Recasting the World: September 1943–January 1944
For every [democrat] that is killed or mutilated by the Gestapo [and their allies] two more are made by that example . . .
Letter, 25 December 1943
But a democrat has a great advantage over the people whom he is fighting. Even his death is, in a sense, creative. When a democrat dies – that is, a man who has shown . . . by word and action that he cares more than anything for democratic freedom – then one, ten or a hundred new ones are created by his example . . . When a fascist dies the effect on his confederates is the reverse.
Letter, 18 January 1944
The ex-schoolmaster and fellow CP sympathiser he befriended in Baghdad, Peter Wright – ‘best bloke I’ve met since leaving England’ – had joined SOE from the Intelligence Corps on 19 April 1943. Since Frank at once started scheming to join SOE himself, Wright probably told Frank about the organisation then. It took him five months. On 10 September he finally said goodbye to Phantom, newly excited about the future, yet much moved by this leave-taking from men he had sailed out with in March 1941. His father praised Frank’s description of this tearful farewell as ‘almost worthy of Tolstoi’.
He spent that weekend in Shepheard’s Hotel, exactly like two years earlier before another momentous change – going to fight in the Western Desert – taking stock once more in a letter home. As in November 1941, he sorted out his kit, putting surplus possessions into store. He contrived for Tony Forster to inherit his Phantom job the same day he left, and Forster – driven by his batman Lorton whom Forster also inherited – took three bags of Frank’s books, papers and letters to Aunt Meg Leavitt in Beirut on 23 September. Evidently Frank from the start eschewed a desk job and wished to travel light. Specifically, he hoped to be dropped into Greece.
He had many motives for moving. That July Frank again read War and Peace (in Italian), which had ‘passages almost as real as if I had lived them’, struck like many by how its brilliant characters dwindle finally into commonplace middle-aged dullness. Rupert Brooke had avoided that unheroic fate in the previous war, after being famously hymned by Frances Cornford: ‘A young Apollo, golden-haired, / Stands dreaming on the verge of strife, / Magnificently unprepared / For the long littleness of life.’ Might SOE help Frank avoid the ‘long littleness of life’ and thus stay inspired and venturesome?
He feared he was vegetating in a ration-consuming unit stuck in transit camps without much possibility of training. Phantom’s relative failure in the Middle East one of its officers attributed to the hostility of the military establishment towards a private army getting information for the high command. Phantom’s fortunes changed around the time Frank left and during the final two years of war it gained credibility: in every Allied campaign henceforward it operated with forward units and played an important role.
Leaving Phantom also resolved the paradox of his youth. On exiting his tent on 23 May 1943 and observing a group of men not putting their heart into PT, he yelled ‘Come on! Let’s see a bit more life in that!’ He soon realised with a mix of delight and embarrassment that the trainees were senior naval officers, not a man below lieutenant-commander – a ranking equivalent to major. Frank had spent three years impersonating a grown-up. Maybe he could afford to stop.
Although Frank when they first met was twenty-two, Peter Wright like others took him for twenty-seven or twenty-eight. Frank had to hold his own with people ten years older, giving orders to seven officers with an average age of thirty, and adopting their mannerisms as protective camouflage. Addressing another twenty-three-year-old officer as ‘Young man’ and pipe-smoking were further pieces of theatre. Meeting twenty-year-old Rifle Brigade officers made Frank feel old, and he observed, optimistically, that Englishmen of his class altered more between twenty and twenty-three than at any other period. Yet inside he still felt hopelessly childish and it broke out when he devoured sweet buns or Russian children’s books, or found himself weeping on bidding farewell to his Phantom unit where he was known as ‘the Gaffer’. He celebrated childishness thus: ‘Without going all James Barrie . . . the real, the enduring people are those who have kept something of the child within them.’
His squadron earned a good chit for their cheerfulness and efficiency in Sicily, but their saluting was never very smart. Frank himself, long-haired and bohemian, was certainly not the disciplinarian a second-in-command was supposed to be. Finally, he accounted himself very frightened of generals. And now a prospect of escape from all these pitfalls offered itself, rebutting his father’s charge that his life had become a mere ‘desultory tale’: in Greece.
The type of patrician Englishman who viewed Greece through a romantic mist distilled from Byron, Keats and the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles was affectionately parodied in Louis de Bernières’s Captain Corelli’s Mandolin as ‘Lt Bunny Warren’ who parachutes into Kephalonia in 1942 talking Homeric Greek. Bunny spoofs a type exemplified by Frank. On 23 May he had written to Iris Murdoch from Alexandria:
Today I want to talk to you about Greeks because they are staunch antifascists, because they are simply among the best people I have met, because they are very much the same as the Greeks who fought at Scamander and Marathon, drove their chariots by the weeping firs on the Hill of Kronos or packed the slopes of the Acropolis to hear the Agamemnon.
The idea of a direct continuity between the old Hellas and the new was shared by other Wykehamists. In August 1943 in a Tripoli restaurant he ran into his schoolfellow Christopher Seton-Watson, driving trucks from Cairo to Algiers, who had won an MC during the 1941 retreat from Greece and still romanticised that country. Frank admired his ‘gentle sane bravery’.
On 13 September Frank reported to SOE Cairo, housed in Rustum Buildings – a well-appointed block of flats known to every Cairene taxi-driver as ‘Secret Building’ – where he met Seton-Watson’s brother Hugh ‘mumbling into his beard’ in a basement and noted that Monty Woodhouse, for whom Frank had ‘fagged’ for one unhappy term at Winchester, was also employed there. Frank found that he was to keep the rank of captain and worked with Peter Wright ‘to get the hang of things’, taking afternoon siestas in Peter’s flat near by.
Like the Seton-Watsons – and John Pendlebury, who had been killed in 1941 – Monty Woodhouse was yet another philhellene Wykehamist. On 26 November 1942 he had helped blow up the Gorgopotamos viaduct, severing the Thessaloniki–Athens railway line and thus cutting what was wrongly thought to be the main supply route to Rommel’s Afrika Korps – one of the most spectacular wartime acts of resistance in occupied Europe. Although called ‘Major’ by Frank, Woodhouse in fact – at twenty-seven – had just been gazetted colonel, heading the Allied Military Mission to Greece, where he took the Italian surrender, his gingerish hair and eyebrows dyed black to make him look Greek. His co-saboteur Eddie Myers was now visiting Cairo.
By autumn 1943 SOE Cairo was running eighty such missions in the Balkans. Operation Animals had recently scored another success by blowing up the Asopos railway bridge, persuading the Germans to divert two divisions to Greece away from Sicily during the invasion Frank had participated in.
Frank lied to his parents that his was ‘a safe job. You know me well enough – I wouldn’t volunteer for anything dangerous . . .’ He told them truthfully that his new job was ‘hush-hush’ but contrived a way to communicate about it. His closest friend from 1940 in Richmond, Rupert Raw, was also in SOE: he advised his folks to drop in, in North Oxford, on Rupert’s wife Joan.
Theo soon lunched with Joan Raw and that October in a letter to Frank praised the Greek Partisans, while EJ wrote to his sons that ‘If either of you gets into the Balkans, may you find the place where Apollo rose as apple king’ – the theory about Apollo’s origins long attractive to Frank.75 On 1 November, EJ wrote of a possible landing in the Balkans: ‘We are not as crass as we appear . . . hints dropped in the press tell us more than we let on . . . we know what perils you both have to face . . . those Greek and Jugoslav patriots must be the world’s ace heroes.’ EP, too, started learning modern Greek and continued that autumn in Algeria.
Frank had joined Phantom in 1940 in the hope of getting to Greece but, while he was sailing, Greece had fallen. Now he joined SOE for the chance of playing a part in Greece’s liberation. He had been studying and practising modern Greek in the intervening three years and must have looked an excellent recruit. And SOE was famously hospitable to Winchester men.
On Frank’s letter-headings SOE Cairo appears sometimes as ‘MO4’ and at other times as ‘Force 133’; during its four years of active existence it changed its name seven times, each new name corresponding to a change of structure. During the same period it had eight heads: three civilians who mistrusted soldiers and five senior officers who mistrusted politicians and diplomats. SOE was responsible to the Ministry of Economic Warfare through its HQ in London, to the Foreign Office through the diplomatic representatives of the latter, and to the commanders-in-chief for its operational activities. This triple responsibility was a source of confusion and reflected uncertainty about its role. It was in perpetual flux, lacking internal cohesion: four months after the first party of British parachutists were dropped into Greece, SOE Cairo – scandalously – had lost all record of their names.
His Phantom colleague and fellow CP member Frank Jacobson wrote that Frank was known and loved ‘not simply by a few intimate friends but by a large section of the progressive forces from Alexandria to Baghdad and beyond’. An invisible history is implicit here: Communist sub-culture in Egypt revolved around the Rond Point bookshop near the Cairo Opera, selling the biggest selection of magazines, newspapers and political pamphlets in the Middle East, including KD: The Middle East Forces Anti-Fascist Monthly, printed clandestinely in Haifa, then smuggled into Cairo by train. KD’s editorial adviser was Major James Klugmann, second-in-command of the Yugoslav section in SOE, who almost certainly recruited Frank that September, seeing that Communist BLOs had a special usefulness among Balkan Partisans because of common aims and sympathies. According to one source, Frank and Klugmann talked for long periods, probably in Shepheard’s Hotel, about their shared ‘blind faith’ in the Partisans, East European literature, Christopher Caudwell’s Studies in a Dying Culture, their Communist ideals and Klugmann’s passionate belief that CP members again needed to join up with socialists within an alliance recalling the Popular Front in a war for ‘national liberation, peoples’ liberation, colonial liberation’.
Above all, there was the smart converted cinema off Suliman Pasha Street, once called La Potinière and now renamed Music-for-All, with cheap but good food, a place hospitable to many different cultural events including those staged by ABCA and ENSA76 – among them a Music Appreciation Society that had since 1942 been meeting weekly in a quiet back room, convenient cover for a Marxist Study Group. Within the central space in Music-for-All the six famous Forces Parliaments convened, with up to 500 men attending, starting in September 1943. During the 1 December Parliament a motion to nationalise the distributive trades was passed with an overwhelming majority, as was an Inheritance Restriction Bill on 1 January 1944. Press interest was keen, and war correspondents and photographers were invited. After German propaganda broadcast news of the ‘mutinous radicalism’ of the British forces in Egypt, the mock-Parliaments were stopped, their leading members posted to the Far East and the future Labour MP Leo Abse held in prison for participating in a debate to nationalise the Bank of England.
These Forces Parliaments are famous for many reasons. First they show the doublethink that made the British fight for democratic freedoms denied to their own fighting men. Then the Parliaments portend the July 1945 election when Churchill was unceremoniously kicked out of office and the clear message conveyed that the country would never again return to the vastly unequal and unjust days of the 1930s, to depression and unemployment. For ten days in Cairo that July other ranks refused to salute officers.
Lastly in Music-for-All socialist and CP voted on a single joint Labour ticket. This was consonant with Labour and CP uniting some years before to create the University Labour Federation, reflecting consensual politics that we remember as the Popular Front, a consensus that – whether Frank attended any of the first four Forces Parliaments before being dropped abroad or not, which we do not know – he found sympathetic.
Everything about Frank belongs to this one particular historical moment, when Hitler had to be beaten and a new, better world created.77 His final letter to young Edward in April 1944, stressing the need for ‘a new communal ethic’, was utterly of its time. Indeed M. R. D. Foot wrote to Frank in August 1943 about the ‘Need to build up some . . . communal feeling in Europe so that we don’t win the war only to lose the peace.’ Here was that optimistic consensus between a far leftist like Frank and the more cautious Michael which was famously charted in Paul Addison’s 1975 work The Road to 1945 and which Frank’s brother later termed the ‘radical populist euphoria of 1944’.
Frank was a typical 1930s intellectual, fashioned during the years of the Popular Front, that genuine alliance of left-radical opinion which simplified the world by dividing it into two opposing camps, Fascist versus anti-Fascist, free man versus slave, and hence white versus black. Young Edward, forty years later, elegised this as ‘that half-democratic, half anti-Fascist time, when the chances of life were shared, the young gave priority to the injured, the sick, the children and the old, and the pursuit of private privilege was deemed contemptible’. Edward called the period 1936–46, in a stirring phrase, ‘the decade of heroes’ – of which Frank was notably one.
The Popular Front came into being in 1935 during the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International uniting all parties that opposed Fascism. They were to stop Fascism for good, and Frank was soon to pay its pieties tribute in his most famous letter, which gave the title for his posthumous memorial volume There is a Spirit in Europe. This winning spirit, he divined, was ‘broader and more generous than any dogma’. In other words it recalled the Popular Front. (Iris Murdoch in 1940 had noted Frank’s ‘simplicity tinged with melodrama’: the hero fitted his period perfectly, simplicity and melodrama belonging to the moment of the Popular Front itself.)
One commentator wrote, ‘Spain was the first and last crusade of the British left-wing intellectual. Never again was such enthusiasm mobilized . . . Disillusion had not yet sapped the idealism of the young.’ Frank was so deeply marked by the Spanish Civil War that Mussolini’s fall in July 1943 appeared to him ‘the work of John Cornford, Ralph Fox and the Carritts’, all of whom fought, and some died, in Spain. Frank remembered those men who, ‘in the Sierras and on the banks of the Ebro, bore the heat of the day alone, fighting against hopeless odds’. Their efforts had paid off and the Italian surrender was ‘the final victory of the Asturian miners and Barcelona working men who proved the idea that freedom and Fascism can’t live in the same world, and the free man will always win’.
This is very striking. We who come after know that freedom and dictatorship can not merely cohabit, but have done so promiscuously for sixty-odd post-war years, and will probably continue to make uneasy bedfellows. Frank’s certainties belonged to a period of political idealism as remote from us as the Romantic Revival two centuries earlier, of which his heroic age was the last flowering.
The hope, however admirable, that freedom would finally defeat Fascism in some apocalyptic showdown was never likely to be justified by results, if only because freedom and servitude cohabited within the Alliance itself: the USSR, for all Frank’s and Edward’s illusions about it, was scarcely a free society, but in its own way would prove in time to be a corrupt tyranny as brutal and terrifying as Nazism.
To this Frank was not entirely blind and deaf. If he wrote at this time to Catherine Dalton (née Nicholson) to the effect that ‘When the Communists come to power after the war, as they surely will, I will be the first to be hung as a heretic,’ then he knew he was exactly the kind of independent-minded sympathiser who would soonest be purged in post-war Eastern Europe. He had the self-abnegating commitment to a secular faith shown by many CP members but lacked their fear of independent thinking or their masochistic attraction and submission to authority.78 Such criticism as we have from him of the USSR is mild. For example he was sceptical about whether the Battle of Britain had been adequately reported in the Russian press at the time – or reported at all. (German bombers were in 1940 said to be fuelled with Russian oil, the two dictatorships then in monstrous collusion.)
Yet there is still much that is starry-eyed in his feeling for Russians and Slavs in general. It starts with the Russian language itself, ‘a sad, powerful language [that] flows gently off the tongue like molten gold’, compared to which – he wrote from parachute school that October of 1943 – ‘Polish and Czech seem nervous and restless, Bulgarian poor and untutored, Serbo-Croat – probably the next most satisfactory, just a little barbarous, a fine language for guerillas and men who drink slivovitz in the mountains . . .’79
There was much discussion among the Allied leaders at the Cairo and Teheran conferences of the role of Balkan guerrillas, to the gratification of Frank’s SOE colleagues in Cairo – a matter to whose political complexities we return. Indeed a high-level deputation of Greek Partisans, aka Andartes, which had arrived in August was still in Cairo for the first week Frank spent at SOE; its members were at first roughly mishandled, leading to Lord Glenconner’s resignation, and left only on 17 September.80 Frank probably met them, as he also met Yugoslav Partisans that December.
Meanwhile the death-throes of Fascism did not lessen its vileness, the egoism of one man – Hitler – causing a bloodbath in Europe. Had even the reign of Attila the Hun been as bad as the Nazi Terror? Frank doubted it. The Russian newspaper Ogynek carried pictures of murdered women, of gibbets and of ‘the whole of proud Kharkov desolate’. The ordeals of Warsaw and Belgrade over three years were intensifying and the Germans had just set fire to Frushka Gora – the so-called ‘Jewel of Serbia’ with its ancient monasteries – thereby igniting thirteen centuries of Serb pride. Frank refers weekly to new horrors, and the ‘deluge of black anger’ they inspire in him. He quoted Ilya Ehrenburg: ‘You could not call [the Germans] beasts: the bears would be offended.’ He agreed with his brother that this ‘Devilry’ needed to be driven out of Europe: his rhetoric dwelt on the Last Days, Judgement and the Redemption of history.
He had managed in 1940 to stomach the Soviet Union’s aggression against the Finns and even countenance its savagery against the Poles. The more vexed the politics of the war became, the simpler and more streamlined his language. Frank understood the living power of rhetoric, which his father the previous April called both ‘matter’ and ‘poise and self-carriage’. That month, too, he praised Antony and Cleopatra to Iris, a play both admired: ‘There is something uncanny about the way in which these slightly sordid middle-aged lovers, who have talked very little else but drivel for the first three acts, suddenly rise in the last two to the very pinnacles of poetry, and blaze their trail across the mind of humanity for all time.’
Trail-blazing was on his mind. On Boxing Day he wrote her a letter that quoted from his translation of Mayakovsky’s ‘The Secret of Youth’81 about casting the world anew:
With the passing of the year I seem to have come to a watershed in my life . . . 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.’82 If not, why then those that follow us will be able to smile far more happily and honestly in the world that we all helped to make.
While Michael Foot wrote to Frank angrily on 25 May 1943 warning him against taking suicidal risks in his longing to finish either Fascism or himself – ‘Neither a true choice nor a true opposition’ – Frank and Iris by contrast shared a do-or-die, all-or-nothing romanticism. And the apocalyptic note in these last months of his life runs through all his letters in a vein of heroic simplicity. He repeatedly prophesies – and invokes – a final unifying of Europe to defeat Fascism.
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 which is finer and braver than anything that tired continent has known for centuries, and 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 . . .
This letter continues: ‘For every one that is killed or mutilated by the Gestapo [and their allies], two more are made by that example . . .’
This piety that even a democrat’s death is in a sense creative he repeated on 18 January 1944. For, by showing that the democrat cares more for freedom than for life itself, ‘one, or ten or a hundred new ones are created by his example’. The death of a Fascist had the opposite result.
This directly recalls the early Christian author Tertullian (ad c. 160–220), for whom Christian martyrs’ blood was seed, so that ‘the more you mow us down, the more numerous we grow’. Thus Tertullian encouraged those in prison about to be fed to the lions, opposing a Christian death to the false ideals that comfort pagans. Christians are soldiers of the living God, and no one becomes a soldier without painful training. Prison and martyrdom are that training ground. Frank always liked best of Christ’s sayings ‘the one about losing one’s life and gaining it’.
This millenarial sub-text now lends his prose its intense and heady excitement, taking force from a Marxist version of the End of Days: that the death of Fascism entailed the inevitable birth of something new and better, a faith essentially religious. It underlies his pious hope that the terror bombing of German cities that was making the London Blitz look ‘like a nuisance raid . . . may outlaw war for ever’.
The family felt this quasi-religious charge first. It is appropriate that one year later, on 27 November 1944, Theo wrote to young Edward, then fighting in Italy, asking him to choose one of two given moments on Christmas Day to read Frank’s ‘Christmas message’ when she and old Edward also planned reading it in England. They hoped against hope that Frank might have been taken prisoner and be alive and thus the family would keep faith with Frank’s spirit.
Frank needed training for the coming battle. A running series of nicknames points to his lack of coordination – at school ‘Caliban’ and in his OCTU ‘Tarzan’. In SOE Frank was ‘Ham’ for ham-fisted. That – by contrast – he was soon observed during a single morning prosecuting to successful conclusions conversations in Polish, Arabic, German, French and Italian evoked (he noted) silent awe.
He went to commando school, where they taught skills that included sabotage and the use of small firearms; boxing lessons improved his fitness and coordination. He insisted he had at last caught up with his own strength and ‘had the makings of a powerful thug’; photos show how remarkably handsome he had also grown. Commando school was followed by parachute school at nearby Ramath David in northern Palestine, starting on 22 October 1943 with one week’s preparation for five drops, of increasing difficulty, over three days. A Pole with a wooden leg called Andrew Kennedy (aka Andrzej Koverski) accompanied parties emplaning for their first jump, always first out of the aircraft. The theory went that if a Pole with a wooden leg could jump, so could you: ‘It worked with outstanding success.’
The main discussion points of these ten days were fear and courage. During the preparatory week, he dreamed roughly three nightmare descents per night, tangled and struggling in the rigging lines. He was being tested: it recalled working late at school for an exam. He noted in his diary, ‘so, you see, it’s really rather good fun’, yet he also pointed out that even when instructors with fifty jumps behind them did demonstration jumps, some after hitting the ground were still tense and shaking for minutes. A flush of courage was needed just to get you out of the door. An officer from the preceding intake who bragged that half an hour’s heavy bombardment was a far more searching test of courage none the less admitted to Frank being ‘shit-scared’ for his first three jumps, adding: ‘if you’ve known that fear and overcome it, I don’t think anything is going to scare you’. Such was the theory.
This officer had volunteered to become a parachutist on vague rebound from a girl for whom he did not much care. Frank considered how arbitrary were many significant life-choices, how randomly everybody was shaped and blown. He admired the camaraderie, courage and resourcefulness of his fellows, their hatred of having life cut and dried. He used the metaphor of ‘jumping’ for the inbuilt uncertainty of life itself, wondering where he would ‘land’ in civilian life, as a journalist, general, actor or teacher.
And he played with other futures: writing a DLitt on the Decembrist rebellion of 1825 and becoming a Workers Education Association (WEA) lecturer in Slavonic Studies, or researching a whole raft of disparate Slavic topics.83 Then he might be a Daily Worker correspondent in Shanghai (living in China was a persistent 1943 fantasy), a painter in Samoa, a biographer of Trotsky or a London University historian. Bulgaria, as well as China, recurred. Perhaps he would lecture with the British Council on Oscar Wilde to Sofia University students, or – another favourite daydream – even manage a one-man rose farm in Bulgaria. As often, ‘Bulgaria’ meant escape. Theo wrote promising to buy him a motorbike to offset his restlessness.
Meanwhile the ordeal of parachuting loomed, and the drugs others used to lessen terror were feeble jesting, drink and benzedrine. Frank refused alcohol until his final night, when he bought some wine. He had a temperature – either flu or sandfly fever – causing him to sweat through two pairs of pyjamas in one night and accepted aspirin and quinine to deal with night-sweats.
The first and easiest drop was from a Hudson – a door-jump at 1,000 feet. Frank dived clean into space and ideal air conditions and, after the slipstream had shaken him like a terrier with a rat, was wafted away without ever coming to the correct position of attention. He experienced neither bliss nor terror as his chute opened and he drifted awkwardly down to a landing that recalled a hard rugby tackle. Fever dulled fear and feeling alike.
But soon after he landed, the last parachute of the ‘stick’ came down at more than double normal speed – not as they hoped a container, but a man roman-candling, his chute failing to open and his screams clearly audible as he plummeted to earth. He broke one leg but sustained terrible internal injuries from which he soon died.
It was an ill beginning. A brisk pep talk from a flight-lieutenant advised a hearty breakfast, assuring them that this happened only once in 10,000 drops and that ‘you’re just as likely to get killed riding a bicycle’. This failed to lift their spirits. Frank observed his own difficulty experiencing pity for someone he did not know and a self-centred annoyance that the anxiety of future jumps would now be intensified. The second was from a Vickers Wellington (aka a Wimpy): a narrow-aperture jump with the extra fear of hitting your head. He watched the sweating faces and bulging eyes of his stick-mates straining upwards in prayerful farewell before joining them, whacking his head on landing and endangering his ankles.
The night before the third jump Frank dreamed of twenty descents. This was a traditional time for some to pull out of the training (like Peter Wright, who had first told Frank about SOE). But although this jump had the added scare-factor of being from only 600 feet, so your parachute had less time to open, he landed swiftly with a very gentle side collapse. The man ahead of him on the fourth – at only 500 feet – froze, and had to be pushed out of the plane, while the next chap refused point-blank; but Frank flopped out like a sleepwalker, hitting his pack on the doorway, spinning and burning his hand in the rigging line before gently landing.
The fifth and last was the night jump and in prospect the most eerie and terrifying. He drifted towards a flaming beacon but managed to land, with only a moderate thump, to one side. He had now graduated, and celebrated with a bottle of red wine during a rowdy party.
Frank took stock afterwards in a hotel in Alexandria. He had first felt tested during five months in the Libyan Desert in 1942, next in his five days in Sicily that July. Parachuting was his third ‘blooding’. He was moderately pleased to have gained his ‘wings’. While his senses had often been numbed by the terror of jumping, and he never felt master of himself until several seconds after hitting the ground, he had learned that he need not be paralysed by terror. His conclusion was both heroic and sententious, that ‘Every man is a weapon in this fight, which will only end when we achieve some mythical perfection. My tempering has only just begun. I mean the process to be thorough.’
One week after gaining his wings Frank was publicly rebuked by a Greek girl. In May, immediately after he had received news of Iris’s deflowering, he and two other officers and seven NCOs were deputed to learn modern Greek for three mornings a week with a view to a possible Phantom landing in the Dodecanese Islands. Young, comely Maroula Thalis came out from the Berlitz School to Sidi Bishr camp outside Alexandria with black lively hair, fierce restless eyes and a figure that ‘gave one all the wrong ideas when she started rubbing the blackboard’. She liked people and had humanity and an attractive way of collapsing with laughter during class. Frank sent her cat-stories for homework. He listed her virtues, ending with integrity, being religious in just the right way and ‘less of a tart than any girl I’ve met’, suggesting the fear of female sexuality that he had confessed to Iris.
‘Love (Eros) and the Cat. A Love Story’.
Maroula crops up in his letters and diaries over the following six months, moved by the flowers he sends when the unit discontinued Greek lessons (preparing now for the Sicilian landings instead). Their attraction was mutual: she enjoins him always to be ‘serious’, teaches him to tango, takes him to watch her play basketball and frets over his thinness.
She was no doubt again useful for practising modern Greek when, from September onwards, he hoped once more to be dropped into her country. Maroula was one of three Greek girls in Alexandria wearing his badge. Women have taken keepsakes from fighting men for centuries, and you could buy badges for a few shillings at a Naafi store-counter. Neither the RA nor SOE was among the few regiments so proud as to discourage the custom.
She once lunched with him unchaperoned in public – the ‘height of immorality’ among stuffier Alexandrian Greeks – and pinched his arm twice when dancing with him. Frank, who we know ‘could flirt only in a foreign language’, sounds in all this a thoroughgoing spinster. He took fright when he found himself the only non-family at her nephew’s baptism: this was ‘a bit final’.
Old Edward warned him against ‘sirens’ and implied – possibly accurately – that the tale of the rich older man Maroula’s father wanted her to marry was a ploy to entrap him. He also reminded Frank that a young English officer now was an enormous catch. ‘There are absolutely first rate girls [elsewhere],’ EJ exhorted, pretending that he was president of a permanent Selection Committee for Vetting Prospective Cats and Wives, the latter more serious – ‘for a Tib if not up to standard can be drowned’. Both his sons had ‘atrocious taste in girls’ – no doubt a reference to EP’s love for Wendy and Frank’s for Iris.
Theo’s contribution was to ‘terrorise suitable damsels’ into writing to Frank. One was Tony Forster’s sister Fifi, whom Theo called ‘cocksure of herself, a good hearted little piece’. The education given clever English girls appalled Theo: never letting them discuss even the wartime news, let alone its political implications, sent out into the world ‘well-bred little pale white mice, silly and unable to do up a parcel properly or look up their own trains, giggling and trembling at the sight of a telephone or a railway guide . . .’ Theo noted a second category of girls who should be trained merely to be charming dance partners, ‘dizzy, completely foolish, ravishingly pretty and well-turned out . . . glamour girls’. Neither category enticed Frank who, judging these views ‘extremely just and neatly phrased’, agreed that he would be hard to please. (Theo probably doubted that any girl was good enough for her son and quite possibly hoped at some level that his heart belonged to Mother.)
Frank wearing his ‘wings’, November 1943.
On 6 November, when in the half-light of Ramleh Square in Alexandria he met up with Maroula fresh from a Berlitz class, she noticed the parachute badge newly sewn on to his arm. She stamped her foot and gave him a ‘rocket’, no doubt fearing his being dropped into occupied territory. ‘How stupid you are! Weren’t you happy with [Phantom]?’ she demanded in Greek. Frank bowed his head until the storm passed and then suggested dinner the following night. From his diary: ‘with a really nice girl one doesn’t want to talk about significant things . . . I’ve never met anyone so lively, so full of laughter, so little evil. It would take very little to make me fall in love with her.’ Maroula and Frank called each other ‘thou’ in Greek, implying intimacy; she called in on him each day.
Frank longed for mutual sexual love and believed marriage its proper context. On Malta that July he had been ‘sick with envy’ at all the courting couples, and cheered up his furious, downhearted men after they saw newspaper pictures of Canadian soldiers marrying British girls: would there be anyone left to marry when they got back? Old Edward pretended that Canadians were marrying only girls who were ‘good riddance’, so that a ‘helluva pick’ of beautiful ones would await his return: he understood Frank’s fears. Indeed Frank’s story ‘Lofty Fades Away’ concerns a nihilist who, seeing life as futile, wishes before death to father a child. Frank’s gay friend Roger Keyes84 offered to help find him a wife.
Considering all this his rejection of Maroula – in love with him and able to bear his children – requires explanation. Frank’s invention of contradictory excuses for not marrying Maroula suggests confusion. He claimed first that he would not marry till he was forty-five – and then to Maroula’s daughter – and followed that by pretending to be not only an atheist but also an anarchist. After that he further insulted her by inventing a fiancée at home. Frank aptly called Maroula ‘my Nausicaa’, after the princess whose love for Odysseus exiled by war was never expressed but who mothered him instead: Homer knew the painful chastity that war imposes.
Frank tried to explain to his parents, writing: ‘You ask for an explanation of my cable NOT MARRIED YET. We could have fallen in love but – for all that I seem weak-willed and impulsive – I have a very definite plan for living . . . my wife would have to have far fewer illusions than Maroula, or the same as mine, craziest of all – that the whole of life can be cast anew [emphasis added],’ the phrase from his Mayakovsky translation implying that he would marry if not a Communist, then at least an idealist.
The same phrase crops up in his Boxing Day letter to Iris: ‘We must crush the Nazis and build our whole life anew.’ Iris, whose first novel would carry the epigraph ‘’Tis well an old age is out, / And time to begin a new,’ was his true soul-sister. And Frank seemed to recognise his own dreamy romanticism when in his diary he admired Don Quixote as the ‘lofty visionary who had no regard for material and practical interests’. His old loyalty to Iris was arguably as quixotic as his new dedication to the Bulgarian Partisans.
Indeed there is an echo between Frank choosing unattainable, distant, complicated Iris over comely, accessible Maroula and his choosing the Bulgarian over the Greek Partisans. In both he opted for some ideal impossibility, and for an heroically difficult goal. A hint of this tendency haunts his praise to Iris of Antony and Cleopatra that April, a play that promised ‘us lesser folks . . . that we might . . . provided we still have the grace to be dissatisfied, know a moment like Antony’s, – at any rate that we are not doomed to be Octavians . . .’ ‘The grace of dissatisfaction’ is a striking phrase, one he associated both with politics and with love for Iris. ‘One must never forget one’s princesse lointaine, otherwise one is in danger of becoming satisfied and that would be the end of all living,’ he wrote on 1 November. Thus he finally jilted Maroula for Iris – or for his idea of her.
Iris uses the word ‘romantic’ of Frank four times in nine months. Under his enviable guise of apparent practicality she well understood Frank’s dogged otherworldliness.
The simplicities of the Popular Front were by late 1943 making way for a much more complex world, and Russian military successes were creating new anxieties. The Thompson family, as always, were shrewd observers. Theo around Bledlow village for two years propagandised Aid to Russia. In this fourth winter of the war, she wrote:
A collector will call at your door between Nov 7th and 14th. If £90 is raised, Mr Wooster has promised to add £10. Watch the thermometer opposite the Post Office. Proceeds of the Whist drive on Nov 17th will also be added.
She raised £109 for Russia week in 1942 and £107 in 1943. Not bad, she thought, for a hamlet of 150 houses. On hearing over breakfast the grand swinging chorus of ‘Soviet Fatherland’ on the wireless Theo wept into her porridge. EJ, stirred too, agreed that ‘one lives for the Russian news’.
Frank noticed how ‘smugly pleased’ everyone was by Soviet victories, for people hoped that Germany might as a result move twenty or thirty divisions to the USSR, which would – he feared – in turn delay the liberation of Warsaw and other cities. Russian victories brought other dangers too. Old Edward feared – accurately – that, if the Russians demanded a post-war corridor to the Aegean, nobody would have the moral right to refuse them, and Balkan nations would thus be condemned to subservience to the USSR. Young Edward also observed from Algeria how some feared the Russians might get to Berlin first, before the Americans and Brits, and thus bring Bolshevism into the very heart of Europe.
Frank, EP and like-minded people had long agitated for a Second Front, to gain the Soviet Army some relief. EP now feared that this might be hastened for bad reasons: Russian victories might stimulate those in the UK losing interest in total war to ‘fight politically against the Russians’ – competing with them for control of liberated territories. The Americans were amassing food supplies as a weapon against ‘anarchy’ among the liberated peoples; food could be useful as a bribe to keep them sweet and biddable for capitalism too; in a starving continent only governments that Americans deemed ‘safe’ would be given control of food.
Nowhere was the embryonic Cold War clearer in 1943 than in Greece and Yugoslavia. In both countries the Partisans divided into two opposing camps engaged in mutual strife over which would control the country post-war, one Communist, the other (in Greece) Republican or (in Serbia) Royalist. In Greece a bloody civil war, which would not end until 1949, was just beginning.
Which factions was SOE Cairo to back? The Greek case was complicated by Churchill’s gratitude to King George II of the Hellenes, the British Empire’s last remaining ally during the dark days at the end of 1940. He wanted Greece post-war to be a monarchy and a democracy, and, in the infamous ‘percentages agreement’ between Churchill and Stalin determining – in effect – which countries post-war would be on which side of the Iron Curtain, the USSR would not demur. SOE tried vainly in Greece to bind both sides together into a single movement under British command. By November Churchill had been persuaded by the Foreign Office to ‘liquidate’ the Communist-led EAM and ELAS85 who ‘must be starved and struck at by every means in our power’, a proposal vexed by the fact that there were eighty British personnel serving with ELAS units. The Yugoslav case was opposite: Churchill was persuaded during 1943 unequivocally to support Tito’s efficient and well-disciplined Partisans and to abandon support for Mihailović’s Chetniks, who were secretly assisting the Germans. Klugmann may have prepared the way by doctoring relevant statistics; and Fitzroy Maclean, leader of the British military mission to Tito, met with Churchill in Cairo at the beginning of December. This clinched Allied support for Tito by the Big Three just agreed at Teheran, and played a role in Frank’s decision to ditch Greece for Yugoslavia/Bulgaria.
Frank encountered these tensions head-on, as Peter Wright, also working in SOE Greek section, witnessed. They attended daily briefings that they termed ‘Prayers’, perhaps because enshrining false pieties. They were led by a Captain Dan Norton, Greek-speaking and with an MC won on Crete, who induced in Frank furious indignation by exaggerating the successes of the Republican Partisans under General Napoleon Zervas. Norton simultaneously minimised the role of the CP Partisans, by whom Frank was tremendously impressed, as they were already the more disciplined and by far the bigger group. The internal politics of Greece reproduced in miniature the international rivalry of the USSR, USA and Great Britain.
Norton made clear that SOE’s help would be given generously to Zervas and only grudgingly to the CP Partisans. Frank believed – wrongly – that the Gorgopotamos had been blown up only by the latter, and that the British, in attributing this action to both groups, were lying. They were not: that act of sabotage represented the only British success ever in getting the two sides to collaborate. Since then the two groups had been rehearsing the first stages of ferocious civil war. Its repercussions reached Cairo when Greek troops in the Near East mutinied and the British imprisoned them.
Frank and Peter Wright had what Frank termed daily ‘commination services’ during which they denounced the British establishment and the ‘Bankers and Brewers’ governing SOE and agreed how much better the world would be after the defeat of Fascism. Frank struggled for weeks to control his anger and then for a further spell to have his assignment changed.
By 1 December he had disentangled himself from his promise to be dropped into Greece and was working at a desk job once again. He put a brave face on his disappointment by writing gloomily to Iris that he supposed now that it might not be a tragedy if he survived the war. In a tone of resignation, he now proclaimed his enjoyment of sedentary pleasures: ‘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’.86 For three sad weeks he tried out this new role of disenchanted, desk-bound seer.
But he was pressing for a fighting role elsewhere in the Balkans and accomplished this on 24 December: he was now to drop into Serbia to liaise with Bulgarian Partisans. It was safer for them in Serbia than in Bulgaria proper. His Slavophilism, his knowledge of Russian and his politics must all have recommended him for the job. He also knew a little Serbo-Croat and now turned to Bulgarian – one of those languages, he boasted, that like Italian were handed you on a plate: ‘simply Russian as a Turk would talk it’. He had in 1941 noted that ‘even the old peasant Bulgars will turn [against Fascism] in the end – just you see’.
Peter remembered Frank just before he set out as ‘a fine dreamer, a versatile scholar and a true internationalist’. He was cheerful and confident, keenly aware that he was going not just on an adventure, but to liberate Europe from Fascism. ‘How wonderful it would be to call Europe one’s fatherland, and think of Krakow, Munich, Rome, Arles, Madrid as one’s own cities,’ he had rhapsodised earlier. Now he added: ‘My eyes fill very quickly with tears when I think of what a splendid Europe we shall build.’
In Bulgaria a kindergarten, a station and a biscuit factory have all been named after Frank Thompson, the country’s second most famous Englishman (Gladstone being the first). From the perspective of Sofia it is tempting to read Frank’s story – on the analogy of Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘The Convergence of the Twain’ – as if his and Bulgaria’s rendezvous were forewritten in the stars. And indeed his longstanding fascination with that country is mysterious and uncanny.
Yet Frank was on Bulgarian territory proper87 for exactly one fortnight before his capture and execution, and he opted to fight with the Bulgarian Partisans as a way of resolving various types of confusion, only four weeks before his departure. At parachute school he had pondered the capricious smallness of men’s lives and fates. When he was dropped into Serbia on the night of 25 January 1944 Thompson family politics affected his decision to go there.
His parents unwitttingly provided him with an urgent motive. Letters from them had waited in the wrong pigeon-hole in the post office for weeks, until after he had learned by 18 December from a mutual friend that they were plotting to get out to the Middle East themselves. EJ secured leave of absence from Oriel College and cabled Theo’s cousin Bayard Dodge, President of the American University of Beirut, and wrote also to several others about a job in the Levant or Egypt, telling Frank partly disingenuously, ‘It would not be fair to have your parents on your doorstep.’ Frank, mulling over whether or not to be dropped to work with the Bulgarian Partisans, saw that they might well come to Cairo and sent a very long, vehement and muddled reply, bristling with caveats.
He warned his parents that Cairo’s literary/social scene was second rate and would hardly replace their existing circle of friends in Oxford and London. Cairo was now a forgotten backwater. He resented their supposition that he might not want them so close. Now grown up, he boasted, he was ‘beyond being embarrassed’ by their proximity. It was not as if he were concealing ‘three Turkish mistresses’. He implied that he had recently extricated himself ‘by graft and lying’ from a stooge job (referring to Greece). While he cautioned them on 18 December that he was, however, ‘not one of the fixtures of Cairo’ and that if he were still there when they came out he would be ‘extremely bad-tempered’, what he actually feared was his parents finding him still trapped in a mere desk job.
On 24 December he agreed, after days of uncertainty, to be dropped into Serbia to liaise with the Bulgarian Partisans, a far more dangerous undertaking than Greece. Meeting some Yugoslav Partisans visiting Cairo had just made a positive impression. But the prospect of his parents’ arrival in Cairo in 1944 – such powerful personalities that, love them though he did, he had to be away from them – played another part in his reckless decision: he never showed himself less emancipated from parental influence than by this gesture. They never knew about this synchronicity.
Frank wrote, ‘1944 is going to be a good year though a terrible one,’ greeting the prospect of his Via Dolorosa with exaltation. Soon he wrote to EP and his parents of an old Chinese proverb: ‘Of two sons, only one should be permitted to make a fool of himself and as the elder I claim this as of right.’ He, Frank, would soon put his life at risk: EP, who had the makings of an exceptional leader and would be needed after the war, was to take better care of his chances, and – he repeatedly admonished – avoid putting their parents through the possible loss of both their children. And when the war ends, whether Frank was there to introduce them or not, EP should meet up with Iris Murdoch, a ‘Compleat Humanist’, and they could work out his scheme of Dialectical Idealism together. Thus Frank prepared for his own sacrifice.