I looked at the sepia photo of Reg Cavendish — Charlie’s son — who looked down from the top of the writing cabinet in one of those boat-shaped forage caps that we had all looked so silly in. I remember the day Reg got that hat. He was a tall gangling boy with ginger hair that he held lowered in sympathy with the more stunted members of the human race. He was the brightest pupil in the sixth form but was never made a prefect because, ‘…there’s such a thing as being too gentle Cavendish and it’s called slackness.’ Reg just smiled a small smile, he wasn’t a great talker. That’s why we were such inseparable friends I suppose — I was the most vociferous boy there — when Reg was with me he wasn’t required to say much.
Reg was most at home in the country, he knew about cumulonimbus and isobars and could tell a Song Thrush from a Fieldfare at fifty yards, which is pretty impressive if you can’t tell a Barn-Owl from a Buzzard. Reg knew about moles and foxes and Latin names of wild flowers. Reg came to terms with life in the army, he quietly did everything better than anyone else. Reg’s style of leadership was to be out in front where things were hardest and most dangerous and he used firepower with the same economy that he used words. Reg didn’t have to convert to the idea of airborne warfare, he’d never known any other kind. Dropping out of an aeroplane as an overture to battle was as natural as pipeclayed breeches, burnished firelocks and heel-balled cartridge boxes had been to other soldiers in other times.
He became Regimental Sergeant Major Cavendish; one of the youngest RSMs in the British Army during the Tunisian campaign when the parachute brigade was used as infantry. It was here he got the nickname ‘Springer’.
In the fighting around ‘Longstop’—the most costly of the whole campaign — Reg was in a 15-cwt lorry that lost its way while in convoy, went off the road and struck a mine. The German engineers had sown s-mines around the big ones. As the soldiers jumped down these leapt high in the air and exploded metal ball-bearings. The Afrika Korps put mortar fire amongst the flashes and screams as dawn came.
It’s hot in Tunisia even in May and the heights of Longstop Hill housed a thousand keen German eyes. The bangs and smack of grenade and mortar rolled across the slopes and so did the sweet smell of hot dead flesh. Big black sated flies hovered and waited for Von Arnim’s mortars to search them out and convert them to carrion. Men died all day. Some died very quickly, some took an infinite time and some slipped into impercipient dolour and came to a very private arrangement with death. Wince, writhe or ease a cramped foot, reach for a hard-tack biscuit, stifle blood, swat a dozen flies on your eyelid, touch the hot metal of your gun, these were things men did a finger- squeeze before they died. ‘We went to ground like mouldwarps,’ Reg said.
Slowly inch by inch it became night. A man moved but did not die. The shattered group dragged their desiccated bodies out of the moulds they had formed in the dirty sand and shuffled off, without saliva enough to spit. All the survivors had to do was walk back to their lines through a minefield. Only Reg and two lance-corporals made it. They got promotion and a 48-hour pass.
By the July of 1943 there was a change in Reg. His eyes watched over your shoulder and he looked at the ground too much. Reg had seen a lot of combat. Reg was part of the airborne attack against Catania in that July. They were blasted out of the sky in error by the Allied Fleet. He didn’t need his parachute that night, his Dakota crashed. Before the night was over Reg had gained two superficial wounds, a DCM and a twitching muscle near his left eye. They sent him on leave in Tunisia that Autumn. By now he looked nearer 40 than 20, seldom smiled and spent all his leave writing next-of-kin letters.
It was one A.M. on D-day that Reg dropped into the River Dives in full equipment. He got fifty men and an officer through chest-deep swamp and undergrowth by hitting the slowest. He wasn’t a lot of fun by now. He was tense and irritable and spent every minute of every leave visiting the relatives of the dead. I told him it wasn’t doing any good. He had developed a stammer and his coordination wasn’t all it should be. ‘Mind your own business,’ he said, so we went to see the relatives. Hollow houses and gutted people were at both ends of dirty blacked-out trains.
‘Springer’ Cavendish still survived, soldiers were still drawing lots to go in his aircraft, his operations, his ‘stick’. ‘Springer’; Reg was you see. Always Springer survived and what’s more he brought others back with him like the time he brought back a song-bird in a cage bent almost flat. They were both whistling.
When, some weeks after Arnhem had grown quiet, Reg and four other airborne soldiers paddled across the lower Rhine in a Wehrmacht inflatable boat the 1st Airborne knew it had lost 7,605 soldiers of the 10,000 who had gone in. It seemed as though Reg was indestructible. He wasn’t. A rations lorry hit Reg as he was coming out of the Montgomery Club in Brussels. It was four days before VE day.
The Adjutant of Reg’s unit phoned me. What should he tell Reg’s father? Should he record it as it was? He could hardly believe it himself. He said that Reg was with him when he first jumped. He said it three times. I was going to London that night. I said I’d tell his father.
The last time we had seen anything on this sort of scale was when the Home Office pulled in all aliens during the war. At that time Olympia was used to house them before they were moved to the Isle of Man. But then there had been no need to keep them separate, and the numbers were kept down by the movement to the internment camps. This was a much more complex job.
Work by Dr Holger Hyden, professor of Histology at Goteberg, revealed that Tricayandaminopropene, a substance made by manipulating the molecular structure of a series of chemicals, can change the brain’s nerve cells and the cells of membrane that sheath the cells.
The fatty substance and protein of the nerve cells is increased by 25 per cent.
In surrounding membranes the quantity of the molecule RNA was decreased by almost 50 per cent.
From this change the suggestibility of the subject is increased by the functional change of these important substances.
About the Author
Len Deighton was born in 1929. He worked as a railway clerk before doing his National Service in the RAF as a photographer attached to the Special Investigation Branch.
After his discharge in 1949, he went to art school — first to the St Martin’s School of Art, and then to the Royal College of Art on a scholarship. His mother was a professional cook and he grew up with an interest in cookery — a subject he was later to make his own in an animated strip for the
Deciding it was time to settle down, Deighton moved to the Dordogne where he started work on his first book,
Since then his work has gone from strength to strength, varying from espionage novels to war, general fiction and non-fiction. The BBC made
As Max Hastings observed, Deighton captured a time and a mood—‘To those of us who were in our twenties in the 1960s, his books seemed the coolest, funkiest, most sophisticated things we’d ever read’—and his books have now deservedly become classics.
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