Flying, fighting, writing

There are thousands of memoirs of the Second World War, including the war in the air. But a few feel especially alive – because they were written while it was happening. Some are still read; others are not, but should be, for they bring the air war vividly to life

As Washington Post publisher Philip Graham said back in 1963, journalism is “the first rough draft of history”. That hasn’t changed; new books about Donald Trump and Brexit pour off the press or onto our Kindles almost weekly, and they’re often by journalists – Bob Woodward and CBS correspondent Major Garrett are the latest. In a year or two their books will be out of date and out of print. But in time, historians will go back to them as primary sources.

A Halifax Mk I (Imperial War Museum © IWM CH 3393)

The Second World War was no different. Publishers fell over themselves to commission the topical. Sometimes, these commissions went to the well-known – people such as war correspondent Ernie Pyle and journalist and socialite Ève Curie, who slugged it out for a Pulitzer in 1943; Pyle won, but Curie’s book is a tour de force; I wrote about it here a couple of years ago. In Britain, Richard Dimbleby published two books during the war – The Waiting Year (about the run-up to D-Day) and the splendid The Frontiers Are Green. Even John Steinbeck got books out on the war while it was on (Bombs Away, about an American bomber crew, and a rather good short novel, The Moon is Down).

But publishers know an expanding racket, and they didn’t just publish the great and the good. A number of serving RAF pilots wrote about their experiences during the war. The best-known were Enemy Coast Ahead and The Last Enemy, by Guy Gibson and Richard Hillary – both to be killed later in the war – and Leonard Cheshire’s Bomber Pilot. There was much they could not talk about while hostilities were still on. Airfield names are omitted, for instance, and sometimes the names of other pilots. And of course they could not talk about the extraordinary electronic war that the RAF was fighting in the skies over Germany; some of that remained secret for some time after 1945. But they could give civilians a taste of the war being fought above their heads.

Books like Hillary’s and Gibson’s are still in print, but most have vanished. The two writers reviewed here are less well-known. Their books are not notable as literature, but they do offer flashes of fine writing. And they give an acute flavour of the war and what it was like to fight it in the air.

First, R.C. Rivaz’s Tail Gunner.

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Richard C. Rivaz was born in 1908 in India, where his father had been a civil servant. In the 1930s he tried to earn his living as an artist, but made little money, and turned to teaching. When the war began he volunteered for the RAF and was disappointed to be told that he was too old for pilot training, but was accepted as an air-gunner. In the summer of 1940 he was posted to an operational unit; as it was wartime he did not name the squadron or the airfield in the book, but it was 102 Squadron at Driffield, north of Hull.

Arriving late, he was put in a room with an officer who was already asleep but had left his possessions scattered all over the room.

I was awakened next morning by the buzzing sound of an electric razor, and saw a slight figure in brightly-coloured pyjamas walking up and down the room trailing a length of electric flex behind him and running the razor in a care-free manner up and down his face. After a few moments I said ‘Good morning’… and was favoured with some sort of grunt in reply. I saw this ...strange person several times during the day… but never once did he show that he recognized me. I noticed that he seemed to know everybody, and that most people called him Cheese. That night I changed my room.

Not long afterwards he is assigned to fly with this unfriendly character, who then makes himself quite charming. Rivaz gives his first name, Leonard, but not his second, which was Cheshire. At the time he wrote his book, Rivaz would have known that Cheshire was to be a successful pilot, but not just how famous he would become.

Before he can get off the ground, however, Rivaz experiences a fierce air attack on the airfield.

I saw a party of men digging furiously around a shelter that had received a direct hit: the ambulance was there… and the orderlies were lifting a man — with his tunic, face, and hair covered with earth — on to a stretcher. ...I noticed that his legs were in an unnatural twisted position. Someone was digging around another pair of legs: the body was still buried and the legs obviously broken. I saw two more men crushed — with faces nearly the same colour as their tunics — between sheets of corrugated iron: they were both dead.

It was August 15 1940 and Driffield had been attacked by a large force of German bombers; 14 RAF personnel were dead, including the first female RAF fatality, and 12 British aircraft were destroyed. These were details that Rivaz couldn’t give, but it doesn’t matter – his description of the raid is very vivid. So is much else in the book; Rivaz was to see a lot of action, and there are few dull moments. Flying over Cologne, his aircraft is hit and a flare explodes in the rear of the plane, temporarily blinding the crew, injuring one terribly and blowing an enormous hole in the fuselage; Rivaz, in the tail turret, must struggle past the damage and try to put out the flames. Cheshire eventually regained control of the aircraft and brought it home, a feat that won him the DSO. Later, Rivaz would twice fly on missions against the Scharnhorst at Brest, daylight attacks on a heavily defended target. He was not to know that in the first of these raids, in July 1941, armour-piercing bombs of the type he was carrying did damage the ship quite badly. They may have come from his aircraft. He also “ditched” twice and was rescued from the sea, both times in winter; on one of these occasions, he only barely survived.

Whitleys at Driffield (Imperial War Museum © IWM HU 104766)

Rivaz flew as rear-gunner in two types of aircraft. Again, he was writing in wartime so says little about them, but he does identify them. At Driffield it was the Armstrong Whitworth Whitley, a twin-engined type that had been introduced in early 1937. In a time of rapid change, this meant it was already outdated. But it was not unsuccessful as a bomber, and later variants were also used for sub-hunting and for clandestine long-distance transport. What it wasn’t, was fast. Rivaz records that on one raid, to Leuna in Saxony, they were in the air for 11 hours. Life in the rear turret must have been extremely uncomfortable (and he does mention the extremes of heat and cold). Later he transferred, like Cheshire, to 35 Squadron at Linton-on-Ouse; this was the first squadron to fly the new four-engined Handley Page Halifax Mk I.

Rivaz’s writing is inconsistent. But at its best it is excellent. He was a thoughtful and observant man; at one point he describes, in detail, taking off on a mission to Cologne on a March night. The Whitley’s engines are being run up. “The ground crew were standing by, watching: one stood too near the slipstream and had his hat blown off… it was rolling over and over behind the aeroplane, and he was chasing it. ...A large pool of water by my turret was being thrown up into a fine spray, and some bits of oily rag were flying about in the air.” They move off; the tail lifts in the air; the plane sways from side to side as the pilot keeps it straight with the rudder; then they are crossing the airfield perimeter, the lights glowing yellow and red below. Rivaz, as a gunner, is alert, knowing that enemy intruders have sometimes attacked bombers as they take off. Yet he sees his surroundings. He was, after all, an artist:

Rivaz with Cheshire in 1940 or 1941

We were still circling the aerodrome and climbing… and it was getting lighter instead of darker the higher we climbed. The ground appeared as a sort of grey-green colour, and seemed very remote and unreal. The aerodrome beacon was flashing red. ...The sky above us was a green-blue… and the western sky was lit by a glorious red sunset. The red glow tinted the edge of my gun barrels and the perspex round my turret a bright red colour. I was thrilled with the beauty, and called through to A__, telling him about it and asking him if he could see it. He replied that he could just see the edge of it. They would have lost the sunset from the ground by now… but up here it was as vivid as the ground was obscure. On the ground one is not always conscious of the transition of light to darkness. But in the air one is in the change… it is all around one.

But this night would not end well. By early morning “A__” (the captain) would be dead. Rivaz does not identify him; in fact, his name was Clive Florigny and he was from Streatham, South London. Rivaz also does not say, and probably did not know, that Florigny’s brother, also a Whitley pilot, was to be killed later the same day. Their names are on the Air Forces Memorial at Runnymede, along with other aircrew with no known grave.

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At about the time Rivaz was arriving at Driffield, Arthur (Art) Donahue was arriving at his own first operational station; like Rivaz, he does not name it, but it was Kenley in Surrey, on the southern approach to London. It was a rapid transition. As he recalls in Tally-Ho! Yankee in a Spitfire, also published in the middle of the war, just six weeks earlier he had been at work on his father’s farm in St Charles, Minnesota. He had applied to join the US volunteer reserve very early in the war, but had heard nothing. Now, hearing that France had collapsed, he decided that, as an American, he could wait until his people were forced to fight, as they surely would be; or he could join the battle now. He travelled to Canada to join up and just 10 days later he was on a liner to Britain.

I didn’t have any of the qualifications of a soldier. I was neither big nor very strong; I was quite mild-tempered and absolutely afraid to fight, and I was more cautious in my flying than the average pilot then.

Art Donahue

This may be modest. Donahue, then 27, had been a Depression-era barnstormer but was also a serious pilot; when the war broke out, he was instructing. Even so, the speed with which the RAF got him off the boat and into combat is astonishing, given the very long training that most RAF pilots had to undergo. On arrival, he was sent straight to an Operational Training Unit (OTU) – again, he does not say which, but it was No. 7 OTU at Hawarden. OTUs were what their name indicates – advanced training units from which newly trained pilots would undertake their first missions. After a brief period flying trainers, he was unleashed on a Spitfire, a plane that cruised at twice the speed of anything he had ever flown before.

As in Tail Gunner, there is hardly a dull moment. Donahue began his combat career by chasing a Messerschmitt 109 across the Channel and engaging it, he says, at Cap Griz Nez – a hot pursuit that I’d always thought Battle of Britain pilots avoided, not wishing to be lured into combat over enemy territory. Which is what happened to Donahue, who caught the fighter but was then bounced by its friends. He escaped, and landed at Hawkinge on the Kent coast with serious damage to his aircraft. Then just a week later his aircraft caught fire after being hit in combat, forcing him to bail out with serious burns to one leg. By the time he returned to flying, the Battle of Britain was essentially over. Yet he had taken part in it – one of only about 10 American pilots to do so.

Tally-Ho! is not always as gripping as Tail Gunner, and Rivaz is the better of the two writers. But every now and then Donahue does capture the imagination. A flight from Kenley to their advanced base at Hawkinge:

We had to fly to our advance base at dawn, and it was an unforgettably beautiful flight for me. It was just getting light when we took off, and the countryside was dim below us. Wicked blue flames flared back from the exhausts of all the engines as I looked at the planes in formation about me. We seemed to hover motionless except for the slight upward or downward drift of one machine or another in relation to the rest, which seemed to lend a sort of pulsating life to the whole formation; and the dark carpet of the earth below steadily slid backward beneath us. The sun, just rising and very red and big and beautiful, made weird lights over the tops of our camouflaged wings. We were like a herd of giant beasts in some strange new kind of world.

There is also striking detail on the life of a fighter pilot. They were clearly very organised. Donahue describes how, preparing for a period on readiness, he puts his parachute on the aircraft’s tailplane, as that is where he can grab it quickest if he’s scrambled. He even arranges the straps so that they will fall easily to hand. In the cockpit he hangs his helmet over the control stick and plugs in the radio and oxygen leads, making sure that they are hanging in the right way so they won’t slow down the business of putting the helmet on. The seat and shoulder straps are similarly arranged. Then Donahue methodically sets various valves to the open position so that he will not have to waste time doing so when the call comes. There are many more checks, all of them – by his account – meticulously carried out.

Donahue was apparently a strict Catholic and teetotaller (he mentions neither in the book), and one wonders how he fared with the hard-drinking RAF pilots; well enough, it seems. Also, he recounts in the book that he went to Canada to join the RAF but does not say that he claimed to be Canadian, almost certainly because he faced losing his American citizenship for serving under a foreign flag. In fact, the US rescinded this threat only a few weeks later. But it may explain why there are different stories as to how many US nationals flew in the Battle of Britain (between seven and 11, depending on where you look; more joined the RCAF/RAF soon afterwards).

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Rivaz’s Tail Gunner ends with the second daylight raid on the Scharnhorst at Brest (he gives no date, but it was in January 1942). At the end of the book, Rivaz staggers ashore after another ditching; the second attack, it seems, proved as hairy as the first one.

Rivaz still wanted to be a pilot, and finally persuaded the RAF to post him for training. The result was a second book, Tail Gunner Takes Over. It describes his training in Manitoba, and ends with his posting back to Britain. Tail Gunner Takes Over is not as good as Tail Gunner; there’s some padding, and the details of his training are now really only of interest to historians of wartime flying. Rivaz was a good rather than great writer. But the first book is gripping – not least because he was in the thick of the air war at the start of Bomber Command’s offensive against Germany. The casualty rate was high, and relatively few of the early pilots can have survived to write of those early raids in Hampdens and Whitleys. Later aircrew were more likely to, by virtue simply of having less time to get killed.

Moreover Rivaz could be quite thoughtful, and was fully aware of the destruction he was causing below:

Cheshire's Whitley after Cologne (Imperial War Musem © IWM CH 1764)

The fires would still be burning in Cologne, where there would be a lot of suffering and misery. That was what we had intended. Our target had been a large factory, and a lot of night-shift workers would have been working there: there would be people dead or dying… there would be people burned there. Some might be alive… living with broken bones, unable to move, and with crushed and mangled bodies pressed against them… with nothing but the stink of rubble and putrefying flesh for company. There would be people with arms and legs blown off… and people with their stomachs blown open… and people with half their faces blown away. They might have to wait hours or even days until they were found; unable to help themselves and wishing they could die… yet afraid to die. Some would be badly burnt and would die; [or] would not die, but would be crippled and scarred always… All these things I had seen when our own aerodrome was bombed.

Did Rivaz have doubts about what he was doing? He might have done; he was clearly aware of its consequences. Nearly 700,000 Germans would die in the air bombardment before the end of the war, and Rivaz was right – they would not always die mercifully. In practice, though, he probably felt, as others did, that the Germans had started the war, and besides had bombed us, and others; they could hardly complain that bombs were being thrown back. Most members of his generation still had no sympathy when I was growing up. But a few were not so sure.

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Donahue’s book ends a year or so before Rivaz’s, early in 1941; the Battle of Britain had really ended by the time he recovered from his injuries, and he was reposted to another squadron in the south of England. Here there is much that Donahue does not say, hinting only that he was transferred more than once. In fact, it seems that he was posted to an embryonic squadron for American RAF volunteers. It is said that he disliked it; no planes had arrived, and the Americans were not to the taste of the strict Catholic from the farm. But he does not say this in the book, and it is hard to confirm. At any rate, he gets himself posted again and as the book finishes he is flying offensive fighter sweeps over Northern France. These became more common in 1941 as the RAF, stronger now, looked for ways to strike back. They were not without losses; Douglas Bader, flying a Spitfire V, was captured on a sweep of this sort after his plane collided with a German in combat. Still, the fierce fighting of the previous summer was over. Tally Ho ends there.

Donahue’s flying career, however, didn’t. Like Rivaz, he was to write a second book. Unlike Rivaz, he would have plenty of action to speak of therein. In the autumn of 1941 he was transferred to a squadron that was going overseas, apparently at his own wish; he wanted to fight. The squadron set off on a troopship, to be united with their new aircraft at their destination. They weren’t to be Spitfires but Hurricanes, which Donahue had not flown before.

The Hurricane had entered service a little earlier than the Spitfire. It too was a fast modern monoplane with retractable undercarriage and eight guns, but instead of being all-metal, it was – like older aircraft – partially fabric, with a linen skin stretched and shrunk over a skeletal framework. This had its advantages, as it could be repaired more quickly, but it was also more prone to fire, and most RAF fighter pilots who suffered terrible burns did so in the Hurricane rather than the Spitfire. It did not help that the fuel tank was sited right in front of the pilot. (Though Messerschmitt 109 pilots actually sat on theirs, which may have felt worse.)

Donahue never learns where the squadron was supposed to have gone. In fact, it seems to have been the Middle East. But in South Africa they learn of Pearl Harbour; also, that they have a new destination. Arriving in the Dutch East Indies, they collected their new planes, and at the end of January they arrived in Singapore.

In Last Flight from Singapore, Donahue recalled his first sight of the island.

We began passing under heavy, blue-black storm clouds that forced us to fly lower and lower, and looking ahead I could now make out a great harbor on the coast, with the dim shapes of several ships anchored in it. Singapore harbor! ...We made it just ahead of a heavy rainstorm that was bearing down from the north, and though the setting sun was still shining from the west, we had to fly through a curtain of rain on the north side when we were approaching to land. Even circling the drome we could easily see we were in a war zone, for it was spotted with filled-in bomb craters just like the ones in England, and there were quite a few unfilled ones, too, indicating that the airdrome had recently been bombed. There was a fresh hole in one end of the concrete runway that we had to dodge when landing.

The next two weeks are intense. There are only a few Hurricanes, and less capable Brewster Buffalo fighters, on the island. Although they fly daily, the Hurricanes are rarely able to get high enough in time to get above the Japanese bombers, as there were no observers in Malaya to warn of their approach; the peninsula is now occupied by the Japanese, and on his first night Donahue is woken by the sound of British engineers blowing up the Johore causeway onto the island. Singapore is now under siege.

It is a bizarre time for the pilots, fighting for their lives in the day and then returning to the luxurious Seaview Hotel, where they are served wonderfully cooked multi-course meals and lived in sumptuous suites. Meanwhile the pilots encounter snobbery from the colonials, with one elderly man who was waiting to be evacuated protesting that they should not use the swimming pool because they had not been “introduced”. “His dislike for us was made obvious quite often,” records Donahue, adding that besides “fighting to keep the Japs off his head now, we would quite likely have to patrol and perhaps fight over his ship later, to keep him from being sunk.”

Donahue becomes aware that terrible mistakes are being made in the defence of Singapore and that the decadence of the British in the East is not helping.

Australian nurses arrive at Singapore, October 1941 (© IWM FE 49)

There’s no need denying that I was terribly disillusioned by much of what I had seen and experienced out here — things that I have avoided or passed over in this story because it isn’t in my province as a member of the forces to speak of them, and because I could only do harm by telling about them now. The enemy don’t advertise their failings either, you know. Doubtless you have seen references to this in the press, so there’s no harm in admitting that I saw many things out here that were very bad.

Yet there is also a poignant unreality. One day, with the Japanese already on the island, he and another pilot watch an “exotic, dark-haired English girl” exercising two greyhounds on the hotel lawn, as if nothing has happened.

She was swinging a cloth about for them to leap at. Her movements and theirs were so graceful that I thought she must be a dancer, but someone said she was a nurse. It seemed that either she or the approaching enemy and the terrible fighting must be unreal. It just didn’t make sense — but neither did a lot of things, in the last days of Singapore.

Later Donahue would wonder what became of her, as well he might; the Japanese would kill a large number of staff and patients at the British military hospital on February 14. (Although it was the Chinese community in Singapore that would suffer most; tens of thousands would be killed during the occupation.)

Donahue's own picture of a crashed Hurricane in Singapore

The battle for Singapore was brief. A week after Donahue’s arrival, the Japanese landed on Singapore. Two days later, on February 9, orders came to evacuate the last fighters to Sumatra, and he took off with two other Hurricanes and a Buffalo from an airfield that was already under ground attack, the crack of rifle fire only a few hundred yards away. It appears that this was indeed the last flight from Singapore, and there were no further Allied air operations over the island. It fell five days later.

Donahue continued to operate for a few days from Sumatra, but before long this too was invaded. On February 16, with other pilots, Donahue attacked the invading troops as their boats came up the Musi River towards Palembang. Hit by ground fire and seriously wounded, he managed to land his aircraft, and was evacuated to hospital in Bandung and finally embarked on a hospital ship. Last Flight from Singapore ends there; he wrote it shortly afterwards in India and in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), where he had rejoined his squadron.

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What were these men like?

Rivaz, the artist, seems to have been the more worldly; Donahue was from rural Minnesota and proud to be, and his letters home talk of the pigs on the farm there, and of the eggs and potatoes that the airmen produce on the base. But both were men of substance. Neither had had to fight; Rivaz was too old, and Donahue was a national of a neutral state. They were also, in the manner of the time, quite modest. Rivaz does not mention his prewar career; though he’d made no money as an artist, he must have been a good one, as he had studied at the Royal College of Art and is known to have exhibited at the Royal Academy. Donahue nowhere says that he had qualified as a commercial pilot at just 19, at a time when flying in the States was dangerous. Moreover both write warmly of other men’s courage but speak little of their own. They do not reveal in their books that they had both had the Distinguished Flying Cross – Rivaz for his conduct on the first daylight raid on the Scharnhorst, when he destroyed an enemy fighter and saved his own plane, and Donahue for that last desperate low-level attack on the Japanese in Sumatra.

Spitfire Vs of 91 Squadron, Hawkinge, 1942 (© IWM (CH 5429)

One wants of course to know their eventual fates. On completion of his pilot’s training, Rivaz was posted back to Britain – not, to his disgust, as a combat pilot, but to the forerunner of Transport Command. He survived the war. In October 1945 he was a passenger on a Liberator that crashed on takeoff from Melsbroek, now part of Brussels Airport. All 31 passengers and crew died, including Rivaz; he is buried in Brussels Town Cemetery.

Donahue stayed for some months in Ceylon, but in August 1942 he returned to Britain and was posted to 91 Squadron at his old airfield of Hawkinge in Kent. On September 5 he wrote to his family in Minnesota:

Well, I think my plans are definite enough for the next few months so I can risk telling you this much, that the chances are four to one that I’ll be with you for Christmas this year! I have the furlough coming and could take it now if I wished to, but prefer to wait until then. I hope to have a month in the States, possibly more, so don’t go planning any celebration but keep it in your hope chest anyway.

Five days later, on September 11, Art Donahue took off in his Spitfire to chase a Ju 88, which he caught; it later crash-landed in Belgium. But his own aircraft must have been damaged in the encounter, and a brief message was received saying that he was ditching off Gravelines. His body was never found.

Tail Gunner, Tally-Ho!: A Spitfire Pilot's Personal Account of the Battle of Britain and Last Flight from Singapore: The Gibraltar of the East are all available in e-book form Amazon and other retailers. They can usually also be found in printed form. The e-books of all three can be bought in an omnibus edition together with D.M. Cook’s Spitfire Pilot.

Mike Robbins’s books are available in e-book or paperback from 

most online retailers, including Amazon (UK and US).

An anthology of anger

The Anti-Austerity Anthology brings together some of the best active indie authors in a collection of original poetry, prose and more. It is an angry book. It should be

What does the word “austerity” mean to you? In its most generic form, of course, it just means plainness, simplicity, an absence of the superfluous. When I was younger, it had a more specific meaning; “austerity” clothes or furniture were those made during and especially after the war, when there was a scarcity of materials and skilled labour. Today, however, it has taken on another meaning – an economic policy that seeks to reduce budget deficits at all costs, through raising money and through not spending it. It’s a policy that has been widely adopted, especially in Britain, since the 2008 crash.

(Cover design by Chris Harrison)

On the face of it, this is reasonable. Every country has finite resources. But not everyone agrees that austerity is the way to conserve them. It’s not what Roosevelt did in the 1930s, when he raided the coffers in order to get men back to work; do that and they’ll pay taxes instead of being a charge on the public purse. Whether that’s a better idea than austerity is a big argument, and best left for another time. But the key point about austerity, for me, is that successive British governments have sought to reduce the deficit not by raising taxes from those who can afford to pay, but by cutting social support to the poor, the jobless and those who for health reasons cannot work.

The way this hits people was the subject of Ken Loach’s recent film, I, Daniel Blake. Loach was not joking. According to the food-bank charity the Trussell Trust, there were 1,332,952 emergency food supplies delivered by food bank charities to people in the UK between 1st April 2017 and 31st March 2018. Britain had the world’s 24th highest per capita income in 2017 (according to the World Bank; the IMF and the CIA World Factbook put it a little lower). So there’s no excuse for this. As Steve Topple writes in the Foreword to the The Anti-Austerity Anthology: “In reality, austerity is much more than just a policy and a word no one had really heard of until 2010. It’s a cover for an ideological position. One that has its roots in the very structures of society we see around us.” Yep.

Now we’ve gathered together some of the very best indie authors, in the Anthology. The proceeds will go to foodbank charities. It’s our way of fighting back.

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I first heard of the Anthology back in 2016, when writer Rupert Dreyfus asked if I would like to contribute. I had come across Dreyfus the previous year, when I read and very much liked his debut novel Spark. In it, a young finance professional becomes disaffected and decides to use his IT skills to blow up the entire system. It’s a fast-moving little thriller, definitely political, but also very funny. It is especially memorable for Vinnie Sloan, one of the great comic creations of all time – a foul-mouthed posh git who makes his living from internet scams while ingesting unpleasant substances. In 2015 Dreyfus followed on with a satirical short-story collection, The Rebel’s Sketchbook, which I described in a review as one of the few books can make you laugh and vomit at the same time. His latest, Broke, a savage take on austerity, will be out soon. Dreyfus is a fiercely contemporary writer; his preoccupations are austerity, Trump, the NHS – in fact much of what’s in the news today. And yet he’s also part of a very English tradition of bawdy dissent that stretches back through Gillray, Hogarth, John Wilkes and into the stews of Elizabethan London.

George W. and Laura Bush meet food-bank volunteers in Washington

Dreyfus knows plenty of radical indie writers and poets, and the Anthology began to take shape. But it was a lot of work, and in 2017 he roped in Harry Whitewolf and myself as co-editors. He chose well in Whitewolf, who is a creative professional but also a startlingly original radical poet. He styles himself as a Beat poet but is actually something unique in his own right, writing repetitive, rhythmic, barbed poems that fall, every now and then, into unexpected humour or tenderness. He is a talented illustrator and cartoonist, and has also ventured into travel writing – with two books describing anarchic journeys of self-discovery, in Egypt and in South America. He’s certainly political, as seen in his poem Short and Long Division, from his collection Two Beat Newbie:

Me and my neighbour hated each other.
Our street hated the next street, so me and my
neighbour would then stick together.
...Our country hated another country, so our counties would then stick together.

Whitewolf has a wide frame of reference, citing influences as diverse as Milton, John Cooper Clarke and Baudelaire (another of his collections, New Beat Newbie, contains a short but elegant tribute to the last-named, Ragmen). But his style is very much his own.

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I already knew, and liked, a number of the writers in this book. They included poets M.J. Black and Andy Carrington – like Whitewolf, they’re hard-hitting and political. Steve Topple is a frequent contributor to the online news site The Canary, where’s he’s called the Department of Work and Pensions to account for some of what they’ve done to people in the name of austerity. 

 Amongst the prose writers, I’m a fan of Rebecca Gransden, who is less overtly political and yet deeply subversive; her strange and beautiful books anemogram. (sic) and Rusticles strongly repay close reading. The one US contributor is Riya Anne Polcastro; I already knew her work but only slightly, and will now read more. Her piece here packs a serious punch. Ruth F. Hunt let us use a powerful extract from her 2015 novel The Single Feather, about austerity and disability. Mary Papastavrou, who contributed a dystopian short story, Maria Jumps, is also the author of a strange and compulsive novel of ideas, How to Sew Pieces of Cloud Together; like Gransden’s work, it rewards a close read and is very subversive. 

Come on, admit you want the job

Leo X. Robertson is the author of much short fiction with a horror bent, but also a couple of novels – one of which, the wonderful Findesferas, weaves together Paraguayan history, science fiction and Guaraní mythology to create a novel that, despite being quite short, has an epic quality. Jay Spencer Green contributed Green’s Vacuous Vacancies, a series of career opportunities that are scattered through the Anthology; do check them out (come on, you’ve always fancied a post as a Witchfinder, haven’t you?). He’s the author of several books, including the outrageous satire Breakfast at Cannibal Joe’s. Last but not least, Dreyfus, Whitewolf and I have also contributed. In my case, it’s a preachy essay on the roots of austerity. The other two have deployed their satirical wit.

Other contributors I didn’t know. There’s a witty short story from Chris Harrison, for instance; he’s the author of a series of original vampire novels with a twist (the TotenUniverse). We owe him especial thanks as he also did the excellent cover for the Anthology. When not writing, he’s a landscape architect. Bradford Middleton is a poet and short-story writer who sometimes looks at the dark side of life; he’s published widely, and not just in Britain. So has Bristol-born writer Matthew Duggan, whose work has appeared in a number of periodicals; his first collection, Dystopia 38.10, was published in 2015. Guy Brewer is another new one on me; besides writing poetry, he also undertakes union work. (I especially liked his poem Choking Fumes and Smoke-Filled Skies). Connor Young, from Brighton, gave us a Poem for the Brighton Homeless (Ed gets his head kicked in as he sleeps/By pale blue shirted West Street creeps). Ford Dagenham is an unusual poet with a nice line on everyday hypocrisies – this comes out well in his contributions here.

We hope you like the Anti-Austerity Anthology. It was a lot of work by a lot of people. But the proceeds will be going to food banks. And anyway, this all matters. We can’t go on as we are. At the end of the book, we quote Plutarch, who wrote over 2,000 years ago that: “An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.” Let’s not put that to the test.

You can buy the Anti-Austerity Anthology here (or in the US, here), as an ebook or paperback – or order the paperback from from any bookshop using the ISBN 978-1724577962.

Mike Robbins's essay Such Little Accident: British democracy and its enemies  was published in December 2016 and is available from Amazon and other online retailers, or through bookshops 

(ISBN 978-0-9978815-0-9, ebook; ISBN 978-0-9978815-1-6, paperback)

 Follow Mike Robbins on Twitter (mikerobbins19), on Facebook or on Goodreads

In northern waters

Grey seas, icebergs, wrecks and whales. 

A voyage to the St Lawrence, 50 years ago

One of the odder things about aging is that one may enter a room, forget why, and suddenly recall what one was doing 50 years ago to the day instead. It happened to me this morning. I noticed that it was August 21 and a series of images came unbidden into my head; then I started playing one of those mental newsreels of a past time that are always incomplete. It flickered into life with the image of a train. I was in the dining car with my parents and sister. A flat stretch of late-summer countryside was flashing by, black-and-white cows in a field; a white-jacketed waiter emerged through a swing door with oval windows, a large silver tray at shoulder-height. I wondered why we had been in the dining-car; my parents were the sort who found sandwiches quite adequate. But perhaps it was all part of our ticket, for this was a boat train.

*

The Empress of Canada in her original livery (Canadian Pacific postcard)

The boat train was once a quite usual feature of international travel, speeding you from Euston or Waterloo and taking you, not to the main station for the port, but straight into the docks, where one climbed down and entered the terminal building or shed to surrender your baggage. This would be labelled as needed, to be taken to your cabin or stickered “Not Wanted on Voyage” and swung into the hold in nets that hung from cranes or derricks. In this shed, too, one would undergo passport formalities before striding up the gangway and into the doors let into the side of the vessel. On one’s return to Britain one went through the same process in reverse, assuming one got through customs in time.

On one occasion some years earlier, my mother had missed the boat train. Disembarking from the Holland America Line’s much-loved Nieuw Amsterdam at Southampton with a two-year-old (me) and my seven-year-old sister, she made the mistake of giving me an orange as we waited in the queue, enraging a customs officer who lectured her about the phytosanitary dangers of American oranges and proceeded to examine our luggage in minute detail. The boat train left without us.

“He was very small. A pipsqueak,” she remembered years later, thought for a moment and added, outraged: “He was Welsh”, as if this somehow explained the man’s behaviour. I remember someone – I believe it was John Treasure Jones, the last captain of the mighty Queen Mary (and himself Welsh) – telling a magazine interviewer how to avoid trouble at customs. Look for a chap with a loosely-knotted tie, he said; a tight, small knot indicates a small, tight mind. It is advice I have carried through life ever since.

*

But back to the late summer of 1968.

The train rolled into the docks at Liverpool and came to rest outside a cavernous shed. We entered it, and through the open doors at the other side I saw a huge wall of white steel, punctuated by row upon row of portholes. It seemed a leviathan.

The Queen Elizabeth at New York (date and photographer unknown)

In fact, at about 27,000 GRT, the Empress of Canada was dwarfed by the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, which at over 81,000 GRT were for a long time the largest man-made moving objects on earth. I had sailed on the Queen Elizabeth, too. In what I believe to be my earliest memory, I am in the children’s playroom on board, pushing a toy car along the art-deco ventilation grilles at the edge of the room and annoying a little girl trying to play with one of the doll’s houses set against them. Then I look up to see my mother standing above me in a Dior-like New Look skirt. If I am correct, it was August 1958, and I was just 15 months old, so it does not seem possible – surely it must have been another ship, probably the Nieuw Amsterdam – but old black-and-white pictures of the Cunarder’s playroom seem to match my memory.

If the Empress of Canada could not compare to the Queens, it was still very large, and was one of the most modern liners on the North Atlantic run, launched on the Tyne in 1960. Designed for the Liverpool to Montreal route, she could carry about a thousand passengers. In the 1960s there was still demand for cabins. Atlantic flights had been offered since the 1940s, and were having an impact on shipping. Jets had offered a transatlantic service since October 1958, a British-built airliner beating the Americans by a matter of days. But jet travel was still for the very well-heeled; older planes often had to refuel at Gander, and the journey to New York could take 12 or 14 hours. And all air travel was still very expensive. All this would change with the arrival of wide-bodied jets in 1970. But for now, ships remained the best choice for many, for Australia as well as North America (many of the British emigrants who went to Australia as part of the assisted passage scheme in the 1960s made the six-week voyage by sea).

We walked up the gangway and into the entrance in the ship’s side. The first thing one noticed was the flooring; often in this ship, it was a light blue rubberised surface with raised buttons, from which water would drain, and on which one would not slip in rough seas. The first place one called was one’s cabin, where hopefully one’s luggage would arrive too. The cabins were small but not cramped and had their own bathrooms and toilets. I took the upper bunk above my sister. I was sleeping right by a porthole and could sit up in bed and look out at the sea.

I was 11, and old enough to wander around the ship alone; in fact I had just been given my first watch especially for the voyage, so that I would know when to turn up for meals. On this first day I went on deck and looked over the side at the docks. I was in a crush of other passengers, many waving goodbye to friends and relatives on the docks far below; some held coloured paper streamers that ran over the side, with the other end held by those below. As the ship pulled away the streamers would break or fall. In those days many passengers on a ship to Canada would have been emigrants, and I suppose the streamer represented the ties that were being broken in a rather poignant way. In fact I remember that everyone was in quite a cheerful mood, despite the greyness of the English summer sky. One passenger may not have been so happy – the owner of a large steamer trunk (yes, we had them) that was bobbing up and down between the ship and the water. A pair of stevedores tried half-heartedly to retrieve it with grappling hooks. “I say, I hear the poor chap’s PhD thesis is inside,” said someone. There was general chortling. And then the hawsers were unwound and we began, ever so slowly, to inch away from England.

*

At Greenock (date and photographer unknown)

In the morning all had changed. The ship had steamed up the Irish Sea in the night and had entered the Clyde estuary, and was standing off Greenock, waiting for the tender that would bring the last mail and passengers for Canada. We went on deck. It was a quite brilliant, still summer’s morning, the mountains to the north standing out green against the wonderful cloudless sky; the water was flat calm and the ship lay on a mirror in a room of deep blue. I have travelled widely in the half-century since, but I do not think I have seen many scenes to rival that strange and beautiful morning.

We did not stay long. In due course the tender nosed out to meet us, a small motorboat with a dozen or so passengers and some mailsacks. I suppose the sheer white walls of the ship must have reared hundreds of feet above them. They came up a ladder and the tender went about its business; we pulled away. I wonder what became of passengers who had booked their passage from Greenock to find that the weather had been too bad for them to transfer to the ship in this way – as must surely sometimes have happened.

As we left the Clyde behind, the weather dulled. The coast of Ulster was a low grey-green smudge in the distance. We settled into the ship that would be our home for the next week.

Shipboard life acquires a rhythm. Dinner was taken in a large airy dining-room below, at a shared table, served by a waiter in evening clothes, a very small red-headed man from the Shetland Islands; he was quiet but friendly and every night he handed us a new elaborate menu, great white creations of heavy card, with embossed letters and each night a different picture of a sailing ship’s stern on the front. The menus delighted me and the Shetland waiter, noticing that I liked them, kindly brought me a large white envelope marked “A Souvenir of a White Empress”, with a sample of each menu used on the voyage. I had it for many years and believe it may still be among my papers somewhere.

A 1950 poster by Roger Couillard

Between meals there was not that much to do. One could shop at the duty-free. One could play deck games, weather permitting. One could visit the cinema (we did, once; the film was the latest hit, The Cincinatti Kid. It bored us and we walked out). There were lounges and, of course, bars. My parents made little use of these and did not mingle much with the other passengers; my father, though not unfriendly, was not a clubbable man and was rather self-contained. In those days English people were more reserved than they are now and were cautious with strangers until they could place them, or identify a common relative or acquaintance. I made one friend on board, but apart from that I can remember few friendships being forged. We did meet a young woman who was travelling with two unfeasibly slender borzoi dogs. I had a plastic box-brownie camera (I have it still) and she posed for a picture with the dogs, which sat on a bench beside her; her legs were crossed and her skirt quite short and her leather raincoat unbuttoned, and in the picture there is an elegant expanse of thigh.

And of course one looked at the sea.

If one stood at the stern one could see the wake of the ship, a huge white maelstrom, fading at its edges to green and then grey. Seabirds wheeled and screamed above it. The volume of water displaced must have been enormous as the 27,000-ton ship ploughed through the water at 23 knots. One wonders what the wake of the Queen Elizabeth was like; three times the size, and rather faster – she made well over 30 knots, about 33 MPH.

When one tired of looking at the wake, there was the vast seascape around us. As anyone who lives by the sea can tell you, it has many moods. There was none of the glassy tranquility that we had seen at Greenock. Further out the fresh wind whipped up whitecaps. As it was summer, we followed the Great Circle route some way to the north; it grew cold, and the sky was a dirty light grey and the sea gunmetal with crests of white. One day an announcement on the PA told us that we were near what was thought to be the last position of the Titanic (it had yet to be found). Late that afternoon we saw icebergs in the distance.

At that time, no British person could cross that stretch of ocean without remembering that it was also a graveyard. The U-boat battles of the second war had reached their climax in 1943, just 25 years earlier; plenty of people on board would have remembered them, and perhaps some of the crew had sailed through them – in fact I am sure they had, for the ship was crewed in Liverpool. My father was quiet and mildly irritable throughout the voyage and I know he disliked the sea. I did not understand why, but now I realize that he must have spent weeks on a troopship to what was then the Gold Coast in 1941, a tense voyage; the vessel would have swung much of the way out towards Brazil to avoid U-boats. Many were sunk off West Africa, including a previous Empress of Canada; she was torpedoed by an Italian submarine, but by a twist of fate the ship was carrying Italian prisoners, nearly 200 of whom died.

A few years ago I wrote about crossing the Atlantic, then and now – a piece I later included in my 2014 book The Nine Horizons. It included this passage:

A convoy in 1942 (US Navy picture)

Some journeys on this ocean always have ended badly. You are in your cabin; it was a five-day voyage before, but now it's three weeks as you limp along at the pace of the slowest ship, and you zigzag and dogleg, and destroyers and corvettes fuss around like smoky sheepdogs. It's early morning and you're still in your bunk when there is a soft thud and a jolt and the ship falters and seems to have come to a stop. There is an odd silence. The lights flicker but stay on. You can hear the footsteps of a steward clanging on the steel floor of the passage outside so you open the door. No, probably nothing to worry about, but perhaps you wouldn't mind going topside, sir, do you have warm clothing? – good, sir, if you can get it on quickly. On deck everything's quite calm, but the other ships have moved on ahead, leaving a black smoke stain on the horizon; and you're alone in the early morning between a still, solid grey sea and a gunmetal sky, and there's a cool breeze. It's very calm and it must be only your imagination that the ship is settling slowly to starboard. In fact everything is so calm that you cannot envisage the jagged hole below and the cold water streaming in across the hot boilers and the lascars and stokers screaming in agony from the superheated steam.

When I was young, many older people hated the sea.

*

On the fifth day it was still dull and cold. In the early afternoon I was standing on the deck when someone pointed in the distance. A school of whales was passing us a mile or so away, their bodies breaking the water, huge, but very small in the distance. I went up again at dusk, which came late (we were a long way north, and it was still summer). On the far horizon in front of the ship was a long, low shadow, and it was not a cloud. I wonder if it looked the same to Leif Ericson a thousand years ago, or to the first of the Breton and Iberian cod-fishermen not long afterwards. Or maybe to St Brendan, 500 years earlier. Many believe he made it. Should we be so sure he didn’t? The American explorer Robert Marx once claimed to have found amphorae from a Roman shipwreck in Guanabara Bay, off Rio de Janeiro. Who knows who first saw that shore from the sea?

That night, there wasn’t much to see. But the next morning we had passed Belle Isle and into the mouth of the St Lawrence.

The sheer size of this river is hard to comprehend. It drains the Great Lakes into the Atlantic and, if one counts the estuary, is not much less than 2,000 miles long. To make landfall at Belle Isle and then spend two days steaming to one’s destination is to comprehend its size and that of Canada itself. Of course, there was now other shipping. Before long that morning a bulk carrier of Manchester Lines slipped past on its way to the ocean, and as the ship ploughed on towards Quebec, the traffic became more frequent. We were some way out in mid-stream; as the day wore on, however, we started to see small white houses nestled in the wooded shoreline. Bit by bit we sailed back into the human world.

The Empress of Ireland (Bibliothèque et Archives Canada)

The St Lawrence had its own harsh history for Canadian Pacific. On the night of May 29 1914, near Rimouski in Quebec, just inside the river proper, the Norwegian collier Storstad hit the Empress of Ireland in fog. The Storstad remained afloat, despite a damaged bow. The 14,000 GRT Empress of Ireland did not, sinking in just 14 minutes with the loss of just over a thousand lives – a disaster quite comparable to that of the Titanic, yet hardly known; perhaps the outbreak of the Great War two months later overlaid it in memory. The rapid sinking was attributed to the use of longtitudinal watertight compartments, which allowed one side of the ship to fill very quickly with water while the other did not, causing it to capsize rapidly. Many of those who did escape the ship died in the water, which at that time of year was still very cold. The exact circumstances of the collision were disputed at the enquiry, and remain so now. (The Storstad was repaired and returned to service, but seized by Canadian Pacific after a civil suit. She was torpedoed southwest of Fastnet Rock three years later.) I did not know it then, but we must have passed the wreck site in the St Lawrence during the sixth day.

In the evening we tied up at Quebec City. It was not yet time to leave the ship, but we went ashore to stretch our legs, striding along the dock below the towering mass of the Château Frontenac, built by Canadian Pacific themselves in 1893. It was there that Churchill had met Mackenzie King and Roosevelt in 1943 to discuss strategy. On this evening in late August 25 years later, there was little activity on the dock – it seemed empty – and even the other passengers seemed to have stayed aboard. At length we returned to the ship. But we had stood on North American soil. Well, concrete.

The next morning I pulled back the curtains above my bunk and saw an odd view. We had come to a halt at Montreal and were tied up near Man and His World – what had been Expo 67, the very successful World’s Fair the previous year. It was over but one could still visit the site, now called Man and His World. I was looking at Habitat 67, the strange cuboid flat complex that had been part of the exhibition and was still lived in, and is to this day.

We were chivvied off the ship by our parents and a Montreal metro train with big rubber wheels took us to an American-style train that took us to Ottawa. We rode upstairs in the observation car. The train rattled slowly along, seemingly right through people’s backyards. We left the Empress of Canada and its great white walls behind us at Montreal. I never saw her again.

*

From the 1930s

A year later, my father’s work in Canada was done. This time he flew. The rest of us returned the way we had come, in almost the same week. But this time we sailed on a sister ship of about the same size – the Empress of England, also built on the Tyne. The weather was markedly worse and the ship, although only slightly older, was less modern in design. It pitched and rolled. I had been ill before we went aboard and for the first and, so far, last time in my life, I was seasick. After two days for which I had vomited uncontrollably, my mother summoned a nurse from the dispensary in the bowels of the ship. The nurse unsheathed a very large needle that looked as if it was used to tranquilize horses. “Turn over,” she barked, and thrust it into my rump; I could not see but I think she was holding it aloft with both hands, as if sacrificing a goat. It did make me better, but not well enough to go to dinner. Instead, while my mother and sister went to eat, a friendly Belfast steward brought me some rather nice sandwiches and stayed with me until they returned, telling me all about the Mini-Coopers that he rallied in the winter season. It was a cheerful act of kindness that I still remember after nearly half a century. I recall little else about that voyage, except that we tied up at Liverpool’s Gladstone Dock on a cold and drizzly afternoon, I think the first day of September. I looked over the rail at the rows of cars parked on bombsites near the dock, their windows streaked with rain, and felt a strange sense of being grounded, of being dragged home to England against my will. I would feel it later, as an adult, many times.

The Empress of England would not make people vomit for much longer. In two years she was off the route; in five she was scrapped. But the Empress of Canada would work on. Her own life as a transatlantic liner was nearly over; 18 months later the first of the wide-bodied jets entered service. A very few vessels staggered on for two or three years, but soon the QE2 was the only liner left on the route. The others found new lives as cruise liners. For the Canada, this was nothing new; although her sister-ships stayed on the Atlantic route the year round, she herself had always spent the winters cruising.

Twenty years later, as a volunteer in Sudan, I met a man who had been one of the crew in the ship’s heyday, and had been aboard when we made that crossing. He had fond memories of the cruise season. Every woman loves a sailor, he said, and recalled a Hollywood star who had liked to go ashore with them and have sex with them, one by one, against a palm tree. “Funny, she was always sort of unfriendly once you’d done her,” he mused, nursing a glass of the local firewater. He then identified her as someone who was, in the 1960s, a household name. She has long passed away, but I shall take that name to the grave.

The ship was sold in the early 1970s, becoming the first of the Carnival line’s cruise ships. As the years went by, the North Atlantic survivors were replaced by purpose-built cruise ships, vast, slow, soulless floating malls that meander slowly through the water, pausing now and then to unleash thousands of holidaymakers on some defenceless Caribbean island; were our Hollywood star still living, she would find it hard to find a palm tree to herself. But the Empress of Canada somehow survived into the new century, latterly on gambling cruises in the Gulf of Mexico.

Final fate: The Empress of Canada broken at Along, 2003

In 2003 she was finally sold for scrap and was run ashore at the great shipbreakers at Alang Beach, Gujurat – one of those places where men swarm across a huge ship in their hundreds and break it with axes and saws and the sweat of their brows. In a few months, there was nothing left of a great ship that had been home to thousands for days or even weeks at a time, on which some men and women would serve for years.

But that is the fate of the things we use, isn’t it? The year I sailed on the Empress of Canada, British Rail finally abandoned steam, and thousands of engines were left in long lines at a huge yard in Barry, South Glamorgan. One moment they were living, breathing monuments to human ingenuity. The next they were rotting hulks in the drizzle. And the same happened to typewriters, to record players, to valve wirelesses, to cathode-tube TVs and to the car that once picked you up from school; and one day it will happen to your phone and to your tablet and your microwave and the laptop on which I am typing this. Later, someone will look at one in a book or online or in a museum and wonder, yes, but what did it do? And few will know what it was to forge through a vast grey sea, peopled by ghosts of Vikings, Breton fishermen, men o’war and submarines, to see icebergs pass astern or whales in the distance, or see a low grey line on the horizon at dusk and wonder if it was a low cloud, or the New World.

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Mike Robbins's collection of travel writing,  The Nine Horizons, was published in 2014 and is available as a paperback, as a Kindle download and in other eBook formats.