Growing Up In a War (12 page)

George was a tough boy with a long, pointed, unusually determined nose and chin. His school cap (we were not required to wear them, but a lot of us did) was invariably askew, because when he put it on he picked it up by the peak and swung it up on to his head with a sideways sweep of the arm and then left it where it landed, so the peak was always sticking out to one side. He told me his father was a heavy for hire who worked the south London dog tracks, and he entertained me with funny stories about his old man’s adventures. We all, in our different ways, boasted about our fathers, and much of what we said was either made up or exaggerated: no doubt George was the same, but his basic story about what his father did rang true, and George certainly knew a great deal about it all. My father had taken me to greyhound racing tracks innumerable times, and had pointed out to me people like George’s father, and explained to me what they did, and the tricks the criminal fraternity got up to; so I was already familiar in quite a bit of detail with the setting of George’s stories, and much in them fitted what I knew. I envied him for having these stories; and this led me to invent colourful ones of my own, about my own father, to tell to him in exchange. Although my father could do no wrong in my eyes, and I loved him and my grandfather with unconditional love, I had always felt that working in a shop was an un-macho thing for them to be doing – though I did not regard them personally as unmanly – so I now fitted them out with a few semi-criminal adventures.

I missed George when his family took him back to London, and I never heard of him again. None of us were letter-writers at that age, not even the girls, and none of us had telephones; so when childhood friends were separated there was no more
contact.
George’s place was taken for the remainder of my period in Market Harborough by a boy called Stanley, who lived in Coventry Road, not far from the school. He explained to me that he was Jewish Orthodox and therefore had to be billeted with an Orthodox Jewish family, but at first no one had known how to find one in Market Harborough, and his seemed to be the only one. I asked him what was different about being Jewish Orthodox, and he tried to explain their ways of eating and drinking; but he did not really understand them himself, and got in such a muddle that I never understood.

The war had a great effect on anti-Semitism in Britain. Before it, I had been used, as a normal thing, to hearing people make anti-Semitic remarks, even though there was no trace of this in my family. But once we were at war with the Nazis it became taboo – as someone put it, Hitler gave anti-Semitism a bad name. So whereas in Hoxton there had been a certain amount of anti-Semitism all around, the only time I heard an anti-Semitic-sounding remark in Market Harborough was from Auntie, who was the soul of kindness, and had probably never met a Jew. There was a visiting funfair in one of the fields, and I was there with some other boys when the man running one of the stalls cheated me over my change and then brushed all my protests aside. As a child I was powerless to do anything about it. When I got home I told Auntie, and she said: ‘He jewed you.’ Each time she told the story, the word came up again. ‘Did you hear, our Kath? Bryan got jewed at the fair … Yes, they jewed him out of sixpence’ … and so on. I had never heard the expression, but somehow knew it was not right. This must have been due to my father’s teaching, plus perhaps wartime propaganda beginning to have its effect. The massive public indictment of the Nazis that went on throughout the war concerning their treatment of Jews had the incidental effect of driving anti-Semitism very largely, though never entirely, underground in Britain.

In fact the war changed everything, and children adapted to it as if war conditions were normal – which for them they soon were: the blackout (a total absence of any light at all showing out of doors during the hours of darkness, not even chinks of light from windows), rationing of nearly all the basic goods of life, shortages of nearly everything else, queues, regulations, the fact that there were almost no young men around, so that you only ever saw middle-aged and old ones not in uniform. Because social activity was so focused on what everyone called ‘the war effort’, most other things went by the board, and were either underprovided for or ceased to exist. No services seemed to work as they should, and none could be relied on. If you complained, the reply was: ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’ You were expected to put up with things no matter how badly they turned out; and on the whole people did: if a train departed two hours late the passengers made a joke of it, and if it then went to a destination different from its advertised one they coped with the consequences of that too with a lot of jokey grumbling. Such things were expected to happen during a war, and it was considered unpatriotic to complain. As government slowly took over responsibility for everything, the inefficiency and muddle that are natural to bureaucracy became a normal part of everyday life.

On the other hand there grew up, alongside that, a community of purpose such as has never existed in Britain before or since. We were all in the same boat, each one doing his bit. ‘Doing your bit’ became a dominating idea in daily life, and it affected everyone’s behaviour. These sentiments grew more powerful as the war proceeded, but they were already strong enough by the end of 1940 to be obvious. When the government appealed to the population to hand over all the metal it could for the manufacture of armaments, people voluntarily gave up the railings in front of their houses, the fences from their back gardens, and all the pots and pans they could do without. I was not surprised that
other
families should give up theirs, but I did not expect us to give up ours. Kettles and pots that had not been used for years were winkled out of remote corners and piled up in the back room, and even stranger metal objects made their way down from the attic. When Auntie and Kath could think of nothing further they could spare they took up hammers and, to my astonishment, started bashing holes and dents in all the objects. When I asked why they were doing this they said it was so that no unofficial person would steal them and take them home to use himself. This was too good an opportunity to miss, so I grabbed a hammer and laid into the pots and pans with ecstasy.

The peak occasions of our lives were those when Winston Churchill spoke to us on the wireless. Everyone – family, neighbours, teachers at school, other children – would talk excitedly in anticipation beforehand, so there was a great buzz and build-up. When the moment came, the whole family would be seated round the radio, waiting. I remember staring at the set as that voice tromboned out of it. The language was direct and clear: even I understood every word. But the articulation was peculiar to this man: a bit of snarl, a bit of bark, a lot of bray, sometimes a rising inflection as if delivering orders under protest, sometimes a melancholic, throwaway fall – I became familiar with its musical patterns. The message was always the same: defiance. We were not going to give in, ever, in any circumstances: we were going to win this war, whatever it cost. In each speech there would be a sentence or phrase that no one afterwards forgot. But for days people would be discussing the whole speech animatedly, quoting extensively and approvingly, while phrases from it crept into other conversations. Churchill was visibly taking people over, galvanising them, putting backbone into them. And that was how I too reacted. I regarded this man as speaking for me. No other speeches I was ever to hear matched these in the significance they had for me at the time they were made.

I think I was in London, visiting my parents, when the Blitz began – there is often a problem with memory of knowing whether something was itself a beginning, or whether it was just new to me. I was there for part of it, and I think I was there when it started. It evoked surprise and yet not surprise: surprise because of the shock of its happening, and not surprise because it had been expected for a year. I found it hugely exciting: the whistling and screaming of the bombs as they came down, the sound of each one growing louder and louder as it fell, culminating in the satisfying explosion; the fact that, loud as they were, you could not see them falling but only hear them; the weirdly earth-shifting crunch of the anti-aircraft guns; the lordly searchlights sweeping the sky, occasionally picking up a plane and clinging to it, chasing it as it veered and ducked, and suddenly being joined by another searchlight that crossed it at the point where the plane was; the elephantine barrage balloons appearing and disappearing in their beams. I would nip out of doors to look at it all whenever I got the chance, with my mother chasing after me to shove me back in. I took it for granted that the bombs would not hit me. I knew I was untouchable. Later in the war, as I grew older and more self-aware, I became terrified during bombing raids. But at the age of ten I found them exhilarating, as if each night was Bonfire Night on an unsurpassable scale.

On the first couple of nights I was asleep in bed when the air-raid warning sounded. My parents dug me out of sleep and bundled me downstairs to the kitchen, where we bedded down. On subsequent evenings they tried to delay my going to bed in case there should be an air raid. In fact, once the Blitz began, London was bombed every night for several months; but at the time people did not know that this was going to happen, so to begin with they looked on it as a separate question each night. If the raid was late in coming, people would start to think there
was
not going to be one. I would become sleepy and fractious, and complain about being kept out of bed. This drew bitterly ironic comments from my parents to the effect that whenever they had wanted me to go to bed I had wanted to stay up, but now that they wanted me to stay up I was insisting on going to bed.

My father arranged for us to spend our nights in a beer cellar in one of the local pubs, a few hundred yards away. It stood by the bridge over the Regent’s Canal, at the bottom of Southgate Road, and was called the Prince of Wales. (Its sign was a head of the boy-king Edward VI, who, as a matter of fact, was never Prince of Wales.) Over the coming years I got to know the publican, Percy Buckhurst, well. He had a full moustache and a deep, carrying voice, and was fully in charge of whatever was going on – every inch the host: hail-fellow-well-met, firm, but genuinely friendly. He liked people, but had no illusions about them. Years later I discovered that his pub was one of two beside the canal in which recruiting was done every evening for jobs that might not be legal. I do not think he felt a need to break any laws himself – apart from the licensing laws, naturally – but he had a good idea what the people in his pub were up to. In this he resembled my father, who was an appreciative observer of life, and knew every trick of the trade, but was honest himself. The two were good friends.

When we left home to spend the night in Percy’s cellar we changed into our oldest clothes, and took armfuls of blankets. All my life I have found it unpleasant, bordering on the painful, to have wool next to my skin – I have some sort of allergic reaction to it – and this was when I discovered that fact. The cellar was big, the size of the whole ground floor of the pub, but we and the Buckhursts were the only occupants. We were kept company by gigantic vats of beer, and the pub’s entire stock of bottles, empty as well as full. The alcoholic atmosphere, so heavy as to be
almost
tangible, was thick with the heady, pungent reek of stale beer. I quite liked it, though it may have had something to do with the fact that we were all frowzy and red-eyed when we woke up in the morning. In this state, dirty and dishevelled, still wearing the old clothes we had slept in – and probably smelling of stale beer – we made our way home for a wash and change, and a longed-for breakfast. By this age I had been so indoctrinated with the idea that it was important for us as a family – running a clothes shop as we did – to appear in the streets well dressed that I was acutely self-conscious on these walks home. For the whole family to appear so scruffy together in public felt to me an infringement of the right order of things, as if we were making exhibitions of ourselves. But I did not experience it for long. Either because I had to go back to school anyway, or because it was now looking as if raids were going to happen every night, I was sent back to Market Harborough.

Harborough was never bombed, though Coventry, twenty-five miles away, was, in one of the most famous air raids of the war. I watched it with the Toombses from their attic window. Logan Street runs up a hill, and from the top floor of number 34 Coventry is visible on the horizon – or at least the German air raid on it was. Actually, the scene was as if a volcano were erupting beyond the horizon, so that what we were seeing were the glow and the tops of the flames, and sudden circles of light from explosions, all coming from a conflagration whose main body was out of sight. For me it was like the Blitz again, though the familiar sounds of aeroplanes and exploding bombs were farther away. And the mere fact of having been got out of bed to watch it was enough to make it exciting. Auntie kept muttering things like ‘Oh, those poor people!’; and for the first time it crossed my mind that it might not be fun to be in the middle of what I was looking at. In the ensuing days the newspapers and the wireless seemed to be about nothing else, talking up the destruction of Coventry
as
a war crime. The people of Market Harborough, living so near, discussed nothing else either. And I found myself profoundly moved by it, simply because I had seen it and it was now being talked about.

CHAPTER TWELVE

WHAT TO DO
with me became a problem for my school. When a new year began in September 1940 I was ten and a half, and had another year to go before sitting the scholarship that was later to become known as the eleven-plus. This was an exam that everyone took, and it decided whether you went on to a grammar school or an ordinary school. I had already been through the syllabus of the top class three times, twice in London and once in Market Harborough. (A class existed for half a year.) There was obviously no point in going through it twice more. Yet what else was there for me to do?