Growing Up In a War (7 page)

The first winter of the Second World War was an unusually harsh one; in fact it was said then to be the coldest in living memory. The canal in Market Harborough froze so solid that the entire town turned out one Sunday and walked along it. This was
the
idea of the local newspaper, and a good one. From the top of Logan Street to the Wharf there was a mass of people walking in both directions as if the ice were a street. It amazed me to see everybody promenading like this. There were constantly people slithering and falling down, while others whizzed past on skates. Whenever since then I have seen a picture like this in a Dutch painting – and there seem to be a lot of them – I have thought of Market Harborough. I was surprised at how rough and multicoloured the ice was, though of course I know now that it must have been treated to make it safer. I had expected it to be like glass, completely clear and impossibly slippery. Something about the way the bulrushes on both banks stood out of the ice appealed to me especially, and has remained a powerful image. The weather was still freezing, and our feet became as cold as the ice. But it was immense fun.

That winter, going to and from school every day, there would be snowball fights, and groups of boys building snowmen. All this was new to me. In Hoxton, snow never stayed on the ground. In those London streets, full of pea-soup fog, teeming with humanity, such snow as had fallen during the winters of the late 1930s had turned to black or dark grey slush immediately. Only from comics and Christmas cards did I know about things like white snow, snowball fights and snowmen. Now they were real, and happening all round me, and I loved them. One evening when Joey, the other boy who lived with the Burgesses, came in through the back door covered from head to foot with compacted snow (a gang had captured him and rolled him in a snow bank), I thought he looked wonderful. The next day, just before getting home from school, I did a lot of solo rolling in a snow bank to effect a similar entrance, and was deflated by how much less responsive the audience was.

Most of the boys, including me, wore balaclava helmets and woolly scarves, so we looked very different from our usual selves. There were some who knocked together home-made sleds out of
wooden
boxes, and dragged them along the ice-covered pavements on lengths of string, or took them to nearby slopes for tobogganing, which then developed into races. Ponds and lakes froze, fish died. We were living in a transformed landscape, dazzling white, exhilarating.

That was the winter of the so-called Winter War, Russia’s invasion of Finland, which impinged on me to a surprising extent. In his secret pact with Hitler, Stalin had been promised Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, as well as half of Poland, and in accordance with this he was to take possession of the three Baltic states the following June. But now, meanwhile, he tried to annexe Finland. The blind courage of the resistance he met with astonished the world, coming as it did from so small a country against so powerful an invader. The Finns inflicted great losses on the Russians, driving them into retreat in some places, even pursuing them back over their own frontier at one point. Phrases like ‘plucky little Finland’ were used all the time, and given an ironic edge by the fact that no other country was doing anything to help them. The British public followed the war with the attitude of football spectators. Stalin being Hitler’s ally, we naturally thought of the Finns as being on the same side as ourselves; and because our war with Hitler was quiescent, the Finns’ war against Stalin became our front-page news. The local paper had offices only a few doors away from the school, so I passed and re-passed its display windows every day; and although the Finnish war was not reported in its pages, its windows contained an ever-changing display of news photographs from Finland. These all-white pictures of snow-covered scenes drove home powerfully the subarctic conditions of the war. I followed them with as much fascination as I would have followed a serial in a comic, though with the difference that I knew they were real. It was the first time I interested myself in a public news event unprompted by my father.

I had not yet begun to look at newspapers on my own initiative,
but
people often pointed things out to me in them, and I would then read with interest. However, there was another way my reading habits developed while I was with the Burgesses. Mrs Burgess used to read magazines that looked to me like a version of my comics but aimed at grown-up women. In exactly the same way, these magazines of hers were printed on newspaper, in a smallish tabloid format, with line illustrations; each issue cost a penny or tuppence, and consisted of instalments of half a dozen serials. Her penny one was called
Silver Star
, her tuppenny one
Golden Star
; and there were copies of both lying around the house. I had always regarded love stories as soppy, and resented the apparently obligatory intrusion of a love interest into otherwise decent films, even cowboy films. But now, when I picked up Mrs Burgess’s magazines and started reading the stories, I found myself not just interested but suffused with a peculiar melting feeling. Nothing in my comics had caused me to feel like that. It was the feeling I had had in Three Bridges when I looked at Morag Macdonald. Once I discovered it again here it became a fix that I wanted to repeat; and so I became addicted to reading Mrs Burgess’s magazines. The serials were more samey than those in my comics. Each was always a love story, and the man was always a higher-up sort of person than the woman – either she was a nurse and he was a doctor, or she was a secretary and he was her boss, or she was a servant in a big house and he was a son of the family. Only the backgrounds differed, but they were nearly always places of work, and that too made the stories grown-up. Work was the grown-up world. Places of work never figured in my comics.

When Mrs Burgess found I was reading her magazines she was put out, and told me they were not for young boys. When I asked why not, she was unable to think of a reason. So she asked her husband. He reacted in the same way: he began by telling me that it was quite wrong for a boy of my age to read these things, but when I asked him what harm they would do he was unable
to
think of any. These exchanges left the Burgesses not knowing what to say, and the result was that the matter was left dangling in the air – which in practice meant that I continued reading the magazines.

Contrary to what the Burgesses must have supposed, when I read those stories there was no thought of sex in my mind. In fact, in those days no sex entered the stories either. Although it may be obvious now that I was experiencing the first stirrings of sexual feeling, it was not apparent to me at the time. I enjoyed wallowing in the lovely feelings my reading gave me in the same way as I enjoyed wallowing in the bath: it was a pleasure in itself, and therefore an end in itself. I was distantly aware of not understanding why I felt as I did, and perhaps of being mildly perplexed by it, but any such awareness was peripheral. By and large, the feelings themselves were enough for me. I identified with the young men in the drawings, always tall and slim, clean-shaven and open-faced, noticeably well dressed. They were decent, well-meaning chaps, and yet always misunderstood, even by the girl herself. They always loved the girl, if only coming round to it at the end; but until that point something always stood between them. For me all this was light years from identifying with figures like cowboys, gangsters, pirates, airmen and explorers, as I had done before. These new chaps were everyday people, not exotic, and certainly not superheroes; yet somehow I relished the thought of being in their shoes.

It was during this period that I went to adult films alone for the first time. Market Harborough had two cinemas, a fleapit on the road to the station called the Oriental, and a bright, modern one, the Ritz, that had just been built in the road I lived in. Both were open only in the evenings, when they showed the main film twice; and both put on two programmes a week. Before the days of television it was common for whole families to go together to the cinema a couple of times a week, and I went as often as the
censorship
rules would let children of my age go in by themselves. I preferred the Ritz, because at the Oriental the manager walked down the centre aisle halfway through the programme spraying the audience with disinfectant: I did not like that, although it did not stop me going there. I saw a lot of films, and now that I was going on my own they made a greater impact on me. One called
Poison Pen
, in which Flora Robson played a woman in a village who wrote anonymous letters, and ended up hanging herself, gave me nightmares. (It was the first time I had heard of anonymous letters, and this is one of those associations that have recurred ever since.) The opening sequences of
Wuthering Heights
frightened me so much that I had to leave the cinema and miss the rest of the film. These films cut so deep that if I find myself watching one of them now on television, more than sixty-five years later, and not having seen it since or even thought about it, I realise that I remember parts of the dialogue and some of the screen pictures. The memory often takes the form of knowing what words are going to be spoken next, and sometimes I check this by saying the words aloud before the character utters them. I am seldom wrong, and when I am, it is usually because something else that I have forgotten happens before the words are spoken: they always come soon. A lot of these films are not even especially good ones. Those I liked best were adventure stories on an epic scale, historical for preference, like
Drums Along the Mohawk
. The bigness of the stories gave me a sense of satisfaction that was also big: I felt satiated after them, as if I had just had a wonderful dinner. There were a couple of films with Ronald Reagan, and I was so intrigued by the formation of his upper lip that the next day I stopped on my way to school to examine it in the still photographs outside the cinema. From then on I knew who he was, and was less shocked than surprised when he became President of the United States.

Each time I went to the cinema there were newsreels and other
shorts;
and of course my grandmother was no longer there to force me to miss them. For ten minutes or so before the lights went down the management would put on Flanagan and Allen records, to indicate that things would soon be under way. These included ‘Underneath the Arches’, ‘Hometown’, ‘Umbrella Man’, and one that struck me as so sad that I thought it ought not to be a song at all – it made me feel desolate to listen to it. It began, I think:

We’re always on the outside
,

On the outside always looking in
.

We’re never there when fortunes are made:

When the sun starts to shine

We are caught in the shade

and ended

But we know some day we’re going to be on the inside

Instead of the outside always looking in
.

Because I was familiar with the Flanagan and Allen characters, a pair of rough-sleepers, the optimism of this ending came across to me as implausible. The whole spirit of the song struck me as the opposite of what songs were supposed to be for.

Within myself I had a new sense of freedom. For the first time in my life I was not living with any of my family. There was something liberating about not being watched over, as if I were now able to be
me
. I found myself capable of doing many things I had not been able to do before. For instance, my family had tried to teach me to swim on our summer holidays, and also on visits to Pitfield Street swimming baths, but I had seemed incapable of learning. Now, free to go by myself to the local swimming baths whenever I felt like it (I had been forbidden by my parents to go
alone,
but I found that the baths had periods specially for children, so I went), I learnt to swim almost immediately. The school started organising visits to the baths, and I went on all of them, and loved them.

Behind the swimming pool was my favourite park in Harborough, a square open field surrounded by trees. It was the best place I knew to play release, and was close to where I lived. In fact I liked it so much that after I moved across town I often went back to it. Along the far side of it straggled the village of Little Bowden, once separate but now absorbed into Harborough. And it was in the village school that my Cubs evenings were spent. In London I had belonged to the Lifeboys, the junior division of the Boys’ Brigade, but they did not exist in Harborough. Next best were the Cubs, the junior division of the Boy Scouts, so I joined them. And along I went to their weekly meetings, wearing a green-and-gold cap. They read Kipling aloud to us –
The Jungle Book
and
Just So Stories
– and we hopped up and down in a crouching position like little apes, touching the floor with our fingertips and chanting: ‘Akela, we’ll do our best.’ We were sometimes divided into two lots, one of which shouted ‘Dib, dib, dib’ at the other, and the other shouted back ‘We’ll dob, dob, dob’. I asked the other boys what this meant, but they had no more idea than I had. It was only when I was grown-up that I discovered that ‘dib’ and ‘dob’ were acronyms: ‘dib’ was really ‘dyb’ and stood for ‘do your best’, and of course ‘dob’ was short for ‘do our best’. I enjoyed these evenings because of the Kipling stories. I was spellbound by Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, and characters like the cat who walked by himself. In adult life it has always seemed to me that Kipling is a genius who is underrated because of his imperialist views. At its best his work taps into something that has the capacious significance of myth and legend, in the same sort of way as
King Solomon’s Mines
does, and not much other such literature.

CHAPTER EIGHT

HOME LIFE WITH
the Burgesses was lacking in warmth, and I cannot say I liked them very much. But I did not spend much time with them, and was not unhappy – life outside the house was too enjoyable for that. Their general way of living was roughly what I was used to: the same sort of space, the same kind of furniture, similar meals at similar times, not much heating, no running hot water, no bathroom, an outdoor lavatory, chamber pots under the beds. Most of the evacuees lived in homes like this, I was to find. At that time most of the homes in Britain were probably like it, for Harborough was a more than averagely prosperous town. In my grandmother’s newly built bungalow at Worth I had lived with all mod cons, but did not yet take them for granted.