An English Affair. Richard Davenport-Hines

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СКАЧАТЬ phrase that some laughed at, and others recognised had a valuable meaning. A question of precedence arose when Profumo’s wartime senior commander Field Marshal Earl Alexander of Tunis dined at Cliveden in 1962. The moment came for the men to leave the dining room to join the ladies. ‘By age and distinction,’ recorded a fellow guest, ‘there was every reason for him to go out first, but he didn’t immediately do so, since as an earl his rank was below that of the Marquess of Zetland’s. While he hesitated to go, there was a respectful silence, everyone looking towards him with quiet admiration and, by a slight inclination of the head, inviting him to lead the way. A hardly visible expression of pleased assent passed over his face. He went out as it were imperceptibly, as if it just happened that he went out first.’ As late as 1978, Lord Denning came within an ace of being disbarred from appointment as Deputy Lieutenant of Hampshire on the grounds that his military service in 1917–19 had been spent in the ranks.²⁶

      Profumo’s son David, who was born in 1955, recalled seeing war-wounded fathers of his school friends – men wearing eyepatches, those who kept an empty sleeve pinned to their jacket, the father whose face was gruesomely disfigured despite all the skill of plastic surgeons. Public men especially needed to show that they had had ‘a good war’. Jack Profumo had fought in the battle of Tunis and the invasion of Sicily; as the youngest brigadier in the British Army he had been second-in-command of the British Military Mission in Tokyo. He was still on the military reserve in 1963. The Labour candidate who stood against him at Stratford-on-Avon in 1950–51 had been awarded the Military Cross after the Battle of the Somme in 1916; his Labour opponent in 1955 had served in the Royal Navy; while Joe Stretton, the fifty-year-old Labour candidate for Stratford-on-Avon in the 1959 general election, a Co-op worker and councillor in Rugby, had war service with the Royal Army Ordnance Corps in Italy and Austria.

      ‘Funny how the war was a historical watershed,’ mused the Labour MP Wilfred Fienburgh in 1959. ‘Every date, every age, had to be translated into terms of how many years before or after the war.’ When a man over forty saw a pretty young woman, his calculations were framed by the war: that she was just born when it started, suckling when he paraded for his first rifle drill, toddling and talking when his fighting started, and entering primary school when he was de-mobbed.²⁷ One wonders if Profumo had comparable thoughts about Christine Keeler, who was a swaddled infant when he was fighting in Italy and not yet at school when he first met his wife.

      Profumo’s great task as Macmillan’s Secretary of State for War was to manage the abolition of National Service, and to return the army to a body of professional volunteers. His political adversary, Colonel George Wigg, jibed that this required him to massage the army’s recruitment figures so as to prevent any necessity of reviving conscription. Under the terms of the National Service Act of 1947, all eighteen-year-old men were obliged to serve in the armed forces for eighteen months (raised to two years after the outbreak of the Korean War). More than 2 million youths were called up (6,000 every fortnight): the army took over a million; there were thirty-three soldiers, or twelve airmen, for every sailor. After discharge, conscripts remained on the reserve force for another four years, and liable to recall in the event of an emergency. Although the abolition of National Service was announced in 1957, conscription continued until 1960, and the last conscripts were not released until 1963. Some suspected that the government would be obliged to introduce selective service by ballot, which opponents denounced as tantamount to crimping during the American Civil War. Others regretted the retreat from notions of individual obligations and service to the state.

      By 1963 there had never been so many ex-soldiers and ex-sailors in British history. Many people respond well to being drilled: in England, millions of people were respectful of authority, conformist, glad of regular pay and communal amusements. ‘Only a fool could resent two years National Service as a waste of time,’ wrote the art connoisseur Brian Sewell, who was conscripted in 1952. ‘Bullying, brutality, intimidation and fear were among its training tools with raw recruits, victimisation too, but even these had their educative purposes, and were the stimulus of resources of resilience that had not been tapped before.’ Many young men, unlike Sewell, seethed at the regimentation and sergeant majors’ bullying. With two by-elections pending at Colne Valley and Rotherham in 1963, nearly 700 servicemen tried to escape from the armed services by standing as parliamentary candidates. The government reacted by appointing a panel, chaired by David Karmel QC, to winnow the men. Only twenty-three of the 700 applied to Karmel for interview. A single one was approved: ‘Melvyn Ellingham, twenty-four-year-old REME sergeant, yesterday became the first Army Game by-election candidate to win his freedom.’ He had joined the army aged fifteen, and had two years still to serve as a £14 8s a week electronics technician. ‘I’m for the Bomb,’ he told the Daily Express, but ‘against the Common Market. I think a united Europe would only aggravate world tension.’²⁸

      The psychic air of mid-twentieth-century England was thick with bad memories. Pat Jalland, in her history of English grief in a century of world wars, quotes from the memoir of J. S. Lucas, a private in the Queen’s Royal Regiment who, like Profumo, served in the gruelling campaigns in Italy. Before the action at Faenza in 1944, when Lucas was aged twenty-one, he was reunited with his friend Doug, beside whom he had fought in Tunisia. Doug had just asked him for a smoke when a mine exploded. ‘My hand was still opening the tin of cigarettes,’ wrote Lucas, ‘and even as I ran to where he lay, my mind refused to accept the fact of his death. One moment tall, a bit skinny, wickedly satirical, and now – nothing – only a body with a mass of cuts and abrasions and a patch of dirt on his forehead … I felt sure that some part of his soul must be hovering about. But he had gone – forever … between asking for a fag and getting one.’ That night at Faenza, in freezing cold, after heavy losses from shelling, the remnants of Lucas’s company took shelter, but he was too hungry and agitated for sleep. ‘Before my eyes there passed, in review, a procession of the mates I had lost – faces of chums who had gone in Africa, below Rome and in the battles above Rome. But most clearly I saw those who had died that day. Doug reeling backwards as the concrete mines exploded and Corporal Rich’s gentle eyes as he turned away with a goodbye “ciao”. The whole assembly of these dead comrades stood in a sombre semi-circle around me as if they were waiting and watching until the time should come when I joined their ghostly company.’ Next day Lucas was sent to the base psychiatric hospital at Assisi. There the medical officer strove to convince him that, although his grief and battle exhaustion were justified, his shame was not.²⁹

      A Midlands teenager remembered visiting Portsmouth during the 1950s, and being told that ‘Before the War’ this bombsite had been a chemist’s, or that hole had been a draper’s … ‘Before the War – Before the War’ was the sad, weird incantation of the times. All the youth could see were ‘stumps of shops, office blocks, houses, streets, piers, just stumps’. The sole undamaged residue of ‘Before the War’ was swaying wires above the streets, between the rubble and stumps, for trolley-bus power lines survive bombardment and blast. He also visited his mother’s family in Cambridgeshire. ‘There was the uncle who was half-blown to bits in the First World War, shouting and grunting meaningless sounds as he loaded hay on a truck, and then limping across and shaking my hand and screaming and laughing, and I was very frightened and people said it was a shame, and that he was very intelligent, and couldn’t help it, and how it wasn’t his fault.’³⁰

      There were widows and spinsters so lonely that they could fill their teapots with tears. In 1958 the novelist John Braine described eating poached eggs on toast in a London tea shop. The middle-aged woman next to him, ‘pale and drab in a skimpy cotton dress clinging to her scraggy body’, wore no wedding ring. When she was young, he thought, ‘some British general, breathing heavily, would have at last worked out the meaning of attrition and would have issued the order which deposited her future husband screaming on the barbed wire or drowning in the mud, and which left her, forty years later, eating a roll and butter and drinking a glass of orangeade, with dreadful slowness, alone in a London tea shop’. Later he glimpsed the woman again. ‘She was walking very slowly, her face a mask of misery, peering from side to side as if looking for help.’³¹

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