Growing Up In a War (16 page)

When Mr Hickford warned me that my thoughts might upset me I had not understood what he meant. I had always found this kind of thinking absorbing. It was frustrating, admittedly, because
I
did not seem able to find any answers to the simplest and most obvious questions; but this very fact made the questions interesting, kept me thinking about them, and held me in thrall to them. Out of that I got some sort of satisfaction alongside the frustration. But now I was frightened. I tried to stop myself from thinking about the future in this particular way. It was too terrifying to face. It became a taboo subject for me within myself, and I shied away from it every time it hove up on the horizon of my thoughts.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

AT THE END
of 1940 the Magees and the Toombses spent Christmas together in Market Harborough. My mother was there already, my father came up from London, and my sister Joan, now fourteen, came over from Huntingdon.

My father arrived with a pile of records and our old wind-up gramophone. It was obvious to him that my passion for music was developing at an express rate, and he was concerned that I was not getting the best stuff, which in his mind was orchestral music and opera. The only classical music I was hearing was the little salon piano pieces that Kath played. If I had been living at home, he would be taking me to concerts by now, but in any case there were no concerts in Market Harborough. Nor, of course, was there any opera. So he brought records of these things to leave behind. On his previous visit he had noted the tinniness of the Toombses’ old gramophone, so he brought our much better one, which he no longer needed because he had his electric radiogram.

He also brought a Monopoly set, which the rest of us seized on and played addictively throughout the Christmas holiday. As a game it still possessed an aura of novelty. I had watched it being played in London before the war, but had never been allowed to join in, if only because the grown-ups played for real money. They had told me that first-class passengers on the transatlantic liners played not just for real money but for the sums specified in the game. I grew to love it in a way I have loved no other board game,
in
fact few games altogether – billiards and snooker some time later, and then poker.

For a child, I became quite good at Monopoly. The top hat was always my talisman. My favourite game plan, if the fall of the dice gave me any chance of following it, was to make a determined effort early on to buy up the property sets with Whitechapel and the Angel, because the cheapest properties were the easiest to get control of, and if you could do it quickly enough you could build up a winning position earlier than other players. The game is very educative in how to conduct negotiations, which is what it mostly hinges on.

It was a glorious Christmas, with an abundance of whatever were the unrationed foods, and music in such intervals as we allowed ourselves between marathons of Monopoly. My sister Joan kept herself a little apart from it all. I discovered when I talked to her alone that she had a different attitude from the rest of us. The girls of Highbury Hill High School were would-be sophisticated young ladies who had been ejected against their will from the capital city just before they expected to inherit it. They looked down their noses at the country folk with whom they had been billeted in Huntingdon. They were much worse in this respect than us younger boys, and Joan, then embarking on a perfectly normal phase of teenage awkwardness and self-consciousness, arrived in Market Harborough with attitudes of this kind towards the Toombses – who, of course, objected to them, just as the people of Huntingdon must have done. The result was a silent stand-off between the two parties. But the Toombses showed themselves very understanding about it, and did not allow it to impair their relationship with me.

After my father had gone back to London I found myself the keeper of some of his records, and able to play them whenever I liked. There was Wagner, of course, but all of it (I am sure by design) straightforwardly tuneful, none of it slitheringly chromatic
or
‘advanced’: some of the more lyrical parts of Act III of
Lohengrin
, for example, and Act I of
The Mastersingers
. One oddity was a transcription for solo violin and orchestra of one of Wagner’s rare piano pieces, ‘Album Leaf’, a fill-up to the overture to
Tannhäuser
. There were excerpts from stage works by other composers too, for instance duets for tenor and baritone from Verdi and Puccini, and my old friend the ballet music from
The Bartered Bride
. The purely orchestral pieces were short – for instance Beethoven’s
Egmont
overture, and Mendelssohn’s overture to
Ruy Blas
. The nearest thing to a contemporary piece was
Rhapsody in Blue
. I realise now, thinking about it, that there were not all that many more records than I have named; but at the time it seemed like a cornucopia. I played them until I knew them by heart – and then went on playing them. Often, if I was by myself and had only a few minutes, I would pop into the front room just to play one side, which lasted about four minutes. The fact that these records were now ‘mine’, and the gramophone too, and I could play them whenever I wanted to, and listen to them by myself, made a huge difference to me. I felt I had begun my first free voyage out on to the open sea of music.

My mother, who must have been given a record token by my father at Christmas, bought a couple of records to add to this collection. Both were highlights from operas she had seen with him and enjoyed,
Madame Butterfly
and
The Tales of Hoffmann
, in each case a potpourri of some of the best tunes strung together for orchestra – or rather, in the case of
Hoffmann
, for military band. The Toombses were surprised at how much better their own records sounded on this new gramophone, so we all went through a honeymoon period of record-playing.

I was hearing again, after a long time, the sound of a symphony orchestra. And again, as before, it spoke to me in a unique way. My skin prickled into gooseflesh at the sound of the violins: the sound itself was beautiful, regardless of what they were playing. I
formed
a passionate desire to learn the instrument, and started badgering my mother about it. She kept saying no, it was too expensive: first of all you had to buy the violin, then you had to pay for lessons. But I went on and on about it, and in the end she said all right, when April came she would buy me a cheap second-hand violin for my birthday – not a good one, mind. ‘Do you promise?’ I persisted. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘What about lessons?’ I asked. She laughed and said: ‘There wouldn’t be much point in giving you a violin if you didn’t learn how to play it, would there?’ This reply made me tingle all over.

For weeks and months I lived for the violin I was going to get, thinking about it several times a day, and in bed at night. I peppered my mother with questions. ‘Where are you going to buy it? Who are you going to get to give me lessons?’ – and to these she always gave wait-and-see answers, accompanied by looks and body language indicating what a wonderful surprise it was all going to be. I ticked off the agonisingly slow days to my birthday, and feared they would never pass. During the night before, I hardly slept. I went down to breakfast in the morning almost uncontrollable with excitement, my heart in my mouth, expecting to see the violin on the table, and wondering whether it would be packaged or naked. I found a different present there. Still the penny did not drop. As I started opening the present I looked up at my mother and said: ‘Haven’t you managed to get the violin yet?’

‘What violin?’

I naturally assumed she was joking. ‘The violin you’re giving me for my birthday.’

‘I’m not giving you any violin.’

She was serious. I stopped unwrapping the present. I could not take in what she was saying.

‘But you promised,’ I said.

‘I was joking.’

This was flagrantly a lie, at odds with everything that had been going on for weeks. ‘No you weren’t,’ I said. ‘You promised.’

She laughed, snortingly and derisively. ‘Now you’re the one who’s joking. How on earth could I afford a violin? Where would I get the money from? Be serious.’ She laughed again, as if it had been obviously a joke all along.

I was reeling. Everything started moving away from me. ‘Why did you promise?’

‘To keep you quiet.’

In that moment it was as if the world stopped. She had straightforwardly lied to me, betrayed me, in what mattered to me more than anything else in the world. I was completely incredulous, except that I knew it had happened. But I could not come to terms with it. I went into a state of shock.

I had never liked my mother, but this was a historic turning point in our relationship. Before, I had thought of her as indifferent to me. Now she was behaving like an enemy. And so she was to prove at other points in the future. Only a few months later she put all her energy and determination into preventing me from being given piano lessons which my father wanted to pay for. And she was successful in that, too, for a time.

My relationship with Kath became closer, no doubt because of all this. I was growing up fast at this age, and becoming more of a companion for her. In music she had a special love for the operettas of Sigmund Romberg and Rudolf Friml, songs from which had been popular hits between the wars – ‘Indian Love Call’, ‘The Desert Song’, ‘The Donkey Serenade’ and the rest. She had the piano scores of some of them, and I sang from these to her accompaniment. The most popular of the operettas had been, and were still being, made into films, all of which she had seen. The leading stars were usually Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald, and Kath had decided that Nelson Eddy was her pinup boy. He was a good-looking baritone with a fine, if hard and
unvarying,
voice. I went with her to the Oriental to see the films
Balalaika
and
New Moon
, and became hooked on the songs in
New Moon
. I had been given some money for my birthday, so I decided to buy the records from the soundtrack. When I told my mother this she forbade me to do it. I was taken aback – it was my money, and I thought I could do what I liked with it. She said the songs were rubbish, and that I wanted to buy them only because of the influence of Kath. It was too much money to spend on records, she said – and records were far too expensive, anyway. I knew that my wanting to buy the records had nothing to do with Kath, and I insisted that it was my money to spend as I liked. We ended with a compromise: I could buy two ten-inch records, but no more.

When I told Kath and Auntie what had happened, Auntie said: ‘Why does she say the songs are rubbish?’

‘She says they’re about nothing else but love. And all that stuff about love is a lot of silly nonsense.’

Auntie looked personally affronted. ‘But it’s love that makes the world go round, isn’t it, our Kath?’

At about the same time, my mother did a parallel thing over books. There was a lending library just off the main square, near my school, and Kath asked me one day if I would change her books there for her, giving me a note about what she wanted. When I was in the library the thought came into my head that it might be time I had a go at one of these grown-up novels myself, so I picked out two or three extra and persuaded the librarian to let me take them. There was nothing saucy about any of them, as I recall: they were standard middle-brow commercial fiction, the usual lending-library fodder, which was positively demure by today’s standards. But when I got them home my mother was scandalised.

‘You can’t read those,’ she said. ‘They’re much too old for you.’

She was rattled and angry, and I was puzzled as to why. I could
understand
that I might try the books and find them boring, but I did not see how they could do me any harm.

She exclaimed about how wrong it was of the librarian to let me have the books. ‘What can she have been thinking of? It’s disgraceful. She ought to be ashamed of herself,’ and a lot more in that vein.

Next day she marched down to the library, with me reluctantly in tow, the books held savagely under one arm, and berated the librarian in front of everybody else there. I could see that the poor librarian was as much at sea about what she was supposed to have done wrong as I was. In retrospect, my guess is that my mother was rattled by the fact that I was growing up, perhaps even beginning to overtake her in some respects, and she wanted me to stay in my place. Also, I think, I was getting the backwash of years of resentment at the money my father spent on books and records which were of no interest to her, while the family was living in poor circumstances. She had come to look on such things (plus theatre, opera, and above all concerts) not as feasts that enriched our lives but as follies that were ruining them, and she viewed them with implacable hostility. I was to come damagingly up against this attitude for the rest of her life, which lasted until my mid-twenties.

The most immediate result, in the Market Harborough library, was that the librarian was ordered to allow me to take out children’s books only. Kath was to be left to change her own books in future, and I was to be kept on a diet of
Just William
and the like.

I had, myself, no sense of books or music being in any sort of hierarchy. The only thing that seemed to me to matter about any such thing was whether you liked it or not, or at least whether you found it interesting. I was constantly having the experience of finding myself suddenly liking something that I had not liked before, so I never thought of taste as fixed. When I played records,
I
played Beethoven and Wagner interspersed with music-hall songs and jazz, whatever I felt like playing. That unmistakable inner feeling that you got in response to some things but not others was the only thing that mattered; and you could get it in response to anything. You got it to differing degrees, of course; but even so, you either got it or you didn’t: no one could
talk
you into having it, nor could you talk yourself into having it. If someone else got it and you didn’t, that might persuade you that there was something you were missing, and you might give it another try. Lots of music of every kind gave me the feeling, and plenty of every kind did not, and as far as I was concerned, any of the former was better than any of the latter. Taken all in all, there was no shortage of good stuff.