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

by Ritchie, Charles

  Places I hope will not be destroyed – the unregenerate streets of Soho, the chilly splendours of Carlton House Terrace. But I would rather see them bombed than torn down to make way for blocks of flats. My fury against the German bomber is not nearly so great as the rage I feel against the speculative builder and his supine accomplices – the local authorities and the bovine public. We are at least doing everything possible to prevent the destruction of historic London from the air. I wrote just now of fury against the German bomber, but I feel none. The random bombing of central London is like an act of nature, like a volcano erupting nightly. The bombers are like the agents of some blindly destructive force. Their bombs fall, like rain, on the just and the unjust. They do not hate me nor I hate them. We are caught in a fated mechanistic duel of forces which maims and kills bombers and bombed. This is a war fought in cold blood. That is my feeling about it, but I often hear people say, “Why don’t we give them hell in Berlin?” I sense a lack of conviction, a sort of nervous irritability in this question as though those who asked it knew the futility of the query. But I may be reflecting in others my own feelings.

  Sometimes I feel brave for no good reason and then I wish for danger. Why should one always be brave twenty-four hours a day any more than one is always amorous. The rest of the time one has to act courage or love because it is not admitted to say “Today I am feeling cowardly” or “Tonight I do not want you.”

  12 October 1940.

  Hart (Massey) and I went to an American movie – a saga of a small town in America. We sat there lapped in a feeling of false security while the cinema shook from the explosion of bombs outside. As we came out it seemed as though all Piccadilly were on fire. Tongues of flames were licking the colonnade at the top of the London Pavilion. We drove to the Dorchester Hotel through bombs and shrapnel – there seemed to be fire everywhere. For once London had a catastrophic appearance worthy of American newspaper accounts. At the Dorchester we found the Masseys pacing the floor nervously. In our elation Hart and I seemed childishly excited in telling them what was going on. Mr. Massey lost his temper, and, his voice rising to a peak of exasperation, he said, “You seem to be pleased at what is happening. I do not understand you. These places that are being destroyed are irreplaceable – to me it is like a personal loss.” We looked somewhat shamefaced. Then he led the way on to the Dorchester roof. We could see fires in all directions. A bomb came whistling down and we all ran for shelter except Hart, who remained standing where he was – an obstinate figure. I was annoyed with myself for taking shelter not because I was afraid but because the others had run for shelter and I had instinctively imitated them instead of waiting as Hart did to see if it was necessary. I noticed that when Mr. Massey came down from the roof he was in the same exalted state that we had been in when we arrived. There is an exhilaration in this orgy of destruction and in the danger, but next day was the morning after the debauch. I was awakened by the sound of shovelling glass.

  16 October 1940.

  Dined at the Dorchester Hotel, which is like a luxury liner on which the remnants of London society have embarked in the midst of this storm. Through the thick walls and above the music of the band one could hear the noise of the barrage and at intervals the building shook like a vibrating ship with the shock of an exploding bomb falling nearby. Meanwhile there was N. coming swaying into the dining-room, his hands resting affectionately – reminiscently – on his buttocks, with the pale, grey face of a tired but impudent and dishonest waiter. He stopped at several tables on his way to join a bird of gleaming and immaculate plumage whose habitat might be Cannes, Newport, Le Touquet, or Mayfair. She wore in her hair a little velvet bow which by its irrelevancy pointed up the polished chic of her person. At another table was Lady Diana Cooper – the postcard beauty of the First Great War whom every officer in those days carried in his eye. I remember as a boy having her pointed out to me walking in Bond Street. “There,” said my aunt, “is Lady Diana, the Great Beauty.” In my anxiety to see what was meant by a Great Beauty I left my aunt’s side and hurried to the other end of the street and walked down it again so that I could pass her once more. I caught a confused glimpse of a marble white arm and a glance from those azure eyes so often described and still so magical.

  18 October 1940.

  I went with Mary1 to Bath to visit her mother, Mrs. Adlington. I have hardly seen Mary since she joined the ATS at the beginning of the war. We have been swept apart – she out of London. Yet at once it was as if we had never been separated. Will it always be like this, this deep underlying feeling between us? Dear Mrs. Adlington, now very old and very small, sits up erect with her knitting, her jokes, her prejudices, and her cast-iron loyalties. I love her. She has kept a kind of innocence through eighty years and like Mary she is true-hearted.

  26 October 1940.

  The Pheasantry is a new underground eating club for the new, classless, Americanized English who before the war had grapefruit for breakfast and preferred the New Yorker to Punch. So far as I know they are limited to London, Maidenhead, and weekend cottages in the home counties. The men are apt to be subject to ulcers. The women wear “simple” black dresses with diamond clips and have an arrogant manner which follows the third gin. In politics they are against the “Old Gang,” whom they think slow-witted and blimpish, but an instinct of self-preservation makes them distrust “parlour-pinks.” Connected with no tradition and with no part of the country they are a floating population financed on the money made during and after the last war.

  Margery, Frank,1 and I went after dinner at this club off the King’s Road to their house in Blantyre Street; they are still living in this dangerous outpost near Lot’s Road Power Station. It is the only street in World’s End which has not yet been bombed. Their house, like the others, is a little square box of bricks of the type that falls down when a bomb comes anywhere near it. On this occasion the bomb fell in the next street. We all rushed out and I found myself helping to remove the people from the remains of three bombed houses. There was a large crater where one house had been, and in the centre of the crater were Margery and a doctor, trying by the aid of a torch to see who was injured and how badly. People were being pulled and pushed up the sides of the crater, to be taken off to the nearest pub to wait for the ambulance to come. These were the “shock” cases – an old man who let them make an injection in his tattooed arm without question or even tension of the muscles – an old distraught mother gasping for breath and trying to collect what had happened to her – a tall, scraggy daughter, her cheeks blackened with smoke powder and her hair wisping wildly about her head. Margery called in imperious tones from her crater, “Hot water.” I rushed panting through the dark and empty streets to the nearest police station then to the nearest public house in search of water. By now the sky was an ugly “fire pink” glow from a row of houses burning noisily in a street nearby. Bombs were steadily falling and the members of the Air Raid Precautions and Rescue Squad whom I encountered in the streets cowered in carefully restrained attitudes against walls as the bombs came down. In the end when I came back with the hot water it was only to find that full supplies had been brought up already. It was the same with everything I tried to do. I helped shock cases to walk to the First Aid station when it was plain that they needed no help. Frank and some men in tin helmets emerged from the crater carrying a wounded woman stretched out on one of the doors of her house. We carried the stretcher, Frank calling, “Go easy there,” “Gently now.” When we put the woman down on the pavement a man came out of the mobile ambulance, felt her pulse and heart, and said, “She is dead.” Frank contradicted in a pettish tone, “The other doctor found a pulse.”“No she is dead.”“Do not cover her face up,” said Frank as we walked away. We all went to a pub where a fat landlady, her hair in papers, was offering cups of strong sweet tea, while her husband with a conspiratorial air offered to break the law and give us beer or “take-away ports” although it was 2 a.m.

  We all went back to Bla
ntyre Street and slept on the floor in the basement passage.

  29 October 1940.

  I was thinking today of the last time I was in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and went for a walk to my old home, The Bower.

  That day I was trying to look outward from an introspective bout of indigestion by reconstructing the road as it used to be. Only it was more a question of destruction than construction. First of all that row of white clapboard bungalows would have to be swept away and replaced by scrub and pine trees. Then over the stone wall of Gorsebrook – green fields must stretch to woods beyond where now hulked St. Mary’s newly-built Catholic College in a monumental freestone, priests pacing its cement-filled paths. Where that stone wall ran my eye could detect the gap built in of new stones where had been a gate on which Peter and I had leaned on a summer afternoon, undirected sex driving us clumsy and breathless. In the Gorsebrook fields I had walked in my new beige Oxford bags reciting Rupert Brooke and trying to keep my pace steady when the small boys from the village catching sight of me through the gap called names after me.

  The wall ended at the turn into The Bower drive. Here I was thrown back on memory with no stick or stone to help me – gone the gateposts, gone the lodge, gone the woods on either side of the drive and the tall trees that cast a green gloom until you came out on the slope which curved between rough lawns towards the house. I turned into the cul-de-sac of new houses which with their gardens had obliterated the former drive and woods. My walk was becoming an archaeological expedition but instead of being buried under this new layer of living the old had vanished without a trace, swept off into space and time existing only in my memory.

  There seemed to be an excessive number of dogs about. From each porch or garden gate of the new houses a barking dog bounded out sniffing my ankles. Children on bicycles circled the end of the cul-de-sac where The Bower house stood – for it still stood, though crowded into a corner by the new houses so that it hardly had room to breathe. Shorn of its approaches it was at an awkward angle to the street. Altogether the house looked sheepish and out of place among its brisk new neighbours – too large – but without giving any impression of grandeur. They had painted it a musty pale yellow and torn down the vine from the front wall. All that was left of the lawns was a wedge of grass on which still stood the big oak tree. The house would, as they say, have been “better dead.” Its physical presence there stopped the power of my imagination like a leaden block. I could not go into the house in my memory while that solid door stood facing me. Yet in that room above the porch on the left I was born. In that room I had shivered and sweated out my adolescence. From that window I had watched for Katherine coming up the curve of the drive from under the summer green of the trees into the sunlight in her pink cotton dress, swinging her straw hat in her hand. But it was no use – these memories were manufactured.

  6 November 1940.

  Things one will forget when this is over – fumbling in the dark of the blackout for one’s front door key while bits of shrapnel fall on the pavement beside one – the way the shrapnel seems to drift – almost like snow-flakes through the air in an aimless, leisurely way, and the clink of it landing on the pavement.

  9 November 1940.

  Dined alone at Brooks’s off silver plate among the prints of eighteenth-century Whig lords to the sound of German bombers overhead. At the next table the Duke of St. Albans, an old boy in battledress who had spent the day on guard at the Admiralty Arch was saying, “I hate all the Europeans, except Scandinavians. I have always been for the Scandinavians – of course I loathe all dagoes.”

  16 November 1940.

  I came back from spending the night at Aldershot to find my flat a heap of rubble from a direct hit, and I have lost everything I own. That is no tragedy but a bore – and doubtless a cash loss, as the Department of External Affairs will never approve replacing suits from Sackville Street at twenty pounds per suit. I am most annoyed at losing my new “woodsy” tweed suit, the picture of the Rose that Anne gave me, volume two of the book I am reading, my edition of Rimbaud, and the little green book of my own chosen quotations. I do not much regret all the pigskin which used to jar on her so much.

  I am enjoying the publicity attendant on this disaster, particularly the idea which I have put abroad that if it had not been for a chance decision to go to Aldershot for the night I should have been killed. I should probably only have been cut about or bruised. The rest of the people living in the flats were in the cellar and escaped unhurt. Hart and I went to see the ruins, and the youth next door was full of the fact that Lord A and Lady A too had had to be pulled out of the débris – so had fourteen other people, but what struck him was that even a lord had not been spared by the bomb. A further fascinating detail was that Lord A’s naval uniform was still hanging on the hook on the open surviving wall for all the world to see. Now I know that the Evening Standard is right when it prints those items “Baronet’s kinswoman in a bus smash” etc.

  I feel like a tramp having only one suit and shirt and in particular only one pair of shoes.

  Last week when I wrote this diary I was sitting on my sofa in front of my electric fire in my perfectly real and solid flat with my books at arm’s length – the furniture had that false air of permanence which chairs and tables take on so readily – the drawn curtains shut out the weather. Now all that is a pile of dirty rubble, with bits of my suits, wet and blackened, visible among the bricks.

  On top of the pile my sofa is perched (quite the most uncomfortable and useless article in the flat but it has survived) – this violent, meaningless gesture like a slap from a drunken giant has smashed my shell of living into a heap.

  17 November 1940. Dorchester Hotel.

  It certainly feels safe in this enormous hotel. I simply cannot believe that bombs would dare to penetrate this privileged enclosure or that they could touch all these rich people. Cabinet Ministers and Jewish lords are not killed in air-raids – that is the inevitable illusion that this place creates. It is a fortress propped up with money-bags. It will be an effort to go back to an ordinary house which can be blotted out by one bomb.

  I went for a walk in the park with my ballerina. I am trying to talk her into coming to live with me, but am getting nowhere. She says her brothers back in Portland always told her it cheapened a girl in a man’s eyes – he never would want to marry a girl who had done that. We walked round and round the equestrian statue of William of Orange in St. James’s Square arguing the point until an elderly gentleman called out to us, “I do not want to interrupt you but I feel I should tell you, just in case you did not notice, that there is a police warning on the railings saying that there is an unexploded bomb in the garden!”

  17 November 1940.

  The ballerina is ridiculous, but I must not begin to think that she is pathetic because she is really very well able to look after herself, and what is more she has succeeded in making me a little bit in love with her.

  18 November 1940.

  I could have strangled her today while she was eating her chocolate cake, but I was so disagreeable that I do not think she enjoyed it much. Poor little devil – I am sorry for her. She looked so gay and pretty today with her little coloured umbrella in the rainy afterluncheon Jermyn Street. It is rather touching the way she sticks to her American small-town gods in the midst of this London. When I first knew her only a few weeks ago she was excited at being taken to a smart restaurant. Now she thinks it fashionable to complain – “The smoked-salmon here is not as good as at the Ritz” – “I like the way they pull the table out for you here” (if the waiter has not pulled the table aside for her to pass).

  27 November 1940.

  I am living at Brooks’s Club, a combination of discomfort and old-fashioned comfort. Magnificent coal fires in the living-rooms, icy bedrooms, the kind of confidential valeting that you get in a good country house, the superb bath towels, yards of them, impossible to manoeuvre – the only thing to do is to wrap yourself up in one and sit down unt
il you dry.

  As I write I hear the ever-menacing throb of a bomber coming out of the fog. Tonight there is an old-fashioned London fog. Fumbling my way along Piccadilly I could hardly – as they say – “see my hand before me.” I hear the hall porter saying in a grieved tone, “There is no air-raid warning gone.” This is one of the nights when I feel interested in life, when I should much resent a bomb removing me from the scene. There are other nights when I feel it could not matter less.

  Came back last night in the tube from Earl’s Court. I hear that the drunks quite often fight it out by throwing each other on to the live wire, which contrary to superstition does not always kill you. If the toughs in the shelter tube do not like a chap they wait for him and throw him on to the wire. I must say that I saw nothing of this – just people sleeping, and not the poorest of the poor. They were all fully dressed and looked clean and quite prosperous, some pretty girls who might be serving in a big store, quite a lot of men and children. I have never seen so many different ages and types of people asleep before. Their sprawled attitudes, arms flung out, etc. made me think of photographs of the dead in battlefields – their stark and simplified faces. What one misses in the sleeping and the dead are the facial posturings prompted by perpetual vanity.

  I am off the ballerina – she is rude to waiters who cannot answer back.

  3 December 1940.

  If that bloody ballerina does not come across tomorrow I am through with her. She gave me a model of Our Lady of Lourdes today, but she seems positively to be getting colder the fonder she gets of me.

  6 December 1940.

  Weekend with the Sacheverell Sitwells. He is charming with a sort of gentleness, which is most attractive, and manners that show his delicacy and sensibility. He would disappear after tea with, “I am going to my room to scribble for a little while” or “I will withdraw to my apartment.” It was exciting to feel that up there he was distilling another of those magic potions of his. He thinks it is all up with Europe, its culture and vitality exhausted. There I think he is mistaken, although certainly his European tradition – that of the civilized aristocrat – is hard hit. His wife Georgia is a Canadian – a beauty – tall with pale skin and dark eyes. She is amused and amusing and impulsively warm-hearted. I came down on the train with Princess Callimachi (Anne-Marie), a lively little Romanian with the look of a lizard, who lives with the Sitwells at present.