The Pursuit of Laughter (76 page)

When we left England we took her with us to the Temple, where she seemed very happy. Our French cook said:
Il fait le policier ici
’ [He (sic) behaves like a policeman]. No other tom cats were allowed in her domain, though plenty of ginger kittens appeared round and about in the village. After a little more than a year she became ill. The local vet could do nothing, and Kit took her to a famous Paris vet; she sat on his lap, and going through the Fork de Meudon he said she pricked up her ears. But she gradually faded away. When she died Kit and the cook and I sat in the kitchen, crying, and the cook said
angrily
: ‘I should never have come to you if I had known
this
was going to happen.’ We mourned her, and never replaced her.

A few years later one of our swans fell in love with Kit. He followed him everywhere, ate bread off the table when we dined in the garden, and sometimes insisted on coming indoors. After many years suddenly, early one morning, he seemed unable to eat. His beak was half open. It was a day of torrid heat, and I lifted him up and put him under a tree in the shade. I brought him water. But he wanted neither food nor drink; he wanted Kit, who spoke to him softly. At the sound of his voice the swan fluttered his feathers a little. Then he put his head under his wing. We sat with him all morning, until he died. He looked like a huge, pure white egg, head and feet tucked out of sight. In my end is my beginning.

Kit said: ‘Never again.’ We always had swans, but he refused to talk to them or make a special friend of any of them. He had minded the death of this beautiful and loving bird too much. When he walked by the pond he missed the sound of the rush of water as the swan swam at speed to the bank, clambering up it in order to be near him.

Although never a pacifist, Kit was resolutely anti-war; from the very beginning, for
example
, long before it became the fashion to do so, he deplored American involvement in Indo-China. He said that the Americans and the Russians were paralysed giants, and that the West had been saved by the scientists with their nuclear bombs. But for them the
mistakes
and miscalculations of our politicians would have ensured the defeat of all Europe by Russia.

To him, the idea that ours was ‘the century of the common man’ was pure nonsense. On the contrary, it was the century of the uncommon man; scientists, inventors, brilliant engineers, and surgeons were the people who could help to conquer pain, poverty and squalor. He often said it was the paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty that took him into the Labour Party as a young man. To the end of his life he regarded it as being due to political failure that this blot on our country is still there. Pain, sorrow, suffering are part
of life, but it is the task of the politician to mitigate them by harnessing the talents
available
, which in Britain and Europe are remarkable. Where should we be now, but for the uncommonly clever scientists and engineers who discovered and exploited North Sea oil?

Kit did not give a fig as to whether he was called a racialist because he opposed
immigration
and advocated paying for the blacks to be repatriated while investing in their islands so that they could find work. He said the very last thing we needed was an influx of unskilled labour. They came here for economic reasons, and in the late fifties at the time of Kit’s campaign it would have been perfectly possible to reverse the policy. ‘Poor people,’ he used to say. ‘They only come because we have neglected our colonies and they are starving.’ He foresaw mass unemployment, which apparently our rulers did not. The whole business added an unnecessary problem to the many we already faced, and it
speedily
became an irreversible problem. Indians and Pakistanis came next, and many of them made fortunes by working hard in little shops and restaurants, open at all hours and a boon to the natives in London and other big cities.

In the early sixties I gave an interview to a Sunday paper about Kit. The interviewer asked over and over again what it felt like to be married to someone so unpopular. I tried to explain that in politics as a rule if you are disliked by some you are all the more loved and admired by others, and you tend to see supporters; also we were usually in France where as a matter of courtesy Kit naturally took no part in politics, and we had friends in many countries of all ages and opinions. I got a good few letters afterwards, including one from the Irish Nationalist M.P. who was father of the Stormont House of Commons, Cahir Healy. He wrote: ‘I feel that you [sic] over-stressed his unpopularity. He is no more unpopular than any man would be who wants to upset the political set-up of his time… His
Europe: Faith and Plan
(Published in 1959 by Euphorion Books) is a masterly survey of our present plight and at the same time a novel suggestion for a way out of it. His “
thinking
as a European” is finding sympathy in unexpected and high places.’

In fact, most of the famous unpopularity was confined to Whitehall and Fleet Street, and a good deal of it, as R.H.S. Grossman said, was because he had so often been found, too late, to have been right.

During my life, in peacetime, Britain has never benefited from what Asquith called the pervading influence of a commanding mind; no Adenauer or de Gaulle appeared; no Gladstone, no Lloyd George, not to speak of a Chatham. Churchill was dismissed by the electorate the moment the war was over. He came back five years later to a Britain where even the special relationship with America was a mere figment of his imagination. The Empire was no more. After almost total destruction and the dismantling by us of what was left of German industry, the Germans were creating once again the most powerful industrial country in Europe. Churchill was plagued by a series of strokes; his last term of office was not a success. After him we had a procession of political light-weights. Thus not only were we no longer a great power, we were also near the bottom of our own league.

Kit was often jeered at in the Press for living in France awaiting a call to come and run affairs in England. Of course, this is complete nonsense. He knew perfectly well there would be no call. There was never a tremendous crisis such as might conceivably have given him a political opportunity soon after the war. Instead, as he had foreseen all along could well happen, there was a slow, steady, inexorable decline. Apart from putting forward ideas as problems arose there was nothing he could do about it; he looked upon political and economic ideas as his essential work.

It was not until 1966 that Kit made the journey to Greece. At last he saw the Parthenon, and the Aegean Sea across which the Homeric Greeks sailed to Troy, and where Goethe’s Homunculus broke his phial and mingled with the blue water. On the Acropolis he got a guide, who rather persistently showed us the spot where St Paul stood when he preached to the Athenians, and wanted to go on to describe other scenes from the Acts of the Apostles. ‘Please don’t tell me about St Paul. I want to hear all you know about the Temples,’ said Kit.

It was in February, there were no tourists. Mark Ogilvie-Grant, an old friend who lived in Athens, took us for luncheon to a little fish restaurant out of doors. There was a pale blue sky and wild flowers; Kit’s pleasure in all this was wonderful to see. Paul Valéry’s words: ‘
La Grèce ancienne est la plus belle invention des temps modernes
’ [Ancient Greece is the most beautiful invention of modern times] came to mind; also Goethe’s
‘Alles vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis
’ [Everything transitory is but a symbol]. If ancient Greece is no more than an invention, or a symbol, it was nevertheless all-powerful in Kit’s imagination, its art combining, like nature itself, brilliant beauty and darkest tragedy.

In 1968, when his autobiography
My Life
was published, the television ban broke. For
thirty-four
years he had never been allowed to say a word on the BBC, although he was
constantly
attacked in their programmes. In 1966 he brought an action for libel against the BBC and, while the action was pending, the libel that he was organizing violence was repeated. Thereupon he brought an action in the High Court, applying for committal to prison of the governors of the BBC for contempt of court. The case was heard before Lord Chief Justice Parker, who made the observation in his summing up:

The BBC representatives in court were visibly shaken by these words from the Lord Chief Justice, even though he did not commit the governors to prison. Kit conducted his case himself, with his customary brilliance. He then applied to the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg; it accepted his petition and agreed to hear his complaint (it will only hear a complaint if the petitioner is unable to secure justice in his own country). This so alarmed the BBC that they agreed to allow him to appear on television. The publication of Kit’s book in 1968 gave an excuse to rescind the ban, and he did a whole
Panorama
, filmed at the Temple with James Mossman.

Robin Day began by asking Mossman whether, when he actually met Mosley, he had found someone rather different from what he expected. ‘Startlingly different,’ said Mossman.

The ‘ratings’ for this
Panorama
were enormous, more than nine million. Mossman’s remark showed how successful the Press and the BBC had been over the years in suppressing mention of Kit’s brilliance and his ideas; depicting him as someone whose mere presence was enough to attract violence. His peaceful meetings were never reported, let alone his political ideas which were the only point of making speeches. Nevertheless interest in him remained widespread all over the country. The ratings were probably a surprise, but he was now seventy-two and for that reason posed less of a threat to our complacent politicians.

He read newspapers, also weeklies in English, French, German and American; reams of paper poured into the Temple, added to by letters from all over the world. He looked at television news wherever he might be, and listened to the BBC. Now that one can hear the House of Commons at Question Time, and its hardly human noises, I think of his amusement. All the same he rather regretted the days when occasionally there was wit and rapid intelligence in debate, and speeches were not drearily read.

Life held great joy for him; seldom can there have been a man who got more pleasure and inspiration from beauty. He used to say of Venice: ‘If beings from another planet came to Earth they would imagine gods must have built this city.’ He loved the beauties of nature, sunshine, forests, flowers, as well as amusing company and beautiful girls, and our little French house. He spoke as if he considered himself the luckiest man alive. ‘How fortunate I have been in my private life!’ he often said. I think he gave our children this sense of beauty and joy.

He felt deep compassion for the less fortunate; he was convinced he could have improved their lot. ‘
Der Menschheit ganzer Jammer fasst mich an!
’ [The whole misery of mankind seizes hold of me] he said, quoting Faust’s words. But his country had rejected him and his ideas, and he loved life. If he was irritated by the mistakes our rulers were making he never felt they were due to evil intent; he knew the politicians were doing their best, but they were in his view perverse and foolish.

Kit felt the mysterious force within man and within nature was what we must build on
in order to survive, let alone to progress. He said it was essential to encourage the highest and he called this his doctrine of higher forms. To that extent he rejected the Christian conception ‘blessed are the poor in spirit’. He thought the poor in spirit must be helped towards greater riches, spiritually and materially, but that they were less valuable to
humanity
than was the genius or the talented man. He respected Christianity and often quoted Nietzsche: ‘it taught beasts to be kind’, a doubtful proposition in my opinion. Unfortunately I never asked him the origin of this quotation, or what Nietzsche’s actual words were.
Kind?
But about religion Kit was totally undogmatic.

As a companion he was a perennial wonder. I am not going to pretend that we never quarrelled, never had fierce arguments—that would be absurd. But living with him was not only happiness but a perpetual enrichment. On one occasion I must have annoyed him so much by disagreeing with him that he began to heap abuse upon me. Robert Skidelsky, his biographer, was with us, and after a while said, ‘Oh, Kit,
poor
Diana!’

I turned to Robert: ‘Don’t worry. One doesn’t live with Kit for forty years and get upset by a few insults.’

Later on, when Kit came to say goodnight, he said, ‘It was
dreadful
of you to say that to Robert; he will imagine I am
rude
to you.’ When I laughed, he began to laugh too.

After constant moves from place to place, always for me a painful uprooting, he found in the little Temple at Orsay his ideal house, where he decided to stay for the rest of his life. He loved France, and he liked to know he could get into a car and drive anywhere in Europe without being held up by fogs or strikes.

He frequently went to England, to see old friends, or to speak at meetings, or at the Oxford or Cambridge Unions. For four years after the war we had been refused passports, but he had discovered that a British subject can leave or return to his island at will, in time of peace; in order to get away in 1949 we had had to buy a boat. I suppose at this time he had studied the law—at any rate, there was nearly always the following dialogue when we got to Heathrow. After we had waited for a long time our luggage was taken to the
customs
, where he had nothing to declare: