OLIVIA MANNING

The Great Fortune

1960

OLIVIA MANNING lived in a hard-core circle of writers and actors, editors, critics and reviewers and BBC producers, up-to-the-minute in artistic matters, assiduously keeping their names before the public and fretting about royalties and contracts. She rather encouraged all such folk to drop in for a drink in the evening, and it was as well to be sure whom you were talking to. Her husband, Reggie Smith, all over the place physically as well as intellectually, was often away. Guy and Harriet Pringle, the protagonists in Olivia’s sequence of six novels set in the war, are plainly and even comically drawn from married life as Olivia lived it. On one level, she was pleased that Reggie’s career with the British Council had brought her to the edge of events that were to settle the destiny of nations, and on another level she had a grudge that the world had treated her unfairly. Guy’s part is more reportage than fiction, and Harriet’s part is more autobiography than fiction.

First in the sequence of six, The Great Fortune is set in Romania where Reggie was posted and amid much circumstantial detail of Bucharest is Dragomir’s food store, “where a gentleman might sample cheese unchallenged and steal a biscuit or two.” Lionel Bloch, my lawyer and a forceful character, had been born and brought up in Bucharest, and Olivia took it amiss when he teased her with not understanding how the unaffordable luxury of Dragomir’s had impressed a child like him. At one dinner in our house, Clarissa accidently spilled some water in Olivia’s lap, and she got up at once and left without a word.

In October 1940 the Germans occupied Romania. Reggie and Olivia fled to Athens, “just one step ahead of the Nazis,” as Neville and Jane Braybrooke put it in their biography of Olivia. Clarissa, then a two-year-old, was in Athens because her father Harold Caccia was at the British Legation. In April 1941 it was the turn of Greece to be occupied by the Germans. The official boat taking off from the Piraeus was too small to accommodate more than some of the Legation staff, a party of commandos under Peter Fleming and the Caccia family including Clarissa. According to the Braybrookes, Reggie and Olivia left on the Erebus “which had been commandeered for the British” including the rest of the Legation staff. Lord Granard is said to have rescued all the remaining British on his yacht, but the Braybrookes don’t say if Erebus was that yacht. At any rate, Olivia felt that through their British Council connection she and Reggie should have had a place on the Legation boat. The implication was that Harold – and Clarissa by association – had been prepared on behalf of officialdom to leave her and Reggie to the Germans. As it turned out, the Legation boat was dive-bombed and sank with some loss of life, and survivors remained on an uninhabited island in the Aegean until another boat rescued them. Olivia reached safety faster and in less danger than Clarissa.

When she was awarded the CBE, I played on her sense that she had not been properly recognized by writing her a letter to say that the initials stood for a cultural policy of Cash Benefits Excluded. Her lengthy and spirited answer showed that I had touched a soft spot. On the flyleaf of The Great Fortune and several of its successors she wrote in a big generous hand, “To David and Clarissa, with love from Olivia.”