Iris’s wartime letters, though kind, abound in anti-sentimental pragmatism. While consoling Michael Foot on his hurt on the occasion of Leonie Marsh’s marriage, she remarks to Frank, ‘This sort of damn silly fidelity is rare enough in this bloody matter-of-fact chacun-pour-soi existence.’ This grim note of ‘à la guerre, comme à la guerre’ recurs. In November 1942 she wrote that she missed Frank’s ‘burly self, and ‘like all sensible people, I am searching out substitutes’. Two months later, after recounting to Frank her loss of virginity, she comments:
Ersatz? Well, yes, a bit – but then all life is rather ersatz now, since the genuine articles have been separated from us – & he is a fool who does not go ahead on the basis of what he has.
This is bitter-sweet consolation, especially for one whose standards for marriage were, in Frank’s own words, ‘1860 Baptist Chapel’. He wanted both an idealistic wife who would believe ‘crazily’ that ‘the whole of life can be cast anew’,1 and children. Meanwhile Iris’s lovers, she implies, are inferior imitations or substitutes for Frank himself, tokens of how much he is missed. Finally, in March 1943 she writes:
It isn’t as if we all had endless lives & could say ‘OK we’ll put all that off till a better time’. Christ, this is the only time we’ve got, poor wretches, & we must make the best of it – our only lives and short enough of youth to enjoy them to the full.
Such briskness could sound cruel. When Iris reported to a friend that she had decided she was stronger than ‘David’ from the OULC, with whom she had spent a night, it is hard not to wonder how the chap in question felt about the verdict, albeit presumably unspoken. In one of her best novels, A Fairly Honourable Defeat, the devilish Julius taunts his listener, and the reader, by proclaiming that ‘Human beings are essentially finders of substitutes. They never really see each other at all.’ For the wise the first proposition might be true, but not the second.
Iris at this time was not wise, despite Frank’s idealisation of her, and nor did the exigencies of war, with its endless sense of a nightmare present full of longing and dread, cut off from its future, necessarily encourage wisdom. ‘How the war changed my life I only now begin to see and feel,’ she noted in 1977;2 and later: ‘There is a kind of intensity, even rage, about that time when I had no notion what the future held.’3 Though she never wrote directly about the war in her novels, her experiences during it inform all her fiction. She put photos of the narrow alley outside Seaforth into her album. The flat and the famous hothouse emotional atmosphere of the war alike incubated within her imagination.4
In the autumn of 1943 Philippa Bosanquet moved from Oxford to London. She worked as an economics research assistant at Chatham House in St James’s Square on the prospects for post-war European economic reconstruction with American capital, together with representatives of governments-in-exile.5 At first she lived sometimes in her close friend Anne Cobbe’s rather grand flat in Weymouth Street, Marylebone, where she and Anne had a couple to look after them, but found this constricting (if meals are being prepared, you have to say when you will be in for them). So she gravitated more and more to the simplicity and freedom of Seaforth Place. But she was also looking for a place of her own, and found a rather flea-ridden but attractive flat in Fitzroy Street, into which she put a bit of furniture. It was only when Iris said she supposed they would in future spend half the week together in Seaforth and the other half in Fitzroy Street that they started to laugh and realised it would be much easier for them both to stay where they were. So Philippa never moved in to the Fitzroy Street place, and by mid-October was living full-time with Iris, where she stayed until spring 1945. Chatham House was within walking distance. In 1944 the time of V1 and V2 rockets began: going to work in the mornings they would find various buildings had disappeared in the night;6 they stepped through the resultant debris.7
On Philippa’s first night Iris explained that she had insufficient blankets, and showed Philippa how to pull down the blackout material from the skylight to cover her bed. They were often cold. The ancient gas-cooker supplemented the single feeble gas-fire on bitter winter nights, when the girls went to bed fully dressed, even wearing their overcoats, taking hot-water bottles with them – by the end of the war, when rubber gave out, unyielding stone bottles. (Philippa, noting later how often hot-water bottles appeared in Iris’s fiction, was unsurprised.) The Lyons tea-shop across Victoria Street gave them breakfast warmth, tea or coffee and sticky buns. Sometimes, though not often, older, richer friends like Thomas Balogh or Nickie Kaldor – those ‘cloistered aliens, with un-British [i.e. left-wing] views’, as Churchill remarked in the House of Commons, originally Philippa’s friends, later very much Iris’s also – would take them out to l’Etoile in Charlotte Street or the Gay Hussar. The men paid for the meal, as was then customary. The five-shilling limit on restaurant meals did something for social justice during that time of strict rationing. While clothes rationing did not worry them over-much, the fact that they had only three pairs of shoes between the two of them was troublesome, given the amount of walking that had to be done. The extremely broken-down and frayed state of Iris’s shoes much impressed Philippa’s sister Marion when they first met in a Chinese restaurant (one favoured dish: a plate, only, of plain boiled rice), more even than Iris’s fairly elderly raincoat, which was to become a trademark, and her lack of make-up.
When Iris’s single pair had eventually to be mended, Philippa lent her a pair of hers, and complained bitterly that she got them back as ‘flat bottom boats’, which was how they were from then on referred to. Iris later recalled the good times at Seaforth, and how much we laughed together – ‘the scene changes to Illyria’ (as we leave the supper table uncleared): I had forgotten that. The cheese and cabbage. How? pulled down the blackout. The bomb that arrived just before the alarm clock went off (not quite so gay).? ironing my blouse with desperate slowness as I chafe to go out to a party … 8
They were still young and ‘ready for silliness’, laughing a good deal, and with a closeness based on shared jokes and gossip about boyfriends. Once they decided to tell each other of the men who had asked to marry them. Philippa’s ‘list’ was soon done. As Iris’s went on and on Philippa asked crossly whether it might not save time if Iris listed the men who had not yet asked her to marry them.9 Philippa had in 1942 become one of the unsatisfactory Thomas Balogh’s girls. He had, he told a wartime colleague, a ‘penchant for blue-stockings’. Charming and interesting to talk to when he wished but also sometimes violently irascible, rude and arrogant, selfish and unscrupulous, Balogh worked partly at Balliol, partly at the Institute of Statistics, which he had helped to found, in the New Bodleian, and partly on ‘hush-hush’ work in London,10 whose importance he possibly exaggerated, staying each Wednesday in Nickie Kaldor’s flat in Chelsea Cloisters. Philippa and Iris took care of each other – Philippa’s health was for years precarious – not just in the light of Donald MacKinnon’s ethic, but because of the natural protective anxiety of each and their easy affection for each other. MacKinnon stayed in touch with his protégées, worrying about Iris’s wildness and bohemianism, perhaps unnecessarily.
On one occasion Iris helped an impoverished, distressed civil service friend to have an unwanted pregnancy safely terminated, a common enough wartime scenario. The girl concerned expressed lifelong gratitude towards Iris, who had ‘taken upon herself the whole misery of the situation’. The event was celebrated by a party in Redcliffe Road, with the sailor who had impregnated her present. Iris was anything but light-hearted about this; indeed the sailor hoped she might be absent from the party, in case her presence turned it into a ‘wake’ (Iris did appear, bottle in hand and lugubrious). In a similar spirit she helped disseminate information, then hard to get, about contraception: both acts symptomatic of her regard for the freedom of women.
If politics generally played any part in their existence, it was probably no more than joining in the Trafalgar Square demonstrations for a ‘Second Front NOW!’ Iris struck Philippa by coming in from work and getting instantly into a book. Serious and orderly, she tidied things away if Philippa left them out.11 Having been brought up mainly by governesses, Philippa still felt very ignorant and under-educated. Iris introduced her to the joys of Beckett’s Murphy,* which they located with difficulty through a borough library, of Queneau’s Pierrot mon ami,12 of Dickens and of Proust, whole passages of whose Le Côté de Guermantes Book II Iris transcribed in a wartime journal, together with passages from Murphy. They had few, if any, quarrels. Having no fridge or larder, Iris kept food in her cupboard, where Philippa once commented on the strange odours it produced. And Iris was dilatory about ‘Taking Measures’ against the many mice which had eaten more than one of Frank’s letters, and which left her ‘sentimental with a fringe of annoyance’. Though she did at one stage start chemical warfare13 she would, she wrote to Frank, encounter them on the stairs, and liked their ‘nice long tails’. Philippa would jest, on their going to sleep, about whether Iris had remembered to leave out enough of their scant rations for them. Even Iris did not, on the other hand, collaborate with the rats, the sound of whose scrabblings was magnified behind the bathroom walls.
Iris loved ballet,14 and Leonid Massine of all male dancers —'one appreciates ballet with one’s whole body';15 both liked films – especially René Clair’s Sous les toits de Paris. They visited Philippa’s grand home in Kirkleatham, North Yorkshire, where Iris’s informality irritated Philippa’s American mother. Kitchen staff were now absent because of the war, and Iris, strong-willed and without a by-your-leave, went to make sandwiches; on another occasion she pushed her plate away and put her head on the table. They also went to occasional parties in London, often on foot, and gave two, the first in autumn 1943, the second in May 1944.16 Both the Hungarian expatriate economists Balogh and Nickie Kaldor (known to some as ‘Buda’ and ‘Pest'), Dorothy Thom and Vera Hoar from Somerville, Mervyn James and Vernon Saunders17 from Oriel, Jane Degras and her ex-burglar and author boyfriend Mark Benny, Stevie Smith and Tambimuttu came. Guests brought a bottle. James Meary Tambimuttu – ‘a darling & has beautiful hair’, wrote Iris18 – editor of the leading poetry magazine of the 1940s, the bi-monthly Poetry London, and protégé of T.S. Eliot, had arrived in 1938 from Ceylon almost penniless.19 The predicament of such uprooted people always awoke in Iris interest and compassion.
One escape from the cold of the flat was into the bohemian pub-life of ‘Fitzrovia’ – less an area of North Soho than a state of mind.20 Iris danced with Dylan Thomas at the Gargoyle. She visited the Pillars of Hercules pub in Greek Street, met Dan Davin the Irish-New Zealand novelist and, in the Wheatsheaf, wild Mulk Raj Anand.21 Arthur Koestler, whom she loathed, propositioned her insultingly at a party, and was rejected. She lent Ruth Kingsbury’s Corona 4 typewriter to the Canadian prolet-kult prairie-poet and close friend of Orwell Paul Potts, who declined to return it, his need, as he put it, ‘being greater than yours’.*22 Keidrych Rhys – editor of Poetry Wales – gave her books and offered to marry her. She drank with Tambi, and tried to get a poem published in Poetry London, without success.23
Iris, who had been writing stories and poems since she was a small child, was now starting to conceive of herself as an apprentice writer, as well as a ‘bemused intellectual misfit’.24 She did not dissent when Philippa said she had an entry in an imaginary diary reading ‘Mem.: to make my mark.’ Philippa was never in doubt that Iris would one day do something extraordinary. Iris wrote several fictions before publishing Under the Net in 1954 – sometimes she gave the figure as four, on one occasion six. A number were destroyed by her around 1986.25 In the late autumn of 1944 she submitted her second novel, completed that July, to Tambimuttu’s mentor T.S. Eliot at Faber & Faber, receiving a letter of rejection from the great man himself. He was right to reject it, she later thought, though the lack of any encouragement from him meant that she did not venture to apply to Faber again. For his part, Eliot had done her a favour. These early novels were ‘too personal’. By the time she published successfully, she had learnt to burn the confessional and subjective out of her writing. Iris had entrusted part of one novel to a Somerville friend, Margaret Stanier, living in the country during the worst of the bombing, and told her she might if she wished read what Iris had written. Stanier, to whom about six manuscript notebooks were entrusted, recalls now only a heroine called Mary, who partly lived in Paris, and a group of young English characters. Iris later reported the novel ‘lost in a taxi’. Friends were surprised that she had done nothing to retrieve it.26 It is probable that this loss was a convenient fiction (as well as a homage to T.E. Lawrence, who had similarly lost a draft of Seven Pillars of Wisdom) to cover the pain and embarrassment of Eliot’s rejection, which elsewhere she ascribed to wartime paper shortage. ‘I so hate the sight of it, I haven’t the heart to try any other publisher,’ she wrote in February 1945.27
Iris’s 1943 letters to Frank abound in references to her desire to write. In January:
I have no time to live my own life – at a time when my own life feels of intense value & interest to me. Jesus God how I want to write. I want to write a long, long & exceedingly obscure novel objectifying the queer conflicts I find within myself & observe in the characters of others. Like Proust I want to escape from the eternal push and rattle of time into the coolness & poise of a work of art.
In July: ‘My chief thought will probably be “Whether or not I am a writer” – a thought which has obsessed me all the year, & grows in proportion daily, like an angel I am wrestling with.’ And in August: ‘Writing is the only activity which makes me feel, “Only I could produce this.'” Philippa, who read one of Iris’s wartime novels, recalls a character called Stuart who sprang up some steps out of the underground ‘erect with longing’, a double entendre Iris presumably did not intend, and if so a symptom of the mysterious innocence accompanying her love-life. John Bayley recalled a paragraph about the ‘little red bee’ of desire which the heroine, detached if not disassociated, is surprised and possibly irritated to register within her brain, while a boor puts a hairy leg over hers in bed, murmuring in her ear: ‘You know you want it.’
Fragments of three ‘lost’ novels survive. The earliest, on a few loose leaves, features characters called (indeed) Stuart and also Peter, Damien, Benedicta, Hilary and Morgen. The second, volume IV of which was started in January 1945, is some pages of an otherwise lost manuscript with the characters John, Valery, Pete, an Oxford classicist called only ‘The Professor’,28 and Christie, ‘a mystic’ (Iris’s emphasis) who loves Mark. Set in Oxford and London, it has a pleasing reference – considering the direction Iris’s Platonism would take her twenty years later – to the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus, ‘high above the gyrating traffic’, ‘poised and still, most gross & simple, a most refined & strange little god’. The Professor struggles with being incarnate, being attracted to girls, and appears a cross between Fraenkel and MacKinnon.
Mark, who wishes to write a book on Pindar, Frank’s favourite Greek poet, is a heroic portrait of Frank. He is acutely focused as having the rare combination of ‘great intelligence with great warmth’. Mozart’s ‘Voi che Sapete’, which Iris had heard in Frank’s rooms in New College in spring 1939, makes an appearance. Mark ‘wants to act, he wants to commit himself, and feels consumed by a flame of love enabling him to rise above ‘the mud of ambiguity’ and indecision in which the others are embroiled. He is to be offered an Oxford Fellowship but may reject it. A lengthy analysis of the last free Spanish elections, in February 1936, must be there to deck out Mark/Frank’s political passion. Frank was profoundly affected by the death of his friend Anthony Carritt with the International Brigade in 1937, and saw the Second World War as a continuation of that struggle by other means. Mark identifies more with Lenin than with Christ, since Lenin is ‘less concerned with the value of his individual righteousness’, and is thus the more completely self-effacing of the two.
A.N. Wilson once wittily remarked that Iris joined the Communist Party for ‘religious’ reasons.29 She left it for religious reasons too. The choice between Lenin and Christ might be said to underpin her only wartime publications, three reviews in the Adelphi in 1943 and 1944. The magazine’s founder John Middleton Murry, who in 1931 had published The Necessity of Communism, now veered towards the semi-mystical, seeing life as a spiritual search. The Adelphi explored spirituality without orthodoxy. Possibly MacKinnon suggested that Iris write for it.30 In her first review, in January-March 1943, of ‘Nicodemus’s’ Midnight Hour, she three times disclaims being, herself, a Christian. This is indeed to ‘protest too much’. In 1941 she had, in a New States man letter written on behalf of the OULC, attacked the philosopher C.E.M. Joad’s ‘liberal ethics of the nineteenth century’ and his facile invocation to ‘truth, beauty, goodness and love’ alike. At that time she held Plato in contempt. Her 1943 review marks a turn towards a later position, which would purge and reconstruct those ethics, and invoked Plato to do so. She now attempts to imagine and understand the wartime Christian ‘spiritual pilgrimage’ in the book under review. ‘Nicodemus’ (a name taken from St John, 3: 1–4) was the nom-de plume of one Melville Salter Chaning-Pearce, and the book, an intimate spiritual journal, charted his dark night of the soul as a failed ordinand.
How, asks Iris, do his spiritual struggle and quest connect with ‘Malta and Stalingrad and Coventry'?
One may sympathise with this horror that turns its face utterly from this world as from a place of unrelieved filth and corruption – but the problem of the ‘return to the Cave’ remains a very real one for Christianity.
She identifies herself, too, with the figure of the ‘artist’, as the following passage, with its echo of Auden’s December 1938 poem ‘The Novelist’, who ‘suffers dully all the wrongs of man’, makes clear:
[Nicodemus] compares the apartness of the artist with that of the saint. But the artist is not ‘apart’ in this sense. He sees the earth freshly and strangely; but he is inside the things he sees and speaks of, as well as outside them. He is of their substance, he suffers with them. Of saints I know nothing.
In the succeeding reviews she notes, again, the necessity that Christianity grapple with the real world before it can win the respect of her disaffected generation. Christianity needs to condemn ‘a disintegrating capitalist society which can offer only an endless prospect of exploitation and war’, and must take sides in the choice between ‘some form of Socialism and Fascism, and champion that common life which is, for the majority, ‘such an all-absorbing, degrading and hopeless affair’.31
The advocacy merely of ‘some form of Socialism, like her 1942 championing of the Fitzrovia bohemians despite their ‘utter lack of any political sense’, suggests a weakening of Iris’s doctrinaire Communism. A passionate religious sense can perfectly well coexist with an impassioned political radicalism, as the careers of Walter Benjamin and Simone Weil alike make clear, both mystics, both Marxists. Yet Iris, like Orwell, often opposes religion and politics. In many letters to Frank she talks about her growing interest in Christianity. In spring 1942, and awaiting life after Finals:
After June I must a) read the Bible and b) go into the history of the Roman Catholic Church which fascinates
me … Christianity, you know, when you get away from it a bit and really see it, is a most amazing and almost incredible phenomenon. How does it look from Galilee? What a beautiful, queer, unexpected world it is. Christ, what a miserable, humiliated, broken, & altogether bloody world it is. I do believe in the future though – I believe tremendously. My God, we’ll make something of this hole-&-corner planet of ours …
In autumn 1942 she is ‘reading a great deal, mainly theology at the moment which you mightn’t approve of, but don’t worry, Jesus won’t get me’. By 6 July 1943, strikingly: ‘Better than being an Epicurean, to be a Kantian, and better still to believe in the True Gospel’ (my emphasis). Early July 1943 was a crucial time in both Iris and Frank’s stories. She adds how unbearable she finds the ‘suppression of the individual most Eastern philosophies have at their heart’. The following month, ‘I am re-reading large sections of the Bible.’ MacKinnon, despite crises and breaks in their friendship, feared for Iris’s soul and worked towards her Christian conversion. Although he asked Philippa, a little sententiously and inappropriately, to look after Iris, MacKinnon could appreciate Philippa’s own idea of her role – to make Iris laugh, to help keep her happy. When Philippa asked him whether she needed to be a Christian too, he replied after some thought, ‘No; it’s not necessary.’
Frank, who, apart from the image of the Madonna, then hated Roman Catholicism, nonetheless wrote to another friend, a Christian pacifist,32 that of Christ’s sayings he ‘liked best the one about losing one’s life and gaining it'; and, thinking Christ’s death an even more splendid gesture than Socrates’, wrote his best-known poem, ‘Polliciti Meliora: an epitaph for my Friends’, informed by the sentiment of self-sacrifice. Other English soldier-poets either fought in wars we remember little of (Sir Philip Sidney) or which generated poetry out of futile human sacrifice (Brooke, Owen). Frank’s, though the rhetoric was low-key, was a just war:
As one who, gazing at a vista Of beauty, sees the clouds close in And turns his back in sorrow, hearing The thunderclaps begin So we, whose life was all before us, Our hearts with sunlight filled, Left in the hills our books and flowers, Descended, and were killed Write on the stone no words of sadness, – Only the gladness due That we, who asked the most of living, Knew how to give it too.
By the time Iris was writing about Christie and Mark, her and Philippa’s lives had undergone an interlude as strange and painful as anything in her fiction, and the little red bee had not been inactive. With the capricious and improbable symmetry that marks her fictional imagination, she and Philippa exchanged lovers. Two years later Iris wrote to Philippa: ‘One doesn’t – as I know you realize – get over an histoire like that of 1944 very quickly. When one has behaved as I then behaved to two people one loves, the hurt and the sense of guilt go very deep.’ At the time it seemed to happen with an unconscious logic of its own.
The original love-quartet of Michael in love with Leonie, who loved Frank, who loved Iris, had been decisively broken by Leonie marrying Tony Platt in January 1941. Leonie would not see Michael at that point, and Iris, as she wrote to Frank, consoled him. ‘Dear old Michael. A lost soul too.’ He was grateful, buying her a box of expensive Turkish cigarettes for Christmas that year, and making her sole beneficiary of an early will; indeed, soon he was head over heels in love with her, pursuing her, by his own account, for months. They went away together for a weekend at Betty Pinney’s (who did not care for Iris) in Dorset early in 1943. Iris, torn and undecided, finally refused him. Michael wrote to Frank on 2 April about working with the sense of feeling knocked down.
On 9 July 1943 she finally told him that she would spend the night with him, in his pleasantly austere rooms above a printer’s shop33 at 48 Rochester Row,34 not far from Seaforth. Michael, an Army Captain on the Intelligence Staff, was working at Combined Operations HQ at Richmond Terrace, opposite Downing Street, with a view over the Thames. He handled a good deal of secret information. Above all, he knew that that night the invasion of Sicily was to start, although he could not tell Iris. He did not then know – though he shortly guessed from a letter-code – that Frank was taking part in the landings, near Catania.
‘Who says that one swallow doesn’t make a summer?’ asked Michael rhetorically, shortly after. In fact this was an inauspicious start to an unhappy affair, which dragged on until early the following year. Michael had been at Winchester with Frank, and in becoming his lover Iris was arguably getting as close to Frank himself as she could manage. She was not able to conceal this from Michael, who perceived himself a ‘stand-in’. In September she wrote but did not send Frank a love poem, ‘For WFT’, whose conceit is that when they were physically close in Oxford, she measured their distance: now they are separated he is close to her heart.* Michael noted uneasily Iris’s growing preoccupation with Frank, feeling that she and Frank were kindred ‘free spirits’. They were, for example, more serious about their writing, and about literature in general, than was Michael. They all wrote and circulated their poems to each other, and Iris had told Frank that Michael’s poems revealed ‘a very sensitive appreciation of the beautiful & an intense desire for it. Like most of our juvenilia …’, but lacked ‘clarity & originality’. By contrast she wrote to Frank in October 1943 that he must be changing a great deal, though ‘it’s hard for me to measure the stuff of the change from your letters – which are in the old vein, though so much more adult & so infinitely enriched’. In the same letter she requests his photograph, and promises one of her own. That she was bedding his friend cannot have been comfortable for her. The sense of being a stand-in for a Frank whom, he noted, Iris now in some sense loved, was also acutely uncomfortable for Michael. They had been friendly rivals at school,35 and had exchanged many letters during the war. That July Michael apologised for baselessly accusing Frank of melancholy, and added that Iris was reported as ‘missing life in the pursuit of art’.
Iris was Michael’s first lover, and though he knew he was not hers, she did not appear to him experienced either. He had won where Frank had failed, without much joy, though their lovemaking was eventually unbroken even by air raids. He tried to cook meals for Iris; she never. He was scrupulous about wartime decorum and secrecy, never telling her about Combined Operations, or enquiring what work she was doing, assuming – quite wrongly – that it was of national importance. Yet when a coded address on a letter from Frank revealed to Michael that he was in Sicily, his gentlemanly willingness to put Iris’s peace of mind, and indeed Iris and Frank’s ‘cause’, before his own, made him tell Iris. So, on the ‘baking breathless hot evening’ of Thursday, 29 July, a day she had penned a short lyric ‘For Michael: Bettiscombe in July’, Iris also wrote to Frank wondering ‘greatly whether … you are in Sicily’ and requesting a postcard ‘enumerating the Sicilian antiquities which you have preserved from the British hordes’.
In September 1943 Philippa borrowed ‘Tommy’ Balogh’s empty cottage in Dorchester (outside Oxford) for a week,36 and Iris accompanied her. Iris bought Hölderlin’s poems,37 got asthma when a pan of fat caught fire, sent an ecstatic postcard home about the beauty of the countryside. Philippa moved into Seaforth that October, and they gave a party to which Tommy came. Soon Iris informed Philippa that she and Balogh were now also lovers. Philippa, who like many of Tommy’s girls had had an Off-on’ relationship with him for two years and then thought herself disengaged, was nonetheless aggrieved and jealous at the sheer speed with which he had moved from one flatmate to the other, not to speak of the rapidity of Iris’s move, or the deception of both, and spent a sleepless night. The lines from ‘The Agamemnon Class 1939', about how then – before the war – they had known nothing of ‘betrayal of lover or friend’ take on new force. Philippa read, much later, The Black Prince with its meditation on the perils of introducing friends: ‘Of course one fears treachery. What human fear is deeper?’ For an interlude she felt herself excluded. Iris was like a force of nature.
Michael suffered very directly from Iris’s divided affections, while she, in thrall to Balogh,38 averted her gaze. Early in 1944, moreover, egged on by Balogh, who while willing to run more than one affair at a time himself would not tolerate a rival,39 she with some cruelty gave Michael his marching orders. A la guerre, comme à la guerre. ‘It has not been a good winter,’ Michael wrote to Frank on Easter Sunday 1944, without naming any of the participants, ‘and it all ends in dumb failure and tighter twists than before. It’s one of many stories you shall hear from one of us after the war.’ Michael had a recurrent vivid dream of a friendly and reassuring Frank appearing in his rooms to grasp his hand. But each time, before they could talk, the dream ended, the dream-Frank vanishing away.
In Iris’s absence, Michael, disconsolate, paid a visit to Seaforth in April 1944. Iris had some time before pointed Philippa out distantly to him in the tea-shop in Victoria Street.40 Now he left a note at the empty flat, mentioning a time that he might call again. Philippa, who had not before set eyes on him but who hated the careless cruelty with which he had been dispatched by Iris and Tommy, fell in love at first sight. Michael was both heartbreakingly beautiful and also unhappy. They were soon lovers, most happily and successfully. The comic properties of the situation were then clear to none of them. The times lent themselves to intensity.
There were roses round the door,’ Iris tried to reassure Philippa of her ill-fated affair with Tommy, with whom there were ‘idyllic’ weekends at his Dorchester cottage. She had a pet name for him;41 marriage was spoken of.42 Philippa thought she had the better bargain, and time proved her right. It was Balogh who caused Iris those tears on the bus; happiness absorbed Philippa and Michael. On one early occasion Philippa banished Iris from the flat, to avoid Michael being hurt by seeing her, and because they wanted to be by themselves. ‘All right, I’m going, I’m going,’ Iris cried, collecting her things. It was time for her to feel excluded and rejected.
A period of trial awaited them all. Michael had joined the SAS* in February, was stationed in Scotland for much of that spring, training as a parachutist and coming down intermittently to London. By May 1944 he was in a tent at Moor Park, just outside London, HQ of ‘Boy’ Browning, who was in command of all airborne troops. He and Philippa were engaged that June. Michael had been absent one night helping bring home an agent from France, as Philippa much later discovered, and he forewarned her that he might suddenly disappear again, and was not to be questioned. At his request she sewed into his uniform a compass, a silk road-map of France, and a file. On 15 July her birthday present to Iris was Alex Comfort’s book of poems Elegies, inscribed merely, ‘Iris from Pip’. In late August, a month in which Iris was anxiously awaiting news of Frank, Michael disappeared. Philippa wore his watch and looked after his bicycle and waited. MacKinnon wrote daily letters which brought some comfort. Philippa, when sleepless with worry, would walk the streets of bombed-out London at night, as far as the City and back.
Frank, taking part in the 10 July invasion of Sicily, led his unit with distinction,† although there is no record of his ever having fired in anger. Leonie Marsh wrote to him that ‘one day the “good” will triumph’, and that his gun tended to jam because he had ‘real brotherly love in him’ and so did not wish to kill.43 Like his father, Frank was ‘more & more inclined to Buddhism’.* Iris too wrote to him, ‘There is no bitterness in your letters.’44 Approaching the Sicilian coast, most of the landing force feared a ‘barren, waterless, disease and sirocco-scourged island peopled with imbeciles and murderers’. For Frank, by contrast, Sicily was the island Theocritus, the Emperor Frederick and Matthew Arnold had all hymned, ‘an eclogue’ itself, where Pindar had eulogised the tyrants of Syracuse, and where Aeschylus lay buried at Gela.
On the long night-time approach Frank encouraged his unit, dished out the rum ration, lit up his pipe. Two mortar shells killed the crew of the landing craft as they landed, setting the stern ablaze. Another took most of the arm and leg off a fellow a few paces in front, who fell, groaning. To calm his badly shaken men, Frank led the way to a safe wadi reeking of thyme and mint and nearby lemon groves, encouraging them to start black-berrying. Looking at him a little oddly, they joined in. ‘The English, whom Europe understands so little and needs so much’ – a reciprocal state of affairs, he noted – ‘had returned to her after two years of absence.’ He spent some hours tramping out of his way to return a tuppeny-ha’penny watch stolen from a child of sixteen by a British soldier, meditating mordantly that when the Germans conquered an East European town they, by contrast, shot 50,000 inhabitants and sent the best-looking girls to military brothels.
He read War and Peace in Italian: ‘However villainous the character’, the great Russian novelists ‘never for one moment let you forget his humanity’. In Malta on 15 July there were so many courting couples he felt ‘sick with envy’, and the incurious philistinism of most of his brother-officers made him feel estranged. They stayed in the mess playing cards; he roamed and looked, trying to understand what he was watching and recording in his journals and letters.
He had written to Iris on 23 May from Alexandria:
Today I want to talk to you about the Greeks because they are staunch anti-Fascists, because they are simply among the best people I have met, because they are very much the same Greeks who fought at Scamander and Marathon, drove their chariot by the weeping firs on the Hill of Kronos or packed the slopes of the Acropolos to hear the Agamemnon …
Peter Wright, who met Frank in Cairo, was also working in SOE Greek section. They found attending briefings agonising. Frank had chosen Greece partly because he was a Greek scholar, mainly because he was so impressed by the bravery of the CP-led resistance groups ELAS and EAM. British policy was nominally to support all genuine resistance movements, but in fact, it became clear, the British gave the Communist-led groups credit only grudgingly, if at all, for brave and effective action, and sometimes distorted intelligence reports to give the royalist Zervas equal – and undeserved – credit. Frank, furious, negotiated a posting in Serbia. He struck Wright as a ‘fine dreamer, a versatile scholar and a true internationalist’. Wright saw Frank just before his departure for Macedonia, cheerful, confident, keenly aware that he was going not merely on an adventure, but to help liberate Europe from Fascism.
Letter-writing, of course, is a performance art, as Frank implicitiy acknowledged in addressing Iris’s enthusiasm for Antony and Cleopatra a year before:
I too am very fond of [it]. There is something uncanny about the way in which these slightly sordid middle-aged lovers, who have talked very little but drivel for the first three acts, suddenly rise in the last two to the very pinnacle of poetry, and blaze their trail across the mind of humanity for all time. It is in a way a promise to all of us lesser folks … that we might, in our time and on our own level, provided we still have the grace to be dissatisfied, know a moment like Antony’s.
He had expressed one kind of self-dramatisation earlier in the war when he wrote facetiously, ‘I am, if anything, too brilliant. I am afraid that this, my precocity, will prove a flash in the pan. I shall be burned out at 23. I must seek an early death to keep my fame untarnished and immortal.’ By December 1943 he now ‘harbour[s] a good deal of malice’ towards that pseudo-heroic mode which had accompanied his volunteering three months before for parachute duties. Demoralised in base camp, he wrote to Iris about the detail of life in Cairo; and:
I still press for active work because it suits my temperament better than sitting in an office … [But] it won’t be a tragedy if I survive the war. I can see so many evil and petty men surviving well entrenched. For all my vices, I don’t think I am either of these. Every man of good will is going to be badly needed in the years that lie ahead … [I] don’t say it to reassure you, nor even myself.
To his family he wrote: ‘I find that more and more of my delight in living comes from isolated moments of perception. The Nile at sunrise, a tortoise-shell cat … a small girl in a grey frock, with long black cavalier curls … picking white chrysanthema, and the last white roses before the frost.’ And with a greater rhetorical up-beat:
My Christmas message to you is one of greater hope than I have ever had in my life before. There is a spirit abroad in Europe finer and braver than anything that tired continent has known for centuries and which cannot be withstood. You can, if you like, think of it in terms of politics, but it is broader and more generous than any dogma. It is the confident will of whole peoples who have known the utmost humiliation and suffering and have triumphed over it to build their own life once and for all … all that is required from Britain, America and the USSR is imagination, help and sympathy.
‘No sicker epitaph for the Second World War’, as Frank’s brother E.P. Thompson observed, was ever written.45 Frank goes on: ‘1944 is going to be a good year though a terrible one,’ and on 26 December 1943 he wrote to Iris of arriving at a watershed in his life, and of ‘profoundly moving experiences':
I have had the honour to meet and talk to some of the best people in the world. People whom, when the truth is known, Europe will recognise as among the finest and toughest she has ever borne. Meeting them has made me utterly disgusted with some aspects of my present life, reminding me that all my waking hours should be dedicated to one purpose only. This sounds like all new year’s resolutions, but in this case I think I shall soon have a change in my way of living which will give me a real chance. Nothing else matters. We must crush the Nazis and build our whole life anew.
‘If we should meet again, why then, we’ll smile.’ If not, why then those that follow us will be able to smile far more happily and honestly in the world we all helped to make. No men are more disarming in their gaiety than these men our allies, who have known more suffering than we can easily imagine.
Frank wrote to Leo Pliatzky saying he was to go on a special mission, quoting the Aeneid. He was very fit. He had learnt Serbo-Croat – ‘plum-easy’ – and Bulgarian too – ‘simply Russian as a Turk would talk it’ – and early noted that ‘even the old peasant Bulgars will turn in the end – just you see’. On the night of 25 January 1944 he was dropped, with supplies, onto the high Serbian plateau at Dobro Polje. Code-named ‘Claridges’, his mission was to remain on the Serb-Bulgarian frontier and act as a base for the four men in ‘Mulligatawny’, led by Major Mostyn Davies, which was alone to move into Bulgaria. The plan was ill-conceived and ill-executed.
It began badly. For two months on snowy, mountainous terrain, hunted from camp to camp, the missions evaded capture. Bad weather was blamed for the unpredictability of drops of supplies. On 18 March more than ten thousand troops, mainly Bulgarian, encircled the whole South Serbian plateau. Partisans and refugees repeatedly escaped from ambush, at terrible cost in terms of casualties. An old mill by a stream, with Frank, Davies and a wireless-telegraphy operator within it, was attacked by hand-grenade on the twenty-second or twenty-third. Only Frank got out alive, through a back window, hiding for a day or two in the snow, then in a haystack, until rescued by a peasant, who showed a small partisan unit how to reach him. Together with two Mulligatawny survivors they moved towards Macedonia where, in Tergoviste on 21 April, Frank at last found time to write three letters.
To his parents he laconically writes that he ‘now hold[s] the record for the twenty yards sprint for three major battle areas’. He misses England, ‘where they really know how to organise Spring. But I want to see dog’s tooth violets and red winged blackbirds before I go over the hill.’ To his brother E.P., then engaged in the long assault on Monte Cassino, he promises a post-war walking tour, with frequent stops at pubs. And to Iris he writes a letter, citing Agamemnon 418–19, and making clear that he has, from her letters, put together a picture of events at home.
Irushka!
Sorry I haven’t written for so long. Old Brotoloig seems to have been monopolising my attention. I know forgiveness is one of your chief virtues. Three air-mail letter-cards from you, bringing me up to the end of JAN.
‘Brotoloigos’ is the Homeric epithet for Ares, god of war, meaning plague-like or baneful to men. Iris had clearly been unhappy. The stoicism, sweetness, warmth and intelligence of Frank’s letter is remarkable, written as it self-effacingly is in the midst of so many perils.
… You know quite well there’s no danger of your succumbing to [weariness of soul]. You have springs within you that will never fail … I can’t say precisely what your role in life will be, but I should say it will certainly be a literary-humanistic one.
A whimsical prologue envisages the different kinds of literatteur Iris, Hal, Leo and Michael Foot might be after the war. ‘Does this restore your faith in yourself & your mission? It certainly should … I can’t think why you are so interested in MORALS. Chiefly a question of the liver and digestive organs I assure you.’ The important task of the moment, he argues, is by contrast ‘the question of building a new communal ethic’. He continues:
My own list of priorities is as follows:
1. People and everything to do with people, their habits, their loves and hates, their arts, their languages. Everything of importance revolves around people.
2. Animals and flowers. These bring me a constant undercurrent of joy. Just now I’m revelling in plum blossom and young lambs and the first leaves on the briar roses. One doesn’t need any more than these. I couldn’t wish for better company.
These are enough for a hundred lifetimes. And yet I must confess to being very fond of food and drink also.
I envy you and Michael in one way. All this time you are doing important things like falling in and out of love – things which broaden and deepen and strengthen the character more surely than anything else. I can honestly say I’ve never been in love. When I pined for you I was too young to know what I was doing – no offence meant. Since then I haven’t lost an hour’s sleep over any of Eve’s daughters. This means I’m growing up lop-sided, an overgrown boy. Ah well, – I shall find time, Cassius, I shall find time.
All the same, I don’t think you should fall for ‘emotional fascists’ – Try to avoid that.
This ‘emotional fascist’ – a recurrent psychological type in Iris’s life – is Balogh, over whom her Treasury work was now suffering, and who cost her many tears. It is impossible to judge how hard-won is Frank’s tone of dispassionate objectivity. He had had romantic friendships, Iris knew, with two girls, one Polish, one Greek,* and had written some time before to Iris as ‘soul-sister’, relishing the phrase’s Shelleyan and incestuous ambiguities. And certainly he had other matters to worry about. The lack of irony in his account of the character-forming ‘importance’ of falling in and out of love is breathtaking, a simplicity capable of stinging.
Julius Caesar, that great play about friendship and betrayal, had provided the leitmotiv of his December letter, with Brutus’s ‘If we should meet again’ from Act V. He now quotes Brutus from the following scene about finding time, later, to grieve for the death of Cassius, after the battle of Philippi: ‘Friends, I owe more tears/To this dead man than you shall see me pay.’ The ironies of ‘I shall find time, Cassius, I shall find time’ are almost unbearable. Time was exactly what was now in short supply, and he knew it.
On 17 May he marched with the 2nd Sofia Partisan Brigade from the Serbian frontier into the heart of Bulgaria, where conditions were worse. It was a fateful move, a ‘military folly of the first order’.46 The brave but inexperienced Bulgarian partisans were, as he reported ‘too badly armed and scattered to be made into serious nation-wide force before big day'; a less charitable observer called them a horror-comic army.47 Bulgaria, moreover, unlike Yugoslavia, though not at war with the USSR, was an Axis ally. The Bulgarian occupation of Thrace and Macedonia was noted for its brutality – ‘most murders were accompanied by torture, most rapes … ended with murder’,48 and the partisans knew that their end, if caught, would be messy. Frank had wired SOE Cairo on 29 April, requesting ‘general direction soonest’. He received no answer.
As in good tragedy, many malign forces were at work. There was the ‘characteristic military balls-up’ that dropped Frank’s new wireless operator – Sergeant Kenneth Scott – and his code-book in two very different places. Then SOE headquarters was moving from Cairo to under-staffed Bari in Italy, where Frank’s desperate pleas for food and arms had to be decoded and recoded, in both directions, with a resultant delay of two to three days even in messages being received. ‘Pinpoints’ for drops were persistently lost under pressure of enemy advance. Cairo received no message from Frank after 11 May. By the time the matter of the code-book was sorted out he was in Bulgaria, involved in running battles and wild marches across mountains. Scott’s wireless equipment, always dicey as well as heavy, requiring a mule to carry it, fell into a river during one ambush. They covered fifty kilometres a day across pathless ground for nine days without a break under conditions of terrible hardship. Once during a march Frank, exhausted, fell asleep and dropped over a small cliff into a river. They were by now lice-ridden – ‘Enemy number 2', they would joke. They had had no food for fifteen days, and were so hungry they ate live wood-snails and unripe cherries. It may have been the need for food that drove them, despite a government bribe for the head of each partisan of up to 50,000 lev, to a village, where they bought bread – Frank putting his cap beneath his chin to catch each crumb. On 31 May 1944 they were betrayed.
Near Litakovo, north of Sofia, Major Frank Thompson – wearing the British uniform that should have protected him – was captured together with his unit. They were tied up, kicked, spat at by villagers angered by the Allied bombing of Sofia, beaten with fists, pistols, rifles and once, during the interrogations that continued by day and by night, a truncheon. A Gestapo officer was present.49 They were sometimes deprived of sleep, and there were terrible cries from the cells where the women were held. His gentle colleague Yordanka was raped, then killed.
Raina Sharova, who claimed to have been an eye-witness, gave a theatrical, oft-repeated and unreliable account of the last days.50 It ran as follows. Frank may have been tortured.51 His claims for protection as a prisoner of war under the Geneva Convention were ignored. He revealed nothing. During his imprisonment he was calm and observant despite a fever. After an old peasant woman spoke up bravely in his defence, Frank and his companions were given bread and onions to eat.52 On 18 January he had written that even the death of a democrat is in a sense creative: ‘One or ten or a hundred new democrats are created by his example.’ ‘I don’t despair,’ he answered a query in Bulgarian,
‘but time flies very fast.’53 The decapitated heads of colleagues appeared, piked, in the square.
The villagers could not be persuaded to enact the lynching the authorities required, and during a staged trial Frank much impressed his hearers by calmly smoking his pipe while leaning against a pillar, dismissing the interpreter and answering questions in idiomatic Bulgarian.54 He avowed Communism at this trial. Found guilty around 7 June,55 when the second front that he so longed for was finally opening in Normandy, he was taken with his men and four other officers for execution.
Major Thompson took charge of the condemned men and led them to the castle. As they marched off before the assembled people, he raised a clenched fist, the salute of the Fatherland Front which the Allies were helping. A gendarme struck his arm down, but Thompson called out to the people, ‘I give you the Salute of Freedom!’ All the men died raising this salute. The spectators were sobbing, many present declared the scene was one of the most moving in all Bulgarian history, that the men’s amazing courage was the work of the English Officer who carried their spirits, as well as his own.56
They were hurriedly buried in an unmarked grave. A volume of Catullus was found in Frank’s pocket, and a Byzantine coin, sewn into his tunic, was kept by a collaborator. These, in time, were returned to Iris.57
The last letters of Bulgarian partisans, generally apologising for the troubles they had brought upon their parents, were often doctored as Party declarations.58 Thus too the authorised, pious version of Frank’s death – dying with Botev’s ‘Song of Freedom’ on his lips – gave a heroic ancestry and legitimacy to the new Bulgarian Communist regime. Iris had no reason to disbelieve it. Some of it – the bread and onions, and also Frank’s courage – is true.59 But now, after the fall of Communism, Litakovo villagers say emphatically that there was no ‘trial’ of any kind, merely brutal interrogation.* Litakovo was a killing-ground for partisans, where none survived. Those who had offered them food or shelter were treated with ‘exceptional cruelty’ – the atmosphere was terrifying, uncontrolled and wild. The villagers had witnessed bodies, some decomposing, dragged into the village behind carts for weeks, and had also been forced to witness executions and then walk, or even dance to a band playing, around the bodies to show disrespect. Some victims were beaten to death in the public square. Sashka Razgradlian, a nineteen-year-old Jewish partisan from Sofia, was in late May raped, forced to dig her own grave, and buried alive.
Naku Staminov, then twelve years old, whose parents’ house fronted the square, followed a group of about twelve partisans including Frank, the tallest and handsomest and strongest, who was chewing something. Frank wore a green jacket with a zip-fastener, and Naku later recognised his picture in a newspaper as that of the foreigner whose murder he had unexpectedly watched. The partisans were surrounded by gendarmerie but seemed calm. Later Naku learned they had been told a lie: they believed they were being marched to another village. There was complete silence; then they were shot in a ditch. Frank half-turned, shouting something furiously in English before being raked with fire across the shoulders. The bodies were then injected – presumably with poison – to ensure that there had been no mistake. Frank was the last to stop convulsing. A ring was cut off his finger with a knife. Naku was sick with terror for months afterwards. He thought normal life could never begin again.*
E.P. Thompson’s Beyond the Frontier movingly analyses the forces that led up to this moment. The very small, weak Bulgarian partisan forces were attacking a regime which both Britain and a by now rapidly advancing Russia were alike – and competitively – wooing. The Cold War, which saw a global extension of such rivalries, was in view. On 6 April 1944 Churchill minuted: ‘We are purging all our secret establishments of Communists because we know they owe no allegiance to us or our cause and will always betray secrets to the Soviet.’60
It is a sick irony that Frank Thompson, that gentle and gifted apostle of internationalism, may have been among the Cold War’s first victims. ‘How wonderful it would be to call Europe one’s fatherland, and think of Krakow, Munich, Rome, Arles, Madrid as one’s own cities.’ Was he still a Communist? He had praised Communism to the partisans, without avowing the creed himself, perhaps doubting that he would be believed. He was not in contact with the headquarters of the CPGB in King Street, near Covent Garden market, or with the Comintern, and E.P. thought his Communism, which went with a deep sense of democracy, would have died at the Kostov trials of 1949, although a friend disputes this.61 Frank was, in late 1942, shocked by the number of people Stalin had personally ordered to be poisoned.62 He wrote from Cairo, shortly before embarking for Serbia, ‘When the Communists come to power after the war, as they surely will, I will be the first to be hung as a heretic':63 he knew he was exactly the kind of independent-minded sympathiser who would soonest be purged in post-war Eastern Europe.
His politics, instinctively humanitarian, are quickly summarised. He hoped that the war was to forge a new and better world order, not defend a bad, old one. He wanted full employment, a welfare state, and believed there would be no world peace without world government. He told the partisans he ‘respected’ Communists, and certainly he had a strong attachment to the war aims of the Soviet Union.64 There was also within him a patriotic Englishman with a sentimental attachment to the English countryside, who thought Communism a ‘cold and rational creed’ and who in 1942 told E.P. ‘how very rarely I’ve found myself marching down the stream-lined autobahn of my socialist theory’. Though so massively well-read, and in so many languages, he once boasted that he had never read Das Kapital.*65
Frank believed many things more interesting than politics, and that ‘art and literature’ were ‘paramount’. He saw himself as a ‘left intellectual, unkempt, talkative, lazy’, missing his own set, with their ‘homewoven ties and untidy hair whose ideas and emotions are in such a mess but who know better than anyone how to make a friend and keep one’. He described his mind as ‘more inclined to love than analyse’, and rebuked his brother, ‘It’s a mistake to hate people because of their class.’ He knew, though he came from an opposing, bohemian-intellectual England, that ‘the best fighting regiments were blue-blooded’, even if they were fighting merely ‘to save the lunch tent at Ascot’. He felt compassion for the homesickness of the soldiers whose letters he had, as an officer, to censor; for his comrades ('my major has been captured, poor old boy'); for those Sicilians prisoners who, having just shot at the British, now begged for mercy. He grieved for how much men and women had suffered ‘for millennia’,66 growing up and dying ‘in filth and flies and stench’. He wrote:
In a world as filthy as it is today, one should remember how helpless and lonely the individual human being is; and that kindliness, especially when it costs so little, is a policy that justifies itself.
Whitehall and Moscow alike had each by 1944 some interest in the failure of such missions as Frank’s. Moscow, together with the exiled Bulgarian Communist leader Dimitrov, mistrusted the Bulgarian brand of Communism.67 Dimitrov encouraged the missions to enter the country, where their lives would be in even greater danger than in Serbia. The royalist Bulgarian authorities for their part wanted an end to Western stimulation of partisan activity as one price for their change of allegiance. E.P. Thompson argues that there was ‘very heavy and specific weeding’ of the British archives that demonstrated ‘expending’ of Communists at the time of Frank’s death, and that the authorities would not have ordered the execution of a uniformed British officer unless some gesture or signal had passed offering licence: ‘Somebody winked.’68 As Peregrine Worsthorne, like Frank a member of Phantom, put it: ‘In executing Major Thompson, the Bulgarian authorities were doing the British government’s dirty work.’69 Michael Foot, later the leading historian of SOE, disputes this: ‘Everyone in SOE or SAS … knew that his chances of trouble if captured were high … It was part of one’s routine training.’70
Whatever the truth of the matter, Frank died bravely, yet has never been posthumously decorated. In Communist Bulgaria he was a national hero, and is remembered today.* The railway station near Sofia named after him shows him, in bas-relief, still smoking his pipe.
For months the Thompsons at Bledlow in Buckinghamshire were tormented by the usual bogus messages sent on Scott’s captured wireless transmitter, implying that Frank was still alive. On 27 September a ‘Missing, Believed Killed’ notice appeared in The Times. More than a week later Philippa, at work in Chatham House, was alerted to this by Donald MacKinnon. On her return to Seaforth she found Iris in the kitchen, and broke the news.71 Iris wept. Confirmation of Frank’s death came in the new year, and over the following years the details gradually came together.
In 1988 Iris was reported as saying that, though not engaged, she and Frank would have married.72 In fact she had told Michael Foot (of whom Philippa then learnt that he was missing, probably a prisoner, and feared terribly that autumn and winter that the Germans might take him with them as they retreated through the Mannheim Gap) that she would not marry until she was thirty-five, and then to a civil servant. In the event she was only two years out. ‘Frank was the person I thought about’73 is a more scrupulous recollection.
The idea of marrying Frank represents a later wish, and indeed in July 1980 she vividly dreamt that she had somehow married both John Bayley and Frank, and was nervous of how this ménage-à-trois would work out. But both her husbands were evidently so sweet-tempered and so civilised that, within the dream, they all got along splendidly, and were happy together.
A dream about Frank. I was with Frank and he told me he loved me. (As he did on that day in autumn 193874 in New College.) I was very moved but not sure what I felt (as then). He went away and I then realised I loved him. (As I really did come to love him later.) In the dream, realising I loved him I felt great joy at the thought that I could tell him now, and I sent for him. He appeared at the top of a steep slope, dressed as a soldier, with a black cap on. As I climbed up the slope towards him I felt sudden dismay, thinking I cannot marry him, I am married already. Then I thought, it is all right, I can be married to both him and John. We met and were somehow very happy and yet awkward too.
‘When the war ends’, Frank had written in his last letter to his brother, ‘whether I’m there or not’, E.P. should meet Iris, a good philosopher and ‘Compleat Humanist’ – they could work out E.P.'s scheme of ‘dialectical idealism’ together. Around the end of 1945 Iris wrote at length to E.P., or Palmer as she always called him,75 from Innsbruck, to help with the family’s plans to publish There is a Spirit in Europe with Gollancz, commemorating Frank:
He is so much more than the odd collection of things one remembers. One gets mixed up too with all the feelings of sickness about not having loved him enough – which was true at the start, though not later. And the sheer sickness of loss. You have a difficult job. Then his opinions, his splendid positive uncompromising faith in the world’s people. Oneself, one goes on changing, & can’t argue out with him one’s shifts of opinion on the USSR, one’s compromises with life. It’s not easy to write about him, even a few paragraphs of a letter, he was pure gold.
‘I felt very unhappy and very proud when I read his letters through,’ Iris wrote to Frank’s mother Theo on 21 November 1945; Theo had visited Iris at Seaforth.76 Fifty years later, in 1996, Iris wrote, ‘It is all so moving and so near,’77 and indeed she thought about Frank all her life. In 1995 his ‘Polliciti Meliora’ was read on television on the fiftieth anniversary of VJ-Day by Edward Fox, and transmitted worldwide. There were to be two books dealing with his life and death before Beyond the Frontier.78Slavcho Trunski’s Grateful Bulgaria and Stowers Johnson’s Agents Extraordinary, which Iris hated for its portrayal of Frank as a grim and fanatical megalomaniac trying to be Lawrence of Bulgaria,79 rashly and romantically leading his men towards the false dawn of a liberated Bulgaria. She was particularly incensed that a film based on Frank’s life, tailored for an American audience, would omit all mention of his Communism. It was never made. Her Frank ‘had a horror of violence’80 and never dreamt of himself as a hero but was ‘delicate, scrupulous and tender … never the victim of dreams of violence or illusions of grandeur’.81 She wrote to Trunski:
He was a very various person … gentle, quiet, very reticent and modest and also eccentric in a very English way. He didn’t seem in the least framed to be a soldier. In fact he was very like … a sort of English hero who is very, very quiet and is interested in flowers and birds … One wouldn’t have imagined him as a soldier, but he was, when it came to it, a very good and brave soldier … he was a very absolute man … This absoluteness, courage, this feeling of being willing to make sacrifices was part of his character. One wasn’t surprised when he became the kind of hero he was. We who loved Frank waited most anxiously to see him again, but when it was not to be, one felt that it was as he would have wished it. He died for a cause that he believed in … I think he was someone who was very happy … and died in a way he would have understood or approved, if one can say that about somebody’s death when they die so young.
She wrote to Palmer around 1980 that ‘In a sense of course it wasn’t worth it, nothing in the subsequent state of the world seems worth it in relation to such destruction, because of the complex nature of causality and because of the shabbiness of the outcome. And yet of course —’. The sentence is left deliberately unfinished. When Iris’s alter ego says in The Black Prince that she reveres no one except great artists and ‘those who say No to tyrants'; or when at the end of The Red and the Green Frances thinks of the ‘inconceivably brave’ Irish dead of Easter 1916, ‘made young and perfect for ever’, Iris is surely thinking of Frank.* The Book and the Brotherhood, too, envisages a confrontation with a figure who, like the dead Frank, has never moved ideologically while the world around him has compromised its ideals.
Perhaps Iris captured the sense of grief and of mysterious causality best in the long poem she dedicated, in 1977, to Frank’s memory, ‘The Agamemnon Class, 1939', ingeniously conflating the deaths of Frank in Thrace, and Achilles on the ‘windy plains of Troy’. It ends:
What was it for? Guides tell a garbled tale.
The hero’s tomb is a disputed mound.
What really happened on the windy plain?
The young are bored by stories of war.
And you, the other young, who stayed there
In the land of the past, are courteous and pale,
Aloof, holding your fates.
We have to tell you that it was not in vain.
Even grief dates, and even Niobe
At last was fed, and you
Are all pain, and yet without pain,
As is the way of the dead.
No one can rebuild that town
And the soldier who came home
Has entered the machine of a continued doom.
Only the sky and the sea
Are unpolluted and old
And godless with innocence.
And twilight comes to the chasm,
And to the sea’s expanse
And the terrible bright Greek air fades away.
* Denis Healey had introduced Iris to Murphy: see his Time of my Life.
* Iris, very put out, sent Ruth a cheque for £5 or £10 after the war, which Ruth declined to encash.
* ‘For WFT': Not far from the green garden, folded in/Your room, your story & your arms, I guaged [sic]/With a heart quietly beating the long/Long gulf between us. Summer hung/Its colours on the window, & a song/Swept over us from the gramophone./Now, in a sad September, gilt with leaves, I am without you, & as many miles/Of sea and mountain part us, as my thoughts/Could then imagine of our separateness./[Yet you speak simply & your human voice/Gentle as ever: deleted] Yet, listening at last, I have caught/That human echo in your tone that might/Call me to love. Nearer, far nearer to my heart/You lie now, distantly in your grief’s desert than/When all your candid years did homage then’ (16 September 1943). Frank had begun a flirtation with his Greek teacher Maroula Thalis in August, and was possibly writing less frequently to Iris that summer.
* The Special Air Service was formed in October 1941 as a parachutist-commando unit, initially for use in the Middle East.
* In January 1944 he wrote to his ‘folks’ that this year he would have the chance of following one of the Buddha’s eight-fold paths: Right Living.
* Corporal Emilia Krzyprowna and Maroula Thalis.
* They include Todorka Kotseva, pro-gymnasium headmistress, official guide to the monument and the events of 1944, familiar with evidence collected from villagers for a 1986 exhibition; the Litakovo Mayor Svetlana Toderova; and the partisan Slavcho Trunski, Frank’s acting General, speaking two weeks before his death, in November 1999. Trunski is a key witness, for as Bulgaria’s Deputy Minister of Defence the two books he had written on Frank gave currency to the story of the staged trial. Robert Conquest, press attaché to the Allied Control Commission in Bulgaria from 1944 to 1947, suggested to Topencharov, then Director of Press, that something be done to honour Frank, which would redound to the credit of the Bulgarian Communist Party’s image, as well as to that of the British. The naming of a railway station near Sofia after Frank, and his reburial with his mother Theo and his brother E.P. present, followed. Though he did not know, or know of, Sharova, Conquest is ‘sure the trial story was a later invention’ (letter to the author, 17 December 1999), and believes that at most a ‘drumhead’ trial without speeches might have occurred. There is nothing in Znepolski’s Memoirs (1998) about a trial.
* The report of the Allied Control Commission’s official inquiry, recently uncovered in Bulgaria, corroborates Naku Staminov. Frank Thompson was shot on the orders of Captain Stoianov, who was tried and condemned for exceeding his authority, illegally ordering subordinates to shoot Thompson without due sentence. Stoianov was summarily executed on 11 September 1944 in Litakovo, one month before Iris learnt of Frank’s death. Six subordinates were tried by the Novoselski and Botevgradski People’s Courts, sentenced to death and executed: Georgi Manov, Dicho Dichev and Boris Tomov for their role in the interrogation; Stoian Lazarov, Angel Stanchev and Ilia Tupankov for their role in the execution. Only Tupankov admitted his guilt. He and Manov both claimed that Stoianov had confessed that he himself shot Thompson. Source: state archives in Veliko Tarnovo, letter N-4454/19–20 December 1945.
* This was in 1941. His biographer believes that he later remedied this omission.
* The British Liaison Officers were represented first as heroes against Fascism, then as imperialist agents, and finally, after 1991, as Soviet agents intent on establishing Soviet hegemony. See E.P. Thompson, Beyond the Frontier, p.41.
* E.P. Thompson also compares Frank’s death with the ‘symbolic confrontation’ of Easter 1916. Beyond the Frontier, p.42.
† He began training with Phantom for the Sicilian landings some time after February 1943