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.

Thomas Francis Neil, DFC*, AFC, AE

Tom Neil had already fought in the Battle of Britain when he was posted to Malta in the summer of 1941. He is well known for his books on his wartime experiences; Gun Button to Fire, Onward to Malta, Questions of Guilt (short stories), Flight into Darkness (short stories). His most recent book is Silver Spitfire published in February 2013. 

On 21^st May 1941 Neil and his fellow pilots from 249 Squadron were to fly off from H.M.S Ark Royal when they were within about five hundred miles from Malta; taking off in two batches; a flight of twelve led by ‘Butch’ Barton and the second flight of eleven led by Neil. Each group was to be escorted by a Fulmar and to fly just above the water, maintaining RT silence throughout the flight.

This may all sound straight-forward although for the pilots it was fraught with risk. Their route took them past Cape Bon on the northern tip of Africa. The Vichy French were known to be hostile and it was uncertain whether or not they might attack the Hurricanes. Then the planes had to avoid Pantelleria, Lampedusa and Linoa before locating Malta.

The first difficulty for Neil was a problem with the port wing. The gun and ammunition panels came adrift during takeoff and a piece of metal several feet in area was sticking up; effectively acting as an airbrake on the left hand side of the aircraft. In addition the paper and maps on which he’d written the courses for Malta and had tucked into the windscreen crevasse had been blown out of the plane. Faced with the choice of attempting to land back on the carrier without a hook and with two overload fuel tanks just waiting to catch fire or continuing, he decided to press on, following the Fulmar eastwards. After about half an hour of flying and once they were clear of the Cape Bon suddenly and inexplicably the Fulmar began to accelerate, pulled up steeply and disappeared into cloud.

 “One moment it was there, the next it wasn’t!… Apart from knowing that Africa was somewhere to the south and Malta approximately to the east, I could have been in Tibet.” 

He was also responsible for ten other pilots and only twenty years of age. He broke RT silence to ask if anyone else would like to lead the way to Malta and nobody volunteered. So Neil decided the only thing to do was to head back for Gibraltar. They came upon the fleet which they had left earlier and salvation in the form of a Fulmar, their Fulmar as it happened which took off from Ark Royal and waggled its wings to demonstrate that they should follow. Later they discovered the pilot had had to return to the ship after an oil pipe had burst spraying him with hot liquid and he thought his engine might seize up. By now they’d been airborne for more than two hours and had a further three and a half hours of flying to reach Malta.

“Malta, when it came, appeared with magical suddenness… in the form of cliffs… white and brown out of the mist and sea and were almost within touching distance… the island itself – ochre-coloured sandstone, glaringly bright, tiny brown stone-fringed fields the size of pocket handkerchiefs, , everything hot and lumpy and harsh to the eye…"

Luqa was being bombed as they approached but as they were running out of fuel there was no choice but to land anyway. Once on the ground a chap with a pipe climbed onto the wing to guide Neil explaining that they were in the middle of an air raid. Neil commented dryly that he had noticed and then a spark from the man’s pipe landed in his eye causing him agony. It was a brusque welcome to the island. 

Tom Neil spent seven months on the island which he wrote about in Onward to Malta. This includes an incident on 8th November 1941 involving Pilot Officer Pat Lardner-Burke which he kindly agreed I could use as the basis for two of the poems in Convoy. He wrote

"I feel honoured that you have thought fit to single me out as being rather special - which, of course I'm not!

I and readers of this blog may well disagree with that last comment. 

 

Captain Thomas Sydney Horn, Merchant Seaman, OBE, 5 May 1899 – June 1971

A brief word of explanation about these biographical sketches. These will mostly be about the things I found out about these men for which there wasn’t room in Convoy. They do all feature in the poems but there is so much more to tell about their lives. Each one of them could do with a book to himself and many of them, for example Laddie Lucas and Tom Neil have written their own books.

Captain Thomas Horn is someone who I really wish had written a book about his experiences during the war. He was master of the Blue Star line’s Sydney Star. He was born in Amble, Northumberland in May 1899. He went to sea when he was fifteen and he obtained his second mates certificate in 1924 and his Master’s certificate in 1924, the year he got married. He took the Sydney Star on her maiden voyage to Australia in May 1936.

I discovered him and his ship in Ian Cameron’s Red Duster, White Ensign. Cameron evidently interviewed Horn for the book as there is a very full account of what happened to the Sydney Star during her eventful voyage to Malta as part of Operation Substance in July 1941. Thomas Horn and his ship have a poem to themselves in Convoy. He was awarded the OBE as a result of his actions, as was his chief engineer and other members of the crew also received awards as follows;

 London Gazette 16 December 1941 - For services when the ship was torpedoed and damaged during Operation Substance - a convoy from Gibraltar to Malta in July 1941.

Haig, George - Chief Engineer - OBE(Civ)

Horn, Thomas Sydney - Captain - OBE(Civ)

Mackie, James Hunter Andrew - Chief Officer - MBE(Civ)

Knights, John Arthur Bamford W/50 - Leading Seaman RANR - Commendation

Roberts, John Wakeling W/303 - Able Seaman RANR - Commendation

Robinson, Anthony Jesse - Gunner - Commendation

Ungazetted award by Lloyd's

Haig, George - Chief Engineer - Lloyd's War Medal for Bravery at Sea

Horn, Thomas Sydney - Captain - Lloyd's War Medal for Bravery at Sea

Mackie, James Hunter Andrew - Chief Officer - Lloyd's War Medal for Bravery at Sea

London Gazette 4 June 1943 - Birthday Honours List 1943

Bones, Frank - Carpenter - BEM(CiV)

The other glimpse I got of Horn was in the pages of Tom Neil’s Onward to Malta. Neil left Malta on board the Sydney Star on Boxing Day 1941. She’d been on the island since arriving in the summer undergoing repairs. Neil writes


“Mealtimes were welcome breaks [from the claustrophobia of his cabin] during which all four of us RAF officers dined at the captain’s table, the latter a worried little man who was only occasionally joined by the Chief Engineer and one or two others, their empty chairs serving to cast an additional shadow over our halting conversation.”

The following morning the ship is bombed by a Ju88 without any consequences although this does raise the spirits and interests of the pilots.


“The Captain and several of his officers having joined us for the meal, it was obvious that the headman was in a nervous and unsociable mood – as well he might be! Much less concerned we joked about the attack, pointing out that the bombing had been as effective as the gunfire, which seemed to us all bark and no bite The gunners were hopeless, we opined. How could they expect to hit anything if they were ignorant of even the rudiments of deflection shooting? Being fighter pilots we knew all about such things, naturally; it was a pity the gun crews weren’t similarly competent. We laid it on pretty thick, aware of our hosts’ frowning and slightly injured silence.

Finally the Captain stood up and blotted his lips. Did we think we could do any better? We all exchanged exaggerated glances of surprise. Of course we could; it was just a matter of know-how and practice wasn’t it? He nodded then turned away. In that case when the next attack came, we could show him just how it was done. All right?

So as the next attack starts to develop the forty-two year old Captain does turn the tables on these twenty-something year old pilots, Neil, Cassidy, Harrington and Peter Le Fevre by summoning them to the bridge and pointing out the machine guns he expects them to use. According to Neil what followed was

“ three of the noisiest and most hair-raising minutes of my life, the engagement introduced by the crack of countless guns, the shriek of four and five inch shells as they ripped through the rigging above my head, the thud-thud-thud of the Bofors, the tearing rattle of cannon and machine-gun, the soaring curve of flaring incendiaries and the white streaks of smoking tracer as it whipped across the waves. But through it all, seemingly unscathed and with magnificent, even foolhardy, bravery, came the Savoias. Line abreast, a terrifying phalanx”

They and the ship survive the attack and continue on their voyage.

“Now about twelve hours sailing from Port Said, much of the tension had disappeared; it looked as though we would make it after all and even the Captain’s face was seen to crack into the occasional bleak smile.”

The Sydney Star reached Egypt on Tuesday 30 December 1941.