The Day Gone By Page 45

  ‘What on earth is he going to do if the valve blows?’ I asked Doug. ‘Or if something punctures the tube, come to that?’

  ‘P’raps it won’t,’ replied Doug. sleepily. He was a man who positively seemed to create calm and security. In his ambience, things didn’t go wrong much. Anyway, he was relaxing after what must have been a very bad, stressful year: I don’t know - I never asked. I expect he’d have manhandled Hearn out somehow or other; if not, well, many airborne soldiers were silly, reckless sods, anyway, and it was my batman, not his.

  From all this the reader will no doubt have grasped that, although I had no soldiers under my own command - apart from my administrative corporal — I was nevertheless able to find a few spare people to give Mr Kwek a hand with the refrigerators. We got the job done, every mess in the Brigade duly received its working model and I reported as much to the Brigadier. However, he was now somewhat preoccupied with other matters.

  Singapore was by this time getting back on its feet and the place was daily becoming more normal. So was the military set-up. Several fresh units were arriving. A regiment of Ghurkas came into camp next to us. It was the first time that I had had any experience of these renowned soldiers, and I was as deeply impressed as everyone else who has had to do with them. Not only was Lord Mountbatten in Singapore (he had presided at the formal surrender of the Japanese on 12 September) but also General Slim, the commander of the 14th Army, which had first retreated through and then re-conquered Burma.

  As I got to know a fair number of people who had served in the Far Eastern campaigns, I realized - we all did - that most of them felt a certain sense of grievance and resentment against people coming out from the United Kingdom. They thought not only that they themselves had had a very bad time, fighting the worst and most merciless of all enemies under horrible conditions, but also that the Allied European armies had been given priority over them and that they had been left at the bottom of the list for equipment and reinforcements. The press called them ‘the forgotten army’ and I personally came to be convinced that there was a good deal of truth in it. They had first defended India and then re-conquered Burma on a shoestring, and they reckoned little to people newly out from England who had not been through what they had. It was widely believed that General Slim himself shared his soldiers’ views. He had commanded them through some horrible actions — Kohima, Imphal and Myitkina must have been as bad as anything that took place during the whole war — and it would have been surprising if he had not thought as they did, especially as it was he himself who must have felt more frustrated than anyone else by the shortage of supplies.

  Brigadier Poett was keen for General Slim to dine in 5th Brigade’s mess, and in due course he came. I got the impression -I think all the junior officers did - that he actually meant to show how little he cared for red berets and for whatever reputation they might have brought with them from Europe. This - if it is true -was perhaps a bit unfair, for Brigadier Poett had shown himself, in two airborne operations, to be a most heroic and competent commander. He had, however, always been well supplied and he hadn’t been in the Burmese jungle.

  General Slim turned up late for dinner, without (unless I’m much mistaken) having changed out of the day’s working clothes. He wasn’t complimentary about anything and he wasn’t conversational or warm to the junior officers (as General Dempsey, commanding 2nd Army in Europe, had been on an earlier occasion at which I was present). In fact, not to mince words, he seemed off-hand, grumpy and not particularly concerned to conceal it. I had — and still have - nothing against Brigadier Poett, and the professional ambitions and aspirations of regular Army officers meant nothing to me; but I think that if I had been Evelyn Waugh I might have felt sardonically amused by the Brigadier’s compunction to show respect and to try to please the General, and the General’s corresponding implication that he cared for none of it. It was a distinctly sticky evening: there wasn’t much conversation, and it was embarrassing to hear the Brigadier’s courteous remarks dropping like lead pellets between the General’s corroborative nods and shakes of the head.

  It was at about this time — as a lot of the fun went out of Singapore, the notorious 13th Para. Battalion mutiny took place, and there began, coincidentally, to be talk of the Brigade moving on to cope with the troubles in Java (which it eventually did) – that I became a great deal more conscious of something of the greatest importance to me. I qualified, and was due, for what was known as ‘Class B’ release. This was demob. queue-jumping. The Government - it was Attlee’s Socialist Government now, of course, Mr Churchill having been heavily defeated in the ‘khaki election’ earlier in 1945 - had decided that with the war won, it would be in the public interest for certain categories of people to be demobbed and back in their civilian occupations as soon as possible. One of these categories was that of undergraduates whose academic courses had been interrupted by the war. I was officially told that I qualified and so was a friend of mine at H.Q., Rob Stevenson. Naturally, we became expectant.

  However, weeks slid by and nothing happened. At length, having talked it over with the Brigade Major and one or two other senior brigade H.Q. officers, I decided to ask the Brigadier if he could help. I requested a personal interview and got it.

  The Brigadier’s greeting, after I had saluted and been told to stand easy, was not particularly cordial. In reply to his asking what I wanted, I said ‘Well, sir, as far as I can see I’m being mucked about for my Class B release.’

  I guess it wasn’t very tactfully put. People aged twenty-five aren’t always terribly diplomatic. Perhaps it seemed to imply inappropriate criticism of authority: I don’t know. Anyway, the Brigadier replied ‘It annoys me when you say that. Class B release is a privilege, for which anyone who gets it ought to feel thankful. It’s not something to demand.’

  It was on the tip of my tongue to reply that surely the position was that the Government had decided that it would be best for the country if certain categories of people - but you don’t say that sort of thing to brigadiers. I apologized and said I didn’t want to press the matter against his wishes.

  However, the Brigadier, as was often his way, having said a piece to make it clear who was the boss, then showed himself ready to be reasonably helpful. As though grudgingly and against his will, he said ‘Well, if I send a telegram about it, stating the details - which you can give to someone in the office - will that satisfy you?’ I said it would, thanked him very much and got out.

  My release duly came through, but not Stevenson’s: a pity, as I’d hoped we might have been able to travel home together. But now another obstacle appeared. I — and others — were supposed to be sailing home on the S.S. Orontes. She was known to be somewhere between Hong Kong and Singapore, but that was all that was known. As she became more and more overdue we grew worried, for in those days you could never be sure of anything and for all we knew she might well have been diverted elsewhere. At length the delay became quite the talk of Singapore. I used to go down every day to the docks to have a look. So did many others. When at last she arrived, a large blackboard was put up at the berth, saying ‘Believe it or not, the Orontes!’

  I realized, now, that I was glad to be getting out of the lashing, three-times-a-day rain of Singapore, and out of the humidity and damp. When I came to pack I found a lot of things ruined either by rust or by mildew.

  The prospect of actual release from the Army had given matters a different aspect altogether. It took six weeks to sail home but, naturally, it was a happy voyage for everyone on board. From Biscay onwards we were in the heart of winter, and after the Equator it struck cold indeed.

  At the demobilization centre everything went smoothly. Indeed, they seemed to me anxious to rush us through as quickly as they could. For the final formalities, I found myself in the office of a fairly young, rather abrupt major, who told me to ‘sign here, and here’ and gave me my Class B release papers (which I still have).

  ‘That’s all,’ he said at leng
th, as I stood waiting.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ I replied. ‘I wonder, could I ask you to be so kind as to look into the case of a friend of mine, a Captain Stevenson, a fellow officer due for Class B, whom I left in Singapore? I’ve got his details written down on this bit of paper -’

  ‘Why don’t you get out?’ he said. ‘You’ve got your release: I don’t know what more you want.’

  It seemed a fitting conclusion to the Army. Quite as good, in its way, as the Aldershot ‘bus conductor’s ‘’Ow the ’ell d’you expect me to know?’

  Chapter XXII

  I arrived home to find my father very weak and confined to bed. He was nearly seventy-six. I could tell, from the way my mother looked and spoke, that she did not expect him to survive the winter. I sat beside his bed and we talked - as best he could - about all that had happened. To anyone at all who lived through it, in whatever capacity, the Second World War was an enormous, shattering experience. It was - and I say this in all seriousness - difficult to believe that it was really over; one could not remember what things had been like before. Anyway, that no longer mattered much: they weren’t ever going to be the same again.

  ‘I think Daddy was just waiting, dear,’ said my mother, ‘until everyone was safely home.’ My brother, of course, had been demobbed months before, having joined the Army at the outbreak of the war. Ironically, my sister, in her reserved occupation as a teacher, had been the only one of us actually to come under enemy fire. She had been blown across the room and nearly killed by a V.2 in Tottenham - one of the last, perhaps, that the Germans had been able to fire before the launching sites were overwhelmed.

  I went over to Oxford from Newbury, saw the Provost, the Bursar and my tutor, and without difficulty made the necessary arrangements to return for the Hilary term of 1946, due to begin in a few days’ time. Digs were a trouble to find, for the whole university was crowded with ex-services people returned to get their degrees. It was with the help of one of my old friends from The Jolly Farmers, the kindly landlady, Hilda Brown, that I was lucky enough to get rooms with a good soul in Walton Street, almost opposite the College.

  Having got things fixed up, I naturally dropped in to the College buttery and was soon chatting over a pint to my scout of pre-war days, Bill Money, and to the manciple, Henry Mallett. They had a lot to say, of course, about the changes brought about by the war, about short staff, rationing, food restrictions and so on.

  ‘I suppose there’ll be a lot of ex-services people coming back this term,’ I said. ‘The place’ll be absolutely full up. By the way, do you happen to know whether Mr Christison’s back yet? Or Mr Schumer?’

  Henry Mallett looked down at the floor and paused. After a few moments he replied ‘Well, sir, I think if you care to go across to the Bursary, they’ll be able to give you details about the gentlemen you remember from before the war.’

  His manner seized upon me with a sudden misgiving. I finished my pint, said I’d look forward to seeing them later, and went across the quad. to the Bursar’s office.

  It is hard to find any appropriate way in which to write about this experience: the worst experience of my life, and one which has altered my outlook of the world from that time to this. It will be best simply to write down what I learned that morning.

  Alasdair was dead. I remembered that he had been called up, in 1940, into the Oxford and Bucks. Light Infantry, and that he had expressed his determination to transfer, when he got a commission, into one of the renowned Scottish regiments. The Bursary people were able to pass on to me a good deal about Alasdair, since his parents had sent the College a copy of his company commander’s letter.

  He had got what he wanted, being commissioned into the 7th Battalion of the Black Watch - part of 51st Highland Division -and had fought as a platoon commander at Alamein. The letter went on to tell how he had received the personal thanks of the brigade commander for playing a leading part in guiding a tricky night march - whether of the battalion or of the whole brigade I am not clear — to a place in the desert called Mersa Brega. This had been Rommel’s first halt after Alamein, and Montgomery had attacked him there on 13 December 1942 with the Highland and New Zealand divisions and 7th Armoured.

  The details of the Alamein to Tunis campaign are so well-known and have been written about so extensively that I need not say more about them here. The part played by the Black Watch is fully set out in the regimental history. After entering Tripoli on 23 January, the 8th Army pressed on westward, broke the Mareth Line and entered Tunisia.

  They then faced one of their most difficult tasks, namely, to force the Germans and Italians out of the position known as the Wadi Akarit. This could not be outflanked for, as a glance at the map will show, the sea lay to the east and, not far inland on the west, the extensive salt marshes known as Shott El Jerid. There was no alternative to a direct frontal assault, and this was made by three infantry divisions, 4th Indian, 50th and 51st Highland. Alasdair, leading his platoon, was killed by Italian shell fire on 6 April 1943. He is buried in the military cemetery at Sfax.

  I have often meditated on the discomfort, exhaustion, stress, anxiety and fear which Alasdair must have endured for more than five months during that campaign. The writer of the letter, a certain Major Ian Buchanan, described his platoon’s devotion to Alasdair and their grief. He was his parents’ only child. 6,000 men altogether died in that campaign.

  Few days - if any - have passed during the intervening years when I have not thought of the death of Alasdair and missed him. I have never had another friendship like his.

  Frank Schumer was dead. Having been in the University Air Squadron as an undergraduate he was, naturally, called up into the R.A.F. As far as I could learn, his death came about on a ferrying flight, when his ‘plane’s engine failed over the North Sea.

  William Brown was dead. I think he must have been the first of our little group to be killed. As I was told, it came about in a motorcycle accident relatively early in the war; I think, some time during 1941.

  Mike Seale was dead. I forget whether I was told much detail, but I have always retained the idea that he was serving in the Far East. It was probably in Burma.

  ‘Robey’ Revnell was dead. He had been for quite a long time an instructing officer in an infantry training battalion, but during the final months of the war had been posted to a battalion of 2nd Army serving in Europe. He was killed in February 1945, in the bitter fighting to clear the Germans from the area between the Meuse and the Rhine.

  Other friends had been killed, also. Both Cullen Powell and Jim Sharp had died in the R.A.F., and Frank Savory (the musician) at Salerno. I could mention others, but will not, since their names have not previously come into this memoir. The total number, however, was grievous indeed.

  The shock took time to enter me deeply, but of course it has remained of permanent effect. You don’t feel lucky, really: you feel guilty to be alive: and always full of bitter regret. About once or twice a year (more or less) I dream that Alasdair is alive. If he were to return now, of course, he would be a boy considerably younger than my own daughters. He was twenty-three. They were all about that age, or less. The passage of years has made no difference.

  The huge, inestimable wrong - the deprivation and grief - the unhealed wound to the world caused by the two wars of the first half of the twentieth century - will their effects ever cease entirely to be felt? They are very hard, if not impossible, to accept or to make part of any reasonable view of life. Either you are lucky enough not to have to think about it, or else it is something - the hundreds, the thousands, the millions of young men and others killed - that can’t really leave your thoughts for long. I suppose that paradoxically, to think about it in general terms is less depressing than to remember individual people. Many say ‘The only thing is to forget it’, but for people of my generation this is not really possible. Once you know from personal experience that human beings kill each other and that the killed include your closest friends you cannot forget
it - ever. It remains a preoccupation.

  ‘Have you forgotten yet?

  Look down, and swear by the slain of the

  War that you’ll never forget.’

  [Siegfried Sassoon]

  The principal effect on me was not, perhaps, to destroy but seriously to weaken my motivation. I didn’t feel much interest in getting on and there was nothing that I could feel to be worth doing. I was upset, also, by two minor, concomitant features of the bereavement. The first was that the permanent members and functionaries of the College, from dons to scouts, seemed so little affected. If you tried to talk to the porters or the scouts, their regret seemed perfunctory. Perhaps that was understandable, all things considered. (The son of my own scout, Money, had been among the last killed, in spring 1945, in an armoured car east of the Rhine.) But when I tried to talk to my tutor, reminding him of the names of the many dead - several of them his former pupils - all he replied was ‘Hadn’t you any friends in other colleges?’

  The second was the daily pang of seeing new, unknown undergraduates occupying my former friends’ rooms, sitting in their places in hall and so on. They were, of course, nice fellows, and friendly; most of them ex-servicemen, some with distinguished records; but all I could feel, from their reminiscences and conversation, was that they were intruding strangers, almost literally wearing my friends’ shoes.

  I know only too well that I was difficult company during that term. I was gruff, overbearing, dismissive and all too ready to snap. I didn’t really want to be friendly to anyone; although there were those, such as Iain Glidewell and Douglas Johnson, who were understanding and patient, and who in time grew to be friends. I took refuge in academic work, and won unsought tutorial approval with long and carefully researched essays. I tried to think of the College as a different place altogether. This was easier than you might suppose, for post-war shortages, over-crowding and the relative maturity and unfrivolous ways of the undergraduates (most of whom, at twenty-five or more, simply wanted to get on with their degrees and get out) made for an entirely different atmosphere from that of 1938 to 1940.