Kim Philby Read online

  It was a good time. I am sure that Kim and Michael, with a year of Cambridge behind them, must have found me irritatingly schoolboyish, but they were generally tolerant. The only sinister character we met was a smooth rich Hungarian who got into conversation with us at the Danube pool. He took us out to a sumptuous dinner under the stars, followed by a trip on the river in his speedboat. His intentions turned out to be strictly dishonourable, but I fear he had no return at all for his outlay.

  The time came for our journey back to England. Since the bike and sidecar seated only two, and since only Kim drove, Michael and I had to take it in turns to go by rail. It fell to Michael to take the train to Vienna, where we were to meet him at the Westbahnhof. Our rendezvous arrangements never made proper allowance for delay or mishap. As far as I can recall, Michael simply had to hang about the station until we turned up. Kim and I had progressed only fifty miles from Budapest when, in the village of Bábolna, we broke down: a large nail through one of the tyres, and other troubles now forgotten. There was no hope of any help that day: the entire village was drunk, celebrating some unidentified occasion. We joined wholeheartedly in the celebrations, but afterwards had nowhere to sleep. A kindly and still fairly sober farmer or horse breeder offered us room in his stables; passing between the backsides of two long rows of horses, we sank gratefully into the straw of a small windowless barn at the end of the building, happily unaware of the rats. In the morning heads were clear, the sun shining and the bike soon repaired. Reasoning that as Michael had waited so long he would not mind waiting longer, we made a detour to Bratislava in Czechoslovakia, largely to buy The Times and find out what was happening in the final Test. It was late in the day when we reached Vienna.

  From there we continued to Salzburg, Munich, Cologne, Liège, Brussels and finally Wissant, between Boulogne and Calais. We were not, I think, complete philistines. I remember our standing in Vienna in almost shocked silence before a Raphael Madonna, and listening in a Salzburg courtyard to Mozart. But generally the journey was uneventful. Somewhere in Austria we thought we would sleep in the open to save money, but were driven indoors by thick mist and dew. In the Rhineland, Kim had a letter from home saying that St John Philby had turned Moslem. Kim made light of it, but I suspect that he was a little distressed that – whether for political reasons or not – his father had renounced atheism or agnosticism or whatever had been his exact brand of scepticism.

  We finished up at Wissant because Kim’s mother, Dora, his three young sisters, Diana, Patricia and Helena, aged about ten, eight and six, and a male cousin of Kim’s age were staying there in what we regarded as a truly palatial hotel. Dora Philby, with her red hair and husky voice, was very attractive; much the best looking, I thought, of the mothers of my various friends. Kim moved into the hotel with the others, while Michael and I found a modest pension which gave us full board and lodging for five bob. We spent much of our time at the hotel, taking illicit baths and playing auction bridge with the Philby family. After four days I had to return to London to take part in a family celebration. There was no room inside the bus to Boulogne, so I sat on the roof rack with the luggage: a suitable finale to the whole enterprise.

  So ended my first look at the outside world, and it enormously whetted my appetite for more – preferably in the company of Kim if possible. He was a marvellous travelling companion, intensely interested in everything and impervious to discomforts and setbacks. Also, although I think he never formally studied languages after doing School Certificate French, he was an excellent linguist. His German was already more than adequate and he had some Hungarian.

  Kim’s politics at this time, September 1930, were still somewhat vague – certainly left wing, but he had not yet acquired the knowledge of or interest in Marxism that marked his third and fourth year at Cambridge. Michael Stewart was seemingly more interested in art than politics. In later years I met him once or twice at Acol Road, but he was never an intimate of the Kim–Lizy or Kim–Aileen homes. After the war he had a distinguished career in the diplomatic service, became British ambassador in Athens and received a knighthood.

  In October 1930 I went up to Christ Church, Oxford. It was nearly two years before I managed to get abroad again with Kim. I saw relatively little of him during this period, but from time to time we watched cricket or football together. Occasionally we met at Lord’s. Indeed a kind of coterie, including some Oxford friends of mine, would gather in the upper tier of seats by the sight-screen at the Nursery End. At times Kim’s father turned up, sometimes in the company of Harold Hardy the Cambridge mathematician. On one memorable occasion St John Philby found himself sitting next to Bertram Thomas, who – to St John’s intense disappointment – had beaten him by a year or two to the first crossing of the Rub’ al Khali. I expected fireworks but instead the two conversed gravely and politely, like two old Arabs over a hubble-bubble.

  I have no real recollection of Kim’s father before the early 1930s. I never got to know him well but always liked him. In spite of his quarrelsome reputation he was invariably pleasant to me – perhaps more because he had known my grandfather, father and uncle than because I was a friend of Kim; unlike Kim, he looked back on his school and university days with great affection. He was small and stocky, with a beard – unusual for his generation – which gave him an air of distinction and made it easy to imagine him in Arab costume. Dora Philby has sometimes been pictured as a meek character whom St John treated as a doormat. No one who knew her could have thought of her in this way; and Elizabeth Monroe’s very well-informed and documented study, Philby of Arabia,2 makes clear what a resourceful and courageous woman she was and how much her husband depended on her. Kim was often rather contemptuous of his mother, but when he was in trouble in 1955, he turned to her rather than anyone else; nor did she let him down.

  On such occasions as I saw father and son together, the relationship always seemed friendly, relaxed and adult. While Kim can have agreed with few of St John’s political views, he respected his realism and outspokenness. He quoted to me something his father had said about India. One of the arguments then currently used against home rule was that only 10 per cent of Indians were literate. St John pointed out that 10 per cent of 400 million was forty million, about the same as the then population of Britain: why use forty million literate British to govern India instead of forty million literate Indians? For the life of me I could not see a flaw in this argument, as far as it went, and I’m not sure that I can today. Another of his father’s remarks quoted by Kim was ‘The Times has a profound distrust of the expert’. St John believed strongly in experts; he was one himself, and for all his pugnacity he recognised expertise in others. I think Kim inherited something of the same attitude.

  In the long vacation of 1931, for family reasons, I stayed in England. Kim went off to Yugoslavia, in particular Bosnia. He had a strong attachment to the former Austro-Hungarian Empire – not of course its political system, but its lands and peoples. The most beautiful parts of Europe, he thought, were to be found within those old boundaries, and whenever he had the opportunity to travel he went there: in 1930 (twice), 1931 and 1932, not to mention his long stay in Vienna in 1933–34.

  In the summer of 1932 we made our second trip. This was the most ambitious of the three. We planned to visit Yugoslavia, Albania and, if possible, Bulgaria. Kim had already left England, and I visited the Albanian consulate in London to seek a visa. The consulate turned out to be a small British solicitor’s office in the City. Visas were no doubt filed somewhere between Torts and Wills. The Bulgarian visas had not yet reached London, but we had hopes of picking them up at the Bulgarian legation in Tirana. I left London in mid-July, and met Kim in Paris; where he had been in France, I cannot remember. We were going to have to do a lot of walking in the Balkans, as means of transport from one place to the next, and decided to get ourselves into condition in the Black Forest. We walked there in hilly country for three or four days, gradually lengthening the day’s stint to something
over twenty miles. Our plan was to go on to Munich for a day or two and then take the train to Venice. But a crucial general election was going on in Germany, and Kim, who was by now extremely interested in German politics, felt impelled to make a diversion to Berlin; he had a strong journalistic urge to be wherever things were happening, or might happen. We had already attended a rally in Stuttgart, where Alfred Hugenberg (of the far right) spoke. So we separated for a week: Kim to Berlin, I to Munich, where I spent the time trying to learn a little German and walking endlessly until I knew almost every street in the city. When I felt bored or lonely, I would go to Munich Hauptbahnhof and watch the expresses leave for exotic parts of Europe. Kim duly rejoined me. He was keeping a diary on this trip, but though I read the Berlin entries I do not recall anything of them. I do recall that he wrote, ‘Milne has found lodgings that boast the prettiest housemaid in Munich.’ This was news to me; but his views and mine on female attraction seldom agreed. Certainly she was a charming and friendly girl.

  On the eve of the election we attended a vast Nazi torchlight rally at which Hitler spoke. Unlike Kim, I could not follow much of what was said, but that mattered little; he had said it all before, many times. What impressed and alarmed us was the totally uncritical attitude of so many perfectly ordinary German men and women. Our predominant feeling was contempt for the whole circus – the showmanship, the schoolchildren prancing round in gymnastic displays, the stupid petit-bourgeois citizens swallowing it all. Politically I think that at this stage we were more concerned over the threat to the left, even the moderate left, than to world peace. A day or two later we sat in a workers’ café listening to the ominous election results on the radio: Nazi gains everywhere. The main left-wing parties had held their ground, but most of the small parties had been almost annihilated. Just how far Kim had moved towards communism or Marxism at this time I find it difficult to judge: my political education had a long way to go. According to his own story, his final conversion came in the early summer of 1933. Sitting in the Munich café, we applauded both Social Democrat and Communist victories.

  Our fortnight in Germany, intended primarily as a loosener before we tackled the Balkans, must have left a deep impression on Kim, as it did on me. The Nazis were not yet in power, there were no concentration camps, Germany was still a free country; but we felt we had seen into the future.

  We took a night train over the Brenner Pass, spent two or three hours in Verona, and reached Venice in the afternoon. This was not a Baedeker tour and we did no justice at all to Venice: our boat was leaving for Dubrovnik at 6.30 the next morning. We asked the proprietress of the albergo to call us at five. She forgot, but at five past five, for no discoverable reason, a brass band struck up outside our window and woke us: I have never been able to think entirely ill of Italy since.

  So here we were in the Adriatic, two healthy undergraduates in good physical training, on a sunny August day of 1932. We had nothing with us but rucksacks. At least half the weight in mine consisted of books I was reading for greats – Plato, Aristotle, the Greek and Roman historians – and a heavy raincoat which I never wore. I had but two shirts – one on, one off – and no spare shoes: when my shoes wore out, as they did twice, we had to wait while they were repaired. No spare trousers, no medicines. I think Kim’s outfit was much the same, except that he had a camera. For money each of us had merely a bank letter of credit, a single sheet of paper. With this I could walk into any bank in the Balkans, even in Albania, and draw two or three pounds’ worth of local currency with no trouble at all. Optimistically we thought we might be able to use it on the boat during our thirty-six hours’ voyage, and had come aboard with only a few lire. The pleasures of Adriatic travel began to pall when we found that the boat was not a bank, and we went to bed that evening – that is, dossed down on a wooden bench – extremely hungry.

  Up at six the next morning, the day already hot, we were looking wistfully over the ship’s rail at Diocletian’s palace in Split, and wondering how to raise a meal, when we became aware that we were being watched with curiosity by two people, apparently Englishmen, who had just come aboard and like us were travelling third class. One of them looked familiar to me, and after a minute I placed him: Maurice Bowra,3 already a celebrated Oxford figure, who had been one of the moderators when I took honours mods a few months earlier and had invigilated some of the papers. We all got into conversation, and before long Bowra and his companion, Adrian Bishop, were standing us the most delicious omelettes I have ever tasted. The rest of the voyage was highly entertaining. This was Bowra off duty: not the Oxford don of brilliant and malicious epigram, but the relaxed holiday acquaintance in whose company we all sparkled. Everything that happened was funny, or could be made funny: the world suddenly seemed a much more interesting place. Bowra had had a fascinating early life: three times as a boy before the Great War he had travelled to China by the Trans-Siberian Railway. When we arrived at Dubrovnik, he and Bishop – who for some reason had been living at Metković, a small malaria-ridden town lying between Split and Dubrovnik – forsook their third-class status and went off to a good hotel, while we sought a cheap but adequate place which sported twin adjacent thunderboxes. During the next two days we continued to see Bowra and Bishop until they left for the Greek islands. It was a highly civilised interlude.

  From Dubrovnik we took ship southward to Kotor, at the head of a superb fjord, and trudged up the mountains towards Cetinje, the capital of the former kingdom of Montenegro. Kim had been at prep school with the sons of the Montenegrin royal family, and we visited the decaying so-called palace, part of which was known locally as ‘Biljarda’ because it had once boasted a billiards table. We spent three or four days walking in Montenegro, and finally took an ancient bus down to Bar, a small port not far from the Albanian frontier.

  Our boat was due to leave at six the next morning for Durrës in Albania. This time, taking no chances, we kept awake in turns. I spent my hours trying to learn Albanian by candle-light from Archibald Lyall’s splendid little volume Twenty-Five European Languages. Lyall was obviously a humorist. In addition to a vocabulary of 800 words, there were some thirty conversational sentences, the same for each of the twenty-five languages. These included ‘Where is the water closet? On the fourth floor.’ In Albania, we found later, there appeared to be, as far as one could judge, neither fourth floors nor water closets. Albanian was clearly a primitive language, borrowing widely from others to deal with any invention or concept later than the Stone Age. But there was something endearing about a language which took seventeen words to say ‘Have you a cheap single room?’

  Not many Englishmen have been to Albania – for lack of facilities and attractions before the war, and political reasons since (at least until about 1991). I liked it so much that I went again in 1938, not with Kim but with my wife, and got to know a few Albanians with whom we corresponded until Mussolini invaded the country in 1939.

  Arriving in Durrës in the evening, Kim and I began our Albanian interlude in highly uncharacteristic fashion, knocking up the British consul to complain that we had been overcharged by the boatman who brought us from the ship. The poor consul, in dressing gown and slippers and suffering from malaria, could do nothing for us. Later we got into conversation with two British engineers staying in our so-called hotel, and listened with amused superiority to their ultra-conservative political views. Theirs were the last English voices we were to hear on our Balkan journey.

  One of the likeable things about the Albania of the 1930s was its air of self-deprecating inefficiency and absence of nationalist self-importance. But there could be efficiency, too. In Durrës my shoes, which had been badly repaired in Montenegro, began to disintegrate. We found a little cobbler in an open-fronted shop, and within an hour they were not just repaired but stronger than when new. (I was truly sorry when later my mother gave them away to the Boy Scouts.) From Durrës we took a bus to Tirana, the capital, but there was no transport eastward to Elbasan, our next objective. We wo
uld have to walk the thirty miles in a single day, which meant getting on the road by 4.30 in the morning. As we had to share our room in Tirana with four Albanians, and the beds were too dirty even to get into, we slept little and were glad to leave. Our plan was to divide the day into three: five hours on the road or track leading to the top of a 2,000-foot pass, five hours resting there in the heat of the day and five hours walking the remaining fifteen miles down to Elbasan. The map, which owed as much to imagination as to research, showed a spring at the top of the pass. Parched with thirst, we struggled up the rocky bed of a waterless stream, but no spring was to be found. It was some time before we came across a local inhabitant. Here was a chance to try my Albanian, and I pulled Lyall out of my rucksack. Splendid fellow, he actually gave the word for spring! ‘Ku asht prendvera?’ I asked eagerly. The man looked completely blank: two foreigners, plainly unhinged by some experience, had just asked him ‘Where is the springtime?’ Eventually all was explained and we were guided to a bubbling ice-cold spring in a green glade. When we finally reached Elbasan it was nearly dark. By the time we had eaten, we had had enough. I was attacked all night by mosquitoes and later counted seventy bites. The next morning, after buying a Flit-gun, we spent our time resting, washing our clothes in the river Shkumbin and walking around a town as oriental as anything in Asiatic Turkey.