by Cecil Beaton
NEWS OF BABA
Nancy came back from Baba’s. The atmosphere had been gloomy. Baba apathetic: she feels there is nothing further to live for now that Alec[18] has been killed. Nancy reported that the youngest child had an angelic disposition, but that Xandra was going through a difficult phase. Perhaps out of deep unhappiness she seemed determined to show no feelings of friendship or affection for anybody. She even remained outwardly unmoved when told of her father’s death, and remarked that for her mother to buy a lot of black clothes was ‘a waste of coupons’.
Xandra looks like a gipsy child, burnt as brown as leather, very stringy, with long lank hair: she wears a cotton smock with nothing underneath it, leather shoes and no stockings. Each morning, as soon as she is awake, she is round at a neighbouring farm milking the cows. She is lost all day, seldom returning at meal times. She only likes driving the cattle. She will wade them across a river, and spend the rest of the day in her muddy shoes. She swears like a trooper: when a rabbit she is feeding scratches her, she holloas, ‘You bloody so and so!’ She spends her days with the village boys and enjoys a good fight with them. The other day there was a hideous scene at the back door: Baba was appalled to find an irate mother shouting, ‘I’ll have the police on her! She’s thrown a brick at my Tommy and got him right on the nose. She’s a menace to our kids, always fighting with ‘em. I’ll put the police on her!’
Part V: With the RAF, 1941
Torquay
Cooped together in a two-seater motor-car one is apt to get to know one’s travelling companion pretty well by the end of a ten-hour journey. Jolly lucky to have, as my cicerone on a photographic tour of RAF bases for the Ministry of Information, someone whose company is so easy to enjoy and who, in turn, is so appreciative, as Derek Adkins. Our many expeditions across and around England and Wales have the aroma of adventure. Derek, blue-eyed and beefy with fair crinkly hair, is very much the average man in the Service, and it surprises and pleases me to discover that his sort has so much sensitivity and understanding of others. In the washroom of the officers’ mess, meeting fellows in corridors, his contacts are easy, gay and mysterious in their simplicity. Perhaps his breeziness is part of a tremendous assurance; without being braggartly or conceited he keeps his own independence and individuality through every circumstance. Derek is in contact with life at first hand, all day long and every day. He does not need any of the escape-screens behind which I like to hide. Figuratively, I am lost without a secretary. Derek prefers to overhaul his fountain pen, fill in his own income-tax returns, pay the bills, interview the judge, and cope with everything as ordinary citizens of the world should do. He even mends the carburettor himself, or jumps out of his car to argue with the man who is advising him on the road. Enough...
Diana Cooper suggested that Alfred Mason[19] should have us to stay at his rented house in Torquay for our tour of hospitals and rehabilitation centres around there. Alfred would be away, but he would be only too pleased to have his copious staff tend to our wishes. Until a few months ago when she died, the house belonged to a Victorian woman with a religious mania. It remains exactly as it was when she decorated it sixty years ago. Such a mass of rich Victorianism is now rare — windows hung with heavy cut velvets and starched Nottingham lace, piccalilli-coloured carpets, buhl, over-upholstered sofas, love-seats and ottomans, and gilt-framed religious pictures, crucifixes and porcelain reproductions of Florentine Madonnas. Severely uniformed Edwardian parlourmaids serve port, sherry, turbot, and gooseberry tart. Miss Andrade (Alfred’s literary secretary) comes in, every now and then, to stifle our bewilderment: ‘Mr Mason always has this tantalus of whisky.’ ‘Mr Mason doesn’t realize the food shortage.’ ‘We can get fish, but it’s terribly dear.’ ‘We’ve opened these windows ever since he’s been away, but we still can’t get rid of his cigar smoke.’
I am innately shy, but I have to overcome this. It is often hard when it is up to me to take the initiative before a group of servicemen and try not to display my abysmal ignorance about things in general: the strain of trying to learn and memorize facts, statistics, names and ranks begins to tell by the evening. It is like convalescence to be able to return in the evenings to the Villa Borghese, and to relax in front of a huge fire.
Yellow cartons of exposed film accumulate by the gong in the hall into such a bulky pile that I long to take a morning off to potter out to the rock-garden with its Scotch heather, cacti, and stones looking like petrified spittle. Or I would like to browse with a book until the sun sets against spiky palm-trees, over the Bay of Torquay. For then the effect of light on the harbour is completely Mediterranean. But no — Derek is conscientious, and has the strength, the vitality, of a lion. If I show signs of weakening he bullies me into further activity, and the pile of yellow cartons by the Indian gong in the Victorian hallway grows ever higher each evening.
Biggin Hill Fighter Station
It was from here that much of the Battle of Britain last September was fought. The CO of a squadron, whose name is Robinson, was particularly amicable, and suggested my going up in the air to photograph him in his Spitfire flying in formation. I was taken up in an old plane, ‘Miles Maggie’, to fly at a height of 4,000 feet and circle around above the clouds.
Out of the cumulus Robinson suddenly appeared, like a shining fish, alongside our wing. He smiled, and continued to grin as he kept level with us, and we travelled thus while I photographed him. The wind blew my eyelashes into my eyes, and it was difficult to focus. Suddenly, I saw myself reflected in the viewfinder of my camera. The crow’s feet around my eyes were those of an old man. Oh God! Was there no escape from oneself even under these unusual conditions?
When my pictures were taken Robinson, still grinning, put up his thumb, pulled back the stick, and the Spitfire climbed, its nose soaring backwards into the heavens like an inverted dive. Climbing higher and higher he was triumphant over space and time; defying gravity he had attained a means of expression that had given him an elasticity denied to all the earth-bound. With this new element at his disposal he had attained exquisite sensations of power and purity.
We, in the ‘Maggie’, continued to fly across the empty blue, weaving arcs and patterns up and down. It was a sultry day below, but this mountain freshness was refreshing and cleansing to the soul. The clouds beneath dispersed and I watched the insectlike shadow of our aircraft gliding smoothly over patchwork squares of fawn and green fields and squares spotted with rows of corn-stooks. Our shadow coursed over the orderliness of walled-in gardens, their secrets of washing pathetically revealed on the drying lines: it hurdled over haystacks and the miniature church with its steeple smaller than a pepper-pot. It flew over avenues of trees, and counterpanes of woodland and the stationary arabesques of small rivers.
Cruising along so smoothly like this, watching the slow-moving scenes below, there was the added balm of escape from terrestial troubles. It seemed impossible that such turmoil should be fermenting down there. These troubles suddenly seemed as childish as the world itself looked childish. For this neat and efficient toy world belonged to a child’s nursery. By now I had forgotten myself, my human frame, and worldly cares. This escape into the skies had been also an escape from war. Just to leave the earth even for these few minutes had given a perspective to the problems that daily assail us, and suddenly life, and even death, seemed relatively unimportant.
As we came back to earth the warm air engulfed us like a towel. Like a gull coming to rest we glided down, then taxied around jerkily, bumping to our resting-place. The airscrew blades turned visibly as they rotated more and more slowly and finally jerked to a stop.
Robinson, whose smile across the sky had been so euphoric and intimate, was already back at the dispersal unit. His mood had changed: he was no longer smiling; he had become somewhat matter-of-fact and pedestrian. When I told him how much I had enjoyed our encounter in the skies, he replied, ‘Yes, it’s always wretched to have to come down.’
De Havilland Aerodrome and Tr
aining School
The training school here gave me a glimpse of the concentrated effort needed to make each pilot accomplished enough to take to air combat. Although the pilots are now being rushed through the elementary school in less than five weeks, by the end of that time their receptive heads are crammed with knowledge that would take me years to imbibe. It is deeply impressive to see the seriousness with which all these young men tackle their job. They have the perseverance of a kindergarten child, but none of its recklessness. They set out on their afternoon flights with the same attitude as a surgeon tackling an operation, and it all seems far removed from the dare-devil conception of an airman that my brother Reggie gave me the impression of aiming at.
The training wing presents a microcosm of the entire RAF. Every aspect of activity is emulated with care and imagination. The trainees rehearse the ritual they will ultimately perform, but with dummies and ‘props’ instead of the real thing. One pupil sits lidded down in a wooden box and must go through the entire procedure of a long solo flight under all conditions of weather. (He is sometimes four hours in this contraption, complete with thermos and sandwiches.) Classes are occupied doing Morse signalling, navigation, winding airscrew wheels, or you will see trainees squatting under the belly of a skeleton bomber loading the racks with bombs filled with sawdust. To an intent group of would-be gunners a sergeant instructor demonstrates the working of an electrically operated gun turret, and aims his sights at the art nouveau or Paul Klee-like diagram of swirls and convolutions marked on the wall. No moving-picture studio can make more careful models than the miniature enemy towns used in bombing practice.
One is astonished at the youthfulness of these seventeen-year-olds with their subtle English looks, clear complexions, and thatch of hair shorn closely over the ears. One bright young man asked when my pictures would appear, and in answer to my ‘in six weeks’ time’ said, ‘Oh, most of us will be dead by then!’ But it was pleasant to discover that most of the RAF volunteers are utterly fulfilled in their job — they live and breathe flying. During their spare time they make models of aircraft from odd bits of wood, or read aeronautical magazines. They are neither pining for home, lusting after girls, nor fretting about danger. It is all much happier and simpler than I’d imagined, and the discipline is freer than in the army.
Air Commodore Critchley agreed with the article in which Ingersoll, an American journalist, stated that, if the Germans had been prepared to go on losing 150 planes for another week the Battle of Britain would have been lost: but not for the reasons Ingersoll claimed. Critchley explained that we were on the knife-edge of disaster, not from the point of view of bomb damage or of services breaking down — but because our pilots could not be got into the air. They had been on the alert to surprise and danger continuously, and had become so overtired and unnerved that they could not sleep without such strong sleeping draughts that, when eventually pills had taken effect, the men could not be woken again.
London
Looking at a batch of photographs I had taken — the result of cursory visits to various RAF stations — Hugh Francis at the Ministry of Information said, ‘It’s rather surprising that you enjoy doing this — they’re so different from the stuff you used to publish.’ But although my subject matter had changed so violently, often my approach with the camera was the same in that, wherever I went, I was trying to find groups and settings that would compose into a design. Often the bare walls or the struts of a hangar lent themselves as usefully to a pictorial scheme as any more calculated effects of decoration.
The fact that here were people of character living under dramatic conditions inspired me to adopt a more realistic approach, and the freedom of doing a straightforward piece of reportage was something that I found stimulating. My equipment consisted of one Rolleiflex and a flash bulb, so my powers of ingenuity were given full rein.
Hugh Francis told me he would authorize my making a complete study of the RAF. Apart from the uses he would make of the photographs, I should write a fictional composition, written for propaganda.[20] At last, I felt, I was able to do something to assuage my pangs of guilt at being unable to make a more worthwhile contribution.
LIFE ON THE STATION
Somehow, it always seems to be that light is fading when, after a long and hazardous train journey, I arrive, cold and stiff and full of trepidation, to be met by some cheerful PRO. In fact, it is sometimes an early afternoon arrival, yet at this time of the year, and at this stage of the war, daylight seems something always on the wane. Yet I have not been in the company of my new friend for more than a few moments before he has succeeded in assuaging my pangs of anxiety. ‘You will enjoy seeing this set-up; it’s bags of fun.’
We drive to the outskirts of the town where, on a bleak strip of land, the aerodrome is situated. All air stations, with their widely-spaced bungalow buildings, seem to be laid out on an identical plan and, with their protective covering of olive greens and khaki, the long, narrow buildings themselves are so impersonal and anonymous that, each time one arrives, one is baffled by the strangely familiar feeling of ‘I have been here before’.
Work never stops in the ‘Ops’ room. The electric bulbs burn continuously upon the maps and charts that show the progress of the latest sorties. Day and night the Met. people foretell the weather conditions of the future. In the vast dark hangars the electricians are making major repairs to every sort of aircraft. In the bomb dump armourers are loading on to trucks the explosives destined for the pressure points of the enemy’s arteries. Sunday differs in no way from other days, and only when completing their forms and log books do the constantly changing occupants of these warren-like buildings know the date of the month.
Here the necessities of life are provided, the food is good, for pilots are too valuable not to be kept in top condition, but little emphasis is placed on comfort.
The community itself creates, by its own fervour, the warmth and cosiness in which it lives. Former existence, ties and interests are intentionally forgotten: family or fiancée are secluded beyond the barriers. The farther removed from a large town with its girls, colour and distractions, the better is the spirit and morale of a station.
The aerodrome itself is the orbit of these men. It is simpler not to rely, or even embark, upon friendships when life is so precarious. The RAF encourages a loyal camaraderie rather than deep individual friendships. Under an armour of carefree gaiety there is an inner core of quiet and reserve. On an off-duty evening men divide into groups of four or five of those who are in the same flight (or have the same amount of spare money) to drink a tankard of beer at the local pub. Yet, living within their realm of local jokes and rounds of beer, pilots undoubtedly have a fuller life than we groundlings outside. The aerodrome is confined within its barbed-wire palisades, but from that constricted space, by day and by night, the inhabitants audaciously invade the domains of the deities.
Perhaps I have not yet seen enough to generalize about the character of each Service, but it does seem to me that RAF men acquire a certain similarity of outlook: each man shows an enthusiasm towards his duty — everyone is always trying to learn more about his own job. Even while waiting at the ready by their aircraft the pilots ‘talk shop’, exchange experiences and suggest new tactics.
The RAF has had less time to create traditions than the older Services, and one notices that there is less of a uniform style of manner than in the Army. In appearance, too, there is more variation in dress: personal preferences are shown in boots, shoes and coats. Some wear the top button of their jacket undone with a civilian scarf worn at the neck. Those who are old enough to grow moustaches do so, emphasizing their personality in variations of style, shape and proportion. None the less, tradition, together with training, does play a large part in the maintenance of morale. Morale is highest in the presence of a leader, or when dangers can be faced in company with others. Flying is a solitary form of duty, and pilots have not always the presence of their companions to support them, as
the soldier has his regiment. It is when the individual is called upon to face danger alone that the greatest strain is placed upon him. Yet if he has a crew with him, the comfort their company gives may be outweighed by the added burden of this responsibility.
The spirit of a squadron is also enormously influenced by the personality, vitality, or even wit, of certain of its members. A squadron is keyed up to produce its best results only when it feels itself to be in good form. The whole fabric can become slackened by the removal of a few of its compelling personalities. It is just the same as during the run of a play: the acting can deteriorate if a star member leaves the cast. Each individual counts in the structure of the whole.
When a pilot of a fighting squadron does not come back, the others, after waiting about an hour or two, disperse rather quietly. If the reports show the missing man to be safe, these fellows show their relief. But if no word comes through they are likely, that night, to drink a tankard or two extra, to have a determinedly cheerful evening, so that they may forget the gnawing at the back of their minds.
Shirley Woolmer, who is an intelligence officer attached to Victor Beamish’s heroic squadron, told me about a party that had been arranged at North Weald. A few hours before, a sweep was called in which three of the pilots were killed. No one suggested, however, that the party should be put off. Everyone got rather drunk. That was the way of demonstrating that in all circumstances ‘the show must go on’.
At first, so lighthearted appeared the general atmosphere, I had the impression that on these RAF stations no one felt very deeply about anything anymore. There was little interest in activities outside, no talk of Whitehall, and all unpleasantness, danger, and even the war itself was banished from conversation. In a unit where, from one hour to another, a friend may ‘fail to return’ (how heartless a phrase with its ignoble note of censure!), gloomy subjects are forbidden by tacit consent: mention of the possibilities of disfigurement or being seriously burnt is unthinkable. An intuitive wisdom dictates these rules. If emotions were allowed free play the shocks would be even harder to bear. Death may be mentioned flippantly, if at all. Someone had ‘gone for a Burton’ or been ‘bumped off’; the men seldom again referred to anyone once ‘presumed lost’.