A Very Dangerous Man

A VERY DANGEROUS MAN BEGINNINGS In 1939 the prospect of an invasion along the Sussex coastal plain persuaded my parents to send me away to boarding school. We lived outside the city of Chichester. I was five years old. At Branksome Hilders, a prep school near Haslemere in Surrey, ’in the hills’ beyond the South Downs, I would be safe. Boarding schools in those days were reckoned to provide the best preparation for life. The regime ‘toughened you up’ made you self-sufficient and self reliant. I belonged to the generation that encouraged a stiff upper lip. My abrupt departure at an early age felt like an amputation. The notion of home vanished, the trunk forever packed, unpacked and re-packed, a portable school boy’s coffin. Being parents did not come easy to my mother and father. I remembered my father as passive, taciturn and private. We always shook hands as though we had just been introduced. I knew little about him. When he grew older I hoped he might open up and tell me more about his life. One of the pleasures for me as a young vicar would be visiting residential homes and listening to stories of elderly women describing high points in their lives, such as seeing Queen Victoria stopping at Mitcham Junction in the Royal Train (‘a grumpy little old woman!’). Talking about the past did not interest my father and he vouchsafed nothing about himself. My own researches revealed he had been brought up in a seventeenth century manor house, Croesnewyd Hall near Wrexham, rented by my grandfather, a gentleman 1 farmer who late in life married a much younger woman and started a family. My father’s sister died young. His brother Sidney became the black sheep of the family. I remember Sidney having a broad Lancashire accent. Being the older brother he inherited the family fortune which he then squandered on gambling, ending his life as a night watchman at Blackpool Bus Station. My mother particularly resented him selling off the furniture at Croesnewyd to pay his debts. ‘He’s a ne’er do well!’ she told me. Years later I visited his widow, then living on a Blackpool housing estate. Her first words on opening the door to me were: ‘If you’ve come for money there isn’t any! And what I’ve got I’m leaving to a cat’s home!’ Then she shut the door in my face. My father was educated at home before going to Cranwell in 1916, then on to a training school for the Royal Naval Air Reserve. I came across a large heavy bible printed in 1868 and showed it to my father. He paused for a long time before saying: ‘We used to have prayers with the servants every morning.’ And that was all I ever got out of him. Cars and motor boats were my father’s sole passion. He described himself as a garage proprietor and marine engineer. Nothing pleased him more that making engines purr and run smoothly. He owned a garage in Chichester. With a small private income he had no interest in making money. The garage became his life. Under a snapshot of my father bending over the bonnet of a Morris 8 my mother’s caption reads: ‘Bill doing the usual.’ My mother was energetic, lively and gregarious, the oldest of a family of three sisters and one brother. Her father, a farm manager, died young leaving my grandmother to bring up the family at Tangmere near Chichester. It seems Grandfather Rusbridger had been a 2 ‘ne’er do well’ like my Uncle Sidney. With some family money my mother, her sisters and brother were educated privately. My uncle inherited a farm and my aunts on leaving school became domestic companions, not quite members of the family, but more than just nannies. The family revolved round Grandmother Rusbridger and I became her first and favourite grandchild. She liked my father, respecting his reticence and good manners. After marriage my mother designed an unusual three bed-roomed house with a spacious south-facing sitting room and a large kitchen set in an acre of woodland two miles outside Chichester. If the family grew, the house could be extended. This did not happen. I remained the only child. Temperamentally my parents were ill matched. My mother craved more out of life. She loved socializing, especially with male company. Even after I was born and up to 1939, my parents went on lengthy driving tours all over Europe with two close friends who were my godfathers. A succession of nannies looked after me while they were gone. Sometimes I stayed with Grandmother Rusbridger. My aunt Anne, her youngest daughter, enjoyed telling me later that the first time my parents delivered me to her house I stared at everyone and wet my trousers. Another family memory, gleefully narrated by my mother, involved my christening. Preparations were made and at the party before the service drinks flowed until my parents realized they were running late. Everyone rushed to the church. They arrived, settled down and suddenly looked at each other: ‘Where’s the baby?’ Despite being passed around like a parcel from my grandmother to my aunts as they began to marry and have families of their own I preferred not being at home. I loved my 3 grandmother, patient, kindly, old-fashioned and sometimes stern. I felt safe with her as she taught me how to tie my shoe-laces and knot my tie. At Christmas the whole family would gather at Hunston Manor, a sixteenth century modest manor house owned by the Church Commissioners along with the farm that went with it. My uncle was the tenant farmer. No one went to church. Sitting under the big dining room table while everyone played roulette I would try and match the legs with the owners. Until leaving Chichester in 1957 my happiest memories were visiting my aunts and uncles. I never enjoyed returning home. What was there to come home to? War upset our fragile family unit. My father joined the Royal Naval Voluntary Reserve. He sailed up and down the English Channel in Motor Torpedo boats and had particular responsibility for ensuring the boats’ engines functioned at their best. Emotionally he had always been absent from home, now he was physically absent. My mother took over the business and ran the car as a hospital taxi. This ensured she could buy fuel, then heavily rationed, and take to the hills with me in the event of an invasion. Being the youngest at Branksome Hilders I became a target for bullies. A dormitory fight broke out in my first week and the noise attracted the attention of the headmaster. ‘What’s going on?’ he growled. ‘It was Reeves,’ they all chorused. He took me to his study and gave me a walloping. My eyes were full with the pain, but I had learnt not to cry. No one likes a cry baby. When I returned to bed my leopard was missing. This small stuffed toy was precious. It had been with me for as long as I could remember. Thrown out of the window it was never found. 4 The headmaster Sidney Smith and his wife were in loco parentis, but parenting sixty small boys is impossible. Enforcing discipline and obedience – yes; care and attention to their needs – no. This upbringing instilled in me suspicion of father figures. Even bishops with their croziers presenting themselves as caring Fathers in God yet any misconduct and you get a walloping. But I anticipate. Cubs and scouts were firmly on the school agenda. Sidney Smith and his wife were more frequently in scouts uniform that anything else, both bristling with badges, whistles and woggles. The high point of our scouting activities was the annual camp at Corfe Castle near Swanage. The scout masters insisted that each morning the boys take off their pyjamas and roll in the dew, carefully avoiding cow pats and prickles. To embarrass us further a troop of girl guides some yards down the hill giggled at our mortification. The war barely impinged on school life. Occasionally at morning prayers a notice would be given out about the war’s progress. The headmaster officiated in a faded Oxford MA gown, green with age. The gown signified something important but I never understood what. My first experience of religion - a hymn, a reading and some prayers – was intimidating. The headmaster had a plentiful supply of chalk which he regularly hurled at any boy who offended with some untoward noise. A pile of hymnbooks were at hand to deal with more serious disruptions. Back home in Chichester life felt quite different. The peaceful cathedral city had become a sensitive military zone, the hub of a network of airfields including Tangmere and Thorney Island and airstrips at Westhampnett, Merstham and Selsey. The threat of invasion hung over the city for three years. 5 My mother managed her life and mine efficiently in the school holidays. We quickly got used to rationing, queuing and carrying identity cards. Gasmasks were issued to every household, but we never used them. Curtains had to be lined with heavy dark material to ensure complete ‘black out’ at night. My father and various uncles built an air-shelter, a ‘dug-out’, in the garden. When the air raid sirens blared we were supposed to leave the house and hide in the dug-out. We used the dank musty shelter once. With nowhere to sit and no light my mother declared: ‘If we are going to die then we may as well die in comfort!’ and we returned to the house.

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