Shooting History: A Personal Journey

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In the afternoons, Stan was Major Tackley, and ran the Combined Cadet Force. The school would suddenly become a sea of khaki and air-force blue. Boys would run about brandishing bolt-action Lee Enfield guns. We were tutored in war. The staff’s wartime exploits were the iconography of discourse at the dinner table. But no member of staff could hold a candle to the school’s most famous old boys. These included Guy Gibson VC, who led the original ‘Dam Busters’ raids against German dams and was one of the greatest pilots of the Second World War, but died in action, and the legendary Group Captain Douglas Bader DSO, of 242 Squadron, RAF, who was very much alive, but literally legless. Bader was a living legend who had had both legs amputated when his fighter plane crashed during a stunt. He fought back to fly again in combat, wearing artificial pins.

Now, in the early 1960s, he would rock around the school grounds, stickless and unaided, a lesson to us all. He had no job there, he was just a professional old boy. Bader in many ways typified the politics of the school. If they were ever mentioned, the Labour Party, the burgeoning ‘Ban the Bomb’ anti-nuclear movement, socialism and, of course, Communism were the enemies of what we were about. It was a political culture that chimed with that of my parents.

My first memory of an ambition was indeed, at the age of fifteen, to be a Tory MP. Whether this aspiration derived from my early brush with Macmillan or from the school I don’t know, but it was certainly there. My sense of the outside world depended almost exclusively on the Daily Mail. We were only allowed the radio on Sundays, when we would listen to Forces’ Favourites, yet another reminder that all over the world there were British troops ranged against ‘the enemy’. Otherwise we listened to Radio Luxembourg, the only pop station then in being. We had no access to television. So our knowledge of world events was narrow in the extreme.

I was fifteen at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. Bearded Castro, dictator of Cuba, and bald-headed Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet Union, were depicted as exceptionally unpleasant and dangerous men. Never more so than when the latter repeatedly banged his shoe on a desk at the UN General Assembly in New York in October 1960. By contrast the handsome and clean-shaven American President, John F. Kennedy, couldn’t put a foot wrong. And Harold Macmillan had by now been transmogrified into ‘Super Mac’. The argument that Cuba might need Russia’s nuclear missiles to guard against, or even stave off, another American invasion was simply never made. Russia wanted to put her missiles on Cuba to attack America, that was the only interpretation we were ever offered. This was the Cold War, the East–West standoff.

As the missile crisis deepened, we went through our nuclear protection exercises on an almost weekly basis – under our desk lids, heads in the brace position. It wasn’t until much later that I began to learn about the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, in which Kennedy had sent 1500 US-trained Cuban exiles to try to overthrow Castro. For a time the world was on the edge of the abyss of nuclear war, but I cannot pretend to have been aware of the true magnitude of it at the time.

By November 1963 the world had changed again. Adorned as a woman, I was strutting my stuff on the school stage. I was playing Eva in Jean Anouilh’s comedy Thieves’ Carnival. Of my performance, the Oxford Times wrote: ‘the only giveaway is the too-masculine stride’. On the twenty-second of that month my mother and father drove down to watch the play. Act One passed without incident, but something happened during the interval. Somehow members of the audience found out that Jack Kennedy had been shot, and was dying in a Dallas clinic. The belly laughs of the first half of the performance were not repeated in the second. There was much whispering and talking low. People scurried away at the end. It was as if innocence itself had been shot. My parents were overwhelmed with gloom. ‘Super Mac’ and Jack had bonded like father and son. There had been a new optimism abroad, a new sense of Camelot and magic. And now this spirit was all but dead.

With Kennedy gone, the wheels started coming off Macmillan’s wagon. The sixties began to swing. The Daily Mail revelled in telling us who was having whom, and where and how. Suddenly the where was Cliveden, and the who was the Minister for War, John Profumo. Profumo, who had had the misfortune to make love to a woman who was already sleeping with a Russian diplomat named Ivanov, a Soviet spy, was unhorsed for being economical with the truth about the matter in the House of Commons. We boys, reading this stuff, simply couldn’t believe it. The entire British Establishment had its collective trousers round its ankles, and we were thrilled by it. One day I would encounter John Profumo myself, in a very different guise.

We, with our posh accents, sneered at the Yorkshire-accented Harold Wilson, who became Labour Prime Minister in 1964 with a wafer-thin majority. But he won us over the moment he set fire to his jacket pocket with his pipe. Few other outside events impinged upon our lives. And then, one bleak winter’s day in January 1965, Winston Churchill died. Every living Field Marshal and more than sixty world leaders, led by former US President Dwight D. Eisenhower, attended the funeral in St Paul’s Cathedral on 30 January. Classes were abandoned for the day, and we were allowed to cluster around the few black-and-white television sets near the school. The lying in state, the swarming crowds, the vast procession, the gun carriage and the service in St Paul’s were all on an epic scale. Eisenhower, when he spoke, made my backbone tingle.

I can presume to act as spokesman for millions of Americans who served with me and their British comrades during three years of war in this sector of the earth. To those men Winston Churchill was Britain … I, like all free men, pause to pay a personal tribute to the giant who now passes from among us … We say our sad goodbye to the leader to whom the entire body of free men owes so much … and now, to you, Sir Winston – my old friend – farewell!

We weren’t to know it, but this was almost certainly one of the last times that collective America ever looked up to a politician who was not an American. One much later exception might prove to be Nelson Mandela, who at the time of Churchill’s death had already been in prison for treason for over two years, and still had twenty-four more to go.

Churchill’s coffin was borne by barge to Waterloo. Hearing on the wireless that it had departed for its final resting place at Bladon in Oxfordshire, hundreds of boys from the school set forth, swarming across the playing fields, down across the swing bridge on the Oxford canal and across to the side of the railway line on the edge of Port Meadow. There, exposed to the full might of the mad January wind, we stood in our grey-flannel uniforms and waited, straw boaters in our hands. Bladon was only ten miles up the line, close to Blenheim Palace where Churchill had been born. And then we heard it, far down the stilled line. Soon we saw the belching steam pumping into the brittle blue winter sky. Then the great Battle of Britain class locomotive was upon us. Irish Hussars flanked the catafalque. The sturdy, flag-draped coffin was clearly visible. We bowed our heads in genuine awe. As suddenly, it was gone. However brief, it was a passing of history that would inform my sense of Britain and America, and war, for the rest of my life.

America for me was still more than a decade away. That summer of 1966, at the age of eighteen, I went abroad for the first time with two friends from school. We bought a Bedford Dormobile for £50, converted it, and headed for Greece. Belgium, Germany, Austria and Yugoslavia yielded up an effortless tapestry of history and geography. More importantly, they generated a real thirst in me to go much further. It was that summer that confirmed in me the desire to spend a year in Africa or India, or some far-flung Pacific isle, to learn more about the world.

At the same time, having just left St Edward’s with only one ‘A’ level – a C pass in English – I had to set about getting educated. That autumn I ended up at Scarborough Technical College, on the edge of my father’s diocese. I was suddenly translated from dunce to intellectual. Fewer than twenty-five people out of the thousand at the college were taking ‘A’ levels at all; most were doing ‘day release’ courses in plumbing or bricklaying. Seven of us signed up to do law and economics at ‘A’ level. We had one lecturer, Bob Thomas, a wise and down-to-earth Welshman, and I learned more in a year with him than in five with the entire staff at St Edward’s. He even saved me from a disastrous affair with a beguiling older member of the administrative staff. After I was spotted disappearing out of the grounds at lunchtimes in her car and coming back more than a little dishevelled, Bob sat me down and suggested that I had a long and successful life ahead of me, and that it might not be such a good idea to be caught in flagrante with a married woman on the Scarborough downs.

I left the Tech after only a year with two more ‘A’ levels, having done much to redress the ravages of private education on my confidence, ready to strike out into the world. My application to do Voluntary Service Overseas had been accepted. I was ready to go, but far less prepared than I knew.