Tag: history

The Last of the Paladins

TonyLeave a comment

Many bibliophiles explain their condition (addiction? affliction?) by recounting how they grew up in a home filled with books, with parents who themselves were great readers and acquirers of books. I’ve often believed that my own bibliophilia is a result of just the opposite. My memories of childhood are of a house with few books — possibly no more than two short shelves. I don’t remember my parents being great readers, nor did they encourage my desire to read. They were much more likely to say, “Why don’t you get your nose out of that book and go out and get some fresh air?”

Because they were few in number, I remember some of those books quite well. One of the few of them that was for children was a large bound volume of the Boys’ Own Paper, from 1887-8. Since it was published 30 years before Dad was born, I assume it must have belonged first to his father or father-in-law, both of whom were boys in the 1880s. The Boys’ Own Paper was first published in 1879, following an idea raised by the Religious Tract Society for a magazine to encourage children to read, and to instil Christian moral teachings during their formative years. As well as factual features about nature, sport, history and simple science experiments, there were stories about public school1 life, explorations, and adventures in ‘the colonies’. Many of these promoted the ideals and values of the British Empire, and often contained ‘information’ which we would now regard as appallingly racist. The BOP continued to be published until 1967 — I remember buying it occasionally when I was young — but by then its imperialist bias was understandably less. The 1887 volume seemed very old-fashioned to me, and I never found the school stories and the rest interesting. The one serial story I loved was the story of one of Charlemagne’s paladins, fighting to defend the realm of the great Frankish emperor against his enemies.

Somewhere along life’s journey I ‘lost’ that big old volume. It succumbed to one of our moves and clearances, maybe was donated to a charity shop. (I wonder where, if anywhere, it is now?) But I remembered it the other day when reading Peter Fletcher’s history of The Conversion of Europe.

Google can be a wonderful, if time-consuming, tool. With its help I was able to discover that there exists an archive, in the United States, of those old volumes of the Boys’ Own Paper, and downloaded a PDF of the 1887-8 volume. There, indeed, I found the serialisation of The Last of the Paladins2, by the French author Charles Deslys.

Will I read it again? Will I find it still has the fascinating appeal that it has had for me all these years? Or will it turn out to have lost all that, and to be magical only in memory? I find I am almost too afraid to put it to the test. Perhaps it will be better for the Last of the Paladins to be laid to rest, never to ride again.

  1. For non-British readers, a ‘public school’ in Britain is a private, fee-paying school. The leading ones include Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Rugby, and so on. Not for the likes of me, then. This is a fine example of the perfidious nature of some English usage, in which common expressions mean the exact opposite of what they say. ↩︎
  2. Very few of his works seem to be still available. The original of The Last of the Paladins is L’Héritage de Charlemagne. ↩︎

Hermione’s War

TonyLeave a comment

I’ve owned a copy of this book for several years, but have only now got around to reading it.

To War with Whitaker, by Hermione, Countess Ranfurly. (Slightly Foxed edition)

It’s a war book with a difference. It’s not about the military campaigns and battles. It’s a woman’s diary, written during the 6 years of the Second World War, but not edited and published until 1994.

The diarist was Hermione, Countess of Ranfurly. She married her husband Dan in January 1939, knowing that war was likely if not inevitable. When it did break out in the following September, Dan was posted with the Sherwood Yeomanry to the Middle East. Hermione was determined to go with him, even though it was ‘against the rules’ for Yeomanry wives to accompany their husbands. But she was an accomplished stenographer and typist; and more to the point, a woman with the stubbornness and perseverance to take on the military bureaucrats and jobsworths who tried repeatedly to get her sent back to England. She made herself indispensable to a succession of generals and other leaders, who were happy to ignore the ‘rules’. She became not only their secretary, but a ‘fixer’ for all kinds of hospitality, accommodation.

Dan was captured in the North African desert and spent years in a prison camp in Italy, before escaping and eventually making his way back to Allied-occupied territory. Hermione, meanwhile, though she was only in her 20s, was eventually recognized as having “the highest woman’s job in the theatre” (of war). She records meeting kings, prime ministers, senior military officers, film stars, and others. It was six years of unremitting hard work, flying backwards and forwards around the Mediterranean – when she was afraid of flying, and frequently air-sick. Six years of fun and enjoyment of new experiences, which she records with a keen eye. Six years, too, of anxiety for Dan, and for the outcome of the war, especially during the years of Axis victories and advances in North Africa and Eastern Europe. The tide eventually turned, of course; but through it all there is hardly any hatred of the enemy.

Towards the end, there are many details which we don’t always find in the more military histories of the war. I wasn’t aware of the problems in many places, when countries were finally liberated from enemy occupation, of acute food shortages, raging inflation, and fighting between former partisan factions, communist or democrat. Noting the mounting air supremacy of the Allied air forces, and the huge bombing raids on Germany, Hermione grieves over the suffering and the level of damage and casualties being caused. After the second atom bomb was dropped was dropped on Nagasaki, and the war finally ended, she notes:

Walking back to the office, with paper cascading from office windows and swirling in gusts along the streets, and people on the roofs and balconies singing and shouting, I felt terribly sad. It is so wonderful that the Second World War is over, and no wonder people celebrate, but what we have all done — to defend ourselves and to win the war — is too frightful for words.

And Whitaker? Whitaker was Dan and Hermione’s faithful butler, who insisted on accompanying them to the Middle East and Mediterranean, and was a loyal and amusing friend throughout the time.

WAR! What is it good for?