14

Afterlife

How can I live among this gentle

obsolescent breed of heroes, and not weep?

Keith Douglas, ‘Aristocrats’

The family thought that the BBC had an unofficial ban on mentioning the Bulgarian Partisans, that the British Government moreover refused permission for Frank’s two Bulgarian medals to be awarded – the Order of the People’s Liberty (First Class) and the Military Medal – and that Frank’s desk officer Hugh Seton-Watson, who met them and talked very frankly in 1944, had been reprimanded for getting Frank such aid and sorties as he had contrived. Family grievance was not assuaged when Kenneth Scott – whom they met in Room 238 in the Hotel Victoria on 3 January 1945 – received the DCM (Distinguished Conduct Medal). Why had Frank received no British decoration? They ignored the fact that posthumous decorations were then almost never awarded, and indeed Mostyn Davies’s DSO (Distinguished Service Order) had come on 1 June, which, though after his death, just preceded his being officially declared Missing Believed Killed.

It was Mostyn Davies’s mission that Frank had been dropped into Serbia to support, and the difference in the way each man was treated after his death is remarkable. Davies’s widow Brenda, like the Thompsons, sought proof of her husband’s end. She had also served in SOE and had not, under promise of secrecy, told Mostyn’s parents about their son’s demise. Lacking the Thompsons’ contacts and savoir-faire, she sent SOE the March 1945 News Chronicle article that purported to reveal the truth about Frank’s death, in order to try to accelerate disclosure about her husband’s. In vain.

Neither her suffering nor her ignorance ended in the 1940s. In the late 1950s she communed with her dead husband at what she understood to be his only memorial, in the Phaleron war cemetery in Athens, and later believed from Stowers Johnson’s 1975 book about Frank called Agents Extraordinary that Mostyn was buried in Gerdelicka near Ruplje in Serbia. She was accordingly agitated and distressed in 1990 to discover from the spring Special Forces Club magazine that his grave in Belgrade had just been blessed, a venue nobody over nearly fifty years had troubled themselves to mention to her. An ex-SOE officer named Captain Edgar Chavasse, working for Graves Registrations from 1946 to 1988, had exhumed what was left of Mostyn Davies’s remains: his notes make for the grimmest reading.

Comparison with Frank is salutary. Davies was as brave as Frank and gave his life for the identical cause: each man spent the final six months of his life working towards the liberation of Bulgaria, and SOE justly recorded Davies’s leadership after his death as both ‘heroic and inspiring’.117 Yet Davies is to this day devalued in Bulgarian accounts as cold, arrogant and condescending when not defamed as delaying sorties or – as we have seen – organising them exclusively to deliver his favourite foods. EP brilliantly showed in Beyond the Frontier how Mostyn Davies was encoded as the ‘bad’ or imperialist BLO, while Frank was gilded as the ‘good’, democratic BLO.118

 

Frank’s ceremonial reburial at Litakovo.

 

Frank, together with thirteen Partisans, was given a ceremonial reburial at Litakovo on 12 November 1944, with a weeping crowd of 50,000 in attendance. The contrast with Mostyn Davies, a forgotten name on casualty lists, is stark. Nineteen-forty-five saw a second ceremony on the anniversary of the first, the Consul’s wife Mrs Boyd-Tollington taking out rosemary and thyme from Theo’s garden together with some English earth and the Orthodox priest placing on the graves a libation of wine and fresh apples. Frank, long intrigued by the possible connection between Apollo and apples, would surely have approved. A third ceremony on 15 July 1947, which Theo and EP got permission to fly out via Prague to attend, featured a solemn observance in the National Theatre in Sofia, a retracing of the march with Partisan survivors up to the scene of the final battle and a reconsecration of his grave. Asked where Frank’s remains should find their final resting-place, they decreed that they should stay with his comrades in Litakovo. On the unveiling there of a memorial to Frank, the crowd knelt as if at religious observance. Some moving film footage survives of a black-clad Theo, austere and dignified at the graveside, consoling bereaved mothers of Partisans. On return she became Hon. Secretary to the Anglo-Bulgarian Friendship Society.119

 

Theo and EP with Bulgaria’s President Dimitrov, July 1947.

 

In public officialdom was blamed for Frank’s loss. In private his parents feared their own complicity. Perhaps it had all started long before the war? A neurotic perfectionist with a love of control, Theo wrote in 1935 that she feared that the way she and EJ had brought him up had nearly ‘broken Frank’s spirit’: he was too patient and philosophical for his age, and they had praised him insufficiently.

Frank, EJ added, was almost without flaw: his only weakness was thinking himself older than he was. ‘When fourteen he thought himself eighteen and so on . . .’ At twenty-three he had deemed himself fit for a hero’s death; EJ judged this precocious. Moreover Frank was ‘too restless to stay out his time at Winchester, and in his one year at Oxford, utterly restless’. Frank’s inbred wanderlust also played a part in the choices that led directly to his loss.

Theo at least was aware of dangers. She strongly argued against the BBC in 1947 making a radio play about Frank out of the family’s well-received commemorative There is a Spirit in Europe, in which they collected some of Frank’s poetry, letters and journals. A second edition was to come out the following year, but a radio play was a step too far.120 Theo feared unsympathetic portrayal of the Partisans, heartbreak for EP and herself, and the contempt of those who might think they were pushing Frank’s story for publicity’s sake, making Frank unpopular with his friends. Even her good friend Nancy Nicholson – the recent death of whose son David had been unaccompanied by any fanfare – had said to Theo, ‘You do get yourselves into the papers, don’t you!’

 

 

Pain from terminal cancer and having to deal with officials infuriated EJ equally. Believing the legend that Frank had avowed himself Communist121 and thus needlessly risked his life upset him greatly too. But disquiet at his own complicity may also have disturbed him. Frank’s schooling at Winchester certainly inculcated the classical ideal of ‘the good death, the public death’, but his father had groomed him for the role of tragic English hero too. One schoolfellow maintained that Frank’s parents had a major responsibility for his end: he had never outgrown his upbringing. Not for nothing had he written in 1942, ‘My father is the best-loved Englishman in India, my mother and grandfather the best-loved foreign folk in Syria . . . My dearest wish is to carve a similar niche for myself in Greece, Jugoslavia or Bulgaria.’ He had moreover obsessionally contemplated mortality, as his poems demonstrate, and prepared himself for immolation. Few poets have essayed so many epitaphs for themselves.

If Theo worried during the 1930s that they had ‘almost broken Frank’s spirit’ (through refusal to offer him praise), EJ had infected Frank with his own alarmingly high-minded chivalry. EJ, believing in the heroic virtue of going to the edge, had as we have seen expressed in October 1940 the bloodthirsty sentiment that to become a man entailed necessary ordeals. He wrote that it should ‘cost . . . everything a man has, to face the breaking of body and mind’. And Frank was also trying to redeem himself from his father’s taunt in April 1943 – the month he started scheming to join SOE – that his life risked turning into ‘a desultory tale’.

Moreover EJ had been writing a play about the recurrent type of Wandering Englishman in Balkan history. This was a character who – in EJ’s view, like Byron – symbolically sacrifices himself to redeem Britain’s historical guilt and bad faith by a ‘gesture’. Frank, who deplored the influence of Byronism on Pushkin and Lermontov and had reasonable doubts about the ‘mischievous doctrine’ of atonement too,122 none the less took an interest. In December 1943, when Frank opted to be dropped into Yugoslavia, EJ’s 1924 play Atonement was restaged. Frank acted out his father’s symbolic message himself, a sacrificial English lamb in the Balkans.

This accords with the most accurate123 Bulgarian biography, Kiril Yanev’s The Man from the Legend (2001), which starts by claiming that historically Great Britain has always been against Bulgaria, supporting the Ottoman Empire, and then at the Berlin Congress causing Bulgaria’s ‘ill-fated historical development’. Indeed Churchill himself called Bulgarians a ‘peccant’ or guilty people, deserving the ‘sharp lesson’ of having their cities bombed. Frank’s sacrifice is thus to Yanev ‘[a] sort of atonement for the sins of the British leaders towards Bulgaria’, and Frank is loved by Yanev’s fellow Bulgarians for the same reason.

Frank’s father was not prejudiced in favour of Bulgaria either. In a bitter letter to Major Last on 1 December 1944 EJ says he wishes Frank had stayed in Yugoslavia, whose villages were pro-Partisan and whose guerrillas were of proven quality. But two main reasons, EJ surmises, made Frank decide to join the march into Bulgaria, a country which EJ rightly saw to have been weighing the advantages of abandoning its support for Germany while waiting for the USSR to get close before surrendering. First, Frank’s one clear directive was to stay with the Bulgarians. Secondly, Frank refused to allow them to think – after all they had been through – that he would let them face new dangers without him. EJ saw Frank as exhibiting a suicidal ‘chivalry’, in context a significant word.124

The word ‘chivalry’ merits reflection. We know that Frank, just before leaving for the Balkans, was for weeks in Cairo prevented from writing by a broken finger, acquired when trying to get some drunken soldiers off a tram only to have them put him through the window instead. ‘One can’t really blame them.’ Not to blame Christmas drunks for causing you grievous bodily harm is indeed quixotic. But it was in character: the man who interpreted for him for three hours after his capture reported that Frank, so weak he lost consciousness, on being given a glass of water offered this first to Scott. That too has the ring of truth about it, as well as reprising the warrior-poet Sir Philip Sidney’s famous end. When a cupful of water was brought to Sir Philip, mortally wounded at Zutphen in 1586, he handed it to another wounded comrade, saying chivalrously, ‘Soldier: your need is greater than mine!’

Chivalry, too, arguably made Frank a lesser poet than Keith Douglas, with whom he otherwise has much in common. Douglas died in the same week, at the same age (in Normandy), and also lived in awe of an heroic father and failed to experience happy sexual love. Both poets fought in North Africa where both wrote of the cruelty and cowardice of Italian soldiers, and both described looting. But Frank is more chivalrous to Italians and more shocked by the looting, and it is hard not to think that – for all his bohemian and Communist sympathies – he is ultimately a less original poet than Douglas, who might have had Frank in mind in his marvellously moving poem ‘Aristocrats’, which celebrates the chivalric hero’s last stand:

 

The noble horse with courage in his eye,

clean in the bone, looks up at a shellburst:

away fly the images of the shires but he puts the pipe back in his mouth.

 

Peter was unfortunately killed by an 88;

it took his leg away, he died in the ambulance.

I saw him crawling on the sand, he said

It’s most unfair, they’ve shot my foot off.

 

How can I live among this gentle

obsolescent breed of heroes, and not weep?

Unicorns, almost,

for they are fading into two legends

in which their stupidity and chivalry

are celebrated. Each, fool and hero, will be an immortal.

 

These plains were their cricket pitch

and in the mountains the tremendous drop fences

brought down some of the runners. Here then

under the stones and earth they dispose themselves,

I think with their famous unconcern.

It is not gunfire I hear, but a hunting horn.

 

Tunisia 1943

 

Frank was also far less sure of his vocation than Keith Douglas, who entrusted most of the poems he wrote in the desert to Terence Tiller and Lawrence Durrell. Frank considered both ‘minor poets’ and channelled his literary aspirations, if at all, through contacts back in London, or left them to his father to look after. Encouraged by a foreword in the second volume of Penguin New Writing soliciting contributions from serving soldiers, he in November 1941 sent two untitled stories to John Lehmann, together with a chivalrous stamped-and-addressed envelope, and waited one anxious calendar year before these were returned unread, with an official stamp indicating that damage had rendered the package undeliverable. He made no further attempt. His father’s friend General Jack Collins published Frank’s fine account of the Libyan campaign, ‘Desert Memories’, in the spring 1943 Army Quarterly.125 He did not submit his poems for publication: his father did so on his behalf.

Unlike Keith Douglas, Frank was unsure whether poetry would be his métier, and made no attempt to ingratiate himself with Cairo literati. ‘The British Council people aren’t awfully thrilling . . . Dancing attendance on . . . Roger Keyes and Prof Bryn Davies . . . is a galaxy of minor poets. Bernard Shaw, Terence Tiller, Lawrence Durrell,’ he warned his parents on 18 December 1943. Frank knew Bryn Davies well enough to leave some of his effects with him when he was dropped into Serbia, while calling him ‘a second-rate brain’.126

He frequented the elegant café Groppi’s, enjoying their famous cakes cooked in clarified butter, but there is no evidence of his cultivating the doyenne of the Cairo literary and social scene Amy Smart or frequenting the Anglo-Egyptian Union at 179 Shria Fuad al Awali, haven of Cairo’s English-speaking literary life, or contacting such Cairo literary magazines as Parade, Personal Landscape or Salamander. If he had had the time or inclination to network in literary Cairo, he would most likely have met Murdoch’s future fiancé David Hicks, editing Citadel magazine from July 1942.

The fact is that Frank wondered whether writing poetry might be a youthful habit he would one day outgrow. Had he known that – like the mythical songster and greatest of poet-muses Orpheus – he was to die terribly and in Thrace, such foreknowledge would surely have elicited a wry smile.

 

 

In 1978 young Edward accepted an invitation to deliver the three Camp Lectures at Stanford University, choosing to return to the question of how Frank’s sacrifice had been received on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The following summer he and Dorothy revisited Bulgaria where they were ‘kidnapped’ by officialdom and fed the legend that SOE Cairo had daily betrayed Claridges’ positions to the Royalists. At exactly this time EP was equally disturbed and distressed by rumours circulated by a schoolfellow of Frank’s to the effect that Frank had entered Bulgaria only by threatening his Signals Sergeant with a pistol – denied by Scott; that Frank was betrayed to the Fascists for a large sum – possible; and that his end was ‘unpleasant’. The strange symmetry between these two opposing sets of legend helped inspire and drive his narrative.

 

EP and Theo at the graveside, July 1947.

 

By 1981, when he gave the lectures, the arrival of Cruise missiles in Britain had supervened. Edward, revered leader of the renewed movement for disarmament, was necessarily distracted by attacking the opposing ideologies of the Cold War. He apologised that his three lectures were consequently ill prepared. Their full title was ‘Journey across the Frontier: Tracking the Cold War to a Source: The Balkans, 1944’.

The Peace Movement informs Beyond the Frontier, the slim, elegant book put together by Edward’s widow and published four years after his death, for Frank is here the Cold War’s first martyr, wickedly betrayed by both West and East, a thesis deserving scrutiny. Edward thus ponders whether Dimitrov wished to destroy the Bulgarian Communists of the 2nd Partisan Brigade with his murderous and lunatic diktat that they proceed to Plovdiv. ‘The Soviet state disliked the self-activating revolutionary democracy of the Partisans only a little less than did the western allies’, for such Partisans – unlike Dimitrov himself – had not learned to toe the Moscow line.

But Beyond the Frontier also indicts Strategic Air Command for abandoning Frank and then Churchill for wanting him dead. To this observer Frank’s end already seems fated without such theories; the culpability of SOE was not in abandoning Frank but in sending him on an ill-thought-out mission in the first place, his doom made even more probable by Dimitrov’s intervention. But before considering EP’s new claims it is necessary to remember that 87 per cent of SOE files were destroyed after 1945 and what remains today is a fraction of once available evidence. Edward thought this destruction a malign attempt to bury guilty secrets, which is one possibility. What is certain is that much of the weeding was random and pointless, and establishment conspiracy, if it existed, was less monolithic than Edward believed.

Yet Frank’s loss aroused in EP many fears and suspicions. Visiting Bulgaria in 1947 Edward – like Theo in a highly charged emotional state – heartily disliked Frank’s Winchester schoolfellow Robert Conquest, now ACC Press Officer, whom he thought a ‘very hostile’ establishment agent, actively obstructing all honours due to Frank. In reality Conquest, though now famous as Stalinism’s scourge, had been in 1937–8 a CP member, and accounts himself in 1947 still sympathetic to the USSR. It was Conquest himself who approached Vladimir Topencharov, Bulgaria’s Deputy Foreign Minister and Press Director, with the suggestion that honouring Frank would bring credit equally to the Bulgarian CP and to Britain. It was thanks to Conquest that the Bulgars renamed Prokopnik station after Frank, placed a bas-relief of him there, and staged the ceremonies attended by his mother and EP. Of the seven British soldiers who died in Bulgaria with Claridges and Mulligatawny, Frank alone was singled out for beatification.

Edward further believed that Frank’s Partisans were deliberately starved of sorties.127 He could find only twenty-four sorties flown between February and May 1944, a time when urgent Cairo memos bemoan the bad weather that delays sorties and emphasise the desperate need for them, to avoid repetition of the disaster that befell Mostyn Davies.Yet if such a reduction had coincided with Frank’s odyssey across Bulgaria, Cairo by EP’s own admission received no messages from Frank after 11 May, so no sorties could in any case have reached Claridges, on the move non-stop and thus unable to establish pinpoints for drops.

In fact Sweet-Escott claims that, after a reduction due to the claims of Yugoslavia, sorties to Bulgaria actually increased, while Dencho Znepolski remembered that in March, April and May Partisans were ‘better armed than the regular [that is, Bulgarian] army – every Partisan group of eight had one machine-gun, four sub-machine-guns and loads of bombs and ammunition at their disposal’. Znepolski details air deliveries for which he signed inventoried receipts, sometimes driving more than 200 ox-drawn sleighs to a mountain top to collect munitions that required many horse-drawn carts to take the supplies away after they had been brought down from the mountains. He specifies 5,000 rifles, between 300 and 400 machine guns, between 700 and 800 sub-machine guns, much ammunition, sanitary materials, high-quality warm British Army clothes, waterproof and snow-resistant leather shoes, woollen socks, fine woollen underwear, the whole khaki-clad squad and 2nd Partisan Brigade starting to look like English troops.

British sorties aside, they also acquired such large quantities of Italian and German guns that they hid some in dug-outs and ammunition dumps. They even tried to return guns borrowed from Yugoslav Partisans: the English reproached them for disposing of items specifically dropped for Bulgarian use.

 

 

EP also believed that Frank’s murder on 10 June had the tacit approval of Churchill, who certainly hated Communists and spoke of getting rid of them. On 13 April in a minute: ‘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, even while we are working together.’ By ‘purging’, Churchill surely meant sacking rather than liquidating Communists, but a sleight-of-hand on EP’s part blurs the difference.

EP further maintained that the Bulgarians made it a condition that, if the UK stopped stimulating Partisan/Communist activity, Bulgaria would agree to turn democratic. Two facts trouble this hypothesis. In early June – during the precise week of Frank’s imprisonment – foreign secretary Anthony Eden at Churchill’s request formally proposed that Bulgaria post-war should be in the Soviet area of concern. The UK faced major problems in Greece and Yugoslavia, so in a tit-for-tat policy of benign neglect, it agreed to ignore Soviet interference in Bulgaria in return for Soviet tolerance of British interference in Greece. Churchill had no post-war game plan for Bulgaria for which Frank could be sacrificed. Moreover within twenty-four hours of Frank’s capture, on 1 June, Dobri Bozhilov’s pro-German government resigned in response to Soviet pressure, and Ivan Bagrianov’s pro-Western Cabinet did not formally take office until the day of Frank’s execution. With whom was this supposed British deal entailing Frank’s murder to be brokered?

This fast-changing politics might not encompass the whole story. It is always possible that intentions sown earlier that year by Churchill saw a belated harvest. What remains certain is that Frank was killed by Fascists. If his destruction had also been plotted by both Churchill in London and Dimitrov in Moscow that would have turned him into a proto-hero of the New Left – a forerunner of EP in 1980, then fighting capitalism and Stalinism simultaneously.

 

 

‘He was the kind of boy who became the butt of bullies and I, too little to protect him, would intervene with flailing fists and tears.’ This is EP’s seminal recollection of their time together at the Dragon School, when EP was six or seven and Frank eleven. Its relevance is clear: Frank was once again in 1944 the butt of bullies when EP’s tears could stop neither his torture nor his murder. EP in 1978 recalled Frank’s generation as ‘too bloody innocent by half . . . too open to the world, and too loyal to each other to live.’

Survivor guilt – as well as the nuisance of being his mother’s less favoured child – travelled with him. ‘It is by you that he [Frank] will live on,’ EJ in 1944 had enjoined, and Frank’s influence on Edward cannot be exaggerated. Contrary to popular misconception EP played no part in the famous Communist Party Historians’ Group, but was heavily involved in the Party’s organisation for writers whose company he preferred, and throughout the 1950s taught as much literature as history to his WEA students in Yorkshire. Edward, like Frank (and their father), at first thought himself foremost a poet.

One day in the 1960s Theo was unnerved to learn from a fellow train passenger reading her younger son’s The Making of the English Working Class that this major work of research and synthesis pioneered the then entirely new ‘history from below’, that he was widely regarded as the leading historian of his generation, and that he was acclaimed by some a genius.

Family piety absorbed him. It is not just that his first and final books commemorate Frank; he spent part of one New England summer researching his and Frank’s Jessup ancestry; and among his last books is a homage to his father, Alien Homage: Edward Thompson and Rabindranath Tagore.

Part of Edward’s life work would be what he called ‘liberating the intentions of the dead’, among whom Frank was foremost. When, in 1956, he and his wife Dorothy faced the trauma of leaving the CP, Edward was affronted by Bill Carritt’s reproach that Frank would have stayed. Furious, he wrote a very sharp – even for him – letter to Bill. He doubted that Frank would have stayed even as long as 1956, and this doubt seems just. Frank was the least doctrinaire of Communists – in Robert Conquest’s felicitous phrase, more ‘contrarian’ than apparatchik. Tony Forster never took Frank, either, for a dogmatic Communist.

Edward was inspired throughout each phase of his writing by what he memorably called ‘the Decade of Heroes’ from 1936 to 1946, when Marxism was still in his view authentically liberal and individualistic; and chief among those heroes was Frank. Edward revered his beloved elder brother as a touchstone, an emotional and moral reference point in all his writing and political thinking. His belief in the ‘total mendacity’ of modern nation-states owed something to his reading of Frank’s last months too.

EP died in 1993 and his daughter, the writer Kate Thompson, provided two moving footnotes. She thought it strange – and perhaps just as well – that her father should have died without ever learning the exact details of Frank’s death. Not that it made any difference to the story. Frank’s power for her resided far more in the voice that still comes through his poetry and his letters than in the archetype of the hero. In some ways his death puts him where he would have wanted to be: ‘pulls him into the present even more firmly, into a common stream of humanity where people are still being shot in ditches every day . . .’

Among the things in her father’s study was a package of soil with Theo’s handwriting, which she had taken from Frank’s grave in 1947. Kate had no idea what to do with it. ‘Nothing was as difficult to deal with as that packet. I can still see the room now, with nothing left in it except the furniture and that little corner of a foreign field left on a desk beneath the window . . .’ In the end she took the packet outside to the magnolia tree beneath which her father had died. And under this Kate scattered the soil. Kate’s poem, ‘Lily-White Boys’, written around this time, contemplates the grief of all families who lose a child in war:

 

In this full rolling flood of years

There is somehow time,

And somehow plenty,

For remembrance.

Of how each evening brought

Returning heroes,

The climber, the window breaker,

The bearer of the bleeding nose,

As they raced against it,

The wind sprang dog-rose blossoms on their cheeks.

 

If we had known our sons were born as extras,

How then would we have built their boyish courage?

Look here for this is how it is.

This image is your destiny.

For they were laid out, even as

In funereal green

They fell.

On their faces the final bloom

Lily-white.

 

Theo in 1948 (as we have seen) wished Frank had married – ‘had, at least, had some home of his own for his spirit on earth. Iris was not enough.’ Did love of Iris cause Frank to risk his life? An angry letter from Michael Foot in 1943, when Frank was disturbed by her loss of virginity, warned him, as we have also seen, against taking suicidal risks in his longing to finish either Fascism or himself: ‘Neither a true choice nor a true opposition.’ His decision to enter Bulgaria came soon after he learned of her affair with Michael: was his reckless disregard for his survival a peevish reprisal for her troubled love life? Iris never said so. She protested that she could not regard him ‘as a suicide, however noble-minded . . . he . . . so much knew how to enjoy living’, while acknowledging to EP:

 

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 [commemorating him]. Then his opinions, his splendid positive uncompromising faith in the world’s people. Oneself, one goes on changing, and 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.

 

Iris sent in November 1945 a selection of Frank’s letters to Theo to use in There is a Spirit in Europe. Theo explained to EP that Frank had ‘in several instances said things more clearly to her than to any of us’, and she is the only non-Thompson in the memorial volume thus honoured. On her return from Bulgaria in August 1947 full of the moving scenes she had witnessed, Theo invited Iris to stay at Bledlow for two nights, and probably gave her Frank’s edition of Catullus, found on him after he was shot.

 

Iris Murdoch on Oxford Street, winter 1946–7.

 

Frank came increasingly to haunt Iris. He first appears in an abandoned wartime novel as Mark, who wishes to write a book on Frank’s favourite Greek poet Pindar. Mark is acutely focused as having the rare combination of ‘great intelligence with great warmth’.128 ‘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 – but may reject – an Oxford Fellowship. A lengthy analysis of the last free Spanish elections in February 1936 reflects Frank’s view of the Second World War as a continuation by other means of the Spanish struggle. Mark identifies more with Lenin than with Christ, since Lenin is ‘less concerned with the value of his individual righteousness’ and thus the more completely self-effacing of the two.

In 1975 a retired schoolmaster called Stowers Johnson published his bad book about Frank entitled Agents Extraordinary. Murdoch wrote angrily to The Times about its portrayal of Frank as a grim and fanatical megalomaniac trying to be Lawrence of Bulgaria, rashly and romantically leading his men towards the false dawn of a liberated Bulgaria. Her Frank ‘had a horror of violence’ and never dreamed of himself as a hero but was ‘delicate, scrupulous and tender . . . never the victim of dreams of violence or illusions of grandeur’.

She captured her own sense of grief and mysterious causality best in the long poem she dedicated in 1977 to his memory, ‘The Agamemnon Class, 1939’, ingeniously conflating the death of Frank with that of that earlier hero, Achilles, on Troy’s ‘windy plain’.

 

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.

 

In January 1979 at the Bulgarian Embassy she recorded a TV programme about Frank which she found moving and upsetting. At the end the director gave her a Roman coin sent him with an anonymous letter from someone present at Frank’s death – presumably a collaborator. The letter writer said that Frank when captured had in his pocket a volume of Catullus and that coin. Having heard of the documentary film being made about Frank, he asked that the coin be given to ‘the most suitable person’ in England.129

She wrote to General Trunski, who was involved with the film and writing his own book on Frank, that 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.

 

And she wrote to EP 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.

The night of 26 July 1980 she had a significant dream that she had married both John Bayley and Frank, and was nervous of how this ménage à trois would work out. But they all got along splendidly, and were happy together. Frank appeared at the top of a steep slope, dressed as a soldier, wearing a black cap that foreshadowed his murder.

In 1988 Iris announced to the Mail on Sunday that she and Frank, though not engaged, had ‘hoped to be married’; friends who had known both Frank and Iris well, such as M. R. D. Foot and Leo Pliatzky, were bemused by this rewriting of history. Since she set store by the truth, what prompted it? It has been argued that his assumption of the role of tragic hero required his recasting in this larger role as her fiancé – ‘each need[ing] to be nearer the centre of the other’s story to give the drama of his execution its due weight’. But if so, why did she wait over forty years? In any case, just as she came to call herself Anglo-Irish, and to imply a grander ancestry than was the case, so with a novelist’s fabulating imagination she unquestionably believed this invention too. She told close friends that her love-life had frequently been unhappy and out of balance: either she or her beloved cared too much for the other. Frank thus became the first significant possible husband who had eluded her, in a series that notably included the refugee poet Franz Steiner, whom she very probably would indeed have married, but who died in 1952.

Certainly Frank’s life inspired her and he became one of her noteworthy muses. Thus Frank’s death could serve new purposes. He influenced her depiction of ascetic warriors: Felix in An Unofficial Rose (1962) and the Buddhist General James Arrowby in The Sea, The Sea (1978). She is remarkable among liberal novelists in thus treating the military profession sympathetically, emphasising its propensity for self-sacrifice rather than for violence; Frank Thompson was a big reason for this. Not that her picture of Frank was ever entirely tame, and when Philippa Foot intuited that the opposition between the wild Pat Dumay in The Red and the Green (1965) and the more hidebound Andrew Chase-White reflected the rivalry between Frank and Michael Foot, Iris concurred. Her Frank was rebellious too, and not simply otherworldly. 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. EP too compared Frank’s death with the ‘symbolic confrontation’ of Easter 1916.

In The Black Prince (1973) Iris’s alter ego says that she reveres no one except great artists and ‘those who say No to tyrants’; it was Frank who had died defying tyranny. Then The Book and the Brotherhood (1987) envisages a confrontation with a zealous figure who, like the dead Frank, has stayed ideologically pure while the world around him has compromised its ideals.

One of Iris’s final diary entries, in November 1995, invokes his memory. And thus, too, in her last and unpublished book of philosophy Iris wrote of those who resisted Nazism and Stalinism as ‘reflections of pure goodness, a proof of [Good’s] connexion with us as a reality, as a real possibility’. She surely had Frank in mind.130 Iris’s friend Philippa Foot, who brought Iris the news of Frank’s death, shared this view of him, and it fed her interest in the book entitled Dying We Live – prison letters from Germans executed for defying the Nazis, who wished their own symbolic sacrifice of life itself to witness the depravity and cruelty of Nazism. Frank’s value, as it were, for both Philippa Foot and Iris consisted in his living proof of such connections during the most terrible of centuries.131 For Iris Murdoch Frank grew to combine the roles of heroic martyr, potential husband and lost soulmate.

 

 

Today, with benefit of hindsight, Frank’s mission reads as if doomed from the start. In 1944, by contrast, no one could have foretold exactly when the unstable Bulgarian government would collapse, when the Russians would arrive to trigger regime change, or when the long-awaited popular uprising might begin. Wars are not won if people do not take what seem to be desperate chances, and Frank’s mission was one such.

Frank had managed to equip some 500 Partisans after Mostyn Davies’s death and to maintain contact with his base. He had won the trust of a ‘vital, unruly people’, with good reason to be suspicious of all foreigners. During the terrible march he was once so exhausted he fell into a river, asleep. Yet he never complained, and always declined the offer of a horse, saying that he was young – still only twenty-three – and that the horse concerned should carry a woman or a wounded Partisan. Of all the SOE officers who died in Eastern Europe, he alone is thought of kindly by the country in which he fell. Generations of Bulgarians will always associate England with the martyr of Bulgarian liberation.

A Russian joke runs: Communism purveyed a certain future, while rendering the past totally unpredictable. So Frank and the other BLOs were first seen in Bulgaria as heroic allies in the fight against Fascism, a mystique sensationally enhanced by CPGB Secretary Harry Pollitt’s reference in December 1948 to Frank as ‘one of our party members’.132 The Kostov trials a few months later suddenly reversed this: BLOs were now imperialist agents infiltrating on behalf of the Western Allies, and two prominent Partisan comrades – Znepolski and Trunski – were brutally interrogated for months in jail, branded spies for having associated with Frank and other BLOs, as also with Titoism.133 Rehabilitation in the 1970s – when Trunski, now Deputy Minister of Defence, commemorated Frank in Grateful Bulgaria – was followed after 1989 by BLOs now turning into Soviet agents intent on establishing Soviet hegemony. As if to illustrate this Kafkaesque trajectory Prokopnik station, renamed ‘Thompson’ after Frank in 1947, was then threatened with denaming after the Berlin Wall came down.

Around 1994 Frank’s memory was kept alive by the British Defence Attaché in Sofia, Colonel Robert Pearson, who greatly admired Frank. His picture hung in the Embassy and Pearson arranged a fiftieth anniversary service near the Litakovo monument to Frank and his comrades. Pearson took Frank’s sister-in-law Dorothy Thompson and her middle child Mark along the trail the Partisans had followed during their long march into Bulgaria – a walk that he had previously videoed.

A man who had led a Partisan column agreed to meet Pearson to share his memories, but was visited first by the secret police who claimed he had been a British agent supplied with British weapons. This was 1994, post-Communism, and yet he changed his mind about speaking to Pearson. Truth-telling in a small country with bullying neighbours will always be tough; outlandish conspiracy theories abound. But a recent book suggests how Frank’s reputation may settle. Kiril Yanev, a Fatherland Front journalist, fell under Frank’s spell when doing his military service after September 1944, spent decades collecting stories about him and published The Man from the Legend in 2001. What follows is culled mainly from Yanev.

Relations between Bulgarian Partisans and British liaison officers were strictly formal; use of titles emphasised distance and minimised risk of false promises. Both Davies and Frank were reticent, and Frank admitted only that he was a Labour supporter, a democrat and a staunch anti-Fascist. But Mostyn Davies’s reserve was experienced as arrogant and supercilious and he was personally blamed for the non-appearance of sorties; while Frank’s was warm-hearted and sympathetic to the Partisan cause, and when rebuked for the non-appearance of sorties, he evinced a sense of personal shame that by contrast won him credit.

Frank could express a lot quietly and simply. When on 19 May a village meeting was called, at which Vlado Trichkov, Gocho Gopin and Frank spoke, his speech was vivid, emotional and full of sense; one survivor recalled that ‘Frank was a true poet . . .’ He enjoyed humour, joking that not all Britons were conquering imperialists – possibly an attempt to smooth feathers ruffled by Davies. If Frank elicited sensitive information about the structure of the Fatherland Front and Partisan movement, he did so, unlike Davies, without forfeiting liking or trust. While BLOs were supposed to stay above the fray politically and support no single faction, it no doubt helped that, while denying that he was himself Communist, Frank admitted that he ‘respected’ Communists.

Davies managed two phrases in Bulgarian that point to the terrible realities of their long march, Partisans often falling asleep in a standing position: ‘Marching not good’ and ‘There will be arms supplies.’ Frank, who sometimes muddled Bulgarian with Serbo-Croat, learned Bulgarian songs and poetry. He was a very intelligent man of high culture with an expressive face: tall, young, slim and handsome. He spoke slowly, seriously with a concentration somehow unbecoming to his age. Sometimes he burned some note or lay on the ground, his eyes fixed on the sky as if in deep thought. He had the foresight to insist that the wireless set and horse to carry it be kept away from any fighting, together with some strong men to carry the set if anything happened to the horse.

There are other touching vignettes. Frank in prison, requesting through the open door with gestures a cigarette from a middle-aged lady. The next day she shows up again, when food is served, managing to slip him a packet of cheap cigarettes. He feels in his pockets for something to repay her kindness but everything has been taken from him. A kind smile lighting up his tired and pain-stricken face, he rips the right epaulette off his shoulder saying, ‘I have nothing else I can give as a token of appreciation: take this as a keepsake.’ That has the authentic Frankish ring about it.

On capture he bravely insisted he be granted POW status. He requested medicines, bread and spring onions, which he got, his first food for fifteen days, and yoghurt, which Stoyanov jested he would get plenty of in Kingdom Come. He complained once when lunch was late.

Kocho Stoyanov was notorious for making Litakovo, where he committed many atrocities, a Golgotha for Partisans. Yordanka was horribly tortured; Frank, too, was physically broken by savage beatings and probable torture,134 yet police records show that he never gave anything away. When villagers asked why one gendarme beat Frank so hard, he replied: ‘Because he keeps his head high.’

Stoyanov’s aide-de-camp, Dimiter Avgardski, who helped execute Frank but whose own life was spared, recorded his memories for both Trunski (1979) and Yanev (2001). Frank smoked a pipe, he never lost heart, his guards respected him. His boots were stolen and he said nothing when Stoyanov, to humiliate him, stepped on his naked feet. He conducted himself with poise and dignity and did not look frightened or alarmed. The manner of his death gave his captors ‘a strong shock’.135

They walked outside under the evening sky on Saturday 10 June, along a country path, their steps heading uphill to Turskoto Kale,136 the guards swearing. They stopped by some barely discernible, crumbling walls, Avgardski’s torch lighting up the prisoners’ faces to identify them. Frank was tied to Hristo Vasilev Gurbov and Lazar Stoyanov Atanasov.

Captain Yanko Stoyanov137 said: ‘Major Thompson, we are going to execute you by shooting.’ Thompson replied: ‘Remember that my government has sent me here and will be looking for me. And you, captain, will be held responsible.’ A gendarme called Pacho went up to the three men tied together, tripping Frank’s feet so that he fell face down, dragging the other two as he did so: the preferred position for executing prisoners.

Before Frank can be shot – according to Yanev’s and Avgardski’s narrative – green sparkles start to swarm in front of his eyes, causing him wonderment. Fireflies, imitating the myriad stars above, twinkle, flicker and fill him with joy.

 

 

These fireflies function in Yanev’s narrative as outward signs of Frank’s apotheosis – they are Bulgaria’s parting gift to a man sacrificing himself to safeguard the nation’s future, and making ‘history itself bow before the stubborness of his conscience’. And yet Frank would have hated special treatment, being cast in this way as a hero when so many – including Mostyn Davies, Nick Munroe, James Shannon, Watts, Walker, Trichkov, Gocho Gopin and Yordanka and countless others – all died and are forgotten, and his Bulgarian comrades suffered so abominably, their severed and sometimes eyeless heads piked in the village square before his own murder.

But then, perhaps exactly because he would so genuinely have hated being invidiously singled out in this manner, his good name in Bulgaria is assured. Frank’s raid provoked the Germans and the Royalist Bulgarians into reprisals so atrocious that these helped prepare the ground for their own overthrow: in this way even the Partisans’ defeat helped them achieve their aims. He stands for internationalist comradeship, self-sacrifice and that brief moment of the Popular Front so long ago. A time when hatred of Fascism lent sense and purpose to life and death alike.

 

 

An English-speaking acquaintance of Yanev’s was assigned an unexpected task. A bulky, worn and muddy haversack of strong green canvas, with many compartments and pockets, zips and fasteners, was carried into his office. It belonged to some English officer who had been taken prisoner after the battle of Batulya and he was ordered to go through it and provide a detailed description thereof.

There were no guns, cartridges, maps or compasses: these had all gone to those interrogating the Englishman. The translator had to deal only with many papers needed for someone traversing long distances through valleys, mountains and rivers, until being caught and taken prisoner. The clerk found English–Slav dictionaries in one of which a bullet had stuck, hollowing it out and saving the life of its owner. He also found diaries and notes: observations on the Bulgarian national character, episodes of Bulgarian history, descriptions of different Partisans and associates, portraits of people met on the road and landscapes. In one notebook the translator found something unusual: an ‘English to Tran dictionary’138 with colourful words, phrases and anecdotes from the Tran region. But what moved him most was an English translation of a short story by the good writer Yordan Yovkov (1880–1937), ‘Along the Wire’. Years later Yanev learned that Frank had worked on this translation together with Gocho Gopin in their few spare minutes. ‘So maybe that was their secret occupation,’ joked one of the Partisan commanders who was told this story.

The clerk reported that the haversack was the mobile office of an exceptionally gifted, original, highly intelligent personality who, despite all the hardships of the battles and the marches, despite all the risks and dangers which he had faced at every turn, had kept thinking rationally, gathering observations and material for his future work – a man who remained deep down in his soul a poet.139

 

 

Ten years after the war Dorothy Thompson was out walking with Uncle Alfred and one of her and EP’s very small boys near Halifax in the West Riding. Family jokes abounded about Alfred – simple but not confused or unpleasant – whom Theo and EJ took under their wing. (When asked for his favourite record, Alfred replied, ‘I like to hear the Bishop of Croydon speak occasionally on a Sunday morning.’) A Yorkshire neighbour greeted Dorothy and Alfred and admired the baby, saying idly: ‘Ah he’s a little soldier!’

Alfred flew into a rage and replied that he would certainly not be a soldier. ‘I had a brother and a nephew who were both soldiers and were killed in the two world wars, and thank you very much but my great-nephew is not going to go out to any war.’ It was not hysterical or loud and Dorothy Thompson thought it very moving.

 

 

See notes on this chapter