The Love-Charm of Bombs (50 page)

Peter was less convinced. ‘The only thing that attracts me now to the German job,' he wrote on 14 February, ‘really the only one, is the prospect of a decent climate.' Every other aspect of German life seemed hateful. Nonetheless on 20 February Peter responded favourably to Hilde's suggestion that they should move to Germany (perhaps relieved that she had abandoned the idea of zigzagging around Europe). ‘Absolutely. If that is what you are after – I should have never dared suggesting such a Teutonic horror – I'm delighted – for a while.' But he warned her that the trouble with Germany was that where in Austria you could live and work without having to take the Austrians seriously, in Germany you could not help occupying yourself seriously with ‘the bastards and their problems' if you wanted to be of any use. He was worried that he would involve himself too deeply in their affairs and lose the English ground under his feet as a result. You could not laugh off the Germans as you could the Austrians because you never knew what they were going to do next.

Both Hilde and Peter continued to vacillate throughout the rest of the year. Peter was enjoying the powerful position he had created for himself in Berlin. The two newspapers he had founded,
Der Tagesspiegel
and
Der Telegraf
,
were both doing extremely well, and he was now responsible for editing
Die Welt
, trying to bring this rather substandard paper up to par with his own. ‘Already people are saying: the only two good newspapers in Berlin were founded by Mendelssohn,' he announced to Hilde in May. ‘The rest is rubbish.' He felt that he had now built up a platform from which to influence public opinion, and that this would be useful if and when the situation imploded with the Russians. Indeed, he wondered if he even had a duty to continue his public career, and to move from newspapers to politics.

 

I'm building up a record, and I'm not inclined to abandon it after a year. There is more to come, Mummi. I'm only 38 now, the same age as Crossman and Hugh Gaitskell and the rest. In five years, at 43, I shall have caught up with them, and shall be in parliament. I know I shall, and they're not going to stop me. Good job I joined the Labour Party when I did.

 

Hilde herself was still keen to be in Europe, but she was anxious about reports of renewed Nazism in Germany and about the risk of spending too long outside Britain and losing their carefully acquired Englishness. Peter wrote to reassure her that there was no Nazism and that they could return to England whenever they wanted. In fact, living in close quarters with the other British officials in Berlin they could be more intimately connected to the English than in London, where they were often isolated in Wimbledon. In Berlin he worked in a British office, surrounded by the British; ‘it is certainly not the Krauts who determine the picture'. And, perhaps more persuasively, he wanted them to be together. ‘I should like to give you a big kiss on your big soft lips and sleep with you in the same bed and feel your warm tummy,' he added, in a rare expression of physical affection.

 

 

See notes on Chapter 17

18

‘O, maybe we'll live a while in Killala'

The English in Ireland, 1947

 

Not everyone could contemplate leaving London altogether. However displaced they felt in post-war England, Henry Yorke and Graham Greene had no alternative home to return to, and instead found a respite from the English austerity of the late 1940s in briefer trips abroad. One particularly enticing destination was Ireland, which for them, as for Elizabeth Bowen, seemed to offer a tranquillity and ease that was now lacking in England. In fact the Irish economy was no stronger than the British economy. Unemployment was high and the cold winter of 1946 caused fuel shortages in Ireland as well as Britain. Bread rationing was imposed in January 1947. Strikes were threatened, and in June 1947 de Valera told the trade union representatives that the government would reluctantly ‘take whatever steps it felt necessary to protect bread supply'. But for Graham Greene and Henry Yorke as well as for their mutual friend Evelyn Waugh, the country's economic and social problems remained hidden. They appreciated the continued old-world luxury of the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin and the apparent plenty of rural Ireland.

Evelyn Waugh made several visits to Ireland in the autumn of 1946, hoping to buy a Big House or castle in which to hide away. That November he mentioned ‘constantly recurring' thoughts of Ireland in his diary.

 

Not so much of what I should find there as what I should shake off here. The luxury of being a foreigner, of completely retiring from further experience and settling in an upstairs library to garner the forty-three-year harvest.

 

He was certain that Britain as a great power was done for and that the loss of possessions and claim of the ‘proletariat' to be a ‘privileged race' would produce increasing poverty. He told Winston Churchill's son Randolph in December 1946 that he was negotiating to buy a castle in Ireland where he hoped to find ‘brief shelter from the Attlee terror'. In the end he did not buy the castle. Six years later Nancy Mitford remarked to him that ‘total to me is the mystery why you don't live in Ireland'. It was made for him, with its pretty houses, cold wetness, low income tax, polite lower classes and uncompromising Roman Catholicism.

Ireland was made, too, for Henry Yorke, who visited the country twice in 1947. Yorke had always been fond of Ireland, having fished there as a boy. Even the 1938 holiday had been pleasurable until the Munich crisis made it too difficult to continue. Before the war the Yorkes had stayed regularly with the Earl of Rosse at his eighteenth-century Gothic house, Birr Castle, in County Offaly, which some claim as the original of Kinalty, the house in
Loving
. Now Yorke was curious to see how Ireland had fared in the war, having described it from an imaginative distance in his novel.

In
Loving
Yorke shows the English servants to be contemptuous of Irish neutrality. ‘The war's on now all right,' Kate says to the other servants, ‘and do these rotten Irish care? They make me sick.' ‘It's too bloody neutral this country is,' Raunce tells Edith, revealing that his mother thinks they are ‘'iding ourselves away in this neutral country'. And his boy Albert goes so far as to return to England to join up as a soldier. But any patriotism Henry Yorke himself had felt during the war had dissipated by 1947 and he, like Waugh, was keen to make the most of the positive consequences of neutrality. In May, Dig had jaundice, so Henry took her and Sebastian to Dublin for eight days to recuperate. They stayed, like Bowen, Waugh and Greene on their nights in Dublin, in the Shelbourne Hotel. Bowen in particular was fond of the Shelbourne, reporting to Charles Ritchie after a visit to Dublin in November 1945 that ‘the dear Shelbourne was very much the same'. In her 1951 history of the hotel she commended it for carrying on its own ‘impassive, cheerful, wonderfully unchanged life throughout changing, sometimes distressful times'. Yorke too welcomed the unchanged luxury of the hotel, which contrasted refreshingly with the seedy London pubs where he now spent a large part of his days.

In September 1947 Henry Yorke took Dig and Sebastian to the Shelton Abbey Hotel in County Wicklow, on the coast between Dublin and Bowen's Court. This was a holiday which he described to Matthew Smith as ‘a complete success'. But he remained disengaged, both from the countryside and his family. Since the affair with Mary had waned he had rarely experienced anything passionately. His enjoyment of Ireland was very different from his happiness during that first holiday in Suffolk with Mary and Matthew, where he had felt like a donkey dropping its burden. Now his pervasive sense was one of apprehension. They were living in a large Victorian mansion, eating six-course meals and looking out onto a pageant of every shade of green. But Henry was finding the surroundings eerily desolate. There were no birds, rabbits or fish to be seen, and the only noise was the sound of a railway engine. ‘Sebastian and Dig are the only things that hold me to life,' he told Matthew; ‘they laugh and giggle all day long and do not notice.' And he blamed Ireland itself for his own troubled detachment: ‘The thing about Ireland is that it is cursed. That is probably true about all of us, and we may only notice it when over here.'

 

 

Graham Greene's visit to Ireland in April 1947 was one of the defining moments of his life. He flew to Dublin and then drove to Achill Island in County Mayo, just off the coast from Castlebar and a day's drive north-west from Bowen's Court. There he spent a week in a small cottage rented by Catherine Walston, a rich American socialite with film-star looks, impetuous vitality and candid sexuality. For most of the year Catherine was in charge of Thriplow Farm near Cambridge, one of the most extravagantly luxurious houses in post-war England, where she lived with her five children and her husband, Harry Walston, a rich gentleman farmer, civil servant and future Labour candidate. But occasionally she would retreat to this small, white, three-room cottage in Ireland, which looked out onto barren, wind-shorn grass and an empty bay. Together, Graham and Catherine filled up buckets of turf for the fire, baked bread, ate boiled eggs and made love on a mattress on the floor. For the first time in months, Graham was writing without difficulty; for the first time in years he had found peace. In a poem written in 1949 he depicted this as a revelatory entry into a new world:

 

A mattress was spread on a cottage floor,

And the door closed on a world, but another door

Opened, and I was far

From all the world I had ever known.

 

Graham was ready to close the door on the old world. In his autobiography, he described 1946 as a year when he felt himself at a loss. He was finding it difficult to write, chiefly because the booby-traps he had planted in his private life were blowing up one by one. He had always thought that war would bring death as a solution, but instead he was alive, causing unhappiness to people he loved and frequenting brothels once again. Like Scobie in
The Heart of the Matter
, the book he was struggling to write, Graham Greene contemplated suicide. But in fact salvation came through love instead of death, and it was a love that would result in his most passionate novel,
The End of the Affair
, and that would bring him some of the most intensely happy and also the most anguished moments of his life.        

Catherine was twelve years younger than Graham and had come into his life the previous summer as his would-be goddaughter. On the verge of converting to Catholicism, she wrote to tell him how crucial his novels had been in her decision and to ask if he would take the part of godfather. Too busy to play more than a nominal role in the proceedings, Graham sent Vivien to the christening in his stead. On 25 September he wrote Catherine a belated congratulatory note, confessing to being a neglectful godfather – he had not even sent her a silver mug – and conveying her all best wishes for the future. She replied with an enticing description of Achill Island; Graham suggested that she should come to tell them all about the west of Ireland when she was back. He was in fact genuinely curious about Ireland. Earlier in the year he had written to Evelyn Waugh saying that he was keen to go to Ireland, because he liked the Irish and approved so strongly of their recent neutrality, and complaining that Vivien had an anti-Irish phobia, so he would not be able to go. Soon he would make plans to go to Ireland with Dorothy the following May.

 

Vivien Greene (
top right
) at the christening of Catherine Walston (
bottom left
)

 

Graham and Catherine finally met in the autumn. They had a drink in London, where Catherine was intrigued by Graham's descriptions of excursions to the nude revues at the Windmill Theatre. Then in December Catherine invited Graham to come to lunch with her family at Thriplow Farm. Evelyn Waugh, visiting Thriplow with Greene in 1948, described it to Nancy Mitford as ‘an extraordinary house', which revealed ‘a side of life I never saw before – very rich, Cambridge, Jewish, socialist, highbrow, scientific, farming':

 

There were Picassos on sliding panels and when you pushed them back plate glass and a stable with a stallion looking at one. No servants. Lovely Carolean silver unpolished. Gourmets' wine and cigars. The house a series of wood bungalows, more bathrooms than bedrooms. The hostess at six saying ‘I say shall we have dinner tonight as Evelyn's here. Usually we only have Shredded Wheat. I'll see what there is.' Goes to tiny kitchenette and comes back. ‘Well there's grouse, partridges, ham, a leg of mutton and half a cold goose' (literally). ‘What does anyone want?' Then a children's nannie dining with us called ‘Twinkle' dressed with tremendous starched frills and celluloid collars, etc and everyone talking to her about lesbianism and masturbation. House telephone so that generally people don't bother to meet but just telephone from room to room.