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

by Ritchie, Charles

  We are staying in what used to be the Viceroy’s house here, Lutyens’ palace, imposing, original, monumental, and monumentally successful, an establishment on the scale of Versailles. Indeed, Versailles in its pompous emphasis is the only palace comparable to this. Hundreds of servants, hundreds of gardeners, hundreds of cooks in the kitchen (I believe there are eight hundred servants in all). Some are turbaned; some, in a curious livery of scarlet and gold, wear flat Chinese hats. A turbaned, bearded father-figure brings in breakfast and stands over you while you eat it. The bathtubs are of marble, built for giants. In the interminable marble halls are yet other attendants who hover and cluster and come bowing forward to put you in one of the lifts which never, to their great chagrin, can they move without a hitch from one floor to another. In the great courtyard standing under every arch, patrolling the Mogul garden, are the soldiers of the Government House bodyguard.

  The Prime Minister had been looking forward to this visit and his meeting with Nehru as the high point of his tour. He and Nehru have been conducting a tremendous pen-pal friendship for months. They have been exchanging interminable telegrams of mutual congratulation and esteem, but I am not at all sure how this love affair is going to prosper. It was surprising to Mr. St. Laurent to find that this Wise Man of the East conversed in the style and language of Bloomsbury, a style very far from the Prime Minister’s own. However, our High Commissioner here, Escott Reid, seems to think that the talks between them, after a shaky start, are going extremely well. I have not been present at their official meetings, as Escott has taken over. If anyone can make the visit a success Escott can, as in addition to his exceptional ability and charm of manner he is an enthusiastic lover of India.

  As for one’s impression of Nehru, what can one say? The English painter who has come out here to paint his portrait says that the task is impossible. A thousand expressions flicker across his face. When he met us at the airport he jumped about from one foot to the other, making the gesture of pulling up his long white cotton trousers as if they were slipping down. He kept twisting the red rose in the buttonhole of his long cream-coloured linen coat, and made as if to scratch the top of his white Gandhi hat. He is always in movement, never still, or if he is, his eyes are always moving, or his mouth. He is not the pontifical figure I had expected. Gayer, more mobile, more immediate; impatient, too, between a caress and a barb.

  Last night we dined with him – the Prime Minister, Madeleine, and myself. It is, I think, unfortunate from the point of view of a “prise de contact” between him and Mr. St. Laurent that Lady Mountbatten should be staying here. She strikes a Mayfair note which the Prime Minister cannot pick up. When we arrived in the hall of Mr. Nehru’s house it was she who greeted us, looking charming yet lined and wrinkled from gracious smiling. In the hall was a head of Nehru by Epstein. The Prime Minister remarked, “Well, I suppose that is a very fine likeness.” Lady Mountbatten emitted a little cry of horror and said, “Oh, don’t tell him that. It is too ghastly and must be got rid of.” The Prime Minister looked somewhat at a loss.

  At dinner there was no real opportunity for any consecutive talk between the two men. After dinner, long pauses in the conversation began to set in. Finally Lady Mountbatten, to break the log-jam, said to Nehru, “Do show the Prime Minister your Tibetan costume and your Kashmiri dressing-gown.” At once Nehru jumped to his feet and, slightly stooped, ran from the room. (We do not move as these people do or run in this sudden, lightfooted way.) After a longish interval he returned, clad in a magnificent Kashmiri dressing-gown, then disappeared again, to return in Tibetan dress. He seemed to be much enjoying himself and relieved to escape from conversational effort.

  27 February 1954. Viceroy’s House, New Delhi.

  I have taken to my bed with some kind of throat infection. Outside my window in the darkening dusk the great raised courtyard looks like a stage-set. Any figure appearing there has significance. After a day of silence, at evening there is a monkey chatter of talk from the soldiers below who have come off duty. The flowers in my “sick room” – sweet peas and phlox – have no scent. Perhaps no English flowers smell here.

  Last night was Mr. Nehru’s dinner in honour of the Prime Minister – white tie and decorations (if any). At the hour of dinner I had a call to go to the Prime Minister’s bedroom. I found him standing in the middle of the room, white tie, white waistcoat, tailcoat, long woollen underwear, no trousers. He said, “Here now, I suppose my trousers have been left on the plane.” That was precisely what had happened. Everyone else in his entourage had his trousers, but the Prime Minister was trouserless. Like Sir Walter Raleigh throwing down his cloak for Queen Elizabeth to walk upon, I said, “Take mine, Prime Minister,” but a second look at his girth and mine showed that this was a physical impossibility. I called one of the innumerable servants to inquire after a pair of spare trousers, but apparently there are none in this vast palace. We sent him running to the nearest bazaar in New Delhi to purchase a pair. The moments ticked by. The Prime Minister was already eleven minutes late for dinner. Finally the servant returned bearing with him an extremely greasy pair of second- or third-hand trousers of such circumference that they had to be fastened round the Prime Minister’s waist with safety-pins. During the whole of this agonizing ordeal Mr. St. Laurent remained perfectly unperturbed and patient, with never a word of complaint. My mind boggled at the thought of what Mackenzie King would have said in these circumstances.

  Finally we descended to dinner. Turbaned Lancers behind every chair, magnificent flowers on the table, no wine. During the endless dinner party three pigeons flew into the dining-room from the garden through the French windows and perched on the cornice above the fireplace. They behaved very well for quite a long time until boredom with the after-dinner speeches drove them to fly high across the long candle-lit table with protesting cries and out of the windows again.

  During the Prime Minister’s speech before the Assembly the Indians only applauded the compliments to themselves. I don’t believe that, apart from the meetings with political leaders, anything we have said or done on this visit has got across to the minds or hearts of these people. They are easily bored and I think that they have been.

  The sentiment heard in government circles is extremely anti-American. The Americans can do no right in Indian eyes. At one moment they are accused of selfish isolationism and neglect of poorer countries, at the next of imperialist ambitions to dominate. There is a great deal of harping on American materialism in contrast to the spiritual values of India. I am beginning to find this very irritating. As a Canadian, I feel quite free to criticize the Americans, but when other people do it I instinctively rally to their defence.

  I had a long talk the day before yesterday at one of these endless lemonade-drinking receptions with Indira, Nehru’s daughter. She is a handsome woman, but cold. She talked humanitarianism and social reform but in a bloodless fashion, tinged with immense smugness and self-righteousness. I took strongly against her.

  A day of sightseeing. Fatehpur Sikri in the morning. Talk of a deserted Mogul capital had put me on the wrong track. I had expected romantic ruins. What I found was a creation of art so totally new to me that it might have been new in time. The completeness, the state of preservation, are due to the accident of its being abandoned by Akbar and thus never plundered or destroyed by armies. Those courtyards, mosques, and pavilions of red sandstone are unhaunted, picked dry of all human context by the heat of the sun. Or is it simply the advantage of my ignorance that I can see these monuments as timeless works of art because I do not know the language of their history which would set them safely in a framework?

  The Prime Minister said that he pictured in his imagination the carpets and fountains of the time of the Mogul court. He responds to every impression in India. He seems as interested in ancient monuments as he is in pipelines and the complexities of corporation law. I find it very attractive that a man of his age and in his position should be so open to new impressions. He says
that never in his life has he had such a sense of new experience as in this one week in India. Perhaps it is doing the same thing for him as it is doing for me. Yet how profoundly alien India is; nothing responds to my predilections. I do not “love” this country, I am not even “attracted” to it, but I feel it is a multitudinous sea in which one might shed one’s personality.

  28 February 1954. Colombo.

  When we got here last night, Madeleine stretched back in her chair and, kicking off her shoes, said, “Well, I guess I like the small countries.” We all knew what she meant. The complexity and sophistication of India, the grandeur of its monuments, the imperial touch, Mogul or British, all imposed their strain. Canadians cannot quite stomach the excessive. Then, too, we are beginning to tire. From Government House to Government House, from dinner party to dinner party, from reception to reception, from interview to interview, from Bombay to Madras. Ceylon seems a holiday after India. The friendliness of the people, the disorganization at the airport. It is a spice island of flowers and fruits and voluptuous foliage.

  8 March 1954. Ottawa.

  After Ceylon I gave up keeping this diary. Some day I shall try to sort out my impressions of the rest of the trip. At the moment they’re a jumble of unrelated details. Jakarta, with Sukarno boasting and posturing; the squalor of war-wrecked Seoul, bad oysters at dinner with horrible old Syngman Rhee, the visit to the Canadian troops at the front in Korea; Tokyo and lunch with the Emperor, where two silences met, the silence of the Prime Minister and the even more extensive silence of Emperor Hirohito, blinking through his thick-lensed glasses; the pointless visit to Manila.

  It was at Tokyo that the Prime Minister began to show signs of fatigue. From being tired he began to show signs of melancholy. He seemed austere and more abrupt. I am beginning to fear that this trip has been too much for him.

  Honolulu is a boring place, Hawaiian music sick-making. They hung leis of flowers round our necks at the airport, making us – apart from Madeleine – look extremely silly. In my bedroom at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel was a pineapple with a card “Compliments of the Manager.” The pineapple was already sliced. I thought it looked delicious and went out for a brief walk, intending to eat some of it on my return. When I got back it had gone. I telephoned the room service and asked, “Where is my pineapple with the Manager’s compliments?” “Aloha,” a voice replied (they always say “Aloha” in Honolulu instead of “Hallo”). “Aloha, pineapples only left in rooms to welcome guests on arrival.” I never saw that pineapple again.

  10 March 1954. Ottawa.

  Ever since I got back I have been working on the draft of a speech for the Prime Minister to make in the House of Commons about his tour. It was not an easy job but after about eight drafts I felt reasonably satisfied with it. The Prime Minister read it and then said, “Here now, Charles, I suppose you have told me what I don’t want to say.” Rather nettled, I replied, “Prime Minister, I am glad to have been able to clarify your thinking.” I went to the gallery of the House of Commons to listen to the Prime Minister deliver his version of the speech, which I found absolutely deplorable.

  Looking back on my association with Mr. St. Laurent during the trip, I think that though he treated me with so much kindness and consulted me so frequently, I am no closer to him than I was at the outset. As Norman Robertson1 said of his own relationship with Mr. St. Laurent, “Our natures and our minds do not mesh.” Yet I respect him, I admire him, and I could be fond of him if personal relations meant anything to him, which I think they do not, apart from his devotion to his family. His philosophy of life seems to be a sort of Roman Catholic Rotarianism which does not admit the existence of evil. He lives by Christian rule. I have never heard him say an uncharitable thing. Also, he never praises. His mind is more a lawyer’s mind than a politician’s, and he is completely free from the vanity and the grudges of political life, hates gossip, does not drink, has great public charm, no small talk, humour très sec.

  6 April 1954. Amherst, Nova Scotia.

  My mother and I are here on a visit for a few days. The wind never stops blowing in from the Tantramar marshes. Only the eye of love could descry beauty in Amherst. It is fascinating to see how different each of these Nova Scotian small towns is from the other. Wolfville is charming, indeed pretty, the houses painted in spotless white, the gardens tended, trees surrounding the colonial houses. Much of Amherst dates from about 1880 when it was “busy Amherst,” a boom industrial village-town, now in decline. It is not helped by the unhappy attraction that a kind of maroon sandstone had for Amherst builders and of which many of the buildings, including the post office and the Baptist church in the main street, are built.

  The town is at the edge of the marshes, which gives it something of the character of a seaside place. The streets all end abruptly where the marsh begins. Beyond is space and skyscape. An eternal wind blows from those marshes. Yes, it is a peculiar little town.

  My mother’s family came from here. The only traces left of them are the stained-glass windows (ordered out from England) in the little Anglican church, and the graves on the windy marsh side – “The Honourable Alexander Stewart, C.B., Master of the Rolls” and his children and his grandchildren. In the church there is a brass to the last man in the family, my mother’s brother, “Lt.-Colonel Charles James Townshend Stewart, D.S.O., Croix de Guerre, killed in action Bourlon Wood, October 20, 1918.” No one in Amherst even remembers the Stewart name now, yet the old man aspired to Found a Family only a hundred years ago and we still live on what is left of his money. We are children or grandchildren of the small town and have never quite got free of its influence. Those dire words, “What will the neighbours say?” still echo in the ears on a hung-over morning.

  21 April 1954. Ottawa.

  In two weeks’ time I leave to take up my appointment as Ambassador to Bonn and Head of the Military Mission in Berlin. Now that I am to leave Ottawa I am beginning to know that I am fond of it and to know how much I shall miss my friends. The truth is that, much as I grumble about life in Ottawa, I have become attached to the place. Today I took my farewell walk along the terrace behind the Houses of Parliament and looked down on that scene that I know so well – the noble wide-flowing river, the Laurentian hills changing colour with every shift of light, and the silvery spires of the Basilica in the middle distance. Then I came back through the quiet tree-lined streets of Centretown, past the sensible red-brick mid-Victorian residences, the ponderous palaces of the lumber barons, and here and there a turreted fantasy, porch and balcony adorned with tortured woodwork. Our own apartment is in the upper floors of this old house, the bedrooms high among the top branches of the trees. In summer the sunlight on the shabby carpets is mottled in a changing leaf pattern; there are sun patches as warm as a summer beach and cooler spots where the leaves keep out the sun. This has become our home, more so than any Embassy could be. Our friends are here – we have become part of this closely knit community. Mike Pearson says that he saw very little sign of my new sentimentality about Ottawa until the day of my appointment abroad.

  1 Blair Fraser, the Canadian journalist, was an old friend.

  1 The three sisters, daughters of Sir William Ritchie, Chief Justice of Canada, were: Beatrice, Lady Macnaghten; Elsie, Mrs. W. H. Rowley (mother of John and Roger Rowley); and Amy, Mrs. James Smellie (mother of my wife, Sylvia, and her brother, Peter Smellie).

  1 Hume Wrong, Canadian Ambassador to Washington and Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs, and his wife, Joyce.

  1 Norman A. Robertson, twice Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs, Ambassador to Washington, and High Commissioner to London.

  BONN

  1954–1958

  When I took up my post as Ambassador to Bonn, the occupation of Germany by the Allied Powers was not yet ended, although official relations with the German government were becoming increasingly close. It was difficult not to think of the Germans with suspicion as the dangerous ex-enemy. The psychological and human breach
had not had time to heal – much deeper ran the horror excited by the obscenities of the concentration camps and the brutish nastiness of the Nazi régime which stained the German name. The Germans, for their part, treated the representatives of the victors with the respect which Authority has always commanded in them. There was no resistance and no servility, but the acceptance of a fact – the fact of defeat. While one’s social dealings with the Germans were friendly enough, there was too much on both sides that could not be spoken of, or forgotten, to make for real ease. During my years in Bonn this situation was changing. The German people were finding renewed confidence in themselves, the “economic miracle” of recovery was on the way. Germany under Adenauer’s guidance was showing itself in advance of France and Britain in understanding the future role of Europe and was becoming the favoured friend of the United States. As the war receded and the Cold War intensified, we increasingly shared fears and interests with the Germans, who were soon to become allies. Then, too, with the ending of the Occupation there came an abrupt change in the attitude of the population. The measured deference due the former Occupying Powers disappeared with almost startling rapidity. At the same time a most definite note of equality – sometimes of superiority – came into German voices. The socially false situation of the Occupation period was over – it was possible to have German friends. I think some of these changes may be found reflected in the small mirror of the diaries.

  15 May 1954. Bonn.

  It is a glorious May morning. We are just off to Assmannshausen on the Rhine for the weekend. The Cadillac, with friendly and respectful chauffeur (ex-German Army), will draw up in front of the door at precisely 11 a.m. Our luggage will be carried from the door to the car by the amiable Erich, the butler, who will bow us off the premises. The excellent Lena, the lady’s-maid, is now engaged in pressing Sylvia’s underclothes in the linen room. The parlour-maid has just brought me on a silver salver my Ottawa dentist’s bill, which I am afraid to open. The major-domo, Rudolf (ex-Rommel’s army), has just presented to me the new gardener, an ex-sergeant-major in the Wehrmacht. So this is the way the War ends! No one could stay sulky on such a fine day with so many people devoting themselves with such cheerfulness to meeting one’s every wish. No wonder our heads of mission get an inflated idea of themselves.