Meanwhile, the British, if they could not ensure justice, were doing their best to promote goodwill between the former allies through the activities of the British Council. Following the success of a big art exhibition featuring John Piper and Graham Sutherland among others, the Council turned their attention to music. Mary Wallington, who had studied French and Italian at Oxford before working in publishing, now aged thirty-two, landed a job in the summer of 1946 as a music assistant with the Council, based at 28 Avenue Champs-Elysées. Other than the constant rain that summer, Mary loved her job, which mostly involved organizing orchestral exchanges and gramophone concerts, or ‘séances’ as she called them, promoting British music by Purcell, Vaughan Williams and Delius (Delius’s Paris: The Song of a Great City was a predictably popular choice) and traditional sea shanties, ‘which brought a light touch to the end of the proceedings’. Because getting to the office required her to walk down the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, ‘I have done a lot of gloating at the unbelievable shop windows but have been so overpowered that so far have only dared buy 3 pairs of stockings!’
Mary was also well placed to see how ordinary Parisian women, preoccupied as ever with food, were managing the transition to peacetime shopping and cooking. Although she bemoaned the lack of marmalade, soluble sanitary pads and Turkish cigarettes – ‘I have plenty of Virginians but Naafi don’t rise to Turkish’ – she told her ‘darling family’ that the food was mostly very good with plenty of meat but no salads. She was shocked when invited to dinner one evening to see her profligate hostess throwing a large pat of butter into the frying pan to cook some veal and then mixing even more butter into the noodles. The story well illustrates the terrible disparity between those in Paris who had more than enough to eat (the British, Americans and rich Parisians), while many others in the city were on the verge of starvation. There was plenty of meat – but at a price, and butchers were good at exploiting this – while other staples were in short supply. On 1 January 1946 the government had had to introduce bread rationing once more, which led to angry demonstrations as well as violent arguments at bakeries. Women seen to be buying several loaves were sometimes attacked by those still queuing who feared there might not be any left. Once again the black market flourished, and wherever possible, goods – sometimes stolen – and services were bartered. This avoided the cash economy, creating additional difficulties for the government as it tried to collect taxes. One of the most notorious methods of increasing rations was to use the name of a dead relative to acquire an additional ration card. After four years of Occupation, many Parisiennes, cooks and countesses alike, had had time to perfect their forging. Janet Flanner, the US reporter now back in the city sending her ‘Letter from Paris’ to the New Yorker, described the delight of one literary Parisienne ‘who, browsing in her attic among pre-war books, found two boxes of pre-war cartridges’. For twenty shells, a neighbourly crackshot brought her back in trade ‘two pheasants, a kilo of country butter and a roast of veal’.
However, there was little that anyone could do about the extreme cold weather yet again that winter, especially harsh since there were grave shortages of heating fuel. Public buildings such as theatres were largely unheated. Mary was lucky to attend some of the autumn season’s cultural highlights, before the blizzards set in, including what she called ‘the great theatrical event of the moment’ – Jean-Louis Barrault as Hamlet in a translation by André Gide at the Théatre Marigny, a production which dismayed Janet Flanner as ‘athletic, hearty and hasty’, though she realized that no one dared criticize ‘the demi-god Gide’.
On 16 October, Mary Wallington was excited to be invited to a gala performance with Marjorie Lawrence, the pre-war Wagnerian rival of Germaine Lubin who had overcome a crippling wartime bout of polio, in aid of establishing penicillin research centres throughout France. Lubin herself was finally brought to trial in 1946, having already served almost three years in prison. In the event, she was acquitted of the most serious accusations after several testimonials were produced from people she had helped during the war. But her career was finished.