Handsome Brute: The True Story of a Ladykiller (21 page)

Built at the end of the nineteenth century, the main buildings at Hollesley Bay were large and rambling, complete with dormer windows and a clock tower, all designed to resemble a great Tudor manor house. On arrival, the borstal boys, having travelled in chains, were unshackled and issued with a kit of blue jacket, shirt, shoes and shorts, finished with thick stockings and a woollen tie. Unexpectedly, they were also given half an ounce of Ringers A1 Shag tobacco and a packet of cigarette papers.
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This welcoming touch was very much the tone of the institution which had been established by Hollesley Bay’s enlightened governor, C. A. (‘Jack’) Joyce, a man of great integrity who was convinced in the ability of the borstal system to redirect the lives of young men who had gone off the rails, empowering them by teaching them self-respect as well as respect for others: ‘While you are here, the first thing I ask of you is courtesy to each other, to the staff and to myself.’
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Joyce stayed in touch with many of his former borstal boys, including Behan and Heath. Both found their experience at Hollesley Bay formative. From prison, Heath later remembered the profound effect that Joyce’s regime had on him. ‘You and . . . your ideals which we all worked so hard for once, occupy a very special corner in my long list of pleasant memories.’
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Much of the daily routine at Hollesley Bay aped the structure of a public school timetable. Four houses – St Patrick’s, St Andrew’s, St George’s and St David’s – accommodated about 100 boys, each with prefects and a housemaster. Most of the boys were between sixteen and eighteen but the colony would admit young men up to the age of twenty-three. Most were single, but some were married with children. The boys were regarded very much as delinquents rather than criminals, deserving of rehabilitation, rather than punishment. None of them were thought of as high risk and much of the time they were unsupervised and able to abscond. Few did though, so responsive were they to Joyce’s methodology.

Though the manual work could be hard – sometimes nine-hour days harvesting fruit and vegetables in all seasons – the facilities at Hollesley Bay were very comfortable. Though the dormitories in which the boys slept were basic and unheated, there were several public rooms offering a variety of leisure activities: a games room to play table tennis, darts and billiards, a radio room to listen to the wireless, a gym, a library, as well as playing fields for football and rugby. There were frequent treats – Brendan Behan nostalgically remembered teas of bread and jam, treacle duff and sweet cake and Heath was regularly able to buy the
Daily Mirror,
the
Observer
, or his beloved
Daily Telegraph
. The centrally heated dining room was furnished not with refectory tables, but with sociable tables for four, each decorated with bowls of flowers from the Hollesley Bay gardens. The walls were hung with colourful prints of the colonies – a subliminal suggestion, perhaps, to the delinquents that in the future they could make a fresh start in one of the British dominions.
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The colony promoted a healthy, outdoor lifestyle that suited Heath and he certainly prospered there. Food was fresh and plentiful and the coastal breeze invigorating. At Wormwood Scrubs Heath had measured 5 ft 10 ¼ and weighed 152 lb. By the time he left Hollesley Bay he was 15 lb heavier and had grown half an inch.
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His strategy whilst at borstal seems to have been to keep his head low and behave, in the hope of securing an early release. He did carting, cropping and general farm labouring as well as working with horses. He was most keen, though, to tend the colony’s show sheep, regarded as a light job for a man of his athletic build and developing strength. This he did with Fred Sams, Hollesley Bay’s shepherd.

His sole job for months was to be my assistant and all he had to do was make sure the sheep did not fall into the sea. He would laze there, mostly lying on the bank of the saltings at the edge of the North Sea, dreaming and scheming and never working but to shoo the odd sheep back from danger.
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The colony provided Heath with a sufficiently easy life with the sort of public school or military structure in which he thrived.

But in the outside world, political events were conspiring to impact even on this sleepy corner of the Suffolk coast. On 30 September, Neville Chamberlain landed at Heston aerodrome and announced that war had been averted by the signing of the Munich Agreement. The increasingly acquisitive Nazi Germany had been appeased, with Britain, France and Italy agreeing to the annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland – an issue that had been causing international anxiety since Germany had annexed Austria in March of that year.

We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.
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Arriving at Downing Street later that day Chamberlain (in)famously announced that he believed that this was ‘peace for our time’.

Heath’s housemaster, Mr Macfarlane, hadn’t, at first, been impressed by his new charge. In the autumn of 1938, he worried that Heath was too conceited, showing off his superior education and culture to the scorn of the other boys who dismissed him as an affected snob. But by the following spring, McFarlane had completely revised his opinion and commented that Heath had settled into the colony’s routine extremely well.
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He was taking an active part in the community and was even appointed as captain of his house. On arriving at Hollesley Bay, the precocious Brendan Behan was introduced to Heath, noting how ‘strongly built’ he was, as well as the silver star he wore on his jacket – a badge of seniority and authority.

‘My name is Behan,’ said I.

[Heath] smiled and said in a mock Irish accent, ‘An’ it’s aisy to say where you’re from, Paddy.’

I smiled too, because it seemed to be meant as a kindness.

‘Phwart paart of Tipperary, Paddy?’

‘I’m not from Tipperary,’ said I.

‘Are you not, now?’ said Heath.
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Heath advised Behan and the new ‘receptions’ to keep their heads down and to commit themselves to scrupulous, almost military self-discipline. Violence, boisterousness, even swearing was out of order.

‘Look here, cock,’ said Heath, ‘as long as I’m here, you keep that kind of talk to yourself. I won’t wear it, and if I get you or any other filthy bloody swine talking like that he’ll know all about it.’
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It seems, as far as Behan and his contemporaries were concerned, that Heath was, if not one of the lads, certainly respected by the other borstal boys.

In February 1939, the first Anderson shelter
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was built in London. By April the WRNS had been re-established, followed in June by the creation of the WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force). The Military Training Act was introduced in April,
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initiating conscription for men of twenty and twenty-one to take six months’ military training. As the country watched the international situation darken and realized that Chamberlain’s promise of peace looked more and more like naïve wishful thinking, Britain prepared for war. In May, eleven months into his sentence, Heath wondered if he might be eligible for discharge for military training, given his background in the services and his spotless behaviour since he had arrived at Hollesley Bay. He had already made it clear to Mr McFarlane that his ultimate ambition was to rejoin the RAF. McFarlane told Heath he must be patient. By now he genuinely admired Heath’s ‘persistent good humour and common-sense adjustments’ that had enabled him to fit in with the other boys like Brendan Behan, ‘without lowering his own standards’.
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More and more, Heath seemed like the model borstal boy, his time at Hollesley Bay having moulded a mature and responsible young man.

During his time at borstal, Heath acquired some very useful friends in high places. As well as gaining McFarlane’s admiration and support, he managed to catch the interest of Jack Joyce, the governor. Through him, Heath secured a meeting with Mr Scott, the Head of the Borstal Association, to discuss his future. These two friendships were to develop throughout the rest of Heath’s life with Scott and Joyce as unofficial mentors, taking a genuine interest in Heath’s progress. When he first met Mr Scott in June 1939, Heath’s ‘consuming anxiety’ was to find out if there was any hope of his being accepted by the RAF on his discharge from borstal. He argued that he had held commissioned rank as a pilot and already had 200 flying hours under his belt. Surely he’d be ideally placed to rejoin the service in a time of national emergency, even if it meant starting again in the ranks?

Scott was impressed by Heath’s passion, his excellent physique and superior intelligence and promised to help. In Mr Scott, Heath had secured a very influential champion. Later that month, Heath’s father also visited Scott at the Borstal Association offices in Victoria Street to discuss his son’s future. Again, the two men became very friendly, united in their desire to try and help young Neville fulfil his potential. Like the Heaths, Scott also lived in Wimbledon, so he began visiting them socially in Merton Hall Road, always curious to know how their son was getting on.

True to his word, throughout the summer, Mr Scott made a series of enquiries at the Air Ministry on Heath’s behalf to see if there might be some chance of his rejoining the RAF. These appeals were all rejected. This can’t have been surprising as Heath had been dismissed from the service only two years previously and since then had been in court twice, thereafter spending most of his time in borstal. There was also a rush by hundreds of thousands of young men to enlist. The RAF neither wanted nor needed him back.

From the end of the summer, Britain galvanized herself for war. On 23 August, the Soviets and the Germans signed their mutual treaty of non-aggression, the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. A week later, the Royal Navy manned their war stations and the evacuation began to remove children from major British cities to the countryside. On 1 September, the Germans invaded Poland. The British army was then mobilized and a blackout imposed across the British Isles. The international crisis had an impact even at Hollesley Bay; on 2 September, Heath was discharged under emergency regulations and sent home to Wimbledon. This wasn’t special treatment, though, as approximately 1,750 borstal boys were similarly discharged on the same day. And though Heath had been released, he would remain on licence for another three years.

The day after Heath was released from borstal, the National Service Act was passed, introducing mass conscription for all men between the ages of eighteen and forty-one. The following day, Heath called to see Mr Scott at the Borstal Association offices in a frenzy of excitement. He burst into Scott’s office with his arms waving and his eyes blazing, shouting, ‘My God, sir, they’re up and I’m not with them.’ Knowing the boy and his history, Scott could understand Heath’s passion, but he felt at the time that ‘Heath’s manner, appearance and expression disclosed lack of control and an excitability far from normal’.

Making full allowance for the excitement prevailing throughout the country on that day and for this ex-pilot’s feelings of frustration and impatience, he displayed unnatural excitement and loss of self-control. His eyes were wild, his whole body shook with emotion and he could not sit down.
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For Heath the outbreak of war was both an opportunity to put the past behind him, but also a fulfilment of his destiny. There was no sense that he wanted to fight for King and Country with the old Rutlish rallying cry, ‘arming for the fight, pressing on with all our might’. His objective seems to have been a personal one – to embark on a great adventure which at this point he felt was being blocked by various authority figures for mistakes he had made in his youth. He seems to have had no anxieties about actively pursuing a role in a war in which he might forfeit his life. This is very much the
Boy’s Own
attitude to mortality enshrined in
Biggles
: ‘He knew he had to die sometime and had long ago ceased to worry about it.’ This became Heath’s maxim for life.

Heath trudged from one RAF recruiting office to another, but was rejected by all of them. In a letter to Mr Scott, his sense of frustration is palpable.

Life is full of disappointments. I was ready, packed and preparing to depart yesterday morning when I received a letter from the Recruiting Centre at Croydon telling me not to go. Apparently Uxbridge is so full (5000 over number) that yesterday’s and today’s draft of recruits had to be stopped.

However, in spite of the letter, I went to Croydon complete with case, just in case there was an off chance of getting away. The Recruiting Officer was awfully sympathetic but said there was nothing he could possibly do.
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Despite his efforts and his obvious commitment, the RAF would not take him. He was ‘horribly disappointed’, but, with some tenacity, refused to be defeated. With his favoured options closed to him, he enlisted as a private in the army, volunteering for the Royal Army Service Corps. His admission to the RASC was in stark contrast to his former status as an RAF pilot – glamorous, heroic, daring, modern. The RASC was a much more mundane facilitating corps providing services and support staff. Heath joined them as a driver. This role could not have underlined more clearly the downward trajectory he had been on since being dismissed from the air force. A modern Icarus, his was a literal as well as figurative grounding; from flying a fighter to driving a truck.