When the appointment was confirmed he told Baba at once, writing to her sadly on December 21: “How hateful this last 24 hours has been, with all that it means, redeemed only by being able to share the first feelings of it all with you, and by the knowledge that we should not be as far away from each other as outward things would appear.”
Baba was shattered by the news. Irene’s journal for the following day records: “In my post a heartbroken letter from Baba saying she had had two days of agony in London and that she did not know what it would do to her with him gone to Washington.” Irene went straight to the Dorch to see Halifax, who told her that he thought his appointment a mistake but that Dorothy had failed to convince Churchill of this. Irene concluded by telling him how sad she was for Baba, adding, in a parallel that may have startled Halifax, “I only hope she will look upon it as Nancy looked upon Philip Lothian going there—as God’s will.” Lothian had been the man closest to Nancy Astor for many years.
32
An Unexpected Proposal
For Baba, the New Year of 1941 was overshadowed by the departure of the Halifaxes for America. “I dread their going,” she wrote in her diary. “It seems like the bottom falling out of my present world . . . no letters, no dinners, no heavenly cosy evenings, besides the interest of knowing a bit what goes on in the world. I’m sure his success is certain and he may well be the key to getting America in finally, but it is a hard price to pay.” She was with them constantly in London before they left, only taking time off to drive herself, Irene, Nick and Vivien to Brixton Prison on January 13 so that the children could see their father for the first time since his arrest and detention eight months earlier. But their visit was fruitless.
“Did everything possible to see him but without success,” records her diary.
That evening Victor Cazalet, together with the builder of the hotel, Sir Malcolm MacAlpine, gave a huge farewell party for Edward and Dorothy at the Dorchester. He sent the Curzon sisters corsages of orchids, with which they bedecked themselves, but it did not make the entertainment any more appropriate, in Irene’s opinion: “47 people they would never want to see on their last day in England.”
The Halifaxes left on the morning of January 14. Baba went to church early; on her return, there were constant telephone calls as the final packing was completed and last-minute government messages came through. All the while Baba went backward and forward between Irene’s room and the Halifaxes, getting whiter and tenser by the minute. Finally, they had to part. “We were all three crying so much it was impossible to speak,” wrote Baba later. “The sweetness of Dorothy has been unbelievable. She might well have been bored by my friendship with Edward; instead, the things she said about what it had meant to him, and them both, made me want to cry.”
Baba came back from seeing them off just after eleven, fell into Irene’s chair and wept so copiously that Irene shed tears in sympathy. Sensitively, she left her sister alone for a while, going off to pay her bill and talk to people in the hall. At 11:45 Walter Monckton called in for ten minutes to report that the Halifaxes had sent a final farewell to Baba as they were being seen off at the station by the assembled cabinet.
Both of them wrote to Baba that day, Dorothy to say how she treasured Baba’s friendship and Edward Halifax a more intimate note from the train.
I have just opened your note, Baba darling. It has made it seem a little less beastly in one way wishing you goodbye this morning and in another infinitely worse. You need not be afraid that I will forget you or stop loving you, for I don’t think that would be possible, and the memory of you, and knowing you are remembering me in your thoughts and prayers, will be of quite untold help.
You were so good and brave this morning, with that horrible Miss Bennett and everyone else buzzing round. But we both knew what we both were thinking and, hard as that made it, it yet helped, for we were so very close together.
The Halifaxes crossed on the new British battleship, the King George V, to Chesapeake Bay. A letter from Charles Peake, the witty diplomat who was Halifax’s private secretary, suggested that all those close to Halifax were aware of how much Baba meant to him. “Edward sent you a letter in a cigarette tin which was soldered up, tied to a buoy and a flare, thrown overboard and subsequently picked up by a destroyer.* Most romantic I call it. I wish for many reasons you were here and think you will have to end by coming if the mission is to be a real success and he is to be happy.”
Peake’s letter was followed closely by one from Halifax himself, written on February 2. “You can guess how I am longing for a first letter from you. I tell myself that one might come any day now if they had sent a bag by air mail. It seems perfectly ages and ages since we said goodbye to each other in the Dorch. Anyway it is three weeks nearer the time when we shall see each other again.”
Baba was well aware that Halifax showed her letters to Dorothy. Certainly the letter which she wrote to both Halifaxes from Cliveden on January 24 was noticeably different in tone from Halifax’s, expressing simple friendship only, without the endearments and longing that thread his. “Here it is relatively peaceful and Nancy in a sweet mood. She thinks that it was a pity Waldorf and she were not sent to Washington as they could have carried on with Philip’s work as every connection he made and everything he knew of the U.S.A. was what she had taught him!
“Apparently the Pooh [their nickname for Winston Churchill] asked the hectic Corgi [Lloyd George] to join the band wagon but he refused except on his own terms which were a cabinet of five and an early meeting every morning with ministers fresh from their slumbers.” From Ditchley [the home of the Trees] two days later she wrote: “Everything heard at Cliveden proved to be wrong! The Corgi will never be a member of the Government as there will not be a war cabinet and anyway he hates the war.”
Halifax tried to counter their separation by maintaining a regular flow of letters, all numbered so that they would not be taken out of order, sometimes accompanied by extracts from his diary, sometimes giving her news from the U.S.: “I am sending you cuttings from the papers this morning on Wally’s operation for face lifting! To judge by the photographs she would have been better to leave it alone, I think! I am hearing mutterings about the governor of the Bahamas wanting to come up here. With the face-lifted one? I suppose so.”
All the letters breathe love and longing. “Jan 14 seems a terribly long time ago,” he wrote on February 10, “and all I have had of you since then is your photograph which looks at me as I write, and your last note, that I keep locked up but look at from time to time.” The epistolary log jam was soon broken. By mid-February he had received several letters from Baba.
He advised her on her marital difficulties.
I have thought a lot about your problem, darling, about how much you should say to F when he is doing something that is likely to put him wrong with other people. I would have thought you certainly should say what you thought, and why, very nicely. After all it takes two doesn’t it (or perhaps it doesn’t) to make a row and I would think that you could say your say in unprovocative form and when you saw a row likely to begin, step off and refuse to be drawn, saying that you had only thought it right to tell him how it might strike other people etc. Anyway I loved your asking my advice about it.
He added a cryptic sentence implying that some of their correspondence was shielded from Dorothy’s eyes: “Your little note where you abandoned the high tone of respectability pleased me much as you can guess. When you do abandon respectability, put it on a separate sheet from your regular letter (although your letters come to me unopened all right) . . . You are seldom out of my thoughts, my dearest, and I pray for you every day. May God continue to let us bring happiness to each other.”
The cold and her hard work took their toll on Irene’s health, but she continued to go to her committee meetings and to visit canteens. In mid-March, she paid a visit of a different kind, driving Nick over from Eton to Denham. Here they were met by the charming Colonel O’Shea, in charge
of the intelligence work taking place in the house, so sensitive that they were not even allowed to walk through the gardens. The house was in excellent condition, the barn had been rebuilt and one of the cottages had even been fitted up with electric light and telephone.
As one of the Dorch inner circle, Irene naturally saw a great deal of Victor Cazalet, so she was not surprised to receive a confidence from him. He was, he told her, going to America in three days’ time with General Sikorski* for a short visit. Her first thought was that it would make Baba green with envy. She was, however, greatly taken aback by the next development. She had imagined that Victor would be going by the usual route, by clipper from Lisbon [the commercial air service to the U.S.], so was surprised to receive a letter from him in Scotland. She was even more surprised by its contents: a proposal of marriage.
It took her several days to come to a decision. She was very fond of Victor. Almost a year younger than herself—she was just forty-five—he was good-looking, intelligent, cheerful, rich, gregarious and, as Conservative MP for Chippenham, the friend of many ministers. They had much in common: Irene was passionate about music, Victor was a talented pianist; she greatly enjoyed tennis, at which he was a near professional; even more important, his faith was as deep as her own. She had many Jewish friends and intensely disliked any form of anti-Semitism; he was a keen Zionist and friend of Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s future president. Victor’s sister Thelma was perhaps Irene’s greatest woman friend.
Baba begged Irene to consider Victor’s offer, but she finally decided against it, even though she was fundamentally lonely despite her life of ceaseless activity. One reason was probably her suspicion that Victor was not really “the marrying kind.” So, on March 27, she wrote her refusal, sealed it up, and gave it to Baba to enclose in her letter to Halifax (which went by the diplomatic bag) as the quickest and surest way to reach him.
Devoted though she was to Halifax, Baba did not let his absence inhibit her lively social life. In fact Baba had so many admirers, who rang at all hours, that Irene found sharing her Dorchester room with her sister difficult. The three chief beaux, who seemed to be constantly on the telephone, were the American diplomat Averell Harriman, Walter Monckton and Leo d’Erlanger. Sometimes she would ask one or more of them down to Little Compton in a house party for the weekend; often they would take her to whatever gathering they had been invited to—generally something important or glamorous, as when she arrived back very late one night having dined in a large party with Walter Monckton, Lord Beaverbrook, Brendan Bracken, Averell Harriman and others. “She certainly gets ‘in,’ on much more than me and gets all those people to do her bidding,” Irene noted enviously. “I had a bad morning of loneliness, fears and hopelessness,” she wrote on March 29, two days after turning Victor down.
To the outside world she appeared frantically busy. She worked daily in the East End, running a busy food center serving meals to the bombed-out. She also visited nurseries, where the warmth she always felt for children could be given free rein. “The children much enjoyed your visit,” wrote Father Edwyn Young after she had visited a children’s home in Wapping. “And this is not because you are who you are, but because they love your natural and friendly approach, and because they’ll always look on you as a friend, and a friend in the best sense—i.e., one who came to see and cheer them up when they most needed a little cheerfulness.”
But in her bouts of depression Irene wondered why she did not manage other more public achievements, such as speaking on the BBC like Violet Bonham-Carter, or why she did not have such devoted friends as Baba. “She can order them to do anything she wants. What is wrong with me that I fail on these lines? But I suppose if the poor and lonely love one as their friend it was like Christ and I am grateful.” For Irene, though, it was not enough, and gradually she began to turn to her old comforter, the bottle.
At the British embassy in Washington, the possibility of a visit by the Windsors had been mooted, a prospect viewed by Halifax with barely concealed repugnance. “You will be amused to hear about the Windsors,” he wrote at once to Baba. “He telegraphed home to say he thought of coming here and I was asked my opinion. I said that I deprecated it but if it had to be we had all better pretend to like it and do him well.”
Fortunately for the Halifaxes, the duke had just given an extraordinarily indiscreet interview to the American magazine Liberty. Sitting amid the white satins and chintzes of his drawing room in the Bahamas, dominated by a portrait of his wife over the mantelpiece, he had lamented the fact that he had never met Mussolini. Although he acknowledged that Churchill and Roosevelt were greater than either Hitler or Mussolini, he went on to say, “There will be a new order in Europe whether it is imposed by Germany or Great Britain.” The Duke even advocated that the United States should keep out of the war as it was “too late” to make any difference, adding that he himself could later act as mediator between the two sides. Churchill reacted immediately with a stinging telegram of rebuke. “The appended passage from the article in Liberty which has not been repudiated by Your Royal Highness gives the impression and can only bear the meaning of contemplating a negotiated peace with Hitler. That is not the policy of HMG nor is it that of the Government and the vast majority of people in the U.S.” Churchill requested the duke not to go to Washington; the duchess’s spending habits on visits to Miami were already incurring criticism.
The Windsor visit averted, Halifax turned to other matters in his letters home. All refer to his hoped-for visit from Baba, made more likely because his inquiries had led to someone who could fix her a return passage either by clipper or in a bomber. He was, he assured her, constant in his affections. He updated her on the war front.
Roosevelt is declaring the Red Sea open which means American ships can start carrying stuff to Suez. He is also I fancy considering direct convoying but I doubt whether he will get there just yet. And I guess he will start showing the fleet up a bit more in the Atlantic, with the object of knowing where raiders are not, which will help our hunting groups. They are also going to get hold of the foreign ships tied up here and this will influence South American states. So there is a good deal to put against the sinkings, and they are of course building as hard as they can.
I don’t like this Balkan scene a bit, though Egypt looks a bit better. As regards the Balkans, even if we get kicked out altogether I expect it will be less bad than if we hadn’t tried to help the Greeks. Morale is what is going to count in the long run, and the moralities. And this country I would guess will be moved by our desperate efforts to save Europe and the world. I fancy they are more and more feeling a bit self-reproachful while we are suffering, to be only making money . . . the real reason I should like to come [home in August]—apart from private reasons!—is to get in touch with what Pooh [Churchill] and Co are thinking, so that one can be intelligent here.
Baba in her turn regaled him with gossip, telling him of Victor’s proposal to Irene even before Victor knew he had been turned down. “First and foremost Victor!!!” wrote Halifax on April 17. “Dorothy and I have done nothing but smile whenever we have thought of it. Somehow it never would have occurred to me. I did not know he might be thinking on those lines. I would give a great deal to hear your nocturnal discussions on this with Irene. I see she has written to him and I have duly forwarded it. Do tell me if you can when you write as to the decision. I should hate to think of his poor little feelings being hurt. But it certainly is an odd idea.”
In early spring the Luftwaffe stepped up its night raids on London and the southeast while Germany’s success in other theaters of war kept the thought of invasion alive. Raids or not, Londoners did their best to lead normal lives, and Baba’s admirers were no exception. Walter Monckton, with whom she had been on terms of friendship since first they met, seemed now to have become a would-be lover. After they had both dined with the Willingdons in Lygon Place, Walter Monckton came back with Irene to the Dorchester to see Baba, and as Irene recorded: “After talki
ng in my room they went into her bolthole and lay on the bed and chattered till all hours!!!” A letter from him in April certainly hints at a sexual relationship.
“Darling Baba, Not ‘hurtingly faithless!’ How can you say that when you keep me tantalisingly suspended between frying pan and fire. The fire just doesn’t begin to burn. The frying pan fries only too efficiently. But I agree toto corde with Edward. It is your bounden duty as a friend to extricate me from these perils. But it is you who are faithless. You extricate the Averells and the Bills but you allow this poor old man to sizzle—with cool detachment.”
After nine months came the last and greatest raid on London. On May 10, 1941, in the bright moonlight that became known as “bombers’ moon,” 550 German bombers dropped hundreds of high-explosive bombs and over one hundred thousand incendiaries. Fourteen hundred died that night—the most for any single raid—every railway station was hit and the chamber of the House of Commons reduced to rubble. It provoked from Fruity, who had come to accept their separateness, a passionate plea to Baba, begging her in the name of sense and judgment not to come to London. He wrote to her from White’s Club because his room at the Ritz, where he had spent the night, was unusable.
It was terrifying—a foot of ceiling and windows all over my room, rug, chest etc crashing into the passage buried in a heap of rubbish. No lights, no phone, no anything. One bomb dropped when I was in bed in the garden outside my window. The streets today are a foot deep in glass.
It is not fair on your three children if you do come up. Please believe me and act accordingly. Death is round every corner here in a night like last. It is even money if you escape, with at least your eyesight gone through broken glass. I implore you not to make the excuse of “dining with Walter,” “hearing Walter speak” or dining with Cazalet or people like the Halifaxes. These people have got to be here, doing their work. If you had work to do then I’d say do it and stay but having absolutely none it is very wrong for you to come near London.
The Viceroy's Daughters Page 40
