Growing Up In a War (17 page)

If I knew a piece of music, I took it for granted that all well-informed grown-ups were bound to know it too. Once, in a bout of enthusiasm for a tenor–baritone duet from a Verdi opera, I asked Finky and Ogle what they thought of the singers Heinrich Schlusnus and Koloman von Pataky, and if they could tell me what else they had recorded. The two teachers responded in an amused way, asked me how I came to know the record, and exchanged approving little glances as I explained. I could see perfectly well that they were jollying me along, but I thought it was because this was ABC to them, even though they happened not to know the answer to this particular question. It would never have occurred to me that they had not the remotest idea what I was talking about, and that this was the joke between them. It was a long time before I realised that most people were not acquainted with, and did not even particularly like, the kind of music I found myself loving most. And when I did, I found it hard to understand, and even harder to come to terms with.

In 1941 we were all getting deeper and deeper into the war. One morning Kath came into my bedroom and woke me up to tell
me
that Germany had invaded Russia. After that I followed Hitler’s drive into Russia in the
Mirror
every day with such intensity of interest that I can still remember some of the cartoons and maps. Our government told us to grow as much food as we could, and even advised us what to grow – for instance rhubarb. Everyone grew rhubarb, and we ate rhubarb jam ad infinitum, not to mention rhubarb tart, rhubarb pie and just plain rhubarb (with custard). Unused land in and near the town was turned into allotments to grow food, and most families acquired an allotment in addition to their garden. The school had one, and my class had to spend an afternoon every week working on it. That was where I learnt to use a spade, fork, rake and hoe. I got a certain satisfaction out of digging up potatoes with a fork, but for the rest I found it intolerably boring. So I leant on my spade and chatted instead – to the exasperation of Mr Hickford, who supervised us. He made me work next to him so that he could inhibit me. Once, when he and I were digging, he asked if my name was Irish, and I said I didn’t think it was. It was the first time I had heard this mentioned, and it was a blank to me. He said he had fought his way through the First World War without acquiring any grievances against anybody except for one person, an Irishman who had done the dirty on him. This had given him a permanent prejudice against Irishmen; so he was pleased I wasn’t one.

The fact that all of us, the whole of society, even children, were working together in a joint war effort created a bond that I can still recall. It was a marvellous feeling of common purpose and social warmth. Self-evidently, we had to win the war, whatever it cost, so everything must be subordinated to that; and we all had this feeling of being an essential part of it. To many individuals it gave a sense of purpose and fulfilment that they never had at any other time, and after the war one often heard people say that the war years had been the happiest of their lives.

This warmth of comradeship flourished in a daily life that was physically deprived. There was no investment in the social fabric, so the look and quality of everything declined, became run-down and grey, tatty. The world out of doors was totally blacked out from sunset to sunrise. Basic foods were rationed; so was clothing. Everything else was scarce, so you had to queue to get most things. Long, silently waiting queues were part of everyday life, and many people spent several hours a week in them, especially women with large families. Children were often sent to do the queuing, or part of it. Factories kept their output up round the clock by changing over to shift work through the twenty-four hours. My mother and Kath were like the rest of the population, or most of it, in getting out of bed in the dark to go to work in the morning.

The factory in which Kath worked was a few yards beyond the end of our garden, its chimney visible to someone sitting in our back room. Previously it had manufactured swimming costumes, but now it was packing parachutes. Its chimney emitted not just smoke but noise: about every five seconds it gave a loud, vibrant belch that was a nerve-racking nuisance for everyone living near it. At one level of my mind I got used to it, and ceased to notice it, yet at another I was conscious of it all the time. The people in the neighbourhood complained to the local authority, but were told that nothing could be done: the chimney had once had a silencer, but this no longer worked, and a replacement was unobtainable in wartime. The factory had to carry on because it was involved in essential war work. So the people living round it would have to put up with it. (‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’)

Because Kath started work early she got home at about the time I got back from school. We would then do something together while Auntie prepared the tea – play darts or skittles, or sing a few songs, or listen to records. After tea I would go out and play
with
my friends most evenings; but sometimes I would stay in and play a game with members of the family, or listen to the wireless; or there would be a musical evening. The radio programmes we listened to were mostly variety shows, of which there were a great many, and which we loved. Radio then had the place in people’s lives that television was later to acquire: its stars were known to everyone, and their catchphrases came into everyday conversation. At school we would fling around jokes we had picked up from them, and would sing their songs – between us we could usually piece the words and tunes together. One of the comics we read was
Radio Fun
, the characters in whose strip cartoons were the radio personalities.

Some evenings, depending on the hours my mother was working, I would pick her up at the Three Swans and we would go to the pictures. Sometimes I had to hang around till she was free, and then I would chat to the other people behind the scenes in the hotel. The staff got to know me; and it was on these occasions that I met the owner, John Fothergill. What impressed me about him more than I can express was that he had written one of the books we had at home,
An Innkeeper’s Diary
. He must have been the first author I met. Needless to say, I had not read the book, but I was familiar with it as an object, and knew that it was about the job I was seeing him doing, namely running a hotel. He must have been the best-known hotelier in Britain at that time, because his book had been a best-seller in the thirties and was currently in Penguin Books at a time when Penguins were the only mass-circulation paperbacks. I saw him as an outlandish figure. He wore his hair to his shoulders, and buckle shoes, and went out of doors in a cape, none of which I had seen a man do before. Yet he was not effeminate. He had a wife and two sons, and was very much the boss, both of his family and of the hotel. He spoke to everyone in a direct way that I found disconcerting. He was simply saying what he thought and felt, but I had never
heard
anyone do that. If he thought you had an ugly face he told you so. Sometimes you could scarcely believe your ears. Most of his staff took little offence, having learnt from experience to let it brush off them. (‘Oh, you don’t want to take any notice of him. That’s just his way. He’s all right.’) Some could not cope with it, and left. My mother was impervious to his candour. She would probably have talked that way herself if she could have done so and survived.

I still possess two copies of
An Innkeeper’s Diary
that he inscribed to her, in one of which he had stuck that day’s menu, not even the size of a postage stamp. It is written in his own hand in black ink on a piece of orange card:

3 Swans

soup

lamb

stk & kid pie

rabbit

jam roll

treacle pud

cheese

Underneath, on the flyleaf of the book, he had added: ‘paper-saving device 12.12.40’. All this was his way of protesting against wartime shortages of food as well as paper, and disclaiming responsibility for their effects. All his menus were like this, and he wrote new ones each day, with great care (he had been an art student). My mother felt a fool when she handed this menu to a guest, who often could not read it because it was so small, which meant she had to tell him what it said. Not that Fothergill cared what guests thought – if he did not like one he told him so, and told him not to come again. My mother had many good stories to tell along these lines. But some of the most interesting things about him were things I did not know, and would not have understood. He had been a close friend of Robert Ross, who in turn was the closest and most loyal friend of Oscar Wilde. After Wilde’s imprisonment and exile, Fothergill visited him in France
and
stayed with him there. A mere eight or nine years after I knew Fothergill, the opportunity of asking him about all this would have been valuable beyond price, but it was wasted on me when I was ten.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I WAS IN
Market Harborough when a bomb destroyed my old school in London, completely, and made the rooms over our shop uninhabitable. This happened in a night raid, when my family and the neighbours were sleeping somewhere safer, so no one that I knew was hurt. The shop itself remained undamaged. It continued in business throughout the war, and for several years after. Eventually it was swept away as part of a slum-clearance programme. Today there is nothing there, just a small empty space.

After the bombing, my father had no choice but to move. Since he was already spending nights at his sister Peggy’s in Southgate, and his parents now lived in that area, it seemed natural to look for a place near there. A huge number of families left London during the Blitz – many thousands of rented homes were simply abandoned – so house prices and rentals tumbled, and he found he could hire a roomy modern flat at a low rent. The one he chose was in a block only five or six years old, built in the mid-thirties almost opposite Arnos Grove tube station, which is the station before Southgate on the Piccadilly Line. The address I now wrote to was 22 Arnos Grove Court, London N11. It conveyed nothing to me at all – I had never heard of Arnos Grove, and was not to go there until I left Market Harborough for good in the summer of 1941.

All this had been preceded by the so-called Battle of Britain in
1940.
This was a battle between two air forces, Germany’s and Britain’s, for control of the sky over southern England. The Germans wanted it because the invasion they were intending was guaranteed of success only if they had air control. The outcome was touch-and-go: the British came within a hair’s-breadth of losing. If they had, they would certainly have lost the war, which would then have been over altogether, with the Germans the victors – neither Russia nor America was yet in it at that point. As it was, the British air force – few in numbers and inadequately serviced, the pilots flying themselves to exhaustion – snatched the victory by the skin of their teeth. It is a heroic story, immortalised in one of Churchill’s most quoted sentences: ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’ Those pilots are still sometimes referred to as ‘the few’, and rightly so. They were not able to stop the nightly bombing of London, but it was only through them that Britain remained in the war, to become three years later an indispensable launching pad for the invasion of western Europe by, chiefly, the Americans. This was true liberation for the whole of western Europe, which, without it, would have faced ‘liberation’ and domination by Stalin as the only alternative to Nazi occupation.

Although the Germans crucially failed to gain air control over Britain, their nightly bombing of London went on until May 1941. The wonderfulness when it stopped included the fact that my mother returned to London, leaving me to be happy again.

At the end of the school year, that summer, I sat for the scholarship, as did my classmates. It was a school from which rarely more than one child a year would be expected to pass. The previous year it had been a boy called John King, but his parents would not let him go to a grammar school, for fear he might ‘get above himself’, as they put it – might think he was too good for them. The year before, in London, it had been a boy called Bourne, very clever – I do not know what became of him. This
year
it turned out to be me. That surprised me, because I knew of at least one serious mistake I had made in the examination. This had been invigilated by the headmaster, Mr Ogle, who walked round the room from boy to boy, gazing down thoughtfully but silently at their answers as they wrote. Afterwards he explained to me a mistake I had made in the arithmetic paper, resulting in a wrong answer. When I heard this I thought: Well that’s it, then. No grammar school for me.

But I was passed, the only pass in the school. There seemed to be some question about what school I should go to next – not, apparently, the grammar school in Market Harborough. Grammar schools in those days still charged fees, and for children who got scholarships these were paid by local government; and the local authority in Market Harborough was willing to pay only for local children. I would have to go to a school which was contributed to by the London County Council. So it looked as if I would be sent to a London grammar school that had been evacuated somewhere else, in the way my sister’s had to Huntingdon. I waited to be told which one.

Meanwhile, knowing I would not be coming back to Market Harborough, I went to London for the summer and stayed in my parents’ flat for the first time. Never having been there before, and knowing that I was not going to stay for long, I found I no longer thought of my parents’ home as my home. In fact it was with reluctance that I had left Market Harborough. I had been happier there than anywhere else in my life. To this day I have a special affection for it.

My regret increased when I looked around in Arnos Grove. This was unknown territory. I was not acquainted with a soul there, did not know even such shops as there were, or the streets, or the names of the streets – rows and rows of anonymous houses that were there only because railway and tube stations were nearby. It was unrecognisably different from any environment I had
known,
and it felt like a desert. To a degree that was almost disturbing I found it empty and alien. There was, so to speak, nothing there, no oxygen for me to breathe. To do anything, even fairly basic shopping, one had to go somewhere else. From that time onward I paid three visits a year to it until I joined the army, but only for brief stays, and never got to know it properly. I never felt it belonged to me or to my life, as I had felt so strongly about Hoxton and Market Harborough. That experience implanted in me a dislike of suburbs, an active hostility to them that has remained with me ever since, though I am belatedly coming to realise the occasional unfairness of this.