Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey (7 page)

'Good luck to India! Good luck to Pakistan!' I cried. We raised our glasses. Others heard and soon we were all slapping each other's back and drinking toasts to the new nations. So, in the middle of the English Channel, I was cut adrift from my past.

In Camberley Barbara and I settled down to our Life Appreciation. There is an old saying that, when making an appreciation, one should spend about half the total time available clarifying the object, to a point where one can define it in a single clear sentence. A few weeks earlier a civilian lecturer on scientific research had given us a classic example of an ill-thought-out object. In the 1930s both the army and the air force were concerned with the problem of detecting enemy aircraft at a greater distance than the existing searchlights and sound rangers could do. Each service gave the scientific establishment an object to be achieved. The army said they wanted searchlights and sound rangers that could pick up an aircraft at 30,000 feet and 20 miles instead of the then limit of 20,000 feet and 10 miles. In due course they got what they had asked for — better searchlights, better sound rangers.

The air force defined their object more accurately:
to detect and track aircraft from as great a distance as possible.
They got radar.

So it was about 'object' that Barbara and I talked first. What was our object in life? It is a hard question to answer, in a single sentence. We would all like everything — security, riches, fame, good education for the children, travel, a life useful to others; but experience — and not only in military affairs — teaches that he who goes after incompatible objects is likely to achieve none of them. You have to choose just one object, and take the rest merely as factors to be considered in achieving it. We rejected
security
first, even though it was important to both of us, particularly to me. No one in my family had worked without the security of a government pension to follow for about 150 years. The idea of launching my family into a rootless future, with no special protection, no adequate pension, and almost no savings, was quite appalling. But when we tried to tell ourselves that security was our object, we could not say it. So out it went.

'The best possible education for the children?' Barbara suggested. This made more sense, for they were good children and would, we thought, deserve every opportunity we could give them. But, as the object? Suppose it meant my becoming a bank clerk, or going to Malaya, or handing them over to some State School for the Production of Geniuses? If it were our object, we'd have to do it. In fact the children's future would not depend on education as much as on other factors, especially our own happiness and the kind of environment we could surround them with. Throw that out then, as our object.

To become rich? Well, that was most desirable. So many other things, ranging from security to adventure and good works, could be attained through money. Also, we had expensive tastes and a wide enough experience of the world to know that whatever we had, there was something better. But, as the object?...
A long grey Rolls phaeton drives up. A distinguished-looking man gets out and I stroll to the front door to meet him. He pats Susan on the head and introduces himself: Lord Melchett, chairman of I.C.I. He does not beat about the bush. Word of my Mountain Warfare Exercise has reached Mond House. He would like me to start right away in his office, with succession to his post. 'Say 30,000 pounds a year to begin with, Colonel? I know it isn't much, but, as a start...'

The vision faded. You worked hard to be rich. That I could do. But you didn't let up. Fifty weeks a year at least; on call day and night; watching stock markets, lunching with bankers, dining with merchants. For some ten years now I had been working seven days a week, usually more than twelve hours a day — but only for nine or ten months a year. Those long free months were vital to us. No, being rich could not be our object, because I was unwilling to pay the price.

'You don't want to be famous, do you?' Barbara said, in the tone she had used a year earlier, when she had said, 'Well, you may become a general but I'm damned if I'm going to become a Mrs General.' Now I could answer at once, 'No', because I had thought about fame and glory when wondering what was going to happen to the Indian Army. Those remarks of Sam Lewis and the Auk, about my becoming Commander-in-Chief, had meant a lot to me. Generations of Masters had been galley slaves in India, dying unsung and unhonoured in lowly jobs and lonely places. They would rotate in their graves with delight merely to see the words
Field-Marshal Sir John Masters
in print, let alone all those cryptic and to them unattainable letters that would follow the name. But it had not taken much consideration then to realize that it was not the end that mattered but the road, and now I could see fame as a spur, perhaps; but as an object, shaping our every move — no.

Did I have any great compulsion or drive which, by itself, would mean fulfilment? I could happily spend my travelling and exploring: but what of the home and education the children must have? I had enough ideas and experience to become a 'military expert' and thinker outside the army, like Liddell Hart. Perhaps, but my heart was in soldiering with Gurkha infantry, not in cerebrating. Politics? A Member of Parliament lectured our little dining club and afterwards invited me to go into politics. He was sure I would soon get a seat in Parliament, and quickly become a junior minister. Perhaps, again; but the only political party with which I felt the slightest sympathy was the Liberal Party, who were having a hard time keeping 6 seats out of 615. A Liberal politician was going to need some other means of support... which took me back to Square One.

Four weeks passed, with many objects considered and rejected. We began cruising among the wreckage, picking up surviving ideas: Independence. Travelling rather than arriving. Public and private liberty. A family unit. Sense of space. Opportunity.

Gradually we hammered them into a sentence, by God into an object.

To live as a family unit in a place that offers space, liberty, and opportunity to all of us and, to me, independence in a work that I like.

I wrote it down on a sheet of paper and put it away in a drawer. Later we would finish the Appreciation: the factors affecting the attainment of the object, the courses open to us, and so on. Then I typed out my formal request to be permitted to resign my commission, the resignation to take effect on December 31, 1948, and to be preceded by the customary twelve months leave 'pending retirement'.

I did not appreciate till years later how extraordinarily kind fate had been in forcing me to think out the purpose of my life. Like most people I had plunged into a career before I had the age or the experience to know what I wanted, before I could
appreciate
(whether in its military or ordinary meaning) what, on earth, I should do. I had no sense of vocation when I went into the army; indeed I had tried to become, at different times, a lawyer and a sailor.

The weeks rolled unhurriedly towards graduation. We visited the R.A.F. in Germany, to study the effects of mass-bombing on industrial areas (expensive and inefficient, I thought). We descended on the Royal Navy in Portsmouth, and were lectured by an admiral whose ancestor had been one of Nelson's captains at the Nile. The old salt rolled in, reeking of seaweed and tar, reached the dais and turned to confront our mass of khaki uniforms and military moustaches, all standing as we waited for his order to be seated. 'Anchor!' the admiral bellowed.

Lecturers visited us in a steady stream, but the only one who left a lasting impression on me was a youngish gentleman from the Foreign Office who gave us a most interesting, depressing and, as it turned out, penetrating interpretation of Russia's attitudes and policies. He said that the Russian leaders believed that capitalism was about to collapse. Russia would join various co-operative bodies, such as the United Nations, only in order to hasten that collapse by working to prevent agreement or co-operation. Their main fear was that the capitalist world, seeing the end of its system as inevitable, would launch a war to stave it off. More specifically, he said, Russia would never negotiate treaties to end the official state of war with various central European countries, until she had established Communist governments in them. The lever to achieve this was a clause in the armistices which permitted Russia to maintain troops in any country,
and on her lines of communication to it,
until a peace treaty had been negotiated with that country. The most useful ex-enemy country to Russia in this respect was the furthest west, Austria. For as long as Russia delayed making a peace treaty with Austria, she could keep troops in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and Bulgaria.

The Yugo-Slav attacks on unarmed American transports strayed over that country were not merely a snook cocked at the West, but a demonstration to the people of the countries about to go under that no one, not even the United States, was going to help them.

I left this lecture in a grim mood. It seemed to me that if we accepted this sort of aggression from the Soviets now, we would have to face much worse in the future. They were acting in precisely the same way as Hitler had done in the mid '30s, and we were responding in the same way, too, by talking or waving pieces of paper, instead of instant and overwhelming retaliation. I thought the Americans should have dropped an atom bomb on the Yugo-Slavs within six hours after they shot down the first of those planes, and sent troops in to run another election, a free one this time. If the Russians had tried to interfere, they could have had the same treatment. Instead, no one had done a thing, because we had no politicians with the guts to make the people face the unpleasant truth. So, like everyone else who will not learn the lessons of the past we were going to be condemned to re-live it. We would drag again through the '30s and '40s, under continuous pressure and outrage from an armed and murderous dictatorship (which had already murdered rather more of its own subjects than Hitler killed of his).

I felt tempted to stay in the army, where I could at least work to see that we won the next war, as we had the last. But the problem was not military, it was political. Only Parliament could save the future, and I had been into all that. I put the sad prospect of an endless grey half-war, with a real war under unfavourable conditions as the only prospect at the end of it, into a corner of my mind, and resolved to stick to my plans.

In October, on my way to visit the Combined Operations school in North Devon, I turned aside to perform a painful duty. On a day in May 1944, the Japanese had sent a number of 105 mm shells into my brigade headquarters, in North Burma. One splinter stunned my Intelligence Officer, standing next to me in our foxhole. Another killed the artillery major who had just flown in to command our few guns. After the campaign I wrote a letter of condolence to, among others, the mother of the major. She was living with another son, a parson of the Church of England, who was rector of a village under the southern slope of Dartmoor. The parson had long since written asking me to come, if I possibly could, to tell his mother how her son had died. I did not want to do it. Men are killed in many and unpleasant ways in war, and though the major had died almost instantly, what could I say that would make his mother feel better? Still, that was not for me to decide. She wanted it, and now I could make the opportunity to go to her, for my train passed the foot of the valley where the village stood, and I could afford a night there.

It was a glorious evening in October. The railway runs by the verge of the sea, and the flat sunlight fell on the estuary, on fleets of seagulls anchored on the calm water, on the fishing boats coming back to port. The low hills the other side of the estuary rose soft as a Chinese print out of the haze. This, with the Wiltshire downs and the Cornish cliffs, was an England that I loved with a physical passion. Yet, as we reached the 'courses open to us' in our Life Appreciation, it was becoming clear that to achieve our object we must emigrate.

But could I leave this beauty? By here I had passed on my bicycle, a young man, a tent on the back and thoughts of a girl in my head. In Cornwall on a summer night, I had slept under a hedge, wondering what was the rhythmic silent beat that throbbed in the air and shook the earth below me. I found it was the swells of the western ocean breaking on the 400-foot granite cliffs ten miles away, a fetch of 3,000 miles behind them. On the grassy cliff tops by Tintagel and King Arthur's Seat I had watched the choughs wheel against a wind from America. In Wiltshire I had walked at night on the short turf, past the White Horse of the West Saxons, alone in moonlight past Stonehenge, awed, exhilarated.

In my pocket I had a cutting from
The Times.
The County Council of Cornwall — that very Cornwall of my cliffs and castles and curved surfing beaches — was advertising for a gentleman to fill the post of Chief Constable. In those days Chief Constables, especially in rural areas, were still usually retired officers, and I thought that a young lieutenant-colonel, staff college instructor, with a D.S.O., and an O.B.E., would receive very favourable consideration. The salary was reasonable, a good house went with the job, I would be my own master, the work was for the public good, and it was in
Cornwall.
My mind raced, and stopped, reversed, and started again. Should I? Shouldn't I?

I arrived in darkness at the village. Dartmoor loomed like the silhouette of a giant hound crouched behind the rectory, and above it the sky was bright with autumn stars. The rector and his mother received me with reserved gratitude for making this journey. After dinner the old lady led me to a small sitting-room whose uncurtained windows looked down the valley, where yellow lights shone between the moor and the sea. I told her of those moments in Burma when her son had died. Before I had said a dozen words her small hand crept out and clasped mine. Tears formed in the corners of her eyes. She was beautiful. I remember her now more vividly than the clearing there on the hillside, the metallic crash of shells all morning, a voice suddenly shouting, 'The major's hit, sir,' choking dust, a rain of bamboo leaves and cut twigs falling on my head, splinters screaming, Pat Boyle limp at my feet, a little blood trickling over my boots.