Under the Libyan Dog-star: 1942
I know that you must die my Comrade
Die gaily as the sunset glows on Hermon . . .
For you and me and the young vine leaves death is the end.
But life goes on for ever.
‘Red Gladiolus’, April 1942
Christians have a panic confidence that after death their own personality will be translated to some place in the ether . . . The Buddhist view . . . the only one that begins to make sense . . . [is the] idea of the individual personality merging back into the mainstream of consciousness.
Letter, 26 July 1942
While Frank sickened with septicaemia, EJ was welfare officer at the RAF camp near West Malling in Kent, where red tape, a huge burden of letter-writing and physical frailty distressed him; after two months of feeling increasingly useless, ill and ‘past it’, he left. He felt a failure. On the Denham Studios set in Buckinghamshire of Powell and Pressburger’s ‘hands-across-the-sea’ movie, 49th Parallel, he and Theo had shaken hands with the actor Leslie Howard; they later attended the film’s gala opening. But his film plans came to nothing. Nor would any newspaper advertise his new collection of poems, New Recessional (June 1942), and fears of an establishment conspiracy further depressed him. The cartoonist David Low – a new friend – introduced him to H. G. Wells, who talked ‘less delirious rot’ than EJ had expected. But friendship could not compensate for the absence of official war work. India remained his raison d’être.
Was Britain fighting this war to preserve the imperialist status quo or to create a brighter, more progressive future? India was a test case. Two and a half million Indians fighting on the Allied side were proving crucially important in the Middle East and North Africa alike. EJ’s Enlist India for Freedom (1940) explains why they had the right to expect their cooperation to be rewarded by independence. One obstacle was India’s 650 princely states, and his work-in-progress The Making of the Indian Princes (1943) again suggested how to move forward. When he communicated with members of the Government (Stafford Cripps or Clement Attlee), when he wrote for The Times or the New Statesman, visited the House of Lords, broadcast or appeared in a panel at Kingsway or Conway Halls, India was the topic.
He thought the ineptitude of the British Government and the crassness of Indian nationalist leaders roughly equal. Nehru, who learned of this, wrote to him: ‘please do not carry away all this bitterness against my poor unhappy country’. EJ strove to be fair-minded. He did not agree that hatred between the Muslim League and the Hindu Congress Party proved India’s unreadiness for self-rule; such strife was simply another result of bad British government. But he also never gave up faith in the British Empire as a potential force for good and accordingly canvassed Dominion status for India, like Canada or New Zealand. This was exactly what Sir Stafford Cripps offered India in his failed March 1942 mission. Gandhi scorned this as ‘The post-dated cheque of a failing bank’, and promptly launched his last campaign, the Quit India movement, that led directly in 1947 to independence. The morning after Gandhi’s speech all major leaders and 100,000 other Indians were arrested, demonstrators fined or flogged and some shot. This final imprisonment of Nehru lasted three years. Then in April 1942, on his way to meet with Cripps, EJ’s close friend Geoffrey Garratt – with whom he had co-written The Rise and Fulfilment of British Rule in India – was killed by a bomb.
India compelled Frank’s and EP’s imaginations too. At Corpus Christi College in Cambridge EP, now eighteen, gave a talk on India, ‘background, social conditions, history – Congress, Muslim League &tc’. And Frank, serving with an Indian brigade followed by three weeks in an Indian Army hospital, sent home enthusiastic reports. Indians were ‘the neatest, cleanest and most dignified soldiers in our army’, first-rate soldiers and good technicians too. When he took four broken springs to an Indian workshop they had them mended and back on the vehicles within four hours. He thought India a tragedy, a half-disgruntled colony dragging at Britain’s feet unconsulted when it could play an important and dignified role. At the end of 1942 Theo and EJ both feared that EJ’s letters to Frank had been stopped after he had written seditiously about the India Office, and Frank meanwhile joked that his father, after being used to ‘sort the whole shemozzle out’ as ‘Man-of-the-hour’, might be appointed Lord Coneygar61 of Bledlow, KCBE [sic]. He wrote to Désirée that ‘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 – or even the vast territories of old Muscovy.’
Practicalities absorbed Theo. She corresponded with the BBC Overseas Service about a talk they wanted her to write in Arabic; chaired a WI meeting where Great War survivors shared their experiences; helped organise the investment of £2,000 each for her sons from her wealthy Brooklyn relatives. EJ’s handicapped brother Alfred – dropped as a child, simple and given to fits – moved to lodgings two miles away where he worked in a corset factory and was a Methodist lay preacher, visiting Bledlow at weekends. Alfred, whose simplicity was the butt of many jokes, was good, serious and loyally tended by the Thompsons. ‘Uncle Alfred informs me’, EP wrote to Frank, that ‘Venice is a place and that St Paul did a lot of missionary work in Troy.’ Theo, who grew vegetables, bought Alfred an orchard with sixty young trees, where he planted a kitchen garden.
After the USA had entered the war in December 1941, she pondered her own indebtedness to what she called its ‘unusual form of society’. One American friend in London was Marchesa Louise de Rosales, who told Theo about being entertained as a child by the King and Queen of Bulgaria in their cliff monastery-palace overhanging the Black Sea, and about her work as a nurse in Italy during the Great War. After Louise’s chauffeur left to work in an aircraft factory she patriotically gave away her ‘enormous Packard or Buick’ to the Red Cross, hiring a car when visiting Theo from the Connaught Hotel where she waited out the war. Her maid, Drummond, took photos of EP kitted out in his uniform as an officer in the 17th/21st Lancers, when he spent a night in Louise’s suite in summer 1943. (He was grateful that the army taught him about the insides of a car, electricity, wireless, first aid, as his liberal education had entailed no applied learning.) Theo and EJ, too, sometimes stayed at the Connaught, to take in a show or a film. She found Walt Disney’s jokes about stork-babies in his ‘tricksy and cute’ film Dumbo vulgar.
Theo cultivated London-based Phantom officers. Lieutenant John Fitzwilliam, training the next generations of recruits in Richmond, advised during summer 1941 about how to get money and messages to Frank and gave news of sick leave granted to his fellow officers to return home. Captain Sir John Wrightson, Richmond HQ’s gloomy intelligence officer, also rang Theo several times with news of Frank. And Wrightson helped her on 14 January 1942 cable fretfully: ‘No word from you since November 19. Please signal at once how you are. Love from us all. Mother.’ Wrightson, she assured EP, ‘chalked it up to Frank’s credit that he told us . . . that no news was good news . . . we ought to hear within 3 days’.
Russian sufferings moved her. She raised money for the Russian war effort, joined the Fabians, thought constantly of her two boys, worked on a Puffin picture book and, despite rheumatism, polished the communion rail of the village church, ‘at which I, a Non-conformist, will never kneel’.
Frank had been in Libya for two months, and would stay a further three. He called the war in North Africa ‘a game of shuttlecock’: five separate ‘swings’ went alternately to the Axis or the Allies, each failing when the victors lacked the capacity to follow up or exploit their success, in long exhausting tank battles resembling medieval jousts. Four days after Frank had rejoined his squadron the Eighth Army relieved the long siege of Tobruk, driving 350 miles west to capture Benghazi on Christmas Day itself. This was Operation Crusader, with 118,000 Allied troops taking losses of 17,700, and Axis forces taking even bigger casualties. One month later, on 28 January 1942, Rommel recaptured Benghazi with three months’ army rations and one million cigarettes going up in smoke, before retaking Tobruk in May. Shuttlecock offensive and counter-offensive ended only with General Montgomery’s decisive victory at El Alamein that November.
In all Frank crossed the Libyan Jebel Desert three times. He first came under fire after the battle of Sidi Rezegh on 30 November 1941 when attached to a raiding column of the South African Armoured Cars trying to cut the coastal road and shoot up enemy transport. After the ritual dusk brew-up, when sausage or bully sizzling in cut-down petrol tins was consumed with the indispensable cup of chai, they moved forward jerkily through the night in close formation, Frank and Lorton singing softly together.
Frank, who had a sweet tooth, was drowsily eating the last bar of captured chocolate that the South Africans had given them when the column stopped, under red and white lights indicating streams of bullets and machine-gun fire. When his wireless operator jumped out and dived under the vehicle ahead Frank at last understood that Italian Breda posts were shooting vigorously at them: he had missed his opportunities to experience fear, courage, nonchalance or excitement. On another occasion they got mixed up with some German tanks, but he affords no details. Allied and German tank crews were so battle-fatigued that they often leaguered down for the night in close proximity, and – since each also had vehicles captured from the other side – with confusing and comical results in the morning.
Frank evoked an air raid in a poem – ‘the black winged planes like bees in swarm with steady droning . . . wheel overhead and descend: crash after crash resounds, dust fountains the horizon’. The first time he and Lorton were dive-bombed by Stukas – the best and most precise dive-bomber of the Second World War – they were on top of a fuel dump holding a petrol can and did not even run for cover. But they soon learned to shelter in a slit trench, despite Hoppy’s pronouncement. Frank experienced during raids a mixture of terror and humiliation that reminded him of ‘a schoolboy awaiting a caning’, while the courage of the anti-aircraft gunners inspired him. During the December advance to Benghazi his unit sent a raiding party behind enemy lines to report battle progress with Frank busily enciphering. Lorton received a painful bomb splinter wound below the shoulder but, plucky and uncomplaining, was back in action by spring.
War alternates boredom with terror, and Frank once got his men spending two whole days digging his wireless truck in against air attack, then a third digging it out again because it was stuck. When Rommel after a lull rallied in January, Frank’s unit was attached to 7th Indian Brigade making a ‘brilliant escape’ from Benghazi – retreating at 40 mph towards the Egyptian border. Frank spent months on the Gazala Line, where the white houses of Tobruk with its blue harbour featured as their desert metropolis, and won a few days’ comfort at Eighth Army HQ.
There was a pervasive dread of getting lost in the featurelessness of the desert, whose place names rarely corresponded to anything recognisable. Chance encounters were the more memorable. He met French NCOs trying to bag a hare, appreciated the unfailing courtesy of his first Poles and watched British cavalry officers passing by in dandified dress. He ran into an unnamed schoolfriend, killed months later, who gave him tea in his dugout at Bir Hacheim.
With access to intelligence about where units were, he sought out Leo Pliatzky in his field army workshop dugout, and arrived singing ‘Whitworths are a girl’s best friend’. They had not met since the Blitz two years before and Leo, ‘the old cynic himself’, was delighted. They enjoyed a can of warm beer each while Leo, observing a new physical confidence and coordination in Frank, wondered whether this followed from his loss of virginity. (That women the following year were still refusing to dance with Frank because of his clumsiness suggests that this ‘new coordination’ had its limits.)
From left to right : standing, Jasper Backhouse and Carol Mather; seated, Donald Melvin, ‘Lt X’, as Frank captions himself, and George Grant.
The extraordinary desert spring blossomed from late January, and Carol Mather saw Frank intoxicated by its beauty, recording twenty-seven different species of flower, in immense drifts of red, yellow and blue. By April Mather noted drily that ‘Frank was reading Greek poetry and dreaming of the egalitarian society to come – from the safety of the officers’ mess tent!’ Frank’s attempts to raise the Red Army banner were met with polite amusement.
Fear of a German breakthrough in the Caucasus in pursuit of Iraqi oil caused Phantom’s redeployment that April to Palestine and Syria, where it was to report on pro-Vichy French sentiment, and give an account of troubles on the Syrian–Turkish border. Its members left the desert with some sadness: it was a mesmerising place, its very vastness accentuating the intimate camaraderie of small unexpected campfire welcomes, sharing tea laced with rum under the immense canopy of desert stars. The burned-out tanks and planes would soon be picked clean by Senussi tribesmen; meanwhile it was ‘not a bad desert’, having been enriched, Frank wrote, by ‘some of the finest deeds of courage and endurance in Man’s history’.
His five months in Libya were harsh, alternately dull and dangerous, confusing and memorable. Frank and H Squadron alike, despite mistakes, found their feet there. However, the Eighth Army while in Libya soon moved away from Phantom to J Service instead, which listened in to forward radio traffic ‘chatter’, including the Eighth Army’s own, for an up-to-date account of the progress of a battle.
Frank chronicled the campaign in a retrospective journal. The remains of Graeco-Roman civilisation in Cyrenaica, erstwhile bread-basket of Rome, stimulated his imagination, the hem of the Hellenic world almost more fascinating than the heart. This theatre of war reminded him of Syria while remaining essentially African. As they proceeded north out of the desert, they were startled by the sudden green hubbub of the delta.
Although for weeks or months they had little water to wash with, mail – ‘dearest thing next to tea to the heart of a soldier’ – somehow happily filtered through, on one occasion arriving during a dull interlude between dive-bombing raids. While censoring his men’s letters Frank was shocked by the braggart heroics and exotic lies of one, the repetitions of another, but recognised the opposing needs to soothe or stimulate your relatives back home. He too prettified conditions for home consumption, offending neither decorum nor security. When in March 1942 Theo yet again raised the question of his going home for treatment, he berated her angrily. True, two of his fellow officers had been invalided home, but his commanding officer ‘Brian Frank’s eczema made him resemble a leper; Gerald Pinckney had every bone in his foot crushed by an armoured car’. His last boil had disappeared in January; he was taking ‘vitamin tablets’ and drinking ‘half a pint of lime-juice each day’; he ‘often’ ate fresh meat and bread and wore ‘comfortable’ desert boots.
Carol Mather one month earlier reported such a plague of desert sores that simply putting your unbandaged hand into your pocket removed the skin, leaving a bloody mess: clearly no vitamin tablets or lime juice were then in evidence. When Frank told his parents that his Major had been captured – ‘poor old boy’ – so that Frank had to take command for five challenging days, he omitted to tell them that Dermot Daly had been so incapacitated by hand sores that he was an easy target for a German snatch raid. Frank naturally also withheld the news that on briefly taking command the previous month, still aged only twenty-one, he had consumed a bottle of whisky the day before.
Those privations that he could turn to lyricism or wit Frank would admit to; others he kept silent about. He acknowledged Benghazi’s fleas: ‘vast forces of dangerous and determined guerilla fighters’ left behind by the Italians. He lyricised the formidable cold ‘penetrating, eating through innumerable layers of clothing into the bone itself so that I can’t write’. And when fearsome sandstorms blew he admitted huddling like others in the back of the truck demoralising himself, really hating the desert.
On dry nights they slept in the open, so the March rains took him by surprise. He had been prepared for heat – tank metal by afternoon was so searingly hot you could fry an egg on it – as for thirst, flies, weariness and high explosives. ‘But when the great father of camels countenances torrential rain he is definitely going beyond the terms of reference.’ He came back drenched after a day’s work on an old battlefield salvaging parts from smashed vehicles, to find his bedding soaked, while Herbert (the fellow officer so short-sighted he mistook a German patrol for a group of gazelle), unable to spot his tent at 200 yards, wandered most of the night in the rain, sleeping for a few hours wrapped in an old tarpaulin. Herbert was exultant on reappearing at 9.30 a.m. to find that his bed, unlike Frank’s, was still dry.
Frank confessed some truths. Water to wash or shave in was so rare that they grew ‘bearded like the pard’; a single hot bath in many months at Agedabia constituted an event. Frank’s pleasure in For Whom the Bell Tolls was diminished by the fact that even Hemingway baulked at admitting how Robert Jordan’s feet must have stunk, lest his love scenes lose credibility. When in early February a bottle of beer each and new clothing appeared, the old rags they had been wearing had to be burned on a bonfire. Leo Pliatzky together with his corps were lice-ridden, and Frank’s probably were too. (‘Our own soldiers get [lice] quite frequently,’ he noted.)
Censorship would not have permitted him to share the tally of Phantom H losses by February 1942: two captured, two invalided home, one disciplined for an unnamed misdemeanour, a casualty rate of 10 per cent. But he operated strong internal self-censorship too. Not only was he silent about vitamin deficiency and lice, which concern for his family’s peace of mind made him downplay, but he called his work early in 1942 during the lull between campaigns a ‘soft’ job, ‘beer and skittles’ compared to the daily routine of Britain’s ordinary fighting troops.
He had a sunny disposition, and enjoyed painting little vignettes to charm his audience. So he recorded in a quiet rear area of the desert a soldier who kept six quails under his bed. All lived together in contented domesticity until one day after gas-attack practice the soldier strode back into his tent disguised by his respirator: the birds fled as one quail never to return. He also evoked Biscuit, the spirited kitten thrown in for want of four piastres change when he bought a bottle of chianti in Benghazi; Biscuit travelled curled up in the driver’s hat untroubled by mechanised movement, and even got on with Bully, a black and white puppy kidnapped the following week. Frank spent his spare time teaching Biscuit to fight for his country against a piece of paper and some string.
To Iris Murdoch too he described Biscuit and also commended the ‘warm-heartedness and simplicity’ of Maxim Gorki’s peasants in The Mother. She replied ironically that she and he were scarcely straightforward peasants so much as ‘bemused intellectual misfits’. Or at least she was. But she brooded over his phrase ‘simple and warm-hearted’: it struck her imagination forcibly. Six months later she was writing to another friend in Egypt about Frank as being ‘maybe too simple and warmhearted’.
Frank shrewdly thought Virginia Woolf’s characters in Between the Acts either absurdly conventional or ‘too sensitive to live’. He had a growing dislike of introspection. He wrote to his folks on 15 February 1942:
the young Englishman’s faculty for introspection lessens to almost nothing with the end of adolescence. Very rarely now do I find myself inspecting the murky mass of incoherence a metaphysician would call my soul. My chief intellectual interests are in the earth and the people on it, especially ‘the characters’ and myself as a potential ‘character’, in the figure I cut to the outside world, which probably bears no relation to the one I would find in the silences of my own mind.
What of the motto ‘Know thyself’, drummed into him at school? Marcus Aurelius and Thomas à Kempis were great in spite of their introspection, he riposted, not because of it. He ridiculed the ‘tracking down [of your] mental fleas’ which made nineteenth-century Russians wretched and ineffectual. When in 1943 Iris demanded a response to the news of her having lost her virginity he argued that ‘I think Tolstoy and Chekhov went as far into the minds of our fellow men as it is profitable or seemly to go.’ He rejected what he called ‘continued psychological kit-inspections’.
Here was a new theme. It was partly his way of evading capture, refusing criticism, safeguarding privacy and independence. Communists and bluff professional soldiers alike embraced simplicity, and ‘One forgets unless reminded constantly that one has ever been a civilian or had any [other] raison d’être.’ It is also his surrender to the masculine culture of the mess.
Warm-hearted simplicity was increasingly Frank’s persona. ‘The more I see’, he wrote from Libya, ‘the less I understand why civilisation has gone to the bad, when there are so many good people.’ The lack of bitterness in his letters impressed both Iris and Leonie Platt (née Marsh), whose husband longed to see a German plane crash with no survivors, but who doubted whether Frank were capable of the same hatred and who wrote saying she knew his gun would jam because he had ‘real brotherly love in him’ and would not wish to kill.
It was possibly due to observing him in his role as the unit’s Education Officer that one of his men told him he was too restless to be a schoolmaster post-war as he wished. He noted ruefully – but probably accurately, had he survived – that he would have to try and hack his way in life as a journalist instead. Frank feared that his impatience meant also that he would never settle down anywhere long enough to marry or have children and that meanwhile soldiering looked like being his first and only profession. So far as a journalistic future went, his letters are effortlessly readable, brilliant reportage and full of wild leaps of imagination – as when, in one, he compares Charles I and General Robert E. Lee as ‘reactionaries who went down with great dignity’ or Lincoln with Lenin as twin heroes.
His 250,000 or so words written during the war (letters, diaries, poems) bear testimony to his obsessive urge to turn life into narrative, and he wished he had the eyes and ears of Tolstoy. But his surviving stories are – at best – apprentice work. Iris Murdoch none the less accurately saw that he was designed to be a teller of tales and noted his propensity always to ‘hit upon the picturesque’ in life as in words.
Americans began to appear in the Middle East after the USA entered the war in December 1941. He was moved to see the American flag fly. While knowing that Old Glory was brandished against California Okies and Detroit steelworkers, it still seemed to him to stand for something bigger and more progressive.
He tested out these theories that April during a week’s leave in Beirut, staying with his mother’s American cousinry, Meg and Leslie Leavitt, with visits to the Dodges, Glocklings, Freidingers. He liked staying in an American household, appreciated American accents and manners, and thought the American University of Beirut a beacon of sanity in a backwater generally badly misgoverned. One Beiruti recalled and praised his great-grandfather Henry Harris Jessup and Frank visited Theo’s father’s grave. He was proud of being a Jessup. He would like any daughter of his to speak with an American accent; his wife would have to have one too. He noted that The Heights, the Jessup house at Aleih, was now valued at £5,000.
He also rekindled acquaintance with Anglo-Levantines such as Cecil Hourani (at Oxford with him in 1939) and, in Aleppo, Ernest Altounyan (whom the Thompsons had met at Lake Coniston in 1933: his and Dora Collingwood’s children were the originals for Arthur Ransome’s Walker children in Swallows and Amazons). He read Ernest’s Ornament of Honour, his strange poem addressed to T. E. Lawrence, and in Jerusalem met his attractive daughter Tacqui. Such visits made him reflect that he belonged to a definite class of people with whom he instantly felt at home: Leavitts, Nicholsons and by implication Altounyans – educated, intelligent people who valued good conversation enough not to dilute it by card-playing, cinema-going or allowing their children to dominate.
From left to right : standing, Jo Adams, John Pearson-Gregory, Frank, Graham Bell and Norman Radcliffe; seated, Angus McBain, George Grant and Maurice Avril. Frank’s caption reads: ‘I had the sun dead in my eyes – also a touch of fever. I look like a French bicyclist.’
None the less Phantom, where he was number two, was now his home. He was gazetted captain on 8 September 1942 but told nobody at home; his parents discovered this promotion only five months later. He thought his new commanding officer George Grant one of the kindliest and most rational of men.
After a brief refit in Cairo, H Squadron was now sent to Syria, where the previous summer the Allies had defeated pro-Axis forces, and – as in Iraq and Iran – installed a puppet ruler loyal to their interests. Phantom had the job of going into the unoccupied part of Syria to discover a port and airfield prepared by sympathisers for German invasion, and establish which officials were still actively pro-Vichy. It also reported via long-range wireless on the dispute between two Bedouin tribes across British lines of communication with the southern Russian front and explored points of passage for mechanised transport on the Turkish–Syrian border: UK forces might have to cross ‘if things deteriorated in Turkey’. All this was accomplished by 13 June and shows Phantom’s roving brief. Frank’s French and fledgling Arabic surely helped in this work.
Carol Mather left Phantom and returned to the Commandos, and last saw Frank ‘getting itchy feet’ in Syria, wanting to return to action either in Libya, where the news worsened, or elsewhere. He minded very much being left out of the current fighting, in which first-rate chaps were chucking their lives away ‘like cigarette-ends’. In June 1942 George Grant helped him apply to return to the now mechanised Royal Horse Artillery, where he hoped his knowledge of desert warfare, wireless communication and mechanised transport would help him avoid a desk job. He requested Theo neither to send telegrams asking him to change his mind, nor to betray his plans to Phantom HQ in Richmond.
Frank longed to share the dangers of war, and experience a communal sense of purpose. Summer 1942’s alarums and excursions at first promised both. When Rommel recaptured Tobruk and the Eighth Army fell back to El Alamein, Phantom was abruptly recalled to the Western Desert, the men trekking nearly 2,000 miles to get there in eight punishing days. Disappointment followed, and indeed their worst month of the war awaited them in Burg-el-Arab on the Egyptian border, passing wireless messages for a tank delivery regiment.
‘You’d better not try plotting my moves over the last two months: they’re too nonsensical,’ Frank wrote home that August, now en route back northwards to Iran. The prospect of cooperating with the Red Army defending the Caucasus was ‘a job [he’d] rather have . . . than any other’: nearly 1,200 tons of freight went through Iran each day to the USSR by rail and vast quantities also by road. Frank gave up his plans to leave Phantom, now part of the newly formed Paiforce – Persia and Iraq Force. From a base in Hamadan it could help guard Russian supply routes and listen in for any German breakthrough of Russian defences. ‘Fielding long-stop to Brother Ivan’ was not as suicidal as gunnery, but interesting, important and – he boasted – ‘by no means safe either’. Above all it promised the likelihood of meeting Russian soldiers. Perhaps Phantom might still deliver the danger and adventure he sought.
Meanwhile an airgraph from Winifred Carritt stunned him. Brian had died on 1 July, after six weeks of TB.62 Like Rex the previous year, Brian was only twenty-one. But this news was far worse: unlike Rex, Brian was neither conventional nor conservative. Their shared Communism made a close and vital bond. From Arborfield army training camp where he taught young women to use predictors on anti-aircraft guns they took him to the Osler Sanatorium in Headington, and finally home, where Brian died on the balcony overlooking the Boars Hill garden that for Frank held so many memories of discussion and play. Winifred ended bravely: ‘Don’t be too sad but work all the harder to fill up the gap he leaves . . . We spoke often of you . . . Victory in 1942.’ Frank replied that Brian had been an integral part of Thompson family life, effectively another brother to him. Theo, eloquent in grief, tried to console Frank that TB made its victims in some way happy or at least optimistic, and yet ‘some things are utter loss . . . My heart aches for you night and day.’
Memories gathered. Brian dining and smiling, Brian tossing his blond forelock when they last met, unexpectedly, in Leicester Square in 1941, both hands clasping Frank’s before he turned and walked away into the crowd. He tried out different goodbyes, from the American ‘So long Fella, been good knowing you’ to the quieter British (to Iris) ‘I shall always be glad at the thought of him.’
He proclaimed Brian a ‘new can-do type’ lacking all Frank’s own inhibitions from the past, while in private registering that Brian’s letters, despite being emotional and hence un-English, were yet ‘half-strangled’ too. Frank and Brian fully shared discomfort about emotion.
Fifty years later Brian’s elder brother Gabriel (Bill) praised the sancta simplicitas Brian and Frank shared. This was partly sentimental, partly true. Frank believed that the way Brian over-simplified life was valuable and instructive. Writing to his Eton tutor of the flashes of comradeship he treasured, Brian added tellingly, ‘It’s as though one could stretch out a hand when one is happy and feel it clasped by millions of people all over the world.’ The potent illusion 1930s Communism offered is here distilled into a phrase: an end to injustice and loneliness, and an escape out of ‘half-strangled’ English inhibition into simple, communal certainties.
Frank received Brian’s Dragon eulogy containing that stirring phrase that November. It inspired ‘Aubade’, a poem in letter form he sent to Mrs Carritt, starting: ‘Hullo Brian! Writing to you from Persia. / Here is a picture that you would have liked . . . / Morning. North, on the snow mountains, / Black thunder-clouds . . .’ He communes with a kindred spirit whose courage and strength he celebrates, summoning him to greet a dawning new age. The same month he wrote to his parents quoting Cecil Day Lewis’s ‘A Time to Dance’, declaring that Brian would always be ‘my friend who within me laughs’, a beloved figure reminding him of happiness.
By July 1942 his correspondence with the newly engaged Désirée had faltered, while that with Iris Murdoch flourished. She four times addresses Frank in her letters as ‘Brother’ while he reciprocated with ‘Soul-sister’ or ‘Tovaritch’ (Comrade), stressing their political affinity. His feeling is apparent from his translation of Pushkin’s ‘Ya Vas Lyubil’:
I loved you once. Who knows but even now
Love in my soul may not be wholly dead?
But never let it trouble you. I vow
I would not hurt you by a thing I did.
I loved you once in silent desperation.
Shyness and envy wracked me numb with pain.
I loved you once. God grant such adoration
So true, so gentle, comes your way again.
Frank manages to convey the stylishness of the twenty-year-old Pushkin’s Russian. He also wrote a story about a Gunner Perkins who wished to express passion by letter to his girlfriend Helen, rather than ponderous thoughts about books and politics. ‘If only he had had the courage before he left. Now it was too late, you could never break down barriers by letter.’ ‘Helen’ is an interesting nom de guerre for Iris: the Greeks died at Troy for another Helen.
Towards the end of 1942 each appealed for greater intimacy. Frank was depressed from jaundice when he reflected on the vagaries of their friendship: ‘Three years & a bit since I joined the Army. More than that since you & I first exchanged Weltanschauungs [worldviews] in a room at Ruskin. Now I am 22 instead of 18, and you 23, almost a matron. Looks like being another three years straight before we meet again. We shall probably find we have both changed out of all knowing and have nothing any longer in common.’ But her letters – ‘a golden gift, a winged gift’ – meant a lot to him. ‘They strike fire immediately. And when one arrives . . . I am impelled forthwith to answer it . . .’ He would like to see her post-war. He repeated the appeal in April 1943: ‘there are only four people left in . . . England who can speak almost as clearly on paper as with their lips. Three of those are my closest kin and the other one is you.’
On 22 January 1943 Iris reciprocated by evoking her loneliness within the ‘miles and miles of frigid protective atmosphere’ in the Treasury, where she was now an assistant principal. Her bohemian period in Fitzrovia, where she would collect new admirers, was starting. But she wanted to find ‘the patient mind which is prepared to comprehend my own & toss me back the ball of my thought’. Each shared the gift of making the other feel understood.
And Frank increasingly appealed to Iris’s imagination. Her 24 November 1942 letter conveys two opposed views of courage in which he features. On the one hand she hopes that he will stay as far from the firing line as ever, wanting him to be a hero but without endangering himself. To her fellow romantic Frank, any charge of timidity would have stung. ‘I am quite certain you have all the qualities of a stout fella, without the necessity of a vulgar display,’ she reassured him.
But Iris had been rereading T. E. Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and later in the same letter records an indescribable ‘reverence for that book – for that man . . . To live such a swift life of action, and yet not simplify everything to the point of inhumanity – to let the agonizing complexities of situations twist your heart instead of tying your hands – that is real human greatness.’ Lawrence was the man of action most admired by Iris’s future philosophic heroines Simone Weil and Simone de Beauvoir. Iris praised him as a ‘world-changer who never lost his capacity to doubt’.
T. E. Lawrence, she now tells Frank, is ‘the sort of person I would leave anything to follow’. Here was a crude bribe that worked elsewhere. Iris persuaded another Oxford contemporary, the ex-pacifist Paddy O’Regan, into joining SOE where he won an MC and bar: imitate T. E. Lawrence and win love and admiration, including hers.
And Lawrence had haunted Frank’s childhood: he had excavated in Carchemish with Rex Campbell Thompson’s father, was friend to Robert Graves, Gilbert Murray and Ernest Altounyan, was cousin to EJ’s good friend Lord Vansittart, and had once even visited the Thompson family home for tea. Theo and EJ had attended T. E. Lawrence’s memorial service in St Paul’s in 1935, recording it as ‘a bit too domestic and stuffy for anyone as “stark” as TE’. In January 1943 Frank was reading the Marxist Christopher Caudwell, another admirer of Lawrence.
Where Iris’s nervous self-consciousness can – to this reader – be arch and irritating, war was making Frank grow up faster. Iris repeatedly contrasted her own romantic dreaminess with Frank’s relative realism. Indeed, when she wrote flippantly of the glamour of the East, he by contrast described its misery that killed all joy and hope in him, as it had in his father earlier.
In the summer of 1942 Frank wrote home that he was lucky to be in touch with one or two chaps whose ‘views on life are very much the same as mine’ – code for CP members – though the affinity did not preclude disagreements. Indeed Frank told Iris he was tired of militant socialists with no historical perspective or ability to make allowances for people’s class background.
Frank, not for the first or last time, refused the Party line and held it in contempt. He had read not merely the official Bolshevik historian of Russia Mikhail Pokrovsky but also, as we have seen, critics of Russia like Bernard Pares, as well as Eugene Lyons in his Assignment in Utopia, from whom Frank was surprised to learn that ‘apparently the Famine [of 1932–3] could have been stopped’. Frank thought the doubts and criticisms of both Pares and Lyons honest, deserving of respect and not to be dismissed with unthinking Party catchwords such as ‘Whiteguard, Trotskyite, or Social Democrat’, a lazy habit he despised.
EP himself was involved at Cambridge with the Communist journal Our Time, by which Frank was not impressed: it showed a tendency to caricature generals as idle if not cowardly. In a long crucial letter he took his brother to task also for jibes about a Harrovian fellow trainee. ‘It’s a mistake to hate people because of their class,’ he wrote, since each class was a victim of its environment – and neither were all the upper class cads, nor all workers Sir Galahads. This is good Marxism, yet rare, and fifty years later in Beyond the Frontier EP praised Frank’s lack of dogmatism.
EP’s reaction at the time, when he was still only eighteen, differed, and in a 1945 letter he criticised Frank, as we have seen, for espousing the ‘rather easy cynical philosophy of Winchester at his time together with its lazy all-embracing humanism’, by which EP probably meant that Frank’s tolerance extended even to Old Harrovians. He thought Frank offered to humanise Communist doctrine ‘to the point of glossing over it’. Frank, sensing this, apologised that the New Thinking he had been trying to digest at Oxford had all been vomited and none had entered his bloodstream, which was still all Winchester and Horace and a tinge of Lytton Strachey. And it was now that he declared his mind ‘more inclined to love than analyse’.
He made other, more congenial CP friends. Peter Wright, ‘a German teacher before the war’63 and now in the Intelligence Corps, was also sent to the brown and dusty hills of Persia and feared a German breakthrough. Wright noted an unusual, slightly mysterious reconnaissance unit called Phantom that moved in armoured cars and whose officers would drop by to study maps or gather information about German advances in the Caucasus. One tall young subaltern who collected such information in a quiet self-effacing way gave an impression of uncommon intelligence and sensitivity. He was very modest about speaking some Russian himself and spoke of Russians as if they were human beings.
Wright did not learn Frank’s name and so was doubly impressed when, that Christmas in Baghdad, a rather unkempt Frank not merely invited him to lunch but greeted him by name. On the bookshelves in Paiforce officers’ mess were books by E. J. Thompson, whose talks at Larkhill Wright had appreciated two years earlier; and over lunch he was overjoyed to discover that Frank – ‘by Jove’ – was related to EJ, and then Frank’s copy of Christopher Caudwell’s Studies in a Dying Culture (sent him by EP) alerted him to their shared Communism. Wright, whom Frank thought ‘the best bloke I’ve met since leaving England’, promptly borrowed the Caudwell. They saw a lot of one another from then on, and both the following year joined SOE.
Though accounting himself second to none in the family in his regard for the Indian people, Frank’s enthusiasm wavered that autumn. A clumsy Gurkha mess waiter shoved his fist over the mouth of a beer bottle, letting the beer pour unhygienically over his hand while serving. Frank, sickening with hepatitis, blamed the poor diet of tinned sausages, tinned bacon and tinned salmon with no fruit or veg apart from the odd apple and reassured his anxious parents that the cause was not vodka. (After recovery, his uncertain liver made him moderate his alcohol intake.)
On 18 October 1942 he was bright yellow and so depressed and lacking in energy that he hardly opened a book and struggled to write even one letter a day. The tiny so-called Indian ‘hospital’ – one medical officer, one cook and three orderlies – dispirited him further. Small sallow Indians squatted around in groups, or dashed up ‘saluting about five times’ or gabbled away incomprehensibly. They irritated him, and Frank’s internationalism faltered. ‘Let them live their ways and us ours . . . when I’m ill I’m afraid they give me the creeps.’ He felt relief in thus being ‘really wicked and insular once in a while’.
Still yellow-eyed in hospital he began a series of Russian-conversation lessons at five shillings an hour from Terterian, an Armenian wine merchant and political refugee who pleased him by calling him in Russian ‘little Dove’. Terterian spoke no English so, though his grammar was imperfect, everything was said in Russian. His tales of Stalin’s terror made an impression. Frank, writing both to Iris Murdoch and to his parents about the number of people Stalin had personally had poisoned, listed six, then added that he assumed that Stalin’s disposal of the Bolshevik Sergei Kirov by other means than poison (he was shot) was to ‘break the monotony. Old Bolsheviks never die. They only get bumped off by Stalin.’
Terterian’s list of Stalin’s victims is partly fanciful: Lenin, Kirov, Ordzhonikidze, Dzerzhinsky, Frunze. Since the lie that Stalin poisoned Lenin was concocted by Trotsky, Frank was right to be sceptical about Terterian’s ‘trite calumnies’. Yet the list is of course not entirely an invention, and in Rostov around 1920 Terterian knew Sergo Ordzhonikidze very well, saving his life and having his own spared in return. Ordzhonikidze’s death in 1937 has never been properly explained.
When Frank left hospital he yet again assured his mother that, though still yellow, he did not intend to take home leave. The following month he adopted a small ginger cat whose ears he cleaned with a turkey feather and linseed oil and which he nicknamed ‘Koba’ – like Stalin himself. Unlike another cat that left mouse entrails as a present on his camp-bed, the only mouse Koba destroyed was one the sergeants caught and presented to him. Koba, Frank concluded, had ‘no traits in common with his namesake’. Even if Frank doubted some of Terterian’s instances, he evidently countenanced the idea of Stalin’s murderousness.
Persia had Russian civilians, films, restaurants and foodstuffs, and in Teheran a Russian bookshop (where he found lives of various Soviet leaders including Lenin and Stalin, and Crime and Punishment, and was soon reading War and Peace in Russian, just as the following July on Malta he read it – with greater ease – in Italian). Encounters with Russian soldiers, however, were rare. From 10.30 to 12.30 each night, crouched over a small wireless, he listened in to Radio Moscow, learning new phrases, finding out all he could of how Russians perceived and endured the war. From 11 p.m. onwards Moscow broadcast at slow dictation speed, providing front-page copy for local newspaper editors all over the Union to quote verbatim. He understood nearly every word.
His first Russian soldiers put him in mind of Brian, and then of Iris Murdoch: fellow Communists both. To Iris on 4 September 1942 he excitedly described his first Russian soldier, cap tilted in a jeep, singing lustily all the way down the dusty road in a loud unbroken monotone. On 3 October he hitched a lift on a truck for forty miles with his first native Russian-speaker – a huge, ugly, taciturn Ukrainian from Kharkov who threw up his hands in disgust at Persia and Iraq: rotten countries with nothing to be said for them. Frank by contrast thought Persian poverty a yardstick for the achievements of the USSR.
Soon he evoked for Iris a setpiece – a radiant Persian November day, clear sky with few clouds – and a conversation. Under the gentle winter sun and against snow-white mountains with shifting cloud-shadows stood delicate poplars in a valley rioting with red and yellow leaves. Mammoth dark-green Russian convoy lorries were refuelling at a village petrol pump, their drivers in overalls and great floppy fatigue-hats stretching their legs and checking their vehicles. One Russian driver, a great thug with a mop of yellow tow for hair, stood grinning at Frank.
‘H’are ya doing?’ I shouted at him in Russian.
His grin broadened as he heard his own tongue. He came slowly towards me, ‘How am I doing? Well. Very well.’
He came & leaned on the door of my truck grinning thoughtfully, feeling none of our western obligation to continue conversation.
‘Splendid news from Kavkáz [Caucasus]’ – I said. We had just heard of the first victories at Ordzhonikidze [a city named after the Bolshevik].
He grinned again. ‘You think it is good?’
‘Yes. Very good. Don’t you?’
He thought & grinned & looked steadily at me for nearly half a minute. ‘Yes. It is very good.’ Another half minute devoted to thinking & grinning. ‘Yes, it is just as Comrade Stalin said. He said. ‘There’ll be a holiday on our street, too.’ (budet i na nashei ulitse prazdnik) And so there will! So there will! There’ll be a holiday on our street too!’
We both laughed at this. ‘Yes!’ I said. ‘So there will! There’ll be a holiday on our street too!’
‘Who is this handsome man?’ reads Frank’s caption.
Though Frank talked in Russian with Polish friends for more than three hours, it is likely that this was the longest Russian conversation with a Russian that he ever had. The traffic cleared and they moved on, but for hours after his heart laughed and sang as it had not for months. Frank, still recovering from jaundice and somewhat yellow, heard in everything a spirit saying, ‘You go to hell! It’s worth while being alive, whatever you say!’
His conversation with the Russian driver suggested that Stalingrad, albeit with unimaginable casualties on both sides, would resist the Germans. If so, Phantom’s useful life in Persia would soon be coming to an end. On 4 December Frank’s unit crossed into Iraq to serve with the Tenth Army near Baghdad. One of their fifteen-hundredweight trucks was converted into a coop for a dozen Persian turkeys which escaped and were found, on 22 December, roosting on a nearby lavatory roof and recaptured. For Christmas dinner the men ate roast turkey, sausages and Christmas puddings while their master of ceremonies led toasts of beer to absent friends. Frank loathed Iraq, where he had to command his unit, but it is only here that we glimpse him as a CP activist.