THE ENGLISH LADY - book review

William Harrington’s Second World War espionage novel The English Lady was published in 1982. It comprises three parts: 1931-1934; 1938-1940; and 1941-1942 (though the final pages are 1981).

Lady Nancy Brookeford has grown up knowing the rich and famous movers and shakers of Great Britain and the United States, including the Prince of Wales, Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt! ‘Her face was faultless, clear, smooth skin; a small nose, a small mouth with full mobile lips; large, deep-blue eyes; straight, unplucked brows... She had a reputation for being pretty and intelligent’ (p5). The family had relations in Germany, one of whom was Helmut Bittrich, a cousin, who taught her to fly when she visited that country.

Her skill as a pilot combined with her looks gained the attention of Germans, especially Nazis, not least Von Ribbentrop and Hindenburg, and in the early 1930s Göring and Goebbels. By 1934 she found herself being employed as a pilot for Lufthansa. Before long she was brought to the notice of Hitler, who seemed enraptured by her...

However, Hitler was not the only one under her spell: Reinhard Heydrich was intensely interested in her: ‘He was a sensual man – his narrow eyes wandered over her like exploring fingertips... He liked to fly, to fence, to play the violin, and to make love to beautiful women. This was the positive side of his personality. He showed a dark negative in the performance of his official duties, she supposed. Maybe she need not see that side’ (p132).

And then, when returning to England for a funeral, she is faced with a proposition she cannot refuse: to become a spy because war was imminent.

Haydrich observed ‘We have to prepare for war. To save the peace, you prepare for war’ (p183).

A phrase handed down from the fourth century Romans, perhaps: si vis pacem, para bellum. Interestingly, part of this was used as a motto by a German arms maker – parabellum guns and cartridges.

There is plenty of intrigue among the Nazi hierarchy, several of them intent on ridding the country of Hitler and then suing for peace – among these was Admiral Canaris. Nancy is often in the thick of it, all the while getting closer to Heydrich.

Two aspects of the novel create suspense and verisimilitude. The detailed behind-the-scenes behaviour of the Nazi hierarchy and the quite exhilarating flying sequences.

Certain events are touched upon, notably Kristallnacht – the Night of Broken Glass, and Hitler’s detestation of the Soviets. Both monsters, Hitler and Heydrich, are given human faces, no mean feat, though I doubt that this will endear some readers to the book.

Any student of the Second World War will be aware where the book is leading when Heydrich is transferred to Czechoslovakia. While Nancy frequently uses the airfield at Lidice, the book does not mention this town’s awful fate.

William Harrington was a lawyer turned prolific novelist, writing a half-dozen Columbo books and over 17 standalone novels. He died in 2000, having committed suicide aged 68. 

FFB - Over by Christmas

Over by Christmas, a historical novel by William Dayshe, MBE, was originally published in 2008; it's now available again, with a splendid new cover.

The title employs the phrase used by many at the start of the First World War; sadly, those hopes were greatly optimistic and the conflict lasted four years, claiming thousands of lives. So many lives. In a brave and bold attempt to reflect those lives and times, William Daysh has examined a number of real life people and imagined other fictional characters, blending them into an engrossing novel about cataclysmic events.

Some two years before the outbreak of war, Prime Minister Asquith, 59, fell in love with 24-year-old Venetia Stanley. Married and a father of five, Asquith confided state secrets to Venetia. Alongside him were politicians and military leaders whose bickering and antagonism towards each other simmered and often affected the decision-making process during the war. Among these were Churchill, Admiral Fisher, Lord Kitchener, Bonar Law and Lloyd George. Naturally, the common soldier and sailor sent to fight the politicians’ war were oblivious of the in-fighting and preening self-importance of their leaders. Which was just as well, for morale if not for the war itself.

One family who went to war was the Royals. George followed in his father’s footsteps, joining the Royal Navy as a gunnery rating. The naval town of Gosport is brought to life, as are the hardships of serving at sea. Time ashore is savoured and George spends much of it with his best mate, Bill, a tradesman who was deemed unfit for service. It is during one of his visits that he meets Bill’s live-in girlfriend, Carrie, who is an unwed mother.

The scene is set for a love triangle. Before any kind of relationship can be sorted for George, his ship is called to the South Atlantic to avenge a bitter naval defeat under the guns of German Admiral von Spee’s heavy cruiser Scharnhorst. It seemed that no sooner was that action successfully concluded than Churchill, Admiral Fisher and the Prime Minister concocted a scheme to invade Turkey through the Dardanelles, thereby breaking through to relieve Russia. Little did they realise that this Gallipoli campaign would have dire consequences for more than one political and service career. George’s ship was sent to the Dardanelles, where he would be involved in a landing party and life-and-death situations.

Inevitably, Carrie and George are drawn to each other, but life is not going to be simple for this ill-starred couple, it seems…

Daysh manages to juggle several balls with assurance during the narrative. The conditions at the home front are well depicted and the emotions of Asquith’s wife, Churchill and the confused Venetia are realistically conveyed. The narrative is aided by the inclusion of excerpts from Asquith’s letters to Venetia – he tended to write at least once a day to her. The battles at sea, and the rise of ungentlemanly submarine warfare, are recreated in suspenseful and taut prose. The bickering between Churchill, Lord Fisher and Kitchener make grim reading when it is realised how many lives are at stake. At one point, it is mentioned that the loss of ships is causing concern – they’re hard to replace, whereas men are plentiful. Saved for the closing chapters, there is an intriguing revelation from Carrie’s past that puts much into perspective.

We learn of Asquith and his infatuation, his peers and faulty decision-makers; we share in the trauma and loss of conflict at sea and on the Turkish peninsula; and we empathise with those left at home to pick up the pieces and make something of their lives during a period of grey austerity. Everybody seems to realise that no matter what the outcome of the war – and by the book’s close, the conclusion is not certain – nothing will ever be the same again. Highly recommended.

Make a date - November 2, 9, 22 and 30

Some time ago I published a regular monthly magazine column linking a set selection of dates in history. The series was popular. I'm busy coordinating the articles into book form. As today is 2 November, here are a number of linked events for that date plus three other November dates. To avoid repetition, I've simply indicated the relevant date in brackets. Apologies for the length of this entry!

The three dates for this article are:

2, 9, 22 and 30 November

This time, since I live in Spain, let’s begin by looking at some anniversaries that relate to Spanish-speaking people or their countries. One of my favourite composers is Joaquin Rodrigo, who was born (22) in 1901; the premiere of his famous ‘Concierto de Aranjuez’ took place (9) in Barcelona in 1940. [He died in July, 1999 and a nation mourned this socialist composer of the people.]

The rather spooky ‘Day of the Dead’ - el dia de los muertos - is held in Mexico to celebrate dead ancestors (2). On All Saints Day (1) they generally honour the dead children - angelitos, little angels; All Souls Day (2) is the turn of the adults when families gather round their family burial plots and eat special food, offering to the departed too. And of course there are fireworks.

In 1966 the Cuban Adjustment Act came into force (2), allowing 123,000 Cubans the opportunity to apply for permanent residence in the US. This was four years to the day after the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis (2) when Kennedy announced that the Soviet nuclear missiles were being withdrawn from Cuba.

Gibraltar was captured from Spain in 1704 and subsequently was under siege several times afterwards. The Treaty of Seville in 1729 was signed (9) by France, Spain and England and confirmed that England owned Gibraltar. Political self-serving skirmishes occur from time to time, as has happened recently, regarding the sovereignty of the Rock.

Gibraltar

 

In 1975 Juan Carlos was declared King of Spain (22) following the death of the dictator Francisco Franco and, as we know, in the following years Spain has undergone a remarkable transformation.

At the Cabildo building in New Orleans in 1803, the Spanish representatives officially transferred the Louisiana Territory to the French representative (30) and twenty days later France transferred the same land to the US as the Louisiana Purchase.

France got rid of other places as well, whether Charles de Gaulle liked it or not: he was born (22) in 1890 and was President of France from 1958 to 1969; he was certainly a mite taller than many of his successors! In 1943 Lebanon (22) became independent from France, as did Cambodia (9) ten years later.

Other land changed hands or identity this month in history too. Barbados (30) became independent in 1966 and a year later the People's Republic of South Yemen became independent, both from the UK.

As far back as 1917 the Balfour Declaration proclaimed support (2) for the Jewish settlement in Palestine. The United States gained (9) rights to Pearl Harbour in Hawaii in 1887 and eventually became the fiftieth state in 1959.

Of course John F Kennedy, the thirty-fifth president of the US, was assassinated (22) this month in 1963, in Dallas, Texas, ostensibly by Lee Harvey Oswald. As it will be fifty years ago, I imagine there will be much discussion about this and the subsequent conspiracy theories. Those of us who were old enough will always remember the grainy film and newsflash, as potent an image as the much later Twin Towers atrocities.

JFK - assassination - 22 November 1963

All brought to us by the immediacy of television. In fact the BBC started (2) the world's first regular high-definition television service in 1936.

Two of the biggest early TV stars were Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, who were married (30) in 1940; there were 180 episodes of the I Love Lucy show, starting in 1951.

In 1974 a rather older Lucy was discovered in Ethiopia (30) - a 3.18 million years’ old female hominid, Australopithecus. About 40% of her skeleton was found and it was estimated she died aged twenty-five. The skeleton was christened ‘Lucy’ because on the night of the discovery, during the celebrations, the Beatles’ ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ was played repeatedly. The name stuck.

Six years earlier, the Beatles released (22) The White Album and one of the tracks was ‘Back in the USSR.’

Once-communist Czechoslovakia is proud of one of its greatest athletes, Emil Zátopek.

Emil Zátopek, one of my father's heroes

In the 1948 Olympics he won the 10,000m race. The following year he broke the 10,000m world record twice and in the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki he won gold for the 5,000m and 10,000m races and the marathon, the first time he'd attempted it; he broke Olympic records in all three events. While an ardent communist, he advocated reform and supported the Prague Spring so was ultimately sent to work in a uranium mine as punishment. He died (22) in Prague in 2000.

Communist-controlled East Germany opened the checkpoints in the Berlin Wall in 1989, allowing its citizens to travel freely to West Germany (9). Ten years earlier, Pink Floyd released (30) their famous rock opera, ‘The Wall.’

Another wall came tumbling down – the wall of an Egyptian tomb – in 1922. Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon opened the last resting place of Tutankhamen, untouched for three thousand years (22).

 
Perhaps walls didn't fall for the Countryside and Rights of Way Act that came into force (30) in the UK in 2000, but it provides for greater access to moor, heath and common land than hitherto. Not that the idea is original – Sweden has given free access to all land for years.

Swedish King Christian II executed (9) over a hundred nobles in 1520 in what is known as the Stockholm Bloodbath. Christian II of Denmark successfully invaded Sweden and, despite declaring an amnesty, ordered the execution of all the nobility and clergy who opposed him. Swedish soprano Jenny Lind was born in 1820 and after touring with the showman P T Barnum, she was dubbed the ‘Swedish Nightingale.’ She was a great hit with Queen Victoria and became a philanthropist, living her later years in Great Malvern, Worcestershire, where she died (2) and was buried in 1887.

On the same day (2) in 1961 the Canadian singer k d lang was born while the female singer Dorothy Dandridge was born (9) in 1923. Dandridge went on to star in Carmen Jones, Porgy and Bess and Island in the Sun. She lapsed into alcoholism and died from barbiturate poisoning, aged forty-one with about two dollars in her bank account.

Dorothy Dandridge

Where would singers be without lyricists? Lorenz Hart died (22) in 1943 and was the writer of the words for Richard Rodgers’ musicals, such as Babes in Arms whose songs included ‘Johnny One Note’, ‘The Lady is a Tramp’ and ‘My Funny Valentine’ and ‘A Connecticut Yankee’, based on the book by Mark Twain, who was born (30) as Samuel Clemens in 1835.

 
The following year, the British politician Lord Frederick Cavendish was born (30). A protégé of Gladstone, he was appointed Chief Secretary of Ireland and almost on arrival in that post he was assassinated by the ‘Irish National Invincibles’ in Dublin’s Phoenix Park in 1882.

In fact, November is an interesting month for British politicians. Prime Ministers Ramsay MacDonald and Neville Chamberlain died on the same day (9), in 1937 and 1940 respectively. And Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher resigned (22) in 1990.

 
Possibly our greatest Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill was born (30) in 1874. Serving in the Nile Expeditionary Force in 1898 he fought hand - to hand with the Dervishes at Omdurman. Later, acting as a London newspaper correspondent in the Boer War, he was captured and escaped with a £25 price on his head.
 
In 1899 the Boers started (2) their 118-day siege of the British town of Ladysmith, the town being named after the Spanish wife of Sir Henry Smith, the British general governor of Cape Colony.

Africa is an immense and beautiful continent that has been torn apart by warfare and slavery for centuries. More recently however there was the massacre in 2002 in Nigeria (22) when over a hundred people were killed in an attack aimed at the Miss World contest.

 
Africa was referred to as the Dark Continent, somewhere for intrepid explorers to investigate, while risking their lives. They didn’t come more intrepid than Sir Martin Frobisher, roaming the seas for new discoveries and booty from Spanish galleons. Wounded at the siege of Crozon near Brest, he was brought back to Plymouth where he died (22) in 1594.
 
Forty-nine years later Robert Cavelier de La Salle was born (22). He was a French cleric and explorer who ranged over the Great Lakes region, the Mississippi River, the Gulf of Mexico and claimed the entire Mississippi basin for France. He must have turned in his grave when the Louisiana Purchase went through for fifteen million dollars, less than three cents an acre. If you scan a gazetteer of North America you’ll find many townships named after La Salle. During one of La Salle's expeditions he lost several ships to pirates.
 
One of the most notorious pirates in the Caribbean was Blackbeard, Edward Teach, who died on the same day (22) as Frobisher, in 1718: a Royal Naval sloop engaged the pirates and Blackbeard was stabbed a score of times and killed in the fighting, his head subsequently seen hanging from the sloop’s bowsprit. In 1996 Blackbeard's ship was discovered off North Carolina.

Then there’s Captain Vallo, the fictitious pirate played by Burt Lancaster in the film The Crimson Pirate, a 1952 light-hearted adventure involving prison breaks, battles, lots of sword-play and Lancaster's considerable athletic skill. Burton Stephen Lancaster was born (2) in 1913. Another fun adventure film of his was His Majesty O'Keefe.

Burt Lancaster in The Crimson Pirate

In 1541 Her Majesty Catherine Howard was demoted from her position as Queen (22) and confined to her rooms, being charged with adultery with Thomas Culpepper. Having been tortured, Culpepper confessed and he was executed, his head staying on a spike on London Bridge until 1546. Catherine went to London Tower and was beheaded in February 1542.

London’s Crystal Palace, built for the 1851 Great Exhibition, was destroyed (30) in a fire in 1936, twenty years after the death (22) of Jack London, the author of the classics The Sea-Wolf, The Call of the Wild and White Fang. He was a socialist and wrote about the poor of London in The People of the Abyss.

 
Another writer with a conscience, notably in The Travels of Gulliver, was Jonathan Swift. He generally employed criticism by means of satire. This Irish writer was born (30) in 1667, the same day as Irishman Oscar Wilde died in 1900.

We’ve all heard of Anne Frank’s Diary, but there is another Dutch girl who wrote a diary too - Etty Hillesum. In her family, knowledge was admired and she often cut back on food in order to buy books. In March 1941, a year after the German occupation of Holland, she started her diary while helping Jews at the internment camp there. In September 1943 she and her family were sent to Auschwitz, where she was killed (30). Her letters and most of her diaries were saved and published after the war.

 
An Austrian actress who hated the Nazis was Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler. Born (9) in 1913, she was notorious for the first nude scene in films in the 1933 Czech movie Ecstasy. When she moved to America in 1937, she changed her name to Hedy Lamar and seemed to exude sexuality in Samson and Delilah with Victor Mature.

Hedy Lemar (9 November 1914 – 19 January 2000)

 
Hedy Lemar also co-invented an important technology for radio communications called ‘frequency hopping’, a secret communications system involving the use of carrier waves of different frequencies, initially to aid remote-controlled torpedoes against the Nazis. This system also proved difficult to discover or decipher. Nowadays, this is ‘spread spectrum’ wireless communication, used by GPS devices, cordless and wireless phones.
 
I’d better hang up now.

 

EXPRESS WESTERNS 2ND ANTHOLOGY

Editor: Nik Morton
Co-editor: Charlie Whipple



At long last, here is the lineup for the next Legends anthology. About ninety-eight thousand words. Twenty-one new stories of the Old West. Listed in no particular order:




DEAD MAN TALKING – Derek Rutherford
LONIGAN MUST DIE! – Ben Bridges (David Whitehead)
BILLY – Lance Howard (Howard Hopkins)
THE MAN WHO SHOT GARFIELD DELANY – I P Parnham
HALF A PIG – Matthew P Mayo
BLOODHOUND – Courtney Joyner
MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE – Gillian F Taylor
BIG ENOUGH – Chuck Tyrell (Charles T Whipple)
ONE DAY IN LIBERTY – Jack Giles (Ray Foster)
SHADOWS ON THE HORIZON – Bobby Nash
ON THE RUN – Alfred Wallon
THE GIMP – Jack Martin (Gary Dobbs)
VISITORS – Ross Morton (Nik Morton)
THE NIGHTHAWK – Michael D George
DARKE JUSTICE – Peter Avarillo (Chantel Foster)
ANGELO AND THE STRONGBOX – Cody Wells (Malcolm Davey)
THE PRIDE OF THE CROCKETTS – Evan Lewis (Dave Lewis)
CRIB GIRLS – Kit Churchill (Andrea Hughes)
MAN OF IRON – Chuck Tyrell (Charles T Whipple)
CASH LARAMIE AND THE MASKED DEVIL – Edward A Grainger (David Cranmer)
DEAD MAN WALKING – Ed Ferguson

Congratulations to all. Still to be determined, the cover picture and the title. Watch this space.

(I drew the above picture in the late 1960s; Ursula Andress in Four For Texas.)