But as it happened I did meet someone while my friend Peter and his companion were up to whatever. There was a girl at the Gezira nightclub called Kitty Costello; we walked hand in hand round the racecourse under the stars, caressed by the hot desert wind; we talked about love. And I must in some way have loved her, because I still remember her name. And we seemed to have got what we wanted. But about even this I had to make a joke to my sister: ‘I said I was a ballet dancer and executed an intricate pas-de-quatre in the middle of a racecourse.’ My new friend Kitty and I did not plan to meet again.
I had a letter from Mervyn on his education course in Beirut –
I thought I had better report on myself to you and also ask for your reassurance that you are not beating up the local clubs every day. This is a likeable place. The object of the course, so I am told, is to inspire an interest in citizenship. The chaps are earnest in the extreme, and I am sure they could not play Up Jenkins even if they tried. They like reading well-thumbed works on economics.
We had to give lectures, so for the avoidance of work I have selected two obscure legal subjects on which there are library textbooks and I give an incredibly boring half-hour.
Beyrouth is pleasant enough: the swimming is good and I am sorry to say I have been hearty enough to bathe before breakfast. The hotels are pretty empty, most people having gone up into the hills. So that any adventures that might be likely to befall me are extremely unlikely.
Have you had leave? Do let me know how it goes and who you spent it with and who you had to avoid spending it with.
There is an excellent library. All the chaps make a dive for K. Marx, which leaves the whole of the poetry section for me. Also those nice books that were coming out in England on the paintings of folks like Van Dyck (Gogh?) So I sit reading John Donne and looking at Art photographs surrounded by scratching pens amassing copious notes on nutrition, public health, sewage and drainage. I wish you were here. We could put on a shocking prig act.
In Cairo there was trouble brewing between the troops on leave — the 78th Division of which the Irish Brigade were part — and the local population. This was August 1944 and it was felt that the war should be about to be over but was not. The party-going became more obstreperous. We were told that we might bump into King Farouk in a nightclub, so we sat around and banged our glasses on the table and sang ‘King Farouk King Farouk hang your bollocks on a hook’. Out in the street the troops were angry at being pickpocketed and ripped off by traders; and it was said that boot blacks were flicking boot polish on to their uniforms. In August there was a full-scale riot by troops of the 78th Division with vehicles being overturned and windows smashed. The new commanding officer of the LIR, Bala Bredin, was reported as saying, ‘There will be no peace until we have them safely back in the line.’ So the rest period in Egypt for the whole Division was curtailed, and we found ourselves on our way back to Italy.
I wrote to my father, ‘I’m not really sorry … I hope soon to be able to visit Florence and Pisa and Siena, and perhaps in a little while there will be Venice or Nice.’
In Cairo I must have managed to do some sightseeing, because I wrote home that the Sphinx had ‘a pile of anti-air-raid sandbags under his chin, which gave him the appearance of having toothache’.
The news from home was that my father and stepmother, having been released from prison, were now under house arrest near Newbury, and could not travel for more than a few miles without police permission. But the family, consisting of my sister and younger brother and our two small half-brothers, were now having the chance to reassemble again. My sister wrote to me, ‘We all went for a vast picnicking bicycling expedition: Daddy looks quite wonderful with a pair of clips on his trousers and an ancient cap turned back to front like a butcher’s boy.’ And then of a weekend to which she took my two old school friends who were temporarily back in England with wounds — ‘We all sat around till 3.30 a.m. listening to Poppa discoursing fascinatingly on the theme of Will to (a) Comfort, (b) Power, (c) Achievement — Superman to the Child and so on — with a bit of Democracy v. Fascism thrown in.’
My own attitude to the war at this time was that it was just something to be got on with — no more questions about ethics or justification. And it seems that my father did not go on about the war much now either: he was thinking about what he would say or write when it was over. He had professed to be a fan of Nietzsche but he was also now a critic. His line was that what Nietzsche had seen as the ‘Will to Power’ was a comparatively primitive affair; what was demanded of the ‘higher type’ of man was rather a ‘Will to Achievement’. I had not been able to read much Nietzsche yet (his books were almost unobtainable in wartime England) but it seemed to me that my father had got his own reading wrong: what Nietzsche was on about was not the ability to exercise power over other people, but a power (if this was the word) over oneself. That is, one needed the ability with part of oneself to observe and be critical of other parts of oneself: and by this possibly to reorder them. But this my father did not seem to have recognised — although he did have the capacity, sometimes, to laugh at exaggerated parts of himself. I don’t think I talked much with Mervyn about Nietzsche, but Mervyn seemed to me to illustrate, with his quiet and amused irony, more of what Nietzsche meant by a ‘higher’ man than what had been envisaged by my father. I didn’t talk much with Mervyn about my father; in later life he would say about him just — ‘A man should have the courage to say what he thinks.’
In my own letters to my father during my time in Egypt I was still plunging about on difficult and not very well thought-out ground; but usually in efforts to understand the daft predicament of war in which I found myself –
I think the Hellenists of the 18th and 19th centuries shrank from the acceptance of ‘horror’ in nature because they did not realise what far greater potentialities for horror there are in the unnatural man. To a sensitive spirit of this generation the ruthless sense of doom in nature is not a quarter so horrifying as the miserable sense of futility when in contact with the ‘unnatural’ man of the present day. Anyone who has fought in the last two wars must realise this. It is incredible that there are sane men who believe that by renouncing natural life they can alter it or be immune from it. But could they not learn to make deals with it?
And then –
There is an interesting man in my Company called Desmond Fay who before the war was an active communist. He is intelligent and very reasonable; and when we feel earnest enough we talk of this and that. And the more we talk the less is the difference that I can see between the conceptions of the communist and the fascist corporate state. But then the only training I have had in the theory of Fascism was in the Pamphlets that you sent me when I was to debate on the subject at the Abinger [my prep school] Debating Society.