The Final Curtsey by Margaret Rhodes Read Free Book Online Page A

cancelled.
    The men drove off for half a mile, only to re-emerge when they safely knew that the chaperone’s taxi was out of sight. Jean married one of her clandestine guests and at the beginning of
the war was living in Northamptonshire with her two small children. Her husband, John Wills, had been posted to the Middle East and was not to return until the war ended. Jean’s in-laws,
Captain Benjy and Hilda Wills, had an estate called Applecross on the north-west coast of Scotland. It was a fisherman’s dream and the salmon often seemed to be lying in layers in the deeper
pools. Jean used to invite me there and one day we took the family’s small yacht out to an island which had a row of deserted cottages. We anchored there to picnic and to our astonishment saw
smoke rising from one of the cottage chimneys. Then a young kilted man approached, claiming to be a university student who needed complete solitude so as to write his thesis. He seemed perfectly
genuine and we swallowed his story, even giving him what was left over from our provisions to help him replenish his scanty supplies. Sometime later we discovered that he and an accomplice were
Nazi sympathisers reporting on Allied shipping movements. We had unwittingly aided and abetted a couple of enemy spies.
    After my brothers had joined their regiments, my father, who was seventy in 1939, had been appointed Chairman of a board which adjudicated on the appeals of conscientious objectors. It was a
difficult and unpleasant task, compounded on one distressing occasion by the appearance before him of William Douglas-Home, the son of the 13th Earl of Home, his oldest friend and best man at his
wedding. Whatever the verdict, William subsequently became an officer in the Royal Armoured Corps and in 1944 refused on moral grounds to take part in an attack on Le Havre because the thousands of
refugees packed into the town had not been evacuated. Over 5,000 of them were killed in the operation, but William was sentenced to a year’s hard labour, serving eight months for refusing to
obey an order. Courage takes different forms. He later became a successful writer and dramatist. His oldest brother, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, was Conservative Prime Minister between 1963 and
1964.
    I remember my brother John coming home on embarkation leave, looking wonderful in uniform. He was in the Black Watch of which his aunt Queen Elizabeth was Colonel-in-Chief. John was particularly
close to her, and when, in the early months of the war, she visited the regiment’s Perth depot she had a poignant encounter with him. She had never seen him in uniform before and wrote to
Queen Mary: ‘It gave me such a shock to see John in his Black Watch uniform, for he suddenly looked exactly like my brother Fergus who was killed at Loos [in the First World War] and in the
same regiment. It was uncanny in a way and desperately sad to feel that all that ghastly waste is starting again at the bidding of a lunatic.’

    Prisoners of war: my brother John is in the back row, second from the left
    Five years later, a strange, gaunt figure returned from Germany. We all met him in London and had a celebratory dinner at Buckingham Palace. John had been taken prisoner at St Valery, along
    with most of the 51st Highland Division at the time of Dunkirk. The 1st Battalion was cut off and forced to surrender near Abbeville after fierce fighting. Only nine men and one officer escaped.
    By 12 June all fighting had ceased. The officer prisoners were separated from their men, which caused my brother great concern. John, in a contingent of 2,500 prisoners, marched 220 miles in
    fourteen days from northern France to a railhead in Holland, subsisting on a bowl of soup a day, dandelions, marigolds and acorn coffee. They slept in their clothes, sometimes huddled together in
    open fields under driving rain. It was very cold at night and they stripped greatcoats from the bodies of dead soldiers by the roadside. The French