Growing Up In a War (4 page)

My grandmother seemed not to know many people in the village, apart from Miss Rutland, but she was perfectly happy about that. Grandma was a tough old party, hard in character, and tightly closed up. Traumatic poverty in childhood had turned self-reliance and self-sufficiency into absolutes: you must never, never depend on others, never
need
others, because if you did you were done for. She had not much imagination, and no sense of humour; but very surprisingly, to me at least, she was aware of this: she was the only person I have ever known who said unaffectedly and truthfully that she had no sense of humour. When she said it, her voice had a note of wistfulness, almost of yearning: others were laughing, sparkle-eyed, and she would have loved to join in, but she remained outside it, not understanding. Her basic form of self-protection was to keep herself beyond reproach: always tell the truth, always keep your word, always be on time, always be meticulously honest about money, always obey the rules – not out of concern for others, but to keep yourself invulnerable. If you did these things no one would be able to get at you – or, if they did, you would be in the right, not they. To preserve this position she avoided anything that might bring pressure on her to compromise – discussion, explanation, consultation – and just got on with doing what she thought right, and presented everyone with fait accomplis. This was the thing I found hardest about living with her: I was never allowed to make a choice or express a preference. Everything was presented to me as a settled decision, and all I could do was come to terms with it. Inevitably it made me feel excluded, alienated. But from her point of view, everything was being done in my best interests, as she thought it should be.

Throughout the time we were together at Worth, she seemed to me to be living in her own little air bubble. Most Sundays her
son,
my father, would come tootling down from London in his second-hand Austin 10, occasionally bringing her husband, my grandfather, with him, and thankfully seldom her daughter-in-law, my mother. And that made her content. On one such Sunday my grandfather was sitting in a deckchair in the garden reading a newspaper, my parents were in the house with my grandmother, and the car was parked outside the front gate. Teddy Green and I were playing in the street; and I, trusting that the garden hedge would prevent my grandfather from seeing us, started to show the car off to Teddy in whispers. ‘And this,’ I said, ‘is the handbrake,’ operating it to show how it worked – at which, in slow motion, the car rolled into the ditch under the hedge. My grandfather stirred. Teddy and I scuttled off into the brushwood opposite the house and hid behind trees, waiting in fear to observe the consequences of our actions (my action). Grandad emerged from the front gate and looked at the car, his jaw in his hand. Then he went into the house. Then everyone came out. My father was exasperated. ‘How could that have happened? Did you see anybody?’

‘No,’ said my grandfather.

‘Or hear anything?’

‘No.’

It took all four of them a lot of heaving, and a lot of time, to get the car back on to the road, all talking at once while they were doing it, speculating on how this could have happened. At last, when it was done and the handbraking double-checked, they went back into the house. When I rejoined them later I looked, or hoped I looked, the picture of innocence, and had to be told what had happened in my absence. When the time came for our visitors to leave, my grandfather said his goodbyes to me out of earshot of the others, and his last words to me were: ‘I saw you. But don’t worry. I won’t give you away.’

CHAPTER FOUR

WORTH WAS JUST
a single stringy, straggly street off a not-very-main road. It was a cul-de-sac, so no one passed through it: the street just ended with the church, and then there were miles of unusually thick woodland (in which I and my friends spent a lot of time). I have since found that there are people who live not all that far away yet are unaware of the village’s existence. To them the name Worth is associated with a Roman Catholic abbey and boarding school, round which they assume any village of the same name is bound to be clustered; but in fact the abbey and school are some miles from the village, on the other side of the woodland; and during the time I lived in Worth I never even heard of them.

Another thing that added to the isolation of Worth was that it did not contain a single shop or pub. This was because the woman who owned the village would not allow them. She wished to keep it, she said, unspoiled. She lived somewhere called Wentworth Park, on the other side of the main road. I have no memory of seeing a house there, but in any case I did not envisage her as living in a house but living in a park, as it might have been a London park. She was pointed out to me one day driving past in her car, and looked a nice woman. She was rarely mentioned, though; she was too remote. This has since suggested to me that people who own villages probably figure less in the minds of the villagers than they imagine. I am quite sure that scarcely anyone
in
Hoxton would have known who owned the land there. It would not have entered most of their heads to wonder – though critics of slum landlordism might expect effigies of the landlords to be burnt every Bonfire Night in the slum streets.

The nearest shop, the little corner store that sold cigarettes, was a short way up the main road, at the crossroads from which Pound Hill ran down into Three Bridges. Although the shop was oddly isolated, it prospered. My grandmother went there for everything she needed at short notice, and bought the rest of her provisions from the yellow van that came to the village every day – a general store on wheels that stopped at each house. For big items she would walk to Crawley and bus back, as we did when the two of us went to the pictures there. (Of the films we saw, the one I always remember is
Stagecoach
.) Only one or two people in Worth had cars. Several had bicycles, but these were not of much use across fields, so most of the time people walked. This, of course, must have been so since the beginning of time, and no doubt it never entered people’s heads to question it, but it did mean that their horizons were narrow by the standards of the post-war world. During the three and a half months I spent in Worth, the only other places I went to were Three Bridges and Crawley. Other nearby towns I heard mentioned were Horsham and Horley – I used to mix the two up – and East Grinstead; but I never went to any of them; and there were quite a few grown-ups in the village who never went to any of them either. Some had never been to London.

Although Worth was a backwater, it was less rustic and remote than the village in Dorset where I had been for a couple of holidays when I was younger. That had been an exotic world of buzzing heaviness and flies, of farmyards and outdoor privies, with the reek of dung everywhere, and few roads, whereas this was comparatively well tailored. Even so, my experience in Dorset was of great help to me in Worth. It had made me used to being in the country,
and
hearing country accents all round me, and playing with village children, mostly in fields, or clambering in trees; and it had taught me such basic skills as how to make a bow and arrow. Having enjoyed it before helped me to feel at home in Worth – more at home, I suspect, than my grandmother, who probably had less experience of being outside London, except at some of the cockney seaside resorts. Even so, I went on thinking of London as real life, the real world, from which I was now separated because of the war. But I did not feel homesick, perhaps because I was relieved to be away from my mother.

Homesickness was something I never experienced as a child, despite the fact that after the age of nine my base was always away from my family. I was pleased to see them during school holidays, but never longed for them when I was not with them. One thing I do remember, though, that may be connected with living away from home for the first time, is that at Worth I took a new kind of interest in reading. I had always gobbled up comics greedily, unable to put one aside until I had read every word of it, and secretly spending forbidden sums of money on them. But in the area round Worth the shops did not sell the comics I was addicted to – the
Wizard
, above all, and also the
Hotspur
– and I regarded the others as inferior, so I was forced now to move on to something halfway between comics and books. They were novelettes, actually, though no one used that word. They looked like very thin paperbacks, were aimed at grown-ups, cost tuppence, and were probably the crudest as well as the cheapest adult fiction outside magazines. The leading genres were romantic, adventure, detective and cowboy, and I opted for detective, these being mostly Sexton Blake stories. But I was prepared to try anything, except romantic. I became as addicted to novelettes as I had been to comics – in fact I thought they were better, because they were longer and more grown-up. I remember one about the Ku Klux Klan (the first time I heard of it) in which its members were the
goodies
as against the dirty niggers who were the baddies. This makes me wonder now about the provenance of some of them. There was one about airmen in the First World War in which, as in my comics, pilots were represented brandishing pistols and shooting at one another from their cockpits – wonderfully exciting. This, I thought, was what I wanted to do when I grew up. Once in the bungalow, when my grandmother thought I was out, I heard her in the next room praising me to a visitor and wondering aloud what I was going to be in life, and I bawled out to them: ‘An airman!’

For my grandmother I felt no positive affection, unlike the way I did for my grandfather and Aunt Peggy. Although I accepted the other aspects of my life in Worth, I was not happy about living with Grandma. It gave me problems which I did not know how to cope with. At home in London my mother’s indifference to me had always had the back-handed advantage of leaving me to grow up in freedom. She cared little what I did, and never wondered where I was, provided I came home for meals. On days when there was no school she would shoo me out on to the pavement of Hoxton Street after our midday dinner and say: ‘I don’t want to see you again till it gets dark.’ And from that moment I was at liberty to do whatever I liked, go wherever I liked – anywhere, that is, except home. If I got into trouble it would not matter provided my parents never heard about it, so for me the important thing was not keeping out of trouble but keeping the trouble from my parents. This was how I had become used to living; so when I found myself in Worth I went on behaving like that. However, my grandmother was not like my mother. She felt responsible for my welfare, and wanted to know where I was going, and what I would be doing when I got there; and she became angry if I did not tell her. Furthermore, because the village was a village, the scrapes I got into reached her ears. She genuinely tried to do what was best for me, but without asking me what I
thought
or wanted. Her decisions boxed me in at every turn, and it became intolerable. She was, it seemed to me, behaving as if I were a well-treated prisoner.

A day came when I exploded. Shouting through floods of tears, I denounced her for ‘the way you treat me’. She was dumbfounded, and in righteous outrage said things like: ‘But everything that happens here is done for your benefit. I do everything I can think of for you.’ I knew this to be true – in fact I understood the situation clearly – but at that age I was incapable of putting such thoughts into words. The frustration this induced was itself intolerable – I knew exactly what was wrong but did not know how to say it. So I carried on accusing her of treating me badly when I knew that this was not what it was, and not what I really meant.

I think this scene may have played a decisive role in bringing my period at Worth to an end. When Christmas showed its funnel over the horizon, my father said that, since the anticipated bombing of London was not taking place, it would be all right for me to come home at least for Christmas. After that, I would not return to Worth but would rejoin my old Hoxton school, which had been evacuated to Market Harborough in Leicestershire. Then, he said, I would once more be with my old mates and my old teachers. The reason he gave for this change was that the school in Three Bridges had turned out not to be good enough. It was not educating me properly, he said. I imagined this must be true if he said it, but was puzzled how he could know, since he was not living with us and had never been to the school. It seemed to me I was learning more there than I had at my school in Hoxton. Certainly I was finding it more interesting. But I supposed what he said must be true in some grown-up sense beyond my comprehension. Only now, as I write this chapter, over sixty-five years later, do I find myself reflecting that the real truth was probably otherwise.

What I think now, when I look back, is that my grandmother felt herself inadequate to the task of controlling me. There were my scrumping and smoking, both of which were crimes and could have led to trouble with the police, perhaps even (in her mind) to my being sent to a borstal. There were probably whispered, giggling sounds in the night telling of who-knows-what going on between me and Gwen. I was roaming all over the countryside getting up to mischief, and then lying about it when I got home. I was misbehaving about the house – on one occasion I tore up all her rose bushes. And finally there was my explosion of direct rebellion, and my denunciation of her. I suspect she told my father that she simply did not know what to do with me. And he would have decided the rest.

The first thing to happen was that Gwen was taken away from us and returned to her family in London. When she was no longer there I started waking up in the night crying, but I had no idea what I was crying about. I had only the vaguest of recollections of what might have been bad dreams, and was not sure I had been dreaming at all. During the day I was a happy enough child, but in my sleep I would be overwhelmed by the same feelings of grief and loss as had afflicted me when I slept alone in London. One night I woke myself with the noise I was making, howling and sobbing at the top of my voice. When I was fully awake I sat up in bed and stopped crying. Immediately my grandmother’s voice came to me in the blackness, calling from her bedroom: ‘What’s the matter, Bryan? Are you all right? You’ve just woken me up.’ I shouted back: ‘It’s all right, Grandma. Don’t worry. I’m all right now. Go back to sleep.’ And she did. So did I. What strikes me now is that incidents like this must have made her think I was desperately unhappy in Worth, when actually I was not.