My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles (27 page)

To me as his son, the fourteen volumes of his diaries are of absorbing interest. They give me a picture of his life that I could never have acquired otherwise. It is very hard for children to visualize their parents' lives in the round. Parents alter their own plans to suit their children's; tea parties and expeditions are promptly cancelled and friends put off when a daughter rings up at the last moment to announce that she will be bringing down two friends for the week-end or when a son returns unexpectedly on leave. Children forget that their parents have real lives of their own and do not go into hibernation in their absences. My father's diary showed me how much he was
doing all the time; particularly during his last twenty months.

There are many references to my brother in his final entries. Evelyn had a dramatic war. He was a regimental officer the entire time, first in the Royal Marines, later in the Blues, attached to a Commando. He went on three separate campaigns, in the summer of 1940 to Dakar, in 1941 to the Middle East where he was in the raid on Bardia and in the Crete evacuation. Later he went to Yugoslavia, with Randolph Churchill, as part of a military mission and was lucky not to lose his life in an aeroplane crash. But from the close of 1941 through mid-1944 he was stationed in England.

It made a great difference to our father; Evelyn was now a director of Chapman & Hall as well as a Chapman & Hall author and they worked together in easy harmony. During a part of 1942 Evelyn was stationed at Sherborne, in the Digby Hotel where my father had always stayed when he came down to see me, which was an added bond. That Christmas when food was scarce, Evelyn managed to acquire a goose which he sent up to Highgate by his batman; a no doubt highly irregular operation which touched my father as much as the goose delighted him. If only my father could have lived long enough to read
Brideshead Revisited
. How proud of it he would have been.

Three weeks before my father died, he presided over Chapman & Hall's annual shareholders' meeting. ‘Of course there were no shareholders left,' he wrote to me, ‘except the directors of C. H. and Methuen. Chamberlain spoke most generously, that they were all pleased to see me looking so well, long to reign over us, happy and glorious and so on. It really looks as though the old firm would live out its need of me. It will be very pleasant if we manage to keep light at eventide.'

The first two pages of the letter were written in his firm, clear Greek script. Earlier in the year I had been worried by a change in his handwriting. He seemed unable to control his pen and the sheet was scored by scratches. Occasionally it was impossible to read. But the warm spring had brought improvement. I remembered the old adage of the creaking door. He was only seventy-six. As I read his account of the shareholders' meeting, I saw no reason why he should not celebrate his golden wedding day in October, but on the third page of his letter the script was again criss-crossed with scratches. ‘My hand seems wearing out, but I have been two hours over this,' he wrote.

It was with no real surprise that I received the telegram that announced his death.

The funeral service was in Hampstead Parish Church, on a day of sunlight, with the friends of a lifetime gathered round him. He had chosen for the inscription on his tombstone a line from Revelations: ‘And another book was opened which is the book of life'.

Half a week later I received in Baghdad the last letter that he had written me. There are words in it which try as I could I have been unable to decipher.

I have been feeling villainously guilty in my relations
vis à vis à toi
, having had 3 really splendid letters from you and being prevented from replying by this exasperating failure of my writing hand. I was plugging away when your mother said ‘My dear you can't possibly send that, it is illegible'. So I tore my letter to pieces and had not the endurance to begin again. But here is another attempt which I hope may be more successful.

I am pretty well in myself, except for bad sleeping which is bound to knock me up. I feel very like the dyspepsia I got in 1931. At any rate I feel very much as I did then, before we went to Villefranche, but I have never felt anything like as bad as I did then.

My one pleasure has been watching the school cricket which has had many good days and successful wins.… I never remember a boy not
much higher than the stumps getting 102 not out twice as young Laws did while Maclure was getting 74 and 30.

Evelyn has been over to see us several Sundays. He has had Laura with him. He has been most agreeable and has brought me some wine.…

Well, I have looked through what I have written, but I must confess that it has made me sad. So often I have said to myself ‘Well, when I am growing old and ugly, at least I shall have the old gift of communication and if I can still speak in the old language, I shall be able to bring the old look back… But alas it will not. I can see the old secret vanished and when a letter comes, my dear ones can no longer.… The old clouds lose their colour in the sky. Never mind, God bless you, son of my soul, there will never be shadows in the… With every tender remembrance. May every base be broad in honour.…

Your loving and grateful

Father

When I returned to New York in September 1945, an engaging female enquired if I had had ‘a chic war'. No, I answered, but I had had a lucky one. My birthday, 8 July 1898, which had made me old enough for the First War, made me just young enough for the Second; as a Lieutenant in the R.A.R.O. (Regular Army Reserve of Officers) I was recalled to my regiment on the first Monday of the war, and was not demobilized till June 1945. Those six years away from my desk gave me a much needed ‘breather' in midstream. I had been writing for twenty years and was beginning to be conscious of the strain. In the autumn of 1945 I returned to professional authorship refreshed. I also returned with sharpened susceptibilities, with broadened interests. I never rose higher in rank than major, so that my opposite numbers were always men considerably younger than myself. In the early ‘twenties most of my friends had been older than myself. Now the balance was adjusted.

In September 1941 as I have already mentioned I was posted to the Middle East—six months in the Lebanon and Syria, two months in Cairo; then thirty-three months in Baghdad. But for the war, I might never have seen the Arab world. How much I should have missed if I had not. Moreover I gained an insight into the machinery not only of military intelligence but of police procedure; this insight has been invaluable to me as a novelist.

There are two kinds of military intelligence, offensive and defensive. Offensive intelligence tries to discover the enemy's intentions, defensive to conceal one's own.
Offensive intelligence operates in an enemy or neutral territory. It is invariably exciting and often dangerous. Defensive intelligence operates in one's own or in an allied country and, in spite of its importance, can be extremely dull, since it often has to concentrate on preventing one's own troops from acting in a manner that would give information to the enemy, if there were an enemy agent on the watch. It is a negative activity employed against an imaginary and often non-existent foe. Defensive intelligence can, however, be exciting when it is pitted directly against active offensive intelligence and it was on this kind of work that I was employed for two years in Baghdad.

My particular job was to watch the subversive elements of Iraq, in particular the agents and groups of agents who were sending information to German Intelligence in Turkey. Though the actual fighting was by now many miles away, it was important for the Germans to be misinformed about the quantity and quality of the troops stationed in Iraq; it was important that saboteurs should not interfere with the transport of aid to Russia; nor with the oil installations in Kirkuk and Abadan; it was important that
agents provocateurs
should not cause civil trouble and thereby necessitate the maintenance of troops who could be better employed elsewhere. Thirty years before Baghdad and Mosul had been vilayets in the Ottoman Empire. Many of the elder Iraqis had been educated in Turkey. The Turks had been allies of the Germans. There was no lack of disaffected persons ready to assist their former friends. At times I felt that I was living in a novel by Phillips Oppenheim. Could this really be happening to
me?

I was present at the arrest of several men who were working for the Germans. It was invaluable for a novelist
to observe how men who have had no reason for suspecting that they are being watched behave when they are arrested. To my surprise not one of them showed surprise or fear. The only man who did show fear was completely innocent. He was a barber. In the old quarters of Baghdad, where the streets are narrow and congested, and it is difficult for a postman to find his way, barber's shops are used like an Englishman's club as a
poste restante
and when we arrested the members of a subversive group who had used a particular shop in this way, we had to take its owner into custody as well.

We arrested him on a Sunday morning when his shop was opening and I have never seen a man more harassed and distressed. We took him back to his house so that he could collect some clothes and inform his family. He was desperate with despair. He ransacked his trunk for paper money and scattered a quantity of it among the womenfolk who were squatting on cushions round a coffee-pot. He had no idea what it was all about, he told them. His ignorance, no doubt, accentuated his alarm. He had read stories of innocent people caught up in a plot. This was now happening to him. Anything might happen next. The other men who knew precisely what they had done, were stoical. The barber was back with his family within three days but those three days must have been a torture for him.

I also while I was in Baghdad saw the C.I.D. at work. When Iraq acquired its independence after World War I, a number of British experts were appointed as technical advisers to organize the various Ministries. They were all of them men of the highest quality and they worked no less loyally because their efforts were devoted to the making of their own posts unnecessary through rendering these organizations so efficient that there would be no need for technical advisers.

The technical adviser to the police was Colonel Wilkins, a Scot who had been trained by Scotland Yard. He was in his middle sixties when I met him, tall, white-haired, urbane, with a twinkle in his eye. I saw him on an average twice a week.

Within three minutes of my arrival, as in all Arab offices and houses, a cup of strong black coffee would be offered me. During Ramadhan, so that the drinking of coffee should not offend orthodox Moslems, the cups were brought in cardboard boxes. We would sip the coffee and gossip and then Wilkie would begin to talk.

Interviews with him tended to last two hours. He was never in a hurry. He did not go home for lunch. It was believed that he brought sandwiches down with him but I never saw him eat them. He would pull out the bottom drawer of his desk, place his foot in it and on this leverage rotate himself in a swivel chair. He would talk round and round a subject, thinking it out as he was talking, reading a report slowly, lifting it to his nose and shaking his head, ‘No, no, I don't like the smell of it, I don't like the smell of it at all.'

In the heavy heat of a Baghdad summer when for days on end the temperature does not drop below 110°F. and often rises into the 120s, it was hard not to feel drowsy, sitting there while he talked. To cool the room brushwood was stacked outside the window with an arrangement that let water trickle over it. As he swung in his swivel chair I would sit there half mesmerized watching the drops drip from twig to twig as his voice droned on.

I cannot say exactly what it was I learned during these long hours in Wilkie's office, but I believe I gradually absorbed an atmosphere. Friends have told me that in my West Indian novel
Island in the Sun
the character of the policeman Whittingham rang true. If it did, it was because of those long hot noon-day visits to that shaded
room, with the water dropping twig by twig and the taste of strong sweet coffee on my palate and the sound of that voice going on and on. There he was, the spider at the centre of the web, benign, friendly, humorous, but inexorable in the pursuit of justice.

I also learnt how large a part chance plays in criminal research. Much depends on how busy the investigating officer may be. If he has three important cases on his hands, he is likely to dismiss cursorily a minor case. If, however, he has nothing particular to do, he is likely to raise a hornets' nest; and the enquiries that he initiates often reveal conspiracies of quite another nature.

The police know both more and less than is generally recognized, and in war-time when a man is suspect, they proceed to find out all they can about him—which are his clubs, who are his friends, what are his tastes and habits. Not only is his correspondence censored, but that of his friends. Several cases of tax evasion came to the notice of authority in this way. Once we were watching a man who had come to our attention because a friend of his was a pro-German suspect. The man was, we eventually found, a person of blameless political affiliations but his correspondence proved him to be a homosexual who in company with an acquaintance made a practice of picking up Air Force personnel in cinemas, taking them back to his house and doping them with arak into acquiescence.

It is the general practice to leave a suspect at liberty as long as he is not immediately dangerous, so as not to frighten his friends and to obtain information from his correspondence. But a time may come when his activities become so quiescent that more information can be obtained by taking him into custody for interrogation. Such a position was reached on one occasion in the case of a man who was, we were very certain, concerned with a
pro-German conspiracy. We had not enough evidence to ask for his arrest by the Iraqi Police—Iraq being a sovereign state—but when he applied for permission to take a holiday in Beirut we had our chance. He could be arrested by the French and taken to Cairo for cross-examination. I was in charge of the case and it was for me to decide whether it was more advantageous to arrest him or leave him at liberty.