by Ben Graff
On a number of occasions when the planes came over, I was at home. My father, being an officer in the Home Guard, had rifles stored in the house, and armed with one of those I used to fire at the planes from my bedroom window. I am a good shot, so it is highly unlikely that my bullets failed to find their mark.
I did not imagine that my bullet would bring down an aircraft, but I hoped that with luck I could kill or disable the pilot and the plane would crash. If it had done, it would probably have wiped out half the population of Wootton, but I had not thought of that. Did any of my bullets strike home, or were they all completely harmless? We still don’t know. I suspect not, but I am in that very small group of people who cannot be entirely sure whether or not they have killed somebody. Most will know one way or the other. The thought does not really trouble me, I don’t think.
In 1942, Cowes, the industrial centre of the Island, with shipyards and aircraft manufacturing on either bank of the river, was itself the target of a German assault, and this was the height of my war. We arrived to find the whole town ablaze, explosives and incendiary bombs coming down like rain. The phrase is a cliché, but I cannot think of a better one to do justice to what the experience was like.
Our squad were directed to the main shipyard which was burning fiercely. You don’t feel anything in moments like this: the adrenalin takes you forward, drives you on. It is only much later that you think to the danger, to what has happened to people and to what could have happened to you.
Not then, though. With one of my comrades I worked my way into the centre of the yard. It takes two men to hold a branch (the nozzle on the end of the hose), and we were completely surrounded by flames. The roof had gone completely and everything else was blazing; a scene of awesome beauty. I had the sense of seeing something that was not meant to have been seen, not meant to have been like this, and somehow drew strength from this sense of standing outside the normal run of things.
We felt relatively safe from the fire so long as water was coming through the hose. Finally, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was an officer ordering us to withdraw. I protested that we should stay, as we were beginning to have an effect on the fire, and maybe we could have saved a boat or two. For answer, the officer pointed upwards. There in the sky were parachute flares lighting up the second wall of bombs that were about to arrive. A matter of minutes after we had left, another bomb landed on the very spot where we had been standing. Another of those turning points, which could have been my ending but instead was just another near miss.
We regrouped to a street where the first three of the terraced houses were on fire. Our pump was connected to an overland main; cast iron pipes that had been laid in the gutters. Ready for an emergency like this, pumps down by the river kept us supplied with water. This was how it worked. The first thing we had been taught was that when houses in a street are on fire, the heat is enough to cause the house next door to burst into flames without any need for direct contagion. By concentrating the flow of water on the fourth house we were able to contain the fire, until further bombs shattered the mains and our water supply failed.
We could only watch helplessly as the fire spread remorselessly along the street, consuming another ten houses before water was restored and we could get to work again. The power and the force of it, and the speed; it seemed impossible to think that it could be tamed, and of course it could not without water. So much ruined in that period that might otherwise have been saved. When we got the water to work again we re-grouped and tried to save what we could, picking a new house as a firebreak, but I am afraid that whilst we saved it the owners were to return to witness the damage that thousands of gallons of water pumped over it and into it could do, against a backdrop of a street half burnt away, almost like a mouth with black and rotting teeth.
When, that morning, we had finished damping down, we went back to the shipyard, now almost completely gone, and sat down by the river for tea and cornbread sandwiches. All was now peaceful and secure, we thought, being unaware that we were sitting within a few feet of a large unexploded bomb! It seems strange now, but it was almost funny at the time. Perhaps it was hysteria, a way of coping with what we were facing, to laugh at everything. I have read that this is often what the emergency services will do, often the only way of coping with everything that has to be faced. I think it was that way for us.
Finally the war turned and it was clear that we were in the ascendancy. I started to think to life afterwards, but what was there to think? I would be going back to the business and things would ultimately go back to the way they were meant to be, I supposed. Although of course I had Anna now, and this changed everything.
The preparation for the invasion of Normandy went on with increasing vigour, and I was able to watch it day by day. In the course of time a flotilla was assembled in the Solent, close inshore just to the west of Wootton Rocks. More and more ships and equipment arrived, until the Solent was so filled with ships of all sizes and floating islands that it seemed possible to walk from Wootton to Portsmouth. It was an extraordinary sight I can still visualise after all these years of peace. I pray that nobody will ever see the Solent looking like that again. But it was also a testament to what we could do, what we would do, to free the world from Hitler.
At a more mundane level we thought a lot about food in those days. It was very scarce (even on the black market as the war years rolled on) but, notwithstanding that, we made it an aim at Binstead fire station to try and cook something really good on Sundays.
One of our number, a month or so before D-Day, had brought along some partridges. A real treat and one he did not encourage us to ask too many questions about. These were perfectly roasted and ready to eat, when we received an emergency call out to Newport! It was extremely hard to drag ourselves away from the smell of them, which took me back to meals before the war; better times that we hoped were going to come again soon. Still, we had a job to do, albeit there was very little sign of danger, we thought, as we drove along, adrenalin pumping as it always did, ready for a repeat of the Cowes attack.
We were far from pleased when we arrived at Newport market and discovered we were engaged in a training exercise, running hoses all over the place to fight non-existent fires. We were then required to stand around while top brass from London evaluated our efforts. Our thoughts were on the beautiful dinner now in ruins at Binstead, and we were feeling cold, so I put on my coat. Presently I was accosted by some high-ranking officer, who told me that this was a breach of the rules. Frustrated, I replied that I had been fighting fires for six years and would not attempt to do so whilst wearing a coat. I said that if he could show me where the fire was I would take it off. Otherwise, it was a cold night and I was keeping it on.
In the opinion of my comrades I would be court martialled and shot. I felt that the consequences were likely to be less severe. I could not be reduced to the ranks as I was already in the ranks. I could not suffer loss of pay, because I was underpaid. Indeed, nothing happened. Sometimes it is right to stand your ground.
At the Electricity Board where I worked we had a drama group. We were due to stage a production of Tonight at 8.30, a Noel Coward play. One evening as we arrived for a rehearsal the news came through that Germany had surrendered. This was VE day (Victory in Europe).
The rehearsal was abandoned. Our leading man, John Huesly2, and I went off to celebrate. John became a professional actor soon after the war, appearing occasionally on television in supporting roles. Later he went to Hollywood, where he had a successful career in films and television as a supporting actor. Most of those films have faded in my memory over time, although he did appear with Roger Moore once I think.
After everything, finally the war was over. John and I went to a pub called the Black Horse at the bottom of George Street. It was packed to the doors, many people in uniform. John was a slightly built man, but with considerable strength he elbowed his way to the bar. We drank to v
ictory, songs were sung, strangers embraced. People you knew well, people you didn’t know at all, all mixed together in an atmosphere that invited more revelry with every drink. Whatever had gone before and whatever was coming next, there, in that moment, we had stood firm. We had prevailed.
I look back on this now, as all of my generation will, as the most dramatic and eventful few years of my life. I had not been able to fight, but I hope that I played my part by helping quell the Island’s fires at night, and through the strangely peaceful and entirely contrasting meter reading in the day.
I feel that I was part of a time that will obviously last in history and be remembered long after I and all of the others who lived through it have gone. Of course, many of us have already passed on, and in the scheme of things I will go soon. Life is lived at lots of levels and those years were never just about the war for me, just as they weren’t for anyone else either.
I had married Anna and a different future lay ahead, albeit one that would entail going back to Holmes & Son.
Chess Stories – Bobby Fischer Broke My Heart
My father taught me to move the pieces, but he did not teach me how to play. I might have explained it this way once, before I discovered that teaching children the basics of chess is not easy.
Annabelle and Maddie had no particular interest, and from a time when she was quite little I knew of Annabelle’s dislike both for the game and the amount of time I spent playing it. But the pull was too strong and I did not play less, simply choosing to accept that my choices did not reflect well on me.
My father had had no such equivalent activity which saw him leave the family to drive the roads on winter nights to Banbury, Solihull, Rugby, Olton, Nuneaton and other such places to play a game, pursue an interest outside of the family. Perhaps he was more generous with his time, and myself less so, than I had thought.
Francesca was promising, but football, karate and acting interested her more. I saw her sing in a school play once and it was beautiful, and not just in the way parents normally say, but in a way that hushed the hall. I had missed a chess match to be there and had resented it, until she opened her mouth to sing and then I felt ashamed.
Gabriella was the most natural player and I started teaching her earlier than I had the others. I saw in her my last chance to have a chess-playing child, but in the end I wanted it too much and she was reluctant to listen to anything I might say on the subject, any advice I might give.
I was baffled as to how to proceed. We would stare at the plastic pieces with a shared sense of frustration and we knew that this simply was not going to work. As a personal coach I had failed with her almost before I had started, and ended up asking a friend who was a much weaker player to try and teach her instead. So my father was a better chess coach than me too.
It was true that I wanted them to do their own things, to find their own way. But it saddened me that I could not bring any of them to chess. Chess had its history, its stories; it is not just a series of moves on a board where black follows white until eventually the matter is resolved. I learnt this but never managed to convey it to the kids.
What it really showed was that I had ideas about what might be best for them which sometimes differed from their own, just as my parents had had when they had wanted me to read law instead of English. It was a small thing, but it made me think that good intentions and more life experience were not sufficient to call the shots on behalf of others. You had to let your children figure out what they wanted to do for themselves. Reading law had been a mistake for me that I would undo if I could; my parents had been wrong to push me in that direction, no matter how good the intentions.
At secondary school, my teacher Mr Keohane gave me my first chess book, and as well as teaching me more about openings and endgames, I discovered the array of characters that had shaped the game. These were not always happy stories and there were some I would not have wanted my own children to know.
The ‘pride and sorrow’ of chess, Paul Morphy, came to Europe from America in the late 1850s and played beautifully, beating all serious opponents and creating masterpieces in his wake. He had played a game against the Duke of Brunswick and Count Isoaurd during an interval in an opera that still stands today as one of chess’s finest. The sort of game I would have shown to my own children, had they been more interested.
Somewhat ironically, given my own circumstances, Paul Morphy did not want to be a chess player. He returned to America determined to be a lawyer and did not play again. All his clients were interested in was talking to him about chess, and Morphy was to spend the last fifteen years of his life grappling with serious mental illness, before dying in his bath of a stroke at the age of forty-seven.
It was hard for me to understand as a child how somebody could play like he could, could create as he did, and then not want to do it anymore and not be made happy by it. Perhaps the things we think might make others happy, might make ourselves happy even, are sometimes just destined not to be quite how we would imagine them. The same with writing and writers as with chess perhaps; what we create, however beautiful or terrible others think it to be, is still separate from us and we are still alone.
Many years later the second American chess genius, Bobby Fischer, would follow a path with similar echoes, and this would be something I would talk to my father about as he had witnessed it first-hand. I idolised Fischer. I thought once that he was everything I wanted to be, and I would have swapped places with him in a moment.
I read about how for a while in the early 1970s, he had made chess the centre of the world. Against the backdrop of the Cold War, at a time when the game was seen as a powerful ideological tool by both America and the Soviet Union, Fischer played Boris Spassky for the world title in Reykjavik in 1972, three years before I was born. Insiders knew that Fischer and Spassky were both hopeless representatives of the systems they were meant to be role models for, but no matter. Fischer, the loner who asked for hotel rooms that did not have a view, the better for him to study, was far removed from being a poster child for the American way of life, however hard others tried to spin it. He was a product of nothing other than his incredible gift and relentless focus on the game.
Spassky, who could send the party faithful in any Soviet chess club running for the exits with his less than sound conversation (he was good enough at chess to get away with it), was later to defect to France. He was more interested in women, tennis, drink and Greek myths than he was in communism.
Fischer was only interested in chess, or at least that was how it had seemed to the public back then. He had beaten three world class players in order to qualify to play Spassky, the defending champion. He destroyed the Russian Taimanov 6-0, perhaps the equivalent of a top tennis player losing a match without winning a game. There were no parallels in chess history.
Taimanov was subsequently severely censured by the Soviet authorities for his poor showing. It is said that he was rebuked by Soviet customs officials for having a book by the banned Solzhenitsyn in his luggage. The official told him that had he played better, he would have carried the volume for him himself.
Then Fischer beat Larsen 6-0 as well. He had been expected to win comfortably but not like that. Finally, former world champion Petrosian put up slightly stiffer resistance, but it was not enough and the Fisher-Spassky ‘Match of the Century’ was on. Perhaps.
Until the last minute it was not clear if Fischer’s demands concerning money and cameras (his desire for an absence of cameras), and a multitude of other requests, were going to be met, or appropriate compromises struck.
Henry Kissinger called him.
A British financier doubled the purse.
Still, nobody could be sure if Fischer would play. Eventually he became the first player in history to lose a game in a world chess championship final by virtue of not turning up. Then he made a beginner’s mistake in the second game, an extraordinary blunder which p
ut him 2-0 down.
There were real fears that he would not turn up for the next game and that would have been that, the match would have been ended. But turn up he did, and everything changed. Fischer won comfortably, but the Russians thought Spassky had made too many concessions; even at one point agreeing to play in a back room behind the main stage. A harder-nosed individual who did not yield to any of Fischer’s requests to vary the playing conditions might well have won by default. When asked about this many years later, Spassky had shrugged and said that he had known Fischer was the stronger player, but he had wanted to play him just the same. All chess players find it hard to walk away.
Yet after the match this was precisely what Fischer did, as he fell apart and his mental health collapsed. He became convinced that the Soviets were out to get him. He had the fillings removed from his teeth. He turned down millions of dollars to play in events or promote various products. He declined to endorse a brand of car because he did not drive it and thought it would be inauthentic to lend his name to it. Perhaps Holden Caulfield might have done the same.
Eventually, his demands in relation to the 1975 world title match with new challenger Anatoly Karpov were rejected and he was stripped of his title. Fischer would spend the next twenty years drifting from cheap hotel to cheap hotel, now more interested in obscure religious texts and anti-Semitic literature (even though he was Jewish) than he was in chess.
Fred Waitzkin wrote a book called Searching for Bobby Fischer in which he talked about his son Josh Waitzkin learning the game, and his own dream of somehow bringing Fischer back to the board. Convincing Fischer that the noise in the room or the position of the cameras did not really matter, urging him to compete once again. I loved the book. I would have liked Fred Waitzkin to be my father; he spoke to my imagination in a way that my own father, who had the more prosaic job of actually bringing me up, did not.
