Now I had a whole letter from her.
I wrote back to her the same day. I composed what I intended to be a thoughtful letter, one that was helpful and sympathetic without trying to interfere in any way. At the end I said, as blandly as possible, that if she thought it would help, I could probably obtain a short leave and make a hurried trip across to see her.
Two days later I received a one-sentence reply from her: ‘Come as soon as you can.’
I immediately put in an application to the station commander’s office for a forty-eight-hour pass, but at the same time I felt I should take a final precaution against the impulses of the heart. I too wrote a one-sentence letter to her.
‘If I come to visit you,’ I said, ‘am I likely to see my brother Joe?’
She did not reply. As soon as my leave was confirmed I went anyway.
20
My meetings with Rudolf Hess at Mytchett Place extended over three days. As soon as I realized who the prisoner was, I assumed that I had been sent because he remembered me from our meeting in Berlin, or he had asked to see me for some other reason. Nothing could have been further from the truth. He showed no sign of recognition at all, was suspicious of me and for the first day the only responses I had from him were hostile or uninterested.
Hess’s circumstances had changed a great deal in five years. In 1936 he was one of the most important and feared people in Germany, but by the time he was incarcerated in Mytchett Place he had become a prisoner of war allowed only the minimum of comforts or privileges. The easy bullying manner had gone. The small talk did not exist. When he spoke at all, it was to complain about his treatment or to make demands to which I was simply unable to respond. For most of that first day he was sullen and silent, unwilling even to acknowledge my presence in the room.
Matters changed and improved on the second day. Although his suspicions remained, I think it finally sank in that I really had been sent by Churchill himself. For that day, and the next, I made much more progress than at first. It wasn’t an ideal meeting, because of the circumstances, but by the time I finished I felt I had gained some important information for the Prime Minister.
I left Mytchett Place on the fourth morning, immediately after an early breakfast. I did not see Hess again before I left. The car drove swiftly to London, taking me to Admiralty House. My mind was swirling with a heady mixture of excitement, intrigue, anticipation and the more prosaic memories of many hours of awkward boredom. Whatever the circumstances, Hess was the worst of social company.
As soon as my arrival at Admiralty House was known I was taken to a two-roomed suite of offices which had been set aside for me on the top floor of the building. That my investigation was something of a priority was borne in on me because, as well as being allocated the rooms, I also had assigned to me a secretary and a translator. I was promised that the archivists in the library would treat any requests from me as a priority. Still feeling as if I had been thrown suddenly into a world of intrigues I barely understood, I settled down to assemble my thoughts and try to write them down in a coherent form.
I worked solidly for the next few days, travelling into central London every morning from my base at Northolt. In that time, two reminders came through to me from the Prime Minister’s office, asking when my report might be ready. Time was of the essence and I was not to be allowed to forget it.
I had never been involved in this sort of work before, so organizing the material sensibly was a serious problem. My first version of the report was a lengthy and ill-arranged affair. I presented it as a verbatim account of each of my several meetings with Hess, including unedited transcriptions of the recordings of our conversations (translated into English when we had spoken in German) and supported by much other detail and elaboration that I was able to obtain from the library archives. I tried to produce a comprehensive account, a definitive record, comparing my own observations of Hess with what facts I could find about him in the Foreign Office archives. They had been observing him for years and the files were stuffed with information.
Miss Victoria MacTyre, the War Office secretary who was assigned to me, took the report away and had it typed out in full. She distributed it among four typists downstairs in the pool. If I say that it took them a day and a half of intensive typing this will give some impression of how many pages the report comprised.
Miss MacTyre brought the finished report to my office. While the secretarial work was going on, she managed to read the whole thing. She complimented me generously on it and told me that in the two years since the outbreak of war she had never read such an interesting piece of work. However, she said, there was a particular problem.
‘Group Captain, I must warn you that Mr Churchill will not read it,’ she said.
‘I think he will. He commissioned it personally and has been pressing me to deliver it to him as quickly as possible.’
‘I do understand that, sir. The fact remains that he will take one look at it and send it back to me.’
‘Why should he do that?’
‘It’s far too long,’ she said. ‘It presents a brilliant analysis of the subject and I’ve never read any report that is so well cross-referenced and supported by evidence, but the plain fact is that Mr Churchill does not have the time to read anything so lengthy and detailed.’
‘There are an incredible number of ramifications,’ I said. ‘Until I went to the place, to Camp Z, I had no idea how complex the situation is. It wouldn’t do justice to the problem if I left half of it out.’
‘What the Prime Minister requires,’ Miss MacTyre said, with what I belatedly realized was immense patience, ‘what he needs is a succinct and reliable summary of the salient points. You should add detail where it is necessary, but wherever possible the supporting material should be contained in a separate report. That is the version the officials will analyse and retain as the basis for whatever actions the Prime Minister decides to take.’
Still feeling the pressure of Mr Churchill’s expectations on me, I stared gloomily at the thick pile of typewritten sheets on my desk, wondering how I should ever be able to organize such rambling and discursive material. Everything in it needed to be there, because everything I had learned about Rudolf Hess had a bearing on what I had discovered. I began sifting through the pages, trying to see what I could distil from them.
After leaving me for an hour to work on the problem alone, Miss MacTyre returned and briskly offered me the solution. She brought with her a copy of a report commissioned by the Admiralty into what had gone wrong during the Narvik campaign at the beginning of 1940. It was four pages long.
‘This took more than three months to prepare,’ she said, laying it on my desk. ‘The original depositions amounted to over five hundred sheets of paper. What Mr Churchill read is the first four pages, from which he gained an accurate summary of the main points. The rest of the report was distributed to the various departments who needed to act on the lessons learnt from what went wrong.’
I glanced through the four-page report. It looked so easy, so plain and straightforward. It consisted of a number of fairly short sections, each one of which was preceded by a question.