In the summer term in 1934 I wrote my first full-length novel. Having no other spare paper I wrote it in my Special Drawing Book after first hiding this in my bootroom locker, reporting it as lost and being given another. Why I was put in the Special Drawing class was a mystery. I had no talent for drawing. But the Head and my parents decided I should take the extra lessons. I was the sorrow of the art mistress but enjoyed her classes as she was too good at her job to waste time trying to teach the untalented a talent and left me to sit and doodle and live in fantasy. I worked on my novel every evening during prep period, and by using a mapping pen, purple mapping ink and both sides of the foolscap cartridge paper, managed simultaneously to cram in more words and persuade the mistress taking prep that I was working on geography. I finished the novel before it was discovered, confiscated and I was summoned to the Head’s study.
Our Head was very distressed. She said never in her long experience of girls had she been so disappointed, appalled, nay saddened. First there was The Deceit. Then came the shameful misuse of preparation time and waste of my father’s hard-earned money. Did I not realize the cost of my second Special Drawing Book would be placed on his bill, or was I so lost to all decent feeling to have forgotten my filial duties? Having read my disgraceful tale, our Head feared this must be so. She would not now dwell on my lamentable grammar, spelling and style, but I could depend upon her taking these matters up with my English mistress in due course. Duty, however, forced her to deal here and now with my theme. This concerned banditry, murder, lust, true love and the flooding of the Yellow river in China. I knew nothing of China, either. My theme was NOT NICE.
She gave me a Bad Conduct Mark – the school’s Mark of Cain – and I never saw my manuscript again. I guessed, probably correctly, that it was burnt in the basement boilers by the elderly, lugubrious, head gardener, the only man allowed to roam unescorted in the school basement and on the ground floor, but not above stairs. I was too furious at losing my manuscript to care about my Bad Conduct Mark, though it meant no tuck for the rest of the term. Eventually I forgave the Head because, fundamentally, I was fond of her. I never forgave the gardener, nor the form mistress who found my novel in one of the unannounced inspections made in our absence on our desks and dressing-table drawers.
School life was minutely regulated and supervised for all but the much-envied seniors in the Upper Fifth, the School Certificate form. I longed to be a senior, to enjoy the wondrous privileges of not going to bed until 9 p.m. and playing gramophone records in the gym after senior supper at seven-thirty. On summer evenings the tunes floated up to open dormitory windows … Love Is The Sweetest Thing … I’ll See You Again … Someday I’ll Find You … Love In Bloom … and the one that had the whole dormitory bouncing up in bed and miming, ‘Where’s that tiger?’ Harry Roy’s Tiger Rag.
Until the golden future, life was organized from first waking bell at 7 a.m. to lights-out. Junior bedtime began at 6 p.m. and in each dormitory lights-out came one hour after the youngest occupant went to bed. Talking was forbidden between lights-out and waking bell, so we talked, argued, fought, made up stories, plays, poems, sang songs in whispers and took turns to guard the door and hiss ‘Cave!’ When, as often, the warning was too late: ‘Hands up who’s been talking. Miss break tomorrow and write twenty lines – “I must not talk after lights-out”.’
Our very occasional midnight feasts were more successful, as better planned. We worked out a rota to ensure one girl was awake at midnight to wake the rest to churn up lemonade powder and water in toothglasses and eat the cakes, bulls-eyes and biscuits removed by stealth from parental tuck parcels. These were opened under supervision before being locked in the tuck cupboard and issued in rationed quantities on Saturdays and Sundays after lunch. Extra sweets, chocolate bars and the bright yellow lemonade powder were usually illicitly bought from the nearest sub-post office-cum-general stores. This stood a few yards back from a very sharp corner of the main road that was the route generally taken by returning school walks, as the pavement was wide enough for the two-abreast crocodile. Once we were round the corner, the shop was invisible. One pair would ask the walk-mistress’s permission to drop out to re-tie a previously loosened shoelace and, permission granted, fiddle with the lace until the crocodile vanished round the corner, then race into the shop. Officially, money was forbidden us, but by careful joint hoarding, one shilling (5p) or two raised in pennies bought a feast. Twenty caramels cost 2d. Lemonade powder 1d. a quarter. Chocolate bars 1d. each, a Mars Bar 2d. The goods were divided in pockets and bloomer legs to be stored mostly in shoebags in bootroom lockers until the night of the feast. I remember everything always tasted of bootpolish and mud, but never one post-feast upset stomach.
When we walked in crocodile, conversation was only permitted between each pair. From our junior years we learnt to talk to the pairs ahead and behind without turning our heads or moving our upper lips. Consequently, I have long been convinced the traditional stiff upper lip of the English middle classes originated in their English boarding-schools. After a decade of school walks to talk with a stiff upper lip became an ingrained mannerism I have still to lose.
Those walks, and so many other aspects of my education, would have come in very useful had I been imprisoned in Colditz. Yet, if the iron routine attempted, not necessarily successfully, to stifle individuality, it had some concrete advantages for insecure children. Rare is the child of absent parents who is not insecure. It was reassuring to know exactly what was and what was not permitted and that on either side of the authorized path were the invisible, solid walls of adult rules and conventions. If those walls limited and blinded, they also guarded. Children may not always enjoy being guarded, but almost always they sense the need for the guard as they are themselves far more conscious than many adults of the terrifying vulnerability of childhood.
There was a paradoxical security in the frustration of knowing the day of the week from the morning hymn and pudding at lunch. ‘New Every Morning’ and ginger sog (sponge) – Monday. ‘Praise My Soul’ and dead baby (plain suet roll sprinkled with brown sugar) – Friday. No prayers and mending at ten past nine with a story – Saturday. The staff took mending classes in turn and I longed for the geography mistress’s turn as she read us Haggard and Stevenson in her ordinary, and not ‘I’m-reading-Eng. Lit.’ tones, often pausing to explain a long word, or repeat or comment on a phrase or sentence as if thinking aloud rather than instructing the young. ‘One step nearer Mr Hands and I’ll blow your brains out … One step nearer Mr Hands and I’ll blow your brains out.’ Long pause. ‘Yes. Jim Hawkins would have called Israel Hands “Mister” as he was a polite boy, but that wouldn’t have stopped him blowing off the man’s head if he’d had to. Good manners make life pleasanter all round and are a very useful way of disguising one’s real feelings, but anyone stupid enough to mistake politeness for weakness is usually in for a very nasty shock.’
Outside the sheltering walls of that oasis of the long, lingering Edwardian middle-class evening, lay an unknown England. Being still an infant at school during the General Strike, all I remember of it was the later apocryphal legend of the day the bigger girls cried and refused to eat lunch because the pet rabbits had been killed and cooked. In the 1930s, neither the Depression, nor the two million unemployed, the Jarrow hunger marchers, the Dole and the Means Test, cast even small shadows over my walls. I saw no newspapers at school and the ‘wireless’ was a strictly rationed novelty which I only remember permitted for broadcasts involving royalty. The wedding of Prince George, newly created Duke of Kent, to Princess Marina of Greece, gathered the whole school into the dining-room to sigh romantically and enjoy a lesson-free day. The approaching death of King George V interrupted senior prep, and the announcer’s measured ‘The King’s life is drawing peacefully to its close …’ sent fearful yet not unpleasant chills down the spine. The Abdication broadcast of King Edward VIII followed special history lessons on the meaning of Instruments of Abdication, the M
onarch’s position as Head of the Church of England, and that Church’s attitude to divorce.
In the Christmas holidays just after the Abdication, Mother, and my friends’ mothers, continued to discuss it in the hushed, dazed voices of those who have suffered shattered dreams. ‘Who could have believed our nice, dear Prince of Wales … such a charming young man … different if she had been a pretty gel … when a man of his age falls in love with a pretty gel, he’s bound to lose his head, but – really! Of course, he had to go … my dear, if not, the end of The Home! One feels so distressed for poor Queen Mary … of course, the poor Duke of York is a perfect dear and so good with his Boys’ Camps, but that stutter must be a trial …’
I was delighted we never heard news bulletins at school. At home in the holidays our new wireless seemed perpetually tuned to the news that my parents insisted be heard in silence. Either I left the room, or mentally switched off into my fantasy world, and the few outstanding events that did penetrate did so mainly by worrying Father. Germany walking out of the League of Nations, Italy invading Abyssinia, made Father leave his chair and stand straight-backed at our dining room window, to chew his pipe and stare down at our back garden. The long, narrow strip of gardens, as all the gardens in our row of small semi-detached houses, sloped downhill to join those behind the row of houses on the opposite hill and form a little valley of gardens. All the houses in our row were new, the gardens rough, virgin turf when the first owners moved in. Father had dug, drained and planted the heavy Sussex clay with the special love of a returned exile and passionate amateur gardener owning his first home and strip of homeland. All his retired years, always when worried, either he silently retreated to work in the garden, or as silently watched it from the dining room window.
The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War impinged more strongly as it affected us personally. Mother was deeply anxious for her country, relatives and friends, and constantly infuriated by the BBC news readers’ Spanish pronunciations: ‘Aie, aie, aie! Not Andalooziar! Underluthia! Not Toeleedo – Toletho!’
Then Munich; newspaper pictures of Londoners digging trenches in Hyde Park; Mother thanking God after every news bulletin that Father was over sixty and John still only eleven and at prep School; more newspaper pictures of Mr Chamberlain waving his little piece of paper and Father at the dining-room window shaking his grey head in anguished incredulity. Being a transparently honest man incapable of dishonesty he never understood nor suspected it in others. ‘We’ve broken our word to save our own skins. We won’t. This is only a breathing space.’
Whilst the country had a breathing space in 1938 I had heart-block after diphtheria and, for about six months, had to stay in bed at home. No one explained why I had to stay supine until I asked our elderly GP the reason. He sat on the side of my bed, drew pictures of a diagrammatic heart to illustrate his detailed explanation. ‘Understand, do ye?’ He looked over his glasses at the blue rug in front of the dressing-table. ‘Understand now that if you get up and dance on that rug when your mother’s back’s turned, you’ll die?’
Mother was shocked and outside my room she told him so. ‘You’ve terrified the child!’
Our GP’s boom echoed round the house. ‘Very much doubt it. But we’ve got to have her cooperation. If you want the young to cooperate in illness, you must give ’em the truth. Got any whisky in the house? She can have it now and straight. Pulse is down to 32 this morning. Got to get it up.’
I loathed the taste of whisky, but once I stopped feeling choked I rather enjoyed being ill as it provided unlimited reading, thinking and mental story-telling time, and after the first two or three months I was allowed to be visited by my St Leonards’ friends. That illness began the great friendship between our GP and myself that lasted until his death in 1969. In 1938 his fair hair was beginning to turn white, his long drooping moustache, grey, and his vivid blue eyes looked over not through the glasses propped on the end of his nose. He was a man of strong opinions, few words, and a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. When he had been a house-surgeon at Guy’s Hospital, Lister’s carbolic spray was in use in operating theatres. ‘Theatre air was thick with carbolic and we’d great sheets soaked in the stuff hanging over the doors – my godfathers, child, how it made the fingers tingle. After a long list, tips of m’fingers were numb for hours.’
Once I began to convalesce his boom from our minute front hall dispersed my own and parental fears. ‘Delicate? Nonsense! No one’s delicate! Either a bad illness kills you or it doesn’t and you get well. Not delicate – well! Don’t turn the child into an invalid. The illness is over and sooner she gets back to normal and forgets it, the better.
‘She’ll do. Well, what do you think of the news, eh? War’s coming …’
Every adult seemed to be saying that last by the uneasy dawn of 1939. Waiting for the war was like waiting for a door to bang even if I could not follow why it had to bang, or why everything I had been told or read about the Great War being the war to end war, was apparently all wrong. Slowly, almost shamefully, as it involved disloyalty to my parents, I wondered what else I had been told and taught would prove to be false. I did not discuss this with my siblings or friends, partly as it worried me too much and partly as we were all exasperated by the non-stop war talk of our elders. When the subject did crop up amongst my own age group, we moaned over the maddening interruption it was bound to cause our lives and changed the subject.
By early summer the lives of most of the older boys and younger men in my circle were already interrupted by conscription into the Army, or the arrival of call-up papers from Territorials, Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, or University Air Squadrons. Nearly all initially joined as a means of getting in free riding, sailing, or flying. When home on twenty-four or forty-eight hour passes, these friends called at our house to show off their new uniforms. The Army conscripts’ (Militia-men) khaki was uniformly as ill-fitting and unattractive as their pudding-basin hair-cuts. ‘Bloody bore,’ they said when my parents were out of the room ‘and bloody itchy’.
I had left school, and as Betty spent that summer visiting our relatives in Gibraltar, once John’s prep school broke up for the summer holidays, most days (after my share of the housework) John and I spent the rest of the day on the beach. August in St Leonards was hot and dry. Throughout the month letters and cables flashed to and from Gibraltar insisting and promising Betty would be back for the war, as if the expected holocaust were some social season.
We always used the bit of pebbled beach just left of St Leonards’ pier and, like our friends, we kept our striped canvas bathing tent in a cavern under the promenade behind that beach, in which the Corporation rented storage space to local residents during the holiday season. The small colony of coloured tents transformed ‘our’ beach into a summer youth club enlivened by the music blaring down from the pier’s loudspeakers. Often that August someone’s father brought a portable wireless onto the beach and the little picnic groups in swimsuits, beach jackets, long fading khaki shorts that were relics of Africa and India, and the bathing trunks that only a year or so back had evoked, ‘Well, really, it’s not that one’s old fashioned but what will young men wear next?’ but by 1939 were worn by every male under thirty, all swung their heads towards the wireless as if they were puppets and some unseen hand had twitched their strings. The pebbles at the water’s edge shimmered in a heat haze, the sun made millions of diamonds dance on a Channel blue as the Mediterranean in high summer, the black raft thirty odd yards out bobbed lazily, emptily, the lukewarm hard-boiled eggs and limp lettuce sandwiches tasted of the dried salt on the lips, the glare stung the eyes behind dark glasses, and the unemotional voice of the news reader was half-drowned by the pier music. South of the Border … Roll Out The Barrel … The Woody-Woodpecker’s Song … The Ferryboat Serenade.
‘I want to ride a ferry … where music is so merry … According to our Berlin correspondent, Herr Hitler … Mummy, can I have another ice-cream – why not? Why should I shush, Mummy
, why? … South of the border … down Mexico way … Herr Hitler is reported as saying the Polish Corridor … Can I swim now, Daddy? It must be an hour since I had my sandwiches … That’s where I fell in love … when stars above … Danzig … Danzig … Herr Hitler says … Did you see me swim round the raft, Lucy? Next year I’ll swim right round the pier … There in a veil of white … Danzig.’
John standing on his dripping dark brown head, his long skinny boy’s body tanned as a Latin and looking, as all his life, a Spaniard not an Englishman. The sun drying in minutes the new, scarlet, cotton – decorated with large white carnations – bathing suit that had cost me five shillings and my friend George had just described as ‘Very fetching’. John liked George as he kept him supplied with pennies for iced lollies, and every penny kept John in the lolly queue for roughly fifteen minutes.
George was one of the few local boys I knew who was not yet called-up. George was an engineer in an aircraft factory and on the reserved occupation list. He was home for his annual two-weeks’ holiday. We had met in school Christmas holidays a few years earlier, when, along with most of my local friends, we had been reluctant performers in our Rector’s annual Nativity Plays. We spent hours talking together on the beach and tried to avoid the war but it kept creeping in. ‘Thought about joining anything, Lucy? Or will your heart keep you out?’
No Time For Romance Page 4
