by Alec Waugh
He was indeed having as good a time as anyone in the world. Amusingly occupied, without any worries, with a surplus of the creature comforts. Moreover, by his service in Crete, his conscience had been assuaged. He had won the MC; he had been wounded; it was because of his wound that he had been transferred to the Staff. In the first war every soldier had prayed for a ‘cushy blighty’; a sliver of gold braid on his cuff and the right to enjoy the flesh pots of Piccadilly in the role of a rewarded hero. There were few people in the world who would not envy him. But all the same, it did not seem quite good enough for Raymond Peronne. So much more had been expected for him.
It was four months before I was to see him again, and in those four months a great deal happened. First there was Pearl Harbour, and with America in the war, the certainty that in the long run Hider must be overthrown. But in the meantime, those four months were marked by a series of reverses for British arms, in the Western Desert and in for Eastern waters. Rommel was in the ascendant. Repulse and the Prince of Wales had been torpedoed. Malaya had been overrun. These calamities had brought two major changes in the narrow and narrowing circle of my personal interests. The first, that Derrick Whistler’s battalion had been moved from India and that he had been taken prisoner at Singapore. The second, that Michael’s battalion had been posted overseas and that on his embarkation leave he had married Iris. When I learned that Raymond was coming to Beirut for a week’s leave I was curious to know what his reaction to this news would be.
He asked me to meet him at one o’clock on the terrace of the St George’s Hotel.
It was a warm spring day. The sky was blue. The sun glistened on the snowcapped mountain peaks. I found Raymond seated with a French full colonel, the equivalent of our BGS, at the grand serail, the French Headquarters. ‘I expect you know each other,’ Raymond said.
I knew him by sight, but I did not think he would be aware of me. I had, however, underestimated the extent of Gallic courtesy. ‘But of course,’ he said, ‘Captain Waugh is one of our most valued colleagues.’ He rose to his feet. ‘I thank you a thousand times for my aperitif and the matter of our mutual friend, that is well understood. I will put the request through this afternoon.’
Raymond rubbed his hands together in self-congratulation.
‘Very satisfactory. Very satisfactory indeed.’
‘What was that about?’ I asked.
Tony Richardson. I’ve got him a job as liaison officer with the Free French. You know Tony, don’t you ?’
Yes, I knew Tony. I had seen him about at parties before the war. He had got a rugger blue at Oxford. He had been one of Mosley’s early recruits, as a British Fascist, but later had thought better of it, along with a lot of others. He had been engaged to one of the Ringold girls, but the engagement had been broken off. In 1938 he had been one of those young men who in an indeterminate hour had seemed to be heading nowhere. I had not seen or heard of him since then. I had not known he was in the Middle East.
‘How does he fit into this?’ I asked.
Raymond explained. Tony had been wounded in one of the earlier campaigns. He had been in hospital several weeks. When he was passed for duty, his original unit had not applied to have him back. The old colonel had been found a sinecure as a camp commandant at a rehabilitation centre. The new CO had been a company commander when Tony had first joined the unit. At the depot there had been some difficulty about a girl they both had fancied. ‘That’s Tony’s story; at any rate; they did not want him back.’ He was posted to BTE, then he got an attack of sandfly fever and was in hospital again. ‘I don’t know if you’ve ever had sandfly fever. It’s a tricky business. It leaves you very depressed. They take away your revolver in case you get suicidal. Perhaps they sent him back to duty too soon; I gather he put up a black or two; at any rate they sent him on a course. He didn’t do well enough on it to get himself an appointment. In the meantime they’d filled his place with his unit. He found himself in the pool, and went back to his war substantive rank—Lieutenant. Then he got mixed up with a girl, a Palestinian ATS, and a subaltern without a private income is not in a position to get mixed up with a girl in Cairo. The competition is too fierce. He might get himself into an awful mess. Tony lacks backbone. But he’s not a bad chap. I wouldn’t like to see him go down the drain. And as it happens he does speak excellent French, almost bi-lingual. What’s more he likes the French; they feel that and like him back. They say about him “One would never think he was an Englishman, though he looks like one”—which is about as high praise as they can give. I remembered that that Colonel was somewhat in my debt. He’d stayed at Charminster. I thought that there might be a string there I could pull. I found there was; so an application is going through for him to come out as a liaison officer with the French, a G2 appointment, and on a major’s pay he should do well among the Lebanese houris. I’m told that they are far from unresponsive.
‘I wouldn’t contradict you.’
‘You shouldn’t from what I’ve heard. At any rate, the posting should be through in a week. I’m seeing Louis Spears tonight. A word in the right quarter there should settle it.’
A smile of satisfaction played across his mouth. ‘Everything, or at least nearly everything, goes by backstairs influence. It’s a funny thing, but I’ve always had the connections that have made it possible for me to do things for other people. Do you remember that character in War and Peace of whom Tolstoy said, “he had realised that the only way to have influence is not to use it”. I haven’t found that. I’ve always found that for people on the Tony level, I’ve been able to pull the right strings. It’s been one of my hobbies. You remember Judy?’
‘Of course.’
‘I got that job for her.’
‘She’d no idea you had.’
‘I know she hadn’t. I took good care of that. If she had, she’d have thought I was trying to get rid of her, which in fact was the last thing I wanted. I was having a fine time; as fine a time as I’ve had with anyone.’
‘Then why did you get that job for her?’
‘It was best for her. She wasn’t getting anywhere through me. I was spoiling her chances of the jobs that might have been right for her. She wasn’t taking her work seriously, and I kept her, through being around, from concentrating on one of the men who would have made her a good husband. She had reached the marrying age. She’d had her share of being wild. Better to start again in a new country. And I was right, wasn’t I ? It’s worked out very well.’
She was married, with three children; her husband a powerful figure in Canadian politics.
‘She writes to me every Christmas. I get a real kick out of her letters. I suppose that’s what gives me more kick than anything in life; doing things for people and never letting them know I have. I hardly ever let them know. It might spoil a friendship. People don’t like having to feel beholden. They like to feel they’ve done it on their own. Besides I enjoy the dramatic irony of the situaton. Just now and again I do tell them when I’m sure it could do no harm. For instance …’ He paused. He looked at me thoughtfully, asking himself a question. ‘Do you remember,’ he said, ‘being commissioned by Metropolis to do them a piece about the south of France?’
‘I certainly do, I look back on that article as a watershed. It started me off on a new tack.
‘I’m glad to hear that. I fixed that commission. I thought it was what you needed.’
‘You thought it was what I needed?’
‘Um. You had published a novel about post-war London, Kept. I thought it pretty good. It showed that you weren’t a one-book man. Then you began a serial in the Daily Mirror, about the same kind of people against the same background. “He’s repeating himself,” I thought. “He needs a change.” That summer I had been to Monte Carlo. There was no official summer season then, but a few people were beginning to realise how delightful the coast was at that time of year. Another year and a vogue might well have started. I thought of you. You could write about the same people, onl
y against a different background, a background that would make them and their problems different. I thought of suggesting it to you; then at a lunch party I found myself sitting next to the proprietor of Metropolis. I talked to him about the Côte d’Azur in August. “It’s got everything,” I told him. “In three years’ time it’ll be the most fashionable summer playground in the world. You ought to have a piece on it.”
‘He was intrigued. He wondered whom he should get to do it. Of course I had you in mind, but I didn’t want to mention you right away. He might think he was being got at. I suggested Michael Arlen. He shook his head, “Too expensive. I can’t afford him.”
‘“What about Alec Waugh? He should be within your price range.”
‘I saw that he was nibbling. But I tried other names— against all of which there would be, I knew, some objection— either too old or tied up with another paper. Finally I came back to you. “I don’t think you’d do better than Alec Waugh.”
‘He pencilled your name on his place card. “I’ll get my secretary on to that right away,” he said.’
‘I’m glad he did. It made a difference to me.’
He laughed. ‘I’m glad I told you. Now that it’s so long ago you won’t feel you’ve been put under an obligation.’ He paused. He smiled. ‘It’s a funny thing, but I always seem to have the connections that my friends need, but never the ones that can be of use to me. I’m sure that there’s some job at GHQwith red flannel attached to it that I’d be perfect for, but I don’t know what it is, and nobody sponsors me.’
‘Nobody imagines that you need any help. Everyone thinks that you’re capable of looking after yourself, that if you weren’t satisfied with what you’d been offered, you’d find yourself the job that suited you.’
‘I suppose you’re right. At least I’m not worrying, but I do sometimes feel that I might be more usefully employed. Don’t you get that feeling sometimes ? What’s this job of yours at the mission like?’ As a matter of fact that was the precise feeling that I was getting. I had arrived in Beirut to find that there was no special niche for me in the mission. There was a publicity department. ‘But I can’t ask a writer of your standing to take on a post like that,’ the chargé d’affairs, whom I had already met in England, said to me. Tt’s a very minor sort of work and we’ve a very junior journalist who’s admirably suited for it. We’ll make you staff captain Q. so that you can fit into the establishment and draw staff pay, and look around to see if there’s not something that really suits you. Something’s bound to turn up soon.’
It had not yet and in the meantime my technical limitations had become apparent. I was concerned with transportation. I would attend conferences between French and English as an interpreter. An English colonel would announce: ‘And now Captain Waugh will explain to our French colleagues what it is we want from them.’ My French vocabulary was adequate to a dissertation on the pleasures of the table and the bed, but not to a discussion of the rival merits in a hilly area of track-lined and wheel-propelled vehicles. I was forced to admit that I did not know what these things were in English, let alone in French. I was beginning to suspect that the military section of General Spears’ mission to Syria and Lebanon would soon be needing a new staff captain Q. But I did not want to confide that to Raymond. He would have probably found me an appointment that would have put a crown upon my shoulder. But I did not want to be beholden to him. I preferred to make my own plans for myself.
‘It’s a funny kind of job,’ I said. ‘The last kind of thing that I pictured myself as doing when I went back into the army, but it’s going to prove very useful for me as a writer. I’m meeting my French opposite numbers for the first time. Up till now the only French men and women I’ve met have been fishermen or barmaids, the kind that went into the bars at Villefranche, with an occasional colonial official on a French liner, but here I’m mixing with the equivalents of the officers and their wives that I met at Dorchester at the Depot. I’m also meeting the Lebanese and they’re a delightful crowd. My posting out here has been a great, great piece of luck for me. I might so easily have found myself a garrison adjutant in a dreary midland town.’ I enlarged on the characteristics of the Lebanese; then I changed the subject.
‘I suppose you haven’t brought any photographs of your nephew’s wedding.’
‘As a matter of fact I have.’
Here on the terrace of this Mediterranean hotel, surrounded by a polyglot collection of Moslems with long white robes, their head scarves held in place on their foreheads by gold braided cords, by elegant young Lebanese women with their black shining hair falling loose over their shoulders, with smart French cavalry officers with pale blue kepis, with British officers in light gabardine uniforms, with the mountains towering in the background—the beleagured, deprived and rationed Britain that these photographs evoked seemed very far away yet heartbreakingly familiar. It had been a January wedding. The trees that you could glimpse outside were leafless. In the grate was burning a large fire, which must have involved a regime of strict rationing for a week. But there were the family portraits on the walls. There were the Chippendale chairs and table, the Queen Anne bookcase. It all looked as it had four years ago—except that in the centre of the group Michael was in uniform. He looked very handsome, very healthy. Iris was wearing a simple cocktail party dress. She had presumably had an economical trousseau.
‘Let’s hope it was a real honeymoon,’ I said.
‘It’s strange to think of the life that’s going on there now,’ he said. ‘My father and those three women and my young son. What must he be making of it?’
I asked what were Iris’ plans. Was she doing any war work, was she thinking of doing any war work? He shook his head. ‘I think that she’ll have all she can manage with her share of running Charminster. They used to have six servants, now they’ve got one cook. Thank heaven I’m not there. Let’s go and lunch and compare it with what they’re eating there.’
That was in March. During the next three months I was to become increasingly aware that I should need to find myself another posting. I was not the Staff Captain Q. that the Mission needed and I asked for a week’s leave in Cairo, in the course of which I could consult the MS branch on the possibility of my finding myself another billet.
At the Canal I changed trains, and took a ferry into Egypt. On the ferry was a young captain with whose face I was familiar but to which I could not put a name. He was wearing an identity bracelet. I edged close enough to be able to read it. Why, but of course, Robin Maugham, whom I had met at the Villa Mauresque five summers before. I re-introduced myself. It was seven o’clock. I had been planning to dine off a sandwich, but this was an occasion that demanded a celebration in the dining car. It was a meal that I remember still with gratitude. We were now on the Egyptian State Railways, and the wagon-lit company was maintaining its pre-war cellar at pre-war rates, content to let its patrons profit. We consumed a superb red Burgundy. I forget its label, but I remember gratefully its depth and richness—and the warm feelings that it nourished. That bottle began a friendship that has been one of the most valued treasures of these my later days; it was a friendship that was also to play a part in Raymond’s story.
The next few weeks had for Cairo a curious atmosphere of suspended animation. As I had been assured, I found no difficulty in getting myself a desk with the military security section of GHQ. A charming and very efficient major was in charge. He did not believe in making work where a need for work did not exist. All he demanded of his officers was a punctilious punctuality. That I dutifully supplied. The war was momentarily at a lull. In July there had been the days of panic when Rommel’s tanks had strolled towards the Canal, when wives and secretaries were flown to the safety of South Africa, when the secret files were burnt on the day that was to be called ‘Ash Wednesday’; Auchinleck had sent back Rommel ‘with a bleeding nose’; Churchill came out to reorganise the Eighth Army; soon it was rumoured that the Eighth Army would be resuming the attack under t
he new regime. In the meantime life went on, in that bland heavy heat, with party following on party, and the golf club crowded. There were some excellent cricket matches to be watched at the Gezira ground. On Saturdays Wally Hammond was not the only test cricketer to be seen there. I was staying at Shepherd’s; and in the evenings I could look out on the screens of two separate outdoor cinemas. At that time the newsreel of thte Malta convoy was on show and sleep was rendered impossible by the din of the bombing and the gunfire. That was the only evidence that we were at war. One morning there was a total eclipse of the moon which I watched in broad daylight from my hotel bedroom.
I saw a lot of Robin Maugham during this period. He had been wounded in the head in the Western desert. It had seemed a slight casualty at the time, but its consequences have plagued him all his life. He has been the victim of excruciating headaches. Even then it was apparent that he would be unfit for further combat service. He could have been posted back to England, but he had become interested in Middle East politics. He had the feeling that there was something of use for a person with his powerful connections. This was indeed to prove the case. He was largely responsible for the founding of the Middle East School of Languages behind Beirut. At the moment he was feeling his way towards that. He was a gentleman of leisure, without an occupation; officially awaiting posting in the pool, drawing pay and allowances, staying at the Continental; with his private income he did not have to worry about ways and means.
Not altogether surprisingly, he and Raymond had never met. They belonged to different generations. Raymond had been in Dominica half the time. Their military training had followed different courses, but they, of course, knew a great deal about each other. They could meet now on equal terms, with the same rank, though for someone like Robin, rank and age did not matter. He was, and is, a person of great vitality, great charm, in addition to being a man of outstanding gifts. His father had been Lord Chancellor. He had met and been on terms of friendship with many of the most influential personalities of the day. Yet he met everyone, no matter what their age or position in the social scale, on equal terms. He and Raymond liked each other from the start. And it was through Robin that Raymond became interested in Middle Eastern politics.
