Where the Hell Have You Been?

by Tom Carver

  De Gregorio Donato

  Via Marco Aurelio Severino 33

  Naples

  It was April 1945 before Richard was fit enough to rejoin the war. By then, Monty and his Army Group had crossed the Rhine into Germany. My father joined his unit in Germany and happened to be in Belsen a few weeks after it had been liberated.

  *

  At 5.30 in the morning, I hear a scratching sound on the baby monitor that the carer has installed in his bedroom. I walk sleepily down the corridor to find my father sitting on the side of the bed. He complains that his feet feel cold, despite the heavy eiderdown.

  “I feel like a skeleton, like one of those poor people in the concentration camps,” he says.

  “What do you remember of the camp?” I ask him.

  He doesn’t say anything for some time. Then there’s a small break in the clouds and a memory emerges.

  “We posted photographs of the inmates and the conditions inside the camp in the nearby villages, but the Germans just shook their heads when they saw them. They didn’t believe it had happened, they thought it was all Allied propaganda.”

  It’s now daylight and he falls asleep as The Times lands with a smack on the gravel drive outside his window, carrying news from a world he no longer has the energy to care about.

  It is too late to go back to bed so I cross the corridor into his study, and in one of the boxes I find a copy of Monty’s visitors’ book that he kept in his caravan. Everyone who came to stay with him was told to leave an entry. I turn to the end and come across the signatures of four Germans. 3rd May 1945. General Admiral von Friedeburg, General Kinsel, Rear Admiral Wagner and Major Friedel: the four commanders who arrived unexpectedly that day at Monty’s headquarters on Luneburg Heath to discuss terms of surrender. Monty informed them that there were no terms: the surrender must be unconditional. They returned the next day and surrendered unconditionally; Monty must have told them to sign his visitors’ book at the same time, as if they were his house guests. Von Friedeburg killed himself in despair shortly afterwards.

  Three weeks later, on 24th May, Churchill called on Monty.

  “This record of military glories reaches its conclusion,” Churchill wrote in the visitors’ book. “The fame of the Army Group, like that of the Eighth Army, will long shine in history and other generations besides our own will honour these deeds and above all the character, profound strategy and untiring zeal of their commander who marched from Egypt through Tripoli, Tunis, Sicily and southern Italy and through France, Belgium, Holland and Germany to the Baltic and the Elbe without losing a battle or even a serious action.”

  After that entry, there are only blank pages; the “immortal march” of Monty’s army had ended and the visitors stopped coming. From Berlin a few weeks later, Monty sent a copy of the visitors’ book to his stepson (“To Dick Carver with all good wishes, B.L. Montgomery, Field Marshal”). He then journeyed into peacetime as a national hero, with ticker-tape parades, honorary degrees and the freedoms of distant cities that he had no intention of visiting.

  The surrender document, misdated 5th May 1945. It was actually signed on 4th May

  As for Richard, he had given little thought to how he was going to handle the blank pages of his future. Without a war to fight, life became more complicated. He could have chosen to take off his uniform. No one would have suggested that he hadn’t more than done his duty; he had fought all through North Africa, Italy, France and Germany. He was 31 and still young enough to start a new career – perhaps in architecture, the subject that he’d once hoped to study.

  For someone like Richard who had known only an imperial life, Britain after the war felt diminished and disorientating. Though the Allies had won, London had the air of a defeated city. Rubble covered the streets. The government was bankrupt and everything in the shops was rationed.

  He decided to stay in the army, with what was familiar, telling himself that he was simply continuing a career he had had before the war began, and hoping that his wartime achievements would be rewarded with promotion in peace. The army’s mission was to caulk the Empire’s leaky hull as best it could, and the first posting he received was to Egypt, a British colony that was rapidly becoming ungovernable.

  Richard felt he needed to make up for lost time “on the marriage front”. He was good-looking, well educated and carried a mild aura of reflected glory through his connection to Monty. He was also refreshingly free of the bravado and chauvinism that most army officers possessed. It wasn’t long before he fell in love.

  In Egypt, he met Julie O’Bryen, the daughter of a British navigation pilot, on the Suez Canal, a petite, nineteen-year-old blonde with a large captivating smile. They dated for a year and got married in Folkestone in 1947. Richard’s side was poorly represented at the wedding: his mother was dead, and his only brother John was far away in India. Monty had become chief of the Imperial General Staff, the highest post in the British army, inheriting the role from his old mentor Brooke. Richard assumed he would be too busy to turn up but to everyone’s surprise he appeared at the church, delivered by his spotless staff car with the pennants of field marshal and CIGS fluttering over the headlights.

  They took their honeymoon on Dartmoor. Julie stuck a series of small black-and-white photographs into an album, showing the two of them posing on horseback in a farmer’s yard. Richard looks tall and comfortable in the saddle while Julie looks nervous, as if she is not used to being around horses. And something about the way she holds the reins suggests a person in a hurry to get on with her life.

  The next page shows the interior of the cottage on the moor where they stayed. Julie took a photograph of each room; the bare-walled bedroom, the sitting room and the kitchen with an old iron range. Her handwriting is upright and careful, like a child’s.

  Richard and Julie had no chance to develop any kind of rhythm of married life, for straight after the honeymoon, he was posted to Kenya where the Kikuyu tribes were mounting a campaign of civil disobedience against British rule. He was put in charge of a company of sappers and ordered to build a road across the Serengeti from Nairobi to Lake Victoria to tighten the British military’s control. He lived in a tented encampment near Tsavo, with a thorn fence around it to keep the lions out at night. There was only one other officer in the camp: “Steve” Stephenson. Though Steve came from a more modest background than Richard, he played the role of the cultivated officer with greater adroitness and confidence. He too had recently got married – to a young Auxiliary Territorial Service sergeant called Audrey.

  One night, as the two of them sat outside their tents listening to the hyenas tussling on top of the termite mounds in the dark, Steve asked Richard a favour.

  “If anything happens to me, will you look after Audrey?”

  The request caught Richard by surprise: he didn’t know Steve that well and had never met Audrey. But he promised that he would; it was the decent thing to say.

  Back in Egypt, Julie pasted a photograph into her album of herself standing alone outside their army quarters in Ismailia. “Married five months” says the caption. In the next photo, labelled December 1947, Richard reappears by her side dressed in a pinstripe suit. Julie’s bulge is now obvious.

  Richard made it back to Ismailia just in time for the birth in April. They called the son Christopher and gave him the middle name of Oswald, the name of Richard’s father who had been killed at Gallipoli. Richard was thrilled – the blank pages in his life were beginning to fill in – and he returned to Kenya, able to imagine some kind of a future. One week later, as he was supervising a troop of men whitening stones to mark out the side of his new road, a Masai runner appeared with a telegram ordering him to return to Ismailia immediately.

  There is a photo of Julie lying in her hospital bed with ten-day-old Christopher beside her; she is staring intently into his barely open eyes as if she can hardly believe he exists, oblivious to the camera.

  Next comes a photo of the outside of the hospital of St Vin
cent de Paul in Ismailia showing Julie’s corner room with an ornate iron veranda. The heavy dark shutters on the windows are closed to keep out the heat. There is an ominous absence of people in the picture. At this point in the album, Richard’s handwriting takes over. The next page carries the caption “Last photos of Julie taken on Sunday April 18th”, but eight small dabs of glue are all that remain on the heavy black page. The photos have been torn out.

  The images resume with a picture of her grave: “Julie Aida Carver, beloved young wife of Major ROH Carver, died Ismailia 9th May 1948”. She had died from undiagnosed complications caused by the childbirth.

  It seems as if that is the end of the photos, but then on the next page, there’s a series of photographs of Julie posing in a swimsuit on the beach in Devon, presumably taken on the honeymoon. If they had been among the other honeymoon photos they would have looked quite normal but after what’s just gone before, they have an unreal quality and the sunlight seems to dance off the water a little too brightly.

  Christopher’s christening was delayed until after the funeral. Without his mother, Christopher is held instead in his christening gown by his grandmother, Julie’s mother, and surrounded by a phalanx of stern-looking female relatives. Richard stands uncertainly off to one side, looking bereft.

  Wedged into the spine on this page I found a description of Julie written by Richard shortly after she’d died.

  “She had a lovely oval face and sparkling hazel eyes. A small and beautifully shaped mouth which I picture framing the word ‘more’ after I had kissed her… she loved me with an intensity which she admitted was almost frightening… and we motored around Dartmoor singing ‘The first time I saw you’ to each other. If ever I should die, she once wrote, with my last thoughts I would fly back to those wild moors hand in hand with you.”

  Julie’s death left Richard emotionally marooned. It seemed that no relationship ever lasted. He’d lost his father at two. At eleven, a bristly army major had abruptly taken his mother away. Ten years later she had died. Then came six years of fighting which had claimed the lives of many of his colleagues. When peace returned he re-engaged his heart once more and fell immediately in love – only to lose Julie on the threshold of their new life together. The accumulated grief nearly flattened him. He became increasingly withdrawn.

  During that winter in the cave, Richard had felt a strong bond with Donato the dignified Neapolitan. Here was a friendship, unexpected in its origin, which might have been able to weather all vicissitudes. After they were separated at Atessa, Donato appealed to Richard not to disappear – you know very well that here there are two brotherly arms, a heart and a house always open to you – but his letter appears to have gone unanswered. My father did not have the energy to keep their relationship alive.

  Despite being raised by a single parent, Richard had little clue how to be one himself. Since he couldn’t take Christopher back to the camp in the Serengeti, the army sent them both home, where he handed the baby over to Julie’s mother and reported for duty at the Ministry of Defence.

  A year later, in June 1949, he received another telegram. Steve, his friend from the Serengeti, had died from a massive heart attack, apparently brought on by his war wounds. At his funeral, from the back of the church, he stared at the young widow, wondering what he should say to her. Beside her in the pew he could see a two-year-old boy.

  But for his sense of duty, he would have walked out of the church and not looked back. “Look after her,” Steve had asked of him. When the service was over, he introduced himself to Audrey outside the church.

  “I was a colleague of Steve’s. From Kenya,” he said. He told her how sorry he was to hear of Steve’s death and wondered what Steve had told her. “I have a boy too. He’s about the same age as yours.”

  “They could play together,” said Audrey. “Rex would like that. He needs a friend to distract him.” She didn’t tell him that she was also pregnant with Steve’s second child.

  Audrey’s family lived in a cramped terraced house near Bournemouth that backed onto salt marshes. The family kept chickens in their back yard and sold the eggs to supplement their income. Her father taught art at Bournemouth College and scraped a living as an artist. Audrey used her widow’s pension to buy an abandoned fisherman’s cottage on the banks of the River Avon.

  The first time Richard came down to visit her, she asked him to accompany her on an expedition round the boatyards. He was startled at the sight of this pregnant woman lifting up tarpaulins and boat covers and scouring the boatsheds in search of timber and paint that she could use to renovate her cottage. But her mildly bohemian life and her small cottage reminded him of Betty’s cottage on the Thames, and her spirit and energy lightened the grim ration-bound atmosphere of England. He admired the way she revelled in life despite the strain of raising two tiny children and a pain in her back that the doctors seemed unable to cure.

  Sitting at his desk in Whitehall, he started to write to her during his lunch hours.

  After she gave birth in February 1950, Audrey asked him to be a godfather. Using his god-daughter as a excuse, his visits became more frequent. She could see that he was holding many things back and assumed it was the war that had made him like that. A lot of young men carried that slightly distant stare, as if they weren’t fully participating in the present. She tried to bring him out of himself with activity. She got him to help her paint the walls; they went sailing together in her little dinghy with the old canvas sails and took their three children up onto Hengistbury Head where they picnicked among the sand dunes and chased the oystercatchers. Audrey began to fall in love.

  She teased Richard about his puritan habits; she noticed the way he endlessly reused the same piece of paper, folding it over and over, rubbing out and then rewriting in pencil on the same space.

  “It’s as if you’re still in POW camp,” she said laughing.

  Audrey saw no point in denial for the sake of it. She was frugal because she had no choice; she had no money, whereas Richard’s austerities belonged to some kind of moral framework, since he had an officer’s salary and a private income. They were very different characters, like Betty and Monty had been. Over the Easter weekend of 1950, Richard asked Audrey if she would consider getting married. Audrey turned him down. She said she wasn’t ready, for Steve was still in her thoughts every day.

  “You must understand,” he wrote the next day to try to explain his behaviour, “that I have not had much experience of women. Having no sisters, my mother having died before the war and having only lived with Julie a matter of months that is probably why I failed to appreciate what your reaction would be. I did not think of how you must have a longing for security and stability after the storm you have weathered and see that is your little house. Whereas I come along and offer to uproot you even before you are in and give you that Army life again which you probably hated.”

  But a month later, Audrey just as abruptly changed her mind. Without a husband she knew that she would always be living on the verge of poverty. The only job she had done was drive lorries in the blackouts and she had two children to look after. They were both still dealing with the ghosts of previous marriages and did not know each other well, but they would make it work somehow. Richard was delighted.

  When Richard informed his stepfather that he was marrying again, Monty replied he didn’t see the point. Like Richard, Monty was struggling to find his feet in the post-war world. His brusqueness and lack of tact, endurable in war, could no longer be overlooked. His tenure as chief of the Imperial General Staff was not a success and after just two years he was shuffled to the Continent to be commander-in-chief for the Western European Union, a forerunner of NATO.

  “I was summoned to Monty’s office yesterday,” Richard wrote to Audrey in June. “He had our engagement notice in front of him and suggested that I should put in his name if I was going to say ‘son of etc’. Also he said that I must say you are a widow ‘to protect you’, otherwise people w
ill think you are divorced!”

  They were married on 25th September 1950. Monty turned up once again, this time walking down the aisle with Audrey’s parents, his presence making front-page news in the Christchurch Times.

  Richard and Audrey at their wedding, September 25th, 1950 with Monty in the background

  *

  One day during that summer, Richard got a phone call from Jim Gill saying he was in town.

  “On Wednesday I gave lunch to Jim Gill and his wife who are here on a short visit from South Africa,” he wrote to Audrey. “I saw him last on Dec 1st 1943 when we parted behind the German lines. He looked a bit fatter than at that time, but otherwise much the same. He had left his wife in England and gone off to Italy for a week to re-visit the old haunts.

  “He found the cave and Donato’s mother was at the cottage, but Donato himself had disappeared rather mysteriously and no-one professed to know where he was. Of course, he had great difficulty getting to these places and said he was astonished at the distances we had walked…”

  The Dean too had been back to Italy and was eager to tell Richard about how he had visited some of the places that he and Richard had walked through.

  “I had dinner with ‘The Dean’ and his sister last night. They were most enthusiastic about their Italian trip and gave me the address of a convent hostel above Florence where they stayed, which sounded very good. They went by car and took a young English priest with them to act as guide and interpret. It must have been a very funny party. The Dean offered to give us a coffee percolator, similar to his own, as a wedding present.”

  Richard suggested to Audrey that they go to Italy for their honeymoon. They went to Florence, Pisa, Portofino, Orta, Maggiore and Baveno but they do not seem to have gone anywhere with any connection to his time in the war. With his compass and his makeshift map he had walked unscathed through some of the most well-known parts of Italy. But in the photograph album that remains of their honeymoon, the only pictures of any Italians are the staff of the Hotel Sempione in Baveno. The De Gregorio family are nowhere to be seen.