Nick Drake (3 page)

Before Pearl Harbor, Burma had been seen as a safe outpost of the British Empire, the likelihood of war reaching its inhabitants remote. Even as Nazi tanks trampled across Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands and France in the spring of 1940, the residents of Rangoon were
untroubled by the war which raged half a world away from them. Others scoffed at such lassitude, and a rhyme, popular in the officers' messes of the Far East, ran:

‘Where was I when the war was on?'

I can hear a faint voice murmur,

‘Where was I when the war was on?

In the safest place, in Burma.'

Within three days of Pearl Harbor, the British territories of Singapore and Hong Kong had been bombed, and Japanese troops had landed in Malaya. By 12 December the war was inching towards Burma, and Victoria Point, the Burmese town nearest to the Thai border, was evacuated. Rangoon itself was bombed during the following December, and as the Japanese swept along the Malay Peninsula, Burma's rich rubber and teak plantations offered a succulent prospect.

As Singapore – ‘the Gibraltar of the East' – fell in February 1942, the full extent of Japanese barbarities became apparent. On capture, prisoners were bayoneted or beheaded. Survivors were treated contemptuously by their Japanese captors, who believed they had sacrificed all honour by allowing themselves to be taken alive. A living hell followed, in the steaming jungles of the Malay Peninsula, where the Japanese built their prison camps.

As the Japanese swept on, bombing Australia, taking Java and the Dutch East Indies, they seemed unstoppable. Early in March 1942 Japanese troops entered Pegu, forty miles from Rangoon, and within days General Alexander ordered the evacuation of the city. Burma fell soon afterwards.

By July the country was occupied by the Japanese, who sought to build a railway connecting their forces in Burma with those in Thailand. For over a year 46,000 Allied prisoners of war laboured on the line which became known as ‘The Railway of Death'. By the time the last sleeper was laid, 16,000 POWs and 50,000 Burmese labourers had died of starvation, brutality and disease. It was said that every sleeper laid along the 258 miles of track had cost one prisoner his life.

As the Japanese thrust deeper into Burma during the spring of 1942, my Uncle Jim led a group of British subjects and loyal Burmese out, by car, train, raft and on foot. He was doctor and leader to the straggling column for two months as they made their escape, sometimes
only hours ahead of the advancing Japanese. In his journal he wrote of professors and bankers, planters and policemen, all fleeing. As the detritus of the European community in Burma lay all about them, they knew they were witnessing the end of something and that, inconceivable as it had seemed a few months before, this Empire too might fall.

Rodney Shuttleworth Drake was born at his parents' home in Redhill, Surrey, on 5 May 1908. The Drakes were a medical family and his father, Ernest Charles, was a surgeon who had trained at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London. At the age of fourteen, Rodney followed family tradition by going to Marlborough College, but he left the school just a few months after his seventeenth birthday. He trained as an engineer and later took the long voyage out to Burma, to work for a British firm dealing principally in teak.

Rodney fitted in well in both Burma and the company, and his name occurs frequently in A.C. Pointon's official history of the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation. It was in Rangoon that he met Mary Lloyd, known as Molly. On 14 April 1937
—
a quarter of a century to the day since the
Titanic
had sunk – they were married in the cathedral in Rangoon. Molly was twenty-one years old, Rodney almost twenty-nine.

During early 1942, caught up in the chaos as the Japanese armies cut a swathe across Burma, Rodney and Molly Drake, along with others employed in Burma, were evacuated to BBTC's headquarters in India. By the end of the year Rodney had taken over sawmills at Poona and Jhelum.

Nick's older sister, Gabrielle, was born in Lahore, while the Drakes were stationed in India. One of her earliest memories is of living in an inventive house built by her father. Rodney had been sent a sawmill from America, and in addition to erecting this he used the enormous packing cases to construct a home for the family.

Within three years Rodney was back in Burma. He returned to Rangoon just weeks after its liberation in May 1945, to inspect what remained of the milling capacity after the long years of Japanese occupation. BBTC officially resumed trading on 1 January 1946, with the intention of returning the company to its pre-war eminence. But things had changed in Burma.

Despite initial cooperation with the Japanese, whom they saw as a means of overthrowing British imperialism, the Burmese nationalist movement had eventually fought alongside the Allies against the
Japanese. But with the war over, and buoyed by the announcement of independence for India in May 1946, the nationalists once again took up arms against British imperialism. With weapons supplied by the British to fight the Japanese, the Burmese began their fight for freedom. Soon struggles within the movement led to a civil war in Burma, with fighting between nationalist guerrillas and communists continuing until Burma was granted full independence, on 4 January 1948, some five months before Nick was born.

Like other British companies, BBTC was concerned about the effect Burma's independence would have on trade. It fell to Rodney Drake to formulate a plan, and early in 1949 he put a proposal before the Burmese Government to terminate BBTC's responsibilities in exchange for ‘a form of payment for all it would surrender'.

Walter Snadden worked alongside Rodney in Rangoon in 1948, and nearly half a century later he still remembered Nick's father fondly as ‘one of the old school'. Rodney, he said, was ‘an Englishman of the past, of the colonial past, and well respected'.

On 19 June 1948, while the eyes of the rest of the world were on the divided city of Berlin, where an Allied airlift was bringing supplies to the starving population, my late uncle, Dr J.W. Lusk OBE, MD, ChB, the Drakes' family doctor in Burma, delivered Nicholas Rodney Drake, at the Dufferin Hospital in Rangoon.

Nick's birthplace was the one exotic and faintly exceptional thing about him. A scion of the English upper middle classes, the Drake's second child was born where his parents' business had taken them. Those who dealt in Empire business, whether in commerce or on active service, were well used to a life of dislocation.

Rodney continued to work in Rangoon, supervising the gradual hand-over of mills to the Burmese Government. In 1949 he travelled to Borneo to negotiate with the North Borneo Trading Company over the possibility of expanding BBTC's operations into their territory. The Drakes left Rangoon in 1950, when Rodney was made Company Manager in Bombay, but by 1951 he had decided that it was time to take his wife and children back to England.

The following year he joined the Wolseley Engineering Company, in Birmingham, installing his family in a small village half an hour's drive from the city. The company Rodney joined, and of which he became Managing Director in 1953, manufactured cars. In later years he would remember that in 1900 his own father had bought a car from the pioneering Herbert Austin – then of the Wolseley Sheep
Shearing Machine Company – and driven it all the way back to Redhill: ‘quite a feat in those days'.

Coming back from the bright sunshine of Burma to the grey austerity of Britain in the immediate postwar years must have been a shock. During the war Britain's cities had been pummelled by Nazi bombs and rockets while it stood alone against Hitler's aggression, and by 1950 the nation was counting the cost. Determined that returning troops would not suffer the humiliation which had greeted returning survivors of the Great War, the new Labour government embarked on a massive wave of public spending. Money was poured into houses, schools and hospitals. In the chill winters of the Attlee government, the Welfare State was painstakingly constructed, brick by brick, from the bomb craters and blitzed buildings of a Britain which had won the war but was already in danger of losing the peace.

It is questionable how much of this change impinged upon life at Far Leys, the large comfortable house in the Warwickshire village of Tanworth-in-Arden, where the Drake family settled on their return from Burma. What we do know is that this beautiful little village would remain home to the Drake family for as long as Rodney, Molly and Nick lived.

Sitting sleepily amid the green, rolling Warwickshire hills, Tanworth-in-Arden is a rural idyll which the twentieth century seems to have passed by. Visiting Tanworth in the sunshine, as traffic thunders along the M42 in the distance, far away enough not impinge on the calm, you half expect to see Miss Marple hastening to investigate a murder at the vicarage, or Mrs Miniver preparing another batch of jam for the church Bring & Buy.

The centre of Tanworth is a tiny village green, in the middle of which stands the parish War Memorial. The green is bordered on one side by the Bell Inn, and on the other by the parish church of St Mary Magdalene. Even the present incumbent, Canon Martin Tunnicliffe, is baffled as to why a small village like Tanworth should merit such a disproportionately large place of worship. A new school now stands next to the church, the cottages by the Green are perhaps more conspicuously gentrified, and the village garage boasts names other than that of nearby Rover; but otherwise little in the village appears to have changed in the forty-five years since Rodney Drake brought his family back from Burma to settle in this tranquil corner of England.

Barely a dozen miles away is Stratford-upon-Avon, the birthplace of William Shakespeare. Shakespeare too left to find his fortune in London, but returned to end his days in the Warwickshire village of his childhood. Nowadays the contrast between Stratford and Tanworth could not be greater. Stratford is virtually a Shakespeare Theme Park, stuffed with Bardic mementoes, tea rooms and Ye
Olde Antique Shoppes. Tanworth remains undiscovered, its few pilgrims drawn by the music of Nick Drake.

Just a handful of miles north of Tanworth begins the scabrous urban sprawl of Birmingham. The coal-black industrial heart of Britain is the nation's second city, but lacks London's charm and glamour. Motorways circle the city, turning it into a concrete compound, caught in the Spaghetti Junction of spiralling concrete loops which carry traffic past the city. Aptly enough, given the city's engineering tradition, this was the first place in Britain where the car took priority over human beings. It was to here that Rodney Drake travelled to work each day.

Far Leys, the beautiful brick-built house in Tanworth where the Drakes settled in 1952, was bought from a Mr Stanton, a BBC director of music, who had purchased the property during the 1940s. The house stands back slightly from the road, on a lane on the outskirts of the village. Although large, it had the friendly feel of an extremely comfortable, rambling, family home, rather than an air of great elegance. At the front a wooden gate with the house name painted on it, stood open, while at the back french windows opened on to a small terrace and then the garden: a huge expanse of lawn surrounded by shrubs and trees which merged into the countryside beyond.

One hint of exoticism which the Drake family imported to Tanworth was their Burmese maid, who came to Britain with the family to act as nanny to Nick and Gabrielle. Otherwise, Far Leys was a typically English household, decorated and furnished by the Drakes in the traditional way. The house was cosy and homely, not ostentatious or particularly stylish; pieces of furniture collected during their life together were kept for their familiarity and comfort. It would remain their family home for forty years.

Gabrielle has nothing but happy memories of growing up in leafy Tanworth. The Drakes were a close family, and from their parents both children inherited a love of music of all sorts. Molly Drake played the piano and sang, and once composed a whole suite of children's songs for Nick and Gabrielle. During the 1930s, when suave sophisticates such as Noël Coward and Ivor Novello, Al Bowlly and Jack Hylton, were giving the American crooners a run for their money, Molly had even turned her hand to a little amateur songwriting. It is generally accepted that Nick inherited his musical gifts from his mother, but Gabrielle remembers that Rodney also composed, once writing an entire comic operetta about an Englishman who was based out East.

In 1985 Gabrielle, by this time an actress, told
TV Times
, ‘It was an idyllic childhood,' adding: ‘It was exciting living abroad, but the really wonderful thing was coming back to England – seeing snow for the first time and being able to drink water straight from the tap. I remember thinking that was extraordinary.'

When, that same year, the American writer T.J. McGrath interviewed Rodney and Molly Drake at Far Leys, he asked them about Nick's childhood. ‘Well,' said Rodney, ‘he was always very fond of listening to music'. The voice is bright and well-enunciated, a voice of authority, upper-middle-class, worn and shiny like a much-used cricket bat. The pride in his only son's achievements shines through.

‘As a baby he was always conducting,' added Molly, ‘whenever the music started. He always said he was going to be a famous conductor.' Rodney remembered Nick being frightened as a child by a piece by Sibelius,
The Swan Of Tuonela
. Written in 1895, the tone poem had its origins in the Finnish epic which tells of the young hero Lemminkäinen, who journeys to the North Country in search of a wife and dies in the attempt, but is brought back to life by the magical powers of his mother. Sibelius used a solitary cor anglais to represent the swan, which glides on the black waters that surround Tuonela, the land of the dead.

‘He was very fond of classical music. He listened to a lot …' Rodney continued sadly. ‘I don't know about the early days, but going right to the very end, the night before he died, he was listening to one of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos.'