Time at War (16 page)

But in the vast maelstrom that follows from the crackup of the ice floes of war, what can any individual do with
certainty, whether soldier or politician? One hopes to do one's best.

At the Ossiachersee I was made Battalion Sports Officer, whose job it was to provide occupation for those who had nothing much more militarily to do. I organised conventional games; I could pick myself for any team I liked. I had never been much good at cricket, but at this I could at least show off. Also at hockey, which I had never played before. But at football I had to deselect myself: almost anyone seemed better than me. I had been a good runner at school, so I entered myself for the 440 yards at the Army Games at Klagenfurt – and came in a long way behind the champion of the Jewish Brigade who was said to have run at the White City. After this I thought I should retire from organised sport. At Ossiachersee I watched with some admiration the flirtation games that one or two of my fellow young officers played with a very pretty young Austrian nurse at the orphanage.

It was during these days that in the course of conversation with Desmond Fay I let on that I had been to school at Eton. He had long since come to terms with me being the son of Oswald Mosley; he had said – ‘Oh well, he was a serious politician.' But at the news that I was an Old Etonian he announced he was so upset that he was not sure if he could carry on with our friendship. This was not entirely a joke: it is part of Leninist theory that fascism is not the unequivocal enemy of communism – it can be a necessary stage in the collapse of capitalism. The clear-cut enemies of the communist proletariat have always been the upper classes.

I went on a week's leave to Venice and stayed on the Lido, where I had stayed with my father and mother in the summer holidays of 1930. Then, my father had spent much time flirting with my future stepmother Diana, who at that time was married to Bryan Guinness. My sister and I, I remembered, had spent much time being outraged not at my father's behaviour to my mother, which I suppose we either did not notice or took as normal upper-class behaviour, but because Randolph Churchill, one of my father's and mother's entourage, insisted on referring to us children as ‘brats'. Now, on leave in Venice, I wrote to my father that I did not want to do any more sightseeing; I wanted to come home. In continuation of the letters I had written from Ranby and Naples, still in pursuit of what now increasingly obsessed me – the question of how to look for what might be an alternative to humans' propensity for war – I wrote –

I wonder if Neitzsche's final madness was really the decadent desperation that people suppose – if it were not ‘tragic' in the ultimate sense – the culmination of a tragedy in the true Greek style – and therefore something to be greeted and accepted with a ‘holy yea-saying'? Is anything much known of Nietzsche's final madness? It is a theory that entrances me – that it is perhaps the culmination of all ‘great spirits' that they should appear to be what the rest of the world calls mad: that perhaps this one form of madness – the Dionysian madness – is really an escape into the ‘eternity behind reality': neither an advance nor a regression in life but
just a sidestep into something that is always beside life. Or am I slightly mad?

It seems to me that the physicists have argued themselves out of their original premises and are floating blindly … if all our sense-perceptions, measures, observations etc. are unreliable, indeed misleading, when it comes to interpreting the ‘real' world, why do they presume that any experiment they make has any bearing on reality at all? The only thing they can be certain about is that they can never be certain of anything …

It seems that the infinite only makes itself known to the finite by means of selected symbols or ‘emotions' (which perhaps are only the result of symbol-action): it is beyond the comprehension of the finite (human?) mind to understand the reality behind these symbols. But this does not exclude the possibility of creating – througha fuller understanding of the symbols – a higher form of consciousness which might ultimately glimpse the reality that lay behind.

I had long since seen that my father looked on Nietzsche's work mainly in political terms whereas I saw it as dealing with metaphysics – in that Nietzsche had seen that language was what humans used in their exercise of power, and that any idea of ‘truth' had to recognise this and somehow overcome it. Hence Nietzsche's extraordinary elliptical, ironic, highly wrought style that had to be understood by a reader as an artwork rather than an argument. I hoped to go up to Oxford after I got out of
the army in order to read philosophy and to try to get more straight my ideas about all this. (But then, when I did get to Oxford, my tutor said, ‘We don't do Nietzsche' – implying that he had been a Nazi).

Mervyn had left the London Irish in Austria in order to work on the staff at Central Mediterranean Headquarters. It seemed that I might not be in a close working relationship with him again. I had a letter from him –

The chaps here are nice, but at present they seem solely interested in their work – not because they like it, because they seem to have been allowed hardly any other interests during the war. How terrible. There is also a large content of ‘the affected young man' – not your sort of affectation but a far more transparent species of this sometime delectable trait.

Am READING seriously and furiously. Do you know that we have been living in ignorance (I have anyway) of
décadence
(French) as opposed to honest English decadence. The French sort is far more awful and I must define it to you as soon as I understand it so that we can practise it like mad.

Hope you have opened a branch office of the SDA; you should get many members now. I am having difficulty in extending it here of course.

PS Has your mighty epic (which we planned you would publish at the age of 80 years) taken any less amorphous shape?

For many years I forgot I had planned an epic. But here it now is, rarefied and distilled over a lifetime of not knowing quite in what style to write it.

I had been impatient to get home, not only to my family but also to my old school friends; and now when I got back to the battalion from Venice I learned that this would be possible – under the aegis of an army order that all officers and men under a certain age and with less than a certain time of serving overseas were now eligible to be sent to the Far East to continue the war against Japan – with the benefit of a month's leave in England first. So my wish to get home was granted – but rather in the manner of that ghost story in which a couple are given three wishes, the first two of which are fulfilled in such a horrific manner that the third has to be that the first two should be cancelled. However, I wrote home –

The authorities declared I was eligible for Burma by just three weeks, and nothing that any kindly CO or brigadier out here can do can stop me. But as it happened I received the news with something like relief, and would not now alter the arrangement even if it were possible. I have been growing moribund in Austria with the harassing job of organising sports from the confines of a stuffy office. Leave, I am sure, will miraculously revive me.

I don't know how much this was bravado: it was perhaps a fatalism I had learned; and there might be a way of going east with my old clique of friends. So off I went from
Austria on the long and by now familiar journey back through Florence and Rome to Naples to wait for a boat to take me home, if only en route to tortuous approaches to Japan. I was sitting with a few fellow travelling companions on the terrace of the Officers' Club looking out across the beautiful bay at Vesuvius, which was smoking rather ominously in the distance (it had caused some consternation by half erupting the previous year: this was August 1945), and I was thinking that after all on no account did I want to go to fight Japan. Then we read in the local army newspaper that a bomb had been dropped on Japan that was a new sort of bomb – something to do with what goes on at the heart of the matter – and its effects were so horrific that countless thousands of people had been killed and the Japanese were already talking of surrender. In fact, its effects were so unknown and so uncanny that in future large-scale wars might be made impossible. So I thought – Well that's not so bad then! Good old whatever-it-is at the heart of matter!

Humans seem at home in war. They feel lost when among the responsibilities of peace. In war they are told what to do: they accept that they have to ‘get on with it' In peace it seems uncertain what they have to do: they have to discover what the ‘it' is to get on with.

I had been keen to get home to be with my family and friends, even if it was only for a month before going out to Burma or wherever. But if the war was really about to be over, then it might be possible that I could be at peace in the Far East with my so-called clique of friends. This clique I had fantasised about in Italy was a sort of alternative family, to be enjoyed if possible in conjunction with both my father's and my sister's establishments. At school my friends and I had been, yes, in our attitudes homosexual; though only in one pairing occasionally practising. For the most part we were fantasy-gay in style, in conceits. In war this style had had to be carried on mainly by letter. But as part of occupying forces in Burma, Malaysia, might not three or four of us form an exotic home from home?

When I had gone from public school straight into the army this had seemed to be a continuation of a homosexual world in which there were no natural family ties –
no responsibilities, no chance of children. In this sense it had been like the Garden of Eden. Would it be possible to create a peacetime Eden?

In the army in Italy I had hardly thought of myself as homosexual: I had scarcely felt myself sexual at all – sex was an itch that war had pushed into the sidelines. Then, when I had been in Naples with Anthony (with whom my friendship was strictly platonic) I had written to a third member of the clique who was recovering from D-Day wounds in England – ‘Anthony keeps talking paternally of the ultimate necessity of marriage and family-rearing which, he maintains, involves SETTLING DOWN at some quite early date. I do not grant him this last proposition, for I hold that it is just as preferable to be UNSETTLED in marriage as it is out of marriage.' And then – ‘I WILL NOT BE RESPECTABLE.' And earlier – ‘I am both ignorant and disinterested in women.'

But then, when I got home to London in September 1945, I found that the whole grandiose social whirl had started up again as if there had been only a blip since September 1939. Almost every night there were what used to be known as debutante dances, to which those thought to be socially acceptable were invited and to which I had the entrée through my sister Vivien and my Aunt Irene Ravensdale. And each of these dances seemed to consist of an enchanted garden of girls. How was it possible that I had not noticed girls before? Now, suddenly, they seemed to be everywhere and infinitely alluring; as thick on the ground as – how might it be put? – ‘autumnal leaves that strew the brooks in Vallombrosa'? But had not this been
Milton's reference to fallen angels? Well, so be it. If it was love that one wanted – take one's pick!

But here was a problem: how on earth did one pick and choose? In a heterosexual world it seemed that one was expected to fall in love with just one girl, but surely with such profusion one wanted the whole lot – or at least a big bunch, an armful. But this was held to be not acceptable.

Such were the dilemmas when one was over the edge into peace. I learned that two of my old school friends were settling in to the Far East. But now, surely, it would be more pleasant and even vital for me to stay in London and explore the peacetime possibilities, however baffling, of getting to grips with women.

But with my orders to embark for Malaysia having come through, how would this be possible? After such homosexual affectations, in the heterosexual world had my luck run out?

Then, at one of these dances – at the Savoy Hotel, I think – I had retired to the bar in some exhaustion from trying to squeeze what dalliance I could into what time I had left, and there I came across a major whom I knew slightly, or perhaps he was a friend of my sister's; and he asked me what I was doing nowadays; and I said I was just off to the Far East. And he said – ‘My dear fellow, why on earth do you want to do that?' And I said – ‘I don't.' So he said – ‘Come and see me in the War Office in the morning.' So I did, and I did not know if he would even remember me. But there he was, behind a desk even if somewhat holding his head; and he said – ‘I'm afraid I can't quite manage the War Office, but would a job in
Eastern Command, Hounslow do?' And I said – ‘Indeed, thank you, Eastern Command, Hounslow would do very well.' So in a day or two I received papers taking me off the draft to the Far East and instructing me to report to Hounslow Barracks – a gaunt building like a furniture depository some ten miles west of London. There, no one was expecting me, but I was given a desk and a chair, where I sat and wondered once more in what style I would one day be able to try to write about war – its luck that seemed to take the place of conventional responsibility. At intervals I played ping-pong with the man with whom I shared an office, using our desks pushed together as a table and copies of
The Manual of Military Law
as bats. Eventually work was found for me, which was to do with officers' pay and courts martial – the latter often dealing with officers caught and photographed as transvestites. And in the evening I would catch the District Line back to London, where I continued to learn the pleasure of prowling in search of – yes, this was surely a better way of putting it – the rose among the rosebud garden of girls.

So this was peace? But there remained the problem of how to make sense of responsibility.

When people said at the end of the war that they found themselves at a loss – they could no longer feel that that they just had to ‘get on with it' but now had to find the ‘it' that they had to get on with – was this ‘it' really just the evolutionary business of finding a mate, settling down, procreation? But humans had always found confusion with this; was it not a sort of war? But in so-called ‘peace' there were no longer orders coming down from on high; or if
religion or social custom claimed that there were, then it was still up to the judgement of individuals to respect these or reject them. Humans had to make their own dispositions to deal with the ‘its' that they were finding they had to get on with – work, faith, relationship. And regarding these they felt not only at a loss, but that such a feeling was somehow reprehensible – for should not at least love, the commitment to love, the care of children (so they had an instinct to believe) be sweetness and light? And if it was not, should there really be only themselves to blame? Humans were thrown into the deep end of peace and had to learn how to swim. But why had it ever been thought that peace should be easy? If peace involved the requirement to take responsibility for oneself, then all right, yes, it could be seen how obedience in war might be easier.