Hitler believed in the Darwinian struggle for existence. Life did not, could not, exist without conflict.
All too soon after his ascent into power, and initially, Europe got to experience the consequences of his grim and aggressive political beliefs.
In Great Britain, after years of tension, there was both resignation and apprehension. As the Manchester Guardian wrote in September 1939 we ‘enter this war with sad hearts at the inexpressible and wanton folly of it’. It went on to add: ‘we must win’.
One answer among many to fight the Nazis was the creation of the Commandos, Britain’s first Special Service troops and the forerunners of the Parachute Regiment and the SAS.
I was gestating the latest novel, Woodspring, in which a central theme is the survival of a house weathering changes forced on it by social and political upheaval over three generations from 1940 to 2005. I had already written a couple of novels about the SOE (Special Operations Executive), Light of the Moon and I Can’t Begin to Tell You when I found myself on holiday in the Highland fishing village of Arisaig, close to Arisaig House where SOE personnel had been trained in fieldcraft and small arms by the naturalist Gavin Maxwell. I headed for the museum which details local SOE activity – a perennial fascination – and is stocked with books, including Arisaig and the Special Operations Executive. Its section on worked examples of the Playfair and Double Transposition Ciphers in the SOE early years used to send coded messages back and forth to its agents is recommended as a holiday diversion. However, beware the headache that ensues.
Also on the shelves was Stuart Allan’s Commando Country and I picked it up. Reading it was to introduce a theatre of war which, for me, was new and equally enthralling. Like many, I had heard of the Commandos but knew little about them. To be reading about them while in their terrain so to speak was quite an experience. Plus, we were lucky enough to be shown over Inverailort House where the Commandos were based in the early days. When we went it was still operating as a post office – it is now a ruin. To place a foot on the bottom stair of the famous staircase where the instructors Fairbairn and Sykes were alleged to have thrown themselves down as part of their legendary training routine was obligatory. Later on, operations were relocated to Achnacarry, the ancestral home of Cameron of Lochiel.
Raised on the specific orders of Winston Churchill in the summer of 1940, the men were to be recruited from all branches of the British army and tutored in unorthodox, and sometimes extreme, methods and techniques to prepare them for operations worldwide. Small military units would take part in sea-borne raids, on sabotage missions inside enemy-occupied territory and to be there to defend Britain if it was invaded. The thinking was they were to be warriors trained to ‘butcher and bolt’, highly disciplined, fast-thinking, fleet-of-foot and resourceful. They were to display, to quote from James Dunning’s It Had to be Tough: The Origins and Training of the Commandos in World War II, ‘high morale and confidence’ which was ‘the outcome of thorough and demanding training under sound leadership’.
Like the SOE, the Commandos made a huge contribution to the war effort, operating in Norway, North Africa, Burma and in much of Europe. Unveiled in 1952, their memorial just outside Spean Bridge in the Scottish Highlands features three giant bronze figures looking over towards the mountains which is guaranteed, if not to bring a lump to the throat, to impress.
During my writing career, I have learnt that ideas coming from the unexpected left field are often the ones that become mainstream in the book. So it proved with the commandos who slid, or rather barnstormed, into my writer’s psyche. Somewhat to my astonishment, I found myself making a commando one of the three main characters who lives at Woodspring.
Built in 1810, the Dane family have occupied it continuously up to World War Two. Like many, they began as industrious entrepreneurs who make good and turn into landed gentry. My research yielded many delights, including the discovery of an entry in a census taken in the 1860s. This was for a family conforming to my fictional family that might have lived in a similar establishment, and I was enchanted by the entry for the daughter of the family who, under the section for occupation, was said ‘to do what she pleases’. She sounded great.
Harry Dane is 29 at the outset of the war. With the help of estate workers and domestic staff, Woodspring has worked well and flourished but the fallout from the conflict, with its demands on the economy and the population, makes it impossible to continue in the same manner. What precautions must he take to ensure that his family house survives? What will guarantee continuity and which of the sea changes in culture and social structure will impact the most?
These are questions that Harry knows he cannot solve at the time; he has neither the time nor the opportunity to focus. They will be answered with hindsight – and by historians. The war imposes on him different urgencies and responses. Survival is at issue. In the months before the Nazi invasion of Poland, Harry has found himself in the orbit of Colin Gubbins, the legendary maverick with a life-long interest in irregular warfare. Gubbins’ (promoted to Acting Brigadier in May 1940) team had trawled pre-war Europe (as the fictional Harry does) for ideas and information on unorthodox fighting methods and had devised training manuals on guerrilla warfare. He was also influential in wrangling the commandos into being and latterly became third Chief of the SOE.
Inspired by him, Harry undergoes the commando training in Arisaig – 50-mile hikes, learning to handle explosives, how to make an assault from the sea, how to manage fieldcraft in all weathers, outwitting the ghillies who had been set on their tails and were not shy of using live ammunition.
He also meets Faith who has spent several years in Europe and has a different perspective on the capabilities of a small island to survive Hitler. She is sceptical about humanity. She thinks that philosophers and pundits who consider humans are progressing into a better and more civilized era have it badly wrong. Faith is instrumental in making him realise that he must not allow the war to kill his capacity to feel, and ‘to take time to feel’. Later in bomb-stricken London, he understands even more profoundly that dissonance from war results in minds fracturing and hearts pulverising. Woodspring assumes more importance as an emotional locus.
The next two generations to inhabit Woodspring witness huge changes. Nell Dane inherits it in 1975 at a time when land for development becomes desirable, prices rise and labour becomes scarce, jeopardizing the survival of a house with acreage attached and expensive upkeep. It is a time also when governments were worried about juvenile delinquency, a consequence, it was posited, of the post-war baby boom. How to nurture children who needed care was a vexed question, debated forensically by government and committees – for example, how should social workers and probation officers fit into the social welfare structures? Who were these children? Nell is to encounter one such child and finds herself in a battle with officialdom. While still hugely important to her, Woodspring is still demanding, still problematic – she is caught between the need to spread protective wings over a child and to coax them into sane and healthy maturity and the rational financial problems that require solving.
Woodspring is surviving, albeit in a different guise when Mia is introduced to it in 2005. An MI5 surveillance agent for MI5, she considers it lazy to imagine there are no bad actors in societies, and her work is to find them. She cares very much about the defence of this country. The UK had its faults, with sufficient operational kleptocrats, narcissistic politicians and feral youth to give itself problems but, she feels instinctively, it was decent at heart. Cities, towns and villages were worth guarding. So, too, were its fields, trees and rivers.
E.M. Forster wrote that the growth and destruction of the English countryside is ‘a genuine and tragic theme’. Woodspring and its land hover on the cusp – and that includes the fields which Harry had ordered in the 1940s to be sewn with sainfoin and burnet, the wildflower meadow which had been established post-war, plus the patch of woodland abutting the house which shelters wildlife and has survived the decades. As Harry was forced to face the conflict in Europe, and Nell a social and financial predicament, so Mia responds to the present crisis, which is that of increasing pollution and a race to mine resources. Can she convince Joey Dane that, in the skilful, timely metamorphosis of an estate such as Woodspring, lies the future?
Of course, any number of facts and documented circumstances do not good fiction make if the imaginative alchemy, the skill and the technique to fuse them into a story is absent. When I began writing, I offered up a prayer to the muses Calliope and Clio that they would help me to snare onto the page the seduction and beauty of the country house, its mythic status in our national life and, more important, the substance of the people who inhabited its elegant, light-filled rooms.
What happens to them and whatever they experience – sadness, contentment, war, betrayal, love affairs, bereavement – is the stuff of fiction. Even so, whether this family lives at Woodspring or not, the notion of it remains constant.
Elizabeth Buchan is an award-winning and bestselling writer, and the author of Woodspring.
