Such promise wasted

BUY NOW

In a prologue to his biography of the soldier-poet Frank Thompson, Peter Conradi sets out his reasons for writing an account of a man whose life was cut short almost before it had begun. “Biography,” he notes, is “the literary form in which the dead are invoked in order to teach the living” and Frank’s shade, he contends, has much to teach us.

His subject, he writes, “is a figure in many different landscapes: pre-war Oxford, the war, during which he … was a civilian-soldier in two private armies — Phantom then SOE; and not least a remarkable family … Frank was an apprentice poet who wished to speak for his remarkable generation” — and “since we cannot enjoy his company in the flesh, a biography is one way of celebrating him in spirit”.

Frank Thompson was born in Darjeeling in August 1920. His parents,

E J Thompson, a soldier, writer and scholar, and his American wife, Theodosia, met in Jerusalem in 1918 and married after a six-week courtship. Methodism ran strongly in both families, and family life was informed by a vivid sense of social obligation as well as a vigorous engagement with the life of the mind and a fluent habit of writing diaries, letters and poems.

From Winchester, where his intellectual brilliance was matched by a startling physical maladroitness, Frank won a scholarship to Oxford where he was one of the brilliant generation of passionate idealists who included his fellow Wykehamist, the historian MRD Foot, and the novelist, Iris Murdoch.

After Frank’s first meeting with Iris, he recorded that: “I staggered home and lay on a sofa… announcing to the world that I had met a stunner of a girl and was joining the Communist Party for love of her.”

Conradi notes that “the extent of communist penetration at Oxford [was] remarkable… Idealism, romanticism and a passionate anti-Fascism came together to move the best of a generation Leftwards.”

Frank, himself a romantic, noticed that the party appealed to “the uncontrolled romantic and the cold-blooded theorist”. Drawn to communism by its promise of “an imaginary politics of kindness, caring and compassion”, he joined the Army at the outbreak of war, to the chagrin of his parents.

In a poem addressed to a Winchester friend, David Scott-Malden, who had joined the RAF, he wrote: “You went, my friend,/To spread your wing on the morning;/I to the gun’s cold elegance; and one/ — Did you feel the passing of a shadow/Between the glasses? — one will not return.”

Scott-Malden died, a much-decorated air vice marshal, at the age of 80. Frank was brutally murdered while fighting with partisans in Bulgaria, aged 23.

Frank Thompson’s life is extraordinarily well documented in his voluminous correspondence, poetry and diaries and in those of his family and friends. With his habitual diligence, Peter Conradi creates a vivid image of his world, at home, at Oxford and at war.

But to read the story of a life in the knowledge that its protagonist dies horribly and young — all his bright promise wasted — is a melancholy business.

In a wartime letter to Iris, Frank wrote that his list of priorities was:

“1. People and everything to do with people…

2. Animals and flowers… Just now I’m revelling in plum blossom and young lambs and the first leaves on the briar roses. One doesn’t need any more than these… And yet I must confess to being very fond of food and drink also.”

For all Conradi’s contention that Frank Thompson had much to teach us, one’s overwhelming sensation at the end of this biography is of sheer misery at the terrible pity of a life filled with promise, cut short after only 23 years in which to enjoy the plum blossom and young lambs.

Save up to 20% off books when you buy from our Bookshop with free P&P