4.2: Parents: working towards reconciliation

Once Henry had surmounted his initial shock in discovering just how unfaithful Daphne had been to him during his absence in the Middle East, they had worked out a modus vivendi, putting in quite an effort to make the marriage work. Even so, I remained oblivious of just how close they had come to divorcing over those initial months. I remember one conversation in particular, with my school friend [X], (Romeo,) when he came to stay with us in the holidays, about the impossibility that either set of parents would ever see fit to divorce. I simply didn't imagine that they might contemplate such an issue. I had the feeling that our home environment was so definitely secure.

Nor did I then see fit to connect Henry's fierce reassertion of dominance within the household as related to the idea that he was feeling cuckolded in his absence. I daresay that they were both now having sexual relationships on the side, but as far as the domestic scene was concerned, Henry was back there in the command seat, in a manner which Daphne accepted without demur.

The idea of being posted as an instructor at Bovington for the remainder of the war had never appealed to my father greatly. The piece of shrapnel that had been lodged briefly in his chest during the battle of El Alemein could not account for the fact that he had not been permitted to rejoin his regiment. In effect, he had been passed over, and the command of the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry had been now entrusted to someone junior to himself. He felt both dissatisfied and offended at this outcome, and desired to play a more active part in the war.

Daphne in the meantime had offered her services to the American hospital, which was then being constructed in the park at Longleat. The American forces had been flooding into Britain, in preparation for the opening of a second front - in Normandy, as it eventually transpired. And Longleat was the site chosen for one of their principal hospitals for convalescent servicemen. Daphne was appointed the official librarian, and she would sometimes take us along with her, to push her book trolley and to accompany her to lunch in the mess. She claimed that I put her to shame on one occasion, by spitting out all the pieces of gristle from my beefburger, and leaving them in a ring around the circumference of my plate.

The American connection made quite a big difference to all of our lives. American attitudes were so different to our own, (more effusive and unreserved,) and they exuded a brash opulence such as we had been raised to conceal from public view - or even from our own recognition. And they were lavish with their presents, whether this amounted to toys or chewing gum. Henry repaid their hospitality by inviting them to join his shooting parties, and there was the occasional dinner party at Sturford for them too.

Hospitality remained as lavish as ever incidentally. Daphne's lovers might have emptied Henry's cellar during the period while he had been away in Africa, but there was replenishment available - in terms of all the port which had been laid down at my birth, and originally intended for my own consumption after marriage. (Such had been the family tradition over successive generations.) This treasure trove was promptly sequestered to my father's use, to compensate him for his own depleted cellar.

It was by his liberality as a host at Sturford that Henry now became friendly with General Pete Corlette, who was amongst those Americans in Britain who had been designated to lead the 9th army, when they finally went into battle on the other side of the Channel. The idea of having a real live English aristocrat on his staff may have been something which appealed to General Corlette. Anyway Henry gleefully accepted the post of liaison officer, when it was offered to him. Not that it was ever really specified with whom it was that he was intended to liaise: a question that was put to him without satisfactory answer, on the occasion when General Montgomery came to visit Pete Corlette. The idea was more that Henry might prove useful in a whole number of ways, if only to enhance the social status of the American general's headquarters.

The months while we were all waiting for the invasion of Normandy coincide with the peak of my hero- worship for Daddy: for all of us brothers, I daresay. Caroline's excellent relationship with Henry was of a different kind. She was treated more in avuncular fashion, and as more of an adult of course. But it was notable that even little Val was now striving his utmost to discover what he had been missing in this idea of a paternal relationship. All three of us boys would accompany my father, whenever it was permitted, on his trips out to inspect what was going on around the estate. Henry liked to be seen checking up on things, in a highly personal style of management. He had always criticised his own father incidentally, on his impersonalised manner of running the estate through the services of an agent.

Val appeared in some ways troubled by the whole business of fitting a father into his life. It must have been evident to him that Nanny wasn't quite the impregnable redoubt that he may once have hoped, but then there was nobody else who could be relied upon to champion his cause like her. He was the runt of the litter, and neither Mummy nor Daddy were especially interested in supervising his situation in life. There were even facetious jokes, by Henry, about his real name once having been chosen as Gillian - because he was "Mr Gill's son". Val was to tell me later how he could never tell if this information was intended to be taken as true or false.

In hindsight, I have more to add. Despite the fact of such words always being uttered as a joke, I think it may have reflected a current anxiety in Henry's mind. I was to question him, many years later, about rumours I'd heard circulating in London about Val not actually being his son. He replied in effect that he did have his doubts upon this matter, and that they were based upon "something your mother once said to me - in a fit of anger.... We were quarrelling at the time."

It is not much for me to go by, but I am inferring that what he meant was that, around the time of his return from Africa, during the explosive conversations which followed his discovery of the full extent of Daphne's infidelities, he may have enquired about the paternity of all his children. I know not how Daphne replied, but it would have been in character if she had taunted him a bit - if only to get back at him for the injustice of his accusation. It could well be that she told him that she couldn't know for sure if Val was his son; but whether this uncertainty was genuine or not, I have no means of knowing, nor whether Henry did, at this time, have any serious doubt on the issue. Where I am certain is that he never thought for a single instant that Valentine had been fathered by Mr Gill.

The arena of humour was never a safe one between Henry and myself, any more than it was with Val. With Chris, it could be that my father encountered a safer streak of appreciation. I might be the wrong person to analyse this correctly, but I'd say that his feeling of humour needed to be triggered by an empathy of stepping inside Henry's shoes, and reading an incongruity from that position. My own concern about what factually should be regarded as true or false might possibly have been a hindrance in my appreciation of his wit. But of course in this instance, it was Val who was suffering rather than myself.

I am going to stress the word `facetious' (or inappropriate) in any reference to Henry's humour. It did require that you accepted him for what he was, and then became sensitive to all the ripples of mirthful incongruity which surrounded him. But if you fell out of line with that way of thinking, then you might brush up against some rougher aspects, finding yourself as an object to be teased, or even bullied, according to whether the feeling of good humour lasted within himself.

Inasmuch that Henry was the model to whose image I wanted most of all to conform, I was always striving to feel my way to a full understanding of what I needed to be doing, or saying, to merit his sparkle of merriment. But usually, when I was trying to be funny, I somehow got it wrong, and I was aware how nobody really laughed. I was a slow starter in developing anything akin to my own brand of humour.

When the invasion of Normandy finally took place, we were back at school for the summer term. There were feelings of enormous excitement everywhere, for this was the battle we'd all been waiting for. It also furnished the boys at Ludgrove with the nearest we'll ever get to having front seats in witnessing an aerial cavalry charge. It may have been D-day plus the odd day or so, and we trooped out on Mr Barber's front lawn one evening to gaze up at a sky filled with gliders on tow towards the coast - and France. There was a real feeling of them all charging into battle, and the sky was simply full of them. I can still feel a lump of emotion swelling in my throat at my recollection of this scene. Henceforward we were going to have the Huns on the run.

But of course it did mean that Daddy went off to the battle front, once again, and I was enormously proud of him - fantasising upon the heroic exploits that he might be performing. And it wasn't very long before we learnt that he had been awarded the bronze star, which I persuaded myself was somewhere close to the Military Cross in equivalent merit. I wrote to him eagerly urging him to divulge how many Germans he had killed. His modesty on this subject had always been confusing. He had once been at pains to explain to me that, when you give the order for a shell to be fired from a tank, you're not very certain just how many people it may (or may not) have killed - let alone the question of it not actually being your own finger on the trigger. But I eventually elicited from him that he might, perhaps, have killed three Germans; and I was prepared to settle for that, informing all those of my friends who had enquired.

Daphne continued with her librarian activities at the American hospital, while keeping the home fires burning at Sturford. In some ways she had always been a more constant presence in the family, yet I was aware at the same time how there was something peculiarly inconstant in her nature. She lacked that quality of being like the metaphorical rock upon which anyone could safely build. But I still felt enormously warm towards her, and knew that she esteemed me well. With Henry, it was always a huge challenge to earn his esteem, but with Daphne, I knew that I had it - even when it was unearned.

One of the most delightful aspects of Daphne's charm was her aura of slightly batty femininity. There was little sense of strict logic beneath her whimsical enthusiasms, but they all gave colour to her entertaining personality. An anecdote might illustrate the point.

Daphne enjoyed the occasional small flutter on the horses, but she was also superstitious, and once she had struck upon some successful way of courting Lady Luck, she pursued that method relentlessly: well, for a week or so in any case. For a while she attributed all her recent winnings upon the divine intervention of Bacchus, who surveyed the drawing-room window from his white marble pedestal at the far end of the front lawn. So before placing any further bets, Mummy would rush over to perform a short ritual of obeisance, which involved her pouring a small libation of wine into his bird-stained lips, and then over his lichened feet. It was a habit which she discontinued however, the day she looked up from her reverences to perceive that the new head gardener, who had been trimming the yew hedge with a pair of clippers from the other side, was stood there peering over the top of it, distinctly curious at her antics. Daphne hesitated for a moment, and then waved the emptied wine glass vaguely in the air. "It's a sort of game," she explained, before retiring sheepishly towards the drawing-room.

My attitude towards Daphne however, had by now become stricken with an uncertainty concerning how I ought to be judging her; and I am here talking about sitting in moral judgement. My intuitive antennae had picked up the message that there were those who regarded her as a bit of a scarlet woman. But my own feelings of loyalty towards her were still paramount. Perhaps I sensed that her position wasn't exactly a safe one. Perhaps I was asking myself whether, in the event of her being offered up as an expendable sacrifice, my own fate might not turn out to be bound up inextricably with hers.

The ambivalence in my attitude shows up in a poem that I sent her at this time. I may have thought that I was displaying my potential as a ballad writer, but it strikes me now that I was trying to communicate something deeper than that.

One day a dame slipped out of bed
and, over some small strife,
she severed through her husband's head
by slashing with a knife.

And then at once she told her son
to mind he didn't say
about her deed to anyone
until she'd passed away.

She said that if it got afloat,
she'd take the knife again,
and plunge it deep into his throat,
and split it up in twain.

Unknown to her, a man had passed
when she had done her crime.
With eyes aflame, he'd watched aghast,
and stayed there quite a time.

Then off he'd run to find some men
to catch this vile female;
to find her first, arrest her, then
to cart her off to jail.

They went and found her in her bed,
and forced her and her son
to follow to the place they led
by showing her a gun.

They locked the prisoners up in jail
and outside left as guard
a tough and brawny, thick-set male
with muscles big and hard.

But there inside that beastly cell,
the mother sat with glee
while vowing that she'd eat, as well,
her little son for tea.

So thereupon, with every ounce
of strength she ever had,
the wicked mother made a pounce
upon the luckless lad.

She then proceeded, with great greed,
to take his eyes and tongue,
and ate them. So for these few deeds,
the wicked wretch was hung.

At this distance in time, let me now pose as a psychiatrist concerned to analyse the anxieties that the young poet may have been striving to express. The mother's crime is that she severs through her husband's head, which is a clear case of symbolic castration, or cuckolding. The son's crime is that he bore witness to this cuckolding, but had been sworn to silence on the issue. Nonetheless, he gets taken to the house of punishment alongside her. Once there however, he finds that his eyes which had born witness to the mother's crime, and his tongue which might always speak out about it, were now objects which she might wish to destroy in him. He perceives this as the potential destruction of his identity. But it is she who remains, ultimately, the real guilty party and she is obliged to pay the full penalty for her misdeeds.

Another way of looking at it is to say that the verses display a remarkable deterioration in my conception of motherhood, since the days when I had penned those stanzas which began:-

Oh the little foal has play,
while his mother works all day.....

But I was growing up, of course.

While uncertainty may have been gathering in my attitude towards Daphne, my attitude towards Henry was to absorb as much of his identity as I possibly could. And I was enormously perturbed at the time of the Runstedt breakthrough in the Ardennes, that he might be killed. It was a stroke of good fortune that he had been back at home with us, on a short spell of leave, when the offensive had initially been launched, and when most of the casualties had been inflicted. But he had returned immediately to the front, (leaving me sobbing at night in my bed, I might add.) And the situation emerged after arriving back at General Pete Corlette's headquarters when, with the Germans still advancing, he was sent to demobilise American trucks, only to find that the enemy were already on the premises. His cool behaviour in pretending not to have observed that they were observing him, while continuing to supervise the demobilisation of the trucks, won him the Silver Star (to add to his Bronze Star,) and I now truly felt that I was the genetic offspring of a war hero.

Press Cutting from

Hank the Yank

by Cecil Carnes

Major the Viscount Weymouth, next Marquess of Bath, leads his brace of pet ducks along the western front on a leash, and thereby qualifies as the GI's pet British officer.

LT. COL. GEORGE FORSYTHE, of Gregson Springs, Montana, quickly picked a squad of soldiers from the drivers, cooks, clerks and signalmen about him. He led them into the tall ferns a few hundred yards from the corps command post, then not far from the German border. Then captured five German officers and 148 men who had blundered in there during the night. There followed a long, triumphant procession through the camp with an MP rearguard smoking a big cigar and bowing right and left to his pals. And trailing them all came a tall, thin British major, walking with two ducks on a leash of string.

Busy officers and men looked up, smiled and added a friendly wave for the man with the ducks. To a stranger, it would have been a scene worthy of a double-take in the Hollywood manner. After all, this was within the sound of battle. And the little Muscovy ducks had humps on their noses just where their master had one on his. Ducks and master moved with a waddling saunter which should have told the world, "Watch out for three uninhibited characters."

But to those who knew the folkways of the corps, this was almost SOP - standard operational procedure. They could have told you, with pride, how the tall British major and his duck pets had turned up in the strangest places; how they had given tone to the 19th Corps; how their adventures provided a living, day-to-day, comic newsreel.

They had written many a letter home about this single-ring circus at the war. Many a story had appeared in the corps' mimeographed newspaper. Thus the group of energetic AWVS workers in New York City, who had "adopted" the 19th Corps, took official notice of the ducks.

On the very day of that procession through the camp, Mrs A.J. Stone went to a sporting-goods store and picked up a special present she'd ordered some weeks before. It was a couple of tiny duck collars attached to one split-leather leash, the only one of its kind ever made. Mrs Stone addressed the gift to Major the Viscount Weymouth, known as Henry, or "Hank the Yank." She and her associates have equipped Henry, who will be the next Marquess of Bath, with the gear he needed to put his ducks in the victory parade down Unter den Linden.

His American friends have no doubt that Henry will parade if the notion strikes him, and the ducks, Don Juan and Yvonne, are in health. For Henry is absolutely at ease with the world at all times. In any compendium of unforgettable characters, he would rate an honoured spot near the top of the list. Americans are delighted with him not only because he is the screwball they'd always imagined a titled Englishman ought to be - even though he doesn't wear a monocle - but because he also is the kind of two-fisted guy you'd like to have beside you in an alley brawl on a dark night. He would be famous for his bravery if it weren't for the fact that he has already been acclaimed the most beloved eccentric who ever tried to drink his binoculars while looking through his canteen.

Henry, forty years of age and convalescing from wounds received in action in Syria, had met the officers of the 19th Corps back in England. He and his father, the eighty-two-year-old Marquess of Bath, had entertained them at his comfortable place, Sturford Mead, and his father's famous estate, Longleat, near Warminster, Wiltshire. The Americans had been intrigued by Henry's enthusiastic misuse of American slang and his nostalgic recollections of a trip to Texas in 1924. He had roamed the plains around Amarillo, was soundly hazed by cow hands and loved it. Ever since, he confesses, there has been a touch of Texas in his blood.

"Like the blokes who read the football tallies in your country, " Henry explains, "and become alumni of Notre Dame through a sort of sympathetic reaction. My friends are teasing me now for my affinity toward Americans. They call me `Hank the Yank.' Tie that for a basin of bah-nah-nahs!"

The Americans borrowed "Hank the Yank" as a name for Henry. They liked the fact that Henry had a flattened beak from boxing. They learned Henry shoots (hunts) and hunts (rides). And while Henry was strictly old-school-tie - Harrow - his Yankee friends learned he had stood for Parliament in 1931, and been elected by the largest majority ever given a candidate from his constituency. One term had been enough for Henry, because he would see war coming any time after 1935. Holding a commission in the territorial army, he settled back to training, spending time with Lady Weymouth and their four charming children, three boys and a girl, in the Longleat library, which houses one of the finest private collections in England. There Henry showed his American friends original Chaucers and Caxtons, the first folio Shakespeares, and the letter written by Lord Derby to Queen Elizabeth advising Her Majesty that Mary, Queen of Scots, was well and truly dead.

While the Americans were near by, Henry took keen interest in their training for the invasion of Europe. As D day drew near, some of the younger American officers decided to stage a polite kidnapping of Henry for the battle of France. Henry knew of the schemes, and they pleased him immensely. But kidnapping did not turn out to be necessary. Maj. Gen. Charles H Corlett, the "Cowboy Pete" who, as a character right out of America's great Southwest, delighted Henry, applied for a British liaison officer for the 19th Corps. He asked for, and got, Lord Weymouth, alias Hank the Yank.

Major the Viscount Weymouth showed up at camp wearing a pair of G.I. pants, British field boots and an American combat jacket bearing the crown of a British major and the insigne of the 19th Army Corps, a tomahawk. Perched on his thinning brown hair was a Montgomery beret, very black, sporting the badge of the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry, a regiment founded by that particular Marquess of Bath who was his great-grandfather.

Henry hit the beachhead from a PT boat in company with two generals, six colonels and another major. Figuring himself outranked, he immediately took over the mess. He was, as he happily put it, "a natural" for this sort of hanky-panky, since he spoke French. He went through the countryside, scrounging and mooching. Butter, chickens and eggs quickly replaced K rations. Henry was right on the beam when groping through the chicken roosts of France.

It was in one profitable barnyard that his heart was taken by a pair of Muscovy ducks. Recalling what lovely pets they made, he promptly bought them. Now, at this time, the beachhead wasn't a great real-estate development - we had a battle lien on a small section of France and had to throw our entire weight in to hold it. So shells were landing almost everywhere. Henry named his ducks "Yvonne" and "Don Juan," unfolded his portable canvas bathtub - the one he called "my family shield," - and set the ducks up in housekeeping. One of the ducks was larger than the other. This one, he reasoned, was a drake. It was only natural, therefore, that when he exercised them, the drake should go ahead, as Henry put it, "feeling out the mines which might cook his goose, or rather, duck." It may have been the war, but both Yvonne and Don Juan turned out to be highly excitable. Henry had to anchor them by strings attached to their legs. He was confident that after a few days of food and affection, they would grow domesticated, matching the lovely pets he had made out of his well-mannered English Muscovys.

All this time Henry was going up to the front daily. He was on duty with the combat observer section of corps headquarters and his idea of how to check enemy positions was to stroll over and look in on the German positions in person. After the sun went down, he would come back and enjoy his ducks. I remember the first time I saw him. Henry and I were listening to the artillery pounding not far away. "I let the ducks take a walk by themselves at dusk," Henry said. "I thought it was the democratic thing to do." One of the generals commanding a division strolled over and began explaining a tactical problem for the next day. It was rather an involved situation for a novice like myself, but Henry grasped it at once. After he had listened to the general for ten minutes or so, Henry said politely, "I think I hear them now." I could hear nothing but the plunging, exploding shells. Henry walked through the darkness along the hedgerows and recovered his ducks.

Next day, the corps headquarters moved. Profiting by his long experience in the field in Africa and the middle East, Henry paid attention to the little niceties of living, and by careful attention to details he managed to minimize the inconvenience of war. He had the use of a captured German Opel touring car, loudly painted with the Allied star, so it might easily be identified by Allied pilots. To Hank, Opel was short for opulence, and even though the car inevitably broke down - after ten miles - as certainly as if it had been guaranteed by a Broadway sharpy - he wouldn't trade it for any number of other assemblies he was offered.

So this corny joke of a car was run alongside the wall tent which Henry shared with Capt. Lloyd. L. McDaniel, of Decatur, Illinois. Into its comfortably upholstered rear, Henry put a cardboard miniature of a Pullman section. That was for Yvonne and Don Juan. Then Henry packed in his red dressing gown and carpet slippers, his two foot lockers, a supply of American D ration - vitamin packed chocolate bars, on which he dotes and hopes to gain weight right in the middle of a war - his fleece-lined sleeping bag - the only one in the corps - a market basket - the one in which he packs his lunch when he goes out to the battlefield - a tripod, and a very, very white washbasin. Next he put in Henri, his nice, red-cheeked French valet, a kid who had volunteered for the job and who had found it no mean task to ride herd on two ducks of the uninhibited type and an equally uninhibited duck lover. Henri had been outfitted - quartermasters please look the other way - with American G.I. clothing. So they took off, and after the customary number of breakdowns - the number of miles divided by ten equals the perverse ratio of the motor - they reached the meadow where the command post was to be established.

Here Hank dropped things and went about his business of "liaising," after taking his ducks for a short leg-stretching stroll. And here a visiting inspector of camouflage dropped around. He stopped in his tracks and stared at his lordship's collapsible washstand, holding aloft the brightest, shiningest, whitest porcelain basin that ever graced a battle front. His red face turned to mauve - a menacing mauve. And then he called to a lieutenant - the very nearest one.

"Whose," he demanded, is that?"

"Why, sir that - that is Henry's."

"Oh. And doesn't Henry care what happens to the Nineteenth Corps? Doesn't he know a Luftwaffe pilot could spot that damned thing from twenty thousand feet? You tell Henry to smash that thing and bury the pieces!"

"Sir," the lieutenant offered, "that might lead to serious - I might say, international consequences. Why - "

"Have you got trouble here with a bunch of goofs?" the major asked. "Well, I know how it is when you run into bad luck in a corps. Like, for instance, when I was coming in here, my jeep passed a guy who was actually leading a couple of ducks on a string. Forget it! Cut some branches off the nearest tree and tie them to the main tent pole, so they overhang this prominent bit of equipment. I know what it is to live among crazy people. I live in Los Angeles!"

And he was off on his rounds, leaving a young lieutenant joyful because Henry's style hadn't been cramped. That feeling about Henry was universally shared. Ordinarily, liaison officers are appointed for some linking mission, say between the British 2nd Army and the American 1st or between the British 30th Corps and the American 19th, or 7th, or whatever. But only for a specific task. Then they are recalled. Now, Henry was not to be trammelled by such restrictions. The corps commanders wanted him to liaise in all directions. But they knew he was probably the only liaison officer-at-large. There was, therefore, some anxiety when Field Marshal - then General - Sir Bernard L. Montgomery visited the corps headquarters and met Major the Viscount Weymouth.

"What do you do?" inquired Montgomery showing just the correct interest.

"Major Weymouth is our liaison officer," interposed General Corlett hurriedly.

"Who does he liaise between?" asked Monty casually.

Henry started to harrumph a bit, but General Corlett was equal to the situation, tactically. He remarked quickly that Henry liaised with whoever was on their flank, and in addition was assistant G-3 - Operations. Monty looked a bit bewildered by this explanation, but it obviously was a position he couldn't attack without his famous massed artillery. His conversational guns being spiked, the subject was re-rifled, successfully.

It was merely a coincidence, but the very next day Henry had a chance to show that it took more than charm and a penchant for making friends to keep him in business. He and Lt.Col.Thomas L Crystal, Jr., of Washington, D.C. were reconnoitring at the front for a promising-looking command-post site. The Germans sent a force through west of Tessy-sur-Vire and cut them off. To the very conservative Henry, it looked like a mere patrol. Actually, it was a full company of crack German infantry and a platoon of tanks. Henry and his driver went to the right and Colonel Crystal and his driver went to the left. They were going to set up a small cross fire, if practicable. When Henry discovered the true size of the enemy force and inspected their defensive positions covering the road, he went home - on tiptoe. Having walked through the German lines and failing to find Colonel Crystal back at corps headquarters, Henry returned and did some more gumshoe work up and down behind the Germans. No Crystal. So back to camp. Henry took Yvonne and Don Juan for a long walk, just to get his mind off the colonel's disappearance. And, of course, ran into the colonel riding back in someone else's jeep. He had stayed, surreptitiously, with the Germans, in order to finish sketches of their installations.

The next thing the Germans thought up for the 19th Corps was the Gethsemane of Gathemo. They launched a counteroffensive in great force north of Mortain. Henry got very much enthused by the manner in which the Americans contained this drive. He wound up every day as an integral part of the front lines. When word came to General Corlett about this, he called Henry before him. In the little trailer office where he maps his plans, General Corlett said, "Henry, I hear you have been neglecting your ducks. From now on, you will go no farther than battalion command posts, so you can get back to your tent earlier. A dead duck of a liaison officer is no good to me."

Just the same, Henry was given the American Bronze Star for bravery. King George has to approve all decorations received by British officers. While Henry's American medal was working its way through Buckingham Palace, the King suddenly came though with a Territorial Efficiency Medal. When news of this reached General Corlett's mess, where Henry and the other officers of the corps family eat their meals, Lord Weymouth hastily volunteered an explanation. "It's just a routine decoration," said Henry, "awarded all who have not disgraced themselves in twenty years." The staff officers pretended there was only one explanation: King George was just trying to wean Henry away from the 19th Corps.

"There is a dirty ring here, too, surrounding our Bath," quipped Maj. Roy D. Craft, editor of the corps newspaper, "suggesting duck with Free-French fries would be character building. Let us nip this campaign in the very taste buds. Especially is such talk subversive, as Henry, heady with liberation here in France, is about to unleash Don Juan and Yvonne."

The day Henry decided to free his ducks was one of the frequent headquarters moving days. He loosed the strings from their legs. Yvonne immediately soared aloft, gracefully cleared a line of 100-foot trees and vanished forever. Don Juan sat around for a time, then went aloft in the slipstream of his girl friend. Sadly, Henry loaded his Opel and drove off for the new CP site, thinking never to see either of the Muscovys again.

Don Juan, however, came back to the old CP at the usual time for chow - to find the place deserted. He was hissing his disgust when the corps chief of staff chanced to come back for something. The general tossed Don into a gunny sack, piled maps and brief cases on top of him and drove to the new post. Here Don Juan waddled indignantly out of the sack, and without so much as a look at his fond master, took off out of Henry's life.

But in less than four hours, Henry was given their successors, two tiny ducklings. Again, assuming the larger to be a drake and the smaller a duck, he named them Don Juan and Yvonne, in memory of those earlier friendships. And Henry worked on their emotions from the very start. It was something to watch when he took them out for a stroll, with cannon pounding a short distance ahead, the ducklings walking in single file, the larger leading the way. They went all through France and Belgium like that, making a big hit with the civilian population. Some of the children even offered the ducks tastes of the bonbons they had been given by the American soldiers. Henry and his web-footed friends were inseparable. He would unleash them and they would walk long distances, but always come back. Henry claimed that his "poultry patrol" had often penetrated tough Nazi defenses.

One day up near the German border, the command post was established on the grounds of an ancient château. Through the moat flowed a swift-moving stream of ice-cold mountain water. On the banks waited a husky, energetic, chocolate-colored puppy named St. Lô, after the battle-scarred town where he was found immediately after the Americans broke through.

St. Lô had been getting all of everyone's attention until this last set of cute ducklings came along. As for Yvonne and Don Juan, they hissed like a busted steam pipe as they strutted past St. Lô. He retaliated by catching the Muscovys in an unguarded moment and driving them into the brook.

He kept them there, paddling desperately against the rapid, icy current. Barking furiously, he raced back and forth, heading them off whenever they tried a landing. They were at the point of exhaustion when an enlisted man rowed out and brought them ashore. But when he put them on the ground, they couldn't stand up. The fell down and lay helplessly paralyzed for days. St. Lô was disgraced. But Major Craft, his owner, said the pup felt bad about the whole thing, and hinted at extenuating circumstances - combat fatigue and war nerves, coupled with exhaustion in trying to catch up with the retreating Germans. In the corps newspaper, Le Tomahawk, he expressed his hope that the incident wouldn't be allowed to affect Anglo American relations.

"At least not ours and Henry's," he wrote. "When this war is over, we want to be on the best of terms with him, so we can visit his place and sit on a stick and shoot partridges while the hired hands drive them by".

Finally, tender treatment brought the Muscovys back to health. One night not long ago, at the command post near the front, the staff officers were having dinner.

"Isn't that the whistle of German planes?" someone asked.

"Nope," said Col. Carl Jones. "You can tell them miles away."

Whereupon there were the explosions of several aerial bombs just outside and the racket of diving Stukas.

"Yvonne!" gasped Henry. "Don Juan! They're out!"

He ran through the blackness and the explosions, looking for his Muscovys. It was a much more dangerous thing to do than removing a wounded man from the front lines in daylight. Bombs burst all around. But in a short time, Henry reappeared, smiling and ruffling the Muscovys' neck feathers soothingly.

In the light of a faltering flash lamp, the brass hats looked at one another and grinned as they heard the G.I. cook say, "Henry is a very fine Joe."

There was a less healthy side to our relationship however, in that he himself had been converted to fascism - by a colonel on General Corlette's staff. During his spells of leave, he was concerned to make all his guests understand how this was the new inspiration in his life, with myself listening with devout attention to all that he uttered. And it is important that I should analyse this position in detail.

The manner in which Henry would present his case was roughly as follows. "There was this colonel on the general's staff, and when he was there in the mess, he would have the whole lot of us arguing our heads off. But he knew what he was saying and he would stick to his guns.... He kept telling us that we were in the process of wiping out the finest nation in Europe. `Look at their farms,' he would say. `Do you ever see any muck, or dirt? They are the best kept farms that you'll ever see. And we're in the process of trying to wipe these people from the face of this earth. But of course, we've got to - because we're at war with them. It's their neck, or ours.'

"It was this colonel who advised me to take a closer look at what Hitler had actually said. He told me to get hold of an English translation of Mein Kampfe, which I've done. And I've got to admit that there's a lot of truth in what he tells us.... I mean it's a fact of life that the wolf pack follows its leader. The pack's success or failure depends upon the wolf that's up there in front. If he's strong and cunning, they go places, but if he's grown old and weak, then they all perish. We've all got to find someone intelligent and strong to place up there in leadership. And once we've done this, we've got to do what he says. We've got to follow him through thick and thin, in a spirit of undivided loyalty - until he grows old and weak, that is to say. Then we have to take the ruthless decision to put someone else up there in his place, switching our loyalties to him instead.

Little by little, Henry became far fiercer in his endorsement of fascism, especially after the general election when Atlee replaced Churchill as Prime Minister, during the final stages of the war. His line then would run as follows. "There's democracy for you! Churchill did all the spade work to bring us victory. But when he goes to the people and asks them to show their gratitude by voting him another term of office, they throw him out. Someone's out there promising them quick riches, and they get sucked in. They believe all that rubbish. That's the people for you! If you're going to allow them to take crucial decisions, you'll land up in every manner of mess."

Then someone might probe whether Henry's foremost admiration was for Churchill, or Hitler. His line of reply was then: "Well it's got to be Hitler. I mean he took on the entire world, and he damn nearly won. You've got to be a genius to come so close to victory in that kind of situation. Churchill did all right, but he had all the advantages stacked on his side. And when you come down to it, his one claim to fame is that he finally managed to defeat Hitler. There's little else that he'll go down in history for. He didn't get a chance for that: not under a system when he's always got to go cap in hand to the people and ask them for another term in office. Under democracy, he gets slung out."

The subject of fascist outrages would often arise: an apology demanded for acts of brutal suppression in countries occupied by the axis powers, or the programme for racial purification in the extermination of Jews. With regard to the former, Henry would argue that ruthlessness was necessary, (and admirable,) at times when you were fighting with your back against the wall. "You can't blame the Germans for acting like that, when they had the whole world lined up against them. The alternative was to chuck in the sponge just as soon as the going got tough. But that would have been out of character for Hitler, and we must admire him for it."

On the question of genetic purification, it is best that I say as little as possible. Henry would deny that the deaths were as high as were rumoured. Then he would appeal for a consensus of opinion that the world hadn't really lost anything from the death of a few Jews. Some basic streak of anti-semitism was emerging from his subconscious, prompting him to credit his political hero with the concoction of a spurious rationale for their elimination from the human scene.

But it was in the justification of right wing political thinking, versus left, that Henry's conversion to fascism gave rise to his most eloquent tirades. What to do with the striking dockers, or miners, for example. "Just put their leaders up against the wall, and tell them to go back to work -or else.... And if they're still refusing to listen, then you bloody well shoot them. And I can promise you that there won't be anyone talking about strike action after that!"

Daphne did nothing to encourage him within his fascist views, and she joined in the general chorus of protest against the inhumanity of so many of his utterances. But she did little to expound a contrary thesis for my understanding. To my ears, it always sounded as if Dad was setting out to be true to himself, presenting unpopular ideas against all opposition. I admired his boldness, and it was the only coherent case that was ever argued in my presence. So I gradually got the feel of his position, and began to absorb it as my own.

But this was really a period of rapprochement between Henry and Daphne. While he preened himself, and pirouetted in his new found eloquence, she welcomed in effect that she was back under the domination of a virile masculine influence; and they were possibly even sexually faithful to one another, for the time being. Any thought that the ideas Henry was feeding me might be unhealthy for my burgeoning personality was never even considered. In all probability, Daphne felt that I was now quite old enough to take care of myself.

Mention should be made of two deaths on my mother's side of the family. The first was Granny McCalmont, my mother's mother's mother, and my own great-grandmother of course. She finally died after a short illness, at the age of ninety-...... I had always been her favourite grandchild, ever since the days when she would come and sit at my bedside, while I was recovering from that mastoid operation in a London hospital. I was the only one in our family to whom she bequeathed anything in her will. This took the form of a painting attributed to Zoffany, which experts ultimately pronounced to be an oleograph, not an oil painting, and in all probability by one of his pupils rather than by the master himself. But the intention was there, and I still feel grateful (and affectionate) towards her.

The second death was that of Grandpa George Vivian, my mother's father. There was an ageing gun-dog which survived him by a few days: so old that the decision had been taken that it should be put down. So George took him out on what was intended as a last walk in the woods, so that he could be shot while enjoying life to the full, at some distance from the house. A shot was indeed heard, and my step-Granny, Nancy, awaited her husband's sorrowful return. But it was the dog who returned, wagging his tail and as full of life as ever. A search party later discovered George lying with gun in hand, and deceased. The emotional crisis in pulling that trigger had brought on a cardiac arrest, fouling up his aim into the bargain.

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