The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II by Charles Glass Page A

to Ireland, James played “one of his little jokes” on three-year-old John, lifting him “over the rail with only the black waves below me, leaping and foaming like enormous wolves, hungry for the proffered titbit.” The boy’s cries for help earned only his father’s “wild laughter.”
    The staff sergeants at the Mustafa Barracks resembled so many omnipotent fathers. Bain’s description of his father’s “peculiar half-grin, half-snarl” came close to the “mixture of snarl and smile” he spotted in Staff Sergeant Henderson. Although he made no direct comparison between his father and the MPs, Bain’s appraisal of his father might have applied to Staff Sergeants Hardy, Henderson and Pickering: “I now understood and have understood for many years that he was a sadist. I remember many instances of his grim pleasure derived from inflicting physical or mental pain on my brother or me.” In Ireland, Kenneth and John survived on a diet of potatoes, porridge and soda bread. Meat appeared rarely. Sweets were unknown. Once, their father called the boys into the kitchen to give them a half-pound chocolate bar. With childish delight, Kenneth unwrapped it. Inside was a block of wood.
    Their father kept a leather strop for sharpening straight razors on a hook beside the fireplace; but, Bain reminisced, “I do not recall this one being used for any other purpose than flagellation.” The flagellated, of course, were Kenneth and John. When his business failed in Ireland, James Bain took the family back to England. They settled in Beeston, Nottinghamshire, where James opened another photography shop. When John was seven, he watched his father challenge a Sunday teatime guest, an unassuming man named Bob Linacre, to a fight. While the men’s wives and children squirmed, James forced Bob to don boxing gloves, reduced him to a state of terror and bloodied his nose. “What I felt was disgust and shame and hatred,” Bain wrote. “Until then I think that I had known nothing but a simple fear of him. Now I hated him.”
    For reasons left unexplained, John went to live with his father’s parents in Eccles, Lancashire, for two years. Then, in 1931, when John was nine, the family moved together to that “dream of rural sweetness and light,” Aylesbury. Living in a dingy flat above the photo studio in Market Square was, in Bain’s own account, anything but sweet. Their father continued to beat the boys, once knocking twelve-year-old John flat with a punch to the head. Their mother, whose hard-drinking husband was brazenly unfaithful to her, took refuge in her conversion to what John called “that quasi-religion called Christian Science.”
    While life with their father in Aylesbury was hardly “sweetness and light,” the Bain brothers retreated into a world of books and music that was. Kenneth taught himself to play his mother’s piano, and John borrowed a wide range of books from the library—Dickens, T. S. Eliot, John Buchan and the lowbrow crime novels of Edgar Wallace. The boys wandered together into the meadows with armfuls of works by their favorite poets. Literature gave Bain his “only distraction from the fairly grim present.” From the age of fourteen, he wrote poems that he did not show to anyone. The boys bought a gramophone, but they waited until their father was out of the house before playing Liszt, Debussy, Schubert and the great mezzo-soprano Marian Anderson. James Bain, detesting his sons’ “sissy” interest in music and books, enrolled them in the Aylesbury and District Boxing Club. Within two years, John made the final round of the British Schoolboy Championship.
    James Bain told his sons he had enlisted in the army at fourteen and been wounded at Mons. His endless stories of Great War escapades, in which he invariably played a heroic role, made John suspicious: “I began to wonder about their historical veracity, until his boasting became something of a secret joke between Kenneth and me.”