Naturally, the salaries were so low that the members were rather inferior. One had hopes that our general culture was going to be on a pretty high standard, but my boss for these lectures was sitting at his desk one day and asked me what I wanted to lecture about and I gave him some subjects which might please the Greeks when all of a sudden the accountant came in absolutely white and said “There is 10,000 pounds missing from the safe, sir.” This man, who was a clergyman said, after a moment of blankness, “Oh yes, my goodness, I think I have it here.” And he had. He had it all in his pocket. He had forgotten. He transferred all the petty cash to his pocket and he was only interested in ancient history. He was working on a book about Herodotus. And so the entire funds were in his pocket — I was horrified too because my salary was coming out of it. And then in Egypt I went ’round to see the British Council representative to find out if they’d like any lectures that could be done for the Middle East, political ones especially, and I met an extraordinary man, very gloomy, who said, “Where would you like to live if you really wanted to live somewhere, old man?” So I said, “Well, really, there’s only place I really want to live. That’s in France.” He said, “Why France?” I said, “Well, I can give you a number of reasons, but just take the simplest… food.” He said, “I thought you’d say that.” Then he said, bitterly, “Do you know I’ve crossed France frequently and I always carried my food in a paper bag because I was so badly swindled one day at lunch I decided I was never going to pay for another French meal?” And this man was our cultural representative! Needless to say I didn’t go any further with this thing at all. I went back to the embassy and I stayed there.
I should perhaps say a few words about the functions of embassies and the role they play; in our crazy spy-mad age the whole question of information has been much bedevilled by the fact that all information of whatever kind has been lumped together by the spy-nuts behind the Curtain and made to sound as if it were military in scope. This is plain madness. When an embassy is appointed to a country it is perfectly normal for them to find out what is going on there, what personalities rule there, in the simple interests of business or cultural association. Of course when some countries are acting in bad faith and with bad intent their consciences prick them for they know that they are building a secret army or secret airforce and they don’t want the fact known. But the whole domain of commercial and cultural relations is helped or hindered by the knowledge of a good embassy. They study the produce of the country and put people in their own country in touch so that business deals can be arranged. They send poets and journalists and painters on short visits. They arrange for painting or films to be shown reciprocally. All this is for the best, and only in this lunatic age would it be thought of as spying. But when countries have something to hide, particularly the communist countries, and you get a spy phobia, it’s very amusing to see what is regarded as spying: all these legitimate activities which in peace time or under normal diplomatic arrangements wouldn’t be considered at all reprehensible, but in fact helpful information. For example, here I wouldn’t have to bug you for information about silkworms or about San Francisco wines; I would just ring up the board of trade and go out and get all the information I needed and send it home clear, not in cipher. Whereas, half the trouble with this problem is that what is not really spying is considered spying. For example, I spent 4½ years in Yugoslavia for my sins; that was tough. There everything was considered spying, even breathing. When you arrived at the gate you practically have a man to breathe for you, to breathe down you and on you. And when you went to the embassy he breathed on your car, and when you came out he followed in another car. And then there was a man in your house who breathed on you too. That’s how I’m so good at yoga now because I learned breathing from the secret police there. But it was perfectly foolish also, because the amount of information you can get if you really want to out of censored papers is absolutely marvellous if you know a little bit of Freud, a little bit of crossword puzzle, a little bit of this and that. The military attaché used to have great fun because he could read Yugoslav, and reading the official communiques he could follow the movements of their units of the army all over the town. For example, the artillery was largely horse-drawn, so every time they arrived in a village they put an ad in the local paper asking for farriers to shoe their horses. Thus we always knew the 37th division was at this particular place because we used to buy all the papers, even the provincial ones. I mean, if they force you to work you can really find almost anything with a bit of logic and intuition. Meanwhile, they used to do silly things. They used to put microphones in the bowl of roses on your table. Whereupon we would tape the noise of lavatory chains and fill their mikes with long long strips of water music. We played this lavatory chains noise for hours to their mikes until they got tired and moved them.
All that’s the rather futile and foolish end of diplomacy, but the serious end is fascinating, and it is interesting and it can be fruitful. As I say, acted on in good faith, it can be enormously useful between nations. It’s a pity that communications have rendered it rather suspect and rather moribund because a great personality is still a great negotiator; and I have seen even very silly personalities — I would describe Sir Anthony Eden as rather a fop, but he’s an extraordinarily good negotiator — and I saw him locking horns with a trade delegation in Yugoslavia and he was extremely bright. I wouldn’t have suspected it from his political role. And then of course we had other problems because half the world is ruled by nuts as you probably know. Or do you know?
And then the evaluation of a very trick position between church and state, for example, in Egypt. In the middle of the war — the Egyptians had declared war but they didn’t want to fight — they declared war because we asked them to. So we allowed them to man the anti-aircraft defenses of Cairo and Alexandria, which they did with considerable skill, but technically they were out of the war, so that their towns were not bombed, they were open cities. Now Farouk was a strangely divided character, very strange. On one hand rather civilised, on the other hand seething with Arab resentments, and like anyone who’s been to British public school, pretty scratched up. It was even dues what he might elect to do. While we were fighting the Germans in the desert we couldn’t really risk a political situation on an Arab basis in Egypt where, for example, the anti-aircraft defenses of Cairo might be withdrawn suddenly. It was not that the defenses themselves were so terribly important, but the towns would’ve been bombed and then the Egyptians would have panicked and we would have had an interior situation which would have benefited Rommel very much indeed. As it was, by a stroke of luck and a fluke, and some diplomacy, and the use of one tank it was stabilized. They went late one night and broke down the palace wall and told Farouk that he really must appoint Nahas Pasha who was pro-British and able to stabilize the situation. And he did do that, but he didn’t like doing it at all and it was, I suppose, a bit of a fascist act. But he had no choice. We had to do that because at one point the Germans were 40 kilometers away and it was quite clear Rommel was going to reach Cairo that evening.