By the July of 1943 there was a change in Reg. His eyes watched over your shoulder and he looked at the ground too much. Reg had seen a lot of combat. Reg was part of the airborne attack against Catania in that July. They were blasted out of the sky in error by the Allied Fleet. He didn’t need his parachute that night, his Dakota crashed. Before the night was over Reg had gained two superficial wounds, a DCM and a twitching muscle near his left eye. They sent him on leave in Tunisia that Autumn. By now he looked nearer 40 than 20, seldom smiled and spent all his leave writing next-of-kin letters.
It was one A.M. on D-day that Reg dropped into the River Dives in full equipment. He got fifty men and an officer through chest-deep swamp and undergrowth by hitting the slowest. He wasn’t a lot of fun by now. He was tense and irritable and spent every minute of every leave visiting the relatives of the dead. I told him it wasn’t doing any good. He had developed a stammer and his coordination wasn’t all it should be. ‘Mind your own business,’ he said, so we went to see the relatives. Hollow houses and gutted people were at both ends of dirty blacked-out trains.
‘Springer’ Cavendish still survived, soldiers were still drawing lots to go in his aircraft, his operations, his ‘stick’. ‘Springer’; Reg was you see. Always Springer survived and what’s more he brought others back with him like the time he brought back a song-bird in a cage bent almost flat. They were both whistling.
When, some weeks after Arnhem had grown quiet, Reg and four other airborne soldiers paddled across the lower Rhine in a Wehrmacht inflatable boat the 1st Airborne knew it had lost 7,605 soldiers of the 10,000 who had gone in. It seemed as though Reg was indestructible. He wasn’t. A rations lorry hit Reg as he was coming out of the Montgomery Club in Brussels. It was four days before VE day.
The Adjutant of Reg’s unit phoned me. What should he tell Reg’s father? Should he record it as it was? He could hardly believe it himself. He said that Reg was with him when he first jumped. He said it three times. I was going to London that night. I said I’d tell his father.
The last time we had seen anything on this sort of scale was when the Home Office pulled in all aliens during the war. At that time Olympia was used to house them before they were moved to the Isle of Man. But then there had been no need to keep them separate, and the numbers were kept down by the movement to the internment camps. This was a much more complex job.
Work by Dr Holger Hyden, professor of Histology at Goteberg, revealed that Tricayandaminopropene, a substance made by manipulating the molecular structure of a series of chemicals, can change the brain’s nerve cells and the cells of membrane that sheath the cells.
The fatty substance and protein of the nerve cells is increased by 25 per cent.
In surrounding membranes the quantity of the molecule RNA was decreased by almost 50 per cent.
From this change the suggestibility of the subject is increased by the functional change of these important substances.
About the Author
Len Deighton was born in 1929. He worked as a railway clerk before doing his National Service in the RAF as a photographer attached to the Special Investigation Branch.
After his discharge in 1949, he went to art school — first to the St Martin’s School of Art, and then to the Royal College of Art on a scholarship. His mother was a professional cook and he grew up with an interest in cookery — a subject he was later to make his own in an animated strip for the Observer and in two cookery books. He worked for a while as an illustrator in New York and as art director of an advertising agency in London.
Deciding it was time to settle down, Deighton moved to the Dordogne where he started work on his first book, The Ipcress File. Published in 1962, the book was an immediate success.
Since then his work has gone from strength to strength, varying from espionage novels to war, general fiction and non-fiction. The BBC made Bomber into a day-long radio drama in ‘real time’. Deighton’s history of World War Two, Blood, Tears and Folly, was published to wide acclaim — Jack Higgins called it ‘an absolute landmark’.
As Max Hastings observed, Deighton captured a time and a mood—‘To those of us who were in our twenties in the 1960s, his books seemed the coolest, funkiest, most sophisticated things we’d ever read’—and his books have now deservedly become classics.