A special agent’s secret weapon? His teddy bear
BIOGRAPHY
by Tim Clark and Nick Cook (Unbound £10.99, 336pp)
MONOPOLI BLUES
SEBASTIAN SHAKESPEARE
This is the charming story of a man who took his teddy bear to war, tucked into his battle dress. After World War ii, merchant banker sir Robert Clark seldom spoke about his experiences. When he died, in 2013, his children knew little about his time at war, except what was written on six pages of notes scribbled down by his son, Tim, from snatches of conversation — and that he’d been honoured with the DsC.
Oh yes, and that his threadbare teddy, Falla (pronounced ‘fire’), accompanied him everywhere from the year of his birth to his death.
As a young boy, Tim’s curiosity was first piqued when he discovered his father’s naval uniform with a parachute badge on the sleeve. it was only on a family holiday in italy in the sixties that his parents revealed they had met in the italian town of Monopoli, during the war.
The area, Tim later discovered, was the hQ of No 1 special Force, the special Operations Executive’s (sOE) covert operation in italy from 1943 to 1945.
More scraps of information emerged over the years: his father had spent his 21st birthday in the infamous Le Nuove prison in Turin, where he shared a cell with a murderer; that day, he was given an egg by a nun, the best present he had ever received.
seventy years on, in an attempt to fill in the gaps left by these intriguing, but random, facts, Tim Clark has doggedly pursued a trail across scotland, Cornwall, italy and Germany.
HE hAs pieced together the story with the aid of his parents’ love letters, some unpublished memoirs of his father’s contemporaries and assiduous research in the sOE archives.
As the story unfolds, we are treated to a stirring tale of derring-do and teenage love against the odds, but what never ceases to amaze is the sense of duty of the wartime generation.
Clark met his future wife, Marjorie, an sOE radio operator, in italy when they were both 19. The daughter of a Welsh mine owner, she had turned down a place at Oxford at 17 to serve in the war. (‘how could i have possibly gone to Oxford, when London was being bombed?’)
Robert left king’s College, Cambridge, to join the Royal Navy (‘it didn’t seem right to continue my personal education while the country was fighting for its very existence’).
six months later, a chance encounter with a ‘man from the ministry’ seeking people with sailing experience led Clark to join the sOE. Created to ‘set Europe ablaze’ by carrying out sabotage and subversion in Nazi-occupied Europe, the sOE’s byword was secrecy. For years, its activities were kept under wraps: no wonder Tim had such difficulty in eliciting information from his father.
After training in scotland, Clark was sent to Monopoli as part of Churchill’s push into ‘the soft underbelly of Europe’, where he blew up railway lines and placed agents behind enemy lines by boat and submarine.
Parachuting into the Piedmont Mountains to work alongside the partisans, Clark was dropped miles from his target. he broke his ribs landing in a tree and was rescued by a 16-year-old partisan. But within three weeks, he’d been betrayed by a local and imprisoned by the italians, who subjected him to a mock firing squad.
The romance between Clark and Marjorie, who was assigned to receive his secret radio messages from behind enemy lines, forms the soft underbelly of this story. it is the tear-jerking stuff of hollywood movies.
Offered the choice of being despatched to the Far East or going BLO (behind-the-lines operations), he stayed in italy to be with Marjorie. After not hearing from him for some months during his incarceration, she received a radio message from him in plain English, instead of code: ‘Bob sends love to Marjorie.’
The story is enlivened with indelible images: on arrival in italy, Marjorie was greeted by German PoWs, holed up on the lower decks of the ship on which she’d just sailed. They stuck their tongues out at her. she returned the compliment. in Le Nuove, red wine was used to dye chess pieces homemade from bread. And there are compelling insights into the sOE’s modus operandi. When working behind the lines, the fact that the Germans did everything by rote was a huge advantage: Clark always knew that if a patrol passed, it would be back in exactly 30 minutes.
What also comes across is the sheer tedium of war — weeks of boredom punctuated by nights of pumping adrenaline (as captured in the wartime song from which this book takes its title: ‘I’ve got Monopoli blues, Monopoli blues, Oh Lord, I’m bored and I don’t like Monopoli booze.’)
You won’t get bored reading this book, but you might gain a less laudable view of the italians.
According to Clark and his fellow operatives, italians were more brutal than Germans. The Germans either killed you or imprisoned you, whereas the italians tortured without pity.
CLARk’s son adds two poignant postscripts. When his father revisited Le Nuove in the sixties on a business trip to Turin, he found his old murderous cellmate still incarcerated there.
he visited him and the man welcomed him with open arms.
in 1991, Bob Clark received a letter from sergio Curetti, asking if he was the same man he pulled from a tree nearly 50 years before. They met. Curetti recalled Clark as ‘very tall, a giant’ and that he had coveted his underwear.
it is a bit disconcerting that the protagonists are referred to throughout as ‘Mop’ and ‘Pop’, but then, it reinforces what an intensely personal story this is.
And it’s a pity that Falla, reputedly the only bear to have been captured by the enemy and held in prison, doesn’t have more of a starring role.
Clark says he decided not to refer to him throughout the text ‘as he too remained silent until the end about his war’.
Never has a teddy bear’s silence been so eloquent.