SATURDAY, THE SEVENTH of July, 1945, was a signal day in southern England. For a luxurious fourteen hours the sun bathed village greens and city row houses, visibly parting the lingering miasma of war and revealing the wonderfully immutable aspects of English life. At Eastbourne, Lord’s, and Westcliff, joyous crowds watched cricket matches on freshly mown pitches. On the River Thames, the Henley Royal Regatta had resumed, and spectators thronged the riverbanks for the All Comers’ Eights. And at Ascot, King George VI, Princess Elizabeth, and the fashionable cheered the Gold Cup sprint of Ocean Swell, offspring of sire Blue Peter.
In 1945, the barley wine had truly made the cuckoo stutter, and Britannia still ruled. Now the swallows of July were joined by the irrepressible din of humanity on the mend. Like the survivors of a shipwreck, those who had outlived Hitler showed an amazing capacity for looking at the bright side of life and moving on. Almost reflexively, England set about the task of righting itself. Committees met to plan the rebuilding of churches and neighborhoods. Military couples reunited or, all too often, faced up to sad truths and parted company. The past and future were now. Forgive or not, but move on, chin up.
Now that the war in Europe had ended and the Union Jack flapped triumphantly over Berlin, things were happening quickly for foreign office intelligence agent and erstwhile fiction writer Richard Patrick Russ. At last, there was a modicum of breathing room from war duties and war worries, and Russ, a slim, dark-haired, wan-complected resident of Chelsea, London’s tony, if somewhat bruised, neighborhood of artists and writers, was busy implementing certain changes in his life, preparing for his own new start after the war.
The first change was his marriage, his second, on the fourth of July, to Mary, the pretty English-born Russian countess Russ had known intimately, despite many complications, since the beginning of the war. Now, on the twentieth of July, a little more than two months after VE-Day, he was about to inscribe his signature—the last time he would use that particular one—on an important deed, a bold move but one, given the unpleasant circumstances, that he was determined to make. To take care of this bit of business, Russ traveled to Leadenhall Street in the City.
So much had changed since war had descended on Europe and on the self-absorbed twenty-five-year-old writer of nature and adventure stories he had been. The flood of war had in many ways scoured his slate clean. In the fight against Hitler, Russ had, to a degree, become his own antithesis. As a writer, he had been a revealer of truths—a promising voice, the critics had proclaimed. But the foreign office had needed his skills for other purposes. He had become a broker of secrets. The war had made him proficient at deception.
All of this was in the back—if not the fore—of Russ’s mind as he entered London’s devastated financial district. At one stretch, during the Blitz of 1940–41, London had been bombed on fifty-seven consecutive nights and some days as well. Waves of German bombers had dropped high-explosive bombs, capable of boring through fifty feet of earth, and incendiary bombs, whose fires raged throughout the city. Each night, Londoners had huddled for cover in underground stations, in brick-and-concrete neighborhood shelters, or in family lean-tos of corrugated steel and earth. Each night, hundreds had been crushed to death and thousands more wounded. An ambulance driver during the Blitz, Russ had seen his share of destruction firsthand.
Just west of Leadenhall Street, St. Paul’s Cathedral, a lonely survivor, stood watch over the wreckage. South of the cathedral, between Cheapside and Queen Victoria Street, much was obliterated, although miraculously the ruined church of St. Nicholas Cole Abbey had not been felled. To the east of Cheapside, where Leadenhall Street lay, the devastation was more complete still. On September 29, 1940, during the Blitz, the heart of the London book publishing industry, on Paternoster Row, near the cathedral, had been destroyed by bombs. The offices of Simpkin Marshall, the wholesaler and distributor for many publishing houses, perished. Six million books turned into pulp or ash in a single night.
How different, how frightening the ruin seemed now that the war in Europe was over. Without the immediate threat and passion of the war with Germany, the evil that caused it was almost incomprehensible. The sight of the destruction sobered him. Nothing, no amount of repair or rebuilding, could mitigate this disaster. Only time could remove its memory.
On Leadenhall Street, the magnificent centuries-old St. Katherine Cree Church had suffered only minor damage from the bombing, unlike the almost equally ancient Chelsea Old Church in Russ’s own neighborhood, where a German bomb had destroyed the sacred stone building in 1941, killing five fire watchers. But no matter how unaffected Cree Church appeared to be, Russ knew this was an illusion. No one and no place living through World War II was unaffected, and those directly in the warpath were in many ways changed forever.
Russ, his pulse elevated a notch, to be sure, opened the cut-glass doors of the three-story brick building at 77 Leadenhall Street and entered the offices of Baddeleys and Co. Solicitors. Through the window he could see the bomb craters, where pasts had been erased and where new buildings would soon rise. Anxiously, he awaited his turn to appear before the solicitors’ managing clerk, and then he conducted his business: he was there to sign and file the form that would give him, his new wife, and his son by his first marriage a different surname.
Russ was canny enough to sense that this turning point in world history cleared the path for a break in his own history. It was nothing short of a chance to start over, to put his personal failures behind him. He knew the power of a name. Whether “unsoil’d” or “black,” as Shakespeare had once qualified, a name had a defining nature.
If the war had encoded a new message on his slate, Russ would now choose which parts to reveal to others. Ironically, for a writer of fiction, and one who would prove to be among the best at his craft, the ultimate act of creating fiction came down to filling out a legal document:
By this deed which is intended to be enrolled in the Enrolment Department of the Central Office of the Royal Courts of Justice, I the undersigned Patrick O’Brian of 1 Upper Cheyne Road, Chelsea, London S.W.3 in the county of London, Foreign Office Official, described in my certificate of birth as Richard Patrick Russ, a natural born British Subject DO HEREBY for myself and my wife Mary and remoter issue absolutely renounce and abandon the use of my said surname of Russ and in lieu thereof assume as from the date hereof the surname of O’Brian.
AND in pursuance of such change of Surname as aforesaid I hereby declare that I shall at all times hereafter in all records, deeds and instruments in writing and in all actions and proceedings and in all dealings and transactions and upon all occasions whatsoever use and sign the name O’Brian as my surname in lieu of the said surname of Russ so renounced as aforesaid.
AND I HEREBY authorise and require all persons to designate and address me and my wife and remoter issue by such assumed surname of O’Brian only.
IN WITNESS whereof I have hereunto signed my first names of Richard Patrick and my assumed name of O’Brian this twentieth day of July one thousand nine hundred and forty-five.
SIGNED, Sealed, and Delivered by the above named Richard Patrick O’Brian in the presence of: E. Rowe, Solicitors Managing Clerk, 77 Leadenhall Street, London E.C.3.
[signatures] Richard Patrick Russ Richard Patrick O’Brian (Legal Seal)
Although the paperwork would take another month, for all practical purposes the deed was done. What the name change signified was this: Farewell, Richard Patrick Russ. You bore your pain. You made your mistakes. You served your country. Now, thank God, the madness is over.
With a stroke of the pen, he had dumped some of the baggage that weighed him down. He could now go where he wanted, do what he wanted, and make a fresh start in life with his new wife.
However, to one so sensitive to the power of words, the act of changing his name could not have been taken lightly. Symbolically, he was annihilating his past, and there was a taste of death in it. He was burying the child-writer prodigy he had been along with his problems. Or was he?