Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Preface
Whispered Words
A Large Jar of Talc
A Little Boy’s Dream
Learning French
Learning German
Back to Germany
Languages
A Step Nearer to the Stars
A Long Hike
A Silly Revenge
A Gentleman of Clare
Learning Spanish
Tangier and Commandos
Leopard-skin Solution
‘I’m Jesus Christ’
Vampire
King’s Lynn
Fleet Street
Paris Aflame
Big Brother
The Death of Kennedy
Helping Out the Cousins
Outbreak of War
Headlights
Beer with a Camp Guard
A Very Unwise Choice
A Mistake with Auntie
A Day with the Arrows
A Taste of Africa
End of Career
Farewell, Auntie
Living History
Eilat
Jerusalem
Confession
Of Mice and Moles
A Media Explosion
A Useful Certificate
Mr Sissons, I Presume
Worth a Large One
Bits of Metal
Of More Mice – and Mercs
Memories
Flight Out
An Unwanted Manuscript
The ODESSA
Dogs of War
An Unusual Dinner
Perfect Joy
Friends and Opponents
Five Years in Ireland
A Neat Trick
The Amazing Mister Moon
Back to Zero – Start Again
The Passing of Humpy
A Very Burning Question
From Maiko to Monks
A Very Untidy Coup
Peace Hotel and Tracers
Dream Come True
Picture Section
Picture Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Frederick Forsyth
Copyright
For my sons,
Stuart and Shane,
in the hopes that I was an OK dad.
Frederick Forsyth has seen it all. And lived to tell the tale.
We all make mistakes, but starting the Third World War would have been a rather large one. To this day, I still maintain it was not entirely my fault. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
During the course of my life, I’ve barely escaped the wrath of an arms dealer in Hamburg, been strafed by a MiG during the Nigerian civil war and landed during a bloody coup in Guinea-Bissau. The Stasi arrested me, the Israelis regaled me, the IRA prompted a quick move from Ireland to England, and a certain attractive Czech secret police agent – well, her actions were a bit more intimate. And that’s just for starters.
All of that I saw from the inside. But all that time I was, nonetheless, an outsider.
Trained first as a pilot, then as a journalist, Frederick Forsyth finally turned to fiction and became one of the most lauded thriller writers of our time. As exciting as his novels, Forsyth’s autobiography is a candid look at an extraordinary life lived to the full, a life whose unique experiences have provided rich inspiration for thirteen internationally bestselling thrillers.
WE ALL MAKE mistakes, but starting the Third World War would have been a rather large one. To this day, I still maintain it was not entirely my fault. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
During the course of my life, I’ve barely escaped the wrath of an arms dealer in Hamburg, been strafed by a MiG during the Nigerian civil war and landed during a bloody coup in Guinea-Bissau. The Stasi arrested me, the Israelis regaled me, the IRA prompted a quick move from Ireland to England, and a certain attractive Czech secret police agent – well, her actions were a bit more intimate. And that’s just for starters.
All of that I saw from the inside. But all that time I was, nonetheless, an outsider.
To be honest, I never intended to be a writer at all. Long periods of solitude were first a circumstance, then a preference and finally a necessity.
After all, writers are odd creatures, and if they try to make a living at it, even more so. There are reasons for this.
The first is that a writer lives half his life inside his own head. In this tiny space, entire worlds are created or erased and probably both. People come into being, work, love, fight, die and are replaced. Plots are devised, developed, amended and come to fruition or are frustrated. It is a completely different world from the one outside the window. In children, daydreaming is rebuked; in a writer, it is indispensable.
The result is a need for long periods of peace and quiet, often in complete silence without even gentle music, and that requires solitude as an absolute necessity, the first of the reasons behind our oddness.
When you think about it, with the abolition of lighthouse keepers, writing is the only job that has to be undertaken wholly alone. Other professions afford colleagues. The airline captain has his crew, the actor the rest of the cast, the soldier his mates, the office worker his colleagues grouped around the water cooler. Only the writer closes the door, takes the phone off the hook, draws down the blinds and withdraws into a private world alone. Man is a gregarious beast and has been since the hunter-gatherers. The hermit is unusual, odd and sometimes weird.
You may occasionally see a writer out on the town: wining, dining, partying; being affable, sociable, even merry. Beware, this is only half of him. The other half is detached, watching, taking notes. That is the second reason for the oddness – the compulsive detachment.
Behind his mask the writer is always watching; he cannot help it. He observes, analyses, takes mental notes, stores nuggets of the talk and behaviour around him for later use. Actors do the same for the same reasons – for later use. But the writer has only words to use, more rigorous than the film set or stage, with its colours, movements, gestures, facial expressions, props and music.
The absolute need for extensive solitude and the permanent detachment from what Malraux called ‘the human condition’ explain why a writer can never really enter in. Membership involves self-revelation, conformity and obedience. But a writer must be a loner and thus always an outsider.
As a boy, I was obsessed by aeroplanes and just wanted to be a pilot. But even then, not one of an aircrew. I wanted to fly single-seaters, which was probably a warning sign, had anyone noticed. But no one did.
Three factors contributed to my later appreciation of silence in an increasingly noisy world, and solitude where the modern world demands jostling crowds. For one thing, I was my parents’ first born and remained an only child, and they are always slightly different. My parents might have had more children but the war intervened in 1939, and by the time it was over it was, for my mother, too late.
So I grew into little boyhood largely alone. A boy alone in his playroom can invent his own games and ensure they are played by his rules and come to their desired conclusion. He becomes accustomed to winning and on his own terms. The preference for solitude is beginning.
The second factor in my isolation was occasioned by the Second World War itself. My town of Ashford was very close to the coast and the English Channel. Just twenty-two miles across that water was Nazi-occupied France. For a while, the mighty Wehrmacht waited across that strip of grey water for the chance to cross, invade, conquer and occupy. The bombers of the Luftwaffe droned overhead to raid London, or, fearing the waiting fighters of the Royal Air Force, to turn back and dump their loads anywhere on to Kent. Other raids sought to destroy the great Ashford railway junction, just 500 yards from my family home.
The result was that for most of the war, many of the children of Ashford were evacuated to foster homes far away. Apart from a brief departure during the summer of 1940, I spent the whole war in Ashford, and there was no one else to play with anyway. Not that I minded. This is no poor-little-me narrative. Silence and solitude became not my bane, but my dear and lasting friends.
The third factor was the public school (meaning of course the private school) to which I was sent at thirteen. Nowadays, Tonbridge School is a fine and humane academy but back then it had a harsh reputation. The house to which I was allocated, Parkside, was the most brutal of all, its internal philosophy dedicated to bullying and the cane.
Faced with that, a boy has only three choices: to capitulate and become a fawning toady, to fight back, or to withdraw into some mental carapace like a turtle in a shell. You can survive, you just don’t enjoy it. I survived.
I recall the Leavers Concert in December 1955 when those departing had to stand up and sing the ‘Carmen Tonbridgiensis’, the Tonbridge Song. One of the lines records that ‘I am shut out of the garden, the dusty high road waits’. I mimed the words without singing, aware that the ‘garden’ had been a loveless, monastic prison and the ‘dusty high road’ was a broad and sunlit path that was going to lead to much fun and many adventures.
So why, eventually, become a writer? It was a fluke. I wanted not to write but to travel the world. I wanted to see it all, from the snows of the Arctic to the sands of the Sahara, from the jungles of Asia to the plains of Africa. Having no private funds, I opted for the job I thought would enable me to do this.
During my boyhood my father took the Daily Express, then a broadsheet newspaper owned by Lord Beaverbrook and edited by Arthur Christiansen. Both were extremely proud of their foreign coverage. At the breakfast hour, I would stand at my father’s elbow and note the headlines and the datelines. Singapore, Beirut, Moscow. Where were these places? What were they like?
Patient as ever and always encouraging, my dad would take me to the family atlas and point them out. Then to the twenty-four-volume Collins Encyclopaedia, which would describe the cities, the countries and the people who lived there. And I vowed that one day I would see them all. I would become a foreign correspondent. And I did, and I saw them.
But it was not the writing, it was the travelling. It was not until I was thirty-one that, home from an African war, and stony-broke as usual, with no job and no chance of one, I hit on the idea of writing a novel to clear my debts. It was a crazy idea.
There are several ways of making quick money but in the general list, writing a novel rates well below robbing a bank. But I did not know that and I suppose I must have got something right. My publisher told me, to my complete surprise, that it seemed I could tell a story. And that is what I have done for the past forty-five years, still travelling, no longer to report foreign news stories but to research the material needed for the next novel. That was when the preference for solitude and detachment became absolute necessities.
At seventy-six, I think I also remain part-journalist, retaining the two other qualities a reporter must have: insatiable curiosity and a gritty scepticism. Show me a journo who does not care to discover the reason why, and who believes what he is told, and I will show you a bad one.
A journalist should never join the Establishment, no matter how tempting the blandishments. It is our job to hold power to account, not join it. In a world that increasingly obsesses over the gods of power, money and fame, a journalist and a writer must remain detached, like a bird on a rail, watching, noting, probing, commenting but never joining. In short, an outsider.
For years I have fended off suggestions that I should pen an autobiography. And I still do. This is not a life story and certainly not a self-justification. But I am aware that I have been to many places and seen many things: some amusing, some gruesome, some moving, some scary.
My life has been blessed by extraordinary good fortune, for which I have no explanation. More times than I can count, a lucky break has got me out of a tight spot, or procured me an advantage. Unlike the moaners in every Sunday tabloid, I had two wonderful parents and a happy childhood in the fields of Kent. I managed to fulfil my earlier ambitions to fly and to travel and the much later one to write stories. The latter has brought enough material success to live comfortably, which is all I ever wanted anyway.
I have been married to two beautiful women and raised two fine sons, while enjoying so far robust good health. For all this, I remain deeply grateful, though to what fate, fortune or deity I am not quite sure. Perhaps I should make my mind up. After all, I may have to meet Him soon.
MY FATHER WAS born in 1906, the eldest son of a frequently absent chief petty officer, Royal Navy, in Chatham, Kent, and emerged at twenty from the Dockyard School to an economy that was creating one job for every ten young men in the labour pool. The other nine were destined for the dole queue.
He had studied to be a naval architect but as the Great Depression loomed no one wanted ships to be built. The Hitlerian threat had not materialized and there were more merchant ships than anyone needed to carry the diminishing industrial product. After five years scraping a living from little more than odd jobs, he followed the popular advice of the age: Go East, Young Man. He applied for and secured a post as a rubber planter in Malaya.
Today it would seem strange to appoint a young man with not a word of Malay nor knowledge of the Orient to go to the other end of the world to manage many thousands of acres of plantation and a large labour force of Malays and Chinese. But those were the days of empire, when such challenges were perfectly normal.
So he packed his things, said goodbye to his parents and took ship for Singapore. He learned Malay and the intricacies of estate management and rubber production, and ran his estate for five years. Each day he wrote a love letter to the girl with whom he had been ‘walking out’, as they called dating back then, and she wrote to him. The next liner from Britain to Singapore brought the week’s supply of letters and they came to the estate in Johore on the weekly river boat.
Life was lonely and isolated, illuminated by the weekly motorcycle ride south through the jungle, out on to the main road, across the causeway and into Changi for a convivial evening at the planters’ club. His estate consisted of a huge tract of rubber trees set in parallel rows and surrounded by jungle that was home to tigers, black panthers and the much-feared hamadryad or king cobra. There was no car because the track to the main road ten miles through the jungle was a narrow, winding line of red laterite gravel, so he rode a motorcycle.
And there was the village in which the labour force of Chinese tappers lived with their wives and families. And like any village there were a few craftsmen – a butcher, a baker, a blacksmith and so forth.
He stuck it for four years until it became plain there was little enough future in it. Rubber had slumped on the market. European rearmament had not yet started but the new synthetics were taking more and more market share. The planters were asked to take a 20 per cent salary cut as a condition of continued employment. For the bachelors the choice was either to send for their fiancées to come and join them or to go home to England. By 1935 he was havering between the two when something happened.
One night his houseboy roused him with a request.
‘Tuan, the village carpenter is outside. He begs to see you.’
The routine was usually rise at five, tour the estate for two hours, then the morning reception when he would sit on the verandah and hear any petitions, complaints or adjudications in quarrels. Because of the early rise, he turned in at 9 p.m. and this request was after ten o’clock. He was about to say ‘In the morning’ when it occurred to him that if it could not wait it might be serious.
‘Bring him in,’ he said. The houseboy demurred.
‘He will not come, tuan. He is not worthy.’
My father rose, opened the screen door and went out to the verandah. Outside, the tropical night was warm velvet and the mosquitoes voracious. Standing in a pool of light below the verandah was the village carpenter, a Japanese, the only one in the village. My father knew he had a wife and child and they never mixed with anyone. The man bowed deeply.
‘It is my son, tuan. The boy is very ill. I fear for him.’
Dad called for lanterns and they went to the village. The child was about ten and racked with pain from his stomach. His mother, an agonized face, crouched in the corner.
My father was no doctor, not even a paramedic, but a compulsory course of first aid and a clutch of medical textbooks gave him enough knowledge to recognize acute appendicitis. It was pitch black and closing on midnight. Changi hospital was eighty miles away, but he knew that if appendicitis turned to peritonitis it would kill.
He ordered his motorcycle brought out, fully fuelled. The father used his wife’s broad sash, the obi, to fasten the child on the pillion, tied to my father’s back, and he set off. He told me it was a hellish journey, for all the predators hunt at night. It was nearly an hour down the rutted track to the main road, then due south for the causeway.
Dawn was close to breaking some hours later when he rolled into the forecourt of Changi General Hospital, yelling for someone to come and help him. Nursing staff appeared and wheeled the child away. By luck a British doctor was coming off night-shift but took one look and rushed the boy to surgery.
The doctor joined my father for tiffin in the canteen and told him he had been just in time. The appendix was about to burst with probably lethal results. But the boy would live and was even then asleep. He gave the obi back.
After refuelling, my father rode back to his estate to reassure the impassive but hollow-eyed parents and catch up with the delayed day’s work. A fortnight later the river boat brought the mail package, the usual stores and a small Japanese boy with a shy smile and a scar.
Four days later the carpenter appeared again, this time in daylight. He was waiting near the bungalow when Dad returned from the latex store for tea. He kept his eyes on the ground as he spoke.
‘Tuan, my son will live. In my culture when a man owes what I owe you, he must offer the most valuable thing he has. But I am a poor man and have nothing to offer, save one thing. Advice.’
Then he raised his eyes and stared my father in the face.
‘Leave Malaya, tuan. If you value your life, leave Malaya.’
To the end of his days in 1991 my father never knew if those words caused his decision or merely reinforced it. But the next year, 1936, instead of sending for his fiancée he resigned and came home. In 1941 imperial Japanese forces invaded Malaya. In 1945, of all his contemporaries, not one came home from the camps.
There was nothing spontaneous about the Japanese invasion of Malaya. It was meticulously planned and the imperial forces swept down the peninsula as an unstoppable tide. British and Australian troops were rushed up the spine of the colony to man defensive points along the main roads south. But the Japanese did not come that way.
Out of the rubber estates came scores of sleeper agents, infiltrated years before. On hundreds of bicycles the Japanese rode south along tiny, unknown jungle tracks, guided by the agents. Others came by sea, leapfrogging down the coast, guided inshore by winking lanterns held by fellow countrymen who knew the coast and all the inlets.
The British and Australians were outflanked over and over again as the Japanese appeared behind them, and in strength, always guided by the agents. It was all over in days and the supposedly impregnable fortress of Singapore was taken from the landward side, her massive guns facing out to sea.
When I was a child, but old enough to understand, my father told me this story and swore it was absolutely true and it happened nearly seven years before the invasion of December 1941. But he was never quite certain that his village carpenter was one of those agents, only that had he been taken, he too would have died.
So perhaps only a few whispered words from a grateful carpenter caused me to appear on this earth at all. Since 1945 the Japanese have been held responsible for many things, but surely not this as well?
THE SPRING OF 1940 was not a relaxing time to be in East Kent. Hitler had swept across Europe. France was overrun in three weeks. Denmark and Norway were gone, Belgium, Luxembourg and Holland swallowed.
The outflanked British army in France had been driven into the sea off Dunkirk and Calais and only rescued, minus all their equipment, by a miracle of small inshore boats manned by civilians who chugged across the Channel from the English coast and brought 330,000 of them off the sand dunes against all the odds.
All Europe was either occupied by Hitler, putting into office servile collaborator governments, or sheltering in their neutrality. The British prime minister had been tossed out to be replaced by Winston Churchill, who vowed we would fight on. But with what? Britain was completely isolated and alone.
All Kent waited for the invasion, the famed Operation Sealion which, on Eagle Day, would see the German army roar up the beaches to invade, conquer and occupy.
My father had already volunteered for the army but was still based in his native Kent and living at home. He and my mother decided that if it came, they would not survive. They would use the last gallon of petrol in the old Wolseley and, with a length of hose, end their lives. But they did not want to take me with them. With my crown of blond curls I would be accepted by the Nazis as of good Aryan stock and raised in an orphanage. But how to see me safely evacuated somewhere else?
The solution came in one of the customers at my mother’s dress shop. She was the principal of the Norland Institute, the training school of the famous Norland nannies who for decades had gone out to raise the children of the rich and royal worldwide. The institute was at Hothfield, a village outside Ashford. It was going to evacuate to Devon, far away in the southwest. My mother put it to her client: would they take me with them?
The principal was dubious but her deputy proposed to her that nannies in training would always need babies to practise on, so why not this one? The deal was done. When the train bearing the Norland Institute steamed out of Ashford, I went with them. May 1940: I was twenty months old.
It is hard to describe in the modern world, or explain to the new generation, the anguish of those parents as Ashford was emptied of its evacuees, seen off by weeping mothers and a few fathers who thought never to see them again. But that was the way it was on Ashford station.
I cannot recall those five months I was in Devon as class after class of eager young nannies experimented at putting me to bed, getting me up and constantly changing my nappies. That was before Velcro fastenings and absorbent padding. It was all terry towelling and pins back then.
It seems I could hardly pass wind or let go a few drops before the whole lot came off to be replaced by a new one. And the standby was talc; lots and lots of talc. I must have had the most talc-dusted rear end in the kingdom.
But the Few in their Spitfires and Hurricanes did the job. On 15 September, Adolf simply gave up. His vast army on the French coast turned round, took a last look at the white cliffs across the Channel which they would not conquer after all, and marched east. Hitler was preparing his June 1941 invasion of Russia. The landing barges bobbed uselessly at their moorings off Boulogne and Calais.
Sealion was off.
Our photographic recce planes noted this and reported back. England was saved, or at least saved to struggle on. But the Luftwaffe bombing raids on London and the southeast would not cease. Most of the evacuated children would stay far from their parents but at least with a good chance of reunification one day.
My own parents had had enough. They sent for me and back I came, to spend the rest of the war in the family home in Elwick Road, Ashford.
I recall none of this, not the going away, the ceaseless attention to the nether parts in Devon nor the return. But something must have struck in the subconscious. It took years until I ceased to feel trepidation every time I was approached by a beaming young lady with a large jar of talc.
THE SUMMER OF 1944 brought two great excitements to a small boy of five in East Kent. The nightly droning of German bombers overhead, leaving from the French coast for the target of London, had ceased as the Royal Air Force won back control of the skies. The rhythmic throb-throb of the V-1 rockets or doodlebugs, Hitler’s pilotless drones packed with explosives, had not yet started. But by May all the grown-ups were tense. They were expecting the long-awaited Allied invasion of occupied France. That was when the Texan came and parked his tank on my parents’ lawn.
At the breakfast hour he was not there but when I returned in the mid-afternoon from kindergarten, there he was. I thought the tank, which turned out to be a Sherman, was immense and hugely exciting. Its tracks were half on the parental lawn, the fence reduced to matchwood, and half on Elwick Road. It simply had to be explored.
It took a chair from the kitchen and a lot of climbing to reach the top of the tracks, and then there was the turret with its formidable gun. Having reached the top of the turret I found the hatch open and stared down. A face stared up; there was a muttered conversation down below and a head began to climb towards the light. When a tall lanky figure detached himself from the metal and towered over me I recognized that he had to be a cowboy. I had seen them in the Saturday-morning film shows and they all wore tall hats. I was looking at my first Texan in a Stetson.
He sat on the turret, coming eye to eye with me, and said: ‘Hiya, kid.’ I replied: ‘Good afternoon.’ He seemed to be speaking through his nose, like the cowboys in the movies. He nodded at our home.
‘Your house?’ I nodded. ‘Waal, tell your paw I’m real sorry about the fence.’
He reached into the top pocket of his combat fatigues, produced a wafer of something, unwrapped it and offered it to me. I did not know what it was but I took it, as it would have been rude to refuse. He produced another piece, put it in his mouth and began to chew. I did the same. It tasted of peppermint, but unlike British toffee it refused to dissolve for swallowing. I had just been introduced to chewing gum.
That tank and its entire crew were convinced that in a few days they would be part of the invasion force that would try to storm Hitler’s Atlantic Wall in the massively fortified Pas-de-Calais. Many must have thought they would never come back. In fact, they were all wrong.
My Texan was part of a huge decoy army that the Allied commanders had stuffed into East Kent to dupe the German High Command. Secretly they were planning to invade via Normandy, way down south, with another army then crouching under camouflaged canvas miles away from Kent.
The soldiers of the decoy army might go over later but not on D-Day. Thinking they would be the first shock wave, with terrible casualties, thousands of them were jamming every bar in Kent to the doors, drinking in the final saloon. A week later a solemn voice on the radio, which was then called the wireless, announced that British, American and Canadian troops had landed in strength on five beaches in Normandy and were fighting their way inland.
Two days after that there was an ear-splitting rumble from the front garden and the Sherman rolled away. My Texan was gone. No more chewing gum. Under the guidance of my mother I knelt at the bedside and prayed to Jesus to look after him. It was a month later that I was taken to Hawkinge.
My father was a major in the army, but for the past ten years he had been a member of Ashford’s amateur fire brigade. Despite his protests, this put him in a ‘restricted occupation’, meaning he could not be posted abroad and go into combat. The country needed every fireman it had. He insisted on a job and was made a welfare officer, answerable to the War Office and charged with overseeing the living conditions of all the soldiers based in East Kent.
I do not know when he ever slept for those five years. My mother ran the family furrier’s shop while Dad spent his days in a khaki uniform and his nights on a fire truck racing around putting out fires. My point is, he had a car and a cherished petrol allowance, without which he could not have done his day job. Hence the trip across the Weald of Kent to visit the grassfield fighter strip at Hawkinge. It was the base of two squadrons of Spitfires.
Back then the Spitfire was not just a fighter plane, it was a national icon. It still is. And for every small boy the men who flew them were heroes to surpass any footballer or showbiz personality. While my father conducted his business with the base commander, I was handed over to the pilots.
They made a great fuss of me, thinking perhaps of their own children or kid brothers far away. One of them picked me up under the armpits, swung me high and dropped me into the cockpit of a Mark 9 Spitfire. I sat on the parachute, overawed, dumbfounded. I sniffed in the odours of petrol, oil, webbing, leather, sweat and fear – for fear also has an aroma. I studied the controls, the firing button, the instruments; I gripped the control stick. I stared ahead along the endless cowling masking the great Rolls-Royce Merlin engine to the four-bladed propeller, stark against a duck-egg-blue Kentish sky. And in the manner of little boys I swore a little boy’s oath.
Most small boys swear to something they want to be when they grow up, but usually the promise fades and the dream dies. I swore that one day I was going to be one of them. I was going to wear the pale blue uniform with wings on the chest and fly single-seaters for the RAF. When I was hoisted back out of the cockpit I had made up my mind what I was going to do. I would be a fighter pilot and I would fly a Spitfire.
I could not foresee the years of discouragement from schools and peer groups, the mockery and disbelief. When my father drove his little Wolseley saloon back to Ashford I was lost in thought. A month later I turned six and the dream did not die.
BEFORE THE WAR my father had been a pillar of the Rotary Club of Ashford. With the departure of so many men into the armed forces or to war work, that was all suspended for the duration. But in 1946 it was restarted and the next year saw a programme of ‘twinning’ with our newly freed neighbours in France. Ashford, beginning with the letter A, was twinned with Amiens in Picardy.
My parents were matched with a French doctor, the Resistance war hero Dr Colin and his wife. Throughout the occupation he had remained the doctor assigned to the hundreds of railwaymen living and working in the great rail hub of the Amiens marshalling yards. Permitted his own car and free movement, he had observed many things useful to the Allies across the Channel and, at risk of discovery and execution, had passed them on to the Resistance.
The Colins came to visit in 1947 and the following year invited my parents back. But the shop came first and they could not take the time off, so I went instead, a pattern that would be repeated for the next four years. Not just for a weekend but for most of the eight-week summer school vacation.
Like many families of the French bourgeoisie, the Colins had a country house far from the city fumes, buried deep in the countryside of Corrèze in the Massif Central in the middle of France. Thus in July 1948, aged nine, in short trousers and school cap, I accompanied my father on the adventure of crossing the Channel on a ferry. Only at the other side, looking back, could I see for the first time the towering white cliffs of Dover which the German army had been staring at so longingly eight years earlier. Dr Colin met us at Calais and my father, pink with embarrassment, was duly embraced and kissed on both cheeks. Then he patted me on the head and re-boarded the ferry for home. Real men did not kiss in those days.
Dr Colin and I boarded the train for Amiens and I saw for the first time wooden seats in a railway carriage. The doctor had a complimentary ticket for first class, but he preferred to travel in third with the working-class people he served.
At Amiens I met Madame Colin again, and their four children, all in their early twenties and late teens. François, then seventeen, was the wild one, arrested several times by the Gestapo during the occupation and the reason for his mother’s snow-white hair. Not one of them spoke a word of English and after three terms at a British prep school I could just about manage Bonjour and Merci. Sign language came into its own but I had been given a primer textbook for the grammar and began to work out what they were saying. Two days later we all left for Paris and Corrèze.
‘Abroad’ seemed a very strange but fascinating place. Everything was different – the language, the food, the mannerisms, the customs and those massive French railway engines. But a child, in the manner of learning things, is like blotting paper. They can soak up information. Today, sixty-five years later, stumped by the new internet-connected, digitalized world, I marvel at children little more than toddlers who can do twenty things with an iPhone which I have a problem switching on.
Dr Colin was not with us. He had to stay in Amiens tending his patients. So Madame and the teenagers travelled south to fulfil the sacred French summer holiday in the country with a small and slightly overwhelmed English boy. We changed trains at Ussel on to a branch line to Egletons and thence by wheezing country bus to the ancient village of Lamazière-Basse. It was like going back to the Middle Ages.
The family home was large, old and decrepit, with falling plaster, a leaky roof and many rooms, one of which became mine and where mice ran freely over me as I slept. The lady who lived there was the old family nanny, pensioned off but given a home for the rest of her days. Amazingly she was English but had been in France since her girlhood.
A lifelong spinster, Mimi Tunc had served the Colin family for many years and throughout the entire war had passed for French under the noses of the German authorities, thus escaping internment.
Lamazière-Basse was, as said, very old and almost medieval. A few homes, but not many, had electricity. For most, oil lamps sufficed. There were one or two archaic tractors but no combine harvesters. The crops were scythed by hand and brought home in carts hauled by yoked oxen. In the fields the peasants at midday would stand to murmur the Angelus, like figures from a Millais painting. Both men and women wore wooden clogs or sabots.
There was a church, packed with attendance by the women and children while the men discussed the important things of life in the bar-café across the square. The village priest, always called Monsieur l’Abbé, was friendly to me but slightly distant, convinced that as a Protestant I was tragically destined for hell. Up at the chateau on the hill dwelt Madame de Lamazière, the very old matriarch of the surrounding land. She did not come to church; it came to her in the form of poor Monsieur l’Abbé, sweating up the hill in the summer sun to bring her mass in her private chapel. The pecking order was very rigid and even God had to recognize the distinctions.
As my French improved I made friends with a number of village boys to whom I was an object of extreme curiosity. The summer of 1948 was blazingly hot and our daily magnet was the lake a mile outside the village. There, with rods made from reeds, we could fish for the large green frogs whose back legs, dusted with flour and fried in butter, made an excellent supper.
Lunches were always large and taken outside: hams cured black in the chimney smoke, pâté, crusty bread, butter from the churn and fruit from the trees. I was taught to sample watered red wine, like the other boys but not the girls. It was at the lake one sweltering day that first summer that I saw Benoit die.
There were about six boys skylarking in the clearing by the water’s edge when he appeared one midday, clearly very intoxicated. The village youths murmured to me that he was Benoit, the village drunk. To our fascinated bewilderment he stripped naked and waded into the lake. He was singing out of tune. We thought he was just going to cool off, waist deep. But he went on walking until the water reached his neck. Then he started to swim, but within a few clumsy strokes his head disappeared.
Among the boys I was the strongest swimmer so after half a minute it was suggested I should swim out and look for him. So I did. Having reached the point where his head had disappeared I peered downwards. Without a snorkelling mask (unheard of back then) I could see very little. The water was an amber colour and there were tangles of weeds and some lilies. Still unable to see much, I took a deep breath and dived.
About ten feet down, on the bottom, was a pale blob lying on its back. Closer up I could see a trickle of bubbles emerging from his mouth. He was clearly not frolicking but drowning. As I turned to resurface a hand gripped my left ankle and held it. Above my head I could see the sun shining through the dim water, but the surface was two feet away and the grip did not slacken. Feeling the onset of panic I turned and went back down.
Finger by finger, I peeled the dying hand off my ankle. Benoit’s eyes were open and he stared at me as my lungs began to hurt. Finally the hand was off my leg and I kicked for the surface. I felt the fingers seeking a second grip but I kicked again, felt an impact with a face and then shot upwards towards the sun.
There was that wonderful inrush of fresh air that all free-divers will recognize when one returns to the surface and I began to splash towards the gravel patch under the trees where the village boys waited open-mouthed. I explained what I had seen and one of them ran for the village. But it was half an hour before men appeared with ropes. One stripped to his long johns and went in. Others waded waist-deep but no further. The man in the long johns was the only one who could swim. Eventually a connection was made with the object under the water and the body was hauled out by one wrist on the end of a rope.
There was no question of resuscitation even if anyone had known the technique. The boys gathered round before being shooed away. The corpse was bloated and discoloured, a trickle of red, either blood or red wine, dribbling from the corner of the mouth. Eventually an ox-cart appeared and what was left of old, drunk Benoit was taken back to the village.
There were no formalities such as an autopsy or enquiry. I suppose the mayor wrote out a death certificate and Monsier l’Abbé presided over a burial somewhere in the churchyard.
I spent four happy summer holidays at Lamazière-Basse and when I returned from the fourth, aged twelve, I could pass for French among the French. It was an asset that would later prove extremely useful many times.
That summer of 1948 was the first time I had seen a human corpse. It would not be the last. Not by about fifty thousand.
MY FATHER WAS a remarkable man. His formal education was from the Chatham Dockyard School, maths-oriented, and in what he knew he was largely self-taught. He was not rich or famous or titled. Just a shopkeeper from Ashford. But he had a kindness and a humanity that was noted by everyone who knew him.
At the very end of the war, being a major serving directly under the War Office, he was summoned to London without explanation. In fact, it was for a film show, but this one did not star Betty Grable. With a hundred others he sat in a darkened hall inside the ministry to see the first films, taken by the army photographic unit, of British soldiers liberating the concentration camp known as Bergen-Belsen. It marked him for ever. He told me much later that after five years of war he had not really understood what he and millions of others had been struggling to defeat and destroy until he saw the horrors of Bergen-Belsen. He did not know there could be such cruelty on earth.
My mother told me that he came home, still in uniform, but instead of changing he stood for two hours in front of the window, staring out, his back to the room, impervious to her pleading to tell her what was wrong. He just stared in silence. Finally he tore himself away from his thoughts, went upstairs to change, instructing her as he passed: ‘I never want to meet one again. I never want one in my house.’ He meant Germans.
It did not last. Later he mellowed, went to Germany, met and spoke civilly to many Germans. It is a mark of the man that when I was thirteen in 1952 he decided to send me to live during the school holidays with a German family. He wanted his only son to learn German, to know the country and the people. When my bewildered mother asked him why, he simply said: ‘Because it must never happen again.’
But he would not, by the summer of 1952, have an exchange visit with a German boy, though there were plenty of such offers available. I would go as a paying guest. There was a struggling British–German Friendship Society and I think it was arranged through them. The family chosen farmed outside Göttingen. This time I flew.
Dad had a friend from his army days who had stayed on and was based with the British Army of the Rhine at the camp at Osnabrück. He saw me off at Northolt aerodrome outside London; the aeroplane was an elderly DC Dakota which droned its way across France and Germany to land at the British base there. Father Gilligan, a jovial Irish padre who had been billeted with us in Ashford, was there to meet me. He drove me to Göttingen and handed me over.
It was very strange to be an English boy in Germany back then. I was an oddity. I had had three years of German at prep school so at least I had a poor smattering of the language, as opposed to my first visit to France four years earlier when I had hardly a word of French. The family was very kind and did all in their power to make me feel at home. It was an uneventful four weeks of which I recall only one rather strange encounter.
There was a world gliding championship that year and it was held at a place called Oerlinghausen. We all went off there for a family day out. My host’s interest in flying stemmed from the fact that he had been in the Luftwaffe during the war, as an officer but not a flyer.
The huge expanse of grassland was crowded with gliders in a variety of club markings, scattered all over the field, waiting their turn to be towed into the air. And there were notable pilots round whom admiring crowds were grouped. There was one in particular who was clearly very famous and the centre of attention. And she was a woman, though I had not a clue who she was.
In fact she was Hanna Reitsch, Luftwaffe test pilot and Hitler’s personal aviator. If he doted on her, his admiration was as nothing to the adoration she bore towards him.
In April 1945 as the Soviet army closed on the surrounded heart of Berlin, and Hitler, drawn and trembling, moped about his bunker under the Chancellery, Hanna Reitsch flew into the doomed enclave at the controls of a Fieseler Storch, a high-wing monoplane with an extremely short landing and take-off run. With amazing skill she put it down on an avenue in the Charlottenburg Zoo, switched off and walked through the shellfire to the bunker.
Because of who she was, she was allowed into the final redoubt where Hitler would blow his brains out a few days later, and ushered into the presence. There she begged the man she admired so much to let her fly him out of the Berlin death-trap and down to the Berghof, his fortified home at Berchtesgaden in southern Bavaria. There, she urged him, surrounded by SS last-ditch fanatics, the resistance could continue.
Hitler thanked her but refused. He was determined to die and bring all Germany down to ruin with him. They were not worthy of him, he explained, a notable exception being Hanna Reitsch.
A friend of my host, another veteran of the Luftwaffe, secured our admission into the admiring circle round the ace aviator. She was beaming and shook hands with my host and his wife and their teenage children. Then she turned to me and held out her hand.
That was when my host made a mistake. ‘Our young house guest,’ he said. ‘Er ist ein Engländer.’
The smile froze, the hand was withdrawn. I recall a pair of blazing blue eyes and the voice rising in rage. ‘Ein Engländer?’ she squawked, and stalked off.
Like my father, it appeared she had not quite forgotten either.
IN THE FOLLOWING year, 1953, I returned to Germany. The farming family outside Göttingen could not have me back so I went to stay with Herr Dewald and his wife and children. He was a schoolteacher of Halle, Westphalia.
Back then Germany still seemed like a country under some form of occupation, even though the German Federal Republic had been formed under the Chancellorship of Konrad Adenauer in 1949. But the old Germany was divided into East and West, with the capital of West Germany not at Berlin but in Bonn, a small town on the Rhine, chosen because it was close to Chancellor Adenauer’s home town.
The reason for the impression of occupation was the omni-presence of the NATO forces, which were not there to occupy but to defend; it was NATO that held the line against the expansionist Soviet bloc which had, until his death in March, been in the grip of the brutal tyrant Joseph Stalin. Westphalia was in the British Zone, which was studded with British army camps and airbases. This force was simply known as the British Army of the Rhine and its vehicles could often be seen speeding through the streets. The invasion threat from east of the Iron Curtain was seen as very real.
The eastern third of Germany was behind that Iron Curtain and part of the Soviet empire. It was known as East Germany or, weirdly, the German Democratic Republic. It was very far from being democratic, being a harsh dictatorship with a nominal German communist government eager to do the bidding of the real masters, the twenty-two divisions of the Soviet army and the Soviet embassy. The Western powers retained, by treaty, only one enclave, the encircled West Berlin, stuck eighty miles inside East Germany.
The infamous Berlin Wall, completing the encirclement of West Berlin, would not go up until 1961 to prevent the constant flow of East German graduates pouring out of the technical colleges and universities via West Berlin to seek a better life in West Germany. But the general air of threat after the Berlin Blockade of 1948/49 which nearly sparked World War Three meant that the British army, far from being resented by the Germans, was much appreciated.
In my own class I had a more practical use as a guest with a German family. Using my stiff blue passport I could enter a British base, go to the on-site duty-free shop and buy real coffee, which, after years of drinking bitter substitutes, ranked with gold dust.
I arrived in Halle after the break-up for the Easter holidays of British schools but before that of German ones. As Herr Dewald was a teacher and his children were still at school, it was thought practical that I should attend the German school until its holidays began a fortnight later. Here I was very much a figure of curiosity, the first Britisher they had ever seen, and presumed to have fanged teeth or at least a forked tail. There was considerable mutual relief that we all looked much the same. Both in the Dewald home and at the high school my German was improving rapidly.
A characteristic of German society that I was introduced to and which somewhat bewildered me was the worship of nature, the open countryside. Having been brought up amid the fields and woods of Kent I pretty much accepted Mother Nature as just being there with no need to adulate it. But the Germans made great play of going on long walks through it. These were called ‘Wandering Days’. The whole school, age group by age group, would be lined up to go on these country hikes. During the first I ever went on, I noticed something strange.
While a similar group of British kids would simply amble along in an untidy mass, the German children within half a mile had somehow formed themselves into a column, rank upon rank, three abreast. Then the walking slowly transformed, with all the feet coming up and down in unison until we were marching.