A Sort of Life (14 page)

I
ONLY
stayed in Paris ten days, although it was my first visit abroad. Claud Cockburn and I had become probationary members of the Communist Party at Oxford, and I held a Party card containing three or four sixpenny stamps which represented my monthly contributions. It was a very small branch, though it served both city and university; I doubt if there were more than half a dozen members, and Cockburn and I, with no scrap of Marxist belief between us, joined only with the far-fetched idea of gaining control and perhaps winning a free trip to Moscow and Leningrad, cities which six years after the Revolution still had a romantic appeal. Our mercenary motive was seen through almost at once by a very serious Australian Rhodes scholar who was much older than ourselves and we soon ceased to attend meetings.
¹
But I still kept my card as a souvenir, and with it in my hand I visited the Communist headquarters in Paris, where they were equally puzzled by my youth and my bad French. However I was invited to a meeting that night somewhere around Menilmontant. The working-class quarter was full of policemen in blue steel helmets and Gardes Mobiles who carried rifles, but the meeting nonetheless bored me to exhaustion. Endless messages from branches abroad were read out amid cheers, and soon I slipped away and took the Métro home to my hotel in the Rue Tronchet and the huge blue copy of
Ulysses
, the size of a telephone directory, which I had bought on my first day in Paris at Sylvia Beach’s bookshop. Years later, writing
It’s a Battlefield
, I used this meeting and the sense of futility it conveyed to describe
rather unfairly a branch meeting of the Communist Party in London.

This was the only experience which differentiated my visit from that of any other young man in the 1920s. I went to the Casino de Paris to see Mistinguette, to the Concert Mayol to excite myself with naked breasts and thighs, and then back to the small room smelling of urine in the second-class hotel in the Rue Tronchet, passing the Madeleine on my way. The Madeleine in those days was suitably surrounded by aunt-like figures of a certain age who called to me as I went by. But I was too timid to make my first experiment in copulation with any of them, or else they were not young or pretty enough when I compared them with the girls of the Concert Mayol. It was certainly no sense of morality which restrained me. Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.

I had one respectable chance of adventure, and there is a touch of vanity in the letter I wrote to my mother about it: someone at least had considered me old enough to marry. ‘At the moment I am in a state of utter panic. I have just had two solid hours of French conversation (good for me, I suppose) with a French matron in this hotel. She has a daughter, whom I have not met. I did not meet the mother till this morning. She has been matchmaking in a most brazen and terrifying manner. She has described her daughter most intimately with regard to character and looks. She has even insisted on my meeting her this afternoon, and corresponding with her from England when I return. She has had the barefaced impertinence, though I assure you I gave her no encouragement, to inquire into my prospects. As though I had asked her blasted daughter in marriage! At any rate she confessed that her daughter was
plus tranquille et plus timide
than herself. And at the end, as she left the room, leaving me limp and helpless, a poor fly hopelessly entangled in the web, powerless even to struggle, she let out her only words of English, “Pardon me, but you see – I am a mozzer.” It’s lucky I’ll be leaving on Wednesday. She can’t possibly make me propose in three days. And yet – the Lord knows what she can’t do.’

As a distraction from lost love and baffled desire Paris was not a success, and now that Russian roulette had failed me, I tried drink instead when I returned to Oxford. For nearly one term I went to bed drunk every night and began drinking again immediately I woke. I had given up going to lectures after my first term, judging them less useful than reading; and now, though I was within a few terms of my final exams, I only had to be sober once a week when I read an essay to my tutor.

At the end of term there was a ceremony called ‘The Handshake’, when each in turn had to sit at a table opposite the Master and the Dean, while his tutor commented on the work he had done during the term. I was helped as far as the door by two of my friends, Robert Scott and George Whitmore, who held me on a steady course through the quad. Then I slumped into a chair beside Kenneth Bell and faced the Master and the Dean. I don’t think it occurred to either of these two that an undergraduate would appear before them drunk at that early hour and on such a serious occasion and they probably put down any strangeness in my manner to nerves. My tutor recognized my state, but he was sympathetic. Kenneth Bell and the Dean (who was known as ‘Sligger’) were the two opposite poles of the college, and they had little liking for each other. Sligger gathered around him young men who attracted him by their looks and who played, if only superficially, the comedy of homosexual inclinations: Bell’s pupils were aggressively heterosexual and were inclined, like himself, to drink large quantities of beer. So he stage-managed skilfully what might have been a disastrous Handshake, and I was released safely into the care of my friends who had a taxi waiting and they lodged me as though I were something breakable in the train for Bletchley. The long wait there for the connection to Berkhamsted was enough to sober me. I have never again in my life drunk quite so heavily over so long a period, but I have cause to be grateful to that spell of alcoholism: it left me with a strong head and a tough liver. ‘Mithridates he died old.’
²

Now I look back, there seems something a little bizarre about my Oxford days. They certainly do not recall those of Newman or the early pages of
Brideshead Revisited
; perhaps they were closer to Maclean’s and Kim Philby’s at Cambridge …

A small affair of what might have become espionage began innocently enough in early 1924. I had read a book of short stories by Geoffrey Moss called
Defeat
about the occupied zones of Germany. Moss described the attempt of the French authorities in their zone to establish a separatist Palatine Republic between the Moselle and the Rhine. German criminals had been brought in from Marseilles and other ports – pimps, brothel-keepers, thieves from French prisons – to support the collaborators. Even one of the ministers had served a prison sentence. French troops held the crowds back while unarmed German police were beaten unconscious. Only the opposition of the British and American governments put an end to what was known as the Revolver Republic, but it was believed in Germany that at any moment the ‘spontaneous’ outbreak would be renewed.

I was easily aroused to indignation by cruelties not my own, and the idea of experiencing a little danger made me write to the German Embassy in Carlton Gardens and offer my services as a propagandist. The
Oxford Outlook
was at my disposal, for I was the editor, and to the
Oxford Chronicle
, a city paper, I was a regular contributor, if only of the five-shilling love poems.

I had not expected the promptitude of the German response. Coming back one early evening to my rooms in Balliol I found my armchair occupied, my only bottle of brandy almost finished, and a fat blond stranger who rose and introduced himself, ‘Count von Bernstorff.’ He was the first secretary of the German Embassy, a man who loved luxury and boys and who frequented a shady club called the Abyssinia in Archer Street, Soho. No one could have foretold that hidden in those folds of flesh was a hero who was to run a Jewish escape-route from Germany to Switzerland during the last war and be executed in Moabit prison.

My days after that seemed to be filled by Germans – there was a very pretty Countess von Bernstorff, the diplomat’s cousin, who left a scented glove behind in my room to be added to my adolescent harem of inanimate objects, a young man with a long complicated title, who claimed a nobler and longer descent than the Hohenzollerns, and a mysterious wizened narrow figure with a scarred face, Captain P., whose full name I have now forgotten. Captain P. would turn up at irregular intervals, like someone who looks in at a kitchen door to see if the kettle is boiling. Now that I have worked in the Secret Service myself, I feel I should have smelt him out immediately as an intelligence officer. The day arrived when I called at Carlton Gardens and Count Bernstorff handed me a packet and told me to burn the envelope – which, of course, I kept for some years as a souvenir. Inside were twenty-five pound notes – more than sufficient in those days for a fortnight’s holiday down the Rhine and the Moselle.

My father took the affair very seriously. He told me how Lord Haldane’s career had been wrecked by his too great friendship for the Germans, and he offered to pay for my holiday himself. I knew that he could ill afford his generosity and I refused the offer. After all, I argued, I was not going to follow the same career as Lord Haldane and was unlikely to attain his eminence.

I asked Claud Cockburn to come with me; we were to be joined in Germany by my cousin Tooter, for neither Claud nor I could speak German. We went inexpensively by the Hook, and as we were laughing with pleasure in the railway compartment to Harwich at the thought of our free holiday and the confiding nature of German diplomats, there slid in beside us thin narrow Captain P. with his duel-scarred face. Our laughter broke abruptly off and we tried to appear the serious observers we were meant to be. I was very sea-sick on the crossing in spite of Mothersil and saw no more of Captain P. – perhaps he
was sea-sick too.

Our holiday was uneventful, in spite of the stack of introductions which waited for us in the Cologne hotel. There we met a man called Waldenheim who was the political organizer in the German Volkspartei, and an industrial magnate, Doctor Hennings, who owned a great dye factory outside Cologne and gave us a gargantuan feast in Leverkusen, while he talked glibly of Germany’s starvation.

After Cologne we went to Essen and lodged in simple luxury at Krupp’s private hotel. In the Ruhr, newly occupied by French troops, ‘there was a delightful sensation of being hated by everybody,’ I wrote my mother. ‘No tourist could be expected in the Ruhr, and I suppose all foreigners are taken for French officials. In the evening we went to a cabaret where we were even more unwelcome, and a rather fat naked woman did a symbolic dance of Germany in chains, ending up of course by breaking her fetters.’ I can remember still the menace of Essen where most of the factory workers were on strike: the badly lit streets, the brooding groups. We flirted with fear and began to plan a thriller together rather in Buchan’s manner.

At Bonn, then a small provincial university town, we stayed for half a crown a day in a little
gasthaus
built in 1649. On the riverside at night, encouraged by the atrocity stories we had heard in Cologne, we followed innocent Senegalese soldiers in the hope of seeing a rape, which never occurred. At Trier on the Moselle, which had been the centre of the Separatist movement, Spahis in turbans and long cloaks lounged under the Roman gateway, but there were no incidents to excite us. A local editor told us that every letter which left Trier was censored by the French authorities, so I wrote a letter to myself, addressed to ‘The Editor of the
Oxford Outlook
’, recounting imaginary atrocities by the French and mentioning the day and hour of the train we were to take out of the zone. But there were no soldiers to arrest us on the platform and the letter arrived safely in England unopened – a useful lesson in checking one’s information.

Only in Heidelberg, outside the occupied zone, did our introductions provide us with an interesting encounter. There in the bureau of what was called respectably the Society for the Relief of Exiles from the Palatinate we
met a kindly middle-aged
man in plus-fours called Doctor Eberlein, who frankly explained to us the real purpose of his society. He was a kidnapper. He recruited young men to drive fast cars across the frontier into the French zone where they seized mayors and officials who were collaborating with the French authorities and bundled them back into Germany to be ‘tried’ for high treason.

In those days, when Hitler was still unknown to us, Doctor Eberlein’s adventurous story appealed to me and gave me an idea for the future. When I returned home I wrote to Count Bernstorff suggesting that there might be difficulties in transmitting funds to the secret nationalist organizations in the occupied zone. An Oxford undergraduate would hardly be suspected as a courier … After some delay Bernstorff replied. He wrote that at present they had no difficulty in transmitting funds, but he had been asked by his ‘friends’ in Berlin whether I would be prepared to return to the French zone, get in touch with the Separatist leaders and try to obtain some information about their plans for the future. I finished reading the letter with excitement and a measure of pride, for I was being promoted from propaganda to espionage. It was a heady thought for a boy of nineteen, and I am amazed now, in these more security-conscious days, at what both of us had so rashly put upon paper.

Today, I would have scruples about the purpose I served, but at that age I was ready to be a mercenary in any cause so long as I was repaid with excitement and a little risk. I suppose too that every novelist has something in common with a spy: he watches, he overhears, he seeks motives and analyses character, and in his attempt to serve literature he is unscrupulous.

It was an odd schizophrenic life I lived during the autumn term of 1924. I attended tutorials, drank coffee at the Cadena, wrote an essay on Thomas More, studied the revolution of 1688 ‘from original sources’, read papers on poets to the Ordinary and the Mermaid, attended debates at the Union, got drunk with friends; then ‘Cross a step or two of dubious twilight, come out on the other side, the novel’. There another life began, where I exchanged last letters with the woman I loved, who was engaged to another man, wrote a first novel
never to be published, the unhappy history of a black child born to white parents, and prepared plans with Bernstorff for espionage. All the time Germans were dropping into my life unannounced, arriving from Paddington for the day to see the colleges and drink in my room. Of course my parents had no suspicion of what I was about, but surely my social life during that last year at Oxford must have surprised them a little. ‘My gentleman from the Foreign Office, Berlin,’ I wrote to my mother, ‘was great fun. A real pre-war Prussian, but with a charming wife. In town he had been to
Primrose, Saint Joan
and
White Cargo
and explained the contrast in the real blood-and-iron fashion: “You must see all kinds of plays, in order to sympathize with all types of people, for only by sympathizing with them can you dominate them. It also helps in the study of their weak points.” I felt all through lunch, which he gave me at the Mitre, that he was trying to discover mine. However
his
weak point was adiposity, and I quite broke his spirit and dominated him thoroughly by dragging him round Oxford at the speed of an express.’ Didn’t it occur to my parents that their son was keeping somewhat curious company?