Read Growing Up In a War Online
Authors: Bryan Magee
Growing Up In a War
CONTENTS
About the Book
This utterely compelling memoir opens with a sceptical nine-year-old Bryan Magee being taught the facts of life. It goes on to tell the story of the Second World War as seen through a child’s eyes. He experienced some of the earliest air raids on London, and his family home was bombed. Like more than a million other children, he was sent away as an evacuee, first to a tiny village and then to a market town, where he lived with two remarkable and very different families.
Growing Up in a War
nostalgically evokes the atmostphere of wartime England, the community spirit of a society before television, where very few had cars or telephones. A kid from the East End, he won a scholarship to one of the country’s ancient public schools and found the Battle of Britain raging overhead. During the school holidays, he returned to London and the air raids, the doodlebugs and V2 rockets. Wartime London is brought vividly to life, the streets teeming by day and empty at night, the theatres opening before blackout, and even the cheap restaurants conquering the challenges of rationing.
With the war over, Bryan’s school sent him to a Lycée in Versailles, and he explores the Paris of those post-war years. Then, back in England but still at school, he tumbles into his first love affair, with an older woman. The book comes to an end with his call-up into the army, and his unexpected posting to the School of Military Intelligence.
About the Author
Bryan Magee has had a many-sided career. In the 1960’s and 70’s he worked in broadcasting as a current affairs reporter on ITV and a critic of the arts on BBC Radio 3. At one time he taught philosophy at Oxford, where he was a tutor at Balliol College. His best-remembered television programmes are two long series about philosophy: for the first he was awarded the Silver Medal of the Royal Television Society, while the book which he based on the second series was a bestseller. From 1974 to 1983 he was Member of Parliament for Leyton, first as Labour, then as a Social Democrat. He is now a full-time author. His last book,
Clouds of Glory
, was awarded the J.R. Ackerley Prize for autobiography. His others have been translated into more than twenty languages.
to
Richard Cavendish
GROWING UP IN A WAR
BRYAN MAGEE
CHAPTER ONE
I WAS SITTING
in a tree with Teddy Green, talking about what I was about to discover were the facts of life. At the top of it was an intertwining of branches that formed a wide-bottomed, broad-backed place to sit, like a throne; and whenever this was our tree for climbing, whichever one of us got there first took possession of the throne, while the other one sat astride a branch. It was a favourite place of ours. We would talk there for hours.
Today I was in the throne. One of us had just told a dirty joke, and I was reflecting aloud that these sorts of jokes were funny all right, but it was such a pity we had to base them on a silly pretence about some ridiculous thing that grown-ups were supposed to do.
Teddy gave me a look. He was a village boy, and was used to animals. The conversation went something like this.
‘It’s not silly. It’s true.’
‘Garn.’
‘Yes it is.’
‘Can’t be.’
‘They really do.’
‘Gercha.’
‘Really.’
‘Corse they don’t.’
‘They do.’
‘Get away.’
‘I promise you.’
And so on, for a long time. Why I ever did start believing him I don’t know. Perhaps it had something to do with his manner and expression (he did, after all, know) and something to do with our ages (I was nine, he ten) and the fact that I had for so long been familiar with the ideas, and the meanings of all those naughty words (since I was about five), although it had never occurred to me to take them seriously. When, after many refusals, I accepted the truth of what he was saying, there was still a sense in which I could not believe it. How could grown-ups, of all people, do such a thing? Children, perhaps, yes, but grown-ups … How could they do it for laughing, quite apart from anything else? Did they titter and giggle all the time they were doing it?
Why
did they do it, if they wished they didn’t have children? Come to think of it, it was a dirty thing to do, as well, joining up the things they pissed with. How could they
want
to do that? I was mystified. Enthroned at the top of the tree I gazed out over a wide, sunlit green field, awestricken by these revelations, struggling to take them in.
No doubt Teddy and I went on chattering, but I have no memory of what we said. I remember only my thoughts, though I expect I was putting them into words. If this really was how babies were born then it must be how I was born. And that … no … yes … they couldn’t … they must … it meant my parents had done it!! The realisation was a thunderbolt. Never in my life had I been so gobsmacked. I tried to picture my mum and dad at it, and found this impossible. Yet I wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t, so I was a sort of living proof that they had. They must’ve.
In spite of my inability to conceive it, I arrived at the conclusion that my parents must have done it not once but twice – once for my sister and once for me. Of course, this was a very long time ago, and they had been different people then. Even so, it remained baffling beyond anything I had ever tried to get my mind round. And of course, there was the fact that they disliked one another, so that may have helped and made it easier for them.
But
I kept coming back to the question of
why
they did it. My mother had never wanted children, and she certainly wished she’d never had us. Perhaps it had been my father who wanted us. He loved us, that was for sure; but what a thing to have to do to get us!
I felt like a traveller on foot who finds a range of mountains springing up around him. Problems heaved up on every side, whichever way I looked.
Everybody
had been born the same way. So my parents had. And this meant that my grandparents had done it … And Norman Tillson’s parents … And all the boys’ parents at school … And everyone’s parents in the village … And everybody’s in Hoxton … Everybody’s … All the people that had ever existed since the beginning of the world. Obviously everybody who had ever had children had done it. And then, when the children grew up, most of them did it too; and then
they
had children themselves, and that’s how the world carried on – in fact it’s what the world
was
. Without it there wouldn’t be a world, or at least there wouldn’t be any people. It was a flabbergasting picture. The entire human world suddenly seemed phantasmagoric to me, grotesque.
I wandered around lost in these thoughts for days. As incredulity faded, it gave way to curiosity. I was sharing a bedroom with a girl called Gwen, a cousin of the Pammie Ainsworth who had wheeled me about in a pushchair when I was two. Gwen, who was eleven, slept on a divan in the diagonally opposite corner of my bedroom. I realised now that my grandmother was keeping us as far apart as she could. These were the earliest weeks of the Second World War, and we were having to go to bed by torchlight because of the blackout. Gwen and I would always natter together in the darkness before falling asleep, and sometimes, after my grandmother had gone to bed, we would get up again and play by the light of our torches, which we thought were fun in themselves.
Gwen
was a whole year older than Teddy, so one night I asked her if she knew about this incredible thing grown-ups were supposed to do. She said she did. But did she realise, I persisted, that they actually did it? Yes, she said, she did know that. I found this disconcerting and encouraging at the same time. Why should you have to be grown up to do it, I wondered aloud – I mean, what would there be to stop the two of us doing it, right now? She said she couldn’t think of anything that was stopping us. Well shall we have a go at it, I suggested, and see what it’s like? She was game, in a way that gave me the impression that she had wondered about it already.
The first thing we needed to do was get our pyjama trousers off. Then we used our torches to examine the situation. I found she had something I had never seen before, pubic hair, and this held me up a bit. I was familiar with pubic hair as an idea, because it came into the jokes, but it had never occurred to me that people actually had it. I had frequently seen girls of my own age showing off what was under their knickers, and none of them had it. I moved the torch in to a close-up, and examined the hair in detail, fingering it with fascination. It made such an impression that it is the only part of Gwen I now remember – I have only the vaguest recollection of her face. When I questioned her about the hair she told me that all girls got it at about her age – and then, she supposed, they must have it for the rest of their lives. This was another revelation – my grandmother … my mother … my sister … they must all have this hair. In some huge, secret way everything was turning out to be different from what I thought – and altogether more gamy.
Eventually we moved on to the main agenda – or rather we tried to. My attempts to insert my penis into Gwen’s vagina were completely unsuccessful. We tried and tried, but it was impossible to get it in. She did everything she could to help, holding herself open with the fingers of one hand while trying to stuff me in with
the
other, but it was hopeless. My penis was a tiny little squashy thing that just flattened itself against her, while her vagina was dry and tight-lipped. It was as if we were trying to force a blancmange through a blocked keyhole. After trying and retrying, and re-retrying, we were flummoxed. How did people do it? Assuming they did, which we accepted, there must be some trick to it that we were missing. We were unable to think what it could be. It was all so hopeless that we never tried again. But the mystery went on puzzling me for quite some time. It was more than another year before someone (a seventeen-year-old girl) explained to me that erections made the difference. I had had erections, naturally, ever since I could remember, but only occasionally, and they had seemed to happen out of the blue, unconnected with anything else, like having a pain that then went away. It had never occurred to me to think of them in such a connection as this. In any case, they happened so seldom that I did not see how someone could expect to be having one just at the moment he needed it. Nor did I see, still, how he would be able to get it in to that tightly closed lock, even if he had one.