And Is There Honey Still For Tea? (16 page)

25

Sir James Digby

I graduated from Cambridge with a First Class degree in modern languages in June, 1934. My passion was still chess, and in an ideal world I would gladly have devoted myself to the game, but it was obvious to me that the only way to eke out some kind of living as a chess player was to become a journalist, and even then it would have been a sparse, hand-to-mouth existence, and other part-time work would have been needed to make ends meet. I could have chanced it. I often wonder why I did not, what I thought I had to lose by giving it a go, at least for a year or two. I would still have been young enough to change direction if it hadn't worked out. Perhaps it was a preoccupation with worldly comforts. Perhaps it was a feeling of obligation to Bridget, now that she had accepted my proposal of marriage. Perhaps it was a feeling that being a professional chess player would be looked down on, certainly by my family – not the done thing, not for the Digbys of Lancashire. Perhaps it was all of those things. In the end, I don't really know why I abandoned my passion without any real fight. It might have been that my enthusiasm for chess was not all I thought it was. Or it might have been a simple case of moral cowardice.

Whatever the reason, or reasons, I decided to pursue my original plan of a career at the Bar. My father had a good friend, Lester Carville, who was a Silk at the Chancery Bar and a Bencher of Lincoln's Inn. I went to London to see him in July. It was the legal vacation, and he had time to spare. He met me in his chambers in the Inn, took me to lunch, and encouraged me to join Lincoln's and to consider Chancery work as a career. I took his advice, submitted my papers to become a student member of the Inn that afternoon, and made arrangements to start on the twenty-four dinners in hall which every aspiring barrister must attend before being called to the Bar. There was also the question of two terms of intensive legal education at the Inns of Court School of Law, followed by the Bar examinations. The course was to start in September. It was tempting to take some time off before plunging into this new world, but I wanted to get started as soon as possible, and Lester had hinted that there might be a pupillage available in his chambers if I passed my exams by the following July.

I found a small flat to rent in Holland Park, and returned to spend what was left of the summer at home. Roger had returned from South America just before Christmas, and was now spending most of his time on the estate, working with my father. Consequently, I had not seen much of him, and it was good to talk to him again for hours on end as we used to; walking around the estate, going into the village; spending an hour or two in the King's Arms; sometimes picking up fish and chips to eat from a newspaper during the walk home, as dusk was falling along the quiet country lanes. He looked fit and tanned, and had an endless fund of stories about his travels in South America, during which he had encountered everything from revolutionary priests to homicidally inclined llamas – he professed himself unable to decide which was the more dangerous animal – and he had learned to speak and read Spanish well. He had come to regard South America as a likely breeding ground for socialism because the people had been oppressed for so long – living in so much poverty, denied any proper education, indoctrinated by a Church, at the service of the State, to accept a life lived under almost feudal conditions – yet he felt they still had an unbroken, resilient spirit. He spoke of going back one day to help them in their struggle for freedom and dignity. He had obviously been deeply moved by the people he had met. I was surprised by his depth of feeling, and it was the first time I knew for certain that we shared a belief in an active socialism as an antidote to fascism and oppression.

Bridget was home from Bristol, too. Both families understood now that we were informally engaged, and both seemed to be genuinely pleased about it. Of course, as the younger son, my romantic life was scrutinised with far less anxiety than Roger's. I am sure that my parents were concerned for my happiness, but it was Roger's duty, not mine, to produce an heir to perpetuate the Digby line and inherit the Baronetcy in due course. Perhaps, for that reason, Roger was always shy and skittish about the subject when it came to his own love interests, and deftly avoided our parents' gentle questioning over dinner. He was never very specific about his love life, even with me, though when I got him alone late one evening, he did drop a hint that there was a certain young lady in London who had come to his notice. Relieved of that kind of pressure, Bridget and I spent a lot of time in each others' houses, and were able to sneak away to hideaways for more intimate purposes from time to time. We were very careful.

* * *

In September, Bridget returned to Bristol and I went down to London to begin my legal studies. I knew within a matter of days that my decision to try for the Chancery Bar was right. Chancery barristers spend a good deal less time in court than those in other areas of law. Much of their practice is advisory. This, I calculated, would give me a better chance of making time to play in enough chess tournaments to do myself justice. I felt it was also better suited to my talents. I had no illusions about having any great abilities as an orator, thundering away at a jury, but I was quite confident about my ability to absorb the kind of law I would encounter in Chancery practice, and to explain a case to a judge with the same background. Many of my contemporaries had a pathological dread of land law, wills, and trusts. The Rule against Perpetuities alone induced panic attacks in some of my friends who were destined for the criminal or personal injury Bars. But I knew exactly what I was dealing with from the first day, and it made perfect sense to me once I made one fundamental discovery. This was that the law dealing with land, wills, and trusts was the product of a centuries-long game of chess, the object of which was, not to checkmate the King, but to avoid paying tax to the King to the maximum extent possible without provoking the King to order your client to be beheaded or abjure the Realm. Medieval lawyers had pondered tax-avoidance schemes for hundreds of years, hunched over candles in cold, draughty chambers, exactly as lawyers do today in warm, comfortable offices with electric lighting. All the arcane kinds of interests in land, formulations of complicated trusts, and obscure testamentary provisions, which students find incomprehensible as abstract rules of law divorced from the real world, yield up their secrets with little resistance when you ask yourself the simple question of how they helped to reduce the client's tax bill, or that of his heirs and assigns. And you could not help but marvel at the ingenuity of those lawyers so long ago. Legal acumen is not a modern invention, however superior we may like to think ourselves to be today.

The work was demanding. I knew I would have to put chess in any form on hold for the year. But I managed to enjoy a limited social life – quite apart from the regular dinners in Lincoln's Inn hall. Roger was as good as his word, and solicited a number of friends to propose me for membership of the Reform Club, to which I was elected in November. I ran into Guy at the Club once or twice, and Anthony quite frequently. He had decided to take a sabbatical year from his Fellowship; he was lecturing at the Courtauld Institute and had become the art critic for
The Spectator
. I told him of a letter I had received from Donald, which I had found rather odd. In it, he said that he was seriously considering a career in the Foreign Office. Of course his background in languages would be a great asset, but I was surprised that he would opt to go in that direction given his active involvement in socialism at Cambridge. That was how naïve I was then. Anthony smiled, and for a moment seemed poised to respond to what I had said, but then changed the subject with such ease and charm that I forgot about it until we had parted company at the end of the evening. I even found time to return to Cambridge once or twice for Apostolic meetings. And twice, once each term, Bridget came from Bristol covertly to spend the weekend with me. I passed my Bar exams, and was called to the Bar in February, 1935. Lester Carville offered me a pupillage in his chambers, to begin in late April, which I accepted immediately.

* * *

On the surface, things were working out well for me. But it was impossible to close my eyes to what was going on around me. It seemed that all the pessimistic predictions Donald and I had made over our pints of bitter after CUSS meetings were coming true, one after another. Italy remained in the grip of fascism under Mussolini. In Germany Hitler was systematically eradicating the last vestiges of democracy as he transformed the country from the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich. Portugal was drifting ever deeper into the grip of a dictatorship. And in Spain, the writing was already on the wall.

26

I daresay anyone who has lived for any length of time has, at various points, longed for the ability to put the clock back; for the ability to erase a certain moment from history; to start over again from a particular point in time; to make a story end more happily. For me, that moment was the year 1936.

The King died on the 20th January, and was succeeded by Edward VIII. It was a heavy blow to my father, who had enjoyed the King's personal friendship, in addition to respecting him as a monarch. He and my mother attended the funeral, and had a private meeting with the Queen, but my father never approved of the new King's cavalier attitude to convention and apparent indifference to his constitutional responsibilities. As the year wore on, and the question of the new King's relationship with Wallis Simpson threatened to destroy the monarchy and bring down Stanley Baldwin's government, my father grew bitter and disillusioned. He seemed to lose interest in everything except the estate and his family, and Roger wrote to tell me that he spent long periods of time alone in his study, where he preferred not to be disturbed. That was not at all like my father, and I wondered whether his disapproval of the new King was the whole story.

The war in Spain finally erupted in July. Before long, it became clear that Franco's Nationalists were better equipped and enjoyed a huge military advantage over the Republican militias. Their newer, faster German and Italian fighters gave them superiority in the air, and they were able to carry out punishing air strikes almost with impunity. The Army of Africa had devastating heavy artillery and efficient modern rifles. The Republican militias were relatively poorly trained and lightly armed; the rifles they had were not always compatible with the types of ammunition available to them. The Nationalists were rapidly gaining ground, and at times it seemed that their victory would be a formality. Quite early in the war Madrid was threatened. Franco had declared it to be a priority to take the city, and he was spurred on by his German and Italian allies, who regarded it as a vital step and who never ceased to remind him how much he was in their debt for the personnel and supplies they had put at his disposal in the interests of creating a European fascist axis. The newspapers were reporting that Madrid was already experiencing siege conditions, and was likely to suffer shortages of food and medical supplies. I took an active interest in the news from Spain, partly because I also had a certain amount of inside information available to me.

Donald, to my continuing surprise, had been appointed Third Secretary at the Foreign Office in London the previous year. I didn't see a lot of him – we were both very busy – but we would meet for a pint from time to time, and he had grown very pessimistic about Spain, especially as it was becoming clear that our government had absolutely no intention of intervening. By September it seemed that the fall of Madrid was only a matter of time, and a short time at that. In the first week of that month I received a terse note from Roger – from him to me, not Johnson to Boswell. It told me only that he was arriving in London in two days' time, that he would be staying at the Reform, that he wanted me to meet him there for dinner, and that I was not to discuss anything with our parents before we had the chance to talk.

I arrived at the Reform on that Wednesday evening intrigued by what Roger had written, but I was also preoccupied with the first heavy case I had received as a barrister. I had been accepted as a tenant in Lester's chambers at the end of my pupillage, and my first months of practice had been meagre in both quality and quantity. But now I had been asked to advise two brothers who had been disinherited by their father in favour of an animal welfare charity not long before his death. There were suspicions that the father might not have been of entirely sound mind by the time he came to change his will, and the estate was a substantial one. It seemed that litigation was inevitable. I had promised the solicitors an opinion by the end of the week, and it had been absorbing most of my time and energy.

Roger was waiting for me in the dining room when I arrived. He had selected a secluded corner table. It was a bit on the early side for dinner, and the dining room was empty apart from the two of us. A glass of dry sherry, his favourite pre-dinner drink, was in front of him on the table, but he had hardly touched it. I also could not help noticing that he was wearing a rather shabby old suit and a threadbare tie, almost as if getting dressed up to go to dinner in his club were something in which he had lost interest. Roger had always been a stickler for being properly dressed for all occasions, something he had learned from my father. After a brief embrace I sat opposite him and asked a waiter to bring me a whisky and soda. I watched Roger closely. He seemed anxious, almost skittish, looking down at the table, playing with the end of his tie.

‘Have you spoken to Father?' he asked.

‘Not recently,' I assured him. ‘I did as you asked.'

He nodded.

‘Thank you,' he said. He seemed unsure, reluctant to begin. ‘We have never talked about this very much,' he continued eventually, ‘but from what you told me about your time at Cambridge, I gather that you and I have probably taken a very similar path in terms of our political beliefs.'

I nodded, but did not immediately reply.

‘Given our family background,' he said, ‘it would have been natural for both of us to turn out to be dyed-in-the-wool conservatives, men who embraced the hunting-shooting-fishing classes.'

I smiled. ‘Not something I have ever found very attractive,' I replied.

He returned the smile. ‘Nor I, though I suppose a certain amount of that must have rubbed off on me, and once I became Sir Roger in the fullness of time, I might have found it impossible to resist.'

I shook my head, still smiling. ‘Not you.'

‘Well, perhaps,' he replied. ‘In any case, it's something I have been thinking about quite deeply over the last year or two. I haven't said much to anyone else about it, but … the fact is that I now regard myself as a committed socialist.'

Having finally said it, Roger lifted his eyes up from the table and allowed his hands to release their hold on his tie.

‘You almost told me as much when I was home last summer,' I pointed out. ‘It was obvious from what you said about your trip to South America.'

‘Yes,' he agreed, ‘and I meant every word I said. I felt for those people, and there is no doubt that I had become an intellectual socialist by then. But South America is so far away, and information about what is really going on is hard to come by. I was spending almost all my time on the estate, learning how to run the place, meeting all kinds of important people Father felt I ought to know. I couldn't even get down to London very often any more. And I suddenly realised that if I went on like this for another couple of years, I was going to forget every principle I had ever learned; I was going to become a country conservative, a loyal son of King and Empire.'

I smiled and shook my head.

The waiter returned with menus, and we took a few minutes to order dinner.

‘You are right,' I said, after returning the menus to the waiter. ‘I found myself drawn to socialism almost as soon as I went up to Trinity. But that is nothing unusual at Cambridge. Many men saw what was going on in the country; we saw how the Labour Party was powerless to prevent the poverty and the inequality and the injustice, and we wanted to do something about it. It didn't make you stand out particularly. I am sure it must have been the same in your day?'

‘It was moving in that direction,' Roger agreed. ‘But I think it speeded up considerably in the years you were up.'

The waiter had returned with our bottle of the Club claret. He asked whether Roger wished to taste it, but Roger signalled him to pour. It was something Roger had taught me when I was elected. The waiter was duty bound to ask, but the Club claret was an institution not to be challenged, and was to be poured without the demeaning demand that it be tasted. In all my years as a member I have never drunk a glass which did not fully justify our trust in it. Roger nodded his thanks to the waiter as he retreated.

‘Besides,' he said, ‘there is more to it than just combating the poverty and the inequality, isn't there?' He paused.

‘Go on,' I replied quietly.

‘James, I am talking about fascism. Germany and Italy have already been taken over. And now Spain is about to fall. Our government obviously has no intention of lifting a finger to stop it.'

‘I am not sure there is much they could do,' I said, ‘apart from a military intervention, and I am not sure how we could do that without support.'

Roger leaned forward towards me across the table.

‘James, we are going to have to fight them eventually,' he replied firmly. ‘If we don't do it in Spain we will have to do it closer to home – certainly in France, and very possibly in this country too.'

I sat back in my chair.

‘There is no real support for fascism in this country,' I said. ‘Unthinking and unquestioning conservatism, yes. But even the Conservatives believe in democracy. There will always be political parties here.'

Roger banged his claret glass down on the table.

‘No, you are missing the point,' he insisted. ‘Do you really think that men like Hitler and Mussolini are going to stop because there is no local support for fascism in a country they have set their sights on? They will march in anyway. Look at the way the German arms industry is churning out weapons – tanks, aircraft, warships. They are rearming at a frightening rate. Do you know how much weaponry they have been able to put at Franco's disposal in Spain? Do you know how many military advisers they have on the ground there?'

Actually, I did. Donald had given me the essential statistics of the German and Italian support for the Nationalists according to information gathered by our Security Services, and even the Security Services admitted privately that they probably did not know the full extent of it.

‘This is the test case,' Roger was saying. ‘This is how Hitler assesses how much resistance he is likely to encounter when he pursues his own territorial ambitions in Europe. If there is a precedent for non-intervention in Spain, it will embolden him to think he can occupy territory for the fascist cause elsewhere in Europe without even being opposed. It will give him confidence.'

The waiter returned with our first course, a cold Vichyssoise soup. He offered bread rolls and refilled our wine glasses before retreating. We enjoyed it in silence for some time.

‘Roger, if the Government won't act,' I said, as the waiter cleared away the soup bowls, ‘there is not much we can do about Spain. All we can do is try to elect a government that sees the dangers and makes plans to stop the fascists from threatening our borders. It's a matter of practicality.'

He shook his head. ‘I don't agree. There are things we can do.'

‘Such as?' As I asked the question, for no reason I could account for – it was a warm evening – I suddenly felt a chill inside me. It took Roger some time to respond and, as he was about to speak, the waiter in charge of the trolley bearing the daily roast stopped at our table to serve our main course, roast beef with Yorkshire pudding and vegetables. After the trolley had departed, Roger looked around the dining room. A few more diners were in evidence now, but our conversation at the corner table remained secure.

‘The Republicans are recruiting what they call international brigades,' he replied eventually, ‘brigades of volunteers from different countries to fight under the command of the local militias. And there are some arms shipments making their way to Spain from certain sources.'

I put down my knife and fork. I had heard from Donald that efforts were being made to bolster the Republican resistance, but he had said that most of the information filtering back to the Foreign Office was extremely vague; much of it hardly rose above the level of rumour.

‘How do you know?' I asked.

‘I asked some people I know.'

There was a silence. He was obviously not about to elaborate.

‘Well, who is organising all this?'

‘I can only tell you what they told me. I believe the Comintern is putting a lot of money and other resources into it.'

‘The Soviets?'

‘Yes,' he replied. ‘Well, why not? They obviously see the dangers even if we don't. They see how important it is to stop fascism in its tracks, and if we can stop Franco now, it would be a huge blow to the Axis. Even if Franco can't be stopped, if we can make them fight an extended war in Spain it would use up resources they might otherwise turn on us.'

I made no move to pick up my knife and fork. The roast beef was delicious, but I had lost interest in it.

‘We?' I asked quietly.

He looked me directly in the eye across the table.

‘I am going to volunteer,' he said.

I looked at him for what seemed like an eternity. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the waiter hove into view, no doubt concerned that our dinners were for the moment lying untouched. I waved him away.

‘Volunteer to fight?'

‘Yes.'

The terseness of Roger's letter suddenly made sense.

‘This is why you didn't want me to speak to Father?'

‘Yes,' Roger said. His face took on a sad expression. ‘I told him and Mother three nights ago at dinner. The time had come for me to pack to leave. I admit I had been avoiding it, but I couldn't keep silent any longer. To say that he didn't understand would be something of an understatement. We had a terrible row. He stormed out of the dining room to his study, and stayed there for most of the next two days. He wouldn't even say goodbye when Penfold drove me to the station.'

‘How did Mother take it?' I asked.

‘She didn't say anything at dinner,' Roger replied. ‘She cried quietly to herself while we were at the table. But she helped me pack my things and hugged me as I left. If anything could have stopped me going, it would have been that hug, not anything the Old Man said.'