A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  He had been told by the Admiralty that he would have to wait a long time for a commission but that he could join as a rating, and he had volunteered for the minesweepers as a seaman as early as January 1940 but failed the medical.11 Even so, warned of the dangers of the job by an old captain at the Merchant Marine Office, he was so miserable about his impending divorce that he would have been ‘glad to be blown up, if it were done thoroughly’.12

  His misery deepened in March when he was ‘completely laid out – entire guts red hot, appendix howling’. A doctor was called and insisted that he be operated on immediately, but Bunting could afford neither the time nor the money involved. While his illness raged he was called to an interview at Army Intelligence in London, blaming influenza for his wretched physical condition so as not to invite further medical enquiries. He was pleased with the interview but lost fourteen pounds in weight on the three-day trip. When he returned he was called for another interview at the Admiralty, this time in Newcastle, but he was sent away and told to go to hospital. By the time a third interview, with the skipper of a coasting steamer, came round he could hardly walk and one of his uncles (at his own expense) called a consultant who confirmed that he had three conditions which combined to give the impression of acute appendicitis – a kidney stone and two other unidentified problems that were causing spasms in his colon. Miraculously the following day, ‘the spasms ceased’.13

  Eventually he managed to persuade a doctor who had known his father to allow him to memorise the eye test and he was able to join the Royal Air Force. By July 1940 he was a balloon man, ‘the only thing the doctors would pass me for’, though as yet without a posting.14 In August he complained to Zukofsky that he was ‘idle … no nearer a job … The army (intelligence), air force (balloons) and children’s evacuation people have all got me listed for jobs at short notice, but nothing comes of it.’15 He was also desperate for news of his children. By then he had not heard anything from Wisconsin, apart from a few lines his lawyer managed to obtain, for the fifteen months since he left the US. He told Zukofsky that he was paralysed by the loss of his children and the ‘bitter, gratuitous, vindictive wrongs’ he suffered at the hands of his ex-wife.16

  BALLOONS IN HULL, 1940

  Bunting was finally accepted into No.3 Recruits Centre at Padgate in Warrington on 21 September 1940 as Aircraftman Second Class. Padgate (now a housing estate) had been opened in April 1939, so before Britain was formally at war, as a national training centre for RAF recruits. Bunting recalled that the recruits ‘were all Welshmen and many of them didn’t understand English. Amusing blokes.’17 Padgate was to become an important camp and by 1943, as the RAF stepped up its bombing campaign in Germany, Padgate’s intake rose to fifteen hundred recruits per week. Bunting spent just six days there before joining 653 other airmen and twenty officers at 942 Squadron, Balloon Command, at No.17 Balloon centre in Sutton-on-Hull in East Yorkshire on 27 September 1940, ‘weather intermittent rain or drizzle … 23 balloons shining, 17 balloons sleeping’, according to the Operations Record. Bunting thought it a ‘terrible bore’.18 ‘They’ believed that he was ‘too old for anything except the damned balloons’ after he had been trained.

  A balloon barrage had been part of the defence strategy for British cities since 1929. Balloon barrages forced enemy aircraft to fly higher and consequently to drop their bombs less accurately and they made them more vulnerable to searchlights, anti-aircraft fire and fighter aircraft. They also acted as deterrents to dive-bombing. On the other hand the balloons were as dangerous for unwitting British pilots as they were for the enemy and, of course, a collection of highly visible aerial objects drew attention to the target.

  Balloon Command had been formed in November 1938 and consisted of five groups, each of which was further divided into Balloon Centres. The Hull Centre (No.17) was in No.33 Group headquartered in Sheffield. The first balloons had flown from Hull on 17 July 1939 and by the start of the Hull Barrage on 1 September 1939, just two days before Britain declared war on Germany, just six balloons were flying at war sites. By the time Bunting arrived the Hull Barrage alone was flying over seventy.

  Those of us who have no experience of the Second World War tend to scoff at barrage balloons as a gimcrack response to the terrifying Luftwaffe, if, that is, we know anything about them at all. In fact they were a vital part of Britain’s defence strategy and when Bunting joined it 17 Balloon Centre was one of the most important in the country. A month after Bunting arrived Hull flew more balloons (seventy-two) than any of the UK’s fortyone Balloon Centres except Glasgow and London.19

  Hull, to be fair, was a particularly dangerous place and Bunting would have been happy to move on as quickly as he did. The Luftwaffe regarded the city as a primary target before the war started.20 The Log of 942 Squadron recorded the death of two airmen and a civilian during the month of Bunting’s arrival. But an element of deep amateurism suffuses the story of No.17 Balloon Centre. The following passage from Leonard Bacon’s history of the Hull station could be instructions received from Home Guard HQ by Dad’s Army’s hapless Captain Mainwaring:

  The personnel at the No.17 Balloon Centre assisted by the crews of four nearby Balloon Sites was to form part of the defence of Sutton on Hull by taking over a road block, install a machine gun post at Noddle Hill Farm and with the defence posts at the Centre, cover Wawne Road … The Crews from the Waterborne Barges were to assist Royal Navy personnel in the immobilisation of the Docks and when that role was completed some were to become part of defence of the City Keep, while others join crews from land Sites already in place on the railway embankment running the North edge of King George Dock, it was there they were to resist the enemy’s entry into the Docks until the last! 21

  It is easy to poke fun at a war fought at this local micro-level but there were periods of intense activity and danger. Hull took twenty-two bombing raids between February and early May 1941. A large parachute mine fell in the city centre causing major destruction on the night of 7 May. Raids on the following two nights killed more than five hundred civilians and injured a further 325.22 The record of an evening picked at random (5 November 1940) from Bunting’s posting at Hull tells its own story:

  17.39 hours ‘D’ Flight report bombs and heavy gunfire very near, 17.41 hours ‘C’ Flight reports heavy explosions. 17.43 hours Red warning. 17.43 hours ‘D’ Flight report Sites 8 & 27 machine gunned. Site S down for topping-up. Balloon will be examined for punctures before flying. (No punctures found.) 17.50 hours GY report HMD ‘Student Prince’ in action against enemy a/craft flying SW at 2000. 18.10 hours ‘D’ Flight Site 27 reports 2 enemy aircraft coming in from river. Bombs dropping near ‘D’ Flight HQ. 18.11 hours and 18.18 hours, ‘B’ and ‘A’ Flights respectively report heavy explosions on Lincs. side of river. 18.14 hours ‘E’ Flight report a ‘plane S of Site 83, also one or two explosions S of site. 18.27 hours air raid message White. 18.30 hours GT report ‘HMD Student Prince’ fired on a/craft because guns on Lincs. coast were already firing before a/craft was within range. Therefore ‘S. Prince’ presumed a/craft to be hostile and opened fire. Immediately after guns at Spurn opened fire.23

  And so on through the night. It was a frenetic, round-the-clock defence and repair operation. Bunting was pleased to be moved on from it after ten weeks or so.

  Bunting didn’t talk much about his eighteen months or so inflating balloons in Scotland and the north of England and one can see why. It was considerably less glamorous than his later war career, although that didn’t prevent an element of myth-making collecting around the activity. Lorine Niedecker wrote to Zukofsky on 18 May 1941: ‘So – and Basil is over the North Sea with a machine gun in a balloon and he sees the end of the world.’24

  BALLOONS IN SCOTLAND, 1940 –1942

  On 9 December 1940 Bunting joined 948 Squadron at Rosyth on Scotland’s Firth of Forth, having been promoted to Aircraftman First Class on 28 November. The squadron’s main activity on the day Bunting joined was the condemnation
and evacuation of the Band Hall at Methil25 and he immediately found his circumstances much more congenial:

  the very first day I was there [in Hull] a notice appeared asking for volunteers for what was described as difficult and dangerous work at sea. And I thought, well, that’s the job for me. And went for it. The people I left behind at Hull were killed in the great raid on the docks which took place almost immediately after I left. I found that the ‘dangerous and difficult work at sea’ turned out to be the most comfortable you could find in the Royal Air Force. We worked on these large yachts that millionaires had built before the War. The masts had been taken out of them, of course. They were running on diesel engines. We lived in berths that had been built for the Rothschilds, and we ate very well. The crews were mixed – partly RAF, partly Navy, partly civilian fishermen. We got on very well together. On my boat, the Golden Hind, it was extremely difficult to get anybody to take the day off when they had a day in harbour. We had to make it compulsory to go ashore, otherwise they wouldn’t. Oh yes, I enjoyed that year. That was 1940 and some of 1941 …26

  According to Peter Quartermain the job of the Golden Hind was to escort convoys across the North Sea to the Arctic Russian port of Murmansk, although 948 Squadron’s Operations Record doesn’t support that.27 Few other details of his fifteen months in Scotland survive, although many years later he related a tale to Peter Quartermain from late in 1941: ‘Alloa, Fife: Bunting, B., Leading Aircraftsman, Serial number 1119305, learning how to drive an army lorry, at the front of a large convoy, spots up ahead an archway, on the left side of the road, on which, as he gets nearer, he can read “George Younger’s Brewery.” So he leads the whole convoy into the yard. “We all got a free drink,” he said.’28

  Although the Band Hall was a priority for the men on the day he arrived Bunting was immediately pitched into intense activity at Rosyth. During January 1941 the ‘efforts of all Sections of the Squadron have been directed towards the earliest possible establishment of the Methil Barrage … Six vessels [including the Golden Hind] fitted with winches have docked at Methil during the month, also the R.A.F. Pinnace. Instructions have been received from Higher Authority to fly balloons from these vessels at the earliest opportunity.’29

  The ‘D’ Flight barrage was installed on 9 February and three days later the Golden Hind was damaged in a collision with the jetty at Methil as the ships were withdrawn from the harbour because of bad weather. Squadron 948’s activity was a constant round of inflating, deflating and repairing balloons. In Methil in July 1941 alone 93 new balloons were sent up, 138 were topped up, 22 were repaired and 5 salvaged, all involving 482 tubes of hydrogen.30 Methil was by some way the biggest of the Forth barrages. The month before Bunting left 948 Squadron it used more tubes of hydrogen (a key measure of activity) than the Aberdeen, Oban, Dundee and Aultbea barrages combined.

  Bunting wrote lightly about his time in the North Sea but it could be hard and dangerous work. He gave an example to Gael Turnbull:

  We had been lifted from the water by a depth charge dropped by a German plane, and the leak that caused opened dangerously during a hard easterly gale while we were lying in Leven roads. Our crew, all over age for other service except two boys (who were very frightened), had to keep the pumps going while the job was done by men up to their waist in water in the narrow bilge, without elbow room. We got free and into Methil in time, where engines did the pumping till we could take the Golden Hind (no less a name) to Burnt Island for repairs.31

  Certainly life aboard the Golden Hind seems to have been better than life ashore. In a letter to Zukofsky written in September 1941, mystifyingly damaged by the censor, he wrote that ‘[long blank] I have been without a change of linen, without a bath, sleeping in a horrible smell in an unventilated room with [blank] men in it, shaving [long blank] out in the street from a bucket: scrubbing floors without soap, polishing brass without metal polish, washing dirty dishes in cold water, in all the time left over from “duty”. It’s better now I am back on board.’32 Time spent ashore wasn’t all drudgery. He spent six weeks at headquarters in Rosyth in September and October learning to drive and repair lorries, and ‘having to look smart, for a change, and do all the stupid military things’.33

  During his time in Scotland Bunting became friendly with a local girl, a fourteen-year-old secretary called Violet Harris. Violet offered to type Bunting’s poems and he dedicated a farewell to art to her, ‘To Violet, with prewar poems’.

  These tracings from a world that’s dead

  take for my dust-smothered pyramid.

  Count the sharp study and long toil

  as pavements laid for worms to soil.

  You without knowing it might tread

  the grass where my foundation’s laid,

  your, or another’s, house be built

  where my weathered stones lie spilt,

  and this unread memento be

  the only lasting part of me.34

  He told Zukofsky in September 1941 that he had sought a ‘minor promotion, not willingly’ that would increase his wages by sixpence a day. The reason he wanted this promotion was ‘to save for Violet’, so he clearly had a long-term relationship in mind.35 Poetry had offered to publish ‘To Violet, with prewar poems’ in the September issue, something that pleased him mainly because Violet would see her name in print. Although he longed for a job in Persia he was desperate not to be separated from Violet.36 Violet’s family clearly saw nothing in the friendship to discourage. He told Zukofsky that but for her parents a day ashore meant a day on the streets and he visited Violet’s aunt for supper, so tired that he fell asleep at it.37 By February 1942 he was deeply attached to Violet who had by then become a clerk at the Leven Gas Company, running a small office in Methil. ‘Her gentleness and gaiety are my chief assets,’ he told Zukofsky. ‘I fancy she is beginning to rely on me as much as I on her: and I dread a parting.’38 Violet had made a ‘tolerable life into a good one’ and she had finally helped him to recover from the bitterness he felt at Marian’s departure.39

  Bunting wrote movingly of his experience in the North Sea in his war poem, ‘The Spoils’:

  Tide sang. Guns sang:

  ‘Vigilant,

  pull off fluffed woollens, strip

  to buff and beyond.’

  In watch below

  meditative heard elsewhere

  surf shout, pound shores seldom silent

  from which heart naked swam

  out to the dear unintelligible ocean.

  From Largo Law look down,

  moon and dry weather, look down

  on convoy marshalled, filing between mines.

  Cold northern clear sea-gardens

  between Lofoten and Spitzbergen,

  as good a grave as any, earth or water.

  What else do we live for and take part,

  we who would share the spoils.40

  These lines are about ‘what the tide says, rippling round the anchor chains of the ships assembling in the Firth of Forth for the Archangel convoy; the contrast of leisurely fishing with the need to prepare to face very ultimate things’.41

  In fact Bunting enjoyed his luxurious lifestyle in Fife for the last three weeks of 1940, all of 1941 and the first three months of 1942. By then technology was automating balloon activity and Bunting’s position was becoming redundant. He wrote to Karl Drerup on 1 April 1942:

  I can tell you very little of what I am doing. No enemy has ever come within range of my machine-gun, except Hess: and I was asleep when he passed, & none of the men on deck knew how to fire the gun, though a merchant ship near us did have a shot at him. The work was formerly dangerous, though not fearfully so. But now it is uneventful and boring. I was in some of the heavy bombings on the Mersey and at Hull before they sent me to be based in Scotland: but for well over a year I’ve seen very few bombs. I expect to be transferred to a more risky job – still at sea – before very long, but I know nothing definite about it.42

  The hyperbolic refe
rence to action on the Mersey can only relate to his week at the recruitment centre at Padgate. In later life he was sanguine about his ballooning. He told Gael Turnbull that he ‘went up to 7,000ft under a barrage balloon, wrapped in a blanket. Next chap not so lucky.’43

  PERSIA, 1942–1943

  Bunting’s letter to Drerup was written on his last day at Methil. ‘One day last April,’ he told Zukofsky in October, ‘a drifter came out from Port Edgar to my yacht, bringing a two-page signal from the Ministry; and waited while I packed my kit and left Scotland and the North Sea for “Overseas Posting”. I got 48 hours embarkation leave – and that was cut short by telegram. When I joined my new unit in the south of England I found I was posted as interpreter.’44

  Unimpressed by the requirement to ‘go back to this damned old business of flying balloons ashore’ Bunting had applied for and acquired a posting to Persia on the strength of his knowledge of classical Persian,45 and on 2 April 1942 during a severe thunderstorm that lasted for most of the month46 Bunting joined 929 Squadron at Queensferry, still at Forth, for a month in preparation for service overseas.47 On 29 April he joined the newly formed 982 (Balloon) Squadron at Chessington, according to his service record ‘in formation and will proceed overseas’, and two days later, on 1 May 1942, he was promoted to Leading Aircraftman: 982 Squadron’s destination was Persia. On 6 May the squadron embarked on a thirteen-hour overnight train journey to Glasgow, from where it set sail on 10 May on its voyage round the Cape of Good Hope. From 7 May 1942, according to a cryptic and somewhat detached note in Bunting’s service record, he was serving in Iraq. Within a few days of leaving port, ‘regular lessons in Persian [had] been arranged … Our instructor [is] L.A.C. Bunting who has a sound knowledge of many languages and is quite an authority on certain literary subjects.’48 Bunting did not enjoy the voyage on this ‘appalling troopship, like a bad canto from the Inferno, so overcrowded, such foul food’.49