A couple has got over the disappointment of having their choice of 4Real as the name for their baby son turned down by calling him Superman instead.– Daily Telegraph
In a world where babies can be named Princess Tiaamii (Jordan), Moon Unit (Frank Jappa), Zowie (David Bowie), Rumer (Demi Moore), or Peaches, Fifi Trixibelle and Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily (Paula Yates), 4Real sounds relatively normal to me.
And I am something of an expert on the subject.
But Pat and Sheena Wheaton were told by the government registry in New Zealand they could not register the name because it included a digit. Mr Wheaton said he came up with idea after seeing the baby in an ultrasound scan and realising it was ‘for real’.
Can’t argue with that.
Forty years ago I went to a small town in France to write a feature for the Daily Mirror (in the days when that newspaper's commonly published by-lines might have been Don Short or John Smith) about the origins of my unusual given name – we called them Christian names, in those days.
An American psychiatrist had been researching the subject (academics were clearly as underemployed in the 60s as they are today) and had concluded that children with unusual names were more likely to become juvenile delinquents.
He cited one example of such a child who had been christened Fertilizer, in honour of the product with which his father had become a millionaire. I liked to imagine the child's mother explaining to a pastor at the font that Fertilizer had not actually been her husband's first choice of name.
For my part, I was happy to report from the Haute Garonne that Revel was quite handsome, modest, charming and generally law-abiding.
Better still, it looked good in print.
But 20 years later Mike Molloy, editor in chief, asked me about the origin of the name. I told him there were two versions: the romantic and the boring. Naturally, he opted for the romantic account and as we were on a 12-hour flight I ordered more champagne and told it to him.
George Barker [I said] had enlisted in the Territorial Army out of boredom. He was already in the local church youth club, and he played soccer for an amateur team on Saturdays – so well, in fact, that he’d been spotted by a scout and given trials for the Rams [Derby County] – but most of the week he found that there was little that was legal to interest a teenage boy in 1930s Derby. His elementary education – Mr Chetwynd, the French teacher, and the only one he’d liked, had told him, between fits of choking coughs that were his souvenir of mustard gas in the trenches of the Great War, that his mastery of the language was fluent, even if his vocabulary was lacking – had not equipped him for anything better than being a blacksmith at the Rolls-Royce works. But while he found the job interesting enough, most evenings he was at a loose end. The role of his local unit of the TA, the Terriers, was not especially exciting in itself: it was an anti-aircraft battery, tasked, ‘in the event’, with protecting the factory in which he worked, but it also offered two nights of drill, a summer camp, a uniform, lots of mates… so he signed up.
He took to the life like a duck to water. He loved every minute, even the bull. George’s father, who had been a batman in ‘the war to end all wars’, taught him to remove the grease in which army boots were always packed, to apply a bone to the knobbly toecaps and bring them up to a mirror-like shine, and how to use a button stick. He rapidly became the smartest man in the battery and, being also the tallest, was selected to represent the TA, marching behind the state coach, in the 1937 coronation. This required a specially tailored Number One Dress uniform in dark blue, totally distinct from the usual drab khaki, which thereafter was his to keep.
On the outbreak of war he was among the first to be called up and within a few weeks was sent a railway warrant and despatched to a place he’d never heard of in the home counties. Mr Chetwynd, he would discover later, had recommended him to an old comrade for a special task. He spent six weeks – they considered it sufficient – on an intensive French course, and three months acquiring even more exotic skills. The war was less than a year old, and he was already a captain, the first time he was parachuted into France.
If the medals he collected were any guide, I said, he must have been good at the job – which he would modestly describe in later life as ‘simply teaching the Frogs to kill Krauts’. He taught them how to put explosives into bicycle pumps, before deflating the tyres on a German soldier’s bike; how to detonate a sash window so that it would decapitate anyone who opened it to investigate an unusual noise outside; how to mine bridges, to use machine guns, to remove the tracks from tanks, and how to convert the sort of junk found in most people’s outhouses and stables into terrifying instruments of war. He also trained them in methods of evading capture – and in techniques for escaping if the evasion didn’t work. Of six years’ wartime service, he spent four living ‘underground’ and undetected in occupied France.
His last posting, in 1943, was to a small town in the Haute Garonne, called Revel…
The place had been established a long time when its open-sided, thatch-roof market hall was built in the 12th century. It was – still is – a pretty town with a broad square and an old coaching inn, the Hotel de la Lune, which had a gateway large enough for stage coaches to enter beneath a stone arch. It is more than likely that it was the birthplace of Hugh Revel, who was Master, and then ‘Grand Master’, of the Knights of St John from 1258 to 1277.
The corner of southwest France, where the Pyrenees meets the Mediterranean, was under Vichy rule, and here the prime task was to ensure the safe escape of members of the Maquis who were denounced by collaborators, and then to deal with the collaborators themselves. In 1944 he was told that he was to return home to train for a new task, which would be to assist with the invasion in the northwest.
As usual, he would be collected by a Westland Lysander, the tiny two-man aircraft adopted by the Special Operations Executive because it could land and take off in a small field, or even in a clearing in a forest.
By arrangement, members of the local Maquis group laid out strips of light fabric indicating the landing place and the wind direction on the slopes of the Montagne Noir and, within a few minutes of the designated time, they heard the sound of the Mark III ‘Lizzie’ approaching. It landed safely and George ran through the scrub towards it, dragging a young French woman behind him. He pushed her up the ladder that had been attached to the side of the fuselage specifically to ensure that agents could mount the aircraft speedily.
Above the sound of the single Bristol Mercury engine the couple heard the pilot ask them angrily what they thought they were doing.
‘We’ve got to take her back with us!’
‘But you know the score, old man – there’s only one seat!’ And that, he knew well enough, was cramped, because of the need for an extra fuel tank.
‘She’s my wife!… We’ve got married.’
‘Shit!’ said the pilot. He paused for a second, then told them: ‘Only one thing for it, get her on board and strapped in.’
Once that was accomplished, the pilot threw down his goggles and gauntlets to George, telling him: ‘You… you travel back on the wing.’
George Barker followed his wife up the ladder, shinned across the cloth-covered fuselage, and threw himself bodily across the high port wing, higher than the pilot’s eye line, and grasped the leading edge with his leather-clad fingers.
‘I’ll take it as easy as I can, old man. We’ll fly low and slow, probably not more than a hundred knots.’
‘You’d better take it easy,’ George yelled back to him. ‘She’s pregnant.’
They flew north through the freezing night, stopping once – he knew better than to ask where – to refuel, and landing at daybreak in Lympne, Kent, where they had to unhook George, now suffering from the early stages of hypothermia, from his frozen grip.
George’s next posting, with married quarters, was to a base in west Leeds where the couple’s child, a son, was born in December 1944. They had long ago decided that their baby would be called Revel, regardless of its sex…
That’s the romantic version, I said. The one we don’t usually talk about. The more boring version was that, well, my parents just heard of somebody with a child called Revel, and had agreed: ‘When we have one, we’ll call it that, whatever it is.’
‘That – the romantic one – is a fantastic story!’ Molloy exclaimed. ‘What’s more, I know it’s true.’
‘How so?’
‘The gauntlets… and Lympne… the light-coloured fabric marking the landing strip…’
‘Well, only in the movies did the resistance use burning oil barrels. Where would anybody have got oil barrels, at that stage in the war?’
‘Precisely! It’s the fine detail that only your father could have told you.’
I ordered another bottle.
‘Nah,’ I told him. ‘The reason the family never talks about it, is that I just made it all up.’
#
No comments:
Post a Comment