Then there appeared a further item in the Eighth Army News telling of crowds in London marching round Parliament Square and chanting ‘We want Mosley’ and ‘Put him back’. So what did they want him for — to lynch him? In my diary I launched a tirade — ‘People are either hollow or heavy wet sludge. What hope can there be for the world if Englishmen are thus, and one can find no one better than an Englishman?’
My toothache had gone, but I had acquired a festering raw patch on the sole of my foot which I took to be psychosomatic. Perhaps I would get gangrene and would not need to go to a prison camp after all.
A bunch of letters had caught up with me from my sister. In them she told me of the furore surrounding my father’s release from prison. There were graffiti everywhere demanding ‘Put Mosley back in gaol’. This must have been hard for my sister doing war work in her small-arms factory. But she was full of plans for getting the family back together again. She said that our father had gone to stay at a secret address to escape from demonstrators and the press. In order that I could write to him she would tell me where he was in code, which she hoped I would be as clever at deciphering as she had been about ‘the home of Scarlett O’Hara’. He had gone to stay with ‘a woman’ — ‘Woman’ being the Mitford nickname for one of Diana’s sisters. My sister also told of the night bombing of London that had started up again (‘all hell is let loose when the barrage starts up’); and of a violent quarrel between our two aunts, Irene and Baba, who were now totally not on speaking terms and looked like being so for ever. ‘The GREAT ROW twixt aunts goes drearily on, despite my gigantic efforts to achieve understanding. It is all so petty and futile, but neither will retract or climb down.’ She told how she had taken one of her factory workmates to have coffee with my Aunt Irene (‘Nina’) who was now staying at the Dorchester Hotel, her house in Regent’s Park having been bombed. The meeting went well — ‘Auntie was superb, and Joyce came away saying “any aunt of yours would have to be a sport after all”.’
I went with my would-be London Irish friend into Bari, which I said was like ‘a dirty edition of Bournemouth’. But we found there a concert performance of Tosca, and I rhapsodised — ‘You sang as I have never heard anyone sing before. It was not your voice, not the great mastery of technique: just the throbbing rise and fall of the waves, and the beat of your burning tears.’ Shortly before this I had written in my diary — ‘I would like to know how well I can write.’ Also — ‘I would like to know how original and imaginative I am compared to the very brilliant.’ Well, I was only twenty.
One of our last resting places before we reached the London Irish Rifles was at Termoli, where I sat with my back against a medieval tower, and looked at the ‘pale frail metallic misty hardness of the sea’ and read T. S. Eliot. I wrote, ‘I find him so infinitely more satisfying than the old Zephir-Lethe boys. He has a wonderful ability to make the reader’s mind dance to his song, to become part of it, to think in its terms, to lose itself in his eternity of a serene and yet imminent unreality — unreality of atmosphere, while describing the very real — an artistic achievement of the very highest.’ Well, I was trying.
And then: ‘In even the most intelligent people I meet, or whose books I read, there is a complete lack of unity in behaviour and thought, in faith and reason.’ Indeed, true enough.
So far we had travelled up through Italy by train, which I described to my sister as ‘unutterable confusion — enormous pregnant Italian matrons clambering into cattle-trucks and being ejected by outraged British sergeant-majors; tiny children picking the pockets of half-witted Americans chewing gum; showers of rotten oranges hurled at any Italian soldier daring to appear in uniform. And in the middle of it all me — with an Italian girl aged 12 with tremendous breasts and false teeth on one side, and on the other an Indian who — oh God! — has begun to dribble.’
So I and my friend decided to hitch-hike the rest of the way to the front. At the last transit camp at which we stopped before reaching the London Irish Rifles, on the adjutant’s desk as I clocked in there was a copy of the Eighth Army News with the headlines (even here!) on the continuing protests about the release from prison of my father. When I gave my name to the adjutant he said without looking up — ‘Not any relation to that bastard?’ I said, Tes, actually.’ He said quickly, ‘My dear fellow, I’m so frightfully sorry!’ I thought — Well after all there’s not much wrong with Englishmen.
But what about the London Irish?
4
The 2nd Battalion of the London Irish Rifles was part of the Irish Brigade, along with the 1st Royal Irish Fusiliers and the 6th Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers. The Brigade had come into being in January 1942 on the orders of Winston Churchill, who wanted to create a force in which men from all over Ireland could serve. The idea had come up against opposition from the government of Northern Ireland, who pointed out that there had been an Irish Brigade who had fought for the French against the English in the seventeenth century; also that the name would cause trouble now with the Irish Republic, Eire, which was neutral in the present war. Churchill insisted and the Brigade was formed.
The London Irish Rifles had been a territorial regiment before the war and at the time of the Munich crisis of 1938 the 2nd Battalion had been added to the 1st. By 1943 the 2nd LIR consisted of Irish from the North and volunteers from the South; also others from anywhere that it had picked up on the way. As part of the Irish Brigade the 2nd LIR had landed at Algiers in November 1942 and had been involved in the heavy fighting in the mountains that winter until the German surrender at Tunis in May 1943. They were then part of the army that invaded and cleared Sicily in July. They sailed for Italy in September 1943, landing first at Taranto and then moving on by sea up the eastern coast to Termoli, which I was to find such a haven of peace a few weeks later. In October Termoli was being heavily defended at the eastern end of the German Winter Gustav Line. The 2nd London Irish joined in the fighting and Termoli was taken. From there they moved by land up the coast, overcoming strong opposition at the Trigno and the Sangro rivers. But with the success of all this the Irish Brigade as part of the Eighth Army in the east was finding itself dangerously ahead of the Allied Fifth Army on their western flank. The 2nd LIR were moved to what was supposed to be a more stable position in the central mountains. But there Allied troops were very thin on the ground and no one knew much about what the Germans were up to; though it was evident they were not simply retreating. Also it had begun to snow, was very cold, and the London Irish were equipped with no winter clothing.
I finally reached the rear echelons of the battalion on Christmas Eve 1943 in a mountain village called Pietro Montecorvino. I, aged twenty, and with no war experience, was due to take charge of a platoon of men mostly considerably older than myself who had been fighting for a year through North Africa, Sicily, and a third of the way up Italy, and were exhausted. The Rifle Brigade friend I had been travelling with was posted to a company in another village. So for the first time I was away from anyone I had been friends with.
The first thing that happened to me as I reported for duty at the adjutant’s office was that my kitbag with all my own warm clothing in it was stolen; I had left it propped against an outside wall. I felt this was a calamity worse than my toothache; more desperate than my closeness to the front line. I was told that anything left lying about was pinched in a flash by the impoverished villagers. I could understand this, but could also understand for a moment the urge that must have come upon some Germans, for instance, in occupied countries to take hostages and say — ‘Give us back our property or we will shoot you one by one.’ It was no consolation to tell myself that at least now, with no winter clothing, I would be in the same situation as my men.