The Last Englishmen

by Deborah Baker

  It didn’t proceed. When Michael inquired about the delay he was told by the assistant director, buttressed now by an air commodore, that he was unfit for intelligence work on grounds of security. Was it the German wife he had yet to divorce? Articles for the Spectator conveying sympathy for the prewar plight of the German people? The talk at RAF Medmenham traced Michael’s troubles to his monumental tactlessness. In August 1941 he was stripped of his smart sky-blue uniform with three lines of gold braid and told to leave the aerodrome within sixteen hours. The assistant director ripped up his identity card in his face.

  One-Eyed Hemming called it a “slap in the face with a wet fish.” But for Michael, it was disastrous. He wrote outraged letters to his uncles, referencing his “unimpeachable correctitude” and the failings of the “miserable creature” who fired him. “Parliament exists to prevent such abuses,” he railed, describing an intrigue of Elizabethan proportions. Part of him hoped the Air Ministry would soon see how important he was, part of him knew he’d be wasted anywhere else. He was heartbroken. People he had barely noticed overwhelmed him with expressions of dismay and support. With no movement on his application for a new commission, he withdrew it.

  Michael turned to his Admiralty contacts and was given a post in propaganda. After a while he asked to be shifted to Operational Intelligence only to realize this, too, was a dead end. Uncle Alfred warned him that if he didn’t learn to cultivate at least an appearance of modesty, he would be marked down as an impossible man and written off. When he raised the possibility of renewing his application for an RAF commission, he was told it was safer to be the only PI specialist at the Admiralty, than one of several hundred at the RAF. Once he might have been content with that. But he had received his share of eviscerating letters from Nancy. After a careful study he’d concluded that she would be appeased only if he achieved something noteworthy.

  “For people like us,” he wrote her, “there cannot be any accepting of an inferior position without hope or possibility of betterment.” He knew he had it in him and that if he remained hopeful, eventually a superior position with good pay would materialize. If it didn’t, Nancy would strangle the life out of him, of that he was certain. There was also her tendency to want to die when things got difficult. This didn’t frighten him or mean that it would be a mistake to carry on with her. He knew only that if he took the safer course, she would eventually come to doubt him. So he took his chances with the RAF once again.

  On the understanding that he would look out for the Admiralty’s interests, Michael obtained the support of the admirals for an application to return to work in RAF photo intelligence. As acting pilot officer on probation, he was to report to Squadron Leader Bill Wager, the Greenland geologist he had trained in PI and the man who had spiked John Auden’s shot at Everest. And when Bill Wager took the man he once described as universally despised and gleefully cut him down to size, Michael Spender said nothing.

  Instead, while sitting in his car in front of 30 Upper Park Road in the midst of a fusillade of buzz bombs, he presented Nancy with a ring. He followed up with a stilted letter that set out his reasons for marrying her. Foremost among them was her beautiful body and the pleasures it would bring to both of them. He acknowledged that a wartime marriage might be a shady deal; he had seen too many surprises sprung to be complacent. Less tactfully, he rationalized marrying her by concluding she would be no better off if he didn’t. He also undertook to look after her in illness and old age. “Though we need not search the horizon for portents,” he added cautiously, knowing how she felt about turning thirty-three. Lastly, he vowed to figure out how marriage worked, as if he was prepared to take it apart and tinker with it.

  After Erica agreed to a divorce, Nancy and Michael were wed in March 1943. A son was born the day after Christmas. “Juliet and Miranda adore him and so do I,” Nancy wrote John Auden after a lapse of four years, “but his father is a funny chap and might like an engine nearly as much.” Though there were days when she hated being a mother again, when she missed the ambulance terribly, Nancy was content. And she was immensely proud of having produced a “bootiful boy” (had it been a girl, she had threatened to drown it). Wystan agreed to be godfather.

  It wasn’t long before Michael was writing of young Philip’s sound instincts as a climber. He expected his son would develop a superb sense of balance, since Nancy wasn’t likely to have a fit every time he got into trouble. He ascribed his own difficulty following Eric Shipton to having had an overanxious nanny.

  Melsbroek Aerodrome, outside Brussels,

  February 1, 1945

  When Michael arrived back at RAF Medmenham, he was changed, as if he had at last mastered what it was to be human. Then, just after Philip was born, he was transferred to 34 Wing, the Strategic Reconnaissance Wing of the Second Tactical Air Force. Based out of an aerodrome in Hampshire, its three squadrons would supply reconnaissance for the planning and execution of the Normandy landings. Spitfires, Mosquitos, and Vickers Wellingtons snapped coastal installations, provided maps of landing sites and, on the eve of D-day, undertook night reconnaissance, using flares to track troop movements. Four months later, in early September 1944, 34 Wing followed General Eisenhower into France, dropping flash bombs to illuminate pockets of resistance. By October 1944 the pilots and officers of 34 Wing were in Melsbroek, an aerodrome in Belgium.

  In his early weeks on the Continent, Michael expected the war to end at any moment. He could see the launch of V1 rockets toward London, a sign of Germany’s desperation. But as a sea of mud and slush rose around them, the Wehrmacht fought on. Tents threatened to take flight in the high winds, much as they had on Everest. There was rarely time to remove his seaboots and greatcoat before falling into bed. He had to travel to Brussels, “amongst the shades of John Auden’s erotic adventures,” for hot baths and hot meals. That was his memory of the last nine months of war: no hot water to shave with, unbroken nights of work in the bitter cold, overwhelming fatigue, and the acrid taste of canteen tea. He was often flying between various aerodromes on the front, debriefing pilots, collecting photographs.

  Still, he found time to take a motorbike over pitted roads to practice his schoolboy French on stationmasters, priests, children, and members of the Resistance with whom he bartered his chocolate rations for eggs. He heard stories of inconceivable suffering under German occupation. And when Nancy related some fresh outrage of her mother, Stephen, Bill, or the Slade Boys, he wondered how people dared to behave so shamelessly while soldiers and civilians alike were still dying.

  “I have to use all my imagination and memory to realize that this little group does actually behave like that. It is behavior so far from normal, so far from the ordinary human give and take that exists everywhere else, that one wonders how they ever produce anything satisfactory…. It stinks of all that is worst in England, the dregs left behind for us to fight and get killed for.” Against such behavior, he offered the soulfulness of his men, whose letters home he censored. Riddled with misspellings, grammatical errors, XX’s and OO’s, they conveyed a love and devotion that these London people would never know. No one in England dared contemplate the horrors these men had lived through, he wrote.

  Clear skies over Christmas had Michael working through the night. Air-raid sirens woke him thinking he was back in London during the Blitz. On New Year’s Day Melsbroek was attacked and two out of three squadrons were lost, including all its Mosquitos, five Spitfires, and eleven Wellingtons. Michael had since gained the gold braid marking him as a squadron leader. The London Gazette included his name, for the second time, on the New Year’s list of those mentioned in despatches.

  But home leave in February was difficult. All three children came down with chicken pox and there was little coal to be had. Nancy was near despair, convinced that he would be killed before the war ended. He took responsibility for having married her in wartime, for having saddled her with an infant, for not knowing for certain how everything would turn out. He didn’t
dare mention that PI officers were being posted to India in preparation for the war against Japan. Instead, he warned her that as soon as a person loses faith in their future, nothing would ever happen to help them. She had to keep hope.

  The Dalai Lama was once told that a successful ascent of Everest would bring about scientific breakthroughs that would benefit all humanity. Even unsuccessful ascents had brought about knowledge of the impact of high altitudes on human physiology and cognition. This, in turn, led to the development of oxygen tanks that enabled pilots to fly to impossible heights. The use of stereophotogrammetry to map the North Face of Everest was repurposed for intelligence. And how would the Battle of Britain have been won without Lady Houston, whose Supermarine engine had launched the development of the Spitfire?

  Yet the benefits to humanity must be weighed against cost. Rabindranath Tagore once cursed the desecration of the heavens with planes bearing man’s fratricidal wrath. What had Michael Spender seen of this wrath from 30,000 feet? For six years he had followed the progress of the damage done. He saw more clearly than most the scale and thoroughness of the destruction. When Michael realized that RAF Bomber Command had begun targeting German civilians, he was appalled. Operation Gomorrah, the nighttime firebombing of Hamburg, outraged him.

  On the night of July 27, 1943, in a raid lasting forty-five minutes, over a million firebombs and hundreds of two-ton “block-busters” had rained down in the dark, setting off a tremendous firestorm. A 6,500-foot tornado of fire lit up the old city, generating hurricane-force winds that shrieked and howled like trapped animals. Tidal waves of flames barreled down residential streets at ninety miles an hour. Within minutes tens of thousands of people were incinerated, swept up like dry leaves into the rolling flames or suffocated in air-raid shelters and cellars as the fire sucked all oxygen into the maelstrom. When the air temperature reached a certain point, clothing burst into flames and bodies boiled away on streets of sizzling tar.

  “The bombing of Hamburg cannot be justified as necessary to victory,” Michael explained to Stephen. “It’s the destruction, not just of Germany, but of an essential part of Europe.” One and a quarter million survivors stumbled away from the city, dumb with shock. In the course of four nighttime raids and two daytime ones, forty-five thousand civilians were killed, a number surpassing those killed during the entirety of the Blitz, and twice that in London alone.

  On April 26, 1945, Michael took a small plane over the Ruhr district to see for himself. What he’d seen in dove grays and blacks was now before him in monochromatic rust. Factories and railways lay in ruins. Not a single bridge over the Rhine was intact. The streets of Cologne were empty. Lines of washing that fluttered like Tibetan prayer flags over the rubble were the only sign of life. “Although I have been watching for years the gradual build up of this damage, it still appalls by its horror when you see it,” he wrote Nancy. What sort of broken humanity would emerge, he wondered, when Cologne, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Essen, Dortmund, and the rest were liberated?

  When the liberation of towns and cities had first begun, Michael had had an anxious feeling that some kind of sabotage was under way. There had been arguments in the mess over the disarming of the Belgian resistance by force. Churchill’s speech in Parliament defending, in the name of democracy, the aerial bombing of the Greek Resistance, he’d deemed mendacious. “I’m sure he knew he was being a dishonest old pig, because nowhere in the speech was there a fine turn of phrase or even a resort to the reserves of English morality.” When, long after the German war machine had ground to a halt, the Ruhr was burned to the ground, he’d suspected wicked men behind the front and in England working to get things back the way they were before the war. Propaganda programs on the wireless showed their handiwork, sickening him nearly as much as the firebombing of Hamburg. The intellectuals had drifted away from the business of getting better ideas into people’s heads, he’d written Nancy.

  “It’s been too long for them, and it is only we who get the bombs and the casualties now.” Upon viewing the Ruhr’s devastation three months later, he couldn’t conceive of the effort it would take to rebuild Europe. All he could think of was going home. Reading between the lines of the newspapers, he felt it was quite possible that Downing Street was cooking up a statement at that very moment. A small leap of joy surged through him. By the end of his letter to Nancy, he allowed himself to fully exult.

  “This is the end!”

  125th American Evacuation Hospital

  outside München-Gladbach, Germany, May 5, 1945

  Michael liked to say that he had walked higher in the Himalaya than he had ever flown, as if he had convinced himself that if he didn’t ascend over 21,000 feet, he would be safe. But when he left for Germany the last time he told his brother Humphrey he knew he was going to die. The numbers were against him. There had been scares before—an emergency crash landing in Devon and, that past January, Humphrey had phoned Nancy to tell her Michael’s plane was reported missing. It was hours before he was able to phone the flat to assure her he was fine.

  But on the return cross-Channel flight, Nancy’s weeping and distress had replayed in his ears over the thrum of the Mosquito. In his mind’s eye Michael had seen her, alone with her grief in the living room at 30 Upper Park Road, his son by her side. Two months later that was where Nancy was when the phone rang and she learned that Michael’s plane had crashed in a forest in Germany. Early the next morning she caught a flight across the Channel from RAF Northolt. She was with him when he died a day later. He never regained consciousness.

  Late in the war, Michael enclosed a cutting of a poem by Wystan in a letter to Nancy. The poem was based on a painting ascribed to Brueghel that Wystan had seen in Brussels in 1938. Coincidentally, on the day of Michael’s death, Wystan himself arrived in Germany. On an overseas mission of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, he was there to assess the impact of area bombing on civilian morale. Given the rank and uniform of a U.S. Army major, Wystan spent two months asking Germans how they felt about being bombed. Though he was often near tears, he was never surprised by what they had to say. Yet had he not seen it himself, he wrote a friend, he wouldn’t have believed it possible that a city like Darmstadt could be 92 percent destroyed in thirty minutes.

  During the Great War the poet Wilfred Owen called out Horace’s perennial “it is sweet and right to die for your country” as “the old Lie.” He had seen too many boys die in panic and terror for that ever to be true again. Owen wanted his readers not to expect consolation from his poems but the bitter truth. Wystan had once aspired to follow in Owen’s path, to discover what his generation’s “bitter truth” would be. In the last week of World War II he found it. Compared to what Germany had undergone, W. H. Auden told Stephen Spender, London hadn’t been bombed at all.

  That went over well.

  For Michael, Wystan’s “Palais des beaux arts” captured another bitter truth: what it felt like to watch planes falling out of the sky in full knowledge that in England there were people getting on with their lives, unaware or scarcely registering the loss.

  In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

  Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

  Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

  But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

  As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

  Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

  Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

  Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

  Squadron Leader Michael Alfred Spender was buried in Eindhoven General Cemetery on VE Day while crowds of people the world over celebrated the end of the war in Europe. The sun shone somewhere that day, as it had to, and England sailed calmly on.

  CHAPTER 19

  Incompatible Gods, Irreconcilable Differences

  Geological Survey of India, 27 Chowringhee, Calcutta,

&nb
sp; Direct Action Day, August 16, 1946

  “I read the papers rather anxiously and hope you are not all dead—caught between two fires,” Wystan wrote John when the riots first began in Calcutta. “Kipling and Elgar must be positively tossing in their graves at what’s happening to the B.E.”

  By the time Congress’s leadership had been released from prison at the close of the war, India was changed. When new provincial elections were held, Congress still carried the majority of the provinces, but Muhammad Jinnah’s Muslim League had finally gained the mandate that had eluded it in 1937. Nehru still thought the entire notion of Pakistan impractical and absurd. After the viceroy invited Nehru to form a provisional government and he and Jinnah were unable to agree on what form it would take, Jinnah decided to force Nehru into accepting Pakistan by showing what would happen if he refused.

  Shaheed Suhrawardy, now Bengal’s chief minister, followed Jinnah’s directive to announce a “Direct Action Day” rally on the Calcutta Maidan on Friday, August 16, 1946, in response to the formation by Nehru of a provisional government. Similar rallies were to be held all over India, but Shaheed also mandated a citywide holiday. Moreover, he threatened to declare Bengal independent if Congress took office in Delhi. “Bloodshed and disorder are not necessarily evil in themselves,” he told a reporter for the Statesman, “if resorted to in a noble cause.”

  When Hindu shopkeepers opened their shutters on the sixteenth, Muslim goondas, inexplicably well supplied with trucks and scarce petrol rations, set their shops on fire. “It is not a ridiculous assumption that they had been provided for in advance,” Sudhin wrote in disgust in an unsigned editorial for the Sunday Statesman. With their men away at the mass rally on the Maidan, Muslim bustees filled with women and children were set on fire by vengeful Hindu mobs. At the Park Circus roundabout, Shahid Suhrawardy witnessed a lone Hindu being surrounded by a crowd of young men. While the Hindu was being questioned, another youth stood by. When he raised his finger, the mob closed in, knifing the man in the stomach and melting away. Though a British tank was posted in plain sight, the armed sentry standing guard did nothing but watch as the encounter unfolded. By midnight, cadres of Hindus spread out across the city. There were three Hindus for every Muslim in Calcutta. For forty-eight hours the police were nowhere to be seen.