The Separation

  Outside, he was standing beside the first of three cars that were waiting for us. He was wearing his familiar black hat and coat and already held a fat Double Corona cigar in his hand, as yet unlit. Like all of us, he carried a gas-mask in a pouch slung over one shoulder. As the civil servants and the other military men started to dispose themselves in the three cars, Mr Churchill signalled to me.

  ‘Group Captain, this is your first tour with me, is it not? You should travel in the front car today. Get the feel of things.’

  He climbed into the rear compartment and I followed. One of the civil servants clambered in beside me and the three of us squeezed into the back seat. I held my walking-stick between my knees in front of me, exactly in the same way, I suddenly noticed, as Mr Churchill was holding his own cane.

  Without further ado the convoy of cars set off, first wheeling around Horse Guards Parade, then passing through Admiralty Arch into Trafalgar Square. A crowd of pigeons scattered noisily as our cars rushed along. We headed east.

  It was for me an extraordinary experience to be sitting so close to, indeed crushed up against, this most famous and powerful statesman, to feel the warmth of his side and leg pressing casually against mine, to feel his weight lean against me as the car went round corners. He said nothing, his hands resting on the handle of his cane, the unlit cigar jutting up from his fingers. He stared out of the passenger window, apparently deep in thought, his lower lip set in that familiar expression of stubbornness.

  I had heard that Churchill was normally a talkative man and the silence in the car was becoming one of those that you feel must be broken. What had Mr Churchill known about me and Joe before we met, that had made his staff confuse us?

  Joe and Birgit had moved to the north of England soon after they married at the end of 1936, renting a house on the Cheshire side of the Pennine hills, near Macclesfield, but I had seen hardly anything of either of them since I left university. The last occasion was when we met at our parents’ house during one of my leaves. That was the week of the first Christmas of the war, an occasion of bitter arguments between us which ended up with my leaving the house in a rage, infuriated by Joe’s intractable attitude and beliefs, and feeling, wrongly as it turned out much later, that my father was taking Joe’s side against me.

  I had not seen or spoken to Joe after that: in our different ways we became caught up in the war, I more obviously in the RAF. At the beginning of 1940, Joe successfully applied to be registered as a conscientious objector, afterwards starting to work for the Red Cross. I was bitterly regretful that he and I had not been able to patch up our differences before he died, but that was not to be. Much of what he had gone through in his last months was unknown to me.

  Our motorcade was passing through areas of much heavier bomb damage, where many burnt-out buildings stood looming over the road with their smoke-darkened walls and blank windows. The sky could be glimpsed through their roofless shells. Not all such damaged buildings remained: many had been demolished and the rubble cleared away, allowing new vistas across to other parts of the city. I saw St Paul’s Cathedral, still more or less intact, having famously survived the worst nights of the Blitz, but it was surrounded by acres of levelled ground, ruined buildings and bulldozed heaps of rubble.

  At last I spoke.

  ‘Mr Churchill, last night you mentioned my brother Joseph. May I ask what you knew about him before he died?’

  For a moment Churchill did not seem to react. Then he turned to look at me.

  ‘I’m sorry, Group Captain. I know nothing more of your late brother than what I told you last night.’

  ‘You implied he was known to you in some way. You said your staff had been confusing the two of us.’

  Mr Churchill looked back out of his window, not burdening himself to answer.

  The man who was in the seat beside me, presumably a member of Churchill’s staff, suddenly spoke.

  ‘Group Captain Sawyer, we are passing the Bank of England. It remains undamaged, as you can see. And the Mansion House. I think you’ll find as we move further down towards the docks that the destruction gets worse.’

  I nodded politely. The Prime Minister’s answer had piqued rather than satisfied my curiosity. He had in fact told me nothing at all about Joe during our short meeting.

  ‘Is this your first visit to London since the Blitz?’ said the man beside me, persisting.

  ‘Yes … yes, it is.’

  ‘The damage must seem terrible to you. Did I hear you say you had a brother who was killed in action?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t like that,’ I said, distractedly. ‘Not in action. He was a civilian.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that. My own brother’s in the Royal Navy, you know. Commands a destroyer, out on the Atlantic convoys. Nasty job sometimes.’

  ‘Yes, so I hear.’

  ‘Did you ever fly any naval liaison missions, Group Captain? My brother speaks highly of the RAF.’

  ‘I’m not attached to Coastal Command,’ I said. ‘I’ve never worked with the navy.’

  ‘I must arrange an introduction for you to the C-in-C Western Approaches. Good man. I’m sure he’d be fascinated to meet you. Look,’ he said, pointing across me and the Prime Minister into the distance, over another field of rubble. ‘Tower Bridge is still standing. The Luftwaffe uses it as an aiming point, you know. They line up on the docks by using the river and they know where they are when they see the bridge. They could knock it out if they wanted to, but it’s probably more useful to them left as it is.’

  So it went on, the flood of chatter from the man beside me, removing any possibility of my pressing Mr Churchill on what he might have known about Joe.

  After we passed through the City the visible damage became even more extensive than before, at one point the road narrowing to a single lane that wound between two immense heaps of rubble. Policemen were on duty here, waving our convoy through. They saluted the P.M. as our car went by. Afterwards we crossed the Mile End Road – my companion the civil servant smoothly identified it for me – then joined a narrower road leading down to the river. Here the car slowed to a gentle halt. The other two cars pulled up behind us.

  Two uniformed policemen emerged from one of the intact buildings at the side and together with our driver set about lifting back the convertible roof and folding it into its special place at the rear. The drizzle, still misting down as it had done since first light, began to settle on us.

  The Prime Minister watched the operation of removing the roof calmly. When the driver was back in his seat at the front of the car, he stood up, bracing his weight on the long metal handle that was at the front of the compartment.

  ‘Gentlemen, it’s usually left to you to decide whether you should stand with me or remain seated,’ he said. ‘Because of the weather today, from which there’s no escape, you might prefer to take it on the chin with me up here. It’s actually rather more comfortable to be standing for short distances. You’ll discover, Group Captain, that a firm grip on the handle in front of you will keep you steady.’

  The civil servant and I both stood up, finding, as Mr Churchill said, that with all three of us on our feet it was possible to stand in some comfort. Churchill felt around in his pockets, but the civil servant was already ahead of him. He produced a box of matches and struck one of them. He held the flame steady so that the P.M. could light his cigar.

  Churchill took two or three deep pulls, turned the end around in his mouth to moisten it, then declared himself ready. The car moved forward at about ten miles an hour.

  Behind us the other ADCs were also standing up in their cars. Steadily our little motorcade headed down into the wasteland of blasted homes, warehouses and dock installations.

  We came around one particular corner and I saw that the Women’s Voluntary Service had erected a large tent, from which hot food and drinks were being handed out. A large crowd was clustering around it, but a sizeable number of the people on the edge of the crowd were looking expectantl
y towards us. The moment our car came in sight, an immense cheer went up and everyone began waving and yelling enthusiastically. People inside the tent rushed out to join the crowd. Everyone was waving. Some people were clutching Union flags. The noise was tremendous.

  Mr Churchill immediately raised his hat, waved it in a jovial fashion and held up his big cigar for everyone to see. The cheers redoubled.

  ‘Are we downhearted?’ he cried.

  ‘NO!!’ came the immediate response.

  ‘Give it to ’em, Winnie!’

  ‘We can take it!’

  ‘Dish it out, Mr Churchill!’

  ‘Give the Jerries all we’ve got!’

  The car drove steadily on. A smaller crowd beyond the tent heard the noise and as soon as we hove in view another great commotion arose. Mr Churchill waved his hat, beamed at the crowd, puffed expressively on his cigar.

  ‘We can take it!’ he said loudly.

  ‘We can bloody well take it!’ they responded.

  ‘Give ’em as good as we got!’

  ‘Give old Adolf what he deserves!’

  ‘God Save the King!’

  ‘Hoorah!’

  ‘Are we downhearted?’ cried the Prime Minister, waving his hat and puffing on his cigar.

  This continued for about a mile, with unbroken crowds along the side of the roads, well marshalled by alert police officers, all of whom, I noticed, were eager to take a look of their own at the famous visitor. We reached an area of total destruction where even the bulldozers had not yet started work. It was shocking to realize that the undulating, broken mass of concrete slabs, splinter-ended beams, broken brickwork, millions of shards of glass, large pools of water, rampant weeds already poking up through the rubble, had all of it once been people’s homes and places of work. There were no crowds here, probably because there were no homes left, no reason for anyone to be about. We remained on our feet, silent as we passed along the navigable track that was cleared on the edge of the Luftwaffe’s night-time work.

  Eventually the car entered a less damaged area and drew to a halt outside a tall Victorian edifice. Apart from a few boarded-up windows and the ubiquitous sandbags, it appeared to be comparatively untouched by the bombs. From a sign near the main gate I saw that the building was Whitechapel Hospital. A squad of uniformed police was waiting in the yard to greet us, saluting as Mr Churchill stepped down. We walked at a smart pace into the building, my injured leg giving me difficulty for the first time that day, but I managed to keep pace. A huge roar was going up: people had crowded into the yard to welcome the Prime Minister, and seemingly hundreds more were leaning from all available doorways and windows, waving and shouting and cheering.

  Mr Churchill raised his hat, beamed about in all directions, puffed cheerfully on his cigar.

  ‘Are we downhearted?’ he shouted to the crowd.

  ‘NO!!’ they yelled back, waving their flags enthusiastically.

  We toured the wards, spoke to doctors, nurses and porters, chatted to patients. Mr Churchill spent extra time in the children’s ward, meeting not only the children but their parents too. At every point his message was the same, endlessly repeated, with only minor variations: ‘We’re going to see it through to the end, we’ll never give up, we’ve got Hitler on the run now, we can take anything he throws at us, he’s in for a few surprises.’

  After the hospital we drove to a large school in Leytonstone which had taken a direct hit from a German parachute bomb. After that we drove down the badly bombed High Road in Leyton, where people were crowding on both sides of the street. Wherever there were crowds, Mr Churchill repeated his performance with the hat, the smile and the cigar.

  We were back at Admiralty House by lunchtime. With a curt nod to us and a word of thanks Mr Churchill hastened away into the interior of the huge building. By this time I was exhausted after the morning of crowds and noise and the long walks among them. Mr Churchill remained spry and energetic to the end. I was given a light lunch with the other ADCs, then our respective cars arrived to take us home. I went to my room at RAF Northolt and fell asleep at once.

  Nothing happened the next day, but the day after I was summoned again to Admiralty House. This time the tour Mr Churchill took was to the south of the river, visiting the areas of Southwark and Waterloo that had been devastated in a raid at the end of April. The next day we returned to the East End and dockland. Two days later the entourage travelled north for tours of the worst-hit parts of Birmingham, Coventry, Manchester and Liverpool. Back in London after a week, we immediately set off touring Battersea and Wandsworth.

  I served as a Churchill ADC for just under three hectic weeks, by the end of which time I was convinced of two things about the Prime Minister.

  The first was that he was a truly great man, inspiring belief in the impossible: that Hitler could and would be beaten. In that summer of 1941, the Germans were massively engaged in the first phase of the invasion of the Soviet Union, so for a while the pressure was off the British Isles. But the danger of air raids never really went away and the submarine war in the Atlantic was entering its most dangerous phase for Britain. The fighting in North Africa, which had been thought to be almost over when the Italian army collapsed, suddenly took a new and more worrying direction as Rommel assumed command of the Afrika Korps and moved swiftly on Egypt and the Suez Canal. Most of Europe was occupied by the Germans. The Soviet Union was in retreat. The Jews were being moved into ghettos; the extermination camps were built and ready. The Americans were still not involved. Whichever way you looked at it, the British were not in reality winning the war, nor did the prospects look at all good. Churchill, however, would have none of that. Britain has never had a greater leader at a worse time.

  But I was also convinced of an altogether different matter.

  I quickly realized what the other ADCs must also have known, but which none of us ever admitted or discussed. The cheerful, charismatic man who toured the bombed-out streets and homes of London’s East End, who smilingly received the cheers and shouts from the crowds, who gamely puffed his cigars and uttered the familiar words of patriotic encouragement and defiance, was not Winston Churchill at all.

  I do not know who he was. Physically he was almost identical to Churchill, but he was not the great man himself. He was a double, an actor, a paid impostor.

  17

  I returned to my college in Oxford at the end of September 1936, fêted as a hero and briefly the subject of great interest and curiosity. The fame was only brief, though, because a bronze medal is not the same as a gold, and sporting achievement is ephemeral when you cannot follow it up. That is what happened to me, because Joe showed no interest in returning to Oxford. My career as one half of a coxwainless pair immediately ended.

  For a while I tried to find another rowing partner, meanwhile concentrating on solo rowing, but it was not the same without Joe. Gradually, my practice sessions grew shorter, less frequent, until the cold spell in January 1937 when I no longer rowed at all.

  Instead, I turned to flying, the other obsession of mine that rowing had for a long time overshadowed. I had joined the University Air Squadron as soon as I arrived in Oxford for my first year, and even through the long months of my most intensive training before the Olympics I managed to keep up my flying training hours with the squadron. After the Games I spent more and more time flying, neglecting my academic course. Everyone at Brasenose College knew that I was at Oxford because of my skill at sport, not because of academic brilliance, but I had become a rowing blue who no longer rowed. Flying was no replacement, so I turned reluctantly to the books. I came down from Oxford in July 1938 with a third-class honours degree in German History and Literature.

  Through the adjutant of the University Air Squadron I applied for a permanent commission in the Royal Air Force, intending to become a fighter pilot. I had already logged many solo flying hours and I was qualified to fly single-engined aircraft. It seemed to me that I possessed all the natural aggression and quick re
actions needed in a fighter pilot and that the RAF would welcome me with open arms.

  Nothing, of course, is ever as easy as that. After my first medical examination I was told I was physically unsuited for fighters: I was simply too tall and big-boned and would not fit into the cockpit of any of the aircraft in service. Instead I was selected to fly bombers.

  After my time at Cranwell, the officer college for the RAF, I ended up as a trainee Flying Officer with 105 Squadron, equipped with the Blenheim light bomber. By the time war broke out, at the beginning of September 1939, I was in command of my own aircraft and I was ready for operations.

  When the Germans launched the Blitz, Britain at first tried to respond with bombing attacks on German targets. I was part of that effort: I had been posted to 148 Squadron, equipped with Wellingtons, and I began flying operationally from the end of 1940. At first our targets were the French ports occupied by the Nazis – Brest, Boulogne, Calais, Bordeaux – but with increasing frequency we were sent to attack targets in Germany itself: Gelsenkirchen, Emden, Wilhelmshaven, Cologne, Berlin, Hamburg. Over Hamburg it ended for me, on May 10, 1941.

  I saw nothing of my brother Joe during the early months of hostilities and was completely out of touch with him at the time he was killed. After our falling-out at Christmas 1939 we went our separate ways, cursing each other, misunderstanding each other. We were no more deeply alienated from each other at the time of his death than before, but our separation added an extra ingredient of despair to my loss.