his six years in the Army he was charged with desertion by one regiment when he was already fighting with another one altogether and reported dead when he was still very much alive.
The desertion charge was laid by the Royal Engineers, his second regiment, who called him up in 1941, two years into the war. They charged him when he failed to reply to his call-up papers, then discovered to their embarrassment that he had volunteered to serve with the Gloucesters when the war had first broken out.
Dad was a practical man and his talents suited the Royal Engineers. He was often sent behind enemy lines to prepare the way for the fighting divisions and it was during a mission somewhere in Europe, in 1943, that he was reported missing in action. The telegram that broke the news had a terrible effect on his father, George Fennell, who had already lost three of his six sons in tragic circumstances. The news that another was missing presumed dead was too much to bear. He died of a heart attack days later. My father never really forgave the Army for that; he had not been killed or captured at all and he turned up safe and well just in time to travel back to England for his father’s funeral. What a happy homecoming that was for him.
My dad always believed in what he was fighting for, in serving King and Country. But he also believed war was a series of mishaps. Anybody whose job is to blow things up and then put them back together again doesn’t feel very constructive in a war, he used to say. His philosophy seemed to have been that if you didn’t laugh you’d go mad.
His nickname in the Army was ‘Crash’ because of all the scrapes he got himself into. He was obviously a good soldier, being ‘busted’ as a sergeant, that is to say promoted then demoted again, seven times. His final promotion came in the field and was given by a Canadian officer who saw that my father was the one organizing everything. The officers didn’t know what they were doing, according to my father; it was up to the ordinary enlisted men to sort out the mess the officers made.
The low point of my father’s war came at Arnhem. His unit was moving forward with an escort of tanks into an area just recaptured from the Germans. They had been told the area was free of enemy troops and had been sent ahead to clear the path. No sooner had they set off than the German tanks came over the hill again and my dad was fleeing for cover.
It was a close-run thing, shells going off all over the place, men falling to the ground. Most of Dad’s unit made it but when they reached safety in the trees someone said: ‘Crash, look at your knee.’ It was in bits. He had also badly damaged his elbow. But it wasn’t the end of his war. The Army surgeons put his knee back together with a piece of silver wire. He went back to Europe and stayed on with the Royal Engineers, building bridges in post-war Holland until early 1946.
My father had been twenty-one when he left home. Six years later he returned from the war with a bad limp and the feeling that he had sacrificed his youth, his health and probably his chances of happiness. He often said the war took the best years of his life.
My mother, on the other hand, looked back on the war with feelings of nostalgia. I think the period between 1939 and 1945 provided her with the best time she ever had. For her life afterwards was an anticlimax.
Like my father, she was from west London. Without knowing the full details until much later I was aware that her childhood and teenage years had been tough. Her father had died relatively young, when her mother was expecting the fourth of their children. So when war broke out my mother, like many other young women, found it a liberating experience. She had a job working in a munitions factory, earned a good income and suddenly found herself part of a group of independent girlfriends who were determined to live every day and night as if it were their last – which in the London of the Blitz it might easily have been.
For Mum life was made all the more exciting by the fact that, at twenty, she was a really beautiful-looking girl. We never talked about that period much, for deeper reasons that would eventually reveal themselves. But I think she was engaged seven times. The one story Mum would recall, ad flippin’ nauseam, was of the New Year’s Eve party when Stewart Granger danced with her.
At the time he was one of the country’s great matinée idols and everyone had been excited at the prospect of him coming to the party. He arrived late, close to midnight, and immediately announced he couldn’t stay. ‘I’m sorry I can’t stop, but before I go I must dance with the most beautiful woman in the room,’ he announced with a film star’s sense of the theatrical. To Mum’s delight he fixed his eyes on her, took her by the arm and whisked her around the dance floor. At the end of the dance he plonked a kiss on her – then bade her farewell. Well, that was the highlight of my mother’s life, pretty much. Everybody who ever knew her knew about that. And it reinforced her view of how the world worked.
My mum, bless her, really believed that there was a crock of gold at the end of the rainbow. But her problem was that she never found the rainbow. Whenever it appeared it would vanish again abruptly, a little like Stewart Granger. She was one of those people who, having been told she was beautiful, didn’t think she had to do anything else in life. She thought being beautiful was enough.
What she needed was someone to worship her. And in my father, she found the man to do it.
It was my father’s sister-in-law, Elsie, who brought them together. She had worked with my mother at the munitions factory during the war. At work she had kept telling Nona that she must meet ‘our Wally’. At home, she had kept telling my father he had to meet ‘my Nona’.
When the war came to an end Elsie and Nona found jobs at a biscuit factory together. Elsie had just given birth to a baby boy and Nona had popped round to see her with a supply of free biscuits. Now my father came from a very musical family. He could play the ukulele, guitar, harmonica and concertina, but the day Nona visited he was playing the mandolin. She always remembered hearing it as she walked up to the door of Elsie and Uncle Bill’s house. When she walked into the sitting room she saw my dad stretched out across a chair playing this beautiful instrument.
Violins might have been more appropriate. He said he looked at her and thought, ‘I’m going to marry you.’ Apparently she thought the same. He serenaded her into marriage.
My father truly believed that the stars had shone on him when they brought my mother into his life. ‘I’m so lucky to have her,’ he would always say. She was, he discovered, a demanding woman. But from the outset he would do anything to make her happy.
My father worked as a driver. When I was a little girl he drove the No. 73 and the No. 11 bus through central London. By day he was a pretty ordinary guy, but by night he was transformed. He was a handsome man and in the evening he ‘trod the boards’, usually with his brother Bill. The brothers had inherited much of their talent from their father’s family, who worked in Variety and could count Marie Lloyd as a family friend. In the family tradition they also mixed in a bit of vaudevillian playfulness. Their funniest sketch was something called ‘The Ballsup Ballet’, a spoof of the Bolshoi Ballet in which they dressed up in tutus. Singing, however, was their strong suit.
Dad had a wonderful voice. He would walk into a pub or a club and the shouts would go up straight away: ‘Come on Wally, give us a song.’ He used to do Bing Crosby and Maurice Chevalier numbers and had entertained dreams of making it as a professional singer. But when he had gone to see a West End agent he had been knocked back. ‘There’s already one Bing Crosby and we don’t need another one,’ he was told. Within a year a British singer called Michael Holliday, who Mum said was nowhere near as good as Dad let alone Bing Crosby, became a huge hit. That hurt Dad badly, I think.
During their courtship, Nona used to go to his concerts and he would sing a song from the musical Singin’ in the Rain called ‘Beautiful Girl’. I think it began: ‘You’re a gorgeous picture …’ Such attention was music to my mother’s ears. She thought
