Their Promised Land: My Grandparents in Love and War by Ian Buruma

Author:Ian Buruma
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781594204388
Publisher: Penguin Press
Published: 2016-01-19T05:00:00+00:00

Left to right: Hilary, John, Win, Susan, Wendy, and Roger

One man who understood this perfectly was Bernard’s closest friend, Basil William Sholto Mackenzie, who succeeded his father in 1942 as the 2nd Baron Amulree. “Uncle Sholto,” as he was known to my mother’s generation, was a quiet homosexual medical doctor with a stammer. I saw him last in the late 1970s, when he showed me around in the House of Lords where he had been a Liberal peer and party whip for almost twenty years. This most discreet of gentlemen, always impeccably dressed and diffident in manner, had a long love affair in the 1940s with the art collector Douglas Cooper, a man known for his affected voice trilling in a variety of accents depending on his mood, his loud suits, and his generally outrageous behaviour. But Basil, as most of his non-medical friends called him, apparently enjoyed the flamboyance of his partner vicariously, chuckling quietly at pranks he himself would never have thought of getting up to. That Bernard and Win were perfectly well aware of Cooper’s presence in Sholto’s life is clear from several letters in which they cannot quite conceal a hint of rivalry. Bernard refers to Cooper several times as a bit of a “pansy.” On May 2, Win mentions inviting Sholto down for the weekend at Mount Pleasant but complains that “the old skunk has never let one squeak out of himself since you left, although he is supposed to take such an interest in the family. I suppose the famous Douglas must be somewhere in the offing.”

In any case, Sholto pops up again in a more favourable light in a letter written on May 26. It was the Day of National Prayer, for which the king had rallied the nation. Win went straight from Paddington station to the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in St. John’s Wood, where she was moved to hear Rabbi Mattock fighting back his tears as he told a packed hall that Britain would prevail, even if the odds looked overwhelming for the time being. Win writes, “After the service I went straight to Sholto’s . . . After tea [he] walked me through the Park towards Paddington, and I came home feeling better. The irises in the Park are looking magnificent, and my dear old London is looking far too beautiful and dignified to dare to think of its destruction. On one point Sholto reassured me. He said I might be dead, but I should never be a refugee, and for that I was truly thankful.”

It was the kindest thing he could possibly have said to her, and just the reassurance Win needed. Having established that she would never be a refugee, she could now concentrate on the future of her children, while demonstrating again and again her unquestioning identification with England. The retreat from Dunkirk, for example, in the last days of May 1940, when more than three hundred thousand soldiers were evacuated under heavy German fire by an improvised

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