Ignorance and Bliss

By Nancy Datgel

This is a story of events as seen and experienced by a private individual during the greater part of the twentieth century.

Ground covered: a child in Essex during WWI; convent school in France; encounters with a parent disabled in the war; universities, Sorbonne, Oxford; love story; personal successes; WWII; private war effort, in Berlin for the duration; Control Commission; the postwar bulge; a diplomatic post; change over to an anonymous commitment; Africa, 196061, the Ethiopian attempted coup dtat; Ghana, Sudan; Central Europe, Prague, 20 August 1968; Soviet Union; the Helsinki Agreement, CSCE; Belgrade, Madrid, Stockholm.

The manuscript closes in the last decade of the twentieth century. It could, the author wrote, have gone on for further chapters if found too short.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Mar 14, 2012
• ISBN: 9781466918405

Book preview

IGNORANCE AND BLISS

Nancy Dargel

1912 - 2006

MBA (Oxon)

OBE

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© Copyright 2012 Nancy Dargel.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

Printed in the United States of America.

ISBN: 978-1-4669-1839-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4669-1841-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4669-1840-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012904041

Trafford rev. 03/08/2012

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Contents

Preface

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

Preface

It was Christmas week 2005; she stood there, at her door-step, to say goodbye, physically very small and frail, looking up at me sadly and knowingly, with her large blue eyes; we had a very strong telepathic bond. I gently kissed her cheek, paper-thin and soft; my arms, my hands, did not touch her or squeeze her, I just kissed her. For that moment, the familiar smell of the Geneva flat, our life together, wafted around us; St Roch walked still, with his ministering angel and little dog looked up at him—It was to be the last time we would see each other and we both knew it. We left her on her terms, standing strong and independent of spirit. She died on January 28th, 2006.

I loved my mother and I offer her story to her family and friends. The manuscript of an extraordinary woman is now finally published, in her memory and for your pleasure.

Anna Curtis (nee Ann Dargel)

I

The Little Girl

She is reading herself a story. The six little rabbits ate lettuce on the rubbish heap and now they are sleeping so deeply that Mister MacGregor could pick them up one by one and put them in his sack without waking them. Lettuce is s o p o r i f i c. a new, wonderful word, long and slow-travelling, and mysterious! The child adds it to her personal collection: now she can use it, and repeat it, and hear it again and again as often as she likes.

She is three years old. She lives in her grandmother’s house in the midst of the upheavals of war-time—a war that later on will be called the Great War and later on again World War I; all that is irrelevant, for the moment. She knows that her mother is with the Red Cross, that her father is at the front, and that her three cousins, Maurice, Mordant and Maxwell, will go there too as soon as they are old enough. They will come to say goodbye, one after another; they will be in uniform and very excited; she will see their legs, wrapped in khaki bandages called puttees; she is extremely small, even for her age, and her vision of things is inevitably earth-bound.

The house is full of people—always in a hurry to do something, it seems to her. Only the wounded soldiers, who are convalescent and lie about in deck-chairs on the lawn, have time to be fairly calm. She is teaching herself to read in the books within hand’s reach—those on the bottom shelf along the corridor upstairs, unbound novels and the Strand magazine. To be sure, she only works on passages that are of real interest; in Wilkie Collins’ Moonstone she reads and re-reads everything that concerns Count Fosco. He wears a white suit and a panama hat; he has black eyes that flame like burning coals and a tame mouse in his pocket. He is extremely wicked, The little girl loves him dearly.

Her father will be wounded in the Somme. Was that something she was not supposed to know? She does not remember anyone telling her about it. She does remember being suddenly convinced that her father needed her and she must join him at once. It was hay-making time, so it must have been in June. She and her brother had spent the afternoon with their Aunt Dorothy, playing in the hayfield. Hugh, her brother, is almost two years older than Liz; he loves her blindly. On this occasion, he managed so well that it was only a few steps from home when the Aunt realized that there were not two children playing hide-and-seek along the field path behind her.

Liz too had been doing well. She climbed stiles, crossed two meadows, circumvented a large field left lying fallow, and had just reached a five-barred gate on the edge of what for her was unknown territory, when two men on bicycles appeared on the dusty road, pointed at her, whooped, and said That’s her! One of them then said I’ll get her and got off his bicycle. Liz had never seen him before, but she grasped immediately who he was: the Enemy, someone they mentioned frequently and always in a cross or offended voice. She ran for her life and the Enemy ran after her. Finally she stumbled on the uneven ground and he seized her in his big hand and carried her off, mounting his bicycle and holding her tightly under one arm like a parcel, her feet kicking at one end and her mouth screaming at the other. He rode through the village. There were people everywhere. At her grandmother’s house the gate was open and there were more people all along the drive—villagers, wounded soldiers, and big children—watching. Liz was deeply humiliated; at least she heard the enemy say as he handed her over: she ran like the very Devil. She walked in, her head held high.

She had been out since 6 o’clock and now it was past 9 and the long summer day was coming to a close. She had not done too badly, she thought. Caroline, the children’s Nurse and the entire domestic staff nowadays, undressed her, washed her, put her into her nightgown and—incomprehensibly, told her to go down to the dining-room and apologize. She could not think what for, her father needed her…

She went in and stayed near the door looking at them. There they all were, having dinner; they did not even notice her. It really was very late. The hanging lamp above the table had been lit and the family sat in a cone of light. Beyond the table, it is getting quite dark. Perhaps they can’t see her! She moves in somewhat closer and waits in her white nightdress. Uncle Fred takes her on his knee and lets her eat from his plate. He explains the thing they are eating—a small, long green vegetable they called asparagus; one takes it in one’s hand and dips it in sauce hollandaise. Delicious!! (Uncle Fred, called Uncle Fra, was seldom present. He is an ecclesiastic, an Army chaplain. He has grey hair and is married to Aunt Emily. The English family is C of E.

This takes place long before the railways in England and France and elsewhere were State-run. Here we have Aunt Emily and the minute Liz seated face to face in a railway carriage somewhere between Bishop’s Stortford and London. Liz has never been in a train before. She knows that people take the train; apparently it is the exact opposite. The train stops in the middle of the fields. The people look out of the carriage window, all on the same side, they talk excitedly and point. Then they sit still and say nothing. High up in the sky an enormous object floats and moves gently. It looks as though it were made of tin, like a biscuit-tin. It shines in the sun, very lovely to see. Liz asks what it is and her Aunt says Zeppelin. A very small airplane starts dancing round it, then dives and disappears in a flash of flame and a trail of black smoke. The big tin object grows smaller and smaller and finally disappears too. The train moves on. The people look sad, or cross, and say nothing. In London, in the middle of a huge crowd, they see Uncle Fra waiting for them. He seems to be telling Aunt Emily that they cannot do what they had come to do, but they do not say what it is. Later, she will conclude that they were taking her to visit her father in hospital but that he was too ill to see her. The train back did not leave until the end of the afternoon; her Aunt took her to the Cinema. Again, this was something unknown. The story she saw was very sad, and then suddenly terrifying. A sad man sat outside a closed door. Inside an orchestra was playing; one could see the joy of the musicians and of the people listening to them. At last the sad man was let in and could listen too, but a fat woman put a baby in his arms—its mouth was wide open, howling. The people made faces at the man and threw him out. He went into a barn and began lifting up a broody hen to take her eggs. It was then, quite unawares, that the hen suddenly became as big as a house, with eyes and wings and beak all to scale. Liz got down and made for the exit, her Aunt following. She did not know the relationship between small and far, and large and near. She trembled with fear.

There are only one or two things in her early life that Liz can still remember. There was an adventure when she was about six months old and still moved on all fours. She had crossed the floor in the maid’s room at high speed, making for the unknown—on this occasion the back stairs down to the kitchen. She came to a stop and was stretching out one hand after the other, wondering what one does when the solid ground is no longer there. Somebody rushed up and seized her at the last minute; she remembers the swift journey through the air. Another early adventure was connected with an historic occasion and was not of her own seeking. On the morning of November 11, 1918, Liz had gone to Braintree to the dancing class, where she is nearing the end of her first year of classical ballet, together with some thirty other children of the same age. Liz will be six it December. She dances in the front row, not for her merits, but so that the Mistress can see her. She is very small and very thin. The tablespoonful of Virol—a tonic with malt—that she swallows every morning and finds delicious, has no noticeable effect on her weight or on her size. All of a sudden bells start ringing—more bells ringing, all together than she could have thought possible. The children’s aunts and mothers jump up from their chairs along the wall and start talking, very loud, very excitedly, and the dancing Mistress with them. Everybody rushes out. Liz finds herself in the street, clinging to a railing on the edge of an ocean of sound and movement, a crowd of shouting, singing, dancing, running people, who without doubt might tread her underfoot and leave her in smithereens without even noticing that she was there.

Liz was returned to the school with her arms round the neck of a large dog. It may be assumed that the dog’s master had seen the child in her accordion-pleated dancing frock and ballet slippers and guessing where she came from, had then brought her back. But Liz only remembers the dog.

She will have passed her seventh birthday before she sees her father again. As soon as he gets well, they tell her. Her mother does not come often and not for more than a few days at a time. The village grocer goes to fetch her at the station, together with his goods for the shop. To be sure, there was still a carriage in the coach-house, but the stable had remained empty since the early days of the war. The family went about on foot or on a bicycle. Liz still loves words; she now has books of her own, legends, fairy-tales, Kipling’s Just So Stories where her favourites are The Cat that Walked by Himself and The Butterfly that Stamped. Suleiman-ben-Daoud, the Butterfly’s lord, called his wife Light of my Eyes and Treasure of my soul, words like music, like singing in church. She has also grown aware of linguistic differences; when her aunts talk among themselves and want to sound mysterious, that is French. Aunt Edith uses most beautiful words, such a porcellino when Liz spills something at meals, and that is Italian.

Hugh, her brother, has gone to prep school; he is a boarder and will only come home for the holidays. The house is still full of people, but Liz is the only child there. Her aunt Dorothy gives her music lessons. Her Aunt Emily teaches her arithmetic and grammar and makes her write to dictation. She has to learn a number of things by heart, the Collect for the Day, that she will not remember, but poems that will be with her for life. Her Aunt Lina teaches her nothing in particular. Aunt Lina spends much of her time visiting people who are ill, or old, or in trouble. She also does the flowers every Saturday, on the family graves in the churchyard, and on the altar inside the church. At home she does the flowers and she does the lamps; one has to cut the stalks and change the water; one has to trim the wick and fill up with paraffin. On summer evenings, with the French windows open on the garden in the twilight, Aunt Lina would sit at the little rosewood piano that had been her mother’s and play old Irish tunes. She never lit the lamp and she would go on playing until long after dark.

Life in the house is calm and orderly. They pursue their several given tasks. They gather together at given times. They pray together, the family and Caroline and the little boy who fetches the milk, all on their knees every morning in the dining-room, probably every evening as well. That, however, is something Liz cannot check. She goes to bed earlier than the adults and she, therefore, prays alone, entrusting all that is dear to her to the Good Shepherd and her Guardian Angel. Angels matter to Liz; she is aware of their presence, the rush of their wings, a living flame that is the love of God.

This was till early in the Twentieth Century. It was not the Middle Ages, Central London was lit by electricity—there had been gas-light eve in the days of Byron—but, nevertheless, in country places in deepest Essex like Sailing, the only artificial lighting came from inside the houses, there was no screen between the human dwellings below and the heavenly luminaries above. If Liz raised her eyes at night-time, the sky was thick with stars. She knew the Plough in the North, the Hunter and his Dog in the South, the Evening Star that would travel and become the Morning Star next day. In early life, when the drawers and cupboards of our mind are still fairly empty, the things we put in them seldom get lost. Liz will not forget the clear ring of the blacksmith’s hammer, the voices of the animals from farmyard, field, or pig-sty, the first waking of the birds long before the dawn and the second when the day breaks. All this has now reached a dimension outside time. Where are the big trees in front of the house, the wind singing, sighing, howling, and the pictures drawn by the branches in the moonlight, dancing and changing on her bedroom wall? In a little more than twenty years from now, the trees will be cut down to make way for an air-field; there will soon be a motorway where there was once a gravel drive.

Although she cannot know it, this is the only period in her long life that Liz will spend, if not in her parents’ home, at least in a family one. How often, in the continuous temporary accommodation of her future, we shall see her changing a lampshade, shifting a piece of furniture, polishing a metal fitting, and then viewing her work with obvious pleasure, saying: There now, that’s much more like home!

II

Setting Out

Elizabeth, mother to Liz, worked in a psychiatric home in the South of England. At the time, the place was a military hospital for men who, like her husband, had been gassed, shell-shocked, buried alive—destroyed, body and soul. It looked like any other country house, with large grounds and tennis courts. It was run like an Officers’ Mess. The house-surgeon, Colonel Forest, was the C.O. Some of the bedroom doors were locked at night, however, and you could hear men crying.

Captain Artus spent three years there. Elizabeth, firmly resolved to get him out, found employment on the premises, first as a nurse, then as Lady Superintendent, playing tennis and golf with the patients and presiding at meals; one changed for dinner. Early in 1920, her husband was given a clean bill of health and told he could live an almost normal life." The piece