fly with a short complicated yell which would echo among the resonant walls. What was it, a greeting or an imprecation? Whatever it was it would be answered by more buckets being thrown and other voices from other directions giving answering yells until it seemed the whole town was out there, greeting the day.
That morning, after a French breakfast of croissants and hot chocolate we said goodbye to madame, and Ray paid the bill which, when converted, worked out at one and ninepence (9p) a head.
Ray, for all his atheism, was fascinated by churches. During the tour we must have seen and examined quite a number of them, but the one which has left the strongest impression with me was the Abbey at Ve´zelay. There the tops of the pillars and all the odd corners of the stonework are infested with carvings of ribald persons and unlikely creatures doing unexpected things. I noticed them and searched them out, wondering what they were up to, wondering indeed what religion was up to that it gave house-room to such manifestly disreputable denizens.
It soon became clear that we had not come to France for the architecture. Gradually, as we travelled westwards, I began to recognize the names of some of the towns and villages. I wondered why this was, and then I realized where I had seen them before – on the labels of wine bottles. Sleepy little towns like Nuits-St-Georges, Puligny-Montrachet, Volnay and Mersault were approached by Ray with the reverence of a pilgrim – which indeed he was, for in these places the nectar of the gods might still be found and taken. Here the vin maison was premier cru and the ‘good bottle’ of the evening was the stuff of dreams.
Although they had made the pilgrimage in a spirit of dread, fearing that the impending war might sweep it all away, Ray and Daisy were not so foolish as to allow the wine or food to be tainted with foreboding. It was a very happy time and I suspect that, if anything, the thought that he and Daisy and the rest of us might be mocking Providence simply added to Ray’s delight.
V. When War Comes.
The family returned to Finchley and the real world, a bit saddlesore but content, to find that the international situation had taken a turn for the worse. At school we no longer said: ‘If war comes …’
We said: ‘When war comes …’
Then, at the end of September, Neville Chamberlain flew back from Munich waving the absurd document that, he said, ensured peace in our time. Herr Hitler had confirmed that the Sudetenland had been his last territorial ambition in Europe. The threat of war was said to be over.
I remember the enormous feeling of euphoria that swept through us. Hearts were lighter for many days, but the underlying sense that war was still somewhere in the offing was not fully dispelled and I don’t think anybody, even among the pupils of Woodhouse School, was really surprised when, in March 1939, Hitler’s army marched into Prague and took the whole of Czechoslovakia.
Politics, the international situation, the prospect of war, had never seemed fully real to me, mainly because I hadn’t bothered to pay any attention to them, but gradually things began to happen which brought them home.
I watched Anderson shelters being delivered. These were the corrugated iron bolt-holes that householders would assemble and bury in their back gardens as a refuge from bombing. There had been an ‘air raid drill’ at school and I had been given a gas mask in a cardboard box, which I had tried on and didn’t like. There had also been talk of evacuation; of taking children away and sending them to stay with strangers in safe places. All these things concentrated my attention. I still had the idea, somewhere in my head, that war was supposed to be exciting, even heroic, but these preparations seemed peculiarly unexciting, inconvenient and boring. They were also frightening, in a numb sort of way, because they didn’t seem to be preparations for anything positive, like riding into battle, but more like preparations for some overall but unspecified disaster that would soon befall us all.
Ray seemed to be fairly calm about it all but Daisy was very frightened indeed. She told me that ‘they’ now had bombs that could wipe out half a town at one blast, and guns that could fire round corners and seek out their targets, and gas that was invisible but deadly. Her picture of the power of modern armaments was, fortunately for the world, premature; such things were yet to come. She didn’t speak of it again but fears for our safety must have been in her mind because she and Ray had made plans for our evacuation.
They had met W. B. Curry, the headmaster of Dartington Hall School in Devon, and he had generously offered to take John and me as day-pupils at reduced fees if the war came. Their old friend Kay Starr was the secretary of Leonard Elmhirst, one of the owners of Dartington Hall. She offered to provide accommodation and look after us. So that was settled; the moment war came John and I were to go straight to Devon.
Meanwhile we made ready for war. We stuck strips of brown paper across the windows. We upholstered the thick-walled cupboards between the kitchen and the hall with mattresses and we listened to the wireless, which told us that crowds of children were waiting at railway stations to be evacuated, carrying their gas masks in cardboard boxes.
On September the first Hitler invaded Poland and Ray said it was time for us to go. Philip and Valerie Beales (Lance and Taffy’s son and daughter-in-law) offered to give us a lift in their car. They would be going to somewhere near Cirencester, which was more than halfway to Devon. The offer was gratefully accepted.
It was a nightmare journey. The main roads were packed and the drivers very agitated. The police and the air raid wardens were out in force, shouting at motorists to put their lights out, which they did, and as a result couldn’t see where they were going.
We reached our destination at about 4 a.m. and slept on the floor of a mill belonging to the Beales’ uncle, who had a beard. His name was Percy and he was, I think, a weaver. Then, quite late the next morning, after mugs of tea and chunks of bread and jam, John and I got on our bikes and rode together into the future.
Well, we didn’t exactly ride together. John was seventeen and a proper cyclist. I was thirteen and beginning to be a bit overweight, so he tended to be a long way in front of me, getting impatient. My rucksack was heavy and my gas mask case banged against my leg. We stayed at ‘bed and breakfast’ houses and at a cafe´ we heard the wireless say ‘… no such undertaking has been received and that consequently this country is at war with …’
Then, one sunny morning, we rode up the long leafy drive to Dartington Hall, the grand medieval house and estate that was the great centre of art and progress. Entering the ancient courtyard through the arch, I felt as if I was stepping into a film about knights in armour and maidens locked in towers. I expected a richly caparisoned white horse to ride up to us, bearing a bearded serjeant-at-arms on its broad back. In fact a young man in corduroy trousers and sandals came and asked if he could help us. He directed us to Kay Starr’s office, which was through the Great Hall.
The Great Hall was amazing. It was huge and echoey but bright with sunlight flooding in through the tall windows. The walls were hung with bright banners and the floor strewn with rush mats. It smelled sweetly of beeswax and flowers, and had clearly just been made ready for the arrival of a king.
We knocked on a door in the far corner. A voice said, ‘Come in.’ We stepped down into Kay Starr’s office: a tall rather embarrassed-looking youth and a shorter, fattish one, who grinned, both quite grimy and dishevelled.
Kay was a tall, tidy, tweedy stick of a lady, very upright, clean and exact. I shall never forget the look on her face when she saw us. It was dismay, but a dismay so intense and overwhelming that for a few seconds she couldn’t speak.
Then she said: ‘Oh, so you’ve arrived, have you?’
