Her actions were a little too cold for someone who had represented herself as an innocent virgin only a few months earlier. I was deeply disappointed in her. I told her as much. She simply wasn’t the stuff progressives are made from. Sometimes I was astonished by American conservatism. How had they had been such enthusiasts for Mussolini and, until the Führer let himself down, Hitler? Their own US Nazi Party lasted far longer than the original! Yet most Americans, though supporting Mussolini, did not really have the will to change, as the ballot boxes revealed, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, who would have qualified for euthanasia in some countries, was elected. In those first years many called him ‘the American Mussolini’. Their optimism was to be proven utterly unfounded.
I recently spoke to Mrs Cornelius about this. We sat in the window of the East and West last Friday morning in Westbourne Grove. She was having a cup of the sickly Madras coffee she enjoys and I was sipping a lassi. The owner is Mr Hira, a Hindu. He tells me that most of the people from the Indian subcontinent who work for you are the lowest class of Moslems. It is impossible to find a decent South Indian chef. His eldest son is at university, reading mathematics. They share this ambition in common with the Jews, of course.
We watched the people coming and going from the Portobello Market. On Fridays they are mostly dealers. They wear old-fashioned country-style suits, stout tweed skirts and shapeless hats woven by mad Orkneymen or else some variant of the current fashion, all black velvet and dirty lace, like Mrs Cornelius’s feckless children. They arrive early. By noon the pubs are crowded with them enjoying the euphoria of dealers everywhere, talking of legendary coups and fabulous profits. I find it impossible to get served.
On Fridays we usually walk up Kensington Park Road to have a drink at Finch’s. Then we take lunch at the fish restaurant there. Lately it has become too expensive and attracts the wrong sort of clientele. We content ourselves with the Windmill across from the Odeon. Very few dealers ever use the place, which is run by the better type of Greek family. The restaurant does a very good lamb joint. I always have two helpings of their roast potatoes. They remain well priced and friendly. Mrs Cornelius has a soft spot for them because her daughter was almost born there. She reminds me how the young Jerry rushed into the Alhambra, the nearest pub, to call the ambulance on their phone. He returned half an hour later, just as the ambulance was arriving, and he was almost too drunk to climb in. She was in labour. The Irish clientele of the Alhambra, under the impression that his sister was already born, had insisted Jerry help them toast the baby’s good health. Catherine was born, as she put it, in the shadow of Wormwood Scrubs. Actually it was Ducane Road Hospital, one of the best in the kingdom. I have nothing but admiration for the staff there.
The specialist there asked, for the first time, if I had had my operation on medical or religious grounds. Medical! I cried. At least he did not automatically assume me to be Jewish. I almost kissed his hand. Mrs Cornelius insisted the chips at the Windmill had brought Catherine on. ‘Not many people get ter be Windmill girls at her age, eh, Ivan?’ She was back at home by the next day. She said she never had any trouble conceiving them and hardly any less trouble popping them out. She was an amiable if inattentive mother.
Mrs Cornelius reminded me that almost any political figure who showed any personality was called someone’s Mussolini. ‘It was amazin’,’ she said, ‘just ‘ow many people go through their entire lives lookin’ for someone to boss ‘em about! Some bastard starts shoutin’ orders at ‘em an’ they brighten up like a brass knocker! Hermann told me Adolf’s war record was amazing. ‘E loved obeying orders, too. Takes one ter know one.’
Given how widely travelled she was, Mrs Cornelius has a rather simplistic and stereotypical view of foreigners, especially Germans.
She remains convinced ‘they’ll do it again’. Do what again? I ask her. Defend themselves against their exploiters? All Hitler wanted was a Polish Corridor, and the French and English used it as an excuse to attack him. They were eager for the chance. He was liberating the Poles from Jewish dominance. She must remember Germany during the Weimar days! No honest person could walk the street in safety. Male and female prostitutes were everywhere. The common people were horribly demoralised. Their intellectuals had become cynical, their teachers hopeless. The only stability left was in institutions like the army. Where were they supposed to turn to avoid the civil war everyone predicted? Would the Allies have stepped in, as they did in Spain, if there had been internal war? No. They were waiting only for Germany to tear herself apart. They hoped any winner would turn on the Soviet Union and rid them of the other threat. They were foolish to expect that particular free lunch. The Americans made the same mistake in Vietnam. There are no free lunches in realpolitik. The Germans themselves found that out to their cost. The British learned that lesson from their centuries of colonialism, which was why they were so reluctant to enter the Common Market. Or the New German Empire as Major Nye insists on calling it. I hardly ever see him these days. He is on his smallholding in Kent. His wife is dead and his daughters are married. He says he’s never been happier.
I saw him several times in Rome during that uncertain period. I know now that he worked for intelligence, keeping an eye on the Nazis as well as the Fascists. He took the Nazis seriously, though he was not entirely uncritical of them. He admitted to finding Göring, for all his corpulence and vulgarity, charming. ‘It was impossible,’ he says, ‘to believe that a man who looked and dressed like a lovesick baron in a Viennese operetta could be capable of evil.’
‘Perhaps he was not capable of evil.’ I have always been able to take the broad view.
Sometimes Major Nye is a little too judgemental. After all, look at the British record of genocide. I find it ironic that the survivors of the Irish famines and clearances were the same men who lynched Negroes in New York and joined the American Army to fire into unarmed Indian villages, a rather more direct and efficient act of genocide than any their own families ever suffered.
History and God alone put us in a position to be aggressors or victims. It is not unusual these days for a person to know both roles in a lifetime. I cannot find it in me to judge all those now branded as ‘war criminals’. Were all Germans villains? All Jews heroes? Surely it is time to forgive and forget? You who never knew the all-pervading stink of fear filling your guts, eating your bones, taking control of your brain and bowels, should not judge us who have had such experiences. Believe me. I am not excusing anything. The death camps went too far. But remember, there were only four of them built. The rest were concentration camps.
In Rome Major Nye made an appointment to visit my office. I received very few people there and was glad to welcome him. He took my mind off so many other matters. Of course, I had no hint of his real reason for seeing me. He was interested in my inventions. Years later he told me how part of his brief was to check up on my Land Leviathan. By 1931 rumours of my great moving battle tower were rife in Europe.
Since Mussolini’s territory bordered their own, the British were chiefly interested in learning his African ambitions. They were inclined to think of him as an ally. Most British politicians admired Mussolini. Chamberlain, Eden and Churchill spoke warmly of his intelligence and acumen. David Lloyd George, who invented the National Health Service, saw him as a fellow ‘wizard’. Sir Oswald Mosley, under the influence of his wife and sister-in-law, left the British Labour Party to form the British Union of Fascists. All these people believed Hitler a parvenu, a coarse interpreter of Mussolini’s genius. Certainly, without Mussolini a Hitler would probably not have emerged in Germany. And without Hitler, of course, Mussolini might still be keeping a steady hand on Italy’s tiller. Like us all, he fell under a madman’s spell.