Carl Bennett – Page 15 – Writer-insighter

I beleive

I was reading about RAF Watton. There’s a website, where people who remember the base like to write the things they remembered about it. It was the same as any other base, full of people uprooted out of their lives, ordinary people doing extraordinary things, usually not by choice.

One entry was this:

“one of the pilots who did not return that night had been in the habit of taking his dog, a golden Labrador, on missions. But the C.O. stopped it. The dog used to lie up on the airfield, waiting for him to come back. On this occasion, it lay up there for about four days. It refused water, and food. Then one evening, approaching dusk, a plane flew low over the airfield, and the officer in charge of the guns alerted the crew and gave the order to fire. Suddenly the dog started jumping up and down and barking in excitement. The officer in charge had the sense to tell the gunners to hold their fire. Somehow the Labrador had recognised that his owner was flying the plane. If the dog had not been left behind, they could have been killed as they returned. A few of the men who were shot down had parachuted out of their planes and were still fit to fly. They managed to commandeer planes to get them home, and some had landed at other airfields. We were so glad to welcome them back.”

I used to do a lot of travelling. I remembered a day when I really didn’t know when I’d be back at all, because of the three trains and a taxi I had to get to get from the airport to home.

My old cat knew though. He went to the front door at about the time my plane landed, 120 miles away. He stayed there until I got in the door. Maybe the dog on the airfield saw his owner through the windscreen in the dusk. Maybe. Maybe my old cat just wanted to sit by the door, although he never did at any other time except when this happened on another trip.

But 300 years ago nobody knew what electricty was, either.

The price you pay

Once upon a time, in a land long ago, I was at a rodeo.

No, seriously.

It was in a place called Greencastle, In., and the only way you’ll ever have heard of it is if you work for IBM, know where one of two V1 rockets in the USA are (apart from Werner von Braun’s den, obviously), or you’re an alumni of De Pauw university. Or you know something about Dillinger or the way any old bank robbery in the 1930s got attributed to the famous robbers if the actual robbers didn’t get caught and escaped in a car. Or maybe, like me, you were chasing a red-haired cheerleader called Nancy-Jean and driving a ludicrously big old car that probably extinguished three species on its own.

Anyway, it was a Saturday, Nancy-Jean was out of town, I was staying at her folks’ place in her room with the rainbow painted on the wall (as Werner used to say, ach, it vas all so long
ago…), I’d done a week’s worth of pretending to be in a Springsteen song working in a sawmill the other side of the tracks and apart from golf, which I don’t do because I don’t, there wasn’t a whole lot else to do. As we used to say.

I sat there on the bleachers (oh because that’s what they’re CALLED, ok?) and had myself a darned fine time. The steer wrestling was good. They got a steer and let it loose and anyone who thought they were hard enough grabbed it by the horns and wrestled it to the ground. Then they let it go. They didn’t have a whip or a gun or a stick, just their hands. It looked pretty equal to me.

Look, I know, ok? I’m not like that now. It was the past, it was definitely another country and they did things very differently there. But actually not so much, speaking as someone who had to get a lorry load of bullocks out of a pen and into a truck one dawn at Bridgewater Market. I was fourteen. I learned that bullocks are more scared of you than you are of them but it’s close. That if you twist the ring in their nose they’ll go anywhere you want. And that if you don’t you might end up sneezing your lungs out of your nose after they’ve slammed you into a metal fence and trodden on you.

I still wasn’t gonna go an wrassle a bull and that ain’t no lie.

I just watched and listened. A guy who was about my age now, wearing a cowboy hat, was talking a few feet away. I liked him. He was one of those people who could turn pretty much anything he said into a story and a good-natured one at that.

Even when what he was saying was serious. And sad. He told a woman a few seats away and pretty much anyone else who wanted to hear about his daughter. She’d bought herself one of those fancy Japanese cars, a Honda or a Toyota or something. And in the real world of Indiana back then, you didn’t do that. So he stopped talking to her. It had been months.

He said it was for a reason. Sure, it was a good car. Maybe better than a comparable American car. In fact no, definitely. She was smart. And it was cheaper. But if everybody did that there wouldn’t be no car industry. And that meant Americans, real ones he knew, up in Flint and Gary not even a hundred miles away, wouldn’t have jobs.

I don’t have much sympathy for the people who voted for Trump for a lot of reasons, but this one is up at the front. Actions have consequences. The first time I went to the US all the clothes in shops were from the USA. The second time, 12 years later, I couldn’t find any that were and they were less than half the price. If you buy cheap import stuff I don’t think you have the option of complaining about the lack of jobs at home.

And before anyone writes that off as elitist, that people on low incomes don’t have those choices, they do. They chose to buy a phone made in China and a network data plan instead of a $40 shirt from the USA. But they still need a shirt so they get a $15 one made in Guatamala instead. Funny how that factory closed and there ain’t no jobs here no more. Dang Democrats and their elitist globalisation. Trump all the way.

Tom Petty had to live with some hard promises. Springsteen told us we could count so many foreign ways to the price we paid. And now I’m as old as the guy in the cowboy hat back at the rodeo, I know they were both right. And Trump and his supporters are wrong and always wrong. Because there aren’t easy answers. What you do comes back to you.

Life, as Dr Hook put it, ain’t easy and nothing ain’t free. And cheap stuff isn’t. Sometimes you have to do without the things you want because of what will happen if you get them. Don’t want globalisation? Then don’t buy its products. People like Trump always promise it’s about personal responsibility; Thatcher did it too. But their biggest message was always the opposite: the bad stuff, that’s always someone else’s fault.

I ate a hot dog, watched the men wrassling steers and drove my big old Chevrolet back to Nancy-Jean’s house, up on the hill by the golf course, the good side of the tracks. A week later I drove down to Bloomington to see her, then drove out west on I-70 into my life, leaving her to hers.

Where the poppies blow

I don’t know much, if anything, about football. I’m the first to admit it. But I do know just a little about poppies and Remembrance Day because I’ve always worn one at this time of year. Which is more than footballers have.

Football’s governing body FIFA has decided that in the upcoming England v Scotland match the players shouldn’t wear poppies.

I don’t know whether they asked to, but FIFA has decided they shouldn’t as they class them as political symbols. Footballers, or more accurately, the tabloid press, which decides it’s “the voice of the people” that poppies aren’t a political symbol and our brave, hard-working footballers are being prevented from mourning Our Glorious Dead. Presumably by the tabloids’ worst thing of all, un-elected bureaucrats.

The funny thing is that this is new. Footballers didn’t wear poppies in 1945, when anyone on the England squad would have either known first hand what dead people looked like or would certainly have known someone who did. They didn’t in 1955 after Malaya, or 1966, the last time the highest-paid footballers in the world won the World Cup (just to remind everyone, 50 years ago, which doesn’t seem to make them very good at international football, to me) or at any time at all until the last ten years when a new kind of fake patriotism has made them popular along with Help For Heroes, a charity that manages to collect money but doesn’t seem to do quite so well giving it to people. Ex-Army people I know personally wouldn’t spit on it, let alone give to it, for exactly that reason.

More to the point, poppy wearing isn’t about patriotism. Or it was never supposed to be. It was about remembering the dead.

So I’m with FIFA. I would be hugely surprised if the new poppy herd can name two battles of either war, count how many people died, name a single general who got thousands of people killed or has any experience whatsoever of either World War for the obvious reason that anyone on the England squad now was only born a fraction of the 71 years ago that WWII ended. Wearing a poppy at a football match isn’t about caring. It’s about being seen to noticed as ‘caring.’

I’m deeply suspicious of a patriotism or anything else that needs to be seen to be genuine, literally. You mourn, or remember, or observe, in your heart. It’s nothing to do with wearing a badge to say how much you’re doing it.

People on Sunday

On Friday, without changing the subject, I got out of work early enough to stop in Woodbridge on the way home. I was looking for some mussels for dinner but somehow never got to the fish shop and by the time I would have done I’d found what I was really looking for anyway. Down a little alley, next to a deli and a bulding society and an upper floor flat that’s been for rent for I can’t remember how long, according to the sign in the window, there was a church hall.

There still is, but that’s not the point. It had a sign outside with two fatal words on it:

Book Sale

For anyone pretending to be civlised, there’s no choice but to go in. Because apart from books, some of which you’ll want, for pennies, you’ll get a glimpse of a life of if not quiet desperation then certainly one that careers masters don’t encourage. The life of the church hall bookseller.

I found a Cormac McCarthy I didn’t know existed (Outer Dark, since you ask. About incest. It’s Suffolk, after all). A history of the English Civil War, which I embarassingly know next to nothing about, aside from the liturgic Edghehill, Prince Rupert, New Model Army, Naseby, which hardly seems adequate. A magisterial account of the Dunkirk evacuation, where a friend’s father spent a solid week in the water at the end of a human pier, before being rescued and not by anyone looking remotely like Jenny Agutter. A book about the last days of WWII, after Hitler was dead, a time that fascinates me, for reasons I don’t fully understand. I think most of all I have the hugest admiration for people who literally had nothing left, who unlike the British, managed to parlay that into a scuccesful economdy within 5 years. And before any rabid Brexit tries the ‘ah yes, but they got a Marshall. Plan bailout, true, they did. And Britain got a factually much bigger one, and spent it on works outings, chips and a massive investment in cloth caps to tug. /in fact of course, Britain chose to bankrupt itself continuining to pretend it was a world power, first squandering its reputation on Aden and squandering its cash on thermonuclear weaponry, a programme so spectacularly rubbish that it ended up buying American anyway.

I would say I digress, but I don’t. Because the other thing I got at the book sale, apart from a chat with the guy who has read more than 95% of all graduates anywhere, because he does little else, manning the cash box, was a DVD. Yes, I know, how quaint. When you can explain how I can buy a second-hand streamed film I’ll listen.

The thing for me about book sales isn’t just the feeling that life outside has stopped, and there can be days when that’s a bad feeling indeed. It’s the idea that you don’t have to risk huge amounts on books you’ve never read or films you’ve never even heard of. And I’d never heard of People On Sunday. Ever.

Maybe it was because everyone in it died years ago. Or because it was a German silent film made in 1929, or all of those reasons and more. I bought it to learn about telling a story without words. Nobody spoke. Or they did, but you can’t hear them. They were all amateurs. There are about five frames of explanatatory text, but really I don’t think they needed it. Five young people on a Sunday do the things they used to do. I did. They probably still do. Sleep. Get out of the city. Listen to music. Try to cop off with each other in a half-hearted way. Find something a bit more challenging when they succeed.

It’s a moving film. It opens at Bahnhof Zoo and instantly you know something they didn’t. The whole place was going to be flattened. Anyone left there was going to be caught between mass-raping Russians and devoted Nazi death squads acting out thier own personal Gotterdamerung. Hardly a brick would be left. And watching this, none of them know it.

They knew it soon. Most of the people in the film got out of Germany soon after. Thier biographies read like the midcentury itself:

Erwin Splettstößer (de) Himself (taxi driver) – The five leading actors were all amateur actors. He liked acting and appeared later in small roles in two other films also directed by Robert Siodmak: Abschied (1930) and Voruntersuchung. In an unfortunate accident, he was run over by his own taxi in 1931 and died.

Brigitte Borchert (de) as Herself (record seller) – Like her film figure, Brigitte Borchert (born 1910) also worked as a Gramophone seller when she was discovered for this film. It was her only film, she later married the illustrator Wilhelm M. Busch in 1936. She died in Hamburg-Blankenese in August 2011, aged 100.

Wolfgang von Waltershausen as Himself (wine seller) – Born in 1900 into a wealthy family in Bavaria, he was a descendant of Georg Friedrich Sartorius. Waltershausen later had small roles in two other movies. During the Third Reich he worked in the mining industry, in post-war-Germany he sold books and audiocassettes. He was married twice and died in 1973.

Christl Ehlers as Herself (an extra in films) – Born 1910, the daughter of an harpsichordist and an artist. left Germany in 1933 and you know why. During the Second World War, she lived with her mother in the United States. She had a bit part in the Hollywood movie Escape (1940). She later married and had four more children, in addition to one child from a previous marriage. She worked with her husband in a family-owned aircraft company and also had her own vitamin business. Christina and her husband died in a private plane crash in New Mexico in 1960. All of her children are still living and reside in Northern California.

The one that haunts me most is the last, Annie Schreyer. The model. What became of her? Is she still part of the rubble under the new Bahnhof Zoo? There is no information about Annie Schreyer. Nothing on where or when she was born, nor where she died. Or when, or how, or with who. Just an hour of a girl in her early twenties, modestly but prettily enough dressed in a bathing costume, a skirt, a shirt, a hat, smoking a cigarette in the sun, laughing. Did she get out? Was she part of it? We don’t know anything at all. There is no information about Annie Schreyer. On this night when the dead walk I hope she may tread lightly, this black and white girl.

The cat thing

I always had animals around. When I was very small there were chickens and my collie dog. She probably wasn’t my dog really, but we used to go stealing together. From shops. She’d help me eat the things I got off the shelves when people weren’t looking. I was two.

I know this because we moved to Dorset when I was two and we were supposed to have had a black Labrador then. If it’s true I have no memory of it, whatsoever, which is an odd thing in itself.

Then we had a Pyrenean Mountain Dog because my demented father thought he could rent it to an advertising agency who were tired of the Dulux Dog. Despite being an accomplished liar and fantasist about whom my only regret is being dead he can’t actually read this, the Ad agency guys thought that a bit of consistency would be a better brand builder preferable to funding my father’s predictable progression from Ford Anglia to Mark II Jaguar.

Then the dogs stopped. There had been cats but they didn’t last. Until we adopted my feral cat, Fluff. At best she tolerated the rest of the family. But she got on with me fine.

When I got my own place a cat was one of the first things I got, long before a proper floor in the kitchen. Then another, to look after the first, and then came the Big Storm and suddenly two mother cats brought nine kittens in through the cat flap to the disconcertion of the residents, human and cat alike.

They were everywhere. When every alien in The X-Files was revealed to be basically a bald cat on growth hormones I wasn’t really surprised.

The funniest, Londonest Didn’t You Kill My Brother? time was on Green Lanes one dark, cold winter’s night. Back then it was a Greek area, mostly Greek Cypriots who had left in a hurry, but not so much of a hurry they’d forgotten their food. It was 1990 and local shops meant piles of fruit, gallon tins of olive oil and halva in plastic tubs, spicy sausages hanging outside the butchers and a Essex greengrocers who’d learned two extra languages so they could talk to the customers. You might call it an integrated community. We just called it Green Lanes.

Back on the Cypriot side of the street one night I went to get some vegetables in one of the open-fronted shops. There were two huge guys in their twenties behind the counter and a cardboard box on top of it. At any given time one of the guys was up close to the box, sometimes both of them. There was a gym bag on the floor. I looked to see where the baseball bat was, but they didn’t look as if they’d need one. When I got what I’d come for I got as close to the box as I casually could, trying to see what was inside. I thought it was the week’s takings.

The tiny kitten was something far more precious to two huge young men guarding it that winter night.

Up at the corners

Or; Why Anyone Saying That Needs To ask themselves why they’re in total denial

I didn’t smile much when I was a kid. It wasn’t some Dickensian horror-story about being made to be a pick-pocket or having to go round on a milk-float or frost on the windows inside in the winter. I only went round on a milk-float on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings, because that was my Saturday job.

OK, my Milk Clothes stank of sour milk and couldn’t be used for anything else. Jeans on their literal last legs. A white sweatshirt I’d properly grown out of. A horrible blue nylon coat with weird gold fasteners on the front that now, would pass as a diamond-quilted hipster jacket, but not in Trowbridge back then it didn’t. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t awful. The deal, not the coat. The coat was.

We had Radio One on all the time and back then, that was something worth listening to. We also had the Christmas Eve we started way before dawn so we saw the sun rise through the steely high-pressure-over-Sweden blue winter sky, fuelled by home-made mince pies and whisky left out for us in the porch of council houses, next to the empties. I was fourteen or fifteen. It didn’t kill me. I wasn’t driving the milk-float.

For Proust it was little biscuits that reminded him the past was a different country. Not just one where they do things differently, but one where you can only get a visitor visa that goes out of date too soon. For me, bottles chinking together makes me wait to hear the clack of the solenoids, the deep rising tone of the electric motor winding up and then the sound of the float coasting to a halt again. A pipe tapped out on the door of the float.

Frost on the inside of the windows wasn’t special in those days. Pretty much everyone I knew knew all about that, rich and not very rich at all alike. A friend whose house was so big that the first time I saw it I mistook it for a hotel and asked directions to her house there had her own apartment on the top floor of what looked like half of Yorkshire. Her father refused to install heating up there on the basis that heated bedrooms were “bourgeois.”

On the top floor, anyway. They weren’t bourgeois on his own floor. The other floors were fine. So was the £23,000 he spent on his Purdeys, back when that would buy you a flat in a nice part of Bath.

But little kids generally don’t need to be told to smile most days. I’m not a parent, but I think I can say that pretty safely. If they do there’s something wrong.

Because there was never anything acknowledged to be something wrong, and there is only a finite amount of internet so some other time for that, I didn’t work out there was something wrong. Instead I behaved like a dissociated, self-regarding arse for quite a long time. Sometimes I still do. These days I realise there’s a pretty big difference between self-regard and self-awareness. Usually.

The trouble is – and this is the bit that trips everyone up, including, if not especially, people trying to help – is that when you’re not thinking straight you don’t know you’re not thinking straight. Especially in a culture that doesn’t discuss it, criticises it or tells you to just buck-up and stop being so self-pitying.

It works like this. If you have a white hair in your eye-brow you can see it. When you do there are things you can do. You can accept it. You can dye it. You can pluck it out. But if you don’t know it’s there then you can’t do any of that. And the thing with depression is exactly that. You don’t know it’s there when it’s starting, unless you really, really plug in to what’s going on with yourself. Which sounds like the kind of yurt-hugging thing Kate Archer would say. Which doesn’t help.

Often, all you know is you’re getting in more arguments than usual. Or maybe that’s just me, but it’s a reliable reminder to go for a walk and crucially, don’t self-medicate, because as a friend rammed home to me after trying to drown her own demons, there’s no such thing.

I’ll say it again. There is no such thing as self-medication. When you drink too much and call it self-medication you’ve now got two problems, the thing and the drinking. Except you’ve actually got more than that, because you’ve now still got the thing, plus the drinking, plus the physical and social consequences of that and the stuff you did that you can’t 100% remember entirely, plus most people have zero, but zilch sympathy with drunks. Only drunks think they do. Especially if they’re buying. Obliteration doesn’t help. And it certainly isn’t medication. It’s more denial. Which is how we got here in the first place.

Churchill had it. He ended-up drinking two bottles of brandy a day and slurping mashed-up steak and kidney pudding out of the bowl. That and weeping at the thought of the charred cities the RAF were smashing and continued to smash, because he couldn’t get himself together to say ‘Stop this. Enough.’ A commander who couldn’t command, who couldn’t face down his own subordinate, Sir Arthur Travers Harris. Air Marshall. The man the press called Bomber Harris. The man the RAF called Butcher. This is real history. The nation’s hero was drunk most of the war. Nobody can drink two bottles of brandy and not be drunk. It isn’t possible. Idols always have feet of clay.

For me, trigger signs are not putting the lights on, or if I have to, to cook or wash, just one when a ceiling light would mean I could actually see what I was cooking. That and total silence, no radio, no laptop, no CDs, no noise at all. That’s when I know it’s coming. Just putting some lights on can stop it.

Now I think of it like flu. Once you get it you stand more chance of getting it again. It might kill you if you let it, but the thing is, you don’t have to let it. There are things you can do to make it feel better. Lots of them. And they work, more so if you’re blessed with real friends who watch out for you and spot for you. But first you have to realise you’ve got it. And you know that you can always get it again.

It’s happening again

Once upon a time, I thought I knew things. Now I think I never will. And that quite often, actually knowing things isn’t what’s wanted at all.

It happened writing Hereward. Charles Kingsley, the Victorian author of the Water Babies (a hundred plus years before Martin Amis wrote Dead Babies, but Kingsley could usefully have borrowed the title save for the fact that nobody then would have bought it, most families being knee-deep in them) wrote Hereward’s story up as The Last Englishman. You can see the tabloid headlines:

Plucky Brit Brexit Rebel Defies Normans

Except Hereward wasn’t the fantastic Pure Brit of racist fiction. Because there’s no such thing. He was a Saxon, whose people came from Denmark, Holland and Germany, which is why it’s called Saxony, which is near where the Queen’s family come from too.The Normans came from Normandy, but not even a hundred years before that, they came from Denmark too.

Chin up, fantasists. I’m sorry if this is news to some of you. Big boys don’t cry.

Hereward’s cousin was the King of Denmark, one of the Sweynes. One of the more confusing thing about writing about those times was the appalling shortage of names they seemed to have. If you weren’t called Leofric then Sweyne was pretty much compulsory, unless you went down the Aelf-suffix route. From the Other World, the land of faery. Yes, as in Aelf Garnett. Satire doesn’t change.

Hitler's left-hand man. — Hitler’s left-hand man.

On Sunday I started writing Double Vision, based on the tale of Rudolf Hess.

How about this for a fiction plot?

It’s 1941. The British Army has been hammered at Dunkirk, the year before. Get your flags out, because plucky Britain Stands Alone. America’s not in the war yet because it didn’t suit it. Russia’s still best mates with Germany, or thinks it is. Hitler’s deputy steals an airplane. He flies a rectangular course over the North Sea for no clear reason and seems quite proud of this in his interrogations.

He eventually parachutes out to land a little south of Glasgow in Scotland. He announces he’s called Captain Albert Horn and he wants to see the Duke of Hamilton. He has the idea that the Duke (serving in the RAF quite nearby) will talk to people like Lord Halifax who will lever Churchill and the King into peace negotiations.

He’s bundled off to Trent Park interrogation centre, then the Tower of London and finds himself in the dock at Nuremberg with something of an uncertain future.

For reasons unclear, a spitting-furious Hitler doesn’t hunt down and kill Hess’s family, which he could have done in half a breath. As he threatened to do to Goering’s family, when Goering asked if it was ok to carry out the order Hitler had given him previously.

Hess refuses to speak in his own defence. The Allies hang most of the people in the dock. But not Rudolf Hess, architect of the final solution. He didn’t recognise someone he worked with daily. He refuses to see anyone in his family for 20 years.

He claims he has stomach aches. Herman Goerring (head of the Luftwaffe, sentenced to death) falls about laughing at Hess in court. His wife notes that his voice has got deeper in 20 years, when the opposite is normally what happens. Everyone else in Spandau Prison is let out in 1966. Not Hess. He’s the only inmate there for another 22 years.

During this time a British army doctor treating him claims the patient’s medical records don’t match the historical record of what happened to the Rudolf Hess who was shot through the lung in 1916.

It’s not the first time that someone has said that the Rudolf Hess at the Nuremberg trial isn’t the same Rudolf Hess who sat next to Hitler. Goerring sat next to him and said it first, in court:

“Hess? Which Hess? The Hess you have here? Our Hess? Your Hess?”

Clearly one of the lighter moments at the Nuremberg Trails. — Clearly one of the lighter moments at Nuremberg.

Eventually a 93 year old man who couldn’t move his arms higher than level with his shoulders ties a noose with electric cord and hangs himself from a window catch 1.4 metres above the ground.

A British nurse who arrived to find the body said that she wasn’t the first person there. She gave that honour to two people she was very specific in saying were dressed like American soldiers. She did not say that they were.

Except it’s not a fiction plot. We’re told that’s exactly what happened, with no logical inconsistencies whatsoever.

I don’t know what happened, or who he was, or whether he went insane, or whether it wasn’t him at all. But I’m finding out I don’t know. I think it’s important.

Double Vision

In 1941 Hitler’s deputy, the man second in rank only to the Fuhrer himself, did quite a strange thing. He flew right to the end of the fuel in the tanks of a twin-engined plane he’d been flying, right over Germany, the North Sea and most of Scotland and parachuted out to land in a field near Hamilton.

He announced himself to the farmer who held him at bay with a pitchfork as Captain Albert Horn and said he’d come to talk to the king. The farmer’s exact words are not recorded.

In 1945 Hitler was so annoyed with Goering asking if he should act on the order Hitler had given him that he ordered that he should be rounded-up and shot, along with his whole family. So it was a little surprising that Hitler’s reprisals against the Hess family were nothing at all.

Sitting in the dock at the Nuremberg Trials, Goering fell about laughing at Hess sitting next to him. Hess, for his part, totally failed to recognise someone who had worked with him daily. His wife had trouble recognising him although his handwriting matched pre-war Hess papers. This was the man who designed the final solution. Goering was sentenced to death and killed himself with cyanide. Hess was imprisoned for life. Over forty years later and although crippled with arthritis, he officially hanged himself with a piece of electric flex suspended 1.4 metres off the ground. Not high, but high enough for a man who couldn’t raise his arms above shoulder height.

Fourteen years before this suicide a British Army doctor made a quite astonishing assertion. He claimed that in his professional opinion, as someone who had seen more than enough bullet wounds in a medical career in Northern Ireland, whoever was the last prisoner in Spandau jail definitely was not the same person who had been shot through the chest in 1917, the way the records said Hess was.

If he didn’t believe it to be true then it was an odd thing to say, given it would finish his career in the Army and any future one in medicine.

I don’t know what is true and what isn’t in this story. Captain Horn, who didn’t seem to exist, made great play on his flight plan, flying rectangles in the North Sea, but seemed vague on why he had. What was more certain was that Horn asked to see the Duke of Hamilton, who he seemed to think had access to a network of British aristocrats who would one way or another side with Hitler and bring the war to a close.

Not entirely surprisingly, Hess/Horn found himself bundled off first to Warwick Castle en route to Trent Park interrogation centre, then to the tower of London, then to Spandau for the rest of his life. The very few people who ever saw him again had mixed reactions to him. His wife was surprised that his voice had got deeper. Not least that as men age their voices get higher. His interrogators worried that the prisoner was so unstable that he might well kill himself, which wouldn’t look good on their watch.

What was un-arguable was that there was a network of sympathisers with Hitler, which it didn’t suit anybody in England to be reminded of at the time. The Earl of Halifax, tipped for the Prime Minister’s job was a major figure arguing for an agreement with Mussolini. Prime Minister Chamberlain was instrumental in the annexation of Czechoslovakia. When Unity Mitford had a crush on Hitler and shot herself in Munich she magically and inexplicably to many turned up for treatment in hospital in England. Her sister Diana was more successful, marrying Sir Oswald Mosely, leader of the British Union of Fascists.

Reading about Unity Mitford today, I found some odd similarities with what her family said about her after the shooting and what Hess’ family said about him, when eventually, after years, they were allowed to see him: “Not only was her appearance shocking, she was a stranger, someone we did not know.”

Her sister continued “We brought her back to England in an ambulance coach attached to a train.” As one does, in the middle of WW11. It happened all the time, obviously. If they’d just stuck an Enigma machine on the train as well then it would all have been over by Christmas.

Every word of that is true. Hardly any word of that is remembered in a world where every plucky Tommy had the backing of the whole country behind him.

Every time I read it I think of Johnny Rotten kneeling at the edge of the stage, somewhere in America on a tour he hated, sneering “Ever get the feeling you’ve been had?” I do. So it seems do the Pathe News archivists, who have put inverted commas around Hess name on their website.

In another, rare colour recording, Hess disconcertingly talks of what he would have wished if he had known he would meet ‘ a fiery death.’ The kind you might meet in an airplane for example. Which is odd, given he was never in the airforce at all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PO6Zk5qkYcA&feature=youtu.be

Hess’s story stuck in my mind for years. It’s just so odd, with so many loose ends, or apparently loose ends. Yesterday I decided, out of the blue, to write a version of it. The first two scenes are done, in a single afternoon’s work, even if that did turn out to be an eight-hour stretch.

It was and will be worth it. Writing it feels right. It’s about the only thing about the story that does.

Tropes and memes

The SOE agents were trapped. Each man saved the last bullet for himself. They dumped the magazine, put the bullet in, put the magazine back in the gun, pulled back the slide, then put the gun to their head.

I kept thinking ‘why?’

Not ‘why were they going to kill themselves?’ Compared to a cosy evening with the Gestapo I could understand that. A friend used to work in a building in Amsterdam the Gestapo were said to have taken over on Prinzengracht. Nobody liked being in the cellars. Even 60 years later, in broad daylight.

Why eject the magazine? It’s just a waste of time and effort, when in the circumstances, with half the Wermacht pounding up the stairs, time was something none of them had a lot of. If you leave the magazine in the gun and pull the slide back, you can drop the only bullet you’re going to need now straight into where it should be, let the slide push it to where it seats on the throat of the barrel and get on with meeting your maker.

But you’d have to know that. And you’d have to sacrifice the trope of re-loading the magazine one bullet at a time, which gets done three times in the film to calm the character down. More than not volunteering to be parachuted into Czechoslovakia in the first place. More than the first person you meet phoning the Germans. More than his mate legging it into the woods and getting away. More than taking his truck and not only driving it straight to where you’re hiding

More than his mate legging it into the woods and getting away. More than taking his truck and not only driving it straight to where you’re hiding-out, but leaving the lights on in broad daylight for unspecified reasons.

More than taking pictures of the admittedly rather handsome red-haired woman helping you and keeping them in your wallet, presumably to save the Gestapo some time beating the crap out of you to find out who you know. Which they’ll do anyway, to keep in practice.

More tropes. More Things You Have ToHave In Movies.

Tasty Resistance Girl With Attitude

Your gun’s dirty. Clean it.

Feisty powerful woman – check. Explanation for how come it was, given it was straight from stores and had never been fired – well…….. let’s get on, shall we?

Like taking the guns apart and putting them back together. Like putting them all on the table while you’re looking at the map, for no discernible reason I could see. Other than That’s What You Do In Movies Like This. Don’t they know there’s a war on? They do now.

There was plenty I liked about Anthropoid. I liked the fact that the book I discovered a couple of years ago had been made into a film, not least as it was basically true – two men were parachuted into Czechoslovakia, pretty much everything did go wrong and they still managed to kill Reinhard Heydrich in the street, the architect of the final solution, number three in the entire echelon of Nazidom. And obviously the Nazis were not best pleased by this turn of events, with rather less than hilarious consequences.

I liked more the sheer volume of the soundtrack, the massive roar of noise you’d actually get if someone opened-up with a machine-gun in a stone church, compared to the sanitised-for-your-convenience pop-pop-pop of Hollywood sound mixes. I liked the white noise after explosions, exactly the way your ears would react if you’d been close to a grenade. I liked the way it looked as if bullets actually hurt, not because I’m a sadist but because it made the point that None Of This War Stuff Was Nice, something glossed-over in lots of films. Where Anthropoid had a weakness in that respect it was glaring – it only looked as if it hurt the guys fighting the Nazis. When the guys in the stalhelmen and feldgrau bit the dust it didn’t look much more painful than any old YouTube episode of Combat, made for a generation who ‘d done this stuff and now wanted to kick back with a beer in a recliner chair and talk about the time Joe did that thing with the doozy that time in Yerp.

It was an OK way to spend a couple of hours. Go and see it. Revel in the period clothes, haircuts and rather becoming thin-ness of the main characters. And thank whoever you thank you weren’t born then.

Rabbit Ears and Rudolf Hess

Once upon a time I knew Trent Park quite well. In one of the periodic disaster periods of my life I took up running. I was living in Harringey, where although people ran to catch a bus or if they’d stolen someone’s purse, it wasn’t really the thing to do, back then.

Trent Park was pretty much the nearest big green place that wasn’t Finsbury Park and after saving some random girl from a flasher there (no, really. One morning on the way to work, since you ask) I didn’t much want to run there. Ditto Oak Hill Park where they dumped the body in Antonionionioni – I give up. Italian film-maker. Blow Up. Or so people said at the time.

trent-park

It meant going all the way out past Cockfosters, up Cat Hill where John Betjeman once taught at a school on the top, up out into the open fields of Middlesex. Just before the boundless promise of the M25 you turned right into parkland. Which was. Hidden behind the screen of trees and picnic areas was an old house that was something to do with the University of Middlesex. It’s now going to be sold off as what used to be called Yuppie flats. But before that, like the equally unlikely Warwick Castle, Trent Park was briefly home to Rudolf Hess. Debate-ably.

Radio 4 seemed surprised to broadcast, along with Helen Lederer, that as I’d found out twenty years previously, during WW11 important German officers and Rudolf Hess were taken after capture to Trent Park, not for a walk or a run but for a chat. Obviously, they didn’t give much away. Until they were back in their cells, when they did, unaware that it was now possible to listen-in on conversations using this new-fangled microphonic technology.

Rudolf Hess was Hitler’s deputy. To say he was important was something of an understatement. According to the official record, one day he decided to steal an airplane and fly to Scotland to have a chat with the Duke of Hamilton, who he thought might have a chat with Lord Halifax, who might have a chat with Churchill, who might call the war off. Nothing implausible there, obviously. Nor in the fact that this act of unarguable treachery wasn’t repaid by the liquidation of the entire Hess family, which was pretty much standard practice in Germany at the time. Nothing personal.

The debate over Rudolf Hess was always whether or not it was him at all, not least that the British Army surgeon detailed to look after him in Spandau Prison where he spent the last half of his life was adamant that the man he was looking after simply didn’t have the injuries that Rudolf Hess had received in France in 1917. Notwithstanding too that the old man’s voice had deepened with age, according to his wife, who didn’t initially recognise the man she visited, an odd exception to the rule that old men’s voices generally get higher as they age. If, of course, it was the same man.

There was nothing at Trent Park to tell the visitor any of this. Nothing to tell the students there that some of the people who’d stayed there were if not the architects of the Final Solution, had at least helped it on its way.

None of that was visible at all when I ran there. I remember the dew on the grass. The pink of rabbits ears on a hill with the sun behind them. The long drag back down to Green Lanes. The headline about Steve Marriot burning to death the year before. The church hall where a friend once saw The Who, before they were famous. According to Wikipedia today, Blow Up wasn’t filmed in north London at all. History changes. Trent Park too.

Behave, baby!