Vigorously Involved

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30302, 30 November 1963, Page 3

Vigorously Involved

Try Anything Twice. Desmond Young. Hamish Hamilton. 368 pp.

Desmond Young is best known as the author of “Rommel” which, itself a best-selling biography, was made into a successful film, “The Desert Fox.” His new book is his autobiography. The life is in some senses so typical that it seems that not a man, but an epoch has composed it. In other senses it is a life of extreme individuality and of such energy that Mr Young is hardly able to keep pace in print with what he has done in practice.

Born in the 1890's he grew up in the right years and in the right circumstances for the nourishment of selfconfidence and assured values. By way of a lesser prep school he made his way by scholarship first to a well known public school and then to Merton College. More important than this formal schooling was his education as man of action. His father, a world expert on ship salvage begun taking the boy with him on jobs all over the world. The Oxford years were a period of great edification in all but matters academic. Mr Young went up on a scholarship and was sent down as a young man with more enterprise than his college could contain. This was in 1912. After various adventures in the Shell Company, in journalism, in the theatre and in prep school teaching. Mr Young was caught up. along with all his generation, in the war. The record of the war years is filled with anecdotes of horror and comedy, of vivid personalities and desperate stratagems. The author as might be expected had a career far more varied than a time of war normally permits. He had been under the sea and into the air before others of his age had been on horseback. His acquaintance with journalism and the theatre opened other possibilities for him. Whether desperately wounded in the trenches or on the trail of beautiful spies Mr Young always had his ears and eyes open for the memorable moment. Many of these are also captured by photograph. Between the wars his richest experiences came to him in South Africa and in India, where in the course of his journalistic career he was constantly near the centre of events in those crucially formative years. His own attitudes in matters of national struggle were always those of tolerance, good sense and independent decisions. For instance, in the struggle for the rights of Indians work-

ing in Africa, Mr Young as editor of a newspaper was in a position of influence and in the face of powerful opposition he insisted upon justice and equality for the Indians. “Irrespective of the rights and wrongs. it was, I gathered, by no means the thing to support a native against a European . . .” The Second World War offered a new playground to Mr Young's extraordinary flair for enjoying himself in situations of danger and moments of critical decision. Missing and believed killed in Damascus he was later to read his own “excessively generous obituary notice" in the “Statesman.” In itself his period as a prisoner-of-war in Italy contained enough to body forth a complete book but “this must not be allowed to develop into an escape story." Escape he did. however, to continue a second war career as varied as the first. Mr Young has indeed "tried everything twice” at least. This autobiography is written in a brisk and amusing style, the wealth inherent in each of the anecdotes never being overspent .by the author. It is a book that will have a special appeal to old soldiers, and more generally it is valuable as the record of a man happily and vigorously involved in his times.