Growing Up In a War (6 page)

In the concourse outside the station, waiting to receive them, was a crowd of empty horse-drawn carts from surrounding farms. Teachers and children were packed into these, and off they clip-clopped into the centre of town, driving other traffic off the roads as they trotted the better part of a mile to the cattle market. Here the children were drawn up in rows, each standing behind his suitcase, while local people walked up and down picking the ones they wanted. The attitudes of these people differed enormously, I am told. Most were decent people who wanted to do something for the children, but some gave themselves patronising airs and made loud remarks, even jokes, about the poverty-stricken state of the urchins in front of them, while others were sharp-eyed shrewdies to whom small sums of money meant a lot and who had spotted here an opportunity to make some. A system was in place whereby the children’s parents in London paid maintenance money into the post office, and the families looking after the children drew it out – so if you could keep a child on less than you were paid, you could make a profit. All chose according to their own values: some opted for the most respectable-looking children, some for those evidently in need, some for those who looked least likely to give trouble – and some, I am sure, on other grounds. It was an open market for paedophiles, some of whose activities were later to come to our astonished ears.

I do not believe many of the host families could have seen slum children before, and the condition of the worst of them must have been a shock – the dirt, the lice, the rags, the bony, desperate white faces. There were some that nobody wanted, and these were taken by churches and other charities who sent representatives. For each child a home of some sort was found, to which he was taken straight away, and from which his new guardian had to write
to
his parents informing them where he was. In a matter of days the teachers, who themselves were billeted with local teachers, were calling round at the houses checking on the circumstances of their charges, and telling them where and when to go to school. As far as Edmund Halley was concerned, there was a Baptist church in the middle of town with assembly rooms attached, and these rooms were made available to the school as its long-term home. Within days of leaving central London, with no idea where it was going, the school was in operation in rural Leicestershire.

Much the same thing happened all over the country, with countless variations of circumstance. To most of those who experienced it, it remained one of the milestone experiences of life. A small literature has grown up about it. One of the myths perpetuated by a part of that literature is that these working-class children were billeted with middle-class families, with resultant class shock and class conflict on both sides, but this happened in only a tiny minority of cases. In those days more than eighty per cent of the population were categorised as working class, and the overwhelming majority of evacuees were billeted with working-class families. In fact I never heard of one who was not.

My arrival in Market Harborough was nothing like as exciting as the one I have described at second hand. I went with my father, who had made arrangements in advance. London’s rail terminus for Market Harborough, St Pancras, was only two tube stops from Hoxton, and I remember the steep stairway up to it from the tube exit; then the station building itself, grander than any I had seen (it was built as a luxury hotel). Train journeys took much longer then than now, and it made their destinations seem farther away, especially to children. It seemed to me that we were in the train for most of the day, stopping at town after town that I had never heard of. I began to think of Market Harborough as being an immense distance from London, beyond all those other worlds that lay between. This assumption stayed with me all the time I
was
there. Yet in fact it is under a hundred miles from London. The fastest of today’s trains manages the journey in an hour.

Perhaps a word about distances and communications might help set the scene. In 1940 all but a small minority of people in Britain had neither a car nor a telephone, so neither the personal mobility nor the instant communication that are now taken for granted existed. People travelled outside their own locality mostly by train, and the whole country was criss-crossed with branch lines served by trains that stopped at every little local station and halt. Journeys often involved changing trains twice, or even three times – and each change could involve a long wait. These journeys were exceedingly cumbersome by today’s standards – even one without changing that can now be accomplished in an hour could easily then have taken three, if not more; and wartime conditions made matters worse. The cost, too, was a barrier. Most people were poor by today’s standards, which made a train journey something for a special occasion, unless it was done for work. Because of all this, most people moved very little outside the areas in which they lived – only a minority even went on holiday. The only ready form of communication with absent friends was the post, so people in general wrote a lot more letters than they do now. However, few had been to school beyond the age of fourteen, so not all that many were good letter-writers. What all this added up to was that travel and communications were slow, laborious and expensive, and people had far, far less of them in their lives than they do today. They lived in more self-contained communities; and because of all these barriers, the distances between them were felt to be greater. If you had a particularly close friend or relation in another part of the country, an occasional letter would pass between you, and perhaps a visit once every few years, but neither they nor you would expect much more. If someone you knew emigrated to America or Australia you took it for granted that you would see them either never again or not more than
once.
In Scotland, as the ship moved off, the friends and relations assembled on the quayside would raise their voices hauntingly in the song ‘Will ye no’ come back again?’ If their loved ones emigrated to New Zealand, a letter would take several weeks to reach them – so even a direct exchange by return of post would take some months. Since all these possibilities were improvements on what had gone before, the whole framework of assumption and expectation accepted it in a way that is hard for people to understand nowadays, when children grow up talking on the telephone from infancy, and go on to master e-mail and texting; when most families have cars, and there are long-distance bus services, and super-fast trains, and cheap air travel. During the Second World War in Market Harborough, literally years would go by without most of the evacuees being visited more than once by anyone from London, or receiving more than an occasional letter; and there was no question of talking on the telephone. For many, London had become impossibly far away. Market Harborough was now where their lives were. Many of them remained there when the war ended. Some are still there.

Market Harborough is a compact town surrounded by rich farmland. In the nineteenth century it was described as ‘perhaps the best headquarters in the world for fox-hunting’. But it owes its existence, its location and its character to the fact that it is halfway between Northampton and Leicester. These two county towns are two days’ ride apart, which meant that in the Middle Ages there was need for an overnight stopping place somewhere near the mid-point. In the twelfth century Market Harborough was deliberately founded to meet this need – it can be thought of as the medieval equivalent of a New Town – and was planned from the beginning to be a market town. The open space in the centre was vast, for the market; but over the generations some of the market booths became permanent, and were then replaced by buildings, so there are floating islands of architecture in what is
now
the High Street. One of these is a fourteenth-century church with no churchyard, thought to have one of the most beautiful steeples in Britain. Beside it is a tiny grammar school dating from Shakespeare’s time. The school was built on stilts to function as an umbrella in wet weather for the butter market underneath. So distinctive is this building, and so picturesque, that it has become the logo of the town. During the stagecoach era the High Street was lined along both sides with coaching inns; some are still there, others have left a legacy of coaching yards which are entered under open archways. In the town’s history, travel and trade were always the determining factors. After the stagecoaches came the canal, then the railway; but because the town had been a planned one from the beginning, it remained concentrated on its old centre, which has remained pretty much as it was in pictures made in earlier centuries – and is essentially the same now as it was when I first set eyes on it over sixty-five years ago. It was as different from Worth as it was from Hoxton, and I realised as soon as I saw it that I had entered another world.

My father and I went first to the billeting office in the Town Square, where I was registered, and then to the house where I was to live. We walked up Northampton Road until the house numbers were into the hundreds before we came to a terraced house, smaller than its neighbour, with a minute front garden. Waiting for us was a Mrs Burgess, a small, bony woman in her late twenties, quite good-looking though also hard-looking. She put me in mind of my mother, though unlike my mother she obviously liked my father, as most women seemed to do. Cups of tea were drunk, and I was handed over.

Through the window of the front room where we had been sitting I watched my father’s back as he walked up the path alone to the front gate. I was struck by what a beautiful overcoat he was wearing.

The following morning Mrs Burgess showed me how to get to
the
Baptist church in Coventry Road, where my school was. After that I was on the loose in Market Harborough. Provided I showed up when a meal had been prepared, and came in at night by the appointed hour, Mrs Burgess and her husband showed no concern about where I was or what I was doing. I was back with the indifference I was used to. And after my experiences with my grandmother in Worth, it was welcome.

CHAPTER SEVEN

MARKET HARBOROUGH WAS
such a little town – I doubt whether in those days it was much bigger than Hoxton – that we London kids treated the whole place as our manor. We overran it and made free with it, the more so as we had little means of venturing beyond it. None of us had bicycles, or money for buses, so we got to know few of the surrounding villages. In the town we played in the streets because that was what we had always done – whereas the local children went out into the fields, or played in the parks, which were (to us) surprisingly ample and close. We played in people’s gardens too, helping ourselves to their flowers and whatever we felt like taking from the trees. There were, I have since read, some two thousand London evacuees in a town of just over ten thousand people. For the resident population it must have been an unwelcome culture shock, almost a traumatic experience, but no such thought occurred to me at the time. The truth is – I am ashamed to say this – that we Londoners ever-so-slightly despised the locals, even though they were kind to us. As we saw it, we were from the only place that counted, the big city, London, and they were country bumpkins – well meaning, of course, and nice, but yokels. The grown-ups seemed to us slow-moving and slow-thinking, the children absurdly non-violent, innocent, gullible. Compared with us, I expect all this was true: almost every one of us, having grown up on the streets of Hoxton, was something of an Artful Dodger – always keen-eyed for the main chance,
unscrupulous,
dishonest, quick to use violence if we thought it would serve our ends and we would get away with it. We lied all the time as a matter of course. To the trusting, peaceable children of Market Harborough we must have seemed horrendous. They stood no chance against us, and we took away from them whatever of their possessions we wanted. During my year and a half there, there was very little friendly mixing between us – they played in their groups and we played in ours – though I gather that this changed as the war went on, as one might expect. We evacuees were an impossible handful for some of the families on whom we were billeted. Many reacted by making no attempt to control us beyond insisting on the basics of mealtimes and bedtime. Their ultimate sanction, which they resorted to frequently (it was happening all the time), was to report to the billeting officer that they were no longer willing to have us.

At school I loved being back in the playground atmosphere I had known in London, with ‘release’ still the favourite game. The girls had now been mixed in with the boys, but I was used to that from Three Bridges, and anyway the sexes played their games separately. The children in my class were new to me: my last pre-war term in London had been spent in the top class of the boys’ school, so when that term ended the other boys had departed from the school altogether. What had been Class Two moved up to become Class One, and these were now my companions – boys I had known by sight in the playground, but otherwise did not know. They were a year or two older than me, but I made good friends among them. Some of their personalities have remained alive in my mind ever since: John King, Alan McGouhan, Bert Grant, Ronnie Gentle, Eric Proud (hardly necessary to say that there was a running joke about Proud and Gentle). The school’s two leading lights and brightest sparks, Frank Hawkes and Cyril Mortimer, were too grown-up and sure of themselves to be aware of someone two years younger; but my researches for this book
had
the surprising consequence of putting me in touch with them again, because they stayed on after the war and made their lives in Market Harborough. (They helped me in checking my memories not only of wartime Market Harborough but also of pre-war Hoxton.)

The Edmund Halley school had been reduced in transition. The youngest children had been hived off and put in another school. Some families had not let their children, especially the girls, leave London at all, or had brought them home for the first Christmas of the war, because there was no bombing, and then kept them there. Others had tried to keep siblings together by evacuating them all to some other place, usually following the oldest, or with the mother accompanying. Two of the six assistant masters at my school had been called up, and two had gone elsewhere, so only two were left, though we still had the same headmaster. The two masters were Mr Hickford and Mr Fink, who had taught Classes Two and Three in Hoxton, and the headmaster was Mr Ogle. There was a nice Miss Engel from the girls’ school, who had taught my sister. These four made up the staff for a school of nearly a hundred nine-to-eleven-year-olds which consisted of two mixed classes, each of forty-something children. As usual in those days, the woman took the younger children. My class, Class One, was with Mr Hickford. I had been through its syllabus twice already, but that had been with a different lot of classmates and a different teacher – and there had been a time gap since – so I did not mind going through it again. In any case there was no alternative; and I quite liked Mr Hickford. It was to be a problem, though, after I had been through it a third time, what to do with me next.