by Michael Gill
The two German girls who kept the house neat for us had managed to get the policemen inside. Two of the policemen had passed out. The third was still conscious. He had a dark welt across his midriff. I tried to telephone the first-aid centre at the bottom of the street that had been set up next to an RAF military centre and was run by a WAAF medical orderly. There, some three hundred yards away, were order, discipline and help. But all lines seemed to be down. Unfortunately, Jenkins, the radar expert upstairs, was also our communications man.
Meanwhile the policemen needed immediate medical attention. I made sure again that all six chambers of my service revolver were loaded. I was not a good shot, but how was the enemy going to know that?
I set off down the hill, my shoes making a great clatter on the cobbles. Turning a corner, a black cat darted across the road directly in front of me. If I hadn’t got my pistol jammed in its holster I would probably have fired a couple of rounds to encourage myself. It was a bendy road and I was conscious of prying eyes peeping round the old lace curtains.
The last corner took me directly into the entrance of the RAF regiment’s quarters. As soon as I saw the sentry’s broad Yorkshire back I felt a great rush of confidence. I doubt that my fluty tones had the same effect on him. His sergeant, hearing the shooting, had already sent British soldiers to boost up the German police. The telephone breakdown was soon put right. The bandit was found on the edge of the village. He had lost his gun in the tussle with the police. For their courage the policemen were promoted. They all survived. The bandit was tried by a military tribunal in Mettmann and executed.
II
After Christmas 1945 I was posted to Bad Godesberg. This was to allow me to take a three-month course in physics and chemistry. What had this to do with tidying up the Ruhr? Or capturing Polish bandits? More than you might expect. The British government had set up a scheme that allowed servicemen to take useful courses in subjects that would extend their potential capacity when they were demobilised. I was going to spend six or seven years learning to be a doctor. The first two years were purely school subjects: physics and chemistry. They could be taught in any technical school which had the appropriate facilities and a teacher whose basic language was English. The Germans provided the laboratory, the RAF the teacher.
This was one of the most useful courses I ever took. Within three weeks of the impact of H2O on my ill-trained mind I knew I would never be a doctor. I could never, never, NEVER learn all those boring formulas. I continued the course. It gave me three months to think seriously about what path I might take. It also gave me time to think about how I was to break the news to my father.
Journalism? My six months on the local Canterbury paper had been an enjoyable interlude, but could I see myself thirty years on, wreathed in stale tobacco and old jokes?
I had just won a local RAF award for creative writing. Effectively, this was a short story in which I imagined the narrator had just been given the order to shoot someone and shoot to kill. Clearly my experience walking down the village street, not knowing when I was going to be shot at, had some influence on my choice of subject. At a deeper level, living among the terrible destruction we had wrought on the conquered enemy posed implicit problems. Curiously, losing did not stir up the individual conscience to the same degree.
The Bad Godesberg Officers’ Mess was comfortable and modern. The RAF had clearly chosen it because the destruction close by was relatively acceptable. It was enough to look at the patient lined face of Maria, the German house administrator. It called for sympathy and a dignified distance. It was a silent reminder of the horrors of war.
I persuaded Maria to allow me to escort her to her home among the birches. Walking through the snow-crusted woods, she seemed to have little to say until we reached a small chalet-like cottage. Here she barred the door, but not very effectively. Inside, her room was crammed with objects from the first few months of life, all of the best quality: a shiny pram, a carrycot, rattles, woolly toys and party clothes. Everything just as it should be. Except there was no occupant. I looked up with a question, but anticipated the answer. The child had died of starvation in the winter of 1943–4. I took her hand and spoke some words of sympathy. She had been living with these overwhelming reminders of her loss for two years. In search of consolation, I pointed at a photograph of a handsome, thoughtful-looking young man. Yes, he was the father, but he would not be returning: he had been killed at Stalingrad.
One of the service duties that I still had to carry out was that of Orderly Officer. They were nothing like as hair-raising as my close encounter with the banditry. Mostly it was a case of enforcing closing times. By 10 o’clock there were few people about so it was quite a surprise to hear someone playing the piano. It seemed to be coming from the NAAFI, the only centre for the airmen to meet the former enemy.
The lights were low; the keys of the piano were being struck with more feeling than accuracy.
We’ll meet again . . .
Don’t know where
Don’t know when . . .
The voice sounded familiar.
‘Come on, break it up now.’ The Orderly Sergeant strode forward with the voice of authority.
‘Just a minute, Sarge. I think I recognise that voice.’
I did. It was Wyndham Davidson. He was deeply sun-tanned and lined, but I would never have failed to recognise those precise tones. It turned out that he had been posted to Nigeria when I went to Northern Ireland. He had been back only a month or so. I considered him a kind person and introduced him to Maria. We must have seemed an odd three-some as we walked together in the woods. However, war is no protector of human needs and in the autumn I was posted back to the Ruhr.
Years later I received a long letter from Wyndham. I was flying to the States with my wife Georgina the very next morning, so I’d had no time to follow it up. At about half-past eleven our front door bell rang. He announced himself on the speaker-phone.
I walked on to the landing, and coming up the stairs was an old man. His hair, which used to be such a romantic black, was now a tousled grey. He intercepted my look of surprise.
‘It happens to us all,’ he grunted.
III
My last position in the RAF became in many ways the most interesting. The German airfield at Wahn, near Cologne, was being expanded under RAF supervision to fit the needs of a rapidly growing civilian air centre. It was the RAF’s job to ensure that while all the latest equipment was made available, we should still keep an eye on this formidable ex-enemy. We were attempting to repair shattered Germany, though we had no clear vision of the world we were building. When we met someone who did, it was a genuine shock. One of the most exciting was Group Captain Cheshire. He was the most highly decorated airman on the Allied side. The British Labour Government gave him a Mosquito in which to travel around the world to assess its wants. In the autumn of 1946 he landed at Wahn. It was my task to entertain him until our senior officer had ascertained the official line on Cheshire. The man who had marshalled the most terrible air raids ever carried out and had seen the atom bomb drop on Nagasaki was unperturbed. He looked remarkably fresh and lively.
Tentatively I tried to probe his attitude. He seemed to think that the world could be of one mind. One country would follow another. When the Allies – USA, UK, Russia and the as yet uncommitted China – saw the cost of war, they would hold off. In this he reminded me of the older masters of games at school: some boys, of course, always cheat, but they would be in the minority. It seemed hard to believe that was all we had learned. I reserved my judgement and hoped for the best.
Group Captain Cheshire’s optimism reminded me of one of the parties that I attended in the last days of the war. I had chummed up with our new squadron leader’s navigator. We had strolled round the fading magnificence of the north German schloss that had become our officers’ quarters. It was strangely sentimental of Germany, we both thought, to want to preserve this decayed nineteenth-century palace. We agreed that it w
as an incongrous memorial to the Third Reich.
My newfound friend told me that, having spent five years destroying every aspect of Hitler’s omnivorous greed, he wanted his peacetime career to be that of architect, in some recompense for all the works of destruction that he had participated in.
The following day 137 Wing tried once more to destroy the bridge over the River Meuse. The raid was not a success. Among others we lost the Wing Commander and my friend his navigator. Two or three days later the British army had taken the bridge. We discovered that the Germans had dragged the corpses out of the debris of their aeroplanes and hung them on scaffolding at the approach to the bridge. They hung placards around their necks with an epitaph: ‘These are the British airmen who sought to kill you.’
So much for my friend’s plans to build new bridges.
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry
Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
Afterword
ANTS ON SNOW
Georgina Gill
Michael never went to Guy’s Hospital. Wanting to understand what had turned the ordered world of his childhood into turmoil, and perhaps to change things, he decided to study philosophy and psychology at university. Edinburgh accepted him, but before he went he followed his uncles to America. He went to stay with his charismatic Uncle Clifford, sophisticated Aunt Harriet and cousin Carolyn, who had so impacted on his twelfth year. She was now a full-grown beauty, with a trail of suitable admirers. Michael enjoyed summer on the Great Lakes, cocktail parties, much driving about in fast cars and a thoroughly hedonistic contrast to England and the war years. But he returned, and spent four years at Edinburgh University, making friends who have lasted a lifetime, and meeting Yvonne Gilan, the beautiful actress who was to become his wife.
Michael continued to write, short stories for little magazines, and, on graduation in 1951, he took a job on the Scotsman as a sub-editor and arts reviewer. In 1954 Adrian was born. Shortly afterwards a colleague of Michael’s on the Scotsman persuaded him to apply for a job at the BBC, mainly so that he’d have a companion for the journey to London. Michael got the job.
Michael’s BBC career started in radio, working on the North American Service. This meant compiling programmes for America which would portray life in Britain. They were almost a reverse angle of Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America, which had been running since the war years. It gave him a wonderful introduction to London; a brief to cover arts and politics meant a chance to interview practically anyone and honed his ability to find the point of every story and to present it with simplicity and style. In 1955 his work won him the English-Speaking Union Award for an outstanding contribution to Anglo–US understanding.
In 1958 Michael moved to television. He became an Arts Producer in BBC TV Schools Programmes, creating the first British educational art programming on television. He worked on the arts magazine Monitor, with Huw Wheldon as editor, a nursery for so many talents, from Melvyn Bragg, Patrick Garland and Jonathan Miller to Ken Russell and John Schlesinger. Michael introduced John Berger to the programme, and over the next five years they made many television programmes together for adults and children. As Michael wrote later:
We became friends. I stayed with him and his second wife in their large, quiet house in the Forest of Dean, rode round London on the back of his motor-bike, argued with him in Soho restaurants. . . . Films, whether for the cinema or television, were created out of a dialogue between writer and director; I could not imagine working in any other way.
In 1963 Michael obtained a grant from the British Film Institute to make The Peaches. This was a short fantasy film, written by his wife Yvonne, starring Juliet Harmer (with a cameo role for Adrian as a small bespectacled chess player) and shot partly in the grounds of their family house in Stanmore, just north of London. It has a wonderful early sixties exuberance, as a beautiful young woman is pursued along the River Thames by sinister bowler-hatted young men, in a kind of fairy tale of Beauty and the City Beasts. It became the British choice for the Cannes Film Festival in 1964, and won several international awards.
Pondering Hollywood, Michael remained with the BBC and created the first British adult educational arts series. In 1966 he made Giacometti, a film about the sculptor, with the art critic David Sylvester. The black-and-white film was shown more recently in connection with a Giacometti exhibition, and has worn well.
In 1967 the BBC was to launch colour television on BBC 2. David Attenborough, the channel Controller, thought that a major series on art would be an appropriate way to celebrate the event. He invited Kenneth Clark, former Director of the National Gallery and author of many books, popular and scholarly, on art and artists, to write the series. Michael was asked to produce and direct it. Michael was not initially enthusiastic. He wrote later:
Glittering, self-possessed, armed with precise certainties, Clark seemed to epitomise attitudes the opposite of those of my friends and myself . . . On the other hand, at this very moment . . . I was involved in a film which I believed was going to be a disaster. It had seemed a clever idea to get three bright young foreign journalists – a Frenchman, an Australian and a Zulu – to wander through the swinging London scene, both participating and commenting. But Olivier Todd, Robert Hughes and Lewis Nkosi had little to say to each other; instead of being witty and innovative, the shooting, which was still in progress, showed the concept to be terribly contrived. I was sure the critics were going to pan it. (They did). Nor was it likely that the audience would like it any better. (They didn’t).
Naturally, Humphrey Burton (Head of the BBC Music and Arts Department), when he approached me, knew nothing of this future shock. If he had, would he be offering me the most prestigious series at his disposal? Experience taught that such opportunities were rarely given twice. Television was a competitive trade; moreover there was a tide in the affairs of men. . . .
All these contrary currents, rushing through my head like a flood, allowed me to reply with instant enthusiasm, almost before Burton had finished speaking. Energetic enthusiasm was something Heads of Department responded to gratefully, in a world full of difficult, self-regarding geniuses.
A few days later I had my first meeting with Clark, though it could hardly be called face to face. He had been lunching in a private dining-room in the BBC Television Centre with the Controller of Channel Two, David Attenborough, Humphrey Burton and Stephen Hearst, Head of Arts Department. I was brought in at the coffee stage. The three officials greeted me cheerfully. Clark loitered behind, half turned away. His manner might be termed self-effacing; to me it suggested disdain. His greeting, though perfectly civil, was distinctly chilly. While Attenborough who, as he often demonstrated on film, would find it impossible to be other than warm even to a boa-constrictor, explained the pleasure he felt at the prospect of Clark working with the BBC and the others detailed the resources that would be put at our disposal, Clark and I hardly exchanged a word.
When we had our private meeting, a week or so later, things were no better. Clark produced a small piece of paper on which he had jotted down in his microscopic handwriting the twelve subjects of his programmes. They seemed a very banal list; Raphael, Durer, Rembrandt . . . all the old war horses; and to lump them all into one series would mean there would be little time to say anything profound or original about any of them. Implying this caused Clark’s smile to grow even frostier. He envisaged, he said, sitting at a desk in the television studio from which he could cue in the marvellous film I would have taken; it would appear behind his head, in colour. I explained that in my films I tried to make every frame appropriate to the style of the artist concerned; a film wa
s not a superior form of lecture, it was a different entity altogether. Ah, said Clark, but I am a lecturer, it is what I know about; I am not a film star. We parted at an impasse.
In the spring of that year I had been the producer of a film about the painter Graham Sutherland. It had been photographed at his home in Menton and also at Nîmes, where the critic Douglas Cooper lived. Sutherland came to London to dub the commentary. I told him about my meeting with Clark. Sutherland nodded. ‘I’ve known K over thirty years, and in all that time I suppose I’ve had five minutes of intimacy with him.’ David Sylvester had also worked with Clark, and advised me not to. ‘When you are looking over a script together, he will make you aware that he has noticed that your fingernails are dirty.’ A pipe-smoker, my fingernails were always dirty.
I reported to Humphrey Burton that I had probably better be taken off the project. I felt that Clark was too senior and inflexible in his ways to make our partnership possible. Clark clearly felt the same. He wrote to Humphrey suggesting that he was afraid he could not come up to my requirements for a writer. Slightly waspishly, he added that I would probably be happier with a younger, more radical figure, like John Berger.
Humphrey persisted. ‘Give it one more try. Show him your Bacon.’ In fact this film on the painter, with its staccato cutting and harsh slaughterhouse scenes, could have little direct relevance for the project on high art which we were contemplating. But we must have both approached the viewing in a mood of conciliation. Clark said if I would bear with the efforts of a tyro, he would agree to come to as many of the locations as I required: there should be no lecture desk. I said he should write his scripts as he had always done, as complete entities, and I would turn them, without appreciable alteration, into film scripts.
This was the summer when London and Moscow zoos were co-operating to try and produce a baby panda. The world’s press reported every stage of the difficult, and ultimately sterile, courtship. Humphrey Burton was so delighted with our agreement that, as he wrote in a memo, he felt as though he had brought about the mating of Chi Chi and An An.