Growing Up In a War (8 page)

Outside the Burgesses’ home things were more different from what I was used to. The town was uncrowded and easy-going, roads broad and open; there was plenty of space in the streets – plenty of space everywhere – and no families living in single rooms. Every family, it seemed, rented a two-up and two-down house, the chief difference between them being size – some looked almost like dolls’ houses. But even though all the families seemed to have houses to themselves, nobody used their street doors. All the houses had little back gardens, with back gates, and everyone went in and out by those. All over Harborough there were gravelled, mossy lanes running behind the houses, into which the back gates led, and this was where you met people coming and going. You
never
called at anyone’s front door. Ours was the last gate in our little lane. At the other end of it, where it ran into a side street, was the butcher’s, Gregory’s. I would be sent there for sausages, and they would make them on their sausage machine in front of me while I waited.

The other people whose gates gave on to the lane lived neighbourly lives, continually dropping in on one another. The exception was a woman who lived in the house next door – she was, though I did not realise it at the time, mentally ill. She was Mrs Burgess’s sister, but the two were not on speaking terms. What the background to their relationship was, and why they were living next door to one another, I do not know. The sister, who lived alone, was nasty to everyone, including us children. Mrs Burgess told me and Joey not to talk to her unless she spoke to us, and then to be polite but keep our distance.

When I went into the centre of town, which I did every day to school, its appearance was dominated by the church. I liked the look of that church, in fact it looked just right, somehow; but it would never have entered my head to go inside it. Having no churchyard, it just stood there naked, big, out of proportion to everything else, and in the middle of the High Street. From wherever you were, in or around the town, it was the focal point. The shopping life of the High Street swarmed around it. I found the High Street as a whole pleasing to be in: it made me feel comfortable – I suppose because I had lived nearly all my life in a market street. These surroundings were what I was used to. The town in general seemed a harmonious one in which everybody had a similar way of life. In the course of playing with other boys I went inside homes in many different parts of town, and they all seemed to share the same mode of living. There was no sign anywhere of the sort of poverty that was widespread in Hoxton. Yet nobody seemed well off either. I was to discover from enquiries made many years later that Harborough was largely a one-class town –
prosperous,
respectable working-class – just as Hoxton, in its very much poorer way, had been a one-class area. And in such environments people are seldom prompted to think about social class.

Every now and than Mrs Burgess would draw a contrast between the way we did things and the way ‘the gentry’ did them. I had never heard that word before. It was not in Hoxton’s vocabulary. I asked what it meant. She told me that gentry were people who had servants. She herself had been ‘in service’, as she expressed it; and she explained to me that this was the commonest thing for girls in the surrounding villages to do between leaving school and getting married. She talked about it at some length, since it had been what her life had consisted of before marriage, and it opened new vistas in my mind. Where I came from, and with only a few exceptions, people neither were servants nor had them, and both ways of life were foreign. The old-style cockney was noted above everything else for his cheekiness to anyone in authority, his lack of deference, his independence of outlook. But here was Mrs Burgess portraying a totally different mentality, that of a servant. If she was to be believed, the great thing about these gentry who employed servants was that they were given to disapproving of things for inscrutable reasons: they disapproved of all kinds of normal behaviour that everyone else took for granted. They wanted things done differently. For example, at the end of each course during a meal they did not pile up the dirty plates at the table and carry them out in a stack to the kitchen. They thought this was morally wrong, and they ticked you off if you did it. Instead they carried each plate away separately. This was obviously a silly thing to do, but it was what they wanted. And it was never any use asking why. If you did that, they got angry and said you didn’t know anything, and called you stupid – and then you might lose your job. So what you did was find out how they wanted things done and then just do them, no questions asked. It was dangerous to start thinking for yourself.

I had never seen any of these capricious creatures, these gentry, and I wondered where they were. There were none in Hoxton, that was certain. I had not been aware of any in Worth, and I could think of none in Market Harborough. I asked Mrs Burgess about this, and she told me that they did not live in towns; they lived in the country, in and around villages. They had to do that because there was not room enough for them in a town: not only did they have to have big houses, they had to have a lot of land round their houses, and this was not possible in a town. London chauvinist as I was, I took this to mean that they lived only in inferior places, the middle of nowhere, where no one else really wanted to live.

Domestic life with the Burgesses was lived on the cheap. I think they budgeted to make money out of their evacuees. When they sent us to get our dinner at the fish and chip shop they gave us tuppence, not threepence; so instead of getting a proper fish with our penn’orth of chips we got what was known as ‘a penn’orth of smalls’, fragments of broken fish deep-fried in batter. Neither of us had seen these in London, and we resented them, because we wanted a real fish. Smalls were mostly balls of batter and air. We considered the Burgesses mean. But I do not think we were undernourished, and I certainly have no memory of being hungry.

However, my personal hygiene was not of the best. I had no awareness of it, but my mother discovered it when she visited me. Her coming was not her idea. The Burgesses felt they ought to meet her – or, more precisely, they felt it would be wrong for her not to see where her child was living, and assumed that she wanted to know – so they wrote and invited her to come for a day. When she did, she took me out for a walk in Welland Park so that we could talk, and there we sat on a bench. Looking at me from the side, she said suddenly: ‘You’ve got something in your ear. What is it?’ She peered, then put a finger in, then got out a handkerchief and began poking around. She started muttering things like:
‘Good
God, this ear is absolutely filthy! What on earth … I’ve never seen anything like it! This is disgusting!’ and so on. My ears had not been washed since I was last at home. I was astonished at the amount of gunge that came out of them – and at how black and thick it was. So abundant was the filth she dug out that the only thing to do with her two handkerchiefs was throw them away. She then examined my hair, my neck, and my arms. She made me take my shoes and socks off and looked at my feet. I doubt whether any of me was fragrant, but my ears, fortunately, turned out to be in a class by themselves. What emerged under interrogation was that I had two ways of washing myself: I washed my hands and face every morning when I got up; and when the Burgesses told me to I had a bath, though I could not say how often that was – certainly not once a week. So it was always either ‘face’ or ‘from the neck down’, and the ears, being in between, got left out. The thought of washing them had never occurred to me. But I could see her point.

My mother was angry at Mrs Burgess for letting me get into such a state, and said a lot of insulting things about her. But once we got back to the house the two of them discussed it as if the whole thing were my fault, and what I needed was more supervision. My mother had given me such a talking-to that I actually needed no supervision from then on.

The Burgesses had no experience of looking after children. Both of them were only children themselves, and they tended to address me and Joey as if we were grown-ups – which I liked. Mr Burgess was nervous, and stammered, but in spite of that he was self-confident underneath. He protected himself with little formalities of speech and behaviour. He once started speaking to me as I was pouring milk from a jug, and I stopped and looked up, at which he nodded towards the jug and said: ‘P-p-proceed.’ I knew what the word meant, but no one had used it to me before, and it delighted me. For days I went around saying ‘proceed’ to my
friends,
and sometimes even ‘p-p-proceed’. Once when we had some people to tea he noticed that I was eating tinned fruit without bread and butter, and ordered me to take some. I found bread and butter boring (I always have) and disliked it in combination with fruit, so I refused. He was adamant. ‘You
can’t
eat tinned fruit without bread and butter. It’s unheard of. Fresh fruit, yes. Tinned fruit, no.’

Of my companion in the house, Joey, I have surprisingly few memories. He and I shared a bed, but we went to different schools, had different friends, and lived separate lives. He was not from Hoxton but another part of London, and was a year or two older than me. He was a bit of a clown, the sort of boy who enjoys making people laugh because this causes them to like him. He was Jewish, and even at that young age had a recognisably Jewish sense of humour: self-deprecating, acute, disconcerting, warm. I found him unusually funny, and admired him, and envied the way people liked him. He had more initiative than I, and was constantly doing things I would not have dared to do – and then, being untroubled by the risk of disapproval, getting away with them. One morning when we were lying in bed awake, talking before getting up, he said: ‘Let’s not go to school today. Let’s say we’re too ill to get up. Let’s spend the whole day in bed.’ Fantastic, I thought. The whole day in bed. But we’ll never get away with it. If I had tried that sort of thing at home my mother would have asked a couple of irritated questions, taken a quick look at me, and said: ‘Come on, there’s nothing wrong with you. Up you get. You’ll soon feel better,’ and not taken no for an answer. But Joey insisted it would work. So we waited, giggling, for Mrs Burgess to come and wake us. When she did, we put on solemn faces and said our piece. To my amazement she accepted it, with total indifference. ‘If you’re ill I suppose you’d better stay in bed. But you’ll have to stay there all day, in case the school sends somebody round. If they come and find you up I’ll be in trouble myself.’

I couldn’t believe it. What a pushover. No school. And the whole day in bed. As easy as pie. We had often talked in the mornings about not wanting to get up, wishing we could spend the whole day in bed. Well now we could. This was it.

For an hour we chattered away excitedly about what we had done, laughing uncontrollably, delighted with ourselves. But eventually we exhausted that, and the conversation began to dry up. Now what? The truth began to dawn on us about what we had committed ourselves to. Endless hours of the day stretched ahead of us. And we were going to have to stay in bed for all of them. What were we going to do? I do not remember what the answer to that question was, but I do remember the day as one of unparalleled boredom, the worst I have ever spent. Long before the end of it our only thought, and our only topic of conversation, had become how wonderful it was going to be the next day when we would be able to get up and go to school.

CHAPTER NINE

AS VIRTUALLY ALL
children did in those days, Joey and I went to bed a lot earlier than the grown-ups. We were asleep late one evening when we were woken by some sort of crisis downstairs. Voices were raised in panic, doors slammed, heavy thumping ran along corridors, then more people shouted, adult footsteps scuttled along the path outside. It was fraught, frantic. We expected someone to come into our room and tell us what was going on, but nobody did. It was typical of the way children related to adults then that we stayed where we were, and waited to be told: we would not have dared to go out on to the landing and look, still less go downstairs and ask what was happening. We switched on the light and sat up in bed listening to the hullabaloo, trying to decode it, and discussing it between ourselves in tense voices.

At last our door opened and a woman came in whom neither of us had ever seen. To the two of us sitting up with the light on, gawping at her, she said: ‘You must be wondering what’s happening.’

‘Yes,’ we said.

‘There’s been an accident,’ she said. ‘But everyone in this house is all right. The best thing you can do is go to sleep. You’ll be in the way downstairs. Just stay here in your room. Go to sleep.’

And away she went.

In obedience to instructions we turned off the light and tried to sleep. But soon a weird wailing came from downstairs. It was
Mrs
Burgess. She was howling in a way I had never heard anyone howl, groaning, sobbing, gasping for breath and shouting: ‘
Oh no! No! No! Oh no!
’

There was a low murmur of adult voices trying to console her, but she carried on shouting as if they were not there.

Joey and I sat up in bed again and switched on the light. What could have happened?

Again, after a long time, the unknown woman came back to our room. This time she sat on our bed and talked to us properly. She seemed quite nice.

‘It’s her sister,’ she said.

‘What, the lady next door?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is she dead?’

‘Yes.’

‘What sort of accident? Was it a car accident?’

‘Er, yes.’

The woman stayed with us for as long as the howling went on, which was a long time. When eventually quietness returned she settled us down for the night and left us. I never saw her again, and never knew who she was.

The next day, or the day after, Joey and I were taken away from the Burgesses and billeted with other families. We, too, never saw one another again. I do not think I set eyes on the Burgesses either, except from afar in one of the town’s shopping streets.