The American war correspondent and photographer Lee Miller wandered into my first book by accident, and I couldn’t resist bringing her back: Charlie seems attracted to independent women. Contemporaries still talk of the Lee Miller cocktail she lugged around the Continent in jerrycans: it consisted of anything alcoholic she could get, poured into an empty petrol can, and given a good shake. When she reached Munich she billeted in Adolf Hitler’s apartment with her pal Dave Scherman. They bathed in Hitler’s bath, and used the telephone there to call the Hitler house at Berchtesgaden before it fell to the Allies. The call was answered, but they didn’t get the quote they asked for. My favourite photograph of her is of her in that bath – her battered combat boots alongside. She had been desperate to change her jeep, Hussar, for a larger more comfortable staff car, and eventually Dave did a deal for one. In a new Chevrolet she travelled through Germany chronicling the collapse and aftermath of resistance, into Denmark and through Austria and Hungary – where she was arrested by Russian troops – and into Romania. That’s where she stopped.
I borrowed James Stewart for a few hours: he won’t mind. He had a pawky sense of humour, and a distinguished war record as a bomber pilot. Sorry, Jimmy. As a film actor his range was wider, even, than those he rode in some of the cowboy leads he made so famous.
Soldiers’ graffiti have been around for a couple of thousand years, but World War Two finally legitimized them. The conquering armies in the West – German, Russian, American, Italian or British – daubed every town they passed through. Allied soldiers used their unit signs or nicknames . . . and often topped them off with a humorous put-down, aimed at the friendly units that followed them. The Germans often used quotations from Hitler’s speeches. The Brits, in particular, were also quite keen on comedians’ catchphrases – like Tommy Handley and the mob from ITMA. I suppose that that says something about us. The British Highland Division was so notorious for signing the buildings they knocked over, and roads they wrecked, that other divisions of the Allied armies gave them the nickname the Highway Decorators. You can still see the HD sign which recorded their march on buildings in Italy, France and the Low Countries, although the paint fades with weather and the years. It is worth while reflecting the next time you overreact to the activities of a teenager with a paint spray can that he is only taking forward an art form from his grandfather or great-grandfather’s generations. Charlie says it all the time – what goes around, comes around.
Shining massed searchlights against a low cloud base in order to produce an artificial daylight did occur, and was known ruefully as ‘Monty’s Moonlight’, although Bernard Montgomery was probably not its originating genius – I wonder who was.
My parents’ generation never used words like Spitfire, Lancaster or Mosquito. For them the aeroplanes were Spits, Lancs and Mossies. Possibly the more homely contractions made the killing they had to do with them easier to bear. Halifax bombers and transports, such as flew from Tempsford, were Hallibags, and Typhoon ground-attack fighters – like the one that the Fifer, Ross, broke – were Tiffies. Sherman tanks were Ronsons, but that was for another reason: too often the petrol-engined vehicles burned like the cigarette lighters they were named for. Those that burned their crews were said to have brewed up . . . just like making a pot of tea. Today’s military has not moved away from the practice of having homely, friendly phrases to describe the most terrible of events. By way of a contrast, our stockbrokers and white-collar managers infuse their patois with aggressive and macho phrases that attempt to associate their office politics with trench warfare. Poor fools; if only they knew.
Not long ago some people in Glasgow opened a long-unused door on a floor above an amusement arcade on the Trongate, and found themselves standing in a music hall that had been lost since 1938. They had rediscovered the Britannia Panopticon, on whose stage an uncertain Stan Laurel had taken his first steps to fame in 1906. It had also offered an English actor named Archie Leach an early taste of the footlights. A society, the Britannia Panopticon Trust, has been formed to preserve and restore it, and some guided tours have been carried out. If that’s your bag, try the internet. Maybe, in the slipstream of a generation that has pushed stand-up comedy back into the limelight, the Panopticon’s time has come round again.
My father marched with the Eighth Army: he told me about how he and his peers would retune British forces radios to pick up German broadcasts, particularly in order to listen to ‘Lili Marleen’ sung by Lale Andersen in its original lippy German: I never hear the recording without thinking of him. Many of the popular British and American chanteuses of the time recorded cover versions, but they couldn’t reproduce Lale’s husky, haunted tone.
I first came across the remarkable Ross rifle when I was living in Easter Ross, and shooting targets at an old quarry with the Tain Rifle and Pistol Club, in the days of innocence before Dunblane. One Saturday the Secretary, John Macrae, stopped me by the boot of his car, and reverently began to unwrap a rifle from yards of velvet material. He asked me, Have you
