JUST BEFORE THE Blitz began in earnest, Mum sent for me to come to London to live with her and the new man in her life, Ted Andrews. Though my father had custody of Johnny and me and could have contested it, he didn’t—perhaps because he felt a little girl needed her mother, perhaps because he couldn’t afford to keep us both. Whatever the details of this decision, the result was that I went with my mother, and Johnny stayed behind with Dad.
London was an awakening of some sort—as if I suddenly grew up, child to adult-child in a matter of days. In retrospect it seems I had been half-asleep until then, safely cradled in the warmth of a home and my father’s love. I remember little snippets of early history before I was five, but afterward the memories are solid.
My first impression of the city was that it was full of soot and black. The trunks of the trees were black; their branches were bare and black—with limbs reaching toward an unforgiving sky. The buildings were black, the streets were black. There was seldom any sun. It was foggy, damp, and cold, the kind that gets into your marrow. It must have been a winter month, for I remember a dusting of snow, like dandruff on the hard lumps of brown grass in some little square or park.
I don’t remember how I was brought to London, just that I suddenly came to live in a tiny ground-floor apartment in Mornington Crescent, Camden Town. It was in a building shaped somewhat like a flatiron, on the corner of a curving street that bracketed an old cigarette factory. Two pantherlike statues stood at the entrance, and it was aptly named the Black Cat Factory. With the advent of the war, it had been converted to the manufacture of munitions, and soon thereafter became a target for German bombs.
Camden Town in those days had nothing to recommend it—just a main street coming from Euston and going north to Chalk Farm, the traffic merely passing along it. These days it is increasingly upmarket, and the factory building has been turned into offices. But in 1940 it was a very shabby area.
The apartment was dark, no color that I recall. In the kitchen a dusty window with bars on it overlooked a small, bare inner courtyard. There was a bedroom and a bit of a living room. And there was Ted Andrews—a new shadow in my life.
I don’t recall that I met him before coming to London. I didn’t want to acknowledge his presence, and in truth I only have a vague memory of him at Mornington Crescent. It was as if by focusing on my mother and our genetic bond I could exclude him, deny that he had anything to do with us. I blanked him out, trying to make him disappear. But he didn’t.
Compared to my father, this Ted was a big man. Compact, powerful, a sort of bullet head, and fast-receding sandy hair. For the theater he wore a toupee, blending the hairline with color. He had a florid complexion—everything about him seemed a little pink or red, even at times his eyes. He dressed smartly for the era—he often wore a fedora, and his suit jackets were double-breasted, with two open seams at the back, which created a flap.
“So you can lift it up and enjoy what’s underneath,” my mother would say in the bawdy voice she used when she wanted to convey what a lusty wench she was. She always claimed that she loved a good backside…and teapots, things with spouts. It made people laugh. (And she did indeed have a small collection of bizarre-looking teapots.)
Ted had been the black sheep of his family and had apparently endured a miserable and abused childhood. I know nothing about his parents, although in later years I did meet one sister, Mabel, and her children. He ran away from home when he was twelve, and later traveled from Canada to London to seek his fortune. He played the guitar and had a fine tenor singing voice.
He was ill at ease with me. His occasional overtures were met with shyness or outright derision on my part. My father and mother had not yet divorced—that would take three years. But Mum became pregnant, though I’m not sure even that registered with me at first.
Someone moved in with us—a mother’s helper, I think. There wasn’t space enough for us all to sleep in the apartment, so a room in the basement of the building at Mornington Crescent was taken over. It was a utility room of some sort. Pipes ran across the ceiling and there was an old iron boiler. Certainly it was hot, even stifling. Two barred windows revealed a wall mere inches behind them. The place was freshened up with a coat of whitewash, and cots were brought in for this “someone” and me. After the first twenty-four hours, we kept the lights on all night, as rats would emerge and creep along the pipes.
My mum and Ted continued to go away at times, performing various gigs. They were probably just overnight trips—but life seemed empty and I felt very alone. I missed my brother and the countryside, and thinking about Dad made me unbearably sad. I don’t recall what I did with myself at the beginning…except for one day.
It was close to Christmas, and I think the promise of the holiday had been talked up by my mother in her desire to cheer me and give me something to look forward to.
With no one around, I let myself into their cold apartment (which was never locked during the day), and began to search for hidden Christmas packages. I rifled through a chest of drawers, peeking under clothes that I didn’t recognize. There were satin and lace cami-knickers that seemed too luxurious and indulgent to be my mother’s, but were obviously hers. I opened closet doors and poked about and even looked in the kitchen cabinets. I felt sick and guilty, and knew that if I discovered anything tantalizing it would diminish the pleasure of it on Christmas Day. But the compulsion to search for some concrete proof of love was strong. I was careful to leave everything as I found it, and came away empty-handed.
THE WAR SUDDENLY came into focus for me. Air raid sirens wailed often, especially after dark. The warden came around.
“Put that light out!” he would shout at the smallest chink of brightness escaping through the blackout curtains.
The basement room became my shelter, and I prayed that my mother would be safe in the flat above.
As the bombing raids increased, we were often forced to retreat into the Underground stations for safety, joining the streams of people doing the same thing. I had never been in a subway before. I remember going down long escalators to the station platform and inhaling that unforgettable smell of baked dust. Cots were stacked in tiers against the platform walls, pushed as far away as possible from the black pit and the terrifying electric rail—so powerfully alive that it would kill you if you fell on it.
There was a tremendous sense of unity in the subway shelters. Night after night people survived, and bonded. They gathered in groups to socialize and smoke. They tended to their kids, changing little ones’ nappies or sitting them on their potties. They cooked on small Bunsen burner stoves and drank hot tea. The really exhausted ones slept under coarse blankets, even when the trains roared through. It all looked exactly as depicted by Henry Moore in his extraordinary sketches that I came to admire later in life.
One night when the Blitz was particularly bad, we had just stepped off the escalator when Ted suddenly said, “Jesus, I forgot the guitar!” It was a precious and important belonging, for half the vaudeville act would have been ruined if the instrument had been destroyed. He raced back up and out into the dark night to retrieve it, and it seemed to us below that he was away far too long. Every once in a while we heard the ominous crunch of a bomb decimating some building. My mother was terribly worried. When Ted finally reappeared down the escalator, triumphantly holding the guitar aloft, a great cheer went up from the crowd. He responded by entertaining everyone with his songs, which pleased the crowd and took their minds off the horrors going on above.
Another time, another air raid, my mother and Ted returned late from entertaining somewhere. The warden came around, knocking on every door in the apartment building, saying that an incendiary bomb had been dropped in the area. The trouble with incendiaries was that sometimes they would not explode until hours after they had been dropped. This one could not be found. Everyone was told to evacuate.
My mother and stepfather were so exhausted that they decided not to respond to the call. I believe they
were the only ones left in the building, and they quietly crept into bed. Upon getting up in the morning and going into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, my mother pulled back the blackout curtains and gasped—for there, snugly settled in the concrete square of the courtyard, was the incendiary bomb. They had slept by it all night long.
On November 14, nine hundred incendiary bombs were dropped in a period of ten hours on the city of Coventry, razing it to the ground. It was a terrible blow to the nation, and morale was badly shaken.
AUNT JOAN SENT a terse telegram: “Married Bill in Gretna Green yesterday. Love Joan.”
Gretna Green is a romantic spot in Scotland, famous for providing quick weddings to lovers who elope there.
The news came as a shock to my mother. She believed (probably correctly) that Joan was angry with her for abandoning her and my father, and that Joan only married Bill to spite her. I got the impression that she was also very sad about the marriage and felt it foolish: that Bill was a good sort, but rather weak. Caught up in the confusion and demands of her new life and what must have been a chaos of emotions, it may have been the first time my mother reflected on the consequences of her actions. Aunt’s marriage was the closing of another door, perhaps one that Mum hadn’t anticipated.
Some forty years later, Aunt told me that my father had offered to marry her for the sake of us children. After Mum left, it had been up to him and to Auntie to look after Johnny and me, and though it must certainly have been difficult with Dad working and Aunt teaching, they coped brilliantly. Aunt confided that Dad said that he could never love her; it would be a marriage of convenience only. I think Aunt secretly always loved him, and years later she clung to him as a lifeline—which drove my father nuts! Needless to say, they did not marry.
After Auntie married Bill, Dad moved with Johnny from Kenray to a small flat in Hinchley Wood, near Esher, Surrey.
SOME TIME IN 1941, my mother’s helper took me to the Bedford Theatre on the High Street in Camden Town. It was my first visit ever to a theater. I don’t remember what I saw, but everything I did then was unfocused and anxiety-ridden. Several days later my head began to itch dreadfully. My mother examined my hair. I had lice. She scrubbed me raw, then rinsed with vinegar, which on my lacerated skin was a form of torture. I screamed a lot—but it did the trick.
Also around this time, I remember being taken to a specialist for what my mother referred to as my “wandering eye.” A condition now known as “strabismus,” it was probably inherited—my daughter, and later her son, had the same problem when they were young. At that time it was thought to be due to a weak muscle, and the theory was that if strengthened with exercise, the eye would straighten up. So my mother found a woman who specialized in eye massage.
I underwent several excruciatingly painful treatments. I had to lie down and submit to the therapist sticking her thumb in my tear duct and working the muscle with enormous pressure. I could hardly bear it—the tears simply poured out—but since I was told it was necessary, I tried to comply. I don’t believe the treatments did me any good at all.
Ted Andrews bought me a new book called The Art of Seeing by Aldous Huxley. It was the first gift he ever gave me. It contained eye exercises, such as holding a pencil and following it with one’s eye to the right or left, and wearing a bow pinned to one’s shoulder so that the offending eye could be attracted toward it. I was made to do these exercises religiously, and maybe they worked, or maybe I simply outgrew the strabismus, for today I don’t seem to have it—except perhaps when I’m very, very tired.
A YOUNG WIDOW named Winifred Maud Hyde came to work at the Esher Filling Station factory. Her husband had been a bomb disposal specialist named Pat Birkhead. They had been married only fourteen months when Pat was killed defusing a bomb. Despite her grief, Win had to find a job. She was hired as a capstan lathe operator, doing twelve-hour shifts at Dad’s plant. I met her there once, and I remember the snood that she wore to keep her hair clean and tidy and away from the machinery. She was a handsome woman with lovely eyes, and she seemed kind and real. My father and Win became friends, and when time and the war effort permitted, they would go up to London for an outing.
The radio at the filling station was always on, and often the workers would listen to Mum and Ted performing on a program called Workers’ Playtime. One day, Dad heard Ted Andrews dedicate a song to “my wife Barbara and baby son Donald.” This was extremely disturbing to Dad—particularly since he and Mum weren’t divorced, and she hadn’t yet told him that a baby had arrived.
Donald Edward Andrews came into the world on July 8, 1942, at Rodney House, the Walton-on-Thames maternity hospital, where Johnny and I had been born.
While Mum was there, I stayed in Walton with Uncle Bill Wilby’s mother and stepfather, Aunt Paula (always called “Auntie Caula”) and Uncle Fred. Auntie Joan and Uncle Bill had moved to a flat in Belgravia, so Uncle Bill’s parents were the only relatives I could stay with. It was convenient because I could be near my mother and could occasionally visit her.
I don’t remember what Uncle Fred did for a living, but he left early in the morning and only came home in time for dinner. Auntie Caula was utterly dour. All day long she moaned about her aches and pains, and though she was kind to me, the entire cadence of her voice had a downward inflection. It wasn’t until Uncle Fred came home in the evening that things became more cheerful. He was a complete contrast to his wife: a short fellow, with sparkling eyes and a cheery demeanor. He always announced his presence in the evening by whistling. We heard his familiar trilling just before the garden gate clicked open. He’d come up the garden path calling out for his “girls,” and knowing Uncle Fred was home at last, my spirits would lift.
Their house was immaculate with not a speck of dust. They only lived in the kitchen and the parlor, though there was a front drawing room, where everything was covered in white dust sheets, includng a billiard table. There were stacks and stacks of National Geographic magazines, which I found wonderfully interesting.
I slept in a guest room upstairs, on an enormous four-poster bed, the obligatory white china piss pot tucked beneath it. With the perfectly starched sheets and the huge feather mattress, the whole experience made me feel hugely comfortable, and unbearably lonely.
I stayed there for two weeks while Mum recuperated from Donald’s birth. (In those days one always stayed that long in the hospital after childbirth, even if complication-free.) I was taken a couple of times to visit the maternity hospital, but because of my age, I was told I was not allowed to go inside. Ted Andrews took me to the back of the building, where I stood in a rose bed and looked through the window of her room. My mother held up the baby, smiled, and waved. I missed her very much.
I later learned that Dad, not wishing to get divorced, had offered to adopt Donald if only Mum would return to him. It was one more act of chivalry on his part—but of course it didn’t happen.
FIVE
SOON AFTER DONALD’S birth, we moved from Camden Town to Clarendon Street in Victoria. It was another ground-floor flat, slightly better—with a sitting room and bedroom on the street level, and a kitchen, bathroom, and living area below. Windows in the basement looked out onto a rectangle of concrete set beneath a grid in the pavement, on the other side of which were three arched storage areas with black painted doors. One of these became our air raid shelter, one was used for storage, and one became my bedroom. It had a whitewashed curved ceiling, much like a crypt, and no windows at all. I remember lying in bed listening to the crunch of bombs dropping during the night raids, and though scared, feeling oddly safe being under the road. But to this day I have a fear of explosions: fireworks, guns, balloons—anything volatile and out of my control.
My mother often put baby Donald outside in his pram during the day to give him some fresh air. Since we had no garden, she would tie the pram with a padlock and chain to the railing outside our front door. One morning, I was in the basement kitchen looking up through the grid and I suddenly saw
a strange woman lift Donald out of his pram and walk away with him.
I ran to tell Mum, and the police were notified and came around to question us. It was presumed that the woman could not have gone far, and after a search of the neighborhood they found the misguided soul, who had probably lost her own child or was unable to have one and, seeing this baby unattended, had taken it for herself. Happily, Donald was perfectly fine, but he had in fact been kidnapped for about four hours—and my mother was, understandably, distraught.
In September of 1942, Johnny and I were evacuated to Wrecclesham Farm, in Farnham, Surrey, about thirty miles south of London. With Uncle Bill away in the Royal Air Force, Aunt Joan came along also—presumably to look after us, since I was only six and Johnny was four. We should really have gone to the west or north of England, where many other children were being sent.
Why my mother chose Wrecclesham Farm, I don’t know—but I think she and Ted had once stayed with the owners, a family by the name of Gardener, when they had been doing a concert in the Farnham area.
“Auntie Gardener” was a dear lady and the matriarch of a family that seemed to bicker a lot. She had a very stern husband, Wilfred “Pop” Gardener, and a physically attractive son, Phil, whose use of the English language seemed mostly limited to loud expletives.
The farmhouse was big, old, and comfortable, with the most enormous fireplace I’d ever seen. One could actually walk inside it, and sit in either side of the hearth under the square of the chimney. This was fascinating to me, definitely a place where Santa Claus could manage an entrance. It was also practical because its heat was the main source of warmth in the house. In spite of its charm, the farmhouse was incredibly damp.
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