AN ABLE REPORTER’S REMINISCENCES

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32524, 6 February 1971, Page 10

AN ABLE REPORTER’S REMINISCENCES

The Positive Hour. By Godfrey Winn. Michael Joseph. 445 pp. Mr Godfrey Winn is a popular writer and the wartime reminiscences which make up the most part of the second volume of his autobiography will no doubt be well sought after. Ranging over his experiences in World War n as a war correspondent for three years, he describes a trip to Russia in the ill-fated naval convoy PQ 17, a journey in an ocean-going tug towing a huge floating dock, a dangerous airborne reconnaissance trip over Norway, a visit to the Maginot Line, trips in an Aberdeen fishing smack, a North Sea convoy and a minesweeping patrol, visits to battle training areas, munitions factories and a 200-mile trip through the black-out in a 12-ton lorry. In addition he carried * out public speaking tours to boost the war effort for the Ministry of Information. '

In his own admission “the incurable spectator,” Mr Winn produces some splendid wartime cameos, deftly written of course with his inimitable blend of patient understanding and sympathy. He writes of the casual, transitory encounters of war—"friendships burgeoning so swiftly and so swiftly shrivelled by death or departure.” Refusing to be confined by chronological sequence, he at times darts off into the future. To leaven the wartime anecdotes and philosophy there are descriptions of post-war house parties with Vivien Leigh, comments on Stephen Ward and his questionable activities in high places, an interview with Mrs lan Smith and a visit to George and Joy Adamson in Kenya for an encounter with Elsa the lioness. The author performs the same literary leapfrogging in the second section of his book which deals mainly with his experiences as an ordinary seaman. At the end of 1942 he forsook his pin

to join the navy and after three months initial training was eventually posted to a county class cruiser patrolling Arctic waters until an enforced discharge through ill health. Interpolated with stories of wartime service life on land and at sea are more forays into the future and comments on such diverse characters as the Beatles, Cilla Black, Edwina Mountbatten and Archibald Mclndoe, the N.Z. plastic surgeon who helped to rehabilitate so many burned and disfigured airmen. Mr Winn, a gentle, modest man with a genuine literary flair, has endeared himself to a wide reading public. But behind the self-perpetuated image of garden-loving, tennis and bridge-playing aesthete is the penetrating mind of a shrewd and successful journalist. ’Die decorous mannerisms of his writing cannot detract from the fact that he is a skilled and able reporter and commentator. \