Growing Up In a War (26 page)

After lunch I would spend my time in ways that changed as I grew older. I always had a great love for the life of the streets, which I had grown up with. I would wander along the pavements of the West End full of curiosity about everything: they were nothing like as crowded as they are now, and still less was there the amount of traffic. I had space and elbow room to look at my leisure – people, shops, buildings – and gravitate towards any group or event. If a salesman was selling items out of an open
suitcase
on the pavement I would stand in the group around him and watch, and listen – to the group as well as to him. Street musicians, auctioneers, tipsters, men doing the three-card trick, political speakers, religious preachers, loonies announcing the end of the world, all had me in their audiences. I would usually listen for a long time before moving on. If I saw men working I would stop and watch them, as I would any altercation or fight, or accident, or police incident – any incident of any kind. I loved window-shopping, and even more going inside the department stores: I could happily spend a whole afternoon in one without buying anything. I loved their colour and variety, and the endless swirl of people, whom I would watch individually, and I relished the quality of the goods. My favourite would have been Fortnum and Mason if it had been bigger, but as things were I divided my chief affections between Harrods and Selfridges, and spent many an afternoon in each. I would wander into the parks, mostly Green Park but also St James’s Park and Hyde Park, where there was a bandstand that occasionally offered music. Everything I have mentioned was free, except for my lunch and the tube fares. Until I got older I had no money to buy anything, but I took that for granted, and did not feel deprived. I was having an exciting time.

Because I had this dominating curiosity I was always exploring, always finding new places to go, new things to do. At first they had to be things that were free. First of all there were the touristy things, like the changing of the guard. Then I realised that there were free museums all over the place, most of which were boring but some of which were interesting – I found the British Museum fascinating, and went there many times. Then, as I grew older, I was given more pocket money, and this transformed the situation. I could do touristy things that charged admission fees – go up the Monument, visit Kew Gardens, the Tower of London, the Zoo, Madame Tussaud’s. I discovered the Charing Cross Road bookshops, and for years haunted that street like an addicted ghost.
The
sort of shops I patronised sold many of their second-hand books for a penny or tuppence, and would leave their customers free to browse; so I could spend a whole afternoon in one and emerge with two penn’orth of books, or indeed no books. My finances eventually rose to the dizzy height of affording sometimes to go to a matinee at the theatre, either at the back of the gods or in standing room, or on a returned ticket – I found all the ways there were of getting in for little money – but it was a further while before this happened, and I was then a lot bigger physically (though I still sometimes had to pretend I was buying a ticket for someone else).

Although I went to the West End on most days when my family were not at home I did not go every day: sometimes they would want me to carry out errands locally, since I was the only one of us with free time. On those days I would go to Palmers Green or Southgate, and have lunch there, and perhaps go to a cinema, or visit my grandmother or my aunt Peggy. Whatever I did, I was always home in time for our evening meal, and would then see my family for the first time that day – unless they or one of them were coming to the West End to meet me for a theatre. Because our evenings were the only time we saw one another, we spent them mostly talking. Sometimes one or two would read while the others talked, and sometimes we would listen together to a radio programme.

Since for three-quarters of the year my life was at Christ’s Hospital, I had a great urge to talk about it to my family. In fact I felt a need for them to share it with me. My father did that unprompted. In his usual warm and intelligent way his interest in the school had been ignited by my going there, and he had already bought and read a book about it, with the result that for a long time he knew more about its history than I did. He interrogated me with keen realism about the life there, and about my friends, and what we did, and about the masters, and what we
were
learning. As a lover of language and a connoisseur of cockney slang, he was especially interested in the school’s slang, so different from that of the London that surrounded it when it came into existence. (Some of it goes back a long way: Charles Lamb mentions it.) We had uproarious conversations in which he would laugh delightedly, comment, criticise, mimic, mock, ask. He saw most of the limitations of a boarding school for what they were, but he was an enthusiastic and encouraging ally, a supporter of mine in what had become my new life. He wanted me to be happy, and I think he may have identified with me too: it was a life he had come very close to having himself, and perhaps would have loved to have. For me, what mattered more than anything was that he cared, was interested. My mother was coldly indifferent. My sister Joan was actively hostile, and reacted disparagingly to any talk of Christ’s Hospital. She thought it was unfair that I went to such a good school when she had not done so. The eighteen pounds a year my parents were contributing became a basis for her to tell herself that they were spending money on my education when they had not been willing to spend money on hers, and that the whole family’s standard of living, including hers, was being sacrificed to help me. She voiced these sentiments frequently, and although both my father and I pointed out that they were completely untrue, it made no difference. This made
me
resentful, inevitably. I felt that her attitude was appallingly unfair, and what is more there was nothing I could do about it: I could scarcely be expected to leave the school to satisfy her jealousy; and nothing else would have done so.

This trait of hers was directed not only at me. I remember her complaining to my father that a girl at her office ought to be stopped from taking an extra holiday because Joan had not been offered it too. He responded with weary exasperation: ‘I’ve talked to you about this before. If somebody else has got something that you haven’t got, your attitude shouldn’t be that they ought not
to
have it, it should be that you
should
have it. Taking it away from her would make you no better off, and would make her worse off. If
you
had it, you’d both be better off.’

This remark of his made a great impression on me, because it expressed a general attitude to life that I had always had but been incapable of expressing myself. I never minded others having things that I wanted and lacked, and this was nothing to do with unselfishness on my part. It was because their not having them would not make me better off. My father never felt that sort of envy either, nor did my grandfather.

Joan had left school at sixteen. Most people at grammar and public schools left at about that age – the general school-leaving age being fourteen – and only a tiny number went on to universities. She had now left Huntingdon and come to live with our parents. In London she took a secretarial course, and got a job at one of the leading advertising agencies, Pritchard Wood and Partners. This was in Bouverie Street, just off Fleet Street. That was the centre of the area where most of the national press was, so it was an exciting part of London to be in every day. She was starting a new life which included her own pursuits in the West End. Like the rest of the family, she loved the theatre, and went as often as she could. It was around this time that she began to develop a particular interest in ballet, which was to become something special to her within the family, though my father had always liked it too.

All of us now went to the theatre more often than before. Except for my mother, we thought it by far the most enjoyable of all the ready-to-hand things to do, the one most worth spending time and money on. My mother strung along with the rest of us most of the time, sometimes dragging. When I now look up the listings for the West End theatre in the early 1940s, I am amazed at the sheer number of things I saw, dozens of them, all during school holidays. They include some of the best things I have ever
seen,
such as Frederick Valk in
Othello
– twice, in fact, once with Bernard Miles as Iago and once with Donald Wolfit – and Wolfit in
King Lear
. There were powerfully cast classics besides Shakespeare – I saw Wolfit and Valk twice each in Ibsen’s
The Master Builder
. But we were far from living on a diet of classics: the theatre was our chief source of light entertainment, which was why we went so often. Usually we could agree what to go and see, but I remember one early-closing day when we were unable to decide between two plays; so my father suggested we go to both, a matinee and an evening performance. My mother said: ‘It’s too much,’ and I did not understand what she could mean. Too much what? My sister and I were laughing with excitement at the idea; and off we all went. Evening performances began so early, because of the blackout, that we had to run from the first theatre to the second. I have a clear memory of the four of us running panting along Coventry Street, three of us laughing, and my mother protesting through her gasps: ‘I said it was too much!’

Revues were in vogue, and we saw all the main ones; their names indicate what sort of shows they were –
Up and Doing, Rise Above It, Fine and Dandy, Strike a New Note, Sweet and Low
. If Terence Rattigan was bringing out a new play (
Flare Path
and
While the Sun Shines
) or Ivor Novello a new musical (
Arc de Triomphe
) or Agatha Christie a new thriller (
Ten Little Niggers
), we went to see it as a matter of course. Some of the new plays we saw have established themselves as modern classics, such as
Blithe Spirit, The Man Who Came to Dinner
, and
Arsenic and Old Lace
. In 1943 I saw Noël Coward act in a new play of his own,
Present Laughter
. Most of the plays I saw then are now forgotten, by me as well as everyone else. Even so, the best actors of the day appeared in them, and I continued to see the same actors – many good, some bad, a few great – for the rest of their careers. At the time of writing, some are still around, after more than sixty years. I saw George Cole on the stage for the first time in 1941 in
Cottage to Let;
in 1943 I
saw
Paul Scofield, in
The Moon is Down
– not to mention Deborah Kerr in the same year in
Heartbreak House
. (Bernard Shaw was still alive then.) I find it impossible to convey what all this meant to me. Apart from music, I thought theatre the most wonderful thing in the whole of life. Everything about it was associated with excitement. The thrill of anticipation each time we settled into our seats and waited for a play to begin never dimmed with repetition; and the magic of that instant when the lights began to fade as the curtain was about to rise brought it to an almost uncontainable pitch. At one such moment, when I was about to see Valk as Othello for the second time, the impossible thought flashed into my mind: ‘This is as good as music.’

Because theatre had such a powerful effect on me, it was capable of causing me serious emotional disturbance. This happened with John Gielgud’s
Macbeth
in 1942. A fact unappreciated by me at the time was that the production was an unequalled combination of talents: William Walton composed music specially for it, a nineteen-year-old Michael Ayrton painted the scenery, and the cast was a list of distinguished names right down to the three witches, one of whom was played by Ernest Thesiger. The judgement of the critics was that, given all this, it was not especially good. In spite of them, though, it ran for most of a year – during which time no fewer than four people working in it died, thus confirming the play’s reputation for being unlucky (merely to utter its name is unlucky: many actors refer to it as ‘the Scottish play’). Oblivious to all this as a twelve-year-old, what I was aware of seeing was Gielgud giving an anguished performance of ever-increasing intensity that made my scalp prickle and itch. The witches’ scenes appalled me, and so did the scene with Banquo’s ghost. When I got home to bed and was alone in the dark I was plunged into uncontainable terror, with the most lurid scenes of the play re-enacting themselves in the blackness around me. I had to get up and go into my sister’s room, and ask if I could spend
the
rest of the night on her floor, wrapped in my bedding; and that is what I did. I was still frightened of going to my own bed the next night, though I did in the end.

Incidents like this made my family begin to wonder whether it was a good thing for me to be alone for most of every day. My father had the thought that I might re-establish contact with Norman Tillson, the closest friend of my pre-war years. His family owned two sweetshops in Hoxton Street, and had lived above the one further away from us. Norman had gone to a different school from me, and had been evacuated to Bedfordshire. Boys of our age did not write to one another, and we had no telephones, so we lost contact. Now bomb blast had made the rooms over his family’s shop uninhabitable, while leaving the shop itself intact, so they had moved out to the northern suburbs and were commuting daily to their shop. All this was exactly parallel to my family’s history. They moved further out than we did, to Potters Bar. Norman was still an evacuee in Bedfordshire, but like me he was revisiting his parents during the school holidays, which meant that whenever I was in Arnos Grove he was in Potters Bar. We began meeting again, a couple of times a week, and this set a pattern that continued until he left school and started work after the war.

Out there in Potters Bar it was a different world: a new redbrick suburbia with a life of its own. The people were mostly the first generation of their families to have decent living conditions – indoor lavatories, running hot water, bathrooms, small gardens. Because they had moved into modern homes from what were often dilapidated ones, ‘new’ and ‘modern’ were fundamental values for them: they wanted everything new and modern. And they were proud of their homes. Being better off than they had ever been – the war having created jobs not only for all the men but for most of the women too – they were all the time planning and saving to buy things for their homes. In the conditions of
wartime
their problem was not so much the availability of money as of goods. Even so, what was happening was the beginning of a way of life that was to become the predominant lifestyle of the British people. It was essentially future-oriented and optimistic. People took it for granted that they were going to be better off next year than last. But in those early days they were still self-consciously getting away from the past, a past that had been poor, drab and lacking in opportunity, and had held them down.