by D. J. Taylor
Sent back note saying that as His Majesty’s faithful subject, I hoped that I had done my duty. No doubt this will make Hardinge even angrier than he already is. Naturally, no information on the subject in which I was really interested, viz. what has happened to the King? No reports of his whereabouts, or any official engagements, in the newspapers. No one I know of has seen him. They can hardly be keeping him prisoner in his own palace!
I continue to note down comments about the speech, which show no sign of diminishing.
Middle-aged woman in theatre queue: ‘I’m surprised he didn’t just invite Adolf to fly over and form a government. We should have got rid of him when we had the chance in 1936.’
Young man on street corner: ‘I don’t hold with Royalty, but he’s the only one who’s on our side. The only one who’ll save us from the f——g politicians.’
Letters in newspapers, I notice, about evenly divided for and against. Of course, it may very well be that the newspaper proprietors—who are nearly all pro-war—are suppressing some of the unfavourable ones.
Later. Curious encounter at Criterion Bar, which, among other things, answers the question of what has happened to the King. Had barely been there a moment when a spotty-looking young man came over and remarked: ‘You’re Mr Nichols, aren’t you?’ Remembering that one has to be careful about the kind of people who accost one in the Criterion Bar, I indicated that I was indeed Mr Nichols. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we haven’t seen you for a week or two at the old shop.’ It then dawned on me that he was one of the Palace footmen.
When I suggested that this was hardly surprising in the circumstances, the young man (‘Call me Cyril’) almost burst his sides laughing. ‘No more it isn’t. Do you know, Mr Hardinge wanted to have your guts for garters? Never seen him so cross. Heard him on the telephone telling someone we had “a viper in our midst.” One of the equerries reckoned Mr Lascelles told him it was all his fault and he should have had more sense.’ Naturally, all this fascinating to hear.
Apparently the King has been despatched to the north of England at the personal request of the Prime Minister to inspect military hospitals, regimental barracks, etc., officially to ‘boost morale’ but in fact to get him out of the way. ‘Cyril’ a mine of Palace gossip. Revealed that the footmen’s nickname for Hardinge is ‘Sound of marching footsteps.’ Several of the footmen ‘that way’ and call each other by feminine nicknames—‘Myrtle,’ ‘Denise’ and so forth. I asked: what did they think of the King? To which Cyril replied that he ‘wasn’t a bad sort’ but thoroughly idle, vague, directionless. Very respectful of one’s efforts. ‘We all listened in, sir, and thought it was jolly good.’
Resigned myself to the inevitable appeal for funds and eventually gave him two pounds, but was worth it for the fun.
18 January 1940
No war news. A War Office general quoted in today’s Times to the effect that current ‘stalemate’ (an odd expression for a conflict in which neither side wants to fight) could continue ‘indefinitely.’
To Faction meeting at Ramsay’s house. Had not wanted to attend, as convinced that meetings are under covert surveillance, but Ramsay insisted. Perhaps two dozen people collected in Ramsay’s drawing room: Mrs Ramsay, supervising the maids as they brought in tea; ‘Commandant’ Allen, the very sight of whom always makes me want to roar with laughter, talking loudly about communications received from Berlin, &c. Ramsay, whom I had not seen since Bruton Street, thanked me publicly for ‘signal services’ to the cause. This was very gratifying, but can’t say I enjoyed myself—they are all so horribly fanatical.
Ramsay, as is his custom, had one or two new recruits ostentatiously in tow. These included a Dr Clavane, a Cambridge don, middle-aged and with a high forehead, who talks superciliously about the need for ‘European regeneration,’ and a man named Amery, son of the Cabinet Minister: thin, nervous-looking character with a pencil moustache and a prodigious stammer. Really, this sort of thing makes one question Ramsay’s judgement. Amery, so far as one knows, a thoroughly bad lot. Talks to anyone who will listen about his ‘contacts’ in the Cabinet, friendships with various continental politicians one has never heard of. Ramsay, I noticed, immensely proud of this lion, but also slightly wary, as if fearing the new boy might disgrace himself at any moment.
Bad impression made by Clavane, Amery junior, Allen in her policewoman’s gear, confirmed by business of meeting. According to Ramsay, definite contact has been made with the German Embassy in Dublin, the idea being that somebody (who?) will canvass the idea of a peace conference to be held on neutral ground (where?). This scheme will be taken to Halifax, the suggestion being that Ramsay’s parliamentary allies—not to mention sympathetic army officers, &c.—will turn very nasty if it is not given serious consideration. Looking at the matter objectively, it seems to me that whoever goes to Dublin will be committing a treasonable act.
Struck, once again, by faint note of hysteria in some of the interventions. Ramsay immensely courteous and grateful. Wants me to lunch with him at the House. Thought to myself that this is the last thing I ought to do in the circumstances. In another month’s time things may be very different, of course, but at the moment I get a definite feeling of people playing with fire who do not realise that fire burns. If all this goes wrong Ramsay will end up behind bars. And then what will happen to the people who are seen to have been his friends?
21 January 1940
Struck by the very odd atmosphere in London at the moment. Policemen nervously moving passers-by on, soldiers much in evidence. Victor told me that three officers in one of the Household regiments had been detained by the Secret Services the other day, but there is no proof of this. Curious sense of there being something about to happen, but nobody knowing quite what. Meanwhile, one has a living to make. Wrote piece for Drawbell saying that whatever happened our national spirit would win through, which, queerly enough, I happen to believe.
Later. Intensely disagreeable experience, which I thought I ought to set down in full. I had arranged to meet y at the Turkish baths in Swallow Street. There is never anyone much there after midnight and it is very discreet. Y, whose behaviour is extremely tiresome when one thinks of all one has done for him, arrived late and insisted on reading a poem he had written. The most awful rubbish, but charitably forbore from telling him this. All this is by the way.
Emerging from my cubicle into the ante-room an hour or so later, I saw a sharp-faced man seated in the corner give me the merest imaginable glance and immediately begin dressing himself. Leaving the premises a few moments later I saw him again, settling his bill at the reception desk. Lo and behold if he did not then follow me into Regent Street, only giving up his pursuit when I hailed a providential taxi. Thinking it over later, I am sure that this has something to do with Ramsay, and that someone is taking an interest in me who would better be kept as far away as possible.
Y, to whom I later confided these fears, without of course admitting the full extent of my association with Ramsay, said airily: ‘Oh, one is always getting blackmailed these days. It is something people like ourselves have to live with.’ This must be one of the most vainglorious remarks I have ever heard.
24 January 1940
A story in The Times about troop movements beyond the German border. Ramsay, to whom I mentioned this when he telephoned—he is still avid for me to lunch at the House—absolutely denied it had happened. Quite ‘out of the question’ and ‘simple scaremongering’ on the newspapers’ part. How does he know?
Convinced this morning that I was being followed along Hampstead High Street by a bespectacled man in a Trilby hat. Finally plucked up enough courage to confront him. What did he want, &c? Naturally, the man denied everything, claimed to be a teacher of the pianoforte en route from one lesson to another and even produced a business card to this effect. There is no doubt that this business of Ramsay and the King is playing havoc with my nerves… .
&
nbsp; Chapter 15
The End of Something
At Buckingham Palace there is snow falling against the great high windows: stealthy and insistent, covering the ledges with incremental zest. The King is not much interested in snow. In Canada, once, on one of his Imperial tours, he was invited to inspect a drift twenty feet high which had engulfed a steam train. These things are always a matter of scale.
Instead he is thinking about the photograph taken on the lawn at Barton. When the Revolution came, his father hatched a scheme to import the Russian Imperial family to England and to place one of the royal residences—it may even have been Sandringham—at their disposal. In the end, to nearly everyone’s considerable relief, the plan was dropped. His father, the King thinks, was nothing if not a pragmatist.
It is four years since the old man died. He can remember his face on the deathbed, as white as piano keys, and also some of the things he said about Wallis. Things, he thinks, that are not to be forgotten or forgiven, even at this remove. The little Russian girls, he imagines, symbolise the end of something, that vast net that his great-grandmother threw out to pinion the crowned heads of Europe. His father was not a clever man—even in his lifetime the newspapers made jokes about his stamp collection and the hetacombs of slaughtered grouse—but he knew his worth, what he could expect to give to the world and what he might expect to receive in return. It is a good thing to know one’s value, and the King wishes he knew his.
A cough sounds somewhere in the region of the door, which is Hardinge’s way of announcing his presence. Hardinge has always signalled his arrival in rooms by way of coughs. In his current post-bronchial state they are practically percussive, great claps of laryngeal thunder that break upon the air like gravel stirred in a bucket. Perhaps, like himself, the cough symbolises something. Just lately the King and his private secretary have been communicating in a kind of code. Nothing has been said about the speech or the volume of correspondence provoked by it, which the King has insisted on reading with an ostentatious concern.
On the other hand, silence has its own eloquence. The King knows that he has offended Hardinge, offended him mortally, and that he can expect to pay. Just now there is a plan afoot to induce him to tour the military hospitals of the north-west. There is scarcely anyone to be found in these establishments—not a shot having been fired in the last three months—but still the Government is sure the King’s presence will boost morale.
‘How are you, Hardinge?’ the King asks, as Mr Hardinge glides forward onto the carpet before him. One must always be affable with one’s retainers, however much one distrusts them. Mr Hardinge nods his head. If there is one thing to be said for Mr Hardinge it is that his respect for the institution he serves is never compromised by his opinion of the man on whom its resources are concentrated. In these cases the individual is nothing; the tradition all.
The King notices that Hardinge has a letter in his hand: not one of those large foolscap documents by which official business is transacted, but a tiny, insignificant scrap through which, paradoxically, the real pulse of government is allowed to beat. ‘The Prime Minister requested that I give you this, sir,’ Hardinge remarks, and the King wonders why it is that Hardinge, with his smile, his punctilious manners, his innocuousness, is so irresistible, so impossible to gainsay. The letter is about those military hospitals in the north-west, those caverns of much-laundered sheeting, linoleumed floors, and tenantless beds.
‘I really think, Hardinge …’ he begins, and Mr Hardinge waits to see what his sovereign thinks, one hand gripping the letter with such force that it is as if he half expects it to try to escape his grasp, go sailing off the chimney flue, the other making little undulating movements, as if he is stroking the fur of an invisible cat. ‘I really think,’ he begins again, and Mr Hardinge smiles: conniving but attentive, suggesting that there is no difficulty that cannot be overcome, no royal whim that cannot be conciliated once the truth of their relationship is acknowledged.
He has made enquiries, Mr Hardinge now proposes, and the accommodation in Lancashire looks as if it will be eminently suitable. Although still white around the gills, he is as determined as ever. The King has a sudden vision of himself trying to escape, of running full tilt across the Palace gardens, in sight of the distant gate, and being rugby-tackled by Mr Hardinge, brought down in a tangle of descending limbs and returned to the building in disgrace.
There is nothing to be done, nothing at all. He had thought that making the speech would be a dramatic throwing-over of the traces, a galvanising act from which all manner of spectacular events would follow, but somehow it has not happened and he has sunk back into torpor. The things that mattered most to him—the past, the old dead world before the age of revolutions and marching men, Wallis’s face beyond the teacups, and the Fort Belvedere table set for two—have gone and will never come back.
Outside the snow continues to fall against the quivering glass.
Captain Ramsay (Con. Peebles and South Midlothian) asked if the Home Secretary was aware that, as a result of his recent address to the nation, His Majesty the King had been requested by certain persons in authority to limit the expression of his sincerely held views, and to undertake engagements which, he had on good authority, His Majesty regarded as detrimental to the war-effort, that, in fact, His Majesty’s wholly legitimate interventions in a matter of crucial national importance were regarded as an embarrassment by the Government and had led to an attempt to remove him from the public sphere?
The Home Secretary replied that he feared the question was not only unparliamentary but disingenuous, but that he could assure the Hon. and Gallant Member that no attempt had been made to limit the expression of any sincerely held views, let alone those of the King, and that the King’s current tour of the north-west had been arranged with His Majesty’s enthusiastic consent.
Hansard, 27 January 1940
Chapter 16
Some of the Time
‘Well, at least we seem to be getting somewhere at last,’ Anthea said. ‘And not before time, I can tell you.’
There was not very much one could say in response to this. The glass of gin-and-orange lying on the wooden table top before her had no answer. In the end Cynthia said, ‘Is this what you have to do in your job? Persuade people to do things they don’t want to, I mean.’
‘Oh no,’ Anthea said. ‘Most of the time it’s much less exciting than that. You’d be surprised.’
They were sitting in a pub in Percy Street, whose door kept coming away from its catch so that paralysing shafts of cold air tended to overwhelm the single-bar electric heater in the corner. It was about five past two in the afternoon and theoretically they should have been back at the Duration office, but Desmond had ceased to care about time-keeping.
There were some Polish airmen at the far end of the bar who would clearly have liked to come and talk to them, but were equally clearly put off by the look on Anthea’s face. As to whether the Polish airmen would have been better than the conversation they were having, Cynthia could not quite decide. Mingling with the gin and the smell of sawdust on the floor came the faint scent of ammonia.
‘What on earth have you got in that bag?’ Cynthia wondered.
‘The tiniest piece of salmon you ever saw. The fishmonger in Warwick Way saved it for me. He usually has something if you go at the right time of day and don’t put on any airs.’
Magazine articles of the kind that Cynthia sometimes came across in dentists’ waiting rooms often analysed the factors that separated one woman from another. Beauty, intellect, and charm all had their supporters. Here in wartime, in a world of shortage and blight, there were plainly other distinctions at work. Cynthia knew that no fishmonger in London would ever save her a piece of salmon. Rather than inspiring any resentment, this confirmed the awe in which she held Anthea. At the same time she thought that she was her own woman. Anthea might get the things she wanted from h
er, but it would be because she wanted them too.
‘Do you know,’ Anthea said out of the blue, ‘this phoney war is getting on my nerves? Things happening are so much easier to deal with than waiting for them to happen, don’t you think? Never mind allowing all the defeatists to wander about saying the Germans don’t really want a war and why don’t we get together and stop it before there’s any serious harm done.’
‘Is it true,’ Cynthia asked, ‘that Hitler offered to meet the King?’
‘Who knows?’ Anthea said, so loudly that one of the Polish airmen looked up hopefully from the bar. ‘Mind you, the chances of the King meeting anyone above the level of a Territorial Army colonel are pretty slim these days. They scarcely allow him out in public after that speech, I believe. But never mind about that. The point is that we know where the Faction membership book is.’
‘How did you find out?’
‘We managed to intercept the man who was carrying it around,’ Anthea said. ‘He didn’t have it, but he knew the last person he’d given it to.’
‘Is it at the Embassy?’
‘Happily, not. No, your other friend Mr Bannister has it down in Sussex.’
One of the Polish airmen now detached himself from the group at the bar and came shambling across. He was not bad-looking in a rather haphazard way, but did not seem to have shaved.
‘Hello to you, ladies,’ he said in surprisingly good English, making what looked like a series of semaphore signals with his hand. ‘My hospitable friends were wondering if you would care to join us.’
‘Absolutely not,’ Anthea said. ‘Go away.’
The Polish airman went back to the bar, shrugging his shoulders. Perhaps he was used to these rebuffs. It was well known that London’s womenfolk were not interested in Poland, and would have preferred America to join the war.