The Irregulars by Jennet Conant Read Free Book Online

not Churchill would succeed Neville Chamberlain as prime minister and that Churchill had sent him to America to get him out of the way. It was equally well known that as one of Chamberlain’s key advisers, Halifax had advocated the doomed policy of appeasement toward the Germans and never lifted a finger to bolster Britain’s defenses despite the growing threat. Moreover, Halifax was proving a liability with the Americans, who found the former viceroy of India to be the embodiment of every abominable cliché about the British aristocracy and compared him unfavorably to his predecessor, Lord Lothian, whose death in December 1940 was considered a great loss by both countries. * Only three months after assuming his post, Halifax, true to form, had managed to commit a huge diplomatic blunder by going fox hunting in the green pastures of Pennsylvania. The sight of the new British ambassador riding to the hounds with American landed gentry prompted the poet Carl Sandburg to savage him in The Nation , ridiculing any official representative who would go cavorting around the countryside, indulging in “conspicuous leisure,” while his countrymen “were fighting a desperate war with an incalculable adversary.” He noted that photographs of His Lordship on horseback did nothing for the war effort and only inspired American workingmen to ask, “Are we going to war again for the sake of a lot of English fox-hunters?” Halifax continued to come in for steady criticism from the press, and even Churchill, on his visits to Washington, had taken to excluding him from his conferences with Roosevelt.
    Dahl considered Halifax a pompous fool, completely dull and devoid of humor, and took every opportunity to ridicule his obsession with blood, class, and title. Like a goodly portion of the embassy staff, the British ambassador seemed to live in the past and soldiered on in the vague hope that the future would be much the same. A wicked mimic, Dahl could not resist mocking him. He took to imitating Halifax’s old-empire style, embellishing his letters with the ambassador’s obsequious phrases and endowing all his American friends with exalted titles. Marsh readily joined in the fun and sent his droll replies by return mail to Dahl’s embassy office, which was not without risk. His note thanking Dahl for a box of cigars, courtesy of the diplomatic bag from Havana, was addressed, “For Transmission to the King”:
Your most impressive gift will be consumed in the usual way. It is only human that I add that the element of snobbery which is present in all of us will be exhaled with every puff.
    You will pardon my Anglophobia.
    One cigar per Sunday will be my prayer and ritual to the Union Jack.
     
    Marsh signed the letter, “Your Obedient Servant, Charles the Bald,” and included a lewd postscript: “You, of course, were courteous to the queen [Alice], but haven’t you found out over there that there are many better places to take one’s trousers off than the marital bed?”
    Even though Dahl took the game too far, at times openly flaunting authority, his confidence and air of infallibility made him seem unassailable. “Roald could be like sand in an oyster,” recalled Dahl’s first wife, the actress Patricia Neal. “He seemed to feel he had the right to be awful and no one should dare counter him. Few did.”
    As Antoinette observed, “In a game of one-upmanship, it was hard to top Roald. He got away with a lot. He was always sarcastic, but sometimes he was very rude, and he could be cruel, and that got him into trouble.”
    Whether officials at the embassy eventually tripped to his prank correspondence or simply tired of his antics, Dahl came in for disciplinary action and was warned that he could be shipped back to England at a moment’s notice. Aware that he was under review and that his dismissal was most likely inevitable, Dahl decided he had better take preemptive action. He began checking his options and investigating