I WAS MONTY’S DOUBLE Read online

  Colonel Lester certainly had this gift. He knew almost exactly how I had felt the day before and what I should be likely to say when I met him again. What is more, he knew just how to meet this situation and pump courage and confidence into the deflated balloon. When I came to think of it, he was hardly likely to let me go after the arduous experience he had had in finding a double.

  In a very short time I was myself again, and I heard myself saying: “It was a wonderful show yesterday, sir. I wish you had been there to see it.”

  “I was,” he replied casually.

  I stared at him in astonishment and noticed a twinkle in his eye.

  “I saw the whole thing,” he said. “Once I was standing quite near you hut you didn’t see me.”

  “You don’t mean—disguised as one of the drivers?”

  He evaded the question by asking me one: “Well, what do you think of it all how? Did you come up against any snags?”

  I told him about the drivers, how they seemed to resent having a strange I.C. Sergeant come amongst them.

  He shook his head. “Nothing to worry about. It’s quite natural for them to be on their guard. What else?”

  “I forgot to say ‘sir’ to one of the Staff Captains. He was very angry and yelled at me.”

  “Good. That adds a bit of verisimilitude. It might have been better still if he had put you on a charge.”

  I looked at him and saw that he was laughing.

  “That was about the only thing that went wrong, except that once when I let my attention wander I came to and found the General staring at me.”

  “He’s psychic,” said Colonel Lester, and I knew just what he meant.

  “Give me a little more time,” I said, “and I think I can impersonate Monty as far as his gestures and mannerisms go. If he were slow and stolid it would be much more difficult, but he’s so quick and has so many unusual mannerisms that I think I can take him off all right. But I wasn’t always near enough to hear what he was saying. I should have to study him at closer quarters before I could imitate his voice.”

  “Good. This is just about what I expected. We shall have to arrange to get you closer to him. Report here on Tuesday next at 4.20 in the afternoon and be ready for a week’s trip. I’ll tell you more when I see you.”

  I took it easy for the next day or two, got into mufti and tried to relax.

  One afternoon I had been to a cinema and was returning by Underground. At the lift I had to show my ticket, and I had just extracted it from my wallet when looking up I found myself face to face with Major White of the Pay Corps. Turning quickly I stuffed my wallet into my breast pocket and hurried away. To my dismay a voice shouted “Hey!” I doubled round a corner and found myself at the foot of the circular stairs.

  I don’t know if you have ever tried running up the stairway of an Underground station. Long before I had got half-way up I was panting like a fish out of water, goaded into super-human efforts by the voice behind me, which was shouting at me to stop. At last I came to a halt and a wave of anger passed through me at my being pursued in this way by the officious Major. But in a few moments a little man in a bowler hat came up the stairs holding out my wallet, which in my haste I had pushed between my coat and my waistcoat!

  When I returned on the Tuesday I found Jack Hervey in the office with Colonel Lester. The plan, I heard, was for Hervey and myself to go up to Scotland where General Montgomery and a few of his Staff were spending a week’s holiday. As an I.C. Sergeant I should accompany him wherever he went, and to end up with I should have a private interview with Monty so that I could get hold of his voice exactly and study him at point-blank range. This time I was to stay with Jack Hervey in comfort at a nearby hotel.

  He concluded by saying: “Time is short. Can you finish your study of the General in a week?”

  It was hardly a question, it was an order; but I was able to reply with some confidence that a week would be enough for me.

  In the days when Mr. Hore-Belisha was War Minister I remember reading that the British Army had been made democratic. With the idea of encouraging the recruiting drive, I suppose, the notion was put about that even Privates had a royal time of it and were treated very much like officers.

  I remembered this with a certain bitterness as I walked with Jack Hervey to the Tube station staggering under the weight of a full kit-bag, while he dangled an elegant officer’s hold-all.

  “Look here,” I said, dumping my kit-bag on the pavement, “can’t we have a taxi?”

  “Pack up your troubles,” he replied with an irritating grin. “The Treasury draws the line at Sergeants joy-riding in taxis.”

  “Well, damn it, you might take a turn yourself with this ruddy thing.”

  “We mustn’t spoil you, Jimmy. This is a toughening-up course.”

  At Euston station it was even worse. While he sauntered to his first-class compartment and sleeper, I was left to battle for a third-class seat among a milling crowd of Other Ranks.

  In the night my compartment, which was packed tight with tars, many of whom were also “tight,” gradually discharged itself until I was left with a solitary sailor stretched out on the seat opposite me. We talked about the war, and to my astonishment he began to give me a detailed account of the Navy’s work during the D-Day rehearsal.

  I tried to stop him, but with the persistence of a Scot he insisted on disclosing war secrets which I felt sure the Germans would have given a lot to get hold of. Had I been a spy I should have had an easy and profitable night’s work.

  The train slowed down for Perth, and as he was getting ready to leave me I couldn’t help saying that I thought him rather incautious to open his mouth to a complete stranger.

  His answer was disconcerting. “Och, mon,” he said, “if I canna tell one of you Security chaps, who can I tell—Churchill?”

  Early in the morning I got out at Inverness with a throat like a third-class waiting-room and my head feeling like a lumpy flock mattress, to be greeted by Hervey, rosy and cheerful after a good night’s sleep. But I felt better after a wash and some breakfast, and out drive out of Inverness through some of Scotland’s loveliest scenery was as good as a tonic.

  Our driver, an R.A.S.C. man who knew Jack well, told us that Monty’s special train was drawn up by a siding at a little place called Dalwhinnie. He had orders to report there in the evening, so that we could take our time and have lunch on the way.

  The countryside was very different from England’s. Mile after mile we travelled without seeing even a village, but in the early afternoon we came to a small inn whose doors and windows were bolted.

  After Jack had banged away on the door for some time it was opened cautiously on a chain and the frightened face of an old woman peered at us through the aperture. At length she seemed satisfied with our looks and let us in.

  “I thocht ye was furriners, likely’’ she said.

  “Honest Jack Hervey of Hervey Hall” Jack replied with a low bow. “As true-blooded an Englishman as ever wore the King’s uniform.”

  “Och, we get all sorts in these pairts’’ said the old woman, leading us to a comfortable dining-room. And she began telling us about the foreign troops stationed in the neighbourhood who were as wild as March hares and always trying to get at her daughter, so that she had to keep the doors and windows bolted. But she knew a gentleman when she saw one. Janet would wait on us.

  I thought of that ancient war ditty, ‘A German Officer Crossed the Rhine’, and imagined a beautiful girl with lily-white skin and golden hair. It was rather a shock when the door opened and a muscular, raw-boned woman of forty strode in with a large tray. Surely her mother’s precautions were a trifle overdone?

  We got to Dalwhinnie at about four o’clock and as we came down the hill into the village I saw a file of great mountains receding into the far distance with here and there the gleam of silver-grey lochs which lapped their feet. For a few moments I was overcome by the peace and quietness of a land which had never been sea
red by a modern war or sullied by industrialization. And then my eye fell upon a train of six coaches standing just outside the station, and I knew that I was looking at the brain and nerve-centre of an impending invasion which meant terror, destruction and death.

  We drove to the small hotel, fixed up our rooms and had a (for those days) unbelievable tea of ham, tongue, fresh home-made scones and cakes, a large bowl of fruit and a pint of thick cream. Jack went off to report and left me to my own reflections.

  The pace was beginning to quicken now. At first I had been sent on a mere trip to Portsmouth. Now I was up in the North of Scotland. In a fortnight I should be—where? I had no choice, no knowledge, of where I should go. Like a kite I was being dragged along on a quickly lengthening string. Soon I should rise aloft, resplendent in the uniform of a full-blown General.

  Jack came back to say that I was to report to the train at nine o’clock next morning when Colonel Dawnay would give me my orders. He strongly suspected that arrangements had already been made for me to meet the great man alone. I had already been warned about this but none the less the news came as a shock. He shot me a quick glance and suggested that we explore the mountain which towered above the hotel at the back.

  I was thankful for something to take my mind off what lay before me and we set off on a stiff climb. Soon I was puffing and blowing, but Jack with his enthusiasm for natural history seemed tireless.

  “Now, Jimmy,” he would say, “about two hundred yards in front of us there is a patch of scrub. Do you see it? I’ll circle to the right and you go round to the left. I think we’ll find a ptarmigan’s nest.”

  “How on earth do you know that?”

  “I saw the cock bird chasing the hen back on to her nest. They often do that when the hen’s sitting.”

  Sure enough we did find a ptarmigan’s nest. We also found a golden plover’s. Soon I became thoroughly interested, and it would have been a very unimpressionable man who could not lose himself in the marvellous view we had from the mountain-top.

  On our way down again Jack went on talking about birds and flowers. “What should I have thought in April if someone had told me that in a month’s time I should be in the Scottish Highlands while an MI 5 officer talked to me about wild life to keep me from worrying?

  That night as I lay in bed thinking things over, my position seemed to be more unreal than ever. Although a commissioned officer I was now masquerading as a Sergeant—a Sergeant with no duties to perform except to watch a General who to all outward appearances needed no watching or guarding. Although a complete outsider to the other N.C.O.s, who were a close fraternity, I had to mix with them and get along with them as best I could. They were very curious about me and a single unguarded word or action might spell disaster.

  The same thing applied to my dealings with the officers on H.Q. Staff who must have wondered who on earth I was. Although an officer myself, I must remember to salute even the most junior of them and to jump to any orders they gave me. I was nervous about making a slip, being put on a charge by one of these officers and finding myself obliged to ask for help. If this happened I felt sure that Monty would be greatly annoyed at my clumsiness.

  Then again, my orders were to follow the General very closely from moment to moment and from day to day. Seeing that Monty was on a holiday away from all military cares and responsibilities this was likely to arouse suspicions in the minds of people who were not in the know. When I was shadowing him during the D-Day rehearsals it was not so difficult: it was natural for him to have a Security Sergeant on his Staff. But here in this remote Scottish village surrounded by officers and men who had become his own personal friends I must have seemed absurdly de trop.

  When I took my place among the drivers on that first morning in Dalwhinnie I found myself in a kind of opera bouffe. These men seemed to know every detail of their officers’ habits and mannerisms and even of their private lives, and of course they had a nickname for each one of them. Standing by their cars waiting to move off for the day’s picnic, they were up to all kinds of schoolboy pranks which they would break off instantly whenever an officer hove into view.

  It was rather like being back at school again. Monty was the headmaster and his officers were the form masters. The Sergeant driver was the prefect trying to keep order in the classroom while waiting for the master to arrive for the morning’s lesson.

  On this first morning a batman came along and began loading up the cars and jeeps with picnic baskets.

  One of the drivers, Bill by name, exclaimed: “Wotcha, Alf, what’s ’is Lordship takin’ for dinner? Roast duck and champagne?”

  ‘Don’t be so iggerant, Bill,” another driver remarked. “The nobs don’t ‘ave champagne, they drink hock.”

  “That’s what that piece in the pub says when I tried to date her up,” put in another driver. “‘Hock I,’ she says.”

  Bill took a clod of grass from the bank behind him and was about to throw it when the Sergeant driver barked, “Look out, lads.” In a moment they were all standing at ease beside their cars as a lieutenant came up to the train.

  As soon as he was gone, Bill picked up the clod, hurled it at the driver who had spoken, missed him and hit an inoffensive batman. Pretending that this was his target, he turned to the others and said, “’Ow’s that for a beauty?”

  “Bull’s-eye,” said somebody.

  “Boss-eye,” said the driver he had misled.

  In spite of their boisterous behaviour they all thought the world of their officers and they simply worshipped Monty who was in a genial, holiday mood. I think he knew quite well the way his men behaved behind his back—and he welcomed it.

  “It has been said that the British are the happiest soldiers in the world,” he said in a speech when receiving the Freedom of the City of London in 1946. “They appear to carry about with them an inward cheerfulness which makes them able to laugh at discomfort and make a mockery of danger. Of all soldiers the British are the best humoured. And this is equally so when they are hard pressed and when conditions are adverse. Private soldiers out on patrol in No Man’s Land have often been heard to mutter asides, and strengthen each other with ribald jests. The inexhaustible wit of the soldier—and in particular of the Cockney—is one of our most valuable possessions.”

  He certainly lived up to this dictum himself. He smiled and joked with his Staff, took a keen interest in the details of each day’s excursion even to the extent of having good-natured arguments about how to keep the food fresh and the tea or coffee piping hot.

  At meals he never monopolized the conversation. He was just a genial master on an outing with some of his boys. He chatted gaily about birds, beasts and flowers and quietly pulled his officers’ legs if he found them ignorant of natural history. The war seemed to be far away. I don’t remember hearing him refer to it once.

  As to his energy, it was astounding. Often he would order the cars to halt. Jumping out he would take off his jacket, flex his arms, take deep breaths of the invigorating air, and then set off down the road at a good swinging pace, all the time talking in an animated way to those who were with him. It is possible that he was discussing military strategy at times, but I don’t think so. I believe he had deliberately pushed the war out of his mind and forgotten it.

  The more I studied him, the harder I found it to believe that this dapper, soft-spoken man was to lead our great army into Hitler’s European fortress. There he would stand, smiling at some remark of his youngest officer as if the great battle before him had already been won.

  In his own mind no doubt it had. The whole thing had been planned with such care and precision that there only remained the comparatively routine business of putting it into effect. And since for the moment there was nothing further to be done, what could be more sensible than to retire to Scotland for a week’s fishing and picnicking?

  The only thing which reminded me of warfare was the military precision with which even the picnics were planned and carried out. The c
ars had to be at the exact five-yards interval and everything in apple-pie order before Monty made his debut in the morning. No one seemed to hurry, but each man had his job to perform with the greatest efficiency and exactitude, whether it was cleaning and tuning a car engine or packing a picnic basket. I realized how a single man of genius could so impress himself on his subordinates that everything they said, did and felt was, as it were, a part of his character. From what I saw of Monty the last thing he did was to slave-drive his officers and men. He inspired them with a desire to drive themselves.

  It has always astonished me how such fanciful and derogatory stories about him should have been put about. Only the other day I met an ex-officer who had served under his command.

  “Monty!” he snapped, when the conversation got round to him. “I disliked the man intensely. A swaggering braggart. He used to terrify his officers on principle.”

  “Did you ever meet him?” I asked.

  “Oh no, but I heard all about him.”

  I prefer to remember the frail old lady, a complete stranger, who came up to me on the sea front.

  “Excuse me sir, but you were Monty’s Double, weren’t you?”

  When I admitted it she laid her band on my arm. “He is a wonderful man. My son was one of his soldiers. “When he was killed I wrote to the General about him and he wrote back. Now he sends me a letter every Christmas. My boy would have been so proud to know this.”

  She shook my hand and slowly walked away. I saw that Monty had brought great consolation to that old lady and that it was all done in secret.

  Chapter VIII

  THE YEARS ROLL BACK

  On the following day we set off together towards the train, Jack chattering away on all sorts of topics. But now I scarcely listened to him. All I could think about was the coming interview with Monty, and the more I thought about it the more nervous I grew. My ancient fear of senior officers had come upon me with redoubled force.

  The years rolled back and I was a boy of sixteen just having left school, on my way down to Honiton in Devon, where I was to meet my guardian, the Terrible Colonel James. He was going to decide my future.