July is a month resonant with the sounds of battle, which is perhaps predetermined by being named after Julius Caesar, a man who had battle in his very fabric. But for many of us, it is probably the association with both the Somme in 1916 and the struggle for mastery of the skies in 1940, the Battle of Britain, that come to mind. That link certainly dominates my thoughts and conjures up visions that owe as much to cultural associations as it does to the hard facts of July 1916 and July 1940. Those associations mean that whenever I think of July 1940, I see the box lid of an Airfix Spitfire or Hurricane resonant with the wonderful work of the firm’s in-house artist, Roy Cross. As a child I saw his vision in every toy and model shop I visited. (I was desperately envious of my friends who were skilled in the building of the kits, whereas I threw around enough glue to hold an icebreaker together and created something that looked like a family of hyperactive slugs had got high on the fumes and crawled over every component in the box.) It was a vision that created a very specific geography and a very specific climatic condition. The space was the English Channel coast somewhere between Beachy Head and the North Foreland near Dover. It meant chalky white cliffs topped with lush green, neatly hedged meadows. It meant a powder blue sky, with wisps of cotton wool clouds above a gently swaying blue-green sea. The Battle of Britain become Delius’s Song of Summer overlaid with the sentiments of Rupert Brooke’s Grantchester. And I knew this vision was right because that’s what I saw in the blockbuster film, which all my pals loved as much as me, The Battle of Britain. I wasn’t born when it was released but lapped up every television screening.
That conception of the battle’s environments stayed with me, and on moving to deep East Kent in the late 1990s, I found that I was living a polystyrene-model-Spitfire’s-throw away from The Jackdaw pub. As any fans of the film will know, this is where Squadron Leader Colin Harvey (played by Christopher Plummer) meets his WAAF Section Officer wife, Maggie (Susannah York). Here I was, right in the heart of the real, reconstructed and mythical Battle of Britain land.
A few miles further on is Hawkinge, site of a former RAF aerodrome, and in the civic cemetery is a plot of war graves. As might be expected, most of the headstones mark RAF personnel, including a number from the summer of 1944, which reveals that the aerial campaign during the battle for Normandy was far from an easy victory. And among these rows of war graves are three Luftwaffe pilots killed on 5 July 1940. Part of the five-man crew of a Heinkel He 111, their aircraft was shot down off The Warren at Folkestone by Spitfires from 65 Squadron. Although these precise details were not made public at the time, the local paper, the Folkestone, Hythe and District Journal, reported the engagement under the headline, ‘120 Planes in Great Battle. Dogfight over S.E. Coast. 14 German machines shot down’ and called it ‘the biggest air battle of the war’.
Standing in front of those graves in that neatly tended plot in the cemetery, I always hear sections of the musical score William Walton composed for The Battle of Britain. In particular, I hear the ‘Siegfried Music’ which brings in echoes of Wagner’s horn call from Siegfried. I can’t help getting wrapped up in that, the ‘cultural’ Battle of Britain intertwines with the pain and misery caused by real battle, the evidence of which is right there before me. Look up and around and it will be seen that these enemy graves are surrounded by the headstones marking fallen British, Commonwealth and allied service personnel. Beauty, peace, calm created from the horror of war, an essential piece of England drawn over past enmities and confrontations, a corner of an English field, forever England, deep in the Garden of England.
Come on my Spitfires, Soldiers and Sands tour in Kent, and explore these intriguing ambiguities further.
