For the Wodehouses, as for many Parisians, life in an occupied city was, more often than not, reduced to a daily struggle for survival. Food was still in very short supply, and accommodation hard to find. The Germans kept tight control over both print and broadcast media, as determined collaborationists and equally determined resistance fighters struggled to gain ground.
Wodehouse spent much of his time looking for ways to redeem his reputation in England. Alongside his novels, he was working on a book of reminiscences about camp life, entitled Wodehouse in Wonderland. His urge to publish the book demonstrated both his inability to waste what he saw as good material and his determination to explain his actions. Indeed, the tone of these letters is, for the most part, defiant. In the opening stages, Wodehouse is oblivious to what he was to call the ‘global howl’ surrounding his actions.1 As the gravity of the situation emerges, he remains indignant, but also shows himself to be anxious about his portrayal in America, England – and, on a smaller scale, at his beloved Dulwich. Indeed, there is a growing sense in these letters of vulnerability – a fear of being both out of touch and out of date. Wodehouse repeatedly wonders whether there will be a place for his sort of writing in a post-war world. ‘It seems a waste of time’, he frets, ‘to write about butlers and country houses if both are obsolete. […] I can’t see what future there is for Blandings Castle.’2
Once Paris was liberated from the Germans, Wodehouse encountered more pressing fears. As Herbert Lottman writes, ‘when the Free French led by Charles de Gaulle returned to the mainland […] a symbol of the enemy remained on French soil in the hard core of collaborationists. To identify and punish them was the order of the day.’3 In the months after August 1944, the French épuration, or purges, ensued – the punishment of people known, or suspected, to have assisted the enemy. Traumatic, brutal and often horrifying, the purges ranged from courtroom prosecutions to street executions, summarised by daily lists in Le Figaro under the headline ‘ARRESTS AND PURGING’. Once again, Ethel and Wodehouse found themselves in danger, as the Comité Parisien de Libération considered whether Wodehouse could, given the broadcasts in Germany, be seen as dangerous to the cause of French liberty.
The Wodehouses remained isolated for the majority of these war years and communications continued to be unreliable. Information that reached them, both on a national and on a personal level, came slowly – and was subject to censorship. When he was interned in Tost, it was some months before Wodehouse learnt that his mother, Eleanor, had died in a nursing home. The news that their beloved daughter, Leonora, had died in May 1944 was even more delayed. Leonora was, in an unusual way, a casualty of war. Admitted to hospital for a routine operation, she suffered a post-operative haemorrhage, but a bombing raid in the night meant that her call for assistance was not heard, and she was left to die. ‘Nothing seemed to matter after such dreadful news’, wrote Ethel. ‘Nothing can hurt us as much as that has done.’4
As their time in Paris drew to a close, and plans were made to move to America, it is not surprising to find a sense of darkness pervading the letters. ‘What a hell the last few years has been’, Ethel reflected, near the end of the war. ‘Do you remember […] those happy days at Le Touquet, when our darling Leonora was with us, how happy we all were, and didn’t realize what we had in the near future to face.’5 Wodehouse, characteristically, is more reticent. The years of war, the loss of Leonora and the furore surrounding the broadcasts cast a sort of ‘black out’ over their lives.6
After the liberation of Paris, Major Cussen, a British barrister and MI5 interrogator, was sent to interview Wodehouse, and to produce a report on the events surrounding his broadcasts. The report found that Wodehouse, while foolish, had done nothing that was either criminal or that could be seen as aiming to help the Nazi cause. A brief statement was made, to this effect, in the House of Commons in 1944. The statement was important, but without reading Cussen’s report it meant little to the national press. Cussen followed his report with further investigations after the war, all of which were to corroborate his initial conclusions: that Wodehouse was exonerated of any crime. Two years later, Wodehouse was under scrutiny again, when the Director of Public Prosecutions considered whether the mere act of speaking on German radio, regardless of intent, was a criminal offence. Documents show that by 1947 Wodehouse’s MI5 security file was considered closed, and Wodehouse cleared.7 However, it was not until 1965 that Wodehouse was told that if he were to come to England there would be no question of any proceedings being taken against him.8
Wodehouse meanwhile was conscious that he was at the mercy of the media, and that he had been repeatedly manipulated by journalists. He particularly disliked Harry Flannery, the journalist who had interviewed him in 1941, and who had discussed the broadcasts in his book, Assignment to Berlin. Flannery’s account had, Wodehouse wrote, ‘not a word of truth in it’, but was read by MI5 investigators, and, at one point, used as evidence in Wodehouse’s security file.9 ‘The hostility to Wodehouse’, as McCrum argues, ‘was derived partly from ideological conviction’:
As George Orwell pointed out, Wodehouse became associated in the public mind with the wealthy, idle, aristocratic nincompoops he often wrote about, and made an ‘ideal whipping boy’ for the left.10
Wodehouse’s own handling of his public profile continued to do him no real favours in this respect. His first extended interview with Illustrated, in 1946, shows him smiling broadly, pipe in hand, alongside the caption ‘I’ve Been a Silly Ass’ [see plate 33]. But the interview itself casts a more serious note. Wodehouse speaks of his ‘ghastly blunder’.11 Elsewhere, he was to write of the ‘mental pain’ that he felt in the face of the events of the previous six years, and of the mistakes he had made.12
Tragically for Wodehouse, Cussen’s report and his further investigations were, despite persistent requests for disclosure, not released until 1980 – five years after Wodehouse’s death. Until then, the press and the general public were unaware that his name had been formally cleared. The broadcasts were to cast a shadow over his remaining years.
1 PGW to William Townend, 13 September 1945 (Dulwich).
2 PGW to Frances Donaldson, 2 June 1945 (Wodehouse Archive).
3 Herbert R. Lottman, The People’s Anger: Justice and Liberation in Post-War France (London: Hutchinson, 1986), pp. 13–14.
4 Ethel Wodehouse to Denis Mackail, note appended to PGW to Denis Mackail, 4 January 1945 (Wodehouse Archive).
5 Ethel Wodehouse to Thelma Cazalet-Keir, 5 April 1945 (Wodehouse Archive).
6 See Ethel Wodehouse to Bea Davis, 20 August 1945 (Wodehouse Archive).
7 See G. E. Wakefield to G. C. Allchin, 25 July 1947, FO 369/3509 (PRO).
8 This was an informal communication. While an official memo notes that ‘no Attorney General can say authoritatively whether any individual will or will not be prosecuted at any given moment of time in the future’, another note states that should Wodehouse return ‘he would be admitted without any difficulty’. See F Elwyn Jones to The Right Hon. Sir JohnHobson, 23 March 1965 and F. Elwyn Jones, Memo, 23 March 1965, LO 2/1166 (PRO).
9 PGW to William Townend, 30 December 1944 (Dulwich); see memo of 31 August 1944, KV/2/3550 (PRO).
10 McCrum, p. 319.
11 The Illustrated, 7 December 1944, p. 9.
12 Cussen Report, p. 12.