Their Promised Land

by Ian Buruma

  Win replies on the sixteenth (the mail had improved by then) that John has become “mentally and physically flabby. No comparison with yourself in 1915–18, who were an active soldier in the field, doing very much a man’s job. If I had thought you mentally or physically flabby I shouldn’t have married you.”

  This admirably expressed her love for Bernard, but it was also an extraordinary thing to say, pitting her artistic son against his heartier father, as though the former would always be found wanting. There is, however, an element of bluff in her pugnacious talk, for much as she might have deplored her son’s flabbiness, she was also terrified of losing him. Pride and terror are the two faces of the war mother. But Win is no mother of Coriolanus, who bullies her son into becoming a warrior. When she thinks there is a real danger of John actually having to fight, she is petrified. In March 1944, the much-dreaded letter arrives in Kintbury from the War Office, ordering John to Liverpool for a crash course as a soldier in the Royal Engineers.

  On March 27, Win appears to have forgotten her disappointment with John’s lack of machismo: “They want to bring these youngsters through their training as quickly as possible to provide more cannon fodder for the Japs. Poor John! He is so very young and immature. I pray to God that he may be equal to whatever is before him. I’m afraid I do not make a good soldier’s wife & mother. My heart is so heavy, and my imagination is too active.”

  In answer to this letter, on April 12, Bernard doesn’t comment on John’s prospects in the army, but does mention that John has written to him and “opened out more than he ever has done to me before & I was touched.” He praises his son as “a young man of some spiritual thought and certainly with a very strong family sense.” Bernard is also relieved to hear that John has a girlfriend, Betty Hall, a friend of Wendy’s from Badminton School, not Jewish, which is all right, for Bernard has “long got over my prejudice against mixed entanglements, although on the whole I believe two of a kind make for greater and more solid happiness.”

  Betty was evidently mad about John. Win thinks they are “very much in love.” But she is reassured by her son’s innocence in sexual matters, greater, she assumes, than that of his younger brother, Roger, who was observed kissing a young “sex-starved” nurse on the lips. Win on January 19, 1944: “I don’t think we need to worry too much about the boys’ amatory excursions—certainly not about John’s. He is an awfully clean chap, & thinks the most harmless remarks wicked and daring!”

  Anyone who knew John later in life would find this an astounding statement. But it is quite likely that his thoughts about women were entirely chaste, and his real sexual feelings still a source of embarrassment, which expressed itself in a show of giggly naïveté.

  Win almost certainly misread erotic confusion as innocence. But John’s presumed purity made his imminent entry into a pitiless war even more heartrending: the sacrifice of a boy before he has been able to become a man. In Japanese war propaganda, the sacrifice of young kamikaze pilots—most of whom were from the same social class as John—was pictured as something beautiful and pure: the fall of fresh cherry blossoms on the verge of full bloom. It is said that some Japanese mothers offered themselves to their sons before their last flight, so they no longer had to die as boys. Win would no doubt have been appalled by the very thought of such a thing, but her feelings as a prospective warrior’s mother can have been no less fraught.

  —

  In February 1944, the invasion of Europe seemed a long way off. It “is still a matter of words,” Win writes on February 10, and “we can’t tackle the Japs until we eventually succeed in breaking the Germans . . . Poor old John. The news of the Japanese treatment of prisoners is not reassuring.”

  When Bernard hears about the Normandy landings on June 6, he is in Quetta, high up in the mountains of Baluchistan, near the borders of Iran and Afghanistan. These trips were not without their adventures. In Waziristan, a place now thick with the Taliban and other holy warriors, Bernard had to travel even then in a convoy of armored cars to fend off hostile tribesmen. But listening to the news of D-Day on the radio in a remote hill station, surrounded by people who couldn’t care less, makes him feel even more hopelessly stuck in the wrong place at the wrong time. On June 6, he writes, “So the greatest invasion of all time has begun. Good luck to all the chaps in it . . . How I wish I were back in Europe to lend a hand.”

  After listening to the radio, Bernard meets an old schoolmistress from Badminton, now teaching in Quetta, together with two of her female friends. They seem “much more interested in old school photos than the success or failure of an enterprise by which England stands or falls.” All the more reason for Bernard to long to get back and experience “that top of the toes feeling” again, and rid himself “of the apathy that is bound up with so much in the East.” He complains of getting fat around the waist, and is dying to have “a crack at the European front.”

  Such sentiments were stirred up by a combination of guilt, loneliness, boredom, and patriotism. I don’t think Bernard had any romantic notions of being a hero. He thought typical war heroes were all a bit mad. Win reacted to his frustration in the way she always did when he suggested sleeping out on the frosty lawn at St. Mary Woodlands on Christmas Eve, except that in this instance the stakes were so much higher. She tried to talk him down.

  June 18:

  I want you back so much, and yet not on your conditions. Once more you seem determined to get into things up to the neck. From your veiled hints . . . I gather that you are agitating to join the invasion of France. You seem determined to plunge me from one anxiety into another. Don’t you feel too, dearest, that to have perhaps a week or two at home, and then to be away again into the vortex with another heart-rending “goodbye” would only open up old wounds and upset the whole nervous system once more?

  After the Allies have fought their way into France, Germany still has one more secret weapon. At the end of June 1944, Win and John spend a day in London. The atmosphere, she writes on June 29, was “distinctly unpleasant.” The new German V-1 flying bombs (“doodlebugs”) were “much worse than the 1940 Blitz.” London was “almost empty, and the alert was on almost all day. Robots came over at intervals, flying low, and it is always a tense moment while you hear them roaring overhead & wait for the engine to switch off, followed by the crash.”

  Worse than the Blitz was an exaggeration, but this new jet-propelled weapon, also known as the “buzz bomb,” would claim more than twenty-two thousand lives between June 1944 and March 1945.

  Bernard is deeply concerned. He asks Win on July 27, 1944, “What is it that makes these bombs so devastating? Is it their persistence, their long & haphazard range or what?” The thought of the family being exposed to this new danger adds to his sense of helplessness and guilt. “Here am I in the army,” he writes, “supposed to be taking part in a war, and I live in perfect safety, whereas you . . . I often feel quite ashamed of myself and I suppose it is partly this that unsettles me at times and urges me to fling myself into the scrum, if they would only let me.”

  They would not. And so Bernard had to follow what was going on in Europe from afar. On July 21, Win reports the excitement everyone is feeling about the failed German officers’ plot against Hitler’s life. The bomb put under the conference table at the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s East Prussian HQ, went off but didn’t kill him. Instead, it left him with a hand permanently trembling behind his stooped back, and an even more paranoid disposition. The main plotters, mostly high-ranking aristocratic officers, were hanged on meathooks, “like cattle,” in the führer’s words. But Win rejoiced: “It shows the way the wind is blowing & may help to hasten the end.” On the other hand, she writes, “I think it would be a pity if Hitler died a martyr’s death before the end—it would be too easy for him.”

  Even if the Old Testament meant little to Win, she was no stranger to the feeling that an eye deserved an eye. But all in all, she concludes, in a burs
t of unusual perkiness, “things are looking up” and “perhaps after all it may not be too long now before we are all reunited for keeps & John released to pursue his studies.” The garden in Mount Pleasant is looking its best, and “our sweet peas are marvellous this year.”

  Win’s cheerfulness is matched by Bernard’s answer, more than a month later, from a hospital on the North-West Frontier in what is now Pakistan. On August 28, he writes, “I say, what terrific news from everywhere in the West & what an extraordinary final chapter with all the rats leaving the sinking ship . . . In the South of France it’s all our honeymoon resorts—Arles, Nimes . . . Do you remember those oysters on the way down from Bordeaux?”

  Of course, the moment of euphoria couldn’t last. Less than one month later, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery decided to drop a vast Allied army around the city of Arnhem in Holland to secure the bridges over the Rhine and get to Germany ahead of his American rival, General George Patton. Casualties in this disastrous enterprise exceeded fifteen thousand British, Polish, Canadian, and U.S. soldiers. “Operation Market Garden” lasted for one week and ended on September 25. My paternal grandparents, living in Nijmegen, were in the midst of it, with bombs destroying the center of their town and British and Canadian troops putting up at their house.

  Three days later Win writes a letter about seeing John off for his army training as a combat engineer, or sapper: “We listened with bleeding hearts last night to this epic of Arnhem, & from a few tentative questions, I realised that John had the same thought as I had—Before not so very long he too might be for it & the sappers have a slim chance. It looks now that we cannot look for the end of this European business before the Spring, & by that time John’s year’s training will be up & then the fun in the Far East will begin in good earnest.”

  —

  That John was as ill-suited to army life as he had been to a spartan boarding school was clear to all. But there were other problems, to do once again with the family background. Win writes on October 6 that John is miserable in his “filthy camp” near Liverpool, “and to add to his troubles, when on their second day there, the Padres came to talk to the lads, John and the only other two Jews were ordered to return to their Barrack Room as they were unable to provide Jewish services there. Now John is not an Orthodox Jew in any case, & wouldn’t understand a word of a Hebrew service, even if there were one; on the other hand it would do him good to join in worship with the others & perhaps gain the interest of one of the Padres. It is the wretched Identity Disc that is the trouble.* What ought he to do about it?”

  Win’s worry is puzzling. It isn’t clear whether John himself shared it. Why would she, who never saw much point in religious worship, wish for her son to attend a Christian service? And why was she so concerned about his identity disc? Would she have preferred that he hide his background? According to an often-repeated family story (I heard it as a child), John had exclaimed to his army board, when asked about his religious faith, “I’m a Jew and I’m proud of it.” The same family legend has it that Bernard and Win were both scandalized. The story was usually told as a joke against them.

  Perhaps they were scandalized. I can easily imagine Win being opposed to John’s rocking the boat in this manner. What would those padres say? But there is no evidence of any of this in the letters. In answer to Win’s letter about John and the padres, Bernard gives a perfectly reasonable account of his own experiences in the army. “In both wars,” he writes on October 22, “my true religion was in the unit records—the identity disc was of small account. For the purposes of this war, with the Nazi doctrine to combat in the event of capture I certainly wore a silver disc of my own with no mention of any religion . . . The army deals with religions pretty broadmindedly, having had years of experience with all the Indian races and customs. There is never any objection raised for anyone to attend any service outside his own creed . . . So I can’t quite make out John’s trouble & I see no reason he shouldn’t attend Padres talks or services if he wants to.”

  John (BOTTOM ROW, FAR RIGHT) in military training

  I doubt that John was gripped by a strong desire to attend any services, in either a synagogue or a church. He was never religious. Especially in his American films, religion is usually shown up as a grotesque trick perpetrated on gullible people. I once asked him about this, not long before he died in California. Yes, he answered, that is how he saw religion, as a kind of hoax.

  But that was America. He also had another view of religion. You see it in his British films, like Far from the Madding Crowd, or Yanks, or, most poignantly, Sunday Bloody Sunday. Shared faith in these movies is more like a tradition, a form of cultural loyalty, which is the way many English people experience Anglicanism. In Yanks (1979), a middle-aged English lady, much like Win, left alone during the war by a husband in the army, is tempted to have an affair with a married American officer. They back off at the last moment from what might have turned into a sordid entanglement. When her husband returns in the end, we see them reunited in a country church, standing in the midst of the congregation, singing a hymn. Order has been restored. It is an order in which John felt no more at home than he did in the vast rootlessness of America, but I think he respected it.

  Sunday Bloody Sunday was made in 1971. There is much of John in the main character, a gay Jewish doctor mixed up in a love triangle with a young artist and his female lover. Dr. Daniel Hirsh, played by Peter Finch, is comfortable in his skin, humorous, at ease with his homosexuality, and secular. He is also deeply attached to his family. That is the meaning of a long scene of his nephew’s bar mitzvah. Hirsh remembers his own ritual coming-of-age. He takes part in the ceremony because he wants to be part of a tradition, even if he cannot quite believe in it.

  In reality, neither John nor any of his nephews ever had a bar mitzvah (even though I did appear as an extra in the bar mitzvah scene). There was an element of playacting in his religious experience. On the rare occasion that he would go to a synagogue, he would mumble the first few words of a prayer he barely knew, and then get lost in rhubarb. But he insisted on standing at an odd angle from the society he grew up in, unlike Win, hence the “I’m Jewish and I’m proud of it.” Even though he could be as sentimental about Englishness—the country flowers, the ancient churches, the cornfields—as Bernard, he once told me he didn’t regard the family as really being “English” at all. So what were they? I asked. “Well, not English.”

  What amazed me was to find a letter from Win, written on February 17, 1945, in which, far from expressing disapproval of John’s claim to the military authorities, she actually admires him for it. John may be temperamentally unfit for soldiering, Win writes. Then follows one of her most moving statements: “I am glad to find that he has real moral courage. He told me that he was overjoyed that he had not changed his name, although he has sometimes been put through his paces on that account. He makes no bones about his race or German ancestry, although he has been baited a great deal—sometimes malevolently.”

  In spite of all the unfavorable comparisons Win has made between father and son, she finally salutes him for being braver than anyone else, braver than herself, braver even than Bernard.

  —

  Much of Yanks came from John’s own wartime memories: the sex appeal of the American troops, their big ideas and easy manners, so different from cramped British attitudes. In the spring of 1944, more than one and a half million American troops were based in Britain, waiting for the invasion of Europe. They were, in the popular British phrase of the time, “oversexed, overpaid, and over here.”

  Win played concerts for the “Yanks” with the Finzi orchestra at a military base called Welford, a name I remember from country walks from St. Mary Woodlands. It is now a munitions depot just off the M4 motorway from London to Wales. Despite her warm feeling toward Americans in her Oxford days, Win’s views of the Yanks during the war are not especially positive, but I think fairly typical of t
hat time. As well as other things, the Americans posed an element of sexual danger, a bit like those Continental men whom Win saw on her trips to Italy as a young woman in 1924.

  The following description of an encounter with American GIs, a year before D-Day, during an endlessly interrupted train journey from Paddington to Kintbury, sums up what many people probably felt, not just about American lecherousness, but American racism too.

  July 11, 1943:

  One or two American soldiers had been leering at me unpleasantly. Presently one, quite drunk, put his head through my window & started talking to me in a thick speech which I could hardly understand. I was very cold to him and sat tightly in my corner & then he grew maudlin, said he was from overseas & could he come in. Now I knew I had to keep my wits about me. From my scant experience of drunks, I knew you must never argue with them or let them suspect that you think they are drunk, but just to talk to them kindly and patiently as you would to a sick child. I talked & talked, anything to keep him from pawing me, which he tried to do every little while. He asked me if he might come and see me, & I had to give him my address—anything to keep him quiet . . . Inside me I was terrified, but I dared not show it. He then got more and more vociferous on the subject of the blacks, & a coloured American kept passing the window, & knowing that they had all been drinking, I was afraid that at any moment there would be an unseemly brawl between them, & that I should have to separate them. Shortly before the train left, to my great relief, an English airman got in.