ALMOST NINE LIVES

The extraordinary life and times of Roger Bushell have finally been put into print, writes Michele Magwood

IN the Old Harbour in Hermanus stands a memorial. Raked by wind and spray, flanked by two staunch naval guns, the stone edifice commemorates the men of the town who died in the two world wars. It also bears a plaque in memory of Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, RAF, mastermind of the legendary Great Escape, a man described as “one of the greatest of his generation”.

Simon Pearson compresses the elements of his life thus: South African-born, Cambridge graduate, barrister, international skier, fighter pilot, intelligence asset. A cultivated man, arrogant perhaps, he spoke nine languages, was beloved of women, was handsome, quick and a devoted son and brother. He was a rule-breaker, a risk-taker, a man of audacious courage. A hero, in other words, striding straight from the pages of Boy’s Own.

“I couldn’t believe that no one had written his biography,” says Pearson. The son of an RAF airman himself, Pearson was raised on the story of the Great Escape and growing up he met men who had known Bushell. He read everything he could find about him, but was left wanting to know more. Even Paul Brickhill’s classic book The

Great Escape was sketchy on his character; in the film of the book Bushell was a composite of two men played by Richard Attenborough.

Pearson’s life-long hobby became a quest — “an obsession, my wife would say” — which came to a head when he was working at The Times in London. He found a memorial notice marking the anniversary of Bushell’s death, with the aching words of Rupert Brooke: “He leaves a white, unbroken glory, a gathered radiance, a width, a shining peace, under the night.” It was signed “Georgie”.

“That was the key moment for me,” he says. “I didn’t want to just retell the Great Escape story. Now I knew there was a love story as well.” Contacting the Imperial War Museum, he learned that Bushell’s family in South Africa had donated their personal archive to the museum, and before long he was in the country visiting the places where Bushell had grown up.

Bushell was born in Springs in 1910, the son of an affluent mining engineer and an indulgent mother. Nadine Gordimer grew up at the bottom of the road and remembers the family in the Big House as “aristocracy”. “Roger Bushell is a legend,” she told Pearson, “but the family were colonialists.” His was a privileged life, a roaming outdoors upbringing of hunting, shooting and fishing. Holidays were spent in Hermanus, school was the elite, whites-only Park Town Prep.

It was precisely this early upbringing, believes Pearson, which bred in Bushell a “can-do” demeanour. “It instilled in him a sense of freedom, a sense of independence, a self-assuredness.”

To that one could add a perverse cussedness. Barrelling into his first dogfight of the war, he was shot down over Calais and captured by the Germans. He immediately escaped, but was picked up just as he reached the Swiss border. He escaped again, this time from a train taking him to a more secure camp, and reached Prague. There he was sheltered by a Resistance family for eight months, and had a love affair with the daughter. In an horrific example of “hell hath no fury”, when he told her that his heart belonged to an Englishwoman (the “Georgie” who placed the obituary) and he would not marry her after the war, she betrayed him to the Gestapo. He was interrogated and tortured; the Czech family was shot.

This time he was sent to the highest security camp, Stalag Luft III. Undeterred, Bushell set about planning the greatest escape of the war. Seventy-six men made it out, but only three survived. Mad with rage, Hitler ordered those recaptured to be killed. Roger Bushell died on a grass verge, gunned down by a Gestapo officer.

Simon Pearson has at last done justice to his memory in this enthralling book, an astounding story of honour and resilience, underpinned by the gutting sense of loss for the monstrous theft of a generation. — @michelemagwood