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Bitter letter that cut deep If Lady Fieldhouse had desperately wanted to see her husband during the Falklands conflict, she could have walked down the road to his office.
Most other navy wives were separated from their loved ones by eight thousand miles of water. Some found it hard to contain their resentment. `How very nice for your husband to have his hot baths and his whisky at home while my husband is down there fighting,' read one anonymous letter Lady Fieldhouse received at Admiralty House.
Her husband, the then Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse, had a desk job at the navy's nerve centre at Northwood in London. The closest he'd got to the Malvinas was a trip to Ascension Island to organise the fleet before hostilities began. But as Commander-in-Chief Fleet, responsibility for every last fighting man in the Falklands rested squarely on his shoulders. He spent days holed up in councils of war and could rarely make the short trip home to Admiralty House. It was a case of "watch on, stop on". That one bitter letter dealt a devastating blow to Lady Fieldhouse. The hurt still flickers across her face 15 years later, as she sits amid a sea of her husband's photographs at their Lee-on-the-Solent home. For her, the Falklands conflict was `an on-going nightmare'. While her sleep-starved husband discussed strategy with defence chiefs, she ran several charities, entertained the military's top brass and tried hard to maintain a semblance of normality. It was also her unofficial job to sustain and comfort servicemen's wives. `We had to make sure when people lost their husbands they didn't get newspaper people on their door. We tried to send somebody over there before the press heard but it was very difficult. `I've never forgotten one young mum who had a 17-year-old son who had died two hours before the ceasefire. `She kept saying, "Was it worth it?" You just have to say the Falklanders certainly thought it was. `The wives are put in an impossible position because they are not asked, "Do you mind if your husband goes off to war?" We did have some people who said, "My son didn't join to be killed". But you can't join a service because you like the uniform and the pay's good.' When the Falklands were recaptured, Lady Fieldhouse, a former wren officer at HMS Daedalus, visited the sick and wounded in hospital. The jokes she heard there still make her laugh.
`One of them had lost his right leg and I said, "Oh, that's awful," and he said, "Yes, it had my very expensive tattoo on it".' For others, the scars were not so obvious. Sir John, who became Chief of Defence Staff in 1985 and was made a life peer in 1990, had no war wounds. But his wife believes the stress of the campaign contributed to his death in 1992. He was recovering from a major heart operation in Southampton General when he caught an infection and died at the age of 63. His widow says he bore the burden of responsibility in the Falklands very heavily: He was devastated when HMS Sheffield went down, saddened too when the Belgrano sank. `I thought I knew him better than anybody else in the world but I didn't think I realised how terribly stressed he was,' says Lady Fieldhouse. `If you met him he was terribly smiley and you think, "Gosh, this man can brush off everything," and I'm sure everybody did think that. But if you bottle everything up it has to come out somewhere. `It wasn't that he thought it was a sign a weakness to confide, he was much too nice to want to bother us with it.'
Lady Fieldhouse, a warm, approachable woman, does not romanticise the Falklands war. Four visits to the Argentinian cemeteries - three with her husband and one with Lady Thatcher - have made that an impossibility. `Some of the Argentinian soldiers were only 15 or 16. They were told we were cannibals and we would eat them.' But she retains a patriotic pride for Britain's victory. `A country that seemed to have been so divided suddenly came together. `When we travelled around abroad afterwards, people didn't talk about anything else. `But it's appalling to me that it takes a war to make the country coalesce.' Lady Fieldhouse still travels widely and is always treated like royalty, because of her title and her husband's name. When he died, she had 1,400 letters from people who had known him. `Every one of them without fail said he was such a lovely man.' During the conflict, Lady Fieldhouse became a firm friend of Lady Thatcher who regularly ate with them at Northwood. They met up again a few weeks ago at a dinner on the Canberra when the former Prime Minister described Lord Fieldhouse as `a brilliant commander and humanitarian'. `They worked very well together,' recalls Lady Fieldhouse. `Later she said to me, `"They were stirring days, stirring days".' |
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