Of Fortunes and War: Clare Hollingworth, first of the female war correspondents by Patrick Garrett

Author:Patrick Garrett [Garrett, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Thistle Publishing
Published: 2016-07-09T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

RELIGIOUS WAR

‘Are you really a Roman Catholic?’ I asked my aunt with interest. She replied promptly and seriously, ‘Yes, my dear, only I just don’t believe in all the things they believe in.’

Travels with my Aunt, Graham Greene

Clare and Geoffrey maintained a steady stream of guests through their Paris apartment, but the insects – Geoffrey’s dragonflies, tadpoles and assorted beetles – generally outnumbered the humans. Now there was also Simonette, a French girl in her twenties, who got a free room in exchange for doing household chores, and helping Clare with a bit of secretarial work. And in the spring of 1957 they were all joined by Brian Wormald, a family friend of Clare’s, who was a senior Fellow of Peterhouse College, Cambridge. Wormald, a distinguished historian, was using a Rockefeller scholarship to spend some months researching in libraries and archives across Europe.

Brian Wormald was probably glad to be away from Cambridge for a spell, as his personal life was, to say the least, complicated. A strikingly handsome man, although Wormald was married he seemed to juggle multiple female admirers. (An obituary would list his hobbies as ‘whisky and well-bred women’.) One notable romance was Catherine Walston, the vivacious young American wife of a wealthy Labour peer.135

Despite a certainty of purpose with regard to women, Brian was rather less clear in his religious beliefs. Having taken up Holy Orders and been Peterhouse College’s Anglican chaplain during the war years, he had just renounced the Church of England in order to become a lay Catholic. This caused virtual excommunication with his Protestant parents-in-law. But with the fervour of a recent convert, Brian’s passion for Catholicism was unswerving. Paris that spring seems to have been an attractive sanctuary for Brian to withdraw from his harem, from marital strife, parents-in-law, and the irritations and bitchy politics of Cambridge academia. Hospitable by nature, Clare welcomed Brian in the deuxieme arrondisement, and threw herself into the task of looking after this distinguished guest. Brian, it would appear, relished the attention. Clare found him delightful company, and as the weeks passed they became increasingly close. Though her own marriage had gone through a recent difficult patch, Brian and Clare’s relationship apparently remained purely platonic.136 Instead of romance they discussed and debated endlessly – history, politics, and naturally also religion. Under Brian’s influence Clare became intrigued with Catholicism, despite her hitherto strictly Church of England roots.

Initially Clare’s husband welcomed the witty, erudite Brian as a guest in their home, but as Brian and Clare grew closer, Geoffrey became jealous, and began to resent the academic. By July 1957 the atmosphere in the apartment was frosty, and writing to Clare from Bern, where he was on a research foray in a Swiss archive, Brian suggested that it might be better if he found himself somewhere else to stay in Paris. However the situation became utterly impossible in the Rue du 4 Septembre when it emerged that, for almost a year, Geoffrey had been having an affair with their other lodger, Simonette.

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