Two weeks later I arrived at Cressbrook, a preparatory school in Kirkby Lonsdale. I was terribly homesick and wished I could die. The pain seemed never to leave me. It was there in the classroom, at play and, most of all, at night. I had a model aeroplane which was shot down by a boy armed with a spear. The event coincided with a visit from Nunky who in due course sent me a new plane, but it did not help the sickness. Things got a bit better as the weeks went by, but it was years before going back to school at the beginning of term did not reduce me to tears. In spite of all this I still remember sunny times and I made some very good friends. It is surprising that a few of us did not finish up in the mortuary for we spent our play time capering around on the school roof, throwing spears and lumps of lead at each other and swinging from the branches of trees. One particularly sensational exploit involved our leaping off the terrace, hoping that the homemade parachutes strapped to our backs would ease our landing. They did not.
Every Sunday we had to learn the collect for the day and many have stuck in my mind ever since, particularly ‘Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruits of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded.’ This was learned on ‘Stir-up Sunday’ and after church we all went into the kitchen and stirred the Christmas Pudding. Most of our thoughts centred on food. They were hungry times and one boy with great strength of mind built a splendid stamp collection by swapping his tea-time buns for my Mozambique triangulars. If we were feeling ill we were sent up to the sick room and always received the same treatment – starvation. It was amazing how soon we got better.
In 1939 and for the first few months of 1940 the War did not impinge on our lives to any great extent, except that we were required to knit balaclava helmets for the Finns after Russia’s attack on that unfortunate country. I doubt whether my misshapen effort brought much delight to its Finnish recipient.
In the summer of 1940 we sat in the headmaster’s study listening to news of the evacuation from Dunkirk and the following winter we lay in bed hearing German bombers flying overhead on their way to the shipyards in Barrow. Back home for the Christmas holidays the passage running along the back of the house had been turned into an air raid shelter, and the valley between Blackburn and Burnley was embellished with barrage balloons, each of which was given a nickname leading to questions such as ‘Why isn’t Dickie up, today?’ An Ack-Ack battery was stationed at Simonstone and we had a few noisy nights during the Manchester blitz when the sky was red with the fires of Manchester and Salford, and shrapnel, presumably from anti-aircraft shells, fell on the barn roof. Pa had joined the Home Guard and was enjoying himself enormously, walking up and down outside the house wearing his tin hat and imagining he was back in the trenches.
Once a week Pa had to perform guard duty at the barracks in Burnley. Before leaving home my mother stuffed him full of raw carrots in the belief that it would help him see in the dark. The blackout meant that cars had virtually no lights, drivers being required, at that stage of the War, to cover almost all their headlights with cardboard.
When Hitler invaded Russia, Sykie, Cressbrook’s deputy head, told us to rejoice. Hitler would suffer the same fate as Napoleon and lose the War. I suppose he also told us that Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 was good news, but all I can remember about the end of 1941 and the beginning of 1942 was the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse off the east coast of Malaya and the fall of Singapore. They were disasters of enormous proportions and, although none of us doubted ultimate victory, we could not see it happening for many years.
Before I went away to school my sister Zoe and I used to quarrel a lot. But separation made the heart grow fonder and after I had gone away to Cressbrook the holidays found us inseparable. Once Zoe was so pleased I was coming home for the holidays she jumped into the air while running along the upstairs landing, hit the ceiling and knocked herself out.
My father bought a bicycle and together we cycled from Cressbrook to Sedbergh to see what was going to be my next school. I did not much like what I saw. I should have gone to Sedbergh in September 1943 but I fell off my bicycle and broke my leg so I did not arrive until January 1944. This turned out to be a considerable misfortune because seniority based on length of time at the school counted for a great deal and the chances of getting in to a senior position after only three years in the place were slight. I was faced with another more immediate problem. I was very well aware that my parents were hard up. They had sent all my sisters to Cheltenham Ladies’ College and my youngest sister Zoe was still there. So I had insisted on taking the scholarship to Sedbergh. The papers, however, turned out to be beyond my comprehension. (One of the questions I remember was ‘What is surrealism?’) I did so badly in the scholarship papers that when I arrived at Sedbergh I found I had been placed in the third form doing work which to me was infantile. Eventually I plucked up courage and told the form master, who was old, crusty and frightening, what I thought; and he was so amazed and amused at my temerity that he sent me round to the Headmaster. He was equally amused and promptly transferred me to lower fourth classical where I blossomed and was then swiftly transferred to the fifth form. It was very important to me because I had worked out exactly where I had to get to in order to take Higher School Certificate at seventeen and leave school before I was eighteen.
Sedbergh went in for cold baths and running up hills and had a discouraging motto ‘dura virum nutrix’ (A Hard Nurse of Men). Winder House faced Winder the hill which, towering above the town, was attacked almost daily by hundreds of boys. A friend told me the other day that he had been back to Sedbergh recently and at first could not grasp why the place looked so different. Eventually he realised that it was because Winder was covered in heather. In our day any heather was removed by boys’ bottoms as they slid down from the summit school-ward bound.
But in spite of the running and emphasis on sport, and in spite of the fact that I was once beaten for forgetting to bring a rugger ball back from the field and threatened with another beating for reading a history book by the side of the cricket pitch when I should have been watching the game, Sedbergh was certainly not ‘one of the more pointlessly sadistic public schools’ as it was described by The Observer in 1994. Headmaster John Bruce-Lockhart was quite forward-thinking and, recognising that there was excessive emphasis on prowess at games, particularly rugger where he himself and his sons had excelled, introduced school colours for music.
I enjoyed music at school, playing the piano and then the violin and the viola in the school orchestra. I transferred to the viola because it meant promotion of a sort – from second violin to first viola. A friend, Brian Hurst, played the cello. One night the bridge on his instrument broke with an awful report. Brian suffered from the schoolboy equivalent of shell shock.
Everybody had to join the JTC (Junior Training Corps) which was the old OTC (Officers’ Training Corps), renamed to bring it more in tune with the egalitarianism by then in vogue. I have a certificate to prove that I passed the examination for War Certificate A. I cannot think why because the examination was a nightmare. I was told to reassemble a Sten gun which lay in pieces at my feet. I thought the parts were a bit stiff or the barrel a bit thin but by standing on the butt I managed to apply sufficient extra pressure to force the breech block into place. I had achieved the almost impossible. The breech block was in the wrong way round.
VE Day plus one was a very special family occasion. It was the day of my sister Nancy’s marriage to an RAMC captain whom she had met as a nursing sister in Normandy very shortly after D-day. She had crossed the English Channel in an American ship, docking at Mulberry Harbour, and had then had a dangerous journey by lorry to Bayeux. It must have been very exciting but also very terrifying for a 22-year-old trained at Victoria Hospital, Burnley, who had known precious little of the world before becoming a nursing sister in the QAs.
In August 1945 my mother took Zoe and myself to London and we were there on VJ Day mingling in the enormous crowd outside Buckingham Palace. The Goring Hotel’s scrambled egg made from egg powder did not impress, but we relished seeing the King and Queen arrive at Parliament for the State Opening. Our London visit ended with a performance of ‘Perchance to Dream’ by Ivor Novello and not only did we sing ‘We’ll gather lilacs’ all the way home, we played it for months afterwards – Zoe on the squeeze-box, Ma on the piano and myself on the violin.
Back to Sedbergh where in 1946 we had a day off to enjoy the end of the War. The headmaster announced that we could go anywhere we wanted provided we did not use motor car, train or bus. It did not seem much of a bargain. Sedbergh, after all, was the back of beyond; twelve miles from Kendal, the nearest place with a cinema.
Plans were laid, and four of us walked to Sedbergh railway station, which was well outside the town, and boarded a waiting taxi. In Kendal we went into a pub and bought a pint of beer each and twenty cigarettes, and then proceeded to a picture house where we found four girls who were prepared to sit in the back row with us and let us have a few kisses. The taxi then whisked us back to where we had started, and from there we ran back to Winder House well pleased with ourselves. Unfortunately, one of our party decided to finish off his packet of Players in the boiler room. The packet and a few fag-ends were discovered by the man who did the stoking, and we were all for the high jump.
I had decided that the next year was to be my last at Sedbergh and was determined to do my best to get up to Oxford to read law. So it worked out. I was accepted by my father’s old college, Hertford, and found my way there in October 1947.