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

by Ritchie, Charles

  6 June 1940.

  Having half an hour to spare this afternoon I strolled down to the Foreign Office. No one would have thought that a German invasion is just around the corner. There were three or four pleasantly satirical and studiedly casual young secretaries draped about the room drinking their tea and eating strawberry shortcake. It might have been a scene from a skit on His Majesty’s Diplomatic Service. In fact I am sure they are all conscientious, hard-working civil servants more aware than most people of what is at stake. After all their cup of tea and their ironic little jokes are pleasures shared by this whole nation and are no doubt part of What We Are Fighting For.

  Our standards are being overturned. What is brought home to me is my existence as a member of a community in a way that I never dreamed of before. I rather fancied myself as a cosmopolitan who laughed at blimpish patriotism. Now I subscribe to all the old cries – “My country right or wrong,” I could have my room plastered with these cracker mottoes which have now become for me eternal truths. Meanwhile we are all waiting, almost longing for these bombs. Hart Massey said to me today, “I wish they would start bombing us.” And Michal said with relish, “Soon the bombs will be landing on our heads.” This must be the mentality of the civilians behind the lines. The soldiers do not swell the chorus, nor have I heard any women express a pious hope for a bombing raid. The soldiers and the women must be right.

  15 June 1940.

  Lunched with Mrs. Andreae. She wanted to ask me about taking her grandchildren to America to escape the war. She is a shrewd, worldly, old woman but she is waiting to make her decision until she has consulted a fortune-teller. I should not laugh at her as for the last few days I have had a sort of obsession that the continuation of Hitler’s successes was bound up with this unnaturally fine weather that goes on and on. “Hitler weather” they call it. It is not only the effect of the weather in speeding up the movement of his mechanized forces but a purely silly and superstitious association in my mind.

  17 June 1940.

  The French have declared that organized resistance is at an end and the French Government have asked the British Government if with their approval they may sue for an armistice. The British Government have replied, “Yes, provided the French fleet is handed over to us intact.” Apparently the French do not intend to resist in North Africa. It is difficult to see how they can hand over their fleet to us if they are going to make peace with Germany. A full-dress German attack on England is expected this week or the next. We have about five divisions trained and equipped. The Germans have one hundred divisions. They have a pronounced superiority in the air and in equipment. It is estimated that by bombing they could reduce the produce of our factories to twenty-five per cent of the present output. It would take the Americans at least six months to begin supplying this country on a scale equal to the needs.

  Whatever the odds this country is not prepared to surrender and would not stand for it, although there are elements at the top and bottom of the social scale who secretly lean towards it. If after three months of total war this country cannot take it (any more than the Finns or the French could take it, and they are both brave races), then I suppose we shall make peace as France is doing now after thousands of men, women, and children have been killed. Mike Pearson says, “If this country makes peace I hope Canada will become a republic and that would be the end of this business of our duty to the Empire.”

  I got my promotion today as Second Secretary – an odd time to get it.

  22 June 1940.

  Several exhausting days during which the office has been flooded with people trying to arrange for their children to get out to Canada. I have been impressed by three things:

  1. The unnatural coolness of English parents – no broken voices or tear-filled eyes.

  2. The incredible confusion caused when civil servants are taken by surprise and by a sudden onrush of events. I see how “government” breaks down. The picture of such a breakdown is a queue of people with urgent problems and a distracted civil servant, his desk covered with forms and regulations, cornered by “reality.”

  3. I am impressed by the sacrosanct importance of the British Nanny. People here would rather let their children run the risk of being bombed than send them out on a sea voyage without their Nanny.

  Refugees are arriving from our Legation staff in Paris. They have left most of their possessions behind them. Madame Vanier, the wife of our Minister to Paris, stood at the front door watching the boxes of documents from the Paris Legation arrive. Suddenly she gave a cry of emotion, threw herself upon one package – “My hatbox – my hatbox. I never thought I would see it again.”

  Saw Roger Makins of the Foreign Office at the club today. He says the French Government are completely demoralized and will accept anything the Germans dish out to them. He says it is a question of the collapse of the whole fabric of the Third Republic.

  If these politicians of ours ever read any serious modern literature they might not be so surprised at what is happening in France. For years now there has been bad news from France. Their best writers have given a shaking picture of the dry rot which has overtaken the French bourgeoisie. The fascist and communist undercurrent in French literature has been quite audible. Books like Céline’s Voyage to the End of the Night are social documents as important as white papers or ambassadors’ dispatches.

  Mr. R. B. Bennett1 has just made a speech at some school prize-giving saying that there can never be a fifth column in England because it is such a land of liberty, etc. Let him go and take a look at the slums in this country.

  I dined with Tony Balásy of the Hungarian Legation. He talked about the overthrow of the small states in Europe by Hitler, and said that to understand the mentality of the people of those states one would have to have lived there through the post-war years. He said, “You have the Big Power point of view. If the British Empire were destroyed you would have all lost something real, but it is not the same for us – we have known all along that our independence, the independence of a country like Hungary, depended on a precarious balance of Big Power rivalries. Such independence was always something of a fiction, although we might come ahead of Germany or England in the alphabetical lists for committees of the League of Nations. Our politicians had to repeat that we would die rather than give up a lot of this precious independence – still at heart we knew we had it on sufferance.”

  I can see that despite his hatred of Nazis Tony is half fascinated by the idea of a united European bloc by whatever means achieved. Some Europeans may be tempted to think that if the small sovereign state entities can be broken down and Europe united it is worth the price of temporary Hitler domination, because Hitler will not last forever, and after he is gone it will be as impossible to reconstruct the Europe of small states as it was to reconstruct feudal Europe after the fall of Napoleon.

  26 June 1940.

  Walked today along the Broad Walk through Kensington Gardens. It was thronged with soldiers, the remains of the shattered continental armies, Dutch, French and Norwegian. Then the Canadians who have become almost part of the London streetscape, and the newly arrived New Zealanders including many Maoris, and then, the altogether more solid, as if carved out of some other material, Guardsmen. Moving in this procession of soldiers of the nations I had the sense of swimming in the full tide of history.

  My office is the door of escape from hell. Day after day the stream of people press in. Today, for example, some of the Austrian Rothschilds (escaped from a concentration camp) are trying to pass their medical examination to go to Canada. Would I arrange a financial guarantee for them? The wife of one of the wealthiest men in England is trying to get out of the country. Her husband is a Jew and a leading anti-Nazi. Will I get her a letter to prove (on very flimsy grounds) that she is a Canadian? Lady B, looking radiant, comes to ask if I would arrange for her son’s prep-school to be affiliated with a boys’ boarding school in Canada and to migrate there en masse. The Marchioness of C, in the unifo
rm of the Women’s Naval Auxiliary Unit, wants to get three children out to Canada at once. Two Canadian journalists want to get their wives out but there is a mysterious delay in getting their exit permits. The Spanish Ambassador wants us to get accommodation for his daughter, his mother, and a troop of maids and governesses on board the next ship. They are going to Canada for a little rest from the nervous tension of the war. He knows he is slipping with his own Government and may be in exile himself any day. The Polish Ambassador wants us to take the wives and daughters of one hundred high Polish political and diplomatic dignitaries. Count X, the anti-fascist with a price on his head, must leave for Canada at once on a mission of great importance. I have only touched the edge of one day’s work. I do not mention my own friends and relatives who want to get out. Here we have a whole social system on the run, wave after wave after wave of refugees, and these are only the people at the top, people who can by titles, letters of introduction, or the ruling manner force their way into Government offices and oblige one to give them an interview. What of the massed misery that cannot escape?

  The sense of the dissolution of civilized society is overpowering.

  7 July 1940.

  Mr. Massey says there will be no revolution in England – if socialism comes it will be a gradual kindly English socialism. There will still be country houses but only the smaller ones. Chatsworth1 will go. He foresees an early German attempt at invasion and the early establishment of martial law in England.

  16 July 1940.

  Lord Cromer, the former Lord Chamberlain, came in to see me today to explain some complicated business about the Suez Canal Company which boiled down, as usual, to our taking another refugee into Canada, this time a French Jewish financier. Lord Cromer was very deliberate, very formal, very detailed, and conducted the whole negotiation with the leisurely flourishes proper to the transaction of business between gentlemen in the reign of Queen Victoria. It always amuses me to see how much these old boys enjoy getting what they set out to get and how much charm, manner, and wiliness they are willing to expend; sometimes on objectives which only remotely concern them. But such negotiations are the breath of life to them.

  I have a hankering to get the Hutterite Brotherhood out to Canada. They are a sect of pacifist community-livers – many of them Germans at present residing in the Cotswolds where their life is being made impossible by the suspicions of the country folk. My weakness for obscure and unpopular religious sects of a pacifist or quietist complexion makes me susceptible to them. Their leader, a man called Arnold, looks an Oberammergau Christ with beard, smock, and knee-breeches. He seems somewhat sly and smooth. The Canadian Government do not want them.

  Lunched with Mrs. Andreae and the wife of the British Minister to Sofia. Mrs. Andreae says she has it on good authority that a French refugee approaching the cliffs of Dover on his way to escape from France saw a cloud of angels armed with spears hanging in the heavens over England. She firmly believes we are protected by God or the stars or something – I cannot quite make out what – as she alternates so much between Christianity and astrology. There is even a suggestion there was more than meets the eye in the British escape from Dunkirk – meaning that it was arranged for our special benefit by God. The latter idea is quite widely spread, with the corollary that it was the response to our National Day of Prayer. It is not only old women who believe this but at least one contemporary of my own – a naval officer now in charge of a destroyer. However, naval officers do have strange beliefs.

  I now hear that the ferocious internees whom the British Government begged us on bended knees to take to Canada to save this country from their nefarious activities are mostly entirely inoffensive anti-Nazi refugees who have been shovelled out to Canada at a moment’s notice where they may have a disagreeable time, as our authorities have no files about them and will not know whom or what to believe. Part of the trouble is due to the fact that the Home Office and the War Office seem barely to be on speaking terms.

  5 August 1940.

  The intermingling of various ingredients of English social life is proceeding apace. War is stirring up the mixture. English men and women of different classes, localities, sets, and tastes are for the first time talking to each other. This appeared to be an impossibility in England. The weather was previously the one subject upon which everyone had fixed for conversations with strangers.

  15 August 1940.

  Garnons, Hereford, the country house taken by the Masseys as a convalescent hospital for Canadian officers – big rambling house – early Gothic revival about 1820 – battlements and a great tower. Looks its best by moonlight (like all imitations of the Gothic). A nice house – big rooms full of chintz-covered sofas and bad Italian paintings collected by an eighteenth-century ancestor on the Grand Tour. Some beautiful mirrors – Lelys, Romneys, and Laszlos in the dining-room. The view from my room was like the background of an eighteenth-century hunting print. The house was on a hill with a prospect over a valley and the Black Mountains as a back-drop – a lovely stretch of skyscape across which the airplanes pass and return on their way to intercept German bombers over Bristol. We live a country-house life – croquet, conversation, billiards, and flirtation, while a few miles away the air battles go on which are to decide our fate. When one of these noisy monsters zooms across our neat, snug valley it is as though it had flown straight back into the old England of port and leisure in which we are incongruously living.

  A terrifying night. There are old and evil spirits in this part of the world. A friend who spent his childhood in just such an old house as this set in a lush and misty park, told me that all this Welsh border country is haunted. Here one believes in the fears of peasants and one prays their ancient prayers.

  I was led in a dream of circles through my private hell and all the images which congeal my blood and scarify my soul. My daytime self was abolished, I looked out from my window at the quiet moonlit valley and hoped for an air raid to break the silence and deliver me back in the world where courage and intelligence could still avail me.

  As the days went by, one after another of those staying here let slip that they had been unable to sleep and nervously laughing asked, “Is this house haunted?” All day the sun glows steadily through the mist. The heat haze lingers like smoke over the clumps of oak trees in the park and the airplanes pass and return across the slumbrous valley.

  In the game book which goes back to 1860 I see that this week in August has always been oppressively hot here with the birds lying close. I like to turn the pages of this record with its thumbnail sketches of days’ shooting kept by the successive squires of Garnons – of days when it was “wild and wet” and “I never remember to have seen the birds behave so badly” and the days when all went well and the score of the day’s bag tells its own story.

  Our nerves have been too long taut and this sudden relaxation, this enchanted castle, these long idle days – it is all somehow too much. Today’s was only a small incident but for an hour it filled the sky. We were motoring to the Black Mountains and Mrs. Massey decided just as we were climbing the mountain road to Llantony through the close green lanes, to turn back. The rest of us had wanted to go on – impossible to describe the spell of dumb rage that seized us – the heavy clash of her will against our silent resistance. We motored back down from the cool mist-soaked mountain air into the summer languor of the valley. No one in the car spoke all the way back. When we reached the front door we separated to our rooms as if frightened to face each other and to reveal how strongly we had been shaken for no reason.

  17 August 1940.

  Complete change of atmosphere. The rest of the party have arrived from London. Most successful expedition to Llantony Abbey where the monks kept a Christian oasis during the Dark Ages of the Norse raids. The ruins are deep in a valley buried in the recesses of the Black Mountains, almost inaccessible most of the year, as the roads are a morass. Now part of the Abbey is farm buildings, washing hangs in the ruined nave, chickens step d
elicately among the cowpats in the roofless lady chapel. I am glad the attempt to restore it in the 1900s by a Roman Catholic monastic order was a failure. Modern Roman Catholic priests would have ruined it with their atrocious taste in buildings and they would have given it a horrid, preserved, or worse still, “revived” air.

  Came back and read David Cecil’s1 description of eighteenth-century country-house life in an eighteenth-century country-house library – cream and gilt with classical busts and blue and white china urns over the bookcases. Mr. Massey and I are both bitten with this place. We cannot escape the charms of the past. Their institutions were made for men and women human in scale. Now everything is over life-size. We are no good for the future. It is not our picnic. I tell myself it will be exciting to be alive in an age of change after the war, but it would only be exciting if we could rebuild the human scale.

  26 August 1940. London.

  There go the sirens again! I do not know what will be left of our nerves after a winter of this. First the wail announcing impending doom. Then the city holds its breath as the last dying sound of the siren fades and we wait. Of course everyone is calm enough on the surface, but one gets jumpy at sudden noises. At first raids were exciting and frightening. Now they are getting unpleasant, risky and tiring.

  3 September 1940.

  Weekend with the Bessboroughs who are living on in the middle of the glorious Le Nôtre-style park which is now in the direct line of the German bombers attacking Portsmouth. During the night six bombs landed in the park. On Sunday morning we set out in a little procession to examine the damage. Lord Bessborough, wearing a panama hat, led the way. He prodded the bomb craters with his walking-stick and chatted with magnificent and old-fashioned condescension to the local farmers. Once this insidious process is under way, affability on the one side and an answering feeling of proud gratification are established, the silken cord binds all parties in their respective places in the social order.