Last Days in Old Europe

by Richard Bassett

  Such conversations hinted at Slovene separatist activities which the federal Yugoslav state was careful to monitor. That such an apparatus existed was evident. Once, when one of my colleagues from the orchestra joked that if Yugoslavia broke up Slovenia would be fine and could become an independent state, another colleague looked at us grimly. Bringing his wrists together as if they were handcuffed, he shook his head, unmistakably warning us to change the subject.

  A second-hand bookshop in the old town of Ljubljana provided further education about my surroundings. Alongside novels by the Austrian Alexander Lernet-Holenia, I found a faded edition of that classic adventure Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy Maclean. Maclean had been parachuted into wartime Yugoslavia to act as Churchill’s personal liaison officer to Marshal Tito, then just one of several partisan leaders. Maclean’s support had been critical at several tricky moments during the war and when, after it, Tito broke with the Soviets, he turned to Maclean for help. In this way Maclean had played an important role in cementing Yugoslavia’s fragile position between East and West.

  From the first page, with its romantic departure from the Gare de l’Est in Paris in the compartment of a wagon-lit, Eastern Approaches is still a most absorbing book. That distinguished Times correspondent the late Peter Hopkirk wrote that for his generation Maclean’s book was the natural sequel to Rudyard Kipling’s Kim as an inspiration for fledgling foreign correspondents and players of the ‘Great Game’. Certainly, at that moment few other books appeared as relevant to me as Maclean’s. As the uncertainty over the future of Yugoslavia began to focus minds, I looked at his handsome face gazing at me from the frontispiece of my somewhat dog-eared volume and wondered what he would have made of current developments in Slovenia.

  A couple of months later, after returning to England for a few weeks that winter, I was invited to give a lecture on Plečnik to final-year students of the University of Strathclyde’s architectural class. The morning after the lecture, I visited Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s famous Hill House in nearby Helensburgh. Unfortunately, it had rained heavily in the night and the house had flooded, so it was closed to the public. Disappointed, I retired to a simple café near by to read the day’s Times. On the letters page was a short but stylish contribution from Fitzroy Maclean on the future of nuclear disarmament: ‘Sir, I do not see how any rational observer of the international scene can fail to be amazed at the inept manner in which the superpowers are at present approaching the problem of nuclear disarmament. If ever there was an occasion for serious negotiation between experts behind closed doors, it must be this … surely the time has come for a little secret diplomacy.’ I pondered this before returning to the railway station to catch the train back to Glasgow.

  The station was deserted; its Edwardian waiting room seemed unchanged since the age of steam. I gazed out at the rather black clouds gathering over the hills to the north and prepared to cross over the track to catch the Glasgow train. The dramatic landscape stretched enticingly along the line to the Highlands, like a scene out of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film of Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps. As I took this in, a train heading north pulled up in front of me and, rather than wait for another train heading south to take me back to Glasgow, I was seized by a sudden compulsion to jump aboard and visit the next station along the line, wherever that might be. It was only two o’clock in the afternoon. I assumed I could always return on a later train. The carriage I entered, like the entire train, appeared to be virtually empty. The only other passenger was a grey-haired man in a black pinstriped suit with a green and heather-purple regimental tie who sat at one end reading The Times.

  I looked for a conductor to enquire about our destination, but there appeared to be no conductor on board. Returning to the man still gazing at his paper, I asked him what must have seemed a witless question: did he know where the train was going? He looked up, rather surprised: ‘To Arrochar and then on towards Mallaig’ – two names which then meant nothing to me. He returned to his paper and I started back along the carriage. I noticed that his briefcase bore a label with an old-fashioned white carte de visite. The engraved writing gave addresses in Eaton Square and Argyll but above these in slightly larger letters stood the name of the briefcase’s owner: Sir Fitzroy Maclean Bt.

  As an example of what Jung and Koestler refer to as ‘synchronicity’, this encounter had a slight flavour of the paranormal about it. The odds against not only taking the same train but being even in the same carriage as someone whose letter I had read an hour earlier in a newspaper were of course immense. No doubt the rules of form or politesse insisted that I ignore this unlikely meeting on a train chugging through the empty landscape of southern Argyll, but so vividly had Eastern Approaches captured my imagination, that to be suddenly confronted with its author seemed unreal but also providential.

  ‘Fitzroy … Maclean?’ I asked in halting astonishment.

  ‘Why yes …’ His cobalt eyes held mine in an inquisitive and alert gaze.

  We chatted about Slovenia for about fifteen minutes, and any barriers which might have been present evaporated. Maclean was curious, courteous and charming. Was I travelling far? Would I like to go for a walk? This appeared too generous an invitation to give up lightly. As the train pulled into a rainy Arrochar twenty minutes later, the door of a small car parked near by opened to reveal Fitzroy’s wife, Veronica, dressed in royal-blue trousers with a flash of magenta about her heels. About half an hour later I was shown into a fine Georgian house where I was equipped from among various rainproof hats, coats, stick and boots all arranged along hooks in a brightly lit gun room. Thus attired in the impermeable regalia of the modern Highlander, I followed Fitzroy into a magnificent drenched landscape. The drizzle was interminable but the view starkly sublime, and my host was unperturbed: ‘I always go for a walk in the rain when I get back from London. I find it clears the mind after the train.’

  For two hours we walked and talked mostly about Yugoslavia and its prospects for the future after Tito. We also discussed Cambridge and Russia as well as the British constitution, the ‘unnecessary’ unmasking of Anthony Blunt and my plans for the future. Maclean’s welcome was marked by genial informality which I later came to realize was one of the traits of the western highlands (in contrast to the altogether more formal manners of Edinburgh). He spoke candidly of politics and history and seemed happy to have the company of someone familiar with the latest conditions in Slovenia. Beneath his sincere joviality, I sensed his brain was always working; his questions were to the point and well informed.

  After a glass of the Famous Grouse at Strachur, he escorted me to a nearby inn called the Creggans, whose darkened, wood-panelled interior was filled with smoke. Outside the rain beat down on the windows. We entered this tobacco-rich landscape like two figures from a Richard Hannay adventure. ‘My friend here needs to get back to Glasgow,’ the laird said with a certain matter-of-factness. ‘Is anyone headed in that direction?’ A low murmur filled the room for a few seconds before a small weather-beaten man piped up with the offer of a lift. This man took me to Dunoon, giving me an informed tour d’horizon of his views on the poor fighting quality of US soldiers as we passed an American base. Two hours later, I returned to Glasgow. ‘So the Mackintosh house was flooded and closed,’ commiserated my host from the architectural faculty that evening. ‘What bad luck. You must have had such a boring day.’

  The following week, back in Slovenia, the memory of this encounter with the architect of Yugoslavia’s relationship with Churchill was a constant source of reflection. When I travelled by train to Trieste, I could now gaze out at the ruined stones of the bridge at Borovnica, once the most imposing viaduct of the Südbahn, and recall that it had been blown up in 1944 by the man I had been walking with in Argyll just a week before. It stood (as parts of it still do) as a memorial to the bitter fighting Yugoslavia witnessed during the Second World War. Such a beautiful bridge, I had remarked to Maclean during our walk. His reply had been dispassionate: ‘Y
es, but I’m afraid it had to go.’

  As the months wore on, the fragility of the Yugoslav political situation became more and more apparent and even the usually mild Professor Ravnikar noted grimly that he did not expect matters to continue as before for very much longer. Some months earlier, in March–April 1981, an uprising in the Albanian-populated Kosovo region in the south of the country increased nervousness, although life at the opera house continued its routine as before, punctuated by tours of Carinthia and Croatia. At a performance of Madame Butterfly in Rijeka, it was easy to imagine I was back in the days of a multinational and multilingual empire. Lieutenant Pinkerton, played by a singer from an old family in Istria, sang in sonorous Italian, while our demure Madame Butterfly responded to his advances in slightly harsh Slovene. The chorus, ‘lent’ to us by the local opera house in Rijeka, watched on before entering in a deafening Croatian.

  At the end of the 1982 season the opera house offered to renew my contract for another three years but I did not wish to linger. I had finished my thesis on Plečnik which would no doubt gather dust for decades to come on the shelves of the Courtauld Institute. Ljubljana was still quite rigidly Communist and over-comfortably provincial. Having spent the best part of three and a half years along the southern Südbahn axis, my next port of call was, almost inevitably, the northern terminus of the railway – Vienna. The challenge would be to find the appropriate entrée. While Christa Špun-Strižić had warned me rightly or wrongly in Zagreb that entry into the Foreign Office might be difficult, Fitzroy Maclean had spoken warmly of The Times, whose editor was another impressive Scot, Charles Douglas-Home.

  The demands of the Cold War dominated newspaper reporting from the heart of Europe in those days. Apart from Poland where the aftermath of martial law merited a permanent Times office, the rest of the Soviet European empire was largely uncovered. The aspiring correspondent could attempt coverage of Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania, but there were formidable restrictions on doing so. Western correspondents were not allowed to reside in those countries because the authorities feared they would spread subversion and propaganda. The would-be correspondent’s residence in Central Europe was therefore possible only in Vienna, a place which in those days was neither a Western European nor an Eastern European city but which offered a geographical and infrastructural base from which to ‘cover’ Central Europe comfortably. ‘Neutral’ Vienna had its own peculiar atmosphere and mentality. It was sufficiently far to the east to keep a watchful eye on Warsaw Pact countries while enjoying many of the freedoms of Western Europe. At an appointed hour one evening, buoyed with a sense of opportunity, and no doubt exuding the brazen confidence of youth, I breezed into Gray’s Inn Road, then the headquarters of The Times, and confidently asked to see the Foreign News Editor.

  With the naivety of inexperience, I thought I would encounter a certain bonhomie, even enthusiasm, in response to my efforts, but in this, as in so many other things to do with journalism, I was mistaken. The Foreign News Editor of The Times was cautious. Bearded, formal and with a pen dangling on a band around his neck, he appraised me through sceptical, humourless eyes. He appeared far removed from the trivia and banter which I, after digesting Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, had imagined were the oxygen of any Foreign Desk’s activities. I swiftly recalibrated my gushing phrases and assumed a no doubt wholly unconvincing air of constipated sobriety.

  ‘Of course, you could not have chosen a more difficult place to report from than Vienna’ was how the newspaper man glacially opened the conversation. He continued equally unpromisingly: ‘Nothing happens there these days … bit of a backwater. And of course further to the east we are, as you know, well covered.’ His dispassionate voice only underlined the general insignificance of Austria, Central Europe and anyone foolish enough to wish to work as a correspondent there. The implied message, unconcealed even to the rawest of potential recruits, was quite simple: ‘Why bother?’

  I queasily asked for a letter of introduction, something I imagined from reading Scoop was an automatic requirement, easily asked for and easily given. The Foreign News Editor’s eyes narrowed suspiciously as if I was requesting something he had never heard of. In a neutral tone of voice suggesting that such favours were not granted lightly, he hinted that such a letter might eventually be forthcoming, but he did give me the telephone number (to be used sparingly) of the Foreign Desk and the telex address to which I could send ‘any copy’. Nothing was said about payment. He wished me ‘Good luck’ but gave a convincing impression of believing that any further contact was unlikely.

  Undeterred, I made preparations to move to Vienna later that summer. A passage from a hastily acquired copy of Teach Yourself Journalism by E. Frank Candlin seemed to place my low-octane encounter with the Foreign News Editor into context: ‘Fleet Street fully justifies its reputation for hustle, for the demands it makes on its denizens and for the cut-throat competition which exists therein. It is no place for weaklings or for the idle and easy-going. Those who lack dynamic drive, personal initiative and a supreme confidence in their own abilities will do well to save their train-fare.’

  Before setting off for Vienna, it was necessary to make one more important visit as part of the preparations for taking up life in the Austrian capital. A few months earlier, I had found a copy of Osbert Lancaster’s With an Eye to the Future, published in 1967 but written in the Macaulayesque rhythms of an earlier age, splendidly acidic in its observations of the Austrians and their ability to mask darker motives behind a disarming front of charm. Lancaster had got the measure of the Austrians in the 1930s just as he had, also correctly, taken the temperature of what he described as the ‘mentally underprivileged members of the Bullingdon’ at Oxford. His description of life in Salzburg, Budapest and Vienna was vivid and illuminating. Such expertise would be invaluable, and somewhere in London, I knew, he was waiting to be found.

  After graduating, my first paid work in London had been with the Architectural Review, then situated in a fine eighteenth-century house in Queen Anne’s Gate. In its basement there was a private hostelry called the Bride of Denmark, resplendent with gin-palace mirrors and a glass cabinet containing a stuffed lion, items which had been painstakingly assembled from the rubble of demolished Victorian pubs by John Betjeman and Osbert Lancaster, both of whom had worked at the Architectural Review. The Review was collegiate, intellectual and adventurous. Its editors included many eccentrics, among them the eminent Georgian specialist Dan Cruickshank. Some wore waistcoats and shirts with detachable collars and, in the case of the Paris correspondent, a silk cravat of almost Beau Brummell-like extravagance. The Bride provided a focus for ‘editorial drinks’, an almost obligatory requirement in those days of all creative publishing in the capital.

  It was to this freemasonry of architectural historians that I turned in my search. Cruickshank quickly supplied an address for the retired Lancaster and I was soon invited to tea in an apartment block overlooking the Chelsea Physic Garden. There Osbert’s wife, Anne Scott-James, warned me that although Osbert was only seventy-four, his faculties had already begun to fade, though he might well have ‘some better memories of earlier events’. Long years of life in the upper reaches of clubland had exacted their toll.

  I was shown into a pretty drawing room furnished with Gillray pen-and-ink sketches, including a memorable one for his cartoon captioned ‘Brigade Major – Weymouth 1797’. On a chair by the window, sitting immobile and silent like a faintly glowering Buddha, Osbert Lancaster leant forward with an inscrutable expression. He spoke slowly and unemotionally, but in this deadpan style he delivered one amusing insight after another. He recalled the German pre-war predilection for hierarchy. On crossing into Bavaria one summer in the 1930s, he had surrendered his passport for inspection, only to prompt a great deal of heel-clicking and saluting. The German customs officials had misunderstood Osbert for Oberst (Colonel) and had immediately elevated the twenty-one-year-old Englishman to field-officer status.

  Lancaster had
great affection for the baroque and he urged me to spend as much time in Salzburg as possible, noting that the Café Bazar was still one of ‘the most civilized places on earth’. The Vienna Ringstrasse and the glories of Budapest, however, left him rather cold: ‘very impressive but really all filthy stuff’. He glided effortlessly from the architectural to the military. He recalled the thrill of seeing a Corpus Christi procession led by the Hungarian Regent, Admiral Horthy. The Regent had been accompanied by all the great magnates, dressed in hussar uniforms and dragoon helmets as if they ‘had been in an Erich von Stroheim film’. The whiff of formaldehyde had been quite overpowering.

  Our conversation meandered over these Central European topics for about an hour before I sensed my interlocutor was tiring and I reluctantly moved to leave. Suddenly Lancaster seemed to spring to life with a flicker of a smile. The Austrian girls, he recalled, were one of the lost glories of the Habsburg Empire and, for some reason, were all called ‘Mitzi’. Dispatched by this practical if curious parting shot, I set off across London to pack.

  A few days later, the Foreign News Editor’s letter of introduction duly appeared and I prepared to spend the rest of the summer in Graz, where I hoped to improve my decent but still imperfect German. Two summers earlier I had lived in the villa of the redoubtable Frau Höhnel, the daughter of a fin de siècle architect who had designed many of the city’s pretty villas in a mixture of Jugendstil and neo-Gothic. I now returned here for the summer. Frau Höhnel still exuded propriety and discipline. Her hair was neatly tied and her collar starched. This neatness invested her home. The Villa Höhnel stood in the gas-lit Schubertstrasse on historical ground between the Graz Stadtpark and the Hilmteich Lake. As Gottfried Banfield had intoned with childlike glee when we had first met in Trieste a few years earlier: ‘Graz liegt am Hilmteich. Rings herum liegt Oesterreich’ (Graz lies on Hilmteich. All around is Austria). Here was the heart of Inner Austria.