The Man Who Was Saturday. Patrick Bishop

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СКАЧАТЬ peers, he enjoyed finding ways to get round irritating restrictions. He also liked to challenge authority when the chance arose and the odds of getting away with it were favourable. It was good for morale, a reminder that those who ruled the school did not have it all their own way.

      There are frequent references in the diary to ‘mobbing’: semi-spontaneous outbreaks of high jinks which could erupt at mealtimes and even in chapel. ‘After tea there was a great mob which m’tutor came up and stopped,’ he wrote on 26 September. ‘M’tutor’ was his housemaster, John Foster Crace, a classicist who had been at the school since 1901 and had married late and recently become father to a girl. Then, a few hours later, ‘the captain of house got mobbed at supper.’ According to Neave, when Crace appeared to break it up again the boys ran off, but after prayers the housemaster’s tone was almost apologetic, telling them, ‘“I lose my temper sometimes [titters] but I am not really so bad as you may think” [laughter]. He did not see anything wrong with the mobs but they were rather near his family.’ Crace’s cautious reaction to the shenanigans was perhaps a recognition of the truth that, as in prisons, without recourse to brute force, order in school essentially depended on the consent of the inmates. Imposing authority was a tricky business. The boys could spot – and instantly exploit – any perceived chink in the armour. When the class was assigned a new master called Mr Kitchen Smith, Neave’s first impression was that he was ‘quite nice but rather weak’.13 This assessment must have been shared by the others, because when asked, they assured the teacher that they had no outstanding homework to do. It was a fib that was soon discovered, but it had been worth a try.

      It is an insignificant episode in itself, yet indicative of the spirit that prevailed among a section of the British prisoners held in German camps in the war to come. The camp guards were uniformed versions of the beaks and prefects they had known at school, and their instinct was to defy them, test them, rag them and keep them off balance whenever possible.

      Neave’s school and home life meshed easily. Beaconsfield was only eleven miles from Eton and his mother often visited him at weekends, turning up to chapel or dropping off treats such as baskets of eggs. Neave seems to have been close to her, and sympathetic to her frequent indispositions, when she would retreat to bed with unexplained illnesses. Family lore represents Sheffield Neave as a Victorian father, large and imposing, but absorbed in his work, neglectful of his wife and distant towards his children. By the summer of 1931 there were four of them. After Airey came Iris Averil, 13, Rosamund, 10, Viola, 6, and a brother, Digby, 3. According to Airey’s eldest child, Marigold, ‘He didn’t have a great relationship with his father … He was not a very warm man, I think. This was his problem. He was quite difficult to warm to, quite frightening to look at – he had rather prominent, stern features.’14 As for the other children, ‘They were all girls except for little Digby, who was so little no one hardly bothered with him. And the girls were just considered as girls, and in those days that’s all they were. Nobody paid any attention to them. They were not very important. It was rather a dysfunctional family I always felt.’

      Neave’s diary presents a warmer picture of Sheffield. On 11 July, they went to the Eton–Harrow cricket match together, which Eton won handsomely by an innings and 16 runs. ‘After breakfast Mummy took some photographs of Dad and I. We went by the 10.00 to Paddington and then took the underground to St John’s Wood. We got to Lord’s about 11.10, when play had just started. We had quite good seats in Stand G. Harrow were all out for 230 by about 12.45 and by the lunch interval were 59 for 0 [having been forced to follow on]. We went to a tent at the back of the grandstand for lunch … Sandwiches, cider cup, strawberries and cream, cake and iced coffee … After lunch we walked about and watched the match. We met on the field a friend of Daddy’s …’

      In the summer holidays that followed, father and son pursued a Betjemanesque routine, playing golf and tennis together, making family visits to friends and relations in their Home Counties residences. One day, Sheffield took him off to Woodwalton Fen in Cambridgeshire, to check on the progress of a population of rare Large Copper butterflies that had been introduced a few years before. The diary entries are light and natural, with no hint of tensions or conflict. They contrast with the references to childhood that appear in the diaries Neave kept towards the end of his life, which do not suggest cloudless happiness or any great affection for the patriarchs of the family. His paternal grandfather was ‘a selfish shit’.15 As for the rest, ‘they were a sad quarrelsome family. No one was happy. I suffered from them in my time.’16

      Beyond the security and comfort of Eton and Bishop’s House, the world was swept by confusion and conflict. The early 1930s were a tumultuous time at home and abroad. Britain was sunk in an economic depression that brought misery and despair, not just to the industrial North but to the mellow towns and villages of the Home Counties. In Europe, it was clear that the recent war had settled nothing and old hatreds burned as fiercely as ever. Late in 1932, a speech by Stanley Baldwin raised the spectre of a new war in which ‘the bomber will always get through.’

      It was in this baleful atmosphere that Airey Neave made his first visit to Germany, in 1933, at the age of seventeen. The trip would be a turning point, jolting him into political awareness and fixing him on a moral bearing that he would follow for the rest of his life. Later, he would refer to the experience often, presenting it as an awakening: to the dangers of totalitarianism and the fragility of civilisation.

      His parents had decided he would benefit from a spell in Berlin to improve his grasp of German.17 Eton, like most British schools, took an academic rather than a practical approach to language teaching, with the result that, according to Jo Grimond, ‘no boy who had spent hundreds of hours … of classes could carry on the simplest conversation in French.’18 He arrived in late summer to lodge with a family who lived at Nikolassee, a lakeside suburb west of Berlin. Hitler had been appointed Chancellor on 30 January that year and the Nazis were tightening their grip on German society.

      Neave attended classes at the local school with one of the sons, who was a member of the Hitler Youth. ‘At the entry of the teacher each morning we were expected to give the Hitler salute, but as a foreigner I was excused,’ he remembered many years later. ‘I was an unconventional pupil and at first an object of derision. I sat at the back of the class. My hair was much longer than that of the German boys and I wore a decadent yellow tie with black spots.’19

      Neave soon learned that it did not do to mock Germany’s new masters. Dietrich, the elder son of the family, who was at university in Berlin, was not a party member and admired the young guest’s independent spirit but warned him that it could be dangerous. One day, waiting for the train at Nikolassee, Neave sniggered at the sight of a ‘fat, brown-booted storm-trooper’. He recalled that Dietrich ‘hastily manoeuvred me out of sight. I can remember the bloodshot pig-eyes of the storm-trooper glaring towards us.’20

      The climax of the visit came when Neave went with Dietrich to a rally one warm evening in the first week of September in the centre of Berlin. Neave had signed up as a temporary member of a sports club in Charlottenburg to which Dietrich belonged, and although no great athlete, he was good enough to get into the relay team. When the Nazis announced a Festival of Sport in the capital, the club was advised to take part. It began with a classic piece of totalitarian theatre. At ten o’clock a vast procession of sports organisations set off from the Lustgarten, in the centre of the city, and marched to a rally near the Brandenburg Gate. These were the early days of Nazism and, although the signs of repression were everywhere, in Berlin there were still many who did not disguise their scepticism. Among some of the athletes, participation in the festival was ‘seen as something of a joke’.

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