Christopher Priest - The Separation

The naiveté was therefore my own fault, because my interest in sport, in rowing, overshadowed everything else. I lived only for the moment and was totally focused on the sport I loved. During the years 1935 and 1936 I concentrated on a single aim: to qualify for the British team that would compete in the Olympic Games. My brother and I trained and practised with an almost obsessive energy.

To anyone who had seen us training, or who saw us competing, it might have seemed a foregone conclusion that we would be selected for the team. We were consistently on form and easily won most of the races we entered, but when you are there at the centre of the obsession you feel you can take nothing for granted. When Joe and I were finally selected, at the beginning of June 1936, it felt that this was quite simply the greatest news we would ever receive. We celebrated with friends in a number of Oxford pubs that night, but afterwards returned with single-minded dedication to our training.

My story of what happened to me during the war therefore begins in July 1936, when Joe and I set off together for the Berlin Olympics.

I was nineteen years old and although I had no way of knowing it then, it was not to be my only trip to Berlin. My later visits took place when I was in the RAF, at the controls of a bomber, peering down through darkness, smoke and cloud at the vast city below; releasing incendiaries on to the buildings and streets. That future was unimaginable to me in 1936.

I had been living away from our family home in Tewkesbury for less than a year. I went home most weekends and still collected my mail, clean laundry and a great deal of food for the following week. I had hardly grown up at all, so a journey out of England, especially one to Germany in that eventful year, was an adventure at the highest level.

As we headed for the south coast of England I was at the wheel of our equipment van, in itself another small step for me. I had only recently begun driving, as until then my brother Joe normally drove us around. All the trips I made before this had been short ones, mostly on the familiar roads between Oxford and Tewkesbury. I had gone no further south or east than to London, and then in daylight. Now here I was, embarking on our adventure, driving our van slowly in the dark across the Downs towards Dover, with Joe dozing in the passenger seat beside me.

I wonder now if we should have gone on with that trip, but perhaps that is simply the luxury that goes with hindsight. In the small world of rowing, as in most sports, politics was a dirty word. It was easy to close yourself off from international events in the 1930s: there was no television, radio was not the force of journalistic independence it became during and after the war, and for most people the main source of information was whatever newspaper they happened to read. Joe and I rarely read any part of newspapers other than the sports pages. Britons in general closed their minds against Hitler and the Nazis, hoping they would go away. For people like Joe and myself, though, there should have been no such excuses. We were at university, surrounded by articulate and intelligent men and women with views on every subject, frequently aired. We knew well enough what was happening in Germany and that to take part in the Games could be construed as giving aid and comfort to the Hitler regime.

I knew this, but frankly I was not interested. The finest sportsmen and sportswomen from around the world would be in Berlin. It was going to be the only opportunity in my lifetime to compete in my chosen event at the highest level.

Joe did not think entirely alike, I should say. Whenever we discussed what we thought was happening in Germany we vehemently disagreed, but because we were both committed to the sport and had to work as a team we generally steered clear of the subject.

I loved rowing. I loved the strength I had in my body, the speed I could find, the agility with which I could move. I rowed every day that the weather allowed, sometimes alone for endurance development, but usually with Joe, training for speed, for coordination, for the simple familiarity of rowing together. We could never train too much, or enough. I knew I could always improve, always hone my muscles a little more. We competed in a sport in which winning margins were often measured in fractions of a second; there was no possible improvement that was so small we could safely neglect it.

Joe was just as committed. Everything I felt inside myself I could observe taking shape in him. Joe rowed stroke. As we rowed, his body was only inches away from mine. His back filled my view, shoulders, arms, flowing to and fro, straining back with the main pull, recovering, sweeping forward, slicing the blades down into the water, putting on the pressure for the next stroke. When we rowed Joe’s back became my inspiration, the powerful, functional muscles matching every movement I made as if we were somehow synchronized by an invisible power from above. I watched his back in the sunlight, in the rain, on grey days, when our coordination was perfect and when we could get nothing right. I watched it at rest as well as during the bursts of energy. I watched it, yet I rarely saw it properly. It was something on which to rest my gaze, a familiar and undisturbing sight while I concentrated on the mindless task of going faster than ever before. Joe and I became more than a team at such times -it was as if we were one person sharing two bodies.

People said we were the best coxless pairs team in the country. They invested great hopes in us, because rowing was a sport in which Britain excelled. The Olympic coxless pairs gold medallists in Los Angeles in 1932 had been Edwards and Clive, the British team, now retired from the sport. Edwards and Clive were our heroes, but we were still expected to equal or better them.

So this was the consuming foreground of our lives. Youth is blind to the world around it, but obsessive youth is blinder still. Ignoring everything, we trained intensively for the Games through the spring and early summer of 1936. Germany was rearming, building an illegal air force, and Hitler marched in his troops to occupy the Rhineland, but we were training on weights, sprinting and running, bringing our times down, getting the rhythm and the smoothness of the strokes right, learning when and how to burst with speed, when to consolidate our strength, how to take the shortest, straightest line in water that constantly flowed and eddied unpredictably beneath us. Then July came and it was time for us to travel to Germany.

In 1936 there was no combined embarkation of a national team wearing colours, as we see in the modern age. We were expected to make our own way to Berlin, so we carried our equipment in our own van, taking it in turns to drive.

I prowled about on the boat deck during the short sea-crossing to France. Joe was inside the lounge cabin and I did not see him again until the ship docked. I was wide awake, exhilarated by everything, but also concerned about the well-being of our two shells, lashed side by side to the roof of the van. We transported them everywhere like that, but never before had we taken them on board a ship. Watching the van being lowered by crane into the hold, the chains swinging, had been an uncomfortable moment of alarm. It reminded me how vulnerable they were and how damage to either of them could put us out of the competition.

I stared restlessly out to sea. I watched the two coasts between which we were slowly crossing. Somewhere in the middle of the Channel, with the lights of both England and France in clear view, it felt as if the sea had narrowed. Both coasts seemed to be almost within reach. I had never before realized how close our country actually was to the mainland of Europe. From this perspective the sea did not seem much wider than a big river. I stood at the rail amidships, thinking such thoughts, little appreciating - how could I have done? - what an important symbol of national security that short stretch of water was soon to assume for everyone in Britain.