4

‘THE NAVY’S HERE’

I

The week after the cricket match at Dover things went on getting worse. To everyone’s shock and surprise Hitler and Stalin made a non-aggression pact not to attack each other. Nazi and Communist seemed arch enemies until they made it up at Nuremburg. On 25 August 1939, the day Chalk made his masterly 100, the British Government proclaimed a formal treaty with Poland. Much good it did her. After six years of war, oppression and massacre, Poland was no better off under the boot of Stalin than she had been under Nazi Germany. On the other hand, the ‘non-aggression’ pact lasted less than two years and after it Germans and Russians slaughtered over fifty million of each other, the greatest bloodbath in history.

All this was in the future when we dutifully switched on the wireless at 11 o’clock on Sunday morning, 3 September. The German invasion of Poland had begun the day before. We expected we would hear a message of war, though I could not imagine what that would mean. The Prime Minister, a lugubrious loser, had been told in the House of Commons on 2 September to speak for England. And I suppose he did that, rather laboriously and with a curious accent: ‘This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by 11 o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is now at war with Chairmunny.’

It was rather like a country grocer demanding payment of an overdue account from Bonnie and Clyde. Five minutes later a strange ululating wailing grew and filled the air. It seemed as if the Valkyries, the Germanic war maidens, had been summoned forth by Hitler to chastise his enemies, though now they had grown old and their singing had turned into a rusty screeching. That’s what it seemed like. We knew what it really was: it was the air-raid warning. It had been demonstrated in Canterbury only a few days before. Every town in Britain had one and they were to be sounded only when enemy bombers were approaching. Hitler, like us, must have heard Mr Chamberlain’s speech, and no doubt his reply was winging its way across our coasts at this moment. We had an idea of what it was going to be like; in the cinema newsreels we had seen the bombing of Guernica and Shanghai. That was small stuff in a civil war and in distant Asia. We were sure Hitler would be much more efficient and would send thousands of planes and darken the sky with falling bombs.

We rushed out into the garden (not the best thing to do in an air raid, but we were curious to see the form of our destruction). It was a beautiful sunny morning. The air was full, not of falling bombs, but of the dusty perfumes of late summer. From two gardens away came the rhythmic creak of the nine-year-old daughter on her swing. It was as though we had stepped into a different play. All was familiar, but everything was changed. In my head I kept saying to myself: we are at war, we are at war with Germany. What could it mean? This grass growing under our feet, would it ever need to be cut again? It was one of the most crucial days of my life: nothing was the same and I, like everyone else, knew it, yet the bees buzzed as confidently as ever among the roses.

It wasn’t as though war was a new idea in itself. I was born only five years after the Great War ended (it was not yet called the First World War, because we did not expect there would ever be another). My father was a member of the Ypres League that met every year to keep the memory of those terrible trenches alive. Every year of my life at 11 o’clock on 11 November we observed the two-minute silence in tribute to the dead. Wherever they were, everybody stood still. You could hear the silence spreading along the streets, across the fields and valleys. It was moving, because it was heartfelt. There must never be another war like that one.

That didn’t mean that there might not be a minor war such as the one in Spain. When Mr Chamberlain came back from Munich in September 1938, waving his piece of paper and bleating about ‘peace in our time’, I had just started at St Edmund’s School. Our class of twelve to fourteen year olds debated the crisis. We all believed there would be a war and that we would all be in it. But it was one thing to indulge in a bit of corporate gloom in the classroom and another to grasp that it was really happening. At this very minute people were being blasted and maimed on the plains of Poland just as my uncle had been maimed on the Somme. That thought brought some consolation. It could not be as bad as the Great War. How wrong I was. The war that was beginning was a truly global conflict. It would last six years not four, and the casualties worldwide would be four times as great. Nor was it – as the First World War had been – largely confined in its depredations to young males. This war set a precedent that later minor wars have followed. Everyone was to suffer, young and old, halt and lame, infants and octogenarians, mothers and children, healthy and insane.

Luckily I could not imagine anything like that. In a few minutes there was the soothing hoot of the all clear. People said that the new radio direction finding station on the cliffs near Dover had mistaken a flock of birds for Hitler’s bombers. We were spared his wrath for another day.

II

Now there followed a most curious winter. It was as though we were allowed a trip through Purgatory before entering the Inferno towards which we were inevitably heading. Each nation followed a path characteristic of its own soul. Thus Hitler blitzkrieged Poland into extinction in under a month. France showed a film of its wonderful new defences, the Maginot Line (I remember endless shots of heavy metal doors opening and closing automatically like a vast refrigeration plant, but in the end it failed to save France’s bacon: Hitler bypassed it). England continued to call up and train a citizen’s army without possessing enough First World War rifles to arm them, it was rumoured. Russia enigmatically followed up the terms of its pact with Germany and swallowed the other half of Poland. Watching from the far side of the Atlantic, America’s twice-elected President Franklin Roosevelt seemed to be friendly to us. Our family’s hundred-year link with the States made us hope they would eventually come down on our side as they had in the First World War.

In the meantime, there had been no major air attack on Britain. The cover of the Boy’s Own Paper for November showed a heroic young soldier guarding the White Cliffs of Dover. But those early months of war were most brought home to us, as so often in wars in the past, by naval action. On 14 October a U-boat penetrated the so-called impenetrable defences of Scapa Flow, the huge natural bay in the Orkneys that was the northern anchorage of the British fleet. A British battleship, HMS Royal Oak, was torpedoed and sank immediately with the loss of 786 officers and men. Such dreadful casualties sustained in what was believed a safe anchorage brought home the horrors of war.

We had not only U-boats to fear. The Germans had built three fast, heavily armed warships to maraud British merchant convoys. One of these pocket battleships was intercepted by three British cruisers off South America on 13 December. Though outranged and outgunned, the British flotilla drove the Graf Spee into Montevideo harbour. The German captain scuttled his ship and shot himself. The companion German auxiliary vessel, the Altmark, temporarily escaped carrying over two hundred British sailors captive in her holds. Two months later she was cornered off the coast of Norway by a British destroyer, HMS Cossack. The Altmark was boarded in Nelsonian style. After a hand-to-hand struggle, the 299 prisoners were released to the cry ‘The Navy’s here’.

These distant echoes of ancient sea wars defined the hopes and fears of the early uncertain months, like the songs we schoolchildren sang: ‘We’re Going to Hang Out Our Washing on the Siegfried Line’ and ‘Run Rabbit Run’. No one less like a rabbit than the foamy-spittled Hitler could be imagined. Now the pain and idiocy of the terrible conflict we were about to embark on seems only too clear. How little we knew then. We look back at 1939 across a vast abyss of impending horror: total war, saturation bombing, the concentration camps, mass executions, the London Blitz, Pearl Harbor, the fall of Singapore, the siege of Leningrad, the Burma Road, Stalingrad, D-Day, Dresden, the atomic bomb, Hiroshima, Nagasaki . . . We could go on through the ethnic, tribal, religious, colonial and territorial wars that have continued to strew atrocity across our path.

War or no war, I went back to school that September. The only noticeable change was the deep trench the senior boys were digging in the quadrangle. It was to be an air-raid shelter. Its wet and muddy depths were among the few images I saw in the Second World War that reminded me of photographs from the First. Another was my father’s tin hat. This flattish circle of metal hardly seemed to have changed since Agincourt. It looked much less effective in protecting the brain than the German coal scuttle version. My father acquired it because he had volunteered to be an ARP warden. He was forty-five and, as the manager of the local bank, beyond calling-up age. But all able-bodied men were expected to contribute to the war effort. As an air-raid warden he had to patrol the local streets three nights a week checking that every house was adequately blacked out.

The blackout was a disagreeable and unexpected consequence of the war. The government rightly foresaw that enemy bombers would follow street lights and would be helped to concentrate their night attacks by the lit windows of houses and shops. So for six years our cities, towns and villages, down to the remotest farmhouse, had to show not a chink of light; all street lamps were doused, car lights were reduced by 60 per cent, even hand torches had to be masked so that they gave only a feeble glow around your feet. Unless the moon was out, the hapless pedestrian was reduced to a stumbling shuffle with many a bruising encounter with an invisible lamp-post. After the first year, petrol was so severely rationed that most civilians like my father took their cars off the road for the duration. This menacing darkness, which you tried to avoid entering unless you had to, was one of the enduring miseries of the war. At first, when there were no major air raids on Britain, it seemed an unnecessary discomfort.

Sometimes I went with my father on one of his nightly patrols under the mistaken expectation that it might be exciting. The glamour of darkness quickly wore off. What greatly increased was my admiration for my father. His main patrol area included a new estate a little further out of town. The brand new semi-detached houses had only recently been occupied. Their owners probably disliked the very idea that an air raid might damage their handsome new property. Hence they didn’t want to put up the heavy black material that was required by law to cover every inch of window that might be illuminated. Often they would simply put out all their lights when my father knocked on their door. A shouting conversation would take place through their letter box.

Such arguments usually followed the same pattern. The tenant would point out that there had been no air raids, there wasn’t one at the moment, when there was he would be the first to put out all his lights. My father, in the most reasonable tones, would read out the letter of the law, which required that they shroud their property, just as every hospital and palace in the land had done. He never lost his temper even when a tenant threw a bucket of potato peelings at us. Only once did he have to return with a police constable to ensure that the law was being carried out. The muddle, confusion and grudging acceptance that the war could not be denied and would affect everything; that it was likely to be nasty, tedious and boring as well as dangerous – these were facts brought home to us more by the blackout than by anything else in the early days.

They were facts even admitted by the recalcitrant householders my father had to convince on his evening patrols. I saw a side of my parent I had never had cause to witness at home: his reasonableness. I remember the excellent conversations we had, especially when a near full moon made walking easier (we had not yet had reason to call such nights ‘Bombers’ Moon’). My father, unruffled by abuse and potato peelings, would point out how conscientious most families were. He always saw the other side of things without being at all unctuous. I remember as I write this the lucidity and good sense that he invariably showed in the various crises of life that I brought to him. Many years after his death I found myself sitting at a wedding lunch next to the father of the bride, a man I had never met before. We discovered by chance that he had known my father. His whole appearance lightened. ‘What an extraordinary man. Such sound judgement, such humanity,’ he said. ‘He was a really good man.’ I think he was.

III

It is rare for a new human encounter to bring with it a direct insight into your own past in the way that this wedding guest gave me an assessment of my father that both confirmed and enriched my memory of him. But, of course, there are things more durable than memories: houses, photographs, furniture like my old grandfather clock. By our bedside in Kensington is a small Victorian armchair. It came originally from my grandparents’ farm in Yorkshire. The many curved slats that make the back include two that are broken. For years I have intended to repair them, as I have preserved the broken sections. The sight of the damage reminds me of the first winter of the war, because that was when it happened.

My mother, knowing my difficulty in making friends at school, had suggested that I should give a Christmas party to some half-dozen of my classmates who lived in Canterbury or nearby. Notionally a good idea, it was bound to be a failure because of the frozen nature of my relationship with my peers. Even while they were busy scoffing the bloater paste sandwiches and lemonade, I knew they would be storing up fresh observations of my home life with which they could torment me. Nothing could be better fodder than the sight of how the parents of the victim behaved towards him.

But the task of being both beady-eyed and sufficiently obsequious to disarm the parents’ natural reserve put quite a strain on the acting abilities of the would-be tormenters. One of them, a freckle-faced, ginger-haired youth whose name I have forgotten, squirming in embarrassment at being asked a direct question by my mother, leant so far back in the little Victorian chair that it went over and broke the two slats that I have in my hand now. This was one down for him. To be a successful tormentor you yourself must be invisible and impregnable. However, not even the breaking of the chair was sufficient to unfreeze our relationship.

So sparse were my dealings with my fellows that I can remember only two other guests at that party. They were called Reynolds and were the sons of a clergyman who had seen fit to christen his elder child Lionel Cuthbert. If that wasn’t a sufficient handicap, the school added another. All boys answered to their surnames. If there were more than one with the same surname, the initials of the Christian names were added. Thus the elder Reynolds became Reynolds, L.C. Like me, he wore glasses and found life difficult. There was no escape: Elsie or Cuthbert he remained throughout his school career.

This era of my discontent was mirrored and magnified a billion or so times by the impending trials of war. Christmas could not be the season of goodwill to all men when we were preparing for the death of so many. There was a new moral dilemma to perplex us that horrible Christmas. It was The Tragedy of Brave Little Finland. It was an episode without connection to all the disasters that were about to encompass us. Yet, for a few weeks, it occupied the centre of the world’s stage. Let me tell of it through the way I was reminded of it many years later.

In the spring of 1976 I was filming the graves of the English kings Henry II and Richard I in Fontevrault Abbey in France. This was for the BBC television series Royal Heritage, which took two years of intensive labour to prepare in time for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977. Recording the towering stone arcades of the nave was a refreshing change from the pomp and circumstance of state occasions. I was surprised and not entirely pleased therefore to get a direct message from the Queen. She had heard that the entrance to Helsinki Harbour was past a series of spectacularly beautiful islets. She was about to sail there in the Royal Yacht on an official visit and wondered if I wanted to film the event.

Only a minute’s reflection decided me in the affirmative. The Queen made few direct interventions in the filming, but they were always helpful. I arranged for an additional camera team to go from London to Finland, hired a local helicopter to film the arrival of the Royal Yacht from the air, and arranged that a second team and myself would board the Yacht while it was under way in the Baltic to get the Queen’s eye view of the approach past the islands. The next day I boarded a Finnair passenger flight from Charles de Gaulle airport to Helsinki.

It was my first visit to the home of Sibelius. I was met by a bearded government official. He explained that before taking me to my hotel he wanted to show me the most important site in Finland. He would not tell me what it was. We drove up to a green hill overlooking the city. A simple stone entrance led to a wide perspective of rolling hillside. It was entirely covered with uniform white gravestones: a heart-stopping sight. These were the young men who had died in the Winter War with Russia.

Then I remembered. ‘It was at the beginning of 1940?’ It was. It lasted four months and killed more than 2 per cent of the male population. Finland’s southern border was only fifteen miles north of Leningrad. Despite the secret non-aggression pact signed by Hitler and Stalin in the summer of 1939, its actual results, the partition of Poland, brought the rival dictatorships eyeball to eyeball. Russia had always feared an attack through Finland. This tiny, unprepared and ill-armed country was invaded by the Soviet giant at the beginning of December.

At first the massed Russian forces were opposed by poorly armed men who threw bottles of flaming petrol against the caterpillar tracks of the tanks: the famous Molotov cocktails. No other nation went to the aid of the Finns, but they had a powerful ally in General Frost. They were trained for guerrilla warfare in the forest and tundra. The Russians were heavily armed, but lightly clad. The winter of 1939–40 was one of the coldest in memory. In a few days more than two hundred Soviet tanks were lost to a mixture of fire, ice and courage.

To us, reading about these things in the Daily Express, it seemed intolerable that this land of free-thinking independent Davids should be battered to death by the hammers and sickles of the Soviet Goliath. But whose side were the Finns on? The British arranged to sell them some out-of-date fighter planes; so did Italy, which was shortly to join Germany in the invasion of France. There was talk of an army of volunteers (on the lines of the International Brigade in Spain); it never got under way, though the French supported the idea of sending in an army of the defeated and exiled Poles.

The Soviet invasion broke Finnish resistance before there was time for the politicians of Europe to make up their minds as to how they should react. Perhaps this was just as well, not only for saving Finland from further devastation, but also for faraway Britain. Had we sent a force of 100,000 troops, as was under serious consideration, they would have faced the hug of the Russian bear, and far away in Finland there was no Dunkirk and no twenty-mile stretch of water to retreat across. If Britain had found itself at war with both Germany and the Soviet Union (in the spring of 1940 they were still allies), what would have been the outcome of the war for us?

We were lucky. Ours was the only nation which was in the war from the beginning to the end and which survived. Finland, defeated by Russia, chose to join with Germany in May 1941 in the hope of getting revenge. She only added to the stones in the graveyard: 85,000 young men died in the Winter War; 500,000 were seriously wounded; 10,000 were permanent invalids. This was the debt my government official found it intolerable to have to carry. For us, in 1939, it was a tingling premonition of what we might be facing.