by Tom Carver
Oswald’s family, the Carvers, were serious-minded “chapel folk” who, in the space of a generation, had managed to rise up from carting goods over the Pennines to become substantial cotton traders and manufacturers. They were the biggest employer in the small town of Marple, outside Manchester, with 300 people clocking in at the Carver cotton mill for work every morning. The 1911 census showed that the Carver household employed seven servants and three grooms for their horses at their large estate, Cranage Hall.
All that changed with the First World War. Oswald and his brother never returned. Then the Great Depression sent the price of English cotton plummeting, and in 1927, the family was forced to sell the mill and Cranage Hall. The only bidder was the local authority, which turned the large Victorian mansion into a lunatic asylum. The walls were whitewashed in lime, the carpets taken up and the boards scrubbed with disinfectant, and soon the long corridors were filled with the mumblings of the insane, heard only by the cows grazing in the pasture outside. The Carvers’ brief membership of the leisured classes had expired before it had really begun.
Richard and John moved with their widowed mother to a small cottage on the banks of the Thames in Chiswick. If they occasionally missed having a father, they were far from alone in their situation among boys of their age and they enjoyed the full attention of their mother. Betty Carver was warm and vivacious, an aspiring painter. The cottage was full of her friends, nearly all poets and artists. In the evenings Richard and John lay upstairs in their beds listening to the noise of conversation below.
That winter of 1926, they had something to celebrate: at the encouragement of Augustus John, Betty Carver had applied to the Slade School of Art, and to her delight and due no doubt to a word of recommendation from him, she had been accepted. She decided to raid the small trust fund that her in-laws had set aside for Richard and John’s education and take them on a winter holiday.
The Hotel Wildstrubel was not Lenk’s most fashionable hotel but not its worst either. On the second morning there, Betty and the two boys were having breakfast in the dining room when an Englishman walked up to their table and introduced himself. He had a neatly clipped moustache and was dressed for some reason in lederhosen, as if trying to fit in with the local scene. He was short, with vivid blue eyes and a beaky nose. When he spoke it was with a wiry nervous energy as if he didn’t have time to explain his thoughts in great detail. The image that came to Richard’s mind was of a Jack Russell dog.
In what seemed to be a single breath, the man explained that he had been recently promoted to major in the British infantry and was holidaying alone in Lenk. He said that he had been drawn to their breakfast table by the presence of children, having none of his own. He appeared to be nearing 40 and a confirmed bachelor with no sign of a wife. In fact, though he didn’t reveal it to Betty, he had come to Lenk in pursuit of a girl he had developed an infatuation with the summer before, but the girl, who was much younger, had firmly rebuffed him.
In her casual and slightly detached way, Betty invited the major to spend the day with them. Richard and John enjoyed the presence of this man who was the same age as their father would have been. Despite being an indifferent skier, this eccentric officer had no shortage of theories about how it should be done; in a parent this might have been grating but Richard and John were attracted by his energy and enthusiasm. He was always willing to join in with whatever they were doing; they laughed each time he fell over – there was something comical about the way he would bounce straight back up, shaking the snow off himself as if trying to pretend that he had never fallen. He was an amusing companion and when the holiday ended, they all said friendly goodbyes.
The next year Betty brought the boys back to Lenk. In the interim Richard had not thought much more about the major, and was surprised to see him striding towards them across the lobby of the hotel on the first day as if he had never left. He and John were even more struck by Betty’s greeting. They noticed that she did not seem at all surprised by the coincidence of the meeting – as if she had been expecting to find him there. This time the major did not confine his opinions to the ski slope. He was clearly used to giving orders and having them obeyed.
“You must discipline in the home,” they heard him say to her one day with what they considered excessive familiarity, but Betty only smiled and ignored the questioning glances that the boys threw in her direction.
Three months after they returned from skiing in the Easter holidays of 1927, Betty took Richard to visit his new school, Charterhouse. John was already there and had filled Richard with alarming stories about the fierce regime, the cold baths every morning, and having to wear the “attire of a city gent” with a jacket and pinstripes and a bowler hat. Adding to Richard’s confusion and distress, the major from Lenk – now a colonel and dressed in a crisp staff officer’s uniform – turned up unexpectedly at Betty’s side.
The school echoed with memories of the Great War. As they walked down the long shining corridors that smelt of beeswax, Richard stared up at the walls that held the names of the 700 Carthusians who had fallen in the fields of northern France; the great battles – Ypres, Flanders and Passchendaele – were inscribed in gold lettering as if they had been fought by gods. They toured the school’s new chapel, designed by the famous architect Sir Gilbert Scott, which had been opened that year as a memorial to the fallen. In one of the rooms, John showed his younger brother the three VCs won by Charterhouse boys displayed proudly under glass.
Just then Colonel Montgomery announced that he wanted to “inspect” the sports facilities – he seemed to assume that everything was there for his benefit – so John, too awed to protest, led them solemnly around the tennis courts and then the fives and racquets building. My father remembered his metal heel caps echoing on the parquet flooring.
Inside one of the fives courts, the colonel halted. Betty told John to take Richard away for a few minutes so that she and the colonel could be alone. Bewildered and with the impending nausea of homesickness in his stomach, Richard let John led him up the stairs to the spectators’ gallery. They pretended to play together, but they couldn’t take their eyes off the two figures standing in the middle of the court talking in subdued tones.
“It’ll be alright,” said John jocularly, punching Richard’s arm, but both knew it would not be. Richard sensed that this man was about to disturb their cosy family triangle. After a few moments, Betty looked up, smiled and waved at the boys, beckoning them back. Richard raced down, hurrying to stand next to her to shut out the bristly little figure on the other side.
“Bernard and I are going to get married,” she said. At first, Richard did not hear what she had said, preoccupied with his own thoughts. Then, seeing the astonished expression on John’s face, he asked her to repeat the news.
“We’re getting married,” Monty interjected.
*
The match was greeted with horror by Betty’s circle of friends. Betty introduced him into her artistic salons and Monty sat in the small living room of the cottage gamely trying to contribute something to the conversations about Art Deco and Futurism, but the only thing he liked to talk about was the art of war, a subject he could expound on with great passion for hours. Betty’s friends concluded that he was an eccentric in the wrong mould, obsessed by what had gone wrong in the First World War, which none of them wanted to think about. It was too dull and depressing. They feared that his fierce sense of discipline and routine would overwhelm Betty’s fragile sensibilities. He’s a philistine who has never read a thing, they told each other.
But to everyone’s surprise, Betty didn’t seem to care about the difference in their temperaments. Though she had no interest in her fiancé’s military world, she was attracted by his passion; the way he became so excited and voluble over strange issues like the role of the tank in future warfare and the benefits of enfilade fire. She detected within him a surfeit of raw emotional energy. During that period of the 1920s, when the rest of the world had ha
d their fill of war, Monty could not stop talking about it. He seemed to be planning for some new conflict in the future that Betty had no concept of. Besides, she was tired of being the only parent and she wanted to be looked after. And she certainly felt loved by this strange, compelling man.
On 25th June 1927, an announcement appeared in The Times of an engagement between Lt Colonel Bernard Montgomery and Mrs E.A. Carver. They married quietly one month later; Monty insisting on having not one but two honeymoons, first in England and then in Switzerland.
Brushing aside the concerns of others, he immediately assumed the role of both husband and parent, oblivious to the fact that he had no experience of either. Monty couldn’t bear to see anything that wasn’t well run, and the only way he knew how to run anything was on military lines. He took over the management of the household chores and divided Betty’s disorderly life into carefully allotted spans, posting “orders of the day” on the dining-room door with instructions such as “lunch at 1300 hours” and “girls will pick up flowers for the house”. Betty often ignored them but she nonetheless found the routine reassuring. She sold the old motorbike and sidecar that she used to drive her two boys around in, and allowed Monty to drive her in his stately Belsize car. He took the two boys riding through the woods of Sandhurst and swimming in the lakes and thus, through the force of his character, he pulled all three of them into his gravitational field.
Betty understood that Monty’s obsessive orderliness and self-discipline was a way of containing his inner demons. Monty had spent the early years of his life on the remote island of Tasmania off Australia, where his father had been an Anglican bishop, ministering to a parish largely populated by recidivist convicts.
For six months a year, the bishop walked the hills of Tasmania in a bush hat and hobnail boots, visiting the distant prison farms, while Maud, his much younger wife, ruled the home and their six children with a fierceness that bordered on cruelty. When Monty sold the bike that he had been given for his tenth birthday, she forced him to buy it back with every penny of his pocket money. The beatings were unrelenting: it was said that Maud Montgomery handled a cane like a man. But she was unable to bend the fifth of her six children to her will. On one occasion when Maud was trying to make herself heard at a children’s party, Monty jumped on a table and yelled, “Silence in the pig market, the old sow speaks first!”
The old bishop, hoping that boarding school might temper his son’s volcanic energy, sent him to St Paul’s in London. But the 1906 school magazine gives a portrait of a boy unbowed; its sport section recorded Monty’s demonic fury towards opposing teams in rugby: “stamping on their heads and twisting their necks and doing many other inconceivable atrocities with a view no doubt to proving his patriotism”.
He decided to join the army largely to spite his parents who tried hard to push him into the Church, and his military career was nearly derailed almost immediately when he set fire to the shirt-tails of a fellow cadet at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, badly burning him. Slowly, the military discipline and routine began to have some effect and Monty learnt to channel his energy into hard work. He fought through the First World War and emerged on the other side – minus part of a knee and a lung from snipers’ bullets.
A year after his marriage to Betty, she gave him a son, David – the only child they had between them. In 1928, he took his new stepsons back to Lenk, this time without Betty. The three of them shared a room to economise. My father remembered Monty telling them how to pee.
“You boys are very uncivilised,” he said. “You must stand up to use a chamber pot, not kneel down.”
Brought up without a father, no one had told them. Monty kept reminding them “to keep to their partums”. Each day was planned meticulously in advance, though the boys could not help noticing that it rarely went according to plan. Richard was surprised to discover that Monty had a keen sense of the absurd. They fooled around, having snowball fights and laughing at the outfits of some of the other guests. To the end of his life, my father remembered a limerick that Monty taught him on that holiday:
There was an old soldier from Lyme
Who married three wives at a time
When asked why the third
He said, one’s absurd
And bigamy, sir, is a crime
On the surface my father put on a brave face. When adults told him that he must be pleased to have a new father, he did not demur. He told his mother he was happy for her. But inside he was in mourning. Monty’s arrival had severed the intimacy of the life that he and John had had with their mother in the cottage in Chiswick. They no longer had her full attention. She was now an army wife – a role for which she had sacrificed her dreams of being an artist – and at Christmas 1931, when Monty and his regiment were posted to Jerusalem, Betty left with him. From Palestine they would move on to Quetta on the North-west Frontier, taking David, their three-year-old, with them and leaving behind John and Richard at boarding school.
Betty with her boys: Richard and John (left and right, respectively), and David, the son she had by Monty
Richard (left), with David and Monty, 1936
Richard was by now in his late teens, and thinking about his future. Without Monty in his life, my father might have pursued a very different path, far away from the military. His own father Oswald had joined the army only because of the war; he had no intention of making it his career. And Betty had little to do with the military after he died. But, as Monty pushed and elbowed his way up through the cobwebbed ranks of Britain’s imperial army, he dragged everyone along in his slipstream. After graduating from Cambridge, in 1936, Richard declared an interest in becoming an architect, but Monty persuaded him otherwise.
Monty and Betty with Richard and David, 1935
“We will fight Germany again before long,” Monty said. “It’s unavoidable.”
He reminded Richard how Oswald had given his life fighting for his country. Richard did not resist and joined the Royal Engineers, Oswald’s old corps; there was a part of him that wanted to win the respect of his stepfather.
*
In the summer of 1937, Monty was promoted to the rank of brigadier and acquired large army quarters in Portsmouth, which Betty was delighted with. By then they had been married ten years; she had proved her friends wrong. She had found happiness with a man that most others found intolerable. Her gentleness had softened his nature if not his will, keeping him within the bounds of normal society.
Monty set about training his new brigade at once. Time was running out; he was convinced that England would soon be fighting Hitler and he wanted to be ready. Throughout the hot August of that year, when many of his fellow officers were on the beaches or the grouse moors, he led his grumbling troops through manoeuvre after manoeuvre around Stonehenge and Cranborne Chase.
During summer troop manoeuvres there was an unspoken agreement that the working day would finish around five o’clock, in time for officers to catch the train up to London or travel to the pleasures of Bournemouth, but Monty wasn’t interested. He made his brigade sleep in tents on different parts of Salisbury Plain and forced them through complex night movements in which they had to capture an opponent’s position before dawn.
On August 21st, Betty took nine-year-old David to the beach at Burnham-on-Sea in Devon, so that they could be near Monty on manoeuvres. The first day that Betty was on the beach, she was bitten by an insect. She was never able to tell the doctors what it was, but that night her leg began to swell and she was taken to the local cottage hospital. Monty came to see her. Assured by the doctors that it was only an inflammation from which she would recover, he left shortly afterwards.
As August moved into September, the infection spread throughout Betty’s body. Antibiotics did not yet exist. Reluctant to interrupt his war-gaming, Monty visited her only briefly, always hurrying back to his brigade. For several weeks David played alone on the beach during the day, spending the evenings by his mother’s bedside watching her ste
adily decline. By September, Monty could see that it was serious but felt there was little he could do; when term began he insisted that David return to his boarding school instead of staying by his mother’s side.
“Perhaps I did wrong,” he wrote later in a rare admission of error, “but I did what I thought was right.”
Had she been strong enough to protest, Betty would surely have asked for David to remain, but by now she was slipping in and out of consciousness. The maid packed away David’s beach clothes and filled his trunk with clothes for school. He was brought to the hospital to say goodbye. He bought her a little gold brooch in the shape of a sword as a parting present and stood by the side of the bed holding it, watching Betty toss from one side to the other, hoping that the fever might lift enough for her to notice him and say goodbye. But the time came for him to leave and she was still delirious. David laid the brooch softly down on her bedclothes beside her hand and left. Back at the hotel he wrote his mother a final note before he was driven to school. He seemed to be the only one who could see she was dying.
Betty lingered on for a few more weeks, but the doctors had run out of ideas. The poison from the bite, if that was the cause in the first place, had long since entered her bloodstream and taken over her entire body. In October, they decided to amputate both her legs. It was a gesture of despair and she died in Monty’s arms on 19th October. The post-mortem recorded septicaemia. Later that day, sitting beside her bed, Monty wrote to Richard, who was in India, to tell him that his mother was dead.
I found the letter many years later among my father’s papers, written in Monty’s thick-nibbed handwriting and carefully preserved by my father in its original envelope: “I think she knew she could not live. This morning when the doctor had left the room she whispered to me to go after him and ask him what he thought. And later when he came in again she gasped, ‘Is there any hope?’ Poor darling – she had a ghastly time during the last six weeks and had fought most bravely to live. I used to tell her she must fight for our sakes. But it was too much for her… Life is very black at the moment. I do not know what I shall do without her. It will be very hard for you to bear, away in India by yourself. Mummy looks very peaceful now. There is a look of complete calm and rest on her face.”