Just Me Read online

  I first became acquainted with fear on the day I saw my mother cry. It was when the wireless told us that we were at war with Germany. As I watched her clinging to my father, muttering 'Christ not again', I was very afraid. I was six years old and adult tears were unknown to me. I did not understand that my mother had already lived through one world war. Up until then I had known only peace so I didn't know what war meant. I could think of no words of comfort. Or comprehend why they were needed. As my mother wept I could only close my eyes tight and clench my fists and teeth, a technique I cultivated to great effect over the following years. I remained frightened for much of the duration of the conflict, which ended when I was twelve. And maybe for the rest of my life. Not all the time of course. I also tasted joy during those days. That has been less easy to sustain. Tranquillity, a valuable ingredient of childhood development, was non-existent. And has been ever since.

  I can remember vividly some of my feelings as a wartime child, but the sequence of events escapes me. Except for my sister all of the people whom I knew then are dead or have disappeared from my life. Certain incidents stand out as milestones, however, with all the distortions that time may have wrought. That I still feel shaky and tearful as I recall some of them seems to prove their veracity.

  The temporary crack in my mother's calm, coping façade was soon mended and she set about reorganising our lives and home to deal with potential bombing and invasion. We soon had an Anderson shelter in the garden, six foot six by four foot six with a wooden floor and paraffin lamp and candles. Dad constructed frames to fit into the windows at night as blackout, which it was my job to put up – maybe curtains would have been easier but he liked to be different. Brown sticky paper was crisscrossed to my father's design across the panes, to prevent flying glass. Dad joined the ARP (Air Raid Precautions) as a warden and taught me how to rotate the wooden rattle to be used to warn people of a gas attack.

  We had to practise putting on our gas masks and Mum made natty leatherette cases for them that weren't as awkward to carry as the square cardboard boxes we were issued with. I found these rubber acrid-smelling masks horrific, and it took a lot of threats to make me put mine on. I felt claustrophobic and suffocated but the alternative fate described to me by my desperate father forced me to comply. It also terrified me. As did his instruction on how to work a stirrup pump and use buckets of sand to extinguish the deadly incendiary bombs that were coming our way. He made me recite my identity number CJFQ29 stroke 4 in case of somehow being separated from my parents. It was engraved on a disc around my neck and on my memory to this day.

  My mother learnt how to create tasty dishes out of nothing. With rationing she had to. It is staggering to contemplate that I now eat more in one meal than our ration for a whole week. Each person had four ounces of butter, one ounce of cheese, one egg, and about one chop of meat. I remember beating the butter with milk, and something else – maybe margarine – to make it stretch further. In addition we children were given nasty glutinous cod-liver oil and a spoonful of orange concentrate. And every day at school we had fat little bottles of creamy milk sucked through a straw. As I had constant styes in my eye, I also took Yeast Vite.

  The whole of our garden, and indeed the local park, was turned over to growing vegetables. I loved working in companionable silence with my father, digging and seeding. We marked the rows with a piece of string, fixed either end by a bit of wood pushed into the ground. Then Dad trowelled out a little trench, or dug a big one if it was potatoes, and I was allowed to scatter in the seeds, or plop in the potatoes or beans at regular intervals, push over the earth and jump it down flat. My favourite job was collecting caterpillars from the cabbages, and blackfly from the Brussels sprouts, and drowning or squishing them. They were our enemies, and I was quickly learning the desire to eliminate insects and people who threaten.

  The sweets ration was a measly eight ounces a month, for which we had a book of points to manage our allocation, so the choice between sherbet fountains, a bit of austerity chocolate or barley sugar was a serious business. Maybe my adult gluttonous inability to take merely one or two chocolates but instead devour the lot, however large the box, in one sitting, stems from those parsimonious childhood decisions. I can remember on one occasion, hearing on the grapevine that a shop some distance away had Crunchie bars, rushing over on my bike and queuing for ages, then sitting on a wall outside with my trophy, sucking the chocolate coating very slowly and poking my tongue into the melting honeycomb interior. No sweet has ever tasted so sublime since.

  Clothes too were rationed, which resulted in a lot of 'make do and mend'. I don't remember buying any new clothes during the war, but I did enjoy a dress made out of barrage-balloon silk, which at least wasn't a hand-me-down. Less pleasing were some rather smelly big mittens, made from the fur of an unfortunate rabbit that also supplied us with several dinners.

  The first few months after the declaration were known as the Phoney or Bore War. Not a lot actually happened on the home front, but the threat was in the air. The adults whispered a lot and looked tense when listening to the wireless news. There was talk of sending the children away. The government was insisting on the necessity of getting us out of danger. A mass evacuation was planned called Operation Pied Piper. An unfortunate choice of name, considering the fate of the children in that story.

  Operation Pied Piper was not a popular proposal. The country was divided into three categories: reception areas, which would receive evacuees; danger areas from which children and mothers with babies would be evacuated; and neutral areas, which were neither. Straight off, 200 reception areas asked to be made neutral and no one asked to be made reception. Not a situation likely to make the evacuees feel welcome. The people in the danger zone did not want to relinquish their children, to send them into the arms of strangers, anyway.

  Some children were sent abroad. A risky project, with U-boats already marauding the waters around Britain. One heartbreaking tragedy happened when the SS City of Benares was torpedoed, and 256 people died, 81 of them children. After the ship went down, the children were tossed about in lifeboats in storm conditions. When rescuers arrived they were faced with one boat full of 19 dead children and others barely alive, after twenty hours in the raging sea.

  When I set out from King's Cross station to be evacuated, I can remember the train being crowded with labelled children, clutching gas masks and suitcases or bundles, sometimes just paper parcels. But I do not remember the selection process, in which local people picked the prettiest and cleanest first, leaving the less attractive to deal with the humiliation of rejection, so it can't have been too bad for me. There are heart-warming tales of kids from the slums landing up in middle-class homes or even aristocratic palaces, and tasting luxury for the first time in their lives, although a lot of them were thrown out, when they were discovered to be lousy and not toilet-trained.

  I ended up billeted on Mr and Mrs Giles, an elderly childless couple. Despite previously only ever having lived in the staff accommodation of the hotels and pubs in which my father worked, latterly my home had been a semi-detached, pebble-dashed, two-bedroom-plus-boxroom house in Bexleyheath. Somewhat overcrowded, with two grannies, my parents and my sister and I, but you could use a bathroom and toilet if you were patient. Baths were only once a week, the regulation five inches deep and had to be shared, so that for the last one in it was freezing cold. But it was a proper bath and a lavatory, indoors, with a chain to pull. The Gileses' cottage had no such comforts. There was a ghastly outside lavatory; but the tin bath put in front of the black kitchen range, I quite enjoyed. Constantly topped up with water from the kettle on the big iron hob, it was much warmer than the baths I was used to.

  The Gileses had a snappy little Pekinese called Dainty that I fear was easier for them to deal with than a twitchy, miserable seven-year-old girl, but they did their best. My relationship with Mr Giles was very like that portrayed in Goodnight, Mister Tom, in which John starred on television. John, being ni
ne years younger than I, did not remember the war, so I was able to help him with my experience. We agreed that the sense of abandonment I felt then was much the same as he did when his mother deserted him.

  To begin with, Mr Giles never spoke to me, even when we ate together. One day, while I was playing in the garden, some cows got in. I screamed the place down, as these huge creatures lumbered around in a panic. Mr Giles rushed out, clay pipe hanging from his mouth, whipped me up in his arms, took me indoors and drove the cows away. From then on, I knew he was on my side. I may not have my parents, but he would protect me. Slowly, a shy, warm relationship developed between us, which looking back probably gave him some pleasure, despite the disruption to their placid lives.

  However, with the best will in the world, they were not equipped to deal with the psychological problems that beset a child wrenched from her home and parents, whom she feared were in danger of being killed by gas, or bombs or invading Germans. And I, in my turn, could not discuss with them the problems I was facing at the local village school.

  Before I was evacuated, I attended a primary school, imaginatively led by Miss Markham. She was one of several big, slightly butch, women teachers that nourished my childhood. With fifty-odd children in a class, she and her tiny staff managed to keep order by the sheer brilliance of their teaching skills. I had a tendency to get over-excited and the punishment was to 'see Miss Markham'. The agonisingly long wait outside her door was doubtless intentional, because, by the time I got into her room, she needed to say nothing to increase my regret at disappointing her. The contrast at the village school I attended in Berkshire was incomprehensible to me. The headmistress doubtless had a name, but I remember only that I called her Miss Greenbum. Her method of punishment was the cane. The thought of a big person assaulting a little one was revolting to me then and it still is.

  In class, except when writing, we had to sit in silence with our arms folded. Art was endlessly drawing flags with a ruler, which merely taught me the right way up for a Union Jack. To this day I obsessively doodle flags on my scripts. It was very hard for the reception towns to assimilate thousands of strange and troubled children, and it was made clear to us what usurpers we were. The locals were already doing joined-up writing, but I was still just printing. As were many other evacuees, or vaccies as we became known. We were held up to derision, inferior beings that we were. Originality and creativity, as learnt from Miss Markham, were worthless commodities to Miss Greenbum, and what few compositions we did were judged for the neatness of their writing and accuracy of spelling, rather than the use of imagination.

  Also, we were deemed dirty. Some of us were. The whole school was made aware of it when the weekly Flea Inspection revealed our crime. On one occasion, nits were found in my hair, and when another teacher tried to take me to the cloakroom – to wash my hair in carbolic soap and vinegar – I bit her, which earned me two strokes of the cane on my hand in front of the whole school. I hated that woman and the local kids, who smelled blood when they sensed my inability to defend myself. To get to school, I had to cross an area of grass where they would lie in wait for me. I would hide behind some little hillocks on the perimeter, until I thought the coast was clear, then pelt across, arriving at the school panting and sweating. And sometimes bruised.

  I do not remember exactly how, whether it was the biting of the teacher, and the cane, or my face too being painted purple when I contracted impetigo like them, but over time I became friends with the Jones family, the local outlaws. They taught me far more than Miss Greenbum. What I learnt from the Joneses was that even the most savage enemies can become friends – a valuable lesson for a wartime child who is being taught to hate. And self-sufficiency.

  The Joneses were a large, very obviously poor family. They had no bikes or toys. None of us had Game Boys or TVs to distract us. Amusement was improvised from nothing. The wall of a house was good for complicated hand- and headstands. A ball thrown against it with variations of clapping, twirling, between your legs, backwards, underarm, overarm, behind your back, could occupy several hours. An iron girder in a barn was a hair-raising setting for an acrobatic display of somersaults and tight-rope walking. Haystacks were slides and cosy dens. Trees were swings and climbing frames, requiring the careful skill of a mountaineer to reach the summit. Food was provided by scrumping apples, blackberries, raiding turnip fields and, I'm sorry to say, the bun shop near the school.

  Mr and Mrs Giles had no idea of what I got up to, but when they saw I was beginning to have a good time, they allowed me a free rein. From cowardly wimp, I emerged as the Joneses' favourite clown, up for anything, and in turn protected by them. In our dens I told them stories, something I suspect no one had ever done. I led them in songs and wild dancing. From what I observe, that kind of playing is dead and gone. Dangers imagined and real nowadays restrict children's freedom to roam. Gangs still exist, providing – as they did for me – a substitute family, but the crimes are more serious than our occasional shoplifting. The Jones boys had knives, but they were used for cutting wood for lighting a campfire. And skinning rabbits. Very nasty.

  Nature became a solace and delight. As I got bolder, I often wandered off on my own, putting frogspawn in jam jars or sitting in the sun reading. If Proust had his madeleines to remind him of times past, I have watercress. We picked it from the beds in the stream at Ewelme, tied it in bunches and sold it. An evocative flower for me is the cowslip. My mother came on a visit, bringing me a new frock made from two of her old dresses. It was blue-and-white check cotton with a panel inserted in the bodice of sky-blue linen. A sash that tied at the back gathered in the full skirt. Wandering around in my new finery, on a perfect English summer's day, I saw a field of delicate yellow in the distance, and when I reached it, discovered it was not the usual buttercups, but a carpet of exquisite little flowers, which I later discovered were called cowslips. I gathered two bunches to give to Mr Giles and my mother, and made for the cottage. The sun on my face, the breeze blowing my new frock around my bare brown legs, the hum of insects, the scent of flowers, made my spirits soar into what I recognise, looking back, as transcendence. I had never had a feeling like it in my short life. Breathtaking, wonderful. A magic moment for me alone. I did not, could not, explain it to anyone but kept it close to my heart. Maybe it is such epiphanies that people regard as union with the divine and make for religious conversion. For a seven-year-old girl, it was a precious secret, and a state of consciousness to be sought ever after.

  When nothing much happened for some time, a false sense of security prevailed and I and many other evacuees were returned home – just in time for the Blitz. We were subjected to a relentless nightly bombardment. Bexleyheath was situated in 'Bomb Alley'. It was in the middle of prime targets Vickers-Armstrong, Woolwich Arsenal and the docks. Behind our house was a searchlight and a deafening ack-ack gun; above our heads, a skyful of barrage balloons; and along the road, black containers for creating a smoke screen, and concrete blocks and barbed wire ready to lay across the road to bar the way of approaching tanks. Our house never took a direct hit, but was constantly blasted, so that in the end my father gave up repairing damage. He put a tarpaulin over the roof, and boarded up the broken windows. Anyway we spent most of the time down the shelter.

  To begin with, when the air-raid warning went, I would turn off the gas and water and put on my siren suit over my pyjamas. This was an all-in-one trouser-and-jacket garment copied from that sported by Churchill, which he wore with a homburg hat and bow tie when visiting bomb sites. I then lead the way down the garden with a masked torch. Inside the shelter, we would light a candle and read or play cards and board games, whilst the raid raged above us. In the corner were our bags, packed ready in case our house was bombed or destroyed by an incendiary fire before I could get to my stirrup pump. Sometimes my mother nervously allowed me to watch the dogfights between the Spitfires and hordes of German planes. The average age of the Battle of Britain pilots, many of whom were killed, was twen
ty-four. We thought they were wonderful. And they were. They saved our skins. Hitler must have wrongly thought we were well defended, such an incredible fight they put up. Ducking and weaving and twirling in the sky, little cotton-wool puffs of smoke and trails from their exhaust creating complex patterns. At night the searchlights crisscrossed the darkness, every now and then picking up a plane in their beam. If no bombs fell, it seemed so remote it was like being at the pictures.

  Most of the time when the raid was overhead, the door of the shelter was firmly closed. Eventually we stayed down there all night, on bunks built in by my father. With the help of earplugs, I could sleep through the loudest incidents, even a landmine that exploded a few doors away and the dreaded ack-ack gun. My poor mother, who before the war would hide in the cupboard under the stairs in a thunderstorm, must have suffered dreadfully; although the only time I remember her demonstrating her terror was one night when she struggled on to her bunk in the dark, and a terrible hissing and squawking filled the shelter. It was the next door's ginger tom, who was lucky to escape with his life when my frantic mother beat at him as though he were the Führer himself.

  My main fear was that a German airman would bail out in our garden, for of course he would be a murderous villain – all Germans were. I had a good look round when I crept out of the shelter to go to the lavatory under the apple tree, making sure the searchlight was not in action before I crouched down. Sometimes the sky glowed red with fires from London or the docks.