Growing into War

by Michael Gill

  When lovely woman stoops to folly and

  Paces about her room again, alone,

  She smoothes her hair with automatic

  hand,

  And puts a record on the gramophone.

  Well she would have been plain daft if she had done any stooping to folly with me, whatever that might mean in practice. Yet there was something. If I did some particularly crass and clumsy movement, she would suppress a deep-felt sigh. When a shimmy or hesitation went quite well, I could sense how her body responded. She would sweep me along into movements I would not have dared imagine. ‘Jolly good,’ she would murmur under her breath.

  What did she do when I had gone? Her house was full of pretty, delicate things: Persian rugs and carved ivory combs and watercolours of some Eastern bazaar; yet it seemed patently too large for one person and there never was a sign of anyone else. One of the tunes we danced to was by Noël Coward. My parents had the record at home. He sang the refrain with his characteristic brittle poignancy:

  Dance, dance, dance little lady,

  Youth is fleeting – to the rhythm beating

  In your mind.

  Dance, dance, dance little lady,

  So obsessed with second best,

  No rest you’ll ever find.

  Time and tide and trouble

  Never, never wait

  Dance, dance, dance little lady.

  Surely it would not be second best that obsessed her. She wanted some sort of perfection. Certainly it was not anything I could provide or even imagine. Keith and I analysed her in a manly way over a lunchtime half-pint. It was one of the enjoyable perks of having a job. It brought the independence of alcoholic consumption: pub life, darts, snooker, talk about women. Nor were we entirely bereft of experience of the opposite sex. Keith had a sister, and in our office were those two dazzling but tricky examples: Beez and Christine. A book might have been written about their perverse and inexplicable behaviour.

  Our knowledge did not stop there. We had got to know a mixed group of people of our own age. We all met every Saturday afternoon at the tea dances held at the Regal Cinema. A tea dance! Does such a thing exist today? The cinema had a properly sprung dance floor, tall, artnouveau windows and a live group of four or five players: saxophone, alto sax, clarinet, piano and drums. Band, dance floor, pot of tea and cakes, all came to only two shillings and sixpence (approximately 12p). All the Kentish Gazette group went along.

  It was here that I learned the important fact that women not only laughed at your jokes differently, they responded to instructions on the dance floor in unique ways. No matter how much I tweaked and pulled some (not necessarily the tallest or strongest), they would just go on boring in, pushing you in front of them like a wheelbarrow. Others tried to keep on repeating the same combination of steps. I liked to think out what I wanted to do, putting in surprising new movements now and then. I learned that to be able to do this sort of thing successfully meant having rehearsed it a number of times with your partner. Occasionally you found the ideal: light as a gossamer shawl, intuitive as my dog Patch had been. But even that wasn’t the final word. Beez was a more responsive partner than Christine. But Christine was beautiful. And she used her beauty to enrapture you, clinging close to you, leaning her cheek against yours, till you wanted the dance never to end.

  There was another good reason why you tried to linger longer on the floor between numbers. The dancers were not only locals. The war, you will remember, began because Germany invaded Poland. Many Poles were captured at the end of the brief month-long war. The unlucky ones were handed over by the Germans to the Russians. In 1940 all the officers, 18,000 young men, were shot. It was done night after night for a month, secretly. Two years later we knew nothing of it. But we did know that many Poles had escaped. A dozen or so regularly attended the Regal Cinema tea dance.

  They operated long-range guns that were kept in a disused railway tunnel near Canterbury. They were part of the defences of Kent should Hitler have chosen to invade. But by this time in 1942 invasion did not seem very likely. Instead the guns were wheeled out to retaliate if the Germans started a barrage from their long-range guns which were just across the Channel near Calais.

  It was not their enormous weapons that impressed me adversely about the Poles. It was their ability to click the heels of their highly polished boots, to bow over the hand of a girl they were asking to dance. They had the gift totally to ignore everyone except the person who was their selected partner for that afternoon. Not surprisingly this partner was often Christine. She was already engaged to a young British officer stationed somewhere in the Midlands. Much healthier for her to lavish her attentions on solid British types like us, Keith and I reasoned. Unfortunately Christine thought differently.

  There was a tragic glamour about these refugees from a faraway land that I could see would impress a susceptible young girl. Christine was just twenty, eighteen months older than me, but she clearly did not understand how flirtatious behaviour might lead these chaps on. They were rumoured to be a hot-blooded lot. I had seen a film in which after responding to a toast they had all thrown their glasses in the fire. They could not have had any rationing in the eighteenth century!

  Other, nastier things were whispered about our Poles. The sort of thing you could not really mention to a young girl. Keith and I discussed it of course. They were said to be very sadistic in their lovemaking. Even going to the extent of biting off a girl’s nipple in a moment of frenzy. I found this hard to imagine, especially as I had never seen a real female nipple. But such behaviour did not seem conducive to passion. Eventually we got it across to Christine by Keith telling his sister who told Christine. What did she say? Keith was enjoying being the intermediary. ‘Stuff and nonsense, and if anyone tried any funny games, she would jolly well bite off his you-know what.’

  So Christine continued to exasperate us by flirting at the tea dances with these courteous sadists. Our only retaliation the next day in the office was to ask if she had had a good bite. At which she was actually seen to blush.

  Teasing was one way we could make contact with this superior being, whose very appearance entering the reporters’ room stunned us to silence. I went to the extent of analysing all the effects she had on me, from walking into a closed door to falling over my own feet.

  The only other group of people who upset my equilibrium to anything like the same extent were war heroes. By this time in the third year of the war a number of my near contemporaries had been in action, either in the Army in the Western Desert or Greece or Crete or in the Navy in battle with the Italian fleet in the Mediterranean or in the Air Force either bombing Germany or patrolling the Atlantic in search of German submarines. One Coastal Command pilot, Johnny McFee, whom I had seen a couple of years before, regularly playing cricket in the local Canterbury side, Keith and I met by chance near the Christ Church Gate of the cathedral. His head was heavily bandaged and he was limping along on a single crutch. We managed to persuade him to tell us his story over a coffee in the nearby Cadena café.

  He was flying a Catalina, the American flying boat, on the North Atlantic convoy route often stalked by U-boats. Such Catalina patrols could last for many hours and the pilot often opted for changes of height to maintain alertness and attention. McFee had reached the furthest perimeter of his patrol and his navigator was giving him his homewardbound course. Something made him look down. Two thousand feet below the water was seething and boiling; could it be a whale coming up for air? Mesmerised, he watched a familiar shape emerge from the foam. It could not be? But it was. A German U-boat was surfacing – out of all the thousands of miles it might have chosen, it was coming up right below him. Any moment it would discover its danger. The depth charge added to the turbulence. Had he hit it vitally? In a moment it would be gone. Intolerable to lose it in such circumstances. He fired another depth charge and brought the Catalina down in a wide sweep. Something rose like the hand of Neptune from the tortured sea. Flying metal debris from
the injured submarine smashed in the front of the plane and split McFee’s skull. Slumping forwards he was unaware of his plane following the submarine into the tormented waters. His navigator got him to the surface, inflated a rubber dinghy and sent off the alarm code. The whole episode took three minutes. The dinghy was picked up five hours later on the edge of dusk. It all happened fifteen days before. His navigator got the DSO and McFee, who should not have brought the plane so low when firing depth charges, got the DFC.

  Would our war when we got into it have episodes like this? It was difficult to imagine. Hence the chance meeting with McFee was like talking with a figure out of mythology. Our eighteen months in the Air Training Corps with its Sunday morning drill, Morse Code practice, aircraft-spotting slide shows and exercises in astral navigation and dead reckoning brought us the reassurance that uniform and discipline were meant to do. For me they had another great benefit. Here was a group of young men from all walks of life who accepted me as one of them without a second thought. The ATC began the long period of rehabilitation I needed to recover from the self-questioning gloom and despair that the years of schooling left me prone to in any large gathering.

  I realised that others had their own problems of shyness and selfdepeciation, often cleverly disguised. I found this in my particular group of friends, though one of them was the outstanding figure in our flight of a hundred or so youths. Tony Rickell was a natural leader; he had been selected as our flight sergeant when only seventeen. He radiated humour and a generosity of spirit that would uplift any doubting group. Yet he had a profound tragedy in his life, which he never referred to. I only knew of it through my father. Tony Rickell was illegitimate. His father would not see him or acknowledge him.

  Peter Woods was also the offspring of a broken marriage, though at least he was able to continue to see both his parents. He had a more laid-back charm than Tony’s. All the girls loved him. He was extremely good-looking with dark curly hair, and a gentle, sweetnatured manner. Indeed for some time, though remaining in the Air Training Corps, he wrestled with the problem as to whether he should fight at all. His religious conscience suggested that he should not. In the First World War this would have led to prison and the delivery of a white feather. In the Second he would probably have been sent down a coal mine. Realising this he opted to go into the Merchant Navy. This was a highly dangerous form of service, but it was only bringing food and needed supplies to beleaguered Britain. As to the white feather: I never heard of any fluttering through the post in the Second World War. Certainly Peter lost none of his wide circle of friends. I was at his farewell party in spring 1942 before he left to join his first ship.

  Also present was my third friend, Albert Lewis, though his aspirations were quite different. Albert was a cockney; I do not know what brought him down to the cathedral city. He worked as a shop assistant in the draper’s shop opposite the Regal Cinema. When business was slack (and when clothes rationing was as tight as it was in 1942, business was usually slack), Albert would come to the shop entrance and stand, his portly figure rocking slightly on his heels, his auburn hair and freckles gleaming in the late afternoon spring sunshine.

  He had a smile for everyone. But he must have realised that his stubby legs and turned-up nose did not easily cast him as a romantic hero. Nor were his mathematics good enough to allow him to become a navigator or a pilot, but he had set his heart on the RAF and when his call-up time came he got in – as assistant cook. Once inside he was able to apply for retraining as an air gunner. He had calculated correctly that there was always a shortage of rear gunners. It was the most vulnerable position in the plane.

  As for Tony Rickell, he turned out to be as brilliant a pilot as he was a leader of men. He survived the war to become a test pilot, internationally known.

  Alas, I am writing about all these acquaintances in the past tense. They have all been dead so long, it amazes me that I remember them so well. Peter Woods survived torpedoes and shipwreck to die of typhoid fever in Marseilles in 1944. Albert Lewis became a mid-gunner on a Liberator bomber based in India. They were ferrying supplies to the Americans under General ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell in northern China. Their plane was lost somewhere over the Pamirs early in 1945. Its precise fate was never known.

  Tony Rickell’s death was watched by millions. He had changed his name to Tony Richards and was taking part in the Farnborough Air Show in September 1952. At this time Britain still had aspirations to contribute new planes and new technology to the air race. Tony was flying with John Derry, a senior test pilot, in the prototype fighter, the DH 110. It crashed shortly after take-off, killing both pilots, in a spectacular inferno of destruction.

  VII

  The passage of time gives a glamour to events that at the moment seem tragic, exciting or merely suprising. Small happenings can bulk large. Some time around Easter 1942, Christine, Beez, Keith and I went to a spring charity dance. It was held in a lunatic asylum.

  At that time I had never been to a loony bin, as we charmingly called it. It was not what I expected. Instead of padded cells there were elegant flower beds; long terraced walks and wooded hillsides beyond; a beautiful eighteenth-century reception hall, which became our dance floor. I expected to be watched by gibbering ghouls, but I think all the inmates must have been locked up.

  I had never danced in such grand surroundings. Perhaps their splendour affected Christine also. Quite soon she suggested we should explore and led me away by the hand. The moon was just coming out and nearly full, giving gardens, flowering magnolia, almond and cherry a frosty glimmer. We walked arm in arm along the terrace to where the woods began. And there I kissed her and we sat on a stone seat, watching the moon gathering brilliance as it rose.

  I passed the rest of the evening in a daze of happiness. Those moonlit kisses expanded to fill all time and space. Yet I must not omit the climax of the evening. We were boarding the bus that had brought us and was going to take us back to Canterbury. I became aware of a number of people silently watching us through a wire-mesh fence. A tall, imposinglooking man beckoned me over.

  I was not in a mood to deny anyone anything. I walked across to the fence and said hello. The figure drew himself upright. ‘I am Julius Caesar,’ he said in a voice not to be gainsaid. Then in a much more conversational tone he went on: ‘I landed near here, you know.’

  So people really did imagine they were characters in history. Or was he just having me on? Wasn’t that what Christine was doing with me, anyway? The kissing episode was not repeated, but it did mark a change in our relationship. She would ask me if I would like to go shopping with her; or meet her for a coffee on a Saturday morning. I was cast I suppose in the classic role of the cavalier servente. I was useful for carrying the parcels. In return Christine lost her snappish, condescending tone and revealed a sharp sense of fun.

  Those spring days in the ancient city; sunlight and shadow falling on the crouching oak corbels that must have greeted Chaucer’s pilgrims; my mood was in tune with that expressed by earlier travellers: ‘The still nooks, where the ivied growth of centuries crept over gabled ends and ruined walls; the ancient houses, the pastoral landscape of field, orchard or garden; everywhere – on everything – I felt the same serener air, the same calm, thoughtful, softening spirit.’ What Dickens felt I felt too.

  The happiness that came with my affection for Christine was reflected back to me in every aspect of this benign city. Its twisting narrow streets with houses reaching out almost to meet from opposite sides in a plaster and beam embrace; the constant but subtly changing views of the cathedral spires revealed in every twist and turn of the winding lanes, luring one on like the song of the sirens for a yet more expressive and magisterial vision; the calm confidence of tradesman and passer-by in the survival of this passionate yet grand affirmation of the enduring presence of God.

  Whatever aspect human frailty took it would be bent to maintain the Divine Will. So it seemed to me on a day in April 1942 when I walked through the cath
edral close. I was going to interview the new archbishop. Cosmo Lang, who had held office since 1928 with all the penache of a Renaissance cardinal, was retiring. The new man, William Temple, had made a powerful impact of a very different sort as Archbishop of York. The difference was obvious at once.

  When I was shown into his study he stood up rather awkwardly and apologised. His feet were bare and his long ecclesiastical socks were steaming in front of the fire. He explained that he had just been caught in a sudden shower. He had only moved in the day before and had not yet unpacked.

  This led him to tell me that the cathedral had been built on a bog and the crypt was still liable to flooding. In Saxon times prayers were regularly made for its survival. It was in fact burnt by the Danes in 1011.

  ‘We must pray that nothing like that happens in our time,’ said the Archbishop, looking up at the dominant spires of the Bell Harry Tower.

  7

  HOT NEWS

  I

  All the six months that I was so greatly enjoying myself on the Kentish Gazette (‘Such larks, Pip, such larks,’ as Joe Gargery would say), all that time the war was grinding away and our fortunes reached their lowest ebb. U-boats took a greater toll than ever before; in the Western Desert, Rommel proved more than a match for the serious but unfortunate General Auchinleck. The Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor had brought America into the war on our side, but also destroyed the Allied Pacific Fleet. A series of brilliant campaigns captured the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, Hong Kong, most of Burma and, most devastating of all, Singapore. This was the greatest defeat the British Army ever recorded; more than 80,000 of our men fell into Japanese hands. Some had only just been diverted to the futile defence of an ill-prepared stronghold. Many were to rot away on the building of a Japanese military highway, the Burma Road. The Japanese had nothing but contempt for an enemy that was so easy to defeat, and showed it by acts of the most horrible brutality.