By the time the plane had gained cruising altitude, I had to reconcile myself to at least seven hours inside this cocoon of noise. The converted American bomber would have been unbearable without ear-plugs. The seating was cramped; it would have been difficult to read. My New Zealand Brigadier neighbour was friendly enough but even if we had wanted to talk, it would have been difficult due to the noise. We adjusted our issue blankets and shrunk back, each into the private world of his own head. I only had conjectural notions of my future, but I had some very clear pictures of what I was leaving behind me. I realised that it was only by a narrow margin that I was not in a train heading for Yorkshire. My Air-Marshall, once we had done what we could about the V2s, had been contemplating the transfer of his whole crew to the Industrial North. This was a direct result of Winston Churchill's concern for the imminent second front and a quick end to the war. Safety and productivity problems had been threatening the delivery deadlines on which the whole time-table depended. There had always been some question of leaving me behind in London because of my involvement with Allied Governments, but only a few weeks back we had been studying the inch to a mile maps that Janetta and I had got to search out a possible Yorkshire village for ourselves and little Nicolette.

Of course I was excited about the future, but there was an overlay of repining, of sadness, about the discord in that earlier unanimity of thinking which had made it pure joy to be with Janetta. I spent that seven hour flight in a deep reverie roaming through our shared years. London, in the early 1940s, had manifested an intimacy of atmosphere now gone for ever. It had been bred out of the shared danger of the aerial siege and out of the fact that common meeting grounds were few. The Café Royal, the French Pub and its neighbours, that round of restaurants between Charlotte Street and The London Pavillion, the National Gallery mid-day concerts - what else was there? Watching Dylan Thomas, embracing with his lower lip the glass of his third pint, allowed one to sense vicariously the voluptuous meaning of a drink to the really committed. Orwell, eating alone inside the Majorca, spotting Janetta and myself passing by on the pavement and our being able to hear him calling us in, such was the village silence with the lack of cars. A certain calm had at that time reigned in Central London. It was the hour of sunset. Had we been at home in Park Road we would by now have been giving Nicolette her supper. Janetta and I had never found it a drag having a baby around--partly because Nicolette was by nature cheerful - and partly because Janetta had shown an amazingly practical adaptation to the problems of war-time house-keeping. We did a lot of entertaining at home, so also did our friends. Now I, in this bloody plane, was going in entirely the wrong direction. I fell back into thoughts of the warm life we had been living together and of the friends we shared.

I had always regretted that Orwell never came to our house despite the friendly terms of his relationship with Janetta. My own sporadic meetings with him had never been entirely comfortable; the fact that we had both been in Spain at the same time should have served as a bond but, in our particular case, it was regrettably and un-necessarily divisive. He had fought under the flag of the POUM, as indeed had John Cornford when he first went out. I myself did not feel that we had been on different sides, but Orwell's experiences when the POUM, the independant left, was being broken up at the behest of the Soviet CP, had made him suspicious of those like myself who had been in the International Brigade. For me this had neither reason nor personal relevance. We did, however, see a lot of Sonia Brownell who was already office manager of Horizon. Orwell was not yet in her orbit; Sonia's personal life had then been centered on William Coldstream but, as I observed it, she always fenced herself off from close contacts by giving free play to her aggressive, rebarbative, manner. Had anyone suggested it at that time, a pairing with Orwell would have appeared a gross mismatch. She always gave me the impression of being, so far as men were concerned, an extremely uneasy partner. She was utterly without the revolutionary feelings that were such a fundamental part of Orwell's being. I do not pretend to any insight regarding their later relations, but marrying Orwell on his sick-bed may well have been the kindest and most generous act of Sonia's life. In 1942 Sonia had a freshness of complexion, a Renoir-ish buxom mien with a brisk swirling of her cotton skirts. There would have been plenty of this left by October 1949, it must have been pure magic to a man pinned into a hospital bed. That the marriage was in large part an act of calculated self-interest as Michael Sheldon implies seems to be based on a false logic postulating that when an action produces several results any one of them is sufficient to provoke it. Here I must interject a foot-note on money. I last saw Sonia before this marriage in a Charlotte Street pub; she spotted me and promptly asked me to lend her five pounds (then worth about fifty of today’s money). As she was asking for the loan, her manner told me that she had no intention whatever of returning it which indeed proved to be the case. A similar experience with Tom Driberg makes me wonder whether such borrowings (with a hidden codicil of "to hell with the lender") does not have a special value in a certain state of emotional stress; a value that is potentialised for those (like Sonia and Tom D.) who could afford to pay debts. This must be one of the few psychological poultices that has the advantage of costing nothing - even better, it brings in a net cash profit.

In this flying noise-tunnel, I had been thinking of our friends, amongst them Koestler who had been brought back into my life by Janetta before he had become a literary figure in his own right. He was then serving in the Pioneer Corps and had come up on leave to discuss the best medical scenario for getting out of it. This was a precursor to future asperities because Janetta and I both knew plenty of people who were having to put up with war-time jobs that did not satisfy their fundamental vocation; so I could not feel that his wish to be discharged from military service was based on any sort of natural right. All of us had to fit our aesthetic and personal lives into the common cause of the war. Janetta very reasonably had remarked that his talents were never going to be used in the Pioneers so I did my best to help him. Medical releases depended very much on the way the subject replied to the Medical Board's questioning. Such bodies rarely react well when the person facing them is, as an individual, demonstrably more clever than they are collectively and they become maddened when the applicant is obviously trying to out-smart them. It is hard to get a genius to act dumb, but, for once, Koestler accepted to do so. He did not find it either easy or appealing, but he did accept the advice I gave him.

Not long afterwards a Medical Board set him free. There has always been something magic in the air of Budapest. Maybe stupid or dull people do get born there, but they certainly hide themselves in later life. Koestler's verbal penetration was similar to that shown visually by Capa in his pictures with one great difference: where Capa was warm in his reactions Koestler was cold. There was more laughter in an evening with Capa than in a week with Koestler. They did not mix well together. Capa never cared for theorising, so my only evening with the two of them was a flop. Pre-1936 in Paris they had inhabited interconnecting millieux. Remembering his time in Paris did not suit Koestler who wished to forget his earlier sponsorship of the communist inspired SDSE (Schutzverband Deutscher Schriftsteller im Exil). This writer's union had then been run by Koestler, Kantorowicz, Egon Erwin Kisch, Gustav Regler and Bodo Uhse. Capa had been in and out of that circle which amounted to a liberal communist caucus. It cannot be viewed as a matter of shame that Koestler, as many other young Central European intellectuals, had once seen hope in the Communist Party's opposition to the feudal fascism of the twenties and thirties. The bother was that he never came to terms with his own past. He simply could not face the period of his earlier loyalties calmly. When I first met Capa, he was still called André Friedmann; but he was already trying out the alternative Capa, the name invented for him by his unique great love Gerda Taro who was to be killed at Brunete just before Thora and I left Spain. In their trial run of name changing her own quite impossible surname (Pohorylles) was junked while Capa - still Friedmann - dropped his Hungarian given name - Bondi - for André. The basic ruse was for Gerda to sell his photos at double the price because they had been taken by a very special man called Capa. It worked, moreover so did the tactic of selling Capa's surplus pictures cheap as the work of André.

Capa lived without arguments. He wasted no time deploring situations he galloped through what he did not like without tears which set him apart from his compatriot Koestler who confused a light heart with a light head. I still am puzzled by Koestler's literary success because he was simply a good specimen of that whole Central European intellectual class in which the ideal had been the polymath - and many approached it closely. That meant being on familiar terms with all that was new in science, literature, art, music and politics. Their wits were sharpened by interminable conversation and sometimes, when their intelligent talk got transcribed into print, one got a Koestler article. For this a café life is needed; pubs offer no sort of a substitute. An effort was made in the late 1930s to start a Viennese café at the bottom of Tottenham Court Road, but it did not take; this may have been just as well since one Koestler is enough and shines brightest on its own.

In the pre-war years, Koestler and I had often enough met as speakers at Left Book Club Spain evenings; then we were oddly wary of each-other. In 1945, long after this plane journey, we had a public row at a George Strauss party in the latter's Kensington Palace Gardens house. Koestler's view of Stalin was at that time sharper than my own. I had indeed met the Red Army on the Danube and had appreciated Tito's reservations about them, but I also knew that we would have lost the war without the Russians. Having met the Red Army face to face I certainly did not regard them as cosy companions but, in the very year of the Allied victory, I was unable to follow Koestler and damn them all.

As I flew away from England, I remembered how, when the bombing slackened, Janetta and I had found more time to live our lives, time to breathe and to look at the road ahead of us; we never had doubts about being together. We were not consciously perfectionist but between us we had an effortless concordance that made everything go right. We had both been faced with material and psychological obstacles on the dissolution of our previous marriages. These problems had arisen more from what was then imposed on the spouse relationship by the law and by current social mores than by any action of our ex-spouses. The two of us had decided that all we wanted was to be together. Our common will was all that was needed to make our union solid. As we flew out over the Atlantic the engine noise became a numbing mantra which summoned up the happy past. Within this mantra I remembered how Jan, Janetta's mother, emerged via Portugal from Vichy France a year after Petains surrender. Jan had been one of the children of the "Souls", that wonderful generation that had opened the way for all that makes today worth while. Lady Diana Cooper was perhaps its best known survivor; her son, John Julius Norwich and his daughter Artemis Cooper are holding high the fanion for later generations.

Jan was wonderfully kind to me and stayed with us until she found a place of her own but she, tragically, only lived long enough to start enjoying the England she had left so long before. That mid-war winter of 1942/43 became a very sociable time. Many, if not most of the people we saw, had two raisons d'être, one a war time job that was London centered and, second, their own vocation which, in the case of our friends, tended to be writing or painting. Stephan Spender was a fireman; Philip Toynbee had some job in Economic Warfare. Very few people were really free, so their spare time was precious and had to be used to the best advantage. Koestler had not yet become a sage. He was thrusting ahead, getting admiring girls to type for him, while nurturing his fluency and his real inventive penetration in personal and political matters. Once out of the Pioneer Corps he celebrated his release by writing "The Yogi and the Commissar." He was then as pleased to see it printed in the June 1942 Horizon as was I to find my own contribution on the "Prospect for Medicine" which was the opener to that same number. Cyril Connolly had teased me saying that he, as an editor, could not very well do more for me, a first time contributor, than to bill me with Koestler, a writer who was bound to succeed and to print me with Andre Gide, who had already succeeded. I remembered Cyril saying "The bother with you, Kenneth, is that you are too busy doing too many things. To write well, you must care so much that you let all else go.

Dreaming my way through that most uncomfortable flight I remembered a touchingly significant dinner with Roland Penrose. Just after we had arrived in their house, someone whose face I did not know dropped in. Roland asked him if he would care to stay. The reply, in view of the problems of rationing, seemed designed to put our host at his ease. The man said, in a heavy accented voice, that it was not for food that he, the dropper-in, was looking but for bus-tickets. This sounded odd but, following his lead, I asked him what sort of tickets he needed. What the visitor wanted were those purple sevenpennies, then the red tenpenny, it is terrible; without them I cannot finish my collage." It was le Papa de Dada Kurt Schwitters. He had immense energy, he was totally self-immersed - which is perhaps a necessity at the moment of artistic creation but becomes trying during a meal. Towards the end of our supper Kurt Schwitters said that he thought he ought to give us one of his voice sonatas. Without waiting for encouragement he closed his eyes, hit the table three times as though a curtain had to go up, and started a falsetto twittering which gave way to odd sounds without meaning and various vocalisations without tune, rhythm or seeming plan. There was a sudden silence when he said, "I shall repeat the second half only of the first movement". Then a terrible thing happened, we all got the giggles. Had we but known it, there was still many minutes more within which to master ourselves. When Kurt Schwetters had finished our faces were recomposed, but we were tongue-tied. For him that was success. As an early precursor of surrealism, Kurt Schwitters had played a real part in the liberation of art from the manacles of academicism. No one in their senses would say that collages are nonsense, but I did not find his vocal collage a sympathetic randomisation of sound. When we had all recovered and were quietly talking in a corner of the room. I asked him point blank whether he was satisfied with the voice-sonata as a form of expression and if so why. I got a good reply. "No, of course I am not satisfied, how can an artist ever be satisfied? You have to try, always try. There are more to things than how they look on a map, or in a catalogue; it is how they seem to you the artist. You must ask 'Have I communicated to whoever is faced with my work the essential reaction from inside me that I so desperately needed to exteriorise?'..That is why I want those bus-tickets; I need them for what I have to tell.... My voice sonatas are not quite right yet, but one day they will tell something that no one else has ever told." That voice-sonata performance may in fact have been laughable but what Kurt Schwitters (1887 - 1948) had to say about it was a most significant declaration of artistic integrity. Inside this inexorable noise cocoon, sitting in that cramped canvass seat next to my New Zealand companion, I could but be jealous of the way he had sent himself to sleep with the help of his whisky flask. I had lacked his foresight, I had no flask.

The planning I had been sent to do with the London-based Governments of the Poles, Belgians, Czechs and Jugoslavs had not, even in my widest dreams, suggested that I would have found myself beside him in this plane. I had always assumed that I would be going back into Europe via France. I was sorry that I had been seeing so little of the French. No one wanted to tangle with General de Gaulle, least of all me, after my one crushing interview with him in 1940. The Free French were not very open to those quick friendships that the war-time style of London life made so easy. You could only meet the French on their terms. Though they often seemed to find our ways almost endearingly comic, they very rapidly became impatient with us. The Anglo-French compatibility problem haunts us permanently. We and the French have a genius for mutual misunderstanding. Ten days after D Day, a jovial, prankish, British Officer was detached from his Royal Artillery battery to act as liaison with a French Unit; there was a risk that its rapid advance might bring it under 'friendly fire'. He was chosen for this task because, as a civilian, he had been a Prep-school French master. After a few days he got a monstrous attack of flu which put him into a Field Hospital sited in the infirmary of a small, newly liberated, township. This little hospital was being run by an Infirmier-Major, an old sweat Sergeant-Major. Temperatures were taken with military precision, naturally enough in the French manner by the anal insertion of the thermometer. During the first days the British Officer did not take much notice but as he recovered he found this departure from under-the-tongue so quaint that he turned it into a Prep-School dormitory joke by sticking his backside into the air in an ostentatious quadrupedal manner in order to receive the sergeant's thermometer. Recovered and due for discharge, at the time of a temperature round, he was in high spirits. A senior French Médecin-Colonel on a forward area inspection was at the door of the ward at the very moment that this genial British prankster was presenting his backside to receive the Gallic Thermometer. The Infirmier Major, by whatever motivation, seized a wild daffodil from the little bouquet that the local ladies had placed at each of their liberators bedsides, and thrust it in instead of the thermometer. For the patient this exchange provoked no appreciable sensory difference and he retained his joke position. The Adjudant-Chef, having inserted the flower, leapt to attention as the Colonel advanced into the ward. The Colonel stood frozen in glazed amazement at the sight of the oddly placed solitary daffodil. "Mais qu'est ce qui passe.? "Mon Colonel, c'est le malade Britannique." "Ah ça m'explique beaucoup mais on ne soigne pas les déments même Britanniques en premier line. A évacuer immédiatement, sans aucun retard, aux Psychiatres de la Division Britannique. Je signerai la fiche moi même."

The jovial Officer's anal discrimination was not such as to differentiate a daffodil stem from a cold glass thermometer so, while gratified at his rapid discharge, he was unable to follow the insistent and sometimes indecent questions about flowers with which he was greeted by the British MOs. One of the doctors asked him for about the tenth time what he would do with a bunch of flowers and the normally gentle, tired-out, ex prep-school French teacher finally lost his temper: "What the Hell do you think?" he snapped " If you keep going on like this all I can say is 'up your arse!' Realising that he had lapsed into other-rank language, he then burst out laughing. The military psychiatrists were at last able to close his file. Returning to the realities of that interminable 1944 flight to Casablanca, to insulate myself from the noise I had been consoling myself with memories of the past years in Park Road, with such events as the visits of Phillip Toynbee. Were he still alive I would not go on; what follows should have been told by Phillip himself. When, in 1976, I was writing my piece for his "Distant Drum", I asked him why he had not written up those two magnificent Economic Warfare campaigns of which he had given us a privileged account one evening after one of Janetta's good dinners, complete with two bottles of Aloxe Corton from the cellar-salvage-man round the corner. He said he could not remember the detail, but if I could do so I had better have a try myself. Phillip had got hold of a Ministry of Economic Warfare virgin file cover, he labelled it "Top Secret" and entitled it "Far-Northern Protein Reserves" with the sub-title "Soviet Offer". The file started off with what purported to be a translation of a recent paper published in the learned journal "Sovietskaya Nauka" giving an account of the discovery of a vast mammoth cemetery inside an enormous Siberian glacier. The freeze-up had been so sudden that there were even baby mammoths frozen solid before they had had time to finish chewing the grass in their mouths. The meat was therefore in perfect condition. Over the millennia, the glacial edge had been slowly melting, now at last the contents had become visible and for he past few years had been used by the indigenous inhabitants of a very remote corner of Northern Siberia. The health of these people was proverbially robust. Recently our Soviet Ally, so the contents of the file explained, had started the industrial exploitation of this immense protein reserve in order to meet the needs of the Red Army. The highest level in the Soviet Government had reacted with concern to reports of the grave meat shortages in the United Kingdom, where the average citizen could not hope to receive even as much as the equivalent of one lamb chop per week. A most senior level in the Government of our Soviet Ally, the memo went on to relate, had given orders that Convoys returning to Britain from Murmansk, should carry as many tons of this 'Siberian Beef' as they could load - all as a gesture of friendship from our Great Hearted Soviet Ally. There was but one problem: though there was plenty of Siberian Beef, there was not enough tin-plate for canning it, without which it could not stand the journey back to Britain. The papers on this file argued that it would be prudent, politically, economically and even gastronomically, to make no matter what sacrifice in order to accept the Soviet offer. We should certainly forgo other tin-plate exports - for example those to New Zealand for that doubtful canned mutton which was really of pet-food quality. Our Soviet Ally was very short of all metallic products. Every bit of iron was needed for making cannon and tanks. We must liberate the necessary tonnage of tin-plate for Murmansk and thus signify to our valiant Soviet Ally our Grateful Acceptance of this boost to our meat ration, offered as it was with Comradely Generosity within the context of the Shared Struggle. The file contained a strong economic case argued in almost emotional terms. Attached to the file there was an unopened sample tin of Red Army bully-beef which, somehow or other, had got into Phillip's hands. Phillip inadvertently dropped the File into his out-basket so it got taken away by the Office messenger. He was tired, he had forgotten about it all until, three weeks later, it came back. Registry, reacting to the "Top Secret" labeling, had sent the file direct to the office of the Under-Secretary of State for 'assignation of task'. From that eminence the Under Secretary's PA, a progressive young lady, launched the file onto a round of senior desks. Ten days later a thrusting official, seconded from the Hotel Industry, organised a tasting of the contents of the attached can. The originator of this épreuve organoleptique had unconcealed ambitions, consequently only very responsible levels of the Civil Service were told of the tasting. He thought it would be graceful to provide a means of freshening the palate of the great ones so he obtained a bottle of vodka. Phillip had it all documented in holograph by the privileged recipients of the secret file. There it all was : "Somewhat fibrous but entirely delicious.".."The jelly surrounding this meat is undoubtedly fortifying"..."That our Soviet Comrades-in Arms think of us in this way must not go unrecognised"."No sacrifice is too great to be conceded in the building of the path of Anglo-Soviet friendship." This was the final lapidiary verdict of the young man fron the FO who had been invited to join the tasting. Phillip was furious. He had not helped to drink the vodka; he tossed the file to one side on the sill by his open window. As invented files were more fun then real ones Phillip did another about snow-shoes for the pack-carrying Reindeer crossing Lake Ladoga in sub-zero winter bringing relief to the city of Leningrad. They had grave problems with the treacherous surface. The idea was to deprive the tennis-racket makers of their allocation of cat-gut so that the tonnage per reindeer-kilometer could rise enough to provide the essental cold-weather rations for the defenders of the Hero-City. Making snow-shoes would prejudice the dollar market in tennis rackets. So judgement was sought from a higher level. It came - "We must not shrink from sacrificing the considerable dollar income resulting from the cat-gut allocation to the tennis racket exporters. Perhaps some compensation may be sought by increasing the rubber quota for the making of balls." This particular minute had a very good senior signature. Phillip laid the snow shoe file aside with its protein reserve fellow. It was early in 1943. The windows had been opened to catch the vagrant sun in that Ministry building, which, if I remember rightly, was very near Berkley Square. These two pseudo "Top Secret" files were parked on the ledge just inside Phillip's window. They fell out, landing on the pavement below to be picked up by a pedestrian whose head they had just missed. He saw they were "Top Secret" and gave them to the nearest policemen, who took them to his station. There they met a new Standing Instruction which ordained that all Top Secret documents found lying around had to be sent at once in a sealed envelope, with a report of the exact circumstances of the finding, to Number Ten Downing Street. It seems that the week before some wretched Air-Force officer had left an early draft of the invasion air-cover in a taxi. This had brought Churchill to take a personal interest in security. The upshot was that Phillip was convoked by the PM himself. Churchill did not conceal that he had seen the joke. "Young man, your undoubted talents are wasted where you are; I shall see to it that you are more suitably and more actively employed. You have been playing with fire so perhaps you should be put closer to it." The PM went on. "Those who reacted to your particular piece of mischief in these two files have been so obliging as to furnish their own particulars. I am requiring you to abstain from any discussion of this matter. I cannot very well thank you for what you have done, you may have been wasting your own time, but you have not wasted mine, and it is possible that, even for you, some good may yet be made to come of it." I do not know what happened to the eminent Civil Servant tasters. Phillip got a posting to SHAEF about the time I myself went to Cairo in 1944, so I am sure that Winston Churchill had been as good as his word. I saw him again all too briefly in 1947 and again in 1976 over the Distant Drum book, it is sad that I have left the writing-up of his two stories until it is too late for Philip to see them.

As this maddeningly uncomfortable plane lurched on, I remembered Lucian Freud coming to see us because he was worried about a call-up notice. He had heard that I had helped Koestler, but Lucian Freud was not, as had been the case with Koestler, wanting to get out of something. He simply wanted to be left alone in the Merchant Navy - an occupation much more dangerous than any armed service. Janetta had asked Lucian round for a meal. We were not keen to go to his place because we knew that he had been keeping dead monkeys in his fridge - not to eat, but to draw or paint. He had got them from the Zoo and had put them in the fridge to prolong their usefulness as models. His charlady had once opened the door and had had hysterics. When he came to supper he had already worked out and operated a better strategy than any I could possibly have devised for someone who wanted to continue in the Merchant Navy rather than being put into the Army. Just before reporting for call-up, he had painted his black-leather shoes white with ordinary domestic oil-paint. When the Sergeant told him to sit in line on the bench ready for his medical inspection, Lucian thanked him nicely and asked if it would be all right if he sat in the corner as the paint on his shoes was still wet. The sergeant looked at the shoes, then he looked at Lucian, thenceforward he kept this potential recruit under closer observation. Eventually the sergeant asked him why he had painted his shoes. Lucian said that he had put fresh paint on to make them smart for this particular visit; he hated black and didn't the sergeant agree that white was the right thing. Anyway it was easy to get white paint at sea. When told to undress he explained that it would be hard because of the fresh paint. The upshot of it all was that, after talking about nothing else but white paint, and telling no lies of any sort, the Medical Officer looked at him for less than a minute (Lucian warned him that the paint on his shoes was not quite dry) and then told the sergeant to give him a cup of tea and a card awarding him the lowest possible medical category. He was clearly classable as psychiatrically disabled. Lucian left the recruiting station free to continue in the Merchant Navy which was exactly what he wanted. I did learn something from Lucian Freud that shocked me profoundly. Sigmund Freud, his great uncle (or was it his grandfather?) used to visit the Nursery school at which the infant members of that illustrious family were being brought up in accordance with advanced principles. Lucian remembered sitting on his pot with a score of other tots similarly enthroned, all in a great horse shoe while the Master - Sigmund Freud himself - awaited the report that all had done their little job. Lucian had sometimes had an empty pot which earned him no praise. That this could have occurred under Freudian auspices does indeed go to show that the children of the cobbler are always the worse shod. I wonder what it did to Lucian Freud - certainly nothing that lessened his creativity. At last I felt the plane change its aspect and its course; we settled on to our approach path; we landed and at last there was silence. I stood on the tarmac knowing that, according to the American Corporal who had acted as flight attendant, I had at least an hour and a half to wait before the Movement Officer came on duty. Suddenly I smelt coffee. I was on an American base in Morocco so I followed that wafted odour, it got stronger and stronger as I approached a hanger inside which there was an unbelievable bacon and egg breakfast. It was still a long way to Cairo - I felt that I would rather walk there than to get back into that plane.

 

 

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