BOOKS

Unlike Rupert Brooke, John Corn- ford, Richard Hillary, each of whose tragi-

cally broken-off lives suggests the final chord of the prelude to a composition never written — a prelude complete in itself and beautifully intimating the main themes of the work to follow — the life of Esmond Romilly suggests very little more than broken-offness. This 'short life' reads like an account of the boyhood and youth of a future political leader, general or business tycoon, whose significance can only be confirmed by a great future — like the early life of a Northcliffe, a Beaver- brook, or of Romilly's uncle, Winston Churchill. True, Esmond wrote two works of reportage which retain even today their Immediacy and freshness (and which, in- cidentally, when quoted here, show up the thesis-like quality of Mr Ingram's prose):

Out of Bounds, written in collaboration with his brother Giles, about their public- school education at Wellington in the early Thirties; and Boadilla, about Esmond's experience of fighting in the Spanish Civil

War- But their very accomplishment as journalistic reportage gives one the feeling that the importance of Esmond could only be realised through his conquest of much larger worlds than those described. What they show is that Esmond had a remark- able grasp of the material of public events. Everything about him — his energy,, vital- ity, courage, gifts of leadership, warmth and generosity, as well as his much noted

unscrupulousness, pointed to the future great man.

Esmond's mother, Nellie Romilly — nee Flozier and sister of Clementine, wife of Winston Churchill — was a loud, confused, overbearing matriarch who adored her elder son, Giles, and resented Esmond who was two years younger. The boys' father, Colonel Romilly, was a victim of

the first world war, having suffered a serious head wound in May 1915. Colonel Romilly was a void in the lives of his sons whilst Nellie was a superactive chaotic post-

Edwardian volcano.

The corpse-like military father and the very vocal imperialist mother are like characters in an Auden-Isherwood. Thirties Play. (Probably the two brothers came to feel this themselves.) Mr Ingram quotes

some lines from their schoolfellow Gavin Ewart which appeared in The Wellingto- rtian in November 1933 (when Ewart was 16):

And Maxwell, hovering round like a kite. Said, 'Read this poem I wrote last night. It's good.'

While by himself the elder Romilly Delivered an introspective homily on motherhood.'

This shows so obviously the influence of

Auden's The Orators that — remembering,

Brave bored brothers

Stephen Spender

REBEL: THE SHORT LIFE OF ESMOND ROMILLY by Kevin Ingram

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, L12.95

too, that Auden's disciple Cuthbert Wors- ley was a schoolmaster at Wellington at this time — one may wonder whether the public-school rebellion of the 1930s was not an offshoot of Auden's early poems, with their lampooning of colonels, gran- nies, nannies, invalids who were the rulers of 'England, this country of ours where nobody is well'. The attack on the public schools is more a surrealistic attempt to treat a neurosis than politically revolution- ary, though politics came more and more into it with the incursions of Fascism. The revolutionary methods of The Airman's Journal in The Orators in their wild high spirits appealed, surely, to schoolboys: A preliminary bombardment by obscene telephone messages for not more than two hours destroys the morale already weakened by predictions of defeat made by wireless- controlled crows and card-packs. Shock troops equipped with wire-cutters, spanners and stink bombs, penetrating the houses by infiltration, silence all alarm clocks, screw down the bathroom taps and remove plugs and paper from the lavatories.

Mr Ingram, perhaps wisely, refrains from psychoanalysing his subject. Yet if we are to hear about examples of Esmond's lying, boorishness and unscrupulous be- haviour at school and shortly after, it is not enough just to be in possession of the evidence. Some attempt must be made, surely, to explain these things in the light of Esmond's and Giles's psychology. Their mother did not love Esmond but ostenta- tiously loved Giles and she showed her feelings. T. C. Worsley is cited here:

Giles as a schoolboy did not know whether to hate his protective mother or to love her. Esmond was undivided in his hate — the lack of any such division in his character was his great strength.

The 'case' of Esmond is surely that, feeling at an early age unloved by his mother, and his father being a kind of perambulating vacuum, he wished to make himself loved by people for those very qualities on acount of which his mother, as he supposed, rejected him. He forced his boorishness on people, demanding loudly that they accept him for it.

Gavin Ewart once made the brilliant observation to me that whereas Esmond looked like one of those square chocolates that have a hard centre and Giles looked like one of those round ones that have a soft centre, in fact Esmond had a soft centre and Giles a hard one. Giles de- veloped an inner hardness and callousness in order to resist his mother's cosseting. Esmond developed a hard exterior in order to cover over the sensitivity of the boy who felt rejected.

In the following statement about himself by Esmond, which is very characteristic, there is a touching ambiguity. He takes up a rebellious position because he thinks that this will make him loved and in the same breath turns against himself for doing so. Among other interesting things, this pas- sage reveals his fundamental honesty:

At first I thought that being a 'Communist' might gain for me added respect and even popularity at Wellington. I know a good many people who longed to achieve a reputa- tion by this means. Very few succeeded for, as with me, the colossal conceit which accompanied their pose absolutely undid any effect that orginality might have achieved.

From the age of 13, Esmond looked and behaved as though he was two or three years older than his actual age; not older in the sense of being more learned and more imaginitive, like the young Milton, but simply 15 when he was 13, 16 when he was 14, like a post-dated cheque. He could easily have written editorials for the Daily Mirror at the age of 15. His relationship with Giles resembled that of a dissimilar twin born at the same time as his brother, but strikingly different in appearance and most of his outward behaviour. But, under the contrast, in some ways Giles and Esmond had identical characteristics. Both were gifted journalists (Giles had literary gifts beyond journalism), both were ex- tremely brave, and, au fond, both were extremely bored. What each did was nearly always in reaction to this boredom which perhaps derived from the atmosphere of the family home in Pimlico Road — its mixture of motherly nonsense and the father's nullness.

Esmond himself attributed his more outrageous behaviour to boredom. With Giles, boredom seemed almost a vocation. When an undergraduate, tired of reading a Greek philosopher and a French novelist, whose names on the spine of each volume Nellie Romilly pronounced as PLUTO and

PROUT (so Giles told me), he would lie in bed until noon, when the earliest edition of the Evening Standard in which the Londoner's Diary appeared, and then get up and go out to buy it. For both brothers, the the ultimate and perhaps the only answer to boredom was some extreme form of action. For Esmond fighting on the Madrid front was an extension of the vagabond life which he had been leading in London in 1936 as dogsbody for the firm of World Film News, which he found not quite active enough. With characteristic candour he explained: 'However strongly I sympathised with the cause of the Spanish people, no doubt if my circumstances in London had been completely satisfactory, I should have gone no further than sym- pathy.'

Giles went to Spain largely because my friend Tony Hyndman, ex-guardsman, with whom he was then involved, joined the International Brigade and persuaded Giles to accompany him. I visited them both at the International Brigade head- quarters at Albacete. Soon after this Tony, who was sick already when he left Eng- land, deserted, his nerve broken by fight- ing in the battle of Jarama. Giles also deserted but for a reason the opposite of Tony's — in order to fight. He had discovered, on his return to headquarters from the front, that he was kept hanging around at Albacete became his mother, using her influence with Winston Chur- chill, had managed to persuade the Spanish Republican authorities that he should be kept away from the fighting. He deserted in order to demand from the political commissars of the International Brigade that as punishment he should be sent to the front. There he took part in one of the bloodiest battles of the war at Brunete but was unhurt.

Giles regarded the communist leaders of the Brigade with detached amusement. He treasured their politicised use of langauge — for example, he would quote the Glaswegian Kerrigan saying to a packed meeting of the British Battalion, 'Com- rades, we will now unanimously send a spontaneious telegram to Harry Polit,' then secretary of the British Communist Party).

Giles, returned to England and led for a time an East End communist life; later he became a journalist working for the Daily Express. Philip Toynbee's remark quoted here saying that he became a 'ruthless communist' is, of course, absurd. He was far too self-denigratingly ironic to become a ruthless anything. The Daily Express sent him to Norway as their correspondent. When the Germans invaded Norway he was taken prisoner and eventually sent to the prison at Wulzburg and then to Col- ditz. In collaboration with Michael Alexan- der, he wrote a book about his experiences as one of those prisoners of war who had famous relatives, The Privileged Night- mare. Some years later, after an unhappy marriage, he committed suicide.

In 1937 Esmond eloped with Decca Mitford, one of the brilliant Mitford sis- ters, daughters of Lord and Lady Redes- dale. They went to the Basque country where he tried to earn money by writing about the Civil Wars as a freelance journal- ist. He persuaded Lady Redesdale to approve their engagement, and in May 1939 he and Decca had a proper family wedding in Bilbao. They returned to Eng- land and after a period of living in a rambling house on the river at Rotherhithe, where they gave uproarious bottle parties, and after travelling to Corsi- ca and Munich, they ended up in America where they made friends who would have been the greatest help in Esmond's career had he lived. Americans understood his tremendous energy and were amused by his bravura. Then Esmond went off alone to become a trainee in the Canadian Air Force, after which he returned to England where he got the position of observer in the RAF. A few days before Decca was to come over from America and join him in England he was killed in his aircraft making a raid on Hamburg on 30 November 1941.

There is little doubt that had Esmond survived his name would now be a house- hold word. The question that teases the mind is whether he would have been a force for good or for ill, an exploiter or a benefactor. He was a rebel, certainly, but in no true sense a revolutionary. His contemporaries noted that he had some of the characteristics of a power-monger. Myself, I think that his ruthlessness and delinquency were only the cover of a precocious youth of Churchillian energy striving to escape from the straitjacket of any kind of institutional life imposed on him. In such dealings as I had with him, I remember him as polite, decent, warm- hearted and truthful, though gauche. I think that his qualities of warmth and affection would have won out. As for Giles, he lacked the energy to break out of his chrysalis, which when he escaped from his German prison in the last days of the war, was, it is pleasant to imagine, a peasant girl's dirndl quite like that which I had once seen him wearing on a Tyrolean holiday in 1934 at the village inn of Miedes.