A World of My Own (6 page)

In 1966, only six months after the German invasion, civil war broke out. I was in my home town of Berkhamsted and, returning to the town after a walk on the Common, I found leaflets strewn around bearing what was obviously the code name for a military operation. I remembered what a close woman friend had said to me as a joke when I told her I was leaving England to live in France: ‘You’ll be back for the civil war.’

Near the station I saw in the sky a multitude of small planes and parachutes all the same colour as the leaflets, and as I hastened up Castle Street I found the parachutists were coming up behind me in a dense body filling the streets. It was some kind of an attempted Fascist take-over. A platoon of soldiers came down the road and a clash was inevitable because
the Fascists would not give way, nor I hoped would the troops. But I was unprepared for the savage way in which the troops bayoneted the leading Fascists, for they were unarmed and it was a massacre.

I took refuge in a house where I found the Prime Minister, who was then Wilson. No one there seemed to want to know that fighting had started. Wilson appeared weak, worried, indeterminate. His only action was to go to another room to be left in peace.

There was an occasion which I am proud to remember when I was instrumental in capturing Hitler. I happened to be waiting on a railway platform when I saw two men leave a train. One I knew was a general in German Intelligence, and when I looked at his companion I felt sure I recognized Hitler, though the absurd moustache had gone and his face was crumpled and more human. I shouted to all who were standing around, ‘Hitler. Hitler’s alive.’

The two men were descending into a subway. People looked at me as if I were mad, but I continued my cries and the escape of the two was stopped.
Hitler returned angrily to me. We went up to the end of the platform, where we sat down and talked a long while. I can’t remember the subject of our conversation. A few others were there helping to guard him and presently a squad of soldiers arrived and took him away.

Europe was under German occupation and I had an appointment for lunch with a leader of the Resistance who had been personally responsible for the murder of half a dozen German soldiers. ‘I hope you don’t sympathize with that,’ a friend said to me.

I felt very conspicuous walking over a piece of open country in town clothes and a soft hat. German soldiers were drilling and a German officer was walking behind me. I was afraid of being stopped. I saw some militia also on an exercise.

At the entrance to a small town I was surprised to find a customs post. There was no avoiding it. I was stopped by a black soldier and the man in charge asked me if I had anything to declare. I said, ‘Two hundred cigarettes.’ He tore the pack open, checked the cigarettes, and returned them to me, pointing to a poster which authorized him to pass cigarettes if
they were ‘elegantly and properly’ declared. So I went on to what I knew would be a dangerous lunch.

I found myself back in the Malayan Emergency, which I had known in the Common World in 1951. I was hiding from the Chinese guerrillas, but at the same time I was a possible target for the British bombers searching them out. The bombers had an ingenious system by which electric lightbulbs lit up on the ground to expose the presence of a living person and then a bomb was dropped. I lay down on the ground and immediately a light went on beside me. I flung it away into the dark and crawled away, but as soon as I stopped another light went on. There seemed little hope of escaping the bombs, but all the same I somehow did escape, and joined an unofficial group of English who were searching for the guerrillas.

I was only nine in the Common World when the First World War began, but in the World of My Own my memory of 1914 is very different.

The war began with total disaster to the British army and the unconditional surrender of Field Marshal French, who became himself a prisoner with another general who bore the name of Juillard. Their wives were allowed to join them in captivity, which helped their morale, and General Juillard’s wife brought him an electrical apparatus with which he could ‘do things’ and pass the time. What puzzles me now is how we emerged victorious after such a total defeat.

For the first time in this very personal World of My Own I found myself someone else. I was Wilfred Owen, the poet, and I wore an officer’s uniform and a steel helmet in the style of the First World War. I was alone in a dug-out and I recited a poem I had composed to the photograph of the girl I loved. I called the poem ‘Givenchy’, which I suppose was a place in the line held by my regiment. The poem went something like this and I spoke it aloud.

Suddenly weariness of the interminable war swept over me and I began to sob. As I cried—or rather as Wilfred Owen cried—a voice said, ‘The Germans have dropped gas bombs on this or that section.’

I have just spent a dangerous day in Haiti at Port-au-Prince. I was with my friend Trevor Wilson, a former member of M.I.6 whom I had last seen when he was consul in Hanoi. We were both arrested almost immediately on landing. My black police guard proved to be a great reader of rather juvenile fiction featuring a character called Bambi. Opening one of the stories at random I could see it was high-flown and erotic, with a scene where Bambi was being seduced by the Queen of Heaven.

I promised the man that I would get him the complete series of about seventeen volumes, and he whisked me into an invalid chair, put a cloth over my head, and so got me out of prison. Somehow I managed to release Trevor too and we went rapidly down the road and then up the drive of the British embassy to take refuge there. I was a little hurt by the coolness and lack of interest shown by the ambassador
and his wife, who had just returned from a picnic. I had known them before, when they were in Santo Domingo. But of course ambassadors never want to get involved in trouble.

On another visit I had gone to the lavatory of my hotel in Haiti to shit when I was told that an admiral and a general were waiting to see me. I hurried to finish and join them. They looked a little absurd in their uniforms and decorations, but they seemed honest men. They told me that any day now there was going to be a revolution. ‘You and your friends better get away as soon as possible. Anyway the moment you notice something unusual go into hiding. You have shoes—offer your shoes as a bribe. People want shoes badly and they would hide you.’

‘What will you do?’ I asked the general.

He replied with great dignity, ‘I will die. No one will hide me.’

Rereading the diary I kept in the sixties of my life in a World of My Own, I seem to have played the same kind of Russian roulette that I once played in the Common World, for I returned yet again and again to Haiti.

In November 1966 I found myself driving very unwillingly through the streets of Port-au-Prince with
Peter Glenville, with whom in the Common World I had been working on the film of
The Comedians
, a book condemned by Papa Doc. Peter scented the danger which I felt myself in. There seemed to be a number of tourists about, and in a museum we encountered Seitz, the owner of the Oloffson Hotel, where I had stayed before writing
The Comedians
. While greeting Peter he turned his back on me. ‘If you knew the trouble I have had,’ he said, ‘with the Tontons Macoute because of him.’

Upstairs I encountered two other people I had known—one a doctor. They were astonished to see me and more and more I wanted to get quickly away.

Out in the yard there were a number of cars. An old lady stood by a car close to ours. I had seen her before in the streets of Port-au-Prince. ‘I believe that’s Papa Doc’s wife,’ I said, and sure enough, the President himself joined her and they rode away. I tried to hide my face with my hand, and I was very afraid. Peter insisted on sitting quietly there at the wheel of his car eating a hard-boiled egg.

Finally when we did start we found the road from the museum blocked by a wooden post on a swivel. Peter got out to swing the post open, but just opposite was an armed sentry who said the barrier could not be raised without the President’s order. This time we were really trapped. Luckily I remember no more.