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

by Ritchie, Charles

  In the afternoon went to a German film, Canaris, in Bonn. There was an old news film showing Hitler’s entry into Vienna. At his appearance the German audience burst into laughter, mocking and hating laughter. It was an extraordinary performance.

  Diplomatic dinner in the evening. A terrible row over the placing of the guests. No fewer than three ambassadresses claimed that they had been wrongly placed at table, and one threatened to leave.

  Popski is gnawing one of Sylvia’s evening slippers. Every time we try to get it from him he shoves it under the sofa and when our backs are turned hauls it out again.

  1 March 1955.

  Alone in the house. Sylvia has flown to Canada to see her mother before she dies, if there is time. I felt so sorry for her as alone she stepped on to the plane to leave.

  11 March 1955.

  My official visit to Hamburg. This visit is going better than I expected and I may even do some good for German–Canadian relations. Dinner last night at the Anglo-German Club. Businessmen and consuls, Englishmen who had spent twenty, thirty, forty years in Hamburg and spoke German with old familiarity. Germans who had been born in Liverpool or educated in Scotland and spoke English with homely local accents acquired in their boyhood. It gave me an idea of the character of Hamburg as a twin sister of Liverpool or Glasgow, tied with England in peace or war for decades or centuries. I like this community of shipowners and merchants. I have been on a tour of the newly built areas of Hamburg, which cover the square miles of the densely built city totally destroyed in the three-day air-raids.

  They are constructing a new city of space, light, greater privacy, and less density of population per acre – a planner’s dream.

  12 March 1955.

  After dinner drank brandy with the British Consul and he took me for a tour of the Reeperbahn. A most unvicious place with the atmosphere of a Hammersmith palais de danse. A nude woman emerges from a bubble bath and an attendant showers the soap off her bottom, all to slow music, then up go the lights, dance music, a collection of women in snuff-coloured dresses or sweaters and skirts waiting to be danced with, waitresses or tarts tittering and drinking beer. At every corner nude displays and then a solo dance by a lady in a lace gown who represented refinement. It all seemed clean fun suitable for children and grandmothers. Indeed, there seemed to be a lot of grandmothers around, stout elderly bodies in groups or with their husbands. There seems nothing between these shows and brothels.

  13 March 1955.

  I had lunch yesterday at Friedrichsrühe with the Bismarcks. The house is situated in a great forest of firs and was destroyed by a bomb during the War, which also killed the Swiss Consul and his wife, who were staying at the time with the Bismarcks. The new house is built on the foundation of the old. Their house party was standing about in the drawing-room, talking. Then the door burst open and Prince and Princess Bismarck bounced in as if released from a circus cannon, he with a pink face and a pink carnation in his buttonhole, she a Swede with the “international society” manner, opening her ever-so-blue eyes very wide at one as she talked. Age around fifty, quick in conversation, mischievous and mocking. She has her social twin sisters in London, Paris, and New York. Her husband is a member of the Bundestag but he is not, I think, taken very seriously.

  17 March 1955.

  The day began badly. Popski escaped from his room and came into mine at five in the morning and woke me up. I lost my temper with the poor little bugger and began yelling at him like a banshee, and threw boots at him. All day I felt sad, sensual, and sloppy. Sylvia arrives today from Canada with her aunts, Elsie and Beatrice, who are coming to stay. I have been getting the servants to put flowers in their bedrooms; Claus is cooking up a steak-and-kidney pie for their lunch.

  The possibility of nuclear warfare looms over all hopes. It looks as though this unhappy generation will have to pay an enormous overdue bill for all the follies and sins of the human race, and by comparison every previous generation, whatever its fate, may have been lucky not to be born in the twentieth century.

  20 March 1955.

  It is lovely having Sylvia back again. I am enjoying this visit of the old girls. Aunt Elsie (now seventy-five) is, of course, my old friend and ally. How many nights at her apartment at the Roxborough in Ottawa we have sat up together talking about life, love, and politics, and drinking whisky. I love her for her warm, generous heart and for being so funny, but she has got terribly deaf, and there is something touching about her impatience with her own deafness. She has still kept her wish for happiness and still suffers from childish disappointments. She says she hates old people, that they are empty of everything, like old paper bags blowing about. Perhaps I shall hate the old too when I am old. Being sorry for them gives me a feeling of being younger than I am. Talking of age, Aunt Beatrice is now eighty-seven. She is, as usual, full of stories of Dundarave, the Irish estate where she passed her married life – also long anecdotes beginning “On one occasion when we were staying at Brown’s Hotel …,” which is a signal that she will go on for twenty minutes. All the same, I admire her spirit and her toughness. She is perfect with the German servants, who appreciate her “grand manner” and respond to her bossiness. In some ways she is a natural German herself.

  I can’t think why I am haunted by that bloody boarding-school. Looking back it seems to me that a miasma of sexual prurience, excitement, and fear hung over those boring days and dream-filled nights. Of course, I was an insufferable boy – but who isn’t, at fourteen?

  Tomorrow is supposed to be the first day of spring, but still snow on the ground. Sylvia and Aunt Elsie have just left for church (Aunt Beatrice disapproves of religion). Popski is barking despairingly in the garden where he has been left to amuse himself for an hour. An unmistakably Sunday feeling in the house today. Can even the nuclear bomb change Sunday?

  The Wittgensteins and old Countess Metternich to dinner last night. Countess Metternich and Aunt Beatrice are made for each other. Monica Wittgenstein was mocking the social aspirations of the Cologne bourgeoisie in tones familiar all the world over wherever the hard-up gentry talk of the newly cash-conscious.

  At dinner at the Starneses’ was a German ex-officer, a handsome bob-sleigh champion, who figure-skates near here. He had been on the Eastern Front and said that when the Germans came into the Ukraine he went with them right into the villages on his motor-bike and that the Ukrainians threw so many flowers and so much food and butter to the German troops that he was lucky to have his tin hat on or he would have been brained. He said all the Ukrainians wanted was independence, or at least a show of it, and if the Germans had pulled a Grand Duke out of Paris and set up a Ukrainian state they could have settled any quantity of Germans there and have secured the agricultural produce of the Ukraine. He went on, “None of you on your side would have cared and we could have got away with it, but that little Austrian pup Hitler had to go and blow up the holy places at Kiev and turn the people against the Germans. Then he imported narrow-minded German schoolmasters and made them Gauleiters who oppressed the people and lived on champagne. When the War began I thought it was a crusade against communism, but after serving on the Eastern Front I soon discovered that it was not a crusade. I had two old White Russian aunts living in Berlin as émigrées, naturally violently anti-communist, but as the campaigns on the Eastern Front went on and the destruction of Russian cities began, they began to say that this was a wicked war against Holy Russia and to listen to Stalin’s speeches on the radio.”

  2 April 1955.

  The two old girls are having a social success here. We have taken them round to a lot of parties and they seem to be very much enjoying themselves. Aunt Beatrice got into a misunderstanding yesterday at a diplomatic party with the South African Ambassador. She said, “I do not approve of your government’s policies in South Africa.” The Ambassador, thinking he was up against a gentle, liberal-minded old lady, began a long-winded explanation of how devoted his government was to the best interests of the black populati
on when Beatrice interrupted him to say, “I don’t mean that at all. I think you should take a much stronger line with them. Shoot them down if they give you any trouble.”

  Went into Cologne with the aunts. I had to stagger round the jewellery shops with them, carrying a bag of asparagus, vermouth, and cheese, while they had every diamond in Cologne out to compare unfavourably with their own rings. I cannot think that Aunt Beatrice needs any more rings. Her old hands are already laden with four outsize cat’s-eyes, one large diamond, and one mammoth dark opal, known in the family as “the frog.”

  15 May 1955.

  Chip Bohlen has suggested my flying to Moscow with him for a visit, as he is American Ambassador there now. I think I might do this. I am in the mood for a fresh start. From now on not a single day is to be thrown away as you chuck in an unsatisfactory hand at poker. Today is windy, sunny, lilacs blowing in the wind, everything in bloom, a feeling of exhilaration like a morning in one’s youth, a restless mood, up one minute, down the next. Yet one must be wary of the dreams and projects which swarm in one’s mind as the sun plays on lilacs and chestnuts as you walk quickly past the neat white houses of the English suburb of Cologne to buy the Sunday papers.

  12 June 1955.

  Sitting alone on a bench in Sud-Park with my eyes closed, thinking that I used to imagine what it would be like to be an old man sitting alone on a bench in a park. Perhaps when my heart grows as small as a peanut I shall be a cheerful and sociable old man like my grandfather and like I was in my heartless youth. There is rain on the rhododendrons and the roses. A brooding resentment settles in this climate like a low cloud that hangs never far away over the Rhine Valley. Then brief passages of sunlit elation. Yesterday – or was it the day before? – the clergyman came to lunch. “Blessed be the poor in spirit,” he quoted. What does that mean? I understood better today when Mrs. Chichester came to lunch, so smug in good works, so qualified for salvation. She was indeed “rich in spirit,” quite overpoweringly so.

  Now what could be fairer than this rose garden with the roses just out, a swimming-pool waiting for me around the corner, caviare for lunch with a little white wine, a valet tenderly brushing my morning coat. My hopes and unsung struggles would make the average man laugh himself sick and say, “Affectation and nonsense.”

  Reading André Maurois’s account of George Sand’s love life and her ghastly, claggy letters to her lovers. How did they put up with her? How much nicer to have had as a mistress an obedient, co-operative, brown-skinned maiden who could not speak a word of any known language but was graceful and usually half-nude, and to live with her in a clean, sunny house in a valley in Ceylon.

  1 July 1955.

  Our National Day. A reception here this afternoon – five hundred guests and it will certainly rain. It started out fine this morning but is already clouding over and the birds by their twitterings are obviously expecting rain. Diana Cooper and Frank and Kitty Giles1 staying here. Frank is so intelligent, so open to new ideas and impressions. As for Kitty, she makes everything and everyone around her alive – who could not love her? Everything went swimmingly. We sat out a lot on the terrace among the roses while the atomic air exercise “Carte Blanche” went roaring over the garden. Diana was adorable but has the bad effect on me of making everyone else seem dull.

  Sat next to the Ethiopian Minister’s wife at dinner last night and fell a little in love with her – an exquisite, intelligent, dark statuette dressed by Dior.

  There is not enough to do in the office and I hate an office that is going at a slow pace where every little snippet of business is magnified to fill in time. I have a goose of a German student as a language teacher. He stinks so much in this hot weather that I can hardly bear having him sitting next to me on the sofa.

  23 July 1955.

  Haus-Assen. Staying with the Von Galens for the week in their schloss in Westphalia. A family of five daughters, a refugee aunt from the Sudetenland, an English school-friend of the daughters, the only son of the house, an Oxford friend of his, an Austrian archduke, and two little local barons are all staying in this moated sixteenth-century house. (The moat is solid with a beautifully coloured green scum with a dead fish on the surface and some very live ducks swimming about in it.) The Von Galens very welcoming, extremely nice. Their girls with English-schoolgirl voices calling “Mummy” and “Daddy” from the garden. Racing Demon after dinner. My host explained to me the difference between the barbarous Prussians and the West Germans, whose civilization goes back to Charlemagne. There were so many at dinner that the young ones sat at what they called “the cat’s table,” the one for the children. I wished I had five daughters. We have a circular room in Biedermeier style with a balcony over the moat.

  We all walked over to the vegetable garden and ate currants and raspberries, talked in a desultory way, drifted down lanes and around farm buildings. Their son is on vacation from Oxford – Christ Church – a breath of undergraduate goings-on.

  25 July 1955.

  A long argument last night after dinner with Mike Handler of the New York Times, who attributes all the evil in the world to Adenauer and Dulles and says that as Adenauer is now in fact United States Secretary of State, why not name him so? An American woman was there, rather drunk. She says that all her friends in New York came from the three per cent of successful people in all fields.

  Sylvia says that this is the end of summer. The heat is over. The roses in the garden are dead or dying. The pink ramblers look rather disgusting in their vegetable decay. There is a feeling of break-up in the house. We had last night one of our last and least successful dinner parties of the season. The butler, Erich, is leaving. The other servants are anxious to go on their holidays and so am I. We can hardly be bothered to train the dog any more. We shan’t be seeing him again for a month and then perhaps we shall all be different, including Popski. Our first year in Germany is over. I want to get away now from this queasy climate, the quilt of low cloud, hazy in heat, dark in dank weather.

  7 August 1955.

  A newly appointed special consultant in the German Foreign Office came to dinner last night. He has spent the greater part of his life in Russia, as has his wife. Their parents were members of the German colony in St. Petersburg. They have the accent and the charm and the naturalness of manner of White Russians but are very German. They were complaining that the Russians in their own view know everything better than everyone else, but I felt inclined to reply, “So do the Germans, so do the French, all three are know-it-all nations. The English do not know it all and don’t wish to. They just know that they are better.”

  26 January 1956.

  I am getting quite fond of the new butler, Karl, but my God he is obstinate! This morning I asked him to pack my dark-blue suit to go to Soest. He said, “The suit is dark but it is not blue,” to which I replied, “Please pack my dark-blue suit.” We stared at each other without yielding.

  Motored to Soest in wind and snow. Great double trucks interlocked in collision along the autobahn. Volkswagens crushed like tin cans. The Germans are the most frantic drivers in the world and their roads are strewn battlegrounds. Got to Soest five minutes before dinner, changed in a rush with my drink in my hand. Roger Rowley is in command of the Canadian Brigade. This was the occasion of the visit of General Gale, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Army on the Rhine, and Lady Gale, who had come over for the night in their private diesel train from their schloss, which Lady Gale tells me has four drawing-rooms and takes twenty-one servants to run. General “Windy” Gale is like a bloodshot old bulldog barking amiably. His hackles rose a bit at the sight of an Ambassador, and a Canadian Ambassador at that. I dare say he thinks it quite superfluous for us to have any diplomatic representation at all, but we circled around each other in fine fettle. Lady Gale was the success of the party – red hair, plump, fiftyish, shrewd, and good fun. Played games until three in the morning. The Army are tough. Roger came into my room at dawn while I was asleep – in uniform, off to manoe
uvres.

  27 January 1956.

  I lunched today with Von Welk, who looks after Canadian affairs in the German Foreign Office. We meet for lunch twice a month at the Adler, a restaurant that specializes in the food the Germans best understand – venison. Von Welk and I discuss our problems in Canadian–German relations. He snorts and crinkles up his brown eyes, looking at me with a dachshund expression. For some reason I am much drawn to this unattractive man with whom I seem to have nothing in common. He is stiff and rude at times, but never pompous. He can be malicious, but he is not boring. There is something dowdy about him which inspires a sort of confidence. He might do a double-cross, but he himself is not a lie.

  4 February 1956.

  Have been staying with Norman and Jetty Robertson in London, where he is now High Commissioner. Norman was at his most delightful, with his wonderful, wide-ranging curiosity and interest in everything and everybody, his pleasure in his own cleverness, his mixture of boldness in thought and of caution. Isn’t he in the long run profoundly on the side of constituted authority although he enjoys dissecting it? He is a non-believer of Presbyterian origin. How different in mentality is a Presbyterian from an Anglican agnostic, not to mention a Roman Catholic one. You can renounce your own faith but its particular imprint remains. I measure myself against Norman and I know that he is a wiser and better man than I am. I came away even fonder of him than I was before and I tremble to think what he would make of this diary. “Burn it,” he would say, and I have little doubt that he is right. I love Jetty too. Her receptiveness, responsiveness, and funniness charm me. I enjoyed London – the stucco streets in the mist, with a great red sun in the fog. I liked meeting chaps for lunch in clubs and taking women out to restaurants and all the comings and goings, encounters, and gossips of London life.