Growing into War Read online

  Growing into

  WAR

  MICHAEL GILL

  Foreword by

  A.A. GILL

  First published in 2005

  The History Press

  The Mill, Brimscombe Port

  Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

  www.thehistorypress.co.uk

  This ebook edition first published in 2013

  All rights reserved

  © Michael Gill, 2005, 2013

  The right of Michael Gill to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9593 4

  Original typesetting by The History Press

  I dedicate this book to my three children,

  Adrian, Nicholas and Chloe

  CONTENTS

  List of Illustrations

  Foreword by A.A. Gill

  1.

  Distant Relations

  2.

  A Friend for Life

  3.

  Expectations of Love

  4.

  ‘The Navy’s Here’

  5.

  Regions Dolorous

  6.

  Cold Hands

  7.

  Hot News

  8.

  Stamping on the Hinge of Fate

  9.

  Hut 50

  10.

  Scrambling for Orders

  11.

  Fire on the Runway

  12.

  A Cottage in the Woods

  Afterword by Georgina Gill: Ants on Snow

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  1. Mary Gill, my mother

  2. My father, George Arnold Gill

  3. This is me at fourteen months being held by my nurse

  4. My father relaxing in our garden

  5. My mother and her younger brother Clifford

  6. My mother’s parents, William and Emily Taylor

  7. The wedding of Sarah Jane Taylor, my great-aunt

  8. Fred and Will Taylor, my great-uncles

  9. My great-grandmother Taylor, in formal pose

  10. William Taylor, my grandfather

  11. My grandmother, Emily Thomas Taylor

  12. My grandmother Taylor (on the right) with a friend

  13. Henry Talbot, my grandmother’s admirer

  14. At Winchester with my grandmother

  15. My grandfather, George Gill, and me

  16. Out and about with my mother at Herne Bay

  17. This is me at eight

  18. Here I am in my spinal chair with my father, grandfather and dog Patch

  19. My cousin, Carolyn Taylor

  20. Stephen Coltham, my tutor, who was an important influence on me as a boy

  21. No. 28 Squadron RAF, Skegness, 1942

  22. Christmas Day menu, 1943

  23. Jimmy Blair and me in Dublin, September 1943

  24. Pilot Officer Michael Gill

  25. The ops board at Hartford Bridge on D+1, 7 June 1944

  26. An RAF Mitchell bomber takes off to attack a target in Northern France shortly after D-Day, 1944

  27. No. 137 Wing, Hartford Bridge, 1944

  28. The special fog dispersal aid ‘Fido’ in operation at an RAF bomber station

  29. The King and Queen leaving the Officers’ Mess at Hartford Bridge with the station commander, Group Captain Macdonald, September 1944

  30. Medal presentation parade at Hartford Bridge, September 1944

  31. Enjoying a drink at a café on the Champs Elysees with Hillerby, our Met Officer

  32. In the ops room at Vitry-en-Artois, near Douai, in Northern France, 1945. I’m the one with the pipe

  33. A knocked-out German Tiger tank on the Vimy–Lens road. Sergeant Metcalfe, Les Rates, me, Leading Aircraftmen Boulter and Nichols, April 1945

  34. Germany, 1945. I’m on the right. We both had revolvers

  35. Ruined Cologne, but the cathedral survived

  36. In Germany, 1946

  Copyright note

  The extract from Stephen Spender’s poem ‘I think continually of those who were truly great’ on p. 170 is reproduced by kind permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.

  FOREWORD

  My father never wrote at a desk. He always sat on the sofa and used a felt tip pen to write in longhand on a clipboard surrounded by books, larded with ripped-up paper bookmarks. A desk would have been too formal, too reminiscent of his father the bank manager. He didn’t wear suits or ties either or go in for any of the coded trappings of probity, the Establishment or the past.

  He was a man who was happy to be at home in his time. He liked contemporary things, contemporary people and ideas. I never once heard him hanker for yesterday, or ever wax nostalgic. He was a man of his age and worked in the medium that both marked and identified the age – television.

  He wrote constantly: scripts, proposals, drafts, letters, chapters of books, the start of journals and for me, postcards. School breakfasts were an expectation of a card from dad. He travelled a lot filming and they’d arrive with pictures of strange cathedrals or exuberant statues and his familiar, timidly excited handwriting that seemed to be fighting its classical pre-war education to become something a little more extempore. The cards were always civilised. He had a passion for museum shops and church porch racks, and his cards were always full of information, facts and observations, wrapped up with pithy, often funny opinions. They were like scenes from a shooting script.

  He never wasted time with the ‘Wish you were here, weather’s lovely . . . food’s foreign . . .’ stuff and a small but lasting part of my education came from these postcards. Not least the lesson that anything worth saying can be said both succinctly and elegantly, and that the prime purpose of writing to anyone, be it a letter, an article or a book, is not to show them how clever you are, but to leave them cleverer than they were.

  When he finally finished making television programmes he settled down on the sofa with his annotated books and started to write. We’d all encouraged him to embark on a book. He has a charmingly faceto-face style, a turn of phrase that is only a voice away from listening to him; and some memoirs from the pioneering public-service age of broadcasting would have been interesting and a gift for posterity. He’d interviewed Marilyn Monroe, worked with Giacometti and plenty of other interesting people in between. We’d all lived in London during the Sixties.

  So it was a surprise when he started writing the story of his childhood. It seemed very previous. When I was a child he told us stories, but they were invariably about his dog, Patch. I had only the haziest idea of his early life or our antecedants beyond my grandparents. I’d never imagined that he really thought it that important. He always seemed to have that self-contained confidence that is the consolation of the only child.

  What we didn’t know was that he was, already, incubating the first losses of Alzheimer’s. I write about him in the past tense, though he’s not dead, and I don’t mean to imply that he’s any less alive, or any less my dad, but dementia and the rubbing-out of words, connections and memories are a great and widening moat that separates the him on this side from the man that was on the other.

  When I read this book for the first time, he’d already crossed over, and pulled up the draw
bridge. It was a huge shock. I’d never heard any of it before. This life that was so vivid, so beautifully remembered and reconstructed. I would never be able to talk to him about it, ask him about this marvellous cast of characters. But as I read it I understood that that was exactly the reason and the rightness for going back. My father was as much a self-made, self-thought-up man as anyone you’ll meet.

  The choices we make and the courses we plot are cause and effect of where we started and who we started with. The man my father became and whom I knew wasn’t so much a reaction against the world he was brought up in, but someone who felt that he and his generation had an obligation to change and improve it. I realised there is far less distance between my childhood and my children’s than between mine and my father’s.

  There was another pressing reason to write this down. The Alzheimer’s meant that it would all be lost and broken into shards of non-sequitur and nonsense. This book is Daddy committing his memories to the lifeboats, this is what got out, this is what survived and made it safely into print. Women and childhood first.

  A.A Gill

  London 2005

  1

  DISTANT RELATIONS

  I

  The first thought that I can recall – something that came from my own mind as opposed to feelings and reactions to outside events – this thought, powerful enough to seem still vivid over sixty years later, came to me on a summer Sunday morning in 1929.

  My parents had just built a house in Herne Bay, the small town on the south-east coast of England to which we had moved. It was near the brow of a hill on what was a wheat field when we first saw it. Ours was the first house on a new concrete byroad that was built at the same time.

  Every Sunday morning my father would play golf while my mother cooked the lunch. Coming from a Yorkshire farm, she was a very good cook. Often, when the roast beef was nearly ready, we would walk together over the fields to meet my father returning from the golf club in the valley.

  One day she told me I could go and meet him by myself. I was nearly six years old and about to start school. I was very proud of the responsibility. She waved me goodbye from the door.

  I walked up the road to where it petered out in a wilderness of nettles and thistles and took the familiar path across the fields. Rabbits scuttled away into the hedgerows. I climbed the first stile, between the pallid blooms of wild rose. This was a favourite playground: a wide breast of the hill, comfortable to lie back on and watch the occasional biplane rising and falling as it droned its way across the Channel to distant magical places. A few months before, when it had been bright with poppies, I ran straight into a lark’s nest, a rough twist of grass holding four tiny eggs. Now I walked firmly forward, not even stopping to see how ripe the blackberries were. I was pleased with my independence.

  When I crossed the second stile I began to falter; I would soon be entering unfamiliar territory. Then I saw my father coming into sight over the slope. I felt a tremendous wave of pleasure and excitement. I rushed up to him and banged him on the knee, explaining that I had been sent to hurry him up, as lunch was ready. (He was often a little late, if the nineteenth hole proved a long one.)

  He took my hand, and told me how the match had gone. Golf was not a game I understood very well, but I liked walking beside him, having a serious conversation. When we had nearly reached our house, my mother came to the doorway.

  ‘Look,’ I shouted, ‘I’ve brought Daddy home.’

  She smiled. Throughout my life she had enveloped me with love and power. Having been away from her on this great adventurous journey, I suddenly saw her as though for the first time. She was beautiful. I felt sure that no one else would ever mean as much to me.

  II

  Of course, if I trawl my mind back to my earliest memories, many fragmentary images occur. One feeling dominates: pain. A terrible piercing pain that filled my head so that I wanted to wrench it off and throw it away. Instead, I would throw myself about and scream and scream. My head would be wrapped in scarves and laid on a hot-water bottle. This was only a temporary comfort. The pain would return, shooting triumphantly through my head in great throbbing bursts.

  Though I remember nothing of it, when I was eighteen months old I was taken to Southampton Hospital and had a mastoid operation on my left ear. I have been told that this was a relatively rare and serious operation in 1925, and especially at my age. It involved chiselling through the bone of the skull. What I thought about it was expressed in my reaction to my father. He had carried me into the hospital and when, weeks later, he came to collect me from my cot, I turned my back on him. Intermittent pain and infections in my ear troubled my childhood for years. This was long before the days of antibiotics. I remember being dosed with a dark sticky medicine of indescribable bitterness.

  Illness has been a recurring thread in my life. For years it was assumed by my parents that I would be fit for only the most sedentary job. Fruit farming was the general preference. At that time we lived in Kent, in a landscape jostling with apple trees. I preferred the thought of writing – though it has taken me a long time to get down to it seriously.

  That all comes later. My first four years were spent in Winchester in a big half-timbered Edwardian house that my parents shared with my mother’s parents. Memories from those times are like the vivid images from a film trailer. Now I can subtitle them with what my parents told me later. I recall a kindly old man with grizzled whiskers peering down at me as I lay in my pram in the garden and tickling me. I still had a bandaged head, so it must have been soon after my operation. He was Sturt, the first in a long line of benign gardeners who have weeded my paths.

  Another favourite was Bailey, my grandmother’s chauffeur. I was fascinated by his olive uniform with its shiny buttons and polished leather gaiters. A ride in the big upright Chrysler was a great treat. It had a silver vase attached to the dividing panel, always with a fresh cut rose in it, and a yellow corded speaking-tube. The glossy fur rug to put over our knees I imagined to be a buffalo skin that had come, like the car, from America. The huge head of a real buffalo that had been shot on the Great Plains by my great-grandfather adorned the wall of the local museum in Batley, Yorkshire. My mother’s family had been mill owners there for generations. We often went back to Yorkshire for Christmas or summer holidays to stay at the family farm – now run by my mother’s elder brother, Tom. He was said to have been a wonderful horseman in his early days. Lean and bow-legged, he had the look of a rider.

  I have another reason to remember his legs. On my third Christmas I was given the game of Snakes and Ladders. The board was illustrated by Mabel Lucie Attwell and showed a mustachioed policeman pursuing a plump little dog that had stolen a string of sausages. If you landed on the sausages you slid back down the board; land on a ladder and you would climb up to where the policeman was brandishing his warning truncheon. I was greatly taken by the power this truncheon demonstrated. One morning I went into the kitchen and ‘borrowed’ the rolling pin. I ran along the narrow corridors and steep stairs, from the dairy to the music room, brandishing my new authority at all I met. Eventually I reached the bathroom. My uncle was shaving with his usual care. (He had a different cut-throat razor for every day of the week.) His long, bony legs, bare between shirt-tails and garters, were just on my eyeline.

  ‘Unc,’ I shouted, ‘I’m a policeman.’

  And, in proof, I whacked him on the shin with all my strength. The dent was visible decades later.

  Equally memorable was our return to Winchester at the end of that holiday. Much of England seemed to be flooded. Men carrying red flags diverted us down winding lanes where the water lay like glass on every side. It was nightfall before Bailey’s careful driving brought us in a snow blizzard into Hampshire. I dozed on my grandmother’s knee waking to a succession of snow palaces glittering in the headlights. I doubt if I had ever been driven at night before. To my sleepy mind it seemed as though we were entering a magic world.

  Eventually I woke with a
start to realise the car had stopped, it was pitch dark and Bailey was lifting me out onto his shoulder. I couldn’t tell where we were, but Bailey explained that we were on the last stretch of the road home when the Chrysler stuck in a snowdrift. Sometimes he was up to his waist in the fine powdery stuff. I didn’t mind. I would have liked every homecoming to have been as exciting.

  There was still a further surprise. Instead of only my grandparents’ cook waiting to welcome us, the kitchen was crowded with dark-skinned people hugging round them a mixture of colourful rags and our blankets. Their strange chatter was hushed as Bailey carried me through to my nursery. He knew them, of course. They were the gypsies who lived in two caravans over the hill. Lacking any heat except peat fires, they had been given shelter from the blizzard by our kindly cook.

  This bastion of caring, cheerful servants peoples my memories of Winchester. They came to us, as did the big house itself, through the generosity of my uncle in Detroit. My mother’s families, the Taylors and the Thomases, had started emigrating to the States in the 1830s. Each generation sent over a fresh wave. My mother’s favourite brother, Clifford, went to join his uncle when he was sixteen. He returned to lose a leg fighting at the Somme. This had not impeded his financial success as a stockbroker. His business acumen was no doubt aided by his personal friendships with Detroit car builders such as Edsel Ford. He never gave up his British citizenship or forgot to share his good fortune with his parents in the old country.

  By contrast, my father’s family was solidly working class. Both my grandfather and my great-grandfather spent their lives in the noisy dusty caverns connected with the clothing industry.

  The mill owners, like my grandfather’s family, the Taylors, built big houses for themselves on the hilltops. The factories were down by the fast-running stream, and on the steep slopes between were the long rows of workers’ cottages. We used to visit my grandfather George Gill when we were staying at the Taylor farm. My grandfather was a stocky man with a heavy beer belly. He smoked a pipe and when he bent to kiss me his moustache smelt of tea and tobacco. I liked him, though I thought his house much too small. There were only two rooms, one on each floor. The front door opened straight in from the street. There was room for a couple of shabby armchairs. Then the room changed into the kitchen with a long coal-fired range that included an oven and heated the water and the cottage itself. A sink, a table, two wooden chairs and a larder completed the downstairs furnishings. The narrow stairs ran up the side wall. The upper room had a double bed and a smaller bed in which my father and his elder brother slept through their childhood. A blanket pinned to the ceiling divided the generations. What would they have done if they had had a son and a daughter?