Growing Up In a War (9 page)

For years I accepted what the unknown lady had told me, knowing no reason not to. But as a grown man, on a visit to the family I was then sent to live with, I was told what had actually happened. Mrs Burgess’s sister had hanged herself in the house next door, and had left a suicide note blaming Mrs Burgess.

I was taken in by a family called Toombs, who lived at 34 Logan Street. They told me I would be there for only a few days before
being
sent to somewhere more permanent, but this was just a cover story to conceal the fact that I was on probation. I stayed a year and a half. It was my first experience of happy family life, which came as a revelation.

Mr and Mrs Toombs were in their middle or late fifties. They had had six children, all of whom were now grown-up, and five of whom no longer lived with them. Mrs Toombs was later to tell me that she took me in because she missed having children around. Her name was Eva, but she told me to call her ‘Auntie’ (I had always called Mrs Burgess ‘Mrs Burgess’). She was a motherly but no-nonsense woman who lived almost permanently in an apron. Her dead-straight hair had been chopped off halfway down her head in a straight line all the way round, and had an amputated look which I never liked. Her two oldest children were in their mid-thirties now, married, and living in more distant parts of the Midlands. Three others were married and living in Harborough. The youngest, Kath, was seventeen, unmarried and living at home. She worked in a factory that stood almost immediately outside the back gate.

Mr Toombs managed a grocery shop in the High Street, the main grocery shop in town. It was one of a chain called Maypole which I think had branches all over the country, certainly all over the Midlands and the north. He had been with them since leaving school, working his way up from grocer’s lad, through jobs in Evesham and Leamington Spa delivering groceries by pony and trap, until finally he came to Market Harborough as a manager. To me he remained distant – I have an idea he had not been enthusiastic about taking a strange child into the house, after having at long last got free of his own. He was not unkind to me, but paid me little attention. He had a tendency to grumble in a humorous, good-natured way that his family teased him about. Typically of this, he told me he had a low opinion of London. He had passed through it as a soldier during the First World War on
the
way to Flanders, and had seen it all the way from St Pancras station to Waterloo. Upstairs in the attic was a German helmet with a bullet hole in it, a souvenir he had brought back from the trenches. I was curious to know if he had killed the man in the helmet, but he would not tell me – in fact, he would not tell me if he had killed anybody. (I am pretty sure he had.) He still looked like a cartoon of a First World War soldier, with what people used to call an Old Bill moustache; and he had the military virtues of doggedness, integrity, and a willingness to take responsibility. I always thought of him as belonging to the last war.

Kath was obese, owing to some glandular condition that no one knew how to cure. Not tall, she looked as wide as she was high, and therefore globular. As a number of fat people do, she moved with light-toed elegance. I had noticed this when I had seen her, once, before I knew her. I had been with the Burgesses and Joey, and the four of us had been heading up to the top of Logan Street to walk along the frozen canal when we passed Kath walking the dog (whom I now knew to be Flossie). We had made some crude joke among ourselves about her fatness, and then in the very act of laughing I had noticed how gracefully she walked. It disconcerted me, because it made my laugh feel suddenly on the wrong side of my face. For that reason the incident had stayed in my mind. And now here she was. On the day of my arrival – new and awkward, not quite ten years old – I was introduced to her when she came home from work. As she flopped heavily down on the settee in the corner of the living room I said, laughing shyly (by way of a joke meant to hold out a hand of friendship), ‘Mind the couch don’t bust.’

She scowled at this and said nothing. Seeing her expression, Auntie asked her: ‘What did he say?’

‘Mind the couch don’t bust.’

Auntie rounded on me. ‘Don’t you be rude to our Kath. If you’re going to talk like that you won’t be able to stay here.’

I shrank into myself. I had meant well. Never again did I refer to Kath’s fatness, though she was to become, for over a year, my closest friend.

The two of them showed me round the house. The family did nearly all its living in what they called the back room, looking down to the garden, eating their meals at a dining table set against one wall, and sitting around the rest of the room on armchairs and the settee. Leading off it in the direction of the garden was a kitchen-cum-scullery, tacked on as an extension, and quite sizeable. At the scullery sink was a cold-water pump, which must at one time have been out of doors. Out of doors still, in the little concrete yard before the garden started, was the lavatory. On the other side of the house, facing the street, was what they referred to as the front room, and here there was an upright piano and a gramophone, and other musical instruments. They showed me a zither, something I had not seen before, and a Hawaiian guitar, which I had seen in films. There was a mouth organ. Auntie told me I must never touch any of the instruments, as they were delicate, easily broken. In one corner was a pile of records. Auntie looked more and more thoughtful. ‘I think you’d better always ask me before you come into this room,’ she said.

I told her I was used to playing records by myself on the gramophone at home.

‘Even so,’ she said firmly.

She played me a tune on the zither to show me how it was done – a before-my-time popular song called ‘Rainbow Valley’. It was not much of a tune, I thought, but it looked so easy that I thought I could play it myself.

‘The trouble with a zither is, the strings break,’ she said. ‘And when they do you can’t replace them.’ Then in her firm voice again: ‘That’s why you mustn’t touch it.’

She opened the lid of the piano and plonked her fingers down
on
a few of the keys at random, to let me hear the sound. Then she said: ‘Come on, our Kath. Give us a tune.’

Kath opened the piano seat, which turned out to be full of sheet music, took out a piece, set it on the rest, sat down and played it. It was a popular song I knew. I was mesmerised. It seemed to me indescribably wonderful that she could do this. She played well, with a bounce in the rhythm and a sense of freedom in the style, her podgy fingers rippling over the keyboard with accuracy and assurance. I was so impressed that I was almost speechless, but I did manage to ask her: ‘Do you have lessons?’

‘Not any more. I used to.’

‘Why not?’

‘I wasn’t getting any better.’

When she finished playing, Auntie said to me – perhaps warned by my reaction – ‘You can come in here with our Kath, but you must never, ever touch the piano yourself. Do you hear that? Never touch the piano. If you do, I won’t have you here any more.’

The room they gave me was on the first floor, overlooking the garden. It was the first time in my life that I had had a whole room just for me. As well as a wardrobe, a chest of drawers and a bed – the biggest I had had to myself – it contained a table and a chair by the window. The house as a whole was quite big by my standards – only two storeys, but with more rooms than I was used to, and an attic on top of those. They had, of course, needed every square inch of this space when their six children were at home. The Toombses did not own it but, like nearly all house-dwellers at that time, rented it. (The figure of fifteen shillings a week is in my mind, but that could well be wrong.)

A lot of things about the way the Toombses lived were new to me. Whatever the pudding was at dinner, they poured hot custard over it, as they did on tinned or stewed fruit at tea: ‘custard with everything’ seemed to be their motto. In Hoxton we had used either the top of the milk or nothing at all – real cream only with
guests,
unless we were broke, in which case we had custard. Instead of eating their Yorkshire pudding with the meat course, they ate it afterwards, as, literally, a pudding, covered with jam. Pots of tea were made at all hours of the day, not only with meals. On Sundays it was as if we drank tea all day, using the same leaves over and over again, gingering them up now and then with a fresh pinch.

Most of our food came from the Maypole. Mr Toombs was strict about not letting his family have more than their rations. I often heard Auntie try to cajole him out of this, but I do not think she succeeded. Even so, we ate well. There was always plenty of unrationed food: vegetables and fruit were never rationed during the war, and nor, until after it was over, was bread. Nor was game: we ate lots of rabbit, which I loved in spite of the agony of biting on bits of shot.

The newspaper that came into the home every day was the
Daily Mirror
. It was new to me, and I took to it immediately. Its big, bold, high-quality photographs would have been better teaching aids for my father than the pictures he had used from the
News Chronicle
to interest me in the news, and they helped me to get interested by myself. The family talked about the
Mirror
as if it were an oracle – ‘Have you seen today’s
Mirror?
… The
Mirror
says … According to the
Mirror
’ – an attitude to a newspaper I had not encountered before, and one which encouraged me to look at it. I passed straight over what I thought of as women’s things, such as cookery and clothes, and devoted the cream of my attention to the strip cartoons and the letters. The letters maintained a fiction, which I took literally, that they were answered by two unbelievably ancient men who referred to themselves as ‘the Old Codgers’. They were familiars of my daily life. I read more and more of the news, partly because it pulled me in like a serial; and when real fighting began I was hooked. Every day the paper printed sketch-maps of the battle fronts, with all the names in block capitals, and huge arrows showing where the armies were
moving.
And every day brought new developments in the story. It was more exciting than a comic. And it was real. As far as the war was concerned, there was never any question of my confusing fiction and reality. I was too much part of the war myself, and it dominated all the most important aspects of my life.

Because I was a child throughout the war – nine when it started, fifteen when it ended – it never occurred to me that England could possibly lose. I took it for granted, as a fact, not a judgement, that however bad things might get, England was bound to win. So when I heard adults expressing a fear of possible defeat – as in 1940 quite a few did, and with reason – I thought they were not just cowards but stupid, because they were failing to grasp the obvious. However, there was no defeatism in the Toombs household. The decisive fact, as far as Mr Toombs was concerned, was that we had beaten the Germans last time, and this proved that we were better than they were, so we could beat them again. We were only having this war at all because they had not learnt their lesson. This time we would teach it to them properly.

There was a collective hedonism about the Toombs family that was new to me. I was used to living in a family in which each one went his own way. My father and grandfather took it for granted that the serious purpose of living was to enjoy oneself, but they also took it for granted that enjoyment was outside the home – for them in such things as horse-racing and theatre. The Toombses shared the first of these assumptions but not the second. Auntie and her husband almost never went out together, but they took it for granted that the chief object of life at home was to enjoy themselves. They played almost every game that could be played in the house. On the table at which we ate they played cards, board games of every kind, dominoes, shove-ha’penny, and goodness knows what else; and there was a miniature snooker table that fitted over it. A dartboard hung on the wall behind the settee. In the garden there was a badminton net and a swing. The use
of
all these had fallen off a bit after their children had left home, but now a new generation of grandchildren – our Geoff, our Bernice, our Ray – was dropping in to visit their teenage aunt Kath and their grandmother, and getting caught up in these things all over again; and my arrival brought them back to full strength. In my first couple of weeks all the games were hauled out of their cupboards and shown to me, one after another; and if I did not know how to play them I was taught. It put me in my element, because I loved indoor games. My favourite of those new to me was ninepins. The feeling of inner satisfaction I got when I knocked down all nine with a single swing of the ball was indescribable. I felt them go down deep inside my own body.

The Toombses were a games-playing family like no other. I began to suspect that Auntie had taken me in because she wanted someone to play games with. I became quite good at them – that is to say, no better than the others, but no worse. And they gave me great feelings of happiness, which included a hitherto unknown sense of belonging.

Another thing the Toombses did was sing at the piano. Soon I was going into the front room to do this with Kath almost every day. Sometimes she played popular classics as well – Beethoven’s ‘Für Elise’, Schubert’s ‘Serenade’, Brahms’s ‘Lullaby’, Strauss waltzes – most of which I then heard for the first time; but usually she just played the sort of popular songs that are now called ‘standards’. In various parts of the room were piles of sheet music that went back through the thirties and earlier. A lot of these songs I knew already, but many I did not. I would stand at the top end of the keyboard beside Kath as she played, and she would tell me when to turn the pages. At first, when she suggested I sing along with her, and pointed out the words printed there on the music, I was too shy to join in; but I soon got over that, and happily stood there singing. She explained the musical notation, and how it related to the keyboard, so that I would be able to turn the
pages
without having to be told. We made our way through all the music she had, not once but several times. There were our favourites, of course, which we performed over and over, but we constantly tried less familiar songs for a change. Many a whole afternoon or evening was spent in this way. We got quite hooked on it, and would squeeze songs into little bits of time – if, say, the whole family was in the back room, and Auntie announced that she was going to make a pot of tea, either Kath or I would say: ‘Time for a song,’ and we would slip into the front room and play one while the tea was being made. Sometimes Auntie would come in and sit in an armchair and listen. Because of this I now carry in my head hundreds of those songs. The best of them – by George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin – are among the true glories of twentieth-century music, and will last as long as any of it.