The idea that a girl might value my attention and be pleased to receive it had simply never crossed my mind. I knew for certain that girls were by nature always hostile to advances and I assumed that my role as a suitor could only be that of the plaintive lovelorn swain, ever hopeful but always unworthy. The assumption may sometimes have been accurate, but it was never attractive.
VII. The Home Front.
Returning home from school for the Christmas holiday in 1939 was a happy anticlimax. In September we had fled, as refugees, from the terrors of the war that was to come. The war had come and had brought no terrors, at least not to 45 Hendon Lane in Finchley. Like Mole in The Wind in the Willows I returned to my home and was deeply moved to find it miraculously unchanged, exactly as I had left it. The windows were still striped with brown paper and at night fully covered by heavy blackout pads made of cardboard and black cloth.
Ration books had arrived but were not yet to be used. We looked at them closely and tried to divine what amounts of the various foods we might be going to receive but to no avail. Otherwise there was not much war to be seen. The only bombs that went off in London were put there by the IRA. So I painted huge frogs and Chinese dragons on the blackout pads and settled down to enjoy Christmas.
Although the house was unchanged, the atmosphere was quite different. Dread had gone, or been shelved for the moment, and there was gaiety about. War had not, after all, wiped everything away and it was good to be alive and able to enjoy ordinary things.
Only at dusk, as darkness fell and the blackout was complete, did a sense of menace return. Then no man-made light could be shown, in case the German eyes lurking in the sky should see it. Even the air-raid warden’s torch was sparingly used – flashed on to see something and then off again at once. There were very few cars about and their headlamps were intricately shielded so as to shine a very little light down on to the road. Without any streetlights or house lights the streets were in a world separate from people, a place where everything was still and sharp-edged. Even when it was absolutely black, at times when there was no moon, the stars were clouded and I was truly blind, I discovered that I could tell where I was by interpreting the subtle echoes of my own footsteps. I had first noticed this faculty at Dartington, where every night I walked back from Foxhole over the hill to Kay’s house near the Hall. I had found that on pitch-black nights I could walk back almost as briskly as on clear nights, so long as I didn’t think about it too much and remembered to sing.
In the spring of 1940 I heard that Grandad was very seriously ill and, in May, that he had died. I would have liked to go to his funeral but for some reason this wasn’t possible, perhaps Dartington was too far from London, I don’t know.
Dartington was also a long way from the war. Kay and I listened to the news on the wireless and saw the maps in the newspapers, all covered with arrows, but the reality of the war only really came home to me when I returned to Finchley in the summer of 1940.
There the sky was very noisy and was often decorated with circles of smoke as the aeroplanes fought out the Battle of Britain. The air-raid sirens sang at all hours and from time to time the earth would shudder underfoot and a heavy crump would be heard. The kitchen at 45 Hendon Lane was dark because the windows were heavily sandbagged. The cellar had been shored up to make an air-raid shelter and a long escape-way had been dug under the long room to a trapdoor in the garden. As ration books were now in full use and food was short, the honorary post of head of household had fallen to Daisy. She held the books and took to the task of feeding the flock in the midst of shortages with a mixture of enthusiasm and dismay.
With her father’s death an era of great activity in Daisy’s life had suddenly come to an end, so I think she found this challenge to her very considerable skill as an organizer quite rewarding. Her originality and resourcefulness as a cook was certainly a great joy to the rest of us.
I returned to Dartington at the end of the summer holiday fairly confident that our lives were charmed and that although war would probably be interesting, it was unlikely to be dangerous. I was wrong about that. A couple of days later a bomb fell in Hendon Lane, blowing out all the windows and damaging the house.
I came back to Finchley for the Christmas holidays of 1940 to find that life there was different. It had become very busy. Daisy was now fully in charge of what was, in effect, an extended-family boarding house. Kate (who used to be called Kitty), lived there, as did Peter when he was on leave from the RAF, also our uncle Eric with his wife Emily and their three boys. Daisy’s younger sister Nellie had gone back to her little flat in Gray’s Inn after a nightshift and had found it not there, just a hole and a heap of charred things, so she was in residence. John was back at his old school at Kingsbury, studying for Oxford Entrance, and I was back from Devon.
The house itself had changed quite a lot. The window glass had been replaced by a sort of oiled buckram which let in some light but you couldn’t see through it. The cellars had become two bedrooms with camp beds. Even Matilda the cat had given up nocturnal outings and spent her nights lying on Daisy’s feet.
Our night-time procedure was fairly standardized. John and I would go to bed in our own bedrooms as usual but as soon as the air-raid siren went or, when I became more blase´, as soon as I heard the sound of bombers or gunfire, I would jump out of bed, roll up the bedding like a Swiss roll with the pillow in the middle, pick it up and prance lightly down the stairs into the cellarage, where I would unroll the still warm bed on a camp bed and climb in. Once I pranced very lightly indeed because a bomb fell quite near and I took the last flight of eighteen stairs at a single bound and landed squarely on the bedding. I didn’t hang about to check for broken bones, I was down and unrolled and had my head under the covers in a matter of seconds.
I was frightened by the bombing, but so was everybody else, and as it was quite obvious that there was nothing to be done about it, people just went on with life as usual and hoped one wouldn’t drop too close. I was also slightly thrilled by the danger and excitement of it all. This was a bit childish I suppose and the feeling would probably have evaporated if I had been really close to a disaster and seen people killed or lying dead, but, perhaps fortunately, I was lucky enough to miss that experience. I did see other unnerving sights, like bombed houses with their insides on the outsides. I remember looking up and seeing flowered wallpaper and tiled fireplaces on the outsides of walls four storeys up. One fireplace had a picture of a stag over it and the ornaments were still in place. Above it a large bath hovered, hanging on its pipes in midair, like a hippopotamus diving off a cliff.
To come home on a late tube-train through the London stations with their lines of steel bunks was a strange and moving experience. Each family brought small living-items with them: cushions, bedding, books, torches, cans of water, bowls, all personal bedroom things, and made their bunks into a piece of home. Coming alongside and waiting quietly, I was like a ghost passing through their private lives. I felt enormous affection and care for them and prayed silently for their safety, but I was also glad they took no more notice of my presence than they did of the bright trains that roared in and out, stopping less than a yard from their beds.
One night we heard the distant sound of many planes and gunfire. We went outside into a world lit by what seemed to be a sunset in the south-east. On the horizon the distant houses and trees were silhouetted black against a sky glowing golden red and flickering softly. That was the city of London being burned by incendiary bombs.
The war moved eastward. Hitler postponed his plans to invade Britain and started on the second part of his great war plan: the invasion of Russia.
I was sixteen and the School Certificate Exams were looming, but even so I remained fairly uninterested in academic study. I had already found out, by reading my reports, that I was not thought to be ‘higher education material ’ and that an art or
