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Working on MincemeatFarhana Sheikh aa Keele , Newcastle‐under‐Lyme, UKPublished online: 22 Jun 2010.

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Changing EnglishVol. 17, No. 2, June 2010, 153–160

ISSN 1358-684X print/ISSN 1469-3585 online© 2010 The editors of Changing EnglishDOI: 10.1080/13586841003787282http://www.informaworld.com

Working on Mincemeat

Farhana Sheikh*

Keele, Newcastle-under-Lyme, UKTaylor and FrancisCCEN_A_479250.sgm10.1080/13586841003787282Changing English1358-684X (print)/1469-3585 (online)Original Article2010Taylor & Francis172000000June 2010FarhanaSheikhRedbox91@btopenworld.com

Farhana Sheikh is co-author of Mincemeat, a play about a World War Twointelligence operation, and its connection to the world of the homeless. In thisarticle, she reflects on some themes of the play, in the context of the continuingBritish preoccupation with the war, and discusses the play’s attempt to representthe upper echelons of society and its lower depths.

Keywords: theatre; Mincemeat; war; homelessness

I remember the war very well. When I came to London in the 1960s, everyone wastalking about it still. The bombsites might have been built upon, but boys playedfighter planes in the playground and passed war comics around the classroom. On tele-vision, the fighting seemed never to have gone away. Most Sunday afternoons JohnMills and Richard Attenborough battled the Germans, depicting – unforgettably – aset of class-bound masculinities and moral codes, and offering, in a way that is nolonger possible now, a stable and commanding account of what it meant to be a Britishman. I watched them, semi-attentively, but absorbing much. If I had known moreabout my sub-continental heritage, I might have thought, even then, of the war and itsserial recastings, as a new ‘ocean of the sea of stories’, giving Britain what othercultures had long possessed, an inexhaustible narrative resource, characters and tropesthat could be recycled and played with endlessly.

But I did not see myself as someone who might be such a player. My father mayhave worn the uniform, but these were not my battles. I could not easily think of themas the ‘good war’, the great exception among Britain’s military adventures. Scepticalof the idea that 1939–45 were the years when liberty fought to the death with tyranny,I tended to be unmoved by most depictions of their heroism, suspecting that even inthe most tragic stories – Carve Her Name with Pride – lurked some deeper motivation,some quiet and disreputable legitimation of Britain’s role in the world. I was resistantto the ocean’s lure. To myself, at least, therefore, I owe an explanation of how I cameto work on yet another episode from the British Iliad. In 2001, and again in 2009,I worked with Adrian Jackson as co-writer of a play which, to some critical acclaim,told a wartime story of secrecy, deception and heroism. One reason for my involve-ment might be that I had written about the British before. Once Upon a Time, VeryFar from England (Sheikh 1997) was a play based on some of Kipling’s short stories,interwoven with some material of my own. In Kipling’s brilliant tale, On GreenhowHill, Private Learoyd tells with aching tenderness the story of his lost Yorkshire love,while he prepares the lair from which he will shoot an Indian malcontent. I intercut

*Email: Redbox91@btopenworld.com

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this, obviously enough, with what wasn’t present in Kipling: the passions and dissi-dent memories of the malcontent himself, ‘Sniper’. Perhaps this gave me a trackrecord of writing about ‘Britishness’, and British men, enough for Adrian to ask meto write a script for the theatre company Cardboad Citizens, of which he was – andstill is – artistic director. The script was a war story, Mincemeat.1

On its website, Cardboard Citizens defines its work and purposes thus:

● we present plays performed by homeless and displaced people, to share experi-ences and problem-solve together

● we work in partnership to widen the reach of the company’s work and underpinits support for participants

● we make theatre for general audiences so a wider public can share in thecompany’s learning and understanding of the issues faced by homeless people

● we enable excluded people to develop skills and confidence through projectsand workshops

● we meet the practical needs of homeless and displaced people, supportingthem in matters of housing, education, employment, health, career and personaldevelopment.

The company does work of many kinds, from Forum Theatre with homeless people,to theatre for a general audience, with actors who have been formally trained workingalongside others who have not. The project on which I worked fell into the latter cate-gory. My initial script provided a basis for the company to work on, for much rewrit-ing by me, and for writing, too, by Adrian as co-author. The final version wastherefore something multi-layered and the work of many hands, but those that didmost of the eventual shaping were Adrian’s and mine, with a few happy interpolationsby others. ‘Each of you sees it in your own earthly way’, says the play’s guiding angelabout the nature of heaven, and this will be true of the account that follows: it’s mytake on the play, with a general leaning towards what I think some of my major contri-butions were; but a more reliable attribution of who contributed what will have to waitfor the work of textual scholars.

What brought Cardboard Citizens to Mincemeat was in part, I guess, a fascinationwith the tricks of war, but more fundamentally a commitment to the homeless. It’sthe latter that provides the passionate vantage-point from which the company, and theplay, look upon the national epic: the upper echelons, one of the characters tells theaudience, are being viewed from the lower depths. Mincemeat is the story of a glori-ous episode in the history of British espionage and deception. In 1943, the AlliedArmies had defeated Rommel in North Africa. Now they were poised to invadeSouthern Europe. The obvious place to do so was Sicily. The problem was, asWinston Churchill pointed out, ‘Anybody but a damned fool would know that’.Operation Mincemeat was an exercise intended to disinform German intelligenceto the point where they became ‘damned fools’. A body wearing the uniform of aBritish officer was dropped in the sea off Cadiz. Strapped to his wrist was a briefcasecontaining documents identifying the landing sites for the invasion – not Sicily, butSardinia and Greece. Franco’s regime, as the British had predicted, passed on thedocuments to the Germans, with results that are well known. The defences ofSardinia were built up, and those of Sicily were not reinforced. The island wasinvaded and occupied in just six weeks, with losses that were horrifying – 5000 deadon the Allied side, a comparable number among the Italians and Germans – but

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apparently fewer than would have been the case without the deception. OperationMincemeat became famous.

In The Greek Myths Robert Graves gives four accounts of Clytemnestra’s deathand two versions of the end of Oedipus. The tale of Mincemeat, told many times over,in versions fictional, factual and factoid, has its own variations. Different protagonistscome to the fore, different denouements are offered. At the centre of all the variants,however, is the body in the sea, carrying so much information, reminiscent of so manyother stories (The Tempest, The Waste Land, I Know What You Did Last Summer…),yet anonymous and – indeed – anonymised. The ex-Cabinet Minister Duff Cooperscandalised his colleagues when he was the first to present it, in fictional form, asOperation Heartbreak (1950). In 1953, emboldened by Duff Cooper’s success – or,in a different version of the story, acting on government instructions – the intelligenceoperative Ewen Montagu brought out a ‘true account’, called The Man who NeverWas, and this served as the accepted version of the story for more than 40 years.2

Montagu belonged to an eminent Jewish banking family. Educated at Westminster,Cambridge and Harvard, he was decorated for his part in Mincemeat, and after the warbecame Judge Advocate of the Fleet. In 1956, his account became a film, featuringalongside Gloria Grahame and Clifton Webb, a familiar gallery of war-movie charac-ter actors – Geoffrey Keen (Sink the Bismarck!), André Morrell (Bridge on the RiverKwai) and so on. Montagu did well out of book and film, making (so one of our char-acters alleges) ‘£30,000 in 1956, according to documents lodged in the Public RecordsOffice’.

Montagu’s title plays on an impossibility. ‘The man who never was’ […] is at onelevel simply an uncompleted sentence ‘…who he claimed to be’. At another level, itsuggests an unresolvable enigma, a human without identity, a cipher. Perhaps a beingakin to Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) homo sacer, who – unrecognised, and lacking allstatus and connexion – can be deemed to be entirely at the disposal of a sovereignpower. Montagu did not want to reveal the identity of the body. He said he hadsolemnly sworn to the dead man’s family that he would not do so. But at the sametime, he felt the need to drop some comforting hints that would locate the body some-where within the familiar world of British society (and its upper echelons): the man,he told his readers, came from a good family, and this hint is well developed in thefilm. The reality, however, was closer to Agamben than to Montagu’s memoir.

In 1996, the researches of Roger Morgan in the archives of the Public RecordOffice suggested that the body in the sea was that of Glynd[wcirc ] r Michael. Glynd[wcirc ] r wasfrom Aberbargoed in South Wales. He had worked in the colliery there (at one time itwas said to have the largest slag heap in Europe). He had left Aberbargoed forLondon. He had spent some time in a mental hospital, had been homeless and hadkilled himself, with rat poison, at the age of 34. With the aid of an eminent forensicscientist and a coroner, Glynd[wcirc ] r’s body had been made available to Montagu, for usein Mincemeat. There is no evidence that any member of Glynd[wcirc ] r’s family wasconsulted about this contribution to the war effort.

Suitable material, then, for Cardboard Citizens.The play’s plot begins with the arrival of Major Martin in a bureaucratic, Powell-

and-Pressburger heaven, just as procedural as the one that David Niven escapes in AMatter of Life and Death. Entry is strictly regulated and Martin cannot get past theheavenly border control. He is not who he says he is, and must return to Earth todiscover his identity. Accompanied on his journey by an angel who is said to look likeCharlie Chaplin – I’d wanted Buster Keaton, but the actor, Robert Gillespie, looked

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more like the man who played the original filmic tramp – Martin arrives in the midstof the Mincemeat operation. He follows it through its various stages, backwards andforwards through the conspiracy: the construction of a false identity, with letters froma pompous father and a doting lover; forwards, to the loading of a body onto thesubmarine that will take it to Spain; backwards, to the arrangement with pathologistand coroner to snatch the body; forwards again, to a mortuary in Hackney where thebody is dressed in uniform and loaded with the trappings of officer-class identity.Martin at first looks on in optimism: perhaps he was someone significant after all. Hishopes sink as the layers of the conspiracy unpeel. In the final long scenes of the play,Martin and ‘Charlie’ track Glynd[wcirc ] r’s path to suicide, through the blitzed East End.

Reviewing the play in the Daily Telegraph, Charles Spencer (2009) wrote thefollowing:

Occasionally you turn up at a show with meagre expectations only to discover that youhave stumbled across theatrical treasure. Such is the case with Mincemeat … At first, weseem to be in for a ghastly piece of agit-prop as a van roars into the building full of angryactivists wearing animal masks. They pull a coffin out of the back and reveal an old manwho is tied up and submitted to hostile questioning about his role in the Second WorldWar’s Operation Mincemeat. It turns out that he is Ewen Montagu, a Royal Navy intel-ligence officer, who masterminded the famous deception in which the body of a deadmarine was deliberately washed up on a beach in Spain in 1943, manacled to a briefcasecontaining top-secret documents suggesting that the Allies planned to invade Greece andSardinia, rather than their intended target, Sicily. The idea that this brave and ingeniousreal-life plan was going to be mocked by a right-on theatre company made me foam withfury, but the opening is a trick, and the play turns out to be much more subtle and haunt-ing. As we are led through a succession of derelict rooms, conjuring such locations as amortuary, a bomb site and an air-raid shelter, Mincemeat becomes a moving account oflost identity.

I am grateful, and impressed, that Charles Spencer was able to set his first reactionsaside, and pleased – as writers usually and cravenly are – that the critic liked the play.But we wanted the play to be more than the account of lost identity that he recognises,and be more barbed and spiky towards those who ensured its loss. One of my interests,following my efforts in the Kipling play, was to ask the question: ‘how do they do it?’How do the upper echelons of England convince themselves of their good intentions,and present to the world a virtuous self-portrait, even while they engage in nefariousactivity of diverse kinds, trampling over Welsh vagrants and Indian malcontentsalike? The production took on this question. The deception committee that Montaguchairs is more bumbling than it is audacious, meticulous or any of the other positivequalities mythically ascribed to ‘Intelligence’. But beneath the sloppy and BorisJohnson-like bonhomie, is a view of the lesser breeds as both useable and disposable– essentially at the command of those who are certain of their place. In this scene,Montagu and his co-conspirator Cholmondley, are at the Hackney mortuary. Theyhave the body on a slab before them, and it speaks:

Body: Iesu Crist. What the fuck do you think you are doing?Montagu: Sincere apologies my Welsh friend. What must you think of us?Body: I think it’s a bloody liberty, that’s what I think. Have you got anyone’s

permission to do this?Cholmondley: Thank God there aren’t any relatives to worry about – think of the fuss

they’d make.Martin: I’ve got relatives … I’m sure I’ve got relatives … Everyone’s got some

relatives, if you really look for them.

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Body: Iesu Crist.Montagu: Our chaps made enquiries – not too strenuously.Body: This takes the biscuit.Montagu: What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over.Cholmondley: As long as we’re not going to have a crowd of grieving cousins after our

blood in five years’ time.Shrieve: Is this strictly legal, your lordships?Montagu: Silent leges inter arma. Which means…Shrieve: Everyone keep shtum.Martin: (becoming more Welsh by the minute): Fucking liberty that’s what it

means.Cholmondley: More or less.Montagu: The laws lie quiet when in arms.Body: Duw, if there was one place a body ought to go to get a bit of peace and

quiet – no such luck.Shrieve: There, done him. Now I don’t know what you want him for, but he’s as

good now as he’ll ever look.Montagu: There, all done I think.Shrieve: There’s a bit of green there though (wipes mould off the Body’s face).

What do we do now?Montagu: Kindly wait for us outside.Shrieve: I could put on a brew if you don’t mind it weak.Montagu: That would be nice, thank you.

Typing out these lines, I’m reminded, first, of how the scene came to be written:I wrote a draft, Adrian reworked it – some of the bite of these exchanges comes fromthat. I added a few more lines. I’m also struck by what’s happened in the multi-layeredprocess of writing. The cold command of Montagu and Cholmondley is plain enough,but other voices – Welsh, London – are just as strong, and the mechanics of the planencounter the experience of those outside the charmed circle of its devisers.

This brings me closer to what seems to me, when I look back at it, something likethe heart of the play. Its staging, and thus to some extent its script, were shaped by theresources that the company brought to it. An Ethiopian voice sang ‘We’ll MeetAgain’. Spanish became one of the principal languages of heaven. Present-day refu-gees walked across the play’s bomb-site, and the bomb-shelter where the playconcluded was filled with Italian and Irish voices. There was also a Welsh one. Myfather-in-law, Jack Jones, was from Pontardawe in the Swansea Valley. During themonths I worked on the play’s first draft, he was dying. He would phone me with frag-ments that he thought I would be interested in – a rhyme left on the answer-phone,songs, memories of the RAF and wartime London. What he had turned over in hismind did not always make sense to me. But rhythms and places, references and stories,found their way into the script, and added to its polyphony. In the shelter, a charactercalled Dai tells Major Martin some stories about Glynd[wcirc ] r – stories that may even betrue. They met on the A4, the road from South Wales to London along which manyrefugees from the Welsh depression had walked. (In the script, Martin is ‘becoming’Glynd[wcirc ] r; other characters, such as the Irishman Gerry, take other parts.)

Dai: We met on the road. ‘Where are you going’ he says, and I says ‘Spain,the war’ and he says ‘Are we fighting the Spaniards now?’

Firestarter: Ignorant bastard.Dai: Never knew anything, Glynd[wcirc ] r. So I told him about the fascists, and

how one thing led to another, and how they’d be here next. And I couldsee that impressed him. And I gave him a bit about the workers’ inter-national. ‘Workers of the world unite’, I said – this was tramping

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through some bloody English village – ‘you have nothing to lose butyour chains (THE INTERNATIONALE SUNG AGAIN).’ And he wason fire. Like a man possessed, hopping by the side of the road.

Martin: ‘Show me where these fascists are, take me to them. I’ll give them agood hiding now, this minute. Let me at them – bastards’.

Dai: I thought he was mad, then, like, though it wasn’t anything like whatcame later. … Anyway, in the end I calm him down and we get a lift inthe back of a lorry. Takes us to Windsor. With the castle and the statueof the old queen. Two scruffy taffs sleeping in the park there withbloody deers for company. Very peaceful. Didn’t do his back any goodmind. And in the morning what does the silly bugger do – he sees thesoldiers and the barracks, and in he goes up to the counter, and he saysto the sergeant, with his back all bent up.

Martin: ‘I want to fight.’Dai: And the sergeant says:Gerry: ‘Come on then.’Martin: ‘No I want to fight in Spain.’Dai: ‘We don’t do that,’ says the sergeant.Gerry: ‘We got no quarrel with Spaniards. Maybe in a year or two.’Martin: ‘I want to go now!’Gerry: ‘Come back in a couple of years and we’ll have a proper war for you.

Bugger off now.’Martin: ‘I will – I’ll bugger right off.’

This was the world beyond Montagu, that Jack helped realise. The dynamics of thecompany – the homeless experiences of some of its members, their different dialectsand languages – offered similar resources, that helped turn the writing in a particulardirection. This was to recognise and recreate a society of the streets and shelters thathad a despairing and vigorous life of its own, and that existed in a space beyond thescheming of government agencies. A running joke in the play – about ‘TemporaryAutonomous Zones’ – recalls the ideas of the Sufi anarchist Hakim Bey (2003), withhis evocation of ‘Pirate Utopias’ (Wilson 1996)3 as momentary alternatives to theworld of the powerful. It began as a throwaway line; it ended, in the shelter, as some-thing I thought embodied, and moving.

I have tried to show something of the multi-voiced nature of the play. In additionto the Welsh, the Italian, the Spanish, we’d had Churchill earlier on; we’d had someof Hitler, too. At the end of the play, there was time for two new voices – neitherenvisaged in the draft I wrote, both the result of someone’s responsive inspiration.One was that of Shakespeare’s Glynd[wcirc ] r, Owen Glendower in Henry IV, Part I. I havelearned in theatre that you cannot pilfer the powerful lines of others unless you haveearned the right to do so with the strength of your own work. If the work isn’t strong,the effect is bathetic – like a movie dependent for its (cheap) effects on a soundtrackof classic soul. I think putting in the mouth of Glynd[wcirc ] r Glendower’s angry lines toHotspur thrillingly expanded the reach of the play, so that the burning frustration ofthe dispossessed, the limitless passions of lives cut short and circumscribed found anew expression:

…[O]f many menI do not bear these crossings. Give me leaveTo tell you once again that at my birthThe front of heaven was full of fiery shapes,The goats ran from the mountains, and the herdsWere strangely clamorous to the frighted fields.These signs have marked me extraordinary,

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And all the courses of my life do showI am not in the roll of common men…

The other interpolation was on film. We showed part of The Great Dictator, a workwhose topic was suggested to Chaplin, oddly enough, by the Communist IvorMontagu, brother of Ewen. Chaplin plays a Jewish barber, mistaken, by turns of plottoo numerous to mention, for an anti-semitic dictator. Disguised as the dictator, thebarber makes the final speech of the film. It resonates with much that has happened inMincemeat, and serves as the generous antithesis to Ewen’s antics:

I’m sorry but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to ruleor conquer anyone … We want to live by each other’s happiness, not each other’s misery… In this world there is room for everyone, and the good earth is rich and can providefor everyone.

This was almost the end. But there was room for one more thing. When I had finishedthe first draft of the play, it was not uncritically received: ‘Farhana’s written a fuckingpromenade play again’. This was true, though I hadn’t quite intended it. My first expe-riences of playwriting were with the London Bubble Theatre Company, who didoutdoor theatre, in which the audience followed the play from scene to scene, andplace to place – a promenade and a journey. Despite the reader’s irritated reaction,Mincemeat, it turned out, suited such a structure. The production, first in the JamFactory, Southwark, and then in Cordy House, Shoreditch, led the audience from roomto room, taking advantage of the shape and mood of the buildings. More than that, theproduction was itself inspired by the possibilities of the location. The cold of the JamFactory gave us the bleakest of mortuaries. The cellars of Cordy House provided adark shelter in which the audience sat among the actors. And the metal roll-up door ofthe building allowed Adrian, as director, one final coup de theatre. Chaplin’s speechfinished, the door rolled up – and Charlie and ‘Major Martin’ walked out of the theatreand into the night-time street outside. The world was all before them, and all of itspotential was everyday and ordinary, expressed by the pedestrians passing by and theoccasional car. The contrast between this world, and both the machinations of thepowerful and the claustrophobia of the shelter did not need to be spoken. War seemed– momentarily – to have gone away.

Notes1. Mincemeat by Adrian Jackson and Farhana Sheikh, is published by Oberon Books,

London (2009).2. Operation Heartbreak by Duff Cooper and The Man who Never Was by Ewen Montagu

have been reprinted in one volume by Spellmount Ltd., Staplehurst, UK (2006).3. Peter Lamborn Wilson also writes under the name of Hakim Bey.

Notes on contributorFarhana Sheikh was born in Lahore and grew up in Putney. She has written a novel, The RedBox, and 10 plays, including Gilgamesh and The Flood. She is currently working on a playabout bombing.

ReferencesAgamben, G. 1998. Homo Sacer: sovereign power and bare life. Stanford, California: Stanford

University Press.

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Bey, H. 2003. TAZ – The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism.Brooklyn, New York: Autonomedia.

Sheikh, F. 1997. Once Upon a Time, very far from England. Unpublished play, performed byLondon Bubble Theatre Company, July and August.

Spencer, C. 2009. Review of Mincemeat, by Cardboard Citizens at Cordy House. DailyTelegraph, June 22.

Wilson, P.L. 1996. Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs & European Renegadoes. Brooklyn,New York: Autonomedia.

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