Siren Years : A Canadian Diplomat Abroad 1937-1945 (9781551996783)

by Ritchie, Charles

  23 August 1939.

  Weekend in the country—When Sally Gordon-Ives met me at the bus stop at Chippenham she had a stranger with her, a man with the oval face of a Gainsborough portrait, an impression partly derived from his white, wavy hair. As he drove the car he kept waving his long fine hands. “Where are we to turn now, Sally?” “This is where I always get confused.” “Oh, this is worse than death.” We arrived at the house before dinner in time for passion fruit and gin cocktails. The small white drawing-room was sweet with the smells of lilies and carnations. Sally’s son, Victor, came downstairs in a dinner jacket with a carnation in his button-hole – long legs, lounging Eton manners, and abundant dark locks. He seemed dripping with softness like a young Orsino. He is a caricaturist, a lover of music and a photographer of talent. “Let’s play Beethoven’s Eighth on the gramophone just once, Mummy, before dinner. I do so love the part that goes …” and he hummed it in a pure, rounded, full voice. No doubt when war breaks out he will be among the first killed leading the lower classes into action.1

  At dinner we had a discussion of literature. It crackled up quite suddenly and spread like a forest fire, started by John Davies (who is also staying here) saying that Dostoevsky was superior to Tolstoy. After drinking some sparkling hock I demolished him entirely.

  John had just come back from exercises as a trooper – “For three days I only slept three hours a night carrying a weight of fifty pounds all the time. Nothing saved my bottom but wearing silk pyjama trousers under my cavalry breeches. One morning I was so weak with exhaustion that I wept into my gas-mask. Have you heard about the cavalry officer who was so stupid that the other cavalry officers noticed it?” The white-haired man’s name was David. He kept on saying, “Worse than death” and “Too tiresome for words to tell” all the weekend. John says he really is a typical New College highbrow. There was a girl there whom they called “Society” because she was a débutante. “Society will not play tennis with a man in braces.” After dinner we played bridge and danced to gramophone records in the drawing-room. Young Victor and Society danced with grave seriousness – he a sensitive dark youth, she the perfect answer to his question. She had been to forty-five débutante dances and never leaves until they are over. She dances with a somnambulistic certainty of timing. I went out and stood in the garden, searchlights guarded our revels. I could hear the music of the “Kleine Offizier” coming through the window and could see the lighted, flower-filled room with the figures dancing and David’s lounging figure. I went back to my pub through the empty streets of the village. They were still dancing and I could hear the drawing-room floor vibrating as they practised new tap-dancing steps. When I got into bed the sheets were damp as they always are in village pubs, and I soaked up my French three-volume saga by the light of a candle.

  26 August 1939.

  Yesterday Hadow of the Foreign Office suggested that the High Commissioners should ask Mr. Chamberlain to represent to Poland the full danger of the Russian position. It was a way of asking them to climb down. As I walked back across the Horse Guards I thought, “Should I suppress this suggestion?” but I passed it on to Mr. Massey. If I believed that nothing must be done to discourage the Poles I would not have passed it on. I knew that I had to make up my mind in a hurry. I suppose my feeling was that as a Canadian I should be right in doing anything, however small, in the direction of postponing war. Mr. Massey took up the suggestion with Bruce, the Australian High Commissioner. Bruce took it up with the Prime Minister. Mr. Massey himself had the idea at second hand and understood it very imperfectly. Bruce must have understood it even less. They just got the essential part of it – to warn off the Poles. Mrs. Massey said, “I saw the film of Mr. Bruce going to Downing Street – the irony of it that he should have the credit of making this suggestion to Mr. Chamberlain which really originates with Vincent.” As a matter of fact it is a double irony – the idea originated with Hadow, was brought from him by me to Mr. Massey, and Bruce made the effect. That is a historical fact for you – like a stone dropped in a pool.

  Still not a word of enquiry or guidance from the Canadian Government. They refuse to take any responsibility in this crisis which endangers the future of Canada. Mackenzie King is condemned in my eyes as unworthy to hold office as Prime Minister.

  Mrs. Massey and I sat up until 11 p.m. drinking whisky and water in the High Commissioner’s big Mussoliniesque office awaiting his return from his meeting with Halifax.1 London seems very calm – everyone appears resigned to war if it comes. They have lost any positive will to peace. The last year of peace has been too insufferable. If Russia was on our side I think people would not be sorry that war had come at last.

  29 August 1939.

  This is like one of those dreams in which images appear in incongruous juxtaposition. One sees one’s maiden aunt riding through the park naked on a polar bear.

  At the end of the quiet stuccoed streets hang the great silver elephants of the balloon barrage floating airily high in the evening sky. These captive monsters may be seen between their ascents pinned to the ground in the parks or public places – lying exhausted, breathing faintly with the passing puffs of wind. While the general London scene is the same, there are oddities of detail – brown paper pasted over fan-lights and walled-in windows on the ground floors of the buildings, the sandbags around hospitals and museums, the coffin-like enclosures around the statues in the central court of the Foreign Office. And there are odd tableaux too – glimpses of people in shirt-sleeves digging air-raid shelters in their back gardens, or offices debouching typewriters and desks for removal to country premises. Then there is the outcropping of uniforms, raw-looking young soldiers in very new uniforms unload themselves from Army trucks and stand about awkwardly in front of public buildings. Women in uniform looking dowdy as old photographs of the last war, full-bosomed, big-bottomed matrons who carry their uniforms with a swagger, and young girls copying their brothers – a spectacle to make their lovers quail.

  1 September 1939.

  A day which may have lasted a week or a year. It began when that severely black-clad spinster in my office handed me the Evening Standard with the text of Hitler’s proclamation to the German army. Until then I suppose I had not really taken in that there would be a war. There followed an interminable period of sitting about. It was like waiting for a train that would not turn up. People made their appearances in my office, stayed and disappeared. Voices from what seemed to be every part of my life spoke to me on the telephone. It was like the anteroom to Hades in which one expects to run into an ill-assorted variety of company.

  This drawn-out waiting in the close, grey day was interspersed by my visits to the Foreign Office where Hadow was sitting, stunned, among his telegrams. “These bloody pigs,” he said of his Foreign Office colleagues, “want to set up a Jewish-cum-Leftist régime in Germany.” Like a man possessed he repeated his old anti-communist ravings but weakly like a gramophone running down.

  At seven in the evening Mr. Massey came back from the House of Commons. By then there was a black-out. Three or four of us gathered in his huge office, its walls marked where the oil paintings had been removed to safety, its windows curtained. Mr. Massey stood under the vast chandelier. He was excited – unnatural or too natural “We shall be at war some time tonight.”

  I dined in the candlelit gloom of Boodle’s Club dining-room. All but two waiters had been called up. It was the first time in history that members were permitted to dine in the dining-room in day clothes. After dinner I emerged into the coal-black St. James’s Street of Pepys or Dr. Johnson. Through the driving rain I walked along the Mall. I half expected to see a crowd outside the Palace, but its grey mass did not show a light. I hailed passing cars, unable in the blackout to see whether they were taxis or private cars. As I squelched through the mud by the park railings I thought that this compact city civilization, inter-related like a switchboard, is overturned. One’s friends join up or go to the country, sail to America, or evacuat
e school children. If you see a friend you cling to him. For when he is gone he is swept away, and God knows when you will see him again. Telegrams are not delivered, telephones not answered, taxis do not run. I suppose once the war gets under way we shall get back to more normal conditions.

  3 September 1939.

  The war feeling is swelling. I believe it would sweep aside any compromise with Germany if the Government at the twelfth hour could secure one. I think we may have cheering, weeping crowds in the streets yet. This thing is a drug which alternately depresses and elates its victims and which gives them release from the slow death of their daily lives. No one who has not felt this war-feeling inside him can know how it shakes the foundations and lets loose hate, generosity, lust, fear, courage, love – all the bag of human tricks. Some thought they had been analyzed away, but it was just that the right button had not been pressed.

  At the doors of the houses in my neighbourhood stand cars laden with luggage. Little groups of Kensingtonians are evacuating their aunts, their canaries, and their small dogs.

  8 September 1939.

  Is that humming an aircraft? That faint fluting sound – is it a siren? Our ears have been sharpened. Who would have thought of using “our” of Londoners before?

  Was there a time when we did not all carry gas-masks? Only a few days ago.

  The liner Athenia has been sunk by the Germans. The absurd wicked folly of these utterly unwarlike people being drowned. This war has a quality which no other had. We do not approach it with our former innocence. We are in cold blood repeating a folly which belongs to the youth of mankind. We are driven to it by the force of sheer human stupidity, laziness, and error which we have been unable in the last twenty years to overcome.

  We awake at three in the morning to sirens. I go for my overcoat, my gas-mask, my shoes and stumble through the french window into the garden where the other inhabitants of this boarding-house are already in the shelter. They are making jokes and meeting with sleepy or nervous responses from their neighbours. The cook says, “We shall be used to this in ten years.” Then she goes off to the kitchen and comes back with a tray of tea. I get bored with the shelter and come up for air in the quiet garden. The old man we call “Uncle” is looking at the stars. He has appointed himself an outside watcher. He often thinks he can hear sounds of enemy planes coming over. So far he has been mistaken. His wife “Auntie” talks all the time in the shelter. She gave us quite a clear little description of different kinds of poisonous gases. I think she has a relish for horrors. “Chris” appears in the shelter with her hair tied up in a pink gauze scarf. She looks better like that than she does in the daytime with her blondined curls – a little better but not enough to matter. I came in and had a bath before the all-clear signal went. People will get less careful each time – especially if we have so many false alarms.

  15 September 1939.

  Living in London is like being an inmate of a reformatory school. Everywhere you turn you run into some regulation designed for your own protection. The Government is like the School Matron with her keys jangling at her waist. She orders you about, good-humouredly enough, but all the same, in no uncertain terms. You need look no further to know what British fascism would be like. Nothing but acute physical danger can make such a regime bearable. So far we have had the restriction without the danger, and there is healthy discontent as a result. After the first air raid we may feel differently. Meanwhile London is a waste of dull desolation. Never has there been such a colourless war – not a drum, not a flag, not a cheer – just sandbags and khaki and air-raid shelters and gas-masks and the cultivated, careful voice of the BBC putting the best complexion on the news. London is waiting for the first raid like an anxious hostess who has made all the preparations to receive formidable guests – but the guests do not seem to be going to turn up. Every time the door-bell rings she thinks, “At last there they are,” but it turns out to be the grocer’s boy delivering a parcel. So the days pass. We look at our watches, turn on the wireless, pick up a novel, and wait. There are reports in from Denmark that five hundred German bombers are collected in the Sylt and that we may expect a raid in a few days. Meanwhile the Poles have begged the British Ambassador to press the Government to raid German military objectives as the one action which we could take which would really be helpful to the Poles. I do not see how we can avoid doing so any longer unless – Is this a token war fought to save our faces to be followed in a few weeks by a peace conference? The suspicion exists in England and is strong on the continent.

  What a relief to be spending an evening alone in my room without thinking, “the so-and-sos are giving a dinner-party – I should rather like to have gone.” There are no dinner-parties.

  I have been reading “New Writing” which is full of bloody death and the symbolism of decay and destruction. The editors have collected the omens of our impending disaster from China and Spain. This monster which was grazing in exotic fields is now approaching England’s garden cities.

  16 September 1939.

  I went to a typical American comedy film with Ginger Rogers in it. There is a country thirty-eight hours away by Clipper where it is still important that women should be smart and attractive, where the most irreverent wisecracks are permitted, where people are still trying to get rich, where individual happiness is still an aim. The selfish, free world of America seems electric with vitality and with hope compared to this scene of grey submission. All this comes from going to an American film. The truth is that I would not leave this country now if I was presented with a ticket to America and a cheque for one hundred thousand pounds.

  17 September 1939.

  Weekend with the Masseys. Mike Pearson was there. He went to a night-club last night and says there was a crowd of RAF chaps all having a good time pretending to be tight, pretending to fight over the girls, etc. This was fine and as it should be. But he was disgusted by a group of middle-aged men, survivors of the last war, back in uniform again, singing the old songs of the last war, trying to fancy themselves heroes to the night-club hostesses, trying to get back the glamour of their own youth. Certainly one war generation should be allowed to die off before another war is started.

  18 September 1939.

  Dined with Robert Byron.

  He was very amusing in his richly baroque style with his love of exotic places and extravagant episodes. He is an English eccentric – there is nothing quite like them – with their fear of losing face, their wit, their courage, their thin skins and their thick hides, the rudeness they dole out to others and their own palpitating sensitiveness to the snub.

  19 September 1939.

  I saw Hadow at the Foreign Office today. He says that the Germans and the Russians will merge into one barbarian horde. They will sweep into the Balkans on a tide of pan-Slavism. Turkey will never fight Russia – her western frontiers are too vulnerable to Russian attack. Therefore, the Turks will not come to the help of Romania when it is attacked by Germany and Russia. We may be able to hold the old line of the Roman Empire along the Rhine against the barbarians. Michal Vyvyan on the other hand says that the Russians and Germans will never be able to agree, and that the Russians must know that they have everything to gain from an eventual German defeat. I dined with Michal last night. He wants to join the Army as a private but at the moment he is employed by the Ministry of Economic Warfare. He says there is no use clinging to comfort. It is all so bloody anyway that one might as well enlist. He says he will not mind seeing people in uniforms killed half as much as it makes one lose one’s sense of their individuality, whereas if a bomb landed in this restaurant it would be awful watching all the people in their different clothes and with their various manners of suffering making different kinds of faces over it.

  There is no war spirit as there was at the beginning. We are just jogging along in a state of some mystification about this peculiar contest. There seem to be such a lot of cultivated intelligent, youngish men about who have nothing to do in this war.
They cannot all get into the Ministry of Information.

  27 September 1939.

  Jock Colville1 told me of a communication from the Shah of Persia to a Victorian Foreign Secretary which he had seen in the Foreign Office Archives. The Shah wrote as follows:

  “Last night I dreamed a dream. I was walking in my garden and I saw a great tree growing whose branches overshadowed the lily pond and the rose garden. Lo, as I approached nearer I saw that it was no tree but Queen Victoria of England. Then I gave orders that it be cut down and cast into a pit.”

  19 October 1939.

  I shall be sorry to leave this quarter for my chic new flat.2 I have got attached to the dowdy, genteel streets off the Fulham Road. It is part of the ritual of life here to have a stack of pennies for the telephone and a stack of shillings for the gas fire. The boarding-house breakfasts are all right too. I do not mind the young men existing on three pounds a week, keeping their umbrellas rolled and their shoes shone and living for the weekends of golf in the country. And the daughters of small-town doctors and country clergymen who have taken jobs at Harrods. They may be dull but at least they want things – to have enough money for smart cars and smart restaurants, to chat easily with earls or live in sin in Mayfair flatlets. They get a kick out of thinking of things like that. Far be it from me to look down on them on that account. Earls and Mayfair flats floated before my youthful eyes.