Did You Really Shoot the Television? (11 page)

From the outset, Steve was delighted with what he found:

Here was an idiosyncratic collection of people, officers and men with the minimum distinction between them, whose only bond seemed to be a reflection of their extraordinary commander’s personality. It was all very different from the enveloping tribal hierarchy of the battalion. Six foot five inches in his desert boots, with a slight stoop, an eager open face with beetling eyebrows beneath a battered service dress cap, David Stirling radiated urgency and confidence. His eyes carried a penetrating directness and hint of impish humour. Here was no welcome for affectation. His expression could shift with bewildering suddenness from an intense, almost puzzled concentration, rather like a schoolboy who ought to know the answer, to one of uproarious irreverence. This change of mood often followed some reference to the doings and denizens of GHQ, whom he held in ribald and more or less permanent contempt. He demanded absolute loyalty and adherence to his own concept of duty, yet one always sensed an underlying kindness and humanity. Here was an inspired and merry warrior whose time had come.

Most of L Detachment’s officers had come out from England in the Commando Brigade, now disbanded. They were smart – their social connections contributed decisively to the SAS’s ability to secure resources and sponsorship – bright and, it is almost unnecessary to add, brave. There were Fitzroy Maclean and Carol Mather, both of whom later became MPs, as did Steve himself. There was George Jellicoe, son of the admiral; Paddy Mayne, the huge Irish rugby forward, whose drinking bouts ‘led to outbursts of berserk proportions’ – Mayne once laid out six Australians in a bar brawl; and
around twenty others. Most were already veterans of raids on Rommel’s airfields.

Steve completed parachute training from a Bombay bomber. Briefing for his first mission with the group, now designated as the SAS, took place in the Cairo flat of Peter Stirling, David’s brother, second secretary at the British Embassy:

In one corner of the large and somewhat battered drawing room a group of SAS officers were poring over a large-scale map of the Western Desert marked ‘Top Secret’, while George Jellicoe described to them the route they were to take behind enemy lines. Across the room an animated drinks party was in progress, consisting mainly of people going to Gezireh races in the afternoon. It included several pretty girls, and the ‘
vas et viens
’ between the two groups added much spice to the proceedings. The briefing was late, so I subsequently learned, because Mohammed or ‘Mo’, as Peter’s incomparable butler was known, had hidden the secret maps in the bathroom in a praiseworthy if vain attempt to tidy the place up.

The Second World War was probably the last in history in which some members of the British upper class were able to arrange their assignments to suit themselves. In Evelyn Waugh’s
Sword of Honour
trilogy, an officer observes in 1940 at the bar of White’s club – thinly disguised as ‘Bellamy’s’: ‘It’s going to be a long war. The great thing is to spend it with friends.’ It was in this spirit, and warmly abetted by Winston Churchill, that private armies evolved – SOE, the Commandos, SAS, Long-Range Desert Group, Popski’s Private Army, Special Boat Squadron and so on. By the later stages of the war, these organisations were consuming far more resources and high-quality manpower than their achievements justified. The ‘Clubland Heroes’ atmosphere which Steve’s description vividly evokes was funny only up to a point, viewed from the lofty perspective of national interest in a world war. But the exploits of these undoubted heroes contributed mightily to British folklore of the 1939–45 experience, and gave immense pleasure to the participants.

The party in Peter Stirling’s flat in Cairo eventually broke up, its guests dispersing variously to the races, and to a column of twenty heavily armed jeeps waiting in the street below. It was 2 July 1942, and Steve found himself embarked on his first SAS operation. They crawled through the dense city traffic towards the Delta, and thence into the desert. At this time the main British army was deployed on the Alamein line, barely forty miles from the Egyptian capital. Four days after setting out, the SAS group was in hiding, and in waiting, at an oasis rendezvous to which they had been guided by the Long-Range Desert Group, sixty miles inland and 150 miles behind the German lines.

Steve’s inaugural raid, in three jeeps under George Jellicoe’s command, was rudely interrupted by an Italian air attack. All their vehicles were riddled with machine-gun fire, which wrecked two. The third, though badly damaged, somehow carried nine men back to their starting point. There they remained for three weeks, while David Stirling drove back to Cairo to fetch replacement vehicles and supplies. Some thirty men in all, they presented a wild spectacle, burned black by the sun, heavily bearded, intensely bored, and driven mad by the flies. They yearned above all things for the sun to fall each night, ‘a great orange ball, its progress eventually perceptible to the human eye as it dropped below the far escarpment, now turned black, the outline of every rock standing sharp against a livid sky. Slowly the hated thing disappeared, leaving the whole desert bathed in colours so rich, hard and brilliant as to defy a painter’s brush.’ They talked little of home or about the war, but mostly of their fantasies of a day in Cairo which started with a Turkish bath and a shave, and ended among the ravishing belly dancers of the open-air nightclubs.

When Stirling at last returned with a column of vehicles and a plethora of supplies and munitions, they prepared to launch a big airfield raid. Men laboured intently on repairing jeeps and preparing charges with plastic explosive, time pencils and black tape. Then, at dusk, they set forth:

It was easy to see at first. The jeeps kept no particular formation. We picked our own way a little to right or left of the man in front, and following his dust. Occasionally you hit a rock or bad bump; gun mountings rattled, cans and ammo boxes clashed in the back. Mostly we rolled along at a good 20 mph over flat shingle or sand. Every now and again we had to negotiate small escarpments. There was a halt until somebody found a way up or down. The dust rose thicker, engines revved as we changed gear to pull up one after the other, then fanned out again on the level.

At nightfall they hit the airfield, racing their jeeps past lines of German planes at which they emptied machine-gun drums and hurled their charges.

First there was one tentative burst, then the full ear-splitting cacophony roaring and spitting. Streams of red and white colour shot through the darkness, struck the ground and cascaded upwards in a thousand crazy arcs, criss-crossing each other. Some of the incendiary bullets caught fire as they hit the ground and burnt with a brilliant white flame. Figures ran before us, or rather seemed to be lumbering away. Another white stream shot through the night and two of them slumped into the ground…Our line moved on, leaving the big aircraft crackling and blazing…My rear gunner said: ‘There’s two Jerries.’ ‘Well, shoot at them; go on – shoot.’

One British gunner was killed, several jeeps including those of David Stirling and Steve Hastings were hit. A few miles back on their retreat, Steve’s engine subsided into silence. He and his crew somehow crammed onto one of the serviceable vehicles.

On their way home, the group narrowly escaped discovery by successive patrols of searching Stukas. They got lost. There were no more spare tyres, so whenever a wheel was punctured, the jeep had to be abandoned, its passengers being crammed aboard those vehicles which remained. They were utterly exhausted, and down to the last of their water, when somehow they blundered into the rendezvous.
Stirling and a handful of others were flown out to Cairo. Steve was among those who made the slow, painful passage back in jeeps and trucks. They were in the midst of the Qattara Depression when he began to lose consciousness at the wheel, and found himself running a high fever. Back in Egypt, he was sent on extended leave to Beirut to recuperate.

On his return he was flown to the Kufra oasis in southern Libya to join a big SAS operation, decreed by GHQ against David Stirling’s better judgement, against Benghazi, some six hundred miles behind the German lines. This proved a disaster. After an epic journey, as they approached the target they met heavy opposition. Turning back, they were repeatedly bombed and strafed by enemy aircraft, losing most of their jeeps and trucks. Steve found himself in a party led by Paddy Mayne, unsure of their position, desperately short of water. ‘The next few days were among the most unpleasant in my experience,’ he wrote. He and others, stricken by thirst, became delirious and began to fantasise. By a miracle, they eventually reached the Jalo oasis, where they were met by an officer of the Sudan Defence Force. ‘My dear chap,’ he said solicitously, ‘will you have a whisky and soda?’ Not surprisingly, Steve’s illness recurred. He was diagnosed as suffering from chronic bronchitis, and discharged from active service for six months. It was the end of his time with the SAS. He was glad to have served for nine months under Stirling, and cherished the memories, but he had had enough. He spent the next few months as a staff officer in Cairo, and nobody could doubt that he had earned the break.

Anne, like most women, discovered far fewer compensations in the experience of war than did Mac, Lewis and Stephen. She loved the work she was doing, but never ceased to lament the tragedies, public and personal, that were the common lot. Her mother Violet died of cancer in 1942, aged fifty-nine, though this could scarcely be blamed on Hitler. Among her close friends, one colleague from
Vogue
died when the ship on which she was travelling was torpedoed, another lost her husband, a bomber pilot. A film-director contemporary from Oxford,
Pen Tennyson, was killed in an air crash. Another friend drowned when his warship sank in the Mediterranean. Yet despite the tragedies, Anne learned to marvel at the normality of life between the shocks and dramas. Once in 1944, during the flying-bomb offensive, she was lunching in a restaurant when there was an explosion nearby. Only one patron sought shelter beneath a table, while everyone else continued eating. ‘The poor fellow was an American, who had just arrived in England, and he emerged red-faced and apologetic.’

At a time when food was a permanent preoccupation, Anne often found herself writing about it. She collaborated with Constance Spry, then living in an old farmhouse in Kent. Connie had become famous as an arranger of flowers, but turned her wartime energies to promoting healthy eating from the garden. She taught Anne how to cook
petits pois à la française
, then almost unknown in Britain, how to serve cabbage leaves in bundles like asparagus, and sweet corn (likewise unusual at that time) in browned margarine. Anne wrote about another country housewife who had become expert in cooking with weeds: dandelion and wood sorrel salad, elderflower fritters, puree of Good King Henry, rose-hip jam, herb sandwich-spread and stinging nettles on toast were among the recipes she subsequently offered to readers in a pamphlet. She was grateful that the war provided her with an incentive to learn to cook, which she soon did as competently – indeed better than competently – as she did everything else in her life. ‘I doubt if you
can
cook,’ she wrote proudly later, ‘until you have made an omelette with margarine, dried eggs and chopped chickweed,’ as she had done.

Anne found it hard to keep Rose Cottage going through the war, or indeed to get to Berkshire at all. After a year in which she rented the place to tenants, she lent it to friends, two sisters each with a baby and a husband in the forces, in return for their services in the garden, and a room left free for Anne when she could make the journey from London. This was seldom, and required a three-mile walk up the steep hill from Goring & Streatley station, clutching suitcase and food. It was rare for any car to pass, offering the chance of a lift, for civilian traffic was almost non-existent. In 1943, one of her
tenants’ husbands, a bomber pilot, was shot down and killed over Germany. The sisters decided to depart for their own home, and Anne took back the cottage.

Anne and Mac began living together that year. In London, they occupied a flat in Swan Court, Chelsea, which Anne inherited when Lesley Blanch went off to marry the French fighter pilot and novelist Romain Gary. Anne said later that she should have understood that Mac’s view of marriage was unsympathetic when he employed a fishing figure of speech to propose to her: ‘I mean to hook you.’ She went ahead anyway, with a simple register office wedding at the beginning of June 1944. The couple set off to honeymoon at Rose Cottage, which had captured Mac’s affection as deeply as her own. Two days later, Tom Hopkinson telephoned from
Picture Post
to tell him of the D-Day landings. Within hours, he was on his way to France. The cottage was mothballed for the remainder of the war.

Mac’s reports from North-West Europe were examples of fine descriptive journalism. Here is how he began one piece from Normandy in August 1944:

Ask a British soldier, ten years hence, what he remembers best of that famous victory of 1944 in Northern France, and, if he still cares to talk about it, he’ll tell you it was the bouquet of smells: the sickly smell in the intestines of a landing craft; the sweaty whiff of damp battledress, the stomach-wrenching stench of dead cattle, the sour air of a blasted village, the peculiar unforgettable odour of a German prisoner.

Ask a German what he remembers best and, for a Teutonic certainty, he’ll say it was the horrific orchestra of the Allied instruments of war: the nightmare drumming of the artillery, the wasp-like persistence of the aircraft, the whine of shells, the poop of mortars, the crump of bombs, the unspeakable quavering note of a Typhoon rocket.

Ask a Frenchman, and he’ll tell you of the wounded horse that dragged him and whatever was left of his possessions in an overloaded cart to safety; of the crops that were never harvested; of the
cows that died for lack of milking; of the litter of tree stumps that was an apple orchard; of the tank track that was a garden; of the graveyard that was a farm.

Ten years hence – if, by that time, you’re not too bored with wartime reminiscences to listen, or too young to care – ask me what I remember best of the collapse of the German Seventh Army and, being middle-aged and sentimental about the past as I shall be by then, I’ll probably tell you that the magic moment was the beginning of the pursuit, the sight of the columns of the British Second Army riding the road to victory like gods on a cloud of dust. You needn’t believe it. War is only romantic in retrospect. The ridiculous truth is that up in the forward infantry areas, we didn’t know the battle was won until we heard a rumour that Monty had said so.