A full-scale German invasion started on June 23, 1965. They were moving into London from the south in a wide sweep. I and a friend, with one heavy gun—a mortar—between us, were operating as guerrillas on the flank. With our mortar we had attacked a German post and several hundred men and an officer had surrendered to us. Now we argued about our next move. Were the Germans aiming at London or did they intend to cut the road between London and the west? We decided to take a train, but we realized too late that it passed through German-held territory and we would be inspected.
A young German officer came up to see us. I stuck a revolver in his back and told him to go to the lavatory. There we intended to take his uniform. (Once before, my companion had escaped in this way.) But there was another German at the door and I could see from his look of triumph that he had pulled the emergency cord. The train stopped in a railway shed under blazing arc lights.
Suddenly I seemed detached from the situation and saw it as an observer. I was outside the shed and watched one man—my friend—dash out carrying our mortar. He found an empty cart with a huge cart-horse which reared up and leapt forward so that the car for a moment took to the air. Then a second man—surely myself—came out and ran after the cart.
In 1966, only six months after the German invasion, civil war broke out. I was in my home town of Berkhamsted and, returning to the town after a walk on the Common, I found leaflets strewn around bearing what was obviously the code name for a military operation. I remembered what a close woman friend had said to me as a joke when I told her I was leaving England to live in France: ‘You’ll be back for the civil war.’
Near the station I saw in the sky a multitude of small planes and parachutes all the same colour as the leaflets, and as I hastened up Castle Street I found the parachutists were coming up behind me in a dense body filling the streets. It was some kind of an attempted Fascist take-over. A platoon of soldiers came down the road and a clash was inevitable because the Fascists would not give way, nor I hoped would the troops. But I was unprepared for the savage way in which the troops bayoneted the leading Fascists, for they were unarmed and it was a massacre.
I took refuge in a house where I found the Prime Minister, who was then Wilson. No one there seemed to want to know that fighting had started. Wilson appeared weak, worried, indeterminate. His only action was to go to another room to be left in peace.
There was an occasion which I am proud to remember when I was instrumental in capturing Hitler. I happened to be waiting on a railway platform when I saw two men leave a train. One I knew was a general in German Intelligence, and when I looked at his companion I felt sure I recognized Hitler, though the absurd moustache had gone and his face was crumpled and more human. I shouted to all who were standing around, ‘Hitler. Hitler’s alive.’
The two men were descending into a subway. People looked at me as if I were mad, but I continued my cries and the escape of the two was stopped. Hitler returned angrily to me. We went up to the end of the platform, where we sat down and talked a long while. I can’t remember the subject of our conversation. A few others were there helping to guard him and presently a squad of soldiers arrived and took him away.
Europe was under German occupation and I had an appointment for lunch with a leader of the Resistance who had been personally responsible for the murder of half a dozen German soldiers. ‘I hope you don’t sympathize with that,’ a friend said to me.
I felt very conspicuous walking over a piece of open country in town clothes and a soft hat. German soldiers were drilling and a German officer was walking behind me. I was afraid of being stopped. I saw some militia also on an exercise.
At the entrance to a small town I was surprised to find a customs post. There was no avoiding it. I was stopped by a black soldier and the man in charge asked me if I had anything to declare. I said, ‘Two hundred cigarettes.’ He tore the pack open, checked the cigarettes, and returned them to me, pointing to a poster which authorized him to pass cigarettes if they were ‘elegantly and properly’ declared. So I went on to what I knew would be a dangerous lunch.
I found myself back in the Malayan Emergency, which I had known in the Common World in 1951. I was hiding from the Chinese guerrillas, but at the same time I was a possible target for the British bombers searching them out. The bombers had an ingenious system by which electric lightbulbs lit up on the ground to expose the presence of a living person and then a bomb was dropped. I lay down on the ground and immediately a light went on beside me. I flung it away into the dark and crawled away, but as soon as I stopped another light went on. There seemed little hope of escaping the bombs, but all the same I somehow did escape, and joined an unofficial group of English who were searching for the guerrillas.
I was only nine in the Common World when the First World War began, but in the World of My Own my memory of 1914 is very different.
The war began with total disaster to the British army and the unconditional surrender of Field Marshal French, who became himself a prisoner with another general who bore the name of Juillard. Their wives were allowed to join them in captivity, which helped their morale, and General Juillard’s wife brought him an electrical apparatus with which he could ‘do things’ and pass the time. What puzzles me now is how we emerged victorious after such a total defeat.
For the first time in this very personal World of My Own I found myself someone else. I was Wilfred Owen, the poet, and I wore an officer’s uniform and a steel helmet in the style of the First World War. I was alone in a dug-out and I recited a poem I had composed to the photograph of the girl I loved. I called the poem ‘Givenchy’, which I suppose was a place in the line held by my regiment. The poem went something like this and I spoke it aloud.
Imagine, dear, the shallow trench,
An impregnable redoubt
For this good night and more.
Suddenly weariness of the interminable war swept over me and I began to sob. As I cried—or rather as Wilfred Owen cried—a voice said, ‘The Germans have dropped gas bombs on this or that section.’
VI
Moments of Danger and Fear
I have just spent a dangerous day in Haiti at Port-au-Prince. I was with my friend Trevor Wilson, a former member of M.I.6 whom I had last seen when he was consul in Hanoi. We were both arrested almost immediately on landing. My black police guard proved to be a great reader of rather juvenile fiction featuring a character called Bambi. Opening one of the stories at random I could see it was high-flown and erotic, with a scene where Bambi was being seduced by the Queen of Heaven.
I promised the man that I would get him the complete series of about seventeen volumes, and he whisked me into an invalid chair, put a cloth over my head, and so got me out of prison. Somehow I managed to release Trevor too and we went rapidly down the road and then up the drive of the British embassy to take refuge there. I was a little hurt by the coolness and lack of interest shown by the ambassador and his wife, who had just returned from a picnic. I had known them before, when they were in Santo Domingo. But of course ambassadors never want to get involved in trouble.
On another visit I had gone to the lavatory of my hotel in Haiti to shit when I was told that an admiral and a general were waiting to see me. I hurried to finish and join them. They looked a little absurd in their uniforms and decorations, but they seemed honest men. They told me that any day now there was going to be a revolution. ‘You and your friends better get away as soon as possible. Anyway the moment you notice something unusual go into hiding. You have shoes—offer your shoes as a bribe. People want shoes badly and they would hide you.’
‘What will you do?’ I asked the general.
He replied with great dignity, ‘I will die. No one will hide me.’
Rereading the diary I kept in the sixties of my life in a World of My Own, I seem to have played the same kind of Russian roulette that I once played in the Common World, for I returned yet again and again to Haiti.
In November 1966 I found mys
elf driving very unwillingly through the streets of Port-au-Prince with Peter Glenville, with whom in the Common World I had been working on the film of The Comedians, a book condemned by Papa Doc. Peter scented the danger which I felt myself in. There seemed to be a number of tourists about, and in a museum we encountered Seitz, the owner of the Oloffson Hotel, where I had stayed before writing The Comedians. While greeting Peter he turned his back on me. ‘If you knew the trouble I have had,’ he said, ‘with the Tontons Macoute because of him.’
Upstairs I encountered two other people I had known—one a doctor. They were astonished to see me and more and more I wanted to get quickly away.
Out in the yard there were a number of cars. An old lady stood by a car close to ours. I had seen her before in the streets of Port-au-Prince. ‘I believe that’s Papa Doc’s wife,’ I said, and sure enough, the President himself joined her and they rode away. I tried to hide my face with my hand, and I was very afraid. Peter insisted on sitting quietly there at the wheel of his car eating a hard-boiled egg.
Finally when we did start we found the road from the museum blocked by a wooden post on a swivel. Peter got out to swing the post open, but just opposite was an armed sentry who said the barrier could not be raised without the President’s order. This time we were really trapped. Luckily I remember no more.
It was in 1972 that a lot of houses in London were destroyed by bombs. Going upstairs to my apartment with a friend I was immediately suspicious of a canister which was tied to a radiator on the stairs and attached by a glass tube to an electric point. My friend detached the tube and I went down into the street and showed it to a group of policemen.
One of them examined the tube and said there was enough explosive in it to blow up the whole block. They went into the house. I was afraid for all their lives, for a second bomb might have been planted, and sure enough a suitcase did explode and a shower of sharp little pieces flew in all directions—not dangerous but stinging.
I found myself in a room where a parrot was at liberty and flew suddenly up to the ceiling. I explained to a companion who was with me, ‘I am terrified of birds, as my mother was. I can’t bear touching feathers. I can’t stay in this room.’ I went crouching into a little dark room next door, but the parrot swooped after me, nearly touching my face.
There were other creatures around me in this room, but they were little furry friendly ones. Suddenly someone thrust a large fat spider into my trousers and I felt it grasp my penis. This was worse even than the parrot.
In January 1983 I was in Mexico attached to a gang of guerrillas pursued by the army. I and a companion had been separated from the main body. As we were crossing some rough country we were shot at from a line of shallow trenches.
My companion didn’t reply but fired into the air, at which an elderly man who I think was his father stood up in the trench and waved his welcome. Then he ran forward and fell wounded on his knees.
Some time must have passed for the next thing I remember is the two of us, again alone, making our way along a road. Coming towards us were a man and a woman driving a horse and cart. I saw that the man had what looked like a very new rifle in front of him. As they reached us I grabbed the rifle and they passed out of sight round a bend in the road. I felt sure they would tell our pursuers where we were. My companion went back to the bend to see if they were close and he waved to me to make a deviation.
I could see that a company of troops was approaching, and when I looked down the road to my left where he had waved me to go I saw another troop marching towards us, while a third company was coming down the road towards me. We were hemmed in.
I decided to walk straight on carrying my rifle, and hoped they wouldn’t recognize me. They began to pass without firing, but then I heard the click of bolts—they would shoot at any moment. The road we were on was striped alternatively white and black, and I thought—‘White is life and black is death.’
I must have survived, for death is rare in dreams, so rare that I think I’ve only encountered my own death once—the death with which this book ends.
VII
A Touch of Religion
I am surprised to find how often religion of a kind intrudes itself into the World of My Own. I write ‘of a kind’ for I have always resented being classed as a Roman Catholic novelist. After all, one of my books, The Power and the Glory (perhaps my best), was condemned by the Holy Office, and the Cardinal of Westminster previous to Cardinal Heenan severely criticized my work. I am not surprised that in the World of My Own too I can hardly be described as an orthodox Catholic.
Nevertheless, I have encountered three popes there, though only two in the Common World—Pius XII and Paul VI. Luckily John Paul II was asleep when we first met in the World of My Own.
John Paul II is a great traveller and I am not sure in what hotel and in what country we happened to be staying at the same time. For a reason I don’t understand myself, for I have no liking for him, I felt a strong desire to make my confession to him. It was late evening and I hesitated a long while outside his bedroom door wondering whether to knock. Then I turned the handle and the door opened and there was the Pope in bed fast asleep. The face on the pillow had the same charismatic look I had seen on so many television screens. I stood looking down at it, wondering whether I should wake him, but there my memory fails me. I suppose I slunk away, carrying away with me unspoken what must have been a very unimportant confession.
My other encounters with Pope John Paul II have not been happy ones. In 1984 we had a walk together around the Vatican garden. He was in turn very amiable and then very impatient. We stopped beside two groups—one of women and one of men—who were playing cards. He gave a chocolate Perugina to each of the two winners, and I was a little disgusted by the pious and servile way in which they received them, as though he were giving them the Host.
In July 1987 I was shocked to learn from the newspapers that the same pope was thinking of canonizing Christ. I felt the man must be mad with pride to believe he was in a position to give an honour to Christ. As it happened he was on a visit to Antibes, and one day I passed him on the ramparts, kneeling in prayer and gazing at the sea. After I had passed I realized that he was following me and I slowed my steps, hoping that he might speak to me and that I would be able to express my feelings about the honour he was proposing to give. But he passed me without a word and turned off into the town. He was dressed in an old pair of very dirty white trousers and a green pullover. There was something pathetic in this disarray and for the first time I felt a little sorry for the Pope.
My only meeting with Pope John XXIII, whom I much admired, was a curious one. It occurred in the last year of his life. The Pope was blessing the sea, an ancient ceremony in the course of which he waded into the water waist deep, wearing his triple tiara. Unfortunately three unruly Englishmen were bathing at this spot and they combined together to splash the Pope. They were—I hesitate to give their names, but two of them at least are now dead—the Earl of Southampton, Sir Kenneth Clark, and Raymond Mortimer. Because I knew the last two personally, the Pope took me on one side when the ceremony was over and asked me to give them some form of rebuke, and he lent me a room in the Vatican for the purpose. I forget now, after twenty-four years, what I said to them, but I am sure I criticized them as strongly as I could, for their conduct had shocked me.
In the case of Paul VI, whom I had known and liked in the Common World, I remember a very different religious ceremony, but the handwriting in my diary after twenty-four years is sometimes difficult to read. A religious ceremony was certainly in progress, in Rome this time, before a great square palace which reminded me more of Vienna than of Rome, and did lions really play a part or is my writing deceptive? I seem to describe the lions who were there chasing after children, though I admit I was not sure whether it was a bit of flesh they were chasing or an innocent tuft of hair. There were also tall stone statues, with grotesque cardinals’ heads, which moved around the square followed by a
nun who beat them on the heads to prove that they were of stone. Finally, after all this, came Pope Paul’s sermon—but it emerged from the throat of a mule of which I could see in mid-air only the head and the long extended throat, like a monstrous speaking-tube.
When I returned to the house where I was staying I found a jewelled crown on the dresser—presumably it belonged to the Pope—and I was tempted flippantly to try it on, but I feared that the Pope might enter at any moment.
I had on an earlier occasion been closer to Pope Paul VI than through the head of a mule. I found myself walking beside him in a procession up the aisle of a church in Rome. He seemed tired and dispirited and I began to tell him that he was working too hard and that we loved him (something I would never have said to his successor). Tears even came into my eyes. When we arrived before the altar there was an empty row of chairs for us to occupy. I felt that I had had more than I deserved of the Pope’s company, so I hesitated to take the chair nearest him, but I was saved from that.
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