It was not until years after he had ignominiously left them in his teens that Ian realized he had only joined the Boy Scouts because his father had.
Ian looked up to the elder Whitgift, a King’s Scout himself, and an austere, understated, self-contained man of few words, as a model of self-discipline, courage, and restraint respected for his quiet integrity by his colleagues at work, if disconcertingly distant from his own children at home. He kept his own counsel. Self-disclosure was anathema to him. George Whitgift had spent several months before the outbreak of World War II among the working poor of London’s east end. He lived, until he joined the Royal Air Force at the outbreak of the Second World War, in Roland House, a hostel adjoining Stepney Green, named for Roland Philipps, a committed Boy Scout, friend of its founder Robert Baden-Powell, and a casualty of the First World War, who had willed his house to the Boy Scouts. George Whitgift had lived there with like-minded idealists, as an office clerk by day, and a uniformed social worker disguised as a Boy Scout in his off-hours. He was, to Ian, the living embodiment of Baden-Powell’s prescription of service, duty, and self-sacrifice even before he enlisted to help his compatriots, as Churchill had urged, save civilization in its darkest hour. By the time the war ended, he had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Ian’s mother had added lustre to the legend by telling him and his sisters, starry-eyed, stories of their romance: George had risked all by commandeering a friend’s Hurricane to pay an unauthorized visit to her in training in the north of Scotland. Both of humble background, they had met as children, as if by fate, after he had mistakenly sent her a Valentine’s Day card intended for her older cousin, and the rest, as they say, is history. They married after three years of wartime separation in 1945, raising three children, Ian and his younger sisters, quietly in the suburbs, George volunteering as a scoutmaster in his spare time.
On the family’s first overseas posting, George had enrolled his son in a Wolf Cub pack consisting mostly of sons of expatriates. It was run by an enthusiastic husband-and-wife team from Tulsa, Oklahoma, with an unfamiliar accent.
“Hi. I’m Mr. Mars, an’ this here’s Miz Mars. My wife,” he added unnecessarily. And that there’s our son Bread Mars. He’s one of you.”
‘Bread Mars’ alias Brad Morris, became one of Ian’s friends, but he was a much more proficient cub, earning merit badges by the week, while Ian could not, to his chagrin, learn to tie a reef knot or remember how to make a sling for a broken arm. He found tedious the frequent hikes above the firebreak in the foothills around the city in which they lived. Once, on a ‘Dads and Cubs’ outing, he had complained so much about a twisted ankle that George had rebuked him with yet another story about his cherished Spartans, the stoical fabled warriors of antiquity.
