Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

Dependence on Wilfrid was too soft an option, a benevolent prison, which, perhaps, with infinite tact and very deftly, he was unlocking. Like God, he experimented and, if dissatisfied, withdrew.

Impasse. A useless life, Goethe wrote, is an early death. Imagination is quickened by gaps, by not knowing too much, and, rather too glibly, I began suspecting impatience or malice lurking beneath Wilfrid’s forbearance. I was diseased by uncertainties, seeing myself in a Blue Train, stationary on the wrong track. Instinct urged me towards Mother’s people, her Landed gentry, on the island of Byron and Dickens, juicy milords, flawless police, red buses. Her fables exuded perpetual scarlet-and-gold parades, resplendent bishops with sermons beginning, ‘Those of you who read Greek…’ In one anecdote, the patrician Lord Halifax, Foreign Secretary, mistook Hitler for a footman and handed him his hat. Unlikely. Unfortunately.

Arrival in post-Suez London was no bugle-call rag. Knowing no one, anonymous as a burglar, I was bidden to no grandee mansion, no candle-lit banquet or crimson opera-box. Landed gentry, of hunt balls and royal polo, brick-faced countesses, had apparently disfavoured Mother’s defection to a Baltic Baron and her son, Herr Nobody. Had they allowed me any, their smiles would have been sunlight on ice. I was a misfit, quaint, like the great Mr Bevin, ‘not one of us’, first tasting caviar and remarking that the jam tasted fishy. Not a Sir Anthony observation. They might fear me urinating on the Persian rug.

Silent voices of stone, fumes, cloud, dirt, more amorphous than Paris, slowly seeping into me, were concealing other contours of grey, monarchical London, socially ramped like a ziggurat, while wooing all with parks, street theatre, movement. Giant cranes slanted like surreal giraffes, high-rises mounted further, behind Victorian terraces and Regency columns grew immigrant enclaves. Immigrant myself, as if wearing the Tarnhelm, cap of invisibility, I attracted few glances, my friendliest exchange was with a little Malaysian waitress. ‘Kinda worried,’ she said, after my short absence.

I had hoped for some welcome in coffee bars – Che, Partisan, Lumumba, Vega à Go-Go – brimming with sumptuous rubber plants, radical posters, the exuberance of youth, denimed, duffled, embracing with madcap clamour or teenage sullenness. But the young, too, ignored me, while jeering amongst themselves at taxpayers and literates. They were more generous to striking miners and unmarried mothers than to beggars. Denied immediate fellowship, I could only watch, in cavern or small indoor stadium, their dervish jives, their flashes of unicorn grace. Occasionally, sloping in all weather at outdoor tables, they offered me sale of an ‘anti-Fascist biro’ or wanted my signature for a petition against Belgian imperialism, censorship of an underground paper or for Princess Margaret, to assuage racialism, to marry a Jamaican. They invited me not to a party, a jive, a happening but only to join their hilarity when a wealthy socialist sent his son to Eton, the better to meet his social equals.

In the USA Trilling was accused by students for teaching Jane Austen, thus showing support for US foreign policy. Zealots wrecked a Hampstead cinema for showing a film anti-Mau Mau, and, in a Bristol church, ‘Logic Is Fascist, Clarity Confuses’ was sung to a hymn tune. The Pill was promised, like Iduna’s Apples of Perpetual Youth. A girl offered me mescaline, guaranteeing visions of minute Alps, dust particles enlarging to Arizona, a trouser thread to green veins of Antarctica. I was allowed to subscribe for the funeral of a drugs martyr, a trainee doctor, blinding himself by seeking a third eye.

Did any such joylets read, ponder or, despite a vogue for meditation, risk solitude? They were rowdily post-war, post-Christianity, post-democracy, unpatriotic without being international. Mother’s remembered music-hall song, ‘Be British was the cry / As the ship went down’, would have baffled them, like Greek, Sanskrit, Esperanto. The Vice-Supremo of the Holocaust was, illegally but righteously, kidnapped, then hanged, by Israelis. ‘Who’, a young agitator against capital punishment, demanded, ‘is, I’d say was, this Eichmann?’ The newly erected Berlin Wall was accepted as protecting the People from Imperialism, and a student leader was wildly applauded for announcing that, had he to choose between the destruction of the venerable Abbey and the death of a human being, however worthless, he would unhesitatingly save the latter.

The Saturday Knights, helmeted, visored, black-leathered, sat motionless on motor cycles, awaiting signal to crouch low, then roar off, to pillage seasides and maul flick-knife rivals. The young had the mystique of cabals and élites, though regularly rebuked by their elders as too rich, too happy, too irresponsible. The obsolescence of Empire. One youth winked at me, tapping his military greatcoat. ‘Redistributed from supplies, mate. We’re doing the country good, armies aren’t needed now. Aldous says…’

Roxanas and Sandras, Jakes and Garys tossed words like crackers. ‘Fantastic. Greatest ever.’ Beads, mantras, joss-sticks, bizarre coiffures were no access to the Infinite, but I envied freedom from caste, habit, agility. Youth discarded the past, danced on the present, the electric moment, turned backs on all future save the Bomb. I could not risk confessing that I had rejoiced at Hiroshima, as destroying thousands to save millions. Marxism explained, Marc-Henri retorted. Perhaps sincerely, young Londoners feared the limbless cretin and two-headed baby, saw a Japanese girl’s eyes crumble at a touch.

For them, I was conformist, ‘square’, short-haired, my head almost page-boy. Their admission prices were too drastic. They would scream for Vello, as they did for Castro, Guevara, for Sinatra and Joan Baez. They delighted in rumours that the Fourth Man was a spy in the Palace. With sex easy as oil, the perils of beauty exciting, the slave camps of Kolyma and Vorkuta were only the invention of right-wing scribblers. An Estonian was freak of nature, a German had glamour of jackboot and truncheon, even of the New Economic Miracle.

I enjoyed protest songs but was unable to bawl for unearned rights or use the Bomb as an excuse for misbehaviour, or suicide, and was thus debarred. ‘See you morrow-day,’ youngsters said, but I knew I never would.

I was like a hyphen between a lost Paris and hypothetical Londons, was threatened by Rising Tide.

Accident, or apparent accent, tyche , intervened. I chanced on a tiny north London art-house cinema, showing a blurred silent Lubitch movie, The Patriot , Emil Jannings twitching, slobbering, as Tsar Paul, clinging to his murderer, Lewis Stone, who else but Count von der Pahlen. Uniformed conspirators stalked weird palaces, limitless, mirrored corridors ornate with giant guards and dwarfs in immense hats spitting and capering while, outside, His Majesty inspected grenadiers motionless as toys which he imagined they were, while, heads bending towards each other in shuttered rooms, Pahlen and his conspirators planned to save Russia from a madman. Some tick in my blood revived, quivered, restoring me to history.

My Guilford Street lodging-house was surrounded by cheap hotels, Italian restaurants, foreign tourists, my bedroom opposite a nurses’ hostel so that, in theatre, I could watch a live frieze of girls chatting, eating, reading, undressing, stinging me with recollections of Suzie, the pizzicato of foreplay, versatility of hands and mouth, the magnetic pull of thigh and buttock towards flashpoint. Through open windows drifted conversational codes resolutely English: ‘Quite warm at last.’ ‘Yes, very cool.’ ‘Adam’s Apple.’

The Embassy had a play-reading group, a choir affiliated to the Estonian Lutheran Service at Gresham’s Church, a tennis squad, an occasional dance. Also, a note periodically circulated. If Mr Kaplan arrives, he is to be given the arrangement. Latterly, however, this was reversed. Mr Kaplan? The old librarian put finger to his lips, so that I immediately envisaged dull green eyes, emaciated face, B-movie mackintosh crammed with forgeries.