Hotel Tiberias: A Tale of Two Grandfathers. Sebastian Hope
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Churn Valley was a wrench; moving into a house on the corner of a B road in the middle of a village near the M4, surrounded by flat land, was both a shock and a disappointment. Long stretches at boarding school augmented my alienation from our new ‘home’.
Visiting Granny and Grandpa was also to revisit childhood memories. At first my brother and I would leave the lunch-table early and scramble onto the oak that had fallen across the stream where we used to have our tree house, or put on gumboots and rebuild a dam with nuggets of clay. Crayfish live in the banks, trout in the pools. Later on we would sit with the adults listening to their serious talk upstairs in the drawing room, whose windows framed the big ash tree at the top of the cowslipped bank where the tyre-swing used to hang. The room itself had changed, the yarra boards covered with pale carpet, the windows double-glazed. The image of how it once had been faded quickly, but every now and again I would look out over the millpond and see myself on an oil-drum raft paddling upstream, a wartime mission deep in the jungles of Burma.
These birthdays and anniversaries, Boxing Days and Easters were always difficult occasions for my father. He may have married the general’s daughter, but he was a different type of soldier. In 1944, at the age of seventeen, he had left school without sitting his Highers, grown a moustache, lied about his age and joined up. The war ended before he could be posted – ‘the atom bomb saved my life,’ he says – but his career did not lack active service: Palestine; Korea; Malaya. He met my mother during his regiment’s tour of duty in West Germany. Five days after I was born in 1964 he left for fourteen months, fighting insurgents in the Radfan. He was a regimental soldier by nature and did not attend Staff College, partly because of his strong anti-intellectual bias. Grandpa, battlefield commander, sought out the weakest point and attacked. Any discussion on any topic between the two men invariably ended in Grandpa correcting my father’s use of English, and my father taking umbrage. He would always lose more than the argument, his composure and his temper being frequent casualties of the engagement.
‘Shan’ Hackett was not an easy man with whom to have lunch. We never knew what his mood would be when we arrived. We never knew what part of his memoirs, his correspondence or his military punditry he would be rehearsing that day, or how he would try to suck us into the quicksand of a discussion. Sometimes he would start right in with the barbs, like the time he asked my father, who had recently gone to work for an insurance company, ‘How’s trade?’ as he walked through the door. Sometimes, when the approach work was slower, it was possible to avert the clash. It did no good to change the subject, as Shan needed no opening to bring up the topic again and reiterate his position, but one could harry at the margins and draw fire. We developed a variety of survival tactics. My grandmother and my brother would keep their heads below the parapet. My mother and my aunt Elizabeth sought distraction in the preparation and supply of food, although Lizzie was fond of joining the fray and could always retreat outside for a cigarette. She never married.
My strategy was to engage, but without the irritability that made my father vulnerable. I tried not to let his corrections and interruptions either anger or deflect me. I was not always successful; one discussion we had when I was nineteen, a particularly weighty debate that centred on dukes in bathing suits, ended when I called him a mental masturbator. ‘Dear boy,’ he said, ‘I do so enjoy our talks. They remind me of my time at university.’ I too had come to enjoy our rigorous exchanges.
The only person who did not have a strategy was Susan, the only child Margaret and Shan had together, primarily because she did not seem to need one. She was Daddy’s Little Girl, as the youngest daughter often is, though there was never any suggestion that this favouritism stemmed from her being his only natural child. She had her own name for him, ‘Fred’, and as a Christmas present from her an ordinary-looking tie with the letter ‘F’ repeated in a mock heraldic design was a comedic tour de force. Susan’s husband, Andrew Taylor, a lean, urbane man, had been an officer in the Gurkhas. His career thereafter took them to Australia and Hong Kong. They separated and divorced in the 1980s, Susan moving back to London. She died of pneumonia on Christmas Day 1992.
Though married to his favourite – or maybe because of that – Andrew was no more exempt from the general’s displeasure than was my father. Matters came to a head one Guy Fawkes Night, my grandfather’s birthday, when the two sons-in-law felt so insulted that they made a pact never to come to one of these ‘parties’ again. When the next occasion swung round my father declined the invitation, telling the general they would both have a more enjoyable day if he did not attend, and I was thrust into the front line.
It goes without saying, or rather it does all too frequently in English families, that I loved, love all these people. I was also immensely proud of Grandpa. I found exciting his talk of letters to The Times, of correspondence with eminent people and comrades in arms, of speaking engagements and radio interviews and the writing of forewords – I relished these dispatches from a life of the mind and of letters that was absent in my own home. He published a war memoir in 1977 called I Was a Stranger and though I was too young to appreciate the quality of the writing, the story it told was straight out of the war comics that passed around my school. Five years later he published a bestseller, a future-history entitled Third World War. It was translated into many languages, but its crowning achievement was to have been clearly visible on Ronald Reagan’s desk in a Time picture of the Oval Office.
I Was a Stranger told the story of Brigadier Shan Hackett’s experience of the Battle of Arnhem, the airborne attempt to capture bridges across the Rhine in September 1944. He was in command of the 4th Para Brigade, a force he had raised eighteen months previously. The brigade had participated in the invasions of Sicily and the Italian mainland. It made a vital contribution to the success of the Taranto landing, taking the harbour and establishing a beach-head, but Operation Market Garden, as the plan for capturing the Rhine crossings was codenamed, was far more ambitious. It failed. The 4th Para showed great bravery and sustained heavy losses before they surrendered. Hackett had been wounded twice. The bullet in the thigh seemed the more serious, but when he reached the military hospital in Arnhem it was discovered that a piece of shrapnel had entered his abdomen and shredded his large intestine – ‘two sections and twelve perforations, you know’. Grandpa still had the vest he was wearing at the time. The German doctors gave up on him, but a South African surgeon called Lipmann Kessel, who had also been captured, operated and stitched the serviceable pieces of his gut together with such skill that his life was saved.
Hackett was the most senior officer to have been captured, but as the allied forces had parachuted in without badges of rank and regiment, the Germans did not realize they had a brigadier in their custody. On the third day after his operation two Dutch resistance workers walked into the hospital disguised as orderlies, dressed the brigadier as one, and walked him out past the guards. He was taken to the house of a Dutch family where he was hidden for nearly five months while he recuperated. His strength regained, he set out for the Allied lines with another Dutch resistance worker. They crossed Holland by bicycle to rendezvous with Canadian commandos on the banks of the Meuse.
The title of the book shows what was most important to Hackett: the courage and self-sacrifice of the de Nooij family. One of the few books he had to read during his convalescence was a copy of the New Testament in the Greek of its earliest editions. The title is a quotation from Matthew, chapter 25, verses 35–6: ‘I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:/ Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick and ye visited me: I was in prison and ye came unto me.’
It was not long after the memoir was published that the film A Bridge Too Far was released. Grandpa escaped portrayal, and for him it was the one good thing about the film. For me, it reinforced my perception of the Second World War, that the Allies were right, but that the Germans had the best kit.
One does not have to come from an army family to be aware of weapons and war from the age of about three. Boys everywhere play with guns, have toy soldiers, fight imaginary battles. When we lived in Dorchester, our war games took place in a copse behind the house and were given an added reality by the fact it had once been the site of an army post. The barbed wire still stood in places and the ground bore signs of trenches. You could easily find shell cases in the undergrowth and I once came upon some live rounds, but the best