Great Escapes

At various times in my life, from my twenties to my fifties, I planned to travel through France by boat. As real life gradually rendered the achievement of this ambition ever more unlikely, I took to reading in a random way books by people who had done it. About twenty years ago I came across a large paperback called Isabel and the Sea. I knew nothing about it or its author George Millar, but I consumed it greedily, loving every word. It was the classic ‘through France and across the Mediterranean by boat’ book. Later, I tracked down and consumed equally greedily all the other books that George Millar had written, most of which were then out of print.

This was the perfect introduction to a remarkable man, whose life seemed to reflect so many of my own enthusiasms: country life in all its meanings, boating and sailing, France, the landscape, chance opportunities. In addition, Millar was clearly a man of great charm and an elegant writer whose books seemed to underline a fundamental belief, namely that history is about putting the pieces of the jigsaw together and making sense of the missing bits without the picture on the lid. Isabel and the Sea is a multi-layered love story, at the heart of which is Truant, the rather stocky and practical craft in which the Millars made their voyage from austerity Britain to Greece in the challenging climate of 1946. It is also about a long love affair with France which had carried George Millar to Paris as a journalist in the 1930s, when he became a fluent French speaker, and through his extraordinary time as a successful Special Operations Executive agent in 1944 in the east of the country (an affair that was to continue into the 1950s as the setting for various sailing adventures). Most important, it is the story of the love between the Millars, newly married and, in effect, undertaking a long and gloriously escapist honeymoon. The voyage was a great adventure, for which the Millars were remarkably unprepared:

Isabel’s lack of experience more than matched mine. She had twice been in a sailing boat, each time in an undecked boat on a Hawaiian lagoon. She stated that she believed herself, from experience on large ships, to be a ‘very bad sailor’. But to set against this I knew that in spite of her small size and slender bones she had great reserves of physical and nervous strength, that she was a matchless organiser for any kind of life, and the best natural driver of a motor car that I had ever met. This last aptitude encouraged me to believe that she would soon be expert at handling Truant. Isabel was confident that we could sail in the European seas without any great difficulty, but she occasionally wondered how we were going to find our way.

They did find their way, but every day seemed to offer new challenges and excitements. These make entertaining, sometimes compulsive, reading but just as enticing is the sense of gentle pleasure inherent in such a trip, with plenty of time for observation:

I steered in the sunshine at the tiller aft, and Isabel sat beside me on a deck chair. We passed a champagne-coloured horse with a lemon-coloured tail; we passed two bourgeois fishermen on the bank, one in a blue town suit and the other in pink overalls, but neither bothered to raise his head to look at us; we passed artillerymen shelling a target down in the swamps, and they abandoned their guns to watch us out of sight; we passed a sleepy village at the water’s edge, and a cow raised its face to look unseeingly at us from the grass outside the Restaurant des Pecheurs.

The delights of the Seine were the perfect introduction to a voyage that was to become ever more varied and unpredictable. Ahead lay many unforeseen adventures – storms, obstructive officials, dangerous harbours and much else – but they always enjoyed the memory of that first French river. Over the years I happily read and reread most of Millar’s books, fulfilling various personal fantasies and enjoying the pleasure of great adventure stories. Of these, the greatest was clearly Maquis, his account of his time in the Franche-Comté region of occupied France, working as an agent called Emile with the SOE Treasurer circuit. His achievements, and his adventures, in one of the most successful SOE networks, were breathtaking. He was dropped near Besançon just before D-Day and remained in the field for the duration, the daily hazards of his life as an agent compounded by his essentially British good looks, tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed. Even before the SOE, Millar had had a good war. Turned down in 1939 by the RAF on the grounds that at 29 he was too old, he joined the army, fought in North Africa, was captured by the Germans, escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp in Italy and made his way back to England via France and Spain before volunteering for the SOE. Maquis is a lively book, a pioneer in a genre that was to become over-familiar, and written in the straightforward, entertaining and self-deprecating style that Millar made his own, and that was to be echoed later by his great friend Eric Newby in that other escape classic, Love and War in the Apennines. In 2005 a book entitled The Jedburghs: The Secret History of the Allied Special Forces, France 1944 appeared, written by Will Irwin, a former Lieutenant-Colonel in the United States Army. Reading this as part of my ongoing SOE enthusiasm, I was intrigued to find a long section devoted to Millar’s work as Emile, and his rather uneasy relationship with the American-led Jedburgh team dropped into his area in late August 1944. To the Americans, Millar was typically British and over-cautious, despite his phenomenal success rate and his reputation as a guerrilla leader who was able to keep up the pressure on the Germans without provoking vicious reprisals against the civilian population. The Americans wanted more action and quickly, regardless of the delicacy of the local situation. The Jedburgh team leader, a rather outrageous character, is quoted as saying, ‘For Pete’s sake, Emile, let’s get down to that road and bag us a couple of Krauts.’ Some things don’t change. Beyond Millar’s books and the fact that he lived, or had lived in Dorset, my own county, I knew nothing of him, not even whether he was still alive. One day in the mid-1990s I had a phone call from my father, who had also enjoyed his books, to say that he had met Millar at a dinner party. One thing led to another and eventually we were invited to the house in West Dorset where he was then living, not long after the death of his beloved Isabel in an accident. Meeting a hero of long standing is a daunting experience, even for someone in their fifties, as I then was. I had brought all my Millar books with me, hoping to get them signed, but my father made me leave them in the car, saying dismissively, ‘You can’t do that sort of thing.’ Luckily hero-worship soon turned into friendship and the next few years brought some delightful meetings and memorable conversations. In April 2002, George and his friend Venetia came to a dinner to celebrate my birthday, despite his having recently suffered a stroke, and on that occasion I did get him to sign my books. To my lasting delight, in each one he carefully wrote, ‘To Paul, with love from George’ in his still elegant, but now slightly shaky, hand. The George Millar story came to an end in 2005, his ninety-fifth year. The funeral, held on a cold, clear January day, was splendid, and the Dorset church packed. The addresses were given by Eric Newby’s wife Wanda, Eric himself being too ill to attend, and by the recently rediscovered friend with whom George had escaped from the Italian prisoner-of-war camp in 1943. George was buried beside Isabel to the sound of ‘Gone Away’ on a hunting horn, as befitted the great countryman he had become.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 19 © Paul Atterbury 2008