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CH RO NICLES OH W ASTED TIM E M ALCOM M UGGERIDGE P THE INFERNAL GROVE opens with the author The Infernal Grove in Geneva preparing a survey of co operative movements throughout the world, a work the object of which both then and subsequently escaped him. Then it was back to India, as assistant editor of the ‘Journa Calcutta Statesman. lists follow authority as sharks do a liner’, and soon he was at the Court of Lady Willingdon in Simla. ‘ “I’ve heard of you”, the Viceroy said, a touch of grimness in his voice. It seemed better than nothing.’ Back to London and a job on Londoner’s Diary in the Bruce Lockhart Evening Standard. handled diplomats, Randolph Churchill politicians, and Malcolm Muggeridge was left with sudden deaths and the appointment of new headmasters to minor public schools. From this he was rescued by the war. Inevitably he ended up in Intelligence, working side by side with Kim Philby and studying invisible inks and the mysteries of cyphering and coding. Thus equipped he was posted to Louren^o Marques where he spied dutifully upon his German opposite number - ‘the only discovery I made was that Dr Wertz wore a hair-net in the privacy of his room - an interesting but scarcely significant, item of intelli gence’. He cultivated the arts of bribery, made judicious use of the local prostitutes as a weapon against the enemy and was probably responsible for the destruction of a U boat. Thus back to Europe, the liberation of Paris and the gloomy glories of the Rothschild mansion in the Avenue Marigny. The final scene is Westminster Abbey when continued on back flap Chronicles of Wasted Time Part 2: The Infernal Grove By the same author THE THIRTIES SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL FOR GOD CHRONICLES OF WASTED TIME: i: THE GREEN STICK In Fontana Books JESUS REDISCOVERED MUGGERIDGE THROUGH THE MICROPHONE TREAD SOFTLY FOR YOU TREAD ON MY JOKES By Malcolm Muggertdge and A. R. Vidler PAUL: ENVOY EXTRAORDINARY MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE Chronicles of Wasted Time 2 The Infernal Grove Till I turn from Female Love, And root up the Infernal Grove, I shall never worthy be To step into Eternity. - Blake COLLINS St James’s Place, London 1973 William Collins Sons & Co Ltd London • Glasgow • Sydney • Auckland Toronto • Johannesburg FOR MY EVER-DEAR CHILDREN: LEONARD, JOHN AND VALENTINE, AND THE OTHER THREE THAT HAVE COME TO US THROUGH THEM! SYLVIA, ANNE AND GERRIT-JAN First published 1973 © Malcolm Muggeridge 1973 isbn o 00 215123 5 Set in Monotype Imprint Made and printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd, Frome and London Contents i The Iron Gates page 7 2 Grinning Honour 72 3 On Secret Service 120 4 The Victor’s Camp M00 Index 273 The Iron Gates I Let us roll all our strength and all Our Sweetness up into one ball, And tear our pleasures with rough strife Through the iron gates of life - Andrew Marvell O! dreadful is the check - intense the agony - When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see; When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again; The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain. - Emily Bronte A passionate tumultuous age will overthrow everything, pull every thing down; but a revolutionary age that is at the same time reflective and passionless leaves everything standing but cunningly empties it of significance. - Kierkegaard IN THE AUTUMN of 1933 I came to Geneva from Rosiniere, where I had been staying after my Moscow adventure, to take a temporary job at the International Labour Office, then part of the now defunct League of Nations. Kitty and the two children and I had a small apartment in the Rue de Lausanne overlooking the Lake and the Jardin des Anglais. The stern, forbidding Kremlin seemed far away, with its Red Flag endlessly flying; by night arc-lit to make a pool of blood in the surround ing darkness. As were also the brown-shirted bully-boys and braided embonpoint maidens roaming the streets of Berlin in search of cowering Jewish shopkeepers. It was a snug little retreat, tucked away among mountains; more like a stage-set or a willow-pattern than an actual place, with steamers puffing to and fro across the Lake, and pretty Renaissance-style houses, their gardens reaching down to the Lake 8 The Infernal Grove shore, recalling Mme de Stael, with her tall, red-headed Benjamin Constant in attendance, and their interminable rhythm of meals and talk and talk and meals. Then, as now, a great storm raged beyond the snow-capped mountains, standing guard like majestic sentries; their heads rosy at dawn, shining white by day, and in the evening scarlet. I comforted myself by recalling the many honourable precedents for thus taking refuge in this particular sanctuary. For instance, Rousseau wearing Armenian dress and seated at his crochet work; or Voltaire, an earlier version of Bernard Shaw, growing rich and famous by shocking and thrilling those for whom the tumbrils were already waiting. As today there are the millionaire colonists of Gstad, and the lords of show busi ness scattered about the cantons where the Inland Revenue men cease from troubling and the wealthy are at rest. It was through David Blelloch that I came to hear of the ILO job, and thanks to his kind offices that I got it; he being the son-in-law of Robert Dell, Guardian Paris correspondent during my time in Manchester, who had now been transferred to Geneva to report the doings of the League of Nations. I used to run into Dell there from time to time; still gloved, cane in hand, shoes of patent leather, soft hat rakishly tilted, reminiscing about Anatole France and the villainies of the Quai d’Orsay. Employment of some kind I urgently needed, as once again I had practically no money. So I was greatly beholden to Blelloch and his wife Sylvia, who were uniformly kind and generous to Kitty and me while we were in Geneva. The ILO, brain-child of Albert Thomas its first Director-General, was set up at the same time as the League of Nations in the mood of ebullience which followed the 1914-18 war, the intention being to re inforce the League’s machinery for safeguarding international peace by equivalent machinery for promoting social justice, on a basis of fair wages and humane working conditions. Alas, despite Albert Thomas’s valiant efforts and ardent oratory, as little progress seemed to have been made towards the realisation of social justice as of peace. By the time I arrived on the scene, Thomas was dead, and his place had been taken by an English don and sometime civil servant named Harold Butler, who accorded me a brief interview when I took up my temporary post. He had to a marked degree the curious, disconcerting way dons had in those days, when one was supposed to be conversing with them, of seeming to have dozed off and to be muttering in their sleep. The section of the ILO to which I was posted had overflowed from the newly constructed main building into a temporary structure in the