John Alldridge Meets Douglas Bader

In September 1955, the Manchester Evening News sent my uncle to interview Group Captain Douglas Bader – Jerry F

There was a time — not so long ago — when for seven weary months I lay on my back encased in plaster from toe to chin.

There was nothing seriously wrong, the doctors said. Just a broken thigh that refused to knit. Nothing to worry about.

Nothing to worry about. Stored away in the corner of a ward like a bit of old lumber. Nothing to worry about. While autumn turns to winter, and winter reluctantly gives way to spring, and you lie on there listening to the feet click-clacking in the world outside.

Watching your one good foot turn waxy-yellow from disuse.

Remembering the simple things that now seem so impossibly remote — like walking a dozen yards to the toilet.

Waiting for the hell that comes in the long, dark hours of night, when a devil-voice whispers from the pillow: “You’ll never walk again. You’ll never walk again. Never-never-walk again…” 

In the blackness of that despair, which is second-cousin to madness, I grasped at a name. Always the same name. Douglas Bader.

Well, I am walking again — almost as well as ever I did. They say the surgeons did a marvellous job on me. No doubt they did. But surgery had nothing to do with the will to walk again, the courage to throw away those sticks they said you’d carry with you for the rest of your life. That comes only from example.

And the man who got me on my feet, who made me throw away those sticks, was a man I had never met until a few days ago. A legless wonder called Douglas Bader…

They live now, Douglas and Thelma Bader, in a mews-flat off Queen’s Gate, in South Kensington. A modest little home, painted black and white, gay with window boxes. A bow window glows with light. A pair of ancient carriage lamps mount guard over the front door.

The new home was Thelma’s idea. Most things in Bader’s private life, I imagine, have been Thelma’s idea.

It was typical that Douglas Bader’s letter inviting me to meet him included the words: “I think it preferable that you should interview me and my wife.”

I have known them only a couple of hours. But I have never met a more obviously devoted couple. You might think that such a womanly woman would have a difficult time with such a man, restless, ever-eager to be up and away.

Not a bit of it. Thelma and Douglas are a team. She decided that, too, long ago when they were courting.

There came the moment when Thelma’s mother, as any mother would, asked the obvious question:

“He’s charming. But how could you marry a man with no legs? Have you thought of that? You must be very sure.”

“I’m perfectly sure,” said Thelma, with all the supreme confidence of 22. “Without his legs I still like him more than anyone else.”

“You might have to be a sort of nurse to him,” Mrs. Addison warned.

“Not with Douglas,” said Thelma, who knew her man.

And so it has been. For 20 happy, exciting years. I believe the only thing that Bader fears in this life is losing Thelma. That is why he will not let her fly without him.

Like all men who have gone down into the Valley of the Shadow and come back, he has no fear of death. But he cannot bear the thought of having to live without her.

You ring the bell. (A little nervously. For the Group Captain has a reputation of being rather shy of journalists.) It is opened by a shortish, stocky man in shirt and trousers. sleeves purposefully rolled up, an empty pipe clenched between white teeth. A man who at 46 looks a good ten years younger.

Carelessly neat, with black hair carrying a glossy wave in it still. The body of an athlete: taut, small-boned, muscular. An aggressive figure that swings at you like a boxer.

Phenomenally strong hands that can — and sometimes do — grip like a vice. Twinkling dark eyes, quick-tempered, that can go suddenly cold with disapproval.

But it is the legs that fascinate you. You can’t take your eyes off them. You follow them across the room, rolling slightly, stumping, like a sailor’s legs.

The legs sit down on a sofa. And you sit, still watching them. Watching one, neatly shod in suede shoe, bend naturally at the knee while the other, artfully sprawled out in front, looks perfectly relaxed.

Embarrassed, you look up and catch his eyes on you, quizzical.

Bader has seen it all. As he must have seen it a thousand times. The baffled fascination. He is positively grinning with delight: the delight of a naughty small boy who is wearing father’s trousers.

“Bit of a shock eh?” says Douglas Bader, winking at Thelma.

And in that moment the ice is broken. There is no more embarrassment. You realise that Bader is proud of his legs — those legs he puts on each morning as casually as I put on my shoes. Those legs which after 25 years are never entirely comfortable and often hurt him, though he will never admit it.

I remembered that story Paul Brickhill tells about Bader in Chicago visiting the bedside of a small boy of 10 who had both legs cut off below the knee. Bader, who will do almost anything for children, spent an hour and a half with him, showing how legs really don’t matter so much.

The boy’s father seemed far more worried than the boy. “The kid doesn’t realise how serious it is yet,” he complained to Bader.

Bader, so gentle with the boy, turned on him passionately:

“That’s the one thing he must never realise. You’ve got to make him feel this is another game he’s got to learn, not something that will cripple him. Once you frighten him with it he’s beaten.”

In that you have Douglas Bader’s whole philosophy, not only towards legs but to life itself.

If you ask him why he taught himself to wa1k on two artificial legs — that gay young man of 21, who had seen all his hopes of a brilliant future on the rugger field and in the sky disappear in 10 dreadful minutes — he will say: “I refused to be a bore to my friends.”

That is simply British-and-R.A.F. understatement. What he means is that he set out to find a way to face life on equal terms with other men.

He found it first of all through golf — the first legless man ever to complete 18 holes unaided. He has a handicap of six (“Still go out to the right a bit”) and when he is not flying himself and Thelma round the world for Shell, still manages 36 holes a week.

He found it again through flying in 1940. By sheer persistence he bullied and badgered the Air Ministry into letting him pilot a Hurricane. He was given command first of a flight, then a squadron, then three squadrons, then five.

His exuberance, his utter disregard for danger, were contagious (read the citations that won him his D.S.O. and D.F.C.). He was not only an inspiring leader of men: The fighter tactics he evolved contributed very largely to the victory in the Battle of Britain.

But peace has victories no less than war. Bader will line-shoot cheerfully over his golfing triumphs. You will never get a word out of him about his war-time experiences.

Perhaps it is typical of the man that this pleasant lamp-lit room, with its flowers and books and nice bits of furniture, contains only one reminder of Bader the war hero. That hangs over the bookcase: a crayon drawing by Eric Kennington of Bader, the bareheaded, square-jawed officer commanding 12 Group.

“It makes me hot all over when chaps start writing me up as a hero,” he will tell you. “I did no more than dozens of others. The spotlight was on me because I did it with no legs. My real battle was won years before that. The rest was anti-climax.’

(And every man or woman who has struggled grimly from the horizontal to the perpendicular knows how true that is.)

But the spotlight was on Bader. And it has never left him. I would never dare say this to his face — but his courage and example have given new hope to the disabled all over the world. Since the publication of his life-story, “Reach for the Sky,” his mail has reached film-star proportion.

Only the other day an old lady of 76 cabled him from Sydney, Australia: “Am coming to England to get a pair of legs like yours.”

Bader met her at the boat, got her a room at Roehampton, where his own legs were made, showed her “the drill,” and a few weeks later was marching her off to dinner at the Savoy.

Douglas Bader’s approach to this new — and rather terrifying — responsibility is typically realistic.

“It makes me very humble when people say nice things about me. It makes me mad, too. ‘How good of you to bother !’ — and all that rot. Why the hell shouldn’t I bother? Why shouldn’t we all bother? Here’s a poor bloke trying to get back into life again. Is it so strange that I should want to help him on his way?

“The best thing in life is helping other people. There’s nothing so rewarding. I don’t like things — I like people.”

So a dozen times a week Douglas Bader will sit down — maybe at one of those times when the legs are “playing up” and write a typical, pithy note to some sufferer who has all but given up hope. More often than not — for Bader is no waster of words —the note reads like this:

“Don’t believe a word the doctors tell you, man. The world is full of chaps who should have been dead long ago if they’d believed what the quacks told them.”

All the big London general hospitals know him — particularly those in the poorer districts. Suddenly, unannounced, that stocky figure will come stumping briskly up the ward, plump down on a bed, and start talking. The Group Captain is getting another patched-up “crate” into the air.

I asked him if his life would have been very different if fate had been kinder. He thought a bit:

“I might have played rugger for England. I might have got on faster in the R.A.F. On the other hand, you know, I’d never have baled out that day if I’d had real legs… No, I believe I’m glad it happened, looking back now. It taught me what life was all about. It’s made me thankful for small mercies.”

I’ve heard it said that the youth of today knows little and cares less about the heroes of 10 years ago.

If that is so then it is encouraging to know that Douglas Bader, who led the shining youth of yesterday, has infinite faith and confidence in the youth of today. When he reads about magistrates and other wiseacres making portentous judgments on “teddy boys” he gets mad. Those blue eyes go a steel-grey.

“Our fathers said our generation was a bunch of bums. Now we’re saying the same of the teddy boys. Don’t you believe it! These young blokes today are as good as we ever were. And they’ll prove it — if it ever happens again!”

Afterwards he walked me down to the entrance of the mews, shook my hand in another of those vice-grips, and said goodbye. I watched him for a long time as he went stumping, hands in pockets, back to Thelma and that cosy little home behind the bay window.

Just two more touches which, I think, make the picture complete: the following morning I was in a very fashionable florists near Victoria, ordering flowers to be sent round to Thelma Bader. The assistant, a woman in middle life, read the name and the address:

“I didn’t know they lived round here,” she said. She might have been talking of royalty.

Before I had even met Douglas Bader I spoke to his secretary on the phone. I was very anxious to meet the Group Captain in the setting where he’d be happiest, I said rather pompously.

“That man would be happy anywhere,” she said.
 

Reproduced with permission
© 2024 Newspapers.com

For more about Douglas Bader – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Bader
 

Jerry F 2024