Until then, the preparations had seemed pretty much a Boy's Own adventure.
Sir John Keegan: A great correspondent
Hundreds of thousands of GIs had poured into Somerset with their amphibious trucks and giant transporters laden with tanks and bulldozers. It was like Legoland, only military. He says he was gripped by the power, majesty and terror of the moment. The next day, the Americans had gone. It couldn't have been anything else.
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At the outbreak of war, the Keegans were living in Clapham Park, south London. John's father, Frank, who had been a gunner in the First World War but was now too old to enlist, was a schools' inspector, responsible for transferring hundreds of pupils from south-east London to the relative safety of the countryside. His wife and three children moved with him. I was transplanted in an intact family from one reassuring fireside to another. I loved the English countryside. We lived a sort of Arthur Ransome life. Today, Sir John Keegan, distinguished military historian and man of letters, lives on the Wiltshire-Somerset border, not far from the village to which he was evacuated.
He has spent his life in the theoretical pursuit of war, first as a lecturer in military history at Sandhurst, then as an author of 20 books, and from as defence editor of The Daily Telegraph. It has always seemed an unlikely obsession for a man of such pacific gentleness and courtesy.
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His best-seller, The Face of Battle a study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme established his exceptional ability to enter the heart and mind of the fighting man, as though he had actually experienced the horror of combat and understood why soldiers put their lives on the line. The quality of his insight into the military psyche is so unusual that it's assumed he would have been a soldier if he had not been left permanently disabled by TB of the hip. I would not have made a good soldier. It's just that I decided early on that you could only write properly about war by willing yourself into the shoes of the participants and letting them determine what you thought and what you did.
I talk to soldiers a lot. I talk about the difficulties to them. They like being questioned, too. I have learnt a great deal from them. I've also got a vivid imagination. A Military History , is the belated fruit of a grant-aided trip he made to the US battlefields when he was a year-old undergraduate, and where his love of America took root.
His account of the American Civil War is a captivating narrative, huge in scope, covering a vastly mismatched conflict that lasted four years. A month after he finished it, in April, he had a stroke and was not expected to live. So poor was his prognosis that the doctors had stopped feeding him and were instead concentrating on making his last hours comfortable. But Sir John, 75, has been confounding medical opinion for most of his life.
For nearly four of his teenage years, he was incarcerated in an orthopaedic hospital with TB and spent the freezing winter of in an open-air ward with snow drifting under the iron beds.
John Keegan
At night, the nurses lowered canvas screens that flapped and banged in the winter gales "like the sails of a man-o'-war". When he eventually got out, it was with a hip immobilised by a bone graft. But hospital was his education in every sense. The chaplain taught him Greek, the schoolmistress kept up his French and he read the whole of Thomas Hardy as well as numerous volumes of history. For many months, he was in a plaster cast from shoulder to thigh. The ward was full of chaps in their twenties who had been in the war and came from Borough, the Elephant and Castle and the Old Kent Road.
I found the company very interesting.
These south Londoners had a wonderfully positive attitude to life. Today's culture of dependency would have been anathema to them. While at Balliol College, Oxford, where he read history in the early Fifties, his hip fusion broke and he had to return to hospital — but by then there were antibiotic drugs, notably streptomycin. Years of limping eventually wore out his spine but his habit was, and still is, to dismiss pain as a minor inconvenience, incidental to the general gaiety of life.
Eighteen months ago, he had a leg amputated to help his circulation but maintained a stoical fortitude and continued to work on his book.
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I had quite a remarkable recovery from the stroke. The doctors said to Susanne: I don't remember anything of that at all. Although Keegan suffered disappointment at the hands of Ferguson, he also guided Manchester City to their first Premier League victory over United, in the last ever Manchester derby at Maine Road. Manchester City wins on Penalty Kicks.
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