TEN

I wasn’t. There is now a stage demon, wheezy, sleek haired, jaw-crunching, jumping in with a puff of acrid smoke from the wings in the shape of my interfering father, wanting to change everything in my life for the worse. Nat writes to Hubert on 22 November 1954:

Dear Hubert

I hear that you have been recently in London and gather that you have seen Joe. It seems that he is trying to get an Irish passport, and it is possible that for ordinary travel and holiday purposes he might be entitled to one, though not of course without his mother’s and my consent. We suspect however that his purpose is to disappear to the continent for a long period (say until he is 27) during a part of which he is liable to military service in this country. His mother and I have been very exercised and anxious in our own minds as to whether we should give this consent for a passport. (We have, of course, been aware that this matter would probably arise).

For different reasons Biddy and I are both against giving our consent; but I feel that perhaps you might think differently and that you might have some arguments on the other side which I ought to take into consideration. I would be grateful in any case if you could let me know how you feel about the problem.

My regards to Peggy,

Yours,                    

Nat Hone.               

 

5th December. Since writing this letter (and not posting it) I hear that a new bill to be introduced in the present parliamentary session will make 36 (instead of 26) the age of liability to call up. It seems ludicrous that he should be facilitated to play hide and seek with the authorities here for that length of time.

Well, I had no mind to dodge any authorities in Britain, just as I had an even stronger mind not to do any National Service. Though I was born in London, my mother was born in Ireland and my father was certainly Irish, albeit Anglo-Irish-American, and I had spent over fifteen years in Ireland and only a few years in England, and thus so far as I was concerned I owed no military allegiance to Britain. Indeed, with all this parental Irish background, I could certainly have got an Irish passport, as I eventually did. Nor, if I got an Irish passport, had I any intention of running off to the continent for ten years. How my father got this nonsense into his mind I’ve no idea. But what is clear is that, having abandoned me as a two-year-old, and taken no responsibility for my upbringing later, and having done little or no work himself (least of all in the armed forces) and lived half his life off my mother’s earnings, he was now insisting that I take the Queen’s shilling. And to ensure that I did so he would deny me an Irish passport, which of course would not just have been available to me for ‘holiday and travel purposes’ but would have made me an Irish citizen and not therefore liable for military service in Britain, as Nat appreciates without his quite saying so. All this high moral tone of his about my having to take on obligations (which he never did himself) shows, in these circumstances, an extraordinary dictatorial impertinence.

What is perhaps more extraordinary – given that Hubert was a pacifist and a regular subscriber to the War Registers International magazine – is his reply to my father, dated the following week, 8 December 1954:

Dear Nat

I quite agree with you and Biddy that it would be a great mistake for Joe to try and dodge the authorities about military service. I was over in London and spoke to him about it all last week, but I found him, as did the Cooke-Smiths, very determined to go his own way, and I’m not sure what impression my arguments made on him.

He has not and does not have any moral scruples against military service. It is merely that he considers it a waste of time and an unnecessary obstacle in the way of his project for a training in film technique.

Personally I don’t hold any very strong views about the disciplinary value for Joe of military service. I think he would probably quite enjoy it, being of a convivial turn of mind, but that he’s probably right in thinking that the ordinary training of sloping arms and bayoneting sandbags would be a waste of time and not particularly elevating to his character … So I am not thinking of it in terms of ‘DUTY’, stern daughter of the voice of God, but as a piece of legislation that Joe can’t infringe without disaster to himself and which he had better therefore turn to his own advantage if that is possible …

With this in mind I made enquiries about an interpreter’s course when I was over in London and found out that these did exist within the military framework and also that Joe was ready to be interested in them. One does a few weeks ordinary military or naval service and the rest of the time is spent as an ordinary student of some language that the War Office considers valuable … The most valued language now of course is Russian, and there is a course at Cambridge under a Professor Hill with whom I have good contacts. I am not sure how easy it is to be taken onto this course. I believe that Joe could, but that he would be much more likely to be taken on if he had already shown an interest and had some knowledge or experience. It’s impossible to get into Russia but the day before I left I took him round to the Yugoslav Embassy and found that they were quite willing to consider the idea of an exchange. We would take a Yugoslav boy here for two or three months and Joe would go out there for a corresponding period. The only financial costs would be his fare to and fro … With some experience of Slav languages and countries behind him he would be in a very strong position to be taken on for this interpreter’s course, which would be of permanent value to him, and would rank equally with other forms of military service.

As regards his Irish passport, I certainly think he ought not to be encouraged to take out this simply as a way of dodging his obligations in the country where he works. Yet of course he is Irish, both by parentage and upbringing, and if he feels himself Irish, and is ready to accept some of the obligations and some of the privileges of belonging here, I don’t see that he could be refused his passport …

I hope in the meantime you will give your support to this interpreter’s course idea, as frankly it seems to me the best way out. I think it appealed to Joe’s imagination and while he wouldn’t admit that he was ready to embark on it I felt I had broken down some of his resistance to the whole idea of the two years’ service.

I would wait to decide about his passport until you see what his reaction is. I suppose when he gets to twenty-one he will be able to decide his own nationality himself, will he not? – provided the Irish government is willing to admit him to citizenship. So I would be inclined not to make too much of an issue of this, do you not agree?

Good wishes to yourself and Biddy.

Yours,                     

Hubert.                   

Another long and thoughtful letter (what a time Hubert spent writing letters on my behalf!). The reason for Hubert’s stalling with my father on the Irish passport and citizenship business may be that, with his own linguistic gifts, and his study of Russian at the London School of Slavonic Studies before the war, he hopes that I may follow in his footsteps, and benefit as he did in doing this Russian course with Professor Hill at Cambridge. It doesn’t strike him that I had little gift for languages, least of all the difficult Russian language. This Cambridge Russian interpreter’s course, as emerged later, was in fact as much for the training of spies as for interpreters, a course which people like Michael Frayn took at the time. I don’t suppose that Hubert had any idea then that the course was an entry stage for work in the British Secret Service and that, had I taken it, I might have ended up being shot by the Ruskies against a wall at the back of the Kremlin.

Meanwhile, as well as canvassing Hubert, my father had been agitating about my doing National Service with the one person who had been willing to help get me into the film business, Tony Guthrie. Nat writes to him from Cheltenham:

Dear Mr Guthrie,

I understand through Peggy Butler that my son, Joe, is going to see you about getting a job in the film industry. He is apparently keen to get in on the technical side and possibly has a superficial knowledge of it. I do not wish to put obstacles in his way, nor will I. On the other hand it would be utterly disastrous for him if people to whom you may introduce him were, out of kindness, to say ‘Maybe – I’ll drop you a line sometime.’ He is older in sophistication than his age (sixteen and a half) but younger in learning and discipline. Though he may tell you otherwise he will have to do his National Service in this country if he is going to live here. (He is a British citizen, born in London, and the Irish authorities have refused him an Irish passport).

I think myself that the proper procedure for him is to join the army on a three-year contract, and to pick a trade relevant to the film industry. He would thus learn discipline and technical knowledge which he so far conspicuously lacks.

He would have to add a year to his age to join the army but there is no difficulty about that. If he did this he would be at least a year ahead of the other boys and would have fulfilled his obligation to the State.

Yours sincerely,             

Nat Hone.                     

 

PS: Of course you will not show, or communicate the contents of this letter to Joe. Though you may send it to Peggy if you think that worth while.

Which Tony duly did, almost immediately as is clear, since he hadn’t yet taken me to see his agent:

Dearie,

Thought you’d be interested to see this. I have replied saying, yes, I take his point about Joe doing his National Service, and as regards the film industry have said that the man I’m taking him to see is likely only to offer the most vague general ‘advice’. I’ll endeavour to make clear to Joe, if not clear already, the difference between this and any concrete offer of work …

Nat’s letter to Tony continues his sporadic, cheeky and lying interference in my life. There are three or four examples of this in the letter. First because he says he’s not going to put obstacles in the way of my getting into pictures, but then insists that I have to do National Service first, which would be the biggest obstacle to my getting into them. And then there were no National Service courses, apart perhaps in aerial photography, which would help me get into the film industry. He then says that I can lie my way into the army by saying I’m a year older! Well, lying about my age would surely have been tantamount to my lying to the Queen, which might possibly have resulted in my being put in the glasshouse for the duration. And certainly I wasn’t going to lie to her, or indeed join her army. Then he says that I’m a British citizen, which I wasn’t, and then that the Irish authorities have turned me down for a passport, which they couldn’t have done since Nat hadn’t as yet given me his consent to apply for one. Nat’s whole letter is thus one of devious special pleading to Tony, so to persuade him to get me into the army. What possessed Nat to write such a farrago of fibs? Was he making a very late start in being ‘responsible’ about me?

In any case Hubert persists with me and with Nat in his idea that I should do my National Service, but first go to Yugoslavia to get the lie of the Slav and Croat land and its language. So Hubert writes to Nat again on the theme late in 1954, in a letter as ambivalent as his previous one to my father:

Dear Nat,

I heard from Joe this morning. He has been round all the various offices enquiring, and I gather that his view is that he would stand a chance of being accepted for the Slav languages course if he had some previous experience but not otherwise.

But if he registered of his own accord as an Irish citizen he would of course be in a much stronger position. As he has not registered already, he would, as an English citizen, start with a black mark against him.

That is why Peggy and I have decided to ask you to support Joe’s application for Irish citizenship and I am making it clear to Joe that I am only asking you this on the strict understanding that he registers for military service (or ‘volunteers’ as the case may be).

I think if he got Irish citizenship as soon as possible he should then go to spend two months in Yugoslavia as I have been able to arrange for him, in Belgrade; then when he comes home he would be in a far better position to impress the authorities … I have two or three friends who possibly might be influential enough to help, once it appeared that he knew something about the whole business.

I forget if I told you. Zvonimir Petnicki to whom he would go is a school teacher whom I first met in 1934 … He speaks English perfectly and has latterly been employed as an interpreter for the various Yugoslav delegations abroad and has accompanied them quite often to London, New York and Paris. We would take his boy aged thirteen for a couple of months here to perfect his English as a pay back to them for having Joe. Joe would be staying with Petnicki’s wife in Belgrade who I gather looks after the family and is amicably separated from Zvonimir. I liked her very much when I saw her. I have a good many other friends in Belgrade and Zagreb, mainly bourgeois like myself! – but sufficiently varied for Joe to have a wonderful opportunity of learning something about the place. And of course he would have to work hard at learning about the place. I am going to suggest to him that he tries to write about it while he is there and I will make an effort to get his stuff put into shape and printed.

How is his fare to be paid for? That is a problem we’ll have to face. As it seems such an opportunity for Joe I am ready to take responsibility for collecting the money which will be at least fifty pounds even if it means sending the hat round among the relations. It will always be something for him to look back on and should be a real education as well as a way out of the present difficulty.

I think a friend of mine is still in the British Embassy in Belgrade. If I find he still is, I will ask him to give an eye to Joe now and again.

Yours ever,                

Hubert.                     

However there was only one problem in the whole scheme, which Hubert doesn’t mention. I was all on to go to Yugoslavia and stay with these interesting people, see the sights, learn a bit of the language, broaden my outlook and all that – but I still had absolutely no intention whatever of doing National Service or taking the Russian interpreter’s course. Perhaps, for the sake of the Yugoslav trip which I was looking forward to now, I didn’t mention this crucial factor to Hubert.

Nat meanwhile writes to me in mid-December 1955:

Dear Joe,

News that I have received from Hubert this morning inclines me to alter my decision about your passport. Subject to one or two conditions I am now prepared to give my support to your application.

The conditions are (1) that you register on the 18th at your local labour exchange (claiming exemption on the grounds of Irish citizenship) and (2) that when your passport is issued it will be held in my custody except at such times as it is required for the purposes of foreign travel. When I have evidence that you have complied with the first condition and that you are agreeable to the second I will give my formal consent to the issue of the passport.

Love from Mummy,

Yours, Daddy.                   

Another impertinent letter, and pompous in its legalistic, courtroom phraseology. Where did Nat get these phrases from? He may have remembered them from his time in 1930s Dublin, as a supporter of the Irish fascist Blueshirts, shooting the tops off the Brandy and Benedictine bottles in the Wicklow Hotel, when he was probably arrested and ‘held in custody’ for his bibulous target practice. And he must have unearthed them again so as to impress on me his stern and dutiful interest in my future. And it may have been that he actually thought I would comply with his conditions. In any case there was a delay in the whole passport matter, and Nat writes to Hubert, late in January 1956:

Dear Hubert,

I have been telling Joe ever since your pre-Christmas letter on the subject that I will endorse his application for an Irish passport if he sends me the forms properly completed. I did make and have made the stipulation that he should confirm that he is obtaining the passport for the particular purpose of carrying out your excellent idea. He knows this but we have not had a letter from him yet.

I am grateful to you for all the help you are offering him in this matter and I do hope if it can be arranged he will take proper advantage of your kindness.

His fare to Belgrade could be a difficulty. We are even more hand-to-mouth than usual. (My Mama might cough up his fare – twenty-five pounds return if he goes via Ostend and Salzburg) and I daresay he has some money of his own. An approach from you would, I’m afraid, be more likely to succeed than one from me.

Yrs,                      

Nat.                      

Hubert must have made the approach to me, and I must have agreed to Nat’s conditions (though I never later fulfilled them) for I got my Irish passport, and the money for the return rail ticket was somehow raised, and Hubert gave me fifty pounds cash for expenses for the two months’ visit, along with a small notebook in which he stipulated I must account for every penny of the fifty pounds when I got back. He also gave me half a dozen packets of Players cigarettes and bars of chocolate for me to give to his friends in Zagreb and Belgrade. And several rolls of lavatory paper. Such things were in short supply in Yugoslavia, he told me. And off I went, on my first real trip abroad, eighteen years old and fancy free – with Hubert’s cigs and choccies and the fifty pounds of his money.

I can appreciate now, as I didn’t then, Hubert’s generosity towards me. But I see his careful financial mind too, in giving me the little account book. Hubert was still the pennywise Victorian and I was still the spendthrift, unreliable boy, likely to run amok with his money. It didn’t strike him, I suppose, that I might perhaps fiddle my expenses, filling the account book with sensible costs, like Zagreb museum tickets and Serbo-Croatian grammars, when I had spent the money on movies and beer. On the other hand this may have struck him. But he was an honourable man and had the same hopes for others. And so I took the train, several trains, across Europe, and arrived in Zagreb in the summer of 1956.

I first stayed with Dr and Mrs Curcin, old friends of Hubert’s, in their large, bright, modern apartment on the hill overlooking the cathedral. Dr Curcin was a great friend and admirer of the famous Yugoslav sculptor, Ivan Mestrovic, then living in America, and the flat was crammed with his work, which Dr Curcin was keeping for him – a petrified forest of heroic statuary, mostly in the Great Mother Earth department.

And it was here, lying out on a steamer chair on the sunny balcony recovering from a bout of ’flu, that I first met Marija, a friend of the Curcins, who happened to visit one morning. Marija was an art student, with long blonde Rapunzel-like rings of braided hair, wound round and round her head, until it formed a honey gold crown on top, a retroussé nose, high cheekbones, flawlessly pale skin and a look both virginal and provocative, making haughty distances with her big blue eyes one moment, filling them with scandal and mischief the next.

When I was back on my feet she showed me round the city, particularly the old medieval and baroque town on the hill, where we took the little funicular railway up, buying paper cones of hot chestnuts next to the ticket kiosk at the top, before wandering off along the pastel-washed streets with their sugar-stick churches, candlelit shrines and sudden leafy vistas over the later Hapsburg city far beneath. And it wasn’t long before I was pretty well in love with Marija.

One day we learnt that President Tito was due to visit Zagreb, and we went downtown for the great event. Tito arrived in a huge American limousine, at the head of a long motorcade, resplendent in a white suit, streaming through the wildly cheering, waving crowds in Republic Square.

There was genuine delirium and tumult. It was my first taste of what was Yugoslavia’s most obvious quality then – a sense of tremendous optimism among the people, a sure belief in their ability to create a new and united country out of that previously so divided and battle-scarred land; to forge a middle way between Marx and capitalism. These were days of hope in Yugoslavia, when young people from all over Europe came out to spend working holidays helping on various construction projects such as the Zagreb-Belgrade motorway. For many at the time Yugoslavia was the promised land, offering a way out of the impasse of conflicting East-West ideologies, a country where communism had a human face. And what with Marija’s sensuous company and all the buoyant political enthusiasm of the time, I became a Titoist myself.

In those days, with Yugoslavia’s sharply controlled currency and economy, life in Zagreb was ridiculously cheap for a foreigner with sterling to convert into dinars. For the equivalent of ten pence each Marija and I had the best cinema seats, and twice that sum took us out dancing, at the University Club or a student café, with spicy kebabs, wine and accordion music.

We were joined by her friends and I became a part of the city, an almost invisible foreigner (for there were no tourists in the city then), picking up some of the language as the autumn came, leaves falling lemon yellow in the light – embarking on a love affair and a political conversion at the same time, the first very much part of the second.

But this was not quite so as far as Marija was concerned. Neither she nor her parents were Titoists. Quite the opposite. Like the majority in the north they were Catholic and Croatian – and strongly nationalist in the latter cause, for the family had come from the old Hapsburg Catholic bourgeoisie, when Croatia had been a province of the empire and Zagreb had always looked north to Vienna for its religious, intellectual and material sustenance. And even farther north to England. Marija’s parents, for instance, when I sometimes went with her in the afternoons to their dark, heavily furnished flat overlooking Strossmayer Square, always served up an English tea with Earl Grey’s best.

Thus it was Marx and Cupid rampant, so that at first I wasn’t conscious of it at all; I began to deviate from Marija, praising this great new socialist society while she mocked it gently and, when I persisted in my praise, condemned it roundly. ‘Everything in Yugoslavia is run by the Serbs,’ she told me rather bitterly, out walking one day over the crunchy leaves in the Tuscanatz woods. ‘And they have no ambition but to dominate us up here, feed themselves on our wealth and hard work.’

I was unaware then that Marija, like many Croatians, regarded most Serbs, with their Turkish colouring and Orthodox faith, as rough and dangerous peasants – vile bedfellows, forced upon them most recently by Tito and his godless social order. I argued her points like a commissar.

‘But Marija – surely you and the Serbs and all the other smaller republics here are in this together: for the sake of national unity, the greater good, sink or swim.’ This was my sort of response; hers was of bitter laughter.

‘If the Serbs really believed that themselves we wouldn’t mind so much. But they don’t. They simply want to use this enforced national unity as another opportunity to crush us.’

It finally dawned on me that Marija’s antagonism towards communism and the wicked Serbs was rather stronger than her affection for me. The affair waned on her side, and I reacted by trying to save it with more specious Marxist argument – by pointing out to her, among other things, that appropriate emotion between people could only bloom in an appropriate society. For me that autumn love affair depended on the personal and political going hand in hand, and so I persisted in propagating this dubious equation.

Ah, that I might have kept my commissar’s mouth shut! It all came to a head one day between us when, passing through the lovely candlelit shrine to the Virgin in the old city gate, I mocked the superstitious, outmoded values perpetuated there, in a world where there was now so obviously a new and caring God, the Socialist God. Such shrines would inevitably disappear, I said, just as nationalist antagonisms would in the coming Balkan millennium. After this spiel Marija was not available for any further political or emotional education.

Shortly afterwards I left for Belgrade, in the wicked south lands of the Serbs. I had already read some of the classic fictional texts on the city and the Balkans – John Buchan, Graham Greene, Eric Ambler, Agatha Christie and others: they evoked a land of rough adventure and revolution, of plum-pudding bombs, the Orient Express and Stamboul Train, a land of seedy spies and revolutionaries lurking in third-class carriages, nursing all sorts of mayhem. And wasn’t it somewhere down there that the Lady Vanished and Hercule Poirot, waxing his moustaches, pondered the grisly wagon-lits murder? I was looking forward to all this mystery and derring-do. Belgrade at the time, as I saw on my way from the station, still had a lot of shabby Serbo-Turkish wooden houses and old stucco mansions near the centre, just the sort of houses for revolutionary assignations and bomb plots.

There were half a dozen of these houses on the street where my hostess Mrs Petnicki lived, and as the taxi drove along I hoped she might live in one of them. She didn’t. She was a thoroughly modern communist woman and lived in a new apartment block at the other end of the street, just round the corner from the parliament building – Mrs Petnicki, wife of Zvonimir, Hubert’s Yugoslav diplomat friend, from whom she was separated, living with her teenage son Petar who was to come to Maidenhall later.

Mrs Petnicki, ensconced as she was in her large new flat in a city with great housing shortages, was clearly a favoured member of the Party, and after my conversion to the Titoist cause in Zagreb I should have got on well with her. I didn’t. She was a real virago – a small intense short-fused woman, who had been a brave partisan fighter with Tito in the war. I soon realized what the Wehrmacht had had to put up with when, swapping guns for words, she came to deal with me in a series of vehemently executed verbal attacks, ambushes, feigned retreats and vicious counter attacks. A guerrilla war broke out between us, with her son Petar acting as a spy for her.

The casus belli lay in the fact that, through other Belgrade friends of Hubert’s, I met a number of dissident students – painters, poets and musicians who were not just against Tito but against everyone and everything. They were Serbian anarchists in the great Balkan tradition, these half-dozen Byronic souls and some equally headstrong, dark-haired, arrogantly beautiful girls. Despite my earlier political conversion in Zagreb I soon took to them, attracted by their vagrant spirit, talent, wit and idealism.

It was this that came to infuriate Mrs Petnicki, dedicated hard-line communist that she was. She attacked me, condemning me and my new friends as anti-social, anti-state and enemies of the people. She stormed at me that I was abusing her hospitality, consorting with criminals.

At first, since I’d told her nothing of these new friends, I wondered how she’d found out about them. Things became clear the next day when I spotted Petar, the wily son, following me secretly as I crossed town for one of my ‘antisocial’ meetings. Pretending ignorance of Petar’s tailing me, I stopped at a shop window, watching his reflection in the glass as he paused across the street from me. Then I doubled back, mixing among the crowds in the main Terazije Square, before going in the front door of the old art deco Moskva Hotel and slipping out of the back entrance, losing Petar entirely. That was my first exercise in the art of espionage, mimicking the role of hunted spy. I wasn’t unaware that afternoon that, by slipping my tail, I’d lurched into Greene-and-Ambler land, taken a first step into the shadowy world of spies and counter-spies.

A Serbian friend of Hubert’s – a Mr Radovic as I’ll call him here – the representative of a big western multinational company, had an office in this same Moskva Hotel. Shortly after the incident with Petar I used my introduction to him.

A number of western businesses had offices in the Moskva Hotel – a sort of safe house at the time when Tito’s relations with the Soviet Union were going through a very rocky stage and a Soviet takeover was possible. Mr Radovic’s suite, reflecting the clout of his company, was spacious, typical of the extravagant but now tawdry décor of the hotel: a flashy suite with Tiffany-style lamps and Balkan-Gothic stained glass windows, rather like an upmarket Turkish brothel.

Mr Radovic, middle-aged, withdrawn, professorial, seemed at odds with these louche chorus-girl surroundings. He took me down to the diningroom, offering me a tasteless lunch of meatballs and watery gravy, eating meagrely himself, diffidently and soberly peering at nothing in particular through heavy-lensed spectacles.

But he was friendly in a punctilious manner, spoke perfect English, and seemed wise and understanding of westerns ways. So I told him of my difficulties with Mrs Petnicki. He commiserated with me tactfully, but offered no other comments or advice. We finished with an inedible Serbian pudding – a prune or two in an ersatz chocolate sauce. And that, I thought, was the last of Gospodin Radovic. I resumed my by now very surreptitious meetings with the students.

These devil-may-cares, given the acute housing shortage in Belgrade and their generally anti-social attitudes, had created an extraordinary camp for themselves out of tin huts and sack tents on a marshy spit of land hidden by reeds and willows, by the banks of the Sava river across from the ramparts of the old town. Here they pursued their ‘anti-social’ activities.

In the daytime, the revolutionary paysagistes painted rather conventional views of the willows and the pearl-grey, misty water beyond. At night, in the warm autumn, things were much livelier, the encampment lit by dozens of candles by which some of the new arrivals still painted in the half dark. Indeed one of the students, an emaciated, tow-haired, most morbidly refined Serb, sunken- and wild-eyed, would only paint at night and on only one theme: corpses in open coffins surrounded by keening, witchlike women; macabre studies of orthodox funerals. The others simply chatted, played the mandolin, smoked, drank a little and canoodled in the velvet shadows. It all seemed very daring to me at the time.

Petar still followed me, but I’d become adept at giving him the slip and had told Mrs Petnicki that I was occupying myself daily at the British Council library over Serbo-Croatian grammars, which was partly true. It was here one afternoon that I spied Mr Radovic, fiddling among the books on the far side of the room. I went over, greeting him, and he jumped.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I was just looking to see if the new Herman Wouk had arrived, The Caine Mutiny. They say it’s very good.’ The shelf he’d been fingering through contained nothing but non-fiction. He then suggested we walk back together to the Moskva Hotel.

‘How are all those wicked student friends of yours?’ he enquired lightly as we strolled across the Terazije. ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Of course they are all artists,’ he remarked. ‘Or do they talk politics as well?’ ‘No, not really. Just bohemians.’ He seemed disappointed. We were approaching the entrance to the Moskva Hotel when, seeing something or someone at the doorway, Mr Radovic suddenly stopped, taking my hand. ‘Do come and have lunch again,’ he murmured, before, quite absent-mindedly as it seemed, he noticed the book he’d been carrying in his other hand. ‘My goodness,’ he said, ‘how careless. I took this book away from the Council library without having it checked out.’ He passed it to me quickly. ‘I have to go, an important appointment. I wonder if you’d be so kind as to take the book back to the library for me? And return it in my name to Mrs Moore. Make sure you say it’s from me, won’t you?’ Then he was off, and I had the book in my hand – a copy of Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own. It didn’t seem his sort of book. I couldn’t return it that day, the library being closed. So I took the book down to the charmed encampment among the reeds and willows on the Sava. And there, horror of horrors, I lost it, somewhere in the candlelit dark that evening.

I went back next morning to the Moskva to tell Mr Radovic what had happened with the book, and asked for him at reception. The clerk denied all knowledge of any Mr Radovic living at the hotel, as did the manager when I pressed him. ‘No, you are mistaken. There is no such person here, or such a business company either. Try the Balkan Hotel opposite.’

My friend Mr Radovic had become a non-person overnight. I was puzzled. Something was up and it didn’t sound good. That evening, when I got back to Mrs Petnicki’s flat, still without the book, I knew the worst. I found her with a stolid, grim-faced man. Mrs Petnicki translated his questions to me. ‘You have been meeting with a Mr Radovic at the Moskva Hotel?’ ‘Yes,’ I said casually. ‘You were seen receiving a book from him yesterday,’ she went on. ‘What have you done with it? This gentleman requires it.’ ‘I’m afraid I lost it, careless of me, left it down somewhere.’

She translated this back to the sour-faced man, who posed another loaded question. ‘He asks if you lost it down by the river Sava last night, among your friends. You and your other counter-revolutionary friends,’ she added ominously.

The fat was in the fire. They shot counter-revolutionaries in communist countries, didn’t they? The secret police, and the grim-faced man was surely one of them, were looking for Mr Radovic’s Virginia Woolf book, which must have been a code book, the pages marked in some special way, intended for the British Secret Service when it was deposited back with Mrs Moore at the Council library. And I had lost the book, down by the Sava, but clearly neither Mrs Petnicki nor the secret policeman believed this. The code book had been given to me by Mr Radovic, so I was clearly in league with him. We were both counter-revolutionary spies. The man, with Mrs Petnicki, searched my room and didn’t find the book. The two of them then talked together. It seemed I was about to be taken off for more severe interrogation. But Mrs Petnicki, who, as a partisan heroine, must have had more clout than the secret policeman, prevailed on him to let me go. After the man had left, she said to me, surprisingly, ‘You think you are Jesus Christ! You must leave, tomorrow. At once. You must get out of Yugoslavia at once.’ I was very ready to comply.

There was only one problem. To get out of Yugoslavia in those days you needed an exit visa stamped by the police, and in the circumstances they were unlikely to comply. I was trapped. There was only one thing for it. At the time the British represented Irish interests in Yugoslavia, so next morning I packed my suitcase and went straight round to the British Embassy, and explained things to the duty officer, who passed me on to a middle-aged, sandy-haired man, and I told him all that had happened with Mr Radovic, Mrs Petnicki, the secret policeman and the students by the river.

‘What was the name of the book that Mr Radovic gave you?’ the sandy-haired man asked. ‘Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own,’ I said. He nodded. The whole business now seemed to make sense to him. He went into the next office and there was a short murmured talk with someone else. When he returned, he wrote me out a diplomatic laissez passer and stamped it with the Royal Arms. I made a diplomatic exit on the Orient Express that same day.

This was my first brush with the secret service world of letter drops, code books, and assignations in Balkan hotels and British Council libraries. Spotting trouble at the door of the Moskva Hotel, Mr Radovic had unloaded the dangerous book on me and done a runner just in time. I suppose now I ought to have done the Russian interpreter’s course at Cambridge and joined the service myself, without the meatballs and ersatz chocolate pud – dry martinis, shaken not stirred, instead.

But I appear to have done nothing on my return to Maidenhall and the Butlers. Indeed it seems I did nothing – at least physically – so successfully that Hubert became alarmed, or annoyed, or both, and wrote to my grandmother believing me to be suffering from some physical illness. Then he wrote to his own doctor in Dublin, early in January 1956:

Dear O’Brien,

I think Vera Hone will have telephoned you by now about young Joe. I do hope you will be able to see him. I really don’t think there is anything wrong with him physically, but his inability to exert himself is so extraordinary that I don’t think one can just dispose of it by saying he is lazy. But I won’t write you an essay on him here; I enclose two letters I have received about him from his hosts in Yugoslavia, which are more valuable than anything I can say, as I think it fills in the picture. It oughtn’t by the way to be at all an ugly picture. Joe has plenty of admirable qualities and we are fond of him here.

I dare say you will conclude that the case is ‘psychological’, but my wife and I are very unwilling that he should consult a psychologist; it would merely increase that preoccupation with himself which is already considerable. In any case a psychologist would probably only point to various causes for the instability in his background of which we are perfectly aware already, and are dealing with as best we can.

If you find there is nothing physically wrong with him you can help him best by assuring him of this very strongly. Several times I have hesitated to urge him to exert himself, sawing logs or something of the kind, because the prospect of having to do this has really almost made him look physically ill! And he argues so convincingly that it would be bad for him that he persuades us sometimes against our better judgement. There are plenty of ways in which he could entertain himself or make himself useful out of doors, but he has shrunk from them all on his last visit. This was very disappointing to us because we had made a big effort to bring off this Yugoslav trip for him; we have to take two children of his hosts here in exchange and we thought he would make it his duty to see that the experiment justified itself and that he shared some of our bother this end. I incline to think that in the long run he will have profited by it but in the meantime one is more conscious of all the bother and expense it was.

I don’t want to persecute him. A friend of mine who is Foreign Editor of The Manchester Guardian has asked Joe to try some articles for him on Yugoslavia. And Joe is trying and is plainly quite a good writer who has to take time to think things out, but he is using his preoccupation with his writing as an excuse for avoiding every other obligation. But I promised not to write another essay and here is one!

If you thought this a good idea and could prescribe to him some daily physical regimen, as strenuous as you thought he could manage, we would do our best to see that he carried it out.

Yours sincerely,                       

Hubert Butler.                         

I don’t think I saw Dr O’Brien. Certainly I can’t remember his prescribing me any strenuous ‘physical regimen’. Perhaps I became more willing over the log sawing in Maidenhall? Certainly I was making notes for articles on Yugoslavia when I got back – as Hubert was very much encouraging me to write, and I was no doubt preoccupied with this, at the expense of pulling my weight in the household. It’s true that I was selfish then in my preoccupations with other aims, mainly at that point trying to get into the picture business. In fact I think my problem with the log sawing was psychological. I didn’t like it, and thought I was being press-ganged into ways that had no future for me. As Argyle at St Columba’s had earlier pointed out to Hubert, since my Hone family had failed me, and because of the awfulness of Sandford Park and my failure to take much benefit from St Columba’s, I was determined to rely on my own resources, to make a life for myself in my own way – which didn’t include sawing damp logs. A selfish way no doubt, but I could see no other.