I WAS FOUR and a half when the war began, so I had little understanding of the anxiety and dread my parents must have been feeling, like so many others, in the summer and autumn of 1939. In their case the stress must have been heightened when my mother lost the baby she was carrying at that time, a daughter, due to a miscarriage. I don’t know what caused it or how advanced the pregnancy was; indeed I first learned of this lost sister of mine as an adult – I’m not sure how, perhaps from my aunt Eileen, but certainly not from my mother, who never mentioned it and with whom I never raised the subject. The information was a total surprise, and made me wonder what difference it would have made to all our lives if this daughter had lived. I had got used to being an ‘only child’ long ago, and never consciously regretted it. There were advantages in being the sole focus of parental love, care and attention, which were essentially my mother’s during the war years, when my father was mostly absent, serving in the Air Force. Melvyn Bragg has described vividly, in his autobiographical novel The Soldier’s Return, the Oedipal tensions caused when a soldier returns home at the end of the war to his wife and a six-year-old son who was an infant when he left, and to whom he seems a threatening interloper. That was not my situation: I was old enough to have pre-war memories of Dad, and saw him just often enough during the war to keep a filial image of him in my mind and to look forward with longing to his permanent return home. When we were finally reunited as a family I transferred my primary allegiance to him, while still taking my mother’s devoted care for granted. Lacking a satisfying career of her own, and having a limited interest in the things that preoccupied Dad and me, like music, literature and sport, she was marginalised and became a kind of servant to both of us: shopping, housekeeping and serving up meals, often individually at hours which suited our separate timetables. It seems to me now that if she had had a daughter, and I a sister, the balance of power in our family might have been more even and her life more fulfilling. How that would have affected my own character is more difficult to imagine, but perhaps I would have been less introspective and self-centred. I presume Mum and Dad avoided conceiving another child during wartime on one of his rare leaves, and by the time the war was over she was forty-two, and it would have seemed too late. Needless to say, the possibility never crossed my own prepubescent mind. I was just happy to have two parents again, all to myself. Later in life I regretted not having siblings with whom I could have shared the responsibility of looking after their welfare in old age.
I know that my mother’s miscarriage happened shortly before or after the beginning of the war because of an extraordinary anecdote that was attached to it, which I would hesitate to rely on if my father had not repeated it in the taped conversation I had with him late in life. It seems that they heard of some kind of nursing home in the country south of London which offered a safe refuge for expectant mothers and their young children from the threat of air raids, and my mother had accepted a place there just before she lost her baby. A woman friend urged her to tie a cushion round her tummy and pretend she was still pregnant to get into the nursing home – and, encouraged by my father, she did so and was admitted, taking me with her. I actually have a memory picture of the place: a rather idyllic scene of women and little children strolling and playing on a big green lawn, and a white-painted wooden summerhouse which fascinated me because it could be rotated like a carousel to follow the movement of the sun across the sky. According to my father, Mum didn’t have to wear the cushion once she was interviewed and accepted for admission to the place, after which she presumably pretended to be at an earlier stage of pregnancy, but even so the revelation that my rather shy and diffident mother had had the gumption to pull off this somewhat theatrical deception astonished me, and revealed what unexpected resolve people can sometimes show under the pressure of circumstances.
The vivid opening sequence of the 1936 film Things to Come, scripted by H.G. Wells from his own novel, had shown a world war beginning in 1940 with a devastating aerial attack on London. It had a chilling effect on the large number of people who saw it, and when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced that Britain was at war with Germany in September 1939 there was widespread panic in the capital and other big cities and an exodus of people to the country, followed by a rather sheepish return home by most of them as the ‘Phoney War’ set in. I have a memory which must belong to that time, of getting off a train in the warm dark at a country station with a group of grown-ups including my mother, carrying suitcases and walking into a village and knocking at people’s houses looking for somewhere to stay. Before long we returned to Brockley.
I am not sure how that memory relates chronologically to the nursing home episode. Indeed the chronology of all our many movements during the war is very vague and now irrecoverable, but I am fairly sure this village was Lingfield in Surrey, where my mother and I lived at times later in the war. We also spent two other periods near St Austell in Cornwall, and returned home to Brockley for at least one long spell when it seemed safe. This itinerant life inevitably disturbed my education – I attended five or six different schools during the war, some of them pretty poor – but I had a much broader and more varied experience as a child than I would have had if there had not been a war, without suffering the loneliness and homesickness of the official ‘evacuees’, who were packed off to the country by the trainload with gas masks round their necks and labels pinned to their coats, to be billeted on often reluctant strangers. Interesting experience is money in the bank to a novelist, and you can’t open an account too early in life.
There was a popular radio comedian called Rob Wilton in the 1940s, who always began his monologues, ‘The day war broke out . . .’ On the day war broke out all places of entertainment – theatres, nightclubs and dance halls – closed immediately, and my dad was out of work. He was thirty-three, young enough to be conscripted for military service in due course. He got a day job for a while, but as time passed without the anticipated air raids materialising, some nightclubs and similar venues were allowed to reopen and he began to work again as a musician and vocalist, singing with several well-known big bands on BBC radio. A columnist in a magazine called Bandwagon reported in March 1940: ‘One of Arthur Roseberry’s discoveries, a young laddy who seems to be getting a very full share of the broadcasts available to tenor vocalists, is making quite a stir. His name is Bryan Lodge . . . he is easily one of the best vocalists in town.’ Dad was well aware, however, that he was bound to be called up sooner or later, and acted on a tip from a fellow musician: that if he volunteered to enlist with the RAF Central Band at Uxbridge he could spend the war playing music for airmen to march to by day and dance to in the evenings, rather than in some boring, uncomfortable and possibly dangerous occupation not of his own choosing. ‘Looking after number one as always, I got my application in a bit sharpish,’ he told me.
In due course he got a call from a band leader he had worked for, Jack Nathan, who was forming an ‘entertainment band’ at Uxbridge and was in need of a sax player who could also sing. Dad jumped at the offer and began his basic training forthwith. ‘I don’t have to tell you about basic training. Those corporals! I don’t know how they make them. So ignorant! They’re bastards, they are, that’s why they give them the job.’ But once that was over, he had a fairly cushy time in the Air Force. Musicians were excused menial duties, such as shovelling coal, which might damage their fingers; and when Jack Nathan was made a flight sergeant he was able to get them spared guard duty. The band’s first posting was to RAF Cottesmore in Rutlandshire, a base mainly used for training bomber crews. There were frequent crashes, followed by funerals at which Jack Nathan’s band played, slow-marching behind the coffins. This regular duty instilled in Dad a keen awareness of the dangers of flying, and he declined all opportunities to experience it himself. In fact he served for five years in the Air Force, travelling to the Shetlands and India, without ever going up in an aeroplane, and maintained this remarkable record in his post-war life.
But Dad was still at Uxbridge, and my mother and I were at home in Brockley, when the long-delayed Blitz on London began, at the beginning of September 1940. I contributed some memories of this time to a feature in the magazine Areté, called ‘I remember’:
I remember hearing the up-and-down wailing noise of the air-raid siren on being woken by my mother and putting on my siren suit and running up the road to a neighbour’s house, where they had an Anderson shelter dug out of the ground in their back garden. The sky was all red with the fires at the docks, and searchlights swept across the sky lighting up the barrage balloons and a big anti-aircraft gun boomed from the railway line behind the houses opposite.
I remember the smells of earth and paraffin oil and cocoa inside the shelter, and feeling very safe and not frightened at all.
I remember my father came home sometimes in his hairy blue Air Force uniform from a place called Uxbridge. He joked that he was safer where he was stationed than we were.
And so he was. We were only a few miles from the Docks, a prime target for German bombers, whereas he was almost in the country at the western end of the Metropolitan Line.
I drew on those memories at the beginning of my novel Out of the Shelter (1970, rev. 1985), changing, combining and embellishing the facts for narrative and thematic reasons. For example, the father of the central character, Timothy, is an ARP (Air Raid Precautions) warden, being too old for military service, while the father of the family in whose shelter Timothy and his mother take refuge is an airman who happens to be at home on leave when a bomb hits the house, an invented episode. I don’t know how long we stayed in London once the Blitz began – long enough, anyway, for me to start collecting shrapnel from the street, rough and still warm to the touch in the morning after a raid – but eventually my mother must have decided it was getting too dangerous, and we went back to lodgings in Lingfield.
Lingfield, in Surrey, thirty-odd miles south of London, is best known as the site of a racecourse, for which reason it has its own railway station, reached from the village by a longish walk across fields, pleasant or unpleasant according to the weather. It has a village green with a duck pond, but its only historic and picturesque feature is the part-medieval parish church, flanked by Tudor cottages and containing some exceptionally fine brasses. It evoked no memories when I revisited the place after an interval of some fifty years, and I don’t suppose my mother and I ever went inside that church. Catholics in those days were forbidden to attend Protestant services, and the taboo inhibited us from entering non-Catholic churches at other times (not that we would have been tempted to do so by historical or architectural curiosity). We went on Sundays to a building not much better than a large shed, where a visiting priest said mass.
There was, however, just outside Lingfield a convent school run by the Notre Dame order of nuns which took boys as well as girls up to the age of seven, and my mother placed me there as a day pupil; then, after a while, to my dismay, as a boarder. She said she had to return to London to do some kind of ‘war work’ – presumably of a clerical nature – and that she couldn’t look after me there because of the bombing. I doubt if she was impelled by patriotic motives; more likely, now that Dad was on a serviceman’s pay, she needed to earn some money. This episode figures in Out of the Shelter:
His mother kissed him goodbye and told him to be a good boy. She was crying and he couldn’t understand why she was leaving him all on his own. He didn’t cry but he was frightened and unhappy. The boarding part of the school was cold and dark, with wooden floors and passages that had no carpets and creaked when you trod on them. There was stew for supper with bits of white fat in it and watery gravy that made the potatoes all mushy. He didn’t eat any of it, but he was frightened in case Sister Scholastica noticed. After supper they went into the chapel and sang hymns and said long prayers which he didn’t know. He opened and closed his mouth soundlessly to pretend that he was singing and praying with the others. Then it was time to go to bed. His bed was in a big room with some other little boys. There was a place to wash, but only cold water. There was only lino on the floor and it was cold under his feet when he took off his shoes and socks, so he got into bed quickly. The Sister in charge asked him if he had said his night prayers and he said his mother let him say them in bed if it was cold and the other boys giggled. The Sister said next time he must kneel down and say them like the other boys. He didn’t like being a boarder at the convent. He felt like crying but it wouldn’t be any use. When his mother came to see him he would cry a lot and ask her to take him away. He pictured himself crying and saying to his mother, Take me away, take me away, and she took him away. It was a nice picture. Thinking of it, he fell asleep.
That was written when I was much closer to the experience than I am now, and I can no longer distinguish confidently between the details that were taken from life, those that were inspired by classic fictional treatments of the subject, like Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Antonia White’s Frost in May, and those that I imagined myself. But the passage, and the whole sequence to which it belongs, is certainly true to the sense of abandonment I felt, as a five-year-old used to my mother’s devoted and no doubt over-indulgent care, when suddenly thrust into the austere collective life of a boarding school. On parting my mother had promised to visit me soon, bringing my wellington boots from London, and I remember waiting tensely beside the front door of the convent when she was expected, and when I saw her coming down the drive, dashing out of the house and throwing myself into her arms. I don’t know whether I said ‘Take me away’, but it was something like that, and she did.
I was not a boarder at the convent more than a week or two, but until my mother returned it seemed to me of indefinite duration, like a bad dream from which one wakes with overwhelming relief. I went back to living with Mum in various places, sure that she would never abandon me again; and indeed by the closing stages of the war I was sufficiently self-confident to willingly board with a family in Lingfield for some months while she returned to London to work. But when much later in life I became troubled by anxiety to a neurotic degree I sometimes wondered whether the seed of this tendency was planted by the episode of the convent boarding school – that abrupt, unforeseen, indefinite withdrawal of everything which had made my infant life comfortable and secure.
I continued to attend the convent school as a day pupil, living in lodgings with my mother. For a time we lived with a disagreeable woman called Mrs Green, who complained that I made too much noise, and whose house, like many in Lingfield, had no electricity, only gaslights on the ground floor and nothing on the first floor, so that you had to go to bed with a candle, and no bathroom, so that I had my weekly bath in our living room in a tin tub filled with hot water from jugs. I believe it was not very long afterwards, probably in the spring or summer of 1941, that we left Lingfield to live in Porthpean, a seaside hamlet near St Austell on the south coast of Cornwall. Mum had an older cousin on her mother’s side, Victor Wood, whom she and Eileen had known and liked when they were girls. Victor grew up to be a successful businessman who moved to Cornwall and owned two chemist’s shops there, one in St Austell and the other in Newquay on the north coast. Having discovered the rather miserable circumstances in which my mother was looking after me in Lingfield, he generously invited us to go and live with him in his spacious house in Porthpean, and so we did.
We travelled by coach, I suppose for economy’s sake – an interminable journey in those pre-motorway days, involving a change in Exeter. But I imagine that I soon cheered up once we arrived at our destination. Porthpean was a more appealing place to a child than damp, muddy Lingfield, and Victor Wood’s house infinitely more comfortable than the lodgings we had occupied there. The area around St Austell is not one of the most picturesque parts of Cornwall. It is the centre of the china clay industry, and conical hills of the whitish-grey waste this produces rear up from the fields like spectral slag heaps. The town itself lacks charm, but scenic Fowey and quaint Mevagissey are not far away, and there are several small bays in the area with attractive beaches, like Porthpean. My uncle Vic’s house, called The Retreat, was only a short steep walk from that beach, and although it was disfigured by a long barricade of obstacles constructed of concrete and rusting iron, designed to repel a German invasion, they did not prevent us from getting to the sea. It was a perfect beach for a child, with plenty of sand at low tide, and a stretch of rocks at one end that were easy to clamber over, their hollows and fissures becoming seaweed-lined pools when the waves withdrew, home to mussels, limpets, crabs, shrimps, sea anemones and tiny fish. When I revisited the place in 2002 the rock pools were still there, but with little sign of life in them. Being ‘evacuated’ here felt, at least for a while, like being on an extended holiday rather than being in exile from home. To my joy Dad was able to join us for a reasonably long leave, and I have a snapshot of him and me smiling side by side in an identical pose, legs apart, with our thumbs hooked into the waistbands of our shorts. Dad is shirtless, so it must have been taken in the summer of 1941. I dare say I was very sad when he had to put on his uniform and return to base, but I was proud of him too, and somewhat idealised his contribution to the war effort. I took intense interest in a little book on aircraft recognition which he gave me, and learned to distinguish between the silhouettes of Spitfires and Hurricanes, and Dornier and Heinkel bombers.
Just east of Porthpean was Duporth House, home of the Rankin family, who before the war had converted the estate into an upmarket holiday camp, building chalets on the land that sloped down to their private beach. At the commencement of war the site was requisitioned for the accommodation of troops, but Mr and Mrs Rankin continued to live in the manor house with their son Alan, who was about my age. My uncle Victor knew the family and as a result I was invited to Duporth House on several occasions to play with Alan, a rather mischievous boy with a mop of golden curls. He led me through the rooms of the (as it seemed to me) vast house, and we explored the big echoing buildings that had once served the holidaymakers – a dining room, a ballroom with a sprung floor – and the boardwalks and paths outside. We peered through trees at the Indian troops who were at that time occupying the chalets, swarthy men in turbans who cooked their food over fires in the open air. It seemed to me a magical place, and the pièce de résistance was a magnificent model railway Mr Rankin had constructed in an attic room, as big as the one I had seen in Hamleys of Regent Street before the war, which he enjoyed demonstrating to us.
Alan’s parents were always chiding their son for his behaviour and, I believe, hoped I would be a good influence on him. I certainly had a much greater respect for authority, as an incident I recall from that period illustrates. I was playing, or rather hanging out (the American phrase is more expressive of the aimless congregation of unsupervised children), with a few kids on the corner of the road in Porthpean where my uncle’s house was situated. A small car came up the hill from the beach, and on a naughty impulse, to impress my playmates I threw a stick I was holding at the vehicle as it passed. I doubt if I meant it to hit the car, but it did, on a side window. To my horror the car stopped and the driver got out, revealing himself as an army officer in uniform. The cliché ‘frozen to the spot’ is the only possible description of my state of mind and body as he walked back towards us. I don’t think I feared anything specific, like being summarily arrested and hauled off to a police station. I was just aware of having committed some terrible transgression which would be punished. Of course all the man did was to speak sternly to us about the danger of throwing things at cars – I’m not even sure that he identified me as the culprit. But for years afterwards, in moments of reverie, especially when trying to go to sleep, I would mentally relive those traumatic moments, and struggle vainly to escape the memory of my guilt and fear of retribution.
An occasional visitor to us in Porthpean was my aunt Eileen, my mother’s younger sister, who had moved from London to the south-west in search of war-related employment in a safer environment than the capital. She worked as a Land Girl for a time, then later as a secretary to the CO of the American troops who replaced the Indians at Duporth House. I was always glad to see her, as were most people. She was attractive, vivacious, always elegantly turned out and groomed, very good company, a great talker, slightly ‘actressy’ in her speech and body language, and full of amusing anecdotes about her experiences which would keep the adults around her in fits of laughter. There was a sadder side to her character, as I would discover later in life, but to me as a child she was a fascinating figure who banished boredom whenever she appeared, and she in turn was very fond of me. I looked forward eagerly to her visits, and on one occasion, when I was about six, I proposed to her a secret compact between us, namely that I would confess to her when I had been naughty and she would have to punish me, beating me on the bottom with a stick I supplied from the garden, and make a record of it. She giggled in a rather embarrassed way, as well she might, when I explained this plan to her, and found ways to avoid implementing it, apart from a token ‘practice’ stroke, as light as a fairy’s wand, which I insisted on. What would a psychoanalyst make of the scheme I concocted? Obviously I didn’t really want to be physically hurt, and relied on my aunt’s tenderness towards me to ensure that. Was it then an expression of infantile sexuality, for I was in a way in love with my aunt and this may have been the most intimate connection between us that I could conceive of at that age? Or was it an unconscious effort of the child to rid himself of the uncomfortable emotions associated with the episode of the officer in the car (a stick figures in both episodes), to purge the memory of that traumatic moment of transgression and fear by a ritual performance of punishment? I shall have more to say about my aunt Eileen later. She was a very important figure in my life, and her own partly inspired two of my novels.
My uncle Vic was a thoroughly nice man. Slight of build, he wore glasses, had grey, thinning hair, and his face broke frequently into a broad, toothy smile. He had retained his Yorkshire accent, which was a novelty to me, but seemed eloquent of his homely warmth and generosity. He was in his early fifties, too old for military service, though he was in Civil Defence. He had a small car and, because of his business, a petrol ration, from which we benefited. Once he drove Mum and me across the Cornish peninsula to Newquay, which was then a quiet and modestly sized resort very different from the crowded and somewhat tawdry place it is now. Even at that early age I was struck by the contrast between the rugged windblown north Cornwall coast and the gentler, more sheltered south, and awed by the great rollers that surged in from the Atlantic to break on the vast Newquay beaches.
I have made this time we spent in Cornwall sound idyllic and in many ways it was. But there were tensions in the ménage at Porthpean created by Vic’s wife Isabel, who resented the presence of Vic’s relatives in her house. This feeling was perhaps understandable, but her way of expressing it was often bizarre. Looking back, it seems obvious that she was psychologically disturbed, but she was an alarming figure to me then, liable to sudden changes of mood, given to fits of anger and hysterics which we would hear through closed doors. She was a Protestant and seemed particularly aggravated by the fact that we, like her husband, were Catholics; on Sundays she would sit at the piano in the drawing room singing ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ and other Protestant hymns at the top of her voice to demonstrate her religious allegiance. She and Vic had two teenage children, Ralph and Mary. Ralph, who was the elder, seemed to side with his mother, to judge by his reserved manner towards us, while Mary was much more friendly. The saintly Vic did his best to keep everyone happy, but I presume my mother decided at some point that we had better not stay with the family any longer. We went back, rather surprisingly it seems to me in retrospect, to London, to Brockley, to Millmark Grove.