The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II (9 page)

Three other prisoners were already inside, squatting against the far wall and scouring a rusty bucket. The airless space, fifty feet long and only eight feet wide, reeked of urine. Henderson told the men to dress and take two blankets each from a pile in the corner. A diagram on the wall explained how the blankets were to be folded for inspection. Each man was issued a “chocolate pot” for body waste. When Henderson locked them inside, each convict claimed a portion of the floor as his bed. Bain and two others, “Chalky” White of the Middlesex Regiment and Bill Farrell from the Durham Light Infantry, whispered to one another in violation of the rules. Bain was afraid that someone was watching through a small hole in the door, although he did not hear anything. “Of course you didn’t,” Chalky whispered. “The bastards wear gym shoes at night.” Farrell said their guards were worse than those in civilian prisons.

Chalky asked him, “You been in civvy nick then?”

“Aye. Armley in Leeds. Six months.”

“What was that for?”

“Minding my own business.”

The first lesson of prison, Farrell explained, was never to ask a man his crime. He admitted, though, that his offense was stealing lead from a church roof. Chalky said he had served fifty-six days in the military “glasshouse” at Aldershot, but he did not say what he had done. Suddenly, the door opened and a new voice shouted, “SUS’s . . . stand by your beds!” This was Staff Sergeant Pickering, who introduced himself as “a proper bastard.” Lights out was in three minutes, Pickering shouted, after which he would be listening at the door. “If I hear as much as a whisper I’ll put the whole lot of you on the peg. That understood?”

Bain lay on one blanket and pulled the other two over his aching body. From a corner of the cell, a man with diarrhea squatted noisily over his “chocolate pot.” All Bain could do was wait for “the brief mercy of sleep.”

•   •   •

Bain had not had a peaceful sleep since he witnessed his friends’ looting their comrades’ corpses at Wadi Akarit. In his mind, he had not run away, because he was no longer there. “I seemed to float away,” he recalled. A psychiatrist later told him he had suffered a “fugue.” From the Latin for flight, it meant a sudden escape from reality.

No one noticed his departure from the Roumana Ridge, until some minutes later a jeep stopped him. Still dazed, Bain stared at a lieutenant. The lieutenant asked him, “
Are you going back to rear echelon?” It was as simple as that. Bain got in, and the lieutenant took him to a camp in the rear.

From the camp, he walked without a word into the desert, still carrying his Lee-Enfield rifle. “
All he cared about was moving back, away from the front, away from where the dead Seaforths were disposed on the sand and rocks in their last abandonment, in their terrible cancellations, their sad mockery of the living.”
Along the route he had traversed as a fighting soldier, he wandered in the opposite direction as a deserter. Trucks carrying men and supplies to the front ignored him, and in his “trance-like state” he paid them little attention. He found cans of meat that had been abandoned by Italian troops, and he chanced upon a Gurkha private who invited him to share his tea and chapatis. Later, as he walked east along the desert road, an RAF supply truck stopped.

The driver introduced himself as Frank Jarvis and offered to take him to Tripoli. It did not take long for Frank to realize Bain was not a straggler: “You’re on the run, John? You can trust me, mate. I wouldn’t shop you.” He would have to leave Bain outside Tripoli, before the RMP checkpoints where Bain would be arrested. “You might be able to scrounge some grub at the Transit Camp but you’ll get picked up sooner or later,” Frank warned. “Unless you dress up as a wog or something. Kip up with an Arab bint.” John fell asleep for a few hours, until Frank stopped to brew tea. While they drank, Frank took some English cigarettes from a can he had picked up at the docks. “You scared?” he asked Bain, as they lit up. “I’d be fucking scared I don’t mind telling you. They reckon the glasshouses out here are fucking terrible. Worse than in Blighty. And that’s saying something.” John said he had not thought about it, adding, “Nothing could be worse than action.”

Several miles before Tripoli, Bain got out of the truck to walk into town. Frank handed the young deserter three tins of corned beef and some hardtack. As he was about to drive off, he said, “You’d better take these, mate.” “These” were the precious English cigarettes.

Walking alone with rifle and pack on his back, he reached Tripoli after dark. It occurred to him that the city had a port, from which he could stow away on a ship. He imagined that friendly sailors would hide and feed him on the voyage to Britain. There, all would be well. “His reverie was abruptly smashed by the squeal of tyres as a fifteen- hundredweight truck skidded to a halt in the gutter at his side,” he wrote. The truck was driven by the military police. He was under arrest.

The army appointed a lieutenant to represent him at his court- martial. At a brief meeting before the trial, the lieutenant prompted Bain for excuses, “troubles at home perhaps,” that he could use on his behalf. The defendant was no help, saying only that he was sick of the business of war. The court-martial convened a few days later in Tripoli and convicted him of desertion “in a forward area.” The crime was not as serious as deserting “in the face of the enemy,” but it was enough to earn him three years at hard labor in the harshest prison in North Africa.

Mustafa Barracks provided Bain with long hours to reflect on the life that had brought him to his desertion and imprisonment. He remembered the town where he spent much of his childhood, Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, “
as a kind of amulet against despair, a dream of rural sweetness and light, an arcadian landscape in which music and poetry and the possibility of romantic love were ubiquitous presences.” Like all childhood fables, Bain’s was inhabited by an ogre. His was his father, a tough veteran of the Great War and a brutal disciplinarian who did not permit his sons to wear underwear because it was “sissy.” Also “sissy,” in the old man’s view, were books, poems and classical music.

James Bain had married Elsie Mabel, a woman three years older than he was and a few notches up the social ladder, just after the Great War. While Bain had left his Scottish regiment as a private, Elsie’s uncle had been an officer.
The couple had three children, Kenneth, John Vernon and Sylvia. John was born in Spilsby, Lincolnshire, on 23 January 1922, while his father earned a livelihood photographing visitors on the beach at Skegness. When John was three, his father in a chimerical bid to break out of poverty moved the family to Ballaghaderreen in the Irish Free State and opened a photography studio. On the ship from Liverpool to Ireland, James played “
one of his little jokes” on three-year-old John, lifting him “over the rail with only the black waves below me, leaping and foaming like enormous wolves, hungry for the proffered titbit.” The boy’s cries for help earned only his father’s “wild laughter.”

The staff sergeants at the Mustafa Barracks resembled so many omnipotent fathers. Bain’s description of his father’s “peculiar half-grin, half-snarl” came close to the “mixture of snarl and smile” he spotted in Staff Sergeant Henderson. Although he made no direct comparison between his father and the MPs, Bain’s appraisal of his father might have applied to Staff Sergeants Hardy, Henderson and Pickering: “I now understood and have understood for many years that he was a sadist. I remember many instances of his grim pleasure derived from inflicting physical or mental pain on my brother or me.” In Ireland, Kenneth and John survived on a diet of potatoes, porridge and soda bread. Meat appeared rarely. Sweets were unknown. Once, their father called the boys into the kitchen to give them a half-pound chocolate bar. With childish delight, Kenneth unwrapped it. Inside was a block of wood.

Their father kept a leather strop for sharpening straight razors on a hook beside the fireplace; but, Bain reminisced, “
I do not recall this one being used for any other purpose than flagellation.” The flagellated, of course, were Kenneth and John. When his business failed in Ireland, James Bain took the family back to England. They settled in Beeston, Nottinghamshire, where James opened another photography shop. When John was seven, he watched his father challenge a Sunday teatime guest, an unassuming man named Bob Linacre, to a fight. While the men’s wives and children squirmed, James forced Bob to don boxing gloves, reduced him to a state of terror and bloodied his nose. “
What I felt was disgust and shame and hatred,” Bain wrote. “Until then I think that I had known nothing but a simple fear of him. Now I hated him.”

For reasons left unexplained, John went to live with his father’s parents in Eccles, Lancashire, for two years. Then, in 1931, when John was nine, the family moved together to that “dream of rural sweetness and light,” Aylesbury. Living in a dingy flat above the photo studio in Market Square was, in Bain’s own account, anything but sweet. Their father continued to beat the boys, once knocking twelve-year-old John flat with a punch to the head. Their mother, whose hard-drinking husband was brazenly unfaithful to her, took refuge in her conversion to what John called “that quasi-religion called Christian Science.”

While life with their father in Aylesbury was hardly “sweetness and light,” the Bain brothers retreated into a world of books and music that was. Kenneth taught himself to play his mother’s piano, and John borrowed a wide range of books from the library—Dickens, T. S. Eliot, John Buchan and the lowbrow crime novels of Edgar Wallace. The boys wandered together into the meadows with armfuls of works by their favorite poets. Literature gave Bain his “only distraction from the fairly grim present.” From the age of fourteen, he wrote poems that he did not show to anyone. The boys bought a gramophone, but they waited until their father was out of the house before playing Liszt, Debussy, Schubert and the great mezzo-soprano Marian Anderson. James Bain, detesting his sons’ “sissy” interest in music and books, enrolled them in the Aylesbury and District Boxing Club. Within two years, John made the final round of the British Schoolboy Championship.

James Bain told his sons he had enlisted in the army at fourteen and been wounded at Mons. His endless stories of Great War escapades, in which he invariably played a heroic role, made John suspicious: “I began to wonder about their historical veracity, until his boasting became something of a secret joke between Kenneth and me.” To avoid a thrashing, they kept that joke to themselves. Yet his childhood was awash with reverence for a war he knew only through hearsay. John later told an interviewer, “
I also remember very vividly Armistice Days when I was a child, because I actually wore my father’s medals. He got his medals out, and I would have them on my jersey, my jacket, whatever I was wearing.” He would turn out in the town square, while old soldiers observed silence for comrades who had died in France. “It was a very militaristic occasion, in fact. I still feel uneasy. There was a kind of glorification of war itself.”

While their father made them wary of the army, the boys shared a fascination with the Great War’s poetry, novels and films. To John, the conflict in the trenches was a “
tragic and mythopoeic event.” He became “haunted by its imagery, its pathos, the waste, the heroism and futility” via the writings of Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and Ernest Hemingway.

The 1938 Munich Crisis, when the British and French ceded western Czechoslovakia to Hitler’s Germany, affected him less than “two momentous discoveries: D. H. Lawrence and beer.” Having left school at the age of fourteen in 1936, he was working as a junior clerk in an accountant’s office. In his free time, he read James Joyce, courted young women and drank Younger’s Scotch Ale at the pub. He and Kenneth were not above getting into trouble, once drunkenly climbing the roof of a hotel to break into it. After their arrest and trial, the local newspaper called them “
the boxing Bain brothers.” Their two-year probation was less notable than the newspaper’s disclosure that John was eighteen. Until then, his twenty-six-year-old girlfriend, Sally, thought they were the same age. She accepted the age difference, but John’s father disapproved of the girl. He ordered John to leave her, backing up the command by throwing a punch. For the first time, John fought back and gave his father a black eye. It was the last time his father would strike him, but they stopped speaking to each other.

John’s response to the declaration of war in September 1939 was “one mainly of puerile excitement.” He did not, however, rush to the colors. When the German bombing raids known as the Blitz began in September 1940, Bain’s mother and sister were evacuated to the Cotswolds for safety. The three men of the family stayed on in uncomfortable silence in Aylesbury. Having lost his job with the accountants after his arrest, John went to work selling spare parts for the Aylesbury Motor Company at thirty-five shillings a week. His attempted enlistment in the Royal Air Force faltered over the medical exam that discovered his bad eye. He wrote later in “The Unknown War Poet,”

He enlisted among the very first

Though not from patriotic motives, nor

To satisfy the spirit of adventure . . .

In December, he and Kenneth decided to enlist in the Merchant Marine. While their motives were unclear, merchant service offered two advantages: a way out of an intolerable life at home and the opportunity, provided the Luftwaffe or Kriegsmarine did not sink their ship, to cruise around the world. With £400 that they stole from a hidden store of cash their father kept to avoid income tax, they fled to London. They spent lavishly, taking a room at the Regent Palace Hotel and buying tickets for Donald Wolfit’s production of
King Lear
and Myra Hess’s lunchtime recitals. They got drunk in one Soho pub after another. Finally, they went to the Shipping Federation to sign on as merchant seamen. “
Our interview with the uniformed officer at the Federation was brief and humiliating,” Bain wrote. They tried the docks in Cardiff and Glasgow, where the recruiting poster drew them into the infantry that Christmas.