Page 56 Daily Mail, Friday, August 23, 2019
FRIDAY
BOOK OF
THE WEEK
CONSTANCE CRAIG SMITH
TO WAR WITH THE WALKERS
by Annabel Venning
(Hodder £20, 336 pp)Secret No 10 meetin gs
T
he next time you see a
new Cabinet assembled
in No 10 Downing Street
for their photoshoot —
and given the current cli-
mate who knows how soon that
might be? — take a look at the
ends of the Cabinet table. You’ll
notice that they taper inwards,
making the table narrower there
than in the middle. This is a relic
from harold Macmillan’s time as
Prime Minister (1957 to 1963).
he was the first to realise a ‘lozenge’
shape would allow those Cabinet members
at either end, to catch his eye more easily,
and feel more included in the meeting.
Although, politicians being the cynical
animals they are, some of his colleagues
rejected the ‘lozenge’ description andinstead described the table as a coffin.
Macmillan’s attention to detail is shared
by author Jack Brown, No 10’s first ever
Researcher in Residence, who forensically
examines the history of the Prime
Minister’s residence and the people who
have lived and worked there.
Of course it isn’t just the nation’s leader
who works at No 10. Support staff number
over 200, which can make for cramped
conditions, though not as cramped as you
might think — No 10 is actually several
houses joined together, making it far
bigger than it appears from the front.entering through the famous front door
(with its lion head knocker and letterbox
inscribed ‘First Lord of the Treasury’, the
Prime Minister’s other title), you
walk along a corridor joining the building
to another, larger house. No 10 also
expands sideways by linking up internally
with both No 11 and the Cabinet Office
building on Whitehall.
Sarah hogg, who worked for John Major,
commented on how noisy it was, due to
repair works at the Foreign Office over
the road. These were so loud that, hearing
a bang one morning in February 1991,
hogg assumed it was a particularly large
scaffolding pole. It was, in fact, an IRA
mortar bomb hitting No 10’s garden.
As the former Cabinet Secretary Robert
Armstrong put it, ‘proximity is power’.
harold Wilson’s right-hand woman Marcia
Williams was frustrated to see civil serv-
ants following Wilson into the gents’ toi-
lets: she knew they were doing so to giveMARK MASON
NO. 10: THE GEOGRAPHY OF POWER AT
DOWNING STREET
by Jack Brown (Haus £18.99, 220 pp)HISTORY
... are you reading now?
A DANGEROUS Man by Robert Crais. Bob is a
good friend and a helluva writer.
In this book we get to see his two greatest
creations, Elvis Cole and Joe Pike. I’d love to
see Leonardo DiCaprio play Cole and Brad
Pitt play Joe Pike, particularly after their
wonderful collaboration in Once Upon A Time
In Hollywood.
Bob is like a Porsche when it comes to
writing. Indeed, it’s quite fitting that he drives
that model of car. Like the Porsche, his writing
is elegant, stylish, funny, can fire on turbos
when need be and dive deep when the plot
demands it, but this is far and away some of
the smoothest writing and best storytelling
you’ll ever read. He’s written a lot of books,
but just keeps getting better and better.
... would you take to a desert island?
MY STANDARD reply is ‘100 Ways to Get Off a
Desert Island If You’re Unlucky Enough to End
Up On One’, but I will refrain from using that
here. I would pile up on mysteries, because
not only are they great reads, they’re like
Sudoku in that they keep your mind engaged
as you ferret out the puzzles.
Thrillers are books that you can re-read
over and over, so you won’t have to bring an
endless supply. You’ll just continue to fascinate
yourself as you read them again and again.
And you never know, somewhere buried in
one of those mysteries might be a nifty way to
rescue yourself.
... first gave you
the reading bug?
THE Freddy The Pig
series by Walter Brooks,
set on a farm in upstate
New York. For a kid who
loved animals, there was
nothing better than ani-
mals dressing up as
humans and having these
amazing adventures,
complete with wonder-
ful illustrations.
I loved mystery too,
particularly Alfred
Hitchcock And The Three
Investigators series. They were kids my age
who solved mysteries in California. I loved
them so much as a child that as an adult I
found and bought first editions; I go back and
re-read them particularly around the holi-
days, which is when my parents would give
them to me as presents.
As for literary fiction, it was Huckleberry
Finn and To Kill A Mockingbird. Again, kids in
adult situations always fascinated me.
... left you cold?
MY VERY strict rule is that I don’t like to
disparage any other writer. I consider that
pretty unclassy. With that said, any books that
I was forced to read at school (notably Atlas
Shrugged by Ayn Rand) are ones that left me
cold. The last thing we want to do is turn off
entire generations to reading because we
told them what was good for them.
The choice of what to read should be a per-
sonal adventure and we should always allow
it to play out. We don’t force kids to listen to
certain music and watch certain films or TV
shows, or play only approved video games.
It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison for
obvious reasons, but I think we tend to be a
little too controlling when it comes to what
books are chosen for reading.
O DAViD BAlDAcci will be appearing at
capital crime on September 28 at the
Grand connaught Rooms, london Wc2B
5DA. Other guest speakers include Anthony
Horowitz, Peter James, Elly Griffiths and
Rachel Abbott. The festival runs from
September 26-28 — for more information
and tickets, visit capitalcrime.org.
One Good Deed by David Baldacci is out
now (Macmillan, £18.99).
S
O MANY thousands of
books have been written
about World War II that
at times you wonder if
there can be anything
new or original left to say.
To War With The Walkers is Annabel
Venning’s account of the wartime
experiences of her grandfather Walter
and his five siblings. Although it covers
well-trodden ground — the Blitz, Dunkirk,
the fighting in the Far east and the
horrors of Japanese prisoner of war
camps — the fortunes of this ordinary
family have been woven into a heart-
pounding narrative that feels fresh.
The six Walker children had a cheerful,
sporty, middle-class upbringing in Devon.
edward, the oldest, attended Sandhurst
along with the actor David Niven,
remembered as being ‘very naughty’,
before joining the 8th Punjab Regiment
in India in 1929. Walter, the second
oldest, also headed for India, joining the
8th Gurkhas.
Peter, the most mischievous of the
brothers, became a tea planter in Assam.
The fourth brother, harold, trained as a
doctor while his sister Ruth became a
nurse. Beatrice, a beauty with famously
shapely legs, worked in a clothes shop
and did some modelling for Norman
hartnell while she waited for the right
husband to come along.W
heN war broke out Ruth,
the youngest of the
Walkers, was in the thick
of it, dealing with
casualties from Dunkirk and tending
pilots who had been horribly burned in
the Battle of Britain. Ruth, who would
have made a top-notch doctor if she
had been born in a different era, was
impressively level-headed.
She was alone one night on the ward
when a Dunkirk survivor, probably suffer-
ing flashbacks, threatened to cut her
throat with a razor, Ruth coolly pointed
out he wasn’t wearing his slippers. ‘he
looked down and said, “Oh dear”. And he
put the cut-throat razor on the desk and
went to get his slippers,’ she recalled.
St Thomas’s hospital in London, where
both harold and Ruth worked, was
bombed a total of ten times during the
war. In September 1940 Ruth, sheltering
in the basement, was trapped by falling
masonry. She resigned herself to death
but was saved by a rescue party which
included her brother.
A week later, harold had his own narrowescape when the hospital was hit again.
he was unconscious for a week but made
a remarkable recovery; the incident left
him with the firm conviction that his life
had been spared for a reason.
On the other side of the world, Walter
was among the troops trying to halt the
Japanese advance in Burma. This hope-
less endeavour led to the Army’s with-
drawal to India, ‘the longest retreat in
British military history, a harrowing
exodus of a thousand miles through jun-
gle, over mountains and across rivers.’
When they reached India, gaunt and
exhausted, Walter and his comrades were
treated with disdain, although their escape
had been just as remarkable as Dunkirk.Walter, a born soldier, did not let the
experience crush him. he was put in
command of a Gurkha battalion as they
fought to drive the Japanese back out of
Burma. Venning, who remembers Walter
as a twinkly-eyed grandfather, was
dismayed to discover that some of his
men considered him a bully and a tyrant.
‘he had that relatively rare attribute of
not needing to be liked,’ she reflects.
Gradually, Walter won his men over and
gained respect for his tactical cunning.
After weeks of savage fighting, his
Gurkhas took more and more territory
until finally ‘they realised that the only
Japanese remaining in the village were
twisted, torn bodies’. Noticing a largeBlinded by the
Japanese, stranded
in the jungle, bombed
in the Blitz, the
Walker family
endured all the
horrors of war. Now
a gripping account
by one granddaughter
reveals how they
ALL survived ...
WHATBOOK..?
DAVID
BALDACCI
Thriller writer
went
The
ALL survived ...
six sib
Picture: GETTYwho