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____________________________ GROWN UP WAR John Daniel for my children and grandchildren
It was late August and I was building a sandcastle on the beach at Sandown in the Isle of Wight helped by a small blonde girl with a pageboy haircut wearing a pink swimsuit. Behind me, in a line of deckchairs with their trousers rolled up and knotted handkerchiefs on their sunburned heads, a number of men including my father were discussing the possibility of war. Usually I didn’t listen to grown-ups, whose conversation was difficult to understand, but these were only a few feet away and their voices were loud and emphatic. “It’s all talk, newspaper talk.” “It’s not us Hitler wants to fight, it’s the Russians.” The sea splashed in, filling the moat with satisfying realism. Dad and I had spent much of the afternoon building the castle with a red metal spade purchased at the shop on the promenade, where he had also bought me four paper flags that decorated each of the plump towers: the red cross of St George, the blue flag for St Andrew, the red diagonal for Ireland and a scarlet dragon with its tongue branching out in flames for Wales. “He wants to be friends with us.” “We have a lot in common.” “Say what you like, the Germans make wonderful binoculars.” “And cameras.” “ Best in the world.” Mum waded into the surf holding her box Brownie in its scuffed leather case. “Hold hands,” she said to me but I didn’t want to hold hands with the little girl, who obligingly took mine. Mum snapped us and later mounted it in her snapshot album with “Sandown, 1939” written underneath, the last photo before six years of filmless war. “And cars. Mercedes-Benz and Opel. ” “Best there are except for Rolls Royce.” We didn’t have a car but one of Dad’s friends had driven us to Portsmouth where we caught the ferry. It was the first time I had been in a motorcar. The little girl and I were decorating the castle with seashells and seaweed but I was becoming irritated with her because she was dumping armfuls of seaweed indiscriminately over the walls. I pushed her and she ran off then returned with her wooden spade. “I don’t like all those uniforms.” Dad said, “All that marching and swastikas.” There was a general murmur of agreement that the marching and swastikas were unfortunate blots on an otherwise admirable civilisation. “Hitler’s done a lot of good. You’ve got to hand it to him. He solved the unemployment problem,” another deckchair put in. “More than we could do.” There were more murmurs of agreement. The sea was flooding over the tops of the moat into the central courtyard. If there was one satisfaction greater than building a sandcastle it was watching it being swept away. The towers started to slip sideways. The little girl hit them with her wooden spade and I pushed her so she’d stop. The deckchairs retreated up the beach another few yards and re-arranged themselves in line. “Roads too. Autobahns straight as a die. Not twisting and turning like ours.” “Best roads since the Romans.” “It’s the Jews he doesn’t like, not us.” There was silence “My brother’s been to Germany. He says there’ll be war.” That was Dad talking about Uncle Norman, his younger brother. Uncle Norman was the voice of authority in our family and if Uncle Norman said there was going to be war there was probably going to be one. Uncle Norman had studied chemistry at the John Cass Institute and had a first-class degree with letters after his name. He spoke French and German and any other language he wanted and had brought back a metal knife from his camping and walking tour in the Black Forest with Zimmerman stamped on the handle which was in our kitchen drawer. There was a murmur of foreboding. “Let’s hope not. The last one was bad enough.” “We don’t want any more wars.” There was general assent as the sea swirled around their ankles and one of the towers slid into the foam, the four paper flags plunging into the waves. I scooped them up and put them in my metal bucket. The little girl in the pink swimsuit was picking up all the shells and putting them in her bucket, an appropriation I decided was unfair. I gave her another shove and she brandished her spade at me before running off for ever. The political commentators folded up their deckchairs and stacked them against the wall as we climbed the steps to the promenade. The tar was so hot I could feel it burning through the soles of my sandals. The men said goodbye to one another and Mum, Dad and I walked back along the promenade to the boarding-house. One of the balconied hotels facing the sea was on fire and there were red and gold fire-engines in the road with hoses trailing across the tarmac. I had never seen a real fire before and it was frightening; the policemen were ordering the crowd to stand back and I realised anyone inside would be burned to death. A column of black smoke was pouring through the roof into the blue sky and the long windows on the front were exploding with the sound of falling glass; the road was full of broken panes and water from the hydrants. A fireman in a brass helmet was standing at the top of the turntable ladder aiming a jet of water into the flames. It was exciting but Mum didn’t want to stop so we walked on back to the boardinghouse. At tea in the dining-room a man dropped five cubes of sugar into his cup and winked at me. I was only allowed two; we didn’t have cubes at home only the boring, granulated kind. I was told off for stirring my blackberries-and-custard round and round until it looked like the purple and yellow patterns on the covers of exercise books. There were so many rules and regulations connected with eating that it was difficult to survive a meal without getting into trouble. I was not allowed to spin my knife to see who it pointed at to be shot in the morning or to make faces in the back of the dessert spoon like a fairground mirror or put my elbows on the table. Everyone in the room talked in whispers as though they were in church. Afterwards we went into the next room where there was a tall picture of a nude lady with long hair holding a jug of water on her shoulder. I pretended not to take any notice because nobody else did. Everyone talked about the war. “The Royal Family’s German,” Mum said to a woman in a green dress from the next table sitting on the sofa. “They changed their name to Windsor because it sounded more English.” “Let’s hope they won’t fight one another if they’re relatives.” said the woman, Mum was an expert on the aristocracy and the royal families of Europe. “Queen Victoria married a German, Albert, the Prince Consort,” she informed the woman. “ That’s right. They named the Albert Hall after him.” “And the Albert Memorial,” Mum said, “Queen Victoria never got over his death. I used to walk round it on my day off when I worked in London. I knew every blessed camel on it.” “Hitler’s not royal.” said the woman. “It might be better if he was.” “Then there’s the Prince of Wales,” Mum said, “He was friends with Hitler. He went to see him with that woman.” I knew who that woman was. It was Mrs Simpson, beside whose potential for destruction Hitler’s almost faded into insignificance. I sneaked another look at the nude lady with the jug. “And the old Queen, Queen Mary of Teck. She’s really German.” “Well,” the woman in green said, getting up from the sofa, “I lost my fiancee on the Somme last time. And I wasn’t the only one. It wiped out a whole generation.” We travelled back to Portsmouth on the paddle-steamer. I held Dad’s hand and we climbed down the steep stairs to the engine-room to look at the pistons driving the paddles because Dad always wanted to look at engines. We stood on a perforated metal gangway and watched the steel pistons leaping backwards and forwards like fairground horses. There was a strong smell of oil and the long shining steel rods shone in the sunlight. Through the spokes of the paddles I could see blue sky with the gulls wheeling around. It was exciting watching the water boil up underneath us but frightening too and I knew I’d be drowned and disappear into the green whirling pool and waves of foam if I fell. I gripped Dad’s hand tight. The steel rods under our feet bucked and reared driving the paddles and the foam boiled white; the smell of oil made me feel sick so I was glad to climb up to the fresh sea air on the top deck, where Mum was knitting. My skin started to peel like a snake’s with the sunburn and I pulled it off in strips, playing a game to see how long I could make each one. “Don’t do that!” Mum said and dabbed white camomile lotion out of a bottle on me. But I couldn’t stop pulling it. When we reached Portsmouth harbour there was a newspaper boy waving a paper in the air shouting. “PM to address the nation tomorrow! Chamberlain to address the nation!” The next morning was Sunday and I was outside on the path with my red tricycle when I was told to come inside. We sat in a row on the couch in the dining-room with Bob lying on the carpet in front of us, his brown and white woolly ears spread out on either side. I loved Bob and told him all my secrets. Dad had his rubber boots on; he’d been digging the rockery in the back garden; Mum was wearing an apron because she was cooking the Sunday joint and there was a smell of fat that I didn’t like, coming from the kitchen. The yellow arc on the radio with its names of strange places on the dial was lit up in the corner of the room where it stood on a small table above a photo of Uncle Norman in his black gown. Chamberlain’s was explaining that the British ambassador in Berlin had handed the German government a note which said that unless we heard by eleven o’clock that Germany had withdrawn their troops from Poland there would be war. I looked at the electric clock with the difficult Roman numerals on the mantelpiece. I could almost tell the time. It was past eleven. “I have to tell you,” Mr Chamberlain said, “that no such undertaking has been received and consequently this country is at war with Germany.” Through the open front door I could see my trike on its side where I had left it on the path in the sunlight. There were some words like ultimatum I didn’t understand but I knew something momentous was happening. I had seen a photograph of Chamberlain in The Daily Express holding up a note in front of a metal aeroplane. “Poor man,” Mum said, “he does his best. I wouldn’t want his job.” It is what she often said about politicians. Dad walked across and switched off the wireless as if he were switching off something important. “We shall see,” he said grimly. Later that morning an air-raid warden cycled past blowing a whistle, then the sirens sounded, up and down like a snake for the Alert, a clear steady peal for the All Clear. But they were just practising. The war didn’t start although I thought it might. Nothing else happened. It never did on a Sunday.
My father loved engines and machines, an aesthetic of stainless steel and chromium that found its expression in streamlining, those modernistic curves that emerged in seaplanes, racing cars and cinema balconies of the 1930’s.
I was aware growing up that my father was more modern than I was. I enjoyed prowling around country churchyards reading inscriptions on the decaying tombstones. For him few pleasures were more satisfying than the Crittall’s metal window-frames in the Capthorne Avenue house which he and Mum had purchased in 1933 for £615. “Look at that!” he’d exclaim, opening the bay window and swinging it back and forth, “Look how it swings open!” It looked like an ordinary window to me, but I had never dealt with sash windows and was not to encounter them for many years. In Bow sash windows were universal. The family house in Athelstane Road had sash windows that, according to my father, stuck in their grooves, broke their sash cords, squashed his fingers and threatened to guillotine him every time he leaned out to tell the cat’s meat-man to leave the meat under the knocker. The metal window-frames put Rayners Lane at the cutting edge of modern technology. Sash windows were part of a left-behind Victorian culture which included jellied-eel stalls, public-baths and music halls. It was an environment that my father viewed with some affection but which he had no desire to return to. He regarded the East End as a place to escape from, a claustrophobic existence where it was necessary to have lodgers in order to survive. One possessed a wooden leg and stamped across the floor above their heads keeping them awake at night. The rooms were over-ornamented and over-furnished. The velvet cover along the mantelpiece had silver balls dangling off it. Above all the East End was poor. Malmesbury Road School which Dad reluctantly attended until he was fourteen, considered itself superior to the Roman Road School because its pupils wore shoes.
From this economic cul-de-sac, stuck as fast as a sash window, Dad was determined to move. Symbolically he constructed, at the age of seventeen, a thirty foot aerial - the highest radio mast in Bow at the time - to receive the voices of the outer world. The programmes from 2LO, the pre-BBC transmitter, crackled into his bedroom. A few years later marriage to my mother provided an opportunity not for only him, but also his brother and sister to escape. Norman and Doll moved with the newly married couple to Rayners Lane, a far-flung suburb to the northwest of London advertised on the Underground posters as being in the deepest and greenest countryside. Dad and Norman piled the horsehair sofa, the velvet mantelpiece-cover and other remnants of Victorian furniture into the small yard at the back of the Athelstane Road house and set fire to them. Only one piece of furniture passed the Rayners Lane test – the couch on which we were to sit in a row listening to Mr Chamberlain some six years later. The rest went up in smoke. But modern living meant more than electric lights in every room and walnut-veneered furniture. It meant owning a home, a financial piece of wizardry that mystified Mum who couldn’t understand how it was possible to spend £615 on a house when neither of them possessed such a sum. Dad found out about mortgages and the builder’s promise that £25 deposit down secured a home of one’s own. Landlords, universal in Bow, disappeared with the Victorian furniture. “You pay rent all your life and have nothing to show at the end of it,” was the collective wisdom on renting. Rayners Lane meant freedom from peg-leg lodgers and shuttling relatives who exchanged living spaces every year like musical chairs. Rayners Lane meant no more trips to the public baths with a bar of soap and a towel under your arm. The upstairs bathroom in Capthorne Avenue had hot and cold running water, black and white modernistic tiles and a lavatory with a chain.
To be sure Rayners Lane houses were not as modern as the purists might have dreamed. There was the splendid new Underground station designed by R.H.Uren at the top of the small hill in the centre of the shops. There was the white modernistic Odeon with its curling top and powder-room and there was the brick and metal window-framed Roxbourne School that I was to attend. But the rest was all pseudo-Tudor with pebbledash, imitation timbers, bow windows and a spray of stained glass in the front door. The thousand houses a year erected by a young builder, Thomas Nash on a tract of land purchased from Christ Church, Oxford for £60,000 and marked on 19th century maps only by marsh-signs was about as unmodernist as he could build them. The Devonshire street-names – Exeter and Lynton Road, Widdecombe and Lulworth Crescent, Torbay and Newquay were rurally romantic, although as my parents spent their honeymoon at Lynton in Devon they probably appreciated them. On the outside the houses had pitched roofs and beams but inside there were newly-plastered bare walls with smooth ceilings, decorated by a hanging marbled light-bowl supplied gratis. But if the exterior didn’t resemble an ocean-liner, the interior might. Dad set to work papering the walls with oatmeal paper and a thin dado strip of sober autumn leaves. Otherwise there were no ornaments on the mantelpiece, no statues or pictures, no photographs except Uncle Norman in his gown under the wireless. Plainness was the watchword and although Dad never actually banned porcelain shepherdesses and alsation-dog table-lamps it was understood that ornaments were part of the old, overstuffed Bow world that had been left behind. He fitted a stainless steel letter-box on the front door and installed a bell, that harbinger of modernism, to replace the brass knocker that the cat’s meat had been left under. Everything was new: the shops, the streets, the red letter-box at the corner of Capthorne Avenue, the 114 bus, the streetlights, the sycamore trees planted at fixed intervals, the newly-weds, the families. The families were as slimmed-down and modernist as the Odeon. Gone were the sprawling broods that filled the backstreets of Bethnal Green and the Commercial Road. We came mostly in ones, occasionally in twos, rarely in threes. I was one, born in the front upstairs bedroom and according to later reports followed by my mother’s pronouncement, “I’m never going through that again”. Whether this was because I was male, a gender that my mother always had reservations about, or whether it was because my mother had little desire for motherhood and felt that one child was the minimum she could get away with is uncertain. Four years later the onset of war supplied a rational reason for not having another and postponed the decision for the duration and in effect for ever. Dad in his democratic fashion stated that it was up to Mum. But Mum had had enough. One was more than enough, since I didn’t require dresses or embroidered frocks which would go some way towards justifying my existence. “It’s all men,” she said, referring to the world at large or to the fact that Norman had moved in and the two Daniel brothers naturally formed a bond. Or perhaps because her sister Marjorie had also given birth to a boy, my cousin Michael. Motherhood was not my mother’s dream of identity. Doll, was only sixteen, but Mum had no intention of extending her mothering to all and sundry. When I was born two years later Doll was required to move out of the house to make space for the new baby. I was an only child, that problematic being who inhabits the grown-up world without being part of it, who misses the rough-and-tumble sharing of siblings and who is both in the limelight and out of it, the focus of parental attention and yet unable to share opinions with anyone else on the subject. I have always felt that brothers and sisters complete the family picture and there is something lacking in those who didn’t possess them. And although those with siblings assure me that not all problems are solved by their presence, I remain unconvinced. In her desire to restrict her family to one my mother was quintessentially modern but otherwise her aesthetic tastes were not as uncompromising as Dad’s. One afternoon she brought back a reproduction framed print of a vase containing a bunch of red and yellow dahlias. “It’s a splash of colour,” she exclaimed to my father in self-justification, “I think it would look nice on the wall.” It was a revolutionary statement given the bareness of the walls, but Dad was not a tyrannical man. It was her home as well as his. The picture was hung on its small chain over the light oak dining table. Perhaps my mother appreciated his forbearance because she never bought another and the pot of red and yellow dahlias remained the sole representation of western art in our house. But the breach had been made and in later years Uncle Norman sent back two brass storks with inlaid enamelled wings from India and Auntie Doll six ebony men paddling a dugout canoe from the Congo. Over the years the bare rooms gradually succumbed to the clutter of school-photographs, music-box chalets and cork-pictures that made the place look, as they say, like home. But my father never needed ornaments to express his feeling of home. Plain walls and metal window-frames that swung open to the touch were his idea of utopia. He’d grown up in a Petticoat Lane of artefacts. Rayners Lane was his dream of Eden where everything was new and there were no neighbours knocking on the back door for half a cup of sugar. He had never heard of the Austrian architect Alfred Loos but he would have agreed with his pronouncement that decoration is a crime.
The onset of war and the Luftwaffe effectively stopped the spread of suburbs like Rayners Lane encircling London from Watford to the north, Brighton to the south Reading to the west and Southend to the east. After the war the Green Belt of the Underground posters and Metroland become a reality, at least for a few more miles and a few more years. Many heaved a sigh of relief and thanked God that Nazi bombs called a halt to the unstoppable march of the speculative builders. John Betjeman famously implored friendly bombs to fall on Slough and he might have added Rayners Lane. But John Betjeman was no modernist and had never lived in Bow. There was a political dimension to modernism. Dad always voted Labour unlike his brother and his wife. He believed social life would get better and better given free education, clean air and the widespread use of stainless steel. It was a belief he never abandoned. Rayners Lane was the first step to the Promised Land, and he had taken it.
Mum took me on secret trips to London – Up West as she called it – and we walked through Hyde Park where there were anti-aircraft guns sticking out of the newly dug earth surrounded by sandbags and the hawsers of barrage balloons anchored in concrete blocks. Long cables were attached to the silver balloons that floated in the sky with floppy fins like elephants’ ears. They were supposed to stop the Germans bombing us, but I couldn’t understand why the German pilots didn’t just fly around them. It was years later I discovered it was the wire hawser that was the deterrent not the balloon, which was only there to hold the wire up. I was not sure why we had come up to London, particularly as I was instructed not to tell Dad about our visit but it was an exciting place with statues of soldiers on horses with plumes in their hats. “London always gives me a lift,” Mum said. “It does me good”. We walked through the park to where there were cream-coloured houses four storeys high with long windows and black railings that had not been taken away as they had in Rayners Lane. We climbed up a flight of steps and Mum rang the brass doorbell. The door was answered by a maid in a white cap who led us into a large room with a high ceiling and tall windows. I was instructed to wait there and not touch anything. There were tall vases and shelves of leather books and long, dark-blue velvet curtains and bunches of flowers and a large mirror in an ornate gold frame. I stood in the middle of the thick carpet looking around until Mum reappeared holding a brown paper parcel and the maid opened the door for us. We walked back down the steps across the park to the Underground and then home, which we reached just before Dad came in from work. I wanted to tell him about the barrage balloons but I kept Mum’s secret although I didn’t like doing so. She told Dad we had been shopping but didn’t say where.
Mum often talked to me about her life as a lady’s-maid before she was married. “It was the happiest time of my life, “ she said, I didn’t have a care in the world.” She told me her ladies took her to Scotland when the families went grouse-shooting and the South of France where she stayed in the Carlton Hotel in Cannes and saw the Battle of the Flowers in Nice. She had lived in big houses in London in Hans Crescent and Sloane Street and Eaton Square. “It was all wonderful,” she said, “Rayners Lane was a comedown but I wanted to marry and have my own home and you can’t do that and stay in service.” The Rayners Lane neighbours didn’t know about the Season when there were parties with champagne and oysters and the debutantes were presented at Court, or Cowes Week when they raced yachts at the Isle of Wight. The neighbours only knew about the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race when they wore dark blue or light blue badges in their buttonholes. Mum loved to talk about her life in service. Her first job was as a children’s maid with Lord Rayleigh, a scientist who had discovered argon in the atmosphere. “All one wing was laboratories,” she said, “and the drive was a mile and half long.” Lord Rayleigh employed a staff of fifty on his Essex estate and engaged my mother as a children’s maid at £16 a year, a modest salary even for the time. “Bloodsuckers” was Dad’s opinion of Mum’s employers but Mum won’t hear a word against Lord and Lady Rayleigh though she agreed that £16 as a yearly salary was not much. “ I wanted for nothing” she declared, “I had free board and lodging and the lady’s clothes when she’d got tired of them.” She even claimed she saved on her annual salary. “But you had to do as you were told,” she would say, with the implication that my father would not have survived. All Dad’s arguments were outweighed by her love of the life in Kensington and Chelsea. Dad only knew about the East End. Mum had taken him on a tour of the Dorchester Hotel in Park Lane when it first opened. “Do people live here?” he had asked, not being sure what such an enormous building was for. My mother had escaped from what she regarded as the dreariness of country life as my father had escaped from the East End. “Bread on bread” was her opinion of existence in her Essex village. “We walked backwards and forwards to church twice on Sundays. That’s all we did. “ Her dislike of the countryside was long-lasting. “Once I’d been to London I never wanted to go back,” she told me on numerous occasions and as she moved up from children’s maid to lady’s-maid she received the status accorded her position. “All waiting on one another” was Dad’s verdict when Mum explained that she had all her meals cooked for her and one of the house-maids made her bed each morning. “I couldn’t boil an egg when I got married,” Mum would boast with pride. I was told stories about the sub-culture below stairs which set out to imitate the festivities above in a succession of balls and parties. There were the footmen, the first always called James, the second Charles, whatever their real names were. There were Christmas and New Year parties when the valet dressed up as a ghost in the cellars and terrified the parlour-maids. There was a scandal when one of the footmen taught a parrot to welcome her ladyship in the drawing-room with an hilariously obscene greeting. There were numerous invitations from chauffeurs to drives in the Rolls Royce around the country lanes.
“They thought they were the lords and ladies” Dad observed, but Mum passionately defended her years in service. She followed the activities of the gentry in “The Graphic” re-living the debutantes’ presentation at Court for which she dressed her ladies in three-feathered headdresses and made their silk underclothes by hand and copied Parisian fashions from photographs in “Vogue”. “You don’t seem very interested in looking after children,” Lady Rayleigh had observed to her one day with some insight, “You seem more interested in dressmaking.” So Mum was enrolled in the Regent Street polytechnic on her afternoon off each week to learn cutting-out and sewing. She had discovered her natural talent. She left Lord and Lady Rayleigh and remained in London at an annual wage of £50 a year. But the households were never as numerous again and the great establishments began to disappear. The First World War killed off most of the large households as it did their subalterns. Mum’s wages went up but her career as a ladysmaid followed a downward spiral into four and three-servant establishments. She lived in Cadogan Square and Hans Crescent and finally in the Hyde Park hotel. The establishments declined but her loyalty remained unswerving. In the 1926 General Strike she made tea for those aristocrats who volunteered to drive trains and buses. “What else could I do?” she would say in answer to Dad’s charge that she helped the strike-breakers. “I had to, or I got the sack.” One of her employers was Lady Diana Manners, aged twenty-four, the same age as my mother. The two young women became as close as their social positions allowed and when Lady Diana’s engagement was announced my mother was responsible for her elaborate trousseau - underclothes, going-away dresses, evening gowns. She was given an invitation to the wedding in St Peter’s Church, Knightsbridge, a rare honour for a servant. And when a month later, the news reached her that Lady Diana had been killed on honeymoon in a car crash in India my mother shut herself in her room for three days and wept. “I thought I’d never get over it,” she said, showing me the yellow newspaper cuttings and embossed invitation, and perhaps she never did. Her knowledge of the landed aristocracy was extensive and her allegiance unswerving. She knew about the Princess Louise, Princess Victoria and Princess Maud and she passed on news of their engagements and marriages to Dad and me who received the news in respectful silence. She was ecstatic about the beauty of Princess Marina who married the Duke of Kent and devastated by his death in a plane crash during the war. She felt compassion for King George currently reigning over us “because he never wanted to be king.” We listened to King George making his Christmas broadcast the first Christmas of the war, which we celebrated with Uncle Paul and Auntie Marjorie at their house in Beckenham. The king stumbled and stammered as he talked of the dark days ahead. I prayed that he would be able to start up again and negotiate the hurdles of consonants. It was an agonising performance “Poor man,” my mother says, “He never wanted to be king. If it hadn’t been for that woman.” I knew it was Mrs Simpson again, appearing like Banquo’s ghost at our Christmas feast. I felt that Mrs Simpson was responsible for the king’s speech impediment. Uncle Paul was a socialist. He didn’t approve of the Royal Family. “They wouldn’t wait in the rain to see you, Vi,” he said to my mother. “ Why should you wait in the rain for them?” Everyone laughed. “You and your old Labour,” Mum replied. “They’ll always be rich and poor, whatever you say.” At last the King reached the end of his speech with his “God bless you all.” Uncle Paul continued to tease Mum. “Don’t forget,” he says, “only four inches in your bath, Vi.” Everyone laughed again but Mum didn’t care. The king only has four inches of water in his bath because of the war and everyone was expected to have the same. The broadcast ended with the national anthem as if to celebrate the fact that the king had managed to get through his speech. When Grandad and Grandma were with us we all had to stand up and toast the King, including Uncle Paul, but as they weren’t, we stay seated. Some years we stood up and some years we sat down. “If he could have continued as Duke of York he’d have been happy,” Mum said, “He likes being at home with his family doing jigsaw puzzles.” “I’d like to stay at home with my family doing jigsaw puzzles,” Uncle Paul snorted, “but some of us have to fight in this bloody war.” He was angry at being called up into the Tank Corps especially as Dad was in a reserved occupation because he was a toolmaker. “What do I know about tanks?” Paul asked everyone, “I’m a journalist.” Uncle Paul was sports editor of the Daily Express and earned a lot of money. On the wall was a drawing given to him by the cartoonist Giles showing a troop of soldiers sitting on the grass by a tank. One of the soldiers was holding up a loose tank-track saying, “He says there’s a ticking somewhere”. Giles had given it to Uncle Paul because he was waiting to be called up in the tank regiment. Mum envied her sister because Marjorie didn’t have to make her own dresses but could go out and buy them from Marshall and Snelgrove’s or Swan and Edgar’s. But she didn’t envy the fact that her husband was being called up. Shortly after our secret trip to London Dad found out about Mum’s journey because she complained that the lady hadn’t paid for the work she had done. This confirmed Dad’s belief that the aristocracy had always made its money on the principle that employees should work for nothing. “It’s exploitation,” he said. He sat down and wrote a postcard in bright red ink demanding prompt payment – “so all the servants can read it” he explained. “I’ll never get another order,” Mum wailed but Dad sent it and the lady sent a cheque by return. But perhaps Mum was right too, because that was the last of our secret trips Up West. Gas. The word had a terrible sound as if terror was built into it, like Berlin or Germany. It was a word which carried a legacy from the First World War which was almost as vivid in the popular imagination as what was actually happening. My grandfather, George Daniel, died before I was born but I felt I knew him because we possessed his mahogany writing-box with rolls of Italian lire and his medals on orange and blue silk ribbons. The writing-box contained his diary of the war, written in pencil in a red book that opened from bottom to top secured with a wide black elastic band of the sort I used to hold my socks up. One entry read: “Piave 20/10/18 heaviest shelling either France or Italy lasting from 9 pm 20/10 to 4am 22/10
H.E We were to be gassed from the air as the soldiers in the last war were gassed in the trenches. Nobody would survive. The trench-war was out of date; the new war would be fought from the air and civilians will be gassed in their millions. Every man, woman and child in the country would be issued with a gasmask. Strangely enough there was little panic at this prospect of mass-destruction although it seemed credible and possible. As with so much else, we accepted it with that equanimity and fatalism which greeted so many drastic changes in the opening stages of the war. I was summoned to be fitted with a gas-mask in a church hall staffed by women of the Voluntary Service, wearing bottle-green uniforms and hats like Girl Guides. We were instructed to stand in a large circle and were each handed a mask in a cardboard box while two WVS women patrolled around the outside of the circle, pulling us about like rag dolls. “How old are you?” one asked me. “Six,” I replied with my fingers crossed behind my back to protect myself against the sin of telling lies. The fires of hell were less fearful than having to wear a Mickey Mouse mask, which was the prescribed issue for under-fives. Apart from the grotesque ears and wobbly nose it stigmatised its wearer as an Infant, only one step up from a Baby. The WVS lady looked at me with suspicion but finally handed me a box with a grown-up mask inside. “Put that on!” she ordered, tugging it out and holding up in front of me like a bedraggled octopus. I pulled it on. The inside smelled rubbery; the heavy green metal end to the short trunk weighed it down so that I was unable to breathe. The transparent visor misted up. I couldn’t see and was close to panic. “You’re to carry this at all times,” the distant, muffled voice of the chief WVS officer commanded. I felt I was drowning. I dragged the short snout skyward and succeeded in pulling the rubber above my upper lip and sucking in the cool, life-giving air. I was immediately seized by one of the green-hats. My head was jerked back by my hair and the mask replaced, the WVS lady running her finger round inside the rubber to make sure that I was perfectly sealed inside. She then yanked at the straps behind my head so that I was buckled into the mask and unable to escape. I gasped for breath while she placed her hand over the top of my head and produced an oblong piece of cardboard which she held against the base of the perforated metal trunk. “I want you all to breathe in and hold the cardboard on the end of your gas-mask,” the chief green-hat announced. My cardboard fell straight to the floor. I felt as if I was about to expire. It was like being gassed. “You tiresome boy!” my WVS advisor shouted giving my hair a violent tug. She stooped down, picked up the cardboard and rammed it against my short trunk. “Now breathe in properly!” I gasped for air since there was no alternative and the cardboard oblong clung to the end of the mask. “Remove your masks like this!” another green-hat ordered and we were given a demonstration on the correct way to slide our thumbs under the straps and extract our chins. I was trembling and the inside of my mask was wet with sweat and smells of rubber. “When must you wear them?” the chief WVS person demanded. We knew how to reply because grown-ups frequently asked questions to which they had just given us the answer. “At all times,” we chorused. “Gas can kill you,” the WVS lady goes on, “We are expecting it at any time and if you leave your gas-mask at home it will be your own fault if you are killed.” As everything was our own fault already, there was no reason to think that being gassed would be an exception. We re-packed our masks in their square cardboard boxes and marched out of the hall in the double-file we moved around in on these occasions. Once outside we broke into anarchic violence, the boys whirling the boxes around their heads and charging at one another like mediaeval knights. But the gas-attacks from the air forecast by the authorities never happened and no gas-canisters were ever dropped on England. After a few months we began to leave the cumbersome boxes at home. The girls or their mothers stitched linen covers on their boxes and embroidered them with their initials and elaborate daisy-chains or strings of blue forget-me-nots. The boys kept the raw cardboard but they were not useful even as weapons. When I ran they bumped awkwardly against my knees, entangling my legs and bringing me crashing to the pavement. I dumped the box in the cupboard under the stairs with the piles of old newspapers and the shilling-in-the-slot meter. The popular explanation was that the Germans were frightened to use gas because they knew we would retaliate in kind. “Jerry knows what will happen” everyone said. “They’re scared to use it.” There were memories of blister gas and mustard gas and chlorine but gradually everyone realised that it was not to be one of the weapons of this war. My childhood experience with gas was also traumatic albeit on a smaller scale. I developed a technique of clambering up the stairs rapidly on hands and knees, only to slip on one occasion so that the edge of the step crashed into my mouth and knocked out several front teeth. They dangled up and down like yo-yos on strings of blood. It was not a spectacle that my mother could easily cope with. For her the first-aid aspect of motherhood was the most appalling part of an unsatisfactory role. Mouthfuls of blood, a wailing child and bouncing teeth compelled her towards the front door and out into the street where she seized the first passer-by – an elderly woman on her way to the shops. Mum dragged her back into the kitchen where I was sitting on a chair, conscious that I was at the centre of an important drama. But the woman was capable and efficient, and with the help of scissors and a bowl of warm water, my injuries were soon staunched. The stumps of my teeth remained a problem however. “ He should see a dentist,” the woman said. I have never been to a dentist before and was unprepared for what happened. “I think we should use gas,” the dentist, Mr Sutterby said, producing a black rubber plunger, not unlike the one used by Dad to clear the kitchen sink when it was blocked with tea-leaves. Mr Sutterby approached me holding the plunger in one hand with the clear intention of clamping it over my nose and mouth. I moved the other way and was held as I rose upwards, flailing my arms in a desperate attempt to escape through the ceiling while Sutterby pursued us both around the room waving the black rubber plunger, attempting to cover my nose and mouth. Eventually he cornered me and I succumbed to what was a terrifying attack, slipping into a blackness, which did not expunge the trauma of the experience. I made sure I never had gas again. Gas was regarded as the unused weapon of the Second World War and the gas-masks issued to all British citizens were seen as totally separate from the gassing of six million Jews in the Nazi death-camps. But the decision to use gas was taken by men who fought in the First World War and were familiar with its effects in the trenches. Hitler himself was gassed by the British. Five weeks before the end of the war near Werwick, south of Ypres, the British released canisters of chlorine gas. Hitler lost consciousness and by the time he reached the hospital at Pasewalk near Stettin he was completely blind. Twenty-three years later, in 1941 in Chelmno, Poland, 700 Jewish people a day were being gassed in specially fitted furniture vans. Gassing was more efficient, cheaper on ammunition and less demoralising for the soldiers than pulling triggers all day. The furniture vans were succeeded by Zyklon B manufactured by I.G.Farben with assistance from Siemens. “Ein Tag, ein tausend” – a thousand a day - was achieved and by the end of 1941 there were death-camps at Birkenau-Auschwitz, Chelmno, Belzec, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka. A further hundred concentration camps including one at Alderney in the British Channel islands were established by 1942, the year in which the allied governments release a statement condemning the cold-blooded extermination of the Jews. Anthony Eden read it to the House of Commons, which stood in silence for two minutes, although only two weeks later Eden insisted that Britain could not admit more than one or two thousand extra refugees. Gas was a major weapon of the Second World War as it was of the first.
The shelters went up, overnight it seemed, along the street - raw-brick oblong blocks without windows but with flat tarred roofs and a single entrance with a slatted wooden door that was always padlocked. Mum flatly refused to use them. “I’m not going to sleep in those,” she announced, “They’re common.” “Everyone’s supposed to sleep in them,” Dad said, “That’s what they’re for.” “You can sleep in them if you like,” Mum declared, “I’m staying in my own bed.” Mum made where she slept a personal vendetta against Hitler. Hitler was a common little man, no more than a corporal in the last war. “He’s not going to make me get up in the middle of the night. I’m staying in my own bed.” I began to realise that common was a complex word with a multitude of meanings. The shelters were common not only because everyone could use them but because the inside was full of stagnant water and the outside walls were decorated with the figure of Chad, a bulbous-nosed character peering over a wall with Wot No Butter? or Wot No Bombs? painted underneath. It was common to write on walls or to say What and even more common to spell it that way. Common was something you had to protect yourself against because it was everywhere. Mrs Beeson, only three houses away, was common, although Mum said she had a heart of gold. Mrs Beeson worked in the off-licence, which was a bit common and wore trousers and a headscarf, which were also common and smoked as she ran along the street and shouted “Hullo Vi!” to Mum over the hedge, which were the most common things of all, especially shouting over the hedge. Common or not, Mum’s dislike of the street shelters was shared by everyone else in Capthorne Avenue so that they remained virtually unused. There were private, uncommon shelters on offer for those who could afford them: the Anderson, named after John Anderson a Cabinet minister and the Morrison, named after another Cabinet minister, Herbert Morrison. The Anderson was designed for the back-garden and had a two-step entry into a semi-circle of corrugated iron covered with soil. The Morrison was an indoor heavy steel structure with zoo-like square mesh down one side. Both had their uses for us. My cousin Michael possessed an Anderson in his back-garden which served as an authentic underground headquarters with rusty water dripping through the roof and John Brown had a Morrison in his dining-room, providing a vast flat surface which could be used as a race-track for metal cars or an aerodrome for Dinky planes. There were also school shelters at Roxbourne, long concrete tunnels under the dug-up playing fields into which we were herded when the Alert sounded. We sat facing one another across the slatted walkway with our hands on our knees singing a medley of songs as orchestrated by Miss Jessy. The sound wavered up and down the long tunnel disappearing into the small circle of light at the end. “D’Ye Ken John Peel” and “The British Grenadiers” were my favourites with their rousing choruses, followed by “A Froggy would A-wooing go” and “”Bobby Shaftoe’s Gone to Sea” with “While the Moon Her Watch was Keeping” as a plaintive, lyrical finale. Even though my musical sense was not of the finest, I enjoyed these sing-songs in the shelters more than any other lesson. There were also the Underground stations which were used as shelters in the centre of London, immortalised in the drawings of Henry Moore, but these, too, were regarded as common by my mother whom I could no more imagine lying down on an Underground platform than I could her lying on the track. Mum fought her personal war by staying in her own bed while the house rocked with the noise of shelling and Dad, Bob and I crawled into the cupboard under the stairs. It was our compromise shelter although not a very comfortable one. We dragged our blankets, sheets and pillows into the narrow space with the sloping roof and attempted to make our beds between the gas-meter and the empty beer-bottles while Bob shuffled around in a circle on the newspapers. “He’s trampling down the grass to make a bed,” Dad explained, ever ready to make an evolutionary point, “that’s what he would have done in the wild.” But Bob was not happy with the sudden shafts of bright light from the searchlights and the crash of exploding shells. He threw back his head and howled with a strange eerie sound I have never heard him make before. I held his head under my arm and stroked his forehead in an effort to calm him. Rayners Lane was not a target for the German pilots although there were munitions factories a few miles away at Park Royal and Acton. There was more danger to us out on the streets from the shrapnel of exploding British shells; in the morning after a raid we patrolled the gutters collecting pieces of the grey, jagged metal which we valued as highly as marbles or fag-cards. After a night of raids Mum would come down the stairs announcing triumphantly “I didn’t lose a wink of sleep,” with a touch of superiority for those of us who had crept under the stairs. Sometimes Dad tried to recreate the dangers of being bombed – incendiary sticks that fell on the roof spouting fire and going through the floors of the house like a knife through butter, or the power of a blast that blew out all the windows and carried the heavy Victorian sideboard in my grandparents’ house in Ipswich the length of the garden. But Mum refused to give in to such scares. “It’s best not to think about it,” she maintained. Her attitude fitted in with the nation’s stoicism. “Britain Can Take It,” was the watchword exemplified by the Queen’s comment that she was glad Buckingham Palace had been bombed because she could now look East Enders who had lost their homes in the face. Much later I heard of incidents such as that of a young woman hurled into the air by blast, coming down skewered on a broken-off lamp-post where she hung in the air like a piece of burning meat. But such incidents were never reported - hysteria did not officially exist and even if I was not terrified, I was happy to sleep under the stairs with Bob and Dad, although it meant dragging our blankets and pillows up the stairs again in the morning. One afternoon John Brown discovered that the shelter in King’s Road had been left open and invited a select audience of his friends to view his younger sister, Sally’s genitalia at a cost of threepence entry-fee. The three of us paid and stood in the semi-darkness between the unpainted wooden bunks to enjoy the spectacle. It was a thrilling moment. Prompted by her brother, Sally lifted up her skirt, pulled down her dark-blue knickers then lifted up her skirt again so that we could all inspect. We peered through the gloom at the small triangle at the top of her legs. It was not sensational. “There’s nothing there,” John Martin said eventually. He was right. There seemed to be nothing there except Sally’s five-year old legs. Although I’d not known exactly what to expect the result was certainly anti-climactic. John Brown said nothing and Sally continued to stand there holding up her skirt with her knickers around her ankles. We leaned forward to examine the situation more closely but even in the gloom of the shelter it was obvious that a small white triangle of Sally’s anatomy was all there was to view. “It’s a swiz,” Brian said, directing his criticism at the showman rather than the show. “It’s not worth it.” We all agreed. We had been led to believe that our threepences would introduce us to something sensational but John Brown was a natural showman and he stood there with the silence of an impresario who did not need to justify himself. “I want my money back,” Brian said. It was a decisive moment. We all wanted our money back. Threepence was not a negligible sum to be wasted on such a spectacle. John Brown, however, refused to give us the refund we demanded He clearly felt he had justice as well as nature on his side. “It’s not my fault,” he said. Sally dropped her skirt and pulled up her knickers as the disappointed customers were ushered out. The shelters remained remote and unused, too high to climb and their flat, tarred roofs held our balsa-wood gliders, parachutes, cricket balls and other treasures as securely as if they had been confiscated by teachers. Only in the last months of the war when the heavy iron demolition ball crashed down on the flat roofs reducing them to rubble did we glimpse our treasures from the past six years slide momentarily into view before plunging into the dust and bricks of the unloved shelters.
Six months younger, my cousin Michael was my superior in everything that mattered, climbing trees to a height where they started to bend towards the ground, building intricate dams that created lakes, hammering the lids on treacle-tins filled with water and hurling them into the bonfire so they exploded with exhilarating force. Michael was resourceful and anarchic, my ally against the grown-up world and my most treasured visitor especially since his father has been called up into the Tanks and posted to North Africa. “I don’t know how I’m going to manage,” Marjorie complained to my mother, “If ever a child needed a father, it’s Michael.” They were visiting us from Beckenham in Kent where we had spent the first Christmas of the war and where our alliance had been forged. On Christmas morning we had sat up in bed on either side of Uncle Paul who tilted a tray full of toy cows and sheep up and down on his knees, making mooing and baaing noises in his Devon accent with great gusto as they slid from one end to the other. “There you go me lovers!” He often called us me lovers or me darlings. The war news was coming in all the time. The German battleship the Graf Spee had been cornered by H.M.S Exeter and other British battleships at the mouth of the River Plate in South America. After a few days of mounting excitement it was announced that the Graf Spee had been scuttled, a confusing word that I associated with the coal scuttle. The Graf Spee was a pocket battleship, another confusing word which the Germans used to evade the restrictions on battleship-building laid down at the Treaty of Versailles. It was the first great sea victory of the war and we all thought the war would soon be over. Michael and I woke up at four o’clock in the morning to empty our bulging pillowcases, much to Uncle Paul’s annoyance who swore and shouted “Bloody Christmas! Why does anyone have Christmas!” Now he was in North Africa and sent us two metal cap-badges of flat, silver tanks with pins in the back that we pushed through holes in our caps. Michael came to stay in his pink preparatory-school cap and blazer, and discovered in the first few hours that it was possible to climb out of the bathroom window, along the drainpipe and into the back garden. “What can I do with him?” Auntie Marjorie asked my mother “He’s like this all the time. I don’t know which way to turn.” Life became much more thrilling when Michael was around. A pale-faced, frail-looking boy he seemed practically indestructible. I was inclined to be cautious and fearful of physical injury. Michael invented a new game of jumping off the shed roof, a bone-jarring leap that took all my courage and one I would never have performed without his example. The war was becoming more dramatic. Hess, Hitler’s second-in-command, flew to Scotland to meet with the Duke of Hamilton and other aristocratic friends he had known before the war, allegedly to conclude a separate peace between Germany and Britain. But he lost control of his Messerschmitt, crash-landed and was arrested. The incident was treated as evidence of Hess’s instability. “Hess is mad” was the verdict in our kitchen where Mum discussed the news with Marjorie. Peace was now beyond the realms of possibility. If Hess had brought an offer of peace on condition that Britain’s empire remained untouched in return for German control of Europe it was inconceivable that our government would accept such a proposal and Hess remained a silent, enigmatic figure from the day of his flight to the day of his death. Churchill’s war-speeches were characterised by a powerful pro-war rhetoric and Hess served as a focus for the madness of stopping the conflict, a solitary figure in the years that followed who appeared in the Nurenberg trials after six years confinement when he was sentenced to life imprisonment in Spandau prison until, at the age of 93 he hanged himself, as he had attempted to do a number of times previously. Michael and I were committed to hostilities in our own fashion. It took the form of building elaborate wooden battleships, specifically H.M.S Hood and the Bismarck which we constructed in the shed at the end of the garden. We slept in the same bed, head-to-toe, and rose at dawn to begin hammering nails into long lengths of wood that were the hulls of our battleships. Our naval construction consisted chiefly in banging several pounds of nails into each vessel then arming them with brass corner pieces, bolts, nuts and any other fixtures that my father kept in round tins on a shelf over the bench. By the time we had finished, the battleships exhibited a porcupine appearance bristling with masts, gun turrets and lifeboats. With reels of cotton we created ship’s railings and wireless aerials; finally we painted each ship in a grey-and-black-camouflage that we were too impatient to let dry. The paint dribbled across the bench, our hands and our clothing. “We should sail them,” Michael proposed. “Where ?” “In the bath.” We carried H.M.S Hood and the Bismarck into the house. Michael had brought a tin of blue paint from the shed with which he proceeded to paint the bottom of the bath to give it a fjord appearance, he explained. The paint floated to the surface in oily circles, mixing with the grey and black of the hulls as we launched them down the sloping back of the bath. Unfortunately both the Hood and the Bismarck immediately turned upside down, made top-heavy by the heavy armament of their superstructures. “They need keels,” Michael said decisively so we carried the boats back to the shed, hammered a few pieces of steel underneath the hulls and brought them back to the bath. This time they listed heavily to one side. It took a number of trips, trailing water and paint, before we achieved upright stability. “The Hood gets sunk,” explained Michael. “It blows up and the Bismarck escapes.” We enacted the salvos from the Bismarck and the sinking of The Hood with considerable effectiveness. “Then the Bismarck gets bombed by Swordfish from The Ark Royal and sinks,” Michael informed me and we improvised a variety of bombs and depth-charges. Our war-games were interrupted by Michael’s mother who emerged from her bedroom and began shouting at she opened the bathroom door and discovered the mayhem of the battle-scene. “We’ll clear it up. It’s only paint,” Michael protested but Marjorie was in no mood for negotiation and my cousin was dragged around by his hair and scrubbed at the kitchen sink. It was perhaps his experience of violence with the scrubbing brush at the kitchen sink that a day later prompted him to hammer a nail through a caterpillar as it crawled across the wooden surface of the bench. I shouted but it was too late. The body of the caterpillar twisted convulsively on the nail and a yellowish-green liquid spurted out. It was not a species of caterpillar that I was particularly attached to, preferring the bushy, white-haired ones that shuffled endearingly along. This was a black, stick-caterpillar with feet at either end of its arching body. “Why did you do that?” I demanded. “It was disturbing me,” Michael grinned, giving the head of the nail another thwack. “It won’t now.” The caterpillar went into its final spasms on the nail. I was undoubtedly influenced by my father’s instructions not to kill anything and in my righteous, non-violent anger I launched myself at Michael, twisting his head under my arm and trying to bang it against the sharp edge of the bench. Michael responded by kicking me as hard as he could on the ankles so that I was forced to continued my campaign against violence by wrestling him to the floor where we rolled back and forth until separated by his mother who dragged her son from the shed, locking the door and forbidding him to enter it again for the duration of his visit. We were instructed to sit down and read a book. Reading books was not Michael’s forte, but he disappeared into the house and eventually reappeared with the unlikely choice of The Life of David Livingstone, proposing that we sit on top of the shaky pergola trellis which had been constructed to carry the garden roses. We sat precariously on the topmost cross-trees among the thorns to read the story of the Scottish missionary and explorer that Michael passed me to read; it was the only skill in which I had some measure of superiority and although a low-level activity it did have its occasional uses. I began reading aloud, beginning with Livingstone’s birth in a Scottish village and continuing until I reached the moment when he said goodbye to his family to sail for Africa. Michael’s eyes were suddenly full of tears “What’s the matter?” I asked but he was too upset to explain. His father’s departure had been triggered again by the story, which was perhaps why he had chosen it. We abandoned reading and several days later found our way back into the shed and unearthed a large can of geranium-red paint from under the bench. Michael levered the rusty lid off with a screwdriver and we probed the surface which was covered with a thick, rubbery skin that could be pierced with a screwdriver, cut round the edge and lifted out. It was glutinous scarlet paint of a vivid hue that had a hypnotic quality about it and we sat on either side of the can facing each other, plunging our hands in, squeezing the skin and daubing it over our arms and faces. By the time we had finished no amount of scrubbing and turps could remove the paint; the scarlet traces remained under my fingernails for months, and I felt a mysterious kinship with it, long after I have walked with my parents up to the Underground station and said goodbye to Michael. I treasured it as a blood-bond with my cousin and was sad when finally it faded into ordinary boring skin.
We were ordered to black out. Mum made the blinds on her sewing-machine and Dad constructed the wooden grooves in which they ran up and down. This parental cooperation was a triumph and produced a blackout definitely superior to the neighbours, whose slivers of light shining through their curtains and tacked-up blankets attracted the air-raid wardens like moths to the flame. We were in total darkness. It was a Stygian world. The lights in the street lamps were switched off or painted black so only a yellow spot the size of a sixpence shone through. On the Underground platform lamps were dimmed and inside each carriage dark blue bulbs made the seated passengers look like a row of corpses. The few cars on the roads were restricted to slits of yellow in their headlights. Dad cut out a circle of black paper and inserted it into his bicycle lamp as instructed by the Ministry. Torches and flashlights were similarly masked and the names of Underground stations reduced to minute letters, a tactic that irritated my mother who was unable to read them in the dimmed platform lamps. “How am I supposed to know where I am?” she demanded. “You’re supposed to know where you are already,” Dad explained. “It’s so the German pilots won’t be able to read them from the air.” “I never heard such nonsense. They know perfectly well where they are. They have their maps and instruments. They probably know every town in England.” Seeing in the dark was not one of Mum’s natural abilities. On the walk from the Underground, she bumped into trees, stumbled off the curb and crashed into the pillar-box at the corner of Kings Road and Capthorne Avenue. “This dratted blackout!” she shouted. It was the nearest she ever came to swearing. The lights may have gone out in 1914 as the Foreign Secretary Viscount Grey, is supposed to have said, but they had been relit in the 1920’s with a brilliance Mum never forgot. She loved the lights of London and adored window-shopping in the illuminated displays of Harrods and the new wrap-around windows of Peter Jones in Sloane Square. She talked of the pre-war decorations in Oxford Street and Regent Street with heartfelt nostalgia . London was a world of light that had been snuffed out with brutal abruptness. Whatever the historians may say about the poverty of the 1930’s they were the diamond-glittering years for my mother, as light-studded as a dance-sequence by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, glitzy as the mirror-balls she danced under at the Lyceum in the sequin dresses she made, (“I sewed every sequin on by hand myself” she told me) and the shoes and headbands she wore. Now it was all gone. Not only the physical lights but the theatrical shows that were festivals of light – “Showboat”, “The Student Prince” and “The Merry Widow” which my mother considered peaks of perfection never again to be equalled. They had all been plunged into blackness. Dad’s attempts to be philosophical only made matters worse. His suggestion that we should walk along the cliff-top by moonlight when we were on holiday she considered absurd and dangerous. He would theorise about our ability to see at night as we were walking back from the Underground. “When all this was swamp,” he’d say, “and we were out hunting at night, we found our way by the stars. Look!” He pointed out the North Star and the Plough. “ We’d know where to go without any lights at all.” Mum wasn’t interested in the constellations. “I’m not out hunting,” she’d say, “ I just want to get home.” But Dad was endlessly intrigued by our animal qualities. “We’ve lost our ability to see in the dark,” he’d declare, “Modern civilisation has blunted our faculties. We need to relax with the darkness, then we can see as clearly as other animals.” His speculations about our affinity with animal-life were of even less interest to Mum than the position of the stars. “We’re really animals with clothes on,” he’d say. “Look at babies in their prams. “You can see by the way they clench their hands above their heads they’re trying to reach for the branches.” “I never heard such nonsense,” Mum replied. “It’s the same with our ability to see at night. We’ve evolved from animals who found their way at night instinctively.” The word evolved implied the works of Charles Darwin, a writer whose books Dad had never actually read but in whose theories he devoutly believed. But evolution also incited Mum to indignant protest: “I’m not an animal,” she retorted, “You may be but I’m not.” “We all are,” Dad insisted, “I can’t understand how you can believe all those stories about Adam and Eve.” “Lots of clever people do,” Mum would reply, “You and your Darwin.” At such times I thought my mother associated Darwin with the blackout as surely as she associated God with Genesis and light. Sometimes I thought she blamed Darwin for the blackout and the war. It was not just the blacked-out lamps that Mum disliked but the colours of war, the drabness of khaki uniforms and the dullness of ration-books. She hated the sandbags that were banked outside buildings and the camouflage scrim draped over pill-boxes. For her the war was the absence of colour and light. One evening when I was alone in the house I heard a warden shout, “Get that light out!” I rushed around the rooms checking the blinds were down, then ran upstairs and observed a sliver of light underneath the door of my parents’ bedroom. But I hesitated before bursting in. The parental bedroom was not just another room into which I could charge whenever I felt like it. It was hallowed ground that I trod on only once a week on Sunday mornings when I carried my parents a morning cup of tea and the Sunday Express. And the sanctity of Sunday and all it stood for hung over it as well as a mysterious, erotic air. Stockings were draped over the backs of chairs and there was a scattering of powder on the dressing-table and a seductive trace of perfume. A dressing-table with three full-length mirrors captured me from the sides in a disturbing fashion whenever I ventured near. The double bed and the wardrobe were of figured walnut veneer with a swirling grain that was more expansive than anything else in the house. It was not a place to be violated without penalty, but the situation was extreme.. “Get that bloody light out!” shouted the warden emphasising his words with a thundering kick against the front door. I abandoned my hesitation and rushed in, spotting immediately the offending light dangling above the bed. To reach it I would have to climb up onto the bed and march across the billowing eiderdown. “Get that bloody light out!” bellowed the warden’s voice again accompanied by renewed kicking at the door. I launched myself, jumped on to the eiderdown, marched over the soft waves in time with the beating of my heart and clicked the switch off, relieved to hear the warden’s retreating feet in the darkness. Next morning Dad discovered the line of dents caused by the warden’s steel-capped boot in the painted surface of the door. “How did these get here?” he asked me. I decided it was simpler to deny all knowledge of the incident than go into involved explanations. “I don’t know,” I said. “You must know. You were in the house last night. These are the warden’s hoof-marks.” I was intrigued that he called them hoof-marks as if the warden was a horse and peered at them thoughtfully. “You must have left the light on, ” Dad says. I decided that it was too late to attempt an explanation and said nothing. . “Why would he kick the door otherwise?” I remained silent, aware that my non-explanation compounded my guilt. Dad filled the toe-marks and repainted the surface, but I could still see the faint indentations under the surface. The blackout seemed at one with the black-and-white images of the war years. The Gaumont newsreels at the cinema presented us with images of convoys steaming across a grey Atlantic to the final black-and-white stick figures bulldozed into black holes in the death-camps. The patriotic photographs that captured the spirit of resistance – the dome of St Paul’s rising from a pall of black smoke and the milkman picking his way through the rubble, delivering the morning milk were in shades of black and grey. The grainy texture matched the grimness of the period and when coloured film of Spitfires or of Hitler with his dogs at Berchtesgaden was shown much later, it seemed inauthentic. Goebbels used colour for photographs published in his propaganda magazine Signal but our most memorable images were of a Junker twisting down in a spiral of black smoke or thousands of grey prisoners coming in holding up white flags. The black and whiteness emphasised the nature of the war. Earlier conflicts with their red uniforms, flags and horses were painterly pageants by comparison. Even the First World War, for all its mud and trenches had its red poppies. But we were fighting the forces of absolute darkness and the fact that so much of the conflict took place in the snows of Russia and northern Europe gave the black and white contrast greater validity. How could Auschwitz ever be in colour? There was one exception in our monochromatic world. The London blitz was a great firework display, full of bursting stars, tracer bullets and huge flares. Dad woke me up to see the spectacular forest of light in the night sky. “It’s the end of the Blitz” he informed me, as if it was the last night of a theatrical performance I shouldn’t miss. Later I wondered how he knew but at the time I accepted it, as I accepted all statements made by grown-ups.
On Saturday mornings before eight o’clock the four of us were despatched by our mothers to Lakins the greengrocers to queue for vegetables. We had become a group - John Brown with his curly hair and red cheeks, the eldest by a few months and our natural leader, John Martin rather sallow and strained, Brian the youngest with an infectious laugh and me the tallest. We set off at half-past seven in the morning when it was still dark, clutching the lists our mothers had supplied and wearing knitted balaclava helmets and gloves tied on a tape that went up one sleeve of our coats and down the other. When it snowed we dragged a homemade sled on which to load our purchases. Outside the shuttered greengrocers there was already a forlorn-looking line of women with red, windswept faces bundled up in headscarves, gloves and winter boots. As there was half an hour to wait before the shop opened, we employed the time pushing one another and/or reading comics that we bought at Farquarsons the newsagent next door. The head-scarves made continuous disparaging remarks about our behaviour. “It’s kids like this who are going to grow up and run the country.” “They’re allowed to do what they like.” “I blame the parents.” “We never behaved like this.” “We‘d’ ve got a good hiding if we had.” “Sunny Stories” edited by Enid Blyton was our first encounter with the world of reading, a small pink-covered booklet with a riddle inside the front cover and a series of stories inside printed on grey wartime-standard paper that seemed to have small lumps of porridge embedded in it. But in spite of its dismal format, Enid Blyton was a magical writer for us and we became addicted to her tales of happy middle-class children exploring caves with lanterns by the sea-shore, or discovering hoards of gold coins under the floorboards of country cottages. From “Sunny Stories” we moved - downwards perhaps - to “The Dandy” with Korky the Cat on the cover. Our favourite was Desperate Dan a cowboy with a stubbly chin eating enormous cow-pies with the tail hanging out of the pastry at one end in Cactusville, a town that combined stage-coaches, sheriffs and British policemen. The surrealistic humour of these comics was even more compelling than the fables of the Famous Five. In our puritanical and war-obsessed society the comics and radio offered a world of anarchic comedy if a politically incorrect one. “The Beano” portrayed a piccaninny eating a melon on the front cover and another favourite character was Keyhole Kate, a girl with plaits obsessed with peering through keyholes. There was Lord Snooty, an upper-class hero in a silk top hat offering leadership to his working-class pals. The war itself became an extravaganza with Musso the Wop (‘he’s a big-a-da-flop’) and ITMA, the high-voltage radio programme that we listened to compulsively every week, where Funf the German Spy whispered “Funf Speaking,” a catch-phrase that became as fascinating Mrs Mopp’s “Can I Do Yer Now Sir?” or Colonel Chinstrap’s “I Don’t Mind if I Do.” It was a British surrealism that stood the war on its head, although it was invariably patriotic. It linked back to the music-hall and McGill’s seaside postcards and forward to Spike Milligan and Monty Python. And to us queuing outside Lakins at half-past seven in the bleak winter half-light it was life itself. We were fiercely loyal in our comic-choices. Brian and I were devotees of “The Dandy” and John Brown and Martin “The Beano.” Strangely enough we didn‘t exchange comics but clung to our own pages, re-reading them continuously. From “The Beano” and “Dandy” we graduated to the “Hotspur”, “Wizard” and “Champion”, with their densely-packed columns of writing that required considerable reading-ability to follow the weekly exploits of record-breaking athletes, acrobatic fighter-pilots and murderous commando-raids. Here was hyperbole of a different order, intensely male and more closely linked with the war, lacking the anarchist humour of “The Dandy” and its rivals. The serials celebrated militarism and heroic daring-do but they were, in Wallace Steven’s phrase, necessary fictions, as we waited in the freezing cold until at long last, Mr Lakin emerged with a long pole with a hook at one end which he hooked into the black shutters and rattled up. The interior of the Lakin shop did not appear at first sight to be worth the wait. A series of wooden partitions on the right-hand side housed a narrow range of vegetables that looked as if they had just been hacked out of the frozen ground - earth-clogged King Edward potatoes, frostbitten Brussels sprouts the size of marbles and disfigured, grotesque parsnips. Large clods of earth clung to the produce which was nothing if not organic. Mrs Lakin, a grim lady in her knitted fingerless gloves, armed with a brass scoop burrowed into the piles of potatoes and hurled them into our shopping bags. The only colours in the shop were the pre-war posters pinned to the walls or hanging banner-like from the ceiling advertising Cape apples and Jaffa bananas with brown-faced, white-teethed laughing women in spotted turbans holding up bunches of fruit we had never seen and never expected to see. The only real fruit on offer were sticks of unpleasant-looking pinkish rhubarb and apples of a hard green variety. It was a green apple that I decided to steal as I stood in line for my potatoes and parsnips. It was my first public, deliberately criminal act and I am not sure why I attempted it. Perhaps it was simply experimental. I sneaked it from the pile as I was leaving the shop, fled down the alley behind the Kings Road, and bit into its sour flesh before hurling it high over a garden fence to destroy all evidence of my crime. But throwing the apple back was easier done than said. My crime would not disappear. I had still stolen the apple and I realised what it felt like to be an outcast from society. Guilt about the theft and a fear of being caught continued to haunt me. I had crossed some dreaded Rubicon that divided law-abiding people, such as I had previously been, from pariah-like outcasts. I experienced a physical sense of alienation that was impossible to expunge, on top of which there was no doubt in my mind that Lakin would take the necessary steps to track me down. Retribution was inevitable; there was no way I could wind the film back and for several months after my apple-stealing I was haunted by the fear of sudden arrest. Whenever I spotted a policeman walking towards me I crossed the road and vanished down a sidestreet. Revisiting Lakins for the Saturday morning shop became an unnerving experience. I kept my head down and muttered my requests for frozen parsnips in a disguised voice. Gradually the realization that I had successfully accomplished a crime and escaped the punishment of society dawned on me, but this did not alleviate my guilt at having committed it. I was branded and the stigma would never disappear although it grew less vivid with time. Strangely enough this guilt did not extend to stealing apples from the Bulls’ back garden where we clambered over the fence one afternoon to pick their crop which was even harder and greener than that in Lakins. Scrumping was legitimate and perhaps my violent vomiting and the spectacle of bright green apple-skin floating in a basin as I lay prostrate and retching until my chest ached, struck me as punishment enough. After Lakins we stopped at Pheasants the bakers, where Brian’s mother, Lena, gives us uncooked crumpets which we ate with enormous enjoyment. Then we reported back to our respective homes for our change to be carefully checked against the pencilled list of prices before setting out again to the Odeon, where the Saturday Morning flicks were about to start. This was the high-point of our Saturday mornings and our week. The Odeon was one of Rayners Lane’s architectural triumphs, a splendid building with a vast auditorium and a background of ever-changing satin curtains looped in swags of purple and rose and orange. We drummed our shoes against the seats in front, hurled paper-darts into the projector-beam and sucked on sherbet packets through a liquorice tube. It was unalloyed delight. The manager, a large man with bryllcreamed hair and a double-breasted suit appeared on the stage in the spotlight holding a microphone and asked us if we were happy. “Yes!” we shrieked hurling another forest of paper darts and drumming our feet continuously. Apparently not satisfied with our level of response, he repeated his question, exciting us into a frenzy of acclamation wh |
