Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (18 page)

Early in August he returned to London, was promoted to acting captain, and posted as a general staff officer to the War Office where his job was to liaise between MO9, the department responsible for the commandos, and the individual commando units themselves. Sharing his desk and ploughing through reams of documents was another captain,
Quintin Hogg, who would later inherit the title Lord Hailsham and become a Cabinet minister. Niven and Hogg inspired and processed numerous plans for commando raids on German-occupied Europe, many of them bizarre. One, Operation Colorado, suggested that British commandos should seize the entire country of Denmark, and Operation Attaboy envisaged capturing the huge German headquarters at Knocke in Belgium. As the desperate Battle of Britain between the RAF and the Luftwaffe raged in the skies over southern England, Niv was so excited about the possibilities of the new commandos – and how they were being trained to lead an underground resistance movement should the Nazis invade – that he told Churchill all about them one weekend when they met again at Ditchley Park and went for their customary walk in the walled garden. Churchill, now Prime Minister, was appalled. ‘Your security is very lax,’ he rumbled. ‘You shouldn’t be telling me this.’

The first commando raid that David helped to organise was a night assault on the British Channel Island of Guernsey, which had been occupied by German troops on 28 June, in the hope of killing some and capturing others. The leader of the raid was Lieutenant-Colonel John Durnford-Slater, who took a hundred men with him and said in his book
Commando
that he was first briefed by Niv, who was ‘a model of what a staff officer should be, lucid, keen, able and helpful’. Niv claimed in
The Moon’s a Balloon
that the raid was a success and a few Germans were captured, but it was in fact ‘a fiasco’, said Durnford-Slater. ‘Two launches broke down, another ran onto a rock, one boatful of commandos landed on Sark by mistake, and they captured no prisoners and did no serious damage at all.’ Weapons were lost overboard in the heavy swell, three men were left behind and Churchill was furious, said Durnford-Slater, ‘and insisted that future commando raids should be serious operations, not amateurish failures’.

Niv’s memory was equally faulty when he described how he met ‘the WAAF’ again and quickly married her. In
The
Moon’s a Balloon
he said that at the end of August he wandered into the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square to listen to a lunchtime concert and realised that a woman standing a few feet away was the WAAF. ‘She was even more beautiful than I had remembered,’ he wrote, ‘and so sweet looking and gentle.’ At the end of the performance she turned to him, said ‘Hello. Wasn’t that wonderful?’ and he asked her to have a sandwich in a coffee shop, discovered that her name was Primula Rollo, that she worked just outside London as a cypher clerk at the RAF Reconnaissance Squadron at Heston and was living with a family friend in Regent’s Park. ‘There was never a shadow of a doubt in my mind that this was the one,’ Niv wrote, ‘but with the whole world flying apart at the seams, there was no time for the niceties of a prolonged courtship.’ That night he went to the house in Regent’s Park, was invited in and within a week had met both her parents, Flight-Lieutenant and Lady Kathleen Rollo, who were separated, and had asked permission to marry her. ‘I can’t think why you want to marry her. She can’t cook and she can’t sew,’ said her father, Bill Rollo, a fiftyish divorce lawyer who had won the Military Cross as a lieutenant in the Scots Greys during the First World War and was now in the RAF Volunteer Reserve, and turned out to be such fun that he and Niv were to become good friends. ‘War is a great accelerator of events’, said Niv in the book, so he and Primmie were married seventeen days later.

He told a different story in the series that he wrote for the
Sunday Express
in 1958: that he had been visiting the RAF station at Biggin Hill, just south of London, when German planes started bombing the airfield and he jumped for safety into a slit trench ‘and landed on a white Pekinese which promptly bit me on the behind. It was Primula’s dog and we had quite a little argument as to who attacked whom. She was a cypher officer at the station and said she outranked me. I disagreed … We were married ten days later.’ Whichever version is true, when
The Times
on 16 September announced
the wedding he fibbed again by saying that his address was still Carswell Manor.

He and Primmie were married soon after noon on Saturday, 21 September 1940 in the depths of Wiltshire in the ancient, tiny parish church in Primmie’s little home village of Huish, near Marlborough. It was an unlikely place for a Hollywood film star wedding: a simple, remote little stone and brick church set in the middle of flat, dull farmland, with only sixteen pews, a plain altar, a small font, a timbered ceiling, just six commemorative plaques on the walls and no garish decoration at all, not even one stained-glass window. Niv was thirty, Primmie twenty-two, and it did indeed make sense to marry quickly because who knew how long they might have to live? During the previous week the German
Luftwaffe
had launched wave after wave of terrifying bomber attacks on London, the Blitz, a terrible period of seven months during which London and other great British cities were bombed and set ablaze almost every night and thousands of civilians were killed and buildings destroyed.

Primmie wore a simple blue dress and carried pink orchids. Michael Trubshawe, tall, hugely moustached and wearing the uniform of the Royal Sussex Regiment, was the best man. Niv’s sister Joyce signed the register as one of the witnesses, and one of the few guests was Lady Astor, who used up much of her small wartime petrol ration to drive all the way from Hever in Kent in her little red Morris car. It was such a small wedding that only one bottle of champagne was drunk afterwards at the reception, which was held at Cold Blow, Primmie’s pink childhood home.

‘I liked David very much,’ her younger brother, Andrew Rollo, who was in the navy, told me at Cold Blow, where he was still living in 2002. ‘My parents approved of him too. He had enormous charm and was great fun, and he made Prim happy. She herself was beautiful and gay in the old-fashioned sense.’

The Rollos were a rural, horsey, dog-loving, aristocratic
family. Primmie’s father came from a titled Scottish family and her mother, Lady Kathleen, was the daughter of the sixth Marquess of Downshire, a splendid old Northern Irish eccentric whose grandchildren called him Uncle Jumpy because of his devotion to horses, and who did not speak to his wife for half a century even though they had ten children. Primmie’s mother was a touch eccentric herself and even in company ‘she would fart and make bird noises’, I was told by Niv’s son David. Primmie’s father was a member of the Turf Club and had a very decent income of £5000 a year – the equivalent of about £135,000 a year in 2003 – as well as six horses and a Rolls-Royce, though to pay for their extravagant lifestyle the family also took in a series of ‘PGs’ – ‘paying guests’. As children and teenagers Primmie and Andrew had gone riding, hunting and shooting regularly with their parents, and although they spent every summer at Huish – where they had five servants – they would often have holidays in Scotland and spent every winter in Leicestershire hunting from a house they rented at Melton Mowbray, where their mother hunted six days a week. As a girl Primmie had not been at all academic and had gone to two boarding schools and then to a ‘finishing school’ in Munich, and in 1935, at the age of seventeen, had ‘come out’ and been presented to the king and queen as a debutante. ‘She was a country girl,’ said Andrew Rollo. ‘I can’t remember her ever having a job.’ Grizel told me: ‘I approved of Primmie. She was nice and David loved her very much.’

The photographs of Primmie at the time show an upper-class English girl with small eyes and podgy cheeks, but perhaps she did not photograph well and everyone who knew her said she was charming, sweet and adorable. Peter Ustinov, who met her a few years later, said that ‘she was like a minor member of the royal family because she smiled a great deal, very generously, and had that slightly mincing talking, rather like the Queen, “
my husband and I
…” She was charming and so typical of that class of woman that I saw her in tweeds
with a Humber Snipe station wagon with wood on it, and a dog.’ Or as Ustinov told Morley, comparing her to a minor English princess: ‘She had that same kind of constantly interested expression; you felt that she could make herself frightfully keen on knowing how much underwear was being produced by a certain factory during her visit.’ And Trubshawe told Morley: ‘She was an absolute darling … David always used to say he was the luckiest man in the world, but it was only when he met Primmie that I began to believe him. She was a radiant girl, and at once she gave David something he had never really had before: a sense of purpose and continuity, as well as a sense of what his life was supposed to be about … Primmie was England in the 1930s: country cottages and small children and all that gentle, lost world of the upper classes at home.’

The young couple spent their first few married days looking for a house to rent and settled on Halfway Cottage, a four-bedroom, sixteenth-century, thatched, brick-and-timber house with tall Tudor chimneys a few miles to the west of London on the northern edge of the sleepy village of Dorney, near Windsor, which had a post office and just one shop. Primmie had left the WAAF to get married but found a job building Hurricane fighter planes at the Hawker factory two miles away in Slough, to which she would cycle at seven o’clock every morning. She also took in an elderly widow who had been bombed out of her home in London, a Mrs Wisden, who cooked and cleaned for them.

Niv returned to his desk at the War Office in London and wrote to Doug Fairbanks in New York: ‘A lot of laughter has gone out of our people, but they are anything but downcast. They all feel rather like knights of old about to do battle against the heathen … If we ever go under, at least we will have set a standard that will be hard to beat.’ He added, ‘I hope nobody sees my face when I’m being bombed. I hate it.’ Three weeks later he wrote to Goldwyn from Brooks’s: ‘Well! I am now married and extremely happy about it …
She is
lovely
, Sam. The most beautiful complexion you have ever seen, and you know how our fogs and bombs improve complexion over here. She is about 5′5″.
GORGEOUS
figure. Blonde. Enormous blue eyes and extremely intelligent.’ He added,

In November David’s three months at the War Office came to an end and he was sent back to the Green Jackets’ barracks at Tidworth, but not for long. He and Primmie spent their first married Christmas at Halfway Cottage, saw the New Year in with the Trees at Ditchley Park, and then on 5 February 1941 David was promoted to acting major and sent to Stourton in Wiltshire, near Shaftesbury, as an intelligence officer to join a secret new outfit, the General Headquarters Liaison Regiment, which was much more commonly known by its nickname, Phantom. Joan Evans, the sister of the soldier who inherited Niv’s Rifle Brigade Squadron and later took it to North Africa and Italy, Major James Lonsdale, told me in 2002: ‘He said it was very difficult to come after David Niven because he was such a good soldier and his men all adored him.’

Phantom was a wildly unorthodox outfit, almost a private army, that has been called ‘the eyes and ears of the Commander-in-Chief’ and went out on reconnaissance, collected intelligence, ensured that its information reached the right people as quickly as possible and was involved in clandestine activities with the French Resistance, the SOE (Special Operations Executive), the SAS (Special Air Service) and in Greece, North Africa, Sicily, Italy, Syria and Iraq. In his book,
Phantom Was There
, Lt-Col R. J. T. Hills, Phantom’s first quartermaster, wrote: ‘The importance of such a service cannot be overrated. Every commander in the field has always striven to know what lay “on the other side of the hill”, or, in other words what his opponent was up to.’ Phantom’s commanding officer and guiding genius was a squat, cheerful, frighteningly tough, brave and energetic little lieutenant-colonel, G. F. Hopkinson MC, who was known to everyone as Hoppy. He was a man’s man who was nervous of women but flirted constantly with death and loved everything military, believing that war was vital if men and nations were not to become feeble and decadent. His idea of a restful leave was to persuade the RAF to take him as a tail-gunner on one of their dangerous
daytime raids over Europe, and when one of his Phantom officers, Michael Astor, was about to go on leave himself Hoppy suggested that he ought to spend his holiday having his appendix out. ‘When you go into battle you will be a better risk as an officer if you don’t have an appendix,’ he said. ‘I had mine out on leave in India.’