exam at sixteen, but I became eligible in the winter of 1941, when I was still fifteen, and, to Vine’s considerable surprise, passed with sufficient honours to have won “Exemption from Matriculation” had I had the requisite foreign language credit, the mystifying French. The explanation for my modest success was in part that I had always enjoyed exams, writing around a question to which I did not know the answer, to influence the examiner by displaying what I did know. Later in life, I used this technique in journalism to persuade editors and readers that I knew more about the subject than I really did. But looking back on the school years, I think I got a pretty good grounding in the basics. I learned also that I was hopeless in sports of all kinds. In the school yard we played cricket with balls we made ourselves by encasing a bundle of rags in a string net and soaking the result in water. The explanation for that curious custom, I think, was not poverty but respect for the school windows and a healthy fear of what damage a hard ball could do when bounced on an asphalt surface. There was a school sports field about a mile away, and there we played with the proper equipment. By appearing regularly as a volunteer to umpire games or, with others, to replace a horse in tugging an enormous roller over the wicket, I earned a place eventually in the school’s cricket team. I was opening bat with the less than heroic role of dispiriting the opposing bowlers, not by scoring runs but by stonewalling their best efforts. But we weren’t much good as a team anyway and always lost our annual game with the inmates of a nearby asylum, perhaps because we were distracted by the hope that they would act like lunatics, which they never did. I was as averse to competition in school sports as I was in dinghy racing, but that may have been because I knew I was without talent and would lose. In other words, I was unwilling to face defeat. Against that painful thought, when I played chess I preferred to lose a good game than to win a poor one. But for whatever reason I have never been interested in professional sports, which cuts me off from an important element in male culture, even from the Canadian national culture of hockey. I never read the sports pages in the newspapers or watch games on TV — and I couldn’t care less who wins in the Olympics, which I suppose makes me an alien in today’s culture, and an agnostic alien at that. So much for my childhood.
~ Chapter 3 ~
Going to War
I was vaguely aware from childhood that war was approaching. There were black-shirted fascists handing out pamphlets in the High Street, and I was told that they scuffled with Communists on Saturday nights, even in sleepy old Exeter. After the Munich crisis in 1938, we were all fitted with gas masks, and there was much talk of civil defence against air attack with bombs that might explode, create fires, or shower us with poison gas. But life went on, and we spent the summer of 1939, as usual, on the Warren. I remember when we were shopping in Exmouth one morning seeing the front page of the Daily Express announcing that Germany and the Soviet Union had signed a non-aggression pact, and being told that this made war more likely. We had no radio and heard that war had been declared when a police constable pushed his bike over the sand dunes to tell us and others that we must black-out our windows. That was not a problem; we just turned out the oil lamps, but for the first time in memory there were no lights on the seafront across the water in Exmouth, and no lighted trains passing in the night. The lights did not come on again for five years.
When we packed up to return to Exeter we knew that we were losing a battle to another threat, the sea, which had been eroding the dunes year by year and was by then almost at the backdoor of The Cabin. During the winter storms in 1940, the sea finally broke through the Warren to join with the estuary bay. All the summer homes were eventually swept away and the Warren became a sandbank visible only at low tide. But years later, the unpredictable sea began to return the sand, and the Warren dunes rose again, although smaller than before. There are no buildings now and signs on the beach say, pleasingly, “Give Way to Birds” because it is part of a much larger sanctuary.
I was still at school, of course, when the war began and became probably the greatest transforming experience of my life — as indeed it must have been for everyone who was near the front lines. It changed everything, and often for the better, including social and moral values, and economic and political expectations. It is a disturbing paradox that the world was a much better place in 1945 than it had been in 1939, and reflecting on it, I realize that the social values of Britain in the war years were almost the opposite of those today. In short, they were those of the left, liberty, equality, fraternity. The national spirit was fraternal, not individualistic. We were united against a common enemy, and the struggle for liberty took precedence over everything else.
Even the famous British class system softened, and people who would hardly have talked to each other in peacetime found common cause and a measure of fellowship. The goal was production, not consumption, and in fact it was unpatriotic, often illegal, to consume more than one’s equal share. Food, clothing, and petrol were severely rationed: four ounces of butter per week, an ounce or two of cheese, four ounces of bacon or ham, two ounces of the essential tea, a couple of shillings worth of meat which families pooled in order to buy a pitiful Sunday roast. One had to present a ration book to buy almost anything edible: dried and canned vegetables, rice, cereal, canned fish, cookies, candies, everything except bread, and for that you lined up at the bakery to buy the standard, greyish National Loaf. And then of course one had to queue, often for hours, for a ration book when they were issued from time to time.
The popular fish and chips were not rationed, but the shops could open only when they had cooking oil, so one went out looking for a shop with the welcome notice in the window, “Frying Tonight.” The unthinkable happened when pubs occasionally ran out of beer, and Scotch whisky, like cigarettes, was mostly “under the bar,” which meant that it was reserved for regular customers and no others need apply. Feeding pets was a nightmare:There were special shops selling horsemeat dyed green to prevent it from going onto the black market for human consumption, and one of my jobs as a schoolboy was to line up at a horsemeat shop and, if supplies held out until I got to the head of the queue, tuck a bloody parcel into my schoolbag for the ride home to a grateful dog. If we had known it at the time, no doubt we would have used the American saying popular during the Depression when clothes were an unnecessary expense, “Make it do, wear it out, use it up, do without.” We recycled waste to an extent that makes today’s programs look half-hearted. There were special bins for everything, including bones. Exhorted to give aluminum to make more Spitfires, we lined the streets outside our homes with cooking pots, learning only much later that they proved unsatisfactory for the job. Miles of old books lined the roads during paper drives, and the iron railings on our front garden were cut down and taken away, along with everyone else’s.
When Winston Churchill formed his coalition government in 1940, political debate and media criticism almost disappeared. Those few critics who remained, mostly on the left, were frowned upon, even reviled. Newspapers were reduced to four or six pages and found ways to print even in the “gutters” between two pages. The BBC radio news at 9 p.m. became the national source of reliable — or so we thought — information. We know now that after the collapse of France and the rout of the British army, Churchill seriously doubted Britain’s ability to survive. But at the time his defiant speeches rallied the country, and I doubt that the thought of defeat bothered many Britons. Call it stupidity or arrogance, but it probably saved us. The spirit was that of the solitary British solder, in David Low’s great cartoon, holding his rifle high and saying, “Alright, alone!”
It would be wrong to say war made people happy. Life was hard, particularly for women left to raise children on their own, and it was often tedious for everybody, but war removed a lot of reasons for envy and complaint. In fact, complaining became almost illegitimate and brought a swift and sarcastic retort, “Don’t yer know there’s a war on?” And in a way life was fulfilling; everyone had a job to do, and most did it, which was a relief for millions after the mass unemployment of the Great Depression. This helps perhaps to explain another paradox: While we claim to hate war, history suggests that it has been a popular occupation in most centuries. When wars were declared there was more celebrating than sobbing, with patriotic crowds marching through the streets in many countries. Now, films, TV programs, and
