news/editorial

9 November 2014 News/Editorial

After yet another frustrating fishing week, too much water and too few fish, I hope it is forgivable, on this Remembrance Sunday 100 years after the First War began, to look away from the river and tell a sad story of WW2, no doubt just one of millions such.

I returned this morning from Coldstream’s War Memorial, on which is inscribed, amongst too many others in this small Borders town, under those who fell 1939-1945, the following:

Home, The Hon George D F/O

Uncle George, my father’s younger brother, and another Uncle, William, takes up the story from his autobiography.

“The last child, George, arrived at Hirsel two years later, introduced by Dr Fisher. In due course, he travelled down to England for his education, but he never went to Oxford as his brothers had, because, at the conclusion of his time at Eton, he went straight into the Air Force, only to be lost in 1942 while training off the coast of Canada. Because he was the youngest, and without much doubt the most attractive of the brood, his disappearance struck my parents very hard. Yet he was hardly ever mentioned in the family thereafter. This may sound strange, I concede, but is not so in my family. The fact that we did not discuss his death did not mean we had forgotten him. Quite the reverse. Somehow, by some strange process, we succeeded, through our reticence, in keeping him alive.

I saw him last in Torquay, I dressed as a private soldier, he in Air Force uniform, before he went to do his training in Vancouver Island. From my billet down in Kingsbridge, I reported to my parents on his cheerfulness and general well being, and suggested to them that, in Coastal Command, for which he was training, he might have a chance of coming through the War in one piece.

Three months later, word came through that he was missing. Evidently, fog or some Pacific storm had swallowed up all the planes in his training flight, and they had not returned to base.

I do not think of him in that predicament, however. I remember him as I last saw him, smiling goodbye in a Torquay street, his forage cap set at a jaunty angle.

No doubt my father would remember him as he saw him on his final leave, walking down towards the lake with Mr Collingwood, the butler, talking sixteen to the dozen, disappearing into a hide with his camera, and then dispatching his companion back towards the house, coat-tails flapping in the wind, still talking, so that the Great Crested Grebe would think that George was with him still, because birds cannot count.

I used this portrait of him in my play The Dame of Sark when Colonel Von Schmettau, German Commandant of Guernsey, told his prisoner of his last meeting with his youngest son, killed on the Russian front, and proudly showed the Dame a photograph of a Great Crested Grebe.

When I think of George’s death, I think too, of a line of Siegfried Sassoon’s, brought to my attention in another context:

“Remember this one afternoon in Spring

When your own child looks down and makes your sad heart sing””

George and his flight, 72 years later, have never been found.