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had written a long short story about Vienna and he suggested various improvements. When I sent him the emended version, in July, he wrote me a long letter about what it still needed done to it.
         
    I have already been carefully through the story twice. I think it is enormously improved, and obviously the Lane reader was an idiot to refuse it, as it is certainly one of the best contributions I have seen so far. At the same time, at the risk of making you quite desperate, I must say I should like you to rewrite it just once more! The idea is so extraordinarily good and rich and fruitful of suggestions that it should be worked out to the full and no pains spared to develop it. Already it has ceased to be merely an anecdote and become something symbolic, which of course is what you want; but I feel that, in following the working out of the fable, you haven’t paid enough attention to the characters. For instance, I don’t think Rains himself is clear enough. I should like him much more personal, even a bit satirized perhaps. And then his relations with Rudi are not made as interesting as they might be. I know you want to keep off the homosexual note; but surely it is just this kind of homosexuality, this semi-erotic interest in the working classes, which is so profoundly significant … unless you make the relationship between the two of them more vivid and lively, you hardly explain why Rains took so much trouble to find Rudi. And it is just this idea which contains the whole allegory which the story is meant, as I see it, to convey. Again, another frightfully important symbolic counter is the dead writer whose works Rains is investigating. You say that Rains’ attitude towards this writer was changed by his experiences in Vienna, but you don’t go into details. This seems to me a profoundly exciting idea, and one which goes to the roots of the whole business ….
         
    He ended up by saying that ‘if you really worked out all the implications of this subject you would have ceased to write a short story and have written a short novel. Very well, so much the better. It is a novel, and the longer you make it the better it will be … .’
    I did eventually follow this profound and sympathetic advice, and enlarged and re-wrote the story once more, and had it published as a novel under the title Evil Was Abroad. I have no recollection of what Christopher thought of the final version, but I was immensely touched and impressed by the trouble he took about it - more than I remember any editor taking with a work of mine, before or since.
    Meanwhile, Hitler had taken the fatal decision to reintroduce conscription for German subjects, which caused almost hysterical anxiety in the Sintra household. They were well aware that the Germans knew exactly where in Portugal young subjects affected by the new decrees could be found. In the last days of June the blow fell. They came back from a lunch-party in Estoril to find a letter from the German Consulate on the hall table, instructing Heinz Neddermayer to report in the near future to get his orders for military service. The misery of the next few weeks was aggravated by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.
    It soon became clear to Christopher that the only hope of saving Heinz from return to Germany and military service was for him to change his nationality and become the subject of a country outside Europe, though even that was not necessarily safe. Many of their friends in Portugal told them that it was an illusory hope. Nevertheless, Christopher set in train the moves to obtain a Mexican passport for Heinz which ended so fruitlessly and ignominiously a few months later.
    A large sum of money had to be obtained in order that various Mexican officials should be bribed. Christopher persuaded his rather reluctant mother to produce this money from family funds. He sent it to a lawyer Gerald Hamilton had found for him, who,