Poetry has its part in politics because it sharpens our vision of reality. It helps the shaping of Society, helps man to know who, and where, he is. It was not an accident that Federico Garcia Lorca was murdered by Franco. The last thing the fascists wanted was acuity of vision at that time; the time when in Tom Wintringham's words:

Minutes are told by the jerked wound,
By the pain's throb, fear of pain, sin
Of giving in, and the unending hardness of the pillow

For Thora and myself our pillow was not all that hard nor was the pain all ours, but the fear of giving in was something we both knew. Actual battle conditions made me grow new reflexes and, temporarily, I was able to suspend my revolt at the destruction of human beings. Months of exposure to the toll of war had made me physically tougher but in the long term this did not blunt my emotional processes. I think I can honestly say that I was not haunted by the fear of being killed, though, on an intellectual level, I was most certainly afraid of being badly wounded. I had seen too much battle surgery to be indifferent.

Thora was much more deeply touched by the dangers, but, by her conscious effort, she continued her job with a total self-discipline. My own case did not need such an effort, as, by some sort of hormonic accident, I only generated enough adrenalin to keep awake and not always enough even for that. Logically I was sometimes shocked that I myself did not feel more shock. I became more reactive emotionally after we were ordered off to the Sierra Guaderama where we took over the Club Alpino. It is still there today, on the shoulder of the hill looking south-west from the sunny side of the Navacerada Pass, some 5000 feet above sea level. On the other side of the pass the road goes gently down to La Granja and on to Segovia. When I first read For whom the Bell Tolls, my memories of that countryside were a perfect fit for Hemingway's story. After a night move, we were turning the Club Alpino into a hospital when, soon after first light, a few 18 pounder shells from the other side of the valley fell maybe half-a-mile away onto the loop of our access road. The Club itself was just on the reverse slope and out-of-range. The day-time main road traffic to and from Madrid would be vulnerable as long as that gun stayed in position. Settling in the hospital was not difficult, the premises were excellent. I had to go down the hill to get supplies from the Divisional Pharmacy and when, that afternoon, I saw a most evident build-up in progress, I knew that the lull on the Navacerada Pass was not going to continue much longer. I started the return trip which turned into a nightmare. A bridge had been blocked by a truck accident, diverting myself onto the ruined minor roads. I arrived in the small hours at the Club Alpino, dead beat.

All I wanted to do was to be horizontal. The stretcher store was next to the entrance so that ambulances could draw clean replacements and blankets in exchange for the loaded stretchers they deposited. I went straight in to the store telling the sentry to wake me at sun-rise. I flung myself onto the nearest stretcher, falling asleep as I did so. Later, half-awakened by the cold, I pulled another blanket over me from the neighbouring stretcher. When I got up at dawn, I noticed that I had snitched my second blanket from another sleeper lying alongside me whom I had not disturbed on my arrival. He was very still. I looked again. He was dead. He had arrived too late for help and, against all proper practice, had been parked in the stretcher store until morning. That I had stolen his blanket upset me profoundly; I knew this was neurotic but it preyed on me. When the mortuary truck came later, already bearing on its deck dead from the advanced positions, I saw my last night's neighbour being loaded, with his other final companions, to lie in the truck without stretcher or blanket or boots. The Army was short of these necessities, and it was cold in the High Sierra. Then, perhaps for the first time, I fully understood with my physical being the full personal price of war. The preliminary skirmishes of the battle for La Granja had been joined. Later that day the fighting became heavy; by evening we were very busy. The surgeons were hard at it. I was doubling as administrator and as anesthetist until three the next morning. By ten o'clock on the second day, casualties were flooding in again. I got a message to come to Triage (today that case-sorting space is a jazzy Club Alpino lounge) where Archie Cochrane told me that someone was asking for me. It was my friend Nicholas, a young London student architect whose sketching ability had put him into a Reconnaissance Unit. He had been in a forward observation position mapping fire-points and had received an abdominal wound with an entry and no exit. He needed immediate surgery. His sketch book was in his pocket, his hand still on it. I told him that I would take him into the theatre at once and send his maps to Brigade. Dr Broggi's table was free; I anaesthetised him while he was saying thank you.

Broggi opened him up; his gut was intact but a spent bullet had cut a gash in his left iliac artery. This cannot be tied, as the iliac arteries are the left and right branches of the aorta carrying the life-blood to their side of the pelvis and the corresponding leg. We realised that Nicholas was going to die. Broggi tried a 500 to 1 chance; he sutured down live tissue over the spurting leak, "sand-bagging" it. Nicholas went to the wards.

Thora and Broggi, who also knew and liked Nicholas, saw that I was badly hit by his fatal prognosis. My reaction was strangely reinforced by my stretcher store experience and by fatigue. Very sweetly, they led me out and told me to go and take a turn in the Pine woods behind the Hospital and to sit in the sun for half an hour. They could manage without me. Thora induced the anesthetic, and an orderly would maintained it.

I did as I was told and quite simply sat and wept with the mountain sunshine on my back. I thought of the dead truck of that morning and decided that we must save Nicholas from that anonymity and would bury him under the Pines where I was sitting. That day became a surgical marathon. Once or twice I saw Nicholas sleeping and then, later that evening, there was another face in his bed.

Our work routine had become a thinking clockwork, and it continued to accept the accelerating work load as the battle for the Segovia road ran to a halt before La Granja. I switched to my other post as anaesthetist. We were operating in the former Bar where there was plenty of room so we expanded to our maximum pattern. This meant running three operating tables arranged radially at 120 degrees. I would be at the centre, running three anaesthetics helped by two orderlies. I also sewed up and helped dissect out shrapnel and damaged tissue. We ran a surgical production line--three tables with only two surgeons. I always did the inductions and kept an eye on the condition of patients whose anaesthesia was being maintained by the orderlies whom we had ourselves trained.

All that night the wounded poured in. By the time I got to the morgue the next morning Nicholas had already gone off on the first of that day's transportes de los muertos to lie with his comrades in the International Brigade cemetery just North of Madrid. General Franco celebrated his 1939 victory by its desecration. I have a splendid daughter; we called her Nicolette when she was born more than fifty years ago. She is a very good painter married to a very good writer. Once again Stephan Spender speaks for us all:

A stop-watch and an ordnance map.
He stayed faithfully in that place
From his living comrade split
By dividers of the bullet
Opening wide the distances
Of his final loneliness
All under the olive trees
A stopwatch and an ordnance map.
And the bones are fixed at five
Under moon's timelessness;
But another who lives on bears within his heart forever
Space split open by the bullet.
All under the olive trees

In that spring of 1937, I had seen stalwart characters crack. Helping them had helped me to pass through a very acute attack of self-doubt. I was perfectly satisfied that I had done right in coming to Spain, but what I was worrying about was really my whole raison d'être. I had been brought face-to-face with someone else's major personal crisis, and this led me to look more deeply inside myself. I had found an absolutely splendid Belgian male nurse going around a ward administering lethal injections to patients he considered moribund. By the time I caught up with him, I do not think that he had shortened anyone's life by more than a few hours, but this was something we never did in any circumstances at all. Young men would come out of appalling shock, and we never presumed to condemn a life. I took the nurse outside under the trees, and he broke down totally, a sobbing hulk, a thirty year old muscular adult male, well educated, with a record of entire commitment to his work. What in fact had happened was that for too long he had been giving far beyond his physical and psychological capacity. In his particular case, he was giving those pathetically ill patients what he himself required but could not face: "the sin of giving in". I had to get him to believe that it can be a duty to give in, and that a point comes when it is no sin but the right thing to do. This he did, accepting the rather facile psychological life-belt of returning to Belgium where he should "fight for Spain on his own home front". All I could do was to sedate him immediately, to knock him out for the night. For six months he had been under "battle strain". He was not trying to run away, far from it. This case of battle-fatigue made me realise that I myself was becoming mortally tired. Had it not been for Thora, I doubt whether I would have stayed the course. Her situation was the mirror image of my own but we each kept the other going.

I must have first met Cyril Connolly at about that time in the basement shelter of Madrid's Hotel Florida. We talked and drank; Cyril, sensing my depression quoted Horace: "O passi graviora dabit deus huic quoque finem" This has passed into my reflex thinking and for decades I have indeed seen it verified. Cyril Connolly was a genuine humane liberal. His classical Graeco-Latin education (which had also been my own starting point) lent a blend of cynicism and irony to his perceptions. So long as he was not himself vitally concerned this was mellowed by a gift of instant empathy. In that Madrid basement he brought me to see that our only insurance for the future lies in perfecting our present performance. As we got to know each other, I realised that, providing he was not emotionally involved, Cyril could be a most perceptive friend with deep psychological insight. Just as he helped me then in Madrid, he was to help me again some years later in a profoundly dark moment. In that cellar, as we heard the intermittent crumpf of artillery, he brought me to feel that my contribution had perhaps been made, that the Unit was working well enough under its own steam, it no longer needed me and that I had a duty to look at myself in a wider context and to do something constructive in our own country.

So, against this psychological background, Thora and I moved with the Unit to the Escorial where we took over a relatively modern building which was to be the last hospital we were to help set up in Spain. Our work load was greater than ever before and our standards were, I believe, truly exemplary. As the principal Field Hospital serving the Battle of Brunete, we benefited from the total logistic support that comes with being a part of a real Army.

Julian Bell joined us at this point; we had both known somehow that the other existed. Julian had enormous energy; he had come up to Cambridge in 1927 and had been an Apostle into which grouping (unlike my half-brother Austin) I had not been deemed worthy of the call. Julian had asked me if I had been one of the elect, but my exclusion did not stop us having many very Apostolic discussions. He was profoundly anti-fascist but not Marxist in any organised or orthodox sense. He had been deeply influenced by his time in China. He felt that England needed a dose of Confucius. There was plenty of Right Thinking, he said, a fair amount of Right Talking, rather less Right Writing and far too little Right Action. Unless these unities were manifested, man's intellectual life became a bundle of meaningless contradictions. Since I had arrived at much the same conclusion (without going to China), we got on very well indeed.

Though Julian had great worldly experience, he had retained a capacity for wonder, an innocence, a candour, and a ceaseless zest for activity. All this made him magically attractive. Though he detested the heartless destruction of war, it did not make him afraid. He was consistently courageous. The battle for Brunete went on and on; we won 75 square kilometers at the price of 25,000 dead (to be fair the Franco losses of 10,000 should be added which makes the price in human lives 35,000). This meant that every one hundred paces of our advance had been bought with the lives of four men. One of those lives was that of Julian Bell. Dying in the bed next to him was a young Hamburger whose last message of love to his family I took down and sent back to Nazi Germany by the Rote Hilfes underground mail. Julian drifted out of this world quietly, on the edge of coma since admission. It was on the 18th of July 1937 that the Luftwaffe bombed the spot where Julian was repairing the road for his Ambulance to move forward. He had a massive lung wound; his case was beyond hope but he came back in time for us to be able to make his end comfortable. Dr D'Arcy Hart (no relation of Tudor Hart), a most distinguished lung specialist, was with us as Julian came in, so quite literally everything possible was done to save him. Wogan Phillips had been brought in with Julian. They had been hit by the same shell-burst. Wogan was holding his wounded arm with his sound hand; he was in considerable pain but held himself back. He told us with insistence to leave him alone and to get on with the stretcher cases. I remember his face today - drawn and very pale. Though in no sense a militarist, he was built in the George Nathan tradition.

While the Brunete battle had been in its earlier stages, Colonel Domanski-Dubois had a long talk with Thora and myself. Dubois felt that I must finish my medical studies; he had no use for student martyrs. Also he wanted the Spanish Medical Aid Committee to have a first hand view of Spanish realities. His thesis was that we had both made our contribution to the Brigade and, now that we had helped to make the Medical Service a going concern, we had earned the right to think of our own future. We, Thora and I, tended to agree with Dubois but said we would tell him our reaction when the battle was over.

That time came soon enough. The military result of Brunete was another stalemate, due to the Republic's lack of fire-power and thanks to the British Government's leadership in maintaining Non-Intervention while Hitler and Mussolini sent what they liked to Franco. When we accepted the Dubois proposal, I had no way of knowing that within a month our whole Division (the 35th) would be going to Aragon and would be fighting on a front that stretched to Grañen. Even today a bit of my heart is in that that village. I would not have gone back to England had I known of that next move.

Saying goodbye to General Walter (Swierczewski) was brisk: "When the fascists are beaten we will have a party." I was not to see Dubois again; he fell at Quinto del Ebro a month later. General Walter and Len Crome risked their lives to go out at night and get his body in. It now rests in Père Lachaise among the great of his adoptive country, France. In Warsaw, amongst the Battle Honours inscribed on the Polish National War Memorial, are Brunete, Quinto del Ebro and Monte Casino.

Of the journey back I have almost no memories. I do have a mental picture of Thora and myself getting civilian clothes in Madrid. She ended up with something very stylish from the 1936 pre-civil war summer collection of a modish little Madrid shop that smelt of fifth column--pale blue with white polka dots. I was not so lucky, though I did get a sports jacket with a zip-fastener, a device I had never before seen.

In the ease of being back at home, I could all too readily see again, burnt into my conscious and subconscious, the wounded with their agony tempered by the relief many so often showed when they were at last in our safe hands - and then I would remember that too often all we could do was to ease their last moments, as we did with Nicholas and Julian - and a hundred others, all men much like myself.

I believe that we who went to Spain and those who made it possible for us to do so, did something to save the sum of things. Many gave all they had; they gave their life.

These, in the day that heaven was falling,
The hour in which earth's foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and earth's foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.

What was this pay? For me it is the life we live today with its freedoms and, for all its faults and constraints, its rich quality. For those who stayed in Spanish soil it was, to use A. E. Houseman's words again, the certainty that

Here dead lie we because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young.

It is an index of my fatigue that I have no idea how we got to England. My memories wake up again with our arrival at Wareham. My ninety year old father gave us a great welcome. He and my mother, both staunch members of the Conservative Party, had become ferocious partisans of the Spanish Republic. Thora was a great success with him and in a surprisingly short time we had all settled into place. When the next election came along my mother, by then a widow, voted Labour. She ended up a Labour Parish Councillor.

After a few days at Wareham we moved to London where Thora and I spent the next few weeks at the Spanish Medical Aid Committee's Offices where we found immense good will and a total readiness to readjust the Aid Programme to the changing needs of Spain.

At St Bartholomew's Hospital, to my surprise and relief, I was made to feel entirely welcome. I had feared that by dropping-out for more than a year I would be penalised academically, but the reverse was the case. It took some time for me to unwind. Leisure was something that puzzled me in the immediate period after our return. Back in that warmth of London, not only did I revel in its comfort, but, while doing so, I also suffered from a sense of guilt. I saw the ruins, the terrified, the bewildered, the half-starved and all those battered homesteads in the high plateau before Madrid after their wretched dwellings had been bombed by the Luftwaffe. I saw the man as he walked out of the ambulance holding with his sound hand the stump where his other hand had been. I saw the man coming round from the anaesthetic I had given him and who had just verified that now he only had one leg. I cannot write now, any more than I could talk in 1938, about what the war did to human bodies and to individual lives.

In accordance with the new secular practice of the Republic, Thora and I had signified our mutual firm commitment, as compañera and compañero. We had done this on the Madrid front and thus were, in then Spanish law and custom, a legal couple which had given Sefton Delmer a little photo-story in the Daily Express. Using the Rote Hilfe's system of underground mail, I had been able to write to Truda telling her of my own personal position. Truda wrote with immense understanding, and we remained close friends for the rest of her life.

Thora and I had both felt perfectly happy and settled as we were, but our lack of British formal status troubled my mother and Austin my half-brother more than it did my father. I had always been very close to my half-brother so he acted as intermediary. He put it to me that, considerations of religion apart, it was unfair to my parents to deprive them of the comfort of seeing me settled down.

In view of my father's age, and in the social climate of 1937, these arguments about marriage had a telling substance, but what clinched it all was Austin's further suggestion that if Thora and myself did not each have faith in the other, it would be absurd to go on being together. If we were satisfied with each other, we could have no logical objection to saying so publicly before "God and man". This, as he put it, was what marriage was about. Thora and I found this totally logical so we were married very quietly in a little Roman Catholic Church just off Golden Square. At the very last minute the young Irish priest decided that Thora must be classed as a pagan because he was not satisfied that she had been baptised. He was firm that Catholics can not have pagan wives. Thora, with great diplomacy, rearranged her replies to his questioning about her childhood and just squeezed under the fence as an inhabitant of Welsh Baptist Wales.

By that time in the Autumn of 1937, the shortening of the days was bringing me back from Barts in the dark. The light in the window of 12, Great Ormond Street told me that we had made that large rickety flat into a safe haven, not only just for the two of us, but also for a very wide group of people whose common bond was Spain. Built as it was at the junction of the 17th and 18th centuries, there was no lack of space. In plan it was an irregular triangle with two very large rooms in front, one behind the other. Then came a smaller kitchen followed by a bathroom behind which was the WC which had a second door into a flagged court-yard. This was certainly far from perfect design as had been demonstrated by Eleanour Rathbone (the brave prototype spinster Independent MP) when she had been on her way out for a breath of fresh air. She had opened the door to go through to the yard revealing Alistair Cooke enthroned upon that WC. His instant "Pardon me, Madam, if I do not rise." proved that even then he was incapable of being caught short for lack of a word.

From 1937 until the outbreak of the war, there was an ever increasing consensus, uniting men and women of all ages and all backgrounds, in a simple refusal of complaisance towards fascist thinking. Numerically the Marxist component of this consensus was small; this is not to say that it was unimportant, but the vast bulk of those who joined the Left Book Club, or who helped collect for Spanish Food Ships, drew their inspiration from something older: from the good neighbourliness of the village, from the mutual help of non-conformist Dissenter tradition, from the hunger for improvement that came with the industrial revolution. Fascism had blown Spain apart. I believed that the same could happen in Britain, in a more British, less violent, way, and I wished most passionately to stop this. This was not entirely due to my time in Spain; I did also have considerable direct experience of Germany at the start of the 1930s. I was amazed, and flattered out of my wits, when I was asked to consent to my adoption as Labour Parliamentary candidate for the Borough of Holborn. It was also proposed that in the forthcoming Municipal elections, the Labour Party should contest the Conservative seats in the one ward of the Borough where residents outnumbered the business voters. I was asked to spearhead the campaign in a series of open-air meetings. After a weeks reflection I said yes.

Since returning from Spain, I had been trying to concentrate on completing my medical studies. My attachment to the Spanish Republic - to Spain - was in part rational but it had become visceral, lodged in my instinctual system. You might conceivably start to fight a war as a volunteer on the basis of a sudden impulse, but you do not stay on, see your friends being killed and take your share of that same risk, without raising your own stakes to a higher level. There were good reasons for refusing these political proposals, but I accepted them as I believed it could help gain support for Spain. Having assented to this entry into Holborn politics, I had to accept that I did have something to offer. But, just because I was articulate, I was still a very ordinary young man of my time. There were a million like me who were ready to try and make the world a better and a kinder place; liking reason more than force, liking plenty better than riches, we viewed giving and taking as twinned. We enjoyed work, as without it leisure became idleness which we found boring. We did not wish our world to be outside our control; we did not like fascism, war, or poverty juxtaposed with riches. We were ready, to do something about the world we lived in, rather than to accept whatever might happen next.

The idea of politics as a career had had no previous place in my thinking. My decision to study medicine was made too early for me to know much better and may well have been conditioned by the fact that the only person who had any influence over my father's behaviour was his doctor. The Metropolitan Borough of Holborn had always been regarded as a safe Tory enclave in a London which depended, for most of its vital services, on the London County Council with its solid Labour majority. The LCC was ruled by Herbert Morrison who, later under Churchill was brilliantly successful in the Home Office. Holborn's own Parliamentary and Municipal representatives were, of course, Conservative of the truest blue while, to the east of Holborn and the City all the Metropolitan Borough Councils were Labour.

The Holborn Labour Party was a young persons affair; we stumped about Holborn, knocking on doors to find out the felt needs of the people who lived behind them. We had held scores of street corner meetings and I became a competent impromptu speaker. All six of us were returned as Borough Councilors with thumping majorities. We were pledged to get more frequent garbage collections, better Maternal and Child Health Services (including pram shelters for rainy days), a home-work corner in the Public Library for secondary school children, and a number of other practical targets - all of which we delivered fairly quickly. We made local politics a live issue in an area where a cosy little oligarchy had previously shown little or no concern for Holborn as a place in which to live. For the Conservative business voter it had been no more than a convenient office address near the City but cheaper.

From the start I was faced with inducements to cross over to the Conservative side. It was touchingly comic how naively these approaches were made. The Aldermen were heavy city magnates out of a Dickensian mould. They kept telling me how much they needed young men, just like me from a good Cambridge College, for junior Directorships with a guaranteed future in their Companies. Alderman Mullins had an approach that made him a positive model for Punch; his inducements took on a more modern, more Edwardian, character. He suggested that what we needed was a nice relaxed talk with no one in a hurry. He thought we ought to go down to some friends of his at Marlow. On the river, with good wine and the nice girls he knew, I would get a better perspective of the great prospects that lay ahead of a young man of my alleged calibre.

There was a very lively Labour League of Youth of which the leading spirit was a lad of about eighteen called Graham Thomas, the grandson of a stonemason who had been one of the builders of the Admiralty Arch. He was a great canvasser and once brought back an offer of 18000 votes from the 'godfather' of the West-end prostitutes - an offer we found prudent to leave on the shelf. Graham put himself through University and later forged a consistently liberal career in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, where he deservedly won the confidence of the founding fathers of Sudanese independence. He finished his career in Kenya where he continued to apply his clear-sighted social policy. At the same time he retained the trust of the last of the British Administrators, which says something about the quality of all the parties concerned. Imagination and energy did not lack in that pre-war Holborn Labour Party; its membership had real intellectual capacity.

On a wider front, as 1938 rolled on towards 1930, the German and Italian intervention in Spain became more and more open, and the non-intervention farce approximated more and more to open support of Franco. In those late 1930s, the touchstone, which showed whether an individual was reactionary or progressive, was Spain. The Labour Party stood for support of the Spanish Government but, paradoxically, continued to support the non-intervention that allowed Franco to be supplied while the Republic was embargoed. Official Labour did not like any form of joint working with the British Communist Party. In practice nothing was done to inhibit joint action directed to helping Spain, but the Labour Party reacted strongly against any joint activity with Communists concerning local or national politics. The very words "popular front" had become reprehensible in the ears of the official Labour Party.

So was the anti-fascism of my generation premature? In 1938, political life in England was polarised as never before, The Holborn Labour Party turned out to join a vast procession chanting "Save Czechoslovakia, Save Peace", which ended up in Whitehall at the level of Downing Street. I was just by one of the side doors of the Foreign Office when it opened and out came a man of about forty, Bowler hat, umbrella, small sandy moustache, pale grey-blue eyes - a pleasant looking man, the sort of man I might well have chatted with in the bar of the Junior Constitutional Club. If he turned up again today I would instantly recognise him. Our eyes met; we were maybe twenty four inches apart. I asked him, "Are you coming to join us?" I liked his looks, and it was perfectly possible that, like Duff Cooper, he did not support Munich. His face froze; for once I have seen blue eyes change colour with rage "I would like to pogromize the lot of you" was his reply as he turned inside and slammed the door behind him. That man, or his twin brother, could perfectly well have been as passionately against the fascists as was I, indeed many Conservatives were. Munich certainly did divide society in a way that allowed no compromise. A day or two later, I wrote my letter resigning from the Junior Constitutional Club, giving Munich as my reason. I did not want to meet men like the would be pogromiser. I had a secondary reason for leaving that cosy Club, as I had not always been entirely at ease when sitting in the big bay windows overlooking the Green Park. Count Popov-Rikovski, with whom, one afternoon, I was sharing a pot of tea and a dish of crumpets, had remarked, "You know Sinclair-Loutit, it really makes a fellow appreciate the better a decent fire and a good pot of tea when one looks out of this window at those men in the park; there they go now, fishing newspapers out of the rubbish baskets to stuff under their jackets". Outside in the gathering dusk of an autumn evening, some unemployed men, who had been on a bench while the sun was out and before the wind had got up, were indeed padding up their clothing against the cold with discarded newspapers. It had become time for me to go; I was not prepared to continue having tea in this way.

Chamberlain's style of Government prefigured that of Thatcher in its contempt for the principle of Cabinet responsibility, but no one at the time knew how far he had been prepared to go in his pro-fascist sympathies. At the time of Munich, Chamberlain thought nothing of writing to Hitler and Mussolini without consulting his Cabinet Colleagues (vide Churchill "The Gathering Storm"), but we had to wait until Ciano's diary became available to learn how far he was prepared to go at an even earlier date. Ciano noted under the date of December 22nd 1937, "Lady Chamberlain wears a fascist badge; I am too much of a patriot to appreciate such a gesture in an Englishwoman at such a time. I went with Lady Chamberlain to the Duce, to whom she showed an important letter from Neville Chamberlain. The letter assured the Italians of British understanding on the conquest of Ethiopia plus hopes for its early recognition - all this behind the back of the Cabinet and Foreign Office." Today we also know that Chamberlain, on his own private initiative, rebuffed Roosevelt's overtures in January 1938 which would have involved America in the darkening European scene.

As Churchill said, "We must regard this rejection as the loss of the last frail chance to save the world from tyranny otherwise than by war, one cannot today even reconstruct the state of mind which would render such gestures possible." Now that we know of the Prime-Minister's sister-in-law's secret letter-carrying, we can the better appreciate Chamberlains state of mind and my own generation’s opposition to it. His pro-fascist stance did not bring him much in return. As a comment on the esteem in which Chamberlain was held in Rome I must quote a later letter:

"Fuehrer, Rome, 26/6/40: Now that the time has come to thrash England, I remind you of what I said to you at Munich about the direct participation of Italy in the assault of the Isle. I am ready to take part in this with land and air forces and you know how much I desire it. I pray you to reply in order that I can pass into the phase of action. Awaiting this day, I send you my salute of comradeship. Mussolini."

Sir Stafford Cripps and Aneuryn Bevan led the radical Labour grouping that was unequivocal in its opposition to appeasement. The left's earlier pacifist tinge had withered under the heat of the Spanish Civil War. The bellicose, menacing, voices of Hitler and Mussolini needed to be met with a simple refusal to be intimidated. It was obvious that the Axis was playing for our surrender without a fight, which is exactly what Munich promised. The Holborn Constituency Labour Party, along with scores of others, was anti-appeasement and for a policy of standing up to the Dictators. This was also the position of the European Popular Fronts, and it involved accepting common cause with everyone who was of like mind, including, at that particular moment, the Communist Parties. The result was that Cripps, Bevan and myself (midget though I was beside such men) received a letter of anathema from the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party. We were told that we would be expelled from the Labour Party if we continued to appear on platforms that included Communists. The reason I was being grouped with the great for this call-to-order was that I had been doing a lot of speaking in London and had been billed with Cripps (who turned out to be a distant cousin) on a number of occasions. Though I was perfectly happy in Holborn and though I was not looking for a parliamentary career, there had been talk of finding me another constituency with better electoral prospects. So I found myself sitting in an office in Chancery Lane with Cripps and Bevan while Cripps held up the letter to re-read the National Executive's terms for our rehabilitation. Cripps treated it as though it were a document replete with indecent details in a carnal knowledge case. Bevan said something about preferring to be out than in. The way things were going, so he said, it was no time to be mealy-mouthed. So they refused to assure the National Executive that they would in future keep more right-wing company. Bevan turned to me and said that expelling me would do no one any good because it would not make the splash that his expulsion and that of Cripps would cause. "You can do more good by thanking them for their letter and simply saying that you have noted its contents. They will leave you alone for a bit and, before they get round to going after you again, we shall all be in this together. " Bevan was sure that Chamberlain had made war a certainty by giving Hitler the idea that he could walk over Britain.

This post-Munich meeting is especially interesting as Cripps, the cooler mind of the two, also thought that war was probable but that France, Britain and the Soviet Union could still unite in a last chance to call Hitler's bluff. They felt their own expulsion from the Labour Party would help to galvanise public opinion in the face of the real risk of appeasement sliding on towards a tolerant acceptance of fascism. "And that," said Cripps to me," is where you can help in leading the younger side of the Labour Movement." "Stay in but don't knuckle under," said Bevan. There was nothing starry-eyed about this. We now know that Chamberlain's Government was secretly informed by General Beck, Chief of the German General Staff, that Great Britain only had to take a decisive stand at the time of the Nazi attack on Czechoslovakia and then the German professional Army would have toppled Hitler. This was between the 18th and the 24th of August 1938, and we had another chance in June of 1939. Churchill himself wrote, when looking back at those years, "There never was a war more easy to stop.“ Had we done so Stalinism would never have lasted a further forty years.

WAR

Early in 1939, Commander Kenworthy, who was in charge of Air Raid Precautions in the Home Office, asked me to come and see him. He wanted to talk to someone with recent experience of being bombed. We had an entirely realistic conversation which left me most impressed by his open-mindedness and his evident repudiation of appeasement. We did not talk politics but it was clear that he had got himself informed about where I stood and that he was trying to make sense out of the very lukewarm ARP brief that Chamberlain's Government had elaborated. In Saint Bartholomew's Hospital I had always met with an amazingly kindly tolerance from senior staff. I had never been particularly assiduous in my studies; when I went off to Spain I had taken a summer vacation that lasted more than a year. My Inter-Hospitals Socialist Society activities and my later election as a Labour Borough Councilor were not such as to endear me within the basically Conservative hospital atmosphere, but in that final year after Munich, Sir Girling Ball, the Dean, took me as an adviser and as a helper in the establishment of the Hospital's war emergency plan. Many of those in leading positions had seen for themselves, in the war of 1914/18, that tactical and strategic thinking had all too often belonged to the war before last. They did not want to see that repeated again. Such men had that element of humility inherent to truly big minds. The men under whom I had been studying were open-minded enough to see that Chamberlain could not be allowed to go on. They felt that more had to be done by individuals because our official institutions lacked effective response to the threat of war. Geoffrey Pyke, that brilliant engineer and educator who later worked in Combined Operations, got hold of me in July 1939 because he remembered my North German attachments. He believed that a Gallup-type poll in Germany would reveal critical weaknesses that could be exploited to defeat Hitler without a war. Alternatively, should war come, we would learn the better how to conduct it. He teased me with the offer of a trip to my old haunts in Hamburg. This, as he had to accept, was really out of the question since, with my newer Spanish background, I could not hope to be treated very kindly by the Nazis. Pyke persisted. He claimed that by staying in the right sort of Hotel and following the procedures he had in mind, mere insolence would guarantee my safety. He did not press the point on me personally but he did indeed end by sending a remarkable group of young people to a variety of German destinations and getting them back home just in time. None had to walk out into Holland by night as Pyke himself had done in 1915.

On the third of September 1939, Bart's was as ready as we could make it. Then, for the first time, we heard the sirens and waited for the Luftwaffe. I stood behind the sandbags near the gate overlooking Smithfield Market; Sir Girling Ball, the Dean, was next to me. London was very still; all traffic had stopped. He asked me "What are you thinking about Dr. Sinclair-Loutit?" I thought he was teasing me, the Dean had never called me Doctor before - I had only been qualified a few weeks. I turned to look at him as he went on, "I'm glad you went to Spain. At the time I thought you were wrong. Now we will all have to see it though to the finish. When they do come, what parts of London will they go for?" All I could think to say was that when I had been bombed at Aranjuez, a country town about the size of Dorking, the Lufwaffe had not bothered to look for targets; they had simply unloaded their bombs. What I had been thinking about was that three years ago at Madrid we could have stopped them and that then we would not have found ourselves behind sandbags in London. The next day Sir Girling Ball told me that he had put my name on some list which would stop me being removed from the hospital's staff. I now have to assume that he must have put my name onto that Hankey/A. V. Hill Register of Special Scientific Personnel as this is the only way of explaining the selective way in which I was moved for later tasks and travels.

While we mobilised in 1939, the news of the war's first battles poured in from Poland where the defenders Cavalry proved no match for the Nazi's tanks rolling out their blitzkrieg. In a matter of weeks Poland was crushed. The Nazi-Soviet pact ensured the debacle was complete. One result of this situation was the retreat of broken Polish Divisions and civilian dependents into Romania. The Romanians were not looking for trouble, they loaded the Poles into trains, pushed them off to France, saying, "Here are your Allies." The French sent the Military elements to Rennes and the Polish Government to Angers, while the civilians, mostly women and children, were piled into the Caserne Bessières in the North of Paris. This Napoleonic barracks lacked even the most elementary facilities. The French then, in their turn, informed the British that their Allies had arrived. In October 1939, a Polish Relief Committee had been set up in London, but it was not a good time for public appeals. Chamberlain had frozen the Czech assets held in the City and by some quirk of creative accountancy this money was made available to help the Polish Civilians in France. The first I knew of all this was that one morning I found a message from the Dean of Bart's telling me to go down to some address near Hyde Park Corner. I went down there and within three days found myself at Croydon climbing into an enormous Handley Page biplane. I had been appointed Medical Officer in Paris to the Polish Relief Fund and was to report to the Military Attaché's office in our Embassy.

The hallucinatory effect of this transformation was not lessened when on arrival at the Embassy I found Noel Coward, dressed in Naval Uniform, talking to a man whose surname really was Darling. I had gone to the Military Attaché's part of the Embassy because my point of liaison with the Poles was there. It turned out that the wife of one of the M. A. 's was the correspondent of the Polish Relief Fund; she had splendid spirit but it did not provoke much understanding amongst the 1939 French. This very British lady pedalled everywhere on her bicycle. She believed in saving petrol and in abiding by rationing. She despised the aristocratic ladies of the French and Polish Red-Cross with whom she was supposed to work. She believed in getting things done rather than simply talking about them.

Darling warned me that if all I wanted was fun, there was plenty to be had; if I wanted to work, I had better avoid the French Red Cross. But the first thing for me to do was to get my bearings. My reception could not have been better. A really magnificent female Colonel, with lovely short grey hair, told me that we should get going at once as the Ladies at the Polish Embassy had been expecting me all day. At this, my introducer, the British wife who had come on her bicycle and who was dressed in slacks, bowed out. "Not my cup-of-tea, Doctor, tell me about it afterwards." She left, to the scarcely concealed relief of the elegant female Colonel who switched at once from French to absolutely splendid American-accented English. It was evident that she had only been talking French to discomfit the British wife for whom she clearly had a marked antipathy but well camouflaged under the coldest of French good manners. The Red Cross was an emotional mine-field. The French female Colonel was an aristocratic butch who had learnt the game with an American Women's Ambulance Unit in the Great War. She was surrounded by adoring Aides-de-Camp, one of whom was trying to chew gum just like her distinguished boss who did it masterfully, while the little ADC looked merely silly, nibbling away like a rabbit. As she took the wheel of the Colonel Delage’s staff car, she was told to spit it out and to take us to the Polish Embassy. The French Red Cross would always be delighted to advise, said the Colonel, but it would be the Poles who would have to be responsible.

It was indeed very old-world when we got there. The chauffeuse ADC was told to stay in the car (which indicated that sometimes she did not). Inside it was Sèvres cups and little cakes handed around by a white gloved Polish butler. The refugees and the Caserne Bessières, were not first on the agenda. Great concern was expressed about my apartment-- what! no-one had taken me there! How scandalous! The Caserne Bessières? No, not one of the ladies present had been there. Instructions had been given to persons professionally qualified to do all that was necessary. Yes, I could certainly see someone tomorrow, and even go there, should really I so wish. The Ladies always met at least twice a week, more often if necessary. I must be assured that they were filled with a sense of the most profound satisfaction that their British friends and allies were showing such manifest sympathy for the oeuvre of the Polish Red Cross. That such an understanding delegate as me should have been sent from London was an immense encouragement to the Polish Ladies.

We withdrew and a Secretary of the Polish Embassy was asked to show me the lodgings allotted to me for the duration of my mission. . After setting us down in front of a house in the Avenue Kléber not far from the Arc de Triomphe, the female Red Cross Colonel, alone in the back of her vast Delage, was whisked off by her little chauffeuse. The Secretary led me up in the lift to the top floor and opened the door of a very nice flat, shaped like a slice of cake, with the sitting room at the sharp end. The sitting room had windows all around that sharp end with a fitted settee beneath them. This settee was upholstered in blue wool on which were embroidered flags of the international maritime code spelling out the message "I love You" over and over again. We rapidly reached a virtually complicit understanding when I explained that what I was looking for was an organigram or a listing showing the operational responsibility for the care of Polish refugees. He perceived that I was trying to escape from the drawing-room cabal. He told me that by a happy chance, Monsieur Modarkiewicz, Secretaire d'Etat pour la Prevoyance Sociale, would be coming up from Angers, either that day or the next. Meanwhile he would phone Countess Balinska who was best placed to ensure my introduction. Perhaps I may have winced slightly, as, with that ghost of a smile that was all that he allowed to penetrate his impassivity. He hurried on to add, "You may know her maiden name better - the Countess is the daughter of Dr Rajchman. The Head of the Health Department of the League of Nations was called Rajchman; his liberal sympathies were well known. He had worked for Polish Independence in London during the 1914/18 war.

From that moment on, my presence in Paris began to make sense. Balinska turned up in a tiny Fiat and took me off through the rush-hour, driving like a fighter pilot. She spoke perfect English, knew everybody and knew what she was doing. Without turning a hair she said the Embassy was packed with supporters of Colonel Beck, whose main activity was feathering their own nests in preparation for their next retreat. As she slalommed through the traffic, which towered above our minute motorized pram, she told me that, as soon as the Germans decided to switch their force to the West, the French Government and Army would do no better than had the Poles. I asked why she was so convinced, she had a reply ready, "You British, and the French, decided that you did not want to work with Stalin, so he has taken the intelligent step of putting his weight in the middle of the see-saw. He will watch both sides for a few months, but it can't go on like this for ever. He will always join the side he judges to be the stronger. At the end of my first day, when I got back to my apartment with it's "I love you" maritime signal, I found that the kitchen had been restocked. The packets of sugar and biscuits had Polish Red Cross labels, but their contents were of French origin. There was a new bottle of vodka in the fridge as well as several thoughtful half bottles of champagne and a pot of foie-gras. A short note explained that a housekeeper would call each day and there was a large engraved invitation to a reception. The emphasis of the Embassy ladies towards good works was undoubtedly boyaresque•; though there were no evident misappropriations of funds it might have been better to have thought less about the comfort of those administering relief and more about those receiving it. As Balinska said, "You are asking too much of those Beckists - let's finish the foie gras. " Balinska teamed me up with Hanka Poznanska the daughter of a Polish Socialist journalist. She was a little dynamo about seventeen years old who helped me to understand and to respect Poland.

After a couple of weeks I was faced with two choices: to make Paris my job for the foreseeable future or to call it a day and to return to the realities of London. I had been instrumental in obtaining rapid practical help for the stranded Poles. The plight of the several thousand civilians accompanying the routed elements of the Polish Army that had survived the Nazi-Soviet attack was one of total poverty. They had finally retreating into Romania where they were sent on to France, The men were reformed into Polish Units with Franco-British help while their families had been dumped in a totally unsuitable ancient barracks. Here, with Czech-British funds, we set up a Maternal and Child Health clinic, a canteen, and clothing services. We had converted an improvised stop-gap into a staging-post.

The war had seemed serious when I had left England. In Paris I was meeting people who seemed to feel that the war was simply a nuisance and that it might even go away if less notice were taken of it. Not so the Poles, who had lived through its first battle, nor indeed the bicycling wife of the British Military Attaché. I was liking the fighting Poles more and more; they refused to be humbugged by the French who, by acting all superior and knowing, tried to push them around. Even less successful were the bids made by the French Army to assert military authority. The Poles had started to make structural alterations to that impossibly antique Caserne Bessières. A Garison Major came round and ordered the work to stop - he was told in impeccable French that much as they wished to oblige him, as Poles they were unable to do so. They could only accept orders delivered in proper form through the correct Polish channels. They would indeed be happy to suspend their work should the French Army send French soldiers to do it. As an Officer, they were sure that the Major would be able to explain their fidelity to normal disciplinary standards to those who had instructed him to visit this Polish establishment on allied French soil.

It was tempting for me to stay with this Polish connection, but I had become suspicious that there must be a catch in doing so if only because it was obviously such fun - that is not what wars are about. It was essential for me to get clear ideas before deciding what to do, so I had a long talk with Darling who was no longer even pretending to work for the British Council. He was very depressed by the lack of combative spirit in France and agreed with Balinska’s view that the French were incapable of withstanding a determined offensive. At my mention of the Maginot Line and of the existence of an immense volume of anti-fascist feeling in France, his reply was to forget both: "No one in their senses wastes time battering down a barrier when they can walk round it. Remember that French anti-fascists leadership is pro-Soviet and is becoming constructively pro-Nazi."

I sensed that what Darling was saying reflected mature enquiry on his side and started to ask some questions. He dodged them; his heart was certainly in the right place, but to distract himself from the political limbo of the 1939/40 winter, he had become obsessively interested in tracing the fate of the subscription raised after Munich by Paris Soir to give Mr. Chamberlain a fishing lodge in the Dordogne. That paper had collected from its grateful readers half a million Francs in three days but nobody, including its current Editor and the intended beneficiary, knew what had happened to the money.

Darling said that if I felt like staying, I could help him with this problem. Anyway there was no need for me to be idle since the Polish Armed Forces needed British Liaison Officers. By the sort of happy accident that I had come to expect when ever Darling had an affair in hand, he told me to go and see a Lt. Colonel Gubbins who happened to be in the Embassy that day. He had been with the Poles as they retreated into Romania and was now concerned with the reform of their units in France. Colonel Gubbins knew that I had been in Spain and asked me about Tom Wintringham's tactical planning. He advised me to get back to England where I would most certainly be needed - as indeed turned out to be the case.

The day before returning to London, was in the Embassy with Darling and Denis Freeman gossiping about a weird escapade of Leslie Hore-Belisha (then War Minister) in the Ritz. Hore-Belisha is perhaps better remembered today for his invention of pedestrian crossings, than for anything he did with the Army. His brief visit to Paris had fallen during my own rather longer period of service with the exiled Poles. He had surprised the Embassy by insisting on staying in the Ritz rather than with the Ambassador. In the event his visit had been curtailed by a feverish cold which had forced him to rush back to London in his RAF transport plane, all wrapped up in blankets like a mummy. A week after the Ministers abrupt return home a most wonderfully packed cylindrical cardboard box had been delivered to the Embassy. When this was opened it revealed a dome shaped support on which reposed a wig, all curled and scented. It had come, addressed to the Ambassador, from the best Paris wig-maker; the box contained a label with the name of Mr Hore Belisha. Sir Ronald Campbell had not known what to make of it; he had felt that there must be some catch somewhere so he wanted a member of his staff to contact the wig-maker who has sent it. Who better to put on to it than Darling? The explanation he uncovered revealed a little-advertised aspect of the Ritz Hotel's service.

In a Hotel of Ritz standards it seems that guests flush valuable items down the water-closets often enough for the management to need to take appropriate precautions. All waste-waters from each room are led down to a sub-basement where they are discharged from their numbered pipes, onto a grid over which presides a trusty employee with an instrument rather like a croupier's rake. Thus, when a diamond and ruby necklace appears, it can be fished up and returned to its owner. One day, a wig had been discharged onto this grid, somewhat the worse for its journey. Retrieved, it was hosed down and sent to a Paris wig-maker for a wash and set; it had a label on the inside with a London makers address and a serial number. The Paris wig-maker contacted their London confrère to check the number. They had thought it prudent to verify that it really did belong to the tenant of the room, the Right Honourable Leslie Hore Belisha. The fact that it had been flushed down from his suite did not identify for whose head it had been made, after all it might have belonged to one of his guests. It would be interesting to know whether the El Fayed brothers have been ready to accept the cost of retaining such levels of attention - and even to learn something of their more recent catches.

The Ritz staff had remarked that the presence of the Minister's most frequent visitor had been leading to disputes and door bangings. The number was identified as being that of Mr Hore-Belisha's own wig. It seems that on the day it went down the drain the floor staff had realised that things were taking a very bad turn in the Hore Belisha suite: raised voices, door bangings and sudden departures. It seems that the guest had seized the Minister's wig and flushed it down the drain, slamming the door behind him as he left. Since the Minister was completely bald, he had decided to catch a bad cold, curtail his stay and so home with a blanket over his head. He had left his spare wig behind in Albany.

Even those short weeks in the Autumn of 1939 that I had spent in Paris left me with the conviction that the war was not being taken very seriously by the French. Mobilisation had indeed upset millions of families, business was disturbed. The war was regarded as a nuisance, so, in Cartesian logic, the war had to be an error. Such was the reaction of the majority of the petit-bourgeoisie. The fall of France in 1940 is the easier for me to understand when I look back at that brief period of service in Paris. Fortunately for us all it was but a small minority of the French left-wing movement who, in 1940, chose to forget that they had fought for three years to keep the Nazis out of Madrid. Most of those who had been misled by the French CP eventually remembered "No Pasaran". Many even came to believe that it had never been forgotten and joined the Resistance with re-found courage to redeem their earlier lapse.

CROSS-ROADS

On my return to Bart's from Paris, all was on a war-footing and the hospital was running like a clock. I could have stayed on there as Professor Chandler's House-Physician with a salary of sixty pounds per year. It was the classic starting point for a serious medical career, but I did not have ambition for Harley Street. I had a wife, and our joint tastes needed more than a houseman's salary could provide. The Dean of Barts then told me of a job in Finsbury, for which my Spanish experience gave me good qualifications, at the then princely salary of six hundred pounds per year. It seems that those with whom my name had been listed had made this suggestion. I subsequently learnt that Admiral Sir Edward Evans (Senior Commissioner of the London Civil Defence Region) had had me ear-marked for work with his service on Colonel Gubbins recommendation.

Ove Arup's engineering genius, plus Lubetkin's firm TECTON and the Finsbury Borough Council's initiative had combined to produce a logical Air Raid Protection plan with a real shelter policy. I was invited to join this team as Medical Officer for Civil Defense, and I accepted the offer without an instant's hesitation. So, at the age of twenty seven, I found myself in charge of an autonomous municipal department employing several hundred men and women spread out in First Aid Posts (situated in the empty schools), a Mobile Unit, a Depot for the Stretcher Parties with their transport as well as a mortuary. This service worked in cooperation with the Municipal Engineers Light and Heavy Rescue Parties together with a central staff of instructors and supervisors plus local doctors who had volunteered to help. We also had our own garage and repair shop.

The Leader of the Finsbury Borough Council was Alderman Reilly, a veteran Labour politician whose crafty ways may not have always made him loved but which, pragmatically, were most successful. His support made the establishment of an efficient Service easier, and he gave his backing to the constant tactical exercises with which I filled our time while the phoney war continued. Since he ensured my freedom from budgetary problems. my position did excite some jealousy particularly as my appointment had broken all Ministry of Health promotion rules. Once the bombing had started, there was no more trouble as Finsbury put up an exemplary performance.

During the strange lull in hostilities at the war's beginning we seemed, for the first time in our lives, to have enough money to enable us to stretch out and enjoy that 1940 London spring with the passing of which vanished the world in which Thora and I had grown up and which my father too had known. Changes there were, but not all constituted a dead loss.

One evening we had the idea of going to dinner at the old Eiffel Tower - that relic of the 1920s - at the bottom of Charlotte Street. My last visit must have been before going to Spain. On arrival we were welcomed into the totally rejuvenated, but still relatively modest, atmosphere of the new White Tower. Janni Stais, and his splendid wife Eileen, had picked up the old wreck, kept the duck-press, but remade the kitchen. For once I was delighted to see a land-mark go. Later I did get him to scrape some walls looking for the Wyndham Lewis murals but they had vanished for good. The Stais's never closed, even in the worst of the blitz they were there every night, and their cooking never faltered.

The White Tower had a particularly villainous, but also an obliging, Head Waiter called Louis. Villainous, because he could never serve a brandy without somehow getting half a tumblerful for himself; he would sniff a cork and say "I regret it very much, but I fear, sir, we are too late for the 1924 claret - I will bring you the 1927, it is now at its prime" This really meant that he was reserving the earlier and better bottle for himself. According to Stais, he always left with a couple of good cigars in his pocket, but he never put his hand in the till. Now I do not often have the courage to face the ghosts by going to that restaurant alone. Those I would wish to have with me have other company, as indeed do I. So, saluting that past brave excellence, I make do elsewhere.

In 1940 the older generation did not yet accept that a chasm lay between them and the young - nor did we who were then still in our twenties. The Meynells instituted an open house on Thursdays. Francis Meynell had founded the Nonesuch Press so he did not lack contacts, and it was at their house that I first met my life-long friend, Edith Loeb, who had just escaped from Germany and was helping to make Mass Observation work. Later, as Edith Temple-Roberts, she became a most percipient commentator on the BBC. I am touched when I remember that very Edwardian house at Notting Hill Gate and the efforts made by people like the Meynells to avoid the banalisation of intellectual and personal life that the war threatened to bring. During the 1939/40 limbo, when the Armies faced each other with loud speakers rather than with cannon, the one side in its Siegfreid and the other in its Maginot line, our social life became more active. There was a spurious air of freedom, there were no pressing obligations, but we were not really at liberty. The shortages, that of petrol excepted, were not yet very apparent, but the blackout altered the whole atmosphere. Horizon started publishing; I remember meeting Cyril Connolly for the first time since Madrid. He had a lemur on his shoulder and was going to see our next door neighbours Ian and Lys Lubbock.

In Spain the personal partnership of Thora and myself had found its practical expression in very simple terms. Then we had but few possessions; we could pack and move in five minutes; we were in perpetual bivouac; our days were filled with automatically interlocking duties, some reciprocal, some separate though our separate targets were, day by day, related. That the Spanish Medical Unit worked well, professionally and socially, was due to its interior discipline and its social atmosphere in the creation of which we both played a significant part. In Spain we had shared both the happiness of being in love and that of joint achievement.

In England, since our return, life was not so simple and its gifts were less manifest. A multiplicity of choices replaced the clear line of conduct with which we had been faced in Spain. As 1938 had been coming to an end, it had become progressively more evident that the Spanish Republic was militarily broken. By March of 1939 this became a fact to which I had been brought agonisingly close. I had found myself in the curious job of translating for Colonel Casado, who had negotiated the final surrender of Madrid thereby saving its defenders from total butchery. Why had I been involved? - because the British Communist Party had not been able to make up its mind whether he was a 'traitor' or not.

The most terrible duty that can fall to a Commander is that of surrender, but it can be a duty imposed by honour. The Aid Spain movement did not know which way to turn and the CP's customary 'input' was silent, it did nothing to help Casado. His arrival in London landed him into a confused situation, noticeably lacking in welcome. The orthodox Marxist leadership was in fact boycotting Colonel Casado, but I accepted to help this sad refugee. I therefore got a horribly privileged view of the last wretched days of the Spanish Republic.

After our own War had started, we experienced a brief period of unity throughout the whole British Left; but soon the Nazi-Soviet pact brought communists to oppose any effort to defeat the very enemy we had all been fighting in Spain. The anti-fascist basis of the Popular Front was destroyed and with it the unity of the left which had previously been shared by everybody, from radical Conservatives like the Duchess of Athol, on through the Liberal and the Labour Parties and the whole spectrum of progressive opinion. The effect of the Nazi-Soviet pact on Thora, and those like her with old loyalties had been one of confusion and emotional disorientation. In Welsh valley terms it had been as though the Chapel Elders had gone to lodge in the whore-house. If Orwell, before it had actually happened, had invented the Nazi-Soviet Pact, he would have been accused of going too far.

The phoney war of 1939/40 had given us all a breathing space; I personally had been busy enough in France with the Poles and later getting Finsbury ready. Thora had given so much in Spain; since getting back she had come to realise that London under bombardment would be more than she could take. This had led us to hire a cottage on the other side of West Wycombe at Green End. The low rent was conditioned by our keeping on the gardener. He turned out to be a very young Roman Catholic conscientious objector who was always mud-encrusted when he came in to eat and who made outrageous eyes at Lionel Grunbaum whenever he came down to stay with us. Lionel's visits became more frequent.

I have not the heart to attempt a blow-by-blow account of the breakdown of that very brave partnership which Thora and I had shared until this time. For a few months we straddled our existence between Great Ormond Street and the country but, by the time of Dunkirk, Thora had settled into the Green End cottage. The rest of this story would be very different if either of us, or even better if both of us, had given even a quarter as much time to looking after our relationship, as we had been spending on matters external to our marriage. At this precise moment Thora found that she had an unplanned pregnancy. We decided, after preliminary hesitation, to go ahead with it. The prospect of a child was seen by us both more as a remedy for the weakening of our rapport than as the source of proper positive optimism. Of course there should not have been any hesitation at all but the wonderful reciprocity, the automatic consensus, which had ruled our lives in Spain, was failing to function in our more complex London situation. We had had no money problems in Spain, but we had plenty in London. In Spain we had had no housekeeping, no entertaining, our problems were minute; in London our problems were legion. We had no problem of sexual jealousy, our priorites were each for the other, but, imperceptibly at first, the tough fibre of our marriage was thinning out by the time our daughter was born.

As soon as the war started to be serious I had spells of night duty in Finsbury, and Thora stayed more and more at Green End. Once we got out of step, neither of us became any easier with the other. Blocked in London by the Blitz I spent much of my free time with a girl called Melissa who eventually became a Wren. Thora was very tolerant with me, neither of us realised what was happening until the point of no return had been reached. While her presence weakened my linkage with Thora, it did not itself constitute a new bonding, and we soon stopped seeing each other when I met someone whose impact became paramount. In the last years of Melissa's life we became good friends, and her story has been well told.

At the beginning of August 1940, I was in Admiral Sir Edward Evans' office (Senior Commissioner for the London Region), when Colonel Orr-Ewing, the Military Liaison Officer with London Military District H/Q (whom later I was to get to know very much better), came in with a problem. When General Spears had delivered General de Gaulle to London on the afternoon of the 17th of June 1940, it was in advance of any study of his eventual functions or of his diplomatic status. Soon after his arrival, the General had been allotted rations, transport, accommodation, uniforms for his forces but, in return for all this, he was supposed to shut-up, behave like a one star General and give everybody time to think. Such restraint did not suit his temperament; he made his splendid 18th of June appeal to France through a BBC microphone, following it up the next day with another one that really rattled the Foreign Office. They were not used to this sort of thing.

General de Gaulle was ready for anything and everything. He had been allotted a large and superior Humber motorcar and always had a Royal Corps of Signals motorcyclist to lead him to wherever he wanted to go. He had, so I later learnt, applied through routine channels to London District Military Headquarters at Leconfield House for a motorcycle escort. This request had puzzled the routine level at which it had been delivered; it was remarked that he had his m/c guide, what more could a junior foreign General want? The reply they got from the French, informally and verbally, was that, as Head of an Allied Force he simply wanted to be treated like anyone else in that category - the King of Norway for example. The ration for a Head of State was four motorcycle outriders plus a m/c riding point to find and to open the way.

The top levels of London Military District H/Q, when they finally absorbed the nature of this demand, rang the Foreign Office. There they had an easy answer; it was nothing to do with them. They had heard of the General, but his arrival in the country had been not been accomplished under F. O. auspices. This was a matter for the Military themselves to arrange. After all they had brought it on themselves in the first place by ferrying in this General to the United Kingdom.

To the military reasoning of London District it all seemed simple enough; they just needed someone who spoke the lingo to sort out what exactly was bothering the Frogs, anyway the status of this particular French grouping seemed a bit obscure. Not lacking in guile they had left those tetchy people in the FO alone and asked Colonel Orr-Ewing to see if Admiral Evans or the Air Marshall in the Civil Defense Region H. Q had a French interpreter. When this request arrived, the Admiral, who had been chairing a committee at which I was assisting, turned on me and asked, "You speak French, don't you Sinclair-Loutit?" This was one of our earlier contacts and I was naturally anxious to please, so I said yes without knowing what lay behind the question.

The upshot was that I was driven round to the Military District at Leconfield House. I was in Civil Defence uniform, with one broad and one narrow stripe, which pleased the Brigadier I saw who remarked, "That's just the ticket; makes you a Lieutenant Colonel; the Frogs can't complain - believe me they're very touchy; good of the Admiral to help; just tell 'em there are not enough m/c s for everyone to have an escort. This fella already has four, they do six hours each, he's got 24 hour coverage." I asked to whom I was supposed to explain all this - "Oh, didn't they brief you? It’s that General de Gaulle or his orderly officer down by the river in St Stephan's House. "With idiotic self-confidence I was in fact delighted to oblige because I was longing to see the Free French. I went down to the car and five minutes later I was deposited at St Stephan's House where I found myself in front of the General's Officierd'Ordonnance, a Capitaine de Courcel. He had a rapid and easy manner. He soon realised that there was to be no real increase in their motor-cycle establishment and said, "Il vaut mieux que vous faites vous même votre rapport au General." The Captain had already asked me to sit down and - wonder of wonders - had given me a gauloise to smoke. He added,"Je ne crois pas que le Général sera satisfait de la réaction à sa demande.” I put my cigarette out and then he opened the door to the inner Office and put me forward, himself staying in the rear. I advanced to within three paces of the desk behind which de Gaulle was seated and saluted. He looked up, and with no change of expression, turned his eyes towards the Captain who said, "Mon General, l'emissaire du Commandant de la Place." The General looked back at me, and I said my bit about giving him twenty four hour coverage with four men in series around the clock. Before I had finished he beckoned his officer over to his side and handed him a file with which he left the room. I had said all I had to say and was left standing in front of de Gaulle who went on writing. Surely he was going to react. Nothing happened; I knew that it was quite contrary to the accepted manner for me simply to walk out. In French eyes to have done so it would be totally rude and undisciplined. I waited for what seemed an age; the General simply ignored my existence. In the back of my head I started to rehearse the correct formula -"Permission de se disposer, Mon General." When I got it out, it came much louder than was needed. He looked up and for the first time seemed actually to see me. After a fraction of a second and a minute change of expression, he came out with an "Accordée. " at almost parade ground volume. For me it was a pace to the rear, salute, about turn, and out to breathe again.

Closing the door behind me I saw that Captain de Courcel was smiling. In a way quite foreign to British routine we shook hands. On my side I felt that I was indeed in France, his own manner suggested that to him this whole business was displaying the comic elements that Pierre Daninos' "Carnets du Major Thomson" would have led him to expect in England. Soon General de Gaulle was to be rated by the Foreign Office as worthy of their direct attention, and Charles Peake (whom I was to meet later in Jugoslavia) was appointed ambassador in all but name to the General's Court.

What Admiral Evans heard about that short job with de Gaulle evidently pleased him. I was convoked more and more frequently to his staff-meetings. It must have been early autumn of 1940 as invasion counter-measures were still on the agenda. He kept me behind to tell me that one of his friends wanted to hear at first hand about my visit to St Stephan's House. Would I please go down next day, late in the lunch hour - say at five minutes to two - and eat some oysters with him at Overton's bar. I was happy to say yes once again and asked how I would recognise his friend. "No bother at all" said the Admiral "simply tell the bald barman that you have come with a message for the General and he will put the two of you together."

Next day at 13:55 hrs the barman, who was obviously expecting me, said "Why yessir, just follow me" and he led me out of the bar upstairs to a comfortable sitting room where I found myself in front of a sixty year old in a dark suit who was drinking hock and selzer. Without any preliminaries he gestured me into a chair saying that the Admiral had told him to give me a dozen oysters which I could have downstairs in a few minutes as he was in a hurry. He then asked a cascade of questions about de Gaulle's set-up and about the Free French before suddenly switching to my work in Paris. This prompted me to ask whether he knew of Darling. I got a sharp reply with a not altogether re-assuring tight half-smile "It is I who am asking the questions today." He was very penetrating and clearly knew the Paris scene well. Getting up he said "You seem to have a very good visual memory, you should develop it further." I replied that I owed it to my father who had played Kim's game with me from a very early age. As we went out of the door he grunted an instruction to thank the Admiral and to finish the hock with my oysters down below in the bar. I had been left with no idea whom I had seen and when I reported back to the Admiral I asked no questions. A few days later he told me that my discretion and my visit had been noted with approval. He could now tell me that I had been interviewed by "Uncle Claud" - Lt Colonel Dansey - deputy to Colonel Stuart Menzies who was then Director of the SIS. Discretion is an ingrained habit; these words are typed with reluctance, with a feeling that it is wrong to do so. Following this meeting I continued to help in the filling in of gaps in that immense mosaic of information on which all successful battle planning depends. I was happy doing so at the time and happy to look back on it all now.

One day, at the beginning of September, I was sitting around in the very early afternoon in the Finsbury Casualty Service H/Q , fretting that I was in Central London rather than out in the sunshine. Thora was at West Wycombe and I was on duty for the week-end; there had been some sporadic bombing in the last ten days south and east of us but absolutely nothing was happening in London. Legally, as I was on standby, I could have been anywhere at the end of a phone. For reasons of good order and discipline, I had preferred that my presence should be generally evident, but my zeal had been melting in the early autumn fine weather. Fed-up with sitting around, I decided to get into my car to make for the nearest real greenery in Epping Forest which was the East End's traditional lung. At the last minute I asked one of the volunteers in the Health Centre who was also on stand-by, to come along for an hour of fresh country air. We were not specially connected but she jumped gladly enough into my old MG coupé. Some thirty minutes later we were sitting on the grass, and I was getting the biscuits and ginger beer (in those old stoneware bottles) out of the boot where I had put them after buying them at the Angel market. On neither side had there been any premeditation. We had both reacted to my snap impulse to get away for a moment from the constraints of an idle week-end's duty. Our separate motives may well have had their own subconscious components, neither of us was naive. As we sat down on the grass with the sun above the trees, we moved into each others arms as though that were the reason for the trip. Neither of us had been prowling around looking for a short, or a long-term partner, but both of us must have felt that the moment was suspended outside current space and time. How long that moment lasted I do not know. My whole memory of that afternoon is nailed into my mind by the accelerating screaming roar that came straight at us from the sky. It was a thousand motorcycles cornering at speed, it was a Spitfire diving and banking up again. For that moment, it may have lasted twenty seconds or even two minutes, that we had been isolated from everything except each other, the world had not existed. Then we were hurled back into the afternoon of the 7th of September 1940.

In the split-second that it took to return to the present I heard the roar of many engines. I was not with Thora near Madrid where last I had heard a comparable if lesser noise, I was on the edge of London with someone else. Then I heard bursts of air-to-air firing and I felt something close to despair. We had tried to stop the Luftwaffe in Spain, but no one at home had wanted to believe us, now they were here over England. We stood back, looking through a gap in the trees; right high up I saw a white shape drifting downwards - a parachute. I do not remember her name, but I remember her eyes, her hair and her voice - "What is it?" "It's a parachute, but there is no way of knowing whose" "Well, it’s started, we must get back." she replied. We got the car out of the woods onto the main road. After half a mile we saw a policeman on a bike who asked us if we had seen a parachute coming down. I gave the general direction, off he went, pedalling like a racer.

As we raced back through empty streets, we saw a column of smoke going up from the docks. In Finsbury, to our relief, nothing had happened. The girl said, in a matter-of-fact, unpreachy way, "That had better be a lesson to us both, we were on duty, we have been more lucky than we deserve." Thenceforth we greeted each other with a certain smiling complicity, but we never went into the Forest again, or anywhere else. But, when at times I have been tempted to cheat on the obligations of watch-keeping, I hear her voice. She has helped me many many times - even until today.

The Blitz became a virtual institution; it killed people; it frightened people; it made life much more than difficult, but the one thing it did not do in London was to lower that strange collective reaction called morale. I was out every night of that weird period, the Finsbury group worked with courage under conditions that were certainly intimidating. The noise of descending bombs with the shake of the ground under your belly while tunnelling underground to dig out people already imprisoned by an earlier bomb leaves you with nothing to imagine. You are face to face with a form of Russian roulette in which the trigger is pulled by someone else. In those days and nights no bomb dropped in Finsbury without our Stretcher Party and Rescue personnel being on the spot in minutes. I, as MO Civil Defense, was always with them and together we developed a number of very effective techniques for extracting casualties and helping to save lives. There were plenty of others working away just like ourselves. They were wonderful people in the East End of London, they were consistently admirable. Someone in 1991 has written a book to say that there was no Battle of Britain and that the Blitz was exaggerated so that we could all give ourselves a self-satisfying ego-trip. I am sorry that this author did not share our lives during that period. It was a time when everyone had something to give and this was done with both courage and with grace in the London region. The danger and the destruction deprived the inhabitants of London of their social camouflage. The social boundaries ceased, they did no one any good during the blitz. Sometimes we were all frightened together and there was no concealment of the facts. In the middle of a night-long raid, I was picking my way up City road when I scented a most wonderful aroma of good coffee. Lipton's warehouse was blazing; it was a major incident and the Control Officer had been calling for reinforcements. Nearby there were a number of crowded air raid shelters and he feared that the major fire would serve as a marker for the next wave of bombers. The water mains had been hit and water-supplies for the Fire-engines were insufficient. The coffee aroma was real, torrents of good, freshly infused, coffee were rolling out of the carcass of the warehouse as the stocks burnt and the water from the hoses percolated back into the sewers. At that moment a very smart Fire Engine from Chalfont drew up (it must have been called in from that polite suburb as a part of the ultimate reserve force); its volunteer Fire Service crew were clearly, and with reason, worried. As the fire gained, the water supply diminished. I suggested the unthinkable: we opened a sewer manhole and pumped the torrent of newly infused coffee back on to the fire. The man who was to direct the hose went up and up that narrow ladder until it was swung over towards the blazing warehouse. He was frightened when he went to the ladder; he was a brave man on top of it, fighting an apocalypse. This must be the only example of fire-fighting with doubly infused café espresso.

At the peak of this fire and with an intensifying raid, a family came out of Britannia Walk - a side street of little early nineteenth century workmen's cottages which was then a genteel slum. They were pushing a pram in which there was their pathetically hidden family shame - an idiot child, now adult, with grotesquely lolling head and a face showing a dimly comprehended terror. With exquisite tact and in no time at all, the people in the nearby air-raid shelter made a space for them and rigged up a private corner screened with blankets. Later that night the raid shifted down towards Stepney and the docks. I was sent there with reinforcements. It was morning, a sunny morning before I could pick my way back, zig-zagging to avoid the debris along the largely deserted streets. I overtook a pedestrian carrying one of those old-fashioned enamelled quart pots with a lid and a swivelled handle. He was making west, as was I, so I offered him a lift. He climbed in with care, settling the pot upright on his lap, obviously it was full. He said, "Sorry to be slow but I don't want to spill it." I asked what it was, "It's me Mum's lokschen soup. She won't leave 'ome so I get's down whenever I can to have sabbath supper with her and bring some back for the kids. Nothing' l stop her ever, least of all 'itler. "

London was a very heartening place during the blitz. A week later, for a split second, I thought I was being blown up, because I did leave the ground. I had beens driving along King's Cross Road in the black-out during a raid. Bombs were dropping, but you were no safer stationary than moving. I had no lights on because they bothered people; there was no moon; it was cloudy. The Luftwaffe had no special need to aim. London was a large enough target tto be hard to miss. There was a lot of noise, some of it from rail mounted AA. Then, suddenly, my car became airborne, it seemed to rise and came down with a fantastic crash. A little later, as I came to my senses, I heard a voice saying "Are you all right?" I found myself still in the driver’s seat with my hands on the steering wheel. I could not see a thing; the window was open. Looking through it I saw earth, looking up I could just identify a man looking down from three of four feet higher. I've no idea what I said, but he and his mate came down to my level. "Sure you'r OK Guv?" "You gave us a scare, never seen a car do the long jump before." said the other. They were Gas, Light and Coke Company men. The night before there had been some bad Gas ruptures; they had opened up a very big pit to get at the mains for re-routing. Bowling along without headlamps, alone in the middle of an empty totally dark road, I had not seen any difference in the quality of the black in front of my car, so I had driven smartly over the edge into the pit. The car's roof was just below street level, but there was no ramp up; there was plenty of room but no way out. Like many other Blitz problems this was instantly solved. Pure muscle power did it; the car was lifted up by some twenty willing hands and received by twenty others. Placed on its wheels beyond the pit, I started the engine. It worked; I arrived at Finsbury where we found that the steering had been badly damaged and that I had a few bruises.

Early in 1941 I was told that I had been listed for an MBE. I had known nothing of this until Admiral Sir Edward Evans, the senior of the Trinity of Regional Commissioners for the London Region, casually mentioned that "something is coming your way Sinclair-Loutit-- - I'm very glad, you certainly deserve it, but you have managed to kick up quite a hullabaloo. " Finsbury had come to be regarded as a model operation, and I was once again at Regional Headquarters at his request. I did not see what might be coming my way and said so. He roared with laughter and said that he had felt the same at the beginning of his career. He tapped his vast row of ribbons saying "I don't know what you are going to get, but I've had to put a stop to some jackanapes from Security;, these fellas have no sense or shame. Some story about you being in disloyal company and drinking toasts to the fall of France. Yes, of course we know all about your travels;, they have turned out very useful. I told him you were a gentleman, we liked you and that he should not waste everyone's time with snivellings from his informers. " The source of the hullabaloo became very plain--; that Lloyd Square party the day of Petain's surrender--.o Our silent toast to France and my fugue with the well packaged, but hen-headed, girl on the way to the Wrens. Serves me right for provoking her telephone calls to which my response had not been adequate.

The Admiral went on to tell me that, once the Palace had sent for me, he was going to get me transferred to London Region Headquarters. "Not fair to move you until you are decorated because its an honour for you to share with your Unit."

Eventually the summons arrived, and I went with Thora and my Mother to the Palace for my MBE. An orotund Court official instructed the hundred or so candidates for investiture on the drill for filing by the King. The landmarks he gave us were the rings of roses in a long Aubusson carpet - it was rather like a parlour game, you were not to move until the man before you stepped out of his own safe harbour. We were put into a doubly checked order corresponding to the position of the various Decorations and Orders ranged in their separate compartments of a special tray. Mistakes had to be avoided; I believe that someone was once made a knight by accident and there was no way of undoing it. The official, having told us the drill, posed the inevitable, "Any questions?" A civilian, very much older than myself, came back with a request for a definition of the bow we had been instructed to make before stepping forward the final two paces to face His Majesty. "Should it be the full long bow, or a short bow?" The reply came, "As you will be at the top of the ramp, on which His Majesty himself is standing, there will be handrail behind you. The short bow suffices; the last time a long bow was attempted that rail was carried away, which caused considerable embarrassment. The short bow, Sir, the Buckingham bow… and one final point - should His Majesty address you a question, considerations of security need not limit your reply."

I shall not forget that moment in front of King George the Sixth. He had the gift of making the brief phrase, “It gives me very much pleasure to decorate you," sound extremely personal. When he went on to say, "Please tell them in Finsbury how proud I was of London during those times," I also felt very proud myself. Thora had come up from West Wycombe for the investiture. It was one of the last times we were to be in London together. She had been born in Abertillery, and she had given me the privilege of some brief stays in that valley. Her father had been a miner, and his family represented that whole very lively Welsh civilization that has now vanished along with the coal industry. Once, when I was tunneling to get at casualties through the mountain of debris that had once been a block of flats, I realised that I was faced with the same problems as those of rescue after a fall in a mine. I got invaluable lessons from Abertillery and a miner's pick which I always had with me during air-raid duty. It probably saved my life on more than one occasion when a cave-in was stopped by switching it to the vertical with the blades acting as a short roof beam. I had meant to keep that miner's pick for the rest of time but, alas, like much else it stayed behind when I went. Soon after all this, London Region had me transferred to their Headquarters.

The Ministry of Home Security was responsible for Civil Defense and combined with the Ministry of Health to provide the Casualty Services. This had involved the creation of "The London Civil Defense Region" as an operational structure which ensured coordinated action between the separate local services, previously the sole responsibility of the separate Borough Councils. The London Region, exceptionally, was governed by three Regional Commissioners, Admiral Sir Edward Evans, Sir Ernest Gowers and Air Marshall Sir Victor Richardson to whom I was personally attached, serving as ADC. These three had immense responsibilities with corresponding powers including those of Government in the event of invasion. There were in all ninety four separate Local Authorities in the London Civil Defense Region which extended well outside the LCC area and covered a then population of over nine million. I became Secretary to the Standing Committee coordinating these ninety odd Municipalities.

Sir Victor had made me responsible to him for a number of classified topics concerned with our tactical reply to major emergencies, such as invasion with suspension of normal government and civilian panic under massive bombing. He informed me that I would be a part of the stay-behind team in the event of invasion when my commander would then have been that same Lt Colonel Gubbins, - risen to Brigadier, - I had met with the Poles in Paris. Churchill had meant what he had said to General Ismay, "What is the position about London? I have a very clear view that we should fight every inch of it and that it would devour quite a large invading army. "

1941/42 was a settling down period. With hindsight, it seems impossible that the German General Staff had no well thought out invasion plan. I have just pulled out of the drawer the map of Germany issued to me by AMGOT in 1946 which had been printed on captured paper. On the other side, with a large French-imposed diagonal red cancelling mark, is the excellent full colour reproduction made by the Germans of the British Ordinance Survey one inch to one mile map showing Fleet and Farnham. In 1940/41 Air Marshall Sir Victor Richardson had been using the British issue of that very same sheet. I had been putting red markers just outside these two small towns showing our tank-traps. I have several such German military maps, on one of them is printed in the margin a painstaking explanation of the British method of indicating an exact position by means of map coordinates. This can only mean that the Nazis were expectinsexpecting to have British documents in their hands, as well as maps, We now know that it was the German Navy that could not keep up with the Wehrmacht, and that German hopes depended on the Luftwaffe crushing our ability to resist. We really can believe that London's response to bombing did much to save the United Kingdom from invasion. In the London Civil Defence Region Headquarters our philosophy and our actions had always been predicated on the solid conviction that we were winning the war. I personally believe that we would have conducted a very robust defense had there ever been a German landing. The threat of invasion dissipated, and all the more readily because a very large part of the population had never really believed in it.

TOTAL CONVICTION

 

By 1941, when invasion seemed to be no longer a real risk, Tom Wintringham had the time to give a party. It was somewhere near Dorking. I knew very few of the people there and ended up talking to a young woman called Janetta who was wearing white wool knitted knee-length stockings. She had straight hair, little make-up and a very economical and accurate vocabulary. She was beautiful, and she had, in her quietness, an immense presence. She was staying in Number 2 Dorset Street, just off Baker Street. I had written down her telephone number. Personal life, the life of the spirit, is not subject to any sort of automatic pilot, preprogrammed to take you to a predetermined point. A coup-de-foudre, a blinding impulsion, brought me face to face with the fact that "letting things take their course", good old nineteenth century masterly inactivity, could settle nothing. What passed between us at that party had had presaged, in its total ease and the idiom of its contact, something that I could no longer do without.

Ten days after Tom's party I rang Welbeck 5934. Normally I am neither shy nor hesitant but on this occasion I had not been sure of myself. I knew and feared the consequences of my becoming sure; I knew that I was facing a road on which there could be no turning back. That I went ahead and phoned does perhaps demonstrate that I truly knew where I was going. Janetta answered the phone. I went round to Dorset Street. For all practical purposes, from then on until I left for Cairo on Monday the 24th of July 1944, Janetta and I were inseparable. She, later, much later, told me that she herself had barely left the Dorset Street house during those ten days; she too knew that my call would be one that she could not afford to miss. From the moment we had met there had been nothing casual about our reaction to each other - it was an immensely specific conviction of our shared sympathy and necessity for each other. The only difference was that she was then alone and I was not.

It was early in the morning, as I left the intensity of our being alone together in 2 Dorset Street, that I began to take in the measure of my own situation. Though I continued to think of Janetta all the time, I did indeed give myself the chance to reflect on where I was going. I went down to Green End where there was everything that should have made the place into a safe harbour, a refuge of peace and happiness. Thora was going through a bad patch: not only was our daughter allergic to cows’ milk, but the whole burden of war-time life lay heavy upon her. She was sustained by the loyal support of her friends and indeed that support was to ripen eventually into a new marriage with the legal and emotional adoption of her daughter. Thora was to become what she is today: the happy matriarch of a united family.

My memories of that visit are still with me: nothing went right. I returned to London where - surprise surprise - no sooner was I back with Janetta than all problems seemed to solve themselves. In Dorset Street I had become aware of a background in Janetta's reactions of sadness, almost of pessimism; it melted away as we started to plan, and it vanished as soon as we made the decision to join forces. Her failed marriage with Hugh Slater had turned out all too rapidly to have been a mistake. Not unnaturally she had felt cautious when subsequent friendships had threatened to mature into something more. What then occurred between the two of us was that we were both simultaneously faced with an "all or nothing" option. Without hesitation we both chose the "all". Though may have been commoner at the end of the eighteenth century, in our times it is rare for men and women to pair-off as a result of a purely logical appraisal of social and material advantage. The decisive voice is not that of logic; it is inner impulsion that dominates. In this context what I felt was total optimism. In matters of importance, I had generally been rated as reliable. Bills of Lading, free on board with me, are sound. The exceptions to maritime responsibility are, and always have been, "Wars of Princes and acts of God". Powers as mighty as these have struck my personal craft on three occasions, to leave me stranded, on strange, though not always inhospitable, shores. This was the first of such shipwrecks. I left Thora. I brought virtually nothing with me. I came with very little luggage, leaving my material possessions with Thora. In neither contractual, nor in normally accepted social terms, was this behaviour of mine defensible. I left behind virtually everything, coming ashore with the clothes on my back. Many old friendships were lost in the storm, some, though not all, were recovered later. Being with Janetta was all that mattered.

A load of guilt is always projected onto whoever actually leaves the other half of a couple. In this particular case the load was considerable and, in view of what we had been to each other as well as what we had represented to those with whom we had been closely linked in Spain, the breakup with Thora was to have wider implications. Janetta was blamed as an unscrupulous husband snatcher by some of Thora's partisans. This was an over-simplistic interpretation, because the split had already occurred. Melissa, who had constituted some sort of a wedge between Thora and myself, obtained, as is classical, no sort of benefit. Anyway, my name became mud to large part of my previous acqaintanceships and what was left of the old Finsbury-Aid-Spain Popular Front; its orthodox CP component had a simple explanation. In joining Janetta, as she belonged to that stratum of British Society that used to have its daughters presented at Court, I had quite simply "sold-out". I was seen to have deserted the left and rejoined my class-enemy origins. Many of those making this diagnosis were of at least bourgeois stock themselves, so I realised that the case was as much for their psycho-analyst as for mine.

There is a factor that overrides all else to provide the decisive impulsion bringing two people together. This factor may well relate to our instinctual past or to some unexorcised void that once preoccupied a part of our infant spirit. It is a factor that can certainly vary in both quality and intensity; at one extreme it can be the simple conviction that "we are sure to get on". This would be enough to promote a business partnership. At the other extreme it can be the blinding conviction, the 'coup de foudre' which is the state of those who have fallen head-over-heels in love. When the appreciation of this force is but one sided, its very absurdity eventually brings its own cure. When it is mutually shared, the consequences follow in a cascade, the joy of which is both instant and immeasurable. Its unilateral interruption must be counted as one of mankind's major psychological traumata. Janetta and I were to live through all of these experiences.

The smallness of mind of people I had held to be friends-for-life surprised me but I had to accept that it is not always easy to stay friends with both parties in a marriage break-up. For example Judge Evatt, a friend to whom I had felt truly close, Australia's Minister of External Affairs and later the first President of the United Nations General Assembly, was utterly against me. His support would have meant much to me when I joined the UN at the end of the war. While I found all this hurtful, I also saw that such partisanship was giving an oblique psychological support to Thora for which I was correspondingly glad.

I had felt a profound conflict before accepting that the separation from Thora had to come about. It was not willful hedonism that had been the motor for my leaving, nor was I completely carried away; I did indeed know what I was doing. I was reacting to a psychological imperative. Janetta had made me feel a new and different person; the price of this was the abandonment of what had been mine beforehand. It was a big price for a big reward. I am still paying the price. I have still an inalienable part of that reward. Janetta had to get a job. She had been working in Horizon's Office and had helped Tom Wintringham set up the Home Guard tactical school. She was not accustomed to being idle; what she liked doing best, and did best, was painting, but that did not protect a girl from conscription. There was a vacant place in the Risinghill Street First Aid Post, on the boundary between Finsbury and Islington, so she took it immediately. It was in my own area of activity so, until the birth of our daughter, we shared those extraordinary Luftwaffe-lit nights. I was moving around the whole time, but we each knew that the other was not too far away. Janetta did not want to stay on in Dorset Street and anyway I had no status with its owners. That house had flooded because a tap had been open after the water-supply had been cut-off following an air-raid, Janetta had been on duty at her First Aid Post when the water supply had been restored, so the water had flowed on down the stairs. This was not her fault, but she certainly had felt that it had made her welcome precarious. The fact that the damp carpets had then frozen solid made it even harder to set the place to rights. This served to hasten our acting on the decision we had already made; in no time at all. Janetta found a flat. She got some of her childhood's home furniture out of store. Diana, a friend who always had a proper sense of privacy which I shall continue to respect, took over one room in the flat and in a matter of days we were all settled in. I had brought no material possessions with me, but I was promoted soon afterwards so my pay went up and we were able to make ourselves comfortable. We set up house near Regents Park. In those early days, when we had to go off about our separate occasions, we used any spare moment to ring each other, not that there was necessarily anything special to say. To us, there was an extraordinary intimacy in our silences, when all that could be heard down the line was the breathing of the other party, the gentle susurration as on an early morning pillow. Such silence lent passage to "words that are not heard with ears" which gave a special sense to our lives.

The relaxing of the rhythm of the air-raids brought Janetta and myself the time to settle really comfortably into that Park Road flat. A year later we moved a few doors down to a larger flat above a hand-made chocolate shop (Claire's) right opposite the gates of Regents Park. In war-time London this was a wonderful place to live as it was near Baker Street Tube, practically in the Park and within walking distance (important in those times) of Soho and of Piccadilly Circus. But living above a sweet shop brought its own problems. The proprietor, a little old lady in coquettish 1920s hats, received a small supply of the tightly rationed basic materials to allow her to go on earning her living by hand making her incredibly delicious chocolates. She put them in the cellar to cool, and I had to pass them every time I went down for coal. There they were, lined up on parade in their black uniforms on little aluminium trays. I could not always resist, and their ranks tended to thin. Janetta had got her old Nursery table out of store. We sandpapered down the top and the good oak showed its honest face, the legs and side we painted white. She had found French earthenware bowls and some matching though unrelated cups and plates. I can taste the coffee in those bowls still. We always had a good cafe-au-lait, even if it meant using all the ration, and sometimes made that breakfast, described so well by Proust, with the toast and butter amalgamated into a floating crust on top of the bowl for which you really need an old-fashioned stove. The flat was furnished from improvised and disparate sources, but it developed its own harmony of appearance. For both of us it felt as though we had been living in it for years even when Rodney Phillips lent us two Henry Moore tube studies. Janetta was soon painting again, and as I write today I look up at a small picture which still lets me share the view into Regents Park as we saw it under the dirty snow of a war-time winter.

Soon after we had moved in, we walked over the road to Clarence Terrace where Elisabeth Bowen was then living. We had dinner in that older urbane atmosphere which for me had a déejàa-vu reality. She was quietly Anglo-Irish, and in her informal and friendly way reflected the way of life that had so impregnated my own childhood in Cornwall. The Anglo-Irish kept it longer than anyone else. Our own life assumed a comfortable cadence. Without cheating or black-marketing, it was possible to make very good meals in wartime London. There was a street market near the Windmill theatre where you could get excellent young goat meat, and there were wine merchants selling off the wonderful contents of bombed-out cellars. My memories of the wine we drank at home and in the houses of our friends is that it was amazingly good. John Davenport, with whom I had lost touch since Cambridge and who had now become literary editor of the Observer was one of our frequent visitors. Janetta's cooking produced sumptuous meals. He said we had the best food in London which did not stop him breaking our chairs by shifting his weight on them. I remember him with a particular affection along with many others some of whom happily survive, though within horizons that today are distant from my own. I remember our going off to the Wigmore Hall for Natasha Spender's first concert, which she played with tender authority. I shall never forget that night because it turned out to be my last visit to a place that had been a part of my life for years. My departure from London in 1944 in the event proved final so today I retain the clarity of an exile's reverse telescope view of a happy past.

When Janetta and I found that a third person was on the way, we wanted to be able to concentrate on our family life rather than on argument and divorce litigation. Janetta did a deed-poll instead so, when our daughter was born on June 11th of 1943, she had a nice elegant birth-certificate. For duty reasons, I did not feel free to leave the London Regional Headquarters on that particular day which illustrates how the needs of service took priority over personal life in the atmosphere of that time. Even a few months later I would have taken the day off, I was only fifteen minutes drive away from the Nursing Home where Nicolette was born.

We were very proud of our relationship in that it depended entirely on the combined will of the two persons concerned. That was one of the reasons for Janetta doing her name change by deed-poll. Our joint life was in no way responsive to any role dictated by social rules and conventions. It was our affair and ours alone. Later on, after Nicolette was born, with our daughter very much a part of our lives, we were a family nucleus held together by its own internal emotional energy, not by social compression. Later happenings are easier to understand when the importance to us of our joint will - this was no passive consensus - is given its weight. We each kept our different qualities, which enriched the mix. Unanimity of will and spirit was the cement that kept our household together. We held then, as I do today, that the only tolerable bonds were those self-imposed. Living with Janetta, problems vanished as soon as they emerged. The result was that I certainly became absurdly self-confident and far too pleased with myself. I did not lose all sense of self-criticism, but I did certainly consider our partnership impregnable - as then indeed did Janetta. I knew from her that on her maternal side there had been two generations of bolters. This equine term may sound a bit disobliging, but there is a human parallel to the reaction of a horse faced with more than it can bear; it takes the bit in its teeth and goes off at a pelting gallop in the opposite direction. Trudging old nags do not do this; finely bred ones are more inclined that way. We both treasured the history of the family carriage conveying an early Edwardian lady to Swann and Edgars, waiting vainly at the Piccadilly door, while this relation of her's took a Hansom cab at the Regent street entrance for Charing Cross station, France and guilty liberty. There were other examples nearer our own times of such independence of spirit and of the strength of character needed to sustain it. All this made me feel the safer, just as one does when one is in courageous company. Janetta also had an admirable mastery of the small things of life, so our days were comfortable and trouble free.

Despite my work-load, we were able to live a well filled social life. Amongst our blessings was the fact that Janetta only needed to pick up the phone, and we could get on the next train down to Ham Spray. Ralph and Frances Partridge for years had been the loving protectors of Janetta and had seemed to treat my emergence into their world with tolerant kindness. I have the keenest memories of those stays. The facade and veranda of Ham Spray had a very strong resemblance to that of my father's house in Wareham, but all else was very different. Ralph and Frances preserved intact an atmosphere that nourished mind and spirit, it owed much to Lytton Strachey, whose lares and penates had not left his old house. I remember on our first night together in Ham Spray looking up at the plaster cornice of our bedroom ceiling. Its fern-frond pattern had been picked out in greens and red - it must have called for hours of work which had been done for Lyttton by Carrington. The whole house showed such care for individual detail. The garden, with the cellar thoughtfully stocked for a four year war and wise planning, ensured wonderful meals. Our fellow guests were often persons I had in the past admired from afar, so I think that, even today, it would be an abusive trespass to write more about the private times of those very private people.

Since the start of the war I had been protected from arbitrary postings as it was considered that I had languages, and aptitudes that made me specially useful . This had given me a secure, London-based, niche. Niches are often safe, this one had not been specially so as I was always out in the raids. Indeed I was sent to wherever the bombs were falling. By 1944 the war was visibly being won, though our own optimism had been cut by the death of Rollo, Janetta's brother, his friendship and understanding had been very precious to me. His plane had been shot down over Tunisia. The later arrival of his pathetic personal effects made me feel how privileged had been my own position, and I could no longer be proud of it. I could not bear to throw away those half worn out ordinary things of Rollo's. I used his shoe trees for the next fifty years; when they finally broke I was desperately sad.

The first part of the war had been for me honourably full of risk, but by 1944, my position undeniably was sheltered. Here I was, in London, able to live with Janetta and our daughter in our own home, with jobs from which I could not be moved by those arbitrary assignments that had disrupted the personal lives of my whole generation. It was even respectable to stay on where I was as I had a ribbon on my uniform indicating that I had been decorated for what had been reckonned as bravery - even though I did get home most mornings for breakfast. Then one day, late in 1943 or early in 1944, Sir Victor, with that affectation of judicial innocence or plain ignorance that the great use in order to show that they are just ordinary folk like anyone else, suddenly said : "Loutit, they want somebody in Czecho or Yugo what do you think about it?" ”It depends which it is, Sir." "Well, they are all the same aren't they?" "No Sir, I would not say that." "Well then, what's the difference?" "One, Sir, has a coast line. The other has not." "What difference does that make for heaven's sake?" "Walking out of Czecho would lead you into a worse mess, Sir, than staying there. But Yugo, with its coast, would give the visitor a chance of a lift from the Navy."

Sir Victor Richardson had started in the Navy so he roared with laughter and said that boats were more reliable than planes. For some months past he had been putting me onto liaison tasks with Allied Governments. In particular we had become concerned with the planning of supplies necessary to prevent disease and civil unrest within newly liberated populations. Such planning is an integral part of line-of-communication strategy and tactics; its military purpose is to allow Troops to advance without hindrance and without having to share, out of human sympathy, Army services and rations with a starving population. Our recent conversation was not out of context, nor did it necessarily touch me personally. We had been working on these problems with a number of the European Governments then lodged in London, and I was being sent regularly to Allied National planning groups in Gas Industries House at Hyde Park Corner - much used for Committee meetings and an address which never failed to provoke sardonic comment from Admiral Evans.

Sir Victor told me to take a look at the file and to see for myself. I soon saw that this talk about Czecho and Jugo was not about some problem, but concerned the appointment of a GSO. There was a first mention of Romania with more recent emphasis on Jugoslavia. The immediate need was to fill a post in Allied Military Liaison which called for specific language and professional ; there was a clear perspective towards the post-war implantation of UNRRA in the Balkans.

To ensure access to military facilities and to situate the work within both British and Allied Military authority the job was listed as for a Lt Colonel on the General Service List. The Romanian operation was highly classified; the only thing clear about it being its urgency and that it involved the Special Services. Tito's Jugoslavia, thanks to Fitzroy Maclean's reports, was exciting public admiration. So far as both countries were concerned the job was tailor-made for me. The fact that the Air Marshal was serving all this up to me on a plate was in itself flattering, as men much senior to me would have given anything for such opportunities. I thanked Sir Victor for thinking of me. He replied with something about not wanting to hold me back and only letting me go for something worthwhile. He added that Lord Falmouth's Committee (where that 1939 listing had initially lodged my name) would not stop my movement as the project was on the PM's list and that Lord Moyne, the Minister Resident in Cairo, was locally responsible for both posts. I knew that the decision to leave London and to go to Cairo en route for the Balkans was important but I did not foresee its repercussions over the years. It had been a hard decision to make, even though the spirit of the times - in that spring of 1944 - made assent inevitable to anyone with my own family background.

When I got back to our flat, our dear flat overlooking Regents Park, I told Janetta the news. She was shattered. To her it seemed an incomprehensible, a perverse reversal of priorities, a silly seeking for adventure on my part for which our little family would have to pay the price. She did not want to know any more about it, nor to talk about it. The subject became unmentionable. Nothing happened and, as the weeks went by, I began to believe that there had been a change of plan - for which a part of me would have been thankful. Janetta outlawed any talk about the Balkans, about this job or anything to do with my posting. Never before had we had a such a taboo. Months later, without warning, my orders came. Sir Victor said that either he, or the Admiral, would be writing to Lord Moyne, the Minister Resident in Cairo, so as to "make sure that I did not get lost in the crowd." There was time for one last week-end at Ham-Spray before reporting to the RTO at Paddington Railway Station on the evening of Monday the 24th of July 1944. It was no stiff-lipped warrior's send off.

Socially, in wartime, it was of course completely normal - I was going off to do my bit, etc. Millions of others did the same but, in the inside of the little kingdom we had made for ourselves, it was a desertion. Janetta was miserable. She was fundamentally resentful of my brash acceptance of Sir Victor's casual suggestion, worse at my positively volunteering to abandon everything that we had built up together. At that precise time I was incapable of analysing my inner motivations, I do remember feeling (and for the first time in our shared life) that Janetta did not understand me. I was right, indeed from a pragmatic point of view nothing could have been more of a contradiction than to leave the two people I loved to fend for themselves when I could perfectly well have stayed with them.

I tried to justify my volunteering in terms of my playing as full a part as possible in bringing the war to an end. To this, Janetta had an excellent and Kantian reply. "If everyone stayed at home and looked after those they loved, wars would not even be possible." I believe that it is but while writing this account that I am now approaching clarity about my own motives of fifty years ago. I could perfectly well have stayed on with my Air Marshall. Why did I take up this vague offer of a Balkan jaunt? I was fully involved in our own Headquarters where I was really needed. Nothing is so Patrist as a war. Its chain of command, rising upwards, symbolisinges the patriarchal family. Respect for those placed in authority over us was one of the fundamentals of the society in which I had been brought up. Equally and opposite, revolt against authority was a reaction that I, in common with my generation, had readily manifested. Many of those who had shown this spirit of revolt had gone on to submit themselves, in the name of that very revolt, to another authority - that of the Communist Party - an entity more closed, more stubborn and more blind than that of the earlier authority they were rejecting. While I was free of this particular obligation, I had not yet come to a balanced relationship with Authority and maybe never will.

I believe I was under a psychological imperative to please collectively Air Marshall Sir Victor Richardson and Admiral Sir Edward Evans for both of whom I had a positively filial affection and respect. When the idea of Czecho or Jugo was raised, I said what was expected of me. My then Chiefs would not have thought less of me had I failed to rise to their offer, but putting the demands of the service first was in the tradition of Evans, who had been Scott's second in Command at the Pole and a mess-mate of Captain Oates.

My father used to read aloud to me Herbert Ponting's "Great White South" when I was a very small boy so I knew all about the Admiral before I ever met him. It could be said that, in leaving Janetta, I was exorcising my loving dependancy on her by yielding to Patrist imperatives. If not a case for the nut-house this makes a good subject for the analyst. My Orders were in the sealed envelope in my hand. So, that Monday evening, the 24th of July 1944, I went to Paddington Station with twenty pounds of luggage and presented my envelope to the RTO. He took out his bit of paper, handing back the enclosed second envelope which was addressed to number something or other Movement Control which still did not let me know my routing. He gave me a blank ticket and told me to go to platform 6 at 2200 hrs. On platform 6 I found myself being put into a First Class sleeper on a special train of some dozen coaches. I had long forgotten that such things existed. Most passengers were in uniform, many were red-tabbed. There was only a sprinkling of civilian passengers. It was all first class so everyone had a single berth compartment to himself. There was no tendency to hob-nob-security was second nature.

The attendant said he would bring tea at about 7.15 next morning, giving me plenty of time to shave before getting in at 8 o'clock. It was not done to ask where a train of this sort was going so I turned in and went to sleep torn between my heavy-heartedness at leaving my family, and that other part of me that was captivated by a return to Europe via the Balkans. I had an impudent confidence that I would be able to face the unknown prospects ahead in a way that would bring to all the three of us, Janetta, Nicolette and myself, total recompense at the war's end. I knew that for Janetta, this could not fill the present void, but, I told myself, the future was no further away than the peace and it would be richly rewarding. I did not sleep deeply. At first light I pulled the curtain back. We were going slowly through a cutting; we came out and went through a small station. In war-time the station name-boards had all been taken down so as to stop enemy reconnaissance planes, or parachutists, knowing where they were. Ten minutes later my growing suspicion became a certainty:- I was in the train coming back from school. Par, St Blazey, Bugle, Roche, those were the little stations through which we chugged, I had not travelled that way since I had been a boy at Ampleforth.

We arrived at Newquay, my old home; as I stepped onto the platform I could see that our train had shrunk to but a single coach. At the station a corporal told me that everyone on the train was billeted in the Great Western Hotel which was just over the road. When I was fifteen year old I used to go there for the Christmas parties of those whose parents could not face a rout at home. This was the same Railway Station as the one where the grown-ups had started to cry when, twenty six years back in 1918, the soldiers had marched with their band to entrain for France. I went to my hotel-room, had I stayed there, I too would have cried; so I went for a walk only to be assaulted with nostalgia at every turning. In the three days of waiting while I roamed around my childhood, I was not able to have a proper phone-talk with Janetta; security had become such an integral part of wartime nature. All the time I thought about this very first rift in our shared thinking. Why had I volunteered to leave? Fifty one years gives a better perspective than the forty eight hours I am writing about.

Today, what I was then getting at emerges more readily: I certainly did not see it at all clearly at the time. My own social philosophy or motives seem to have been based on an amalgam of left-wing aspirations with a more right-wing hereditary sense of duty. This was perfectly familiar to Janetta who largely shared it, but with an added codicil making paramount the responsibilities of love. I was not under compulsion to say yes to Sir Victor, but my own acceptance that the call of service came first, brought me to do so. My voluntary departure came into collision with another concept of loyalty that ruled those at Ham Spray who were closest to Janetta; there the cherished values were based on individual relationships. E. M. Forster had said in his 1938 essay "What I Believe" that were he to be faced with the choice of betraying his friend, or of betraying his country, that he hoped he would have the courage to be faithful to his friend.

These then were the two forces in collision; the irresistible force that was meeting the immovable post; neither of us had at the time the sense to understand what was happening. But, during that last weekend on the eve of my departure, if Ham Spray had not written me off, I was perhaps viewed as nearing the anathema under which lay Gerald Brennan. His back-slidings into belligerency were later to be forgiven, perhaps so also were mine but of this I was never to learn.

To all this I was completely, stupidly, unperceptive; I should have refused Janetta's taboo of discussion of my going to Cairo. Had we but faced its implications we could have found our way. I was blind to the imminent ruin of my private life and dangerously vain about my new job. As far as work was concerned, this was maybe just as well: had I been modestly timid I could not have faced what was ahead of me. So, half dazed, I walked around that so familiar town of Newquay. I found a Trafalgar glazed earthenware figure, an 1820 sweetheart's token, and got the shop to post it to Janetta thus letting it declare my passage.

On the third evening at the bar, I got the order to move and the friendly American Movement Officer's papers showed that I was manifested as Lt Colonel S-L. I was in for one final dose of that eerie dream-like return to childhood: the airfield turned out to be centered on the forty acre field at St Mawgan where I had learnt to drive. That was the field on which Austin and myself in two cars had conducted 'Flotilla manoevres' to the horrified fascination of my mother. The plane seemed immense; my last flight had been to Paris in October of 1939 in that old Handley Page with its leather arm-chairs for my spell with the Poles. For this rushed departure my, orders listed me as a Military Liaison Officer on the Cairo Minister Resident's staff. I had been told that AML would have to look after my para training after my arrival. The converted bomber had about thirty little canvass seats filled with senior officers, Brigadiers, full Colonels and some free French. There were a few American diplomats going to the Soviet Union who shocked my security-minded neighbour (a friendly New Zealand infantry Brigadier) with their loud and disparaging talk about our Soviet Ally.

The pre-flight briefing was that excessive air activity over western Europe necessitated a course over the Atlantic, after heading for New York we would cut back half-way and land in Casablanca. Brief cases containing security classified papers were to be put placed in the Captain's pre-weighted bag for jettisoning were we to become a casualty. I was most unhappy on take-off. The plane seemed ridiculously fragile. The four engines acted as though they were combining to tear it to pieces. We got off the ground somehow after rumbling down the runway for an age. I did not like it one bit, and for the first time, but not the last, wished I had listened to Janetta and got out of the job. The plane took an astonishingly long time to get off the ground, we went on and on down the runway. Rising and turning towards the ocean, at last we left our shadow behind on the land. I had left more than that. Never had I felt so alone in my whole life as I did on that take-off.

 

Educational Websites Standards Site, BBC History, PBS Online, Open Directory Project, Schools Wikipedia, Education Forum, History GCSE, Design & Technology, Music Teacher Resource, Freepedia, ATW, Science Active, Brighton Photographers, Sussex Photo History, Compton History, Industrial Revolution, English Teaching, HistoryWorld, Virtual Library E-HELP, Ed Podesta Blog, Macgregorish History, Historiasiglo20, I Love History, ICT4LT

Spartacus Educational First World War, Second World War, The Tudors, British History, Vietnam War, Military History, Watergate, Assassination of JFK, Assocation Football, Normans, American West, Famous Crimes, Black People in Britain, The Monarchy, Blitz, United States, Cold War, English Civil War, Making of the United Kingdom, Russia, Germany, The Medieval World, Nazi Germany, American Civil War, Spanish Civil War, Civil Rights Movement, McCarthyism, Slavery, Child Labour, Women's Suffrage, Parliamentary Reform, Railways, Trade Unions, Textile Industry, Russian Revolution, Travel Guide, Spartacus Blog, Spartacus Review, Latest Books

News and Search Guardian Unlimited, Times Online, SOS Children Charity News, The Independent, New York Times, Daily Telegraph, BBC, CNN, Yahoo News, New Scientist, Google News, Channel 4, Google, Excite, Yahoo, MSN, Lycos, AOL Search, Hotbot, Metacrawler, Netscape, Ask, Search, Go, Looksmart, Dogpile, Raging Search, All the Web, Kartoo, Search Engine Watch, About Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Robert F. Kennedy, Queen Victoria