Growing Up In a War (38 page)

Because my family was so disunited the only people we knew in common were one another. Apart from that we each had our
own
friends, and our own lives, and went our own ways. There were no other families that we visited together, or who visited us. However, my bit of the family would go out quite often together, as indeed we always had, to places of public entertainment – sometimes without my mother, though only at her insistence. Joan got a job in Frith Street, Soho, and from then on the rest of us would meet her in one of the Soho restaurants called Fava, and have dinner before going on to a performance. I was still not allowed to choose freely from the menu in any public eating place – my father always read out to me a choice from the cheapest dishes – and at Fava’s my choice was between two, each of which cost four shillings and sixpence. One of these was Vitello Milanese, a veal escalope with spaghetti, and I loved that. We never had veal at home, or spaghetti, so I ordered it every time we went to Fava’s, and never got tired of it. Occasionally, at another table, we would see Tony Turner, the Hyde Park orator, with his friends, but we never spoke to him. Years later, when I got to know him, he told me that Fava’s had remained his favourite restaurant even after he read in a newspaper that it had been prosecuted for selling horse meat. For years, well into my twenties, it was the Soho restaurant I preferred to all others; and in my memories of those years it figures almost as a character in its own right.

Joan’s new job was a turning point in her life, and brought new interests into mine. It was with a printing firm, the Shenval Press, which acted as a publisher in the way printers in the eighteenth century had also been publishers. She was secretary to its boss and owner, James Shand, known to everyone as Hamish. He was intensely interested in everything to do with design, starting with the typefaces of his own printing; and among other things he published a quarterly journal concerned with the relationship between technical design and the arts, whether in industry, architecture, interior decoration, furniture, or popular art such as posters and advertising. The journal was called
Art and Technics
(for
which the in-house nickname was
Tarts and Technics
). He also published a journal about printing. Joan brought these home, and talked about her work. And it came to me as a new kind of education.

I had taken the physical objects in my environment for granted, just as they were: the furniture, the books, everything from the vacuum cleaner to the telephone; also public objects such as tube stations and trains. Now I realised that for each and every one of them a host of conscious decisions had been taken by individuals before they were able to come into existence, not just the decision that they should be produced but what their design was to be, what material they were to be made of, how big they were to be, and so on down to the smallest detail. It could never have started out with the decision to produce
this
vacuum cleaner or
this
telephone, because each was itself the outcome of multiple choices. Each time I picked up a book, there was someone who had consciously decided not just to publish it but what format it was to have, what typeface, what quality and thickness of paper, what materials in the binding, what colours in the jacket. Everything had been decided and designed. And in every case someone was responsible, if only by default. I looked at things in a new way, down to each box of matches, and the matches in the box. It was a revelation.

I had a honeymoon period with this, and enjoyed it with all the excitement of discovery. I am not primarily a visual person, and I do not respond to visual experiences with anything like the same depth as I do to music and words. There was to come a time when I had become used to seeing things in terms of their design, and the bloom and freshness of the experience faded. But I never went back to taking the look of everything for granted. The way I saw things had been permanently changed.

While Joan was with the Shenval Press it published a magazine called
Ballet
, and with this she was in her element. She was, so to
speak,
secretary to the magazine, so the editor and contributors were continually in and out of her office. She found herself moving deeper into a world she already knew and loved. The venture was successful, so the firm launched a sister publication called
Opera
. This has since become the international house magazine of the opera world, and is thriving today. I have a friend, Richard Law, who contributed to the first issue and is still writing for it more than half a century later; and I have written for it myself, many times.

My sister, though living permanently with our parents – not just for a few weeks at a time, like me – was developing a distinctive life of her own. But my parents also had their separate lives. Whether there was more to my mother’s than met the eye I doubt, but my father may have been having an affair during those years – I almost find myself hoping so, for his sake. If he was, it may well have been with someone of whose existence I was ignorant. But there is a woman I think it might have been. She had been a colleague of his in Civil Defence, and I had met her when I visited him at his depot – she was always around when I was there, and I found her unusually likeable. She was sexy and warm, and seemed to have a certain softness for my father, and also to show more than a normal interest in me. I must have known her name at that time, but all I can remember now is her nickname, Speedy.

A big change that occurred in my life during this period was that I started getting vacation jobs. Although it was my father who gave me my pocket money it was my mother who insisted that I get a job during the school holidays. How I found the job I no longer remember, but I became a temporary junior clerk in the income tax office in Tottenham. The people there wanted me to start work on a Saturday morning – all offices worked on Saturday mornings in those days, but it was the time people most wanted to take off, which is why they wanted me there then. On my first day I was instructed to man the enquiries counter and deal with
the
public – who, they said, arrived in maximum numbers on Saturdays. When I protested that I would not know the answers to any of their questions I was told that this did not matter. ‘The important thing is to send them away happy. You talk nicely, and you’ve got good manners, so you can do it. Just tell them that we know all about their problem, and are dealing with it, and that they’ll hear from us very soon. Take a note of their name, and let us have it, and we’ll then deal with it. There’s nothing anyone can do across the counter anyway. If there’s anyone who won’t take this from you, fetch Mr So-and-so, and he’ll deal with them. But you’ll find you’ll be all right.’ And I was. I had no knowledge of tax matters whatsoever, none at all, and to begin with no knowledge of the workings of the office either, but none of this made any difference. And the fact that I was only a teenager, which I expected in itself to annoy the people who came with their problems, appeared not to matter. I was tall, and seemed well educated; and in those days these things in themselves were enough to evoke respect. The whole experience was an eye-opener, if a saddening one. I soon learnt how the office worked, and absorbed some of the basic lessons about how bureaucracy operated at its interface with the public. Most of the individuals who passed their lives in that office were decent, well-intentioned people with a normal sense of fairness; but at the same time they were little people: unimaginative, blinkered, governed by the rule-book, and inclined to laziness. Above all they were fearful for their jobs, and therefore terrified of putting a foot wrong. What governed their behaviour more than any other consideration was fear of doing something that would open them to serious criticism from their colleagues or superiors.

Working on the counter was the most interesting job I was given. Most of the others were mechanical and mindless, like altering with a pen a single digit on each of a pile of out-of-date printed forms, so that they could go on being used – there was
no
office machinery except for typewriters and telephones. This was an introduction to the realities of life for the lowliest of the people who worked in offices. There were still millions of people doing jobs like that. When I came across Bernard Shaw’s remark that, of all the damnable wastages of human life, clerking was the worst, I knew what he was talking about. (So did he. It was an abyss into which many writers, trapped in a way that I was not, had stared.)

What made it bearable was the presence in the office of another temp of my own age, and a congenial one, Ken Connor. He was a local grammar-school boy on the way to becoming an art student. We were often set to the same task in an otherwise empty room, so we spent whole days in animated talk. He loved music, and went to concerts, so we sometimes went off together in the evenings. I also visited his family. His mother was intelligent but authoritarian, formidably harsh-tongued, and his father a bus-driver. Father was haunted by the fact that someone had committed suicide by throwing himself under his bus. His inability to get this out of his mind communicated itself to me, and in his presence I felt the touch of a finger of inconsolable yet resentful melancholy. Ken and I remained friends for a number of years. When my first book was published – a volume of embarrassing poems written in my teens – it was he who designed the jacket. His cover is better than my poems, and is now what makes the book worth having.

It was in my mid-teens that I started to write poetry. My conscious mind had little to do with the process. The poems came to me spontaneously, under some sort of pressure from within, and the only self-aware thing I did was write them down and punctuate them, and occasionally polish one of them up a bit by altering a word here or there to remove an obvious fault. I would always know when a poem was on the way: I would be overcome by a broody, heavy, full, drowsy feeling that I experienced at no
other
time. This would cause me to withdraw into myself, and then the poem would push its way into my mind. In that sense it was authentic poetry, even if, at the same time, not very good. It is extraordinary that all this versification, with its rhyming, scansion, division into stanzas and the rest of it, can happen unconsciously, but it does. And the fact that the poems are not very good makes it more rather than less surprising. The nearest thing to it I can think of is the tightly plotted structure of some of my dreams, with their intricate organisation and vivid detail, which are also creating themselves spontaneously and involuntarily in an unconscious mind.

It was nearly always in London that I wrote my poems, not at school, because only at home could I find the necessary solitude for uninterrupted parturition – a paradoxical benefit to get from being in London. Altogether, the richness of my London life was extraordinary. In some ways I think of it as the nodal point of my whole development as a human being.

However, and of course, although being in London was so special for me, it was not special to the other members of my family, who lived there all the time. They had a perfectly normal need to get away from it for holidays, sometimes when I was with them. By this time they had taken to going away separately, my mother usually to Bristol. My sister would take charge of the flat while Mother was away, and go off with her friends at another time (perhaps to Stratford-upon-Avon to see some plays). There was one summer – I think it was immediately after the end of the war in Europe – when my mother, sister and I went for a holiday in Bournemouth. I enjoyed it. I have always liked resorts, for the same reason as I have always liked circuses and pantomimes: they are showbiz at its most basic, and are fun. The one special memory I retain is hearing a young Australian pianist called Noel Mewton-Wood play Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto with the Bournemouth Municipal Orchestra. He was altogether
exceptional,
and became internationally recognised as such. But he committed suicide while still very young, over a homosexual love affair.

I was still in London with my parents at the end of that summer when the war against Japan came to an end, and with it the Second World War. It happened precipitately, because of the dropping of the two atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The public had been given no hint of the existence of these weapons, and we were all expecting the war to go on for another year or two. I was as astounded as everyone else. But I had done enough physics and higher mathematics to understand the popular-science explanations that some of the newspapers and magazines were giving, and it was now a question of me explaining things to my father rather than the other way round. It was obvious to everyone that a new historical era had opened. If ever the term ‘cataclysmic change’ had a literal meaning, it was now. No other public event in my lifetime has imposed with such iron certitude the instant feeling that the world would never be the same again. These astonishing weapons had suddenly, out of the blue, ended the war, and we were all glad of that – we had been expecting tens of thousands more deaths on our own side, which did not now occur. But there had already been two world wars in quick succession, and if there should ever be another, these weapons would be what the combatants would start with. To us, who had just lived through six years of world war, and found the outbreak of another easy to envisage, the prospect was ungraspable. But our very inability to imagine it froze our blood. It was instantly clear that the need to avoid atomic war would exercise an altogether new kind of dominance over world politics.

Meanwhile there was uncontrollable joy that the Second World War had ended, and without the terrible further casualties on our side that we had been steeled for. On VJ Day my family felt an overwhelming need to celebrate with other people, just to go out
and
do something – shout, sing, laugh, dance about, punch the air, we did not know what or where. Guided by our atavistic Londoners’ intuition we made our way to Trafalgar Square, where we found tens of thousands of other people who felt the same way. What we did with the time we spent there was bizarre – stroll around arm in arm with total strangers, exchange garments with them, hug people, do silly little dances with them, fall about in a lot of physical joking, shriek with laughter, sing songs, yell with bliss, work off our energy, make ourselves tired. The grown-ups around us went in for endless kissing, and anyone of either sex in a uniform was smothered with embraces. According to later analysis this scene was a prelude to massively profligate copulation between total strangers. Hundreds of new human beings must have been conceived that night.