Dearest Jane... (8 page)

Again and again the planes swept down and strafed us from practically road level. Mercifully they must have used up their bombs on the lorries. By this time, Freddie, John, Morty and I were trying to make ourselves as small and inconspicuous as possible in a little hollow some ten yards off the road. We felt horribly exposed and very frightened. My instincts were of self-preservation, but this soon gave way to complete fatalism, punctuated by prayers and thoughts of my family.

It was only when someone had the presence of mind amongst the mayhem to unfurl a Union Jack and lay it in the across the road that the bombers ceased their attack and withdrew. By which time, eight comrades had been killed and forty-two wounded
.

At last, we were told that we could make our way back to the camp. We set off carrying our absurdly heavy kit. I have never been so thankful to get back anywhere as I was to reach the comparative sanctuary of our camp at Eichstätt.

I must admit that this whole adventure has shaken me badly, like most other people too. The fact is that after five years of this unreal life, one’s powers of resistance to any shock are practically nil and all the terror and tragedy of the morning has hit me deeply. Luckily we are to spend the night here and march off at dusk tomorrow evening, only moving at night. This will give us all a chance to regain our balance. I thank God that all my own friends are safe and sound . . . It is depressing to think that, before the day of our liberation, the line of battle will have to pass over us and that today’s horrors may only be a foretaste of things to come.

There would be further darkness before the dawn. Their final camp, Moosberg, was a living hell to be endured before Roger and his surviving comrades would become free men. Their next destination was home – at last
.

Years later, my father would reflect back on his life. On 5 May, the anniversary of VE Day, he wrote to me describing his own situation on the day that Europe was liberated
.

Dearest Jane

VE Day. I spent it in 1945 on an airfield in Bavaria waiting for a Dakota to take me part of the way home. Having been in robust health for the entire time in prison, I now contracted diarrhoea. The US Dakota pilots were as drunk as an Irish priest on St Patrick’s Day and flew the whole way at just above ground level. Every Frenchman with a gun fired at us. We had been released some days before by General Patton’s Army. Patton was a howling cad but a dashing soldier. He hated the English. We were in Moosburg which really was anus mundi. There were 50,000 half-starved Russians in the camp. When these individuals got at the booze and began rounding up German women between the ages of six and ninety-six, there were some very unpleasant scenes I have done my best to forget. We were all confined to the camp by the Yanks but I took no notice of that and went for a walk with Charlie Rome and Peter Black, my first stroll as a free man since May 1940. It was not very romantic as the Russkis and others crapped everywhere! A lot of the Yanks were unattractive and seemed to regard spitting as normal behaviour. I made friends at merry Moosburg with Peregrine Worsthorne’s brother, a jolly little fellow who taught medieval music at Worcester College, Oxford. We are quite chummy to this day though he is an RC. His stepfather Montagu Norman was a v. bad Governor of the Bank of England.

Love to all,

xx D

Another letter is a reminder that my father was old enough to recall the impact of the First World War on his schooldays. As a younger boy, he had wondered at half the women in London appearing in black mourning dress, notably during the Battle of the Somme. After the waste and loss of life on such a scale, it was unimaginable that similar sacrifice could be demanded just twenty years later. His anger is palpable; his memories of German war criminals fascinating
.

My Dearest Jane

Armistice Day. When I was a boy, Armistice Day was taken very seriously. To make the faintest squeak of noise during the two minutes of silence rated a crime only slightly less deserving of dire punishment than murder. At Eton the whole school assembled in School Yard for the Two Minutes Silence and when the big clock finished striking eleven, silence was absolute. A fair number of my contemporaries had lost a father or a brother in the war. Some of the older masters were visibly moved, remembering the many boys of high promise they had taught and who had given their lives. Over 1,300 Etonians were killed in World War I (we then called it ‘The Great War’). My own house had won the football cup in 1914. The photograph in the dining room showed that six out of the eleven members of the team had been killed. The possibility of another European war would at that time (1922) have been considered too improbable for serious consideration. It was not, I think, until 1936 that I fully appreciated that we were doomed. When I think of some really splendid friends who were killed in the last war, I wonder if they would reckon they had been swindled if they could see England as it is today. Incompetent politicians, corrupt trade unions, punks, muggers – charming. The only good result of the last war was getting rid of that dangerous lunatic Hitler. For a short time I looked after some odious war criminals in a house in Kensington Palace Gardens. One, a general, was almost illiterate and simply had no idea of how to spell quite easy German words. He was just a crude thug. Far worse was a former Bavarian priest who gave me a feeling of acute nausea whenever I saw him. He was really cruel in an oily, odious way. Cruel war criminals were seldom Prussian; nearly always Bavarian or Austrian. The nicest man we had in London was Field Marshal von Runstedt, far more agreeable and amusing than many English senior officers, certainly more so than American top-ranking officers. I used to take him in a drink in the evening and we had a good gossip together. No one ever pinned any war crimes on him. A man turned up there, Hauptmann Ebse, who had punished one of his own sentries for failing to shoot me dead when he had the opportunity to do so in 1943. I soon had him scrubbing the cookhouse floor and peeling potatoes with a blunt knife.

I also had to look after a lot of English officers awaiting trial by court martial for various offences. They were quite a jolly lot and I got up a successful little bridge tournament among them to help them pass the time.

Best love,

xx D

As an avid reader of twentieth-century military history, he was perpetually re-examining the events of the two wars that reshaped our world
.

My Dearest Jane,

The date, August 4th, always makes my blood run chilly. I can hardly bear to think of the appalling slaughter, all to no purpose. In the first few months of the war the French suffered more casualties than this country did in 4 years. They had been trained to attack come what may, and wearing blue coats and red trousers (the officers in white gloves) they advanced shoulder to shoulder with standards flying and trumpets blaring. The Germans sat tight and mowed them down with little loss to themselves. Gestures, like the dying French officer who called to his men ‘Debout les morts!’ were not much use. By Christmas the officer class had been destroyed. Even now I cannot read the staid official account of the Battle of the Somme without tears coming to my eyes. The British Army that attacked the Germans that day was an army of volunteers, the flower of the nation (the regular Army was wiped out at Ypres in 1914). At the Somme, the infantry, half trained, attacked Germans in deep shelters protected by uncut wire. They lost 55,000 killed on the first day, few of them ever setting eyes on a German. Some divisions were completely obliterated. Most battalions went into action with about 24 officers; few emerged with even half a dozen. That is why the left-wing actors in ‘Oh! What a Lovely War’ were so despicable, the whole attitude being that the officers shirked their duty and left everything to the other ranks. The average lifespan of the 2nd/Lt in the front line was about three weeks. Richard Attenborough’s malice in ‘A Bridge Too Far’ against certain senior officers (dead, conveniently for him) was contemptible. Less serious is that really there has not been much ‘douceur de vivre’ for the middle classes since 1914. World War II destroyed it all together.

Love,

xx D

This chapter is dedicated to my father and his trusted friends and comrades, both those who died and those to whom he remained close for many more years
.

As ever, I give the last word to my father:

A good lunch party given by Desmond P. for ex POW chums. All healthy (bar me) and materially successful (except me). Two with dubiously earned knighthoods. One guest had a sexual slip up (male masseur) but has made a million in Thames Valley newsagents’ shops.

xx D

[1960s]

My Dear Child,

Thank you for your twittering letter. Parts of it were legible and almost coherent.

Yours ever,

D

[1970s]

Dear Little Jane,

I trust you are in your customary robust health, eating like a starving hippopotamus as usual, and managing to keep out of the more hideous forms of trouble.

Love,

xx D

[1980s]

Dearest Jane,

Thank you so much for your letter; the pleasure of receiving it was enhanced by its scarcity value.

Best love,

xx D

The doorbell rang and dressed up in my best, starched summer frock, I rushed to open it. My parents were having a party. As the arriving guest stepped over the threshold, my father loomed into view. ‘This is Jane,’ he said cheerily. ‘My first and worst.’ Tears smarted my eyes, and I turned tail and rushed away.

The role of the eldest child is a double-sided coin. Enjoying exclusive attention for a while, they will also receive the full focus of their parents’ anxieties in their first effort in that universal experiment – bringing up a child.

As the eldest, I received the largest quota of letters from my father, a bonus of his determination to launch me into the world to make my own way, as soon as I was able. Unlike Mr Bennet in
Pride and Prejudice
, my father saw more options for his daughter’s future security than marriage; I don’t think he could foresee any man who might commit himself to my small range of charms. My voice was too loud, my interests too trivial, my nose too large and my dress-sense too curious: I was destined to work. In this aspiration on my behalf, my father was rewarded – intermittently, as consistency of purpose was not a conspicuous virtue in the Mortimer children.

In my earlier years, between the ages of eleven to twenty-two, my father’s letters – usually funny, deeply understanding and affectionate – were often also sharp with criticism.

‘Sending a child away to school is merely a middle-class abdication of parental responsibility,’ my father would pronounce in grave tones. Nevertheless, the children of this responsible father were sent away to school. As his children’s trunks were loaded into the car for school, he found it irresistible to chant:

Going to school, Father Goodbye,

Take care of Mother and don’t let her cry.

My small Hampshire boarding school, Daneshill near Basingstoke, had a friendly, family atmosphere. Our youthful headmistress could be depended upon for her humour and fairness as she steered her ‘little toads’ towards their O levels, assisted by a sample of sterling teachers along with others whose lessons increased a sense of the world’s mysteries but not our knowledge of them. By the time I was fifteen my father commented, ‘I’ve been paying for your education for ten years and you’re still as ignorant as a piece of lavatory paper.’ He once wrote to me:

‘Dear Wafer Head,

You left those nice buttons I gave you on the mantelpiece. I think your head is full of eggshells, old socks and a copy of the
Woman’s Magazine
for 20 October 1937.’

I attribute any mental deficiencies to the 1960s bedtime custom for females to wind their hair over great prickly curlers – ‘rollers’ – and pass their nights, apparently asleep, with these vicious porcupines anchored with pins all over their craniums.

My father enjoyed stimulating his children’s idle brains with board games, cards, dominoes, quizzes and general knowledge tests designed by him. Our least educational game was played in the middle of Sunday lunch, between the roast and the pudding: ‘The Spinning of the Knife’. My father would take an ivory handled ‘best’ knife and spin it round on his tablemat. ‘Now, whoever this points at will win a gigantic prize next week!’ Cries of glee! ‘Whoever this points to will find a huge splinter in their left toe tomorrow!’ Cries of woe! The game often got completely out of hand, concluding only with my mother’s customary protest, ‘Oh really, Roger – I do wish you would back me up with the children!’

That we were confident in the love of our parents did not alter, as far as I was concerned, the sense of confusion that they were inadvertently adroit at creating. They each expressed colourful opinions but there was little consensus between them. Having no original thoughts of my own, I soaked up my parents’ commentaries and exchanges like a sponge, storing them away for my own use. When, in naive ignorance, I reiterated their views, they sounded at best precocious, at worst pretentious and, to my own peer group, somewhat weird.

My parents’ differences could only be exacerbated by their children’s progression – if it can be called that – into adolescence.

For teenage Jane, shrouded in cigarette smoke, on went lashings of eye make-up under a curtain of hair hanging over skinny ribbed jumpers and miniskirts or skimpy purple dresses from Biba. As my parents pointed out with castigating candour, I looked ridiculous in such fripperies – common and tarty. One day my father drove me to the station to catch a train to London. He glowered at the feather boa round my neck, the donkey jacket beneath it and the plum, bell-bottom trousers from which peeped my white Courrèges patent leather boots: ‘I just hope you are not going to see any of
my
friends in London,’ he growled. ‘I hope I won’t either,’ I replied, smiling sweetly.