Growing Up In a War (11 page)

It was either at the end of 1940 or in the following year that my father took me to my first Shakespeare play. This was
Richard III
, with Donald Wolfit. It affected me in some of the ways
Die Fledermaus
had: it seemed, somehow, to be all expression. Never had I been so swept up and carried along by a play. The sheer driving force of it was phenomenal. Wolfit’s powerful and explicit
style
of acting, unsubtle but good, was just right for a child. The play itself came across to me as something like a gangster story set in historical times. What a brilliant idea, I thought, if you were the severalth in line to a throne, to bump off those in between so that you became king. I clamoured to see it again; and the second time I became aware of all sorts of things I had not noticed first time round. About the play as a whole there was something huge as well as marvellous, something that filled every space. It was like seeing the whole world in a play. People had always said that Shakespeare was the best writer of plays, and now I could see what they meant.

What with opera and Shakespeare, on top of the shows I already loved, I developed a passion for theatre in general – perhaps I had had it from the start – that has given it a special place throughout my life. Already, while the older members of my family had been going to grown-up theatre without me, and talking about it afterwards with lots of ‘you should have seen this’ and ‘what a pity you weren’t there’, I had been revelling in the music halls, the variety shows and pantomimes that I was taken to, and thinking them more fun than anything else I did. When my sister Joan was considered old enough to go to straight plays but I was not, she confirmed my excited imaginings about what I was missing, and I was deeply envious. But now, at last, at
long
last, here I was, going. I was like a starving man let loose on food. The combination of love and greed was lustful. I went whenever I got the chance, and saw whatever came my way, to some extent indiscriminately, though there was always this special love of opera and Shakespeare. Jonathan Miller has remarked to me that Shakespeare’s plays are in such a different class from everyone else’s that if we call those others ‘plays’ we ought to have a different word for Shakespeare’s; and that is how they came across to me from the beginning. They spoke to me directly in a way that only music did otherwise; and this was not, I think, something
primarily
to do with the use of language, still less the poetry. It had no more to do with concepts than music does. I was not sitting there listening to people saying words, I was sitting there watching people doing things; I was watching things happen. And for years, whenever I saw a Shakespeare play, for the first few minutes I would have little idea what was going on (or, for that matter, what some of the words meant); but soon it all began to fall into place, and I would be taken up into it in a state of luminous absorption. It became not just clear to me but compellingly interesting who was doing what, and why. I would be lost in it. From then on I would be unaware of not understanding anything, though I am sure that if you had stopped the play at almost any point and said to me: ‘What does this unfamiliar word here mean, or that condensed metaphor?’ I would not have been able to tell you. It was the play itself that had got me, and was sweeping me along; and I would have seen the words as dangling from its outside, with the same sort of relationship to it as a recipe (which I would also not have understood) to a delicious meal (which I would have eaten with joy). A play is not its words, it is something else, something intangible, that stands behind the words – though the language is needed for us to make contact with it.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

AT SOME TIME
in 1940 an offer came for Joan and me to be evacuated to the United States. Quite a lot of British children were sent there during the war. Our offer came from relations so distant that neither Joan nor I knew of their existence. I think one of my grandfather’s siblings, or perhaps a cousin, had emigrated to the United States and eventually acquired a family in the Midwest; and the invitation now came from a younger generation of that family, a couple roughly my parents’ age, with children. None of us had met them.

My mother was for sending us, but my father held back. The war had been going on for nearly a year now, and it had become obvious that it was going to last for some years more; so, if we went, it would be a long time before they saw us again, and before we saw England again. Also, getting to the United States meant crossing the Atlantic on a ship that ran the gauntlet of German submarines, so it was not a risk-free option. In fact, the crossings were stopped after one of the boats was torpedoed and seventy-three children drowned. My father was so undecided that he came to the conclusion that we ourselves should make the decision. Joan was nearly fourteen now, and in a better position than I to make a rational choice, which I think she probably did. I was adamant that I did not want to go. Fortunately, Joan did not want to go either, so that was that. But for the rest of the war our father was prey to a feeling that if either of us should be
killed
or injured, as so many children he knew were, the fault would be his.

Although I did not have the adventure of going to the United States, I did a lot of very good growing-up in Market Harborough, opening out in all sorts of directions. Some of this had to do with the age I was reaching anyway, but some with living away from my family, and some with being for the first time in a happy home. I began to feel a kind of security I had not felt before. In Hoxton I had always been free to wander outside the home, explore, go my own way, do my own thing; but within the home I had felt unwanted, in the way, a nuisance, always having to watch my step so as not to bring down explosions of anger, or get a smack in the face. But the Toombses actually wanted me there, and enjoyed having me, and told me so. Inexplicably, they had chosen to have me. For the first time I
felt
wanted. And this meant I no longer had to get away from home to be myself.

But my very happiness, combined with a deeply ingrained insecurity, gave me an irrational fear of doing something that would bring it to an end by causing the Toombses to send me away. And there was, I was firmly convinced, such a something. On my first day, Auntie had told me, not once but three times, that if I touched any of the musical instruments I would not be allowed to stay. So I developed what can only be described as a phobic terror of being suspected of having touched a musical instrument. The problem was that music was becoming, if it had not already become, my ruling passion, and I longed to immerse myself in it, and learn to play all the instruments, especially the piano. But I did not dare to reveal this to the family, for fear of being thrown out. It is obvious now that they would have helped me in every way they could, but it was not obvious to me then. I suppose it was itself part of my insecurity that I thought the complete rejection of me was something that could happen at any instant. When I stood beside Kath at the piano, singing, I never, ever touched the piano.
I
am sure she did not even notice this, and would have laughed me out of the inhibition if she had. When she and I listened to records on the tinny old gramophone, I left her to do everything, I never touched anything myself. And I never allowed myself to be left in the front room alone – until, that is to say, one day.

I was in the house by myself, and I knew that the others would not be back for a long time, so – thrilling with excitement and terror – I went into the front room and started trying to play the piano. I found it impossibly difficult. I could get no music out of it at all, only sounds. I knew there would be no more chances, so I had a go at the zither instead – when I had seen Auntie play it, I had been struck by how simple it looked. I searched on it for the tune she had played, ‘Rainbow Valley’, and discovered it with an ease that amazed me. It excited me, too, and I played it over and over, first to get it up to speed and then at different volumes – loudly, softly, and then as loud as I possibly …
Choi-oinggg-gggg!!
A string broke. My heart stopped. My blood froze. Auntie’s words came back to me, and I heard her voice inside my head as if she were there. There could be no doubt about it. As soon as she knew what I had done she would throw me out, and I would never see the Toombses again.

My only thought now was to delay her finding out for as long as possible. The next person to play the zither would see what had happened, but the instrument was not played often, so it might be weeks before it was discovered. I fiddled the broken string into being as unnoticeable as I could make it, and put the instrument back in as unobtrusive a position in the room as I could find.

Ever since then I have had inner knowledge of what it is like to have a guilty secret. For several weeks I lived in permanent terror, almost unable to think of anything else. It dominated my life. Every time anyone went into the front room my throat tightened as if I were being strangled.

The person who discovered the broken string in the end was Kath. She asked me secretly if I had done it, and I said I had – by now she and I were heart-to-heart friends, and in any case she would know it had to be me. ‘Better not tell our mam,’ she said ominously. Several more weeks went by. Then, at last, Auntie saw it. ‘Ooh look, our Kath, one of the strings’s broke. Damn nuisance. We’ll have to try and get a new one. What a bother.’ Then nothing more was said. My relief was indescribable, not least because I was so incredulous. When I finally got used to the situation, and realised that I was not going to be destroyed by it, I came to feel that if that incident did not take me away from the Toombses, nothing was going to.

My closeness to Kath educated me as much as my school did. Not the least part of it had to do with sex – which no older person had ever talked to me about. She told me that the girls in the factory spent most of their time discussing boys, and sex, in very frank terms. She passed on to me, as being the only person she could talk to about it, the juiciest things they said. So I became especially well informed about such things, or so I imagined. I asked her all the secret questions that I had about sex, and she answered them to the best of her ability. I also confided to her my extravagant but secret ambitions about what I was going to do when I grew up, and years later she told me that these changed all the time but were always ‘very grand’.

My life with the Toombses fitted in happily with my life outside. I roamed around Harborough with gangs of cockney kids who would call to collect me at the back gate. We extended our wanderings further afield, as we became overfamiliar with our old pursuits, and more adventurous. In the end we were playing in woods and fields, building huts, and climbing trees. Some of the more enterprising boys began to catch rabbits, though I never did. We were becoming, without realising it, countrified. We even started gathering wild flowers, and taking them back to our homes
to
keep in water, a pursuit which in Hoxton would have been considered cissy. One of our hunting grounds for these was Dingley Dell, which contained standing pools of wild violets. We still, as we always had, fought over territory; and there was once a pitched battle between two gangs of boys over who was to have the violets.

A few days after this battle my parents came up from London to visit me, and the moment they arrived they jumped on me with inquisitorial harshness. I had, they said, just caused them the most appalling embarrassment. They had given a lift to a couple from Hoxton who also wanted to visit their son in Market Harborough, a couple they scarcely knew. No sooner had the car entered the town than a group of boys appeared ahead of them, playing in the street, and the couple shouted: ‘There he is! That’s him! Stop the car!’ My father pulled over, and his passengers called out to their son. The boy came across to the car with the most enormous black eye, a fruity one.

‘Good God!’ said his mother. ‘How on earth did you get that?’

‘Somebody hit me.’

‘Who?’

‘A boy called Bryan Magee.’

Paralysed silence inside the car. My parents, they told me, did not know where to look. The other parents could not think what to say. When my father eventually set them down, he promised to give me a giant-sized telling-off – which he was now doing.

‘You must have copped him a real fourpenny one to give him a black eye like that.’

‘Yes,’ I said with satisfaction. ‘I did.’

‘Why?’

‘’E pinched me violets.’

And so he had. After I had gone to all the trouble to gather a really big pile, and was cradling them in my arms, he tried to hijack them by hitting me in the face as hard as he could while
my
hands were full, grabbing the flowers out of my arms, and running away with them. I was after him like a greyhound, and caught him.

Another way in which we evacuees adapted our old ways to our new circumstances was by taking up competitive games that had not been available to us in London. The one I became most devoted to was conkers. A conker is a horse chestnut, and what you did was thread one on a piece of string and hold it dangling while another boy swung his against it, like a ball on a demolition crane, and tried to smash it. It was then your turn to try to smash his. Each tried to destroy the other’s. If you succeeded first, you added to the number yours had broken not only his but also the number his had broken too; so if yours was a twoer and his a fourer, yours became a sevener. We reached amazing figures. Boys not only went to obsessional lengths to find conkers that were unusually compact and hard, they specially looked for misshapen ones that had something like a cutting edge that could split an opponent’s conker; and they secretly baked these to make them harder. (This was illegal.) We often went climbing trees for conkers, and knew where the best ones were. Even if you weren’t in need of any at the moment, a good one was a valuable commodity that could be traded for something else.

My special friend for a good deal of this time was a boy called George Hall, not from Hoxton but from New Cross, though he had somehow arrived at the Edmund Halley. I had never heard of New Cross, and George told me that it was in south London, which I had been conditioned to regard as a place not to be taken seriously. To this day, whenever I see or hear New Cross mentioned there is a microsecond during which the thought of George Hall crosses my mind. I do not know if everyone’s mind works in this way, but there are scores, if not hundreds, of instances in which the connotations of a word have never freed themselves entirely from the circumstances in which I first encountered it; and a large
number
of these derive from this period of my life. Whenever I hear the word ‘tawdry’ I think of my father with me at
Madame Butterfly;
and the word ‘proceed’ brings back the sight and sound of Mr Burgess saying ‘p-p-proceed’.