Time at War (2 page)

Oh the Rifle Brigade has gone away
And they've left all the girls in the family way
The KRRs who are coming behind
Will have seven-and-six a week to find

–seven shillings and sixpence being the cost, in those days, of the upkeep of a child.

No one at the depot seemed much interested in my father; and I was not thinking much about the sense or ethics of the war. It seemed we were all involved in some gigantic juggernaut of fate or the grim workings of evolution. Our task was just to keep going, with as much good humour as possible. By this time both Russia and America were in the war against Hitler, so there was the sense that in the end, so long as one stayed alive, things would turn out all right.

From Winchester our group of mainly ex-public schoolboys went briefly to Tidworth on Salisbury Plain, where we did training with transport. The speciality of the Rifle Brigade and the King's Royal Rifle Corps was to form motorised battalions ready for quick deployment in war. Then from Tidworth we moved to an Officer Cadet
Training Unit in York. Here we were treated more specifically as potential officers: we did tactical training at platoon and company level. But we still had to go regularly on long half-jogging marches covering ten miles in two hours, carrying heavy packs and weapons; we were tested for the dexterity with which we could take various weapons to bits and put them together again. We learned to drive trucks; we were taking on cross-country motorbike rides by a former hill-climbing champion, during which he led us up almost vertical slopes and we laughed when our machines tipped over backwards and chased us down the hill. We were lectured on current affairs and regimental history. We also felt free to indulge in some of the more traditional pastimes of officers.

I had asked my father if I could borrow his shotgun. I wrote to him from Fulford Barracks, York –

Many happy returns of the day.

Your lawyer has managed to rescue your guns from the Home Office, and they are now safely up here with me. The trouble is cartridges, which are practically unobtainable, but perhaps some of my sporting friends in the OCTU will be able to wheedle me some from their family dealers. I will be able to get in a fairly regular shoot on Saturday afternoons, and we are now being encouraged to take a gun when we go on manoeuvres on the moors. The authorities are very reasonable about all this; and if one gives a pheasant or two to the officers' mess they will let you take a gun almost anywhere.

We have now finished our mechanic's course, from which I passed as a 1st class driver-mechanic, which was really very bogus, and was granted only through systematic flattering of the instructor. Also our wireless course, which was not so successful, as I was rather overconfident and idle, spending most of the time listening to the BBC and trying to wreck the wireless schemes by sending false messages. Which displeased people, and I fear I may have got a low mark.

But we are embarking upon the most important part of our training now – endless tactics and toughening courses, horrible 5-day manoeuvres in Northumberland, sleeping open-air with one blanket and being harassed by live ammunition and artillery barrages. Then on December 18 we pass out complete with natty suiting and prominent chest and are allowed to show off to our families for a week or so. I will come and see you then just before Christmas.

The times that it seems meant most to me while I was stationed at York were those when I could get away at weekends to the home of an old school friend, Timmy, some five or six miles away, here a group of us continued enthusiastically to play the games we had played as children – a chasing-and-capture-and-escaping game called Lions; acting games; pencil-and-paper games. Then occasionally at weekends, I and others would be able to get down to London where my sister shared a flat with two girlfriends also working in her small-arms factory. We would land up in a favourite nightclub called The Nut
House where we drank and sang communal songs like
The Sheik of Araby
(to which the antiphon was
With no pants on)
; or
Bell-bottom trousers coats of navy blue
(antiphon:
He'll climb the rigging like his father used to do).
These chants have stuck in my mind like strange mantras. The lady who ran The Nut House told me she had known my father, and did I know how attractive my stammer was? I said – No. This might have been a life-giving moment for me.

When the time came for me and my colleagues either to become officers or to have failed, I was interviewed by the young captain who had largely been responsible for our training and he told me that they did not usually commission cadets with a stammer as bad as mine, but … but I don't remember him quite being able to finish this sentence. But anyway, there I was, turning up in London for Christmas 1942 resplendent in my new Second-Lieutenant's uniform. And the battle of Alamein had by this time been won, the battle of Stalingrad was going all right, was it not? And the war seemed as distant as ancient mythology.

One of the consequences of my having become an officer was that I got permission from the Home Office to spend the best part of a day with my father and stepmother in Holloway Jail. So in the New Year I dropped in at Fortnum and Mason on the way and arrived with the inside of my huge army overcoat hung with a ham and a bottle of brandy, and under my arm a Wagner record for Diana's wind-up gramophone with a giant horn. We had a fine day – this was the first time I
felt old enough to talk on anything like equal terms with my father – we did not say much about the war; we talked about ideas and books. Then towards the end of the day there was a knock on the door of the bleak cell-like room where my father and stepmother and I were sampling the brandy; my father said, ‘Who is it?' and a voice said, ‘The Governor.' My father said, ‘Oh do come in!' and made a half-hearted attempt to hide the bottle under the table. The Governor was a pleasant man and he stayed and chatted with us for a while. Then my father said, ‘Would you like a glass of brandy?' The Governor said, Thank you!' My stepmother went off to wash a tooth-glass. The Governor said, ‘Ah, you don't often find brandy like this nowadays!'

My father still seemed extraordinarily serene in prison; it was as if prison were evidence of his disapproval of war. Then, on a later visit when we were alone together for a while, he did speak briefly of the war. He said that when I went abroad to fight, if ever it happened that I were taken prisoner, I should remember some password that he would give me in case he were able to get in touch with me. I thought this odd: surely my father could have no contacts now with Germany? He had never, unlike my stepmother, been on close personal terms with high-up Nazis. I thought – This is just a way of implying that he might still have a finger in the world of intrigue. But I did perhaps begin to wonder – Well it might not be such a bad thing after all to be taken prisoner and so survive a war which before long, surely, would be as good as won. But
what a time it might still take to finish it off – for armies to slog to and fro across North Africa, and all the way back across Russia to Berlin.

Newly commissioned officers waiting to be sent overseas went to the Rifle Brigade Holding Battalion at Ranby, in Nottinghamshire, a rather bleak encampment of huts either side of the Retford-Worksop road. But here everything became different.

We felt ourselves liberated from institutional subservience; from the need to ingratiate and dissemble. We could begin to be what we felt we were: but most of us were only nineteen.

We were each to be in charge of the training of a platoon of thirty to thirty-five men, most of them much older than ourselves. I wrote to my Aunt Irene –

At the moment I have a platoon of 35 men all to myself who are only just starting their training, and who are ignorant and stupid beyond belief. So I have a hard and anxious job, but I believe when some of the other officers come back off leave I may have someone to help me. Unfortunately I was given the platoon which had the reputation of being the scruffiest in the Company, and now it is up to me I suppose to descruff them. They never wash, lose all their equipment and come out half dressed; but are incredibly keen when out training
in the country, and good fun if you treat them right. They are so shabby and slack about their appearance and their barrack room, and yet they are so pleasant and good-natured when one chats to them. I try to be both pleasant and firm, but it is tricky.

The time is taken up with Weapon Training, which I leave to the NCOs, who are efficient, and can do that sort of thing much better than us: unending lectures on Gas, Map Reading, Tactics, and even First Aid and Topical Interest, which I give, rather shakily at first, but I am getting used to it now, and am becoming reasonably good. My sergeant is very helpful. I really do take my hat off to these old NCOs, some of whom have been in the army for years. They all play up to us junior officers, and there is no question of the jealousy which I believe you get in some regiments.

To my old school friend, Timmy, who was following in my footsteps a few months behind me and who had written asking for hints from which he could learn, I wrote –

So long as you tell your sergeant just what you want done and leave him to do it in his own way, the house on fire burns merrily. It is only when you butt in on the sergeant's pitch, and quibble with him in front of the men, that the trouble starts. When you want to take over the platoon he will step into the background and help without pestering suggestions.

With the men I have so far got on well, and we have
been able to laugh together and they do have respect. I have only had to deliver one personal rocket when I saw a man chewing gum on parade. I told him to spit it out, to which he answered that he was unable because it had stuck to the roof of his palate. I then waxed vicious and said that he either got his gum unstuck or I would get him so stuck himself that he would not be able to extricate self for weeks, at which he accordingly expectorated (is this the word?) and so we went on.

Later. Christ, am I weary this evening. My platoon is really too bloody keen for words. They led me slap through a river today, and I had to follow with pretence of enjoyment. But they are fun, and so much more worthwhile than the old sweats I was with at Winch.

When we went out on manoeuvres we were able to go to the beautiful Peak District of Derbyshire, where it seemed to make sense to do tactical training in the style of stalking-and-catching-and-rescuing games which my friends and I had played ever since childhood. My friend and colleague during these exercises was Raleigh Trevelyan, who later was to write one of the best books about fighting in the Second World War,
The Fortress,
about his experiences at the landing at Anzio. In the Peak District we would pit our platoons against each other like Cowboys and Indians; in the evenings we would all sit around campfires and sing songs under the stars. We junior officers often felt more at home with our men than we did in the officers' mess at Ranby. I wrote to my sister –

I really think that the usual life of an officer is even more narrowing and binding than that of a man. In the ranks one was admittedly restricted physically by petty regulations, but as an officer one is up against the appalling tyranny of etiquette and good manners. The mess is stuffy and staid like a Victorian clubroom; and there is no escape. One cannot even roll out and wallow in a pub. One is always under the eye of a keen and critical audience.

It seems that I was beginning to realise that in describing my men as scruffy and unruly, and yet also in important ways the salt of the earth, there was indeed a tradition in which these were likely to be aspects of the same thing.

And before long we junior officers were creating our own manner of anarchic protest by turning one of our rooms (we had rooms which two of us shared in a large hut on its own) into a fantasy nightclub which we called
The Juke Box.
Here, away from the officers' mess, we played records on a wind-up gramophone; we danced ballroom or exotic dances; some of us got hold of women's clothes. There is a tradition in armies for this sort of thing on the fringes of war – presumably as a reaction or counterbalance to the brutally macho business of killing; perhaps psychologically as a form of bonding. I do not know how many of us were at that time, or remained, in fact gay: there was no evidence then of anything overtly sexual. We had nearly all come from public schools where it seemed naturally the fashion to behave in a gay style; what better could one do with no girls in sight? I myself had been no exception to
this. The word ‘gay' had not been applied to homosexuality yet, but one can see how this use of it arose. Homosexuals were seen as paragons of wit and fantasy; such qualities were life-giving in wartime. In 1942 at Ranby the emphasis was on gaiety in the old sense.

Many of the denizens of
The Juke Box
went on to be killed or wounded in Italy – Timmy Lloyd, one of the occupants of
The Juke Box
room, was shot at point-blank range when leading a patrol; Charlie Morpeth had a leg blown off in a minefield. Bunny Roger, who had been famous as a fashionable milliner before the war and was old enough not to be required to do any fighting, became renowned once more in Italy for the story that he, having become impatient with his regulation officer's pistol, had seized a rifle from one of his men and, after a brief reminder from his corporal as to how it worked, had shot a German at an almost impossible range. Raleigh Trevelyan, my companion in the cavortings in the Peak District, was grievously wounded in the hand-to-hand fighting at Anzio. Once, when he and I were out with our platoons playing our catching-and-rescuing games, I came across him in the early morning looking pleased and I said to him, ‘Raleigh, you're looking very starry-eyed!' and he said ‘I've been seduced by my sergeant.'

I wrote to my friend Timmy, who was following my path through the army a few months behind me –

My darling platoon is now very much to my liking. They spend most of their time on training either killing chickens or stealing eggs, of which they give me a
goodly portion, so I pretend very hard not to notice, though they would steal just the same if I did. And we have riotous games of football during recreational training, when it is their sole objective to trip me up and sit on me whether I have the ball or not. Which I enjoy because some of them are rather attrac.