Time at War Read Online Free PDF Page A

and our old Nanny, who was now housekeeper and cook, would be staying in a small holiday house on the north Cornwall coast, and I said I would join them there. I wrote – ‘Eventually one will have to look at the world objectively and to decide what is to be one’s relation to it; whether to fight the horror or run from it; to search for perfection in the solitude of one’s own beliefs, or in the greater struggle for external fulfilment. At the moment however everything is unkindly settled for me, and thus all I can do is sulk or giggle’
    In Cornwall we swam and surfed and picnicked and climbed about on the rocks; we played cards in the evening; we had a good time. I was among people with whom I had spent the best part of my life and whom I loved. But it seemed that we did not quite know what to say to each other about my going off to war: what can one say? My aunt wrote in her diary that I was defensive about my father and was ‘shatteringly crude and offensive about Christ’. Perhaps it was not possible for me after all just to sulk or giggle.
    One of the last things I did before embarking on the troopship at Liverpool was to go with my grandmother to the Home Office and put in a request to a high-up official that my father should be released from prison; he could surely, we argued, no longer be considered a security risk. And he had phlebitis, which was getting worse, and his doctor had said that without a reasonable chance of exercise he might die. Watching the Home Office official, I felt I could see the levers of his mind clicking this wayand that; but whether to the unlocking of prison doors or not I could not tell. My grandmother said, ‘This is his son who is going off to war.’ I wondered— Could it make any difference, my going off to war?

3
    The war in North Africa had been over for some months. The British and Americans had landed at Casablanca, Oran and Algiers in November 1942, and had headed east to link up with the advance of the British across the desert in the west after the victory at El Alamein in October. Hitler had declared war on America in December 1941 at the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; for a year the Americans had concentrated on fighting the Japanese in the Pacific. They had then, however, wanted to get a foothold in the war across the Atlantic. By this time the enemy in North Africa consisted almost entirely of Germans: the Italians had faded away after defeats by the British in the two previous years and the German Afrika Korps under Rommel had taken over.
    In May 1943 the Allied armies advancing from east and west met in Tunisia and the Germans surrendered en masse. In July Sicily was invaded, where the opposition was again mainly German. By the end of August Sicily had been cleared and the question was being debated among Allied leaders about whether, and how, Italy should be invaded. This was when my group of Rifle Brigade and KRRC officer reinforcements were setting out from Liverpool.
    We seemed to sail far out into the Atlantic; where on earth could we be going? No one of course had told us: this was the style of wartime information. There were the inevitable rumours – we were going round the Cape of Good Hope; we were to join up with another convoy coming from America. This guess appeared to be correct, because one day there were suddenly other ships around us. Then someone said we must be in the Bay of Biscay because it was so rough; and one by one figures disappeared from the breakfast table, leaving myself and one or two other sturdy gluttons to consume their leftovers: bacon and eggs, bowls of fresh fruit that had not been seen in Britain for two or three years. Our ship, the
Vollendam,
was Dutch and had recently been to New York, where it had stocked up with provisions. I wrote to my sister ‘I suffer more from being vomited against than vomiting.’
    We were discouraged from working off our self-indulgence on deck