Lessons in Gunnery: September 1939–July 1940
But if you’re asked by anyone,
I can’t quite think who would –
Tell them I got a bullet in the lung
When we charged Ilya’s wood
Tell them how lousy our doctors are;
And say I send greetings to the old fatherland.
Epitaph from Lermontov’s ‘Youth’s Testament’,
as translated by Frank in February 1940
Stand to the barricades beside us!
Then I would die today and hardly care.
from Frank’s ‘To Irushka’, July 1940
Frank wrote to Forster: ‘My beloved Antony, My father . . . is very depressed. In fact he is nearly worn out. One can’t go through two wars in twenty years, and remain a carefree optimist.’ EJ, still exhausted from the Mesopotamian campaign and praying that war might never come again, realised that during this new conflict it would be his ironic duty to represent the civilisation ‘for which the other poor buggers are fighting’. The ironies were multiple. The civilisation he was to represent had broken down: he listened to ill-informed critics blaming the war on his friends Gilbert Murray and Robert Cecil, both associated with the failed League of Nations, and felt personally implicated in this bankruptcy. Moreover the poor buggers who would fight on his behalf included his own sons. His generation had let them down.
The young had come to identify ‘democracy’ with reactionary self-indulgence on the part of the rulers and mass poverty and unemployment on the part of the ruled. Hitler, who had done away with German unemployment, might achieve the same elsewhere. While fearing and detesting Hitler, EJ none the less saw how profoundly unjust and weak democratic nations seemed. ‘The Nazis and Fascists have demanded of their young people sacrifice, & so have lit a devouring flame’; but that Communism appealed to both his sons because it too demanded noble sacrifice and austerity he will not admit. His pessimism is on view when, speaking of the coming night-time of civilisation, he writes: ‘We are sorry that you two boys (and how many other boys!) have been given a world so grim. I never dreamt it could happen again . . .’ EJ then added movingly, ‘I wish it were night and all well. It will soon be the one [night], but will it be the other [all well]?’
Old Edward’s was the war of a writer mesmerised by India. Shortly after the outbreak he flew the five days it took from Poole harbour by hydroplane (Rhodes-funded) to meet up with Gandhi, Nehru and the Muslim leader Jinnah and then reported back to London on the readiness of India to join the war effort. Despite Viceroy Lord Linlithgow’s gross ineptitude in informing the people of India that they were at war with Germany without consulting any Indians and despite the pro-Hitler politics of the nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose (whom Edward also met), India in the event provided two and a half million troops, the largest volunteer army in history. Edward played his part in all this, contributing Enlist India for Freedom (1940) for Gollancz’s Victory Books.
His love for India and for Indians was passionate and never shallow. He confided to his family what it was like to travel in trains soiled by defecation, and the incompetent speeches given by Indians at an Emergency Conference on India called by the Fabians dismayed him: ‘It is so easy to accept the case for Indian independence – until you hear Indians actually talk about it.’
From left to right : Peter Wright, Andrew Ensor, C. Seton-Watson, Frank and T. L. R. S. Dickin
While EJ was in India, a letter with a railway warrant instructed Frank to report to Larkhill for artillery training on 5 October 1939. Although he boasted to friends that he was now to be schooled as a professional murderer, Larkhill was not his first taste of army discipline. The above photo survives of him in July 1936 at OTC (Officer Training Corps) summer camp on Salisbury Plain near Tidworth (not far from Larkhill) where Winchester boys marched, polished their buttons and turned out on parade. Frank had problems getting his equipment clean and putting on his uniform, and was found by a visiting general improperly dressed in puttees. As today, OTC training provided a constructive grounding in military skills: a War Office letter dated 23 December 1938 told Frank that his name had already been registered in the Officer Cadet Reserve for commission in the Royal Artillery in the event of mobilisation.
He was surely the least militant or military of men, and the most rebellious. His horror of violence was real. And yet, when he and John Hasted opted out of the OTC after one year, for a quieter life in the Scouts, as they were entitled to do for their final two Winchester years, this was emphatically not from anti-militarism. In April 1939 he and M. R. D. Foot marched in London against conscription exclusively because they thought a prime minister as bad as Chamberlain might misuse a standing army to break strikes; they were by no means against conscription as such. Frank went to OTC from New College for two weeks in July 1939, observing how the old-school-tie network dominated, and learned about motorised transport.
The war’s first three years saw defeat after defeat for the British, notably at Dunkirk in 1940, then on mainland Greece followed by Crete in 1941, and finally the disastrous Dieppe raid of August 1942. The fact that Britain’s was an amateur army, while the German war machine was highly professional, played its melancholy role. If Frank was unprepared, so was the country at large.
Larkhill was chaotic, with building work unfinished and much improvisation in evidence: a general camp, with all sorts of courses going on, in the midst of which the OCTUs (Officer Cadet Training Unit: Frank joined the 122nd) had their own huts and bits of parade ground while communal buildings housed lectures. Frank and his fellow cadets were billeted in Nissen huts during the coldest winter since 1895. Snow fell for weeks, trees and telegraph posts were encased in an inch of ice, and washing and shaving, after you were woken at six, happened outside. When two orderlies mistakenly hit and damaged both frozen boilers, there was no hot water for a fortnight; Frank’s hands were raw. He appreciated the beauty of the frost more than he enjoyed marching a mile to church parade on black ice or, as a maintenance signaller on exercises, crouching behind haystacks with a bottle of rum to try to stay warm.
Beds were very narrow and one night Frank – so burly he was known as Tarzan – turned over in his sleep and fell on to the floor. Everything seemed in short supply – ammunition, guns and matériel – severely limiting firing practice. Their guns were in any case not yet the new 25-pounders but a standard Great War field gun, the Mark IV 18-pounders first tried out in 1916. There were bicycles to get around on. No exercise with vehicles was possible until civilian transport came in, when you practised loading everyone training for gun positions into, for example, a baker’s van, which then proceeded to the mini-ranges.
Frank’s Larkhill months throw light on why the British Expeditionary Force in France soon suffered disastrous defeat and evacuation. An Oxford don and Great War veteran taught the mathematics of gunnery, badly. A needlessly complicated, long-winded drill for getting guns into action entailed stages one, two and three during which Command Post Officer and Assistant transferred data from optical instruments to and fro for up to three hours, so that, by the time you were ready to fire, the Blitzkrieg might well be over. Here was one of many things wrong with the artillery. After June 1940 new procedures meant guns could be put into action much faster.
Much time was spent on ranging exercises with smoke drill. You surveyed at eye level a sand and canvas table model simulating rolling countryside. You had to calculate line, elevation, angle of sight and range and finally give your order to fire. There were deceptive false crests of sand, and someone with a smoke bottle represented your fall of shell-shot with a puff of smoke. No smoke at all meant a dud round, after which you had to work out what to do with your next fire orders. The highest degree of ranging was fifty yards, called a short bracket, while a verified short bracket meant two shells the other side, and two shells just short: the best you could achieve. Though it is difficult to imagine, Frank was none the less reported first in the mid-course gunnery examination.
The other cadets Frank dismissed as the same easy-going, humorous, mildly lecherous men you find wherever English public schoolboys herd together with wild northerners and Scots. The future gallery owner David Wolfers and Frank, both so bad at maths that they became soulmates, attempted their sums together. Frank seemed a lost boy to David, who being three years older mothered him. Their talk mainly concerned books: Frank read Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphosis and Browning’s The Ring and the Book in bed for distraction, and both David and Frank wrote poetry. They wore battledress and sent up the customs of the army. They did not discuss politics. It seemed to them that they were accomplishing a practical one-year course in gunnery within five months. To compound the pressure, a second lieutenant’s pay after tax was only 14 shillings a week, a private’s 10s 6d, while a steak at the Red Lion cost 7s 6d.
Army customs were new, plentiful and disagreeable. You learned to give orders over the radio without superfluous words – for example, you should never say ‘enemy machine guns or tanks’ since you would scarcely try to shoot friendly ones. There was plenty of ‘bull’: kit inspection, room inspection with all blankets dressed by the right, and dress inspection, all to Guards standard, with no bootlace allowed out of place. You used a hot spoon and then a toothbrush to spit and polish your boot toes. The idea behind such ‘bull’ was to help increase esprit de corps by making you feel proudly superior to sloppier units. Fresh from college, wild of hair and foul of pipe, Frank would not have lasted a week had he not had the unconscious ability to deflect criticism. When he stopped shaving for one day the Sergeant Major took pity and tried to reform him. But Frank riposted: since God had made him a tramp, who was he to tamper with His handiwork?
You were taught not only to talk as little as necessary but to put the well-being of your vehicles and men first. You (the officer) came second. Assessment happened quietly by Sergeant and Commander, after which those few who failed had the shame of telling their family, and the units to which they were returned. This happened twice, once with an officer whose voice could not carry: if the Tannoy was knocked out you had to be able to bawl. Frank by contrast was informed that he was gazetted for a commission with effect from 2 March 1940, his demeanour recorded as ‘keen and intelligent’.
Kitting out as an officer followed: his murderer’s kit, Frank called it. Military tailors laid out their wares and you chose your uniform as a private purchase on your small allowance, supplemented in Frank’s case by £30 from his father. Sam Browne belt with its diagonal strap. Brown boots. Officer’s greatcoat and cap. Officer’s valise. Swagger stick for carrying under the right arm, with silver top bearing regimental insignia. When in 1943 EP joined the smart 17th/21st Lancers Regiment, Theo insisted he have at least one decently tailored uniform, and not – as some were doing – buy his officer’s outfit off the peg. Thus kitted out you went home on leave and awaited the telegram that told you to which unit to report: 259th Field Battery of the 118th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, in Eastbourne in Frank’s case. His pay had risen to 11 shillings per day.
One reason Frank would record even in 1942 that his bloodstream was still ‘all Winchester and Horace’ was that his transformation from student into soldier was so rapid. By April 1940 he was rising at 06.45 to check his men’s breakfast (an earwig in the men’s potatoes once prompted wide-eyed contemptuous stares).
He also with some thirty men and no other officer constructed roadblocks in East Kent to delay an invading army. He was wholly untrained as an engineer. Each night he had intensively to study army textbooks to keep ahead of his NCOs before an architect without military expertise came in to inspect his handiwork: small wonder he thought Britain’s defences sleepy and uncoordinated. He wrote to Theo looking forward to a time when he could be a civilian again and live a life more consistent with his inclinations. Home leave for one night was bitter-sweet. Parcels containing (variously) maple syrup, ankle boots, tennis whites and racket, Oxford blazer, a whistle, torch and even a camp-bed, plus foods, his two books of Russian verse, books from the London Library and Life magazine, all helped.
Meanwhile – still nineteen – he wished he were a little older than a few of his colleagues and, above all, his men, a recurrent complaint: he had throughout his war somehow to impersonate the conviction of an officer in order to command men much older than he was. Pipe-smoking (Balkan Sobranie) won him gravitas. He liked the Bombardiers, disliked his Colonel, who kept a handbook entitled ‘Social Classification of Officers’, and rejoiced in his last English spring. Being out of doors every single day meant that he saw more of it than he ever could have done in Oxford: bluebells, early purples (orchids), galaxies of windflower (wood anemone). The inability of the other subaltern in his troop at thirty years old to distinguish blackthorn from hawthorn won Frank’s tart rebuke that he did not deserve to be an Englishman. The subaltern explained that, as a Londoner, he had seen his first bird’s nest only at twenty-three.
His younger brother soon repeated this swift metamorphosis. At Cambridge in 1941 the first time EP drilled a squad he covered up his ignorance with a fierce military manner. He enjoyed working with the Royal Armoured Corps (RAC), getting excellent instruction on how engines work and on practical maintenance. One afternoon they had driving instruction. When he sat at the wheel of a lorry, the Sergeant asked if he had ever driven before. ‘No.’ ‘Well, these are the gears. You have to double-declutch when you change down. Now drive off.’ Within half a minute he was driving a fifteen-ton lorry at 30 mph.
Frank had deplored the USSR and Germany signing their infamous August 1939 non-aggression pact just before both invaded Poland, even though he accurately saw that Marshal Piłsudski’s was scarcely a liberal regime: ‘next to the Fascist regimes it’s the worst in Europe’. The CP, after days of in-fighting, declared that the war was between two kinds of imperialism and so to be boycotted. Some Communists excused Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, by saying he was no worse than Chamberlain at Munich, parleying with Hitler to buy time. But a friend since childhood days severely shook Frank’s confidence in the inevitable and absolute purity of Soviet intentions. Indeed Frank wrote to Forster, ‘My father wins about Russia, but he has the grace not to be cocky about it.’ And so his politics did not make Frank a reluctant soldier and he wrote rebelliously to Iris, then dutifully toeing the pacifist Party line, as ‘Madonna Bolshevicka’:
Sure, lady, I know the party line is better.
I know what Marx would have said. I know you’re right.
When this is over we’ll fight for the things that matter.
Somehow, today, I simply want to fight.
That’s heresy? Okay. But I’m past caring.
There’s blood about my eyes, and mist and hate.
I know the things we’re fighting now and loathe them.
Now’s not the time you say? But I can’t wait.
Maybe I’m not so wrong. Maybe tomorrow
We’ll meet again. You’ll smile and you’ll agree.
And then we’ll raise revolt and blast the heavens.
But now there’s only one course left for me.
Autumn 1939
Complementing this poem is his later ‘To Irushka’ (July 1940) which ends by invoking the image of Iris herself arousing Frank from reverie: ‘You with the peaceful eyes and soothing hair / Stand to the barricades beside us! / Then I would die today and hardly care.’ Iris would refuse his invitation to stand on the barricades beside him (metaphorically speaking) until Hitler invaded the USSR in June 1941 and the CP – shamefully late according to its critics – declared the war effort legitimate. Meanwhile Frank wrote ‘Bilge’ over his first poem and ‘Hooey’ on his second, rejecting the poor poetry more than the political line.
Russia’s invasion of Finland on 30 November – with three times as many soldiers as the Finns, thirty times as many aircraft and a hundred times as many tanks – was a severer test. Frank felt ‘hit in the kidneys’. In uniform and very upset, he burst into Leo Pliatzky’s room in Corpus: ‘Right now how do you explain this going into Finland?’ Leo, a fellow-traveller, tried to bluster some excuse. Evidently Frank allowed himself once more to be persuaded not to break faith with the USSR. And such loyalty as he felt to the tortuous reasoning of the CP seems not to have compromised his army career.
The bulk of the Oxford University Labour Club, sickened by this Winter War, split off in 1940 to form a new Democratic Socialist Club. Roy Jenkins wrote often to his Stalinist co-Treasurer in the tiny rump OULC ‘Dear Miss Murdoch’ to sort out their assets, while her replies started always ‘Dear Comrade Jenkins’.
Iris thus stayed obediently pacifist in public while exploring private doubts only in some poor verses. Frank’s meeting with her in Oxford over Christmas 1939 sounds to have been a peaceful one. Probably his joining up impressed her and they met as equals at last. Iris Murdoch is nevertheless the ‘fighter and mystic’ of ‘Camilla’ (January 1940) for whom he feels ‘sick desire’.
EJ for his part observed these antics from Bledlow with a contemptuous eye and thought that the CP leadership’s ‘somersaultations’, as he called them, in 1939 and again in 1941, lost the Party credibility. If Hitler was the enemy in 1941, why was he not the enemy when overrunning France? But by then Frank had left England for good.
The careers around 1940 of the family closest since childhood to Frank, the Carritts, all four surviving boys in the CP, contrast with his own. Once the Blitz started Frank dined regularly in the Carritts’ Dolphin Square flat, with Bill’s beautiful first wife Margot, Secretary of the National Union of Students, also present. Frank read Communist literature there that he could not easily access in the army, and probably learned the Party line. Although Bill Carritt excelled in his OCTU he was never made an officer; other blacklisted CP members never rose above the rank of sergeant or – like Noel, and despite his recent military experience in Spain – were never called up in the first place. The CPGB’s backing of Stalin while he supplied the oil that may have helped Luftwaffe planes bomb London played its part here. An erratic and inconsistent government campaign against ‘dangerous Reds’ saw the Daily Worker banned between January 1941 and September 1942.
Brian Carritt, Frank’s age and a close friend, was also at those dinners. Frank and Brian had been rivals for the affections of Robert Graves’s daughter Catherine Nicholson, to whom Frank wrote as ‘Katya aux yeux verts’ (sometimes ‘Madonna of the Green Eyes’) just as he Russianised Iris to ‘Irushka’. Catherine later berated herself for having preferred blond handsome feckless Brian to Frank, the solider of her two suitors. She visited Brian at Eton on 4 June 1939, his straw hat flower-garlanded for Founder’s Day. He had set up an Eton CP cell, plotted to escape to fight with the International Brigades in Spain (he was too young) but joined CP meetings in Slough. In 1940 he spent two terms at Queen’s College Oxford reading Modern History and wrote to her of ‘people whose entire life is politics, and mine must be too’. When he failed to talk her into joining, he told her ‘in despair’ to stay away or his political friends ‘would kill her’.37 ‘Some friends you’ve got!’ Catherine reasonably retorted, promising to wait for him for two years.
Her story that Brian was required by the CP to filch papers from his father’s desk is believable; such rifling was common and Kim Philby did the same. Though Professor Carritt’s desk might offer little of interest, the fathers of other Etonians Brian recruited might have supplied richer pickings. Brian’s complaint to Catherine of living in two worlds in conflict rings true.
Brian’s middle brother Michael Carritt, who had officially left the Indian Civil Service in 1938, nonetheless suffered in 1940 a visit from senior police officers. Unfazed by his mother’s protests they marched through the rambling Boars Hill house and triumphantly unearthed in a copse outside two tin chests of government papers and incriminating correspondence between Michael, the Indian independence movement and (probably) the CP of India. As well as advising the Indian underground of impending police raids, Michael had been able to import, through diplomatic channels, quantities of banned nationalist literature. Michael was neither sacked nor prosecuted but forfeited his pension of £12 per month.
The CP required you to drop your membership on joining the army but some continued in secret as so-called closed or clandestine members. Did Frank filch papers, or threaten the lives of friends? Although he was actively involved in CP business in Iraq in 1943, his Communism always seems less fanatical than Brian’s or Iris’s. Since he – unlike them – refused the Party line on the war in 1939–41 and also thought the French CP wickedly defeatist, it is unlikely that he then had opportunities to work for the Party.
In a March 1940 letter to EP Frank none the less twice asks him at home to play down Frank’s political commitment – one EP already shared. This might have been from a desire to minimise further domestic disturbance. The best evidence against Frank’s having been compromised is that he was so soon to be recruited to work for Military Intelligence and to rise in the army up to the rank of major. The question needs revisiting when in 1943 some British Communists like Frank were deliberately groomed and recruited for work in the Balkans. Meanwhile it is likely that in 1940 the common sense tempering his political zeal was clear to all.
Such common sense is clear from the copious letters he wrote to Désirée Cumberledge, reading English at Girton College in Cambridge, whom he had met in Wales at the Camp for the Unemployed the previous summer. That he poured his heart out to her so often in 1940–2 may owe something to Iris retreating into Pre-Raphaelite isolation while working towards the First she eventually won, and to Frank cooling in his pursuit of her. And Catherine, as we have seen, was occupied with Brian. Désirée meanwhile made an excellent sparring partner, foil and confidante, before whose affectionate scrutiny he could define himself anew. His restless confusion in 1940 is mainly visible in his poetry and in his letters to her.
They differed on religion and politics, Désirée having abandoned Communism for Christianity and pacifism. Not a pacifist, Frank also thought that there was no God or afterlife – ‘I damn well hope there isn’t because they spoil and soften everything, take the meaning out of this life and lower human dignity.’ He was also as baffled by Christ’s celibacy as by his claims to be the Son of God. Frank preferred the pagan cult of Apollo, god of music and song and – because sexually libertine – more rounded than Christ. Some remarks of Gilbert Murray influenced Frank at school to pore over the obscure lexicographer Hesychius of Alexandria before having ‘great fun’ evolving his own theory in an essay about Apollo’s origin as god of apples, and making ingenious parallels with non-classical gods from India and elsewhere. In fact the Apollo-as-apple-god theory had long been in the public domain. Frank also had a Wykehamist’s conceited cult of the Virgin Mary, addressing Catherine, Iris and Désirée as ‘Madonna’, rather as Feste in Twelfth Night in courtly-comical style addresses Olivia, yet implying an ideal of womanhood too. Mary and Apollo are thus also private emblems for him of a stiffly traditional dichotomy between male and female.
His letters come alive when he defends his idea that there are matters worth discussing more than politics. Art and literature, he insists, are paramount, and those who cannot see this he believes damned. He returns to the argument more than once: the arts are not just the focal point of human living, but the only things that give any real point to it. War, he insists, is tolerable at all only because Horace, Marvell, Aeschylus, Homer in The Iliad and Tolstoy in War and Peace all knew that, despite its evils, the men who have to fight wars are in themselves none the less good. He has – or so he claims – almost abdicated as a politician. What better can a man do than create something beautiful, striking, interesting or inspiring, unless it be to live inspiringly? (This was a belief relating to the sprezzatura that he shared with his father.) And it was exactly this faith in human values as enshrined in literature – in the heights as in the depths – that, he says, kept him sane while learning for months at a time at Larkhill the ‘multiform details connected with the killing of men’.
Learning to ride a motorbike eased travelling. He returned to Oxford in October 1939 to sit an emasculated Honour Mods and met Denis Healey, who sixty years later recalled Frank’s vivid spirit, and went to Winchester (thirty miles from Larkhill) in November, and to New Herrlingen in March 1940. He was looking for traces of his earlier civilian selves but found that while the places stayed the same they had forgotten him already. He drafted two poems on the theme of ‘Le Revenant’, the dead man who cannot break the habit of returning and who knows, like a ghost, his ‘utter emptiness’. He was, as he half joked, revisiting the haunts of his more innocent schoolboy and undergraduate personae, poorly disguised as a professional murderer. He considered submitting a poem for the Newdigate before remembering that Oxford had suspended that prize for the duration.
He felt the contrast with his present army life ‘rather bitterly’ and wrote home about its pointless waste of energy. He reported that he had been woken in Eastbourne around 06.30 to reconnoitre together with another officer, quartermaster and battery clerk a small inland village with insufficient billets for their entire battery (perhaps one hundred men) who were to move there the following night. They knocked up the police force – one constable plus pushbike – then the Wesleyan minister, and finally the President of the Women’s Institute. They also earmarked the two village pubs for the officers’ and sergeants’ messes. Villagers were rushing to the door with ready-made excuses about evacuees expected that very weekend and Frank’s party was slowly gearing up to a state of smooth if slightly ruthless efficiency when a dispatch rider arrived with a terse note: ‘Move cancelled. Return to Eastbourne forthwith’. (Evelyn Waugh’s account of such futile military orders and counter-orders made EP smile with recognition when he read Brideshead Revisited.)
Frank’s regiment had been given in succession three different places to move to and had dutifully packed and unpacked, yet met all this being ‘messed abaht’ with admirable patience and stoicism. The good humour and the incoherent cockney goodwill his men showed towards newcomers and new situations alike were sources to Frank of ‘evergreen joy’.
They were on home defence, which he found almost as tiring and potentially as dangerous as ‘the real thing’ – joining the British Expeditionary Force in France – though far less glamorous. Jobs included relearning to ride a horse and to canter, trying at 1.30 at night vainly to pull a broken-down lorry with guns up a one-in-seven hill, a week’s map-reading course and whizzing up and down at about 35 mph on a motorcycle guarding Beachy Head, plus six other ‘Vulnerable Points’ he was in command of, near Dover. When once his motorbike was dangerously grazed by a passing lorry he wrote a poem – of course – on just escaping death.38
He entertained his parents and EP, all of whom came to stay at the George in Alfriston, and the three men to Theo’s distress – probably because it excluded her – discussed poetry. ‘Three quite separate standards of performance & criticism, all most sincerely held, all with a lot to be said for them,’ she remembered later.
He also had time each night to study an hour’s Russian, to write another poem about Gogol starting ‘I shall laugh my bitter laugh’, read Gogol’s Inspector-General in the original and some Turgenev and translate Lermontov’s ironical, touching poem ‘Youth’s Testament’, whose narrator – once again – is of course a romantic hero on his deathbed. He enjoyed medieval Latin verse too, especially secular love poems like ‘The Nun’s Complaint’ and ‘The Lover in Winter’ that gave to love a graceful charm.
At an Eastbourne dance four decorous young sirens tried to teach Frank to jitterbug. Frank and a Balliol friend at an Oxford Labour Club social had the previous year done a jitterbug walk in unison which ‘did not make [them] exactly popular’, and he recorded the jazz names for well-known musical instruments – high hotlick suitcase, liquorice stick, dog house, slush pipe and mud hook. The girls now tried to teach him ‘trucking and swinging’, waving his right index finger in the air while shuffling and kicking his heels – without much success.
Fifth columnists were thought to have been responsible for the falls of Norway and of France in 1940, and the consequent rounding-up, care and transportation of enemy aliens that spring absorbed him briefly as a sideshow, German Jews and Nazi sympathisers alike being subject to the same order. Frank was proud to count many Jews as friends – ‘so alive, so intelligent, so generous . . . they have a queer fascination for me’ – and enjoyed this new contact with his ‘dearly loved Israelites’. He felt an awful ass when picking up loaded rifle and bandolier to converse with his group of pathetically friendly, dishevelled and unathletic Jewish refugees. He won good marks for being the only officer in the battery who could pronounce their names correctly.
Summer 1940 abounded in fears about spies parachuting in, followed by invasion: road signs were accordingly removed or painted over (replaced only in 1942 to orientate GIs). ‘Dear Shipmate’, EP now sixteen years old wrote to Frank in a letter by turns witty and inventive in the Thompson manner. Taking a short cut one morning from their new Bledlow home to visit a friend, along a beautiful overgrown country lane, EP got arrested when he stopped to rest in a barn. A vigilant farmboy who spotted him summoned a ‘whiskered gaffer’ in plus fours who remarked ‘narthenyungfeller showmeyerhidentitycard’.
EP produced it out of his rucksack, in which unfortunately a map and telescope were suspiciously on view. The gaffer examined the identity card, saying ‘mfraidshllhaftdetainyer’. Up the rickety lane came a police car with a constable and another official. They took his name and address, looked through his telescope the wrong end, examined his map for red and green circles, went through his rucksack looking for parachutes and bombs, cross-questioned him at length and ordered him back to the road. As they had to back their car two miles down an unvisited green lane, EP got there faster than they did. Bledlow village, evidently fearing that he might have knocked the police on the head and be making a getaway, turned out in force to watch the execution. ‘Which all goes to show that these bolshies jest wont have a chance . . . I hear a thundering on the door; I shall have to change the wave length . . .’
EP signed off: ‘Daddy has applied for 18 jobs, and been accepted by the only one that isn’t paid.’ Money remained a hot topic. EJ, who cycled to Risborough to join the Home Guard that May, had been informed over the garden hedge on his return that – as an air-raid warden – he was ineligible. Theo and EJ were annoyed that they could be found nothing more positive to do; they seemed only to be asked not to do things. Not to travel. Not to spend. Not to use this or that. EJ was asked to help feed refugees in the London Underground, but Theo vetoed this: he would do better ‘talking rot to the troops’. Sick of doing nothing, EJ volunteered as YMCA welfare/education officer attached to the Royal Artillery and went to Larkhill, where he was offered the rank of captain and lectured five times a week on such topics as (he joked) ‘Can Germany stand the strain?’ On one occasion the camp was bombed and there were seventeen deaths; luckily EJ was weekending at home.
One of his audience there, Peter Wright,39 attested later how grateful he was for the lectures and discussions EJ offered on poetry, music, politics, cinema and much more. EJ offered human warmth and friendliness, intellectual stimulation and a way of understanding how and why it was that all their lives had been so grievously uprooted. He combined deeply liberal opinions with a remarkable breadth of mind. EJ mentioned to these men that he had a son in the army who was a Communist with whom he argued vehemently. While seeming perturbed by this, he was pleased that points he had argued out with Frank could also be addressed at Larkhill. Even though the Daily Worker would shortly be banned, there was in the army itself still considerable freedom of expression.
Theo meanwhile kept busy tearing round the village helping with Bledlow’s new fruit-preserving centre, watching out for enemy parachutists, attending first-aid lectures and collecting salvageable aluminium that might during the coming Battle of Britain be turned into Spitfires (‘such a marvellous way to get to know the village’). She especially liked dawn patrol from 5.30 to 7.30 (as she pointed out, because of Double Summer Time adopted during the war, this period was really 3.30 to 5.30), and she thus enjoyed the summer dawn. The news at home was turned on ‘about 23 times per day’ and she lectured the WI on ‘If the Invader Comes’, where her demonstration of Rescue of Unconscious Person from Burning Room won ‘Much Applause’. Civilians were instructed to ‘deny food’ to German troops and parachutists. ‘Just exactly how is that done?!’ Theo asked mordantly and, ever practical, suggested various places to hide food instead. She practised putting out fires with a stirrup pump and decided that incendiary bombs, though they sounded menacing, were manageable affairs; she also knitted for the army. In March 1941, after months of separation, she would let the Bledlow house and move down to join EJ in lodgings in Amesbury, on a main road so noisy with night traffic that sleep suffered, by day serving buns and tea in the canteen and offering Arabic lessons. Sandy the dog languished with a Bledlow neighbour, looking out each day from the drive for the return of the Thompsons and partaking in the general condition of separation and anxiety.
When the Dunkirk evacuation began in late May 1940 Frank was at Northiam in East Sussex, only thirty miles from the anger of the Wehrmacht, surrounded by Great War 4.5-inch howitzers with their dark-green muzzles, and by wood violets. He noted that as danger approached impressions grew more vivid. The Sussex oatfields had masses of flowering cow parsley that his troops stuck in their helmets as he marched them down the peaceful honeysuckled lanes. Later he thought that that ‘invasion’ summer had been gentler and the hedgerows greener than they had ever been before or would ever be again. Danger intensified the glorious pleasures of the season: he had never felt so intensely alive.
On Sunday 26 May the King and Archbishop Cosmo Gordon Lang had requested prayers for miraculous delivery. There were false alarms when some fool by mistake set the church bells ringing, suggesting that invasion or some other disaster was under way. Then, in the nine days from 27 May to 4 June, 338,226 men from the beleaguered British Expeditionary Force wonderfully escaped from northern France to (mainly) Sussex and Kent, aboard 861 vessels. In fact – though this news was censored at the time – another 30,000 were also killed or wounded together with a similar number missing or captured,40 and among these were so many linguists that, within a very short time, new and unforeseen calls would be made on Frank’s abilities.