Dirk Bogarde - Cleared for Take-Off: Autobiographies Series, Book 6

DIRK BOGARDE

First published in Great Britain in 1995 by Viking

This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Reader

Copyright 1995 Badger Films

Cover image Getty Images

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ISBN: 978 1 4482 0826 5
eISBN: 978 1 4482 0827 2

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For
Pat Kavanagh
With Love

Im beginning to forget.

Which seems a very good reason to bring this seven volume ego trip to an end.

After the first effort, A Postillion Struck by Lightning, I never remotely thought that Id write another book. Neither did anyone else. But fate, or whatever one chooses to call it, deemed otherwise, and I sprinted away with delight.

But now the time has come to call a halt; as far as autobiographical work is concerned. Enough is enough. It is not at all easy. I keep reminding myself that each book has to be integral, a book to read separately, alone and entire. To that end I have dealt here with some familiar (to some readers) situations but have gone into deeper detail where, before, I feared to disturb the past too much. For obvious reasons I have changed names and even place names when I felt it essential.

So, as always, to my editor, Fanny Blake, who has tried to control my excesses, and to Mrs Sally Betts, who has set them down with perfect clarity, my profound gratitude and thanks.

D.v.d.B.
London
26 June 1995

BELGIUM, 1944

GERMANY, MAY 1945

Brussels was liberated by Chris and me on a Monday. I know this because I wrote it down in my pocket diary as we bumped across tramlines and cobbles in the jeep. I wasnt driving; Chris, my RAF counterpart, was doing that. Bert Cobb, his batman-driver, was slumped anxiously in the back seat, distastefully ducking the bunches of garden flowers and reaching hands of the screaming, delirious population. It was Monday, the fourth of September.

Sunlight exploded like shell bursts through the dense leaves of the plane trees along the road. People were cheering, waving, singing, shouting, hugging each other. Arms and legs flailed as people scrambled wildly to try and get up on to, or into, the jeep, and Bert Cobb kept scowling and pushing them off. He said they were all bloody barmy, as barmy as the lot in Paris. They had no self-respect or control. Last month in Paris theyd been right loony.

On that day in Paris the Germans were still banging away. Bullets whined and zinged all about us like mad hornets, chipping the faades of buildings, shattering windows, clanging into the huge brass monuments to past wars. Brussels, it had to be said, was marginally less hysterical because the Germans had pulled out. Marginally. Everyone had gone crazy. If not quite barmy.

A woman in a light flowery summer dress, her hair piled high, suddenly grabbed Chriss arm to pull him towards her. For a kiss, I suppose? The crowd around her cheered and Chris lost control of the jeep and we idled into a tree. We were only meandering along anyway, in the crush. People chucked more flowers and, for some reason (I suppose because it was September) apples and grapes at us. Bert Cobb threw them back. Furiously.

The woman was shouting above the noise. Had we seen her husband anywhere? He was formally dressed for his office. He would have been very easy to see in a Lanvin suit. She had seen him climb on to a tank, but couldnt get up on to it with him because of her high heels. He had a rosebud in his buttonhole. She directed us, in perfect English, towards a quieter side street. She was running beside the jeep so I just pulled her up next to me, and her hair spilled down. People still ran alongside, but it was not as dense a crowd as in the big square.

Chris muttered hed murder for a cold beer, and was there a bar anywhere? She replied no, but there was a very good restaurant she knew off the avenue Louise which was very chic. Chris didnt mind about the chic part, did it have beer? Bert Cobb sat hunched indifferently, his .303 across his knees. He didnt care about the beer, being TT. The restaurant was extremely chic: lace curtains, crystal, white cloths, little pink lamps, polished wood, deep carpet. People sat murmuring quietly at the tables or else along the walls on crimson plush banquettes. They hardly looked up at us; when they did it was under lowered lids, then the eyes slid away and they went on murmuring to each other. We were dusty, untidy, unshaven, booted. Chris and I carried the Un-expired-Portion-of-the-Daily-Ration: two tins of bully-beef, four slabs of cookhouse bread wrapped in the Daily Mirror. Bert Cobb had exactly the same, but stayed outside to mind the jeep and keep an eye on things. He had Roses lime juice in his water bottle. Against scurvy. So we didnt argue with him.

The matre dhtel came silently towards us, smiling smoothly, eyebrows raised in polite enquiry. The woman, who now looked pretty dishevelled, demanded a table in a clear, cool voice, and a bottle of Krug and three glasses. She made it obvious that she was used to ordering things and knew her way about perfectly well. I remember that her lost husband wore a suit by Lanvin. She wasnt the kind of person you messed around with and the matre dhtel didnt. We moved to a table at the back. A huge, aged woman with rouged cheeks and feathers raised her glass to us as we passed, gently inclined her head. Pearls gleamed. Everyone was very calm, polite, well bred, discreet. No fussing or staring. You would never know wed just won this part of the war that morning.

I put our tins on the table with the bulky package of bread, and when the champagne arrived the woman, who had introduced herself as Madame Alexandre Malfait and told us that her husband was in steel, gave the tins to the matre and told him to deal with them. He accepted them with well-concealed distaste but as if they were tins of beluga. We toasted each other. We toasted Belgium. The Allies. Churchill, Eisenhower and The End of the War by Christmas. I dont really know why it is, but all the wars, it seems, are supposed to be over by Christmas. They never have been. Of course we couldnt possibly tell her that we were actually on our way north to Arnhem in Holland, where a gigantic operation was about to take place which would quite certainly mean that the war would be over by Christmas. No doubt about it. So Chris and I, with a secret smile to each other, made the toast feel private and, somehow, real. We drank to Arnhem.

Instead I asked her if she knew a little town called Courtelle, it was near Louvain? My recent ancestors all came from there and my father had suggested that, when the time came, I should go and liberate it, which seemed quite a pleasing idea to me.