As an historian by calling, and one compelled by his interests to pursue topics across the traditional borderline between the medieval and the modern, I have always been skeptical about attempts to delineate too sharply the division between one historical epoch and another. The traditional periodization of European history into ancient, medieval, and modern (a Renaissance humanist invention) I have come to think of as a sort of creaking and groaning late-Ptolemaic system which calls for an increasingly baroque array of epicycles if it is to continue to function at all and to account at all plausibly for the complex phenomena involved. And yet, in my own life, and ironically so, I date the line dividing what I think of as the worlds of BEFORE and AFTER with startling precision. It coincides, in effect, with Hitler’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. With that moment, our holiday had to be cut short and we had to return home immediately that very day. The city’s plans for the evacuation of over 100,000 children (an astonishing number) were to go into effect at once. My brother Noel’s Jesuit grammar school—St. Francis Xavier’s College—relocated in Flintshire, North Wales, and Molly’s convent grammar school, run by the sisters of La Sagesse (an émigré French religious order) moved to less bleak surroundings in South Wales. As my oldest brother, Vincent, believed he had a vocation to the priesthood and was already committed to leaving for the archdiocesan seminary in Upholland (rural Lancashire), our family was suddenly truncated. Because of our youth, evacuation was deemed to be out of the question for children at the parish elementary school which I attended and, in view of the likelihood of air raids, the school was simply closed. So, within a couple of days, we went from being a household of six, bustling with the activity of four children, to a small family of three with a single seven-year-old child who had no school to fill in the long days and who was destined, it seems, to spend all too many lonely hours mooching around the house in the pallid grip of boredom.
For my mother and father all this was hard enough. They missed their children and worried about them. For the children, it varied. Vincent appeared to be basically happy at the seminary, where he seemed to spend a lot of time playing football (soccer) and, when the winter came on, learning to ice skate—an unusual avocation in the England of the day. All went well with Molly, too. She was older, after all, and was billeted with a very nice and welcoming family which had a daughter her own age, and she was to remain in touch with them long after she came home. Noel’s experience, however, was altogether different. He was placed with an impoverished family which had taken in a young evacuee (and a papist at that!) because they actually needed the miserable six shilling weekly remuneration they were paid for so doing, and they were a good deal less than welcoming to a lonely eleven-year-old boy who had suddenly been uprooted from home and who couldn’t even participate in familial conversation because it was conducted largely in Welsh. Even by wartime standards, moreover, they fed him poorly. Though in his letters home the poor kid tried to keep a stiff upper lip and to put a reassuring gloss on the situation in which he found himself, it gradually became clear to my parents that he was utterly miserable and struggling even to keep his head above water. Having visited him to assess the situation—and, in so doing, discovering that, skinny though he had already been, he was now actually losing weight—and having talked things over with the headmaster of the school, they eventually decided in the winter of 1939–40 to bring him home, the threat of air raids notwithstanding. Other parents had already done likewise. And, as the trickle of returnees grew to a steady stream, the school responded by instituting a schedule of classes in Liverpool, which continued to increase in scope until the whole school returned to its original site on Salisbury Street, close to the city center. It did so, ironically, just in time for the onset of the blitz.
For me, the sudden departure of my siblings, and especially my big brother Noel whom I dearly loved, ushered in some months of deep loneliness and much boredom, all of it exacerbated by the fact that I was deprived also of the easy, daily camaraderie of school life. Sporadic small classes were organized for us in people’s homes, with teachers going from house to house to run them. But these lessons didn’t amount to much—not enough, certainly, to meet the educational aspirations my parents had for their children and which distinguished them from most of their neighbors and friends. In the long row of council houses fronting onto Woolton Road in the midst of which we lived, there were probably a couple of dozen children. All but a handful of them finished their schooling at the age of fourteen, the small remainder going no further than sixteen. All, that is, except us. For us, my parents mysteriously had greater expectations and we were made to feel that we were destined for different and less predictable futures. Sometimes we chafed against that feeling for, during the school year at least, we were not as free as the neighboring children to while away the hours in play. Homework was taken with the utmost seriousness; so, too, was practice on the piano or violin, for money was somehow found to pay for our private lessons. My mother, then, was very worried about the possibility of a protracted gap in my schooling, fearing that it would leave me poorly placed to perform successfully in the competitive examinations for the Junior City Scholarship. Only with the help of one of these scholarships could I hope to go on to an academic high school and have at least a chance of getting into university. Otherwise my schooling would end at the age of fourteen. It was only the winning of such scholarships that had enabled Molly and Noel to move on to academically-oriented grammar schools. These schools, known as “direct grant” schools because they were in receipt of some government funding and were subject to government inspection, were nevertheless in essence private schools that charged tuition fees substantial enough to put them beyond my parents’ means. If my own formal schooling was not to come to an abrupt halt, I had to be prepared well enough to compete successfully for one of those prized scholarships. In the context of my mother’s great concern about the sudden closure of my school in 1939, I can recall her suddenly dissolving into tears when discussing the matter with a teacher after one of the periodic classes held at our house. So she threw herself into the breach and picked up the pedagogic slack. Lack of prolonged formal education notwithstanding, she proved herself to be an effective teacher, supportive but demanding. Indeed, I found the arithmetic book she favored (dating back to her own school days in Ballycasey) rather more difficult than the textbook we had used at school. Patient in explanation, she carefully led me through it, corrected my sums and the writing exercises she had set me to write, and from time to time suggested that I should write a story rather than an essay. One Sunday I did precisely that when she and my father were out and was enormously gratified when, upon her return, she was clearly impressed by what I had written.
The story in question was a simple one about a short ride on an aeroplane (something, of course, that I had never experienced) from the takeoff to the thrilling ascent up through the clouds, the joy of floating high above the ground, and the controlled descent again to landing. In it, describing our emergence from the clouds and our excited observation of the intricate and quintessentially English patchwork of fields interspersed with woods far down below, I had ventured to deploy, much to my mother’s astonishment (or maybe apprehension), the word “panorama.” Where I had picked it up, I don’t know. But the whole story, I am sure, owed much to my delighted reading of the “Biggles” books by a certain Captain W. E. Johns. Intended originally, I gather, for adolescents, under wartime conditions these books had proved increasingly popular with younger boys, and I had been enthralled by the daring exploits of their hero, “Biggles,” the nickname of James Bigglesworth. His early career as a young officer flying Sopwith Camels for the Royal Flying Corps during World War I drew him into perilously enthralling dogfights with his German counterparts in the air over the tragic network of trenches that defined the Western Front. Red Baron territory! The fictional Biggles was to enjoy a remarkably long career, living on, eternally young, to fly Spitfires and Hurricanes in World War II. But my Biggles was the heroic ace of the Great War, and I was later charmed to discover that he was also the hero of the little Parsee boy from Mumbai in Rohinton Mistry’s novel, Family Matters. “Chocks off,” Jehangir would proclaim, finding a new way to feed his beloved but bedridden grandfather. “Just a little left, Grandpa. Let’s do an aeroplane.” “First of all, Biggles is climbing into the plane,” he said, dipping the spoon into the mush. The engine was revving, the chocks were off, and they were ready for takeoff. “The spoon taxied several times around the bowl and was airborne. After a straight ascent it began to swoop and swerve, banking sharply and looping the loop.” Then, with a “Prepare for landing, Grandpa,” it swooped down safely into the old man’s mouth. Mission accomplished! But I should not have been surprised that the fictional Biggles of my Anglo-Irish youth had lived on to thrive in Mumbai. After all, he was the son of an administrator in the Indian civil service, had been born and brought up in India, loved the country, had many Indian friends, and even spoke fluent Hindi!
While I was pursuing my home schooling, the remainder of 1939 and the early months of 1940 proved to be a quiet time, punctuated only by the descent upon western Europe of a cruelly severe winter, bringing to us the type of heavy snowfall that one takes for granted in New England but that was excitingly unusual in our part of the British Isles. That period was punctuated also by the outbreak of war between the Soviet Union and Finland, which, having acquired our first wireless set (cause for great celebration), we were able to follow via the BBC, enthralled by the stiff resistance “the gallant Finns” were putting up against the monstrous regiment of Russian might. For me personally, at least until my parents finally bit the bullet and brought Noel home, loneliness and boredom loomed large and I sought to amuse myself with various distractions, most of them in some way war related. My favorite jigsaw puzzle was composed from RAF aerial photography of Hamburg (which we viewed as our sister city), and, having become familiar with the silhouettes of our own Spitfires and Hurricanes, I set out to memorize those of the leading German aircraft—Messerschmidts, Junkers, and Heinkels. I also drew a lot of ships, planes, and fighting men. Oddly enough, many of those soldiers wore uniforms and carried weapons dating back to the Boer War, details which had caught my attention in a wonderful series of bound illustrated magazines dating back to that era. These I had encountered and pored over in the welcoming home of my Uncle Peter and Aunts Rosie and Lily (Elmsly), whose dog I used to walk and play with. They were not blood relatives but the aging, unmarried children of a British Army captain whom my parents had befriended in Athlone. For Aunt Rosie, the kindly elder sister who ran the household, the imposition of a blackout to make things difficult for the Luftwaffe brought back fond memories of her childhood when her father had been stationed in British India up near the Khyber Pass. There, it turns out, they had had to maintain a comparable blackout regimen because the Pathans were prone to taking long-distance potshots at whatever glimmers of light they could detect in the military cantonments.
On the international scene, these rather quiet months were the period of the “Phony War,” when the earlier fears of the horrors of gas warfare had begun to recede and the prospect of Guernica-like bombing attacks had begun to seem less likely. During this period, people became less religious about carrying their gas masks with them wherever they went, and we were regularly regaled with accounts of the utter impregnability and wonderful amenities of the Maginot Line, accompanied by reassuring pictures of French poilus sunning themselves beside their well-appointed bunkers. And we all sang, of course, that we were going “to hang out our washing on the Siegfried Line.” Food rationing, it is true, was beginning to bite deep, scrap iron was at a premium and handsome wrought iron gates and railings were being carted off to be melted down, and the shortage of petrol drove private vehicles off the road, though some, with the help of cumbersome, coal gas–filled bags on the roof, put in a lugubrious appearance. As the spring of 1940 wore on, there was a sense of time almost standing still, and with Noel’s return home, a matter of great joy for me, we began to detect glimmers, at least, of a return to something approximating quasi-normalcy.
But not for long. With the German invasion of Norway and Denmark in April 1940, and the British seizure of Narvik in response, the clouds of war began to thicken. And with the unprecedented catastrophes of May and June, unanticipated by Germans and Allies alike, the harsh realities of war were finally brought home to us in England. With the capitulation of Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France, and finally, after courageous and tenacious resistance, that of Norway too, Great Britain in June 1940—licking its own wounds after Dunkirk and in military disarray—had to face the grim prospect of standing alone against the assembled Axis powers, for Italy had now entered the war as a German ally. Before the nine o’clock news on Sunday evening, the BBC had adopted the practice of playing the national anthems of the fallen Allies. As the list grew depressingly long, it was reduced to playing only the opening bars of each anthem, with the “Marseillaise” being, in my youthful and doubtless bellicose estimate, unquestionably the best and most stirring. I memorized, accordingly, its thrilling words and began to imagine myself to be an honorary “enfant de la patrie.” Unwilling to accede to Hitler’s oblique overtones of peace (though there were clearly some English people of prominence who would have welcomed such a move), the country braced itself in the summer of 1940 for the impending Nazi invasion that was to continue to seem possible long after Hitler (as we now know) had abandoned the idea as unfeasible and had begun to turn his attention to the East. How seriously that threat of invasion was being taken was everywhere evident in England during the grim latter half of 1940 and the early months of 1941. And as a curious boy, I must now somewhat shamefacedly confess, I was excited and enthralled by the defensive steps being taken.
Some of those steps, like the evacuation of people from coastal areas, were limited to those southeastern regions that were most likely to be the initial targets for invasion and where it was anticipated the most decisive defensive battles would be fought. But others, so far as I know, were taken nationwide. Certainly they were prominent enough in the Merseyside area: the removal from the roads of all signposts carrying place-names, and also the removal of identifying names from railway stations; the erection across open flatland of seemingly endless rows of “dragon’s teeth” anti-tank traps; the closing off of beaches with tangles of barbed wire, and the seeding (real or implied) of those beaches with life-threatening land mines; the guarding at night of important nodal points where roads converged and the blockading of those nodes with barbed wire and concrete blocks intended to force the traffic to slow down and wind its way at a snail’s pace through the maze; the building of concrete pillboxes to cover the approaches to such spots; and the recruitment and deployment of Local Defense Volunteers armed with a bizarre variety of weaponry (privately-owned shotguns were not uncommon). At first distinguished only by an LDV armband worn over civilian clothing, the volunteers mutated quite rapidly into a uniformed and disciplined Home Guard, equipped (courtesy of Lend-Lease) with long, World War I–vintage American Springfield rifles, readily distinguishable from the Lee-Enfield 303s with which the regular army was then equipped. Indeed, the army continued to be equipped with Lee-Enfield 303s during my own army days in the 1950s until the Belgian-made NATO FN FAL rifle became standard issue.
All the preparatory steps in question were brought home clearly to us as our house was situated close to one such nodal point, where the Woolton Road narrowed from being a dual carriageway down to a single road before passing by Allerton Railway Station and under a bridge carrying the main London, Midland and Scottish (LMS) Railway lines to points east and south. The underpass was blockaded with concrete obstacles and barbed wire and guarded at nighttime, and the approaches to it on the Garston side were dominated by a newly constructed concrete pillbox situated in a field on the other side of the road, right opposite our house. Similarly, the Long Lane Recreational Ground around the corner, equipped with tennis courts and a bowling green but consisting largely in flat, open, and regularly mowed grassland available to the public for scratch cricket and football games, was now crisscrossed by deeply ploughed furrows, and the open space between the furrows was seeded with poles at least twelve feet high. This, it seems, was now standard practice with such large, flat open spaces, and it was intended to interdict their use as landing places for enemy planes or troop-carrying gliders.
To the period when such steps were being taken belongs the only time I have ever heard in Britain shots fired in anger. One night we were awakened by the sound of shouts from the sentries posted at the underpass by the station. There then ensued the sound of a car (or lorry) engine revving in high gear as the vehicle suddenly took off at speed. That in turn was followed by frantic shouts of “Halt!” and then by two or three shots. The flow of information at that time being very tightly controlled, no public mention was subsequently made of the incident, and we were left in the speculative dark about what, precisely, had happened.
For me and for my friends, all of these exciting goings-on were of compelling interest. Despite their ominous implications, and in this like the Blitz which was soon to follow, they were part of the exhilarating liberation from the ordinary that the early years of the war brought with them. We became habituated to seeing in the streets airmen from the various fallen nations who were being trained at a nearby RAF base to fly Spitfires. Most of them wore the standard RAF uniform with a shoulder flash indicating their nation of origin—Poland, Norway, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia. But, doubtless at General de Gaulle’s insistence, the Free French stood out by virtue of wearing their own distinctive uniforms. All of this was very interesting. So, too, were the recently constructed pillboxes. And as they were not usually manned by day, it was in them that we gallantly fought our own imagined rearguard actions against overwhelming numbers of German invaders—otherwise known as “the Hun.” Similarly enthralling were the military maneuvers in which fascinating pieces of equipment like Bren Gun carriers and the occasional tank were deployed. And only a little less so were the civil defense logistical exercises, in one of which I was lucky enough to become a participant. The objective of that particular exercise, or so in retrospect I assume, was to test the adequacy of the hospital and ambulance services under conditions involving fairly massive civilian casualties. Along with some of my comrades, I spent a happy day being shunted to and fro in ambulances and being fed tea and sweet biscuits by kindly nurses. To each of us was attached a large label detailing the nature of our injuries, thus signaling to which first aid post or hospital we should be taken. My injuries, described in technical terms I didn’t understand, were clearly very severe because I ended up, having been shuttled to and fro between two hospitals, having my original label replaced by one that simply said “DEAD.” My next trip, then, was across town to the city’s morgue from which, after the requisite tea and biscuits and even a piece of milk chocolate, I was driven home. All in all, for a young, inquisitive boy, it was a most satisfactory and enjoyable day.
After Hitler turned his attention eastward and launched his ill-fated invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the threat of an invasion of Britain receded and the frantic defensive scramble of the waning months of 1940 began to fade from popular memory. The barricades defending the approaches to nodal communication points were eventually dismantled (they hindered ordinary traffic as well as the movement of troops and military paraphernalia), though thousands of pillboxes were left in place, some of them (like the one on the edge of Clarke Gardens dominating Springwood Avenue) surviving down to the present. During the peak of the invasion threat, there must doubtless have been people of defeatist sentiment among the populace at large. Certainly, there was enough interest in Hitler’s views to keep our local public library’s copy of Mein Kampf tied up with a succession of borrowers, and the German propaganda broadcasts by one or another of the actors known as the figure Lord Haw Haw were widely listened to—though partly, I think, because they were quite amusing. And I can well remember the skepticism with which our own government’s claims for the successes of the RAF in the Battle of Britain were often met with up north. In our own area this last was not altogether surprising given the fact that in daytime we never once saw RAF planes rising to attack even solitary German intruders. All of that said, however, the determination to resist and the will to fight off any German invasion was, at the time, quite palpable. In the summer of 1940 an astonishing 1.5 million men volunteered for duty in the Home Guard. In post-war years they were to be affectionately parodied as “Dad’s Army,” but they included in their ranks a significant number of battle-tested Great War veterans and would, I believe, have mounted a determined, if not necessarily effective, resistance had the expected invasion actually occurred. A government poster designed for use in the event of such an invasion but never disseminated said, simply, “Keep Calm and Carry On.” I think that is precisely what the British public under such perilous conditions would have done. Certainly, with some inevitable exceptions, that is by and large how the public seems to have reacted when the Luftwaffe’s campaign of bombing London and other major urban centers got underway late in the summer of 1940. To the degree to which that campaign was intended to destroy the morale of ordinary people, it clearly failed.