1.

My Father’s Shakespeare

My father’s Shakespeare was the New Temple Edition. Pocket-sized, with bright-red boards, they sat in a row on their own little shelf above the mahogany wireless around which we gathered as a family to listen to the plummy voice of Roy Plomley’s weekly presentation of Desert Island Discs on the BBC Home Service. ‘And what book would you take, apart from the Bible and the Complete Works of Shakespeare, which are already there?’ I wish I had asked my mother and father what book they would have chosen, but the presence of the Bible by their bed and the New Temple Shakespeares in the living room readied the house for the castaways who were regularly invited into our home.

My mother believed that hospitality was a duty; her mother had taken in evacuees during the war. Once a month on a Sunday afternoon we entertained a boy from the local school for the blind, a reminder to me and my brother how privileged we were to have our sight. And every Christmas we welcomed a lonely Australian or Malaysian student via a scheme organized by the Commonwealth Institute in London. That was the only time of year when another wartime rule – a frugal table – was broken.

We didn’t have a television at the time of Winston Churchill’s funeral, so we watched it at a neighbour’s home. I laid out an imitation of the procession through the streets of London with my toy soldiers on the dining-room table. Even at the age of six and a half, I sensed that it was the end of the era that had shaped my parents.

Four years later, in 1969, we were propelled into the future, watching the moon landing on our first black and white television. It had taken the place of the big old radio with its visible valves, white knobs and the red line on the dial that moved across the names of stations near and far. The incomplete set of the New Temple Shakespeares remained on the shelf above all through my teens, as if in a shrine. I didn’t open them until it was too late.

Much Ado About Nothing has never been my favourite Shakespearean comedy. Over the years, my personal number-one comedy spot has flipped between A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Winter’s Tale and Twelfth Night. But there is one speech in Much Ado that I can never get out of my head. Claudio has been tricked into believing that his fiancée Hero has been unfaithful to him on the eve of their marriage. His gullibility in this regard is a black mark against his character, so he is forced to pay a heavy price. A Friar assists in a cunning plan to make him believe that Hero has died of shock and shame because of the way in which he has denounced her as a whore in the middle of their wedding ceremony. The Friar then delivers a homily that includes the lines

for it so falls out

That what we have we prize not to the worth

Whiles we enjoy it; but, being lacked and lost,

Why, then we rack the value, then we find

The virtue that possession would not show us

Whiles it was ours.

You never really value what you have until you have lost it. Until it is too late. Or who you have, and what their virtues were. This is especially true if you are a teenager, hormonally programmed not to value the virtues espoused by your parents.

It was the summer holidays in early August 1978, the long vacation after my first year at university. I was running a show called Magic Circus. We were a small company of student actors who toured around the village primary schools of Kent, taking the children off their parents’ hands for an afternoon. Things always went best when the weather was good, allowing the children to run around and the theatre games to fill the playground while artwork could be created inside. The afternoon in the village of Weald was a tough one because it never stopped raining. In the evening, I flopped in front of the television and chatted to my mother and father. For some reason, we found ourselves looking through albums of old black and white photographs of their wedding and my childhood. I told myself that it was time to ask my father to tell me about his life before getting married. Something of which I only had the sketchiest outline: childhood in Frinton-on-Sea, Classical Studies at Cambridge in the late 1920s with the alcoholic novelist Malcolm Lowry as his friend, schoolteaching in Eastbourne and Warwickshire, then the war. But it was late by then, and I was tired. We could pick up the conversation tomorrow or tomorrow or tomorrow.

I wasn’t paid for directing the Magic Circus, so I also had a morning job, teaching English language to a class of Greek schoolchildren who had taken up summer residence in Walthamstow Hall, the local girls’ school. That next day, in the middle of second period, a wasp appeared. I got up to chase it and knocked a book off the table. At that moment Costi Dardoufas, the teacher who organized the summer school, came through the door. I thought he was going to tell me off for horsing around. But he just said, ‘There’s someone to see you.’ He led me up the passage, in silence. It was Tom Mason, one of the teachers at my school and also our next-door neighbour. He told me it was my father’s heart.

‘How bad is he?’ I asked. I knew in my heart that he was dead. Besides, that would be better than a long illness – there had been enough of those in the family. Better death than a half-life of confinement. Uncle Tom, as we used to call him when we were children, said briefly what had happened as he drove me home, after Costi had put his arm round my shoulders and told me I needn’t work again.

The drive up the town had never seemed longer. I remembered the previous weekend: Dad had played his last game of cricket on a beautiful village ground nestling below the Downs. He had made twelve runs and was delighted to hear in the evening that I had scored a fifty on the same day. It was my parents’ twenty-fourth anniversary, so we had gone out to dinner – a very rare treat in the 1970s. That must have been why the wedding album was still on the coffee table a few nights later.

At home, there was the family doctor and a policeman. Dad had been dead on the doctor’s arrival. He had been tutoring a boy in the dining room and had apparently called Mum to come quickly. The boy was sent home. Typical Dad, teaching till the last minute. He had said that there was a terrible pain above his heart and he couldn’t breathe, so he went and lay down while Mum phoned for the doctor and ran next door to Beryl Mason, who had been a nurse. She was with him when he died, while Mum was waiting at the window for the doctor.

I didn’t go straight in to see Mum. First, I answered the policeman’s questions and talked a little to Dr Harrison. Twenty years earlier, he had delivered me to life in the very bed on which my father had just died.

I failed in my attempt to leave a message for my brother, who was living away from home, but succeeded in telling my friends that I wouldn’t be able to do Magic Circus that afternoon. I put my father’s watch and wedding ring in a drawer, then went in to see my mother. She wept but was never hysterical. ‘But why so soon?’ she asked. I remembered a friend of hers saying, just a few weeks before, ‘Enjoy him while you have him.’ I began to wonder whether I had failed to heed that advice myself.

The policeman asked me to identify the body for the coroner’s case, because it was a heart attack and Dad had no previous cardiac history. Then I realized that he had seemed tired the last few days, and apparently he had told Beryl that he felt a bit off on his bike one day, which made me feel guilty that through the summer I had too often hogged the family Mini.

The room was cold and dark with a musty smell. He was wrapped in the counterpane, more like a thing than a person. Dr Harrison removed the cover and I saw the head. Mouth open as in sleep, face thin and blue. At least there was no sign of pain. Later, Mum talked of him ‘lying on that bed, sweating’ – but he had said nothing.

I made the first phone calls to the wider family, then sat with Mum, who was in her chair staring at the blank television screen and the New Temple Shakespeares, until the policeman came to say that the body had been taken away. I put his clothes and shoes in the wardrobe, went downstairs to tidy away the books with which he had been teaching. His typewriter was on his desk, a piece of writing half finished. What would we do with all his books?

That night I wrote out two quotations from King Lear:

But his flawed heart –

Alack, too weak the conflict to support –

’Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief,

Burst smilingly.

And

Vex not his ghost: O, let him pass! He hates him

That would upon the rack of this tough world

Stretch him out longer

If you’re patient enough to persevere with him, Shakespeare will give you the words.

When I got round to sorting his books, I opened the New Temple Shakespeares for the first time. They were beautiful little things, each adorned with an Eric Gill woodcut on the title page. Then I made my discovery: always a methodical man, my father had written on the endpapers of each volume a note of the productions he had seen.

At random, I picked out his Romeo and Juliet: ‘27 Oct ’34 Devonshire Park Theatre, Eastbourne (Touring Company).’ There wouldn’t have been much culture in Eastbourne during the dour years of the early 1930s. That ‘touring company’ bringing Shakespeare to the seaside resort’s Victorian theatre, which had been given a makeover by the prolific theatre and music hall architect Frank Matcham, would have offered a rare treat. I suspected that it would not have been a distinguished version. So what must it have been like for my father to see the play again two years later in the West End? ‘7 Jan ’36 New Theatre, London.’ The legendary production in which, halfway through the run, John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier switched between the roles of Romeo and Mercutio. The young Peggy Ashcroft was Juliet and grande dame Edith Evans perfectly cast as the Nurse. I cursed myself for never having had the curiosity to discover that my father had seen it. Now it was too late to ask him which way round Olivier and Gielgud had played it on the night he was there.

As for the film with Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer, next on his list, I didn’t even know that it existed. All I knew about Leslie Howard was that when my mother was a girl she had a crush on him in ‘Pimpernel’ Smith. That was one of our favourites when she and I used to while away rainy Saturday afternoons watching old black and white movies on the television. Another was, naturally, Brief Encounter, romanticized by steam trains and Rachmaninov, her favourite composer. But that was with Trevor Howard, not Leslie.

I did recall my father once saying that after he moved from Eastbourne to a school in Warwickshire, he and a girlfriend used to bicycle over to the Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. Romeo on 4 June ’38 must have been one such excursion. I had never asked for stories of these expeditions, but in a rare moment of revelation about that distant past my father did once say that the relationship petered out when he went off to war. I imagine the girl as the school matron, with dark curly hair, jolly voice and floral dress, bicycling gamely to keep up with him as they whirled along lanes verged by tall grass and Queen Anne’s lace.

His life was punctuated by war. ‘What’s your earliest memory, Dad?’ my brother Michael had asked. ‘Going out on to the sand dunes at Frinton, when I was six, and hearing the guns of the Somme booming across the sea.’ I still find it a cause for wonder that, because my father only married in his forties, I am the grandchild of four Victorians, all born in the 1880s. My father was forty-eight when I was born; I was forty-eight when Harry, my youngest child, was born. If he and the planet stay well enough, he might live into the twenty-second century, and in that sense I will have touched four centuries. Which makes the four centuries since Shakespeare’s death seem not such a long time after all.

When the second war came, my father had no hesitation in joining up. Loyal to his county, he was commissioned in the 85th (Essex) Medium Battery of the Royal Artillery, under the command of Major J. D. R. T. Tilney. If you were in the Artillery and you weren’t sent to join Monty’s Desert Rats in the North African theatre, you would have spent most of the war hanging around. Training, and waiting for the opening of the Second Front. While sorting through my father’s books in that grieving summer of 1978, I discovered that the Battery had kept a diary in the Officers’ Mess and that my father had been delegated to write it up after the war.

Several officers from his band of brothers had come to his funeral, including Major, now Sir John, Tilney. My brother’s godfather, he was Member of Parliament for Liverpool Wavertree and an intimate of his recently elected party leader, Margaret Thatcher, something for which, in the circumstances, I forgave him. Over tea following the service, during which I had honoured my father’s classical credentials by reading an elegiac ode of Horace in my own translation, his army friends invited me and my mother to their next annual regimental reunion, where they would toast his memory. ‘Your father was the bravest man I served with,’ one of them told me. ‘He was mentioned in dispatches three times and really should have got the Military Cross, but he was too modest and self-effacing to let them write about what he did in that Forward Observation Post.’ In the early days of the Normandy campaign he had climbed on to the roof of a church, binoculars strapped round his neck and headphones over his ears in order to radio the position of the enemy. This meant that he didn’t hear the sound of the snipers firing at him, so a Canadian officer had to pull him down by the ankles. Later, as they advanced towards the Rhine, he took over the controls of a tank while under heavy fire. Finally, just as everyone was preparing for victory and being demobbed, he volunteered to join the still-unfinished war in the Far East. This earned him a medical check to establish that he was in his right mind.

The stories were all news to me. The only thing I could remember my father ever saying about the war was that he would never forget the smell of the bloated carcasses of dead horses and the sight of refugees on bicycles or pushing their possessions in carts as he and his men trundled their howitzers and field guns through France and Belgium. So I opened the Battery Diary with genuine curiosity.

Unexpectedly, it was peppered with literary references. As on 16 August 1943:

A peacetime Saturday afternoon at Stratford with an Avon punt sandwiched between ‘Othello’ and ‘Winter’s Tale’, and this evening there are great sports v the RAF, whom we soundly defeated at football. While Rome was being declared an open city, Dvr. Scrimshaw was leaving the NAAFI manager a heap of rubble on the NAAFI floor.

I think it was Evelyn Waugh who said that the saddest words in the English language were ‘too late’. It was now too late to ask my father what the officers of the Battery made of these two plays. One of them is about a general brought down by an NCO jealous of the granting of a commission to his rival. Both of them are about accusations of marital infidelity – a fear to which many a soldier in the field has been subject.

Back at university some time later, with access to a library, I dug out an old review in order to get the feel of the productions. Othello had opened on Shakespeare’s birthday that April. The Observer’s critic, J. C. Trewin, concluded:

Mr Baliol Holloway’s Moor remains in the middle distance. It is hardly enough to be sonorous and direct: one misses the surge and swell of the Othello music. Mr Abraham Sofaer’s Iago is beautifully spoken, but this demi-devil of the Renaissance, his mind as swift to villainy as his hand to the sword-hilt, could hardly have been mistaken for Othello’s ‘man … of honesty and trust’. It would be happier, perhaps, if the parts were exchanged.

And exchanged they were on subsequent nights: like Olivier and Gielgud in the famous Romeo and Juliet, Holloway and Sofaer shared the roles of Othello and Iago. Turning to the little red New Temple Edition, I discovered that my father had in fact seen the production twice. The Battery was still stationed in Stratford in early September. He must have gone a second time in order to see what it was like with the roles reversed.

Baliol Holloway was something of an old ham, who had played the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon for decades. His best turns were comic: Malvolio in Twelfth Night, Parolles in All’s Well That Ends Well (a very disreputable soldier, the antithesis of Othello), and Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale, a role he took that wartime summer night in a production directed by Dorothy Green, another company regular, who had played Hermione back in the 1920s and Cleopatra before the Great War. Leontes was Sofaer, one of the most interesting actors of the age. Born in Rangoon to Burmese-Jewish parents, he established his reputation playing outsiders, notably Jewish-born Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in a Broadway production of a play called Victoria Regina. We think of Paul Robeson as the twentieth century’s pioneering non-white Othello – he was electrifying and scandalizing New York in the role that very summer – but Abraham Sofaer also deserves to be remembered. His voice and visage were the perfect embodiment of the noble Moor.

By the end of 1943, the Battery had moved from their Cotswold training camp to Hove on the south coast, in preparation for what was coming soon. The officers took it in turns to make entries in the diary. Thus on 8 December:

Should imagine that Capt. Bate is sleeping with one eye sort of half-cocked on ‘Signal Training, All Arms’. But dear Lieutenant Bonnick is thinking rather on the lines ‘Whenas in silks my Julia goes, / that liquefaction in her clothes –’ always of course with one eye on next week-end. To spare his bluster I’ll withhold the rest of the ditty.

The lines are from an exquisite erotic lyric by the seventeenth-century Cavalier poet Robert Herrick, writing in the time of England’s Civil War. The rest of the poem, in which Herrick imagines his girl’s body free from the constraint of any clothes, must have been available in the Mess because it was included in The Oxford Book of English Verse, a copy of which travelled with the Battery.

In June 1944 they moved to Milford-on-Sea near Southampton in readiness for embarkation. One of the officers wrote in the diary: We arrived to take our place in the stalls, just as the curtain went up on the eve of the famous 6th of June. I appreciated the metaphor: the curtain going up as they entered the theatre of war. They played one game of tennis in a peace-time club while our bombers and fighters roared over to Normandy. And they received General Montgomery’s pep talk, distributed in writing to the entire army. It included a poetic quotation:

He either fears his fate too much,

Or his deserts are small,

Who dare not put it to the touch,

To win or lose it all.

Some of the chaps wondered who the author was. They soon got their answer. Those were the days when poetry was in the blood of the officer class. The Battery Commander was able to go straight to page 364 of The Oxford Book of English Verse and identify the (slightly misquoted) quatrain by James Graham, 1st Marquis of Montrose, accomplished poet, tactically brilliant soldier, Covenanter turned Royalist, executed in Edinburgh in 1650 during the Civil War.

They were held back from the first wave and then diverted to the mudflats of the Thames Estuary. My father would have looked northwards and seen the sand dunes of the Essex coast from which he had heard the guns of the Somme nearly thirty years earlier when he was a boy. They rounded the Thanet shoreline, where we would spend our seaside summer holidays twenty years later when I was a boy. They hugged the English coast, witnessing doodlebugs flying overhead towards London, then crossed the roiling Channel and, dodging depth charges, disembarked on Juno Beach, which had initially been taken by the Canadian Allies.

A small envelope had dropped out when I opened the Battery Diary. It contained two letters, written in a shaky hand on wafer-thin paper, from the mother of a lance-bombardier – the artillery equivalent of lance-corporal. His name was Fisher. The first letter was a request for the details of his death. ‘Don’t trouble to spare me one bit as I would like to know just how he met his death and where he was buried.’ She added, ‘He was all that I had left.’

I had been studying for the Shakespeare paper of my English degree all through the summer term in the months before my father’s death. I had focused especially on some of the lesser-known plays such as the Henry VI trilogy, the historical dramas about the Wars of the Roses that he wrote early in his career. Mrs Fisher’s request brought to my mind an exchange between brothers. A messenger comes on with news that the courageous Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, has been slain on the battlefield. His eldest son, Edward, wants to be spared the details: O, speak no more, for I have heard too much. His youngest son, Richard, has the opposite reaction: Say how he died, for I will hear it all. My brother and I were like that when my father died: for him it was more than enough to hear the news, whereas I wanted to know every last detail. Mrs Fisher, all alone, wanted to hear it all.

My father must have written with an account of the circumstances, because the second letter was her response. ‘I cannot really believe it to be true,’ she began, ‘but as he would say “Be Brave”, as I have told you he was all I had, but I must now face the lonely years alone. He was such a lovely boy.’ The letter went on with a request for advice about how to dispose of her boy’s beloved motorcycle and the hope that there would be a little army pension. It was clear that something about the nature of his death had shocked her deeply. Leafing through the diary, I found the explanation. It had happened on their very first day in France, as they unloaded the big guns on Juno Beach:

First casualty: Lbdr. Fisher killed by a gun running over him.

Killed in an accident before the Battery had fired a shot in anger. There was nothing heroic about that. I thought of the words of the common soldier Michael Williams, when he and John Bates argue with the disguised King Henry V in Sir Thomas Erpingham’s camp on the night before Agincourt: I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle. War and again war; the poetry of war. Western poetry began with war: Homer’s Iliad. At school, our study of poetry had begun with war, with

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! …

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Wilfred Owen raging against

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

The sentiment made my father uncomfortable. He didn’t believe it was a lie. He believed in duty. He was a Classics teacher; the odes of Horace were his favourite poems, along with the verse of A. E. Housman. His desert island book would probably have been either A Shropshire Lad or his pocket edition of Horace. Once, in the quiet voice which meant that he often lost authority in the classroom, he schooled me in the context of the phrase quoted by Owen. Horace’s poem was about honour, which meant integrity. The line about it being a sweet and decorous thing to die for your country was followed by a line about cowardice, running away from battle. And the lines after that were about not bowing to the changeable wind of popular opinion. It didn’t matter whether your party won or lost at the polls, the important thing was to stay true to your own principles.

An opinionated teenager, I fought back, armed with Shakespeare. One of our A-Level set texts was Henry IV Part 1. I had been preparing for the exam by learning quotations. Conveniently forgetting that Sir John Falstaff is a coward and a liar who commits an atrocity on the battlefield, and that his friends run away from battle immediately after King Harry says Once more unto the breach, dear friends, I launched into his assault on my father’s cherished value:

Can honour set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is honour? A word. What is that word ‘honour’? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. Is it insensible, then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it.

My father deflected. Henry IV Part 1 was absent from the red row of his New Temple Shakespeares and the flyleaf at the back of Part 2 was a blank, suggesting that he had not seen either of the Falstaff plays. He simply replied that Henry V was a play that had always meant a lot to him.

Now I knew why.

The evening of VE Day, Tuesday, 8 May 1945. Eighty-five (Essex) Medium Battery Royal Artillery are on one side of the Rhine, the Russians on the other. The regiment has fought for nearly a year. Their heavy guns have helped to liberate Boulogne and Calais, to clear the south bank of the River Scheldt and capture Walcheren Island, to cross the Roer, to advance through the Reichswald Forest and reach the Rhine. They have travelled 1,285 miles and spent 211 days in action, participating in Operations Totalize, Tallulah, Wellhit, Undergo, Switchback, Infatuate, Mallard, Blackcock, Veritable, Plunder, Torchlight and Varsity. Between them, their vehicles have run up mileage in excess of three hundred thousand, using over forty thousand gallons of fuel at a cost of two shillings per gallon. They have fired over fifty thousand rounds, the shells weighing more than two thousand tons.

Captain Bate, Officer Commanding B Troop, has done the deed of bravery at the Forward Observation Post that should have won him a Military Cross. He has also had to write letters to the families of young gunners killed in action, though none could have been as hard as that first one, to the mother of Lance-Bombardier Fisher. The Battery have seen things that no one should be forced to see. In the battle to clear the River Scheldt of the enemy so that the Allies could bring in supplies from the port of Antwerp, they have suffered heavy losses as the result of a huge explosion caused by an accident involving the Royal Engineers, a modified Bren gun and a tank of nitroglycerine. In the words of the Battery Diary, a pleasant farmhouse with its apple covered orchard had within two minutes been transformed into a blasted heath, all the trees stripped of their leaves and every apple on the ground. Shakespearean resonances again. A scene of peace echoing Justice Shallow’s mellow Gloucestershire orchard in the deep England of Henry IV Part 2 had become the battle-scarred landscape where Macbeth encounters first the Weird Sisters and then the bloodstained sergeant: upon this blasted heath.

Since then, they have watched with approval as photographs of Buchenwald are pinned on noticeboards in churchyards for the edification of the German people. And today they have tuned their radio to the BBC frequency and heard the King’s speech proclaiming Victory in Europe. Now there are bonfires, effigies, song, rum and beer to see out the day in the Sergeants’ Mess, officers and men together, divisions of class and rank forgotten. And then Major Tilney, who for some reason bears the nickname Mary, recites a poem in iambic pentameter with laconic feminine endings, in which he commemorates their battles and their route march:

Ten months ago we left that English haven,

Leaving, for Wanstead, Milford-by-the-Sea.

Little we knew then what the future covered;

Would it have helped had we known what it would be?

Friends to be lost and laurels to be garnered

On it goes, until a climax is reached with a nod to Churchill’s broad sunlit uplands of victory and a voicing of the hope that everyone who is sharing that night will remember how they had fought to build a future worth the having, Giving to those unborn a fuller life. Major Tilney then launches into full Crispin Day mode, straight out of Henry V:

Then looking back we’ll justly bore our children,

Telling again the names of bygone strife.

How very English to use the self-deprecating oxymoron justly bore in the context of war stories. In a clever variation on the original, the poem lists the names not of the soldiers in the company, but of the towns they had liberated:

Norrey and Mondeville, Roquancourt, Cramesnil …

Boulogne’s La Vignette, bomb bespattered Blacourt …

Gennep and Boeckelt and the Siegfried Line …

Xanten and Wardt, then on across the Rhine …

Of course this jeu d’esprit, dashed off on the day of victory after five and a half years of war’s attrition, was not Shakespeare. But it was wholly inspired by Shakespeare:

Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,

But he’ll remember with advantages

What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,

Familiar in his mouth as household words –

Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,

Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester –

Be in their flowing cups freshly rememberèd.

This story shall the good man teach his son,

And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be rememberèd;

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.

For he today that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother.

Shakespeare gave those men on VE night, as he has given soldiers for generations, the words in which they could express their fraternal bond in arms and remember their fellows who had given their lives for friend and country. That incomparable, oft-quoted phrase: we band of brothers.

Looking up the original speech in Henry V, and remembering my mother telling me how she had gone to see Olivier’s film when it was released just a few months after D-Day, I was struck by the line This story shall the good man teach his son. My father was a good man, who believed in duty and that code of honour which King Harry articulates so memorably, but he was also a quiet, modest man. I had learned from his comrades-in-arms that in editing the Battery Diary for print, he had again and again omitted accounts of his own deeds of daring. Like so many of his generation, he did not think it right to boast and he probably found it painful to remember, except during those annual regimental reunions. So he did not heed Shakespeare’s advice to teach his son the story of his service in time of war. And now it was too late. Which made the Battery Diary and the red pocket New Temple Shakespeare, with its handwritten record of playgoing, all the more precious.

I had my own take on Henry V by then. And my own view of Olivier’s film.

My lucky generation still finds it hard to grasp the experience of war. As we grew up in the 1960s, we watched movies featuring cartoon villainous Nazis and plucky stiff-upper-lipped Brits escaping from a prisoner of war camp by burrowing a tunnel beneath a vaulting horse in the exercise yard. Or eccentric boffins designing bouncing bombs to burst a dam. But that was entertainment, not the real thing. Vietnam was too far away for little Englanders to understand, and even though the civil war on the streets of Belfast and Derry sometimes reached the mainland in the form of horrific bombings, that was called terrorism and was regarded as something distinct from a proper war in which the very future of the nation, even the world, was at stake.

The nearest I came to an understanding of the experience my parents had been through in the summer of 1939 was in August 1968. Every morning my mother would come into the bedroom I shared with my brother and open the curtains. That day, my father came too. Something’s up, I thought. They told me the morning’s news: Russian tanks had rolled into Prague. The spring thaw was over. They did not say it, but I knew what they were thinking: this might mean another war. I saw the fear in their eyes: my father was hitting the Normandy beach a second time, my mother back in a Kentish field, a teenage girl picking hops as Hurricane and Heinkel wove their dance of death above.

It didn’t happen, of course, and as I went through my teens and grew my hair I rebelled against my parents’ values, as every teenager should. For duty, I read deference; for patriotism, militarism. Shakespeare helped me in this. As we studied Henry IV Part 1, we laughed at the old chivalric code of Harry Hotspur. He may have been brave, but he was vain and hot-headed. He charges into a council of war, only to say, A plague upon it, I have forgot the map! I felt I was living life to the full when drinking in the pub with my mates: just like Prince Hal in Eastcheap, in flight from his father’s stuffy court. We even had our own Sir John Falstaff: Bob Taylor the drama teacher, who would buy us pints and tell tall tales.

I couldn’t forgive Hal for disowning Falstaff when he becomes king at the end of Henry IV Part 2. So when I read Henry V, my favourite scene was not the rousing rhetoric of St Crispin’s Day and the band of brothers, but Mistress Quickly telling of old Falstaff’s death, broken-hearted at his rejection. Besides, King Harry’s claim to France was shown to be very dubious, justified only in that ridiculously convoluted speech by the Archbishop. This was no just war. And my problem with Olivier’s film was that it glossed over the mess of war, the moral ambiguity. It cut out the traitors, Cambridge, Scroop and Grey – allegedly at the behest of Winston Churchill, who thought that it would be bad for morale to include any fifth columnists in a wartime film. Olivier also omitted the King’s threat to allow his soldiers to rape the daughters and kill the babies of the people of Harfleur. And the admission in the Epilogue that winning the war was fruitless since England soon dissolved into bloody civil war. I wanted to see a much darker Henry V, a film that showed the real price of war.

A decade after my father died, I was living in Los Angeles and was invited to an advance screening of a forthcoming version. There hadn’t been a successful Shakespeare on the Hollywood screen for many years, so there was a real buzz about this new Henry V – especially as it was by the rising star Kenneth Branagh. I had admired his acting when he played the part in Stratford. My hope was that the film would prick the bubble of honour. To my surprise, when the music swelled and Branagh mounted a cart to deliver the band of brothers speech a tear came to my eye and for the first time in my life I felt … patriotic. Maybe it was simply because I was in west LA, six thousand miles from home, but Shakespeare had pulled off his special trick of upending your expectations, making you see the opposite point of view from the one you started with. Now I understood the sense of duty, of sacrifice, of purpose, above all of brotherhood, that had made the war years in their way the most fulfilling time of my father’s life.

This time, there was no glossing over the treachery of Cambridge, Scroop and Grey. And this time, the dubious justification for the war, played for comedy in the Olivier, was all intrigue in flickering light. But there was one notable omission shared with Olivier: Branagh’s film cut the scene in which King Harry orders the killing of the prisoners of war, an action – to use the phrasing of Captain Fluellen, the moral conscience of the army – expressly against the law of arms. Fluellen is referring to the French killing the boys and the baggage-carriers, and King Harry’s action is sometimes justified as revenge for this, but the text makes it clear that he orders the killing of the French prisoners before the attack on the non-combatants.

After the screening, Branagh talked about his desire to create something very different from the old Olivier film. He had been inspired by the historian John Keegan’s The Face of Battle, which told the story of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme from the point of view not of the generals and strategists, as in traditional military history, but from that of the common soldiers, who know nothing of what is going on beyond the fear and the noise, the mud and the blood, of their immediate surroundings. And at the end of the battle, he had wanted to show the full price of war, which it seemed to me he had done consummately well by way of the long tracking shot in which the King bears the body of Falstaff’s pageboy (a young Christian Bale) through the leavings of the carnage.

When questions were invited, I challenged Branagh about the omission of the killing of the captured French. He said that it would have slowed the pace at the climax of the battle scene and that it wasn’t necessary to include it because he had added a scene earlier in which the King does not merely order the hanging of his old friend Bardolph for robbing a church, but witnesses the noose being put round his neck. This, Branagh alleged, was sufficient to show that the King had a ruthless streak. But in the film this is the cue for a flashback to the tavern scenes when he was Prince Hal, one of the boys out on the lash, back in Henry IV Part 1. Recalling their larks in his mind’s eye, King Harry wells up with personal remorse for the loss of Falstaff and Co. That is hardly to be compared with the chilling order to kill the prisoners. Besides, another cut was the scene in which Pistol, the braggart from the days of the King’s wild youth, also acts expressly against the law of arms by threatening to cut the throat of his French prisoner unless he is given a stack of money. The mess of war.

I was not angry since I came to France, says King Harry when the boys and baggage-carriers are killed. Shakespeare knew that anger on the battlefield can unleash the bloodiest of revenge. In the early 1970s, we knew that too. We knew about revenge killings in Northern Ireland. And we knew about the My Lai massacre. But Shakespeare also knew of humankind’s extraordinary capacity for resilience and restraint. After hearing of the miraculous disproportion in the numbers of the dead on the field of Agincourt, King Harry says:

And be it death proclaimèd through our host

To boast of this.

That was the thing about my father’s generation: they neither boasted nor complained. Even if I had asked him, my father would have played down his brave deed in the Forward Observation Post. And then there was our next-door neighbour, Tom Mason, who came to find me on the morning my father died: one would never have known from his words and his demeanour that during the months when 85th Battery were grinding their way through France and Germany, he was in a camp in the Far East, enduring unimaginable brutality and deprivation as, in the euphemism of a colleague, ‘a guest of his Imperial Majesty the Emperor of Japan’.

One sentence in the Battery Diary especially disquieted me:

It is an odd war, the night the BC saw a grave of eight people (four children) at Cormelles – pushed into a cellar by the Germans, hand grenaded and finished off with a tommy gun – RHQ Officers’ Mess with visiting BCs had brandy and cigars.[1]

Only an Englishman, I think, could have used the understatement ‘odd’ in that context. Shakespeare was there first. Once Cleopatra has lost her battle and her beloved Antony, all she wants is death. A simple countryman brings her a snake and she asks for confirmation that its bite will be mortal. To which the countryman says: The worm’s an odd worm.

‘Write about what you know’: that’s what they teach you in creative-writing classes. Undeniably, much of the best war literature is written by men and women who knew the experience of war. My friend Chris, who seemed to have read everything, persuaded me that The Spanish Farm Trilogy of R. H. Mottram was a gem of Great War literature because it was such an accurate record of the author’s experiences on the Western Front. The same could be said of Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth. My father had huge admiration for Alamein to Zem Zem, the memoir of tank-driving war poet Keith Douglas, who kept a copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets in his battledress pocket throughout the desert campaign. He was killed by a German mortar at the age of twenty-four, three days after D-Day. And nothing brings you closer to the American experience of Vietnam than The Things They Carried by Sergeant Tim O’Brien of 3rd Platoon, A Company, 5th Battalion, 46th Infantry Regiment of the 23rd Division: They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.

Shakespeare shared their awe – a combination of woe and wonder, he called it – in the face of extremity, of battle, of death. But he was never a soldier. He didn’t fight in the Low Countries like his friend and rival Ben Jonson, just as he didn’t murder a king like Macbeth or go mad like Lady Macbeth. He wrote about what he didn’t know: Cleopatra and the asp, a prince slumming it in a tavern, the Battle of Agincourt. He gives us the best education because he takes us not only through the cycles of birth and copulation and death that we all know, but also on journeys to places such as battlefields and broken minds where we hope we will never have to go. So that if we do have to confront the worst, we can learn his lesson that people come out on the other side of it.

I happened to host the poet Joseph Brodsky at a time of personal anguish. He recognized that something was not right. He did not pry, but simply said, ‘Whatever it is, if it is not organic, you will survive.’ This was the testimony of an expert witness, a man who had endured a show trial, forcible confinement in a mental hospital and exile to the Gulag. His empathy for my petty sorrows was a mark of his great soul. But Shakespeare’s art seems to me greater, because his own life was for the most part comfortable and rather boring. It was only in imagination that he entered into the spirit of those who have lost everything and still endure. Edgar in King Lear, for example, driven from home, stripped naked, on the run, reduced to feigned madness, then confronting his tortured and blinded father, but still able to say:

The worst is not,

So long as we can say ‘This is the worst’.

My father’s Shakespeare

© Ernest Bate