Dearest Jane... (2 page)

At the beginning of each school holidays, the study assumed a dark, Dickensian demeanour, when we were summoned there individually to apply our attention to paternal admonishments. Gravely, school report in hand, the catalogue of criticisms would be recited. Our father reminded us, rightly, of the ‘hard-earned cash’ with which he parted for our benefit. Soberly, we left the room promising to do better, our heads bowed. The holidays would pass and, all too often, good resolutions would pass with them.

Over time, a writer’s room can emanate a very particular atmosphere, reflecting the essence of its occupant. Orderly and meticulous with his paperwork, my father made regular clearances of documents and memorabilia, and discarded incoming correspondence – including all his children’s letters. He was proud of his claim that all letters from the breakfast delivery would be answered by the midday postal collection.

I have been going through old family papers, destroying much. Would you like this cutting from
The Times?
The next time I get a mention in that publication will be when I appear in the ‘Death’ column. Unless I forget myself one day and you see a paragraph headed “Well-known journalist faces serious charge. Alleged incident in Reading Cinema.”’

A decade later, he wrote, ‘As you are the keeper of the family archives and mementoes, I enclose some odds and ends. I have been tearing up and burning things all morning.’ Fortunately, his folder of wartime letters was not destined for the incinerator. He entrusted it to me five years prior to his death. ‘You can do what you like with these after I’ve gone,’ he instructed.

When my father’s final hour came, his roll-top desk was found nearly empty bar the odd paper clip in a dusty cubby hole. But his typewriter – by then electric – still held a few paragraphs of a half completed racing article between its rollers. He was eighty-two years old.

There is no record of what his correspondents had to say to him – their letters were long ago crumpled into wastepaper baskets – but we know a good deal of how he responded. How astonished he would be now to know that the litany of thoughts, gossip, jokes, chastisements, advice and love that he had dispensed to his children in the last century would have a second life in the twenty-first century.

Less surprisingly, the real, living presence of such a characterful, entertaining father etched as many memories on the heart as he endowed on paper. My father’s impromptu performance of the dying swan from
Swan Lake
, as he twirled his fifty-year-old self lightly but with tragic demeanour around the drawing room of our childhood home, was an unforgettable tour de force. I ended up as a heap of uncontrollable laughter on the floor whereas my father, throughout his silent, solo dance, retained his decorum, making it all the funnier.

Earnestness was anathema to my father, but instinctive though his humorous response was to any circumstance, there was a real depth of feeling and sensitivity at the core of his nature. There were emotions to be dealt with, values to be adhered to and a code of conduct to be respected, as his letters – never heavy no matter what the content – increasingly revealed as both he and I grew older.

As an impressionable child, there was one occasion which shines out for me as the seminal moment when first I became aware of the profounder aspects of my father and how history had shaped the man he had become – as you will discover.

One late summer’s day in 1960, on a family holiday in France, my father decided that we should make an expedition to a big beach that was of particular interest to him. On arrival, my parents, brother, sister and I, aged ten, carried our beach bags down from the car and selected a nice picnic spot for ourselves. The beach was enormous, stretching out from east to west on either side of us. In front of us, as far as the eye could see, curled and frothed a deep band of sea, the English Channel.

My mother and I were soon in our bathing suits and as we set off towards the sea, my father quipped, ‘Buzzing Bee and Fiddling Flea went down to the sea to bathe.’ His version of ‘Adam and Eve and Pinch-me went down to the sea to bathe, Adam and Eve were drowned, but who do you think was saved?’ Buzzing Bee, generally abbreviated to ‘The Buzzer’, was my mother’s nickname at the time – one of many bestowed upon her. Fiddling Flea was my nickname, mercifully only on the beach.

Everyone was hungry after our swim and once we were dry and dressed, the picnic hamper was opened and hunks of crusty baguette were shared out, along with butter, pâté, slices of
saucisson
, sardines, Camembert and peaches – all fresh, French and quite delicious. I had little inclination to run around and play games halfway through lunch, unlike my younger brother and sister. Food interested me much more. My mother had promised to explore the beach with the younger ones if they would sit still and eat lunch, and as soon as the picnic had been devoured the three of them set off together.

My father and I remained at our little encampment near the sand dunes. Between us on the rumpled tartan rug was the empty picnic hamper. My father looked at me. ‘Well, little Jane,’ he said. ‘Do you realise that we are in a very remarkable place?’

I cast my gaze around and saw that the beach was not merely an expanse of sand that stretched into infinity but that if you looked to left or right, it was punctuated by curious, irregular shapes. ‘Not so very long ago, this was possibly one of the most important beaches in the whole of France,’ continued my father.

This was intriguing information. My father always enjoyed sharing his knowledge and this was clearly a prelude to further facts concerning the beach. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be boring. He did not bother to say things unless they made you think or laugh. Preferably both. I looked at him expectantly as he lay there on his side, propped on one elbow, his long legs crossed over. This was a habitual position for my father on a beach, one which he found comfortable for reading, his preferred activity. Above his faded aertex shirt, a jaunty red and white spotted kerchief round his neck blew gently in the sea breeze. Unusually, on this occasion he seemed to have neither book nor newspaper to hand.

‘How long do you think this beach is?’ he asked, before answering the question himself. ‘Five miles long – which is one of the factors which made it ideal as a beach for an invading force to land on. It is why it became one of what are known as the Normandy Landing beaches.’ Not wishing to appear dim, always a concern in conversations with my father, I responded cautiously to this information.

‘It’s probably impossible to imagine now but this beach – Omaha beach it is called – was where, on a bloody awful day in June 1944, in appalling weather, American forces landed to launch the last big push against Hitler. If they teach you anything at school, you will come to learn that this was the D-Day invasion of France. It was a gigantic undertaking. Of course, our own troops played a major role, staging their invasion on other landing beaches here in Normandy. If D-Day had not succeeded, things would have turned out very differently for all of us,’ he pronounced with grim satisfaction.

Amazed, I sat in silent wonder. My father, on the other hand, was warming to his theme and starting to expand upon it. As he spoke, I gradually began to take in the surrounding scene from a different perspective. It was not just a beach for gentle holiday pastimes. If you looked hard enough, remnants of the multiple rows of defences installed by the Germans were still in place, now softened and veiled by the shifting sands. As the child I was, it was not an easy thing to envisage that only sixteen years earlier, this beautiful beach had been a bloody and brutal battleground, the site of one of the most dramatic chapters of our recent history. Now, people in bright and cheerful colours seemed to be enjoying their holiday pursuits all around us; there were no bombs exploding, no tanks weighing through the sands, no guns firing; there were no soldiers fighting for their lives, encumbered by battledress sodden by the sea from which they had waded on to the beach; there were no moans and cries from wounded or dying men.

My father’s emotional and eloquent description of D-Day was gathering pace, weighted with a history that could not lightly be dismissed. With his keen sense of the meaning of place and of the past, I could start to grasp why this Omaha Beach might move him to memories of the world war in which, after all, he had played his own part.

In 1939 my father was a regular, professional soldier. He had been in the Army since leaving school – a classic progression of Eton, Sandhurst and the Coldstream Guards. At the outbreak of war, he was Captain Roger Mortimer, thirty years old. As I listened to him describing the military action in Normandy, following D-Day, it became clear that he had not played a part in this crucial allied invasion or in the subsequent Battle of Normandy. I inevitably started to wonder where he had been in the war, which battles he might have fought in. Now full of curiosity, this question rapidly became pressing. I may even have asked that classic question: ‘What did you do in the war, Daddy?’ However I phrased it, the answer I received was comprehensive and devastating.

My father spoke gravely: ‘I had the misfortune, possibly the ineptitude even, to be wounded in action in Belgium in May 1940. I was knocked out and when I came round, I found I had been taken prisoner by the Germans.’

I can remember the sound of the sea resonating with my father’s voice as he unfolded too much his personal story from his capture in 1940 until his liberation in 1945 – how he spent five whole years in prison. To him, it had been a seemingly interminable period of time. To me, it was unimaginable – nearly half my own lifetime at that point.

His revelation had a powerful impact on me. This was my father’s own real story which started before the one I knew, the one in which he had met, fallen in love and married my mother, become a writer, had children, bought a house in the country, made a garden, enjoyed friends and told jokes.

It was an awakening for me in my little, self-absorbed world. I had never felt true hunger, serious cold, discomfort or fear. My life was just about perfect. I would never complain again.

As he talked, I would chance a question when I could, anxious not to break the spell and bring my father back to the present, when he might get up, shake himself down and make his customary parting shot – ‘Well, there we are, my dear child’ – before wandering off to find the rest of the family. Warmed by a new and intensely loving admiration for my father, it struck me that he too was someone’s child, the only son of his parents. What worry they must have endured in the war, fearing that they might never see him again.

‘What was it like when you came home again?’ I ventured.

Frowning, my father said, ‘Well, it was all very difficult.’

I had already conjured up a heart-warming picture of his homecoming, scenes of the welcome and joy which would embrace the long absent and exhausted son, who though over six foot had weighed well under eight stone on his return. How thrilled my grandparents must have been to have him home again.

‘I’m afraid being thrilled to see me wasn’t really my mother’s style. Rather the reverse, in fact. I was made to feel like a major inconvenience because I had not given her enough advance warning of my arrival and it put the servants out. Food was rationed and there was something about shortages of soap!’

I was incredulous.

‘There was not all that much pleasure in being at home. I was fond of my father and we got on well. He spent the greater part of his leisure hours at his club or on the golf course.’

He added, ‘I can remember in one of the worst winters of the war, getting letters in prison from my mother full of emotion about one of her pet poodles being ill. There we were, prisoners – hungry, cold, with very few parcels of provisions getting through at that point – with no knowledge of what the future held.’ A silence fell upon us both.

As the air grew cooler and the tide pulled out into the further distance, my father’s memories were still in full flow. How proud I felt of his endurance – and yet how angry and how sad. Where had people found the strength and courage to stand up to Hitler’s tyranny? I knew that people called out to God in terrible circumstances, that praying to him might help. I also knew that my father was not remotely religious. Perhaps in wartime though, God might have had a meaning for my father?

‘No,’ he laughed, without amusement. ‘God was not important to me, neither then nor now. What mattered most of all in prison was comradeship – the friendships with your fellow prisoners. That is what saw me through.’ Finally, he smiled.

The hurly-burly of family life soon resumed its usual patten and we were happy enough to see my mother, brother and little sister reappear, damp, sandy and a little weary. The sun had gone in and the Mortimer family gathered up their things and set off to the car.

But I ended my day looking at the world rather differently from how I had seen it on arrival at Omaha Beach. In the years to come, I would sometimes think back to that afternoon, recapturing the scene in my mind, sitting with my father and listening to his dear, familiar voice, his turns of phrase. As a child I often infuriated my father and as a teenager I concerned him constantly, but that afternoon we had initiated a quality of communication together, father and daughter, that would often renew itself as I grew up.

That father of mine went on to teach me a great deal more about life in all its aspects over the coming thirty years, often through his letters. In that autumn of my eleventh year, I was sent off to boarding school. From that moment, and for the rest of his life, my father wrote to me regularly – some 450 letters, unique and extraordinary in content, fizzing with his bon mots.

Before Roger became a parent at thirty-nine, he had already lived nearly half his life and had the experiences which shaped the man he became: Roger the racing writer; Roger the husband; Roger the father; Roger the friend. And throughout, Roger the wit.