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

by Ritchie, Charles

  27 October 1968.

  The day of protest marches through London. Demonstration against the U.S. Embassy next door expected. I can hear somewhere in the near distance the sounds of horses’ hooves – that must be the mounted police. U.S. Marines are installed in the Embassy and closed-circuit TV is on the roof. What is this protest march protesting against? Everything. And what does everything mean? I am as out of touch with this protest as if I lived on another planet. And the young whom I happen to know seem to understand it as little as I do. Sexual freedom, social freedom, outrageous clothes, long hair – if they want these I am all in favour. I also sympathize with the fun of protesting, but the social and political meaning of the “permanent revolution” is gibberish to me. A protest against this permissive society – isn’t it punching a pillow?

  Roger leaves today. I shall be sorry to see him go, which is more than I can say for some of my guests. He makes me laugh and he is attractive. Moreover, he has a lot of sense.

  Do I envy these young men? Not really. Those decisions and indecisions affecting one’s whole future loom so large, and what the family expects of one, what one’s contemporaries think of one, how to get hold of a girl, or how to find a job. It’s agony shot through with high spirits.

  12 November 1968.

  I saw Eliza riding in the park yesterday morning, trotting along on a grey nag with her red hair flying in the wind. She wants to buy a stallion from Zsa Zsa Gabor to save it from being gelded.

  In the Communications Centre the cypher clerks are on to me about tax-free cigarettes and drink. It is outrageous that they can’t have them. Why shouldn’t they get some droppings from the diplomat’s table? Why the bloody hell can’t they? They work as hard as, or harder than, anyone, and everything depends on them and no one pays the least attention to them.

  The Lord Mayor’s dinner at the Guildhall. Technicolor brilliance of robes and uniforms under the klieg lights, especially the Archbishop’s violently purple robes. What an old stage-stealer he is. The Prime Minister [Harold Wilson] standing no nonsense from the City in his speech, which was coldly received. How they hate him! Then a series of drippingly mellifluous exchanges from the Lord Mayor, the Archbishop, the ex-Lord Mayor – reciprocal compliments, jokes, tributes, resounding affirmations of Faith in Youth, sound as ever to the core but with a few rotten spots; the Commonwealth (these tributes sound hollower each year); Britain (hopefully); and the City of London and all that it stands for.

  15 November 1968.

  In the afternoon dedicated a plaque at the veterans’ Star and Garter Home at Richmond, in the company of the United States Ambassador. Made a short and “stirring” speech.

  In the evening chaired a big dinner at the Canadian Club. Wore a bloody silly chain and medallion round my neck like a Mayor. Made a fulsome speech introducing Earl McLaughlin – quite disgusted myself.

  That woman whom I met at the reception the other day – did I say too much to her? I thought I saw the small-town tightening of the lips, that remorseless glint of satisfaction at having heard scandal and intending to retain and retail it. A walk in Regent’s Park, seagulls in sunlight, last roses, copper beeches, swinging my umbrella, exhilaration.

  Stout men in Homburgs and double-breasted overcoats walking in pairs and discussing how to beat the new government financial regulations.

  A lady came for a drink and began, “It means so much that there is still graciousness to be found in the world.” We asked where. “At Claridge’s, where I am staying. The flowers in my room, the exquisite manners of the waiters.”

  1 December 1968.

  I like making love as much, if not more, than anything. What else do I like as much, or nearly as much? In some earlier diary I write that what I liked most was the kind of conversation in which characters and motives were dissected. That now seems to me trivial. I do like walking alone in public parks – St. James’s Park; Bois de Boulogne; Central Park, New York; Point Pleasant Park, Halifax, Nova Scotia; Christ Church Meadow; Magdalen Park, Oxford; Sud-Park, Köln; the Luxembourg Gardens, Paris; Dumbarton Oaks park, Washington, D.C.; along the canal in Ottawa; round the poop-deck overlooking the Ottawa River; along the Rhine-side walk at Bonn. I like sinking into a movie after a good lunch. Reading would once have come first on my list – I still can’t imagine life without it; looking at pictures – yes, in a responsive mood. The transient glow of hospitality given. Some seaports I like, and a town hotel or country house which is unfamiliar. Smoked salmon and hot baths. I don’t know if I like drinking but I have to, and I like the effects – sometimes. Smoking is another must and only rarely a pleasure. Are addictions different from pleasures?

  Things I hate most – flying, or preparing a speech, or reflecting on my own unworthiness.

  Lunched at the Travellers with my old friend Tony Payne, now Rector of Lichfield. He arrived in a period shovel hat which would sell well in the King’s Road. We had a very good lunch – whisky, then chops and Club claret and Stilton. Tony is in a Retreat in Great College Street for a week. I asked him, “Can you smoke there?” He said, “Yes, on the roof.” “Would I like it?” “I don’t know how much of a man of God you are.” Hard question to answer. Tony and I parted in a glow of friendship.

  13 December 1968.

  All-day sessions of the Anglo-Canadian Continuing Committee on Trade and Economic Relations. I was in the Chair and listened, understanding a little here and there. Lunch for thirty men here at the house. Cocktails given by the RCMP for the Intelligence Wallahs. One of the English Intelligence people had had dealings with Norman Robertson over cases of people being blackmailed, etc., by the other side. He said that Norman’s wisdom and compassion were those of a saint.

  3 January 1969.

  Waiting for Trudeau. Message telephoned anonymously – “He will not leave the airport alive.” So, we start the drama with melodrama; so, I am off to the airport.

  5 January 1969.

  First meeting between Trudeau and Harold Wilson. The conversation started on NATO. There was a good and full discussion which I do not record as I make it a rule not to include accounts of confidential political and diplomatic negotiations in this diary.

  Trudeau said that he was impressed by Wilson’s apparently relaxed mood, by his taking time for random conversation. He added that Wilson was a fully political animal as he, Trudeau, was not. He said he would never spend a whole weekend, as Wilson does, talking politics and getting officials around him and going over with them all the speeches he would later make at the Commonwealth Conference. Trudeau was impressed by Wilson’s intelligence and dialectical skills. I think that Wilson and Trudeau enjoyed each other and got on perhaps better than Mike and Wilson.

  23 January 1969.

  Scattered impressions of Trudeau’s visit. The press have concentrated quite largely on his “love life.” He attacked them for this at his press conference, but he is himself largely responsible. He trails his coat, he goes to conspicuous places with conspicuous women. If he really wants an affair, he could easily manage it discreetly. This is a kind of double bluff.

  I lunched on gammon at the Travellers’ club and afterwards read a pornographic book in the library. It is the most beautiful room in London. We used not to have any sex in the club library but now it is everywhere, like petrol fumes in the air.

  I believe that this notion of the younger generation – embattled and different from any other – may turn out to be a huge hoax. It is certainly a huge bore.

  24 January 1969.

  Went down in the train from Charing Cross to Hythe for the day. There was Elizabeth waiting at the Central Station, Folkestone. God! how will it be if I must outlive her. We walked on the lees at Folkestone in the mild spring weather under the groin of the cliffs and went back to her house, Carbery, for dinner. She showed me the outline of her new book, Pictures and Conversation. Yesterday was the London birth day of Eva Trout and the reviews are just beginning to come out, and already she is at work on the new book. In it
she asks the question “Is writing allied to witchcraft?” We drank a lot of 1949 Burgundy and I waited in the dark night, Burgundy-filled, at the little Sandling Station for the London train to come in.

  25 January 1969.

  A fully spring day of early sunshine in which Sylvia and I walked cheerfully together. I came back and read an old memoir of the fate of my great-great-aunt Catherine, a beautiful, high-spirited girl given to too much novel-reading, who was driven mad by her family and by an overdose of laudanum and thought she was being dragged over broken bottles. She died young and insane.

  Matthew Smith says that at my reception at Canada House, to which Trudeau came so reluctantly, Trudeau attacked him for wearing a dinner jacket and told him that he ought to be out in the street joining with the other demonstrators instead of swanning around at a social occasion.

  27 January 1969.

  I heard Sylvia saying to Bruna, our “wonderful maid,” “Mr. Ritchie does not like bacon or fried egg for breakfast.” Poor Bruna – she goes into the hospital tomorrow to have a cyst or cancer removed from her breast. Think of her on these black London mornings, getting my Goddamned fried egg ready, toting it up in the lift, toting it – untouched – down again, taking the dog round the block in the dank morning air, and all the time worrying, worrying, “Will they remove my breast?”

  Lunch and dinner for Cardinal, the President of the Quebec Council; elaborate food and lousy speeches, but none so bad as that of Whitlock, the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, who quoted Rupert Brooke – “Some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England” – and spoke of World War graves to this group of Quebeckers who regard those wars as British imperialists’ ventures in which their countrymen were used as cannon fodder.

  5 February 1969.

  Recovering from flu and from the jungle of high fever, restless turning in the “burrows of the nightmare.” In that fetid region all the paper mottoes of faith and conduct are swept out of touch and sight.

  I spent the afternoon recovering in bed. Read Antony and Cleopatra and became so moved and inflamed by it that I could not get to sleep at night.

  10 February 1969.

  Back from Stansted. The two days there were extraordinarily happy and healthy. I was exhilarated to wake up to the famous parkscape from my bedroom, the “rides” through the forest, the black trees with a snowy foreground and the sky cold and cloudless with visibility to infinity, infinity all enclosed in the woods and avenues of Stansted. The familiar enchantment of the place operated once again. Everything pleased. Driving round the estate with Eric in his new Land Rover, watching the pigeons rise from a field of kale, watching Mary paint flower pictures in her attic studio, and standing in the library before a fire of great logs, turning over photograph albums.

  1 March 1969.

  Eliza has come to stay. She and I walk round the Square in a mild thaw from a small snowfall, two tall figures nodding heads, a rustle of talk, plans, contrivances, phrases for dealing with dilemmas, rattles round as we mimic communication together.

  Young Marshall from Ottawa came to see me about the visit of the Canadian Parliamentary Committee, with the suggestion that all their briefings here should be tape-recorded and attended by the press. Of course this means that no one will speak frankly. All this is in the name of “participation,” to build up parliamentary committees so that they feel they are participating in the formulation of policy, that all options, including neutrality, have been considered and all voices heard. I am divided about all this; I see what Trudeau is driving at. He is impressed by the alienation of people from their government and their feeling that foreign and defence policies are formulated mysteriously and imposed on them. He is indeed undertaking to change the system of Cabinet solidarity and the organization of Executive and Legislature; “broaden the base,” and also secure a new kind of “General Will,” incarnate in himself. He may be right in his diagnosis of the gravity of the social disease. As to the cure, he is looking for it by an apparently endless process of review, of digging institutions up by the roots to examine them, of shaking up Establishment figures. And then what? He is not really a revolutionary. Is this process aimed at the reversal of alliances or at real economic and social programs of change? No. Is it just a grandiose and perhaps necessary manoeuvre to establish communication? How much of it is done with mirrors? Well, I am with him so far, but is he with me? I think he believes that diplomats as a class are an organized lobby against change. Perhaps he is right – especially elderly diplomats.

  Met horrible literary female, and felt a shuddering repugnance for this malicious, round-heeled, blowsy bore.

  16 March 1969.

  Two and a half more years, with luck, of living on a millionaire’s income in a London mansion of the kind that disappeared from ordinary life thirty years ago, with five servants, a chauffeur and the biggest car in London, with whisky and cigarettes virtually free – and presto! down we go to a heavily taxed middle-class income; from invitations to Buckingham Palace and Chatsworth to the company of a few old friends, if any left after an absence of years; from being surrounded by the young, who find it convenient to lodge here, to seeing only contemporaries; from a diversity of company to relative isolation; from influence and inside information to neither of either. On top of all this – old age, impotence, loss of hair and memory!

  23 March 1969.

  I am having my portrait painted. An artist – even a bad artist – can create mayhem around him. I have a craving to destroy the portrait – and perhaps to destroy the painter.

  Eliza plays her scales over in the long drawing-room in the half-light of this grey Sunday afternoon. She props her music against the Barbara Hepworth bronze. Facing her is the ill-fated portrait, still on its easel. The floor is strewn with the matting on which he stood while painting. When the artist departs, the room will revert to its parlour-like sterility. Yesterday Eliza and I went to Chiswick. The sun came out and went in again. There were colonies of purple and yellow crocuses on the lawns. We went into the house and stood in a window embrasure of an empty, unfurnished little panelled room, looking out together at the cypresses and urns and obelisks and allées. Then we went to Chiswick Mall by the river and watched blue-sailed boats scudding before the March wind, and chose a house in which to live called Strawberry House – Georgian, with a vine-clad balcony overlooking the river.

  15 April 1969.

  Walking through St. James’s Park I encountered that Gypsy woman whom I have seen telling people’s fortunes. I decided to try mine. She took my hand, looked at it, and instantly said, “They will never make a gentleman out of you.” I can remember nothing else in the fortune.

  I had a long talk with Jerry Hardy about politics. The truth is that he and I know that there is no interest in Canada in tightening relations with the United Kingdom or in reporting home on British policies. Dispatches from Paris are read because French politics affect our future as a nation, whereas Britain has virtually no influence at all. The “British connection” seems to be receding out of view. Only the Crown remains.

  In the evening went to a crowded cocktail party and accidentally stepped on my hostess’s toe. She gave a real squeak of anguish.

  17 April 1969.

  They are going to make me a Companion of Canada, so now I am a registered member, in good standing, of the Canadian Establishment. I was going to write that my mother would have been pleased, if she had been alive, but I don’t think she would have understood what it was all about. The only awards she respected were “real” British awards.

  McMillan, the president of the CNR, came to lunch. He is a Winnipeg Westerner and spoke of the revolt of the West against the Trudeau regime, saying that in the Party caucuses in the West there is a strong underground movement of Western separatism.

  More Westerners in the afternoon, including an oil-business couple. I took very much to her but not so much to him. There was an air of over-used charm about him and he smelt of hair essence o
r after-shave cream or something, and kept referring to Canadians as “Canucks.” Perhaps he is an American.

  20 April 1969.

  Woke feeling levitated, put on my blue pullover, taxied to Regent’s Park, walked happily with my head full of projects in the spring sunshine by the rock garden, to and fro over the bridges; looked at some nesting coots; saw three nuns quacking away together on a bench; knew that I had not too long to live; remembered that day Elizabeth and I walked down the road by the Park lined with flowering cherry trees. It was during the war, and I was recovering from flu and it was my first day out. It must have been the same time in April as today, because the fruit trees lining the road were just in bloom.

  Went down to lunch at Knebworth with the Cobbolds, charming elderly couple (about my age). They garden together, clear out the undergrowth in the “wilderness,” making do with one gardener where once there were sixteen. (The gardens of England’s Stately Homes before the Fall must have been the most over-staffed organizations in history.) The Cobbolds have three upstanding, nice-mannered, intelligent sons, and the appropriate quota of grandchildren. Lord Cobbold is a former Director of the Bank of England, now Lord Chamberlain. Has a grace-and-favour house in St. James’s Palace overlooking the courtyard. Knebworth, built by Bulwer Lytton – or rebuilt by him – is a German romantic fantasy of the 1840s, unfortunately tidied up by Lady Cobbold’s uncle, Lutyens, who was appalled by the gimcrackery, which is the only point of the house, and wanted to uncover and restore the original uninteresting fourteenth-century house. Now the remaining nineteenth-century heraldic figures, gargoyles, and Victorian armorial bits and pieces are quite literally falling off the exterior. Warnings out everywhere – “Beware of falling stone-work.” We had excellent roast beef for lunch.

  12 May 1969.

  In the morning went to a NATO commemorative service in the new Guards Chapel built to replace the one destroyed in the blitz. I was revolted by the sermon from a sanctimonious old Dogan plastering over this necessary military alliance with pseudo-Christian pi-jaw.