Young Philby (20 page)

I recount this episode, Mr. Deakin, so you will grasp what
war reporters
—to employ my sainted father’s appellation—were up against whilst covering the BEF in Flanders. The high point of our sojourn in the Hotel du Commerce involved organizing a lottery on whether the Phony War would end with a whimper or a bang. We had all thirty-seven journalists billeted in the hotel, along with a mixed bag of BEF ranks, maître d’s, restaurant captains, taxi drivers, desk clerks, and telegraphers, buying into the lottery at three quid a head.

The chaps who put their money on the bang, me amongst them, won.

On 10 May, a Friday if memory serves, the shooting war began with German Panzer divisions pushing through the Ardennes woods to bypass the Maginot Line entirely and attack Belgium and France from an unanticipated direction. In London, Prime Minister Chamberlain, having famously waved his umbrella whilst promising “peace in our time” after the Munich conference with Herr Hitler, had the good sense to resign. King George VI had the good sense to replace him with the former First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill. I had the good sense to quit the Hotel du Commerce one jump ahead of the invading boche, who in short order pierced the BEF’s front and headed for the English Channel, effectively splitting the Allied armies in two. It was, as everyone now understands, the beginning of a dreadful debacle that must rank as the single worst defeat of British arms in history. We war reporters fled Arras in a municipal omnibus requisitioned by the general staff press people, who felt duty bound to personally escort us. The next days passed in a blur consisting in equal measure of dust rising from the roadways of Northern France and panic emanating from the hordes of civilians running for their lives, many on dilapidated bicycles, others pulling farm carts piled high with their worldly possessions. We drove through deserted villages acrawl with crazed dogs abandoned by their owners—they had been tied to fences and could be heard for miles howling with hunger. Our BEF lads were putting them down, one bullet to a dog. We sped across country bridges as army engineers wired explosives to the pilings. Somehow we reached Amiens, only to be roused from our beds before dawn to flee to Boulogne. That city was bedlam. Soldiers from a dozen countries bivouacked in the streets, refugees riding horses or bicycles or on foot clogged the roads leading in from the countryside. The local constabulary patrolled through the night to prevent the looting of abandoned homes. From time to time, rifle fire reverberated through the city, giving rise to rumors of German paratroopers landing in soccer fields adjacent to schools. As the telegraph lines to England were down I wasn’t even able to file a dispatch describing the scenes I’d witnessed, not that they would have gotten past the censor, especially if I had mentioned the weather.

Since we couldn’t work, several of us hired out the hotel’s limousine and set off to play a round at the famed golf links in Le Touquet. We were waylaid en route by P. G. Wodehouse, who had a cottage thereabouts. Elated to find himself in the company of Englishmen, Pelham stood us drinks in the local café. He told us that he and his wife reckoned the Germans were civilized chaps, propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding, and had no intention of joining the exodus. Luckily for us we had stopped for a drink because word soon spread that Guderian’s Panzers had reached the front nine of the links. Hearing this, we promptly abandoned any notion of golf and set off for Calais (figuring, as
Collier’s Weekly
Martha Gellhorn quipped, we could return the hotel’s limousine after the war). Fact is I regretted not driving up to Touquet—imagine the scoop if I’d discovered that German commanders went to war with golf clubs in their tanks and had suspended the blitzkrieg to play a round.

In Calais I chatted up some subalterns from one of those elite units, The Queen Victoria’s Rifles, I think it was. They were reconnoitering for buildings to defend in the port area. They’d been told Churchill had issued an order to hold Calais to the death and were ready to do it, except they didn’t know where their general was, they weren’t sure who was in command or when their heavy equipment would be offloaded. I suppose it was then that I realized the whole shebang—the Maginot Line, Flanders, The BEF H.Q. at Arras, Amiens, Boulogne, Calais, the beaches of Dunkirk up the coast—was a colossal cock-up. Hitler had been training his Stukas and his Panzers for years whilst we brandished umbrellas. If there is an upside to the story, it’s that we seem to be managing to evacuate tens of thousands of our boys off the beaches of Dunkirk, though as Churchill has pointed out, wars are not won by retreats.

I’ve been assigned a berth on what looks to be one of the last fishing boats out of Calais harbor—I’m typing this on my trusty Underwood portable in the cramped galley that stinks of diesel oil, actually. The French captain plans to cast off at ebb tide tonight and hopes to reach Dover before first light to avoid the Luftwaffe pilots stalking juicy targets in the channel. Hard to believe I will be in England tomorrow morning and, with any luck, in London tomorrow evening. Truth is, I feel guilty as all hell saving my own hide and leaving The Queen Victoria’s Rifles behind to hold the harbor. But my guilt didn’t keep me from accepting the berth when it was offered. Oddly, the Reserve Colonel M. R. Protheroe, the one who accused me of betraying king and country by describing the weather over Flanders, is a fellow passenger. “You look to be familiar,” he said when he saw me backing down the ladder to the galley, my helmet with
War Reporter
attached to the kit on my back and clanging against it. Colonel Protheroe appeared to have difficulty bringing me into focus. His eyes had the vacant stare I’d seen so often on shell-shocked soldiers in Spain.

“Philby of
The Times
,” I said, offering a paw. He didn’t shake. I’m not even sure he noticed the gesture.

After a long while, during which he gnawed the inside of a cheek, he inquired, “Have we met?”

“In Flanders, yes.”

“Oh, dear, Flanders. Was that in the First Great War or this one?”

“This one, I should think.”

“I trust you’ll bear with me—I recall things well enough but I am often uncertain in what order they occurred.”

“News from the front being what it is, I expect there are not a few back home in the same boat,” I said.

“Do you? Well, misery does appreciate company. We are off to Dover soon. I rather think the arrival will take place after the departure.”

He didn’t smile and I understood he wasn’t attempting a joke.

Respectfully,

H. A. R. Philby

11: LONDON, JUNE 1940

Where Mr. Philby Promises to Keep a Straight Face for the Photograph on His Identity Badge

Looking out of sorts, as men will when they turn up for assignations with women whom they have never before set eyes upon, the Englishman wandered into the forecourt of St. Ermin’s Hotel on Caxton Street near Victoria station and glanced round uncertainly. He saw me sitting in the small alcove near the curtain that led to the corridor that led to the loos, but didn’t for a fleeting second entertain the possibility that his rendezvous was with me, though I was the only human in sight if one doesn’t count his reflection in the mirror. I was gray-haired and elderly, not to put too fine a point on it. He checked his wristwatch, shrugged, and turned to leave. At which point I inserted two fingers between my lips and whistled—a charming trick my late brother Nigel taught me when I was twelve and has since stood me in good stead flagging down hackney carriages on rainy days. H. A. R. Philby turned back in terminal confusion. I beckoned to him with an index finger. “Do join me for tea,” I called across the room. “I am Miss Maxse, your four o’clock.” I was already filling a second cup with a wonderful green tea from China, the stock of which St. Ermine was unlikely to replenish if the European war spread to Asia, as I reckoned it would. “Do you take sugar, Mr. Philby?”

He settled onto the seat facing me. “I don’t r-remember.”

“Well, you do give satisfaction, Mr. Philby. I can’t recall the last time I so discombobulated a male of the species he forgot if he took sugar with his tea.”

“Ahhh, yes. Two p-please.”

“Good. It has come back to you.”

“I was rather expecting…” He let the thought slip through his fingers.

“Dear boy, do spit out what you were expecting.”

“I’m not quite sure what I was expecting.”

“Let me assist you in your inquiries. You weren’t born yesterday. When your foreign editor at
The Times
, the very crabby Mr. Deakin, suggested someone was eager to interview you about war work, you will have figured out you were being sized up by the Secret Intelligence Service. But you were expecting someone younger.”

His failure to respond was response enough.

“You were expecting a gentleman, surely,” I said.

My vision is not what it used to be but I could have sworn I saw a blush tint his ruddy cheeks. “I didn’t know ladies were employed by … whoever it is that employs you,” he said.

“Other than in secretarial positions.”

“You are trying to p-put me on my b-back foot. I must admit you are succeeding.”

“These days I gratefully accept whatever little successes come my way.”

He sipped at his tea. “I p-presume you are a ranking officer—they would be unlikely to send a secretarial p-person to vet a prospective recruit. I didn’t really think it through but I must have assumed that above a certain rank it would be like the army officer corps.”

“Men’s room types. Gents who pee into solid Armitage Shanks urinals, concentrating all the while at the ceiling so as not to catch a glimpse of the willy next door.”

“Quite.”

“Well, at least we’ve cleared the hurdle of your preconceptions. If you are going to come to work for us, you must learn to keep an open mind.”

“Duly noted, Miss Maxse.”

I am thought of as someone who doesn’t smile a great deal but I suspect I might have broken the rule then with a grin. Clearly I was in charge of this conversation; it went where I steered it. “Your father seems quite keen on your joining the service,” I remarked.

“In this instance, Miss Maxse, you are more familiar with my father’s wishes than me.”

“He has put in a word, though I will confide he wasn’t the one who raised your candidacy.”

“May I ask who raised my candidacy?”

“No.”

“Ahhh.”

Actually his candidacy had been raised by his old Trinity sidekick Guy Burgess, whom we’d lured over from the F.O. several weeks earlier. What with war raging on the Continent and SIS frantically expanding its staff to cope, we regularly asked new recruits to suggest friends or colleagues who might be qualified for what was euphemistically called
war work
. The first name on the index card Mr. Burgess had given me was Harold Adrian Russell Philby. He was described as someone who spoke several foreign languages and knew Europe like the palm of his hand. Curious expression, that. I myself am not familiar with the palms of either of my hands. I happened to be in the Caxton Holy of Holies on the sixth floor introducing Mr. Burgess to Colonel Menzies, who had been named SIS chief on the death of Admiral Sinclair in ’39, and mentioned in passing I would be vetting a Mr. Harold Philby. “Oh, you mean Kim,” Colonel Menzies said. “I know his people. Westminster. Cambridge. Trinity. Good British stock. Though the paterfamilias—ha! I recollect the Admiral nicknamed him the
Hajj—is
something of a character, what?”

Normally a testimonial from the Holy of Holies is thought to be the equivalent of one foot in the door. But like my late chief, the Admiral Sinclair, God rest his soul, I was old school. Which meant Mr. Philby still had the other foot outside the door. As a matter of routine I ran his candidacy past the long noses of our MI5 cousins, who sent me a minute so succinct I am able to recite it in its entirety from memory:

From: Mr. Montague Smallwood, MI5 security subdivision

To: Miss Marjorie Maxse, MI6 recruitment subdivision

Subject: Harold Adrian Russell Philby, aka Kim

1. Nothing recorded against.

“More tea, Mr. Philby?”

“Thank you, no, Miss Maxse.”

“Good. Let’s talk turkey, as the Yanks say. We know all about your Cambridge escapades—your membership in the notorious Socialist Society, your canvassing for Socialist candidates in Romsey Town. We know about your motoring off to Vienna to assist refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. Good God, did you actually ride a motorcycle from England to Vienna?”

He leaned forward. “It was a Daimler with one of their new V-twelve Aero engines—”

“One should avoid telling a person more than he or she can possibly grasp, Mr. Philby. That is something else you might keep in mind if you come to work for us.”

“I am taking this all in, Miss Maxse.”

“As I was saying, we don’t hold your escapades against you. We take the broad view that those who aren’t revolutionaries in their twenties have no heart, those who remain revolutionaries in their thirties have no head. Good gracious me, if we ruled out hiring staff who had a fling with Marx in their misspent youth, we should have to fight the war with the Women’s Auxiliary. We know, of course, about your marriage to Miss Friedman. Rather good show on your part, I should think. Jewish damsel in distress situation. You
are
still wedded to her, are you not?”

“I am indeed. We both thought it b-best to stay wedded so long as Hitler menaced Europe.”

“What is your actual relationship, apart from being wedded?”

“I beg your p-pardon?”

“Do you sleep together? Do you copulate?”

“You are disconcertingly direct, Miss Maxse. We haven’t slept together since I went off to cover the war in Spain for
The Times.
”