V
1914–1918
Brothers at War
WAR WAS DECLARED ON 4 AUGUST 1914, at eleven p.m. On the following evening, Eddie saw people dancing in their enthusiasm on the tables of the Café Royal. He came home by the Tube train, hung up his bowler hat, and whistled for the terrier, Caesar. He was thirty-four, an age when it is awkward to interrupt a promising career, and he had hoped to take Christina and his year-old baby son for a holiday to Whitby.
Neither of them doubted that the cause was a just one, or that the Germans must be made to restore Belgium. It was something, in any case, that we had undertaken, as a nation, to do. “I knew, and he knew, that he would have to go,” Christina wrote in her diary. “Going”, at that moment, meant joining the first quarter-million auxiliaries who were enlisted in 1914 to reinforce Kitchener’s Army and the Territorials. It was assumed that since the war would be fought at sea by Britain, and on land by the French, the quarter-million would be quite enough to fulfil our obligations.
The war might not last long. Belloc, who had emerged, as editor of Land and Water, as the continental expert, declared in October that the Germans had already thrown in their last reserves. Not very much appeared to be ready for the reserves at home. Eddie drilled all weekend; there were no uniforms; he learned to slope arms with his umbrella. “It seems that we are to have 400 rifles shortly,” he wrote to his father in November, “of a somewhat antiquated pattern, and also, they say, a machine-gun, so that we shall be extremely deadly—probably about the time the next European war takes place. It is now possible to sleep in camp permanently if one wishes it. I—strange to say—don’t.” Kitchener at this time was hesitating between two or four machine-guns for each regiment.
By Christmas Eddie was a temporary second lieutenant in the Lincolns, and wrote to his Fleet Street editors to say that after the emergency he hoped to be working for them again. Owen Seaman wrote:
I am very glad for your sake (not for my own, except as a matter of Punch-family pride) that you have got a commission. I hope the Muse may recover under canvas. Let me know your address and books shall be sent to you … If you don’t get sent to the Front we may meet somewhere in an anti-raiders ditch! … Good luck.
Seaman also gave Eddie to understand that he himself was a marked man; the German Intelligence had special orders to keep him under observation, because of some dispute in a hotel in Baden-Baden.
The proprietors had feared that Punch must close down, but were glad to be proved wrong; humour proved to be a necessity, even though an agonizing division soon appeared between the jokes at the front and the jokes at home. After the first battle of Ypres in November 1914 the British armies, at the cost of 32,000 casualties, held on to the Channel ports, and both sides dug into positions which were never altered by more than about thirty miles during the next few years. After this the main task of an infantry regiment was to be shot at or shelled.
Eddie had joined the Lincolns, instead of the Artists’ Rifles, because it made him feel closer to Christina. Her elder brother, Edwin, had returned from Rangoon to join the regiment; her younger brother, Ned, had already done so. The 4th Battalion had its headquarters in the Drill Hall in Lincoln, and Christina, with baby Rawle and a stout nursemaid of fifteen, was to spend the time of separation in what Eddie hoped would be the tranquillity of her father’s home.
However, as soon as war was declared, Bishop Hicks (whose comment had been “England does not want this war and I hate it”) turned over the episcopal palace to anyone who needed shelter. The first-comers were the Belgian refugees, who began to arrive in October.
They fled from Antwerp to Ostend [the Bishop wrote to Christina], then in Ostend they had to hurry away in a steamer for fear of the Germans, leaving all their goods behind them in les malles in the station. So beyond a little bag, they had nothing but what they stood up in. This was a real sorrow to them, for it made them, they thought, look contemptible: dear souls! They like, at present, to live in ‘Tina’s room’ and the rooms adjoining, upstairs. There they have their meals, after the continental manner.
All over England the refugee problem followed a familiar pattern, early generous welcome giving way to friction. Ronnie, waiting at the station in his long soutane, was asked doubtfully by a lady, “Êtes vous Belgique?” and did not like to answer “Non, je suis Angleterre.” At Lincoln every cooking pot and pan was soon ruined; but to the Bishop his guests were always “dear souls”.
Ned, removed, at least for the time being, from the dangerous influence of Ronnie Knox, was sent to Gallipoli. Eddie was lucky enough to miss this. The 2/4th Lincolns began their duties in Ireland, in County Kerry, which was supposed to be dangerously Republican; but they found themselves peacekeeping in a peaceable area. Eddie unfortunately had time enough to draw caricatures, an art he gave up altogether in later life, and one of his drawings caused him to fall foul of the Adjutant. He was also very nearly killed in the regimental horse races. Being light and agile, he was put up on the favourite, but had to wear two cartridge belts to bring his weight up to the handicap; the belts came loose and almost battered him to death. Afterwards he was asked why he had not pulled up, but this had simply not occurred to him.
For Eddie, horses were one of the redeeming features of the opening months of the war. He loved to watch them, particularly if they were cantering freely in the open, moving, as they always do, in a half-circle. He had an idea that it is because we always require them to move in a straight line that we have never quite tamed them.
By 1916 the battalion began to be impatient to be “out there”. It was the year of Verdun, where the French casualties were so heavy that for the time being the fighting on the Western Front had to be largely left to the British Army. Haig had tried a mass breakthrough on the Somme, with losses of about 65,000 men, and it was said that the Higher Command were disappointed with the new drafts from the Midlands and East Anglia, because they were too stupid to do anything more than advance straight forward towards the enemy in daylight, and be killed. Disenchantment had set in, conscription was introduced for the first time, and still the Lincolns wanted to join their other battalions in Flanders.
In December, Christina gave birth to her second child in somewhat cramped conditions in the Bishop’s Palace. Eddie did not get compassionate leave, perhaps because of his difference of opinion with the Adjutant. The 2/4th had been brought back to England to bring up their equipment to scale, preparatory to embarkation for France.
Winnie had never seen Wilfred so distressed as on the day when his beloved Territorials were recruited into a general service battalion. There was not much chance, after his ordination, of his joining them as a chaplain. The Chaplains’ Department of the War Office was firmly opposed to Anglo-Catholicism; they felt, for example, that it was not the business of a priest of the Church of England to administer the last sacraments to the dying on the battlefield. In that case, Wilfred asked, could he be a stretcher bearer, or train as a medical orderly? The Bishop of London told Wilfred—who was still only a deacon—that he could not.
Ronnie was inclined to agree with this decision. He had returned, in the Michaelmas term of 1914, to an almost empty University. “Oxford is quite indescribable,” he wrote to his father. “A cloud of depression hangs over it which it would take several Zeppelin bombs to pierce.” None of his friends had been able to come to the house party at More Hall; his advice to them to stay and take their degrees, instead of rushing into uniform, fell on deaf ears. They would not listen to reason, or even to affection disguised as reason. His influence seemed suddenly to count for nothing.
In truth, his friends were in another world of experience. Julian Grenfell, a natural soldier, had already joined the army. Harold Macmillan and Charles Lister, among so many others, were training for commissions. Guy Lawrence was at Belton Camp with the 7th Battalion of the South Staffordshire Regiment. “Yes, I think Gi is happy,” Ronnie wrote to Dick Rawstorne. “With fifty people to run errands for him he’s happy, and they’re happy, so what’s the odds? But oh, my dear, the thought of his going to the front.”
Finding the deserted colleges intolerable, he went to teach classics, without pay, at Shrewsbury. Here he thankfully re-entered for a time the world of childhood, devising ingenious games for the boys, or challenging them to translate “motor-car” (= “a smoking vehicle”) and “Zeppelin” into Latin. In the casualty lists he began to read the names of his friends, the first ones to be killed in action. Others were standing by to go out, and “the nearer it gets to the time,” Ronnie wrote, “the gloomier life is. I can’t think, you know, how women stand it at all.” Then, in the spring of 1915, the foundations of his belief in the Church, which had been so secure, without loose stones, began to tremble.
Both Guy and Harold Macmillan expected to be sent overseas before long. They turned to him for spiritual direction. Having reached a point of extreme Anglo-Catholicism, could they be content with it? If they had to die, they wanted to die in absolute certainty. Should they “pope” now? The fashionable word revealed the depths of embarrassment and trouble. And Ronnie, as a priest, found that he did not know what to say. If they came back alive in a year’s time, he was not sure that he would still be an Anglican himself. What kind of an answer was that?
His first unmistakable intimation, Ronnie tells us in A Spiritual Aeneid, was in May 1915, when Wilfred, now an ordained priest, said his first mass at St Mary’s, Graham Street. Ronnie travelled up from Shrewsbury to be there:
We had been brought up together, known one another at Oxford as brothers seldom do. It should have been an occasion of the most complete happiness to see him now … in the same church, at the same altar, where I had stood three years before in his presence. And then, suddenly, I saw the other side of the picture.
If this doubt, the shadow of a scruple which had grown in my mind, were justifiable—only suppose it were justifiable, then neither he nor I was a priest … the accessories to the service—the bright vestments, the fresh flowers, the mysterious candlelight—were all settings to a sham jewel; we had been trapped, deceived, betrayed, into thinking it was all worth while.
Ronnie said nothing as yet to anyone about his doubts. Wilfred wrote to his father to tell him that there were fifty-five communicants in the church and the collection taken up was one pound and one shilling, but both of them knew, neither of them needed to say, what it meant to Bishop Knox to have a second son ordained, even though once again he did not feel able to attend an Anglo-Catholic mass. Wilfred began life as an assistant curate, with his vicar, J. C. Howell, as his confessor and friend. He got permission to go on living at the Trinity Mission—in what Ronnie called “almost habitable lodgings” in Caroline Street; St Mary’s was in a smartish district where Wilfred felt somewhat out of place, except in the rows of slum cottages which were then still standing behind Ebury Street. “He is still remembered in the parish,” writes the present vicar, John Gilling. “People in the cottages used to darn his socks for him while he waited barefoot.”
Ronnie was in a state of shock. The chapter of A Spiritual Aeneid which described this period is called “Seeing a Ghost”. Two days after Wilfred’s first mass, Guy Lawrence wrote that he had been received into the Catholic Church by the Jesuits at Farm Street. “My mind was made up for me,” he wrote. “God made it clear to me, and I went straight to Farm Street … I know I am happy and I only long for you to be happy with me. Come and be happy. Harold will, I think, follow very soon … You’ve been and are my best friend, Ron; there is no shadow between you and me.”
In the event, Macmillan put off his decision until after the war, “if I’m still alive.” If so, he meant to get away from home, from Ronnie, from every outside influence, and relearn his belief for himself. Neither he nor Guy loved Ronnie any the less, but they did not need him as they once had done.
At present [Ronnie wrote to Rawstorne], I’m like a top that’s got outside its grooves and is spinning about all over the place, and you can’t tell whether it’ll get side-tracked into the groove again or go clean off the board. But I’m afraid I shall never be broad-minded, Dick—unless I pope, perhaps: I think I might turn into rather a broad-minded Roman Catholic … But oh, Dick, I do hate it all, and I do hope you’ll hate it less than I do. Do for heaven’s sake not get a fever, there’s dangers enough without that. God bless you, my dear, you’ve been very good to me.
Dick Rawstorne was due to sail for Gallipoli. The Dardanelles landings began in February 1915. Charles Lister went out with the Naval Division, was wounded three times, and died in August. Guy’s battalion had relieved the Naval Division, and Guy himself came through unhurt, but the losses were terrible; as he put it, “an almost full parade of the regiment is now in paradise.” His nerves were wearing thin. He was invalided home, and “I think Gi isn’t quite so well,” Ronnie wrote to Dick, “because I was to have gone there for the weekend, but he’s put me off.” The shadow had fallen. Then Dick himself was taken prisoner by the Turks.
While the slaughter continued on every front, Ronnie fought his own battle with himself. He made a list of reasons—not the most important ones, but still important—for and against his conversion to Rome.
| You’ll be more popular in the long run. |
But you’ll first lose all the popularity you’ve got. |
| You’ll get rid of the prayer-book. | You’ll miss the Authorised Version. |
| You’ll be able to get an altar when you want it, even abroad. | But you won’t say mass in old Parish churches, like All Saints, York. |
| Your fellow priests won’t be married. | But they’ll be much more vulgar. |
| It will distress Guy and Harold if you don’t. | It will distress your father if you do, and many who have been kind to you. |
It will be seen that nobody could be more cruelly hard on Ronnie than he was on himself. He began to consider the idea of entering a monastery, and devoting his life to the memory of his dead friends. To outside observers his will power seemed to be “slipping away like a piece of soap down the drain”. “Don’t break all our hearts,” said Howell, at St Mary’s. He spoke for Wilfred, who could not bring himself to say anything.
In August 1916 Ronnie went to Hickleton to consult Lord Halifax, the great supporter of Anglo-Catholicism and Church reunion. At the house party he met a most singular person, the Jesuit priest Father Martindale. Martindale, in the nursery language of the Knoxes, was Ronnie’s “haunt”. Their lives crossed at many points, Martindale, quite without intention, acting as something between a warning and a reproach.
Charlie Martindale—he was christened Charlie—was nine years older than Ronnie. His biographer, Father Caraman, tells us that he was sickly from birth—“I cried; I didn’t like the world; nor do I.” Like Ronnie he had been brought up by elderly relatives, promised brilliantly and won every conceivable academic prize, but his reaction against middle-class life was early and violent. Before his reception into the Church he had gone to work as a hospital porter; after ordination he became a Jesuit, because he had heard that the Oratorians and Benedictines “were all gentlemen”; he was expected, because of his wretched health, to confine himself to a life of scholarship (he did, in fact, write nearly five hundred books, and was asked by the Vatican to collate their manuscript of Ausonius) but he broke away, appeared in unexpected places, conducted missions to seamen, dockers and incurables, all of whom loved him. He never stayed long in the houses of the great, and was only at Hickleton to collect some details for a biography of Hugh Benson. Ronnie, who was eagerly looking forward to consulting Martindale, felt that this would make a bond between them; he did not know that Martindale, who had had to struggle with his own temptations to homosexuality and undue sentiment, disliked Benson’s work and hated the idea of writing the Life, which he had undertaken only after pressure from the Benson family.
Ronnie described the meeting more than once, always telling the story against himself. In a conference at Oxford in 1936 he recalled how he must have looked, in his smart buckled shoes and consciously “Roman” cassock, while Martindale hurried in, thin and shabby, “with a face like an extremely animated skull, not dressed in a cassock at all, but in a rather seedy frock-coat which didn’t fit him too well and I think I knew in that moment that this was the real thing … Anyway, I went and talked to him that evening while he was packing up to go somewhere else. Father Martindale was always packing to go somewhere else.” As the priest flung his shoes into a suitcase, Ronnie told him, in agony of mind, that he was coming to believe the Church of England “hadn’t got a leg to stand on”. Ought he not to take the plunge and become a Catholic at once? The answer was completely unexpected: “Of course you couldn’t be received like that!” Ronnie felt the sensation, familiar since childhood, of being hit suddenly in the wind.
Father Martindale had not intended a rebuff, simply a call to positive thinking. The effect on Ronnie was decisive, but for a while he drifted without moorings. His only certain conviction was that he must leave Shrewsbury. His last address in the chapel of the school which he had loved so much had none of his usual humour. He took Newman’s subject, “The Parting of Friends”, and the boys, he thought, had a suppressed air of wanting their money back.
Wilfred bore as best he could with these apparently endless hesitations. The idea of a separation was terrible to him, but he tried to concentrate only on Ronnie’s unhappiness. The best thing for his brother, he thought, might be a hard spell of work in a parish.
In spite of everything, there were moments when they could laugh together. Sometimes they laughed so much that, as in former days, they felt like rolling about the pavement. This was the case when they were walking up Whitehall and saw Erm coming out of the Admiralty, all dressed up, as Wilfred put it, like Lord Nelson. Both were too overcome to ask him what he had done with his telescope. They exaggerated a little. Dilly was in the uniform of a sub-lieutenant, R.N.V.R.
Bloomsbury and Cambridge attitudes to the war varied. Of those closest to Dilly, Henry Lamb, who had medical training, served with the R.A.M.C., Frank Birch joined the Navy as an ordinary seaman and amazed the lower-deck concert parties with impersonations of Wedd, Nixon and Monty James; Maynard Keynes was needed at the Treasury. Of the cast of Dilly’s play, The Limit, four were to die at Gallipoli.
Dilly, determined that his motor-bicycle should be of use, made strenuous attempts to enlist as a military dispatch rider. “It seems it’s mostly night-riding,” Ronnie had anxiously written home, “so there’s not much chance of Erm, with his sight, being accepted.” Dilly’s contention was that in the darkness there was no difference between good and bad sight, but a demonstration of his riding led the selection board to reject him decisively. His future, however, had been decided for him elsewhere.
At the beginning of 1915 he was asked to join I.D.25, the department of Naval Intelligence which became better known as Room 40. He was to become a cryptographer, that is, an expert in the art of reading secret writing, a system which in wartime ranged from the crucial signals of Higher Command down to a junior officer in the trenches, struggling by candlelight with his muddy codebook. “Who would appreciate an obituary such as: He died like a hero, his last words being XB.35.06.7K2?” asked Punch in 1917. The answer might well have been: the regulars of Room 40.
By the time Dilly joined Room 40 it had come a long way from its amateurish beginnings. When war was declared the Admiralty had no cryptographic room at all. Alfred Ewing, who had been a professor of mechanics, had been asked to see what he could do about getting up a department. He found himself, as he says in his own account of those years, “in the thick of special work quite outside my ordinary lines,” and reduced to looking through the dusty codes at Lloyd’s and the Post Office to learn even the rudiments of the business. He was a good organizer, however, and he had three pieces of luck; he got on well with the terrifying Admiral Fisher; he was given the current cipher and signal book of the German Navy, picked up by the Russians from the body of a drowned seaman; and he knew that the Germans could not send messages by their underwater cables—the British Navy had cut these on the first day of the war. All German signals, then, must pass either through Allied or neutral cables, or by radio. Calls from their shore stations or between their ships at sea could all be intercepted by our directional radio stations, which rapidly learned to identify the sources and the call signals. Our operators covered positions across the vast face of the waters extending from the Arctic Circle down to the Cape Verde Islands.
For I.D.25 itself Ewing recruited naval officers, and as the work grew heavier he was allocated Room 40 (which is still used as an office) in the Old Buildings of the Admiralty. At first the possession of the codebook made solutions fairly easy, and Ewing himself took the signals, in their bright red envelopes, to Fisher and Winston Churchill in the war room.
It may be wondered, and Ewing did wonder, why the German Navy did not suspect, even at this early stage, that their code was compromised. Ewing came to the conclusion that it was because of the English reputation for stupidity; Ewing, however, was a Scotsman.
But early success (in particular the forewarning which led to the Dogger Bank action) earned for Room 40 the fate of all departments that do well. It was taken over, in this case by the Director of Naval Intelligence, Captain Reginald Hall. Under his hypnotic blue gaze and furious energy the work was reorganized and redivided, and the modest fifty personnel, keeping two-man watches round the clock, were greatly increased. Hall foresaw the complications that were to come, and imperiously told the Treasury that he must have more money for more codebreakers. Why “Blinker” Hall made up his mind to recruit university dons for Room 40 is uncertain. Having gone to sea at the age of fourteen, he cannot have met many of them before. Dons are clever, but how did he know that they would be clever in the right way? International business would seem a more promising field, and there were in fact brilliant cryptographers in the department from the City. The French and the Germans recruited serving officers. But Hall wanted dons.
It was no easy matter to “sell” them to the Treasury and the Navy. Gilbert Waterhouse, W. H. Bruford and Leonard Willoughby were lecturers in German, and seemed admissible, but John Beazley was an expert on ancient sculpture and pottery; Frank Adcock, the Dean of King’s, was a classical historian; Frank Birch, drafted back from active service, was also a historian; and Dilly came straight from the papyri. It was much to Hall’s credit that he managed to turn this awkward squad, who muddled up six bells and six o’clock and failed to salute admirals in the street, into a more or less naval department. Once in, however, they settled down well enough. Senior Common Rooms had prepared them for this much stranger room, cut off from the ordinary world. And for accuracy, discretion and secrecy they could be absolutely relied on.
You reached I.D.25 through two arches in the Old Buildings. The basement acted as a kind of telegraph office. Intercepted messages coming in by land-line were printed out and sent up by pneumatic tube in shuttles of the kind that can still be seen in some old-fashioned shops. In the enormous Room 40 itself, the shuttles rattled into wire baskets at the rate of two thousand a day, with a sound like a Maxim gun. “Tubists” sorted them into their time-groups and put aside those beginning SD (sehr dringend, very urgent). The signals were still in the familiar code, but this was super-enciphered by rearranging the letters in vertical columns under a keyword. The key, which in 1914 had been changed once every three months, now changed every twenty-four hours. At midnight the watch on duty set to work frantically to find the new key. It was alleged that if they solved it they fell asleep again immediately; if not, they hung their heads in shame as the new watch came on.
But Room 40 was only the central cell of the hive-like organization. It was surrounded by rooms which were all marked “NO ADMITTANCE. RING BELL”; but there were no bells. In the rooms were specialized units: directional, diplomatic (Desmond MacCarthy worked in this), Baltic Traffic (set up by Frank Birch), the Card Index, on which every signal was registered, and so forth. There was also an administrative staff, though much smaller than in most departments, but no tea ladies, and no cleaners. Room 40 was never dusted until the war was won.
Dilly, once his capabilities were established, was asked to work on problems very much more difficult than the day-to-day decipherment of Room 40. He was assigned Room 53, at the end of a dark cul-de-sac, and described by Frank Birch as “no bigger than a bathing-machine”. The table in the middle was so large that you could only just squeeze between it and the wall, and Dilly himself conspicuously failed to look naval; long thin wrists stretched out from the cuffs of a uniform that hung on him like a sack. His work was presented, as it had been in his Eton days, in inky scribbles on sheets of dirty paper, frequently mislaid. It was supposed that he kept his spectacles in his tobacco pouch to remind himself that he had taken the tobacco out of the spectacle case, substituting a piece of stale bread to remind himself that he was always hungry. Room 53, however, had one great distinction, the only bath in I.D.25, in constant use by the night watch. Dilly himself, working on amid soap and steam, could not have done without it. Hot water speeded up his perception of analogies. He had solved many cruces in the text of Herodas in his bath.
He was looking for “ways in” or “cribs”, the essential clues to an unknown cipher. Even a few phrases in clear might provide these. In the 1914–18 war, the cryptographer looked for groups representing place names, which were likely to recur, and repeated messages, which he could assume were preceded by the words besser geben or bitte wiederholen (send more clearly, please repeat). Sometimes, too, the signal might be sent on by an outlying German station in a simpler code, or one that he knew already. The idiosyncrasies of radio operators came to be recognized like those of old friends, or like the copyists of the papyri. Any of these indications, however, could be confused by meaningless blinde signale or nulls, of which the Germans grew increasingly fond as time went on. Above all there was a certain art, a certain flair with which Dilly was born, for the shadow patterns of groups of letters, no matter in what language, revealing themselves, like a secret dance, only to the patient watcher.
I.D.25 had its splendeurs et misères. In 1917 it almost faced disaster. In the early days of the war, Jellicoe had been accustomed to walk in and ask with confidence, “Can I count on a quiet night, gentlemen?” But in February 1917, through a misunderstanding rather than an error, he was given a misdirection which led, he considered, to the disappointing outcome of the Battle of Jutland. A number of people at the Admiralty were not displeased. They had always distrusted Intelligence anyway. When, shortly afterwards, the Germans introduced a new codebook, Admiral Sir Thomas Jackson exclaimed, “Thank God I shan’t have any more of that damned stuff!” Room 40 began to suspect that many of their deciphered signals were being filed unread, and were deeply resentful. Hall shrewdly chose this moment to reorganize the department once again, this time under a delightful, breezy and efficient sailor, William James, who did not pretend to understand cryptography—“around me were a number of civilians and R.N.V.R. officers, all talking a strange language and doing strange things,” he wrote—but who gave everyone new courage. “It was an astonishing sight,” he added, after a tour of the cramped rooms and their scholarly inhabitants. And these were serving with the Navy!
After Frank Birch had joined the department he shared a house, No. 14 Edith Grove, in Chelsea, with Dilly and another friend. Birch gave musical parties every week, inviting Madame Suggia, the great cellist, who lived nearby. Dilly chose these occasions to work all night at Room 40, so that the guests were spared his observations on music; Birch had probably counted on this. Dilly used to have breakfast at the Ship, a public house in Whitehall, before “doddering”, “wandering” or “prancing” (all Frank Birch’s words) home to Chelsea.
He had not forgotten his family. In the summer of 1916, knowing that Ronnie had left Shrewsbury and was at a wretchedly loose end, he suggested that he might just as well come and work in the department. To Dilly, all the long-drawn-out suffering over his youngest brother was a matter of unrealities; we pray, no one answers, the Churches dispute to the death over how to go on speaking to someone who is not there. But he gladly made room for Ronnie between the end of the table and the bath, and so another unlikely figure, “in clerical garb”, as Admiral James put it, joined the already unlikely Room 40.
Ronnie mentioned once, quite mildly, that Dilly had never explained to him exactly what he was meant to be doing. In any event, a transfer was soon arranged for him to a small branch of the War Office which specialized in reading the newspapers of neutral countries. It was M.I.D.7—“not 70,” Ronnie wrote to Mrs K., “the poor tax-payer isn’t expected to support 70 military intelligence departments”—and the pay was six pounds a week. Among the quota of old men and bored disabled officers, the “captain person”, as Ronnie called him, could hardly believe his luck in getting such an intelligent clerk, still more so when, in the autumn of 1916, Wilfred began to come in on half-time duty. Wilfred’s motives for doing this were mixed. He, too, had lost many friends in Gallipoli and Flanders, and he wanted to be nearer to his brother before he lost him also. Distressed at the failure of the Anglo-Catholic movement to protest at the continuance of the war, he wanted to work harder himself. He had resolved to take no holidays at all until a peace was signed. He and Ronnie toiled away on different floors of the building. There was a Zeppelin scare, “and Wilfred didn’t see anything,” Ronnie wrote, “but then, he didn’t bother to go to the window and look out.”
All through 1917 his father wrote to Ronnie with increasing urgency, as if by words he could be held back from the brink of a gulf. He begged him, if he could get leave, to come up to Manchester. “I’m afraid you must look forward to seeing me with some pain, considering the direction my mind is now set in,” Ronnie answered, “but you will believe, Paw, that if I could help it—well, there isn’t any need to finish the sentence.” Winnie, for once, was powerless to help. Deep in the anxious business of rearing babies and of not giving offence to the genteel society of Edinburgh, she could not join them; they must fight it out for themselves. The Bishop, in letters that are pathetic in the truest sense, tried to enter into further controversy with this favourite son, so evidently favoured by God and man.
I could have wept almost at the thought of what might have been [he wrote, and again, reaching the central point in his argument], it is quite true that if there is a God He must have revealed Himself, but is there any reason to suppose that it is necessary that His revelations of Himself are such that there must be one and only one true interpretation of them all? …
I am amazed at my own boldness in entering into the lists in which you are a far more skilled and practised contestant. I remember so well the kind of pity with which I used to regard my dear Mother’s, and even my Father’s arguments with me. The fact that I now see I was often in the wrong in spite of my Greats, &c. is not likely to make much impression on you. But what can I do? … I can but make my poor attempt—which for its very length will bore you long before you have read it, if ever you do read it. At least say to yourself—Well, Father must love me or he would not worry so much about me. If I return to the fray you will have to forgive me—Ever your loving father, E. A. Manchester.
It was from their father, as well as their mother, that the Knoxes inherited their tender hearts.
In reply Ronnie tried to explain his need for an absolute spiritual authority, comparing the Church of Rome to a shop window in which there was no need to examine the goods, because over the door was a sign THIS IS THE TRUE DEPOT ORDAINED BY CHRIST HIMSELF. “I should not have used the metaphor,” the Bishop answered, yet he strove to understand. Among the heavy extra duties of wartime, he felt bowed down. Not for many weeks did he add to his reasoned arguments a direct personal appeal. He was suffering; Ronnie pleaded in return to be allowed “to follow what I feel is God’s will, wherever it leads me, quietly and without fuss.” Whatever happened, he promised never to preach in the Manchester diocese while his father was still there.
Ronnie not unnaturally believed that, in the third year of the war, his “going over” would be of interest only to his family. “I’ve twice been asked ‘How’s Ronnie?’ by people who mistook me for Wilfred.” He resigned from Trinity, and, at the suggestion of the Abbot, went in September to make a retreat at Farnborough. The weight of indecision—which, as he knew, can become a habit—fell from him. “I came to my conclusion yesterday,” he told Winnie, “you’ll realise what it is.” On 22 September he was received into the Catholic Church.
He did not feel any special illumination, but he was so happy that he wanted to laugh out loud all through dinner in the refectory. He had found authority. “Ultimately the Catholic Church challenges one with the question: ‘Look in my eyes. Can you trust me?’ And the rest is all quibbling.”
Ronnie was mistaken in thinking that his conversion would go unnoticed. The press commented freely; the Westminster Gazette called him an utter reactionary, who perhaps wished to restore the Stuarts, the Guardian said that Rome “had landed the biggest fish since Newman”—another metaphor which the Bishop would not have used. To his friends it was, as Harold Macmillan put it, “a parting of the ways.” From his family there were no reproaches—certainly none from Wilfred, although he was told that his brother’s conversion had lost him his own chance of the chaplaincy at Merton.
Of course it won’t make any difference; why should it? After all our views are far closer than they were when we were at Oxford, when I never believed in anything, and it never made any difference there … I can’t say how sorry I am, but it certainly won’t make any difference as far as I’m concerned.
I doubt if there was any real point now in your waiting till after the war … unless there was any chance of your finding out after all that you were sorry you’d been received, it’s so much better for you to recover your effectiveness as soon as you can, to say nothing of your happiness. If I ever felt anything else, it can only have been part of the selfishness for which I am so justly famous.
But it did make a difference. The love remained, but so did the lifelong disappointment and regret. For the Bishop the fires had died down, and he could send only his resignation to the will of God, and a little news from home.
The rest are all well. Mother is out digging in the garden, after having done the work of 10 women from morn to sunset. The other day she dug by moonlight. With overflowing love, dearest boy, and ever your most loving father, E. A. Manchester.
Surely one would think it must have been as clear then as it is now that if human love could rise above the doctrines that divide the Church, then these doctrines must have singularly little to do with the love of God. But in 1917 it still appeared to them all that Ronnie was “lost”, and that whatever merciful words were said he was divided from his family by an invisible door of iron.
Guy Lawrence was not given to overstatement, but the news brought him intense relief. “Ron, dear, I am glad you’re back with me again. It makes a lot of difference to me.” Guy had recovered, and was with a Training Reserve Battalion—the 102nd, so great had the wastage and the replacements become. Ronnie, he said, must “be quick and become a priest”. On his return from France, when the war was over, he hoped to become a postulant at the Oratory. The family understood that in the event Ronnie also would become an Oratorian.
The glimpse, in the Bishop’s letter, of Mrs K. digging the vegetable garden by moonlight gives the feeling of the darkest and hungriest of the war years. Britain very nearly starved in 1917. In the spring of that year three hundred U-boats ranged the deep seas, and one in four of our merchant ships failed to return to port. American shipping losses were also high. The two great necessities were to find a way to protect the convoys, and a way to bring the United States into the war. Room 40 made a significant contribution to both, by breaking two codes.
Breaking a code is more difficult than breaking a cipher, or at least any cipher that was in use in the First World War. A high-grade codebook transposes every word, and sometimes every syllable, into a random group of figures or letters. The codebook is in two parts, one alphabetically arranged for encoding, one numerically for reading back:
| 032 | ab | 000 | England |
| 461 | Amerika | 001 | heute |
| 168 | an | 002 | angriff |
| 211 | auf | 003 | zurück |
To get even higher security, any words which are likely to recur frequently may be encoded in, say, five or six different ways, so that heute (today) may appear as 001, 563, 287 and so forth. Groups of letters are sometimes used instead of numbers. To relate the two lists, many hundreds of thousands of words long, is exceedingly difficult without an effective “way in”. Stops, if they can be identified, will help if the language is German, because they are likely to have a verb, with its characteristic ending, in front of them. The code-breaker writes any probable solutions into his list in pencil; it makes the long columns of blanks look somewhat more human. Ink is for certainties. But even with great skill and patience, and an adequate amount of material to work on, his task may take years. He prays for a miracle.
In February 1917 the diplomatic section of Room 40 produced the solution to the Zimmermann telegram. This was a signal from the German Foreign Minister, offering the Mexican government active support in their claims to Arizona and Texas as a price for coming into the war and launching an attack on the United States. The exposure of these German proposals was crucial, and it was said that nothing else would have reconciled Texas and the Middle West to a European war. The “way in” for the codebreakers, in this case, was the lucky purchase, or theft, by a British agent in Mexico City, of a copy of a second telegram from the post office. This Western Union telegram repeated the first one in a simpler code which had been in use since 1907, and which Room 40 could read without difficulty.
For the Zimmermann solution Dilly felt professional admiration, but also some professional jealousy. “Can’t we buy something from the post office?” became his plaintive murmur in all kinds of situations, even quite inappropriate ones, as for instance when things were left behind at a picnic. He had no such good fortune, in 1917, with his own assignment. He had been detailed to work exclusively on the special flag-code, that is, the code used by the German Commander-in-Chief. All the energies of the German admirals, with their High Sea Fleet still confined to port, were concentrated on unrestricted submarine warfare. Breaking the flag-code would mean intercepting the operational orders of the U-boat campaign at the highest possible level, and discovering at the earliest stage what information the enemy had about our sailings. The U-boats, which could not communicate at all in deep water, chatted to each other freely in low-grade cipher when they surfaced, but this was a routine matter for Room 40. The flag-code was quite unknown and did not correspond with any system the Room had met. The only certainty was that it consisted of three-letter groups, some corresponding to words and names, and some to syllables.
James remembered, as one of the “astonishing sights” of his department, the little room where Dilly sat “labouring” over the apparently insoluble. But “nothing is impossible”. No worksheets, of course, were ever kept, and of the steps he took towards the solution there is a record of only one, but it is very characteristic both of Room 40 and of himself.
One afternoon Dilly (who by now ignored the correct watches and was living in the office) sorted through a heap of signals which had just come up the tube. They were a practice session by a German naval radio operator, sending in the flag-code. Some of the three-letter groups he was pretty sure he could recognize. They were the equivalents of en, the commonest bigram in the German language. But even so, it struck him that there was an unusually high proportion of ens for a short message:
As Dilly looked at the lines, they took on the appearance of poetry, or at least of metre, since metre, as he strangely declared, is “the raw material of poetry”. What metre? He suspected dactyls, and if both lines ended in en, there was probably also a rhyme. The kind of radio operator who would choose a lyric for his practice signals must be sentimental, a sentimental German, and the poetry might be romantic. Could one of the en words be Rosen? The German experts, who were also professors of literature, were housed in a drafty room along the passage; they identified the poem, and the roses, almost at once; they were two lines of Schiller’s:
Ehret die Frauen; sie flechten und weben
Himmliche Rosen im erdliche Leben.
[Give reverence to women; they plait and weave
Heavenly roses in this earthly life.]
This gave Dilly nine or ten new groups, including the useful leband erd-, and even such tiny beginnings can constitute a “way in”. The rest was hard work, perhaps inspiration in the bath, and the help of his three clerical staff; there were now four people in the tiny room, referred to as “one for each letter and one for the pot”. The three-letter flag-code was broken in the summer of 1917, and so many convoys were saved that in October James was made a captain.
Room 40 had recovered totally from its disgrace after Jutland. “Blinker” Hall, who had piloted the department through with such success, had great ambitions for it, particularly on the diplomatic side. As a result, there was another expansion (the staff numbered a hundred by the end of the war), and this had far-reaching effects on the life of Dilly. More stenographers were needed, their discretion must be absolute, and it was thought best to turn to ladies of county and service families. At the end of 1917 Dilly was allocated a new secretary. She was Miss Olive Roddam, the daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel Roddam, of the ancient and distinguished Northumberland family the Roddams of Roddam.
The first embarrassment was the bath. Miss Roddam worked office hours, not the naval watches, so that it was a matter of finishing one’s bath and getting dressed correctly in uniform before she arrived. This was a serious alteration of routine. Then there was the problem of working at such close quarters with a young lady in a room as cramped as No. 53. Eddie had always said that in spite of Dilly’s intellect, and in spite of, or because of, his uncertain contact with daily life, he would be quite powerless if he was thrown together for any length of time with a normal, pretty young woman. Eddie was right. Himmliche Rosen im erdliche Leben! Dilly did become powerless, and before many weeks had passed he fell in love with Miss Roddam.
At the end of February 1917 the 2/4th Lincolnshires were stationed at Havant, ready to go. Eddie had at least been spared the miserable Christmas of 1916 at Bishopscourt, when Ronnie and his father had scarcely been on speaking terms, and had been reduced to leaving notes for each other on the hall table. Christina came down from Lincoln to Havant to say good-bye. Afterwards Eddie wrote to her, in the words of hundreds of thousands of young officers, that it was a pity that she hadn’t come to the station because they hadn’t entrained until 1:53 after all, and they could have had another hour and a half together. The battalion was pretty well supplied with everything, including a pierrot troupe which had unfortunately tried to imitate Pelissier’s Follies. “I’m afraid most of it is rather above the men’s heads.” He expected to go with the advance party, and she was the dearest wife a man ever had. When he got back, he would draw some more pictures for his four-year-old son.
The Lincolns were brigaded with the Leicesters to go out as the 177th Brigade in the 59th Division. In the first week of March they went up the line to positions south of the Amiens-Villers-Carbonnel road. Amiens was a staging post; the brigade was a routine draft, already almost unidentifiable in the mud, of another vast offensive which was to end the war, as before, in a few weeks. “The trenches are in very bad condition,” reads the Regimental Diary. “It has been necessary to dig men out.” The first casualties were from trench fever, and among them was Christina’s elder brother Edwin. Bishop Hicks, who was at Lincoln, in the grip of his last illness, asked that nothing about “victory” should be put on the grave of his dead son.
Ludendorff had withdrawn to the prepared forts of the Hindenburg Line, and what was termed the Allied advance was, as the old sweats hastened to point out, nothing but a trudge forward over a few miles the Germans hadn’t wanted. The Lincolns crossed the river Somme at Brie, and in April made their first set-piece attack on the Hindenburg Line “on a position reported to be evacuated, which turned out to be very much not so.” There were heavy losses. “Teddie writes that he hopes they’re going in the right direction; they all look the same,” Mrs K. wrote to Winnie. His only request had been for candles, and if possible a few onions. The battalion settled down to trench warfare for the summer of 1917.
During the immobile three months, Eddie became expert at shooting rats with a revolver as they came over the top of the dugout, and he got to know the men very well. The Lincolnshires had a curious double reputation, on which they prided themselves. On the one hand, they were considered ludicrously rustic; they were said to clean their teeth with soot, and to be permanently sleepy from eating the poppies in the flower-growing districts. On the other hand, they were known as preternaturally “fly”. Guy Lawrence had written back from Gallipoli that the Lincolns had delayed just long enough at the embarkation point to get the deck cabins. And they had no rivals in getting themselves dug in comfortably.
Eddie was a poet in the front line, yet he did not feel able to do what Owen Seaman had asked him, and contribute to Punch from the trenches. He knew that Seaman expected something light, and as he explained many years later: “I found that humour in the camp and at the front was so much more technical and so much less refined than it seemed to be in the papers, that I contributed nothing during most of those four years. But to their great credit the artists at home produced a continuous spectacle of surrendering Germans and happy good-humoured British riflemen.”
The inhibiting factor was not resentment, but affection.
English humour is distinguished by cheerful endurance [he said]. I saw that in the trenches; I don’t mean behaviour in action or under heavy fire, when, whatever you say about it, people are not amused, but ordinary behaviour under terrible conditions. I mean the men who sang doleful marching songs saying that they didn’t want to fight and wished they could go home, which other nations would have sung if they were about to mutiny or run away, or songs about Tipperary, where they had never been and didn’t want to go.
Why did we join the army, boys,
Why did we join the army?
Why did we come to France to fight—
We must have been bloody well barmy.
It did not seem to Eddie that the feeling of 1917 could be put better than that. But his failure to write anything was not intended as a criticism of Seaman’s Punch, which came punctually up the line, once a week, with the mail.
In August his week’s leave came up. He arrived in Lincoln to find that the Bishop had given up the Palace completely, turning it over to a Red Cross hospital, while he and Mrs Hicks, Christina and the babies were managing in the lodge. Rationing was very strict. What was margarine? Punch had given the answer to this: “I take thee, dearest margarine, for butter or for worse.” Christina said that she did not trust it, and would prefer to bring up the children on dripping.
On the way back to the front, with a single evening to spend in London, he managed to assemble his three brothers for a dinner at Gatti’s. It was the first time they had all been together since his marriage. Dilly, towering over them in the glasses and improbable uniform, was, at first, abstracted, Wilfred and Ronald miserable. Eddie relied on champagne—the price did not matter that evening—to work its magical effect, and for a few hours, among the flashing gilt and the long mirrors of Gatti’s, they were back at St Philip’s Rectory, accusing each other of every possible crime and incompetence. Then they were happy. The next day Eddie found the 59th Division preparing to move from the Somme to the Ypres sector, in time for the battle of Passchendaele.
The brigade was on the north side of the salient, ready to advance in yet another of the “waves”, which, this time, were to break through to the U-boat bases on the coast. The weather was fine, which was as well, since all the ditching and drainage system in the area had been destroyed in the preliminary barrage. The ruined land sank under mud and water which had been carefully held back for centuries.
On 26 September the division were to attack from the Menin Road and push eastward to consolidate the old enemy positions. It was taken for granted that there would be no opposition. Indeed the official account was “successful advance with little resistance”. But the reality failed to live up to the report. The Germans counter-attacked and shelled heavily, and the 2/4th Lincolns held on, for two days, with great difficulty. On the first day, a sniper, left behind in a farmhouse to pick off the British officers, shot Eddie through the back. The bullet lodged somewhere in the left shoulder, and ended his usefulness in the Third Battle of Ypres.
Bishop Knox had determined not to communicate with Ronnie again for at least a year, but when the news came that Eddie was a casualty, he sent it on at once to all the family. Eddie had first been reported missing, then been picked up out of a pool of blood in a shell-hole and shipped back to England. “You will be glad to be out of the fray for a while,” Aunt Fanny wrote from Edmundthorpe.
In a series of hospitals, he experienced a black nostalgia for his own men, still bogged down at Passchendaele, and the usual longing to get back to the only place where the disillusionment and loyalty of war could be understood. “This time last year the frost broke in the trenches,” he entered in his notebook:
I knew what fear was and I lived with fear
Now there are only comfortable things,
Oh, God, to be again where I was then This time last year.
The hospitals, in fact, scarcely qualified as comfortable things, and, as a patient, his satirical spirit returned. His shoulder had to be re-broken twice. In the morning there were remedial exercises, and in the afternoon he was supposed to take a walk with his left arm in a splint, “a cross between a strait waistcoat and a portion of the dentist’s chair where the glass of hot water ought to be.” The streets were full of soldiers and once he had to salute two hundred and fifty times on one walk. Why not, he asked the doctors, let him salute with the left arm to give it exercise, and put the right arm in a sling “to gain sympathy”? His superiors called a special committee to decide whether a wounded officer might be permitted to salute with his left hand, but they decided against it.
Ronnie’s hours at M.I.D. ended at three-thirty; he was living with friends in Kensington, and he went home every afternoon to write the history of his conversion, A Spiritual Aeneid. As soon as possible, he took the first steps towards his new priesthood. Once again, in his brothers’ view, he was somewhat indulged. He did not have to go to a seminary, and in the words of Father Corbishley, S.J. (in Ronald Knox the Priest), “few outside the ranks of the clergy will appreciate the remarkable liberality of such an arrangement.” Cardinal Bourne recommended him to live at the Oratory, “as a mixture of paying guest and theological student,” he told Winnie. He had his own quiet room, overlooking the carriages and treetops of the Brompton Road, where he could study and put his thoughts in order, and wait, under God, for the return of Guy Lawrence.
The end of the war brought the changed light of day into the seclusion of Room 40. The U-boats were handed over at Harwich, the German fleet surrendered at Schillig Reede and the professors of German literature went as interpreters. The Foreign Office was negotiating with the Admiralty to take over the whole department. To many, looking back on it, the strange world of decipherment seemed like a dream. During the past four years they had read over fifteen thousand enemy signals; all waste paper now. The dark linen curtains which had been fixed across the windows during the Zeppelin raids were taken down at last. A ball was given at the Savoy; some of the ladies of Room 40 had their hair cut, and some “shingled”; Miss Roddam was shingled; Dilly, like some great wading bird, attempted the fox-trot. That morning, all of them had received a form to fill up, stating whether they wished to stay in Intelligence after the conclusion of hostilities. Dilly had no two thoughts about it. He was eager to get back to King’s, and the still unfinished Herodas. He was also beginning to wonder in his turn whether, on what he could earn, it would be possible to propose marriage.
On Armistice Day itself everyone working in Whitehall turned out into the street. The crowds were at first quite silent, then a subaltern going by on an open-topped bus gave a solitary cheer, and suddenly there was a riot of noise from Westminster to Trafalgar Square. Then people went off to get drunk.
The “last push”, which the young officer on the bus had survived, took only three months from the first breakthrough, but the losses during those three months were surely the hardest of all to bear. On 28 August, during the final advance near Arras, and only a little way short of the Hindenburg Line, Guy Lawrence was killed. He was twenty-five.
Ronnie wrote to an old friend, Francis Urquhart of Balliol:
There was a time when I used to dread your handwriting, because it might mean fresh bad news. Well, you’ve got to have it from me this time, if you haven’t heard already—yes, the very worst news … This is only just to tell you. I’m too numbed still to think, far less to write about it.
The numbness lasted long enough for him to feel, after it wore off, that he had a scar, rather than a wound—that is, a profound sense of what he had lost, rather than the loss itself. But what had been the total effect on the Western world of so many million mourners of so many million dead? “What kind of state of mind are we in?” he wrote to Winnie, after a friend of his, a Magdalen don, had just shot himself dead in his rooms; “What has the war done to us?” Certainly this brilliant and indulged youngest brother, who was now thirty years old, could never again be thought of as spoiled. “One has to grow up some time,” he wrote, at the end of his Spiritual Aeneid.
In his letter to Urquhart, Ronnie did not even mention Guy’s name; he could not bring himself to do so for another two weeks. He had not even heard the news directly, because he had given up reading the casualty lists, and had never been in touch with Guy’s family in Worcestershire. A handful of faded letters are the only record, after half a century, of his dark hour, and they show nothing except how he brought himself to bear it.
Faith maintained him—not a greater faith than Wilfred’s when he had to face the separation from Ronnie, or the Bishop of Lincoln’s when his son died in the trenches, or Christina’s when she got a telegram to say that Eddie was missing—not greater, but the same. Meanwhile there remained for Ronnie only one certainty in his waste land, the knowledge that he was called to be a priest.
He was ordained at St Edmund’s Old Hall on 5 October 1919, taking the anti-modernist oath “against all Liberal interpretations whether of scripture or history”. Looking back on the scene, he felt that “it was something of a disappointment that the Vicar-General was not there to witness the fervour I put into it. He had gone out to tea.” On this ordinary enough occasion, Ronnie had taken a step, and received a privilege, greater than he could hope to describe. He had been warned at Farnborough that “one does not become a Catholic in order to be happy”; still less does a man become a priest to forget suffering. But “if happiness means to be fighting under colours of whose ultimate success you are assured, whose temporary reverses provide, nevertheless, the authentic thrill of battle; if, in a word, happiness is to be where you are meant to be—why, yes, I am happy.”
“Well, they have him now, and they will make no sparing use of him,” Bishop Knox wrote gloomily to Winnie. Rome had taken from him his dearest pledge. In the closing chapters of his memoirs, he tried to sum up the loss and gain.
I have not succeeded, as my father succeeded, in bringing my children up entirely in their father’s faith, and for this I take no small share of the blame, so far as it is blame, to myself …
When Ronald was quite a small boy at school one of his masters challenged the class with the words: ‘
—can any of you finish that line?’ Ronald instantly replied: ‘—
—It is our boast that we are far ahead of our parents.’
These words seem to me to embody, at once, the effects of a Public School education, the spirit and temper of the age in which my children grew up, and the exceptional vivacity of their character. They were determined to be better than their parents had been, and to do better than their parents had done, and to live in the spirit of the restless first decades of the twentieth century. Who shall say that this ambition was in itself wrong or unnatural? That it led some of them in directions often very costly to those whom they loved and who loved them, cannot be denied, and here I find the saddest of the experiences and remembrances of my life, records of the most humiliating of my failures. Against these I set the treasure of the full and over-flowing measure of my children’s love, surpassing all that I deserve.
Eddie was not demobilized until April 1919. Even that was relatively early, since the date of demobilization depended on the length of war service and the number of wounds. He was signed off with his gratuity at the Crystal Palace, the last military command which he received being “Mind the step”. Meanwhile he had acquired the lease, or so he thought, of another little Hampstead house, this time in East Heath Road; but it turned out to be mysteriously inhabited by John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield, whose comment was: “Portland Villas! It sounds like one of those houses where a few guests are taken, mental not objected to.” Meanwhile, Eddie and Christina, with the two infants, were homeless in an overcrowded London. It might, he thought, be easier to live, with their few possessions, in a furniture van, with horses and auxiliary steam, and pull up outside any likely property until it fell vacant.
He had begun to contribute again to Punch in 1918, but a regular job was absolutely necessary. It was simply to support his family that he worked for eighteen months at the Ministry of Labour, where, he said:
We were supposed to be discovering appointments for ex-officers, but were chiefly, I think, trying to find appointments for ourselves … The first duty of a civil servant, I gathered, was to decide at what date he would take his holidays, the second to decide at what time he would have his tea … I also, rather hastily, asked for a doughnut at teatime, but soon got tired of them. But at the same time I felt, perhaps owing to my army training, an overwhelming inability to alter any regulation once made, and I think the man who was employed to bring them felt the same. So I put the doughnuts in a drawer. When I left the Ministry, I had a whole drawerful of doughnuts, and I have often wondered what the officer who succeeded me did with them.
What were the other possibilities? Little else was discussed by his old Army friends. One of them, who had bought a small grocery in Nottingham, wrote:
You had better start something like this, it pays and is alright when one gets over the shop part, but I am lucky in that I supply all the ‘knuts’ of the city, and know most of them as an ex-officer. I must say it strikes me as Comic sometimes, when I am at one of their Houses and suddenly think that I gave my hostess a pound of Marg at is 2d in the morning wrapped up in a paper bag.
Eddie, he said, would be most welcome as a partner if he would care to become a “Practical Dairy Farmer”. But the prospect seemed daunting, though less so than the Civil Service. Eddie was now in and out of the Punch offices, helping with unimportant routine jobs, and hoping, in time, for an assistant editorship. In a reckless moment, he handed in his notice to the Ministry. Meanwhile the family could not continue in lodgings. Christina thought they might try living in the country.