‘My father loved really intelligent, racy women’
Charlie Mortimer, star of bestseller ‘Dear Lupin’, has now edited his late father’s wartime correspondence. Joe Shute reports
Captain Roger Mortimer didn’t see all that much of the Second World War. In September 1939, he was dispatched with the Coldstream Guards in Belgium and France. What was hoped would be an exercise in sabre-rattling to deter Hitler soon turned into a disastrous retreat pegged back by Nazi troops.
During one such set-to, Capt Mortimer was blown up on the banks of the Dyle river in Belgium. At first he was presumed dead and his passing was reported in the newspapers back home. In fact, he woke up to find himself being scrutinised by what he later described in a letter as a “fairly unpleasant German officer”, who ordered his immediate execution.
“Fortunately, that little difficulty blew over,” Mortimer wrote. He was designated POW No481 and was condemned to spend the next five years as a German prisoner of war.
Readers may already be familiar with Roger Mortimer (who later became a racing journalist and author) as a great man of letters.
In 2012, 21 years after his death, his son Charlie published an anthology of curmudgeonly correspondence written by his father lamenting his wild youth. The book was called Dear Lupin, Mortimer’s affectionate nickname for his wayward son, and became a surprise bestseller, Radio 4 Book of the Week and a West End play. Mortimer Jnr followed his father into Eton and the Coldstream Guards, but failed to see out either. His 20s were a maelstrom of sex (men and women) and drugs. In 1986, at the age of 33, he was diagnosed with HIV.
“At the time, it was like having Ebola,” he tells me as we settle down on the sofa of the bohemian west London flat he shares with his long-term partner. “But with social consequences.”
Despite this wild life, Charlie always kept hold of his father’s letters. Now he has delved into the archive to compile a new anthology of correspondence, Vintage Roger, written during Mortimer’s wartime internment.
The chief recipient was a woman called Peggy Dunne, whom a friend had introduced as a pen pal while he was overseas. Despite sharing some 70 letters in which they discussed sex with an, at times, arresting frankness, Charlie is insistent theirs was never a romantic relationship. As far as he knows, they didn’t meet after the war.
“My father just loved really intelligent, quite racy women,” he says.
Letters to his parents back home were a considerably more drab affair. During the war, Charlie says, his grandparents were living in some style in London’s Cadogan Square, with 10 servants. His grandfather, he says, was a lovely and kind man known as the “worst stockbroker in London”, and his grandmother, “an absolute horror”.
When she discovered her son had not in fact been killed and was instead being held at Spangenberg Castle, she wrote: “trust you to get captured”.
His correspondence with Dunne, who was married and working as a nurse on the home front, started prior to his capture. “Quite honestly, I should feel very lost without your letters now,” he wrote. “You are about the only person I hear from whose letters aren’t a series of drab commonplaces mixed up with a few sops in the shape of foolish optimism.”
They discussed everything from the plays of Eugene O’neill to the sex appeal of Ginger Rogers. One early letter recounts a trip to a brothel with fellow soldiers, an establishment Mortimer described as presided over by “a troupe of elderly trollops who had probably seen service during the siege of Paris”. He added: “I’m ashamed to say that I eventually sneaked upstairs with the lady who combined the most charm in proportion to lack of BO.”
His first letter to Dunne from the prison camp was dated June 10 1944. “I’m living at present in a medieval castle, complete with wild boars in the moat in pleasant surroundings. I suppose after 30 years of ease, a little discomfort is good for one, but I hate never having a bath and having only one suit of clothes.”
He also gave note to the censors: “I’m afraid this won’t be a very amusing letter as discretion has to be given preference to attempted humour.”
Remarkably, Charlie says, given his father’s generally impractical nature, he acquired a tiny radio set. He nicknamed it the Canary Bird and established a prison news bureau where he would jot down stories and circulate them about the camp. Eventually, Charlie, says, his father blew a valve on the set listening to a horse race from Newmarket.
Mortimer was moved between various camps, spending the longest period of time (September 1944 to April 1945) at Oflag VII-B in Eichstätt, Bavaria. He notes the pain of hearing of the death of friends in battle and the constant hunger. In June 1943, a “wretched month”, he wrote to his father: “I suppose my resistance to the bleakness of things is decreasing, but at present I feel like attaching my old school braces to the lamp bracket, fitting a slug knot behind my ears, and jumping off the table.”
Being a prisoner of war, Charlie says, changed his father – to whom he was always close despite the angst he had caused him – completely. He did not speak much about the dark times, but even as a boy Charlie noticed he would refuse to kill any animals.
During one family holiday to the German spa town of Baden-baden when he was about 15-years-old, he noticed his father shaking as he handed over his passport at the border. “I didn’t mention it, but has stuck with me ever since. That wasn’t a side of my dad I’d seen before.”
Mortimer died in 1991, at the age of 82, without knowing his son’s diagnosis. Charlie says there was no point in telling him, considering the social stigma and that, at the time, it was considered a death sentence. But, like his old man, he survived – he is about to celebrate his 68th birthday and thriving in his twin late-life careers as author and art collector.
Considering the bleak early years of his own diagnosis, he felt a curious kinship in reading his father’s experience in the camps: “Both my dad and I were under sentence of death,” he says, “it changes the way you think.”
‘Both my dad and I were under sentence of death’