Killing Rommel

A child sees and understands far more than grownups believe. I knew at once that this was death. My mother was gone; this inert object was not she. She was with Jesus or amongst the stars. I didn’t believe any of that bollocks, but I repeated it to myself as I imagined I ought. I told myself I should not be angry. The hospital had many patients besides my mother whose needs were urgent. At times, the overtaxed staff had no alternative but to stick a dead person temporarily out of the way so that they could get on to other emergencies. The nurses would return soon, I was certain, and restore my mother to dignity.

  But I knew this was rubbish. I hated the authorities for leaving her like this, even for a moment. And I was furious with them for not telling my sisters and me. For how long did the hospital intend to hold us in suspense, believing that our mother might yet survive, when in truth her cold corpse had been dumped and forgotten upon this shameful siding? I crossed to the trolley and repaired my mother’s modesty. I worked the rings off her fingers and put them in my pocket. I didn’t want the staff stealing them.

  My sisters told me later that I reappeared in the corridor in a state such as they had never seen. “Your face was scarlet,” Edna said. “Tears were streaming down your cheeks.” The surgeons, a young man and a senior, had just that moment emerged from the rear doors. “Without a word, you sprinted the length of the hall and hurled yourself upon them, kicking and punching.” In the end, my sisters told me, I had to be given a sedative and carried physically to the car. I have no recollection of that. What does remain, with blazing clarity, is this:

  My mother’s death was my fault.

  I knew this instinctively and with every cell of my body. I had caused her end. How? By being too young and too small to protect her. Had I been driving the car instead of my father, no accident would have happened. Had I been with them, even as a passenger, somehow I would have preserved her. But I wasn’t there. Because of my absence, my mother was dead.

  A child does not understand with reason. Later at university we studied Freud, Adler and Jung. I could grasp intellectually the preposterousness of this childish belief. But rationality is powerless against emotion.

  Not long after that night, my uncles’ influence got me into Winchester. Before then I had never been in trouble at school; from that date I was rarely out of it. I got into scrapes daily, with the other boys and with the masters. I hated them all. I despised the school and every sham rite and cruel tradition it prided itself upon. The house I was assigned to was called Kingsgate. Each house had three prefects. These were sixth-formers who received privileges in return for acting as counsellors and maintaining order. Our prefects were Tallicott, Martin and Zachary Stein. Stein was a Jew. Rumour declared him a poet. I knew only that he was tall and rich and spent a lot of time in his room. He had an American Schwinn bicycle with an illustration of a Red Indian on the chainguard, which he rode in all weathers.

  I came in with two other boys whose names I forget. We were all thirteen. The older youths at once gave us the treatment. I had no experience of boarding school and was not prepared for this. In addition I was both a “muley” (an orphan) and a “duff” (a hardship case), meaning I inhabited the absolute basement of the pecking order. The other two new boys alternated between rage and despair as each new indignity was heaped upon us. They hated the older boys and burned with murderous fantasies; that, or worshipped them shamelessly. I would do neither. I held in contempt the seniors who inflicted these abuses upon us. They perceived this, of course, and gave it to me twice over.

  By then I was having a recurring nightmare. In the dream I found myself beside a lake at twilight. A mist stood on the water. My mother’s body lay on a barge, swathed in silk and flowers; her eyes were closed, hands folded across her breast. Yet I was certain she was alive. Suddenly the barge was either pushed or began to move of its own accord, away from shore and into the mist, which I understood to mean oblivion. I had to save her! In a state of desperation I plunged into the lake, hands stretching for the boat to pull it back. A great weight of iron—a garment of some kind—dragged me down. My mother’s sleeping form slipped from my grasp. I woke in a state of dread and consternation.

  The culmination of the initiation ordeals at Winchester is a rite called the freeze-out. This was a tradition at the school. Upon a bitterly frigid night, we new boys were stripped of mufflers and overcoats and locked out in the storm. We had been told by one of the more kindly sixth-formers that the torture would not last all night. The seniors would observe us in secret; when we had turned blue enough to satisfy the demands of the trial, they would fetch us back indoors. My fellow sufferers clung together, overacting their misery. I despised them. I would not give our tormentors the satisfaction.

  I began walking. I was going home.

  I made my way to the railway station. The place was deserted. I set off down the tracks. How far I marched, I don’t know. At some point I lay down in the snow.

  Stein, the prefect, saved me. He told me later he had sensed the freeze-out coming, but had been fooled by the older boys, who had made pillow-dummies of me and the other two and had put them in our beds. Stein didn’t realise what had happened till the frozen pair were brought back indoors. How did he find me? From my tracks in the snow and his own imagination. The train station. Home. He was a poet; he could figure it out.

  I was lying on my side on the tracks when I heard the tinny bell of Stein’s American Schwinn. “Chapman! Where in damnation are you?” I had never heard an upperclassman employ such language. Stein pedalled up. He was frightened; he thought I was dead. He wrapped me in a woollen blanket. Close behind him came the master’s assistant in an ancient Peugeot. The assistant pulled up on the road that paralleled the tracks. Stein carried me through the woods to the car.

  “You better not pop off, you little sod,” the master’s assistant said as he bundled me through the passenger door and up against the machine’s feeble heater. Stein wrapped me in the blanket and his own greatcoat, cursing when the assistant botched the clutch and stalled. “Is this little twit going to croak?” the fellow demanded.

  Stein produced a silver flask. “He’ll be fine,” he said, lifting the whisky to my lips. “He just wants a stiff belt.”

  3

  AT OXFORD, Stein was my tutor. For those unfamiliar with the tutorial system, it works like this. A student at university acquires his education by attending lectures and seminars given by dons. Attendance is voluntary. Theoretically you could duck every lecture—as some did, myself amongst them, passing the hours playing croquet on the lawns behind Magdalen, my college—and still graduate with a First. But you must be examined and demonstrate mastery of the material.

  To assist the student in this, the university assigns him a tutor. Tutors are usually shaggy, ill-groomed junior dons who smoke and drink to excess and never leave their rooms except for illicit sexual liaisons or to replenish their stocks of tobacco and spirits. A good tutor can make one’s college experience a revolutionary passage, to life as well as to literature; a bad one can make it misery. The college provides accommodations for each tutor, usually in double suites with another tutor (Stein’s rooms were actually at Trinity College, where he was pursuing his own doctorate) with a kitchen and bath/WC, two sleeping rooms, and a sitting room between. The latter was invariably a hellhole, overheated in winter to a point barely shy of combustion, and knee-deep in texts, papers and the usual detritus of the academic life. I loved Stein’s sitting room. It was the first home I’d had since my mother died.

  I went up to Oxford because of Stein. His letters and testimonials got me in. Stein had eight or nine other pupils, among whom was Alan “Jock” McCall of Golspie, Sutherland. Jock became my closest friend. In those days, to be an all-round fellow was the ideal. Jock was that—a crack quarter-miler, brilliant essayist, undergraduate editor of the Cherwell in his second year, an unheard-of honour—though I abhorred his politics, which were thoroughly military and imperialist. Jock’s sister Rose became my bride, to whom I
have been blissfully wed for more than thirty years. But again I’m getting ahead of my story.

  Stein was five years my senior. He was twenty-four when I arrived at Oxford and already a published poet. Beyond his own studies in Milton, in which field he was known even then as an authority, he was working on a novel. This impressed me even more. Stein refused to show pages to anyone or even to reveal his subject. Rumours, however, declared it homoerotic and political. “So,” Jock used to ask me as he arrived for his tutorial, immediately after mine, “what have you and Oscar Wilde been chatting about today?”

  Stein’s tone towards me was one of affectionate irony. He teased me constantly, usually over my “black Irish,” meaning the moodiness that descended upon me with such regularity and which I had acquired, Stein speculated, from my Irish mother.

  Stein had a theory that there was a difference between Jewish despair and Irish despair. “Jewish despair arises from want and can be cured by surfeit. Give a penniless Jew fifty quid and he perks right up. Irish despair is different. Nothing relieves Irish despair. The Irishman’s complaint lies not with his circumstances, which might be rendered brilliant by labour or luck, but with the injustice of existence itself. Death! How could a benevolent Deity gift us with life, only to set such a cruel term upon it? Irish despair knows no remedy. Money doesn’t help. Love fades; fame is fleeting. The only cures are booze and sentiment. That’s why the Irish are such noble drunks and glorious poets. No one sings like the Irish or mourns like them. Why? Because they’re angels imprisoned in vessels of flesh.”

  When I told Stein of my recurring nightmare, his immediate question was “What garment of iron are you wearing that drags you down?” When I described it, he said at once: “Armour.” I had never thought of that.

  Stein’s conclusion was that I was at heart a knight and that the mystery of my life could never be solved without taking into account the centrality of that vocation.

  Stein lifted my gloom. His example gave me permission to seek my truest self. He assigned me readings far beyond the scope of university instruction. With Jock and others, we talked of literature for hours. Under Stein’s tutelage, I blossomed both as a writer and as a critic of writing. I lost my fear of seeming smart, of standing out or appearing different.

  Amongst the many qualities I admired in Stein, foremost was his refusal to be anything other than who he was. In those days to be a homosexual, even in a university setting, was something one dared not speak of. It was against the law. You could go to prison. Certainly your career could be impeded. Stein didn’t give a damn. “A Jew, a poet and a poof,” he declared of himself. “The hat trick of social undesirability!”

  Once, in the dining hall, Jock and I got into a row over Stein. Jock respected Stein but avoided him in public. A too-close association, he believed, could do harm to one’s standing. “Balls,” I told him. “Stein’s keener than half these bloody dons, he’s twice the writer, works three times as hard; he’s the only one who actually takes time for his pupils, and he’s got the belly to speak his mind, unlike these other careerist bootlickers.”

  Stein’s politics were left and radical. He was wildly rich. I visited the family estate once in the West Riding of Yorkshire; the grounds covered seven hundred acres. Stein was related to the Rothschilds on his father’s side; his mother was descended from Benjamin Disraeli’s niece. The family fortune came from wool. The Lederers, Stein’s mother’s family, owned mills at Bradford, Leeds and Bingley. Stein’s great-grandfather Hyman had pioneered the concept of the factory village. He provided housing, education, and medical care for his workers, of a standard surpassing anything of the time. His essay “On the Perfectibility of Human Nature” was required reading in my Natural Sciences course.

  In those days at Oxford, the social roost was ruled by an elect spawned of the wealthiest and most ancient families, who possessed or affected the following constellation of virtues: athletic prowess, especially if acquired without apparent effort; capacity for alcohol; reckless physical daring, particularly involving horses, heights or motor cars; contempt for all affairs of religion, politics or commerce; and a withering disdain for academia and academic achievement. The scions of this elite by no means despised Hitler; many applauded the Munich Pact of 1938. They viewed with scorn the “red” opponents of appeasement. In their eyes, Churchill was little better—an arch-conservative jingoist and warmonger.

  I hated these bastards. So did Stein. At Winchester he had been famous for abhorring the twentieth century. He refused to learn to drive. He believed in reincarnation. Asked what religion he followed, he answered, “Hindu.” He spoke and read French, German and Italian and could translate classical Greek and Latin as fast as he could read them. The more anti-Semitism he observed in government and in the press, however, the more he identified with his co-religionists and the more outspoken he became on their behalf. He penned letters to the editor; he wrote cheques to all sorts of causes. By the time I reached Oxford, Stein was reading six newspapers a day. I know because he sent me down to the newsagent to pick them up. Stein demonstrated with the Communists outside Parliament. He was arrested. In the late thirties, as I said, there was tremendous pro-German and pro–National Socialist feeling in England. Stein’s hair was too long, his dress too unkempt. He was “not the right sort.” Rumours began. Stein laughed them off, declaring that such calumnies were the same as those levelled against Socrates—inventing new gods and corrupting the young.

  Stein’s downfall came about because of an undergraduate I shall call B. (B., a fine rugby wing, became a Royal Marine and was killed piloting an assault craft at Gold Beach on D-Day, 6 June 1944.) B. fell in love with Stein. But he never told him. He confined his passion to entries in his private diary, no doubt terrified of the consequences should he dare act upon his impulses. Somehow B.’s father, a prominent solicitor, learnt of this. The next thing anyone knew, two police inspectors appeared at Stein’s door. Stein assumed that his offence was connected to his activities on behalf of refugee Jews.

  “It’s the Amendment Act,” said the officers.

  This was a charge of “gross indecencies” and “solicitation of unnatural vice.” Stein was arrested for having seduced a boy he had never met. In the end, the charges were dropped for want of evidence. Not, however, before Stein had become notorious. In those days such a scandal might have been weathered by a tenured don; for a tutor it was fatal.

  Worse were the consequences for Stein’s novel. B.’s father, it seems, was not content with running Stein out of Oxford; he made it his business to finish him in the world of letters as well. At that time, there were only a handful of houses with the intrepidity to publish the type of novel Stein was writing; it was no chore for B.’s father to persuade them of the inadvisability of such a course. Stein went to the man and confronted him. I went with him to back him up. This was at B.’s father’s offices in Great Titchfield Street. The old man had us thrown out.

  Throughout it all, Stein affected to be aloof and amused. But we who knew him could see that he took the affair hard—the meanness of it and the bitter, small-minded malice. “It’s literature’s loss,” declared one of our fellow pupils one night in Stein’s rooms.

  Stein laughed. “Not to mention England’s.”

  Of course none of us had read his manuscript. Stein had shown it to no one.

  The caucus broke up. We students felt like the disciples at Gethsemane. When Stein asked me to stick around, I imagined he wished to discuss my work in Milton, which was faltering. The rooms cleared out. Stein poured sherry.

  “Chap, would you consider taking a squint at my manuscript?”

  I was speechless.

  “It would have to be tonight,” said Stein. “You’ll need to read it here. I have no other copy, and I can’t let you take the pages away.”

  It would be my privilege, I said. I only hoped I’d prove worthy.

  “Don’t disparage your capacity, Chap. You’ve a keen mind. I can think of no one w
hose opinion I should value more.”

  I stayed up all night. I read the manuscript straight through, returning to critical passages twice and even three times. The book was far more political than sexual. It was Swift, not Rabelais. Stein’s reach was fearless; the work bore ambition beyond anything I had anticipated. And it was funny. I was terrified of offering some boneheaded critique, particularly now that Stein had demonstrated such faith in me. The tower bell tolled six; I asked Stein if I could have the rest of the morning to order my thoughts. “No,” he said. “It has to be now.”

  We walked down by the river. I proffered reams of conventional praise. Stein chafed. He was getting angry. We had stopped at a bench beneath a row of hornbeam trees. Stein drew on his dead-coals pipe. I took a breath.

  “The book is too good, Stein. Too true, too brave. Too far ahead of anything the public will tolerate. No publisher will have the guts to bring it out, and if they did, the critics would savage it and crucify you.”

  I had dreaded offering this assessment, which I was certain was accurate and which I feared would devastate Stein. Instead, he threw back his head and loosed a great, roaring whoop. “Chapman, my friend, let’s get bloody, stinking pissed!”

  My review, it turned out, had been precisely what Stein had hoped for.

  “By God, if you had offered tamer praise, I’d have leapt in the flipping river.”

  I couldn’t get drunk with Stein that day; I had two examinations and a rowing club meeting to attend. “Why,” I asked him, “did you need me to read this so fast?”

  “Because,” he said, “I’ve joined the army.”

  He took the train to Aldershot that afternoon. The date was February 1939. War with Hitler was only half a year away.

  4

  STEIN ENLISTED as a private soldier but was soon summoned forth and commissioned. The army assigned him to the Royal Horse Artillery, the smartest of the gunnery regiments. We celebrated one night in late summer at a pub called the Melbourne in Knightsbridge; Jock with his sweetheart, Sheila, I with Jock’s sister Rose. Stein was fresh out of OCTU—Officer Cadet Training Unit—at Sandhurst. He looked fit and military in his RHA uniform with its single second lieutenant’s pip.