Win was so desperate for Bernard to come home that she worried about his desire to embark on more dangerous duties than inspecting military hospitals in northern India. On January 11, 1944, she writes, “I know your fear, which is almost a fetish, of appearing unpatriotic or un-public spirited, but . . . you would apply for a return to England, wouldn’t you, when you are legally entitled to it?”
Bernard taking it easy
Who was more fetishistic in this regard, Bernard or Win, is hard to say. But Bernard’s desire for more action had been there from the beginning of the war. He was restless at Benenden, bored in Ormskirk and Bangor, and felt guilty about his hectic but relatively shielded existence in India. In September 1942, he writes about having to give away one of his hospital nurses at her wedding. He hopes he won’t have to wear a sword for the occasion, for fear of tripping over it: “What false peace-time soldiering, it all seems to be here,” he grumbles.
Was this just an excess of patriotic zeal, as Win’s letter suggests? I don’t think so. The frustration goes deeper. Bernard explains himself in more detail on January 12, 1943, after commiserating with Win’s difficulties in keeping the household going under increasingly harsh material constraints. “I feel ashamed,” Bernard writes, “when I’m faced with the good things out here & am beginning to feel more and more my war morale being sapped by the fleshpots. It was mainly for that reason that I vainly sought a transfer to greater trials & discomforts for the good of my soul.”
There can’t have been many people in 1943 who actively pined for greater hardships. For most it was hard enough to survive, and for most Jews in Europe even that was impossible. But the more Bernard heard about the miseries in Europe, or even in England, which was still incomparably better off than countries under German occupation, the more uneasy he felt about his life as an officer of the British Raj. His shock at the squalor and inequality of Indian society added to his sense of guilt. Not that he blamed such conditions on the Empire itself; on the contrary, lifting India from its own wretchedness was, for him, and others like him, a justification for continued British rule.
Here he is in Naini Tal, a pleasant hill station in the Himalayas, famous for its grand views of snowy mountains, and sailing on the lake, for which the British, in Bernard’s words on June 3, 1944, “dress up for the part, complete with yachting caps, blue tops & white flannels on Sunday morning.” Cars are not allowed to disturb the peace up there among the summer villas and municipal buildings in the “domestic Gothic” style. Rickshaws, “pulled and pushed up the steep hills by four coolies at a trot,” are the only form of transport for the sahibs and memsahibs on their way to the tennis courts and tea parties. Bernard feels guilty about this too, “as I think it’s undignified for people to be hauled about by their fellow men acting as beasts of burden . . . Only once have I travelled in one in Simla, soon after I came out & then I helped them push up the steep bits instead of being a passenger—they thought I was quite mad & feared I would not pay them at the end.”
India often disgusted him. It was a country, he writes on August 1, “where there has always been one law for the wealthy & a very different one for the common herd & I fear this will never change, Quit India or no.” Sometimes the squalor of India, the beggars, the constant tang of poverty overwhelmed him. Taking a stroll around the station at Cawnpore one day while waiting for his next train, he observes children defecating in the streets of “the native quarters,” which “we practically always miss in our rapid transport to the Cantonments from the railway station,” the flies, the stink, the open sores: “What a country!”
Back on the train, he opens an old copy of Country Life, the type of magazine from the home country that would have been piled up on the side tables in the officers’ mess or the golf club at any colonial outpost. Reading Country Life on the train, he writes on January 16, “wafts away these Oriental smells & gives me the feeling of cleanliness again with its pictures of sunny, bright and verdant England, smiling and friendly, with its fine stately old mansions, undulating plough land, woods, birdlife, country lore, queries and answers about the pleasant things in life—habits, customs, antiquities, collector’s pieces, articles on husbandry, fruit trees & daffodils. There, I feel better now, as if a draught of fresh air had blown through my bones.”
This was the sentimental vision of home cultivated by many British servants of the Empire, who only later found themselves much too late in life, after years in the tropical sun, miserable and isolated in some rain-sodden village in the Home Counties. Bernard, too, pined for his safe haven, his Berkshire idyll, but what he wanted at the same time was to be tested in action, be it against Japanese or Germans, preferably the latter, as long as he no longer had to feel in danger of going soft in body and soul.
Win understood his feelings, although she often assumed, only half in jest, that he was swanning about town with “young damsels” while she was growing old and ugly waiting for him to come home. He continuously had to reassure her on this score. But she was alarmed by his restlessness. She didn’t even like him flying around India on airplanes, after she read reports of regular plane crashes in that country.
If Bernard was tugged by mixed desires—for going home as well as for the ruggedness of combat—her feelings were no less contradictory. For she admired his gung-ho attitude in spite of her anxiety, and couldn’t help comparing her husband’s manliness to what she saw as the lack of it in her eldest son. Even as Bernard is hungry for action, John is on his summer holiday in Kintbury preparing to appear as Carmen Miranda in a variety show he put together. This is his last year at Uppingham. His school career has not been a success. Win reports with a modicum of pride that at least he had
a part in the school play (“female inevitably”), which he seems to “have carried off outstandingly well.” His head is filled with movies he has seen, plays attended (John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier at the Old Vic), and plans for future shows when he goes up to Oxford. But before Oxford, he will have to serve in the army, a prospect that horrifies him and alarms Win.
Win to Bernard, February 23, 1943, about John: “He is such a kind, clean honest fellow, and in so many ways still so refreshingly ingenuous, and so good-natured, but he is utterly lazy, spineless & self-centered. My great fear is that if he should become actively involved in this war, he will fail to lead his men into battle with courage and determination.”
Win’s attitude, expressed in different tones and variations over and over in her letters, is that of many mothers in times of war. She wants John to do his duty for his country. She wants him to be brave, to lead his men into battle. She even thinks the army might “do him some good.” Bernard agrees. Even though John has his mind set on “the stage and set designing,” he writes on February 2, 1944, “no doubt the forthcoming army life will have settled his ideas along more orthodox and safer lines by the time he is through with it.”
What she cannot understand is how they, Bernard and Win, “who have always been rather exceptionally energetic and public spirited come by children like John and Wendy.” My mother, too, was evidently a disappointment, even though her proficiency with the cello redeemed her a bit. Whereas John could think of nothing else but the theater: “He doesn’t sleep when he has a show on.”
The most remarkable letter of all, on John’s manliness, or the lack of it, was written by Win after the war against Germany was already won and there was still a chance of her son being sent to fight the Japanese. He has failed hopelessly in military training as a common soldier in the Royal Engineers and is laid up for weeks, possibly for psychosomatic reasons, at a hospital in Manchester. She is responding to a letter sent by Bernard on June 6, 1945, where he mentions the possibility of having John transferred to ENSA, the army entertainment division. That is indeed where he ended up, happily putting on drag shows for the troops in Singapore with Kenneth Williams and Peter Nichols, who later dramatized this experience in a musical play entitled Privates on Parade. Bernard is less hard on John than is Win, and reminds her of his own mental deterioration in 1918—“perhaps you think that I have never really recovered from then & you may be right.”