Diplomatic Passport : More Undiplomatic Diaries, 1946-1962 (9781551996790)

by Ritchie, Charles

  1 Princess Anne-Marie Callimachi was a refugee from Communist Romania. Formerly she had been a wealthy political and social hostess in Bucharest.

  1 Paul Beaulieu, an officer of the Department of External Affairs and subsequently Canadian Ambassador to France.

  1 Maréchal Lyautey, French soldier and administrator in North Africa.

  1 Elsie, Lady de Mendel, fashionable interior decorator and hostess. Her husband, Sir Charles, was an honorary attaché to the British Embassy.

  2 H. K. Stewart, C.M.G., my mother’s brother. He was a Gordon Highlander and King’s Messenger.

  1 Nellita McNullty. She married M. Dechaume, a wartime supporter of General de Gaulle.

  OTTAWA

  1950–1954

  In January 1950 I was posted back to Ottawa from Paris, with the rank of Assistant Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs, and in Ottawa I remained until 1954, becoming Deputy Under-Secretary in 1952 and serving as Acting Under-Secretary for several periods. These years were for me the most satisfying of my professional career. To have reached my rank in the Service gave me a sense of accomplishment. Sharing the management of a government department with all its multifarious problems meant participation in a corporate life and in a corporate loyalty. The Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs, Arnold Heeney, was a great public servant and a warm friend. My colleagues were men and women to whom the job was of exciting importance and to whom hours of work and rates of pay (by no means excessive) meant little compared with the sheer interest of what we were doing. The interest was never lacking, for this was a period in which our country was playing a conspicuous part on the international stage, in NATO, in the United Nations, and in the Commonwealth. In June 1950 the Korean War broke out, and our involvement in it, and the political consequences of the war – in the United Nations, on our relations with the United States, and on our Far Eastern policy – became of dominating importance. During this time I worked closely with our Foreign Minister, Mike Pearson, whom I had known and admired since the war years in London. To be near the operation of power, to live under the tensions of recurrent crises, to participate, in however small a way, in the great game of world politics, all this was immensely stimulating. It also drained away one’s other interests, leaving behind it a sediment of dissatisfaction. There was the risk that one’s sympathies and amusements with people, one’s reaction to the visible world about one, would evaporate, leaving one A Dedicated Civil Servant. The diaries were an escape from this admirable but arid fate. They shut out politics and the office, in an attempt to rediscover an appetite for life.

  18 January 1950. Ottawa.

  In winter the town seems to shrink in size without foliage and flowers – the smallness of the plots of garden, the nearness of the houses to each other, become plain – so do the drabness and poverty of the architecture. Snow fills up the spaces and seems to bring the buildings closer together. Ottawa has the look of a sub-Arctic settlement huddled together around the Gothic battlements of the Parliament Buildings. The straggling business streets with their Main Street stores and telegraph poles and the untidy mesh of streetcar wires and telegraph lines look like an old photograph of Ottawa in the 1880s. On a day of blizzard when whirling, skirling snow is blown in gusts around the street corners, when cars are embedded in snowdrifts, and people bent forward against the gale stumble and slide across the snow-piled streets, you feel the isolation of this place as if it had reverted to its early days and was no longer pretending to be a modern capital. The cheerful readiness with which people help each other to dig a car out of the snow has in it something of the original spirit of the pioneer community. Ottawa remains in its soul a small town – not quite like the old, small, settled communities of the East, but more a lumbering settlement in the Ottawa Valley. That spirit still pervades the place.

  19 February 1950.

  The streets are almost clear of snow – that is to say, the middle of the streets and the pavements – for the snow is banked up in brownish-white piles. It is pre-spring, the season of dirty snow, of mild, melancholy weather, of no-coloured skies. Melting snow drips from the window frames with an uneven drip like a leaking bath-tap. On the roofs of the high buildings men with long poles are dislodging great chunks of ice and masses of half-frozen snow. The streets below are barred off so that these snow-slides should not fall on to the heads of the passing citizenry.

  There is the dust that must have lain under the snow on the sidewalks – pale brownish-yellow dust that blows into swirls where the wind catches it at the street corners. It is not worth tidying up the streets, for it will snow again tomorrow and cover the old dropped cigarette packages, car tickets, newspapers which lie in the dust and are blown with it. In this mild air people yawn and stretch and wish for a good skiing snow. The pressure of winter is relaxed – the icy band of cold around forehead and knees, the knife-cutting wind, the brilliance of sun on ice and dazzling white light on the half-frozen snow. This is neither spring nor winter. It will snow again tomorrow.

  26 February 1951.

  Buffet supper. The men off in the corner talking shop, the women on the sofa talking servants and babies. No sexy flutters or sentimental approaches between men and women. Flat-footed good sense and practical friendliness tinctured by local hates and irritations. Mrs. Griffin told us of an adulterer run out of town by the adulteress’s brothers. Four of them went to his hotel bedroom and sat glowering at him with horsewhips in their pockets. Mrs. Griffin approved this manner of dealing with the situation, which she said was “good because it was natural.” I said nervously that it sounded like the Wild West. “That’s what I mean,” she repeated, “it’s natural.”

  Blair Fraser1 says we should tell our newly fledged diplomats “No shirt too young to be stuffed.”

  Easter 1951.

  Today at Easter communion service I felt boredom, irritation, and then hatred secreting itself in my system. I was surprised by the poisonous strength of these feelings. Where do they come from? The Devil, people once would have said. The Scoutmaster clergyman in the pulpit, the inoffensive congregation, the midday banality of the middle-of-the-way middle-class Church of England morning service goaded me to near hysteria. I felt that I could not take communion in such a state of mind, but when I had taken my place at the altar rail I felt shaken and dissolved, and went back sadly to my pew in the church, not knowing – or caring to know – whether there was God in the bread and wine.

  21 May 1951.

  It is not the work in the Department that I dislike; in fact, it absorbs me totally. It is the “surround” that goes with it. There is the underlying assumption that anyone who is not overworked, underpaid, eye-strained, joy-starved – in fact, not a senior civil servant – is frivolous or materialistic, that these are the hallmarks of a higher calling, the stigmata of the faithful. “Poor so-and-so, how tired he looks, how overworked,” we murmur in tones in which respect mingles with compassion. Why respect? Why not contempt? That a man should so mismanage his life as to be totally immersed in office work is lamentable, unless he loves it. If he loves it, he is doing what he wants, like another who drinks himself to a standstill, and he has no particular call on our sympathy. A civilized, curious, pleasure- and thought-loving man, reduced to a dreary, weary automaton. What is there to respect in that painful spectacle?

  23 May 1951.

  The subject I should like to write about is love between brother and sister, growing up together as children in an old house with their grandfather and a couple of aunts, his daughters. They would be orphans, and the boy would be raised on stories of their picturesque or dashing father killed in the war, and their mother who died when the boy was born. As their lives went on they would discover that no man or woman could satisfy them, that the bond between them was so strong that it unfitted them for any other love and made them destructive in love. Entangled with this subject is another, that of the personality of the dead father as interpreted in the old wives’ tales of the aunts, actin
g upon the boy as an influence so much stronger than that of any living person and building his naturally timid nature into rash, would-be-heroic shapes.

  Well, back to this diary again. If I must do it, let me make my little messes in private. God knows who will clean them up after I am gone. I hope someone who will not be bored by them. It would be appalling to be a Bore after one was dead – an immortal Bore.

  “All the spring goes on without her” – where does that come from? This Ottawa spring is beautiful, but they can have it. I find it quite an effort to remember that this life is real – that it matters whether you do up your fly before going out in the street, or call people by their right names. Only in the office I mean business. Otherwise, there is the habit of not hurting people’s feelings, of being on time for dinner, of having three large whiskies between six and eight, and of being a little uneasy about money.

  2 July 1951. Wolfville, Nova Scotia, on vacation.

  I feel as if I were recuperating after a serious illness. Outside it is perfect June weather – sunlight on a white house – on a slope of neighbouring lawn. The main street is almost deserted at this midday hour. At Frank’s Clothing Store the removal sale is slowing down. At Babcock’s Restaurant and Soda Fountain Mr. and Mrs. Babcock and the two waitresses are recovering after the rush of the Dominion Day crowds. The Post Office is empty – people collected their mail at the bustling hour of twelve after the Halifax train had come in. In the old-fashioned frame houses behind the roomy porches and the standard rose-bushes, sundry old ladies are resting – resting their rheumatism, their weak hearts, their jangled nerves. The little church on the bluff overlooking Minas Basin is cool, dark, and empty. Light comes through the Sherwood memorial window in crimson-lake puddles. In the churchyard the de Wolfs – the town’s founders – lie. From the grassy ledge at the verge of the cliff where the churchyard ends abruptly I can see the whole curve of the land round the water of Minas Basin. The tide is in now, right up to the edge of the dykes and in places seeping through into the dyke land that lies directly below me. Beyond the picture-postcard blue of the water rises Blomidon, swathed in a hyacinth mist, drawing the eye and the imagination – that sombre and dramatic shape dominates the seascapes of mist and water and the receding mauve folds of hills that lie behind it. I am half bored, half enchanted, by this long stretch of June days, by the hot, sweet smells of clover fields, of wild-strawberry patches, the breeze off the water that always keeps the tall elm trees stirring and that blows pollen from flowering bushes in tenderly tended cottage gardens. In and out of the sunny main street too blows the town’s gossip – blowing like pollen from house to house, from garden to garden.

  11 November 1951. Ottawa.

  Sunday afternoon again. A grey, dank, damp day – old tin cans lying in dirty slush in the gutters. I walked in from Rockcliffe across the bridge over the grey river which is slowing to freezing-point. The hills, the Laurentians, glow like dark sapphires. Somewhere around the corner a band was playing and soldiers marching back from the Armistice ceremonies. Plump, bright-eyed French-Canadian girls were strolling with their boyfriends through the dirty streets; French-Canadian mothers-of-ten were taking their brood for a Sunday walk, accompanied by their husbands. Rounding the corner by the Château Laurier to go up to my office I thought how very much I should prefer to find myself in a big double bed making love.

  27 November 1951.

  Aunt Beatrice came to dinner tonight – eighty-four – recently (three weeks) widowed, just flown out to Canada after fifty years of county life in Northern Ireland. She sits in her black and pearls, talking about Dundarave, the place which the law of entail has obliged her to quit in favour of an unworthy nephew, and of the follies of the housemaids. She is a plucky old girl with spirit and stoicism. I like it when she talks about her niece being “so good at cartooms – always been artistic.” After dinner we looked at old photographs with her – those embalmed moments of lightheartedness at picnics when the men put their straw hats on back to front or enacted facetious courtship scenes with the girls before the camera in the sunlit summer of 1900. How depressing it is to look through these albums now with a survivor of the picnics, skating parties, and weekend gaieties. There is no physical connection, not the slightest, between that laughing girl in the canoe with the towering flowered hat, the tie and starched shirt, and the old woman beside me. “Look,” Beatrice says, “at the clothes. How could we have worn them? The hats, my dear, such a suitable outfit to go canoeing in! I was considered very fast for wearing a soft collar to play tennis in. An older married woman told me, ‘Of course there is nothing wrong in it, but I should wear a stiff collar in future if you don’t want to get the reputation of being a fast girl.’ ” Those three sisters1 must have been quite a feature of Ottawa in those days, with quick wits, a great sense of fun, and no money, but determined to be in on everything. Endless flirtations, Beatrice’s courtship by Lord Ava – “he wrote me the only real love letter, what you would call a love letter, that I have ever had. The best-looking man I ever knew. Died at Ladysmith in the South African war.” And Harold, who proposed to all three sisters, and whose daily letters, lying on the radiator in the hall, were greeted by the other sisters with “Elsie, the daily question is waiting for you on the marble slab.” Why do I write about these old sisters? I spend my days with Cabinet Ministers, distinguished (and interesting) civil servants – I am in a good position to report the gossip and politics of society in this little but important place, but

  I have old women’s secrets now

  That had those of the young;

  Madge tells me what I dared not think

  When my blood was strong,

  And what had drowned a lover once

  Sounds like an old song.

  (W. B. Yeats)

  When I was young I used to be shocked by the callousness of the old, the casual way they would look at a photograph and say, “She used to be my closest friend. She was so pretty and gay. She married a very ordinary man in Toronto and I don’t know what happened to her in the end.” I expected, somehow, more feeling, a pause to think of years of friendship, the tragedy of change, the decline of everything – including themselves. Now I think that Proust’s ruthless analysis of old age is not cynical but the simple truth – as the capacity for feeling shrinks, as the freshness of interests narrows, brain and heart contract. I fear it in myself. Or perhaps feeling becomes more canalized – there is less overflow. Two or three human beings out of one’s whole world of people seem the only ones truly human.

  20 March 1952.

  From the world into which I was born, cruelty, violence, and coarseness were altogether excluded. Pain, and even discomfort, were fended off wherever possible. Apprehensions of illness were always in the air, perhaps because illness seemed the only enemy likely to penetrate the defences of my home. Security was – or seemed – complete in those days before 1914 as it has never seemed since. Security in this world and the next, for my parents’ generation was the first to retain a belief in Heaven while dispensing with the fear of Hell. It was felt that Hell was a Victorian superstition. Since God was Love and it was unthinkable that he would punish His children with perpetual torment, it would be wrong to darken a child’s mind with such horrors. Hell might exist for some unspeakable outsiders, but in any case, like sex, it was not to be mentioned before children.

  A sub-fusc day, grey sky dripping on dirty snow. Spring in Ottawa is not a season but one vast mopping-up operation. Civil servants, glum or smug, have now – at 9.30 – been absorbed into the government buildings. The whole population seems mewed up, like the animals in the Ark. The Parliament Buildings, like the Ark, ride high above the surrounding slush and puddle. Silence reigns in the dripping and now almost empty streets. Stenographers are now adjusting in their typewriters the first memorandum (with carbon copy) of this day; their bosses, with or without hangovers, are girding themselves for the day’s effort to get nearer the top of their grade. In their homes the wire
less whines and housewives prepare lists of purchases for Steinberg’s and the A&P. The melting ice discloses an old overshoe, or a French safe, buried throughout the winter under the snow – our Ottawa version of the spring crocus.

  This last week has flashed by in days of high-pressure work, absorbed in this absorbing little world where politics and diplomacy merge into personalities. You spend the day working with this group of politicians, officials, and diplomats, then you dine with them and their wives, gossip with them, and drink with them. The dominant theme – the only point in this place – is the pursuit of power. It obsesses the men and infects the women. Other societies may be dominated by money, snobbery, or the search for pleasure. Here the game of political power is the only one that really counts. It creates an atmosphere very uncongenial to love, very unflattering to women – almost any man in official Ottawa would rather talk to a Cabinet Minister than to the most beautiful woman in the room. It is easy to understand this once you are inside the game. You are tuned in to the power waves and you can hardly hear any others, except as “interference.” This is the game for middle-aged men – you can even play it into the sixties or seventies with growing expertise, when you would be at a sad disadvantage in the games of love.