Alun Lewis at Highfield, photographed by Freda
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A poet soldier’s passion
Illtyd Harrington reads the wartime letters that a young Welsh soldier poet, Alun Lewis, wrote to his lover and muse
A Cypress Walk. By Alun Lewis. With a memoir by Freda Ackroyd. Enitharmon Press £20.00 order this book
THE 1939-45 war was really a “just war” in which millions died – ferocious and inhuman and a massive diabolic game conducted by psychopaths, continually re-enacted and interpreted by film, television documentaries, cloistered historians and armchair generals.
So this collection of letters to his mistress by a Welsh lieutenant in the South Wales Borderers, who reached India in 1942, tells its own story.
It is a story of two people caught up in those cataclysmic events. Lieutenant Alun Lewis was born in Aberdare, South Wales, on July 1915, the son of a schoolmaster. He was already a recognised poet – his first collection, Raiders’ Dawn had been published in 1942.
On July 25, 1943 he arrived at Freda Akyroyd’s house in the coolness of the Nilgiri Hills, 8,000 feet above sea level.
Freda’s husband Wallace was an internationally respected nutritionist and their house provided a haven for soldiers desperately needing rest and recuperation from the horrors of war.
The two fell in love. Lewis, like so many soldiers, was a committed socialist. Freda was a writer and her preface to his letters may not be A Passage to India, but she perfectly catches the atmosphere of 1943. The war with Japan inspired fear for their armed forces had a worrying record of battle triumphs. Lewis, an intelligence officer, would have faced unspeakable torture if captured.
On March 3, 1944, when Lewis was preparing for action against the Japanese in Burma, he “accidentally” shot and killed himself while cleaning his revolver. His private devils may have led to this, or guilt. He had a wife and family back in Aberdare.
In her old age during 1980, Freda edited 39 of his letters to her during 1943 and early 1944. This she did in the tranquillity of her Oxfordshire garden. She had proved a constant resourceful partner to Lewis, keeping him going until he broke into the London literary world.
He is a poet that should be revisited, forget for a minute Dylan Thomas’s industry and the ideology around W H Auden.
Descriptions of combat incidents are painfully vivid: “I’m afraid of fighting when it comes, I’ll fight much better for peace.” A friend tells him of a direct hit on a tank when a soldier without legs crawled beside him for a mile. The man could not forget the “piteous eyes” of the mutilated man he had to abandon. No mock heroics, just horror.
The couple’s value system is built on music, books and the gentleness which the war machine challenges. After a visit to the full length Walt Disney cartoon The Reluctant Dragon, he is ecstatic with delight. And the last film he saw, John Ford’s Stagecoach, caught his enthusiasm.
There is no doomed motif here although he refused promotion to captaincy that would have ensured him a desk job far from the front line.
Listening to the irrelevant words of the inadequate chaplain, he writes: “Our mood has no religion in it, we sheer away from any clericalism or confessional advances.”
Not a lone voice in the ranks on the manipulated or the motivated, Lewis’s letters and Freda’s editing 40 years on leave me at least with the bitter taste of forgotten sacrifice. This is not an intrusion into private passion but an intriguing invitation into the lives of two generous actors in that pivotal year of 1943 when their love flourished.
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