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For Perspective

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For The Critic

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For the Sri Lankan Sunday Times

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By 1943, after nearly four years of war ‘ameliorated [only] by a thin gruel of successes,’ Britain and her western allies had little to boast in terms of their offensive victories; the lion’s share of the burden was very clearly being shouldered by the Soviet Union; and even the notably (not to say uniquely) busy Royal Air Force had not grabbed headlines since the Battle of Britain, three years previously.

Then, on the night of the 16^th/17^th May, the RAF launched a surprise attack on half a dozen dams in north-west Germany, the (secretly) avowed intent of which was to unleash billions of cubic feet of water and land a single, knock-out blow to the Ruhr industries, thereby crippling the Nazi war machine and proving – as the jargon goes – ‘decisive’.

The attack was most surprising because it was basically impossible. Indeed, the Germans had identified the threat before the war (and likewise eyed up British dams), but dismissed such operations as unworkable. The Möhne valley was so quiet that German troops were sent there for recuperation.

By night, meanwhile, Britain’s Bomber Command could currently identify no target smaller than a city, so even at the conceptual stage the technical demands of breaching a dam were assessed by the RAF as ‘highly problematic’. Big enough bombs – ‘bouncing’ or otherwise – did not exist, nor did the planes to carry them. Said bombs (depth charges, codename: ‘Upkeep’) would also have to be dropped from extraordinarily low levels (100 times lower than usual, in fact, at heights that would usually see pilots court-martialled) and in bright moonlight.

The ‘madman’ Sir Arthur Harris, head of Bomber Command, was – not alone and not unreasonably – flatly against this as a hopelessly speculative waste of unaffordable resources. But the Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Charles Portal, signed off on Operation Chastise as ‘a good gamble’. Only a single squadron of bombers was authorised, however: what Max Hastings calls ‘a niche operation’, indicative of British ‘gesture strategy’.

The recruitment of 617 Squadron began just weeks before the dams were set to reach their fullest, and though several of the crews were quite experienced, many others were extremely raw or had not flown before as working teams. Their Avro Lancaster bombers needed to fly almost at ground level over the lethal terrains of occupied Europe, which meant that mishaps of any kind would almost certainly entail the deaths of everyone on board. The new planes were strained by the technological requirements of the operation, and full of jury-rigged modifications. The frantic training schedule did not go well, and by the time the operation was launched most crews had not flown planes with even full-scale dummy Upkeeps. Whatever Portal said, the odds on Chastise making a decisive impact were frankly miserable.

It was, at best, partly successful.

There were immediate repercussions from the lack of navigational technology, inexperience, and other issues, once they reached the Dutch coast. Only one plane in the Sorpe wave even made it to the target. Many pilots and crews were simply not up to the intimidating task: eight planes out of 19 went down, and 56 out of 133 pilots and aircrew died.

Two dams, the Möhne and the Eder, were breached, unleashing a biblical horror for which (of course) the Germans coined a new word (‘Möhnekatastrophe’); but almost all the approximately 1,400 victims were civilians and more than half of them were POWs – our allies. There was significant infrastructure damage, knock-on effects on gas and coal production, and diversion of resources. But this did not curtail ‘a quarter’ of the Reich’s industry, Barnes Wallis’s promised ‘disaster of the first magnitude,’ and the dams were repaired within a few months (a process with which, astoundingly, the RAF did not attempt to interfere). The secret weapon of the bouncing bomb, once used, could not be used again, either inland or – as had been the Navy’s fervent hope – at sea.

But the aircrews – men barely out of school who ‘still thought it the best joke in the world to pull off a man’s trousers after dinner’ – were heroic in a more than usually tough, physical sense, exemplified and led by the hard-driving, amply-decorated 24-year-old bombing veteran Wing Commander Guy Gibson (to say nothing of his dog). There were also the heroic feats of engineering (and politicking) by Barnes Wallis, the ‘white-haired evangelist’, and his team.

And so Chastise was fundamentally – if not unimportantly – a propaganda victory. It represented an ‘amazing example of team-work and co-operation’, and was billed as ‘a turning of the tide’ to the advantage of the Allied powers. In Hastings’ estimation it inflicted a ‘trauma’ on Germany, and demonstrated to Germans that their homeland was not invulnerable. It was, he notes, also ‘unmentioned in Allied warlords’ private diaries.’

Hastings is a ‘big picture’ narrative historian, who tackles head-on the not inconsiderable task of making a compelling narrative out of a time-honoured national myth. In all, Chastise is a calm but forthright reappraisal, not prepared to swallow the triumphalist (and ‘victimless’) impressions of, e.g, the 1955 film version, nor to have any truck with flimsy modern notions of winning ‘a war of national survival’ without the taking of lives.

And not just German lives, of course. One of the last remaining Dambusters died only this year; but it was a sad, blunt statistical inevitability that, for all their heroism, the vast majority of Chastise men, including Gibson, did not live long enough to see VE Day.

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For The Oldie

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For Geographical

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For Queen Mob’s Tea House

I had invited an old friend, a raven-haired young lady (named in Debrett’s) of impossibly romantic tendency, who first exposed me to the film in, I’d say, about 1998 or ’99. It took a bit of selling, even then (and back then I thought I was Byron); but after not much more than a couple of minutes of the multi-Oscar-winner – about, to take just Michael Ondaatje’s main character, Count Ladislaus de Almásy, a pilot of dubious origin who is shot down in the Egyptian desert during the Second World War, knows the lines to every song he’s ever heard but not his own name, and may or may not have betrayed his colleagues to ze Chermans for the sake of love (we have no time for the true biography of László Almásy) – I was, of course, completely hooked.

Alexandra, alas, is unavailable (she works in theatre, natch), so I’ll be going with Harry – and as Harry’s guest, in fact. Harry and I were in Afghanistan together, in 2013, and, as he likes to say, I’ll never come to Dorset. (Don’t tell him: I’ve been several times, just not to visit him. He lives in Fulham, anyway.) But that film that Alex showed me has been with me for the better part of 20 years, now.

I applied to study Egyptology almost entirely on the strength of it, a fact I carefully concealed from cagey academic overseers at school and university. During my gap year in South Africa – just to be even more abysmally pretentious – I didn’t tuck things in a copy of Herodotus (‘the book he brought with him through the fire’), but in a Collected Works of Oscar Wilde. At Oxford I would walk around listening to the movie’s famously aching – nay, plangent – Gabriel Yared soundtrack on a loop (like all Ondaatje books, the original itself is in any case full of music and singing). In Canada I bought a black leather blazer-style jacket from Banana Republic, although I drew the line at knee-length khaki shorts.

In the libraries of the Oriental Institute I found odd books on modern Egypt (gasp!), or at least more-recent explorations of the desert, and began to make my own trips – though actually seeing Egypt, perhaps predictably, was not really a course requirement. And when I fell out with my college it was the lonely-hero movies like The English Patient I returned to in the bitter evenings. I became well-versed in the admissions criteria for the Foreign Legion. And then – under the signature of my professor – I joined the Royal Geographical Society, as found, thinly disguised, in the EP novel:

‘In the 1920s there is a sweet postscript history on this pocket of earth, made mostly by privately funded expeditions and followed by modest lectures given at the Geographical Society in London at Kensington Gore. These lectures are given by sunburned, exhausted men who, like Conrad’s sailors, are not too comfortable with the etiquette of taxis…’

The RGS – right next door to the RAH – has some nice old copies of Almásy things (not all in English), as well as material on the Long Range Desert Group (cf. the famous picture of bearded, hard-eyed SOE types in duffel coats, that used to do the rounds of my regimental HQ) and more scholarly desert-exploration articles by the likes of Bagnold, Bermann, Ball and Hassanein Bey, which Ondaatje sought out in back numbers of the Journal.

And in my then mood, the romantic, antisocial, somewhere-on-the-spectrum explorer and lover of the desert’s solitude, whose happiest memory, as he tells his (supposedly) illicit inamorata, Katharine Clifton, is the time he travelled all day with a guide who said nothing until he pointed at the horizon and said “Faya”… well, it struck a loud, if none-too-subtle, chord.

After a meeting once with Ranulph Fiennes (I followed him round the bookshops of Oxford, between signings, until he told me that in Oman he would have killed me by now), he put me in touch with John Hare, who had just completed a long camel-backed Saharan crossing, and whose brain I wanted to pick about doing one through the long crescent of oases in Egypt’s Western Desert. I never made that journey (yet). But a flame had obviously been kindled.

My first copy of the novel, came, entirely fittingly, from the American University in Cairo bookshop: a well-annotated, typo-strewn Picador paperback reprint, with the price (I think) on the title page in blue biro, bought on my first trip, in 2003, in the days immediately following the invasion of Iraq – an interesting time to be a tall, blond, white man in an Arab capital. (The receipt is still inside: it cost 45 Egyptian pounds.) I later gave in and bought myself a first edition, on Charing Cross Road, which I’ve not opened. No doubt I have a clingfilmed ‘deluxe’ version of the movie somewhere, also.

The book, of course, is total poetry (if there were ever any grounds for criticism it would be that there’s too much ‘poetry’). In a wonderful deleted scene, available on YouTube, an old bedou tells Almásy something, which he translates to Katharine: “He thinks he’s been there – but the route he’s describing, well, he couldn’t survive the journey now; but he’s a poet, so his map is poetry.”

I’ve ever since been an enthusiastic reader of Saul Kelly, Justin Marozzi, and other writers on Herodotus, the lost oasis of Zerzura, and the ‘real’ Almásy, all of which led to a friendship with the freewheeling, polymathic writer Robert Twigger, to interview whom I ‘crossed the Sinai’ (I was on a bus) in 2009. Rob now lives in Dorset (ssshhhh…!), and his most recent travel book – on the Himalayas, following on from one on the Nile – was Book of the Month in Geographical magazine, the magazine of the RGS. In a nicely complementary kind of way, I’ve just this week been asked to write my first piece for that magazine.

Eventually, the chance arose to go to my own desert war, and so I leapt at it. But that was years ago now, and unexciting – and I survived, unharmed, unlike (the fictional) Almásy.

I remain ‘a person who if left alone in someone’s home walks to the bookcase, pulls down a volume and inhales it.’ I still keep things I need in books (which means that I can never find them). I know both names for what that place is called, at the base of a woman’s neck. Beyond a weekend or two with HM Forces, I haven’t yet got round to learning Arabic, let alone Hungarian, or several of the other languages that Almásy spoke (my two brothers speak a little, though I bet they can’t describe a mountain that looks like the shape of a woman’s back); but I can name some of the winds Almásy/Ondaatje describes, and tell their stories. I often listen to the Yared soundtrack. In fact, Benny Goodman’s ‘Wang Wang Blues’ was one of the first things that I played my child when she was born. Nor can I give her (or anyone else) a bit of plum without informing them that it’s a ‘very plum… plum.’ We were in Brighton, the other week, at the aquarium, to celebrate her turning one, and I found myself humming Lorenz Hart’s original words to ‘Manhattan’, ‘before they were cleaned up.’

I’ve watched the film at least a dozen times, now, and read the novel maybe half a dozen. I’ve given copies of both DVD and book as gifts, and indeed the movie-script on one occasion. And despite the fact that I own several copies, it’s one of a number of books – among those by a small number of literary favourites, like Chatwin, Coetzee, Golding, Dyer, Sebald, Hitchens – that, if I see it in a charity shop, I feel I ought to rescue, simply because it’s wrong that it should be there.

A few years and/or rewatches back, I realised that the day the ‘ENGLISH(?)’ patient is introduced to us is, by the notebook of the interrogating officer, my birthday.

In July, The English Patient won the Mother of all Bookers (or whatever this go round was called). We all know books mean many things to many people, and can have major real-world repercussions, on personal and even national levels. But amid all the renewed plaudits for Ondaatje’s classic novel, and the obvious, widespread awareness that it’s a tale packed full of questionable characters, traumatised and very literally scarred by conflict, it suddenly occurred to me that, given a long-enough trajectory, and alongside several other factors, it seems entirely plausible The English Patient is the reason that I went to war.

What would Ondaatje think of that, I wonder? My guess is he’d probably be horrified.

— The Nelson Evening Mail, March 14 1907
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Wherever there is a fire that ravages everything in its path, the protea is the first thing to regenerate.

Clive James once voluntarily interviewed the Spice Girls.

Manchester has become ‘Womanchester’.

Cineworld has landed in Weston-super-Mare.

The ‘little people’ have been missing out on the opportunity to turn $250 into a retirement fortune.

Literally no-one knows how household heating works.

They do not, in fact, drink Um Bongo in the Congo. (It’s mostly Coca-Cola out there.)

Bowls commentators call contestants by their first names.

There’s a way to say ‘Sir’ that denotes a deep contempt.

Since becoming President, Donald Trump has been sued over 130 times.

It is impossible to be Oscar Wilde.

Elon Musk, tech entrepreneur, designer, billionaire, and astronaut, is most inspired by Kanye West.

There are currently few patisserie chefs in need of work.
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— The Nelson Evening Mail, September 8 1908
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Benedict Cumberbatch reads Oryx magazine.

A piece of pasta (dry) weighs essentially one gram.

A man can only care about so many things.

Labels are for clothes.

In Bosnian there are no words for fiction and non-fiction.

The eating of grapes has killed several Englishmen by throwing them into fluxes and fevers.

Allah does not like hearing the word ‘Allah’.

The shooting schedules in pornography are quite brisk.

Darryl Gerrity loves people, perhaps too much.

Washing machines live longer with cows on.

It’s all kicking off in Jamestown. 

Russian composer Dmitri Kabalevsky died on this day in 1987.

Two childhood friends in Honolulu have recently found out that they are brothers.
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— The Nelson Evening Mail, October 20 1906
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‘The is cat washing dishes’ is an 18th-century expression for the reflection of water on the walls of a room.

A skate’s vagina is anatomically similar to a woman’s.

Just because a thing is true does not mean that it need have been.

A field marshal never retires.

By the time Tennessee Williams was 15 he’d lived in 16 different houses.

The code-word for the Egyptian seizure of Suez was ‘de Lesseps’.

One of the Fratellis is called Mince.

Some paper cups are five times stronger than steel.

In 1931 the Soviet Union published an erotic alphabet book to combat literacy. 

The next stop after Canterbury, heading east, is not Chatham.

Casey Affleck’s only recent cinema trip was to take his kids to brother Ben’s Batman v Superman.

Roy William Scranton’s poll has ended.

‘Yippee ki-yay, motherfucker!’ is Italian for ‘Merry Christmas’.
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