I finished writing this book in the same place I finished my first one: sitting in the garden, with a rug across my shoulders to cut away the north breeze that curls over the forest and hill behind the house in September. I’ve told you before that I don’t believe in ghosts. I’ve also told you that I’ve seen men walking who I knew to be dead. I don’t do anything with these two opinions; I just let them snarl at each other across my brain from time to time. It won’t be long before I find out for certain, I guess. The old lady who brings me my morning dram sees them more frequently than I do. Which is why I am surprised that she hasn’t seen my most recent visitor. Today she walked right past her.
A big old plane tree sits at the far edge of the garden, in front of the house. Beyond it the hillside drops out of sight into the blues and greys of the Cromarty Firth. My visitor is sitting on the ground under the tree, looking out to sea. Her arms are wrapped around her knees, and she is wearing the same clothes I once saw her in: frayed fatigue pants, and a skimpy khaki vest that clings to her body. The other thing she is wearing is that smile that’s maybe a smile, and maybe not. She doesn’t appear to feel the cold. I suppose that means that she’s gone, at last. It won’t be long before we’re all gone.
I don’t care as much about that as I used to.
Springtime in Germany: a recipe, and a little history
Charlie Bassett’s journey through northern Europe in 1945 has been a much more personal trip than any of those I flew with him from Bourn Airfield in Tuesday’s Child in 1944 – I knew some of the men who actually did it, you see. There actually was a car named Kate, and they took her to Germany.
The airfield at Tempsford, which was the trigger of his headlong rush across the Low Countries, was once referred to by Winston Churchill as the most secret place in England. He was sandbagging, of course; there were far more secret locations than that – perhaps Tempsford was just the most secret place he felt he could trust us with. The function of the two squadrons that used it was flying personnel and supplies to agents and Resistance fighters operating in Axis-held territories. The aircraft they used were frequently unarmed, and the work was dangerous. It is to the RAF’s great credit that it made room there for a few pilots whose personal beliefs conflicted with killing other human beings, but who still wanted to serve. Tempsford still has its pub, but another two that the aircrews used are now private houses, and the Hall is a corporate HQ. The village’s best-kept secret is the small medieval manor farmhouse on the south side of its main street – it looks as if it hasn’t changed in five hundred years. Everton village, just east of the airfield, has the Thornton Arms, the pub that Charlie knew; it still serves one of the best pints of bitter in England. A time traveller can lunch there, then walk almost from its front door, down the wooded footpath, to the skeleton of the airfield. There you will find sections of runway and perimeter track, a parachute store camouflaged as a barn, and a clump of trees, each planted and labelled in memory of an agent, or an aircrew, who didn’t return. Waterloo Farm still endures, and the farm cottage at which Charlie was billeted can be seen from the track that spears past it.
Charlie set off for France from Croydon Aerodrome, which was the original London Airport – and a far more civilized terminal than the municipal toilet we built at Heathrow to replace it. Before the war one could see over the airport perimeter from the top deck of a passing bus . . . and that’s how my mother and father saw a new squadron of Spitfires arrive in August 1939, and realized that another world war was imminent. The old man joined up a couple of weeks later. The prewar airport terminal has been sensitively conserved, and converted for commercial use. The visiting public are welcomed, and there is usually a display of artefacts and memorabilia demonstrating its history. A society has been formed to preserve and promote its heritage.
Sadly, the last time I looked you could no longer get a pint at the Propeller. The watering place of choice for many of the defenders of London in 1940 is boarded up and falling to pieces. Shame on the owners and the council; that should never be allowed to happen to a decent pub.
Charlie recalls the old prewar Imperial Airways biplane airliners that dominated the air route between Croydon and the Continent. Like most large aircraft in private hands, they were pressed into RAF service in 1939. One, named Scylla, ended up at Drem Airfield in East Lothian, Scotland – just twenty minutes’ drive from where I write this. It was blown over and wrecked by one of our northern storms in 1940, and the fuselage, with its galley and first-class seats, turned into a dispersal hut for the pilots of 605 Squadron who were defending Edinburgh. They cut a glade into the woods close to their Spitfires, and hoisted it up on bricks. Who knows, perhaps a schoolboy poking through the thickets and woods around the old airfield will yet come upon its mouldering frame.
It is wrong to think of the newly liberated countries of Europe as pacified in early 1945. There were old scores to settle, and political tensions, centred on organized armed groups with incompatible ambitions, created deep fault-lines in societies – there were more guns per head of population in France in January 1945 than there are in Florida today. Young men from Resistance groups, who had grown up with no trade except fighting and sabotage, grappled with a similar problem to today’s retired Provo or UDA fighter –What do I do next? The liberation of the Channel countries called into being a window of opportunity for the opportunists, and criminal opportunities for the criminals . . . and armies of displaced people were beginning to move around Europe like a legion of the lost. By 1948 there were few adults in the UK who didn’t know what the acronym DP stood for. It is not in current use, even though mass movements of the dispossessed have occurred throughout Europe, Africa and Asia ever since. There were also the deserters – from both sides – operating as individuals, or in gangs. Don’t forget a few isolated or lost Axis stay-behinds, who for a couple of months vented their spleen by throwing hand grenades into cafes, and by other acts of sabotage. An old man at an Algerian cafe in Dijon once told me, There were some bad losers! and shrugged. He said that in one particular street of restaurants, in one particular month, there were so many incidents that the local Gendarmerie started calling the establishments ‘shooting galleries’.
The American war correspondent and photographer Lee Miller wandered into my first book by accident, and I couldn’t resist bringing her back: Charlie seems attracted to independent women. Contemporaries still talk of the Lee Miller cocktail she lugged around the Continent in jerrycans: it consisted of anything alcoholic she could get, poured into an empty petrol can, and given a good shake. When she reached Munich she billeted in Adolf Hitler’s apartment with her pal Dave Scherman. They bathed in Hitler’s bath, and used the telephone there to call the Hitler house at Berchtesgaden before it fell to the Allies. The call was answered, but they didn’t get the quote they asked for. My favourite photograph of her is of her in that bath – her battered combat boots alongside. She had been desperate to change her jeep, Hussar, for a larger more comfortable staff car, and eventually Dave did a deal for one. In a new Chevrolet she travelled through Germany chronicling the collapse and aftermath of resistance, into Denmark and through Austria and Hungary – where she was arrested by Russian troops – and into Romania. That’s where she stopped.
I borrowed James Stewart for a few hours: he won’t mind. He had a pawky sense of humour, and a distinguished war record as a bomber pilot. Sorry, Jimmy. As a film actor his range was wider, even, than those he rode in some of the cowboy leads he made so famous.
Soldiers’ graffiti have been around for a couple of thousand years, but World War Two finally legitimized them. The conquering armies in the West – German, Russian, American, Italian or British – daubed every town they passed through. Allied soldiers used their unit signs or nicknames . . . and often topped them off with a humorous put-down, aimed at the friendly units that followed them. The Germans often used quotations from Hitler’s speeches. The Brits, in particular, were also quite keen on comedians’ catchphrases – like Tommy Handley and the mob from ITMA. I suppose that that says something about us. The British Highland Division was so notorious for signing the buildings they knocked over, and roads they wrecked, that other divisions of the Allied armies gave them the nickname the Highway Decorators. You can still see the HD sign which recorded their march on buildings in Italy, France and the Low Countries, although the paint fades with weather and the years. It is worth while reflecting the next time you overreact to the activities of a teenager with a paint spray can that he is only taking forward an art form from his grandfather or great-grandfather’s generations. Charlie says it all the time – what goes around, comes around.
Shining massed searchlights against a low cloud base in order to produce an artificial daylight did occur, and was known ruefully as ‘Monty’s Moonlight’, although Bernard Montgomery was probably not its originating genius – I wonder who was.
My parents’ generation never used words like Spitfire, Lancaster or Mosquito. For them the aeroplanes were Spits, Lancs and Mossies. Possibly the more homely contractions made the killing they had to do with them easier to bear. Halifax bombers and transports, such as flew from Tempsford, were Hallibags, and Typhoon ground-attack fighters – like the one that the Fifer, Ross, broke – were Tiffies. Sherman tanks were Ronsons, but that was for another reason: too often the petrol-engined vehicles burned like the cigarette lighters they were named for. Those that burned their crews were said to have brewed up . . . just like making a pot of tea. Today’s military has not moved away from the practice of having homely, friendly phrases to describe the most terrible of events. By way of a contrast, our stockbrokers and white-collar managers infuse their patois with aggressive and macho phrases that attempt to associate their office politics with trench warfare. Poor fools; if only they knew.
Not long ago some people in Glasgow opened a long-unused door on a floor above an amusement arcade on the Trongate, and found themselves standing in a music hall that had been lost since 1938. They had rediscovered the Britannia Panopticon, on whose stage an uncertain Stan Laurel had taken his first steps to fame in 1906. It had also offered an English actor named Archie Leach an early taste of the footlights. A society, the Britannia Panopticon Trust, has been formed to preserve and restore it, and some guided tours have been carried out. If that’s your bag, try the internet. Maybe, in the slipstream of a generation that has pushed stand-up comedy back into the limelight, the Panopticon’s time has come round again.
My father marched with the Eighth Army: he told me about how he and his peers would retune British forces radios to pick up German broadcasts, particularly in order to listen to ‘Lili Marleen’ sung by Lale Andersen in its original lippy German: I never hear the recording without thinking of him. Many of the popular British and American chanteuses of the time recorded cover versions, but they couldn’t reproduce Lale’s husky, haunted tone.
I first came across the remarkable Ross rifle when I was living in Easter Ross, and shooting targets at an old quarry with the Tain Rifle and Pistol Club, in the days of innocence before Dunblane. One Saturday the Secretary, John Macrae, stopped me by the boot of his car, and reverently began to unwrap a rifle from yards of velvet material. He asked me, Have you ever seen one of these before? It was an exquisite Ross rifle. The original Ross Rifle was designed by one of the Rosses of Balnagowan, an estate and castle just south of Tain in Ross-shire, at the turn of the century. As a military weapon it was superseded by the rugged .303 Lee Enfield, because it had a number of weaknesses, including the fact that its bolt can take out the shooter’s eye if it is reassembled clumsily after cleaning. It has one saving grace that repays the care and love its sharpshooter devotees still lavish on it: in the hands of a skilled marksman it can consistently shoot the pips from a playing card at a quarter of a mile. It is a true sniper’s rifle.
During the last weeks of the war the Allied armies at the point seethed with rumours of supposed Werewolf Units – allegedly well-armed groups of stay-behind fanatical Nazis dedicated to what we would identify today as acts of terrorism. There were such units, but not many of them: neither were they well organized or equipped. They mounted a couple of operations, but in the large scheme of things didn’t amount to much. They were successful insomuch as the fear of them, and the steps taken to counter them, used far greater resources than their actual threat warranted, but in 1945 no one was prepared to take a chance with a Nazi. Charles Whiting’s book Werewolf is an accessible account of their activities, and contains as much information as the general reader will need: a footnote to history.
The story of the dying soldier sitting on his bed in the Fifties and believing that he saw the victims of the concentration camps beckoning to him from his dressing mirror is true. I know: I was there, a thirteen-year-old sitting alongside him.
Finally: A state-of-the-art plateful of Stovies, and a fine pint of beer, can still be had for less than a fiver at the Halfway House in Fleshmarket Close, a narrow street of steps, behind Waverley Station in the Old Town of Edinburgh. For those of you that want to do it yourself, a typical Stovie recipe comprises 6 large peeled and cubed potatoes, a cup of milk, a tablespoon of salted butter, a chopped onion and a 12-ounce tin of corned beef cut into small chunks – with additional salt and pepper to taste. Drop the milk and potatoes into a saucepan, boil and simmer until the potatoes are soft – maybe half an hour. While the potatoes are simmering sauté the onion in the butter, in a skillet over a medium heat, until pale and soft. When the potatoes are soft, mix in the sautéed onions and the corned beef. Give it another ten minutes to heat through, and season with salt and pepper. Some recipes include a small poke of finely ground oatmeal, if it needs stiffening, or a serving can be topped off with a dollop of soured cream, or crowdie. Bon appétit.
I had anticipated that Charlie Bassett would bow out of my life with this story. However, the Russians are coming, and now I know that Charlie will have to fly again.