Posted
Saturday, March 28, 2009 [Brentwood
years] (1947-1956) by David
Irving AT BRENTWOOD School hung a
portrait in oils of Vivian Rosewarne, the
author of An Airman's Letter to his Mother, a
famous wartime propaganda document. ("Dearest
Mother," he had written in 1940 to his widowed
mother, who had stinted to bring up her only son.
"Though I feel no premonition at all, events are
moving rapidly and I have instructed that this
letter be forwarded to you should I fail to return
from one of the raids that we shall shortly be
called upon to undertake. . .") I thrilled to
Thomas Babbington Macaulay's Lays of Ancient
Rome, and took due note of how Horatio held the
bridge. - … as
that great host, with measured
tread,
- And spears
advanced & ensigns spread,
- Rolled slow
toward the bridge's head,
- Where stood
the dauntless Three.
It was easy in ones
imagination to become Horatio in Ancient Rome, or
Jack Cornwell VC
in 1916, or that Battle of Britain airman in 1940.
There was no force-feeding
of opinions or overt propaganda at Brentwood. We
were schooled in more subtle ways. The whole school
was paraded in sections to the local Odeon to see
John Mills in the Ealing Studios epic
Scott of the Antarctic and I connected his
men's ordeal to those sepia photos of icebergs and
snowy wastes and yellowing naval sweaters left over
from my father's own forays into that bleak
wilderness in 1930. The film was produced in
Technicolor by Michael Balcon in 1948 -- was
I really only ten? Ralph Vaughan Williams'
haunting Sinfonia Antarctica still evokes that
Odeon morning with the, for once, hushed schoolboy
audience and the Britishness of the understated
courage shown: the army Captain Lawrence
Oates, a paying guest on the Polar expedition,
stepping out of the final tent into the blizzard
murmuring, "I am just going outside and may be some
time." Years later in the British Museum I stood
before the actual diary of Captain Robert Falcon
Scott which recorded that farewell, opened at
its famous last page -- "I do not regret this
journey." So something of the
historian began to stir, unsuspected, within me.
"Ich habe es gewagt," the philosophical
epitaph on Rudolf Hess's stone grave-marker
now, is similar: "I took the risk." He had flown in
mid-war to Britain in a single-handed effort to
halt the madness, before the deadliest barbarism
had even begun, and spent the next forty-six years
in prison as his reward. Schoolchildren now are now
taught to hate -- marched off to see less subtle
movie epics like the war-porn Schindler's
List, based on a novel by the Australian writer
Thomas Kenneally; and they are force-fed
Anne Frank's tragic diary, and with
measurably different results. SEE, I still recall Scott
with a thrill sixty years later, though I remember
with equal vividness going with schoolfriends to
the same cinema to see Henri-Georges
Clouzot's 1953 cult thriller Le Salaire de
la Peur. Four men down on their luck are hired
to drive two truckloads of nitro-glycerine to a
blazing oilrig in South America: They will get two
thousand dollars if they survive, "the wages of
fear." I remember this film as
much for one scene widely discussed at schoolboy
level, of a young Mulatto woman bathing in an
interestingly shallow tin bath, as for a piece of
dramatic artifice: The first explosives truck is
miles ahead and unseen across the valley; in the
open cab of the second, Yves Montand is
steering with one sweaty hand and rolling a
cigarette with the other. There is a pale flicker
of light from the horizon; a silent puff blows the
tobacco off the paper, followed seconds later by
the cataclysmic blast. The first truck has blown
up. Time-and-space prefiguring,
that's how it's done. Another little wrench went
into my mental toolbox: that's how to capture
attention. I adapted this technique slightly in
some of my histories. In The Destruction of
Convoy PQ.17 (London, 1967) Nazi U-boats and
bombers hunt down thirty-eight merchant ships, one
by one. After a time the reader subconsciously
realises that if at last I give the ship's tonnage,
its turn has come: "His victim was the Matson
Navigation Company's 6,069-ton Olopana.
" Schiller's Gedichte
completed my knowledge of the heroic sagas. The
cunning written word, the oil painter's artistry,
the sparkle of brass on the breech of that six-inch
gun, these are the really dangerous ingredients of
boyhood and they are not easily forgotten; and nor
should they be. Taken to see HMS
Victory by my mother, I gazed at the brass
plate marking where Horatio Nelson fell in
1805: another Horatio, another boyhood hero -- and
when a daughter died tragically fifty years later
the London undertaker's quietly murmured
reassurance, "We handled the arrangements for
Admiral Lord Nelson, you know," earned him my trust
immediately. ©
2009 Copyright David Irving / Focal Point
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