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.’

Ashamed to be gay?

Henry Dundas, his long-time friend and political ally, is said to have wagered £500 that William Pitt the Younger never touched a woman.

Pitt did a great many other things. The son of the elder Pitt who had also been Prime Minister, he would be the youngest holder of that office that Britain has ever seen. He came to power at 24. Seventeen years later, when he resigned (temporarily as it turned out), he was still younger than any other British Prime Minister has been on first taking office.

Being Prime Minister was his one driving aspiration. So much so that following his return to power, he would hold it to the grave, dying in office less than two years later. He was still unbearably young, just 46.

What about that business of never touching a woman?

It had seemed at one point that he might. He drew close to the family of his friend and political ally William Eden, Baron Auckland, the nearest neighbour to the country house Pitt then had in Kent. He spent much of his time with the family and in particular in conversation with Auckland’s daughter, Eleanor Eden. The strong attachment between them became so obvious that in 1797 there was widespread talk of a marriage between the Prime Minister and Eleanor.

Eleanor Eden: disappointed
by insurmountable obstacles to her marriage

It seems he suddenly became aware of how committed he was becoming. So he wrote to explain he’d had had no intention of getting in so deep though, this being the late eighteenth century, it wasn’t to Eleanor that he wrote, but to her father.

It can hardy, I think, be necessary to say that the time I have passed among your family has led to my forming sentiments of very real attachment towards them all, and of much more than attachment towards one whom I need not name. Nor should I do justice to my own feelings, or explain myself as firmly as I think I ought to do, if I did not own that every hour of my acquaintance with the person to whom you will easily conceive I refer has served to augment and confirm that impression; in short, has convinced me that whoever may have the good fortune ever to be united to her is destined to more than his share of human happiness.

Whether, at any rate, I could have had any ground to hope that such might have been my lot, I am in no degree entitled to guess. I have to reproach myself for ever having indulged the idea on my own part as far as I have done without asking myself carefully and early enough what were the difficulties in the way of tis being realised. I have suffered myself to overlook them too long, but having now at length reflected as fully and as calmly as I am able on every circumstance that ought to come under my consideration (at least as much for her sake as for my own), I am compelled to say that I find the obstacles to it decisive and insurmountable.

Pitt never explained what the obstacles were, which strikes me as significant enough in itself. The collapse of the hopes for the match must, however, have helped Dundas win his wager, if anyone accepted it: it seems unlikely that Pitt ever did touch a woman, in the sense Dundas intended.

Curiously, one man famously did touch Pitt. William Hague has written a great biography of Pitt, proving that it’s possible to be an infuriating Tory politician (at one time leader of his party, as it happens) but be good historian and, even more important, a fine writer too. As Hague explains, a protégé of Pitt’s and future Prime Minister himself, George Canning, ‘had once even been seen to touch Pitt on the shoulder, an action unthinkable to the majority of MPs.’

Later on, Pitt played a significant role in making Canning’s marriage possible and acted as one of the witnesses to it. But, as Hague again tells us:

He seemed to behave bizarrely at Canning’s wedding on 8 July, although he should have found it a joyous occasion, having encouraged the match, bringing Canning and his bride Joan Scott together at Walmer, and giving Caning promotion [in government] so that he was better provided for. […] At the ceremony Pitt seemed too nervous to sign the register, suggesting that he was either distressed, ill, or much influenced by alcohol.

Distressed? That seems distinctly plausible. If Pitt had feelings for Canning that he couldn’t avow, helping fix up his marriage would have been an obvious stratagem. But, obvious or not, the stratagem might very well not have protected him from feelings of unbearable sorrow and disappointment when the event took place.

Hague is careful not to assert more than the record can confirm. At one point he suggests that an answer to mystery of Pitt’s behaviour may have been…

…that Pitt had homosexual leanings but suppressed any urge to act on them for the sake of his ambitions. Social attitudes were more hostile to such tendencies in the late eighteenth century than they are today, or had been only a few decades before. It is possible that the suppression of private feelings added to Pitt’s apparent aloofness and his dedication to work.

The record certainly provides no confirmation:

We have no sure evidence that Pitt was homosexual: no surviving letter or diary of any of his friends gives any hint of it, no enemy directly alleged it even after his death. Nevertheless, there was a good deal of innuendo and gossip.

Pitt was a remarkable man. In purely practical terms, he had a remarkable career and achieved far more than most politicians manage.

But isn’t it intriguing to think that behind all that success there may have lurked a tragic, unavowable and insatiated longing?

Is Labour really anti-Semitic?

There was a time when to be a British Jew was virtually tantamount to being a Labour Party supporter.

That was the case of the Jewish side of my family. My mother was an active Labourite, working as a secretary to a Labour MP during the Second World War, and true to that loyalty right up to her death at 94 two weeks ago.

Like her, I’ve never voted for any other party, and remain a member to this day.

That makes it sad to see that a breach has opened up between Jews and the Labour Party today. A personal sadness for myself. But also ultimately for the Labour Party itself.

The current conflict focuses on Labour’s refusal to adopt in its entirety the definition of anti-Semitism adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA). Or rather, not to accept all the accompanying examples.

Three Jewish papers express their anger at Labour's stance

As it happens, the IHRA’s text is weakly drafted and open to multiple interpretations. Take this suggested example of anti-Semitism:

Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.

The Labour leadership objects to it because they see it as limiting the freedom to criticise the state of Israel. However, I see no basis for saying it prevents anyone saying that when the Israeli government reduces the rights of its Arab citizens. Nor does it prevent anyone arguing that by doing so, the Israeli government and many citizens are displaying racist attitudes. As they are.

Indeed, it does not even prevent anyone arguing, as I do, that setting up the state of Israel was an error. It has always struck me as way for Americans and Europeans to salve their consciences over Europe’s failure to learn to iive with its Jews. In effect, we said ‘we can’t learn to live with you, so go away and set up your own country, even at the cost of the people living there today.’

Today, though, it’s far too late. The state of Israel exists and is home to about 6.5m Jews. That’s a reality with which anyone trying to argue about Middle East politics simply has to come to terms.

What is it about that example that annoys the Labour leadership? What argument do they feel it limits their right to express? Do they want to protect the freedom to argue that the Jewish population of Israel has no right to self-determination?

Let’s see where that argument would lead in practice. If that population has no right to self-determination, Israel has no right to exist. If it has no right to exist, then it’s legitimate to use force to bring it to an end. And what would happen to the Jews in the region? We would be backing a policy of ethnic cleansing of Jews.

Is that a position anyone in Labour really wants to take? I can’t imagine a more clearly anti-Semitic stance.

It makes no difference that Israel, while asserting the Jewish right to self-determination denies it to the Palestinians. The bad behaviour of the Israeli government does not justify Labour backing the use of violence against Israel’s citizens.

Another IHRA example of anti-Semitism to which Labour leaders object reads:

Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

Again, what right are they trying to uphold? Comparisons with the Nazis are the most facile and futile of arguments. Unless a government has deliberately set out to exterminate an entire race, the comparison is false. Injustice, collective punishments or excessive force against civilians are shameful crimes that Israel has committed, but so have the US and Britain. Perhaps a parallel with them would make more sense than a comparison with the Nazis.

In any case, why would Labour pay a high political price just to allow some of its members to make so lazy and intellectually weak a case?

Because the price is high. Had Labour simply adopted the full IHRA definition and examples, it would have won itself some credit with the Jewish community. It would have undermined the opponents who are now making mileage from the accusations of anti-Semitism. Instead, they have handed their enemies a weapon they could hardly have hoped for in their wildest dreams.

There is, however, another explanation. I’m afraid things turn a bit ugly at this point.

It could be argued that this is all about too little. There are only around a quarter of a million Jews in Britain. Labour could win every single Jewish vote and fail to win an election, or it could lose every single one and still get in.

Besides, though I don’t have statistical evidence for it, my persona experience suggests that British Jews have moved to the right since my mother was young. Like many immigrant communities, they started out on the left while they were poor and oppressed. But as they became prosperous and assimilated, many drifted rightwards.

So maybe there aren’t many votes for Labour to win among the Jewish. How much do they matter to figures in the leadership who suspect them anyway, because of their sympathy for Israel?

The people who matter much more are those traditional Labour voters who, out of xenophobia and delusion that Brexit would benefit them, went over to the far right. That’s why we have the paradox of figures on the left sharing a platform with the hardest nationalists, notably veteran left winger Kate Hoey posing for photo opportunities with Nigel Farage, then leader of the crypto-fascist United Kingdom Independence Party.

After all, there are several million of those voters.

The calculus is easy to follow. On the other hand, many of us in Labour would like to see it being a little more principled than that.

A party that cosies up to the hard right but can’t will make no concessions to show some respect for Jews? That’s not the party my mother and her friends backed in the forties.

How I wish we could get that party back.

The banality of death

They tell you about death as dire but inevitable, a dread we all must face.

They tell you about death as bereavement and loss, as a pain to suffer and mourn.

They don’t tell you about death as an endless procession of bureaucratic tasks, turning a moment of sorrow into a litany of monotonous administrative chores.

Take arranging a funeral.

Is there going to be a service? If so, who will conduct it? Does the crematorium have a slot available (my mother had asked to be cremated) at the same time as the celebrant (he was about to go on leave)?

What style of coffin did we want (given that it was going to be burned…)? What colour of flowers? How should the press announcement be worded? How about the Order of Service booklet – which should contain what photos, to represent 94 years of life in just five images?

Then there’s the will. The lawyer was kind enough to phone me.

‘You need to contact your mother’s bank.’

‘Done.’

‘You need to contact the Department of Work and Pensions.’

‘Done.’

‘You need to make arrangements for the cremation.’

‘Done.’

Have you noticed how helpful lawyers are? How they’re happy to provide all the advice you could possibly need and more? At £280 an hour, wouldn’t you be?

But the worst bit is clearing the flat. My mother was living in sheltered accommodation, in what was in effect just a bed-sitter with its own kitchen and bathroom. But it never ceases to amaze me just how much someone can cram into a small space if they really set their mind to it.

Trolley load after trolley load of books went down to the charity shop. Great piles of clothes. Bits of bric-a-brac. And that’s without counting the items of furniture which the organisation that runs the place has decided to keep.

Or, come to that, the bits and pieces my brother and I simply couldn’t bring ourselves to part with. I came home with my car full. But not just of those objects – above all, what I had was boxes and boxes of photos and correspondence, not just my mother’s, but my father’s, even my maternal grandmother’s and grandfather’s.

Leonard, my father, amateur writer who generated another

Strangely, both my maternal grandmother and my father were keen amateur writers, as I am. I now have a box file labelled in my mother’s hand as her mother’s writings, as I have another of my father’s. My grandmother’s papers included several sealed envelopes marked ‘Before destroying these manuscripts, have a little patience, and read them. Your relative had a questing mind, and a certain literary facility.’

Well, I shall be the first to fulfil that wish since she died. I shall break the seals on those envelopes. That will be a time of some emotion. I’ll have a reminder that death is about loss and bereavement and not just about a banal and tedious bureaucratic process.

Sadly, before I can get around to that, I still have to get through some correspondence with the public authorities, a meeting with a lawyer at £280 an hour, to say nothing of dealing with any outstanding payments due for utilities, phones or, indeed, funeral services.

It’ll be a poignant moment when I can turn my attention to my grandmother’s writing. And my father’s. But oh, what a relief that will be.

Yetta Bannister, a while before she became my grandmother
An amateur writer in the making

The pets concur: a full house is a joyful house

Luci, our black toy poodle, was telling me the other day how much she and the other two pets liked having the house full of people over this weekend.

‘Six humans! It’s great. We can never miss out on a lap. If one’s not available, there’s always another we can occupy. And the walks! When there’s family around, friends come too, and they want to go out. Usually to the best places.’

It’s true that we took her and Toffee, the orange toy poodle, to one of their favourite places, which is also one of ours, Ashridge Forest. It’s wonderful any time of year, but particularly comfortable now in a real summer, though it was good to have a breeze blowing to take the edge off the heat during our walk.

Toffee and Luci leading the way through Ashridge

‘And one of the humans is sleeping in our favourite place – the couch,' Luci continued. 'What could be better than to sleep next to a human, except to sleep next to a human in our favourite place?’

A human to sleep next to on our favourite couch?
Very heaven

She and Toffee certainly took advantage of that opportunity. But Toffee just made a point of sleeping where the family was anyway, couch or no couch. They both spend the night on our bed, and in the morning Toffee and I have a ritual: I get up and start to go downstairs, and she follows, a couple of steps behind. In the kitchen I just get time to turn the coffee machine on before her expectant look gets too much for me and I find myself serving up her breakfast of dog biscuits.

But with the house full, the rite has changed. We got down to first floor where one of my sons had made the mistake – perhaps because of the heat – of leaving his bedroom door open. The notion of going down to the kitchen was driven right out of her head. Well, to be fair, she doesn’t like the biscuits that much anyway, and the open door was obviously a far greater temptation.

She shot in.

‘No, no,’ Toffee, I heard, ‘just lie down and keep quiet.’

Toffee likes licking faces. Unfortunately, not all owners of faces like to have Toffee licking them.

‘Down girl. Have a rest. I want to sleep.’

She must have done what she was told because it was a while before she came to sample the bowlful of biscuits I’d served up for her.

‘Even Misty likes it, you know,’ Luci assured me.

In the days when a basket was a snug resting place

Misty’s our cat, and no diminutive figure in our family. He doesn’t like to admit it, but he’s nearly twice Toffee’s weight. There was a time when he used to find a small shopping basket a wonderfully snug place for a siesta. These days, no basket would accommodate him, unless it was specifically designed to carry pineapples. Or possibly water melons.

‘He loves having all these people to stroke him,’ Luci went on.

‘Yes, he does seem to prefer their stroking to mine,’ I sadly replied.

‘Well,’ she said, rather more sternly, ‘they concentrate. They focus on him. When you stroke Misty, you always seem at least half distracted by the TV news or a book you’re reading.’

I have to confess that’s true, and I have the scratches on my hand to prove it.

‘As well as the better stroking, the other thing is that the guests have small suitcases and they leave them open. Now that shopping baskets are, well, just a bit too tight, a suitcase is, you know, a much better fit…’

A visitor's open suitcase
As if specifically designed as a siesta place

That’s true too. It seems the full house is a recipe for satisfaction for Misty as well.

All round, really. We’re all happy with the visit. Win-win-win: human residents, pets and visitors, everyone has enjoyed the bustle and the company.

Gathering of the clan and plans for a post-Brexit future

It’s more fun for a wedding or a birth, but at least a funeral brings a family together.

Our three sons are with us, in our home (rather than simply on holiday) for the first time since – well, I suspect it’s the late eighties. With our granddaughter here too, my mother’s funeral has turned into an occasion for a real gathering of the clan.

The funeral itself went reasonably well.

Moving gesture from my colleagues
A wreath delivered, without my knowledge, to the funeral

My mother had called on me to do a eulogy, which was an interesting challenge. At work, my aspiration for some time has been to cut the number of words in my PowerPoint presentations. At best, I’ve managed to use words only for slide titles, and limited the content to pictures alone. The next stage would be to eliminate the titles too, but I’m not quite there yet.

The eulogy required a completely different approach. With no projector, it had to consist of words alone. So I wrote the whole thing. You know, properly, in full sentences and paragraphs, even indulging in luxuries such as punctuation.

Trouble was, when I read it out to my eldest son, who’d come down specially from Scotland to support me, the address was stilted, hesitant and unnatural. So I had to go through and take out all the sentences and paragraphs, even most of the punctuation, and just turn it into a series of notes. Which, come to think of it, is rather like a PowerPoint presentation with only pictures: the notes, like the pictures, are just reminders of what I was going to talk about, rather than a list of what I was actually going to say.

That worked quite well. It was a lot smoother and apparently natural than when I read things out. A useful lesson I need to note for the future.

Then we headed back home to the splendidly full house. Fun, though having six people in it does rather underline that it’s just not that big. I was glad that the work we had done I the autumn at least meant we now had two bathrooms.

The event therefore combined both woe and joy. What I wasn’t expecting was wrath too. That came from a surprising source: my wife Danielle. She doesn’t tend to go for the road rage, even though she did a few years ago give a finger to a driver who’d behaved badly to her, only to have him try to open her car door and attack her. She was saved by a passer-by who dragged the aggressive driver away.

On this occasion, though, the object of her anger was our local vet’s. We’ve been making monthly payments to them for looking after our cat and our dogs. Frankly, all we get for that is a supply of flea and worm treatment, worth a great deal less than the monthly payments. However, we also had an informal arrangement with the reception staff that, because we were ‘such good customers’, we could occasionally use their car park to visit our nearest shops, since the vet has the only parking spaces nearby. We agreed not to abuse the privilege, not to take advantage of it too often, to keep the stays short and generally to leave a driver if spaces ran out.

That seemed a fine arrangement until our most recent visit, when a new member of staff ordered us out of the place. Which would have been fine, had she been less rude and not picked on Danielle.

I drove away and was a little surprised when I got back to find Danielle emerging not from the shop, but from the vet’s.

‘That’s it,’ she said, with obvious satisfaction. ‘I’ve cancelled our pet plans and told her we’re never coming back.’

I’ve seldom seen her that fed up, so decided it unwise to point out that this was the only vet we could walk to. Hey, we can drive to another one in the future.

The strangest part of the experience that it felt like the cutting of a tie to the neighbourhood. The death of my mother had been the severing of a major bond to England. This was a much less significant one, but could be the first step on a road we’ve been discussing with increasing seriousness since she died.

The most outspoken Brexiter in the Conservative Party, Jacob Rees-Mogg, has just been declaring that the most likely outcome of the Leave vote is now a hard Brexit. Britain will quit the EU with no agreement in place for future trading relations. Rees-Mogg says Britain has nothing to fear from such an outcome, but he’s an ideologue. I believe the economic damage will be substantial, and will start with a further serious loss in value of the pound and a probable fall in house prices.

My job is one I can do from anywhere in Europe. Danielle and I have long been planning to move to Valencia at some date in the future. Maybe the time to do that is now, while we can still get a reasonable price for our house, and convert both its value and my salary into euros at a sensible rate.

The death of my mother makes that possible. The cancellation of our agreements with the vet feels like a step towards putting the plan into action.

Of course, it means we’ll only enjoy the conversion of our house for little over a year, and would be unlikely to repeat its present overcrowded joy. This wouldn’t be the first time we’ve done that. We spent a fortune making our flat in Germany a lovely place to live in, before moving back to England for work. Maybe we’ll have better luck in Valencia.

Meanwhile, the first person I wanted to tell about our embryonic plans was my mother. Even though it was only her death that made them possible.

They’re paradoxical, the effects of bereavement.

Leatrice: leaving Britain, entering marriage, living with an empty nest

Having only travelled out of Britain once in her life, and at three so she retained no memory of it later, my mother Leatrice set out to get to know the world better just as soon as the Second World War ended and peacetime made it possible.

It wasn’t easy at first. Her first trip, to Switzerland in 1947, was a shoestring affair, only made possible because accommodation was provided by a socialist youth organisation. But she loved it, right from her entry onto Swiss territory: she had breakfast in the restaurant at Basel station and was bowled over by the quantities of fresh-baked bread and, above all, the heaps of butter, an extraordinary luxury for someone from ration-bound Britain.

Clearly, she enjoyed the experience, because by 1948 she had gone a step further and moved out of the country altogether, to settle in Paris where she found a job with UNESCO. It was there, as I described last time, that she met the man who would become my father, attracted by her first glimpse of him in the form of a sighting of his silk socks.

But 1948 was also the year of a trip that she would remember as magical. She travelled to a UNESCO conference in Beirut, at a time when it was regarded as the Paris of the Mediterranean. It was a land of beaches and mountains, where skiers starting a run could look down towards swimmers in the sea, where history breathed everywhere and cultures coexisted, if not in harmony, at least without conflict.

Leatrice, third from left, in Beirut in 1948

She loved the visit. Throughout her life, she spoke in wonderment of the place, a wonderment tinged with horror at what Lebanon became later, as peace and pleasure gave way to blood and brutality.

1948 saw her launched into a series of adventures. The stay-at-home Englishwoman set out on a voyage of discovery. Or rather two, as her exploration of new countries was intertwined with her exploration of a new relationship, as she and my father got to know each other more intimately. For instance, it’s hard to imagine a more romantic setting than Capri and that’s where they went in 1949.

Leatrice in Capri (or nearby)

Their exploration of each other led in 1951 to their launching themselves into the 32-year long adventure of their marriage. That too was linked with travel: their wedding was in Genoa, as they travelled towards Rome where my father was taking up a post with the Food and Agriculture Organisation, another agency of the United Nations, like UNESCO.

That led to a further adventure, of the type that rather restricts other kinds: they launched into parenthood. Their ability to travel at will was hampered by my arrival in 1953 and my brother’s in 1956.

Still, we had good times. There were several summers in succession in Porto Ercole in Tuscany, now a major and fashionable seaside resort, then a small and isolated fishing village, with glorious beaches nearby – kilometre after kilometre of golden sand with barely a person on it.

We also travelled many times to England, later several times to France, and on one memorable occasion to what was then called Yugoslavia, not yet ravaged by secession and civil war. A memorable moment on a French trip came when we shot across the border into Spain, just for a day: Franco was still in power, at the head of the last Fascist regime in Europe, and we weren’t going to make an extended visit but, shamefacedly, felt we could get away with a day trip.

Day trip to Spain
Leatrice with my brother Nicky on the left
and me on the right

If my mother had a major disappointment in her life, it was being denied post-school education, partly because she belonged to a generation in which it was offered to few women, partly because she turned eighteen at a time when Britain was at its lowest point in the war.

Much later, she was able to fulfil her aspiration to study, but even while we were children, she hankered for an intellectual life. She belonged to a historical society in Rome. And when we went on holiday, usually camping, we seldom stopped anywhere for more than two or three days so that my brother and I could indulge our taste for swimming or playing on beaches, but would move on quickly to yet another town of historical significance and with wonderful churches.

‘Oh, no, not another church!’ became a bit of a refrain from the back seat of the car.

On the other hand, we were two of the laziest kids imaginable. For some reason, my father didn’t believe in making his sons help him, instead hoping that we would spontaneously volunteer to assist in pitching our tents. Never happened. We would sit, often in the car, reading (no computer games then) until he’d finished.

Honestly, I have no idea why he put up with it.

This life continued into the 1960s, when my father returned home one evening and announced that he had volunteered to join the United Nations special mission in the Congo. The country had sunk into civil war after independence from Belgium, and now the UN was putting in both military forces and civilian support to try to pacify the country and help it emerge onto a pathway to development.

As a married man, he was assigned to a nine-month posting (unmarried staff did eighteen). My mother never fully forgave him for taking it without even discussing it with her, but in his view it was his duty to step forward to the UN’s support when it was in its greatest need. As a result, she had to cope with two kids alone for nine months, and it was no easy task.

The posting would eventually lead to another major change. In 1966, after thirteen years under a boss who treated him with contempt, and with his career at a standstill, he could take no more of it. When the United Nations Development Programme, yet another UN agency, asked him to go back to the Congo as one of its staff, with a double promotion, my parents decided he should. In consultation with each other, this time.

At that point, they decided that our educational needs would be better served at a boarding school in England. Our lives under a single roof were about to end. From now on, my mother would be seeing her sons only in the school holidays. She’d be sharing an empty nest with our father for eight months of the year.

Another phase was starting. In a new country. On a new continent. And with a different home life.