The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler (31 page)

VII

Three days later I was sitting next to my wife Margery at the entrance to our beach hut in Frinton, watching my seven-year-old daughter Helen and three-year-old son Maxim running in and out of the sea. Maxim stamped triumphantly at the thin lace border of foamy water on the polished sand. One of his stampings sent up a splash of brine into Helen’s face so that she screamed. Maxim laughed and was duly scolded by Nanny Benton who was supervising their activities at the water’s edge.

‘Charles!’ said Margery suddenly. I turned to look at her. The Frinton weather had been kind for once and had brought out the freckles on her sweet, ordinary face.

‘Yes, my dear?’

‘What were you looking at?’

‘Helen and Maxim, of course! What else?’

‘Well, if I may say so, you were looking at your offspring in a most peculiar way.’ It was the closest thing to reproach that I have ever heard in her voice.

I could not explain to her that, though I was looking at them, I was seeing other things. I saw the splash and spray not of water, but of blood; and in the distance I heard the tramp and slap of tiny, angry marching feet.

BLOODY BILL

I

That afternoon the season of mists reigned over Timbralls, Dutchman’s Farm and Agar’s Plough, Eton playing fields which had once long ago been the fertile domain of Thames Valley farmers. Who Agar had been and who the Dutchman I never knew, but their names still ring in my memory, evoking uneasy nostalgia. It was November. The air had a damp chill in it, and the breath of the cheering spectators on the touchline augmented the fog. Everything, the thick thud of the football, the hoarse cries of the players, even the referee’s whistle, seemed muffled and dim. Mist had sucked colour from the shirts of the players and the mud-churned green of the pitch.

It was the quarter finals, as I remember, of the inter-house championships. On our house notice board a paper had been pinned up which gave details of the time, location and team for that day’s match. Below this the house captain had written in capitals the words: ALL MUST WATCH AND CHEER. It was an injunction which someone of my lowly status in the house could not afford to disobey. I disliked games, but if there was one thing I disliked even more than games, it was being made to watch them.

A group of us, roughly contemporaries, who resented being forced to turn out for this dreary event, were huddled together on the touchline, occasionally stamping up and down on the ground to warm our feet, trying to keep ourselves entertained by making ribald remarks. Eventually our lack of enthusiasm was noted by Hellmore-Henderson, a boy in a junior position of authority in the house with a taste for power and a dull, earnest streak. He strode along the touchline towards us.

‘Take a brace, you spastics!’ he shouted. ‘Cheer! That’s what you’re here for. Don’t you want us to win?’ It was obvious that he was going to stay with us and make our lives a misery. I searched for something to distract him and amuse us.

Further along the touchline stood our house master Mr Naughton (usually known by his initials R.F.N or as ‘My Tutor’) shouting lustily and accompanied by his wife (always known bizarrely as ‘Mrs My Tutor’) who was smiling in her dutiful, bemused way. Some distance from them, and still further from us, an elderly man in a heavy overcoat was standing alone. He was bareheaded and staring at the game intently, his head thrust forward, his heavy jaw jutting out in an aggressive way. It was difficult to tell at that distance and in the mist, but I judged him to be in his seventies.

What struck me immediately about him was his size. He was broad, heavily built and must have been over six feet six in height. The mist and the distance only enhanced the impression that this was a giant of a man. I was intrigued.

‘Who’s that chap over there?’ I asked Hellmore-Henderson.

‘That’s Bloody Bill,’ he replied, as if I ought to have known.

‘Who’s Bloody Bill?’

‘He was a beak here once.’ (‘Beak’ is the Etonian for master.)

‘Why was he called Bloody Bill?’

‘Because he was Bloody Bill, that’s why. Now, come on, stop shirking and cheer.’ Presently Hellmore-Henderson got bored with trying to instil ‘keenness’ (that popular Etonian virtue) into us and moved off to torment others.

‘So that’s Bloody Bill,’ murmured Johnny Scott, one of our group, when Hellmore-Henderson had left.

‘You know about him!’ I said, passionately curious, almost in spite of myself. It turned out that Scott’s father had been at Eton before the war and had told him something of Bloody Bill, who had been a legend. His real name was William Hexham, a beak whose formidable athletic and academic prowess had made everyone believe at the start of his career that he was destined for great things, even the headmastership. He gave every appearance of having been built in the mould of the legendary giants of public school education, like Arnold of Rugby and Thring of Uppingham. When he became a house master, his boys carried away many of the available prizes, both on the playing field and in the classroom, but then rumours began to spread about his harshness, and his use of the cane, excessive even for the inter-war years in which he flourished. He acquired the sobriquet ‘Bloody Bill’, and the name stuck. He eventually had to give up his house ‘because,’ according to Scott, ‘he once nearly killed a boy,’ but he had still been retained by the school as a teacher.

‘My God,’ I said. ‘Why the hell wasn’t he sacked?’

Scott looked rather shocked. ‘Oh no. Bloody Bill was a brilliant rowing coach,’ he said, ‘and anyway he was an Old Etonian.’

Not myself having a father who had been at Eton, I was unimpressed. The man was clearly a monster, but this only enhanced my curiosity. Just after half time I sauntered away from my group and towards Bloody Bill, trying to make my movements appear aimless.

He seemed barely to have moved from the position in which I had first seen him. Closer to, the strangeness, the sheer formidableness of the man, was enhanced rather than diminished. His face had a monumental quality as if it had been carved out of a mountainside. Like a Greek statue the nose ran straight from the brow without any indentation at the top; the heavy chin jutted out truculently. His pose was slightly hunched and his hands were thrust deep into his pockets.

His hair was white and still fairly abundant, with that fine, slightly woolly quality which made one suspect that it had once been curly and blonde. His face was grey, which enhanced his resemblance to an archaic stone statue of a god or hero, unrelieved by colour, except for the remarkable eyes. If it is possible for a pale colour to be intense, I would say that they were an intense pale blue, the colour of a cloudless winter sky.

As Bloody Bill continued to watch the game with extraordinary concentration, I saw that his jaw was working up and down, as if he were chewing or muttering to himself. The steam of his breath came out in great heavy puffs to unite with the chill vapour that surrounded him.

Suddenly he turned and looked at me. It was a look that spoke, and I shall never forget it. It was not so much that it expressed menace, or malevolence, though those elements were undoubtedly present; more significantly, it was a look which said: ‘If you know what is good for you, keep away.’ It warned. I withdrew to a safer distance.

Presently I saw R.F.N, my house master, walk up to him. They exchanged a few words, then glanced in my direction. This made me nervous, so for the rest of the match I devoted myself conscientiously to cheering on my house side which lost that day.

The image of Bloody Bill, the ruined giant in the fog, stayed with me, especially as I began to notice him around Eton. If I had not known who he was, had I not been somehow sensitised to his presence, I might have missed him. As it was, I often saw him, usually in the playing fields, at a distance, alone, motionless and watching some game or activity; and when I noticed him I was frequently invaded by the sense that he had also noticed me. This feeling threatened to develop into a complex, so that whenever I had to go out to a game in the afternoon I would keep my eyes averted from places where I expected to see him. I was fully conscious of my irrationality, but the idea would not leave me, so that it became a kind of personal superstition, like not walking under ladders, or avoiding the colour green.

II

It was about that time that I began to develop a friendship with a boy from another house called Tristram Ronaldson. We had discovered a shared interest in Egyptology and Tristram, though like me only in his second year, had plans to found an Egyptological society. He had the misfortune to be the son of a famous man, the great explorer and naturalist, Sir Jasper Ronaldson. Most people I knew had read his famous book
A Stroll in the Arctic
. Then there was
Ambling in the Himalayas, Amazon Excursions
, and others. I had read them myself, and enjoyed them, even if I found that air of phlegmatic nonchalance in the face of appalling danger a little artificial at times. And though the concept of racism did not figure largely in my moral consciousness I was slightly bothered by the tone of amused condescension he evinced towards ‘the natives’. Nevertheless he was a considerable figure whose war exploits had been legendary.

Perhaps, in being very different from most other boys I knew, Tristram was deliberately making a bid to establish an identity beyond his father’s shadow, but there was more to him than that. Tristram had a naturally individual approach to life.

I remember it was in my second Summer Half, as terms were called at Eton, that I first visited him at his house. The decor of his room immediately marked him out as an original. The walls were not adorned with the usual team photographs and posters of The Beatles, Raquel Welch in a fur bikini, or a youthful Marlon Brando sitting morosely astride a motorcycle. There was a row of severely framed lithographic prints by David Roberts of Egypt, and numerous photographs framed in
passe partout
, probably taken by Tristram himself, of Egyptian deities and
objets d’art
. On his ‘burry’ (the Etonian for desk) was a skull. The lid of his ottoman was up and Tristram himself was engaged in throwing a dagger at it. The ottoman was situated just below the window which was open. It looked out onto a narrow pedestrian thoroughfare called Judy’s Passage.

‘Suppose you miss and the knife goes sailing through the window and kills someone in Judy’s Passage,’ I said.

‘I’d rather risk that than break a window,’ said Tristram. ‘I’ve already broken two this half and my Tutor is getting pee’d off. Here’s the book you wanted to borrow.’

He tossed me the volume in question, D.P. Simpson’s
Funerary Rites of Ancient Egypt.

‘I’m fed up with this. Shall we go for a walk? You can sock me a Brown Cow at Rowlands afterwards.’

I soon discovered that Tristram had inherited at least some of his father’s intrepid genes, as his idea of a walk was to explore areas of Eton which were out of bounds. This afternoon, brilliantly sunny and breezy, he had set his heart on Luxmoore’s Garden, a slender eyot, attached to the Eton side of the Thames by a wooden Chinese bridge. This sequestered spot was allowed only to the most senior boys, but Tristram was determined to visit it. I was marginally more afraid of being thought a coward by Tristram than being caught so I went along with him.

Luckily, everyone else seemed to be out on the river that afternoon or playing cricket so we had the place to ourselves. With its shady walks, exotic vegetation, and little emerald lawns, the place seemed to us like a secret paradise, all the more delicious for being forbidden.

In the heart of the garden is an oval lawn at one apex of which stands a bronze bust of Luxmoore himself and below it a bench. We were approaching this, shielded by a screen of trees, when I stopped and restrained Tristram. I could see that someone was sitting on the bench, a large man, who, despite the mildness of the weather, wore a heavy overcoat.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said. Tristram consented to withdraw a little into the undergrowth.

‘Who was that?’ he asked.

‘Bloody Bill. He’s—’

‘God! Bloody Bill! I know who Bloody Bill is. He was my pa’s Tutor.’

‘Let’s get out of here.’

‘No. Wait!’ Tristram seemed strangely excited. ‘I want to have a word with him.’

‘Good Grief! Why?’

‘Because my pa says he’s the only person he’s ever been afraid of.’

That seemed to me a poor reason for approaching Bloody Bill, but I knew I could do nothing to stop him. So I remained concealed in the undergrowth while Tristram walked towards the old man sitting on the bench. Though I moved as close as I could to them without allowing myself to be seen, I could still not hear clearly what they said to each other. The only words I caught were Tristram’s first. He said: ‘Are you Bloody Bill?’

As the old man looked up I saw those pale sapphire eyes blaze with anger, but Tristram stood his ground. They talked for about five minutes, Bloody Bill seated, Tristram standing in front of him, and it seemed an age to me. Eventually Tristram extended his hand which Bloody Bill took and shook reluctantly; then Tristram turned and walked away from the old man.

We left Luxmoore’s Garden in silence, and I could tell that Tristram was full of repressed excitement. I asked him what they had talked about, but all he would say was: ‘He remembered my pa.’ Even when I socked him a Brown Cow (a glass of coca cola with vanilla ice cream in it) in Rowlands he still refused to give me any further details.

Nothing more of significance happened that half. Tristram and I remained friends but our efforts to set up an Egyptological society did not progress. In the summer holidays I read that Tristram’s father had died suddenly of a heart attack in the Sudan. When we returned for the Michaelmas Half I wondered how he would be, but he seemed much the same as ever, though perhaps a little more withdrawn. I heard rumours that he had an air pistol in his room, but I never saw it myself.

November came again and I remember that one afternoon I was going for a run. It was my preferred form of exercise, not because I liked it but because it was a solitary pursuit requiring no skill, in which one was not being perpetually urged to demonstrate keenness. It had been prescribed by the authorities that this run should be to a place called Easy Bridge by a path which took one through an unattractive landscape of flat, featureless grassland, a kind of steppe, that bordered the Thames. Windsor Castle loomed in the far distance on the opposite bank; nearer at hand the way led past gas works and under railway arches. That day the chilling mists had come up from the river so thickly that I could barely see my way in front of me. I felt unusually isolated. Other runners, out to perform the same dull task as myself, either overtaking me, or coming in the opposite direction from the goal of Easy Bridge, would suddenly appear out of the thick white vapour and with almost equal suddenness disappear, pounding and puffing like steam engines, seeming about as human.