Johann and Daniel
by Charles Lacey
Chapter 2
Christopher.
It seems amazing, looking back at my life from the age of fifty, how much I seem to have managed to do. I was born in 1920 in London and brought up in a very conventional way. But we moved when I was a little boy to a larger house near Croydon, in Surrey, and from my bedroom windows I could see the aircraft taking off and landing at Croydon Aerodrome. Very small and primitive, we would think those aeroplanes now, but to my boyish eyes they were the last word in modern technology, and I grew up with a fascination with them.
At school I enjoyed games and was keen on physical fitness. I attended Whitgift School as a day boy, and was lucky enough to find teaching that was generally sound, and occasionally inspired. But I was also lucky enough to have a natural aptitude for technical subjects, particularly mathematics, and so it was no surprise to anyone that in 1938 I joined the Royal Air Force and trained as a pilot. At school I had also shown something of a gift for languages, and had learned French and German, the latter to some way beyond the ordinary School Certificate. It must have been in about 1934 that my parents took me on the first of several holidays to Austria and encouraged me to use my German. They, of course, knew none, but I was surprised at how easily I both made myself understood, and how much I could grasp of what was said to me. It probably helped that my German teacher, Dr Riemenschneider was himself an Austrian, from Vienna.
Everyone in England then could see the way the Continental wind was blowing. Hitler and his gang of thugs had annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia, and were clearly looking round for the next bit of land to grab. Poor Neville Chamberlain did his best, but he was an old, sick man and despite the efforts of Lord Runciman, Winston Churchill and others to get him to see the realityof what was happening, he came back from Munich in 1938 waving his famous piece of paper which, of course, turned out to be worthless.
But I loved flying. I was regularly reprimanded by my C.O. for executing dangerous manoeuvres. The Spitfire was a wonderful machine, responsive to one's lightest touch on the controls, and I would frequently perform damn-fool tricks like flying under a bridge. But I did learn the limits of what even the Spitfire would do, and became a competent, if sometimes rather over-confident, pilot.
War came, as we knew it would have to, and we were all issued with gas-masks and endless regulations and advice. The actual declaration of war in September 1939 was followed by a long period when no-one quite knew what to expect or even what to do. The anticipated invasion attempt on Britain never materialised, and a very good thing too, as we were woefully unprepared and a heavily armed invasion would almost certainly have succeeded. But Hitler was not nearly as good a war-leader as he liked to think he was, and his dithering then gave us the breathing space we needed.
The government, of course, was still in theory led by Neville Chamberlain, but he was a nineteenth-century gentleman at a time which needed someone far more vigorous, and he was set aside and replaced by Mr Churchill. Much has been written about Mr Churchill, a good deal of it adulatory, and some downright critical, but when all was said and done, he was an inspiring war leader, who put heart into the British people. Without him, I consider it a certainty that we would have capitulated; Lord Halifax and others were behind a scheme to do a deal with Hitler, mediated by the Italians. Thank God that never came off. If it had, I'd probably be writing this in German. Or, more probably, I wouldn't be writing it at all, as we'd be far too scared of the consequences of any sort of anti-Nazi writing. We British can never agree about our governments, except in general about their badness, but at least we can criticise them openly without fear of a visit from the secret police. I think that's worth a lot.
Well, came the Battle of Britain, and I was in the thick of it. It's difficult to describe the emotions it produced in air crews. We were frightened, of course, and only a fool would deny it. We would eat our breakfast, with no sort of guarantee that we would still be here to eat our supper. But set against that was the fierce pride in our country, our King and Queen, our Services and everything that was British, and most of all the sheer excitement of pitting our machines and our skills against the Messerschmitts and Junkers of the enemy.
Like most of my friends, I shot down several enemy aircraft, and was privileged to meet the King when he awarded me the DFC and later the DSO. Of course, it was very much a young man's game, but we were young and fit. Two of my comrades were shot down, though, Andrew Boyle, a lad I'd grown up with, and Peter Williams, who was my room-mate. We grieved for them, of course, we did, though in that characteristically self-mocking, buttoned-up English way. But our grief drove us to what was not so much hatred of the enemy as a determination to shoot down as many of the bastards as we could. It was not until much later that I began to think that each one I shot down was probably a young man like myself who, but for the accident of war, might have become my good friend and who, like me, probably had parents, sisters and a sweetheart. It was some years after the war that I had a breakdown – though in those days we didn't call it that – and eventually became a Quaker and a pacifist. I'm still active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Thank God we didn't have atom bombs in 1940, or the world would probably no longer exist.
But I mentioned a sweetheart. Back then in 1940 I had one, as did most of us. She was a lovely girl called Celia. Her father was a business man in Canterbury. I used to take her dancing whenever I could. We were all terribly proper in those days, though. No nice girl would have dreamt of sleeping with a man until they were married. It's all very different now, of course. But it worked in my favour, because I could be seen to be trundling around with a girl on my arm, and no-one would ever have guessed that I had very different feelings deep down.
I'm reminded of the remark attributed, probably accurately, to King George V: "I thought chaps like that shot themselves". Certainly, no young man in those days would have admitted to anyone else that he was attracted to other young men. In my case, it took a long time before I admitted it even to myself. I'd plenty of opportunity to see young men naked, of course: at school; in the changing room or showers after Rugby matches, in which I frequently played if I could; in barracks and so on as well. But because homosexuality was so unmentionable, it was in a strange way easier to remain concealed provided one avoided looking too obviously at other chaps in the shower or whatever. A man had to be very obviously a pansy before he was identified as such.
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