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I was instantly enthralled, but the ferry pilots surrounding her presented such formidable opposition I was afraid to intrude. When it grew dark and everyone moved inside to drink and dance, a pilot jokingly introduced me as Ferry Command’s pet penguin. To my delight she allowed me to buy her a drink and I was emboldened to, in the language of the times, pitch her a line.

Penelope listened with gratifying interest until a handsome Yank (who
claimed
to have flown in the Antarctic with Admiral Peary) sauntered over and shot me down in flames.

”Enough of your crap, Penguin,” he said sternly. ”You wanna fly with pretty birds like this you gotta have wings! C’mon, Penny baby, let’s cut a rug.”

She smiled kindly at me as she took the Yank’s extended hand. Somehow I managed to smile back, the sardonic grin of One Who Does Not Care, before slipping miserably off to my canoe.

It was an awfully dark night and just below the Angler I found myself paddling into a side channel that turned out to be blocked by an ancient weir over which even the sluggish Thames poured with unexpected vigour.

The canoe tipped forward, burying her bow and spilling me out. I floundered ashore on a muddy little islet, where I was immediately attacked by two spectral beings clad in white who beat me savagely about the kidneys with what felt like flails. By the time I had leapt back into the river and splashed my way to the mainland, most of the Angler’s customers, including Penelope, had assembled on the bank to see what all the fuss was about.

Although it was not one of life’s great moments (I had come ashore in a sorry state), my misadventure awakened Penelope’s protective instincts. She demanded towels and hot whisky for me and as she drove me back to the hospital in her little red
MG
sports car proceeded to make amends.

”Someone really
ought
to have told you about the swans. They’re royal birds, you know, and they do get frightfully huffy when someone trespasses on their breeding grounds. But not to worry, dahling, I’ll make it up to you.”

We were barrelling along in almost total darkness (the little car’s normally ineffectual lights had been further dimmed with blackout tape) when she jammed on the brakes and brought us to a squealing stop beside a roadside callbox erected by the Royal Automobile Club for the benefit of members who might experience a breakdown.

Penelope slid smoothly out of her bucket seat and with her member’s key unlocked the door of the callbox. Then she beckoned me to join her in the glass-enclosed little cubicle. Puzzled but willing, I did as bid. When we were jammed inside, she scrunched the door shut and began making passionate and acrobatic love to me.

Nothing had prepared me for the likes of Penelope.

A day or two later she drove me to her home – a mansion surrounded by impressive lawns and guarded by a grim-visaged Scots nanny who met us at the door holding a year-old infant in her arms. Penelope fondly took the child and in reply to my mute inquiry explained that ”Baby Dumpling” was hers.

”Daddykins,” she would later tell me, was a senior staff officer ”doing something frightfully important in Cairo for dear Alex –
General
Alexander, you know” – but who
expected her to ”live a normal life” in his absence. This she was doing to the best of her ability.

Life in Penelope’s England was heavy going for a callow youth from the Colonies. The doctors at the hospital were puzzled to find I was no longer gaining weight and, in fact, had actually lost a pound or two. God only knows where it would all have ended had not the black tragedy of Dieppe intervened.

On August 19 most of the Second Canadian Infantry Division made a foredoomed raid on the German-defended French Channel coast. The Channel and the beaches of Dieppe ran red with blood and the crimson welt soon extended back into England as far as sylvan Maidenhead.

At 2:00a.m. on August 20 the ambient patients in No. 5 General Hospital, myself among them, were rousted out of bed and dispatched to their holding units to make way for some of the flood of shattered men returning from the shambles of Dieppe.

By the time dawn broke, I was back at 1-
CDRU
in Witley – never to encounter Penelope in the flesh again.

H
aving missed my turn in the queue to join the regiment, I was fated to spend the next month in limbo at Witley, where the colonel commanding 1-
CDRU
concluded I was unlikely ever to become a useful infantry officer and decided to make me permanent camp adjutant. Although this would eventually have brought me the rank of captain and ensured a safe and easy life, the prospect filled me with dismay. I ran to Major Ketcheson for help.

His solution was to tell the camp commandant he simply could not have me. Why not? Well, Ketch lied, because I was a nephew of Canada’s Minister of Defence, who would be
most
upset if I was prevented from joining my regiment.

The commandant decided to dispense with both of us. Next morning Ketch and I were on a train to, as our orders read, ”join the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment in the Field.”

In this case ”in the Field” meant the lovely, rolling Sussex countryside in the valley of the River Wal. Here we found the regiment billeted on farms, in little villages, and on a few large estates scattered around the district. Battalion headquarters was in a rambling old vicarage in the hamlet of Waldron and when we arrived was in a state of some confusion as a result of a shake-up of its officers, a number of whom were being shifted to rear area jobs or sent back to Canada.

The new commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Bruce Sutcliffe, welcomed Ketch with open arms and immediately made him second-in-command. Ketch’s first act was to appoint
me
as battalion intelligence officer. I had expected to be posted to a rifle platoon and had only the vaguest idea what an I.O. was supposed to be, or do, but I liked the sound of the title and the prospect of living at headquarters, where I would be in the heart of things.

Waldron consisted of half a dozen thatched cottages; a tiny pub that looked and felt as if it belonged to the days of Robin Hood; the vicarage, a sixteenth-century brick-and-timber warren with leaded windows; and the parish church which, the old verger told me, had been built by the Saxons about A.D. 600, refurbished by the Normans around 1100, and hadn’t had much of anything done to it since.

This crumbling, square-towered little church, plastered with bright green moss, stood half buried in a grove of ancient linden trees and was surrounded by stone walls and yew hedges pierced by a canopied lych-gate (literally, a corpse gate). The lushly overgrown churchyard, richly manured by more than a thousand years of human burials, was bursting with birds, rabbits, and other creatures but rarely visited by
living human beings since even the verger had given up the struggle to keep nature under control. It was my kind of place and I felt instantly at home there.

Headquarters was small, cozy, and friendly. Since almost all of its half dozen officers were new to their respective jobs, nobody put undue pressure on me and I had time to find my feet. My ”command” consisted of a ten-man Scout and Sniper Section and an eight-man Intelligence Section. Fortunately they were a kindly and forbearing lot – old hands who knew their jobs inside out – and they carried me until I began to learn the form. They also taught me the joys of swanning.

Swanning was not, as the name might imply, a specialized form of birdwatching. It was the art of escaping from the clutches of one’s superiors in order to do what we now refer to as one’s own thing. Thus, on the pretext of looking for possible spies, organizing intelligence exercises, or undertaking reconnaissances of various kinds, I was able to absent myself and explore the surrounding countryside, and meet many of the English Others.

I had bought a pocket bird guide with whose aid I was able to tally many new species. I particularly recall the day I spotted my first bearded tit. Eventually my British list included such notables as the chough, hoopoe, capercaillie, twite, chiffchaff, whinchat, wryneck, knot, dotterel, dabchick, and corncrake. English ornithological nomenclature was anything but dull.

By now I had spent nearly two years preparing myself to be a fighting soldier; but life that autumn with the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment was a far cry from what I had anticipated. Most of the troops were living in distinctly unmilitary ways, preoccupied by unmilitary tasks.

Widely dispersed across the countryside, companies and even platoons were spending much of their time helping their farmer-hosts with farm chores. This was a happy time for most of us. I was able to spend long hours in company with foxes, badgers, hedgehogs, rooks, pheasants, magpies, barn owls, and the like who were also living in happy times because the war had effectively brought an end to sport hunting in Britain.

Such a happy state as we were in could not last. In mid-November the regiment was ordered to exchange its comfortable civilian billets for a bleak collection of newly erected Nissen huts slowly sinking into a quagmire of sticky mud on a large estate called Possingworth Park.

Nobody was happy with the change. As the autumnal rainy season melded into the winter rainy season we again became just another part of a great khaki gob that was overwhelming England.

Our new quarters (lightless metal tunnels from whose cold corrugations condensation was forever dripping) were dismal, frigid, and dispiriting. Opportunities for supplementing army rations with fresh vegetables and fruits were much reduced. To make things worse our lordly masters at First Canadian Corps Headquarters concluded we had become too relaxed in our habits, so it was time for a turn of the disciplinary screw. As Allan Richmond, my intelligence sergeant, put it:

”The silly fuckers up above have to justify their useless existence somehow so every now and again they shove a rocket under the tails of the poor bloody infantry.”

Worst of all, Canadian Military
HQ
in London now afflicted us with a new 2 i/c – a hard-mouthed, spear-tongued
major with the double-barrelled Anglo-Irish name of O’Brian-Bennett. He wasted no time letting us know we had a tiger in our midst. Mud or no mud, rain or no rain, the whole regiment went back to parade-ground bashing, arms drill, and close-order drill in the mindless ritual that is supposed to turn men into soldiers, but that tends to turn them into automatons instead.

Keeping out of O’Brian-Bennett’s way became synonymous with survival. Evasive tactics were possible for some junior officers in the rifle companies but were generally impossible for me. The 2 i/c’s cold glance seemed always to be on me and clearly he did not approve of what he saw.

”Smarten up, Mowat!” and ”You’d bloody well better get with it!” were his two favourite salutations.

I was not even able to escape his hostility in the presumed sanctity of the officers’ mess. As we were eating dinner one evening a mess orderly brought me a small, beautifully wrapped parcel which had just arrived by registered mail. There was no return address or name on the outside so I rather casually ripped it open. It contained an ornate silver automatic pencil in an alligator leather sheath. While I turned this expensive trinket over in my hands wondering rather stupidly who could have sent it, Lieutenant Jerry Austin, fumbling through the wrapping paper, uncovered a gilt-edged card. He read what was written on one side in copperplate script then loudly demanded, ”Jeez, Farl, who’s this Penny bint? And what’s she mean, ‘
May you always have lots of lead in your pencil
’?”

The gilt-edged card was passed from hand to hand down the long table, accompanied by laughter and wisecracks – until it reached O’Brian-Bennett. He glanced at it, turned
it over, and saw what none of the others had noticed: the neatly engraved name and rank of Penelope’s husband.

O’Brian-Bennett’s raised voice cut like a machete.

”It is despicable for a man to accept valuable gifts from
any
woman except his wife and especially so from a woman married to another serving officer!” He paused for effect. ”Lord Jesus Christ, what could be
more
despicable?”

I should have held my tongue, but foolishly tried to defend myself.

”She’s not his wife … she’s his daughter … sir.”

A smile touched his lips but there was no smile in his eyes.

”
Wrong
, Mowat! As you so often are! I have met this officer …
and
his charming wife. Are
you
calling
me
a liar?”

This was my first trial-at-arms with O’Brian-Bennett. Another soon followed. Having had enough of being referred to as Junior, or the Babe, by superiors, inferiors, and peers alike, I had begun to grow a moustache. It was not much – a few pale yellow hairs – but the best I could manage.

One rainy afternoon O’Brian-Bennett decided to hold a ceremonial parade. The entire regiment had to turn out and stand in the drizzle for his inspection. When he got to the Intelligence Section, he halted in front of me and in a voice that could be heard all over the parade square shouted, ”
MISTER MOWAT
!”

”Sir?”

”
WHAT IN HELL’S THAT ON YOUR UPPER LIP
?”

”Moustache … sir.”

”
LORD JESUS CHRIST, THAT’S NOT A MOUSTACHE … IT’S A DISGRACE! SHAVE IT OFF
!”

Although quaking inwardly, I was not to be cowed into silence. Too much was at stake. The whole regiment was
listening and I knew that if I did not make a stand I would never live it down.

”Can’t do that … sir. King’s Regulations and Orders, Section 56, paragraph 8 states that a moustache, once begun, may not be removed without permission of the commanding officer … sir!”

I had him there. Lieutenant Colonel Sutcliffe was a gentleman and also a gentle man. He never did give the requisite permission. In fact, he was overheard to take my side to the extent of remonstrating with the 2 i/c for ”riding me too hard.” O’Brian-Bennett’s attempted explanation – also overheard – did not endear him to me.