After Christmas that year I stayed with the Cornishes at the Cloisters at Eton, and we acted a play called _Sylvie and Bruno_, adapted from Lewis Carroll’s book. The Cornish children and the Ritchies took part in it. I played the part of the Other Professor, and one act was taken up by his giving a lecture. The play was successful, and Donald Tovey wrote some music for it and accompanied the singers at the pianoforte.
In January I was appointed attache to the Embassy at Paris, and I began my career as a diplomat.
I had rooms at the Embassy, a bedroom above the Chancery, and a little sitting-room on the same floor as the Chancery. The Ambassador was Sir Edmund Monson; the Councillor, Michael Herbert; the head of the Chancery, Reggie Lister. Both of these had rooms to themselves where they worked. The other secretaries worked in the Chancery.
In the morning, the bag used to arrive from the Foreign Office. It used to be fetched from Calais every night, and twice a week a King’s Messenger would bring it. The business of the day began by the bag being opened, and the contents were entered in a register and then sent to the Ambassador. The dispatches were then sent back to the Chancery in red boxes to be dealt with, and were finally folded up and put away in a cupboard. Later on in the day, a box used to come down from the Ambassador with draft dispatches, which were written out by us on typewriters, if we could, or with a pen.
Work at the Embassy meant writing out dispatches on a typewriter, registering dispatches and putting them away, or ciphering and deciphering telegrams. That was the important part of the work. It was for that one had to hang about in case it might happen, and it was liable to happen at any moment of the day, or the night.
Besides this, there was a perpetual stream of minor occurrences which came into the day’s work. People of all nationalities used to call at the Embassy and have to be interviewed by someone. A lady would arrive and say she would like to paint a miniature of Queen Victoria; a soldier would arrive from India who thought he had been bitten by a mad dog, and ask to see Pasteur; a man would call who was the only legitimate King of France, Henry V., with his title and dynasty printed on his visiting card, and ask for the intervention of the British Government; or someone would come to say that he had found the real solution of the Irish problem, or the Eastern question; or a way of introducing conscription into England without incurring any expense and without English people being aware of it. Besides this, British subjects of every kind would come and ask for facilities to see Museums, to write books, to learn how to cure snake bites, to paddle in canoes on the Oise or the Loire, to take their pet dogs back to England without muzzles (this was always refused), or to take a book from the Bibliothèque Nationale, or a missal from some remote Museum. All these people had to be interviewed and their requests, if reasonable, had to be forwarded to the French Government, for which there were special stereotyped formulæ. Drafts had to be written for notes to the French Government, and there was a large correspondence with the various Consulates.
