The British community was in a state of some flux, with a new ambassador, Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, distinguished Arabist and former British adviser, arriving. There were rumours, uncertainties, a pause, during which Cornwallis arranged for the landing of British troops at Basra. A second landing of troops triggered off the start of hostilities in the desert. The embassy was besieged.
Freya was one of the last to arrive in Baghdad before its gates closed. She had been travelling in Persia and had hastened south, driving up, she later explained to Cockerell, through ‘about 5,000 students with banners, and dancing and patriotic yells. They engulfed the car and surged along on either side, giving it a kick or a spit now and then; I kept smiling …’
While one rescue party set off from Basra, and another from Transjordan, the embassy settled down to its siege. There were about 350 people, including the servants, but very few women, the wives and children having been flown out to India; it was the kind of situation Freya greatly enjoyed. While the gardeners went on watering the cypresses and the verbena, she recruited Seton Lloyd, former adviser to the Iraqi Department of Antiquities, to help her monitor the foreign news and prepare a daily bulletin for the embassy. Since all the other radios had been confiscated, they listened to one in a car, parked on the lawn. To this day Seton Lloyd can remember Freya’s cross voice saying: ‘We’ve heard all this,’ as the dim voices from Jerusalem crackled and faded.
Freya’s morale was superb. Spurning the dormitory set aside for the ladies, she took her mattress up to the terrace and slept in a corner overlooking the Tigris from where she could watch the police launches chugging up and down the river and keep an eye on the crowds gathering in the upper town. Through Vyvyan Holt’s good relations with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, fresh food was brought in every day; Freya put in a request for face powder for the ladies, causing a policeman on the gate to remark how strange it was that English women could think about their faces when they were shortly to be massacred.
With these policemen she was at her most lordly. When a British reconnaissance plane came over they lifted their guns and fired. Freya, standing near, expressed immense disdain. ‘You know best, madam,’ one of the men said, and put down his rifle. In the evening, there were rationed drinks served on the lawn; at dawn Holt could be seen exercising his polo ponies in a corner of the compound. As the days went by, Newton, the butler, offered to whiten Freya’s shoes. It was British frontier spirit at its best.
On 28 May guns could be heard from the north, where a column led by the Arab Legion was cutting off the rebels’ retreat. Inside Baghdad, two battalions turned against Rashid Ali and the colonels fled to Persia. The siege was over.
It ended with characteristic British Empire dash. On 30 May a message from the town came to say that a deputation, led by the lord mayor, would like to see the ambassador. Through the wicket gate filed the mayor, followed by the chief of police and a very young commander-in-chief of the Iraqi troops. They were shown into the ambassador’s study, where immediately the commander began to shout and gesticulate, and express his hope that the British would know how to respect the independence of Iraq. Cornwallis was well over six foot tall, a quiet man with a long, distinguished nose. He listened patiently. When silence finally settled on the gathering, he spoke, in perfect Arabic. ‘I had the privilege of serving his Majesty King Faisal the first. With him, I assisted in creating the Iraqi nation. I do not intend to be lectured by young men who were in shorts at that time.’
Few in Baghdad believed that the British victory over the rebels was more than a setback to German plans. The Vichy French in Syria were busy refuelling German planes and in Crete there had been a serious defeat of the Allied troops. Her transfer requested by Cornwallis, Freya now prepared to set up her Brotherhood in Iraq, though in a somewhat muted form, as Freya felt the country was not ready for anything as specific as Brotherhood cells.
In mid-October Freya found a house in Alwiyah, the Hampstead of Baghdad, modelled on British Indian army cantonment lines, with detached single-storey bungalows set among lawns and oleanders. Pamela Hore-Ruthven arrived to help her, and later, after she left, Peggy Drower, a fluent Arabist and the daughter of old Baghdad friends of Freya’s. Once again, Freya set them a punishing routine. Occasionally they felt like slaves, Freya having decided that office grind was not for her. There were meetings to set up, the news to be gathered and sifted, a bulletin to be written and copied. Most time-consuming were the ‘Qabul’, the ‘At Homes’, a regular feature of Baghdad life, to which ladies simply went along uninvited and ate cakes, and which Freya and Peggy Drower used as occasions for pro-British chat. One week, Freya noted that she had attended thirteen. After the Brotherhood took serious root, there were also trips to set up cells among the Marsh Arabs and the Kurds.
Against this background of continual occupation, Freya always found time for reflection. ‘Very few people who think much seem really convinced of personal immortality,’ she wrote to Cockerell. ‘I myself … came to the simple faith that what had no beginning could have no end … When I was so near death once or twice the cold and bleak prospect frightened me: since then, however, a strange reassurance has come and I think I could no longer feel that fear: I know that in moments of great ecstasy even in this life you cease to be “personal” at all: your whole being is merged and loses itself as it were, even in such daily things as the loveliness of a sunset or a rose: if such is the loss of personality, and I believe it to be so, it does not seem to matter.’ She was to repeat this, often, later.
As in Cairo, wartime life in Baghdad could be very pleasant. Though something of a backwater, the city was full of soldiers and provided a centre for British intelligence, which soon gathered to it many friends of Freya’s, and many others who were to become friends. ‘It is so nice’, she remarked, ‘to be mate and not skipper …’ There was Adrian Bishop, in charge of the Special Operations Executive, Teddy Hodgkin, Aidan Philip and Stewart Perowne, now posted as information officer to Iraq. There was the embassy itself, with Vyvyan Holt as Oriental Secretary. In the early mornings horses were brought to the door of the little pink villa in Alwiyah and Freya rode out into the desert with Stewart Perowne, or her young paying guest, Nigel Clive. At weekends there were picnics by the river, with Seton and Ulrica Lloyd, who took their mongoose with them to swim. And there were always parties. Freya, never dull, was capable of great, enjoyable frivolity. Robin Maugham, visiting Baghdad, was taken to dine with her. ‘I had imagined a rather gaunt, tough traveller,’ he wrote in his autobiography, Nomad. ‘I found a small, sprightly lady … with her head on one side like a bird, inquiring, with clear, piercing eyes beneath fine brows.’
This was a good time for Freya. She had a steady income, her health was good and she had been made temporary Attaché at the embassy. It was fun to have the Prime Minister, Nuri Pasha, to dinner and to discuss military strategy with Jumbo Wilson; reassuring to learn from the ambassador that what she was doing was important. Rightly, she could feel appreciated, able at last to exercise some influence on policy. (Even if she was also short of funds. She wanted £9,300 for her committees. Stewart Perowne, her superior, refused to authorise payment for anything he had not approved. Freya got her own back by putting down a new typewriter under ‘telephones’, arguing that ‘they all seemed the same to me, the same sort of mechanical idea, and telephones was the only heading that had money left’.) Everywhere from Delhi to Washington she could count on influential friends. In her support of the ‘young effendis’, the new, educated, middle-class Arabs, the product of the ‘internal combustion engine, the (mostly) American educator, and the British Government’ now chafing for power, she saw herself as helping to mould a better post-war Middle East.
There was also truth in her conviction that the Brotherhood was important. If there were some in Baghdad who argued that it couldn’t possibly reach the young intellectuals who really mattered, and others who said that Freya would do better to talk less herself and listen mor
e to others, whose English was better than her Arabic, there were many more prepared to vouch that it played its part in keeping Iraq friendly, in persuading the Iraqis, and particularly the women, that English people were perfectly reasonable, that their ideology was acceptable, and that they were neither as aloof nor as foreign as they had seemed before.
In November 1942, Freya heard that her mother had died. To the sadness of her loss was added guilt, for she felt responsible for some of the difficulties of her mother’s last years. In May 1940 she had sent her an urgent warning from Aden to leave Asolo, where she and Herbert Young were living in the house that had been left to Freya. They tried to get visas for Switzerland or America, but they were turned down. Freya, locally, was believed to be a British spy, and, though no one ever actually established the connection, two weeks after Italy declared war, Flora and Herbert Young were taken to the gaol in Treviso, where Flora, upright, very gracious in her high-necked blouses, found herself incarcerated with thieves and prostitutes. Later, Flora wrote a charming memoir of her imprisonment. Penal life in wartime Italy was as feudal as any outpost of Empire. Wardens and inmates alike did their best to cosset Flora. When one used bad language, the others made a loud noise to conceal the words. Marina Volpi, daughter of the finance minister, and an Asolo neighbour, brought her three pairs of white cotton gloves, having noticed that Flora’s chamois ones needed washing.
After a few weeks, they were released and by September allowed back to Asolo, where Herbert Young, already frail, soon died. Flora, at seventy-eight as handsome as ever, greatly loved by the whole village, left for California, where she lived with friends. Her death made a terrible hole in Freya’s life. For all the betrayals of childhood, the falling out over Guido and Vera, Freya had remained exceptionally close to her, writing to her at least once and often several times a week, a cosy intimate correspondence that had gone on for over forty years. The relationship had never been simple; there was too much ambiguity, too much history in it, to make it always pleasurable, but it answered a need in Freya that nothing else seemed able to. To friends in Baghdad, she seemed very wretched. ‘I feel’, she wrote sadly, ‘as if no one in all the world belongs to me and it is rather like being in a room far too big for one.’
There was, however, much to cheer her up. That month Letters from Syria, a selection of pre-war letters edited by Cockerell, was published in London. It sold 4,000 copies before publication. And in June the Royal Geographical Society had bestowed on her its Founder’s Medal, remarking particularly on her journey from Hureidha in the Wadi Hadhramaut to the sea. ‘Her success’, read the nomination, ‘has been due to her courage, determination, and, above all, to her gift for making friends with all types and conditions of peoples.’
She was also living the kind of life she really liked best, surrounded by experts and soldiers and scholars, all driven by a common purpose. Freya always admired soldiers. She liked their ‘impression of calmness and efficient leisure’. She paid attention to what they said, and made allowances for them that she would never have made for civilians. She looked for the soldier-scholar in them all. She saw it in Wavell and in General Wilson, whose eyes, she once said, were like those of an elephant, ‘small, shrewd and wise’. She was, said her friends, very like a soldier herself, thinking tactical thoughts and strategies of Empire.
PERSUASION, NOT PROPAGANDA
CHAPTER SIX
Freya’s talents were now widely recognised to lie in propaganda, or, as she preferred to call it, persuasion. Among the generals she had become a celebrity – General Smuts was said to know parts of her books by heart – and at the Ministry of Information she had acquired a reputation for being able to talk to ordinary people in such a way that they believed what she said. There was something in her manner, stern, uncompromising, full of charm, using words that rang out with conviction and unmistakable probity, that was very attractive. From Cairo, Wavell was on record as saying that the Brotherhood had played an essential part in internal security and done much to lessen sabotage against the Allies in Egypt. What was more, Freya now had a wider following. For some time she had been writing regularly from the Near East for The Times, articles that upheld Britain and her role as moral guide in a confused world. The time had perhaps come to give her a new audience.
By 1943 there was a strong agreement in official circles in Britain that the Zionists in Palestine should be helped as far as possible, but only with the consent of the Arabs. Finding this historical attachment to the Arab world so entrenched, the Zionists had been shifting their campaign to the United States. They were now fighting Malcolm Macdonald’s White Paper of 1939, in which he had proposed limiting Jewish immigration into Palestine to 75,000 in the next five years, and after that only if the Arabs agreed. Freya, whose understanding of the Arab position was thought to be acute, was now asked to go to America to lecture on the Middle East – largely on the premise that Americans had very little idea of what it was really like – because the Zionists were currently making British policy in Palestine much harder to enforce. Freya herself, having watched American interest in the area grow with that in oil, thought the time right.
She was not, perhaps, the most obvious of choices for the task, for all her travels and understanding. Freya had never been to America and her one encounter with the new world in Canada had left her a little scathing of its culture. More important, she had never been admiring of the Jews. From Haifa, in the summer of 1931, she had written to her father: ‘I don’t think anyone but a Jew can really like the Jews: they so obviously have no use for anyone else. Their manners are horrid compared to the Arab; and I felt, by the end of a day among them, that it is far better to be a Jew among the Philistines than an unlucky Philistine among the Jews.’
The tour started with a by now customary set-back to her health. Far out to sea, crossing the Atlantic on a crammed troopship, the Aquitania, Freya developed appendicitis. By the time she was carried to shore by stretcher at Halifax, through heavy rain, with the troops lining the railings watching, the appendix was rupturing. She was immediately operated on in the Halifax infirmary and, surviving by her usual combination of robustness and tenacity, she was soon sitting up and writing letters, tended by nuns. Though she lamented that she had lost a month, by November she was in New York, building up to a schedule of tea parties, lectures and dinners that would have crushed many younger and healthier women. The city enchanted her: ‘I can’t get over the exciting beauty,’ she wrote, ‘the pencil buildings so high and far that the blueness of the sky floats about them; the feeling that one’s taxis, and shoppings all go on in the deep canyon-beds of natural erosions rather than in the excrescences of human builders.’ After four years of war, the hats and lingerie of New York were particularly dazzling.
Within days of arriving Freya began contacting anti-Zionist Jews, to whom she spoke out firmly on the second clause of the Balfour Declaration (‘It being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.’) Her view, and the one that she intended to carry up and down the country, was that the proposals outlined in the White Paper were far too important to the Arabs and to the stability of the Middle East to be tinkered with, and that it was up to the moderate Jews, because they too were interested in fighting Zionism, to co-operate with the British. She soon wrote to Elizabeth Monroe, her senior at the Ministry of Information, about a dinner organised in her honour: ‘The distressing thing is that I like the Jews I meet here and have to argue with, almost better than anyone else I see, and there was a most disarming mixture of sharpness, kindness and humour about the rabbi.’
Not everyone did so well with her as the rabbi had done. At a dinner in New York, Freya was introduced to Clare Luce. Within minutes they had fallen into a discussion about India. Clare Luce observed that the British were behaving badly by failing to give an undertaking on independence; Freya countered by suggesting that she might like to float a new slog
an, ‘Freedom for Fratricide’. The exchange grew chilly. ‘Let there be massacres,’ declared Clare Luce. ‘Why should the white races have a monopoly of murder?’ To her friends, afterwards, Freya had the last word. ‘If she carries much weight now,’ she wrote of Clare Luce, ‘I don’t think she will in a few years; she is too much tinkle … and she makes the mistake, eventually fatal to lovely women, of antagonising all the women.’
From this moment on, in fact, Freya’s tour was often prickly. In a letter to Cockerell she reported that her days were spent dealing with ‘slanders, envy, detraction and all malignancy as well as mere ignorance’. As usual, she was caught by the spectacle and distressed by man’s abuse of it. From Chicago, where she had witnessed a snowstorm, she wrote of the ‘skyscrapers in the background and the lake with blocks of ice making a white horizon … and inside the hotel it is like the Balkans grown prosperous – square short females with furs and cordial voices telling everyone’s business in the lounge. It is immense fun – only appalling to think that these are the people who are to have a hand in the delicate and subtle East. Anyway, I believe it is ridiculous to try and pour culture like chocolate over an ice on top of a nation …’
Catching ‘The Chief’, the famed steel-and-aluminium East-to-West-Coast train, Freya moved on late in January to California, where she stayed with Lucy Beach, daughter of the Sylvia Beach who had run a silk factory in Asolo in the early years of the century, before turning it over to Flora, and the family friend with whom Flora had spent her last months. By now she was deeply disenchanted with America. ‘I feel’, she wrote mournfully to Pamela Hore-Ruthven, ‘their civilisation not only alien but dead and also have a horrid fear of it, that we may be infected and let ourselves be carried down this way of mechanical annihilation.’ To Wavell, she complained: ‘This is a monstrous country … I feel rather like a slightly discouraged David travelling across this land with one Goliath after another to meet, and only a small packet of sling stones which the Mogul perpetually begs one not to use …’
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