night not long after I had started school, a British bomber torpedoed a German troop ship that was sailing between the west coast of Scotland and Ireland. For days after the attack, I watched the bodies of German soldiers washing up on shore.
In Stranraer harbour, there was a Royal Air Force base, from which planes went out on patrol at night on the North Sea and the Atlantic. I spent time at the base and became a sort of mascot of the air force pilots. Some of the young pilots and crew that I got to know didn’t return from their patrols. I also spent time after school with the soldiers who occupied an anti-aircraft position not far from the house we were living in, and they would give me chocolate.
It was difficult sharing accommodations with strangers during the war. My mother, an excellent cook who was proud of her kitchen, often got into arguments with our landladies. And so, it was not long before we left the house outside Stranraer and moved into a house in town, renting rooms on the top floor with our own kitchen and bathroom. The house was owned by a dour, unpleasant older man. My father was usually away every night at the port, boarding vessels that came in from southern Ireland. He was searching for Nazi spies who would have entered Ireland from U-boats and then stowed away in fishing boats and smaller vessels coming in from Dublin and Belfast.
One morning, when my father returned from his shift at the port, and I was in the kitchen with my mother, who was preparing his breakfast, he announced that he had joined the army as a private. He felt that he was not contributing enough to the war effort at the port. My mother was shocked by this decision and couldn’t understand why he would do this at the age of thirty-four. He soon started a rigorous six-month program of commando training in an intelligence unit of the army in the south of England. My mother and I stayed on for two months in Stranraer and then moved to Glasgow, where we lived briefly with my grandparents and my aunt Rhoda until we found a flat of our own to rent. In Glasgow, my mother had a government job censoring the letters written home by British soldiers on duty abroad. She had become fluent in reading and writing English during the years she had been married to my father.
My father came back to Glasgow on leave once during his training. When my mother and I met him at the railway station, I barely recognized him getting off the train, carrying his duffle bag and rifle on his shoulders. He had lost so much weight during his strenuous training that he was a shadow of the father I had known. During his leave, and while my parents were away from the small flat, I enjoyed playing with his service rifle and revolver. At one point I overheard my father telling my mother that because he spoke Danish, he had been ordered to be part of a spy operation to be dropped into occupied Denmark by parachute. Fortunately for my father, the operation was cancelled, for his chances of surviving this adventure were low.
In Glasgow I was put into a first-rate educational institution, Allan Glen’s School, where unfortunately I did poorly academically, except for the chemistry class, where for some inexplicable reason I always got the top mark. My mathematical abilities did not impress my mathematics teacher, and my physics teacher considered me an abysmal failure. However, I discovered that I had inherited my father’s talent for drawing, and won an all-Glasgow drawing competition, which greatly pleased my art teacher.
After his training, my father was promoted to corporal and was stationed in Glasgow. Since the flat my mother had rented was too small for all three of us, my father rented rooms in a house in the western part of Glasgow. Unfortunately, not long after moving in, my mother had yet another altercation with the unpleasant landlady with whom she shared the kitchen. My mother objected to the mouse tracks in the fat in the frying pans, which the landlady had not washed. And so, one night, my father came in and pulled me out of bed and said that we were leaving. We took off in the dark in a military jeep with our few belongings, and my father requisitioned living quarters for us in yet another house, using another war permit.
The council house we were billeted in was owned by a Mrs. Barge, who had a nine-year-old daughter and a five-year-old son. Mr. Barge was in the medical corps, stationed in Libya as part of the Eighth Army. For the next year and a half, I shared a room with Mrs. Barge’s daughter, my parents had the main bedroom, while Mrs. Barge and her son slept in a third room.
The Germans bombed the port of Glasgow in 1941 and 1942, trying to destroy its shipbuilding industry, which was located about five miles from Mrs. Barge’s house. Over a period of three nights, we suffered a serious blitz, as the bombing raids over Glasgow increased in intensity. The six of us had to sleep in an Anderson air raid shelter in the Barges’ back garden. It was partially underground, and was made of corrugated iron. Most houses had these air raid shelters in their gardens during the war.
On the second night of the blitz, the Germans dropped incendiary bombs on our neighbourhood. They destroyed the church at the end of the street, and many houses near us caught fire, but we were spared. The next day, I walked around in the garden picking up pieces of shrapnel from the anti-aircraft shells. They had razor-sharp edges. One had to be careful going from the house to the shelter when the bombing started, because fragments of shells were dropping from the sky. One night when in a panic we were running from the house to the air raid shelter, my parents donned steel helmets and ran on ahead, leaving me to reach the shelter bare-headed, since all the helmets were taken. This scene continues to haunt me today, a reminder of the horrors of war suffered by children.
During the three days the blitz lasted, about 1500 civilians were killed in the port of Glasgow, the highly populated area of Clyde-bank and in our neighbourhood. Roughly 60,000 civilians were killed during the bombings of England and Scotland. This compared to the 400,000 casualties suffered by the British soldiers and air force and navy personnel. In addition, of course, were the many thousands of severely wounded in the civilian population and the military, and the more than one million houses destroyed or damaged in the air raids on London alone.
Soon it was time to move again. In late 1943, my father, now a captain in the intelligence corps, was posted to the east coast English port of Grimsby and Hull, where he was put in charge of security, checking the fishing boats that came in from Denmark, again potentially containing Nazi spies. This time my father succeeded in getting me accepted by Hymer’s College, even though my scholarly aptitude did not impress the headmaster. At the age of eleven, I was a day student at this prestigious English public school, while living in a boarding house in Hull with my parents and twelve other people.
The war ended in 1945, and my father, now a major, was sent to northern Germany the next year to oversee the Flensburg occupation troops. Instead of following him once again, my mother and I returned to Copenhagen by boat in January 1947, and I entered a Danish high school. Since by this time, after all our years in England, I was neither speaking nor writing Danish, the first year of school in Copenhagen turned out to be another gap in my education. It was a strange experience, sitting in classes not understanding a word that was being said around me, particularly by my teachers. I spent a lot of time looking out the window of the schoolroom, daydreaming.
In Denmark, children finish high school in their mid-teens and are then considered for a preparatory program for university in the gymnasium. Entrance to the gymnasium stream in Denmark depended upon tests, academic performance during high school and, most important, upon the recommendation of a gymnasium teacher. When I was fifteen, in my last year of high school, and by this time fluent in Danish, I was interviewed by a young mathematics teacher from the Copenhagen gymnasium. My whole future seemed to be riding on this interview. If the teacher was satisfied with my answers to his questions, he would recommend that I enter the gymnasium in the fall. Three or four years later, I could then apply to university. If I failed this personal interview, the only options available to me after high school would be entering a trade school or seeking work, most likely menial and ill paid.
The teacher ushered me into a small schoolroom with grey-painted walls and wooden desks. He cleared his throat, wrote on the blackboard and asked his first mathematical question.
