of the Labour Party. Michael agreed, provided it was understood that Djilas would be the first matter he would raise with Tito’s Central Committee. The diplomat did not object, except to say that he did not think Michael would change any minds and that the whole Djilas matter now seemed passé.
Michael arrived in Belgrade just after Tito’s death to address the Central Committee. He spoke to five or six of its members, apparently with no results. He was then invited to visit Dubrovnik. “They took me round the wall,” Michael said. He was never one to describe what he saw: in this case, a marvellous walkway that encircled the old city. By the time I arrived, it had recovered from Serb shelling. There were no ruins, but new tile roofs were evidence of the effort that had been made to repair a world heritage site.
When Michael got home, he said to Jill, “I’ve discovered a new place for a holiday. We’ll go there next year,” and that is what happened. They came to stay at the Villa Dubrovnik. Between 1981 and 1991, they took their holidays in Dubrovnik, a world so self-enclosed that they never managed to visit such famous sites as Sarajevo.
Jill immersed herself in the Dubrovnik arts community and Michael tagged along, developing on the fly a friendship with Stevan Dedijer, the brother of Vlado Dedijer, at one time one of Tito’s staunchest supporters, who braved considerable risk in coming to Djilas’s defence during his trial. Michael extolled the delights of Dubrovnik. He would often call spots he loved to visit, “a good place to read.” I decided to interrupt: “But what did you think of Yugoslavia then and what were your first reactions to the country’s breakup? Yugoslavia as an entity ... ” Michael broke in: “Well we didn’t think it had any sentimental … and we weren’t favouring the breakup, nor were we saying that we thought everything was being run well.” Informing much of Michael’s thinking was Djilas’s call for a more democratic society. Then came the autumn of 1991, the “first time I ever heard the words ‘ethnic cleansing,’” Michael noted. “A Belgrade chap” (Michael seemed to recall he was a journalist) said, “They’re going to claim every territory for the Serbs.” Michael said, “There aren’t many Serbs here, are there?” “Oh, they don’t mean just where they have a majority,” he was told, but any place where there are Serbs. In September 1991, the Serb attack on Croatia began in the North while Michael and Jill were still in Dubrovnik. “We didn’t know about the scale of it. We discovered we had to take a new route home.” Instead of flying home from Dubrovnik, they had to travel to Montenegro, take a plane from there to Belgrade and then change aircraft for the trip to London.
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I gazed at the city in the distance and asked, “What were people thinking here? That separation was the right choice?” Yes, Michael and Jill went out and bought Croatian badges. By the end of September, at some public gathering having to do with the House of Lords, Michael spoke to Lord Carrington, suggesting how serious the attacks on Dubrovnik and Vukovar had become. The people in those cities had a right to self-determination. “Of course they have,” replied Carrington. “We’ll have a fresh look at it.” A skeptical Michael told me, “He pretended then to be slightly shocked at what was happening. He bloody well should have been more shocked in my opinion. From that point on, he did not become exactly an apologist for the Serbs, but he and the foreign office were much too accepting of the Serb point of view about the breakup.” The Serbs were bound to prevail, the foreign office thought, because they had such an edge in weaponry. Michael also thought that Fitzroy Maclean, a British agent who had played a significant role in Churchill’s backing of Tito and his partisans during the Second World War, influenced British government policy. Michael knew Maclean well (they were both first elected to Parliament in the 1945 Labour landslide) and Michael surmised that Maclean had advised the government that whatever the rights and wrongs of the case, the Serbs, in control of the central government and its army, were bound to crush the Croats. But the British government underestimated Croatian and then the Bosnian, resistance. The Germans and the Americans understood the situation on the ground much better than the Major government, which made such a show of not intervening, Michael added.
Michael and Jill returned to Dubrovnik in December 1994, having followed a roundabout route by bus from Zagreb. Part of the twelve-hour trip took them near the Bosnian war zone, but these intrepid octogenarians were overjoyed to return to their beloved city. Dubrovnik, not yet fully recovered from the shelling, but bathed in sunshine two days before Christmas, seemed to Michael “never so beautiful.” They wanted to make a film about the 1991-92 siege. “During that time we had been in touch with some of the people we had known before the war.” They went to see their friend, the painter Duro Pulitika, whose studio had been used as a lookout post during the siege. A frustrated Michael had not even been able to persuade the British government to send in a food ship. It would be considered an act of war, he was told. “But the Italians are sending in a food ship,” he replied in amazement.
Michael and Jill stayed nearly a month in the Villa Dubrovnik, then occupied by refugees. Jill and Michael interviewed the mayor and defenders of the city. Although Michael narrated the film, Jill’s writing, editing, and direction were what counted, he told me again and again. He had a hard time adjusting to the role of narrator. Jill’s grandson, Jason Lehel, a professional filmmaker who did the camera work, argued that Michael ought to be replaced. Instead, Jill coached Michael day after day, slowing eliminating the stentorian style that had become habitual after so many years on the hustings and in Parliament.
To obtain funding, “We went round to our friends with lots of bloody money,” Michael recalled. One friend, Harold Lever, a multimillionaire, sympathised with Dubrovnik’s plight, finding parallels with what had happened to Spain when the Western democracies failed to support the Republican government’s resistance to Franco’s attack. Yet he did not heed Michael’s plea. Then a fund-raising meal with Sidney Bernstein, founder of Granada Television, and a Labour Party supporter, also proved a disappointment. “I had to pay for the bloody lunch in the end,” Michael said, laughing. Michael resorted to using his own retirement money and Jason cajoled his friends in the film industry to work with no pay, except what they might receive should the film be sold to the BBC or ITV. Finally, a BBC showing of the film, with a panel discussion to balance the film’s pro-Croatian bias, allowed everyone involved to just about recover their expenses.
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“I had just finished my book on H. G. Wells,” Michael noted, recollecting their September 1995 holiday in Dubrovnik. “Jill read it here. Couldn’t do much about it then.” I laughed, knowing that Michael was referring to her reservations. “I don’t say she agreed with every word”—a vast understatement! “She thought I was too enthusiastic about Moura Budberg—the magnificent Moura, as I called her.” The mysterious Moura might have been a better appellation because of Budberg’s murky history in the USSR. She has been accused of being a Soviet spy, exciting a good deal of controversy about her. Michael, an ardent champion—indeed an idoliser—of his heroes and heroines, had befriended Moura’s daughter, Tanya. Michael was enchanted with what she told him about Wells and Rebecca West visiting Moura at her country home outside London on weekends during the war. “My mother could hold her own in any company, although with Rebecca she was inclined to be a little quieter,” Tanya told an admiring Michael.
I could imagine the skeptical Jill listening to Michael’s impassioned description of Moura’s “wonderful, serene countenance—one of the most beautiful faces I’ve ever seen, in spite of all the turmoil she had. Jill didn’t know Moura, but she said to me, ‘I think you’re a bit thick about Moura.’”
The talk of Moura reminded me of a joke I’d been told about Rebecca attending a funeral for one of H.G.’s mistresses: She turned to another mistress at the ceremony and said, “I guess we can all now move one up.” Michael laughed. “Would you like to meet Tanya?” he asked. Moura and Tanya had nothing to do with my biography of Jill, but it was typical of Michael to corral Jill into the pen of his enthusiasms. He had extended a similar invitation for me to meet Stanley Kubrick’s wife. Kubrick and Jill had had a casual friendship, meeting on a few occasions, and Jill was an extravagant admirer of his films, but Kubrick’s wife had not known Jill—as Michael knew.
I shifted Michael’s attention back to Jill’s Dubrovnik film, wondering aloud whether any other subject