Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (19 page)

Hoppy handpicked his officers, and the fact that he chose David and gave him command of one of his four squadrons is a tribute to Niv’s genuine qualities as a soldier. ‘Phantom was renowned for the unusual selection of brilliance, nobility and idiosyncracy, wit, achievement and even criminality exhibited by its officers,’ wrote one of them, Peter Baker, in his memoir,
Confession of Faith
. ‘The qualifications required for the new officers were in theory high,’ wrote another Phantom officer, Miles Reid, in his book,
Last on the List
. ‘The work entailed the writing of reports by junior officers which might find their way quickly to the commander short-circuiting the whole of the intervening hierarchy. To do this a definite standard of intelligence and a discriminating judgment was needed.’

Hoppy organised his forty-eight officers and 400 men into four squadrons, each consisting of highly mobile patrol units that had an officer, two radio operators, two drivers and two or three despatch riders, and were equipped with an armoured scout car, radio, Bren gun, three-quarter-ton truck, three motorcycles, and a basketful of carrier pigeons for sending messages back to the regimental pigeon loft in London, at St James’s Park, where Lance Corporal G. Starr, assisted by the future champion jockey Gordon Richards, was in command of 500 homing pigeons in the largest loft in the army. All the vehicles were marked with a P – for Phantom – which gave them priority over other vehicles on the roads, and every officer and man wore on his right shoulder a white embroidered P on a black background.

At Stourton Niv was billeted in Stourhead House and his sergeant, Denys Brook-Hart, told Philip Warner, the author
of a history of the regiment,
Phantom
, that ‘Niven’s personality was one which attracted and created amusing and unusual incidents … We had some carrier pigeons at Stourhead and one day Niven wrote out a message and sent a bird winging for London. It so happened that a lady member of the Royal family had been invited to inspect our carrier pigeon facilities and she and Niven’s bird arrived at St James’s much at the same time. This was thought to be a lucky demonstration of our efficiency. The capsule was removed from the bird’s leg and handed to HRH who opened it and read out the following message in Niven’s hand: “I have been a very naughty girl and so Daddy has sent me straight home!” ’ Niv himself told Warner that General Paget was inspecting the pigeon loft when ‘a bird slapped in through the intake box. It was from “A” Squadron … and the message was ripped off the poor bird’s leg and read in an expectant hush as follows: “That beast Major Niven sent me away because he said I had farted in the nest.” ’

Primmie came to Stourhead for a romantic weekend that spring, Niv took a room for her at the Spread Eagle Inn, and the landlord asked them to scratch their names and the date, 1941, with a diamond ring on a window in the bar that was rediscovered in 1998. Soon afterwards Niv wrote to ‘Dear old Fred’ and Phyllis Astaire from Boodle’s: ‘I have managed to be in all the worst Blitz we have had, including three months in London without a day or night off during the worst period.’ He was convinced that Hitler was about to invade Britain but despite the real danger that he and all Londoners were facing every night, he was still determined to keep everyone’s spirits up and gave an example of typical British army humour:

‘I can’t, you can’t, Hitler can’t.’

‘Can’t what?’

‘Milk chocolate.’

But he ended his letter, ‘God knows I miss you both terribly.’

In another letter to Hollywood, this time to Nigel Bruce,
he said with unexpected venom, ‘Thank God we have now got a real government and in Churchill a real leader at last, but there is going to be a little scalp-hunting when the smoke has cleared off the battlefields … besides cousins and relations I have now lost practically all my old friends and all in the last few weeks … they need never have been sacrificed if the people then at the top had been doing their jobs as well as they said they were doing them. I want to stick a knife into them just as much as I want to fix Hitler.’

In May 1941 Niv was sent to Phantom’s headquarters at Richmond Park in Surrey and put in command of its ‘A’ Squadron, which was preparing for a possible German invasion and learning bomb disposal. He was billeted in a beautiful Georgian mansion, Pembroke Lodge, which had belonged to the nineteenth-century Prime Minister Lord John Russell, had witnessed the signing of the treaty ending the Crimean War and contained a bathroom in which King Edward VII was once heard exclaiming piteously: ‘Here I am, King of England, and they don’t even allow me a sponge.’

Niv and his men launched into an exhausting dawn-to-dusk training schedule in the park that included motorcycling, Morse code and cyphers, and since Hoppy was determined that his men would be alert and ready at whatever hour the Germans chose to invade he made them train in the middle of the night and sometimes do without a night’s sleep altogether. There would be sudden inspections at one o’clock in the morning and vehicles would have to be maintained by torchlight.

Niv ‘was very highly respected in the unit for his qualities as a soldier’, wrote Philip Warner, ‘a dedicated and professional soldier’. One of Niv’s comrades, Harold Light, who commanded the training unit, told Warner that Niv brought ‘a fresh and exuberant spirit to his duties’ and got on well with everyone, and Lt-Col Reggie Hills wrote in his memoir that ‘Major Niven had been among our chief delights. He was the morale raiser
par excellence
.’ One of his morale-raising jobs
was to organise and compère a concert at Richmond Park for all the Phantom squadrons and he rounded up an extraordinary array of talent that included Bud Flanagan and Chesney Allen and was followed by a riotous party where Flanagan and Allen performed a complicated Highland dance. ‘As master of ceremonies,’ Niv told Warner, ‘I was too drunk to be able to assess it properly and afterwards in the officers mess, one of the Crazy Gang asked Hoppy what the sandwiches had inside them. Hoppy pointed to a flag on the pile marked “sardine”. Whereupon Jimmy Nervo … ate the flag, brushed the sardine sandwiches to the floor and broke the plate on Hoppy’s head. They were wonderful days which I would not have missed for anything’ – a remark that suggests that he did not hate
every
minute of the war, as he claimed.

Niv and ‘A’ Squadron were sent to the south coast, attached to General Montgomery’s 5th Corps, and stationed behind Poole Harbour, where they assembled a collection of disguises so that they could go underground if the Germans invaded. Niv’s own chosen disguise was that if the godless Nazis arrived he would wear a dog-collar and pretend to be a vicar. Montgomery was generally considered to be a fine general but so awkward, prickly and demanding that officers shuddered when they were posted to his command, ‘
ARE YOU 100% FIT
?’ bellowed a large notice inside his headquarters. ‘
ARE YOU 100% EFFICIENT
?
DO YOU HAVE 100% BINGE
?’ Nobody had any idea what ‘binge’ might be but Monty forced even senior staff officers to go on cross-country runs every week – those that he had not already sacked by the dozen as being ‘dead wood’ – and had recently described one fellow general in an official report as being ‘extremely idle [
and
] quite unfit to be a Major-General’. Another elderly officer ‘is idle and has taken to drink’ – Monty was teetotal – and the commander of the Royal Engineers in the Portsmouth area was ‘completely and utterly useless … has also taken to drink [
and
] gives the impression of being mentally deficient’. The fact that Niv
survived the close attention of Monty is another indication of how good a soldier he was.

When the lease on Halfway Cottage in Dorney expired Primmie rented another house in the village, Flaxford, a 1930s four-bedroom house that had a half-acre garden. ‘Prim was charming, awfully sweet and not at all affected,’ its owner, Brigit Ames, told me. ‘She was well liked in the village but I don’t think the villagers knew them much. Food was very short under rationing and you were allowed only 2 ounces of sugar a week, 2 ounces of tea, 2 ounces of butter, 2 ounces of milk, and that was it. If you had meat you had to make it up with rice or spaghetti. They had some ack-ack guns on the common and there was a good deal of noise and shooting going on there at night, and doodlebugs used to come over, and it was quite nasty. There was a time in 1941 when we thought we were going to be invaded by parachutists and they took all the road signs down. It was a real threat and we felt quite nervous.’

Even though Niv was now so happily married, he was still highly susceptible to a good-looking woman, though luckily Primmie never discovered his infidelities. Doug Fairbanks Jr reported in his autobiography that in 1941 he received from Niv an eight-page letter which ‘described in hilarious detail a surprisingly uninhibited amorous adventure he had recently experienced in a car, at night, in blacked-out London, during a heavy bombing raid, with a mutual female acquaintance of ours. She was a most attractive lady we had once thought to be far removed from carnal fun-and-games. Niv left nothing out. Every detail of every moment of their mutual lechery was carefully noted.’

Niv was undoubtedly a proper soldier – and that summer he was photographed in full battle kit inspecting Phantom’s ‘A’ Squadron with the Duke of Kent at Richmond Park – but he was still also considered an important weapon in Britain’s propaganda war and started making numerous radio broadcasts to the USA. He also joined the Cambridge historian
Professor Denis Brogan in
Transatlantic Quiz
, a witty and remarkably intellectual radio programme in which the two of them took on a team from the USA that included the broadcaster Alistair Cooke, and a series of programmes,
Answering You
, in which he and Leslie Howard replied to questions from North American listeners. And Goldwyn was finally persuaded to let him make a morale-boosting movie about the RAF for the British government,
The First of the Few
, at a time when the war was going badly and the British needed an inspiring film.

On 1 September the army released him temporarily to civil employment and he took a week’s leave with Primmie at Ditchley Park, where Churchill, who was once again enjoying a country weekend, invited Niv to walk with him again in the walled garden, and talked about how badly the war was going but how he believed the United States would soon be drawn into the war, as it was a few weeks later when the Japanese air force attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. When Niv next met Churchill he asked him how he had been so prescient. ‘His reply gave me goose pimples,’ said Niv. ‘ “Because, young man, I study history.” ’

The First of the Few
told the moving story of the inventor R. J. Mitchell and his legendary British single-seater fighter plane, the Spitfire, with which the young pilots of the RAF had foiled a German invasion the previous year. Leslie Howard played Mitchell, Niv a fictional ex-test pilot and RAF station commander, and the film was shot in September on location in Cornwall, and then at Denham Studios, and on an active RAF airfield at Ibsley in Hampshire, where they spent weeks filming real RAF pilots going into action. Niv was at first wary of making the picture in case people sneered at him for going back to films so soon and not being a proper soldier, but he was excellent in the role: brave, charming and insouciant, a roguish ladies’ man who flirts with several women including one Elsie Trubshawe. Although much of the film was fiction it was uplifting and defiant, with stirring
patriotic music composed by William Walton, and it was Niv’s first major British movie and possibly his best performance to date.

During filming Niv met two young British actors who were to become lifelong friends: John Mills and Patricia Medina. Mills was also in the army and making a film at Denham, and told me: ‘There’s never been another man like Niven. He was a great raconteur and could entertain you for an hour and never repeat himself. If he heard a funny story he wrote it down, so he had a terrific fund of stories.’

In
The Moon’s a Balloon
Niv claimed that he spent only four weeks filming
The First of the Few
and continued to command his Phantom squadron via a radio transmitter in his dressing room, but his army record shows that in fact he was ‘released to civil employment’ for nearly five months and did not return to Phantom until 20 January 1942 – a month after he and Primmie joined Peter Fleming, John Gielgud, Celia Johnson, Edwina Mountbatten and others at a fortieth birthday party for Noël Coward and three weeks after he learned that Alexander Korda had been knighted for services to the film industry, making Merle Lady Korda. Once back at his post Niv led his men from Richmond to Wales on icy roads in dreadful winter weather for a two-month regimental reconnaissance exercise on the Welsh coast to plan a defence should the Germans invade from Ireland.

Soon after Primmie became pregnant in March she gave up working at the aircraft factory in Slough, and followed Niv and ‘A’ Squadron wherever they were sent, living in a series of rented rooms. ‘We were wonderfully in love,’ he wrote in
The Moon’s a Balloon
, but that did not stop him misbehaving in London that summer when his naughty old friend Doug Fairbanks Jr arrived in England along with thousands of American troops. Niv told Fairbanks that he was dreadfully bored since he had little to do but train his men and kill time while they waited for an eventual invasion of Europe. Otherwise he was spending much of his time in London
hanging around his various clubs – Boodle’s, Brooks’s, Buck’s and White’s. One night he and Fairbanks wandered through the West End in the blackout and were picked up by a couple of prostitutes: a vast but jolly cockney and a pretty little French girl. Niv suggested going back to their flat for a few drinks, where they paid £5 each and the tarts immediately recognised them as soon as the lights were switched on. ‘I have never before or since seen Niv at a loss,’ wrote Fairbanks in his autobiography. ‘But we shared a silly embarrassed grin.’ According to Fairbanks they stayed for an hour, drank whisky, and eavesdropped on the sad performance in the next room of one of the girls’ regular customers, an elderly major whose pleasure was to ride her around the room cracking a whip and crying ‘Giddyap!’ while she made whinnying noises.