Storm Signals : More Undiplomatic Diaries, 1962-1971 (9781551996806)

by Ritchie, Charles

  I got Hardy5 to qualify the gloom of his telegram about Wilson’s future as Prime Minister. It is too easy to be carried away by these gusts of opinion. Wilson is not through yet, though many I meet wish he were.

  Lunched alone on sausages and mash at the Griffin – “There is a table free, love, in the corner.”

  Went to the National Gallery and saw a celestially blue Bellini Madonna, “such a forgiving blue” as Stephen Tennant would have said. John Maher says the National Gallery is too near to go to and I am going to prove the opposite.

  10 March 1968.

  Reflections on a spring Sunday afternoon … The picture of the world from the TV and the Sunday papers is an apocalyptic one – race war, war between the generations, collapse of the financial system, Vietnam, collapse of moral values, erosion of parliamentary government, etc., etc. America in trauma, England full of self-disgust, and everywhere swarms of protesting students – in Warsaw, Cambridge, Tokyo, Rome, in America, Canada, in China, in Europe – hordes of angry milling masses of placard-bearing youth. Student riots – a preliminary to revolution? What kind of revolution? Against what, and for what? The casualties or near-casualties of this day in time include internationalism (the decline of the United Nations and the Commonwealth), the multiracial society (racial struggle in America, in England, and now in Kenya), the concept of “one world” (nationalism is everywhere rampant). Is some vast shudder going through the frame of man-made society or is it all inflated and inflamed by the news media?

  Today Sylvia and I went in this mild grey weather for a mild and happy little expedition to Richmond. We walked along the tow-path, past dilapidated hotels, to the Star and Garter, where we had lunch for only £1.10 and looked out on the famous view of the bend of the river. Then we took a mini-taxi to Ham House.6 How strange it is, unlike any other house in the world. To think of that coarse, sinister, scheming couple – the Lauderdales – plotting in these little over-decorated rooms among the japanned cabinets in the baroque décor under the floridly painted ceilings. Ghosts that Horace Walpole said, when he visited the house in 1770, he would not give sixpence to see. One would give more than sixpence not to see them.

  11 March 1968.

  I wonder, sometimes, about my various predecessors in this house. I suppose they had the same marital conversations about servants and allowances, plus talk, in their case, of their children, and they made love in the same bed and looked out at the same chimneypots and ended by “loving London.”

  I was so touched and pleased that Peter7 came with a present of six pairs of silk stockings for Sylvia. I recognized him in this gesture more than anything he has done since I met him again. He told Sylvia that he had come to see me because I sounded so low on the telephone.

  12 March 1968.

  Frederic Hudd8 died last night. At the end, he said that he wished he had married, and that he had had a lonely life. General and Mme. Ailleret were killed in a plane accident yesterday. Two ways of dying – a stroke following old age and years of senility, or a plane crash. Which would you choose?

  Garwood, the butler, is back, “on the wheel” as he puts it. He looks years younger for his illness.

  For some reason, when I woke up this morning I was thinking about butlers. I could write a book about “Butlers I Have Known.” In their lofty idea of their own position and their devotion to protocol, in the gravity of their public façade, they much resemble certain ambassadors. Indeed, they often look like them physically. On one unlucky occasion at a cocktail party, I called out, rather impatiently, to the passing servitor, “Bring me another whisky, please,” only to realize a moment later that he was a newly arrived Ambassador of notorious prickliness and self-importance. However, butlers can get their own back as effectively as diplomats. Once, at a reception in Ottawa, I encountered an ex-butler from one of our embassies, now – with his wife – catering for parties there. An old Cockney he was. He greeted me with the remark, “I just said to my wife when I saw you: ‘My God, how Mr. Ritchie’s aged; my God, how he has aged!’ ” I tried to indicate my lack of interest in this train of thought, but he went on repeating it with intense conviction.

  12 April 1968. Weston Hall.

  Staying with Sachie and Georgia Sitwell for Easter. We had a day at the races with Kisty Hesketh9 and her party from Easton Neston. High spirits in a cutting wind at the races. Lunch in a drafty tent – shivered with cold and thoroughly enjoyed myself. Back to Weston for tea (cinnamon toast and chocolate cake).

  Now I sit writing in this little bedroom overlooking the garden where first I came twenty-eight years ago, and I remember the intoxication of the first visit when the name Sitwell was a key to a fabulous landscape with figures. Sachie is now recovering from an operation but refuses to be daunted by illness. They have both been so affectionate and welcoming – I love them.

  20 April 1968.

  We have a new Prime Minister – Trudeau – and I try, from reading articles about him, from talking to his friends, to penetrate to the man. Nothing so far said or printed reveals him to me, nor did my own meeting with him. I recall something enigmatic about him which struck me even at that time, long before his present celebrity, something inhuman (the word is too strong) beneath the courteous, charming manner; too much all-of-a-piece, perhaps, the cultivated, intelligent, cool observer?

  21 April 1968.

  It is time that Elizabeth returned. What if she never did? Some day she won’t.

  In St. James’s Park, sensually happy in the morning, sensually sad in the evening.

  Read Malraux’s Anti-Memoirs. I started it as a duty and was discouraged and surprised to find how many French words I do not understand. Then I read on and something else irritated me – there was too much talk of Destiny. I began to suspect inflation, and a peculiarly French form of inflation, but I persisted and was rewarded, engaged, swept along by the marvellous rhythms of language and brought up short by the telescoping of thought and image.

  22 April 1968.

  Just back from a weekend staying with Huntley Sinclair for the Badminton Horse Show. Huntley, an old friend from early Ottawa days, came over here in the RCAF during the war and has stayed on and married a very nice and very wealthy woman. They live in a big house of Cotswold grey stone, with a Lutyens wing and a view of the Stroud valley.

  The Queen is staying nearby with the Duke and Duchess of Beaufort, and was at the morning service in Badminton church. She had a word with me on the way out of church about Trudeau’s succession as Prime Minister. (I had told her some days ago that I felt certain that he would win over his competitors.)

  The Queen has treated me with the greatest kindness and informality since I have been here. And she has no more devoted admirer than I. It is not only loyalty to the Throne (and I have always been a royalist) but fascination with the personality of the woman who occupies it.

  2 May 1968.

  What would we do without Jean Halton? She is the widow of Matthew Halton, the brilliant Canadian journalist, and we are lucky enough to have her as social secretary at Canada House. It’s a tricky job, as, in addition to our own official entertaining, she has to cope with the stream of applications by Canadian visitors for invitations to the Royal Garden Parties and the Trooping of the Colour. The applicants do not always realize that these invitations have to be shared out among all members of the Commonwealth. Those who do not get invitations sometimes become disgruntled, and Jean copes with these and all other social problems with her mixture of charm, good humour, and friendly firmness.

  6 May 1968.

  A blowing day of wide skyscapes. Sylvia wore her purple suit with a new flowered blouse and we walked together in Hyde Park, watched a sailing boat capsize in the Serpentine, and came home to lunch on trout and asparagus.

  The new Canadian government is apparently contemplating some measure of military withdrawal from Europe and perhaps from NATO itself and putting increased emphasis on the continental defence of North America. I am planning to write a dispa
tch on this subject and have been thinking it over. One argument for the change would be that it would make us slightly more independent of the United States’ continental defence umbrella. At first sight this argument is not impressive. Our additional contribution to continental defence would be a flea-bite. Then there is the fashionable argument that money saved from NATO should go into aid and peace-keeping. There is disillusionment, too, with the failure of the Atlantic Community idea and our concept of Article 2 of the Treaty. Also there is the influence of de Gaulle and the French military pull-out from NATO. Some may even believe that by retreat from NATO we might improve Canadian–French relations and take the French heat off Quebec. After de Gaulle’s behaviour in Canada this would be kissing the boot that kicked us. Such appeasement would not affect de Gaulle but only encourage him.

  There is also the widespread feeling (how widespread I doubt) that NATO is becoming regarded in Canada as an “old-fashioned” military alliance. The very word “alliance” savours to such critics of power groupings and does not fit with our image of ourselves as “progressive.” The further dangerous implication is that it is dated to believe in the political or military aggressiveness of the U.S.S.R., especially in Europe. How far does Trudeau share these notions?

  At any rate it seems to me quite unthinkable that we should contemplate leaving NATO in the foreseeable future. A unilateral precipitate announcement of troop withdrawals would be messy but not quite so bad. It would gravely embarrass our NATO allies. A phased redeployment of Canadian forces after consultation with our allies could be justified in terms of an increase in our North American responsibilities. It would be disintegrating in its effects on the Alliance, perhaps pointless in terms of positive results, but not fatal.

  8 May 1968.

  Went down on the morning train to Hythe to spend the day with Elizabeth.10 I was an hour early at Folkestone, so Elizabeth was not there to meet me. I walked in the sun round some playing fields and tulip beds and had a happy drink alone in a pub where skippers off the Folkestone-Boulogne boats were reminiscing. Then Elizabeth called for me in the car and we lunched in the hot sun at the Hotel White Cliffs, at Dover, where the glass-ended lounge looks across to the esplanade, to the equable blue channel and the boats coming in and out. It has always been warm and sunny when we have gone together to Dover and we are always happy there and always have Dover sole and Pouligny-Montrachet for lunch and walk afterwards under the cliffs which look as though they would topple over the line of late-Georgian houses, in one of which my aunt, Lale Darwall, ended her days. Then we walked out on the long pier and the weather changed to grey and the landscape looked “like a photograph,” as Elizabeth put it. She said that she remembered in her youth coming back from adventures in France on such a day, to find, with sinking heart, England looking just like that.

  In the afternoon I read Lady Cynthia Asquith’s diaries about the brothers and lovers and sweethearts who went out to die in the 1914-18 war, while the house parties and flirtations and gossip went on at home, and Ego and Ivo and Basil were on the casualty lists or reported “missing, presumed dead.” The sadness and waste of it all and the triviality of the gossip combined to depress me. We have come such a long way since then that for all their worldliness they seem innocent – and brave.

  Coming home I stood in the light rain alone at Sandling Station waiting for the train – a little station, probably shortly to be suppressed.

  5 June 1968.

  A dark, rainy morning. The Pearsons, who have been staying here, will be off to the airport for Canada in a few minutes. The shooting of Bobby Kennedy, with its play-back to the assassination of JFK, has given a nightmarish flavour to the last twenty-four hours. Mike says that people in Canada will be smug about it and will say “it couldn’t happen here.” It only accentuates one’s feeling that Canada must not, shall not, be absorbed into that runaway American society which is like a giant plane out of control.

  A quiet last evening of the Pearsons’ visit – Sylvia and Maryon playing Russian bank, Mike and I watching soccer on the TV, a brisk argument on the future of NATO after dinner, Mike saying that we will withdraw our forces from Europe, that NATO is an “old-fashioned military alliance,” that our future lies more in the North American continental sphere. It’s this last bit that I find difficult to absorb.

  19 June 1968.

  London seasonitis. Morning of breathless exhaustion, like a swimmer weakening a long way from land, land being in this case our holiday at Chester. Deterioration of human relations because of always having to break off conversation just as it might come to a point, in order to rush to change for another party. Undue dependence on alcohol to buoy one up for another encounter, smoking frantically in the car in traffic queues, always twenty minutes late for a luncheon or a dinner party; always a day behind in little thank-you notes for a day-before-yesterday’s dinner party, or condolence notes to widows whose mates have finally fallen out of the race due to strokes or heart attacks from just one day or night too much; decline of sexual energy from too much social stress – and all this is self-inflicted (All of Us on All of Us), and still there is the whole of July ahead of us.

  22 June 1968.

  A muggy, claggy day, a day to sit on a park bench wrapped up in a raincoat like an old tramp, with some crumbs to feed the ducks while waiting for the mild drizzle to come down. But in fact I am away, top-hatted, to the commissioning of a Canadian submarine at Chatham, and to pass in review the crew, and to orate from a dais. And Sylvia, very nervous, is to present the Captain of the submarine with a large crest-engraved silver cigarette box. There, that is Commander Swiggum at the door, to A.D.C. us, sitting in the car all the way to Chatham, thus imposing a certain measure of chat. Better have a pee now and not have to arrest our great black hearse at some Esso station on the rain-wet road.

  8 July 1968.

  Back from Stansted after a most enjoyable weekend with Eric and Mary Bessborough.11 Eric says that from his bed he sees nothing but tulips. His bedroom is hung with Dutch paintings of tulips and with beautifully articulated watercolour drawings of tulips; in all the vases are more tulips. Tulips and macaws – not only paintings of macaws, but real live ones. When not infuriated in a cage, biting the hand that feeds them, they fly free in glorious Technicolor from tree to tree, making a wickedly unfriendly noise, but undeniably ornamental. During lunch on the terrace, as I was putting a piece of pâté to my lips, a macaw swooped down and flew away with it.

  Peter Ustinov came for lunch. Is he the clown country gentleman in a nineteenth-century novel? Broad, pale, heavy hands; broad Russian nose; mimicry and wit with the very edge that Russians can find for pretensions and affectations. A lumbering, friendly, comical creature who could change mood with the speed of a bear.

  27 July 1968.

  In the parks, under the sulky sky and on the used-up grass, the couples lie, length to length. They follow an undeviating protocol in their embraces – kiss, kiss, hug, hug, no copulation; hour after hour they entangle thus without culmination but with convulsive twitching of blue-jeaned buttocks. Dotted about in conveniently sited deck chairs, elderly men watch them, uncross their legs and gaze absently at the clouds above. Children throw balls over the recumbent writhers. Tired ladies in ones, or sometimes twos, close their eyes in unsimulated indifference, and adolescents seated in groups discuss over the recumbent bodies whatever it is that adolescents do discuss.

  30 July 1968.

  Dinner at the Apéritif with Elizabeth. The bartender remembered me from the days more than twenty years ago when I used to go there and sit on a high bar-stool drinking martinis and waiting for Margot, cursing her for always being three-quarters of an hour late and in an accumulating rage which changed in a jiffy to pleasure and relief when her tall figure finally came through the door with a rush of modish, Mayfair-ish excuses, interlarded with “darlings.” Then there was always the promise of the night ahead – a promise often unfulfilled, and put off with the most blatant lies about h
er visiting sister-in-law, etc., lies which had to be swallowed because I was only a substitute, a filler-in, a role which, apart from the frustration it sometimes involved, really suited me better than being No. 1, with all its claims.

  1 August 1968.

  I have been thinking about the forthcoming Commonwealth meeting in London and the role of Canada and of Trudeau in it. He is a new figure whose advent will be greeted by British public opinion and by his Commonwealth peers with curiosity and interest. He may be the star of the Conference; the others are mediocrities. The popular press will be after him, his speeches will get a good play. He is in a position to be heard, if he has anything to say. What is his thinking about the Commonwealth? Is he interested? I doubt it.

  Will there be a tendency to expect Canada to take on Britain’s role? I don’t think so – it’s plainly impossible. Arnold Smith, as Secretary-General, will want us to take a more positive part, possibly over Rhodesia. So will Nyerere and Kaunda, who flatter and actually believe in us. All this is very tempting – its multiracial quality is popular in Canada; also it corresponds to a real but not deep-rooted trust in Canada by the Africans. But the terrain is dangerous. Expectations can easily be built up and disillusionment can result. The British might be prepared to push us into a more ambitious role. It will cost us more in aid – perhaps we can afford that? We should, in talking to the Africans, not “hot them up” but try to cool them off. There is realism among them underneath. We should not get mixed up in their politics or in the protection of British interests, which a Commonwealth Peace Force would have meant. We should stay right away from African freedom fighters. We mustn’t be used by Harold Wilson and must remember the possibility that the Conservatives may be in power in England before long.