As my French improved, I made friends with a number of village boys to whom I was an object of extreme curiosity. The summer of 1948 was blazingly hot and our daily magnet was the lake a mile outside the village. There, with rods made from reeds, we could fish for large green frogs, whose back legs, dusted with flour and fried in butter, made an excellent supper.
Lunches were always large and taken outside: hams cured black in the chimney smoke, pâté, crusty bread, butter from the churn, and fruit from the trees. I was taught to sample watered red wine like the other boys, but not the girls. It was at the lake one sweltering day that first summer that I saw Benoît die.
There were about six boys skylarking in the clearing by the water’s edge one midday when he appeared, clearly very intoxicated. The village youths murmured to me that he was Benoît, the village drunk. To our fascinated bewilderment, he stripped naked and waded into the lake. He was singing out of tune. We thought he was just going to cool off, waist deep. But he went on walking into the water until he was up to his neck. Then he started to swim, but within a few clumsy strokes his head disappeared.
Among the boys I was the strongest swimmer, so after half a minute it was suggested I should swim out and look for him. So I did. Having reached the point where his head had disappeared, I peered downward. Without a snorkeling mask (unheard of back then), I could see very little. The water was an amber color, and there were tangles of weeds and some lilies. Still unable to see much, I took a deep breath and dived.
About ten feet down, on the bottom, was a pale blob lying on its back. Closer up I could see a trickle of bubbles emerging from his mouth. He clearly was not frolicking, but drowning. As I turned to resurface a hand gripped my left ankle and held it. Above my head, I could see the sun shining through the dim water, but the surface was two feet away and the grip did not slacken. Feeling the onset of panic, I turned and went back down.
Finger by finger, I peeled the dying hand off my ankle. Benoît’s eyes were open and he stared at me as my lungs began to hurt. Finally the hand was off my leg and I kicked for the surface. I felt the fingers seeking a second grip, but I kicked again, felt an impact with a face and then shot upward toward the sun.
There was that wonderful inrush of fresh air that all free divers will recognize when they return to the surface, and I began to splash toward the gravel patch under the trees where the village boys waited, openmouthed. I explained what I had seen and one of them ran for the village. But it was half an hour before men appeared with ropes. One stripped to his long johns and went in. Others waded in waist deep, but no farther. The man in the long johns was the only one who could swim. Eventually a connection was made with the object under the water and the body was hauled out by one wrist on the end of a rope.
There was no question of resuscitation even if anyone had known the technique. The boys gathered around before being shooed away. The corpse was bloated and discolored, a trickle of red, either blood or red wine, dribbling from the corner of the mouth. Eventually an oxcart appeared, and what was left of old, drunk Benoît was taken back to the village.
There were no formalities such as an autopsy or inquiry. I suppose the mayor wrote out a death certificate and Monsieur l’Abbé presided over a burial somewhere in the churchyard. I spent four happy summer holidays at Lamazière Basse, and when I returned from the fourth, aged twelve, I could pass for French among the French. It was an asset that would later prove extremely useful many times.
That summer of 1948 was the first time I had seen a human corpse. It would not be the last. Not by about fifty thousand.
LEARNING GERMAN
My father was a remarkable man. His formal education was from the Chatham Dockyard School, math-oriented, and in what he knew he was largely self-taught. He was not rich or famous or titled. Just a shopkeeper from Ashford. But he had a kindness and a humanity that were noted by everyone who knew him.
At the very end of the war, being a major serving directly under the War Office, he was summoned to London without explanation. In fact it was for a film show, but this one did not star Betty Grable.
With a hundred others, he sat in a darkened hall inside the ministry to see the first films, taken by the army photographic unit, of British soldiers liberating the concentration camp known as Bergen-Belsen. It marked him forever. He told me much later that after five years of war he had not really understood what he and millions of others had been struggling to defeat and destroy until he saw the horrors of Bergen-Belsen. He did not know there could be such cruelty on earth.
My mother told me that he came home, still in uniform, but instead of changing, he stood for two hours in front of the window, staring out, his back to the room, impervious to her pleading to tell her what was wrong. He just stared in silence. Finally he tore himself away from his thoughts, went upstairs to change, instructing her as he passed: “I never want to meet one again. I never want one in my house.” He meant Germans.
It did not last. Later, he mellowed, went to Germany, and met and spoke civilly to many Germans. It is a mark of the man that in 1952, when I was thirteen, he decided to send me to live during the school holidays with a German family. He wanted his only son to learn German, to know the country and the people. When my bewildered mother asked him why, he simply said: “Because it must never happen again.”
But he would not, by the summer of 1952, have an exchange visit with a German boy, though there were plenty of such offers available. I would go as a paying guest. There was a struggling British–German Friendship Society and I think it was arranged through them. The family chosen farmed outside Göttingen. This time I flew.
Dad had a friend from his army days who had stayed on and was based with the British Army of the Rhine at the British camp at Osnabrück. He saw me off at Northolt aerodrome outside London; the airplane was an elderly Dakota DC, which droned its way across France and Germany to land at the British base there. Father Gilligan, a jovial Irish padre who had been billeted with us in Ashford, was there to meet me. He drove me to Göttingen and handed me over.
It was very strange to be an English boy in Germany back then. I was an oddity. I had had three years of German at prep school, so at least I had a poor smattering of the language, as opposed to my first visit to France four years earlier, when I knew hardly a word of French. The family was very kind and did everything in their power to make me feel at home. It was an uneventful four weeks, of which I recall only one rather strange encounter.
There was a world gliding championship that year, and it was held at a place called Oerlinghausen. We all went off there for a family day out. My host’s interest in flying stemmed from the fact that he had been in the Luftwaffe during the war, as an officer but not a flyer.
The huge expanse of grassland was crowded with gliders in a variety of club markings, waiting their turn to be towed into the air. And there were notable pilots, around whom admiring crowds were grouped. One in particular was clearly very famous and the center of attention. And she was a woman, though I had not a clue who she was.
In fact she was Hanna Reitsch, Luftwaffe test pilot and Hitler’s personal aviator. If he doted on her, his admiration was as nothing to the adoration she bore for him.
In April 1945, as the Red Army closed in on the surrounded heart of Berlin, and Hitler, drawn and trembling, moped about his bunker under the Reich Chancellery, Hanna Reitsch, at the controls of a Fieseler Storch, a high-wing monoplane with an extremely short landing and takeoff run, flew into the doomed enclave. With amazing skill, she put it down on an avenue in the Charlottenburg Zoo, switched off, and walked through the shell fire to the bunker.
Because of who she was, she was allowed into the final redoubt where, a few days later, Hitler would blow his brains out, and was ushered into the presence. There she begged the man she admired so much to let her fly him out of the Berlin death trap and down to the Berghof, his fortified home at Berchtesgaden in s
outhern Bavaria. There, she urged him, surrounded by SS last-ditch fanatics, the resistance could continue.
Hitler thanked her, but refused. He was determined to die and bring all Germany down to ruin with him. They were not worthy of him, he explained, one notable exception being Hanna Reitsch.
A friend of my host, another veteran of the Luftwaffe, secured our admission into the admiring circle around the ace aviator. She was beaming and shook hands with my host and his wife and their teenage children. Then she turned to me and held out her hand.
That was when my host made a mistake. “Our young house guest,” he said. “Er ist ein Engländer.”
The smile froze, the hand was withdrawn. I recall a pair of blazing blue eyes and a voice rising in rage. “Ein Engländer???” she squawked, and stalked off.
Like my father, it appeared, she had not quite forgotten, either.
BACK TO GERMANY
The following year, 1953, I returned to Germany. The farming family outside Göttingen could not have me back, so I went to stay with Herr Dewald and his wife and children. He was a schoolteacher in Halle, Westphalia.
Back then Germany still seemed like a country under some form of occupation, even though the German Federal Republic had been formed under the chancellorship of Konrad Adenauer in 1949. But the old Germany was divided into East and West, with the capital of West Germany not at Berlin but in Bonn, a small town on the Rhine, chosen because it was Chancellor Adenauer’s hometown.
The reason for the impression of occupation was the omnipresence of the NATO forces, which were there not to occupy but to defend; it was NATO that held the line against the expansionist Soviet bloc, which had, until his death in March, been in the grip of the brutal tyrant Joseph Stalin. Westphalia was in the British Zone, which was studded with British Army camps and air bases. This force was simply known as the British Army of the Rhine, and its vehicles could often be seen speeding through the streets. The invasion threat from east of the Iron Curtain was seen as very real.
The eastern third of Germany was behind that Iron Curtain and part of the Soviet empire. It was known as East Germany or, weirdly, the German Democratic Republic. It was very far from being democratic, being a harsh dictatorship with a nominal German Communist government eager to do the bidding of the real masters, the twenty-two divisions of the Red Army and the Soviet embassy. The Western powers retained, by treaty, only one enclave, the encircled West Berlin, stuck eighty miles inside East Germany.
The infamous Berlin Wall, completing the encirclement of West Berlin, would not go up until 1961 to prevent the constant flow of East German graduates pouring out of the technical colleges and universities via West Berlin to seek a better life in West Germany. But the general air of threat after the Berlin Blockade of 1948–49, which nearly sparked World War III, meant that the British Army, far from being resented by the Germans, was much appreciated.
In my own class, I had a more practical use as a guest with a German family. Using my stiff blue passport, I could enter a British base, go to the on-site duty-free shop, and buy real coffee, which, after years of drinking bitter substitutes, ranked with gold dust.
I arrived in Halle after the break for the Easter holidays of British schools, but before that of German schools. As Herr Dewald was a teacher and his children were still at school, it was thought practical that I should attend the German school until its holidays began a fortnight later. Here I was, very much a figure of curiosity, the first Britisher they had ever seen and presumed to have fanged teeth or at least a forked tail. There was considerable mutual relief that we all looked much the same. Both in the Dewald home and at the high school, my German was improving rapidly.
A characteristic of German society that I was introduced to, and that somewhat bewildered me, was the worship of nature, the open countryside. Having been brought up amid the fields and woods of Kent, I pretty much accepted Mother Nature as just being there, with no need to adulate it. But the Germans made great play of going on long walks through it. These were called “Wandering Days.” The whole school, age group by age group, would be lined up to go on these country hikes. During the first I ever went on, I noticed something strange.
While a similar group of British kids would simply amble along in an untidy mass, the German children within half a mile had somehow formed themselves into a column, rank upon rank, three abreast. Then the walking slowly transformed, with all the feet coming up and down in unison until we were marching.
This was soon accompanied by singing, specifically a song I can remember sixty years later. It started “Whom God wishes truly to favor He sends out into the wide world to see His miracles in mountain, forest, and field.” All good, healthy stuff.
After a while, I noted a stick had gone up into the air at the head of the column, held high so that we could all march behind it. There was no flag, but soon a hat appeared on the stick, like a sort of banner.
We were now deep in the forest, marching down a sandy track behind our leader, singing away, when far ahead a jeep appeared, speeding toward us. It was a British Army vehicle; I could make out the regimental insignia on the front mudguard, and it was clearly not going to stop.
The children broke ranks and jumped to one side to let it pass. It was open-topped, with a redheaded corporal driving and a sergeant beside him. As it swept past, the corporal leaned out and shouted something in a clear East London accent. As the tail disappeared down the track and the sand and dust settled, the German children gathered eagerly around me to ask, “Fritz, what was that the soldier called out to us?” I felt it wise to be diplomatic.
“He said, ‘Have a happy Wandering Day,’” I reported.
They were delighted. “Ach, Fritz,” I was told, “your British soldiers are so nice.”
I had not the heart to tell them what he had really shouted. It was: “Practicing for the next time, are we, lads?”
There is simply no substitute for Cockney humor, and obviously a certain amount of reconciliation was yet to be achieved.
I spent a third vacation with a German family the next year—the Dewalds again—and by 1954 I could pass for a German in Germany. That, too, was to prove extremely useful when, a decade later, I was posted for a year to live in East Berlin and, after shaking my secret police “tail,” used to disappear into the heart of East Germany.
LANGUAGES
It is sometimes thought that to speak a foreign language—really speak it rather than just get by with fifty words, a phrase book, and a lot of gestures—it suffices to master grammar and vocabulary. Not so: those are two, but there are, in all, three further aspects to passing unnoticed in a foreign language.
Third, there is the accent. The British are spectacularly useless at mimicking foreign accents, and there is absolutely no substitute for starting young and living with a family in the foreign country involved, with the one proviso that the family should speak hardly a word of the student’s language. With English now the common language of virtually the whole world, this is harder and harder. Everyone wants to practice their English.
But after the accent comes the slang. Perfect, academic language is an immediate giveaway—because every people sprinkles its native language with phrases that appear in no dictionary or guidebook and simply cannot be translated word for word. We do not even notice how often we do this, but it is constant. Listen in a crowded bar or at a lively dining table, and it will become clear that in almost every sentence a speaker will use a colloquialism that will never be taught in any language class.
The last aspect is even harder to quantify or imitate. It is the body language. All foreign languages and the speaking of them are accompanied by facial expressions and hand gestures that are probably unique to that language group and are picked up by children as they watch their parents and schoolteachers.
Thus, when in 1951, at the age of thirteen, I went to Tonbridge School to try for a scholarship
in modern languages, I recall the senior teacher in French, Mr. A. E. Foster (always known in the absence of political correctness as Frog Foster), sitting in some bemusement, facing a small boy jabbering away in French complete with colloquialisms and gestures. A few days later, Mr. Logie Bruce Lockhart had the same experience in German. I got the scholarship and transferred to the upper school in September.
A year later, having swotted hard at Latin, history, geography, and the hated math and science, I collected my Ordinary Levels, and at fifteen, three Advanced Levels—all in languages.
But Tonbridge, whatever its failings, was academically excellent and, discovering a teacher who had served on the Arctic convoys to Russia and spoke Russian, offered a third language. The choice was Russian or Spanish. I chose Russian on the grounds that it would be much harder than Spanish, which I could learn later.
The summer of 1954 would entail O-Level Russian, and my dad thought some holiday tutelage might help. Somehow he tracked down a pair of Russian princesses in Paris who tutored in Russian and took in young paying guests. Their services were much patronized by the Royal Navy (I think it was a Navy contact who recommended them). So that spring I was sent over during the school holidays to reside for three weeks at their apartment in Paris.
They were the Princesses Dadiani and they were actually Georgian, but pillars of the White Russian community of Paris. They were completely divorced from planet Earth and charmingly dotty. But huge fun.
Their world had more or less stopped when, in 1921, as the White forces lost the civil war to the Red Soviet army, they were evacuated by their father, the last king of Georgia, and arrived with only a suitcase of jewelry in Paris, which was then teeming with refugees from the Russian aristocracy.