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

by Ritchie, Charles

  The old ladies whom Mother sees in Wolfville are forever spinning their web of daily living, of small worries and jokes, incidents and purchases, sympathies and antipathies, nerves and rests.

  I have been re-reading my own early diaries written in my teens and at Oxford and I am so stifled by the fumes of my own personality that I have to overcome nausea to write at all. Yet I am glad to have the diaries. They bring before me a youth who appals me by his silliness and by the banality of his mind. Only the eager appetite for experience is attractive – the astringent notes on people are sometimes amusing, and there is a recurrent sense of the writer’s own ridiculousness. The diary describes a life which I had only remembered in a blurred way. The endless succession of people coming and going at home, the dances, picnics, and flirtations. A “social animal,” one can see that. Personal relationships and aesthetic or literary impressions (rendered in an appalling pastiche style) dominate. There is nothing worthy to be called an idea from cover to cover, and not one single mention of politics or world events. There is a note of gush mixed with a cynicism about my own motives – altogether an impressionable animal.

  20 October 1944. Ottawa.

  The feeling in the Department of External Affairs is very pro-Russian and anti-Pole – they do not see this as being inconsistent with our emphasis on the rights of small nations and find it inconvenient to be reminded that it is so. Someone in the Department said to me today that he would be more fearful of a strong Poland than a strong Russia. I suppose it is a remark that he must have read somewhere. It seems extraordinarily silly. The truth is that the old left-wing prejudices still stick. Poland is “reactionary” – Russia is “progressive.”

  1 November 1944. London.

  I reflected coming over on the plane on how obsessed I have been all my life by my determination to forgo nothing. How gently but ruthlessly I have insisted on my pattern at the expense of other people’s feelings and my own. Has it all been downright silly? Am I like the man in Henry James’s story “The Beast in the Jungle” who found in the end that it was his singular fate to be the man to whom nothing happened?

  London seems to me quite meaningless. The illusion it provided has vanished. As Elizabeth says, “It is no doubt an old and interesting city but for me it has come unstuck.”

  1944 will stand in our memories as the year of fatigue and sorrow when “the silver cord was loosed,” etc.

  15 November 1944.

  Dreamt that I was in the throes of an air raid and woke up to find that it was true. There had been a raid last night but these buzz-bombs and V2s have never made much impression on me, though God knows I was scared enough in the early raids.

  I sat about all morning in my dressing-gown in a demoralized state talking about life with the Life Force (my name for the woman who cleans my flat because of her whirlwind energy). We agreed that soft, imaginative people go rotten and bitter much more certainly than those who start dull or hard.

  3 December 1944.

  The squirrel-faced lift-woman was talking away volubly last night about the English – “The greatest race on earth,” she said. “Never has been anythink like us – never will be. Look the way we borne the brunt of the war yet we never talk about ourselves – no swank – we just get on with the job.”

  The Americans in London are a well-behaved, tolerant army of occupation. They are so polite that one almost hears their thoughts and they are thinking, “These poor, quaint people. They have guts but – backward, reactionary.” And the English with their kindly street directions thinking behind shut faces, “These people have not got what it takes – no breeding – an inferior race but, damn them, they have the money and the power. We can only dominate them by character, our national asset from which we can always cut and come again.”

  The two races and the two armies mingle in street and pub without ever touching except for the collaborating little factory girls who chew gum, wear their hair à la Lana Turner, and queue up for movies hand-in-hand with their protectors. The American men are so different with the women. They fondle them in the street, always a hand splaying over breast or buttock. Loose-limbed they amble at the girlfriend’s side whispering in her ear, pinching her behind, their two mouths rhythmically moving in unison – so different from the wooden Englishman walking side by side with his girl not seeming to see her except for covert glances and the occasional clumsy touch of his hand on hers.

  20 December 1944.

  Dined at the Masseys with Rab Butler.1 I like him better each time I see him. He enjoys his own success so much. He is so malicious and under the don-like manner he is a born politician. He puts out so many tentacles into the conversation and never muffs or muddles what he is saying. He has a trick of praising in general terms before getting on to particular denigration. “I admire X enormously – he is very nearly a great man, but what I think, don’t you, has so far held him up has been quite simply lack of intelligence.”

  All the same he and his fellow Tories understand nothing about Canada. It is discouraging to find this ignorance in the intelligent ones like Rab. A small instance – Rab was trying to show that he appreciated Canada’s position in the Commonwealth and said to Mr. Massey, “To show you what I mean I have several times in speaking of Canada to you referred to it as ‘your country.’ Quite separate from us.” This was said in good faith. Any Canadian’s reaction would be, “Why the Hell wouldn’t you – it is our country.” Isn’t it or is it?

  He was talking of the need for Canada becoming the second line of defence, the refuge of the British race, perhaps the future centre of the Empire. “If,” he said, “this was presented to the Canadian people on racial grounds they would understand it. Race after all, as Disraeli said, is fundamental.” But there are – I reminded him – two races in Canada. “Oh, your French-Canadians,” he said, “that would be all right if we had a much closer relationship with France.” The Foreign Office cannot get it out of their heads that the French-Canadians are politically devoted to France. Pure ignorance – I only hope to God that they know more about other foreign countries than they do about Canada.

  I asked Rab if the country was restive at the delays in implementing social reforms. “Everything in politics can be solved by not making up your mind in a hurry and not getting rattled – procrastination – or I should say – patience.”

  26 December 1944.

  Christmas at Loelia, Duchess of Westminster’s. The house is so like a stage set that it engenders a stagey brilliance in people. It looked more unreal than ever in Christmas-card weather, with silver hoarfrost in the park – an interior of crystals and silks seen from the fogbound avenue. The party were Loelia (who had fits of impatience when she turned on us all and rated the nearest victim, but she is a wonderful creature; coming in from a walk in the cold showed her sudden dark flashing beauty) then the Sitwells and their son, Reresby, Angie Biddle Duke, very smooth – I thought too easy to the edge of insolence, Peter Quennell, emitting a phosphorescent charm.

  We went over to the Christmas Ball at Sutton.1 The whey-faced Duke speaks and moves like a zombie. The ball was an odd mixture – fresh little country-girl neighbours, boy midshipmen, red-faced middle-aged hangers-on of the Duke, and our own group. Then there were American Colonels slapping Duchesses on their bottoms and feeding free lifts, free champagne, free cigars, free silk stockings to the aristocracy, seeing how much dirt they can make the English eat. One said to Loelia, “Since I have come here I find that the Royal Navy stinks, the RAF. stinks and I always knew the British Army stank.” Loelia said she very nearly threw the bottle of Noilly Prat he brought her out of the door after him, but she had second thoughts. But when he said to young Reresby, “Why do you Etonians go around with your hands in your pockets all the time,” he answered like a true Sitwell; “If we had three hands we would keep them all in our pockets if we were inclined to.”

  An exotic element was added to the ball by the arrival of the Spanish Embassy party, the Duke of Alba’s daugh
ter, the Duchess of Montero, cleverly dressed by some dressmaker to look like a Velasquez Infanta.

  The house, Renaissance Italianate, is beautiful outside – lovely in its shape against the frost-silvered gardens. Inside it is 1912 Tudor – inescapable panelling everywhere, vast hotel-like rooms, buffets of heat from the grates in the floors, the library full of photographs of women in flower-pot hats and motoring veils.

  31 December 1944.

  After this war the most we can aim at is a breathing-space which, if we are lucky, might last a generation. It is a delusion to talk of permanent peace and there is no “solution” of a “political problem.” The latter is the language of mathematics not of politics. The only new element in the permanent human situation is the technical one. As weapons become so much more destructive there is the possibility that the human race may outlaw the more deadly ones and carry on its struggle by common agreement with the less destructive. This would seem unduly optimistic but for one fact, that in this war gas has not so far been used, even by a Hitler.

  1 Halifax argued that for Great Britain to be an effective power in the post-war world, she would need a closely unified Commonwealth.

  1 Mackenzie King repudiated Halifax’s argument in a speech in the Canadian House of Commons. He rejected any notion of a shared Commonwealth foreign policy.

  2 See above, this page.

  1 Lady Ottoline Morrell, patron of Bloomsbury writers and of D. H. Lawrence, died in 1938. A selection of her memoirs was eventually published in 1963.

  1 My cousin, and later brother-in-law, Peter Smellie.

  1 The Heat of the Day.

  1 A niece of Winston Churchill, she later married Anthony Eden.

  1 I was on a visit to Canada on leave and for “purposes of consultation.”

  2 I was staying with my mother at an hotel in this small town in the Annapolis Valley.

  1 R. A. Butler was Minister (or President of the Board) of Education from 1941 until the end of the war. He had previously been at the Foreign Office, and was to hold many high ministerial posts (other than that of Prime Minister) later.

  1 The home of the Duke of Sutherland.

  1945

  3 January 1945. Paris.1

  New Year’s Day was magnificent – sun and frost. From the roof of Saul’s flat which faces on the Esplanade des Invalides you have a panorama of Paris through the sunny mist; the familiar silhouettes sharpened as the day went on and directly below us ran the Seine, the colour of chartreuse between the white bleached stone quais. The sun burnished the melodramatic gold statues on the Pont Alexandre III. Paris was preserved, untouched physically by the war.

  At last I got an opportunity to get out alone into the streets and to look for Paris. It was like a dream in which you see the woman you love but cannot speak to her and cannot touch her. The untouched beauty of the city lying about me in burnished splendour under the winter sun made the emptiness more sinister. Paris is dead – there is no movement, no life, no crowds of talking, gesticulating people, no hum of assurance, no noisy erratic traffic of people and vehicles. Nothing but a spacious emptiness of the streets and the shabby, silent passers-by with drawn faces and hunched shoulders, grim, cold, hungry people. You look at their faces, and pity and nostalgia for the past seem out of place. The irony of the heroic arches and spectacular perspectives – the backdrop for their humiliation and their bitter unresigned endurance. This was how Paris seemed to me, and it would have been idle to think twice of my past youth there and memories of old loves when faced with this iron logic of defeat.

  Everywhere in Paris you are haunted by the Germans. In the flat where I am staying two German diplomats had been living throughout the occupation. They had left in a hurry, their hair ointments and medicines were still in the cupboard, their calendar on the wall, and they had their own telephone switchboard in the salon with a direct line to Wilhelmstrasse. The maid who brought me my morning coffee had brought them every morning for four years their morning coffee. She was a Luxembourg peasant woman with a German accent. I asked her what she thought about the Germans and she said, like one who has sought the advice of a good lawyer and been told what she says might be taken in evidence against her, “There were some who were bad and then naturally there were others who were less bad.” Saul says that you often hear people in the shops saying, “Well, after all, the Germans provided coal, they kept the transport running, and when they were here one could buy things.”

  There is resentment against the Americans and some practical cause for irritation. The American military authorities have demanded all the accommodation which the Germans had had. They are in all the best hotels with the only central heating working in Paris in this icy winter. They have money and, above all – and this is to the Parisians the unforgivable thing – they have food. The United States army rations are incredibly, almost scandalously abundant. They have the only cars in Paris, while Paris freezes and nearly starves. The Allies and a small fringe of rich French have everything they want and live from one party to the next.

  In the shops it is not the contrast between French and American but between rich French and poor French which comes into play. No foreigner can afford the prices in these luxury shops, whose goods are, in fact, investments against inflation, but the rich French will buy anything by any means to get rid of currency in which they have no confidence. The astonishing thing is the beauty and variety of the luxury articles displayed. Coming to the shops fresh from wartime London I feel like a simple Russian soldier who has his first view of the western world and its amenities. It is so long since we have seen any object that tempts that we have almost forgotten the lures of vanity. This puritanism melts away at the sight of the Paris shopwindows. Here are jewels and clothes which would make you love your mistress more – simply because you had given them to her. We in England have missed a chapter in the history of taste. Everything is new to our eyes – the fantastic, sumptuous hats, pyramids and turbans of satin and velvet, of fur and of feathers, the new settings for jewels, the new colours of materials, the dramatic brilliance of the presentation in the shop windows.

  In the empty boulevards the only traffic is United States army vehicles and a few ancient horse-drawn cabs, or bicycle-propelled hooded affairs which have been invented to try to fill the need for taxis – otherwise the Parisians have no transportation except the Métro.

  The Raes’ flat belongs to a rich Canadian woman. It is a typical modern luxury flat – great expanse of window, beige carpets, white china horses on the mantelpiece, imitation leopard skin on the bed, and every modern device of comfort, only none of them working owing to the complete absence of fuel. The bathroom was an elaborate mockery with its showers and appliances – no one in the house had had a bath for two months. There was a large salon full of Empire furniture covered in striped satin, but it was too cold to contemplate as a sitting-room. As for my bedroom there could be no thought of sleeping in it. I slept on the sofa in front of the wood fire with a hot-water bottle, a sweater, and all the windows closed. The family spent the day sitting on the floor to be as close as possible to the one minute wood stove in the sitting-room. We ate well on United States army rations.

  12 January 1945. London.

  Lionel Massey’s farewell party for me. If you take twenty or thirty fairly adult and intelligent people and pump them full of alcohol from 6:30 until two in the morning you hear some pretty astonishing things. I do not think the English and Americans quite understand this kind of party. I sometimes think that Canadians, who are at heart a sensitive, pugnacious, voluble, and amorous race, are only released by whisky.

  3 February 1945. Ottawa.1

  I suppose I could have gone on year after year representing my country abroad without knowing much about what was going on at home. I am in for an intensive bout of re-education. In the Department I feel like a new boy at school. They all seem to know so much more than I do. I asked myself what I can have been doing in these years when they were informing themselv
es so fully. Living through the war must be the answer.

  18 February 1945.

  Pavlov, an officer of the Soviet Embassy, came to a dinner for people from our Department and some foreign diplomats. He was out to épater le bourgeois and succeeded. Very cocky and on the offensive – looks like Harpo Marx but with fanatical eyes and a false mouth, nimble-witted and entertaining – the only one from the Embassy who talks freely, but then he is NKVD, and so can say what he likes. He began by attacking, saying that Canada was owned by the Americans and why didn’t we have a bigger population? Why didn’t the Head of the European Division speak Russian? Why hadn’t we provided houses for diplomats posted here as they did in the Soviet Union? Why did we allow the incubus of the church to stifle us? In fact, he thoroughly enjoyed himself at our expense. Norman Robertson1 was good with him – ironic, sceptical – but he brushed aside argument. It was disconcerting to see how well our people took it. If an Englishman had dared half as much criticism there would have been a free fight, but the bourgeois fall for this proletarian line with inverted snobbery.

  24 February 1945. Ottawa.

  Staying with dear Aunt Elsie. I had breakfast alone in the dining-room among Elsie’s glass tigers and cats and under the eyes of that portrait of the Admiral, her grandfather. The flat is full of tapestries, silver, nice “bits” of furniture, and in the hall a series of watercolours of the old Rowley family manor house in England. You have only to put your nose in the flat to be conscious of “background.”

  Elsie and I shout at each other at the tops of our voices (she is getting deafer and deafer). We carry on inconsequential conversations from room to room. We meet half-dressed in the hall – she in a silk slip, I in my shirt-tail. We inveigh against the Government, discuss love and the upbringing of children, rehash old scandals. She is incapable of getting into low gear, never wants to go to bed, never sleeps when she gets there, but lies all night listening to the wireless and worrying about her sons at the war.