My Place in the Bazaar Read online

  My Place in the Bazaar

  ALEC WAUGH

  Contents

  Foreword

  LONDON 1919–1926

  A Stranger

  An Unfinished Story

  WORLD TOUR 1926–1927

  The Making of a Matron

  The Last Chukka

  ‘Tahiti Waits’

  ENGLAND 1932–1939

  A Pretty Case for Freud

  ‘Ambition’ Bevan

  THE SECOND WORLD WAR

  ‘Bien Sûr’

  A Luckless Lebanese

  TRAVEL YEARS 1946–1952

  The Woman who knew Frank Harris

  A Bunch of Beachcombers

  The Wicked Baronet

  Circle of Deception

  Sources

  Foreword

  I Wrote my first novel when I was seventeen. I am now sixty-two. In the intervening years I have published over forty books. They fill two library shelves. I sometimes survey them wistfully. They were written with high excitement and delivered to their publishers with heady hope: presented to the public in shining covers and advertised glowingly in the Sunday Press, they enjoyed, one or two of them, a brief, bright summer of approval; then one by one they went off the market. Of the books published before 1956, only three are still in print, two of them precariously. My only novel that has been consistently in circulation is the first I wrote—The Loom of Youth.

  I do not expect that any of its ‘between-the-wars’ successors will be reissued. They dealt with problems that the world has solved or shelved, with situations that could not arise today, with a way of living that has vanished and with characters who were the product of those problems, those situations and that way of life. Occasionally, a sociological novel will survive as a museum piece, as a picture of a period. But I make no such claim for stories like The Balliols and Kept. I console myself with the reflection that not only many pleasant but even certain noble wines lack longevity, particularly those of Burgundy. And, in my devotion to the grape, I have always been a Burgundian rather than a Bordelais.

  Yet even so a writer is reluctant to accept forty years of authorship as the pouring of so much water through a sieve. Are all those titles tombstones? Can nothing be rescued? A novel is a substantial piece of merchandise to salvage; a novel is complete in itself, it must be presented as a whole; but might there not be scattered among my twenty miscellaneous books stray passages and chapters that could be extracted and placed in a different setting? Had I not more than once filled a book with make-weight material so as to get two or three favourite pieces between covers? Might it not be possible to compress a dozen books into one or two, finding in each one something of contemporary appeal?

  Rereading some of my old books with this in view, it did seem to me that the stories that have been assembled here, possess a certain undated homogeneity. The first was written in 1920, the last in 1952. They deal with different periods and places, with the First World War, with the London of the 1920s and the 1930s; with the Far East and the Caribbean, with second war counterespionage. But they have this in common: they are told in the first person singular. They are not autobiographical. Their ‘I’ is the observer and the recorder. But they are intimate in the sense that there is a direct contact between the author and the reader. I have always enjoyed writing in this way, feeling myself linked with the traditions of my craft, at one with the storytellers of the Orient whom I have seen in Marrakesh and Baghdad taking their place in the Bazaar, with their audience squatted round them on their haunches. That is why I chose this title for the book.

  The story told in the first person obeys an established literary convention. The author tells his story as though he were recording an actual event, or series of events, of which he was the witness, but he is not giving evidence on oath in a court of law. The episode, the anecdote that he records did not necessarily happen in just that way, at just that time, in just that place and to just those people. He selects, invents and rearranges; recreating a personal experience in a special pattern. The reader recognizes this. He knows that he is being offered a piece of fiction. At the same time, he expects the self-portraiture involved in this kind of story to be exact. For that reason I have prefaced the various sections of this book with a few autobiographical details. I do not know whether the young man who wrote the first story in this book at the age of twenty-two is a very different person from the man of fifty-five who wrote the last, but I do know that the circumstances of his life were very different; I felt, therefore, that it would make the reading of these stories simpler, if I explained at various points what those circumstances were. These notes are printed in italics.

  A.W.

  London 1919–1926

  The Loom of Youth was published in 1917. Few novels have been the centre of more controversy. This will surprise a modern reader; the book is tame enough today; but it must be remembered that for half a century the English Public School system had been revered as one of the ‘two main pillars vaulted high’ that supported the British Empire. My novel was one of the first to criticize its cult of athleticism and the very first to accept as a matter of course the existence of homosexuality in the average school. The Spectator for ten weeks and the Nation for six devoted two or three pages of each issue to a correspondence debating its veracity.

  Ten days after its appearance I joined the B.E.F. in France as a second-lieutenant in a machine-gun company. Reading the reviews of my novel in the trenches, realizing that I had ‘set the Thames on fire’, I thought ruefully of the exciting time I should be having if I were in London. A success like this could come only once in life and I was missing all the fun of it. I felt sorry for myself. But actually I was lucky. As a junior officer responsible for men’s lives in action, I could not give myself any airs. At Passchendaele and Cambrai I was a very unimportant person. Had I been in London as the lion of the season, I do not see how I could have helped having my head turned.

  I was, moreover, in no position to follow up my success. Eight years went by before another book of mine sold more than twenty-five hundred copies. An abrupt and complete eclipse would have been hard to take. Those few garish weeks might have spoilt my enjoyment of the next ten years.

  I was taken prisoner in the big retreat of March 1918, and spent the remainder of the war in captivity in Mainz. My fellow prisoners included Gerard Hopkins, Hugh Kingsmill and Milton Hayes. It was the first time that I had met on equal terms men of intelligence and education several years older than myself. Mainz was for me the equivalent of a university. I read voraciously, argued and exchanged ideas.

  In the spring of 1919 I left the Army with a posting to the R.A.R.O. (Regular Army Reserve of Officers) and in the autumn joined the staff of Chapman & Hall, the venerable publishing house of which my father, Arthur Waugh, was the Managing Director.

  It was a half-time employment. I spent Mondays and Fridays in the firm’s offices, in Henrietta Street; the rest of the week I could devote to my own writing. I had a flat in London, but I have never been able to write in a big city. Too much is happening. I need a day-to-day eventlessness before I can concentrate upon a novel. During the winter I used to go out of London every Monday evening to a small country inn in Hertfordshire, returning on the Friday morning.

  I was a keen athlete. I played Rugby football every Saturday during the winter, and cricket three or four days a week during the summer. I did my serious writing during the winter. In April, between the football and the cricket seasons, I took a holiday abroad.

  Cricket and football determined the pattern of my life. They kept me not only in sound condition physically, but in touch with what are called ‘ordinary people’. I was fortunate in that. It is very easy for a young writer to dri
ft into a Bohemian set where he meets only painters, musicians, actors and other writers. Bohemians can be and usually are delightful as companions; but for the novelist they are less ‘good copy’ than the doctors, lawyers, accountants, businessmen whom I was meeting on the playing fields.

  The ’twenties are today qualified with the adjective ‘roaring’; they are presented as a period of hectic, extravagant self-indulgence. They may have been for some people; they were not for me. I was working hard. I kept early hours so as to be fit for football. I had very little money. The early ’twenties were a happy time for me, but not a wild one.

  A Stranger

  I Was looking for a wedding present costing about three pounds and I was looking for it in a jeweller’s shop in Hampstead where one often picked up bargains. I was browsing round its show cases when my attention was caught by a familiar voice. I turned to see beside the desk, a tall dark bearded man arguing with the proprietor.

  ‘I must show you these samples. I insist. I know my firm is German. But we aren’t at war with Germany any longer. I can sell you stuff at a third of the price they charge you here. A bargain is a bargain. We’re businessmen not politicians.’

  I stared. His back was three-quarters turned to me; the beard was thick; it covered the line of his jaw and hid his mouth, but the voice was unmistakable. It could not be any one’s but Morrison’s. Morrison, a man whom I should remember as long as I remembered anything.

  He had joined our machine-gun company in the autumn of 1917. We had just come down from Ypres; we had been in the line eight days, had taken the remains of a village, a few kilometres of ruined land, and had lost four officers and twenty men. We had been hurried south and were waiting to take over a quiet sector to the east of Bullecourt. We were in tents at the foot of a hill, and the fierce October rains that turned Passchendaele into a swamp were driving over us.

  We sat in our leaking mess-tent, huddled round the stove, trying to be thankful that we had seen the last of the salient. Jones, who had spent most of his life in Malaya and who loathed the cold, had wrapped his sleeping-bag around his knees and was chanting a song that he had learnt from an Australian in an estaminet at ‘Pop’ the night after we had been relieved. We only knew the chorus; it went:

  Cheerioh, cheeiray,

  and a rolling stone gathers no moss so they say.

  Cheerioh, cheeriay,

  and a rolling stone gathers no moss so they say.

  Cheerioh, cheeriay …

  Every few minutes he would pause, take a sip at his glass, and mutter, ‘I expect that poor bastard is gathering moss himself now, up in that bloody salient,’ adding, ‘And bloody well out of it, too.’ The rest of us joined in the chorus when we felt inclined.

  Then Morrison arrived. It was just before tea-time, and I can see him now as he strolled into the tent, a black figure against the night, letting in the wind and the rain. He stood there, blinking at the candle, and Jones broke off his song to growl over his shoulder, ‘Who the hell is that?’

  ‘Me, Morrison. I’ve just come to join you. Let’s come near the fire. I’m ruddy damp.’

  He was tall and burly with undistinguished features, and his uniform did not suit him. Some men look right in uniform and others don’t. Morrison looked as though he had called at the Army Ordnance Stores on his way up, and asked for a stock size. He seemed to be in his later twenties.

  We moved aside to make a place for him and he sat on the bench, his hands pressed forward, with the light from the open stove falling on his chest and knees, leaving his face in shadow.

  ‘Heavens, but this is good. I had a job to get here from Bapaume,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe I’d ever have got here at all if I hadn’t bribed an A.S.C. wallah to drive me out in the town major’s car. I knew he wouldn’t think of moving on a day like this and it was a pity to see the old bus standing in a shed.’

  It is usual for subalterns who have just joined a unit to keep quiet in the mess at first, but Morrison did not stop talking till we had heard the whole account of his journey from Grantham: how he had a row with the R.T.O. at Boulogne, how he had managed to break his journey at Amiens, and how the fool of a sergeant at Bapaume had wanted him to come up in the light railway.

  ‘The light railway!’ He laughed. ‘I could see myself coming up in that damned thing. No cover to it, nothing to keep the rain off, and then I and my damned valise would have been dumped in one of these blown-up villages with no prospect of getting anywhere. I know that game!’

  We thought at first he was merely the talkative ass who was anxious to make a good impression and was going the wrong way about it. We looked forward to his first turn in the line. He might not talk so much when he had to inspect his guns along a communication trench that was being shelled. It is a national heritage, that prejudice against the actor, that belief in the strong silent Englishman: we can’t believe that the other sort, at its best, can be more than an amiable Falstaff. I soon learned, however, that there was a good deal to Morrison.

  The evening we moved up the line, my batman, Carter, came up to me with his features set in a serious expression.

  ‘That new officer, sir, he’s got too much kit. He’ll have to dump some.’

  Carter was the one man in the company of whom I really stood in awe. He was very respectful, but how he looked at me when he disapproved! When I first joined the section I washed inside the tent and I heard afterwards that he had gone up to my section officer and said: ‘That new officer, sir, do you mind asking him not to wash inside the tent?’

  It was always ‘that new officer, sir’. Carter hated them: it took him a long time to get used to people, and I looked forward to seeing how he would deal with Morrison.

  At that moment Morrison came in to start what threatened to be a long story about the price of cigarettes at the Expeditionary Force canteen. Carter interrupted him.

  ‘That kit of yours, sir, there’s too much of it. I can’t get it all on to the limber; you’ll have to dump some, sir.’

  Morrison swung round impatiently.

  ‘My kit! I need everything I’ve got. Now, look here, my good man, you get along and pack it up at once.’

  Carter was not used to being addressed as ‘my good man’. The expression of his face was respectful but obstinate.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t do it; you’re the only officer in the company that’s brought a bed out with him; I can’t get it all in.’

  ‘You can’t? Then I’ll have to show you. Come here.’

  He opened out his valise, spread its contents on the ground, then began to pack, talking at full pace all the time. ‘This hold-all goes in there, my boots there, and be very careful that my boots don’t knock against my shaving glass; my collars in here, that blanket there and riding breeches here, and then the bed in there, and then the bucket.’

  Within five minutes he had packed the whole thing, strapped it up and, as it lay on the floor of the tent, it looked about the smallest valise I had ever seen.

  ‘That’s the way to do it. If you know how things fit in you can pack ‘em away in your pocket. It’s only a question of method. I’ve thought it out very carefully. Now unpack it again so to see if you know how it’s done.’

  And the great Carter dutifully unpacked the valise and packed it all again with Morrison standing there beside him talking.

  ‘Not so bad,’ he said, when Carter had finished, ‘not perfect yet, not by a long chalk, but you’ll get the hang of it in time; only a matter of practice.’

  From that moment I respected him. He is the only man I ever saw get the upper hand of Carter.

  I saw a good deal of Morrison during the next few weeks, but we never got intimate. He was a lonely man, the most lonely man I think I have ever met. His extreme volubility masked a gloomy, taciturn nature. He cared for no one. ‘Friendship’s not my game,’ he said. I never discovered what his real game was. I don’t know that he had one; he appeared to have no ambition; apart from a fierce determ
ination to get even with some force that was, he felt, working contrary to him. Fate had loaded the dice against him, but he was not going to be beaten, he was going to see it through. In the waging of that struggle lay failure or success in life.

  He had been brought up outside London in one of the northern suburbs. He had gone to a local school, thence to a local bank. He had loathed it there. ‘I don’t know what I shall do after the war,’ he said. ‘But I can’t go back to that, I don’t see why I should; I’ve got no home, no one is dependent on me; it does not matter to anyone what happens to me; I don’t know how I managed to stand it for so long. But one drifts into habits. I had to, while my father was alive and afterwards—well, it’s hard to break a habit, and I didn’t see what else I was to do; there was the club where I played bridge and billiards in the evening, there was football every Saturday in the winter and cricket in the summer; always some little thing to look forward to. I felt sure that something must turn up soon; that it could not go on like that for ever; that’s the mistake we all make, waiting for something to turn up instead of going out and finding it. Some of us have good reason to be grateful to the war.’

  He had, I soon found, a hard side to his nature. If he had once made up his mind he let nothing stand in his way.

  Once we were taking over a piece of line from the Australians. They had had a bad time; it was a filthy night of rain and mud and the officer whom Morrison was relieving had a cold; probably trench fever coming on.

  ‘Do you mind if my sergeant takes you round the guns? I’m feeling “dud”,’ he said.

  Headquarters had issued strict instructions that we were to be shown round by an officer and not a sergeant, but it was a rule that no one worried about very much; as far as I remember, Morrison nearly always sent his sergeant round himself. But on this night, for some reason or other, he was determined that the officer should come round with him.

  ‘No, I’m sorry, the captain’s very strict on this. If anything went wrong there’d be the hell to pay. I’m afraid you’ll have to come round with me.’