Secret Letters

by John Willis

  Last night, after dinner, my friend told me that you had arrived. I felt like a morning breeze. My feet were light and my head was dizzy with excitement. It had become known in the mess that you had arrived, so we had drinks to celebrate it. Two or three bottles of Graves were fetched from the mess cellar. The wine was filthy, but I didn’t care. I did not need a drop and drank little because I wanted to be fresh for the morning.

  The morning was a let-down. Several phone calls to friends produced no further news. No one had heard from Margot or from the ship. Then a letter arrived for Myers.

  Instead of a telegram, I received a letter from you dated June 25. So your ship was waiting somewhere before sailing. Obviously, you were in Gibraltar when I thought you were on the way back. I phoned the Air Ministry Civil Airways Department to see if they had any news. Their information was that you were still in Gibraltar, so I keep on wondering if you are there now, or on the sea. I’m going through it all over again. Just a bit of bungling on my part that has cost me a great deal. I must hide all the thoughts of last night. I must not look at the little cot too much. I must get back to that cold storage feeling, because I must concentrate on my work and not show my disappointment.

  In fact, his family was closer than he imagined. One evening, after they had been sailing for two weeks, Margot spotted a rocky island and asked a sailor if it was England. ‘That’s the beginning of it,’ the man said. The next morning, they saw two battleships coming out to welcome them, ‘They took my breath away and I felt deeply moved,’ she recalled.113 It was probably the most dangerous part of the journey with all the mines but Margot felt curiously safe. That night she undressed for the first time on her long journey.

  The following day the boat headed up the Clyde. No one in the shipyards was working because it was a Sunday. Margot was surprised. There was a war on, she thought, and Britain was short of ships.

  ‘At last we were on British soil! Everything happened as though we were arriving under normal conditions. They calmly checked our passports and luggage. Ever since the fall of France, in June 1940, I had lived in an atmosphere of fear, ignoring what the next day would bring. I had endured administrative complications, difficulties of travel. I had needed to fight and hold my own among the crowds. I had witnessed all these lost people who seemed to be running around in circles with no exit in sight. For the first time since the fall, I felt reassured. I was in a free country.’114

  To Margot, fresh from the brightness of Lisbon and Madrid, wartime Glasgow seemed a dismal, grey city. She found a small city centre hotel and was so delighted, and astonished, to have arrived safely that she gave the porter a ten-shilling note for a tip. He was so shocked he said, ‘Haven’t you got anything smaller?’

  The next morning there was a knock on Margot’s hotel door. Geoff Myers had travelled all night to finally be reunited with his family. There was a tremendous electricity in the air. Everyone seemed to be crying. Robert remembers his father lifting his mother off her feet in a huge embrace, ‘I was amazed how strong he was.’115 Margot had talked to her children often about their father in England and had explained that the whole point of the long and dangerous journey was to join him. Now they understood. Myers recalled, ‘I wondered if the children would recognise me?’116 Margot, Robert and Anne jumped up and clung round his neck. ‘It has been like that with the children ever since.’

  Margot and Geoff had not seen each other for nearly eighteen months, between March 1940 and July 1941. The children had changed hugely in that time. Margot remembers ‘a hugely emotional moment.’117

  The reunited family went first to Edinburgh. On a bus, Margot was talking in French to Anne and a woman leaned over and gave Anne a silver 3d bit for luck. From Scotland they moved to Ipswich where there was a house waiting for them. Alan Birtwhistle, the new intelligence officer at 257, was very helpful. Soon, Myers began telling his wife about the Battle of Britain and what had happened to his squadron. He gave her the unposted letters. Margot was astonished.

  Margot was desperate to reconnect with her family in occupied France and to let them know that she and the children were safe. Robert and Anne missed their time with their grandmother. Margot was both horrified and relieved to discover that soon after she and her children had escaped, they had been betrayed by a local to the occupying Nazis.

  The diary and letters were redundant now. Geoff was in direct contact with his family and had no need to write anything further in the notebooks for the family to read after the war. He waited six weeks and then wrote one last entry.

  August 27 1941

  Six weeks of dream. Mummy is at my side, my little ones, and you are sleeping a few yards away. Mummy has asked me to go on writing so you know how things were. I want you to both realise first how Mummy and I are utterly soaked in thankfulness for this deliverance. Since we have been together again some people have talked about fate, others about providence, and others about God. If your ship had been sunk, we should still have been dependent on these same forces.

  104Memoirs of Margot Myers translated by her daughter, Anne

  105Interview with Robert Myers, February 2020

  106Margot Myers memoir, translated by her daughter, Anne

  107Memoirs of Margot Myers translated by her daughter, Anne

  108Robert Myers memoir

  109Notes from Margot Myers translated by her daughter, Anne

  110Interview with Janet Willis 1981

  111Interview with Janet Willis, 1981

  112Margot Myers memoirs, translated by her daughter, Anne

  113Margot Myers memoirs, translated by her daughter, Anne

  114Memoirs of Margot Myers translated by her daughter, Anne

  115Interview with Author, 2020

  116Interview with Author, 1981

  117Memoirs of Margot Myers, translated by her daughter, Anne

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  No one described the reality of the Battle of Britain better than Terry Hunt, who in 1942 wrote Pilot’s Wife’s Tale: the diary of a camp-follower. As she emphasised when we met near her flat in Victoria in 1982, ‘It was a queer golden time. The world seemed full of lights. They were golden boys too. You met people once or twice and then they were dead. Now they seem such little boys, such boys.’118

  Terry Hunt was right. Although every day young men were killed defending their country in the Battle of Britain, there was an unreal quality to those months too. It was summer and the days were long and bright. Below them, as they flew, were the green and brown fields of Kent and Sussex, covered with hop fields and hay bales, orchards and oast houses. The pilots could see small villages with their pubs and churches, and sometimes a cricket field. It was a constant reminder of the country they were fighting for.

  The pilots were young, in their early twenties mostly, but a few as young as eighteen. Geoffrey Myers, being a few years older, would survey his squadron and think, ‘They looked so young and so innocent, as if they had come straight from school to war.’119

  For most of the young men, war was an escape from the factory or the office, the classroom or the shop. It was as if they had been given a Ferrari or a Maserati to drive, although Spitfires and Hurricanes were bigger, faster and infinitely more dangerous. On top of that, the pilots of Fighter Command were paid, some more generously than in their civilian lives, and they were well fed and watered.

  There was an intensity about everything, whole lives compressed into a few months or even weeks. Friendships were deep, as only those whose survival sometimes depended on the pilot in the Hurricane alongside him could fully understand. Alcohol was in plentiful supply and some young men would drink in a week a quantity that would have taken months to down in peacetime.

  In war, inevitably, relationships with the opposite sex were speeded up too, as the pre-war boundaries faded away. The brave fighter pilots in their uniforms were very attractive to women and, if you didn’t know whether you would be alive tomorrow, why wait for anything, including sex? Some women,
too, had already lost a fiancé or a partner earlier in the war and they didn’t want to risk losing a second loved one. So courtships were short and marriages often happened quickly.

  This sense of grabbing at happiness echoes in the diary of the chaplain at RAF Duxford near Cambridge, when he described how his close friend, Pilot Officer Peter Watson, talked to him frankly about his relationship with a woman in Norwich. ‘Watson said, “What does it matter? I shall be killed anyway; if not killed, I shall be maimed; there won’t be much left to live with.” We talked and walked for a long time, very frankly and about many things with a directness that I never wanted to talk to any young man about. We both of us smelled death. So, he feels the hurry to do things while there is time…’120 Peter Watson was killed a few weeks later.

  As the emotional charge of the letters from Myers to his family convey, separation and danger only added to the overall intensity. The letters would often shift suddenly between his profound and private concerns for his family to his more public responsibility and fear for the young men in his charge. Geoff saw all too clearly how that sometimes unreal world of young pilots, the world ‘full of lights,’ could come to a sudden and lethal end. Myers was living on a daily basis with two different types of deep and powerful relationships.

  Terry Hunt’s life was wrenched out of that ‘queer golden time’ when her young husband was shot down and badly burned just a few weeks into the Battle of Britain. When she saw his terrible injuries, she thought, ‘He himself was something brand new and very real.’ Although David was not blind, as originally seemed likely, his wife spent many long months caring for him. In 1943, her book was turned into a radio play starring Hugh Burden and Wendy Hiller, but in the radio adaptation the pilot was not burned ‘because it [would not be] good for recruitment.’121

  In a letter to Geoff Myers, Terry Hunt added, ‘David was indignant when the BBC said he should be wounded in a more amusing way. I think that was how they put it. He said he would be burned or nothing; but finally had to settle for a couple of broken ankles so as not to put people off.’122

  For the pilots of 257 Squadron, reintegrating to civilian life was never going to be easy. Nothing was ever going to be as exciting as flying a Spitfire or Hurricane in combat. Most of the pilots had reached the pinnacle of their lives at twenty-one or twenty-two. As Terry Hunt observed of her husband, ‘David said he’d rather do war again – including the burning up – than be an edge tool worker in a ghastly place like Wolverhampton.’123

  David and Terry Hunt never did return to Wolverhampton. As a Guinea Pig under Sir Archibald McIndoe at East Grinstead, David had extensive surgery. After a year he managed to fly again, although he never flew in combat. Through the rest of the war he co-ordinated vital defence systems including radar, before leaving the Air Force as a flight lieutenant in 1945.

  Terry Hunt recorded her feelings at the end of the war. ‘It was four o’clock in the morning on VE Day in Cardiganshire. The victory beacons were going out. I thought of those who weren’t there to share that moment and then I realised that the golden years had gone, they had dried out with that fire.’124

  David and Terry Hunt later divorced. David moved to New Zealand, where he died in 2000, sixty years after his almost fatal crash.

  If Bob Stanford Tuck was a legend going into the Battle of Britain, he was even more famous afterwards, partly for his exceptional work in welding 257 into a more than capable squadron. The Times wrote of his fame, ‘In the face of constant death he preserved a lightness of heart, which was not simply bravura, but was allied to a precise and ruthlessly applied technical skill.’

  In July 1941, Tuck – now a wing commander – moved from 257 to take command of the fighter squadrons at RAF Duxford in Cambridgeshire. Six months later, in January 1942, it looked like Tuck’s legendary luck had finally run out. He had already moved on from Duxford to take charge of RAF Biggin Hill, just outside Bromley in Kent. Soon after, he was caught in cross-fire flying at low altitude close to Boulogne in northern France. His engine belched smoke and his windscreen was smeared with oil. Tuck was flying too low to be able to bail out, so he had no alternative but to crash-land in a French field.

  The Immortal Tuck was immediately taken into custody. He was moved to the prison camp Stalag Luft III where he stayed for more than two years. Unsurprisingly, Tuck was part of the group that planned what became known as the Great Escape. But just before the actual escape, Tuck was moved from Stalag Luft III to a satellite camp called Belaria, six miles away on the other side of the local town, Sagan.

  Bob Tuck and the others who were moved to Belaria, all of whom were suspected of actively planning an escape, cursed that they had missed the Great Escape by just a few days. In another way, however, this was Tuck’s Luck working its magic again. Seventy-six men escaped in the Great Escape, and all but three were recaptured. Fifty prisoners were then executed by the Germans including Roger Bushell, the key architect of the plan. Given his own role in the escape team and his powerful personality, there is little doubt that Tuck would have also been killed by the Germans had he played an active part in the original plan.

  Belaria was a bleak, isolated but well-guarded camp. Suddenly, at the end of January 1945, the prisoners were moved out of the camp and began marching through the deep snow in a south-westerly direction. At a farm in Upper Silesia, where the marching prisoners stopped for the night, Tuck and a fellow pilot, Zbishek Kustrzyński, managed to fool their German captors and escape. They worked their way east, supported largely by Russian slave labourers. They even fought alongside the Russians for a time. It was a long, tough journey, peppered with close encounters, but eventually the two escapers made it through Poland across the Russian border where they were able to phone the British Air Mission in Moscow. They were safe.

  In 1949, Tuck finally retired from the RAF after an astonishing service career but he continued to exhibit his flying skills as a test pilot. Eventually, he retired from that too and in 1953 he became a mushroom farmer in Kent. He was successful in business but spent much of the rest of his life as what might be called a Battle of Britain ‘professional’, endlessly touring, lecturing and writing about the war. His lectures were sometimes in tandem with the famous German pilot, Adolf Galland. One of the quirks of war was that these two men became great friends. They holidayed together and Tuck became godfather to Galland’s children. The irony was not lost on Tuck. When we interviewed him in 1984, in Ian Fleming’s former property overlooking Sandwich Bay in Kent, he said, ‘Many people think it is strange that we should be such good friends but when we met, we discovered we had a lot in common. Galland was never a Nazi, just a damned good pilot.’125

  Some of the less high-profile pilots from 257 Squadron also stayed in the RAF in the years after the Battle of Britain. Sergeant Pilot Reg Nutter was called up on the outbreak of war and was moved to 257 Squadron after his training. He flew 112 operational flights with his squadron before being moved to the training school at Hullavington as an instructor and, early the next year, to a similar role in Medicine Hat, Canada. After three years in Canada, Nutter saw active service again over Germany and Holland in 1944–45, before being attached to the famous Desert Rats as they advanced through Germany. He was awarded a DFC on September 14 1945 and the citation read, ‘This officer has completed numerous operations against the enemy in the course of which he has at all times displayed outstanding courage, fortitude and devotion to duty.’

  After the war, Nutter moved back to Canada where he had already met and married a Canadian woman. He became a conductor on the Canadian Pacific Railway, before training as a teacher. He died in Calgary on December 9 2014 in his nineties.

  The Canadian connection was also strong with other squadron pilots who had made less of a mark in the Battle of Britain. Charles Frizzell, who moved to Canada, and Jimmy Cochrane, both rather ignominiously dumped out of the Battle of Britain in the drunken car smash, continued with the RAF after they had recovered from their injurie
s.

  Frizzell, after returning to action several months after the incident, was rapidly promoted. He served with 91 Squadron doing shipping recces up and down the Channel. In 1942–43 he served in North Africa with 152 Squadron. In June 1943, Charles was posted to command 1676 Fighter Defence Flight at Gibraltar. He retired from the RAF in 1946, eventually moving to Canada and becoming a teacher.

  Over time, Frizzell became very disillusioned with what he called, ‘a sort of bogus romantic cult that has been built up about the Battle of Britain,’ but in the wider context he was clear. ‘It was a war. I think that sometimes it is necessary for a small minority of people to do unpleasant things in the form of killing people so that justice might prevail for the majority.’126

  Looking back, he thought that the Battle of Britain was something of a ‘jolly’. He said, ‘At night we were able to return to a comfortable mess or to divert ourselves with gin and gypsy girls – whose numbers were legion.’

  Frizzell felt that ‘war [was] a frightful folly. The tragedy is that when one is in touch with human folly, one is in touch with the infinite.’127

  Arthur Charles ‘Jimmy’ Cochrane, Frizzell’s fellow casualty in the car accident, was one of the 117 Canadians who flew in the Battle of Britain. Cochrane also returned to flying with conspicuous success. By 1942, he was leading 87 Squadron and, after some brilliant work in North Africa, was awarded the DFC. He and Frizzell were together in North Africa. The day after Cochrane received his DFC, March 31 1943, he crashed in the vicinity of Cap Bougeron, Tunis, and died.