Once Again Assembled Here

by Sean O'Brien

  Struggling to master my anger and shame, I returned to the office and summoned Risman, instructing him that Carr and Crossley were to be forwarded to Britain for debriefing and trial. I would need to speak to the third prisoner again. Until instructed otherwise, Risman was to deny all knowledge of this prisoner’s presence.

  The next passage was typed on paper yellowed with age.

  Transcription of Recorded Interrogation of Charles Rackham by James Carson, Wednesday 20th June 1945

  R: What equipment are you using? You’re obviously going to be recording this, aren’t you? German recording equipment is much better on the whole. What I shall tell you is true, James. It has all been a great adventure.

  C: You have taken the side of the murderers.

  R: Well, possibly, possibly. But do you want me to tell you about it so you can have it for posterity? Not that you’ll be able to do anything with it.

  C: Why should I believe you?

  Here again Carson had attached a later note:

  This was an unprofessional question. It was like being mad, holding this conversation in this setting, given our history. This smirking creature – for that is what he seemed to have become – had been my pupil, a protégé, a lover. Rackham seemed wholly unperturbed, as if viewing the situation externally for the purposes of amusement.

  The interrogation resumed:

  R: In practical terms it makes no difference whether you believe me or not. But as I have tried to indicate, you have no choice in the matter.

  C: Then you had better get on with it.

  R: Before the outbreak of war I was, as you know, active on the livelier fringes of the British fascist movement. As a result I made several visits to Germany in which I established contact with officials of the Nazi regime. These facts were clearly known to the authorities at home, who were also aware of my liaison with [here the name had been left out] a member of the aristocracy known to favour appeasement. It became evident that not only were such hopes entertained by more than a few political figures, businessmen, civil servants and diplomats (this after all was hardly a secret at the time), but also, as is less widely appreciated, that there were those in both groups prepared to work in a clandestine way to secure the end sought by ——. They did so both while the conflict was approaching and then after war was declared.

  C: They were prepared to commit treason?

  R: ‘Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.’

  C: But it has not prospered, has it?

  R: Well, not yet. Are you going to keep interrupting? When I joined the army in autumn 1939, my card was marked by two gentlemen from the relevant department. They gave me to understand that I might be of use to them. The alternative was jail. It was clear that this was no idle threat. Having settled that, they explained that at some future moment of crisis I might receive instructions from a senior source concerning arrangements with the German Foreign Ministry. That day might never come, but I was to be ready and to obey without question.

  C: A senior source?

  R: That’s what I said. They named——, you may not be surprised to hear. During the Fall of France in May 1940 my unit was involved in a rearguard action near Audenarde. I received telephoned instructions from a staff officer that I was to surrender at the earliest opportunity and make myself known to the enemy officer commanding. I was also told that once I was a prisoner of the Germans I would be contacted with further instructions. I followed these orders. Several months went by. I was imprisoned with other officers at a camp in the vicinity of Kassel. I reconciled myself to boredom. Then orders came – the source was not made known – to join a planned escape. The escape party would be allowed to get out of the camp and disperse as planned before being rounded up. I would be captured and disappear.

  The plan succeeded. I was moved to Berlin. After this I was given employment of two kinds. Firstly I wrote propaganda material for broadcast to Britain, as well as doing some translation work. Secondly, later on, I was used to recruit disaffected prisoners of war for the British Free Corps. During this period my initial contact contrived to resume communication and I supplied information about my activities. After a time it was no longer in fact clear to me which side I was working for, or, indeed, whether there were sides in this tragic and unnecessary conflict, or what my eventual role might be. Certainly, strong bonds of mutual interest should have led us to make common case against the Jewish Bolshevik threat.

  C: Don’t editorialize, Charles. Just let me have the facts.

  R: The Free Corps recruited very poorly compared with the SS Nordland and Charlemagne and Walloon units, and never saw action. As the war came to its close my contact fell silent. My work for the Germans came to an end and it was clear I would be abandoned to cut my own devices. I could understand this, given the larger situation. I would need to fend for myself. I had no intention of being taken by the Russians when they got to Berlin. So I did my duty as an officer of the Queen and sought to return to my unit.

  C: Who was your contact on our side?

  R: —— [Name omitted].

  C: Why should I or anyone else believe you?

  R: [laughing] I am a brother officer.

  C: You’re on the books as a traitor.

  R: It’s a little like that passage in Ashenden where he’s told that if he succeeds he’ll get no credit and that if he gets into trouble he’ll get no help.

  C: Ashenden’s loyalties were not in question.

  R: Neither are mine, I assure you. We can leave this a stalemate, James, but if you move against me you will leave me no choice. Just get me on a boat and I’ll deal with the rest of it back at home. Exercise discretion. We know you can do that, don’t we? The war’s over. The soldiers can go back in their box for now.

  C: Supposing I can get you on a boat, the likelihood is that you’ll be picked up as soon as you land.

  R: Don’t worry. I’ll put in a good word for you.

  C: For God’s sake leave me out of it.

  R: As you wish. That wasn’t so difficult, was it?

  And now Rackham’s handwriting resumed.

  15th June 1968, continued

  At the time of this encounter with Rackham I was seeing Claire Ormond, who was over working as a translation clerk. I was in fact about to ask her to marry me, and I’m pretty sure she sensed this and would have accepted my proposal. I considered confiding in her – no, I longed to confide in her – but although I believed in her absolute discretion, the knowledge, which was verboten from every perspective, would have been a cruel imposition. Claire was at least as principled as I might have liked to imagine myself to be had Rackham not turned up in the glasshouse that day. But if I were to live with her I could not bear to have secrets – which in turn demonstrated to me that I should never have considered marrying her in the first place. So I broke things off with Claire. She behaved with a dignity of which I was clearly quite incapable. She has been a lifelong friend. But I had loved Charles Rackham, and desired him beyond reason, and the memory has remained, composed on the one hand of guilt and regret, and on the other the sense that I was never so alive as during that damning folly. Enough. And I was saving my skin. Had I passed on the names he mentioned, I am pretty sure the axe would have fallen on me. So I was a coward as well as a fool.

  I need you to have a fuller picture of the world, Stephen, and the temperaments, from which these events arose. Charles Rackham was a gifted pupil, the son of a landed family for whom local loyalty meant that their sons would be sent to Blake’s. He came into the sixth form in 1935 with a reputation for great if erratic brilliance in classics and the humanities, clearly bound for Oxbridge.

  Rackham’s hold on me, as he keenly appreciated, was not created simply by the fact of our involvement. Such things are not uncommon; men have borne the subsequent exposure somehow. No, the important element was the shame I would feel at having betrayed my own profession. To some – perhaps to you; I am unsure – such a sense of things must seem antiquated,
and even perhaps absurd in the seriousness with which it regards the fall from grace. To that I can only reply that this is how I was made – conscientious to a fault but not wholly able to follow the dictates of that conscience. Rackham knew that I would kill myself if he exposed me. At times, now especially, I wish I had done so anyway. In retrospect, I see that I was the one seduced, though I seemed to make all the moves. When I asked him in the cell why he threatened me, he looked at me as if the question were meaningless. ‘Put it down to experience, love,’ he said. ‘That’s what I’ve done, anyway.’ You will understand if I reveal no further details of this brief liaison. For me it was a coup de foudre, from which I have never properly recovered.

  We had our share of youthful communists in the 1930s. It was to be expected. Some of them showed the courage of their convictions. One former pupil, a boy called Arram, from another landed family on the Plain of Axness, joined the International Brigade and died of wounds. His family arranged for a privately published book of his poems, which I very much doubt if anyone read but themselves. We have a copy in the case of pupils’ publications.

  Rackham went in the other direction.

  Mosley and his men did not spring fully formed into existence. As you will know, there were precedents, albeit of a feeble and eccentric kind, among vegetarians, spiritualists and in our neck of the woods, for some reason, dentists. But of course there were also embittered ex-servicemen hoping for someone to speak for them when MacDonald’s spineless Labour government failed to do so. Certainly the BUF found a vein of support among the unemployed dockers and sailors, with a convenient scapegoat in the local Jewish community. Fascism was more exciting and theatrical altogether than the grim priesthood of the Marxists, and it offered more opportunities for action, for parades and brawls. As is well known, much of Mosley’s public support, and almost all of its middle-and upper-class element, withdrew in distaste after 1934. Which is not to say that parts of that support did not continue in the background. The true facts about fascist sympathies in Britain in the years leading up to the war have yet to emerge. Were I not a historian I would predict that what emerges will be at once startling in detail and not in the least surprising in general.

  Rackham was in some ways too eccentric even for the BUF. He would rather have been a one-man party, the permanent vanguard of deranged anti-Semitic extremism. Yet while he could be brutal in word and, I imagine, in action, he was also a remarkably intelligent and charming young man. It seemed to many that his political involvement was simply a phase which he would outgrow when he went off to university. The famous charm certainly assisted in his exculpation over an attack on a well-known Jewish baker in the old town. A couple of his working-class comrades served time in prison, while Rackham never saw the inside of a courtroom.

  After he left school for Oxford I lost track of him, or perhaps he relaxed the attention he paid to me. I made no enquiries. When Regulation 18b was enacted, placing Mosley and a number of his supporters in prison for part of the war, I would not have been surprised to discover that Rackham was among them. Nor was I surprised when I found his name on the watch list of deserters and traitors we sought to apprehend at the war’s end. The surprise was that he turned up in that cell. But, as he liked to remark, he always tried to give good value.

  When I resumed my teaching duties at Blake’s, you may imagine my surprise at finding Rackham there too, as a teacher of modern languages. Yet it took only a moment for my surprise to dissolve; Rackham had been right, of course he had: his way back to respectability would be smoothed. He had gone back and completed his degree. A quiet life awaited him, writing and teaching, supposing he could bear such confinement. He did not say so, but I inferred that he was still acting under instruction: wait until called upon. I assume that it was through Rackham’s influence that when Crossley was eventually paroled he joined the ground staff at Blake’s. Crossley never acknowledged our previous acquaintance. He became Lurch, the wordless assistant groundkeeper and comic bogeyman to the school. For myself, I arranged that Risman become the school porter. He had seen Rackham at Spa. It was not necessary to explain the situation to him. He would be there by day, and if necessary in the watches of the night. We all adapted to these strange circumstances, forming a balance of unexerted powers, engaged in a sort of phoney war it was sometimes possible to forget was going on. Blake’s was a strange place in itself in any case. We fitted in – I as the permissible element of academic seriousness, Rackham as the aesthete. And there was proper work for me to do, teaching, and by doing that I attempted, inadequately and in the end hopelessly, to make reparations for my failures of character.

  Like many another returning soldier on the staff, Rackham said little of his wartime experiences, and his silence was treated with respect as a sign of decent reticence and maturity of attitude. It was the conventional way. It was known – as is the way of these things – that he had been a prisoner of war, and this added another layer of slightly awesome humility to his reputation. He had in any case moved on and was publishing his poems in the fag-end of the Apocalypse movement. They were bad poems in my estimation, but this seemed to matter less than that they showed Rackham as serious, a discreet asset to the school, the more effective because unboasted.

  And twenty years went by, and in some mysterious way Rackham did not grow older as we did. He retained a youthful appearance and an air of imminent distinction, as if perpetually almost ready to be the coming man.

  I have as little to do with him as is professionally possible; the setting of the school still enables a slightly anachronistic formality, as might exist between men from the same regiment who would only encounter each other in the Mess. He is, I understand, a charismatic if sometimes capriciously cruel teacher, extensively knowledgeable in European literature, art and music. The boys are both drawn to him and a little afraid, I suspect, for there is always the promise of the unexpected. But he behaved himself, I think, for a long time. It was in his interests to do so. His own sister is the wife of the most recent Headmaster and has also become a member of staff. Charles Rackham is in a sense part of the Blake’s family. As you can see, although I have avoided him I must have been taken a keener interest than I realized, watching and listening when I scarcely knew I was doing so. Why have I not simply left? Because Blake’s is also my home. It is all I have. And because, at some level, I have been waiting.

  Rackham has no ambitions in the school, it seems, nor any wish to move elsewhere. And his literary activities have never gained recognition beyond the small circle of the likeminded, all of whom ostensibly shun worldly fame on the grounds that those who might bestow it are unworthy to do so. It is the realm of the self-declared giants, too great for the world that in turn finds them invisible and inaudible. Rackham and his poetic kind are not well enough known to be thought of as obscure. When a well-known poet living locally came to speak the sixth form last year Rackham’s was a conspicuous absence.

  I think he is bored. Time has passed. No threat to him has emerged and neither has the long-postponed call to duty come. His misdeeds seem to have been forgotten. Perhaps, like some drunkards, he supposed himself cured by a period of abstemiousness.

  At any rate the disease has reasserted itself. It is a disease, surely, the anti-Semitism, the paradoxical love of order and violence, the thousand-year ideology whose one true aim is fiery extinction. People have begun to say that communism and fascism are two sides of the one coin, but I cannot believe that. Communism is predicated on a future as fascism is not. It has its own economics, as fascism does not. Fascism is a death-cult, much more an event than an idea. It would have been better if, like Henry Williamson and some others of Mosley’s men, Rackham had taken up farming, but there seems not to have been anything in him of the love of the soil and the seasons and the implacable endless demonstrable proof of something – what, exactly? – offered by farming life. Corduroys and physical labour were not for Rackham, it seems, although I think his protector could certainly boas
t of rural property.

  What seems to have stimulated Rackham to involve himself once more in the right-wing political fringe is partly the exploits of Colin Jordan with his crackpot National Socialist Movement, recently renamed the British Movement. Rackham, I suspect, considers himself to be a more elegant, sophisticated ‘political soldier’ than the demented thug Jordan clearly is. And Rackham has always been tempted to make a splash – a feature of his temperament which will always in the end separate him from the upper-class appeasers and their children, in whose sphere he would otherwise naturally move, but to which he remained connected by ties of sentiment rather than politics, and perhaps – I would not be surprised – by his power to blackmail.

  And now? Now I simply know that Rackham is at work again, spreading the poison, seeking a destructive opportunity. I see in him that familiar combination of the parochial and the grandiose that will seek to affect larger events while gorging itself on a local crime. Our lives, it seems to me, were a long time ago – in another country, as they say. I have kept up few connections with those days. But what of Rackham? Who keeps a protective eye on him? And what are they protecting? Him? Themselves? The general good? I feel too old to puzzle it out again. I want to be left alone to read my books and simply disappear. But he will taunt me with his deranged schemes. He will require me to be in attendance. His target, as you may have already inferred, is David Feldberg. I do not know how far Rackham is prepared to go. But Feldberg must be protected somehow. I am asking you to do that.