Life Without Armour (6 page)

Unfolding the thin sheets, it was possible to make out the land, on which I daily rambled, in such detail that by going a hundred paces I had moved over an inch on the paper. With pencil and rubber I arranged the companies and platoons of an imaginary battalion into defensive positions around groups of cottages, on a bridge, by the edge of a wood, and along the railway embankment. Machine-guns were set out for crossfire, and barbed wire laid, the maps used this way until they were worn out. The idea of joining the army as soon as I became of age appealed to me as a way of leaving home.

My grandmother said that on my passing ‘the scholarship' she would pay for uniform and books by arranging a loan from the Cooperative Society, of which she had long been a member. What attracted me to the scheme was that at a secondary school one would be taught French, a necessary road through education being paved with a knowledge of that language. Jack Newton's brother taught him to count up to ten in French, and these magic syllables were passed on to me. I bought a dictionary and tried to translate sentences
into
French, though not knowing how to conjugate verbs was a fullstop to getting anywhere in my studies.

In the basement of Frank Wore's secondhand bookshop downtown was an enormous table on which many treasures could be found for threepence, and some for slightly more on the shelves above which occasionally came out under my coat. A Pitman's French grammar showed my errors of translation, and provided a rough but effective phonetic guide to pronunciation. One such primer contained a plan of Paris, making me familiar with the buildings and street names of that place much sooner than with those of London.

In the week before taking the scholarship examination I felt set apart from those in the class, though the proportion of pupils sitting for it was not small. My sister would tell her friends proudly on the street: ‘Our Alan's going to do his scholarship next week.' Needless to say, I did not pass, though two boys did, one whose father ran a hardware shop, and another whose mother owned a café. The unfamiliar puzzles and conundrums I was asked to solve might just as well have been Chinese ideograms, for I had expected to be tested on knowledge rather than intelligence.

When the result came my disappointment was not acute. I had wanted to pass, and hoped I would, yet didn't care too much that I hadn't, telling myself that the test had been taken as much for the experience as for anything else. Perhaps it was thought by the teacher, however, that my marks had been close enough to justify another attempt, for I accepted the chance of a free scholarship exam the following term for Nottingham High School. Hard to remember what season it was, the day of the test being cold and wet, and my shoes letting in water, but the high spirits of Arthur Shelton and I declined somewhat on going through the gate and seeing masters wearing caps and gowns much like those at the school of Billy Bunter in the comics we laughed at.

Since my experience of the previous attempt I'd had no coaching, but at least knew what to expect. A hard try was not enough, however, and my second failure indicated that I was not a fit subject for formal education. Success would in any case have led to all kinds of complications, not least that of leaving my friends and entering a world I was not prepared for. I could not know it then, but I wanted to go in by the ceiling, not enter by the cellar.

I knew that to continue schooling until the advanced age of seventeen was impossible in a family which needed any money that could be earned as soon as the legal age to work full time had been reached. It would be emotionally out of the question for me to endure the justifiable resentment of someone like my father, who at least had the power to make me feel guilty at having money in my pocket to buy books when there was little enough to eat on the table. It was the only moral problem I was to inherit.

Disappointment was not despair, there being worse things in the world than failure, and once the illusory hurdle of further education was out of the way my life could take the course it was obviously fitted for, and allow me to do the best that was possible in no other terms but my own.

Chapter Nine

Sometime in 1939 I stood in line at school to receive a gasmask. At last we mattered to the government, which was arranging for us not to be choked to death during an air raid. In my already long life there had been talk of war: in China, in Abyssinia and Spain. The Germans (of whom I had often heard that the only good ones were dead), after electing the Nazis to run their country, had retaken the Rhineland in 1936, and had now gone into the Sudeten part of Czechoslovakia. Hitler ranted like a dog with the colic, and people in the rest of Europe were afraid because they did not want war.

As well as being poor, we could shortly expect to be bombed. The only good thing was that for most of the time we were too poor to be worried, and you could only worry about one thing at a time. Nevertheless, listening to people discussing the horrors of the previous conflict, which had ended only twenty years ago, and hearing of bombing atrocities in Spain, the prospect was frightening. The gasmask was a precious piece of equipment that had been
given
to us, but its significance could hardly promise a peaceful future.

At Radford Boulevard Senior Boys' School I was, with a few friends, always near the top of the ‘A' stream. The diminutive Percy Rowe, another reputed terror of a teacher, had been a victim of shellshock, which to our silent amusement seemed a positive advantage as, with shaking hands, he drew a map of the western coast of Scotland or the fjords of Norway on the blackboard. On seeing me looking at a Michelin map from Wore's bookshop he said he had used them driving lorries to and from the trenches during the Great War. He also taught English, and responded keenly to whoever wrote good ‘compositions'.

Many of the usual boys' books were borrowed by me from the nearby public library, which included every ‘William' title by Richmal Crompton, as much as could be found by Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle and Jules Verne (who replaced G.A. Henty and Herbert Strang) as well as other novels by Alexandre Dumas (especially the d'Artagnan series), and Hugo's
Hunchback of Notre Dame
and
The Toilers of the Sea
. Thirty or forty books were kept in the bedroom cupboard, mostly novels but also history, geography, and French grammars. An ex-Guardsman living nearby let me have his one-inch Ordnance Survey sheet of the Aldershot Training Area, which greatly increased my knowledge of map-reading. Old Mr Smith, who was dying in a house at the yard-end, sent me his paper railway map of England.

A scene which impressed me, in a film on the life of the Victorian prime minister Benjamin Disraeli – though I suppose it could have been put in by the scriptwriters – was when in the House of Commons during some important debate he seemed to be asleep, not caring to be influenced by what the Leader of the Opposition had to say. Disraeli's own speech was already prepared, and this gesture of integrity, and disregard of other points of view, must have impressed if not influenced me, since I remember it when most films from that period have been forgotten unless they contained set-pieces of violence and adventure. Such films, far more thrilling to see, were those of James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart and Paul Muni. Never mind that such characters ended heroically dead, at least they'd had their time of glamorous power and glorious excess.

Every day was an island, closed by sleep and sleep. The hour of a film came and went, leaving no firmer mark that school life could not rub out, or tread down to a layer where it was apparently forgotten. At the time of tests, because no homework was ever given, I often (though not too often) studied in the bedroom in order to steal a march on the others. Having little confidence in my ability to memorize what was imparted during lessons, it was the right thing to do, and proved I could learn more through lack of confidence, which was a secret kept to myself, than by boasting or carelessness.

By the summer of 1939 I was sufficiently well informed to deplore the treaty between Communist Russia and Nazi Germany, but such an event was overridden when on 1 September we were sent home from school with a cyclostyled map showing those areas of the city from which all children under fourteen should be evacuated. Anyone living east of the sinewy River Leen could become a casualty in a bombing raid, and our house lay within the area.

My father found work building shelters, a job calling for overtime which he was willing to give, the double advantage to the rest of us being that there was more money to spend, and he was less around the house. My parents were thirty-eight years old, and after fourteen years of marriage it was suddenly easier to feed and clothe their children in terms which were no longer desperate. As my mother said with bitter irony: ‘There's no cloud that doesn't have a silver lining.'

They were against sending four of their five children – Michael had been born two months ago – away for the Duration. If they were killed in the bombing, which everyone thought sure to come, they might never see us again. On the other hand, if we went away they wouldn't have us to look after for a while, which Peggy and I knew weighed somewhat in their arguments, while she and I had no objections because we would be getting away from home on an adventure which the government was paying for.

‘We'll let them go,' my father said finally, ‘and see what happens.'

My mother was more fearful. ‘I suppose so. We don't want the Germans to kill all of us.'

Everyone had been so terrorized by propaganda that mass bombing was expected to start immediately. The parents of Arthur Shelton, however, refused to sign the offer of evacuation, his father saying: ‘If we die, we all die together.' The signature giving permission had to be written on the back of the map, which I had hoped to keep.

The list of clothes to be taken included such exotic garments as pyjamas and underwear, which none of us had. I walked up the street to the buses with my gasmask box on a string, and a carrier bag containing a shirt, a pair of socks, and
The Count of Monte Cristo
. One could not have travelled lighter. I said goodbye to my Latin, French, Spanish and German Midget Dictionaries, and my maps and papers, thinking they might get lost if taken with me, though perhaps to keep an anchor after all at home.

Given a pastry and a bar of chocolate, which Pearl vomited out of the window even before the bus reached open country, we sang our way through Sherwood Forest, Peggy keeping her arms around Brian who wondered what was happening to the world. At Worksop, a colliers' town twenty-seven miles to the north, we assembled in a church hall to be sorted out for different homes. Unable to say goodbye to the others in the crowd, a car took me to a house in Sandhill Street, much like our own but slightly larger, opening at the back on to a shared area of beaten earth. Forty-year-old buxom Mrs Cutts, who wore glasses, showed me into her comfortable living room, a pot of delicious beef stew warming on the hob, which my hunger wasn't yet acute enough to taste.

Mr Cutts, a big man who also wore glasses, and was fond of his beer, sold fruit and vegetables from a handcart for a living. During the Great War he had served with the South Nottinghamshire Hussars in the Salonika Campaign as a sergeant-major, which gave his voice a sufficiently high decibel count for bellowing his wares. Schools hadn't yet been found for the evacuees, so I was soon helping him to push the cart through the streets, up on to awkward pavements and among the backyards of the houses. On Saturday he would give me threepence and an apple, and even a banana if he had done good trade.

Another evacuee shared my bed, and we explored the country roundabout, roaming quarries for newts to put in a jam jar, so that it wasn't long before Worksop and its environs was as familiar as my native Radford. The Cutts left us free to come and go, the only rules being that we had to sit down to a hot dinner at midday, and finish supper by eight o'clock at night. For breakfast there was porridge and toast, and sometimes a treat of tinned pineapples at tea. When the trousers I arrived in became unfit to wear Mr Cutts bought me new ones out of his own money.

I was fascinated, possibly infatuated, by a girl called Laura, who lived in a caravan of the gypsy sort on some nearby waste land. Her parents sold crockery from a horse-drawn cart in the mining towns roundabout. On once referring to them as ‘gypsies' Mrs Cutts gently corrected me: ‘They aren't gypsies, Alan, they're “travellers”,' though no offence had been meant by me, because ‘gypsy' sounded more romantic.

The idea of going to school in a strange town was not to my liking, but the day came when Mr Cutts ordered a general sprucing up and took me to a building much like the one in Radford. My teacher, he said, had been his captain in the Great War, and would be sure to look after me providing I behaved myself. This cohering microcosm of society seemed strange after the non-hierarchical homogeneity in Radford, where my father avoided everyone except an equally destitute friend or two.

At school I was commended for an essay on ‘The Great Nottingham Warehouse Fire', perhaps my first piece of fiction, for it had never happened, though the conflagration was lovingly described. I joined the public library and took books into the Cutts' home, the only one found there being a spy novel by William le Queux.

It was easier to get into the adult cinema, and also cheaper than in Nottingham, though try as we might the ushers would not let us pass to see a French film about venereal disease called
Damaged Goods
. Still, we saw H for Horror films such as
Dracula
and
The Vampire Bat
, which more than made up for our disappointment.

An indefinite stay in Worksop would have been to my liking, but one morning a letter from home was handed to me by Mrs Cutts, who had paid the postman, since it had come without a stamp. I immediately imagined that my father had lost his job, that my mother hadn't even the money to spare for postage, that they were once more on the edge of penury and fighting as bitterly as ever. In the letter she merely asked how I was getting on, and told me that all was well at home, but the air of gloom lasted for days at the implication of the missing stamp.