Dearest Jane... Read online

  I cast my gaze around and saw that the beach was not merely an expanse of sand that stretched into infinity but that if you looked to left or right, it was punctuated by curious, irregular shapes. ‘Not so very long ago, this was possibly one of the most important beaches in the whole of France,’ continued my father.

  This was intriguing information. My father always enjoyed sharing his knowledge and this was clearly a prelude to further facts concerning the beach. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be boring. He did not bother to say things unless they made you think or laugh. Preferably both. I looked at him expectantly as he lay there on his side, propped on one elbow, his long legs crossed over. This was a habitual position for my father on a beach, one which he found comfortable for reading, his preferred activity. Above his faded aertex shirt, a jaunty red and white spotted kerchief round his neck blew gently in the sea breeze. Unusually, on this occasion he seemed to have neither book nor newspaper to hand.

  ‘How long do you think this beach is?’ he asked, before answering the question himself. ‘Five miles long – which is one of the factors which made it ideal as a beach for an invading force to land on. It is why it became one of what are known as the Normandy Landing beaches.’ Not wishing to appear dim, always a concern in conversations with my father, I responded cautiously to this information.

  ‘It’s probably impossible to imagine now but this beach – Omaha beach it is called – was where, on a bloody awful day in June 1944, in appalling weather, American forces landed to launch the last big push against Hitler. If they teach you anything at school, you will come to learn that this was the D-Day invasion of France. It was a gigantic undertaking. Of course, our own troops played a major role, staging their invasion on other landing beaches here in Normandy. If D-Day had not succeeded, things would have turned out very differently for all of us,’ he pronounced with grim satisfaction.

  Amazed, I sat in silent wonder. My father, on the other hand, was warming to his theme and starting to expand upon it. As he spoke, I gradually began to take in the surrounding scene from a different perspective. It was not just a beach for gentle holiday pastimes. If you looked hard enough, remnants of the multiple rows of defences installed by the Germans were still in place, now softened and veiled by the shifting sands. As the child I was, it was not an easy thing to envisage that only sixteen years earlier, this beautiful beach had been a bloody and brutal battleground, the site of one of the most dramatic chapters of our recent history. Now, people in bright and cheerful colours seemed to be enjoying their holiday pursuits all around us; there were no bombs exploding, no tanks weighing through the sands, no guns firing; there were no soldiers fighting for their lives, encumbered by battledress sodden by the sea from which they had waded on to the beach; there were no moans and cries from wounded or dying men.

  My father’s emotional and eloquent description of D-Day was gathering pace, weighted with a history that could not lightly be dismissed. With his keen sense of the meaning of place and of the past, I could start to grasp why this Omaha Beach might move him to memories of the world war in which, after all, he had played his own part.

  In 1939 my father was a regular, professional soldier. He had been in the Army since leaving school – a classic progression of Eton, Sandhurst and the Coldstream Guards. At the outbreak of war, he was Captain Roger Mortimer, thirty years old. As I listened to him describing the military action in Normandy, following D-Day, it became clear that he had not played a part in this crucial allied invasion or in the subsequent Battle of Normandy. I inevitably started to wonder where he had been in the war, which battles he might have fought in. Now full of curiosity, this question rapidly became pressing. I may even have asked that classic question: ‘What did you do in the war, Daddy?’ However I phrased it, the answer I received was comprehensive and devastating.

  My father spoke gravely: ‘I had the misfortune, possibly the ineptitude even, to be wounded in action in Belgium in May 1940. I was knocked out and when I came round, I found I had been taken prisoner by the Germans.’

  I can remember the sound of the sea resonating with my father’s voice as he unfolded too much his personal story from his capture in 1940 until his liberation in 1945 – how he spent five whole years in prison. To him, it had been a seemingly interminable period of time. To me, it was unimaginable – nearly half my own lifetime at that point.

  His revelation had a powerful impact on me. This was my father’s own real story which started before the one I knew, the one in which he had met, fallen in love and married my mother, become a writer, had children, bought a house in the country, made a garden, enjoyed friends and told jokes.

  It was an awakening for me in my little, self-absorbed world. I had never felt true hunger, serious cold, discomfort or fear. My life was just about perfect. I would never complain again.

  As he talked, I would chance a question when I could, anxious not to break the spell and bring my father back to the present, when he might get up, shake himself down and make his customary parting shot – ‘Well, there we are, my dear child’ – before wandering off to find the rest of the family. Warmed by a new and intensely loving admiration for my father, it struck me that he too was someone’s child, the only son of his parents. What worry they must have endured in the war, fearing that they might never see him again.

  ‘What was it like when you came home again?’ I ventured.

  Frowning, my father said, ‘Well, it was all very difficult.’

  I had already conjured up a heart-warming picture of his homecoming, scenes of the welcome and joy which would embrace the long absent and exhausted son, who though over six foot had weighed well under eight stone on his return. How thrilled my grandparents must have been to have him home again.

  ‘I’m afraid being thrilled to see me wasn’t really my mother’s style. Rather the reverse, in fact. I was made to feel like a major inconvenience because I had not given her enough advance warning of my arrival and it put the servants out. Food was rationed and there was something about shortages of soap!’

  I was incredulous.

  ‘There was not all that much pleasure in being at home. I was fond of my father and we got on well. He spent the greater part of his leisure hours at his club or on the golf course.’

  He added, ‘I can remember in one of the worst winters of the war, getting letters in prison from my mother full of emotion about one of her pet poodles being ill. There we were, prisoners – hungry, cold, with very few parcels of provisions getting through at that point – with no knowledge of what the future held.’ A silence fell upon us both.

  As the air grew cooler and the tide pulled out into the further distance, my father’s memories were still in full flow. How proud I felt of his endurance – and yet how angry and how sad. Where had people found the strength and courage to stand up to Hitler’s tyranny? I knew that people called out to God in terrible circumstances, that praying to him might help. I also knew that my father was not remotely religious. Perhaps in wartime though, God might have had a meaning for my father?

  ‘No,’ he laughed, without amusement. ‘God was not important to me, neither then nor now. What mattered most of all in prison was comradeship – the friendships with your fellow prisoners. That is what saw me through.’ Finally, he smiled.

  The hurly-burly of family life soon resumed its usual patten and we were happy enough to see my mother, brother and little sister reappear, damp, sandy and a little weary. The sun had gone in and the Mortimer family gathered up their things and set off to the car.

  But I ended my day looking at the world rather differently from how I had seen it on arrival at Omaha Beach. In the years to come, I would sometimes think back to that afternoon, recapturing the scene in my mind, sitting with my father and listening to his dear, familiar voice, his turns of phrase. As a child I often infuriated my father and as a teenager I concerned him constantly, but that afternoon we had initiated a quality of communication together, father and daughter, th
at would often renew itself as I grew up.

  That father of mine went on to teach me a great deal more about life in all its aspects over the coming thirty years, often through his letters. In that autumn of my eleventh year, I was sent off to boarding school. From that moment, and for the rest of his life, my father wrote to me regularly – some 450 letters, unique and extraordinary in content, fizzing with his bon mots.

  Before Roger became a parent at thirty-nine, he had already lived nearly half his life and had the experiences which shaped the man he became: Roger the racing writer; Roger the husband; Roger the father; Roger the friend. And throughout, Roger the wit.

  Let’s go back now and meet the young, bachelor Roger as a soldier abroad – latterly as a prisoner of war. From the late 1930s, my father’s letters home to his own parents and others illuminate this key period of his story.

  In July 1937, Roger was a twenty-seven year-old officer in the Coldstream Guards, embarking on his first overseas assignment.

  He set sail in ‘a small white vessel’ of the British India Line. In his earliest existing letter home, he describes the ship passing smoothly through the Bay of Biscay, a beautiful dawn as they sailed into Gibraltar and how, in Malta, he was captivated by the island and its people. His final destination was Alexandria in Egypt.

  His battalion had been dispatched to the Middle East on a peace mission to curb and contain the civil unrest and terrorism, rife in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine. At the core of the conflict was the resentment and anger of resident Arabs at the waves of Jewish immigrants arriving as they fled persecution in Europe.

  Roger was English by birth and in taste and habit. Committed to the life of a professional soldier – a career initiated by his father who regarded him as a somewhat shambolic character who could only benefit from military discipline – Roger did not have the instincts or outlook of an adventurer. He responded with great pleasure to the charms of civilized watering holes in Europe, but ultimately he was at his happiest and most at ease in his own country. I will not say ‘at home’ as that was a place of only intermittent enjoyment for him, controlled as it was by a mother for whom warmth meant something generated from a heater.

  His letters home from this period introduce us to some of the qualities that Roger later distilled into his epistles to his children. Restless and bored in the company of anyone who took themselves too seriously, he yawns at the tedium he is subject to: the Royal Egyptian Yacht club, dreary guests at formal social occasions, pompous and inefficient Army officers, aggressive nationalists, political fanatics . . . dictators. All could be laughed at – along with himself – sometimes lightly, at other times with a sharp twist of the lemon.

  Roger’s easy capacity for friendship was always coupled with a need for regular retreat into solitude. Company was all well and good, but he relished quiet periods in which to read, reflect and enjoy his own thoughts. Sometimes, though, it is not the solace of solitude but loneliness which percolates through those letters. There is no mention of a girlfriend, significant or otherwise. Maybe he just chose not to permit any girls to dance across the pages of letters to his parents.

  Roger was not constrained by the stiff upper lip of his generation. He was not inhibited in expressing his feelings about unpleasant, uncomfortable or fearful experiences; and the period he served in Egypt and Palestine provided its share of them. Finding himself in a region of terrorist attacks, bombs, shoot-outs, assassinations and road ambushes, there was more than a chance that Roger might not have survived to tell these tales. Addressing the downside of things, sympathetically, mischievously or caustically, added further spice to his letters to his mother, father and other relations.

  Alexandria

  Winter 1937

  The weather here is perfect – very hot and sunny with a pleasant sea breeze and not too cool at night either. I have left off my vests and never wear a waistcoat before dusk.

  The chief trouble is the mass attack by flies and bugs; every Wednesday is a day set apart for de-bugging every conceivable article of furniture and apparel and even so they continue to thrive.

  At present Alexandria is rather like Le Touquet in mid-winter – all the amusing places closed till the spring – but the locals are very hospitable and entertain a good deal. Never have I seen people drink more; apparently the climate is suitable for soaking and you can certainly put down a packet here without any ill-effect.

  Would you like some Jaffa oranges? Do let me know and I’ll send you some after the Christmas rush. I’ve sent off some Turkish Delight but God knows if it will ever get there, they’re so hopelessly inefficient here.

  Social and recreational life in Alexandria occupied the time whilst awaiting orders, as Roger told his father, Pop, in a number of letters:

  We’ve been pretty tense and anxious lately but on the whole life is quite enjoyable. I sail most afternoons in the harbour, being a very nautical and seamanlike member of the Royal Egyptian Yacht Club – extremely smart and exclusive (I don’t think). We usually go out in a boat which holds four or five people (it’s called a ‘Fairy’ I believe) and cruise round the harbour watching the boats come in and out and meeting the Imperial Airways Seaplanes. It’s usually rather rough outside the harbour so I find I enjoy myself more if I exercise a certain discretion and refrain from committing myself to the mercy of the waves and my own very limited nautical abilities. There are races in the harbour three days a week and although I sometimes take an extremely minor part as portion of the crew in these events, I find them rather a strain owing to the intense seriousness with which they are taken by the local yachtsmen.

  My social outings have been severely limited – I’m afraid I’m not a popular success with the local ‘gens chics’. However, I toiled off to a very stiff lunch party the other day (invitation card 6” × 4”) and paid for my temerity by undergoing a three-hour ordeal sandwiched between two of the dreariest bores I’ve ever met. One of them would lean across to talk to me and perspired most liberally on to my plate. I nearly covered my food with my handkerchief whenever I thought he was going to address me.

  Best love,

  Roger

  I went up to Cairo this week to do some work there; it’s far worse than here, very much hotter and terribly dry and dusty. The Nile has reached a record height and people are beginning to get nervous of a flood. This is really an extraordinary country: even at the main bookstall at Cairo Central Station it is quite impossible to buy anything but literature of a highly pornographic description!

  Best love,

  Roger

  I’m just off to motor down to Moascar (military garrison) about two hundred and twenty miles away in the desert. I’m not taking the Vauxhall as I know it would never make it on the ghastly roads out here, and it is far too valuable to me for running about town. I leave at midday in an Austin 7 (military) and drive from the Canal road to the Pyramids (about 120 miles) and I’ll spend the night out there in the open. The next day, I leave the road and drive cross country over the desert, my only guide being a compass whose accuracy has been more than questionable since a cow stood on it at Sandhurst! I expect the last 100 miles will have to be done at about 10 mph and I shall be lucky if I don’t stick in the soft sand. The country is hideous the whole way except for occasional bursts of wild flowers.

  I went for a picnic with some pretty tiresome girls at Aboukir Bay, a most lovely place for bathing and sailing, and prawns the size of small lobsters. I very rapidly tired of the party and spent the day with some native fishermen who were far more amusing and rather better mannered. I think I shall have to hire a very small boat next summer and just cruise quietly about in it.

  Best love,

  Roger

  An awful dinner party last week – 34 people and I sat next to a fabulously wealthy and exceedingly vulgar old bitch who was in the back row of the chorus of a Greek cabaret before marrying the richest man in Egypt. I told her a lot of shocking lies and asked her to come on a cruise on
my 100-ton yacht to the Aegean Islands; she has accepted and is I think looking forward to it.

  Best love,

  Roger

  There is not much to do in the evenings here – but there are good places where you can eat yourself silly on excellent food for about half a crown; the cinemas are indifferent and all the films are cut and they adhere to the odious French habit of having a long interval in the middle of the big film. Thank God for Penguin Books!’

  Best love,

  Roger

  Then Roger found himself caught up in a modern Battle of Jericho. There were plenty of military challenges in the area. When my father later described his days in Palestine to me, it was clear that over and above the conflict, he personally liked both Jews and Arabs for their different qualities, not least in the Arabs’ readiness to always laugh at a joke.

  Dear Pop,

  I have just returned from a short trip to Jericho where we were dispatched to restore order and re-establish the police who have been turned out by the rebels over the last three months.

  We had another of those bloody night drives – a convoy a mile long, leaving billets at 2.45 a.m. and getting to Jericho at 9 a.m. I thoroughly enjoyed it: You go down a twisting, precipitous road with the hills rising sharply up on either side. The whole 25 miles can have changed very little since biblical times and the only signs of modern civilisation were the ashes of burnt out Jew lorries, driven up without escort from the Dead Sea Potash Company and meeting with the inevitable fate on what must be the world’s best road for ambushes.

  Bethany is a charming place, without any of the unfortunate traces of tourist-catching vulgarity that mars so many places in Jerusalem.

  After 20 miles or so downhill, we reached the Dead Sea, with Jericho in the distance. It’s a very small town, appalling hot and stuffy in summer and full of mosquitoes – with plenty of trees and surrounded by banana groves. The inhabitants are mainly of Sudanese extraction but periodically the place gets overrun by the gangs who come down from the hills and raise hell.