Growing Up In a War (3 page)

‘His name’s Bryan,’ she said as she turned and went back into the house, leaving me standing there. Once she was out of the way they loosened up. ‘We’re playing so-and-so,’ said one of the boys, who remembered me. Two girls started talking at once to explain what they were doing. And before I knew where I was, I was in the game. It had been much the same on earlier visits. When my grandmother yelled to me from the kitchen door to come in and eat, I did not want to go.

‘Coming tomorrow?’ asked one of the boys as I walked away.

‘’Spec’ so.’

And so I was recruited, in what seemed an entirely natural way, into the gang of village children. We played together more or less every day after school, most often in the field, though frequently some of us would get up to some mischief elsewhere. My special friend became Teddy Green, who lived in one of the railway cottages at the far end of the field, fronting the main road. All the wage-earners there worked at the railway station in Three Bridges. Teddy said that when he grew up he was going to work for the railway in Three Bridges, just like his dad, and he did.

The hero among the children was a boy who played with them only occasionally, and I heard him talked about before I saw him. I took them to be calling him King Constable, and asked if that was really his name, and they said yes, it was. What a splendid name, I thought, for the chap who is obviously the chap of chaps. Actually they were saying Ken Constable, but I found this out only when he came to play with us and I heard them address him as Ken. He was a good-looking, strongly built fourteen-year-old who had left school that summer. This meant he was looked on by the rest of us as more or less grown-up. He had known the other children all their lives, but because they were younger he played with them only when he could find no one better to hang around with. Then he dominated them. He did everything better than they did, and they idolised him for it, and tried to emulate him. I, like the rest, imitated the way he played football. I had never played with such a big boy before – no such persons had ever deigned to take notice of me. I was overawed by him. Four years later he was drafted into the navy and killed. A plaque in the village church commemorates him.

The church played an essential part in our lives as the chief source of pocket money. I was told that if I joined the choir and attended regularly I would be given half a crown for the period up to Christmas. The children in the choir got half a crown for
each
of the three terms in the year. I could scarcely believe it. I had never possessed anything like such a sum of money at once: I was used to getting money in ha’pennies and pennies, plus fourpence on Saturdays. Teddy told me he went to the vicarage every Saturday morning and cleaned all the boots and shoes, including those of the servants, and for this he was paid the unbelievable sum of sixpence. On top of that he got money from his parents. The village children were wallowing in money, it seemed to me, and the biggest sums of all came from the church. This was a revelation. I joined the choir immediately. Thus choir practices and church services became part of my life.

It was the first time I had been to grown-up services – I had been to weddings and Sunday school, but no one in my family went to ordinary church, so it was new to me. It surprised me that grown-ups were expected to kneel, though I noted that the hassocks provided for them to do it on were so high that they didn’t have to do a really proper kneel. As a choirboy I was provided with a scarlet cassock and white surplice, an outfit I thought snazzy, especially the cassock. We processed a lot, walking behind a man carrying a cross, out of the main door, round the outside of the church, then back in again, singing as we went. No matter where we started, we always ended up in the same place as we began. I had no idea why we did this, nor indeed what any of it was about, but I was never bored, because there was always so much going on. There were the people in the church, for a start – although never full it was usually well attended. And there seemed to be some sort of indoor autumnal mist, so that the lights shining through it on to our red cassocks made everything look shimmery in a cheerful, Christmassy way. It was the first time I ever noticed chandeliers. And of course there was the music. But I discovered that my voice was awkwardly positioned between treble and alto: if I sang with the trebles I could not get the high notes, and if I sang with the altos I could not get the low ones.
What
I did was sing treble and stop whenever it got too high. This meant I missed out on the best bits, the climaxes. On the other hand, if I got carried away, and strained to stay with the others to get up there, I made a croak that brought grimaces and shushing from the choirmaster. I half expected to be dropped from the choir for not fitting into it properly, but I never was. I went on having the same trouble with singing until my voice broke – whereupon I became too low for the tenor part and too high for the bass.

My grandmother came once to see me in my cassock and surplice, and told my father I looked angelic. Next time he visited us from London he came to church to see for himself. I could not take my eyes off him. His presence seemed to fill the church. He was, and always had been, the lodestar of my life, and I must have been missing him more than I consciously realised. Actually, I think he visited us on most Sundays, often with my grandfather, occasionally with my mother; but I was used to living with him and seeing him every day, and all I knew was that he was not there most of the time. But anyway, here he was now, and in a church of all places, something I knew he would not have done if it had not been for me. I noticed that he did not kneel. Afterwards he said how awful those hassocks were – people should either kneel or not kneel, not fudge it. From him I learnt that the church was unusually old – Saxon, he said – and famous with people who knew about churches. It was surprisingly big, apparently, for something as old as it was, and this showed that, although it was now in the middle of nowhere, the area round Worth must have been important at one time. It so happens that the church is considered by many the most beautiful cruciform Saxon church in England; but there would have been no way in which that could have been made to mean anything to me. I just liked it, that was all. And it remains to this day the only church I have ever attended voluntarily and regularly.

The vicar was an irascible, dislikeable man. In the village it was said that more people would have gone to church had it not been for him. Teddy heard new gossip about him every Saturday morning from the servants in the vicarage: they said he had fits of uncontrollable temper in which he sometimes threw his dinner at his wife. When Teddy told my grandmother this it impressed her so much that she made occasional references to it in conversation with me for the rest of her life.

Teddy was my chief source of information about most things. It was he who introduced me to the crimes (literally) of scrumping and smoking. There was a few yards of the village street that constituted a bridge over one of the railway lines into Three Bridges, and Teddy and I liked to clamber down at that point and play along the line. Beside the railway, not far off, was an orchard and, this being autumn, apples were ripening. We raided that orchard several times, climbing over the wire fence with special joy because its purpose was to keep us out. It was the first time I felt my heart in my mouth. Climbing back again with armfuls of apples was much trickier, and we always managed to drop most of them. Even those we clung on to were a problem, because we could not eat them all, yet neither of us dared to take them home. We ended up stuffing ourselves with as many as we could – enough to make us ill, sometimes – and throwing the rest away. I found scrumping by far the most thrilling of all the things there were for us to do, and I wanted to do it more and more. A couple of times we were spotted by the man who owned the orchard, and he screamed at us through the trees, rushing towards us waving his arms. When this happened we panicked and hurtled like rabbits over the fence. Once I was not quick enough, and he grabbed me by the collar and gave me a clip round the ear while yelling abuse into it. I was surprised to be let free – I expected something terrible and final to happen; to be arrested, handed over to the police. He must have complained to my grandmother, though, because she
said
something about it a day or two later. After that the scrumping expeditions became more exciting, because more forbidden and dangerous.

Smoking presented us with the same basic problem as scrumping. Cigarettes were sold only by the packet, and not even between us could we get through a whole packet at once, yet neither of us dared to take cigarettes home. So the question was, what to do with those we had not smoked? We felt the dilemma more keenly with cigarettes because they were so dear that it hurt us to throw them away. In the end, most often, we did – though only after having puffed our way frantically through enough to make us ill. We naturally discovered that the more fiercely we sucked a cigarette the quicker it burnt. And we lit one from another. They made us far sicker than the apples. There was a Saturday morning when we got through most of a packet of Craven A like this, and when I got home I was monumentally sick. My head in that lavatory bowl is almost as present to me now as it was then. I heaved my heart out, my grandmother standing over me, and me realising that I stank of cigarettes. The nausea felt terminal, like seasickness. The experience must have been something of a trauma for me, because never again, not even in my thirties when I was an addicted smoker, was I ever able to bring myself to touch a Craven A cigarette.

The shop where we bought our cigarettes was just outside the village. The man there explained to us that because the law forbade him to sell them to us he could let us have only the largest and most expensive packets, those of twenty, since to sell us fives or tens was not worth the risk to him. He could not even let us have the cheaper packets of twenty – the smaller, more elegant cigarettes ‘for ladies’: it would have to be the bigger, full-priced ones. In Hoxton no sales would have been possible on that basis, but he made quite a lot of money out of the children of Worth.

Although as the offspring of two heavy smokers I had been pre-programmed,
in
the womb, for addiction, I had never smoked until now. At home there had been cigarettes lying about all over the place, and I had constantly been sent out to buy them, but my parents would have punished me so harshly if I had smoked that I never did. In fact I do not remember any children of my age in Hoxton smoking. It was probably a matter of money more than anything. It was an everyday thing to see grown-ups scavenging for cigarette ends in the gutter, in the same way as there were always children who would pick up apple cores. Nearly all grown-ups smoked, but it was a luxury for them, most of all for those who bought cigarettes in ones and twos. When I started smoking, at Worth, I could not understand why anyone did it. Cigarettes tasted disgusting, and caused my head to swim, and made me feel sick almost from the first puff. They also gave me a headache, and a burning throat, and made me cough. So why did people smoke if they were allowed to? How could anyone like it? I was aware that the only reason I smoked was that I was forbidden to, and thought that as soon as I was allowed to smoke I would stop.

Smoking was so much a part of everyday life in those days that it was a matter for remark if someone did not smoke. Like drinking, smoking was thought to oil the wheels of ordinary life. When people were offered cigarettes they said things like: ‘All right, I’ll have one just to be sociable.’ I knew only one or two grown-ups who did not smoke; but my grandmother was one of them, so any telltale signs of smoking in her bungalow would have been noticed. In any case, she did know I smoked – she asked me, and I denied it, but I could see from her eyes that she knew I was lying.

The only other adult I knew who did not smoke was Miss Rutland, our neighbour in the bungalow next door. She was a thin little woman with a face like parchment, and seemed to me unimaginably old, at least ninety. In fact she must have been about
sixty.
She dressed always in black from head to foot, in clothes appropriate at the time of Queen Victoria’s death, in mourning for her fiancé, who had been killed in the Boer War – which of course had taken place less than forty years earlier. However, although she looked ancient and funereal, she was on easy, friendly terms with the village children, and particularly with me, simply because I lived next door. She bought sweets and chocolate from a yellow van that used to come round – to give to ‘the bairns’, as she called us in her Scottish accent – and this may have had something to do with the fact that I would sometimes wander into her home. The two of us played games of our, or rather her, invention. She introduced me to one in which each in turn had to guess a tune from its rhythm. We sat beside a chest of drawers that had metal rings on its handles, and with one of these we tapped out the rhythm of a tune in staccato clicks. I started with the popular songs of the day, but she did not know them, she knew only hymn tunes, so I changed over to those. I was surprised at how often – sometimes almost immediately – I was able to identify one, out of the hundreds of tunes I knew, from just these tuneless taps; the words would come leaping into my head during the first line. I was receiving the lesson, without realising it, that there was a great deal more to even the simplest of tunes than its melodic line.

On my first visit to Miss Rutland, she showed me round her house, which included many photographs and other mementos of her fiancé. The man in the photographs was young enough to be her son or grandson now, and his funny old-fashioned army uniform located him in the world of silent film comedy. One of her mementos was a paperknife he had given her, the handle of which was a military cartridge in its case. I was chilled by the sight of it: even to me as a nine-year-old it looked a horribly evil thing, obviously intended to kill someone like the young man himself. When I commented on it to my grandmother, she said that this
was
typical of the way people had thought during the Boer War, and even during the First World War, but no one would think like that nowadays.