The Extraordinary Life of Rebecca West by Lorna Gibb

Author:Lorna Gibb
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619023741
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2018-04-27T00:00:00+00:00

After the war, Rebecca was in no doubt that her stance was vindicated. Stalin and Churchill had ostensibly divided Yugoslavia between them but, despite the Allied support he had received, Tito refused to allow either the Russians or the British into the country. In fact, he told Stalin that if the Red Army tried to cross the border they would be attacked by the Partisans. In the decades that followed, Tito brought unity to a country badly fractured by the war. Propaganda urged Serbs, Croats and Muslims to live side by side, and intermarriage and movement between the republics were encouraged, all in an attempt to create a single national identity. Free health care and education, new roads and electricity for rural areas, meant that Tito’s rule is still remembered with nostalgia. The regime was ultimately unsustainable, but the communists’ total rejection of Chetnik ideology was fundamental to its existence, and to the notion of a unified Yugoslavia. When, in the early 1990s, Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic and Croatia’s Franjo Tudjam reignited the old enmity between Chetnik and Ustase, the Croatian revolutionary party, the country was once more plunged into war.

Free health care and good roads made no impression on Rebecca, however. She refused to acknowledge any of the benefits provided by a government she would regard as ideologically unsound for as long as she lived. The Slavic ‘inat’ she had so admired, their almost stubborn belief in a higher aim, was part of her too.

The last years of the war brought other problems for Rebecca, ones which were much closer to home. At the beginning of 1944 she learned from an announcement on the wireless that Tommy, her former lover, had been given a chair in plastic surgery at Oxford, endowed by Lord Nuffield, who had also funded the creation of a dedicated new unit at the John Radcliffe Hospital. Oxford was barely twenty miles from Ibstone. It was the job Tommy had always wanted and Rebecca was thrilled for him, immediately sending him a telegram of congratulations. His reply was woefully inadequate, ending, ‘I send you thanks and all my good wishes’.43 Bruised, Rebecca felt that her passion for him had been ridiculous.

Anthony had taken a part-time job at the BBC and divided his time between there and the farm. The relationship between him and his mother was the best it had ever been. Relieved that the difficulties of Anthony’s teenage years were well and truly over, Rebecca greatly enjoyed visiting her son and his family and loved seeing her grandchildren. But in late March, Anthony telephoned with bad news. Wells, now seventy-nine, had cancer; he was dying. He had been told by his son Gip, and had taken the terminal diagnosis well. Rebecca confided to her diary the confusion she had felt on hearing the terrible news. She acknowledged the pain that Wells had cost her, remembering bitterly how she had felt humiliated by Jane, and recalled the way Wells had isolated her from her friends and kept her short of money and thus dependent on him.

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