Growing Up In a War (14 page)

At first I read. Sparked by Finky’s introduction to anatomy, I read a book called
Wonders of the Human Body
, which I found engrossing. It taught me most of whatever anatomy I have ever
known.
This was followed by
Lorna Doone
and
Hereward the Wake
– I think they must have been abridged editions. They transported me completely away from my surroundings. Since my favourite film was, and had been for years,
Captain Blood
– I had seen it four times – I read the novel it was based on, by Rafael Sabatini. So excited was I by the book and the film together that I felt impelled to write the book myself – not to copy out Sabatini’s, but not just to tell the story either: to write my own whole book. By this time I had had enough of reading anyway, and wanted a change of activity. So I helped myself to a pristine exercise book, wrote

CAPTAIN BLOOD

by

Bryan Magee

on the first page, and carried on writing. After a week or two of real effort I grew increasingly surprised and dismayed at how slowly I was progressing. I kept contrasting the amount I had written with the bulk of Sabatini’s book. Something was obviously wrong with my assumption that it would take the same length of time to write a book as to read it. The truth dawned on me that it was going to need several months of writing every day. And I began to think that if
that
was what was involved, it was silly to give all that time and effort to writing a book that someone else had already written. Only if I wrote a book that was mine and no one else’s would it be worth it. So I abandoned
Captain Blood
and set to work on an original book.

I had started to write books before, but never persisted beyond the first few pages. I would begin in a rush of enthusiasm for the story I had to tell, and then peter out after a couple of days. If later, after months or a year, I came across what I had written, it would look shamingly childish to me: I would cringe at the thought
of
anyone else seeing it, and tear it up. But now, with my newly gained experience, I approached the task in a more realistic frame of mind.

In the kind of stories I enjoyed reading most, the hero was a crook, or at least some sort of rascal, just as the films I liked most were those in which the hero was a pirate, or an outlaw, or a gangster. I was in thrall to the idea of the baddie as hero. I was still reading pulp novelettes, but also now a few proper books, presumably written for adults, about people like the Saint, Raffles, and Bulldog Drummond. I decided to write a book about a gangster who always wore a mask, and whose identity was a mystery to everyone, friend as well as foe, to be revealed only on the last page. I called it – and him –
The Masked Mystery
. I had no plan for it, I simply made it up as I went along. The whole thing brims with absurdities that are revealing of my ten-year-old self. The sort of thing I would do would be to have gangsters burst ferociously into a nightclub and, at gunpoint, demand ice creams from a terrified management. But I wrote it with my whole self, and meant it with the utmost seriousness.

The moment I began writing, I realised that I did not want anyone to look at it while I was doing it. But this meant I could not write it at school, where teachers would want to inspect whatever I was doing. So, after the first day or two, I worked on it at home, during spare evenings with the Toombses. It took months to finish, but finish it I did, filling two exercise books down to the bottom of the last page.

Because it took so long, I did not embark on the writing of another book until I was grown-up. This one, my first, unexpectedly survives, because it fell into the hands of my sister, and was therefore not destroyed by me in the way I destroyed my other writings. I cannot help toying with the idea of publishing it one day. If I do, I shall not change a single word, but merely paragraph and punctuate it. I would like it to be illustrated by pictures
which
I see in my mind’s eye as not unlike those drawn by Nicolas Bentley for the Damon Runyon stories.

My writing showed the way to my reading. Having started to write books, I now began reading them to the exclusion of novelettes and comics. I had long been in the habit of going to the library with Kath, and now I invariably got her to take out a book for me as well. When people asked me what I wanted for Christmas, or for my birthday, I would ask for a book; and it was those books, books that were mine, books I kept, that made most impact on me. Not surprisingly, people gave me books that were intended for children. One I considered wonderful was
A Buccaneer’s Log
, but I cannot remember who wrote it. I discovered school stories, and through them the existence of schools of a different sort from mine – schools where the boys actually lived all the time, and had fun. How marvellous, I thought, to be at a school like that. As I read about the intensity of the friendships that were brought about by living together, and the equally intense hostilities, the high drama of games on proper cricket fields and football pitches, the ragging of unpopular masters, the hushed excitement of secret midnight feasts in dormitories, the forbidden sorties out of bounds, the common life and practical jokes of the dayroom, boys having their own individual studies, and over and above everything else the sheer fun that everyone seemed to be having most of the time, I developed a nostalgia for a world I assumed would never be mine. What so held me about the stories was that it was boys just like me, not grown-up men, who were having the adventures, and that schools like this did actually exist, so that these things were going on in the real world. There was one writer who seemed in a different class from the others, a man called P. G. Wodehouse. He wrote several of these books, but his masterpiece, I thought, was
Mike
.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

INTO MY GARDEN
of Eden came my mother. Unexpectedly, she announced a visit to me, by herself, for a weekend. She travelled by rail, and I went with Kath to the station to meet her. She stepped down from the train in a hat that made me think of Errol Flynn in
The Adventures of Robin Hood
. Her suitcase was as big as she could manage. I did not twig, but Kath did immediately. Afterwards, she observed scoffingly, ‘You don’t take a suitcase that size for a weekend.’ As soon as we got back to Logan Street, and polite preliminaries had been gone through, my mother raised with Auntie the question of her staying with us permanently.

Now that London was being bombed nightly, a lot of evacuees’ mothers were turning up in Market Harborough to join their offspring, but it had never occurred to me that mine might. Many years later, I learnt from other members of my family that during the air raids she had become terrified to the point of near-hysteria. Hoxton was being bombed to smithereens, and night after night someone known to my parents would be killed, perhaps a whole family. Mine stopped sleeping at the Prince of Wales because of the danger of a direct hit, and travelled by tube every evening out to Southgate, where my aunt Peggy lived with her husband Bill. My grandparents did the same, so all six of them were sleeping every night in one of the northernmost suburbs of London, though they went on working in the centre during the day. That meant they were still, at night, on the edge of the danger area,
and
they heard the bombs coming down and exploding, and also the aeroplanes, and the anti-aircraft guns. Sometimes a stray bomb would fall not far away. So my mother carried on being terrified, with a fear that was not wholly within her control. The others began to be seriously concerned that she might have a breakdown. Some of them looked on her behaviour with compassion, others with contempt, but all agreed that the only sensible thing for her to do was to get away from the bombing altogether. My sister and I had been sent out of London for this purpose, so it occurred naturally to them to think of her joining one of us. That is how it came about that she came to see me ‘for a weekend’ and asked to stay for good.

Auntie was not keen. She put forward the obvious objections, the chief being that there was not a spare room for my mother to have – there had been once, but I now occupied it, and I was too old to share it with her. Auntie also pointed out gingerly that my mother did not know Market Harborough, and did not know any people there; and she would almost certainly not enjoy living in such a small town, because she was used to London. The Toombses would feel they were letting her down, were not giving her what she expected. And so on and so forth. The discussions went on a long time, with Auntie only too obviously not wanting her to stay. The crucial phase of the talks took place outside my hearing, and I do not know what decided them, but the outcome was that my mother moved in as a paying guest, sharing Kath’s room, and her bed. (It was common practice in those days for members of the same sex to share a bed, not least on visits away from home, for instance on holidays.)

It was easy to find a job in wartime, and my mother soon got one as a waitress at the Three Swans, which was then, as it is now, the best of Harborough’s hotels. The hours were always long, though variable. To be there in time to help prepare breakfast she had to get up at six in the morning; and although she might
be
free for two awkward periods during the day, she was not usually able to leave work for home at night until after the last dinner guest had left the dining room. As a healthy woman in her late thirties, living with a happy family, she could still have gained a lot of pleasure from life if her temperament had been different. As things were, she grumbled perpetually. The rest of us became fed up with this – repeated complaint is irksome even when justified. She went on feeling, as she had in London, that she was working hard all the time without ever having much money; and she remained a doggedly lonely person who never came to terms with her situation.

I was aghast at the whole turn of events. Getting away from my mother had been a motive with me ever since I could remember. When I left London to live with my grandmother in Worth, and then again with the Burgesses in Market Harborough, I may have encountered domestic unhappiness in new forms, but it had never entered my head to want to go back to my mother. With the Toombses, for the first time in my life, I had a happy family and a happy home. And now, like a bomb out of an empty sky, my mother had dropped in and was wrecking things. The destruction began immediately. For instance, it had always been accepted by the Toombses that, if a discussion of general interest got under way, I would take part in it on equal terms with everyone else; but on the first or second day after my mother’s arrival, she and Auntie were talking about something that was in the newspaper, and I started to speak, getting as far as the words ‘in my opinion’, when she rounded on me angrily and spat: ‘Shut up. You’re not old enough to have an opinion.’ She felt that the Toombses had let me get above myself, and that I needed to be put in my place.

She felt the same about the dog, Flossie, and objected to her being on the table during meals. In fact she objected, and said so, to a great many things that were taken for granted in the household, from having custard on everything to reading the
Daily
Mirror.
For herself she ordered the
Daily Telegraph
, which she had never read before and which I found nothing like as interesting – when your eye fell on the
Mirror
it was drawn in to pictures, but when it fell on the
Telegraph
it smacked into a solid wall of print. She upbraided me for leaving letters from my father lying around. Other people would read them, she said. I did not think they would, and in any case what difference would it make? She told me to tear them up after I had read them. ‘Never let other people know your business’ was one of her reiterated lessons to me, which she would enlarge on. ‘If you tell one bit of your business to this person over here, and another bit to that person over there, they will both tell other people, and then before you know where you are the whole of your business is known to everybody.’ I struggled to understand what this business could possibly be that it was essential nobody should know, and supposed it must be more or less anything personal. Actually I now think that that is precisely what it did mean. My grandmother was the same. In both cases, I believe the attitude had been created by prolonged experience of deprivation and desperation, which produced the feeling that survival depended on rolling your private self into an enclosed ball like a hedgehog.

But I did as I was told. When a letter from my father came I would stand beside the fire reading it and then tear it up and throw it into the flames. One day Auntie asked Kath in my presence, with pointed heaviness, if she had noticed that I always did this, and asked why it should be, and wondered if I thought that other people were going to read my letters, and said nobody would dream of doing any such thing, would they, our Kath? Shamefacedly, I said I did not think so either, but I did it because I had been told to by my mother. This evoked a lot of heavy harrumphing but no further comment.

I had worn glasses for reading since I was five, and my mother decided it was time to have my eyes tested again, so she took me
to
a clinic in the centre of town, where tests for children were free. When we arrived we found a row of broad-backed wooden chairs on which mothers and their children sat waiting, and we took our places. Someone explained to me that the doctor would need to be able to look inside my eyes, so to make this possible I was going to be given eyedrops that would make the pupils dilate, and it would take a little time for this to have its effect. The drops were put in, with me still sitting there on the straight-backed chair, and I was told to close my eyes and sit quietly. I did. I seemed to drift into some sort of internal confusion, and the next thing I knew,
Crash!
, an almighty smash that I was in the middle of, as if I had exploded. I had to struggle out of unconsciousness as if I were deep underwater, fighting desperately to get to the surface. When I came to, I was lying on my back on the floor, looking up at people bending over me, all of them talking at once. My vision was very blurred, which made the whole experience dream-like, but that was actually the effect of the drops in my eyes. I had fainted. I was helped to my feet, and was then violently sick. There was something especially horrible about the whole experience, something traumatic. And although I had never fainted before, I was soon to do so again.