Growing Up In a War (2 page)

CHAPTER TWO

TOWARDS THE END
of the 1930s it was obvious to most people in Britain that war was going to break out soon, and the only question was when. It was expected that Hitler would launch immediate air attacks against Britain’s cities. (The air attacks came, but not immediately.) So the peacetime government began making plans for the defence of the civilian population, organising air-raid shelters and gas masks, and preparing the evacuation of children from those cities most likely to be targeted. To anyone with low expectations of bureaucracy, the high quality of the planning was disconcerting. Within four days of the outbreak of war something like one and a half million children had been removed by train in good order from the most vulnerable cities, and were billeted with families in safe areas. The organisation of the evacuation was based on schools, not on individual children or residential areas: whole schools, together with their teachers, moved to small non-industrial towns, or to cities beyond the range of bombing, and carried on their activities in makeshift surroundings such as church halls and assembly rooms, or disused large buildings of other kinds.

It was only because the civilian population had been put into a high state of preparedness beforehand that all this worked. There had been, inevitably, people who said that a Tory government was manipulating the population to prepare for a war it was planning; but this was the usual nonsense from what had become
the
usual quarters: few governments in history have tried harder to buy off aggression by appeasement than that pre-war Conservative government. The critics of what were in fact highly civilised and sensible precautions were only too often apologists for Stalin’s Russia, which at that juncture entered into an alliance with Nazi Germany, and was even then preparing a secret agreement with Hitler to divide up Poland and the Baltic states.

That is how it came about that in the summer of 1939 ordinary British families were discussing over their breakfast tables what action they were going to take when war broke out. Our family shop – which my grandfather owned, and worked in with my father – sold men’s and boys’ clothes. Since people were obviously going to go on needing clothes, it was assumed that the shop would continue trading. At the age of thirty-seven my father was unlikely to be called up early, and that was a blessing, because my grandfather would not have been able to run the shop by himself. If Dad were to volunteer, it was not likely that Grandad would be allowed to hire another able-bodied man to replace him. So the decision was reached that Dad would continue working in the shop until ordered by officialdom to do something else, at which point the family would reassess the situation in the light of whatever turned out to be the prevailing circumstances. But meanwhile, what about the children, my sister and me? The shop, which was where we lived, was in Hoxton, in the very heart of inner-city London, which everyone expected to be the most heavily bombed area. All the local schools were now forming plans to evacuate themselves on the outbreak of war, to as yet unknown destinations. Joan and I were automatically invited to go with ours. But there was nothing compulsory about all this. So should we go? If not, and our schools went, what would we do instead?

These questions were gone over repeatedly. My parents decided quickly enough to send us away from London for our own safety, but they were uncertain on what basis to do that. In the end,
differing
decisions were made for the two of us. Joan, just now becoming a teenager, was at a good grammar school in Highbury, and it was decided that she should stay with it, because of the unlikelihood of finding a better school. At her age she would be able to manage if sent beyond the reach of visits by parents. But I was still only nine, and at a bog-standard elementary school round the corner from the shop, a school to which there was no reason for me to remain attached; so it was decided that there was no need for me to stay with my school. Perhaps it is worth remarking that these considerations, although they turned out to be less pressing than was thought, were by no means superfluous or unrealistic. Although the bombing did not begin until a year after the outbreak of war, when it came it demolished a third of Hoxton, which was one of the most heavily bombed areas in the country. The rooms in which we lived above our shop had their roof torn off by the blast from a direct hit on my school, which was totally demolished.

My grandparents were now in their sixties, and had been planning to retire quite soon in any case to a cottage in the country. At least, my grandmother regarded herself as having made this decision: with this in mind she had rented one of three newly built bungalows in a tiny village called Worth, in West Sussex. She got it on the cheap because a speculative builder had been left with it on his hands. It was a mile or so outside Three Bridges, and two or three miles from Crawley. The way you got there was by taking a train to Three Bridges from Victoria. In those days Three Bridges was little more than a railway junction, Crawley was a small and charming country town, and Worth a single street. Various members of the family, including me, had already been there for weekends. I have memories of a longer stay over the Easter of 1939, when I recall my delight at the colourfulness of the birds, and my pride and surprise at being able to identify many of them from a set of pictures I had collected from my parents’ cigarette packets.

The family decision was that, when war began, I and my grandmother should go down to Worth and live together there. It would be an already familiar home for me, within easy reach of London, in a place that my parents knew how to visit – whereas my school could well go to somewhere inaccessible. Worth had its village school, in which, we were told, all the children over eleven were taught in one room; but there was no junior school, so my father arranged that, like other Worth children of my age, I should go to school in Three Bridges.

Actually, I and my grandmother travelled down to Worth the day before war broke out. My father’s sister Peggy had a friend, a secretary in Whitehall, who telephoned her to tell her that Germany was about to invade Poland; that Britain would immediately issue an ultimatum to Hitler to withdraw; that Hitler was expected to ignore the ultimatum; and that we would then declare war on Germany; and that all this was going to happen within the next few days. It did, but none of it was explained to me in advance, and I complained clamorously about being sent away from home when there was not even a war. My father, whom I trusted in everything, assured me that I could rely on war breaking out in a few days, and that it would be a good idea to go before the rush. So, at the age of nine, I left what had been my world until then, never to live in it again.

Since birth my home had been my birthplace, 276 Hoxton Street. This street was both the main and the market street of a whole distinctive area called Hoxton, one of London’s Domesday Book villages that for centuries had nestled just outside the northern gates of the City. With the expansion of London after the Industrial Revolution it became the westernmost part of the East End; and by the time I came on the scene it was notorious throughout the country for its combination of poverty and crime. A report published when my grandparents were young adults had famously declared: ‘Hoxton is the leading criminal quarter of
London,
and indeed of all England.’ But for me it had up to now been where I felt I belonged. I was at home in it, it was the only place I knew really well, and I loved it. It was to be largely wiped off the face of the earth in the few years after I left: what was not destroyed by German bombing was swept away in the post-war slum-clearance programmes; so today almost nothing of the Hoxton I grew up in remains. What goes under that name now is a quite different place even physically, with mostly different buildings and even different streets, in which much of the population is black; and what were warehouses when I was there have been turned into lofts and artists’ studios.

The first whisper of a realisation that everything had changed for me for ever did not sound until after Jimmy Ainsworth, who kept the pub nearest our shop, came down to Worth to bring his niece, Gwen, to stay with us. He told us confidently that the war would be over by Christmas, so the first time I saw my father after that I asked him if this was true, and he said no, the war would last for several years.
Years
, I thought.
Years!
How could a war last for years? Surely you had a jolly good fight, which settled everything, and then it was over.
What
could possibly go on for years? Still, if my father said so, it must be true. But I could form no understanding of it. And somehow the first beginnings of a realisation crept into my head that in these circumstances I could not form any expectations about going home again – in fact, I could not form any expectations about the future at all, neither the future in general nor my own in particular.

On the morning after my grandmother and I arrived in Worth, soon after eleven o’clock, an air-raid siren sounded. I knew what this meant, because we had had air-raid drill at school in London, and I assumed that the village was having a drill. But my grandmother went into a panic such as I had never seen her in before. ‘Shut the windows! Shut the windows!’ she screamed, rushing to
the
nearest window and slamming it. For a moment I goggled at her uncomprehendingly; but she went on shouting at me while running from window to window (I had never seen her run before): ‘Don’t just stand there! Shut the windows in the bedrooms or we’ll be having poison gas in here!’ I opened my mouth to protest, but she yelled at me hysterically, and I did as I was told.

When every window had been tightly closed, checked and double-checked, I rejoined her in the living room, nonplussed that she should be reacting in such a way to a drill that she and I, there being no one else with us, had no need to take part in at all. What was the point, I wanted to know, of getting worked up like that about poison gas until there was a war on and there could actually
be
some poison gas?

‘There’ll be some gas all right,’ she said, still terrified. ‘Where’s your gas mask?’

‘But there isn’t a war yet.’

‘Yes there is.’

‘No there isn’t. It’s only a drill.’

‘It’s not a drill. It’s real.’

‘It can’t be real. The war hasn’t started yet.’

‘Yes it has.’

‘Eh?’

‘It started this morning.’

‘This
morning?
’

‘Yes.’

‘When?’

‘Eleven o’clock.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I didn’t want to upset you. Run and get your gas mask.’

Even as a nine-year-old I was engulfed by a sense of the inanity of it. How could she have imagined she could keep secret from me the fact that there was a war on? And if I was going to find out anyway, why not straight away?

At last, after what seemed an eternity of sitting in our living room, gas masks at the ready, waiting for the terrifying noise of aeroplanes, we heard the siren sound the all-clear. That unnecessary alert on the outbreak of war took place all over the country, and became a notorious event, because a population that was expecting instant air attack thought,
By Jesus, here it is!
and panic was widespread. Apparently some senior bureaucrat thought it would be a good idea, now that war had begun, to make sure that all the air-raid sirens were in good working order.

For the whole of the time I was with her, my grandmother tried to shield me from the war. Either she did not take a newspaper or, if she did, it was kept from me. When I was around she never listened to a radio news bulletin. When we went to the cinema in Crawley she timed our arrival so that we missed the newsreel; and if it came round as soon as the main film was finished she chivvied me out of my seat in an agitated manner: ‘Quick! Quick! We must go. We must leave.’ Since the newsreel always started with exciting action shots – bombs falling, guns firing, tanks charging – I always wanted to stay and see it, so I objected, and tried to dig in, but she would bundle me out physically. ‘Come on! Don’t hang about! We’ll miss the bus. We’ve got to go.’ It was against nature that I should be made actually to leave a cinema in the middle of a battle scene – and it could even be, in those earliest weeks of the war, a scene with horses, which was better still.

I was also at an age when I was beginning to follow intelligently some of the feature films I was seeing, instead of just absorbing them like blotting paper. The fact that I was for the first time seeing grown-up films without my parents made a difference. I became very aware of the music on the soundtrack, perhaps because I was getting so much less music than I had been used to at home. The string tremolando that usually accompanied suspense fascinated me, and I assumed that there must be one
instrument
that made that sound. I asked people, ‘What is the instrument that goes
diddle-iddle-iddle-iddle-iddle?
’ but they could never answer the question to my satisfaction. To those who suggested it might be violins I said: ‘No, it doesn’t sound like a violin at all.’

CHAPTER THREE

IMMEDIATELY OUTSIDE THE
back door of our cottage was a low hedge, then an open field. This was used by the children of the village as their playground. There would usually be separate groups of them, all ages and both sexes, doing different things. Even if something got under way that took up most of the space, like a football game, other children would go on playing round the edges of it, and get shouted at when they got in the way.

My grandmother kept a permanent eye on all this through the kitchen window. A couple of days after our arrival she led me out into the field through a gap in the hedge and shouted to the nearest children who looked as if they were roughly my age: ‘Here’s somebody for you to play with.’

They stopped what they were doing to gawp at me. They had seen me before, but only for a day here and a day there, with long absences in between, to forget.