Killing Rommel (4 page)

3

AT OXFORD, Stein was my tutor. For those unfamiliar with the tutorial system, it works like this. A student at university acquires his education by attending lectures and seminars given by dons. Attendance is voluntary. Theoretically you could duck every lecture—as some did, myself amongst them, passing the hours playing croquet on the lawns behind Magdalen, my college—and still graduate with a First. But you must be examined and demonstrate mastery of the material.

To assist the student in this, the university assigns him a tutor. Tutors are usually shaggy, ill-groomed junior dons who smoke and drink to excess and never leave their rooms except for illicit sexual liaisons or to replenish their stocks of tobacco and spirits. A good tutor can make one's college experience a revolutionary passage, to life as well as to literature; a bad one can make it misery. The college provides accommodations for each tutor, usually in double suites with another tutor (Stein's rooms were actually at Trinity College, where he was pursuing his own doctorate) with a kitchen and bath/WC, two sleeping rooms, and a sitting room between. The latter was invariably a hellhole, overheated in winter to a point barely shy of combustion, and knee-deep in texts, papers and the usual detritus of the academic life. I loved Stein's sitting room. It was the first home I'd had since my mother died.

I went up to Oxford because of Stein. His letters and testimonials got me in. Stein had eight or nine other pupils, among whom was Alan “Jock” McCall of Golspie, Sutherland. Jock became my closest friend. In those days, to be an all-round fellow was the ideal. Jock was that—a crack quarter-miler, brilliant essayist, undergraduate editor of the
Cherwell
in his second year, an unheard-of honour—though I abhorred his politics, which were thoroughly military and imperialist. Jock's sister Rose became my bride, to whom I have been blissfully wed for more than thirty years. But again I'm getting ahead of my story.

Stein was five years my senior. He was twenty-four when I arrived at Oxford and already a published poet. Beyond his own studies in Milton, in which field he was known even then as an authority, he was working on a novel. This impressed me even more. Stein refused to show pages to anyone or even to reveal his subject. Rumours, however, declared it homoerotic and political. “So,” Jock used to ask me as he arrived for his tutorial, immediately after mine, “what have you and Oscar Wilde been chatting about today?”

Stein's tone towards me was one of affectionate irony. He teased me constantly, usually over my “black Irish,” meaning the moodiness that descended upon me with such regularity and which I had acquired, Stein speculated, from my Irish mother.

Stein had a theory that there was a difference between Jewish despair and Irish despair. “Jewish despair arises from want and can be cured by surfeit. Give a penniless Jew fifty quid and he perks right up. Irish despair is different. Nothing relieves Irish despair. The Irishman's complaint lies not with his circumstances, which might be rendered brilliant by labour or luck, but with the injustice of existence itself. Death! How could a benevolent Deity gift us with life, only to set such a cruel term upon it? Irish despair knows no remedy. Money doesn't help. Love fades; fame is fleeting. The only cures are booze and sentiment. That's why the Irish are such noble drunks and glorious poets. No one sings like the Irish or mourns like them. Why? Because they're angels imprisoned in vessels of flesh.”

When I told Stein of my recurring nightmare, his immediate question was “What garment of iron are you wearing that drags you down?” When I described it, he said at once: “Armour.” I had never thought of that.

Stein's conclusion was that I was at heart a knight and that the mystery of my life could never be solved without taking into account the centrality of that vocation.

Stein lifted my gloom. His example gave me permission to seek my truest self. He assigned me readings far beyond the scope of university instruction. With Jock and others, we talked of literature for hours. Under Stein's tutelage, I blossomed both as a writer and as a critic of writing. I lost my fear of seeming smart, of standing out or appearing different.

Amongst the many qualities I admired in Stein, foremost was his refusal to be anything other than who he was. In those days to be a homosexual, even in a university setting, was something one dared not speak of. It was against the law. You could go to prison. Certainly your career could be impeded. Stein didn't give a damn. “A Jew, a poet and a poof,” he declared of himself. “The hat trick of social undesirability!”

Once, in the dining hall, Jock and I got into a row over Stein. Jock respected Stein but avoided him in public. A too-close association, he believed, could do harm to one's standing. “Balls,” I told him. “Stein's keener than half these bloody dons, he's twice the writer, works three times as hard; he's the only one who actually takes time for his pupils, and he's got the belly to speak his mind, unlike these other careerist bootlickers.”

Stein's politics were left and radical. He was wildly rich. I visited the family estate once in the West Riding of Yorkshire; the grounds covered seven hundred acres. Stein was related to the Rothschilds on his father's side; his mother was descended from Benjamin Disraeli's niece. The family fortune came from wool. The Lederers, Stein's mother's family, owned mills at Bradford, Leeds and Bingley. Stein's great-grandfather Hyman had pioneered the concept of the factory village. He provided housing, education, and medical care for his workers, of a standard surpassing anything of the time. His essay “On the Perfectibility of Human Nature” was required reading in my Natural Sciences course.

In those days at Oxford, the social roost was ruled by an elect spawned of the wealthiest and most ancient families, who possessed or affected the following constellation of virtues: athletic prowess, especially if acquired without apparent effort; capacity for alcohol; reckless physical daring, particularly involving horses, heights or motor cars; contempt for all affairs of religion, politics or commerce; and a withering disdain for academia and academic achievement. The scions of this elite by no means despised Hitler; many applauded the Munich Pact of 1938. They viewed with scorn the “red” opponents of appeasement. In their eyes, Churchill was little better—an arch-conservative jingoist and warmonger.

I hated these bastards. So did Stein. At Winchester he had been famous for abhorring the twentieth century. He refused to learn to drive. He believed in reincarnation. Asked what religion he followed, he answered, “Hindu.” He spoke and read French, German and Italian and could translate classical Greek and Latin as fast as he could read them. The more anti-Semitism he observed in government and in the press, however, the more he identified with his co-religionists and the more outspoken he became on their behalf. He penned letters to the editor; he wrote cheques to all sorts of causes. By the time I reached Oxford, Stein was reading six newspapers a day. I know because he sent me down to the newsagent to pick them up. Stein demonstrated with the Communists outside Parliament. He was arrested. In the late thirties, as I said, there was tremendous pro-German and pro–National Socialist feeling in England. Stein's hair was too long, his dress too unkempt. He was “not the right sort.” Rumours began. Stein laughed them off, declaring that such calumnies were the same as those levelled against Socrates—inventing new gods and corrupting the young.

Stein's downfall came about because of an undergraduate I shall call B. (B., a fine rugby wing, became a Royal Marine and was killed piloting an assault craft at Gold Beach on D-Day, 6 June 1944.) B. fell in love with Stein. But he never told him. He confined his passion to entries in his private diary, no doubt terrified of the consequences should he dare act upon his impulses. Somehow B.'s father, a prominent solicitor, learnt of this. The next thing anyone knew, two police inspectors appeared at Stein's door. Stein assumed that his offence was connected to his activities on behalf of refugee Jews.

“It's the Amendment Act,” said the officers.

This was a charge of “gross indecencies” and “solicitation of unnatural vice.” Stein was arrested for having seduced a boy he had never met. In the end, the charges were dropped for want of evidence. Not, however, before Stein had become notorious. In those days such a scandal might have been weathered by a tenured don; for a tutor it was fatal.

Worse were the consequences for Stein's novel. B.'s father, it seems, was not content with running Stein out of Oxford; he made it his business to finish him in the world of letters as well. At that time, there were only a handful of houses with the intrepidity to publish the type of novel Stein was writing; it was no chore for B.'s father to persuade them of the inadvisability of such a course. Stein went to the man and confronted him. I went with him to back him up. This was at B.'s father's offices in Great Titchfield Street. The old man had us thrown out.

Throughout it all, Stein affected to be aloof and amused. But we who knew him could see that he took the affair hard—the meanness of it and the bitter, small-minded malice. “It's literature's loss,” declared one of our fellow pupils one night in Stein's rooms.

Stein laughed. “Not to mention England's.”

Of course none of us had read his manuscript. Stein had shown it to no one.

The caucus broke up. We students felt like the disciples at Gethsemane. When Stein asked me to stick around, I imagined he wished to discuss my work in Milton, which was faltering. The rooms cleared out. Stein poured sherry.

“Chap, would you consider taking a squint at my manuscript?”

I was speechless.

“It would have to be tonight,” said Stein. “You'll need to read it here. I have no other copy, and I can't let you take the pages away.”

It would be my privilege, I said. I only hoped I'd prove worthy.

“Don't disparage your capacity, Chap. You've a keen mind. I can think of no one whose opinion I should value more.”

I stayed up all night. I read the manuscript straight through, returning to critical passages twice and even three times. The book was far more political than sexual. It was Swift, not Rabelais. Stein's reach was fearless; the work bore ambition beyond anything I had anticipated. And it was funny. I was terrified of offering some boneheaded critique, particularly now that Stein had demonstrated such faith in me. The tower bell tolled six; I asked Stein if I could have the rest of the morning to order my thoughts. “No,” he said. “It has to be now.”

We walked down by the river. I proffered reams of conventional praise. Stein chafed. He was getting angry. We had stopped at a bench beneath a row of hornbeam trees. Stein drew on his dead-coals pipe. I took a breath.

“The book is too good, Stein. Too true, too brave. Too far ahead of anything the public will tolerate. No publisher will have the guts to bring it out, and if they did, the critics would savage it and crucify you.”

I had dreaded offering this assessment, which I was certain was accurate and which I feared would devastate Stein. Instead, he threw back his head and loosed a great, roaring whoop. “Chapman, my friend, let's get bloody, stinking pissed!”

My review, it turned out, had been precisely what Stein had hoped for.

“By God, if you had offered tamer praise, I'd have leapt in the flipping river.”

I couldn't get drunk with Stein that day; I had two examinations and a rowing club meeting to attend. “Why,” I asked him, “did you need me to read this so fast?”

“Because,” he said, “I've joined the army.”

He took the train to Aldershot that afternoon. The date was February 1939. War with Hitler was only half a year away.

4

STEIN ENLISTED as a private soldier but was soon summoned forth and commissioned. The army assigned him to the Royal Horse Artillery, the smartest of the gunnery regiments. We celebrated one night in late summer at a pub called the Melbourne in Knightsbridge; Jock with his sweetheart, Sheila, I with Jock's sister Rose. Stein was fresh out of OCTU—Officer Cadet Training Unit—at Sandhurst. He looked fit and military in his RHA uniform with its single second lieutenant's pip.

“Do you really have horses,” Rose teased, “in the Royal Horse Artillery?”

“Horses? We're lucky to have artillery!”

Stein had orders for Egypt. Wavell's Army of the Nile was defending Cairo and the Canal from thirteen divisions of Mussolini's
fascisti,
who were building up in Cyrenaica and outnumbered our fellows by between five and ten to one. Stein entertained us with tales of his training as an OP, a forward officer whose role it was to direct the gunnery of his battery of 25-pounders. He talked of “surveys” and “time on target.” All this was Greek to me but Stein, to his own surprise as well as mine and Jock's, seemed to be thriving on it. His ship sailed in twenty days; he would spend his embarkation leave with his family in Yorkshire.

“Will you look after something for me, Chap?”

And he produced his manuscript.

Rose frowned. “There's nothing morbid in this overture, is there, Stein? For I won't stand you forecasting some dire fate for yourself.”

“My dear,” said he, “I shall outlive you all.”

Rose, as I said, was Jock's younger sister. During our first terms at Magdalen, Sheila would take the train from London at the weekend. Rose came along to keep the thing from appearing unseemly. Inevitably she and I were thrown together.

If it is possible to be a double, or even triple, virgin, such was my state at that time. The concept of sex, let alone love, seemed absolutely unreachable. I had never known a woman, save my mother, to see past my surface presentation—and certainly none who actually believed in me. Rose changed that. From the first instant, I felt that she saw through to me—to a “me” that I was but that I could not yet grasp. She saw that “me” and all future “me” s and believed in them all. As for her, the first time I saw her, I thought she was the most ravishing creature I had ever set eyes upon. And she had wit. I had never known a girl who made me laugh. Rose feared no one and was kind to all, especially to me, a phenomenon I could not begin to make sense of. I could not imagine being worthy of her and would no more have pressed my physical attentions upon her than flown to the moon. Rather, the emotion I felt towards her was one of fierce protectiveness. She seemed, from the first, so precious that I would have hurled myself into fire in her defence.

When you're young and without resources, you have no place to go. Rose and I had no private rooms, no car, no way out of the weather. It seemed we were outdoors all the time. It was wonderful. Only Stein took us in. He made pots of tea and sat up with us till all hours, talking politics and poetry.

Rose and I corresponded by mail. I still had not kissed her. It took me weeks to summon the temerity simply to upgrade my salutation from “Dear Miss McCall” to “My dear Miss McCall.” At the same time, I knew with absolute certainty that she and I would be married. I never said a word, nor did she. But we both knew it, and we knew that we knew it. At Oxford, each college has its own rowing club short of the varsity Blues. I rowed on Magdalen's. There is a competition in early summer called Eights Week, a rather posh event in the university calendar. Rose came up to cheer me on. I can't remember what place our boat took, but in the warm evening afterwards, when Rose and I as usual had no place to go, we walked with another couple along the river. A storm had got up; the four of us ducked for shelter into one of the boathouses. The other couple immediately began having it off in the one dry corner, an act that in those days was audacious beyond belief. Rose and I were mortified. We slipped out under the eaves. Our companions' passion continued unabated. We gave up waiting and simply set off into the rain. I was so in love, I could barely draw breath. Suddenly I felt Rose take my hand. The rush of blood nearly dropped me faint.

We began a romance. I fell into it like a man dropping off the edge of the earth. The innocence of our lovemaking would strain the credulity of today's youth. Yet chastity did not preclude passion. We found places for trysts. Hideouts in the woods, back seats of cars. We took hotel rooms, registering as husband and wife.

One night Jock caught Rose and me emerging from rooms above a pub on High Street, in front of a pharmacy that's no longer there called Saxon Chemists. Jock was with Sheila; clearly they'd been doing the same thing and probably a lot more. “Damn you, Chapman! Where have you been with my sister?”

Jock was a skilled amateur boxer. In a flash his fists went up; I tackled him to keep him from swinging. The scene devolved into low burlesque, with the pair of us crashing together into the rows of bicycles parked along the pavement while our young ladies beat upon our backs with their handbags, clamouring for us to stop. Two policemen pulled us apart. Jock was hauling Rose away. She jerked free. “Piss off, Jock!”

She crossed to me; I took her under my arm.

Jock goggled in consternation. “Bloody hell, Rose! Is this the kind of language you've caught from him?” He glared at me. “What have you to say, you damned sod?”

I took a breath. “Your sister's with me, Jock. That's it.”

Rose's arms tightened round my waist. I had never been happier in my life.

For months, Jock wouldn't speak to me. This was at the moment in Stein's scandal when the college was physically evicting him. I had read Stein's novel by then. When Stein left for the army, I took it upon myself to see the book published, if I had to bring it out myself, hand printed and hand bound. Rose backed me up. We spent days at a time in London, resubmitting the manuscript to every house that had turned it down. An editor at Lion's Gate mulled it briefly, imagining war breaking out and Stein dying as a hero. Novels by gallantly fallen authors sell better. “We'll speak to Stein,” said Rose. “Perhaps we can arrange to have him catch it precisely upon date of publication.”

Rose was living at home then. Her father, a Territorial Army colonel, took a dim view of her liaison with a penniless, academically faltering university student. He ordered Rose “confined to quarters.” She sneaked out anyway. We'd meet in tube stations and news arcades, riding for hours on buses or the underground. Just before the autumn term, Rose left school and moved out on her own. She found a flat at Shepherd's Bush and a job in a print shop. “It's positively Dickensian.” She loved it. We planned to marry. I was set to return to Oxford. Then came 1 September 1939.

Hitler invades Poland! Two days later the nation was at war.

There was no question but that I would enlist. What astonished me was the intensity of my reaction. At once, all clouds lifted. Clarity returned. I loved Rose and I was going off to fight. The only question was where to enlist and in what capacity.

Of all people, it was B. who decided my course—the unfortunate fellow whose infatuation with Stein had kicked off this whole debacle. He had come to Stein at the height of the scandal and apologised. Astonishingly, he and Stein became friends. I liked him too. It was B. who suggested that he and I enlist as private soldiers. We drove to the recruiting station in Kensington in the rain in his '32 Standard. B. was ecstatic. “Tell me, Chapman, do you feel as I do? I'm overwhelmed by relief. I feel as if I've been waiting for something all my life and now it's here.” This was the moment, he declared. “History. Great events.”

At Kensington, the various regiments had set up tables on the pavement under awnings, each manned by a senior NCO and each with a queue of young men waiting before it in the rain. B. went straight for the Royal Marines. I set out seeking the Staffordshire Yeomanry, in which my father and uncles had served. The recruiting sergeant informed me that a young man with my qualifications, that is, more than two years of university, would be enrolled at once in OCTU and sent straight to Sandhurst. This, I knew from Stein and other friends, could mean, with specialised training afterwards, a year or longer before getting into action. I baulked. Behind the adjacent table sat a lean sergeant-major of about forty. He had been talking with two potential enlistees, but I could see that with one ear he had been keeping tabs on my conversation as well. Propped before him, half-sodden in the drizzle, stood a recruiting poster depicting that armoured clanker I would come to know at Bovington as a Nuffield Cruiser A-9. A name plate said:

SGT-MAJ STREETER ROYAL TANK REGIMENT

“Why walk,” he said, “when you can ride?”

He promised that if I took the King's shilling that day, he'd have me on my way to battling the Hun in twenty-six weeks.

Rose was the only one who approved of my decision. My uncles were apoplectic. Rose herself had signed to be a Volunteer Air Warden and was applying for training as an ambulance driver. We all felt that way then. We would have drained our blood for England.

Jock and I repaired our friendship some months later. Jock had enlisted with the Cameron Highlanders, his family's regiment for five generations. He could not forgive me for the “liberties I had taken” with his sister. “But,” he wrote, “it's my own fault for putting her in harm's way.” He added that he would give me two choices for the war ahead—get killed or marry Rose.

The platform at Victoria Station was packed with enlistees and their sweethearts seeing them off for the various training depots. The mood was not brash and gay as it had been in our fathers' time, the Great War. Neither was it grave, as it ought to have been. Rather, as B. had said, the sensation was one of overwhelming relief. One felt released from a state of excruciating suspense and set free on to the field of action.

At last, I thought, I am neither too small nor too young to defend my country and the woman I love.