I wish I could remember my coronation, the day I was crowned overall winner of the Litherland Baby Show at the age of eighteen months. I wish I could remember that morning in the backyard, when I stood up in my pram to dip my dummy into a cloud and fell out, landing on my head, or that time I was kidnapped and held to ransom by Hungarian gypsies … All right, I was kidding about the kidnap, but I clearly remember being woken up in the middle of the night, and my sister and me being put into dressing gowns, the ones with silken rabbits stitched on, carried downstairs and hurried off to the air-raid shelter at the bottom of the road.
The cord of my new dressing-gown
he helps me tie
Then on to my father’s shoulder
held high
The world at night with my little eye
I spy
The moon close enough to touch
I try
Silver-painted elephants have learned
to fly
Giants fence with searchlights
in the sky
Too soon into the magic shelter
he and I
Air raids are so much fun
I wonder why
In the bunk below, a big boy
starts to cry.
Although the fear of those adults around me may have been contagious, the only feelings I can remember were of excitement. The bunk beds in the shelter would have been crammed with children, the young ones laughing or crying, the older ones reading stories to them or singing, and the grown-ups coming and going, trying to make light of the situation. My father would have been a volunteer fireman, perhaps on duty outside, where the sky would have been fizzing with light and noise.
Whenever the sirens went off and there wasn’t time to run down to the shelter, we would hide in a small cupboard under the stairs. Brenda and I would be put into a cot that took up all the space, and Mother would lie on top of us with my dad covering us all. As my sister and I drifted off to sleep they would listen to the aircraft thundering overhead, to the ack-ack fire and to the explosions that seemed to be drawing closer and shudderingly closer. It must have been terrifying for them and no doubt the Hail Marys came thick and fast. The idea of our hunkering down there was that should the house be bombed and collapse, my sister and I would stand the best chance of survival. Luckily my father’s brave, and perhaps foolhardy, attempt to withstand the full force of Hitler’s Luftwaffe was never put to the test.
The alleyways that ran between the backs of the houses, or ‘jiggers’, as they were known, were good places to find the tail fins of enemy incendiary bombs that many boys collected, but you had to be careful when picking them up for some mornings they would still be white hot. It was scary but reassuring to know that once handed in, the tail fins would be melted down to make incendiary bombs that could be dropped on German houses. Barrage balloons, the pride and joy of the ARP (Air Raid Protection), were moored in a field close by and when lowered by metal cables they seemed to perch on the roofs of the house opposite, like alien spacecraft, or elephants grazing. In the first published version of that poem about my dad giving me a piggyback to the air-raid shelter, I had described them as: ‘Unheard of silver elephants have learned to fly’, which made perfect sense to me, because as a child, I remember someone saying ‘a herd of elephants’ and my mishearing it as ‘unheard of elephants’, and years later assumed that the reader of the poem would also make the connection. Several of my poems have sprung from a creative dyslexia, but in this case I changed the line to ‘A herd of silver elephants’ and again to ‘Silver-painted elephants’ in search of a less confusing image.
There is a little town in north Wales called Chirk, and when the bombing was at its fiercest my mother took my sister and me to stay there with a local family. It was an evacuation of sorts, but I don’t know how it was organised, and we certainly didn’t have our names written on luggage labels and attached to our coats. The Hulse family took us in, Alma and Orlando, who had two older children, and they were so welcoming and warm that I’ve never been very good at Welsh jokes. Uncle Lando, as we called him, worked down the coal mine and was built four-square, with arms and legs like sawn-off pit props. He would come home from the shift covered in coal dust with his blue eyes sparkling and teeth shining, and chase Brenda and me round the living room pretending to want a big hug until Aunty Alma chased him upstairs for a bath. He would take us into the fields at first light to gather mushrooms and for long walks along the banks of the River Vernwy, where the smell of wild garlic was almost tangible.
My memories of that period seem to belong to a child of another time and place. Of distant mountains and open skies, and greenness in every direction. Of the tuneful clamour of birds as I walked with Brenda and Aunty Alma through hedge-lined country lanes to Old Jack in his grocery shop, a caravan on wheels, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Of the flickering black-and-white films and the noisy projector, as we all sat on wooden benches in the village hall. Another twelve months or so down there and I might have become a Welsh Laurie Lee and, instead of Summer with Monika, my first book would have been ‘Cider with Blodwyn’. But Hitler had other ideas, the bombs stopped falling and we moved back to the city.