Bog Myrtle & Peat

By mid-October 1943, my grandfather had moved with his squadron to Sicily. Flying spitfires from an airstrip in the shadow of Mount Etna, he led a number of raids into Italy to disrupt troops and supplies as they frantically attempted to eject the Allied invaders. During one of these sorties, he became lost and detached from the other spitfires in his section. It was obviously time to return to base, but passing over a range of low hills, he discovered a convoy of Italian infantry marching along the highway, led by an officer on a pure white horse. It was a chance encounter; a total fluke. But responding to training laid down by three years of combat experience, my grandfather could not pass up the opportunity to attack. He turned his aeroplane and filled the roadway with machinegun fire. In a matter of minutes, he’d made three passes back and forth across the convoy and churned those soldiers into a chaos of blood and fragments. As he turned for home, he caught sight of the officer’s white horse thrashing in red foam upon the highway, surrounded by a mess of broken men. They had never stood a chance.

My grandfather told that story to his son – the boy who would later become my uncle. And deafened by the impact of this horror, my uncle asked his father how it felt to singlehandedly destroy a column of almost defenceless men. My grandfather only replied – “well, it was a pity about the horse”.

When I recently wrote about Henry Williamson, I was downright dismissive of his autobiographical novels. I reckoned that “they don’t contain much to interest a modern reader”, and I was rightly challenged on this point. In particular, I’m grateful to Roderick Leslie, TJBaner and Harry Turner for getting in touch. It’s fair to say that I haven’t read enough of Williamson’s work to speak with authority one way or another, and I am already moving to amend that. But they say the best time to publish a piece of writing is a month after you’ve published it – that way, you can benefit from corrections suggested by a range of interested and interesting readers. And I regret this error in particular because having dismissed Williamson’s autobiographical work, I failed to grasp the enormity of his experiences in the First World War – experiences which shaped the man who would ultimately support fascism.

Nowadays, we can find it hard to understand men who have been scarred by conflict. And I draw on the example of my own grandfather because only a small number of his memories survive within our family, often disguised as expressions of bravado or cruelty. He rarely spoke about his experiences, and he could be oddly mercurial when official historians approached him for interviews in later life. He might arrange to have them over, then announce after ten minutes of conversation that he was going away for three days. At times he would refuse to respond to requests for information, then for no reason he would invite academics and historians to visit. They’d arrive with their notebooks ready, then realise with a sag of disappointment that he only wanted to talk about cattle, or cars, or whatever had popped into his head. He could be ferocious and contradictory – and just when it seemed that he would burst with rage or delight, he would fall into terrifying silence. 

After several of his uncles were killed in a single week during the First World War, my grandfather was raised by a mass of widowed aunts. As they died, he inherited their confused but not inconsiderable legacies. So in a world of farmers, he became wealthy – and that wealth gave him a freedom to act as he chose in the world. From what I’ve heard, it’s clear that he was the kind of child who would pull the wings off flies, or scorch ants with a magnifying glass – he often behaved like a bully, insecure and spoiled by alternating periods of affection and neglect as a child. Falling ill at the age of fourteen, he was sent away from home and incarcerated in a TB ward in the Swiss Alps for two years, surrounded by dead and dying invalids while his friends were growing into men. Even that would have been enough to unsettle his understanding of the world, but having established a reputation for heroism during the war, wealth and celebrity allowed him to operate with impunity. He was excused many of his most outrageous quirks on account of the trauma he’d experienced, and it’s reasonable to wonder if the role of “eccentric hero” was a mask which allowed him reverberate and magnify his failings. 

These loud, conflicting influences played across a man who seems to have been damaged not only during the war but in a thousand strange ways before Hitler ever came to power. Even now, I’m not sure how to feel about him. He left a great deal of bitterness in his wake, and in the clamour of obituaries and memorials which followed his death, I felt proud to be his grandson. But my childish pride left a bad taste in the mouths of various family members – a great aunt argued that my grandfather was only a victim of circumstance; that I or anybody would have done the same in his position. A family friend explained that those pilots didn’t know they were heroes until we pressed the title upon them afterwards – and crucially, he believed that the war simply allowed my grandfather to realise his inner monstrosities. A dozen different interpretations spilled out during those conversations; the consequence of deep consideration and hurt, measured against a need to understand a bloody difficult man. Every single explanation warrants consideration and further thought – but more than anything, I was impressed by how deeply scarred my family had been by my grandfather’s life and legacy.

I will never know how far we can blame the Battle of Britain for my grandfather’s behaviour, any more than we can blame Flanders for Henry Williamson’s fascism. War is an outrageous maker of monsters, but while the comparison feels trite, even my own peace-time personality is twisted and battered by tiny motes of success and failure. I even carry the load and influence of my grandfather’s war, and it’s clear that every one of us is differently warped by our experience of life. But if we are all a compromise between who we are and what we do, it becomes clear that while the First World War shaped Henry Williamson, it still does not completely explain his actions thereafter. Reading hard in Williamson’s direction, I understand that my first article was too brief and too glib to cover the detail usefully – but like all the best “nature writing”, my encounter with Tarka the Otter has begun to ask questions which extend far beyond the belving of hounds and the babbling streams of Devon.

Picture: My Grandfather as AAF Flight Lieutenant, 603 (City of Edinburgh) Squadron, Turnhouse, March 1940.