Freya Stark (6 page)

With these policemen she was at her most lordly. When a British reconnaissance plane came over they lifted their guns and fired. Freya, standing near, expressed immense disdain. ‘You know best, madam,’ one of the men said, and put down his rifle. In the evening, there were rationed drinks served on the lawn; at dawn Holt could be seen exercising his polo ponies in a corner of the compound. As the days went by, Newton, the butler, offered to whiten Freya’s shoes. It was British frontier spirit at its best.

On 28 May guns could be heard from the north, where a column led by the Arab Legion was cutting off the rebels’ retreat. Inside Baghdad, two battalions turned against Rashid Ali and the colonels fled to Persia. The siege was over.

It ended with characteristic British Empire dash. On 30 May a message from the town came to say that a deputation, led by the lord mayor, would like to see the ambassador. Through the wicket gate filed the mayor, followed by the chief of police and a very young commander-in-chief of the Iraqi troops. They were shown into the ambassador’s study, where immediately the commander began to shout and gesticulate, and express his hope that the British would know how to respect the independence of Iraq. Cornwallis was well over six foot tall, a quiet man with a long, distinguished nose. He listened
patiently. When silence finally settled on the gathering, he spoke, in perfect Arabic. ‘I had the privilege of serving his Majesty King Faisal the first. With him, I assisted in creating the Iraqi nation. I do not intend to be lectured by young men who were in shorts at that time.’

Few in Baghdad believed that the British victory over the rebels was more than a setback to German plans. The Vichy French in Syria were busy refuelling German planes and in Crete there had been a serious defeat of the Allied troops. Her transfer requested by Cornwallis, Freya now prepared to set up her Brotherhood in Iraq, though in a somewhat muted form, as Freya felt the country was not ready for anything as specific as Brotherhood cells.

In mid-October Freya found a house in Alwiyah, the Hampstead of Baghdad, modelled on British Indian army cantonment lines, with detached single-storey bungalows set among lawns and oleanders. Pamela Hore-Ruthven arrived to help her, and later, after she left, Peggy Drower, a fluent Arabist and the daughter of old Baghdad friends of Freya’s. Once again, Freya set them a punishing routine. Occasionally they felt like slaves, Freya having decided that office grind was not for her. There were meetings to set up, the news to be gathered and sifted, a bulletin to be written and copied. Most time-consuming were the ‘Qabul’,
the ‘At Homes’, a regular feature of Baghdad life, to which ladies simply went along uninvited and ate cakes, and which Freya and Peggy Drower used as occasions for pro-British chat. One week, Freya noted that she had attended thirteen. After the Brotherhood took serious root, there were also trips to set up cells among the Marsh Arabs and the Kurds.

Against this background of continual occupation, Freya always found time for reflection. ‘Very few people who think much seem really convinced of personal immortality,’ she wrote to Cockerell. ‘I myself … came to the simple faith that what had no beginning could have no end … When I was so near death once or twice the cold and bleak prospect frightened me: since then, however, a strange reassurance has come and I
think
I could no longer feel that fear: I know that in moments of great ecstasy even in this life you cease to be “personal” at all: your whole being is merged and loses itself as it were, even in such daily things as the loveliness of a sunset or a rose: if such is the loss of personality, and I believe it to be so, it does not seem to matter.’ She was to repeat this, often, later.

As in Cairo, wartime life in Baghdad could be very pleasant. Though something of a backwater, the city was full of soldiers and provided a centre for British
intelligence, which soon gathered to it many friends of Freya’s, and many others who were to become friends. ‘It is so nice’, she remarked, ‘to be mate and not skipper …’ There was Adrian Bishop, in charge of the Special Operations Executive, Teddy Hodgkin, Aidan Philip and Stewart Perowne, now posted as information officer to Iraq. There was the embassy itself, with Vyvyan Holt as Oriental Secretary. In the early mornings horses were brought to the door of the little pink villa in Alwiyah and Freya rode out into the desert with Stewart Perowne, or her young paying guest, Nigel Clive. At weekends there were picnics by the river, with Seton and Ulrica Lloyd, who took their mongoose with them to swim. And there were always parties. Freya, never dull, was capable of great, enjoyable frivolity. Robin Maugham, visiting Baghdad, was taken to dine with her. ‘I had imagined a rather gaunt, tough traveller,’ he wrote in his autobiography,
Nomad
. ‘I found a small, sprightly lady … with her head on one side like a bird, inquiring, with clear, piercing eyes beneath fine brows.’

This was a good time for Freya. She had a steady income, her health was good and she had been made temporary Attaché at the embassy. It was fun to have the Prime Minister, Nuri Pasha, to dinner and to discuss military strategy with Jumbo Wilson;
reassuring to learn from the ambassador that what she was doing was important. Rightly, she could feel appreciated, able at last to exercise some influence on policy. (Even if she was also short of funds. She wanted £9,300 for her committees. Stewart Perowne, her superior, refused to authorise payment for anything he had not approved. Freya got her own back by putting down a new typewriter under ‘telephones’, arguing that ‘they all seemed the same to me, the same sort of mechanical
idea
, and telephones was the only heading that had money left’.) Everywhere from Delhi to Washington she could count on influential friends. In her support of the ‘young effendis’, the new, educated, middle-class Arabs, the product of the ‘internal combustion engine, the (mostly) American educator, and the British Government’ now chafing for power, she saw herself as helping to mould a better post-war Middle East.

There was also truth in her conviction that the Brotherhood was important. If there were some in Baghdad who argued that it couldn’t possibly reach the young intellectuals who really mattered, and others who said that Freya would do better to talk less herself and listen more to others, whose English was better than her Arabic, there were many more prepared to vouch that it played its part in keeping Iraq friendly, in persuading the Iraqis, and particularly
the women, that English people were perfectly reasonable, that their ideology was acceptable, and that they were neither as aloof nor as foreign as they had seemed before.

In November 1942, Freya heard that her mother had died. To the sadness of her loss was added guilt, for she felt responsible for some of the difficulties of her mother’s last years. In May 1940 she had sent her an urgent warning from Aden to leave Asolo, where she and Herbert Young were living in the house that had been left to Freya. They tried to get visas for Switzerland or America, but they were turned down. Freya, locally, was believed to be a British spy, and, though no one ever actually established the connection, two weeks after Italy declared war, Flora and Herbert Young were taken to the gaol in Treviso, where Flora, upright, very gracious in her high-necked blouses, found herself incarcerated with thieves and prostitutes. Later, Flora wrote a charming memoir of her imprisonment. Penal life in wartime Italy was as feudal as any outpost of Empire. Wardens and inmates alike did their best to cosset Flora. When one used bad language, the others made a loud noise to conceal the words. Marina Volpi, daughter of the finance minister, and an Asolo neighbour, brought her three pairs of white cotton gloves, having noticed that Flora’s chamois ones needed washing.

After a few weeks, they were released and by September allowed back to Asolo, where Herbert Young, already frail, soon died. Flora, at seventy-eight as handsome as ever, greatly loved by the whole village, left for California, where she lived with friends. Her death made a terrible hole in Freya’s life. For all the betrayals of childhood, the falling out over Guido and Vera, Freya had remained exceptionally close to her, writing to her at least once and often several times a week, a cosy intimate correspondence that had gone on for over forty years. The relationship had never been simple; there was too much ambiguity, too much history in it, to make it always pleasurable, but it answered a need in Freya that nothing else seemed able to. To friends in Baghdad, she seemed very wretched. ‘I feel’, she wrote sadly, ‘as if no one in all the world belongs to me and it is rather like being in a room far too big for one.’

There was, however, much to cheer her up. That month
Letters from Syria
, a selection of pre-war letters edited by Cockerell, was published in London. It sold 4,000 copies before publication. And in June the Royal Geographical Society had bestowed on her its Founder’s Medal, remarking particularly on her journey from Hureidha in the Wadi Hadhramaut to the sea. ‘Her success’, read the nomination, ‘has been due to her courage, determination, and, above
all, to her gift for making friends with all types and conditions of peoples.’

She was also living the kind of life she really liked best, surrounded by experts and soldiers and scholars, all driven by a common purpose. Freya always admired soldiers. She liked their ‘impression of calmness and efficient leisure’. She paid attention to what they said, and made allowances for them that she would never have made for civilians. She looked for the soldier-scholar in them all. She saw it in Wavell and in General Wilson, whose eyes, she once said, were like those of an elephant, ‘small, shrewd and wise’. She was, said her friends, very like a soldier herself, thinking tactical thoughts and strategies of Empire.

Freya’s talents were now widely recognised to lie in propaganda, or, as she preferred to call it, persuasion. Among the generals she had become a celebrity – General Smuts was said to know parts of her books by heart – and at the Ministry of Information she had acquired a reputation for being able to talk to ordinary people in such a way that they believed what she said. There was something in her manner, stern, uncompromising, full of charm, using words that rang out with conviction and unmistakable probity, that was very attractive. From Cairo, Wavell was on record as saying that the Brotherhood had played an essential part in
internal security and done much to lessen sabotage against the Allies in Egypt. What was more, Freya now had a wider following. For some time she had been writing regularly from the Near East for
The Times
, articles that upheld Britain and her role as moral guide in a confused world. The time had perhaps come to give her a new audience.

By 1943 there was a strong agreement in official circles in Britain that the Zionists in Palestine should be helped as far as possible, but only with the consent of the Arabs. Finding this historical attachment to the Arab world so entrenched, the Zionists had been shifting their campaign to the United States. They were now fighting Malcolm Macdonald’s White Paper of 1939, in which he had proposed limiting Jewish immigration into Palestine to 75,000 in the next five years, and after that only if the Arabs agreed. Freya, whose understanding of the Arab position was thought to be acute, was now asked to go to America to lecture on the Middle East – largely on the premise that Americans had very little idea of what it was really like – because the Zionists were currently making British policy in Palestine much harder to enforce. Freya herself, having watched American interest in the area grow with that in oil, thought the time right.

She was not, perhaps, the most obvious of choices
for the task, for all her travels and understanding. Freya had never been to America and her one encounter with the new world in Canada had left her a little scathing of its culture. More important, she had never been admiring of the Jews. From Haifa, in the summer of 1931, she had written to her father: ‘I don’t think anyone but a Jew can really like the Jews: they so obviously have no use for anyone else. Their manners are horrid compared to the Arab; and I felt, by the end of a day among them, that it is far better to be a Jew among the Philistines than an unlucky Philistine among the Jews.’

The tour started with a by now customary set-back to her health. Far out to sea, crossing the Atlantic on a crammed troopship, the
Aquitania
, Freya developed appendicitis. By the time she was carried to shore by stretcher at Halifax, through heavy rain, with the troops lining the railings watching, the appendix was rupturing. She was immediately operated on in the Halifax infirmary and, surviving by her usual combination of robustness and tenacity, she was soon sitting up and writing letters, tended by nuns. Though she lamented that she had lost a month, by November she was in New York, building up to a schedule of tea parties, lectures and dinners that would have crushed many younger and healthier women. The city enchanted her: ‘I can’t get over the
exciting beauty,’ she wrote, ‘the pencil buildings so high and far that the blueness of the sky floats about them; the feeling that one’s taxis, and shoppings all go on in the deep canyon-beds of natural erosions rather than in the excrescences of human builders.’ After four years of war, the hats and lingerie of New York were particularly dazzling.

Within days of arriving Freya began contacting anti-Zionist Jews, to whom she spoke out firmly on the second clause of the Balfour Declaration (‘It being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.’) Her view, and the one that she intended to carry up and down the country, was that the proposals outlined in the White Paper were far too important to the Arabs and to the stability of the Middle East to be tinkered with, and that it was up to the moderate Jews, because they too were interested in fighting Zionism, to co-operate with the British. She soon wrote to Elizabeth Monroe, her senior at the Ministry of Information, about a dinner organised in her honour: ‘The distressing thing is that I
like
the Jews I meet here and have to argue with, almost better than anyone else I see, and there was a most disarming mixture of sharpness, kindness and humour about the rabbi.’

Not everyone did so well with her as the rabbi had done. At a dinner in New York, Freya was introduced to Clare Luce. Within minutes they had fallen into a discussion about India. Clare Luce observed that the British were behaving badly by failing to give an undertaking on independence; Freya countered by suggesting that she might like to float a new slogan, ‘Freedom for Fratricide’. The exchange grew chilly. ‘Let there be massacres,’ declared Clare Luce. ‘Why should the white races have a monopoly of murder?’ To her friends, afterwards, Freya had the last word. ‘If she carries much weight now,’ she wrote of Clare Luce, ‘I don’t think she will in a few years; she is too much tinkle … and she makes the mistake, eventually fatal to lovely women, of antagonising all the women.’

From this moment on, in fact, Freya’s tour was often prickly. In a letter to Cockerell she reported that her days were spent dealing with ‘slanders, envy, detraction and all malignancy as well as mere ignorance’. As usual, she was caught by the spectacle and distressed by man’s abuse of it. From Chicago, where she had witnessed a snowstorm, she wrote of the ‘skyscrapers in the background and the lake with blocks of ice making a white horizon … and inside the hotel it is like the Balkans grown prosperous – square short females with furs and cordial voices
telling everyone’s business in the lounge. It is immense fun – only appalling to think that these are the people who are to have a hand in the delicate and subtle East. Anyway, I believe it is ridiculous to try and pour culture like chocolate over an ice
on top of a nation
…’

Catching ‘The Chief’, the famed steel-and-aluminium East-to-West-Coast train, Freya moved on late in January to California, where she stayed with Lucy Beach, daughter of the Sylvia Beach who had run a silk factory in Asolo in the early years of the century, before turning it over to Flora, and the family friend with whom Flora had spent her last months. By now she was deeply disenchanted with America. ‘I feel’, she wrote mournfully to Pamela Hore-Ruthven, ‘their civilisation not only alien but dead and also have a horrid fear of it, that we may be infected and let ourselves be carried down this way of mechanical annihilation.’ To Wavell, she complained: ‘This is a monstrous country … I feel rather like a slightly discouraged David travelling across this land with one Goliath after another to meet, and only a small packet of sling stones which the Mogul perpetually begs one not to use …’

However ill at ease and hostile she felt, Freya clearly disguised it, for she was not disliked by the Americans in return. On the contrary, her particular
style, forceful and gracious, and her English air of cultured certainty, went down very well among the ladies arid on the platforms, where she had become a fluent speaker. Writing of Freya’s reception in California, Lucy Beach remarked to a friend in London: ‘You know I’ve not seen Freya for six years, and I found that she has grown very much. She has great poise and authority. But she is the same dear person, quite unspoiled …’

The tour ended in Boston, at the end of April. Apart from a brief visit to Canada, to see the farm her father had left her, Freya had been to New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston and Newport. It was not easy for anyone to assess quite what she had achieved, though her visit had not passed unnoticed or unreported and two rabbis and a member of Congress had requested her removal.

In the House of Commons, Brendan Bracken, Minister of Information, was questioned by a Liberal MP called Geoffrey Mander as to whether Freya had been sent to the United States to spread pro-Arab propaganda. Brendan Bracken replied that she had gone at the invitation of the Oriental Institute of Chicago and that he would certainly put on record ‘that she has nothing to do with propaganda for Arabs or anyone else’.

Freya herself had reached the conclusion that in the States the British technique over Palestine should be that of a relay race, with one Arab expert taking over when the last became too visible in the Zionist spotlight. She now planned to retire to the Devonshire moors to write a short and popular book on the Arab question. Her last official function was to give a talk on Boston radio; after which, to her chagrin and confirming all she felt about America, the announcer thanked her and promised listeners a ‘circus of performing animals’ for the next day.

Freya was never absolutely clear about the purpose of her next wartime occupation, a visit to India. In the autumn of 1944, having spent the summer months in a hotel in Chagford writing
East is West,
she received an invitation from Lady Wavell, since 1943 Vicereine of India, to go out to Delhi, where a committee of the Women’s Voluntary Services had been formed to try and think up ways of involving Indian women in the war. It had, wrote Lady Wavell, a programme ‘beyond me and anyway I haven’t the time’. The Wavells and Freya were by now good friends, with affectionate letters passing regularly between her and the Viceroy, who filled his pages with verse and doggerel, both charming and funny. Lady Wavell was not a letter writer. Though never
at her best with women, and increasingly impatient with administration, Freya agreed, asking only that she be allowed to return to Europe once Italy was liberated. Before leaving she wrote to a friend, Austin Harrison, that she hoped the new job was not going to consist of running the WVS as ‘my one aim and function in life is to de-organise the organised, especially women. Organisation is becoming a sort of nightmare.’

Early in February 1945, Freya left England by flying boat in the company of three generals, the party having been delayed for nearly a week in Poole harbour by ice. She reached Delhi when the weather was at its best, hot days, cold nights; the roses were out; the gardens of the Viceroy’s house had been opened to the public and were full of ‘families, which makes them cheerful … astonishingly like a Persian miniature, especially when the
chuprassis
with a pointed cap sticking up from their turban and scarlet coats come wandering by’. The Wavells were away, so Freya joined the amateur artists and went painting with one of the ADCs, Billy Henderson. In the afternoons she made excursions to photograph a palace or a temple, or visited the bazaar, to bargain for a piece of jewellery or early coin.

It was not, in fact, her first visit to India. In
February 1943, wishing for a break from the Brothers and Sisters of Freedom, Freya had come to spend a few weeks with the Wavells; she had liked what she saw, approving of the ‘solid Victorian feeling – everything
good
, nothing of careless rapture’. Something of a mystery surrounds the end of that visit. Freya had expressed a wish to drive from Delhi to Tehran and on Wavell’s orders a car had been found for her. Whether she bought it, as she always claims, or was only lent it, as others maintain, when she reached Tehran she sold it, at an enormous profit, a transaction greatly frowned on by officials from one end of the Near East to the other – cars were in acutely short supply. (Another version had it that the car had belonged to the MoI, and that after being rebuked, Freya cabled London with the words from Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’: ‘If you can make one heap of all your winnings and risk it on the turn of pitch and toss …’) The affair had been put down to Freya’s unique mixture of mild unscrupulousness and disregard for officialdom; in Delhi it was the subject of many affectionate jokes.

When the Wavells returned to Viceroy House immense formality came with them. Though Wavell was a very different figure from his predecessor, Lord Linlithgow, and as easygoing as the former Viceroy had been orderly, as representative of the King there
could be no relaxation from the most rigid attention to etiquette. Matters of rank, title and precedence were presided over by four ADCs, two of whom were always on duty; curtseying and bowing were compulsory and at the end of State dinners the ladies left the dining room in pairs, pausing at the far end of the hall to form up and curtsey. Freya remarked that curtseying had a ‘devastating effect on conversation’ and that splendour cast a blight, ‘a loveless thing that the human soul has difficulty in digging its roots into’.

Her words were somewhat disingenuous. Freya liked pageantry and grandeur; this was her sort of place. For all the complaints that she found it hard to discuss
Hamlet
among a lot of silent ADCs, ceremonial was always something she much enjoyed. Lutyens’ Viceroy House, last of the great palaces of its kind, was not exactly beautiful, with its sandwich-like layers of cream and reddish stone; nor was it precisely comfortable, with marble corridors the length of railway stations, so poorly lit there had to be artificial light all day, while the trees in the garden were expressly pruned low, on Lutyens’ orders, so that guests had to carry their chairs round with them from one patch of shade to another. But life within had all that Freya desired. There were 300 servants. She had a pleasant set of rooms and
ate whenever at home with the Wavells, whether informally in the small dining room, occasions on which she excelled, for Wavell had no small talk, and wished only really to discuss poetry, military history and golf, the first two of which were ideal for her; or on State occasions, when a turbanned servant stood behind every chair. It was at one of these banquets that she found herself seated next to Mountbatten. She considered him very
good-looking
, but was distressed when she realised that he was totally uninterested in her, coming to life only when two pet cranes were brought in to be fed. ‘True British trait,’ she remarked a little sourly, ‘to prefer animals to conversation.’