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Becoming an officer was important to him: he felt, for the first time, on equal terms with his father. In Holloway, and later by letter, they were more inclined to talk cloudy abstractions about God and Nietzsche than about politics or the war, but he was puzzled, and still is, by his father telling him that he would give him a password to use in case he was captured by the Germans and wanted to make contact. Was this just posturing again, or something more?
At the heart of this book is Nicholas Mosley’s gradual detachment of himself from his father’s powerful influence and his discovery of his own very different ideas and identity. He began the war half hoping that he would be taken prisoner, and planning to live with his father after it was all over. But when, on a snow-covered hillside in Italy, he was captured by the Germans, he risked his life in a determined and successful effort to escape. This instinctive act of courage marked, he now thinks, his liberation from his father; he went on to win the MC.
Ever since, Mosley has grappled with the realisation that although the war was brutal and stupid it had to be fought. He has also come to perceive the awkward truth that for all its horrors, war is simpler than peace. ‘Humans,’ he writes, ‘are at home in war ( though they seldom admit this.) They know what they have to do.’
Although (despite the publishers’ claims to the contrary) much of the story Mosley tells here appears in his long and outstandingly good biography of his father which came out in the early 1980s, this account of himself when young digs deeper and reveals more about the author’s inner conflicts. It is also a generous tribute to the friends he made during the war, who helped him to grow up, and to the very British decency of all the soldiers who accepted him for what he was and apparently never gave him a hard time for being who he was. Once, during the uproar after his father was released from prison (‘Oh frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’, wrote the young Mosley in his diary), he was asked, casually, if he was ‘any relation to that bastard’. When he said, ‘Yes, actually’, the response was, ‘My dear fellow, I’m so frightfully sorry.’
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