Where the Hell Have You Been?

by Tom Carver

  Having given Richard his account of their adventures, the Dean suggested that Richard write up his own version before he forgot. Richard took out the miniscule green notebook that he’d carried with him on the run and copied his account into a school exercise book with a wine-red cover. At the entry for 24th November 1943 – the day that the German patrol came looking for them in the cave – he stuck in a studio photo of Donato with a gauzy background of Tuscan hills behind. Donato’s face with its small neat beard is turned slightly away, but his eyes look straight at the camera.

  Two years later, in 1952, the army ordered Richard back to Ismailia for a second tour of duty. It was nearly a year before the situation in Egypt was considered safe enough for Audrey and the children to join him. By then she had given birth to twins. “I know life will be full and happy with our children my darling,” Audrey wrote on 11th February 1953, “and there will be no time to grieve but always my love for you will underline the absence of your physical presence and I shall not feel complete until we are together again.”

  Richard was also desperate for them to be reunited and wrote back frequently, sometimes three or four times in a week. Eventually, she arrived after a gruelling journey by sea with five children. It cannot have been easy for either of them living in the camp where he and Julie had met and lived together. Richard barely mentioned Julie to the family, which only increased the presence of her ghost. He found it easier to withdraw his memories into some private space, inaccessible to anyone else. Audrey did the opposite, bringing Steve up in conversation as much as possible as she tried to find a way to entwine the memory of him with her new life. She wore the wedding ring Steve had given her just below Richard’s ring, so that I grew up assuming that all widows wore two rings of different golds.

  *

  In July 1958, the Ministry of Defence told Richard that they had an important mission for him. The news at first came as a shock: the posting was on Christmas Island in the Pacific Ocean, where Britain was testing its first generation of nuclear bombs. Knowing his hunger for promotion, they stroked his ego: it’s a good career move; you’ll be the senior army officer on the island, in charge of protecting the nuclear scientists. They played on his patriotism: this is the secret weapon that will keep Britain at the centre of world affairs and a force to be reckoned with; we need men like you to help secure our place at the top table, they said.

  The posting would be for two years and unaccompanied. We’re not set up for wives or families, they told him bluntly.

  The newspapers were full of descriptions of this heroic new frontier. “H BOMB PUTS BRITAIN ON LEVEL TERMS.” “BRITAIN’S EMERGENCE AS TOP-RANKING POWER.” The breathless articles described how each bomb was suspended below four helium balloons and detonated in the air with scientific accuracy. Clean, technological and devastating, the nuclear bomb is a fitting symbol for the Age of the Common Man, said the editorials.

  In time, Richard would learn that Britain was trying to become a nuclear superpower on the cheap. The soldiers on the island had been close to mutinying because of their poor diet and jerry-built accommodation; the “miracle bombs” were crude devices and the wondrous technological balloons only old barrage balloons left over from the war.

  Audrey longed for him to forsake his duty and stay with his family but knew that it was not in his nature and so she did not ask. They spent their final night together at Carol Mather’s parents’ large house overlooking Wimbledon Common. In the morning, Audrey drove him down to Heathrow.

  As the plane taxied down the runway, Audrey waved a yellow umbrella from the spectators’ enclosure. Audrey very good about it right up to the end, a very gallant woman.

  The BOAC flight went first to New York, then stopped briefly to refuel in a San Francisco shrouded in mist, before finally heading out over the Pacific to Honolulu. The next morning, he caught an RAF Hastings plane on to Christmas Island. The isolation of the atoll felt immediately familiar.

  “I find I am living in the Task Force Command mess,” he wrote on his first evening with evident satisfaction. “A delightful place looking straight out to sea.”

  There were ten officers in the Task Force Command mess. Each night they would dress for dinner and gather for a chota-peg on the mess balcony and stare out over the unplumbed sea. The distances were mesmerising; the closest continent was 5,000 miles in any direction. The old hands pointed out that they were balancing on a spike of coral one mile high.

  Richard “talking to Corporal Simpkins in the Corporals’ Club” – during the visit by the Duke of Edinburgh to Christmas Island in April 1959

  “When the early tests happened, everyone was afraid that the blast waves might snap the coral’s slender stem, sending the island and everyone on it plunging to the bottom.”

  They all laughed together at the absurdity of the idea. And yet it was apt. They had all lived through the war and knew that nothing lasted; life was a slender stem that could be swiftly severed. But these were emotions that they could not discuss with each other. Richard found the indirectness of their interaction comforting. Here on this atoll his relationships with others could be kept at an undemanding level; no one challenged his equilibrium.

  The month before he arrived, there’d been three nuclear tests on the island – more than ever before – and it seemed like the programme was accelerating, but it wasn’t. Eisenhower and the Russians had agreed to a moratorium on nuclear testing and England had quickly followed suit. Richard asked whether he should come home, but the Ministry said that he should continue with his mission as normal. He was to supervise the building of the airfield, the roads and the flying-boat port. Britain had every intention of resuming the tests once the moratorium was lifted, the MOD told him.

  In fact, the moratorium offered a convenient way to close the programme without the embarrassment of pleading penury. Soon the scientists began to leave, and the stream of MPs from London and American admirals from Okinawa dried up. Before long, the only visitors were the black frigate birds and the storm petrels that floated in on the ocean currents, resting for a few days on this dot in the undulating blanket of endless sea. The only indications that there had ever been nuclear tests were the bodies of the fish and birds that continued to wash up on the beaches for several weeks afterwards, killed by the blast’s shock waves.

  Richard moved away from the officers’ mess to camp on the coral:

  I have moved my tent to the edge of the sea and now hear the surf continuously and can see the broad Pacific in all lights; sunset, moonlight and sunrise. At high tide the sea comes to within 10 yards of my tent and about six feet below the level of it down a steep little bank of broken coral. It is really very lovely and at night wonderfully peaceful. I am sending some shells home by a ship.”

  He had returned to the cave. He spent his days striding over the hard coral in long khaki shorts, his skin turning red, then brown then black in the blinding sun. If he wondered to what purpose his new asphalt runway and the freshly painted concrete accommodation blocks would be put, he did not confide such doubts in his diaries. He was content. At weekends, he snorkelled slowly around the reefs and lagoons staring at the tropical fish, and bobbed on the swell in fishing boats catching wahoo and tuna.

  At home, Audrey struggled to cope with the demands of five children under the age of twelve. She was exhausted by the constant rounds of winter flus, coughs, measles, adenoids and accidents but tried hard to keep her letters sounding upbeat.

  The family’s only proof that Richard was alive were letters and the occasional coconut, a fruit almost unknown in 1950s England outside the coconut shies of travelling fairs. Each one had the name of a child and our address painted in white road-marking paint around the coconut’s tummy with two rows of brightly coloured stamps glued firmly on the hairy head. When the postman pulled one out of his tattered postbag with a flourish, it’d be greeted with squeals of delight and thrown from one child to the next, held and admired. There was intense discussion about the
journey it had taken; the twins imagined the coconuts sitting on the deck of a dhow as it made its way through the shark-infested waters of the Pacific.

  Richard returned home in November 1959, after fourteen months away. I was born one year later. In his absence the family had been forced to adjust to being without a father, and he made little attempt to reassert his authority. He maintained the façade of the affable, courteous army officer who enjoyed talking politics and religion, but behind it, Richard the person was becoming increasingly hard to find. He had returned from Christmas Island, only to absent himself in other ways.

  The 60s washed over the family, turning my older brothers and sisters from curly-headed eight-year-olds into surly, hormonal teenagers who played their Beatles records too loud and ignored their father’s orders to be home by midnight. They crashed motorbikes and flunked exams. Richard did not understand the social revolution that was going on and saw their rebellion only as further evidence of his own irrelevancy.

  Christmas Island did not deliver the hoped-for promotion. He felt he had failed to produce a career of any substance, especially when measured by the yardstick of his stepfather. Monty, the one person who might have intervened on his behalf, was of no use. He had retired from public life a disappointed man and lived alone at Isington Mill, absorbed by his own past.

  Audrey and the six children – and Sally, the dog

  One day in 1966, Richard found himself running the welfare and administration records at the Royal Engineers Records Office outside Brighton. He was no longer in charge of any soldiers, just their paper records. He decided to resign. After 30 years in the army, he had no idea what to do next. He thought vaguely of becoming a vicar but Audrey, who had no intention of becoming a vicar’s wife, adamantly refused. In October, he interviewed with Clark’s Shoes. In December, he discussed the possibility of joining Unilever. In January, he decided to become a teacher. He was offered a post teaching physics and maths at Marlborough public school and given one week’s training.

  In the teachers’ common room, he struggled to relate to the young socialist teachers who argued over whether boarding schools in the Soviet Union were preferable to the English public-school system. The Empire was considered an embarrassment and no one seemed to believe any longer in God. The Second World War – the defining experience of his life – was now just part of the curriculum. The school assumed that as a military man he would be a disciplinarian, but it wasn’t in Richard’s nature to be harsh. He had been through too much confinement to have any interest in inflicting punishment on others. He stuck it out for six years, first at Marlborough, then Radley, and finally asked the army to take him back. They gave him a retired officer’s job editing training manuals in Chatham, Kent. It was 1972. As far as the world was concerned he was just another mild-mannered middle-aged civil servant.

  It was during the Easter holidays that year that my mother’s appendix ruptured. By now I was the only child still living at home.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll be fine,” she said, waving weakly at my father and me as she was wheeled past us to the waiting ambulance. I was scared and wondered if I was going to see her again. Throughout my life, my mother had been the one constant, steady force of happiness for me. My father and I stood in the doorway and watched the blue lights of the ambulance recede into the rainy night. I was eleven years old and had never before been on my own with my father. Up to this moment, he had been little more than an ornamentation in my upbringing. He would come home in the evenings from the office and disappear into his study. Weekends he would spend in his potting shed or at church. Each Saturday morning when I was not at boarding school, he would present my pocket money to me (one pre-decimalisation penny for every year of my age) with a little pat on the head.

  His potting shed was a place where he seemed happy. I volunteered to help him “do jobs” so that I could be near him; it was the one time I felt permitted to be in his world. He had no idea, I think, how much I loved being in there with him. Sometimes, when I had held a piece of wood that he was nailing or sawing or varnishing, he would thank me with a brief hug around my shoulders. I longed to be close to him, but outside the potting shed I had no idea how to do it.

  I noticed how little he ever talked about himself, to the point of self-denial. I assumed that all fathers were as removed as he was.

  Where the hell have you been?

  In the bigger context of my father’s life, Monty’s question was curiously apt. Having lost so much, my father had anaesthetised himself against any further pain by engaging in our lives only intermittently. His unconscious tendency was to move towards the edges, away from the focus of attention. My mother had tried to keep him connected to the family, but she had always had the army pulling him in the opposite direction.

  My mother was given an emergency operation that night. When she eventually emerged from hospital, she suggested that we go to Italy on holiday to recuperate. It was during that trip that we made the unexpected detour to Fontanellato, and Richard Carver, began to come into focus as my father.

  17.

  IN 1979 MY father finally retired completely, and my parents bought the house by the sea. Seven years later, my mother contracted cancer and died. They had been together for 35 years and everyone assumed – his children, his friends – that without my mother my father would be lost, too unworldly to be able to handle life on his own. He had never opened a recipe book and had no idea how to operate the washing machine. But we were all too focused on the practicalities, which showed how little any of us really knew him.

  Imagining that he must be lonely, I came down from London where I was then living to see him as often as possible. He loved to walk and so we would stride across the fields to the Gun Inn that overlooked the Solent, or push our way through thick bracken to some pub hidden within the green darkness of the New Forest.

  I watched a slow metamorphosis come over him. He started to become more accessible. And at the same time he subconsciously began to dismantle his physical appearance. A tie and jacket had always been a part of the artifice of the proper Englishman that held him in place – like going every Sunday to church and reading The Times at breakfast. He had worn a tie every day in the week, and even at weekends he had felt the need to wear a cravat. But now I noticed he wore his shirts unbuttoned at the collar.

  He began to give glimpses of a life I’d never seen before.

  He laughed as he told me how he’d travelled by boat a thousand miles up the Amazon River at the age of nine, taken by an aunt desperate for a break from a claustrophobic marriage. And he laughed again as he recounted coming down one morning to breakfast in an Austrian guesthouse during a walking holiday in the 1930s to find that the Anschluss had taken place in the night and there were German soldiers everywhere.

  Bit by bit he re-emerged. With my mother gone, he had no one left to hide behind. He found himself the centre of his children’s attention for the first time. That vivid flash of understanding that I’d had as an eleven-year-old looking up at him, as I lay in the ditch beside Fontanellato, came back to me. For 40 years he had been missing in action, telling himself that he was irrelevant, with extraordinary stories bottled up inside him.

  When he turned 80, I took my father up to London to attend the opening of a new “Monty Exhibit” at the Imperial War Museum. Monty had been dead eighteen years, consigned to history books. We joined a queue of elderly Eighth Army veterans and London schoolchildren outside the museum, my father reluctant as ever to pull rank of any kind. He was excited by our “little jaunt together”, as he called it.

  Before long, a young man in a blazer and tie bustled over and introduced himself as the chief curator.

  “I recognised you from photos in the books about Monty,” he said to my father, who seemed flattered. “There is a section about Monty’s personal life with one or two photos of your family in the exhibition.”

  We walked slowly around the memorabilia, my father leaning on my arm. Dozens of images
of Monty stared out at us from the walls. I had discovered from our pub walks that his relationship with Monty was more complicated than it’d seemed. He showed me the anguished letter that Monty wrote to my father the day of Betty’s death – “I feel desperately lonely and sad. I suppose in time I shall get over it, but at present it seems that I never shall” – and it made me realise how much the two of them had been united in their grief for the same woman.

  In time I was to come across other letters from Monty expressing concern about Richard’s safety in the war. Monty’s overbearing personality had left no room for Richard’s more fragile character to grow. But now the man who had dominated my father’s life was locked safely inside a row of glass cabinets. My father seemed both relieved, and at the same time curiously protective of him and his war record.

  “Monty was always criticised for being too cautious as a general, even by Churchill,” my father mused as we studied the many publicity shots that Monty had so carefully orchestrated. “But he had good reason to be cautious: he hated wasting men’s lives unnecessarily.”

  Our first sight of Monty’s two caravans was from the floor above where an old First World War plane had been suspended from the roof.

  “We have left them exactly as they were in his garden at the mill, with the D-Day caravan on the left and the desert one on the right,” the curator commentated cheerfully as we leant over the railing.

  I felt chill memories of Sunday exeats from Dumpton and the dread of being taken back to school by my parents in time for evensong. Surrounded by large howitzers and tanks, the caravans looked much less grand than I remembered.