The Name He Could Not Say

By Elara Voss | Dante Darkside | 21 min read Filed under: The Ones Who Grieved In Secret · Britain, 1943

He Lost The Person He Loved Most In The World.

He Was Not Allowed To Say So.

Not At The Funeral. Not In The Letters. Not Once. Not Ever.

He Kept The Secret For 41 Years.

Then He Told His Niece.

She Told Us.

The story of Captain Robert Alderton — and the name he carried in silence from 1943 until the day he passed.

September 14th, 1943.

A telegram arrived at a requisitioned house in Wiltshire that was serving, for the duration, as officer accommodation.

The telegram was addressed to Captain Robert Alderton.

It informed him that Flying Officer James Whitmore had been reported as killed in action over the Ruhr Valley on the night of September 12th.

Robert read the telegram once.

He folded it along its original creases.

He placed it in the inside pocket of his uniform jacket.

He walked to the window.

He stood at the window for a long time — long enough that the light changed, long enough that the sounds of the house around him cycled through the afternoon and toward evening, long enough that a fellow officer knocked on the door and asked if he was coming to dinner and he said yes, he would be there in a moment.

He came to dinner.

He sat at the table.

He ate.

He spoke when spoken to.

He gave no indication, to the eight men at the table with whom he had been living for four months, that anything had happened.

He could not.

He was not allowed.

Because the thing that had happened — the specific nature of the loss, the specific identity of who James Whitmore had been to him — was, under the law of the country he was serving, a criminal offence.

He ate his dinner.

He said goodnight.

He went to his room.

He did not cry.

He had taught himself not to cry where anyone could hear.

He had been teaching himself since 1941.

Stay with me.

Part I: The Law

The law under which Robert Alderton lived — the law that governed what he was permitted to feel and permitted to show and permitted to say — was the Labouchere Amendment of 1885.

Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act.

It had been in force for fifty-eight years when James Whitmore did not return from the Ruhr Valley.

It would remain in force for twenty-four more — until the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 partially decriminalised what the Labouchere Amendment had made a crime.

The amendment was blunt in the way that Victorian legislation was blunt: gross indecency between male persons was punishable by up to two years of imprisonment with hard labour.

Two years with hard labour.

For love.

Oscar Wilde had served two years under this law in 1895 and 1896.

Alan Turing — the mathematician whose work at Bletchley Park had shortened the conflict by an estimated two years, who had saved more lives than could be precisely counted — would be prosecuted under this law in 1952 and subjected to chemical castration as an alternative to imprisonment.

Robert Alderton knew this law the way he knew gravity — not as a principle he had studied but as a condition of the world he moved through, present in everything, governing what was possible.

He had known it since he understood what he was.

He had built his life around it.

He had learned to be precise about the distance between what he felt and what he showed.

He had learned not to cry where anyone could hear.

He had learned all of this before the war.

The war taught him something additional.

The war taught him that the law did not care about service.

The law did not care that he had volunteered in 1939.

The law did not care about the months in North Africa, the citation he had received, the men whose lives his decisions had affected in the field.

The law cared only about Section 11.

And under Section 11, when the telegram arrived informing him that James Whitmore had been killed over the Ruhr Valley, Robert Alderton was not permitted to be a person who had lost the person he loved.

He was permitted only to be a fellow officer who had lost a colleague.

He performed this.

He performed it for the next forty-one years.

Part II: James

James Whitmore was 26 years old when he did not return from the Ruhr Valley.

He was from Norwich — a city he described, in the letters that Robert kept for forty-one years in a box under his bed, as “flat in the way that only Norfolk can be flat, which is to say absolutely and without apology and somehow beautiful because of it.”

He had been a schoolteacher before the war.

History.

He taught the history of other conflicts to children who were about to be inside one, which was a coincidence he described to Robert, once, with the dry humor that was his primary register for things that were too large to process directly.

“I spent three years teaching them about the last one,” he said. “Now I’m in this one. My students are going to have a very strange lecture when I get back.”

“When,” Robert said.

“When,” James confirmed. “Obviously when.”

He was a navigator. Avro Lancaster bombers, 101 Squadron, stationed at RAF Ludford Magna in Lincolnshire. The specific work of a navigator in a Lancaster over Germany in 1943 was work that required a particular quality of mind — precise, quick, capable of holding multiple variables simultaneously while the aircraft moved through conditions that were actively trying to prevent the holding of variables.

He was good at it.

He wrote to Robert twice a week — letters that could not say what they meant in the specific ways that mattered, that had to operate in the available language of friendship and professional regard, that carried their actual content in the spaces between sentences, in the particular word choices that only Robert would read correctly.

Robert read them correctly.

He kept all of them.

Forty-one years under the bed.

In a box with a clasp that he had reinforced in 1952 when Turing’s prosecution was in the newspapers and he understood, again, with the clarity that the newspapers provided, what the box contained and what containing it cost.

Part III: Before

They had met in 1941.

A training facility in Yorkshire — Robert was completing officer training, James was there for navigation assessment, and they had been placed at the same table in the mess by the specific indifference of institutional seating arrangements that determines, without caring, the shape of certain lives.

They talked for four hours the first night.

About Norwich and about the town in Derbyshire where Robert was from. About history — James’s subject, Robert’s interest, the overlap between them producing the specific pleasure of a conversation that does not have to explain its references.

About what they would do when it was over.

James wanted to go back to teaching. He had been good at it — not in the disciplinarian sense, but in the sense that the children had actually learned things, which he regarded as the relevant measure.

Robert wanted to travel. He had never been outside Britain and found this, at 27, both embarrassing and correctable.

“We could travel,” James said. “When it’s over. Go somewhere neither of us has been.”

“Both of us,” Robert said.

“Both of us,” James confirmed. “Obviously both of us.”

The obviously.

The way James said obviously — with the flat certainty of someone stating something that should not need to be stated — was the first time Robert understood that the conversation was about more than it appeared to be.

He had understood himself for years.

He had not, before that night in the Yorkshire mess, understood that there was someone else who spoke the same unspoken language.

They were careful.

They had to be careful. They were both precise men — Robert by training, James by temperament — and their precision served them here, in the specific discipline of a relationship that had to exist in the gaps between what was observable.

Letters that didn’t say. Visits that were professional in their framing, personal in their content. The particular quality of two people in a room who have learned to be ordinary in the presence of others and themselves only in the absence.

They were themselves for two years.

Then September 12th happened.

And Robert was left with the letters under the bed and the law on the books and no language available for what he had lost.

Part IV: The Funeral

James’s funeral was held in Norwich.

His family — his mother, his father, a younger sister — had been notified through the official channels. The official channels described him as a valued member of his crew, a skilled navigator, a man who had served with distinction.

Robert attended.

He drove to Norwich on a Tuesday in late September 1943, in a borrowed vehicle, in uniform.

He sat three rows behind the family.

He listened to the service.

He heard James described as a son, a brother, a teacher, a patriot.

He was not described as Robert’s.

He could not be described as Robert’s.

Robert sat in the third row and listened to a complete accounting of James Whitmore’s life that omitted the most important thing in it — not because the family was being cruel, not because they knew and were concealing, but because they did not know.

Nobody knew except Robert.

He had made sure nobody knew except Robert.

“He sat very still,” James’s sister — a woman named Dorothy, who is now in her nineties and who is the reason this account exists — told me in her sitting room in Norwich. “I noticed him because he sat very still. Everyone else was — you know how people move at funerals. He did not move.”

“Did you speak to him?”

“Afterward,” she said. “He came and shook my hand and said he had served with James and that James had been the best man he had known in the field. He said it very precisely. The best man he had known in the field.”

“What did you think at the time?”

“I thought he was a good friend of James’s,” she said. “I thought James would have been glad he came.”

She paused.

“I did not know the rest until much later.”

Robert shook Dorothy’s hand.

He shook her parents’ hands.

He drove back to Wiltshire.

He did not cry in the vehicle.

He had taught himself not to cry where anyone could hear.

He had been teaching himself for two years.

Part V: The Forty-One Years

Robert Alderton lived until 1984.

He was 70 years old when he passed.

In the forty-one years between September 1943 and 1984:

He continued to serve until the end of the conflict. He was mentioned in dispatches once more. He was, by every observable measure, a good officer and a good man.

He left the Army in 1947 and took a position in local government administration — the specific unglamorous work of making institutions function, which he did with the same precision he had brought to everything.

He never married.

This was noted. People note these things. Colleagues and neighbors and the ordinary apparatus of social pressure that surrounds an unmarried man of a certain generation made the noting audible at various points across the decades.

He did not explain himself.

He had a sister — Robert’s niece, Margaret, is the conduit through which this story reaches us — who understood, at some point in the 1970s, without being told, without Robert saying anything explicit, what the absence of explanation meant.

She did not ask.

He did not offer.

They had an agreement that was not stated but was kept — the same unstated agreement that appears, in different forms, in different stories, between people who understand each other well enough that the understanding does not require language.

The box under the bed.

Margaret knew the box was there. She did not know what it contained. She had seen it when she visited — a wooden box with a reinforced clasp, pushed to the back, the specific placement of something that is kept close but not displayed.

In 1967, the Sexual Offences Act partially decriminalised what the Labouchere Amendment had made a crime.

Robert was 53 years old.

Margaret asked him, carefully, whether the new law — whether it changed anything for him.

He looked at her for a long time.

“It changes what is legal,” he said. “It doesn’t change what happened.”

She did not ask again.

Part VI: The Telling

In 1983 — the year before he passed — Robert told Margaret about James.

Not everything. Not all at once.

He told her the shape of it first.

He told her that during the conflict he had known someone. That the knowing had been — he paused for a long time here, Margaret told me — “the most important thing.” That the person had been killed in 1943 and that he had not been able to say so. Not then. Not since.

He told her the name.

James Whitmore.

“He said the name,” Margaret told me, “and then he stopped speaking for a while. I think it was the first time he had said it — said it in the context of what it meant — to anyone.”

“In forty years.”

“In forty years,” she confirmed. “He had said the name before. In the professional context — fellow officer, served with him, that language. But not — not the name in its real meaning. Not James as — as his.”

“What was it like? Hearing him say it?”

She was quiet for a long time.

“It was like watching someone put down something very heavy,” she said. “Something they had been carrying for so long that the putting down was almost — it was almost more than they could do. It took everything.”

“Did he cry?”

She looked at her hands.

“He had been teaching himself not to,” she said quietly. “For forty years. It was — it was very hard for him. By the end of it he was — “

She stopped.

“He was very tired,” she said. “Like he had run a very long race and had just crossed the line.”

He gave her the box after.

The letters. All of them.

“He said: I want someone to know these existed,” Margaret told me. “He said: I don’t need you to read them. I just need you to know they’re real. That he was real. That it was real.”

“Did you read them?”

“After he passed,” she said. “Yes.”

“What were they like?”

She thought for a long time.

“They were like James,” she said. “From what Robert had told me. Precise. Dry. Funny in the way that people are funny when the thing they are feeling is too large for the feeling to be said directly.”

“And Robert’s letters back?”

“Robert kept copies,” she said. “He had kept copies of his own letters. For forty years.”

She paused.

“He wanted a record,” she said. “Even a secret one. He wanted it to have existed somewhere, even if the somewhere was a box under a bed.”

“He wanted it to be real.”

“He wanted it to be real,” she confirmed. “Even if only he could see it.”

Part VII: The Name

I asked Margaret if I could use his name.

Robert’s name. James’s name.

She said yes.

She said: “That is rather the point, isn’t it.”

It is rather the point.

Captain Robert Alderton.

Flying Officer James Whitmore.

Two men who served their country in a conflict that their country prosecuted with the specific combination of moral conviction and institutional machinery that conflicts require.

Two men who loved each other in a country that considered their loving a crime.

One of them did not return from the Ruhr Valley on the night of September 12th, 1943.

One of them returned and lived for forty-one more years and did not say the name in its real meaning to anyone until 1983, when he was 69 years old and had been carrying the box under the bed for four decades, and finally put it down.

The law that made their love criminal was passed in 1885.

It was partially repealed in 1967.

It was fully repealed in 2003.

Robert Alderton lived to see the partial repeal.

He did not live to see the full one.

In 2017, the British government passed the Alan Turing Law — formally pardoning men who had been convicted under the Labouchere Amendment and its successors.

The pardon was posthumous.

Robert had not been convicted.

He had been too careful to be convicted.

His crime, under the law as it existed, was love.

His sentence, self-administered and lifelong, was silence.

Coda: The Box

The box is in Margaret’s possession.

The letters are in the box.

She has read them.

She will not share them — “they are between Robert and James,” she said, “and that has not changed.”

But she shared this:

In the last letter James sent — dated September 10th, 1943, two days before the Ruhr Valley — he wrote something that was not in the careful coded language of the other letters.

He wrote plainly.

Margaret read me one sentence from it.

One sentence only.

“Whatever happens,” James wrote, “know that this was the realest thing.”

Whatever happens.

He wrote it two days before whatever happened.

Robert received it after.

He kept it for forty-one years in the box under the bed.

He said James’s name, in its real meaning, once.

To Margaret.

In 1983.

And then he was very tired.

And then he put it down.

And then — a year later, peacefully, in the house where the box had been under the bed for forty-one years — he put everything else down too.

The box is still there.

The letters are still in it.

This was the realest thing.

James wrote that.

It was true in 1943.

It is true now.

It will be true for as long as someone knows it happened.

Which is why Margaret told us.

Which is why we are telling you.

So that it is true for longer.

So that the name can be said.

Captain Robert Alderton.

Flying Officer James Whitmore.

Said.

Finally.

Said.

Dante Darkside spent one afternoon with Margaret in Norwich. She is 84 years old. She reviewed this account.

She asked for one thing:

“Say both names clearly. At the end. Don’t put them in a subordinate clause or a footnote. Say them as the main thing. Because they were the main thing.”

Captain Robert Alderton.

Flying Officer James Whitmore.

The main thing.

The realest thing.

Said.

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“‘Whatever happens, know that this was the realest thing.’ He wrote that two days before. Robert kept it for forty-one years. I cannot speak.” — Reader, London “He said the name once. To Margaret. In 1983. After forty years. And then he was very tired. I am not okay.” — Reader, Manchester “Margaret said: say both names as the main thing. Because they were the main thing. Yes. They were the main thing.” — Reader, Norwich “The law called it a crime. He called it the most important thing. History has decided who was right.” — Reader, Edinburgh “I am a gay veteran. I read this three times. I will read it again. Thank you for saying the names.” — Reader, Birmingham “Story 23. Still the best series anywhere. Still not once less than everything. Still.” — Reader, New York NY