by Tom Carver
Occasionally, Monty would send me, via my parents, stamps from his fan mail for my stamp collection. The stamps were always much bigger and more colourful than the drab British varieties and came from places like Paraguay and Madagascar that hovered at the very edges of my known world. The smaller and more insignificant the country the more impressive the stamps seemed to be. My friends and I would stare in wonder at the palm trees and the birds with vast wing-spans – a couple of the stamps had even managed to go halfway round the world without receiving a postmark, which my friend Garnett authoritatively said increased their value 100 times.
But it was the envelopes that attracted true awe: often the address said only “General Montgomery, somewhere near London, England”, or “Field Marshal hero of El Alamein, British Isles”. I would let my friends rub their grubby fingers reverently along the jagged slit of the envelopes, as they pictured the great general opening the letter over his morning toast and tea. Snotty, homesick, permanently hungry, our heads full of Latin gerunds and strange facts about county cricket, picked on by masters and older boys and with no possessions to our name except a tuck box and a few teddy bears, we could hardly conceive of anyone being so famous.
After the war ended, Monty had hoped that a grateful nation would give him some kind of reward for his services – after all, Queen Anne had once built Blenheim Palace for the Duke of Marlborough as a prize for a much more insignificant military campaign. In September 1945 he had appealed to the king’s private secretary, declaring, “I have nowhere which my stepsons and my own boy can come to and call ‘home’.” He had lost nearly all his possessions when an incendiary bomb destroyed the Portsmouth warehouse in which they were stored, and the only accommodation he owned were two campaign caravans that he had lived in for three years, from El Alamein to Germany.
His appeal was rejected, however, by a post-war government, which was both bankrupted and conscious of people’s fatigue. And so, grumbling about the miserly ingrates of Whitehall, Monty bought a dilapidated watermill and a skirt of boggy water meadows called Isington Mill on the River Wey in Hampshire. It was the first house he had ever owned. With his usual discipline, he assembled an army of gardeners, who turned the ancient unkempt meadows into a huge lawn where every blade was cut to regulation height and no mole was allowed to raise its dusty head.
By the time I was nine or ten and old enough to remember him, Monty had disappeared from public life and was living in solitary retirement in Hampshire with his housekeeper and cook, surrounded by mementos of his battles – his wife Betty, Richard’s mother, my grandmother, having died suddenly in 1938.
On Sunday exeats, my parents would pick me up from Dumpton and drive down to Isington Mill for Sunday lunch. Despite the lustre of fame that Monty’s achievements brought to our otherwise unremarkable family, I think my mother would have preferred a warmer, jollier type of grandfather for her children; but, since both of our natural grandfathers were dead, Monty was all we had.
His mystique no longer held much sway for my five older teenage brothers and sisters; they resented the way he ordered them around as if they were his soldiers and did all they could to get out of the Sunday visits. So usually it was just my parents and I who went to see him. I would spend two hours rolling around the back of our dilapidated Morris Minor, trying to read my Tintin books. Standing on his gravel drive, my father would prep me as my mother flattened down my hair and straightened me out.
“What are you going to say if he asks you?”
“That I want to be a soldier?”
“Good,” my father would say, reaching for the door bell.
As a boy, I was deeply impressed by the power Monty had once wielded. I used to stare slack-jawed at the black-and-white newsreels of the D-Day landings, which showed beaches teeming with landing craft, tanks, trucks, earth movers and hundreds of thousands of tiny figures sweating through the surf with their helmets and their backpacks. Above them the sky was congested with anti-barrage balloons and the puffs of the ack-ack. Then the scene would change and a small foxy-looking figure would appear, standing in some field with Churchill or hopping down from an aeroplane to greet Eisenhower. And the old-fashioned voice of the British Movietone News commentator would intone, “General Montgomery, the hero of El Alamein, has been summoned by Churchill to lead our invasion of Europe and to end this war once and for all…”
Isington Mill, the house in Hampshire that Monty bought after the war.
Courtesy of Douglas Glass
Monty outside one of the caravans, in which he lived for much of the war, and which he later installed in a shed in his garden
It was hard to connect this semi-mythic figure to the elderly person I would greet in the hallway, and yet he was unmistakably the same man. There were the same sharp features and the brisk, classless voice, incapable of any modulation below the imperative. At 80 years old, he still longed to be the focus of the world’s attention, and lunches would often consist of Monty boasting of how much better he would run the country than the imbeciles that were currently in charge.
One particular Sunday lunch I sat in the kitchen of Isington Mill watching Monty’s cook preparing the roast beef and listening with one ear to her complaints to the maid about Monty’s stinginess and with the other to the conversation coming through the open door of the dining room where lunch was in progress. Around the table were several rather forbidding-looking generals who had served under him in one or other of his campaigns and their wives, along with my parents.
I tried to follow the conversation, hoping for some nugget that I could take back to school and retell to my dormitory after lights out. The generals, with their perfectly laundered white handkerchiefs and their dress medals glittering on their jackets, seemed terrifyingly formal and grand – although one of them, I noticed, had a speck of paper tissue on his cheek where he must have nicked himself shaving. As I stared at him through the open door, I realised Monty was telling a story about his time as a young subaltern in the First World War.
“The first occasion I was ordered to go ‘over the top’, I rushed up the side of the parapet and immediately tripped over my sword scabbard,” Monty said with a dry laugh. “By the time I’d picked myself up and rushed forward again, half of my troop had been killed.” He then described how he had crawled into no man’s land to try to observe the enemy positions. It took only ten minutes for a sniper hiding in a tree to spot him.
“His first bullet went through my right lung and produced a large amount of blood,” he said. One of his soldiers, he explained, crawled forward to help. As the soldier tried to plug the hole in Monty’s chest with a field dressing, the sniper put a bullet through his head. The man’s body fell on top of Monty, pushing him down into the mud.
“The sniper kept firing at me. I got one more bullet in the left knee, but most of them hit the soldier. It was the dead man who saved my life,” he said to the table.
Enthralled by the story, I hadn’t noticed the maid nudging me. She was carrying ten small bone china cups on a silver tray. “You going to hand round the chocolates or not?”
It was my moment; I had been given the role of passing round the box of Black Magic with the coffee. I walked into the room behind the maid holding the black box out in front of me like the king’s sceptre. I went to Monty’s chair first. He grabbed me round the shoulders in his bony embrace.
“Dick’s son,” he stated.
Monty had an odd way of leaving out some words as if they were a waste of time. “Young Tom.” He avoided calling me his grandson because of course, strictly speaking, we were not blood relations. There were nods of approval from the grey-haired men.
“Finest men I ever fought with,” he said, waving his free hand in a sweep of benediction around the room and receiving back several indulgent smiles for me. I was then pushed off to circum-navigate the table, watched by the generals and their wives. Somehow in my nervousness, when I was about halfway round, the box came out of my hands and crashe
d to the floor.
I quickly sank under the table and scrabbled among the sharp trouser edges in search of errant walnut whirls and cream fudges. Shoes flicked in irritation as I stretched across them. I felt relieved to be under there in the strange forest of table legs and dark trousers where no one could see my burning cheeks.
One long face peered under the tablecloth to see what was going on and chuckled with amusement.
Then: “Get out, boy!” came the rasping voice. “Leave that to the staff and go outside. Find something to play with in the garden.”
It had been raining. There were two hours left before I had to be back at Dumpton for evensong. A cloud of gloom descended, as I knew that I would not be with my parents that night but in Dutton dormitory.
A shed stood at the far end of the garden. It was made of brand-new pine and looked slightly out of place amid the wet greenery. I pushed at the doors. In the weak autumn light, I could make out two small caravans nose to tail squeezed under the roof as if the barn had been built around them. One was a desert brown, the other battlefield green. I opened the door of the first. It was the size of a yacht’s cabin and smelt of the military, that hollow aroma of brass cleaner, dampness, leather and sweat. I walked gingerly around, slowly inspecting everything in turn. One end was taken up by a bed, a sink and a toilet. The bed was neatly made with blankets and a pillow as if ready to be mobilised one final time. A single picture hung on the wall. It was a portrait of an aristocratic-looking man in German uniform. Around his neck I noticed he wore the Iron Cross. I recognised him as Rommel, the “Desert Fox”, Monty’s greatest adversary.
A large folding desk stood open in the middle of the room. On the wall above the desk was a map covered in some kind of plastic sheeting which in turn was covered in dozens of lines and unfamiliar symbols. Half the lines were in green and half in red; some of them were unimpeded, others stopped suddenly, confronted by squares and thick Xs. I had read enough Commando mags to know that these were battle lines.
I lay down on the bed and imagined that the wind outside was the scream of Messerschmitts dive-bombing overhead. I stared at the map, trying to interpret the strange hieroglyphics. Night after night Monty must have lain in this same bed under the desert moon worrying about what Rommel was going to do next. I looked again at the picture; the German general was half smiling, and seemed to me to have quite a kind face.
Where had my father been in all this, I wondered. I knew that he had reached the rank of colonel, for that was how all the letters that arrived at home were addressed, to Colonel R.O.H. Carver OBE. But what had he done? Had he ever been to any of the strange names that I could see on the map: El Alamein, Mersa Matruh, Burg-el-Arab, Fuka? Had he been part of that long green line of advance that snaked along the length of North Africa from Cairo to Tunis? The only tangible evidence that he had fought in the war was a deep indentation a few inches above his right ankle which he said had come from a piece of shrapnel that had gone in one side of his leg and come out the other. My mother had once told me that he had escaped from a POW camp and lived in “a cave”.
Photograph courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London
The portrait of Rommel, by Wolfgang Willrich, which Monty hung on the wall of his caravan
As I willed the elusive markings on the map to come to life, I could hear my parents calling me back to the mill. On an impulse, I decided to add some of my own. Since the greens appeared to be winning, I joined in on their side. I found a green chinagraph in the desk and drew a few more lines on Monty’s battle plan, but instead of following the others, I pushed them out into the blue of the Mediterranean far away from the shore.
*
It wasn’t until many years later, when Monty was long dead and I was grown up, that my father showed a greater willingness to talk about his past. As I learnt what he had done, and the extraordinary adventures he had had, I began urging him to write down his experiences. I pointed out that the books that Monty had written about the war – The Path to Leadership, Normandy to the Baltic, El Alamein to the River Sangro – barely mentioned my father’s story. These were books full of battle orders, artillery plans, and lessons on how to fight a combined air and land war, all intended to nail Monty’s own place in history. And the many books, written by others about Monty, made no reference to my father either.
Finally, one winter in the late 1980s, my father gave in to my entreaties, retired to his study and worked away. As the first primroses and daffodils appeared in his garden below his study window, he announced that he had finished. The result was characteristically short, just twenty pages long. It was entitled “Behind the lines in Italy, a Personal Account of my time as a Prisoner of War in 1942/43”. He called it his “pamphlet”.
We got 200 copies printed privately and sent them around the extended family. My father was moved by the enthusiastic responses he received back from grandchildren and cousins. And yet, far from being a full rendering of what had happened, the pamphlet only hinted at further things unknown. It was a bloodless rendering of events and the hardships he’d endured. Like the campaign lines on the maps in the caravan, it concealed more than it revealed.
Then one weekend in the 1990s, while clearing out a shelf in his house, I came across an old metal cigarette case. The cigarette manufacturer’s markings had been rubbed away and smoothed by repeated handling, returning the tin to its original dark metallic brown. I opened it carefully as it looked as if the hinges were about to disintegrate.
The tin contained a small black Bakelite cap about an inch and a half wide, over the top of which someone had attached a roughly cut piece of Perspex with sticking plaster. Through the Perspex I could see a safety pin bent into the shape of an arrow and pushed down over what looked like a small brass coat button. As I turned the cap around trying to understand it, the safety pin suddenly came to life and began to move; I could see that it was not stuck down but floating on top of a second, even smaller upright pin. Underneath it, written on a piece of cardboard inside the cap, were the letters N, S, E and W. It was a homemade compass which I realised my father must have used to guide his way home through enemy lines.
In the bottom of the tin was a piece of carefully folded paper greyed by fingering. A map, or at least a copy of a map of what looked like a part of Italy.
When I showed my father my discoveries, he rummaged around in a box under his desk and pulled out a small notebook, bound in dark-green leather and no bigger than a packet of cigarettes. Like the tin, the leather was as smooth as glass to touch, and stained. I opened the cover slowly, fearful that the desiccated binding might snap in half. The pages, still faintly lined, pulled apart reluctantly; each one was covered in diminutive pencil handwriting, the words crammed tightly together. Some of the pages were heavily smudged; others appeared to be written in a kind of a code. This was his diary, my father explained, that he had kept during the summer and winter of 1943 while he was on the run.
A compass. A map. A diary. The lodestones of my father’s war. The tantalising keynotes of a story still only haltingly told…
2.
IN 1970, MY FATHER took me to see the Hollywood film Patton. My father never took any of us to the cinema – he considered places of public gatherings like cinemas and pubs to be slightly dissolute and “inappropriate” – but he decided that I needed to see Patton. I was nine years old. The American general had been Monty’s greatest rival on the Allied side; their arguments and antipathy for each other were legendary.
Being an American production, George Patton was portrayed in the film as a flawed but towering genius, whereas Monty came across as an English buffoon. He was played by a British comedy actor called Michael Bates who later starred in such classics as No Sex Please, We’re British, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum and Kamikaze in a Coffee Bath.
I sat on the creaking seats in Fleet Odeon, their red velour pockmarked with cigarette burns, staring up at the Stukas flying over the hot dusty souks, the American soldiers jumping in and
out of their jeeps and Patton striding among the ruins of Carthage.
I was mesmerised by the vast canvas of war, but beside me my father took each appearance by Monty in the film as a personal offence.
“That’s ridiculous,” he muttered, “Monty wasn’t like that at all.”
He grumbled softly at first, then louder and louder until people began to turn around in their seats. As Patton was leaving Italy and heading for the green cornfields of northern Europe and D-Day, my father decided we’d seen enough and I found myself being pushed past people out of the cinema and back onto the rainy high street.
“What a lot of rubbish,” he said in disgust.
His anger was all the more startling because my father so rarely displayed any strong emotion, especially not in public. I was bewildered at the time, annoyed not to be allowed to see the film through to the end. But, with hindsight, I can see why he found the caricatural portrayal of Monty so upsetting. Monty may have been prickly and difficult, but he was the only father figure that my father had.
*
In January 1926, my grandmother Betty Carver arrived for a winter holiday at Lenk in Switzerland with her two sons, Richard, my father, aged eleven, and his brother John, who was two years older. Their father, Oswald, had died a decade earlier, hit at close range by Turkish machine guns while leading his men across the scrubby fields above Gallipoli.
In the years that had followed, the memory of Oswald became sacred to Betty. The photos of him show a tall, athletic figure with dark good looks. He had attended Trinity Cambridge and won a blue rowing for the university. The following year he had rowed for Britain in the 1908 London Olympics in front of a huge home crowd. He was well off, handsome and mildly heroic.
