The year in books Part One

I’ve decided to look back over a year of reading rather than producing my list of books of the year and therefore things that you should read too! There are books which I’d recommend but it’s up to you as many of us have more books to read than hours in which to read them.

The year began and ended with Mary Renault’s The Charioteer, which I re-read at the turn of 2012 and start of 2013 in company with a group on Good Reads. Then as an early Christmas present BBC Radio 4 had Anton Lesser reading a severely abridged version of the book but he read it so convincingly with seemingly a different voice for each of the characters. I’m hoping it will be available as an audio book so that I can listen to it all over again.

During January 2013 I was putting the final touches to the manuscript of Convoy. Well actually I was panicking over whether it was good enough to let my publisher have it so I kept going back to my shelf full of Malta books. You can read blog posts from earlier in the year to discover my favourites amongst these books including those by Tom Neil and Laddie Lucas.

I managed a couple of times during the year to take part in the War and Literature Readalong organised by Caroline of  Beauty is a Sleeping Cat blog. It provided the motivation to read Kevin Powers fragile butterfly of a book – The Yellow Birds and I’m currently late with finishing the final book The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh, because it is so moving and humane I don’t want to rush it

As you might expect my year’s reading had lots of poetry in it. Hearing Sharon Olds read from Stag’s Leap at the TS Eliot prize event in January was a highlight of the year, as was her book.

During the year I took a long time over David Jones In Parenthesis – his long poem about the first world war. It was a reading which gathered momentum as I followed the journey of the soldiers over to France, in training and then moving up to the front line and then on to Mametz wood where for many of them their lives ended. My own copy of In Parenthesis is now dog eared and got considerably water logged in October when I took it to Mametz to read n the company of Jeremy Banning and the Writers Pals; Vanessa Gebbie, Zoe King, Tania Hershmann and Sarah Salway.

I think Jones would have been somewhat bemused at the thought of his book being taken back there where he had to abandon his rifle under one of the oaks. I like to think he’d also be pleased that his work is still remembered. If you haven’t already read In Parenthesis I would encourage you to do so and you are allowed to take months to do so.

Tony Conran died at the end of January 2013 and it seemed fitting to remember him by reading his elegy for the Welsh killed in the Falklands and here is an extract. You can read the whole poem in The Shape of My Country.

Elegy for the Welsh Dead, in the Falkland Islands, 1982

Gwyr a aeth Gatraeth oedd ffraetheu llu
Glasfedd eu hancwyn, a gwenwyn fu
Y Gododdin (6th century)

(Men went to Catraeth, keen was their company.
They were fed on fresh mead, and it proved poison.)

Men went to Catraeth. The luxury liner
For three weeks feasted them.
They remembered easy ovations.
Our boys, splendid in courage.
For three weeks the albatross roads,
Passwords of dolphin and petrel,
Practised their obedience
Where the killer whales gathered,
Where the monstrous seas yelped.
Though they went to church with their standards.
Raw death has them garnished.

Percy Belgrave "Laddie" Lucas, RAF Pilot, CBE, DSO and Bar, DFC, (2 September 1915 - 20 March 1998)

Laddie Lucas lived a full life, as a champion golfer, an MP, a businessman and a writer as his volumes of autobiography attest. However I am principally concerned in this post with the time he spent on Malta during 1942 as an RAF pilot and from June as squadron leader with 249 squadron.

Laddie arrived on Malta on 17 February 1942, on a Sunderland Flying boat from Gibraltar. He describes his previous experience with the RAF in the Portreath sector (West Country) as ‘singularly dull’. That was soon to change. He and his friend Raoul Daddo-Langlois had volunteered for what had originally been billed as a posting to Burma. Their first encounter was with Squadron Leader, Percival Stanley ‘Stan’ Turner, a Canadian who’d fought in the Battle of France, at Dunkirk and during the Battle of Britain. He flicked open Lucas’ greatcoat and took disdainful note of the young Flight Lieutenant’s lack of decorations. That also was to change during Laddie’s time on Malta.

He wrote about his experience in two books Malta: The Thorn in Rommel’s Side (Penguin 1993) and Five Up: A Chronicle of Five lives (Crecy 1999). He has a journalist’s eye for a story. He does tend however to stick to the facts and his books are those of a man who’d been brought up not to show his emotions. Just occasionally he lets his guard drop. It was through one of these clinks in his armour that I got a glimpse of a scared young man whose cockpit was filing with smoke and who was desperate to find somewhere to land – not easy on Malta with all its stone walls and tiny fields.

This incident became one of the poems in Convoy. Laddie made light of it in an article he wrote which appeared on the front page of the Daily Express on 23rd May 1942. He’d taken advantage of a brief period he’d spent on Gibraltar waiting to fly planes off an aircraft carrier back to Malta to send the article home as “a lobby briefing so that the editor might have it as background to counter some of the ridiculous propaganda which is being written about the fighting here’ (Lucas (1993) p156).  But in Malta: The Thorn in Rommel’s side he comments that the experience was ‘still cut deep in the memory’.  

Aside from the ferocity of the air battles where they were well and truly outnumbered by enemy fighters and bombers another issue for the pilots was that they were often not able to fly due to lack of planes. This was akin to asking an Olympic athlete to put in a world breaking sprint on the track but without having spent much time running.

“I flew only five times in April on interceptions for a total flying time of five hours and twenty minutes. Few, in my flight logged more. True such flying as we did was packed with action. Every minute of every scramble, from take-off to landing, was full of incident.” (Lucas (1993)  p96).

Laddie also makes an appearance in the longer poem about Operation Vigorous, the convoy that set out from Alexandria in June 1942. It was late in the day and he and his flight were expecting to be stood down…. when the telephone rings…

In July 1942 He was awarded the DFC for an attack on three Italian Bombers. The citation reads

Acting Squadron Leader Percy Belgrave, LUCAS  (100626), Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, Nor. 249 Squadron.

Squadron Leader Lucas displayed great courage in an engagement against 3 bombers escorted by 14 fighters. He unhesitatingly led his squadron through the enemy's  fighter escort and, diving down, they, destroyed all 3 bombers, 2 of them falling in flames. Squadron Leader Lucas has destroyed 3 hostile aircraft and damaged 7 others. 

It was in July too that Lucas came to the end of his tour of duty on Malta. He and Daddo-Langlois were the only two pilots still flying of those who had come to the island in February. The newly arrived AOC Keith Park had decided they should be sent back to England. Laddie writes

"...I knew I had had my chips and ought to be taken off but the news depressed me. I have never been any good at saying goodbye... Leaving 249 which, for months, had been my life, and where I found friendship, kindness and loyalty, was just like going away to school. I longed suddenly to be picked up from the bar, parcelled up and, without anyone else noticing, deposited by some magic in London without having to say any goodbyes. I didn't know how I was going to face them. I was close to tears when I put my head on the pillow of my bed in the Xara Palace that night. Exhaustion leaves you with no resistance once you let go."