A CHILDHOOD IN TWENTY BOOK COVERS - NIGHT OF THE FOX BY JACK HIGGINS

 
4 – Night of the Fox by Jack Higgins

Sometime around 1983, my Uncle Jack and Auntie Marge bought a caravan and rented a permanent pitch on a small caravan site just 7 minutes drive from Bridlington sea front (a 15 minutes walk away from Sewerby village). The caravan site was very tiny indeed: horseshoe shaped, with room for around 25-30 caravans and tents.^*1 An ablutions block stood to the right hand side (as you go into the camp) with toilets and showers.^*2 At the far end of the camp, over the hedge, was the railway line that passed through Sewerby and then onto Bridlington Station, along which trains would occasionally rattle passed. My aunt and uncle’s caravan sat on this site all year round, on a pitch that was halfway up the left hand side of the site, pretty much directly opposite the ablutions block.

It wasn’t a big caravan - maybe 7 metres by 2 metres – but just about every shelf and overhead cupboard was stacked full of paperback books. Uncle Jack was a big reader, and he loved political thrillers, Second World War actioners, Cold War Spy adventures, and TV tie-in novels. Jack always had a book on the go, and as soon as he'd finished one, he'd immediately start another.*³

When we went on holiday, we always went as a group of seven – my mum, dad, sister, brother, me, Jack and Marge. Sometimes it would be eight, if we were joined by my cousin Steve. When we first started going to Bridlington in the summer of 1980 (our two weeks’ holiday would always be Newquay during the 1970s), we’d stay in what my parents always called ‘Digs’ – small self-catering flats. But, by around 1983, Jack and Marge bought the caravan, so every year after that we’d stay in the small camp site – Jack and Marge in their caravan, the family in a trailer tent with lots of awnings and extensions.^*4

It was during these holidays that I really became obsessed with books. Seeing them piled on shelves, and almost falling out of the overhead cupboards when they were opened, brought a strange sort of magical quality to them. Many of the titles and covers still stick in my memory (and over the years I’ve found identical copies in second hand bookshops and added them to my own ever-growing collection), such as the Minder tie-in books (novelisations as well as the original novel written by creator Leon Griffiths), the novelisation of the 1979 13-episode TV drama Fox (bought because Jack and Marge’s surname was ‘Fox’, and he found it amusing to own a book named after him), novels by John Le Carre, Craig Thomas, Alistair MacLean, Len Deighton, Willi Heinrich, Frederick Forsyth, Colin Forbes and, of course, Jack Higgins.

It was in June/July of 1987, when I was 13 years old, that I remember vividly sitting in their caravan, holding Jack’s copy of Higgins’s Night of the Fox, staring at the cover and wanting to read it. It was a cover that fascinated me enormously (The Eagle Has Landed fascinated me too. It had a Reichsadler prominently on the cover (an eagle holding a Swastika in its talons). The lower half of the cover of Night of the Fox had an annotated map of Jersey laid out, with the proposed landing sites for an Allied mission marked out in red felt tip pen. The thing I loved the most was, that the ‘X’ in the word ‘Fox’, was the Iron Cross.

Growing up in the late 70s/early 80s the Second World War had become partly glamourised. War films were a staple on British TV, many starring tough action film actors such as Richard Burton, Lee Marin or Clint Eastwood. Many of the films made throughout the 1960s and 70s, focused on a heroic group of soldiers attempting a seemingly impossible mission against seemingly impossible odds.

During that hot June/July holiday of 1987, the Second World War seemed very glamorous and very exciting^*5. So I asked Jack if I could borrow Night of the Fox and took it back to the family trailer tent and spent the rest of the two week holiday reading it. I read it on the beach, and at night before going to bed, but I don’t think I actually managed to finish it during those two weeks. Thinking about it now, I could have taken it home with me and finished it. Jack would have been more than happy for me to take it, then return it the next time we saw them. But, for some reason, I didn’t. I told him I’d finished the book and handed it back to him.

A few years later, I discovered that the hardback cover of Night of the Fox had a different, but equally exciting cover - a soldier standing legs-astride the island of Jersey, the right side of his uniform (as we look at him) is that of a German officer, the left side of his uniform that of a British officer. If Jack had had a hardback copy of the book in his caravan, I have no doubt I would have been equally fascinated with it.

Flash forward 35 years. A second hand bookshop in Berwick Upon Tweed. As my eye is moving along the spines of a shelf of alphabetically arranged thrillers, it stops somewhere among the ‘H’s. I quickly reach forward and slide the book from the shelf. That familiar cover hits me like a sockful of sand round the back of the head: the annotated Jersey map with the red felt tip, the ‘X’ in the word ‘Fox’ replaced with the Iron Cross. I’d found a copy at last to go in my own classic and out of print paperback collection.

I took it on holiday with me not long after and read it again. I finished it this time. All the time I was reading it, I couldn’t help but think about Jack and Marge and that little caravan in Bridlington crammed to bursting with books.

NOTES:

1 – It’s still there. I’ve just checked. Looking at the pictures on their website the site hasn’t changed a bit. It’s still small and quiet. It hasn’t expanded or built any new blocks or add-ons.

2 – The showers used to take 50p coins, and a little metal chain with a handle dangled down above your head, and when you pulled it the water would flow. If you let go the water immediately stopped. I remember one year, when you pulled the chain, it sent a tiny electric shock through your arm. Nothing frightening, just an odd, vague sensation.

3 – I call it chain-reading – as soon as one is put out, you immediately start up another. A habit I seem to have picked up from him. I hate not having a book on the go.

4 – One year we even managed to get the pitch right next to their caravan, so both caravan and trailer tent became like a small holiday village.

5 – I’ve read a lot of non-fiction books about the Second World War in the past few years (it's become one of my obsessions). Now I know it was anything but 'glamorous' and 'exciting'.