It came with a terrifying roar of gunfire from Battersea Park, the sound of bombs falling and explosions in the dark. The air raid siren at night became the most chilling sound imaginable. Its hollow warning was of 1,000lb bombs, of baskets of incendiaries, even of sinister green parachutes, dangling their river-mines, floating silently through the night…"
So Donald James Wheal describes, in the first of his riveting memoirs, World’s End, the advent of the Blitz in 1940. He and his parents and younger brother Kit were living in the ‘warm and grubby corner of Chelsea’ that was wartime World’s End, housed in a tiny but cosy flat in the Guinness Trust Buildings in the shadow of the mammoth Lots Road power station. Massive banks of anti-aircraft guns were stationed in Battersea Park and, night after night, the family would hear their thunder from across the river as the Luftwaffe set London alight.
Playing by the river one day, he and Kit even witnessed one unforgettable daylight raid: ‘A new coaler was manoeuvring towards the wharf at Lots Road power station and we were excited to see that it had double anti-aircraft Bofors guns mounted on its deck. When the sirens went, we were meant to go straight home but we stayed to watch the Bofors guns rotating towards the southeast. Then something caught our attention in the sky…’
That ‘something’ was an airborne armada ‘made up of hundreds of two-engine bombers and even more squadrons of Messerschmitt fighters. Nearly a thousand aeroplanes in the sky at once is a breathtaking sight. Nearly a thousand enemy aircraft in the sky above your head is nothing short of terrifying.’
Donald would experience many more moments of terror as the war progressed, but none to equal the night in February 1944, when Luftwaffe squadrons were dispatched to West London. Their target: the Kraftwerke, Kesselhaus und Maschinenhalle – boiler house and turbine hall – of Lots Road power station. The massive aerial bombardment demolished much of the Guinness Trust Buildings, killing at least 73 civilians and gravely injuring at least 100 more. As the Kings Road blazed, the Wheal family escaped – with their lives and little else.
The rest of the war was seen out in new quarters in White City, where the novelty of having an indoor bathroom and a garden warred with a nostalgic yearning for the tight-knit community of World’s End. Donald’s second memoir, the recently published White City, recalls these years and those that followed as he travelled in war-torn Europe with the army, developing a fascination for political history that would shape his later career.
A scholarship to Cambridge to read History led to a post-graduation job in teaching, but writing was always Donald’s first love. Through a fortuitous meeting, he won the chance to present his first script; ‘for a show now long forgotten, called No Hiding Place’. Luck may have played its part at the outset, but talent did the rest. Donald became a hugely successful scriptwriter for such 70s TV classics as The Saint, The Avengers and Mission Impossible.
Presciently spotting, towards the end of the 70s, the decline in the British films-for-television industry, Donald turned to fiction, amassing a host of critically acclaimed political thrillers including Monstrum, The Fortune Teller and Vadim. He’s also a highly respected non-fiction writer, whose enduring fascination with modern history has produced such classics as The Fall of the Russian Empire and The Penguin Dictionary of the Third Reich. With such a varied pedigree, it’s not surprising that his autobiographical writing combines powerful description, humour and great humanity with a keen retrospective insight into how the stirring events of his youth shaped the Europe of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Donald’s an inveterate south west Londoner. By the 60s he’d moved back close to his childhood stamping grounds in SW10, with David Dimbleby and Susan Hampshire as neighbours. Then rumours began of the construction of a new West Cross Road to go straight through their quiet street: ‘David was the first to have heard the news and he moved immediately; Susan stayed on and I was in the middle, thinking, what shall I do?’
What he did was fall in love with a huge corner house on the Upper Richmond Road: ‘It had very little plumbing and very little electricity and it took a lot of time and money to do it up but I never regretted it.’ Despite occasional excursions to live in Ireland and France (‘my second wife is French; very Anglicised in many ways, until France are playing rugby or football’), he views Putney as home, though it’s inevitably changed since he first came here nearly 40 years ago.
‘It’s traffic, I’m afraid, more than any other factor. On the Upper Richmond Road, when we first moved there, I hardly noticed a car. But I had an office overlooking the road and latterly you’d have these 40 ton things throbbing at the traffic lights right outside the window…’ A move to a more tranquil side street now sees Donald very happily enjoying the quieter pleasures of Putney; the ‘wonderful open space’ of the common and proximity to the river: ‘We’re lucky that perhaps Putney simply hasn’t had enough room for many large blocks to be built here and so it still has its heart and character!’
And it’s obviously a congenial place for writing. A new novel is underway, set in Paris some years in the future: ‘The event is the overthrow of the Fifth Republic, which I think is a ramshackle constitutional exercise by de Gaulle; I’m amazed it’s lasted so long’. Some of his earlier fiction has been so politically prescient he’s been accused of being in the know with the CIA; with all the furore over the recent French presidential elections, this charming, prolific and insightful writer might just again be foreshadowing history in the making!
White City is published by Century (£12.99 h/b); World’s End is published by Arrow (£6.99 p/b)