A Sort of Life (15 page)

Meanwhile I wrote to a right-wing journal owned by the Duke of Northumberland called
The Patriot
, which had supported the Separatist Republic, and offered to be their correspondent in Trier. As I demanded no expenses and wrote from the respectable address of Balliol they were ready to welcome articles so long as I understood, they frankly explained, that I could represent only one point of view, their own. Then I wrote to the French Embassy in London, telling them how I was visiting Trier for
The Patriot
and would be glad of any introductions they could give me. All was set, and with sufficient cunning, when the blow fell. The Dawes Plan was formulated, the Great Powers met together at some Swiss resort, agreements were reached, guarantees were given, and one insignificant recruit to the ranks of espionage was told to fall out – his services no longer required. All the lessons in German I had been taking from a maiden lady in North Oxford had been wasted time.

I often wonder what would have happened if my plans had not been aborted. Espionage is an odd profession: for some it is a vocation, with an unscrupulous purity, untouched by mercenary or even patriotic considerations
– spying for spying’s sake. Already I had begun to be dissatisfied with the plain gathering of fact and rumour and with its transmission to a single source; the idea of being a double agent had occurred to me. I would be certain, I thought, to learn something of my employers’ interests: even the questions I had to answer would have value for the French authorities, and the honest pity which I had formerly felt for defeated Germany had died a quick death after the gormandizing in Leverkusen and the lies of the editor in Trier. Perhaps it was lucky for me that Germany was able to dispense with my services, for the life of the double agent is a precarious one.

¹
Life’s ironies: neither Cockburn nor I were then at all inclined to Communism, but some years later he became a Party member and afterwards left the Party, while I found myself thirty years on, after my experience of the French Vietnamese war and American policy there, in greater sympathy with Communism than ever before, though less and less now with the Russian version of it.

²
I think it must have been during this period of perpetual drunkenness that I unconsciously made an enemy who cropped up nearly twenty years later in strange circumstances. In 1942 I went up to Kailahun in Sierra Leone near the Liberian and French Guinea border to try to contact some American missionaries in Liberia who possessed a radio transmitter that might prove useful in our watch on the Vichy border. Installed in Kailahun was a district commissioner who didn’t disguise his profound dislike of me. So violent did his antagonism prove that I had to have a censorship clamped on his mail, and his letters home proved to be breaking all the rules of security. I still remain in complete ignorance of what happened between us at Balliol.

P
ERHAPS
, until one starts, at the age of seventy, to live on borrowed time, no year will seem again quite so ominous as the one when formal education ends and the moment arrives to find employment and bear personal responsibility for the whole future. My parents had given me everything they could possibly owe a child and more.
¹
Now it was my turn to decide and no one – not even the Oxford Appointments Board – could help me very far. I was hemmed in by a choice of jails in which to serve my life imprisonment, for how else at twenty can one regard a career which may last as long as life itself, or at the best until that sad moment is reached when the prisoner is released, in consideration of good behaviour, with a pension?

‘I’ve just applied for a sub-editorship on a trans-Atlantic liner,’ I wrote to my mother in January 1926, but that was only the last wild throw after many failures and more than six months of virtual unemployment since I left Oxford. I don’t even remember whether I had an answer to that particular application.

The last term before I took Finals had been filled with frustrated efforts to decide the future. I don’t think my old dream of the Nigerian Navy ever led me very far, but I passed my viva for the Consular Service, having an idea of following in the footsteps of Flecker in the Levant, although in the end I never sat for the examination, for it would have entailed many months of being coached in French. I had at the time a great admiration for some of Flecker’s poems and I pictured myself in a caravanserai on the Golden Road to Samarkand or sitting beside a clicking jalousie, full of self-pity and nostalgia, in a Middle Eastern seaport:

‘Half to forget the wandering and pain,

Half to remember days that have gone by,

And dream and dream that I am home again!’

More and more the wind-vane of my inclination swung in the direction of the East. I applied here, I applied there …

For example there was an interview with the Asiatic Petroleum Company. Here I had been helped by my uncle, who was head of the Brazilian Warrant Agency; he had spoken on my behalf to a director. Unfortunately I found my interviewer knew all about a book of verse I had published at Oxford and he regarded this tendency of mine with deep suspicion. No one, he said, who worked with the Asiatic Petroleum Company could have outside interests. I tried hard to persuade him that my small book had been an aberration of adolescence: now that I was mature I had outgrown literature and my only ambition was to make a success in business. When I saw that nothing was of any avail I suggested to my mother that there might be an opening in the company for my eldest brother Herbert to whom unemployment was like a recurring flu – at least he hadn’t put himself out of court by publishing a book.
²

I had been play-acting to the director, but there was some truth in my desire to cut away from the past. I knew I could never be a good poet, I associated even the act of composition with unhappy love, and my first novel which I had written while at Oxford had never found a publisher. I was ready to wear any mask to escape from myself, and so now I flirted with a less important business opening than Asiatic Petroleum, and one far removed from Samarkand. The Lancashire General Insurance Agency had opened a branch at Oxford under a genial manager with a silky moustache called Captain Harris who was always good for a free drink and a doubtful joke; he was the more popular because he had a plump blonde secretary who hinted, when she was left for a moment without him, at all kinds of possibilities, even a weekend in Paris. Captain Harris offered me, as soon as I should go down, a job at three hundred and fifty pounds a year plus commissions, which might easily, so said the optimistic captain,
amount to another eight hundred, but I had my doubts … I think I must have made contact with the captain and his girl when I offered to readers of the
Oxford Outlook
a free insurance against failure in examinations. They had only to fill in the coupon on page 37 and in case of failure they would receive a free champagne dinner for two at one of the Oxford restaurants. I suppose Captain Harris insured me against my risks. ‘Of course the chief attraction of the dinner,’ I wrote home, ‘will be its mixed character, and as stupid females have the reputation of being the prettiest, this ought not to be negligible.’

Finals came and went with the future undecided. I managed to get a moderate second in Modern History, my only alpha being in Political Science of which I knew least, but I remembered how I had won my Balliol exhibition with the aid of a poem by Ezra Pound, and I carefully learnt by heart certain passages from authors who had not been required reading – Santayana was one of them – passages sufficiently general in idea for them to fit with a little ingenuity into almost any essay I might be required to write. I was much helped by a game we often played at Christmas called ‘Noun and Question’. In this game papers were handed round on which one person would write a noun, concealing it with a fold, another a question. The papers were all reshuffled and drawn from a hat, and a player would have to reply in verse to the question he picked, introducing the noun. One might be faced by such a word as ‘skyscraper’ and the question ‘Who is your favourite character in Shakespeare?’ Compared with this game, it was child’s play to insert a purple passage of Santayana on
Hamlet
into an essay on Machiavelli’s
Prince
.

I never joined the Lancashire General Insurance Agency (although, of course, I suggested it might be a suitable opening for Herbert). Instead I found myself for two weeks an employee of the British-American Tobacco Company, destined for China in two months’ time.

From the first I was daunted by the great concrete slab beside the Thames, with the uniformed porter like an officer of some foreign country demanding credentials; in the lift several middle-aged men were carrying files carefully like babies. The director who interviewed me (his name, I think, was Archibald Rose) had
the appearance of a senior army officer, perhaps a brigadier, in plain clothes. He was correctly dressed in dark capitalist uniform with a well-tied bow tie, a well-groomed moustache; he had the politeness of a man speaking to his equal in age and position. He would have made a good Intelligence officer, and I have little doubt now that he belonged, however distantly, to the Secret Service. A man in his position, recruiting and controlling men for the Chinese hinterland, could hardly have escaped contact with the ‘old firm’, and perhaps for that reason he was not scrupulously accurate about the details of the employment. The end justified the means.

‘I want university men,’ he said in remarkable contrast to the director of Asiatic Petroleum, ‘because they have other interests. They can stand loneliness.’ It was the best chosen fly he could have attached to his hook. After one year, he said, spent in the treaty port of Shanghai, I would be appointed to some station in the interior with one other companion. The starting salary would be four hundred and fifty pounds a year. I discovered soon after joining the firm that both these facts were inaccurate. I would have to spend at least three years in the Shanghai office and maybe longer, and the salary was three hundred and sixty pounds. What was more important to me, because of my interest in a girl at Oxford, I should not be allowed to marry for the first four years after my appointment and only then with the permission of the directors. If I threw up the job before the end of my first year, I would not only have to pay my return fare, I would have to reimburse the company for my passage out.

I went to work – if you can call it that – almost at once. I was shown into a large office like a classroom where there were rows of desks. I felt as though I were back in the Junior School – how civilized the big library table of the Sixth seemed in comparison. To make the resemblance to school even closer the new boys, some half a dozen of them, were all placed at the front of the class. Now I can remember only two of them. Mr Rose’s hook had caught one other university man: he was from Cambridge, where he had played cricket for his college but had not succeeded in taking a degree. The other sat at the desk next to mine. He had been a bank clerk in
Cardiff, and he insisted on playing game after game of double noughts-and-crosses, which he invariably won. He was equally knowledgeable on the subject of motor-cycles. My tutor Kenneth Bell had written of me in his recommendation, ‘He is a good mixer,’ and I tried to live up to this unsound judgement, but noughts-and-crosses palled rapidly. I bought two paper-bound copies of
Chinese Self-Taught
and tried to keep my companion occupied, but we made small progress.

There was absolutely no work for any of us to do. Far from being new boys who had to be bullied into learning, it seemed that we were favoured pupils who must be kept happy. We belonged to a privileged class because we were destined for China, though sometimes I felt we more closely resembled pampered prisoners who must not know the fate to which we were being led. Our passages had already been booked, and my heart sank when my companion, busily drawing his squares for yet another game, said, ‘We’ll be able to do this on the boat going out, won’t we?’ The excitements of the Forbidden City, the Boxer Rebellion, Captain Gilson’s
Lost Column
faded from my imagination, and only an awful inevitability of double noughts-and-crosses took their place. Perhaps we were to be chained together, not only on the boat and on the Shanghai Bund, but in that small up-country station, which had at first seemed so romantic a prospect.

As there was no work to distract us from the enigmatic future, they gave us to read, to help pass the slow office hours, big folio ledgers, and in the pages of insignificant accounts an entry would sometimes stand sharply out: ‘For burial of coolie found dead on office steps … Radio for son of General Chiang Kai-shek on his twenty-first birthday …’

The next week we were to go to the Liverpool factory for a month and watch from eight in the morning till seven at night the way cigarettes were made. Some of the older men were knowledgeable about the foreign substances which were added to the tobacco. There was no practical point so far as I could see in our stint at the factory, for we were to be concerned in all our working future in marketing cigarettes not making them.

I went to see Archibald Rose and told him of my uncertainties. He was a little impatient. After all I was
being paid five pounds a week for doing nothing at all. It was time I made up my mind, one way or another. (I nearly offered my brother Herbert in my place.) Then I went back to my lodging in Chelsea and tried to go on with my second novel – I had abandoned all hope for the first.

Conrad was the influence now, and in particular the most dangerous of all his books,
The Arrow of Gold
, written when he had himself fallen under the tutelage of Henry James. I have long forgotten the details of my plot. The setting was nineteenth-century London when Carlist refugees lived around Leicester Square. A young Englishman became involved in their conspiracy. There was a girl, of course, as romantic and ill-defined as Donna Rita. The book was a greater struggle to write than the first had been, for I had now much less hope. How could I abandon the chance of being a businessman, when it seemed my only escape from the hated obsession of trying to make imaginary characters live? I went to Oxford for a weekend to confide my fears, became engaged to be married and sent a telegram to Archibald Rose telling him that I was not returning to the office. I was ashamed of my cowardice, but I couldn’t bring myself to face him: I had taken ten pounds of
B.A.T
. money and ten pounds seemed a lot in those days.