by David Niven
There, stark naked and strapped to the foot of my bed was a pillar of High Society. Thrashing him with great concentration with a birch, was a large-red-haired lady wearing a black bra, black gauntlets and black thigh boots…
‘Mercy, mistress.’
‘Mercy, mistress,’ he squealed as the birch rose and fell.
The little dog sniffed at his heels. Nobody saw me so I left quietly and went to a movie. When I came back later, there was no trace of the activity except for a small puddle in the drawing room. Philip promised to reduce my rent if he lent my room to anyone in the future.
Being the owner of a well-known movie face has opened all sorts of doors. It has also closed a few, but I have had the chance to meet people whom I would only have read about if I had been a successful bank clerk or a well-to-do butcher.
The last weekend before I went to Tidworth, I was invited to the home in Kent of Sir Adrian and Lady Baillie, Leeds Castle. Here, I was to see some of the big wheels of Government at play. David Margesson was Chief Whip of the Conservative party and later, Secretary of State for War. Geoffrey Lloyd was Minister of Transport and ‘Crinks’ Johnson was Head of the Liberal party.
Individually charming and for all I knew, performing their tasks with the greatest ability, as a group they depressed me.
I had a feeling that they had no right to eat and drink and dress for dinner, to make small’talk and gossip like ordinary people. I was quite unreasonably shocked that they were not locked in their offices for the weekend, working tirelessly to find ways to finish the war before it got properly started.
For,E190 I bought a Hillman Minx. With the petrol ration of a few gallons a month, its tiny consumption would at least allow’me some freedom. I spent my last night in London at the Cafe de Paris, hoping to see the W.A.A. F. again, but she did not show up. The next afternoon, I put on my new uniform, threw my baggage onto the back seat of the Hillman and headed out on the Great West Road.
It was a cold, wet, windy and altogether miserable winter’s evening when I stopped the car on a hilltop on Salisbury Plain. Woodpigeons were homing into the dark isolated clumps of firs, the sodden turf on either side of the road had been chewed up by tanks. Below me lay Tidworth…acres and acres of Victorian Barrack squares in all their red-brick horror. Grey slate roofs glistened in the drizzle. A band of blue smoke hung above the place and the sound of bugles rose.
With every mile that Tidworth had come nearer, my depression had increased. ‘What have you done?’ I asked myself. ‘Nobody asked you to come—they even told you not to…you hate the Army…you certainly are not very brave and you don’t want to get hurt…you’ve thrown away a wonderful life and career in Hollywood…you’re going to miss all that, you know…why did you do it?…are you sure it was not just to show off?’
I put my head on the steering wheel and warm tears of self-pity pricked my eyeballs. After a while, I drove downhill.
The Second Battalion was a motor training battalion. I was, by at least eight years, the oldest of the subalterns under training and being an ex-regular but knowing less than the others, a bit of a freak. It didn’t take long to catch up. All too soon, I realised that in the intervening years, there had been pitifully few innovations. We now formed threes instead of fours; the Lewis light automatic had been replaced by the Bren; a few small Bren-carriers with tracks had been added, and instead of marching into battle, we were now driven there in trucks. Once there, we were required to perform in much the same way as before.
Jimmy Bosvile was an excellent Commanding Officer. Dick Southby, my Company Commander, was first class as was Mark Kerr, the Adjutant.
The officers came from all corners of the British Isles, the men recruited almost exclusively from London with a preponderance from the East End. Conscripts, particularly cockney ones, were, I soon discovered, very different from the professional peacetime Jocks of the Highland Light Infantry and it took me a while to get used to the grumbling of bored soldiers who resented being pulled out of good jobs and warm homes to train in acute discomfort for a war they didn’t believe would ever come to anything.
Jimmy Bosvile made it clear that I was earmarked for the First Battalion which was already on the Belgian border, and in the meanwhile, I settled down to a deadening routine of teaching men to drive trucks and to march and march and march…
A tall flaxen-haired Danish model, a nymphomaniac of heroic proportions, came down from London most weekends and I installed her in a cottage in a nearby village. The Great Dane did not pack a prodigious intellectual punch but her bed, though every bit as tiring, was a welcome change from spending cold frustrating nights chasing non-existent German parachutists all over Salisbury Plain. I introduced her to a rather dubious Jimmy Bosvile…he was convinced she was a spy.
A few days’ leave came my way in February and I spent them at Ditchley. Winston Churchill was there with Mrs. Churchill. Also Brendan Bracken, his trusted lieutenant, and Anthony Eden.
I arrived in uniform just in time for dinner—the meal had, in fact, already been announced and a move was being made in the direction of the dining room. Nancy Tree took me by the hand. ‘Come and sit next to me,’ she said, ‘it’s too late for introductions.’
We were twenty in number and just as we were about to sit down, Churchill spotted me from the far end of the table. I had heard before that he was an ardent movie-goer but I was unprepared for what was to come. He marched the whole length of the dining room and shook me by the hand.
‘Young man,’ he growled, ‘you did a very fine thing to give up a most promising career to fight for your country.’
I was conscious that the great and the near-great in the room had remained standing and were listening with interest.
I stammered some inane reply and Churchill continued with a twinkle, ‘Mark you, had you not done so—it would have been despicable!’ He marched back to his seat.
After dinner Churchill talked and expounded on every subject under the sun. Eden took issue with him on several occasions but Bracken, always so opinionated on his own, was very subdued in the presence of the Champion. After church on Sunday, Churchill requisitioned me for a walk round the walled garden.
He talked at great length about vegetables and the joy of growing one’s own. He made it clear that before long, rationing would become so severe that ‘every square inch of our island will be pressed into service’. He questioned me about the problems of a junior officer in the Army and listened most attentively to my answers. It saddens me greatly that I had the enormous good fortune to have several of these ‘garden tours’ with this unique human being and that I remember so little of what he actually said.
That first weekend he extolled the virtues of Deanna Durbin, ‘a formidable talent’, and whenever he spoke of Hitler, he referred to him either as ‘Corporal Hitler’ or as ‘Herr Schickelgruber’.
Ronnie Tree asked me if I could arrange an occasional private showing of a movie for Churchill. ‘He loves films but he doesn’t want to go out in public to see them for obvious reasons.’ The next morning I got busy and on the last evening of my leave, I booked a projection room in Soho and obtained a copy of the latest Deanna Durbin musical. I installed a bar in the projection room and gave a small dinner in the private room of a nearby restaurant before the showing.
The Trees and Eden came to dinner. Churchill was detained at the Admiralty but he joined us for the show. When he arrived, he accepted a large liqueur brandy, lit a cigar and settled happily down in his seat. Half way through the film, whispering started at the back and I saw that Churchill was leaving. I followed him out and he thanked me kindly for my efforts but said that ‘something important’ had come up and he must return to the Admiralty.
The next day the headlines were ecstatic. Churchill had given the order for H.M. S. Cossack to enter the Josling Fjord ‘to board with cutlasses’ the German naval auxiliary Altmark and free three hundred British prisoners—seamen of merchant ships sunk by the Graf Spee.
>
The phoney war continued and the deadening boredom of the training battalion melted into that which I had found so intolerable in the Citadel Barracks, Dover…I felt I had never been away.
New battalions were being formed but I still waited for my posting to the First Battalion in France. Suddenly at the beginning of May, all hell broke loose. Norway fell, Holland and Belgium were invaded and Churchill became Prime Minister.
By the end of the month, our First Battalion were fighting desperately in Calais with their backs to the Channel, as a rearguard, protecting the evacuation from Dunkirk. I was ordered to standby to move there with two hundred replacements. Events moved too quickly. By June 4th the last troops had left Dunkirk, and our entire gallant First Battalion was wiped out—all killed or taken prisoner.
My brother decided that this was the moment to get married to a beautiful South African from Durban, Doreen Platt.
After their three-day honeymoon ended, he was sent out to the Eighth Army in the desert and did not see his wife again till he came back in one piece six years later. Miraculously, the marriage also survived.
I was shown an interesting document by Mark Kerr, calling for volunteers for a new ‘elite force’ of a highly secret nature. There followed qualifications about age and questions about liability to air- and sea- sickness.
‘I think it must be parachuting,’ said Mark. ‘I heard rumours that they are forming something like that.’
‘Jesus!’ I said. ‘I don’t want any part of that.’ But the Tidworth boredom prevailed and ‘anything to make a change’, I put my name down.
It turned out to be something equally alarming…the beginning of the Commandos.
I was accepted and found myself being interviewed by Colonel Dudley Clarke at the War Office.
He told me the whole conception of the quick cut and thrust of raids on the enemy coastline. He had some special ideas, he said, which he might disclose later. In the meanwhile, I was to report to a prohibited area in Scotland—Lochailort Castle in the Western Highlands for special training with the other volunteers.
Before leaving, I made a quick but fruitless reconnaissance of the Cafe de Paris in the hopes of seeing ‘the W.A.A.F.’ who I could not get out of my mind, and then fulfilled a noisy, bruising late-night rendezvous with the Great Dane. Volunteers usually fall into two groups. There are the genuinely courageous who are itching to get at the throat of the enemy, and the restless who will volunteer for anything in order to escape from the boredom of what they are presently doing.
There were a few in my category but most of the people I was thrown together with were made of sterner stuff.
Bill Stirling, Brian Mayfield and the Everest climber, Jim Gavin, were the founder members of the group. They were lately recovered from being depth-charged almost to death while returning in a submarine from some secret operation on the coast of Norway. Other instructors were David Stirling,↓ who later collected a record three D.S.O.s for desert raids deep behind the enemy lines, ‘Mad Mike’ Calvert, the demolition expert; Lord Lovat, who became the great Commando leader of the Dieppe Raid and the Normandy landings, where he also lost half his stomach; Colonel Newman who collected a Victoria Cross when he raided St. Nazaire and blew up the dock gates; the highly decorated Freddie Chapman who spent three and a half years behind the Japanese lines in the Malayan jungle; and two very formidable Shanghai police, Mr. Sykes and Mr. Fairbairn, who concentrated on teaching us a dozen different ways of killing people without making any noise.
≡ The younger brother of Bill.
Volunteers of all ranks came from every conceivable outfit and were a tough adventurous group prepared for any hardship. Mixed with us, for a while, were the semimutinous remains of the independent companies, defeated in Norway and now awaiting either absorption into the Commandos or disbandment. The Regimental Sergeant Major of this rugged conglomeration was a huge man, brought by Brian Mayfield and Bill Stirling from their parent regiment, the Scots Guards. The first morning I was at Lochailort, this splendid creature passed me, ramrod straight and moustache bristling. He let fly a tremendous salute which I acknowledged. He replied to this with an unmistakable and very loud Bronx cheer or common raspberry. I spun round as if shot and shouted after him, ‘Sergeant Major!’
‘SAH!’
‘Come back here!’
‘SAH!’
He came back, halted and snapped off another salute.
‘Did you make that rude noise?’
‘YESSIR!’
‘Why, may I ask?’
‘Because you look such a cunt in a Rifle Brigade hat—SAW
Only then did I catch on—it was John Royal of Green Beer fame!’ While I gaped at him he said, ‘I heard you were coming…I have a room in a crofter’s cottage, name of Lachlan, just behind the kirk in the village—see you there this evening…SAH!’
Another Scots Guards salute and he was gone.
John’s cottage was a godsend. Every evening, I repaired there and tried to forget my aching, bruised body and my ‘fleabag bed’ on the hard wooden floor of aloft, shared with forty or fifty others.
John, after his problems in India, had found it impossible to obtain a commission so he had joined the Scots Guards as a guardsman and within a few months had risen to his present dizzy height. Later he became a parachutist and at last got back his commission as a glider pilot. He was killed at Arnhem.
After two months running up and down the mountains of the Western Highlands, crawling up streams at night, and swimming in the loch with full equipment, I was unbearably fit. I spoke to Bill Stirling about my problem and he, most understandingly, allowed me forty-eight hours’ leave in London to rectify the situation.
I visited the little village sweet shop which doubled as post office and sent a telegram to the Great Dane.
ARRIVING WEDNESDAY MORNING WILL COME STRAIGHT TO FLAT WITH SECRET WEAPON.
The Great Dane lived in Swan Court and I went there as soon as the night train from Glasgow had deposited me in London.
I was about to ring the bell when I was tapped on the shoulder. A major and two sergeants of the Military Police had materialized from nowhere.
‘Come with us, please,’ said the major.
‘Why? What’s the matter?’
‘I couldn’t say—my superior wants to see you.’
I was taken in a military car to a building in St. James’s Street almost opposite Boodle’s and shown into an office where sat a man in a blue suit. He didn’t look very friendly.
‘M. I.5 would like to ask you one little question,’ he said grimly. ‘You are a member of the most secret outfit in the British Army: you are in training in a Prohibited Area; you have sent a message in code to an enemy alien: WHY?’
I said, ‘Sir…that’s not code—that’s fucking.’
I explained the circumstances and finally persuaded him that all was well. He melted a little but said that he would investigate the whole matter further. The upshot of it was that although I spent my holiday as planned with his daughter, the Great Dane’s father was discovered to be working in the Ministry of Supply in a department closely connected with the organisation of convoys at sea. He wag removed.
By September, I was sent back to Colonel Dudley Clarke who told me that I had been promoted to Captain and was now the liaison officer between M.0.9—the War Office department which was responsible for the Commandos and their operations—and the units themselves. When at the War Office, I shared a desk with a portly amiable captain who coped tirelessly and uncomplainingly with the mountainous paper work—Quintin Hogg—now Lord Chancellor of Great Britain. The rest of the time, I was on the move. A weekend leave at Ditchley provided me with a second tour of the walled garden with Winston Churchill, now Prime Minister.
He asked me what I was doing at the moment so, as we walked, I filled him in on the exciting prospects of the Commandos.
He stopped by a greenhouse and said, ‘Your security is very lax…you shouldn’t be telling me t
his.’ He was always a superb actor but to this day I don’t know whether or not he was joking.
The first big raid was on Guernsey. We trained in the Isle of Wight. R.A.F. crash boats were used because landing craft had not yet been built. It was a success and a few bemused prisoners were taken out of their beds. One party made a landing by mistake on Sark which had no Germans on it at all. They were invited to the nearest pub by the locals.
The Battle of Britain was now in full swing as Goering tried to break the back of the R.A.F. as a prelude to invasion.
As the battles over London and the south and east coasts [-] suddenly disapp[-] Billy Fiske, tic first [-] killed in World War II, died flying a Spirfire, with [-] squadron. The phoney war was over with a vengance.
Dudley Clarke switched the role of Commandos from offence to defence and we trained to be overrun by the itwaders and then to form the nucleus of an under rear-end movement.
—radon was being heavily bombed and moves we—[-] the minds of the civilians off their [-]. At the National Gallery, for [-] to relax and forget what [-], eminent musicians gave free lunch-time [-] its.
[-] advantage of this and on [-], I walked [-] at Office and wandered roumi a couple of [-] ties. From a third, I heard a cello being played by an expert. I watctcd her complete concentration and bathed myself in the haunting sounds for several minutes before I realised that a few feet away, and totally engrossed, stood—‘the W.A.A. F.’
Almost guiltily, I stared at her. At close quarters and under the overhead lighting of the gallery she was even more beautiful than I had remembered and so sweet looking and gentle.
When the music ended she ‘did not move: she stood quite still, lost in the beauty of what she had heard. People applauded and the cellist picked up her things and left. Still the W.A.A.F. did not move. When there was only two of us left in the gallery, she looked up and noticed me.
