The Blessings are charming. Very civilised people with lovely manners, he is devoted to Harry … Blessing says that no one has any legal right at all to prevent Schacht starting his bank and they only do it because they are afraid of him.
Hamburg – 16.11.52
… I am furious for you that you are being made to come halfway home to Karachi and then back to Bangkok. However, even though you work for idiots there are times when you have leisure. Here the German business man is at his desk at eight, leaves it at seven, has practically no time for lunch, pays 70 to 80 per cent income tax, and is always on the move, rattling off to Cologne, Dusseldorf, Munich, Frankfurt or abroad on a non-stop conveyor belt of exhaustion. Blessing says it’s terrible. Ricardo at 50 looks 70 and the only person who seems to thrive is Schacht for whom, as you may have noticed, I have developed a strong taste …
I spent all yesterday recovering from the effects of being trotted around the night clubs by Dindi and Ricardo who under the mixed influence of a variety of drinks ending up with pink champagne quite unbuttoned and we had a very jolly evening contradicting each other.
Tomorrow I am spending the day at Rosenberg chez the Bernsdorffs. I like her very much. She is intelligent and observant and has a sense of humour …
I miss you so much for jokes. Ricardo who, as we all know, reeks of money and works like a black said that Charlie had complained bitterly … on the subject of his abject poverty. I said, ‘Quite ridiculous. He isn’t so rich as Harry perhaps or Eric who does very little work and gets enormously paid.’ ‘Enormously paid!’ said Ricardo. ‘Naturally,’ I said. ‘What else do you expect?’ Ricardo looked very thoughtful and sent me an expensive book next morning about Mount Everest.
He says that news from the East Zone [East Germany] where he still has offices, and from Roumania, is of ever increasing restlessness and of some cases of open revolt against the Russians. Last month’s desertions to the West of the East German police was the highest ever.
Bridget Bernsdorf says that in the event of Germany being reunited there would be very little ‘going back to the old home’, most refugees have got settled there, so the people shoved into the farms and businesses they previously owned would remain put … She is a very level-headed, impartial girl. Married to Hugo Bernsdorf in January 1939. H was an early member of the Nazi party in ’32 and quarrelled with them in ’35. He was SA during the War, wounded and had trouble with the allies after because he had won a proces against the Nazis and had not been put into a camp. He is a large landowner and has just had a flaming row with Burgermeister Brauer.
My treasure, you are far too far away … Tender and provoking kisses partout for the next hug …
M.
Broughton – 20.11.52
I got home yesterday lunch time after a fearful bouncing across the North Sea. The boats after mine failed to make port and I held on with both hands so as not to be thrown out of my bunk – with one to be exact as I was reading Joyce Cary’s last book which is frightfully good,fn39 as good as The Horse’s Mouth …
I left Germany ice and snow bound under a black sky, blew home in a gale and nearly died of cold when I got here … My last days were busy … I was lunching with Marion Donhoff fifteen minutes before I caught my train. I like her very much and I think she is very much of the élite, which she collects …
Of course she loved Adam Trott who was hanged after the July ’44 [assassination plot]. Her flat is full of his photographs.
On Monday before I left I spent the whole day at the Bernsdorffs who have a heavenly Schloss, 18th century and Bridget has made the part they live in quite lovely. I like her very much, she grows upon one rapidly. He is delightful too. Terribly wounded in the war and poked his eye out with a ski last winter and though not of the elite not stupid. He was originally a Nazi. Although they only live in a small part of their house it is still immense and in great comfort with lots of servants, horses, lady dachshunds who live in your lap and several motor cars. The rest of the schloss is inhabited by refugees who work on the farms and one or two old Lady Bismarcks. They also have a bullfinch in a cage in their bedroom whose pipes reminded me of my childhood.
Safe home, the house is in order. Nothing has changed … The leaves are off the trees and winter is come …
Missing you atrociously … I love you,
M.
Comet (between Singapore and Bangkok, en route to Rangoon) – 27.11.52
I found the whole Hamburg saga at Singapore …
You can hardly imagine the delight with which I lay on the bed and read through your adventures. Most amusing and well-written so that I gloated. I have rarely had such a thrill. It was sexual and intellectual … [It] is my delight, and brilliant.
Kindly state clearly, at once, with whom you went to Fidelio and who made the fourth when you Tarantella-ed with Dindi and Ricardo …
I was met in Indonesia, to my surprise, by a polite and slightly dour Dutchman, and his very pretty and cultivated wife; and they took charge of me … They are condemned to live in Djakarta, which is AWFUL … We played Beethoven Piano Concertos on the gramophone, and I was made to dance. By a miracle, the style in Djakarta is ‘Savoy Ballroom 1923’, smooth and even with outside steps etc – ie my stuff! I gained confidence, and fairly glided around, partly with la petite exquise who danced badly, and partly with a lewd, very old trout who – as these lewd old trouts do – danced perfectly …
My host encouraged me in my fell scheme – to spend a week in Bali, a mere 500 miles. And I did, staying with Mr Pandy, an art dealer, who ‘lets a few rooms in his studio on the beach’.
As you reach Bali there is a huge notice forbidding tourists to photograph Balinese women with naked breasts, as this is derogatory in the new Indonesian republic. These breasts are brown and very lovely, but 70% of the girls wear drab blouses since the war. I am glad you did not see the young men, who swim naked on the beach, brown … brown-shouldered and thin-hipped and bien développés. But the hatred of the foreigner is being installed by the Javanese, and you don’t feel quite happy even in a Balinese village … and I was massacred by mosquitoes …
After luncheon, at Bangkok: A most agreeable Englishman, of the Richmond type (most solid tweeds … feather appurtenances in hat) has promised to post this in London at 2pm tomorrow …
We are moving off … so love and love … Vibrations due to Comet, not lunch.fn40 It’s a marvellous plane. We’re going up runway. Soon!
E.
Karachi – 9.12.52
Karachi is awful, and I have been prostrate for 3 days … Money and cruelty are the keynotes …
Burma was unexpectedly delightful, and – one guessed – beautiful outside town, where one cannot venture. Even in town, very green trees and shrubs round huge lakes, bougainvillea, frangi-pani, hibiscus; and I lolled swimming all one Sunday with an unusually nice British group. Then, of all things, an Asquith! The old man’s grand-daughter,fn41 whose father (Brigadier and VC)fn42 and mother (a Manners) I’d known. It opened the flood gates: I dined with them – her husband called Boothby,fn43 wholly obliterated in this same influence, so that I realised how special, how isolating it is – and we talked Antoine and Elizabeth and Puffin …
I’ve got that feeling of exhilaration … really because in SIX days I shall be hugging you. You have been a dim, un-nourishing ghost in my bed, nightly, around Hong Kong, Tokyo, Manila, Saigon, Singapore, Djakarta, Bali, Rangoon, Karachi …
Darling, I am indeed lost without you … So much to tell you … A toujours –
Eric
The years at Broughton were the happiest of their marriage and their son, Bill, was born in December 1953. Throughout his four years at Portals, Eric frequently made long business trips around Europe and across the world. He found these an increasing strain and the final journey ended in disaster. Eric set out in the spring of 1954 for a six-week tour of the Middle East that took him back to Karachi. The region was in a ferment of actual and threatened revolution; the s
ecret Anglo-French partition of 1916 was being challenged by ‘Arab nationalism’. It was not a promising moment for the arrival of a salesman from Hampshire bearing samples of banknote paper. His letters to Mary describe the international crisis and hint at the personal crisis that was brewing inside. He started in Beirut.
Hotel St Georges – 1.3.54
… I was met by a nice young Lebanese who instantly diverted me with the double crisis of Neguibfn44 and of the Syrian dictatorfn45 … Everything is still attributed to British macchiaveleism [sic] (hooray) and … every crisis raises the question of a possible union of Irak-Syria-Lebanon. This might be Irak-led, and more friendly to us than an Egyptian-led Arab League; but none of it is likely to take place. One cannot help being pleased at Neguib’s personal success, a moderate man, though a collapse of the ‘revolutionaries’ followed by a revival of party politics might have been more malleable. I hope Damascus has quietened down when I get there, but it is all most interesting and I derive a shameful joy out of the messes made by all these nationalists when we leave them alone …
2, Mary Road, Karachi – 7.3.54
It is 5.30am and the old turbaned ‘bearer’ is finishing my packing. I hope to give this to somebody on the aeroplane, which goes on to London …
I leave Karachi with joy … I have been dogged by the DLR [De La Rue] chief – who plied me with liquor and impertinent questions, so that once or twice I was rude to him … It all ended amicably in dinner-jackets and politeness, and hatred underneath! …
Now I am in the aeroplane [Eric is back in a Comet] … the vibration rouses my senses, and I think of you in accommodating positions …
Karachi is odd. The British shout ‘bearer’ and talk to their servants like dirt and drink gins at the Club; but they are polite to the ruling Pakistanis, Civil Servants etc. which I suppose they weren’t in EM Forster’s day …
Baghdad, when he reached it, was ‘awful!’ Then came Damascus … In his final report to the chairman of Portals, Eric wrote:
Please excuse the slight scrappiness of my reports … It has been a tiring and beastly tour … the conditions have been so foul in most of the Arab countries that pen, ink or table … have been totally lacking even in the ‘best’ hotels.
He then referred to the problem directly:
[In Damascus, Syria] I visited the permanent head of the Ministry of Finance … one of the few consistent factors in a country where a revolution had taken place a few days before my arrival … I had a foolish misunderstanding with the British Council, of all people, about some indiscreet remarks which I was alleged to have made about Arab Nationalism, within hearing of Arabs. They took it up with the Embassy, and I shall have to report to you privately about this …
When Eric got to Tripoli he was joined by Mary and he told her the full story. He had found the trip exhausting and had started drinking to keep going. Then in Damascus, as Mary recalled, someone had given him ‘some pills’ which, mixed with whisky, had robbed him of any discretion, so at a party at the British Embassy, he had predicted ‘trouble and war in the Middle East between Jew and Arab’. ‘The Foreign Office are very angry and they are going to report me,’ he said. ‘I’m going to lose this job.’
Which is what happened. Phyllis had driven him out of three good jobs, and he had lost two through his own errors. He never held a regular job again. The war he had prophesied, the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on the Suez Canal Zone, broke out two years later.
Twelve months after Eric was fired he and Mary were forced to sell Broughton House. The roller-coaster ride had begun.
PART FOUR
The Making of a Writer: 1957–67
IN MAY 1955, one year after Eric had been fired by Portals, Mary took a lease on a tumbledown farmhouse high up on Dartmoor. The house was called Thornworthy. Life had not gone smoothly following Eric’s departure from his well-paid position. Further attempts to hold down regular jobs in advertising and public relations had failed, but there had been an unexpected success when he completed a book. Confessions of a Nihilist, an account of his early life, was published by Gollancz in November 1955 to mixed reviews. He continued to write novels and continued to abandon them halfway through. Mary was also writing fiction, but she did not feel confident enough to send any of her work to a publisher and was mainly occupied in looking after her husband and their young son, Billy.
In August 1956 they were both received into the Catholic Church after taking instruction from a Jesuit based at Farm Street, Father Richard Mangan. The novelist Antonia White, author of Frost in May and a former girlfriend of Eric’s, was one of their godmothers. The circumstances were unusual since both were remarried divorcees and their conjugal life was illicit under Roman Catholic canon law.
In the summer of 1957 Eric started to work as a summer relief sub on The Times foreign desk. He intended to take cheap lodgings in London, writing fiction in the mornings before starting his evening shift. Thornworthy had already become a financial burden but Mary loved the house and did not want to lose it. She decided to turn it into an asset; she would take in foreign students as paying guests and teach them English. It is clear from Mary’s first letter that Eric has just abandoned and destroyed another book.
Authors’ Club
2, Whitehall Court, SW1 – 31.5.57
Darling,
… The tiny club is awful as usual … Pens and writing tables reduced to two! … Luckily there is the London Library.
I am not to be deterred from my book which is … inspired by you … I wonder what you’d write, if you told our story truthfully? I fear I have been a great trial to you … But I love you more than ever.
Yours is a courageous venture, and I’m sure it will succeed …
All my love,
Eric
Authors’ Club
1.6.57
Good morning my love,
I do hope you are not too lonely … Je te regrette. I slept not too badly without pills, but still fitfully and nightmarishly …
I’ve found a good writing table; if I can bag it early enough! …
Johnny [unidentified], warned to be sober, said he was too broke to be otherwise … He besought me [to write] down in 60,000 words ‘How I became a Catholic’ … Second person to ask me: Gollancz having done so. It would take a year …
Nat Micklemfn1 is in this club almost daily! Great news. ‘A good influence.’ I rode on his back in 1907 …
Thornworthy – 1.6.57
My Darling,
Lovely to get a letter from you so soon, I wasn’t expecting one until Monday at least …
Overslept this morning as the usually fast clock was two hours slow. Got bogged down in the Chagford ‘shopping’ …
A lot of correspondence a propos PG’s. Takes ages. The Spanish pain in the neck now wants to send a nephew instead as her own child has ratted [i.e. raté’d – failed] his ‘bachot’ [French slang for school leaving certificate, the baccalaureat] or whatever you do in Spain.
Tomorrow to Mass armed with the jumble and then I must get the house in ordnung … Mrs Wonnacottfn2 says the signs are pretty good. Marjorie [a cleaner] wishes to come too and Valerie is standing by so I certainly won’t be left alone so please don’t worry …
The Master of Hounds has had to tour every farmer to apologise for the numerous foxes. One farmer is poisoning the foxes and threatens to poison the MFH and hounds too if they come near him. The smith came up last night to shoe the ponies so a lot of local news leaked out …
On reading this I see I had better brush up my English or my little visitors will return to their mamas belching fearful slang …
I am very glad you are writing a happy book, not only because it will sell but because it will be better for you to write about something you enjoy. The manuscript of The Lovekiller choked the boiler – this one won’t …
Authors’ Club – 2.6.57
… I am off to The Times. It is 4.30 and hot.
I went to a church off the Strand …
‘No confessions till 5’. But a down-at-heel Irishman with a hard [luck] tale took 10/-fn3 off me (well-known place for rascals and thieves, was Father Mangan’s comment) and took me to a French church off Leicester Square – where confessions are heard ‘at any time’. I rang a bell in vain and then an angry French priest bustled through the church and said rudely he was just coming …
When I unloaded my tale of seven weeks, he questioned me fiercely and rudely and said it couldn’t be so and ‘she is not your wife’ and he couldn’t understand and better go to Farm Street and no priest could accept … etc. How had I been received? I said by the Charity of the Church. This shocked him (and made Mangan laugh) and he gave me an angry absolution and THREE ROSARIES (105 Hail Mary’s, I think). To be continued. I go to work …
When Roger was filling in his application form for Sandhurst he did not know what to put for his mother’s religion and asked Toby if he had any information on the subject. Mary and Eric’s conversion to Catholicism was part of their private relationship, and a mystery to Roger and Toby. Bill, on the other hand, was brought up as a Catholic.
Thornworthy – 2.6.57
Such a wonderful hot day and you not here … I have divided the day between long sunbathing and getting the house very clean. The little dogs and the geese giving lots of gesellschaft. I still have the posh Sunday papers to read in bed.
Mass this morning and the Archbishop of Canterbury got a sharp rap in the sermon. The little dogs sat outside and then ran up the lane on the way home. I thought of you, probably in Westminster Cathedral. On Saturday next I am having my hair washed in the morning at Torquay calculating that there will be confessions in the afternoon (when I can let it down). If you wander to Farm Street give my love to Father M. who is a good man. Good to us anyway. Tomorrow the geese are to mow for Miss Varwellfn4 but they will come home if they don’t like it. I wired them in to eat round the pond and they crawled under it and went back to their own pen. I had fits as I thought they had disparue down the drain under the tennis court.