Shadows of Orkney

If you are a certain age, the name Robert Shaw will instantly conjure up a jaunty theme tune:

A life on the ocean wave will be The only life for you and me; We’ll sail across the Spanish Main for-e-ever, And if you see that danger’s near Just whistle a tune and I’ll be here, And we will face the enemy together.

What child couldn’t thrill to the derring-do of The Buccaneers? It was launched on ITV in 1955. You can see it on YouTube: Shaw strides about, flinging his cloak around, bawling lines he made up himself in a cod Cornish accent lifted from his parents. It netted him £200 an episode – a fortune, which he spent on golf clubs, cars and booze. But that may not be the Shaw you remember. Perhaps you’re a Bond fan, unlikely to forget the controlled menace of Grant, the blond psychopath in From Russia with Love. Maybe it’s A Man for All Seasons which catches you – Henry VIII leaping off the royal barge into the river, or butting against Paul Scofield’s Sir Thomas More over divorce. Or were you transfixed by Quint’s mesmerizing monologue in Jaws, that moment when we see under the skin of the pursuer, and understand what drives him? There were, it would seem, as many Robert Shaws as there were parts to play. It was both a blessing and a curse, this catholicity. My Robert Shaw is perhaps less known; but he may be the key to all the other manifestations. I know the writer, the man who never forgot the short, crucial time he spent in my home town in Orkney. Shaw was born in 1927 in Lancashire, to Doreen and Thomas. She was from Swaziland, though the family had Cornish roots. He was a doctor, charming, athletic, competitive, assiduous – and an incurable alcoholic. As bills mounted and the marriage began to unravel, the couple took drastic action. When Robert was 6 they bought Seaview, a fine house overlooking the harbour in Stromness, big enough to hold four children and a surgery. They moved north with very little idea of what they were coming to. Orkney was in the doldrums. The intense activity of the First World War had subsided. The murmurings of the next were as yet unheard. It was a sleepy, inward-looking place. Robert went to Stromness Academy. He was a strong lad who loved sport; but the Orcadians, unaccustomed to incomers with strange accents, took their time about accepting him. Classes were tiny, and the children had known each other since birth; the only strangers were the lighthouse bairns, who came and went as their fathers moved around the coastline. Shaw wasn’t picked for the football team, and it rankled. There are tales of him hanging out of the upper window (the house sits directly on the street, opposite a very imposing bank) kicking his legs, shouting and, some say, urinating on unsuspecting bank customers. He acted in a pageant written by Eric Linklater – that may have been his first taste of theatre. There’s a tale too that his father rescued two children from the sea. But tiny communities know their drinkers. Shaw’s father crumbled in front of the town’s eyes. Three years later he moved them all again, back to his sister’s in Cornwall. Shaw was thrown in with cousins. Doreen gave her husband one more chance. He got a job in Somerset in 1937; but this new start was the last one. He took opium – the doctor’s poison – and died, aged 38, when Robert was 11. Just when a father is becoming more than a figurehead, becoming someone you might confide in, model yourself upon – he’s gone. Shaw described later – though he rarely talked about it – how the man would come into his son’s bedroom and weep or curse; he’d suddenly say, in the car, ‘Shall I drive us over? Shall I end it all?’ Shaw spent only three years in Orkney. What can three years do? The philosopher-poet Edwin Muir saw Orkney as his Eden – but he spent all his childhood here, and left to go to the inhumanities of a bone factory in Glasgow. You might well say no wonder the island became a metaphor to him for all that was simple and pure. Yet Shaw was affected in the same way. The school was small, the education predictably thorough and rather unimaginative. Discipline was tough. The strap was on the desk; arms were folded, no one spoke until spoken to. This regime may have suited a boy who lacked stability in his home life, was moody and introspective, quick to go to extremes. It certainly nurtured his love of writing and independent reading. Then there was the magical escape from school, into the life of a fishing town. The herring boats came. The whalers came. Every boy wanted a flattie, to row around the shore. There were birds’ eggs to get, turnips to steal, bicycles to ride. Local farmers held trials of strength; daring feats – diving, jumping from high dykes, games with knives and tugs of war handed down from the Vikings – were happy diversions. The diurnal farming and fishing preoccupations of a simple community caught in the moment between wars suited the young Shaw. The bereaved boy never came to terms with the loss of his father. He spent his life striving, aching for praise, as if frantic activity would fill the emptiness. He became Head Boy of Truro School. He was bullied, and bullied back. He had to come first, worked tirelessly to win, never heeding who was left behind him. Head Boy notwithstanding, however, he had no close friends. His drama teacher, Cyril Wilkes, was something of a father figure, and nourished his love of writing. But he wasn’t a real father. Doreen, damaged and exhausted, withdrew her affection. She concentrated on surviving. The gloom Shaw was trying to escape was compounded by the looming threat of Nazism. He saw a Messerschmitt over the school, close enough, he said, to see the pilot’s head. He knew all about planes. He followed the news. He heard Lord Haw-Haw. He was a wartime adolescent, with all the enthusiasms and furies that implies – but cruelly, when he applied to join up, he failed his medical. (He had two fused vertebrae, and back pain plagued him all his life.) So he became an actor, an actor who wrote. He said, in a BBC Omnibus interview, ‘It was only through writing that I began to function as a person.’ Certainly, it was only through writing that he was able to explore father-and-son relationships, the nature of evil, the innocence of childhood. There, too, he was able to create ideal women – an escape, perhaps, from the torrid, messy business of his real relationships. The Hiding Place, his first novel, was published in 1959. He was lucky – he knew the actress Jill Balcon, who was married to Cecil Day Lewis, then working at Chatto & Windus. Day Lewis looked at drafts, and was encouraging. The theme was well chosen – considered, reflective writing about the war’s psychological effects was beginning to appear, as Britain came to terms with a chastened yet invigorated Germany. ‘It was Monday, the first day of a heat-wave, and the sun was just beginning to shine down on the shabbiest suburb in Bonn.’ A confident start – and so we meet the diminutive figure of Hans Frick, dreaming of violence, doing his exercises, donning his Nazi uniform, winding his wristwatch. So far, so predictable. Then Frick heads downstairs ‘to get breakfast for himself and the two men locked in the wine-cellar’. It’s thrown away, this line, so casually that you read it again, just to be sure. Perfectly placed. The captured men ‘lay like two animals . . . shaped by the cage’. It’s a cage with a gramophone, books, manuscripts – but no nails, no mirrors. Wilson, the elder prisoner, has an Orcadian mother. ‘Give you a cloth cap and you could be Keir Hardie . . . you don’t talk, you sing!’ his fellow prisoner Connolly tells him. Connolly is restless, anxious, worried about his young wife. Shaw never loses control of the tension created by the gradual revelation of their story. They’ve been held since their aircraft came down in a raid. Frick saved them from the Gestapo, offering them sanctuary, but has found himself unable to let them go. Wilson has acclimatized – ‘There were days when he was happier than he had ever been in his life’ – because he has time to write, obsessively, about Orkney. It anchors him:

I always harboured some romantic notion . . . I should find some place that I’d know I wanted to live in for the rest of my life . . . it was when I was a boy that I found it. It has haunted me ever since.

Connolly, however, broods on escape. The discovery that Frick, harried and in pain, has made an error – he’s left his broom in the cell – fills him with excitement. There will be a nail in the broom, and with a nail they may be able to unpick the lock on their chains, and reach the door. It is as if Shaw is examining both sides of his personality, as the two airmen argue, then comfort each other. Wilson tries to prepare Connolly for his wife’s defection. Connolly tries to give Wilson the energy to rebel. They debate the nature of time and the meaning of their dreams. We warm to Connolly’s sensuality, his need to rejoin the world; but we appreciate Wilson’s mature philosophical calm. We applaud Connolly when he works the nail free, and wait on tenterhooks to see if they’ll escape. As this episode unfolds we discover we are being invited, very subtly, to feel sympathy for the captor. There’s something lost about him.

His one recurring nightmare was to return to the cellar to find the chains empty . . . and his mother pointing accusingly by the open door. He was like some poor orphan who, conceiving his sole chance of love is to become chess champion of the world, locks himself up in a tower with an enormous chess board and a copy of all the games that have ever been played.

Frick’s hip aches; his boss at the chemist’s shop is trying to find him a housekeeper and he can’t explain why this is an impossible idea; children stick their tongues out at him in the street, old women make fun of him. He frets about how to afford new slippers for Connolly. He has a sweet tooth. He’s burdened by his country’s history. He has a pistol, which he is prepared to use. Three rounded characters, all flawed, all attractive, boxed together, approaching a crisis. Above the cellar, Bonn suffocates in a heat-wave. We discover why Frick is a part-time Nazi before the airmen do. We feel for him as his illness robs him of the ability to look after his captives; and enjoy the captives’ gradual realization that all is not as it should be. More inexplicable mistakes creep into the daily routine. Then the situation abruptly becomes impossible for Frick. He drinks Schnapps in his uniform, and ‘so many memories crowded in; conversations in the cellar; evenings when he has read to them in German . . . new dishes he had cooked at the weekends; mending their clothes’. Bottle empty, he descends with his pistol – but, at the last moment, instead of killing them, he orders them to shave. Captivity is one thing – freedom another. The second half of the book is as gripping as the first, the climax psychologically and politically satisfying. We are accustomed, now, to novels about incarceration. There’s John Fowles’s The Collector, Emma Donoghue’s The Room. But The Hiding Place came first. It’s an extraordinary debut, touching on themes which Shaw would worry at for the rest of his life. It’s full of energy, philosophy, wit, poetry. Poignant too. Shaw was as imprisoned as the men in the cellar, and just as trapped as their captor. He never managed to escape the demons – he drank himself to death at 51. But I like to think that Orkney helped to succour him a bit, in the dark times; the evidence certainly seems to suggest it.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 48 © Morag MacInnes 2015