London on Edge

VOLUME 159

NUMBER 4

APRIL 1937

BY JOHN GUNTHER¹

Monday, January 20, 1936. — Wrote a piece, talked for a few moments to Tom Balogh who dropped in, did a lot of phoning, and caught a train at about two for Sandringham. What followed was one of the wildest nights of my experience. The only thing I can think of to rival it journalistically was the Lindbergh arrival in Paris and perhaps the night of the Dollfuss murder two years ago in Vienna. Interesting to see the Duke of York’s luggage on my train, somewhat less elegant than my own. I got off at Dersingham, after observing that Sandringham station provided no means of conveyance to the palace grounds. My job was not so much to get the news of the death of the King, when he died, but to describe the attendant circumstances in Sandringham House and the vicinity.

Sandringham and Dersingham are in one of the most inaccessible parts of England, and on a spur railway that ends in the Wash on the North Sea. I felt, as I stepped off the train, that I might have been in Alaska. It was dark and misty; a chill vapor blew across the meadows from the sea. I stopped a villager, who told me where to find a cottage with a telephone; after a long wait I got a taxi, one of the two the village boasts. Most of the correspondents would, I thought, be in whatever pub was nearest to Sandringham House, and we drove to a place called the Feathers, where, sure enough, the fraternity was assembled.

Chaos was also assembled. The Feathers has five bedrooms and when I got there between forty and fifty newspaper men had already arrived. They were scattered in the lounge, the bar, the hallways; outside it was frigidly cold and doors were continually opening, letting in blasts of Siberian air; the proprietor, sleepless for three nights, was tossing drinks across the bar. He had long since given up trying to reckon accurately who had what or who paid for it. Drinks and food poured out and money poured back and no one knew what belonged to which. He was assisted by two East Anglian daughters, Ethel and Ivy, and rare creatures they were. The whole place was churning like a ship in motion. A few moments after I got there a baffled little Japanese arrived, who had seemingly come direct from, of all places, Ethiopia. He got half a doormat to sleep on. Everyone was very kind.

Copyright 1957, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.

The lounge had been made into a sort of pressroom. Almost all discernible features of hotel life disappeared, and two old ladies who had been guests before chaos struck the Feathers looked like spinsters marooned by a typhoon.

The Feathers had originally been equipped with two or at most three telephones. There was only one trunk line, and this had to go through Kings Lynn near by. By the time I arrived the post-office authorities had managed to install two or three extra phones, and a teletype printer had been assembled and put to work in a near-by cottage. By Tuesday night, we heard, there would be a special line of cable laid to Kings Lynn, which would speed up messages. But at the moment the congestion was terrible. There were hours of delay on simple calls to London. A post-office official tried to restore some semblance of order by rationing calls, and allowing each correspondent, once he got his paper, only three minutes at a time. All the phones but one were in a single small room, all going all the time; there were no booths except one in the frigid hall outside.

Presently I observed a flamboyant and courteous young man, whose name I learned later was Louis Wolff, taking charge of things. He was the correspondent of the Press Association, the official British agency, and an informal agreement had been made with the palace authorities that Wolff should get what official news there was and pass it on to his colleagues. So Wolff, in a flapping fur coat, was the sole instrument of transmission of a very big news story to the press of all the world. Newspapers in Hongkong, in Buenos Aires, in remote villages in the Dakotas, in India and Spain and Finland, were waiting upon Louis Wolff. It was a sensible arrangement. Obviously no such troop of voracious redskins as we were could be handled in Sandringham House itself. Clive Wigram, the King’s secretary, would tell Wolff what had happened. And he would tell us.

Wolff prowled the floors, back and forth. Everyone else waited. But all were busy nevertheless. The phones kept ringing incessantly; every editor in London wanted every scrap of available information. The sparse bulletins were not enough. So rumors flew. We described the park, the pub, the conversation of the villagers, the little colorful details. Someone said there was no central heating in Sandringham House, and that therefore it was difficult to oxygenate the King’s room. Someone said that the Archbishop of Canterbury was preparing to return to London.

Every train had to be met at Sandringham station. The two taxis did a marvelous business, but by this time most of the journalists had hired cars from Kings Lynn. Every twenty minutes or so we drove to the great gates of the House to see what kind of crowd was assembled and to read the new bulletins, if any. Then back to the screaming phones. Someone got hysterical; he had waited almost an hour for London and then the paper had no telephonist free to take his stuff. Someone thought he had an ‘exclusive’ story. Nice irony, because he could n’t talk it to London without forty other journalists listening. Drinks surged across the bar. Inside Sandringham House, a man of seventy lay in bed, mortally tired, awaiting death.

About 9.55 one of the chauffeurs brought ‘absolutely authentic’ news that the King was dead. He had crawled over the wall, he said, and talked to a servant in the lodge, who had heard orders to close the palace canteen. Another rumor about 10.30 was similarly ‘authentic’ to the effect that the village carpenter had summoned five assistants and begun work on the coffin. At about eleven I went for the fourth or fifth time to the House. It is surrounded by a six-foot ochre brick wall, hung at irregular intervals with loops of ivy. At the gate, framing the bulletin, two grave policemen stood to answer inquiries. No one was, of course, admitted. The crowds were small; it was too cold. One girl shrieked and fainted when the bulletin appeared that the King’s life was drawing to a close. I talked to a villager standing quiet in the gloom, ‘It’s a bad job, it is,’ he said. ‘I’ve known ’im since I was a boy, and I’m two years older than ’e is.’

The tension, the confusion, the sense of fatigue, grew intolerably in the Feathers as the night advanced. Wolff kept pacing the rooms, his coat flapping, his face inquisitive and morose. At 11.50 the host closed the bar. He could no longer see to pour drinks, he said; three nights up had done him in. Rumors still danced around. Calls came for reporters who could n’t be found; reporters got their offices and the line would be cut; no one could hear a word; one reporter finished dictating his story and found that he had the wrong paper. Then a noisy dead boredom for a while. Then more phones ringing. All because it was of the most tremendous importance to every newspaper in London to get this news by a split second ahead of its rivals. All because that mysterious entity, the general public, would pay a penny, more or less, to read the story which was first and most complete. At 12.08 A.M. the call came. We heard Wolff’s ‘Yes . . . yes’ into the phone as he took down the message. ‘Yes . . . yes. . . .’ The King was dead.

Tuesday, January 21. — There were no beds in Dersingham, Sandringham, Kings Lynn, or elsewhere in the immediate vicinity, and I did n’t want to sleep on the floor, so at about 3 A.M. I drove twenty miles to a town called Downham Market, and then slept till 6.30, when I caught the early train to London. Then cut loose and filed almost the entire day. Besides the Sandringham picture story I sent a character sketch of the new King, about 1300 words, and then the news story of the events of the day, beginning with the meeting of the Privy Council and ending with the special sitting of Parliament at 6 P.M. I saw as much of it myself as I could. Of course I hit hard the fact that the new King broke precedent by flying from Sandringham to London, and I did not miss the little bit about his setting the clocks in Sandringham right. (Since Edward VII’s time, they had been kept half an hour fast, to give more daylight for shooting.) All told, between 11.30 A.M. and 6 P.M. I sent 4058 words of cable, which must be a record for the paper. It is too much, of course, but my guess is that they’ll want it all. . . . Sure enough, a nice wire came from Chicago at about eight.

Wednesday, January 22. — To-day I sent five different stories, a total of 3150 words, and in the evening got a cable back from Chicago saying that they liked it but to ease off. The main story dealt with the proclamation of Edward VIII at St. James’s, Charing Cross, Temple Bar, and the Royal Exchange. I followed on foot for half the way. I might have missed one nice detail, and luckily F. caught it — namely, the court circular of January 21. It was only three paragraphs long (so British!) and mentioned neither old nor new King by name. Few people, incidentally, noted that Queen Victoria died thirty-five years ago to-day.

Thursday, January 23. — Easier today. I sent two pieces, about 650 each, one trying to outline the political functions of a British King, the other in description of the funeral procession through London — that is, the march of the new King and his brothers behind the coffin from King’s Cross to Westminster Hall. Moving. Also foolish. No sense in people walking all the way in such weather bareheaded. As usual on such occasions, the crowd was the most interesting part of the story.

Friday, January 24. — Two stories. One very brief, about Edward’s modernity: for instance, he talked to Parliament yesterday in the first person singular. The other described the lying in state at Westminster Hall. A barbaric but beautiful spectacle. I walked in with the crowd.

Professor Harold J. Laski and his wife had a party for us to celebrate the book. It was an interesting occasion, and two of my most considerable heroes were there, David Low (the cartoonist) and H. G. Wells. Laski was glittering. Slight, eloquent, utterly sure of his own superlative mind, with enormous glowing eyes, he can maintain such a mesmeric stream of anecdote as I have never heard before. He is quick as wings. A few months ago — on election evening, I think — F. and I went to hear him lecture. Afterward he answered questions, which were handed him on slips of paper. He read each question very rapidly, and then without an instant’s hesitation proceeded to the answer, eloquent, incisive, and perfectly phrased. A new question was in his hand by the time he reached the last words of the previous answer. There were no breaks at all; it was like a river. The questions were varied and difficult. I thought then I had never heard a finer virtuoso performance.

H. G. looked tired. He has recently come back from Hollywood, and his work on his own movie, Things to Come, has been exhausting. We had not seen him since Vienna about two years ago. He is building a house in London, which consumes his minor energies. ‘As soon as I saw the bathrooms in Hollywood,’ he told F., ‘I telegraphed my contractors, “Stop all work on bathrooms until I return. ” ’

II

Tuesday, January 28. — Caught the 9.32 for Windsor, and Birchall and I stood in the frozen slush and rain for four hours till the funeral procession came in sight. I sent a long story, and it was hard to get it out, what with crowds and confusion. It was full of clichés, but I am fed up with the whole episode. I shall not write another word about a king, any king, for a month of Sundays. Procession itself, like a ballet, beautiful.

In the evening, went to a party at Naomi Mitchison’s for Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the leader of the Indian Congress. I had only a slight chance to talk to him. Strong in profile, his head has a strange soft twist when you look at it full face. He had read me in the Nation. It is strange that no one, under any circumstances, ever sees any of the thousands of words I do for Chicago; but a great many people, from the furthest and remotest places, have read my Nation pieces from Vienna. Nehru’s skin is the exact color of that of Josephine Baker. The party was fairly large, and most of the Left-Wingers of London were there. If a bomb had exploded in that room, British radical thought would have perished. Guests I saw: Kingsley Martin, the editor of the New Statesman; Vera Meynell; Mrs. G. D. H. Cole; Vallance and his handsome wife; Ernst Toller, the German playwright; Pritt, a leading K. C.; the Laskis; the Gollanczes; the Ewers; Ellen Wilkinson, M. P.

Friday, January 31. — In the afternoon did my annual office house-cleaning, exactly one month late. Checking on bankbooks and so on, I found that in 1934 I had kept a quite accurate record of what I earned, each item in place — and had never totaled it up! In 1935 apparently I kept no records at all after the middle of March, when I was busy moving to London from Vienna. Evening went to the Café Royal, talk with Cockburn.

F. said the other day that she was a Penelope writer: ‘I spend all afternoon unknitting what I wrote in the morning.’

Monday, February 3. — Heavy day. I wrote two brief stories, then lunched at the New Statesman, a formidable array of Left celebrities: Attlee (leader of the Labor Party), Leonard Woolf, H. N. Brailsford, Aylmer Vallance. The guest of honor was Pandit Nehru, and also present was the Divan (chief councilor) of an Indian native state; he and Nehru, with good humor, watched each other like cat and dog. Which is it most important for India to be, socialist or nationalist? This was the substance of the convention. Back to the office, worked hard all afternoon. Cable from Brandt that Collier’s might like a piece on the new King. Cocktails at Mrs. Schulberg’s for Bernie. Peter Lorre and a lot of movie people, all amiable. Dinner with the Ferdinand Kuhns; I talked too much and badly.

Wednesday, February 5. — Sent a story, brief, about Germany and navies. Lunched at the Escargot with Baroness Moura Budberg. This a treat, as always. Moura is Russian by birth, a Baltic baroness by marriage, a cosmopolitan by temperament. She was for a long time Maxim Gorki’s secretary. I don’t know how many years it is since her great days in Moscow; she is a Russian patriot still. Moura has a broad lovely head and enough appetite to choke the English Channel. We met her in Vienna two or three years ago, and I know no woman more consistently attractive. She has a great quality of making you feel at your best, and comfortable, too. I told her how stunning I thought Wells’s film scenarios were (two have recently appeared in Nash’s); they are a perfect cap to his career, in that they are composed from his very earliest stories and yet express his ultimate philosophy. How marvelous to be able to make a movie in 1936, fresh as to-day, out of a short story written in 1895! The chord of Wells’s whole life rings solid and consistent. It is as if those earlier books were written with a superscript in invisible ink; warm them and the present ideas, latent then, come out fresh and strong.

Moura talked about war, as does everyone else these days. She thought it was avoidable: like an appendix — wait till the wound swells a little more, becomes a little more inflamed, then operate. Fine, I said, but unless you are pretty sharp the appendix may burst and then you have peritonitis and then Europe dies. And whereas a sick man has doctors who coéperate, Europe is sick while the doctors are at loose ends quarreling over the would-be corpse. Moura quoted something nice about the septuagenarian Webbs and their big book on the U. S. S. R. ‘They showed,’ she said, ‘all the recklessness of old age.’

Thursday, February 6. — Another of those days. Did my stint. Lunched with Bingy Saxon-Mills (advertising expert) at the Savoy. Went to tea with John Wheeler Bennett, and Bill Bullitt was there. This was an exciting and pleasant surprise. Bullitt full of salt, vigor, enthusiasm, and curiosities. I had n’t seen him since Moscow last summer. When he likes a story his cheeks bulge and his eyes almost pop; he is packed with erupting energy and humor. Another guest had a nice conceit, that in the year 5000 Hitler would be known as the greatest benefactor of the Jews since Moses, inasmuch as he would be the agent whereby all Jews left Germany, so that they were spared the universal destruction and slaughter which overcame Germany in the 1940’s.

I left at 5.30 to say good-bye to Princess Bibesco, who is en route to Paris. She began talking of her father, H. H. Asquith, whom she adored (as did everybody) ; she said that not only did he never think about himself, he was never even conscious of himself. He had an acute sense of humor. Once he defined a cad as a person who asked him at lunchtime what he thought of the League of Nations. Everyone got on with him. A child of five emerged after half an hour in his company when he was almost seventy. ‘What were you doing with Uncle Herbert?’ the child was asked. ‘Oh,’ he replied, ‘we gossiped.’

From the Oxford house I went on to Moura Budberg’s. She asked me, talking about Austria, what I had found so delightful there, quite apart from scenery, cooking, Gemütlichkeit, and beer. I said it was the civilized sense in the best Austrians that something mattered more than mere country, more than the crass kind of patriotism. The Austrians have a more nearly panand proEuropean attitude than the people of any other country I know. In Austria one could talk about Europe as a whole, as an entity, and not feel a fool. Moura told a pleasant little story. ‘How can Austria possibly survive,’ the question is asked. Answer: ‘Did you ever hear of a really beautiful woman starving to death?’

Friday, February 7. — Suddenly could not stand the sight of people or the smell of talk, and fled to Devon.

III

CARDIFF,Tuesday, February 11. — Last November I visited the ‘Special,’ Distressed Areas, notably those near Durham and the Tyne, but I saw nothing to compare with the misery and hopelessness of the coal fields here today. Armed with letters from Aneurin Bevan and others, I went to Merthyr Tydfil, to Tredegar, to Nantyglo, and to the terrible black villages of the Rhondda Valley. In some of them the population is 85 per cent unemployed; in none is there much hope of real recovery. My guide during part of the journey was a young schoolmaster, Archie Lush, who took me into schools, homes, welfare centres. The road was a bleak slaty ribbon, wet with snow, tying the desolate low hills together. The valley, under the mist, looked like a giant hand, since there are four parallel hollows somewhat like the spaces between fingers. I’ve never been colder in my life.

Nantyglo is a pithead village about thirty miles from Cardiff, in the Blaina Valley. It squats at the top, where coal is difficult and expensive to mine. The tops of the valleys are the first to go. One hundred years ago Nantyglo and Blaina ushered in the Industrial Revolution; they were the greatest coal producers in Wales. Now they are black stumps. The district is so desolate that Korda and the others chose it for the scenes in the Wells movie which are background for the collapse of civilization after the next great war.

In few of the houses we visited could the residents afford much fire, though the coal is very near the surface; you can shovel it out of the side of the black hills. In some districts foraging for coal is forbidden; in others the unemployed pay one penny a week to the local land or royalty owners for the privilege of collecting scraps of heat.

The thing that puzzles me most is the intense respectability of the unemployed miners. They are n’t loafers; they want to work; they keep clean and upright; as long as their clothes last, they put up a sturdy front. And there is surprisingly little political bitterness. One would have thought that such poverty as I saw to-day would cause revolution. Yet it is a fight in some districts to make the people on the dole vote Labor instead of Conservative.

I made a careful attempt to find out exactly how these people live, how they keep body and shoestrings together on a Means Test allowance of twenty-six shillings a week ($6.50) for a married couple. One miner, an educated fellow who has had no job since 1927 and little hope of ever getting one again, outlined his family budget. His biggest item is rent, five shillings a week for two and a half rooms. The rooms were clean and intensely ‘respectable’; but I noticed as we talked into the afternoon that he did n’t turn on any light, even though I could scarcely see to take notes. Light costs money, about one shilling a week if they use a ‘midget’ burner, which gives them double time but with only half the strength of the light.

Coal costs 1s. 6d. a week on the average. One shilling a week goes to clothes; the miner pays this sum to a workers’ club, which buys clothes wholesale or at cheap auctions and distributes them. Once every twenty weeks our friend gets a pound’s worth of clothing. One shilling a week goes to tobacco, one to newspapers, one shilling to an insurance fund (so that he can have a proper funeral), and about sixpence to household utensils, soap, polishes, and so forth. These miners may be starving, but. they keep clean.

Subtract all this from twenty-six shillings, and the miner’s family has just two shillings a day for food — for two people.

They have no coffee, no cocoa, no alcohol, very little bread. They get utterly no fish, green vegetables, or milk. Once a week they buy meat — ‘of a boiling nature’ — out of which they make soup with vegetables like cabbage and potatoes which they grow themselves. They have one chicken, and as a rule get one egg for two people once a day.

Talk about the human losses under Communism! I felt that it was almost better to kill off a lot of peasants in Russia than let 400,000 people like these just survive starvation.

In one village we met a young Communist, Philip Abrahams, who had just got out of jail. In Bulgaria, in Germany, in Syria and Egypt and Spain, I have met political prisoners; I did n’t expect to find one in the British Isles. Abrahams had been convicted of incitement to riot; the fact that he was Communist organizer for the district was additionally against him. I heard some things about the Cardiff jail, not pretty.

Everyone I met was bitter about one main thing, the Means Test. This is a test to ascertain how much relief a man or family may claim after the original ‘dole’ period. The local officer, at his discretion, may cut the amount of relief if, through some lucky chance, a man earns a fortunate shilling. For instance, suppose I had given sixpence to the chap who helped pull our car out of the snowdrift. Strictly speaking, he would have to report having earned this sixpence to the authorities and it would be deducted from his payment. So, even if a man does get work, his income remains the same.

Besides, the family is considered as a unit in the Means Test regulations, and earnings by brothers, sisters, children, and so forth, are counted in. Thus, if a growing lad gets a job, the amount of his father’s benefit is correspondingly cut; the gross income of the family remains the same. As a result, thousands of homes in the distressed areas have been broken up. The children prefer to leave home rather than diminish their parents’ income.

From Nantyglo we went on to Dowlais, a derelict steel town more than 80 per cent unemployed. The wife of a shopkeeper stood before her smudge of fire, shivering.

‘Ah, yes,’she said, ‘they look respectable enough, but it’s empty in their stomach they are. . . . Of a Sunday, even now, ye’d never know it was a depressed area. Pride they have, all of them have pride. . . . What a fine sight it was ten years back! All of them streaming out of the pits, as nice and black in the face as ye could wish.’

IV

Thursday, February 13. — Back in London. In the evening dined with Dr. Letitia Fairfield to meet John Strachey. One of the guests was a teacher of sociology at the University of Chicago. I heard that she had chanced to pass a black-shirt headquarters some days ago, immediately got off her bus, went inside, and harangued the Fascists about the evil of their ways for half an hour, then complacently departed, leaving them agape. Strachey very quiet, and left early. I had never imagined he was four feet broad.

Wednesday, February 19. — At seventy-two, Margot Oxford still stands straight as a wand. She seems, in fact, to arch backward. But not in her conversation. Her steady, flexible, attentive, wiry speech could never have been more untiring. She has two or three gestures that do not change: her head cocks far to the side, pertly, awarely, when she finishes an anecdote; she seldom laughs, but she smiles always when she listens; her fragile-seeming fingers give a stronger handshake than mine. Something of a bird in the way she darts and hovers. In the corner of her eyes is a tiny dark touch of red. I have never seen her without a hat. Her house is mellow, golden; everything shines dully and everything has been there for a thousand years. In the study a huge animal rug and her husband’s red dispatch boxes and a lot of photographs. She explained to me once some of the remarkable juxtapositions in centuries among the furniture (also what bargains some of the things were); but they all fit. To-day at luncheon a host of people talked avidly. I came late and did n’t get everybody’s name. Lord Middleton sat next to Margot and argued with Philip Morrell at the other end of the table. Food glorious, as always. Everyone seemed pro-German. Margot explained this by saying simply that they were anti-French.

Friday, February 21. — At 4.30 had an appointment with Rex Leeper, chief of the news department of the Foreign Office, and we talked an hour. He is a quiet-spoken Australian with an acute but restrained sense of humor. The news department here is the best I have ever struck in Europe. Leeper and his men receive newspaper men of a dozen nations every afternoon, taking them one by one; we sit waiting in the bare hall outside, smoking under the sign ‘No Smoking’ and otherwise scandalizing (mildly) the messengers, dignified folk these, who hurry back and forth with the big red dispatch cases. There are always half a dozen journalists about: Voigt and Ewer almost every day, and an assortment of French, Poles, Italians, Japanese. Frequently one gets more from one’s colleagues in the corridors than from Leeper, Wright, and the other officials inside. But the staff does a hard job very well. No one lies; no one is deliberately misleading. If they don’t want to talk, they simply say so, or tell you something off the record; sometimes they fence and let you guess if they think you are bright enough. What a difference from press departments in a couple of other nations!

Thursday, February 27. — Lunch at Rule’s with Voigt, Graham Hutton, and the political correspondent of the Observer, Hugh Massingham. Whenever I am with a group like this I want to crawl away for six weeks or six years and read all the books in the world, from Plato down. These people, all about my own age, know so much more than I do; they have a stronger point of view; they can back up any assertion with historical or literary allusions; they know Spinoza and Rousseau and Marx and Thomas Jefferson and John Milton and Lucretius and Mein Kampf by heart; they are, in a word, educated in a way that I am not. Hutton to-day particularly challenging. His mouth is like a steel trap, also his mind. Basis of discussion: Does the creation of the League tend to make wars more or less avoidable? Hutton and I took the League side; Massingham was against. Like Garvin, he is terrified that sanctions may cause an Italo-British war. Voigt was alert. He said that isolationism is over for England, and that rearmament will begin. Also said we should n’t forget that there are three liberal parties in England: the Conservative Party, the Labor Party, and the Liberal Party.

Friday, February 28. — This was an exciting day, because I met Aldous Huxley. He has just finished a long novel, Eyeless in Gaza, and the work on it exhausted him; his friends say it is his best book. Lady Rhondda was the hostess at our meeting, and Gerald Heard the other guest. There was some amusing desultory conversation, about how many books a week a person could profitably read; Heard said he read three or four, Huxley two or three. I mentioned the Wells film and Huxley said that his brother Julian was the only person who could successfully manage H. G.

Huxley is, as everyone knows, very tall and loose-limbed; his legs curl around a chair; his nose is short, almost pert, the nostrils abnormally long. He looks somewhat like an extraordinarily elongated and enlightened rabbit. For years he has meant more to me than any writer in England. We talked a bit about dictators, Heard very sure of himself and eloquent, Huxley hesitant and perhaps shy. I wanted to know if there was any case in history of a dictator successfully choosing his successor. Augustus Cæsar, said Heard; but then Huxley wondered if Augustus Cæsar could properly be called a dictator.

Later the talk turned to Spain, and we tried to resume where Lady Rhondda and Heard had left off last week: whether or not a democratic government like that just formed in Spain was entitled to use undemocratic means to suppress its enemies. They asked me, finally, exactly what I would do if I were in Azaña’s place; this put me fairly on the spot, and uncomfortably, since as a rule I can never say anything satisfactory in a discussion of this kind until the next day, when it is too late. However, I thought one could lay down several general principles, and I voiced them. First, a rough measuring stick on the free-speech problem might be one that Knick put forward a couple of years ago: ‘No free speech for those who themselves would avowedly destroy free speech.’ Second, absolute and instant extirpation of any private armies, any people with shirts, whether black, gray, green, or brown. Third, fair trial for open seditionists, with exile as punishment for minor offenses. Fourth, fulfill your political promises. Fifth, a broad programme of education.

Incidentally Heard was surprised when casually I said I had been horrified last week at the bloodshed in Japan. He had, apparently, thought that I was one of those ‘hard-boiled’ newspaper men whom even murder leaves quite ‘objective’ and cold. I tried to explain myself. Hard-boiledness does n’t become me. But after a lot of discussion I did say that I would, after fair trial, allow my enemies to be put to death, if the survival of my government depended on it. I think that if Azaña shoots a few guilty people now — after a proper trial — it may save thousands of lives in civil war later. Lady Rhondda disagreed. So did Heard. And Huxley apparently trusts in complete Tolstoyan nonresistance. Finally we got down to a root question, whether or not we believed in the natural goodness of man. Liberals do. Fascists and Communists, by and large, do not. And so on till midafternoon, when Huxley had to go.

In the evening — a second notable event to-day — we met Sir Stafford Cripps at dinner with the Ted Achesons; the other guests were Colonel Raymond Lee, the American military attaché, and Mrs. Lee. Cripps is the bright hope of the Left Wing Socialists, and may very well be Prime Minister some day. Tories fear him as a real radical. He was on a very strict diet and ate only a bit of salad and fruit. He has a rather doctrinaire mind and is full of theory, I thought, but his intelligence is manifest and expressive. His best idea was that the traditional idea of the unity of the state, His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and so forth, might easily and dangerously be a bridge to a totalitarian reaction. One has always assumed a two-party system to be an insurance of democracy, but suppose that in some great international crisis the national government here is enlarged by the adhesion of the trade unions; will this not create a very close approximation to a totalitarian Britain?

V

Tuesday, March 3. — Across town for lunch with Lady Violet BonhamCarter. Lord Cecil, Archibald Sinclair, and H. G. Wells were there. Cecil was at the other end of the table, and I did n’t hear much that he said. Sinclair, half-American, is the leader of what is left of the Liberal Party. H. G., of course, I think of as practically God the Visible King. There was some of the best conversation I have ever heard at this luncheon. When Wells came in, Lady Violet recalled to him that he and she had met Winston Churchill at some similar lunch just twenty years ago. Yes, H. G. said, and nowadays they all were still talking about the same things. He should be minister of offense and Winston minister of defense in the new cabinet, he suggested, and then added, with his infectious chuckle, that in a few weeks they would quarrel, each trying to get the other’s job.

Wells and Cecil discussed great men and what accomplishments they leave. Cromwell (‘not very endearing a character’), Napoleon (‘that “noble” Corsican’), Alexander (whom H. G. conceded a touch of genius), Julius Cæsar (‘dull’), were among the dramatis personœ. Wells said he thought Napoleon III was in some ways a greater man than Napoleon I. Winston Churchill might, in another age, have been an Alexander the Great, Wells thought. Discussion narrowed to what good, if any, Cromwell did for England. He built an army and a fleet. But, Lord Cecil said, he left nothing; the real reason Charles II came back was that the country was ‘a chaos dotted with major generals.’ Napoleon I, H. G. said, might have been a Voltaire (‘my hero’), but instead he tried to resurrect the Roman Empire. Why can’t things like the Roman Empire stay buried? Cremate ’em!

Went to a reception at the Soviet Embassy to see the private film of the Kiev manœuvres last year. Most formidable array of political and journalistic celebrities: Liddell Hart (the military critic of The Times), Wickham Steed, George Glasgow of the Observer, Walter Elliot (Minister of Agriculture), Lord Strabolgi (who was once a noisy Labor member as Commander Kenworthy), Lord Marley, and lots of military attachés and diplomats. Talked with Abshagen, a German journalist, with Smolka of the Neue Freie Presse and Jenkins of Izvestia. The film was impressive. It shows the recent developments in mechanical and aerial warfare in the U. S. S. R., including the delivery of troops and even machine guns and light artillery by dropping them in parachutes. All the technical loveliness of Russian camera work included: the planes sweep across telegraph wires, just missing them; the hundred parachutes descending together are like marshmallows floating down a field. Opinion mixed among the experts as to the technical value of this innovation. Most of them impressed. If the Poles or Germans attack the U. S. S. R., they will have to leave pickets in every field that a plane could land in; otherwise the Russian parachutists might get behind the lines, attack means of communication. What would have happened in 1917 if the Germans had been able to land even a few determined men, via parachute, behind the British at Amiens?

Monday, March 9. — Sent a story as long as could be. I went out whole hog on what I believe to be true, and started flatly as follows: ‘Germany is going to get away with her reoccupation of the Rhineland. There will be formal protests by Great Britain and righteous rancor in France, but no one is going to war to push the Germans out of what is, after all, their own territory.’ Then went on, of course, to point out what a gravely unpleasant step the German action is, since it destroys the Locarno Treaty. Also pointed out that our friends the British are in a tough spot, since they took a strong line against Mussolini, a treaty breaker, and now must at least pay lip service to a strong line against Hitler, a much more powerful and dangerous treaty breaker than the Duce.

Tuesday, March 24. — This was one of those days. Did a long piece on the windup at St. James’s. Lunched with Dick Mealand, the editor of Nash’s Magazine. He told me something I had n’t known, that magazines, et cetera, here insure themselves against libel. Must tell Hamilton this. He said that magazines can’t get good stories any more: articles are on hand a-plenty, but short fiction of merit and authority is very rare. Cocktails at the Berkeley with the advertising manager and London correspondent, newly appointed, of Time magazine. Prosperous-looking chaps. Time is n’t well received at the F. O., I was told.

Dinner chez Colonel and Mrs. Raymond Lee; among the other guests were General Spears and his wife, who is Mary Borden, the novelist. Very amusing the way they banter each other across the table. Then to a party at Victor Gollancz’s; the whole Left world there. It was pleasant having a word with Rose Macaulay and with Benn Levy’s beautiful wife, Constance Cummings. I got into a frightful argument over Germany and the line taken by the News-Chronicle with Gerald Barry, its editor; Helen Barry and F. separated us when we were just about to start to shout.

Monday, March 30. — Lunch with Jimmie Sheean, who is back from Egypt and en route to Ireland. He was on a strict diet, but he looked extremely well and we talked an hour, mostly on professional affairs. I asked him how he found plots; he told me. I have dozens of characters for stories, rough ideas, themes even, backgrounds; but I’ve seldom thought in terms of plots.

Sheean is perhaps the most remarkable American of my generation I know. I met him when we were both at the University of Chicago. He was bizarre in those days. He hummed Mozart, wore green pants, spoke better Italian than the Italian professors, read the Talmud, quoted Spinoza, learned German, borrowed money, admired dancing, and wrote a treatise on the Wahabis. He was, by and large, more interested in aesthetics then than political affairs. What turned him to politics was the unfortunate necessity to earn a living.

He has a great love for precision in words, but also an occasional wild uncontrollability. I remember in Jerusalem his showing me the MS. of an early novel. He was reading a passage aloud and came across an inadvertent cliche — ‘the noise of a great city,’ I think it was. With terrific savagery he shouted, ‘How can anyone be a writer who uses a phrase like that?’ And then, quite uncontent to erase or rewrite the passage, he tore a hunk out of the manuscript and stamped it on the floor.

Once I was taking a siesta on a hot afternoon in Jerusalem. He entered my room. ‘God!’ he muttered. ‘As if there was n’t enough sleeping to have to do at night!’

Sunday, April 5. — Lady Oxford phoned the other day and said her cook was ill and asked if she could come to lunch alone, just with F. and me. To-day was the day. The marvelous old lady walked from Bedford Square, thought our address was 194 instead of 104 Gower Street, and almost reached Euston Road before discovering her mistake. She is always punctual to the second (like everybody here), and we were alarmed when she was late. Talked about the King, with whom she dined the other night: he loves his garden, therefore hates to leave England in the spring. But there has n’t been much spring this year, heaven knows. Margot’s peculiarly Oxfordian gift of phrase was in full evidence. We were talking about America (she reminiscing about her lecture tour there ten years ago), and I said apologetically that after all we were a young country. ‘Yes,’ said Margot, ‘and getting younger every minute.’

She met Eden a couple of years ago when he was a comparatively unknown young man; Churchill was there and said something to the effect that all geniuses should be allowed liberty of action; Eden said No, because, in virtue of their special gifts, geniuses had a special position of responsibility to the community, and should discipline themselves for its good. Such a confrontation of Churchill took courage in a very young man, Margot thought, and she has watched Eden’s career with interest ever since.

Reminiscing, she told us of her indignation at much that has been written ex post facto about her husband; for instance, the ‘calumny’ that his saying ‘Wait and see’ to the House of Commons during the war was an indication of indecision. On the contrary, according to Margot, ‘Wait and see’ came on the only occasion in her life when she had known Asquith to be really angry; ‘Wait and see’ was a threat, not a supplication; he hissed it ‘like an otter.’ She talked on about the war and suddenly — but briefly — burst into tears. All her friends had been killed in the war; it had all been so hideous and hopeless; there was no religion in the world; a new war was coming; the world, her world, would be destroyed. She recovered promptly, and at about three-thirty she left, tripping down the stairs slight and rigid like an arrow, and behind her a cloud of all the England she has known. Balfour, Gladstone, Jowett, Salisbury, Queen Alexandra, Kitchener, all those names were in our flat to-day.