Growing Up In a War (10 page)

Kath and I did more and more things together. She got on well with people, and had good friends among the girls she worked with; but they had boyfriends, while she, because of her obesity, did not. This made her find me a welcome companion. On my side, I had my schoolfriends, and spent a lot of time with them; but I found her more interesting. At first I just enjoyed her company at home, but soon we were doing things out of doors together. Her parents rarely went to the cinema, but she and I took to going together every week. Sometimes we went into the middle of town to shop – not that I personally did any shopping, but I liked going into the music shop when she bought sheet music or a record. I also liked it when we went to the library – it was then that I made the transition from novelettes to books. The dog, Flossie, a Jack Russell terrier who was part of the family (and was seen as often on the tea table as anywhere else), needed to be exercised, so we would walk her in the surrounding streets, or in Welland Park, or on Lubenham Hill. On these walks Kath and I talked nonstop. She was interested in most of the things that
interested
me. She engaged with daily life at a down-to-earth level in her factory while at the same time loving music, reading books, and being interested in ideas. Nowadays, as a matter of course, she would go to a university, but until after the Second World War this was out of the question for nearly all such people – of whom, inevitably, there were a great number. In spite of the age difference – she seventeen and I ten – there was nothing condescending about her attitude towards me, and we related as equals. What she taught me chiefly had to do with the bringing to bear of intelligence on daily life. None of my schoolboy companions could do this to anything like the same extent. And I could talk to her about thoughts that were going on in my mind unconnected with what we were doing, and she would understand and respond, which almost none of my schoolfriends did.

CHAPTER TEN

LOGAN STREET WAS
near the edge of Harborough, and I thought of myself as living a long way from my school in the centre. Each journey there or back was like an odyssey. I would set out through the garden, going out of the back gate and down the lane into Highfield Street. In walking the length of Highfield Street I might pick up a friend or two. We would turn right into East Street; and there almost immediately in front of us, on the next corner, was the shop that sold the things that mattered. If any of us had any money we would go in and buy sweets or a comic. In the same shop there was a post office, where Auntie drew out the money to keep me, and where later I was to start spending some of my pocket money on savings stamps to help win the war. We would encounter schoolmates in the shop, so an enlarged gang of us would emerge, and then, perhaps, start arguing in the street over sweets or comics, or something that had happened the previous day. We might have a fight there and then, or two boys would go at it while the rest of us formed a ring round them and watched; or the general argy-bargy might carry us round the corner into Nelson Street. Here the space widened, so we would forget about the fight and start a game. But we had to keep moving towards school, so our game would carry us on past the Catholic church and down towards Coventry Road. There on the pavement we would encounter local children about to go to their own school, beside the church, so we would set on them and terrorise them
for
a bit, perhaps chasing them into school. Finally we would arrive at our own school, behind the Baptist church, and carry on our games and fights in the playground until the bell rang.

I did this journey in one direction or the other four times a day, and each time it was crammed with incident. In or alongside the central flow of events all sorts of other things would be going on – two boys would be playing a running game of conkers, or swapping cigarette pictures, or telling dirty jokes, or one would nip across to the other side of the road to barge into somebody else’s game of hopscotch. These four journeys were often the best things in the day, and still bulk huge in my memory, like sea voyages. Among the most disconcerting experiences I have ever had was returning to Market Harborough as an adult and finding that each such journey covered only a few hundred yards, and is now no more than ten minutes’ walk, if that.

I remember boasting to one of the local children, on the pavement outside the Catholic church, how much bigger London was than Market Harborough. ‘It’s not just twice as big, or even three times as big, it’s twenty times as big.’ While I was saying this I thought: I’m overdoing things here. This isn’t true. He won’t believe it. And he did not believe it. But the truth is that London was several hundred times bigger than Market Harborough, and I myself had not the remotest conception of the fact.

I had little idea where Harborough was. On my daily way to school, when living with the Burgesses, I had passed signposts with names like Kettering, Wellingborough and Corby, but I had never heard of any of them, and had no idea what sort of places they were, or where they were. I never went to any of them. London, of course, was unmanageably distant. It was the common experience among us evacuees that almost no one in any of the families we lived with had been to London. Apart from Mr Toombs’s journey between St Pancras and Waterloo, none of the Toombs family had – nor, so far as I discovered, had any of their
neighbours
or friends. What they thought of as the big city was the county town, Leicester. Once a year the Toombs family organised a day outing there, a mammoth and magical shopping expedition which was preceded by weeks of planning and discussion, and great excitement. Because it was such a special occasion they returned home loaded with presents for those of the family who had not been with them. It was the nearest thing they ever had to a holiday. All this caused me to think of Leicester as so far away as to be beyond my ken. There was never any question of my going there myself, and indeed I never did. It was fourteen miles away.

The only places I went to outside Harborough during the year and a half I was there were some of the nearby villages, and not even many of those. While I was with the Burgesses, Joey and I had walked a couple of times to Braybrooke, three miles away. On one of these walks we had carried on to the little town of Desborough, a couple of miles further. Night began to fall as we were walking back, and we were afraid it would get pitch-dark while we were on the road and in open country. By the last stretch of the way we were jogging. When we got home we were angrily told off for being so late; and naturally, when we were asked where we had been, we said, ‘Desborough.’ We were not believed. It was considered too far away for us to have been there.

From the Toombses’, the village I went to more than any other was Lubenham, two miles away. I liked the walk that took you there, over the hill. It was on Lubenham Hill one night that I first registered that some of the stars were in patterns. It was a lucidly clear night, the sky amazingly full, and I tried to trace some of the patterns. I knew that stars, like aeroplanes, were actually big, and looked small only because they were a long way away. In fact I knew that they were bigger than the world, but looked even smaller than aeroplanes because they were zillions of miles away. And I stood there transfixed, gazing at hundreds of them,
lost
in wonderment at them for the first time. I felt an unspecifiable, disturbing intimation that since there were all that many of them, and they were all that big, our earth and we people on it could not really be what we …

Harborough was my whole world while I lived there, except for brief trips to London during some of the school holidays. In my letters to my parents I told them how much happier I was at the Toombses’ than I had been with the Burgesses, and they arranged to come and see me. I looked forward to showing my father off to the Toombses, but I puffed him up in such extravagant terms that Auntie began to wonder whether my parents might not be too grand for them. She became quite agitated about this. ‘Are you sure they ain’t swanky?’ she said more than once. ‘I can’t bear swanky folks. I do hope they ain’t swanky.’ I did not know what swanky meant, and although I asked her I could not get out of her any explanation that I could understand. To me now it is fairly obvious that she was afraid of being patronised, perhaps because my family owned a shop, and had a car, but above all because they were Londoners. She would have found it intolerable; and it could have ruined her relationship with me. But she need not have worried. When my parents arrived she found my father delightful – full of charm, but unassuming and likeable. It commended him especially to the Toombs family that he was good at both cards and snooker. It is so much easier to play snooker on a miniature table than on a full-sized one that he made enormous breaks, breaks of which they had never seen the like. They were as excited as I was. They were impressed, too, by his sight-reading at the piano. Knowing from me that he liked opera, they had dug out from their collection the score of
The Merry Widow
, which Kath rarely played because parts of it were difficult. The rest of us stood round the piano while he sight-read it with ease. I was ravished by ‘Vilya’s Song’, and the way his right hand floated up the keyboard with the tune: I thought I had never heard
anything
more beautiful. The hair on the nape of my neck bristled up harshly, and my skin went cold all over my body, and then stood out in goose pimples. I was transported to a degree I do not think I had ever been before, not even by other music.

The whole visit was a success. It created bonds between the two families, and made me all the happier to be where I was. After my parents had left, Auntie said to me: ‘I like your dad. He ain’t at all swanky, is he? Funny, you’d’ve thought he’d be swanky. But he ain’t.’

I am not sure about the sequence of events, but I know that after going to Market Harborough in January 1940 I made a couple of visits to London during the remainder of that year. On the first I went for the first time to an opera. It must have been during the school Easter holidays, because it was a birthday treat for me, and the performance was at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, which closed in the spring of 1940 for the rest of the war.

The opera, in this case operetta, was
Die Fledermaus
. As people did in those days when they went to the theatre, I wore my best suit, whose conker colour I still remember. I was with my father, mother and sister. We sat in the upper circle on the same level as the chandelier that hung in the centre of the auditorium. I remember my father saying to me: ‘Each sheet of glass in that chandelier is as tall as you are,’ which was his way of getting me to look at it with interest and curiosity. He had told me beforehand what the story was going to be, and already I knew the overture from his recording of it; but nothing could have prepared me for my reaction after curtain-up. It was as if the music was taking the cover off the stage action and letting me see the real thoughts and feelings that were going on inside the characters. It was what a play or film would have been if you had seen the characters’ insides instead of their outsides. And I knew it was the music doing this. It was telling you what was
really
going on. And
what
music! Occasionally a character would sing a bit from the overture that I recognised, but most of the time they were singing other things; but either way, it was one super tune after another.

In the first interval I asked my father: ‘Are other operas like this?’

‘Yes. Only a lot of them are better.’

‘
Better?
’

‘Yes.’

‘How?’

‘Well, there’s no talking. In this one there’s lots of talking. But in most of the others it’s music all the time. And with some of them it’s better music.’

Gosh. In spite of all the listening I had done to his records, I had not realised that opera was like this. I had heard it as music only. I knew there were stories and characters, because he had told me about them, but I had not understood how basic they were to the whole thing, or how connected they were with the music. I had, I suppose, unthinkingly assumed that opera was like what a film would be like if it were all soundtrack music. A new world opened.

The performance must have been on my last day in London, because in the next few days I was walking around Market Harborough singing bits of
Die Fledermaus
, and reliving the fact that with this bit three characters each suddenly shoved the same foot forward, and with that bit one tore his wig off and shouted: ‘I am Eisenstein!’ I went through it in my mind over and over, the stage action alongside the music, hugging myself about the way they mingled, not having realised that they
could
mingle.

From then on I went to opera nearly every time I went to London. After Sadler’s Wells closed, its opera and ballet companies shifted their base to the north of England for a couple of years, but revisited on tour during that time, and then moved back to London. Meanwhile there was a surprising amount of
one-off
opera in London during the war, even miniature seasons of it. Also there was the Carl Rosa touring company. All of them concentrated on the most popular operas – such as
La Bohème, Madame Butterfly, Tosca, La Traviata
– so these, luckily for me, were the ones I saw first. My special favourite was
La Bohème
, which by my mid-teens I had seen three or four times. Puccini was my first love with staged opera. I have particularly sharp memories of seeing my first
Tosca
at the King’s Theatre, Hammersmith, with Joan Hammond in the title role and Otakar Kraus as Scarpia. When I saw
Madame Butterfly
my father described the plot as tawdry (the first time I heard the word, which has ever since been associated in my mind with Pinkerton) and said that as far as the music was concerned we might just as well go home after the first act.

I was older now, and getting to be a better companion for him. Because I was living away from home, and was seldom around, he treated me as if I were on holiday when I was at home, and took me out a great deal, to theatre and concerts as well as opera. It gave him an excuse to see more of the things he wanted to see himself. Like most of the population, he was becoming much better off financially as the war went on. He was also launching me on a way of life that became habitual to me during the school holidays, and which was quite different from the one I lived for the rest of the year – going to live performances in central London once or twice every week. And because I was seeing most things for the first time, they had an impact on me such as few performances have equalled since.