Charles Ritchie was a Canadian diplomat and diarist. His published diaries record his diplomatic career and his literary and social life, including his long association with Elizabeth Bowen.
Charles Ritchie
The Siren Years: Undiplomatic Diaries, 1937-1945
Macmillan, 1974.
29 September 1941...This afternoon Elizabeth and I went to see the roses in Regent's Park. For days we had been talking of those roses, but I could never get away from the office before nightfall...Then one perfect September afternoon she telephoned me to say that if we did not go today it would be too late - they were almost over...As we walked together I seemed to see the flowers through the lens of her sensibility. The whole scene, the misty river, the Regency villas with their walled gardens and damp lawns and the late September afternoon weather blended into a dream - a dream in which these were all symbols soaked with a mysterious associative power - Regent's Park - a landscape of love. A black swan floating downstream in the evening light - the dark purplish-red roses whose petals already lay scattered - the deserted Nash house with its flaking stucco colonnade and overgrown gardens - all were symbols speaking a language which by some miracle we could understand together
The author was a Canadian diplomat, in the first flush of his affair with Elizabeth Bowen. Her novel, The Heat of the Day, dedicated to him, draws upon their relationship. His diaries record visits to her home in Clarence Terrace, and its subsequent destruction.
2 June 1942. I went to see Elizabeth this afternoon and found her standing on the balcony of her sitting room that looks over Regent's Park. The tall, cool room is full of mirrors and flowers and books...Later we walked out into Regent's Park. It was a blazing June day - we sat on the bank by the canal watching the swans "in slow indignation", as she says, go by
20 July 1944. Elizabeth's house in Clarence Terrace has been hit by a blast for the third time. She has at last decided to move out now...It was the last house in London which still felt like a pre-war house. There was always good food, good talk and wine (as long as wine lasted) and a certain style. Then I liked the house itself with its tall airy rooms and good, rather sparse furniture...