Bertie Davis suggested they should rent a cheap flat to take girls to, and he found a top floor flat on the corner of Guilford Street, overlooking Coram’s Fields. Wheatley was still living with his parents, turning up for the Artillery on a daily basis, so he was only able to use the flat for evenings and Sundays except when he was “Officer of the Guard.” This happened about once a fortnight, and entailed going in during the night to turn out the guard and inspect them.
Wheatley particularly remembered a relatively respectable girl he had picked up at Piccadilly Circus, after a girl he had met at Richmond had failed to arrive for the champagne supper he had laid on. She was unenthusiastic at first, and when Wheatley rushed out to inspect the guard he raced back fearing she might have gone. But having decided to stay, she was “a changed personality”, and for Wheatley it was “the night of a lifetime.”
It was “a jolly life on the home front” as Wheatley says, and the laziest Flashman-style cad could hardly have done better. This was not through any desire to shirk; having volunteered in 1914, he spent over three years caught up in endless courses and administration and didn’t get to France until Autumn 1917. Nor was it a reflection on the Territorial RFA, which had already seen heavy action. In retrospect it looks like the luck that Wheatley always believed in.
*
Wheatley’s first course was in October 1914 down at Woolwich, where he was sent to learn about field telephones. The Mess was excellent, the regular officers were friendly, and he was shown how to use a proper range finder, a splendid precision item that he never saw again. The British Army was so badly equipped that when the time came, he had to use his fingers and thumb.
Early in 1915 he was sent on another course, this time gunnery, down at Maresfield Park in Sussex. This was less pleasant, and the officers – still not regulars, but old time territorials who had been in before the war – were less enthusiastic about Wheatley and the other newcomers. The main benefit of this course for Wheatley was that he met Major Herbert Clark, an officer Wheatley greatly admired and who took something of a shine to Wheatley.
“Nobby” Clark was a kind and reasonable individual who never bullied or shouted, and took time to explain what was being done and why. After exercises he would go back over the day with the junior officers, asking each one why they had done whatever they did, and either praising them or explaining how it could have been done better. Then he would shout “Horses!” and they would race to see who could gallop back to camp first.
The next course was held at Lord’s Cricket Ground, where Wheatley was sent to learn the work of an ordinary gunner. Wheatley was selected as a driver, and had to ride a pair of draught horses, sitting on one while trying to control them both. He also had to wash and comb them, no doubt while thinking of injuries he had seen, clean the harnesses with oily rags and sand, and dismantle and reassemble the gun, with its massive springs in their bath of oil.
Wheatley was getting sick of training, although he enjoyed daily outings to Hampstead Heath for drill, where the Officers Mess was a room in the pub Jack Straw’s Castle. It was a three mile march there and back, and on the way back, downhill into London, the men would sing songs of the period such as Keep The Home Fires Burning, and It’s A Long Way to Tipperary. There was a more modern note struck when a photographer came and photographed them dug in on a snowy day. Wheatley was surprised to see the pictures printed in a newspaper with the caption “Our Boys on the Western Front.”
*
Wheatley’s next course was at Ipswich, and on the 15th May 1915 he marched out of London with the regimental band playing. Being a City regiment it was their right to march through the major thoroughfares, past the Bank of England. They held the traffic up, but the public thought they were going to France and stood on the pavements cheering.
Wheatley had turned up in full marching order, which was unnecessary; no other officers had done it. None of his gear was packed and he was wearing it all: haversack, binoculars, map case, torch, water bottle, prismatic compass, pistol, and sword. He was, as he says, done up “like a Christmas tree”, and probably the cause of some amusement.
Ipswich was unpleasant; the First Line Territorial officers regarded their Second Line comrades like Wheatley with contempt, and ignored them in the Mess. Wheatley was soon back, but then he was sent out there again. “It was now that my many months of purgatory with horses really began,” he writes, with a hundred and forty horses being brought down in pairs to be watered at a long canvas trough:
Often the drivers would spend ten minutes or more splashing the water gently on the muzzle of some stupid brute that refused to drink; and to send it away without it having done so was a serious offence. Many a time I have stood for over an hour watching this procedure in a mackintosh with the rain trickling down the back of my neck.
This had to be done three times a day, with a six a.m. start.
The other business on the agenda was gunnery, and Wheatley had now reached the stage, as he reported to Hilda, of firing live shells at a large square of canvas a mile or two away, representing the Hun. He had no great flair for gunnery, and wondered why he couldn’t see his shells hitting the target. They were bursting in the sky because he had not adjusted the fuses properly – a moderately technical job involving a thermometer and spanner – and he remembered being gently ticked off by a General: “Look up in the air, my boy”.
Wheatley was growing so bored with horses and artillery and training that in November 1915 he volunteered to join the Royal Flying Corps. “One doesn’t fetch horses in the RFC,” he told Hilda, having no idea that the pilots’ average life expectancy would be around two weeks.
The RFC was still in its infancy, having only just got past the stage of using hand-held revolvers in aeroplanes, but it was now rapidly expanding. In May 1915 it comprised only 166 planes in total, but within eighteen months it was losing fifty planes a week. Parachutes were not issued; senior Army staff believed pilots would try harder without them. Wheatley went to Ipswich for his medical, where it transpired he was colour blind. At the time it must have been a disappointment, but it was one more lucky escape.
*
Wheatley had more good fortune a little later, “an awfley good stroke of luck … really a ripping stroke of luck”: this was the reappearance of Nobby Clark, who had been promoted to Colonel and was now Wheatley’s Commanding Officer. “He is only about 35 but very fat,” Wheatley wrote to Hilda, “with a lovly round red jolly face and brown eyes that are always laughing. He is far more like a pal than a C.O.”
Wheatley admired Clark’s combination of dedicated soldiering and good living: “He is worth heaps of money and when he was in France he never missed having his seven course dinner … and yet he is a splendid soldier, knows his job from A to Z.” Clark took an interest in everyone (“every day he gets letters from his men in his old Batt in France”), and he was an utterly decent person: as Wheatley put it, in a resonant phrase of the period, he was “one of God’s own White Men.”
Kitchener had just issued an order forbidding the smoking of cigarettes on marches, and permitting only pipes. Wheatley bought a pipe, but he hated it. He persevered for a week or two until there was a full parade, with Clark at the front as they marched down the road. After a couple of minutes Clark gave the order “March at Ease,” which was associated with smoking. He then took out his cigarette case and lit up, to cheering from the troops.
Wheatley’s erstwhile companion Shitty Bill Inglis was still around, and placed him under close arrest for some minor misdemeanour. This meant he had to take off his Sam Browne belt – the great emblem of being an officer – and stay confined in his room. That evening his room mate gave him a message from Colonel Clark, to say he should lower a long piece of string out of his window. Half an hour later, Wheatley found he had caught a box of chocolates on the end of it.
*
Wheatley’s main recreation was reading, but more communally it was singing; the officers had an upright piano. They liked the indecent songs of the period such as “Bollocky Bill The Sailor”, “Charlotte the Harlot”, “Abdul El Bulbul Emir”, and “Never let a sailor get his hand above your knee.” Few of these have aged well, and “She Wouldn’t Do Just What I Wanted Her To (So I Socked Her In The Eye)” less than most.
Wheatley’s favourite was “She Was Poor But She Was Honest”, with its well-known chorus:
It’s the rich wot gets the pleasure
It’s the poor wot gets the blame
It’s the same the ‘ole world over
It’s a bleedin’ bloody shame
This could be sung in a mock cockney accent for greater merriment. It is the story of a village girl, seduced by the local squire, who becomes a high class prostitute in the big city, mixing with “Dukes and toffs.”
There are further verses, all too realistic and Victorian, about how she ends up as a poxed old crone selling matches, but Wheatley didn’t like these; he preferred just to think of her as an erotic social climber. The idea of an amoral woman making her way in the world fascinated him, like Georgina Thursby in his own Roger Brook books, or Amber St. Clare in Kathleen Winsor’s once controversial bodice-ripper, Forever Amber, which he owned.
Nearly sixty years later Wheatley revisited the theme – and the song itself, quoted on the blurb – with The Strange Story of Linda Lee, an abysmal novel from the end of his career (sample chapter titles: ‘The Transformation of Linda’, ‘The Price of a Lift’, ‘Drugged and Kidnapped,’ ‘Sex Rears its Ugly Head’.)
As we shall see, the degradation of women was a highly charged subject in Wheatley’s imagination, whether as sadistic threats in the thriller fiction, orgiastic rituals in the black magic books, anxieties within his own family, or even national prospects in his wartime defence papers. This was so fascinatingly awful that it could never be allowed to happen, but the possibility always had to be raised as fulsomely as possible.
*
Wheatley had an erotic disappointment at Ipswich, in the shape of a girl called Sibilla. She was a nurse whom he had met back on Streatham Common, one Sunday afternoon. Wheatley and Sibilla met on several evenings and indulged in what a slightly later generation would call heavy petting. The next stage was to get her into a proper bed, so Wheatley invited her down to Ipswich, rented a room for the night at a local farm, and laid on a champagne supper.
The appointed train came in, and she wasn’t on it. Thinking she might have missed the train, Wheatley waited for the later one, but still no Sibilla; it transpired that her hospital had been short-staffed and she had not been allowed her time off. Shortly afterwards, Wheatley was moved to Salisbury Plain, and that was the end of his fling with Sibilla. His list of women figures “Sibyle” [sic], but there is no tick.
Wheatley had money troubles, with a Mess bill of £29/13s/1d to be settled before they moved to Salisbury Plain, and a further £16/14s/6d outstanding from the previous month (these sums are not as quaint as they might sound, and represent about £2200 today). He had already had to sell his motorcycle, and now he went to see Colonel Clark to ask if the Mess could extend his credit. Clark was sympathetic but firm. He could lend Wheatley the money himself, or even give it to him, but this would not be good for Wheatley in the long run. He had to face up to his problems, in this case his relationship with his father: “I know that you are not on the best of terms with your father,” said Clark, “but he can well afford to pay your Mess bill for you and I’m sure he will. You must write to him.”
Wheatley’s father paid him an allowance to supplement his army pay of £300 a year (around £14,000, and not much for the life an officer was expected to lead, but some private income was assumed) and he expected him to manage on it. Wheatley awaited his reply with anxiety. In the event he cleared Wheatley’s debts, but made a point of being paid back at £5 a month (about £200). Wheatley sent off the first cheque, but was soon in money trouble again and he didn’t manage to send any more.
Ten years later, Wheatley’s father died, and Wheatley had the melancholy task of sorting through his effects. Among them he found his cheque, and he was moved when he realised that although his father had insisted on having it, he never banked it. Wheatley kept it for the rest of his life.
*
In August 1916 Wheatley moved to Salisbury Plain, where he was stationed at Heytesbury: he later used the area’s desolate landscape for the Walpurgis Night sabbat in The Devil Rides Out. It was a bleaker posting than Ipswich, but he still managed to enjoy himself. He visited Bath for the first time, where he was very taken by its Georgian terraces, and he devised a gambling game for the Mess. This was a low-tech version of roulette, which could be played using a pack of cards instead of a wheel.
Wheatley found particular solace in the company of Dolly Gregson, whose social class he was pleasantly in awe of. Gregson knew the Marquess of Bath, and on one occasion he and Wheatley were entertaining Lord Bath’s two daughters in the tea tent at a gymkhana when a Brigadier’s wife hovered nearby, complaining to her husband that all the seats were taken by junior officers “and their shop-girl friends.” Gregson was on his feet at once and told her that he only wished he could give her his own seat, but he could hardly leave his guests: “May I introduce you,” he added, “to Lady Mary Thynne and Lady Emma Thynne.” It must have made Wheatley’s day.
It was also through Gregson that Wheatley entered his first gentleman’s club, shortly after the war. He had already joined the Services Club in Stratford Place, but this was merely a sort of Mess-cum-hotel in town, compared to the Bachelors’ Club on Piccadilly, to which he was taken by Gregson. This was a real club; so real, in fact, that P.G. Wodehouse’s Piccadilly Jim is a member, and it features in the fiction of John Buchan.
Compared to the horror taking place in France, Wheatley was having an absurdly pleasant time. The Battle of the Somme had now started, with 57,000 British casualties on the first day, 19,000 of them dead. Wheatley was put in charge of fattening up about thirty horses, for which he had his own hut and servant, and he was free to read for most of the time. In the evenings he tried to bag pheasants from the adjoining woods with his pistol, but they were too fast for him. Ever ingenious, he decided to ply them with corn soaked in brandy, in the hope of slowing down their reflexes. He still didn’t manage to bag one.
Two deaths hit Wheatley closer to home around this time: his grandfather, William Yeats Baker, died in August, and Wheatley’s old best friend, Douglas Sharp, died in Egypt from blood poisoning after a camel bite. Far from glorious, Sharp’s death was still sustained on active service, which seems to be the serious point in the otherwise comic poem Wheatley wrote about the two of them and the two girls glimpsed in Streatham:
Well you wouldn’t be sittin’ ‘ere,
If it weren’t for some like ‘im, sir,
‘Oo went off with a smile an’ a cheer,
To gasp out ‘is life in the desert,
A thousand miles from home …
(and Wheatley manages a rhyme with “legions of Rome”).
Life on Salisbury Plain became less comfortable as winter came on, and an exercise was begun to dig trenches that would correspond to a section of the Western Front. This involved about five hundred men, with nineteen-year-old Wheatley in charge of the artillery contingent.
It rained and rained. Tents became porous, starting to let water in wherever the canvas was touched. Cooking fires were rained out, and efforts to sustain them with petrol and sugar were useless. The men were cold and miserable, in wet clothes day after day, and they began to fall sick.
Two men died in their tents, and their bodies were taken away in small wagons meant for transporting rifles. Another hundred and seventy had to be taken off the Plain and hospitalised with bronchitis and pneumonia, but still the exercise went on. Wheatley became ill, having already had three bouts of bronchitis since joining the army, most recently in April, when he had three weeks in hospital; his lungs were always his weakness.
Early one morning the head of a Captain Griffiths came through the tent flap, and asked Wheatley why he wasn’t on parade. Wheatley told him that the Officer Commanding didn’t take the first parade, and that he took the second parade at nine. Griffiths still said he would report him. Next day Brigadier-General Peel appeared on horseback with his entourage. It was still raining heavily, and without dismounting he had Wheatley up before him, told him he would be dealt with later, and rode away.
The exercise was finally called off and they went back to Heytesbury, where Wheatley reported sick. As was the army practice, Wheatley was shown a copy of Griffiths’ report on him and given the chance to reply.
A couple of evenings later Wheatley was informally summoned by Colonel Clark. Clark gave him a drink and broke it to him that he was in trouble. He had been out riding with their new Brigadier, who told him he wasn’t impressed by the Territorials and was going to find a couple of junior officers to court martial as an example. The first one he was planning to pick on was Wheatley.
Clark had a plan of defence. He thought the exercise on the Plain was a disgrace, with nearly two hundred men hospitalised and two dead, and that there would be a scandal if it became public. He told the Brigadier that Wheatley was angry about what had happened to his men, and that through his father’s contacts he was thinking of having a question raised in the House of Commons. The Brigadier would therefore be well advised not to persecute him further.
Wheatley was particularly keen not to have his career fouled up at this point because he was in with a chance of being promoted to Captain and sent to France. Trench mortar batteries were being formed, and Wheatley’s name had been put forward as a potential commanding officer for one of them.
Colonel Clark had made a report on Wheatley, and sent him a copy. Dated the nineteenth of September 1916, it read “I have a very good opinion of Lt.Wheatley. He has a good command of men with whom he is very popular. I consider that he has plenty of ability and he is not afraid to use his own judgement.” He added a note to this report for Wheatley alone. “Please live up to it,” it ran, and regarding the possible promotion:
Please be as gay as you like, but always remember your added responsibilities, and that you will be looked up to as a leader, and as a man who can be followed: the higher authorities will rely on you as I do.
If I have occasionally thought you have lacked a little ‘ballast’ I have always thought that the ballast was there, and I am confident that my trust in you as a good boy will not be misplaced.
Wheatley was summoned by Brigadier-General Peel, the man who had said he would deal with him later. To his surprise, Peel made no mention of their meeting on the Plain, or Griffith’s charges, or Wheatley’s defence. Instead he talked of the trench mortar companies. Would Wheatley like to command them? The appointment was not for one company but three, and because it involved liasing with infantry it carried staff officer status, as a Staff Captain, which to Wheatley meant a prestigious red hat band and lapel decorations. He accepted at once.
It was a long while before he came to see this offer in a more sinister light, since few trench mortar officers survived more than a couple of months. Peel had just come back from France and he knew what conditions had become. He was sending Wheatley to the Battle of the Somme, which ground to a halt a month later with combined casualties of over a million dead for an advance of seven miles. After Clark’s warning about the debacle on Salisbury Plain and questions being raised in the House, Peel may have seen Wheatley as what we would now call a ‘whistle blower.’ Perhaps this was why he thought France was the place for him.
Once again Wheatley’s luck held, although it was another disappointment at the time. Wheatley never got his trench mortars or his red hat band, because his chest grew worse, and he was sent to hospital in London. The battalion finally went to France in January 1917, but Wheatley didn’t go with them. Instead he stayed in England, where he met a strange new friend.