Not marking a death but celebrating a life

Getting to know my father, in the mid-1950s

It’s a strange sensation to wake up and discover it’s the 24^th of May, as happened to me this morning. Or at least, it has been a little odd for 37 years now (and it amazes me to realise it has been that long). 

It was on that day in 1983 that my father died.

For 35 years, it was particularly difficult because my mother always took it badly. She had the terrible misfortune of being a widow longer than she was married: she survived my father for 35 years, having been married for 32.

Each year, I would ring her and wonder how to broach the subject. Should I bring it up? Should I let her raise it? If I spoke first might I upset her by reminding her, or if I waited to let her mention it, might I upset her by seeming to have forgotten?

Yes. She wasn’t easy, my mother. Many fine and attractive qualities but being simple to know and get along with wasn’t one of them.

I would always suggest to her that we shouldn’t fixate on the 24^th of May, but rather concentrate on the 15^th of September, his birthday, which was always a good day in the family. A day to celebrate rather than a day to mourn. But poor woman, she grieved all the same.

Well, she died nearly two years ago. So this year, I am going to mark the death of my father not with a lament, but with a celebration. A brief overview of his life in photos.

Here he is in his first year. This would have been late 1921 or early 1922.

He was brought up in Brussels, and here he is at four walking up one of the main streets with his mother.

In 1936, he was 15 and in the boy scouts.

By the early 1940s, he was in uniform again, but for war service in the Royal Air Force.

In 1951, he married my mother in Genoa. And why not Genoa? The obvious place to get married, for an Englishman raised in Belgium and who met his wife-to-be in Paris.

They stopped in Nervi, near Genoa, before honeymooning near Naples. He then took up a position he held for sixteen years, at the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, in Rome (which is where both my brother and I were born).

In 1960, he posed rather well, I think, by the River Congo, while serving with the UN Emergency mission. He returned to that country with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in 1967, after his stint in Rome.

In 1964, we had a rather good holiday in what was then Yugoslavia, and stopped at various places on the way back to Rome, including Venice where you can see him feeding the pigeons in St Mark’s Square with my brother.

In 1977, he was approaching retirement, still with the UNDP but at its headquarters in New York.

He retired to France, to Michauroi, a hamlet lost in the countryside of the Charente Department. He loved being there, though he and my mother would also travel to England regularly, staying in a flat they rented in Bromley. Here he is (at right) with my mother (at the back near the centre) and some friends. At that time, he only had two years ahead of him.

He had a rich and varied life and did a lot of things that mattered to him – his war service, his work for the UN in the Congo Emergency, his work on projects for the UNDP. He died far too young, at 61. His style of life had done nothing for his health, however satisfying it was in other ways.

Even if he hadn’t died then, I don’t suppose he would have made it till today. He’d have been rising 99 now. But I still miss him. He was an excellent father and a lot of fun.

Which is what I prefer to mark on the 24^th of May.

A detail underlining tragedy. But with a smile

It’s going to take me months, if not years, to finish going through my late parents’ papers. But however long the task may be, it’s alleviated by some of the findings I make. Sometimes, they’re amusing, sometimes more serious, and the best are both.

As I’ve mentioned before, my father, Leonard, served in the Royal Air Force in World War 2. One trace of this service that I recently discovered in his papers was a card prepared to help airmen escape capture if they were shot down over Nazi-occupied territory and, somehow, managed to survive.

Airmen, phrases for the escape of,

It was marked ‘Not to be Produced in Public’. Clearly, this was sensitive material. Someone had decided that it was important for the general public in Britain not to know that the German for “I am in a hurry” could be “Ich habe es eilig”.

Personally, I have trouble imagining a situation in which a British airman would have used that expression. Faced with a platoon of German soldiers, he would have explained “I’d love to stay and chat but…” and pulling out his escape card, added “ich habe es eilig”. I suspect one of his captors might have replied, “oh, don’t worry. You’ve got plenty of time. You’re our guest now.”

Perhaps the top levels of the RAF thought that it would be harmful to civilian morale to know that their airmen might ever find themselves in such a situation in the first place. Presumably, they assumed that Brits were too short of imagination to guess that RAF crews faced any risk of being shot down or captured. Seeing the escape card might have created panic among them.

That strikes me as pretty farfetched. It would be like believing that a majority of British voters could be fooled by shifty politicians into swallowing the patently preposterous proposition that they might be better off outside the European Union. Can you imagine that ever happening?

I also liked the fact that the card provides translations for the expression “Will you please get me a third class ticket to…” which the RAF rendered in French as “Voulez-vous me prendre un billet de troisième classe pour… s’il vous plait”

Get out of Nazi Europe free card

You’ve got to admire the thriftiness of the air force, haven’t you? Even for an airman on the run from Nazi forces, their men were expected to travel economically. I can just picture an airmen who somehow managed to dodge the German troops across half of Europe and then smuggle himself across the Channel to England being hauled in for a grilling by an irate squadron leader in Finance.

“What’s this in your expenses claim? You travelled from Düsseldorf to Brussels in second class? You know the rules. Only third-class travel’s authorised. You’ll have to pay the balance out of your own pocket, I’m afraid.”

Perhaps the US air force was more generous. Maybe they were taught to ask for first-class tickets for officers and second-class tickets for the others.

Still, the card doesn’t only evoke amusement. After all, the mere fact that it was produced underlines the danger airmen faced. Within Bomber Command, for instance, for every 100 who served, 45 were killed, 6 were seriously wounded and 8 were captured. Only 41 out of every 100 escaped any of those fates.

Leonard was among those shot down. But that happened in September 1944, when Allied forces already controlled a great part of Western Europe. So when his plane was hit, on the way back from dropping supplies to the paratroops caught at Arnhem in the ill-fated Operation Market Garden (made all the more infamous by the film A Bridge Too Far), the pilot was able to keep it in the air until well behind the Allied lines. As a result, instead of being captured they were simply evacuated to Brussels.

There Leonard had a wonderful time. He had no need of the silly phrase card. He’d spent his childhood in the city and spoke a beautiful, fluent French. Fortunately, the RAF had had the foresight to provide airmen not just with useless lists of phrases but also with escape currency to spend if they were shot down (presumably so they could buy third-class rail tickets). Leonard enjoyed himself immensely spending his escape money in the city of his childhood, before being shipped back to England and the rest of the war.

Ah, well. Even when I try to get serious about my father’s war, I notice the story ends up light-hearted. I think that was something of a hallmark of that generation. They’d seen things that weren’t that edifying and saw no benefit in reliving the horror. Instead, they focused on the things that made them laugh, and finished conversations about the war on a smile.

Which strikes me as a good note on which to end this blog post too.

Leatrice: hankering for more

When I last wrote about my mother, Leatrice, I mentioned the strange circumstance that my parents’ wedding took place in Genoa.

Nothing strange about that for the Genoese, of course. Just unusual for a young English couple. Except that they’d met in Paris and were travelling to Rome, where Leonard, my father, was about to take up a new job with the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation. Genoa was on the way. So maybe getting married there wasn’t really that odd after all.

July 1951: my parents get married in Genoa

It was a moment of transition for Leatrice. Years later, she wrote several letters to contacts from the forties, asking for testimonials of the time when she’d worked for them. John Parker, Labour MP and leading member of the Fabian Society, one of the oldest progressive organisations in Britain, wrote one of them. He explained that she had worked for him from 1942 to 1945, when he had been General Secretary of the Fabian Society and MP for the seat of Romford in Essex:

… then the largest Parliamentary Constituency in Britain … which was divided into 4 Parliamentary seats at the time of the 1945 General Election… She also assisted me in the work of the Fabian Society… In particular she did a very useful job in our India Committee at a time when [India’s] future was very much in the melting pot… Much useful organizing work was also carried out for the Fabian Society particularly in connection with the running of the Summer Schools.

She already had a testimonial from August 1947 by Woodrow Wyatt, later an admirer of Margaret Thatcher’s but back then a Labour MP in his first term. He worked with the British Commission in India and in particular handled relations with the Muslims, who were preparing not only for independence from Britain but also independence from India, as Pakistan.

Wyatt had known Leatrice for two years and she had:

…acted as Minutes Secretary of the Indian Affairs Group of the Fabian Society when I was Secretary of the Group and during that time she was most energetic and capable, and showed a high sense of responsibility.

Another of the testimonials she collected in 1974 came from David C. Williams, Chairman of the International Affairs Committee of Americans for Democratic Action. He’d been sent to London in July 1946 on behalf of the Union for Democratic Action, its predecessor organisation.

One of my first actions was to engage Miss Leatrice Bannister, now Mrs. Beeson, as my assistant. Her knowledge of the principles and programs of the Labour Party and the Fabian Society and of many of their leading personalities proved invaluable to me… It enabled me to get into the swing of things much more promptly than I would otherwise have done.

She had worked with him until January 1948, when she left for Paris.

It must have been quite a heady atmosphere for a woman in her twenties. The India committee of the Fabian Society must have been particularly gratifying: Labour’s Clement Attlee was in office and, in foreign affairs, overseeing Indian independence remains his most significant achievement.

1951, the year of her wedding, definitively closed that period of Leatrice’s life. I was born in 1953, my brother in 1956. Leatrice, who’d worked for her own living since becoming an adult, became a wife and mother with no job of her own but dependent on her husband’s earnings.

Leatrice with my brother Nicky in 1956

One of my lasting memories of our time in Italy was the yearly summer holidays in Porto Ercole, in Tuscany. At the time, the place was a small fishing port, where my brother or I could wander off, and local people would be able to tell my parents where we were. Today, it’s a heaving mass of tourists. But what remains is Feniglia, outside the town, with its kilometres-long golden beach, where we’d spend hours in the warm water and then roll in the baking hot sand to get warm again, with barely another person in sight.

Nicky on the rocks (literally not metaphorically)
at one end of the Feniglia beach

Me on the edge of beach

My father would join us when he could

Leonard would come up and join us at weekends, and generally spent a week or two at some point. Eventually we’d head back to Rome, where we lived in a converted farm building on the edge of the city. It was part of a baronial estate which still had a large cement-walled pond where two local families would do their washing, the wives using bars of soap and cold water, wringing and beating the clothes in a sink fed from the pond.

Nicky on the edge of the pond at Via Casale San Pio V in Rome
Not the first place we lived in but the last
and where we stayed the longest

Leatrice in the garden
We lived on the top floor of the building beyond the gate

My father had work. My mother had us. Those long summers at Feniglia – did she enjoy them as much as we did? Or did she miss the intellectual stimulation of her English life? John Parker mentioned her role in organising the Fabian summer schools, at Dartington in Devon, where my parents eventually sent my brother and me to school. Another of the testimonials she solicited in 1974 came from a close friend from those times – I suspect they’d had at least a fling – and he wrote as a Professor from the University of British Columbia at Vancouver.

Did she ever wonder wistfully whether that was the world to which she should have belonged? That all the international travel had been exciting, but that she might have been more at home in academe or politics – or possibly both? Did she ever entirely recover from her pain at not getting the university education she had wanted in 1942 but passed up to go straight to work?

There’s a hint in the reason why she was asking for all those testimonials.

In 1974, Leonard was working at the headquarters of the United Nations Development Programme in New York. Leatrice decided that this was the opportunity to undertake the studies she’d missed before. She enrolled at Queens College of the City University of New York. The testimonials won her some credits for her course, but she hardly needed them: she took A grade after A grade, disappointed on the rare occasions when she fell as low as a B.

She was admitted to Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest and arguably the most prestigious of the American academic honour societies. That was something of which she was profoundly proud, and for many years she would wear the gold Phi Beta Kappa key around her neck.

Badge of pride: Leatrice's Phi Beta Kappa key

One of her papers was graded by a Professor Zvi Yavetz at Tel Aviv university. A Holocaust survivor, he was one of the founders of the university and a major figure in history studies in Israel for several decades. He wrote to her to say:

The following cable has been sent to the department of History, Queens College: ‘Grade Beeson Leatrice’s superb paper A+…

I would also like to tell you that only students like yourself can make a course interesting, because only they can stimulate a teacher to prepare his class.

It’s ironic today, with the Labour Party embroiled in a long drawn out dispute over antisemitism, to read this forty-year old praise from an Israeli academic for a lifelong, Jewish Labour supporter.

In June 1976, at the age of 52, she graduated in History with the top class of a US degree, Summa Cum Laude.

Leatrice's degree certificate
A proud achievement. But - three decades late?

It must have been a valediction for her. But perhaps also a source of regret. 

There’s no doubt that my mother took great satisfaction from most of her life and wouldn’t have wished to change much in it for anything else. On the other hand, her results in 1976 demonstrated just how much she could achieve. She must have wondered at times whether she’d missed the opportunity to fulfil her potential. Had she won such success three decades earlier, when she’d wanted to, how much more might she have accomplished?
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War record

Flying log entries

20.9.44. No. 18. Operation Holland: 20 containers: 4 panniers. Heavy flak damage – B/A wounded. Crash landed Alost Belgium.

Those terse words are a flying log entry by the man, then 23 and a navigator in the Royal Air Force, who would later become my father.

It took a while for my father to tell us about his eighteenth mission. Perhaps at first he felt we were too young. Perhaps it took time before he could talk about it in a matter-of-fact way, even make light of it. But eventually he did.

20 September was the fourth day of the disastrous military enterprise known as Operation Market Garden, a fictionalised version of which appeared in the film A Bridge Too Far. The brainchild of British Field Marshall Montgomery, its aim was to drop paratroops at three points the furthest of which would be at Arnhem with its bridge across the Rhine. Seizing that bridge would open the road into Germany for Allied forces.

The success of the mission depended on ground forces advancing at speed towards the three airborne drops. Unfortunately, planners had seriously underestimated the strength of German forces near Arnhem, and hopelessly overestimated the quality of the road the army would have to move along to relieve the paratroops.

Ultimately, the British airborne troops would suffer terrible losses and few of the survivors would escape capture.

My father was serving with 196 squadron of the RAF, which specialised in airborne troop operations. He was already out on the first day, 17 September:

No. 16. Operation Holland: 1 Horsa Glider: Flak damage

The gliders the squadron was towing, he told me, were carrying anti-tank shells.

‘Unfused?’ he asked a glider pilot.

‘Oh, no, there’s no time to fuse them on the ground. We carry them fused.’

It gave my father great respect for the glider pilots to learn that. One bullet in their load would precipitate a massive explosion, that would certainly kill the pilot. It might, indeed, do no good at all to the towing plane too.

As the log entry shows, my father’s plane was hit by flak – anti-aircraft fire – even on that first mission, but not so seriously as to cause serious damage. He was out on the second day too and suffered no damage. It was beginning to feel like an easy run. The squadron had received a new draft of ground engineers, and a bunch of them asked to come out with the planes since it was all proving so easy. That was strictly against regulations, but they flew out anyway – and very few of them came back.

Then came day 3. The 20th of September.

It was on the return flight that my father’s plane flew over a hospital, clearly marked with red crosses. He saw a skylight begin to open in the roof.

‘Oh, oh,’ he thought, ‘that doesn’t look good.’

A few seconds later anti-aircraft shells were flying towards them. He watched as they began to punch holes in a wing, each hit a little closer to the fuselage where he and the rest of the crew were sitting. They were able to fly out of range before any fatal damage was done to them, but the engines then began to fail, one by one. Once three had stopped and they were down to one, the pilot announced that they weren’t going to get home and that he was going to crash land instead.

The RAF didn’t have enough flying crew, so many had to play more than one role. My father, as well as his principal role as navigator was technically co-pilot as well. He asked the pilot whether he’d like him in the co-pilot’s seat to help with the landing, but the pilot said he could manage and asked him to go back and sit with the crew.

They sat in the main body of the plane, their backs against the sides, their feet braced against each other’s.

The pilot landed in a field, without the undercarriage down. The plane skidded across the rough ground and the stress broke the fuselage open, so stones and dust and bits of vegetation showered the men inside.

Finally, the plane came to a halt and my father went forward to see how the pilot was doing. He found him unhurt, but he plane had hit a tree at the end of its wild rid, and the trunk had cut the co-pilot’s seat in two. Had the pilot accepted my father’s offer of help, he would certainly have been killed and I would not now be writing this account.

‘Crash landed Alost Belgium’ the log book reads. Alost was well behind the Allied lines, so there was no risk of being captured by German forces. Instead, a British jeep turned up soon after to investigate the crash, and the crew was shipped off to hospital in Brussels.

They’d all survived. All but one was unhurt. ‘B/A wounded’ my father recorded in his log book. The reality was rather starker than that.

During the time the plane had been losing power and altitude, the pilot asked my father to go forward to the gondola where the bomb aimer, who doubled as the forward gunner, lay during missions. A shell had exploded near his position and blown him, from his prone position, to sitting upright against the steps that led into the gondola. His head was a mass of blood.

My father sat on the top steps with the injured man’s head between his knees. British aircrew wore leather helmets which could be peeled off. My father started on the grisly task.

‘I froze at one point. I was seized by an irrational fear that if I got his helmet off, his head would fall apart.’

It didn’t. But the bomb aimer eventually lost his sight.

A young airman in the making

On 20 September 1944, my father had been 23 for just five days. The bomb aimer was probably about the same age, perhaps even younger. The loss of his sight, and the threat to the lives of the entire crew, was caused by fire from a gun doubtless manned by men as young as they were.

No wonder European countries decided after the war that it was time to set up a union that might prevent young people ever being called to do that to each other again.

Strange to think that so much is hiding behind the laconic message: ‘20.9.44. No. 18. Operation Holland: 20 containers: 4 panniers. Heavy flak damage – B/A wounded. Crash landed Alost Belgium.’