QUADRILLE WITH A RAVEN
Memoirs By Humphrey Searle
Chapter 8: SILENT KILLING
Horfield
Barracks had been a prison, and I had visited it with the BBC Hens' Chorus
for a concert before my induction into the army. I had played at soldiers
in the school OTC, but of course knew little about the real thing. I found
that the atmosphere, though tough, was not unpleasant, and as we were
all in it together my fellow-soldiers and I mucked in and laughed at what
we could. I was very glad to know the sort of people I had never been allowed
to meet at school and Oxford; it gave me a much better understanding of life,
and I have always been grateful for this. We used to drink in pubs and play
darts in the evenings, as we were still allowed out up to the time of Dunkirk,
and I was able to keep in touch with my BBC and other friends.
After a spell at Horfield we were moved down to Eastville Park, where we
camped out in tents; luckily the weather was marvellous. I had no intention
of applying for a commission as I was quite happy in the ranks, but I did
not want to stay as an infantryman for ever, and could not get into an army
band as I played no orchestral instrument. I had heard that there was a regiment
called the Field Security Police in which languages were needed, and which
might perhaps have enabled me to get to France. So I applied for a transfer;
meanwhile we continued our basic training at Eastville. The war had still
not really begun for us. One day, while we were solemnly slow marching round
the square, a plane appeared overhead and circled about for quite some time;
eventually the AA battery on the hill above realised it was not one of ours
and loosed of at it. The plane, in panic, dropped its bombs, luckily wide
of the camp, and made off as fast as it could. Shades of Dad's Army!
After
Dunkirk we took in a large number of soldiers who had been evacuated from
the beaches, and I had to stay up all night recording their names before
they could be sent on the leave which they thoroughly deserved. Shortly after
this my company was moved elsewhere and I was given a job in the camp office
pending my transfer to the Intelligence Corps depot at Winchester. This proved
to be in King Alfred's College, a teachers' training college of which, oddly
enough, Grandfather Searle had been Vice-Principal at one time. Here the
discipline was much stricter than at Bristol; the Gloucesters, a fine
fighting regiment, could afford to dispense with a lot of bullshit, but the
Army evidently thought that the Intelligence Corps consisted of a bunch of
formerly long-haired intellectuals who had to be licked into shape. So we
were drilled by Guards NCOs and made to blanco everything in sight. Occasionally
we were allowed out in the evenings, but all leave had been stopped because
of the threat of invasion, and I did not even get permission to go to London
for the day to attend my brother Michael's wedding, to Margaret Poole from
Beckley.
Our training at Winchester was fairly short, and at the end of August we
were posted to our various units. As I could speak reasonable French and
German, I was naturally sent to the Highlands of Scotland where the only
language of any use was Gaelic. (My father had a similar experience when
he was recalled to the Civil Service on the outbreak of war. As he knew Burmese
well and was indeed compiling a Burmese dictionary, he was of course sent
up to Lytham St. Anne's, Lancs, to be put in charge of rationing petrol.)
In the end my posting proved a blessing in disguise, but I was not to know
this at the time. The summer of 1940 had been exceptionally fine, but when
our little band - there were six or seven of us - reached Fort William it
was pouring with rain which it continued to do for most of the eighteen months
I remained there. However the air was good, the local people warm and friendly,
and the scenery, when one could see it, spectacular.
Our unit consisted of ten lance-corporals, mainly lowland Scots, two sergeants
and an officer; the latter was Major Gavin Brown, who had been a master at
Stowe and was a highly intelligent man. We were not policemen in the sense
of controlling traffic or throwing people into jail; our job was to preserve
the security of a number of camps in the area between Fort William and Mallaig.
This had been declared a Protected Area, and even the local residents were
not allowed in and out without a pass. The reason for all this security was
kept secret. The cover story was that the camps were for training commandos,
and there was indeed a big commando training camp at Lochailort; at the other,
smaller camps similar training was given to a different kind of troops. The
difference was that the trainees at these other camps were foreign soldiers
who needed toughening up before being returned by parachute to their own
occupied countries to organize resistance, propaganda and sabotage under
the auspices of S.O.E. (Special Operations Executive) These so-called "students"
were not allowed out of the camps and could only be seen on their arduous
exercises climbing the mountains; it was a sparsely populated area, and the
presence of strangers was easily noticed. Our job was to control the number
of people who were allowed to visit the camps and to look out for anything
suspicious. Our. headquarters was in Fort William, and the section was scattered
among various camps along the Mallaig road - some could only reached by boat.
We had had some motor-cycle training at Winchester, and were equipped with
motor-cycles to patrol the area. Once a week we all rode into Fort William
for a conference and to draw our pay. (The basic rate for a private soldier
was then two shillings a day). As much of the road had not been metalled
and consisted of boulders surrounded by mud, this was a somewhat hazardous
experience for motor-cyclists who were as inexperienced as we were.
At first I was stationed at Lochailort, perhaps the toughest commando training
centre in Britain. The trainees had to accomplish endless climbs in full
equipment up and down sodden mountains in pouring rain, as well as rope-climbing,
assault courses, weapon training and various other strenuous activities.
Among the distinguished men who passed through its courses were Lord Lovat,
of the Lovat Scouts, Gavin Maxwell ("Ring of Bright Water") and. I believe,
David Niven; but as they were officers I couldn't meet them. With me I had
another Field Security man, Stevie, a former schoolmaster from Glasgow; our
chief duties were to meet the local train which arrived from Glasgow once
a day and see if there was anybody suspicious on it, and to check security
in general. The camp consisted of the Castle, which was a large country-house
where the officers were quartered, and a number of tents with duckboard on
the mud for the other ranks. Luckily my colleague and I managed to get a
small room in the hut which housed the NAAFI, and so we were able to escape
the worst of the rain - and we didn't have to undergo commando training.
In fact nobody else in the camp had much idea why we were there and we were
allowed to remain aloof and mysterious and even to keep our room locked on
the pretext that it contained secret papers.
Apart from the camp, the village of Lochailort consisted literally of the
railway station, a hotel and a small shop (there didn't seem to be any local
inhabitants). The hotel was run by a formidable-looking lady called Williamina
Maclean, who in fact belied her appearance and was warm and generous. I sometimes
went to the back bar, mostly frequented by Irish labourers who were working
in the camp. They invariably drank spirits with chasers; whisky and beer,
gin and beer when the whisky ran out, and finally sherry and beer. There
was indeed a shortage of Scotch, as it was all exported to America, and on
my first visit to the famous West Highland Hotel at Mallaig I was disappointed
to find the only whisky they had was Canadian Rye.
.
We
didn't have much to amuse us in our leisure time, but occasionally dances
were held in the village hall in Arisaig, near Lochailort. These dances usually
started at dusk and ended at dawn, as the girls had to walk long distances
over the mountains to get to them. They played the traditional Highland dances,
which gave me the idea of writing a suite on Highland tunes, and also modern
jazz. Some of the fisher girls came over from Fraserburgh on the east coast;
one of them and I used to perform an energetic sort of jiving act, which
astonished my fellow-soldiers - though not a good dancer myself, I sometimes
find a partner with whom I can dance well.
The estate manager at Lochailort, Mr. Cox, was still living in his house
near the castle in the middle of the camp. He, his wife and family often
welcomed Stevie and me into his home for tea, scones and conversation in
the evenings, especially on the nights when we were on guard duty at the
castle. He once took me deer-stalking; I went, not because I wanted to shoot
stags, but I hoped to see these beautiful animals in their natural surroundings.
However, they got wind of us a mile away and soon disappeared.
As I was now in a more or less settled position I was able to think about
writing music again. I sketched out a rather Bartokian Music for Piano,
Strings and Percussion, and then a less Bartokian and more individual
Suite for string orchestra. I still lacked confidence as a composer,
particularly as there was nobody to whom I could show my work, but with the
Bartokian piece I felt I had made a break-through, and today I call it my
Op 1. It does not rely so heavily on . other composers as my earlier works,
and it had quite a success when it was performed in London during the middle
of the war. The money for this concert had been put up by Rodney Phillips'
brother Ian; the programme, which was given in the Wigmore Hall, also included
Webern's orchestration of Bach's Ricercare from the Musical Offering, not
often played in those days, Mahler's Kindertotenlieder and Beethoven's 4th
symphony with only a small body of strings. The conductor was Walter Goehr.
Goehr had been a pupil of Schoenberg in Berlin in the 1920s. He came to England
in 1933 with his wife and their infant son Alexander, now one of Britain's
leading composers and Professor of Music at Cambridge. Walter Goehr was offered
a job at Morley College where he gave some enterprising concerts; in England
he was generally better known as a conductor than a composer. However he
used to give a virtuoso performance once a week on the BBC radio show "Marching
On"; this was a dramatisation of events as they occurred and went on the
air at 7 p.m. Early in the day Walter would arrive in the studio, learn what
events were to be presented, write suitable music for them, score it, have
it copied, rehearse it and conduct it that evening. He made a certain amount
of money out of this, with which he generously financed concerts of contemporary
music at a time when no one else, including the BBC , dared to do such a
thing.
Back in Scotland, I had lost my room in the hut over the NAAFI, and had to
sleep on a camp bed in one of Mr. Cox's outhouses, which was at least dry,
if rat-infested. I had been made an acting sergeant, which meant that I could
use the sergeants' mess, and shortly afterwards I was moved to Arisaig House,
a fairly modern mansion which stood on a hill outside the village. This was
more pleasant than Lochailort, and so was the Arisaig Hotel which belonged
to members of the Macdonald family. Lochailort was in Cameron country and
the laird, then away in the army, was a Cameron. He returned to Lochailort
when his aged mother died; she was given a full Highland funeral, with the
eerie sound of the piper's pibroch echoing round the mountains. The laird
also arranged a communal netting of a small loch on the estate which contained
a large quantity of salmon trout. The catch was supposed to be delivered
in toto to the laird, who had the fish sold in London, but a good
many salmon trout found their way into the heather, whence they were retrieved
after dark1 and the whole neighbourhood lived on this splendid fish for some
considerable time.
My Field Security colleagues and I were sometimes sent to meet parties of
"students" in Glasgow; they came up on the evening train from London. We
took them to a hostel for the night, and escorted them on the 5.50a.m.(!)
train from Glasgow up to the destinations beyond Fort William. Fortunately
this was about the only train in the country which kept a restaurant car
going in wartime and when a fairly substantial breakfast appeared about 8a.m.
there was general jubilation. These trips meant that I could sometimes see
friends in Glasgow, including, on one occasion, Sir Adrian Boult, who was
conducting there and invited me to supper in the Station Hotel before the
students' train arrived.
Nevertheless I was becoming rather bored with my circumstances, though they
were not too unpleasant, and I felt that I ought to be doing something more
active. There was no possibility of promotion within my unit, so I felt I
had to apply for a commission. I went to Inverness for an interview, and
in due course was told to proceed to a Transit Camp at the Great Central
Hotel opposite Marylebone Station in London; it is at present the headquarters
of the British Railways Board. The hotel was filled with a large crowd of
NCOs and private soldiers all wondering what was going to happen next; eventually
word spread through the grapevine that we were going to be sent to India
to do our officer training there. Again I felt that I ought to use such French
and German as I had; fortunately the headquarters of SOE was just round the
corner in Baker Street. I went there and asked to speak to a friendly colonel
whom I had frequently met on his visits to the training camps in Scotland.
I explained the situation; he made a few telephone calls, and in due course
I was given a commission as an instructor in SOE.
I was first sent on a course at their "finishing school" near Beaulieu in
Hampshire. This was concerned with the usual paraphernalia of spying-codes,
secret inks, disguises, contacting agents, cover stories, and also the writing
of propaganda leaflets, for which our instructor was the writer Paul Dehn.
But after a few weeks I was sent as an instructor to one of the preliminary
training schools, the first school through which the students went on entering
the service, before their toughening-up period in Scotland. The subjects
here were map-reading, weapon training, fieldcraft, wireless transmission,
P.T., explosives and Silent Killing. I knew something of these already and
had to pick up the rest as I went along. Fortunately there were excellent
manuals to guide us, and we didn't have to spend any time on parades or bullshit
of any kind. The courses were short and designed to give the students the
minimum requirements they would need when living as agents in occupied countries;
their objects were to organize resistance movements, to collect intelligence
and to do propaganda and sabotage. The students came from all the Allied
countries, many of them having escaped with great difficulty from their
homelands; they were brave men and women who had volunteered to undertake
a very hard and dangerous task, and I had a tremendous respect for them.
The students who came to my school, which was held in a large country house
near Wokingham, were mostly French. SOE had two French sections. One was
the Anglo-French section under Colonel Buckmaster, which sent over such
well-known agents as Odette Churchill and Captain Yeo-Thomas ("The White
Rabbit"); these were mostly people who were bilingual in English and French
or were of dual nationality. The other section comprised the De Gaulle French
under "Colonel Passy", who took his pseudonym from a station on the Paris
Metro, and these were the ones with whom I was mostly concerned. They were
Frenchmen who had escaped from Occupied France, usually via Spain and Algiers,
and very few of them spoke any English so my French came in useful after
all. (One exception was a middle-aged man, Louis Burdet, who owned a hotel
in St. James's; we met again after the war following his appearance in a
TV quiz show, "Find the Link", in which he publicly stated that the training
at our school had saved his life. He organized the resistance in the Marseille
area under the name of M. Circumference). These French men and women
came from all parts of France, from Lille to the Pyrenees, and from all walks
of life. Their politics varied from extreme Right to Communist, but they
were all solidly behind De Gaulle, whom they felt was the one man who could
save their country, and they appreciated our efforts in training them for
the work they were-going to do.
My C.O. was Major J.H. Dumbrell, a regular officer from the Royal Sussex
Regiment who had served in the First World War as a very young man. He was
quiet and reserved, and his manner was very pleasant. He left me to look
after the training of the students without interference - though naturally
I asked his advice on important decisions - and concerned himself with the
administrative side of the school, which entailed dealing with endless
correspondence and demands from our Headquarters in London. I was with him
for more than two years altogether, and we always got on well.
Silent Killing was a pared-down form of the Unarmed Combat which was taught
to most Army units at that time; it was an earlier version of what is now
known as karate. But we didn't want to waste our students' time on elaborate
passes, throwing people over one's head, etc;.. what they required to know
was how to defend themselves without weapons and if necessary, how to knock
out a sentry who was guarding a target, say a power station, which they were
ordered to put out of action. Our visiting instructors in this art were two
ex-Shanghai policemen, then in their sixties; they had silver hair, were
soft-spoken and looked like bishops. "Knee him in the balls" they fluted,
"grind down his ankle with your boot". Their training, though simple, was
very efficient, and I am sure that many of our students owed their lives
to it.
As we had a regular training schedule which took up the whole day, but not
the evenings, (except when we had night exercises) we often used to go to
the Railway Inn at Wokingham after supper. This was run by a large and cheerful
Cockney called Stanley and his much younger, pretty wife Anne. Here there
was always amusing conversation and usually quite a crowd of people. Winston
Churchill's daughter Mary used to look in sometimes; she was stationed down
the road as an ATS. Stanley had been on the Stock Exchange before the war
and was then living at Surbiton. One night he went into the bar at Waterloo
Station for a quick drink before catching his train, when a sailor walked
in with a monkey who was wearing a black and yellow check suit. The sailor
ordered two half-pints of beer; he drank one and the monkey drank . the -other.
Intrigued Stanley got into conversation with the sailor and offered to buy
the monkey from him. At first the sailor was indignant - "E's me pal; we've
been all rahnd the world together" - but eventually sold him to Stanley for
£5. Stanley and the monkey walked off hand-in-paw; Stanley bought a
dog ticket for him but was stopped at the barrier - "That ain't no dawg"
- and so the monkey was registered as "cattle". They boarded the train which
stopped once before Surbiton. Here a man got in wearing a bowler hat. "I
love monkeys", he sid; whereupon the monkey seized his hat, tore off the
brim and handed it back. On arrival at Surbiton Stanley and the monkey went
through the barrier, arm in arm; when they had walked some distancethe ticket
collector shouted after them: "'Ere, one of you 'asn't given up 'is ticket".
I also had some time for writing music, and there was a piano in the house.
My Op. 2, Night Music, was written at this time. Its style was suggested
by Webern's orchestration of the Bach Ricercare which I had heard
at Walter Goehr's concert, and it was intended as a tribute to Webern on
his 60th birthday, though of course I was unable to send him a score of it
during the war. Though not a twelve-note work, it was more or less atonal
and was scored transparently for a smallish chamber orchestra. It was performed
in 1944 at one of the first concerts of the newly-formed Society for the
Promotion of New Music, which has done so much over the years to discover
and help young composers. The concert took place in the Royal College of
Music; Constant Lambert conducted, annoying the College authorities by insisting
on smoking throughout the rehearsals, and there was a large and distinguished
audience, including Vaughan Williams, who was always interested in hearing
what the younger composers were doing. The performance made quite an impact,
and I began to get requests to write pieces, for instance a piano piece,
Vigil (France 1940-1944) for an album in honour of the. French Resistance
Forces - a very suitable task in this case.
As instructors we were naturally expected to do all the jobs our students
had to do, and this included parachuting. I was sent on a course to Wilmslow,
outside Manchester, near Ringway airport. We were given a severe stint of
physical training to make our muscles flexible, and also detailed instructions
on how to fall out of a plane and the right way to land. In the evenings
we went to the local pub and had some amusing conversations with members
of the Hallé Orchestra, including their principal clarinettist, Pat
Ryan. But as the day of my first jump approached I was full of foreboding
and thought that my last hour had come, especially as on the landing ground
I had seen several "Roman Candles" - men whose parachutes had got their cords
twisted and did not open. We jumped from only 300 feet (to give the enemy
less time in which to shoot at a descending agent) and our rip-cords were
attached to the plane, so that the parachutes were supposed to open
automatically. We jumped through a hole in the floor in those days, and the
first jump was from a balloon which, since we could see the ground all the
time, was worse than jumping from a plane. However we had been so well drilled
that when the time came to jump we went automatically on the word of command.
When I hit the fresh air I had a feeling of immense relief, and floated down
in supreme happiness. But only for twenty seconds, as we had to concentrate
on avoiding any injury on landing, especially if there was a wind. However
I enjoyed my initial four jumps so much that I later voluntarily returned
for another course of four, three of them in one afternoon.
I was told a story at this time about a Polish officer who was being parachuted
into his native land to organize the Resistance there. Just before the jump,
he drew himself up to his full height, saluted smartly, and before disappearing
through the hole exclaimed: "And if we see us not again, Allo!"
Eventually the entire staff of the school moved to another country house
near Market Harborough in Leicestershire. This was further from London, of
course, but the house had a lake which contained pike, and our cook who,
though a Frenchman, was a British army sergeant, would often make splendid
meals from this tasty if bony fish. The famous John Fothergill, author of
"An Innkeeper's Diary", dating from the days when he was the proprietor of
the Spread Eagle at Thame in Oxfordshire, a hotel much frequented by Oxford
undergraduates in Evelyn Waugh's day - had taken over the Three Swans in
Market Harborough, and we were anxious to try out the fare provided by this
legendary figure. Unfortunately, owing to wartime restrictions, the best
he was able to produce was a variety of different kinds of risotto containing
mostly spam and other tinned food - "Mr. Fothergill's Special", the waiter
told us. But in the circumstances we could hardly complain.
Boosey and Hawkes, the music publishers, put on some concerts of contemporary
music in London, and I was asked to write a piece for string orchestra for
one of these to be played by the famous Boyd Neel Orchestra, which did so
much for modern British music at that time. I wrote an Ostinato (which later
became the first movement of a second string suite); the performance went
very well and attracted quite a lot of attention. My C.O. was also kind enough
to allow me to work on a piano concerto on the mess piano in the evenings
after training, though he must have suffered considerably from the noises
I made. This was partly a reworking of two pieces I had sketched out before
the war, and though the Concerto was later played at the Proms and elsewhere
I have never been happy with it; for me, unlike Berlioz, it is a mistake
to attempt to rehash earlier works.
Meanwhile our training courses at the school continued; from time to time
volunteers for overseas operations were called for. I invariably applied
for these, but was never accepted, so I suppose that I was needed as an
instructor. When D-Day came the French Resistance blew up all the railway
lines leading to the invasion front, thereby preventing the Germans from
moving up supplies; we could feel that our contribution to the war effort
had been worth while in the end. As more European countries were liberated
SOE operations naturally became more limited, but I remained at the
Leicestershire
house until early in 1945, when I was sent back to my original school near
Wokingham, this time with a different C.O., to train some anti-Nazi Germans
who were to help in liberating the prisoner-of-war camps in Germany and I
was there when the war in Europe ended.
Obviously SOE's work was now over, and we were all transferred to other units.
I was given some language tests, in which I apparently did better in German
than French - the French text was an extremely complicated piece about the
technical side of railways - so I was sent to the Intelligence Corps HQ to
await posting to Germany. The RQ had now moved from Winchester to Wentworth
Woodhouse, an enormous 18th-century mansion on the outskirts of Rotherham,
Yorkshire, which belonged to Lord Fitzwilliam, and indeed the earl's mother
was still living in part of the premises. Unfortunately the beautifully
landscaped garden was almost completely spoilt by opencast mining, but I
was glad to have been there for a short time before my next move.
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