Life Without Armour Page 5

  By the summer of 1939 I was sufficiently well informed to deplore the treaty between Communist Russia and Nazi Germany, but such an event was overridden when on 1 September we were sent home from school with a cyclostyled map showing those areas of the city from which all children under fourteen should be evacuated. Anyone living east of the sinewy River Leen could become a casualty in a bombing raid, and our house lay within the area.

  My father found work building shelters, a job calling for overtime which he was willing to give, the double advantage to the rest of us being that there was more money to spend, and he was less around the house. My parents were thirty-eight years old, and after fourteen years of marriage it was suddenly easier to feed and clothe their children in terms which were no longer desperate. As my mother said with bitter irony: ‘There’s no cloud that doesn’t have a silver lining.’

  They were against sending four of their five children – Michael had been born two months ago – away for the Duration. If they were killed in the bombing, which everyone thought sure to come, they might never see us again. On the other hand, if we went away they wouldn’t have us to look after for a while, which Peggy and I knew weighed somewhat in their arguments, while she and I had no objections because we would be getting away from home on an adventure which the government was paying for.

  ‘We’ll let them go,’ my father said finally, ‘and see what happens.’

  My mother was more fearful. ‘I suppose so. We don’t want the Germans to kill all of us.’

  Everyone had been so terrorized by propaganda that mass bombing was expected to start immediately. The parents of Arthur Shelton, however, refused to sign the offer of evacuation, his father saying: ‘If we die, we all die together.’ The signature giving permission had to be written on the back of the map, which I had hoped to keep.

  The list of clothes to be taken included such exotic garments as pyjamas and underwear, which none of us had. I walked up the street to the buses with my gasmask box on a string, and a carrier bag containing a shirt, a pair of socks, and The Count of Monte Cristo. One could not have travelled lighter. I said goodbye to my Latin, French, Spanish and German Midget Dictionaries, and my maps and papers, thinking they might get lost if taken with me, though perhaps to keep an anchor after all at home.

  Given a pastry and a bar of chocolate, which Pearl vomited out of the window even before the bus reached open country, we sang our way through Sherwood Forest, Peggy keeping her arms around Brian who wondered what was happening to the world. At Worksop, a colliers’ town twenty-seven miles to the north, we assembled in a church hall to be sorted out for different homes. Unable to say goodbye to the others in the crowd, a car took me to a house in Sandhill Street, much like our own but slightly larger, opening at the back on to a shared area of beaten earth. Forty-year-old buxom Mrs Cutts, who wore glasses, showed me into her comfortable living room, a pot of delicious beef stew warming on the hob, which my hunger wasn’t yet acute enough to taste.

  Mr Cutts, a big man who also wore glasses, and was fond of his beer, sold fruit and vegetables from a handcart for a living. During the Great War he had served with the South Nottinghamshire Hussars in the Salonika Campaign as a sergeant-major, which gave his voice a sufficiently high decibel count for bellowing his wares. Schools hadn’t yet been found for the evacuees, so I was soon helping him to push the cart through the streets, up on to awkward pavements and among the backyards of the houses. On Saturday he would give me threepence and an apple, and even a banana if he had done good trade.

  Another evacuee shared my bed, and we explored the country roundabout, roaming quarries for newts to put in a jam jar, so that it wasn’t long before Worksop and its environs was as familiar as my native Radford. The Cutts left us free to come and go, the only rules being that we had to sit down to a hot dinner at midday, and finish supper by eight o’clock at night. For breakfast there was porridge and toast, and sometimes a treat of tinned pineapples at tea. When the trousers I arrived in became unfit to wear Mr Cutts bought me new ones out of his own money.

  I was fascinated, possibly infatuated, by a girl called Laura, who lived in a caravan of the gypsy sort on some nearby waste land. Her parents sold crockery from a horse-drawn cart in the mining towns roundabout. On once referring to them as ‘gypsies’ Mrs Cutts gently corrected me: ‘They aren’t gypsies, Alan, they’re “travellers”,’ though no offence had been meant by me, because ‘gypsy’ sounded more romantic.

  The idea of going to school in a strange town was not to my liking, but the day came when Mr Cutts ordered a general sprucing up and took me to a building much like the one in Radford. My teacher, he said, had been his captain in the Great War, and would be sure to look after me providing I behaved myself. This cohering microcosm of society seemed strange after the non-hierarchical homogeneity in Radford, where my father avoided everyone except an equally destitute friend or two.

  At school I was commended for an essay on ‘The Great Nottingham Warehouse Fire’, perhaps my first piece of fiction, for it had never happened, though the conflagration was lovingly described. I joined the public library and took books into the Cutts’ home, the only one found there being a spy novel by William le Queux.

  It was easier to get into the adult cinema, and also cheaper than in Nottingham, though try as we might the ushers would not let us pass to see a French film about venereal disease called Damaged Goods. Still, we saw H for Horror films such as Dracula and The Vampire Bat, which more than made up for our disappointment.

  An indefinite stay in Worksop would have been to my liking, but one morning a letter from home was handed to me by Mrs Cutts, who had paid the postman, since it had come without a stamp. I immediately imagined that my father had lost his job, that my mother hadn’t even the money to spare for postage, that they were once more on the edge of penury and fighting as bitterly as ever. In the letter she merely asked how I was getting on, and told me that all was well at home, but the air of gloom lasted for days at the implication of the missing stamp.

  The matter was easily explained. She had given the letter to a girl in the street, and the twopence-halfpenny for a stamp, as well as a penny for her trouble, to take to the post office. But the girl had spent all the money on sweets, and dropped the letter in the box to get rid of it. Nevertheless, the spell of my idyllic life in Worksop was broken, and in any case, not long afterwards, when I had been there about three months, my mother wrote to say she was coming to take us home.

  The Cutts were sad, and so was I, because there had been talk between Mr Cutts and his captain of trying even at this late stage to get me into a grammar school. When my mother arrived the Cutts laid out a good tea, and wondered why she wanted to take me back. ‘The war might go on for years,’ she told them, ‘and Nottingham ain’t likely to get bombed.’

  Mr Cutts was sceptical about that. ‘The war hasn’t begun yet. You’d do best to leave him, I’m telling thee.’

  In one way I felt no wish to leave, but change was also attractive. If I had shouted definite objections to going back it might have been possible to stay, and perhaps that was what the Cutts were hoping for, yet I was finally without will one way or the other as if, during such periods of decision, it was only possible to live from minute to minute rather than with any sense of days or weeks.

  We said goodbye, then followed my mother to collect the rest of her children, and went together to the bus station. I took back more than I had brought in the form of clothes and goods, and an interesting view on how other people could live. On the other hand, being an outsider, such knowledge hadn’t been earned the hard way by having to grow up in the family. If that had been the case it might have seemed little better than my own, except that there would have been more food to eat and better clothes on my back. But I never forgot how good the Cutts had been to me.

  Chapter Ten

  Nottingham seemed a different place after Worksop: there was a war on. My father laboured again at the sugarbeet factory, and woul
d come home every day with half a pound of purloined sugar in his mashcan – of which there was already a shortage – adding it to a cache in one of the cupboards.

  School at the normal place was discontinued, but classes were held in Wollaton Hall a mile or so away, and it was put about that we should go if we could. Arthur Shelton and I chose not to for a while, relishing the freedom to roam. By a railway bridge near the Trent a solitary soldier manned a Lewis gun in his sandbagged outpost, looking over what we could see as a wonderful field of fire. An army lorry stopped close by, and a soldier took a slice of bread and a mug of tea to the Lewis gunner, before getting back into the cab and driving to the next lonely sentinel.

  The wherewithal to construct an Anderson shelter was dumped in our patch of back garden, and my father, one of the few in the terrace to accept one, dug out the soil into which it would fit, the dimensions suggesting no more than a rather wide grave. He then pieced the curving panels of corrugated tin together and put planks inside for us to sit on, dubious that such a cubby hole would be much help if a bomb fell anywhere near, but padding plenty of soil over the top nevertheless.

  One morning when my mother went across the street to fetch a breakfast loaf she saw a soldier standing forlornly in the shelter of the shop doorway. On her coming out he asked if she knew where he could get a cup of tea. ‘Yes, my duck,’ she said unhesitatingly, ‘come back to our house, and we’ll give you one.’

  Over the breakfast that went with it he told her he had gone absent without leave from his nearby anti-aircraft artillery unit, and she let him stay with us, sleeping on the settee in the living room for six weeks. I was persuaded to give up my Identity Card, on which he rubbed out my name and inscribed his own, so that he could go to the Labour Exchange and apply for a job. This was a successful ruse, and he would have lived out the war working in a factory had not a neighbour suspected that he was a deserter and told the police. When in court for, among other things, having a false Identity Card, he said he had stolen it rather than incriminate my mother or myself.

  After a few sessions at Wollaton Hall, school was resumed in the normal buildings. Nineteen forty opened with a severe winter of ice and snow, and if the Germans had thought to bomb at that time the Anderson shelter would have been no more than an igloo. In minus zero temperatures my dress was basic: shoes and socks, short trousers, a shirt next to my skin, a jersey, and a jacket, though I rarely felt more than merely cold. When Arthur Shelton and I cycled the seven miles to Stanton Iron Works near Ilkeston my physical being seemed to divide in two, the part that felt the effect of the heavy frost slowly benefiting from that dominant part of me which had a warm enough stove glowing inside to heat both.

  When morning school was over we would go to his house one day and mine the next where – always a fire to sit by in both – we would each dissolve a penny Oxo into a basin of hot water and mop it up with a slice of bread, sufficient nourishment till getting home in the afternoon for tea. There would of course be something for supper. Feeding at the dinner centre had been discontinued because my father had work, while Arthur’s, being a skilled carpenter, had never been unemployed. We must have been what Robert Graves and Alan Hodges meant in The Long Weekend (a social history of Britain between the Wars), when they referred to ‘the unkillable poor’.

  Arthur’s mother did cleaning work for a Jewish family, and one day came home with a wind-up gramophone and some records the woman had given her, mostly selections from Offenbach and Gilbert and Sullivan, whose tunes we listened to for a while.

  One of the teachers at school accompanied himself on the piano with the aria ‘Where e’er you walk …’ from Handel’s Semele, entrancing music which sent me home trying to sing it. Apart from the popular bands of Joe Loss, Henry Hall and Debroy Summers, little enough captivated me on the wireless, unless it was a snatch of something quickly drowned by oscillations as my mother swivelled the needle to another station.

  The issue of ration books sharpened her mind regarding food, since she felt obliged to buy the amounts stated on the coupons. From then on, with a family of seven, there was no difficulty in feeding us. Cigarettes were not rationed, though they were sometimes scarce, and we children were quite willing to scour the shops, getting five here and ten there, to keep our father happy.

  I bought sixpenny maps, coloured but schematic, none of them showing every name mentioned on the wireless, to follow what was happening in the war. This was not very much to begin with, though my interest in geography and anything military soon became an obsession. Deciding to write a history of the war, I listened each evening to the six o’clock news, for weeks taking down details of the day’s events, until the pile of notebooks and paper almost filled a cupboard.

  Hurrying home, I cleared a corner of the table, and hoped no one would make a noise and cause me to miss something, which they usually didn’t because the news to my father was the next best thing to being in the cinema. I eventually gave up the task, daunted at the idea of going on till the end of a war which might last as near forever as would make no difference. It was also obvious that the Nottingham Evening Post was doing the job better, so my father used the paper to light the morning fire, though a map stayed pinned to the inside of my cupboard. The experience increased my dictation speed wonderfully.

  The Germans conquered Norway, Denmark, the Low Countries, and then France, people wondering whether it wouldn’t be England’s turn next. Brick air-raid shelters were built in the street, and concrete barricades erected at main road junctions. For a while I made notes, with sketch maps, of the defences around the city, then stopped on realizing it was not the right thing to do. It seemed unlikely that the Germans would come, yet I hoped that if they did everyone would be issued with rifles from the age of twelve.

  Silhouettes of German planes, especially those which could carry parachute troops, covered one sheet of a newspaper: ‘I’ll catch one on the end of my clothes-prop,’ foul-mouthed Mrs So-and-So called along the yard. ‘Right up his arse!’ In a few days I memorized the silhouettes, as had many of the boys at school, where there was as sharp a commerce in small arms ammunition as there was later to be in pieces of shrapnel. I accumulated two score of bullets in their feeding belt, and while playing around with them one day, several fell into the fire. My mother, as silent and cool as I’d ever seen her, pokered them out before they could explode, then made me give the whole lot to the police.

  We followed the cricket-like scores of air battles further south, during a summer which turned out as good as the winter had been extreme. On our way to school the sky was filled with dirty orange puff-balls of anti-aircraft fire at a lone raider sloping overhead, and we heard the pattering fall of shrapnel for the first time.

  My father boasted that because he had ‘swung the lead’ at his medical board for call-up he had been placed into a category that would never be conscripted. Or he said with some glee that he had been ‘too young for the last war, and too old for this.’ No one wanted the war, yet few complained, probably because it brought more work, as well as a kind of prosperity, and a sense of purpose in that peace was something everybody could look forward to.

  Two of Aunt Edith’s sons were called up but promptly deserted, though by the end of the war she had them and two more on active service. My cousin Stanley Sillitoe enlisted in the South Nottinghamshire Hussars, and was killed in North Africa. Various uncles enrolled in the Home Guard, but my father even dodged the chore of fire-watching. When he showed amusement that Hitler, a mere house-painter, had become the leader of the German nation, my mother said: ‘Yes, and it serves the Germans right.’ My father delighted, as did I, in hearing Quentin Reynolds on the BBC taunting Hitler as ‘Mr Schikelgruber’, and listening to the homely postscripts of J. B. Priestley after the nine o’clock news.

  Those who took a more intelligent look at the newspapers than most, and had been in the previous war, said that Germany would be so hard to defeat by Great Britain alone, that the conflict might go on for
ever. If this was the case I would certainly be in it sooner or later, which gave something to look forward to, and not with trepidation either. Any goal was better than none, and to go to war seemed so much of an adventure that it turned into an ambition.

  I took great interest in reports of RAF bombing raids over Germany, measuring the angles of their courses to various cities, the distances they had to go, and calculating the time needed to get there, thus increasing my facility with practical arithmetic. At the main bookshop in town I bought pamphlets on street fighting and elementary tactics, as well as a paper-covered book, Notes on Map Reading, published by the War Office. From it I learned about intervisibility, vertical intervals, horizontal equivalents and magnetic variation, as well as three different kinds of north and how to find the true one from sun or star, a whole new vocabulary. I memorized the approximate value of representative fractions, so that when by chance the teacher at school asked how many inches there were to a mile he was surprised at my right answer.

  Familiarity with colloquial English lagged behind geographical knowledge. A newspaper headline: ‘Sailors on the Spree’ led me to wonder how any member of the Royal Navy could have got to Berlin at this discouraging stage of the war, it being hardly conceivable that some lucky and fabulous military operation had been launched without my knowing. On reading the article I came to understand the expression: a few sailors had been hauled before a magistrate and fined for being offensively drunk.

  From the autumn of 1940, for about a year, the sirens signalled a possible air raid nearly every night. We soon got used to the bang and clatter of gunfire from batteries behind the nearby woods, and the peculiar lame-dog drone of Junkers, Dornier and Heinkel bombers, always hoping that they were not going to drop their loads on us.

  My father worked at the Raleigh factory, almost next door, and was often on nights, so my mother and the five of us would sit in the Anderson shelter. We could not have been living in a more dangerous place had the Germans decided to attack a factory on full war production employing 10,000 people, but no bomb fell within half a mile, though it was machine-gunned by a low-flying plane one night.