It’s April 1940; I am 300 pages into Chips, Vol II, 1938 – 1943.
Although I enjoyed Volume I it was school food; this is a banquet. Chips has become more observant and he has a broader canvas. He is a PPS in the Foreign Office, as before a relentless party-giver and goer and he has Kelvedon Hall in Essex.
These diaries read almost like a novel switching between his political, social and country lives. Kelvedon provides respite for Chips and now the readers of his almost daily diaries. The swans, the ducks, the dogs and his son, Paul, flit in and out as counterpoints to a world at war.
Chips’s prognostications are famously inaccurate. Indeed at the beginning of the war he thought it would be over by May 1940. It nearly was but not in the way envisaged by Chips.
The Covid Chorus: “If you told me this was going to go on for two years, I wouldn’t have believed you”. My assessment of Covid was at least as hopeless as Chips’s of the war and politics. I first heard Britons trapped in China being interviewed in January 2020. A student in Wuhan was effectively under house arrest. That could only happen in China; it would be impossible in a democracy. In February I opined the virus would have fizzled out by the end of May. In Summer 2020 I thought we would be back to normal by Spring 2021. Now I don’t know what to think.
Simon Heffer has done a really good job. With help from Hugo Vickers, the footnotes are almost too comprehensive. Compiled by Alex Bell, the index is superb. However, his work deciphering Chips’s not always easy to read writing is his greatest achievement, although sometimes he resorts to (illegible).
