Micky and 'The Lady'
Left: Micky as a young soldier, early WW11. Right: Micky article in 'The Lady' magazine, showing Micky seated in the Osteria Italiana, Munich
It's almost impossible to accept that my dear friend Micky, surely one of the most exceptional human beings I have ever met - passed away almost eight years ago: all the more so since I still half-expect him to phone at some ungodly hour to tell me that his laptop isn't doing what he wishes of it, and please could I drive the two hours to North Wales to admonish, and hopefully fix, the long-suffering machine. In Micky's world requests such as this had a sort of 'Royal' tinge, as with 'requests' received from on high in Buckingham Palace - and especially so when delivered in plumby and imperious tones which respected neither time, class nor station - a primary example being calls to his friend Deborah Devonshire (née Mitford), the Dowager Duchess, which invariably began with a booming 'DEBO, IT'S MICKY HERE!'
Back in 2009, just under a year before Micky's death, I was asked by Rachel Johnson, then editor of 'The Lady', to write an article about Micky for the magazine. Published in the November 10th edition, it was entitled 'Utopia Deferred' this in recognition of the sad fact that Micky's dream of a more egalitarian world remained unrealised in spite of searches on his part that had encompassed first politics - National Socialism, followed by Marxism - and then religion, none of which had delivered what he had once believed they promised.
The expedition into National Socialism so blinded him that even a tour of the Dachau concentration camp failed to elicit an accurate assessment on his part of what it was the Nazi Party had as its ultimate goal. A post-war exculpatory treatise sought to lay the ghost of this abandonment of good sense on his part, but succeeded only partly in doing so.
Of Marxism, at a time before the worst excesses of Soviet power became widely known, there was the friendship and encouragement of the KGB agent Guy Burgess, whom Micky had met at a cocktail party at Cambridge. Friendship at the beginning yes, but soon to become a sexual affair given Guy's open homosexuality and Micky's slowly developing realisation that his own sexual preference for men (whilst still hoping to one day find fulfilment with a woman) was very much at odds with Society's norms.
World War Two arrived as the catalyst Micky needed, allowing him to advance his 'reformation' further by joining the Colours. In the early war years he joined the Independent Companies, forerunners of the Army Commandos which body eventually replaced them in the face of immense hostility from senior military leaders. Micky joined Number 2 Commando, and became the commanding officer of number 6 Troop. Surely the most unlikely soldier ever, Micky, still espousing Marxism, found in the young working class lads who made up his Troop a social experiment ripe for the plucking, especially so as the Commando ethos, as with Marxism, was wholly egalitarian, recognising value only in service to a common cause.
Chosen to take part in the raid on Saint-Nazaire, Micky was to see his little soldier commune largely destroyed. As a PoW, who later helped run the secret radio in Colditz, he waited in vain for news of his Troop which would indicate that his boys had survived the onslaught. But it was not to be, as explained in this quote from his book 'Turned Towards the Sun', published by Michael Russell.
"But a time came when I could pretend to myself no longer. Until then it had been as if I had been going over and over that night’s events in front of a blurred screen with sound and commentary off. Hope had muted them, confusing what in my heart I knew to be the truth. Now it came on full blast. The guns came on, the explosions, the cries from the boats, the river, the burning oil and the hideous nature of their deaths. Night passed, the sun rose for a moment over the Loire like a Viking funeral pyre. And then all grandeur died, river and sky turned grey, the beach was strewn with bodies of dead men and burnt-out ships, and I knew that all those I had waited for had been killed."
Of Micky's long, and it has been said by others 'risk-strewn' - life there is so much more to be said; however that is a matter for a visual medium such as might allow time both to develop the multitude of often conflicting chapters into which his life seemed to fall naturally, and to bring to a public which never seems to tire of the period, that wonderful existence which could be lived in the '20s and '30s IF one had the money, the position and the connections. Micky's book 'Turned Towards the Sun' is no longer in print but, those of us who knew and admired the man will not let his story die.
Below is a piece I wrote some time ago, which imagines the start of just such a treatment of his life.
It's almost impossible to accept that my dear friend Micky, surely one of the most exceptional human beings I have ever met - passed away almost eight years ago: all the more so since I still half-expect him to phone at some ungodly hour to tell me that his laptop isn't doing what he wishes of it, and please could I drive the two hours to North Wales to admonish, and hopefully fix, the long-suffering machine. In Micky's world requests such as this had a sort of 'Royal' tinge, as with 'requests' received from on high in Buckingham Palace - and especially so when delivered in plumby and imperious tones which respected neither time, class nor station - a primary example being calls to his friend Deborah Devonshire (née Mitford), the Dowager Duchess, which invariably began with a booming 'DEBO, IT'S MICKY HERE!'
Back in 2009, just under a year before Micky's death, I was asked by Rachel Johnson, then editor of 'The Lady', to write an article about Micky for the magazine. Published in the November 10th edition, it was entitled 'Utopia Deferred' this in recognition of the sad fact that Micky's dream of a more egalitarian world remained unrealised in spite of searches on his part that had encompassed first politics - National Socialism, followed by Marxism - and then religion, none of which had delivered what he had once believed they promised.
The expedition into National Socialism so blinded him that even a tour of the Dachau concentration camp failed to elicit an accurate assessment on his part of what it was the Nazi Party had as its ultimate goal. A post-war exculpatory treatise sought to lay the ghost of this abandonment of good sense on his part, but succeeded only partly in doing so.
Of Marxism, at a time before the worst excesses of Soviet power became widely known, there was the friendship and encouragement of the KGB agent Guy Burgess, whom Micky had met at a cocktail party at Cambridge. Friendship at the beginning yes, but soon to become a sexual affair given Guy's open homosexuality and Micky's slowly developing realisation that his own sexual preference for men (whilst still hoping to one day find fulfilment with a woman) was very much at odds with Society's norms.
World War Two arrived as the catalyst Micky needed, allowing him to advance his 'reformation' further by joining the Colours. In the early war years he joined the Independent Companies, forerunners of the Army Commandos which body eventually replaced them in the face of immense hostility from senior military leaders. Micky joined Number 2 Commando, and became the commanding officer of number 6 Troop. Surely the most unlikely soldier ever, Micky, still espousing Marxism, found in the young working class lads who made up his Troop a social experiment ripe for the plucking, especially so as the Commando ethos, as with Marxism, was wholly egalitarian, recognising value only in service to a common cause.
Chosen to take part in the raid on Saint-Nazaire, Micky was to see his little soldier commune largely destroyed. As a PoW, who later helped run the secret radio in Colditz, he waited in vain for news of his Troop which would indicate that his boys had survived the onslaught. But it was not to be, as explained in this quote from his book 'Turned Towards the Sun', published by Michael Russell.
"But a time came when I could pretend to myself no longer. Until then it had been as if I had been going over and over that night’s events in front of a blurred screen with sound and commentary off. Hope had muted them, confusing what in my heart I knew to be the truth. Now it came on full blast. The guns came on, the explosions, the cries from the boats, the river, the burning oil and the hideous nature of their deaths. Night passed, the sun rose for a moment over the Loire like a Viking funeral pyre. And then all grandeur died, river and sky turned grey, the beach was strewn with bodies of dead men and burnt-out ships, and I knew that all those I had waited for had been killed."
(TTTS pp143-4)
By the end of the war his affair with Guy Burgess had all but fizzled out. Guy did once turn up at his door in London with a view to rekindling the relationship; however, Micky by that time had found the woman of whose release, at least in part, from the stress of his burdensome homosexuality , he had always dreamed.
'Mary Booker (above), following her divorce from Henry Booker, had gone into the business of ‘interior architecture’, with friends Edward Hulton and Peter Lindsay. In the early years of the war there had been a passionate affair with Spitfire pilot Richard Hillary, author of ‘The Last Enemy’ and at the time also involved with Mary’s film-actress friend Merle Oberon (later Lady Korda). Hillary had been shot down, badly burned, and put together again by pioneer plastic surgeon Archie Mcindoe. Just prior to his death in a flying accident they had spent an idyllic period together, in Tan-y-Clogwen, a cottage restored by Mary and Peter in distant north Wales. Richard’s death was a huge blow from which it might be argued she never did recover completely.
More than able to look after herself, Mary had become London manager for Miles Aircraft and was in post, aged forty-eight when Micky came on the scene following his repatriation.
Amongst other journeys together Mary, took him to Wales, to stay together in tiny Tan-y-Clogwen. Irrespective of any vibrations the cottage might have retained from the Hillary idyll - sensed perhaps only by Mary - the period was always remembered by Micky as a time of 'bliss’ Indeed so perfect was the atmosphere that Mary’s ashes would eventually be spread upon the waters of the stream running through the meadow below.
Following a lengthy and at times unpromising courtship, Micky and Mary married on 27 March, 1947, shortly after her 50th birthday. Micky was 35 at the time and living in the actress Gigi Bajor’s villa in Budapest, as the 'Times’ ‘man in the Balkans’ (where he was widely believed to be the head of British Intelligence). He later resigned and began a career as a writer, he and Mary abandoning the London high-life and moving permanently to North Wales, first to Tan-y-Clogwen, and then to Beudy Gwyn, a ruinous cottage near Minffordd that they restored together.'
 |
| Tan-y Clogwen - 'Enchanted Ground' Subject of the article 'The Lost Lovers of Tan-y-Clogwyn', The Times, 3rd Feb, 2009 |
Below is a piece I wrote some time ago, which imagines the start of just such a treatment of his life.
'Michael Burn, half-drowned, shaking with cold and shock, is dragged by Lance-Corporal Arthur Young onto the narrow steps below the lighthouse at the tip of Saint-Nazaire’s fortified Old Mole. Cannon fire from approaching British ships strikes jagged chips of granite from the structure’s seaward face. All around him is a psychedelic nightmare of multi-coloured tracer, blinding searchlights and roaring flames.
Not more than fifty-feet away, drifting slowly westwards with the tide lies the blazing wreck of Motor Launch 192, the diminutive warship on board which he and his men had so recently sailed on what was to have been a great adventure. In mere seconds the German batteries had reduced her to a barely floating tomb within whose fires his beloved 6 Troop were now dying, friend by friend; Lance-Sergeant Maurice ‘Boy’ Harrison – for whom Micky bore an unrequited love - his patrician subaltern Lieutenant Tom Peyton, Fusilier Lenny Goss, Corporals Reg Tomsett and Norman Fisher, and all his other fellow travellers in what had been for far too brief a time, a shared Utopian dream.
This moment of epiphany marks the end, for Micky, of a social, sexual and political odyssey that has carried him from exclusive Winchester School, via the indulgences of Le Touquet and Oxbridge, through the authoritarianism of Fascism, to the late adoption of an equally radical Socialist ideal so perfectly realised, until this awful moment, by all the boys in his Troop.
Behind him, lost forever in the darkness, lie the castles, villas and country houses that have marked his passage through a sometimes poisonous cocktail of doubt and self-obsession: before him looms the bleak reality of mere existence as one amongst numberless, similarly humbled, prisoners of a triumphant Reich.'
 |
| The Fortified Old Mole at Saint-Nazaire, 1942 |
Comments