He was, from the start, the spitting image of his father – a father of whom he retains not a single childhood memory. Short leaves were few and brief and by the time Kippe realised that she was expecting a second baby, in the early spring of 1943, Tony Bridge was travelling east, via Basra, to the Iranian city of Abadan, where he had been posted with the Paiforce to guard the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company on the banks of the Shatt al-Arab waterway. It was here that he received a telegram from England announcing that a second son, Michael, had been born on 5 October. It was, he noted in his memoirs, ‘joyous news’.
On the morning of Michael’s birth The Times announced that Corsica had fallen to the French Resistance – the first department of France to be liberated. In the days that followed it became clear that the Allies had the Germans on the run. On 7 October the Red Army mounted a new thrust on enemy positions along the river Dnieper, breaking the Germans’ 1,300-mile defence front; a week later Italy declared war on Germany. By the end of the month the Allies were bombing the Reich from Italian soil. In early December the British government announced that there would only be enough turkeys for one in ten families at Christmas, but any sense of joylessness was eased, on Boxing Day, by the news that the British navy had sunk the last of the great German battleships, the Scharnhorst, off the coast of Norway.
For Kippe, relief that the war might soon be over was mixed with apprehension. Since Tony had left for Abadan she had lived in a state of limbo, real life temporarily suspended. Now she was beset by anxieties. What would her husband do when he came home, and how would he provide for her and the boys? Where would they live? Would the Cammaerts family ever learn to respect him? And, more unsettling, did she respect him herself?
At the Eyrie, childhood rivalries and insecurities had continued to fester, and Tony Bridge had become a source of embarrassment to his young wife. His army career was unspectacular. Flat-footed and rather short-sighted, he had not been commissioned as an infantry officer, and had instead been enlisted into the Pioneer Corps – a blow to Kippe’s pride. His letters home were few and dull, much taken up with complaints about the oppressive Persian heat and his troublesome eczema. Just before Pieter’s death, Kippe’s sister Elizabeth had married an officer serving on the North-West Frontier. Jeanne, meanwhile, was engaged to an officer in the 16th Durham Light Infantry. The letters Elizabeth and Jeanne received were frequent, vivid and entertaining, and they delighted in reading them aloud in the nursery at the Eyrie, reawakening in Kippe the feelings of inadequacy and failure that she had suffered as a child.
Yet all might have been well if, as planned, Tony Bridge had returned home in the summer of 1945. Instead, at short notice, his Iranian posting was prolonged, and just when – as Emile Cammaerts later put it – Kippe was ‘keyed up’ to welcome him back, and ‘worn out by the preparations she had made to receive him and by a series of delays and disappointments’, Jeanne’s fiancé, Geoffrey Lindley, visited the Eyrie with an army friend, Jack Morpurgo.
The visit took place on 27 September 1945, and that morning Michael had spoken his first full sentence. Of Kippe’s first impressions of Jack, there is no record; but nearly half a century on Jack’s memories were vivid. ‘The door opened,’ he wrote, ‘and a girl came in carrying a laden tea-tray. It was unmistakably an entrance; all conversation was silenced, Martha had upstaged a whole cast of Marys; but this Martha had all the advantages … All my attention was centred on that tall slim figure, its every movement a delicious conspiracy between art and nature.’ Here was a treasure, he reflected, ‘who would outshine all else in my collection’.
He knew that she was married, but on the train back to St Pancras that evening Jack Morpurgo comforted himself that ‘a girl as precious as Kippe had no need to waste her loveliness on the Pioneer Corps. “As a golden jewel in a pig’s snout …”’ He was determined, from that first meeting, that he would have her.
Jack Morpurgo had all the qualities that Tony Bridge lacked. He was good-looking, witty, glamorous, faintly rakish. ‘Confidence I never lacked,’ he admits in his 1990 autobiography, Master of None, and self-assurance oozes from his description of himself at the time of his meeting with Kippe: ‘a mature senior officer, his face hardened and blackened by years of sun and wind, his hair already touched with grey, the chest of his uniform-jacket blazoned with medal-ribbons, its epaulets sparkling with rank-badges’.
Born to working-class parents in the East End of London, thoroughly indulged by two adoring elder sisters and precociously clever, Jack had, at thirteen, won a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital, a school founded by Edward VI for poor children. From that moment on, he was relentlessly determined to better himself. ‘I wanted my parents to go,’ he wrote, remembering their delivering him at Christ’s Hospital for the first time. ‘They did not belong in all this spaciousness. They could not match the blatant dignity that surrounded us, already even the elegance of my new uniform set me in another world.’
Jack’s service with the Royal Artillery during the war, in India, the Middle East, Greece and Italy, had stiffened his ruthlessness. He had seen many men die. He had witnessed the defection of wives and girlfriends – including his own great love, Jane, from whose rejection he was still smarting when he met Kippe. He, and those serving with him, had learned that life could be short and uncertain and that they must take what it offered without hesitation or scruple. ‘We were intensely loyal to those who served with us,’ he wrote, ‘but we would not have given a spent shell-case for convention or morality.’ If winning Kippe meant destroying a marriage, breaking the heart of another man, and robbing two infant boys of their father, so be it.
Jack Morpurgo.
In November 1945 Kippe caught the train up to London and she and Jack spent the evening alone together. By the end of the year they were engaged in what Jack later described as a game of ‘Let’s pretend’ – ‘but we were not children, we were in love’.
What happened over the next few weeks can be pieced together from a slim file of correspondence which remains, more than sixty years on, so distressing to Michael that he has never read it in full. Jack Morpurgo was cleverer than Kippe, and he knew it. His letters to her, typed on foolscap in faultless mandarin prose, are exercises in intellectual bullying. He bombards her with arguments until he has her boxed in on every side. Tony Bridge, he insists, is a mere ‘base-wallah’ who has seen no real action. He is utterly undeserving of a wife like Kippe, whom Jack compares to Cleopatra. He flatters Kippe, quoting Keats to Fanny Burney, ‘You have ravished me away by a Power I cannot resist …’, but he also hints that youth is not on her side, and states baldly that he is ‘not prepared to wait indefinitely’. When, briefly, Kippe summons up the strength to break off relations with him, he writes daily to his ‘Lost Darling’, protesting that she has condemned him to ‘an eternity of bleakness’ – yet slipping in a sly reference to Jean Lindsay, a pretty nurse with whom he spent time in Abyssinia, and who has been in touch and wants to see him.
Kippe’s handwritten responses to Jack are, by contrast, short and simple, and filled with self-denigration and remorse. She begs his forgiveness for her ‘failings’ and her ‘selfishness’, for her inability to express herself – ‘it’s pretty poor to be able to say so little so stupidly’ – and to see her way forward. She longs for guidance and comfort. Jack is sparing with his sympathy. ‘You have this marvellous capacity for taking upon your own shoulders the burdens of all the world, and for blaming none but yourself for the mishaps that occur to others,’ he concedes, but he warns that her misery and indecision will be causing damage to Pieter and Michael. And when Kippe admits that, in desperation, she has written a ‘muddled letter’ to Tony Bridge telling him what is afoot, Jack puts her swiftly into checkmate. He and Kippe cannot now stop seeing one another, he argues, because ‘any break in our relations implies acceptance of some guilt, and will imply that to your husband’. Nor can Kippe any longer contemplate a future with Tony Bridge, who, knowing of her feelings for Jack, ‘will pass his days with doubts’.
On receiving Kippe’s ‘muddled letter’ Tony was granted compassionate leave. He made a painful progress back to England – Basra to Baghdad, Baghdad to Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv to Cairo, Cairo to Alexandria, across the Mediterranean to France, and, finally,