Life Without Armour (10 page)

Distance opened in every direction, countryside and townscape from the vantage point of the clouds, on this first flight of many. It was obvious at last where part of my mind had always been, and I knew that if I could get so far vertically off the earth there should be no limit to the mileage I might do on its surface. Eyes ached in closely concentrated search, till after twenty miles the stately old Dominie turned east to join the circuit for a landing, and we were taken to have a meal in the Polish airmen's mess. What was eaten there has been forgotten, but I do recall that pudding came on the same plate as the meat, thus providing a culinary signpost towards life with a difference.

Chapter Fourteen

Armageddons come and go, as did Stalingrad, a great Soviet victory. Germany must be booted into the dust, but when? I wrote to Stanford's in London for a large-scale map of the Volga-Don area, and it came to me rolled in a cardboard tube. Nothing but the best was good enough, if I was aware of its existence, and if I could meet the price, which wages allowed me to do. Two shillings included postage and packaging, and the map was worth every penny. The scale was sixteen miles to an inch (I still unroll it from time to time) and Stalingrad was called Tsarytsin because the map was twenty years out of date, but the rivers and contours were the same as during the battle and those, I thought, would never change, though on going there twenty years later, when the place was called Volgograd, certain waterways had been added or enlarged. For the remainder of the war I followed events on maps in Baedeker guidebooks which could be acquired for little (at times nothing) in Frank Wore's cornucopia-shop.

Orders occasionally came to the factory for a quantity of jacquards, superstrong sheets of cardboard used in the lace trade. Holes were punched in them according to the design, and I wondered if a few wouldn't still be those of my father's brother Frederick, who had long since disappeared to London. He had been back in Nottingham for some years, but wasn't spotted by any of the family till after the war.

Each jacquard measured two feet by four and was put together on the same principle as plywood, but with paper and special paste. The antiquated machinery was in a dingier part of the cellar, and my job was to hump hundredweight sacks of alum and flour to a vat and empty them in, stirring to an even broth with the requisite amount of hot water to make the paste. Overalls and boots got caked with the stuff, and I would go home stinking like a pig.

The next stage of production was more agreeable. Several of us worked in the large and often sun-filled attics hanging hundreds of jacquards to dry in rows under steam heat. While they did, time was our own. Often two or three of us pulled ourselves up and down by rope on the goods hoist, till the strangulated shout of the foreman scattered us to the four corners of the factory.

I taught map-reading to George Meggeson, an army cadet sergeant swotting for his Certificate ‘A', pencilling elaborate topographical maps with their conventional signs on reject jacquards, so that he could pass the latest in infantry tactics on to me. Sometimes we were called down to help despatch the jacquards, which task I did not much relish, but I learned how to make and tie a parcel.

Close to sixteen, I was earning over two pounds a week, but knew there was better money to be made. I had a girl to take out, and wanted to save. On a couple of occasions I worked double time during the holidays to help clean the flues of the furnace. Though the fires had been out for twenty-four hours the narrow space we crawled along like Tom Sweeps to push out the banks of soot was fiercesomely hot. Coming home from such overtime I was black from head to foot, but the extra hard-earned pound went into my pocket.

Between fourteen and eighteen every day seemed like three, every week like a year, every year a decade. After eight hours' work, the long full evening until eleven or midnight was another day, followed by a third of dream-packed sleep. Two evenings a week were given to homework, mainly the study of navigation, and ATC lectures took up two more.

Friday and Saturday nights were spent with my girlfriend who worked at a clothing factory making army uniforms, and lived on a housing estate. At sixteen she was a tall, mature girl with a full bosom, and long brown hair worn in a neat fringe at the front. Our main entertainment was the cinema, or simply walking the streets, but there was real delight in the promise and comfort of being with her, and indulging in whatever trivial talk of the moment interested us. My first real love, she was trusting, passionate and generously willing, so that we were soon ‘going all the way' on the living-room sofa while her parents were out, sometimes on Sunday night as well, for her father was an amiable coalminer who liked to sit with his wife over a few drinks in the pub.

Of the two items to be considered in sexual relations, the first was venereal disease, or a dose of the pox, as Bill Towle put it, but it was unlikely that any of us would catch such an affliction because we were young, knew each other, and stayed within the group. The second fear was that of getting the girl pregnant, and to avoid this I called every week at the chemist's to buy a supply of Durex, it being assumed that those who did not take such precautions asked for all they got, and a bit more. As Arthur Shelton's father said: ‘When you get married, a penny bun costs tuppence!'

On the remaining evening of the week I would go out with John Moult, another cadet, crawling the pubs and knocking back a pint or so of Shipstone's ale. The headquarters of the squadron moved to a place three miles away, and on the long journey home Johnny and I would enliven the empty streets by a caterwauling of popular songs, or try to figure between us the names of the – as then – forty-eight states of the USA, or otherwise test each other on general knowledge. He asked me where Leonardo da Vinci's mural of ‘The Last Supper' was, and told me the church and the place when I admitted not knowing, his question coming back to me on visiting Milan and seeing it for myself many years later.

On Sunday afternoon we listened either at his house or mine to a half-hour programme of light classical music, thus becoming familiar with the names of at least some of the great composers. Neither of us found time to read anything except textbooks, and I was practising more advanced navigation at the table in my room, its surface littered with charts and drawing instruments. I learned what stars, planets and constellations were useful to navigators, the names of cloud formations in meteorology, as well as how to recognize every type of aircraft.

The sky, by day or night, became as important as the earth's surface, and knowing what was in it widened my angle of sight. Most of my life I had glanced little above the treetops or eaves of houses, but now everything to be seen on looking upwards had a name. The glow of the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, took four and a half light years, travelling at 186,000 miles per second, to reach the earth, a fact which put our planet earth in its place, and the people who lived on it even more so, which might have been a depressing realization had it not also been so marvellous as to open my mind to all kinds of cosmic speculations.

At RAF Snitterfield, near Stratford-upon-Avon, I flew at night for an hour on ‘circuits and bumps' (take-off and landing practice) in an Airspeed Oxford trainer. One such aircraft had crashed just short of the runway a few days before, killing both pilots, its sombre wreckage glowing in the lights every time we took off. Once our plane was airborne its manoeuvres were occasionally such that the dazzling multi-coloured pattern of the aerodrome lights seemed half the time to be in the sky, and when I finally stepped out on to the dispersal point a reflected glitter of the same design appeared above my head, suggesting that my senses still had some way to spin before the usual equilibrium came back.

I went on a two-hour ‘hedge hopping' exercise across the fen country, also in an Oxford, and spent much time looking between the pilots' shoulders, ostensibly to consult the map but also at approaching embankments, farmhouses and telegraph poles, wondering whether to duck or where I would run should we hit something. Visiting Shakespeare's birthplace came as an anticlimax, especially as I had so far been no closer to his works than the prose rehashes of Charles and Mary Lamb.

At sixteen I obtained my ‘release' from Toone's plywood mill and became a capstan lathe operator at Firman's small factory in the Meadows district, a two-mile bus ride and one-mile trek from home. The forty people who worked there started at eight in the morning, and I was glad to be back on a five-day week.

No longer a plain labourer, but a capstan lathe operator turning out objects for Rolls-Royce engines, I became familiar with the micrometer and depth gauge, since everything had to be correct to within a few thousandths of an inch. Working at top speed on piece work, my wages soon reached four pounds a week, which allowed me to save from the ten shillings my mother handed back. The repetitious sweat of producing over a thousand brass nuts a day did not worry me, because for one thing I was
making it pay
and, once accustomed to the process, could dream my way from morning till evening as if I were two people.

After a few months Bert Firman, who owned the place but came in full-time like any other workman, offered me an extra ten shillings a week to get there an hour earlier and sweep the place clean. This meant leaving home at half past six, but I accepted gladly, and the old school Bible was soon interleaved with pound notes. My mother told me later that she had found the hideaway and, taking one or two out on Monday morning if she had no cash, put them back by the weekend so that I wouldn't know. But one week, being suspicious because they weren't in the right page place, I pencilled an asterisk faintly on each note, and on finding one that was clean didn't put the reason down to the influence of the Holy Scriptures. Why she should have been so short of funds by Monday was hard to imagine, because my father's and my wages ought to have lasted the week. Though Peggy had joined the Women's Land Army, so there was nothing more from her, Pearl had started work and brought money in.

While giving most of my earnings to the house, I never thought I had decent enough clothes to wear. Fortunately, attending all possible parades at the ATC, much of my spare time was spent in uniform. My mother provided me with overalls, for which extra clothing coupons were given anyway, but otherwise she bought me a suit from a pawnshop, whose pinstripes were almost brushed into extinction. A secondhand overcoat soon became too short, and was passed on to Brian, and for a while an ATC anti-gas cape covered me when it rained. I did not complain, because my mother had few enough clothes of her own, and was genuinely too hard up to supply my proper needs as well as those of three younger children whose priorities no one could question, though they weren't exactly well dressed, either.

A dance at the ATC headquarters went on every Saturday night for about a year, and with a quiff in my hair as dashing as that of King George, and smart to the extent of a tie-pin showing at the opening of my buttoned waistcoat, I must have gone around the floor in waltz or foxtrot time much like a sailor after six months at sea.

Selecting my partners and the type of dance with care, I met a girl who interested me because she did not work in a factory. She was rather short, and very quiet, with hungry little features, and hair worn in a roll at the forehead and then a short way down her back. Grey eyes, the liveliest of her advantages, suggested that if she did have something to say – and she did, was the implication, lots – no one roundabout would be flattered by her opinions, so why waste what was better kept to herself?

I assiduously courted her but, though seeming to like my attentions, and accepting me as her ‘young man', as if I would do until someone better swanned along, she was meagre with any favours beyond the customary good-night snogging. There was little fondness between us, but a mutual fascination at each other's strangeness kept the friendship going. On my part I began to mistake it for love, because the aim of getting into her cunt became my main object in life. We went cycling once into Leicestershire, and I thought my chance had come at last when we lay down to rest on a hillside near the village of Gotham, but it hadn't. Another time we walked from where she lived into the pocket of countryside around Top Valley Farm, but that was no good, either. She was the first girl I took formally out to lunch, instead of informally into a pub, which she would not have countenanced, and I telephoned the office where she worked twice a week from a public box near the factory to say how much I loved her.

After the weekly hop ended at eleven I walked her home, which was even further out of my way, and we spent an hour kissing, with me trying to get as far with her as I had with my previous girlfriend, who had been callously given up for this fruitless pursuit. Further along the wall her slightly more attractive sister was being fucked silly by a friend of mine, but it was my bad luck to be lumbered with the one who was so hard to get, and I never reached my goal, for she always slipped into the house and left me – high, but dry – cursing myself for a fool on the five-mile traipse home.

During the week at my lathe hope revived, only to be put down once more. She must have become frightened when she almost let me ‘get there', and told her sister to say that she didn't want me to see her again. I responded with a long and fervent letter, not one to give up easily, which she must have destroyed without reading. My self-esteem was damaged beyond repair, for a couple of days, and then I met a girl who enjoyed fucking with a steadiness of purpose that fully satisfied me until after joining the air force a couple of years later. Her widowed mother, in her fifties and somewhat deaf, had an Indian man for a boyfriend, and while they were banging around on the bed upstairs, my girlfriend and I were similarly at it, making hearthrug pie in the living room.

Chapter Fifteen