The Day Gone By (49 page)

Paddy was a sensationalist; by temperament entirely the public's idea of a parachute officer; good-natured, debonair, generous, always in high spirits (I know John Gifford, despite his liking for him - you couldn't not like Paddy - found him a bit much at times), a deviser of dares, afraid of nothing (including jumping), so it seemed. He once jumped with a kit-bag on
each
leg, to show that it could be done: another time he jumped with a large wireless transmitter. He had a bucko sergeant, McDowell, and the two of them used to get up to some rare old larks. Once, Kavanagh was going to make his platoon crawl under live fire from a Bren gun, and began by setting them an example. After about a quarter of a minute he called to McDowell, on the gun, to aim closer. Afterwards, they found bullet holes in his airborne smock. Another time, when he had his platoon out on the Derbyshire moors on a bitterly cold day in the winter of early 1944, they came upon a steep-sided reservoir. ‘Fancy a swim, Sergeant McDowell?' asked Kavanagh. The sergeant looked at him and bit his lip. ‘I will if you will, sir.' So the pair stripped off and plunged into the near-freezing water. Paddy was out first, heaving himself up the shelved walling. But Sergeant McDowell was below middle height, and what with the terrible cold, simply could not pull himself out. Instead of helping him, the platoon stood round laughing at him and he very nearly died in the water before someone gave him an arm. Sometimes Kavanagh and McDowell would take the pin out of a live grenade and toss it between them until one of them (‘Cissy!') threw it down the pit or over the wall.

John Gifford's quiet certitude, however, was always finally a match for Paddy, as Hazel's was for Bigwig.

I recall one of my own men, Driver Fisher, saying ‘I'd like Captain Kavanagh to train me, but I'd hate him to take me into action, because I'm sure he'd kill me.'

The evening I joined the Company, I went out drinking in Lincoln with the O.C., Kavanagh and one or two more. I don't know whether or not I was being looked over, but they couldn't have been nicer: Kavanagh was perfectly charming, as a matter of fact. I remember seeing some Other Ranks near by, with their red berets pulled under their shoulder straps, and that I asked Paddy whether that was the thing to do. ‘Well,' he replied, ‘we don't
quite
do it.' (Meaning officers.) He could have said ‘Good God!' etc., couldn't he? That evening I was treated like a guest and no one asked me anything military at all; but somehow I felt confident. This was the new deal at last.

Next morning John interviewed me formally in the office. ‘How do you feel about jumping?' he asked.

‘I want to jump, sir.'

‘Well,' said John, ‘we can see about that. There'll be time. But I think an officer of your experience should have an independent command, rather than being subordinate in a parachute platoon. I'm going to give you C Platoon.' (This was one of the platoons of glider-borne jeeps.)

Oh, C Platoon! Reader, please forgive a brief rhapsody. Was there ever such a platoon - was there? What a plague could I do for C Platoon that they couldn't have done without me? That wasn't
quite
true, actually - there has to
be
an officer, or things start getting wugular - but jolly nearly. Both the N.C.O.s and the men were beyond the wildest dreams of any subaltern. They were not only extremely competent - Sergeant Smith (Gerry) was a great deal more competent than I - but splendidly keen and very diverse. From Corporal Bater (Devonshire) - whom I have personally seen drink sixteen pints in an evening and then drive a jeep (I was in it) - to Corporal Herdman (‘Wheel him in, ah ha ha ha!'), a Geordie, there wasn't a dud in the lot. Well, of course, there couldn't have been, not in 250 Company, only I just wasn't used to that sort of style, see? Even the Lance-Corporals (Barnard and Rushforth) would have made damned good corporals anywhere else. And when I start remembering the men individually - Eggleton, Fisher, Williams — well, a reader is bound to feel this tedious; but don't forget that I'm not the first writer to have found commanding a good platoon the most fulfilling and rewarding thing they have ever had to do. Herbert Read, for a start. And Robert Graves and - a whole lot more. I wish I were back there, straight I do.

The first thing C Platoon had on their plate after I'd taken them over was to go to Wellington, in Shropshire, and collect forty jeeps and eighty trailers - to make us effective according to establishment. Now airborne trailers were tricky things. Towing one empty one behind you was dangerous: towing two was even more dangerous. If you went too fast, the empty trailer might well turn over, and if it did, then the open-sided jeep went over with it. I have known at least one man (not mine) killed in this way. With two trailers per jeep, we had to drive back from Wellington to Lincoln at no more than twenty m.p.h. all the way.

The evening we got to Wellington was actually the evening of the day on which I had taken up command of the platoon. I asked the N.C.O.s how they intended to pass the evening and they said they were going out on the beer. I immediately asked whether I could come along, and of course they said Yes: they couldn't say anything else, really, but I saw an apprehensive shadow cross a few faces. They thought I and my pips were likely to be a drag on the evening. I knew that it was vital for the future of our relationship that I should join them and that in the course of the evening they must come to decide that they liked me without, at bottom, losing respect for their new officer. Well, it worked. It was really that they liked themselves and their red berets so much that they were essentially good-natured and well disposed. They liked being who they were, they liked what they were doing and they liked being under the command of John Gifford. They felt no resentment against the army or against the set-up they were in. As the pints took hold and Corporal Rawlings talked to me of how the company had been formed, in 1942, under the command of Major Packe, and of what they had carried out in North Africa, Sicily and Italy, I felt even more fully committed to what we were doing and to trying to be an airborne officer. I had never dreamt that there could be a platoon - or a company - like this. They should have every scrap of me, twenty-four hours a day. I honestly believe that the N.C.O.s went to bed that night feeling that the new officer at least liked his beer, had a sense of humour and might turn out to be not too bad.

As for the men, there was none of the peevishness, shoulder-shrugging or ill-concealed resentment with which I had become all-too-familiar elsewhere. Neither was there any of the kind of spirit expressed in ‘We are Fred Karno's army, we are the A.S.C.' They did not regard themselves as Fred Karno's army. They were glider-borne troops of the 1st Airborne Division: Hitler had a nasty shock coming. I don't mean that they had no sense of humour, or that I didn't get my leg pulled in all the minor and time-honoured ways. But none of them ever ran down the Company or the Division. (‘'Wish Ah was out o' this f— lot.' To which the answer would have been ‘Well, you can go tomorrow morning — easily. Your passport shall be made and crowns for convoy put into your purse.')