An Officer and a Gentleman: July 1940–March 1941
For my epitaph as good a line as any is [Ivan] Krylov’s . . . ‘He sometimes found it sad, but never boring.’
Frank’s will, c. February 1941
Wartime Britain had many so-called private armies, each hush-hush, many suspicious of and hostile to one another.41 A War Office memo told Frank on 6 July 1940 that he had been appointed to fill a vacancy for a subaltern (Intelligence Section), at GHQ Reconnaissance Unit, Lechlade, in Gloucestershire. The appointment took effect as from two days earlier: this letter put an official stamp on a private deal.
The retreat from Dunkirk made clear how much a general in battle needs a swift, accurate and steady flow of reliable information; the usual channels were too slow. The GHQ Liaison (Secret Intelligence and Communication) Regiment, code-named Phantom, answered this need, performing well in Belgium in May. Phantom listened in to German conversations between tank and unit commanders, accurately predicting German attacks and where they could be thwarted. Information was also provided on casualty rates and the condition of roads and bridges. Phantom helped pre-empt so-called friendly fire too.
Frank would spend much of the next three years with Phantom in the Near East on individual patrols monitoring front-line radio traffic – both British and the enemy’s. Phantom had its own private cipher system, good radio equipment and frequencies. It comprised volunteers of outstanding personality plus exceptional linguistic and motorcycling skills, the last of which Frank would acquire only with difficulty.
As early as the Munich scare in September 1938 his parents had made enquiries about Frank working in Military Intelligence. In March 1940 he and Theo had another stormy passage when she threatened once more to ring up generals on his behalf: she doubtless thought she could help him do better than become a Royal Artillery officer. On 18 May Frank thanked EJ’s friend General Jack Collins for trying to get him a job worthy of his intelligence, but he was reluctant to move. He wrote home with a sketch of a cat-bombardier firing a 16-pound howitzer: ‘I don’t [mind] gunnery, I like guns & I’m very fond indeed of gunners. I don’t want to leave them now unless I could get something really interesting.’
On 28 May, however, the Aboukir leaving Dunkirk was torpedoed and sunk. Among those killed were ten out of the then total of only fifteen Phantom officers plus twenty-two other ranks. Frank soon travelled to London to be interviewed by Lieutenant-Colonel G. F. Hopkinson (‘Hoppy’) and his hard-pressed intelligence officers.
Hoppy was small, frighteningly tough, cheerful, energetic and lonely. A war-related injury to his shoulder that he refused to have treated meant he saluted left-handed; he later fractured his spine. He believed that fear of death was essential for strengthening men and tried to persuade all his officers to have their appendixes taken out. He himself had done this in the Great War, thus entirely avoiding the disappointment of missing future battles. Only the company of women frightened him and he actively forbade wives as security risks and strongly disapproved of his officers marrying. He spent one of his own leaves on a daylight RAF raid over Germany acting as tail-gunner. He was exactly the kind of professional soldier whose spirit and bravery Frank came increasingly – and against what he believed his ‘better instincts’ – to admire. Leading his men into an attack at Taranto in Italy late in 1943 Hoppy was killed.
Hoppy’s team tested Frank’s competence in four languages. Theo noted that there was a written exam and that Frank impressed his examiners by preparing one language that was beyond them. Probably he chose Russian, French and German with modern Greek as the maverick. Hoppy astutely promised Frank ‘dare-devilry’, danger and adventure. Romantic intellectual that he was, the prospect of danger interested and attracted Frank. That he disliked the unfairness of his RA officer-in-command played a role. That Phantom would prove open to the idea of sending a squadron to Greece, the country Frank felt passionate about, may have clinched the deal: the ‘something really interesting’ that he sought.
After Dunkirk Hoppy was skilful at making Phantom grow. Including the magic word ‘Secret’ in the name of his force he rightly believed would make scarce items of equipment easier to obtain. He requested an establishment of a thousand, confident that this would land him exactly half that number; in summer 1940 Phantom grew to eighty officers and 600 men largely by word of mouth: personal introductions avoided poor-quality material. Hand-picked officers recruited family and friends, mostly cavalry types like Hugh Fraser, son of Lord Lovat and first husband of Lady Antonia Fraser, and the actor David Niven, who on film often played the part he enacted within Phantom. They were based in extreme comfort in Pembroke Lodge, a fine period house in a well-tended garden atop Richmond Hill with majestic views over the Thames from the veranda, where white-jacketed mess waiters served officers drinks. Bertrand Russell had grown up here, the house lent by the Crown to his grandfather Lord John, the Victorian Prime Minister.
Soon Frank paraded on his arm an embroidered white ‘P’ (for Phantom) on a black ground, which he noticed other troops imagined to signify a kind of Gestapo. The prevalent suspicion that he was checking up on errant colonels and brigadiers accounted for the mix of deference and caution with which Phantom officers were treated at HQs. It was partly true: reporting obvious inefficiencies or bad work within the Higher Command belonged within their brief and led naturally to unpopularity and friction. But their main work was front-line reconnaissance and communication.
Driving competence apart, Frank was an ideal recruit. Very young and innocent-looking liaison officers proved best at acquiring information from their French and Belgian counterparts. Frank, not yet twenty, looked the part and had charm. Junior officers were given considerable freedom to enter operations rooms to question their seniors, where they could be greeted with ‘Who are you to ask me that sort of thing and what the hell is Phantom anyway?’ Brigade and division HQs were often angry that they were not made privy to the information Phantom was collecting about them and passing on higher up the food chain. Significant tact was required, not least when, in 1942, these HQs could be American. Frank’s being half-American – as also his Winchester training in smooth diplomacy, in making everybody feel at home – came to his aid.
Leaving his old unit made Frank emotional. On his last day with the RA he went round patting the guns on their smooth cold muzzles and chatting with the sergeants about their equipment and ammunition, concerned that some had had no leave for five months.
He had work to do to feel at home in the new officers’ mess, with its embargo on talk of shop, politics or money, its stilted life of bridge and poker in the evenings together with ‘a jump, a ride, a screw, a roger or a rattle’: these were, he noted like an anthropologist, the terms officers and gentlemen used for their drinks. Frank, who had little small talk, found conversation about horses of limited interest, sometimes skipping dinner and escaping to central London on the Green Line bus or tube.
Reading provided another escape: Tolstoy’s War and Peace for the second and third time; Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don; the Oxford Book of French Verse, which prompted after half an hour’s reading the snap judgement that most French poetry between du Bellay and Verlaine was dire. Three writers he read in Russian and commended to Désirée Cumberledge were the poets Blok and Yesenin, who died early, and the fabulist Krylov. Frank also admired Bernard Pares’s romantic affection for the Russian people (in his 1941 book Russia) and took note of Pares’s condemnation of Stalin’s Terror, much joked about also in Ernst Lubitsch’s comic film Ninotchka, starring Greta Garbo, which he watched twice that year and which has lines such as ‘The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians.’42
Though Hoppy was not a zealot, discipline mattered, and Frank soon complained that among the lesser evils of Phantom was that he had to look smart: ‘They might as well tell me to take up ballet-dancing. It would come just as easily.’ He ended mournfully, ‘I’ll write again when I feel more cheerful.’
In late June he had written to Theo, ‘I hope your argument with Miss Murdoch didn’t grow too heated.’ Although EJ would joke in 1943 about both his sons’ ‘atrocious’ taste in women, he would not have invaded his wife’s territory. Theo’s curiosity had probably prompted a meeting with Iris Murdoch on some pretext or other at an Oxford coffee house, where the row happened.
Theo had two friends with views about their children’s suitors – Winifred Carritt and Nancy Nicholson. Winifred, possessive about her sons, intervened in their love lives. Despite her own CP affiliation, she broke up a relationship between Brian and a young ‘intellectually inadequate’ working-class girlfriend and later encouraged the break-up of Bill’s first marriage. Nancy offered a kinder model of motherhood. Theo – despite twice going on the warpath where EP was concerned, in 1943 and again 1945, eliciting information from third parties about successive girlfriends, the second his future wife – stood somewhere in the middle. Moreover, while tolerating Nancy Nicholson’s bohemianism, Theo disapproved of Iris Murdoch’s, especially when after 1942 Murdoch frequented the pubs and clubs of Fitzrovia, the artistic neighbourhood of north Soho.
The likely crux of heated debate between them was Iris Murdoch’s doctrinaire unconcern as to whether Nazi Germany or Britain won the war, both being equally wickedly ‘Imperialist’. While Iris was publicly toeing this Party line she was in private neither a fool nor a zealot, but probably Theo provoked her before discovering her to be a formidable debater. Yet Theo was also careful not to make an enemy of Iris who, she knew, did not then return Frank’s passion. And Frank, aware of his mother’s doubts, ended his June 1940 letter diplomatically, ‘I still love her like a sister, although I haven’t had time to write her for two months.’ He had survived the passionate storms of the previous year, and to reassure his mother possibly exaggerated his present disengagement.
The week that Frank joined Phantom, aware that Iris’s twenty-first birthday was coming up, he wrote to ‘Dear Muvverkins’ asking her to forward a letter together with his poems to Irushka to reach her at her parents’ address. The ring-binder survives in Kingston University’s Iris Murdoch archive; age has rusted its metal rings and its hard canvas cover is no longer straight or true. In it are twenty-five of his poems specially typed out on her behalf, many with their date of composition. On the title page he wrote ‘Mere Breaths of Flutes at Eve, Mere Seaweed on the Shore’ from Kipling’s poem ‘Survival’, modest words by which he deprecates both himself and what his verse addresses. His brother EP early saw Frank’s constant impulse to perceive himself as nothing but ‘seaweed on the tide of history’ as a deliberate pose: it was a pose of heroic simplicity, and an identification that was growing. Lying loose-leaf on top is ‘To Irushka’ in Frank’s own hand, written out that 5 July:
When I can find the time between sleep and working,
Between hard earth and [the] cold morning air,
Or a longer rest in the sunlight basking,
I like to remember the gentle things that were.
The tireless novelty of age-grey cities,
The tabby cat asleep with folded paws,
Cornfields too conscious of their beauties
– All these bring sense and freshness to my cause.
But one things taunts me out of all this kindness;
You with the peaceful eyes and soothing hair:
Stand to the barricades beside us!
Then I would die today and hardly care.
‘To Irushka’ has Brooke’s ‘The Great Lover’ behind it, with its artful transmutation from the erotic into the domestic: ‘These I have loved: / White plates and cups, clean-gleaming, / Ringed with blue lines . . .’ The trajectory of Frank’s poem, from the homely toward the heroic, is slighter, indeed adolescent. The propensities Iris accurately identified in an earlier poem – ‘simplicity tinged with melodrama’ – were his stock-in-trade and proved hard to outgrow. Meanwhile she declined his invitation to join him on the barricades or back the war effort, for one further year.
Both flirted at different times with Anglo-Catholicism, and together they once visited Westminster Cathedral where, with its candles flickering before the saints, he lit one to the Virgin Mary. Around her twenty-first birthday on 15 July Frank also dropped in on Iris’s home at 4, Eastbourne Road, Chiswick. He had the polite habit of ringing beforehand, but the Murdoch telephone had been cut off because they were moving to Blackpool in two days with the Ministry of Health where her father worked. Ministries were being moved out to escape the coming Blitz.
Feeling lonely and low, Frank wanted someone to talk to, and her kindly parents fitted the bill. Iris herself was out. He studiedly arrived at a time that he thought would be after tea – 5.30, but found them just about to start – precisely the joke-misunderstanding Iris wrote into The Sea, The Sea when Charles calls on Hartley at a time that he hopes is between meals, having forgotten the lower-middle-class habit of eating the evening meal early.
Murdoch’s father, thin, spectacled and with a slight Irish accent, told Frank about his career as a trooper in the last war. He had served in a yeoman cavalry regiment, the 1st King Edward’s Horse – real cavalry then, before mechanisation. Frank called Iris’s mother a ‘pretty, blonde Dublinoise with much the best accent of the lot of them’ and saw that she was miserable about going to Blackpool. He joined in their meal with zest and stayed till after seven; they invited him to linger, but seeing all the packing they had on their hands he didn’t have the face to.
That same week Frank called on Leo Pliatzky’s family in Bow in the Jewish East End. The Pliatzkys, having read some of EJ’s books and a recent Daily Herald article, and heard him speak on the wireless, were in some awe of Frank as son of the ‘Famous Author’. They were waiting out on the streets to greet and hustle him indoors with great delight and central European accents – ‘we vont you to be at home’ – and Frank took off coat and tie and ate a first-rate meal of cold beef and pickled cucumber. Leo had been called up one week before as a private in the Ordnance Corps. Visiting these two families who were currently connected neither to the cavalry nor to the Brigade of Guards cheered him up considerably.
Iris Murdoch would later publicly commemorate Frank’s quietness, while privately making a journal reference to his ‘torrent of restless talk’. Both were true. He acknowledged in his 1939 poem dedicated to her that he was ‘uncouth and garrulous his tangled mind / Seething with warm ideas’. But none of his letters to her before June 1942 survives. Shakespeare’s Ages of Man distinguishes the young lover from the older soldier; the many letters Frank wrote Iris in the former idiom – ‘Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad / Made to his mistress’ eyebrow’ – Iris very properly kept to herself. Those he wrote in the idiom of the professional soldier ‘seeking the bubble reputation / Even in the cannon’s mouth’ she by contrast rescued and, after his death, lent to his family at their request for their commemorative volume of his writings.
After the fall of France in summer 1940, when Britain and its empire stood alone, the mood of the war – at first fraught with shame and foreboding – made its first decisive shift. Frank and his father alike greeted the Battle of Britain and the Blitz with exhilaration. EJ predicted accurately that ‘the time of waiting is nearly over and Ragnarok would now clash on our shores’. Ragnarok in Norse mythology is the terrifying, apocalyptic end of the old world, and the necessary overture to the beginning of a new one.
There was a Christian sub-text: what survived of EJ’s Methodism included his belief in the value of redemptive suffering and sacrifice. Somehow the 1940 prospect of invasion and the first battles for centuries on English soil excited him, offering a chance of expiating the sins of imperialism. His 1924 play Atonement championed an English hero willing to renounce further violence against India and Indians, and adopt a passive and self-sacrificial role instead. ‘I will pay the price myself,’ he announces. During the war EJ developed these ideas further. Byron came to exemplify the recurrent type of Wandering Englishman who redeems his country’s historical guilt and bad faith through symbolic self-sacrifice.
After Churchill had replaced Chamberlain as prime minister on 10 May 1940 EJ observed that the country ‘by a miracle and at infinite cost’ had recovered moral leadership of the world. Dread times were afoot, the Thames estuary and Kent would soon be under heavy air bombing and artillery fire, yet EJ’s rhetoric is upbeat. ‘Our cause gets daily cleaner . . . This country with all its sins is the world’s moral front line.’ He claimed to envision a new England and a new Commonwealth of Nations, worth fighting for and living to see. After the inertia of the 1930s he welcomed at last the prospect of action; even the prospect of suffering in and for itself was cleansing. Thus he shared the widespread disapproval of Auden’s ‘cowardly’ 1939 emigration to the USA. He believed – at least with one part of his mind – that young men should stay to be tested in war, commenting bloodthirstily that it should cost ‘everything a man has, to face the breaking of body and mind’.
Frank echoed this rhetoric of noble sacrifice. For all his atheism, he admired Christ’s dictum that ‘he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it’ and thought Christ’s death ‘an even more splendid gesture than Socrates’s’. In all of this he owed much to EJ. He, too, was somehow energised by Britain’s isolation, jesting about the growing chances of Spain, Japan and Vichy France all coming in against Britain and jokily transferring the lexis of imperialist insult – coon, wog, wop, dago, nigger – from so-called inferior races to Fascists, whom he considered to have an inferior and hence dangerous philosophy (‘We might as well take on all the niggers at once’).
Starry-eyed Frank was inspired by belief in a never-never-land USSR, where hunger and unemployment had been banished, all had equal rights and all stories of Stalin’s brutality were mere propaganda. EJ disagreed. Although he softened his rhetoric after the USSR and Britain became allies in 1941, he criticised the CPGB for sloganising and for failing to see that, despite all their apathy and ignorance, the mass of the British were dead opposed to the CP. He joked that listening on the wireless to the inanity of American crooners on Workers’ Playtime was sufficient antidote to belief in any benign Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
There was an excellent teasing understanding between father and son, and many shared jokes. Frank let EJ ramble on with his peculiar mixture of acute observation and witty shallowness, not showing his own political hand. EJ inscribed Frank’s copy of his inter-war memoir You Have Lived through All This with the words ‘God help thee, poor half-witted boy.’ Frank liked his father’s outlook on life, his willingness to risk unpopularity by truth-telling, notably about India. Among those benighted liberals who rejected Communism, there was no one whose outlook on life he liked more, or to whom he listened more attentively: as late as 1943 his father’s idle criticisms wounded him. He commended to his brother their father’s facetious and burlesque humour, his sense of beauty and his steel-hard honesty.
What linked them was greater than what divided them: again and again Frank echoes EJ, on the evil of blood sports, the nobility of self-sacrifice, America and cats, aka ‘tibs’. A November 1940 poem of Frank’s entitled ‘Loneliness’ identifies cats with independent-mindedness: ‘Learn like the cat / The stately cat, soft-prowling through the grass, / Silent and proud, to stalk and think alone.’ Cats were free spirits to be emulated. Frank was thrilled to discover that Alexander Pushkin once romanced in an early poem that all his stories were told him by ‘a learned cat whom he met in fairyland’.43 Perhaps the Thompsons’ namesake cat Pushkin would be pleased at this discovery? But soon after Frank sent this poem home, translated into English, Pushkin was poisoned. EJ eloquently mourned: ‘Never again will he sit, angry and dignified, batting an indignant paw at a shut window; or yowl on the buttress above the pear outside my window . . .’44
Both Frank and EJ understood American hostility to British imperialism and hoped that the war offered a chance to build a better world, not defend an outmoded status quo. If EJ had been twenty years younger he would have taken out Dominion or American citizenship post-war so as to be in with young nations and away from ‘our own outmoded world of Punch/Tatler/Sporting Times’. Frank too intended to become an American citizen post-war: ‘I get more homesick for America every day.’ While the English were ‘bloody fine people with virtues of self-criticism and humour that Americans lack, they’re too old and lifeless’. Frank was willing to accept American bumptiousness and stupidity ‘so long as there’s warmth and vitality too’. The plea for ‘warmth’ is eminently Frankish, a quality everyone agrees that he possessed. It is something he looked for and found in groups as unlike and distinct as Americans, Jews, Greeks, Slavs and fellow Communists.
Phantom officers indented for their ample army rations at depots and used their green forms at will to requisition billets near by at 3s 6d per night. By January 1941 Frank calculated that since joining the army he had slept in fifty-two different places. These included the last, a very comfortable pub where he had played darts with his genial batman Trooper Trollope45 and then discussed Abelard with a staff captain researching medieval history; a three-ton lorry touring the Norfolk coast with sleeping bags on the floor during the invasion scare; the outhouse of one unnamed stately home that had had 120 bombs dropped on it, jettisoned on a Kent flight-path; and Cliveden. If the vagrant soldier’s life suited his restlessness he was none the less relieved when Theo opted not to let out his room in Bledlow. He liked to think that there was a room somewhere which ‘expressed’ him in some measure, where the books, pictures, furniture and oddments were all to some extent of his own choosing. (After Frank died Theo tormented herself with the fear that his spirit had never found a home on this planet. ‘Not even Iris was enough,’ she wrote, to anchor him into this existence.)
In Bledlow the small swimming pool near the ‘oddish’ tennis court had been drained and converted to a makeshift air-raid shelter for aged neighbours. Frank reported the Famous Author spending most of one afternoon walking patriotically round the village inappropriately dressed up in khaki together with a grey trilby hat. Near by were cornfields, meadows, downs, beechwoods, deep lanes, a juniper copse. Butterflies abounded and from every part of the small Bledlow house EJ could hear skylarks sing; sighting woodcock and whitethroat also cheered him. And partridge and hare visited. Moreover that first spring he heard a nightingale, and he waited in subsequent years for its return, in vain. He feared that in the Chilterns nightingales, like his beloved bee orchids, must be dying out.
Frank painted a troubled portrait of home life. Theo was unhappy. In Boars Hill she had led a busy social life before they sold up and moved to Bledlow, which was more economical to run but socially speaking cheerless. She missed Boars Hill friendships and could not admit that this move, on which she had insisted, probably throwing the odd tantrum, was a failure. When Frank rebuffed her attempts to ring up generals on his behalf, she tried out: ‘If I died tonight I don’t think anyone would care.’ When EJ offered her a six-month trip to America, where she claimed all her real friends lived, she complained that they wanted to be rid of her. She fell back on worrying and organising others. Yet Frank defended Theo against EP’s criticisms. Theo entertained too much, but this erred on the side of generosity. Her fantasy of escaping to Syria was innocent. She was better on care and kindness than on imagination. Her requests for her sons’ help with odd jobs around the house were often maladroitly timed: she loved organising others but was also a talented person trapped in domestic arrangements (not least the laundering, mending and darning of her sons’ clothes, which both sent home by mail). It was then that Frank discovered that, aged twenty, she had pulled a donkey in Jerusalem out of a ditch by its tail: no wonder they found her fierce.
EP had confided to Frank about the crush he had on Arnold Rattenbury, who had, he believed, led him on then pushed him away when he got close. Frank, who had endured a bad crush or two himself at Winchester, was understanding. ‘Panseatic’ – the jokey Thompson family code-word for ‘gay’ – suggests a civilised tolerance.46 After talking EP’s difficulties through with EJ, who had never experienced sexual feeling for men, he surmised that the sensual strain must come from Theo’s side of the family. Frank hoped EP would outgrow this phase and encouraged him to do so.
Frank addressed EP’s concerns, then moved on to his own problems, among the chief of which was looking for a woman. He needed one badly in lots of ways but thought the task of finding one in wartime when the balance of all one’s thinking is so disturbed that ‘one can’t tell which of one’s emotions are genuine and which are not’ pretty hopeless. He had had friendships with several girls ‘like my beloved Iris’ but they never got very far. He tended to fall for women who were, like him, idealists – ‘and if a woman’s not an idealist I don’t want her’ – but such idealism prevented them going to bed together. ‘Enough of this muck,’ he concluded. ‘A few months in the army’s bound to lower my standards.’
When Frank moved from Phantom to the Special Operations Executive in Cairo in 1943 he arranged for his old Wykehamist friend Tony Forster to replace him: a classic piece of Phantom insider dealing. Forster noted that, despite mystification, many of Phantom’s activities were humdrum and pragmatic. Moreover Phantom finally proved its usefulness only in 1944 after Frank had left, trusted by generals, its reputation such that Canadians, Americans, Free French and even the SAS wanted Phantom detachments working for them. It had some success in Italy (mostly due to luck and the Italians’ eagerness to surrender), and was useful on and after D-Day, but by then it was a different sort of set-up with more emphasis on wireless and codes, and less on the derring-do motorcycling Frank had, in 1940, to learn.
But that Phantom always had a maverick side is also clear. Its spirit was partly ad hoc in a very English way, and it engaged from the start in extra-curricular activities. In spring 1940 Phantom reported accurately on the psychological state of the Belgian King Leopold III and of his commanders-in-chief and predicted their reactions as the Germans advanced and occupied their country. It also had one squadron trained to move behind enemy lines in battle, sometimes by parachute, an adventure we know that Frank once shared, though no details of this incident survive.
One early historian noted that among the virtues Phantom’s founder Lieutenant-Colonel Hopkinson valued was ‘criminality’; another calls Phantom wildly unorthodox; a 1946 War Office letter numbered Phantom among the bands of pirate-adventurers that mushroomed during the war – SAS, SOE, Commandos among them. The ‘P’ on Phantom’s vehicles gave them priority over all other traffic on the road. From Cairo Phantom would have its very own dedicated telephone line to Regimental HQ in Richmond, a direct link used not for official purposes but by all ranks sending messages home. That such a line was known to exist added to Phantom’s mystique.
Unorthodox too was Hoppy’s insistence that officers undergo the wireless, Morse and motorcycle training that in ‘normal’ regiments was enjoyed only by other ranks. So in early August 1940 Frank rode a motorbike 160 miles, ‘which is probably’, he wrote home, ‘why I sound so depressed’. (Two years later he recalled how his hands lost all feeling.) The same week he was teetering over Amberley Downs in Sussex in an armoured car pursued by maniacal New Zealanders in Bren-carriers, then bivouacking in the grounds of Arundel Castle with these same savages: ‘great fun though hair-raising moments . . . Our [that is, Phantom’s] job is to get to places like a whirlwind & send back vital information like lightning.’ By October, when he was helping reconnoitre the South Wales coast and sleeping à la belle étoile, Frank could manage with Morse to encode and decode ten words per minute: Hoppy’s aim was that everyone should achieve a speed of twenty to thirty words.
Since battles could begin at any time Hoppy became famous, too, for turning night into day, getting his men up at midnight to start a full day’s work, to the puzzlement and anger of other formations. Frank was up all night during the first week of August on a day-for-night exercise, wrestling with wireless atmospherics on the Purbeck Hills. During bombing raids Hoppy also vetoed occupation of slit trenches on the grounds that hiding made men cowards. Frank was standing perilously to attention in a well-turned-out company of thirty being inspected by a visiting general when a German bomber flew over and dropped two bombs. No one told them to stand easy or dismiss. Hoppy’s diktat prevailed.
In September 1940 when the Blitz started, a false alarm declared a German invasion imminent. The unit deployed to the east coast. En route on the night of 7 or 8 September Private Holding following too zealously crashed his truck into the back of Frank’s scout car: a rare accident for which Frank was not responsible. B Squadron HQ stayed at Thelveton Hall near Diss in Norfolk and Theo sent biscuits and foodstuffs for the mess.
They found a farm for the vehicles, whence patrols went round the coast to report weather conditions and contact local military commanders. Frank, gazing out from the Suffolk coast, feared dawn might reveal the thousands of flat-bottomed German boats predicted by Erskine Childers in his novel The Riddle of the Sands. He passed some time stewing blackberries and roasting a partridge which his driver Trooper Jones, with country skills, had killed with a brick. Among the equipment with which Phantom then patrolled East Anglia was a large stock of theatrical disguises for use under the expected German occupation. David Niven, who joined at the same time as Frank, fancied dressing up as an Anglican parson. Another Phantom officer at this time explored the possibilities under occupation of sending secret messages using Asdic (sonar) on the pipes of the London sewerage system. Hoppy settled for carrier pigeons instead, and Phantom’s pigeon loft in St James’s Park with its 500 birds was tended by the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott.
When it was realised that the Germans were not coming, Frank’s unit went back to Richmond, where the Blitz was in earnest. From Bledlow the night sky was red with flame as London burned forty miles to the south-east and gunfire was audible, but the Thompsons suffered little. Frank wrote that though the homeless people in the tube stations were a public scandal, by and large London was not such a shambles as EP might think from the papers. The nearest bomb by January 1941 was a ‘good 200 yards away’, merely splintering the Colonel’s window at Pembroke Lodge. Frank in the mess was smoking his pipe with a glass of whisky in his hand and dived between two sofas when the bomb went off, his pipe landing in his whisky glass. He found that a belly well lined with Younger’s ale was a ‘surefire ticket to the land of Nod’.
He minded more being locked with Désirée into a basement of the National Gallery during an air raid, forbidden to leave or stay with the Paul Nashes and Stanley Spencers upstairs. Half an hour sweating in a stifling basement gave him the horrors, a time ‘dyed with claustrophobia’. Dive-bombing by Stukas in the Libyan Desert in 1941 would remind him of the feelings of a schoolboy awaiting physical punishment, but this episode in the basement during the Blitz is the only time he acknowledges a panic attack.
Theo was capable of referring without irony to what ‘the best people’ thought or said. That Phantom officers were better connected than RA ones would not have escaped her attention; belonging in England to the best people went with being ‘in the know’, with that entitlement to circulate intelligence that was Phantom’s raison d’être.
At Richmond Frank met fellow Phantom officers Michael and Jakie Astor, younger sons of the redoubtable Nancy Astor, whom he at Oxford had dubbed with mock severity an ‘arrant wanton’. The Astors had presented the mess with an ace radiogram which one day struck up EP’s favourite Borodin symphony. Michael Astor turned it off ‘in horror’ (so Frank claimed) and they were treated to a commercial number. Frank tried to tolerate the purple depths of swing but complained that there was not one officer in this group who cared a damn for music. The philistinism, political reaction and anti-Semitism of the officer class were his running themes.
Frank watched Michael Astor take his patrol out as beaters when shooting pheasant, and stay with the Duke of Buccleuch while waiting for his patrol to recover from flu: ‘Trust an Astor.’ Relations between Lady Astor and her sons were famously impossible. That Christmas Phantom spent two weeks training and celebrating at Cliveden, the Astors’ home, where officers stayed in the house, men in the stables (for which Frank apologised). One evening Lady Astor’s second, ‘Red’ son David, the future Observer editor, had an argument with his mother about the unemployed. ‘At one point the room was so full of shouting that several people on the fringes were yelling complete gibberish at the top of their voices so as not to be left out.’
Frank retreated into a corner with his copy of Marriott’s History of the Balkans, bought with Christmas money from EJ, and devoted himself to the far more profitable subject of the Bulgars. ‘I do love reading about Bulgars. My next book after my biography of Kosciuszko47 will be a study of the Bulgar revolutionary movement of the 1860’s and 1870’s. The Bulgars are the most admirable of all Slavs – bucolic, hard-working, frugal and amazingly simple. The best phrase I have come across in this book is where he describes the population of some town in Macedonia as “terriblement Bulgare”.’ He also wanted to write a book on Alex Battenberg, first ruler of modern Bulgaria, whose Bogomil heretics attracted him too: teetotal and vegetarian, they rejected marriage, social contracts, rights of property and all the other established laws of God and bourgeois man – not bad for the tenth century. ‘Why are Slavs such funny people? Or do they only seem funny to me? Like this to Dadza?’
This contrast is instructive: the Astors represented the England he hoped was doomed; the Slavs – especially Bulgarians – represented escape into an idealised elsewhere. There are pages in his letters commending the Slavs. From Sheering in Essex in September 1940 Frank wrote: ‘From the start, the Slavs were big-hearted and full of pity for their victims [my emphasis] . . . Ivan the Terrible built an extremely decorative monastery on the walls of which he asked for prayers for the souls of his 3470 victims, citing some by name.’ This is not ironic and scarcely sounds like a grown-up judgement: some solace to the victims! His view of innate Slavic virtue endangered his life in 1944.
The mess also included Lord (Toby) Daresbury, who took two horses, a valet and a groom with him wherever he went and claimed to have jumped a fence every day of his life, and the Falstaffian Lord Banbury of Southam, who, when commanded to improvise a roadblock out of whatever means lay to hand, instead summoned a builder from his feudal estate. Frank’s Major, Tony Warre, uneducated but bright and efficient, had bought from a gypsy two hideously thin Norfolk lurchers that came into the mess each night with snouts scarlet from hares’ blood. Warre was very hurt when Frank refused to go coursing with him. He advocated acquiring a pack of terriers too, with which each time they stayed in a rat-infested barn they could enjoy ‘colossal sport’.
Frank believed: ‘Get rid of blood sports & we should have made a big step at getting rid of Fascism and war.’ He none the less charmed Major Warre so thoroughly that he was immediately forgiven the considerable damage he did to the squadron’s vehicles, by mistaking the pedals at the critical moment or refusing to pass through gates in an orthodox manner. He once caused a head-on crash between his armoured car and a civilian saloon, and often landed his scout car in a ditch. (When his Scottish batman politely declined to ride his own motorbike any more – ‘I just said to masel I wid na get on one agin’ – Frank was glad that though incarcerated he was dealt with leniently.)
Major Warre won Frank’s affection one night by admitting to an affection for poetry, albeit Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads. And he used a phrase that summed up the small-mindedness of the Tory case for fighting the war and fascinated Frank for years: his ambition was to re-establish the lunch tent at Ascot.
Frank made no secret of his CP membership: his fellow officers took this in their stride. He confided in one of them, Norman Reddaway, that he was horrified by the blinkered, class-conscious attitudes of the British establishment; he opposed capitalism as the wave of the past and looked to Communism as the wave of the future. Reddaway accurately saw Frank as ‘an emotional idealist, not like Eric Hobsbawm a theorist nor like EP a tough apparatchik’.
Although Frank praised the materialist interpretation of history as an intoxicating weapon – ‘I feel as if I cd play with it endlessly. And only after one has wielded it for a long time can one appreciate its strengths and weaknesses’ – in practice his natural instinct was to suspend ideological judgement and love his fellow men. He enjoyed the humour and companionship of these brave, decent ‘but hardly imaginative’ officers whom he termed ‘good cards’. His own tolerance worried him. He wrote at length to Désirée about how governed he was by ‘illogical things’ like gallantry, loyalty and friendship that induced in him conflict, and wondered ‘when, if ever, I shall get a chance to integrate my life’. His tolerance was one sign that he was growing up, while his untidy handwriting manifests unformed, contradictory energies.
Was this liking for his often Tory fellow officers because, being so young, every new experience was welcome to him? Maybe he should abandon politics after the war and confine himself to humanitarian work? He was not fit to be a politician, he told Désirée; he was a romanticist, not a materialist.
Inevitably Frank’s study of what he termed the parasitical sub-species ‘Officer-and-gentleman’ involved some special pleading. EP, unhappy at school, would leave Kingswood in March 1941 to help on Biddesden Farm in Hampshire managed by the journalist Desmond MacCarthy’s son Michael,48 following which he thought of applying to a Scottish university. Frank was thoroughly alarmed: might not a Scottish university be dull or narrow-minded? He protested firstly to EP – ‘Don’t imagine England’s a kind-hearted classless democracy, where merit’s all you need. Irrelevant things like Oxford degrees and friendships are going to come in handy for many years to come . . .’ – and he rebuked their parents for allowing EP to countenance the second-rate: ‘Won’t he bear a life-long grudge if he follows Kingswood by a Scottish University?’
When EP applied for a Cambridge scholarship instead, Frank was delighted. The father of a fellow Phantom officer, William F. Reddaway, Fellow of King’s College and founder member of the Cambridge Historical Journal, telephoned through to Richmond a running commentary on EP’s performance. On 18 December 1940 he vouchsafed that, although EP’s languages were weak, the Thompson family would probably be pleased with the result; and Frank was relieved four days later to learn from the same source that EP had won a Mawson history scholarship to Corpus Christi College. Thus Frank both commended and exploited the usefulness of the old-school-tie network himself.
Frank’s stereotyping of Michael Astor as a young blimp also reads oddly today. Astor left one of the most intelligent – and funniest – of the half-dozen post-war accounts of Phantom. So far from being the upper-class philistine of Frank’s imaginings he longed to be a painter, trained at the Slade and under Victor Pasmore at Camberwell but was too impatient and dilettantish to persevere. He saw how war drove part of your personality into the deep-freeze, and hated and dreaded the monkish claustrophobia, tedium and sheer loneliness of life in the mess quite as much as did Frank. Shooting was his way of contriving time on his own, like Frank’s imaginative escape into reading about the Balkans. He longed for respite, missed female company as ardently as did Frank and married in 1942.
Phantom – though technically a regiment, he terms it a mere ‘outfit’ – charmed Astor precisely because it was so English: irregular, eccentric and amateurish. Frank agreed that if the Allies ever won this war, it would be through valour, never efficiency.49 A comical photograph of the mess that Cliveden Christmas, shows (left to right) Rupert Raw, Norman Reddaway, Lord Banbury, Major Warre, Frank and Michael Astor standing in a row. Frank, at nineteen and a half, looks shockingly young and innocent. He also seems slightly sheepish. Probably he has just been asked to brush his hair.
Frank decried what he – quite mistakenly – called Wilfred Owen’s ‘sickening self-pity’ in his sonnet ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, for he was, after all, learning to transmute his own self-pity into intelligible public rhetoric. In March 1941 he sent Désirée a poem he had written whose English title is ‘They Died in a War of Others’ Making’, quoting lines from Aeschylus’s Agamemnon that moved him. Written the previous August, it starts ‘Between the dartboard and the empty fireplace / They are talking now of the boys the village has lost; / Tom, our best bowler all last season . . .’ It moves in its second part to the whisper that goes up against a war that is the fault of Helen of Troy’s treachery, the Chorus evoking the intense grief of mothers seeing that their beautiful sons will come home, if at all, only as ashes. Its intention to dignify the Second World War by comparing it with the Trojan is audacious and touching, but not wholly satisfying.
Frank alerted Désirée to the presence of ‘grecisms’ in this poem and warned her that if his body were to be cast in the role of fertilisation (recalling Rupert Brooke’s line ‘In that rich earth a richer dust concealed’) it would nourish not English daisies but deep red anemones and wild blue irises – thus indicating his destination in a manner censors could not blue-pencil. Similarly he gave his parents the easy clue that ‘after a break of three years’, that is since his trip to Crete, he had been offered and eagerly seized the chance once more to sight brown spider orchids.
Frank judged Italy’s invasion of Greece in October 1940 the cruellest incident in this contest of empires. ‘Never was there a people possessed of such boundless good nature.’ Greece’s only fault had been to put up with Dictator Metaxas’s rotten government. The invasion also provided Hoppy with his first opportunity since Dunkirk to send men into battle. He created a new group and sent the first echelon out from Liverpool to Cairo, arriving in Athens under the leadership of Miles Reid in late December. Reid communicated directly with Phantom in Richmond via the wireless mast at Leith Hill. Here was exactly the promise of adventure Hoppy had tantalised Frank with when he recruited him.
Only one in fifty volunteered, joining the second echelon and sailing from Gourock that March, and Frank was among this small band. He would later say that he ‘went for love of the scented hills’. He took Désirée and later Theo out to supper at a Greek Cypriot restaurant called Lefkos Pirgos (White Tower) to practise his modern Greek; he was excited about leaving but anxious. One night not long before his departure his echelon were staying at Wotton House near Aylesbury, restored by Sir John Soane, and he went out and got fighting drunk. Rupert Raw, whom he found sympathetic, together with Reddaway, helped undress him and get him to bed.
He had one week’s embarkation leave before his eve-of-departure letter on 17 March 1941 instructed ‘fambly’ on how to get urgent messages of less than twenty words encoded in cable to him. He knew their anxieties. He had been writing home twice each week until, on the eve of Dunkirk the previous May, an unexplained ten-day gap opened. To Theo’s reply-paid wire ‘ARE YOU WELL?’, Frank replied, ‘Robust but occupied. Writing.’ Now he tried to reassure them that if a battle started, ‘you must reckon with hearing nothing till it is ended . . . no news of me is most definitely good news – (nasty laugh from Bad Dadza) – we have equipment to make bad news travel extremely fast’. That no news of him would necessarily signify good news was of course a lie. Not his last.
The will he left claimed that to die at the age of twenty represents getting a good deal from life: further and typical sprezzatura.
Dear Fambly
As this is a death-letter, there isn’t much to say. I did enough talking while I was alive. Now I want to thank you for a score of interesting and enjoyable years. In other words a much better deal out of life than most people get.
You can read anything that I wrote, now. You may find one or two poems that amuse you in the bigger book. You might send the one entitled ‘To Irushka at the Coming of War’ to the lady it invokes, and Madonna of the Green eyes to Catherine [Nicholson]. For my epitaph as good a line as any is Krylov’s . . . ‘He sometimes found it sad, but never boring’. But you can probably think of something better yourselves. My dirge must be ‘Proshchoi moi Tabor’ which more or less sums things up [a popular Russian song ‘Goodbye my Gypsy Encampment’].
I didn’t believe in any form of after-life, so shan’t get one. But any time one of you breaks something or trips over something, you will know that I am with you in spirit. Lots of love. Frank [cat’s face]
Frank on leave in Bledlow, 1941.
The reference to breaking things and tripping up is a standing joke about his Prince Myshkin-like clumsiness. He told Reddaway he believed he would not survive the war.