An English Affair. Richard Davenport-Hines

Colne Valley and Rotherham in 1963, nearly 700 servicemen tried to escape from the armed services by standing as parliamentary candidates. The government reacted by appointing a panel, chaired by David Karmel QC, to winnow the men. Only twenty-three of the 700 applied to Karmel for interview. A single one was approved: ‘Melvyn Ellingham, twenty-four-year-old REME sergeant, yesterday became the first Army Game by-election candidate to win his freedom.’ He had joined the army aged fifteen, and had two years still to serve as a £14 8s a week electronics technician. ‘I’m for the Bomb,’ he told the Daily Express, but ‘against the Common Market. I think a united Europe would only aggravate world tension.’²⁸

      The psychic air of mid-twentieth-century England was thick with bad memories. Pat Jalland, in her history of English grief in a century of world wars, quotes from the memoir of J. S. Lucas, a private in the Queen’s Royal Regiment who, like Profumo, served in the gruelling campaigns in Italy. Before the action at Faenza in 1944, when Lucas was aged twenty-one, he was reunited with his friend Doug, beside whom he had fought in Tunisia. Doug had just asked him for a smoke when a mine exploded. ‘My hand was still opening the tin of cigarettes,’ wrote Lucas, ‘and even as I ran to where he lay, my mind refused to accept the fact of his death. One moment tall, a bit skinny, wickedly satirical, and now – nothing – only a body with a mass of cuts and abrasions and a patch of dirt on his forehead … I felt sure that some part of his soul must be hovering about. But he had gone – forever … between asking for a fag and getting one.’ That night at Faenza, in freezing cold, after heavy losses from shelling, the remnants of Lucas’s company took shelter, but he was too hungry and agitated for sleep. ‘Before my eyes there passed, in review, a procession of the mates I had lost – faces of chums who had gone in Africa, below Rome and in the battles above Rome. But most clearly I saw those who had died that day. Doug reeling backwards as the concrete mines exploded and Corporal Rich’s gentle eyes as he turned away with a goodbye “ciao”. The whole assembly of these dead comrades stood in a sombre semi-circle around me as if they were waiting and watching until the time should come when I joined their ghostly company.’ Next day Lucas was sent to the base psychiatric hospital at Assisi. There the medical officer strove to convince him that, although his grief and battle exhaustion were justified, his shame was not.²⁹

      A Midlands teenager remembered visiting Portsmouth during the 1950s, and being told that ‘Before the War’ this bombsite had been a chemist’s, or that hole had been a draper’s … ‘Before the War – Before the War’ was the sad, weird incantation of the times. All the youth could see were ‘stumps of shops, office blocks, houses, streets, piers, just stumps’. The sole undamaged residue of ‘Before the War’ was swaying wires above the streets, between the rubble and stumps, for trolley-bus power lines survive bombardment and blast. He also visited his mother’s family in Cambridgeshire. ‘There was the uncle who was half-blown to bits in the First World War, shouting and grunting meaningless sounds as he loaded hay on a truck, and then limping across and shaking my hand and screaming and laughing, and I was very frightened and people said it was a shame, and that he was very intelligent, and couldn’t help it, and how it wasn’t his fault.’³⁰

      There were widows and spinsters so lonely that they could fill their teapots with tears. In 1958 the novelist John Braine described eating poached eggs on toast in a London tea shop. The middle-aged woman next to him, ‘pale and drab in a skimpy cotton dress clinging to her scraggy body’, wore no wedding ring. When she was young, he thought, ‘some British general, breathing heavily, would have at last worked out the meaning of attrition and would have issued the order which deposited her future husband screaming on the barbed wire or drowning in the mud, and which left her, forty years later, eating a roll and butter and drinking a glass of orangeade, with dreadful slowness, alone in a London tea shop’. Later he glimpsed the woman again. ‘She was walking very slowly, her face a mask of misery, peering from side to side as if looking for help.’³¹

      One night in 1963 another novelist, Frederic Raphael, struck up a conversation with two men on the late train from London to Colchester. The more loquacious, at first, was a reporter. He had been a warrant officer in the war, was captured by the Germans, and escaped three times. During one burst from captivity, he said, ‘he had killed an Austrian forest ranger whose boots he wanted. After killing him, he discovered the boots were the wrong size.’ The second traveller, returning from a dinner at the Society of Chartered Accountants, said little for a time, except to praise the scampi bonne femme. ‘Finally he broke out: “Have you ever seen a man’s face when he knows he’s going to die? I have. And if you’ve seen it once, you don’t want to see it again”.’ He had been a RAF navigator in an aircraft which had a forced landing on an airfield in an area north of Rome held by the Germans. The RAF men knocked out one German who attempted to detain them, and shot the other dead with his own rifle. ‘I’ll never forget the look on his face; not pretty. When he knew we were going to kill him. You can’t describe it. It’s just a thing you never forget. Thank God I wasn’t the one who had to pull the trigger. I’ll never forget the shot. Loudest thing I ever heard in my life.’ The German, he added, ‘had been a decent chap and shared cigarettes with the man who killed him.’ The reporter found Christmas unbearable. The frivolling children made him think of the bombs he had dropped which had incinerated children. Still, he opposed nuclear disarmament, and would drop the H-bomb himself if ordered to. ‘Oh yes,’ said the accountant, ‘so would I.’³²

      These were the ruminative confidences and formative memories that family men shared when unbending on a late night train in 1963. Jack Profumo’s England cannot be understood without them.