The Secret Ministry of Ag. & Fish (32 page)

By now I was getting to know his fellow officers, some of whom were married. Offers of beds in married quarters whenever I was there for a weekend began to flow towards me from every direction.
I was enjoying Andrew’s company; we laughed a lot, I liked his friends and I gradually began to wonder whether I hadn’t fallen in love. So when, one Sunday afternoon, while having tea
in the River Room at the Savoy, Andrew produced a small black velvet box with a beautiful five-diamond ring inside and told me, ‘Those five diamonds mean “Will you be my wife?”’,
I accepted his proposal. As he slipped the ring on my finger I truly believed I was in love and had finally wiped out the past and found happiness. But one Saturday afternoon, when we were
discussing the plans for our wedding, to his bewilderment, I gave Andrew back his beautiful ring. I don’t know what went wrong. I, too, was bewildered. He took it very well. Perhaps he had
also begun to realize that we had both made a mistake. Nonetheless, I was desperately unhappy, not understanding why all my friends seemed to sail through engagements into happy married life, while
mine tended to disintegrate at the last moment.

Between my two engagements I had fallen in love yet again, this time with a German, a former Luftwaffe pilot. I met Franz through my father, who had been part of a reconciliation programme
called the World Friendship Organization. I don’t think it was very well known or had a very long life, but my father was involved in it for three or four years. I remember meeting Dutch and
Danes and Germans who passed through his hands, and I helped him entertain them. Franz was slightly older than the others, twenty-eight at the time, and had come on a study tour. My father asked me
to show him the sights. There was an instant rapport between us, and I think, had he been allowed to settle in England or even been prepared to emigrate to the New World, as so many young people
were doing immediately after the war, I would have married him. But he was fiercely patriotic, viscerally attached to his country, in spite of the fact that his father and his brother-in-law, both
Army officers, had lost their lives because of their anti-Nazi sentiments. He wanted to rebuild Germany, put it back on its feet with a new regime. And I wasn’t prepared to help him. Quite
apart from my feelings, in 1949, marriage to a German was unthinkable, especially if I wanted to put the war behind me and live a ‘normal’ life. I realized, too, that I would have hurt
my family, who had suffered such tragic losses, and also lost most of my friends, who would have either condemned me or shunned me. It occurred to me that Franz might even have flown the plane
which dropped its bombs the night my cousin’s wife was killed, or those which destroyed my grandparents’ home. But apart from that, deep down I knew I could never marry a man whose
countrymen had tortured and killed so many of my friends; nor could I go and live in Germany and become what was still considered one of ‘the enemy’. At the time, the ‘no
fraternization rule between the local population and the British occupying forces in Germany was strictly enforced. How different it would have been today! So, once again, there were two unhappy
people.

Confused and uncomprehending, I began to wonder whether this was to be the pattern of my life from now on: finding love and then seeing it evade my grasp. A couple of years later, when my second
engagement was broken, I asked myself how many more lives I was going to damage before I either found the right man or gave up the idea of marriage altogether.

Now, looking back, I understand why my engagements always ended in disaster and heartbreak. The men were wiser, more far-sighted than I. They realized before it was too late that I was marrying
a ghost, that I was using them as a substitute for the man I had lost and never forgotten, and they didn’t want to be loved in that way. They wanted to be loved for themselves, and at the
time it was something I was incapable of doing. I not only made myself very unhappy, but I also made them unhappy. It was some years before I discovered that love had been there all the time. But
like so many things which are under our noses, I didn’t realize it.

I had met Jacques in February 1946 shortly after he had been demobilized from General de Lattre de Tassigny’s First French Army, for which he had volunteered in June 1944 after the Allied
landings in Normandy. One afternoon, when I walked into the News Room, he was sitting at a typewriter, hammering away with two fingers. We became friendly, but not more friendly than I was with a
lot of other people at the time, and although I enjoyed his company, he was more interested in me than I in him. I wasn’t romantically interested in anyone at the time, and I don’t
think I had any wish to be. He invited me to Paris to visit his parents and then to holiday with the family in the south-west, where his grandmother had a farm.

I shied at the thought. I was quite happy with the idea of going to Paris, but for me a farm in south-west France meant an old peasant woman with no teeth, wearing clogs and a black apron,
spreading grain for the hens. The thought of perhaps being asked to get up at dawn and help swill out the pigs did not appeal. So I refused. Had he told me that his grandmother’s
‘farm’ was a vast wine-growing estate where all the family, uncles, aunts and cousins gathered in the summer, I would have been more enthusiastic. But in spite of my lukewarm response
to his attentions, when he left the BBC the following year to work for the United Nations at Lake Success we kept in touch through Christmas cards.

Through a meeting at a party, I was offered the chance of going to Bucharest, then very much behind the Iron Curtain – Stalin was still in power – to teach in a small school for
diplomatic children who were too young to go to boarding school in England. I protested that I knew nothing about teaching, but was assured that it was all done through a correspondence course. So
I accepted the challenge and found it very interesting. On my return, as I believed at the time, to London I decided to stop over in Paris, where my brother was on a course for the Army. It was
quite an experience travelling from Bucharest to Vienna – I think the train only went once a week, and Romanians had to leave it at the Hungarian frontier. Only the one carriage, that day I
travelled, carrying the two British Queen’s messengers, the Swiss courier, the Israeli ambassador and me was allowed to proceed. It took ages to cross the frontier into Hungary, which at the
time was also under Russian occupation. While we waited, guards high up on lookout posts had their machine-guns trained on us in case any unauthorized person had concealed himself in the train in
an attempt to cross the border and escape, hopefully to freedom. The formalities took at least an hour, during which time our compartments were turned upside down by Russian soldiers. It was
frightening. The two Queen’s Messengers, who were in the next compartment to mine, asked me to join them, which made me feel a little more secure. They also fed me, since I had brought no
food for the journey. There was none to be had on the train, but since the QMs made the journey once a fortnight, carrying the diplomatic bags back and forth, they were prepared and had a primus
stove and all the equipment necessary for preparing makeshift meals.

We went through the same hair-raising performance all over again on reaching the Hungarian border with Austria, where the train was halted, in the middle of the night, in a kind of no
man’s land before being allowed to cross the frontier and enter Austria. I think that halt was even more dramatic than our experience at the Romanian/Hungarian border, which had been carried
out in daylight. Unfortunately, on the night I travelled, while the train was waiting in Budapest station, a man had inserted himself between the rails underneath the train in an attempt to escape
to freedom. He was discovered by the soldiers doing the search and tried to make a run for it. We were unaware of this until suddenly, while our
wagons-lits
were being literally turned
upside down by the soldiers searching perhaps for more fugitives, several shots rang out, and I imagine the person attempting to escape was killed. By the time the train finally got on its way and
shunted into Vienna I was suffering from violent stomach cramps, brought about solely by nerves. The journey had certainly been an experience, one I don’t think I shall ever forget. Nor shall
I forget the feeling of relief, almost exhilaration, I felt when we finally crossed the frontier and entered freedom.

But our troubles didn’t end there. We were caught up in an avalanche outside Salzburg and nobody, not even the British embassy in Paris, seemed to know what had happened to us. Geoffrey
went backwards and forwards to the Gare de l’Est on false alerts all day, and, finally, when the embassy telephoned him at one o’clock in the morning to say that the train had been
located and would be arriving in an hour, he asked Jacques, who had a car, to accompany him to the station. When the train finally arrived, at two o’clock in the morning, four days after
leaving Bucharest, they were both at the station to meet me. My trunk had disappeared in the avalanche so, in the hope that it would eventually reappear, I stayed on for a few days in Paris. By the
time it did arrive I’d caught German measles!

It was April, a magical time in Paris. The air was like champagne, and I was condemned to view through the open window of a fourth-floor flat the heady spring and the young couples gazing into
each other’s eyes and exchanging kisses as they strolled entwined along the banks of the Seine. I was sitting up in bed, covered in spots and feeling very sorry for myself, when a friend I
had known at the BBC came to visit and commiserate with me. She was now working at a press agency in the rue de la Paix and told me she was looking for an assistant. She offered me the job, and,
being at a loose end, I accepted, only returning to my parents’ home to sort out my affairs. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was never to live in my home country again.

When I returned to Paris, Geoffrey had already left to rejoin his regiment. I had visited the city only once before, for a few weeks in 1949, so I didn’t really know my way around: but
Jacques was there, and we renewed our friendship. He was endlessly helpful and seemed to be always available for me when I needed advice or assistance, and I came to rely on him.

He found me accommodation and coped with the mountain of paperwork necessary at the time in order to get temporary residence status. He even joked that, rather than wading through this lot, it
would probably be easier to marry him and thereby obtain French nationality, a solution which would solve all my problems. I laughed and took it as a joke, but I realize now that he was only
half-joking: he was in fact ‘testing the waters’. After a while he did ask me to marry him, but I hesitated. Scenes of my previous engagements, and the pain, not only that I had
endured, but that I had also inflicted on others, flashed through my mind, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to repeat the experience. I liked Jacques enormously and had come to rely on him. I
enjoyed his company and was grateful to him for all his help. But was that enough?

Jacques assured me that it was enough, and that he could make me happy. I was still a selfish beast and didn’t consider whether I could make him happy. I was only thinking of my feelings,
and again I hesitated. But perhaps, after all this time, something was melting inside me and, in the end, I realized that I did love Jacques. It was not at all the love I had expected. In my search
for some wild passion, I had hoped to recapture the blinding feeling of adoration I had experienced during the war with Bill. I had not considered the simplicity of the union of two souls. In
Jacques’ company I no longer felt alone. I felt complete. Now, looking back, I can see more clearly what attracted me to Jacques. He is not unlike Bill in so many ways: quiet, unassuming,
courageous, amusing, not easily ruffled, and he gets on with everyone, the qualities Bill possessed. One of my husband’s favourite sayings, which I have now adopted, is: ‘Any fool can
fight. It takes an intelligent person to keep the peace.’ I gather from that that he must be very intelligent, since he refuses to quarrel with anyone!

But my heart had been dead for too long for it to instantly spring back to life, and I was troubled with doubts. I was, after all, no longer a starry-eyed teenager rushing blindly into marriage;
I was a mature woman who saw the pitfalls not only of marriage, but of marriage with someone from another culture, and I found myself wondering about the wisdom of the step I was about to take. I
imagine most women have these same doubts at the prospect of sharing their lives, their most intimate moments, with another human being – in my case someone whose upbringing had been
diametrically opposed to mine and who, by nature, was so different from myself.

I am impetuous, impatient, critical, inclined to judge and also to act first and think afterwards, often with disastrous consequences. Jacques is calm, unhurried, optimistic, seeing only the
glass as half full, not half empty, as I am inclined to do. He looks only for the good, and usually finds it, in others. In the more than sixty, nearer seventy, years since February 1946, when I
first met him, I have only twice seen him lose his temper, which I imagine must be a record. How could two people so fundamentally different, not only temperamentally, but also culturally, ever
merge into one whole, I sometimes asked myself in the weeks leading up to our wedding. It was impossible. And yet we have achieved the impossible, largely thanks to my husband’s forgiving
spirit, and also perhaps because we share the same faith, proving that the old saying ‘couples who pray together, stay together’ is true.

Jacques is not at all the kind of man I had expected to marry. The four men I had been in love with had all been military types who towered above me, had blond hair, blue eyes, bristly
moustaches, medal ribbons lined on their chests and enjoyed balls and parties. Jacques is the opposite. He is scarcely half a head taller than I, though with the advancing years he seems to have
shrunk a few centimetres, with the result that we are now running neck and neck
.
I have never seen him with a moustache, though I know from photos that he did sport one briefly during the
war. His dark-brown hair, once wavy and so abundant it used to flop into his eyes, is conspicuous by its absence, and his gentle hazel eyes are now hidden behind glasses. But his smile is still the
same, that smile which so captivated my mother when she first met him and prompted her to exclaim, ‘He’s like a little boy!’ He was twenty-six at the time and a hardened veteran
of the First French Army!