Handsome Brute: The True Story of a Ladykiller (29 page)

In the early hours of the morning, Donnelly woke and checked his trousers, which were normally hanging from the peg behind the door. But when he looked, the wad of cash had gone. He went into Chapman’s room, woke him up and told him he had been robbed. The next morning, he reported the matter to the military police.

That day, unaware of the drama back at Youngsfield, Heath appeared in the Cape Town Magistrates’ Court and pleaded guilty to the charges of fraud. He submitted the letter from the Queen’s Hotel saying that his debts had been paid by his family. Again, he made a plausible defence, claiming that the frauds he had committed were done at a time when his ‘mind was disordered’, highlighting the incident at Venlo and the state of his marriage as extenuating circumstances.

Due to this one month of folly I lost a certain amount of army rank and due to being absent without leave, I’m likely to lose quite a lot more . . .

I was at that time absent without leave and it was impossible to draw my pay. The divorce proceedings have already started. My wife was drawing half my salary. My mind did not seem to be working properly. I was fully aware of what I was doing.
²⁷

It’s significant that Heath drew attention to this awareness of his actions – in conjunction with a feeling that his mind was not working as it should – ten months before the death of Margery Gardner. The issue was not commented on in any of his civil court appearances or at his court martial.

He was once again given a suspended sentence of two years. However, as soon as he left the courtroom, he was cautioned and searched by the RAF police. They wanted to question him about the £50 that had been stolen from Major Donnelly the night before. Heath agreed to be searched – and was found to have only £14 on him in cash.

However, given that Heath had a long history of dishonesty and fraud, the military police immediately began to watch his movements. At 9 a.m. on the 7 September, he sent a registered letter to himself at the base at Roberts Heights in Pretoria where he had been staying. He then sent
another
letter at about 5 p.m. The RAF police contacted the Post Office and asked them to intercept the letters at Pretoria.
²⁸
One of the letters was intercepted and found to contain notes in cash. Heath was arrested by the South African Civil Police and questioned. Cornered, rather than admitting his actions, Heath decided to front it out and told the police an impossibly and unbelievably complicated story.

He claimed that £50 had been cabled to him from England and that he had cashed it at the Post Office in order to pay the fines he thought he might be given by the Cape Town magistrates on 6 September. As he was given no fines, he found he had a large amount of cash on him. On the night of the robbery, he had heard Major Donnelly through the wall between his and Chapman’s room, wondering where his money had gone. He decided to say nothing as if there were any enquiry made, he felt sure that he would be the one to ‘get it in the neck’.
²⁹
He set about trying to get rid of his money as quickly as possible. The military police did not believe Heath’s story.
³⁰
He was arrested and sent to Wynberg civil prison. But despite the extraordinary evidence against him, when he appeared in court Heath was yet again given the benefit of the doubt and found not guilty.
³¹

As far as Elizabeth and the Rivers family were concerned, the divorce between her and Heath was finally granted in the Witwatersrand Division of the Supreme Court on 23 October 1945. Heath wrote a letter to Elizabeth telling her that he would never contact her again. Having brought an end to the marriage, the Rivers wanted to draw a line under Elizabeth’s relationship with Heath so that she could start a new life with her young son. Mr Friedman, the family solicitor, contacted the SAAF, outlining Heath’s various crimes and misdemeanours – including his breach of promise to Zita Williams which Elizabeth and her family were now aware of – and pointing out that he had often claimed that he had no intention of staying in South Africa after the end of the war. Friedman requested that the military authorities encourage the Commissoner for Immigration and Asiatic Affairs to deport Heath as soon as the court martial proceedings were over. The family wanted Heath out of South Africa, and out of their lives, for good.
³²

At the beginning of December, Heath appeared before the court martial at Pretoria. There were eleven different charges including wearing military decorations without authority, conduct prejudicial to good order and military discipline and for being absent without leave. Ten of the offences related to his activities during July 1945.
³³
Though he was not convicted of all the charges, he was found guilty of most of them. For the third time, he was sentenced to be dismissed from the service.
³⁴

Heath was placed in police detention and this time refused bail, pending arrangements for his deportation from South Africa as an undesirable alien. Even his departure caused a minor diplomatic spat. Given that he was an illegal immigrant, the Department of External Affairs in Pretoria suggested to the Office of the High Commissioner for the United Kingdom that they should make arrangements for Heath’s removal at their own expense. This was met with disdain from the British High Commission in Cape Town.

It seems to us a bit hard that we should be expected to arrange and pay for the deportation of this man when the Union Defence Authorities deliberately kept him on in spite of knowing his previous history.
³⁵

It is not recorded who eventually footed the bill.

Heath sailed from Cape Town on the SS
Sumaria
on 17 January 1946, returning to England a changed man, sadder if not necessarily wiser. One night on the passage home, he found himself wandering around the boat deck of the
Sumaria
in his dressing gown, with no idea how he came to be there. He had lost his wife and forfeited his relationship with his son. He had no home, no job, no income and no prospects. The war was over. There was nothing to fight for. Endless civilian days lay ahead. Heath was just one of millions of men returning home in this period, trading a life of risk and adventure for a future of staid sobriety. Many would struggle to make the change, missing the camaraderie, excitement and danger of war. The
New Statesman
worried specifically about men – just like Heath – returning from the RAF:

What are all these young airmen, with their highly specialized training, their terrific sense of adventure and their complete lack of earning power, going to do in postwar England?
³⁶

His only option was to return to Wimbledon – shame-faced and exhausted – a man of nearly thirty living with his mother.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Thursday 20 June 1946

[He] walked home from Moorgate Station across the ruins. Pausing at the bastion of the Wall near St Giles’s, he looked across at the horrid waste, for horrid he felt it to be; he hated mess and smashed things; the squalor of ruin sickened him; like Flaubert, he was aware of an irremediable barbarism coming up out of the earth, and of filth flung against the ivory tower. It was a symbol of loathsome things, war, destruction, savagery . . .

Rose Macaulay,
The World My Wilderness
, 1950

T
o British servicemen returning home from the war, London in 1946 presented a much-changed face; half familiar, yet wrecked, ravaged and ruined.

Throughout hostilities, the city had experienced 1,224 bomb alerts – about one every thirty-six hours. It had been raided 354 times by piloted aircraft and from 1944 was targeted day and night by nearly 3,000 pilotless bombs, the deadly V1 and V2s. A total of 28,890 Londoners had been killed and another 50,000 injured. Many shops, businesses and domestic dwellings were eradicated – 100,000 houses had to be demolished. An estimated 1,650,000 sustained some sort of damage.
¹

The worst losses had been in the City of London. Out of the total of 460 acres of built-up land, 164 acres had been destroyed. Eighteen churches were beyond repair, including fourteen designed by Christopher Wren.
²
Ten had been razed to the ground in a single night. Austin Friars, the Dutch church that dated from 1253, had been a light Gothic building and was now little more than ‘a rubbish heap’. St Giles Cripplegate, which Rose Macaulay wrote of – where Cromwell married and Milton was buried – was now a ruin. The statue of Milton outside the church had been completely blown off its pedestal. St Clement Danes in the Strand had been decimated. St Mary-le-Bow was reduced to a shell, her font destroyed and her famous bells irreparably cracked.

[The churches of London] had suffered a disgusting change, a metamorphosis at first stupefying. How could these dear interiors, panelled, symmetrically murky, personal, redolent of the eighteenth century, filled with ornaments and busts, urns, tablets, organ cases, carved swags, pulpits and galleries, pews, hassocks, and hymn books, have been turned into dead bonfires, enclosed by windowless and roofless lengths of wall, with pillars like rotten teeth thrusting up from heaps of ash?
³

Even the colour of the city had changed, whether it was Victorian granite, modern concrete or even the ‘tweed-textured’ walls of earlier buildings; all had been scorched umber.

Seventeen of the city’s Company Halls – including the medieval Merchant Tailors’ Hall – were flattened; six others were badly damaged.
⁴
The Inns of Court had suffered several times including the Middle Temple Hall, which had hosted the first production of
Twelfth Night
, Shakespeare’s bitter-sweet comedy of love and loss. The Guildhall, once the setting for major trials such as that of Lady Jane Grey and Thomas Cranmer, had been burned to the ground in 1940, just as it had been in the Great Fire of 1666. Though still operational, the Old Bailey had been hit twice and the Royal Courts of Justice several times. Hundreds of London’s historic buildings had come under attack and now lay half-wounded or annihilated. The Tower of London, St Thomas’ Hospital, County Hall, Lambeth Palace, Holland House, Buckingham Palace, the offices of
The Times
and the Tate Gallery had all been damaged in the Blitz. The British Museum had lost ten of its galleries and 150,000 books. Madame Tussaud’s suffered a direct hit on the night of 9–10 September 1940 resulting in the loss of 295 male heads and 57 female heads. Only two occupants of the museum survived completely unscathed; Paul, the museum’s white cat, was found safe after the bombing clinging to the figure of Dr Crippen, the only waxwork not to suffer any damage at all. Directly the war had finished, the figure of Hitler was moved from the gallery of contemporary politicians and placed in the Chamber of Horrors.
⁵

Whitehall, the centre of government, had been frequently bombed. Montague House, the offices of the Ministry of Labour, had been hit on fourteen occasions, the Ministry of Health was hit thirteen times and the Foreign Office, ten. The Palace of Westminster itself had also been shattered. It had taken at least twelve hits in one night in May 1941 when an incendiary bomb had set the House of Commons on fire whilst another hit the roof of Westminster Hall – steeped in British history, having stood since 1097. As firefighters could not save both, all efforts had been focused on saving the more ancient building. The Commons Chamber was left to burn and was not rebuilt until 1950. The clock tower that housed Big Ben also suffered. The glass from the south dial of the clock face was blown out, but its mechanism was not affected and it continued to keep accurate time.

There was complete devastation around St Paul’s Cathedral and a wide area extending north from the river towards Cripplegate and what is now the Barbican. Despite several attacks and severe damage, St Paul’s miraculously survived:

The Cathedral had become in these later years more than ever a symbol of the unconquerable spirit that has sustained the fight . . . None who saw will ever forget their emotions on the night when London was burning and the dome seemed to ride the sea of fire like a great ship lifting above smoke and flame the inviolable ensign of the golden cross.
⁶

Pawson and Leaf ’s opposite the cathedral, where Heath had spent his only successful tenure in civilian employment, was still standing, but had also been damaged by bombing. Further west in Oxford Street, the John Lewis store where he had worked for less than a fortnight in 1938 was completely obliterated. Bombs had also reached the suburbs, including Pinner and Kenton in north London and Wimbledon in the south-west of the city. Number 21 Merton Hall Road, though never directly hit, had been ‘badly shaken by bombs’. Bramham Gardens in Earls Court had three houses which were beyond repair, one on the corner where the gardens met Bolton Gardens, the others to the right of number 24 where Margery Gardner rented a flat.
⁷

Once cleared, the bombsites had been quickly utilized as car parks or colonized as playgrounds by children newly returned from evacuation in the country. These gaps, open spaces and derelict sites were soon taken over by several types of opportunistic weeds and wild flowers that started to sprout up across the city, enlivening the ruins and rubble. Some 126 different species flourished in the freshly created nooks and crannies; groundsel, coltsfoot, Oxford ragwort and the rosebay willow herb. London rocket had flourished in the ruins of the Great Fire after 1666 and had only made a reappearance when the new city wildernesses first started to appear in 1940.
⁸